The market is not free. Tax structures encourage exactly the type of spending (and selling) that Microsoft happens to engage in.
The way US taxes work is this: you can make all the money you want, but you have to get rid of it this quarter. If you use it to buy things of value, you pay more taxes. If you fritter it away on worthless services or give it to employees, you pay less taxes. So there are basically two strategies you can take in order to pay the least amount of taxes possible: give away every dime you make, or make sure you never make a profit.
Did you ever wonder why companies hire people when times are good and fire them when times are bad? It's not because they need more employees to help make widgets. The amount of widgets made has more to do with employee productivity and availability of natural resources than the number of warm bodies employed. And the amount of widgets sold and consumed has almost nothing to do with macroeconomics. When the company is making more profit, they need to hire more employees to write off their taxes.
Now, this applies as much for Microsoft as for its customers, businesses. If you run a business and want to hire your worthless nephew, you don't want to give him an actual job to do. You want to pay somebody else to make it look like he's doing a job. So there's Microsoft with their point-and-click busywork crapware. Now everybody's nephew can make 50 grand surfing the internet and writing spell-checked e-mails. And software is worthless. It's not even legal to re-sell. So you don't pay taxes on whatever you give to Microsoft. It's win-win-win. You get a tax write-off, your nephew gets what you would just give him anyways, Microsoft gets billions of dollars, and the government gets to increase taxes on those too stupid to cheat.
Cheap PCs, idiot-proof software, and the fruits of a successful oil war turned the 90s into the high employment, zero productivity fuck-up that we all remember. And it turned Bill Gates into the wealthiest person on the planet.
But this is nothing new. It's been US policy since Henry Ford rolled the first Model A off the assembly line. He figured out that he could give all his profits to his employees, and that they would just turn around and give some of it right back to him to purchase the cars that they made. That's worked pretty well, of course, until those employees stopped needing new Fords to drive. So for nearly a hundred years there was no incentive to use robots instead of humans to increase the quality of American cars. It took a competitor outside the reach of the ridiculous US tax policy to build a better automobile.
Somebody mentioned Donald Trump. He has taken the second strategy. The man spends more time in bankruptcy court than in the penthouse. He owns half of Manhattan, but I'll bet, on paper, he never turns a profit. So, in reality, he probably gives away as much as anyone, but instead of going to his personal charities and foundations, it goes to his customers and employees.
There are all sorts of other consequences to US tax policy, from the byzantine schemes that Enron engaged in, to companies not looking (or investing) past the next quarter, to recent generations having to change jobs (and careers) every few years, to artificially high employment rates, to volatile market shifts and recessions, to the rise of government services and the catastrophic collapse of those services due to generational demographics, to successful start-ups that turn to crap when the profits and investments and accountants and employees start rolling in.
So, in conclusion, if we had a truly free market, 90% of people would be out of work, products would last longer, society would openly (rather than secretly) engage in the type of "gift economy" that out dipshit president ridicules in countries in the Middle East, and there would be less lying and bullshit going on in the US in general. Really, besides full employment, piddly busywork and products that are designed to fail, lies and bullshit and idiots who believe them is all our obtrusive taxes have gotten us.
That was my first thought as well. With new technologies like GNU software radio, the lines between "rebroadcasting" and "using" can become blurred.
I definitely have the right to use anything within the confines of my house. But, if I setup an antenna and let my neighbors connect their radios to it, am I "rebroadcasting"? If I setup a GNU radio box and send the (undecoded) signals out over the internet, am I "rebroadcasting"? What if I only send them to myself?
And, more importantly, why should radio and TV stations really give a damn anyways? Their services are supported by ad-revenue. If anything, I'm only helping to increase their viewership by rebroadcasting.
ATI does one thing well: multimedia PC hardware. And then they ruin it with their craptacular add-ons, limited, ugly software, shockingly bad drivers, completely missed opportunities in game development, and apparently cheap useless remotes.
ATI is to video hardware as Microsoft is to operating systems: a hype machine backed up by defective trinkets.
I expect 99% to lead nowhere and 1% to revolutionize the world.
I expect more like 60% to lead nowhere, 39% to help supplant fossil fuels and maintain our current energy use, and 1% to revolutionize the world.
Even at current population densities, there are quite a few renewable energy sources that are close to competing with fossil fuels. They require work to implement. And they aren't quite feasible as a plug-in replacement for oil and gas. But they *work*, and they're better than the alternative, which is less energy. And if the 1% doesn't actually revolutionalize the world, there are lots of renewable technologies that will make life better than not having any energy at all.
Taxation is such an awful way for governments to "correct" market failures.
They never do it correctly. I'm sure if there were carbon taxes today, they'd manage to make you pay to burn renewable fuels like wood, ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel along with fossil fuels.
Tax revenue never goes to correct the problems it was meant to correct. In a democracy, politicians will always find a way to divert funds to pork projects or buy votes with dubious social programs.
In the long run, governments become dependent upon taxes from sources that they were originally meant to discourage. Taxes then become the perfect way for harmful industries to become legitimized in the eyes of their regulators. History is rife with examples of corrupt governments becoming one with those who profit from harming others.
What's really better, your neighbor spewing pollutants into the air and water, or him doing so with the backing of the government and military?
You're right. Geothermal is a hugely overlooked energy source. When people talk about "fossil fuel" usage, we think oil and gasoline for cars.
But just as much energy is used heating homes as it is for transportation. Geothermal systems, even just ground-source heat pump systems, are a great way to save energy in temperate climates. And co-generation is another excellent way of improving the energy efficiency of fossil fuels.
Small planes, birds, etc would all be problematic, as would the consequences of a broken tether.
Planes tend to not fly into things. That's one of the main goals of flying a plane. As for birds, I don't see how they could be any more of a problem for floating wind turbines than for regular wind turbines or, say, blimps. And the broken tether problem is easy to solve. Just think about it for more than a few minutes.
Having worked at both types of companies, I don't know which is worse.
Some employers will drive a 486 into the ground, wasting hundreds of man-hours maintaining it, rather than spend any money to replace it. Others will waste tens of thousands of dollars buying any cheap, cobbled-together "solution" a salesperson puts in front of them and expect it to work exactly the way they (lied) said it would.
If there's a middle ground somewhere, I haven't found it.
What the hell is your employer doing picking solutions without any technical knowledge? (And, btw, did you miss the part where he said he works at a "small manufacturing company"?)
In case you haven't noticed, computers aren't cars. Many times you, as the admin, can't just "make them run reliably". And, even if you could, it would probably be a stupid hack or worse, technically illegal.
That's a common trick that vendors use to drive up their margins: sell an entire system based on a few features of the least important part, the applications software. In reality, software applications aren't really all that different. Especially in the area of business software, there is still enough competition to keep application vendors on their toes. And if your entire business hinges on a few important features that only exist in one solution, you should really be relying on in-house software and open source.
I never understand why small businesses completely re-design their workflow and IT every few years just because they have to upgrade software or failing hardware.
As an aside to this good advice, hardware means almost nothing. Software is what matters. Don't start off limiting your software choices based on hardware. But, by all means, do as the parent suggests and don't get locked into a Windows solution either.
If you have more than 100 employees and at least two competent IT personnel, you're in the perfect position to take advantage of the flexibility of Unix or Linux. Spend the time evaluating all of your options.
Thanks, I realize I may not have a 5 digit UID, but I had managed to figure that out. Besides, I don't exactly think it's the users or submitted articles that are the problem.
If Slashdot would let you, you could view my rejected submissions and see for yourself.
I don't know but the article quality on Slashdot really sucks lately. It's winter, and it's the holidays. Geeks aren't looking for articles about what it's like to work at Microsoft or the same old stuff about obscure OSS contests, the US gov't spying on us, Windows having scurity holes, yet another 'Ask Slashdot' "How do I admin a server?", or a (yawn) DE flamefest.
We're looking for something interesting or something to do. This is a site for hackers, remember? Not just middle-managers. I want to see articles about somebody heating their house with a server farm, or HOWTO build your own embedded system from a system-on-chip or something. I mean, ever since somebody decided Slashdot has to only be about OSS, there have been more articles about fscking Microsoft than anything really interesting.
Sony DRM use? Why only Sony? Are all other companies guaranteed to maintain ethical & reasonable DRM implementations?
In case it isn't obvious, this settlement only applies to Sony because they are the ones being sued. I would expect other businesses to take this as a sign that they can get off the hook easily for breaking into people's computers and vandalizing their software.
Okay. Let's say I want some open source software that I can put on an old PC, add a winmodem, soundcard, and headset, and make a functional encrypted phone that can be used on standard lines, with maybe some VoIP on the side.
What do I need? Software? Minimum hardware? Add-ons? Can I do it all with Asterisk? Will it sound awful?
A man in the middle means not just intercepting the communcation, but actively altering the information passed. In this case, the attacker can give each participant a false public key, to which the attacker knows the private key, and render the encryption moot.
You raise interesting points. The fundamental concept of capitalism is that successful businesses eventually make enough profit through competitive advantage to buy out their competitors, thus ensuring improvement in efficiency of the market. At that point, once a monopoly is reached, the assumption is that the successful monopolist will reduce prices enough to prevent competitors from entering the market, and maintain the monopoly.
Of course, that isn't what happens. Monopolies instead raise prices to take advantage of the high profits available. These high prices encourage others to enter the market. To maintain the monopoly, the market leader has to be constantly buying out new competitors. Theoretically, this process could go on forever. Alternatively, the monopoly either uses it's profits to branch out into new markets in which they have no real expertise or ploughs it's monopoly rents into executives', shareholders', and lenders' pockets.
The net result is that prices remain high, new opportunities appear for those with little or no expertise to enter markets that don't need them and make money regardless, the wealth gap widens, and the customer gets screwed.
Now, what that has to do with a small retail store, I have no idea. You might theoretically obtain enough competitive advantage through small things like process improvements to eventually buy out the pet store across town. But, more likely, your sister will marry a vice-president at the local bank and you'll get a lot of funding to buy out *all* the pet stores in town, and you'll spend your monopoly rents to pay off the loans necessary to do so, doing twice as much work for the same amount of profits. And, if not, you can always just raise prices 5% and your customers likely won't notice a difference until they open a Wal-Mart across the street. Because, let's face it, no matter what you're selling or what magical software you use to do so, you can't hold a candle to Wal-Mart. And that's the moral of the story for all of us: try to make as much money as you can until they open a Wal-Mart next door.
Slashdot Mirror
The market is not free. Tax structures encourage exactly the type of spending (and selling) that Microsoft happens to engage in.
The way US taxes work is this: you can make all the money you want, but you have to get rid of it this quarter. If you use it to buy things of value, you pay more taxes. If you fritter it away on worthless services or give it to employees, you pay less taxes. So there are basically two strategies you can take in order to pay the least amount of taxes possible: give away every dime you make, or make sure you never make a profit.
Did you ever wonder why companies hire people when times are good and fire them when times are bad? It's not because they need more employees to help make widgets. The amount of widgets made has more to do with employee productivity and availability of natural resources than the number of warm bodies employed. And the amount of widgets sold and consumed has almost nothing to do with macroeconomics. When the company is making more profit, they need to hire more employees to write off their taxes.
Now, this applies as much for Microsoft as for its customers, businesses. If you run a business and want to hire your worthless nephew, you don't want to give him an actual job to do. You want to pay somebody else to make it look like he's doing a job. So there's Microsoft with their point-and-click busywork crapware. Now everybody's nephew can make 50 grand surfing the internet and writing spell-checked e-mails. And software is worthless. It's not even legal to re-sell. So you don't pay taxes on whatever you give to Microsoft. It's win-win-win. You get a tax write-off, your nephew gets what you would just give him anyways, Microsoft gets billions of dollars, and the government gets to increase taxes on those too stupid to cheat.
Cheap PCs, idiot-proof software, and the fruits of a successful oil war turned the 90s into the high employment, zero productivity fuck-up that we all remember. And it turned Bill Gates into the wealthiest person on the planet.
But this is nothing new. It's been US policy since Henry Ford rolled the first Model A off the assembly line. He figured out that he could give all his profits to his employees, and that they would just turn around and give some of it right back to him to purchase the cars that they made. That's worked pretty well, of course, until those employees stopped needing new Fords to drive. So for nearly a hundred years there was no incentive to use robots instead of humans to increase the quality of American cars. It took a competitor outside the reach of the ridiculous US tax policy to build a better automobile.
Somebody mentioned Donald Trump. He has taken the second strategy. The man spends more time in bankruptcy court than in the penthouse. He owns half of Manhattan, but I'll bet, on paper, he never turns a profit. So, in reality, he probably gives away as much as anyone, but instead of going to his personal charities and foundations, it goes to his customers and employees.
There are all sorts of other consequences to US tax policy, from the byzantine schemes that Enron engaged in, to companies not looking (or investing) past the next quarter, to recent generations having to change jobs (and careers) every few years, to artificially high employment rates, to volatile market shifts and recessions, to the rise of government services and the catastrophic collapse of those services due to generational demographics, to successful start-ups that turn to crap when the profits and investments and accountants and employees start rolling in.
So, in conclusion, if we had a truly free market, 90% of people would be out of work, products would last longer, society would openly (rather than secretly) engage in the type of "gift economy" that out dipshit president ridicules in countries in the Middle East, and there would be less lying and bullshit going on in the US in general. Really, besides full employment, piddly busywork and products that are designed to fail, lies and bullshit and idiots who believe them is all our obtrusive taxes have gotten us.
That was my first thought as well. With new technologies like GNU software radio, the lines between "rebroadcasting" and "using" can become blurred.
I definitely have the right to use anything within the confines of my house. But, if I setup an antenna and let my neighbors connect their radios to it, am I "rebroadcasting"? If I setup a GNU radio box and send the (undecoded) signals out over the internet, am I "rebroadcasting"? What if I only send them to myself?
And, more importantly, why should radio and TV stations really give a damn anyways? Their services are supported by ad-revenue. If anything, I'm only helping to increase their viewership by rebroadcasting.
ATI does one thing well: multimedia PC hardware. And then they ruin it with their craptacular add-ons, limited, ugly software, shockingly bad drivers, completely missed opportunities in game development, and apparently cheap useless remotes.
ATI is to video hardware as Microsoft is to operating systems: a hype machine backed up by defective trinkets.
Are you confounding money and speech or has Russ really suggested restricting political speech?
I expect 99% to lead nowhere and 1% to revolutionize the world.
I expect more like 60% to lead nowhere, 39% to help supplant fossil fuels and maintain our current energy use, and 1% to revolutionize the world.
Even at current population densities, there are quite a few renewable energy sources that are close to competing with fossil fuels. They require work to implement. And they aren't quite feasible as a plug-in replacement for oil and gas. But they *work*, and they're better than the alternative, which is less energy. And if the 1% doesn't actually revolutionalize the world, there are lots of renewable technologies that will make life better than not having any energy at all.
Taxation is such an awful way for governments to "correct" market failures.
They never do it correctly. I'm sure if there were carbon taxes today, they'd manage to make you pay to burn renewable fuels like wood, ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel along with fossil fuels.
Tax revenue never goes to correct the problems it was meant to correct. In a democracy, politicians will always find a way to divert funds to pork projects or buy votes with dubious social programs.
In the long run, governments become dependent upon taxes from sources that they were originally meant to discourage. Taxes then become the perfect way for harmful industries to become legitimized in the eyes of their regulators. History is rife with examples of corrupt governments becoming one with those who profit from harming others.
What's really better, your neighbor spewing pollutants into the air and water, or him doing so with the backing of the government and military?
You're right. Geothermal is a hugely overlooked energy source. When people talk about "fossil fuel" usage, we think oil and gasoline for cars.
But just as much energy is used heating homes as it is for transportation. Geothermal systems, even just ground-source heat pump systems, are a great way to save energy in temperate climates. And co-generation is another excellent way of improving the energy efficiency of fossil fuels.
Small planes, birds, etc would all be problematic, as would the consequences of a broken tether.
Planes tend to not fly into things. That's one of the main goals of flying a plane. As for birds, I don't see how they could be any more of a problem for floating wind turbines than for regular wind turbines or, say, blimps. And the broken tether problem is easy to solve. Just think about it for more than a few minutes.
Having worked at both types of companies, I don't know which is worse.
Some employers will drive a 486 into the ground, wasting hundreds of man-hours maintaining it, rather than spend any money to replace it. Others will waste tens of thousands of dollars buying any cheap, cobbled-together "solution" a salesperson puts in front of them and expect it to work exactly the way they (lied) said it would.
If there's a middle ground somewhere, I haven't found it.
What the hell is your employer doing picking solutions without any technical knowledge? (And, btw, did you miss the part where he said he works at a "small manufacturing company"?)
In case you haven't noticed, computers aren't cars. Many times you, as the admin, can't just "make them run reliably". And, even if you could, it would probably be a stupid hack or worse, technically illegal.
That's a common trick that vendors use to drive up their margins: sell an entire system based on a few features of the least important part, the applications software. In reality, software applications aren't really all that different. Especially in the area of business software, there is still enough competition to keep application vendors on their toes. And if your entire business hinges on a few important features that only exist in one solution, you should really be relying on in-house software and open source.
I never understand why small businesses completely re-design their workflow and IT every few years just because they have to upgrade software or failing hardware.
As an aside to this good advice, hardware means almost nothing. Software is what matters. Don't start off limiting your software choices based on hardware. But, by all means, do as the parent suggests and don't get locked into a Windows solution either.
If you have more than 100 employees and at least two competent IT personnel, you're in the perfect position to take advantage of the flexibility of Unix or Linux. Spend the time evaluating all of your options.
Thanks, I realize I may not have a 5 digit UID, but I had managed to figure that out. Besides, I don't exactly think it's the users or submitted articles that are the problem.
If Slashdot would let you, you could view my rejected submissions and see for yourself.
I don't know but the article quality on Slashdot really sucks lately. It's winter, and it's the holidays. Geeks aren't looking for articles about what it's like to work at Microsoft or the same old stuff about obscure OSS contests, the US gov't spying on us, Windows having scurity holes, yet another 'Ask Slashdot' "How do I admin a server?", or a (yawn) DE flamefest.
We're looking for something interesting or something to do. This is a site for hackers, remember? Not just middle-managers. I want to see articles about somebody heating their house with a server farm, or HOWTO build your own embedded system from a system-on-chip or something. I mean, ever since somebody decided Slashdot has to only be about OSS, there have been more articles about fscking Microsoft than anything really interesting.
To be pedantic, you actually broke the law when you installed the Linux DVD player, which is only slightly more ridiculous.
Sony DRM use? Why only Sony? Are all other companies guaranteed to maintain ethical & reasonable DRM implementations?
In case it isn't obvious, this settlement only applies to Sony because they are the ones being sued. I would expect other businesses to take this as a sign that they can get off the hook easily for breaking into people's computers and vandalizing their software.
That is quite possibly the most fitting analogy of this ridiculous situation.
You're saying people who don't follow the laws are antisocial?
Okay. Let's say I want some open source software that I can put on an old PC, add a winmodem, soundcard, and headset, and make a functional encrypted phone that can be used on standard lines, with maybe some VoIP on the side.
What do I need? Software? Minimum hardware? Add-ons? Can I do it all with Asterisk? Will it sound awful?
If I remember correctly, a pound of sugar is a couple bucks. (I might not be remembering right, though.)
A 25 lb bag of sugar at Wal-Mart is $10. That's $0.40/lb.
40 grams cost 3.5 cents. At 40 grams per 12 ounce can, a 2 liter should have 225 grams of sugar. That would cost 20 cents.
I'm not saying it isn't a dumb idea, just not as dumb as you made it out to be.
A man in the middle means not just intercepting the communcation, but actively altering the information passed. In this case, the attacker can give each participant a false public key, to which the attacker knows the private key, and render the encryption moot.
Oh, are we following the laws now?
Where do you need to go to become self-actualized? And why is it so dangerous as to require medical attention?
You raise interesting points. The fundamental concept of capitalism is that successful businesses eventually make enough profit through competitive advantage to buy out their competitors, thus ensuring improvement in efficiency of the market. At that point, once a monopoly is reached, the assumption is that the successful monopolist will reduce prices enough to prevent competitors from entering the market, and maintain the monopoly.
Of course, that isn't what happens. Monopolies instead raise prices to take advantage of the high profits available. These high prices encourage others to enter the market. To maintain the monopoly, the market leader has to be constantly buying out new competitors. Theoretically, this process could go on forever. Alternatively, the monopoly either uses it's profits to branch out into new markets in which they have no real expertise or ploughs it's monopoly rents into executives', shareholders', and lenders' pockets.
The net result is that prices remain high, new opportunities appear for those with little or no expertise to enter markets that don't need them and make money regardless, the wealth gap widens, and the customer gets screwed.
Now, what that has to do with a small retail store, I have no idea. You might theoretically obtain enough competitive advantage through small things like process improvements to eventually buy out the pet store across town. But, more likely, your sister will marry a vice-president at the local bank and you'll get a lot of funding to buy out *all* the pet stores in town, and you'll spend your monopoly rents to pay off the loans necessary to do so, doing twice as much work for the same amount of profits. And, if not, you can always just raise prices 5% and your customers likely won't notice a difference until they open a Wal-Mart across the street. Because, let's face it, no matter what you're selling or what magical software you use to do so, you can't hold a candle to Wal-Mart. And that's the moral of the story for all of us: try to make as much money as you can until they open a Wal-Mart next door.
Surprisingly, I can decide what is best for me as well. Paying for public transportation and free health care for your broke ass isn't part of it.