Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the U.S. is borrowing money to buy products from foreign countries with unemployment checks?
Yes.
Anyone else bothered by the fact that entire towns are being closed because Wal-Mart says "your product is too expensive?"
No.
Can anyone explain what the fuck "your product is too expensive" has to do with the free market? Isn't "too expensive" the customer's decision?
Nobody is forcing you to shop at Wal-Mart.
Anyone bothered by the fact of both record budget and trade deficits while 50% of working-age adults are not employed full-time?Or is everyone just fine with their neighbors being thrown out of work while they rack up another five figures on the 28% credit card for a plasma TV?
My neighbors are all working, and plasma TVs are 4 figures (and 3 figures at Wal-Mart on Black Friday).
Oracle refused to install on normal Linux. I don't know what the problem was, and apparantly neither did our Solaris guy.
I am sorry, but I am calling bullshit on this. Yes, Oracle can be difficult to install on a Linux installation that is not "supported" because it makes a lot of assumptions about the services that will be available to it. BUT any competant admin can find out what the requirements are without a lot of difficulty. And in many cases there are guides that can be used to install Oracle on non-supported systems.
As far as Oracle running on Windows XP, the main reason that I wouldn't do that is that Windows XP doesn't provide the services that a server OS would. For example, such an installation would be limited to no more than 10 concurrent users, amoung other things.
One of the things to remember is that on any substantial software project coding represents only about 20% of the overall effort. Gathering requirements, design, coding, testing and documentation all require time. So you might be able to write something in PHP quickly, but by the time you go through the whole cycle that PHP code starts to look like a poor bargain.
I have half a dozen myself, and the only reason I have this many is Go Daddy is so inexpensive. As far as parking domains, who cares? It's just a "under construction" or whatever site. For real hosting you pick one of the innumerable other options that give you PHP/MySQL etc. for a few bucks a month, or more elaborate if your traffic needs it.
The CIA has bought up all the supplies of genuine tin and replaced them with aluminum. Aluminum unfortunately merely concentrates mind control rays - this is why it is available so cheaply at your local grocer.
Interesting argument - however the patent claim covers two steps - running a test and then interpreting the result of the test using a known correlation between the test results and the condition described. If you never run the test, or you don't use the results of the test to predict the condition described then you are not infringing. To me the workaround is when you run this test you also run a direct test for the described condition.
Well, the first software patent was granted in 1962. But I do agree that software patents did increase dramatically in the 1980's, but there were a lot of economic reasons for that - this is the period of time the PC took off. However it wasn't really until 1996 that the rules on patenting software were firmly established.
So I don't think that you can tie software patents to one particular president.
Another area of controversy is biotech patents, and again the real precedence in that area came before Reagan took office.
I don't see any reason why Republicans would be against a broad patent scope, since it seems to be rather profitable for large companies.
The Republican party is not exactly a homogeneous entity. There are religous, economic and judicial conservatives all under that banner. The mantra of the judicial conservative is to read laws narrowly, and many of the recent judicial appointments fall into that category.
Let's not forget that it was the Reagan administration that created this entire problem by widening the scope of patents.
How do you reach THAT conclusion? Business process patents weren't allowed until 1998. This is the single largest increase in patent scope this century.
No, the big increase in what is considered patentable is much more recent than Reagan's administration.
In actuality that is quite possible. This is the first time the Supreme Court has heard a case on the scope of patentable subject matter, and it is quite possible that this case will have a profound effect on software and business process patents.
See the following for some speculation on the topic.
I agree, and as far as I am concerned the publication of an article in the NYT that is so obviously full of factual errors exposes the editorial staff of what used to be a great newspaper as incompetant.Such ridiculous articles do nothing to further and in reality detract from efforts to promote real and needed patent reform.
The US patent process has some serious problems chief amoung them being the granting of business process patents and secondarily granting patents for material that does not actually constitute an invention. Congress should make it clear in patent reform legislation that a patent should only be granted for something novel and useful, and business proceses should not be covered. Software patents are an area of great abuse at present - many trivial ideas are being patented.
BTW, the following article describes in a much more cogent way the issues with this particular case than the Crichton editorial.
I think HDTV's great, but there hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade to it, and based on HDTV sales, at least here in Michigan, I think most people are in the same boat.
Boy, Michigan must be a technological backwater. I'd say 75% of my friends own some sort of HDTV. However I am not banking on big immediate HD-DVD or Blu-Ray acceptance. The dual formats hurts, and it is going to take a while before there is enough software to get people interested.
The US economy is actually in pretty good shape if you don't live in a town where GM and Ford employ a lot of people. Some of the big electronic stores like Best Buy had big Christmas seasons driven largely by HDTV sales.
It will take a few years, that I agree. But so did DVD.
Is your friend. Very happy with binary files (in fact it treats binary and text the same and uses a binary diff algorithm). Lots of hooks to add pre-post processing so you can do whatever you want in terms of extracting file data.
CVS is binary-stupid - if you have a lot of binaries it is really ineffecient.
IT spending requests should always occur with a business analysis. If you are really having bottom line impacted by poor IT services it should be easy to document and thus justify the spending as bringing a positive return back to the company. If you can't document it, then you don't need it.
As far as upgrades etc goes, again that should be part of the business analysis process. Including what it costs to maintain two versions of Access for development, QA etc.
If management turns you down, you should understand that they probably have good reasons - the business case justification was insufficient.
Oh YES that would be suitable vengance upon the user community. Lazy slobs with no stake in the company running IT with their own agenda (i.e. PROFIT!!!!).
There was a Dilbert cartoon that closely models this.
Dilbert - We can't ship this new backup program, it has too many bugs. Marketing - What bugs? Dilbert - It deletes all of your files. If you are on a network it deletes all of the files on the other networked computers. If you have a sound card it curses at you. Marketing - We will call it Quick Protect and fix the bugs in an upgrade called Quick Protect Pro.
Caveat Emptor A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public SEC v. Zandford (01-147)
The first aim of management should be to keep its employees very happy.
The first aim of management is to keep their fat jobs. They do that by keeping their bosses happy. At the top of the pyramid is the CEO. He keeps his job by keeping the company owner happy. In a publically traded company that owner is the stockholders. Stockholders (or mutual fund managers) don't give a rat's ass about long term - they want return on investment in a 3-12 month time frame so they can keep their jobs.
And that is how capitalism in America is.
If you want to do something long-term you had better be in a privately held company or some other type of institution.
Of course if you did buy their stock you are now part owner of the company. Whups, the founders of Google now don't have the only say in how the company is run, and have to take push-back from the other owners.
It seems to me that it is stupid to think you can make a public offering of ownership in the company and then ignore the fact that the money that you get from such an offering is string-free.
My experience working in a R&D role in a major corporation with outsourced centralized support was very frustrating. Support was geared towards secretaries and business managers using MS-Office and some AS-400 applications over a terminal emulator. Anything other than that and you had problems because it wasn't covered under the support contract. If I needed to run an NMR modeling tool that required extra RAM on my PC, forget it. That was a non standard configuration and thus you weren't allowed to order the stuff needed to make it work.
Eventually we were able to get an exception for so-called 'scientific instrumentation' but that stuff wasn't allowed to connect to the site network, which was some brain-damaged token ring thing.
In any scientific enviroment you are going to have out of the box requirements that a central support organization isn't going to be able to handle - if you don't you aren't doing your job. You had better get consideration of that in any IT support/management plan up front.
Something that is inert in the environment like polystrene really isn't that much of a problem. We have plenty of land, the only problem with landfills is the NIMBY phenomena.
What becomes a problem is when stuff starts degrading into bioactive compounds that cause various health issues. Once an inert material becomes toxic and mobile through biodegradation have you really done anything good?
Slashdot Mirror
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that the U.S. is borrowing money to buy products from foreign countries with unemployment checks?
r owse_frm/thread/9e5e0f64b84557c2/288705c698505592? lnk=st&q=plasma+TV+under+%241000&rnum=1&hl=en#2887 05c698505592
w ww.economicadventure.org/teachers/primer.pdf+US+st andard+of+living+&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8
Yes.
Anyone else bothered by the fact that entire towns are being closed because Wal-Mart says "your product is too expensive?"
No.
Can anyone explain what the fuck "your product is too expensive" has to do with the free market? Isn't "too expensive" the customer's decision?
Nobody is forcing you to shop at Wal-Mart.
Anyone bothered by the fact of both record budget and trade deficits while 50% of working-age adults are not employed full-time?Or is everyone just fine with their neighbors being thrown out of work while they rack up another five figures on the 28% credit card for a plasma TV?
My neighbors are all working, and plasma TVs are 4 figures (and 3 figures at Wal-Mart on Black Friday).
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv.tech.misc/b
This is about low low standard of living. It sucks and it's getting worse.
Baloney.
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:hljjJgA-wf0J:
Oracle refused to install on normal Linux. I don't know what the problem was, and apparantly neither did our Solaris guy.
e dora-3-Install-HOWTO/
I am sorry, but I am calling bullshit on this. Yes, Oracle can be difficult to install on a Linux installation that is not "supported" because it makes a lot of assumptions about the services that will be available to it. BUT any competant admin can find out what the requirements are without a lot of difficulty. And in many cases there are guides that can be used to install Oracle on non-supported systems.
One such guide is the following:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Oracle-9i-F
So what's your reasoning that XP can't be used?
As far as Oracle running on Windows XP, the main reason that I wouldn't do that is that Windows XP doesn't provide the services that a server OS would. For example, such an installation would be limited to no more than 10 concurrent users, amoung other things.
If you connect the + directly to the -, watch out!
One of the things to remember is that on any substantial software project coding represents only about 20% of the overall effort. Gathering requirements, design, coding, testing and documentation all require time. So you might be able to write something in PHP quickly, but by the time you go through the whole cycle that PHP code starts to look like a poor bargain.
Testers trained as MSCEs of course.
I have half a dozen myself, and the only reason I have this many is Go Daddy is so inexpensive. As far as parking domains, who cares? It's just a "under construction" or whatever site. For real hosting you pick one of the innumerable other options that give you PHP/MySQL etc. for a few bucks a month, or more elaborate if your traffic needs it.
The CIA has bought up all the supplies of genuine tin and replaced them with aluminum. Aluminum unfortunately merely concentrates mind control rays - this is why it is available so cheaply at your local grocer.
Interesting argument - however the patent claim covers two steps - running a test and then interpreting the result of the test using a known correlation between the test results and the condition described. If you never run the test, or you don't use the results of the test to predict the condition described then you are not infringing. To me the workaround is when you run this test you also run a direct test for the described condition.
Well, the first software patent was granted in 1962. But I do agree that software patents did increase dramatically in the 1980's, but there were a lot of economic reasons for that - this is the period of time the PC took off. However it wasn't really until 1996 that the rules on patenting software were firmly established.
So I don't think that you can tie software patents to one particular president.
Another area of controversy is biotech patents, and again the real precedence in that area came before Reagan took office.
I don't see any reason why Republicans would be against a broad patent scope, since it seems to be rather profitable for large companies.
The Republican party is not exactly a homogeneous entity. There are religous, economic and judicial conservatives all under that banner. The mantra of the judicial conservative is to read laws narrowly, and many of the recent judicial appointments fall into that category.
At dictionary.com the first meaning of century is a period of 100 years. It doesn't have to start or end on a particular date.
Let's not forget that it was the Reagan administration that created this entire problem by widening the scope of patents.
How do you reach THAT conclusion? Business process patents weren't allowed until 1998. This is the single largest increase in patent scope this century.
No, the big increase in what is considered patentable is much more recent than Reagan's administration.
Republican bias = contructionism. That generally means reading the existing law narrowly, which would tend to limit the scope for patents.
In actuality that is quite possible. This is the first time the Supreme Court has heard a case on the scope of patentable subject matter, and it is quite possible that this case will have a profound effect on software and business process patents.
c ourt-takes-patentable-subject.html
See the following for some speculation on the topic.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/10/supreme-
It may actuall be a fat wedge.
I agree, and as far as I am concerned the publication of an article in the NYT that is so obviously full of factual errors exposes the editorial staff of what used to be a great newspaper as incompetant.Such ridiculous articles do nothing to further and in reality detract from efforts to promote real and needed patent reform.
r p_v_metab_1.html
The US patent process has some serious problems chief amoung them being the granting of business process patents and secondarily granting patents for material that does not actually constitute an invention. Congress should make it clear in patent reform legislation that a patent should only be granted for something novel and useful, and business proceses should not be covered. Software patents are an area of great abuse at present - many trivial ideas are being patented.
BTW, the following article describes in a much more cogent way the issues with this particular case than the Crichton editorial.
http://patentlaw.typepad.com/patent/2005/10/labco
I think HDTV's great, but there hasn't been a compelling reason to upgrade to it, and based on HDTV sales, at least here in Michigan, I think most people are in the same boat.
Boy, Michigan must be a technological backwater. I'd say 75% of my friends own some sort of HDTV. However I am not banking on big immediate HD-DVD or Blu-Ray acceptance. The dual formats hurts, and it is going to take a while before there is enough software to get people interested.
The US economy is actually in pretty good shape if you don't live in a town where GM and Ford employ a lot of people. Some of the big electronic stores like Best Buy had big Christmas seasons driven largely by HDTV sales.
It will take a few years, that I agree. But so did DVD.
Is your friend. Very happy with binary files (in fact it treats binary and text the same and uses a binary diff algorithm). Lots of hooks to add pre-post processing so you can do whatever you want in terms of extracting file data.
CVS is binary-stupid - if you have a lot of binaries it is really ineffecient.
IT spending requests should always occur with a business analysis. If you are really having bottom line impacted by poor IT services it should be easy to document and thus justify the spending as bringing a positive return back to the company. If you can't document it, then you don't need it.
As far as upgrades etc goes, again that should be part of the business analysis process. Including what it costs to maintain two versions of Access for development, QA etc.
If management turns you down, you should understand that they probably have good reasons - the business case justification was insufficient.
Outsourcing to someone else?
Oh YES that would be suitable vengance upon the user community. Lazy slobs with no stake in the company running IT with their own agenda (i.e. PROFIT!!!!).
There was a Dilbert cartoon that closely models this.
Dilbert - We can't ship this new backup program, it has too many bugs.
Marketing - What bugs?
Dilbert - It deletes all of your files. If you are on a network it deletes all of the files on the other networked computers. If you have a sound card it curses at you.
Marketing - We will call it Quick Protect and fix the bugs in an upgrade called Quick Protect Pro.
Caveat Emptor
A Fool and His Money are Soon Parted
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public
SEC v. Zandford (01-147)
The first aim of management should be to keep its employees very happy.
The first aim of management is to keep their fat jobs. They do that by keeping their bosses happy. At the top of the pyramid is the CEO. He keeps his job by keeping the company owner happy. In a publically traded company that owner is the stockholders. Stockholders (or mutual fund managers) don't give a rat's ass about long term - they want return on investment in a 3-12 month time frame so they can keep their jobs.
And that is how capitalism in America is.
If you want to do something long-term you had better be in a privately held company or some other type of institution.
Nobody forced anyone to buy their stock.
Of course if you did buy their stock you are now part owner of the company. Whups, the founders of Google now don't have the only say in how the company is run, and have to take push-back from the other owners.
It seems to me that it is stupid to think you can make a public offering of ownership in the company and then ignore the fact that the money that you get from such an offering is string-free.
It doesn't work that way.
And you have a handy dandy toy that will keep your pocket warm for an hour or so.
My experience working in a R&D role in a major corporation with outsourced centralized support was very frustrating. Support was geared towards secretaries and business managers using MS-Office and some AS-400 applications over a terminal emulator. Anything other than that and you had problems because it wasn't covered under the support contract. If I needed to run an NMR modeling tool that required extra RAM on my PC, forget it. That was a non standard configuration and thus you weren't allowed to order the stuff needed to make it work.
Eventually we were able to get an exception for so-called 'scientific instrumentation' but that stuff wasn't allowed to connect to the site network, which was some brain-damaged token ring thing.
In any scientific enviroment you are going to have out of the box requirements that a central support organization isn't going to be able to handle - if you don't you aren't doing your job. You had better get consideration of that in any IT support/management plan up front.
Something that is inert in the environment like polystrene really isn't that much of a problem. We have plenty of land, the only problem with landfills is the NIMBY phenomena.
What becomes a problem is when stuff starts degrading into bioactive compounds that cause various health issues. Once an inert material becomes toxic and mobile through biodegradation have you really done anything good?