You realize what you said is impossible, right? If they GPL it, that grants you enough freedom to build an actual product; so they don't have any leverage to "force" you to buy the commercial license.
Tell it to MySQL.
In practice, companies that produce commercial products tend not to want to release the source code to the proprietary portions of their products, therefore they choose the commercial license. It's not exactly "forcing" commercial customers to pay, but if the code was really a "gift" then it would be released under a BSD-style license or something similarly permissive.
This hatred of the Ribbon is becoming a lame cliche. Don't like the Ribbon? Would rather use key commands? Cool, hide the Ribbon and use key commands. Or wait, that would be too easy -- or it wouldn't let you whine as much.
Cloud print works for me very well from my phone and tablet. If printing to a home printer is good enough then it should work just fine for you. Does for me.
Except doesn't Cloud Print require a PC that's connected to the printer to be running as a print server? I'm told there are a few printers that have Cloud Print servers built-in now, but not many. Submitter didn't say whether he had a dedicated workstation at home.
MS has never officially said they're dropping it, although everybody thinks they will given their new pro-HTML5 direction.
And yet you can write Metro-style apps in XAML+.Net, and XAML+.Net is basically the definition of Silverlight. The branding might disappear, but it sounds like the technologies are going to be baked right into future versions of Windows (which makes a lot more sense than making everyone download them, if you ask me).
I'd wait until you hear the terms before you say that. If their plan is to GPL it and then dual-license it and force anyone who wants to build an actual product with it to buy a commercial license, "gift" might be a bit of an exaggeration.
If you try to download Adobe Acrobat Reader, Google toolbar is injected into the download with no way to stop it. It installs before acrobat - I guess so you can't cancel it. If you download the Adobe Flash Player, Google Chrome is injected into the download and you cannot stop it.
Ummm... are you being serious? Because:
A.) I've never seen any of the behaviors you describe; B.) Chrome doesn't use the standalone Flash Player, it has its own, internal Flash Player, so the two downloads are totally incongruous; C.) Google Toolbar for Firefox has been discontinued, so the utility of that plugin seems limited.
I think it just means some large group of computers that some small set of professionals are responsible for maintaining...but at other times "enterprise" is used to actually refer to the overlying business structure. In that case, shouldn't we be referring to "the business" and not "the enterprise"?
"Business" can also refer to revenue-producing work, e.g. a salesperson who is responsible for "bringing in new business" isn't doing mergers and acquisitions. A large company might also be divided into several "businesses,"as in "HP's printer business" -- also known as "business lines" or "business units" -- so referring to "the business" in that sense could be ambiguous. When you refer to "the enterprise," on the other hand, you're specifically talking about HP as a whole company, the sum total of its workforce, assets, revenues, and expenditures.
Typically when you refer to a business as "an enterprise," it implies that the business is large enough to have a significant workforce and management structure; you sometimes hear about "small enterprises," but typically a sole proprietorship or a one-off retail store is not referred to as an enterprise.
So in that sense, "enterprise software" refers to software that's designed to support the functions of a large business organization. It supports lots of users and it integrates with the other kinds of systems enterprises usually want, either directly or via middleware.
GP is correct, though. If you were actually around when Windows 95 was released, it was a huge win and everyone was excited about it. There were some problems bridging your workload over from Windows 3.1, but even so, everyone felt like it was a huge step forward (unlike, say, Vista).
4 - Giving more importance to cost & time, than to quality: what would anyone expect to get, when quality is secondary to time & cost? This is a huge way to undermine your projects.
I doubt anyone approaches your company thinking, "Quality? We don't need that."
The more likely scenario is that your company approaches the client by claiming to produce code of the highest quality at a faster rate and at lower cost. You may realize that this is unrealistic, but this is not what your salespeople are communicating to the clients.
We heard about outsourcing to Canada for a few years in the late 90s/early 2000s, but it doesn't seem like it offers much advantage when the Canadian standard of wages is about the same as that in the U.S. and the Canadian dollar is 1:1 with the U.S. dollar.
His point is that, yes, managers are going to be blinded by that $14/hour price tag and go with that route, but those projects usually fail. They are pitched for too many man-hours up front and they usually run over, and even then the result often isn't up to snuff. The result is that they give up and hire American (Western) programmers to finish the job at market rates. Thus most of the "value" of the overseas effort becomes a cost overrun, but the worst part is that time to market suffers because the initial specification valued cost over time to an unrealistic degree. A company can only get burned like this so many times before cooler heads prevail.
Right, but if the doctor did not specify "no substitution," then you as the patient can opt to substitute for the more expensive brand-name drug -- if that's what you want. I think the reason this seems unclear may be because no patient has ever actually done this.
No, part of me wonders the same thing. There has been research published recently that suggests that the link between serum cholesterol and cardiovascular disease may not be as direct as once thought. If the thing that we're measuring does not have a direct correlation to future disease, then the drug we're taking to lower the measurement might not have any real benefit. Statins like Lipitor have probably improved the health of a lot of people, but they may still be overprescribed.
I mean, TFA itself says Lipitor is "the best-selling drug of all time." Really? Would that many people really have died of heart attacks had they not been prescribed this drug?
People talk about how "modern diet, modern society is killing us" -- again, really? You should have seen how my grandfather ate. He'd trim the thick ribbons of fat from the ends of his pork chops so he could eat them last, then he'd eat the fat off everybody else's plate. He lived to a reasonable age, long before statins were ever invented. Sure, that's anecdotal, but where are the statistics? Was heart disease caused by high cholesterol really that much more common among my grandfather's generation? Or my father's? So much more common that it proves that almost everybody ought to be on Lipitor? My gut tells me no. Some studies from England (where my grandfather lived) suggest rates of heart disease did increase through the postwar years, but then started to decline in the 1970s -- again, before statins were even available. One does have to wonder.
This is not illegal on on its face. IANAL, but AFAIK, pharmacist in most juristictions are allow to subsitute unless the written prescription doesn't allow for it.
I am neither a lawyer nor a pharmacist, so the law in California is a little unclear to me. What is says is that if a prescription is written for a brand-name drug, the pharmacist has discretion to substitute a generic version of a drug with the same active ingredient in all cases, except if the doctor specifically said not to, or if the substitution would end up costing the patient more. So if the brand-name drug is actually cheaper, no substitution can be made.
In the case of a drug that is prescribed by its active ingredient name and not the brand name (in other words, the scrip is written for a generic), a pharmacist may substitute "when the change will improve the ability of the patient to comply with the prescribed drug therapy." It doesn't say anything about cost in this case, but one might assume that getting the same drug for cheaper (the generic) would "improve the ability for the patient to comply." Then again, if the pharmacy just doesn't carry the generic, then the only way it can "aid compliance" is by offering the branded drug. I don't know how this particular clause has been interpreted in practice.
I suspect, though, that the usual cases where a pharmacist might offer to substitute a more expensive drug for a generic would be things like when the generic is made with an inactive ingredient (say a binder or something) to which the patient is allergic, or maybe the generic is a big pill and the brand name is a little capsule and that particular patient would have an easier time swallowing the capsule -- things of this nature. I think the statement in TFA that the deals "require pharmacists to reject prescriptions for generics" is probably inaccurate, or misrepresents how it really works. At the very minimum, ethical standards would require the pharmacy to inform the patient that it will not fill a generic and that the prescription will cost more, giving the patient the option to go to another pharmacist -- and I don't know what pharmacy would be willing to turn away business like that.
Someone else made the point that encouraging patients to choose brand-name drugs over generics (whether through drug company "coupons" or other means) can eventually drive up insurance premiums. That's probably true, but it seems like a separate issue.
I believe you as a consumer can always request a brand-name drug. You'll just have to absorb the cost yourself, because if the insurance company doesn't see a clear benefit it won't pay the difference.
An insurance plan that offers the same co-pay for generic and non-generic drugs is pretty rare these days. My plan will cover brand name drugs, but I pay a pretty premium -- I think there's something like a separate $500 deductible. It's basically designed as a catastrophic option for when you end up needing new, brand-name drugs for some chronic, life-threatening condition like cancer or HIV.
At least Pfizer isn't trying to unreasonably extend the patent
We don't know that, as it wasn't the topic of TFA. For all we know, Pfizer has been busy cooking up a version that amounts to "Lipitor plus Acetaminophen," but it just hasn't received FDA approval yet.
But those agreements mentioned in TFS, where pharmacies must only prescribe their offering - that sounds rather anti-competitive to me.
I don't see anything in TFA that sounds quite as sinister as this. It sounds more like run-of-the-mill aggressive marketing campaign. Pfizer will offer coupons through doctors that will discount the price of branded Lipitor down to a level that's almost as low as the generic. Pfizer will also be manufacturing a generic version. If we assume that both pills are made using the same manufacturing process, and the branded one still costs more than the generic, then Pfizer cannot be selling the branded version at a loss, right? It's just cutting way into its own profits by offering a deep discount, not anything truly anticompetitive. (Selling at a loss vs. the generic would definitely be anticompetitive.) The idea is just to get customers "hooked" on the branded version. Eventually the price will go up, but they want to plant the idea in customers' minds that knowing you're getting branded Lipitor manufactured by the company that invented it is better than getting whichever manufacturer's generic version a pharmacy chooses to stock.
Amnesty does not equal citizenship. I'm an immigrant. For much of my early life I carried around a "green card" (they're not actually green anymore) that said I was a permanent resident of the United States. It didn't give me the right to vote. To get that, I had to be naturalized as a citizen, a process that requires conversational fluency in the English language, basic knowledge of U.S. history and its form of government, swearing a loyalty oath, and more cash than you're likely to be able to save up working the fields as an illegal immigrant.
The dead don't complain much. This isn't being flippant. I personally knew a woman that took the 'alternative' road to 'cure' her breast cancer. It took four years to kill her.
What's the worst this treatment could do? Kill you?
No, the worst would be that this quackery robs you of all the money you could have spent on legitimate medical treatment. Hell, you could have spent the cash on pints of ice cream and raised your quality of life for your last couple of years. Bilking people out of their savings because they're terrified that they're going to die is pretty fucking low.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what's even lamer than that? People who don't have an opinion until they figure out what's popular.
You can't press "Alt", and expose the menu bar. So FTFY.
Might want to press Alt before you say things like that.
You're assuming that Google care that you obviously had no intention of installing or using Chrome. This is a bad assumption.
No, my actual assumption is that GP is lying.
You realize what you said is impossible, right? If they GPL it, that grants you enough freedom to build an actual product; so they don't have any leverage to "force" you to buy the commercial license.
Tell it to MySQL.
In practice, companies that produce commercial products tend not to want to release the source code to the proprietary portions of their products, therefore they choose the commercial license. It's not exactly "forcing" commercial customers to pay, but if the code was really a "gift" then it would be released under a BSD-style license or something similarly permissive.
This hatred of the Ribbon is becoming a lame cliche. Don't like the Ribbon? Would rather use key commands? Cool, hide the Ribbon and use key commands. Or wait, that would be too easy -- or it wouldn't let you whine as much.
Cloud print works for me very well from my phone and tablet. If printing to a home printer is good enough then it should work just fine for you. Does for me.
Except doesn't Cloud Print require a PC that's connected to the printer to be running as a print server? I'm told there are a few printers that have Cloud Print servers built-in now, but not many. Submitter didn't say whether he had a dedicated workstation at home.
MS has never officially said they're dropping it, although everybody thinks they will given their new pro-HTML5 direction.
And yet you can write Metro-style apps in XAML+.Net, and XAML+.Net is basically the definition of Silverlight. The branding might disappear, but it sounds like the technologies are going to be baked right into future versions of Windows (which makes a lot more sense than making everyone download them, if you ask me).
it's a generous gift.
I'd wait until you hear the terms before you say that. If their plan is to GPL it and then dual-license it and force anyone who wants to build an actual product with it to buy a commercial license, "gift" might be a bit of an exaggeration.
If you try to download Adobe Acrobat Reader, Google toolbar is injected into the download with no way to stop it. It installs before acrobat - I guess so you can't cancel it. If you download the Adobe Flash Player, Google Chrome is injected into the download and you cannot stop it.
Ummm... are you being serious? Because:
A.) I've never seen any of the behaviors you describe;
B.) Chrome doesn't use the standalone Flash Player, it has its own, internal Flash Player, so the two downloads are totally incongruous;
C.) Google Toolbar for Firefox has been discontinued, so the utility of that plugin seems limited.
I think it just means some large group of computers that some small set of professionals are responsible for maintaining...but at other times "enterprise" is used to actually refer to the overlying business structure. In that case, shouldn't we be referring to "the business" and not "the enterprise"?
"Business" can also refer to revenue-producing work, e.g. a salesperson who is responsible for "bringing in new business" isn't doing mergers and acquisitions. A large company might also be divided into several "businesses,"as in "HP's printer business" -- also known as "business lines" or "business units" -- so referring to "the business" in that sense could be ambiguous. When you refer to "the enterprise," on the other hand, you're specifically talking about HP as a whole company, the sum total of its workforce, assets, revenues, and expenditures.
Typically when you refer to a business as "an enterprise," it implies that the business is large enough to have a significant workforce and management structure; you sometimes hear about "small enterprises," but typically a sole proprietorship or a one-off retail store is not referred to as an enterprise.
So in that sense, "enterprise software" refers to software that's designed to support the functions of a large business organization. It supports lots of users and it integrates with the other kinds of systems enterprises usually want, either directly or via middleware.
GP is correct, though. If you were actually around when Windows 95 was released, it was a huge win and everyone was excited about it. There were some problems bridging your workload over from Windows 3.1, but even so, everyone felt like it was a huge step forward (unlike, say, Vista).
4 - Giving more importance to cost & time, than to quality: what would anyone expect to get, when quality is secondary to time & cost? This is a huge way to undermine your projects.
I doubt anyone approaches your company thinking, "Quality? We don't need that."
The more likely scenario is that your company approaches the client by claiming to produce code of the highest quality at a faster rate and at lower cost. You may realize that this is unrealistic, but this is not what your salespeople are communicating to the clients.
Ridiculous. What you call "communications problems" is really nothing more than some minor communications trouble.
We heard about outsourcing to Canada for a few years in the late 90s/early 2000s, but it doesn't seem like it offers much advantage when the Canadian standard of wages is about the same as that in the U.S. and the Canadian dollar is 1:1 with the U.S. dollar.
His point is that, yes, managers are going to be blinded by that $14/hour price tag and go with that route, but those projects usually fail. They are pitched for too many man-hours up front and they usually run over, and even then the result often isn't up to snuff. The result is that they give up and hire American (Western) programmers to finish the job at market rates. Thus most of the "value" of the overseas effort becomes a cost overrun, but the worst part is that time to market suffers because the initial specification valued cost over time to an unrealistic degree. A company can only get burned like this so many times before cooler heads prevail.
Right, but if the doctor did not specify "no substitution," then you as the patient can opt to substitute for the more expensive brand-name drug -- if that's what you want. I think the reason this seems unclear may be because no patient has ever actually done this.
No, part of me wonders the same thing. There has been research published recently that suggests that the link between serum cholesterol and cardiovascular disease may not be as direct as once thought. If the thing that we're measuring does not have a direct correlation to future disease, then the drug we're taking to lower the measurement might not have any real benefit. Statins like Lipitor have probably improved the health of a lot of people, but they may still be overprescribed.
I mean, TFA itself says Lipitor is "the best-selling drug of all time." Really? Would that many people really have died of heart attacks had they not been prescribed this drug?
People talk about how "modern diet, modern society is killing us" -- again, really? You should have seen how my grandfather ate. He'd trim the thick ribbons of fat from the ends of his pork chops so he could eat them last, then he'd eat the fat off everybody else's plate. He lived to a reasonable age, long before statins were ever invented. Sure, that's anecdotal, but where are the statistics? Was heart disease caused by high cholesterol really that much more common among my grandfather's generation? Or my father's? So much more common that it proves that almost everybody ought to be on Lipitor? My gut tells me no. Some studies from England (where my grandfather lived) suggest rates of heart disease did increase through the postwar years, but then started to decline in the 1970s -- again, before statins were even available. One does have to wonder.
This is not illegal on on its face. IANAL, but AFAIK, pharmacist in most juristictions are allow to subsitute unless the written prescription doesn't allow for it.
I am neither a lawyer nor a pharmacist, so the law in California is a little unclear to me. What is says is that if a prescription is written for a brand-name drug, the pharmacist has discretion to substitute a generic version of a drug with the same active ingredient in all cases, except if the doctor specifically said not to, or if the substitution would end up costing the patient more. So if the brand-name drug is actually cheaper, no substitution can be made.
In the case of a drug that is prescribed by its active ingredient name and not the brand name (in other words, the scrip is written for a generic), a pharmacist may substitute "when the change will improve the ability of the patient to comply with the prescribed drug therapy." It doesn't say anything about cost in this case, but one might assume that getting the same drug for cheaper (the generic) would "improve the ability for the patient to comply." Then again, if the pharmacy just doesn't carry the generic, then the only way it can "aid compliance" is by offering the branded drug. I don't know how this particular clause has been interpreted in practice.
I suspect, though, that the usual cases where a pharmacist might offer to substitute a more expensive drug for a generic would be things like when the generic is made with an inactive ingredient (say a binder or something) to which the patient is allergic, or maybe the generic is a big pill and the brand name is a little capsule and that particular patient would have an easier time swallowing the capsule -- things of this nature. I think the statement in TFA that the deals "require pharmacists to reject prescriptions for generics" is probably inaccurate, or misrepresents how it really works. At the very minimum, ethical standards would require the pharmacy to inform the patient that it will not fill a generic and that the prescription will cost more, giving the patient the option to go to another pharmacist -- and I don't know what pharmacy would be willing to turn away business like that.
Someone else made the point that encouraging patients to choose brand-name drugs over generics (whether through drug company "coupons" or other means) can eventually drive up insurance premiums. That's probably true, but it seems like a separate issue.
I believe you as a consumer can always request a brand-name drug. You'll just have to absorb the cost yourself, because if the insurance company doesn't see a clear benefit it won't pay the difference.
An insurance plan that offers the same co-pay for generic and non-generic drugs is pretty rare these days. My plan will cover brand name drugs, but I pay a pretty premium -- I think there's something like a separate $500 deductible. It's basically designed as a catastrophic option for when you end up needing new, brand-name drugs for some chronic, life-threatening condition like cancer or HIV.
At least Pfizer isn't trying to unreasonably extend the patent
We don't know that, as it wasn't the topic of TFA. For all we know, Pfizer has been busy cooking up a version that amounts to "Lipitor plus Acetaminophen," but it just hasn't received FDA approval yet.
But those agreements mentioned in TFS, where pharmacies must only prescribe their offering - that sounds rather anti-competitive to me.
I don't see anything in TFA that sounds quite as sinister as this. It sounds more like run-of-the-mill aggressive marketing campaign. Pfizer will offer coupons through doctors that will discount the price of branded Lipitor down to a level that's almost as low as the generic. Pfizer will also be manufacturing a generic version. If we assume that both pills are made using the same manufacturing process, and the branded one still costs more than the generic, then Pfizer cannot be selling the branded version at a loss, right? It's just cutting way into its own profits by offering a deep discount, not anything truly anticompetitive. (Selling at a loss vs. the generic would definitely be anticompetitive.) The idea is just to get customers "hooked" on the branded version. Eventually the price will go up, but they want to plant the idea in customers' minds that knowing you're getting branded Lipitor manufactured by the company that invented it is better than getting whichever manufacturer's generic version a pharmacy chooses to stock.
Amnesty does not equal citizenship. I'm an immigrant. For much of my early life I carried around a "green card" (they're not actually green anymore) that said I was a permanent resident of the United States. It didn't give me the right to vote. To get that, I had to be naturalized as a citizen, a process that requires conversational fluency in the English language, basic knowledge of U.S. history and its form of government, swearing a loyalty oath, and more cash than you're likely to be able to save up working the fields as an illegal immigrant.
The dead don't complain much. This isn't being flippant. I personally knew a woman that took the 'alternative' road to 'cure' her breast cancer. It took four years to kill her.
[cough]SteveJobs[cough]
What? Too soon? Not for Steve Jobs.
What's the worst this treatment could do? Kill you?
No, the worst would be that this quackery robs you of all the money you could have spent on legitimate medical treatment. Hell, you could have spent the cash on pints of ice cream and raised your quality of life for your last couple of years. Bilking people out of their savings because they're terrified that they're going to die is pretty fucking low.