Doesn't Section 508 HTML/design standard make it ILLEGAL for a government web site to not follow the standard?
I don't see how an HTML standard became law, but even if it were law, the loophole is that this government site is not adhering to the HTML standard, so the law would not apply.
I guess the latest version of MSIE for OSX is 5.2 (that is what at least came with OSX 10.3 or Panther). And it has not been updated in 4 or so years. I've come across few websites that would not render correctly in Safari, but typically those sites are so broken or need a newer version of IE to run because only a small subset of those that I try in IE work.
Its also a nightmare that many websites are using the Windows Media Video format for their online movie content. Windows Media Player is horrible under the Mac, and it rarely if ever has the most recent codecs available for it so the program is forever asking me to "Check the filename" when I click on a movie with an unsupported codec.
So yes, IE is available on the Mac, but its not very current, and I believe that it not going to be updated anymore.
Instead of writing a letter, I'll just kill two birds with one stone and get a patent on the method of accessing a website with a proprietary web browser, and show how stupid the patent and the copyright offices are when I sue the copyright office with the patent.
Only when something this ridiculous happens will anything change.
And if you feel just the slightest twinge of guilt upon "cheating" the corner store out of $.60 worth of half and half, what is that worth to you?
Your integrity.
To me, I'll give up my integrity for no less than a few million dollars:) I'm often amused when people think they are "getting ahead" or "getting over on someone" by stealing junk from less than a dollar to 10, 20, or so dollars.
If I'm going to steal something, its going to be worth it.
but at these prices, who cares about failure rates?
I do.
I'm not saving any money by paying less for something, bringing it home/work or waiting for it to be shipped, plugging it in, having it either be DOA or worse dying soon after deployment, then ship the broken thing back, wait again for the replacement, reconfigure the box again (if it works)... you get my point.
I have recently gotten so pissed off at the lack of QA in electronics that I vent on whoever is in my way on the return process. I went off so hard on Seagate, that they gave me a "free" disk after they admitted that none of the last 2 revisions of their drives worked.
In fact, I resent the "but at these prices, who cares about failure rates?" attitude. That is precisely why we have so many failures. The consumers simply want what's cheap, and cheap is what we are getting.
Wired is running an article about a guy with no money making furniture out of FedEx boxes. If that weren't strange enough, FedEx is going after him, legally citing the DMCA. Yes, the DMCA.
Its common for homeless people or people without money to commit stupid crimes in order to get locked up for a while in order to get a free place to stay and food. This guy must have been clever to be able to first get temporary free furniture and then a temporary free place to stay and free food.
Wouldn't it benefit Apple in the long run to get more of its software into the public's hands?
No. To paraphrase Douglas Adams "Apple may only have 10% of the computer market, but its definitely the top 10%".
Would it benefit Ferrari in the long run to have every ghetto curb filled with Ferrari's?
In looking at the demo movies, it was impressive to some degree to see OS X running on a cheap Windows PC. But looking more closely, I noticed that the image appeared stretched. I saw that yucky BIOS black screen with white text. However, it looked close to a regular Mac experience.
...there are going to be some enterprises that STILL want to have the OS backed by a company for their own piece of mind, security, and as an outlet to yell at in case they have a problem.
I hear this argument all the time, yet it does not make much sense in reality. I'm not trying to bash Microsoft here, but they are a well known and easy example to use. Answer these questions:
Does licensing MS software provide a company with peace of mind?
Does licensing MS software provide security?
Does licensing MS software provide an outlet to yell at in case they have a problem?
Maybe the last question. Sure you can yell all you want. From my understanding, Microsoft doesn't have a warrantee or guarantee that their software will do anything to any level of competence. Also, you can buy security through something like Trusted Solaris and I believe MS has a similar product. But overall, I don't see these PHB questions answered by most commercially licensed products.
The HP-UX 11i Operating System license provides the right to use the software as described in these QuickSpecs, and is furnished under the licensing of Hewlett-Packard's Standard Terms and Conditions. Licenses for prior versions must be updated to this version either through the purchase of a Service Agreement that includes the rights-to-use new versions, or through the purchase of Update Licenses.
On another note, did anyone else find it ironic that he is trying to push the ideals of software freedom of creativty and expression...by locking everyone under the same license?
Yes, I did. I also agree with another poster that suggested maybe the BSD license vs. GPL. The GPL license is not very attractive to many commercial software companies, and may also conflict with other contracts that they are already bound to. In general, the BSD license is much more appealing to commercial endeavors. The BSD TCI/IP stack should be a sufficient example.
Your points are valid, but for a small domain, running their own email server can be pretty appealing.
Most of the problems associated with an outage (power or network) can be handled with an MX backup service. It wont save you from a natural disaster that takes out your business, but it'll handle the 24-hour power failures...
Most companies don't work in the dark and without power. If this one does, they most likely have backup power of some kind as well, so if email is that important even when the power is out, odds are they will still be able to power a mail server and some network gear.
If they are not operating when the power is out, every mail system I've worked with will keep retrying a down server for 5 days or so. Email is pretty robust. You might loose some spam from zombied machines that directly connect to your mail server for a few days, but I hope that is not part of their business agenda.
This article is not about the college years. It's not even about late high school. It's about buying a laptop for your kid when they still have eight to ten years of schooling left.
Point taken. But, although its rare that a good argument is made by analogy, I was making a complete tangent and I even used a cell phone and not a computer later on.
I don't have a kid, but I would probably do what most of my friends that do have kids do.
Simply give them my old computer when I get a new one. Hell, it could be a used as an argument by the husbands for those who have wives that that think they have something to say about their husband's money (obviously, I'm not married either).
Its been done with cars, TVs, stereos, guitars, and many other things too.
As you said, if the penalty is just a cost of doing business, then the penalty needs to be increased. IMO, the penalty should be about double whatever you made off of spamming. The penalty is then doubled for each subsequent offense.
Basic math and courtroom logic keeps fines at or below the amount of cash on hand.
Being that the settlement had nothing to do with any agreements to Mr. Richter's future behavior, the judgment was only for compensation for "damages", if his fines were 100% greater than his bank account, what do you think he is going to do to make up the fines?
Hint -- odds are more careful spam that can avoid future lawsuits.
Shouldn't 'we' as the true victims get some of that?
If he has any money left, feel free to sue him too.
Microsoft has one of the busiest mail servers in the world (hotmail), and they probably have more evidence, data, and problems, legal funds and motivation than you have with Mr. Richter.
You might want to start up a class action lawsuit with other victims like yourself. It gets more lawyers interested, gets courts more interested, and gets bigger monetary penalties against the defendant. You and others may get $13 or so upon winning the suit, and the lawyers should be equally as happy or more.
Richter at least made an attempt to operate openly and within a feasible interpretation of the law, instead of setting up shop in China and exploiting zombie networks distribute his spam.
Laws and law enforcement are much different in the US vs China and other well known spam countries. On my systemwide spam filter, I about 50% of the spam that gets caught gets hit with a spam rule that checks for urls that are based on servers in China and Korea. I believe its either the best or one of the best rules I get, aside from basic ones like HTML email messages and bayes scores and whatever.
Back to our lovely friend Scott Richter.
So, being the well behaved spammer that he is, he barely complies with US laws, and instead of immediately going to jail or prison for not complying, get gets slapped with a $7 million dollar lawsuit against him.
I don't know or care which Mr. Richter prefers, but I would rather him be in prison, but being that he appears to have at least complied to the letter of the law, a $7 mil judgment is OK.
You can buy your kid a desktop computer during the middle school years, and upgrade it occassionally until the kid gets to high school or college and needs (or wants) a laptop or a faster gaming machine.
Or you could buy them a decent laptop (which coincidentally are either strongly recommended or possibly required by many colleges) their freshman year and be done with computers for the rest of their time in college.
I work with computers at a college, have been to college, so I guess I hear a thing or two about this stuff.
I can't think of something that on average would need to be upgraded besides possibly RAM on a school oriented computer. If your kid is into warez, music, movies, and needs an upgraded harddisk, buy them a multi-terabyte NAS device if you want.
I used my first computer, and Apple//c, from 1984 to 1994, and I did quite well in school. 1994 was my senior year in college and I "upgraded" to a 486 (and my grades plummeted, but thats an unrelated).
I'm not trying to say that an Apple//c or an 486 would be even near sufficient today, but your average student doesn't need much more than to surf the web, type papers, and whatever basic stuff they need. If a class requires more horsepower than your typical laptop or desktop machine, they will be provided with a system will do what they need. If the program that the kid is in requires XYZ for a computer, then that will be specified by the program.
I just don't understand why computers impair decisionmaking so much.
Wife: Honey, Johnny needs a cellphone for college so he can call us once a week to let us know how things are going.
SlashdotDad: I agree sweety. Why don't we save a couple of dollars and buy him one of those bigger, older phones, and every couple of years we can do something to improve it. We could buy a new battery that is smaller when the come out and shave the phone down to make it smaller like current phones! We could rewrite the javaOS, replace it with Linux, add an analog to digital converter and a cellular modem, and maybe buy them a PDA later so it could be used as a almost functional computer too. Lets see,...
Wife: Why don't we just give him whatever basic phone comes with our plan and add him to the service?
SlashdotDad: Is it upgradeable?
Wife: Ours isn't, who gives a fuck, its a phone?
SlashdotDad: Is it upgradeable?
(pause)
Wife: Go buy him whatever phone and computer you want. Upgrade them weekly for all I care.
With the deployment of the XBox 360 in mass quantities in '06, content producers will have the ability to content lock their movies. Microsoft will finally be able to promise that security to media execs...
Let's think. Target age of an XBox is between teenager to twenty something geek male. Basically, a high percentage of the people that comment on posts like:
These are the same people that are already more likely to be computer literate and steal, borrow, infringe, or whatever you want to call obtaining copyrighted material without paying for it.
These are the same people that repeatedly say that $300 is too much for a game console and $60 per game is too much also.
I would assume that the target audience that Amazon is trying to attract would be somewhat different for their movie service. I could be wrong though.
But after having done this since 1961, you'd think that we'd be at a point where getting "those brave souls" back to Earth in one piece was mundane.
Car accidents are the number one cause of death in the United States for younger people, and the number one cause of accidental death across all age groups.
Those brave souls that came to this country in wooden boats usually suffered a known death rate before traveling of about 25 to 33%, and if you lived through that, odds are you would not reach 40 years of age.
Moral of the story, transportation in general is dangerous. But its not as bad as it used to be.
If your company were to shorten your life-cycle on your hardware to exactly two years, then donate the hardware to schools, you get to write off the entire purchase price of the hardware as a tax deduction even if you have already written it off (in full, or only partially) once.
Read about it here.
OK, I read about it and the 8 year old piece of "news" says:
1) This only works for "only large companies" which was not defined, but the title of the article says "multi-million dollar" companies. The title of the ask.slashdot question is "Establishing an IT Budget for a Small Business".
2) Being an 8 year old tax law, this law could either not exist anymore, could have changed significantly, or maybe apply to people like you and I now. More current information would be helpful.
3) The tax article also says that the equipment must be less than two years, not exactly two years.
But, what do I know? The parent gets modded informative, and I'll probably get flamebate for being so mean.
Slashdot should not allow these posts. They are embarrassing for the rest of us.
I'm sorry, but there is no way anyone can help here without the usual "more info" help. I don't know how much money your firm has to begin with, I don't know how much, if any need there is for an IT department.
So, I'll give generic advice to a generic question:
When in doubt, ask for much more than they will be willing to spend, and odds are you will get more $$$ than asking for what you really need. Basic psychology.
And what's wrong with extending the time until a finite resource is expended? It gives us more time to come up with other options...
How much time do you need, and how much will conservation give you?
I've only conserved things when I was low and I knew a time that it would be fixed. Something like, I only have $50 for the rest of the week until payday. I have to stretch that out.
Lets all start conserving air by breathing less, the trees and other CO2->sun->O2 products might stop doing their stuff soon.
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
Being that an entire day is about 1/3 of a percent of a year, I don't see how 1/24th of 1/365th could add up to anything measurable. But these are rough, back of the envelope calculations here, I have not done a real study, and no real data was found on the website referenced.
In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards. Currently, the foot is legally defined to be exactly 0.3048 meter and the pound is legally defined to equal exactly 453.59237 grams.
What more do you need?
Oh, you want us to use the official system of weights and measure?
On another tangent, I find it amusing that the English or whatever they are called units have been changed to be in reference to the international standards as well. Actually, I believe that the "English" system does not make internal sense anymore. I think that 5280 * 12 _inches does not equal one mile like it should. Humorous. Didn't a NASA Mars thing crash because of the confusion too?
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't Section 508 HTML/design standard make it ILLEGAL for a government web site to not follow the standard?
I don't see how an HTML standard became law, but even if it were law, the loophole is that this government site is not adhering to the HTML standard, so the law would not apply.
AFAIK MSIE does run on Apple's OSX
I guess the latest version of MSIE for OSX is 5.2 (that is what at least came with OSX 10.3 or Panther). And it has not been updated in 4 or so years. I've come across few websites that would not render correctly in Safari, but typically those sites are so broken or need a newer version of IE to run because only a small subset of those that I try in IE work.
Its also a nightmare that many websites are using the Windows Media Video format for their online movie content. Windows Media Player is horrible under the Mac, and it rarely if ever has the most recent codecs available for it so the program is forever asking me to "Check the filename" when I click on a movie with an unsupported codec.
So yes, IE is available on the Mac, but its not very current, and I believe that it not going to be updated anymore.
Gartner also recommends not using IIS, or less specific not using Microsoft servers if connected to the internet.
I also believe they have said the same about some or all of Linux from one time or another.
Gartner is kinda like the Dvorak of consulting. Say a bunch of random stuff publicly, repeat random stuff that happens to be true, rinse, and repeat.
Instead of writing a letter, I'll just kill two birds with one stone and get a patent on the method of accessing a website with a proprietary web browser, and show how stupid the patent and the copyright offices are when I sue the copyright office with the patent.
Only when something this ridiculous happens will anything change.
And if you feel just the slightest twinge of guilt upon "cheating" the corner store out of $.60 worth of half and half, what is that worth to you?
:) I'm often amused when people think they are "getting ahead" or "getting over on someone" by stealing junk from less than a dollar to 10, 20, or so dollars.
Your integrity.
To me, I'll give up my integrity for no less than a few million dollars
If I'm going to steal something, its going to be worth it.
but at these prices, who cares about failure rates?
... you get my point.
I do.
I'm not saving any money by paying less for something, bringing it home/work or waiting for it to be shipped, plugging it in, having it either be DOA or worse dying soon after deployment, then ship the broken thing back, wait again for the replacement, reconfigure the box again (if it works)
I have recently gotten so pissed off at the lack of QA in electronics that I vent on whoever is in my way on the return process. I went off so hard on Seagate, that they gave me a "free" disk after they admitted that none of the last 2 revisions of their drives worked.
In fact, I resent the "but at these prices, who cares about failure rates?" attitude. That is precisely why we have so many failures. The consumers simply want what's cheap, and cheap is what we are getting.
Wired is running an article about a guy with no money making furniture out of FedEx boxes. If that weren't strange enough, FedEx is going after him, legally citing the DMCA. Yes, the DMCA.
Its common for homeless people or people without money to commit stupid crimes in order to get locked up for a while in order to get a free place to stay and food. This guy must have been clever to be able to first get temporary free furniture and then a temporary free place to stay and free food.
Very clever.
How much code has HP contributed to the free software community?
A decent amount. Especially for the ia64 port of the Linux kernel. Speaking of the kernel, searching for hp.com yields:
find -type f | xargs egrep -i 'hp\.com'| field 2- | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
62 * David Mosberger-Tang ignore, necessary to get around lameness filter M871E.B4:'4L(#$Q($%U9R`R,#`U(#$Q
24 * Stephane Eranian M=&5N="U$:7-P;W-I=CH@:6YL:
21 * Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 David Mosberger-Tang IA T87(N8V]M QY+51O.B`\,C`P-3`X,3`Q,C0P+D%!
9 * Copyright (C) 1998-2000 David Mosberger-Tang I86T@86YD($UA E=#X*36EM92U697)S:
6 * Copyright (C) 1999 David Mosberger-Tang 2!W96YT(&]U="!O9B!T;W
6 * Copyright (C) 1998, 1999, 2001 David Mosberger-Tang H*36EK90H*+2T@"B\M+2TM+2
5 * Copyright (C) 2000 David Mosberger-Tang AyFASqYoMmJPf85ZLO00VrEkvAqK1n
4 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/ QMQuvc4wCoVrwy6nntuCWUv5vqWUNL
4 * David Mosberger
3 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Tools.html>. 1N8xbkGGHFA6wsn2vg3Sb1CHBPR0xZ
3 http://www.hp.com/jornada/products/680/>.
3 * Copyright (C) 1999, 2001 David Mosberger-Tang
3 * Copyright (C) 1999-2000 David Mosberger-Tang
3 * Authors : Jean Tourrilhes - HPL -
2 Tourrilhes "); QUru8ETk2Tf3OSbyyVmxq7VtCczJDX
2 * Jean Tourrilhes , iy1RF8caRL62intVPcagjsviCAecgp
2 * I (Jean Tourrilhes - jt@hplb.hpl.hp.com) then started to make some
2 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Wavelan.html
2 * http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Wavelan.html
2 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Tools.html
2 http://www.hp.com/jornada/>. z6mDPHewxRuwEb3zZlqCtOb0d1DbVi
2 * (http://www.hp.com/go/retailbooks/) vnQQAeglPaprGeE8rAUIgCR7tU2Efq
2 Copyright (C) Alex Williamson (alex_williamson@hp.com)
2 * Copyright (C) 2002 Khalid Aziz
2 * Copyright (C) 2001, Jean Tourrilhes
2 * Copyright (C) 2001 Jean Tourrilhes, HP Labs
2 * Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 Stephane Eranian
1 Weissgaerber , Dag Brattli and Jean Tourrilhes ");
1 * v1.25kf Added No Interrupt on successful Tx for some Tx's
1 This method provided by L. Julliard, Laurent_Julliard@grenoble.hp.com.
1 * Stephen Hack : Fixed ace_set_mac_addr for little
1 * see http://devresource.hp.com/devresource/docs/techpap ers/ia64/slit.pdf
1 report them to linux_udf@hpesjro.fc.hp.com, which is the
1 paul_bame@hp.com VkgRelv4ms3ijoXEUIn6x285iE3C4b
1 linux_udf@hpesjro.fc.hp.com
1 jt@hpl.hp.com
1 jsm@fc.hp.com Je8cG1SE6M8ckdHjFAHfIi0B6Zm9gy
1 "John Marvin"
1 * John Marvin
1 * Jean Tourrilhes (new version)
1 * Jean Tourrilhes - HPL - 17 November 00
1 * Jean Tourrilhes (jt@hplb.hpl.hp.com),
1 http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/Tools.html>
1 http://users.dhp.com/~whisper/ipfwadm2ipchains/
1 (http://software.hp.com/ia64linux/>).
1 handheld computer. See http://www.hp.com/jornada/products/720>
1 grundler@puffin.external.hp.com
1 Grant Grundler
1 * for FAST[+] chipsets.
1 eranian@hpl.hp.com
1 Eranian ");
1 Eranian
1 David Mosberger-Tang
1 davidm@hpl.hp.com if IA-64 related, else David.Mosberger@acm.org
1 davidm@hpl.hp.com z3eXOQku4EcpzW1M5WbfrIbrD4VKxW
1 * , and Jean Tourrilhes
1 * Copyright (C) 2002 Bjorn Helgaas
1 * Copyright (C) 2002 Alex Williamson
1 *
Wouldn't it benefit Apple in the long run to get more of its software into the public's hands?
No. To paraphrase Douglas Adams "Apple may only have 10% of the computer market, but its definitely the top 10%".
Would it benefit Ferrari in the long run to have every ghetto curb filled with Ferrari's?
In looking at the demo movies, it was impressive to some degree to see OS X running on a cheap Windows PC. But looking more closely, I noticed that the image appeared stretched. I saw that yucky BIOS black screen with white text. However, it looked close to a regular Mac experience.
...there are going to be some enterprises that STILL want to have the OS backed by a company for their own piece of mind, security, and as an outlet to yell at in case they have a problem.
I hear this argument all the time, yet it does not make much sense in reality. I'm not trying to bash Microsoft here, but they are a well known and easy example to use. Answer these questions:
Does licensing MS software provide a company with peace of mind?
Does licensing MS software provide security?
Does licensing MS software provide an outlet to yell at in case they have a problem?
Maybe the last question. Sure you can yell all you want. From my understanding, Microsoft doesn't have a warrantee or guarantee that their software will do anything to any level of competence. Also, you can buy security through something like Trusted Solaris and I believe MS has a similar product. But overall, I don't see these PHB questions answered by most commercially licensed products.
Nor why HP doesn't think its good for themselves either. From http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/120
Yes, I did. I also agree with another poster that suggested maybe the BSD license vs. GPL. The GPL license is not very attractive to many commercial software companies, and may also conflict with other contracts that they are already bound to. In general, the BSD license is much more appealing to commercial endeavors. The BSD TCI/IP stack should be a sufficient example.
My Ethical Issues in Computing class required almost $200 worth of text books.
The only thing more ironic than that would be spending almost $200 for an Ethical Issues in Business class.
Your points are valid, but for a small domain, running their own email server can be pretty appealing.
Most of the problems associated with an outage (power or network) can be handled with an MX backup service. It wont save you from a natural disaster that takes out your business, but it'll handle the 24-hour power failures...
Most companies don't work in the dark and without power. If this one does, they most likely have backup power of some kind as well, so if email is that important even when the power is out, odds are they will still be able to power a mail server and some network gear.
If they are not operating when the power is out, every mail system I've worked with will keep retrying a down server for 5 days or so. Email is pretty robust. You might loose some spam from zombied machines that directly connect to your mail server for a few days, but I hope that is not part of their business agenda.
This article is not about the college years. It's not even about late high school. It's about buying a laptop for your kid when they still have eight to ten years of schooling left.
Point taken. But, although its rare that a good argument is made by analogy, I was making a complete tangent and I even used a cell phone and not a computer later on.
I don't have a kid, but I would probably do what most of my friends that do have kids do.
Simply give them my old computer when I get a new one. Hell, it could be a used as an argument by the husbands for those who have wives that that think they have something to say about their husband's money (obviously, I'm not married either).
Its been done with cars, TVs, stereos, guitars, and many other things too.
As you said, if the penalty is just a cost of doing business, then the penalty needs to be increased. IMO, the penalty should be about double whatever you made off of spamming. The penalty is then doubled for each subsequent offense.
Basic math and courtroom logic keeps fines at or below the amount of cash on hand.
Being that the settlement had nothing to do with any agreements to Mr. Richter's future behavior, the judgment was only for compensation for "damages", if his fines were 100% greater than his bank account, what do you think he is going to do to make up the fines?
Hint -- odds are more careful spam that can avoid future lawsuits.
Shouldn't 'we' as the true victims get some of that?
If he has any money left, feel free to sue him too.
Microsoft has one of the busiest mail servers in the world (hotmail), and they probably have more evidence, data, and problems, legal funds and motivation than you have with Mr. Richter.
You might want to start up a class action lawsuit with other victims like yourself. It gets more lawyers interested, gets courts more interested, and gets bigger monetary penalties against the defendant. You and others may get $13 or so upon winning the suit, and the lawyers should be equally as happy or more.
Go for it!
Richter at least made an attempt to operate openly and within a feasible interpretation of the law, instead of setting up shop in China and exploiting zombie networks distribute his spam.
Laws and law enforcement are much different in the US vs China and other well known spam countries. On my systemwide spam filter, I about 50% of the spam that gets caught gets hit with a spam rule that checks for urls that are based on servers in China and Korea. I believe its either the best or one of the best rules I get, aside from basic ones like HTML email messages and bayes scores and whatever.
Back to our lovely friend Scott Richter.
So, being the well behaved spammer that he is, he barely complies with US laws, and instead of immediately going to jail or prison for not complying, get gets slapped with a $7 million dollar lawsuit against him.
I don't know or care which Mr. Richter prefers, but I would rather him be in prison, but being that he appears to have at least complied to the letter of the law, a $7 mil judgment is OK.
You can buy your kid a desktop computer during the middle school years, and upgrade it occassionally until the kid gets to high school or college and needs (or wants) a laptop or a faster gaming machine.
//c, from 1984 to 1994, and I did quite well in school. 1994 was my senior year in college and I "upgraded" to a 486 (and my grades plummeted, but thats an unrelated).
//c or an 486 would be even near sufficient today, but your average student doesn't need much more than to surf the web, type papers, and whatever basic stuff they need. If a class requires more horsepower than your typical laptop or desktop machine, they will be provided with a system will do what they need. If the program that the kid is in requires XYZ for a computer, then that will be specified by the program.
...
Or you could buy them a decent laptop (which coincidentally are either strongly recommended or possibly required by many colleges) their freshman year and be done with computers for the rest of their time in college.
I work with computers at a college, have been to college, so I guess I hear a thing or two about this stuff.
I can't think of something that on average would need to be upgraded besides possibly RAM on a school oriented computer. If your kid is into warez, music, movies, and needs an upgraded harddisk, buy them a multi-terabyte NAS device if you want.
I used my first computer, and Apple
I'm not trying to say that an Apple
I just don't understand why computers impair decisionmaking so much.
Wife: Honey, Johnny needs a cellphone for college so he can call us once a week to let us know how things are going.
SlashdotDad: I agree sweety. Why don't we save a couple of dollars and buy him one of those bigger, older phones, and every couple of years we can do something to improve it. We could buy a new battery that is smaller when the come out and shave the phone down to make it smaller like current phones! We could rewrite the javaOS, replace it with Linux, add an analog to digital converter and a cellular modem, and maybe buy them a PDA later so it could be used as a almost functional computer too. Lets see,
Wife: Why don't we just give him whatever basic phone comes with our plan and add him to the service?
SlashdotDad: Is it upgradeable?
Wife: Ours isn't, who gives a fuck, its a phone?
SlashdotDad: Is it upgradeable?
(pause)
Wife: Go buy him whatever phone and computer you want. Upgrade them weekly for all I care.
With the deployment of the XBox 360 in mass quantities in '06, content producers will have the ability to content lock their movies. Microsoft will finally be able to promise that security to media execs...
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Let's think. Target age of an XBox is between teenager to twenty something geek male. Basically, a high percentage of the people that comment on posts like:
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/03
These are the same people that are already more likely to be computer literate and steal, borrow, infringe, or whatever you want to call obtaining copyrighted material without paying for it.
These are the same people that repeatedly say that $300 is too much for a game console and $60 per game is too much also.
I would assume that the target audience that Amazon is trying to attract would be somewhat different for their movie service. I could be wrong though.
But after having done this since 1961, you'd think that we'd be at a point where getting "those brave souls" back to Earth in one piece was mundane.
Car accidents are the number one cause of death in the United States for younger people, and the number one cause of accidental death across all age groups.
Those brave souls that came to this country in wooden boats usually suffered a known death rate before traveling of about 25 to 33%, and if you lived through that, odds are you would not reach 40 years of age.
Moral of the story, transportation in general is dangerous. But its not as bad as it used to be.
If your company were to shorten your life-cycle on your hardware to exactly two years, then donate the hardware to schools, you get to write off the entire purchase price of the hardware as a tax deduction even if you have already written it off (in full, or only partially) once.
Read about it here.
OK, I read about it and the 8 year old piece of "news" says:
1) This only works for "only large companies" which was not defined, but the title of the article says "multi-million dollar" companies. The title of the ask.slashdot question is "Establishing an IT Budget for a Small Business".
2) Being an 8 year old tax law, this law could either not exist anymore, could have changed significantly, or maybe apply to people like you and I now. More current information would be helpful.
3) The tax article also says that the equipment must be less than two years, not exactly two years.
But, what do I know? The parent gets modded informative, and I'll probably get flamebate for being so mean.
Slashdot should not allow these posts. They are embarrassing for the rest of us.
I'm sorry, but there is no way anyone can help here without the usual "more info" help. I don't know how much money your firm has to begin with, I don't know how much, if any need there is for an IT department.
So, I'll give generic advice to a generic question:
When in doubt, ask for much more than they will be willing to spend, and odds are you will get more $$$ than asking for what you really need. Basic psychology.
And what's wrong with extending the time until a finite resource is expended? It gives us more time to come up with other options...
How much time do you need, and how much will conservation give you?
I've only conserved things when I was low and I knew a time that it would be fixed. Something like, I only have $50 for the rest of the week until payday. I have to stretch that out.
Lets all start conserving air by breathing less, the trees and other CO2->sun->O2 products might stop doing their stuff soon.
Doesn't make much sense does it?
It says:
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
Being that an entire day is about 1/3 of a percent of a year, I don't see how 1/24th of 1/365th could add up to anything measurable. But these are rough, back of the envelope calculations here, I have not done a real study, and no real data was found on the website referenced.
From http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/usmetric.html:
In 1893, Congress adopted the metric standards, the official meter and kilogram bars supplied by BIPM, as the standards for all measurement in the U.S. This didn't mean that metric units had to be used, but since that time the customary units have been defined officially in terms of metric standards. Currently, the foot is legally defined to be exactly 0.3048 meter and the pound is legally defined to equal exactly 453.59237 grams.
What more do you need?
Oh, you want us to use the official system of weights and measure?
On another tangent, I find it amusing that the English or whatever they are called units have been changed to be in reference to the international standards as well. Actually, I believe that the "English" system does not make internal sense anymore. I think that 5280 * 12 _inches does not equal one mile like it should. Humorous. Didn't a NASA Mars thing crash because of the confusion too?