Choosing KDE would practically have forced the companies that want to ship closed source software to buy a expen$ive license for Qt
A $1500 expenditure for a QT licence is not expensive at all... Compared with the development cost and the cost of commercializing the application it is peanuts.
When companies want to have their own applications in-house (ie: not distributing the app to external parties), they just use the GPL. Whenever they have an application that they want to sell to third parties, the QT licence costs will probably be less than 1% of the total cost of developing the bloody thing. The licence cost is not an issue for 99.9% of the businesses out there.
"Maybe if we put our system in a shiny box with cool LEDs instead of a rackable server like everyone else, we can call it breakthrough technology!"
This reminds me of an anecdote I heard from one the distributors of Watchguard firewalls over here:
one of the major selling points of watchguard products when they were initially introduced was the fact that the appliance was bright red, and had a lot of blinky leds on the front plate:). Being a much 'sexier' package, the watchguard products were chosen instead of e.g. cisco PIX firewalls when the technical merits did not point to a clear winner.
Hiring consultants or better administrators won't help much. This is not about poor security or a bad setup, but about raw bandwidth and server resources that are being drained because other people's setups were compromised.
Basically, there's nothing you can do (in a technological fashion) about it. Only thing that you can do is hunt them down and sue them; which is not that simple in a global environment.
Gifts are good -- check with your employees!
on
Christmas Bonuses?
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· Score: 1
I don't know how Mr. Taxman handles this in your neck of the woods; but when handing out gifts (part of) the cost may be tax deductible (which is good for your company).
How big is your company? I've done something similar in a company with 6 employees; small enough for me to know what kind of presents the people liked. Ended up giving different gifts of the same value depending on what they liked:
Gift voucher for a travel shop
Gift voucher for computer hardware
Gift voucher for a new bicycle
If you don't know what your employees would like, perhaps you should just ask them what they prefer: a bonus (which will be taxed), gift vouchers for the same monetary amount, a new PC...
Make sure you tell them that this is because as a team, you made a good bottom line; and you wanted to thank them for their efforts. When just giving bonuses, people tend to expect them again the year after and are regarding it as 'appreciation for their efforts', regardless of how the company is doing.
This is a gift from the company, because you can afford it: you wouldn't have given it to the same people who performed exactly in the same way if the company didn't turn a profit.
It's basically the same situation over here in Belgium: a lot of luxury cars (Mercedes-BMW-...) are only accepted for full coverage by insurance companies if a certified anti-carjacking system (ie: satellite tracking, remote shutdown) is installed.
The price tag for such a system is about EUR 1.500, plus EUR 30 monthly fee for the tracking and GSM communication costs (you can use the cellphone).
They are not tracking your every move, since that would be too costly; you're only being tracked when actively requested:
Entering the wrong or no access code when starting
Somebody hitting one of the 'Assistance' buttons (technical assistance, medical assistance, panic button)
Car movement without running engine (ie: being towed)
Crash sensors detected probable accident
Contacting their callcenter directly in case of theft (by either you or the police)
They have the power to remotely stop the vehicle (progressive slowdown initiated by motor management, stop the engine when the car is doing less than 5 km/hr), but can legally only do so when adviced by the police.
Will it put of possible thieves? May be.
Will the chances of retrieving the stolen vehicle increase? Probably
Will professional thieves be stopped by this? Absolutely not.
Next time you produce a rant, please be sure to include at least one qualifying answer in your rant.
Poster was looking for a print spooler (not a print server), that has some kind of configurable output rate throttling; none of which is supported in the devices you listed.
thus making it useless for indie game development.
That must be why it's called the "Personal Learning Edition"...
It's there to allow you to play and learn with Maya, not for developing any kind of product (including indie/free stuff).
One of the great strengths of OSX and Apple is that they only have to support a very small selection of hardware, with added bonus that they have full control over said hardware.
This enables Apple to deliver a quality product without having to dedicate a massive amount of resources for development on "generic" platforms.
If Apple were to go the x86 route, they probably would create their own proprietary x86-based systems, and develop OSX to run on these systems only.
RIAA are now doing what they should do: sue the actual persons that are involved with the illegal distribution of copyrighted material.
The fact that a twelve-year-old did the downloading does not make it less illegal. If the girl's mother thought it was legit because she payed a 'Kazaa' service fee, she did not check into what she was actually buying -- it is no excuse, unless Kazaa sold her indemnity. If they did this out of pure ignorance, the judge may well just decide to a symbolic fine or excuse her for this time.
It is a good thing that the RIAA is suing *after* the crime (ie: copyright violation) occurred. Way better than treating everybody and their mother as would-be criminals by using copy-protection schemes and depriving people of their fair-use rights.
Keyboards that don't provide some tactile feedback that a key has been 'clicked' are very awkward to use, because the only way you know that you have successfully recorded a 'click' is by checking on the screen. This is very tiring.
I don't think I would ever be able to use these kinds of keyboards as efficiently as I do know with my 'regular' keyboards.
Microsoft doesn't give a shit about the well being of it's customers, nor are they looking to benefit the internet community in any way.
I beg your pardon?
Of course they give a damn about the wellbeing of their customers, because they're customers. They're the ones providing MS with gobs of money... MS would be silly not to do so, because spam is undoubtedly the number one nuisance of their customers.
You're entitled to your opinion, but the 'toddler-munching MS dressed in a cloud of evil' is getting real old...
Microsoft is a company. Companies want to make a buck, and pleasing your customers is one good way to start with.
That doesn't seem to be the case since (according to the NYTimes article) Transmeta is getting into the OSDL at the same time.
This is hardly 'distancing' themselves from linux.
That person is entitled to a published response if they have been misrepresented and named in the article
In practice, this does not happen often because in most cases newspapers do not print the names of the person(s) involved for these kind of stories. Allowing any media to publish whatever they want about somebody who is being charged with somehting, without giving that same person the right to a reply on the same forum is imho a lot more damaging to any court case because it will skew the public opinion a lot more. This up to the point that a fair trial is no longer possible...
All these kind of laws do is entitle anyone to the right to respond to published criticism and allegations, even if they normally would not have the financial means to get their message out to the same audience. Anything else would favour the rich and powerful of this world.
You can not demand to publish a rebuttal for any publication that is carrying a position that you're not endorsing... You can only get a rebuttal published if the article:
Names you personally (either individual or as a legal entity/company)
Contains criticisms or facts concerning you that you feel have been misrepresented.
Since the power of the media to personally attack someone (be it an individual/company) is very great, this law warrants your right to having your side of the story published as well.
It is specifically stated in the proposal that a hypertext link to the rebuttal (which does not need to reside on your server) is enough - this is not the type of thing that will kill your TOS or bandwidth.
The current law for offline media also mandates that the size of such a rebuttal should be 'reasonable' (ie: no free full-page ads) with regards to the media in which it is published.
I'm not sure for the rest of Europe, but at least in Belgium there is the so-called "Recht van antwoord" (ie: right to reply).
Basically, it states that you are always entitled to a response at no cost in the publication that has criticized you, to give the readers both sides of the story.
If some paper/magazine writes a critical article on your person or organization, this gives you the right to post your rebuttal to the same audience that read the initial article - which seems OK for me.
The parcel gets stopped because you have to pay import taxes, not VAT.
Up until now, you were supposed to notify your taxing agency yourself that you purchased a product abroad, and that you were due VAT on that purchase. Of course nobody (except the extremely silly) ever did this, and pocketed the VAT he was supposed to pay.
From now on the burden of processing and declaring the VAT is put on the retailer side (as it is in the EU now). You are still due import taxes, and your parcel will still be stopped for customs. For the consumer point of view, this will increase prices with 20% - 25% for all goods acquired overseas.
Mind you, that companies with a VAT number do NOT have to pay VAT for these operations if it is deductible. The extra burden in online shops will not be the VAT percentage they are supposed to add (which is relatively simple), but checking valid VAT numbers.
It amazes me that Berners-Lee isn't more widely acknowledged for his contribution to today's internet.
Funny that most people are only referring to Tim Berners-Lee as the 'inventor of the web', while he was actually working with a companion. Does it have anything to do with Tim being English?
You can also unceremoniously drop any connection that starts pipelining before you say it is OK to pipeline and any EHLO that has an illegal hostname.
Dropping connections like this is not a good thing since the other party (ofc. depending on the implementation) will assume that due to network problems the connection failed; resulting in a re-connect after some time-out.
This may effectively drain more resources than you were trying to save. Always send a 5xx return code (permanent error) to the server, so the other party knows that it should not attempt delivery again.
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When companies want to have their own applications in-house (ie: not distributing the app to external parties), they just use the GPL. Whenever they have an application that they want to sell to third parties, the QT licence costs will probably be less than 1% of the total cost of developing the bloody thing. The licence cost is not an issue for 99.9% of the businesses out there.
Almost all slackware users (slackies?) I know do their upgrades by doing the 'configure;make;make install'-mamba baby!
(for the humor impaired: this was a joke -- albeit a lousy one from a slackie)
one of the major selling points of watchguard products when they were initially introduced was the fact that the appliance was bright red, and had a lot of blinky leds on the front plate
Basically, there's nothing you can do (in a technological fashion) about it. Only thing that you can do is hunt them down and sue them; which is not that simple in a global environment.
How big is your company? I've done something similar in a company with 6 employees; small enough for me to know what kind of presents the people liked. Ended up giving different gifts of the same value depending on what they liked:
Gift voucher for a travel shop
Gift voucher for computer hardware
Gift voucher for a new bicycle
If you don't know what your employees would like, perhaps you should just ask them what they prefer: a bonus (which will be taxed), gift vouchers for the same monetary amount, a new PC...
Make sure you tell them that this is because as a team, you made a good bottom line; and you wanted to thank them for their efforts. When just giving bonuses, people tend to expect them again the year after and are regarding it as 'appreciation for their efforts', regardless of how the company is doing.
This is a gift from the company, because you can afford it: you wouldn't have given it to the same people who performed exactly in the same way if the company didn't turn a profit.
The price tag for such a system is about EUR 1.500, plus EUR 30 monthly fee for the tracking and GSM communication costs (you can use the cellphone).
They are not tracking your every move, since that would be too costly; you're only being tracked when actively requested:
Entering the wrong or no access code when starting
Somebody hitting one of the 'Assistance' buttons (technical assistance, medical assistance, panic button)
Car movement without running engine (ie: being towed)
Crash sensors detected probable accident
Contacting their callcenter directly in case of theft (by either you or the police)
They have the power to remotely stop the vehicle (progressive slowdown initiated by motor management, stop the engine when the car is doing less than 5 km/hr), but can legally only do so when adviced by the police.
Will it put of possible thieves? May be.
Will the chances of retrieving the stolen vehicle increase? Probably
Will professional thieves be stopped by this? Absolutely not.
Poster was looking for a print spooler (not a print server), that has some kind of configurable output rate throttling; none of which is supported in the devices you listed.
It's there to allow you to play and learn with Maya, not for developing any kind of product (including indie/free stuff).
This enables Apple to deliver a quality product without having to dedicate a massive amount of resources for development on "generic" platforms.
If Apple were to go the x86 route, they probably would create their own proprietary x86-based systems, and develop OSX to run on these systems only.
The fact that a twelve-year-old did the downloading does not make it less illegal. If the girl's mother thought it was legit because she payed a 'Kazaa' service fee, she did not check into what she was actually buying -- it is no excuse, unless Kazaa sold her indemnity. If they did this out of pure ignorance, the judge may well just decide to a symbolic fine or excuse her for this time.
It is a good thing that the RIAA is suing *after* the crime (ie: copyright violation) occurred. Way better than treating everybody and their mother as would-be criminals by using copy-protection schemes and depriving people of their fair-use rights.
I don't think I would ever be able to use these kinds of keyboards as efficiently as I do know with my 'regular' keyboards.
Of course they give a damn about the wellbeing of their customers, because they're customers. They're the ones providing MS with gobs of money... MS would be silly not to do so, because spam is undoubtedly the number one nuisance of their customers.
You're entitled to your opinion, but the 'toddler-munching MS dressed in a cloud of evil' is getting real old...
Microsoft is a company. Companies want to make a buck, and pleasing your customers is one good way to start with.
This is hardly 'distancing' themselves from linux.
In practice, this does not happen often because in most cases newspapers do not print the names of the person(s) involved for these kind of stories. Allowing any media to publish whatever they want about somebody who is being charged with somehting, without giving that same person the right to a reply on the same forum is imho a lot more damaging to any court case because it will skew the public opinion a lot more. This up to the point that a fair trial is no longer possible...
All these kind of laws do is entitle anyone to the right to respond to published criticism and allegations, even if they normally would not have the financial means to get their message out to the same audience. Anything else would favour the rich and powerful of this world.
Names you personally (either individual or as a legal entity/company)
Contains criticisms or facts concerning you that you feel have been misrepresented. Since the power of the media to personally attack someone (be it an individual/company) is very great, this law warrants your right to having your side of the story published as well.
The current law for offline media also mandates that the size of such a rebuttal should be 'reasonable' (ie: no free full-page ads) with regards to the media in which it is published.
Basically, it states that you are always entitled to a response at no cost in the publication that has criticized you, to give the readers both sides of the story.
If some paper/magazine writes a critical article on your person or organization, this gives you the right to post your rebuttal to the same audience that read the initial article - which seems OK for me.
Up until now, you were supposed to notify your taxing agency yourself that you purchased a product abroad, and that you were due VAT on that purchase. Of course nobody (except the extremely silly) ever did this, and pocketed the VAT he was supposed to pay.
From now on the burden of processing and declaring the VAT is put on the retailer side (as it is in the EU now). You are still due import taxes, and your parcel will still be stopped for customs. For the consumer point of view, this will increase prices with 20% - 25% for all goods acquired overseas.
Mind you, that companies with a VAT number do NOT have to pay VAT for these operations if it is deductible. The extra burden in online shops will not be the VAT percentage they are supposed to add (which is relatively simple), but checking valid VAT numbers.
So, please get your act together and do something about the EU market, will ya! :-)
This may effectively drain more resources than you were trying to save. Always send a 5xx return code (permanent error) to the server, so the other party knows that it should not attempt delivery again.