Amex charges me 3.5% flat with no monkey business. About 5% of the transaction count is amex, accountng for about 10% of the transaction value. They spend more and tip more and the rate isn't all that much higher than visa/mc.
If you were paying 5% to amex, you were either *really* small or didn't ask nice enough;)
HR/Accounting is coming along, as well as CRM and ERP. The main issue for HR/Accounting is that all the different tax tables needed for each year, each country, each state, etc. These cost money, and you want a throat to choke when they go bad.
I manually calculate my own payroll... I really need to write a payroll app that does all the math, maintains the history and then at a minimum exports to qif or some other format. I've given some thought to the tax tables thing.
The reality is that US tax tables are *not* as complicated as it seems. Every tax I've encountered in three different jurisdictions can be fit into just a handful of categories:
1) graduated tax, varying rates applied at different tiers.
2) flat percentage tax applied to income, sometimes with a wagebase
3) flat amount applied per work unit.
I'm sure there are a couple of others, but there really can't be all that many.
Each of these can be paid by the employer or the employee. You end up with a reasonably small set of possible combinations.
Intuit has got a lot of small employers thinking that tax tables are so complicated that you have to buy their data... that's BS. Anyone who is smart enough to keep their own books properly, or has staff that are smart enough to do that, are in a position to maintain a set of tax tables through a nice gui interface. It requires naybe a couple of hours per year to adjust the tax tables and you're done.
I guess I need to get cracking on that app. I'll open up the svn sooner rather than later.
I'm a US employer, so what I say just may not apply anywhere else.
And yes, there is the whole pass the blame issue if a tax table is wrong. ISTM that an accountant accepting tax tables without proper review is asking for trouble. It's their responsibility to verify this information because if it is wrong, no matter who is to blame, a bunch of people have their payroll screwed up and it's a royal PITA for all involved. now I'm rambling
There are a number of factors to consider in the life of a battery, but they're all fairly easy to get at. Look in/proc/acpi/ for the various bits of battery info. You can get current reported milliamp-hours remaining, current usage, battery spec maximum and I think last max charge level. A little math in a script and you can determine your percentage of charge remaining and expected time left. Compare it to what other tools report and maybe you can get some insight into what's happening.
I just use a really simple percentage and find that it works great for me. When I get below about 10% charge (which the bios seems to agree with as the battery light starts blinking) I plug it in. no big deal.
And so does the other end of the call. And we're both being charged. So... does that mean that I'm really only paying half the cost of a call? I suppose if they went to charging only the originator of the call, then prices would have to double...
It must be nice to deduct two minutes from the ledger for every one minute of system use.
my vision of this is a space shuttle-like launch vehicle where the entire cargo bay is removable. Leave one up there on every trip. I suppose there might be some aerodynamic issues on the return trip...
I find, with beer being mostly water, that I don't need nearly so much water if I drink good quality, generally unfiltered, beer. But yes, copious water after a whiskey binge is a requirement...
What if you write the browser to run on bare metal? What then? The browser could provide all these interfaces for accessing the hardware (could probably even get hardware manufacturers to write the code to glue their hardware to the browser). For example, the browser could provide methods for storing and retrieving data from persistent data stores like hard drives. Then the browser could pull applications from the net to allow the user to do things like write documents or draw graphics, etc. Finally because sometimes the network goes down, and to save on bandwidth costs, the browser could actually save this downloaded code to the persistent storage. Then the user could access their documents and programs directly from that storage and do their work anywhere they happen to have their computer -- even without a network connection!
My question is, aside from the obvious money aspect, what motivates a researcher to do thi kind of research? Is it really that interesting of a problem? Is it some sort of mysterious knot that researchers can't stop picking at or is it really just a money issue?
I'm no professional researcher, though I play one in my off time. I see exactly zero motivation to work on a problem like this.
My thought was that if they filed against Does 1-4 and someone spoke up saying, "hey we're Does 1-4 and we're already being sued over here," the RIAA could say "sorry, our bad." Then they withdraw the second suit, wrap up the first one with much hand-wringing etc. Later when someone contests the use of IP address as a means of identifying someone, they can point to this case and say "see? We sued based on IP address and those folks admitted it was them, so we can claim that IP is a valid means of identifying".
I don't by any stretch think it's right, just a thought on what they might be thinking in their twisted heads. Note again I did not RTFA, and probably won't so weigh my thoughts accordingly...
Creating a market for second hand media helps support the market for first hand media because someone has to buy it first. If you really object to them, and want to deprive them of money, then don't by *anything*, first or second hand, that is produced by them.
I was wondering about this, and without RTFA have a theory. They've had their methods for identifying people come under fire (using IP address as a means to identify a specific person). Could they be trying to set a precedent by getting a defendant to admit that they are the same person, based on the IP address associated with a John Doe suit? That would provide some kind of precedent for them to use in future attempts to connect IP's with people.
Does the potential terrorist uses of a vehicle actually inform your decision about what vehicle to purchase? Because, if so, you really need to get out more.
Not to mention, there's a lot less shrapnel generated from a fabric car than a steel one.
And finally, since the average person is more likely to be (hit by a comet|die in a tornado|killed by lightning) than killed by a car bomb, it might pay to focus your attention elsewhere.
I know for a fact that my grandparents' old chevy station wagon, a huge beast of a car complete with the rear facing bench that folded up or down as needed, could clear a moderately sized ponderosa pine lying in the road. We used to drive that thing up to our mountain cabin all the time, and some times you had to just drive over stuff, and lo and behold it would do it. Sometimes, of course, you had to use it's massive momentum to clear things, like when if you aren't going fast enough it high-centers on the tree. So you'd have to get the front wheels up onto the tree, and then gun it to get the whole thing sliding forward. If you did it right, you could carry enough momentum to get the back wheels to grab on the tree trunk just enough to pop over it. It certainly handled more than it's share of muddy fields and thick roots. Most of that stuff can be navigated by basic driving skills, assumin gyou aren't in a stupidly low vehicle that bottoms out going in and out of standard driveways. I'm sure it would have lasted longer had we not, but when all you got for vacation was a couple weeks of camping on your own land, you took it.
So, those old station wagons were pretty decent vehicles for getting around and could seat 9 (or more depending on the family's views on seatbelt usage, if they were even available).
The best snow car I ever had, I kid you not, was a 1986 Plymouth Colt. Total POS. But it drove like a champ in the snow. Even in blizzard type conditions (like 24 inches of snow on the road) it *never* got stuck. I suspect it was just light enough to sort of wallow over the top of the snow instead of pressing down into it and getting high centered.
I kind of missed that car this winter with our record snowfalls (inland northwest). I know it would have just gallumphed along just fine.
Every few years we buy the most gas efficient, slightly used, minivan we can afford. That allows our three children to fit in the vehicle along with all the various accoutrements appropriate for three children.
This has meant, effectively 7 passenger minivans. The latest, a 2001 Sienna, is soon to be gone because we are now down to only one booster, which means we can fit all three kids across the back of a much smaller vehicle.
The point is, though, that people use lots of kids as an excuse for driving SUVs. SUVs are not an efficient way (ignoring hybrids) to transport lots of people. They carry extra drivetrain and extra suspension that are not required for transporting lots of people. And they frankly aren't as good at transporting stuff as a minivan.
A good minivan can handle a lot more cargo and a lot more people a lot more comfortably and a lot more efficiently than most SUVs out there. IMO. And they seem to be holding their resale pretty well at the moment.
All that said, having small children makes small efficient vehicles an impossibility; at least in the US with constantly increasing requirements for restraining^Wsecuring children.
This whole thread makes me think of the many tiling window managers and their "menu"s. I use xmonad and have used wmii in the past. They use dmenu, which matches every available executeable based on the letters typed so far.
It's a little annoying at first, especially if you have a lot of commands that start with the same several letter. You will match all those, plus all the ones that contain those letters somewhere in the middle of the word as well. One a debian sytem, typing 'apt' will get you a ton of responses, obviously. The trick is learning the shortest unique set of letters that get you the program you want. "eno" gets me openoffice. "refo" gets firefox, though I really need to come up with a better one. Probable "cew" for iceweasel would work. The point is that once you get used to it, it's remarkably efficient in that you can quickly get to what you want, yet still have available the entire list if you aren't quite sure what you want.
I don't even begin to think it's a good analogy...
But, I fail to see how someone can stop me from taking measurements of my house and building myself another one. And I don't think I can be prevented from subsequently selling that house. I do think if I measured the house, drew up plans for it, put my name on it and then sold those plans as my own, that I'd be in trouble, but that's really a different thing. That's claiming someone else's work as my own.
Likewise, someone can look at my house, decide they like it, and have a builder build one that looks like it with no repercussions whatsoever. And in fact, considering that different sets of tract houses look practically identical even when built by different design/build firms, it is apparently a rather common occurrence.
I really don't know a thing about the IP aspects of house designs, though. That's part of what makes a slashdot analogy so fun!
A better analogy is an architect/builder or a design/build construction firm. The design/build team "creates" a house, or in the case of a tract development, "creates" many copies of the essentially the same house. They then sell these houses. The people who buy these houses can do whatever the hell they want with them, including, if they want, any of the following:
* sell the house * modify the house * give the house away for free * take measurements of the house and build, sell or give away a duplicate.
and probably some more...
All this can be done without any recourse by the design/build team that "created" the house. Once the house is sold to the first buyer, all bets are off.
Now, I don't suggest that this is necessarily a great analogy (and the plumbing one isn't either, IMO), but I think it shows the problem with IP. The reason this analogy fails is because the cost of "creating" the initial house is fully recouped in the first sale. In the case of IP, generally that is not possible. If it takes an author a year of full-time work to write a novel, it is hardly reasonable to expect the first copy to sell for $30, $50, $75K to compensate that author for a year's labor.
In the past, this was no big deal because only a few could actually afford to typeset, print, bind, and distribute books in the first place. And in that situation, copyright works, more or less. When the cost to distribute copies falls through the floor, as it has, then there needs to be another way to compensate authors for their labor.
I certainly don't have a solution to this problem, but I think that since the reality is that most people prefer to read paper books over electronic ones, at the moment, the right solution is something like what Baen has done. DRM just won't cut it. You have to rely on the fact that people really prefer paper, and that people are generally reasonably honest.
And the cost per copy needs to be commensurate as well. While I think it's great that some authors get stinking rich, it's much more reasonable, and probably better for society, for authors to make a modest, but comfortable living from their continued efforts. That means that they need to earn a decent living for continuing to produce works. With the ease of modern distribution, and the potentially huge audiences now available, it doesn't make sense to sell a few copies at really high prices. That only encourages piracy. Much better, I think, is to sell the copies very inexpensively, gambling that you will sell lots of them and get a reasonable income come it. This could also offset the softening of demand that is inevitable because of dead-tree book pricing these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Amex charges me 3.5% flat with no monkey business. About 5% of the transaction count is amex, accountng for about 10% of the transaction value. They spend more and tip more and the rate isn't all that much higher than visa/mc.
If you were paying 5% to amex, you were either *really* small or didn't ask nice enough ;)
HR/Accounting is coming along, as well as CRM and ERP. The main issue for HR/Accounting is that all the different tax tables needed for each year, each country, each state, etc. These cost money, and you want a throat to choke when they go bad.
I manually calculate my own payroll... I really need to write a payroll app that does all the math, maintains the history and then at a minimum exports to qif or some other format. I've given some thought to the tax tables thing.
The reality is that US tax tables are *not* as complicated as it seems. Every tax I've encountered in three different jurisdictions can be fit into just a handful of categories:
1) graduated tax, varying rates applied at different tiers.
2) flat percentage tax applied to income, sometimes with a wagebase
3) flat amount applied per work unit.
I'm sure there are a couple of others, but there really can't be all that many.
Each of these can be paid by the employer or the employee. You end up with a reasonably small set of possible combinations.
Intuit has got a lot of small employers thinking that tax tables are so complicated that you have to buy their data... that's BS. Anyone who is smart enough to keep their own books properly, or has staff that are smart enough to do that, are in a position to maintain a set of tax tables through a nice gui interface. It requires naybe a couple of hours per year to adjust the tax tables and you're done.
I guess I need to get cracking on that app. I'll open up the svn sooner rather than later.
I'm a US employer, so what I say just may not apply anywhere else.
And yes, there is the whole pass the blame issue if a tax table is wrong. ISTM that an accountant accepting tax tables without proper review is asking for trouble. It's their responsibility to verify this information because if it is wrong, no matter who is to blame, a bunch of people have their payroll screwed up and it's a royal PITA for all involved. now I'm rambling
There are a number of factors to consider in the life of a battery, but they're all fairly easy to get at. Look in /proc/acpi/ for the various bits of battery info. You can get current reported milliamp-hours remaining, current usage, battery spec maximum and I think last max charge level. A little math in a script and you can determine your percentage of charge remaining and expected time left. Compare it to what other tools report and maybe you can get some insight into what's happening.
I just use a really simple percentage and find that it works great for me. When I get below about 10% charge (which the bios seems to agree with as the battery light starts blinking) I plug it in. no big deal.
I've been warned for speeding on my bicycle. It happens.
dude, take calculus.
And so does the other end of the call. And we're both being charged. So... does that mean that I'm really only paying half the cost of a call? I suppose if they went to charging only the originator of the call, then prices would have to double...
It must be nice to deduct two minutes from the ledger for every one minute of system use.
my vision of this is a space shuttle-like launch vehicle where the entire cargo bay is removable. Leave one up there on every trip. I suppose there might be some aerodynamic issues on the return trip...
The Aristocrats!!
I find, with beer being mostly water, that I don't need nearly so much water if I drink good quality, generally unfiltered, beer. But yes, copious water after a whiskey binge is a requirement...
What if you write the browser to run on bare metal? What then? The browser could provide all these interfaces for accessing the hardware (could probably even get hardware manufacturers to write the code to glue their hardware to the browser). For example, the browser could provide methods for storing and retrieving data from persistent data stores like hard drives. Then the browser could pull applications from the net to allow the user to do things like write documents or draw graphics, etc. Finally because sometimes the network goes down, and to save on bandwidth costs, the browser could actually save this downloaded code to the persistent storage. Then the user could access their documents and programs directly from that storage and do their work anywhere they happen to have their computer -- even without a network connection!
Drink unfiltered beer. The extra B vitamins seem to prevent the hangover. At least in my copious studies...
You'd think with a name like that, the Liberians would have downloaded more than two copies... rimshot!
what the visualizer does with a project that dies. It would be interesting to watch the fits and spurts of activity as it gradually dies out.
Likewise, I'd like to see a project that goes through definitive cycles where it has nearly died more than once and then been resurrected.
I have no examples to provide for either of these ideas... it's just what I'd like to see.
I don't disagree with you, you're probably right.
My question is, aside from the obvious money aspect, what motivates a researcher to do thi kind of research? Is it really that interesting of a problem? Is it some sort of mysterious knot that researchers can't stop picking at or is it really just a money issue?
I'm no professional researcher, though I play one in my off time. I see exactly zero motivation to work on a problem like this.
My thought was that if they filed against Does 1-4 and someone spoke up saying, "hey we're Does 1-4 and we're already being sued over here," the RIAA could say "sorry, our bad." Then they withdraw the second suit, wrap up the first one with much hand-wringing etc. Later when someone contests the use of IP address as a means of identifying someone, they can point to this case and say "see? We sued based on IP address and those folks admitted it was them, so we can claim that IP is a valid means of identifying".
I don't by any stretch think it's right, just a thought on what they might be thinking in their twisted heads. Note again I did not RTFA, and probably won't so weigh my thoughts accordingly...
Creating a market for second hand media helps support the market for first hand media because someone has to buy it first. If you really object to them, and want to deprive them of money, then don't by *anything*, first or second hand, that is produced by them.
I was wondering about this, and without RTFA have a theory. They've had their methods for identifying people come under fire (using IP address as a means to identify a specific person). Could they be trying to set a precedent by getting a defendant to admit that they are the same person, based on the IP address associated with a John Doe suit? That would provide some kind of precedent for them to use in future attempts to connect IP's with people.
IANAA etc.
Does the potential terrorist uses of a vehicle actually inform your decision about what vehicle to purchase? Because, if so, you really need to get out more.
Not to mention, there's a lot less shrapnel generated from a fabric car than a steel one.
And finally, since the average person is more likely to be (hit by a comet|die in a tornado|killed by lightning) than killed by a car bomb, it might pay to focus your attention elsewhere.
I know for a fact that my grandparents' old chevy station wagon, a huge beast of a car complete with the rear facing bench that folded up or down as needed, could clear a moderately sized ponderosa pine lying in the road. We used to drive that thing up to our mountain cabin all the time, and some times you had to just drive over stuff, and lo and behold it would do it. Sometimes, of course, you had to use it's massive momentum to clear things, like when if you aren't going fast enough it high-centers on the tree. So you'd have to get the front wheels up onto the tree, and then gun it to get the whole thing sliding forward. If you did it right, you could carry enough momentum to get the back wheels to grab on the tree trunk just enough to pop over it. It certainly handled more than it's share of muddy fields and thick roots. Most of that stuff can be navigated by basic driving skills, assumin gyou aren't in a stupidly low vehicle that bottoms out going in and out of standard driveways. I'm sure it would have lasted longer had we not, but when all you got for vacation was a couple weeks of camping on your own land, you took it.
So, those old station wagons were pretty decent vehicles for getting around and could seat 9 (or more depending on the family's views on seatbelt usage, if they were even available).
The best snow car I ever had, I kid you not, was a 1986 Plymouth Colt. Total POS. But it drove like a champ in the snow. Even in blizzard type conditions (like 24 inches of snow on the road) it *never* got stuck. I suspect it was just light enough to sort of wallow over the top of the snow instead of pressing down into it and getting high centered.
I kind of missed that car this winter with our record snowfalls (inland northwest). I know it would have just gallumphed along just fine.
Every few years we buy the most gas efficient, slightly used, minivan we can afford. That allows our three children to fit in the vehicle along with all the various accoutrements appropriate for three children.
This has meant, effectively 7 passenger minivans. The latest, a 2001 Sienna, is soon to be gone because we are now down to only one booster, which means we can fit all three kids across the back of a much smaller vehicle.
The point is, though, that people use lots of kids as an excuse for driving SUVs. SUVs are not an efficient way (ignoring hybrids) to transport lots of people. They carry extra drivetrain and extra suspension that are not required for transporting lots of people. And they frankly aren't as good at transporting stuff as a minivan.
A good minivan can handle a lot more cargo and a lot more people a lot more comfortably and a lot more efficiently than most SUVs out there. IMO. And they seem to be holding their resale pretty well at the moment.
All that said, having small children makes small efficient vehicles an impossibility; at least in the US with constantly increasing requirements for restraining^Wsecuring children.
Chuck Norris actually touches the asymptote.
This whole thread makes me think of the many tiling window managers and their "menu"s. I use xmonad and have used wmii in the past. They use dmenu, which matches every available executeable based on the letters typed so far.
It's a little annoying at first, especially if you have a lot of commands that start with the same several letter. You will match all those, plus all the ones that contain those letters somewhere in the middle of the word as well. One a debian sytem, typing 'apt' will get you a ton of responses, obviously. The trick is learning the shortest unique set of letters that get you the program you want. "eno" gets me openoffice. "refo" gets firefox, though I really need to come up with a better one. Probable "cew" for iceweasel would work. The point is that once you get used to it, it's remarkably efficient in that you can quickly get to what you want, yet still have available the entire list if you aren't quite sure what you want.
I don't even begin to think it's a good analogy...
But, I fail to see how someone can stop me from taking measurements of my house and building myself another one. And I don't think I can be prevented from subsequently selling that house. I do think if I measured the house, drew up plans for it, put my name on it and then sold those plans as my own, that I'd be in trouble, but that's really a different thing. That's claiming someone else's work as my own.
Likewise, someone can look at my house, decide they like it, and have a builder build one that looks like it with no repercussions whatsoever. And in fact, considering that different sets of tract houses look practically identical even when built by different design/build firms, it is apparently a rather common occurrence.
I really don't know a thing about the IP aspects of house designs, though. That's part of what makes a slashdot analogy so fun!
A better analogy is an architect/builder or a design/build construction firm. The design/build team "creates" a house, or in the case of a tract development, "creates" many copies of the essentially the same house. They then sell these houses. The people who buy these houses can do whatever the hell they want with them, including, if they want, any of the following:
* sell the house
* modify the house
* give the house away for free
* take measurements of the house and build, sell or give away a duplicate.
and probably some more...
All this can be done without any recourse by the design/build team that "created" the house. Once the house is sold to the first buyer, all bets are off.
Now, I don't suggest that this is necessarily a great analogy (and the plumbing one isn't either, IMO), but I think it shows the problem with IP. The reason this analogy fails is because the cost of "creating" the initial house is fully recouped in the first sale. In the case of IP, generally that is not possible. If it takes an author a year of full-time work to write a novel, it is hardly reasonable to expect the first copy to sell for $30, $50, $75K to compensate that author for a year's labor.
In the past, this was no big deal because only a few could actually afford to typeset, print, bind, and distribute books in the first place. And in that situation, copyright works, more or less. When the cost to distribute copies falls through the floor, as it has, then there needs to be another way to compensate authors for their labor.
I certainly don't have a solution to this problem, but I think that since the reality is that most people prefer to read paper books over electronic ones, at the moment, the right solution is something like what Baen has done. DRM just won't cut it. You have to rely on the fact that people really prefer paper, and that people are generally reasonably honest.
And the cost per copy needs to be commensurate as well. While I think it's great that some authors get stinking rich, it's much more reasonable, and probably better for society, for authors to make a modest, but comfortable living from their continued efforts. That means that they need to earn a decent living for continuing to produce works. With the ease of modern distribution, and the potentially huge audiences now available, it doesn't make sense to sell a few copies at really high prices. That only encourages piracy. Much better, I think, is to sell the copies very inexpensively, gambling that you will sell lots of them and get a reasonable income come it. This could also offset the softening of demand that is inevitable because of dead-tree book pricing these days.
I think all this has been said before...