Internet access is fast becoming as important as water, gas, electricity, roads etc and having the correct infrastructure is not something to be solely left to private enterprise. If we need a bit of socialism to solve it then lets have some socialism.
With the exception of electricity, those are all examples of infrastructure that follows the same model as broadband. Water and gas are only available in more densely populated areas, and roads have "less bandwidth" as they become more rural. In fact, although electricity is almost ubiquitous, there are still places that remain unserviced due to high deployment costs with no payback possibility.
Not sure how socialism ties in - at least where I am, water is a public service and gas is private.
Too many job ads are looking for insane amount of skills in one person...They ask for a "Unix Admin" person who knows how to code in C++, C#, manage an Asterisk server, install mange & tune 1000 RHEL servers, use NAGIOS, maintain a SAP system, automate sysadmin tasks using bash/ksh/perl/PHP/C/C++, setup and manage IIS & Apache, admin websphere & coldfusion, install manage and tune Windows 2003/2008/2008R2, manage VMware/vSphere/ESX/ESXi servers, perform second level support for Windows users, manage printers, travel onsite for servicing, be on call 24/7 (for no extra pay), and be able to interact like a jolly good fellow with customers, co-works and management, oh, and write documentation and explain things as well as Carl Sagan could.
I've seen this happen as a side effect of a formal job evaluation process. Employees write up their job duties/skills in minute detail ("I helped the SAP admin by rebooting a server once" becomes "maintain the SAP system") and these duties are then scored by a committee. More "duties" = more points = more money, so of course, the employee is entirely motivated to pad everything. My personal favourite is the educational requirements. I have a masters in an unrelated field, so therefore a masters is a "requirement" of my job that just happens to be worth 2 pay grades.
The evaluation committee normally does a pretty decent job of leveling out the pay grades, but unfortunately it's the originally document often turns into the job posting when that person needs to be replaced.
4) When a large business buys computers, they don't come with windows licenses. They buy blank machines and get a site license.
Not true. The Windows "site license" is an upgrade to the OEM copy of Windows installed on the PC. It cannot be used on bare metal. What businesses do is buy the cheapest possible Windows license with the PC and then image over it with the desired version. (Or get the OEM to ship the image preinstalled for a few extra bucks.)
we were discussing the rounding of the 50 øre coin. which is why i said - at that level instead of at this level to be clear that i was referring to what was just said and not the article
Actually, it wasn't clear at all. You used
$1.51
as your example. If you were discussing kroner, you shouldn't have used a dollar sign.
Besides, $1.51 will buy you a coffee in Canada, but in Norway it'll be 20 NOK.
at that level of rounding people WILL start gaming the system, hell i know i would. coffee costs $1.51 - i'm going to pay with a card. coffee costs 1.49 - i'm going to pay in cash.
So you're going to pay $0.01 more for each coffee?
$1.51 with card = $1.51, with cash = $1.50
$1.49 with cash = $1.50, with card = $1.49
You haven't accounted for the pirates who then turn into customers, either.
Or pirates that tell their friends about how great of a program it is, and those friends purchase the program legitimately.
---
No, let's operate off of the assumption that piracy never occurred. Who is to say your program will have as many paying customers? Don't think you can simply say, "HEY LOOK X PAID, BUT Y DIDNT, THEREFORE WE LOST PROFITS!" Which is mathematically wrong. It should be represented as:
x = customers who are customers regardless of piracy
n = customers who are customers because of piracy
p = pirates that who are not customers, but would otherwise be customers
r = pirates who are not customers, but would not otherwise be customers
If you're going to claim damages, please provide proof that x > p, not that x + n > p.
Don't you mean p > n? If there are more pirates would otherwise be customers than the number of new customers gained through pirate word of mouth, then damages have occurred. X and R and completely irrelevant to this calculation.
If you implement a consumption tax similar to Canada's "Goods and Services Tax", everything is taxed at every stage through the process. It is impossible for the consumer to know what percentage of the price is tax.
Here is an example. A farmer produces wheat and sells it to a distributor. The distributor pays 10% flat tax. The distributor then sells the wheat to a mill. The mill pays 10% tax (including 10% of tax that the distributor paid). The mill sells flour to another distributor. The distributor pays 10% tax (including 10% of the tax that the mill paid), etc.
GST is not a compound tax, it's a value added tax. Every bill that I pay gets split into two accounts - a "GST paid" asset account and an expense account. Every invoice I collect is split to a revenue account and a "GST collected" liability account. At the end of the period, I simply remit the difference between the two GST accounts.
Here's my example. Let's say a white box supplier buys $400 worth of components and sells me a $500 computer. They collect $25 GST from me, pay $20 to their supplier, and remit $5 to the government. (Let's ignore import/export issues for now and assume that the original supplier remits the entire $20.)
Now I take that computer, install Linux, slap my brand on it, deliver it, set it up, and feed your dog while I'm there. I charge you $700 + $35 GST, When I file my return, I remit the net GST of $10 as well. So a total of $35 in GST was remitted to the government from the supply chain, which is exactly what you paid.
If you were a GST registrant and decided to sell that computer along, but only got $600 for it, you would be able to claim a refund of $5 ($35-$30, or 5% of $700-$600) as well. If that was your only sale in a reporting period, you would actually get a $5 cheque (well, direct deposit) from Revenue Canada.
What often happens in this scenario is that the person selling gets a rebate for the tax that they paid on things that they sold. This is somewhat complicated, but what is very complicated is for the government to track all of this to make sure that nobody is cheating.
Actually, GST has definite advantages in that regard. Invoices must clearly show the amount of GST charged and the registrant number, so an audit has a good paper trail to start from. And business are motivated to collect GST so that they can recover their input credits. It's also easy to cross reference to your income tax return as well - if you aren't remitting about 5% of your gross profit, a red flag goes up.
Never said it did. Still don't see why we're letting Rogers off the hook so easily though. Rogers (and Bell, and every other useless fucking telco out there) owns the relationship with the subscriber, and THEY should be the ones reaching out. They KNEW what was going on, there was no reason they couldn't have been proactive about letting their customers know. Instead they let them find out through the news media.
It's funny when Microsoft complains about other software demanding too many resources.
Actually though, my point was that even that level of ActiveSync "integration" only works with Exchange. You want some Groupwise lovin', you need a BES.
Residential time of use metering has been in use here in Ontario for about a year now. We pay one of three different rates based on time of day, weekday/weekend, and whether it's heating or cooling season.
...there is ONE program that I have to use that ONLY runs on Windows, so I run it on an XP virtual machine... 13 computers in our house, and not one of them runs MS software!
Identity Manager - for auto account provisioning and directory sync. One cool thing we do with this is sync a very limited set of students and attributes into an LDAP directory that our offsite Resnet provider then uses for network authentication.
Access Manager - web single sign on with federated authentication
Netstorage - clientless webdav, basically.
iFolder - think locally hosted Dropbox with admin controls and auto provisioning
iPrint - install printers by selecting them from a webpage
There's a lot of other ones where the "best tool" is a function of the specific job. For example, the SUSE enterprise server is better than RHEL for me, because it is the platform for OES2, and it's more efficient to have to maintain only one (server) flavour of Linux. Groupwise has issues with 3rd party support, but can support 4 times as many users on the same hardware as Exchange. NTFS permissions are more fine grained, but Netware trustees give you automatic filesystem traversal rights. And so on...
eDirectory vs Active Directory is like emacs vs. vi though. Let's stay away from that one.:)
Do you work for the government? That is the only place I see Novell anymore. Governments and school districts.
Higher ed in my case. I've worked in 3 Novell shops, and the first 2 I converted to Microsoft shops before I left. In the hands of a competent administrator, both environments can deliver the same results.
They cannot get off of the platform because it would cost too much. Lots of luck going to the voters for a few billion dollars to rip and replace Novell.
It's not financially prudent to rip and replace functional infrastructure. Any other time everyone screams about governments wasting money, so what's the problem with this?
I really don't get all the Novell hate in this thread. Seriously, what's wrong with having a back end Netware (well, OES) and Groupwise infrastructure, or eDirectory instead of AD? It's not like they're not still being actively developed.
Oh, your meaning was clear, it was just your that grammar sucked. I fail to see how a company can be a bloated piece of crap, or how anyone could be forced to use a company. Perhaps you meant to say Novell makes bloated pieces of crap, or that Novell's software is bloated crap. Both of those would be grammatically correct, but, I digress.
The only reason it's still in use is because there is a certain class of 'admin' out there that refuses to learn something new and update their skill set.
That's just plain ignorant. There are a lot of use cases where Novell's products are the best tools for the job, and I have 4 Novell admins here who regularly learn new things and update their skill sets.
Novell has some winners and some losers in their portfolio, just like most other large software companies. I'm sorry that you have to work with what you feel are unsuitable tools, but that is no reason to insult those of us who disagree with you.
... just create a certificate authority and use self-signed certificates, and send an email to the users covering the installation of private certs in MSIE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Don't waste your money on a versign cert because all it does is eliminate the warning for a price, whereas your users can eliminate it for free.
Seriously? Let's assume an organization with only 100 employees. If just 10% of them require help setting this up, at say 15 minutes user time lost buggering around, plus 15 minutes support from the helpdesk, then you've lost 4.5 hours of total productivity. That covers the cost of a wildcard cert for your internal domains for a year. (Maybe not from Verisign, but certainly from someplace sane.)
Of course, in the real world, at least half of the users won't bother installing the cert, leaving them vulnerable anyway. So the real question is, how does one force the installation of the organizational CA into the trusted store, assuming that we are talking about the installed base and not the new rollouts?
To the poster who suggested AD and group policies, that would work great in a homogeneous Windows environment. Those a very few and far between nowadays - let me know when that GPO works on the ipad.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant. It is not true that buying a computer is tax deductible. A computer is normally a capital expense. It is purchased and then depreciated over the useful life of the asset to emulate "using up" the asset over time. While this does reduce profits to the corporation and thus normally reduces their tax bill, saying that a computer is tax deductible is not true for businesses of any size under normal circumstances.
Well, if we're picking nits, any depreciating asset IS tax deductible - over time.
While the useful life of the asset is generally used for internal accounting purposes, for tax purposes it's not always relevant. (For those following along at home, businesses track depreciation on their own books using generally accepted accounting principles, but deduct depreciation expenses on their tax returns based on current tax codes.)
In this decade alone, the Canada Revenue Agency has placed computer hardware in four different asset classes with 30%, 45%, 55%, and 100% depreciation rates. Right now, computer purchases fall into a special class (class 52) which even waives the usual half year rule.
So, a computer is a 100% tax writeoff in year one, but still gets treated as a capital asset. I'd call that tax deductible.:)
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Internet access is fast becoming as important as water, gas, electricity, roads etc and having the correct infrastructure is not something to be solely left to private enterprise. If we need a bit of socialism to solve it then lets have some socialism.
With the exception of electricity, those are all examples of infrastructure that follows the same model as broadband. Water and gas are only available in more densely populated areas, and roads have "less bandwidth" as they become more rural. In fact, although electricity is almost ubiquitous, there are still places that remain unserviced due to high deployment costs with no payback possibility.
Not sure how socialism ties in - at least where I am, water is a public service and gas is private.
Too many job ads are looking for insane amount of skills in one person...They ask for a "Unix Admin" person who knows how to code in C++, C#, manage an Asterisk server, install mange & tune 1000 RHEL servers, use NAGIOS, maintain a SAP system, automate sysadmin tasks using bash/ksh/perl/PHP/C/C++, setup and manage IIS & Apache, admin websphere & coldfusion, install manage and tune Windows 2003/2008/2008R2, manage VMware/vSphere/ESX/ESXi servers, perform second level support for Windows users, manage printers, travel onsite for servicing, be on call 24/7 (for no extra pay), and be able to interact like a jolly good fellow with customers, co-works and management, oh, and write documentation and explain things as well as Carl Sagan could.
I've seen this happen as a side effect of a formal job evaluation process. Employees write up their job duties/skills in minute detail ("I helped the SAP admin by rebooting a server once" becomes "maintain the SAP system") and these duties are then scored by a committee. More "duties" = more points = more money, so of course, the employee is entirely motivated to pad everything. My personal favourite is the educational requirements. I have a masters in an unrelated field, so therefore a masters is a "requirement" of my job that just happens to be worth 2 pay grades.
The evaluation committee normally does a pretty decent job of leveling out the pay grades, but unfortunately it's the originally document often turns into the job posting when that person needs to be replaced.
4) When a large business buys computers, they don't come with windows licenses. They buy blank machines and get a site license.
Not true. The Windows "site license" is an upgrade to the OEM copy of Windows installed on the PC. It cannot be used on bare metal. What businesses do is buy the cheapest possible Windows license with the PC and then image over it with the desired version. (Or get the OEM to ship the image preinstalled for a few extra bucks.)
we were discussing the rounding of the 50 øre coin. which is why i said - at that level instead of at this level to be clear that i was referring to what was just said and not the article
Actually, it wasn't clear at all. You used
$1.51
as your example. If you were discussing kroner, you shouldn't have used a dollar sign.
Besides, $1.51 will buy you a coffee in Canada, but in Norway it'll be 20 NOK.
I'll add my 0 cents: $1.49 + 12% HST = $1.6688 This will be rounded down to $1.65, so you're paying $0.0188 LESS for each coffee at that price.
See, the HST IS good for something after all!
Fuel has been priced in tenths of cents for as long as I can remember.
at that level of rounding people WILL start gaming the system, hell i know i would. coffee costs $1.51 - i'm going to pay with a card. coffee costs 1.49 - i'm going to pay in cash.
So you're going to pay $0.01 more for each coffee?
$1.51 with card = $1.51, with cash = $1.50
$1.49 with cash = $1.50, with card = $1.49
Not to mention that setting prices to optimize for rounding won't work for purchases of multiple units.
You haven't accounted for the pirates who then turn into customers, either.
Or pirates that tell their friends about how great of a program it is, and those friends purchase the program legitimately.
---
No, let's operate off of the assumption that piracy never occurred. Who is to say your program will have as many paying customers? Don't think you can simply say, "HEY LOOK X PAID, BUT Y DIDNT, THEREFORE WE LOST PROFITS!" Which is mathematically wrong. It should be represented as:
x = customers who are customers regardless of piracy n = customers who are customers because of piracy p = pirates that who are not customers, but would otherwise be customers r = pirates who are not customers, but would not otherwise be customers
If you're going to claim damages, please provide proof that x > p, not that x + n > p.
Don't you mean p > n? If there are more pirates would otherwise be customers than the number of new customers gained through pirate word of mouth, then damages have occurred. X and R and completely irrelevant to this calculation.
If you implement a consumption tax similar to Canada's "Goods and Services Tax", everything is taxed at every stage through the process. It is impossible for the consumer to know what percentage of the price is tax.
Here is an example. A farmer produces wheat and sells it to a distributor. The distributor pays 10% flat tax. The distributor then sells the wheat to a mill. The mill pays 10% tax (including 10% of tax that the distributor paid). The mill sells flour to another distributor. The distributor pays 10% tax (including 10% of the tax that the mill paid), etc.
GST is not a compound tax, it's a value added tax. Every bill that I pay gets split into two accounts - a "GST paid" asset account and an expense account. Every invoice I collect is split to a revenue account and a "GST collected" liability account. At the end of the period, I simply remit the difference between the two GST accounts.
Here's my example. Let's say a white box supplier buys $400 worth of components and sells me a $500 computer. They collect $25 GST from me, pay $20 to their supplier, and remit $5 to the government. (Let's ignore import/export issues for now and assume that the original supplier remits the entire $20.)
Now I take that computer, install Linux, slap my brand on it, deliver it, set it up, and feed your dog while I'm there. I charge you $700 + $35 GST, When I file my return, I remit the net GST of $10 as well. So a total of $35 in GST was remitted to the government from the supply chain, which is exactly what you paid.
If you were a GST registrant and decided to sell that computer along, but only got $600 for it, you would be able to claim a refund of $5 ($35-$30, or 5% of $700-$600) as well. If that was your only sale in a reporting period, you would actually get a $5 cheque (well, direct deposit) from Revenue Canada.
What often happens in this scenario is that the person selling gets a rebate for the tax that they paid on things that they sold. This is somewhat complicated, but what is very complicated is for the government to track all of this to make sure that nobody is cheating.
Actually, GST has definite advantages in that regard. Invoices must clearly show the amount of GST charged and the registrant number, so an audit has a good paper trail to start from. And business are motivated to collect GST so that they can recover their input credits. It's also easy to cross reference to your income tax return as well - if you aren't remitting about 5% of your gross profit, a red flag goes up.
Europeans get shocked at the amount of wires in US cities.
I see what you did there.
Unfortunately, this is true. Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
Evil will never truly triumph over Good because if it does it will have nothing left to eat next season.
No, Least Evil becomes next season's Good, and then the spiral continues.
that doesn't change who's at fault
Never said it did. Still don't see why we're letting Rogers off the hook so easily though. Rogers (and Bell, and every other useless fucking telco out there) owns the relationship with the subscriber, and THEY should be the ones reaching out. They KNEW what was going on, there was no reason they couldn't have been proactive about letting their customers know. Instead they let them find out through the news media.
It's funny when Microsoft complains about other software demanding too many resources.
Actually though, my point was that even that level of ActiveSync "integration" only works with Exchange. You want some Groupwise lovin', you need a BES.
iPhones and Android phones have both been able to integrate into corporate networks for quite a while.
iPhones and Android phones have both been able to *UNSECURELY* integrate into corporate networks for quite a while.
Hey, I'll play.
iPhones and Android phones have both been able to integrate into corporate networks *RUNNING EXCHANGE* for quite a while.
How is it RIM's fault that Rogers didn't send you a text?
Residential time of use metering has been in use here in Ontario for about a year now. We pay one of three different rates based on time of day, weekday/weekend, and whether it's heating or cooling season.
The 33% is out of any money that people paid Comcast directly after their accounts had been turned over to Lindy's.
...there is ONE program that I have to use that ONLY runs on Windows, so I run it on an XP virtual machine ... 13 computers in our house, and not one of them runs MS software!
Umm, what? XP isn't MS software?
Sure. I have a couple of examples. :)
Identity Manager - for auto account provisioning and directory sync. One cool thing we do with this is sync a very limited set of students and attributes into an LDAP directory that our offsite Resnet provider then uses for network authentication.
Access Manager - web single sign on with federated authentication
Netstorage - clientless webdav, basically.
iFolder - think locally hosted Dropbox with admin controls and auto provisioning
iPrint - install printers by selecting them from a webpage
There's a lot of other ones where the "best tool" is a function of the specific job. For example, the SUSE enterprise server is better than RHEL for me, because it is the platform for OES2, and it's more efficient to have to maintain only one (server) flavour of Linux. Groupwise has issues with 3rd party support, but can support 4 times as many users on the same hardware as Exchange. NTFS permissions are more fine grained, but Netware trustees give you automatic filesystem traversal rights. And so on...
eDirectory vs Active Directory is like emacs vs. vi though. Let's stay away from that one. :)
Do you work for the government? That is the only place I see Novell anymore. Governments and school districts.
Higher ed in my case. I've worked in 3 Novell shops, and the first 2 I converted to Microsoft shops before I left. In the hands of a competent administrator, both environments can deliver the same results.
They cannot get off of the platform because it would cost too much. Lots of luck going to the voters for a few billion dollars to rip and replace Novell.
It's not financially prudent to rip and replace functional infrastructure. Any other time everyone screams about governments wasting money, so what's the problem with this?
I really don't get all the Novell hate in this thread. Seriously, what's wrong with having a back end Netware (well, OES) and Groupwise infrastructure, or eDirectory instead of AD? It's not like they're not still being actively developed.
Oh, your meaning was clear, it was just your that grammar sucked. I fail to see how a company can be a bloated piece of crap, or how anyone could be forced to use a company. Perhaps you meant to say Novell makes bloated pieces of crap, or that Novell's software is bloated crap. Both of those would be grammatically correct, but, I digress.
The only reason it's still in use is because there is a certain class of 'admin' out there that refuses to learn something new and update their skill set.
That's just plain ignorant. There are a lot of use cases where Novell's products are the best tools for the job, and I have 4 Novell admins here who regularly learn new things and update their skill sets.
Novell has some winners and some losers in their portfolio, just like most other large software companies. I'm sorry that you have to work with what you feel are unsuitable tools, but that is no reason to insult those of us who disagree with you.
Novell, however, is a bloated piece of crap that no user should be forced to use.
You do realize that Novell is a company, not a product, right?
... just create a certificate authority and use self-signed certificates, and send an email to the users covering the installation of private certs in MSIE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Don't waste your money on a versign cert because all it does is eliminate the warning for a price, whereas your users can eliminate it for free.
Seriously? Let's assume an organization with only 100 employees. If just 10% of them require help setting this up, at say 15 minutes user time lost buggering around, plus 15 minutes support from the helpdesk, then you've lost 4.5 hours of total productivity. That covers the cost of a wildcard cert for your internal domains for a year. (Maybe not from Verisign, but certainly from someplace sane.)
Of course, in the real world, at least half of the users won't bother installing the cert, leaving them vulnerable anyway. So the real question is, how does one force the installation of the organizational CA into the trusted store, assuming that we are talking about the installed base and not the new rollouts?
To the poster who suggested AD and group policies, that would work great in a homogeneous Windows environment. Those a very few and far between nowadays - let me know when that GPO works on the ipad.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant. It is not true that buying a computer is tax deductible. A computer is normally a capital expense. It is purchased and then depreciated over the useful life of the asset to emulate "using up" the asset over time. While this does reduce profits to the corporation and thus normally reduces their tax bill, saying that a computer is tax deductible is not true for businesses of any size under normal circumstances.
Well, if we're picking nits, any depreciating asset IS tax deductible - over time.
While the useful life of the asset is generally used for internal accounting purposes, for tax purposes it's not always relevant. (For those following along at home, businesses track depreciation on their own books using generally accepted accounting principles, but deduct depreciation expenses on their tax returns based on current tax codes.)
In this decade alone, the Canada Revenue Agency has placed computer hardware in four different asset classes with 30%, 45%, 55%, and 100% depreciation rates. Right now, computer purchases fall into a special class (class 52) which even waives the usual half year rule.
So, a computer is a 100% tax writeoff in year one, but still gets treated as a capital asset. I'd call that tax deductible. :)