There is a difference between small companies and large companies in how much they value individual employees. In general, I have seen that small companies or companies that are ran by professional partnerships value employees as being valued assets. From my experience, large corporations tend to see their IT employees as being commodity assets that are easily written off. The whole outourcing situation is an example of how much regard corporations have for employees. Large corporations tend to be very sensitive to quarterly profit reports as they directly affect stock prices. When there is a bad quarter, the edicts to cut expenses start rolling down hill and budgets get cut. Most corporations have already cut the easily cut expenses, such as travel expenses and meeting expenses. The only way that many managers see that they can cut expenses is to cut employees.
I would call playing music using a standard MP3 player to be normal use. OK bright boy, tell me how to play Apple DRM'ed music on my MP3 player, without having to burn a CD.
I wish that Philips would take action against the record lables that sell non-CD audio disks in jewel cases that say 'CD' on them. Most stores, including Amazon, sell these non-CD audio disks as being CD's. If they are not CD's then the store should be responsible for misrepresenting the merchandise that they are selling.
It is not really a flaw, it was a choice that was made because the cost of protecting commercial data centers against EMP is prohibitive and it is not considered to be a major concern. There are hardened servers available; they are usually small, the hardening only protects the server itself, and they are quite expensive.
Most computers, especially large, important servers, have several layers of shielding to prevent just such an occurence. Your home pc and the workstations at your office might short out, but most of the major servers that run the internet and businesses would barely hiccup.
BULLSHIT. Backbone internet data centers are not EMP shielded. My cell phone works just fine in several major Northern Virginia data centers. If a cell phone works, there is no EMP shielding. There also is no EMP shielding in virtually all telco operations buildings. There was a network of underground telco building that were built in the early 1960's (mostly for the military AUTOVON) that were hardened and EMP protected in preparation for a nuclear attack, they are the only EMP shielded telco buildings.
Most of the AUTOVON switches were AT&T #1 4-wire ESS(R) switches, but a few were Automatic Electric switches owned by the local telcos. The non-AT&T AUTOVON switches were generally located in non-EMP shielded buildings and the switches had high speed tape backup systems that were intended to quickly reload the switch's memory following an EMP from a nuclear detonation.
The problem is that the Vonage IPO was not handled in a traditional way with a traditional cast of players. According to TFA, "Vonage took the unusual approach of allowing customers and other people close to the company to reserve shares without putting down any money. They weren't required to pay for the shares until May 30, six days after the May 24 IPO." There are customers who claim that they were not aware that they had actually agreed to purchase any shares as there was no order confirmation process.
The delayed payment arrangement, a web based purchasing system that may not have produced a binding contract, naive investors (who are also Vonage's customers), and the inability of Vonage to forgive the stock purchases; have started a legal and PR nightmare for Vonage.
I have found that the US gave post war aid to various countries in a number of ways and that unless they are quoting Wikipedia (or whatever Wikipedia is quoting), that the numbers quoted in various articles tend to not totally agree and of them seem to be wild ass guesses.
Wikipedia shows that the United Kingdom received $3,297 million plus $many million other aid and W. Germany received $1,448 million plus $270 million after 1951. An article on www.germany.info says that the GARIOA program and Marshall aid to W. Germany added up to over $3.3 billion.
W. Germany paid back $1,016.9 million (another source says $1,100 million), the last payment was made in June 1971. It appears that the UK did not repay any of the Marshall Plan or any other WW II aid. I think that Norway paid back US aid money.
I don't think that any distaster flick has ever been able to show any more utter destruction than the destruction shown in film clips of bombed German cities. I especially remember a film clip showing people salvaging bricks from a sea of rubble and ruin.
I was part joking and I got the numbers wrong, it was a bad cut and paste job. The numbers should have been about 13 billion and about 90 billion as you show. I just read about how the Marshall Plan worked and it sounds like it was actually a US corporate welfare plan. Yeah, I know, George W and his cronies are running the US economy into the ground, and the US trade deficit sucks. For a guy who claims to be a christian he sure does some evil things. I wouldn't put it past the republicans to count the cost of the war in Iraq as being "foreign aid".
Ungrateful gits. My parents paid many of their hard earned dollars in taxes to finance the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan provided nearly 267 billion postwar dollars in aid to Europe -- which equals over two trillion of today's dollars.
"I think the sphere where one or the other (or both) will really take off is in computing devices. True, there are still a lot of people out there who don't even have DVD burners (nevermind dual layer DVD burners), but I can see the need for very large offline storage capacity by computer users ensuring that one or both of these standards does indeed take off."
This ssentially describes the acceptance, use, and demise of the DAT format. DAT was also expensive, crippled by DRM, and it did not represent a major usage improvement; BUT it was a great offline data storage medium. Just as DAT never took off for anything other than data backups (and I understand that it is now dead), I believe that Blue-Ray and HD-DVD will suffer the same fate as DAT.
The US Government had earlier found that simply appealing to the populace to "think of the children" can get the populace to tolerate a great amount of unconstitutional intrusion. The real key to getting the population of the US to allow total government intrusion is simply the word "TERRORISM".
In the US it seems that it is just kids that use text messaging to any degree. Telephones are for TALKING and I have no desire to use a portable telephone to carry on a text based converstation. I do use my cell phone on occasion to send and receive a limited number of short email messages that generally do not require an answer.
I helped a friend migrate to a new PC and found that I had to remove vast amounts of crapware from the new computer. Most users have no idea that they can remove the preinstalled crapware and I now understand why most people never notice the spyware that gets added later.
When I buy a dishasher, I don't mind a free sample of detergent and rinse agent beacuse it is obvious that it can be removed from the dishwasher and it is obvious that it is just a sample. The problem with the "free" software on new computers is that it is not obvious to many users that it can be removed and much of it doesn't say that it is a crippled demo until you actually try to use it.
I am a bit confused why you had a problem with the use of the term "ROI". I don't see that the poster used the term in a way that contradicts your definition of the term.
I noted that in your definition of ROI that you define the Average Income side of the equation to be before interest and taxes. Many definitions of ROI INCLUDE interest on the Average Income side of the equation.
A common paper envelope provides sufficient shielding to prevent the visual reading of a credit card, and the credit card holder can visually determine the likely effectiveness of the shielding. Reading the magnetic stripe of a credit card while it is inside a paper envelope might be possible, but is not a likely threat. Simply putting a credit card in a shirt pocket is sufficient to prevent the surreptitious reading of common credit cards. A wallet that is shielded to prevent the reading of RFID tags would be much more complex than a paper envelope or shirt pocket, and the holder of the RFID cannot determine for himself the likely effectiveness of the shielding. When a user opens an RFID wallet, would he be exposing the rest of his RFID's so that they can be read?
Even if the DRM allowed unlicensed play and didn't degrade audio quality, it is still DRM'ed. DRM is evil because it places restrictions upon which DEVICES can play DRM'ed music, and you can be locked out of the music that you paid for. There is also a possibility that that there may be a timebomb buried in the DRM scheme.
The current state of VoIP technology is not good enough for normal telephone users to use. When PC users can't secure their wireless network and have malware clogged PCs, how can they be expected to be able to successfully use VoIP telephone service at home?
I think that mass market home VoIP service is doomed, at least in it's present form. People have been conditioned to expect to be able to pick up their home telephone handset and hear dialtone, they don't need a phone system that has to be rebooted on occasion to make it work. When the power goes out with VoIP, the entire telephone line goes down unless you have battery backup for the modem and the router. I have had to remind several family members with POTS that they need to have at least one regular non-wireless telephone in the house for when the power goes out. I understand that many VoIP routers have backup batteries and broadband providers provide battery backup for the customer prem VoIP telephone equipment that they provide. How long do those batteries last?
How long does a broadband connection last when the power goes out?
Recently there was a large storm that caused the power in my neighborhood to go out for almost two days. If I had Vonage, it would have only lasted for as long as the cable TV broadband lasted. My cable TV service and broadband connectivity lasted just a few hours after the power went out. The batteried in my UPS, which powers the cable modem and router lasted for much longer than the broadband service did. My cell phone went to analog roam after 8 to 10 hours (and that signal was essentially unusable). My wired POTS phone worked fine the whole time. I had neighbors who were surprised that my phone still worked because their (cordless) phones were dead. The same neighbors were later grateful that I could stop the beeping noise that was coming from their cordless handsets -- they also didn't know how to put the batteries back in after the power came back.
This is not a really fair comparison as the Neo Geo was not originally intended to be a home machine and the price insured that it did not become a popular game console. The Neo Geo console cost $650 with one game, memory card, and controllers; additional games cost $200 EACH. On the other hand, Sony is REALLY hoping that the PS3 becomes a popular game console and Blue-Ray video player.
I wonder how many PS3 owners will actually play Blue-Ray disks using their PS3. The original X-Box and the PS2 both had DVD player remotes available, very few people actually used their X-Boxes or PS2's as DVD players.
I have a brand new Dell laptop running XP pro. The video card handles about any resolution that you would want to use and my external display is a 1280x1024 LCD. Do you think that Windows would set my external display to 1280x1024 @ 85 Hz? Windows defaulted the external display to SGA and the highest resolution that it would allow me to set was 1024x768 (which looked horrible), and it limited me to a 60 Hz refresh. I ended up spending several hours and installing third party software to get Windows to allow me to set my display to 1280x1024 @ 85 Hz. When I booted the laptop with Live Ubuntu it recognized the LCD display by manufacturer and model number and set the resolution to 1280x1024.
Would you expect any less from a Congressman is a lawyor, a right wing Republican, AND heir to the Kotex fortune?
He also wants the Supreme Court to be overseen by Congress, one way that he urged to do this was by the creation of an "office of inspector general for the federal judiciary" to watch over the courts.
Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) must like what he is doing as their PAC was his top campaign contributor.
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There is a difference between small companies and large companies in how much they value individual employees. In general, I have seen that small companies or companies that are ran by professional partnerships value employees as being valued assets. From my experience, large corporations tend to see their IT employees as being commodity assets that are easily written off. The whole outourcing situation is an example of how much regard corporations have for employees. Large corporations tend to be very sensitive to quarterly profit reports as they directly affect stock prices. When there is a bad quarter, the edicts to cut expenses start rolling down hill and budgets get cut. Most corporations have already cut the easily cut expenses, such as travel expenses and meeting expenses. The only way that many managers see that they can cut expenses is to cut employees.
I would call playing music using a standard MP3 player to be normal use. OK bright boy, tell me how to play Apple DRM'ed music on my MP3 player, without having to burn a CD.
I wish that Philips would take action against the record lables that sell non-CD audio disks in jewel cases that say 'CD' on them. Most stores, including Amazon, sell these non-CD audio disks as being CD's. If they are not CD's then the store should be responsible for misrepresenting the merchandise that they are selling.
It is not really a flaw, it was a choice that was made because the cost of protecting commercial data centers against EMP is prohibitive and it is not considered to be a major concern. There are hardened servers available; they are usually small, the hardening only protects the server itself, and they are quite expensive.
Most computers, especially large, important servers, have several layers of shielding to prevent just such an occurence. Your home pc and the workstations at your office might short out, but most of the major servers that run the internet and businesses would barely hiccup.
BULLSHIT. Backbone internet data centers are not EMP shielded. My cell phone works just fine in several major Northern Virginia data centers. If a cell phone works, there is no EMP shielding. There also is no EMP shielding in virtually all telco operations buildings. There was a network of underground telco building that were built in the early 1960's (mostly for the military AUTOVON) that were hardened and EMP protected in preparation for a nuclear attack, they are the only EMP shielded telco buildings.
Most of the AUTOVON switches were AT&T #1 4-wire ESS(R) switches, but a few were Automatic Electric switches owned by the local telcos. The non-AT&T AUTOVON switches were generally located in non-EMP shielded buildings and the switches had high speed tape backup systems that were intended to quickly reload the switch's memory following an EMP from a nuclear detonation.
DRM per se is not the problem, draconian implementation of DRM is the problem.
The problem is that the Vonage IPO was not handled in a traditional way with a traditional cast of players. According to TFA, "Vonage took the unusual approach of allowing customers and other people close to the company to reserve shares without putting down any money. They weren't required to pay for the shares until May 30, six days after the May 24 IPO." There are customers who claim that they were not aware that they had actually agreed to purchase any shares as there was no order confirmation process.
The delayed payment arrangement, a web based purchasing system that may not have produced a binding contract, naive investors (who are also Vonage's customers), and the inability of Vonage to forgive the stock purchases; have started a legal and PR nightmare for Vonage.
I have found that the US gave post war aid to various countries in a number of ways and that unless they are quoting Wikipedia (or whatever Wikipedia is quoting), that the numbers quoted in various articles tend to not totally agree and of them seem to be wild ass guesses.
Wikipedia shows that the United Kingdom received $3,297 million plus $many million other aid and W. Germany received $1,448 million plus $270 million after 1951. An article on www.germany.info says that the GARIOA program and Marshall aid to W. Germany added up to over $3.3 billion.
W. Germany paid back $1,016.9 million (another source says $1,100 million), the last payment was made in June 1971. It appears that the UK did not repay any of the Marshall Plan or any other WW II aid. I think that Norway paid back US aid money.
I don't think that any distaster flick has ever been able to show any more utter destruction than the destruction shown in film clips of bombed German cities. I especially remember a film clip showing people salvaging bricks from a sea of rubble and ruin.
I was part joking and I got the numbers wrong, it was a bad cut and paste job. The numbers should have been about 13 billion and about 90 billion as you show. I just read about how the Marshall Plan worked and it sounds like it was actually a US corporate welfare plan. Yeah, I know, George W and his cronies are running the US economy into the ground, and the US trade deficit sucks. For a guy who claims to be a christian he sure does some evil things. I wouldn't put it past the republicans to count the cost of the war in Iraq as being "foreign aid".
Ungrateful gits. My parents paid many of their hard earned dollars in taxes to finance the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan provided nearly 267 billion postwar dollars in aid to Europe -- which equals over two trillion of today's dollars.
"I think the sphere where one or the other (or both) will really take off is in computing devices. True, there are still a lot of people out there who don't even have DVD burners (nevermind dual layer DVD burners), but I can see the need for very large offline storage capacity by computer users ensuring that one or both of these standards does indeed take off."
This ssentially describes the acceptance, use, and demise of the DAT format. DAT was also expensive, crippled by DRM, and it did not represent a major usage improvement; BUT it was a great offline data storage medium. Just as DAT never took off for anything other than data backups (and I understand that it is now dead), I believe that Blue-Ray and HD-DVD will suffer the same fate as DAT.
You are indeed fortunate to live in a society that has these options.
The US Government had earlier found that simply appealing to the populace to "think of the children" can get the populace to tolerate a great amount of unconstitutional intrusion. The real key to getting the population of the US to allow total government intrusion is simply the word "TERRORISM".
In the US it seems that it is just kids that use text messaging to any degree. Telephones are for TALKING and I have no desire to use a portable telephone to carry on a text based converstation. I do use my cell phone on occasion to send and receive a limited number of short email messages that generally do not require an answer.
I helped a friend migrate to a new PC and found that I had to remove vast amounts of crapware from the new computer. Most users have no idea that they can remove the preinstalled crapware and I now understand why most people never notice the spyware that gets added later.
When I buy a dishasher, I don't mind a free sample of detergent and rinse agent beacuse it is obvious that it can be removed from the dishwasher and it is obvious that it is just a sample. The problem with the "free" software on new computers is that it is not obvious to many users that it can be removed and much of it doesn't say that it is a crippled demo until you actually try to use it.
I am a bit confused why you had a problem with the use of the term "ROI". I don't see that the poster used the term in a way that contradicts your definition of the term. I noted that in your definition of ROI that you define the Average Income side of the equation to be before interest and taxes. Many definitions of ROI INCLUDE interest on the Average Income side of the equation.
A common paper envelope provides sufficient shielding to prevent the visual reading of a credit card, and the credit card holder can visually determine the likely effectiveness of the shielding. Reading the magnetic stripe of a credit card while it is inside a paper envelope might be possible, but is not a likely threat. Simply putting a credit card in a shirt pocket is sufficient to prevent the surreptitious reading of common credit cards. A wallet that is shielded to prevent the reading of RFID tags would be much more complex than a paper envelope or shirt pocket, and the holder of the RFID cannot determine for himself the likely effectiveness of the shielding. When a user opens an RFID wallet, would he be exposing the rest of his RFID's so that they can be read?
Even if the DRM allowed unlicensed play and didn't degrade audio quality, it is still DRM'ed. DRM is evil because it places restrictions upon which DEVICES can play DRM'ed music, and you can be locked out of the music that you paid for. There is also a possibility that that there may be a timebomb buried in the DRM scheme.
The current state of VoIP technology is not good enough for normal telephone users to use. When PC users can't secure their wireless network and have malware clogged PCs, how can they be expected to be able to successfully use VoIP telephone service at home?
I think that mass market home VoIP service is doomed, at least in it's present form. People have been conditioned to expect to be able to pick up their home telephone handset and hear dialtone, they don't need a phone system that has to be rebooted on occasion to make it work. When the power goes out with VoIP, the entire telephone line goes down unless you have battery backup for the modem and the router. I have had to remind several family members with POTS that they need to have at least one regular non-wireless telephone in the house for when the power goes out. I understand that many VoIP routers have backup batteries and broadband providers provide battery backup for the customer prem VoIP telephone equipment that they provide. How long do those batteries last?
How long does a broadband connection last when the power goes out?
Recently there was a large storm that caused the power in my neighborhood to go out for almost two days. If I had Vonage, it would have only lasted for as long as the cable TV broadband lasted. My cable TV service and broadband connectivity lasted just a few hours after the power went out. The batteried in my UPS, which powers the cable modem and router lasted for much longer than the broadband service did. My cell phone went to analog roam after 8 to 10 hours (and that signal was essentially unusable). My wired POTS phone worked fine the whole time. I had neighbors who were surprised that my phone still worked because their (cordless) phones were dead. The same neighbors were later grateful that I could stop the beeping noise that was coming from their cordless handsets -- they also didn't know how to put the batteries back in after the power came back.
This is not a really fair comparison as the Neo Geo was not originally intended to be a home machine and the price insured that it did not become a popular game console. The Neo Geo console cost $650 with one game, memory card, and controllers; additional games cost $200 EACH. On the other hand, Sony is REALLY hoping that the PS3 becomes a popular game console and Blue-Ray video player.
I wonder how many PS3 owners will actually play Blue-Ray disks using their PS3. The original X-Box and the PS2 both had DVD player remotes available, very few people actually used their X-Boxes or PS2's as DVD players.
I have a brand new Dell laptop running XP pro. The video card handles about any resolution that you would want to use and my external display is a 1280x1024 LCD. Do you think that Windows would set my external display to 1280x1024 @ 85 Hz? Windows defaulted the external display to SGA and the highest resolution that it would allow me to set was 1024x768 (which looked horrible), and it limited me to a 60 Hz refresh. I ended up spending several hours and installing third party software to get Windows to allow me to set my display to 1280x1024 @ 85 Hz. When I booted the laptop with Live Ubuntu it recognized the LCD display by manufacturer and model number and set the resolution to 1280x1024.
Would you expect any less from a Congressman is a lawyor, a right wing Republican, AND heir to the Kotex fortune? He also wants the Supreme Court to be overseen by Congress, one way that he urged to do this was by the creation of an "office of inspector general for the federal judiciary" to watch over the courts. Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) must like what he is doing as their PAC was his top campaign contributor.
As long as the College Board isn't scoring the ballots.
Damn, I had hoped that they would have been stupid enough to include only one address.