Oh, and hope they update it multiple times every god damn year to keep up to date with the ever changing tax code.
I think you've identified the real problem. It's not that there is no open source tax software, it's that your tax system is so complex that it requires software to file the return.
But that doesn't make it obvious that a dental x-ray would be a source of such mutations. Like all x-rays they are carefully dosed and focused on a narrow region.
I've had a couple of dental X-rays. Both times I was asked if I'd had any kind of head X-ray within the last year. The last one was almost a decade ago, and even then they were very hesitant to X-ray anyone more than once every few years. Saying that there is an increased risk for people who have 'one or more' dental X-rays per year is repeating something that dentists have apparently known for a very long time. Quantifying that risk may be news, but the existence of it certainly isn't.
There are still lots of small companies around, and increasingly they're hiring people to work remotely. I've done a lot of interesting work for random small companies around the world over the last year.
someone in India is not only learning it better, but willing to work for cheaper
That's not my experience of Indian programmers. Well, both parts of your statement are correct: someone in India is learning it better, and also someone in India is willing to work for cheaper. They are not usually the same person, however.
That's 64KB of code and data, so it's still fairly impressive. Even if you're using a completely off-the-shelf 3D engine, fitting all of the geometry and textures for a virtual environment into 64KB is nontrivial.
The point of class action lawsuits is not to give a return for the victims, it's to punish people and companies that do a very small amount of harm to a lot of people. There's no point in suing over damages of $10, and little point over $100 unless you can do it in the small claims court and you're unemployed. Even asking a lawyer if it's worth going to court will probably cost more than you'll get back. If someone does something that causes damages worth $10 each to a million people though, that can be quite profitable if none of them is going to sue to recover their loss. If they did all go through the small claims courts, then this would be quite an effective DDoS on the legal system, so it's far from ideal. The class action suit is meant to cost the company enough to discourage this behaviour. If spending about $5m and a load of bad publicity costs more than properly securing your server, then it sounds like it worked just fine in this instance.
Think about the American mentality, freedom and liberty first
Is it? I thought the American mentality was 'I am entitled to the best of everything because my country is the greatest! Freedom and liberty, for me, not for anyone else.' Maybe I missed something.
A taxi driving pattern is probably one of the toughest you would typically find, so they can't be too bad for more regular use.
Taxis are pretty much the ideal usage pattern for a hybrid. Taxis spend most of their time starting and stopping, which means that they're constantly using the electric motor for short periods. Normal driving patterns won't see such a benefit.
The question is how long my battery pack will last - it's warranted for 100,000 miles but seems to be holding a charge OK
You probably want to try doing complete discharge cycles regularly and storing it somewhere warm. With luck, you can get it to fail just before the warranty expires, get a free replacement, and then actually look after that one...
The only way to make bikes come out ahead is to mandate that the rider not wear a helmet.
Last study I read showed that people who wear a bike helmet have a slightly reduced chance of death but a significantly increased chance of permanent paralysis (a bike helmet only protects you from a small number of collision types, but a big bulky weight attached your head makes spinal injuries more likely). Oh, and people wearing a helmet were more likely to be involved in an accident in the first place (not sure why, possibly slightly reduced ability to turn their head, or to hear, or maybe the feeling of safety from the helmet overriding normal caution). So maybe wearing a helmet is a better option...
DARPA has a 10 stage model for this kind of thing where, roughly speaking, stage 1 is 'wouldn't it be cool to be able to listen to all of your music wherever you are?' and stage 10 is an iPod. Typically, universities only do stages 1-4 in this, where the end result is a mostly working proof-of-concept. Corporate research does stages 3-7, where the end result is a working prototype, possibly too big, or with some other serious limitations. Corporate development does stages 6-10, where the end result of the last couple of stages is a shipping product and a revision.
If universities are trying to do stages 5-8 in this model, then that's probably the problem. It means that they're failing badly at technology transfer.
Yes, but that can also be an advantage. You can market it as avoiding lock in. If you don't want to - or don't have the manpower to - do a particular job for a customer that's built their company on your solution then they aren't stuck, they can go elsewhere without having an expensive migration. It can also help to grow the market. If you're just a small startup then you can probably not handle more than half a dozen moderately big clients at a time. On the other hand, you and a dozen other small companies may be able to fill the demand. As you grow, your expertise with the system probably means you can start undercutting others, or maybe start subcontracting some of the better ones...
Remember that the Facebook T&Cs give them a nonexclusive, transferable, sublicenseable, commercial copyright license to anything you upload. They've started making money from selling photos that people upload, and I doubt this will stop any time soon...
FireWire 800 cables fit in the Ethernet port and Apple puts the two next to each other. If you're not looking, it's easy to plug the FW800 cable into the Ethernet port and wonder why nothing is happening.
Or do they cover burying the public in excessive copies of useless physical media?
I used to call Compuserve and AOL's free number every couple of weeks to get them to send me a trial. It came on 2-3 floppy disks. Stick a new label on them, reformat, and they work well. I don't think I ever had to buy new floppy disks.
Then again... "intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications" is ok just as long as it does not affect US citizens?
The real problem with this line of reasoning (which is very common in the USA - rights are only for citizens) is that it opens you up to easy abuses. The NSA spies on British citizens, GCHQ spies on US citizens, and both can say 'we don't spy on our own people!'. Of course, they share data when something interesting crops up...
Basically, the only reply to OSS business models is "support your product". If the product is so easy/good that no support is required, then you might as well have no product at all.
Please can we stop repeating this fallacy? That is not what support means. When people talk about paying for support in open source does not mean paying for someone to answer the phone and tell you how to use it. It does not even mean paying for training (although that can be a good business model too). It means paying to turn a product (software) into a solution (something that directly addresses a real need).
Very few off-the-shelf software packages do exactly what the user needs without any customisation. Even something like MS Office generates a huge amount of business for people writing business-specific templates, macros, wizards and so on. In a big company, you'll have customised interfaces for generating all of the standard forms of document that the company requires. Someone had to write all of these, and that person got paid. They would have been paid just as much if the company had been using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. By the way, this is one of the reasons why MS Office doesn't do as badly as you'd expect in TCO calculations: for a big company the cost of customisation is a significant part of the total cost.
The more esoteric the software is, the more that it's going to need time (and therefore money) spent integrating it into a business. This is how companies like IBM make most of their money. It doesn't matter to their business model if the software is proprietary or open: if it's open then it means that they get lots of reusable building blocks for free, but the final solution is so tailored to their customer that they won't be selling it more than once anyway. Look at SAP: their software is proprietary, but it doesn't have to be because their entire business model involves charging a lot of money to customise it. They could give away a stock install for free and still charge a lot for the customisation.
As I said, there are some very good third-party sites using the same data. For example, The Open Source Routing Machine is very fast, seems to route well, and has a much nicer search feature. Unfortunately, it's AGPL, so it's unlikely to be integrated into... well, anything else. As to scalability, the model where anyone can set up a server for the data that they care about seems that it will scale better than the model where Google has to serve everything and then work out how to justify the expense...
Really? My phone isn't exactly the fastest around - it's an HTC Desire, so about two years old - and redraws happen fast. It's very fast if you use tiles rather than vector maps, but that comes at the cost of either more network or storage usage. The only time it's really slow is when you find the zoom level that has half a country in it but it still tries to draw most of the road. I've never seen it crash either. Route finding could be a bit faster, but it's only a beta feature at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and hope they update it multiple times every god damn year to keep up to date with the ever changing tax code.
I think you've identified the real problem. It's not that there is no open source tax software, it's that your tax system is so complex that it requires software to file the return.
But that doesn't make it obvious that a dental x-ray would be a source of such mutations. Like all x-rays they are carefully dosed and focused on a narrow region.
I've had a couple of dental X-rays. Both times I was asked if I'd had any kind of head X-ray within the last year. The last one was almost a decade ago, and even then they were very hesitant to X-ray anyone more than once every few years. Saying that there is an increased risk for people who have 'one or more' dental X-rays per year is repeating something that dentists have apparently known for a very long time. Quantifying that risk may be news, but the existence of it certainly isn't.
There are still lots of small companies around, and increasingly they're hiring people to work remotely. I've done a lot of interesting work for random small companies around the world over the last year.
someone in India is not only learning it better, but willing to work for cheaper
That's not my experience of Indian programmers. Well, both parts of your statement are correct: someone in India is learning it better, and also someone in India is willing to work for cheaper. They are not usually the same person, however.
That's 64KB of code and data, so it's still fairly impressive. Even if you're using a completely off-the-shelf 3D engine, fitting all of the geometry and textures for a virtual environment into 64KB is nontrivial.
The point of class action lawsuits is not to give a return for the victims, it's to punish people and companies that do a very small amount of harm to a lot of people. There's no point in suing over damages of $10, and little point over $100 unless you can do it in the small claims court and you're unemployed. Even asking a lawyer if it's worth going to court will probably cost more than you'll get back. If someone does something that causes damages worth $10 each to a million people though, that can be quite profitable if none of them is going to sue to recover their loss. If they did all go through the small claims courts, then this would be quite an effective DDoS on the legal system, so it's far from ideal. The class action suit is meant to cost the company enough to discourage this behaviour. If spending about $5m and a load of bad publicity costs more than properly securing your server, then it sounds like it worked just fine in this instance.
Hello APK, still trolling? Check my post history and you can easily find the titles. Here's a hint: look for stories about Xen for the first one...
In the UK diesel is more expensive than petrol
Diesel is more expensive than petrol if you measure by volume, it isn't if you measure by energy value.
Think about the American mentality, freedom and liberty first
Is it? I thought the American mentality was 'I am entitled to the best of everything because my country is the greatest! Freedom and liberty, for me, not for anyone else.' Maybe I missed something.
A taxi driving pattern is probably one of the toughest you would typically find, so they can't be too bad for more regular use.
Taxis are pretty much the ideal usage pattern for a hybrid. Taxis spend most of their time starting and stopping, which means that they're constantly using the electric motor for short periods. Normal driving patterns won't see such a benefit.
The question is how long my battery pack will last - it's warranted for 100,000 miles but seems to be holding a charge OK
You probably want to try doing complete discharge cycles regularly and storing it somewhere warm. With luck, you can get it to fail just before the warranty expires, get a free replacement, and then actually look after that one...
The only way to make bikes come out ahead is to mandate that the rider not wear a helmet.
Last study I read showed that people who wear a bike helmet have a slightly reduced chance of death but a significantly increased chance of permanent paralysis (a bike helmet only protects you from a small number of collision types, but a big bulky weight attached your head makes spinal injuries more likely). Oh, and people wearing a helmet were more likely to be involved in an accident in the first place (not sure why, possibly slightly reduced ability to turn their head, or to hear, or maybe the feeling of safety from the helmet overriding normal caution). So maybe wearing a helmet is a better option...
DARPA has a 10 stage model for this kind of thing where, roughly speaking, stage 1 is 'wouldn't it be cool to be able to listen to all of your music wherever you are?' and stage 10 is an iPod. Typically, universities only do stages 1-4 in this, where the end result is a mostly working proof-of-concept. Corporate research does stages 3-7, where the end result is a working prototype, possibly too big, or with some other serious limitations. Corporate development does stages 6-10, where the end result of the last couple of stages is a shipping product and a revision.
If universities are trying to do stages 5-8 in this model, then that's probably the problem. It means that they're failing badly at technology transfer.
Yes, but that can also be an advantage. You can market it as avoiding lock in. If you don't want to - or don't have the manpower to - do a particular job for a customer that's built their company on your solution then they aren't stuck, they can go elsewhere without having an expensive migration. It can also help to grow the market. If you're just a small startup then you can probably not handle more than half a dozen moderately big clients at a time. On the other hand, you and a dozen other small companies may be able to fill the demand. As you grow, your expertise with the system probably means you can start undercutting others, or maybe start subcontracting some of the better ones...
avoid conversation with unknown [...] people
This is a wiser way of life (IMHO). Trust no one.
No wonder your slashdot posts always seem so bitter. You must lead a very depressing life.
And if you do believe that, you have some reading to do about the justice system.
Let's call it a legal system. The phrase justice system may be guilty of misleading advertising.
Also, he's absolutely right about "African-American" being a stupid term that needs to die.
It's especially funny when the US press tries to use it about any black people, including English people of Australian aboriginal descent...
that blacks have lower median IQ than whites (true),
By about 4 points, with 90% of the black and white populations being in the same range.
higher rates of criminality than whites (true),
Or, at least, higher prison sentencing rates in the USA. Whether that correlates to committing more crimes is debatable.
and that you shouldn't go into black neighbourhoods (duh).
You don't go into poor neighbourhoods in a lot of cities. There is quite a significant overlap between poor and black in much of the USA.
Remember that the Facebook T&Cs give them a nonexclusive, transferable, sublicenseable, commercial copyright license to anything you upload. They've started making money from selling photos that people upload, and I doubt this will stop any time soon...
FireWire 800 cables fit in the Ethernet port and Apple puts the two next to each other. If you're not looking, it's easy to plug the FW800 cable into the Ethernet port and wonder why nothing is happening.
Or do they cover burying the public in excessive copies of useless physical media?
I used to call Compuserve and AOL's free number every couple of weeks to get them to send me a trial. It came on 2-3 floppy disks. Stick a new label on them, reformat, and they work well. I don't think I ever had to buy new floppy disks.
Then again... "intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications" is ok just as long as it does not affect US citizens?
The real problem with this line of reasoning (which is very common in the USA - rights are only for citizens) is that it opens you up to easy abuses. The NSA spies on British citizens, GCHQ spies on US citizens, and both can say 'we don't spy on our own people!'. Of course, they share data when something interesting crops up...
Basically, the only reply to OSS business models is "support your product". If the product is so easy/good that no support is required, then you might as well have no product at all.
Please can we stop repeating this fallacy? That is not what support means. When people talk about paying for support in open source does not mean paying for someone to answer the phone and tell you how to use it. It does not even mean paying for training (although that can be a good business model too). It means paying to turn a product (software) into a solution (something that directly addresses a real need).
Very few off-the-shelf software packages do exactly what the user needs without any customisation. Even something like MS Office generates a huge amount of business for people writing business-specific templates, macros, wizards and so on. In a big company, you'll have customised interfaces for generating all of the standard forms of document that the company requires. Someone had to write all of these, and that person got paid. They would have been paid just as much if the company had been using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. By the way, this is one of the reasons why MS Office doesn't do as badly as you'd expect in TCO calculations: for a big company the cost of customisation is a significant part of the total cost.
The more esoteric the software is, the more that it's going to need time (and therefore money) spent integrating it into a business. This is how companies like IBM make most of their money. It doesn't matter to their business model if the software is proprietary or open: if it's open then it means that they get lots of reusable building blocks for free, but the final solution is so tailored to their customer that they won't be selling it more than once anyway. Look at SAP: their software is proprietary, but it doesn't have to be because their entire business model involves charging a lot of money to customise it. They could give away a stock install for free and still charge a lot for the customisation.
As I said, there are some very good third-party sites using the same data. For example, The Open Source Routing Machine is very fast, seems to route well, and has a much nicer search feature. Unfortunately, it's AGPL, so it's unlikely to be integrated into... well, anything else. As to scalability, the model where anyone can set up a server for the data that they care about seems that it will scale better than the model where Google has to serve everything and then work out how to justify the expense...
Really? My phone isn't exactly the fastest around - it's an HTC Desire, so about two years old - and redraws happen fast. It's very fast if you use tiles rather than vector maps, but that comes at the cost of either more network or storage usage. The only time it's really slow is when you find the zoom level that has half a country in it but it still tries to draw most of the road. I've never seen it crash either. Route finding could be a bit faster, but it's only a beta feature at the moment.