I'm afraid that it comes from Apple Marketing, and its collusion with the rabid fringe of mac fanatics. They ask for it, you get it. Not nice, but true. If Apple stopped needling people, they would in turn stop needling mac users. But, this is a deliberate and conscious marketing positioning by Cupertino, so its not going to stop. They are provoking cognitive dissonance. Suffer for your beliefs, and that will reinforce them.
Why some of us don't want anything to do with the company.
The question is how much functionality you want. I had a client who wanted the absolute minimum because the workforce was having trouble even using a department oriented cash register properly, but needed to go to barcode entry because the volumes were too great to do it by hand. The usual bewildering POS screens were a non-starter.
If you use something like PythonCard, you can get a shopping basket screen laid out very fast. As items go in, you add up the total value. You use a wedge scanner to read the codes. When the codes are entered, go to the inventory file and lookup price and description. You use kbarcode to generate labels. You use a free 3of9 font to generate cash register sheets with non-labelable items. You also put control codes on the sheets, stuff like void item, new sale... The user should never have to use the keyboard.
The thing about PythonCard or other hypercard type layouts is that you can have buttons for everything adminwise, and lots of text around explaining what they do for new users. Documentation and training is very easy. Obviously I needed to write it to minimize chargeable time, so this was important. I password protect the admin functions and we have quite a few logs to protect against abuse.
As sales are made and as items are booked in, you have to decrement or increment inventory.
You basically have two files. One is the inventory file, with code, price, description, department, number, price x number. This is the file against which lookups are done when people buy things or when bookins are done. The other is the transaction file, just a chrono record of everything bought. When it comes to reporting, you run your report generator against the transaction file. I do not track goods in as transactions at the moment, but we could easily have a goods in transaction file if we wanted. I use simple text files to store the data, and yes, they are religious about backups. I also do not allow multiple purchases - a transaction is just one item, and if more than one is bought, read it in again.
I would not try this with more than (say) 500 different items or a large turnover, or multiple points of sale, and would only do it where the overriding need is simplicity at a level which you just cannot buy commercially. It has worked fine up to about 15,000 transactions and probably would handle 50-60k just fine. After that maybe go to a proper database for the transaction file. Support is minimal so far.
Trying to do this in a spreadsheet is not going to work. Well, it might if you clear the totals every month. Remember they have a limitation on the number of rows.
He does not link to cash drawer or till. The shopping basket gives a total. Then this amount is rung up on the till and a receipt generated in the usual way. His items are not taxable. That would be an extra complication, but not insuperable, just another flag in the inventory file.
This is definitely not industrial strength. Its strictly thrift shop, small hobbyist store, charity type stuff. And it is not universal. It doesn't have all the configurability you get from a commercial operation. Its specific to the particular operation in lots of ways. That was the price of cheap rapid development and the simplicity. I did not charge normal rates owing to the particular nature of the institution, so if its a commercial relationship and time is being fully billed, it might not make sense for them. If you need industrial strength, go to a commercial system. Other posters are right about that. But it will cost.
For my client, OSS was a cost bonus. It would have been written pretty much the same in VB and Windows to get the minimalism. But on Linux the tools (kbarcode) were free and its very stable. Runs on an old $50 Compaq by the way, with a new drive. 500mhz PIII. Quite snappy. Gnome, not that they can see it, because its autostart. Probably fluxbox would be even faster.
Lets suppose it were something else. People are buying cigarettes for minors in supermarkets. So the government says, the anti smoking league should be able to monitor people buying cigarettes by observation. Then they give a name to the supermarkets. These then deny service to these people. Refuse for instance to accept their credit cards.
Or speeding. We get anti speeding bodies to notify their insurers that they have been observed breaking the speed limit, who then have to terminate their insurance. No court, no ticket, no magistrate, no legally established penalty. No speed camera necessary.
Can you seriously imagine this scenario? The answer is, if people break the law, arrest and prosecute. You cannot just allow self appointed bodies to make unsupported allegations and then have other organisations decide to refuse service, or worse, be obliged to refuse service, on this basis.
Its procedural insanity. And probably will be found contrary to the European Human Rights Act, which, in another part of the wood, another part of the Government signed up to while no-one was looking....
It is extraordinary how little clarity there is about procedures. The industry tells your ISP they suspect illegal behaviour. What is the standard of proof? What's the process for deciding if the evidence is convincing? How is it to be challenged? Disclosed?
Then your ISP writes to you. You say the allegations are false and libellous. What happens next? Do you get to cross examine the industry spokesperson who made the allegations?
Then three strikes, they disconnect you. You sue them. Who is liable? Them? The industry body?
Its not so much iniquitous as unworkable in its present form. You basically cannot do this without all the expense of the courts, which is what they're trying to avoid.
One imagines there may be a complex pattern of incentives. RBN for these purposes should be considered a deniable branch of the Russian state.
The incentive to do it is to try out net sabotage techniques for possible later use in a controlled and deniable way. You don't have the potential embarrassment of trying to do it clandestinely and getting caught. You do it openly but deniably.
The incentive for allowing it is the hope that practice in defense will be more valuable than practice in attack, and that the net will evolve more robust defense systems than if you adopted state measures to prevent it. If you could even find any.
However, what should be somewhat alarming here is that a regime most of whose officials came out of the Soviet equivalent of the Abwehr or the SS should now be in power and conducting a sort of guerrilla war on the West. Never forget, the organizations these guys came out of murdered several times the numbers the Nazis did and operated a camp network many times the size of the Nazi one.
That's right, they are integrated. Besides, they have better components. They use better processors, more expensive and better quality memory, that's why you get less of it, because its better, and they don't use any old disk drives, they use premium ones. And their graphics cards are better too. That's why they cost more. You get what you pay for. Oh, and their optical drives are very high class premium drives too, none of this cheap OEM crap. And I forgot those cases. Those are premium cases.
NY Country Lawyer, does the brief imply that the person who has to be sued is not the one who makes available, but the one who actually downloads what is made available? Or is this misreading the brief? If merely making available is not a copyright violation, then can you go after the maker available for copyright violation in case some other party does violate?
Thinking analogies: local authority leaves carelessly leaves metal bar by roadside. Miscreant picks it up and commits assault. They were liable for an offense, if careless leaving is one, regardless of what miscreants did or did not do. They can't ever be liable for assault unless they actually committed it.
If this is right, that would imply that the RIAA would have to cease going after file sharers in the sense of ones who make stuff available, and instead turn its attention to catching downloaders, and that might be a whole lot harder and more expensive to do.
That is also the force of the various analogies about pictures which are placed in positions where they can be photographed - its very clear there that the offense is committed by the one taking the photograph, not by the one exhibiting the picture. Or the cinema example: showing the movie is not violating copyright even if by showing it you make it available for bootleg filming in some sense.
Be interested in your comments on this issue of who exactly has committed what offense and when.
People will say that if you don't like it, don't buy it. They are wrong.
The problem is not the iPhone. The problem is, trying to tell people what to do with your product after they have bought it. If we start admitting this is a legitimate approach to business, we have basically lost intellectual freedom in the digital age. It gets clearer and clearer that one trend is the open trend - which dominated media for hundreds of years. This approach was, buy it where you want, read/play it where you want. This was books, tapes, CDs, DVDs. It has also marked the PC: buy hardware, run Windows/Unix/Linux, and put whatever apps you want on it. Write whatever you want for it.
However, there is another distinct model, which Apple and now Amazon are struggling to generalize. That is, buy it and then connect to or play on it or install on it what we give you and permit you.
Of course, the iPhone and its third party apps does not matter. Neither in itself does Kindle. Neither does the locking of MacOS to own brand machines, as long as Apple has tiny market share. Neither does the inability to play iTunes on any other players, its just music...
Take them all together, and they do matter. Take them all together, and we can see a real and growing threat to intellectual freedom. Apple has always been a leader in this attack, and its now joined by Amazon. What you can expect to see is ever increasing attempts to hack away and diminish the 'buy anywhere, play anywhere' business model. Each one will be small and unimportant in itself. Take them all together, and you are looking at a very expensive future where, on multiple incompatible products you have access to restricted media which is limited to what a few large companies want you to have access to.
It is a war, and its important to make an example of both Amazon and Apple. Because if their model works in the market, in 10 years time, we will look back with amazement at the freedoms we used to have, and wonder how we ever had them.
Boycott Apple now. And boycott Amazon too. Do not accept that when you buy software, you in fact license it. Assert your right to play bought media on whatever you feel like, and to buy it through open interfaces not closed proprietary software. And agitate and publicize.
This one is really, really important, and its importance goes far beyond the particular detailed examples we are confronted with daily.
Can't find an answer to what seems to be the real question. After they get through building this thing, these 8,000 turbines, and after we take account of total running costs in terms of fuel, how much fuel is going to be saved? It only works, right, if they burn less afterwards than before, and this has to include trips out to service them, maintenance crews on the transmission lines and shore based units, the whole current energy budget.
So what's the answer? Now we are using X tons or btus of oil, coal, gas or whatever to generate a given megawattage. Then we will be using Y and still get the same megawattage.
I suspect there is no answer to be found, because it will turn out Y is actually larger than X. You may feel a whole lot better and get a warm national glow from 'going green', but the reality will not be energy saving. OK, this could be wrong, but then lets see the numbers.
Are not most posters missing the point?
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The Cult of Kindle
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Surely, surely the point is not the device! Were I Amazon I'd be totally delighted that people were focussing on the device, because that's not really the issue. The elephant in the room you are all studiously ignoring is the BOOKS. For goodness' sake guys, you are seriously contemplating buying books which can only be read on one serial numbered device because of totally draconian DRM.
What has got into you? Not only that, you are signing up to a EULA which makes MS Eulas seem generous. Not only that, you are signing up to a Eula, to enforce which, is going to require Amazon to closely watch whatever you do with your kindlebooks and your kindle.
This thing is terrible, it shoud be resisted and boycotted, and especially the books should be, regardless of its merits as hardware. The last thing Western society needs right now is Amazon locking up ebooks with this thing and its successors.
And start thinking about the books. Never mind the hardware, its the books!
I just don't get it. If this was MS introducing such a device on such terms, there would be howls of rage all down the page. As it is, I guess you must all think Amazon, like Apple, is 'cool'. Is that it? Or if not, what is it?
Never mind the merits of perl or ruby, the question inquiring minds in the UK want to ask is, how can we stop spending money on this project? We are not interested in funding the BBC to invent new programming methods, languages or anything else. We do not want to be forced to fund magazines and various news channels we do not watch, and appalling non-stop comedy channels that make our toes curl, and iplayers that don't work with our computers....and so on and so on!
How do we stop this train and get off?
And still be legally authorized to watch TV we do want to watch?
Two questions for anyone who has one, but its about the ebooks not the reader -
1) Can you buy a kindle book from your pc not the kindle, and download it to your pc?
2) Can you read the kindle book on (say) a Sony ebook or on your pc?
Or are these books locked to the Kindle? Is it hackable in that case?
For me at least the books are what counts, not the reader. No way am I ever buying a book I can only read on one particular reader, any more than I will buy a CD that is locked to a Sony or Marantz CD player, or a Tune that can only be played on one particular brand of player....
I do not think this is true. The terrestrial broadcast network is paid for by the different users of it, which are ITV and BBC. It is true that C4 does not pay, but then, C4 does not retain all its advertising revenue. It is swings and roundabouts. The terrestrial network, towers and so on, used to be owned and operated by the BBC, but is now run at arms length. If I recall the transactions correctly, this is now run by National Grid Wireless Ltd, owned by an Australian company, and all users except C4 pay a fee to use it.
You might argue that there is a small subsidy from the BBC because only the BBC and ITV pay for bandwidth, and that ITV keeps some of the advertising revenue, which compensates, whereas the BBC doesn't get any of this. Maybe so.
But what does it show? It shows that we should stop that too. There is no more reason to force people to pay for C4, if they do not want to pay for it or to watch it, than to force them to pay for the BBC. If there are enough of them, there is no reason why abolishing free network access will put them out of business. If your reply is that no-one will do it, or not enough people will do it, well then, why should we be putting stuff out every day over the network that no-one is prepared to watch in enough numbers to make it economically valid? It is just as crazy as forcing them to subscribe to BBC shows they don't want to watch.
The argument about remote rural areas is also not valid. Even let us agree that people in remote areas should have their TV network infrastructure subsidized (which, in the age of satelite broadcasting, must be of very dubious social necessity). It still does not follow that the way to do this is by forcing everyone who watches TV to subscribe to the BBC. It could equally be done even if it were voluntary to subscribe to the BBC. You just mandate the network operator to cover all the country, and have him set rates to the broadcasters which covers his costs. The proof of this is that it is already done in the telephone business - the so called Access Deficit Contribution.
I am afraid that at the bottom of all these contortions to justify compulsory subscriptions is the basic proposition that in some way, the consequences of popular choice will be socially disastrous. But when you probe the arguments, you find nothing real there other than this feeling. There is no reason to think it will be.
It is in the end a deep feeling that the UK population is untrustworthy, does not know what it wants, and must be compelled by law to buy what is good for it. No, we cannot force people to watch Strictly Come Dancing. But we sure as hell can force them to pay for it, and that's something.
That seems to be the approach. It is profoundly authoritarian, and deeply wrong. Not least because of the corrupting effect it has on the BBC. But that is a subject for another day.
Folks, this is the collective wisdom of/. when thinking about the BBC, and it is a strange and wonderful thing to behold.
Fellow proposes that subscription to the BBC be made voluntary, so those who want to watch it, will pay to watch it, and those who do not will not. This seems reasonable enough, and is the way just about every other aspect of life in the West works.
One reply is that this will destroy Channel 4. Quite how this will have any impact at all on Channel 4 is obscure, because Channel 4 is advertising funded. Guess what, Channel 4 is totally unrelated to the BBC, not in any way subsidized by the 'license fee', all of which goes to the BBC. Channel 4 in fact does not retain all of its advertising profits but subsidizes, if that is the word, the other commercial TV channels.
Another reply is that this will leave us with a Murdoch monopoly. How is making subscription voluntary supposed to do this exactly? It will simply adjust the size of the BBC to the demand for its services. There will only be a Murdoch monopoly if all the other commercial channels fail, and if the BBC fails too for being unable to attract any subscriptions. But give me a break: if they cannot get enough voluntary subscriptions to stay afloat, why the hell are we keeping them going in the first place?
Another reply is that the BBC is there to force people to buy what they do not know they want, but when they get it, they will find they like it anyway. There is absolutely no evidence of this. In media, as in other areas of life, people buy what they want to use.
Finally a bunch of people say that they personally like the BBCs output. Or some of it. Yes, probably you do. Now, explain to me again why this means everyone in the UK should be forced by law to subscribe to the BBC? It is a total non sequitur. Making everyone subscribe is not needed for the BBC to make all this wonderful content. It can make it, and you, if you want to, can subscribe to it. What is the problem?
I have an interesting proposition for everyone who thinks compulsory funding is so great. It is the Microsoft model. Lets make everyone who buys a computer buy a copy of Windows, whether they run Linux or MacOS or Amiga or OS2. The reasons for this are, first I like Windows. Second, if people find they have already bought Windows, they are likely to use it in the desperate effort to get some value. Then they will find they might not have wanted to buy it, but they actually like it and it is good for them. Finally, if we do not fund Windows like this, Apple will go broke. Oh, and Amiga too. And maybe Botswana, who knows.
As you know, all media in the world and much shopping right now are funded on the BBC model. This model is that you shall be legally obliged to subscribe to one service, in order to be allowed to buy other competing services. In the UK, if you want to watch any TV you are obliged by law to subscribe to the BBC, or you will go to jail without passing GO.
This is the standard practice in many areas of life, doubtless in imitation of this great British innovation.
It is the norm in the US, I hear, for you to be obliged to pay for the New York Times, whether you read it or not, because that is a condition for being able to read Newsweek or the LA Times. And quite right too. One can only legally read novels in Australia if one can prove paid ownership of the complete works of John Barth. This is just as well, since otherwise no-one would buy them. Not to mention the general practice of supermarket management. If you have not visited Belgium recently, you may not be aware that if you are caught in a supermarket without your Delhaize loyalty card you will simply be thrown in jail. I could go on. In France, for example, a man can drive whatever car he pleases, as long as he has a Peugeot in his drive. Not his garage, his drive. And not financed - owned outright.
So I fully realize that what I am going to propose is a wild revolutionary and radical idea, and fellow slashdotters, I am delighted for you my dear friends to be the first ones to hear it suggested. I do not think anything like this has ever been suggested before on the subject, and while I am aware of the revolutionary implications for the way in which we buy goods in general, we must start small, and start carefully, where the need is most obvious, and that is why I confine the present suggestion to the way we fund the BBC.
What we need to do is very simple. We need to make this fee voluntary. We need to stop making everyone subscribe to the BBC, and instead let them subscribe if they want to watch it, and not if they do not.
Now before everyone bursts into howls of anger, or tells me I have taken leave of my senses, which I agree is quite a natural reaction to a proposal to treat the BBC so differently from all other goods and services in the Western World, let me point out that it might solve a couple of the problems the iPlayer reveals.
The BBC would no longer be drowning in a flood of money, and it would have some slight incentive to offer services which its voluntary subscribers wanted. It might even focus its efforts on giving them what they want, instead of what it chooses to give those who have been forced to pay, and now will take whatever they are given.
Yes, it is shocking and radical, and it could lead to a shakeup of the whole of Western Society. But, we are only talking about one broadcaster in one small country. I think fellow slashdotters you may agree when you think about it, that this is an experiment worth trying.
Probably not whole grains. That whole grains are better for you is a myth. No cultures with a tradition of long lived good health eat wheat or rice bran - or any non soluble bran. They feed it to animals and eat the animals. Also, such cultures treat soy with great wariness and respect. This too they feed to animals, unless fermented and aged, and even then they eat it in very small quantities.
The reason is partly phytates, and partly irritation of the bowels, and partly plant estrogens. Wheat bran is non soluble and so is an irritant to the bowel. But because of phytates, it prevents the absorption of minerals. The plant hormones in soy are just plain bad for you. Brown rice is lower in delivered nutrition than polished. It is not how much nutrients a product contains. Its how much it delivers to you when you eat it.
We are embarked on a huge uncontrolled experiment in nutrition, and one undertaken without the slightest evidence in its favor. We started out with a diet which obtained about one third of its calories from saturated fats, about one third from protein, and one third from partly refined carbs, generally all eaten together with a variety of vegetables. Curiously enough, heart disease was rather low. I say partially refined - the bread before the invention of modern industrial baking was sourdough long fermented and slow risen, and was made from high extraction but not whole wheat flour. It was chewy, low GI and very digestible. These foods were eaten slowly in sociable meals. They were not wolfed down on the way from one place to another, or held in one hand while typing with the other.
We moved from this to a diet which substituted refined and often hydrogenated vegetable oil, high in polyunsaturates, for the animal fat. We then added to this recently the most industrialized kind of processed food there is: soy 'milk' and meal of various kinds. This too raised the proportion of vegetable oil in the diet. We then had a campaign to lower total fat consumption, which led us to a high carbohydrate diet, but high in those same vegetable oils.
Our last state was worse than our first. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for such a diet. Its consequences are continual hunger, over eating, endless snacks, obesity, and degenerative diseases.
What do we need to do? Go back to the traditional comfortably off working family diets of about 1900. Meat and two vegetables, high extraction sourdough bread in liberal quantities, oatmeal, full fat milk, butter, cheese, fish in moderation. Minimal amounts of vegetable oil, minimal amounts of sweets. Pastry made, if one has to eat pastry, with suet. No snacks.
Women are the especial victims of our current dietary mania and the diet industry. If we could do one thing to improve the health of society, it would be to abolish dieting, dieting books, and conversations about dieting and one's weight. Couple that with only eating at mealtimes, cooking only real food from scratch, using ingredients available in 1910, and we would all be infinitely better off.
Read "Nourishing Traditions." It will change your life.
if this is really it, its dead before it gets out of bed.
However the Hanlin V9 with a bigger screen, better looks and a more reasonable price could be what lets the market take off. The Sony is close. It just needs to be a bit bigger screen and a bit less expensive (and drop all the non-book functions), and it could be a real goer. But this thing...!
If anyone is curious, the 8% figure comes from p 43 of the report. It is not sourced, and there is no justification for it. I don't believe it, certainly not without some properly sourced derivation of it.
Isn't it wonderful what the Guardian finds to worry about?
They could be worrying about literacy in the UK. I think a third of school leavers can't read now. But of course, the Guardian is the house organ of the Teachers Union, so we won't write about that.
Or they could be worrying about hospital infections. in which we lead the world. In Maidstone, nurses first told patients to shit in their beds with no bedpans, then left them lying in it. Amazingly enough, this produced an outbreak of disease. I say an outbreak. It went on for several years, but the Guardian didn't notice. No, it thinks the health service is the envy of the world and if all the cleaners worked for Unison, everything would be fine.
Or it could worry about democracy. We elected a government which has a huge majority in the Parliament on a tiny minority of the votes cast. Where was the Guardian then?
Or it could worry about civil rights. We have had the most sustained attack on civil liberties since the time of Charles I in recent years. The Guardian will tell you to vote for the party that's been managing it.
Now the Guardian, with its head firmly bent over and upwards, is worried about saving the environment of the Moon!
It gives new and deeper meaning to the phrase "out of touch".
At a company I did some work for, the Corporate Planner persuaded the CEO to make all presenters to him and his direct reports do it in the form of written papers, not presentations. The papers were to be a max of 5 pages plus two for tables and financials. The only slides allowed were the financials and tables from the paper. Everyone had to get the paper in advance and read it.
The quality of discussion improved enormously. In addition, there was a written archive of what was being argued. Whereas previously with PPT you had maybe 50 slides, and only if you had been there and taken careful notes, could you get from them to what the speaker had actually argued.
In fact, though 5 pages seems incredibly little, the number of words was probably more than in the 50 slides. The difference was, they were combined into sentences, so people had to think more about them while writing!
The thing I've never understood in this debate, and no-one ever gives any explanation of it, is this.
People argue that if Apple sold OSX for non-Apple branded machines, it would kill their hardware business.
Those same people also usually argue that Apple hardware is second to none in quality and value, and that the user experience of a machine where the hardware and OS are both controlled by the manufacturer is second to none.
So, if this is all true, why will it have any effect on their hardware business? Why will everyone not simply carry on buying Apple hardware because its better value, and buy "integrated systems" because they work better?
You cannot have it both ways. Something is completely wrong with the argument. The only explanation why it would damage their hardware business is if people are reluctantly buying hardware they would not choose if they had any choice, in order to run an OS which they do want to choose. It could only damage their hardware business if the concept of "integrated systems" no longer means anything to buyers in a world in which XP is just as "integrated" with an Intel Core2 board or Samsung memory or NVidia graphics as OSX is. People will only choose to buy non-Apple hardware if they can get hardware which better meets their needs cheaper.
But of course, that is exactly what the Mac people fiercely deny, while still making the argument about hardware business destruction.
The real explanation seems to go like this. In effect what's happening is that Apple is choosing to exploit the market value of OSX by setting a price for the OS which is lower than they could get if they sold it freely in the market, by using it to get higher margins on own branded hardware. They are getting margins indirectly, not by charging for the OS, but by imposing hardware costs on their customers. This is the real corporate strategy.
I doubt if it is either wise, the best way to extract that value, or even sustainable long term. The reason is, the costs they impose on customers are greater than they need be, because the margins are acquired indirectly. And the internal costs to Apple of generating those margins are greater too. One suspects the end result is lower revenues at higher margins but lower total margin amount.
The difference is, of course, that Apple is using exactly the same components. It is not like a Lexus....(why, oh why do Mac people still think BMWs are the ne plus ultra of quality in autos? Is it because none of them have ever owned one? Or is it because they don't know what they are driving? God knows!)....
To believe this post, you have to believe in alchemy. Cheap Samsung memory suddenly becomes something quite other when installed in a case with the Apple label on it. A cheap disk drive is transmuted into pure gold. What happens to the core2 is beyond me.
Fact: Apple is using the same mid range components the white box people are using, put together in a fancy case, sold at premium. They are not using better components.
You know, the line "Repeat after me...." when applied to Apple, has probably lost Apple more sales than any other single slogan uttered by the maddest of mad Apple maniacs. And that is saying something. It just reinforces the idea that this is a sort of mindless cult of people waving their little red books and chanting some idiotic slogan in unison.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid that it comes from Apple Marketing, and its collusion with the rabid fringe of mac fanatics. They ask for it, you get it. Not nice, but true. If Apple stopped needling people, they would in turn stop needling mac users. But, this is a deliberate and conscious marketing positioning by Cupertino, so its not going to stop. They are provoking cognitive dissonance. Suffer for your beliefs, and that will reinforce them.
Why some of us don't want anything to do with the company.
The question is how much functionality you want. I had a client who wanted the absolute minimum because the workforce was having trouble even using a department oriented cash register properly, but needed to go to barcode entry because the volumes were too great to do it by hand. The usual bewildering POS screens were a non-starter.
If you use something like PythonCard, you can get a shopping basket screen laid out very fast. As items go in, you add up the total value. You use a wedge scanner to read the codes. When the codes are entered, go to the inventory file and lookup price and description. You use kbarcode to generate labels. You use a free 3of9 font to generate cash register sheets with non-labelable items. You also put control codes on the sheets, stuff like void item, new sale... The user should never have to use the keyboard.
The thing about PythonCard or other hypercard type layouts is that you can have buttons for everything adminwise, and lots of text around explaining what they do for new users. Documentation and training is very easy. Obviously I needed to write it to minimize chargeable time, so this was important. I password protect the admin functions and we have quite a few logs to protect against abuse.
As sales are made and as items are booked in, you have to decrement or increment inventory.
You basically have two files. One is the inventory file, with code, price, description, department, number, price x number. This is the file against which lookups are done when people buy things or when bookins are done. The other is the transaction file, just a chrono record of everything bought. When it comes to reporting, you run your report generator against the transaction file. I do not track goods in as transactions at the moment, but we could easily have a goods in transaction file if we wanted. I use simple text files to store the data, and yes, they are religious about backups. I also do not allow multiple purchases - a transaction is just one item, and if more than one is bought, read it in again.
I would not try this with more than (say) 500 different items or a large turnover, or multiple points of sale, and would only do it where the overriding need is simplicity at a level which you just cannot buy commercially. It has worked fine up to about 15,000 transactions and probably would handle 50-60k just fine. After that maybe go to a proper database for the transaction file. Support is minimal so far.
Trying to do this in a spreadsheet is not going to work. Well, it might if you clear the totals every month. Remember they have a limitation on the number of rows.
He does not link to cash drawer or till. The shopping basket gives a total. Then this amount is rung up on the till and a receipt generated in the usual way. His items are not taxable. That would be an extra complication, but not insuperable, just another flag in the inventory file.
This is definitely not industrial strength. Its strictly thrift shop, small hobbyist store, charity type stuff. And it is not universal. It doesn't have all the configurability you get from a commercial operation. Its specific to the particular operation in lots of ways. That was the price of cheap rapid development and the simplicity. I did not charge normal rates owing to the particular nature of the institution, so if its a commercial relationship and time is being fully billed, it might not make sense for them. If you need industrial strength, go to a commercial system. Other posters are right about that. But it will cost.
For my client, OSS was a cost bonus. It would have been written pretty much the same in VB and Windows to get the minimalism. But on Linux the tools (kbarcode) were free and its very stable. Runs on an old $50 Compaq by the way, with a new drive. 500mhz PIII. Quite snappy. Gnome, not that they can see it, because its autostart. Probably fluxbox would be even faster.
Lets suppose it were something else. People are buying cigarettes for minors in supermarkets. So the government says, the anti smoking league should be able to monitor people buying cigarettes by observation. Then they give a name to the supermarkets. These then deny service to these people. Refuse for instance to accept their credit cards.
Or speeding. We get anti speeding bodies to notify their insurers that they have been observed breaking the speed limit, who then have to terminate their insurance. No court, no ticket, no magistrate, no legally established penalty. No speed camera necessary.
Can you seriously imagine this scenario? The answer is, if people break the law, arrest and prosecute. You cannot just allow self appointed bodies to make unsupported allegations and then have other organisations decide to refuse service, or worse, be obliged to refuse service, on this basis.
Its procedural insanity. And probably will be found contrary to the European Human Rights Act, which, in another part of the wood, another part of the Government signed up to while no-one was looking....
It is extraordinary how little clarity there is about procedures. The industry tells your ISP they suspect illegal behaviour. What is the standard of proof? What's the process for deciding if the evidence is convincing? How is it to be challenged? Disclosed?
Then your ISP writes to you. You say the allegations are false and libellous. What happens next? Do you get to cross examine the industry spokesperson who made the allegations?
Then three strikes, they disconnect you. You sue them. Who is liable? Them? The industry body?
Its not so much iniquitous as unworkable in its present form. You basically cannot do this without all the expense of the courts, which is what they're trying to avoid.
One imagines there may be a complex pattern of incentives. RBN for these purposes should be considered a deniable branch of the Russian state.
The incentive to do it is to try out net sabotage techniques for possible later use in a controlled and deniable way. You don't have the potential embarrassment of trying to do it clandestinely and getting caught. You do it openly but deniably.
The incentive for allowing it is the hope that practice in defense will be more valuable than practice in attack, and that the net will evolve more robust defense systems than if you adopted state measures to prevent it. If you could even find any.
However, what should be somewhat alarming here is that a regime most of whose officials came out of the Soviet equivalent of the Abwehr or the SS should now be in power and conducting a sort of guerrilla war on the West. Never forget, the organizations these guys came out of murdered several times the numbers the Nazis did and operated a camp network many times the size of the Nazi one.
They are not people like us.
That's right, they are integrated. Besides, they have better components. They use better processors, more expensive and better quality memory, that's why you get less of it, because its better, and they don't use any old disk drives, they use premium ones. And their graphics cards are better too. That's why they cost more. You get what you pay for. Oh, and their optical drives are very high class premium drives too, none of this cheap OEM crap. And I forgot those cases. Those are premium cases.
Did I say they're like a BMW?
NY Country Lawyer, does the brief imply that the person who has to be sued is not the one who makes available, but the one who actually downloads what is made available? Or is this misreading the brief? If merely making available is not a copyright violation, then can you go after the maker available for copyright violation in case some other party does violate?
Thinking analogies: local authority leaves carelessly leaves metal bar by roadside. Miscreant picks it up and commits assault. They were liable for an offense, if careless leaving is one, regardless of what miscreants did or did not do. They can't ever be liable for assault unless they actually committed it.
If this is right, that would imply that the RIAA would have to cease going after file sharers in the sense of ones who make stuff available, and instead turn its attention to catching downloaders, and that might be a whole lot harder and more expensive to do.
That is also the force of the various analogies about pictures which are placed in positions where they can be photographed - its very clear there that the offense is committed by the one taking the photograph, not by the one exhibiting the picture. Or the cinema example: showing the movie is not violating copyright even if by showing it you make it available for bootleg filming in some sense.
Be interested in your comments on this issue of who exactly has committed what offense and when.
People will say that if you don't like it, don't buy it. They are wrong.
The problem is not the iPhone. The problem is, trying to tell people what to do with your product after they have bought it. If we start admitting this is a legitimate approach to business, we have basically lost intellectual freedom in the digital age. It gets clearer and clearer that one trend is the open trend - which dominated media for hundreds of years. This approach was, buy it where you want, read/play it where you want. This was books, tapes, CDs, DVDs. It has also marked the PC: buy hardware, run Windows/Unix/Linux, and put whatever apps you want on it. Write whatever you want for it.
However, there is another distinct model, which Apple and now Amazon are struggling to generalize. That is, buy it and then connect to or play on it or install on it what we give you and permit you.
Of course, the iPhone and its third party apps does not matter. Neither in itself does Kindle. Neither does the locking of MacOS to own brand machines, as long as Apple has tiny market share. Neither does the inability to play iTunes on any other players, its just music...
Take them all together, and they do matter. Take them all together, and we can see a real and growing threat to intellectual freedom. Apple has always been a leader in this attack, and its now joined by Amazon. What you can expect to see is ever increasing attempts to hack away and diminish the 'buy anywhere, play anywhere' business model. Each one will be small and unimportant in itself. Take them all together, and you are looking at a very expensive future where, on multiple incompatible products you have access to restricted media which is limited to what a few large companies want you to have access to.
It is a war, and its important to make an example of both Amazon and Apple. Because if their model works in the market, in 10 years time, we will look back with amazement at the freedoms we used to have, and wonder how we ever had them.
Boycott Apple now. And boycott Amazon too. Do not accept that when you buy software, you in fact license it. Assert your right to play bought media on whatever you feel like, and to buy it through open interfaces not closed proprietary software. And agitate and publicize.
This one is really, really important, and its importance goes far beyond the particular detailed examples we are confronted with daily.
Perhaps the V9 when it comes out? It seems to be the only one which is a decent size page. Should not be too long now.
Very interesting. How much energy, people, money is is going to take to keep 10,000 V80's going offshore? Are there any estimates?
Can't find an answer to what seems to be the real question. After they get through building this thing, these 8,000 turbines, and after we take account of total running costs in terms of fuel, how much fuel is going to be saved? It only works, right, if they burn less afterwards than before, and this has to include trips out to service them, maintenance crews on the transmission lines and shore based units, the whole current energy budget.
So what's the answer? Now we are using X tons or btus of oil, coal, gas or whatever to generate a given megawattage. Then we will be using Y and still get the same megawattage.
I suspect there is no answer to be found, because it will turn out Y is actually larger than X. You may feel a whole lot better and get a warm national glow from 'going green', but the reality will not be energy saving. OK, this could be wrong, but then lets see the numbers.
Surely, surely the point is not the device! Were I Amazon I'd be totally delighted that people were focussing on the device, because that's not really the issue. The elephant in the room you are all studiously ignoring is the BOOKS. For goodness' sake guys, you are seriously contemplating buying books which can only be read on one serial numbered device because of totally draconian DRM.
What has got into you? Not only that, you are signing up to a EULA which makes MS Eulas seem generous. Not only that, you are signing up to a Eula, to enforce which, is going to require Amazon to closely watch whatever you do with your kindlebooks and your kindle.
This thing is terrible, it shoud be resisted and boycotted, and especially the books should be, regardless of its merits as hardware. The last thing Western society needs right now is Amazon locking up ebooks with this thing and its successors.
And start thinking about the books. Never mind the hardware, its the books!
I just don't get it. If this was MS introducing such a device on such terms, there would be howls of rage all down the page. As it is, I guess you must all think Amazon, like Apple, is 'cool'. Is that it? Or if not, what is it?
Never mind the merits of perl or ruby, the question inquiring minds in the UK want to ask is, how can we stop spending money on this project? We are not interested in funding the BBC to invent new programming methods, languages or anything else. We do not want to be forced to fund magazines and various news channels we do not watch, and appalling non-stop comedy channels that make our toes curl, and iplayers that don't work with our computers....and so on and so on!
How do we stop this train and get off?
And still be legally authorized to watch TV we do want to watch?
Two questions for anyone who has one, but its about the ebooks not the reader -
1) Can you buy a kindle book from your pc not the kindle, and download it to your pc?
2) Can you read the kindle book on (say) a Sony ebook or on your pc?
Or are these books locked to the Kindle? Is it hackable in that case?
For me at least the books are what counts, not the reader. No way am I ever buying a book I can only read on one particular reader, any more than I will buy a CD that is locked to a Sony or Marantz CD player, or a Tune that can only be played on one particular brand of player....
I do not think this is true. The terrestrial broadcast network is paid for by the different users of it, which are ITV and BBC. It is true that C4 does not pay, but then, C4 does not retain all its advertising revenue. It is swings and roundabouts. The terrestrial network, towers and so on, used to be owned and operated by the BBC, but is now run at arms length. If I recall the transactions correctly, this is now run by National Grid Wireless Ltd, owned by an Australian company, and all users except C4 pay a fee to use it.
You might argue that there is a small subsidy from the BBC because only the BBC and ITV pay for bandwidth, and that ITV keeps some of the advertising revenue, which compensates, whereas the BBC doesn't get any of this. Maybe so.
But what does it show? It shows that we should stop that too. There is no more reason to force people to pay for C4, if they do not want to pay for it or to watch it, than to force them to pay for the BBC. If there are enough of them, there is no reason why abolishing free network access will put them out of business. If your reply is that no-one will do it, or not enough people will do it, well then, why should we be putting stuff out every day over the network that no-one is prepared to watch in enough numbers to make it economically valid? It is just as crazy as forcing them to subscribe to BBC shows they don't want to watch.
The argument about remote rural areas is also not valid. Even let us agree that people in remote areas should have their TV network infrastructure subsidized (which, in the age of satelite broadcasting, must be of very dubious social necessity). It still does not follow that the way to do this is by forcing everyone who watches TV to subscribe to the BBC. It could equally be done even if it were voluntary to subscribe to the BBC. You just mandate the network operator to cover all the country, and have him set rates to the broadcasters which covers his costs. The proof of this is that it is already done in the telephone business - the so called Access Deficit Contribution.
I am afraid that at the bottom of all these contortions to justify compulsory subscriptions is the basic proposition that in some way, the consequences of popular choice will be socially disastrous. But when you probe the arguments, you find nothing real there other than this feeling. There is no reason to think it will be.
It is in the end a deep feeling that the UK population is untrustworthy, does not know what it wants, and must be compelled by law to buy what is good for it. No, we cannot force people to watch Strictly Come Dancing. But we sure as hell can force them to pay for it, and that's something.
That seems to be the approach. It is profoundly authoritarian, and deeply wrong. Not least because of the corrupting effect it has on the BBC. But that is a subject for another day.
Folks, this is the collective wisdom of /. when thinking about the BBC, and it is a strange and wonderful thing to behold.
Fellow proposes that subscription to the BBC be made voluntary, so those who want to watch it, will pay to watch it, and those who do not will not. This seems reasonable enough, and is the way just about every other aspect of life in the West works.
One reply is that this will destroy Channel 4. Quite how this will have any impact at all on Channel 4 is obscure, because Channel 4 is advertising funded. Guess what, Channel 4 is totally unrelated to the BBC, not in any way subsidized by the 'license fee', all of which goes to the BBC. Channel 4 in fact does not retain all of its advertising profits but subsidizes, if that is the word, the other commercial TV channels.
Another reply is that this will leave us with a Murdoch monopoly. How is making subscription voluntary supposed to do this exactly? It will simply adjust the size of the BBC to the demand for its services. There will only be a Murdoch monopoly if all the other commercial channels fail, and if the BBC fails too for being unable to attract any subscriptions. But give me a break: if they cannot get enough voluntary subscriptions to stay afloat, why the hell are we keeping them going in the first place?
Another reply is that the BBC is there to force people to buy what they do not know they want, but when they get it, they will find they like it anyway. There is absolutely no evidence of this. In media, as in other areas of life, people buy what they want to use.
Finally a bunch of people say that they personally like the BBCs output. Or some of it. Yes, probably you do. Now, explain to me again why this means everyone in the UK should be forced by law to subscribe to the BBC? It is a total non sequitur. Making everyone subscribe is not needed for the BBC to make all this wonderful content. It can make it, and you, if you want to, can subscribe to it. What is the problem?
I have an interesting proposition for everyone who thinks compulsory funding is so great. It is the Microsoft model. Lets make everyone who buys a computer buy a copy of Windows, whether they run Linux or MacOS or Amiga or OS2. The reasons for this are, first I like Windows. Second, if people find they have already bought Windows, they are likely to use it in the desperate effort to get some value. Then they will find they might not have wanted to buy it, but they actually like it and it is good for them. Finally, if we do not fund Windows like this, Apple will go broke. Oh, and Amiga too. And maybe Botswana, who knows.
As you know, all media in the world and much shopping right now are funded on the BBC model. This model is that you shall be legally obliged to subscribe to one service, in order to be allowed to buy other competing services. In the UK, if you want to watch any TV you are obliged by law to subscribe to the BBC, or you will go to jail without passing GO.
This is the standard practice in many areas of life, doubtless in imitation of this great British innovation.
It is the norm in the US, I hear, for you to be obliged to pay for the New York Times, whether you read it or not, because that is a condition for being able to read Newsweek or the LA Times. And quite right too. One can only legally read novels in Australia if one can prove paid ownership of the complete works of John Barth. This is just as well, since otherwise no-one would buy them. Not to mention the general practice of supermarket management. If you have not visited Belgium recently, you may not be aware that if you are caught in a supermarket without your Delhaize loyalty card you will simply be thrown in jail. I could go on. In France, for example, a man can drive whatever car he pleases, as long as he has a Peugeot in his drive. Not his garage, his drive. And not financed - owned outright.
So I fully realize that what I am going to propose is a wild revolutionary and radical idea, and fellow slashdotters, I am delighted for you my dear friends to be the first ones to hear it suggested. I do not think anything like this has ever been suggested before on the subject, and while I am aware of the revolutionary implications for the way in which we buy goods in general, we must start small, and start carefully, where the need is most obvious, and that is why I confine the present suggestion to the way we fund the BBC.
What we need to do is very simple. We need to make this fee voluntary. We need to stop making everyone subscribe to the BBC, and instead let them subscribe if they want to watch it, and not if they do not.
Now before everyone bursts into howls of anger, or tells me I have taken leave of my senses, which I agree is quite a natural reaction to a proposal to treat the BBC so differently from all other goods and services in the Western World, let me point out that it might solve a couple of the problems the iPlayer reveals.
The BBC would no longer be drowning in a flood of money, and it would have some slight incentive to offer services which its voluntary subscribers wanted. It might even focus its efforts on giving them what they want, instead of what it chooses to give those who have been forced to pay, and now will take whatever they are given.
Yes, it is shocking and radical, and it could lead to a shakeup of the whole of Western Society. But, we are only talking about one broadcaster in one small country. I think fellow slashdotters you may agree when you think about it, that this is an experiment worth trying.
Probably not whole grains. That whole grains are better for you is a myth. No cultures with a tradition of long lived good health eat wheat or rice bran - or any non soluble bran. They feed it to animals and eat the animals. Also, such cultures treat soy with great wariness and respect. This too they feed to animals, unless fermented and aged, and even then they eat it in very small quantities.
The reason is partly phytates, and partly irritation of the bowels, and partly plant estrogens. Wheat bran is non soluble and so is an irritant to the bowel. But because of phytates, it prevents the absorption of minerals. The plant hormones in soy are just plain bad for you. Brown rice is lower in delivered nutrition than polished. It is not how much nutrients a product contains. Its how much it delivers to you when you eat it.
We are embarked on a huge uncontrolled experiment in nutrition, and one undertaken without the slightest evidence in its favor. We started out with a diet which obtained about one third of its calories from saturated fats, about one third from protein, and one third from partly refined carbs, generally all eaten together with a variety of vegetables. Curiously enough, heart disease was rather low. I say partially refined - the bread before the invention of modern industrial baking was sourdough long fermented and slow risen, and was made from high extraction but not whole wheat flour. It was chewy, low GI and very digestible. These foods were eaten slowly in sociable meals. They were not wolfed down on the way from one place to another, or held in one hand while typing with the other.
We moved from this to a diet which substituted refined and often hydrogenated vegetable oil, high in polyunsaturates, for the animal fat. We then added to this recently the most industrialized kind of processed food there is: soy 'milk' and meal of various kinds. This too raised the proportion of vegetable oil in the diet. We then had a campaign to lower total fat consumption, which led us to a high carbohydrate diet, but high in those same vegetable oils.
Our last state was worse than our first. Nothing in our evolutionary history has prepared us for such a diet. Its consequences are continual hunger, over eating, endless snacks, obesity, and degenerative diseases.
What do we need to do? Go back to the traditional comfortably off working family diets of about 1900. Meat and two vegetables, high extraction sourdough bread in liberal quantities, oatmeal, full fat milk, butter, cheese, fish in moderation. Minimal amounts of vegetable oil, minimal amounts of sweets. Pastry made, if one has to eat pastry, with suet. No snacks.
Women are the especial victims of our current dietary mania and the diet industry. If we could do one thing to improve the health of society, it would be to abolish dieting, dieting books, and conversations about dieting and one's weight. Couple that with only eating at mealtimes, cooking only real food from scratch, using ingredients available in 1910, and we would all be infinitely better off.
Read "Nourishing Traditions." It will change your life.
http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/11/amazon-kindle-meet-amazons-e-book-reader/
if this is really it, its dead before it gets out of bed.
However the Hanlin V9 with a bigger screen, better looks and a more reasonable price could be what lets the market take off. The Sony is close. It just needs to be a bit bigger screen and a bit less expensive (and drop all the non-book functions), and it could be a real goer. But this thing...!
If anyone is curious, the 8% figure comes from p 43 of the report. It is not sourced, and there is no justification for it. I don't believe it, certainly not without some properly sourced derivation of it.
Isn't it wonderful what the Guardian finds to worry about?
They could be worrying about literacy in the UK. I think a third of school leavers can't read now. But of course, the Guardian is the house organ of the Teachers Union, so we won't write about that.
Or they could be worrying about hospital infections. in which we lead the world. In Maidstone, nurses first told patients to shit in their beds with no bedpans, then left them lying in it. Amazingly enough, this produced an outbreak of disease. I say an outbreak. It went on for several years, but the Guardian didn't notice. No, it thinks the health service is the envy of the world and if all the cleaners worked for Unison, everything would be fine.
Or it could worry about democracy. We elected a government which has a huge majority in the Parliament on a tiny minority of the votes cast. Where was the Guardian then?
Or it could worry about civil rights. We have had the most sustained attack on civil liberties since the time of Charles I in recent years. The Guardian will tell you to vote for the party that's been managing it.
Now the Guardian, with its head firmly bent over and upwards, is worried about saving the environment of the Moon!
It gives new and deeper meaning to the phrase "out of touch".
At a company I did some work for, the Corporate Planner persuaded the CEO to make all presenters to him and his direct reports do it in the form of written papers, not presentations. The papers were to be a max of 5 pages plus two for tables and financials. The only slides allowed were the financials and tables from the paper. Everyone had to get the paper in advance and read it.
The quality of discussion improved enormously. In addition, there was a written archive of what was being argued. Whereas previously with PPT you had maybe 50 slides, and only if you had been there and taken careful notes, could you get from them to what the speaker had actually argued.
In fact, though 5 pages seems incredibly little, the number of words was probably more than in the 50 slides. The difference was, they were combined into sentences, so people had to think more about them while writing!
The thing I've never understood in this debate, and no-one ever gives any explanation of it, is this.
People argue that if Apple sold OSX for non-Apple branded machines, it would kill their hardware business.
Those same people also usually argue that Apple hardware is second to none in quality and value, and that the user experience of a machine where the hardware and OS are both controlled by the manufacturer is second to none.
So, if this is all true, why will it have any effect on their hardware business? Why will everyone not simply carry on buying Apple hardware because its better value, and buy "integrated systems" because they work better?
You cannot have it both ways. Something is completely wrong with the argument. The only explanation why it would damage their hardware business is if people are reluctantly buying hardware they would not choose if they had any choice, in order to run an OS which they do want to choose. It could only damage their hardware business if the concept of "integrated systems" no longer means anything to buyers in a world in which XP is just as "integrated" with an Intel Core2 board or Samsung memory or NVidia graphics as OSX is. People will only choose to buy non-Apple hardware if they can get hardware which better meets their needs cheaper.
But of course, that is exactly what the Mac people fiercely deny, while still making the argument about hardware business destruction.
The real explanation seems to go like this. In effect what's happening is that Apple is choosing to exploit the market value of OSX by setting a price for the OS which is lower than they could get if they sold it freely in the market, by using it to get higher margins on own branded hardware. They are getting margins indirectly, not by charging for the OS, but by imposing hardware costs on their customers. This is the real corporate strategy.
I doubt if it is either wise, the best way to extract that value, or even sustainable long term. The reason is, the costs they impose on customers are greater than they need be, because the margins are acquired indirectly. And the internal costs to Apple of generating those margins are greater too. One suspects the end result is lower revenues at higher margins but lower total margin amount.
But we'll see.
The difference is, of course, that Apple is using exactly the same components. It is not like a Lexus ....(why, oh why do Mac people still think BMWs are the ne plus ultra of quality in autos? Is it because none of them have ever owned one? Or is it because they don't know what they are driving? God knows!)....
To believe this post, you have to believe in alchemy. Cheap Samsung memory suddenly becomes something quite other when installed in a case with the Apple label on it. A cheap disk drive is transmuted into pure gold. What happens to the core2 is beyond me.
Fact: Apple is using the same mid range components the white box people are using, put together in a fancy case, sold at premium. They are not using better components.
You know, the line "Repeat after me...." when applied to Apple, has probably lost Apple more sales than any other single slogan uttered by the maddest of mad Apple maniacs. And that is saying something. It just reinforces the idea that this is a sort of mindless cult of people waving their little red books and chanting some idiotic slogan in unison.
Forget it already.