Somebody must be "investing in new mainframes" since IBM keems making money selling more of those machines. Every time I walk into a decent size data center, more often than not, there is a zSeries of fairly recent vintage parked in a corner.
When I was in college pre-Google, it was often never enough to just use Alta-Vista. While it was probably the best of the day, it did not produce particularly useful results with a great many searches. I used multiple search engines, even if Alta-Vista was my primary. Nowadays, I can't remember the last time I used anything BUT Google.
You get what you pay for. The higher-end T and X Series are solid road-warrior machines. They always have been and have not changed. The lower-end R and Z Series (the ones at Office Depot) have always been lower-end plasticky product lines.
IBM has fought back becasuse IBM believes in Linux. (Or at least it's profit-making potential.) If IBM had settled out of court or simply bought SCO outright, that would have lent an aire of legitimacy to SCO's original claims of copyrighted code contamination in Linux. That would have cost IBM far more than the settlement, or the legal defense of the suit.
It IS his problem, though. Because most consumers don't know shit about what they're actually buying, John Expert can't get a TV, stereo, or speakers without having to pay a whole lot more to get the thing to do what it was supposed to in the first place. The mediocre technology usually wins out. I hate it.
Even a cheap-ass stereo will generally play music, and with modern electronics, even a $120 one from Wal-Mart generally will run for many years. A cheap TV will indeed display a picture, and cheap speakers will emit music. Saying that those things don't "do what [they are] supposed to do" is incorrect. They may not do it well enough to satisfy somebody that could appreciate it, but that is why better stuff costs more.
What do you mean "the mediocre technology usually wins out"? If the "superior" technology is available, how has it "lost"? The "expert" has to pay more money to get gear of a quality he is willing to accept... how exactly is that bad? Joe Consumer shouldn't have to pay for quality he couldn't can't appreciate...
And introducing fake detail to make an image look sharper is not good, no matter how many displays it might sell.
Au contraire! Taking a cheap-ass display, and using a clever signal processing trick to make it look sharper and higher quality is an engineering triumph! I'm not joking here. Who is the best judge of which display is "best"? The guy buying the display. If the "experts" want their non-edge-enhanced, non-blown-color, flawless paragon of video processing, great. They can pay extra for the privledge.
Everybody wins: Joe Consumer gets a fine-looking display for a cheap price. (His perspective on quality is the only one that matters here, because it is his living room.) The manufacturer wins because dressing up a cheap-ass display is usually quite profitable.
Why should John Expert care if Joe Consumer bought a "lower-quality" display? It isn't his problem.
This guy didn't lose his job for having the wrong opinion... he lost his job for being public about it. If I was his employer, I'd fire his ass too. You don't dis the products of your employer in public if you want to stay employed. Certainly if there was some safety issue going on, or outright fraud, then there is nothing wrong with whislteblowing. Most employers won't even fire an employee for complaining about something like working conditions or benefits in a public forum. That isn't the case here. He publicly stated he thought his employer's product was smoke and mirrors. He shouldn't have been surprised that Sony wasn't too happy about it.
I work for a LARGE computer company, and I do post to Slashdot about my company's products if questions do arise. While I never make up good things that aren't true about our products, I do adhere to the maxim "if you can't say anything nice, shut the heck up."
SirWired
All FC RAID is going to be high-availibility
on
Fibre Channel Storage?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
First, you haven't articulated your needs properly. "High I/O rates" means two separate things, both of which must be considered and engineered for:
1) High numbers of transactions per second. Your focus here is going to be on units that can hold a LOT of drives (not necessarily of high capacity). You want as many sets of drive heads as possible going here. In addition, SATA drives are not made to handle high duty-cycles of high transaction rates. The voice coils have insufficient heat dispersion. (They are just plain cheaper drives.) High transaction rates require a pretty expensive controller, and you won't be able to avoid redundancy, but that isn't a problem, since you are going to need both controllers to support the IOPS. (I/O's per second.)
2) High raw bandwidth. If you need raw bandwidth and your data load is non-cacheable, then really software RAID + a JBOD may be able to get the job done here, if you have a multi-CPU box so one CPU can do the RAID-ing. Again, two controllers are usually going to provide you with the best bandwidth. SATA striped across a sufficient number of drives can give you fairly decent I/O, but not as good as FC.
There are "low end" arrays available that will offer reduced redundancy. The IBM DS 400 is an example. This box is OEM'd from Adaptec, and pretty much uses a ServRAID adapter as the "guts" of the box. This unit uses FC on the host side, and SCSI drives on the disk side. It is available in single and dual controller models. (Obligatory note: I do work for IBM, but I am not a sales drone.) This setup has the distinct advantage of being fully supportable by your vendor. A homegrown box will not have that important advantage.
Don't be scared away by the list price, as nobody ever pays it. Contact your local IBM branch office (or IBM business partner/reseller), and they can hook you up.
This unit is also available as part of an "IBM SAN Starter Kit" which gives you a couple of bargain-barrel FC switches, four HBA's, and one of these arrays w/.5TB of disk. (I am writing a book on configuring the thing in March, so you will have a full configuration guide (with pretty pictures and step-by-step instructions) by the beginning of April.)
So basically what you are saying is that the punishment of a serious crime should be based on the ability of somebody to frame you for it?
What is happening here is you are confusing the difference between conviction and sentencing. In the criminal justice system, determination of guilt and seriousness of sentence are two separate functions. A conviction is based on the amount of evidence available. Your sentence is based on the crime, NOT how likely it is your conviction is correct. (At least in theory.) Those convicted by circumstantial evidence don't (or shouldn't, anyway) receive a greater or lesser sentence than those convicted by 50 eyewitnesses and 40 forensic scientists. This would reward clever criminals that are good at covering their tracks.
While a wrong conviction may be more likely for such a serious and villified crime, (I honestly don't know), that does not mean that the punishment should be reduced. Instead, the standards for evidence should be raised higher if wrong convictions are a problem.
The determiniation of standards for evidence is a whole other topic that is beyond the scope of this post.
If you are the only one in your dept. working this hard, and you have an understanding boss, let him know, and maybe you can get some relief, like getting some of the work moved to others who aren't working as hard.
Also, I'm a little confused about your overtime situation. If you are paid for overtime, then you are non-exempt. If you do not get paid for overtime, you are exempt. (As in: Exempt from overtime laws.)
If everybody at your office is working this hard, then yeah, it's time to take some "flex" time during the day to do at least a phone interview. If they aren't paying you by the hour, then it is perfectly right for you to do so. (You aren't physically chained to your desk, are you?) If they are paying by the hour, just charge them for less OT.
Remember, you work to live, not the other way around.
Personally, I have no problem with DRM, as long as it is correctly applied, and it is an optional feature for me to obtain content.
Bad DRM: Evil crap done to music CD's to cripple them on anything resembling a CD-ROM drive.
Good DRM: FairPlay on the iPod, (or for that matter, the DRM on most MP3 Players). Sure, the DRM scheme itself may be a restrictive PITA, but it is optional. If I don't want to muck about with FairPlay, I don't have to use it. The device will accept plain old MP3's just fine.
As long as the DRM is not sneaked in, and the terms not stupid, and there is an alternate (although perhaps more expensive) means of obtaining the content without DRM, it is a perfectly acceptable business model in my eyes.
The only way to make what you are worth is to go into business for yourself. If you cannot hack it, then you were never worth that much in the first place.... If they were smart enough to actually do something with their life other than working for someone else, then they would branch off and start their own company. If they arent smart enough, then I am doing them a favor by employing them and helping them feed themselves.
I know SlashDot isn't exactly the place to go for humility, but this statement is pretty damn arrogant. There are some people (like myself), that LIKE not having to worry about anything but the technology. I am an Engineer. That is what I do. I am pretty damn good at it. I don't want to be a marketer, accountant, salesman, lawyer, manager, or even supervisor. Those functions are all necessary time (or money) sinks for anybody going alone, especially if you have one or more employees. Doing all that "overhead" crap would subtract from the time I get to do the work I enjoy doing. This doesn't mean I am not worth anything (my employer certainly would diasgree, given what they are paying me), it means that I choose to be an Engineer, not an entrepenur. I like having my gargantutan employer do all that other crap. I show up to work every day, I work what I consider to be reasonable hours every week, (50 or so) and I get my paycheck twice a month. In return, my employer charges customers about 2 1/2 times what they pay me.
That is more fair than it sounds.
I remember reading somewhere in a "guide to being an independent consultant", that if you plan to actually make money, your hourly rate should be three times what you would get in an equivalent hourly job. This covers downtime, the value of the benefits you aren't getting from your employer anymore, overhead expenses, etc.
In return for paying me far less than what they get paid, they will sell my services, write contracs, give me health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a retirement plan, bill the customer, collect payment, arrange financing, pay me to go to conferences, give me "downtime" to muck about in the lab doing whatever the heck I want on equipment I couldn't possibly afford on my own, (or cost-justify in any business with less than 1000+ employees), give me time off to go write a book (about their products of course, but it is still a refreshing change of pace), etc. Most important to me as an Engineer is the chance to be a part of something far bigger than anything I could arrange on my own. Let others get all the glory for being the fearless leader, just let me do my job doing something I enjoy, and kicking butt doing it.
It is almost guaranteed that you arent being paid what you are worth, because then where is the profit for your employer?
This is an idiotic statement. Have you EVER heard of the concept of "value add"? Or for that matter, do you even UNDERSTAND the concept of a "fair trade"? Business is not a "zero-sum" game. They go over this in every "intro to business" course.
The computer you write your little programs on... where did you get it? Naturally you bought it from some place that sells computers (or computer parts, if that is your thing). Why did you buy the computer? After all, you could have created your own CPU, designed your own motherboard, built your own hard drive, created all your cables, designed a power supply, etc.? Somebody else (the computer seller) just made a profit off of you! Why didn't you do all those things? Because it was a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to let somebody else make a million computers, and sell you one of them, than it was for you to make your own, starting from scratch.
You paid good money to the computer seller because you thought you could derive more value from owning the computer than you were paying the seller give you one. You received what you felt to be a good value for the money paid. The seller of the computer we would assume received enough money fr
Running that CCD full-time takes a LOT of battery juice, which is why the battery in a P&S Digital Camera dies a heck of a lot quicker than a DSLR.
Video cameras run at a lower resolution and have a physically smaller CCD, which in turn requires less battery power. They also have batteries larger than would be practical to put in a digital camera.
This means that you are unlikely to see a DSLR (which uses a larger sensor than a P&S) running as an HDTV camera substitute any time soon.
If you want to see a sturdy keyboard, hunt around for an old IBM Model M. While the sound may drive your friends nuts, there is no finer keyboard ever made. You can get these at any computer swap meet or by digging through the junk closet of any data center.
While the change may not be advantageous for on-line resellers, it puts them on a level playing field with Brick-and-Mortar retailers.
Currently, it is a very common practice to compare different products (i.e. Electronics) at physical stores, and then go purchase the actual item online to avoid sales tax. This is rather unfair to the physical retailer since the consumer is avoiding a tax he is supposed to pay. The online retailer is deriving an unjust benefit from the consumer avoiding the laws of their state.
And no, I don't think consumers are buying goods online that they would not have bought otherwise simply to avoid sales tax. In any case, that is not the concern of tax law, since the consumer is ALREADY supposed to be paying the tax.
The current state of affairs in an unfair subsidy of online (and mail-order) retailers that do not operate any physical stores.
Why should amazon.com be largely exempt from sales tax, while bestbuy.com has to charge sales tax on the same items?
They're making some sort of guarantees about their own Google web site in TFA, but what about all their affiliate relays? Will Google allow customers to flood those with annoying graphical ads?
I believe from reports, and what isn't in the post, that Google will be providing search affiliates with rope to hang themselves with, a gun to shoot themselves with, etc. Basically, it appears Google will give affiliates the option of graphical crap. If those sites want to annoy their users, Google will be more than happy to let them, and make money in the process.
This is not much of a change from the status quo for the affiliates. If a site thinks graphical ads are appropriate, they can get them from any number of ad providers, just not Google. For Google, this is a lost market, until now.
Google has made the decision that they do not believe such ads are appropriate for their own web search, so they won't be carrying them. Notice that non web-search pages aren't included under that umbrella. I think this means that image results and maybe news will start carrying banners.
I am encouraged by the fact that they are promising not to put awful dancing crap all over the screen anywhere on Google's site. I really HATE those ads that keep me from actually reading the page content.
"Again, this measure creates no new taxes, it merely shifts the burden of collection from the consuemer to the retailer. (And would also vastly increase compliance with the existing tax)"
Idiotic statement.
Errr... it's true. Consumers are legally supposed to pay the sales tax already on goods purchased out of state. This measure does not create any new taxes that were not there before.
In California alone, we have over 50 counties that add their own special tax on top of the state tax. And then each city can do the same.
Proceeding in parallel with this bill is an effort by the states to unify tax categories. Then, to determine the tax for a particluar item, you choose one of five item (IIRC) categories, and then determine the tax based on the consumer's address. Again, there are plenty of web-sites that do this ALL THE TIME. It is not rocket science. Yes, it does require somebody to maintain the street adress / tax rate database. This database is not that much different from the Zip+4 database used for mailing by most companies that use the postal service. In fact, it could just be extended to contain tax rate fields. Every block for every street in the country is already in that database.
Yes, it would be a hell of a job if every company had to maintain that database on their own, but that is most certainly not necessary. In fact a single Google query returned such a database for only $1000 / yr, including montly updates. And that was just the first hit. For a business with $5M+ in gross sales (the only companies affected by the proposed law), this is nothing.
Why the hell should I have to pay tax to a governmant that I can't vote for? You are suposed to pay tax to YOUR local government, the one that you have a duty to vote for once or twice a year. That's the way it's always been, though possibly there's some exceptions that they've slinked through.
You don't understand... the business isn't paying the tax to the remote government, the consumer is. The business will bear the burden of collecting the tax (which will involve some cost, yes), but the tax is a line item directly charged to the consumer. If the consumer objects, then they can talk to their local government.
Also note that even with this law, each state will get to choose to participate in this or not. If your state doesn't want to sign up for this system, then businesses in your state will not be required to collect the taxes.
You are right, sales tax rates change all the time, but Software updates? No, database updates. When the postal service changes zip code boundries, it does not require "software updates" in databases throughout the country. Software updates would indeed be a pain in the ass, and they would be necessary if the whole idea of sales taxes were to undergo radical revisions every year, like income tax does. Database updates don't require extensive testing, they just require the company supplying the databasee (a simple flat file would be all that was necessary) to double-check their updates.
Accompaning this effort are the same states simplifying their tax systems, by reducing and unifying the categories to ease the burden on the businesses subject to these laws.
Tracking tax by state at the end of a quarter is not a big deal. This is a single database report that would total up the sales tax charged for each state over the quarter. That is a 50-line report. I'm not seeing this as being a big burden.
In fact, I am not sure if the law would allow the states to require you to send money to other states. More likely (and this would make more senses), you fill out a now longer form for your own state showing how much of your check is supposed to go to each state.
Asserting that it is far more economical for individuals to keep track of their purchases is obviously not correct. It would require each citizen of each state educating themselves on the tax categories for their state and classifying every item they purchased over the year, by hand, since John Q. Citizen doesn't have an item database for everything he bought. Even at a half-hour per citizen, this is not an insubstantial burden when you multiply it by the number of citizens in each state.
There is absolutely no substantial difference between the database necessary for this, and what is necessary for Zip+4 lookups. Address goes in, tax rate(s) come out. Each item has a tax category. Your shopping cart uses the appropriate database ops to apply the taxes for each item to the order total. At the end of the quarter, you run a report to generate the tax totals per tax jurisdiction and tax category.
This is not rocket science, and there is nothing preventing somebody from making a free database available.
I don't see this being a big deal, especially since the proposed law only applies to businesses grossing more than $5M per year.
This is a far smaller paperwork burden on a business (the bill only affects business that gross more than $5M) than on consumers which currently are theoretically required to retain records of all out-of-state purchases over a year.
This software is not rocket-science. Address goes in, tax rate(s) come out. It is no more complicated than a Zip+4 database. The same group of states that wants this bill is also working to simplify their sales tax categories to be more uniform across states. This would require the business to add a field to the item database to indicate the tax catagory.
I don't think the governments are afraid of consumers realizing how expensive the taxes are (since sales taxes are already a line-item on every receipt when they go to the store). Even fairly heavy users of mail-order (like myself), purchase most of their spending in-state.
I think what governments are afraid of is attempting to enforce an untenable paperwork burden on individual consumers. Even though I agree that there would be additional software requirements for large businesses, their overhead would be far smaller than additional record-keeping by individuals.
Err... if you read TFA, you will notice that the proposed law only affects business that gross more than $5M. Most one-man shops won't be affected by this.
Sales tax is meant to be a tax upon the purchases of citizens, not a tax on businesses that sell things. ALL states with a sales tax technically require citizens to mail in sales tax for goods that were purchased out of state. The fact that a good was purchased out of state matters not, since it is the good being taxed, not the business itself. State income and local property taxes cover the costs of the business being physically located in the state, and indeed Amazon still wouldn't have to pay those.
This situation is rather sub-optimal for a couple of reasons:
1) Few people actually pay the taxes on goods purchased out of state. Whether or not they should be required to is a different debate than on who is supposed to track and collect them. 2) It is far easier for a business to keep track of what they sell where than it is for an individual to keep track of everything they purchase out of state.
This is a debate on who is supposed to collect the taxes, not a debate on the taxes themselves. Currently, the consumer is supposed to self-collect, and the states would like the out-of-state businesses to collect instead. (This is what requires federal authorization.)
Your theory on CHOOSING not to have stores in a state is bogus, because the tax is in no way related to the resouces used by the company in that state. If Amazon decides to have a SINGLE employee working out of their house in say, Vermont, that will trigger the collection of sales tax for every order going to that state.
Again, this measure creates no new taxes, it merely shifts the burden of collection from the consuemer to the retailer. (And would also vastly increase compliance with the existing tax)
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody must be "investing in new mainframes" since IBM keems making money selling more of those machines. Every time I walk into a decent size data center, more often than not, there is a zSeries of fairly recent vintage parked in a corner.
SirWired
Click the cursor where you want the selection to begin, hold down shift, and use the arrow or PageUp/Dn keys.
SirWired
When I was in college pre-Google, it was often never enough to just use Alta-Vista. While it was probably the best of the day, it did not produce particularly useful results with a great many searches. I used multiple search engines, even if Alta-Vista was my primary. Nowadays, I can't remember the last time I used anything BUT Google.
SirWired
You get what you pay for. The higher-end T and X Series are solid road-warrior machines. They always have been and have not changed. The lower-end R and Z Series (the ones at Office Depot) have always been lower-end plasticky product lines.
SirWired
IBM has fought back becasuse IBM believes in Linux. (Or at least it's profit-making potential.) If IBM had settled out of court or simply bought SCO outright, that would have lent an aire of legitimacy to SCO's original claims of copyrighted code contamination in Linux. That would have cost IBM far more than the settlement, or the legal defense of the suit.
SirWired
Wow. Maybe Microsoft really has kicked both their asses. In everything, from new technology, manufacturing, and time to market. Sheesh!
I suppose this would be a poor time to point out that the processor for the XBox360 is ALSO made by IBM..., and likely in the same 300mm fab in NY.
SirWired
It IS his problem, though. Because most consumers don't know shit about what they're actually buying, John Expert can't get a TV, stereo, or speakers without having to pay a whole lot more to get the thing to do what it was supposed to in the first place. The mediocre technology usually wins out. I hate it.
Even a cheap-ass stereo will generally play music, and with modern electronics, even a $120 one from Wal-Mart generally will run for many years. A cheap TV will indeed display a picture, and cheap speakers will emit music. Saying that those things don't "do what [they are] supposed to do" is incorrect. They may not do it well enough to satisfy somebody that could appreciate it, but that is why better stuff costs more.
What do you mean "the mediocre technology usually wins out"? If the "superior" technology is available, how has it "lost"? The "expert" has to pay more money to get gear of a quality he is willing to accept... how exactly is that bad? Joe Consumer shouldn't have to pay for quality he couldn't can't appreciate...
SirWired
And introducing fake detail to make an image look sharper is not good, no matter how many displays it might sell.
Au contraire! Taking a cheap-ass display, and using a clever signal processing trick to make it look sharper and higher quality is an engineering triumph! I'm not joking here. Who is the best judge of which display is "best"? The guy buying the display. If the "experts" want their non-edge-enhanced, non-blown-color, flawless paragon of video processing, great. They can pay extra for the privledge.
Everybody wins: Joe Consumer gets a fine-looking display for a cheap price. (His perspective on quality is the only one that matters here, because it is his living room.) The manufacturer wins because dressing up a cheap-ass display is usually quite profitable.
Why should John Expert care if Joe Consumer bought a "lower-quality" display? It isn't his problem.
SirWired
This guy didn't lose his job for having the wrong opinion... he lost his job for being public about it. If I was his employer, I'd fire his ass too. You don't dis the products of your employer in public if you want to stay employed. Certainly if there was some safety issue going on, or outright fraud, then there is nothing wrong with whislteblowing. Most employers won't even fire an employee for complaining about something like working conditions or benefits in a public forum. That isn't the case here. He publicly stated he thought his employer's product was smoke and mirrors. He shouldn't have been surprised that Sony wasn't too happy about it.
I work for a LARGE computer company, and I do post to Slashdot about my company's products if questions do arise. While I never make up good things that aren't true about our products, I do adhere to the maxim "if you can't say anything nice, shut the heck up."
SirWired
First, you haven't articulated your needs properly. "High I/O rates" means two separate things, both of which must be considered and engineered for:
.5TB of disk. (I am writing a book on configuring the thing in March, so you will have a full configuration guide (with pretty pictures and step-by-step instructions) by the beginning of April.)
1) High numbers of transactions per second. Your focus here is going to be on units that can hold a LOT of drives (not necessarily of high capacity). You want as many sets of drive heads as possible going here. In addition, SATA drives are not made to handle high duty-cycles of high transaction rates. The voice coils have insufficient heat dispersion. (They are just plain cheaper drives.) High transaction rates require a pretty expensive controller, and you won't be able to avoid redundancy, but that isn't a problem, since you are going to need both controllers to support the IOPS. (I/O's per second.)
2) High raw bandwidth. If you need raw bandwidth and your data load is non-cacheable, then really software RAID + a JBOD may be able to get the job done here, if you have a multi-CPU box so one CPU can do the RAID-ing. Again, two controllers are usually going to provide you with the best bandwidth. SATA striped across a sufficient number of drives can give you fairly decent I/O, but not as good as FC.
There are "low end" arrays available that will offer reduced redundancy. The IBM DS 400 is an example. This box is OEM'd from Adaptec, and pretty much uses a ServRAID adapter as the "guts" of the box. This unit uses FC on the host side, and SCSI drives on the disk side. It is available in single and dual controller models. (Obligatory note: I do work for IBM, but I am not a sales drone.) This setup has the distinct advantage of being fully supportable by your vendor. A homegrown box will not have that important advantage.
Don't be scared away by the list price, as nobody ever pays it. Contact your local IBM branch office (or IBM business partner/reseller), and they can hook you up.
This unit is also available as part of an "IBM SAN Starter Kit" which gives you a couple of bargain-barrel FC switches, four HBA's, and one of these arrays w/
SirWired
So basically what you are saying is that the punishment of a serious crime should be based on the ability of somebody to frame you for it?
What is happening here is you are confusing the difference between conviction and sentencing. In the criminal justice system, determination of guilt and seriousness of sentence are two separate functions. A conviction is based on the amount of evidence available. Your sentence is based on the crime, NOT how likely it is your conviction is correct. (At least in theory.) Those convicted by circumstantial evidence don't (or shouldn't, anyway) receive a greater or lesser sentence than those convicted by 50 eyewitnesses and 40 forensic scientists. This would reward clever criminals that are good at covering their tracks.
While a wrong conviction may be more likely for such a serious and villified crime, (I honestly don't know), that does not mean that the punishment should be reduced. Instead, the standards for evidence should be raised higher if wrong convictions are a problem.
The determiniation of standards for evidence is a whole other topic that is beyond the scope of this post.
SirWired
If you are the only one in your dept. working this hard, and you have an understanding boss, let him know, and maybe you can get some relief, like getting some of the work moved to others who aren't working as hard.
Also, I'm a little confused about your overtime situation. If you are paid for overtime, then you are non-exempt. If you do not get paid for overtime, you are exempt. (As in: Exempt from overtime laws.)
If everybody at your office is working this hard, then yeah, it's time to take some "flex" time during the day to do at least a phone interview. If they aren't paying you by the hour, then it is perfectly right for you to do so. (You aren't physically chained to your desk, are you?) If they are paying by the hour, just charge them for less OT.
Remember, you work to live, not the other way around.
SirWired
Personally, I have no problem with DRM, as long as it is correctly applied, and it is an optional feature for me to obtain content.
Bad DRM: Evil crap done to music CD's to cripple them on anything resembling a CD-ROM drive.
Good DRM: FairPlay on the iPod, (or for that matter, the DRM on most MP3 Players). Sure, the DRM scheme itself may be a restrictive PITA, but it is optional. If I don't want to muck about with FairPlay, I don't have to use it. The device will accept plain old MP3's just fine.
As long as the DRM is not sneaked in, and the terms not stupid, and there is an alternate (although perhaps more expensive) means of obtaining the content without DRM, it is a perfectly acceptable business model in my eyes.
SirWired
The only way to make what you are worth is to go into business for yourself. If you cannot hack it, then you were never worth that much in the first place. ... If they were smart enough to actually do something with their life other than working for someone else, then they would branch off and start their own company. If they arent smart enough, then I am doing them a favor by employing them and helping them feed themselves.
I know SlashDot isn't exactly the place to go for humility, but this statement is pretty damn arrogant. There are some people (like myself), that LIKE not having to worry about anything but the technology. I am an Engineer. That is what I do. I am pretty damn good at it. I don't want to be a marketer, accountant, salesman, lawyer, manager, or even supervisor. Those functions are all necessary time (or money) sinks for anybody going alone, especially if you have one or more employees. Doing all that "overhead" crap would subtract from the time I get to do the work I enjoy doing. This doesn't mean I am not worth anything (my employer certainly would diasgree, given what they are paying me), it means that I choose to be an Engineer, not an entrepenur. I like having my gargantutan employer do all that other crap. I show up to work every day, I work what I consider to be reasonable hours every week, (50 or so) and I get my paycheck twice a month. In return, my employer charges customers about 2 1/2 times what they pay me.
That is more fair than it sounds.
I remember reading somewhere in a "guide to being an independent consultant", that if you plan to actually make money, your hourly rate should be three times what you would get in an equivalent hourly job. This covers downtime, the value of the benefits you aren't getting from your employer anymore, overhead expenses, etc.
In return for paying me far less than what they get paid, they will sell my services, write contracs, give me health insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, a retirement plan, bill the customer, collect payment, arrange financing, pay me to go to conferences, give me "downtime" to muck about in the lab doing whatever the heck I want on equipment I couldn't possibly afford on my own, (or cost-justify in any business with less than 1000+ employees), give me time off to go write a book (about their products of course, but it is still a refreshing change of pace), etc. Most important to me as an Engineer is the chance to be a part of something far bigger than anything I could arrange on my own. Let others get all the glory for being the fearless leader, just let me do my job doing something I enjoy, and kicking butt doing it.
It is almost guaranteed that you arent being paid what you are worth, because then where is the profit for your employer?
This is an idiotic statement. Have you EVER heard of the concept of "value add"? Or for that matter, do you even UNDERSTAND the concept of a "fair trade"? Business is not a "zero-sum" game. They go over this in every "intro to business" course.
The computer you write your little programs on... where did you get it? Naturally you bought it from some place that sells computers (or computer parts, if that is your thing). Why did you buy the computer? After all, you could have created your own CPU, designed your own motherboard, built your own hard drive, created all your cables, designed a power supply, etc.? Somebody else (the computer seller) just made a profit off of you! Why didn't you do all those things? Because it was a heck of a lot easier and cheaper to let somebody else make a million computers, and sell you one of them, than it was for you to make your own, starting from scratch.
You paid good money to the computer seller because you thought you could derive more value from owning the computer than you were paying the seller give you one. You received what you felt to be a good value for the money paid. The seller of the computer we would assume received enough money fr
Running that CCD full-time takes a LOT of battery juice, which is why the battery in a P&S Digital Camera dies a heck of a lot quicker than a DSLR.
Video cameras run at a lower resolution and have a physically smaller CCD, which in turn requires less battery power. They also have batteries larger than would be practical to put in a digital camera.
This means that you are unlikely to see a DSLR (which uses a larger sensor than a P&S) running as an HDTV camera substitute any time soon.
SirWired
If you want to see a sturdy keyboard, hunt around for an old IBM Model M. While the sound may drive your friends nuts, there is no finer keyboard ever made. You can get these at any computer swap meet or by digging through the junk closet of any data center.
SirWired
While the change may not be advantageous for on-line resellers, it puts them on a level playing field with Brick-and-Mortar retailers.
Currently, it is a very common practice to compare different products (i.e. Electronics) at physical stores, and then go purchase the actual item online to avoid sales tax. This is rather unfair to the physical retailer since the consumer is avoiding a tax he is supposed to pay. The online retailer is deriving an unjust benefit from the consumer avoiding the laws of their state.
And no, I don't think consumers are buying goods online that they would not have bought otherwise simply to avoid sales tax. In any case, that is not the concern of tax law, since the consumer is ALREADY supposed to be paying the tax.
The current state of affairs in an unfair subsidy of online (and mail-order) retailers that do not operate any physical stores.
Why should amazon.com be largely exempt from sales tax, while bestbuy.com has to charge sales tax on the same items?
SirWired
They're making some sort of guarantees about their own Google web site in TFA, but what about all their affiliate relays? Will Google allow customers to flood those with annoying graphical ads?
I believe from reports, and what isn't in the post, that Google will be providing search affiliates with rope to hang themselves with, a gun to shoot themselves with, etc. Basically, it appears Google will give affiliates the option of graphical crap. If those sites want to annoy their users, Google will be more than happy to let them, and make money in the process.
This is not much of a change from the status quo for the affiliates. If a site thinks graphical ads are appropriate, they can get them from any number of ad providers, just not Google. For Google, this is a lost market, until now.
Google has made the decision that they do not believe such ads are appropriate for their own web search, so they won't be carrying them. Notice that non web-search pages aren't included under that umbrella. I think this means that image results and maybe news will start carrying banners.
I am encouraged by the fact that they are promising not to put awful dancing crap all over the screen anywhere on Google's site. I really HATE those ads that keep me from actually reading the page content.
SirWired
"Again, this measure creates no new taxes, it merely shifts the burden of collection from the consuemer to the retailer. (And would also vastly increase compliance with the existing tax)"
Idiotic statement.
Errr... it's true. Consumers are legally supposed to pay the sales tax already on goods purchased out of state. This measure does not create any new taxes that were not there before.
SirWired
In California alone, we have over 50 counties that add their own special tax on top of the state tax. And then each city can do the same.
Proceeding in parallel with this bill is an effort by the states to unify tax categories. Then, to determine the tax for a particluar item, you choose one of five item (IIRC) categories, and then determine the tax based on the consumer's address. Again, there are plenty of web-sites that do this ALL THE TIME. It is not rocket science. Yes, it does require somebody to maintain the street adress / tax rate database. This database is not that much different from the Zip+4 database used for mailing by most companies that use the postal service. In fact, it could just be extended to contain tax rate fields. Every block for every street in the country is already in that database.
Yes, it would be a hell of a job if every company had to maintain that database on their own, but that is most certainly not necessary. In fact a single Google query returned such a database for only $1000 / yr, including montly updates. And that was just the first hit. For a business with $5M+ in gross sales (the only companies affected by the proposed law), this is nothing.
Why the hell should I have to pay tax to a governmant that I can't vote for? You are suposed to pay tax to YOUR local government, the one that you have a duty to vote for once or twice a year. That's the way it's always been, though possibly there's some exceptions that they've slinked through.
You don't understand... the business isn't paying the tax to the remote government, the consumer is. The business will bear the burden of collecting the tax (which will involve some cost, yes), but the tax is a line item directly charged to the consumer. If the consumer objects, then they can talk to their local government.
Also note that even with this law, each state will get to choose to participate in this or not. If your state doesn't want to sign up for this system, then businesses in your state will not be required to collect the taxes.
SirWired
You are right, sales tax rates change all the time, but Software updates? No, database updates. When the postal service changes zip code boundries, it does not require "software updates" in databases throughout the country. Software updates would indeed be a pain in the ass, and they would be necessary if the whole idea of sales taxes were to undergo radical revisions every year, like income tax does. Database updates don't require extensive testing, they just require the company supplying the databasee (a simple flat file would be all that was necessary) to double-check their updates.
Accompaning this effort are the same states simplifying their tax systems, by reducing and unifying the categories to ease the burden on the businesses subject to these laws.
Tracking tax by state at the end of a quarter is not a big deal. This is a single database report that would total up the sales tax charged for each state over the quarter. That is a 50-line report. I'm not seeing this as being a big burden.
In fact, I am not sure if the law would allow the states to require you to send money to other states. More likely (and this would make more senses), you fill out a now longer form for your own state showing how much of your check is supposed to go to each state.
Asserting that it is far more economical for individuals to keep track of their purchases is obviously not correct. It would require each citizen of each state educating themselves on the tax categories for their state and classifying every item they purchased over the year, by hand, since John Q. Citizen doesn't have an item database for everything he bought. Even at a half-hour per citizen, this is not an insubstantial burden when you multiply it by the number of citizens in each state.
SirWired
There is absolutely no substantial difference between the database necessary for this, and what is necessary for Zip+4 lookups. Address goes in, tax rate(s) come out. Each item has a tax category. Your shopping cart uses the appropriate database ops to apply the taxes for each item to the order total. At the end of the quarter, you run a report to generate the tax totals per tax jurisdiction and tax category.
This is not rocket science, and there is nothing preventing somebody from making a free database available.
I don't see this being a big deal, especially since the proposed law only applies to businesses grossing more than $5M per year.
SirWired
This is a far smaller paperwork burden on a business (the bill only affects business that gross more than $5M) than on consumers which currently are theoretically required to retain records of all out-of-state purchases over a year.
This software is not rocket-science. Address goes in, tax rate(s) come out. It is no more complicated than a Zip+4 database. The same group of states that wants this bill is also working to simplify their sales tax categories to be more uniform across states. This would require the business to add a field to the item database to indicate the tax catagory.
I don't think the governments are afraid of consumers realizing how expensive the taxes are (since sales taxes are already a line-item on every receipt when they go to the store). Even fairly heavy users of mail-order (like myself), purchase most of their spending in-state.
I think what governments are afraid of is attempting to enforce an untenable paperwork burden on individual consumers. Even though I agree that there would be additional software requirements for large businesses, their overhead would be far smaller than additional record-keeping by individuals.
SirWired
Err... if you read TFA, you will notice that the proposed law only affects business that gross more than $5M. Most one-man shops won't be affected by this.
SirWired
Sales tax is meant to be a tax upon the purchases of citizens, not a tax on businesses that sell things. ALL states with a sales tax technically require citizens to mail in sales tax for goods that were purchased out of state. The fact that a good was purchased out of state matters not, since it is the good being taxed, not the business itself. State income and local property taxes cover the costs of the business being physically located in the state, and indeed Amazon still wouldn't have to pay those.
This situation is rather sub-optimal for a couple of reasons:
1) Few people actually pay the taxes on goods purchased out of state. Whether or not they should be required to is a different debate than on who is supposed to track and collect them.
2) It is far easier for a business to keep track of what they sell where than it is for an individual to keep track of everything they purchase out of state.
This is a debate on who is supposed to collect the taxes, not a debate on the taxes themselves. Currently, the consumer is supposed to self-collect, and the states would like the out-of-state businesses to collect instead. (This is what requires federal authorization.)
Your theory on CHOOSING not to have stores in a state is bogus, because the tax is in no way related to the resouces used by the company in that state. If Amazon decides to have a SINGLE employee working out of their house in say, Vermont, that will trigger the collection of sales tax for every order going to that state.
Again, this measure creates no new taxes, it merely shifts the burden of collection from the consuemer to the retailer. (And would also vastly increase compliance with the existing tax)
SirWired