I personally know the heads of the charity very well, and they go to Haiti two or three times a year themselves. They have specific people in a specific couple of villages where they are running food and clothing programs and working toward building a hospital, orphanage, and school.
Unfortunately, we can't all know the founders of small charities that deal with Haiti personally. I bet you could find someone in your area who oversees how some sort of funds or food donations are used for some charitable purpose, though. Pretty much every decent sized town has a food or clothing bank at the least. It's easier to trust a small organization you can see doing the work.
Add to your list business expenses, property taxes, sales taxes, municipal bonds, home improvements, child care, and political contributions.
The tax code is 3,800 or so pages. The tax regulations written by the IRS is over 13,000 pages. That's nearly 17,000 pages. taxcode info
Compliance with the code and regulations cost around $340,000,000,000 a year (that's 340 billion, with a 'b', dollars). Hundreds of billions doesn't get collected because compliance is too low (below 70%, apparently, according to the GAO).
The instructions for that 1040 EZ you mention are over 40 pages long.
The Ways and Means Committee, which has the most to do with the tax code, gets over $55 million a year in campaign contributions -- more than any other committee. You don't suppose that's for special tax breaks, do you?
The tax compliance industry employs about 3.8 million full-time equivalents, or hours that normally translate to that amount. All of us who know CPAs know that from January 1st to April 15th is double or double and a half hours for accountants, not to mention all those paid paraprofessional "tax preparers" that are seasonal. Tax compliance is one of the largest industries in the nation, larger than the federal government itself or the education industry.
Would a flat tax with one single sizable standard deduction to offset the proportion for the poorer among us really be that bad? Could an extra $340 billion in the economy being spent on actually boosting bottom lines hurt?
I don't use thousands of clerks to figure out what could be a flat percentage of people's income. I also don't use nuclear ICBMs and wouldn't want to. I do send money to places like Haiti, already did before the earthquake, and do a lot more good with it without some random number of federal fuck-ups handling the money on the way there and getting paid a salary out of my funds to fill out more paperwork about it.
Just exactly how much waste, corruption, and antisocial behavior is acceptable? How much of our taxes actually pay for services? How much of our income does the empire deserve, and how much are we willing to give up for stupidity in our name?
Not only is there plenty of competition in the smartphone market, but RIM is still the undisputed leader in the US by about 16 percent. Google more than doubled its small installed base (from 2.5% to 5.2%) between September and December. The analysis firm comScore has a press release covering third-quarter 2009 cell phone growth patterns.
The handset data vs. platform data is interesting, especially considering that by listing handset manufacturers Apple news sites completely avoid mentioning Google and Android. Some of the HTC, Samsung, and "others" would be listed as Windows Mobile and some would be Android or Maemo/Meego, obviously.
Despite all the hype about the iPhone, it's still only a quarter of the US market and 16% of the worldwide market from the latest data I could find.
First, I specifically stated that tasers can kill.
Second, a gun firing a bullet into someone failing to kill usually means it's not properly aimed.
Third, the fact that a gun can fail to kill and a taser can fail to be non-lethal does not make a taser as deadly on average as a gun and bullet.
Fourth, having several strikes with any weapon is more likely to cause injury or death than a single strike. This is true whether it's a gun, a taser, a knife, a stone, or a frozen pigeon.
Fifth, this is Slashdot, and we're not supposed to be talking to the dead as most people here believe there is no consciousness after death.
Sixth, woosh... I mean, frozen pigeon and frozen leg of lamb? You're actually debating a post with that kind of example in it?
IBM never left the x86/x86_64 server space. They just left the desktop market. I could totally see WPS and a few other OS/2 features being useful in differentiating their server stuff, especially if people still running OS/2 or eComStation can move applications over without much porting effort.
Pretty pictures, big bloated toolkits, hardware independence, internationalization, and localization contribute to that memory use.
Pretty pictures are a big part of it, though. Let's face it. You can't view and edit a 16 megapixel image at 32 bits per pixel in 4 megs of memory. Just loading the image takes 64 megabytes.
He didn't say the NT emulator was built into the OS. It was possible, for example, to emulate a PC in Bochs and run NT in that. Bochs has been around since 1998, and IIRC has run on OS/2 for most that time (although it couldn't properly host OS/2 for a while).
There was probably some other way to do it, too. That's just one that comes to mind.
Also don't forget Haiku, which is a clone of BeOS.
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
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Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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You have almost described vim (or perhaps emacs) and a handful of other programs being run together inside screen's pseudo-windows.
Re:You must be that "other guy" that ran OS/2 also
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Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
I guess you've never seen eComStation run on modern hardware. It's damn fast. I've always considered getting a copy, but I've stuck with Linux rather than spending the hundreds of dollars per seat.
OS/2 fans have been petitioning IBM to either start selling new versions of OS/2 again directly or to open-source it for a long time. There are parts IBM simply doesn't own, including parts still owned at least in part by Microsoft. Getting those as FOSS is pretty doubtful.
If IBM can bring the SOM, the WPS, and some other things to a layer on top of Linux, that will be a nice environment. If they make it all Free or even Open Source, then many OS/2 fans (including me) will flock to at least try it.
If I could get a Linux distro with the usual open-source stack (glibc, glib, qt, gtk, perl, python, etc) that will run all my Linux apps along with OS/2 apps on top of OS/2 services for Linux all in WPS for an interface without some sort of emulator or virtual machine, I'd probably have that distro on half my machines by the end of the week it was released.
I think very few developers of successful software with several versions over several years know exactly what features will be necessary from one release to the next until they get feedback from customers. I think that's even more true with a project like Flash that was developed for years by Macromedia, bought by Adobe, then developed for years by Adobe.
I'm not a fan of Flash because I hate the Flash Player. I am a fan of the Flash authoring tool and some of its knockoffs (I actually use Namo FreeMotion or program stuff in HaXe if I absolutely need to target Flash Player, but I've used Flash for work when someone else picked up the license fees).
In recent years, several alternative players have gotten pretty close to doing what Flash Player does. Several authoring tools have gotten fairly close to doing at least what older versions of Flash (the authoring tool) did. That's largely thanks to Adobe's tendency to be at least partly open with file formats.
Their company site even says that PDF and such are as open as they are because they believe in interoperability of even closed-source software, and that they think they can compete on features. Now that CS5 will use a much more readable save file format, there will probably be other tools that can even work properly with Flash's save files (without using some hack to dump the data objects and ActionScript to the file system).
I think Adobe sucks in quite a few ways. Their tool prices are usually said to be fixed, to the point even that they're said to go after places offering discounts on years old versions new in the box. I think the way they play Apple and Microsoft against one another is harmful to Adobe's customers more than Apple or Microsoft. I do think, though, that they aren't completely against interoperability just because they make closed-source software.
Whether their software turns out according to plan or not, it can be very useful. I think they'd still haver a huge market for Flash Professional and Flash Developer even if they targeted the JVM, JavaScript/canvas/video tags, or native code rather than (or in addition to) Flash Player.
The problem is customers don't want metered access, even if it saves them money most months. They don't understand computers, the Internet, and data transfer well enough to know that they won't be one of those metered-usage horror stories about a $3000 phone bill.
In fact, one PC infected with a nasty worm like Code Red, Slammer, or Conficker or some spam-sending trojan can easily put people on a metered upload plan over their allowance if it's not cleared up. Luckily for most Windows users, downloads are usually all that's metered even on the metered or capped plans. If someone gets a rarer trojan that downloads lots of data as a zombie dropbox for its master, they could hit caps for download easily without usage by a human.
The ISPs sell "unlimited" because that's what customers demand.
The real problem is they try to undercut one another on price (to the point that most local ISPs just gave up) by using their nasty marketing gimmicks. The "unlimited doesn't mean unlimited" farce is what pisses people off. If the ISPs would just charge enough for their unlimited plans to actually offer unlimited usage and come up with some fair metering system (with a fee cap somewhere a bit above the unlimited plan's price) for people who are usually lighter users, then we wouldn't have this mess. The "unlimited, but it's really X GB" plans are basically fraud, and that has nothing to do with reasonable oversubscription of the ISP's peering or upstream capacity.
The problem is that the current amount of oversubscription is not realistic and average total usage is actually more than what the ISPs forecast or are willing/able to build out to service.
A digital network is physical. The fiber and towers only handle so much capacity. The switching and routing equipment, the radios and lasers, and sometimes the number of fibers or the number of towers actually have to be upgraded.
It is entirely possible, BTW, to eat while driving. Your insistence on eating at the dinner table doesn't change that. In any case, it's entirely possible for you to eat while another person from your household (unless you live alone) drives to the mall.
Selling bandwidth proportional to usage cycles is not an 'excuse'. It's how things are supposed to work. You, personally, do not need an OC-192 to every hosting site on the planet. It's all shared infrastructure.
In the end, though, you are right about the problem. The problem is absolutely that they are dictating the usage cycle rather than basing their service on actual usage patterns. If you read my post again, you might actually find I already said that:
The problem is that most ISPs these days use a ratio that is well behind the actual usage patterns of their users. An ISP will likely never build out for the full burst bandwidth of all users combined exactly once. There's no need to do that. However, they should build out enough capacity to cover what their users are actually going to try to use, plus about 50% for news peaks when everyone is checking for headline updates.
Yeah, like that. If anything, the radio station should be the one charging (because it's their broadcast). They don't because they're selling ads based on those listeners.
The RIAA shouldn't want to charge either, because their sales are largely driven by radio and Internet streaming. The RIAA is too greedy to allow a possible source of revenue go to build bigger sources. They're just a bunch of greedy, short-sighted bullies trying to hold a dying business model with their tightest grip. They need to learn that digital distribution is cheap, easy. and can be really profitable.
The analogy is fine. If you live in a town of 20,000 people, the highway does not need 20,000 lanes in and out of it. It does need enough lanes that 20,000 people plus all their visitors can get in and out at the posted speed limit.
What bad (read: most) ISPs are doing is telling you the speed limit is 100 (units of your choice) and you're deadlocked with other drivers to 20 because there aren't enough lanes.
You're not paying for 1Mbps dedicated end to end. You're paying for the ability of X of their Y customers, including you, to use 1 Mbps simultaneously. The problem isn't that you're not getting 1Mbps end-to-end dedicate. It's that their assumptions when they set X proportional to Y was way too low. Z people are using it, and Z > X. Z people can't actually use their upstream at a time at full rate. That's the problem.
Perl 6 is mainly usable, and some form of it is being used in production at multiple sites. It's just not ready for public "launch" yet. If you really want it, you can get it. Perl6.org has it.
Perl 5 hasn't exactly been sitting still the past decade. The changes between 5.6 and 5.8 or 5.8 and 5.10 are huge. I haven't looked over the full changes list for 5.12 yet, but it sure isn't the language Perl 5 was in 2000.
Having two revenue sources for two different services (providing broadcast time to advertisers and providing a copyright license to a cable operator) isn't double-dipping.
Trying to get two revenue sources for providing the same service (moving data from Google to the user who requested it and moving data from Google to the user who requested it) is double dipping.
It's usually already metered. That's what "acceptable usage" usually means. "Unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited in most situations when it comes to data transfer.
BTW, your ISP is paying for data transferred, not just a line connection. That's why they want to pass that cost on to you. If they are big enough, they are paying minimally for the data transferred, but they still have to build out their capacity at some point no matter how long they leave it oversubscribed in the meantime.
The reason they like to advertise unmetered plans is because that's what people who don't run networks for a living want. Mom and Pop don't want to worry whether Junior downloaded 548 MB or 723 MB of lolli porn last night. They have even less of an idea what a MB really is than a Kw/h. They just want to pay the same amount every month.
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I personally know the heads of the charity very well, and they go to Haiti two or three times a year themselves. They have specific people in a specific couple of villages where they are running food and clothing programs and working toward building a hospital, orphanage, and school.
Unfortunately, we can't all know the founders of small charities that deal with Haiti personally. I bet you could find someone in your area who oversees how some sort of funds or food donations are used for some charitable purpose, though. Pretty much every decent sized town has a food or clothing bank at the least. It's easier to trust a small organization you can see doing the work.
Add to your list business expenses, property taxes, sales taxes, municipal bonds, home improvements, child care, and political contributions.
The tax code is 3,800 or so pages. The tax regulations written by the IRS is over 13,000 pages. That's nearly 17,000 pages. taxcode info
Compliance with the code and regulations cost around $340,000,000,000 a year (that's 340 billion, with a 'b', dollars). Hundreds of billions doesn't get collected because compliance is too low (below 70%, apparently, according to the GAO).
The instructions for that 1040 EZ you mention are over 40 pages long.
The poor pay proportionally 12 times as much of their income on compliance, making this a very regressive system.
The Ways and Means Committee, which has the most to do with the tax code, gets over $55 million a year in campaign contributions -- more than any other committee. You don't suppose that's for special tax breaks, do you?
The tax compliance industry employs about 3.8 million full-time equivalents, or hours that normally translate to that amount. All of us who know CPAs know that from January 1st to April 15th is double or double and a half hours for accountants, not to mention all those paid paraprofessional "tax preparers" that are seasonal. Tax compliance is one of the largest industries in the nation, larger than the federal government itself or the education industry.
Would a flat tax with one single sizable standard deduction to offset the proportion for the poorer among us really be that bad? Could an extra $340 billion in the economy being spent on actually boosting bottom lines hurt?
I don't use thousands of clerks to figure out what could be a flat percentage of people's income. I also don't use nuclear ICBMs and wouldn't want to. I do send money to places like Haiti, already did before the earthquake, and do a lot more good with it without some random number of federal fuck-ups handling the money on the way there and getting paid a salary out of my funds to fill out more paperwork about it.
Just exactly how much waste, corruption, and antisocial behavior is acceptable? How much of our taxes actually pay for services? How much of our income does the empire deserve, and how much are we willing to give up for stupidity in our name?
Wouldn't having one be a detriment to your progress?
Two words: penis envy.
Not only is there plenty of competition in the smartphone market, but RIM is still the undisputed leader in the US by about 16 percent. Google more than doubled its small installed base (from 2.5% to 5.2%) between September and December. The analysis firm comScore has a press release covering third-quarter 2009 cell phone growth patterns.
Worldwide, Symbian kicks everyone's ass at 47% for the year of 2009 (as a platform), but Nokia "only" sold 39% in the third quarter (as a hardware solution.
The handset data vs. platform data is interesting, especially considering that by listing handset manufacturers Apple news sites completely avoid mentioning Google and Android. Some of the HTC, Samsung, and "others" would be listed as Windows Mobile and some would be Android or Maemo/Meego, obviously.
Despite all the hype about the iPhone, it's still only a quarter of the US market and 16% of the worldwide market from the latest data I could find.
ITYM "Motorola 68k->PowerPC" switch. ;-)
HTH.
First, I specifically stated that tasers can kill.
Second, a gun firing a bullet into someone failing to kill usually means it's not properly aimed.
Third, the fact that a gun can fail to kill and a taser can fail to be non-lethal does not make a taser as deadly on average as a gun and bullet.
Fourth, having several strikes with any weapon is more likely to cause injury or death than a single strike. This is true whether it's a gun, a taser, a knife, a stone, or a frozen pigeon.
Fifth, this is Slashdot, and we're not supposed to be talking to the dead as most people here believe there is no consciousness after death.
Sixth, woosh... I mean, frozen pigeon and frozen leg of lamb? You're actually debating a post with that kind of example in it?
Umm... it can kill, but it's not designed to specifically and it is less likely to do so than devices designed to kill.
Although, between two things neither designed to kill a person, I'm supposing a frozen pigeon would be less lethal than a frozen leg of lamb.
...and tasty barbecue is served!
IBM never left the x86/x86_64 server space. They just left the desktop market. I could totally see WPS and a few other OS/2 features being useful in differentiating their server stuff, especially if people still running OS/2 or eComStation can move applications over without much porting effort.
Pretty pictures, big bloated toolkits, hardware independence, internationalization, and localization contribute to that memory use.
Pretty pictures are a big part of it, though. Let's face it. You can't view and edit a 16 megapixel image at 32 bits per pixel in 4 megs of memory. Just loading the image takes 64 megabytes.
He didn't say the NT emulator was built into the OS. It was possible, for example, to emulate a PC in Bochs and run NT in that. Bochs has been around since 1998, and IIRC has run on OS/2 for most that time (although it couldn't properly host OS/2 for a while).
There was probably some other way to do it, too. That's just one that comes to mind.
Don't forget MorphOS, which is an Amiga clone.
Also don't forget Haiku, which is a clone of BeOS.
You have almost described vim (or perhaps emacs) and a handful of other programs being run together inside screen's pseudo-windows.
I guess you've never seen eComStation run on modern hardware. It's damn fast. I've always considered getting a copy, but I've stuck with Linux rather than spending the hundreds of dollars per seat.
OS/2 fans have been petitioning IBM to either start selling new versions of OS/2 again directly or to open-source it for a long time. There are parts IBM simply doesn't own, including parts still owned at least in part by Microsoft. Getting those as FOSS is pretty doubtful.
If IBM can bring the SOM, the WPS, and some other things to a layer on top of Linux, that will be a nice environment. If they make it all Free or even Open Source, then many OS/2 fans (including me) will flock to at least try it.
If I could get a Linux distro with the usual open-source stack (glibc, glib, qt, gtk, perl, python, etc) that will run all my Linux apps along with OS/2 apps on top of OS/2 services for Linux all in WPS for an interface without some sort of emulator or virtual machine, I'd probably have that distro on half my machines by the end of the week it was released.
I think very few developers of successful software with several versions over several years know exactly what features will be necessary from one release to the next until they get feedback from customers. I think that's even more true with a project like Flash that was developed for years by Macromedia, bought by Adobe, then developed for years by Adobe.
I'm not a fan of Flash because I hate the Flash Player. I am a fan of the Flash authoring tool and some of its knockoffs (I actually use Namo FreeMotion or program stuff in HaXe if I absolutely need to target Flash Player, but I've used Flash for work when someone else picked up the license fees).
In recent years, several alternative players have gotten pretty close to doing what Flash Player does. Several authoring tools have gotten fairly close to doing at least what older versions of Flash (the authoring tool) did. That's largely thanks to Adobe's tendency to be at least partly open with file formats.
Their company site even says that PDF and such are as open as they are because they believe in interoperability of even closed-source software, and that they think they can compete on features. Now that CS5 will use a much more readable save file format, there will probably be other tools that can even work properly with Flash's save files (without using some hack to dump the data objects and ActionScript to the file system).
I think Adobe sucks in quite a few ways. Their tool prices are usually said to be fixed, to the point even that they're said to go after places offering discounts on years old versions new in the box. I think the way they play Apple and Microsoft against one another is harmful to Adobe's customers more than Apple or Microsoft. I do think, though, that they aren't completely against interoperability just because they make closed-source software.
Whether their software turns out according to plan or not, it can be very useful. I think they'd still haver a huge market for Flash Professional and Flash Developer even if they targeted the JVM, JavaScript/canvas/video tags, or native code rather than (or in addition to) Flash Player.
The problem is customers don't want metered access, even if it saves them money most months. They don't understand computers, the Internet, and data transfer well enough to know that they won't be one of those metered-usage horror stories about a $3000 phone bill.
In fact, one PC infected with a nasty worm like Code Red, Slammer, or Conficker or some spam-sending trojan can easily put people on a metered upload plan over their allowance if it's not cleared up. Luckily for most Windows users, downloads are usually all that's metered even on the metered or capped plans. If someone gets a rarer trojan that downloads lots of data as a zombie dropbox for its master, they could hit caps for download easily without usage by a human.
The ISPs sell "unlimited" because that's what customers demand.
The real problem is they try to undercut one another on price (to the point that most local ISPs just gave up) by using their nasty marketing gimmicks. The "unlimited doesn't mean unlimited" farce is what pisses people off. If the ISPs would just charge enough for their unlimited plans to actually offer unlimited usage and come up with some fair metering system (with a fee cap somewhere a bit above the unlimited plan's price) for people who are usually lighter users, then we wouldn't have this mess. The "unlimited, but it's really X GB" plans are basically fraud, and that has nothing to do with reasonable oversubscription of the ISP's peering or upstream capacity.
The problem is that the current amount of oversubscription is not realistic and average total usage is actually more than what the ISPs forecast or are willing/able to build out to service.
A digital network is physical. The fiber and towers only handle so much capacity. The switching and routing equipment, the radios and lasers, and sometimes the number of fibers or the number of towers actually have to be upgraded.
It is entirely possible, BTW, to eat while driving. Your insistence on eating at the dinner table doesn't change that. In any case, it's entirely possible for you to eat while another person from your household (unless you live alone) drives to the mall.
Selling bandwidth proportional to usage cycles is not an 'excuse'. It's how things are supposed to work. You, personally, do not need an OC-192 to every hosting site on the planet. It's all shared infrastructure.
In the end, though, you are right about the problem. The problem is absolutely that they are dictating the usage cycle rather than basing their service on actual usage patterns. If you read my post again, you might actually find I already said that:
Yeah, like that. If anything, the radio station should be the one charging (because it's their broadcast). They don't because they're selling ads based on those listeners.
The RIAA shouldn't want to charge either, because their sales are largely driven by radio and Internet streaming. The RIAA is too greedy to allow a possible source of revenue go to build bigger sources. They're just a bunch of greedy, short-sighted bullies trying to hold a dying business model with their tightest grip. They need to learn that digital distribution is cheap, easy. and can be really profitable.
The analogy is fine. If you live in a town of 20,000 people, the highway does not need 20,000 lanes in and out of it. It does need enough lanes that 20,000 people plus all their visitors can get in and out at the posted speed limit.
What bad (read: most) ISPs are doing is telling you the speed limit is 100 (units of your choice) and you're deadlocked with other drivers to 20 because there aren't enough lanes.
You're not paying for 1Mbps dedicated end to end. You're paying for the ability of X of their Y customers, including you, to use 1 Mbps simultaneously. The problem isn't that you're not getting 1Mbps end-to-end dedicate. It's that their assumptions when they set X proportional to Y was way too low. Z people are using it, and Z > X. Z people can't actually use their upstream at a time at full rate. That's the problem.
Perl 6 is mainly usable, and some form of it is being used in production at multiple sites. It's just not ready for public "launch" yet. If you really want it, you can get it. Perl6.org has it.
Perl 5 hasn't exactly been sitting still the past decade. The changes between 5.6 and 5.8 or 5.8 and 5.10 are huge. I haven't looked over the full changes list for 5.12 yet, but it sure isn't the language Perl 5 was in 2000.
So they can use a double word for their time_t rather than a word. Problem solved.
Having two revenue sources for two different services (providing broadcast time to advertisers and providing a copyright license to a cable operator) isn't double-dipping.
Trying to get two revenue sources for providing the same service (moving data from Google to the user who requested it and moving data from Google to the user who requested it) is double dipping.
It's usually already metered. That's what "acceptable usage" usually means. "Unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited in most situations when it comes to data transfer.
BTW, your ISP is paying for data transferred, not just a line connection. That's why they want to pass that cost on to you. If they are big enough, they are paying minimally for the data transferred, but they still have to build out their capacity at some point no matter how long they leave it oversubscribed in the meantime.
The reason they like to advertise unmetered plans is because that's what people who don't run networks for a living want. Mom and Pop don't want to worry whether Junior downloaded 548 MB or 723 MB of lolli porn last night. They have even less of an idea what a MB really is than a Kw/h. They just want to pay the same amount every month.