the collapse of the dollar means that books priced in pounds are far more expensive for readers here.
I presume you're not from the United States then? The US Dollar has increased in value by over 25% against Sterling over the mid 2008 price and, ignoring the last 10 months of financial turmoil, is pretty much at a five year high against the Pound.
Earlier this year you could buy 1GBP for less than $1.40 - compared to around $2.10 at the Dollar's weakest point last year.
If a business or other enterprise asks you for your number, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested. For example, utility companies and other services ask for a Social Security number, but do not need it; they can do a credit check or identify the person in their records by alternative means. [emphasis mine]
The problem is that when you demand to remove the SSN (which we already must collect, per Patriot crap) the system will think you're a new customer.
Are you a bank or a brokerage? Those are the only companies required to collect an SSN by the Patriot Act - though you should also be able to accept a federal taxpayer ID number. Non US Citizens are allowed bank accounts in the US.
Don't let the quad-core bit fool you; that'll be low-end in a couple of years, no doubt.
We've been waiting a decade for improvements in multi-threaded processing to take advantage of multiple cores.
Are you suggesting programmers are going to make the dramatic developments in the next couple of years that they have been unable to in the last ten?
Certainly I can see the number of cores increasing at the server end - it's straightforward enough to run one process per client. I'm unsure what's going to change on user desktops that will drive any massive increase in core numbers. Still, I'm prepared to be surprised.
I think population density is a better metric as it gives a better view of the number of potential subscribers per km2. So California should be easier to cover than Alaska.
But look at the coverage in Finland. It's way beyond anything I'm aware of in the US. In the States, even in the more highly populated areas, you don't have to travel far until you find rural coverage is only alongside the interstates.
I can understand that in Alaska with low population density over a very large area, but not somewhere like Virginia with 4.5x the population density of Finland.
US cell phone subscribers are paying some of the highest costs in the world! If any provider could point to a map showing near ubiquitous coverage that might explain it, but they can't.
I should probably have added this when I submitted.
In these threads, there are often comments about population density in Europe making coverage more effective. Finland has a population density of 16/km2 - that's lower than Maine and 37 other US states.
Perhaps you think Finland must be tiny, in fact it's land area is 305470 sq km, that's bigger than Arizona. There are only five US states larger than Finland.
Maybe coverage is actually really poor, restricted to big cities? Take a look at this coverage map.
Wouldn't a Motorola (err... Freescale) 68000 be more than powerful enough for the task, and way cheaper?
.
Maybe, but not by much - reports suggest the Atom costs less than $10 to manufacture. At that price any savings between processor types is pretty tiny unless you're deploying a vast number of them.
There's so much x86 development though, I'd imagine x86, and especially windows programmers, are much easier to find and cost less to hire. The processor cost in a POS system is going to be a tiny fraction of the total when you add in touch screens, bar code scanners, cash drawers, scales etc etc.
From the manufacturer's point of view it can probably develop software faster and cheaper using.net and it's that saving that probably drives lots of x86 uptake in these sorts of devices.
At least with a system that still has a bit of slinkyness to it you can catch big errors before they bankrupt a company.
Sometimes I wonder how countries outside the United States survive what with all these newfangled modern ways they're adopting. Their companies must be going bankrupt left, right and centre.
Re:Can you explain how that works in the UK?
on
Deposit Checks By iPhone
·
· Score: 3, Informative
How does the UK system differ?
Almost every customer bill in the UK is paid by Direct Debit. The organisation automatically draws the money straight from your bank account. I know some firms in the US will do this, but the UK version has some important safeguards, absent from the US system.
For variable amounts, (like your electricity bill) the organisation has to give you fourteen days notice before making the deduction from your account.
You can cancel the Direct Debit at any time.
Banks vet organisations heavily before they are allowed to initiate Direct Debits. I've been through this process, and it is quite a thorough auditing.
Customers are protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee. Every bank that allows customers to have Direct Debits has to adhere to this. In effect it says if the organisation made a mistake, debiting the wrong amount, or on the wrong date, you tell the bank and the bank will immediately refund the money plus any charges incurred as a result, recouping from the company.
It's this guarantee that has made it so successful, for customers who don't have to worry about making payments, it all happens automatically. And for companies the big advantage is cost. To collect a direct debit costs pennies and the system can be entirely automated. The savings in bank charges are substantial and in staff time are enourmous.
If you move to a different bank, you need to sign one form and all your direct debits should be moved to your new account. You don't need to contact any of your suppliers.
Indeed. It's all a bit strange in the US. If you owe someone money you have to write a cheque. Apparently procedures arr so lax though that by having the account number and routing code, people can empty your bank account.
There doesn't seem to be any reasonable way for ordinary bank customers to transfer money to customers of other banks. So in the UK with faster payments now in place at most banks, you can send money to someone else's account alost instantly. In the US, you write a cheque, put it in the post and wait. Then the recipient gets it and sits on it for a few weeks/months until they get to the bank and deposit it. In the meantime, you have to keep track of outstanding cheques in case someone sits on it for several months then sends you overdrawn.
For most other functions, US banks ahve done a pretty reasonable job of getting things automated and electronic. Given the high cost of processing cheques, I'm at a complete loss as to why they still exist let alone are in day to day use.
I've seen 32" 720P sets for under $300. So it's only 50% true I guess.
Of course, I'd expect any version of windows installed on a TV to be much cheaper than $150 or the same in Euros. Nonetheless, a 32" TV will be plenty big enough for a large number of folk - especially in Europe with typically smaller living rooms, and adding a windows license would substantially increase the price of those sets.
I wonder how many network monitoring tools fill all these claims.
Lots of them allow groups, with various contact details for each group member and message delivery to multiple devices based on priority.
In fact, about the only thing that might be missing would be the administration interface for preparing and transmitting. Do any of the packages around pre 2005 allow preparing and delivering a one off message?
While not many folk are running SMTP servers on a cable connection these days, as blacklists will stop lots of their mail, a very large number of users will have client side anti-spam software.
One thing anti-spam software will often do is check the sending domain actually exists. Of course with this change, every domain suddenly exists and you have one less test available in scoring spam.
While I can see the argument that it's unfair to charge for a license to words they don't own, it does raise other issues. There's a risk of them selling a license to something that's copyright which they don't own. What use is a licensing service if you still have to do due diligence afterwards?
Secondly, even where they did cover an event, they may end up selling rights to quotations or even speeches they don't own.
Did the AP write the speech? They claim copyright over it and reserve all rights to it. Presumably they'll happily charge many hundreds of dollars to anyone wanting to reprint it to. Now to most folk, a speech by Obama would be obviously not owned by the AP, but what about quotes from other people?
I licensed it under a Creative Commons Non-commercial use license.
The revenge of the geeks. Students now have to shrink wrap their essays with an EULA saying that by opening you have agreed to the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Use license.
I do hope you included the attribution required clause!
Perhaps you should send a couple of essays to the attorney to find out if you really did manage to opt out. Perhaps one or more of your professors just nodded and uploaded the text anyway?
Yes, it seems that RedHat have a limit to the number of VMs allowed per license, with some licenses covering four redhad instances and some covering ten.
That makes Suse a lot more competitive for those running lots of VMs and using software that is certified on it. It is licensed on a server basis and you can run as many SLES VMs as your hardware can cope with.
Does RedHat really require a separate license for each VM?
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server licenses per CPU - with multi-core CPUs counting as a single processor. A three year multi-processor license is about $1000 so you're paying $333 per year per box, even if it's a quad CPU box with 16 cores running 20 individual VM hosts.
This is a state government, they have data necessary to deliver government services of various kinds to the 6.5 million Washington residents. I'm not sure what the number of employees they have has to do with anything.
Well call me stupid, but I'd figured most of the interaction with the Government's computers would be by the Government's staff.
6.5 million people isn't a big number. There will be scores of folk on/. running databases for that many folk or more on a couple of servers.
So sorry, I'm still wondering just what applications demand a $300 million data center to run the day to day operations of a state government.
If I lived in that state, I'd be pretty upset by the mere suggestion that it would be a good idea to have all the private information which the state holds about me go through either Microsoft or Google.
If you're hosting your own images and just using their processors, storage and bandwidth then what I would be concerned about is the privacy policy that forms part of the contract. Properly set up however, the important data should be arriving at the cloud encrypted and be stored encrypted. The host should have no ability to access raw personal data.
Personally I'm wondering just what sort of IT infrastructure they have that demands a $300 million data center? With 66,000 employees that's $4500 per employee. Just what is the data center for?
I drive from Nor Cal to So Cal, over 500 miles, one way, several times a year to visit family. I'm at far less risk than grandma Owho barely drives 500 miles in a month, or the teen who is an idiot with her cell phone (even though it is illegal already) or....
THIS is the problem with Government. It is a ONE SIZE FITS ALL program that doesn't fit anyone. I've been driving over 20 years, with exactly 4 accidents, none of them my fault.
You're trying to use a one size fits all excuse to criticise the government and in this case it doesn't fit.
You see, insurers employ very highly paid guys to work out your risk to them as an individual. If your driving history shows you to be low risk, that will be reflected in your premium - insurers want your business, but equally don't want to lose money by providing you with insurance.
I can understand concerns about getting the privacy aspects sorted - why doesn't the state simply automatically report each year as part of your annual inspection? But the principle of using miles driven as an aid to calculating risk is one everyone with insurance already subscribes to.
Thanks to the interweb, shopping around for insurance is trivial. I myself have seen a 6 month premium reduced by over $1,000 through 20 minutes shopping around on the internet. As long as you still have plenty of insurers to choose from, you'll be able to find someone that offers a fair price for the risk you reflect.
All this proposal means is that every insurer will be required to factor in the risk the miles you drive presents, and I can't imagine a single insurer that doesn't already use the mileage you reported to them when taking out the policy as a risk factor.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was to make URLs easier to read or pass around. Didn't tinyurl exist before twitter?
Which would you rather give someone over the telephone:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=Pier+5,+San+Francisco,+California+94111&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=32.527387,65.830078&ie=UTF8&cd=2&geocode=FcvBQAIdZmG0-A&split=0&ll=37.800239,-122.396085&spn=0.007918,0.016072&t=h&z=16&iwloc=A
OR:
http://tinyurl.com/mf5htb
If you'd prefer not to use html in your email, the tinyurl link makes your email a lot cleaner too.
I presume you're not from the United States then? The US Dollar has increased in value by over 25% against Sterling over the mid 2008 price and, ignoring the last 10 months of financial turmoil, is pretty much at a five year high against the Pound.
Earlier this year you could buy 1GBP for less than $1.40 - compared to around $2.10 at the Dollar's weakest point last year.
No, it's illegal for the Government to use it other than for its intended purpose. Companies can do what they like with it.
From the Social Security Website: http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/ssa.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=78
If a business or other enterprise asks you for your number, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested. For example, utility companies and other services ask for a Social Security number, but do not need it; they can do a credit check or identify the person in their records by alternative means.
[emphasis mine]
Are you a bank or a brokerage? Those are the only companies required to collect an SSN by the Patriot Act - though you should also be able to accept a federal taxpayer ID number. Non US Citizens are allowed bank accounts in the US.
What if someone who's not a US citizen wants to deal with your company?
We've been waiting a decade for improvements in multi-threaded processing to take advantage of multiple cores.
Are you suggesting programmers are going to make the dramatic developments in the next couple of years that they have been unable to in the last ten?
Certainly I can see the number of cores increasing at the server end - it's straightforward enough to run one process per client. I'm unsure what's going to change on user desktops that will drive any massive increase in core numbers. Still, I'm prepared to be surprised.
I think population density is a better metric as it gives a better view of the number of potential subscribers per km2. So California should be easier to cover than Alaska.
But look at the coverage in Finland. It's way beyond anything I'm aware of in the US. In the States, even in the more highly populated areas, you don't have to travel far until you find rural coverage is only alongside the interstates.
I can understand that in Alaska with low population density over a very large area, but not somewhere like Virginia with 4.5x the population density of Finland.
US cell phone subscribers are paying some of the highest costs in the world! If any provider could point to a map showing near ubiquitous coverage that might explain it, but they can't.
No it doesn't. The average population density of the United States (31/km2) is twice that of Finland (16/km2).
I should probably have added this when I submitted.
In these threads, there are often comments about population density in Europe making coverage more effective. Finland has a population density of 16/km2 - that's lower than Maine and 37 other US states.
Perhaps you think Finland must be tiny, in fact it's land area is 305470 sq km, that's bigger than Arizona. There are only five US states larger than Finland.
Maybe coverage is actually really poor, restricted to big cities? Take a look at this coverage map.
http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=fi&net=te
Do any US states have coverage like that?
.
Maybe, but not by much - reports suggest the Atom costs less than $10 to manufacture. At that price any savings between processor types is pretty tiny unless you're deploying a vast number of them.
There's so much x86 development though, I'd imagine x86, and especially windows programmers, are much easier to find and cost less to hire. The processor cost in a POS system is going to be a tiny fraction of the total when you add in touch screens, bar code scanners, cash drawers, scales etc etc.
From the manufacturer's point of view it can probably develop software faster and cheaper using .net and it's that saving that probably drives lots of x86 uptake in these sorts of devices.
Sometimes I wonder how countries outside the United States survive what with all these newfangled modern ways they're adopting. Their companies must be going bankrupt left, right and centre.
Almost every customer bill in the UK is paid by Direct Debit. The organisation automatically draws the money straight from your bank account. I know some firms in the US will do this, but the UK version has some important safeguards, absent from the US system.
For variable amounts, (like your electricity bill) the organisation has to give you fourteen days notice before making the deduction from your account.
You can cancel the Direct Debit at any time.
Banks vet organisations heavily before they are allowed to initiate Direct Debits. I've been through this process, and it is quite a thorough auditing.
Customers are protected by the Direct Debit Guarantee. Every bank that allows customers to have Direct Debits has to adhere to this. In effect it says if the organisation made a mistake, debiting the wrong amount, or on the wrong date, you tell the bank and the bank will immediately refund the money plus any charges incurred as a result, recouping from the company.
It's this guarantee that has made it so successful, for customers who don't have to worry about making payments, it all happens automatically. And for companies the big advantage is cost. To collect a direct debit costs pennies and the system can be entirely automated. The savings in bank charges are substantial and in staff time are enourmous.
If you move to a different bank, you need to sign one form and all your direct debits should be moved to your new account. You don't need to contact any of your suppliers.
Indeed. It's all a bit strange in the US. If you owe someone money you have to write a cheque. Apparently procedures arr so lax though that by having the account number and routing code, people can empty your bank account.
There doesn't seem to be any reasonable way for ordinary bank customers to transfer money to customers of other banks. So in the UK with faster payments now in place at most banks, you can send money to someone else's account alost instantly. In the US, you write a cheque, put it in the post and wait. Then the recipient gets it and sits on it for a few weeks/months until they get to the bank and deposit it. In the meantime, you have to keep track of outstanding cheques in case someone sits on it for several months then sends you overdrawn.
For most other functions, US banks ahve done a pretty reasonable job of getting things automated and electronic. Given the high cost of processing cheques, I'm at a complete loss as to why they still exist let alone are in day to day use.
I've seen 32" 720P sets for under $300. So it's only 50% true I guess.
Of course, I'd expect any version of windows installed on a TV to be much cheaper than $150 or the same in Euros. Nonetheless, a 32" TV will be plenty big enough for a large number of folk - especially in Europe with typically smaller living rooms, and adding a windows license would substantially increase the price of those sets.
I wonder how many network monitoring tools fill all these claims.
Lots of them allow groups, with various contact details for each group member and message delivery to multiple devices based on priority.
In fact, about the only thing that might be missing would be the administration interface for preparing and transmitting. Do any of the packages around pre 2005 allow preparing and delivering a one off message?
While not many folk are running SMTP servers on a cable connection these days, as blacklists will stop lots of their mail, a very large number of users will have client side anti-spam software.
One thing anti-spam software will often do is check the sending domain actually exists. Of course with this change, every domain suddenly exists and you have one less test available in scoring spam.
While I can see the argument that it's unfair to charge for a license to words they don't own, it does raise other issues. There's a risk of them selling a license to something that's copyright which they don't own. What use is a licensing service if you still have to do due diligence afterwards?
Secondly, even where they did cover an event, they may end up selling rights to quotations or even speeches they don't own.
Here's an example: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hEgzmDPlmhHVfmc1U9rZXLmsQiuwD999J9Q00
An entire speech by Obama four weeks ago, reprinted by the AP. The final line reads "Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. "
Did the AP write the speech? They claim copyright over it and reserve all rights to it. Presumably they'll happily charge many hundreds of dollars to anyone wanting to reprint it to. Now to most folk, a speech by Obama would be obviously not owned by the AP, but what about quotes from other people?
The revenge of the geeks. Students now have to shrink wrap their essays with an EULA saying that by opening you have agreed to the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial Use license.
I do hope you included the attribution required clause!
Perhaps you should send a couple of essays to the attorney to find out if you really did manage to opt out. Perhaps one or more of your professors just nodded and uploaded the text anyway?
Yes, it seems that RedHat have a limit to the number of VMs allowed per license, with some licenses covering four redhad instances and some covering ten.
That makes Suse a lot more competitive for those running lots of VMs and using software that is certified on it. It is licensed on a server basis and you can run as many SLES VMs as your hardware can cope with.
Does RedHat really require a separate license for each VM?
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server licenses per CPU - with multi-core CPUs counting as a single processor. A three year multi-processor license is about $1000 so you're paying $333 per year per box, even if it's a quad CPU box with 16 cores running 20 individual VM hosts.
What about a new version of Elite?
Or is it impossible to improve upon such a classic?
Well call me stupid, but I'd figured most of the interaction with the Government's computers would be by the Government's staff.
6.5 million people isn't a big number. There will be scores of folk on /. running databases for that many folk or more on a couple of servers.
So sorry, I'm still wondering just what applications demand a $300 million data center to run the day to day operations of a state government.
If you're hosting your own images and just using their processors, storage and bandwidth then what I would be concerned about is the privacy policy that forms part of the contract. Properly set up however, the important data should be arriving at the cloud encrypted and be stored encrypted. The host should have no ability to access raw personal data.
Personally I'm wondering just what sort of IT infrastructure they have that demands a $300 million data center? With 66,000 employees that's $4500 per employee. Just what is the data center for?
You're trying to use a one size fits all excuse to criticise the government and in this case it doesn't fit.
You see, insurers employ very highly paid guys to work out your risk to them as an individual. If your driving history shows you to be low risk, that will be reflected in your premium - insurers want your business, but equally don't want to lose money by providing you with insurance.
I can understand concerns about getting the privacy aspects sorted - why doesn't the state simply automatically report each year as part of your annual inspection? But the principle of using miles driven as an aid to calculating risk is one everyone with insurance already subscribes to.
Thanks to the interweb, shopping around for insurance is trivial. I myself have seen a 6 month premium reduced by over $1,000 through 20 minutes shopping around on the internet. As long as you still have plenty of insurers to choose from, you'll be able to find someone that offers a fair price for the risk you reflect.
All this proposal means is that every insurer will be required to factor in the risk the miles you drive presents, and I can't imagine a single insurer that doesn't already use the mileage you reported to them when taking out the policy as a risk factor.