you mean in terms of the development environment, or creating GUI applications? Because I always considered PerlTk actually pretty easy to understand and utilize, and it's cross-platform... Your Working Boy,
No way python/tcl are just as good for that purpose as perl, after all if there were any good everyone would be using them, right?
Perhaps Python, though some people prefer to choose whether or not to program in OO. And Tcl doesn't compare: bytecode-compiled Perl and Python blow it away in execution time as well as (IMAO) syntax and features. I prefer Perl because most of the scripting I do involves regexes, and Perl has the best regex support of any language yet developed on this planet or any other that I know of.. In fact, it is only over the last 6 months that I've tried my hand at any other perl5 features besides the expanded regex set and 'my' and 'use'...
No way there are some instances where speed of program is more important than speed of development.
There certainly are. However, for general CGI programming, speed of development is far more important than speed of execution. Typically for perl modules, any execution-critical routines are actually coded in C or assembler and simply interfaced to Perl. If it's not execution-time critical, then why be concerned?
Not like costs per gate are going up... Your Working Boy,
Because it's probably cheaper than running 10 miles of single-mode fiber, which is what you'd need if you want a 10-mile long ethernet link.. </pedant> Your Working Boy,
Like this one. It should be that if you patent something and it's proven to be invalid because of prior art or whatever, you should be heavily fined and barred from filing patents for some period of years. This would force companies desiring to patent an idea to go the extra mile to prove that nobody ever had that idea and implemented it before.
The penalties need to be stiff, like paying court costs, all patent fees, and maybe a few million dollars in fines. They should be barred from applying for patents for like ten years. This should be enough to deter these pesky morons.
And if someone thinks that IBM didn't figure this out in the forties and/or fifties, they're smoking some pretty potent crack.. Your Working Boy,
... I have to disagree with it in at least 2 ways. Firstly, not all tinkerers and smart people are necessarily the same, or driven by the same things! People are inspired by the strangest things, and perhaps 'Ron' was inspired by the power of computers and the rewarding nature of programming (symbol manipulation, algorithm development). If these facets hadn't been available, perhaps he'd be one of those 'underachievers', sullen and depressed because of ability with no outlet for release. To paraphrase a famous quote: "Stupid people are stupid in the same way, while Smart people are smart in different ways"..
Also, to think that people are going 'to waste' because the internet's a fad is kinda putting the cart before the horse here. Would you have said that James Watt was wasting his time because he was tinkering with a well-known mechanism? What about Alexander Graham Bell? Who would possibly put up with the bother and expense of running all that metal wire when you could perfectly well just write a letter or use a telegraph?
I think that history has taught us that any major advance in communication capability has changed western culture in massive and incalcuable ways. The printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet. If there's any proven historical trend, it's that anything which improves human ability to communicate or travel brings wealth and prominence to people involved in the field. Not necessarily the inventors, but to someone.
The internet joins many different streams of human progress: communications, (virtual) travel, and symbolic manipulation, among others. The telephone's touch-tone system has spun off a huge and entirely unpredictable range of services and interaction available by the side effects of having tone-recognition capability and a 12 button interface. Hell, think of all the features a simple switchhook 'flash' can get you these days! Thirteen buttons are all you need to buy clothes, order food, make travel plans, check movie times.
The internet and the power that simple, standard data communications offer can make life smarter and less tedious than ever before, though along with that (as history shows) it probably won't help decide the difficult questions, and it probably won't make life any easier (since all the tedious bits are done for you, all that's left is the really hard stuff.:( )
We're only 30 years into the Internet revolution, and really only 5 years into the popularization of the Internet. It's a little bit early to bemoan our waste of human capital just yet.
My feeling is eventually the Sysadmin field will end up being similar to other, more traditional skilled fields like carpentry, plumbing, auto mechanics, etc. The job of sysadmin requires both a skillset and a mindset of a highly technical nature, which is rare in both boom and bust times. Sysadmins trade on their knowledge of and facility with their systems, much as a plumber trades on on his knowledge and facility with pipes, water flow, local codes and ordinances, etc. Sysadmins (when the bust comes) will probably have to suffer an attitude adjustment: a lot of primadonna behavior (mine included;) will have to go, but in the end, real sysadmins with skill, knowledge, and a 'calling' for the field will continue to do well. The 'casual' sysadmins who are in it for the money will have to look elsewhere, thus reducing the overall admin pool and equalizing the salaries higher among those that enjoy the job.
Actually, depending on the size of the company, I see sysadmin morphing into a 'superintendent' role for small companies and a combination 'plumber/janitor' role for larger companies. The job actually reflects elements of those jobs now, but with the demand there's an added element of 'fuck you, I can go across the street and get 30% more salary in 24 minutes' which I find ultimately regrettable in terms of personal happiness (in the short run it's fine, but in the long run you have to be pretty social and good at maintaining contacts made in brief amounts of time to make something ultimately worthwhile of the job-hopping act)
And the difference between a burnt-out admin and a working admin is the ability to manage expectations well, as well as the ability to say NO and stand firm. If you bitch and moan about people heaping stuff on you, which isn't really your job but since you can do it in 5 minutes and they would take a half hour you do it, so you do it, they will CONTINUE TO HEAP THINGS ONTO YOU because (and this is the really sad part) YOU'VE TRAINED THEM TO! This is a sure road to quick burnout. Don't sacrifice your personality or psyche to the job: it's JUST A JOB.
McDonalds will be charging $2 for a hamburger at 5pm, and $.50 after 8pm.
IIRC one of the fast food megacorps (I think it was actually McDonalds) tried differential pricing, where you could get a particular sandwich or combo meal for less after 5pm.. or was it before 5pm.. Anyway, it didn't work, or else we'd still be seeing it... And quite honestly, if Coke machines charge too much, I simply won't buy. I don't actually buy vending-machine soda now anyways: I drink flavored seltzer water. I let the quad venti cappucinos do the caffeination grunt work..;)
so doing an NFS install of NetBSD onto a laptop isn't a crisis like installing RedHat is.
Hate to break it to ya, but as of release 6.0, RedHat includes separate boot CDROM and boot NET install boot floppies, as well as images to roll them yourself. Confused me at first, as I downloaded the usual.img files and couldn't figure out why the damn thing wasn't letting me choose FTP install!;)
Also, a crucial bit for me, release 6.0 has a kernel rev with Compaq SMART RAID drivers, as well as install support for out-of-the-box RAID implementations. I had tried (and succeeded after much pain and agony) building a Compaq 1600R + SMART RAID adapter RH5.2 box, using the frantz 'external' drivers, patching LILO and fdisk, copying entire system file trees from a CDROM 'image' of a fully-functional RH5.2 system, etc. It actually worked, and worked properly, after about 3 days of labor.
I forget: does NBSD support the SMART RAID card? Considering most of the equipment we'd consider moving from NT/Netware to Linux is Compaq with SMART RAID cards, our options are limited (and Solaris x86 server licenses are VERY expensive!)
Don't forget the PCMCIA driver pkg.. It works quite nicely as a kernel 'add-on'.. I can't see why any non-canonical kernel mods couldn't be packaged similarly, as long as the kernel builder has the smarts enough to manage it.. (and don't laugh, but the first time I upgraded my redhat laptop's kernel from 2.0.36 to 2.2.1 I broke PCMCIA and other bits, but I learned how to fix it after Reading TF HOWTOs.. Anyone building a HA solution had better know how to build and maintain a kernel!)
Your Working Boy,
Re:Terminal ballistic qualities if it falls ;-)
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
·
· Score: 1
The entire skyhook, which is rotating about the Earth's axis on the same 23 hour 56 minute sidereal schedule, is moving eastward and will keep moving eastward
What I'm wondering is, would a skyhook have enough mass to alter the speed of the earth's rotation in any significant way? Would we have to build 2 hooks on opposite sides of the planet to counterbalance any wobble, or would they just not be massive enough to count... Your Working Boy,
... is the Airport hardware (a Lucent chipset it would appear) supported by Linux, and is a compatible PCI 802.11 (turbo: the plain is 2mb/s IIRC) NIC supported? I can easily imagine a linux box routing for an Airport/802.11 LAN, if it's supported....
The only reason to offer "plans" is to deliberately take advantage of and to cash in on people who choose the wrong plan for themselves.
I think it's kinda naive to expect moneygrubbing corporations to apply complex usage analysis algorithms each month in order to not make money.. I mean, it'd be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen. What I would do is support competition in the space to bring prices down overall...
ObTopic: In NYC at least, with Hell Atlantic, you get to choose from the following for local calls (917, 212, 718, and whatever new ACs we'll be getting):
Per-minute charge: you make a 10 minute call, you are charged X for the first minute and X/Y for each additional.
Message rate: you pay one fixed price per call, regardless of length: you make a 10 minute call, you are charged 10.6 cents
Flat rate: you pay one fixed price per month, make as many local area calls as you like: you make a hundred 10 minute calls, you are charged X per month.
Personally, when I move into my megaloft in 2 weeks, I will not be bothering with a landline! I'll be going PCS + SDSL.. and not dealing with Smell Pedantic should make life a little nicer (I'll let Covad deal with them!;)
They're both 16x9 and take S-video ins for your DVD players.. the KL9000 is a data-grade monitor that can handle 8xx by 480 IIRC.. I know Sony bundles M$ drivers with it. It's supposed to be a very nice DVD-viewing medium that should handle 720p if you get a DTV->VGA converter or a DTV card for your PC.
The W400Q is a DTV-ready projector that streets about $3600 new, and can display up to 300" in 16x9 mode (that's like 20' wide by 1' high or something), though it probably maxes out in quality terms at a mere 130-140" or so. It has an internal scan doubler to display 480p (that's 480 non-interlaced, or progressive) scan and has native 16x9 LCDs. It'll accept a DTV converter that uses Y-Pr-Pb (or is it Cr-Cb? I always confuse them) analog signals though it downconverts to 480p. It's probably the best budget home-theatre projector you can get, and it's the one that'll be driving my home theatre (with actual movie screen and seats scavenged from a closed old theatre) sometime in mid-November..
You _can_ get 'affordable' 16x9 sets in the US, if you're scavengy enough.. Though after visiting Amsterdam I only really saw maybe 2-3 channels actually broadcasting 16x9 PAL and I had cable!
... XiG is free, as a corporation in a democracy, to do whatever it likes with its advertising budget. Likewise, we as consumers in a democratic capitalist system, may decide to purchase their software (or not) based on its merits.
If the slags on XFree are without merit, then we'll know soon enough. If XFree can use some improvement (which it can, in terms of utilizing vendor-specific acceleration HW to its fullest), let's see the commercial market spur the free product!
I've never used XiG, though I considered it for the brief moment when they were the only X server that covered the NeoMagic laptop chipset. Once that feature got rolled into XFree, I haven't needed the performance of the accelerated drivers, and I have never had a problem with stability on XFree. EVER. (though finding the right damn modelines can be a chore;)
I mean really, I can't even get a nice GPF bluescreen from KDE or GNOME
Actually, you're wrong here. Try the 'Black Screen of Death' screensaver in KDE 1.1.1.. It comes with BSODs for both NT and 95! As well as some of your old favorites from Amiga, Mac, and IIRC Atari..
... I ain't interested. Seriously though, I had the chance to setup a Qube remotely (and then visit it in action later;) and it's neat for what it is, formfactor and all, but I don't think it's meant for the tinkerer. Not that that's necessarily a slam, but if you're the type of person who likes to install their glibc from source or recompile a kernel at every patchlevel, you'll be disappointed. LTIC, Cobalt had a piss-poor archive of pretested/precompiled RPMs for their machines, and they don't keep up with the latest kernels (which bugs me for performance, security, and feature reasons).
Suffice it to say, they're interesting systems, but hardly flexible enough for a true tinkerer..
While most people would almost never drive a couple of hours to buy out of state, it isn't that hard to click a link.
This really depends. In the US, if a company has a retail presence in a state, that company must charge sales tax for all transactions to residents in that state at the state sales tax rate, assuming the state has a sales tax. For instance, Land's End charges state sales tax in NY because it has some wonky retail outlet somewhere in western NY. Because of that, any Land's End order in NY is charged sales tax!
So, if company A has a link to company A 'East' or 'West', as long as they're both actually company A they must collect state sales tax. IANATA, but it may be possible to have a tax-free entity associated via a holding company, but IANACPA either..
The point is, if a state wants to jump-start its internet company population it needs to exempt sales taxes on internet transactions and draw large retail operations which will make up the difference in corporate tax (as well as high-paying jobs that generate employee income tax and happy voters)..
Slashdot Mirror
It is weak in areas such as GUI development
you mean in terms of the development environment, or creating GUI applications? Because I always considered PerlTk actually pretty easy to understand and utilize, and it's cross-platform...
Your Working Boy,
No way python/tcl are just as good for that purpose as perl, after all if there were any good everyone would be using them, right?
Perhaps Python, though some people prefer to choose whether or not to program in OO. And Tcl doesn't compare: bytecode-compiled Perl and Python blow it away in execution time as well as (IMAO) syntax and features. I prefer Perl because most of the scripting I do involves regexes, and Perl has the best regex support of any language yet developed on this planet or any other that I know of.. In fact, it is only over the last 6 months that I've tried my hand at any other perl5 features besides the expanded regex set and 'my' and 'use'...
No way there are some instances where speed of program is more important than speed of development.
There certainly are. However, for general CGI programming, speed of development is far more important than speed of execution. Typically for perl modules, any execution-critical routines are actually coded in C or assembler and simply interfaced to Perl. If it's not execution-time critical, then why be concerned?
Not like costs per gate are going up...
Your Working Boy,
Because it's probably cheaper than running 10 miles of single-mode fiber, which is what you'd need if you want a 10-mile long ethernet link..
</pedant>
Your Working Boy,
Like this one. It should be that if you patent something and it's proven to be invalid because of prior art or whatever, you should be heavily fined and barred from filing patents for some period of years. This would force companies desiring to patent an idea to go the extra mile to prove that nobody ever had that idea and implemented it before.
The penalties need to be stiff, like paying court costs, all patent fees, and maybe a few million dollars in fines. They should be barred from applying for patents for like ten years. This should be enough to deter these pesky morons.
And if someone thinks that IBM didn't figure this out in the forties and/or fifties, they're smoking some pretty potent crack..
Your Working Boy,
... I have to disagree with it in at least 2 ways. Firstly, not all tinkerers and smart people are necessarily the same, or driven by the same things! People are inspired by the strangest things, and perhaps 'Ron' was inspired by the power of computers and the rewarding nature of programming (symbol manipulation, algorithm development). If these facets hadn't been available, perhaps he'd be one of those 'underachievers', sullen and depressed because of ability with no outlet for release. To paraphrase a famous quote: "Stupid people are stupid in the same way, while Smart people are smart in different ways"..
:( )
Also, to think that people are going 'to waste' because the internet's a fad is kinda putting the cart before the horse here. Would you have said that James Watt was wasting his time because he was tinkering with a well-known mechanism? What about Alexander Graham Bell? Who would possibly put up with the bother and expense of running all that metal wire when you could perfectly well just write a letter or use a telegraph?
I think that history has taught us that any major advance in communication capability has changed western culture in massive and incalcuable ways. The printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet. If there's any proven historical trend, it's that anything which improves human ability to communicate or travel brings wealth and prominence to people involved in the field. Not necessarily the inventors, but to someone.
The internet joins many different streams of human progress: communications, (virtual) travel, and symbolic manipulation, among others. The telephone's touch-tone system has spun off a huge and entirely unpredictable range of services and interaction available by the side effects of having tone-recognition capability and a 12 button interface. Hell, think of all the features a simple switchhook 'flash' can get you these days! Thirteen buttons are all you need to buy clothes, order food, make travel plans, check movie times.
The internet and the power that simple, standard data communications offer can make life smarter and less tedious than ever before, though along with that (as history shows) it probably won't help decide the difficult questions, and it probably won't make life any easier (since all the tedious bits are done for you, all that's left is the really hard stuff.
We're only 30 years into the Internet revolution, and really only 5 years into the popularization of the Internet. It's a little bit early to bemoan our waste of human capital just yet.
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
My feeling is eventually the Sysadmin field will end up being similar to other, more traditional skilled fields like carpentry, plumbing, auto mechanics, etc. The job of sysadmin requires both a skillset and a mindset of a highly technical nature, which is rare in both boom and bust times. Sysadmins trade on their knowledge of and facility with their systems, much as a plumber trades on on his knowledge and facility with pipes, water flow, local codes and ordinances, etc. Sysadmins (when the bust comes) will probably have to suffer an attitude adjustment: a lot of primadonna behavior (mine included ;) will have to go, but in the end, real sysadmins with skill, knowledge, and a 'calling' for the field will continue to do well. The 'casual' sysadmins who are in it for the money will have to look elsewhere, thus reducing the overall admin pool and equalizing the salaries higher among those that enjoy the job.
Actually, depending on the size of the company, I see sysadmin morphing into a 'superintendent' role for small companies and a combination 'plumber/janitor' role for larger companies. The job actually reflects elements of those jobs now, but with the demand there's an added element of 'fuck you, I can go across the street and get 30% more salary in 24 minutes' which I find ultimately regrettable in terms of personal happiness (in the short run it's fine, but in the long run you have to be pretty social and good at maintaining contacts made in brief amounts of time to make something ultimately worthwhile of the job-hopping act)
And the difference between a burnt-out admin and a working admin is the ability to manage expectations well, as well as the ability to say NO and stand firm. If you bitch and moan about people heaping stuff on you, which isn't really your job but since you can do it in 5 minutes and they would take a half hour you do it, so you do it, they will CONTINUE TO HEAP THINGS ONTO YOU because (and this is the really sad part) YOU'VE TRAINED THEM TO! This is a sure road to quick burnout. Don't sacrifice your personality or psyche to the job: it's JUST A JOB.
Your Working Boy,
McDonalds will be charging $2 for a hamburger at 5pm, and $.50 after 8pm.
;)
IIRC one of the fast food megacorps (I think it was actually McDonalds) tried differential pricing, where you could get a particular sandwich or combo meal for less after 5pm.. or was it before 5pm.. Anyway, it didn't work, or else we'd still be seeing it... And quite honestly, if Coke machines charge too much, I simply won't buy. I don't actually buy vending-machine soda now anyways: I drink flavored seltzer water. I let the quad venti cappucinos do the caffeination grunt work..
Your Working Boy,
Maybe, let's just hope they don't roll over when faced by Microsoft's legal and marketing longbowmen...
I can just see it in Redmond right now...
"Once more into the courtroom my friends! Or wall it up with our overpaid dead!"
Your Working Boy,
so doing an NFS install of NetBSD onto a laptop isn't a crisis like installing RedHat is.
.img files and couldn't figure out why the damn thing wasn't letting me choose FTP install! ;)
Hate to break it to ya, but as of release 6.0, RedHat includes separate boot CDROM and boot NET install boot floppies, as well as images to roll them yourself. Confused me at first, as I downloaded the usual
Also, a crucial bit for me, release 6.0 has a kernel rev with Compaq SMART RAID drivers, as well as install support for out-of-the-box RAID implementations. I had tried (and succeeded after much pain and agony) building a Compaq 1600R + SMART RAID adapter RH5.2 box, using the frantz 'external' drivers, patching LILO and fdisk, copying entire system file trees from a CDROM 'image' of a fully-functional RH5.2 system, etc. It actually worked, and worked properly, after about 3 days of labor.
I forget: does NBSD support the SMART RAID card? Considering most of the equipment we'd consider moving from NT/Netware to Linux is Compaq with SMART RAID cards, our options are limited (and Solaris x86 server licenses are VERY expensive!)
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
Don't forget the PCMCIA driver pkg.. It works quite nicely as a kernel 'add-on'.. I can't see why any non-canonical kernel mods couldn't be packaged similarly, as long as the kernel builder has the smarts enough to manage it.. (and don't laugh, but the first time I upgraded my redhat laptop's kernel from 2.0.36 to 2.2.1 I broke PCMCIA and other bits, but I learned how to fix it after Reading TF HOWTOs.. Anyone building a HA solution had better know how to build and maintain a kernel!)
Your Working Boy,
The entire skyhook, which is rotating about the Earth's axis on the same 23 hour 56 minute sidereal schedule, is moving eastward and will keep moving eastward
What I'm wondering is, would a skyhook have enough mass to alter the speed of the earth's rotation in any significant way? Would we have to build 2 hooks on opposite sides of the planet to counterbalance any wobble, or would they just not be massive enough to count...
Your Working Boy,
Hell, why not a moderation hypercube?
;)
x: interest/relevance
y: humor
z: technical acuity
t: timeliness
Only problem is displaying it properly..
Your Working Boy,
If you want to use the scroller in KDE, get IMWheel.. I use it in KDE 1.1.1 and it works pretty well...
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
... is the Airport hardware (a Lucent chipset it would appear) supported by Linux, and is a compatible PCI 802.11 (turbo: the plain is 2mb/s IIRC) NIC supported? I can easily imagine a linux box routing for an Airport/802.11 LAN, if it's supported....
Cheers,
Your Working Boy,
"I know this!"
Yes, but according to Brooks, aren't odd-numbered releases better than even-numbered releases? ;)
LYNX!!! (maybe with a color Visor + springboard->cart widget)
... IIS?
"I put fifty quatloos on the newcomer!"
I think it's kinda naive to expect moneygrubbing corporations to apply complex usage analysis algorithms each month in order to not make money.. I mean, it'd be nice, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen. What I would do is support competition in the space to bring prices down overall...
ObTopic: In NYC at least, with Hell Atlantic, you get to choose from the following for local calls (917, 212, 718, and whatever new ACs we'll be getting):
Personally, when I move into my megaloft in 2 weeks, I will not be bothering with a landline! I'll be going PCS + SDSL.. and not dealing with Smell Pedantic should make life a little nicer (I'll let Covad deal with them!
They're both 16x9 and take S-video ins for your DVD players.. the KL9000 is a data-grade monitor that can handle 8xx by 480 IIRC.. I know Sony bundles M$ drivers with it. It's supposed to be a very nice DVD-viewing medium that should handle 720p if you get a DTV->VGA converter or a DTV card for your PC.
The W400Q is a DTV-ready projector that streets about $3600 new, and can display up to 300" in 16x9 mode (that's like 20' wide by 1' high or something), though it probably maxes out in quality terms at a mere 130-140" or so. It has an internal scan doubler to display 480p (that's 480 non-interlaced, or progressive) scan and has native 16x9 LCDs. It'll accept a DTV converter that uses Y-Pr-Pb (or is it Cr-Cb? I always confuse them) analog signals though it downconverts to 480p. It's probably the best budget home-theatre projector you can get, and it's the one that'll be driving my home theatre (with actual movie screen and seats scavenged from a closed old theatre) sometime in mid-November..
You _can_ get 'affordable' 16x9 sets in the US, if you're scavengy enough.. Though after visiting Amsterdam I only really saw maybe 2-3 channels actually broadcasting 16x9 PAL and I had cable!
Links:
W400q unofficial FAQ
KLW9000 unofficial FAQ
Now, all I need is BBC teletext..
... XiG is free, as a corporation in a democracy, to do whatever it likes with its advertising budget. Likewise, we as consumers in a democratic capitalist system, may decide to purchase their software (or not) based on its merits.
;)
If the slags on XFree are without merit, then we'll know soon enough. If XFree can use some improvement (which it can, in terms of utilizing vendor-specific acceleration HW to its fullest), let's see the commercial market spur the free product!
I've never used XiG, though I considered it for the brief moment when they were the only X server that covered the NeoMagic laptop chipset. Once that feature got rolled into XFree, I haven't needed the performance of the accelerated drivers, and I have never had a problem with stability on XFree. EVER. (though finding the right damn modelines can be a chore
I mean really, I can't even get a nice GPF bluescreen from KDE or GNOME
Actually, you're wrong here. Try the 'Black Screen of Death' screensaver in KDE 1.1.1.. It comes with BSODs for both NT and 95! As well as some of your old favorites from Amiga, Mac, and IIRC Atari..
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." (M. Gandhi)
(Sounds like M$ is between the laughing and fighting stages...)
... I ain't interested. Seriously though, I had the chance to setup a Qube remotely (and then visit it in action later ;) and it's neat for what it is, formfactor and all, but I don't think it's meant for the tinkerer. Not that that's necessarily a slam, but if you're the type of person who likes to install their glibc from source or recompile a kernel at every patchlevel, you'll be disappointed. LTIC, Cobalt had a piss-poor archive of pretested/precompiled RPMs for their machines, and they don't keep up with the latest kernels (which bugs me for performance, security, and feature reasons).
Suffice it to say, they're interesting systems, but hardly flexible enough for a true tinkerer..
While most people would almost never drive a couple of hours to buy out of state, it isn't that hard to click a link.
This really depends. In the US, if a company has a retail presence in a state, that company must charge sales tax for all transactions to residents in that state at the state sales tax rate, assuming the state has a sales tax. For instance, Land's End charges state sales tax in NY because it has some wonky retail outlet somewhere in western NY. Because of that, any Land's End order in NY is charged sales tax!
So, if company A has a link to company A 'East' or 'West', as long as they're both actually company A they must collect state sales tax. IANATA, but it may be possible to have a tax-free entity associated via a holding company, but IANACPA either..
The point is, if a state wants to jump-start its internet company population it needs to exempt sales taxes on internet transactions and draw large retail operations which will make up the difference in corporate tax (as well as high-paying jobs that generate employee income tax and happy voters)..