Exactly the GP's point, dear AC. How usable was Linux, when the geeks first started using it? Now that it's ready for Joe Sixpack's desktop, 'our work here is done', and it's time to move on to the next candidate in need of geek services for improvement...
Why, on my machine, when I want to create a presentation, I have to use something called 'PowerPoint'. For weeks I didn't touch it because I thought it was some sort of weird ACPI tool, and I was shutting down and rebooting enough that I figured I didn't need it.
It turns out I also have an email app called "Outlook" which I thought was a weather forecaster. It hasn't worked well; maybe I should switch -- I see there's a faster version called 'Outlook Express'.
The file system app is called 'Explorer' which is confusingly named the same thing as the web browser.
There's also this thing called "Access" which, as near as I can guess, is a kind of server that's supposed to give everybody on the internet 'access' to my data.
Oh, and I have to click on a button labeled 'Start' to shut down...
Problem: There is no straightforward way to set keyboard shortcuts for assigning/removing styles, inserting specific special characters, etc. For non-trivial documents, this means repeated use of the mouse/toolbars/insert character dialog are required.
Workaround: Macros can be used, though this is slow and awkward.
I hope you're not running the macro each time from the Macro menu!
I've run into this problem myself, because I frequently type in French. ( Mány spéçîál çháráçtérs... ) Once you have a macro to type a particular character, you can assign that macro to a key combination. I agree this isn't an ideal solution, but once you do the setup (Tools/Customize/Keyboard), it isn't any slower to use than any of the solutions Word makes available.
If your 300-person company is spending 4 million per quarter on SOX alone, you are being vastly overcharged by both your external auditors and whoever is doing internal audit assist. I'm curious about what you count as 'accounting overhead' -- the budget of the entire finance/accounting departments?
Don't forget that external audit for publicly-held companies was a requirement before SOX was even thought of, and IT Audit (Section 404) is just one part of SOX.
As for "out of proportion for the damage small and midcap companies can do", the current debate about revising SOX has to be tempered by the proviso that most misstatements/fraud are detected exactly at those smaller companies. The goal is not to protect the US economy, but to protect the investor, including the small investor. If your 401K vanishes because of corporate malfeasance (intentional or accidental) it doesn't matter if it was invested in Enron or a small-cap.
I accept your statement that your company would be profitable were it not for SOX, but I seriously doubt that SOX alone is responsible for a $16 million swing per year.
Parent: an accounting firm (big 4 or smaller) can either perform external audits for a company, or consult for them. Not both. There are very strict independence rules governing this. And please explain your statement about Enron -- it doesn't make sense to me.
Grandparent: Companies do not have to change auditors (meaning audit firms) every few years. That's the last thing they want to do. Assuming the auditing firm is independent (and MANY heavy regs govern that), they only benefit from the knowledge base the audit firm retains. The rule is that the same partner from the audit firm can't keep the client more than 5 years -- so the client rotates to another partner at the same audit firm.
I think you're confusing the goal of the act with its actual ramifications. Sarbanes-Oxley amounts to a regressive cost of doing business. Small firms pay a disproportionately larger share of their revenues to comply: they have to hire a lawyer or auditing firm when they could have done the paperwork themselves in the past.
When you write stuff like this, could you please also name the neocon website you're parroting it from? Your argument sounds a lot like the estate-tax debate, the rich defending their interests by claiming concern for the little guy.
Stop saying 'companies' like every mom and pop grocery has to do this. SOX only applies to publicly-held companies. And publicly-held companies had to be audited by an external auditor, even before SOX.
Don't ruin Canada's great reputation with your whining. SOX only affects activity within US borders. If the owners (shareholders) of your employer don't like complying with American securities laws, why did the board vote to trade on an American exchange? Vancouver and Toronto have exchanges, don't they? And they're so much better regulated and more secure than the American exchanges, why wouldn't you want to trade there?
Want to really put the screws to "corporate executive" crime? Then eliminate the government granted limited liability that a "corporation" represents. Allow thereby the officers of a company to be directly liable for their decisions, their accounting practices, their performance.
"Sarbanes-Oxley attempts to achieve this goal by legislating: [...]
Personal responsibility on the part of top executives and board members regarding the accuracy of financial statements their companies release..."
You sound like a bitter socialist (and I'm a leftie myself) who's so anti-est that nothing it does can be appreciated. Maybe SOX isn't everything, but it's certainly a step in the right direction, including the direction of requiring personal responsibility you evidently didn't know it had.
SOX is a very heavy burden on small businesses that are public.
Note the emphasis. Most posts are just saying 'companies'. Kudos to you for saying _public_. If you want to get the windfall of an IPO, if you want to have stock in your company traded on an American exchange, you submit to the relevant regulations. It's not like there haven't been any cases of unchecked corporate malfeasance screwing over the small investor, have there? So, the costs are passed on through stock dividends (or less directly, through share prices, which are essentially expectations of dividends), and SOX serves as a form of insurance against fraud for the small investor.
I clicked through to read TFA, and (in addition to it being in German), it was shorter than the summary!... no, wait, it was just a bad link to the home page of this particular group, rather than to the actual article that the AC submitter appears to have translated practically word-for-word to create the summary (which nevertheless didn't bother to link to the source article).
Is it too much to ask that the summary... summarize? Can someone for the love of FSM explain to me why we needed not only all the geeks involved's names, but also their radio call signs? Wouldn't all the Voyager telemetry groupies be willing to read TFA to get that crucial information?
And I'm sure glad the summary cleared up who that anonymous woman was trying out the ATM -- what her name was, where she lived, and what she did for a living. I'd hate to have to drill down to TFA to get that crucial, crucial information.
Geez, mods, parent is not a Troll! (Metamods, please fix...) You're only partially right, though. 'Comity' is more about the politeness of diplomacy, and is not always spelled out in treaties. It's more of a 'we're all gentlemen here' type thing.
Gay Marriage, on the other hand, was explosive (in the USA) because of the 'full faith and credit' clause in the constitution. This meant, in effect, that any decision of a judge in one state had to be respected by all of the other states. Stronger than comity, this principle has the force of constitutional law in the US. Not only marriages, but things like arrest warrants, rulings on evidence, etc., were national in scope. I don't know what the equivalent principle in the EU is -- I imagine it's somewhere in between comity and full-faith-and-credit. You don't see Italian guys going to Holland to get married, then coming back home demanding their marriages to be recognized, for example.
Think about how weird this is -- "Microsoft's own Blogger" has to go ask someone from their PR firm (i.e., third-party, hired-help, outside MS) for accurate information about what's going on at Microsoft . The fact that he has to go outside his own company to get info about his own company tells you all you need to know -- forget about rewrite percentages!
What they need, instead of indecision, is an egomaniac whose single-mindedness of purpose can drive the whole space program forward.
Hell yes!
Someone like Bill Gates...
Oh hell no! I thought you were going to say, someone like Theo DeRaadt, who has a long history of hitting his release schedules -- what is it, every 6 months for 10 years now? -- and building a rock-solid product. And, ya gotta concede, he's got the 'egomaniac' and 'single-mindedness of purpose' bit DOWN.
Bill and Ball release stuff late, charge too much, and even when it's released, their stuff crashes all the time. NOT what NASA needs.
Lots of people have mentioned/etc/portage/package.use already... if you've had enough of config files, you should check out the 'porthole' app, which is a GUI frontend to emerge. It makes it very easy for you to see all and only those USE flags which are appropriate to each app, and you can set them for each emerge distinctly. I'm also trying 'kuroo', which is a similar KDE-based app, but I'm liking porthole better.
Depends who put it there. If Doritos put it there, hey, its Doritos product, and it is a free market. The consumer will decide whether they want to consume doritos with an alternate beverage or consume another chip.
If however Pepsi had some say in the design there are other issues...
Twilight zone time:
Doritos is a Frito-Lay product... Pepsico owns Frito-Lay.
Geez, you're on my case in every thread today, aren't you?
I was making two points here:
1. The 'engineered' threat of nanoparticles/technology is not necessarily greater than the more 'natural' threat of asbestos fibers, so 'nano' in itself isn't any qualitatively new kind of Michael-Crichton-like threat.
2. None of the uses of nanoparticles/technology I've seen discussed anywhere involve aerosolizing them so that they're a threat to our lungs -- they're too expensive to waste that way anyway.
Nowhere did I say that as long as it's less severe than asbestos, we're fine. What I did say is that it's likely to be about the same as any fine dust (my coal dust example), but because of the projected applications, we're not likely to be exposed to nano-engineered dust in any (medically) significant quantity.
Got it now, or did I push another one of your buttons?
you're right, sorry, I was typing fast. But realize you're whooshing way over the head of most people with this detail -- I've found that most assume that 'free speech' means that they can say whatever, wherever, and they first need to learn what it really is, before they can even get to can/shall. From your last sentence, it seems like you're bemoaning popular ignorance of the Constitution, too:).
Excuse me but what *right* do you have to silence in a movie theater? It might be a social expectation but in no way is a *right*. Tell me when and where you are going to see a movie next. I'd love to express my actual *right* of speech and talk during the entire movie and annoy the hell out of you. You do not have a right to not be annoyed by other humans.
It's not him that has the 'right', it's the theater management. You don't have the 'right' of free speech on private property. (The first amendment merely says 'Congress can make no law'; it doesn't mean you can sound off when- and wherever.) The social expectation is based on managment's right to boot you from the theater, which is spelled out on the back of your ticket. Read it sometime. If you don't like the terms, don't buy the ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly the GP's point, dear AC. How usable was Linux, when the geeks first started using it? Now that it's ready for Joe Sixpack's desktop, 'our work here is done', and it's time to move on to the next candidate in need of geek services for improvement...
I don't use it myself, but I constantly marvel at the number of people who buy the stuff.
You wouldn't think so many people would be taking it home just to make steel in such small quantities.
You said it, bro!
...
Why, on my machine, when I want to create a presentation, I have to use something called 'PowerPoint'. For weeks I didn't touch it because I thought it was some sort of weird ACPI tool, and I was shutting down and rebooting enough that I figured I didn't need it.
It turns out I also have an email app called "Outlook" which I thought was a weather forecaster. It hasn't worked well; maybe I should switch -- I see there's a faster version called 'Outlook Express'.
The file system app is called 'Explorer' which is confusingly named the same thing as the web browser.
There's also this thing called "Access" which, as near as I can guess, is a kind of server that's supposed to give everybody on the internet 'access' to my data.
Oh, and I have to click on a button labeled 'Start' to shut down
I've run into this problem myself, because I frequently type in French. ( Mány spéçîál çháráçtérs
Except for the people who have medical reasons to avoid caffeine, and want to make absolutely sure that what was in the orange pot was decaf...
If your 300-person company is spending 4 million per quarter on SOX alone, you are being vastly overcharged by both your external auditors and whoever is doing internal audit assist. I'm curious about what you count as 'accounting overhead' -- the budget of the entire finance/accounting departments?
Don't forget that external audit for publicly-held companies was a requirement before SOX was even thought of, and IT Audit (Section 404) is just one part of SOX.
As for "out of proportion for the damage small and midcap companies can do", the current debate about revising SOX has to be tempered by the proviso that most misstatements/fraud are detected exactly at those smaller companies. The goal is not to protect the US economy, but to protect the investor, including the small investor. If your 401K vanishes because of corporate malfeasance (intentional or accidental) it doesn't matter if it was invested in Enron or a small-cap.
I accept your statement that your company would be profitable were it not for SOX, but I seriously doubt that SOX alone is responsible for a $16 million swing per year.
Parent: an accounting firm (big 4 or smaller) can either perform external audits for a company, or consult for them. Not both. There are very strict independence rules governing this. And please explain your statement about Enron -- it doesn't make sense to me.
Grandparent: Companies do not have to change auditors (meaning audit firms) every few years. That's the last thing they want to do. Assuming the auditing firm is independent (and MANY heavy regs govern that), they only benefit from the knowledge base the audit firm retains. The rule is that the same partner from the audit firm can't keep the client more than 5 years -- so the client rotates to another partner at the same audit firm.
Stop saying 'companies' like every mom and pop grocery has to do this. SOX only applies to publicly-held companies. And publicly-held companies had to be audited by an external auditor, even before SOX.
Don't ruin Canada's great reputation with your whining. SOX only affects activity within US borders. If the owners (shareholders) of your employer don't like complying with American securities laws, why did the board vote to trade on an American exchange? Vancouver and Toronto have exchanges, don't they? And they're so much better regulated and more secure than the American exchanges, why wouldn't you want to trade there?
I clicked through to read TFA, and (in addition to it being in German), it was shorter than the summary! ... no, wait, it was just a bad link to the home page of this particular group, rather than to the actual article that the AC submitter appears to have translated practically word-for-word to create the summary (which nevertheless didn't bother to link to the source article).
... summarize? Can someone for the love of FSM explain to me why we needed not only all the geeks involved's names, but also their radio call signs? Wouldn't all the Voyager telemetry groupies be willing to read TFA to get that crucial information?
Is it too much to ask that the summary
Yes, I'm grumpy today. Sorry...
And I'm sure glad the summary cleared up who that anonymous woman was trying out the ATM -- what her name was, where she lived, and what she did for a living. I'd hate to have to drill down to TFA to get that crucial, crucial information.
Geez, mods, parent is not a Troll! (Metamods, please fix...) You're only partially right, though. 'Comity' is more about the politeness of diplomacy, and is not always spelled out in treaties. It's more of a 'we're all gentlemen here' type thing.
Gay Marriage, on the other hand, was explosive (in the USA) because of the 'full faith and credit' clause in the constitution. This meant, in effect, that any decision of a judge in one state had to be respected by all of the other states. Stronger than comity, this principle has the force of constitutional law in the US. Not only marriages, but things like arrest warrants, rulings on evidence, etc., were national in scope. I don't know what the equivalent principle in the EU is -- I imagine it's somewhere in between comity and full-faith-and-credit. You don't see Italian guys going to Holland to get married, then coming back home demanding their marriages to be recognized, for example.
Think about how weird this is -- "Microsoft's own Blogger" has to go ask someone from their PR firm (i.e., third-party, hired-help, outside MS) for accurate information about what's going on at Microsoft . The fact that he has to go outside his own company to get info about his own company tells you all you need to know -- forget about rewrite percentages!
Bill and Ball release stuff late, charge too much, and even when it's released, their stuff crashes all the time. NOT what NASA needs.
You mean, there are millions of Mac users? Gee, who knew?
(I kid, I kid...)
You are making the specious assumption that you understand what the term 'short-selling' means.
Lots of people have mentioned /etc/portage/package.use already ... if you've had enough of config files, you should check out the 'porthole' app, which is a GUI frontend to emerge. It makes it very easy for you to see all and only those USE flags which are appropriate to each app, and you can set them for each emerge distinctly. I'm also trying 'kuroo', which is a similar KDE-based app, but I'm liking porthole better.
Doritos is a Frito-Lay product
Geez, you're on my case in every thread today, aren't you?
I was making two points here:
1. The 'engineered' threat of nanoparticles/technology is not necessarily greater than the more 'natural' threat of asbestos fibers, so 'nano' in itself isn't any qualitatively new kind of Michael-Crichton-like threat.
2. None of the uses of nanoparticles/technology I've seen discussed anywhere involve aerosolizing them so that they're a threat to our lungs -- they're too expensive to waste that way anyway.
Nowhere did I say that as long as it's less severe than asbestos, we're fine. What I did say is that it's likely to be about the same as any fine dust (my coal dust example), but because of the projected applications, we're not likely to be exposed to nano-engineered dust in any (medically) significant quantity.
Got it now, or did I push another one of your buttons?
you're right, sorry, I was typing fast. But realize you're whooshing way over the head of most people with this detail -- I've found that most assume that 'free speech' means that they can say whatever, wherever, and they first need to learn what it really is, before they can even get to can/shall. From your last sentence, it seems like you're bemoaning popular ignorance of the Constitution, too :).