I feel it's my economic duty to provide accurate and useful signals to the market, so my dollars go to the most efficient and cost effective source that meets my requirements for quality, selection, availability and price. If I need something immediately or I need to touch it before buying, I choose a local supplier offering those benefits. If I don't need those things, I select on the remaining criteria. To choose vendors on arbitrary 'feel good' sloganeering deprives me of the best value and deprives the, perhaps distant, vendor that worked hard to meet my mix of needs of the sale they deserve. It also sends false demand signals to local vendors. However these false signals only serve to distort the market temporarily but otherwise are pointless gestures that, in the long run, achieve nothing and help no one.
I've played around a lot with this stuff for more than a decade. Skype can be okay if the remote system is powerful, well configured, has excellent broadband, a good external webcam and good lighting. However, those necessary things will only rarely all be present, particularly internationally. If you want high quality and a high degree of future-proofness for the video assets you are going to so much effort to create, there is a counter-intuitive alternative.
There are truly amazing small consumer camcorders now available for $500-$700 that work great in low light, capture excellent 1080p, auto focus on faces, auto iris, auto WB, etc quite well. I shoot with high-end pro gear and these little consumer cams deliver an unbelievable picture for the price. Ship one of these to your remote location with a small AV clamp that will mount it to the top of the monitor next to the webcam. Do your live interview via Skype through the webcam but have your remote location turn on the HD camcorder after the Skype session begins. The camera will beep when it starts recording and you can use this beep to later sync the Skype recording with the HD camera recording. After the interview, the remote location can plug the camera in as a USB device and Dropbox the recorded file over to you in non-real-time (AVCHD peaks at ~24mbps but is often much smaller). Or if it's not as time sensitive, you can get the file off the SD card when the camera comes back.
This also gives you the advantage of providing a handheld camera to your remote location. Even rank novices can shoot 'B-Roll' type footage of remarkable quality. The handheld image stabilization on these cams is impressive. If you give your remote amateur "crew" a simple shot list and ask them to first watch a ten minute YouTube tutorial on basic camera handling and shot composition, the results can even rival semi-pros. This way you'll have something to intercut with the talking heads to further elevate your production value.
Yes, this implies that you are actually editing your final product. Basic editing will again double your production value over raw webcam recordings. It doesn't have to take too much extra time, particularly if your remote camcorder has it's time-of-day clock set roughly right. Your handy intern can be making a shot list of good/bad clips and restarts on your end during the interview and reference this via TOD + clip offset time during subsequent editing. This saves a lot of hunting around inside the clips. With practice you should be able to do a basic edit with canned intro/outro, standard title overlays, B-roll cutaways and some still graphics (logos, product shots) in about 3X the total running time of your output. Note: that's just active work time, not unmanned background clip downloading or final output encoding, which you can batch up and leave running unattended.
Finally, as we say in TV land, audio is more than half the picture. Sending a basic wired clip-on microphone will do wonders for your production value by reducing machine noise and ambient room echo. If your remote location is in North America you can send them the Radio Shack part number for a decent clip-on mic that they can pick up themselves for $25. Regardless, if sound/video from your end is going to be seen then you should use at least use high quality mic and camera on your end.
Personally, I'm a skeptic of these kinds of tests. I think they may work to some degree in some scenarios with some people but there will be other scenarios or people for which the test will largely fail.
I believe that prohibition is wrong, but if the laws weren't there, I wouldn't use drugs.
When I wrote the line above about being a skeptic of the test, I was pretty much thinking of someone like you. You have have a principled political/ethical belief system that is not mainstream, but despite what you believe you feel even more strongly that breaking laws isn't the right way to behave. From what I understand about the test (and I'm only a half-hour 'Google' expert), it doesn't rate 'druggie' as a characteristic and I don't think it would peg you as a liar (at least based on these answers). What I think it would do is more subtle (and perhaps no less evil), it might rate you very high on rebelliousness and/or non-conformity. Taken out of context I wouldn't view either of those two as a problem - but I'm not like most people. If the test is interpreted by someone who spends five minutes on it, then the employer isn't looking for 'subtleties' and someone like you isn't getting the job and that's a huge fail for the whole idea of tests like these.
Apparently some psychologists believe that a test like this is really only valid if taken as a precursor to them spending an hour talking with you, where they are able to hone in on the 'why' of some of the indicated traits. If done that way they believe the scenario above wouldn't happen and that the final assessment (written by a trained human psychologist) would be that you are a highly principled person with a consistent set of non-conformist beliefs who would not extend those beliefs into actions if they were in conflict with laws or expected work behavior.
The issue in my mind is that even that seemingly accurate outcome could still be a problem because the ultimate decision makers wouldn't take the time to even think through that assessment sentence and what it means. Ultimately, I believe the real problem is that it is dangerous any time we try to assess people as potential employees based on thoughts and beliefs instead of actions. I've worked with people that believed some absolutely bat crazy shit, but they were really good at their jobs and entirely functional citizens. It's not a problem if the person has the self-awareness to know that what they believe isn't what everyone else believes and they have the maturity/self-control to moderate their actions as appropriate to work well in their environment. Then it doesn't matter what they think internally, only how they behave externally. So, the bottom line for me is that I think background checks (criminal, legal, employment references) can be a good idea. Personality tests for this purpose are too likely to yield false positives and false negatives.
I noticed several posts pointing out some of the seemingly silly questions (ie "My hands and feet get cold"). They may in fact be silly but there is reasoning behind them. I went and actually did some reading up on how the test is supposed to work. There are 8 different major scales measured and several other more minor ones too. For example Scale 1 is essentially looking at Hypochondria, a person's tendency to be really focused on (and maybe whiny) about every little ache and pain. The test understands that everyone has some stuff wrong with them and certain physical peeves too, so you're supposed to mark some of the stuff "T". But if you look at the questions, there are a bunch about this physical stuff and they are all over the place. If you put a "T" by a whole lot of them, then the test scores you higher on this scale. If you put an "F" by all of them, the test basically scores your "truthfulness on test questions" lower because these are things that everyone should complain about a few of.
The issue of test validity is a big deal and dealt with in different ways including checking for truthfulness by asking the same thing in a different way in different parts of the test. There are a bunch of these question pairs and there are some set up for consistent answers being "T/T", "T/F", and "F/F". There are also question sequences in the back half of the test designed to detect if the user is just starting to mostly randomly check or barely skim questions. Too high on this and the test is reflected as invalid.
Gaming the test is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. Some questions can be taken at face value, like "I sometimes think about killing myself". If you check that one "T" along with some other similar questions then you may well be suicidal. However, there are other questions that state mildly negative personality traits that most people have. If you refuse to admit to any of them then the test scores you as either trying to present an unrealistically positive image or as having an unrealistic self-image/ego. Answering some of those type questions with a "T" will get the test to paint you as a self-confident personality with a healthy self-image that feels no need to hide common human foibles.
Personally, I'm a skeptic of these kinds of tests. I think they may work to some degree in some scenarios with some people but there will be other scenarios or people for which the test will largely fail. This particular test is also susceptible to interpretation error. Some evaluators tend to focus in on individual scales but what I read says that that over-simple approach almost always yields skewed results. To get an accurate scoring the evaluator must consider the scales together. In large scale testing of different populations, the experts in this claim to have identified different groupings, for example two particular scales elevated while a third specific scale is lowered may represent a certain personality trait (ie rebelliousness or conformity). It's also said that the evaluator *must* have accurate background info on the subject (ie record of physical violence, manic behavior, etc). These factors can apparently change the assessment significantly.
Having actual lived (and suffered) under this rule as a smaller manufacturer operating on a national level for decades. It has a real and, in some cases, severe financial impact on my life.
This rule caused us lots of harm and prevented the growth of our small, self-funded entreprenuerial business. As a manufacturer, having local resellers is a less expensive alternative to hiring our own sales force. The distribution channel is essentially a way to outsource sales, which if you are a small start-up is often a key enabler to getting your business off the ground. Resellers are crucial to us because they call on customers, demonstrate our products, answer questions, do local support and even run local ads. That's why they are worth the ~30% margin I build in to our business model to pay them. Dealers also assume credit cost/risk and aggregate a bunch of onesy/twosy orders into volume purchases that our small company can handle. To me that 30% is a necessary cost of making and selling my product just as much as parts and assembly. If the dealer didn't make that investment on my behalf, then I would have to raise that much more money and pay to do that work myself. That's the beauty of a distribution channel. I don't have to fund that pre-sales and distribution expense upfront out of my pocket. My reseller partners essentially go into business with me, do the work and get paid for their work by adding that cost downstream of me. It's a wonderful enabling option for me as an entreprenuer - except it doesn't work because of this law. It makes it so that I can't ensure that my reseller will actually be repaid for their investment and work to build our mutual business.
The problem is that as soon as my product starts to get any momentum, an internet or mail-order 'box house' buys a little inventory from a distributor and marks the product up only 15%. Prospects still learn about the product from the local sales calls, ads or shows our 'real' dealers invest their money to do, and prospects still phone the 'real' dealers for pre-sales questions and demos but then many of the prospects buy from the box house because it's cheaper. But it's only cheaper because those box houses 'cheat' by not doing the market development and support work that we need them to do (and built into the margin to pay for). In that case I'd rather lower my product's selling price and split the difference directly with the consumer. The problem is that then I don't have anyone doing local demos, sales, support etc. Some products need those things to succeed and those products (like mine) are harmed by this law.
When I design, cost-estimate and raise capital to build a product, I always have a projected ASP (Average Selling Price). This is what we think a typical consumer will typically pay for the product. We use this to figure out if the product will be a good competitive alternative in the market and if enough customers will actually buy the product. We balance the bill of materials, advertising, cost of sales and customer acquisition costs. In our ASP there is an average expected reseller margin which is there to pay the resellers to do the work we need them to do to make the product successful. Those box houses are essentially 'leeching' the value of the pre-sales work and investment I asked my 'real' reseller partners to make. It sucks that I make this product by my own hand and the "sweat of my brow" so to speak, but then this law limits how I bring my product to the marketplace, how I implement my distribution partnerships, and how I grow my business.
In my view the law is a government intrusion into my right to enter into certain kinds of mutually agreed contracts with my distribution partners. It also quite literally limits what products I can consider creating and offering to consumers. I have to stay away from products that I feel need a lot of face-to-face explanation, demonstration and support to succeed. There's no way I can justify raising the capital from my investors to fund local sales offices and this law make
After looking at all the data, we certainly believe in your results. Your data proves that there is no evidence for ESP (except in flawed non-reproducible experiments). So long and thanks for confirming the obvious.
As others have said, it clearly doesn't apply to "laptop personal computers". All the confusion seems to be from the very inexact terminology that presently describes handheld or embedded computing devices that aren't PCs. But lets look at why MM is restricting usage on these other devices.
It's gotta be because they have a fast-growing and very high potential business in licensing Flash players to be embedded on your cell phone, PDA, music player or what have you. They don't want those manufacturers to have a way of not having to license the Flash player from MM. If you can just power up your cell phone the first time and the manufacturer has it set to go download a free Flash player (assuming there were a free one that was compatible) that would cut into MMs OEM licensing revenue.
DV Rack (http://www.dvrack.com/ by Serious Magic runs on a laptop and was made to do exactly this plus it has automatic quality monitoring that watches video and audio levels in real-time alerting you when thresholds are exceeded. It also turns your laptop screen into a field monitor that lets you compare live camera to recorded clips in split screen (good for checking continuity/framing).
There's an express version that lists for $149.
Disclaimer: Yes, I work at the company but hey someone finally asked a question on Slashdot that requests exactly what a product that I worked on does.
No, you cannot usually recover your costs in defending a patent claim.
Also, the expense of defending this type of claim is on average $750,000 to trial and $1.5 through appeals. Just not worth it for the potential return.
At least in this case the guys blocking them are actually shipping a similar product. Many times the patent holder hasn't made a product and does't intend to, they just want to make anyone who does pay. Sadly, these patent holders are often not interested in licensing a small company to make a product. They are basically waiting hoping that a big player stumbles into their patent trap.
Sorry, that point of view is just wrong. As the founder of a software company, let me assure you that a reasonable proprietary rights agreement signed by all the developers at the company is essential. Without it companies could not get investors (they want to know what they are buying a piece of). Investors are where the paychecks come from. Nor could we deliver to our employee/shareholders an IPO or acquisition that will hopefully make them wealthy. Without clearly defining what the company owns, no acquirer or underwriter would ever give us the time of day.
The company is paying cash money to the employee to do 'work-for-hire'. Unless otherwise arranged, the company should own the resulting work. The company is taking all the risk. The product may be worthless, there may be no market, but the employee has already taken his/her cash money to the bank. Yes, it's less than a owning part of the product if it's a hit but no risk/no reward.
As for an idea that's completely unrelated to the field that the company is paying the employee to think about, and the employee had the idea on their own time and only developed it after they left the company (without using any company-related ideas or proprietary information) then that idea should belong to the employee.
My intention was to highlight two different ways that UL "approval" has evolved to have unintended consequences. The two examples were based on different types of companies, the first assembling commodity products out of commonly available "off the shelf" components.
In my second example (a small company with an innovative new widget), I am positing that the widget in question is innovative enough that at least one critical electrical part won't be "off the shelf" and offered by a larger supplier who has already run the UL gauntlet, thus forcing the small company through the UL process (due to the "innovative" design of their product).
IMHO, UL approval has gotten too regimented and isn't worth what it used to be worth. Now component makers get UL approval for their components (power supply, power cord, etc.) and then a manufacturer buys this component, uses it in some design that the folks at UL never even saw. Of course the manufacturer still slaps that UL logo right on the box.
Also, UL can be a bad thing for some manufacturers. Many national chains (Wal-Mart etc.) will not carry anything electrical if it doesn't have that UL logo. The testing costs money and takes time which can put small companies at a disadvantage. If your creation is so innovative that UL's quickie lab doesn't quite know what to make of this thing from a company they've never heard of, then it may take a long time (longer than your capital lasts) to get your new widget into national distribution.
Here is the contact info for the two representatives mentioned in the article as possibly favoring an extension. It sounds like they are floating a trial balloon to see if they can get away with supporting another extension (and hence get a nice campaign contribution from the Celcos). Getting a flood of responses right now can make a big difference. Send them a fax or letter, it works much, much better than emails. Below is the letter I'm sending but drafting your own comments is best./.ers have never had trouble expressing themselves:)
Representative Fred Upton 2161 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515 202 225-3761 202 225-2986 fax
John Shimkus 513 Cannon House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Phone: (202) 225-5271 Fax: (202) 225-5880
Dear Representative Upton,
I read with dismay and considerable disbelief your comments regarding the possibility of extending, yet again, cellular number portability. As you know, this has been mandated since 1996 and extended three times since 1999. To even consider another extension as sought by the largest cellular providers is simply ludicrous. Your constituents have been waiting, and waiting and waiting for years as the cellular companies have trotted out increasingly creative excuses to maintain this anti-competitive and illegitimate hold on consumers. Granting another extension on top of all the others goes against the interest of voting consumers and does not pass even the most basic âoesmellâ test.
Implementing number portability will not divert funds from other projects as claimed because the cellular companies can charge for this new service. In fact, they will make money by offering portability, just not as much as they are now making by extracting over-market prices from customers who are having their phone number held hostage. Everyone from the FCC, the courts, the media, analysts and even Congress itself, agree that consumers will get better value and service in a frictionless free market. To perpetuate this sitation, is to artificially prevent a cellular company that provides better value and service from gaining the customers it deserves. This has the effect of sheltering the larger players from competition while removing incentives for investment, innovation and excellence. It is interesting that some cellular companies want further extensions and some do not. Now that the FCC and courts will no longer entertain their increasingly fantastic arguments, they are seeking to legislate the unfair competitive advantage they cannot maintain any other way. The massive funds already spent by the celcos lobbying to continue holding consumers hostage would be more wisely invested in better service so their customers won't be so desperate to escape.
This issue has grown increasingly high profile. Each extension has focused more eyes on the actions of everyone involved. It is now a common topic of discussion among your constituents, who are expecting to finally enjoy the relief that has been promised yet delayed for so long.
That's true but I don't care about 1600 x 1200, I want to do 720 x 480 at 30 fps (or interlaced 60 fps at 720 x 240). That's what myself and about one million other users of video editing software want to do. And my processor will compress it in real-time in DV format at ~3 MB/s. No problem for my pokey IDE drive. Big time savings for all us video creators.
I could send you a DVD, S-VCD or DV tape of my output (and not just games). Except I can't record my output now because I can't get it back into my PC from the GFX card at a reasonably useful speed.
There are over a million users of video editing software such as Pinnacle Studio, VideoWave, Ulead, Adobe Premiere etc. If they knew that with a (probably small) driver fix their gfx card could make their video effects creation faster than real-time, I think they would be thrilled (and they would start demanding it). Just about everyone I know that does video on PCs complains about render times. A lot of us have paid $1,000+ to get some hardware card that can accelerate rendering. Kind of silly when we have already paid for a card that can do it even faster than that. All that lovely horsepower is just sitting there at the wrong end of a one way data street due to a lack of driver optimization.
Although there are more game players, I think in today's competitive gfx card market, a million potential customers is enough to get a manufacturer's attention.
Ok, I'll admit that I collect old computers. I've even got a little site documenting my collection of 'home computers' (you remember, the little all-in-one console-style machines that hooked to a TV). I like these machines because they represent the original path 'home' computers were on before the incipient 'beige-dom' of PCs overwhelmed the market. These little guys were sold in department stores (you know, like furniture) and some featured quaint pictures on their packaging of housewives entering recipes into them (for storage on audio cassettes). Hmmm, those were the days.
Sure there are lots of common ones like the C64 and Ataris but there were dozens of different kinds of fascinating machines from less known manufacturers all around the world. What's cool is that many of them were so unique in terms of shape, design, peripherals and OS. I even have a couple of little home computers from Russia. While I have about 70 different machines now, there are lots that I don't yet have and have only heard of. I know there were many unique models made and sold in South America and Arabic countries in the eighties. I have one machine designed and built in Yugoslavia in the early '80's called the Pecom 64. It's based on an RCA 1802 processor.
You can see my collection at: www.homecomputermuseum.com. Stop by and drop me a line if you also collect these kinds of machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel it's my economic duty to provide accurate and useful signals to the market, so my dollars go to the most efficient and cost effective source that meets my requirements for quality, selection, availability and price. If I need something immediately or I need to touch it before buying, I choose a local supplier offering those benefits. If I don't need those things, I select on the remaining criteria. To choose vendors on arbitrary 'feel good' sloganeering deprives me of the best value and deprives the, perhaps distant, vendor that worked hard to meet my mix of needs of the sale they deserve. It also sends false demand signals to local vendors. However these false signals only serve to distort the market temporarily but otherwise are pointless gestures that, in the long run, achieve nothing and help no one.
I've played around a lot with this stuff for more than a decade. Skype can be okay if the remote system is powerful, well configured, has excellent broadband, a good external webcam and good lighting. However, those necessary things will only rarely all be present, particularly internationally. If you want high quality and a high degree of future-proofness for the video assets you are going to so much effort to create, there is a counter-intuitive alternative.
There are truly amazing small consumer camcorders now available for $500-$700 that work great in low light, capture excellent 1080p, auto focus on faces, auto iris, auto WB, etc quite well. I shoot with high-end pro gear and these little consumer cams deliver an unbelievable picture for the price. Ship one of these to your remote location with a small AV clamp that will mount it to the top of the monitor next to the webcam. Do your live interview via Skype through the webcam but have your remote location turn on the HD camcorder after the Skype session begins. The camera will beep when it starts recording and you can use this beep to later sync the Skype recording with the HD camera recording. After the interview, the remote location can plug the camera in as a USB device and Dropbox the recorded file over to you in non-real-time (AVCHD peaks at ~24mbps but is often much smaller). Or if it's not as time sensitive, you can get the file off the SD card when the camera comes back.
This also gives you the advantage of providing a handheld camera to your remote location. Even rank novices can shoot 'B-Roll' type footage of remarkable quality. The handheld image stabilization on these cams is impressive. If you give your remote amateur "crew" a simple shot list and ask them to first watch a ten minute YouTube tutorial on basic camera handling and shot composition, the results can even rival semi-pros. This way you'll have something to intercut with the talking heads to further elevate your production value.
Yes, this implies that you are actually editing your final product. Basic editing will again double your production value over raw webcam recordings. It doesn't have to take too much extra time, particularly if your remote camcorder has it's time-of-day clock set roughly right. Your handy intern can be making a shot list of good/bad clips and restarts on your end during the interview and reference this via TOD + clip offset time during subsequent editing. This saves a lot of hunting around inside the clips. With practice you should be able to do a basic edit with canned intro/outro, standard title overlays, B-roll cutaways and some still graphics (logos, product shots) in about 3X the total running time of your output. Note: that's just active work time, not unmanned background clip downloading or final output encoding, which you can batch up and leave running unattended.
Finally, as we say in TV land, audio is more than half the picture. Sending a basic wired clip-on microphone will do wonders for your production value by reducing machine noise and ambient room echo. If your remote location is in North America you can send them the Radio Shack part number for a decent clip-on mic that they can pick up themselves for $25. Regardless, if sound/video from your end is going to be seen then you should use at least use high quality mic and camera on your end.
When I wrote the line above about being a skeptic of the test, I was pretty much thinking of someone like you. You have have a principled political/ethical belief system that is not mainstream, but despite what you believe you feel even more strongly that breaking laws isn't the right way to behave. From what I understand about the test (and I'm only a half-hour 'Google' expert), it doesn't rate 'druggie' as a characteristic and I don't think it would peg you as a liar (at least based on these answers). What I think it would do is more subtle (and perhaps no less evil), it might rate you very high on rebelliousness and/or non-conformity. Taken out of context I wouldn't view either of those two as a problem - but I'm not like most people. If the test is interpreted by someone who spends five minutes on it, then the employer isn't looking for 'subtleties' and someone like you isn't getting the job and that's a huge fail for the whole idea of tests like these.
Apparently some psychologists believe that a test like this is really only valid if taken as a precursor to them spending an hour talking with you, where they are able to hone in on the 'why' of some of the indicated traits. If done that way they believe the scenario above wouldn't happen and that the final assessment (written by a trained human psychologist) would be that you are a highly principled person with a consistent set of non-conformist beliefs who would not extend those beliefs into actions if they were in conflict with laws or expected work behavior.
The issue in my mind is that even that seemingly accurate outcome could still be a problem because the ultimate decision makers wouldn't take the time to even think through that assessment sentence and what it means. Ultimately, I believe the real problem is that it is dangerous any time we try to assess people as potential employees based on thoughts and beliefs instead of actions. I've worked with people that believed some absolutely bat crazy shit, but they were really good at their jobs and entirely functional citizens. It's not a problem if the person has the self-awareness to know that what they believe isn't what everyone else believes and they have the maturity/self-control to moderate their actions as appropriate to work well in their environment. Then it doesn't matter what they think internally, only how they behave externally. So, the bottom line for me is that I think background checks (criminal, legal, employment references) can be a good idea. Personality tests for this purpose are too likely to yield false positives and false negatives.
I noticed several posts pointing out some of the seemingly silly questions (ie "My hands and feet get cold"). They may in fact be silly but there is reasoning behind them. I went and actually did some reading up on how the test is supposed to work. There are 8 different major scales measured and several other more minor ones too. For example Scale 1 is essentially looking at Hypochondria, a person's tendency to be really focused on (and maybe whiny) about every little ache and pain. The test understands that everyone has some stuff wrong with them and certain physical peeves too, so you're supposed to mark some of the stuff "T". But if you look at the questions, there are a bunch about this physical stuff and they are all over the place. If you put a "T" by a whole lot of them, then the test scores you higher on this scale. If you put an "F" by all of them, the test basically scores your "truthfulness on test questions" lower because these are things that everyone should complain about a few of.
The issue of test validity is a big deal and dealt with in different ways including checking for truthfulness by asking the same thing in a different way in different parts of the test. There are a bunch of these question pairs and there are some set up for consistent answers being "T/T", "T/F", and "F/F". There are also question sequences in the back half of the test designed to detect if the user is just starting to mostly randomly check or barely skim questions. Too high on this and the test is reflected as invalid.
Gaming the test is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. Some questions can be taken at face value, like "I sometimes think about killing myself". If you check that one "T" along with some other similar questions then you may well be suicidal. However, there are other questions that state mildly negative personality traits that most people have. If you refuse to admit to any of them then the test scores you as either trying to present an unrealistically positive image or as having an unrealistic self-image/ego. Answering some of those type questions with a "T" will get the test to paint you as a self-confident personality with a healthy self-image that feels no need to hide common human foibles.
Personally, I'm a skeptic of these kinds of tests. I think they may work to some degree in some scenarios with some people but there will be other scenarios or people for which the test will largely fail. This particular test is also susceptible to interpretation error. Some evaluators tend to focus in on individual scales but what I read says that that over-simple approach almost always yields skewed results. To get an accurate scoring the evaluator must consider the scales together. In large scale testing of different populations, the experts in this claim to have identified different groupings, for example two particular scales elevated while a third specific scale is lowered may represent a certain personality trait (ie rebelliousness or conformity). It's also said that the evaluator *must* have accurate background info on the subject (ie record of physical violence, manic behavior, etc). These factors can apparently change the assessment significantly.
Having actual lived (and suffered) under this rule as a smaller manufacturer operating on a national level for decades. It has a real and, in some cases, severe financial impact on my life.
This rule caused us lots of harm and prevented the growth of our small, self-funded entreprenuerial business. As a manufacturer, having local resellers is a less expensive alternative to hiring our own sales force. The distribution channel is essentially a way to outsource sales, which if you are a small start-up is often a key enabler to getting your business off the ground. Resellers are crucial to us because they call on customers, demonstrate our products, answer questions, do local support and even run local ads. That's why they are worth the ~30% margin I build in to our business model to pay them. Dealers also assume credit cost/risk and aggregate a bunch of onesy/twosy orders into volume purchases that our small company can handle. To me that 30% is a necessary cost of making and selling my product just as much as parts and assembly. If the dealer didn't make that investment on my behalf, then I would have to raise that much more money and pay to do that work myself. That's the beauty of a distribution channel. I don't have to fund that pre-sales and distribution expense upfront out of my pocket. My reseller partners essentially go into business with me, do the work and get paid for their work by adding that cost downstream of me. It's a wonderful enabling option for me as an entreprenuer - except it doesn't work because of this law. It makes it so that I can't ensure that my reseller will actually be repaid for their investment and work to build our mutual business.
The problem is that as soon as my product starts to get any momentum, an internet or mail-order 'box house' buys a little inventory from a distributor and marks the product up only 15%. Prospects still learn about the product from the local sales calls, ads or shows our 'real' dealers invest their money to do, and prospects still phone the 'real' dealers for pre-sales questions and demos but then many of the prospects buy from the box house because it's cheaper. But it's only cheaper because those box houses 'cheat' by not doing the market development and support work that we need them to do (and built into the margin to pay for). In that case I'd rather lower my product's selling price and split the difference directly with the consumer. The problem is that then I don't have anyone doing local demos, sales, support etc. Some products need those things to succeed and those products (like mine) are harmed by this law.
When I design, cost-estimate and raise capital to build a product, I always have a projected ASP (Average Selling Price). This is what we think a typical consumer will typically pay for the product. We use this to figure out if the product will be a good competitive alternative in the market and if enough customers will actually buy the product. We balance the bill of materials, advertising, cost of sales and customer acquisition costs. In our ASP there is an average expected reseller margin which is there to pay the resellers to do the work we need them to do to make the product successful. Those box houses are essentially 'leeching' the value of the pre-sales work and investment I asked my 'real' reseller partners to make. It sucks that I make this product by my own hand and the "sweat of my brow" so to speak, but then this law limits how I bring my product to the marketplace, how I implement my distribution partnerships, and how I grow my business.
In my view the law is a government intrusion into my right to enter into certain kinds of mutually agreed contracts with my distribution partners. It also quite literally limits what products I can consider creating and offering to consumers. I have to stay away from products that I feel need a lot of face-to-face explanation, demonstration and support to succeed. There's no way I can justify raising the capital from my investors to fund local sales offices and this law make
After looking at all the data, we certainly believe in your results. Your data proves that there is no evidence for ESP (except in flawed non-reproducible experiments). So long and thanks for confirming the obvious.
As others have said, it clearly doesn't apply to "laptop personal computers". All the confusion seems to be from the very inexact terminology that presently describes handheld or embedded computing devices that aren't PCs. But lets look at why MM is restricting usage on these other devices.
It's gotta be because they have a fast-growing and very high potential business in licensing Flash players to be embedded on your cell phone, PDA, music player or what have you. They don't want those manufacturers to have a way of not having to license the Flash player from MM. If you can just power up your cell phone the first time and the manufacturer has it set to go download a free Flash player (assuming there were a free one that was compatible) that would cut into MMs OEM licensing revenue.
--- Mark
DV Rack (http://www.dvrack.com/ by Serious Magic runs on a laptop and was made to do exactly this plus it has automatic quality monitoring that watches video and audio levels in real-time alerting you when thresholds are exceeded. It also turns your laptop screen into a field monitor that lets you compare live camera to recorded clips in split screen (good for checking continuity/framing).
There's an express version that lists for $149.
Disclaimer: Yes, I work at the company but hey someone finally asked a question on Slashdot that requests exactly what a product that I worked on does.
No, you cannot usually recover your costs in defending a patent claim.
Also, the expense of defending this type of claim is on average $750,000 to trial and $1.5 through appeals. Just not worth it for the potential return.
At least in this case the guys blocking them are actually shipping a similar product. Many times the patent holder hasn't made a product and does't intend to, they just want to make anyone who does pay. Sadly, these patent holders are often not interested in licensing a small company to make a product. They are basically waiting hoping that a big player stumbles into their patent trap.
--- Mark
Sorry, that point of view is just wrong. As the founder of a software company, let me assure you that a reasonable proprietary rights agreement signed by all the developers at the company is essential. Without it companies could not get investors (they want to know what they are buying a piece of). Investors are where the paychecks come from. Nor could we deliver to our employee/shareholders an IPO or acquisition that will hopefully make them wealthy. Without clearly defining what the company owns, no acquirer or underwriter would ever give us the time of day.
The company is paying cash money to the employee to do 'work-for-hire'. Unless otherwise arranged, the company should own the resulting work. The company is taking all the risk. The product may be worthless, there may be no market, but the employee has already taken his/her cash money to the bank. Yes, it's less than a owning part of the product if it's a hit but no risk/no reward.
As for an idea that's completely unrelated to the field that the company is paying the employee to think about, and the employee had the idea on their own time and only developed it after they left the company (without using any company-related ideas or proprietary information) then that idea should belong to the employee.
My intention was to highlight two different ways that UL "approval" has evolved to have unintended consequences. The two examples were based on different types of companies, the first assembling commodity products out of commonly available "off the shelf" components.
In my second example (a small company with an innovative new widget), I am positing that the widget in question is innovative enough that at least one critical electrical part won't be "off the shelf" and offered by a larger supplier who has already run the UL gauntlet, thus forcing the small company through the UL process (due to the "innovative" design of their product).
IMHO, UL approval has gotten too regimented and isn't worth what it used to be worth. Now component makers get UL approval for their components (power supply, power cord, etc.) and then a manufacturer buys this component, uses it in some design that the folks at UL never even saw. Of course the manufacturer still slaps that UL logo right on the box.
Also, UL can be a bad thing for some manufacturers. Many national chains (Wal-Mart etc.) will not carry anything electrical if it doesn't have that UL logo. The testing costs money and takes time which can put small companies at a disadvantage. If your creation is so innovative that UL's quickie lab doesn't quite know what to make of this thing from a company they've never heard of, then it may take a long time (longer than your capital lasts) to get your new widget into national distribution.
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I mis-typed Upton's fax number. It's actually: 202 225-4986
Here is the contact info for the two representatives mentioned in the article as possibly favoring an extension. It sounds like they are floating a trial balloon to see if they can get away with supporting another extension (and hence get a nice campaign contribution from the Celcos). Getting a flood of responses right now can make a big difference. Send them a fax or letter, it works much, much better than emails. Below is the letter I'm sending but drafting your own comments is best. /.ers have never had trouble expressing themselves :)
Representative Fred Upton
2161 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
202 225-3761
202 225-2986 fax
John Shimkus
513 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-5271
Fax: (202) 225-5880
Dear Representative Upton,
I read with dismay and considerable disbelief your comments regarding the possibility of extending, yet again, cellular number portability. As you know, this has been mandated since 1996 and extended three times since 1999. To even consider another extension as sought by the largest cellular providers is simply ludicrous. Your constituents have been waiting, and waiting and waiting for years as the cellular companies have trotted out increasingly creative excuses to maintain this anti-competitive and illegitimate hold on consumers. Granting another extension on top of all the others goes against the interest of voting consumers and does not pass even the most basic âoesmellâ test.
Implementing number portability will not divert funds from other projects as claimed because the cellular companies can charge for this new service. In fact, they will make money by offering portability, just not as much as they are now making by extracting over-market prices from customers who are having their phone number held hostage. Everyone from the FCC, the courts, the media, analysts and even Congress itself, agree that consumers will get better value and service in a frictionless free market. To perpetuate this sitation, is to artificially prevent a cellular company that provides better value and service from gaining the customers it deserves. This has the effect of sheltering the larger players from competition while removing incentives for investment, innovation and excellence. It is interesting that some cellular companies want further extensions and some do not. Now that the FCC and courts will no longer entertain their increasingly fantastic arguments, they are seeking to legislate the unfair competitive advantage they cannot maintain any other way. The massive funds already spent by the celcos lobbying to continue holding consumers hostage would be more wisely invested in better service so their customers won't be so desperate to escape.
This issue has grown increasingly high profile. Each extension has focused more eyes on the actions of everyone involved. It is now a common topic of discussion among your constituents, who are expecting to finally enjoy the relief that has been promised yet delayed for so long.
That's true but I don't care about 1600 x 1200, I want to do 720 x 480 at 30 fps (or interlaced 60 fps at 720 x 240). That's what myself and about one million other users of video editing software want to do. And my processor will compress it in real-time in DV format at ~3 MB/s. No problem for my pokey IDE drive. Big time savings for all us video creators.
--- Mark
Yes, but Fedex men are all about the same size :-)
I could send you a DVD, S-VCD or DV tape of my output (and not just games). Except I can't record my output now because I can't get it back into my PC from the GFX card at a reasonably useful speed.
--- Mark
The benchmark uses DirectX.
"noone really complaining"
There are over a million users of video editing software such as Pinnacle Studio, VideoWave, Ulead, Adobe Premiere etc. If they knew that with a (probably small) driver fix their gfx card could make their video effects creation faster than real-time, I think they would be thrilled (and they would start demanding it). Just about everyone I know that does video on PCs complains about render times. A lot of us have paid $1,000+ to get some hardware card that can accelerate rendering. Kind of silly when we have already paid for a card that can do it even faster than that. All that lovely horsepower is just sitting there at the wrong end of a one way data street due to a lack of driver optimization.
Although there are more game players, I think in today's competitive gfx card market, a million potential customers is enough to get a manufacturer's attention.
Ok, I'll admit that I collect old computers. I've even got a little site documenting my collection of 'home computers' (you remember, the little all-in-one console-style machines that hooked to a TV). I like these machines because they represent the original path 'home' computers were on before the incipient 'beige-dom' of PCs overwhelmed the market. These little guys were sold in department stores (you know, like furniture) and some featured quaint pictures on their packaging of housewives entering recipes into them (for storage on audio cassettes). Hmmm, those were the days.
Sure there are lots of common ones like the C64 and Ataris but there were dozens of different kinds of fascinating machines from less known manufacturers all around the world. What's cool is that many of them were so unique in terms of shape, design, peripherals and OS. I even have a couple of little home computers from Russia. While I have about 70 different machines now, there are lots that I don't yet have and have only heard of. I know there were many unique models made and sold in South America and Arabic countries in the eighties. I have one machine designed and built in Yugoslavia in the early '80's called the Pecom 64. It's based on an RCA 1802 processor.
You can see my collection at: www.homecomputermuseum.com. Stop by and drop me a line if you also collect these kinds of machines.
--- Mark