I see people watching tv while driving all the time, almost nightly, and very often when on long trips. I like to tell myself it's an illusion, that someone really has it pointed where the kid in the back seat can see the screen or whatever, but once in a while it is *blatant*, someone has a dash-mounted TV right in front of the wheel, and is alone in the car, driving on the freeway watching tv.
My other favorite thing to see, also seen extremely often, is groups of people dressed like thugs, in cars and SUV's hanging out in places like fast food restaurant parking lots, with loud music playing and hardcore porn on the screens in their cars for all to see.
Of course none of these people ever gets the slightest attention from cops, but I got pulled over for having a dim (not spent) license plate light and another time for having an air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. I got the whole third degree on that one. Turns out it's a violation to have anything hanging from your mirror while driving.
That's not the GPL being enforced, that is the derivative works protection of copyright law being enforced. Plenty of examples of that. All you can say about the GPL in that case is that it didn't *abridge* copyright protection.
The results you get from the average $300 Canon Powershot are far better than what you had with your $500 SLR back in the day, especially considering the lenses you could afford then. A Canon 1D or whatever full-frame DSLR is pro-level, but I don't know anyone who doesn't turn livid at the L-series lens prices.
The evidence for that is pretty weak. It relies on the assumption that six thousand poll workers cannot count forty million votes in twelve (not two!) hours.
My sympathies lie with the popular mob versus the authoritarian clerics, but that's my own (solid) bias at work. I denounce the authoritarian rule and the state religion regardless of the outcome of any election. But at the same time I haven't seen any evidence that the election was rigged. I've asked on enough forums to be met with incredulity and insults enough times that I'm willing to bet nobody else has evidence either. They want to believe something based on their (quite reasonable) biases.
If you accept the premise that the vote count was impossible, there are quite a few other countries who do the same or similar (e.g., Canada) whose legitimacy you should also doubt.
Otherwise reasonable people take it on faith that the Iranian election was rigged.
The evidence that persuades them is the idea that six thousand poll workers cannot count forty million ballots in twelve hours, together with the understanding that one unscientific pre-election survey predicted different results.
I think it is at least equally plausible that the election was fair, and that Mousavi knew he was losing and switched his goal to creating the civil unrest that we see today. It is much easier to fake a telephone survey than to fake a national election.
And why are people so ready to believe the count was impossible? They didn't wait until the ballots were collected, they counted them as they were cast, in a very efficient distributed effort. The counting didn't take much longer than the polling, and thousands of people contributed to the task.
Personally, the whole religious and authoritarian nature of the Iranian government offends me but I don't think this election is really the problem. I don't even understand why so many people are ready to believe the election was rigged just based on biased opinions. The fact that the Iranian government is willing to kill protesters and jail journalists and so forth is a separate issue. That is a situation that transcends the effects of a presidential election no matter who "wins."
Someone needs to prove, to a strong standard of evidence, that the vote count was rigged. I'll be right on board if you do. But I can't be persuaded by "It had to have been a sham! Iran is corrupt as hell!"
>And yet more and more books (especially computer science related textbooks) are becoming easily and freely available online (sometimes legally, sometimes >via rapidshare or torrents) for anyone who knows where to look -- far more easily than taking a trip to a library and picking up a dead-tree book.
To get specific books, especially contemporary technical books, you have to do more than just go to the library -- you usually have to go to the library and arrange for an inter-library loan, wait days or weeks for the loan, and often have to deal with the fact that the loaned book is reference-only and be required to read it inside the library.
Now, this arrangement was reasonable when I was doing research, handling original 16th century manuscripts and other special collection stuff, but to get your hands on something like W. Richard Stevens *at a library at Steven's Alma Mater?*, or to get your average O'Reilly title at your local public library, it can be ridiculous. On the other hand, probably the fastest path to this information is to simply go to Border's or Barnes and Noble. Grab the book, and sit in the store with your laptop and your cappucino and consume it.
None of the libraries in my town or the university allow you to take a drink in, let alone has a coffee bar inside. The local Borders even lets me bring my dog. So I can sit in a comfy leather chair, with good lighting, soft tasteful music, a decent beverage, fast free wi-fi, and my dog curled up at my feet, while I have access to a thousand linear feet of current computer science books.
>Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise >bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task, >and do it well.
The problems associated with a university payroll system, in particular, are less related to computer software and more to the incredibly complex set of business rules and legal obligations and contractual commitments that drive the requirements.
No matter how much experience you have with business software, the complexity doesn't go away. The $40 million in the story is more like $12 million in reality, and if you consider a staff of 30 professionals on a four-year project, would you be willing to do this kind of work for less money? That's an average $100K per year per employee to cover *all* overhead, not just their individual pay. This project isn't as ridiculously expensive as the article makes it out to be.
Did this country lawyer's client create the impression that he or she was lying to a jury? I think we shouldn't ignore that element, because it is probably the most significant single factor that lead to the large judgment.
>The product allowed people to eliminate physical boxes and still run dozens or hundreds of logical servers.
For us, ESX is the difference between needing a new contract with our electical contractor (hundreds of thousands of dollars) versus working with our current power capabilities. It's not about the host machines, the licenses, or even the sysadmin workload. It's more about the power supplies and cooling the racks than anything else.
Proportional amounts according to the individual cash investment each of them has made into the company. For most rank-and-file employees, that amount is zero. For shareholders, an equitable distribution would be made. Whose fault is it if you aren't rewarded in that scheme?
>I think the main difference is that they broke it up into a client/server design. The advantage of that being the freedom to use whatever UI you like.
"Client Server" for a music player? I can understand for a music *production* system, or for OS- or Desktop- level audio service, but if a normal end-user cannot simply install it and play music, it's not meeting it's primary goal!
I'm a programmer who has worked on audio applications and other DSP, I've been running Linux since at least 1993, and I couldn't get xmms2 to play an mp3. Maybe there's a distro that sets up a nice basic xmms2 front-end that simply works, but I haven't seen it.
On the other hand, audacious was the solution.
Don't get me wrong -- it's not the apparent complexity of the system that bothers me. I've had good luck with ecaSound and I totally love Jack for production and processing. But a music player is a different category of app, the category that the average drunk party guest needs to be able to operate:-)
>I've been in the software business for a while now and even enterprise level software doesn't cost this much
Tell us a little bit about what you know about a state university's HR and Payroll.
Describe a few of the simpler relationships that can exist between the state, a faculty member, a member of a professional staff, a contractor, an undergrad and a grad student.
Talk a bit about benefits management for faculty that work at other institutions for part of the year.
Discuss considerations of foreign employees, and domestic employees abroad, in an academic context.
I would be surprised if even your quarter-million employee company has the payroll complexity, in particular, of a university system. Just getting the requirements together enough for ADP can be a long, expensive affair.
>Texas' finance law, Sec 481.32(a)(9)(c) article II paragraph 3
Huh? Texas is one of the easier states to do payroll tax for. There's only Federal tax, but some contractors started getting a type of service tax in '88. I remember that because we had to scrap a system to accommodate it, and that's when we started using HP; I got an Apollo on my desk and was told to learn Unix. This was also the first time I ever had a computer that was directly attached to the internet:-P
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>Legalize it, then it can be taxed and regulated.
That's nothing compared to the value of slave labor that can be derived from the prison-industrial complex.
I see people watching tv while driving all the time, almost nightly, and very often when on long trips.
I like to tell myself it's an illusion, that someone really has it pointed where the kid in the back seat can see the screen or whatever, but once in a while it is *blatant*, someone has a dash-mounted TV right in front of the wheel, and is alone in the car, driving on the freeway watching tv.
My other favorite thing to see, also seen extremely often, is groups of people dressed like thugs, in cars and SUV's hanging out in places like fast food restaurant parking lots, with loud music playing and hardcore porn on the screens in their cars for all to see.
Of course none of these people ever gets the slightest attention from cops, but I got pulled over for having a dim (not spent) license plate light and another time for having an air freshener hanging from the rear view mirror. I got the whole third degree on that one. Turns out it's a violation to have anything hanging from your mirror while driving.
That's not the GPL being enforced, that is the derivative works protection of copyright law being enforced. Plenty of examples of that. All you can say about the GPL in that case is that it didn't *abridge* copyright protection.
If I take a photo that's worth keeping, I make/mount/frame an archival print (or series of prints when there is actually demand.)
My professional data these days goes on *daily* LTO-4 tapes, and weekly one of them goes to Iron Mountain. My personal data is pretty much ephemeral.
>Now, a full-size dSLR is at least $2k.
The results you get from the average $300 Canon Powershot are far better than what you had with your $500 SLR back in the day, especially considering the lenses you could afford then. A Canon 1D or whatever full-frame DSLR is pro-level, but I don't know anyone who doesn't turn livid at the L-series lens prices.
>Photographs are also not safe from fire or dampness.
Disc drives and LTO-4 tapes don't do so well either.
Using any digital process you'd like, make a slide that doesn't stand out as "fake" in a set of either Kodachrome-25 or Kodachrome-64 slides.
>The point is that the election was rigged.
The evidence for that is pretty weak. It relies on the assumption that six thousand poll workers cannot count forty million votes in twelve (not two!) hours.
My sympathies lie with the popular mob versus the authoritarian clerics, but that's my own (solid) bias at work. I denounce the authoritarian rule and the state religion regardless of the outcome of any election. But at the same time I haven't seen any evidence that the election was rigged. I've asked on enough forums to be met with incredulity and insults enough times that I'm willing to bet nobody else has evidence either. They want to believe something based on their (quite reasonable) biases.
If you accept the premise that the vote count was impossible, there are quite a few other countries who do the same or similar (e.g., Canada) whose legitimacy you should also doubt.
Otherwise reasonable people take it on faith that the Iranian election was rigged.
The evidence that persuades them is the idea that six thousand poll workers cannot count forty million ballots in twelve hours, together with the understanding that one unscientific pre-election survey predicted different results.
I think it is at least equally plausible that the election was fair, and that Mousavi knew he was losing and switched his goal to creating the civil unrest that we see today. It is much easier to fake a telephone survey than to fake a national election.
And why are people so ready to believe the count was impossible? They didn't wait until the ballots were collected, they counted them as they were cast, in a very efficient distributed effort. The counting didn't take much longer than the polling, and thousands of people contributed to the task.
Personally, the whole religious and authoritarian nature of the Iranian government offends me but I don't think this election is really the problem. I don't even understand why so many people are ready to believe the election was rigged just based on biased opinions. The fact that the Iranian government is willing to kill protesters and jail journalists and so forth is a separate issue. That is a situation that transcends the effects of a presidential election no matter who "wins."
Someone needs to prove, to a strong standard of evidence, that the vote count was rigged. I'll be right on board if you do. But I can't be persuaded by "It had to have been a sham! Iran is corrupt as hell!"
>All the above assumes you're a boy.
It also assumes that the kind of people who go to dance clubs and the environment there don't make you cringe at the very thought.
>And yet more and more books (especially computer science related textbooks) are becoming easily and freely available online (sometimes legally, sometimes
>via rapidshare or torrents) for anyone who knows where to look -- far more easily than taking a trip to a library and picking up a dead-tree book.
To get specific books, especially contemporary technical books, you have to do more than just go to the library -- you usually have to go to the library and arrange for an inter-library loan, wait days or weeks for the loan, and often have to deal with the fact that the loaned book is reference-only and be required to read it inside the library.
Now, this arrangement was reasonable when I was doing research, handling original 16th century manuscripts and other special collection stuff, but to get your hands on something like W. Richard Stevens *at a library at Steven's Alma Mater?*, or to get your average O'Reilly title at your local public library, it can be ridiculous. On the other hand, probably the fastest path to this information is to simply go to Border's or Barnes and Noble. Grab the book, and sit in the store with your laptop and your cappucino and consume it.
None of the libraries in my town or the university allow you to take a drink in, let alone has a coffee bar inside. The local Borders even lets me bring my dog. So I can sit in a comfy leather chair, with good lighting, soft tasteful music, a decent beverage, fast free wi-fi, and my dog curled up at my feet, while I have access to a thousand linear feet of current computer science books.
>There's a company that makes blow-up car passengers to help scare off rapists.
The real purpose is to avoid tickets for using carpool lanes, especially the ones that use cameras for enforcement.
>financial ruin of a mother assuming Chapter 13 bankruptcy doesn't work, and for 3 years if it does
Ask again, once you can show that any amount of money has been collected from her.
>GPL stops to be enforceable.
When has the GPL, in particular, been enforced by any agent of any government?
>Now that we have a generation of IT professionals that were born and grew up in a world with computers, I have plenty of optimism that enterprise
>bloatware like PeopleSoft (Microsoft *, Novell, FootPrints, Cadence, etc) will slowly but surely be replaced by modular programs that actually do a task,
>and do it well.
The problems associated with a university payroll system, in particular, are less related to computer software and more to the incredibly complex set of business rules and legal obligations and contractual commitments that drive the requirements.
No matter how much experience you have with business software, the complexity doesn't go away. The $40 million in the story is more like $12 million in reality, and if you consider a staff of 30 professionals on a four-year project, would you be willing to do this kind of work for less money? That's an average $100K per year per employee to cover *all* overhead, not just their individual pay. This project isn't as ridiculously expensive as the article makes it out to be.
Did this country lawyer's client create the impression that he or she was lying to a jury? I think we shouldn't ignore that element, because it is probably the most significant single factor that lead to the large judgment.
>The product allowed people to eliminate physical boxes and still run dozens or hundreds of logical servers.
For us, ESX is the difference between needing a new contract with our electical contractor (hundreds of thousands of dollars) versus working with our current power capabilities. It's not about the host machines, the licenses, or even the sysadmin workload. It's more about the power supplies and cooling the racks than anything else.
>How much are you going to share with them?
Proportional amounts according to the individual cash investment each of them has made into the company. For most rank-and-file employees, that amount is zero. For shareholders, an equitable distribution would be made. Whose fault is it if you aren't rewarded in that scheme?
>I think the main difference is that they broke it up into a client/server design. The advantage of that being the freedom to use whatever UI you like.
"Client Server" for a music player? I can understand for a music *production* system, or for OS- or Desktop- level audio service, but if a normal end-user cannot simply install it and play music, it's not meeting it's primary goal!
I'm a programmer who has worked on audio applications and other DSP, I've been running Linux since at least 1993, and I couldn't get xmms2 to play an mp3.
Maybe there's a distro that sets up a nice basic xmms2 front-end that simply works, but I haven't seen it.
On the other hand, audacious was the solution.
Don't get me wrong -- it's not the apparent complexity of the system that bothers me. I've had good luck with ecaSound and I totally love Jack for production and processing. But a music player is a different category of app, the category that the average drunk party guest needs to be able to operate :-)
>Corporate banks have more weight than record companies.
In matters of copyright infringement, banks and record companies enjoy equal protection even though they have different risks.
In matters of theft, banks and record companies enjoy equal protection even though they have different risks.
Theft and Copyright Infringement are protected by different laws. Banks and record companies are protected by the same laws.
Xmms2 is just plain weird. I don't get it at all, and the amount of effort I put into trying to understand it was not rewarded.
I felt lucky to discover Audacious, which I found by accident.
Why would you write business software with such a down-to-the-wire network protocol?
Is it really that expensive to wrap your data in a document format (xml) and use http (soap)?
>I've been in the software business for a while now and even enterprise level software doesn't cost this much
Tell us a little bit about what you know about a state university's HR and Payroll.
Describe a few of the simpler relationships that can exist between the state, a faculty member, a member of a professional staff, a contractor, an undergrad and a grad student.
Talk a bit about benefits management for faculty that work at other institutions for part of the year.
Discuss considerations of foreign employees, and domestic employees abroad, in an academic context.
I guess this will start to scratch the surface.
A university's payroll system is more complex than some governments, and if they show up at ADP's door, ADP sees giant dollar signs.
I would be surprised if even your quarter-million employee company has the payroll complexity, in particular, of a university system.
Just getting the requirements together enough for ADP can be a long, expensive affair.
>Texas' finance law, Sec 481.32(a)(9)(c) article II paragraph 3
Huh? Texas is one of the easier states to do payroll tax for. There's only Federal tax, but some contractors started getting a type of service tax in '88. I remember that because we had to scrap a system to accommodate it, and that's when we started using HP; I got an Apollo on my desk and was told to learn Unix. This was also the first time I ever had a computer that was directly attached to the internet :-P