Because Solar won't work so well if you live in say Seattle. Where we are, we get about 250 days of sunshine a year. So we put up solar on our office a couple years ago. There were a couple tax breaks that year at the state level as well, but total cost of the project was $65k. Estimated pay back was roughly 8 years and the panels are guaranteed for 25 years.
It did knock our monthly utility bill down from $2100 per month to about $700.
The United States used to be a collection of independent states up until the civil war, which pretty much established the supremacy of the federal government over that of the states. Right now the Feds control a large portion of many state budgets. Look up "unfunded mandates".
I find it amusing that 15 years ago people laughed because all they gave you was a bag of free bag of peanuts and a soda. Today they are a luxury because they don't charge you for bags and still give you a free bag of peanuts and a free soda.
And they are the only airline I fly domestically these days.
From the stand point of double taxation of foreign profits in the US, you are much better creating your corporate HQ somewhere like the Isle of Man or the Caymens, et. al. and then creating a separate US entity. Then your profits made in other countries are taxed in those countries, but if you send the profits to the Caymens you aren't taxed again on those profits.
As it works now, if you are HQed in the US and have different operating units in other countries, you pay the taxes in those countries. Then any remaining profits sent back to the US are taxed again by the IRS. So the US company is being taxed for the profits made in the UK, Germany, Russia, or wherever.
In most countries, if their company makes profits in the US, they aren't taxed again back home when they bring the profit back.
Serious, Apple is the only one for general use. We sell and deploy our POS product on HP rPOS series products. For Point of Sale, HP has damn good products with one hell of a warranty (5 year next business day replacement on everything in the bundle including bar code scanners and printers). But internally at our company, all the development and business computers are Macs. We have HP POS hardware for testing purposes, but all the software is developed on Macs.
Which when we pitch HP POS hardware we have to explain, especially to small businesses, that HP's POS group is not the same division that produced the crap laptop or tower they have at home.
When I first started here, everyone had Dell laptops. The average cost of the laptops was about $1800, so they weren't the cheap models. These were purchased to replace a generation of HP laptops where 80% of the laptops had their wifi cards and then their entire motherboards fail. Well within 18 months, 1/2 of the Dell's went back due to hardware problems like the motherboard cracking around the power supply.
We replaced the Dell's with MacBook Pros. Only problem we've had is that the power supplies will bust when falling from the tall tables at the coffee shop and hitting the ceramic tile floor just right. And it only seems to happen to me. People on/, like to complain about Apple's high prices, but we've not had the build problems as with other brands.
We follow a similar strategy only at the college level. I have degrees in international business and german, but spent the last 10 - 12 years doing systems work. Roughly half was systems admin, the other half systems integration. I know enough programming that I could get the job done and build something that worked. The company I now run, I wrote the initial the two versions of the software myself. But we started hiring CS & ECE students as interns first and then some full time when they graduated and it's a world of difference to look at the code now compared to what I created.
The school has a reputation as an okay university, but it's not a top tier school by any shot. However, with that being said I can find people just as talented as I can anywhere else and it doesn't hurt that we're pretty much the only shop in town. When we get interns, they know they will be working on a project that will be going into real world production. They aren't sitting around writing documentation nobody else wants to do or reports for some project as their "internship"
The biggest problem we have is scaring off potential candidates because we throw them into the fire day one. Now we're careful not to put them on anything that is time critical. Often times they are working on modules and pieces of the puzzle that are "Nice to have but not critical" and it takes about 2 semesters before they've got enough experience under their belt and we can turn them loose. However, they find their 4th year classes to be a breeze after working for us because they've already done it in the real world.
I used to have a shelf of Mac Mini's for the same purpose (playing with Xgrid) that I picked up off Ebay cheap over the years. A storm last year pretty much leveled my house and everything was a total loss. I bought a single new MacMini that I use as a media center hooked up to the TV. I even got rid of the MBP for an iPad.
The only thing I remotely miss is that I had a Dual Alpha 500Mhz tower with NT 4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5 that I had picked up from some company being liquidated around 2002.
But the big difference is OSX doesn't do anything to break FireFox or Opera. As far as that goes, since it's open source they do nothing to prevent other companies from using Webkit for things like Chrome, Palm, Konqueror or anyone else that wants to use Webkit. If FireFox decided tomorrow to abandon their rendering engine for Webkit, Apple isn't doing anything to stop them. Furthermore I can remove and delete safari from my mac and nothing bad happens. Webkit is still there and used in the libraries, but it is not dependent on having safari installed.
I also think the economy has a big part to play in things as well. It's taken Sony 4 years to break even. And given how much it cost initially, it priced a lot of people out of the market. Especially casual gamers. I have a PS2 now collecting dust because I don't have time but more over it got to the point where I wasn't willing to pay out $60 per game. Most of the PS2 titles I have were the $20 bargin games that had been out for a while. People just don't have the money to spend on it as much because a game console is largely a luxury. I know I much rather spend $60 a week going out to a nice restaurant or a saturday afternoon at the winery with friends than on a video game.
I did buy a Wii because it was a party favourite when it first came out. It was so easy to use that even my non-gaming friends, especially women, loved the tennis and other titles. Couple that with Rock Band or Guitar Hero and it was a winner for the year or two after it came out. But now as we all reach our 30's, it rarely gets used anymore. Also I generally have to spend 12 - 15 hours a day in front of a computer(s) at work between writing proposals, doing demos, and overseeing installs & updates. I don't even like sitting in front of the TV to watch TV or a movie when I get home let alone play a video game. I do like Wii Fit and Wii sports because they are a bit more interactive and you can sit down and play them for 30 minutes and then go do something else.
Funny, because we replaced all our Dell laptops with MacBook Pros over the last 3 years here because the Dell's started having a number of problems after 18 - 24 months. And these were serious hardware problems like motherboards cracking. It wasn't quite the systemic problems we had with HP laptops, but that was 2 generations of PC laptops from two different manufactures both with quality control problems. And these were $1,500 Dell/HP laptops, not the super cheap $500 consumer laptops.
Since switching to the Mac's the only hardware problems across a dozen laptops we've had is folks have broken a number of power supplies at our favourite coffee shop when they fall from the tall tables onto the ceramic tile floor.
As far as the iPad goes, I've had my 3G model over a month now and I've only gone to my Mac Mini for computer stuff twice. Both times relating to MS Office Documents that iWork couldn't open. (I still use the Mac Mini as a media center attached to my TV at home). I've given up my MacBook Pro and have docking stations, one at the office and the other at home. It does exactly what I need a device to do: Email, Skype chat, web surfing, and document editing with iWork.
As far as that goes though, my iPhone had largely replaced my MacBook a year ago. The only problem was composing any emails that required a long response was impractical. With the iPad docking station, that problem is resolved since it has a full keyboard.
What the company got in the form of government loan from the stimulus package (seems like $544M was the number I remember of the top of my head). Also, isn't the CEO about broke?
If our local community wanted to pass any type of tax increase to build a public fiber network and then lease those lines out to whatever providers wanted to compete for my $$$, I'd vote for it in a heartbeat. I'm not sure I want government entities providing the service, but just building and maintaining the line/infrastructure. For rural districts, they should do what farmers and people did years ago: form coops.
I have a house in Missouri and a townhouse I rent in Illinois. All my utilities in Missouri are coop or city/county owned other than my internet connection (cable). The townhouse in Illinois, everything but the water is private infrastructure (and the city is trying to sell that to private company). We had horrible storms through a year ago. In Missouri I was without power for a little over a day. Illinois it was almost two weeks and both locations suffered roughly equal damage. And I pay less than half the utility rates in Missouri as I do in Illinois per Kw/h.
I would agree with you in regards to paypal, and while a lot of people on Slashdot knows this, but most of the people shopping online know the brand of paypal and therefore trust it overall.
If you are not using PA-DSS certified software, hint no OSS shopping cart is PA-DSS certified. Last I checked there were only 4 or 5 on the list period or you have to be PCI Level I certified for your site to even see cardholder data. This means you cannot have a webform to enter in their data. Therefore you have to hand off to a 3rd party payment page that IS PCI Level I certified.
We're going back to remotely hosted 3rd party payment pages BECAUSE THE CREDIT COMPANIES ARE FORCING YOU TO. If you do not comply with PA-DSS/PCI-DSS, you're merchant account gets terminated by Visa.
PA-DSS Certified. Else you have to use remotely hosted payment pages as the Community Edition is not PA-DSS certified. And that takes effect by Visa et. al starting Thursday. It's either that or have your systems PCI Level I certified, which is easily $50k - 100k+ to go through that nightmare. (We've done both PA-DSS and PCI Level I. PA-DSS was far less painful both in the pocket book and time to meet all their requirements for certification. It took longer to get the paperwork pushed through than it did to code in all the features they required. PCI Level I, on the other hand, was damn near a 2 year process.)
From over a decade of creating & deploying E-commerce apps, if you cannot accept credit cards directly on your site and send people to any other hosted payment page other than paypal, you level of cart abandonment dramatically increases. As soon as the customer goes to a 3rd party site, especially if you are a small mom & pop e-tailor, the abandonment rate can be as high as 90% (usually we saw around 70%). This is despite the fact that sending the total to say First Data's checkout page hosted by First Data is FAR safer for everyone rather than having the mom and pop store sent the payment from their server. But with all the fishing scams and warnings, folks have gotten it into their heads that if they are sent to a 3rd party site payment page not to trust it. And unless you've dealt with merchant accounts, chances are you've not heard of Orbital (Chase PaymentTech) or First Data even though combined they are the backend processors for 95% of all e-commerce transactions).
Or Skype In + Subscription for $3 a month. If you pay for a year at time the total is about $70 a year for the Skype in, Unlimited US & Canada Calling, and voicemail. Right now we have a Skype World Plan that is $14 per month + $60 per Skype In number that we use for international tech support. Then when we're out of the office, it just forwards to one of our mobiles. We have Skype in numbers for Canada, UK, and Australia at the moment.
I worked on an OSS browser based MMOG in the late 1990's up until 2003 when someone compromised the OpenBSD server it was being hosted on. As many people who play to win the game, there are more who pride themselves on beating the system. And folks take these games way too seriously.
Not only do you have to keep up with security with your programming, you have to keep on top of your system security. Being a good programmer is almost secondary to being a good systems admin as I learned. That means subscribing and reading all the US-CERT warnings that come out, updated to the latest version of PHP/MySQL as security patches are released, and paying attention to any subsystem/process that is running on the server as well making sure that DNS/BIND, Apache, and anything else running is also up to date.
When my system was compromised, it was one of the other system utilities that was the angle of attack. Something I didn't even bother to notice at the time. Not the game or any of the core software that was being used. After 3 years of constantly battling the people trying to beat the system, the 20 - 30 hours of my free time it was taking to manage it wasn't worth the modest revenue coming in so I put the code up on sourceforge and walked away.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Solar won't work so well if you live in say Seattle. Where we are, we get about 250 days of sunshine a year. So we put up solar on our office a couple years ago. There were a couple tax breaks that year at the state level as well, but total cost of the project was $65k. Estimated pay back was roughly 8 years and the panels are guaranteed for 25 years.
It did knock our monthly utility bill down from $2100 per month to about $700.
The United States used to be a collection of independent states up until the civil war, which pretty much established the supremacy of the federal government over that of the states. Right now the Feds control a large portion of many state budgets. Look up "unfunded mandates".
The CEO works for the board of directors and the shareholders, not the customers.
at southwest.com.
I find it amusing that 15 years ago people laughed because all they gave you was a bag of free bag of peanuts and a soda. Today they are a luxury because they don't charge you for bags and still give you a free bag of peanuts and a free soda.
And they are the only airline I fly domestically these days.
From the stand point of double taxation of foreign profits in the US, you are much better creating your corporate HQ somewhere like the Isle of Man or the Caymens, et. al. and then creating a separate US entity. Then your profits made in other countries are taxed in those countries, but if you send the profits to the Caymens you aren't taxed again on those profits.
As it works now, if you are HQed in the US and have different operating units in other countries, you pay the taxes in those countries. Then any remaining profits sent back to the US are taxed again by the IRS. So the US company is being taxed for the profits made in the UK, Germany, Russia, or wherever.
In most countries, if their company makes profits in the US, they aren't taxed again back home when they bring the profit back.
This guy has huge brass balls: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65T4SU20100630
What the Pirate Party is doing is sticking a thorn in the tigers paw.
Bingo!
Serious, Apple is the only one for general use. We sell and deploy our POS product on HP rPOS series products. For Point of Sale, HP has damn good products with one hell of a warranty (5 year next business day replacement on everything in the bundle including bar code scanners and printers). But internally at our company, all the development and business computers are Macs. We have HP POS hardware for testing purposes, but all the software is developed on Macs.
Which when we pitch HP POS hardware we have to explain, especially to small businesses, that HP's POS group is not the same division that produced the crap laptop or tower they have at home.
When I first started here, everyone had Dell laptops. The average cost of the laptops was about $1800, so they weren't the cheap models. These were purchased to replace a generation of HP laptops where 80% of the laptops had their wifi cards and then their entire motherboards fail. Well within 18 months, 1/2 of the Dell's went back due to hardware problems like the motherboard cracking around the power supply.
We replaced the Dell's with MacBook Pros. Only problem we've had is that the power supplies will bust when falling from the tall tables at the coffee shop and hitting the ceramic tile floor just right. And it only seems to happen to me. People on /, like to complain about Apple's high prices, but we've not had the build problems as with other brands.
We follow a similar strategy only at the college level. I have degrees in international business and german, but spent the last 10 - 12 years doing systems work. Roughly half was systems admin, the other half systems integration. I know enough programming that I could get the job done and build something that worked. The company I now run, I wrote the initial the two versions of the software myself. But we started hiring CS & ECE students as interns first and then some full time when they graduated and it's a world of difference to look at the code now compared to what I created.
The school has a reputation as an okay university, but it's not a top tier school by any shot. However, with that being said I can find people just as talented as I can anywhere else and it doesn't hurt that we're pretty much the only shop in town. When we get interns, they know they will be working on a project that will be going into real world production. They aren't sitting around writing documentation nobody else wants to do or reports for some project as their "internship"
The biggest problem we have is scaring off potential candidates because we throw them into the fire day one. Now we're careful not to put them on anything that is time critical. Often times they are working on modules and pieces of the puzzle that are "Nice to have but not critical" and it takes about 2 semesters before they've got enough experience under their belt and we can turn them loose. However, they find their 4th year classes to be a breeze after working for us because they've already done it in the real world.
That was my first thought as well. And as much as I hate to say it, but Fat32 might be the best option. Either that or UFS.
I used to have a shelf of Mac Mini's for the same purpose (playing with Xgrid) that I picked up off Ebay cheap over the years. A storm last year pretty much leveled my house and everything was a total loss. I bought a single new MacMini that I use as a media center hooked up to the TV. I even got rid of the MBP for an iPad.
The only thing I remotely miss is that I had a Dual Alpha 500Mhz tower with NT 4 for Alpha and Lightwave 5 that I had picked up from some company being liquidated around 2002.
But the big difference is OSX doesn't do anything to break FireFox or Opera. As far as that goes, since it's open source they do nothing to prevent other companies from using Webkit for things like Chrome, Palm, Konqueror or anyone else that wants to use Webkit. If FireFox decided tomorrow to abandon their rendering engine for Webkit, Apple isn't doing anything to stop them. Furthermore I can remove and delete safari from my mac and nothing bad happens. Webkit is still there and used in the libraries, but it is not dependent on having safari installed.
Do you like having the ability to print in Linux? Next time you go to print, I highly recommend opening your browser and typing http://localhost:631/
grab defaults to .tiff though. Which is what we always use to capture a particular window.
screenshot default is .tiff. Which has been around in the print world for a really, really long time.
I also think the economy has a big part to play in things as well. It's taken Sony 4 years to break even. And given how much it cost initially, it priced a lot of people out of the market. Especially casual gamers. I have a PS2 now collecting dust because I don't have time but more over it got to the point where I wasn't willing to pay out $60 per game. Most of the PS2 titles I have were the $20 bargin games that had been out for a while. People just don't have the money to spend on it as much because a game console is largely a luxury. I know I much rather spend $60 a week going out to a nice restaurant or a saturday afternoon at the winery with friends than on a video game.
I did buy a Wii because it was a party favourite when it first came out. It was so easy to use that even my non-gaming friends, especially women, loved the tennis and other titles. Couple that with Rock Band or Guitar Hero and it was a winner for the year or two after it came out. But now as we all reach our 30's, it rarely gets used anymore. Also I generally have to spend 12 - 15 hours a day in front of a computer(s) at work between writing proposals, doing demos, and overseeing installs & updates. I don't even like sitting in front of the TV to watch TV or a movie when I get home let alone play a video game. I do like Wii Fit and Wii sports because they are a bit more interactive and you can sit down and play them for 30 minutes and then go do something else.
Funny, because we replaced all our Dell laptops with MacBook Pros over the last 3 years here because the Dell's started having a number of problems after 18 - 24 months. And these were serious hardware problems like motherboards cracking. It wasn't quite the systemic problems we had with HP laptops, but that was 2 generations of PC laptops from two different manufactures both with quality control problems. And these were $1,500 Dell/HP laptops, not the super cheap $500 consumer laptops.
Since switching to the Mac's the only hardware problems across a dozen laptops we've had is folks have broken a number of power supplies at our favourite coffee shop when they fall from the tall tables onto the ceramic tile floor.
As far as the iPad goes, I've had my 3G model over a month now and I've only gone to my Mac Mini for computer stuff twice. Both times relating to MS Office Documents that iWork couldn't open. (I still use the Mac Mini as a media center attached to my TV at home). I've given up my MacBook Pro and have docking stations, one at the office and the other at home. It does exactly what I need a device to do: Email, Skype chat, web surfing, and document editing with iWork.
As far as that goes though, my iPhone had largely replaced my MacBook a year ago. The only problem was composing any emails that required a long response was impractical. With the iPad docking station, that problem is resolved since it has a full keyboard.
What the company got in the form of government loan from the stimulus package (seems like $544M was the number I remember of the top of my head). Also, isn't the CEO about broke?
If our local community wanted to pass any type of tax increase to build a public fiber network and then lease those lines out to whatever providers wanted to compete for my $$$, I'd vote for it in a heartbeat. I'm not sure I want government entities providing the service, but just building and maintaining the line/infrastructure. For rural districts, they should do what farmers and people did years ago: form coops.
I have a house in Missouri and a townhouse I rent in Illinois. All my utilities in Missouri are coop or city/county owned other than my internet connection (cable). The townhouse in Illinois, everything but the water is private infrastructure (and the city is trying to sell that to private company). We had horrible storms through a year ago. In Missouri I was without power for a little over a day. Illinois it was almost two weeks and both locations suffered roughly equal damage. And I pay less than half the utility rates in Missouri as I do in Illinois per Kw/h.
I would agree with you in regards to paypal, and while a lot of people on Slashdot knows this, but most of the people shopping online know the brand of paypal and therefore trust it overall.
If you are not using PA-DSS certified software, hint no OSS shopping cart is PA-DSS certified. Last I checked there were only 4 or 5 on the list period or you have to be PCI Level I certified for your site to even see cardholder data. This means you cannot have a webform to enter in their data. Therefore you have to hand off to a 3rd party payment page that IS PCI Level I certified.
We're going back to remotely hosted 3rd party payment pages BECAUSE THE CREDIT COMPANIES ARE FORCING YOU TO. If you do not comply with PA-DSS/PCI-DSS, you're merchant account gets terminated by Visa.
PA-DSS Certified. Else you have to use remotely hosted payment pages as the Community Edition is not PA-DSS certified. And that takes effect by Visa et. al starting Thursday. It's either that or have your systems PCI Level I certified, which is easily $50k - 100k+ to go through that nightmare. (We've done both PA-DSS and PCI Level I. PA-DSS was far less painful both in the pocket book and time to meet all their requirements for certification. It took longer to get the paperwork pushed through than it did to code in all the features they required. PCI Level I, on the other hand, was damn near a 2 year process.)
From over a decade of creating & deploying E-commerce apps, if you cannot accept credit cards directly on your site and send people to any other hosted payment page other than paypal, you level of cart abandonment dramatically increases. As soon as the customer goes to a 3rd party site, especially if you are a small mom & pop e-tailor, the abandonment rate can be as high as 90% (usually we saw around 70%). This is despite the fact that sending the total to say First Data's checkout page hosted by First Data is FAR safer for everyone rather than having the mom and pop store sent the payment from their server. But with all the fishing scams and warnings, folks have gotten it into their heads that if they are sent to a 3rd party site payment page not to trust it. And unless you've dealt with merchant accounts, chances are you've not heard of Orbital (Chase PaymentTech) or First Data even though combined they are the backend processors for 95% of all e-commerce transactions).
Or Skype In + Subscription for $3 a month. If you pay for a year at time the total is about $70 a year for the Skype in, Unlimited US & Canada Calling, and voicemail. Right now we have a Skype World Plan that is $14 per month + $60 per Skype In number that we use for international tech support. Then when we're out of the office, it just forwards to one of our mobiles. We have Skype in numbers for Canada, UK, and Australia at the moment.
I worked on an OSS browser based MMOG in the late 1990's up until 2003 when someone compromised the OpenBSD server it was being hosted on. As many people who play to win the game, there are more who pride themselves on beating the system. And folks take these games way too seriously.
Not only do you have to keep up with security with your programming, you have to keep on top of your system security. Being a good programmer is almost secondary to being a good systems admin as I learned. That means subscribing and reading all the US-CERT warnings that come out, updated to the latest version of PHP/MySQL as security patches are released, and paying attention to any subsystem/process that is running on the server as well making sure that DNS/BIND, Apache, and anything else running is also up to date.
When my system was compromised, it was one of the other system utilities that was the angle of attack. Something I didn't even bother to notice at the time. Not the game or any of the core software that was being used. After 3 years of constantly battling the people trying to beat the system, the 20 - 30 hours of my free time it was taking to manage it wasn't worth the modest revenue coming in so I put the code up on sourceforge and walked away.