You need targeted sales and marketing materials. You have to know how much it costs to ship stuff to that country. You need access to people who speak the native language that can help you out with all the business and legal issues that crop up, etc.
Why? If you have a web site in English that takes orders why do you need 'targeted sales and marketing' - this is people looking for your company and begging you to sell them something, why do you need marketing? It's not like you're looking for customers - they're coming to you, it's most companies dream scenario. Of course you need to know how much shipping costs, I'm sure DHL/FedEx will be happy to tell you. As for native speakers, again this is English-speakers asking you to sell them something, and you either have a presence in the country, in which this isn't a problem, or you don't - in which you may not have a problem anyway. I agree with your payment comments except you can say 'payment on international orders (except to countries with overseas offices) must clear before shipment'. Again this is where people are asking you to sell them something, you're not looking for the business it's finding you. Annoying your customers is a good thing to worry about, but if you won't sell to them that's pretty annoying, and they aren't customers.
Warranties are not necessarily whatever you put on the box. There are laws that state minimum warranties for products, and those laws vary country-to-country and sometimes state-to-state.
True but mostly when I buy computer goods from stores in the UK they come with a multi-lingual, mult-national warranty/liability statement. The guy in Hungary is looking to buy from the likes of IBM, after all...
Customer support is a big issue. It is expensive and difficult to provide adequate customer support to the international community, especially when there are language issues involved. In this particular case the guy happens to be a native English speaker, but I can certainly see why a company would establish a general policy of not selling to some countries.
Agreed if you are making an effort to sell to that country/language. But where you're not and people are coming to your English-language website and trying to order goods you don't want to sell them?
Lots of companies do email support in English only.
I don't mean to sound like some Anglophone zealot, all my comments apply equally to Francophone and other websites if someone makes the effort to try and order from them.
You have some good points about international contract law but I suspect you could come up with a 'whitelist' of safe countries to sell to (probably most of the EU , NZ, Australia, Japan etc). I mean most sites say they will on sell to residents of the U.S. or Canada after all.
In my opinion he brutalizes his readers. I started on the Illearth War and, well it made me ill. It's very rare for me to not finish a book - sometimes I slow down until bored but I rarely just give up. And I NEVER throw books out (charity shop etc). Except Donaldson. -1/10 . Yuk.
... and I don't mean BTVS or Anne Rice, then you should real George R.R.Martins Fevre Dream. I would say say it's horror, but fantasy/horror rather than slashfest (no pun intended) - although there is more than a little gore... Similarly in the SF genre there's a short story called The Sandkings by GRRM that's pretty good too.
I thought you could run a sub for a fair while with little electrical power - most of these things have nuclear steam turbines pushing them along and I suspect the controls are hydraulic. You could then easily lose the electrical system and still fight the sub (admittedly at a disadvantage). I may be talking rubbish, but the military kind of goes for redundancy in a big way. I mentioned in another post the probable difficulty in scaling this thing up to make a big display. Then you need a convenient input method (touchscreen? wirelss pen ala tablet?). Another worry might be how these displays cope with vibration over a period of time.
None of these problems are insurmountable but what they have works - the impetus would likely come from a new way of using the display under computer control rather than replicating the existing system. Just replacing a manual system with a computer system is rarely a resounding success, it when you make a paradigm shift that the real benefits kick in. How about layering these to create a 3d display? Project sea-floor and temperature/salinity (thermocline) information - you could increase the situational awareness a lot - get an edge. Once the displays have scaled up and proven durable and reliable (not the same thing) and a way has been found to use them. Don't hold your breath.
Mind you if they're trying out iPaqs with lcd glasses for grunts....
You mean they are still using pencil-and-paper instead of computers to control those things down there?
It's a sheet of plastic and a guy writing backwards with a chinagraph pencil - or possibly an erasble OHP pen these days. That's what they use for the plot. Sure they use computers, but I would assume re-boot time would be a major worry if you're in an engagement. Do you really want a computer to re-ipl when you could have an electrical or electro-mechanical system do the same job with less worry? I'm thinking primarily of weapons and helm control. Admittedly you have to already 'set up' your torps, but for all I know this is still done manually - or knowing the military there is a manual backup. If there's no problem with an (electro-)mechanical system then why change?
In the example of the guy writing on plastic, the display may be an improvement (personally I'd want a holotank) but the input method could be a problem, and do these cellphone displays scale to three to four foot square panels? Considering the reject rate for LCDs I wouldn't order any just yet - and you need to check reliability too, a few dead pixels in a tactical plot might be a trifle... inconvenient.
These things will appear in subs, but I doubt in the next few years.
It might be adopted pretty quickly by the military though. It would be a great upgrade to those plexiglass tactical map displays you see in every modern submarine movie.
Except that plexiglass doesn't need power, is pretty resistant to shaking and twisting, doesn't mind a little water, isn't affected by EMP...
Oh, forget to say - of course there is no legal aid for libel cases but my parent post may have given the impression that there is. You can get some advice, but then you're on your own.
He shouldn't have to prove his innocence to Microsoft. They (apparently) have brought false charges which they may drop if he convinces them. I think that is a nuisance. Civil cases in the UK are often decide by trial by jury - Libel cases are a typical example. Again in the UK you most certainly are entitled to a lawyer - whether the state will provide one for you is another matter, I am not familiar with the current legal aid situation, IIRC you need to be flat broke then HMG will help, otherwise you are sol. In other words, if you are broke or rich you can have a lawyer, if you're on an average-ish income you can't unless you can find one to gamble on your chances of winning (which wasn't allowed here until recently I believe)
Judges have been known to take a dim view of big companies picking on little people, even without a lawyer to represent them, sometime even when the little guy loses so does the plaintiff. Look at the "McLibel" case.
Except that one of the 'spammers' they went after doesn't seem to be. According to spamhaus the spam from his domain was sent before he bought it. The BBS have been covering this quite well. To be fair to MS they have offered to re-pay his legal costs if he proves to them that it wasn't him. Which probably isn't as nice as it sounds as 1) MS should have checked first before firing off the lawyers 2) He shouldn't have to prove his innocence to MS 3) What about his inconvenience and anguish 4) Under UK law MS would probably have to pay anyway if they lost (In civil suits the loser often pays the winners costs, but not always, it's up to the judges and they're pretty good in these cases actually), and may even have to pay compensation if he sues for defamation and wins.
This may be karmic suicide but I resent most of the moderation doen to this comment. I went through 9 months of NT hell with my work pc - the thing kept crashing and locking up for no reason. I wasn't running anything unusual, Office, Outlook and an old 16 bit app we use a lot (the app may crash but it's in it's sandbox and can't take out the os). I had daily BSOD and freezes - we checked the hard-drive, memory - I even booted knoppix from CD to see if that could find any problems. Our support guys re-imaged the PC, then re-built it from scratch. Twice. This was a corporate standard HP vectra, NT pre-installed. Eventually I got a new 2000 box to replace the NT p.o.s.
I used to like NT, now I'd rather use 2000, it's as stable as I once thought NT was.
I've changed my mind on how to make NT boxes stable - upgrade to 2000 (or linux) and use the CDs as landfill, or microwave the bastards.
It got hith-hiker-ish occasionally when screen redraw gave up, it's surrela having a grey box on a grey background. My favourite was explorer dying and not re-starting leaving a black background with no windows, no toolbars, no apps - only a cursor. It get's old quite quickly just moving a cursor on the screen. I really hated that PC. It may not have been the OS but we never found anything wrong with the hardware, and we looked really, really hard. I detest NT
Anyway, I've never looked at the kernel code, I could do it, after a while to get back into C, admittedly. I bet there are a lot of good C people around who couldn't be considered 'tainted' if contamination did matter.
You could try negotiating some deal with IBM to 'lend' you some legal help - or point you at a friendly lawyer. IBM seem to be solid over this case, but I'm sure even big blue would smile at SCO dying the death of a thousand cuts if they're sued over this stuff by the kernel devs.
I was wondering how much money SCO have - they could be bankrupted just by the discovery phase of this case - I vaguely recall an IBM case where they wre required to produce all the documentation related the work of one employee - I think it was several tons of paperwork. I sometimes wonder if IBM gave lessons on paperwork to government - they basically buried the case in manuals until it went away, I wish I could remember the details. It may even have been the anti-trust trial, which died of old age. If SCO want all IBM employee email for the last three years then just print it out and deliver it in a few semis.
While not all racism is anti-semitism, anti-semitism is racism.
As a separate note 'semite' may have come to mean jewish but it originally meant
A member of a group of Semitic-speaking peoples of the Near East and northern Africa, including the Arabs, Arameans, Babylonians, Carthaginians, Ethiopians, Hebrews, and Phoenicians.(dictionary.com)
I know Sammy Davis Jr was jewish (converted?) so not all jews are semities either. I suppose that's why it's become more acceptable in some quarters to be anti-zionist and not anti-jewish, it doesn't sound as prejudiced.
I'm not going into the Palestinian situation as there are plenty of rights and wrongs on both sides. Like Ireland, the Basques, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, the Kurds/Turks/Iraqis/Iranians the......... the list is depressingly long.
You may as well to write to the cop in question to make sure he spells your name right when you go on the sh*tlist.:-( I suppose it varies from force to force how likely that is to happen.
the locals work cheap, the state governments are willing, and the locals aren't sophisticated to know what to do with 4mm dat tapes
How smart do they need to be to throw them in the landfill? If you're DR plan is relying on DAT tapes, well then you don't have a DR plan, you're relying on Lady Fortune, and she's a mighty fickle helper.
Consider keeping a few bottles of treasured Bordeaux first growths, German Auslese, and California Chardonnay.
Spaetlese or Eiswein, not Auslese - do it properly! The Bordeaux is OK, of course but I'm not at all sure about Californian Chardonnay.
Vintage Champagne, vintage Port (and lots of both), Amontillado, Bual, Barolo, Pouilly Fume, Chablis, Chateau d'Yquem... the list could go on for ages. I have a weakness for Rioja and for Australian sparkling Reds (think Shiraz/Cabernet Savignon made method champagnoiose) so I'll have some of that too - oh dear, not enough room for the DLT drives so get rid of the tapes and bring in some Stilton, Yarg, Brie - you get the idea.
I'm not an alcoholic, I have lots of full bottles at my place - well , some of the spirits may not be full any more but they aren't empty yet. The idea of an emrgency wine cellar in a DR site appeals to me but I may end up celebrating the disaster and not recovering from it! Hmmm, is there space in the server room for a bottle of Lagavullin, must check...
There was a period when Dilbert was teleworking/telecommuting. He was standing in his dressing gown (u.s.=robe?) talking to Dogbert at 9:30 and saying "Now I'm working from home do I owe the company the 7 hours I spent at the office or the 2 hours I worked when I was there?"
I've done it, because of a relocate I went from 5 days in the office to 1-3 days at home and 3-1 days in the office - yep I went to a 4 day week too, which was fine with me. I worked my 8 hours (got the work done), but often that was 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening with the afternoon spent shopping (better midweek than weekend), seeing films, spending time with wife and friends. If the commute hadn't been so grim it would have been great, but I was commuting from one end of the Central line to nearly the other end of the District line. I got a lot of reading done but there was plenty of stress on my bladder during a 1.5 - 2 hour jouney with no facilities. And that was a good day;-(
Strangely enough I got it working by using my free downloaded IpCop specialised version of linux and using that as my firewall. Took less time than installing any version of windows since 3.1.
You are not immune from ip issues using microsoft software as another post points out. If you don't like MS licensing than change. If you're afriad of Linux buy from Sun or Apple.
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I agree with your payment comments except you can say 'payment on international orders (except to countries with overseas offices) must clear before shipment'. Again this is where people are asking you to sell them something, you're not looking for the business it's finding you. Annoying your customers is a good thing to worry about, but if you won't sell to them that's pretty annoying, and they aren't customers. True but mostly when I buy computer goods from stores in the UK they come with a multi-lingual, mult-national warranty/liability statement. The guy in Hungary is looking to buy from the likes of IBM, after all... Agreed if you are making an effort to sell to that country/language. But where you're not and people are coming to your English-language website and trying to order goods you don't want to sell them? Lots of companies do email support in English only.
I don't mean to sound like some Anglophone zealot, all my comments apply equally to Francophone and other websites if someone makes the effort to try and order from them.
You have some good points about international contract law but I suspect you could come up with a 'whitelist' of safe countries to sell to (probably most of the EU , NZ, Australia, Japan etc). I mean most sites say they will on sell to residents of the U.S. or Canada after all.
In my opinion he brutalizes his readers.
I started on the Illearth War and, well it made me ill. It's very rare for me to not finish a book - sometimes I slow down until bored but I rarely just give up. And I NEVER throw books out (charity shop etc). Except Donaldson. -1/10 . Yuk.
... and I don't mean BTVS or Anne Rice, then you should real George R.R.Martins Fevre Dream. I would say say it's horror, but fantasy/horror rather than slashfest (no pun intended) - although there is more than a little gore...
Similarly in the SF genre there's a short story called The Sandkings by GRRM that's pretty good too.
I mentioned in another post the probable difficulty in scaling this thing up to make a big display. Then you need a convenient input method (touchscreen? wirelss pen ala tablet?).
Another worry might be how these displays cope with vibration over a period of time.
None of these problems are insurmountable but what they have works - the impetus would likely come from a new way of using the display under computer control rather than replicating the existing system. Just replacing a manual system with a computer system is rarely a resounding success, it when you make a paradigm shift that the real benefits kick in. How about layering these to create a 3d display? Project sea-floor and temperature/salinity (thermocline) information - you could increase the situational awareness a lot - get an edge.
Once the displays have scaled up and proven durable and reliable (not the same thing) and a way has been found to use them. Don't hold your breath.
Mind you if they're trying out iPaqs with lcd glasses for grunts....
In the example of the guy writing on plastic, the display may be an improvement (personally I'd want a holotank) but the input method could be a problem, and do these cellphone displays scale to three to four foot square panels? Considering the reject rate for LCDs I wouldn't order any just yet - and you need to check reliability too, a few dead pixels in a tactical plot might be a trifle... inconvenient.
These things will appear in subs, but I doubt in the next few years.
Oh, forget to say - of course there is no legal aid for libel cases but my parent post may have given the impression that there is. You can get some advice, but then you're on your own.
Civil cases in the UK are often decide by trial by jury - Libel cases are a typical example. Again in the UK you most certainly are entitled to a lawyer - whether the state will provide one for you is another matter, I am not familiar with the current legal aid situation, IIRC you need to be flat broke then HMG will help, otherwise you are sol.
In other words, if you are broke or rich you can have a lawyer, if you're on an average-ish income you can't unless you can find one to gamble on your chances of winning (which wasn't allowed here until recently I believe)
Judges have been known to take a dim view of big companies picking on little people, even without a lawyer to represent them, sometime even when the little guy loses so does the plaintiff. Look at the "McLibel" case.
Except that one of the 'spammers' they went after doesn't seem to be. According to spamhaus the spam from his domain was sent before he bought it. The BBS have been covering this quite well.
To be fair to MS they have offered to re-pay his legal costs if he proves to them that it wasn't him. Which probably isn't as nice as it sounds as
1) MS should have checked first before firing off the lawyers
2) He shouldn't have to prove his innocence to MS
3) What about his inconvenience and anguish
4) Under UK law MS would probably have to pay anyway if they lost (In civil suits the loser often pays the winners costs, but not always, it's up to the judges and they're pretty good in these cases actually), and may even have to pay compensation if he sues for defamation and wins.
I went through 9 months of NT hell with my work pc - the thing kept crashing and locking up for no reason. I wasn't running anything unusual, Office, Outlook and an old 16 bit app we use a lot (the app may crash but it's in it's sandbox and can't take out the os).
I had daily BSOD and freezes - we checked the hard-drive, memory - I even booted knoppix from CD to see if that could find any problems. Our support guys re-imaged the PC, then re-built it from scratch. Twice. This was a corporate standard HP vectra, NT pre-installed. Eventually I got a new 2000 box to replace the NT p.o.s.
I used to like NT, now I'd rather use 2000, it's as stable as I once thought NT was.
I've changed my mind on how to make NT boxes stable - upgrade to 2000 (or linux) and use the CDs as landfill, or microwave the bastards.
It got hith-hiker-ish occasionally when screen redraw gave up, it's surrela having a grey box on a grey background. My favourite was explorer dying and not re-starting leaving a black background with no windows, no toolbars, no apps - only a cursor. It get's old quite quickly just moving a cursor on the screen. I really hated that PC. It may not have been the OS but we never found anything wrong with the hardware, and we looked really, really hard. I detest NT
It's easy to get NT4 stable, switch the PC off.
Anyway, I've never looked at the kernel code, I could do it, after a while to get back into C, admittedly. I bet there are a lot of good C people around who couldn't be considered 'tainted' if contamination did matter.
They were rated on several criteria .
I was wondering how much money SCO have - they could be bankrupted just by the discovery phase of this case - I vaguely recall an IBM case where they wre required to produce all the documentation related the work of one employee - I think it was several tons of paperwork. I sometimes wonder if IBM gave lessons on paperwork to government - they basically buried the case in manuals until it went away, I wish I could remember the details. It may even have been the anti-trust trial, which died of old age.
If SCO want all IBM employee email for the last three years then just print it out and deliver it in a few semis.
anti-semitism is racism.
As a separate note 'semite' may have come to mean jewish but it originally meant
I know Sammy Davis Jr was jewish (converted?) so not all jews are semities either. I suppose that's why it's become more acceptable in some quarters to be anti-zionist and not anti-jewish, it doesn't sound as prejudiced.I'm not going into the Palestinian situation as there are plenty of rights and wrongs on both sides. Like Ireland, the Basques, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, the Kurds/Turks/Iraqis/Iranians the .........
the list is depressingly long.
Or download the page and find the permission is missing.
Or as this is Sweden who's going to bother in the rest of the world to add a spurious header (or meta-tag)?
If a high school kid can be expelled for writing a newspaper article how long will it take?
You may as well to write to the cop in question to make sure he spells your name right when you go on the sh*tlist. :-(
I suppose it varies from force to force how likely that is to happen.
If you're DR plan is relying on DAT tapes, well then you don't have a DR plan, you're relying on Lady Fortune, and she's a mighty fickle helper.
Vintage Champagne, vintage Port (and lots of both), Amontillado, Bual, Barolo, Pouilly Fume, Chablis, Chateau d'Yquem... the list could go on for ages. I have a weakness for Rioja and for Australian sparkling Reds (think Shiraz/Cabernet Savignon made method champagnoiose) so I'll have some of that too - oh dear, not enough room for the DLT drives so get rid of the tapes and bring in some Stilton, Yarg, Brie - you get the idea.
I'm not an alcoholic, I have lots of full bottles at my place - well , some of the spirits may not be full any more but they aren't empty yet. The idea of an emrgency wine cellar in a DR site appeals to me but I may end up celebrating the disaster and not recovering from it! Hmmm, is there space in the server room for a bottle of Lagavullin, must check...
I've done it, because of a relocate I went from 5 days in the office to 1-3 days at home and 3-1 days in the office - yep I went to a 4 day week too, which was fine with me. I worked my 8 hours (got the work done), but often that was 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening with the afternoon spent shopping (better midweek than weekend), seeing films, spending time with wife and friends. If the commute hadn't been so grim it would have been great, but I was commuting from one end of the Central line to nearly the other end of the District line. I got a lot of reading done but there was plenty of stress on my bladder during a 1.5 - 2 hour jouney with no facilities. And that was a good day ;-(
My favourite was his "Shopping List 4th April 1980"
I recommend "Tales of Pirx The Pilot" - at least I think that's the title.
You are not immune from ip issues using microsoft software as another post points out. If you don't like MS licensing than change. If you're afriad of Linux buy from Sun or Apple.
On a Weekday afternoon I wouldn't use this but at 3am it could be handy.
Gee just use Emacs :-) (ducks quickly for cover)