In 1982, the average CEO salary was 47 times higher than that of the average production worker.
In 1990, it was 107 times higher.
In 2001, it was 525 times higher.
In 2004, it was 431 times higher (that's the dot.com crash for you)
Now, you're going to tell me with a straight face that the average CEO's job has got 10 times harder in the last 30 years? That they *really* work *430 times* harder or longer than your average non-management worker? Of course the CEO is free to look elsewhere for work; he's getting paid several million a year and no doubt has a large bank balance to go with it. If he screws up, he doesn't get fired, he just spends a couple of months playing golf, then gets snapped up again by another board because he has 'experience'.
Ordinary workers have to take what they can get, especially in times like this. Those with the money make the rules, and the people without money can literally go hungry. And since I can almost hear the words 'well, why don't you start your own business then' forming, I'll point out that they're calling it a credit crunch for a reason - even current functional small businesses can't get sufficient credit, new startups are really struggling to get the funding needed to get started.
So how do CEOs of large companies get away with these large salary increases? Well, they're voted on by the board of directors - who are all largely non-executive, and CEOs of other companies. What goes around, comes around etc. So why do the shareholders approve it? Because they're told by the board 'this is the current market rate, and if you want the talent, you have to pay for it'. And given most of the stockholders are pension firms etc rather than individuals, they don't like rocking the boat. I've seen this at a couple of AGM's recently - small shareholders revolting over CEO compensation, but the majority large stockholders keep quiet, and nothing changes.
Small business owners who actually work in the company as CEO in the first place have a direct incentive to grow the business by reinvesting profits. CEOs of large companies have an incentive to extract as much money personally as the board will let them get away with.
It's a scrum term; velocity is how much work a team can handle in a sprint (short development period to accomplish a particular goal or series of goals) - harmful to our velocity in scrum terms means - "we're not getting as much done as we would like".
To answer the original posters query; I've worked with scrum, and it sucks. It only works if people work together, are largely self-organising, and don't deliberately chuck roadblocks into other teams paths to get them off their own joblist. Oh, and if management can largely get out of the way and not constantly interfere with the process, i.e. unilaterally adding stuff to the burn-down chart in the middle of a sprint!
The scrummaster is more of a phb role than a senior engineer role; they basically need to have enough weight to stave off senior management interferance, moderate customer input, and have enough authority to crack the whip to developers who are slacking off. Definitely not an intern role. Whoever is the manager of your dev team, the manager who's on the next rung above your senior engineer are the ones who should be scrummaster; the ones that want status reports, talk to customers, and run interference between senior management desires and what your team can actually deliver; not your chief coder, certainly.
I already pay a company via an agent £12 a month for my news, they're called the BBC. Murdoch and his 'quality journalism' can go fuck himself if he think's I'm going to pay to visit one his sites full of garbage, and I mean that sincerely.
Now, if the guardian started charging for their online edition, on the other hand - links to them turn up everywhere...
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He is. News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites. He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't. It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all. So perhaps his plan is this: 1. Charge for access to all his news sites. 2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue). 3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view. 4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke. 5. Watch as all his former readers turn to non-newspaper backed news aggregators 6. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications 7. Close down newspaper print editions as readership continues to plumet 8. Go bust as nobody needs to pay for news online from News International.
I'm afraid you don't fully appreciate the mindset of the british police and crown prosecution service. Do that, and the *parents* wouldn't be investigated and prosecuted for the production of child pornography for allowing their children to be filmed naked. Then win or lose, the kids would be put into care due to the prosecution demonstrating the parents are unfit.
Oh, and they'd probably prosecute the tech who processed the images, just to be on the safe side - they've been known to do that too.
And I'm betting he's not in constant pain from the signal coming from his local TV transmitter passing through his body at a much higher power level than anything a home wifi device is licenced to produce.
Because when it comes to things like laptops, there are economies of scale. There is a decent market for desktop pcs without windows from small OEMs, as they're hand-assembled in small shops to order anyway. There's very little scope for small OEMs to build their own laptops and compete with the big boys, so what the big boys do is what goes.
So this isn't about the small guys being 'forced' to sell computers with linux, it's about forcing dell, acer, hp etc to allow users to follow the EULA in the software they sell; if you don't accept the licence, take it back to the place you bought it and get a refund. If OEMs don't like having to honour that part of the licence, then perhaps they shouldn't be making buying it effectively compulsory in the first place. Make us both happy, and have 'naked PC' a selectable option. Hell, it's even making life easier for the OEM themselves, as they don't have to image the hard-drive first, give me OS support, or supply me with drivers (I get fresher ones from the device makers anyway).
So kudos to amazon for actually making it easy for the customer to get what they want - money back on a component they didn't want in their laptop, that they had no choice but to have bundled, when the licence clearly says you're allowed a refund if you don't accept the licence terms you didn't get a chance to agree or disagree with prior to the sale.
We've started using opengoo in the 3 man IT department at my school for internal documentation and project management (with calendar, task lists and milestones), assigning a separate workspace for each project. You can upload files (such as photos, office documents) then check them out with versioning, or just write and edit simple documents (in html with an editor straight in it. I've even published one specific workspace to a subcontractor, so they can see where we're at with our end of things with one particular project we have running with them over the summer. It's really pretty impressive, and entirely free if you self host on LAMP/XAMP and open source to boot.
We do still have a mediawiki which was our previous documentation store, but having to convert everything to wiki syntax for formatting was a bit of a pain (especially tables), so I'm likely going to migrate everything across to opengoo so everything is in one place and easily accessible.
While ISO loopback mounting really should be in the OS by now, there's the entirely free (with no adware/spyware/nagware) virtual clonedrive from slysoft, i.e. the guys that do anydvd and clonedvd. You just need the beta version from the forum for the moment for win 7 support.
I'm no shill. I have several linux boxes at home and a mac mini in addition to my windows pcs, and I run a whole ton of linux servers (debian, ubuntu, vyatta) at the office running the website, imap/squirrelmail, DNS, VPN, some DHCP, a bunch of routing boxes and some fileservers. We run server 2008 for active directory, and linux for virtually everything else server-wise.
That said - ubuntu still sucks on the desktop for me, especially on laptops. I've tried to love it, I really have. But when you're running half the stuff you need in a virtual windows instance, you might as well just run windows native as save the grief.
Windows 7 is what vista should have been in the first place. I've replaced every single vista box with windows 7 RC. It's faster, it's snappier, ejecting usb keys is finally sane, media centre is a metric shitton faster and better, my other half loves the snipping tool. Is it faster than XP? I think so - my eeepc certainly runs better on 7 than XP. The hardware support is *much* better (built in AHCI support), I actually prefer the interface, and it's not about to be retired, either. Is windows 7 the best OS ever? No, there's still room for improvement. Is it better than linux? Depends upon what your needs are. Is it the best version of windows yet? Holy hell, yes, easily.
Would I pay full retail price for windows 7? No. Will I be taking advantage of technet, discounted upgrade pricing (when it finally starts in europe), OEM copies and using my schools agreement at the office to skip vista entirely and go straight to 7? Yes.
To drive a car, one needs to be trained to operate it safely. You're required to keep it maintained to a good mechanical standard, and it is tested regularly to make sure it meets those requirements. Failing to do so, and making mistakes (or deliberately ignoring the rules of operation) results in fines or jailtime.
Yet cars are far simpler devices than computers, and much easier to maintain (though admittedly with much greater consequences if you screw up). You want to see what can go wrong when such standards aren't enforced? Just look at the road fatalities of anywhere with no MOT and/or a basic driving test; where enforcement of the rules is non-existant.
Well, that's the internet right now - a barely regulated system where users are heavily marketed to buy computers designed to be as easy to use as possible, where they can connect it to the internet without having the first clue of safe operation, and they can install whatever the hell they like. Then you chuck in the number of people that can make oodles of money from exploiting their slackness with virtually no chance of legal consequence.
The biggest weakness in any computer system sits at the keyboard, whether its the coder chucking together code as quickly as possible as cheaply as possible, as that's what the market wants, or the sysadmin that lets them do what they want because he doesn't have the time or money to do it properly, or the user that simply doesn't care what happens to their system as long as they get their porn and pretty emoticons, or even the fraudster exploiting the gullible for profit.
Ease of use, ability for users to install any app they like, security. If the user is untrained, you only get to pick two. Even if the user is trained, human error on their part will still foul things up sometimes.
Computers are complex machines, and expected to be able to do a huge range of things. Add into that the human error inherent in building any complex system on the cheap as fast as possible, and another bunch of humans who can make a bunch of money from finding their mistakes, and you get where we are today.
Some of the mistakes are longstanding, such as the assumption that the mail client could be trusted not to lie, or the more complex trust issues with DNS. Some of the mistakes are because when it gets done cheap and fast, mistakes are inevitable. Windows may be less secure on the whole than linux, but they operate under different pressures. Linux is still a server OS at its heart, and demands more knowledge of its userbase. Windows has been marketed as the OS anyone can use, and pushed out to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible. Security simply isn't a concern of most windows users; they just assume that's what computers are like, and getting it serviced by a tech periodically to clean it up is no different than getting your car serviced by a mechanic.
Either we insist users be trained to a higher standard, restrict what they're allowed to do (as businesses do), force them to do things securely by proper process, or we just accept that some unskilled people's computers will be preyed on by those less scrupulous.
Computers are not TVs or DVD players, but that's precisely what they've been marketed as; home appliances for the unskilled that could be connected to millions of others in the world. People accepted that uncritically, and were happy to get one at such cheap prices, and the expected it to 'just work' without having to do anything themselves. Malware is the inevitable result.
The ones they've had on Top Gear were the hard-top - this is the new convertible, not that you'd know it from the summary. Despite the massive engineering difficulties of slicing the roof off and having it stay rigid and roll-safe, they've managed to keep it as quick as the hard-top. Seriously impressive engineering, even if as a car it's completely insane.
And the list of movies to games is also going to have a huge amount of turkeys on it. I guess cynical cheap media tie-ins to get the impulse buyers is more profitable than doing things right.
This is so true. I too have an incredibly long sedentary job stuck behind a desk.
While metabolism does adjust based upon various factors, which alters how efficiently you burn calories (as opposed to flushing them out) the body is remarkably efficient; if you can digest it (i.e. not fibre), you will either burn it or store it. If you can't adjust how much you burn by substantial exercise, then the answer is to reduce how much goes in at the front end. Most people, like myself, who think they have a slow metabolism simply don't realise how much they eat.
Lets say you do an hour of moderate exercise in the gym a day; that's maybe 500-700 calories. If you work really really hard, that's 1000, absolute tops. 500 calories is the difference between a medium meal and a big meal; or a couple of cans of energy drink. Or a slice of cake. Or even just little snacks between meals. 130 calories a day over how much you expend (a can of coke), and that's 14 pounds weight gain a year.
I've read the hackers diet and it's good advice for guys like us. I've started counting how much I eat. You know what? I massively underestimated how much I was really eating. All the little stuff really mounts up. Even when I thought I was being good, I wasn't. So now I count my calories (reasonably roughly) mainyl by weighing my food when I'm cooking it. I've cut down my portions by around 30% - which sounds like a lot, but honestly isn't considering I was eating past when I was full. I've substituted my crap snacks with fruit, and cut out the sweets, second portions, junk food and normal desserts. I record my weight daily on physicsdiet (which has a nice smoothing function for when you go up or down a few pounds due to water weight - it shows the overall trend very nicely)
I still have three proper meals a day, and even have low-calorie desserts. I can put my hand on my heart, and honestly say I do not feel hungry. I'm eating 1700-odd calories a day, which is about half of what I'm expending. I don't go to the gym, and have only slightly increased how much exercise I do - parking at the far end of the carpark and walking the extra two minutes, a short stroll at lunch, that sort of thing.
Going by the scales, I've lost 21 pounds in 6 weeks. According to the bodyfat it's almost entirely fat. I'm under 280 pounds for the first time in years. I can certainly wear trousers I haven't been able to wear for years. I've lost 4" off my waist. While I may not look much different, I do feel better - I certainly never feel starved. I'm going to try to fit some time in the gym a few days a week, but that will be in addition to the 1700 calories I'm already dieting.
So my advice to you, original tnok85 - estimate how much you eat in a day. Then keep a food diary, and record how much you eat, in full detail. Record your weight daily on physicsdiet (which is basically an online version of the hackers diet spreadsheets), or even just in excel. I bet you'll be surprised at the difference between what you think you eat, and what you do eat.
Then work out how many calories you'd likely spend in the gym, and see if you can cut that from your diet with low hanging fruit - the no-S diet may help here. Keep recording your weight daily. And see how you go.
Me? I'm going to lose all this weight I've put on in 20 years through inattention, whether it takes 6 months, a year or 3 years. I'm likely going to have to keep a close eye on how much I cook, and weigh myself regularly for life. But the diet? It's not a diet. I'm just eating like a normal healthy person, instead of a normal healthy person who eats big meals and has the odd slice of cake.
The record companies already sue under their own name in court; specifically, the major labels who own the copyright, which is why this case is Arista vs Usenet not RIAA vs Usenet.
The RIAA is a lobby group on behalf of the major labels; everything they do is due to the wishes of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI. The RIAA provides a convenient label to group them together, and for them to divert some of the flak from sticking to their brand names, which is one reason why the title of this story should be "Sony Music Entertainment victory over Usenet.com in Copyright case"
Still, in terms of lobbying and excessive lawsuits, disbanding the RIAA wouldn't change anything; we'd just a new name to refer to them as a group when they independently continue doing what they're doing. Maybe the Big 4. Or maybe the Lawsuit Industry formerly known as the Music Business.
BMI is based upon the square of your height; which given people are 3D and not 2D means that it scales badly at both the bottom and top end of the measure.
So in Japan, with lower average heights, you'd likely want to be slightly underweight according to BMI in order to be healthy; if you're a 6'2" westerner, you probably want to be at the top end of healthy BMI or even slightly obese to be a healthy weight, which partially explains the canadian study results. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a different result in a Japanese study.
So while BMI isn't a bad measure as a rough starting point, nutrition and fitness are more important than slavish adherance to a specific weight for your height, as you say; especially given muscle weighs more than fat, leading to the well-known problem of athletic muscular people basically having to ignore BMI classifying them as obese. It also has a problem with the elderly, who with a lower average muscle-mass have scores that underestimate obesity. Carrying a few extra pounds while taking regular exercise, you're likely going to be in better shape than someone doing no exercise at all, but is naturally skinny.
Generally speaking, the waist-to-hip ratio is a better measure of whether you're fit or packing for two. Specifically, If you're a woman, the waist-to-hip ratio should come out as no more than 0.8. Men have a little more wiggle room: a healthy waist-to-hip ratio for them is 0.95; if you have an overhang, you could probably do with some more time in the gym.
Yes, I'll be sure to tell my boss that the company doesn't need all of the current windows-only software so linux isn't a problem, and that we can ignore the rapidly approaching security end-of-life on XP. Hell, office 2007 documents open absolutely perfectly in open office.
Just because you, as an individual, have alternatives doesn't mean businesses do. And even if we could switch to linux on everything, we'd still be screwed trying to exchange document formats with others.
This is a rogering for european and british business, and there's absolutely nothing we can do but take it in the wallet. Gotta love monopolies!
While I don't particularly object to local realtime CCTV surveillance of a public space, I do object to the much larger surveillance state CCTV has become a part of; permanent footage recording, number plate recognition cameras on all major roads, logging of phone calls, emails and recording websites visited, substantial databases of government interactions, financial records and medical records, the largest DNA database in the world, and of course coming things like ID cards which will be must-carry, and will be needed for every interaction with the state or public services, which will also be recorded.
Here's some of my objections off the top of my head:
- Corruption - local government has access to such personal data as my email, and can even setup surveillance units to me to follow me around for accusations as trivial as littering. Someone with a personal axe to grind could use this for personal reasons, i.e. stalking an ex lover, digging up personal info on her new partner, etc. We only have to look at businesses using facebook profiles to refuse to hire someone; how much longer before they get to dig through more private and personal details of your life?
- Incompetence - it wasn't long ago that the tax service lost a CD containing the personal details of 25 million adults and children, including the full financial details of 8 million families. Such information losses are becoming alarmingly common, and the more data is held, the more can be lost by accident, and that's a serious risk of identity fraud.
- identity theft - such databases are vulnerable to accidental loss; they're also vulnerable to deliberate attack, in order to gain substantial info about people; gaining access to bank accounts, setting up fake credit accounts in someone else's name, even getting a real passport or ID card in someone else's name, cloning car number plates to get other people sent the bill for the congestion charge in london; the more data is held, the more likely it will fall into the wrong hands
- misidentity - as more people get put on the DNA database for trivial accusations (no proof needed, no conviction needed) the odds of false positives rise; especially since they go on fishing expeditions to match marginal trace dna; the odds of someone being falsely convicted rise - there have already been cases with DNA records being factually incorrect. The criminal records database designed to stop pedophiles becoming teachers has had a number of failures, both not stopping those who should have been stopped, and flagging people by mistake, causing them to lose their job for having done nothing wrong. Or the poor brazillian man who had his block of flats under surveillance; he was tentatively misidentified as the suspected terrorist, so they followed him onto a tube train and shot him repeatedly in the head. Or the several people who were thought to have illegal firearms, were dawn raided, then shot while unarmed. The bigger the databases, and the more the police rely on them, the greater the odds of fatal mistakes in data quality.
- chilling effects - persistent surveillance can lead to a chilling effect on the participation in democracy. If protesters are video'd, then their cars tagged on ANPR watchlists so they get stopped constantly for 'random' checks, their house put under surveillance, their friends questioned (all of which have happened to protesters over the heathrow runway expansion) then people will be less willing to protest government decisions that affect them and their community. Sit down, shut up, or we'll be seeing you...
- too much noise - vast surveillance of the public space generates so much noise, it drowns out the signal. Looking for a needle in a haystack doesn't get any easier when you massively increase the size of the haystack. Intelligence led policing and targeted surveillance on those under suspicion - with civil rights protected by court oversight - is far more effective and less likely to target the innocent than the security theatre most of us endur
The employer/employee relationship is often a coercive one. The further down the payscale you go, the more likely the employee is going to be in a very difficult situation financially if they lose their job, or if they do not take what they can get in the first place. From the employer's point of view, one unskilled worker is much like another, so they can dictate onerous terms, and employees are in a poor position to refuse them.
As such, given the position of power of the employer, the government steps in to ensure certain minimum standards of safety and employment conditions in the workplace, such that this inbalanced relationship doesn't lead to employees being exploited.
Of course, employees can choose not to work in unsafe conditions; but when the choice is unsafe conditions or penury, people can easily be exploited. We've decided not to allow that to happen to the most vulnerable in our society, which I personally think is a good thing.
Now, you can argue that 2nd-hand smoke in the workplace is not a health hazard anything like of the scale of the industrial abuses of the workforce of the past, and there I'd be likely to agree with you, and if you were to argue that the minimal risks of 2nd hand smoke should make it an optional choice rather than a government enforced protection I would likely nod my head there too.
But just because this particular example might be an overblown knee-jerk reaction to a particular non-existant healthcare issue, that doesn't mean that government protection of the workforce, against them being forced to do work seriously hazardous to their health due to lack of financial options is a bad idea in principle, or in most cases of actual practise.
I have had OEM copies refused phone activation after having actually legimately replaced the motherboard for a customer. OK, I rang up again 5 minutes later with the same reason, and got approved - but the only reason microsoft allow people to claim that and get an activation is forbearance - according to the licence terms, they don't have to.
Now, whether the EULA actually overrides the doctrine of first sale such that they can actually legally spring that on you post purchase is a different matter of course - but you fancy explaining that to a phone drone?
The downside is simply that the workaround that Microsoft allow for OEM copies might one day disappear in a puff of WGA logic, which it won't with retail. Plus of course, you're in breach of the licence terms, and if you're going to do that you might as well rip it off entirely and save yourself the grief of phone activation.
OEM copies are only licenced for install on a single PC; generally considered to be the motherboard. Replace the motherboard, or build a new PC? that's a new OEM licence you need to pay for.
Retail and upgrade copies can be reinstalled on an unlimited number of machines, as long as it's only on one at a time - though given the activation hassles if you do it too often (phone activation to say, yes, you are only using it on one pc) you may not want to - and of course, upgrade installs still need the OS you're upgrading from on the hard-drive, even on a new PC, leading to the ludicrous situation of installing a clean copy of windows twice, with the 2nd install counting the first as the 'upgrade qualifier'. It was a lot simpler when the upgrade disc would take a windows floppy or CD as proof of older version ownership.
In case I wasn't clear, the 18 month window refers to OEMs being able to ship a new machine with a windows 7 OEM licence, but an XP install disc. Beyond that point, no new downgrade sales will be allowed, but home users who already have copies of XP acquired using OEM downgrade rights can carry on using them indefinitely (until support ends for XP security patches, anyway), as can volume licence businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1982, the average CEO salary was 47 times higher than that of the average production worker.
In 1990, it was 107 times higher.
In 2001, it was 525 times higher.
In 2004, it was 431 times higher (that's the dot.com crash for you)
Now, you're going to tell me with a straight face that the average CEO's job has got 10 times harder in the last 30 years? That they *really* work *430 times* harder or longer than your average non-management worker? Of course the CEO is free to look elsewhere for work; he's getting paid several million a year and no doubt has a large bank balance to go with it. If he screws up, he doesn't get fired, he just spends a couple of months playing golf, then gets snapped up again by another board because he has 'experience'.
Ordinary workers have to take what they can get, especially in times like this. Those with the money make the rules, and the people without money can literally go hungry. And since I can almost hear the words 'well, why don't you start your own business then' forming, I'll point out that they're calling it a credit crunch for a reason - even current functional small businesses can't get sufficient credit, new startups are really struggling to get the funding needed to get started.
So how do CEOs of large companies get away with these large salary increases? Well, they're voted on by the board of directors - who are all largely non-executive, and CEOs of other companies. What goes around, comes around etc. So why do the shareholders approve it? Because they're told by the board 'this is the current market rate, and if you want the talent, you have to pay for it'. And given most of the stockholders are pension firms etc rather than individuals, they don't like rocking the boat. I've seen this at a couple of AGM's recently - small shareholders revolting over CEO compensation, but the majority large stockholders keep quiet, and nothing changes.
Small business owners who actually work in the company as CEO in the first place have a direct incentive to grow the business by reinvesting profits. CEOs of large companies have an incentive to extract as much money personally as the board will let them get away with.
"harmful to our velocity"
WTF is that supposed to mean?
It's a scrum term; velocity is how much work a team can handle in a sprint (short development period to accomplish a particular goal or series of goals) - harmful to our velocity in scrum terms means - "we're not getting as much done as we would like".
To answer the original posters query; I've worked with scrum, and it sucks. It only works if people work together, are largely self-organising, and don't deliberately chuck roadblocks into other teams paths to get them off their own joblist. Oh, and if management can largely get out of the way and not constantly interfere with the process, i.e. unilaterally adding stuff to the burn-down chart in the middle of a sprint!
The scrummaster is more of a phb role than a senior engineer role; they basically need to have enough weight to stave off senior management interferance, moderate customer input, and have enough authority to crack the whip to developers who are slacking off. Definitely not an intern role. Whoever is the manager of your dev team, the manager who's on the next rung above your senior engineer are the ones who should be scrummaster; the ones that want status reports, talk to customers, and run interference between senior management desires and what your team can actually deliver; not your chief coder, certainly.
I already pay a company via an agent £12 a month for my news, they're called the BBC. Murdoch and his 'quality journalism' can go fuck himself if he think's I'm going to pay to visit one his sites full of garbage, and I mean that sincerely.
Now, if the guardian started charging for their online edition, on the other hand - links to them turn up everywhere...
It seems a lot of people here think Rupert Murdoch is an idiot. He is.
News Corp has deep pockets and a wealth of profit-making websites.
He understands it would be suicide for his readership of his newspapers if he charged for access, but rivals didn't.
It would be a slightly slower suicide if he charged nothing at all.
So perhaps his plan is this:
1. Charge for access to all his news sites.
2. Encourage rivals to charge also (it has been already flagged that newspapers are willing to work as a bloc on this issue).
3. Watch while readership plunges at all newspaper websites following the introduction of pay-per-view.
4. Hold out until his major rivals are all broke.
5. Watch as all his former readers turn to non-newspaper backed news aggregators
6. Maintain a cost for viewing online publications
7. Close down newspaper print editions as readership continues to plumet
8. Go bust as nobody needs to pay for news online from News International.
FTFY.
I'm afraid you don't fully appreciate the mindset of the british police and crown prosecution service. Do that, and the *parents* wouldn't be investigated and prosecuted for the production of child pornography for allowing their children to be filmed naked. Then win or lose, the kids would be put into care due to the prosecution demonstrating the parents are unfit.
Oh, and they'd probably prosecute the tech who processed the images, just to be on the safe side - they've been known to do that too.
And I'm betting he's not in constant pain from the signal coming from his local TV transmitter passing through his body at a much higher power level than anything a home wifi device is licenced to produce.
Because when it comes to things like laptops, there are economies of scale. There is a decent market for desktop pcs without windows from small OEMs, as they're hand-assembled in small shops to order anyway. There's very little scope for small OEMs to build their own laptops and compete with the big boys, so what the big boys do is what goes.
So this isn't about the small guys being 'forced' to sell computers with linux, it's about forcing dell, acer, hp etc to allow users to follow the EULA in the software they sell; if you don't accept the licence, take it back to the place you bought it and get a refund. If OEMs don't like having to honour that part of the licence, then perhaps they shouldn't be making buying it effectively compulsory in the first place. Make us both happy, and have 'naked PC' a selectable option. Hell, it's even making life easier for the OEM themselves, as they don't have to image the hard-drive first, give me OS support, or supply me with drivers (I get fresher ones from the device makers anyway).
So kudos to amazon for actually making it easy for the customer to get what they want - money back on a component they didn't want in their laptop, that they had no choice but to have bundled, when the licence clearly says you're allowed a refund if you don't accept the licence terms you didn't get a chance to agree or disagree with prior to the sale.
We've started using opengoo in the 3 man IT department at my school for internal documentation and project management (with calendar, task lists and milestones), assigning a separate workspace for each project. You can upload files (such as photos, office documents) then check them out with versioning, or just write and edit simple documents (in html with an editor straight in it. I've even published one specific workspace to a subcontractor, so they can see where we're at with our end of things with one particular project we have running with them over the summer. It's really pretty impressive, and entirely free if you self host on LAMP/XAMP and open source to boot.
We do still have a mediawiki which was our previous documentation store, but having to convert everything to wiki syntax for formatting was a bit of a pain (especially tables), so I'm likely going to migrate everything across to opengoo so everything is in one place and easily accessible.
While ISO loopback mounting really should be in the OS by now, there's the entirely free (with no adware/spyware/nagware) virtual clonedrive from slysoft, i.e. the guys that do anydvd and clonedvd. You just need the beta version from the forum for the moment for win 7 support.
I'm no shill. I have several linux boxes at home and a mac mini in addition to my windows pcs, and I run a whole ton of linux servers (debian, ubuntu, vyatta) at the office running the website, imap/squirrelmail, DNS, VPN, some DHCP, a bunch of routing boxes and some fileservers. We run server 2008 for active directory, and linux for virtually everything else server-wise.
That said - ubuntu still sucks on the desktop for me, especially on laptops. I've tried to love it, I really have. But when you're running half the stuff you need in a virtual windows instance, you might as well just run windows native as save the grief.
Windows 7 is what vista should have been in the first place. I've replaced every single vista box with windows 7 RC. It's faster, it's snappier, ejecting usb keys is finally sane, media centre is a metric shitton faster and better, my other half loves the snipping tool. Is it faster than XP? I think so - my eeepc certainly runs better on 7 than XP. The hardware support is *much* better (built in AHCI support), I actually prefer the interface, and it's not about to be retired, either. Is windows 7 the best OS ever? No, there's still room for improvement. Is it better than linux? Depends upon what your needs are. Is it the best version of windows yet? Holy hell, yes, easily.
Would I pay full retail price for windows 7? No. Will I be taking advantage of technet, discounted upgrade pricing (when it finally starts in europe), OEM copies and using my schools agreement at the office to skip vista entirely and go straight to 7? Yes.
Don't be silly! They're after 300â.
To drive a car, one needs to be trained to operate it safely. You're required to keep it maintained to a good mechanical standard, and it is tested regularly to make sure it meets those requirements. Failing to do so, and making mistakes (or deliberately ignoring the rules of operation) results in fines or jailtime.
Yet cars are far simpler devices than computers, and much easier to maintain (though admittedly with much greater consequences if you screw up). You want to see what can go wrong when such standards aren't enforced? Just look at the road fatalities of anywhere with no MOT and/or a basic driving test; where enforcement of the rules is non-existant.
Well, that's the internet right now - a barely regulated system where users are heavily marketed to buy computers designed to be as easy to use as possible, where they can connect it to the internet without having the first clue of safe operation, and they can install whatever the hell they like. Then you chuck in the number of people that can make oodles of money from exploiting their slackness with virtually no chance of legal consequence.
The biggest weakness in any computer system sits at the keyboard, whether its the coder chucking together code as quickly as possible as cheaply as possible, as that's what the market wants, or the sysadmin that lets them do what they want because he doesn't have the time or money to do it properly, or the user that simply doesn't care what happens to their system as long as they get their porn and pretty emoticons, or even the fraudster exploiting the gullible for profit.
Ease of use, ability for users to install any app they like, security. If the user is untrained, you only get to pick two. Even if the user is trained, human error on their part will still foul things up sometimes.
Computers are complex machines, and expected to be able to do a huge range of things. Add into that the human error inherent in building any complex system on the cheap as fast as possible, and another bunch of humans who can make a bunch of money from finding their mistakes, and you get where we are today.
Some of the mistakes are longstanding, such as the assumption that the mail client could be trusted not to lie, or the more complex trust issues with DNS. Some of the mistakes are because when it gets done cheap and fast, mistakes are inevitable. Windows may be less secure on the whole than linux, but they operate under different pressures. Linux is still a server OS at its heart, and demands more knowledge of its userbase. Windows has been marketed as the OS anyone can use, and pushed out to as many people as possible to make as much money as possible. Security simply isn't a concern of most windows users; they just assume that's what computers are like, and getting it serviced by a tech periodically to clean it up is no different than getting your car serviced by a mechanic.
Either we insist users be trained to a higher standard, restrict what they're allowed to do (as businesses do), force them to do things securely by proper process, or we just accept that some unskilled people's computers will be preyed on by those less scrupulous.
Computers are not TVs or DVD players, but that's precisely what they've been marketed as; home appliances for the unskilled that could be connected to millions of others in the world. People accepted that uncritically, and were happy to get one at such cheap prices, and the expected it to 'just work' without having to do anything themselves. Malware is the inevitable result.
The ones they've had on Top Gear were the hard-top - this is the new convertible, not that you'd know it from the summary. Despite the massive engineering difficulties of slicing the roof off and having it stay rigid and roll-safe, they've managed to keep it as quick as the hard-top. Seriously impressive engineering, even if as a car it's completely insane.
And the list of movies to games is also going to have a huge amount of turkeys on it. I guess cynical cheap media tie-ins to get the impulse buyers is more profitable than doing things right.
Just because he apologised and changed the behaviour, that doesn't mean we're all happy-clappy about noscript again.
Trust, once lost, takes time to be earned again.
This is so true. I too have an incredibly long sedentary job stuck behind a desk.
While metabolism does adjust based upon various factors, which alters how efficiently you burn calories (as opposed to flushing them out) the body is remarkably efficient; if you can digest it (i.e. not fibre), you will either burn it or store it. If you can't adjust how much you burn by substantial exercise, then the answer is to reduce how much goes in at the front end. Most people, like myself, who think they have a slow metabolism simply don't realise how much they eat.
Lets say you do an hour of moderate exercise in the gym a day; that's maybe 500-700 calories. If you work really really hard, that's 1000, absolute tops. 500 calories is the difference between a medium meal and a big meal; or a couple of cans of energy drink. Or a slice of cake. Or even just little snacks between meals. 130 calories a day over how much you expend (a can of coke), and that's 14 pounds weight gain a year.
I've read the hackers diet and it's good advice for guys like us. I've started counting how much I eat. You know what? I massively underestimated how much I was really eating. All the little stuff really mounts up. Even when I thought I was being good, I wasn't.
So now I count my calories (reasonably roughly) mainyl by weighing my food when I'm cooking it. I've cut down my portions by around 30% - which sounds like a lot, but honestly isn't considering I was eating past when I was full. I've substituted my crap snacks with fruit, and cut out the sweets, second portions, junk food and normal desserts. I record my weight daily on physicsdiet (which has a nice smoothing function for when you go up or down a few pounds due to water weight - it shows the overall trend very nicely)
I still have three proper meals a day, and even have low-calorie desserts. I can put my hand on my heart, and honestly say I do not feel hungry. I'm eating 1700-odd calories a day, which is about half of what I'm expending. I don't go to the gym, and have only slightly increased how much exercise I do - parking at the far end of the carpark and walking the extra two minutes, a short stroll at lunch, that sort of thing.
Going by the scales, I've lost 21 pounds in 6 weeks. According to the bodyfat it's almost entirely fat. I'm under 280 pounds for the first time in years. I can certainly wear trousers I haven't been able to wear for years. I've lost 4" off my waist. While I may not look much different, I do feel better - I certainly never feel starved. I'm going to try to fit some time in the gym a few days a week, but that will be in addition to the 1700 calories I'm already dieting.
So my advice to you, original tnok85 - estimate how much you eat in a day. Then keep a food diary, and record how much you eat, in full detail. Record your weight daily on physicsdiet (which is basically an online version of the hackers diet spreadsheets), or even just in excel. I bet you'll be surprised at the difference between what you think you eat, and what you do eat.
Then work out how many calories you'd likely spend in the gym, and see if you can cut that from your diet with low hanging fruit - the no-S diet may help here. Keep recording your weight daily. And see how you go.
Me? I'm going to lose all this weight I've put on in 20 years through inattention, whether it takes 6 months, a year or 3 years. I'm likely going to have to keep a close eye on how much I cook, and weigh myself regularly for life. But the diet? It's not a diet. I'm just eating like a normal healthy person, instead of a normal healthy person who eats big meals and has the odd slice of cake.
The record companies already sue under their own name in court; specifically, the major labels who own the copyright, which is why this case is Arista vs Usenet not RIAA vs Usenet.
The RIAA is a lobby group on behalf of the major labels; everything they do is due to the wishes of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and EMI. The RIAA provides a convenient label to group them together, and for them to divert some of the flak from sticking to their brand names, which is one reason why the title of this story should be "Sony Music Entertainment victory over Usenet.com in Copyright case"
Still, in terms of lobbying and excessive lawsuits, disbanding the RIAA wouldn't change anything; we'd just a new name to refer to them as a group when they independently continue doing what they're doing. Maybe the Big 4. Or maybe the Lawsuit Industry formerly known as the Music Business.
BMI is based upon the square of your height; which given people are 3D and not 2D means that it scales badly at both the bottom and top end of the measure.
So in Japan, with lower average heights, you'd likely want to be slightly underweight according to BMI in order to be healthy; if you're a 6'2" westerner, you probably want to be at the top end of healthy BMI or even slightly obese to be a healthy weight, which partially explains the canadian study results. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a different result in a Japanese study.
So while BMI isn't a bad measure as a rough starting point, nutrition and fitness are more important than slavish adherance to a specific weight for your height, as you say; especially given muscle weighs more than fat, leading to the well-known problem of athletic muscular people basically having to ignore BMI classifying them as obese. It also has a problem with the elderly, who with a lower average muscle-mass have scores that underestimate obesity. Carrying a few extra pounds while taking regular exercise, you're likely going to be in better shape than someone doing no exercise at all, but is naturally skinny.
Generally speaking, the waist-to-hip ratio is a better measure of whether you're fit or packing for two. Specifically, If you're a woman, the waist-to-hip ratio should come out as no more than 0.8. Men have a little more wiggle room: a healthy waist-to-hip ratio for them is 0.95; if you have an overhang, you could probably do with some more time in the gym.
Yes, I'll be sure to tell my boss that the company doesn't need all of the current windows-only software so linux isn't a problem, and that we can ignore the rapidly approaching security end-of-life on XP. Hell, office 2007 documents open absolutely perfectly in open office.
Just because you, as an individual, have alternatives doesn't mean businesses do. And even if we could switch to linux on everything, we'd still be screwed trying to exchange document formats with others.
This is a rogering for european and british business, and there's absolutely nothing we can do but take it in the wallet. Gotta love monopolies!
While I don't particularly object to local realtime CCTV surveillance of a public space, I do object to the much larger surveillance state CCTV has become a part of; permanent footage recording, number plate recognition cameras on all major roads, logging of phone calls, emails and recording websites visited, substantial databases of government interactions, financial records and medical records, the largest DNA database in the world, and of course coming things like ID cards which will be must-carry, and will be needed for every interaction with the state or public services, which will also be recorded.
Here's some of my objections off the top of my head:
- Corruption - local government has access to such personal data as my email, and can even setup surveillance units to me to follow me around for accusations as trivial as littering. Someone with a personal axe to grind could use this for personal reasons, i.e. stalking an ex lover, digging up personal info on her new partner, etc. We only have to look at businesses using facebook profiles to refuse to hire someone; how much longer before they get to dig through more private and personal details of your life?
- Incompetence - it wasn't long ago that the tax service lost a CD containing the personal details of 25 million adults and children, including the full financial details of 8 million families. Such information losses are becoming alarmingly common, and the more data is held, the more can be lost by accident, and that's a serious risk of identity fraud.
- identity theft - such databases are vulnerable to accidental loss; they're also vulnerable to deliberate attack, in order to gain substantial info about people; gaining access to bank accounts, setting up fake credit accounts in someone else's name, even getting a real passport or ID card in someone else's name, cloning car number plates to get other people sent the bill for the congestion charge in london; the more data is held, the more likely it will fall into the wrong hands
- misidentity - as more people get put on the DNA database for trivial accusations (no proof needed, no conviction needed) the odds of false positives rise; especially since they go on fishing expeditions to match marginal trace dna; the odds of someone being falsely convicted rise - there have already been cases with DNA records being factually incorrect. The criminal records database designed to stop pedophiles becoming teachers has had a number of failures, both not stopping those who should have been stopped, and flagging people by mistake, causing them to lose their job for having done nothing wrong. Or the poor brazillian man who had his block of flats under surveillance; he was tentatively misidentified as the suspected terrorist, so they followed him onto a tube train and shot him repeatedly in the head. Or the several people who were thought to have illegal firearms, were dawn raided, then shot while unarmed. The bigger the databases, and the more the police rely on them, the greater the odds of fatal mistakes in data quality.
- chilling effects - persistent surveillance can lead to a chilling effect on the participation in democracy. If protesters are video'd, then their cars tagged on ANPR watchlists so they get stopped constantly for 'random' checks, their house put under surveillance, their friends questioned (all of which have happened to protesters over the heathrow runway expansion) then people will be less willing to protest government decisions that affect them and their community. Sit down, shut up, or we'll be seeing you...
- too much noise - vast surveillance of the public space generates so much noise, it drowns out the signal. Looking for a needle in a haystack doesn't get any easier when you massively increase the size of the haystack. Intelligence led policing and targeted surveillance on those under suspicion - with civil rights protected by court oversight - is far more effective and less likely to target the innocent than the security theatre most of us endur
The employer/employee relationship is often a coercive one. The further down the payscale you go, the more likely the employee is going to be in a very difficult situation financially if they lose their job, or if they do not take what they can get in the first place. From the employer's point of view, one unskilled worker is much like another, so they can dictate onerous terms, and employees are in a poor position to refuse them.
As such, given the position of power of the employer, the government steps in to ensure certain minimum standards of safety and employment conditions in the workplace, such that this inbalanced relationship doesn't lead to employees being exploited.
Of course, employees can choose not to work in unsafe conditions; but when the choice is unsafe conditions or penury, people can easily be exploited. We've decided not to allow that to happen to the most vulnerable in our society, which I personally think is a good thing.
Now, you can argue that 2nd-hand smoke in the workplace is not a health hazard anything like of the scale of the industrial abuses of the workforce of the past, and there I'd be likely to agree with you, and if you were to argue that the minimal risks of 2nd hand smoke should make it an optional choice rather than a government enforced protection I would likely nod my head there too.
But just because this particular example might be an overblown knee-jerk reaction to a particular non-existant healthcare issue, that doesn't mean that government protection of the workforce, against them being forced to do work seriously hazardous to their health due to lack of financial options is a bad idea in principle, or in most cases of actual practise.
I have had OEM copies refused phone activation after having actually legimately replaced the motherboard for a customer. OK, I rang up again 5 minutes later with the same reason, and got approved - but the only reason microsoft allow people to claim that and get an activation is forbearance - according to the licence terms, they don't have to.
Now, whether the EULA actually overrides the doctrine of first sale such that they can actually legally spring that on you post purchase is a different matter of course - but you fancy explaining that to a phone drone?
The downside is simply that the workaround that Microsoft allow for OEM copies might one day disappear in a puff of WGA logic, which it won't with retail. Plus of course, you're in breach of the licence terms, and if you're going to do that you might as well rip it off entirely and save yourself the grief of phone activation.
OEM copies are only licenced for install on a single PC; generally considered to be the motherboard. Replace the motherboard, or build a new PC? that's a new OEM licence you need to pay for.
Retail and upgrade copies can be reinstalled on an unlimited number of machines, as long as it's only on one at a time - though given the activation hassles if you do it too often (phone activation to say, yes, you are only using it on one pc) you may not want to - and of course, upgrade installs still need the OS you're upgrading from on the hard-drive, even on a new PC, leading to the ludicrous situation of installing a clean copy of windows twice, with the 2nd install counting the first as the 'upgrade qualifier'. It was a lot simpler when the upgrade disc would take a windows floppy or CD as proof of older version ownership.
In case I wasn't clear, the 18 month window refers to OEMs being able to ship a new machine with a windows 7 OEM licence, but an XP install disc. Beyond that point, no new downgrade sales will be allowed, but home users who already have copies of XP acquired using OEM downgrade rights can carry on using them indefinitely (until support ends for XP security patches, anyway), as can volume licence businesses.