Now its time for an alternative source of revenue. Unfortunately we are the ones who are going to pay for it as Time Warner and others have shareholders to meet and need to raise the price.
Thank god I do not watch TV that much anymore thanks to the internet. Maybe that is a good thing as some tier packages are approaching $100 and its ridiculous.
People unfortunately will pay big bucks for entertaining as witnessed from cell phones and TV packages. So why not charge more?
The individual tax rate and taxes for services used is very low in the United States compared to other 1st world countries.
Corporate taxes are not however. My dad was taxed 50% when he worked in Canada and so was his pension even though he was American. What incentive will it make people to work harder if taxes take more.
Fact of the matter is taxes suck and we can't live wihtout them unfortunately. Accountants will find loopholes and I bet if you cut the corporate tax rate in half they would still do it. Why not?
Microsoft did not even pay taxes at all for the first 20 years until the government closed some loopholes.
We are trillions in debt and Obama is making references to cutting government services and raising taxes more to pay for it. The problem is most tax cutting schemes just put the savings on credit. Its like saying I got a pay raise because the value of my home went up... you get the picture.
This will alter the behavior of the corporation so they will have a financial incentive to under produce and not invest as much in assets. This will raise the price of goods and lower supply.
This is not good either. Either way the tax is needed and there is no good tax. The best taxes are those that do not alter consumer or producer behavior and a land tax might be the best one here.
Lower the taxes and you have one big deficit that we have today federally and at state level.
Then you need to cut education, roads to ship products, and other services. The end result is that the employer will leave because of a unqualified workforce and no infrastructure to ship products. Everyone loses.
Corporations are big users of governmental services. If you think they pay too much this is understandable. To pay nothing however is immoral as Ireland is making some tax money that the United States is losing.
With this and what the New York state governor is doing you can bet alot of angry conservatives and moderates will get together to vote these clowns out.
This is political suicide as many people who are forced to commute long distances thanks to greedy home owners raising the prices of homes near work will now have to pay more $$$ in taxes in addition to high gas prices.
Oregon has very strong anti tax groups which have successfully defeated any income tax proposal time and time again with riots.
Taxing is not the answer even if their is a budget deficit.
I chose MS Office over Open Office and decided to purchase it from the ultimate steal even though I am tight on money.
Openoffice is inferior lacks MLA and APA support for grammar checking. Also MS Office supports highlighting passive sentences while Open Office does not.
Open Office does not run well on Linux with its ugly non cleartype fonts. It was impossible to install OpenOffice 3 on Ubuntu without doing strange things.
Is MS Word that good of a word processor? No compared to Wordperfect but its what everyone uses and we need better alternatives that are available.
I also have a finance professor who has 13 guidelines on how he wants his excel assignments. I can't rely on excel compatibility issues screwing up the format.
If your not at work all the time management will then wonder why they are paying you. You do not work for them per say but they can fire you if they pay thousands a month and your gone often.
If you start your own business the customer then tells you when to work instead of your boss at impossible deadlines.
You work well past 40 hours if you own a business and drop everything on a customer notice. DO this or lose them. IF you sign a contract with them they will sue you too if you do not provide outstanding service. I will thinking of doing the same thing as I am a college student but I highly doubt "sorry I am at class" will suffice to a customer on my cell.
Laptops are beneficial as the student can learn on their own pace and its more interactive.... however with internet enabled students goof off and their are liability issues.
So the answer is to lock them down tight or disable internet access and provide educational software.
But the lawyers will go after the kid and not the school. The school did their part and the student broke the DMCA so the school is off the hook for any lawsuits.
The lawyers will be drooling over this and be ready to sue on contact for any student who sees something inappropriate on myspace. Free money!!
Unfortunately this means you get the shaft as your in charge of settings. A single lawsuit could kill the whole program and your career.
Play it safe ban all search engines and most blogging and social websites. Google especially as students can google myspace proxy and get around filtering.
"training their Indian and Asian replacements in the US WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING if unions where present"... and why not? They could fire anyone who is in the union and sign an outsourced contractor tomorrow to start doing the work the American workers once did.
I was one a far left liberal and supported unions. However I got a job and took economics courses in college. Turns out most employees who are heavily in favor of the unions do a 180 when they are promoted to upper management. They can't fire employees who are bringing productivity down and their non union competitors are making a killing and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can't give bonuses to those who pour their heart and soul into the business because then you have to give to everyone the same amount including upper management based on seniority.
My wife is a member of the teachers union and they laid her off last spring when the district laid off 350 teachers. Why? Because she was not tenured. She made the NO Child Left Behind numbers and upped testing scored for the whole math department. Meanwhile other teachers who take 20 sick days a year keep their jobs. Screw that!... apologies for my emotions here.
Economics dictate what we work for. Not our employers or ourselves but the market. If we work at a McDs we make squat because we are not willing to pay $18 for a big mac. However is a business willing to pay $$$ for a system administrator who administers servers that costs the company $50k an hour if its down? You bet! Its all about what the market wants and needs and unions distort this mathmatical supply and demand curves.
I hate to break it to you but the old days of the 19th and early 20th centuries are back in full force. Look at China and India? 16 hour days, little benefits, child labor, and no pollution laws getting in the way of American company profits.
Unions are what is killing GM as many retired workers are making 5k to 6k a month and they are not even providing value for their employer anymore? As a result this is bankrupting them and the lawyers will eat them for lunch if they try to sevre this as they were forced to sign a contract for the expensive benefits by force from the UAW.
Management always wins and if we unionize they will just ship our jobs to India to cut costs and not have to deal with this union stuff.
We have a choice. Try to stop this and they will fire all of us and make us work at McD's or let the market decide and provide value to our employers and they may keep us and we can one day be part of management where we do not have to worry about being laid off. Isn't that the point of advancing in a career? Make it illegal to outsource? There goes half our GDP we get overseas. Companies like McDonalds, Microsoft, and others will just outsource 100% of their companies and relocate to Mumbia. That way they can make even more money. We are global and there are 5 billion hungry people out there ready to do our jobs. The only thing we can do is provide better value by cutting our wages and giving them benefits they can't get by outsourcing. This will ensure we get paid for what we are worth and provide job security. By the way the middle class was certainly growing before unions existed as foreigners and elementry school dropouts were the ones typically working in factories. The same is true today except they receive welfare.
Take an economics class and you will see that the supply and demand curves of the market provide the best value for both the company owners, workers, and their customers. True companies have insane bargaining power when your kids are hungry but you only have to be better than everyone else to get a good wage.
Unions are the problem and not the answer. Until India, Russia, and China unionize we all will be heading back to the 19th century and I prefer not to give incentives for our bosses to fire me and outsource me for pennies on the dollar to India. All this is doing is pissing people off and making them think twice before they hire an American. Republicans will be all over this if unionization takes place and the dems can kiss their majority good bye.
My laptop came with Vista and I wiped it and installed XP on it. I ran a few benchmarks like the frames per second in wow. The performance between Xp and Vista was surprising nearly identical.
What sucks in Vista is not the kernel or the driver model but the superfetch and quickboot malware...errr features. This is what makes the disk keep thrashing as Vista assumes its idle and it keeps moving huge program chunks at a time to quicker areas of the hard drive and it fragments the system in the process. Its alot worse if you have an anti virus checker analysing each file that is transfered too. THe quickboot feature shaves off 10 to 20 seconds of boot time but it thrashes your hard drive continiously when you install a new program as Vista tries to reinvent how much of your booting programs go in ram and where to put the programs on the hard drive for faster data access.
Also it seems to me that Vista will time out when accessing multiple files at once when the I/O load builds up. The threading has been improved for Windows7 to prevent this.
Its possible Windows7 disabled the annoying superfetch and quickboot. Doing this on my notebook made Vista about as fast as XP after everything was loaded up.
I would think you would not be able to send a WOL packet unless your on a VPN network. Am I wrong? That and VNC would be difficult to implement with wifi.
I am curious as I would like to do this myself. This is why most folks like myself use flashdrives and just back everything we need up and put it in our pocket.
C# is also free in the express edition and it comes with alot.
I would try Visual Basic.NET as it does not suck like the original vb. Also the kids can create dialog boxes and buttons and you can throw in a little logic if needed..NET can be used if the kids are bored and want to do something more powerful.
... I can tell you they have a right to be paranoid.
1. The BSA have been real assholes and love to double dip on software installations on computers that are in storage and not even in use at various school districts. THey will try to charge us for software students are holding because its on school grounds.
THey even have training on this and piracy.
2. Teachers can get into hot water if students hack and load unauthorized sofware or hacking into school computers.
3. Students are there to learn and not to use alternative operating systems or anything that is not in the districts circulumn is not allowed to be taught. With No CHild Left Behind they have to move very very fast in order to raise test scores and the pressure is huge and its only about reading, writing, and math as this is how the school makes money now. COmputer education is not on the standardized tests so its not taught that much or at all anymore.
Schools are not the same as universities. Basically they are dictatorships because the students can not be trusted yet as they are not adults and its about control in order to create a learning environment.
CDs are great but I would want the principal to decide to pass them out and not put the burden on the teachers if a student loads the software and the school is found liable. The teacher does not know whats on those cds and should not be in a position to care.
I am about to get mine in business administration but used to do systems administration.
I have learned a ton with this particular degree on economics, marketing, supply chain management, as well as how computers fit in with all of this professionally and what customers want. My gripe is that universities may need to treat computer science more as a profession with business courses that are practical and that good people are filtering it out. Also SQL, MVC, and other things need to be taught at a university as well as they are needed for any serious project at work.
Bjarne Stroustrup is correct in this regard to education and how employers are not happy. I agree a degree does show intelligence and dedication.
If colleges did their job and taught students business skills such as economics, accounting, project planning as well as professional programming skills such as object oriented programming, secure coding, MVC, three tier system design and SQL, and not calculus IV obscure algorithms, zxy-tree discrete unified field algorithm garbage we would not have this problem.
HR is convinced computer science is required for any I.T. job when in fact they do not teach practical skills outside of academia. The.com bust created a large surplus of candidates where they could require it but now its leveling out and they are filtering good applicants out.
Every other profession out there is trained at a university on how to do their job. HR is trained from a B.A. with a minor in H.R. Chemists are trained with a science degree in chemistry, teachers with a teaching degree, etc. Its logical to assume HR thinks computer science teaches students how to be practical in business.
I am not a genius in Calculus which is why I am not majoring in computer science. I am good at Algebra but Precalc was the limit to what I could endure in college and had to change majors.
I am sure I am not the only geek here who loves science, business, and philosphy courses but could not give a damn about non practical engineering courses and still have years of experience in I.T. I know what an o^2 algorithm or a linear search routine is to cut down on the number of calculations to solve a problem in code but computer science is not practical as its overly blown to an extreme.
The reason I am talking about this (it may appear offtopic) is because H.R. requires a computer science degree regardless of experience in this day and age after the.com crash and still have not readjusted their qualifications when the labor market shortened again.
Sure they want programmers to work for peanuts but they are filtering out a good number of candidates in the process and then they outsource to India because they can not find any qualifed candidates here in the States or in Canada.
Bjarne Stroustrup is correct in that Business skills are not taught nor valued in computer science today. Sure its a science go to Devry if you want programming!... bla bla that I read here.
Truth to be told I learned more taking economics, marketing, human resources, accounting, and finance about what customers needs are and how computers fit in more than what any computer science degree can teach.
Most of today's grads are clueless and I think Human Resource managers are as well as they assume computer science is about programming and business just like Business administration with an emphasis on HR is about job training for their jobs.
On my AMD TUrrion notebook it takes about 6 seconds to load a JavaFX app. Flash is instantaneously on it. However I do admit I have high cpu usage for stupid flash banner adds that I do not get from java.
Don't modern processors that are pentium IV's and above feature protection from data vs application code? Windows XP service pack 2 features it and I am aware that programs have to be recompiled to take advantage of it.
In a few years it will make sense just to compile the code for the pentium IV and above and you can have the extra protection in your programs like RISC processors.
Slashdot Mirror
Now its time for an alternative source of revenue. Unfortunately we are the ones who are going to pay for it as Time Warner and others have shareholders to meet and need to raise the price.
Thank god I do not watch TV that much anymore thanks to the internet. Maybe that is a good thing as some tier packages are approaching $100 and its ridiculous.
People unfortunately will pay big bucks for entertaining as witnessed from cell phones and TV packages. So why not charge more?
Ok so do you want to pay them then?
The individual tax rate and taxes for services used is very low in the United States compared to other 1st world countries.
Corporate taxes are not however. My dad was taxed 50% when he worked in Canada and so was his pension even though he was American. What incentive will it make people to work harder if taxes take more.
Fact of the matter is taxes suck and we can't live wihtout them unfortunately. Accountants will find loopholes and I bet if you cut the corporate tax rate in half they would still do it. Why not?
Microsoft did not even pay taxes at all for the first 20 years until the government closed some loopholes.
We are trillions in debt and Obama is making references to cutting government services and raising taxes more to pay for it. The problem is most tax cutting schemes just put the savings on credit. Its like saying I got a pay raise because the value of my home went up ... you get the picture.
This will alter the behavior of the corporation so they will have a financial incentive to under produce and not invest as much in assets. This will raise the price of goods and lower supply.
This is not good either. Either way the tax is needed and there is no good tax. The best taxes are those that do not alter consumer or producer behavior and a land tax might be the best one here.
Lower the taxes and you have one big deficit that we have today federally and at state level.
Then you need to cut education, roads to ship products, and other services. The end result is that the employer will leave because of a unqualified workforce and no infrastructure to ship products.
Everyone loses.
Corporations are big users of governmental services. If you think they pay too much this is understandable. To pay nothing however is immoral as Ireland is making some tax money that the United States is losing.
With this and what the New York state governor is doing you can bet alot of angry conservatives and moderates will get together to vote these clowns out.
This is political suicide as many people who are forced to commute long distances thanks to greedy home owners raising the prices of homes near work will now have to pay more $$$ in taxes in addition to high gas prices.
Oregon has very strong anti tax groups which have successfully defeated any income tax proposal time and time again with riots.
Taxing is not the answer even if their is a budget deficit.
I chose MS Office over Open Office and decided to purchase it from the ultimate steal even though I am tight on money.
Openoffice is inferior lacks MLA and APA support for grammar checking. Also MS Office supports highlighting passive sentences while Open Office does not.
Open Office does not run well on Linux with its ugly non cleartype fonts. It was impossible to install OpenOffice 3 on Ubuntu without doing strange things.
Is MS Word that good of a word processor? No compared to Wordperfect but its what everyone uses and we need better alternatives that are available.
I also have a finance professor who has 13 guidelines on how he wants his excel assignments. I can't rely on excel compatibility issues screwing up the format.
If your not at work all the time management will then wonder why they are paying you. You do not work for them per say but they can fire you if they pay thousands a month and your gone often.
If you start your own business the customer then tells you when to work instead of your boss at impossible deadlines.
You work well past 40 hours if you own a business and drop everything on a customer notice. DO this or lose them. IF you sign a contract with them they will sue you too if you do not provide outstanding service. I will thinking of doing the same thing as I am a college student but I highly doubt "sorry I am at class" will suffice to a customer on my cell.
Being your own boss is not for everyone.
Need MS Office. Also Netbeans is ugly as hell on Linux but the windows version looks native and even has cleartype fonts
My wife just finished a thesis on this subject.
Laptops are beneficial as the student can learn on their own pace and its more interactive. ... however with internet enabled students goof off and their are liability issues.
So the answer is to lock them down tight or disable internet access and provide educational software.
But the lawyers will go after the kid and not the school. The school did their part and the student broke the DMCA so the school is off the hook for any lawsuits.
You can lock the bios with a password and disable bootup by cdrom or usb flashdrive before the hard drive.
The lawyers will be drooling over this and be ready to sue on contact for any student who sees something inappropriate on myspace. Free money!!
Unfortunately this means you get the shaft as your in charge of settings. A single lawsuit could kill the whole program and your career.
Play it safe ban all search engines and most blogging and social websites. Google especially as students can google myspace proxy and get around filtering.
"training their Indian and Asian replacements in the US WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING if unions where present" ... and why not? They could fire anyone who is in the union and sign an outsourced contractor tomorrow to start doing the work the American workers once did.
I was one a far left liberal and supported unions. However I got a job and took economics courses in college. Turns out most employees who are heavily in favor of the unions do a 180 when they are promoted to upper management. They can't fire employees who are bringing productivity down and their non union competitors are making a killing and there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can't give bonuses to those who pour their heart and soul into the business because then you have to give to everyone the same amount including upper management based on seniority.
My wife is a member of the teachers union and they laid her off last spring when the district laid off 350 teachers. Why? Because she was not tenured. She made the NO Child Left Behind numbers and upped testing scored for the whole math department. Meanwhile other teachers who take 20 sick days a year keep their jobs. Screw that! ... apologies for my emotions here.
Economics dictate what we work for. Not our employers or ourselves but the market. If we work at a McDs we make squat because we are not willing to pay $18 for a big mac. However is a business willing to pay $$$ for a system administrator who administers servers that costs the company $50k an hour if its down? You bet! Its all about what the market wants and needs and unions distort this mathmatical supply and demand curves.
I hate to break it to you but the old days of the 19th and early 20th centuries are back in full force. Look at China and India? 16 hour days, little benefits, child labor, and no pollution laws getting in the way of American company profits.
Unions are what is killing GM as many retired workers are making 5k to 6k a month and they are not even providing value for their employer anymore? As a result this is bankrupting them and the lawyers will eat them for lunch if they try to sevre this as they were forced to sign a contract for the expensive benefits by force from the UAW.
Management always wins and if we unionize they will just ship our jobs to India to cut costs and not have to deal with this union stuff.
We have a choice. Try to stop this and they will fire all of us and make us work at McD's or let the market decide and provide value to our employers and they may keep us and we can one day be part of management where we do not have to worry about being laid off. Isn't that the point of advancing in a career? Make it illegal to outsource? There goes half our GDP we get overseas. Companies like McDonalds, Microsoft, and others will just outsource 100% of their companies and relocate to Mumbia. That way they can make even more money. We are global and there are 5 billion hungry people out there ready to do our jobs. The only thing we can do is provide better value by cutting our wages and giving them benefits they can't get by outsourcing. This will ensure we get paid for what we are worth and provide job security. By the way the middle class was certainly growing before unions existed as foreigners and elementry school dropouts were the ones typically working in factories. The same is true today except they receive welfare.
Take an economics class and you will see that the supply and demand curves of the market provide the best value for both the company owners, workers, and their customers. True companies have insane bargaining power when your kids are hungry but you only have to be better than everyone else to get a good wage.
Unions are the problem and not the answer. Until India, Russia, and China unionize we all will be heading back to the 19th century and I prefer not to give incentives for our bosses to fire me and outsource me for pennies on the dollar to India. All this is doing is pissing people off and making them think twice before they hire an American. Republicans will be all over this if unionization takes place and the dems can kiss their majority good bye.
May unions rest in peace.
My laptop came with Vista and I wiped it and installed XP on it. I ran a few benchmarks like the frames per second in wow. The performance between Xp and Vista was surprising nearly identical.
What sucks in Vista is not the kernel or the driver model but the superfetch and quickboot malware ...errr features. This is what makes the disk keep thrashing as Vista assumes its idle and it keeps moving huge program chunks at a time to quicker areas of the hard drive and it fragments the system in the process. Its alot worse if you have an anti virus checker analysing each file that is transfered too. THe quickboot feature shaves off 10 to 20 seconds of boot time but it thrashes your hard drive continiously when you install a new program as Vista tries to reinvent how much of your booting programs go in ram and where to put the programs on the hard drive for faster data access.
Also it seems to me that Vista will time out when accessing multiple files at once when the I/O load builds up. The threading has been improved for Windows7 to prevent this.
Its possible Windows7 disabled the annoying superfetch and quickboot. Doing this on my notebook made Vista about as fast as XP after everything was loaded up.
I would think you would not be able to send a WOL packet unless your on a VPN network. Am I wrong? That and VNC would be difficult to implement with wifi.
I am curious as I would like to do this myself. This is why most folks like myself use flashdrives and just back everything we need up and put it in our pocket.
http://www.justbasic.com/
and if you are evil you can do try this too
http://www.microsoft.com/express/vb/
C# is also free in the express edition and it comes with alot.
I would try Visual Basic.NET as it does not suck like the original vb. Also the kids can create dialog boxes and buttons and you can throw in a little logic if needed. .NET can be used if the kids are bored and want to do something more powerful.
... I can tell you they have a right to be paranoid.
1. The BSA have been real assholes and love to double dip on software installations on computers that are in storage and not even in use at various school districts. THey will try to charge us for software students are holding because its on school grounds.
THey even have training on this and piracy.
2. Teachers can get into hot water if students hack and load unauthorized sofware or hacking into school computers.
3. Students are there to learn and not to use alternative operating systems or anything that is not in the districts circulumn is not allowed to be taught. With No CHild Left Behind they have to move very very fast in order to raise test scores and the pressure is huge and its only about reading, writing, and math as this is how the school makes money now. COmputer education is not on the standardized tests so its not taught that much or at all anymore.
Schools are not the same as universities. Basically they are dictatorships because the students can not be trusted yet as they are not adults and its about control in order to create a learning environment.
CDs are great but I would want the principal to decide to pass them out and not put the burden on the teachers if a student loads the software and the school is found liable. The teacher does not know whats on those cds and should not be in a position to care.
I am about to get mine in business administration but used to do systems administration.
I have learned a ton with this particular degree on economics, marketing, supply chain management, as well as how computers fit in with all of this professionally and what customers want. My gripe is that universities may need to treat computer science more as a profession with business courses that are practical and that good people are filtering it out. Also SQL, MVC, and other things need to be taught at a university as well as they are needed for any serious project at work.
Bjarne Stroustrup is correct in this regard to education and how employers are not happy. I agree a degree does show intelligence and dedication.
If colleges did their job and taught students business skills such as economics, accounting, project planning as well as professional programming skills such as object oriented programming, secure coding, MVC, three tier system design and SQL, and not calculus IV obscure algorithms, zxy-tree discrete unified field algorithm garbage we would not have this problem.
HR is convinced computer science is required for any I.T. job when in fact they do not teach practical skills outside of academia. The .com bust created a large surplus of candidates where they could require it but now its leveling out and they are filtering good applicants out.
Every other profession out there is trained at a university on how to do their job. HR is trained from a B.A. with a minor in H.R. Chemists are trained with a science degree in chemistry, teachers with a teaching degree, etc. Its logical to assume HR thinks computer science teaches students how to be practical in business.
Well in this recession that problem is about to change.
I am not a genius in Calculus which is why I am not majoring in computer science. I am good at Algebra but Precalc was the limit to what I could endure in college and had to change majors.
I am sure I am not the only geek here who loves science, business, and philosphy courses but could not give a damn about non practical engineering courses and still have years of experience in I.T. I know what an o^2 algorithm or a linear search routine is to cut down on the number of calculations to solve a problem in code but computer science is not practical as its overly blown to an extreme.
The reason I am talking about this (it may appear offtopic) is because H.R. requires a computer science degree regardless of experience in this day and age after the .com crash and still have not readjusted their qualifications when the labor market shortened again.
Sure they want programmers to work for peanuts but they are filtering out a good number of candidates in the process and then they outsource to India because they can not find any qualifed candidates here in the States or in Canada.
Bjarne Stroustrup is correct in that Business skills are not taught nor valued in computer science today. Sure its a science go to Devry if you want programming! ... bla bla that I read here.
Truth to be told I learned more taking economics, marketing, human resources, accounting, and finance about what customers needs are and how computers fit in more than what any computer science degree can teach.
Most of today's grads are clueless and I think Human Resource managers are as well as they assume computer science is about programming and business just like Business administration with an emphasis on HR is about job training for their jobs.
On my AMD TUrrion notebook it takes about 6 seconds to load a JavaFX app. Flash is instantaneously on it. However I do admit I have high cpu usage for stupid flash banner adds that I do not get from java.
Don't modern processors that are pentium IV's and above feature protection from data vs application code? Windows XP service pack 2 features it and I am aware that programs have to be recompiled to take advantage of it.
In a few years it will make sense just to compile the code for the pentium IV and above and you can have the extra protection in your programs like RISC processors.