American voters don't have any real choice in the matter- it's always between Candidate R who has been bribed by the multinational corporations or Candidate D who has been bribed by the multinational corporations. Either way, us human beings are just second class citizens- slaves to the profit machine that Hamilton started and the Supreme Court made our masters in 1886.
And assuming the machines can be tampered with it's just as likely machines were tampered to favor Kerry as Bush
Not just as likely- the President of Diebold didn't promise to do everything in his power to deliver Ohio to Kerry. It wasn't Republican counties that were shorted machines and given confusing lines without signs to make sure that people who got in the wrong line couldn't vote within the 24 hours alotted. And eyewitness reports didn't see the cursor jump to Kerry from Bush- but they did see the Bush button "click" when they pushed the Kerry button.
All of these suggest that Kerry MIGHT have taken Ohio- but since the head of the elections board was a Republican who refused to investigate these and other such anomalies in a reasonable amount of time, you're quite correct that there will be no day in court for Kerry. Add to that of course that Kerry's a wimp who decided not to press the issue.
Personally, there was enough circumstantial evidence that any county using Diebold in the future will be facing court challenges to prove the verification of their votes. As well they deserve.
Exactly- those are the two choices for defeating this technology. Of course, then you won't get those neat night-vision see-through-clothes pictures....
Duh- it's obvious. An IR filter over your Charge Coupled Device. Already exists on lots of video cameras- not so common on digital cameras yet but will be given this "advance".
Doesn't matter if it's not in a frequency that your rods and cones will react to. A CCD will react to infrared- unless you are some kind of mutant, your eyes simply won't.
Yes, the customer's system is the reference- so why are you trying to write it so that two different customers are treated the same (despite the standards and specs?) You should have a different subroutine for each customer system you're dealing with, and whenever you get a new customer they should get a new module in the system. The primary message queue should simply be able to look at the customer id field, the form number, and use that as a primary key to call up the proper subroutine for that customer.
Black Box Archetecture is key; that's why the legacy code stops working, and why it's so hard to maintain. If you had gone with a black box archetecture to begin with, then it's a simple matter of setting up a meeting with the customer's IT department to find out exactly what format they want the invoice in- and everything goes smooth as silk. If you need to because of the large number of customers, hire a separate programmer for EACH customer. After all, the guy writing the black box to plug in to the system only needs to know his own inputs and outputs, not the entire system.
And luser is not a term of disrespect any more than lvalue is- do you disrespect the variables that end up holding the data at the end of a transaction? "Left user", not "loser".
The Business Reason for getting rid of legacy is to cut down on maintenance cost going forward. Sure, the old stuff still works; but as time goes on you'll find fewer and fewer programmers who want to work with it, or even have the faintest clue how it operates, because it was primarily written under the "find a job niche and protect it" school of design. What we're now finding out is that software and hardware, even the cheapest software and hardware, can be in use for decades. Thus, the good CIO will, when given the opportunity, redesign the entire system so that it is easily maintainable and extensible. So that, as you put it, new packages can be "bolted" into the system quickly and easily.
As for the complexity of the business rules, EDI has got to have the simplest set of business rules ever created. You have this well defined database on one side; well defined because of the meta data in the database, you know the data type and format of every field to start with. You have this well defined interface form on the other side, well defined because the standards organizations make it so. That's internal to your own IT department. Now you meet with the IT department from the business you want to send the data to. They've got their own well defined database format, but you don't have to know anything about that. All you have to do is come to an agreement of what standard form to use, and how to ship the data. From there on out the programming is a complete cake walk. You don't actually have to invent anything at all; in fact, asking other stakeholders for input is a really bad idea because they'll just insert a bunch of stuff that isn't needed into the standard.
The hardware and software that you do this with doesn't really matter as long as Database A puts out a report in format B that Database C can read and store. Yes, there may be thousands of columns per record in that report- but string manipulation is the easiest programming possible no matter what system you're using, or what programming language for that matter. And that's all data transformations are- string manipulation.
Don't get me wrong- I understand what you're saying about non-computer people not allowing you to do your job properly, we've all been there. But the closest the business should *ever* be allowed to get to the desgin of an EDI project is telling the CIO "We need to be able to send records from this system to this other company, make it happen", and from there on out, it should all be negotiation between IT departments, not lusers.
Ok, in this discussion I've learned that what I thought was an old mainframe is really a minicomputer. And that grid computing isn't as useful as I thought it was for getting rid of an IT department. And yes, I used to consider ANY opportunity to rip out legacy hardware and software and replace it with something more maintainable a good thing, thank you for correcting me.
But tell me, why are other programmers so scared of a well defined set of business rules, no matter how large it is? A data transform is a data transform, and while it may take you some TIME to code a data transform, and testing to get it correct, it's a heck of a lot simpler than say, coming up with a new algorithym to break the latest DRM attempt from the RIAA. At least you HAVE business rules. Anything that has business rules to transform one set of data to another is easy money, as far as I'm concerned.
The point is- both of which can be done better WITHOUT an AS/400 in the mix. It's drop dead simple to go from SQL to whatever flat text file format you want- and XML is still a flat text file format.
Ok, this REALLY should have been one for google- even I admit that and I'm usually on the other side. Just how many hackers on slashdot do you think have even messed with EDI?
Still, given IBM's movement to bladeservers, I'd suggest whatever solution you come up with should eliminate the maintenance cost of the old iron, the AS/400. You'll save enough money there alone to purchase a fleet of blades, and even if you're running Oracle or MySQL, you're better off than DB2 on a single mainframe.
I don't think it's very likely that a dude is going to have much sentimental attachment to a piece of furniture (unless it's a lazy-boy).
That's funny- because of my favorite three pieces that I AM attached to, one's a combination lamp table, one's a rocker, and the third is- a lazy boy. They originally belonged to, before deaths, my paternal grandmother, my wife's mother, and my wife's grandmother, in the same order.
In fact, when Christopher plays on the rocker, we call it "rocking with Grandma Joyce" because that's her rocker, and she died only a year before he was born.
The problem is that the cost of information is too high. A government agency (assuming it is perfectly benevolent, which is another failing of communism)
More in keeping with the original purpose of this site- to me you've really hit upon the main problem in basic capitalism or communism (the only difference in capitalism is that you replace the perfectly benevolent government agency which has never existed with perfectly benevolent rich people in the stock market, which is an oxymoron). A large amount of data about needs to be sorted, combined with a lack of objective measurement of "need" to ensure benevolence (if anything, what we've currently got is subjective).
Here's my answer to both- computer networks. You can use widespread wide area networks to gather the data. You can use the new huge storage devices (I hear somebody's already started a petabyte project based on Hitachi half-terrabyte drives) to gather, sort, and compare in a way never before known. It's now possible for an agency, whether corporation or government, to collect every public piece of information about you, your neighbors, etc and split you into a hundred or even a thousand classes- and treat you appropriate to your class.
And it's possible to make that government agency or corporation have no human beings in charge at all- just expert systems based on serving to needs.
#1 True but the back end costs make this almost a neutral cost. When something is broken administrators pick up the phone and tell Microsoft to fix it. With Open source they have to research and find the answer themselves, assuming there is on out there.
A administrator from a non-profit is not going to pick up the phone and wait on hold for 4 hours to tell Microsoft to fix it. A competant nonprofit administrator checks their volunteer network first.
#2 You can alsways cross that bridge when you come to it. I doubt you would see this though as Microsoft doesn't want to upset the people that continue to buy thier products. It is easier to pull the rug out from the support end anyway.
Nonprofits can't afford to buy their products to begin with.
#5 Because CEOs are running bigger companies and spending more time doing it. Email, Blackberries and the internet have made this even more of a 24/7 job than ever before. Last time I checked the Fry person at McD's still just has to cook the fries..
True enough. But 24x7 only adds up to 168- and the fry person at McD's still has to cook the fries 40 of that. 168/40=4.2, meaning that even at the $10 an hour that fry cooks earn in some towns in Europe, based on a straight line increase of more per hour for being asked to work more hours and more hours worked, at best we've got 42x168=$7056/week or $373,968/year. So while you have increased my appreciation for what CEOs do- you have fallen approximately $10.6 million short of justifying their actual average pay.
Plus, given today's automated personal accounting software, it would take a real idiot not to be able to live on $373,968/year in complete luxury. So unless you're going to argue that CEOs are idiots who don't know how to live, you're at least a couple of orders of magnitude short of actually supporting your position in the debate.
Others' have addressed this. TCO isn't the purchase price.
In a corporate arena, where you have to pay for support, this is correct. In the nonprofit arena, where volunteer hours are cheap but hardware/software are scarce, purchase price counts for a lot more.
This is actually incorrect.. If min. wage grew at the same rate as CEOs then their salary would actually stay exactly the same, while CEO's would continue to have their massive rates of increase.
You misunderstand apparently. I'm talking about the injustice of being bigoted against certain classes of people, not the economics behind it. Rightly, what you need is not a minimum wage, but a maximum wage- the minimum wage takes care of itself when those at the top are limited in their income potential, because there is less reward for stealing from the workers.
50 years ago, people generally considered communism to be superior to capitalism in terms of efficient public welfare allocation. The problem is that the cost of information is too high.
Not anymore of course- Wal*Mart has proved that the cost of information is actually quite low, and can be used for exactly this mission. Of course, their purpose in doing the mission is slightly different (attempting to squeeze both workers and consumers to build greater profits), but the data collected is the same (the total needs of a local population and the price points at which they will buy more).
A government agency (assuming it is perfectly benevolent, which is another failing of communism) can not know who best to allocate scarce resources to. The US and other countries use graduated/targeted taxation, so that supply/demand is still in place, but the burden of public services falls more onto the sholders of those that are least troubled by it.
Except, of course, in the last 10 years or so, while we've been switching to a nonprogressive bell curve taxation, in which the burden of both public and private services fall on those in the middle of the income curve instead of the 10% at either end.
So how "much" someone makes is almost completely irrelevant because the dollar is a useless commodity except for purchases.. (fiat money)
Not quite. Under the bell curve taxation scheme, those at the top set inflation, and those at the bottom have to find a way to live with it, and the middle slowly gets flattened under excessive taxation. While yes, it's a useless commodity except for purchases, the difference between those earning at the top and those earning at the bottom sets the price- and the wider the gap, the higher the standard of living, which just means the more people at the bottom starve.
So lets say we had a sudden increase in the min wage.
Did we have a sudden increase in the maximum wage I had not been aware of? No, CEO salaries rose gradually- the minimum wage should be an AUTOMATIC increase in keeping with them.
Well, 1'st, the shock would be such that almost nobody would be willing or able to afford paying higher than min wage.. So you'd have 3 classes of people.. Min-wage, rich, and the scant few who are in between. (shifting from a diamond shaped economy to a pyramid)
Exactly right- but guess what? Under the current bell shaped taxation, the same thing happens. The only real difference is the height of the pyramid.
As a result, every scarse resource is now equally available to everybody (except the few people above min wage). So for a short while, we're in communism.. Everybody wants the best doctor in town, everybody wants the house on the hill.. Everybody wants the red car. So commodities that are desirable to us are suddently as innaccessible as the lottery.
As well they should be. Life should not be based on DESIRE! It should be based on NEED alone. Basing life on desire is highly immoral.
Likewise in this brief period of consolidated purchasing-power equality, most people will be fighting for th
Actually, usually either Mother works for the school (she's a teacher) and I volunteer for free, or the parish asks me to help out. And since my Marxism is actually based on my Catholicism (gee, just like Uncle Karl's was- not a few of his slogans were stolen from the Bible), It's not a problem.
#1: $50 vs downloading the latest open source distro- gee, which do you think is cheaper?
#2 rollback clause in the license- true for now, but there's also a "we may change the terms of this license at any time" clause in the license.
#3- the only reason that the fresh start program exists is because 2 years ago the media made a huge stink about the BSA attacking a school for EXACTLY this. As soon as the heat dies down, the fresh start program will no longer exist.
#4- you may know public schools, but I know private- Catholic schools get the crappiest donations around. And I've been a private schools tech coordinator since I was in high school- about 15 years now.
#5 the commie bashing MicroSoft- probably has something to do with the fact that their CEO is paid very highly, and if minimum wage had risen the way CEO wages had in the United States in the last 20 years, the minimum wage would be $23.20/hr.
Why would they switch the operating system at all?
Primarily to keep the BSA nazis off their backs- when you get a computer free-for-carrying-off-site for your nonprofit or for home use you should ALWAYS reformat the hard drive and install a new OS. To do otherwise opens up your school children to being turned against you in a court of law by the BSA- as some teachers found out not to long ago. NO non-profit should ever be using Microsoft operating systems for that reason- it's just to hard to keep track of the licensing on donated equipment, unless you acutally purchase new copies of the OS. And of course, Microsoft is really pushing people towards Linux- Win2000 and Win98 are already gone from store shelves, and I give XP about 6 months after Vista is released to disappear.
Not everyone loves technology, they don't all go OMFG ITS A NEW VERSION OF MY SOFTWARE!!!! I MUST HAVE IT NOW!!! Especially when it comes to the operating system, most people just leave it as is. You know how many Windows 95 and 98 computers I've been cleaning up (spyware, adware, viri) these last few years? Many of them could run newer versions of Windows, but why would the people bother when their version works?
Different situation though- those are personal use machines that were purchased by people- I'm talking about the castoffs of corporations.
People want computers to just work. They don't have to install new Operating Systems for their microwave, why should they buy a new OS, especially when what they have works.
Because otherwise the BSA nazis invade- and if you don't have that paper license, it's several thousand per machine.
Many corporations will sit with what they have until they replace their computers.
Exactly- but when they do, the people they give the old computers to will go to Linux.
So unless computer hardware venders start mainstream selling PC's with Linux installed
You mean like Fry's does? For $400 less than a compariable Wintel System?
don't expect massive adoption.
Depends on your meaning of the term massive, doesn't it? I see linux growing in two areas on the desktop: Cheap NEW internet terminals with 1/3rd the power of what Vista needs just to run, and people who run organizations that live off of charity (like schools) that need an OS that will run on older hardware and has cheap licensing.
Best I could see there was a 512MB for $49.99- and it was USB, not Compact flash.
Can you provide a link? A 4GB, or even a 256MB CF drive with all of that extra functionality would go great in my IPAQ- regardless of the fact that it's a device on it's own.
This time around, from the hardware specs alone, if it doesn't spur widespread adoption of Linux on the business desktop, it will spur widespread adoption of linux among honest poor people that get the business's 6-month old desktops and laptops that won't run Vista.
More the renaming of the angency in 1979- it had been in existance since the original Congressional Act of 1803 providing assistance to a small New Hampshire town that had burned down from lightning.
Well, that's what you get from buying computers from a bank. Why don't you just run HijackThis and remove the registry keys for the bundled application? Or better yet, buy an all in one from Epson or Canon or even Lexmark that doesn't come with the bundled photo album software?
It's not the All-in-one's fault- it's the software that came with it, and you can't malign the whole set of peripherials by your choice to buy from Dell.
Back in the early 1990s, 5 minutes out of every hour HAD to be public service announcements, by our educational charter. Those got VERY repetitive and boring after a while. The students at KTRU would likely be happy to have something else to read OTHER than the 200th announcement this term telling people to wear seatbelts.
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American voters don't have any real choice in the matter- it's always between Candidate R who has been bribed by the multinational corporations or Candidate D who has been bribed by the multinational corporations. Either way, us human beings are just second class citizens- slaves to the profit machine that Hamilton started and the Supreme Court made our masters in 1886.
Which, of course, the Diebold Employees have been threatened with. So therefore, goodbye democracy.
And assuming the machines can be tampered with it's just as likely machines were tampered to favor Kerry as Bush
Not just as likely- the President of Diebold didn't promise to do everything in his power to deliver Ohio to Kerry. It wasn't Republican counties that were shorted machines and given confusing lines without signs to make sure that people who got in the wrong line couldn't vote within the 24 hours alotted. And eyewitness reports didn't see the cursor jump to Kerry from Bush- but they did see the Bush button "click" when they pushed the Kerry button.
All of these suggest that Kerry MIGHT have taken Ohio- but since the head of the elections board was a Republican who refused to investigate these and other such anomalies in a reasonable amount of time, you're quite correct that there will be no day in court for Kerry. Add to that of course that Kerry's a wimp who decided not to press the issue.
Personally, there was enough circumstantial evidence that any county using Diebold in the future will be facing court challenges to prove the verification of their votes. As well they deserve.
Exactly- those are the two choices for defeating this technology. Of course, then you won't get those neat night-vision see-through-clothes pictures....
Duh- it's obvious. An IR filter over your Charge Coupled Device. Already exists on lots of video cameras- not so common on digital cameras yet but will be given this "advance".
Doesn't matter if it's not in a frequency that your rods and cones will react to. A CCD will react to infrared- unless you are some kind of mutant, your eyes simply won't.
Yes, the customer's system is the reference- so why are you trying to write it so that two different customers are treated the same (despite the standards and specs?) You should have a different subroutine for each customer system you're dealing with, and whenever you get a new customer they should get a new module in the system. The primary message queue should simply be able to look at the customer id field, the form number, and use that as a primary key to call up the proper subroutine for that customer.
Black Box Archetecture is key; that's why the legacy code stops working, and why it's so hard to maintain. If you had gone with a black box archetecture to begin with, then it's a simple matter of setting up a meeting with the customer's IT department to find out exactly what format they want the invoice in- and everything goes smooth as silk. If you need to because of the large number of customers, hire a separate programmer for EACH customer. After all, the guy writing the black box to plug in to the system only needs to know his own inputs and outputs, not the entire system.
And luser is not a term of disrespect any more than lvalue is- do you disrespect the variables that end up holding the data at the end of a transaction? "Left user", not "loser".
The Business Reason for getting rid of legacy is to cut down on maintenance cost going forward. Sure, the old stuff still works; but as time goes on you'll find fewer and fewer programmers who want to work with it, or even have the faintest clue how it operates, because it was primarily written under the "find a job niche and protect it" school of design. What we're now finding out is that software and hardware, even the cheapest software and hardware, can be in use for decades. Thus, the good CIO will, when given the opportunity, redesign the entire system so that it is easily maintainable and extensible. So that, as you put it, new packages can be "bolted" into the system quickly and easily.
As for the complexity of the business rules, EDI has got to have the simplest set of business rules ever created. You have this well defined database on one side; well defined because of the meta data in the database, you know the data type and format of every field to start with. You have this well defined interface form on the other side, well defined because the standards organizations make it so. That's internal to your own IT department. Now you meet with the IT department from the business you want to send the data to. They've got their own well defined database format, but you don't have to know anything about that. All you have to do is come to an agreement of what standard form to use, and how to ship the data. From there on out the programming is a complete cake walk. You don't actually have to invent anything at all; in fact, asking other stakeholders for input is a really bad idea because they'll just insert a bunch of stuff that isn't needed into the standard.
The hardware and software that you do this with doesn't really matter as long as Database A puts out a report in format B that Database C can read and store. Yes, there may be thousands of columns per record in that report- but string manipulation is the easiest programming possible no matter what system you're using, or what programming language for that matter. And that's all data transformations are- string manipulation.
Don't get me wrong- I understand what you're saying about non-computer people not allowing you to do your job properly, we've all been there. But the closest the business should *ever* be allowed to get to the desgin of an EDI project is telling the CIO "We need to be able to send records from this system to this other company, make it happen", and from there on out, it should all be negotiation between IT departments, not lusers.
Ok, in this discussion I've learned that what I thought was an old mainframe is really a minicomputer. And that grid computing isn't as useful as I thought it was for getting rid of an IT department. And yes, I used to consider ANY opportunity to rip out legacy hardware and software and replace it with something more maintainable a good thing, thank you for correcting me.
But tell me, why are other programmers so scared of a well defined set of business rules, no matter how large it is? A data transform is a data transform, and while it may take you some TIME to code a data transform, and testing to get it correct, it's a heck of a lot simpler than say, coming up with a new algorithym to break the latest DRM attempt from the RIAA. At least you HAVE business rules. Anything that has business rules to transform one set of data to another is easy money, as far as I'm concerned.
The point is- both of which can be done better WITHOUT an AS/400 in the mix. It's drop dead simple to go from SQL to whatever flat text file format you want- and XML is still a flat text file format.
Ok, this REALLY should have been one for google- even I admit that and I'm usually on the other side. Just how many hackers on slashdot do you think have even messed with EDI?
Still, given IBM's movement to bladeservers, I'd suggest whatever solution you come up with should eliminate the maintenance cost of the old iron, the AS/400. You'll save enough money there alone to purchase a fleet of blades, and even if you're running Oracle or MySQL, you're better off than DB2 on a single mainframe.
I don't think it's very likely that a dude is going to have much sentimental attachment to a piece of furniture (unless it's a lazy-boy).
That's funny- because of my favorite three pieces that I AM attached to, one's a combination lamp table, one's a rocker, and the third is- a lazy boy. They originally belonged to, before deaths, my paternal grandmother, my wife's mother, and my wife's grandmother, in the same order.
In fact, when Christopher plays on the rocker, we call it "rocking with Grandma Joyce" because that's her rocker, and she died only a year before he was born.
The problem is that the cost of information is too high. A government agency (assuming it is perfectly benevolent, which is another failing of communism)
More in keeping with the original purpose of this site- to me you've really hit upon the main problem in basic capitalism or communism (the only difference in capitalism is that you replace the perfectly benevolent government agency which has never existed with perfectly benevolent rich people in the stock market, which is an oxymoron). A large amount of data about needs to be sorted, combined with a lack of objective measurement of "need" to ensure benevolence (if anything, what we've currently got is subjective).
Here's my answer to both- computer networks. You can use widespread wide area networks to gather the data. You can use the new huge storage devices (I hear somebody's already started a petabyte project based on Hitachi half-terrabyte drives) to gather, sort, and compare in a way never before known. It's now possible for an agency, whether corporation or government, to collect every public piece of information about you, your neighbors, etc and split you into a hundred or even a thousand classes- and treat you appropriate to your class.
And it's possible to make that government agency or corporation have no human beings in charge at all- just expert systems based on serving to needs.
What do you think of that possibility?
#1 True but the back end costs make this almost a neutral cost. When something is broken administrators pick up the phone and tell Microsoft to fix it. With Open source they have to research and find the answer themselves, assuming there is on out there.
A administrator from a non-profit is not going to pick up the phone and wait on hold for 4 hours to tell Microsoft to fix it. A competant nonprofit administrator checks their volunteer network first.
#2 You can alsways cross that bridge when you come to it. I doubt you would see this though as Microsoft doesn't want to upset the people that continue to buy thier products. It is easier to pull the rug out from the support end anyway.
Nonprofits can't afford to buy their products to begin with.
#5 Because CEOs are running bigger companies and spending more time doing it. Email, Blackberries and the internet have made this even more of a 24/7 job than ever before. Last time I checked the Fry person at McD's still just has to cook the fries..
True enough. But 24x7 only adds up to 168- and the fry person at McD's still has to cook the fries 40 of that. 168/40=4.2, meaning that even at the $10 an hour that fry cooks earn in some towns in Europe, based on a straight line increase of more per hour for being asked to work more hours and more hours worked, at best we've got 42x168=$7056/week or $373,968/year. So while you have increased my appreciation for what CEOs do- you have fallen approximately $10.6 million short of justifying their actual average pay.
Plus, given today's automated personal accounting software, it would take a real idiot not to be able to live on $373,968/year in complete luxury. So unless you're going to argue that CEOs are idiots who don't know how to live, you're at least a couple of orders of magnitude short of actually supporting your position in the debate.
Others' have addressed this. TCO isn't the purchase price.
In a corporate arena, where you have to pay for support, this is correct. In the nonprofit arena, where volunteer hours are cheap but hardware/software are scarce, purchase price counts for a lot more.
This is actually incorrect.. If min. wage grew at the same rate as CEOs then their salary would actually stay exactly the same, while CEO's would continue to have their massive rates of increase.
You misunderstand apparently. I'm talking about the injustice of being bigoted against certain classes of people, not the economics behind it. Rightly, what you need is not a minimum wage, but a maximum wage- the minimum wage takes care of itself when those at the top are limited in their income potential, because there is less reward for stealing from the workers.
50 years ago, people generally considered communism to be superior to capitalism in terms of efficient public welfare allocation. The problem is that the cost of information is too high.
Not anymore of course- Wal*Mart has proved that the cost of information is actually quite low, and can be used for exactly this mission. Of course, their purpose in doing the mission is slightly different (attempting to squeeze both workers and consumers to build greater profits), but the data collected is the same (the total needs of a local population and the price points at which they will buy more).
A government agency (assuming it is perfectly benevolent, which is another failing of communism) can not know who best to allocate scarce resources to. The US and other countries use graduated/targeted taxation, so that supply/demand is still in place, but the burden of public services falls more onto the sholders of those that are least troubled by it.
Except, of course, in the last 10 years or so, while we've been switching to a nonprogressive bell curve taxation, in which the burden of both public and private services fall on those in the middle of the income curve instead of the 10% at either end.
So how "much" someone makes is almost completely irrelevant because the dollar is a useless commodity except for purchases.. (fiat money)
Not quite. Under the bell curve taxation scheme, those at the top set inflation, and those at the bottom have to find a way to live with it, and the middle slowly gets flattened under excessive taxation. While yes, it's a useless commodity except for purchases, the difference between those earning at the top and those earning at the bottom sets the price- and the wider the gap, the higher the standard of living, which just means the more people at the bottom starve.
So lets say we had a sudden increase in the min wage.
Did we have a sudden increase in the maximum wage I had not been aware of? No, CEO salaries rose gradually- the minimum wage should be an AUTOMATIC increase in keeping with them.
Well, 1'st, the shock would be such that almost nobody would be willing or able to afford paying higher than min wage.. So you'd have 3 classes of people.. Min-wage, rich, and the scant few who are in between. (shifting from a diamond shaped economy to a pyramid)
Exactly right- but guess what? Under the current bell shaped taxation, the same thing happens. The only real difference is the height of the pyramid.
As a result, every scarse resource is now equally available to everybody (except the few people above min wage). So for a short while, we're in communism.. Everybody wants the best doctor in town, everybody wants the house on the hill.. Everybody wants the red car. So commodities that are desirable to us are suddently as innaccessible as the lottery.
As well they should be. Life should not be based on DESIRE! It should be based on NEED alone. Basing life on desire is highly immoral.
Likewise in this brief period of consolidated purchasing-power equality, most people will be fighting for th
Actually, usually either Mother works for the school (she's a teacher) and I volunteer for free, or the parish asks me to help out. And since my Marxism is actually based on my Catholicism (gee, just like Uncle Karl's was- not a few of his slogans were stolen from the Bible), It's not a problem.
For cheap internet terminals- TinyLinux fits on a PROM chip....and is less likely to be damaged by the end user.
#1: $50 vs downloading the latest open source distro- gee, which do you think is cheaper?
#2 rollback clause in the license- true for now, but there's also a "we may change the terms of this license at any time" clause in the license.
#3- the only reason that the fresh start program exists is because 2 years ago the media made a huge stink about the BSA attacking a school for EXACTLY this. As soon as the heat dies down, the fresh start program will no longer exist.
#4- you may know public schools, but I know private- Catholic schools get the crappiest donations around. And I've been a private schools tech coordinator since I was in high school- about 15 years now.
#5 the commie bashing MicroSoft- probably has something to do with the fact that their CEO is paid very highly, and if minimum wage had risen the way CEO wages had in the United States in the last 20 years, the minimum wage would be $23.20/hr.
Why would they switch the operating system at all?
Primarily to keep the BSA nazis off their backs- when you get a computer free-for-carrying-off-site for your nonprofit or for home use you should ALWAYS reformat the hard drive and install a new OS. To do otherwise opens up your school children to being turned against you in a court of law by the BSA- as some teachers found out not to long ago. NO non-profit should ever be using Microsoft operating systems for that reason- it's just to hard to keep track of the licensing on donated equipment, unless you acutally purchase new copies of the OS. And of course, Microsoft is really pushing people towards Linux- Win2000 and Win98 are already gone from store shelves, and I give XP about 6 months after Vista is released to disappear.
Not everyone loves technology, they don't all go OMFG ITS A NEW VERSION OF MY SOFTWARE!!!! I MUST HAVE IT NOW!!! Especially when it comes to the operating system, most people just leave it as is. You know how many Windows 95 and 98 computers I've been cleaning up (spyware, adware, viri) these last few years? Many of them could run newer versions of Windows, but why would the people bother when their version works?
Different situation though- those are personal use machines that were purchased by people- I'm talking about the castoffs of corporations.
People want computers to just work. They don't have to install new Operating Systems for their microwave, why should they buy a new OS, especially when what they have works.
Because otherwise the BSA nazis invade- and if you don't have that paper license, it's several thousand per machine.
Many corporations will sit with what they have until they replace their computers.
Exactly- but when they do, the people they give the old computers to will go to Linux.
So unless computer hardware venders start mainstream selling PC's with Linux installed
You mean like Fry's does? For $400 less than a compariable Wintel System?
don't expect massive adoption.
Depends on your meaning of the term massive, doesn't it? I see linux growing in two areas on the desktop: Cheap NEW internet terminals with 1/3rd the power of what Vista needs just to run, and people who run organizations that live off of charity (like schools) that need an OS that will run on older hardware and has cheap licensing.
Best I could see there was a 512MB for $49.99- and it was USB, not Compact flash.
Can you provide a link? A 4GB, or even a 256MB CF drive with all of that extra functionality would go great in my IPAQ- regardless of the fact that it's a device on it's own.
This time around, from the hardware specs alone, if it doesn't spur widespread adoption of Linux on the business desktop, it will spur widespread adoption of linux among honest poor people that get the business's 6-month old desktops and laptops that won't run Vista.
More the renaming of the angency in 1979- it had been in existance since the original Congressional Act of 1803 providing assistance to a small New Hampshire town that had burned down from lightning.
Well, that's what you get from buying computers from a bank. Why don't you just run HijackThis and remove the registry keys for the bundled application? Or better yet, buy an all in one from Epson or Canon or even Lexmark that doesn't come with the bundled photo album software?
It's not the All-in-one's fault- it's the software that came with it, and you can't malign the whole set of peripherials by your choice to buy from Dell.
Same thing- it's still the rather racist idea that gangsta rap incites violence.
Back in the early 1990s, 5 minutes out of every hour HAD to be public service announcements, by our educational charter. Those got VERY repetitive and boring after a while. The students at KTRU would likely be happy to have something else to read OTHER than the 200th announcement this term telling people to wear seatbelts.