Those not in academia may wonder why scholarly publishing hasn't moved more quickly to on-line alternatives. A major problem is that in order to receive tenure, an academic generally has to publish in "top journals". Top journals are determined by custom and by the history of citations, and being able to publish in them does say something good about the author. So existing high quality journals with an established reputation have monopoly power and they are exploiting it.
This will undoubtedly change. The whole process has the air of a scam: editors and reviewers effectively donate their time (fees are typically nominal, if they even exist), and the authors surrender publication rights for free. Meanwhile, as someone else pointed out, the big publishers are starting new journals as fast as they can.
I have an HD OTA myth box. Very happy with it, no plans to get cable or satellite. Yes, there are shows we miss and would in theory like to see, but we don't even have the time to watch what we record OTA (I'm currently 3 episodes behind on 24, for example).
A fork might be appropriate, and not only for those outside Novell. Perhaps Novell will end up forking Apache and other key components of Linux in order to keep a version under GPL2.
A company that has to sue (or threaten to sue) to retain its position is often on the way down.
This brings to mind Lotus suing Borland for Quattro's 123-keystroke emulation ability. I thought it was completely clear at the time that Lotus was suing Borland because it was their only hope -- they could no longer compete on the basis of their software. Quattro Pro had blown past 123 as a quality spreadsheet. (And while the two companies were distractedly duking it out, Microsoft Excel then blew past them both.)
Whatever threats Microsoft makes, the bottom line is that if they had compelling products and dazzling new features, Ballmer would pitching the products, he wouldn't be talking in vague terms about protecting their IP. By using lawsuits, Microsoft can cause a lot of pain for everyone, and I'm sure their revenue stream will go on for years. But this is evidence that Microsoft thinks it is losing its market position.
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful post. I agree with a lot of what you say but I don't think complaint #7 is quite right. Once you've alt-tabbed to an application, Apple-` will switch among the windows. I was gnashing my teeth until I discovered this keystroke.
Were you importing mail data from Eudora? I've switched from Eudora to Thunderbird on three machines and the importing of mail and address books was flawless each time. It my not handle other clients as well, I don't know.
I am a parent also. You had better install a "lunchbox cam" to make sure that they aren't trading their carrots to Susie, who actually *likes* carrots but isn't so wild about that cookie her mom packs every day:-)
Does this work with backuppc only if the machine is on a domain? The C$ designation is an administrative share whether or not the machine is on a domain, but perhaps backuppc needs a particular configuration. If you have it working, I should revisit this. Thanks!
Could you elaborate (or point me somewhere) on using the C$ admin share via SMB in backuppc? For some reason that just never worked for me. I would love to get it working (I back up via lots of individual shared folders, which seems silly).
Suppose a company has one owner and one employee. The owner gives the employee 1% of the company as a bonus. What statute gives the SEC jurisdiction over this transaction?
I may not have been clear. I agree with you about the advantages of having 3rd party sellers, in principle. I just think they've implemented it in a confusing way. It's almost as if they've lost control of their web site. It seems to me that if Amazon's website is not impeccably consistent, clear, and usable, first-rate in every way, then they've lost a huge edge.
I believe you and appreciate the warning, although so far I've had a very good experience with them. I do have to laugh when you say "what they once were". Years ago when Buy.com was a newcomer, they shipped me the wrong item (I think it was a book or a computer item). I exchanged it following their procedures, and then they proceeded to ship me TWELVE copies of Foolish and Belly -- at that time it was a VHS two-pack.
It has seemed to me for a while that Amazon is slipping. Their web site, long a model of clarity and usability, has become confusing with the proliferation of non-Amazon sellers. For example I recently did a search for a book and the top listing in the search results was only for used copies, while if I clicked the second listing I got the usual Amazon page for the book. Since you can buy used copies from the main page for the book, I don't even understand why the separate page existed, let alone that it was the first search result.
I have also had several bad experiences with free shipping. In one case, I ordered Christmas gifts well in advance. After a week or so, they moved the expected shipping date past Christmas due to the item supposedly being out of stock. I complained by e-mail (why were they only telling me this after the original shipping date had arrived) and they apologized and shipped it immediately. Umm, was it in stock or not? It could have been a supplier issue, but I also wondered if they were just trying to see how I would react.
I have returned to buy.com after ignoring them for several years. Rotten-looking web site with very poor information about items. But I have found them faster and often less expensive than Amazon.
I expect that Amazon will survive for a very long time and do lots of business, but I don't see how they're ever going to be highly profitable.
Tax and accounting are two different things. (Maybe they shouldn't be, but that's a different story.) The tax issue you're discussing isn't fraud, it's the way the compensation taxes are supposed to work. There is a different tax issue related to backdating. I will discuss it below and I suppose it could be described as fradulent.
Suppose an option gives an employee the right to buy $100 shares for $20. The right to do this is worth $80. When the employee exercises, the company gets a deduction for $80 and the employee is taxed on $80 of ordinary income. This is the standard treatment for compensation: a tax on one side is a deduction on the other. A payment of $80 cash to the employee yields the same treatment (tax deduction for the company, tax for the employee).
The *accounting* treatment under the old rules was definitely screwed up by failing to *ever* recognize expense. However the IRS didn't make the same mistake.
There is a different and more subtle tax issue that arises with backdating. Under the 1993 Clinton tax act, compensation in excess of $1 million is not deductible unless it is performance related. There is a possibility that backdating will lead to the option grant being deemed "not performance related" (since it has a baked-in gain due to backdating). In this case the company will lose the deduction when the option is exercised. The employee would still have to pay taxes. If an executive had exercised $100 million of backdated options, the company could lose the deduction on this amount. When news stories refer to tax issues related to backdating, I think this is mainly what they're talking about.
They don't seem to have revised their programs recently though they're still available for download and purchase. I wonder if they've stopped developing.
I'm not sure. I experimented with a few things such as LaTeX2RTF and finally sent them a version converted using the 30-day trial of Tex2Word (from Chikrii software). It wasn't a great conversion and I got it to them after some time had elapsed. I suspect they did a lot of retyping.
This sounds promising but there is not enough information here to discuss anything. A big issue with MS Office files has always been conversion of a small but important subset of features. How does this plug-in handle equations? How does it handle a document that's been marked up using the "track changes" feature? What happens when a document contains VBA?
Just this week I sent a LaTeX document and the pdf'ed version to a journal editor. It came back in MS Word format for my final approval, and I'm using the track changes feature as I make revisions. Moreover, equations have apparently been created using MathType, a proprietary and relatively costly ($99) plugin. OpenOffice can't handle the equations and it does a so-so job with change tracking (although I'm sure that will improve).
*Archiving* of documents in an open format is a great step forward, but document *creation* uses a lot of software services that won't be easy to circumvent or recreate.
This is off-topic but may be a help to you. I don't know what academic area your ph.d students are in, but in the sciences, math, and economics, the use of LaTeX is very common. (I'm guessing if you were in one of those areas you would already know about it.) LaTeX performs wonderfully with arbitrarily huge documents --- I published a 900-page book using it. On the other hand, if you need to do a lot of fine-grained page-by-page formatting, it probably isn't for you. There are LaTeX solutions for the Mac, but I haven't used them.
To be honest I find Word to be a mess. I know some people love it but I find it unusable.
Chessmaster requires admin privileges to run!
on
Chess for Kids?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Chessmaster is a terrific piece of software, with one very important caveat. It absolutely has to be installed and run with administrative privileges. If you don't want your kids running with administrative privileges, forget Chessmaster. (There is supposed to be a workaround involving symbolic links from the kid's home directory to the administrator's, but I never got it to work.) Talk about brain-damaged software design!
I own Chessmaster 9000. I was told by Ubi tech support that the same issue exists with Chessmaster 10.
It's sounds sort of the same, but it's different. A Nash equilibrium is one where each party does the best he can, taking the behavior of the other as given. For it to be an equilibrium, the anticipation of the other's behavior must be correct.
The economic term for "making everyone better off" is that the change is "Pareto optimal". "Making everyone better off" can include transfers from one party to another. In the OP's example, the job can be accomplished with less labor. It would therefore be possible for the surveyor boss to continue to pay the person he laid off (since the bid included that person's labor), and the laid off person can find more employment. Thus, the owner and the surveryor boss are the same financially, and the person laid off is (in this hypothetical) strictly better off. There are other ways to allocate the gains to achieve pareto optimality.
This is a widely-cited and often misquoted (and misunderstood) theorem in economics. "Win-win" in this situation requires that the winners compensate the losers. If you don't pay compensation for the loss (e.g., the salary they would have earned), then you have a winner and a loser, period. You have no way to say that one's gain offsets the other's pain.
The economic theorem says that the monetary gain for the winners is great enough that it is *possible* for the winners to compensate the losers so to leave as well off as before. In this case everyone is at least as well off. But if you don't compensate the losers, you can't say a thing.
It seems like many of the posters here don't know Walter Mossberg. They should. He is one of the most powerful technology journalists around and he deliberately adopts a newbie tone (when you read him regularly, it's clear he's quite knowledgable). Here is a profile of him.
The review is correct that the OSX version does not work reliably. I find that the database becomes corrupt, something which never happened under Windows. It is also very slow to create the index. Apart from this Mac-only problem, it's a terrific device.
Slashdot Mirror
Those not in academia may wonder why scholarly publishing hasn't moved more quickly to on-line alternatives. A major problem is that in order to receive tenure, an academic generally has to publish in "top journals". Top journals are determined by custom and by the history of citations, and being able to publish in them does say something good about the author. So existing high quality journals with an established reputation have monopoly power and they are exploiting it.
This will undoubtedly change. The whole process has the air of a scam: editors and reviewers effectively donate their time (fees are typically nominal, if they even exist), and the authors surrender publication rights for free. Meanwhile, as someone else pointed out, the big publishers are starting new journals as fast as they can.
Congrats to MIT.
I have an HD OTA myth box. Very happy with it, no plans to get cable or satellite. Yes, there are shows we miss and would in theory like to see, but we don't even have the time to watch what we record OTA (I'm currently 3 episodes behind on 24, for example).
A fork might be appropriate, and not only for those outside Novell. Perhaps Novell will end up forking Apache and other key components of Linux in order to keep a version under GPL2.
A company that has to sue (or threaten to sue) to retain its position is often on the way down.
This brings to mind Lotus suing Borland for Quattro's 123-keystroke emulation ability. I thought it was completely clear at the time that Lotus was suing Borland because it was their only hope -- they could no longer compete on the basis of their software. Quattro Pro had blown past 123 as a quality spreadsheet. (And while the two companies were distractedly duking it out, Microsoft Excel then blew past them both.)
Whatever threats Microsoft makes, the bottom line is that if they had compelling products and dazzling new features, Ballmer would pitching the products, he wouldn't be talking in vague terms about protecting their IP. By using lawsuits, Microsoft can cause a lot of pain for everyone, and I'm sure their revenue stream will go on for years. But this is evidence that Microsoft thinks it is losing its market position.
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful post. I agree with a lot of what you say but I don't think complaint #7 is quite right. Once you've alt-tabbed to an application, Apple-` will switch among the windows. I was gnashing my teeth until I discovered this keystroke.
Were you importing mail data from Eudora? I've switched from Eudora to Thunderbird on three machines and the importing of mail and address books was flawless each time. It my not handle other clients as well, I don't know.
I am a parent also. You had better install a "lunchbox cam" to make sure that they aren't trading their carrots to Susie, who actually *likes* carrots but isn't so wild about that cookie her mom packs every day :-)
Does this work with backuppc only if the machine is on a domain? The C$ designation is an administrative share whether or not the machine is on a domain, but perhaps backuppc needs a particular configuration. If you have it working, I should revisit this. Thanks!
Could you elaborate (or point me somewhere) on using the C$ admin share via SMB in backuppc? For some reason that just never worked for me. I would love to get it working (I back up via lots of individual shared folders, which seems silly).
Thanks.
Suppose a company has one owner and one employee. The owner gives the employee 1% of the company as a bonus. What statute gives the SEC jurisdiction over this transaction?
I may not have been clear. I agree with you about the advantages of having 3rd party sellers, in principle. I just think they've implemented it in a confusing way. It's almost as if they've lost control of their web site. It seems to me that if Amazon's website is not impeccably consistent, clear, and usable, first-rate in every way, then they've lost a huge edge.
I believe you and appreciate the warning, although so far I've had a very good experience with them. I do have to laugh when you say "what they once were". Years ago when Buy.com was a newcomer, they shipped me the wrong item (I think it was a book or a computer item). I exchanged it following their procedures, and then they proceeded to ship me TWELVE copies of Foolish and Belly -- at that time it was a VHS two-pack.
My colleagues started to look at me strangely!
It has seemed to me for a while that Amazon is slipping. Their web site, long a model of clarity and usability, has become confusing with the proliferation of non-Amazon sellers. For example I recently did a search for a book and the top listing in the search results was only for used copies, while if I clicked the second listing I got the usual Amazon page for the book. Since you can buy used copies from the main page for the book, I don't even understand why the separate page existed, let alone that it was the first search result.
I have also had several bad experiences with free shipping. In one case, I ordered Christmas gifts well in advance. After a week or so, they moved the expected shipping date past Christmas due to the item supposedly being out of stock. I complained by e-mail (why were they only telling me this after the original shipping date had arrived) and they apologized and shipped it immediately. Umm, was it in stock or not? It could have been a supplier issue, but I also wondered if they were just trying to see how I would react.
I have returned to buy.com after ignoring them for several years. Rotten-looking web site with very poor information about items. But I have found them faster and often less expensive than Amazon.
I expect that Amazon will survive for a very long time and do lots of business, but I don't see how they're ever going to be highly profitable.
Tax and accounting are two different things. (Maybe they shouldn't be, but that's a different story.) The tax issue you're discussing isn't fraud, it's the way the compensation taxes are supposed to work. There is a different tax issue related to backdating. I will discuss it below and I suppose it could be described as fradulent.
Suppose an option gives an employee the right to buy $100 shares for $20. The right to do this is worth $80. When the employee exercises, the company gets a deduction for $80 and the employee is taxed on $80 of ordinary income. This is the standard treatment for compensation: a tax on one side is a deduction on the other. A payment of $80 cash to the employee yields the same treatment (tax deduction for the company, tax for the employee).
The *accounting* treatment under the old rules was definitely screwed up by failing to *ever* recognize expense. However the IRS didn't make the same mistake.
There is a different and more subtle tax issue that arises with backdating. Under the 1993 Clinton tax act, compensation in excess of $1 million is not deductible unless it is performance related. There is a possibility that backdating will lead to the option grant being deemed "not performance related" (since it has a baked-in gain due to backdating). In this case the company will lose the deduction when the option is exercised. The employee would still have to pay taxes. If an executive had exercised $100 million of backdated options, the company could lose the deduction on this amount. When news stories refer to tax issues related to backdating, I think this is mainly what they're talking about.
They don't seem to have revised their programs recently though they're still available for download and purchase. I wonder if they've stopped developing.
I'm not sure. I experimented with a few things such as LaTeX2RTF and finally sent them a version converted using the 30-day trial of Tex2Word (from Chikrii software). It wasn't a great conversion and I got it to them after some time had elapsed. I suspect they did a lot of retyping.
This sounds promising but there is not enough information here to discuss anything. A big issue with MS Office files has always been conversion of a small but important subset of features. How does this plug-in handle equations? How does it handle a document that's been marked up using the "track changes" feature? What happens when a document contains VBA?
Just this week I sent a LaTeX document and the pdf'ed version to a journal editor. It came back in MS Word format for my final approval, and I'm using the track changes feature as I make revisions. Moreover, equations have apparently been created using MathType, a proprietary and relatively costly ($99) plugin. OpenOffice can't handle the equations and it does a so-so job with change tracking (although I'm sure that will improve).
*Archiving* of documents in an open format is a great step forward, but document *creation* uses a lot of software services that won't be easy to circumvent or recreate.
This is off-topic but may be a help to you. I don't know what academic area your ph.d students are in, but in the sciences, math, and economics, the use of LaTeX is very common. (I'm guessing if you were in one of those areas you would already know about it.) LaTeX performs wonderfully with arbitrarily huge documents --- I published a 900-page book using it. On the other hand, if you need to do a lot of fine-grained page-by-page formatting, it probably isn't for you. There are LaTeX solutions for the Mac, but I haven't used them.
To be honest I find Word to be a mess. I know some people love it but I find it unusable.
Chessmaster is a terrific piece of software, with one very important caveat. It absolutely has to be installed and run with administrative privileges. If you don't want your kids running with administrative privileges, forget Chessmaster. (There is supposed to be a workaround involving symbolic links from the kid's home directory to the administrator's, but I never got it to work.) Talk about brain-damaged software design!
I own Chessmaster 9000. I was told by Ubi tech support that the same issue exists with Chessmaster 10.
It's sounds sort of the same, but it's different. A Nash equilibrium is one where each party does the best he can, taking the behavior of the other as given. For it to be an equilibrium, the anticipation of the other's behavior must be correct.
The economic term for "making everyone better off" is that the change is "Pareto optimal". "Making everyone better off" can include transfers from one party to another. In the OP's example, the job can be accomplished with less labor. It would therefore be possible for the surveyor boss to continue to pay the person he laid off (since the bid included that person's labor), and the laid off person can find more employment. Thus, the owner and the surveryor boss are the same financially, and the person laid off is (in this hypothetical) strictly better off. There are other ways to allocate the gains to achieve pareto optimality.
This is a widely-cited and often misquoted (and misunderstood) theorem in economics. "Win-win" in this situation requires that the winners compensate the losers. If you don't pay compensation for the loss (e.g., the salary they would have earned), then you have a winner and a loser, period. You have no way to say that one's gain offsets the other's pain.
The economic theorem says that the monetary gain for the winners is great enough that it is *possible* for the winners to compensate the losers so to leave as well off as before. In this case everyone is at least as well off. But if you don't compensate the losers, you can't say a thing.
It seems like many of the posters here don't know Walter Mossberg. They should. He is one of the most powerful technology journalists around and he deliberately adopts a newbie tone (when you read him regularly, it's clear he's quite knowledgable). Here is a profile of him.
As usual, the Onion has a helpful perspective.
The review is correct that the OSX version does not work reliably. I find that the database becomes corrupt, something which never happened under Windows. It is also very slow to create the index. Apart from this Mac-only problem, it's a terrific device.