But supporting Windows 2000 (which if it is Enterprises, should be the only option other than XP Pro) does not make financial sense.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Where is the financial sense in recycling perfectly good hardware and retraining all the clerks in a new desk top when the Win2K boxes would continue to run the same databases, spreadsheets and reports that were developed over the last 10 years? The only compelling reason for this company to upgrade is the increasing spyware and virus costs. If those costs can be contained by changing the browsers and email handlers, that makes financial sense.
I wonder how many businesses are waiting to see if Thunderbird will soon grow into a satisfactory replacement for Outlook. And how many are talking about whether they can migrate to Firefox now, or need to replace some of their IT staff with people who don't suffer from Windows tunnel vision first.
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Granted that MSIEv7 only needs to catch up with contemporary browsers. However it fails to do that.
Since as I understand it MSIEv7 only works with WinXP, it is not a solution for enterprizes who are standardized on legacy Windows versions and cannot justify the costs of upgrading until the end of the service life of their present machines. This is a big market, and MSIEv7 as it is currently designed is only going to drive these IT departments toward Opera or Firefox.
On a personal level, I wouldn't even try to move Aunt Tilly and Uncle Ray from WinME to WinXP. MS isn't offering me anything I can recommend to them. Firefox is the obvious way to go.
[re "master password thing"]That was from a while back. They had set up a master "backdoor" password in a version of IOS
So since that didn't work, they put a backdoor into the hardware, then slapped a superficial patch on the first (of a number of possible exploits) that has come to public attention. And now they are persecuting the guy who has publicized the underlying flaw, which they have neither patched nor fixed.
So I think it is time for these questions:
When did Cisco first become aware of this hardware backdoor, and was it purposefully put into place?
Who have they shared this knowledge with?
Who has been listening in on which routers, for how long have they been doing it, and for what purpose?
I guess I'd better get myself a new tinfoil hat. This one is worn out...
I'm not saying cell phones are dangerous, or that they're safe.
<snip>
but where most are held, right next to the eyes and brain, the radiation is quite strong.
I like my headset. Also it gets better reception and captures my voice better. Also it keeps me from doing the dorkish hand dance when I'm working through a voice menu.
I've used PSP for years and was very pleased when vector graphics were added to it (v7 IIRC). I find it easy to mix vector layers with raster layers.
While we wait for the Inkscape site to recover from the slashdotting, is there anyone who can comment from experience on whether Inkscape's SVG offers a better production environment than PSP's vector features?
The article I read was talking about a Doppler effect, which sounds to me like a quality of the signal that is independent of the digital data that the signal was carrying. I wish the article had been more clear about this.
If my interpretation is correct, what is needed is a way to accurately preserve 15 years of continuous tone (presumably so that subtle Doppler shifts in carrier wave frequencies can be analyzed).
Would someone who knows more about this speak up? I only had time to read one of the many fine articles...
Actually the Yucca Mountain disposal site is an excellent demonstration of the accounting problems we've got with the nuclear industry.
This site was designed to house 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel, beginning in 2010. However even during the design phase it was known that the USA alone would have 72,000 metric tons of spent fuel to deal with on opening day. In 2002 we already had 56,000 tons in "temporary" storage, and we've been generating 2,000 tons per year since then.
There is definitely something wrong with this picture. I think it has to do with an accounting system that does such a poor job of modelling the realities of nuclear power that project managers don't know WTF is going on.
Nuclear power lacks public support because of an accounting problem.
The nuclear industry is the first we've developed where the greatest costs occur in the post-production period (with waste and byproduct management). The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that guide economic modelling (and accounting in general) don't address this kind of post production cost very well. Waste management and recycling efforts have usually been regarded as refinements of the basic spreadsheet models, not as core aspects of the problem space. This has been very much the case in the nuclear power industry.
So we've got an entire industry that has been basing its investment and production decisions on revenue and cost projections that in turn are based on flawed models which relegate the greatest costs and liabilities to footnotes, if they are addressed at all. And we've got a lot of intelligent people who recognize that something is wrong with this picture, but who are necessarily inarticulate in their criticisms. Since current accounting practice doesn't provide a way to articulate the present day cost of a future expense that increases over time and extends beyond the service life of the facility (and the probable lifespan of the entire industry).
Nuclear power needs to develop an accounting system that will do for its waste management what Newton's calculus did for orbital mechanics. I'm confident that we've got the engineering know-how to handle nuclear power problems. What we don't have is a trustworthy accounting model to manage the implementation and production phases.
but the fact that it's even possible to format it like that and still have it parse is one of the things that make me feel a little uncomfortable with Perl... I prefer languages which at least attempt to force you to write so other people can read it...
It is up to the project manager role to determine policies on stylistic rules, naming conventions, and other aspects of human readability; it is up to the code review process to enforce these policies. The coding language isn't important in these decisions-- so long as any limitations imposed by the language do not get in the way of the policies you want to use. Perl is deliberately designed to stay out of the way as much as possible.
Languages that emphasize expressive capabilities-- where you can do a lot of work with little coding and make that code self-documenting to boot-- allow one to write really good code. But they also enable inexperienced coders who don't yet 'get it' to write really bad code that still works. There has been a lot of really bad code written in Perl, but that isn't a fault of the language. It is an indication that the language is powerful enough to enable people who are still low on the learning curve to get things done.
While the lower demand will reduce the number of courses the college offers, it also means that the professors will be able to give those 12 students a lot more personalized instruction, so it kind of balances out.
Or the number of instructors and teaching assistants can be cut and the CS professors can be assigned responsibilities in related fields. We'll see 'Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science' titles.
Either way, we'll see an increasing number of high level USA IT positions filled by persons who got their degrees in India or Taiwan and carry green cards.
There is nothing wrong with the use of the word "ironic" in the grandparent post. His point is that one might expect Cuba to use Linux for idealogical reasons, but instead, they choose to use it for financial reasons. Thus, if we accept that their reasoning is based on money, that reasoning is ironic.
Well, except that the OP failed to make his point. For if he had made his point properly, there would have been no reason for you to have to tell me what his point was, now would there?
If we accept as true that OP's unsupported suggestion that Cuba is adopting Linux for the "free beer", then this still isn't ironic. It is merely a bunch of fools accepting an unsupported assertion as being fact.
In my somewhat limited experience I have found that irony is a really heavy thing-- it can't exist unless supported by a solid factual base. That base can't be fabricated from myths or fantasies or other assumptions. The facts have to be established, then you can look them over and see if they are ironic.
There are not as many things that are really ironic as a lot of people talk about. And that, Dear Reader, is one of the very few meta-ironic statements that the english language supports.
Thank you for your research! It now is clear why all the english articles I've seen are using very similar phrasing, since they are all derivatives of this article.
Quoting from the translation you provided:
The operating system Linux,... in which its source code totally is opened, and therefore can be modified and distributed by the user whichever times it wants.
So this original article suggests the reason for changing to Linux is "free as in speech". Those claiming that it is another case of "free beer" have jumped to an unwarranted conclusion. Which is sort of like going sky diving without bothering with a parachute.
It is ironic that the real communists want to use GNU/Linux because it is free as in beer.
I just went back through the three articles cited in the story, and I didn't see any mention as to why Cuba was going through the conversion to Linux. Where did you get your information?
Other than the "free as in beer" reason, these possibilities occur to me:
This could be in retaliation for Gates' recent anti-communist remarks
This could be based on idealogical concerns about whether information can be owned and controlled by individuals/corporations or belongs to the state
This could be a strategic decision to take future software development "in house" rather than depending on 3rd party developers who are based in a hostile country
This could be a pragmatic decision based on studies that show that a gradual conversion to Linux now would be better in some ways than the inevitable enforced upgrades to Longhorn / Office2006
I also question your use of the word "ironic" in this context, but I'll leave discussion of english metallurgy to slashdot's esteemed group of grammar nazis.
It seems that a reasonable transition step between a pure Microsoft environment and a pure FOSS environment would be to run FOSS apps like OpenOffice under Windows. But I suppose that would really twig the MS Sales Rep for the School District, and we just couldn't do that now, could we? I mean, better to pay the extra for the full package than to put oneself in the uncomfortable and sort of embarrassing position of saying to the pretty, young MS gal, that yes, we do want to renew the Windows licenses but no we are no longer interested in buying MS Office licenses...
A School District that can manage to be that impolite to an MS Sales Rep might, after a while, even start thinking about doing dual boots on some of its machines, which just might give some students the basis for developing some useful "compare and contrast" skills...
Mod parent up, please. In addition to a lucid description of the current trend in computer usage, alizard offered this gem:
The process of getting a student to the point of saying "this is a computer and I can use it" is called computer EDUCATION. You're offering computer training in a very specific environment with a shrinking market share. Conflate them as you will, they aren't the same thing.
An accurate and succinct summary of the general training problems I see (as an instructor in a self-paced computer lab that provides training -- not education-- to adults who need competitive job skills).
In this case(as the FTA mentioned), Microsoft initially supplied the best product. This does not mean the[y] supplied a superior product in a technical sense, but as a product, it excelled in the factors that meant the most at the time.
Having been an avid reader of Byte at that time, and the first person in my county (in SW Oregon) to buy a used Apple ][+ (48KB ram, cassette tape storage), I can tell you that Microsoft's early success was a little more complicated than that.
Microsoft produced MS-DOS as a side product; the main moneymaker was IBM-DOS which it produced under contract to IBM for the IBM PC. The success story was really the IBM PC. IBM had done some market research around 1980 and had identified a small niche for a desktop computer with an estimated market of around 250K machines. They contracted with MS for a DOS that could compete with CPM (Apple's OS was ROM based, and clearly too limited).
What nobody expected is that during the year or so that IBM was ramping up to produce the first PC, some young geek in Boston found that he could make an electronic spreadsheet that would run on an Apple ][. Suddenly the market for desktop computers expanded from hobbyists and specialists to CPAs, because a CPA with an Apple ][ and a couple of floppy drives could run more "what if" scenarios in a morning, under good security than his competitors coud do in a week using the traditional stable of half a dozen junior accountants. The other alternative of sending the work to a data processing center wouldn't do for some sensitive material and was often slow and frustrating when it could be used-- nobody much liked sending a job off on Monday so you can get it back on Thursday night and work it up on Friday, only to find on Thursday morning that there was yet another dependency that had to be factored in and the results coming back later that day were going to be useless.
It was easy to move spreadsheet software onto the IBM PC. The IBM PC also had more memory capacity than its competitors, and floppy drives that were built into the case rather than separate boxes. But the big thing was that IBM had name recognition in the market: the secretaries typed correspondence on IBM Selectrics; the hollerith cards that contained client's raw payroll data were processed through IBM sorters, collators, and card readers; the adding machine on the accountant's desk was probably an IBM.
Microsoft made its first real money from all those licenses for IBM DOS. MS's early success was from piggy-backing on IBM, at a time when IBM was in a unique position to reap the rewards of the first effective PC business application: the spreadsheet.
the html coded email is 1/2 of it, and the plain text version saying the same exact thing is the other 1/2 of the email. Thus, you essentially triple the size of each email, if you include all the html tags.
Additionally, even simple graphics will bloat this monstrously when they are encoded into the email. And more than likely the Boss wants an html newsletter because he wants to work some graphics magic.
I have a modest suggestion for Charlie: do up a sample email newsletter with very simple graphics (like maybe the company logo and perhaps one other line drawing), send it to yourself, then print the message source. When you and your boss can see exactly what happens when images are encoded for emailing, then the two of you can come up with a reasonable approach.
But by all means, consider letting your customers choose a plaintext version if they want to keep their inbox trim and svelte.
Putting the html version on the web with a link from a plaintext version is probably a good option for a lot of businesses.
Microsoft would have to donate the hardware Windows needs if it wants to achieve TCO parity in the schools. I don't think that is going to happen... especially with the increased hardware demands that Longhorn is apparently going to require.
That's not a low cost. Consider calling some competitors, such as a local printshop (the kind that do business cards, broshures and flyers, wedding invitations, etc).
For a one-shot of 1 - 6 copies, yes, this was low cost. Since I don't have any free labor available, the cost of comparison shopping for something less than Kinko's quote would be more than any likely savings.
If you are really going to do a number of copies..., you should be aware of recent advances in short-run paper back publishing.
I didn't know this. Thanks, if I'm in that situation, I will certainly look into the vanity presses.
want binding that can be used effectively (stay open at desired page)
want some durability-- I figure about a year before updates or errata make this obsolete
The Kinko's in SE Portland quotes me about $25 for a single copy, double side printing, comb bound with vinyl cover. Add $1 to do spiral bound. There would be a discount for multiple copies-- and at this price doing a copy for each of us, and a couple of spares for the Jolt spills, might be a good idea.
No way I could do this "in house" for such a low cost.
Should school boards be required to look at potential liability issues when considering whether to incorporate intelligent design into science curricula?
My thinking is that if a school district begins to teach intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution, it could be held culpable for the failure of its graduated students to achieve in the realms higher education and/or technological training. There might be massive class action suits by former students who can demonstrate statistically that they were unable to get the high paying jobs that students in similar schools with sound science curricula were able to get.
I envision an argument something like this: the conflation of the scholastic reasoning of intelligent design with the empiricism of the scientific method had damaged the student's minds (or "reasoning", or "cognitive ability") to the degree that they were unable to compete successfully with students from other school districts in acquiring technological skills. Directly measured damages could be the costs of remedial schooling and the loss of income potential for those years that they played catch-up.
I think there would also be very fertile ground for developing punitive damages, since the School Board could probably be shown to be egregiously negligent in causing this situation (purposefully blind to the risks they were putting the students in, despite being charged with minimizing those risks). And as I write this, I begin to wonder whether individual School Board members might be charged with criminal negligence for the recklessness they exhibited toward their obligations of office.
It seems to me that if this line of reasoning is widely distributed now, it would increase the likelihood of success of the class action suits that might be brought in five or ten years. And might also cause School Boards to pause and consider this concern now, and therefore decrease the number of such potential suits later on.
I would dearly love to hear from PJ or other paralegals or lawyers about this.
Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it. Does not say who did it just that some intellegance did it. This is a viable theory. Don't attack it based on how religious organizations use the theory but on it's merits
"Intelligent design" [ID] has been judged on its merits, and it fails as a scientific theory.
ID does not qualify as a scientific theory: there is no possible way of proving it false. There are many ways that the theory of evolution could be proven false-- for instance, any reproducible example of spontaneous generation would invalidate evolution. However the nature of ID is such that there is no scientific method of testing whether it is correct; it cannot be submitted to science's empirical processes.
Some expressions of ID are excellent examples of scholastic reasoning and are well worth looking at if you have an appreciation for the aesthetics of reasoning. But that should NOT be done in science curricula, where the scientific method is used exclusively, even when it results in unreasonable facts (there are a multitude to deal with right now in cosmology and quantum physics). I am not opposed to seeing ID presented in the schools in an appropriate way, but suggesting that scholastic reasoning is equivalent to the empiricism of the scientific method destroys the purpose of education. It would be like trying to teach high schoolers how to do good jazz by studying the painting techniques of the Dutch Masters.
Slashdot Mirror
But supporting Windows 2000 (which if it is Enterprises, should be the only option other than XP Pro) does not make financial sense.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Where is the financial sense in recycling perfectly good hardware and retraining all the clerks in a new desk top when the Win2K boxes would continue to run the same databases, spreadsheets and reports that were developed over the last 10 years? The only compelling reason for this company to upgrade is the increasing spyware and virus costs. If those costs can be contained by changing the browsers and email handlers, that makes financial sense.
I wonder how many businesses are waiting to see if Thunderbird will soon grow into a satisfactory replacement for Outlook. And how many are talking about whether they can migrate to Firefox now, or need to replace some of their IT staff with people who don't suffer from Windows tunnel vision first.
Granted that MSIEv7 only needs to catch up with contemporary browsers. However it fails to do that.
Since as I understand it MSIEv7 only works with WinXP, it is not a solution for enterprizes who are standardized on legacy Windows versions and cannot justify the costs of upgrading until the end of the service life of their present machines. This is a big market, and MSIEv7 as it is currently designed is only going to drive these IT departments toward Opera or Firefox.
On a personal level, I wouldn't even try to move Aunt Tilly and Uncle Ray from WinME to WinXP. MS isn't offering me anything I can recommend to them. Firefox is the obvious way to go.
What changed at the last minute?
Makes you kind of wonder who else has known about this vulnerability and told Cisco to dummy up about it.
So again,
BTW, if anybody in a trenchcoat asks, I'm just going for "funny" here... and don't tell them that I'm opening a discount store for tinfoil hats, okay?
[re "master password thing"]That was from a while back. They had set up a master "backdoor" password in a version of IOS
So since that didn't work, they put a backdoor into the hardware, then slapped a superficial patch on the first (of a number of possible exploits) that has come to public attention. And now they are persecuting the guy who has publicized the underlying flaw, which they have neither patched nor fixed.
So I think it is time for these questions:
I guess I'd better get myself a new tinfoil hat. This one is worn out...
I'm not saying cell phones are dangerous, or that they're safe.
<snip> but where most are held, right next to the eyes and brain, the radiation is quite strong.
I like my headset. Also it gets better reception and captures my voice better. Also it keeps me from doing the dorkish hand dance when I'm working through a voice menu.
I've used PSP for years and was very pleased when vector graphics were added to it (v7 IIRC). I find it easy to mix vector layers with raster layers.
While we wait for the Inkscape site to recover from the slashdotting, is there anyone who can comment from experience on whether Inkscape's SVG offers a better production environment than PSP's vector features?
Can't they just rip the tapes to a hard drive?
The article I read was talking about a Doppler effect, which sounds to me like a quality of the signal that is independent of the digital data that the signal was carrying. I wish the article had been more clear about this.
If my interpretation is correct, what is needed is a way to accurately preserve 15 years of continuous tone (presumably so that subtle Doppler shifts in carrier wave frequencies can be analyzed).
Would someone who knows more about this speak up? I only had time to read one of the many fine articles...
Actually the Yucca Mountain disposal site is an excellent demonstration of the accounting problems we've got with the nuclear industry.
This site was designed to house 70,000 metric tons of spent fuel, beginning in 2010. However even during the design phase it was known that the USA alone would have 72,000 metric tons of spent fuel to deal with on opening day. In 2002 we already had 56,000 tons in "temporary" storage, and we've been generating 2,000 tons per year since then.
There is definitely something wrong with this picture. I think it has to do with an accounting system that does such a poor job of modelling the realities of nuclear power that project managers don't know WTF is going on.
Nuclear power lacks public support because of an accounting problem.
The nuclear industry is the first we've developed where the greatest costs occur in the post-production period (with waste and byproduct management). The Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that guide economic modelling (and accounting in general) don't address this kind of post production cost very well. Waste management and recycling efforts have usually been regarded as refinements of the basic spreadsheet models, not as core aspects of the problem space. This has been very much the case in the nuclear power industry.
So we've got an entire industry that has been basing its investment and production decisions on revenue and cost projections that in turn are based on flawed models which relegate the greatest costs and liabilities to footnotes, if they are addressed at all. And we've got a lot of intelligent people who recognize that something is wrong with this picture, but who are necessarily inarticulate in their criticisms. Since current accounting practice doesn't provide a way to articulate the present day cost of a future expense that increases over time and extends beyond the service life of the facility (and the probable lifespan of the entire industry).
Nuclear power needs to develop an accounting system that will do for its waste management what Newton's calculus did for orbital mechanics. I'm confident that we've got the engineering know-how to handle nuclear power problems. What we don't have is a trustworthy accounting model to manage the implementation and production phases.
but the fact that it's even possible to format it like that and still have it parse is one of the things that make me feel a little uncomfortable with Perl ... I prefer languages which at least attempt to force you to write so other people can read it ...
It is up to the project manager role to determine policies on stylistic rules, naming conventions, and other aspects of human readability; it is up to the code review process to enforce these policies. The coding language isn't important in these decisions-- so long as any limitations imposed by the language do not get in the way of the policies you want to use. Perl is deliberately designed to stay out of the way as much as possible.
Languages that emphasize expressive capabilities-- where you can do a lot of work with little coding and make that code self-documenting to boot-- allow one to write really good code. But they also enable inexperienced coders who don't yet 'get it' to write really bad code that still works. There has been a lot of really bad code written in Perl, but that isn't a fault of the language. It is an indication that the language is powerful enough to enable people who are still low on the learning curve to get things done.
You keep using that word [Wiccan].
It doesn't mean what I think you must think it means.
While the lower demand will reduce the number of courses the college offers, it also means that the professors will be able to give those 12 students a lot more personalized instruction, so it kind of balances out.
Or the number of instructors and teaching assistants can be cut and the CS professors can be assigned responsibilities in related fields. We'll see 'Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science' titles.
Either way, we'll see an increasing number of high level USA IT positions filled by persons who got their degrees in India or Taiwan and carry green cards.
There is nothing wrong with the use of the word "ironic" in the grandparent post. His point is that one might expect Cuba to use Linux for idealogical reasons, but instead, they choose to use it for financial reasons. Thus, if we accept that their reasoning is based on money, that reasoning is ironic.
Well, except that the OP failed to make his point. For if he had made his point properly, there would have been no reason for you to have to tell me what his point was, now would there?
If we accept as true that OP's unsupported suggestion that Cuba is adopting Linux for the "free beer", then this still isn't ironic. It is merely a bunch of fools accepting an unsupported assertion as being fact.
In my somewhat limited experience I have found that irony is a really heavy thing-- it can't exist unless supported by a solid factual base. That base can't be fabricated from myths or fantasies or other assumptions. The facts have to be established, then you can look them over and see if they are ironic.
There are not as many things that are really ironic as a lot of people talk about. And that, Dear Reader, is one of the very few meta-ironic statements that the english language supports.
Thank you for your research! It now is clear why all the english articles I've seen are using very similar phrasing, since they are all derivatives of this article.
Quoting from the translation you provided:
So this original article suggests the reason for changing to Linux is "free as in speech". Those claiming that it is another case of "free beer" have jumped to an unwarranted conclusion. Which is sort of like going sky diving without bothering with a parachute.
It is ironic that the real communists want to use GNU/Linux because it is free as in beer.
I just went back through the three articles cited in the story, and I didn't see any mention as to why Cuba was going through the conversion to Linux. Where did you get your information?
Other than the "free as in beer" reason, these possibilities occur to me:
I also question your use of the word "ironic" in this context, but I'll leave discussion of english metallurgy to slashdot's esteemed group of grammar nazis.
It's been done, at least twice.
OpenOffice is the best I know of.
It seems that a reasonable transition step between a pure Microsoft environment and a pure FOSS environment would be to run FOSS apps like OpenOffice under Windows. But I suppose that would really twig the MS Sales Rep for the School District, and we just couldn't do that now, could we? I mean, better to pay the extra for the full package than to put oneself in the uncomfortable and sort of embarrassing position of saying to the pretty, young MS gal, that yes, we do want to renew the Windows licenses but no we are no longer interested in buying MS Office licenses...
A School District that can manage to be that impolite to an MS Sales Rep might, after a while, even start thinking about doing dual boots on some of its machines, which just might give some students the basis for developing some useful "compare and contrast" skills...
Mod parent up, please. In addition to a lucid description of the current trend in computer usage, alizard offered this gem:
The process of getting a student to the point of saying "this is a computer and I can use it" is called computer EDUCATION. You're offering computer training in a very specific environment with a shrinking market share. Conflate them as you will, they aren't the same thing.
An accurate and succinct summary of the general training problems I see (as an instructor in a self-paced computer lab that provides training -- not education-- to adults who need competitive job skills).
In this case(as the FTA mentioned), Microsoft initially supplied the best product. This does not mean the[y] supplied a superior product in a technical sense, but as a product, it excelled in the factors that meant the most at the time.
Having been an avid reader of Byte at that time, and the first person in my county (in SW Oregon) to buy a used Apple ][+ (48KB ram, cassette tape storage), I can tell you that Microsoft's early success was a little more complicated than that.
Microsoft produced MS-DOS as a side product; the main moneymaker was IBM-DOS which it produced under contract to IBM for the IBM PC. The success story was really the IBM PC. IBM had done some market research around 1980 and had identified a small niche for a desktop computer with an estimated market of around 250K machines. They contracted with MS for a DOS that could compete with CPM (Apple's OS was ROM based, and clearly too limited).
What nobody expected is that during the year or so that IBM was ramping up to produce the first PC, some young geek in Boston found that he could make an electronic spreadsheet that would run on an Apple ][. Suddenly the market for desktop computers expanded from hobbyists and specialists to CPAs, because a CPA with an Apple ][ and a couple of floppy drives could run more "what if" scenarios in a morning, under good security than his competitors coud do in a week using the traditional stable of half a dozen junior accountants. The other alternative of sending the work to a data processing center wouldn't do for some sensitive material and was often slow and frustrating when it could be used-- nobody much liked sending a job off on Monday so you can get it back on Thursday night and work it up on Friday, only to find on Thursday morning that there was yet another dependency that had to be factored in and the results coming back later that day were going to be useless.
It was easy to move spreadsheet software onto the IBM PC. The IBM PC also had more memory capacity than its competitors, and floppy drives that were built into the case rather than separate boxes. But the big thing was that IBM had name recognition in the market: the secretaries typed correspondence on IBM Selectrics; the hollerith cards that contained client's raw payroll data were processed through IBM sorters, collators, and card readers; the adding machine on the accountant's desk was probably an IBM.
Microsoft made its first real money from all those licenses for IBM DOS. MS's early success was from piggy-backing on IBM, at a time when IBM was in a unique position to reap the rewards of the first effective PC business application: the spreadsheet.
the html coded email is 1/2 of it, and the plain text version saying the same exact thing is the other 1/2 of the email. Thus, you essentially triple the size of each email, if you include all the html tags.
Additionally, even simple graphics will bloat this monstrously when they are encoded into the email. And more than likely the Boss wants an html newsletter because he wants to work some graphics magic.
I have a modest suggestion for Charlie: do up a sample email newsletter with very simple graphics (like maybe the company logo and perhaps one other line drawing), send it to yourself, then print the message source. When you and your boss can see exactly what happens when images are encoded for emailing, then the two of you can come up with a reasonable approach.
But by all means, consider letting your customers choose a plaintext version if they want to keep their inbox trim and svelte.
Putting the html version on the web with a link from a plaintext version is probably a good option for a lot of businesses.
Microsoft would have to donate the hardware Windows needs if it wants to achieve TCO parity in the schools. I don't think that is going to happen... especially with the increased hardware demands that Longhorn is apparently going to require.
That's not a low cost. Consider calling some competitors, such as a local printshop (the kind that do business cards, broshures and flyers, wedding invitations, etc).
For a one-shot of 1 - 6 copies, yes, this was low cost. Since I don't have any free labor available, the cost of comparison shopping for something less than Kinko's quote would be more than any likely savings.
If you are really going to do a number of copies..., you should be aware of recent advances in short-run paper back publishing.
I didn't know this. Thanks, if I'm in that situation, I will certainly look into the vanity presses.
I was just looking at a very similar problem:
The Kinko's in SE Portland quotes me about $25 for a single copy, double side printing, comb bound with vinyl cover. Add $1 to do spiral bound. There would be a discount for multiple copies-- and at this price doing a copy for each of us, and a couple of spares for the Jolt spills, might be a good idea.
No way I could do this "in house" for such a low cost.
I give up. They've got the perfect defense: getting themselves slashdotted.
Should school boards be required to look at potential liability issues when considering whether to incorporate intelligent design into science curricula?
My thinking is that if a school district begins to teach intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution, it could be held culpable for the failure of its graduated students to achieve in the realms higher education and/or technological training. There might be massive class action suits by former students who can demonstrate statistically that they were unable to get the high paying jobs that students in similar schools with sound science curricula were able to get.
I envision an argument something like this: the conflation of the scholastic reasoning of intelligent design with the empiricism of the scientific method had damaged the student's minds (or "reasoning", or "cognitive ability") to the degree that they were unable to compete successfully with students from other school districts in acquiring technological skills. Directly measured damages could be the costs of remedial schooling and the loss of income potential for those years that they played catch-up.
I think there would also be very fertile ground for developing punitive damages, since the School Board could probably be shown to be egregiously negligent in causing this situation (purposefully blind to the risks they were putting the students in, despite being charged with minimizing those risks). And as I write this, I begin to wonder whether individual School Board members might be charged with criminal negligence for the recklessness they exhibited toward their obligations of office.
It seems to me that if this line of reasoning is widely distributed now, it would increase the likelihood of success of the class action suits that might be brought in five or ten years. And might also cause School Boards to pause and consider this concern now, and therefore decrease the number of such potential suits later on.
I would dearly love to hear from PJ or other paralegals or lawyers about this.
Intellegent design does not mean it was God who did it. Does not say who did it just that some intellegance did it. This is a viable theory. Don't attack it based on how religious organizations use the theory but on it's merits
"Intelligent design" [ID] has been judged on its merits, and it fails as a scientific theory.
ID does not qualify as a scientific theory: there is no possible way of proving it false. There are many ways that the theory of evolution could be proven false-- for instance, any reproducible example of spontaneous generation would invalidate evolution. However the nature of ID is such that there is no scientific method of testing whether it is correct; it cannot be submitted to science's empirical processes.
Some expressions of ID are excellent examples of scholastic reasoning and are well worth looking at if you have an appreciation for the aesthetics of reasoning. But that should NOT be done in science curricula, where the scientific method is used exclusively, even when it results in unreasonable facts (there are a multitude to deal with right now in cosmology and quantum physics). I am not opposed to seeing ID presented in the schools in an appropriate way, but suggesting that scholastic reasoning is equivalent to the empiricism of the scientific method destroys the purpose of education. It would be like trying to teach high schoolers how to do good jazz by studying the painting techniques of the Dutch Masters.