Hm, so theoretically using this technique, could we build material that reflects away all EM except a narrow arbitrary range we define while it absorbs the EM spectrum that falls on both sides of that range? I haven't been able to get to the paper in Nature Photonics yet, and I didn't pick up the "several layers with increasing RI" part from the physorg article, but your post is the first description I've read of how they were able to capture such a huge swathe of the EM spectrum. The physorg article also led me to wonder if the material was visible light spectrum only, or just EM in general; but if your description is accurate I could see non-visible light parts of the spectrum addressed by the material as well.
As others have noted, you should have taken it to an Apple Store Genius Bar to check out why the sleep didn't last so long. The feature you want is called "Safe Sleep" in OS X. If you still have your PowerBook, and it is running OS X 10.4 or later, there are instructions on how to enable Safe Sleep. That link was on the first page of links that Google returns with the search "os x" hibernate, though it might not have been readily apparent three years ago. Nonetheless, you should have been able to determine through the Apple Support forums that you had a very atypical Sleep period.
How is this "insightful"? Even if you did the typical/. thing and only read the synopsis, and not the article, it's clear that they were getting paid for their OT work, just not at OT rates.
It is insightful because the parent post to your response looked beyond the immediate topic of overtime, and questioned the validity of the underlying premise that highly skilled people should even consider full time employee employment. In other words, we shouldn't be discussing overtime, we should be conversing about whether or not it even makes sense to put yourself in the position to be demanding overtime in the first place. Considering the risk-reward structure in most companies, the actual volatility of most high technology jobs, and the actual hourly wage of full time employees, I'm quite surprised most people in the IT industry still put up with full time employment and its attendant practices. Like the open industry "secret" that the vast majority of IT jobs just naturally expect 50-70 hour weeks.
As someone who markets -> sells -> implements his own work, I'm happy so many people are still clinging to full time status. Less competition for me, helps keep the billing rate high, and gives me time to work on my internal projects that will break me through the hourly billing rate glass ceiling. I'm not going to present a Pollyanna story, it was certainly not easy the first two years (especially since I started my business in the depths of the dot bomb recession). But anyone who can learn C, Smalltalk and Lisp can certainly pick up enough social networking, marketing, sales, bookkeeping, negotiating and business skills to get out of full time employment and start contracting (where others like body shops land your deals and get a big slice of the action) and then eventually go full consulting (when you have direct client relationships and keep the entire billing rate to the client).
If you are in the U.S., you can keep using Wildfire through CR Technologies, Inc.; don't know anything about them other than I have been following the Wildfire saga, and know that CR advertises continued Wildfire services. For everyone suggesting ways to set up a "follow me/find me" feature, please check out the demos on CR Technologies' web site, because you are kind of missing the point of the original poster's desire to re-establish Wildfire in his life.
...you DID have HIGHLY PAID and HIGHLY trained professionals with plenty of experience and oversight, but nevertheless very significant bugs occurred...So, the real lesson from this article is not "you get what you pay for," but rather that "software development is very hard"...
It doesn't matter how highly paid and trained your professionals are, if the environment that produces the software is not conducive to eliminating these types of flaws. Like if they are not given enough resources to test and QA the the projects they are assigned, there is no organizational commitment to take the time and expense to document properly, or leadership overrides technical objections to project timeframes, etc. Most of the cited projects could probably be classified as failures of project management rather than failures of the end product (the software) that these flawed projects produced. Yes, software is hard and the software profession should continue its efforts to improve quality, but that doesn't let the organizational culture, leadership and processes that produced the software in these cases off the hook.
Why is it when the accounting profession makes spectacular mistakes that take down entire Fortune 500 class organizations, there is a critical analysis of the processes that led to these failures, and remedies often comprise prescriptive measures for these processes, but similar analysis for software failures focus upon the software flaw but not the environment that allowed the flaw to emerge? Now sometimes the remedy in the accounting case might not make complete sense (like SOX), but the point here is people don't look at just the end result (the accounting system transactions) of the accounting process.
I don't do mail order. If its not in a bookshop then as far as I'm concerned its not out there.
Any bookstore worth their salt will be more than happy to special order any in print book in exchange for prepayment, and take the order over the phone so you don't have to make two trips to the store; just pick it up on your next trip to the bookstore. If you are worried about someone nicking your credit card number when you give it out over the phone, just get a credit card that lets you generate one time use numbers (Citibank offers this service, for example). Now if you insist upon being able to saunter into J. Random Bookstore and walk out with said book, well, you're mightily limiting your choices in the technical field, not to speak of books in general.
Or you could have the book delivered to your office if you have one.
Or you could rent a private mailbox where they will sign the package for you and place it in your secure box; there are private mailbox places that are designed so their patrons can securely get in after-hours to get at the boxes. These are cheap, and open up mail order for you.
Bottom line, there are many ways to order these or any other books that should address your earlier bad experiences with mail order.
Re:part 2- not trolling, just a little frustrated
on
OpenBSD 3.8 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's a little frustrating when I want to try OpenBSD, and I can't because there's no ISO to FTP or torrent...I want to quickly download, install, poke around. Not spend $X on a CD, wait for it to come in the mail...
If your sole purpose is to just "poke around" and try out OpenBSD, there are plenty of people offering workable unofficial ISOs that are functionally equivalent. Sabotage.org has one that I've used; if you have requirements that demand a feature only available in the latest version, you are well beyond the stage of "poke around" and a budget request is in order. If you want something for free that is one of the project's ways of making ends meet...well, sorry, can't help you much there.
If you are that much a stickler for getting the "official" CD image, then that goes quite a ways beyond the "poke around" level of interest, and whoever is dictating the requirement for the official image either needs to pony up more money or more training/education to close the gap between bringing up the "official" OpenBSD and an FTP-based install (for just playing around, there is no difference). As any number of OpenBSD folks will attest, getting any of the unofficial images will more than suffice to satisfy your curiosity about the OS, and you won't have to retrain if you switch to the official CD's later. Personally, if I were you I would simply just follow the FTP-based install instructions; to really "play around" with a new OS and get any reasonable feel for it you're going to spend a week with it, so doing the FTP install is a fine way to introduce yourself to the OS (if for nothing else than how it lays out devices, for example) and install it at the same time. The instructions are extremely detailed and specific, certainly easy enough for people like yourself who dabble with different OS's and distros. Actual time spent messing around with the installation modulo the download time (which you would have spent anyways) will probably total no more than 1-2 hours.
Finally, note that for disaster recovery purposes, installation from FTP/HTTP/rsync/etc. repositories is one recovery mode that should be supported. You cannot absolutely count upon the availability of the discs, so any production-level interest that has any disaster recovery component (and if that component doesn't exist, you're playing with fire) should require familiarity with the FTP-based installation.
In case anyone else is searching the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Virginia, I finally located the case. When searching, the civil action number is 1:04cv507. Plaintiff is Government Employees Insurance Company (not "GEICO", you won't find it under that term). Defendents are "Google, Inc. AND Overture Services, Inc." Follow the directions at the court's Opinions page.
You will want to read the Memorandum Opinion for the details. See last paragaph of page 3 for an interesting piece of informatoin. Google supplied "no evidence regarding whether such advertisements [Adwords ads that use the string "GEICO" in the heading or text of the ad] generate a likelihood of confusion". This is primarily because GEICO paid for a survey, the results of which should really fascinate marketers who specialize in Adwords and search engine marketing, notwithstanding some of the survey's (IMHO) outrageous flaws like using a screenshot of a page that only looked similar to a real Google results page.
I'm going to tentatively unknot my knickers, because it seems that the crux of GEICO's argument is on page 6 and pretty much onwards from that page, and Google simply conceded the field to GEICO by not offering up survey results of their own. Or Google did conduct a survey, and the results were close enough to GEICO's survey that Google effectively did not challenge the results.
There are some involved discussions on survey result reliability in a court case, issues with survey reliability with this specific survey, and the interaction between business models, Adwords, and marketing (the last of which marketing geeks will love to dissect).
No matter whether Google's legal team declined to pony up for their own survey, or did and found that the results were probatively similar, the reason I'm not as anxious as before is on page 20, where the opinion says, "Aware of the importance of these issues to the ongoing evolution of Internet business practices and to the application of traditional principles to this new medium, the Court emphasizes that its ruling applies only to the specific facts of this case, which include the unique business model employed by plaintiff and the specific design of defendent's advertising program and search results pages." Brinkema seems perfectly aware of the possibilities for abuse of her opinion. Trivia: she was is also the judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui case.
...does this ruling then mean that if you were selling a program that could read/write or convert the data of a competing program, you can't even tell your prospective customers in an AdWords ad that you offered an easy way to migrate away from your competitor? That is what I read into the original linked article.
If that is true, then wow, what a way to lock in an existing customer base. Just "vigorously enforce" your trademarked name. No need to worry about direct competitors comparing themselves against you. Of course, the direct competitors still have the option to obliquely refer to your business, but this recent ruling seems to open up a grey area to me because it appears to stray from the original intent of trademark protection and start to add levels of indirection to protect. Just how indirect is indirect enough?
This ruling says it is illegal to mention a trademarked name in the ad copy itself if it violates the "likelihoodof confusion"test. Initially, you would get slapped down under this doctrine if you infringed the trademark in such a manner that the infringement would mislead consumers. Now, the reports of these rulings (not the opinions themselves, which I'm still trying to find) seem to extend the protection of the trademark from misleading usage to saying protection is granted over any usage in ad copy whatsoever, regardless of context, misleading or not.
So if my grocery business shows an ad with a receipt from your business and right next to it is a receipt from your grocery business, and both show a purchase of the same brand type of soup, that is now illegal in the United States because of the trademark on your business' name?
I'm hoping that Brinkema's phrasing of "solely with regard to those sponsored links that use GEICO's trade marks in their headings or text." limits the expansion of precedent and only rules on the specific ads that used Geico's name in the ad copy. Need to read the court documents to know for sure. If someone knows the PACER case number, please post it up here, because I could not find the GEICO v. Google case in the Eastern Virginia U.S. District Court (there are four cases listed for Google, but none involve Geico).
I haven't been impressed with many of the packages because there is no user training.... even if they had support and training wouldn't I have to pay for it?
This sounds more like you are reluctant to pay for anything, rather than you ran into a lack of training options. It is true that SugarCRM doesn't put up their training workshop material for download. They offer their training workshops as a for fee service.
That is not a drawback of how SugarCRM uses Open Source, that is a benefit. When you say "It seems that you end up not really saving any money by the time you account all the resource that open source cant provide at least in the case of CRM and ERP systems" you are indicating that the only value you see that Open Source offers to you is the potential for zero software code acquisition cost. When the real value lies in the control you can exert over the code base to customize it to your business' specific requirements.
Even if SugarCRM ends up costing you the same as Siebel or Salesforce.com after training and support are factored in, you gain one additional benefit for that equivalent cost: you are not dependent upon SugarCRM's developers to fix/modify the code. If you really need something done, there are third party developers out there who can offer to deliver before SugarCRM's own coders get around to your request. After what I've seen conventional CRM and ERP projects suffer through, a benefit like that can make or break your ability to implement a new business process dependent upon automation that you think will give you an advantage over your competition.
That might not be important to your business. Fine. But to say what you posted is to miss the key long term business rationale for Open Source enterprise software. The economics of low cost software acquisition are gravy, almost a distraction because software at this level of complexity is not a product. The strategic opportunities offered by Open Source solutions to a business due to its open-ended nature as contrasted to closed software are the key differentiator. For example, your business or your business' trade association can add the API and API documentation you find lacking in an Open Source solution. If a similar API in the equivalent closed source solution doesn't offer a particular capability you want, you could be waiting a very long time before it is implemented, if ever.
Note that this is a separate issue from your general unhappiness with ERP and CRM software in general. I noticed your complaint against Microsoft CRM's lack of training material as well. I share your general disappointment, and have some strong opinions on why users in general are only reluctantly satisfied with this category of software. This is not the place to discuss that. I just wanted to point out that knocking SugarCRM, or complex Open Source solutions in general, for not providing a zero cost end-to-end deployment solution, could cost you to overlook a valuable tool and way of thinking for your business.
My boss says I'm reading it wrong, its all legal speak, and its just a friendly contract.
In one-sided contracts like this, the atmosphere is "friendly" until the other party wants something that you have.
Well-crafted contracts are like good fences between good neighbors. A contract does not enforce trust nor friendship. If you are using a contract as the linchpin for trust in a business relationship the relationship has already failed; get out before you sign. A contract shows respect for the other party, and obtains equivalent respect in return.
The other advice you have received in this thread is sound. Negotiate the terms. If you don't know specifically what that means, find a mentor in your geographic area to coach you. Your boss is mostly correct by the way; draconian terms in these boilerplate contracts are rarely enforced. However, if your ambitions take you beyond cubicle-bound wage slavery for the rest of your life, learn how to negotiate contracts now. Your current situation is as good as any place to start. If your company will fire you for wanting to negotiate terms, believe me, you do not want to stay one second longer than it takes to jet out of the building.
The perception of difficult transactions should be laid at the feet of whoever is servicing your account. In reality, if you are not satisifed with your current IBM Business Partner, it is either a quick phone call or fax to change to another IBM Business Partner, as long as you are the individual listed by IBM as the "go to" person for the account. There is also a painless procedure to switch who that person is, in cases where that person has left the company but didn't transfer the account to their replacement (or if you simply want it changed for convenience).
An IBM Business Partner might make it seem very tedious to change these things because on the back end, unless you are practically one of the distributors themselves (like Avnet, and even those behemoths don't have electronic access to a lot of information), a lot of the work involved with purchasing, contract administration (which is what you are complaining about), etc. is still performed manually. The difference between a responsive, pleasant contract administration transaction and one that seems to require you to jump through hoops is often simply an IBM Business Partner who is willing to work through the IBM bureaucracy for you, and only drags you into the loop to say on the phone "I approve this" or send in an email/fax/letter that says the equivalent.
Since this is so off-topic, just email me if you are serious about wanting to switch and I can help you. Claimer: I'm an IBM Business Partner, and yes, I discount heavily for my clients who know exactly what they want since most of my revenue comes from custom services. yenant -at- gmail -dot- com
But I agree that "just compensation" is not properly defined. I would prefer something like double market value, since this action is taking away someone's liberty to pursue happiness, property, etc.
This doesn't even begin to cover the damage to the economy this ruling can have. Unless the ruling is reversed quickly and decisively, the following can easily happen.
Note that the parties who can invoke ED now, government functionaries and real estate developers, can structure a deal where no risk accrues to them whatsoever. With the valuation differentials that they can obtain from seizing low tax revenue property, they can clear a large profit, sell off at a low price to lock in their gains, and be out of the picture before anyone notices that the promised increased tax revenues have long since evaporated. A developer can make any tax increase promise he wants to sway the government official, without any risk for making the projections. The government officials can make campaign promises based upon these fictitious tax revenues, promises like pension guarantees that the tax base will be forced to uphold when the promised tax revenue doesn't fund it. And they will both be long gone when the bill comes due.
This will hollow out the economic vitality of communities as these parasites suck the life out of cities and towns. And it gets worse. If you own a business, ED will pay for your property, but not for the business. If you have a location-based business and are evicted, then you are paid for only a fraction of what it truly cost you to re-establish the business if that is even possible; most small businesses will perish under that kind of pressure. And the citizens can be hit with a double-whammy: not only does the promised increased tax revenue doesn't appear, but the original tax base is destroyed.
The economic moral hazard presented by this outrageously bad legal ruling is just as plain as it gets.
Assuming you live in zoned property where running a business from your house or apartment is illegal, you'll need to buy or rent commercial space to house your company.
Don't ask, don't tell. Those zoning laws were not built for Internet-based businesses. As long as your business operations don't make your neighbors raise their eyebrows, back up the truck and unload your servers into the room designated as the machine room for all anyone cares. Day in and day out vehicular traffic as you bring clients in for face-to-face meetings: bad. Quiet servers humming away, web conferences over your T1 line with a USB headset: good. Amateur XXX models trooping in and out of the house at all hours because camera time is expensive and you gotta run them 24x7: bad. Amateur XXX models trooping in and out of the house at all: bad. You and a few roomies doing video editing and web site work on XXX fare shipped in over a T3 line to the house: good. You get the idea.
You'll need several kinds of insurance.
Depends on the state you are in, but E&O or broad form commercial for example is unnecessary if you are in nose-to-the-code mode of your company's product. You might need workman's compensation, but check with an attorney; some states allow officers of a company to waive coverage.
If you can't hit the ground running with a product, you'll have to pay yourself and/or other developers while you develop something.
Then get a release from your current employer for your "hobby project", keep disciplined time and expense records (you'll need them for tax and payroll purposes anyways if you intend to compensate yourself later for work done for a back end upside that is far in excess of what a normal salary might bring, talk to a tax accountant and attorney for details), and use your day job to support your real job. Or do consulting and use the bench time to work on your product.
Starting and maintaining a business is difficult, but people make it much harder on themselves than they should. You really ought to hook up with a SCORE mentor in your local area. Geeks diss the business people all the time, while not realizing there is a lot to geek out over in the business world as well, and it is much more remunerative.
The worst nightmare of mediocre managers and rapacious recruiters the world over: geeks wising up, learning sales, marketing, negotiation, and business in general the way they apply themselves to debugging their favorite program du jour, and ditching unnecessary overhead to control it all themselves instead. It really is just as fascinating as the most intricate systems you have ever worked with, and can be hacked just as effectively for greater monetary rewards.
While an admirable and laudable goal, you are focusing on the wrong pitch. Realistically, unless something quite drastic happens to the standard of living, your proposal to re-elect nobody even when successful will only achieve widespread acceptance gradually instead of all at once.
The side effect of a ramp-up in adoption of this goal is that groups of constituents who throw out tenured politicians will start to lose "their" parts of the pork doled out in D.C. In real life, the urge to "get back some of our taxes that we sent away" by voting for incumbents who have the political capital to fulfill that mandate will become overwhelming, in any citizenry conditioned as Americans have to all forms of dependency.
Like any addiction, kicking the habit on dependencies cold turkey is doable, but unrealistic for the hump of the Poisson distribution. Asking the citizenry to re-elect nobody is requesting they kick their addiction to dependency cold turkey. You would have more success if you first convince Americans that they have become fatally compromised by their unwise addiction to looking outside of their individual selves to solve the problems of their lives.
Printing hello world, outputting today's date on a web page or anything boring and useless like that is bound to be quickly forgotten.
Oh, for the love of dear God, please do not do this. I might even go as far as to counsel considering not walking them through anything that produces a finished product. This gives them a reason to rationalize once they are in the real world, "hey, even I could do it back in B-school...", and it is all downhill from there.
One of my most difficult and intractable communications issues as a programmer and salesman (yes, I do both) is quickly and concisely conveying the amount of effort involved to respond to requests from my Clients, and why that effort is necessary to meet their request. The hardest cases have always been managers who know enough to be dangerous, and are bewildered when their assumptions don't pan out after they scale their small amount of knowledge to production-grade, enterprise-scale settings.
The suggestions to throw them into a small (1 week) project and change requirements late into the project are good, but need refining. You don't want to traumatize them into believing that software is impossible; they'll be paralyzed when it comes time to make a decision. You are there to teach them tools for managing development practices, not actually carry out the development.
Have you considered going to your school's CS (or better, MIS if they have one, because odds are slim most of your B-school students will go on to manage or interact with teams of CS graduates) department, and finding a professor teaching a software engineering class who is willing to integrate some/all weeks of his syllabus with your class? Most root cause issues with software development/deployment projects arise not between the direct interaction between the development lead (your students in this case) and his programmers (hopefully some MIS/CS students), but rather from pressures (economic, business, or political) originating from outside the team.
Carefully craft a series of exercises where you play the role of the demanding Client. They are the development team; ideally you are going to play the role of Client to as many different development teams as there are B-school students. Like any good teacher, you're going to have to sweat bullets ahead of time to come up with concise lessons through role-playing and assignments to accomplish your goal. Through your Client-team relationship with them, teach them how to negotiate requirements (i.e., knowing when and how to say "no"), how to evaluate and make technical trade-offs based upon feedback from their technical specialists, project management in a software project context, etc. Teach them about all the pressures that will tempt them to cut development practice corners. And make it damn, damn hard for them to stand their ground, as realistic as you can figure how. Threaten to "fire"/flunk them out of the class, entice them with bonuses to meet unreasonable (but not obviously so) demands, etc.
Then and only then, show them how that dovetails into development practices at the technical specialists' level (version control, agile methods, usability testing, software testing, whatever you want to expose them to), so they understand that these development practices have an immediate bottom line impact, and how much of an impact these practices make on the development effort. Showing them how to measure the impact, and how managing by metrics instead of using the metrics as another tool in their management arsenal will entrap them into a project management hole they will never dig out of, would be a bonus. Your MIS/CS counterpart should have a similar course plan that shows those students how to "manage upwards", communicate and think in business terms, convey a professional demeanor even when making a forceful point, etc.
If you and your MIS/CS counterpart are really good, you would try to find out what gets your respective student
Interesting suggestion. This technique might only work for XML documents above a certain level of size, number of tag types, and possibly even parsing complexity. The applicability might depend upon whether your utilization of XML serialized data is batch-oriented or transactional in nature. This technique would yield lots of benefits for scenarios where someone is dumping a few, very large XML documents across the wire, but perhaps not so much for scenarios where lots of small, quick XML documents are being exchanged back and forth. CPU saturation (and eventually memory I/O saturation) for example, might become a concern in certain scenarios.
In any case, it seems one name for this technique is XML "compaction". I searched around Sourceforge and found quite a few projects trying to tackle the general problem domain of efficient XML transmission. The compaction terminology was used and explicitly described by the Xqueeze project. There are other projects that either directly apply themselves against the XML compression problem or are tangentially resolving the problem by completely changing the representation format (no transcoding): xmltk, XMLPPM, XBIS XML, WAP Binary XML (WBXML). I will probably look at Xqueeze and XMLPPM for my own programming work that requires handling XML formatted data in a more batch-oriented setting.
Notwithstanding the OP's implied reliance on their RAID array as their backup strategy being a fatally flawed approach, and tape backups for that RAID a potentially recommended course of action because archival grade discs cost more per gigabyte than tape for starters, recommending they use tape when they have obviously thought of it and rejected the approach might not be fulfilling certain business requirements they didn't share with us. For all we know, they already have an overwhelming, substantial investment into their current approach that eclipses adopting other media. Or they might be in an industry where regulatory requirements require sending off data on disc to some government agency. Or they really might be using archival grade discs and want the data protection assurance that comes with those versus tape; still cheaper than magneto-optical media for example, especially if they have a requirement to take daily backups off site and their data just happens to fit pretty nicely on about 2 discs a day.
For your amanda suggestion to be complete, you need to offer a solution that also automatically labels the tape cartridges. Generally this requires getting a tape library that has a built-in labeler, though I don't know how Linux-friendly these units are (I'm looking into Overland Storage offerings myself).
There are also other companies like the poster who wrote about his Rimage who need automated production of one-off discs and disc sets. The nirvana for these companies is something that can automatically burn, print, place in Tyvek sleeves, stuff into an appropriate sized envelope, weigh the envelope, print postage or express package delivery label, apply the label (or perhaps print directly onto the envelope, then stuff it), seal the envelope, and dump it into an appropriate bin for pickup by a postal carrier or express package delivery staff. Then customized discs can literally be produced as part of a normal workflow system at the touch of a button.
Find out if the Peace Corps sends other people either to where she is doing her stint, or if someone will pass through. Send the PDA with them, and have her meet them at the airport. This won't solve the theft in situ problem, but she probably has quite a few personal possessions in that category already, so it is not like an unaddressed problem. At least if you get a PDA to her, shipping her bytes consists of just sending a flash media card in a letter.
She might not live near an Internet cafe, so printing out the material might not be feasible, or might be prohibitively expensive, depending on how much she wants to print out.
I think PDA-based solutions might even beat out microfiche at this time, which surprised me. It was difficult to find out how much Computer Output on Microform (COM) costs; closest page to prices I could find seemed to imply that there is a $175 USD setup fee per run. This page seems to imply a $0.02/page cost. Maybe the Canadian government agency price of $0.12 CAD per image says I'm completely wrong, and if you can ship someone a TIFF file of the entire microfiche, they can turn around the microfiche to you for really dirt cheap. Or they might be talking about a TIFF image per page, and not per microfiche. I would be astonished if it was not priced per page, and really was $0.12 CAD per microfiche. If it was that cheap, then I would reconsider a PDA based solution if cheap microfiche readers can be found.
Oh, alright. Google is not all knowing. Curiosity got the better of me, so I broke down and called Microfacs and spoke with a nice guy named Rick. Minimum pricing is $0.05 USD per page, and they think 2,000 pages is a very small order. For that, the deal goes like this. You ship them single page TIFF images. You get about a week turnaround, and it is in the form of 16mm microfilm. If you want microfiche, that costs extra. I didn't ask, because $0.05 per page sounded like about the limit for the low budgets we are talking about; I'm guessing that $0.10 per page for microfiche. More expensive than a copy shop, but a heck of a lot cheaper to ship around I would imagine.
Recondtioned readers don't go below $130 USD, although some student projects seem to be aware of the advantages of shipping bulk human readable data around on microform (they are aming for a $20 USD reader, for example). There are handheld microfiche readers that use sunlight, but they cost about the same as a new low-end PDA, so you would still have in situ theft concerns. Used readers have $50 USD opening bids on eBay in the here and now. This is all for microfiche readers; search around for 16mm format microfilm readers that are sunlight or battery capable (if she isn't around reliable electricity), though I'm not sure about the prudence of using for long periods of time any readers that you have to peer through optics.
It currently seems tough to beat the TCO combination of an eBay'd Palm, solar panel, and SD media if you are talking about shipping all of Project Gutenberg to her. Microform readers cost more than a cheap PDA, even used and reconditioned, and the reproduction costs can really swing the cost picture into the PDAs favor (even assuming a couple get stolen) when you start dealing with 10,000 pages (roughly the number of proofed Project Gutenberg pages) and up. If she is around re
For those wondering what he was talking about, I think this is the home page of TeamTrack, which lets you download an evaluation version, and a InfoWorld review indicates pricing is about $9,000 USD for 10 named users and $17,000 USD for 10 concurrent users. Even with heavy discounting, it would put a moderately stiff price tag on a deployment that makes BPM infrastructure like this a linchpin of operations for a medium-sized (400-900) company.
At 50% discount with 400 named users, you are looking at $180,000 USD for infrastructure software that still expects you to wrap your own applications around it to achieve the business payoff; $360,000 USD for a no-discount price. By comparison, Lawson mid-tier ERP deployments bundle in the applications and each module is around $100,000 USD; I've seen $600,000-1M as a typical price tag for a healthily comprehensive Lawson deployment that includes services.
So I am not sure I would characterize TeamTrack as a no-brainer or even easy purchase decision. It is better than some pricing I've seen for this software, but many businesses might be tempted to go with a "good enough" lower-cost solution built around something like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. It sounds like if you already have an ecosystem of stovepiped applications that are integrated together with spit and glue, the payoff might be greater using TeamTrack to tie it all together with a more structured and robust framework than if you were building the integration from scratch (which the original poster sounds like they might be doing). For those whose company purchased BPM infrastructure systems like TeamTrack, what was your company's application integration situation before the purchase and what convinced you to make the purchase and expend additional development effort to tie into a new BPM system?
He isn't doing it because of Social Security, he's watching his wealth shrink by the day as the dollar tumbles.
The significant bulk of earnings for BRK-A comes from insurance investment income and non-insurance business. There are some international holdings like Cologne Re, but by and large the underwriting portion of BRK-A supplies earnings but are significantly offset by long-term liabilities which he smartly insists upon fully accounting for. Basically, while the reinsurance business supplies him with plenty of cheap cash, the parts of BRK-A that really throw off unencumbered cash are the non-insurance portions. Look at his largest equities investment holdings, and survey the range of business holdings. The vast majority (100% of the major equity positions he uses as a compromise proxy for holding the business, about 90% of the subsidiaries by count, they don't break out balance sheet, earnings statements, etc. by subsidiary unfortunately) are U.S.-based businesses; they have international operations and sales, but by and large they concentrate on the U.S. markets.
So you are saying that with a pre-dominant orientation to U.S. markets, he decides that his lesser orientation to international markets justifies repositioning his cash? That doesn't make sense because there are transaction costs to moving cash around like that, and Buffett is not in the habit of paying other people a lot to hold his cash for him. That's why outside of insurance-related risk management activities, you see him tend to just sit tight on top of a mountain of fairly mundane cash instruments with hyper-low transaction expenses. Because his overseas exposure is relatively limited, he doesn't have a huge incentive to switch cash allocation strategies away from a dollar denomination unless he was convinced we're facing a sea change in the forseeable future.
Furthermore, ever since we floated after closing the gold window in the 70's, we've seen fluctuations of the current magnitude before; in fact, worse differentials. BRK-A sat through all of those fluctuations because Buffett simply doesn't care about chasing the first and last 20% of a move. He's not moving because "he's watching his wealth shrink by the day as the dollar tumbles", he's moving because something much bigger has caught his attention. On the order of what traders call a "secular" change.
What a shithole we're digging, and it's all by design, it's happening today, and as far as I know it's not even impeachable, because it doesn't involve any titillating sexual indiscretions.
So you're saying this is all caused by the Bush administration and Republicans? All or most of it? Show me the numbers for that assertion, because the record shows both sides of the aisle fed copiously at the trough. Reckless spending is an equal opportunity sin. It took decades of irresponsible spending by everyone (citizens and Congress) to get us to this close to insolvency. If you snapped your fingers, erased the last five years, and replaced Bush with whoever you prefer, it won't materially change the fact that the American electorate wilfully voted over the course of generations for deficit spending, largely on goals that result in non-income producing assets, and their duly elected representatives complied. The sooner we stop pointing fingers to assign blame for sunk costs, which only wins political points and not national economic advantage, the sooner we can address the national behavioral problems that led us into this mess in the first place.
Public finances are a funny thing, they don't quite operate like a household or business. Because they can roll over debts and tinker with taxation to raise capital, and creditors don't ever really call due the entirety of the debts, everything can go swimmingly until the creditors as a group suddenly lose faith in t
They are very close, but need some additions to nail this right. Everyone freaking out over XML being cited should read the article. Reading the original article, I note that they defined "open format" by policy and not mechanism:
specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community, and affirmed by a standards body; or, de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms.
This means they really don't care about the actual format, they care about the terms of access to the format. Microsoft can't drive a DTD with encrypted blocks through a mechanism-based loophole simply by declaring, "Hey! Look! XML!".
However.
It is said that even the largest companies bear the imprint of their founders. Gates was raised by lawyers, and his company operates like one. Unless you adversarially test this legislation before it passes, I guarantee you Microsoft will find a perfectly legal way to protect their crown jewels if it passes. There are other big players who will fight tooth and nail against this legislation, too. Oracle. IBM's DB2 folks.
It is unfortunate that I could not find on their web site a full explanation of what they meant by "open format". However, going by that small excerpted blurb, if I was thinking of legal and marketing workarounds, here are some things I can come up with off the cuff.
Dilute or pervert one of the definitions of "open standard", "open community", or "standards body". No definition legislated, easy enough to do. Control the standards group, control the standard.
Note that the clauses separated by a semicolon (;) stipulate access terms for the latter but not the former. Sure, place it with a standards group, but make it expensive to obtain the standard "to cover distribution costs". The EIA standard for racks for example, costs over $50 to obtain an electronic copy. Perfectly open, perfectly standard, but certainly not "royalty-free".
Play the Internet Explorer bundle game again, on a different playing field. Make the default format of the application a proprietary format, and allow saving as the standards format as long as the user takes additional steps to configure it or specify the standard format. By default, the vast majority of users will deploy with the default setting, killing any standard format in the crib through sheer inertia.
Sure, there is an open format. It just doesn't support all the features of the application.
Twist the definition of "fully documented" because that term is not nailed down. Yup, it's fully documented. "The 'dynamic_index' field stores dynamic indexes". There. It's fully documented. What? You want to know what a dynamic index is? Oh, but that's a trade secret. Or here is the full format of the dynamic index data structure, "fully documented". Leave out enough adequate description of the semantics, and you can bamboozle nearly everyone, including yourself. Why do you think Microsoft themselves can't get their own Word format consistent across versions? You can take the Microsoft-is-Evil theory that they do this to "entice" their customers to upgrade, but I tend to think it is because the format is ambiguously documented enough that even their own smart programmers trip up on the specifications.
Supply an open standard, but your implementation of the standard is different from the outside world's implementation(s). Hey, bugs happen. No reference implementation that everyone standardizes upon, not a problem to be just barely incompatible enough (without any need for evil conspiracies) to annoy users enough to make them stick with the original application. Coders who hack EDI systems can sympathize with me here; even when everyone agrees upon an implementation standard, a "data format dissonance" tend
Yet the numbers tell a different story. You are being swindled, pal.
And your numbers are?
I'm quite well aware of people writing up reports saying that there is nothing to worry about. Some say, for example that the assumptions of the models that predict bankruptcy are excessively pessimistic. But unless you point us to what you are using as the basis for your statement that we're being swindled, we can simply assume you are just blowing rhetoric.
On the other hand, I'm looking at a $20B hedge that one of financial history's most consistent performers has placed against the dollar. That is 15% of market cap on Berkshire Hathaway. Even more interesting, that is over 50% of the company's cash position, what it really took to position that hedge (he still has the cash, but it is a real pain in the ass to manage multiple currency positions like that). He is not the only one taking short positions against the dollar, just a trader who is well known to the mainstream. In his entire career, he has only ever made one other investment of comparable magnitude, and that is when he bought GEICO, which rocketed BRK.A to the top by essentially giving him a private venture fund to capitalize purchases of other income-producing assets. There is a first time for everything, and Buffett might be wrong, but odds are he knows something you don't.
Talk is cheap, but 50% of cash in the billions backs up a metric assload of talk. And Buffett is saying we're borrowing too much. He doesn't give specific prescriptive advice, but when you look at what we are spending on well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that even if we dropped defense to zero, we still won't dig out of our hole fast enough; and that's just the public debt. You want to talk about Social Security? Sure, let's talk unfunded liabilities. You think our current public debt hole is manageable? Okay, I'll give you a hole so deep, it exceeds the total net worth of the nation. In equities terms, the "book value" of the nation cannot cover the unfunded liabilities. The Social Security and Medicare Trustees' annual reports have to be off by almost 100% to make the unfunded liabilities even match the net worth of the nation.
Naturally, when you are talking about what you owe versus what you have, prudence dictates that you don't risk more than 10% of capital on any one class of expenditures. So you probably want the Trustees to be off by a factor of 10 to be relatively prudent. The only reason our creditors are not running screaming in the other direction is because we don't have to pay these unfunded liabilities right away, so it is not yet impacting our ability to pay them back. It's someone else's problem at this time, in other words.
I don't know what reports you're reading, but I'm looking through the Trustees' own words. If you can point to analyses that can demonstrate how the Trustees' numbers are off by an order of magnitude, hey, I might think history is being made and Buffett will make the biggest mistake of his trading career. The swindle I believe history will write, is upon the enstupidated and innumerate American voting citizenry, for believing they can get something for nothing. Thank God that we have intrinsic strengths that have not been totally destroyed yet, so we are unlikely to see Chinese Cultural Revolution scale deprivation and slaughter when the bill comes due. But make no mistake about it. If Buffett and a hell of a lot of other traders are right, we are in for an incredibly tough, whipsaw ride starting around 2010 or so. And going on for anywhere from 5 years to possibly decades, depending upon
You refer to some "pain", but, honestly, using debt to quickly move millions of people completely off of SS is, IMHO, completely crazy.
That is why I said towards the end of my post that we are very rapidly (within 5-10 years in my estimation) running out of time for options. If this was done two decades ago when the problem was first being heard outside of the thinktanks and outside of the Beltway, we probably could have punted the cost. We are at a particularly bad time to consider options with the Boomers retiring soon, and putting the most stress upon the system it has ever experienced.
Our financial problems extend far, far beyond this discussion over Social Security. What could be crazier yet is how we will (or will not) dig out of them. Remember what I presented was a thumbnail sketch, deliberately made extreme to keep the explanation simple. If you want to numb your mind some insomniac night, surf around and read up on all the variations I mentioned were possible. To be fair to the reform advocates, I have never seen what I presented be seriously put forth as an option, but only trotted out, like I did, as a way to convey the essential mechanism. Actual plans I have seen have almost always been small baby steps, like the President's. It will be fascinating to watch how that plays out, and if it will not be "too little, too late".
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, so theoretically using this technique, could we build material that reflects away all EM except a narrow arbitrary range we define while it absorbs the EM spectrum that falls on both sides of that range? I haven't been able to get to the paper in Nature Photonics yet, and I didn't pick up the "several layers with increasing RI" part from the physorg article, but your post is the first description I've read of how they were able to capture such a huge swathe of the EM spectrum. The physorg article also led me to wonder if the material was visible light spectrum only, or just EM in general; but if your description is accurate I could see non-visible light parts of the spectrum addressed by the material as well.
As others have noted, you should have taken it to an Apple Store Genius Bar to check out why the sleep didn't last so long. The feature you want is called "Safe Sleep" in OS X. If you still have your PowerBook, and it is running OS X 10.4 or later, there are instructions on how to enable Safe Sleep. That link was on the first page of links that Google returns with the search "os x" hibernate, though it might not have been readily apparent three years ago. Nonetheless, you should have been able to determine through the Apple Support forums that you had a very atypical Sleep period.
If you are willing to give OS X another try with a MacBook Pro, there are instructions on how to make Safe Sleep a default action when closing the lid. As well as how to disable it if you want the reverse option.
How is this "insightful"? Even if you did the typical /. thing and only read the synopsis, and not the article, it's clear that they were getting paid for their OT work, just not at OT rates.
It is insightful because the parent post to your response looked beyond the immediate topic of overtime, and questioned the validity of the underlying premise that highly skilled people should even consider full time employee employment. In other words, we shouldn't be discussing overtime, we should be conversing about whether or not it even makes sense to put yourself in the position to be demanding overtime in the first place. Considering the risk-reward structure in most companies, the actual volatility of most high technology jobs, and the actual hourly wage of full time employees, I'm quite surprised most people in the IT industry still put up with full time employment and its attendant practices. Like the open industry "secret" that the vast majority of IT jobs just naturally expect 50-70 hour weeks.
As someone who markets -> sells -> implements his own work, I'm happy so many people are still clinging to full time status. Less competition for me, helps keep the billing rate high, and gives me time to work on my internal projects that will break me through the hourly billing rate glass ceiling. I'm not going to present a Pollyanna story, it was certainly not easy the first two years (especially since I started my business in the depths of the dot bomb recession). But anyone who can learn C, Smalltalk and Lisp can certainly pick up enough social networking, marketing, sales, bookkeeping, negotiating and business skills to get out of full time employment and start contracting (where others like body shops land your deals and get a big slice of the action) and then eventually go full consulting (when you have direct client relationships and keep the entire billing rate to the client).
If you are in the U.S., you can keep using Wildfire through CR Technologies, Inc.; don't know anything about them other than I have been following the Wildfire saga, and know that CR advertises continued Wildfire services. For everyone suggesting ways to set up a "follow me/find me" feature, please check out the demos on CR Technologies' web site, because you are kind of missing the point of the original poster's desire to re-establish Wildfire in his life.
It doesn't matter how highly paid and trained your professionals are, if the environment that produces the software is not conducive to eliminating these types of flaws. Like if they are not given enough resources to test and QA the the projects they are assigned, there is no organizational commitment to take the time and expense to document properly, or leadership overrides technical objections to project timeframes, etc. Most of the cited projects could probably be classified as failures of project management rather than failures of the end product (the software) that these flawed projects produced. Yes, software is hard and the software profession should continue its efforts to improve quality, but that doesn't let the organizational culture, leadership and processes that produced the software in these cases off the hook.
Why is it when the accounting profession makes spectacular mistakes that take down entire Fortune 500 class organizations, there is a critical analysis of the processes that led to these failures, and remedies often comprise prescriptive measures for these processes, but similar analysis for software failures focus upon the software flaw but not the environment that allowed the flaw to emerge? Now sometimes the remedy in the accounting case might not make complete sense (like SOX), but the point here is people don't look at just the end result (the accounting system transactions) of the accounting process.
I don't do mail order. If its not in a bookshop then as far as I'm concerned its not out there.
Any bookstore worth their salt will be more than happy to special order any in print book in exchange for prepayment, and take the order over the phone so you don't have to make two trips to the store; just pick it up on your next trip to the bookstore. If you are worried about someone nicking your credit card number when you give it out over the phone, just get a credit card that lets you generate one time use numbers (Citibank offers this service, for example). Now if you insist upon being able to saunter into J. Random Bookstore and walk out with said book, well, you're mightily limiting your choices in the technical field, not to speak of books in general.
Or you could have the book delivered to your office if you have one.
Or you could rent a private mailbox where they will sign the package for you and place it in your secure box; there are private mailbox places that are designed so their patrons can securely get in after-hours to get at the boxes. These are cheap, and open up mail order for you.
Bottom line, there are many ways to order these or any other books that should address your earlier bad experiences with mail order.
It's a little frustrating when I want to try OpenBSD, and I can't because there's no ISO to FTP or torrent...I want to quickly download, install, poke around. Not spend $X on a CD, wait for it to come in the mail...
If your sole purpose is to just "poke around" and try out OpenBSD, there are plenty of people offering workable unofficial ISOs that are functionally equivalent. Sabotage.org has one that I've used; if you have requirements that demand a feature only available in the latest version, you are well beyond the stage of "poke around" and a budget request is in order. If you want something for free that is one of the project's ways of making ends meet...well, sorry, can't help you much there.
If you are that much a stickler for getting the "official" CD image, then that goes quite a ways beyond the "poke around" level of interest, and whoever is dictating the requirement for the official image either needs to pony up more money or more training/education to close the gap between bringing up the "official" OpenBSD and an FTP-based install (for just playing around, there is no difference). As any number of OpenBSD folks will attest, getting any of the unofficial images will more than suffice to satisfy your curiosity about the OS, and you won't have to retrain if you switch to the official CD's later. Personally, if I were you I would simply just follow the FTP-based install instructions; to really "play around" with a new OS and get any reasonable feel for it you're going to spend a week with it, so doing the FTP install is a fine way to introduce yourself to the OS (if for nothing else than how it lays out devices, for example) and install it at the same time. The instructions are extremely detailed and specific, certainly easy enough for people like yourself who dabble with different OS's and distros. Actual time spent messing around with the installation modulo the download time (which you would have spent anyways) will probably total no more than 1-2 hours.
Finally, note that for disaster recovery purposes, installation from FTP/HTTP/rsync/etc. repositories is one recovery mode that should be supported. You cannot absolutely count upon the availability of the discs, so any production-level interest that has any disaster recovery component (and if that component doesn't exist, you're playing with fire) should require familiarity with the FTP-based installation.
Googling around I ran across the Hufu site, where they sell an artificial human meat product. Their FAQ specifically describes the taste of human meat as "the taste and texture of beef, except a little sweeter in taste and a little softer in texture". So that should rule out the theory behind the religious stricture against consuming pork.
In case anyone else is searching the U.S. District Court Eastern District of Virginia, I finally located the case. When searching, the civil action number is 1:04cv507. Plaintiff is Government Employees Insurance Company (not "GEICO", you won't find it under that term). Defendents are "Google, Inc. AND Overture Services, Inc." Follow the directions at the court's Opinions page.
You will want to read the Memorandum Opinion for the details. See last paragaph of page 3 for an interesting piece of informatoin. Google supplied "no evidence regarding whether such advertisements [Adwords ads that use the string "GEICO" in the heading or text of the ad] generate a likelihood of confusion". This is primarily because GEICO paid for a survey, the results of which should really fascinate marketers who specialize in Adwords and search engine marketing, notwithstanding some of the survey's (IMHO) outrageous flaws like using a screenshot of a page that only looked similar to a real Google results page.
I'm going to tentatively unknot my knickers, because it seems that the crux of GEICO's argument is on page 6 and pretty much onwards from that page, and Google simply conceded the field to GEICO by not offering up survey results of their own. Or Google did conduct a survey, and the results were close enough to GEICO's survey that Google effectively did not challenge the results.
There are some involved discussions on survey result reliability in a court case, issues with survey reliability with this specific survey, and the interaction between business models, Adwords, and marketing (the last of which marketing geeks will love to dissect).
No matter whether Google's legal team declined to pony up for their own survey, or did and found that the results were probatively similar, the reason I'm not as anxious as before is on page 20, where the opinion says, "Aware of the importance of these issues to the ongoing evolution of Internet business practices and to the application of traditional principles to this new medium, the Court emphasizes that its ruling applies only to the specific facts of this case, which include the unique business model employed by plaintiff and the specific design of defendent's advertising program and search results pages." Brinkema seems perfectly aware of the possibilities for abuse of her opinion. Trivia: she was is also the judge in the Zacarias Moussaoui case.
...does this ruling then mean that if you were selling a program that could read/write or convert the data of a competing program, you can't even tell your prospective customers in an AdWords ad that you offered an easy way to migrate away from your competitor? That is what I read into the original linked article.
If that is true, then wow, what a way to lock in an existing customer base. Just "vigorously enforce" your trademarked name. No need to worry about direct competitors comparing themselves against you. Of course, the direct competitors still have the option to obliquely refer to your business, but this recent ruling seems to open up a grey area to me because it appears to stray from the original intent of trademark protection and start to add levels of indirection to protect. Just how indirect is indirect enough?
This ruling says it is illegal to mention a trademarked name in the ad copy itself if it violates the "likelihood of confusion" test. Initially, you would get slapped down under this doctrine if you infringed the trademark in such a manner that the infringement would mislead consumers. Now, the reports of these rulings (not the opinions themselves, which I'm still trying to find) seem to extend the protection of the trademark from misleading usage to saying protection is granted over any usage in ad copy whatsoever, regardless of context, misleading or not.
So if my grocery business shows an ad with a receipt from your business and right next to it is a receipt from your grocery business, and both show a purchase of the same brand type of soup, that is now illegal in the United States because of the trademark on your business' name?
I'm hoping that Brinkema's phrasing of "solely with regard to those sponsored links that use GEICO's trade marks in their headings or text." limits the expansion of precedent and only rules on the specific ads that used Geico's name in the ad copy. Need to read the court documents to know for sure. If someone knows the PACER case number, please post it up here, because I could not find the GEICO v. Google case in the Eastern Virginia U.S. District Court (there are four cases listed for Google, but none involve Geico).
I haven't been impressed with many of the packages because there is no user training. ... even if they had support and training wouldn't I have to pay for it?
This sounds more like you are reluctant to pay for anything, rather than you ran into a lack of training options. It is true that SugarCRM doesn't put up their training workshop material for download. They offer their training workshops as a for fee service.
That is not a drawback of how SugarCRM uses Open Source, that is a benefit. When you say "It seems that you end up not really saving any money by the time you account all the resource that open source cant provide at least in the case of CRM and ERP systems" you are indicating that the only value you see that Open Source offers to you is the potential for zero software code acquisition cost. When the real value lies in the control you can exert over the code base to customize it to your business' specific requirements.
Even if SugarCRM ends up costing you the same as Siebel or Salesforce.com after training and support are factored in, you gain one additional benefit for that equivalent cost: you are not dependent upon SugarCRM's developers to fix/modify the code. If you really need something done, there are third party developers out there who can offer to deliver before SugarCRM's own coders get around to your request. After what I've seen conventional CRM and ERP projects suffer through, a benefit like that can make or break your ability to implement a new business process dependent upon automation that you think will give you an advantage over your competition.
That might not be important to your business. Fine. But to say what you posted is to miss the key long term business rationale for Open Source enterprise software. The economics of low cost software acquisition are gravy, almost a distraction because software at this level of complexity is not a product. The strategic opportunities offered by Open Source solutions to a business due to its open-ended nature as contrasted to closed software are the key differentiator. For example, your business or your business' trade association can add the API and API documentation you find lacking in an Open Source solution. If a similar API in the equivalent closed source solution doesn't offer a particular capability you want, you could be waiting a very long time before it is implemented, if ever.
Note that this is a separate issue from your general unhappiness with ERP and CRM software in general. I noticed your complaint against Microsoft CRM's lack of training material as well. I share your general disappointment, and have some strong opinions on why users in general are only reluctantly satisfied with this category of software. This is not the place to discuss that. I just wanted to point out that knocking SugarCRM, or complex Open Source solutions in general, for not providing a zero cost end-to-end deployment solution, could cost you to overlook a valuable tool and way of thinking for your business.
My boss says I'm reading it wrong, its all legal speak, and its just a friendly contract.
In one-sided contracts like this, the atmosphere is "friendly" until the other party wants something that you have.
Well-crafted contracts are like good fences between good neighbors. A contract does not enforce trust nor friendship. If you are using a contract as the linchpin for trust in a business relationship the relationship has already failed; get out before you sign. A contract shows respect for the other party, and obtains equivalent respect in return.
The other advice you have received in this thread is sound. Negotiate the terms. If you don't know specifically what that means, find a mentor in your geographic area to coach you. Your boss is mostly correct by the way; draconian terms in these boilerplate contracts are rarely enforced. However, if your ambitions take you beyond cubicle-bound wage slavery for the rest of your life, learn how to negotiate contracts now. Your current situation is as good as any place to start. If your company will fire you for wanting to negotiate terms, believe me, you do not want to stay one second longer than it takes to jet out of the building.
The perception of difficult transactions should be laid at the feet of whoever is servicing your account. In reality, if you are not satisifed with your current IBM Business Partner, it is either a quick phone call or fax to change to another IBM Business Partner, as long as you are the individual listed by IBM as the "go to" person for the account. There is also a painless procedure to switch who that person is, in cases where that person has left the company but didn't transfer the account to their replacement (or if you simply want it changed for convenience).
An IBM Business Partner might make it seem very tedious to change these things because on the back end, unless you are practically one of the distributors themselves (like Avnet, and even those behemoths don't have electronic access to a lot of information), a lot of the work involved with purchasing, contract administration (which is what you are complaining about), etc. is still performed manually. The difference between a responsive, pleasant contract administration transaction and one that seems to require you to jump through hoops is often simply an IBM Business Partner who is willing to work through the IBM bureaucracy for you, and only drags you into the loop to say on the phone "I approve this" or send in an email/fax/letter that says the equivalent.
Since this is so off-topic, just email me if you are serious about wanting to switch and I can help you. Claimer: I'm an IBM Business Partner, and yes, I discount heavily for my clients who know exactly what they want since most of my revenue comes from custom services. yenant -at- gmail -dot- com
But I agree that "just compensation" is not properly defined. I would prefer something like double market value, since this action is taking away someone's liberty to pursue happiness, property, etc.
This doesn't even begin to cover the damage to the economy this ruling can have. Unless the ruling is reversed quickly and decisively, the following can easily happen.
Note that the parties who can invoke ED now, government functionaries and real estate developers, can structure a deal where no risk accrues to them whatsoever. With the valuation differentials that they can obtain from seizing low tax revenue property, they can clear a large profit, sell off at a low price to lock in their gains, and be out of the picture before anyone notices that the promised increased tax revenues have long since evaporated. A developer can make any tax increase promise he wants to sway the government official, without any risk for making the projections. The government officials can make campaign promises based upon these fictitious tax revenues, promises like pension guarantees that the tax base will be forced to uphold when the promised tax revenue doesn't fund it. And they will both be long gone when the bill comes due.
This will hollow out the economic vitality of communities as these parasites suck the life out of cities and towns. And it gets worse. If you own a business, ED will pay for your property, but not for the business. If you have a location-based business and are evicted, then you are paid for only a fraction of what it truly cost you to re-establish the business if that is even possible; most small businesses will perish under that kind of pressure. And the citizens can be hit with a double-whammy: not only does the promised increased tax revenue doesn't appear, but the original tax base is destroyed.
The economic moral hazard presented by this outrageously bad legal ruling is just as plain as it gets.
Assuming you live in zoned property where running a business from your house or apartment is illegal, you'll need to buy or rent commercial space to house your company.
Don't ask, don't tell. Those zoning laws were not built for Internet-based businesses. As long as your business operations don't make your neighbors raise their eyebrows, back up the truck and unload your servers into the room designated as the machine room for all anyone cares. Day in and day out vehicular traffic as you bring clients in for face-to-face meetings: bad. Quiet servers humming away, web conferences over your T1 line with a USB headset: good. Amateur XXX models trooping in and out of the house at all hours because camera time is expensive and you gotta run them 24x7: bad. Amateur XXX models trooping in and out of the house at all: bad. You and a few roomies doing video editing and web site work on XXX fare shipped in over a T3 line to the house: good. You get the idea.
You'll need several kinds of insurance.
Depends on the state you are in, but E&O or broad form commercial for example is unnecessary if you are in nose-to-the-code mode of your company's product. You might need workman's compensation, but check with an attorney; some states allow officers of a company to waive coverage.
If you can't hit the ground running with a product, you'll have to pay yourself and/or other developers while you develop something.
Then get a release from your current employer for your "hobby project", keep disciplined time and expense records (you'll need them for tax and payroll purposes anyways if you intend to compensate yourself later for work done for a back end upside that is far in excess of what a normal salary might bring, talk to a tax accountant and attorney for details), and use your day job to support your real job. Or do consulting and use the bench time to work on your product.
Starting and maintaining a business is difficult, but people make it much harder on themselves than they should. You really ought to hook up with a SCORE mentor in your local area. Geeks diss the business people all the time, while not realizing there is a lot to geek out over in the business world as well, and it is much more remunerative.
The worst nightmare of mediocre managers and rapacious recruiters the world over: geeks wising up, learning sales, marketing, negotiation, and business in general the way they apply themselves to debugging their favorite program du jour, and ditching unnecessary overhead to control it all themselves instead. It really is just as fascinating as the most intricate systems you have ever worked with, and can be hacked just as effectively for greater monetary rewards.
Reelect Nobody
While an admirable and laudable goal, you are focusing on the wrong pitch. Realistically, unless something quite drastic happens to the standard of living, your proposal to re-elect nobody even when successful will only achieve widespread acceptance gradually instead of all at once.
The side effect of a ramp-up in adoption of this goal is that groups of constituents who throw out tenured politicians will start to lose "their" parts of the pork doled out in D.C. In real life, the urge to "get back some of our taxes that we sent away" by voting for incumbents who have the political capital to fulfill that mandate will become overwhelming, in any citizenry conditioned as Americans have to all forms of dependency.
Like any addiction, kicking the habit on dependencies cold turkey is doable, but unrealistic for the hump of the Poisson distribution. Asking the citizenry to re-elect nobody is requesting they kick their addiction to dependency cold turkey. You would have more success if you first convince Americans that they have become fatally compromised by their unwise addiction to looking outside of their individual selves to solve the problems of their lives.
Printing hello world, outputting today's date on a web page or anything boring and useless like that is bound to be quickly forgotten.
Oh, for the love of dear God, please do not do this. I might even go as far as to counsel considering not walking them through anything that produces a finished product. This gives them a reason to rationalize once they are in the real world, "hey, even I could do it back in B-school...", and it is all downhill from there.
One of my most difficult and intractable communications issues as a programmer and salesman (yes, I do both) is quickly and concisely conveying the amount of effort involved to respond to requests from my Clients, and why that effort is necessary to meet their request. The hardest cases have always been managers who know enough to be dangerous, and are bewildered when their assumptions don't pan out after they scale their small amount of knowledge to production-grade, enterprise-scale settings.
The suggestions to throw them into a small (1 week) project and change requirements late into the project are good, but need refining. You don't want to traumatize them into believing that software is impossible; they'll be paralyzed when it comes time to make a decision. You are there to teach them tools for managing development practices, not actually carry out the development.
Have you considered going to your school's CS (or better, MIS if they have one, because odds are slim most of your B-school students will go on to manage or interact with teams of CS graduates) department, and finding a professor teaching a software engineering class who is willing to integrate some/all weeks of his syllabus with your class? Most root cause issues with software development/deployment projects arise not between the direct interaction between the development lead (your students in this case) and his programmers (hopefully some MIS/CS students), but rather from pressures (economic, business, or political) originating from outside the team.
Carefully craft a series of exercises where you play the role of the demanding Client. They are the development team; ideally you are going to play the role of Client to as many different development teams as there are B-school students. Like any good teacher, you're going to have to sweat bullets ahead of time to come up with concise lessons through role-playing and assignments to accomplish your goal. Through your Client-team relationship with them, teach them how to negotiate requirements (i.e., knowing when and how to say "no"), how to evaluate and make technical trade-offs based upon feedback from their technical specialists, project management in a software project context, etc. Teach them about all the pressures that will tempt them to cut development practice corners. And make it damn, damn hard for them to stand their ground, as realistic as you can figure how. Threaten to "fire"/flunk them out of the class, entice them with bonuses to meet unreasonable (but not obviously so) demands, etc.
Then and only then, show them how that dovetails into development practices at the technical specialists' level (version control, agile methods, usability testing, software testing, whatever you want to expose them to), so they understand that these development practices have an immediate bottom line impact, and how much of an impact these practices make on the development effort. Showing them how to measure the impact, and how managing by metrics instead of using the metrics as another tool in their management arsenal will entrap them into a project management hole they will never dig out of, would be a bonus. Your MIS/CS counterpart should have a similar course plan that shows those students how to "manage upwards", communicate and think in business terms, convey a professional demeanor even when making a forceful point, etc.
If you and your MIS/CS counterpart are really good, you would try to find out what gets your respective student
Interesting suggestion. This technique might only work for XML documents above a certain level of size, number of tag types, and possibly even parsing complexity. The applicability might depend upon whether your utilization of XML serialized data is batch-oriented or transactional in nature. This technique would yield lots of benefits for scenarios where someone is dumping a few, very large XML documents across the wire, but perhaps not so much for scenarios where lots of small, quick XML documents are being exchanged back and forth. CPU saturation (and eventually memory I/O saturation) for example, might become a concern in certain scenarios.
In any case, it seems one name for this technique is XML "compaction". I searched around Sourceforge and found quite a few projects trying to tackle the general problem domain of efficient XML transmission. The compaction terminology was used and explicitly described by the Xqueeze project. There are other projects that either directly apply themselves against the XML compression problem or are tangentially resolving the problem by completely changing the representation format (no transcoding): xmltk, XMLPPM, XBIS XML, WAP Binary XML (WBXML). I will probably look at Xqueeze and XMLPPM for my own programming work that requires handling XML formatted data in a more batch-oriented setting.
Notwithstanding the OP's implied reliance on their RAID array as their backup strategy being a fatally flawed approach, and tape backups for that RAID a potentially recommended course of action because archival grade discs cost more per gigabyte than tape for starters, recommending they use tape when they have obviously thought of it and rejected the approach might not be fulfilling certain business requirements they didn't share with us. For all we know, they already have an overwhelming, substantial investment into their current approach that eclipses adopting other media. Or they might be in an industry where regulatory requirements require sending off data on disc to some government agency. Or they really might be using archival grade discs and want the data protection assurance that comes with those versus tape; still cheaper than magneto-optical media for example, especially if they have a requirement to take daily backups off site and their data just happens to fit pretty nicely on about 2 discs a day.
For your amanda suggestion to be complete, you need to offer a solution that also automatically labels the tape cartridges. Generally this requires getting a tape library that has a built-in labeler, though I don't know how Linux-friendly these units are (I'm looking into Overland Storage offerings myself).
There are also other companies like the poster who wrote about his Rimage who need automated production of one-off discs and disc sets. The nirvana for these companies is something that can automatically burn, print, place in Tyvek sleeves, stuff into an appropriate sized envelope, weigh the envelope, print postage or express package delivery label, apply the label (or perhaps print directly onto the envelope, then stuff it), seal the envelope, and dump it into an appropriate bin for pickup by a postal carrier or express package delivery staff. Then customized discs can literally be produced as part of a normal workflow system at the touch of a button.
Find out if the Peace Corps sends other people either to where she is doing her stint, or if someone will pass through. Send the PDA with them, and have her meet them at the airport. This won't solve the theft in situ problem, but she probably has quite a few personal possessions in that category already, so it is not like an unaddressed problem. At least if you get a PDA to her, shipping her bytes consists of just sending a flash media card in a letter.
She might not live near an Internet cafe, so printing out the material might not be feasible, or might be prohibitively expensive, depending on how much she wants to print out.
I think PDA-based solutions might even beat out microfiche at this time, which surprised me. It was difficult to find out how much Computer Output on Microform (COM) costs; closest page to prices I could find seemed to imply that there is a $175 USD setup fee per run. This page seems to imply a $0.02/page cost. Maybe the Canadian government agency price of $0.12 CAD per image says I'm completely wrong, and if you can ship someone a TIFF file of the entire microfiche, they can turn around the microfiche to you for really dirt cheap. Or they might be talking about a TIFF image per page, and not per microfiche. I would be astonished if it was not priced per page, and really was $0.12 CAD per microfiche. If it was that cheap, then I would reconsider a PDA based solution if cheap microfiche readers can be found.
Oh, alright. Google is not all knowing. Curiosity got the better of me, so I broke down and called Microfacs and spoke with a nice guy named Rick. Minimum pricing is $0.05 USD per page, and they think 2,000 pages is a very small order. For that, the deal goes like this. You ship them single page TIFF images. You get about a week turnaround, and it is in the form of 16mm microfilm. If you want microfiche, that costs extra. I didn't ask, because $0.05 per page sounded like about the limit for the low budgets we are talking about; I'm guessing that $0.10 per page for microfiche. More expensive than a copy shop, but a heck of a lot cheaper to ship around I would imagine.
Recondtioned readers don't go below $130 USD, although some student projects seem to be aware of the advantages of shipping bulk human readable data around on microform (they are aming for a $20 USD reader, for example). There are handheld microfiche readers that use sunlight, but they cost about the same as a new low-end PDA, so you would still have in situ theft concerns. Used readers have $50 USD opening bids on eBay in the here and now. This is all for microfiche readers; search around for 16mm format microfilm readers that are sunlight or battery capable (if she isn't around reliable electricity), though I'm not sure about the prudence of using for long periods of time any readers that you have to peer through optics.
It currently seems tough to beat the TCO combination of an eBay'd Palm, solar panel, and SD media if you are talking about shipping all of Project Gutenberg to her. Microform readers cost more than a cheap PDA, even used and reconditioned, and the reproduction costs can really swing the cost picture into the PDAs favor (even assuming a couple get stolen) when you start dealing with 10,000 pages (roughly the number of proofed Project Gutenberg pages) and up. If she is around re
If not, I highly recommend TeamTrack.
For those wondering what he was talking about, I think this is the home page of TeamTrack, which lets you download an evaluation version, and a InfoWorld review indicates pricing is about $9,000 USD for 10 named users and $17,000 USD for 10 concurrent users. Even with heavy discounting, it would put a moderately stiff price tag on a deployment that makes BPM infrastructure like this a linchpin of operations for a medium-sized (400-900) company.
At 50% discount with 400 named users, you are looking at $180,000 USD for infrastructure software that still expects you to wrap your own applications around it to achieve the business payoff; $360,000 USD for a no-discount price. By comparison, Lawson mid-tier ERP deployments bundle in the applications and each module is around $100,000 USD; I've seen $600,000-1M as a typical price tag for a healthily comprehensive Lawson deployment that includes services.
So I am not sure I would characterize TeamTrack as a no-brainer or even easy purchase decision. It is better than some pricing I've seen for this software, but many businesses might be tempted to go with a "good enough" lower-cost solution built around something like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange. It sounds like if you already have an ecosystem of stovepiped applications that are integrated together with spit and glue, the payoff might be greater using TeamTrack to tie it all together with a more structured and robust framework than if you were building the integration from scratch (which the original poster sounds like they might be doing). For those whose company purchased BPM infrastructure systems like TeamTrack, what was your company's application integration situation before the purchase and what convinced you to make the purchase and expend additional development effort to tie into a new BPM system?
He isn't doing it because of Social Security, he's watching his wealth shrink by the day as the dollar tumbles.
The significant bulk of earnings for BRK-A comes from insurance investment income and non-insurance business. There are some international holdings like Cologne Re, but by and large the underwriting portion of BRK-A supplies earnings but are significantly offset by long-term liabilities which he smartly insists upon fully accounting for. Basically, while the reinsurance business supplies him with plenty of cheap cash, the parts of BRK-A that really throw off unencumbered cash are the non-insurance portions. Look at his largest equities investment holdings, and survey the range of business holdings. The vast majority (100% of the major equity positions he uses as a compromise proxy for holding the business, about 90% of the subsidiaries by count, they don't break out balance sheet, earnings statements, etc. by subsidiary unfortunately) are U.S.-based businesses; they have international operations and sales, but by and large they concentrate on the U.S. markets.
So you are saying that with a pre-dominant orientation to U.S. markets, he decides that his lesser orientation to international markets justifies repositioning his cash? That doesn't make sense because there are transaction costs to moving cash around like that, and Buffett is not in the habit of paying other people a lot to hold his cash for him. That's why outside of insurance-related risk management activities, you see him tend to just sit tight on top of a mountain of fairly mundane cash instruments with hyper-low transaction expenses. Because his overseas exposure is relatively limited, he doesn't have a huge incentive to switch cash allocation strategies away from a dollar denomination unless he was convinced we're facing a sea change in the forseeable future.
Furthermore, ever since we floated after closing the gold window in the 70's, we've seen fluctuations of the current magnitude before; in fact, worse differentials. BRK-A sat through all of those fluctuations because Buffett simply doesn't care about chasing the first and last 20% of a move. He's not moving because "he's watching his wealth shrink by the day as the dollar tumbles", he's moving because something much bigger has caught his attention. On the order of what traders call a "secular" change.
What a shithole we're digging, and it's all by design, it's happening today, and as far as I know it's not even impeachable, because it doesn't involve any titillating sexual indiscretions.
So you're saying this is all caused by the Bush administration and Republicans? All or most of it? Show me the numbers for that assertion, because the record shows both sides of the aisle fed copiously at the trough. Reckless spending is an equal opportunity sin. It took decades of irresponsible spending by everyone (citizens and Congress) to get us to this close to insolvency. If you snapped your fingers, erased the last five years, and replaced Bush with whoever you prefer, it won't materially change the fact that the American electorate wilfully voted over the course of generations for deficit spending, largely on goals that result in non-income producing assets, and their duly elected representatives complied. The sooner we stop pointing fingers to assign blame for sunk costs, which only wins political points and not national economic advantage, the sooner we can address the national behavioral problems that led us into this mess in the first place.
Public finances are a funny thing, they don't quite operate like a household or business. Because they can roll over debts and tinker with taxation to raise capital, and creditors don't ever really call due the entirety of the debts, everything can go swimmingly until the creditors as a group suddenly lose faith in t
Policy, Not Mechanism.
They are very close, but need some additions to nail this right. Everyone freaking out over XML being cited should read the article. Reading the original article, I note that they defined "open format" by policy and not mechanism:
This means they really don't care about the actual format, they care about the terms of access to the format. Microsoft can't drive a DTD with encrypted blocks through a mechanism-based loophole simply by declaring, "Hey! Look! XML!".
However.
It is said that even the largest companies bear the imprint of their founders. Gates was raised by lawyers, and his company operates like one. Unless you adversarially test this legislation before it passes, I guarantee you Microsoft will find a perfectly legal way to protect their crown jewels if it passes. There are other big players who will fight tooth and nail against this legislation, too. Oracle. IBM's DB2 folks.
It is unfortunate that I could not find on their web site a full explanation of what they meant by "open format". However, going by that small excerpted blurb, if I was thinking of legal and marketing workarounds, here are some things I can come up with off the cuff.
Yet the numbers tell a different story. You are being swindled, pal.
And your numbers are?
I'm quite well aware of people writing up reports saying that there is nothing to worry about. Some say, for example that the assumptions of the models that predict bankruptcy are excessively pessimistic. But unless you point us to what you are using as the basis for your statement that we're being swindled, we can simply assume you are just blowing rhetoric.
On the other hand, I'm looking at a $20B hedge that one of financial history's most consistent performers has placed against the dollar. That is 15% of market cap on Berkshire Hathaway. Even more interesting, that is over 50% of the company's cash position, what it really took to position that hedge (he still has the cash, but it is a real pain in the ass to manage multiple currency positions like that). He is not the only one taking short positions against the dollar, just a trader who is well known to the mainstream. In his entire career, he has only ever made one other investment of comparable magnitude, and that is when he bought GEICO, which rocketed BRK.A to the top by essentially giving him a private venture fund to capitalize purchases of other income-producing assets. There is a first time for everything, and Buffett might be wrong, but odds are he knows something you don't.
Talk is cheap, but 50% of cash in the billions backs up a metric assload of talk. And Buffett is saying we're borrowing too much. He doesn't give specific prescriptive advice, but when you look at what we are spending on well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that even if we dropped defense to zero, we still won't dig out of our hole fast enough; and that's just the public debt. You want to talk about Social Security? Sure, let's talk unfunded liabilities. You think our current public debt hole is manageable? Okay, I'll give you a hole so deep, it exceeds the total net worth of the nation. In equities terms, the "book value" of the nation cannot cover the unfunded liabilities. The Social Security and Medicare Trustees' annual reports have to be off by almost 100% to make the unfunded liabilities even match the net worth of the nation.
Naturally, when you are talking about what you owe versus what you have, prudence dictates that you don't risk more than 10% of capital on any one class of expenditures. So you probably want the Trustees to be off by a factor of 10 to be relatively prudent. The only reason our creditors are not running screaming in the other direction is because we don't have to pay these unfunded liabilities right away, so it is not yet impacting our ability to pay them back. It's someone else's problem at this time, in other words.
I don't know what reports you're reading, but I'm looking through the Trustees' own words. If you can point to analyses that can demonstrate how the Trustees' numbers are off by an order of magnitude, hey, I might think history is being made and Buffett will make the biggest mistake of his trading career. The swindle I believe history will write, is upon the enstupidated and innumerate American voting citizenry, for believing they can get something for nothing. Thank God that we have intrinsic strengths that have not been totally destroyed yet, so we are unlikely to see Chinese Cultural Revolution scale deprivation and slaughter when the bill comes due. But make no mistake about it. If Buffett and a hell of a lot of other traders are right, we are in for an incredibly tough, whipsaw ride starting around 2010 or so. And going on for anywhere from 5 years to possibly decades, depending upon
You refer to some "pain", but, honestly, using debt to quickly move millions of people completely off of SS is, IMHO, completely crazy.
That is why I said towards the end of my post that we are very rapidly (within 5-10 years in my estimation) running out of time for options. If this was done two decades ago when the problem was first being heard outside of the thinktanks and outside of the Beltway, we probably could have punted the cost. We are at a particularly bad time to consider options with the Boomers retiring soon, and putting the most stress upon the system it has ever experienced.
Our financial problems extend far, far beyond this discussion over Social Security. What could be crazier yet is how we will (or will not) dig out of them. Remember what I presented was a thumbnail sketch, deliberately made extreme to keep the explanation simple. If you want to numb your mind some insomniac night, surf around and read up on all the variations I mentioned were possible. To be fair to the reform advocates, I have never seen what I presented be seriously put forth as an option, but only trotted out, like I did, as a way to convey the essential mechanism. Actual plans I have seen have almost always been small baby steps, like the President's. It will be fascinating to watch how that plays out, and if it will not be "too little, too late".