As long as military spending is essentially nonnegotiable and the US is at a perpetual state of war, taxes will nothing but go up.
Don't kid yourself. Taxes aren't just a result of foreign policy and military spending. Taxes will go up regardless of the military. It's just how it works.
Actually - isn't the going tax rate in Sweden 50%? Looks like you're dead on to me.
I'd take $500K. It's not necessarily F.U. money, but it's buy-a-house money. Anyway, if I understand correctly, Swedish capital gains tax for property is around 30%. It looks like business sales are more like 28% (source). More like $756K (after penalties, etc) - still nothing to scoff at.
Anyway, without really understanding their operations and investments; I'd say that other than the possible prison sentence, those guys made out pretty well.
So much for operating thepiratebay.com at no profit. That sounds like a sizable profit to me, even after the $3.6M in damages awarded. There is still the issue of the 1-year prison sentence for each of the four operators...but each will walk away from prison with about $1,050,000 after all is said and done.
Your experience seems like par for the course. My organization is in the middle of replacing their HRIS/Payroll system (not with a true ERP, but there were other reasons for that). It's a bear of a project. I'm confident that we'll get it done, but it's unlikely to launch on time. I'd rather be late than have my pay screwed up though.
Howso? Even with tons of memory, Windows (or at least most apps) require a pagefile. Even when the OS doesn't actively page, it still writes to the commit change, which accesses the disk, slowing down app-loading or other disk access. I'm not very happy with the windows paging behavior. Care to show me where you think that I'm wrong, or just throw around "false, false, and false"?
Without really understanding the details of their payroll system and the task involved, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment. Most university IT groups don't have stellar project managers, which is the one thing that a project of this scale (and criticality) needs. Further, it's likely that nobody has have the expertise in either the outgoing payroll system or the one that's going to replace it (either in a shrinkwrap or roll-your-own configuration). I'm not sure whether or not hiring a high-paid, highly experienced and qualified project manager as an FTE is warranted. Further, what does an IT department do with a really good PM with tons of experience and a huge list of successful projects when this project ends in 18-24 months? The smart money is to eliminate the position, which is what a smart manager will see when they interview the university. Instead, they would likely work on a contract basis and (as you say) slice off 50% for themselves.
Rolling their own payroll system is also a possible disaster for them. It's very likely that they're having a hard time communicating requirements to professional payroll implementation/transition consultants who do this sort of thing all the time with a shrinkwrap ERP (like Oracle, SAP, etc). What makes you think that the university will be able to better communicate requirements to developers?
I guess that this is all armchair quarterbacking from both of us, since I have no idea of the circumstances beyond the details that the article provides (which are light, at best). It appears that this was mishandled on multiple levels though - likely both the fault of the university management and the consultants. Usually for projects to fail on this level, it has to go both ways - consultants mismanage a project, the university mismanages the consultants, and probably isn't able to clearly communicate requirements.
I can buy a terabyte hard drive for around $100. For the same hundred dollars, the best SSD I can find is 32GB. On my computer, Steam's cache folder is bigger than 32GB. My music player has a 120GB drive, my DVR has a 350GB drive, and my backup server has a 1.5TB raid. Just because expensive mobile gadgets use expensive solid-state drives does not mean hard drives are dead, dying, or even decaying.
I totally agree, the fat lady hasn't sang when it comes to magnetic hard drives. It does seem like SSD's will soon find their place in performance-oriented systems though. I'm looking forward to having them sorted out enough that my next desktop will have a SSD for an OS, swap, and perhaps applications (which all tend to be hindered by the slow random access of magnetic media) - and a big honkin' magnetic drive for storage.
...and unlike hard drives, flash storage isn't rapidly becoming less reliable as the density increases....
I can see the logic behind the argument that hard drives should become more failure prone as the platter density increases, but I've yet to see any data substantiating this point. Your claim that hard drives are rapidly becoming more unreliable makes your statement come off as even more dubious to me.
I don't mean to attack you or come off as a complete dickhole, but do you know of any data to back this up? I'm legitimately curious, as in my (completely anecdotal) experience, magnetic hard drives seem to be getting more and more reliable.
(Mind you, I'm seriously knocking on wood...I know that I'm going eat my words when I wake up to multiple simultaneous drive failures just for opening my big fat mouth about my good fortune with magnetic data.)
Yeah, but CoS claims that they should be allowed to do things that other "religions" may not do. They're a minority and deserve some compensation for spreading The Word:
From TFA:
As members of a minority religion, Scientologists deserve to be treated fairly, which means that we should be allowed to do things that other groups may not do. In this way, we are just a little bit compensated for all of our humanitarian efforts and our sharing of Mr. L. Ron Hubbard's extremely workable technology
His rant (TFA) is so goddamn funny. Are all Scientologist rants this funny (or downright insane)? This is like the Church of the Subgenius, except that somewhere along the line, people started taking it seriously.
VW polo was tested on an episode of Top Gear, touted a 75 MPG ratio. Where is this in america? Oh yes, it'll never get here because the gas companies would go belly up...
...or Americans don't buy super-minis. That's a new market for this country. Nice try on your conspiracy theory though. We have some great parting gifts for you.
What gets me is when people make no attempt to understand the tech when I'm making a real effort to understand their job. I hear it all the time "this IT stuff makes no sense to me" - and at the first utterance of an acronym from me, I see eyes roll and hands wave in a dismissive manner.
I don't think that simply making an effort is an unreasonable expectation, especially when I sit in meetings asking about each finance/accounting acronym that I don't recognize and take all kinds of notes to understand the process and terminology. I'm not an accountant either, but at least I'm trying to understand and am contributing something useful to a discussion.
On the other hand, I'm completely cool with the fact that part of my job is to understand both the technology, its application, and the business processes around it. Accounts, HR, business development, and operations staff do not necessarily share this responsibility. I guess that it's another place where I can add value and justify my existence in the company.
On a pure annoyance level, I hear "my server is down" (as a completely generic description of any network issue) far more often than a generic "hard drive" problem. That one tends to get me - I have to conscientiously hold my tongue when I hear that.
Did you read his review? After reading, my understanding was that he didn't even remotely say that.
I suppose that whether or not he liked it or even broke the law is not germane to the discussion. He violated Fox's internal policies about promoting piracy and paid the price./P.
Holy Shit! 61 Days! And you had to reboot for updates, so who could complain about that??!!!
Oh I don't know, how about the Linux users who use an OS that has uptimes measured in years. What's that you say? How incompetent are they if they don't update for years? You see that is the thing. They did apply updates daily! Linux uses some kind of voodoo magic to allow updates without downtime! (it's scary to think about, I know). Now go back to your stickball game kid. The adults have some real computing to do.
You are the epitome of the idea that people who use Windows simply don't know any better.
So; you ran daily updates on your system and had uptime measured in years? How did you manage to patch/update your kernel? Did you apply those patches/updates without rebooting? How?
From your post, you sound like the epitome of an arrogant Linux user who throws half-truths around while looking down your nose at everyone who isn't just like you. When you use that tone, do you expect people to actually listen to you or are you just trolling for an argument? Sheesh.
Here are some ideas for dynamically generated messages for use at work. (Assuming that you use a ticketing system at work.) Most of them use database backends that you can connect to using your favorite protocol. Find a useful way to display pertinent information on the display.
For example, do you have an overdue or high-priority ticket? Program it scroll a reminder. Do you queue tickets and handle them serially? Set it up to display the number of tickets in your queue and the header for the next ticket. Smaller helpdesk where you're responsible for managing systems? Display network metrics from your monitoring system. Managing helpdesk employees? Have it display metrics about your technicians.
Other fun stuff...if you have a swanky gaming rig at home - you could use it to monitor temperatures (ambient/case/CPU/GPU/Disk, etc). You could also pull CPU, disk, and network stats and display it as a histogram or bar.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as military spending is essentially nonnegotiable and the US is at a perpetual state of war, taxes will nothing but go up.
Don't kid yourself. Taxes aren't just a result of foreign policy and military spending. Taxes will go up regardless of the military. It's just how it works.
Actually - isn't the going tax rate in Sweden 50%? Looks like you're dead on to me.
I'd take $500K. It's not necessarily F.U. money, but it's buy-a-house money. Anyway, if I understand correctly, Swedish capital gains tax for property is around 30%. It looks like business sales are more like 28% (source). More like $756K (after penalties, etc) - still nothing to scoff at.
Anyway, without really understanding their operations and investments; I'd say that other than the possible prison sentence, those guys made out pretty well.
So much for operating thepiratebay.com at no profit. That sounds like a sizable profit to me, even after the $3.6M in damages awarded. There is still the issue of the 1-year prison sentence for each of the four operators...but each will walk away from prison with about $1,050,000 after all is said and done.
Wow - impressive (if not scary). I think that I'm going to spend some time today counting my lucky stars while I back up my data. :)
It's amazing. Sony are so bad at format wars that, even when they win, they lose.
A curious game where the only winning move is not to buy Sony.
How about a nice game of chess?
"I'll bugfix this thing with badgers gnawing on both my arms for that kind of pay." That's nothing! I'll get the badgers to do the coding.
Sure - but what will you do with all of those MUSHROOMS, MUSHROOMS -- and SNAAAKE?
Your experience seems like par for the course. My organization is in the middle of replacing their HRIS/Payroll system (not with a true ERP, but there were other reasons for that). It's a bear of a project. I'm confident that we'll get it done, but it's unlikely to launch on time. I'd rather be late than have my pay screwed up though.
Howso? Even with tons of memory, Windows (or at least most apps) require a pagefile. Even when the OS doesn't actively page, it still writes to the commit change, which accesses the disk, slowing down app-loading or other disk access. I'm not very happy with the windows paging behavior. Care to show me where you think that I'm wrong, or just throw around "false, false, and false"?
Without really understanding the details of their payroll system and the task involved, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment. Most university IT groups don't have stellar project managers, which is the one thing that a project of this scale (and criticality) needs. Further, it's likely that nobody has have the expertise in either the outgoing payroll system or the one that's going to replace it (either in a shrinkwrap or roll-your-own configuration). I'm not sure whether or not hiring a high-paid, highly experienced and qualified project manager as an FTE is warranted. Further, what does an IT department do with a really good PM with tons of experience and a huge list of successful projects when this project ends in 18-24 months? The smart money is to eliminate the position, which is what a smart manager will see when they interview the university. Instead, they would likely work on a contract basis and (as you say) slice off 50% for themselves.
Rolling their own payroll system is also a possible disaster for them. It's very likely that they're having a hard time communicating requirements to professional payroll implementation/transition consultants who do this sort of thing all the time with a shrinkwrap ERP (like Oracle, SAP, etc). What makes you think that the university will be able to better communicate requirements to developers?
I guess that this is all armchair quarterbacking from both of us, since I have no idea of the circumstances beyond the details that the article provides (which are light, at best). It appears that this was mishandled on multiple levels though - likely both the fault of the university management and the consultants. Usually for projects to fail on this level, it has to go both ways - consultants mismanage a project, the university mismanages the consultants, and probably isn't able to clearly communicate requirements.
It makes less sense for non-windows OS'es. Windows always seems to make use of the pagefile, regardless of memory.
I can buy a terabyte hard drive for around $100. For the same hundred dollars, the best SSD I can find is 32GB. On my computer, Steam's cache folder is bigger than 32GB. My music player has a 120GB drive, my DVR has a 350GB drive, and my backup server has a 1.5TB raid. Just because expensive mobile gadgets use expensive solid-state drives does not mean hard drives are dead, dying, or even decaying.
I totally agree, the fat lady hasn't sang when it comes to magnetic hard drives. It does seem like SSD's will soon find their place in performance-oriented systems though. I'm looking forward to having them sorted out enough that my next desktop will have a SSD for an OS, swap, and perhaps applications (which all tend to be hindered by the slow random access of magnetic media) - and a big honkin' magnetic drive for storage.
...and unlike hard drives, flash storage isn't rapidly becoming less reliable as the density increases....
I can see the logic behind the argument that hard drives should become more failure prone as the platter density increases, but I've yet to see any data substantiating this point. Your claim that hard drives are rapidly becoming more unreliable makes your statement come off as even more dubious to me.
I don't mean to attack you or come off as a complete dickhole, but do you know of any data to back this up? I'm legitimately curious, as in my (completely anecdotal) experience, magnetic hard drives seem to be getting more and more reliable.
(Mind you, I'm seriously knocking on wood...I know that I'm going eat my words when I wake up to multiple simultaneous drive failures just for opening my big fat mouth about my good fortune with magnetic data.)
Yeah, but CoS claims that they should be allowed to do things that other "religions" may not do. They're a minority and deserve some compensation for spreading The Word:
From TFA:
As members of a minority religion, Scientologists deserve to be treated fairly, which means that we should be allowed to do things that other groups may not do. In this way, we are just a little bit compensated for all of our humanitarian efforts and our sharing of Mr. L. Ron Hubbard's extremely workable technology
His rant (TFA) is so goddamn funny. Are all Scientologist rants this funny (or downright insane)? This is like the Church of the Subgenius, except that somewhere along the line, people started taking it seriously.
I disagree. The Golf/Rabbit is a compact. According to the latest revision of the Wikipedia page, the Polo is a supermini, not a compact.
Fair!?! WHO'S THE FUCKING NIHILIST HERE! What are you, a bunch of fucking crybabies?
(I know...the open source community != Nihilists, but I couldn't resist the chance to use this otherwise applicable Big Lebowski quote)
VW polo was tested on an episode of Top Gear, touted a 75 MPG ratio. Where is this in america? Oh yes, it'll never get here because the gas companies would go belly up...
...or Americans don't buy super-minis. That's a new market for this country. Nice try on your conspiracy theory though. We have some great parting gifts for you.
What gets me is when people make no attempt to understand the tech when I'm making a real effort to understand their job. I hear it all the time "this IT stuff makes no sense to me" - and at the first utterance of an acronym from me, I see eyes roll and hands wave in a dismissive manner.
I don't think that simply making an effort is an unreasonable expectation, especially when I sit in meetings asking about each finance/accounting acronym that I don't recognize and take all kinds of notes to understand the process and terminology. I'm not an accountant either, but at least I'm trying to understand and am contributing something useful to a discussion.
On the other hand, I'm completely cool with the fact that part of my job is to understand both the technology, its application, and the business processes around it. Accounts, HR, business development, and operations staff do not necessarily share this responsibility. I guess that it's another place where I can add value and justify my existence in the company.
On a pure annoyance level, I hear "my server is down" (as a completely generic description of any network issue) far more often than a generic "hard drive" problem. That one tends to get me - I have to conscientiously hold my tongue when I hear that.
It doesn't matter. As long as you're paid by the federal government, you cannot be a net taxpayer.
What about capital gains tax? 1099 income from moonlighting? Surely, federal employees can have windfall years, too.
I hear ya though - it's not a common exception, but it does happen...from time to time.
Can vacuum have a smell?...
Yeah, and it sucks.
...badum ching!
Yes, he said the movie was awful...
Did you read his review? After reading, my understanding was that he didn't even remotely say that.
I suppose that whether or not he liked it or even broke the law is not germane to the discussion. He violated Fox's internal policies about promoting piracy and paid the price. /P.
Holy Shit! 61 Days! And you had to reboot for updates, so who could complain about that??!!! Oh I don't know, how about the Linux users who use an OS that has uptimes measured in years. What's that you say? How incompetent are they if they don't update for years? You see that is the thing. They did apply updates daily ! Linux uses some kind of voodoo magic to allow updates without downtime! (it's scary to think about, I know). Now go back to your stickball game kid. The adults have some real computing to do. You are the epitome of the idea that people who use Windows simply don't know any better.
So; you ran daily updates on your system and had uptime measured in years? How did you manage to patch/update your kernel? Did you apply those patches/updates without rebooting? How?
From your post, you sound like the epitome of an arrogant Linux user who throws half-truths around while looking down your nose at everyone who isn't just like you. When you use that tone, do you expect people to actually listen to you or are you just trolling for an argument? Sheesh.
And I'll beat you both on a black motorcycle than only gets 60 mpg.
Thank gods I don't live in CA.
CA has some benefits. As far as I know, CA is the only state in the union where you can legally split lanes (a technicality).
That's why you fire two shots from the ion cannon first to clear a lane!
Why use an ion cannon when Mega-Maid can easily clean up the whole debris cloud? ;)
1,100 megawatts, eh? Why, that's almost 1.21 gigawatts! Now we just need to come up with a flux capacitor and find an old Delorian!
What's a "jiggawatt"? ;)
Here are some ideas for dynamically generated messages for use at work. (Assuming that you use a ticketing system at work.) Most of them use database backends that you can connect to using your favorite protocol. Find a useful way to display pertinent information on the display.
For example, do you have an overdue or high-priority ticket? Program it scroll a reminder. Do you queue tickets and handle them serially? Set it up to display the number of tickets in your queue and the header for the next ticket. Smaller helpdesk where you're responsible for managing systems? Display network metrics from your monitoring system. Managing helpdesk employees? Have it display metrics about your technicians.
Other fun stuff...if you have a swanky gaming rig at home - you could use it to monitor temperatures (ambient/case/CPU/GPU/Disk, etc). You could also pull CPU, disk, and network stats and display it as a histogram or bar.