It just so happens that I am on hold with Verizon right now.
I lost my phone. So I went on their website and ordered a new one. I had to pay full price because I got the phone a year ago.
So they sent it to an old address. When I lived there, I had signature on file with FedEx and UPS. So the Verizon person said that the phone had been delivered and signed for. But I don't have it.
They made the same mistake three years ago. I spent 30 minutes on the phone a couple of days ago. Now it is Saturday and I have been on hold for more than 30 minutes. While on hold, I hear their cheerful ads. One of them talks about a Worry Free Guarantee. Which says "If you have a problem, its our problem."
Its just great to hear that over and over for a half an hour.
When they finally answer the phone, I am going to ask how much the penalty will be to switch my number to another company.
It is worth a couple hundred bucks to never have to deal with them again.
They know where to send the bill. Why don't they know where to send the phone?
If you follow the link above to the IPCC wikipedia entry, you see that 1.5% of the scientists involved in the IPCC report believe it is biased.
The impression I get is that within the scientists who work in or near the field of climate support both the idea that human/industry induced global warming is happening and that it is bad for us. But it is not a uniformly held opinion among those scientists.
I suppose a person for whom protecting the environment is an important value, they would like to err on the side of protecting the planet.
Another person for whom worldwide economic growth is an important value, they would like to err on the side of not burdening business interests before we are certain about the science.
There is a third group that combines the two and feels that there is money to be made in developing technology that reduces our greenhouse gas emissions.
I personally value protecting environment a bit more than economic growth, but I am turned of by a common assumption amongst some environmentalists that business is synonymous with greed. We cannot all get jobs working for non-profit corporations or live off the land.
One thing that was interesting to me is the quote:
"Since 2001, no climate scientists have expressed skepticism that warming, of the magnitude described by the IPCC, has occurred."
I was working on a project where we had large LCD overhead displays in a facility that operates 7/24. They got "image persistance" as a result. The manual for the monitors recommended having them turned off for a few hours a day to prevent this. This was not an option for our application so we made a change to the application to periodically swap the displays around. I do wonder how the LCD displays they use at the airport avoid this. The good news with LCD "burn-in" is that it is generally reversable.
You can do a google search for "LCD image persistence" to read about it. Or you can just go here.
Conservatives believe that the value of the autonomy of the mother over her own body does not outweigh the value of not killing innocent fetuses.
However, conservatives have no problem believing the value of bringing democracy to Iraq is greater than the value of not killing tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. I'm talking about the civilians killed by American bombs, not the other civilians killed by insurgents.
Conservatives are not willing to compromise in killing in the first instance, but they are willing to make the compromise in the second instance.
When you drop bombs, sometimes you make mistakes and kill innocent people. So you can only choose between killing both bad guys and good guys and not killing at all.
To be consistent either you are against killing innocents or you are not. But I think most people are inconsistent about something or other. The GP was simply saying that both political parties have internal contradictions.
I leave it for conservative/. readers to give examples of Democrat inconsistencies. I don't claim they don't exist.
Almost all teens are so concerned about DRM that they won't listen to AAC files.
Oh wait, Apple is selling millions of iPods and millions of AAC files.
So it is only the teens on/. that don't listen to AAC tunes.
Oh wait, I see "I like iTunes and my iPod" posts on/. from time to time.
So it is only 60% of the teens on/. and maybe 5% of teens in general won't listen to AAC files because of their strong feelings about DRM.
Sounds like a great business opportunity to me!
I think a lot of/.'ers want the copyright holders of music they hear on the radio to see the world the way they see it. "Make your music available in MP3 format." Or "Make your music available in OGG format."
You could argue that not all teens have parents or aunts or uncles that can afford to buy them iPods. Fair enough. I have seen teenagers (and older folks) on the subway with a portable CD player, headphones, and a CD wallet.
I don't want to stand out in the sun all day, day after day picking fruit. Even if picking fruit all day payed better than IT does, I think I would find something else to do. On top of that, when the three week pear season is over, you have to find another crop to pick. So drive your family to the part of the country that has that crop.
I would much rather let someone who wants to do the work come to this country and continue to have them do it.
People pay a lot more per pound for Alaskan Crab than they do for pears. If the pears start costing what the crab costs, I think they will eat more crab.
Some people talk about what it costs to provide services for illegal immigrants. What about the value of the work they bring here?
With pears being produced in other countries at lower prices, the farmers here will not be able to pass on price increases in order to pay higher wages. In the California Farm Bureau article I linked to in the GP, the farmer was talking about other pear farmers in the area buldozing their orchards.
They are lobying for guest workers. If that fails, their bluff will be called and we will see how many farms shut down. Some farms are a marginal business with a lot of risk. Other farms make good money.
On a side note, I once had a supervisor who owned a pear orchard. When the pears ripened, he dissappeared from his IT job for the three weeks it took to harvest. But he didn't pick them himself. And he was a naturalized citizen.
If our current government wants to see what happens to the economy when you remove 20 million hard-working, low paid illegal immigrants, they can go ahead. Maybe next year WalMart will have a shortage because all their workers left to go pick pears for more money.;)
So perhaps we will seal the border. We can have Mexican people who want to pick fruit stuck on one side, and farmers who need someone to pick the fruit on the other. Where we once exported lots of food abroad, maybe we can buy more food from countries that don't have our labor laws. Or better yet, block the imports and let food get expensive enough so that farmers can pay wages high enough to draw all those Americans back to the farms to pick fruit and vegetables like they did 150 years ago!
Anyway, I did not start the GP so much for political argument. I was just driving along the Sacramento River and saw pears on the ground in the orchards. I short while later, I heard that it was because they couldn't get enough people to pick all the pears. California grows a lot of food and it is wierd to see it sitting on the ground rotting.
Perhaps non-green corporations can financially out perform green ones because they can pass on the environmental costs on to future generations and the government.
Iron Mountain Mine in northern California. It is an abondoned open pit pyrite mine. Whenever it rains, it produces sulphuric acid, combined with heavy metals, which would eventually feed into the Sacramento River, if it were not for two intervening dams. During heavy rains, the polution does get past the dams before being sufficiently diluted.
For the rest of time, someone will have to operate a combination of a lime neutralization plant on site, combined with releases of water from the dams timed with large seasonal flows from Shasta Dam. This site was actively mined off and on from the 1860s through 1963. At one time, the site was the largest producer of copper in California.
Another EPA document gives a explanation of the problem, photos of the neutralization plant, and some history. Here is a quote from that document:
When extraction of the ore was suspended from the various stopes above the Lawson, the ground was in very bad shape, and the conditions regarding heat and gas were so terrible that it seemed advisable to abandon any attempt to work from that level. In fact it was a case of walking away and leaving the job for the next generation" (William F. Kett, General Manager, Mountain Copper Co., August 1944)
Mining at the site was abondoned, at least in part, because the ground became too unstable to mine it anymore. So when the mine was operated, the company was profitable. I don't know the relationship of the company that did the mining to the current owner of the site. But it is possbile for a company to cease to exist once the mine is worn out. So the companies that mined this site were profitable while the mine was open, mostly by avoiding paying for the environmental damage they caused.
The EPA has successfully gone after the current owner of the site. In my mind, it is not fair to have a company that did not create the problem pay for cleaning it up. But it is also not fair to have taxpayers pay for it either. Once all the ore is gone and the mining company folds, there is no way to go back and make the owners pay for the damage they caused.
So maybe green companies might underperform non-green companies TODAY. But that is true because often they can skip out on paying all the costs of their activites. The Sacramento River provides drinking water for a significant portion of the population of California. I was astonished when I heard of this site.
If this were some young geek, we would say "social engineering" and say that the folks that gave up the information were idiots. We might even say what a great guy the young geek was for pointing out the flaws in a company's security system.
So lets say you own the copyright to thousands of music videos. Are you supposed to hire someone to keep checking the site for your videos being uploaded? This is for 0 additional income generated from protecting your copyright.
Or do you just go ahead and sue the company and see how the court rules. The court will probably rule in the favor of the copyright holders now that there is the Grokster decision.
Another approach for them would be to track down and sue the uploaders.
Perhaps youtube has a plan to work out a deal with the record labels like Apple did.
They don't have to return the money if they can show that the IT folks on the government side screwed up as much or more than they did.
Usually that isn't very hard. If the FBI had a strong IT department, they would have done it in house.
The background on this project was that the contract was let and specifications were written before 9/11. After 9/11, the system they relized they needed was radically different from what was specified. Rather than tell the government "we need a change order, a lot more money, and a lot more time to analyze the new requirements", SAIC (the contractor) decided to say "we can do it under the existing contract."
I suspect the SAIC folks were motivated by a desire to help the FBI protect the US from terrorism and put that protection in place on a very aggressive schedule. What they should have realized was that it couldn't be done by anybody (in that amount of time).
I worked at SAIC years ago and I can say that they have very good software development processes. But when it is an emergency, people all too often through the process out the window. Many SAIC folks have defense or military backgrounds and are strongly motivated to work towards keeping the US strong and free, not by milking the government for every dollar they can.
There was a detailed discussion of the multiple causes of the failure in IEEE Spectrum (I don't remember which issue). But you won't find the details or the nuances here on/., just "Oh here is another failed government project."
To summarize, a finance professor decided to calculate the return on companies for the 30 days after the award on of options on an unusual date for such award. He looked at 1668 such awards and found that those stocks did 5% better than average for those 30 days each time. Later, the Wall Street Journal calculated odds of 300 billion to one that that would happen by chance.
So a red flag can be raised on a company by mining this data, but it doesn't prove that backdating took place. The SEC has decided to investigate a bunch of these companies. It is likely that they will find wrongdoing in at least some of these cases.
One interesting note was that this practice has been greatly reduced as of 2002, when Sarbanes-Oxley required reporting of options awards within two days of the award.
The details of how options are granted determines whether they have to be shown as an expense or not, so some companies involved are having to restate earnings. The largest impact I'm aware of is UnitedHealth Group, which according to the above article may have to report $300 million in additional expenses.
Enron was fraud on a massive scale to hide tremendous losses.
Backdating options is a lesser fraud that puts more money in the pockets of executives. It does not imply that the companies involved are not making money. It also hasn't been proven for any company, yet.
Well then, I don't know who you should be more frustrated with. RedHat, who charges so much. Or your management, who calls it your budget and then controls how you spend it.
I once worked in a place where my bosses boss worked hard to keep any and all Unix or Linux out of our shop. If you even mentioned Linux (the L word) at the lunch table, she would get up and leave.
Its frustrating to be held accountable for outcomes and be constrained to how you do the job. In my 25 years in the computer business, it has almost never been otherwise. If you find yourself given free reign and sufficent resources to do the best job you can, savor it.
The only way "you" are required to pay licenses is if "you" and the company are one (i.e. self-employment).
If you work for someone who is willing to pay for the name and the support and as a result "you" the technical person have one additional option to solving problems (calling support). Why would "you" object? It's not your money. You could even think of it as your employer voluntarily paying money some of which ends up developing open source software.
I suppose the way it impacts the technical people is that they have to contact the accounting people and tell them to pay out another $800 to install software on an additional machine. But that should be budgeted along with the amount for the hardware, unless the decision makers in the company change their minds.
If you start your own company, then you call the shots. Or you can do what you want with the hardware that "you" buy at home.
I bought a copy of Photoshop Elements 4.0. The main reason I got it was for the ability to organize all my digital photos. It is great for this and will even manage your photo backups. I also like how you can opt to save all the previous versions of an image and hide them under the latest version.
I had used GIMP for quite a while before buying elements, but I find Elements more intuitive. I still use GIMP on other machines (like my computer at work) because I don't want to pirate the software.
I find that after figuring out something in Photoshop Elements, it takes a while to figure out how to do the same thing in GIMP.
I have not yet figured out how to do the equivalent of "Auto Smart Fix" photos in GIMP.
The administration complains about the press when they reveal the extent of government surveillance because they administration doesn't like to be criticized.
But they turn around and reveal details of plots foiled by government surveillance to help lead the public into supporting the government's conduct.
So when you read about the details of how the government catches terrorists, here is a guide to tell if the press is good or bad:
1) if the story makes the government look bad or subjects government actions to more debate and scrutiny, then the press is bad 2) if the story helps to support the view that government surveillance keeps us safe, then the press is good
Or if you read a story in the New York Times, then the press is bad. If you read the exact same story in the Los Angeles times or the Wall Street Journal, then the press is good.
Leaks to the press should be seen in the same light. If someone in the government disagrees with administration policy and leaks embarrassing information to the media, that's bad. If the administration talks to reporters, hoping to leak the name of a covert CIA operative, because her husband was critical of administrative policy, then that's good.
This sounds like the situation we have in US Oil Refinery capacity.
The refineries are running very nearly at capacity. You would think that supply and demand would drive companies to build new refineries. But there is a high barrier to entry, the billions of dollars it costs to build a single refinery. Meanwhile, the owneres of existing refineries are happy to sell their product at the high prices the limited capacity helps to produce.
Saying "lets let supply and demand take care of it" doesn't always produce the best outcome for the country as a whole or the average person.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I finally got to talk to them. They didn't want to tell me how much it would cost
because I was not the authorized person on the account.
So I went and got my girlfriend on the phone so she could ask them how much the
cancellation penalties would be. The answer is $175 per line.
They way we feel right now, we just might pay it. Maybe I can go to small claims to
get the $160 for the phone they gave to somebody else.
It just so happens that I am on hold with Verizon right now.
I lost my phone. So I went on their website and ordered a new one.
I had to pay full price because I got the phone a year ago.
So they sent it to an old address. When I lived there, I had signature on file
with FedEx and UPS. So the Verizon person said that the phone had been delivered
and signed for. But I don't have it.
They made the same mistake three years ago.
I spent 30 minutes on the phone a couple of days ago.
Now it is Saturday and I have been on hold for more than 30 minutes.
While on hold, I hear their cheerful ads.
One of them talks about a Worry Free Guarantee.
Which says "If you have a problem, its our problem."
Its just great to hear that over and over for a half an hour.
When they finally answer the phone, I am going to ask how much the penalty will
be to switch my number to another company.
It is worth a couple hundred bucks to never have to deal with them again.
They know where to send the bill. Why don't they know where to send the phone?
If you follow the link above to the IPCC wikipedia entry, you see that 1.5% of the scientists involved in the IPCC report believe it is biased.
The impression I get is that within the scientists who work in or near the field of climate support both the idea that human/industry induced global warming is happening and that it is bad for us.
But it is not a uniformly held opinion among those scientists.
I suppose a person for whom protecting the environment is an important value, they would like to err on the side of protecting the planet.
Another person for whom worldwide economic growth is an important value, they would like to err on the side of not burdening business interests before we are certain about the science.
There is a third group that combines the two and feels that there is money to be made in developing technology that reduces our greenhouse gas emissions.
I personally value protecting environment a bit more than economic growth, but I am turned of by a common
assumption amongst some environmentalists that business is synonymous with greed. We cannot all
get jobs working for non-profit corporations or live off the land.
One thing that was interesting to me is the quote:
"Since 2001, no climate scientists have expressed skepticism that warming, of the magnitude described by the IPCC, has occurred."
That would explain it. I think these were 42" displays.
As far as TV sets go, most people don't leave them on 24 hours a day.
The LCD displays were much more readable than CRTs would be in this application. It was in a control tower with lots of ambient light.
I was working on a project where we had large LCD overhead displays in a facility that operates 7/24. They got "image persistance" as a result. The manual for the monitors recommended having them turned off for a few hours a day to prevent this. This was not an option for our application so we made a change to the application to periodically swap the displays around. I do wonder how the LCD displays they use at the airport avoid this. The good news with LCD "burn-in" is that it is generally reversable.
You can do a google search for "LCD image persistence" to read about it. Or you can just go here.
According to this the ban has been softened. You can now buy chewing gum with a prescription.
Here are some other references to the chewing gum ban.
Conservatives believe that the value of the autonomy of the mother over her own body
/. readers to give examples of Democrat inconsistencies.
does not outweigh the value of not killing innocent fetuses.
However, conservatives have no problem believing the value of bringing democracy to Iraq
is greater than the value of not killing tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.
I'm talking about the civilians killed by American bombs, not the other civilians killed by
insurgents.
Conservatives are not willing to compromise in killing in the first instance, but they are
willing to make the compromise in the second instance.
When you drop bombs, sometimes you make mistakes and kill innocent people. So you can only choose
between killing both bad guys and good guys and not killing at all.
To be consistent either you are against killing innocents or you are not. But I think
most people are inconsistent about something or other.
The GP was simply saying that both political parties have internal contradictions.
I leave it for conservative
I don't claim they don't exist.
He should have said "The mother of all bloodbaths."
Songs are free on Kazaa, unless you get caught.
I prefer not to worry about finding myself in court someday trying
to explain to a judge how evil coporations are ripping off artists.
YMMV
And of course, you can't listen to AAC tunes.
Almost all teens are so concerned about DRM that they won't listen to AAC files.
Oh wait, Apple is selling millions of iPods and millions of AAC files.
So it is only the teens on
Oh wait, I see "I like iTunes and my iPod" posts on
So it is only 60% of the teens on
listen to AAC files because of their strong feelings about DRM.
Sounds like a great business opportunity to me!
I think a lot of
radio to see the world the way they see it. "Make your music available in MP3
format." Or "Make your music available in OGG format."
You could argue that not all teens have parents or aunts or uncles that
can afford to buy them iPods. Fair enough. I have seen teenagers (and older folks)
on the subway with a portable CD player, headphones, and a CD wallet.
I don't want to stand out in the sun all day, day after day picking fruit. Even if
;)
picking fruit all day payed better than IT does, I think I would find something else to do.
On top of that, when the three week pear season is over, you have to find another crop to pick.
So drive your family to the part of the country that has that crop.
I would much rather let someone who wants to do the work come to this country and
continue to have them do it.
People pay a lot more per pound for Alaskan Crab than they do for pears. If the pears start
costing what the crab costs, I think they will eat more crab.
Some people talk about what it costs to provide services for illegal immigrants. What about the value of the work they bring here?
With pears being produced in other countries at lower prices, the farmers here will not be able to pass on price increases in order to pay higher wages. In the California Farm Bureau article I linked to in the GP, the farmer was talking about other pear farmers in the area buldozing their orchards.
They are lobying for guest workers. If that fails, their bluff will be called and we will see how many farms shut down. Some farms are a marginal business with a lot of risk.
Other farms make good money.
On a side note, I once had a supervisor who owned a pear orchard. When the pears ripened,
he dissappeared from his IT job for the three weeks it took to harvest.
But he didn't pick them himself. And he was a naturalized citizen.
If our current government wants to see what happens to the economy when you remove
20 million hard-working, low paid illegal immigrants, they can go ahead.
Maybe next year WalMart will have a shortage because all their workers left to
go pick pears for more money.
So perhaps we will seal the border. We can have Mexican people who want to pick fruit
stuck on one side, and farmers who need someone to pick the fruit on the other.
Where we once exported lots of food abroad, maybe we can buy more food from countries
that don't have our labor laws.
Or better yet, block the imports and let food get expensive enough so that farmers
can pay wages high enough to draw all those Americans back to the farms to pick fruit and vegetables like they did 150 years ago!
Anyway, I did not start the GP so much for political argument. I was just driving
along the Sacramento River and saw pears on the ground in the orchards.
I short while later, I heard that it was because they couldn't get enough people to
pick all the pears.
California grows a lot of food and it is wierd to see it sitting on the ground rotting.
Yes, and my ancestors started coming over here in the 1870s. They worked hard and were discriminated against.
And here in California, there is fruit rotting in the fields because border tightening has cut the supply of farm workers.
So you out of work IT folks, get out there and pick lettuce, corn, tomatoes and pears!
Perhaps non-green corporations can financially out perform green ones because they can pass on the environmental costs on to future generations and the government.
Iron Mountain Mine in northern California. It is an abondoned open pit pyrite mine. Whenever it rains, it produces sulphuric acid, combined with heavy metals, which would eventually feed into the Sacramento River, if it were not for two intervening dams. During heavy rains, the polution does get past the dams before being sufficiently diluted.
For the rest of time, someone will have to operate a combination of a lime neutralization plant on site, combined with releases of water from the dams timed with large seasonal flows from Shasta Dam. This site was actively mined off and on from the 1860s through 1963. At one time, the site was the largest producer of copper in California.
Another EPA document gives a explanation of the problem, photos of the neutralization plant, and some history. Here is a quote from that document:
When extraction of the ore was suspended from the
various stopes above the Lawson, the ground was in
very bad shape, and the conditions regarding heat
and gas were so terrible that it seemed advisable to
abandon any attempt to work from that level.
In fact it was a case of walking away and leaving the
job for the next generation" (William F. Kett,
General Manager, Mountain Copper Co., August 1944)
Mining at the site was abondoned, at least in part, because the ground became too unstable to mine it anymore. So when the mine was operated, the company was profitable. I don't know the relationship of the company that did the mining to the current owner of the site.
But it is possbile for a company to cease to exist once the mine is worn out. So the companies that mined this site were profitable while the mine was open, mostly by avoiding paying for the environmental damage they caused.
The EPA has successfully gone after the current owner of the site. In my mind, it is not fair to have a company that did not create the problem pay for cleaning it up. But it is also not fair to have taxpayers pay for it either. Once all the ore is gone and the mining company folds, there is no way to go back and make the owners pay for the damage they caused.
So maybe green companies might underperform non-green companies TODAY. But that is true because often they can skip out on paying all the costs of their activites. The Sacramento River provides drinking water for a significant portion of the population of California. I was astonished when I heard of this site.
If this were some young geek, we would say "social engineering" and say that the
folks that gave up the information were idiots. We might even say what a great
guy the young geek was for pointing out the flaws in a company's security system.
Both are lying.
It seems to me you just lost the argument by Godwin's law.
So lets say you own the copyright to thousands of music videos. Are you supposed
to hire someone to keep checking the site for your videos being uploaded?
This is for 0 additional income generated from protecting your copyright.
Or do you just go ahead and sue the company and see how the court rules.
The court will probably rule in the favor of the copyright holders now
that there is the Grokster decision.
Another approach for them would be to track down and sue the uploaders.
Perhaps youtube has a plan to work out a deal with the record labels like
Apple did.
IANAL
They don't have to return the money if they can show that the IT folks on the government side screwed up as much or more than they did.
/., just "Oh here is another failed government project."
Usually that isn't very hard. If the FBI had a strong IT department, they would have done it in house.
The background on this project was that the contract was let and specifications were written before 9/11. After 9/11,
the system they relized they needed was radically different from what was specified. Rather than tell the government
"we need a change order, a lot more money, and a lot more time to analyze the new requirements", SAIC (the contractor)
decided to say "we can do it under the existing contract."
I suspect the SAIC folks were motivated by a desire to help the FBI protect the US from terrorism and put that protection
in place on a very aggressive schedule. What they should have realized was that it couldn't be done by anybody (in that amount of time).
I worked at SAIC years ago and I can say that they have very good software development processes. But when it is
an emergency, people all too often through the process out the window. Many SAIC folks have defense or military backgrounds
and are strongly motivated to work towards keeping the US strong and free, not by milking the government for every
dollar they can.
There was a detailed discussion of the multiple causes of the failure in IEEE Spectrum (I don't remember which issue).
But you won't find the details or the nuances here on
And there slogan: Good People, Good Food
The scale of this is much smaller than Enron.
0 06/pi20060523_848601.htm
Here is an article that explains how the options backdating scandal started:
http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/may2
To summarize, a finance professor decided to calculate the return on companies for the 30 days
after the award on of options on an unusual date for such award. He looked at 1668 such awards
and found that those stocks did 5% better than average for those 30 days each time.
Later, the Wall Street Journal calculated odds of 300 billion to one that that would happen by chance.
So a red flag can be raised on a company by mining this data, but it doesn't prove that
backdating took place. The SEC has decided to investigate a bunch of these companies.
It is likely that they will find wrongdoing in at least some of these cases.
One interesting note was that this practice has been greatly reduced as of 2002, when Sarbanes-Oxley
required reporting of options awards within two days of the award.
The details of how options are granted determines whether they have to be shown as an expense or not,
so some companies involved are having to restate earnings.
The largest impact I'm aware of is UnitedHealth Group, which according to the above article may
have to report $300 million in additional expenses.
Enron was fraud on a massive scale to hide tremendous losses.
Backdating options is a lesser fraud that puts more money in the pockets of executives.
It does not imply that the companies involved are not making money.
It also hasn't been proven for any company, yet.
Well then, I don't know who you should be more frustrated with.
RedHat, who charges so much. Or your management, who calls it
your budget and then controls how you spend it.
I once worked in a place where my bosses boss worked hard to keep
any and all Unix or Linux out of our shop. If you even mentioned
Linux (the L word) at the lunch table, she would get up and leave.
Its frustrating to be held accountable for outcomes and be constrained
to how you do the job. In my 25 years in the computer business, it
has almost never been otherwise. If you find yourself given free reign
and sufficent resources to do the best job you can, savor it.
The only way "you" are required to pay licenses is if "you" and the company are one (i.e. self-employment).
If you work for someone who is willing to pay for the name and the support and as a result "you" the technical
person have one additional option to solving problems (calling support). Why would "you" object?
It's not your money. You could even think of it as your employer voluntarily paying money some of which
ends up developing open source software.
I suppose the way it impacts the technical people is that they have to contact the accounting people and tell them
to pay out another $800 to install software on an additional machine. But that should be budgeted along
with the amount for the hardware, unless the decision makers in the company change their minds.
If you start your own company, then you call the shots. Or you can do what you want with the hardware that "you" buy
at home.
I bought a copy of Photoshop Elements 4.0. The main reason I got it was for the ability
to organize all my digital photos. It is great for this and will even manage your photo backups.
I also like how you can opt to save all the previous versions of an image and hide them under the
latest version.
I had used GIMP for quite a while before buying elements, but I find Elements more intuitive.
I still use GIMP on other machines (like my computer at work) because I don't want to pirate
the software.
I find that after figuring out something in Photoshop Elements, it takes a while to figure out
how to do the same thing in GIMP.
I have not yet figured out how to do the equivalent of "Auto Smart Fix" photos in GIMP.
I use mine while taking public transportation (about 2 days a week).
If you take the train, you can read a book, listen to your tunes, eat a meal, have a beer, all without
risking your life.
It is the driving and not the iPod that is dangerous.
YMMV
The administration complains about the press when they reveal the extent of government surveillance because they administration doesn't like to be criticized.
But they turn around and reveal details of plots foiled by government surveillance to help lead the public into supporting the government's conduct.
So when you read about the details of how the government catches terrorists, here is a guide to tell if the press is good or bad:
1) if the story makes the government look bad or subjects government actions to more debate and scrutiny, then the press is bad
2) if the story helps to support the view that government surveillance keeps us safe, then the press is good
Or if you read a story in the New York Times, then the press is bad.
If you read the exact same story in the Los Angeles times or the Wall Street Journal, then the press is good.
Leaks to the press should be seen in the same light. If someone in the government disagrees with administration policy and
leaks embarrassing information to the media, that's bad.
If the administration talks to reporters, hoping to leak the name of a covert CIA operative, because her husband
was critical of administrative policy, then that's good.
This sounds like the situation we have in US Oil Refinery capacity.
The refineries are running very nearly at capacity. You would think that supply and demand
would drive companies to build new refineries. But there is a high barrier to entry, the
billions of dollars it costs to build a single refinery. Meanwhile, the owneres of existing
refineries are happy to sell their product at the high prices the limited capacity helps to
produce.
Saying "lets let supply and demand take care of it" doesn't always produce the best outcome
for the country as a whole or the average person.