yes, it would kill them because they make big bucks shipping MS Office to small businesses. They're also bound by all sorts of those backroom advertising kickbacks and such the DOJ never got to hear about to put MS Office up front, and to ship lots of demo copies (remember those count too!)
Time for Dell to pony up an be one of the "real" manufacturing outfits... working for companies that supply the auto industry, the auto makers can shut you down on a single phone call. And you don't get to ship product from X plants until you call their engineers and make the problem right.. that means you go to their shop and find, sort, & take back the wrong parts on YOUR dime. You get charged for every hour the customer isn't using their machines, workers sent home wages, and THEIR late delivery charges. Dell is a toy vendor with little actual responsibility for it's products.. time to live in the real world for once.
yep.. because patent infringement doesn't have "pass thru" or "first sale" or "personal use" exceptions... A patent holder "owns" the invention EVERYWHERE, 100%. It's not a new thing, it's been abuse by such greats as Thomas Edison to control which movies got made and not just the sale of movie cameras (hence the move to the "liberal" IP federal court district in California), so the precedent isn't new and isn't going away.
i4i could potentially go after Dell and HP for reselling the "tainted" product and for individual enterprises that "used" the product as well. So even if Dell paid, THEY haven't sold the inventory to a customer yet. As it's licenses, not physical devices there's no reason to keep selling them, just start installing new images on new machines out the door. Too bad Dell has to live in the real world now where companies have to meet legal demands or turn trucks around when product doesn't meet specs.. real companies have to pay the customer actual money just for shipping bad product... they don't get to "call support in india" or "wait for returns" Real companies stop the lines when shit hits the fan and fix the problem or they lose customers.
nope this is a "recall from the shelves" situation... Judges get to do that! Like when Walmart has to pull shelves of bad Peanut Butter.
I think it's perfect justice.. and EXACTLY how these things are supposed to work. It's what Microsoft expects to happen when they DMCA a site for misusing a few words, it's what happens all the time when other big companies get judgments against the "small guy" suck up and take your knocks Dell for selling product from a patent cheater!!!
My opinion is not for courts to "spare the pain" just because Dell is "big" it's just a ploy to sell off (presell?) 120 days of inventory while MS lawyers sort this out. Just like when US little people get DMCA'd, shut um down now, shut um down hard... just like anybody else. Too bad they took orders for "stolen" IP... they should have known better!!!
Ask the management where YOUR profits are? Consider they make 80%+ profits off OS, servers, tools and Office where they hell does all that money go? Most importantly, in a recession why is it not going to YOUR pocket.. as an OWNER and all.
What your saying about "responsibility" and such is a crock. They have a responsibility to turn YOUR money into MORE money as efficiently as possible... choking off air supplies" and "lobbying for favoritism" has nothing to do with that. Their business is to make PROFIT, not even to ensure that they don't "work themselves out of a job".. as once a certain amount of product has been created maybe it's better for investors to CASH OUT and start new companies!!! Microsoft was sitting on $40+ billion in liquid assets at the beginning of the 00's. that's more money than the entire airline industry, more money than paid out for auto industry bail outs!!! They sat on that money for half a decade while it devalued and gained low interest and didn't pay out so their OWNERS could by cars and trucks and take vacations, etc. Many public utilities and such give out dividends in the $1 per share range and they're much more regulated than Microsoft.. Where's YOUR money?
Realize that online services is the only area Google remotely competes in. Yes they have Google Desktop and the online apps and android, but at this stage those are still toys in the real world....about as dangerous as Palm right now. Most of the public and businesses don't need overpriced OSes (and at Microsoft's margin they have a lot to cut) and don't need new hardware in the middle of the second year of really tight belts. If anything this shows Microsoft products aren't providing quite the value to businesses that MS things they are.
Wall street like Microsoft because their core products (OS + Office + servers & tools) have 80%+ margin. For some reason Wall Street managers love powerful mergers and takers rather than companies that return nice profits. Microsoft lost $5 billion PROFIT trying to bring Xboxes out.... that's a nice chunk of an Auto bailout! Wall Street has always rewarded MS for spending money and not for paying it out to stockholders and hopefully it will catch up. Being a monopoly is really expensive work... i.e. MS wastes profits trying to hold on to markets like Netbooks where they have no direction.. they "just can't lose".
I just install Firefox and delete the IE shortcut from my desktop. No more Bing/Live or what ever they call it and Google is the search engine for Firefox by default!
It's poppycock non-GAPP accounting.. it's their choice to measure their money that way and they could easily measure their money some other way. The purpose of the "paid" upgrades is to apply every dime of "sales" to the books as quickly as possible and not keep anything back for "support" or "warranty" services. Apple could easily keep $20 of the purchase price back for "ongoing support and patches" but they CHOOSE to realize it all on the books. Even with things like upgrades of the iPod Touch software they COULD count the upgrade as "marketing and goodwill". They want to count the engineering as discrete projects rather than an ongoing "team". So one team "develops and ships" one version, then another "accounting" team is formed to build the next version. It makes the books look very tight and squeaky but it's a bit of an FU to the customers when managers pay more attention to counting the money than the customers that GIVE THEM THE MONEY.
Complaining about "OSX" only being version #10 is like complaining that Microsoft hasn't released a new OS that's not "Windows" in the same amount of time... totally silly.
The real issue is that Microsoft had such a bad time with XP and security they had to release SP2 forward just to get companies to keep paying for what they had. Remember, Apple's business model is retail boxes.... they want to sell a shiny package every so often, count the bags of money, then work on the "next big thing".
Microsoft's model is enterprise licensing... they get 3 years payment from companies, up front, if they upgrade the OS or if they don't. First many companies don't like to upgrade... even XP SP1 & SP2 were traumatic for many enterprises because a service pack broke stuff. Many companies paid for Software Assurance for 3 years expecting an upgrade they never got... and then had to pay ANOTHER 3 years because they were "renting".. and got Vista which was useless to their hardware.
Apple sells computers so they'd rather have customers upgrade machines (and good resale helps move machines to the people that pay best for them and hand them down) and not worry about OS upgrades, or have them be cheap so software can move forward quickly.
you have a point. Apple only has 5 notebook models (white, air, 13" 15" 17") going at a time and they tend to keep the same model for 18 months or so with only minor updates. Compared to Dell that has many models, plus variations, and upgrades the entire consumer line with completely "new" models every 6 months or so. With Apple the tiniest inconvenience sticks out where with Dell, you'd be lucky to get the same internal parts even if the model numbers were the same, they change them all the time, even from week to week so it's hard to say any specific problem is "Dell's" fault and not your particular mash-up they shipped you this week because not enough people on the internet have Inspiron 13wzyz to complain about..some have 14wxyz and others have 13wxy... get the idea.
I'm sure Jobs ego heard Ellison's ego a mile away looking at Sun. There's no way Apple would tie their OS to tightly to something Oracle owns... the clash of giant Egos would be fun to watch though! Like a real live version of fighting giant alien heads from Start Trek!!
But Apple has those old patent cross licenses from years back when Microsoft had to give them stuff to keep them alive so MS wasn't a TOTAL monopoly... and Apple cleverly negotiated new ones for Exchange support back when iPhone 1 came out and everybody was laughing at them for not having "enterprise" email.
the GPL defines publishing as submitting the code to "outside". For the purposes of a company, internal GPL code that never leaves company owned machines is just the same as your personal modifications on your personal machine. The Company, or their IT staff, is the Owner/maintainer, so it's not considered "publishing" to push changes onto company owned desktops or servers.
This is how Google keeps gobs of Linux customizations they make living on the GooglePlex pushing out google searches but the code never leaves Google's servers so it's not "published".... the Affero GPL is one of the licenses that adds clauses for webpages/ server side packages that the link to code must be visible from the network application..GPL3 has a provision to include "about this code" links but it's not mandatory.
it's also a practical problem of support. Linus and everybody else make changes in the open and leave the source for everybody to see. The live/work entirely in source code other projects compile into distros
If/When Nvida doesn't keep up their binary/encrypted/DRM/stripped of debugging info... blob it's not "Linux's" problem. A long time ago they got sick of trying to write "fixes" for other people's code they're not legally allowed to look at anyway. Linus is giving away source code for a whole OS kernel, lots of drivers for hardware, APIs, etc... what makes Nvidia's one little chip so special they can't play along with everybody else?
The same goes for Broadcom, they has a valid regulatory reason for not releasing the specific code for wireless frequencies and powers.. but why did they not build that into the ROM on the wireless card like other companies do? Why did they put the needed firmware behind encryption in a windows-only exe driver file so nobody else can simply talk to the card like a normal device with normal APIs? Other companies have no problem meeting the FCC requirements and leaving enough APIs open for the linux crew to write drivers... it's not a "legal" issue, it's a "marketing" issue.
but they only pay the high percentage on PROFITS.. and like all good Hollywood accountants most companies report one profit number to the investors, then the "taxable" profits to the SEC which includes all the expenses and deductions they get to take, as well as things like retained earnings and reinvestments (that show as returns over time, even though paid up front). There's lots of ways companies reduce tax burden.
Think of how many taxes YOU pay on INCOME.. you don't get to exclude rent, utilities, cable, cell phone, internet, etc, etc. and companies get to exclude all those types of things as "expenses". Companies only pay taxes on what's LEFT after paying everybody else which is much smaller than the amount of "gross margin" they make.
the point was that the manager wasn't properly trained to have those passwords, and had already accused him of "hacking" and disrupting the network in the few days between demanding the passwords in a meeting and calling the cops. Childs was fucked over if he turned them over because if anything broke it would have been "Childs" fault for not turning the password over, then for not leaving instructions to use the password, then for not describing the configuration, then for doing something "off-script" from what a different Cisco admin might do.... especially when you have a contractor interested making $$$ accusing the "old guy" of doing it wrong (we all know how often that happens!)
that was the point... if anybody can grab the password, then if they have the hardware, they can add new network nodes wherever they want. City offices are stolen from all the time, it was a reasonable precaution for the overly paranoid admin to take rather than having to chase down passwords all the time. This is why he had all the VPN routers set up with a modem connection to his office!
First, this is about another COMPANY soliciting employees, "on the clock" from competition, specifically knowing what projects they work on and what knowledge they have.. way different than an employee non-compete. Even non-competes are legal when properly limited in scope and duration... like telling iPhone OS devs they can't work on Pre is EXACTLY what NCs are for.
It's bordering on unethical to employees to hire them away from working on one type of phone project so your company can work on another, competing phone... or on tying your phone to that other company's software sync product (hint, hint) Jobs can always buckle down and start suing the individual employees that leave for violation of trade secrets for vast sums of money (a la RIAA)... but that's messy and mean (but totally legal, and ethical) better to agree not to poach between companies, and to avoid appearance of unethical behavior from employers asking for info they shouldn't have, or from employees sharing "trade secrets", neither of which is close to a "monopoly" on smartphones right now, and save on IP Lawyer bills later.
The problem is that if you DON'T setup these types of agreements, and continue hiring away employees from direct competitors then you open yourself up to nasty patent/trade secret disputes. You've made a business practice of hiring employees with inside knowledge and you just set yourself up for the lawsuits.. that's why they call it "poaching'.
Many business partners have these agreements, so that suppliers aren't competing with their customers for employees on the same projects... after all, why pay another company to do a job when you can just hire their best employees?
From the slashdotter point of view, the headhunting is quite bad for YOUR career. Because these companies headhunt off each other, that means they're not looking for NEW talent (which of course there is such a shortage of!!!) preferring to hire the guy away that did the last cool project that was published, skyrocketing salaries pricing you, the mid-level employee, out of the game. Consider it like salary caps in sports. The stars make multi-million dollar deals.. the other 29 guys that practice just as hard and show up for all the games too get $75k tops... In the same way, for each of these "rockstars" there's an army of guys making barely enough to afford living 2 hours from work (in northern California mind you).. but they make the "rockstars" look good and get the product shipped on time.
This is why the companies focus on out-of-college recruiting almost exclusively (and there aren't enough new graduates willing to work like they have 10 years experience)... so they can pay sub-market wages and dangle the "rockstar" salary, eventually, rather than looking for older, meticulous, team players that get things done on time and under budget... and don't even work OT to do it! But of course they don't work for "rockstar" wages and they don't work for "newbie" wages either.
AOL-TW was much like the more recent Daimler-Chrysler deal. Within 18-24 months the C Level execs that founded/grew AOL/Chrysler were on their ear run off the board. In AOL's case the idea of purchasing TW was to get exclusive content... to be someplace people PAID to go for exclusive media.. (sound familiar!!) but TW ran it's own sites and refused to play along, that demoted AOL to "advertising" only exclusives... which gutted it's base. Because they were "afraid" of publishing media they botched netscape/mozilla terribly, just like yahoo, running back to Microsoft IE when MSN was a toy. They could have had Nullsoft/winamp as THE media center but again TW didn't want to put any ACTUAL MEDIA on AOL!!! Of course TW was the same company that close the WB stores not because they were losing money...but because they weren't making ENOUGH profit and took real marketing and planning to keep the stores full off goodies versus movie or record production. Of course then the released Lotr and Harry Potter... Imagine the merchandising they missed out on!
I was over at the news site boards and various people stated that the IT office was set up by the county several years ago with "letters of understanding" between agencies (fact). i.e. the county didn't hijack his box and the IT folks in charge had the proper authorizations for the crime database. This sheriff has been in charge forever and HIS name would have signed off, so it should have been legal. Why would he suddenly change his mind?
yes, the sheriff filed an investigation (fact) as he does whenever anybody tries to investigate him? He was told by the courts he couldn't have the information until the court decides (fact).
The IT department is being downsized and the sheriff is concerned unqualified IT staff MIGHT access the data, although at this point in time there are no unauthorized access by IT staff and no knowledge that any IT staff MIGHT be doing something they shouldn't be. (fact)
In spite of all that, they decided to rush the law abiding, properly background checked IT staff, with guns, in their office of a public building to "secure" this one computer system. (facts as claimed by the sheriff) The room also contains the computer systems of the other county departments (fact) The deputies demanded (how many?) passwords from the IT staff for (which?) systems, at "gunpoint" under fear of going to gulag. (fact that the jail is degrading and dangerous and honest people die there)
Fact is that this guy declared war on honest, hardworking IT staff just to get at their bosses, and even admitted there was no known wrongdoing (subject to change now that police have drawn gun on them and they'll be filing suit of course!). Drew weapons on them to illegally obtain access to data pending judgment he was told he couldn't have.
FACT is if you work for public IT and handle law enforcement data get out now! No matter what clearances you have, your still a "civi" and are expendable as not "one of the blue".
This guy seem to be revered by "law enforcement" so expect background checked, law abiding IT workers to be subject to this treatment more and more and you have herr Bush to thank for it.
I believe it's law against gambling "over the telephone". Being as nearly all internet passes over some kind of "communications line owned by a phone company" that makes all online gambling illegal by default (even if your state would allow it!). While the Feds can't regulate gambling (it's a state thing) they can pass a law against going around state laws.. and they regulate phone lines under the FCC.. there you have it.
you haven't been reading news lately, computer automated trades account for more than 70% of the volume on wall street now. When you click "buy" on E-trade they guarantee 5 minutes (or whatever), their broker's computer spends 4:59s buying and selling penny increments at less than 1 second per trade just below what you're willing to pay, just before it hands the stock to you. This where the "quants" equations come in trying to use data from the news and actual people making trades to "beat you to the punch" and score a dime or two in between your mouse clicks.
It's all computers running bots over Google and when they hit a spot google, yahoo, bing reference themselves on a dud news item they all crash costing billions of dollars... and you think robots driving cars is bad?
they carry firearms... if they can't do their jobs correctly they should get new ones and stop threatening to kill people because their cock didn't get sucked today. Nobody should be in such a position their whole career, just like nobody is president, or a star football player... people grow up, move on.
That they're stuck in a "dead end" job is their own fault, taking it out on coworkers and the public is no excuse because they can't learn to play nice. The "world" isn't theirs to save, move on, let other people do the job... except TEHY do the job so badly they're scared of being on the other side of the badge!!
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yes, it would kill them because they make big bucks shipping MS Office to small businesses. They're also bound by all sorts of those backroom advertising kickbacks and such the DOJ never got to hear about to put MS Office up front, and to ship lots of demo copies (remember those count too!)
Time for Dell to pony up an be one of the "real" manufacturing outfits... working for companies that supply the auto industry, the auto makers can shut you down on a single phone call. And you don't get to ship product from X plants until you call their engineers and make the problem right.. that means you go to their shop and find, sort, & take back the wrong parts on YOUR dime. You get charged for every hour the customer isn't using their machines, workers sent home wages, and THEIR late delivery charges. Dell is a toy vendor with little actual responsibility for it's products.. time to live in the real world for once.
yep.. because patent infringement doesn't have "pass thru" or "first sale" or "personal use" exceptions... A patent holder "owns" the invention EVERYWHERE, 100%. It's not a new thing, it's been abuse by such greats as Thomas Edison to control which movies got made and not just the sale of movie cameras (hence the move to the "liberal" IP federal court district in California), so the precedent isn't new and isn't going away.
i4i could potentially go after Dell and HP for reselling the "tainted" product and for individual enterprises that "used" the product as well. So even if Dell paid, THEY haven't sold the inventory to a customer yet. As it's licenses, not physical devices there's no reason to keep selling them, just start installing new images on new machines out the door. Too bad Dell has to live in the real world now where companies have to meet legal demands or turn trucks around when product doesn't meet specs.. real companies have to pay the customer actual money just for shipping bad product... they don't get to "call support in india" or "wait for returns" Real companies stop the lines when shit hits the fan and fix the problem or they lose customers.
nope this is a "recall from the shelves" situation... Judges get to do that! Like when Walmart has to pull shelves of bad Peanut Butter.
I think it's perfect justice.. and EXACTLY how these things are supposed to work. It's what Microsoft expects to happen when they DMCA a site for misusing a few words, it's what happens all the time when other big companies get judgments against the "small guy" suck up and take your knocks Dell for selling product from a patent cheater!!!
My opinion is not for courts to "spare the pain" just because Dell is "big" it's just a ploy to sell off (presell?) 120 days of inventory while MS lawyers sort this out. Just like when US little people get DMCA'd, shut um down now, shut um down hard... just like anybody else. Too bad they took orders for "stolen" IP... they should have known better!!!
Ask the management where YOUR profits are? Consider they make 80%+ profits off OS, servers, tools and Office where they hell does all that money go? Most importantly, in a recession why is it not going to YOUR pocket .. as an OWNER and all.
What your saying about "responsibility" and such is a crock. They have a responsibility to turn YOUR money into MORE money as efficiently as possible... choking off air supplies" and "lobbying for favoritism" has nothing to do with that. Their business is to make PROFIT, not even to ensure that they don't "work themselves out of a job".. as once a certain amount of product has been created maybe it's better for investors to CASH OUT and start new companies!!! Microsoft was sitting on $40+ billion in liquid assets at the beginning of the 00's. that's more money than the entire airline industry, more money than paid out for auto industry bail outs!!! They sat on that money for half a decade while it devalued and gained low interest and didn't pay out so their OWNERS could by cars and trucks and take vacations, etc. Many public utilities and such give out dividends in the $1 per share range and they're much more regulated than Microsoft.. Where's YOUR money?
Realize that online services is the only area Google remotely competes in. Yes they have Google Desktop and the online apps and android, but at this stage those are still toys in the real world....about as dangerous as Palm right now. Most of the public and businesses don't need overpriced OSes (and at Microsoft's margin they have a lot to cut) and don't need new hardware in the middle of the second year of really tight belts. If anything this shows Microsoft products aren't providing quite the value to businesses that MS things they are.
Wall street like Microsoft because their core products (OS + Office + servers & tools) have 80%+ margin. For some reason Wall Street managers love powerful mergers and takers rather than companies that return nice profits. Microsoft lost $5 billion PROFIT trying to bring Xboxes out.... that's a nice chunk of an Auto bailout! Wall Street has always rewarded MS for spending money and not for paying it out to stockholders and hopefully it will catch up. Being a monopoly is really expensive work... i.e. MS wastes profits trying to hold on to markets like Netbooks where they have no direction .. they "just can't lose".
I just install Firefox and delete the IE shortcut from my desktop. No more Bing/Live or what ever they call it and Google is the search engine for Firefox by default!
exactly! Depressed people need their GPP modules adjusted. That's all.
Of course then we'd be dumb as doors... but happy.
It's poppycock non-GAPP accounting.. it's their choice to measure their money that way and they could easily measure their money some other way. The purpose of the "paid" upgrades is to apply every dime of "sales" to the books as quickly as possible and not keep anything back for "support" or "warranty" services. Apple could easily keep $20 of the purchase price back for "ongoing support and patches" but they CHOOSE to realize it all on the books. Even with things like upgrades of the iPod Touch software they COULD count the upgrade as "marketing and goodwill". They want to count the engineering as discrete projects rather than an ongoing "team". So one team "develops and ships" one version, then another "accounting" team is formed to build the next version. It makes the books look very tight and squeaky but it's a bit of an FU to the customers when managers pay more attention to counting the money than the customers that GIVE THEM THE MONEY.
Complaining about "OSX" only being version #10 is like complaining that Microsoft hasn't released a new OS that's not "Windows" in the same amount of time... totally silly.
The real issue is that Microsoft had such a bad time with XP and security they had to release SP2 forward just to get companies to keep paying for what they had. Remember, Apple's business model is retail boxes.... they want to sell a shiny package every so often, count the bags of money, then work on the "next big thing".
Microsoft's model is enterprise licensing... they get 3 years payment from companies, up front, if they upgrade the OS or if they don't. First many companies don't like to upgrade... even XP SP1 & SP2 were traumatic for many enterprises because a service pack broke stuff. Many companies paid for Software Assurance for 3 years expecting an upgrade they never got... and then had to pay ANOTHER 3 years because they were "renting".. and got Vista which was useless to their hardware.
Apple sells computers so they'd rather have customers upgrade machines (and good resale helps move machines to the people that pay best for them and hand them down) and not worry about OS upgrades, or have them be cheap so software can move forward quickly.
you have a point. Apple only has 5 notebook models (white, air, 13" 15" 17") going at a time and they tend to keep the same model for 18 months or so with only minor updates. Compared to Dell that has many models, plus variations, and upgrades the entire consumer line with completely "new" models every 6 months or so. With Apple the tiniest inconvenience sticks out where with Dell, you'd be lucky to get the same internal parts even if the model numbers were the same, they change them all the time, even from week to week so it's hard to say any specific problem is "Dell's" fault and not your particular mash-up they shipped you this week because not enough people on the internet have Inspiron 13wzyz to complain about..some have 14wxyz and others have 13wxy ... get the idea.
I'm sure Jobs ego heard Ellison's ego a mile away looking at Sun. There's no way Apple would tie their OS to tightly to something Oracle owns... the clash of giant Egos would be fun to watch though! Like a real live version of fighting giant alien heads from Start Trek!!
But Apple has those old patent cross licenses from years back when Microsoft had to give them stuff to keep them alive so MS wasn't a TOTAL monopoly... and Apple cleverly negotiated new ones for Exchange support back when iPhone 1 came out and everybody was laughing at them for not having "enterprise" email.
the GPL defines publishing as submitting the code to "outside". For the purposes of a company, internal GPL code that never leaves company owned machines is just the same as your personal modifications on your personal machine. The Company, or their IT staff, is the Owner/maintainer, so it's not considered "publishing" to push changes onto company owned desktops or servers.
This is how Google keeps gobs of Linux customizations they make living on the GooglePlex pushing out google searches but the code never leaves Google's servers so it's not "published".... the Affero GPL is one of the licenses that adds clauses for webpages/ server side packages that the link to code must be visible from the network application ..GPL3 has a provision to include "about this code" links but it's not mandatory.
it's also a practical problem of support. Linus and everybody else make changes in the open and leave the source for everybody to see. The live/work entirely in source code other projects compile into distros
If/When Nvida doesn't keep up their binary/encrypted/DRM/stripped of debugging info ... blob it's not "Linux's" problem. A long time ago they got sick of trying to write "fixes" for other people's code they're not legally allowed to look at anyway. Linus is giving away source code for a whole OS kernel, lots of drivers for hardware, APIs, etc... what makes Nvidia's one little chip so special they can't play along with everybody else?
The same goes for Broadcom, they has a valid regulatory reason for not releasing the specific code for wireless frequencies and powers.. but why did they not build that into the ROM on the wireless card like other companies do? Why did they put the needed firmware behind encryption in a windows-only exe driver file so nobody else can simply talk to the card like a normal device with normal APIs? Other companies have no problem meeting the FCC requirements and leaving enough APIs open for the linux crew to write drivers... it's not a "legal" issue, it's a "marketing" issue.
but they only pay the high percentage on PROFITS.. and like all good Hollywood accountants most companies report one profit number to the investors, then the "taxable" profits to the SEC which includes all the expenses and deductions they get to take, as well as things like retained earnings and reinvestments (that show as returns over time, even though paid up front). There's lots of ways companies reduce tax burden.
Think of how many taxes YOU pay on INCOME.. you don't get to exclude rent, utilities, cable, cell phone, internet, etc, etc. and companies get to exclude all those types of things as "expenses". Companies only pay taxes on what's LEFT after paying everybody else which is much smaller than the amount of "gross margin" they make.
the point was that the manager wasn't properly trained to have those passwords, and had already accused him of "hacking" and disrupting the network in the few days between demanding the passwords in a meeting and calling the cops. Childs was fucked over if he turned them over because if anything broke it would have been "Childs" fault for not turning the password over, then for not leaving instructions to use the password, then for not describing the configuration, then for doing something "off-script" from what a different Cisco admin might do.... especially when you have a contractor interested making $$$ accusing the "old guy" of doing it wrong (we all know how often that happens!)
that was the point... if anybody can grab the password, then if they have the hardware, they can add new network nodes wherever they want. City offices are stolen from all the time, it was a reasonable precaution for the overly paranoid admin to take rather than having to chase down passwords all the time. This is why he had all the VPN routers set up with a modem connection to his office!
First, this is about another COMPANY soliciting employees, "on the clock" from competition, specifically knowing what projects they work on and what knowledge they have.. way different than an employee non-compete. Even non-competes are legal when properly limited in scope and duration... like telling iPhone OS devs they can't work on Pre is EXACTLY what NCs are for.
It's bordering on unethical to employees to hire them away from working on one type of phone project so your company can work on another, competing phone... or on tying your phone to that other company's software sync product (hint, hint) Jobs can always buckle down and start suing the individual employees that leave for violation of trade secrets for vast sums of money (a la RIAA) ... but that's messy and mean (but totally legal, and ethical) better to agree not to poach between companies, and to avoid appearance of unethical behavior from employers asking for info they shouldn't have, or from employees sharing "trade secrets", neither of which is close to a "monopoly" on smartphones right now, and save on IP Lawyer bills later.
The problem is that if you DON'T setup these types of agreements, and continue hiring away employees from direct competitors then you open yourself up to nasty patent/trade secret disputes. You've made a business practice of hiring employees with inside knowledge and you just set yourself up for the lawsuits.. that's why they call it "poaching'.
Many business partners have these agreements, so that suppliers aren't competing with their customers for employees on the same projects... after all, why pay another company to do a job when you can just hire their best employees?
From the slashdotter point of view, the headhunting is quite bad for YOUR career. Because these companies headhunt off each other, that means they're not looking for NEW talent (which of course there is such a shortage of!!!) preferring to hire the guy away that did the last cool project that was published, skyrocketing salaries pricing you, the mid-level employee, out of the game. Consider it like salary caps in sports. The stars make multi-million dollar deals.. the other 29 guys that practice just as hard and show up for all the games too get $75k tops ... In the same way, for each of these "rockstars" there's an army of guys making barely enough to afford living 2 hours from work (in northern California mind you).. but they make the "rockstars" look good and get the product shipped on time.
This is why the companies focus on out-of-college recruiting almost exclusively (and there aren't enough new graduates willing to work like they have 10 years experience)... so they can pay sub-market wages and dangle the "rockstar" salary, eventually, rather than looking for older, meticulous, team players that get things done on time and under budget... and don't even work OT to do it! But of course they don't work for "rockstar" wages and they don't work for "newbie" wages either.
AOL-TW was much like the more recent Daimler-Chrysler deal. Within 18-24 months the C Level execs that founded/grew AOL/Chrysler were on their ear run off the board. In AOL's case the idea of purchasing TW was to get exclusive content... to be someplace people PAID to go for exclusive media.. (sound familiar!!) but TW ran it's own sites and refused to play along, that demoted AOL to "advertising" only exclusives... which gutted it's base. Because they were "afraid" of publishing media they botched netscape/mozilla terribly, just like yahoo, running back to Microsoft IE when MSN was a toy. They could have had Nullsoft/winamp as THE media center but again TW didn't want to put any ACTUAL MEDIA on AOL!!! Of course TW was the same company that close the WB stores not because they were losing money.. .but because they weren't making ENOUGH profit and took real marketing and planning to keep the stores full off goodies versus movie or record production. Of course then the released Lotr and Harry Potter... Imagine the merchandising they missed out on!
I was over at the news site boards and various people stated that the IT office was set up by the county several years ago with "letters of understanding" between agencies (fact). i.e. the county didn't hijack his box and the IT folks in charge had the proper authorizations for the crime database. This sheriff has been in charge forever and HIS name would have signed off, so it should have been legal. Why would he suddenly change his mind?
yes, the sheriff filed an investigation (fact) as he does whenever anybody tries to investigate him? He was told by the courts he couldn't have the information until the court decides (fact).
The IT department is being downsized and the sheriff is concerned unqualified IT staff MIGHT access the data, although at this point in time there are no unauthorized access by IT staff and no knowledge that any IT staff MIGHT be doing something they shouldn't be. (fact)
In spite of all that, they decided to rush the law abiding, properly background checked IT staff, with guns, in their office of a public building to "secure" this one computer system. (facts as claimed by the sheriff) The room also contains the computer systems of the other county departments (fact) The deputies demanded (how many?) passwords from the IT staff for (which?) systems, at "gunpoint" under fear of going to gulag. (fact that the jail is degrading and dangerous and honest people die there)
Fact is that this guy declared war on honest, hardworking IT staff just to get at their bosses, and even admitted there was no known wrongdoing (subject to change now that police have drawn gun on them and they'll be filing suit of course!). Drew weapons on them to illegally obtain access to data pending judgment he was told he couldn't have.
FACT is if you work for public IT and handle law enforcement data get out now! No matter what clearances you have, your still a "civi" and are expendable as not "one of the blue".
This guy seem to be revered by "law enforcement" so expect background checked, law abiding IT workers to be subject to this treatment more and more and you have herr Bush to thank for it.
I believe it's law against gambling "over the telephone". Being as nearly all internet passes over some kind of "communications line owned by a phone company" that makes all online gambling illegal by default (even if your state would allow it!). While the Feds can't regulate gambling (it's a state thing) they can pass a law against going around state laws.. and they regulate phone lines under the FCC.. there you have it.
you haven't been reading news lately, computer automated trades account for more than 70% of the volume on wall street now. When you click "buy" on E-trade they guarantee 5 minutes (or whatever), their broker's computer spends 4:59s buying and selling penny increments at less than 1 second per trade just below what you're willing to pay, just before it hands the stock to you. This where the "quants" equations come in trying to use data from the news and actual people making trades to "beat you to the punch" and score a dime or two in between your mouse clicks.
It's all computers running bots over Google and when they hit a spot google, yahoo, bing reference themselves on a dud news item they all crash costing billions of dollars... and you think robots driving cars is bad?
one of the ones on this half of the blue sphere Monroe and Truman said we had dominion over. And I mean dominion in the "biblical" way!!!
they carry firearms... if they can't do their jobs correctly they should get new ones and stop threatening to kill people because their cock didn't get sucked today. Nobody should be in such a position their whole career, just like nobody is president, or a star football player... people grow up, move on.
That they're stuck in a "dead end" job is their own fault, taking it out on coworkers and the public is no excuse because they can't learn to play nice. The "world" isn't theirs to save, move on, let other people do the job... except TEHY do the job so badly they're scared of being on the other side of the badge!!