Yes, it does make a difference. If T-Mobile meets my needs better, am I going to go with them or with AT&T? What about Verizon? Yes, these companies have to compete for our money, so yes, it does make a difference. That was the whole reason for number portability.
That's true, I believe. Technically, anything you create is covered under copyright, at least, that is the impression I get. This post I am writing right now is copyrighted. As such, I will be sending DMCA takedown notices to anyone who reproduces all or part of this comment. Please send me one. Even if the above quotation doesn't count, several words from your comment (separately) appear on my business web site....
If you have a strong financial backgound, and are able to do support/implentation, you can sell that effort, and lend your expertise to the project by helping us provide what your customers need. Yes, there are ways to make money. You have to know what you are good at and sell that with confidence:-)
In the US, you cant get statutory damages for infringement of a non-registered work. YOu can only get actual damages from the infringement.
IANAL, of course.
On other words, if a letter like this is not registered as copyrighted, they can sue you for the money they lost due to sales of the copyrighted work, but not statutory damages. Since they arent selling this in bookstores, I seriously doubt they could sue for any damages.
knowing that the individual didn't want to just save $2000, I would add a few points.....
The PC-POS market is something I have some experience in. There is a market for good GPL'd systems but so far, every system I have come across is utter crap. Heck all the proprietary solutions I have looked at are utter crap. If someone *could* get it right, there would be a lot of money to be had in it. Unfortunately this isn't just a matter of sloppy programming-- the problems are big and difficult problems, and they require more than just skilled engineers to solve. More on this below.
In other posts, I have plugged LedgerSMB for such a role. THe issue is that the POS module is the old SQL-Ledger POS module with some workflow enhancements, and scripts to provide support for POS hardware, and online reconciliation. It is at the moment suitable for retail environments where everything is scanned in using keyboard-wedge barcodes. I would not recomment it for any other environments at the moment. After 1.3 is released (next few months), the POS module is actually going to be split off from our project and developed independantly. I expect we can actually build a quality POS set of solutions within a year or so for retail, coffee shop, internet cafe, and other environments (I would love to have a restaurant management version).
The big issues involved in POS environments are: 1) You have a complex subset of accounting rules in place. 2) Local tax laws are arbitrarily complex (if you buy a coffee and a donut in a coffee shop in Toronto, are you charged PST? It depends on the subtotal of two categories of potentially taxable items!) 3) Information and management structure is difficult to get right, especially where touchscreens are involved. Most solutions in this area are total kludges. 4) Speed. Latency in a POS system is a Bad Thing(tm).
The system doesn't have to be pretty. It does need to be fast, secure, maintainable, etc. These require solid design and programming skills, an solid peer review. LedgerSMB would not have come as far as it has in the last year if it was just me.
You can use any language you like to write the code that integrates with LedgerSMB. This decision actually came about because we kept getting requests from contributors for an interface for Python. The upcoming 1.3 will have the new framework and some components moved to it. 1.4 will have all the financial logic moved onto the new framework. 2.0 will be when the legacy code is out.
Most of the code will be written in PLPGSQL (since really, nealy all of what you are doing is storing and retrieving information). Stuff that doesn't fall into "give me a set of information such that..." or "store this in the db..." will be handled in Perl with possible interfaces from the db for other components if they represent data logic.
Despite the rhetoric which the media seems to get almost completely wrong, I don't think that Rafael Correa is anything like Hugo Chavez. Correa is a rule-of-law capitalist who wants to see Ecuador develop along the lines of the United States. Of course this means that corporations must be forced to obey the laws evenly, which he has pledged to do. He has also pledged to get the Constitution rewritten to help reduce the level of corruption (restricting who can run on the basis that you must live in the district you want to represent), and a few other structural changes which are not aimed at disolving checks and balances but actually adding them. Independence from US interests and policy is a key element to his approach so he wants to close the USAF base in Manta, and has entered into an alliance of convenience with Chavez.
My own feeling is that Correa has acted responsibly regarding the attempts to rewrite the Constitution by tackling it immediately so that the question of term limits is less likely to be addressed as a way of keeping him in power.
CUrrently everything Correa has accomplished has been through sheer power of personality. He has been able to get previously opposing parties to back him and has, time and time again, routed opposition by building political alliances which would have seemed impossible before.
Correa, unlike Chavez is not a part of a massive political party. In fact, he doesn't have anyone from his party in Congress. Correa wants Ecuador, not Venezuela or Brazil, to be the new center of South America. Appearances aside, I think he is actually Chavez's worst enemy.
Correa earned his Masters in Economics in Belguim, and his PHD at the University of Illinois. He is a former university professor at USFQ (Universidad de San Francisco de Quito). He is hardly Anti-American. though he does dispise the Bush Administration (but so do I....). He is, however, unlikely to be a puppet to any other government.
Nt really, Microsoft has a huge tech support office in Columbia. Ecuadorians can call for support there.
A friend of mine (Mexican) who works for Microsoft was offered a position getting the Columbia center off the ground. He turned them down on the grounds that Columbia isn;t a very safe place to be.
Many Latin American countries have been struggling with corruption for a long time, Ecuador included. Ecuador in particular has been severely destabilized by such corruption (8 presidents in 10 years-- everything from coups to phony impeachments). Correa vowed to change that, and he has been doing a great job of it so far.
If Microsoft is not cooperating with tax audits, this could be due to an issue of management in their branch officies, but it could also be due to a human error. What is significant is that this happened at all. 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable even if they weren't paying taxes at all. 20 years ago, it would have been avoided for fear of covert retribution from the US (as we saw in Guatamala, and arguably Ecuador as well).
This is significant because it means that Correa is serious about his willingness to stand up to powerful foreign corporations. Its significance is not limited to Microsoft-- this is more significant as to how it affects things like oil exports, foreign-owned banana plantations, and the like.
The rule of law is being asserted strongly in Ecuador which is a good thing.
Basically, the argument is that Microsoft didn't cooperate with an audit, so the government doesn't know if they paid taxes or not.
This is a very interesting though as it relates to regional politics. Rafael Correa won his election partly on the promise to clean up corruption in foreign corporate entities (in particular tax evasion and the like). It also has other ramifications for open source, business, economics, etc. in Ecuador. I will be watching this closely.
you are going to have a collision of data models if you try to make this entirely separate.
One of the approaches LedgerSMB has chosen to take is to move all data logic into the database. This way, any add-on can use and extend core accounting logic.
You should join our project. We are on the same track as you suggest. It may be about a year before we are fully there, however.
Our system scales up quite well. TPS is a weird measure in this environment because a transaction doesn't hit until it is committed. In this environment, 3 people entering invoices constantly will not even hit 1 transaction per second, but those transactions could be very large transactions! Basically, your scalability is theoretically limited by Apache and PostgreSQL.
Where we have run into problems (which we have continued to address) is in large sets of stored data. Basically, under certain configurations and use scenarios, large sets of data can suddenly force query plan changes which can cause unacceptable delays. Where we find these problems, we work with customers to correct them rapidly.
Now, on the accounting side, we have also identified a few other performance issues in high transaction workload environments. The main one at the moment has to do with issuing payments to large numbers of vendors, when each payment may have many hundreds of invoices attached. This is, however, entirely separate from the retail management side. This permformance issue will be solved in 1.3.
Is the growth bringing you benefits? Are you getting new paying customers because of it? Yes. I actually have a huge backlog and am spending most of my time on paying work at the moment.
We basically have one "problem" with this arrangement however. As more people join the community doing paid work, this expands the userbase, and hence we get more customers needing paid work.
That is because people try to turn the sale into a political deal (almost as if it were an RMS for President campaign). I point out the business aspects. If they don't want to do use the software, their loss. Also I am working on a LedgerSMB installer for Windows, so that makes me hardly a zealot in most peoples' eyes. (Istr being called a "Microsoft shill" on Groklaw once a couple of years ago...)
The key is to understand that freedom is an economic good, and hence it has value. You can sell that value if you understand how it helps businesses make money and be more competitive, but you have to sell the business benefits. Hence I position the open source decision as a business and economic decision, not a political or ethical one.
In Ontario Canada, some items are subject to PST and some are not. Last time I was told, the rules for pasteries were: If a pastery is not individually wrapped, and you buy fewer than six, they are subject to PST if the subtotal of the pasteries and other prepared food or beverages is greater than $4CAD.
If the pastery is individually wrapped than it is subject to PST unless you also buy a prepared food or beverage, and the subtotal of those items is less than $4CAD.
--- In Quebec, Canada, PST is 7.5%. However, the federal GST is taxed under PST also and the rate must be stated accurately on the receipt (as 7.5%) as it was set by the province, not the effective tax rate.
I am sure there are other screwy laws that would affect POSs as well. I know the above examples because members of the LedgerSMB core team are from these areas.
A lot of it has to do with confusion over words like "niggard" which also comes from the Norwegian (meaning someone who is stingy, no relation to race in either modern or ancient equivalent concepts).
Sometimes I think there is an attempt to ban historical linguistics.....;-)
My advice on PCI-DSS is simple: Do everything the way you should be doing. Store as little as cardholder data as you can. And outsource to payment gateways what you do have to store. Most of the PCI-DSS requirements amount to doing things right and documenting it. I haven;t been able to find a public draft of the PA-DSS, so we will have to wait and see on that one.
I for one support the adoption of these sorts of standards. Note that even in the absense of credit cards, these applications are tracking real money, so security issues can be used to cause real financial damage to you. If your web site is defaced, well, that sucks. But if someone breaks into a POS or an accounting system and steals your money.......
I usually say clearly that the software is open source and explain how this benefits them:
1) No licenses to track or pay for 2) Ability to leverage other community contributions 3) An ability to hire people to fix problems if I am not available to do so.
Hmmm.... Touchscreens are handled by X Barcode scanners usually come in as keyboard input Plain text receipts are not hard (images are more interesting). CUPS may or may not work (LedgerSMB doesnt use CUPS for this because of issues waiting for the document to be printed as it gets spooled on the server, then the client, and possible contention issues with the cash drawer control). cash drawer support and pole display support are also trivial.
Now.....
How about an application that securely tracks money and inventory so as to prevent both employee and customer-initiated theft, under heavy load, which must work as quickly and efficiently as possible? That is the more interesting part.
Slashdot Mirror
I had my son vaccinated againt TB. I think a lot of people don't want TB to survive.
The TB released by that MoFo.....
Oh, you meant Thunderbird.....
Yes, it does make a difference. If T-Mobile meets my needs better, am I going to go with them or with AT&T? What about Verizon? Yes, these companies have to compete for our money, so yes, it does make a difference. That was the whole reason for number portability.
Mnay people, like myself, don't want ad-supported cell service. I want my money to be what controls the services, no the advertisers' money.
If you have a strong financial backgound, and are able to do support/implentation, you can sell that effort, and lend your expertise to the project by helping us provide what your customers need. Yes, there are ways to make money. You have to know what you are good at and sell that with confidence :-)
In the US, you cant get statutory damages for infringement of a non-registered work. YOu can only get actual damages from the infringement.
IANAL, of course.
On other words, if a letter like this is not registered as copyrighted, they can sue you for the money they lost due to sales of the copyrighted work, but not statutory damages. Since they arent selling this in bookstores, I seriously doubt they could sue for any damages.
Guy Hands, CEO of EMI has hired Randsom Love (former CEO of Caldera Systems) as CTO....
Sometimes I wonder if having a wacky name might not be an asset in big business.
The Japanese fighter looks almost identical to an F18 Hornet.
;-)
Maybe the DoD should internationally patent thier designs and enhancements so that other countries know what technology not to steal
Efficient workflow. If the workflow is not efficient you will run into trouble,
knowing that the individual didn't want to just save $2000, I would add a few points.....
The PC-POS market is something I have some experience in. There is a market for good GPL'd systems but so far, every system I have come across is utter crap. Heck all the proprietary solutions I have looked at are utter crap. If someone *could* get it right, there would be a lot of money to be had in it. Unfortunately this isn't just a matter of sloppy programming-- the problems are big and difficult problems, and they require more than just skilled engineers to solve. More on this below.
In other posts, I have plugged LedgerSMB for such a role. THe issue is that the POS module is the old SQL-Ledger POS module with some workflow enhancements, and scripts to provide support for POS hardware, and online reconciliation. It is at the moment suitable for retail environments where everything is scanned in using keyboard-wedge barcodes. I would not recomment it for any other environments at the moment. After 1.3 is released (next few months), the POS module is actually going to be split off from our project and developed independantly. I expect we can actually build a quality POS set of solutions within a year or so for retail, coffee shop, internet cafe, and other environments (I would love to have a restaurant management version).
The big issues involved in POS environments are:
1) You have a complex subset of accounting rules in place.
2) Local tax laws are arbitrarily complex (if you buy a coffee and a donut in a coffee shop in Toronto, are you charged PST? It depends on the subtotal of two categories of potentially taxable items!)
3) Information and management structure is difficult to get right, especially where touchscreens are involved. Most solutions in this area are total kludges.
4) Speed. Latency in a POS system is a Bad Thing(tm).
The system doesn't have to be pretty. It does need to be fast, secure, maintainable, etc. These require solid design and programming skills, an solid peer review. LedgerSMB would not have come as far as it has in the last year if it was just me.
of moving the logic into the db.
You can use any language you like to write the code that integrates with LedgerSMB. This decision actually came about because we kept getting requests from contributors for an interface for Python. The upcoming 1.3 will have the new framework and some components moved to it. 1.4 will have all the financial logic moved onto the new framework. 2.0 will be when the legacy code is out.
Most of the code will be written in PLPGSQL (since really, nealy all of what you are doing is storing and retrieving information). Stuff that doesn't fall into "give me a set of information such that..." or "store this in the db..." will be handled in Perl with possible interfaces from the db for other components if they represent data logic.
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Despite the rhetoric which the media seems to get almost completely wrong, I don't think that Rafael Correa is anything like Hugo Chavez. Correa is a rule-of-law capitalist who wants to see Ecuador develop along the lines of the United States. Of course this means that corporations must be forced to obey the laws evenly, which he has pledged to do. He has also pledged to get the Constitution rewritten to help reduce the level of corruption (restricting who can run on the basis that you must live in the district you want to represent), and a few other structural changes which are not aimed at disolving checks and balances but actually adding them. Independence from US interests and policy is a key element to his approach so he wants to close the USAF base in Manta, and has entered into an alliance of convenience with Chavez.
My own feeling is that Correa has acted responsibly regarding the attempts to rewrite the Constitution by tackling it immediately so that the question of term limits is less likely to be addressed as a way of keeping him in power.
CUrrently everything Correa has accomplished has been through sheer power of personality. He has been able to get previously opposing parties to back him and has, time and time again, routed opposition by building political alliances which would have seemed impossible before.
Correa, unlike Chavez is not a part of a massive political party. In fact, he doesn't have anyone from his party in Congress. Correa wants Ecuador, not Venezuela or Brazil, to be the new center of South America. Appearances aside, I think he is actually Chavez's worst enemy.
Correa earned his Masters in Economics in Belguim, and his PHD at the University of Illinois. He is a former university professor at USFQ (Universidad de San Francisco de Quito). He is hardly Anti-American. though he does dispise the Bush Administration (but so do I....). He is, however, unlikely to be a puppet to any other government.
Nt really, Microsoft has a huge tech support office in Columbia. Ecuadorians can call for support there.
A friend of mine (Mexican) who works for Microsoft was offered a position getting the Columbia center off the ground. He turned them down on the grounds that Columbia isn;t a very safe place to be.
Many Latin American countries have been struggling with corruption for a long time, Ecuador included. Ecuador in particular has been severely destabilized by such corruption (8 presidents in 10 years-- everything from coups to phony impeachments). Correa vowed to change that, and he has been doing a great job of it so far.
If Microsoft is not cooperating with tax audits, this could be due to an issue of management in their branch officies, but it could also be due to a human error. What is significant is that this happened at all. 10 years ago, it would have been unthinkable even if they weren't paying taxes at all. 20 years ago, it would have been avoided for fear of covert retribution from the US (as we saw in Guatamala, and arguably Ecuador as well).
This is significant because it means that Correa is serious about his willingness to stand up to powerful foreign corporations. Its significance is not limited to Microsoft-- this is more significant as to how it affects things like oil exports, foreign-owned banana plantations, and the like.
The rule of law is being asserted strongly in Ecuador which is a good thing.
Basically, the argument is that Microsoft didn't cooperate with an audit, so the government doesn't know if they paid taxes or not.
This is a very interesting though as it relates to regional politics. Rafael Correa won his election partly on the promise to clean up corruption in foreign corporate entities (in particular tax evasion and the like). It also has other ramifications for open source, business, economics, etc. in Ecuador. I will be watching this closely.
you are going to have a collision of data models if you try to make this entirely separate.
One of the approaches LedgerSMB has chosen to take is to move all data logic into the database. This way, any add-on can use and extend core accounting logic.
You should join our project. We are on the same track as you suggest. It may be about a year before we are fully there, however.
Our system scales up quite well. TPS is a weird measure in this environment because a transaction doesn't hit until it is committed. In this environment, 3 people entering invoices constantly will not even hit 1 transaction per second, but those transactions could be very large transactions! Basically, your scalability is theoretically limited by Apache and PostgreSQL.
Where we have run into problems (which we have continued to address) is in large sets of stored data. Basically, under certain configurations and use scenarios, large sets of data can suddenly force query plan changes which can cause unacceptable delays. Where we find these problems, we work with customers to correct them rapidly.
Now, on the accounting side, we have also identified a few other performance issues in high transaction workload environments. The main one at the moment has to do with issuing payments to large numbers of vendors, when each payment may have many hundreds of invoices attached. This is, however, entirely separate from the retail management side. This permformance issue will be solved in 1.3.
We basically have one "problem" with this arrangement however. As more people join the community doing paid work, this expands the userbase, and hence we get more customers needing paid work.
LedgerSMB, as a web app, supports local pole displays, printers, and the like in a POS environment. I wrote most of the code to do this.
That is because people try to turn the sale into a political deal (almost as if it were an RMS for President campaign). I point out the business aspects. If they don't want to do use the software, their loss. Also I am working on a LedgerSMB installer for Windows, so that makes me hardly a zealot in most peoples' eyes. (Istr being called a "Microsoft shill" on Groklaw once a couple of years ago...)
The key is to understand that freedom is an economic good, and hence it has value. You can sell that value if you understand how it helps businesses make money and be more competitive, but you have to sell the business benefits. Hence I position the open source decision as a business and economic decision, not a political or ethical one.
For example:
In Ontario Canada, some items are subject to PST and some are not. Last time I was told, the rules for pasteries were:
If a pastery is not individually wrapped, and you buy fewer than six, they are subject to PST if the subtotal of the pasteries and other prepared food or beverages is greater than $4CAD.
If the pastery is individually wrapped than it is subject to PST unless you also buy a prepared food or beverage, and the subtotal of those items is less than $4CAD.
---
In Quebec, Canada, PST is 7.5%. However, the federal GST is taxed under PST also and the rate must be stated accurately on the receipt (as 7.5%) as it was set by the province, not the effective tax rate.
I am sure there are other screwy laws that would affect POSs as well. I know the above examples because members of the LedgerSMB core team are from these areas.
A lot of it has to do with confusion over words like "niggard" which also comes from the Norwegian (meaning someone who is stingy, no relation to race in either modern or ancient equivalent concepts).
;-)
Sometimes I think there is an attempt to ban historical linguistics.....
My advice on PCI-DSS is simple: Do everything the way you should be doing. Store as little as cardholder data as you can. And outsource to payment gateways what you do have to store. Most of the PCI-DSS requirements amount to doing things right and documenting it. I haven;t been able to find a public draft of the PA-DSS, so we will have to wait and see on that one.
I for one support the adoption of these sorts of standards. Note that even in the absense of credit cards, these applications are tracking real money, so security issues can be used to cause real financial damage to you. If your web site is defaced, well, that sucks. But if someone breaks into a POS or an accounting system and steals your money.......
I usually say clearly that the software is open source and explain how this benefits them:
1) No licenses to track or pay for
2) Ability to leverage other community contributions
3) An ability to hire people to fix problems if I am not available to do so.
Hmmm....
Touchscreens are handled by X
Barcode scanners usually come in as keyboard input
Plain text receipts are not hard (images are more interesting). CUPS may or may not work (LedgerSMB doesnt use CUPS for this because of issues waiting for the document to be printed as it gets spooled on the server, then the client, and possible contention issues with the cash drawer control).
cash drawer support and pole display support are also trivial.
Now.....
How about an application that securely tracks money and inventory so as to prevent both employee and customer-initiated theft, under heavy load, which must work as quickly and efficiently as possible? That is the more interesting part.