A citizen wanting to interact with their government should not be compelled to purchase a particular company's product to do so. If I choose to mail in my tax forms, it should not require purchasing Official Government Printing Stock to do it. If I file electronically, it should not be locked in to, say, Turbotax. An open format (ODF, PDF) should be acceptable.
This also frankly makes sense financially: if MS is the only company supporting OOXML (arguable, since at last check they don't even meet their own standard), then there's no possibility of price competition. If you're on an *open* format where many vendors can compete, the govt can go for best price and properly spend the money they screw us out of annually.
The problem with increasing H-1B numbers is that it swamps the domestic market with offshore workers, likely at lower rates than domestic talent (ref the Oracle lawsuit filed yesterday), making STEM training less desirable for US students as they won't be able to find jobs when they hit the workforce. Now you want to push H-1Bs into the academic market too?
Waiting for the teachers' unions to start raising bloody hell about the impact to their livelihoods. Hmmm, given the clout they have with politicos, this may actually work to all our favor.
I expect between whatever lump-sum he got when BT bought Counterpane, his actual salary at BT, and his writing and speaking engagements, he's not particularly worried about the next mortgage payment.
As usual, Microsoft held back as new technologies surfaced (smartphones & tablets), then jumped in, assuming that anything with their name on it would overtake the early entrants. In this case, though, because of the GUI change in Win 8, they hit resistance in the PC market from both users and OEMs, and the smartphone and tablet markets were already well-entrenched with iOS & Android and saw little need for a third platform (also see: RIM). There was little innovative in Surface (Asus Transformer has had a keyboard dock for ages), the price points were relatively high, and the app portfolio for WinPhone and tablet remains thin by comparison. Gates' comments about tablet users wanting "real Office" was magical thinking at best.
Microsoft is hardly going under, but they're increasingly becoming an enterprise-only company as consumers do the bulk of their work on non-PC devices.
Sarah Jane Adventures ended abruptly fall 2011 with Elisabeth Sladen's passing , and Torchwood ended after the fourth series "Miracle Day" co-produced with the Starz pay-TV channel. There was also an early attempt at a spinoff back in the '81 with Sladen "K-9 and Company", and a children's channel spinoff in Australia "K-9"
Final address Jan 1961 as he left office: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
Some folks apparently weren't listening....
Many other researchers were unable to duplicate Wakefield's work. He formed a company to promote his therapies for this problem that others were unable to find, and neglected to inform anyone of the potential conflict-of-interest. When the press exposed this, his co-authors backed away from the paper. The British medical board looked at his work, including questionable therapies on autistic children, and found him guilty of dishonesty and abuse of patients, and revoked his medical license. The Lancet retracted his article.
I feel for the parents dealing with a full-out autistic child (my wife and I are raising an Aspergers/ADD grandson), but unproven therapies based on debunked theories aren't going to honestly address their problems.
For the Golden Age Superman, and for most of the Silver Age, the Clark-is-the-disguise attitude held; he became a reporter so he'd be aware of events happening that needed Superman's attention. John Byrne's Man of Steel mini-series after Crisis flipped that to the Clark-is-the-real-person,Superman-the-alter-ego we see now. For Batman, Bruce has been the public persona, Batman the reality for years; the hardcore fan will say "Bruce Wayne" died with his parents and Batman was born in Crime Alley that night.
The market is moving to smartphones and tablets, where MS has next-to-zero footprint, Windows 8 is blamed, rightly or not, for the plunge in PC sales. They're Just Another Player in the gaming market (XBox 360 has sold slightly better than PS3 but worse than Wii). BYOD in corporate culture means the lock-in to MS server back-ends actually becomes a barrier to entry. The Elop move has steered a major handset maker into the rocks.
Yet Ballmer wants to double-down on Windows/Office and bulk up the Xbox group, which was a loss leader until very recently.
The only reason he's still CEO is his friendship with BillG, who holds a big chunk of shares.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_(seventh_generation)#Sales_standings, XBox 360 is second in overall sales with 78 million sold behind Wii (100 million) and ahead of PS3 (70 million).
They're background noise in the smartphone & tablet markets at this point, which is where the momentum is. Win 8 cost them standing and probably accelerated tablet adoption. And with BYOD in the business market, the Exchange/Office lock-in becomes a barrier to entry instead.
They're not turning off the lights next week, but they're losing the ability to dictate the market. The recent announcement of Halo for WinPhone is a desperate attempt to pump their dismal standing in phones using their biggest success in the gaming space.
Many companies are going BYOD; if that 'YOD' is increasingly non-MS (tablet, Mac, Linux) then integration with the MS server suite becomes a liability rather than an advantage. There's plenty of options out there, they lack the traction in the market because of the but-EVERYONE-uses-Windows mentality. If that changes the server side of the business might slide drastically.
This line of reasoning is why the last thing I've seen involving John Travolta or Tom Cruise was sitting through a TV rerun of "Grease" with my teen daughters about 15 years back. The Scientologists use celebrities to push their "religion", I vote with my wallet to not support it or them. Were they not such vocal advocates of their personal beliefs I might be tempted to see their work.
You're falling into the same trap the SCaldera management did when they started this mess. The legal agreements, and the Novell board minutes from the time approving the sale, clearly state that the copyrights to UNIX were retained by Novell.
The old Santa Cruz Operation wanted the codebase, but couldn't come up with the money, so as a consolation they got the license fee collection business from Novell, keeping 5% for administration. Other than that they had a source license same as the other UNIX vendors
The only code SCOX holds any rights to is whatever additions were made to Unixware *after* the deal; they had a *redistribution* license for the UNIX codebase from AT&T/USL/Novell same as IBM, HP, Sun, etc. Santa Cruz *wanted* the codebase, Novell wanted out of the UNIX business, but Santa Cruz Operation (!= SCO Group) couldn't produce the money, so what they got as a sop was the royalty collection business from the other source licensees. They got to deal with the billing, collection, etc and keep 5% for their trouble, forwarding the rest to Novell.
Given the rapid decline of SCO, most POS platforms have moved off SCO Unix. Autozone got their own lawsuit for quickly and *publicly* porting their POS system to Linux, SCaldera claiming it couldn't have been done without using their libraries. There was a sealed settlement for apparently minimal $$ proving again the shaky basis for these lawsuits.
I still believe SCO's plan all along was to get bought out by IBM to shut them up. Once IBM declined and blackened the Utah sky with lawyers, it's been a case of seeing how long they could dodge the bullets. Looks like it's finally over.
Check out Steve Albini's often-quoted piece on recording contracts and tell me otherwise...
At this point albums are promotional materials for concert tours, where most bands make their money. At least until Ticketmaster and Live Nation get bought up, at which point musicians may as well go back to flipping burgers....
The situation in FL this year echoes the problem: Gov Rick Scott (known in the press as Lord Voldemort) has had an ongoing feud with the teachers' unions since taking office. This year the state proficiency test was a) toughened and b) given a higher minimum-passing grade. The presumption is that Scott was expecting a small drop in scores he could use as a talking point against the unions.
What he got was a drop between 40 & 60% depending on grade; while I support testing to prevent 'social promotion', the likelihood the performance of the state's teachers dropped so much at once is pretty damn small, prompting many to call BS on the Governor for manipulating the testing process for his political agenda.
For in-depth, of course, groklaw.net, but in short: Oracle (aka One Raving A*hole Named Larry Ellison) filed suit on the Googleplex for beeelyuns of dollars claiming Android and its Dalvik VM infringed various patents and copyrights in Java they own from the Sun acquisition.
Google countered that a) Sun never raised the issue back when Android first came out and Oracle shouldn't now be able to claim damages (legal term: laches) b) Dalvik was based on the Apache Harmony project, a "clean-room" implementation c) many/all of the patents now claimed by Oracle are dubious.
On review, many of the patents *have* been overturned on review, and at this point Oracle's claims are chiefly based on infringing about three dozen of the Java *APIs* as regards arrangement of arguments, etc. The potential damages have been substantially cut back as well, after the judge threw out two claim reports by Oracle, to around $44 million.
Oracle is being represented by Boies Schiller, the same wonderful firm that's [ still stuck ] representing SCO (excuse me, SCOXQ.PK, heh heh) in their futile anti-Linux efforts.
>> did Slader have a bikini scene at the beggining of the B&W episodes?
Closest you're going to get to that is a two-piece 'sunsuit' outfit at the beginning of 'Death to the Daleks' during the Pertwee era, as she and the Doctor were preparing for an outing on a beach planet with effervescent seas...
TN Sen Rand Paul (yes, Ron's son) was returning to DC for the start of the Senate session in January when he was 'detained' at Nashville's checkpoint for refusing a pat-down after a supposed "anomaly" in the scanner. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71818.html
The TSA agents apparently backpedaled and finally allowed him to go back through the scanner after someone probably mentioned that pesky Constitutional clause about detaining members of Congress enroute to/from the current session.
The consensus guess is that they were trying to hassle him after his / his father's slamming the TSA, but they apparently got their collective noses rubbed in it for their trouble.
Given the amount of Other Companies' Servers they run, and the number of ISVs they work with, a frivolous claim of stealing code from a (former) development partner couldn't be allowed to stand and damage their professional reputation.
Hence the scorched-earth/blacken-their-sky-with-lawyers/never-one-cent-in-tribute policy that's clearly meant as a don't-fsck-with-us message to any other dying company seeing a very deep set of pockets to try picking.
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A citizen wanting to interact with their government should not be compelled to purchase a particular company's product to do so. If I choose to mail in my tax forms, it should not require purchasing Official Government Printing Stock to do it. If I file electronically, it should not be locked in to, say, Turbotax. An open format (ODF, PDF) should be acceptable. This also frankly makes sense financially: if MS is the only company supporting OOXML (arguable, since at last check they don't even meet their own standard), then there's no possibility of price competition. If you're on an *open* format where many vendors can compete, the govt can go for best price and properly spend the money they screw us out of annually.
Waiting for the teachers' unions to start raising bloody hell about the impact to their livelihoods. Hmmm, given the clout they have with politicos, this may actually work to all our favor.
I expect between whatever lump-sum he got when BT bought Counterpane, his actual salary at BT, and his writing and speaking engagements, he's not particularly worried about the next mortgage payment.
As usual, Microsoft held back as new technologies surfaced (smartphones & tablets), then jumped in, assuming that anything with their name on it would overtake the early entrants. In this case, though, because of the GUI change in Win 8, they hit resistance in the PC market from both users and OEMs, and the smartphone and tablet markets were already well-entrenched with iOS & Android and saw little need for a third platform (also see: RIM). There was little innovative in Surface (Asus Transformer has had a keyboard dock for ages), the price points were relatively high, and the app portfolio for WinPhone and tablet remains thin by comparison. Gates' comments about tablet users wanting "real Office" was magical thinking at best. Microsoft is hardly going under, but they're increasingly becoming an enterprise-only company as consumers do the bulk of their work on non-PC devices.
Sarah Jane Adventures ended abruptly fall 2011 with Elisabeth Sladen's passing , and Torchwood ended after the fourth series "Miracle Day" co-produced with the Starz pay-TV channel. There was also an early attempt at a spinoff back in the '81 with Sladen "K-9 and Company", and a children's channel spinoff in Australia "K-9"
Final address Jan 1961 as he left office: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." Some folks apparently weren't listening....
Many other researchers were unable to duplicate Wakefield's work. He formed a company to promote his therapies for this problem that others were unable to find, and neglected to inform anyone of the potential conflict-of-interest. When the press exposed this, his co-authors backed away from the paper. The British medical board looked at his work, including questionable therapies on autistic children, and found him guilty of dishonesty and abuse of patients, and revoked his medical license. The Lancet retracted his article. I feel for the parents dealing with a full-out autistic child (my wife and I are raising an Aspergers/ADD grandson), but unproven therapies based on debunked theories aren't going to honestly address their problems.
Dot Matrix would NEVER get involved with the XBONE and still looks better than some MS suit...
For the Golden Age Superman, and for most of the Silver Age, the Clark-is-the-disguise attitude held; he became a reporter so he'd be aware of events happening that needed Superman's attention. John Byrne's Man of Steel mini-series after Crisis flipped that to the Clark-is-the-real-person,Superman-the-alter-ego we see now. For Batman, Bruce has been the public persona, Batman the reality for years; the hardcore fan will say "Bruce Wayne" died with his parents and Batman was born in Crime Alley that night.
The market is moving to smartphones and tablets, where MS has next-to-zero footprint, Windows 8 is blamed, rightly or not, for the plunge in PC sales. They're Just Another Player in the gaming market (XBox 360 has sold slightly better than PS3 but worse than Wii). BYOD in corporate culture means the lock-in to MS server back-ends actually becomes a barrier to entry. The Elop move has steered a major handset maker into the rocks. Yet Ballmer wants to double-down on Windows/Office and bulk up the Xbox group, which was a loss leader until very recently. The only reason he's still CEO is his friendship with BillG, who holds a big chunk of shares.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_(seventh_generation)#Sales_standings, XBox 360 is second in overall sales with 78 million sold behind Wii (100 million) and ahead of PS3 (70 million). They're background noise in the smartphone & tablet markets at this point, which is where the momentum is. Win 8 cost them standing and probably accelerated tablet adoption. And with BYOD in the business market, the Exchange/Office lock-in becomes a barrier to entry instead. They're not turning off the lights next week, but they're losing the ability to dictate the market. The recent announcement of Halo for WinPhone is a desperate attempt to pump their dismal standing in phones using their biggest success in the gaming space.
Many companies are going BYOD; if that 'YOD' is increasingly non-MS (tablet, Mac, Linux) then integration with the MS server suite becomes a liability rather than an advantage. There's plenty of options out there, they lack the traction in the market because of the but-EVERYONE-uses-Windows mentality. If that changes the server side of the business might slide drastically.
This line of reasoning is why the last thing I've seen involving John Travolta or Tom Cruise was sitting through a TV rerun of "Grease" with my teen daughters about 15 years back. The Scientologists use celebrities to push their "religion", I vote with my wallet to not support it or them. Were they not such vocal advocates of their personal beliefs I might be tempted to see their work.
Unfortunately you'd have to have a couple hundred clones of him to have a chance of getting this reasonable proposal through...
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson, 1816
The next Safehold book, Midst Trial and Tribulation, is due out 18 Sept in the US.
I'm personally waiting for the next Hedren War book myself...
I hope you simply failed to apply the sarcasm tags on this, or phrased it badly, as Doc wrote the Lensmen stories, not RAH...
You're falling into the same trap the SCaldera management did when they started this mess. The legal agreements, and the Novell board minutes from the time approving the sale, clearly state that the copyrights to UNIX were retained by Novell.
The old Santa Cruz Operation wanted the codebase, but couldn't come up with the money, so as a consolation they got the license fee collection business from Novell, keeping 5% for administration. Other than that they had a source license same as the other UNIX vendors
The only code SCOX holds any rights to is whatever additions were made to Unixware *after* the deal; they had a *redistribution* license for the UNIX codebase from AT&T/USL/Novell same as IBM, HP, Sun, etc. Santa Cruz *wanted* the codebase, Novell wanted out of the UNIX business, but Santa Cruz Operation (!= SCO Group) couldn't produce the money, so what they got as a sop was the royalty collection business from the other source licensees. They got to deal with the billing, collection, etc and keep 5% for their trouble, forwarding the rest to Novell. Given the rapid decline of SCO, most POS platforms have moved off SCO Unix. Autozone got their own lawsuit for quickly and *publicly* porting their POS system to Linux, SCaldera claiming it couldn't have been done without using their libraries. There was a sealed settlement for apparently minimal $$ proving again the shaky basis for these lawsuits. I still believe SCO's plan all along was to get bought out by IBM to shut them up. Once IBM declined and blackened the Utah sky with lawyers, it's been a case of seeing how long they could dodge the bullets. Looks like it's finally over.
Check out Steve Albini's often-quoted piece on recording contracts and tell me otherwise...
At this point albums are promotional materials for concert tours, where most bands make their money.
At least until Ticketmaster and Live Nation get bought up, at which point musicians may as well go back to flipping burgers....
The situation in FL this year echoes the problem: Gov Rick Scott (known in the press as Lord Voldemort) has had an ongoing feud with the teachers' unions since taking office. This year the state proficiency test was a) toughened and b) given a higher minimum-passing grade. The presumption is that Scott was expecting a small drop in scores he could use as a talking point against the unions.
What he got was a drop between 40 & 60% depending on grade; while I support testing to prevent 'social promotion', the likelihood the performance of the state's teachers dropped so much at once is pretty damn small, prompting many to call BS on the Governor for manipulating the testing process for his political agenda.
For in-depth, of course, groklaw.net, but in short: Oracle (aka One Raving A*hole Named Larry Ellison) filed suit on the Googleplex for beeelyuns of dollars claiming Android and its Dalvik VM infringed various patents and copyrights in Java they own from the Sun acquisition.
Google countered that a) Sun never raised the issue back when Android first came out and Oracle shouldn't now be able to claim damages (legal term: laches) b) Dalvik was based on the Apache Harmony project, a "clean-room" implementation c) many/all of the patents now claimed by Oracle are dubious.
On review, many of the patents *have* been overturned on review, and at this point Oracle's claims are chiefly based on infringing about three dozen of the Java *APIs* as regards arrangement of arguments, etc. The potential damages have been substantially cut back as well, after the judge threw out two claim reports by Oracle, to around $44 million.
Oracle is being represented by Boies Schiller, the same wonderful firm that's [ still stuck ] representing SCO (excuse me, SCOXQ.PK, heh heh) in their futile anti-Linux efforts.
>> did Slader have a bikini scene at the beggining of the B&W episodes?
Closest you're going to get to that is a two-piece 'sunsuit' outfit at the beginning of 'Death to the Daleks' during the Pertwee era, as she and the Doctor were preparing for an outing on a beach planet with effervescent seas...
TN Sen Rand Paul (yes, Ron's son) was returning to DC for the start of the Senate session in January when he was 'detained' at Nashville's checkpoint for refusing a pat-down after a supposed "anomaly" in the scanner. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71818.html
The TSA agents apparently backpedaled and finally allowed him to go back through the scanner after someone probably mentioned that pesky Constitutional clause about detaining members of Congress enroute to/from the current session.
The consensus guess is that they were trying to hassle him after his / his father's slamming the TSA, but they apparently got their collective noses rubbed in it for their trouble.
Given the amount of Other Companies' Servers they run, and the number of ISVs they work with, a frivolous claim of stealing code from a (former) development partner couldn't be allowed to stand and damage their professional reputation.
Hence the scorched-earth/blacken-their-sky-with-lawyers/never-one-cent-in-tribute policy that's clearly meant as a don't-fsck-with-us message to any other dying company seeing a very deep set of pockets to try picking.