How is this news? A company obtaining finance and giving their bank good security is normal practice in business. If anything is weird here it is that Sharp does not already have these assets securing loans. The tone gives me the impression this is meant to be bad news for Sharp, but there is no clue why in the summary.
Reading TFA, it seems the story here is that Sharp is in deep financial trouble, but the good news is that they have been able to refinance, thus answering Moody's recent concerns. The particular importance of Sharp is that they are seen as symbolic of current weakness in the Japanese electronics industry, they are one of the few manufacturers of LCD screens, and the lack of finance had cast doubt on their ability to make screens for Apple's upcoming new iPhone and iPad products.
Surprised at this, because I find iPlayer is a hundred times better than the other services I've used: 4OD, 5Player, ITV and LoveFilm. (I'm not counting YouTube due to the content.) To be fair, a large part of this is probably that iPlayer downloads at about 9Mb/s for me.
Incidentally my opinions on the services are roughly the opposite from what should reasonably be expected. YouTube can be the best, even the advertising is trivial. Admittedly "can be" is a bit of a caveat, not many videos are high quality, I'm not supposed to be able to download them, and it does require letting the videos buffer (probably their major advantage is they do actually let you, however).
iPlayer is second-best, even though they have no means of generating revenue from my viewing. 4OD, 5Player and ITV are utterly shit in every way, even though they're the ones making money from my viewing. LoveFilm (the UK's closest equivalent to Netflix, other than Netflix which doesn't have rights to much here) is the worst of the bunch even though it's a premium service.
No, it's not common and the courts take a dim view. If any term in a no-compete is considered overly strict the court will just null they entire thing (they cannot reduce it to a reasonable level).
Anyway they've shot themselves in the foot by trying to make everything short term contracts. Nobody signs up for 6 months with the prospect of limiting what they can do in the following 6 months. I resent contracts anyway, way to build a committed employee-employer relationship there guys:/
Even if someone did have a no-compete, unless they were a senior manager or something I can't imagine a company bothering to try and enforce it.
Average efficiency? Is this some thing where the manufacturers have to sell x efficient vehicles in order to sell y inefficient but profitable models?
If I follow that correctly, no wonder "Thirteen major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have endorsed the new standards." 13 major automakers basically have the low and middle market all sown up - the efficient vehicle market. It's implausible to begin competing in that market, where scale economics is so strong. Any niche or boutique auto maker, they're stuffed.
The UK approach is to vary the annual road tax based on emissions. I had figured it would be a net tax hike, but it's actually pretty easy to be paying quite a lot less even with a midrange car with fairly basic eco credentials. There's a couple of reasons it works even more effectively than you would think, given that the road tax is actually a pretty small part of an annual car costs.
So consumers want high mpg cars anyway, the road tax is just another small reason. But in business, it's more significant. The road tax savings maybe do not add up to a lot in the context of the entire business, maybe not a lot to each car operator, maybe not a lot to the shareholders, but typically there's one guy who manages all the cars, and to him all those savings really do add up. This is the guy who makes the fleet purchasing decision. That in itself is significant, but the auto makers love the guy who makes the fleet purchasing decision more than all their other customers and they tailor any fleet-compatible type of car to what the fleet buyer wants.
Oh and the co2 approach flows through for tax aswell. If you are given a company car in UK you are taxed on it's value as if it were cash (roughly). But they changed it to co2, so now those getting more efficient vehicles are making a tax saving. Everybody agrees with the fleet buyer what a great job he's done this year.
If you're going to manipulate the market, use economics and apply it to the demand side.
If the money went to directly improving the system it taxed, then yes. I would love to see a tax that helped pay for a nation-wide fiber-optic system that replaced the aged copper system we rely on.
I do not have an issue with subsidising broadband. I am curious however why it is only other broadband users doing the subsidising?
I do not see why there is some special duty imposed on those who have broadband, nor some special relief for those who do not. Existing broadband users do not appear to benefit in any special way. They are not a cause of the lack of broadband in the other areas.
I didn't interpret anything in the segment implying that the one-day course is going to turn you into a developer. It seemed very obvious to me that it's an introducer type course - getting the gist over, a starting point for someone considering changing/supplementing careers or to have a vague idea what the developers at their work are doing.
Perhaps they could have spelt it out over and over again - well they did keep saying "basic" - but it seemed quite obvious to me. That's not to say those interpreting differently are stupid. If the US TV imported over here is any indication, US TV likes to really spells things out - if that's what you're used to then it's quite reasonable to expect it.
I'm a qualified accountant, I could teach the basics of accountancy in one day. Enough to be an accountant the next day? No. Enough to help someone decide if it might be a career for them? Yes. Enough to enable a manager to make good use of reporting? Yes. Enough for a manager to broadly understand what their accounting staff are doing and why they cannot have the accounts "Monday"? Yes.
Since the vast majority if your files aren't changing frequently, use daily an incremental backup. There's options out there which will let you run it at the end of the working day and turn off your machine once its done.
Can you throw some cabling into the garage? Else WiFi would probably do. Stick a NAS in there, configure the software, make a once-monthly entry into your calendar to check the backups are viable and you can forget about it. Well, until winter maybe.
Run a second backup say over the weekend and swap drives at a family/friend house. Safety deposit box if necessary.
After each shoot, be realistic about what photographs you keep. I'd wager a smallish fraction of what you're keeping now. Remember there is some overhead cost in retaining those files, nevermind in hard drives but in your time sorting through it.
QB often just can't update older versions. If you're going from 2006 to 2012 you probably need to first update it to 2008. Also, it needs to be an admin account doing it.
If either of those things are a problem, the QB error message usually does not offer any clues. If you have a private accountant they probably have all versions and can do it for you very quickly.
And yeah, take a backup from the old QB, install the new QB then load the backup. Usually works better than trying to upgrade the currently installed software + data at the same time. It also does not overwrite the old version so you should be fine to carry on with the old version if the upgrade doesn't work.
If all else fails, wait until the year-end, take the printouts from the old QB and start afresh on the new QB.
QB is for small organisations. It works very well for that. QB is by far and away the easiest widely-used software for a non-skilled person to use. Most small biz do not have their own bookkeeper, they get some administrative assistant to do it with maybe half a day's training from an accountant. And no, an administrative assistant is no substitute for a bookkeeper, which is a skilled, specialist job requiring training, experience and discipline.
QB is not crap just because it doesn't do the job you wanted it for in the same way a motorcycle isn't a crap vehicle just because it doesn't do haulage very well. You had the wrong tool for the job. Well okay, it's premier line is maybe stepping out into waters it's not best suited for, but I'm surprised if anyone who has any idea what they're doing is recommending that.
With 5 stores, the obvious software to have a look at is Sage. It's a lot more powerful, but does require a competent bookkeeper with good Sage experience and a skilled-person salary. There's a very good chance you'll have even more problems with Sage, not so much due to the software not being able to do something, but rather because it often requires a specific way of doing things - a particularly disciplined, systematic approach that is a result of their higher product lines which assume you have dedicated sales and purchase ledger clerks, carefully thought out systems with regular housekeeping routines etc. Once mistakes get entered and things get messy, the mess stacks up real fast.
For industrial processes that are labour intensive, the worker's salary is a high proportion of the total production cost. Despite the individual's wage being low, they get through few units, so the cost per unit is still pretty high. If we assume for illustrative purposes that the worker's wage is typically 50% of the cost per unit, then the maximum a worker is ever going to get for turning out an extra 5% more units per hour is a 10% increase in wages (at which point his cost per unit would be the same again, 100/50*5%). The primary way to make profit is to minimise wages, secondly maximise throughput, third control machinery costs (and of course control overheads).
The more automated the process, the more units there are to divide the salary into cost per unit. If the worker represents 10% of the cost per unit, and he figures out how to get 5% more units per hour through his section, the maximum possible pay increase he might get for this is 100/10*5% = 50%. The primary way to maximise profit is to maximise throughput, secondly to control machinery costs... Furthermore, in highly automated processes any downtime is excruciatingly expensive because most of the costs are fixed, so bosses want more competent staff and are more willing to pay up to avoid strikes.
This is why Germany does plenty well out of manufacturing. Wages are high but they're incredibly efficient. There's some good case studies with UK car manufacturing aswell. The industry was in tailspin here but one of them (I keep thinking Honda, but I may be confused as they were the first to want to do it but somehow Rover bosses and the politicians didn't go for it) had the audacity to respond by investing heavily and modernising, turning their plant around and into one of the most productive in the world. Sure the car industry is nothing compared to what it once was, but there's a few good plants and it's still quite a chunk of jobs which are paid pretty well.
In fairness it's a reaction to a legal culture, and to a (much lesser) extent a media culture.
It's mainly a legal check-box to prevent the settlement being a de-facto admission of guilt on anything anyone tries to sue them for that's possibly vaguely related.
The problem is not merely that we're uncomfortable discussing such moral quandaries.
A driver may make his own choice to put himself into a certain-death brick wall in order to avoid probable death of self + the other car's passengers. Nobody and nothing else ever has the right to force it upon him. Irrespective of how logical and regardless of any "choice" previously input into the auto-auto preferences screens.
You realise that subscription TV is the same paying for other people's viewing habits? I think it's fair to assume you won't like every programme on the channels you buy on subscription TV.
And all TV is heavily cross-subsidised. Even pay-per-view.
Until the auto-auto can carry the bags/umbrella, keep the car clean (inside and out) and buy the morning paper, rich people aren't going to be buying auto-autos and sacking their chauffeur.
Also, rich people generally don't speed much because they don't have to hurry, they're not under time-pressure and frankly whomever they're going to see can wait.
Ok...so, does anybody really look for some kind of 'green' label before purchasing a computer?
I mean...is there anyone out there that uses 'green' as a deciding factor between models they are considering??
Yes.
Not me personally, but as stated in TFA for many large organisations it's an absolute requirement. Without the cert the hardware simply isn't eligible for consideration.
It's a call system so presumably there's something going through the speakers and then someone from the call centre is talking to you (there's also a data packet if you cannot speak).
Often it will be worthwhile for the police to be made aware of an accident even if nobody is hurt. Stationary vehicles blocking the road after accidents can cause congestion - and more accidents.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno, I have a feeling that they might be right with the thing about 10m * $10 = $100m.
How is this news? A company obtaining finance and giving their bank good security is normal practice in business. If anything is weird here it is that Sharp does not already have these assets securing loans. The tone gives me the impression this is meant to be bad news for Sharp, but there is no clue why in the summary.
Reading TFA, it seems the story here is that Sharp is in deep financial trouble, but the good news is that they have been able to refinance, thus answering Moody's recent concerns. The particular importance of Sharp is that they are seen as symbolic of current weakness in the Japanese electronics industry, they are one of the few manufacturers of LCD screens, and the lack of finance had cast doubt on their ability to make screens for Apple's upcoming new iPhone and iPad products.
Seems to be a lot of crapping on iPlayer in here.
Surprised at this, because I find iPlayer is a hundred times better than the other services I've used: 4OD, 5Player, ITV and LoveFilm. (I'm not counting YouTube due to the content.) To be fair, a large part of this is probably that iPlayer downloads at about 9Mb/s for me.
Incidentally my opinions on the services are roughly the opposite from what should reasonably be expected. YouTube can be the best, even the advertising is trivial. Admittedly "can be" is a bit of a caveat, not many videos are high quality, I'm not supposed to be able to download them, and it does require letting the videos buffer (probably their major advantage is they do actually let you, however).
iPlayer is second-best, even though they have no means of generating revenue from my viewing. 4OD, 5Player and ITV are utterly shit in every way, even though they're the ones making money from my viewing. LoveFilm (the UK's closest equivalent to Netflix, other than Netflix which doesn't have rights to much here) is the worst of the bunch even though it's a premium service.
No, it's not common and the courts take a dim view. If any term in a no-compete is considered overly strict the court will just null they entire thing (they cannot reduce it to a reasonable level).
Anyway they've shot themselves in the foot by trying to make everything short term contracts. Nobody signs up for 6 months with the prospect of limiting what they can do in the following 6 months. I resent contracts anyway, way to build a committed employee-employer relationship there guys :/
Even if someone did have a no-compete, unless they were a senior manager or something I can't imagine a company bothering to try and enforce it.
Average efficiency? Is this some thing where the manufacturers have to sell x efficient vehicles in order to sell y inefficient but profitable models?
If I follow that correctly, no wonder "Thirteen major automakers, including General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, have endorsed the new standards." 13 major automakers basically have the low and middle market all sown up - the efficient vehicle market. It's implausible to begin competing in that market, where scale economics is so strong. Any niche or boutique auto maker, they're stuffed.
The UK approach is to vary the annual road tax based on emissions. I had figured it would be a net tax hike, but it's actually pretty easy to be paying quite a lot less even with a midrange car with fairly basic eco credentials. There's a couple of reasons it works even more effectively than you would think, given that the road tax is actually a pretty small part of an annual car costs.
So consumers want high mpg cars anyway, the road tax is just another small reason. But in business, it's more significant. The road tax savings maybe do not add up to a lot in the context of the entire business, maybe not a lot to each car operator, maybe not a lot to the shareholders, but typically there's one guy who manages all the cars, and to him all those savings really do add up. This is the guy who makes the fleet purchasing decision. That in itself is significant, but the auto makers love the guy who makes the fleet purchasing decision more than all their other customers and they tailor any fleet-compatible type of car to what the fleet buyer wants.
Oh and the co2 approach flows through for tax aswell. If you are given a company car in UK you are taxed on it's value as if it were cash (roughly). But they changed it to co2, so now those getting more efficient vehicles are making a tax saving. Everybody agrees with the fleet buyer what a great job he's done this year.
If you're going to manipulate the market, use economics and apply it to the demand side.
If the money went to directly improving the system it taxed, then yes. I would love to see a tax that helped pay for a nation-wide fiber-optic system that replaced the aged copper system we rely on.
I do not have an issue with subsidising broadband. I am curious however why it is only other broadband users doing the subsidising?
I do not see why there is some special duty imposed on those who have broadband, nor some special relief for those who do not. Existing broadband users do not appear to benefit in any special way. They are not a cause of the lack of broadband in the other areas.
Who actually got hurt in this battle?
Consumers?
A widely-held valid point, but a separate issue.
Child support is an obligation to the child which is enforced by the courts; it not a punishment.
Whoa there, you appear to be attempting to spread facts and context.
Can't you see we'd much rather remain privy only to the selective facts and subjective misinformation that supports our feel-good armchair outrage?
Internet filters aren't about protecting children, they are about protecting the school from their parents.
Has your sig been this appropriate before?
On second thoughts, probably every time.
So I hit submit, move to the next site on my browsing routine and find a somewhat relevant comic, today's Dilbert.
I didn't interpret anything in the segment implying that the one-day course is going to turn you into a developer. It seemed very obvious to me that it's an introducer type course - getting the gist over, a starting point for someone considering changing/supplementing careers or to have a vague idea what the developers at their work are doing.
Perhaps they could have spelt it out over and over again - well they did keep saying "basic" - but it seemed quite obvious to me. That's not to say those interpreting differently are stupid. If the US TV imported over here is any indication, US TV likes to really spells things out - if that's what you're used to then it's quite reasonable to expect it.
I'm a qualified accountant, I could teach the basics of accountancy in one day. Enough to be an accountant the next day? No. Enough to help someone decide if it might be a career for them? Yes. Enough to enable a manager to make good use of reporting? Yes. Enough for a manager to broadly understand what their accounting staff are doing and why they cannot have the accounts "Monday"? Yes.
Since the vast majority if your files aren't changing frequently, use daily an incremental backup. There's options out there which will let you run it at the end of the working day and turn off your machine once its done.
Can you throw some cabling into the garage? Else WiFi would probably do. Stick a NAS in there, configure the software, make a once-monthly entry into your calendar to check the backups are viable and you can forget about it. Well, until winter maybe.
Run a second backup say over the weekend and swap drives at a family/friend house. Safety deposit box if necessary.
After each shoot, be realistic about what photographs you keep. I'd wager a smallish fraction of what you're keeping now. Remember there is some overhead cost in retaining those files, nevermind in hard drives but in your time sorting through it.
QB often just can't update older versions. If you're going from 2006 to 2012 you probably need to first update it to 2008. Also, it needs to be an admin account doing it.
If either of those things are a problem, the QB error message usually does not offer any clues. If you have a private accountant they probably have all versions and can do it for you very quickly.
And yeah, take a backup from the old QB, install the new QB then load the backup. Usually works better than trying to upgrade the currently installed software + data at the same time. It also does not overwrite the old version so you should be fine to carry on with the old version if the upgrade doesn't work.
If all else fails, wait until the year-end, take the printouts from the old QB and start afresh on the new QB.
^ UK version, YMMV
QB... for 5 stores?
QB is for small organisations. It works very well for that. QB is by far and away the easiest widely-used software for a non-skilled person to use. Most small biz do not have their own bookkeeper, they get some administrative assistant to do it with maybe half a day's training from an accountant. And no, an administrative assistant is no substitute for a bookkeeper, which is a skilled, specialist job requiring training, experience and discipline.
QB is not crap just because it doesn't do the job you wanted it for in the same way a motorcycle isn't a crap vehicle just because it doesn't do haulage very well. You had the wrong tool for the job. Well okay, it's premier line is maybe stepping out into waters it's not best suited for, but I'm surprised if anyone who has any idea what they're doing is recommending that.
With 5 stores, the obvious software to have a look at is Sage. It's a lot more powerful, but does require a competent bookkeeper with good Sage experience and a skilled-person salary. There's a very good chance you'll have even more problems with Sage, not so much due to the software not being able to do something, but rather because it often requires a specific way of doing things - a particularly disciplined, systematic approach that is a result of their higher product lines which assume you have dedicated sales and purchase ledger clerks, carefully thought out systems with regular housekeeping routines etc. Once mistakes get entered and things get messy, the mess stacks up real fast.
For industrial processes that are labour intensive, the worker's salary is a high proportion of the total production cost. Despite the individual's wage being low, they get through few units, so the cost per unit is still pretty high. If we assume for illustrative purposes that the worker's wage is typically 50% of the cost per unit, then the maximum a worker is ever going to get for turning out an extra 5% more units per hour is a 10% increase in wages (at which point his cost per unit would be the same again, 100/50*5%). The primary way to make profit is to minimise wages, secondly maximise throughput, third control machinery costs (and of course control overheads).
The more automated the process, the more units there are to divide the salary into cost per unit. If the worker represents 10% of the cost per unit, and he figures out how to get 5% more units per hour through his section, the maximum possible pay increase he might get for this is 100/10*5% = 50%. The primary way to maximise profit is to maximise throughput, secondly to control machinery costs... Furthermore, in highly automated processes any downtime is excruciatingly expensive because most of the costs are fixed, so bosses want more competent staff and are more willing to pay up to avoid strikes.
This is why Germany does plenty well out of manufacturing. Wages are high but they're incredibly efficient. There's some good case studies with UK car manufacturing aswell. The industry was in tailspin here but one of them (I keep thinking Honda, but I may be confused as they were the first to want to do it but somehow Rover bosses and the politicians didn't go for it) had the audacity to respond by investing heavily and modernising, turning their plant around and into one of the most productive in the world. Sure the car industry is nothing compared to what it once was, but there's a few good plants and it's still quite a chunk of jobs which are paid pretty well.
In fairness it's a reaction to a legal culture, and to a (much lesser) extent a media culture.
It's mainly a legal check-box to prevent the settlement being a de-facto admission of guilt on anything anyone tries to sue them for that's possibly vaguely related.
The problem is not merely that we're uncomfortable discussing such moral quandaries.
A driver may make his own choice to put himself into a certain-death brick wall in order to avoid probable death of self + the other car's passengers. Nobody and nothing else ever has the right to force it upon him. Irrespective of how logical and regardless of any "choice" previously input into the auto-auto preferences screens.
You realise that subscription TV is the same paying for other people's viewing habits? I think it's fair to assume you won't like every programme on the channels you buy on subscription TV.
And all TV is heavily cross-subsidised. Even pay-per-view.
Until the auto-auto can carry the bags/umbrella, keep the car clean (inside and out) and buy the morning paper, rich people aren't going to be buying auto-autos and sacking their chauffeur.
Also, rich people generally don't speed much because they don't have to hurry, they're not under time-pressure and frankly whomever they're going to see can wait.
Or maybe OP meant middle-class? Remember them?
Hmm, what are the major changes for the average user?
I'm assuming there will continue to be a Windows Classic theme, possibly a Windows Aero Classic theme.
Ok...so, does anybody really look for some kind of 'green' label before purchasing a computer?
I mean...is there anyone out there that uses 'green' as a deciding factor between models they are considering??
Yes.
Not me personally, but as stated in TFA for many large organisations it's an absolute requirement. Without the cert the hardware simply isn't eligible for consideration.
It's a call system so presumably there's something going through the speakers and then someone from the call centre is talking to you (there's also a data packet if you cannot speak).
Often it will be worthwhile for the police to be made aware of an accident even if nobody is hurt. Stationary vehicles blocking the road after accidents can cause congestion - and more accidents.