Technically, they don't under Linux. All you're really doing is changing a couple of configuration files that map scan codes into key codes. For Windows it's the same, software like Intellisense is mostly a GUI to make the management of those mappings easier for Joe Sixpack^H^H^H^H^H^H the plumber.
The root of the difference is, of course, marketing theory that says you need to differentiate your products from everybody else's. You could do it based on construction and materials quality, layout, and so on. But that's a niche market because most reviewers aren't capable of evaluating that. The easy and cheap thing is just to add keys that "do stuff" because computer users have gotten conditioned to look at a feature list from years of function matrix comparisons in software reviews. You're effectively damning capitalistic market structures.
but I would prefer a hardware device to work out of the box correctly, without needing software work-arounds
Hey, it's not like you can take any printer off the shelf at your favourite computer hardware vendor and expect it to work with Linux either, is it? Sure you can get printers that will work with Linux but they may not always have your favourite feature set either. Let's face it, that won't change until Linux grabs enough market share to make it too important for hardware manufacturers to ignore when it comes to writing drivers. Even then, some market structures (such as the printer ink razor/razorblade model) encourage protection measures that also actively discourage the production of FOSS drivers. That won't change until the hoi polloi start being intelligent in their purchases and, even in the nasty economic conditions coming down the pipe, I'm just not holding my breath.
Also, Wikipedia has a link to a page for disabling the F-lock key. The criticism about the space bar key being somewhat sticky is valid, although I found that the problem slowly worked itself out over about a month use.
Are you using Vista? The F-Lock setting seems to remain unchanged on reboot with my Windows XP SP3 work machine. I can't remember it being an issue with my home Linux box either (I own two Natural 4000 keyboards). However, maybe you just haven't loaded the Intellitype software or have a different version? I'm running Intellitype 5.50.66.1.0 on this PC
You can also disable the Caps lock key if you have the MS Intellitype software. Go to the Key Settings tab on the Keyboard control panel (in the Printers and Other Hardware CP group).
I agree, I don't understand why we all don't just call each other and tell eachother our comments instead of leaving these text messages on this website.
Because my phone doesn't have 730301 entries in its number list and I don't think many phone systems support that big a party line. It would also be a little hard to pick threads of discussion out of that many people talking at once. It probably would sound a little like pink noise.
If you want to communicate something non-vital that doesn't need an immediate response, which is more convenient?
For them? None of your options. Send them an e-mail next time you get to a computer or tell them next time you're face-to-face. If you can't remember it until that opportunity presents itself, it probably wasn't important enough to bug them with it.
Well, if MSN had the optional equivalent of cellular's voice messaging mailboxes (which would effectively be e-mail) why not? That is, apart from it being a proprietary system that doesn't talk to other messaging systems, as if you could only call other Vonage users, so that to follow your argument, somebody would need to have a phone that could handle separate subscriptions to AT&T, Vonage, Cingular, etc. But hey, that's your analogy breaking down, not mine.
and (b) write down what I said on a piece of paper
Or they could remember what is usually two letters (airline) and a four digit number for the remaining duration of the call or voice mail (which should be short since it can fit in a 160 character SMS), before they can store it in the Notes function on their phone (if they don't have a notes function, they can enter it as a temporary name in their address book). Unless, of course, you were actually organized enough to have sent it to them by e-mail days earlier when you booked the flight.
Well, the plane could be early due to a tailwind, late due to a headwind/storm. If you're landing in a small remote airport, it might not have IRL and fog or snow might have got you rerouted to a different airport. But personally, I would just make a call in that situation.
The main advantage of written is that you have a record of what you sent and when. If you're just requesting information, that may not be as necessary, but if you're managing your customer relationships with a CRM package so that others in the organization can get/be in the loop, it can be quite worthwhile.
The point that you don't get is that the up-front infrastructure cost is already paid for by the voice phone traffic. The text traffic is a very tiny fraction of the total bandwidth used by the voice traffic. Charging for text messaging is pure profit (and gouging). If you paid for texting bandwidth at the same rate as you do for voice traffic, the price would be small fractions of a cent per message.
Which is pretty well the definition of Man-in-the-middle attack. While (hopefully) won't choose to exploit the approach with anything more than wasting your screen space with advertising, I would hope that they would be subject to two types of lawsuits. One from AOL, Yahoo, MSN, et al for brand dilution and/or copyright infringement (the resulting screen is a derived work), and one from users for illegal interception of communications.
The development of the aircraft carrier had made those battleships obsolete. The aircraft carriers were much more effective in force projection. I believe that modern navies don't have anything bigger than a cruiser because they're just too much of an indefensible target for modern missiles, and that became true with the advent of the torpedo bomber. You're better off with the same tonnage in a lot more smaller ships. Some say there's a good reason why the US aircraft carriers were out on manoeuvres and the battleships weren't.
The disadvantage of your approach is that the government is really taking that money from the Visa holder, because the salary+application fee should really be the market rate for the position that the company would pay a local resource if one was available. So you're still applying a deflationary pressure to the market rate salary, which discourages people from training for that position on a global level and exacerbates the skill shortage. Alternatively you make it more likely that resource will work for a competing company (or external division) in a country that uses a fixed visa application fee that leaves more money in the budget for his salary. So you're giving the company the choice between exploiting the indentured servitude aspect of that employment (which your approach doesn't fix) or off-shoring the work to a country where they don't have to pay that application fee. So either you're having the government condoning unfair exploitation of workers in exchange for a lottery kickback, or encouraging a corporate off-shoring strategy that results in a loss of tax revenue. And as a bonus, you would make companies have to go through the process more frequently, raising their administrative costs further when there really is a local skill deficit and they have no choice about bringing in out-of-country talent. Oops.
Now your approach would help bring the number of Visas issued down, because the government would have an interest in keeping them scarce to maximize revenue by keeping bids high through exploitation of an inelastic demand curve. But my approach would also do that by discouraging companies that currently use the system to exploit the Visa holders, without penalizing companies that actually require access to critical resources.
If a company's going to pay a lot of extra money to make sure they get they get access to skills, I would much rather that the money go to the people with those skills, thus encouraging others to develop those skills and reduce the shortage, than that the money go into government coffers where its use to actually fix the shortage is less than assured. If the company really needs the person with the skills so badly that they're willing to pay $40,000 more in a visa auction, let them pay it to the worker (who will pay a chunk of income taxes on it anyways) rather than directly to the government.
Every time we think we've found one (after interviewing a bunch of unqualified people) they get a better offer from somebody else.
Maybe that should tell you something. That you're undervaluing the position for instance.
Re:Sick and tired of people ragging on mark-to-mar
on
How To Create More Jobs
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· Score: 3, Interesting
How much would you pay for swamp land in Florida? Those homes (and their mortgages) are worth as much as people are willing, or able, to pay. If you've got lots of homes that cost over a million to build, but you only have a few millionaires and most people with far less in assets and income, then only the nicest homes that can actually be sold to the millionaires are worth that much. The rest are only worth as much as people are capable of paying for them. So you can sit on them until inflationary pressures raise incomes to the point where the homes are affordable (and thus lose the value to inflation over time, and pay the property taxes during that time) or you can take the hit now and sell the homes at the price people can afford. At least then you can reinvest your remaining money in a different venture and maybe recoup part of your loss.
Those securities may be worth more than 20% of face value, but they're worth a lot less than 80% or 90%, because the values of the houses they covered was often hyper-inflated due to too easily accessible credit and occasional deliberate over-assessment by some involved in the house purchase cycle (realtors, mortgage brokers, speculators). The house prices those securities depend on are now adjusting to the real value of that real estate in a sane lending environment.
The reason why the mortgage-backed securities are at 20% of face value is that the banks or managing agencies don't want to have to pay the property taxes on empty houses for 10 years and yet there's no qualified buyers to sell to. Renting the properties isn't a solution because market rental prices can't cover the mortgage payments. If the defaulters can't pay the mortgage payment, then they won't be able to pay rent to cover the same so the owners will still take a partial monthly loss even if they managed to rent the place while looking for buyers. The boomers with cash are retiring and they don't want their money tied up for the 20 years it's going to take before those homes can be sold without taking a bath at even half of the last assessed value. Due to deregulation, the banks are over-leveraged, so they can't afford to take the loss over that long a period of time. So the house prices are dropping and they are going to continue to drop (in real terms initially or against inflation longer term) for quite a while and the value of those securities is reflecting that.
That's what you get when you try to treat a durable good as a commodity that people can play speculation games with. When enough speculators decide to leave the inflated market for some reason, market values readjust to their natural state. Have you checked the price of crude oil lately? An inelastic demand curve can account for some of the recent roller-coaster ride in that market, but oil demand isn't so inelastic as to account for >3x price fluctuations on relatively small consumption changes (percentage wise). Speculators who manipulate prices suddenly developing a need for liquidity and pulling out of the market on the other hand...
The simplest way to fix the H1/L1 is to remove the indentured servitude component. If you allow the holder of an H1/L1 Visa to move to a job with the same classification (similar skill/educational requirements) at a different company, then companies will have to pay market rates to keep them as employees. To be more fair to the company, make the departing visa holder reimburse the company the cost of the Visa application, prorated for the time spent working for the applicant company vs. the remaining time before the Visa expires. I would also allow the company to have a streamlined process for refilling the position if it happens withing a year of the original application (i.e. no need to re-demonstrate that the position cannot be filled by a citizen).
What's that you say? The companies wouldn't be able to get another Visa replacement because all the H1/L1s Visa quotas are filled up on the first applicable day of the calendar? Make the above change and that will cease to be a problem.
Sorry, which of the three links in the summary are you seeing that in? The first link to Fortune's top 50 employers, the last link to the wikipedia article on eating one's own dogfood, or the valleywag.gawker article where a search for the word tax doesn't succeed? I'm not saying you're not right, I'm just curious why I can't find the text you're talking about.
Yeah, but MacOS is derived from NextStep. By buying/merging with NeXT, Apple would have inherited their copyrights. So an interesting backup strategy for Apple might be, if NeXT was smart enough to file for copyright on NextStep, arguing that MacOS copies still infringe on the original NextStep copyright they are derived from, which is owned by Apple as a result of the merger, and obtain statutory damages that way.
It might even be why Apple never bothered to re-register the copyright since they had registered previous versions.
Huh? I don't see anything in that article that says that. The quoted Google e-mail says that in some countries Google couldn't arrange the phone giveaway and is giving the monetary equivalent instead of the phone.
They also talk about the money substitution being due to legal reasons. I suppose they could have been prevented from giving away unlocked phones if they were in exclusive contracts with cellular coverage providers in those countries, but the countries listed don't look like they would all be early Android roll-out locations. Alternatively there could be legislation regarding phone ownership or telephone service monopolies in those countries that would preclude private ownership of telephone equipment or sales thereof by third-parties. Or maybe their tax lawyers told them they couldn't expense against R&D phones given to what are probably strictly marketing and administrative staff.
I certainly don't think tech companies include in compensation the value of the phones (and associated phone plans) they make their techs carry as part of their job. If an engineer at Ford or GM is given new car models to test out in day-to-day use, does it get counted as income? Or can it get counted as research?
I would think the tax accounting of the Android "giveaway" would depend on how it's done. If Google still "owns" the phone, they get the tax benefit of the asset depreciation and might even be able to count it as an R&D cost as well. It should be easier to get away with this by handing out the unlocked "developer" models like they did. The employee still gets a nice shiny leading-edge phone to use; they just can't re-gift it to someone else. Once it's depreciated, the employee gets ownership of the phone. As a bonus, it might help Google boost their year-end units-shipped count for marketing purposes, and they get free word-of-mouth advertising from people seeing their employees use the new phones. Sounds like a win-win if its doable, and if it is, whoever thought of it probably earned their yearly salary that day.
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Technically, they don't under Linux. All you're really doing is changing a couple of configuration files that map scan codes into key codes. For Windows it's the same, software like Intellisense is mostly a GUI to make the management of those mappings easier for Joe Sixpack^H^H^H^H^H^H the plumber.
The root of the difference is, of course, marketing theory that says you need to differentiate your products from everybody else's. You could do it based on construction and materials quality, layout, and so on. But that's a niche market because most reviewers aren't capable of evaluating that. The easy and cheap thing is just to add keys that "do stuff" because computer users have gotten conditioned to look at a feature list from years of function matrix comparisons in software reviews. You're effectively damning capitalistic market structures.
I use linux exclusively at home. I know that with a little google searching I could reconfigure my keyboard to behave how I want it to,
Yep
Hey, it's not like you can take any printer off the shelf at your favourite computer hardware vendor and expect it to work with Linux either, is it? Sure you can get printers that will work with Linux but they may not always have your favourite feature set either. Let's face it, that won't change until Linux grabs enough market share to make it too important for hardware manufacturers to ignore when it comes to writing drivers. Even then, some market structures (such as the printer ink razor/razorblade model) encourage protection measures that also actively discourage the production of FOSS drivers. That won't change until the hoi polloi start being intelligent in their purchases and, even in the nasty economic conditions coming down the pipe, I'm just not holding my breath.
Yes, it would be nicer if it was an easy configuration item in the Microsoft-provided drivers. However, there exists workarounds.
Also, Wikipedia has a link to a page for disabling the F-lock key. The criticism about the space bar key being somewhat sticky is valid, although I found that the problem slowly worked itself out over about a month use.
Are you using Vista? The F-Lock setting seems to remain unchanged on reboot with my Windows XP SP3 work machine. I can't remember it being an issue with my home Linux box either (I own two Natural 4000 keyboards). However, maybe you just haven't loaded the Intellitype software or have a different version? I'm running Intellitype 5.50.66.1.0 on this PC
You can also disable the Caps lock key if you have the MS Intellitype software. Go to the Key Settings tab on the Keyboard control panel (in the Printers and Other Hardware CP group).
Because my phone doesn't have 730301 entries in its number list and I don't think many phone systems support that big a party line. It would also be a little hard to pick threads of discussion out of that many people talking at once. It probably would sound a little like pink noise.
For them? None of your options. Send them an e-mail next time you get to a computer or tell them next time you're face-to-face. If you can't remember it until that opportunity presents itself, it probably wasn't important enough to bug them with it.
Well, if MSN had the optional equivalent of cellular's voice messaging mailboxes (which would effectively be e-mail) why not? That is, apart from it being a proprietary system that doesn't talk to other messaging systems, as if you could only call other Vonage users, so that to follow your argument, somebody would need to have a phone that could handle separate subscriptions to AT&T, Vonage, Cingular, etc. But hey, that's your analogy breaking down, not mine.
Not difficult. Take your pickof ways to do it.
Or they could remember what is usually two letters (airline) and a four digit number for the remaining duration of the call or voice mail (which should be short since it can fit in a 160 character SMS), before they can store it in the Notes function on their phone (if they don't have a notes function, they can enter it as a temporary name in their address book). Unless, of course, you were actually organized enough to have sent it to them by e-mail days earlier when you booked the flight.
Well, the plane could be early due to a tailwind, late due to a headwind/storm. If you're landing in a small remote airport, it might not have IRL and fog or snow might have got you rerouted to a different airport. But personally, I would just make a call in that situation.
The main advantage of written is that you have a record of what you sent and when. If you're just requesting information, that may not be as necessary, but if you're managing your customer relationships with a CRM package so that others in the organization can get/be in the loop, it can be quite worthwhile.
Don't know why you got modded flamebait, dude. That post is insightful as far as I'm concerned.
The point that you don't get is that the up-front infrastructure cost is already paid for by the voice phone traffic. The text traffic is a very tiny fraction of the total bandwidth used by the voice traffic. Charging for text messaging is pure profit (and gouging). If you paid for texting bandwidth at the same rate as you do for voice traffic, the price would be small fractions of a cent per message.
Which is pretty well the definition of Man-in-the-middle attack. While (hopefully) won't choose to exploit the approach with anything more than wasting your screen space with advertising, I would hope that they would be subject to two types of lawsuits. One from AOL, Yahoo, MSN, et al for brand dilution and/or copyright infringement (the resulting screen is a derived work), and one from users for illegal interception of communications.
The development of the aircraft carrier had made those battleships obsolete. The aircraft carriers were much more effective in force projection. I believe that modern navies don't have anything bigger than a cruiser because they're just too much of an indefensible target for modern missiles, and that became true with the advent of the torpedo bomber. You're better off with the same tonnage in a lot more smaller ships. Some say there's a good reason why the US aircraft carriers were out on manoeuvres and the battleships weren't.
Yeah you're clearly right. All that work done by the CDC and the NIH never amount to anything..
The disadvantage of your approach is that the government is really taking that money from the Visa holder, because the salary+application fee should really be the market rate for the position that the company would pay a local resource if one was available. So you're still applying a deflationary pressure to the market rate salary, which discourages people from training for that position on a global level and exacerbates the skill shortage. Alternatively you make it more likely that resource will work for a competing company (or external division) in a country that uses a fixed visa application fee that leaves more money in the budget for his salary. So you're giving the company the choice between exploiting the indentured servitude aspect of that employment (which your approach doesn't fix) or off-shoring the work to a country where they don't have to pay that application fee. So either you're having the government condoning unfair exploitation of workers in exchange for a lottery kickback, or encouraging a corporate off-shoring strategy that results in a loss of tax revenue. And as a bonus, you would make companies have to go through the process more frequently, raising their administrative costs further when there really is a local skill deficit and they have no choice about bringing in out-of-country talent. Oops.
Now your approach would help bring the number of Visas issued down, because the government would have an interest in keeping them scarce to maximize revenue by keeping bids high through exploitation of an inelastic demand curve. But my approach would also do that by discouraging companies that currently use the system to exploit the Visa holders, without penalizing companies that actually require access to critical resources.
If a company's going to pay a lot of extra money to make sure they get they get access to skills, I would much rather that the money go to the people with those skills, thus encouraging others to develop those skills and reduce the shortage, than that the money go into government coffers where its use to actually fix the shortage is less than assured. If the company really needs the person with the skills so badly that they're willing to pay $40,000 more in a visa auction, let them pay it to the worker (who will pay a chunk of income taxes on it anyways) rather than directly to the government.
Maybe that should tell you something. That you're undervaluing the position for instance.
How much would you pay for swamp land in Florida? Those homes (and their mortgages) are worth as much as people are willing, or able, to pay. If you've got lots of homes that cost over a million to build, but you only have a few millionaires and most people with far less in assets and income, then only the nicest homes that can actually be sold to the millionaires are worth that much. The rest are only worth as much as people are capable of paying for them. So you can sit on them until inflationary pressures raise incomes to the point where the homes are affordable (and thus lose the value to inflation over time, and pay the property taxes during that time) or you can take the hit now and sell the homes at the price people can afford. At least then you can reinvest your remaining money in a different venture and maybe recoup part of your loss.
Those securities may be worth more than 20% of face value, but they're worth a lot less than 80% or 90%, because the values of the houses they covered was often hyper-inflated due to too easily accessible credit and occasional deliberate over-assessment by some involved in the house purchase cycle (realtors, mortgage brokers, speculators). The house prices those securities depend on are now adjusting to the real value of that real estate in a sane lending environment.
The reason why the mortgage-backed securities are at 20% of face value is that the banks or managing agencies don't want to have to pay the property taxes on empty houses for 10 years and yet there's no qualified buyers to sell to. Renting the properties isn't a solution because market rental prices can't cover the mortgage payments. If the defaulters can't pay the mortgage payment, then they won't be able to pay rent to cover the same so the owners will still take a partial monthly loss even if they managed to rent the place while looking for buyers. The boomers with cash are retiring and they don't want their money tied up for the 20 years it's going to take before those homes can be sold without taking a bath at even half of the last assessed value. Due to deregulation, the banks are over-leveraged, so they can't afford to take the loss over that long a period of time. So the house prices are dropping and they are going to continue to drop (in real terms initially or against inflation longer term) for quite a while and the value of those securities is reflecting that.
That's what you get when you try to treat a durable good as a commodity that people can play speculation games with. When enough speculators decide to leave the inflated market for some reason, market values readjust to their natural state. Have you checked the price of crude oil lately? An inelastic demand curve can account for some of the recent roller-coaster ride in that market, but oil demand isn't so inelastic as to account for >3x price fluctuations on relatively small consumption changes (percentage wise). Speculators who manipulate prices suddenly developing a need for liquidity and pulling out of the market on the other hand...
The simplest way to fix the H1/L1 is to remove the indentured servitude component. If you allow the holder of an H1/L1 Visa to move to a job with the same classification (similar skill/educational requirements) at a different company, then companies will have to pay market rates to keep them as employees. To be more fair to the company, make the departing visa holder reimburse the company the cost of the Visa application, prorated for the time spent working for the applicant company vs. the remaining time before the Visa expires. I would also allow the company to have a streamlined process for refilling the position if it happens withing a year of the original application (i.e. no need to re-demonstrate that the position cannot be filled by a citizen).
What's that you say? The companies wouldn't be able to get another Visa replacement because all the H1/L1s Visa quotas are filled up on the first applicable day of the calendar? Make the above change and that will cease to be a problem.
Sorry, which of the three links in the summary are you seeing that in? The first link to Fortune's top 50 employers, the last link to the wikipedia article on eating one's own dogfood, or the valleywag.gawker article where a search for the word tax doesn't succeed? I'm not saying you're not right, I'm just curious why I can't find the text you're talking about.
Yeah, but MacOS is derived from NextStep. By buying/merging with NeXT, Apple would have inherited their copyrights. So an interesting backup strategy for Apple might be, if NeXT was smart enough to file for copyright on NextStep, arguing that MacOS copies still infringe on the original NextStep copyright they are derived from, which is owned by Apple as a result of the merger, and obtain statutory damages that way.
It might even be why Apple never bothered to re-register the copyright since they had registered previous versions.
Huh? I don't see anything in that article that says that. The quoted Google e-mail says that in some countries Google couldn't arrange the phone giveaway and is giving the monetary equivalent instead of the phone.
They also talk about the money substitution being due to legal reasons. I suppose they could have been prevented from giving away unlocked phones if they were in exclusive contracts with cellular coverage providers in those countries, but the countries listed don't look like they would all be early Android roll-out locations. Alternatively there could be legislation regarding phone ownership or telephone service monopolies in those countries that would preclude private ownership of telephone equipment or sales thereof by third-parties. Or maybe their tax lawyers told them they couldn't expense against R&D phones given to what are probably strictly marketing and administrative staff.
I certainly don't think tech companies include in compensation the value of the phones (and associated phone plans) they make their techs carry as part of their job. If an engineer at Ford or GM is given new car models to test out in day-to-day use, does it get counted as income? Or can it get counted as research?
I would think the tax accounting of the Android "giveaway" would depend on how it's done. If Google still "owns" the phone, they get the tax benefit of the asset depreciation and might even be able to count it as an R&D cost as well. It should be easier to get away with this by handing out the unlocked "developer" models like they did. The employee still gets a nice shiny leading-edge phone to use; they just can't re-gift it to someone else. Once it's depreciated, the employee gets ownership of the phone. As a bonus, it might help Google boost their year-end units-shipped count for marketing purposes, and they get free word-of-mouth advertising from people seeing their employees use the new phones. Sounds like a win-win if its doable, and if it is, whoever thought of it probably earned their yearly salary that day.
OK. Drug possession on the other hand...
The fools! They'll destroy us all!