The governor estimates a business tax increase of $64 million by eliminating the distinction between canned software sold at retail (subject to sales tax), custom software (subject to service occupation tax on the value of tangible personal property transferred with the software) and software licensed or leased by the developer (currently not taxed).
The story made it sound like there was going to be a new tax on all software created and not sold in a retail store. However, reading the article carefully, it sounds like the tax is only going to be levied on software that is sold with software (hence, "customized" to the hardware). As noted above, software licensed or leased by the developer will not be taxed, and I believe that most software developed falls under this distinction.
Of course, I am not a lawyer, but it would hurt my business here if there were extra special taxes applied to my software (and the consumer, of course). I guess I will have to find a lawyer to explain this to me more clearly.
"with no buyer protection, no seller authentication, and no desire to participate in seller-buyer conflicts, no return policy, can the business model be sustained?"
Yes.
eBay is wildly popular, continues to grow in ways people don't expect. Go check out their stock growth. While I know that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good company, eBay has had solid returns for the last several years.
If eBay can get away with not providing things like buyer/seller resolution up to this point--I'm guessing they can get away with it for a while to come.
I am currently working on developing a full featured 'running log' for the palm os. Once I get it past the initial design stage I intend to GPL it and put is up on source forge. Any other geek runners interested?
I workout, and I have looked for a Palm app that does what you describe. I have not found a decent one. I am also a professional developer, but I'm interested in getting into Palm development in my spare time (I have a Linux box sitting at home ready for me to begin development on it). I would love to help out--I think this would be a great project for me to learn PalmOS development (I've heard it's more difficult than other types of programming).
I have found the concept of special relativity particularly fascinating. The way that Einstein described spacetime I still find to be quite neat, even though it's a (relatively) old theory at this point. It seems like we're on a speed-of-light course through this universe, and when you're relative velocity is 0, then you are traveling through time at the speed of light (if such a concept can be grasped), and conversely, when you travel at the speed of light, then time is stopped for you (so that the vector sums of velocity through space and time always add up to the speed of light). The simplistic genious of that blows me away, and I love reading any material that has any more insight or explanation into relativity. I even find quantum mechanics to be interesting to study (though the math sucks).
I bought The Elegant Universe a few years ago, and I loved it. I think this is definitely going to be worth checking out at the library.
The nature of most viruses and worms means that they are shared quite ubiquitously. If you have received any of these viruses, then you have the code that makes them work. It's not hard to reverse engineer most code, and it's even easier if the language is something like VB script.
I remember getting the Anna Kornukova virus 4 years ago and just inspecting the script to see exactly how it worked. It would not be tough for a script kiddie to take that and modify it enough to get past virus filters. I'm sure there is virus code sharing, and I'm sure it's increasing, but if you really want to get your hands on the code, the author doesn't even need to intend to share it, he already has!
OK, maybe those really deep field galaxies are still too young to have life
If you believe that the big bang is the true origin of the universe, then you have to understand that what you are seeing is currently the same age as the universe around us. What you are seeing is an image from billions of years ago, and those stars/planets would have matured just as much as the sun and earth.
Here's a great example of that (this guy really pissed me off).
Steven S. Zumdahl at UIUC wrote an Intro Chemistry book--they still seem to be using it there even though he doesn't teach that class anymore. Here's a link to their Chem 101 class:.
Every few years he would come out with a new edition of the book (he's on 6 right now), and the _only_ difference between each edition is the problems at the end of the chapters are scrambled (the numbers aren't even changed)!
I heard rumor that U of I was upset by his blatant misuse of his position there to force students to buy new textbooks, but I can't be certain that is true.
I had edition 4 or 5 when I went to school there, and when I tried to sell it back they would only give me $5 for it because of the new edition. I thought it was far more worthwhile (and entertaining) to keep it and then burn it.
I should probably submit this anonymously*, but what the heck.
I don't know if it is in our genes, or if it's a product of our environment, but male ego resulting from male dominance even affects me a ton.
I was running on a treadmill earlier this week, and there was a girl who was running on one next to me at the same time, at roughly the same speed. There was _no_ way I was going to let myself stop before she did--because she was a girl. And I recognized this as I was running.
Seems kind of silly, I know, but that's what was in my head.
*I've heard that posting anonymously at slashdot isn't really, so what's the difference?
My second-to-last year of college, I had signed a lease for a house just off campus for the next school year. It was looking forward to it because it was a nice house and I'd be rooming with my closest buddies.
Unfortunately, when we went to move in, the place was trashed and grossly out of code for the city/county. In an effort to be released from the lease, I took a bunch of photographs of everything that was wrong with the house, but I took them on my digital camera. I even brought my camera to a developer and had the photos professionally developed.
Nevertheless, I brought my pictures to a lawyer (school-subsidized, provided for student lessor/lessee problems) and he said that if I wanted to use them in any practical way, I had to go take the pictures again with a real camera (and you could _barely_ tell it was digital).
Fortunately, we had enough evidence that the landlord caved (and we all learned many valuable lessons about leasing, and the law in that time period).
I believe that a great language to learn first is BASIC (whatever variety, probably not Visual) with the caveat that GOTO is disabled.
I know that it won't teach them OOP in the least, but OO at its heart is still functional, so adding the object abstraction after that won't be too much of a leap.
I believe BASIC is the way to go because you learn the major constructs of programming (types, loops, functions, etc) without the overhead or complexity of most other languages, and after enough programming (if you're even half clever), you will start to see what you need for 'good programming.' It's hard to teach algorithm efficiency, but even someone using BASIC enough will realize that there is a faster way to write a sort than using bubble sort. By this time they will have matured enough on the fundamentals that they can pick up an algorithm book, understand what it's saying and even move on to a better language.
While this is true, it would be trivial to write a script (Perl, PHP) that would let someone use the browser as an IDE.
Frankly, I'm quite surprised that the author or publisher of the book didn't provide this mechanism online.
The advantage to providing this interface to a beginning programmer is that they wouldn't have to worry about the HTML in the least (i.e. "This is how you 'set up' your script...with <html><head><script> etc.)
You started college in the middle of the dotcom boom. Salarys were inflated.
No college grad is worth $60k. Period.
We pay grads $35k. Good workers make it up to $50k in two years, mediocre ones go nowhere and shitty ones get fired.
I wouldn't say that no college grad is worth $60k right off the bat (I know I'm not)--there are some, but not many at all.
For instance, there could be someone with 10 years of experience that went back to get their degree for future job security. I know it's a technicality, but it shows the flaw in your argument. Also, a very skilled worker right out of college might be worth $60k to a company--that's their call to make.
I think the program you have is a very good one. It's a modest starting salary, but can become relatively good fairly quickly. That's the kind of company I would like to work for.
Funny troll, but I left out my degree and school so as to not sound boastful.
As humbly as I can put this, I got a BS in CS at UIUC (www.uiuc.edu).
I also managed to find the page that shows graduate salary ranges, and I was surprised that the average was a little higher than I thought. There must have been some late entries since last I looked.
Another interesting note is that since last year, the average has remained about the same, but the variance has incresed quite dramatically (which I consider good, because then it sounds like people are getting paid based on their skills and not on their degree).
Here's the url to that page I was talking about (in holding to my own sig): http://ecs.cen.uiuc.edu/employers/salaryoffers2.ht ml
When I started college over 4 years ago, the average salary of a grad (from my school, for my degree) was over $60,000/year.
When I graduated last year, it dropped below $40,000, and it was extremely difficult to find a job. I have a friend with the same computer related degree with a 3.92/4.0 gpa who still hasn't found a job yet. And yes, I know that gpa doesn't always equate to ability/productivity, but this guy is really good.
I'm glad to see that things are back on the upswing for technology, even if this is just a start.
Tracking? No, more like targetting!
on
The Trouble with RFID
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You're thinking about this all wrong. Take off your tin-foil hats, nobody really wants to 'track' you.
Now, what companies will really be salivating over is the opportunity to market to you. If they can track all of the RFID tags on and around you, they can know so much about you that they can tailor advertising to you specifically. Just like Minority Report, only not so cool.
Just think of it as value adding. You're adding so much value to the coffers of manufacturers and advertisers!
Firebird conatains a popup blocker, supports tabbed browsing, is more secure, and has a gestures plugin.
I always liked the idea of Mozilla, but I hadn't switched to it from IE because it was so slow, and you couldn't couldn't do domain name completion with CTRL+Enter (a feature I have really come to love).
When I heard that Firebird supported this, I tried it out and blown away by its speed. I love the built in popup blocking and tabbed browsing, and when I found out you could complete.net and.org with Shift and Ctrl combinations too, I determined to never switch back.
I'm still waiting for better plugins (like Flash doesn't always work, and even though I despise sites that use flash, I am still forced to use some of them), but in general, IE has bitten the dust as far as I'm concerned.
Just curious...what is it that you sell (especially for $99)? I've been interested in starting Palm development. Also, in what manner do you develop (CodeWarrior IDE, regular Palm SDK + gcc)?
Re:IP6s problem is the numeric addresses r so comp
on
The State of IPv6
·
· Score: 1
The same charges were leveled at IPv4 back when it came out -- it was considerably longer than was considered necessary (32-bits? That's way too much space!), it's a far bigger number than is convienently held in short-term memory, and yet, according to you, it's simple.
Funny how people adapt.
Between that and the mystic thing called "cut and paste" that's available on pretty much every platform known to man nowadays, this is a real non-issue.
Sure, people will adapt, but consider this. When I was in college I had 5 computers connected to the internet each with their own IP address (different locations - vastly different IPs) and I was able to memorize them all. For one of them I was using a public DNS system that crapped out all the time, so when my domain name was down, it was convenient to have the IP memorized. Try memorizing 1 IPv6 address. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it takes a ton of effort where glancing at one IPv4 address is enough to get it memorized.
Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to IPv6 (I really dislike having to use NAT at home, though I don't have a choice at work since we're firewalled up the wazoo), but for the human mind this is going to be a huge jump, and you can't cut-and-paste all the time, not when you're on a foreign system trying to remember how to access your home computer and DNS isn't working or set up for it.
As Linux gets more powerful, however, you're more likely to see turn-key solutions, out of box servers that have little or no modification by vender. That's when you'll see the real danger from attacks.
So what you're saying is that there are a lot of operator errors? There are a lot of people who install software but then don't change the defaults to secure it. I've seen that happen with RedHat...if you don't install the patches right after you install it (and you allow it in the net), it gets hacked (this was back during version 7 I believe).
Same thing happens with Microsoft. It does become unsecure for the default install--the default settings. How long did people know about the RPC vulnerabilities before the first worms attacked it, and yet hardly anybody patched their boxes.
I'm not trying to make a case that Microsoft is as secure as Linux (not by a long shot), but while we have (uneducated) users operating their computers, no matter what the platform, exploits will be successful. I have run many Windows machines over the years, both workstation and server, and not once has one of the machines I'm responsible for been hacked or hit by a virus/worm. However, I have run Linux boxes before, and because I'm not as familiar with them, they have been exploited (remote root exploits--I had to give my machine up to the FBI for investigation, this was back when I worked at a government institution).
The best you can do is write secure apps, but people will always fail at some point because no one is perfect. Exploits will always exists, and many exploits will be discovered over time. But if you don't have the users updating to covers the holes in the software they are using, it doesn't matter which OS they use, or which culture it came from, they will be hacked. And I believe that even if Linux were to gain 90% overall marketshare, we would still see as many problems as we do with Microsoft because of the users.
Looks like Apple will be going back to the drawing board. The iBooks look pretty thick in comparison.
Man, talk about groupthink (or whatever you all call it these days); I cannot believe the parent got moderated +3 Interesting for that comment.
I am not trying to troll, etc., but this is a non-comment. It should be rated +0 No Duh.
Apple was at, and has been at the drawing board long before this laptop came out, and they will continue to be at the drawing baord even after they release a product that's better. I would even bet that every laptop manufacturer is at (and has been at) the drawing board.
Anyway, my personal opinion is that the iBook and the PowerBook(s) are great thickness/size(s). They are at a very comfortable size. If you go too small, it's hard to use the laptop, and many features of a standard computer will be missing.
I know this might not be a popular answer, or even a hugely insightful one, but do you really want to work for someone that looks down on you because you worked at a high profile place that they don't particularly like?
For instance, let's say you worked at SCO, but you quit because you didn't agree with their business practices. While it should be easy enough to portray this in an interview (if you're lucky enough to get one), it shouldn't even be an issue because the potential employer should realize that _you_ didn't make the bad business decisions. If they do make that link then that might be a place to stay away from.
If you worked at Enron and you're looking for another job because the place you worked at went out of business--I think it would be very irresponsible of other businesses to (even indirectly) blame you for bad executive decisions (unless you were an executive, then I have to bad feelings for you having a hard time finding a job).
I know I'm probably just reciting some fairy tale, a pipe dream of true equal opportunity for those seeking jobs, but have hope that some company will see you for who you really are and really appreciate your talent in your field.
I work for a firm that writes software for options traders and clearing firms. Sometimes system glitches do happen (or more often than not, a user error, like entering in the wrong price). However, when this happens and a trade occurs, it sticks unless both parties agree to bust the trade.
The fact that the trades were cancelled without permission from everybody involved in the trades is quite disturbing (because then it can set up precedence that any of your trades could be cancelled without you knowing about it, and that can really screw up your position).
Some people lose money because of mistakes, and some people make money because of mistakes...that's part of how the market works, and you should be willing to accept that risk if you're going to trade.
If it really was that bad (and a $20 difference is huge), and archipellago did screw up, they should take responsiblity and take the losses. If someone just entered in the wrong ask price, then that firm should take the responsibility. I know if our systems screw up our traders, then we mitigate those losses.
I have a feeling there might be some lawsuits in the near future if there were a lot of shares traded.
Slashdot Mirror
The governor estimates a business tax increase of $64 million by eliminating the distinction between canned software sold at retail (subject to sales tax), custom software (subject to service occupation tax on the value of tangible personal property transferred with the software) and software licensed or leased by the developer (currently not taxed).
The story made it sound like there was going to be a new tax on all software created and not sold in a retail store. However, reading the article carefully, it sounds like the tax is only going to be levied on software that is sold with software (hence, "customized" to the hardware). As noted above, software licensed or leased by the developer will not be taxed, and I believe that most software developed falls under this distinction.
Of course, I am not a lawyer, but it would hurt my business here if there were extra special taxes applied to my software (and the consumer, of course). I guess I will have to find a lawyer to explain this to me more clearly.
"with no buyer protection, no seller authentication, and no desire to participate in seller-buyer conflicts, no return policy, can the business model be sustained?"
Yes.
eBay is wildly popular, continues to grow in ways people don't expect. Go check out their stock growth. While I know that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good company, eBay has had solid returns for the last several years.
If eBay can get away with not providing things like buyer/seller resolution up to this point--I'm guessing they can get away with it for a while to come.
I am currently working on developing a full featured 'running log' for the palm os. Once I get it past the initial design stage I intend to GPL it and put is up on source forge. Any other geek runners interested?
I workout, and I have looked for a Palm app that does what you describe. I have not found a decent one. I am also a professional developer, but I'm interested in getting into Palm development in my spare time (I have a Linux box sitting at home ready for me to begin development on it). I would love to help out--I think this would be a great project for me to learn PalmOS development (I've heard it's more difficult than other types of programming).
Email me, we can work something out.
Bill
I have found the concept of special relativity particularly fascinating. The way that Einstein described spacetime I still find to be quite neat, even though it's a (relatively) old theory at this point. It seems like we're on a speed-of-light course through this universe, and when you're relative velocity is 0, then you are traveling through time at the speed of light (if such a concept can be grasped), and conversely, when you travel at the speed of light, then time is stopped for you (so that the vector sums of velocity through space and time always add up to the speed of light). The simplistic genious of that blows me away, and I love reading any material that has any more insight or explanation into relativity. I even find quantum mechanics to be interesting to study (though the math sucks).
I bought The Elegant Universe a few years ago, and I loved it. I think this is definitely going to be worth checking out at the library.
The nature of most viruses and worms means that they are shared quite ubiquitously. If you have received any of these viruses, then you have the code that makes them work. It's not hard to reverse engineer most code, and it's even easier if the language is something like VB script.
I remember getting the Anna Kornukova virus 4 years ago and just inspecting the script to see exactly how it worked. It would not be tough for a script kiddie to take that and modify it enough to get past virus filters. I'm sure there is virus code sharing, and I'm sure it's increasing, but if you really want to get your hands on the code, the author doesn't even need to intend to share it, he already has!
OK, maybe those really deep field galaxies are still too young to have life
If you believe that the big bang is the true origin of the universe, then you have to understand that what you are seeing is currently the same age as the universe around us. What you are seeing is an image from billions of years ago, and those stars/planets would have matured just as much as the sun and earth.
Here's a great example of that (this guy really pissed me off).
.
Steven S. Zumdahl at UIUC wrote an Intro Chemistry book--they still seem to be using it there even though he doesn't teach that class anymore. Here's a link to their Chem 101 class:
Every few years he would come out with a new edition of the book (he's on 6 right now), and the _only_ difference between each edition is the problems at the end of the chapters are scrambled (the numbers aren't even changed)!
I heard rumor that U of I was upset by his blatant misuse of his position there to force students to buy new textbooks, but I can't be certain that is true.
I had edition 4 or 5 when I went to school there, and when I tried to sell it back they would only give me $5 for it because of the new edition. I thought it was far more worthwhile (and entertaining) to keep it and then burn it.
I should probably submit this anonymously*, but what the heck.
I don't know if it is in our genes, or if it's a product of our environment, but male ego resulting from male dominance even affects me a ton.
I was running on a treadmill earlier this week, and there was a girl who was running on one next to me at the same time, at roughly the same speed. There was _no_ way I was going to let myself stop before she did--because she was a girl. And I recognized this as I was running.
Seems kind of silly, I know, but that's what was in my head.
*I've heard that posting anonymously at slashdot isn't really, so what's the difference?
My second-to-last year of college, I had signed a lease for a house just off campus for the next school year. It was looking forward to it because it was a nice house and I'd be rooming with my closest buddies.
Unfortunately, when we went to move in, the place was trashed and grossly out of code for the city/county. In an effort to be released from the lease, I took a bunch of photographs of everything that was wrong with the house, but I took them on my digital camera. I even brought my camera to a developer and had the photos professionally developed.
Nevertheless, I brought my pictures to a lawyer (school-subsidized, provided for student lessor/lessee problems) and he said that if I wanted to use them in any practical way, I had to go take the pictures again with a real camera (and you could _barely_ tell it was digital).
Fortunately, we had enough evidence that the landlord caved (and we all learned many valuable lessons about leasing, and the law in that time period).
I believe that a great language to learn first is BASIC (whatever variety, probably not Visual) with the caveat that GOTO is disabled.
I know that it won't teach them OOP in the least, but OO at its heart is still functional, so adding the object abstraction after that won't be too much of a leap.
I believe BASIC is the way to go because you learn the major constructs of programming (types, loops, functions, etc) without the overhead or complexity of most other languages, and after enough programming (if you're even half clever), you will start to see what you need for 'good programming.' It's hard to teach algorithm efficiency, but even someone using BASIC enough will realize that there is a faster way to write a sort than using bubble sort. By this time they will have matured enough on the fundamentals that they can pick up an algorithm book, understand what it's saying and even move on to a better language.
5/5? 5/10?
I believe the standard rating model used here is out of 10 (in this case it would be 5 out of 10 'slashes').
I think that's safe to infer based on the text of the review.
The web browser is *not* an IDE
While this is true, it would be trivial to write a script (Perl, PHP) that would let someone use the browser as an IDE.
Frankly, I'm quite surprised that the author or publisher of the book didn't provide this mechanism online.
The advantage to providing this interface to a beginning programmer is that they wouldn't have to worry about the HTML in the least (i.e. "This is how you 'set up' your script...with <html><head><script> etc.)
You started college in the middle of the dotcom boom. Salarys were inflated. No college grad is worth $60k. Period. We pay grads $35k. Good workers make it up to $50k in two years, mediocre ones go nowhere and shitty ones get fired.
I wouldn't say that no college grad is worth $60k right off the bat (I know I'm not)--there are some, but not many at all.
For instance, there could be someone with 10 years of experience that went back to get their degree for future job security. I know it's a technicality, but it shows the flaw in your argument. Also, a very skilled worker right out of college might be worth $60k to a company--that's their call to make.
I think the program you have is a very good one. It's a modest starting salary, but can become relatively good fairly quickly. That's the kind of company I would like to work for.
Funny troll, but I left out my degree and school so as to not sound boastful.
t ml
As humbly as I can put this, I got a BS in CS at UIUC (www.uiuc.edu).
I also managed to find the page that shows graduate salary ranges, and I was surprised that the average was a little higher than I thought. There must have been some late entries since last I looked.
Another interesting note is that since last year, the average has remained about the same, but the variance has incresed quite dramatically (which I consider good, because then it sounds like people are getting paid based on their skills and not on their degree).
Here's the url to that page I was talking about (in holding to my own sig): http://ecs.cen.uiuc.edu/employers/salaryoffers2.h
When I started college over 4 years ago, the average salary of a grad (from my school, for my degree) was over $60,000/year.
When I graduated last year, it dropped below $40,000, and it was extremely difficult to find a job. I have a friend with the same computer related degree with a 3.92/4.0 gpa who still hasn't found a job yet. And yes, I know that gpa doesn't always equate to ability/productivity, but this guy is really good.
I'm glad to see that things are back on the upswing for technology, even if this is just a start.
You're thinking about this all wrong. Take off your tin-foil hats, nobody really wants to 'track' you.
Now, what companies will really be salivating over is the opportunity to market to you. If they can track all of the RFID tags on and around you, they can know so much about you that they can tailor advertising to you specifically. Just like Minority Report, only not so cool.
Just think of it as value adding. You're adding so much value to the coffers of manufacturers and advertisers!
Firebird conatains a popup blocker, supports tabbed browsing, is more secure, and has a gestures plugin.
.net and .org with Shift and Ctrl combinations too, I determined to never switch back.
I always liked the idea of Mozilla, but I hadn't switched to it from IE because it was so slow, and you couldn't couldn't do domain name completion with CTRL+Enter (a feature I have really come to love).
When I heard that Firebird supported this, I tried it out and blown away by its speed. I love the built in popup blocking and tabbed browsing, and when I found out you could complete
I'm still waiting for better plugins (like Flash doesn't always work, and even though I despise sites that use flash, I am still forced to use some of them), but in general, IE has bitten the dust as far as I'm concerned.
Just curious...what is it that you sell (especially for $99)? I've been interested in starting Palm development. Also, in what manner do you develop (CodeWarrior IDE, regular Palm SDK + gcc)?
The same charges were leveled at IPv4 back when it came out -- it was considerably longer than was considered necessary (32-bits? That's way too much space!), it's a far bigger number than is convienently held in short-term memory, and yet, according to you, it's simple.
Funny how people adapt.
Between that and the mystic thing called "cut and paste" that's available on pretty much every platform known to man nowadays, this is a real non-issue.
Sure, people will adapt, but consider this. When I was in college I had 5 computers connected to the internet each with their own IP address (different locations - vastly different IPs) and I was able to memorize them all. For one of them I was using a public DNS system that crapped out all the time, so when my domain name was down, it was convenient to have the IP memorized. Try memorizing 1 IPv6 address. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it takes a ton of effort where glancing at one IPv4 address is enough to get it memorized.
Don't get me wrong, I am looking forward to IPv6 (I really dislike having to use NAT at home, though I don't have a choice at work since we're firewalled up the wazoo), but for the human mind this is going to be a huge jump, and you can't cut-and-paste all the time, not when you're on a foreign system trying to remember how to access your home computer and DNS isn't working or set up for it.
It is a well-known fact that the Irish Potato Famine wasn't caused by a lack of potatoes; rather it was an overabundance of Irishmen.
Isn't this basically saying the same thing? (i.e. like the other side of the coin)
Also, see my sig.
As Linux gets more powerful, however, you're more likely to see turn-key solutions, out of box servers that have little or no modification by vender. That's when you'll see the real danger from attacks.
So what you're saying is that there are a lot of operator errors? There are a lot of people who install software but then don't change the defaults to secure it. I've seen that happen with RedHat...if you don't install the patches right after you install it (and you allow it in the net), it gets hacked (this was back during version 7 I believe).
Same thing happens with Microsoft. It does become unsecure for the default install--the default settings. How long did people know about the RPC vulnerabilities before the first worms attacked it, and yet hardly anybody patched their boxes.
I'm not trying to make a case that Microsoft is as secure as Linux (not by a long shot), but while we have (uneducated) users operating their computers, no matter what the platform, exploits will be successful. I have run many Windows machines over the years, both workstation and server, and not once has one of the machines I'm responsible for been hacked or hit by a virus/worm. However, I have run Linux boxes before, and because I'm not as familiar with them, they have been exploited (remote root exploits--I had to give my machine up to the FBI for investigation, this was back when I worked at a government institution).
The best you can do is write secure apps, but people will always fail at some point because no one is perfect. Exploits will always exists, and many exploits will be discovered over time. But if you don't have the users updating to covers the holes in the software they are using, it doesn't matter which OS they use, or which culture it came from, they will be hacked. And I believe that even if Linux were to gain 90% overall marketshare, we would still see as many problems as we do with Microsoft because of the users.
Looks like Apple will be going back to the drawing board. The iBooks look pretty thick in comparison.
Man, talk about groupthink (or whatever you all call it these days); I cannot believe the parent got moderated +3 Interesting for that comment.
I am not trying to troll, etc., but this is a non-comment. It should be rated +0 No Duh.
Apple was at, and has been at the drawing board long before this laptop came out, and they will continue to be at the drawing baord even after they release a product that's better. I would even bet that every laptop manufacturer is at (and has been at) the drawing board.
Anyway, my personal opinion is that the iBook and the PowerBook(s) are great thickness/size(s). They are at a very comfortable size. If you go too small, it's hard to use the laptop, and many features of a standard computer will be missing.
I know this might not be a popular answer, or even a hugely insightful one, but do you really want to work for someone that looks down on you because you worked at a high profile place that they don't particularly like?
For instance, let's say you worked at SCO, but you quit because you didn't agree with their business practices. While it should be easy enough to portray this in an interview (if you're lucky enough to get one), it shouldn't even be an issue because the potential employer should realize that _you_ didn't make the bad business decisions. If they do make that link then that might be a place to stay away from.
If you worked at Enron and you're looking for another job because the place you worked at went out of business--I think it would be very irresponsible of other businesses to (even indirectly) blame you for bad executive decisions (unless you were an executive, then I have to bad feelings for you having a hard time finding a job).
I know I'm probably just reciting some fairy tale, a pipe dream of true equal opportunity for those seeking jobs, but have hope that some company will see you for who you really are and really appreciate your talent in your field.
I work for a firm that writes software for options traders and clearing firms. Sometimes system glitches do happen (or more often than not, a user error, like entering in the wrong price). However, when this happens and a trade occurs, it sticks unless both parties agree to bust the trade.
The fact that the trades were cancelled without permission from everybody involved in the trades is quite disturbing (because then it can set up precedence that any of your trades could be cancelled without you knowing about it, and that can really screw up your position).
Some people lose money because of mistakes, and some people make money because of mistakes...that's part of how the market works, and you should be willing to accept that risk if you're going to trade.
If it really was that bad (and a $20 difference is huge), and archipellago did screw up, they should take responsiblity and take the losses. If someone just entered in the wrong ask price, then that firm should take the responsibility. I know if our systems screw up our traders, then we mitigate those losses.
I have a feeling there might be some lawsuits in the near future if there were a lot of shares traded.
A biologist, physicist and mathematician are all sitting outside a restaurant enjoying a meal.
They notice two people walk into a house across the street. Fifteen minutes later they notice three people walk out of the same house.
A little disturbed, the physicist exclaims, "That's impossible! They broke the law the conservation of mass & energy."
The biologist answers, "No, they simply reproduced."
The mathematician, knowing they are both wrong says, "There are now exactly -1 people in that house."