Retinal projection or some kind of VR goggle system?
The only kind of foldable display likely to be seen in real life anytime soon would be something with multiple conventional LCD screens, which would be thick, power-hungry, expensive and of limited value compared to a single, large display due to the lack of physical continuity.
We were told by our switch vendor (its a Nortel Meridian 61C) that we couldn't do caller id outbound due to the fact that we had T1s. I always presumed that the T1s didn't support that kind of signaling, but it could be the combination of Qwest T1s and our switch rev (which is kind of getting ancient) wouldn't send that data out.
The mantra was always that if we wanted good caller id we needed PRI, but its a huge forklift upgrade involving several software releases and CPU upgrades that nobody is interested in spending money on ("the phone works fine"). We have so few display phones anyway that inbound caller id would be kind of a waste of money, unless someone gave us a few hundred displays or phones with displays.
My PHB keeps asking me why we want to spend $30k to upgrade the phone system instead of replacing it, and I keep telling him its cheaper than the $400k it will take to replace it.
I have a cell phone from Verizon and do 10 digit dialing to any area code, whether its considered a local call or a long distance call, and from any location as well. If they can do it for cell phones, why not land lines?
Yes direct dail is cute, but unnessary. Most places only list the master number any way. Even on caller id, so if I place a redail I get the master number, so why have direct lines? Even for those few that a direct number can help... why give it to all?
Businesses with updated phone systems and ISDN PRI can deliver desktop calling party info to outside lines as well as internally. Many places (like us) haven't made that upgrade yet and still rely on T1 trunking which doesn't have that capability -- on our system you get just the trunk number.
The advantage to direct inward dial is huge. For a company of 500 people, you'd need 5 people to handle incoming call routing (4 operators and a supervisor), that's easily $200k in pay & bennies alone compared to under $5k for DID capable trunks.
You *could* have a voicemail system answer the calls and do some lame menu/directory system, but many businesses and customers can't or won't tolerate that, they want a person or an individual voicemailbox to answer it.
But its not a no-cost market to enter. To make some new flat panel technology in mass quantities would take hundreds of million to a billion dollars to get started, not to mention a lead time of at least six months to a year to modify or make new tooling and equipment. It's a high-barrier-to-entry market.
Anyway, my speculation in the parent post was based on the idea that most (all?) of the businesses capable of making the new technology are heavily invested in the old technology. Not only is a new panel technology a high barrier to entry market, but the current market is a high barrier to exit -- you can't just junk many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment for making LCD panels and start a new plant; you have to keep making LCDs until the investment has at least broken even or the loss is acceptable.
If the new techologies were easy, cheap and simple to make, I think you're right, we'd have them by now. But they're at least as hard to make as LCDs (in quantity), and even if there are operational advantages to the new panels the display makers aren't going to junk billions in LCD fabs just like that.
Even though it seems conspiratorial, I still think we're not seeing better flat panel displays in part because the current makers just have too much invested in LCDs, even though they could make new ones.
It is worth noting that the PM has very reduced powers compared to the President so this doesn't make as much sense over here; there's no real way in which the PM's power needs to be balanced by putting a different party in opposition to it. There are more differences in the two systems than most PMs would like, I think.
The US President may have more direct powers over the executive branch, but the way we were taught was that the PM as more effective legislative power because his party leadership coupled with party discipline meant that it was much easier for his policy slate to be made into law than the Presidents.
Although as you indicate, it helps for the party in power to actually like its leader. If you're a hated leader of the party in power and you're there only because the party doesn't trust the outcome of outsting you, then, well, maybe you have less effective power than you think.
There's a lot here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
WCCO -- AM and TV, both in downtown Minneapolis on the west side of the river.
KSTP -- AM (I think the FM is too) and TV -- both in St. Paul, east side of the river.
KARE -- TV, used to be WTCN, based in western suburbs of Minneapolis, of course west of the river. They re-call-lettered themselves a few years back, must have been required to pick the right prefix letter.
KSJN -- Public radio news station, based in St. Paul.
I'm sure there are other radio anomolies, I'm not sure what they are.
Strangely, I think all the TVs should be 'W' stations based upon where they *transmit*, in Arden Hills, a St. Paul northern suburb. I think a lot of radio stations should probably be 'K' stations based on where they transmit, many are on the top of the IDS Center in Minneapolis.
Why do you think this is a big deal? We voted (or not) for parties in the full knowledge of who their leaders were and those leaders were a substantial factor in the way people voted.
I wonder, do Britons care very much about who their MPs are? Do they go to the polls thinking about how great Tony Blair is but hating the labor MP candidate for their district and vote for him anyway because he's labor and they want Blair for PM?
My guess would be that given the strength of the parties in Britain your individual MP wouldn't matter all that much, since they're almost always vote the party line which is mostly directed by the PM.
In America there's quite a lot of stir over congressional elections, and many people deliberately split their vote between President and congress, even when the candidates in question directly oppose each other on policy.
I wonder sometimes if "the powers that be" aren't just holding back on some of the new LCD-like display technologies because they've got a lot of money tied up in LCD technology that's just starting to show a return on investment.
And there's the whole recession thing, which has limited sales and maybe curtailed manufacturers' desire to invest in converting plants and equipment to make the new displays.
I know it seems a little conspiratorial, and the answer probably that the technology isn't reliable or mass producable yet, but I still can't help but wonder if the economy picks up we'll see from Apple or someone else not afraid to roll out an expensive 1st gen product and then see it approach commodity levels a couple of years later.
Although I keep asking myself why a 13" LCD TV sells for $800 and a 17" LCD monitor is $500. That's a market contrast I *don't* get, and the explanations I've been given about the cost of tuners and IR control logic don't add up, especially when a tube 20" is $170.
Re:This is good, but..
on
Spammers Busted
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· Score: 4, Insightful
How many spams are for legitimate products? In the financial services category I'd wager that most of them are not legitimate. The closest to "legitmate" I can think of are ads for porn sites, and I wonder how many of them aren't also credit card scams or trojan-spreaders.
Going after the fraud that makes up a majority of spam would have a huge impact I think, and its the one way you can go after spammers without crippling email with restrictions, laws, etc.
The only potential downside I can see to this is that by removing the criminals from spam, it might 'clean up' spam's image to the point that businesses that have stayed out of email marketing due to the association with fraudulent entities might want to get into it if it was seen as more legitimate.
Negotiation is great for contracts, but we're talking basic human rights here, not political appeasement. That's one of the points behind a Supreme Court, they're supposed to be apolitical interpreters of the Constitution, not deal cutters.
In one sentence you've encapsulated perfectly the the conflict of the Supreme Court. As you said, the supreme court is supposed to be an apolitical interpreter of the Constituion. Their job is not to defend basic human rights, but to interpret the constitution, and the constitution does not enumerate a right to an abortion.
So? Either a woman has the right to do such a thing or she doesn't. I doubt your supposed "crowd pleasing" solution would do anything but produce the gateway legislation the religious right/anti-abortion groups keep trying to pass in congress. Not to mention your suggestion would still be abortion in the traditional sense and the anti-abortionists probably wouldn't agree on priciple alone.
What you denigrate as "crowd pleasing" is the entire purpose behind democratic lawmaking process. It is exactly about political appeasement. The will of the majority is supposed to reign, and the compromise involved in doing so defangs the extremists, it doesn't empower them.
The SC's abortion decision, because it lacked any compromise whatsoever, has been extremely polarizing. A polarized issue empowers extremists, a democratic solution disempowers them.
Few, if any, movies do $360M at the box office. I don't even think TT has done that (yet).
My guess for the cost differential isn't that movies make all their money at the box office, but that the music industry is spending too much on music videos and trying to subsidize it via the purchase of CDs. Videos are basically a giveaway (yes, you can buy them, but most people consume them for free on TV).
I'd wager the music industry actually makes decent money on audio, if you could subtract the cost of videos out of their finances.
Not because I don't support a right to abortion, but because it wasn't accomplished politically, and since it wasn't accomplished politically there's no compromise involved.
If there were to be open debate on it, I think conservatives would have to give a little (rape/incest, save life) to get a little (minors need parental consent, no elective abortions in the second or third trimester). And pro-choicers would too, and we'd probably end up with on-demand abortion for adult women in the first trimester, parental consent for minors, and strict limits on 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions.
The only people unhappy would the zealots at the extreme ends, but they're not the majority and the bad news for zealots is they never get what they want, ever.
You're right, and the SC setting policy reminds me of my wife trying to manage the relationship between the cat (12 lbs) and the dog (8 lbs, but more aggressive) when they have a dustup.
I keep telling her that they have to get to their own conclusions and find a solution for living together on their own. If she keeps intervening, it prevents a 'political' solution that actually satisfies them both. Instead she finds a 'solution' that satisfies her interests and not the animals'.
It would be quite useful for PC rollouts and imaging to be able to do this, but it sounds like something that won't have a huge impact for that for several years until the HW base and the OS are able to actually do something with it.
Anyone familiar with these as usable features on any current x86 systems? What OSes (yes, including Windows) will support installation and boot off of USB devices?
USB2 might just be fast enough where boot from a USB2 HDD might be a very useful feature. I didn't think that PCs would ever be able to boot off of a non-IDE/SCSI disk (network boots and CD/floppy helper boots notwithstanding).
Seconded - the number of badly designed mobos I've seen that need you to twist the IDE cable round to get it to plug into your hard drive is unbelieveable.
Or worse, such as unkeyed IDE connectors on the motherboard either under the footprint of a PCI card or AGP card. Not only do you have to rip the card out to plug the cable in to begin with, you have to guess where pin 0 is, and if its the AGP slot the fsck'n AGP card has to go in and out twice when you orient the IDE cable backwards.
Training is about passing the cert exams. Why? That's what most people want.
People want the certs because they think its the key to a job. Or people need the certs, because their PHBs require them to get/keep/update certs.
PHBs want certs because it shows they're hiring a "qualified" workforce. HR people screen for certs because they're usually too ignorant to look for anything else, and they all have nice acronyms they can type into search engines.
If you want to actually *learn* something, most IT training isn't the place to find it. Cisco training by and large is pretty good, but it still focuses a lot on "Psst, it's on the CCNA test". I've taken MS training that's been OK, although the "learning" was something that could have been compressed into 2 days, minus the bullshit and compulsory 20 minute cig breaks every 60 minutes.
I think the best learning is the hardest kind; pounding your head against the CRT until the manpages, HOWTOs and other stuff sink in and you can actually string stuff together. It's incredibly frustrating and time consuming compared to having someone teach you, but AFAIK there's no one actually *teaching* most of what most admins do.
I was asking our phone system vendor about the availability of 900/2400Mhz DSS phones for our Meridian switch. They said they had a 900Mhz analog version for a while but that it got killed off. They said the next thing was likely to be VoIP over WiFi.
Isn't this really ineffecient and overly complicated? I can see where maybe it might be desirable in a home setting or other uncongested environment, but it strikes me as kind of inefficient both from a power consumption and component basis as well as a bandwidth basis to encode voice to data and then encode data as IP for transmission when it would be cheaper and more efficient to directly transmit the encoded voice the way your run of the mill digital phones now do.
I also wonder what it would do in any situation where a PC may suddenly decide to move 100M over the same Wifi base; is there enough congestion control and prioritization on Wifi to keep calls from dropping out or otherwise sounding like a bad cell call? Or is that merely the standard we're expected to accept?
In spite of their elected leaders' apparent stupidity and the general negative view of government bureaucrats, there are some intelligent people managing tax collection agencies.
And these intelligent people know that there's little point in using N resources to conduct tax collection audits when you're not likely to cover the investment in those resources, and a limit as to how many people the tax agencies can hire to police sales taxes on every business nationwide, if it came to that.
Personally I think the best solution to this, if we're going to collect the taxes, would be for the state the business was located in to collect the tax, the same as if I drove to a store in another state and bought something.
This would enduce business to locate in states with low or no sales tax and provide pressure for states that have one to keep it low or eliminate it to attract businesses that do mail order.
Look, nobody doubts that tax filing in multiple states wouldn't be a bit of a cluster fuck for Mr. Joe Luser selling crap on Ebay. I can't fill mine out right either.
But the majority of businesses are likely big enough and sophisticated enough (wire transfers for the payments, electronic filing for the forms) that they and the professional money people they hire can handle it. After the rules are coded in the case of e-tailers, it's just a matter of procedure after that.
Besides, I don't think that the state governments that collect sales tax in state make it that complicated to begin with. Stuff is either taxable, or not, and you charge a straight percentage on it. The paperwork can't be that complicated (if there is much on individual payments, maybe once per year) and if you can pay by bank transfer that makes it even easier.
We probably should be. The taxes are not charged not because someone feels that you should be exempt from taxes, but rather because it is extremely difficult (i.e. impossible) to figure out the taxes. It is unreasonable to require each retaler to file and keep track of all 50 states rules/laws/tax amounts.
I understand that they have a new device that all the kids are talking about called a "com-pu-ter" that is pretty amazing at keeping track of stuff like this. You match up something like the state's abbreviation and it returns the percentage sales tax. I guess it's pretty useful.
But I guess they're not in widespread use, because there's very few nationwide retail chains who are able to keep track of all those complicated rules. The ones that are nationwide I think are getting smaller, like Wal Mart, Target and Best Buy, primarily due to the business overhead they face trying to keep track of all those state taxes.
They'll never thrive like E-Toys, reach the profitability of Amazon, or any of the other successful internet businesses that don't have to charge state sales taxes. What a help it has been.
Where I work we have to fill out time sheets. Many of the people I work with have some percentage of their time billed to the client, or, in the case of fee-based work someone internally figures out how many hours should be spent on a job, totoal, so that it remains profitable.
My time, however, isn't billable (it all goes in the INTERNAL column), but they still make me fill out a time sheet. I've even been told to include my time spent on the weekend, even though as a salaried employee the company is accruing no costs.
The timesheets are collected by the client accounting department, and they are not used by HR or payroll for counting time off or other pay-related items (those would be attendance sheets and timecards, neither of which I fill out).
I've worked here 10 years and they've never told me why I have to fill them out when none of my time is ever billable and I don't make any overtime. Can't they just assume that I cost salary+benefits/2080 per hour and be done with it?
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear about your timesheets. Unless its executed really well, time sheets in a non-client-billable environment are usually the sign that management has been taken over by petty micromanagers, control freaks and information addicts and that they've lost sight of the big picture.
Before long they'll be inventorying your pencils and demanding pencil usage progress reports detailing what you've been using your pencils for. They're convinced there's too much erasing and too much sharpening going on, and they're going to back up their hunch with SOLID DATA and catch the offender!
Haha, I read this and laughed and then I thought of the 934348498 times my wife and I have complained about how there's no place to go out to eat, in spite of the fact that we live in a metro area of 3 million people.
I'm not sure what that means other than we're bored, picky and not terribly daring, but I think its part of the same phenomenon.
Will there be a reasonable upgrade path from 4.X-STABLE to the 5.X STABLE branch, when it becomes available?
There was from 3.x->4.x, although it may have stretched some people's idea of reasonable. I pulled it off without problems on two boxes, although both were soon replaced with new hardware and fresh installs of 4.x.
Slashdot Mirror
Retinal projection or some kind of VR goggle system?
The only kind of foldable display likely to be seen in real life anytime soon would be something with multiple conventional LCD screens, which would be thick, power-hungry, expensive and of limited value compared to a single, large display due to the lack of physical continuity.
We were told by our switch vendor (its a Nortel Meridian 61C) that we couldn't do caller id outbound due to the fact that we had T1s. I always presumed that the T1s didn't support that kind of signaling, but it could be the combination of Qwest T1s and our switch rev (which is kind of getting ancient) wouldn't send that data out.
The mantra was always that if we wanted good caller id we needed PRI, but its a huge forklift upgrade involving several software releases and CPU upgrades that nobody is interested in spending money on ("the phone works fine"). We have so few display phones anyway that inbound caller id would be kind of a waste of money, unless someone gave us a few hundred displays or phones with displays.
My PHB keeps asking me why we want to spend $30k to upgrade the phone system instead of replacing it, and I keep telling him its cheaper than the $400k it will take to replace it.
I have a cell phone from Verizon and do 10 digit dialing to any area code, whether its considered a local call or a long distance call, and from any location as well. If they can do it for cell phones, why not land lines?
Yes direct dail is cute, but unnessary. Most places only list the master number any way. Even on caller id, so if I place a redail I get the master number, so why have direct lines? Even for those few that a direct number can help... why give it to all?
Businesses with updated phone systems and ISDN PRI can deliver desktop calling party info to outside lines as well as internally. Many places (like us) haven't made that upgrade yet and still rely on T1 trunking which doesn't have that capability -- on our system you get just the trunk number.
The advantage to direct inward dial is huge. For a company of 500 people, you'd need 5 people to handle incoming call routing (4 operators and a supervisor), that's easily $200k in pay & bennies alone compared to under $5k for DID capable trunks.
You *could* have a voicemail system answer the calls and do some lame menu/directory system, but many businesses and customers can't or won't tolerate that, they want a person or an individual voicemailbox to answer it.
But its not a no-cost market to enter. To make some new flat panel technology in mass quantities would take hundreds of million to a billion dollars to get started, not to mention a lead time of at least six months to a year to modify or make new tooling and equipment. It's a high-barrier-to-entry market.
Anyway, my speculation in the parent post was based on the idea that most (all?) of the businesses capable of making the new technology are heavily invested in the old technology. Not only is a new panel technology a high barrier to entry market, but the current market is a high barrier to exit -- you can't just junk many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of equipment for making LCD panels and start a new plant; you have to keep making LCDs until the investment has at least broken even or the loss is acceptable.
If the new techologies were easy, cheap and simple to make, I think you're right, we'd have them by now. But they're at least as hard to make as LCDs (in quantity), and even if there are operational advantages to the new panels the display makers aren't going to junk billions in LCD fabs just like that.
Even though it seems conspiratorial, I still think we're not seeing better flat panel displays in part because the current makers just have too much invested in LCDs, even though they could make new ones.
It is worth noting that the PM has very reduced powers compared to the President so this doesn't make as much sense over here; there's no real way in which the PM's power needs to be balanced by putting a different party in opposition to it. There are more differences in the two systems than most PMs would like, I think.
The US President may have more direct powers over the executive branch, but the way we were taught was that the PM as more effective legislative power because his party leadership coupled with party discipline meant that it was much easier for his policy slate to be made into law than the Presidents.
Although as you indicate, it helps for the party in power to actually like its leader. If you're a hated leader of the party in power and you're there only because the party doesn't trust the outcome of outsting you, then, well, maybe you have less effective power than you think.
There's a lot here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
WCCO -- AM and TV, both in downtown Minneapolis on the west side of the river.
KSTP -- AM (I think the FM is too) and TV -- both in St. Paul, east side of the river.
KARE -- TV, used to be WTCN, based in western suburbs of Minneapolis, of course west of the river. They re-call-lettered themselves a few years back, must have been required to pick the right prefix letter.
KSJN -- Public radio news station, based in St. Paul.
I'm sure there are other radio anomolies, I'm not sure what they are.
Strangely, I think all the TVs should be 'W' stations based upon where they *transmit*, in Arden Hills, a St. Paul northern suburb. I think a lot of radio stations should probably be 'K' stations based on where they transmit, many are on the top of the IDS Center in Minneapolis.
Why do you think this is a big deal? We voted (or not) for parties in the full knowledge of who their leaders were and those leaders were a substantial factor in the way people voted.
I wonder, do Britons care very much about who their MPs are? Do they go to the polls thinking about how great Tony Blair is but hating the labor MP candidate for their district and vote for him anyway because he's labor and they want Blair for PM?
My guess would be that given the strength of the parties in Britain your individual MP wouldn't matter all that much, since they're almost always vote the party line which is mostly directed by the PM.
In America there's quite a lot of stir over congressional elections, and many people deliberately split their vote between President and congress, even when the candidates in question directly oppose each other on policy.
I wonder sometimes if "the powers that be" aren't just holding back on some of the new LCD-like display technologies because they've got a lot of money tied up in LCD technology that's just starting to show a return on investment.
And there's the whole recession thing, which has limited sales and maybe curtailed manufacturers' desire to invest in converting plants and equipment to make the new displays.
I know it seems a little conspiratorial, and the answer probably that the technology isn't reliable or mass producable yet, but I still can't help but wonder if the economy picks up we'll see from Apple or someone else not afraid to roll out an expensive 1st gen product and then see it approach commodity levels a couple of years later.
Although I keep asking myself why a 13" LCD TV sells for $800 and a 17" LCD monitor is $500. That's a market contrast I *don't* get, and the explanations I've been given about the cost of tuners and IR control logic don't add up, especially when a tube 20" is $170.
How many spams are for legitimate products? In the financial services category I'd wager that most of them are not legitimate. The closest to "legitmate" I can think of are ads for porn sites, and I wonder how many of them aren't also credit card scams or trojan-spreaders.
Going after the fraud that makes up a majority of spam would have a huge impact I think, and its the one way you can go after spammers without crippling email with restrictions, laws, etc.
The only potential downside I can see to this is that by removing the criminals from spam, it might 'clean up' spam's image to the point that businesses that have stayed out of email marketing due to the association with fraudulent entities might want to get into it if it was seen as more legitimate.
Negotiation is great for contracts, but we're talking basic human rights here, not political appeasement. That's one of the points behind a Supreme Court, they're supposed to be apolitical interpreters of the Constitution, not deal cutters.
In one sentence you've encapsulated perfectly the the conflict of the Supreme Court. As you said, the supreme court is supposed to be an apolitical interpreter of the Constituion. Their job is not to defend basic human rights, but to interpret the constitution, and the constitution does not enumerate a right to an abortion.
So? Either a woman has the right to do such a thing or she doesn't. I doubt your supposed "crowd pleasing" solution would do anything but produce the gateway legislation the religious right/anti-abortion groups keep trying to pass in congress. Not to mention your suggestion would still be abortion in the traditional sense and the anti-abortionists probably wouldn't agree on priciple alone.
What you denigrate as "crowd pleasing" is the entire purpose behind democratic lawmaking process. It is exactly about political appeasement. The will of the majority is supposed to reign, and the compromise involved in doing so defangs the extremists, it doesn't empower them.
The SC's abortion decision, because it lacked any compromise whatsoever, has been extremely polarizing. A polarized issue empowers extremists, a democratic solution disempowers them.
Few, if any, movies do $360M at the box office. I don't even think TT has done that (yet).
My guess for the cost differential isn't that movies make all their money at the box office, but that the music industry is spending too much on music videos and trying to subsidize it via the purchase of CDs. Videos are basically a giveaway (yes, you can buy them, but most people consume them for free on TV).
I'd wager the music industry actually makes decent money on audio, if you could subtract the cost of videos out of their finances.
Roe v. Wade -- bad
Not because I don't support a right to abortion, but because it wasn't accomplished politically, and since it wasn't accomplished politically there's no compromise involved.
If there were to be open debate on it, I think conservatives would have to give a little (rape/incest, save life) to get a little (minors need parental consent, no elective abortions in the second or third trimester). And pro-choicers would too, and we'd probably end up with on-demand abortion for adult women in the first trimester, parental consent for minors, and strict limits on 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions.
The only people unhappy would the zealots at the extreme ends, but they're not the majority and the bad news for zealots is they never get what they want, ever.
You're right, and the SC setting policy reminds me of my wife trying to manage the relationship between the cat (12 lbs) and the dog (8 lbs, but more aggressive) when they have a dustup.
I keep telling her that they have to get to their own conclusions and find a solution for living together on their own. If she keeps intervening, it prevents a 'political' solution that actually satisfies them both. Instead she finds a 'solution' that satisfies her interests and not the animals'.
Thanks for the info.
It would be quite useful for PC rollouts and imaging to be able to do this, but it sounds like something that won't have a huge impact for that for several years until the HW base and the OS are able to actually do something with it.
Anyone familiar with these as usable features on any current x86 systems? What OSes (yes, including Windows) will support installation and boot off of USB devices?
USB2 might just be fast enough where boot from a USB2 HDD might be a very useful feature. I didn't think that PCs would ever be able to boot off of a non-IDE/SCSI disk (network boots and CD/floppy helper boots notwithstanding).
Seconded - the number of badly designed mobos I've seen that need you to twist the IDE cable round to get it to plug into your hard drive is unbelieveable.
Or worse, such as unkeyed IDE connectors on the motherboard either under the footprint of a PCI card or AGP card. Not only do you have to rip the card out to plug the cable in to begin with, you have to guess where pin 0 is, and if its the AGP slot the fsck'n AGP card has to go in and out twice when you orient the IDE cable backwards.
Training is about passing the cert exams. Why? That's what most people want.
People want the certs because they think its the key to a job. Or people need the certs, because their PHBs require them to get/keep/update certs.
PHBs want certs because it shows they're hiring a "qualified" workforce. HR people screen for certs because they're usually too ignorant to look for anything else, and they all have nice acronyms they can type into search engines.
If you want to actually *learn* something, most IT training isn't the place to find it. Cisco training by and large is pretty good, but it still focuses a lot on "Psst, it's on the CCNA test". I've taken MS training that's been OK, although the "learning" was something that could have been compressed into 2 days, minus the bullshit and compulsory 20 minute cig breaks every 60 minutes.
I think the best learning is the hardest kind; pounding your head against the CRT until the manpages, HOWTOs and other stuff sink in and you can actually string stuff together. It's incredibly frustrating and time consuming compared to having someone teach you, but AFAIK there's no one actually *teaching* most of what most admins do.
I was asking our phone system vendor about the availability of 900/2400Mhz DSS phones for our Meridian switch. They said they had a 900Mhz analog version for a while but that it got killed off. They said the next thing was likely to be VoIP over WiFi.
Isn't this really ineffecient and overly complicated? I can see where maybe it might be desirable in a home setting or other uncongested environment, but it strikes me as kind of inefficient both from a power consumption and component basis as well as a bandwidth basis to encode voice to data and then encode data as IP for transmission when it would be cheaper and more efficient to directly transmit the encoded voice the way your run of the mill digital phones now do.
I also wonder what it would do in any situation where a PC may suddenly decide to move 100M over the same Wifi base; is there enough congestion control and prioritization on Wifi to keep calls from dropping out or otherwise sounding like a bad cell call? Or is that merely the standard we're expected to accept?
In spite of their elected leaders' apparent stupidity and the general negative view of government bureaucrats, there are some intelligent people managing tax collection agencies.
And these intelligent people know that there's little point in using N resources to conduct tax collection audits when you're not likely to cover the investment in those resources, and a limit as to how many people the tax agencies can hire to police sales taxes on every business nationwide, if it came to that.
Personally I think the best solution to this, if we're going to collect the taxes, would be for the state the business was located in to collect the tax, the same as if I drove to a store in another state and bought something.
This would enduce business to locate in states with low or no sales tax and provide pressure for states that have one to keep it low or eliminate it to attract businesses that do mail order.
Look, nobody doubts that tax filing in multiple states wouldn't be a bit of a cluster fuck for Mr. Joe Luser selling crap on Ebay. I can't fill mine out right either.
But the majority of businesses are likely big enough and sophisticated enough (wire transfers for the payments, electronic filing for the forms) that they and the professional money people they hire can handle it. After the rules are coded in the case of e-tailers, it's just a matter of procedure after that.
Besides, I don't think that the state governments that collect sales tax in state make it that complicated to begin with. Stuff is either taxable, or not, and you charge a straight percentage on it. The paperwork can't be that complicated (if there is much on individual payments, maybe once per year) and if you can pay by bank transfer that makes it even easier.
We probably should be. The taxes are not charged not because someone feels that you should be exempt from taxes, but rather because it is extremely difficult (i.e. impossible) to figure out the taxes. It is unreasonable to require each retaler to file and keep track of all 50 states rules/laws/tax amounts.
I understand that they have a new device that all the kids are talking about called a "com-pu-ter" that is pretty amazing at keeping track of stuff like this. You match up something like the state's abbreviation and it returns the percentage sales tax. I guess it's pretty useful.
But I guess they're not in widespread use, because there's very few nationwide retail chains who are able to keep track of all those complicated rules. The ones that are nationwide I think are getting smaller, like Wal Mart, Target and Best Buy, primarily due to the business overhead they face trying to keep track of all those state taxes.
They'll never thrive like E-Toys, reach the profitability of Amazon, or any of the other successful internet businesses that don't have to charge state sales taxes. What a help it has been.
Where I work we have to fill out time sheets. Many of the people I work with have some percentage of their time billed to the client, or, in the case of fee-based work someone internally figures out how many hours should be spent on a job, totoal, so that it remains profitable.
My time, however, isn't billable (it all goes in the INTERNAL column), but they still make me fill out a time sheet. I've even been told to include my time spent on the weekend, even though as a salaried employee the company is accruing no costs.
The timesheets are collected by the client accounting department, and they are not used by HR or payroll for counting time off or other pay-related items (those would be attendance sheets and timecards, neither of which I fill out).
I've worked here 10 years and they've never told me why I have to fill them out when none of my time is ever billable and I don't make any overtime. Can't they just assume that I cost salary+benefits/2080 per hour and be done with it?
Anyway, I'm sorry to hear about your timesheets. Unless its executed really well, time sheets in a non-client-billable environment are usually the sign that management has been taken over by petty micromanagers, control freaks and information addicts and that they've lost sight of the big picture.
Before long they'll be inventorying your pencils and demanding pencil usage progress reports detailing what you've been using your pencils for. They're convinced there's too much erasing and too much sharpening going on, and they're going to back up their hunch with SOLID DATA and catch the offender!
Haha, I read this and laughed and then I thought of the 934348498 times my wife and I have complained about how there's no place to go out to eat, in spite of the fact that we live in a metro area of 3 million people.
I'm not sure what that means other than we're bored, picky and not terribly daring, but I think its part of the same phenomenon.
Will there be a reasonable upgrade path from 4.X-STABLE to the 5.X STABLE branch, when it becomes available?
There was from 3.x->4.x, although it may have stretched some people's idea of reasonable. I pulled it off without problems on two boxes, although both were soon replaced with new hardware and fresh installs of 4.x.