I'm not a CPA either, but IAR once you have a reasonable expectation of paying out the cash you take a charge for the full amouunt, which you can reduce if you discover you overestimated the actual payout.
Side note - this allows companies to control earnings by overestimating, for allowances for unpaid debts. Say you overestimate by 1 billion dollars (in a period where earnings are great) - you can discover your error in a period where earnings are poor, magically adding back earnings removed earlier.
I don't understand why Best Buy et al doesn't like their deals being leaked. How else are you supposed to know what's going to be one sale? I know I, for one, wouldn't be going there on Friday if I didn't see the leaked deals. I'm not going to wait in line for an hour without knowing what I'm getting.
I can think of several reasons:
1. Competitors undercut their price
2. People see the deals, buy product before BF and go ask for price adjustment. This means:
a) They don't have product on shelf of BF, leading to PO'd customers and possibly violation of state laws (if they exist_ requiring stores to have minimum stock on hand for advertised specials
b) If they don't price match, people return previous purchases, costing them revenue and putting stuff back on the shelf they may have sold on BF. Yes, they could price match and not lose the revenue, and would be the logical choice when faced with lost revenue, but who said company's are logical? And, before you say they can put it on the shelf on BF after the return and sell it at the deal - po'd customer may just wait until Sat to do the return.
3) People look at the list, decide they aren't interested, and never look at the circular, which may or may not have other deals or items of interest - so their ad $$ are wasted, and people don't come into the store.
Do I care about BB problems? No, I want the best deal for my money; but I can see why BB may want to keep the prices secret. Can they? I hope not.
Same story - silly russians cutting costs, but costs get cut and things are mismanaged on a spectacular scale in the USA too. Three Mile Island is the textbook example of why you have to have enough staff to watch the contractors when they try to rip you off. The same weld joint was x-rayed several hundred times, with only the numbers changed on the print to pretend that other more inaccessable joints were checked. When the accident occured and people looked at the x-rays to see if there had been any pre-existing flaws they found that the area where the problem occured had never been checked.
TMI is a textbook case, but for other reasons:
a) Had the operators not shut down the safety systems (because they thought it was going to overpressurize the reactor), the event would have been a non-event. Lesson - be sure you know what's happening before you stop safety systems, and is why emergency procedures are designed to make operators diagnose and respond to symptoms, not events.
b) Steam cools as it expands - which is why the downstream temp after the leaking valve was much lower than the operators expected - and caused them to think the valve on the presurizer was shut, not open. Had they checked a p - t diagram, they would have discovered their error. Lesson - double check assumptions,especially when anomlies can be explained by a different conclusion than you reached.
c) A similar event occured at Davis-Besse, but the operators reacted correctly and no damage was done. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell other plants about the events. Lesson learned - share information (which was why INPO - the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations was founded)so you don't make the same mistakes as someone else - something the aviation industry learned the hard way a long time ago.
guarantee that while the iTMS keeps growing and becoming the dominant online music service that Apple will keep insisting that it is not in the business of music to keep an already paranoid recording industry calm. When the sales on iTMS become significant thats when the playing field will alter... apple will be able to negotiate better deals and the record companies won't be able to threaten their supply. Also consider an apple subsidury being able to approach bands and say "here's how many CDs you sold last year and here's how many mp3s you sold on iTMS... now who's you're daddy."
Until, of course, the lablels mention msTunes appearing on a windows box near you. Face it, as long as the labels have content people want, they are in control because they can provide the same content to any competitor, which would hurt Apple, who relies on exclusivity to sell harware and make money, more than the labels, who rely on content sales to drive revenue.
Or, they could simply refuse to continue with Apple - who do you think would back down first?
All the consumer wants is a cheap, easy way to get music - who has the greater ability to disrupt the flow of music - Apple or the labels?
The best scenario is for the two of them to figure out how to increase their profits togetehr and keep strong DRM in place - so they can keep prices up. But if they do fight, I think the lables have a 12 guage relative to Apple's pellet gun.
What I found interesting was the mandatory license fee - you pay so much per cd\device\etc. (such as Canada's tax on CD-Rs and teh US one on Music CD-Rs), but can d\l music for free. Artists then get paid based on popularity; much like the current model for on-air royalties.
The real catch is - who control's the distrobution and defines who is eligible to share in the cash? After all, unlike radio stations, anyone with a computer can d\l a song and give the artist their.0001 cent (or whatever) credit:
1. Post my latest song 2. Slashdot server 3. Profit
This is one area where copoeration benfits the group - but busts the model. Imagine a few thousand "artists" releasing song's and d\l them - the money's not in the music, but in the traffic you can generate. The noise would quickly drown out the signal.
Of course, you could require that a CD be available, but with today's tech that isn't much of a hurdle either.
On air play? A bigger hurdle, until some 50w AM station realizes there's money in a hugh playlist and splitting royalties - sorta like a music co-op - with a little work, you could stream mp3s on-air all day long with no staff beyond that what's needed to maintain equipment and cash checks... Of course, than an audience size issue would get added...
Which leaves it up to the big labels or RIAA to do the vetting, which smells a lot like anti-competitive collusion.
"Complete for each of the eligible Microsoft products listed below that you purchased between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 for use in California. Software for server computers or Apple computers is not eligible."
Pretty clear that Mac Office is not part of the settlement.
Symantec, just like you and I, are under no obligation to provide anyone a forum to expres their views. Symantec can censor whatever they please, and we can chose not to buy their product based on their choices - that's the wonder of a market economy.
sitting in the parking lot, turning the light red every time a car got near the intersection. Green - nope red, green - opps red again, green - surprise red...
He should have included Vonage - more possibilities (POTS access, can call from anywhere in the world with net access or be calleded from POTS, etc - so you can avoid tariffs like nobody business)
Sure, the charge, but imagine having a local, US phone number, in say Europe for calls to the US.
Isn't wood alcohol (the non-drinkable kind used to sterilize) non-conductive? It should be usable, provided it doesn't melt any of the plastic or other parts.
if we abolished all copyright (and patents) completely then we wouldn't need GPL.
Except then i can take the code, make whatever changes I want, sell it and not make my modified code available to anyone - since there would be no owner of the code. MS, could, for example, take whatever they wante dand incorporate it into Windows, keep Windows closed and there would be no recourse available for anyone who's code they took - since no one owns it.
Having the monitoring system die and therefore having to watch meters instead is all very well, but what if you don't know the thing died? If your Windows application is frozen, is there any way to tell it isn't updating?
Yes - tehre is some sort of heartbeat monitor that shows it is updating; but even so, a frozen screen is easy to discern - especially since a nuke plant is not a static system and readings normally change slightly minute to minute. If everything was rock steady stable, you'd wonder what was wrong and check other guages (soemthing operators routinely do anyway to verify everything is really working properly).
Ridiculous. Those important systems shouldn't even be on the same network as the office, much less attached to a network that can see the internet. I'm not talking firewalls/seperate vlans/whatever either, I mean physically no kind of connection at all. If they have to be accessible from a vpn, you better have a damned good idea of who will be doing that accessing.
Except the *display* system is just that - a system designed to display key data, not control the plant. As such, network connections to remote facilities for support and decision making is a desirable thing.
The display system in question is one that takes a bunch of data from systems throughout the plant and displays them in a single loctaion. Its purpose is to provide the information needed by the operators in a single location, making it easier to assess palnt conditions. It is not the only way to get the data, nor is it a control system. Eevn with it out, the operators have enough information to safely run the plant (in fact, they've done that for years before the SPDS was developed - much of a nuclear plant control room is based on 60's tech and hardwired displays); and critical shutdown systems have redundant displays in case one of them fails. In a complex process plant such as a nuke, there are really only a dozen or so readings you need to safely shut it down - a boiling water reactor's operational state can be deduced with with just 3 - power, pressure, and level.
What is the lessen - no matter how secure you think a computer system is, someone may just find a back door. And if your the person who can't understand why those damn fools that run you rnetwork won't let you plug your machine in, it may be because they can't be sure they just haven't put a big door in a previously secure wall.
"Reduced IT cost by 75% by reducing the department from 250 employees to 5 and reducing TCO of all computers, while increasing productivity in other departments."... will get some brownie points from the board of directors when it comes to your stock options.
Or - gee - it's only a 5 man show - why pay CIO $$$ when we can get some manager to run it for a lot less.
It is a about headcount - and CYA. The first time something goes wrong it'll be - "This wouldn't have happened if we satyed with X like everyone else and the tech support staff we had before some idiot fired them.
Did this stand out to anyone else? Image processing on a sub? I wasn't aware that they could see underwater. But I'll bet that's what's being worked-on here... Hmmm.
In addition to periscope images, they could process and analyze downlinks of data. Imagine people on subs analyzing data in real time with intel folks on shore/targets.
Any of his non-fiction books, and there's a ton. All subjects, from algebra to the brain to chemistry. (He even wrote about the Bible...)
As an avid Asimov fan (fiction and non-fiction) I concur - his science books are fascinating.
They would make great ebooks - especially since most are collections of short essays. I suggested that to one ebook vendor of his SF stories, and they said they'd look into it. Never saw them offer them, however. Guess I'll have to dig up my old paperbacks hen i get home. That's one problem with libraries - you read a lot of great books, and when you can finally afford to buy some of them, they're out of print.
There's a matter of trust I'm wary about, when it comes to sites like snopes.com. How easy would it be for them to be 'infiltrated' somehow by a hack attempt or by bribery and the like, and pass off something that is a hoax or scam as being 'real'. or perhaps pass off something that's a real and present danger as being just another net hoax?.
snopes, along with his wife, little gator, are well known in the online urban legend neighborhood going back to afu and are pretty dedicated to debunking urban legends. Given their standards of proof, I doubt someone could slip something past them. As for bribery, I suggest offering them two-fifty and see what they say...
-jlc
"he's dead, Jim" The late Bill Shatner aka Doctor "Bones" Spock on Star Trek.
Delta, in their airport clubs, installed PCs with internet connectivity. After seeing what people leave there (private letters, still logged on to email or other web sites, even 3.5 floppies with files), I'm not surprised that this sort of stuff happens, but that more people haven't been screwed by their own stupidity.
Of course, this is not a new phenomena - when the first paper tape terminals were rolled out, people through printouts with all sorts of info intio the trash. It was the trash, and who digs into trash anyway? For some reason, people think that because they are familar with a certain technology that it is secure.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a CPA either, but IAR once you have a reasonable expectation of paying out the cash you take a charge for the full amouunt, which you can reduce if you discover you overestimated the actual payout.
Side note - this allows companies to control earnings by overestimating, for allowances for unpaid debts. Say you overestimate by 1 billion dollars (in a period where earnings are great) - you can discover your error in a period where earnings are poor, magically adding back earnings removed earlier.
I don't understand why Best Buy et al doesn't like their deals being leaked. How else are you supposed to know what's going to be one sale? I know I, for one, wouldn't be going there on Friday if I didn't see the leaked deals. I'm not going to wait in line for an hour without knowing what I'm getting.
I can think of several reasons:
1. Competitors undercut their price
2. People see the deals, buy product before BF and go ask for price adjustment. This means:
a) They don't have product on shelf of BF, leading to PO'd customers and possibly violation of state laws (if they exist_ requiring stores to have minimum stock on hand for advertised specials
b) If they don't price match, people return previous purchases, costing them revenue and putting stuff back on the shelf they may have sold on BF. Yes, they could price match and not lose the revenue, and would be the logical choice when faced with lost revenue, but who said company's are logical? And, before you say they can put it on the shelf on BF after the return and sell it at the deal - po'd customer may just wait until Sat to do the return.
3) People look at the list, decide they aren't interested, and never look at the circular, which may or may not have other deals or items of interest - so their ad $$ are wasted, and people don't come into the store.
Do I care about BB problems? No, I want the best deal for my money; but I can see why BB may want to keep the prices secret. Can they? I hope not.
Same story - silly russians cutting costs, but costs get cut and things are mismanaged on a spectacular scale in the USA too. Three Mile Island is the textbook example of why you have to have enough staff to watch the contractors when they try to rip you off. The same weld joint was x-rayed several hundred times, with only the numbers changed on the print to pretend that other more inaccessable joints were checked. When the accident occured and people looked at the x-rays to see if there had been any pre-existing flaws they found that the area where the problem occured had never been checked.
TMI is a textbook case, but for other reasons:
a) Had the operators not shut down the safety systems (because they thought it was going to overpressurize the reactor), the event would have been a non-event. Lesson - be sure you know what's happening before you stop safety systems, and is why emergency procedures are designed to make operators diagnose and respond to symptoms, not events.
b) Steam cools as it expands - which is why the downstream temp after the leaking valve was much lower than the operators expected - and caused them to think the valve on the presurizer was shut, not open. Had they checked a p - t diagram, they would have discovered their error. Lesson - double check assumptions,especially when anomlies can be explained by a different conclusion than you reached.
c) A similar event occured at Davis-Besse, but the operators reacted correctly and no damage was done. Unfortunately, no one bothered to tell other plants about the events. Lesson learned - share information (which was why INPO - the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations was founded)so you don't make the same mistakes as someone else - something the aviation industry learned the hard way a long time ago.
guarantee that while the iTMS keeps growing and becoming the dominant online music service that Apple will keep insisting that it is not in the business of music to keep an already paranoid recording industry calm. When the sales on iTMS become significant thats when the playing field will alter... apple will be able to negotiate better deals and the record companies won't be able to threaten their supply. Also consider an apple subsidury being able to approach bands and say "here's how many CDs you sold last year and here's how many mp3s you sold on iTMS... now who's you're daddy."
Until, of course, the lablels mention msTunes appearing on a windows box near you. Face it, as long as the labels have content people want, they are in control because they can provide the same content to any competitor, which would hurt Apple, who relies on exclusivity to sell harware and make money, more than the labels, who rely on content sales to drive revenue.
Or, they could simply refuse to continue with Apple - who do you think would back down first?
All the consumer wants is a cheap, easy way to get music - who has the greater ability to disrupt the flow of music - Apple or the labels?
The best scenario is for the two of them to figure out how to increase their profits togetehr and keep strong DRM in place - so they can keep prices up. But if they do fight, I think the lables have a 12 guage relative to Apple's pellet gun.
What I found interesting was the mandatory license fee - you pay so much per cd\device\etc. (such as Canada's tax on CD-Rs and teh US one on Music CD-Rs), but can d\l music for free. Artists then get paid based on popularity; much like the current model for on-air royalties.
.0001 cent (or whatever) credit:
The real catch is - who control's the distrobution and defines who is eligible to share in the cash? After all, unlike radio stations, anyone with a computer can d\l a song and give the artist their
1. Post my latest song
2. Slashdot server
3. Profit
This is one area where copoeration benfits the group - but busts the model. Imagine a few thousand "artists" releasing song's and d\l them - the money's not in the music, but in the traffic you can generate. The noise would quickly drown out the signal.
Of course, you could require that a CD be available, but with today's tech that isn't much of a hurdle either.
On air play? A bigger hurdle, until some 50w AM station realizes there's money in a hugh playlist and splitting royalties - sorta like a music co-op - with a little work, you could stream mp3s on-air all day long with no staff beyond that what's needed to maintain equipment and cash checks... Of course, than an audience size issue would get added...
Which leaves it up to the big labels or RIAA to do the vetting, which smells a lot like anti-competitive collusion.
From the form:
"Complete for each of the eligible Microsoft products listed below that you purchased between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 for use in California.
Software for server computers or Apple computers is not eligible."
Pretty clear that Mac Office is not part of the settlement.
True - against the entity, not Symantec.
Symantec, just like you and I, are under no obligation to provide anyone a forum to expres their views. Symantec can censor whatever they please, and we can chose not to buy their product based on their choices - that's the wonder of a market economy.
sitting in the parking lot, turning the light red every time a car got near the intersection.
Green - nope red, green - opps red again, green - surprise red...
He should have included Vonage - more possibilities (POTS access, can call from anywhere in the world with net access or be calleded from POTS, etc - so you can avoid tariffs like nobody business)
Sure, the charge, but imagine having a local, US phone number, in say Europe for calls to the US.
Isn't wood alcohol (the non-drinkable kind used to sterilize) non-conductive? It should be usable, provided it doesn't melt any of the plastic or other parts.
if we abolished all copyright (and patents) completely then we wouldn't need GPL.
Except then i can take the code, make whatever changes I want, sell it and not make my modified code available to anyone - since there would be no owner of the code. MS, could, for example, take whatever they wante dand incorporate it into Windows, keep Windows closed and there would be no recourse available for anyone who's code they took - since no one owns it.
Having the monitoring system die and therefore having to watch meters instead is all very well, but what if you don't know the thing died? If your Windows application is frozen, is there any way to tell it isn't updating?
Yes - tehre is some sort of heartbeat monitor that shows it is updating; but even so, a frozen screen is easy to discern - especially since a nuke plant is not a static system and readings normally change slightly minute to minute. If everything was rock steady stable, you'd wonder what was wrong and check other guages (soemthing operators routinely do anyway to verify everything is really working properly).
Ridiculous. Those important systems shouldn't even be on the same network as the office, much less attached to a network that can see the internet. I'm not talking firewalls/seperate vlans/whatever either, I mean physically no kind of connection at all. If they have to be accessible from a vpn, you better have a damned good idea of who will be doing that accessing.
Except the *display* system is just that - a system designed to display key data, not control the plant. As such, network connections to remote facilities for support and decision making is a desirable thing.
The display system in question is one that takes a bunch of data from systems throughout the plant and displays them in a single loctaion. Its purpose is to provide the information needed by the operators in a single location, making it easier to assess palnt conditions. It is not the only way to get the data, nor is it a control system. Eevn with it out, the operators have enough information to safely run the plant (in fact, they've done that for years before the SPDS was developed - much of a nuclear plant control room is based on 60's tech and hardwired displays); and critical shutdown systems have redundant displays in case one of them fails. In a complex process plant such as a nuke, there are really only a dozen or so readings you need to safely shut it down - a boiling water reactor's operational state can be deduced with with just 3 - power, pressure, and level.
What is the lessen - no matter how secure you think a computer system is, someone may just find a back door. And if your the person who can't understand why those damn fools that run you rnetwork won't let you plug your machine in, it may be because they can't be sure they just haven't put a big door in a previously secure wall.
Right, but saying...
... will get some brownie points from the board of directors when it comes to your stock options.
"Reduced IT cost by 75% by reducing the department from 250 employees to 5 and reducing TCO of all computers, while increasing productivity in other departments."
Or - gee - it's only a 5 man show - why pay CIO $$$ when we can get some manager to run it for a lot less.
It is a about headcount - and CYA. The first time something goes wrong it'll be - "This wouldn't have happened if we satyed with X like everyone else and the tech support staff we had before some idiot fired them.
I wonder how long before they change the name to avoid confusion with iGo, the portable computing (Palms, batteries, etc.)retailer?
Did this stand out to anyone else? Image processing on a sub? I wasn't aware that they could see underwater. But I'll bet that's what's being worked-on here... Hmmm.
In addition to periscope images, they could process and analyze downlinks of data. Imagine people on subs analyzing data in real time with intel folks on shore/targets.
you're male but would trade a sex life for a really economical and functional music player
Not sure - I need to know what a sex life is and what I can do with it before deciding...
A little googling shows this:
... and don't rely on fading memories of teh pre-web USENET. Oh well...
Susan Mudgett aka little gator
Said nickname doesn't appear to show up in relation to Barbara at all.
Real AFUistas do their own research.
don't think I've ever heard Barbara referred to as "little gator".
IFAICR, that's her nickname on afu.
Could be an urban legend, though...
Any of his non-fiction books, and there's a ton. All subjects, from algebra to the brain to chemistry. (He even wrote about the Bible...)
As an avid Asimov fan (fiction and non-fiction) I concur - his science books are fascinating.
They would make great ebooks - especially since most are collections of short essays. I suggested that to one ebook vendor of his SF stories, and they said they'd look into it. Never saw them offer them, however. Guess I'll have to dig up my old paperbacks hen i get home.
That's one problem with libraries - you read a lot of great books, and when you can finally afford to buy some of them, they're out of print.
There's a matter of trust I'm wary about, when it comes to sites like snopes.com. How easy would it be for them to be 'infiltrated' somehow by a hack attempt or by bribery and the like, and pass off something that is a hoax or scam as being 'real'. or perhaps pass off something that's a real and present danger as being just another net hoax?.
snopes, along with his wife, little gator, are well known in the online urban legend neighborhood going back to afu and are pretty dedicated to debunking urban legends. Given their standards of proof, I doubt someone could slip something past them. As for bribery, I suggest offering them two-fifty and see what they say...
-jlc
"he's dead, Jim" The late Bill Shatner aka Doctor "Bones" Spock on Star Trek.
Now I know why my iPod went silent 20 minutes into a flight from NYC to London.
Delta, in their airport clubs, installed PCs with internet connectivity. After seeing what people leave there (private letters, still logged on to email or other web sites, even 3.5 floppies with files), I'm not surprised that this sort of stuff happens, but that more people haven't been screwed by their own stupidity.
Of course, this is not a new phenomena - when the first paper tape terminals were rolled out, people through printouts with all sorts of info intio the trash. It was the trash, and who digs into trash anyway?
For some reason, people think that because they are familar with a certain technology that it is secure.
Not that anuone ever thought of pasing a note around in class, back in the pre-IM dark ages.