If you sign a contract (without being under duress or undue circumstances, which you must prove in the course of your case) any contract you sign is essentially valid.
All the software I've looked at does say it on the box. At least in the small print...
Okay, so I don't want to defend MS or anyone else, but let's run through this argument...
1) Most EULA's contain provisions about returning the product for a full refund if you disagree w/the EULA
2) Consideration is not required as part of a contract. You click yes, you sign. No ifs, ands, or buts, at least how the law sees it. Ignorance of the terms of a contract you have signed is no excuse from that contract.
3) You did not "buy" the software. What you bought was the right to be licensed to use software, providing that you agree to the EULA. An analogy can be drawn to currency, or for that matter, a passport. Both are properties of the government, even though you have the right to use them in a (limited) fashion
By clicking yes, you are taking positive action to agree to the contract which you see before you.
It is that principle which enables e-commerce: normally when you pay by credit card, you sign the reciept -- which is a contractual affirmation of the agreement you have with the credit card company. When you click the "order" button on-line, it's the same legal principle. Thus any click-to-agree contract is valid, or we can throw e-commerce out the window.
Actually, some research and a quick consult with a lawyer friend has shown: this is false, and apparantly you learn why as a 1st year law student.
In this case, you are proposing to them an alternate contract, which they must accept. Silence can never be a means of contract acceptance. For example, if you are sent a magazine without asking for it with the legal terminology "failure to cancel in 30 days will be construed as acceptance of a subscription and we will bill you," you can't legally be held to their billing request -- and in fact, by not answering you can continue to recieve the magazine for free.
Furthermore, if you sent the contract back to Microsoft, you couldn't use the software until you either recieved a reply or decided to agree to the EULA.
Sorry, but this post suffers from flawed legal reasoning: silence or the failure to respond cannot be considered legal acceptance of a contract. Check with any lawyer...
1) Maya is available for OS X -- and, for non-rendering purposes (where Intel hardware has it beat), it runs a hell of a lot better than on Win2k...
2) "normal people" "experiment" with things like "Maya, 3DStudioMax" both of which cost several THOUSAND dollars (okay, illegit copies obviously... So Kazaa isn't available for OS X)
3) Like I said: most people don't run more than a few apps. And for the apps I specified, Apple is the winner, hands down.
I run a small consulting firm specializing in digital media technology. Oftentimes our clients have no technical expertise whatsoever. Here are some of my experiences, and the lessons I've learned.
1) Document, document, document. A few years after we started up, we were sued by one of our first clients. The solution (software package) we eventually installed/provided them with was unsatisfactory, even though it wasn't the one we recommended -- it was the one they insisted on. When everbody else went to option B and the company making package they insisted on went out of business, they sued us. We didn't have the documentation to show that it wasn't the solution we reccommended, and so we were basically forced to settle out of court -- and upgrade them to the other software for next to nothing.
2) Define the terms of your consulting contract as best you can. My firm has built up a solid enough reputation with our clients that we can generally dictate the terms of the consulting contract. We have become "complete solutions providers," which I believe to be the holy grail of any consulting firm. First, we work with the client to establish their needs, goals, and a budget. Then we dictate the solution for them. Our contract is built such that they have to buy what we recommend, or they don't get the installation help and the benefits of a support contract -- which they have already paid for.
3) Our contract aren't (and haven't always been) that advantagous, and sometimes we don't get our way. Sometimes the CTOs brother works for Macromedia (when we normally recommend Adobe), or the CEO has had a terrible experience using Windows 2k, or Linux, or the Mac, or Sun, or IRIX, and won't spend a dime on any of those solutions -- which we normally reccommend. When this happens, we generally have a back-up solution, which we use as a bargaining chip. Sometimes, even, it's just arrogance on behalf of CTOs or CEOs: even though they hired us, they don't want to take EVERYTHING the know-it-all consultants suggest. Having the back-up will make it seem as if you are willing to compromise, and that you are sensitive to the needs of your client.
4) Know thy client -- and let him know that you know him. If your client believes that you know his business as well as he does, your client will be much, much more likely to do what you suggest. As a general tip for people just starting as independent consultants: pick a niche business. This is a lesson I learned from my father, a small businessman. Pick a niche and know that niche perfectly. Know who your clients competitors are. Know all the possible solutions available in your field, so that when your client comes up with an alternative to what you've suggested, you can act expertly about it: oftentimes clients of mine will try to do their own research, come up with something that they think is better, and suggest it. If you've never heard of what they've found, it will make them suspicious. If you can show them you know all about their suggestion, it'll be much easier to convince them that you were right to begin with.
5) Interpersonal skills. This is something that many my brightest employees completely lack. The most important thing in a consulting relationship is trust. Trust is much easier to establish if you can laugh with your client, take them to dinner, etc. While you shouldn't make it the number one priority in hiring, it helps to have a few people around with excellent interpersonal skills who radiate confidence and leadership without seeming arrogant. With this in mind, I highly, highly, highly reccommend ex-Marine, and to a slightly lesser extent, ex-Navy, Air Force, and Army officers. They know how to be humble to clients when necessary, but, as experienced leaders of men, they know how to gain a client's trust.
So those are a few observations after many years in the trade.
-Shylock
Questions and comments are welcome and may indeed gain response. Flames will be ignored. Post responsibly.
I'll debate your software argument. Most people, who would need a mac for DV etc. (let's keep this related to the original article) will run three, or at most, four, applications: MS-Word/FinalDraft, Final Cut Pro/Premiere, A Web Browser (take your pick), and After Effects (possibly).
Thirdly, there's a huge realm of open-source software that has become available for the mac, as it is essentially a BSD OS and easily runs XFree.
The truth is, there are some niche apps that won't run on the Mac. But most people, especially video editors, don't use niche apps. They use mainstream apps. And those are even, accross the board. Heck, in all honesty I even prefer Word for OS X over Word XP -- though I use a Win2k/Linux box as my main workstation.
I work every day with graphics professionals. They never have a problem with software on OS X -- and, in fact, prefer the Mac for the simple reason that it supports DVD Studio (by far the easiest professional DVD authoring platform available), and Final Cut Pro. In fact, it's the PC Users drooling over Mac software and not the other way a round. The CEO of a media company I work with saw the CTO using Final Cut on his Powerbook. The first question he asked was "how do I get a copy of that." Well, he can't. He uses Win2k.
The camcorder seems a little extravagant. Why not just use an induction loop (a la EZ-Pass or bicycle spedometers) to sync the pendulum with the atomic clock?
I'm a consultant who does a lot of work with digital media, content creation, and professional design/art companies.
Please, as a response to this post, let me know of one or two graphics professionals (web sites, please) which I can verify use GIMP (not film gimp, which is completely different (and has undergone a name change), but GIMP).
The truth of the matter is, professionals -- true professionals, people who make their living sitting in front of a computer using photo and graphics tools for 4-8 hours a day -- all use Photoshop. It has nothing to do with interface or learning curve. It has to do with color management.
People who make arguments about GIMP and Photoshop and don't mention color management simply don't know what they are talking about. Color management is nearly everything to graphics professionals, and, quite simply, the Mac and Adobe Software does it better than anything else -- light-years ahead of GIMP. That's why many graphics pros use Macs, even *if* PCs are faster. Speed is far less important than output. Color management is everything.
We use GIMP quite a bit in our office (we also use photoshop). It's free, it's fast, and we can get it to run on the four platforms we use. But we can't recommend it as a solution to our customers. It's just not good enough.
Regardless of the economic and political implications, the technological difficulties involved with enforcing such a tariff are simply staggering. Software is completely liquid. You can e-mail source code, compile it in a native country, and then sell it. How would you tariff software developed in multiple countries by persons of multiple nationalities? Allowing for that would make it too easy to get around the tariff.
Generally speaking, it would probably make the most sense to allow something resembling competition. Barring that, I would vote for GSM. It has nothing to do with which is a better standard. The point is, the middle east is a relatively small region. Cell-phone interoperability would be a huge boon -- so it would be great if the whole region used one standard. Iraq is about the size of a mid-sized state. Imagine if you couldn't use your New York cell phone in Connecticut because of standards problems.
This is *way* off-topic. But it merits a response, because this is oft-misunderstood. In fact, this post is a good argument for making "The West Wing" mandatory viewing for all high school students. Anyway...
So, the cons of a flat tax. First of all, there's a good reason that the flat tax makes sense on paper. In fact, it would've made great sense in practice about 160 years ago, when we were still an agrarian republic. All of the problems with the flat tax are mired in the fact that the distribution of income in this country is exponential, not linear. Let me explain the difference.
A good way to think of a linear income distribution is as follows. To simplify things, let's just consider 4-person families with one working parent. Let's assume all such families have different incomes, and that the poorest makes $20,000/year. Now, if the distribution were linear, there would be a family making $20,010, one making $20,020, one making $20,030, and so in in even $10 increments, all the way up to, say, $1,000,000.
But we don't live in a society with a linear income distribtion. Instead, the distribution of income is much more like a curve -- an essentially exponential bell curve. This means that there are exponentially more people clustered around lower and middle-income levels than there are around the $1,000,000 mark. Fortunately for us, however, the biggest cluster (top of the bell) is around the middle (not the bottom), and has been steadily rising since the turn of the century (though less in recent years).
Okay, so back to the flat tax. Because of the exponential distribution of income, a flat tax places what is often called the "burden of taxation" on the middle class. This means that while the middle class might make up 60% of the population, they will pay more than 60% of total tax revenue. I won't go into the math (which is often disputed by proponents of the flat tax and constantly proven by leading economists, conservatives and liberals alike).
There's also the idea of economic hardship. Let's say there's a 10% flat tax. That 10% is much harder on a guy earning 20,000 a year than on a guy earning 1,000,000 a year. Flat taxes also do away with most tax "incentives" (in an attept to simplify the tax code). Tax incentives can either be good or bad, depending on where you stand philisophically.
In all honesty, that's primarily what it comes down to -- philosophy. The proponents of flat tax often say that a flat tax will "help the economy." Like the idea today that the tax rebate will help the economy, it simply isn't true. Anybody who has taken a basic college course in econonomics understands that -- in fact, almost all economists understand that (nearly all the ones who originally supported the Bush tax cuts have since backed off). Most economists feel the same way about the flat tax -- it doesn't really help the economy at all. The propaganda sounds good, but it's really propaganda.
The truth about the tax debate is that, from an apolitical standpoint anyway, the flat tax doesn't have any pros -- but neither does the progressive tax. It's all philosophy: where do you want the tax burden? Should the top 2% of wage earners pay more than 2% of all taxes? Is it important for the rich to contribute a greater percentage of their income than the poor?
I would be happy to answer this question in much more detail, with a run-down of the impact, on all economic classes of people, of each of the tax schemes (please respond to this post with your e-mail if you so desire). However, a good essay on it (not be me, but found through google) can be found here: http://www.wordwiz72.com/flattax.html
I will add one last thing. The progressive tax is often mislabled, because only the "aggregate" percentage -- it is important to remember that, under today's progressive tax, somebody earning 200,000 pays the same percentage of the first 25,000 of their income as somebody earning only 25,000 -- it's only higher amount of income that is taxed at a higher percentage.
noone buys diamonds for anywhere close to what they sell them for. This has been repeately documented, but hasnt sunk into the brains of the populaion yet.
This part of the parent post is entirely false. As a matter of fact, it highlights the most common misconception about diamonds.
Within the United States, you can buy a diamond for exactly what you can sell it for, no more, no less (otherwise, you couldn't buy and sell diamonds on eBay, for being able to buy something on eBay is defined as being able to buy it for what you can sell it for). If you buy a raw diamond for anything more than 1%-2% more than you can sell it for, you are being ripped off. Indeed, it is THAT fact which "hasn't sunk into the brains of the population yet". Diamonds are one of the most fungible goods known to mankind, even more fungible than gold (because the value of gold fluctuates widely and regularly, but the value of diamonds typically do not).
However, finished jewelry is different. A Diamond + A setting will ALWAYS cost more than the sum of the parts. If you're looking to buy a diamond ring, the best thing to do is to buy a diamond wholesale and take it to a jeweler to have a setting custom-made. Alternatively, sites such as BlueNile will allow you to buy a diamond and then have a setting made (although you will pay more than it is worth, you will not get as ripped off as with pre-finished jewelry.)
I first became interested in diamonds several years ago (when traveling to Russia and then Brazil) and have taken several courses in identifying and appraising diamonds from different Gem Labs in the US and overseas. One of the first things they taught us was the misconception in the parent post, and how to exploit it.
Well, yes... and no. You're right in that the ten year roll-out program makes it easier to transition. But the original post implicity makes the point that sometimes a university, especially a 7,000 student university (I went to one), has fairly diverse needs. Each department has specialized applications it needs to run. What happens five years from now, when a new analysis package comes out, and the econ department desperately needs to run it, but it's only for Windows, and requires Windows2005? I'm all for adopting Linux and OSS *where appropriate* which is not in a setting that uses specialized software. Academics don't care what OS they run, or what productivity suite they run. They care whether or not they can run the proprietary software that is the current hot shit in their field.
If you're looking for budget NAS, then you're right -- but the XServe isn't budget NAS. It's designed to compete with solutions from Sun, Dell, and IBM. And compete it does -- a client of mine managed to get two prepro models from Apple (they were basically testing them, then got to keep them). Set up as RAID 5, they are effectively as fast as a the Sun fibre channel array they are going to replace, but cost about a third as much per gig. Amazing hardware. I highly reccommend.
Why not use the orbital eccentricity of the body to (help) define whether it be planet or asteroid. I'm not sure exactly which values we'd define, but it seems to me that a combination of eccentricity and size is the way to go...
I completely disagree. If the CTO of a decent sized company switched to Linux on his desktop, then wrote about it, he'd DEFINATELY get coverage on/. Just hasn't happened yet. As a guy who has had a few Enterprise CTOs for clients, none of them believe that Linux is ready for the desktop.
I am patched. A few more programmer-oriented friends of mine (I'm just a consultant/sysadmin/integrator) have said that the real problem is allowing certain processes in the GUI to run at realtime priority level. This is absolutely necessary for effective render edits in real time, technical/biosystems visualization (particularly the Mathematica visualization engine, which I've been told by clients runs about 4X faster on Windows and Aqua than on Linux), and really high end video postproduction (not just editing -- but After Effects type stuff).
Linux can do these things, sometimes, with nice hardware, but at the huge cost of reactivity... OS X and Windows are still 100% reactive when capturing full-frame DV or when rendering on screen in real time. Not so much with the Linux stations I've used.
The problem, however, with doing so is that it can cause crashes. The only app I've ever used on OS X that brings down the whole system is Final Cut Pro; likewise (almost, a few other apps have done it too:) ) for Premiere on Win2k.
Pixar uses "Renderman" (it's proprietary rendering engine) on Linux boxes in it's Render Farm. A "render farm" is basically just a group of computers that act together to do just that: render, a process which involves no GUI and basically is raw number crunching. Linux is great for raw number crunching, I wasn't disputing that.
The front end workstations aren't Linux based -- but if they are, they are written using a proprietary GUI, not a generalized one (like XFree, Windows, or Aqua).
-Shylock0
Questions and intelligent comments generally get a response. Flames are ignored. Post responsibly.
1) Speed. Linux with a GUI (XWin) is slow. Aqua (let's include OS X as a BSD 'nix), X on Solaris (x86 or SPARC Solaris), X on BSD, IRIX, even X running over Aqua and Darwin, they're all much more responsive than X on Linux. I'm not talking raw-floating-point-throughput (a separate issue), I'm talking the responsivness of the GUI, which -- even with my Athlon 2000+ 1gb+RAID -- doesn't seem to be quite up to snuff with industrial-strength 'nixes. I think this is one thing that should get better before more graphics/postpro houses start adopting Linux.
2) Continuing that note, I'd add industrial-strength reliability in the GUI. Linux is an amazing OS at the server end. It's fast, it's stable, it's fairly scalable, it's cheap, it's no harder to maintain than Solaris/BSD, and it has more supported apps than either. But as a technical/graphics workstation OS, Linux sucks. The GUI crashes. The apps crash. They're unstable. Linux should take a hint from the BeOS, and really move digital media capability in that direction. OS X is better. BSD is better. IRIX is better. Solaris is WAY better.
So, yeah. Improve GUI/OS functionality. Improve OS-level media handling capabilities.
This post is right on. Go to Yahoo! finance and take a look at Microsoft's (MSFT) financials. It hasn't had any "rapid revenue growth." Microsoft's revenue has been fairly stable, or increased at a fairly stable rate, since the introduction of Windows 95.
This particular paragraph -- the one pointed out by the parent post -- truly shows the ignorance of the person who wrote the article. The financial structure the author describes is typical of "new economy" companies -- Amazon.com, Priceline, and others which has long-since gone bankrupt, were all based on the principle of rapid revenue growth and increasing stock value. But NOT Microsoft, which has long been lauded by business leaders as a "new economy" company with an essentially "old economy" financial structure -- much more like IBM -- than a new economy structure which the author describes. Futhermore, Microsoft pioneered the idea of giving employees actual stock -- and not options. (I would be happy to clarify that point -- just post a question)
The author of the article has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, at least when it comes to this paragraph. It looks like he's just throwing around buzzwords in an attempt to gain an audience.
-Shylock0
Questions and intelligent comments often answered. Flames ignored. Post responsibly.
Blades don't necessarily require low power consumption -- although low heat dissipation and low power consumption tend to be two sides of the same coin. In all practicality, blades could be designed for maximum heat dissipation without low power consumption -- in which case they wouldn't really be ideal for laptops...
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If you sign a contract (without being under duress or undue circumstances, which you must prove in the course of your case) any contract you sign is essentially valid.
All the software I've looked at does say it on the box. At least in the small print...
1) Most EULA's contain provisions about returning the product for a full refund if you disagree w/the EULA
2) Consideration is not required as part of a contract. You click yes, you sign. No ifs, ands, or buts, at least how the law sees it. Ignorance of the terms of a contract you have signed is no excuse from that contract.
3) You did not "buy" the software. What you bought was the right to be licensed to use software, providing that you agree to the EULA. An analogy can be drawn to currency, or for that matter, a passport. Both are properties of the government, even though you have the right to use them in a (limited) fashion
It is that principle which enables e-commerce: normally when you pay by credit card, you sign the reciept -- which is a contractual affirmation of the agreement you have with the credit card company. When you click the "order" button on-line, it's the same legal principle. Thus any click-to-agree contract is valid, or we can throw e-commerce out the window.
In this case, you are proposing to them an alternate contract, which they must accept. Silence can never be a means of contract acceptance. For example, if you are sent a magazine without asking for it with the legal terminology "failure to cancel in 30 days will be construed as acceptance of a subscription and we will bill you," you can't legally be held to their billing request -- and in fact, by not answering you can continue to recieve the magazine for free.
Furthermore, if you sent the contract back to Microsoft, you couldn't use the software until you either recieved a reply or decided to agree to the EULA.
Sorry, but this post suffers from flawed legal reasoning: silence or the failure to respond cannot be considered legal acceptance of a contract. Check with any lawyer...
2) "normal people" "experiment" with things like "Maya, 3DStudioMax" both of which cost several THOUSAND dollars (okay, illegit copies obviously... So Kazaa isn't available for OS X)
3) Like I said: most people don't run more than a few apps. And for the apps I specified, Apple is the winner, hands down.
So that I don't have to pay my corp. laywer his $250/hour, can you point me to any relevant cases? Are you a laywer yourself?
1) Document, document, document. A few years after we started up, we were sued by one of our first clients. The solution (software package) we eventually installed/provided them with was unsatisfactory, even though it wasn't the one we recommended -- it was the one they insisted on. When everbody else went to option B and the company making package they insisted on went out of business, they sued us. We didn't have the documentation to show that it wasn't the solution we reccommended, and so we were basically forced to settle out of court -- and upgrade them to the other software for next to nothing.
2) Define the terms of your consulting contract as best you can. My firm has built up a solid enough reputation with our clients that we can generally dictate the terms of the consulting contract. We have become "complete solutions providers," which I believe to be the holy grail of any consulting firm. First, we work with the client to establish their needs, goals, and a budget. Then we dictate the solution for them. Our contract is built such that they have to buy what we recommend, or they don't get the installation help and the benefits of a support contract -- which they have already paid for.
3) Our contract aren't (and haven't always been) that advantagous, and sometimes we don't get our way. Sometimes the CTOs brother works for Macromedia (when we normally recommend Adobe), or the CEO has had a terrible experience using Windows 2k, or Linux, or the Mac, or Sun, or IRIX, and won't spend a dime on any of those solutions -- which we normally reccommend. When this happens, we generally have a back-up solution, which we use as a bargaining chip. Sometimes, even, it's just arrogance on behalf of CTOs or CEOs: even though they hired us, they don't want to take EVERYTHING the know-it-all consultants suggest. Having the back-up will make it seem as if you are willing to compromise, and that you are sensitive to the needs of your client.
4) Know thy client -- and let him know that you know him. If your client believes that you know his business as well as he does, your client will be much, much more likely to do what you suggest. As a general tip for people just starting as independent consultants: pick a niche business. This is a lesson I learned from my father, a small businessman. Pick a niche and know that niche perfectly. Know who your clients competitors are. Know all the possible solutions available in your field, so that when your client comes up with an alternative to what you've suggested, you can act expertly about it: oftentimes clients of mine will try to do their own research, come up with something that they think is better, and suggest it. If you've never heard of what they've found, it will make them suspicious. If you can show them you know all about their suggestion, it'll be much easier to convince them that you were right to begin with.
5) Interpersonal skills. This is something that many my brightest employees completely lack. The most important thing in a consulting relationship is trust. Trust is much easier to establish if you can laugh with your client, take them to dinner, etc. While you shouldn't make it the number one priority in hiring, it helps to have a few people around with excellent interpersonal skills who radiate confidence and leadership without seeming arrogant. With this in mind, I highly, highly, highly reccommend ex-Marine, and to a slightly lesser extent, ex-Navy, Air Force, and Army officers. They know how to be humble to clients when necessary, but, as experienced leaders of men, they know how to gain a client's trust.
So those are a few observations after many years in the trade.
-Shylock
Questions and comments are welcome and may indeed gain response. Flames will be ignored. Post responsibly.
Thirdly, there's a huge realm of open-source software that has become available for the mac, as it is essentially a BSD OS and easily runs XFree.
The truth is, there are some niche apps that won't run on the Mac. But most people, especially video editors, don't use niche apps. They use mainstream apps. And those are even, accross the board. Heck, in all honesty I even prefer Word for OS X over Word XP -- though I use a Win2k/Linux box as my main workstation.
I work every day with graphics professionals. They never have a problem with software on OS X -- and, in fact, prefer the Mac for the simple reason that it supports DVD Studio (by far the easiest professional DVD authoring platform available), and Final Cut Pro. In fact, it's the PC Users drooling over Mac software and not the other way a round. The CEO of a media company I work with saw the CTO using Final Cut on his Powerbook. The first question he asked was "how do I get a copy of that." Well, he can't. He uses Win2k.
The camcorder seems a little extravagant. Why not just use an induction loop (a la EZ-Pass or bicycle spedometers) to sync the pendulum with the atomic clock?
Please, as a response to this post, let me know of one or two graphics professionals (web sites, please) which I can verify use GIMP (not film gimp, which is completely different (and has undergone a name change), but GIMP).
The truth of the matter is, professionals -- true professionals, people who make their living sitting in front of a computer using photo and graphics tools for 4-8 hours a day -- all use Photoshop. It has nothing to do with interface or learning curve. It has to do with color management.
People who make arguments about GIMP and Photoshop and don't mention color management simply don't know what they are talking about. Color management is nearly everything to graphics professionals, and, quite simply, the Mac and Adobe Software does it better than anything else -- light-years ahead of GIMP. That's why many graphics pros use Macs, even *if* PCs are faster. Speed is far less important than output. Color management is everything.
We use GIMP quite a bit in our office (we also use photoshop). It's free, it's fast, and we can get it to run on the four platforms we use. But we can't recommend it as a solution to our customers. It's just not good enough.
Regardless of the economic and political implications, the technological difficulties involved with enforcing such a tariff are simply staggering. Software is completely liquid. You can e-mail source code, compile it in a native country, and then sell it. How would you tariff software developed in multiple countries by persons of multiple nationalities? Allowing for that would make it too easy to get around the tariff.
Generally speaking, it would probably make the most sense to allow something resembling competition. Barring that, I would vote for GSM. It has nothing to do with which is a better standard. The point is, the middle east is a relatively small region. Cell-phone interoperability would be a huge boon -- so it would be great if the whole region used one standard. Iraq is about the size of a mid-sized state. Imagine if you couldn't use your New York cell phone in Connecticut because of standards problems.
So, the cons of a flat tax. First of all, there's a good reason that the flat tax makes sense on paper. In fact, it would've made great sense in practice about 160 years ago, when we were still an agrarian republic. All of the problems with the flat tax are mired in the fact that the distribution of income in this country is exponential, not linear. Let me explain the difference.
A good way to think of a linear income distribution is as follows. To simplify things, let's just consider 4-person families with one working parent. Let's assume all such families have different incomes, and that the poorest makes $20,000/year. Now, if the distribution were linear, there would be a family making $20,010, one making $20,020, one making $20,030, and so in in even $10 increments, all the way up to, say, $1,000,000.
But we don't live in a society with a linear income distribtion. Instead, the distribution of income is much more like a curve -- an essentially exponential bell curve. This means that there are exponentially more people clustered around lower and middle-income levels than there are around the $1,000,000 mark. Fortunately for us, however, the biggest cluster (top of the bell) is around the middle (not the bottom), and has been steadily rising since the turn of the century (though less in recent years).
Okay, so back to the flat tax. Because of the exponential distribution of income, a flat tax places what is often called the "burden of taxation" on the middle class. This means that while the middle class might make up 60% of the population, they will pay more than 60% of total tax revenue. I won't go into the math (which is often disputed by proponents of the flat tax and constantly proven by leading economists, conservatives and liberals alike).
There's also the idea of economic hardship. Let's say there's a 10% flat tax. That 10% is much harder on a guy earning 20,000 a year than on a guy earning 1,000,000 a year. Flat taxes also do away with most tax "incentives" (in an attept to simplify the tax code). Tax incentives can either be good or bad, depending on where you stand philisophically.
In all honesty, that's primarily what it comes down to -- philosophy. The proponents of flat tax often say that a flat tax will "help the economy." Like the idea today that the tax rebate will help the economy, it simply isn't true. Anybody who has taken a basic college course in econonomics understands that -- in fact, almost all economists understand that (nearly all the ones who originally supported the Bush tax cuts have since backed off). Most economists feel the same way about the flat tax -- it doesn't really help the economy at all. The propaganda sounds good, but it's really propaganda.
The truth about the tax debate is that, from an apolitical standpoint anyway, the flat tax doesn't have any pros -- but neither does the progressive tax. It's all philosophy: where do you want the tax burden? Should the top 2% of wage earners pay more than 2% of all taxes? Is it important for the rich to contribute a greater percentage of their income than the poor?
I would be happy to answer this question in much more detail, with a run-down of the impact, on all economic classes of people, of each of the tax schemes (please respond to this post with your e-mail if you so desire). However, a good essay on it (not be me, but found through google) can be found here: http://www.wordwiz72.com/flattax.html
I will add one last thing. The progressive tax is often mislabled, because only the "aggregate" percentage -- it is important to remember that, under today's progressive tax, somebody earning 200,000 pays the same percentage of the first 25,000 of their income as somebody earning only 25,000 -- it's only higher amount of income that is taxed at a higher percentage.
This part of the parent post is entirely false. As a matter of fact, it highlights the most common misconception about diamonds.
Within the United States, you can buy a diamond for exactly what you can sell it for, no more, no less (otherwise, you couldn't buy and sell diamonds on eBay, for being able to buy something on eBay is defined as being able to buy it for what you can sell it for). If you buy a raw diamond for anything more than 1%-2% more than you can sell it for, you are being ripped off. Indeed, it is THAT fact which "hasn't sunk into the brains of the population yet". Diamonds are one of the most fungible goods known to mankind, even more fungible than gold (because the value of gold fluctuates widely and regularly, but the value of diamonds typically do not).
However, finished jewelry is different. A Diamond + A setting will ALWAYS cost more than the sum of the parts. If you're looking to buy a diamond ring, the best thing to do is to buy a diamond wholesale and take it to a jeweler to have a setting custom-made. Alternatively, sites such as BlueNile will allow you to buy a diamond and then have a setting made (although you will pay more than it is worth, you will not get as ripped off as with pre-finished jewelry.)
I first became interested in diamonds several years ago (when traveling to Russia and then Brazil) and have taken several courses in identifying and appraising diamonds from different Gem Labs in the US and overseas. One of the first things they taught us was the misconception in the parent post, and how to exploit it.
Well, yes... and no. You're right in that the ten year roll-out program makes it easier to transition. But the original post implicity makes the point that sometimes a university, especially a 7,000 student university (I went to one), has fairly diverse needs. Each department has specialized applications it needs to run. What happens five years from now, when a new analysis package comes out, and the econ department desperately needs to run it, but it's only for Windows, and requires Windows2005? I'm all for adopting Linux and OSS *where appropriate* which is not in a setting that uses specialized software. Academics don't care what OS they run, or what productivity suite they run. They care whether or not they can run the proprietary software that is the current hot shit in their field.
If you're looking for budget NAS, then you're right -- but the XServe isn't budget NAS. It's designed to compete with solutions from Sun, Dell, and IBM. And compete it does -- a client of mine managed to get two prepro models from Apple (they were basically testing them, then got to keep them). Set up as RAID 5, they are effectively as fast as a the Sun fibre channel array they are going to replace, but cost about a third as much per gig. Amazing hardware. I highly reccommend.
-Shylock0
I completely disagree. If the CTO of a decent sized company switched to Linux on his desktop, then wrote about it, he'd DEFINATELY get coverage on /. Just hasn't happened yet. As a guy who has had a few Enterprise CTOs for clients, none of them believe that Linux is ready for the desktop.
Yeah, but not everybody is just running a server... See some of my other responses...
Linux can do these things, sometimes, with nice hardware, but at the huge cost of reactivity... OS X and Windows are still 100% reactive when capturing full-frame DV or when rendering on screen in real time. Not so much with the Linux stations I've used.
The problem, however, with doing so is that it can cause crashes. The only app I've ever used on OS X that brings down the whole system is Final Cut Pro; likewise (almost, a few other apps have done it too :) ) for Premiere on Win2k.
Use Partition Magic. It's not that expensive, and works great -- you can run it from a boot floppy or CD.
The front end workstations aren't Linux based -- but if they are, they are written using a proprietary GUI, not a generalized one (like XFree, Windows, or Aqua).
-Shylock0
Questions and intelligent comments generally get a response. Flames are ignored. Post responsibly.
2) Continuing that note, I'd add industrial-strength reliability in the GUI. Linux is an amazing OS at the server end. It's fast, it's stable, it's fairly scalable, it's cheap, it's no harder to maintain than Solaris/BSD, and it has more supported apps than either. But as a technical/graphics workstation OS, Linux sucks. The GUI crashes. The apps crash. They're unstable. Linux should take a hint from the BeOS, and really move digital media capability in that direction. OS X is better. BSD is better. IRIX is better. Solaris is WAY better.
So, yeah. Improve GUI/OS functionality. Improve OS-level media handling capabilities.
This particular paragraph -- the one pointed out by the parent post -- truly shows the ignorance of the person who wrote the article. The financial structure the author describes is typical of "new economy" companies -- Amazon.com, Priceline, and others which has long-since gone bankrupt, were all based on the principle of rapid revenue growth and increasing stock value. But NOT Microsoft, which has long been lauded by business leaders as a "new economy" company with an essentially "old economy" financial structure -- much more like IBM -- than a new economy structure which the author describes. Futhermore, Microsoft pioneered the idea of giving employees actual stock -- and not options. (I would be happy to clarify that point -- just post a question)
The author of the article has absolutely no idea what he's talking about, at least when it comes to this paragraph. It looks like he's just throwing around buzzwords in an attempt to gain an audience.
-Shylock0
Questions and intelligent comments often answered. Flames ignored. Post responsibly.
Blades don't necessarily require low power consumption -- although low heat dissipation and low power consumption tend to be two sides of the same coin. In all practicality, blades could be designed for maximum heat dissipation without low power consumption -- in which case they wouldn't really be ideal for laptops...