In addition to what the previous reply mentioned (client access licenses and server software), it's probably reasonable to think that the US Army has a need for things like Project, Visio, or even the occasional development tool.
Java also has the advantage of being free. I can install the SDK anywhere, but if I did the same with.NET I'd either have to buy another copy or support piracy.
That's not quite accurate. You can get the SDK right here. Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can use pretty much any text editor to write and build an app.
If there was something in the EULA at the time of install, I must have missed it (certainly possible). I went this route on a test machine a while back when I didn't want to get another VS.NET license, didn't need the IDE at all, and it was for a short-term testing need on a second box.
Granted, it's a LOT easier to do with the VS.NET IDE, but it doesn't seem that you have to go that route. I think MSFT wants to see as many.NET apps out there as possible, given that it almost certainly means Windows (for the time being), and if the next killer-app is a.NET app, that can't hurt the Windows platform.
If you made zero dollars, that could be good news because any business expenses become tax deductible. Unfortunately, if you don't turn a profit in three years, the IRS considers your business a hobby and will make you pay back taxes on your deductions...
While the latter part is true (3 years without profit is a hobby), the former part is a potential red flag. If you itemize and deduct business expenses on a Schedule C and don't claim any income at all, alarms go off somewhere within the IRS and they get the pencil sharpeners warmed up. To avoid hassles, you really want to show something on the income side of the equation, no matter how small.
That said, the original poster is talking about a C-Corp and I believe that's a very different beast than a personal business (schedule C).
Unless a generous CPA happens to be surfing/. and chooses to post some advice, the first response above to go see an accountant is the best advice on this thread. Even just hitting an H&R Block (or similar) and paying a couple hundred is a worthwhile exercise (most of them are moonlighting accountants). They typically charge by the number of forms required in your return... and I'd bet that you could call a local office and get an estimate over the phone of what your costs will be.
Paying a little bit now could save a lot of headache and expense down the road.
Couldn't artists who use online file sharing as a form of advertisement sue the RIAA for curtailing their activities?
I don't think so because the RIAA's goal isn't to simply "kill file sharing" -- it's to kill the file sharing of works by artists signed to RIAA member labels.
I'm sure that, if the file sharing networks were only sharing files by non-RIAA artists, the RIAA wouldn't care about that at all. They're not opposed to the technology, just the application of the technology as it impacts their profits.
I should say... as they argue it impacts their profits. That's my whole problem with the RIAA argument. They look at their sales growth for the last couple of years or so being down and they say "See, those P2P networks are hurting us."
The problem is that their argument overlooks several things:
1. When Napster was up and running, the RIAA label sales were up. People were finding new music that they couldn't hear on the radio and the economy was up, so they were buying CDs they might not have otherwise. Which brings me to...
2. Over the last couple of years, pretty much everyone's sales are down. We're in a recession, fer cryin' out loud, and that's going to especially hurt non-essential, luxury items.
3. While more subjective, their sales are also likely down because they're putting out crap.
4. Also over the last year or two, the public has learned a lot more about the real cost of putting out that $15.99 CD at Sam Goody.
So combine a down economy with a public increasingly turned off by by the major labels and there you go. If the RIAA spent half as much turning people ON to new music as they do trying to turn people OFF to file sharing, they'd probably be better off.
Looking at my desk, my tower is on the left side (which is by the wall). So with this, I'd have to route the cables *around* the back of the case....
While I generally like the case and the accessibility is nice, I agree with you. Having the cables come out the side could be a pain. Looking at my desk, my tower is on the right side of my legs. Given that the case doesn't look very deep, that means I'd be knocking cables around (and out) with my feet/legs.
I actually kinda like the current Dell Dimension case. It still has problems as far as cable-spaghetti goes, but the PS and motherboard are on one side, with drive bays on the other. You can open it easily without tools and without having to lay it down, and the drive bays are easily accessible.
Just as they did with Foxpro, which they bought and pretended to maintain for a few years while pushing their own products Access and Sql Server, they're going to shelve Borland and Togethersoft too.
While I agree with most of your post, this part isn't quite accurate. Although Microsoft hasn't done enough to market Visual FoxPro, the development team certainly hasn't left it alone to wither off. Since buying it, they made it a fairly robust object-oriented development environment (more OO than VB, until quite recently), and have continued to provide new upgrades every 18 months or so. In the last several upgrades, they've added the ability to connect seamlessly to large back-ends via Remote Views, complete support for XML, it can speak COM fluently in a variety of ways, provide AND serve web services (SOAP/WSDL), and they continue to add new features and hooks to the IDE.
Anyway, I just wanted to point this out because it fills a pretty large gray area between Access (a desktop, end-user oriented database app that doesn't scale to more than 10 users or 10K rows easily) and SQL Server (a large, scalable RDBMS, though it doesn't deploy easily for apps that you want to distribute to the desktop).
I know I sound like a MSFT lackey and will get modded down... but I'm also doing C++ Builder, Java (via Eclipse), PHP, Oracle, and I happily run Linux and a variety of OSS packages on our servers. I just think VFP is a solid choice for some types of apps -- Now if they would just throw some marketing at it and clarify its role in the.NET world.
For the "Screen Savers" crowd (and I watch, so I don't mean that to sound condescending), most of these suggestions aren't gonna cut it. You're talking about people who are (A) primarily Windows users, (B) not sysadmins for a living, and (C) are generally of the "weekend techie" variety. Sure, they have Palm Pilots, they may crank out some HTML for their personal web page, and they may even hack together a little "My Grateful Dead Tapes" database in Access or FileMakerPro. But Mastering Regular Expressions? Linux Admin Black Book? Show them only the CLI? I think Chris is smarter than that.
These aren't all people who are going to compile their own kernel or debate the merits of different file systems over their beer (though some are in that crowd)... taking the usual l33tist attitude of "You don't need no steenkin' GUI, just build from source using the command line" approach is going to turn people off and drive them away -- defeating the purpose of "spreading the word".
In terms of books to recommend, take a look at Linux for Windows Addicts or Add Red Hat Linux to Your Windows Desktop In A Weekend. I've not looked over the latter in person, but the "Addicts" book is one that I read through myself a year or so ago when I wanted to start doing Linux development (after developing Win32 software for several years). It's great for taking general desktop/workstation concepts and tasks you know from the Windows world and explaining how they work or are dealt with in the Linux world. For me, it took me past the initial hurdle after installing Red Hat, firing up Gnome, and thinking "Where to next?".
As for OSS, in general... find some useful apps or utilities, ones that would "show well" on television, and highlight them. Evolution (an Outlook clone) is an easy choice. Churn through SourceForge for others... some that come to mind are the Horde project (web-based PIM, mail client, and more), or dotProject (web-based project management and collaboration tool). There's no shortage of these types of things that could be set up inside of an hour or two, show well visually, and show the useful and usable stuff that's out there in the OSS world.
Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked.
How do they get the sites on which the user clicked? If you didn't choose the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, your results page has regular old <A>anchor</A> tags. So once I have the results page and my HTTP/GET for the results page is complete, how do they know what I clicked on?
I'm no guru, so I this is an honest question... I don't see how they'd do it. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" is easy enough for them to log, but... ??
I agree with most of what you said about ambient music. The artists you list, and Vir Unis in particular, are all excellent examples for anyone interested in truly innovative ambient works. Vir Unis also has a couple of sample CDs available through Sonic Foundry, makers of the Acid looping/composition program.
That said, I disagree with one thing:
For one, I think this is highly innovative.
I know, I know... "art" is in the eye of the beholder, but I can't bring myself to call this an artistic statement -- not to mention innovative. The artists you mention are all pushing boundaries and defining new sounds. This 24-Hour Ode To Joy is just someone stretching a WAV file in Sound Forge. Is the resulting sound interesting? Sure... but hardly innovative. Recompress the time and you still just have Ode To Joy, right?
Remixing an existing work, whether by changing the instrumentation, rearranging the piece, or applying a piece's theme to a new song -- that requires some artistry, some talent. And certainly more thought and consideration than a handful of mouse clicks.
This seems more an NPR version of Puff Daddy adding a new beat to The Police's "Every Breath You Take", or Vanilla Ice adding a 16th note to the bass line in Bowie/Queen's "Pressure".
Re:Vulnerability Check - An easy way
on
Due Diligence?
·
· Score: 2
Thus, we can simply connect to the HTTPS server and issue a HEAD request.
One easy way I discovered to do this, assuming you've got the curl library installed, is to issue this from the command line:
curl -I [your_url__or_hostname_here]
Probably old hat to most of this group, but it proved an easy way to check several servers quickly. It's also handy if you want to make sure that your changes to Apache's httpd.conf (for ServerTokens and ServerSignature) actually "took".
With the possible exception of Apple, all of these make most (if not all) of their money via internet commerce. Dell alone makes millions per day, every day, from online purchases alone. And while their balance sheets vary widely (and at least one may not consistently see a positive bottom-line), none are going to "drop like flies" anytime soon.
There's plenty of commerce being done online. There are just a lot fewer companies doing it now than a couple years ago. Given all the dumb ideas that were given capital, that's a Good Thing.
If you follow discussions at other forums for ReplayTV and TiVo owners, you already know that in that situation you don't really care about performance. A 5400rpm drive can easily handle the job. However, noise is critical, and hence, some of these systems don't have fans, making heat also critical--if you upgrade with a drive that runs hotter than the original, you're likely to have random failures.
In some cases, you have to worry about heat, noise, and performance. For example, with standalone or portable digital audio recorders, such as those from Roland and Yamaha. While some of them do have fans built in, they're usually pretty small and form factor for these things means that circulation isn't very good. Noise is an issue because you don't want some drive chattering around while your singer is singing the take of her life. And performance is an issue, simply because of the throughput demands that digital audio makes on a system.
With a computer-based recording system, such as ProTools, performance is the key factor. Noise is still an issue, but it's not uncommon for the machine to be in a separate room from the microphones. Heat is less an issue because of the circulation and fans available in the typical computer case.
In any case, reviews like this are a very welcome addition for electronic musicians!
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to what the previous reply mentioned (client access licenses and server software), it's probably reasonable to think that the US Army has a need for things like Project, Visio, or even the occasional development tool.
Priced an MSDN Universal subscription lately?
Java also has the advantage of being free. I can install the SDK anywhere, but if I did the same with .NET I'd either have to buy another copy or support piracy.
.NET apps out there as possible, given that it almost certainly means Windows (for the time being), and if the next killer-app is a .NET app, that can't hurt the Windows platform.
That's not quite accurate. You can get the SDK right here. Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can use pretty much any text editor to write and build an app.
If there was something in the EULA at the time of install, I must have missed it (certainly possible). I went this route on a test machine a while back when I didn't want to get another VS.NET license, didn't need the IDE at all, and it was for a short-term testing need on a second box.
Granted, it's a LOT easier to do with the VS.NET IDE, but it doesn't seem that you have to go that route. I think MSFT wants to see as many
If you made zero dollars, that could be good news because any business expenses become tax deductible. Unfortunately, if you don't turn a profit in three years, the IRS considers your business a hobby and will make you pay back taxes on your deductions...
/. and chooses to post some advice, the first response above to go see an accountant is the best advice on this thread. Even just hitting an H&R Block (or similar) and paying a couple hundred is a worthwhile exercise (most of them are moonlighting accountants). They typically charge by the number of forms required in your return... and I'd bet that you could call a local office and get an estimate over the phone of what your costs will be.
While the latter part is true (3 years without profit is a hobby), the former part is a potential red flag. If you itemize and deduct business expenses on a Schedule C and don't claim any income at all, alarms go off somewhere within the IRS and they get the pencil sharpeners warmed up. To avoid hassles, you really want to show something on the income side of the equation, no matter how small.
That said, the original poster is talking about a C-Corp and I believe that's a very different beast than a personal business (schedule C).
Unless a generous CPA happens to be surfing
Paying a little bit now could save a lot of headache and expense down the road.
Couldn't artists who use online file sharing as a form of advertisement sue the RIAA for curtailing their activities?
... as they argue it impacts their profits. That's my whole problem with the RIAA argument. They look at their sales growth for the last couple of years or so being down and they say "See, those P2P networks are hurting us."
I don't think so because the RIAA's goal isn't to simply "kill file sharing" -- it's to kill the file sharing of works by artists signed to RIAA member labels.
I'm sure that, if the file sharing networks were only sharing files by non-RIAA artists, the RIAA wouldn't care about that at all. They're not opposed to the technology, just the application of the technology as it impacts their profits.
I should say
The problem is that their argument overlooks several things:
1. When Napster was up and running, the RIAA label sales were up. People were finding new music that they couldn't hear on the radio and the economy was up, so they were buying CDs they might not have otherwise. Which brings me to...
2. Over the last couple of years, pretty much everyone's sales are down. We're in a recession, fer cryin' out loud, and that's going to especially hurt non-essential, luxury items.
3. While more subjective, their sales are also likely down because they're putting out crap.
4. Also over the last year or two, the public has learned a lot more about the real cost of putting out that $15.99 CD at Sam Goody.
So combine a down economy with a public increasingly turned off by by the major labels and there you go. If the RIAA spent half as much turning people ON to new music as they do trying to turn people OFF to file sharing, they'd probably be better off.
Looking at my desk, my tower is on the left side (which is by the wall). So with this, I'd have to route the cables *around* the back of the case....
While I generally like the case and the accessibility is nice, I agree with you. Having the cables come out the side could be a pain. Looking at my desk, my tower is on the right side of my legs. Given that the case doesn't look very deep, that means I'd be knocking cables around (and out) with my feet/legs.
I actually kinda like the current Dell Dimension case. It still has problems as far as cable-spaghetti goes, but the PS and motherboard are on one side, with drive bays on the other. You can open it easily without tools and without having to lay it down, and the drive bays are easily accessible.
Just as they did with Foxpro, which they bought and pretended to maintain for a few years while pushing their own products Access and Sql Server, they're going to shelve Borland and Togethersoft too.
.NET world.
While I agree with most of your post, this part isn't quite accurate. Although Microsoft hasn't done enough to market Visual FoxPro, the development team certainly hasn't left it alone to wither off. Since buying it, they made it a fairly robust object-oriented development environment (more OO than VB, until quite recently), and have continued to provide new upgrades every 18 months or so. In the last several upgrades, they've added the ability to connect seamlessly to large back-ends via Remote Views, complete support for XML, it can speak COM fluently in a variety of ways, provide AND serve web services (SOAP/WSDL), and they continue to add new features and hooks to the IDE.
Anyway, I just wanted to point this out because it fills a pretty large gray area between Access (a desktop, end-user oriented database app that doesn't scale to more than 10 users or 10K rows easily) and SQL Server (a large, scalable RDBMS, though it doesn't deploy easily for apps that you want to distribute to the desktop).
I know I sound like a MSFT lackey and will get modded down... but I'm also doing C++ Builder, Java (via Eclipse), PHP, Oracle, and I happily run Linux and a variety of OSS packages on our servers. I just think VFP is a solid choice for some types of apps -- Now if they would just throw some marketing at it and clarify its role in the
For the "Screen Savers" crowd (and I watch, so I don't mean that to sound condescending), most of these suggestions aren't gonna cut it. You're talking about people who are (A) primarily Windows users, (B) not sysadmins for a living, and (C) are generally of the "weekend techie" variety. Sure, they have Palm Pilots, they may crank out some HTML for their personal web page, and they may even hack together a little "My Grateful Dead Tapes" database in Access or FileMakerPro. But Mastering Regular Expressions? Linux Admin Black Book? Show them only the CLI? I think Chris is smarter than that.
These aren't all people who are going to compile their own kernel or debate the merits of different file systems over their beer (though some are in that crowd)... taking the usual l33tist attitude of "You don't need no steenkin' GUI, just build from source using the command line" approach is going to turn people off and drive them away -- defeating the purpose of "spreading the word".
In terms of books to recommend, take a look at Linux for Windows Addicts or Add Red Hat Linux to Your Windows Desktop In A Weekend. I've not looked over the latter in person, but the "Addicts" book is one that I read through myself a year or so ago when I wanted to start doing Linux development (after developing Win32 software for several years). It's great for taking general desktop/workstation concepts and tasks you know from the Windows world and explaining how they work or are dealt with in the Linux world. For me, it took me past the initial hurdle after installing Red Hat, firing up Gnome, and thinking "Where to next?".
As for OSS, in general... find some useful apps or utilities, ones that would "show well" on television, and highlight them. Evolution (an Outlook clone) is an easy choice. Churn through SourceForge for others... some that come to mind are the Horde project (web-based PIM, mail client, and more), or dotProject (web-based project management and collaboration tool). There's no shortage of these types of things that could be set up inside of an hour or two, show well visually, and show the useful and usable stuff that's out there in the OSS world.
Searches are logged by time of day, originating I.P. address (information that can be used to link searches to a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked.
How do they get the sites on which the user clicked? If you didn't choose the "I'm Feeling Lucky" option, your results page has regular old <A>anchor</A> tags. So once I have the results page and my HTTP/GET for the results page is complete, how do they know what I clicked on?
I'm no guru, so I this is an honest question... I don't see how they'd do it. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" is easy enough for them to log, but... ??
I agree with most of what you said about ambient music. The artists you list, and Vir Unis in particular, are all excellent examples for anyone interested in truly innovative ambient works. Vir Unis also has a couple of sample CDs available through Sonic Foundry, makers of the Acid looping/composition program.
That said, I disagree with one thing:
For one, I think this is highly innovative.
I know, I know... "art" is in the eye of the beholder, but I can't bring myself to call this an artistic statement -- not to mention innovative. The artists you mention are all pushing boundaries and defining new sounds. This 24-Hour Ode To Joy is just someone stretching a WAV file in Sound Forge. Is the resulting sound interesting? Sure... but hardly innovative. Recompress the time and you still just have Ode To Joy, right?
Remixing an existing work, whether by changing the instrumentation, rearranging the piece, or applying a piece's theme to a new song -- that requires some artistry, some talent. And certainly more thought and consideration than a handful of mouse clicks.
This seems more an NPR version of Puff Daddy adding a new beat to The Police's "Every Breath You Take", or Vanilla Ice adding a 16th note to the bass line in Bowie/Queen's "Pressure".
Thus, we can simply connect to the HTTPS server and issue a HEAD request.
One easy way I discovered to do this, assuming you've got the curl library installed, is to issue this from the command line:
curl -I [your_url__or_hostname_here]
Probably old hat to most of this group, but it proved an easy way to check several servers quickly. It's also handy if you want to make sure that your changes to Apache's httpd.conf (for ServerTokens and ServerSignature) actually "took".
what are you talking about. no one(ok most people) buys anything from the internet. why do you think internet commerce sites are dropping like flies.
http://www.dell.com
http://www.apple.com
http://shopping.yahoo.com
http://www.amazon.com
http://www.expedia.com
With the possible exception of Apple, all of these make most (if not all) of their money via internet commerce. Dell alone makes millions per day, every day, from online purchases alone. And while their balance sheets vary widely (and at least one may not consistently see a positive bottom-line), none are going to "drop like flies" anytime soon.
There's plenty of commerce being done online. There are just a lot fewer companies doing it now than a couple years ago. Given all the dumb ideas that were given capital, that's a Good Thing.
Einstein initially pooh-poohed the idea, and it wasn't widely accepted until the 1930's...
Nice... Nice move, NYT. Leave it to someone in the Arts section to write an article discussing physics and science predictions.
Pooh-Poohed?!
If you follow discussions at other forums for ReplayTV and TiVo owners, you already know that in that situation you don't really care about performance. A 5400rpm drive can easily handle the job. However, noise is critical, and hence, some of these systems don't have fans, making heat also critical--if you upgrade with a drive that runs hotter than the original, you're likely to have random failures.
In some cases, you have to worry about heat, noise, and performance. For example, with standalone or portable digital audio recorders, such as those from Roland and Yamaha. While some of them do have fans built in, they're usually pretty small and form factor for these things means that circulation isn't very good. Noise is an issue because you don't want some drive chattering around while your singer is singing the take of her life. And performance is an issue, simply because of the throughput demands that digital audio makes on a system.
With a computer-based recording system, such as ProTools, performance is the key factor. Noise is still an issue, but it's not uncommon for the machine to be in a separate room from the microphones. Heat is less an issue because of the circulation and fans available in the typical computer case.
In any case, reviews like this are a very welcome addition for electronic musicians!