I'd be curious, did you author or co-author any of the textbooks that you use?
When I was at university, particularly at graduate level this was quite common. So while there might not be kickback per-se there
is quite an incentive to use those books that one has written. An while you could argue that the author is receiving just compensation for his work,
I'd argue that all or most of that work was funded by the same university whose students now need to purchase overpriced textbooks.
OK, so I re-read your note and see "The best thing is if faculty write books and make them free online. I've done that. " Kudos to you. You unfortunately are in a small minority
True, but in that case, being not-for-profit is little more than a status that exists for tax purposes.
Not just in this case, in EVERY case. The only difference between for profit, and non-profit is accounting rules.. period.
All business exist to make money. The only question is what to do with the profits, either return to your investors or spend to further your mission.
Well, the Wall Street Journal is a good paper though, read by people who have money to spend.
More to the point they print news that isn't commonly available elsewhere, targeted to a demo that has money and is willing to pay for specialized information. The same isn't really true for most other papers. They may have some unique local stories, but most of what is available in one newspaper is universally available for free.
I read the Philadelphia Inquirer and its online version at philly.com as a habit, but other than local sports stories, I could get all of the same news from a similar paper from New York, Washington or Boston.. why would I pay?
because 2 million dollars for a single song is cruel and unusual punishment.
While I agree that it is ridiculous, your argument is factually incorrect. The eighth amendment deals specifically with criminal punishment. Copyright infringment and the associated penalties are civil matters
but if I say "I'll sell you my email for $1" and you say "OK, here's $1" and I hit the "forward" button, then "property" has been exchanged.
The law recognizes two kinds of property, real property and chattels. Your email is neither. What you've done is provided a service, or charged a fee for access to data. The data itself is not chattel. It can be protected by copyright, or possibly trademark, but it in no way constitutes chattel.
If a burglar breaks into my house and starts erasing my emails and I shoot him claiming he was destroying my "valuables", no DA will press charges, at least not around here.
Wrong again. You'll be spending quite sometime becoming intimate with your cellmate, even if you live in some backwater town in Texas. You do not have the right to use force in excess of the threat to your person, or that of other persons, and shooting an unarmed burglar without the threat of imminent harm, is a one way ticket to Federal Bang you in the ass prison.
Then market the thing. Where's the TV ads during the superbowl?
You also need the "One cool thing". For apple this was of course the iPod and now the iPhone.
It would be interesting to see how many of those new Apple users started out as iPod buyers.
I'd venture to say its a significant number.
The whole Apple Store concept is what really makes it work, and what really makes them work is the gadgets.
But for many people once they drink the Cool-Ade, they're in for life.
It isn't at all the fault of the people who actually broke the law?
Apples and oranges. Thet issue is the abuse of the legal system in an attempt to prosecute those who MAY have broken the law. There are plenty of legal avenues to sue for damages. The issue here is the insistance of the RIAA to attempt to circumvent those avenues, either to make their task easier, or to make the cases easier to defend.
These people distributed copyrighted material that they had no right nor authorization to distribute.
Once again, this hasn't been established. All that has been established is that there is an ALLEGATION that infrigement took place. The judicial process can determine whether or not any actual infringement took place
they are fully within their rights to sue.
and the defendants are entitled to due process. The RIAA would however (and this has been demonstrated repeatedly) prefer to subvert the process by targeting prosecution at those least able to defend themselves.
But let us not forget that that there is evidence that the people being sued have broken the law
What evidence? These are John Doe subpeona requests made on allegation alone. No evidence in favor or contrary to the allegation has been submitted. Don't you think someone should actually look to see if infact there IS any evidence?
If privacy had a tombstone, it would read "We did it for your own good" - John Twelve Hawks
I can have as many as 40 computers running on my very basic home network. They will each and every one have the same IP address.
They will all have unique addresses. They will have (probably) a single PUBLIC address provided via NAT and advertised to the upstream network. Within your PRIVATE network, they will have unique addresses. This is the entire point of TFA.
Inadequate bandwidth, insufficient storage, unavailability of another suitable site etc.
I don't work for any state government, but I think states have the power to overcome at least one of those issues
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should. I manage a storage environment for a major university that is currently at 500TB, I imagine many government agencies are larger. I keep backups for regulatory purposes for 7 years. Governments do as well (and probably longer) Thats ALOT of tape. Now try to imagine the size of the mirror I would need if I wanted to keep that on disk. Even to keep one cycle, where I would need a complete full and all of the incremental copies.
COULD you provision adequate storage and bandwidth to eliminate the need for tape? Maybe.. should you? possibly if you wanted single copy of your environment (or more likely a subset of it) for rapid disaster recovery, but for general backup purposes, the answer remains no.
to prevent loss in the case of a fire, I cant see one legitimate reason for the tapes even leaving the site.
Which is precisely why offsite copies are made. All legitimate backup schemes involve the offsite storage of tapes. Most companies contract with a company that specializes in this sort of thing, like Iron Mountain.
All data centers are at risk of physical catastrophe in addition to fires. Earthquakes, tornados, floods, hurricanes, etc depending on locale. Shipping the tapes offsite is not the problem. Doing it irresponsibly is.
why didnt they have a remote backup?
Again for any number of reasons. Inadequate bandwidth, insufficient storage, unavailability of another suitable site etc. Remember that backups are often kept (whether for business or regulatory purposes) for many years. Tape is still the most cost effective way to do this.
In what way is a purposefully crippled application which can never be extended by plug ins "outstanding".
perhaps next time you'll actual read the comment.
What I said was "VS by the way is an outsanding IDE" no where in that statement did I mention express edition.
Add that to the broken intelisense, years to open a project, all the crap it does with source control etc...
and yes you have youself and outstanding IDE.
in about an hour I can create a functioning front end, with or without web functionality and with ODBC interface into SQL, Oracle, or just about any other backend known to man, and i can do it in at least 3 common well known languages.
What other development environment will let me do that?
In about an hour I can teach a novice programmer how to create a fully functional windowed application that can actually do something, again in multiple languages, and using a familiar interface. Again, what other product will let me do that?
Is it perfect? of course not, it's a huge and insanely complex product. I'd defy you to show me a product, ANY product of that scope that doesn't have some bugs in it. I'll stand by my original statement, that it is a fine IDE.
Are they? I'd argue that they're trying to entice people to buy pricy development tools. Express is targeted at students and casual users. These are the same users that would either use OSS or nothing at all. By getting them hooked using VS, which by the way is an outstanding IDE, microsoft not withstanding, they're building a market. As these people develop, and as their skills increase, and their needs increase, at least some of them will buy full fledged copies of the product.
Its the basic crack marketing strategy, give away just enough to get you hooked, and then keep you coming back for more.
So in a very real sense no cost is passed on to consumers; the market decides the optimal price for the product
This is true of many purchases for which a simple supply and demand model is adequate.
This isn't true of many markets however. In markets for essential goods where there are few alternatives these models collape. The obvious example is the energy market. Rising prices should reduce demand, which should cause prices to fall again, until an equilimbrium is reached. This isn't the case however, costs are passed directly to consumers, demand never wanes and prices keep rising. This is a pretty simple example, of course, but not every market, and certainly not the software market, is a textbook example of supply and demand.
It's called "Quality Assurance". You should read about it.
Actually last month's patch Tuesday was cancelled as a result of the Daylight Savings Time patches.
It had nothing to do with QA. All Microsoft premier customers were notified well in advance of this situation.
As someone who interviews far too many who believe the same: Certifications prove you can pass a test (like HS) - that is, rote memorization
Yes, but you interviewed him, and that's the point. I interview countless mindless drones as well, but the certifications and other paper trail get him past the HR interviewing process. Some of them turn out to have some actual skills.
We all know its a flawed process, but the goal is to actually GET the interview. Beyond that, actual skills, experience, and personality take over. With limited experience and education, certs still make alot of sense.
I don't think that word means what you think it means
Deal with it.
They have. They've come up with a solution that allows them to play on a non supported platform.
You are confusing non supported with prohibited.
Blizzard makes the game for Windows. If you get it to work in
Linux, power to you. But if it stops working, tough luck, it
was never intended to work anyway
Except it hasn't stopped working, their accounts have been rm'd and they've been banned. This hardly the same thing as their non-supported systems failing as a result of a patch or upgrade.
If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.
In which case you could read any one of the 87000 other articles and reviews that provide that additional depth.
This article was quite clearly intended for those folks, and there are plenty of them, who don't want to spend more time buying a video card than than they would buying a car
We alerady have this. Citrix and winterminals.
The users get only the applications published by the admin, can only save the data allowed by the admin in the shares designated by the admin.
Its certainly not perfect from a security perspective, but it does more or less what the OP asked.
Wow, that's amazing. No wonder prices are so high, there's no incentive for CC companies to reduce them. Pretty tasty legislation for them, I would say.
One really has nothing to do with the other. Different banks and processing companies are free to charge whatever they like, and they can certainly lower their rates to be more competitive if they choose.
Laws like these are more about enforcing tax reporting than anything else.
The customer can then choose whether to save $0.15 and 1.5% on the transaction, or not.
Except that, at least in the US, this is illegal in most states.
The laws for this vary from state to state, but it is almost universally illegal to offer a discount for paying cash (or cash equivalent). Some states will allow a surcharge for CC usage, but that has been done away with in most states too.
In most cases is is generally the law that you can not change the price of a product or service based on the payment method.
Why does a "really higher up" need twice the mail space as a middle manager?
They generally don't. But in that case its more of a political issue than a technical issue. In some cases the volume of mail they receive would flood their mailboxes faster than I would ordinarily archive it. In these cases a bigger mailbox is warranted. In most cases its more of a political thing. They need to be made to feel more important and this is one way to do it. It also makes it easier (for me) to justify spending when I need more storage, servers, etc. because I can remind them that if the 200 or so execs with GB sized mailboxes would accept 100MB boxes I might not need that extra server or the extra SAN disks. Those purchases always seem to get approved. Go figure.
You haven't provided nearly enough information for any answer you get to be useful.
For example, there are lots of good reasons to keep that data. Business needs may (or may not) be obvious but you may also, depending on your business have regulatory requirements.
If you don't have regulatory and compliance issues, and almost everyone does these days, then you can set a much smaller mailbox size and enforce archiving or deletion. In my environment, 15000 Exchange users with heavy regulatory and compliance requirements, we allow 100MB for the typical user, 250Mb for a supervisory employee, 500MB for middle management and 1Gb for some really higher ups. We have a total of just under 2TB of live maail at the moment, and roughtly 10tb archived.
There are alot of really cool products on the market like CommVault DataMigrator for Exchange, and EMC email extender to make alot of this seamless for you. You can use these produicts to move all of the stale (and you can define stale according to a bunch of different criteria) data off to slower (ie cheaper) storage and out of your message stores. The mail migrator will leave a stub in exchange which looks just like a mail message in outlook. The only difference is that if someone opens one of these older messages they have to wait a couple of seconds while it is brought back into the message store.
The whole process is transparent.
These products aren't cheap, but they wind up saving a ton of money, as well as improving performance because you can use much less fast storage for email, your backup needs decrease by a huge amount since you only archive like once a month (and therefore only back that data up once a month), and as a bonus you can easily meet all regulatory and compliance requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be curious, did you author or co-author any of the textbooks that you use? When I was at university, particularly at graduate level this was quite common. So while there might not be kickback per-se there is quite an incentive to use those books that one has written. An while you could argue that the author is receiving just compensation for his work, I'd argue that all or most of that work was funded by the same university whose students now need to purchase overpriced textbooks.
OK, so I re-read your note and see "The best thing is if faculty write books and make them free online. I've done that. " Kudos to you. You unfortunately are in a small minority
True, but in that case, being not-for-profit is little more than a status that exists for tax purposes.
Not just in this case, in EVERY case. The only difference between for profit, and non-profit is accounting rules.. period.
All business exist to make money. The only question is what to do with the profits, either return to your investors or spend to further your mission.
Well, the Wall Street Journal is a good paper though, read by people who have money to spend.
More to the point they print news that isn't commonly available elsewhere, targeted to a demo that has money and is willing to pay for specialized information. The same isn't really true for most other papers. They may have some unique local stories, but most of what is available in one newspaper is universally available for free. I read the Philadelphia Inquirer and its online version at philly.com as a habit, but other than local sports stories, I could get all of the same news from a similar paper from New York, Washington or Boston.. why would I pay?
because 2 million dollars for a single song is cruel and unusual punishment.
While I agree that it is ridiculous, your argument is factually incorrect. The eighth amendment deals specifically with criminal punishment. Copyright infringment and the associated penalties are civil matters
IANAL
Clearly
but if I say "I'll sell you my email for $1" and you say "OK, here's $1" and I hit the "forward" button, then "property" has been exchanged.
The law recognizes two kinds of property, real property and chattels. Your email is neither. What you've done is provided a service, or charged a fee for access to data. The data itself is not chattel. It can be protected by copyright, or possibly trademark, but it in no way constitutes chattel.
If a burglar breaks into my house and starts erasing my emails and I shoot him claiming he was destroying my "valuables", no DA will press charges, at least not around here.
Wrong again. You'll be spending quite sometime becoming intimate with your cellmate, even if you live in some backwater town in Texas. You do not have the right to use force in excess of the threat to your person, or that of other persons, and shooting an unarmed burglar without the threat of imminent harm, is a one way ticket to Federal Bang you in the ass prison.
Then market the thing. Where's the TV ads during the superbowl?
You also need the "One cool thing". For apple this was of course the iPod and now the iPhone. It would be interesting to see how many of those new Apple users started out as iPod buyers. I'd venture to say its a significant number.
The whole Apple Store concept is what really makes it work, and what really makes them work is the gadgets. But for many people once they drink the Cool-Ade, they're in for life.
It isn't at all the fault of the people who actually broke the law?
Apples and oranges. Thet issue is the abuse of the legal system in an attempt to prosecute those who MAY have broken the law. There are plenty of legal avenues to sue for damages. The issue here is the insistance of the RIAA to attempt to circumvent those avenues, either to make their task easier, or to make the cases easier to defend.
These people distributed copyrighted material that they had no right nor authorization to distribute.
Once again, this hasn't been established. All that has been established is that there is an ALLEGATION that infrigement took place. The judicial process can determine whether or not any actual infringement took place
they are fully within their rights to sue.
and the defendants are entitled to due process. The RIAA would however (and this has been demonstrated repeatedly) prefer to subvert the process by targeting prosecution at those least able to defend themselves.
But let us not forget that that there is evidence that the people being sued have broken the law
What evidence? These are John Doe subpeona requests made on allegation alone. No evidence in favor or contrary to the allegation has been submitted. Don't you think someone should actually look to see if infact there IS any evidence?
If privacy had a tombstone, it would read "We did it for your own good" - John Twelve Hawks
I can have as many as 40 computers running on my very basic home network. They will each and every one have the same IP address.
They will all have unique addresses. They will have (probably) a single PUBLIC address provided via NAT and advertised to the upstream network. Within your PRIVATE network, they will have unique addresses. This is the entire point of TFA.
Inadequate bandwidth, insufficient storage, unavailability of another suitable site etc. I don't work for any state government, but I think states have the power to overcome at least one of those issues
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you should. I manage a storage environment for a major university that is currently at 500TB, I imagine many government agencies are larger. I keep backups for regulatory purposes for 7 years. Governments do as well (and probably longer) Thats ALOT of tape. Now try to imagine the size of the mirror I would need if I wanted to keep that on disk. Even to keep one cycle, where I would need a complete full and all of the incremental copies.
COULD you provision adequate storage and bandwidth to eliminate the need for tape? Maybe.. should you? possibly if you wanted single copy of your environment (or more likely a subset of it) for rapid disaster recovery, but for general backup purposes, the answer remains no.
to prevent loss in the case of a fire, I cant see one legitimate reason for the tapes even leaving the site.
Which is precisely why offsite copies are made. All legitimate backup schemes involve the offsite storage of tapes. Most companies contract with a company that specializes in this sort of thing, like Iron Mountain. All data centers are at risk of physical catastrophe in addition to fires. Earthquakes, tornados, floods, hurricanes, etc depending on locale. Shipping the tapes offsite is not the problem. Doing it irresponsibly is.
why didnt they have a remote backup?
Again for any number of reasons. Inadequate bandwidth, insufficient storage, unavailability of another suitable site etc. Remember that backups are often kept (whether for business or regulatory purposes) for many years. Tape is still the most cost effective way to do this.
In what way is a purposefully crippled application which can never be extended by plug ins "outstanding".
perhaps next time you'll actual read the comment. What I said was "VS by the way is an outsanding IDE" no where in that statement did I mention express edition.
Add that to the broken intelisense, years to open a project, all the crap it does with source control etc... and yes you have youself and outstanding IDE.
in about an hour I can create a functioning front end, with or without web functionality and with ODBC interface into SQL, Oracle, or just about any other backend known to man, and i can do it in at least 3 common well known languages. What other development environment will let me do that? In about an hour I can teach a novice programmer how to create a fully functional windowed application that can actually do something, again in multiple languages, and using a familiar interface. Again, what other product will let me do that?
Is it perfect? of course not, it's a huge and insanely complex product. I'd defy you to show me a product, ANY product of that scope that doesn't have some bugs in it. I'll stand by my original statement, that it is a fine IDE.
The Express products are a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_drug [wikipedia.org] to piss you off enough to pony up enough money for the real deal.
Are they? I'd argue that they're trying to entice people to buy pricy development tools. Express is targeted at students and casual users. These are the same users that would either use OSS or nothing at all. By getting them hooked using VS, which by the way is an outstanding IDE, microsoft not withstanding, they're building a market. As these people develop, and as their skills increase, and their needs increase, at least some of them will buy full fledged copies of the product. Its the basic crack marketing strategy, give away just enough to get you hooked, and then keep you coming back for more.
Assault with a deadly weapon. If I set off to kill you, but trip on the way down the stairs and call it off, what am I guilty of?
Conspiracy to commit murder. This is btw just a wordy way to say consiracy to commit copyright violation.
So in a very real sense no cost is passed on to consumers; the market decides the optimal price for the product
This is true of many purchases for which a simple supply and demand model is adequate. This isn't true of many markets however. In markets for essential goods where there are few alternatives these models collape. The obvious example is the energy market. Rising prices should reduce demand, which should cause prices to fall again, until an equilimbrium is reached. This isn't the case however, costs are passed directly to consumers, demand never wanes and prices keep rising. This is a pretty simple example, of course, but not every market, and certainly not the software market, is a textbook example of supply and demand.
It's called "Quality Assurance". You should read about it.
Actually last month's patch Tuesday was cancelled as a result of the Daylight Savings Time patches. It had nothing to do with QA. All Microsoft premier customers were notified well in advance of this situation.
As someone who interviews far too many who believe the same: Certifications prove you can pass a test (like HS) - that is, rote memorization
Yes, but you interviewed him, and that's the point. I interview countless mindless drones as well, but the certifications and other paper trail get him past the HR interviewing process. Some of them turn out to have some actual skills. We all know its a flawed process, but the goal is to actually GET the interview. Beyond that, actual skills, experience, and personality take over. With limited experience and education, certs still make alot of sense.
You are using it on a non-supported platform.
I don't think that word means what you think it means
Deal with it.
They have. They've come up with a solution that allows them to play on a non supported platform.
You are confusing non supported with prohibited.
Blizzard makes the game for Windows. If you get it to work in Linux, power to you. But if it stops working, tough luck, it was never intended to work anyway
Except it hasn't stopped working, their accounts have been rm'd and they've been banned. This hardly the same thing as their non-supported systems failing as a result of a patch or upgrade.
If you provide me with the details, I'm perfectly capable of drawing my own conclusions.
In which case you could read any one of the 87000 other articles and reviews that provide that additional depth. This article was quite clearly intended for those folks, and there are plenty of them, who don't want to spend more time buying a video card than than they would buying a car
We alerady have this. Citrix and winterminals. The users get only the applications published by the admin, can only save the data allowed by the admin in the shares designated by the admin. Its certainly not perfect from a security perspective, but it does more or less what the OP asked.
Wow, that's amazing. No wonder prices are so high, there's no incentive for CC companies to reduce them. Pretty tasty legislation for them, I would say.
One really has nothing to do with the other. Different banks and processing companies are free to charge whatever they like, and they can certainly lower their rates to be more competitive if they choose. Laws like these are more about enforcing tax reporting than anything else.
The customer can then choose whether to save $0.15 and 1.5% on the transaction, or not.
Except that, at least in the US, this is illegal in most states. The laws for this vary from state to state, but it is almost universally illegal to offer a discount for paying cash (or cash equivalent). Some states will allow a surcharge for CC usage, but that has been done away with in most states too. In most cases is is generally the law that you can not change the price of a product or service based on the payment method.
that it couldn't perform as a perfectly adequate server at a less-than-enterprise level.
That's kind of the point though isn't it? Who exactly do you imagine uses Oracle at a "less-than-enterprise level." ?
Why does a "really higher up" need twice the mail space as a middle manager?
They generally don't. But in that case its more of a political issue than a technical issue. In some cases the volume of mail they receive would flood their mailboxes faster than I would ordinarily archive it. In these cases a bigger mailbox is warranted. In most cases its more of a political thing. They need to be made to feel more important and this is one way to do it. It also makes it easier (for me) to justify spending when I need more storage, servers, etc. because I can remind them that if the 200 or so execs with GB sized mailboxes would accept 100MB boxes I might not need that extra server or the extra SAN disks. Those purchases always seem to get approved. Go figure.
You haven't provided nearly enough information for any answer you get to be useful. For example, there are lots of good reasons to keep that data. Business needs may (or may not) be obvious but you may also, depending on your business have regulatory requirements.
If you don't have regulatory and compliance issues, and almost everyone does these days, then you can set a much smaller mailbox size and enforce archiving or deletion. In my environment, 15000 Exchange users with heavy regulatory and compliance requirements, we allow 100MB for the typical user, 250Mb for a supervisory employee, 500MB for middle management and 1Gb for some really higher ups. We have a total of just under 2TB of live maail at the moment, and roughtly 10tb archived.
There are alot of really cool products on the market like CommVault DataMigrator for Exchange, and EMC email extender to make alot of this seamless for you. You can use these produicts to move all of the stale (and you can define stale according to a bunch of different criteria) data off to slower (ie cheaper) storage and out of your message stores. The mail migrator will leave a stub in exchange which looks just like a mail message in outlook. The only difference is that if someone opens one of these older messages they have to wait a couple of seconds while it is brought back into the message store. The whole process is transparent.
These products aren't cheap, but they wind up saving a ton of money, as well as improving performance because you can use much less fast storage for email, your backup needs decrease by a huge amount since you only archive like once a month (and therefore only back that data up once a month), and as a bonus you can easily meet all regulatory and compliance requirements.