Palm-based phones have been out now for about 4 years now. I have a Kyocera smartPhone, which I really like, and after looking at the specs of the Treo, I can say I'm not feeling feature-envy of any kind.
Treo is smaller...so what, the Kyocera is almost too small as it is. They also made the Treo smaller by using a smaller screen then the Kyocera, so enjoy your scrolling.
No car kits from handspring...they are going to leave that to 3-rd parties, which means don't expect them for a while. Kyocera makes their own.
Treo: no voice dialing
Kyocera: voice dialling in the phone ( 99 names )
Treo claims 2.5hrs talk/ 60 hours standby. This is about half the Kyocera's capacity.
Treo says you may need to activate dial up access, and also get an ISP?!?! Both included in Kyocera service. And to make it worse, the Treo's modem is 9600 vs 14.4 in the Kyocera.
The keyboard is not that interesting to me, because I have used a palm long enough to get proficent with the software keyboard and graphitti. Plus my fingers are too fat to use buttons that small with any degree of accuracy...:^)
About the only think that is mildly amusing about this phone is that it is GSM, which doesn't help me where I live. I think I'll stay with my tried and true smartPhone.
I went through a Unix/C coding training course when I worked for one of the big IT consulting shops. They used a similar system for grading, but it compared the student's solution to a school solution, and looked for deviations, for which we got graded down.
It could also look at a batch of source code, and look for similarities. Of course, our class was only 16 people, so you pretty much knew something as up when a person you knew wasn't getting it suddenly gets an A on the project.
If this thing is configured to not catch keystrokes when the modem is active, what does that mean for crooks with "always on" broadband links like DSL or cable modems? Would that require a search warrant and a WIRETAP warrant ? Wiretaps are much more difficult to get...
Also, there is the extended issue of ethernet being a broadcast medium. Thus, there is the potential for intrusion on a system OTHER THAN the system targeted by the warrant. Could you get a search warrant authorizing the government to exploit a known security hole in Windows, for example, in order to gather evidence? At least with this keystroke recorder, you might realize something was going on by looking for files/apps you don't recognize.
The reality is that 99% of the bands that get recording deals are paid a tiny royalty on the NET profits ( Revenues - Total Cost of Production and Marketing - Advances against Royalties = Net Profit ) from the sales of their work. And most of them don't get a chance to really look at the books the record companies keep, so they don't have much idea as to the costs the company may say they incurred in the production and marketing of the record.
So, my guess is that there will be a new line in the record company's cost sheet that has a label roughly akin to "Electronic Distribution Expenses", which will roughly equal Napster's licensing fee. Most bands won't see any additional revenue.
Then once you collected the taxes, you would have to withhold the taxes for each of any of the 10,000 different taxing jurisdictions, with many transactions requireing that x% be withheld for the state, y% withheld for the county/city, & z% be withheld for the school/water/fire district.
I wasn't saying anything about collecting locality sales tax. If you were to wrap that into the scenario, you're right, the details start to get hairy quickly. But the bulk of sales taxes are not collected for localities, they are collected for the states. If you only have to deal with 50 tax authorities, it is definitely possible.
My view may be slightly distorted, since VA limits what localities can charge as "sales" taxes. One of the main issues the governor's race turned on was whether Northern VA voters would have the right to establish, by referendum, an additional 1% sales tax to pay for transportation. About the only other thing is a tax on meals, which are not very common.
Eventually, we will get to the point where the federal gov't is going to mandate each state set an "internet tax" rate, which will probably be extended to catalog/ mail order sales as well, which makes sense. They are not going to be able to restrain themselves for ever. If the system eventually requires tax collection for towns and cities, the next internet tax ban will be one imposed by the courts in the form of a restraining order, because there would be a strong possibility that the court would rule that imposing / enforcing the tax collection would be an undue burden on the vendor.
Really, though. How hard would it be? You know where the buyer is, and finding the sales tax rate where the customer is would be no big deal. They don't change anywhere close to as often as zip codes do, and many vendors update that list every month. Most sales tax rates are the same for years. Also, most states require a quarterly filing, so it is not like Amazon is going to be sending a check for each order they ship. Finally, many states accept, and some are requiring electronic reporting, so the vendor doesn't even need a stamp...
Look, I don't like paying taxes at all. But it would not take much to handle sales tax on all transactions. The tax moratorium was originally passed because they were looking for a fairly cheap way to promote buying on line...as soon as on-line resellers begin to approach the volume of sales as their brick and mortar counter parts, the feds will have to mandate sales tax collection for web vendors.
BTW, many net vendors have to collect taxes for states where they have a physical presence. Apple is one of those. They charge me 4.5% every time because they had an office in VA, and this was before they had a retail store in the state.
....doesn't mean you don't have to employ solid business principles and technical planning!!! I worked on one project where the target market segment was a group that, more or less by definition, DIDN'T USE COMPUTERS! The business plan ( before it got completely shreaded ), was to sell subscriptions to the site, but the group that the marketing goons thought would be interested mostly had no interest in computers in general or the web in particular.
There were a whole lot of really smart business people who seemed to turn their brains off when they started talking about making money on the web. They thought that since they were doing business on the web, then needed the newest technology, to give them the competitive edge, when the reality was their sites sucked because their content sucked, and their business was crappy because they had ignored all of the basic principles they should have learned in Business 101.
I think it is important to distinguish between building custom systems and building shrinkwrapped apps. It IS possible to estimate, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, projects which have a fixed set of FULLY defined requirements. This means everyone interested in the project signs off on the requirements before the first line of code is written. This very useful for beating you customer into submission when they change their minds 3 months into the project.
Shrinkwrap developers face a much different problem, in that the requirements are often set by the marketing goons based on a tenuious grasp of what they THINK the buy public wants, as opposed to actually polling existing users to find out what they REALLY want.
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Treo is smaller...so what, the Kyocera is almost too small as it is. They also made the Treo smaller by using a smaller screen then the Kyocera, so enjoy your scrolling.
No car kits from handspring...they are going to leave that to 3-rd parties, which means don't expect them for a while. Kyocera makes their own.
Treo: no voice dialing
Kyocera: voice dialling in the phone ( 99 names )
Treo claims 2.5hrs talk/ 60 hours standby. This is about half the Kyocera's capacity.
Treo says you may need to activate dial up access, and also get an ISP?!?! Both included in Kyocera service. And to make it worse, the Treo's modem is 9600 vs 14.4 in the Kyocera.
The keyboard is not that interesting to me, because I have used a palm long enough to get proficent with the software keyboard and graphitti. Plus my fingers are too fat to use buttons that small with any degree of accuracy...:^)
About the only think that is mildly amusing about this phone is that it is GSM, which doesn't help me where I live. I think I'll stay with my tried and true smartPhone.
It could also look at a batch of source code, and look for similarities. Of course, our class was only 16 people, so you pretty much knew something as up when a person you knew wasn't getting it suddenly gets an A on the project.
Also, there is the extended issue of ethernet being a broadcast medium. Thus, there is the potential for intrusion on a system OTHER THAN the system targeted by the warrant. Could you get a search warrant authorizing the government to exploit a known security hole in Windows, for example, in order to gather evidence? At least with this keystroke recorder, you might realize something was going on by looking for files/apps you don't recognize.
So, my guess is that there will be a new line in the record company's cost sheet that has a label roughly akin to "Electronic Distribution Expenses", which will roughly equal Napster's licensing fee. Most bands won't see any additional revenue.
I wasn't saying anything about collecting locality sales tax. If you were to wrap that into the scenario, you're right, the details start to get hairy quickly. But the bulk of sales taxes are not collected for localities, they are collected for the states. If you only have to deal with 50 tax authorities, it is definitely possible.
My view may be slightly distorted, since VA limits what localities can charge as "sales" taxes. One of the main issues the governor's race turned on was whether Northern VA voters would have the right to establish, by referendum, an additional 1% sales tax to pay for transportation. About the only other thing is a tax on meals, which are not very common.
Eventually, we will get to the point where the federal gov't is going to mandate each state set an "internet tax" rate, which will probably be extended to catalog/ mail order sales as well, which makes sense. They are not going to be able to restrain themselves for ever. If the system eventually requires tax collection for towns and cities, the next internet tax ban will be one imposed by the courts in the form of a restraining order, because there would be a strong possibility that the court would rule that imposing / enforcing the tax collection would be an undue burden on the vendor.
Look, I don't like paying taxes at all. But it would not take much to handle sales tax on all transactions. The tax moratorium was originally passed because they were looking for a fairly cheap way to promote buying on line...as soon as on-line resellers begin to approach the volume of sales as their brick and mortar counter parts, the feds will have to mandate sales tax collection for web vendors.
BTW, many net vendors have to collect taxes for states where they have a physical presence. Apple is one of those. They charge me 4.5% every time because they had an office in VA, and this was before they had a retail store in the state.
There were a whole lot of really smart business people who seemed to turn their brains off when they started talking about making money on the web. They thought that since they were doing business on the web, then needed the newest technology, to give them the competitive edge, when the reality was their sites sucked because their content sucked, and their business was crappy because they had ignored all of the basic principles they should have learned in Business 101.
Shrinkwrap developers face a much different problem, in that the requirements are often set by the marketing goons based on a tenuious grasp of what they THINK the buy public wants, as opposed to actually polling existing users to find out what they REALLY want.