I just checked how much Microsoft Office Home and Business costs when put on a Dell computer - 179 USD, right there on the Dell site, for a desktop computer.
OK, so what evidence do you have that Dell doesn't mark that as $150 for software and $29 for installation, on their accounting system?
I've posted before about this calamity that is removing Windows 7 from the shelves for this 8 nonsense.
Yep. When they pulled Windows 7 in December, this fortune was inevitable. Oh, you can still find a retail copy on Amazon for $400, but you can almost get a new basic PC, with 7, for that.
The problem with Microsoft and Nokia, is that nobody really wants a Microsoft Phone
Does Microsoft even really want a Windows Phone? Most of us figured Microsoft wanted Nokia for the IP, so they could sue the shit out of Google, rather than trying to make an honest buck.
I doubt this story is even true - it sounds like good cover for upcoming litigation.
Underbidding can happen for two reasons: a) fraud b) poorly written specifications
If it's a) then expect to be in court (or pay the bribes necessary to the corrupt officials of whichever organization is paying). If it's b) then perhaps you shoud have paid a real project planner and requirements people to do their jobs. $2200 doesn't cut it.
I'm not about to start testing every library of the OS that I build against, nor the Java stack itself.
Which is sane, but if you use an open source OS and an open source Java stack, there are other people doing that kind of testing, and even more importantly, social pressure for the developers, because they know other people will be looking.
If you're using a secret-source library, then you're completely at the developer's mercy (though your OS can detect certain atrocious behaviors). Like a sibling post mentioned, make sure you can sue them if they screw up and you get hit because of it. Liability is another way to place social pressure on developers.
If it's secret source *AND* you sign away your right to sue, then you better tell your insurance agent, and be prepared to pay dearly for the coverage. That library has got to be essential and/or irreplacable to put yourself in that kind of risk stance.
Oh, that's silly, the President of Ukrane would never have ordered the protesters' phones bricked!
The only thing I have to add is that the Statists will keep coming back and back for this kind of killswitch, and eventually it will pass, and they'll have the FCC mandate such a feature.
In such an environment, Free Hardware will have to become illegal. But keep voting for those who seek to rule you - it's for your own safety.
Seriously, if you come here to talk about how this isn't a fundamental bitcoin problem, you deserve to have your noise smacked with newspaper like a dog.
Perhaps some comparisons will help clear up some of the confused and conflated issues here (sticking a banana in your ear isn't the way to understand this).
Bitcoins in the hot wallet are like the pile of cash at the retail bank. Most banks don't keep $615,000 of cash at a retail location. That's not a smart move - armored trucks exist for a reason. Flexcoin looks lazy in this regard.
Even so, sometimes banks are robbed (yes, despite all that 'regulation'). Except with banks, there's no way to trace the money, usually. With bitcoin, the "blockchain" knows where the money went and that can be used [if anybody chooses to do so] to track down the thieves. Unmarked Benjamins can't do that.
To help ameliorate the robbery problem, many banks have security guards. Some of them are competent, some are 86-year-old men who are napping on a chair by the window. It seems like Flexcoin had the electronic equivalent of the latter.
Most banks are insured against such losses. It seems that Flexcoin wasn't, and if their security was that weak, they'd probably have trouble acquiring such insurance. For Bitcoin insurance to catch hold will require finding a jurisdiction that can allow for such an office and the ability to inspect facilities in jurisdictions that don't. Some governments can and will used violence to preclude effective Bitcoin insurance in their jurisdiction.
If your argument is that Bitcoin, five years into its existance, doesn't have the same safety measures that using a MasterCard does, then nobody is going to argue with you. If you're trying to argue that Bitcoin cannot be used to make systems that are at least as safe as fiat cash, then there is some fundamental misunderstanding about how such systems work, and how the blockchain works.
Remember that USD insurance is largely illusory - BoA recently moved something like $75T worth of toxic assets into their FDIC insured subsidiaries (US GDP is something like $13T). Private banking insurance is a bit more reliable.
And I say this as somebody who is bearish on the long-term outlook for Bitcoin as an end-user protocol, but as backbone protocol it may well have value.
You'd have to see the contract. It's probably written that if certain parts are broken, other parts remain in effect, but that can't be every part, because then the guy never would get paid in the first place.
(cue IT guys saying "but we have to do that because xyz stupid law requires we monitor everything going in and out and if we cant monitor SSL traffic, we would have to block it and break half the internet")
Why do you have a problem with that? They should just let employees shuttle corporate trade secrets out of the company via a web browser because you feel like doing your personal banking on a work computer?
Make the case for giving every employee unrestricted Internet access from a computer connected to the corporate LAN.
Ford having Blackberry will probably cause exactly 3 customers to pick ford
Did you completely miss that Ford is going with QNX, not Blackberry's phone OS, both properties of the not-dead-yet RIM?
QNX will survive whatever re-org comes because it's valuable - there are some robots rolling around Mars right now powered by QNX.
I'd rather see something open source, but as I understand the market, QNX's real-hardtime is still better than linux can do. There's even a solution out there which runs linux on top of QNX and linux gets hard-realtime via the underlying QNX.
Presumably, Ford is has learned its lesson and will do an IP network inside the car and not have a dozen proprietary stacks running incompatible half re-inventions of various flavors of tech. QNX is suitable for running your brakes - iOS is barely passable for running your entertainment system, and after two major releases your car will be abandoned. Trusting Apple with a 20-year commitment is fiduciarily incompetent.
I wouldn't buy a Ford vehicle made after the early-80's but that doesn't mean they're not making a good decision now.
Sure, but accreditation is a non-issue if an existing school expands.
But constrained supply is beneficial for the incumbents - all cartels take advantage of that. It's the upstart competitors in a free market that drive down prices.
The Dutch don't pay the British TV licence Fee that funds the BBC, so they can't complain.
This is a reasonable complaint. Given a limited resolution, condensing a geographic area will result in a less detailed weather report/forecast for that region. Why should one region get preference?
The irony is that if the Scottish are successful they won't need the BBC's forecast for very long.
The obvious thing to do is to take the screen space, assign the top of the region to the top coordinate, the bottom of the region to the top coordinate, and use an equal measure for each unit of distance between the two.
Is there some reason the obvious thing is the naive thing? I mean, aside from the obvious difficulty of accurately re-projecting those satellite images. Before that can be contemplated, the resultant projection has to be determined.
I'm pretty sure that even if they resolve everything, slashdotters will bitch about its color.
Nope. I spent good money on a handful of RPi's, wasted a few dozen hours on the beasts, just to finally turn up via searching specific error messages on Google that the USB/Ethernet stack is fatally crippled in design and that the GPU blob is secret-source and buggy and crashes on many media file decodes.
Now, for being a '21st Century C=64' and learning computing for school children, the thing is fine. The problem comes from all the geek-chic folks who are hocking the RPi for media center devices, network devices, and a replacement for microcontrollers. Perhaps the next generation of Pi will be fine for them, but the dominant culture currently isn't hipster, it's "The First Rule of RPi Club is Don't Talk About the Bugs".
That just wastes the time and money of people who have been mislead, only to wind up on BBB, Arduino, Atom, or AMD-E to get something reliable going.
If there's a known-faulty part expect the engineers to tell each other about it. Geek-Culture Nerds - who knows, they probably have to check with their self-appoint high priests to see what's cool today.
Then created a debt that can survive even bankruptcy chaining the earnings of someone for life!
Duh - why do you think student loans were nationalized in 2009? It's part of the push to create a very large underclass ruled by a few elites (i.e. a fascist plutocracy).
People need to withdraw their consent for this system *before* they find themselves destitute. Instead they walk into a voting booth saying, "I'll vote for the lesser evil!" and then get a sticker for doing so, like a kindergartener.
So why isn't supply responding to the glut of money? It's had decades.
Accreditation is a legally-sanctioned cartel.
I followed a small startup school for a while in the mid 90's - they tried for years to get accreditation as college and ultimately folded because they could not get it. The education was fine, but they dared to allow students to take classes online (c.1996) which was seen as too much of a threat to the cartel.
A degree from a non-accredited school is maligned, so without a marketable service they had to go out of business.
So: "because the politicians want it that way" is the actual answer to your question.
Read up on tally sticks. At least in Britain, silver didn't make a comeback until the 1600's. If you have 209 minutes to be rapidly educated, check out The Money Masters. It also contains 15 minutes of conjecture, so keep your critical thinking cap on but enjoy the high signal:noise ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
I just checked how much Microsoft Office Home and Business costs when put on a Dell computer - 179 USD, right there on the Dell site, for a desktop computer.
OK, so what evidence do you have that Dell doesn't mark that as $150 for software and $29 for installation, on their accounting system?
Acting all righteous to cover up your laziness is the new geek chic.
I've posted before about this calamity that is removing Windows 7 from the shelves for this 8 nonsense.
Yep. When they pulled Windows 7 in December, this fortune was inevitable. Oh, you can still find a retail copy on Amazon for $400, but you can almost get a new basic PC, with 7, for that.
The problem with Microsoft and Nokia, is that nobody really wants a Microsoft Phone
Does Microsoft even really want a Windows Phone? Most of us figured Microsoft wanted Nokia for the IP, so they could sue the shit out of Google, rather than trying to make an honest buck.
I doubt this story is even true - it sounds like good cover for upcoming litigation.
Do you deal in any trade secrets, monopoly grants, or have NDA's with clients?
I can see where a company without such worries could have nothing that would need auditing and that would be most excellent for the IT folks.
underbidding is too common
Underbidding can happen for two reasons:
a) fraud
b) poorly written specifications
If it's a) then expect to be in court (or pay the bribes necessary to the corrupt officials of whichever organization is paying). If it's b) then perhaps you shoud have paid a real project planner and requirements people to do their jobs. $2200 doesn't cut it.
I'm not about to start testing every library of the OS that I build against, nor the Java stack itself.
Which is sane, but if you use an open source OS and an open source Java stack, there are other people doing that kind of testing, and even more importantly, social pressure for the developers, because they know other people will be looking.
If you're using a secret-source library, then you're completely at the developer's mercy (though your OS can detect certain atrocious behaviors). Like a sibling post mentioned, make sure you can sue them if they screw up and you get hit because of it. Liability is another way to place social pressure on developers.
If it's secret source *AND* you sign away your right to sue, then you better tell your insurance agent, and be prepared to pay dearly for the coverage. That library has got to be essential and/or irreplacable to put yourself in that kind of risk stance.
Oh, that's silly, the President of Ukrane would never have ordered the protesters' phones bricked!
The only thing I have to add is that the Statists will keep coming back and back for this kind of killswitch, and eventually it will pass, and they'll have the FCC mandate such a feature.
In such an environment, Free Hardware will have to become illegal. But keep voting for those who seek to rule you - it's for your own safety.
Seriously, if you come here to talk about how this isn't a fundamental bitcoin problem, you deserve to have your noise smacked with newspaper like a dog.
Perhaps some comparisons will help clear up some of the confused and conflated issues here (sticking a banana in your ear isn't the way to understand this).
Bitcoins in the hot wallet are like the pile of cash at the retail bank. Most banks don't keep $615,000 of cash at a retail location. That's not a smart move - armored trucks exist for a reason. Flexcoin looks lazy in this regard.
Even so, sometimes banks are robbed (yes, despite all that 'regulation'). Except with banks, there's no way to trace the money, usually. With bitcoin, the "blockchain" knows where the money went and that can be used [if anybody chooses to do so] to track down the thieves. Unmarked Benjamins can't do that.
To help ameliorate the robbery problem, many banks have security guards. Some of them are competent, some are 86-year-old men who are napping on a chair by the window. It seems like Flexcoin had the electronic equivalent of the latter.
Most banks are insured against such losses. It seems that Flexcoin wasn't, and if their security was that weak, they'd probably have trouble acquiring such insurance. For Bitcoin insurance to catch hold will require finding a jurisdiction that can allow for such an office and the ability to inspect facilities in jurisdictions that don't. Some governments can and will used violence to preclude effective Bitcoin insurance in their jurisdiction.
If your argument is that Bitcoin, five years into its existance, doesn't have the same safety measures that using a MasterCard does, then nobody is going to argue with you. If you're trying to argue that Bitcoin cannot be used to make systems that are at least as safe as fiat cash, then there is some fundamental misunderstanding about how such systems work, and how the blockchain works.
Remember that USD insurance is largely illusory - BoA recently moved something like $75T worth of toxic assets into their FDIC insured subsidiaries (US GDP is something like $13T). Private banking insurance is a bit more reliable.
And I say this as somebody who is bearish on the long-term outlook for Bitcoin as an end-user protocol, but as backbone protocol it may well have value.
Not everyone is a naked capitalist.
Hey, if you wanna claim that not spending time working all year to earn $50 at the end isn't good capitalism, then by all means.
You'd have to see the contract. It's probably written that if certain parts are broken, other parts remain in effect, but that can't be every part, because then the guy never would get paid in the first place.
(cue IT guys saying "but we have to do that because xyz stupid law requires we monitor everything going in and out and if we cant monitor SSL traffic, we would have to block it and break half the internet")
Why do you have a problem with that? They should just let employees shuttle corporate trade secrets out of the company via a web browser because you feel like doing your personal banking on a work computer?
Make the case for giving every employee unrestricted Internet access from a computer connected to the corporate LAN.
So, you don't have ferries where you live?
For the millionth time on Slashdot - don't assume that because you don't have a personal use case for a technological feature that it's a bad idea.
Ford having Blackberry will probably cause exactly 3 customers to pick ford
Did you completely miss that Ford is going with QNX, not Blackberry's phone OS, both properties of the not-dead-yet RIM?
QNX will survive whatever re-org comes because it's valuable - there are some robots rolling around Mars right now powered by QNX.
I'd rather see something open source, but as I understand the market, QNX's real-hardtime is still better than linux can do. There's even a solution out there which runs linux on top of QNX and linux gets hard-realtime via the underlying QNX.
Presumably, Ford is has learned its lesson and will do an IP network inside the car and not have a dozen proprietary stacks running incompatible half re-inventions of various flavors of tech. QNX is suitable for running your brakes - iOS is barely passable for running your entertainment system, and after two major releases your car will be abandoned. Trusting Apple with a 20-year commitment is fiduciarily incompetent.
I wouldn't buy a Ford vehicle made after the early-80's but that doesn't mean they're not making a good decision now.
Sure, but accreditation is a non-issue if an existing school expands.
But constrained supply is beneficial for the incumbents - all cartels take advantage of that. It's the upstart competitors in a free market that drive down prices.
The Dutch don't pay the British TV licence Fee that funds the BBC, so they can't complain.
This is a reasonable complaint. Given a limited resolution, condensing a geographic area will result in a less detailed weather report/forecast for that region. Why should one region get preference?
The irony is that if the Scottish are successful they won't need the BBC's forecast for very long.
the bottom of the region to the bottom coordinate,
Doh!
The obvious thing to do is to take the screen space, assign the top of the region to the top coordinate, the bottom of the region to the top coordinate, and use an equal measure for each unit of distance between the two.
Is there some reason the obvious thing is the naive thing? I mean, aside from the obvious difficulty of accurately re-projecting those satellite images. Before that can be contemplated, the resultant projection has to be determined.
You do realise that after this announcement, videocore is the most open core on an ARM chip ever, right?
Oooh, so now we can fix the buggy media decodes? Oh, wait, no, that's not open - just the GL/shader stuff.
I'm pretty sure that even if they resolve everything, slashdotters will bitch about its color.
Nope. I spent good money on a handful of RPi's, wasted a few dozen hours on the beasts, just to finally turn up via searching specific error messages on Google that the USB/Ethernet stack is fatally crippled in design and that the GPU blob is secret-source and buggy and crashes on many media file decodes.
Now, for being a '21st Century C=64' and learning computing for school children, the thing is fine. The problem comes from all the geek-chic folks who are hocking the RPi for media center devices, network devices, and a replacement for microcontrollers. Perhaps the next generation of Pi will be fine for them, but the dominant culture currently isn't hipster, it's "The First Rule of RPi Club is Don't Talk About the Bugs".
That just wastes the time and money of people who have been mislead, only to wind up on BBB, Arduino, Atom, or AMD-E to get something reliable going.
If there's a known-faulty part expect the engineers to tell each other about it. Geek-Culture Nerds - who knows, they probably have to check with their self-appoint high priests to see what's cool today.
Right Wing Ideologues looking for Publicity get their asses handed to them.
The NCPPR were only trying to raise their own profile by attacking Apple's policy, nothing more.
Your second claim defeats your first. I've never heard of NCPPR before.
Then created a debt that can survive even bankruptcy chaining the earnings of someone for life!
Duh - why do you think student loans were nationalized in 2009? It's part of the push to create a very large underclass ruled by a few elites (i.e. a fascist plutocracy).
People need to withdraw their consent for this system *before* they find themselves destitute. Instead they walk into a voting booth saying, "I'll vote for the lesser evil!" and then get a sticker for doing so, like a kindergartener.
So why isn't supply responding to the glut of money? It's had decades.
Accreditation is a legally-sanctioned cartel.
I followed a small startup school for a while in the mid 90's - they tried for years to get accreditation as college and ultimately folded because they could not get it. The education was fine, but they dared to allow students to take classes online (c.1996) which was seen as too much of a threat to the cartel.
A degree from a non-accredited school is maligned, so without a marketable service they had to go out of business.
So: "because the politicians want it that way" is the actual answer to your question.
a random Bitcoin guy could speak authoritatively
Well, not without the Satoshi key.
the dark ages' reliance on metals
Read up on tally sticks. At least in Britain, silver didn't make a comeback until the 1600's. If you have 209 minutes to be rapidly educated, check out The Money Masters. It also contains 15 minutes of conjecture, so keep your critical thinking cap on but enjoy the high signal:noise ratio.