- In the real world, the PM monitors subcontractor performance and addresses problems as they come up. Why? Because 2 weeks before a building opening is too late to discover a contractor is 2 months behind.
In the real world, small businesses come up against larger hurdles (relative to their operation) than larger enterprises.
An independent clothing store currently rents a storefront across the street from me. In the spring of last year they purchased the vacant lot beside my building with the intention of having a new building constructed and being open in the new location by last Christmas.
Christmas came and went and now it's almost Christmas again and the building is nowhere near completed; only the outside (unfinished) shell has been built.
There's no comeback on the contractor who's doing the job; if the owner had insisted on writing some kind of specific performance penalties into the contract the guy simply would have refused the job -- there's lots of other construction work around here.
So the store owner is paying rent on his existing location, plus the materials, labour and ongoing costs (electricity, property taxes) for a new building that's nowhere near ready for him to occupy a year after it was supposed to be completed.
Somehow I don't think this situation would have occurred if the clothing store was [insert big name company here].
Same thing with computer services and small companies. A small business owner has very little leverage.
...in the traditional sense of income: you either work or run a business.
There's still nothing new. Avon and Amway aren't "get enough to live on" businesses either. I don't see the difference between selling 3 lipsticks and a box of perfume, and $238 from Google Adsense for your blog.
Reading on a regular computer feels rather restrictive, since it forces you into sitting still.
On the other hand, the computer holds the book for you so you can just sit back and read. If you have a sufficiently comfortable chair in front of your computer and a sufficiently large monitor so you can jack the font size up enough that you can sit back a ways from the screen, it's not bad at all.
I'm still considering the purchase of an ebook reader when I see one that's sufficiently cheap and functional, but in the meantime fbreader and my widescreen monitor work really well.
virtually every community has a vast repository of books from which to choose
The definition of "vast" depends where you live and what kind of books you read.
I used to "read out" the library in my town on a regular basis. They are part of a regional library system that exchanges "blocks" of books between different libraries on a regular basis. However, I used to take a dozen books out at a time, and had more than enough time to read everything that they had that I was interested in (westerns, spy stories, mysteries, science fiction, etc.) long before they rotated that block out and got a new selection of books.
Use something like pdf2txt or pdftohtml to convert the file to something that isn't a PDF file.
Load the resulting file into OpenOffice, set the margins and page size to whatever fits the screen size of your device the best.
Create a new PDF.
Or just use a book-reading program like fbreader that works directly with html files. (You can use OpenOffice to create a html file from a txt file, too.)
A friend of mine is the local dealer for cell phone service. He has a bunch of different cell phones on display, all provided by the phone company. The display models are all hollow cases, not working phones.
Buses certainly never check for guns or sharp pointy things.
There is a notice on the wall at the bus depot here stating that all passengers and luggage are subject to search. I've never seen or heard of it actually being done, though.
A few months ago a friend of mine decided to take his family (wife and two little kids) to the USA for a day of shopping. They recently moved to a town in Manitoba, not too far from the US border.
When he got to the border there was nobody at the checkpoint. He sat there for some number of minutes, nobody seemed to be around and nothing moved at all, so he continued on his way into the USA.
A couple of miles further along the highway he saw a large truck stopped on the shoulder of the road ahead of him. As he approached it, the truck suddenly swung across the highway to block it and three unmarked police cars came roaring up from somewhere behind him and boxed him in. His car was surrounded and he was ordered out at gunpoint (which terrified everyone in the car, of course).
He was ultimately taken back to the checkpoint in one of the police cars while his wife had to drive their car with the kids in it back to the checkpoint behind him -- she had a police car in front and behind all the way. They questioned them there for a couple of hours before they decided they were just dumb and not terrorists, then they released them at the border and they had to return home. (It was too late in the day for any shopping and who's in the mood after that, anyway.)
He asked them if he would be allowed back into the USA in the future and they said he would be, but never go through an apparently unmanned checkpoint again. I don't think he's ever gone back, though.
Are online editions charging too little for advertisements, or are dead-tree advertisers charging too much?
This is based on perceived value versus actual value. For another example, see diamonds. A diamond has a great perceived value (in the thousands of dollars) but what is its actual value? It's just a pretty stone that may also have some industrial uses -- is that actually worth thousands of dollars?
Advertisers can hold a printed ad in their hand and see stacks of the printed material sitting in the back of a truck and on a street corner. They can't see that same "stack" online. Five Hundred Thousand Copies is a lot more impressive when viewed on pallets than it is when viewed as a simple number on a single line of an invoice for online services.
So the printed ad has a greater value as perceived by both the seller (publisher) and the customer (advertiser), therefore it can be sold for a higher price.
Effectiveness, on the other hand, is almost impossible to measure accurately and therefore has little or no perceived value, so that doesn't factor into the price that advertisers are willing to pay for an online ad.
Perception and appearance are very important. A warehouse full of papers looks a lot more impressive, therefore it must be worth more money than something that can't be seen filling that warehouse.
This is not a new problem. The 19th century merchant John Wanamaker said ""Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
We still haven't managed to figure it out in a reliable and accurate way.
I own and operate a movie theatre, and I print and mail out several thousand flyers each month listing the movies that will be playing for that month.
I hear complaints from customers every month if they don't receive the monthly flyer in the mail for whatever reason.
I also have a mailing list of people who I send the flyer to that live outside of the "general distribution" area. I don't even advertise that "service" in any way; people ask me if I can mail them the flyer, so I do.
So again, there are always exceptions; it depends on the type of advertising and what's being advertised. If you're genuinely interested in my flyer, then it becomes useful information ("What should we do tonight?") and not just another ad.
On the other hand, I'm a big believer in Privoxy, Noscript and cookie management on my computers.
I have my own business. Most of the people I deal with regularly also have their own businesses. I can't think of too many who work "only" 40 hours per week.
Really, the true protection the laptop gets is that every student receives one for free, but a replacement laptop has to be paid for out of their parent's pockets. Students will learn to be careful with them or face punishment from their parents.
What about the kid whose parents can't afford to replace a broken laptop?
Is the kid then to be deprived of an education due to the lack of a laptop?
A surprising number of people live paycheque-to-paycheque and if they had an unexpected expense of some hundreds of dollars, it just couldn't be done. At all.
I have been working and playing with computers for over 35 years.
Nobody around here has a mac. Nobody I deal with, anyway.
The other day I went to set up someone's Internet connection and this someone had a macbook. First one I've ever seen.
I was completely lost -- the thing is nothing like a Linux or Windows machine and I truly had no idea how to use it. I knew, of course, what sort of thing I was looking for, but I had no idea how to get there. How do you open a terminal window on a brand new macbook with all of its default settings? I still have no idea.
I did get it going for her but I still have no real idea how. I managed to open the email app and it asked me for the network settings, and after that it appeared to be working.
I haven't been that confused by any computer in, well, ever. Even when I was just getting started learning to programm PLC's I had a keypad and a logical diagram to work with. Maybe mac requires a different way of thinking or something. I sure don't get it.
Actually, Windows drives me mad too; you can't just go in and fix something. With the fancy frontend for everything I always feel like I'm trying to work through a heavy curtain, trying to feel what's behind it.
Why haul 500 pounds of books from place to place (plus associated bookcases, etc) when you can have all of that and more in a single tiny ebook reader that you can scan, "thumb-through" and search with ease?
I have hundreds of ebooks ranging from fiction to Perl programming, and everything in between. With the exception of what's in the bookcase right beside my computer desk, most of my "real" books have now been banished to boxes in the basement. And believe me, that's a real change from what this room looked like a couple of years ago.
I suspect that the experience has simply scared them away from trying anything like that again. They probably lost a ton of money due to unpaid bills, lost deposit interest and disappearing customers so they retreated to a system that's worked fine for years and continue to use it.
Frankly, I can't find too much fault with that reasoning. Waybills get written out by ghawd-knows-who at a bus depot way out on the back 40, and it may be too much to expect a relatively uneducated minimum-wage part-time employee on a remote northern outpost to operate a computer so the proper reports sent in to the head office.
They have a manual system that works and has worked since about 1932, and their attempt to "modernize" was nothing short of a disaster.
It's possible that the system worked perfectly, if it wasn't for those pesky users...
I did indeed pay the bill, but since that glitch affected all of the bus line's charge-account customers, they needed a (larger than usual) subsidy from the provincial government to keep operating.
And I have always wondered how many of their charge-account customers went out-of-business or otherwise disappeared before they realized what was going on and sent out the big bills for 18 months of service.
With all of the associated issues that come from deferred revenue: Extra interest on operating loans, lost revenue from deposit interest, and so on.
I'm sure it cost them a ton of money, even if all of the outstanding bills were ultimately collected, which I doubt.
I run a movie theatre and send and receive a lot of freight (film cans and advertising materials) by bus. I have an account with the provincial bus company so they send me a bill once per month containing all of the waybills for that month.
This story goes back several years, as you will see.
Originally, I got a monthly bill that consisted of a strip of adding machine paper stapled to an invoice that totalled up my waybills for the month. Then the bus company decided to modernize and send out bills printed by computer, which were apparently aggregated by having a computer in each bus depot send in each days transactions by modem to a central computer that printed the monthly bills.
For the next year and a half, I got bills for anywhere from $10 to $30/month, nowhere near the $600-plus that I usually spent on bus freight.
18 months later I got a (manually generated) bill for $13,000.
The bus company has since stayed with manually generated bills and has never tried to computerize that part of their operation again.
How do you track micro-payments, in your checkbook?
Your web browser would probably keep track of that for you. Computers are good at tracking numbers. More importantly, if I'm poor, where do I get this money to read the news?
The same place you get the money to buy a copy of the Herald at the news stand on today's street corner.
More relevant might be asking where a very poor person gets the money to pay for an Internet connection and the computer to read it on; that's a better question and the answer is not as obvious other than pointing to community WIFI and the decreasing cost of hardware.
Information that jurors seek out on their own cannot be challenged. How can it be? If the jurors seek outside information, then the parties won't know what information they obtained, where the obtained it, and (without enough time) how to challenge the information. Is it fair for a party to lose based on evidence that the party never was given an opportunity to challenge?
You don't think a juror is entitled to rely on his own education and experience either? After all, the "other side" doesn't get to challenge what his grade 10 bookkeeping class teacher may or may not have taught him about accounting.
Slashdot Mirror
- In the real world, the PM monitors subcontractor performance and addresses problems as they come up. Why? Because 2 weeks before a building opening is too late to discover a contractor is 2 months behind.
In the real world, small businesses come up against larger hurdles (relative to their operation) than larger enterprises.
An independent clothing store currently rents a storefront across the street from me. In the spring of last year they purchased the vacant lot beside my building with the intention of having a new building constructed and being open in the new location by last Christmas.
Christmas came and went and now it's almost Christmas again and the building is nowhere near completed; only the outside (unfinished) shell has been built.
There's no comeback on the contractor who's doing the job; if the owner had insisted on writing some kind of specific performance penalties into the contract the guy simply would have refused the job -- there's lots of other construction work around here.
So the store owner is paying rent on his existing location, plus the materials, labour and ongoing costs (electricity, property taxes) for a new building that's nowhere near ready for him to occupy a year after it was supposed to be completed.
Somehow I don't think this situation would have occurred if the clothing store was [insert big name company here].
Same thing with computer services and small companies. A small business owner has very little leverage.
...in the traditional sense of income: you either work or run a business.
There's still nothing new. Avon and Amway aren't "get enough to live on" businesses either. I don't see the difference between selling 3 lipsticks and a box of perfume, and $238 from Google Adsense for your blog.
"It's on the Internet so it must be new"....
Reading on a regular computer feels rather restrictive, since it forces you into sitting still.
On the other hand, the computer holds the book for you so you can just sit back and read. If you have a sufficiently comfortable chair in front of your computer and a sufficiently large monitor so you can jack the font size up enough that you can sit back a ways from the screen, it's not bad at all.
I'm still considering the purchase of an ebook reader when I see one that's sufficiently cheap and functional, but in the meantime fbreader and my widescreen monitor work really well.
virtually every community has a vast repository of books from which to choose
The definition of "vast" depends where you live and what kind of books you read.
I used to "read out" the library in my town on a regular basis. They are part of a regional library system that exchanges "blocks" of books between different libraries on a regular basis. However, I used to take a dozen books out at a time, and had more than enough time to read everything that they had that I was interested in (westerns, spy stories, mysteries, science fiction, etc.) long before they rotated that block out and got a new selection of books.
Use something like pdf2txt or pdftohtml to convert the file to something that isn't a PDF file.
Load the resulting file into OpenOffice, set the margins and page size to whatever fits the screen size of your device the best.
Create a new PDF.
Or just use a book-reading program like fbreader that works directly with html files. (You can use OpenOffice to create a html file from a txt file, too.)
How quaint, having to pay more to show less.
Telephone companies have been doing that for years -- it's not new. You pay $2/month for an unlisted or unpublished phone number around here.
It's also to cut losses to to breakage and theft.
A friend of mine is the local dealer for cell phone service. He has a bunch of different cell phones on display, all provided by the phone company. The display models are all hollow cases, not working phones.
Buses certainly never check for guns or sharp pointy things.
There is a notice on the wall at the bus depot here stating that all passengers and luggage are subject to search. I've never seen or heard of it actually being done, though.
A few months ago a friend of mine decided to take his family (wife and two little kids) to the USA for a day of shopping. They recently moved to a town in Manitoba, not too far from the US border.
When he got to the border there was nobody at the checkpoint. He sat there for some number of minutes, nobody seemed to be around and nothing moved at all, so he continued on his way into the USA.
A couple of miles further along the highway he saw a large truck stopped on the shoulder of the road ahead of him. As he approached it, the truck suddenly swung across the highway to block it and three unmarked police cars came roaring up from somewhere behind him and boxed him in. His car was surrounded and he was ordered out at gunpoint (which terrified everyone in the car, of course).
He was ultimately taken back to the checkpoint in one of the police cars while his wife had to drive their car with the kids in it back to the checkpoint behind him -- she had a police car in front and behind all the way. They questioned them there for a couple of hours before they decided they were just dumb and not terrorists, then they released them at the border and they had to return home. (It was too late in the day for any shopping and who's in the mood after that, anyway.)
He asked them if he would be allowed back into the USA in the future and they said he would be, but never go through an apparently unmanned checkpoint again. I don't think he's ever gone back, though.
Are online editions charging too little for advertisements, or are dead-tree advertisers charging too much?
This is based on perceived value versus actual value. For another example, see diamonds. A diamond has a great perceived value (in the thousands of dollars) but what is its actual value? It's just a pretty stone that may also have some industrial uses -- is that actually worth thousands of dollars?
Advertisers can hold a printed ad in their hand and see stacks of the printed material sitting in the back of a truck and on a street corner. They can't see that same "stack" online. Five Hundred Thousand Copies is a lot more impressive when viewed on pallets than it is when viewed as a simple number on a single line of an invoice for online services.
So the printed ad has a greater value as perceived by both the seller (publisher) and the customer (advertiser), therefore it can be sold for a higher price.
Effectiveness, on the other hand, is almost impossible to measure accurately and therefore has little or no perceived value, so that doesn't factor into the price that advertisers are willing to pay for an online ad.
Perception and appearance are very important. A warehouse full of papers looks a lot more impressive, therefore it must be worth more money than something that can't be seen filling that warehouse.
This is not a new problem. The 19th century merchant John Wanamaker said ""Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."
We still haven't managed to figure it out in a reliable and accurate way.
No sane person wants any kind of ad
There are some exceptions.
I own and operate a movie theatre, and I print and mail out several thousand flyers each month listing the movies that will be playing for that month.
I hear complaints from customers every month if they don't receive the monthly flyer in the mail for whatever reason.
I also have a mailing list of people who I send the flyer to that live outside of the "general distribution" area. I don't even advertise that "service" in any way; people ask me if I can mail them the flyer, so I do.
So again, there are always exceptions; it depends on the type of advertising and what's being advertised. If you're genuinely interested in my flyer, then it becomes useful information ("What should we do tonight?") and not just another ad.
On the other hand, I'm a big believer in Privoxy, Noscript and cookie management on my computers.
I have my own business. Most of the people I deal with regularly also have their own businesses. I can't think of too many who work "only" 40 hours per week.
Really, the true protection the laptop gets is that every student receives one for free, but a replacement laptop has to be paid for out of their parent's pockets. Students will learn to be careful with them or face punishment from their parents.
What about the kid whose parents can't afford to replace a broken laptop?
Is the kid then to be deprived of an education due to the lack of a laptop?
A surprising number of people live paycheque-to-paycheque and if they had an unexpected expense of some hundreds of dollars, it just couldn't be done. At all.
Renaming executables doesnt work either, AppLocker blocks executables by Certificate, executable hashes, publisher, path, or name.
So I guess none of the kids will be learning to write programs, either.
What a wasted opportunity.
Even on a Mac (yes, I'm a Mac guy).
I have been working and playing with computers for over 35 years.
Nobody around here has a mac. Nobody I deal with, anyway.
The other day I went to set up someone's Internet connection and this someone had a macbook. First one I've ever seen.
I was completely lost -- the thing is nothing like a Linux or Windows machine and I truly had no idea how to use it. I knew, of course, what sort of thing I was looking for, but I had no idea how to get there. How do you open a terminal window on a brand new macbook with all of its default settings? I still have no idea.
I did get it going for her but I still have no real idea how. I managed to open the email app and it asked me for the network settings, and after that it appeared to be working.
I haven't been that confused by any computer in, well, ever. Even when I was just getting started learning to programm PLC's I had a keypad and a logical diagram to work with. Maybe mac requires a different way of thinking or something. I sure don't get it.
Actually, Windows drives me mad too; you can't just go in and fix something. With the fancy frontend for everything I always feel like I'm trying to work through a heavy curtain, trying to feel what's behind it.
Yer damn tootin', toots!
I'm sure that businesses took full advantage of not having to pay for services for 18 months (and many probably didn't even notice).
Again, though, I'm also sure that several of them vanished before the bill ultimately showed up.
So the final cost to the bus company likely exceeds the "time value" by some large amount.
The best way for it ("it" being the state of copyright law) to become genuinely better may be for it to become tremendously bad.
Therefore, a half-bad workaround is arguably worse than none at all.
Why will I no longer want my books?
Storage, mobility and ease of reference.
Why haul 500 pounds of books from place to place (plus associated bookcases, etc) when you can have all of that and more in a single tiny ebook reader that you can scan, "thumb-through" and search with ease?
I have hundreds of ebooks ranging from fiction to Perl programming, and everything in between. With the exception of what's in the bookcase right beside my computer desk, most of my "real" books have now been banished to boxes in the basement. And believe me, that's a real change from what this room looked like a couple of years ago.
I suspect that the experience has simply scared them away from trying anything like that again. They probably lost a ton of money due to unpaid bills, lost deposit interest and disappearing customers so they retreated to a system that's worked fine for years and continue to use it.
Frankly, I can't find too much fault with that reasoning. Waybills get written out by ghawd-knows-who at a bus depot way out on the back 40, and it may be too much to expect a relatively uneducated minimum-wage part-time employee on a remote northern outpost to operate a computer so the proper reports sent in to the head office.
They have a manual system that works and has worked since about 1932, and their attempt to "modernize" was nothing short of a disaster.
It's possible that the system worked perfectly, if it wasn't for those pesky users...
I did indeed pay the bill, but since that glitch affected all of the bus line's charge-account customers, they needed a (larger than usual) subsidy from the provincial government to keep operating.
And I have always wondered how many of their charge-account customers went out-of-business or otherwise disappeared before they realized what was going on and sent out the big bills for 18 months of service.
With all of the associated issues that come from deferred revenue: Extra interest on operating loans, lost revenue from deposit interest, and so on.
I'm sure it cost them a ton of money, even if all of the outstanding bills were ultimately collected, which I doubt.
I run a movie theatre and send and receive a lot of freight (film cans and advertising materials) by bus. I have an account with the provincial bus company so they send me a bill once per month containing all of the waybills for that month.
This story goes back several years, as you will see.
Originally, I got a monthly bill that consisted of a strip of adding machine paper stapled to an invoice that totalled up my waybills for the month. Then the bus company decided to modernize and send out bills printed by computer, which were apparently aggregated by having a computer in each bus depot send in each days transactions by modem to a central computer that printed the monthly bills.
For the next year and a half, I got bills for anywhere from $10 to $30/month, nowhere near the $600-plus that I usually spent on bus freight.
18 months later I got a (manually generated) bill for $13,000.
The bus company has since stayed with manually generated bills and has never tried to computerize that part of their operation again.
How do you track micro-payments, in your checkbook?
Your web browser would probably keep track of that for you. Computers are good at tracking numbers.
More importantly, if I'm poor, where do I get this money to read the news?
The same place you get the money to buy a copy of the Herald at the news stand on today's street corner.
More relevant might be asking where a very poor person gets the money to pay for an Internet connection and the computer to read it on; that's a better question and the answer is not as obvious other than pointing to community WIFI and the decreasing cost of hardware.
"All men are created equal..."
Apparently everyone and anyone is your peer, regardless of education, experience or intellect.
What if you make $200k in a year?
How much is the judge/lawyers/bailiff getting for being there?j
Expensive jury.
The jurors are supposedly the most important and influential people in the room.
Information that jurors seek out on their own cannot be challenged. How can it be? If the jurors seek outside information, then the parties won't know what information they obtained, where the obtained it, and (without enough time) how to challenge the information. Is it fair for a party to lose based on evidence that the party never was given an opportunity to challenge?
You don't think a juror is entitled to rely on his own education and experience either? After all, the "other side" doesn't get to challenge what his grade 10 bookkeeping class teacher may or may not have taught him about accounting.