Except for the final couple of seasons. Then it sucked.
Finally! Why does everyone else on/. insist that DS9 just kept getting better as it went along? I watched it faithfully for a while, starting with the pilot, then lost the time to do so, then went back to it about 2 seasons later only to find that it totally sucked! What happened?
Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, said in an interview that the company had a "fantastic quarter," adding that its share of theU.S. retail notebook markethad doubled to 12 percent as measured by units in June from January.
What Mr. CFO did not do, was define exactly what the bold-faced phrase in his quote actually means. I accuse him of jockying with the statistics. I suspect that the "U.S. retail notebook market" excludes Internet-direct sellers, like Dell, and probably corporate sales as well. I would imagine this is looking at only brick-and-mortar (or glass in Apples' case) retail stores.
Does anyone have more info on the new budgeting features? That is the one feature I have been waiting for most in Gnucash over the last few years. I have an Excel spreadsheet with my entire Gnucash account tree mirrored, and I used that for budgeting, with my actuals in Gnucash. It works okay, but something seemless (with integrated reports) would be nice.
The wiki has a huge discussion about budgeting, but not much real info on what they actually implemented, how it works, or how to use it. I couldn't get to the gnucash main site to see if the online users guide has been updated, so maybe it is there. Can anyone confirm?
Of course, it happens to be very similar to how I organize directories at home, and seems like a rather intuitive concept that a lot of people would arrive at independently.
Unfortunately, independent invention itself is not a valid legal defense against patent infringement suits.
That bottleneck is not a problem with the theory itself, but rather a problem with a different theory: How much funding IT deserves.
If IT runs out of human resources whenever they proactively "step up to the plate", they are underfunded and will forever by acting in a reactive role, hence the bad image in the workplace.
Others have already covered the whole Class A vs. Class B stock, whereby technically Google senior management can do whatever they want, since as far as shareholder interest is concerned, they are a majority of shareholder voting rights.
But I'm more interested in the emphatic statement that they are required by law to follow shareholder "interests" whatever those may be. How are those interests even enumerated and conveyed?
I see this sentiment on Slashdot repeatedly, but I have yet to see it from anyone who has any real knowledge of corporate law. Can you turn your bold text into links to back up your claims? Under what law can disgruntled shareholders bring suit against corporate boards and/or executives? What would the burden of proof be; how do you prove that the executives were not acting in shareholders' best interests? How do you reconcile the differences between short-term profiteering vs. long-term strategic growth? Is the burden of proof limited to an malicious intent test, or is it an effects test wholly sufficient? Has this ever been successfully tried in court; what are the precedents?
Where in the world did the submitter get New Jersey from? The article is in the Chicago Sun-Times (which doesn't in and of itself mean anything). However, the Plainfield in question is in Illinois, near Joliet (mentioned in the article). New Jersey is not mentioned in the article at all.
They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.
And they would be right. However, regarding "reasonable": I do not think it means what they think it means.
Your conspiracy theory is well crafted, except for the fact that PortalPlayer provides the processing chips, not the memory, for the iPods. Apple already has a fairly long, prepaid contract with Samsung for the memory, if my own memory serves correctly.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel processors (ARM or XScale?) on a touch/widescreen video iPod in the near future. So I think your theory may be correct about Apple seeing the benefit of a strong Intel partnership not just for the Mac, but for the iPod as well, but I think focusing on the memory is missing the target.
The AT&T plan may have resulted in you getting less bandwidth than you paid for if you failed to pay their extortion fees.
The way I understandd it, you would be getting less throughput than you should be able to get based on what you paid for, if your content provider failed to pay their extortion fees.
Despite the humor of your post, Ambilight is a very cool technology -- ambient back-lighting significantly reduces eye strain. I was very hopeful that other companies would come out with equivalent alternatives or start licensing it from Philips -- it deserves to be on every TV set sold, wall-mounted or not.
This is sound advice. You should always buy the largest/most expensive home you can afford at any given point in time while you are in expansion phase (i.e. still have/having kids). Not only for the reasons of the parent post, but because even with the same home value inflation percentage, the absolute dollar gap between your house and a bigger house (i.e. your next house) will continue to increase. You need to minimize that effect. Once you are in a downsizing trend (i.e. empty nest) you can just get whatever size you need and be done with it.
If you think the Stewart screens are a rip off, but you still want something with a higher gain than white paint, check out Screen Goo. Judging from the DIY slant of rest of your post, I think it would be right up your alley.
Cognos has a whole range of products. We used their OLAP product as well as their web-based ad-hoc product. They also have Dashboarding and scorecarding and metrics management...
On the backend, I think Cognos OLAP is just slightly better than MS SQL Analysis Services, but they are roughly equavalent for most uses. On the front-end, however, MS relies on Excel PivotTables, which totally SUCK. Cognos has an entirely web-based OLAP front end that is very intuitive and extremely powerful. This is by far the piece that is the biggest value-add above going with something open source or "bundled" (MSSQL).
The other major difference between tools like Business Objects and Cognos versus things like BIRT and MS SQL Reporting Services is report delivery and security. The latter may be fine report authoring tools, but you are still just emailing the output to the users. The former have customizable web-based portals that allow for automatic sceduling, emailing, and manage your security access (using LDAP) to different report pieces. E.g. nobody but our finance department was allowed to see Royalties. Just set the security once in the metadata, and voila - don't have to worry about emailing the wrong thing to the wrong people.
As far as costs are concerned, I think Cognos runs about US$1000-$2000/user depending on their capabilities. Report authors and administrators were more, but generally you don't have many of those. Well worth it, IMHO. It is not simply a matter of "we'll save this many man-hours using more efficient tools", it is more like "this provides capabilities that we do not even have today, but that we require". Then again, if you don't need it, it would be a waste.
Also - what reporting technologies are you looking at? When I implemented OLAP at my previous employer, it revolutionized the way we reported data, the way we classified data and increased the amount of data people could get.
We were a 100% ad-hoc-written-by-IT shop originally. When we rolled out OLAP, we intended to apply the 80/20 rule to reporting: OLAP cubes should handle 80% of the information requests, we can spend our time on the remaining 20% as complex ad-hoc reports. This turned out to be pretty true generally.
Cognos segments their licensing this way, but I have found it is a good way to think about reporting in general.
Segment the people in your company into four groups:
1) Report Consumers - people who consume reports. Generally this is simply the people receiving an email with their Excel report attached.
2) Power Users - these are your business analysts. They are capable of self-servicing their reporting needs to a limited extent, if the interface is simple enough. These are the people who are savvy with Access.
3) Report Authors - people who know your data inside and out, and understand how it applies to the business. In every company I have worked at, this role is inside the IT department. They have the robust reporting tools.
4) Reporting Administrators - people who manage the report server, as well as define the metadata structure. Often this can overlap with a DBA Role. They need to understand about database relationships, cardinality, and also know the data inside and out, but not necessarily how it applies to the business.
Also think about your uses for reporting. In general, reporting is in nature operational (customer called in and needs a copy of an invoice or a current statement of accounts), tactical (we need to generate a customer list for this marketing campaign using certain criteria so we can send a mailing) or stategic (high level executive view of the business).
I'm a Reporting Engineer, so business intelligence is my speciality. I do not work for a company that sells BI software or services, I'm just an administrator/power user. I've used BIRT, Crystal Reports, Crystal for Eclipse, MS SQL Reporting Services, Excel PivotTables with SQL Analysis Server cubes, Proclarity, Cognos ReportNet, Cognos Impromptu and Cognos PowerPlay.
Business Objects seems to have a pretty solid platform these days, but the company tends to use underhanded advertising techniques and make dubious claims in their marketing material. I'm not sure how they are once you are a customer, but I have been unimpressed with their sales pitches to me. Microsoft SQL 2005 has some pretty neat tools bundled. They have really come a long way, and they are fantastic on the back-end or for use internally to the IT department, but they really have nothing in the way of user-facing front-ends that I would consider ready for "prime time". BIRT looks promising, and within a decade I would say it will be fantastic software.
I highly recommend looking at Cognos Series 8. The back-end is a web services based framework and the zero client front ends blows everything else I have seen out of the water. It is simply the best platform I have *ever* used, though it can be a bit pricey. They used to work with you quite a bit on the price; not sure if they still do that with their new named-user-based licensing model. Their support is excellent as well. I was an early adopter of ReportNet, and Cognos flew an engineer down to our site on their dime to troubleshoot a critical bug; we were not a big site, at only 60ish end-users.
Call up a Cognos rep, they are usually willing to come on-site to do a demo.
I wish I could find a true 24-hour analog watch (hour hand makes one complete rotation each day) that isn't some ridiculously priced Swiss aviator-grade timepiece.
Most Christians seem to have managed to accept evolution as a historical fact, but still wish to give Man special status. Evolution is how God created us, eh? But that still makes us the aim and end purpose of evolution, the special species, the one beloved of God and made in his image. No wonder the idea is widespread that evolution has somehow stopped, or finished, having now produced us.
This is particularly insightful. In fact, this seems to be the *only* way to reconcile Christian belief with the concept that evolution is the origin of man. It seems to me that this presents a contradiction since you can't believe in both in their "pure" forms. I personally think those two beliefs are incompatible.
Slashdot Mirror
Finally! Why does everyone else on
What Mr. CFO did not do, was define exactly what the bold-faced phrase in his quote actually means. I accuse him of jockying with the statistics. I suspect that the "U.S. retail notebook market" excludes Internet-direct sellers, like Dell, and probably corporate sales as well. I would imagine this is looking at only brick-and-mortar (or glass in Apples' case) retail stores.
I do not think treason means what you think it means.
Does anyone have more info on the new budgeting features? That is the one feature I have been waiting for most in Gnucash over the last few years. I have an Excel spreadsheet with my entire Gnucash account tree mirrored, and I used that for budgeting, with my actuals in Gnucash. It works okay, but something seemless (with integrated reports) would be nice.
The wiki has a huge discussion about budgeting, but not much real info on what they actually implemented, how it works, or how to use it. I couldn't get to the gnucash main site to see if the online users guide has been updated, so maybe it is there. Can anyone confirm?
I've seen that and much worse.
Craziest thing I've personally seen is someone playing the trombone (he was actually playing it!) while driving to work.
Of course, it happens to be very similar to how I organize directories at home, and seems like a rather intuitive concept that a lot of people would arrive at independently.
Unfortunately, independent invention itself is not a valid legal defense against patent infringement suits.
That bottleneck is not a problem with the theory itself, but rather a problem with a different theory: How much funding IT deserves.
If IT runs out of human resources whenever they proactively "step up to the plate", they are underfunded and will forever by acting in a reactive role, hence the bad image in the workplace.
Others have already covered the whole Class A vs. Class B stock, whereby technically Google senior management can do whatever they want, since as far as shareholder interest is concerned, they are a majority of shareholder voting rights.
But I'm more interested in the emphatic statement that they are required by law to follow shareholder "interests" whatever those may be. How are those interests even enumerated and conveyed?
I see this sentiment on Slashdot repeatedly, but I have yet to see it from anyone who has any real knowledge of corporate law. Can you turn your bold text into links to back up your claims? Under what law can disgruntled shareholders bring suit against corporate boards and/or executives? What would the burden of proof be; how do you prove that the executives were not acting in shareholders' best interests? How do you reconcile the differences between short-term profiteering vs. long-term strategic growth? Is the burden of proof limited to an malicious intent test, or is it an effects test wholly sufficient? Has this ever been successfully tried in court; what are the precedents?
Under what law? Can you cite the specific law under which they could bring suit and have legal standing in court?
Where in the world did the submitter get New Jersey from? The article is in the Chicago Sun-Times (which doesn't in and of itself mean anything). However, the Plainfield in question is in Illinois, near Joliet (mentioned in the article). New Jersey is not mentioned in the article at all.
A $150 premium for the black color option. Ouch.
They believe movie fans will prefer to pay a reasonable price for a legal downloaded movie rather than risk illegally swapping a computer file that could contain viruses or be a poor quality copy of a film.
And they would be right. However, regarding "reasonable": I do not think it means what they think it means.
Your conspiracy theory is well crafted, except for the fact that PortalPlayer provides the processing chips, not the memory, for the iPods. Apple already has a fairly long, prepaid contract with Samsung for the memory, if my own memory serves correctly.
That said, I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel processors (ARM or XScale?) on a touch/widescreen video iPod in the near future. So I think your theory may be correct about Apple seeing the benefit of a strong Intel partnership not just for the Mac, but for the iPod as well, but I think focusing on the memory is missing the target.
The AT&T plan may have resulted in you getting less bandwidth than you paid for if you failed to pay their extortion fees.
The way I understandd it, you would be getting less throughput than you should be able to get based on what you paid for, if your content provider failed to pay their extortion fees.
Do I have it backwards?
Despite the humor of your post, Ambilight is a very cool technology -- ambient back-lighting significantly reduces eye strain. I was very hopeful that other companies would come out with equivalent alternatives or start licensing it from Philips -- it deserves to be on every TV set sold, wall-mounted or not.
...which is why Oracle has released Oracle XE. It is not open source, but it does compete on price (free).
It's quite fantastic.
This is sound advice. You should always buy the largest/most expensive home you can afford at any given point in time while you are in expansion phase (i.e. still have/having kids). Not only for the reasons of the parent post, but because even with the same home value inflation percentage, the absolute dollar gap between your house and a bigger house (i.e. your next house) will continue to increase. You need to minimize that effect. Once you are in a downsizing trend (i.e. empty nest) you can just get whatever size you need and be done with it.
If you think the Stewart screens are a rip off, but you still want something with a higher gain than white paint, check out Screen Goo. Judging from the DIY slant of rest of your post, I think it would be right up your alley.
Cognos has a whole range of products. We used their OLAP product as well as their web-based ad-hoc product. They also have Dashboarding and scorecarding and metrics management...
On the backend, I think Cognos OLAP is just slightly better than MS SQL Analysis Services, but they are roughly equavalent for most uses. On the front-end, however, MS relies on Excel PivotTables, which totally SUCK. Cognos has an entirely web-based OLAP front end that is very intuitive and extremely powerful. This is by far the piece that is the biggest value-add above going with something open source or "bundled" (MSSQL).
The other major difference between tools like Business Objects and Cognos versus things like BIRT and MS SQL Reporting Services is report delivery and security. The latter may be fine report authoring tools, but you are still just emailing the output to the users. The former have customizable web-based portals that allow for automatic sceduling, emailing, and manage your security access (using LDAP) to different report pieces. E.g. nobody but our finance department was allowed to see Royalties. Just set the security once in the metadata, and voila - don't have to worry about emailing the wrong thing to the wrong people.
As far as costs are concerned, I think Cognos runs about US$1000-$2000/user depending on their capabilities. Report authors and administrators were more, but generally you don't have many of those. Well worth it, IMHO. It is not simply a matter of "we'll save this many man-hours using more efficient tools", it is more like "this provides capabilities that we do not even have today, but that we require". Then again, if you don't need it, it would be a waste.
Also - what reporting technologies are you looking at? When I implemented OLAP at my previous employer, it revolutionized the way we reported data, the way we classified data and increased the amount of data people could get.
We were a 100% ad-hoc-written-by-IT shop originally. When we rolled out OLAP, we intended to apply the 80/20 rule to reporting: OLAP cubes should handle 80% of the information requests, we can spend our time on the remaining 20% as complex ad-hoc reports. This turned out to be pretty true generally.
Cognos segments their licensing this way, but I have found it is a good way to think about reporting in general.
Segment the people in your company into four groups:
1) Report Consumers - people who consume reports. Generally this is simply the people receiving an email with their Excel report attached.
2) Power Users - these are your business analysts. They are capable of self-servicing their reporting needs to a limited extent, if the interface is simple enough. These are the people who are savvy with Access.
3) Report Authors - people who know your data inside and out, and understand how it applies to the business. In every company I have worked at, this role is inside the IT department. They have the robust reporting tools.
4) Reporting Administrators - people who manage the report server, as well as define the metadata structure. Often this can overlap with a DBA Role. They need to understand about database relationships, cardinality, and also know the data inside and out, but not necessarily how it applies to the business.
Also think about your uses for reporting. In general, reporting is in nature operational (customer called in and needs a copy of an invoice or a current statement of accounts), tactical (we need to generate a customer list for this marketing campaign using certain criteria so we can send a mailing) or stategic (high level executive view of the business).
Hope this helps.
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
Now that's a good sig!
I'm a Reporting Engineer, so business intelligence is my speciality. I do not work for a company that sells BI software or services, I'm just an administrator/power user. I've used BIRT, Crystal Reports, Crystal for Eclipse, MS SQL Reporting Services, Excel PivotTables with SQL Analysis Server cubes, Proclarity, Cognos ReportNet, Cognos Impromptu and Cognos PowerPlay.
Business Objects seems to have a pretty solid platform these days, but the company tends to use underhanded advertising techniques and make dubious claims in their marketing material. I'm not sure how they are once you are a customer, but I have been unimpressed with their sales pitches to me. Microsoft SQL 2005 has some pretty neat tools bundled. They have really come a long way, and they are fantastic on the back-end or for use internally to the IT department, but they really have nothing in the way of user-facing front-ends that I would consider ready for "prime time". BIRT looks promising, and within a decade I would say it will be fantastic software.
I highly recommend looking at Cognos Series 8. The back-end is a web services based framework and the zero client front ends blows everything else I have seen out of the water. It is simply the best platform I have *ever* used, though it can be a bit pricey. They used to work with you quite a bit on the price; not sure if they still do that with their new named-user-based licensing model. Their support is excellent as well. I was an early adopter of ReportNet, and Cognos flew an engineer down to our site on their dime to troubleshoot a critical bug; we were not a big site, at only 60ish end-users.
Call up a Cognos rep, they are usually willing to come on-site to do a demo.
I wish I could find a true 24-hour analog watch (hour hand makes one complete rotation each day) that isn't some ridiculously priced Swiss aviator-grade timepiece.
Most Christians seem to have managed to accept evolution as a historical fact, but still wish to give Man special status. Evolution is how God created us, eh? But that still makes us the aim and end purpose of evolution, the special species, the one beloved of God and made in his image. No wonder the idea is widespread that evolution has somehow stopped, or finished, having now produced us.
This is particularly insightful. In fact, this seems to be the *only* way to reconcile Christian belief with the concept that evolution is the origin of man. It seems to me that this presents a contradiction since you can't believe in both in their "pure" forms. I personally think those two beliefs are incompatible.