I've known some people that work at RS, and they all have refered to it as "The Shack." I think it is probably just the internal corprate culture leaking out. In addition, it is kind of a hail mary to rebrand, you might get customers coming back to see what "changed." Furtinture stores do this all the time. They'll have "going out of business" sales and then reopen with a new name, though it is the same owners. The goal is to get passer-bys to see if anything changed. Unfortunately, if you don't really "change" what wasn't working in the past the traffic you do get isn't going to turn into customers very easily.
We have one right across the street from Wal-Mart. I asked they why they did that and if it was business suicide, which the clerk in a surprising moment of candor, said that everything in the store is about $1 more expensive than wal-mart, but due to their smaller size, they get customers willing to pay the extra dollar to get in-and-out fast or to walk to the counter and say "I need one of 'these' or something that fits in this $hole on this $device go get me one." In particular if you're looking for something esoteric, its easier to go there and have them say "we don't have that" than search high and low at the bigger store, particularly if you're not sure what you're looking for.
I remember that exact article, and you are right. I think RS does well in small markets (like where I am from) that doesn't have any of the big-box stores and tends to cater to customers who were told "I need a USB cable" but don't know what that is or where to get one. They expect they'll get marginally better (knowledgable) service than Wal-Mart with less hastle. Last time I was there in California a lot of people were paying the cellular bill there, which I don't understand why anyone would pay their bill in person when there are a lot more efficient method(s).
I think they key for them is that crowd, and the "I need it now so I'll pay a little extra" or the "I'll pay a little extra not to stand in line at wal-mart where the person in front of me wants to send a Money Order and buy a carton of cigarettes they have to get from the counter on the other end of the store."
They also do well when you're looking for esoteric batteries like for cameras, hearing aids, etc. They're also pretty good at having odd cables at decent prices (amongst other brick-and-mortars) such as a male-male 1/4" stereo cable for the AUX jack in newer cars. They are also good when you're traveling and need said odd batteries or a cell charger.
If the Federal government wasn't taking such a high percentage of tax revenue from the citizens and blowing it like it is going out of style, the states could operate the services they ought to and tax at a reasonable rate. Right now the states are doing everything they can to keep their citizens going home with more than 60% of their wages at the end of the day while still providing basic services. Because there is no national referendum and both parties are spending like mad, the state government is the only place the people have an opportunity to try to diminish their tax burdens that are crushing citizens and are making overseas pastures greener for job-producing companies.
If the feds trimmed down their budget and only pursued the duties it has a constitutional basis to pursue, there would be more money for the states to provide the services they need to rather than depend on funding, under heavy inflation, that congress can shift around on an annual basis, causing instability of programs and decreased confidence.
I completely agree with you, however I get the feeling that the government feels they aren't dangerous enough to lock up, but are dangerous enough to keep tabs on; kind of like a sentance of jailtime plus a lifetime of probation.
What really bothers me is that there are offenders who are required to register who were sentanced before these registries came into being. If the judge feels they ought to register, while I disagree, so be it. But for the state to append to a sentance is precarious from a legal standpoint in my opinion.
Already the courts have decided a state can take "administrative actions" like revoking your drivers license if arrested for DUI without a trial by jury. Pretty soon the state will be able to do whatever they feel like short of incarceration without a trial.
I think the message that companies need to understand is that GPL != Public Domain. There are a lot of advantages for using GPL'ed code, but companies need to measure the risks/rewards of using GPL'ed software and how it might impact their product goals for the good or the bad because they are required to fulfill the requirements of the license, no matter how few and and inoccuous the license requirements might be. I don't think exploring that distinction is FUD, but an intellegent discourse that helps protect the vendors who utilize GPL code, their users (in the form of future releases not being interupted by legal issues) and the original developers who released their code as GPL and not public domain for a reason.
There are situations where it might be better for a company to reinvent the wheel than use GPL licensed code when you consider the long term implications of the license and the cost of compliance with the license and the risk of exposing proprietary code that interfaces with the GPL code.
I'm just glad companies are understanding they can't just copy and paste GPL code and be done with it like a fat kid in a candy store and not open themselves up to legal risks the could have avoided by not using the licensed code or using the code while respecting the term(s) of it's license.
Legally established ethical standards are completely independent of certification or other technical qualifications. Hiring employees whose experiences and interview responses demonstrate ethical behavior are a better solution. After employment, not tolerating unethical practices such as stealing user-data or selling/installing unlicensed software creates a culture of ethical behavior, where it is the rule, not the exception. Some shops establish unethical practices from the top and specifically choose workers who they feel won't question the practices or will sell illegal software/refurbed devices for a piece of the pie.
That being said, hiring workers who look at the $7.25/hr job as a good entry level position or a learning opportunity can be very rewarding for employer and the employee. A lot of us started there doing Windows imaging or basic computer construction/repair.
I'd be more nervous to hire an MCSE for this kind of work than an under-qualified but eager and capable of learning employee. The overqualified have a better chance of being disatisfied with the work or the pay and more ability to believe they can get-away with unethical behaviors.
I'm reading a lot of comments about these discs being "frisbees" and trash in the future, which goes to show me that as versed as many on/. are in technology, quite a few don't know anything about archaeology. Discovering a 1000 year old artifact that is physically in good-enough shape to be read (even if it can't be interpereted) would be priceless to some in the field. Nobody said the discoveries in egypt were "as good as gravel" because they were in glyphs that weren't readily readable.
Even from a technological standpoint, reverse engineering a 1000 year old video or data file sounds absolutely fascinating to me... even if the DVD was a 1000 year old rick-roll.
Because then you've got literally hundreds of "versions" to maintain within the organization by hundreds of vendors that may be incompatible with one another with some needed to recieve documents from suppliers and/or customers. We already get support issues because user "A"'s copy of the employee popsicle day flyer doesn't render the same as user "B"'s copy. Imagine if core-functionality was dependant on having the right mish-mash of DLLs or extenions installed. From a security perspective plugins also add more attack vectors and if you look at Firefox as the example, even minor version updates can break them, which is not OK for day-to-day productivity software. What makes it tolerable on FF is that even if you disable all of them, it still does what it was designed to do-- browse web pages.
Like browsers, they are made to meet the majority of the needs for the majority of users doing what it was designed to do.
Big Content has always had to deal with the cost-of-doing-business, just like every other industry. Sharing a video tape, a book, a CD or whatever else it has to produce, does take away from their business (though there is discussion that sharing leads to future purchases in the same way giving out free food at the grocery is an advertising expense).
From a business perspective, I am absolutely certain it has become cheaper to produce their content to CD over Tape (or DVD over VHS), and even more cheaply as a digital download. Content, just like insurance/financial services, is one that should could thrive if it embraced the newer, cheaper methods of production/sales/distribution than trying to do things the old way.
I'm glad that the court is identifying that internet-based sharing is no different in essense, than sneakernet sharing which is always something the companies have had to deal with and has always been a cost-of-doing-business. The fact that it is "online" is ultimately irrelevant, and even if greater sharing drives down sales (which is debatable), online/digital distribution should also lower costs which if done properly, should allow them to remain profitable. Business is about adaption. No business has a fundamental right to exist. Suing your customers and taking rights they either explicitly had, or felt they had is no way to keep those customers, in which sharing and distribution become irrelevant.
As others have stated, this is a measure to catch criminals. If you capture this on video and it aides in a successful prosecution, taking a criminal off the streets, they won't be able to commit more crimes. No one (with any common sense) believes all crime can be stopped (prevented?), but the entire purpose of jail(s) are to function as a deturant (e.g. I don't want to go to jail so I won't engage in behaviours that might land me there) and to separate those who are willing to commit crimes in disregard for the law. Every crime that criminal would have committed if free to do so has been prevented by taking them off the streets.
This tactic is entirely based on fear that detures and in the event of violation, assists in prosecution. Vice cops have been doing almost the exact same thing with putting "fake" dealers and "fake" hookers on the street. It happens enough and ends up in the news enough that it minimally detures a finite, but difficult to measure population from committing the crime, and catches an additional finite, but easy to measure, and prevents them from doing it again.
All that being said, as bad as "crimes" are, there are methods of law enforcement that are worse than many crimes, and this is one of them. Red light cameras are another. There is evidence that they cause more accidents, and are only useful by making criminals out of drivers who, by running the yellow, are making the most safe driving decision at the time.
I think the problem is that while Java is cross-platform, it's apps have always been treated like second-class citizens on Windows and Mac platforms. They behaved different, had a very different UI for most of its' life, had a slow big runtime for the dial-up days that every app seemed to have a different version of the VM to run and took forever to load or update.
For that reason, I think a lot of developers have avoided it on Windows and since Windows has such a market share, if you're primarily a Windows developer, Mono is a good choice. Mac development has always been a niche job and learning the specifics library methods to make Java apps "work" like native mac applications I can't see much reason in not just writing it in Objective-C. Apple has always lagged behind Sun in releasing recent VMs and for OS X 10.4, which is still very in use as many Mac users don't upgrade for the sake of upgrading, it still hasn't been given Java 6.
.NET (at least on Windows) has always had a form designer which is very quick to learn and rapid develop over Swing/Eclipse which has been code-based (I know, behind the GUI forms is code in.NET), but for a lot of us (like me) our CS programs focused on CS, not software development/engineering and we've had almost no exposure to the GUI packages in Java or C, which have a bit of a learning curve even for the educated.
While it is kind of creepy, having worked in Technical Support, I found that when I made myself smile, even when I was furiously angry or irritated, it helped me "be" more friendly and attentive to my callers, than when I frowned, or wrapped my phone cord around my neck like a noose, etc...
When you are in customer service, it makes a huge difference, and belive it or not, it often makes a huge difference to customers who expect that you don't care about them and are just jockeying the time clock. Perception is everything.
However, rather than doing this, it might be better to just talk to the employee if you see them routinely looking like they ate a lemon.
The problem is that most people think the company with its army of lawyers has said that the limit should be 4 pills per day because they know people are going to take more than that and if they print the limit as 4, and the real limit is 8, less people are going to push it. Anecdotally, I've read an OTC medicine that said "take no more than X" per day, but had a doctor say if you're really hurting or really sick you can take "Y" ammount and be OK, just don't do it everyday. For example, the generic ibupropen bottle I have says take no more than 8 pills per day (1600mg), but I have an Rx for 800mg tablets, taken 3 times a day for backpain, which other than being bigger, are the same as taking 4 OTC 200mg ones. Why should I take the 1600mg limit on the bottle seriously when the doctor says go for it pretty frequently when my back flares up.
The problem with the nanny state is when they complain about everything, and put warning labels on absolutely everything because somewhere one person didn't know that a pack of peanuts could contain peanuts, they start taking everything with a grain of salt, including the really important ones and assume it is all there to cover the company's ass to protect against the family that sues because Timmy didn't know that taking 16 tylenols aren't going to make the problem go away faster.
While we're on the subject, APAP "PM" formulations with sleep aides in them serve no purpose if you're awake do to insomnia and not pain. My parents both take them all the time to adjust to shift-work changes which I know would be better if they took just the sleep aide for. It is one of those things that is in everything, and has been around for so long, and is so easy to get that no one questions it.
The difference is that if a person contracts a disease that is a public health risk, the person is generally able to tell physicians who he/she might have had contact with so that person can get treatment, possibily saving their life and slowing the disease spread. Cows can't tell investigators where they have been and who should be notified.
Regarding the cost, I can't imagine that this would be more expensive that the cost of destroying entire herds of cattle when one cow comes down with a confirmed or probable case of these diseases. Being able to isolate the infected could decrease the numbers needed to be destoyed saving money. The difference is that farms can claim the loss of the animal in insurance which is a sunk cost, versus a preventative cost. This would save money upstream as well in the form of smaller recalls to distributors, which seem to happen more and more frequently in the US.
Internet access isn't a good excuse as a low-bandwidth cellular scanner would be enough to report via SOAP web-service to whatever database; not to mention that every industry has costs-of-doing-business and this will/could be one of those things.
I haven't read enough to comment on the implementation of this plan but on the surface, I can't see why this wouldn't be a good idea from a public health perspective.
In a lot of ancient texts, heaven as it is understood to be "where God was" in many religions/mythologies was refered to as the "heaven of heavens" or the third heaven. (e.g. 2 Corinthians 12:2) In that langauge the first heaven was the "sky", the second heaven being space, and the third being "beyond space." Which many understand as authors communicating it being "not here" and "far away" and "unreachable by natural means" as most didn't consider it to be a "physical" place, particularly the thought that the physical was "less than" the spiritual in vouge at the time. However many readers without over the centruies, over different cultures, interpretations with little/no overarching education on the subject (scientific or theological) would have seen it as being "above the clouds" physically. In addition, as most could not read/write in those days, particularly in Europe, religious art was the lay people's way of communicating relgious ideas, rather than text, and that would have been the natural way to express that idea (angels and things above clouds).
Even today most of modern man in may ways has a really hard time wrapping their mind around the vastness of space (in relgious and scientific categories).
The problem is that a lot of the OSS community breathes the philosophy that "all information should and must be free... except for information about me, which should be confidential or not exist in digestable form at all." While an overstated and oversimplified sumation of reality... if those are two guiding principals, then where the rubber hits the road is quite difficult, if you're designing multipurposed software that doesn't have a very narrow scoped-purpose at design time, and you're really concerned that your work is going to be used in ways that violate either of those provlems. FOSS is a widget... if some company builds gears it has to know that one buyer might be using them to build hospital machinery and the other harpoon guns for whales. If OSS says you can use it, execpt for these purposes, it isn't very free as in freedom anymore.
I often wonder when governments of small markets (state/providence/prefecture or national) if smaller companies like Rapidshare who aren't competing on the level of MS or Google ever consider simply blocking access to that region that has laws/rulings that challenge the profitability of their business model. As much as it seems anti-thetical for a "world wide web" it seems from a business perspective a real option.
Even more so, how would you do it to satisfy the court... block by IP, geotraceroute, TLD, a message saying "Due to Company vs. State, if you are a resident of region, you are not permitted to use this site.... [legalese]...".
Maybe $50 US given the exchange rate since it is a US company. On the other hand, if a weather ballon with valuable/interesting gear landed in my yard, it would be mine, and I imagine that would be the case there too. The guy in the polo shirt saying "can I plz have my ballon back" isn't going to go over too well.
I would think properly mounted in a rack that the rack iteself would provide sufficent RFI sheilding. The fronts and backs acting almost like a faraday cage, and sides being pure metal.
It might decrease IE adoption if major OEMs decide to opt for Opera or Firefox, but it isn't going to show much much more people like alternatives. It is only going to show that the vast majority of users use whatever it comes with and are ultimately indiferent.
The only non-geek folks I know that have ever switched browsers for any reason did so because someone told them they should, so they blindly did it; or got what matched at work because thye were too lazy to learn two different pieces of software; or used whatever the ISP install CD set as the default.
I am just dreading the day when OEMs release their own browsers based (osely on OSS offerings or their own design that are bloated crap like most of their other software pre-loaded, because they know that brand recognition helps drive future sales. "Sorry I only know how to use Dellfox(tm)."
The nicest thing about having a bundled browser is that you could out-of-the-box download whatever one you wanted. Windows doesn't have anything like wget to download the packages over the internet, so if you don't have a browser, you're going to have a hard time getting one. When I was working with NT 3.51 (past its intended lifespan) trying to get drivers off the internet on a clean install sucked pretty bad, as I had to install a browser first to get anywhere.
The biggest problem I see is that IE was non-removable, which does present an issue. Amost all OS packages include a browser these days (FF/Iceweasel in *nix, Safari on Mac, IE on Windows), but the difference is that IE was unremovable.
I'm with them in that MS would not be able to stop OEMs from including other browsers. I think it is going a step-to-far to force MS to not include a browser as a part of it's OS offering given almost all their competitors do. No matter how much you love FF or hate all things Microsoft it seems extremely unreasonable. It also sets a bad precident in that now someone can complain and get other builtin software removed because of the competition issue... think WinZIP, WS_FTP, util you've stripped down the OS (Windows or otherwise) that does next to nothing out of the box and won't lower Windows' cost.
I love Linux, but it seems its' get-adoptors-by-being-free-as-in-beer is exactly what pissed Netscape off when MS started giving IE away, and if Linux ever does get a foothold, regulators could start demanding what packages end up in the "default" install rather than the market, which really sucks.
I think this completely diminishes the "severity" of a pandemic.
In the technical sense it is a disease that is widespread and uncontained; but if this is the benchmark then the common cold and normal flu ought to be raised to this level too, because they have the same wide spreadness and are most dangerous to the same classes of people, the elderly, children and those with immune issues. Every single year the "poultry (normal)" flu kills many, many more people in the exact same way and in the exact same circumstances.
This is only getting attention because of the media hype. The left wants more money to expand government to deal with it, and the right wants money to build a fence to keep things like this from coming from Mexico into the US, and the media is psyched because it's new, has political tie-ins, and came when the meltdown was becoming old-news.
Not only that, are we really surprised? Pigs are biologically similar enough to humans that we use pig organs for some transplants. Having infections that cross the species barrier in this way seem blatantly obvious.
This is just like the free gun-lock they provide when you buy a new firearm. It isn't required (in many places) but it is always given.
They want the tool to be available for people that want to use it. Before everyone says OMG the Chinese are at it again, remember that the US Government (via the Childrens Internet Protection Act) mandates schools and libraries in the public K12 system install filters, and it will be really interesting how that applies to school-furnished laptops. It is the exact same lame "protect the childrens!" mandate only the Chinese expand the scope but make it optional for the equipment owner to implement.
While I abhor censorship, from an implementation perspective it seems like an ISP as an opt-in/opt-out filter that is easy to immediately enable/disable would be far more effective, and easier to implement and has no additional vectors for attack/expoitation than normal HTTP traffic does.
The problem to do that is to make a degree in physics be effectively a computer science degree. They're talking about teaching physics students "enough" programming to do "physics" stuff. Most of their programs are going to be "problem" based, not all encompasing applications to handle complex/dynamic/ever-changing business processes. Every second spent not programming gives the student more time to do other things, and hammering out a quickly implemented application that "works" does well.
Whenever you move to a new language there is a learning curve, best-practices, langauge conventions, new APIs to learn so teaching them something, and doing it well gives them a good start, and they can learn the newer languages once they have some programming experience under the belt.
In my experience (as an anecdote) junior programmers who have solid language experience are quicker and more innovative than programmers who have strong fundamentals but minimal actual lines-of-code experience (not to introduce a necessarily false dichotomy).
I worked at a place that used FileNet, which is now an IBM product, to do this sort of thing. We had millions of scanned documents in the system. I wasn't personally very impressed with it, in that whenever anything "bad" happened, you had to call IBM because finding support online was impossible, and at that they support wasn't very good. It was also a very picky system, those seemed to handle the load well. If you go with it, I strongly encourage doing it for UNIX/Oracle because it screamed "poorly ported" when we used it for Windows/MSSSQL. It has an API for integration, but it is also, poorly documented and would take some time to integrate into your existing business systems.
This is more of a rant at this point, but it is a stop-gap solution that allows people to continue to use outdated business processes storing important data in image formats or in documents scattered about with minimal indexing/search capabilities, rather than analyzable "data" that can lead to "information." I always take the position that if the goal is something on paper, or the goal is to store something that "was" on paper, it is time to rethink the business process to see if we can automate it, or store/present the data electronically in the first place. The old school fights against it, but no one has ever been able to say it wasn't more efficent in the end and enabled IT to say "yes we can" when the next great idea came along versus "here is a stack of papers, figure out $trend."
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I've known some people that work at RS, and they all have refered to it as "The Shack." I think it is probably just the internal corprate culture leaking out. In addition, it is kind of a hail mary to rebrand, you might get customers coming back to see what "changed." Furtinture stores do this all the time. They'll have "going out of business" sales and then reopen with a new name, though it is the same owners. The goal is to get passer-bys to see if anything changed. Unfortunately, if you don't really "change" what wasn't working in the past the traffic you do get isn't going to turn into customers very easily.
We have one right across the street from Wal-Mart. I asked they why they did that and if it was business suicide, which the clerk in a surprising moment of candor, said that everything in the store is about $1 more expensive than wal-mart, but due to their smaller size, they get customers willing to pay the extra dollar to get in-and-out fast or to walk to the counter and say "I need one of 'these' or something that fits in this $hole on this $device go get me one." In particular if you're looking for something esoteric, its easier to go there and have them say "we don't have that" than search high and low at the bigger store, particularly if you're not sure what you're looking for.
I remember that exact article, and you are right. I think RS does well in small markets (like where I am from) that doesn't have any of the big-box stores and tends to cater to customers who were told "I need a USB cable" but don't know what that is or where to get one. They expect they'll get marginally better (knowledgable) service than Wal-Mart with less hastle. Last time I was there in California a lot of people were paying the cellular bill there, which I don't understand why anyone would pay their bill in person when there are a lot more efficient method(s).
I think they key for them is that crowd, and the "I need it now so I'll pay a little extra" or the "I'll pay a little extra not to stand in line at wal-mart where the person in front of me wants to send a Money Order and buy a carton of cigarettes they have to get from the counter on the other end of the store."
They also do well when you're looking for esoteric batteries like for cameras, hearing aids, etc. They're also pretty good at having odd cables at decent prices (amongst other brick-and-mortars) such as a male-male 1/4" stereo cable for the AUX jack in newer cars. They are also good when you're traveling and need said odd batteries or a cell charger.
If the Federal government wasn't taking such a high percentage of tax revenue from the citizens and blowing it like it is going out of style, the states could operate the services they ought to and tax at a reasonable rate. Right now the states are doing everything they can to keep their citizens going home with more than 60% of their wages at the end of the day while still providing basic services. Because there is no national referendum and both parties are spending like mad, the state government is the only place the people have an opportunity to try to diminish their tax burdens that are crushing citizens and are making overseas pastures greener for job-producing companies. If the feds trimmed down their budget and only pursued the duties it has a constitutional basis to pursue, there would be more money for the states to provide the services they need to rather than depend on funding, under heavy inflation, that congress can shift around on an annual basis, causing instability of programs and decreased confidence.
I completely agree with you, however I get the feeling that the government feels they aren't dangerous enough to lock up, but are dangerous enough to keep tabs on; kind of like a sentance of jailtime plus a lifetime of probation.
What really bothers me is that there are offenders who are required to register who were sentanced before these registries came into being. If the judge feels they ought to register, while I disagree, so be it. But for the state to append to a sentance is precarious from a legal standpoint in my opinion.
Already the courts have decided a state can take "administrative actions" like revoking your drivers license if arrested for DUI without a trial by jury. Pretty soon the state will be able to do whatever they feel like short of incarceration without a trial.
I think the message that companies need to understand is that GPL != Public Domain. There are a lot of advantages for using GPL'ed code, but companies need to measure the risks/rewards of using GPL'ed software and how it might impact their product goals for the good or the bad because they are required to fulfill the requirements of the license, no matter how few and and inoccuous the license requirements might be. I don't think exploring that distinction is FUD, but an intellegent discourse that helps protect the vendors who utilize GPL code, their users (in the form of future releases not being interupted by legal issues) and the original developers who released their code as GPL and not public domain for a reason.
There are situations where it might be better for a company to reinvent the wheel than use GPL licensed code when you consider the long term implications of the license and the cost of compliance with the license and the risk of exposing proprietary code that interfaces with the GPL code.
I'm just glad companies are understanding they can't just copy and paste GPL code and be done with it like a fat kid in a candy store and not open themselves up to legal risks the could have avoided by not using the licensed code or using the code while respecting the term(s) of it's license.
Legally established ethical standards are completely independent of certification or other technical qualifications. Hiring employees whose experiences and interview responses demonstrate ethical behavior are a better solution. After employment, not tolerating unethical practices such as stealing user-data or selling/installing unlicensed software creates a culture of ethical behavior, where it is the rule, not the exception. Some shops establish unethical practices from the top and specifically choose workers who they feel won't question the practices or will sell illegal software/refurbed devices for a piece of the pie.
That being said, hiring workers who look at the $7.25/hr job as a good entry level position or a learning opportunity can be very rewarding for employer and the employee. A lot of us started there doing Windows imaging or basic computer construction/repair.
I'd be more nervous to hire an MCSE for this kind of work than an under-qualified but eager and capable of learning employee. The overqualified have a better chance of being disatisfied with the work or the pay and more ability to believe they can get-away with unethical behaviors.
I'm reading a lot of comments about these discs being "frisbees" and trash in the future, which goes to show me that as versed as many on /. are in technology, quite a few don't know anything about archaeology. Discovering a 1000 year old artifact that is physically in good-enough shape to be read (even if it can't be interpereted) would be priceless to some in the field. Nobody said the discoveries in egypt were "as good as gravel" because they were in glyphs that weren't readily readable.
Even from a technological standpoint, reverse engineering a 1000 year old video or data file sounds absolutely fascinating to me... even if the DVD was a 1000 year old rick-roll.
Because then you've got literally hundreds of "versions" to maintain within the organization by hundreds of vendors that may be incompatible with one another with some needed to recieve documents from suppliers and/or customers. We already get support issues because user "A"'s copy of the employee popsicle day flyer doesn't render the same as user "B"'s copy. Imagine if core-functionality was dependant on having the right mish-mash of DLLs or extenions installed. From a security perspective plugins also add more attack vectors and if you look at Firefox as the example, even minor version updates can break them, which is not OK for day-to-day productivity software. What makes it tolerable on FF is that even if you disable all of them, it still does what it was designed to do-- browse web pages.
Like browsers, they are made to meet the majority of the needs for the majority of users doing what it was designed to do.
Big Content has always had to deal with the cost-of-doing-business, just like every other industry. Sharing a video tape, a book, a CD or whatever else it has to produce, does take away from their business (though there is discussion that sharing leads to future purchases in the same way giving out free food at the grocery is an advertising expense).
From a business perspective, I am absolutely certain it has become cheaper to produce their content to CD over Tape (or DVD over VHS), and even more cheaply as a digital download. Content, just like insurance/financial services, is one that should could thrive if it embraced the newer, cheaper methods of production/sales/distribution than trying to do things the old way.
I'm glad that the court is identifying that internet-based sharing is no different in essense, than sneakernet sharing which is always something the companies have had to deal with and has always been a cost-of-doing-business. The fact that it is "online" is ultimately irrelevant, and even if greater sharing drives down sales (which is debatable), online/digital distribution should also lower costs which if done properly, should allow them to remain profitable. Business is about adaption. No business has a fundamental right to exist. Suing your customers and taking rights they either explicitly had, or felt they had is no way to keep those customers, in which sharing and distribution become irrelevant.
As others have stated, this is a measure to catch criminals. If you capture this on video and it aides in a successful prosecution, taking a criminal off the streets, they won't be able to commit more crimes. No one (with any common sense) believes all crime can be stopped (prevented?), but the entire purpose of jail(s) are to function as a deturant (e.g. I don't want to go to jail so I won't engage in behaviours that might land me there) and to separate those who are willing to commit crimes in disregard for the law. Every crime that criminal would have committed if free to do so has been prevented by taking them off the streets.
This tactic is entirely based on fear that detures and in the event of violation, assists in prosecution. Vice cops have been doing almost the exact same thing with putting "fake" dealers and "fake" hookers on the street. It happens enough and ends up in the news enough that it minimally detures a finite, but difficult to measure population from committing the crime, and catches an additional finite, but easy to measure, and prevents them from doing it again.
All that being said, as bad as "crimes" are, there are methods of law enforcement that are worse than many crimes, and this is one of them. Red light cameras are another. There is evidence that they cause more accidents, and are only useful by making criminals out of drivers who, by running the yellow, are making the most safe driving decision at the time.
I think the problem is that while Java is cross-platform, it's apps have always been treated like second-class citizens on Windows and Mac platforms. They behaved different, had a very different UI for most of its' life, had a slow big runtime for the dial-up days that every app seemed to have a different version of the VM to run and took forever to load or update.
.NET (at least on Windows) has always had a form designer which is very quick to learn and rapid develop over Swing/Eclipse which has been code-based (I know, behind the GUI forms is code in .NET), but for a lot of us (like me) our CS programs focused on CS, not software development/engineering and we've had almost no exposure to the GUI packages in Java or C, which have a bit of a learning curve even for the educated.
For that reason, I think a lot of developers have avoided it on Windows and since Windows has such a market share, if you're primarily a Windows developer, Mono is a good choice. Mac development has always been a niche job and learning the specifics library methods to make Java apps "work" like native mac applications I can't see much reason in not just writing it in Objective-C. Apple has always lagged behind Sun in releasing recent VMs and for OS X 10.4, which is still very in use as many Mac users don't upgrade for the sake of upgrading, it still hasn't been given Java 6.
While it is kind of creepy, having worked in Technical Support, I found that when I made myself smile, even when I was furiously angry or irritated, it helped me "be" more friendly and attentive to my callers, than when I frowned, or wrapped my phone cord around my neck like a noose, etc...
When you are in customer service, it makes a huge difference, and belive it or not, it often makes a huge difference to customers who expect that you don't care about them and are just jockeying the time clock. Perception is everything.
However, rather than doing this, it might be better to just talk to the employee if you see them routinely looking like they ate a lemon.
The problem is that most people think the company with its army of lawyers has said that the limit should be 4 pills per day because they know people are going to take more than that and if they print the limit as 4, and the real limit is 8, less people are going to push it. Anecdotally, I've read an OTC medicine that said "take no more than X" per day, but had a doctor say if you're really hurting or really sick you can take "Y" ammount and be OK, just don't do it everyday. For example, the generic ibupropen bottle I have says take no more than 8 pills per day (1600mg), but I have an Rx for 800mg tablets, taken 3 times a day for backpain, which other than being bigger, are the same as taking 4 OTC 200mg ones. Why should I take the 1600mg limit on the bottle seriously when the doctor says go for it pretty frequently when my back flares up.
The problem with the nanny state is when they complain about everything, and put warning labels on absolutely everything because somewhere one person didn't know that a pack of peanuts could contain peanuts, they start taking everything with a grain of salt, including the really important ones and assume it is all there to cover the company's ass to protect against the family that sues because Timmy didn't know that taking 16 tylenols aren't going to make the problem go away faster.
While we're on the subject, APAP "PM" formulations with sleep aides in them serve no purpose if you're awake do to insomnia and not pain. My parents both take them all the time to adjust to shift-work changes which I know would be better if they took just the sleep aide for. It is one of those things that is in everything, and has been around for so long, and is so easy to get that no one questions it.
The difference is that if a person contracts a disease that is a public health risk, the person is generally able to tell physicians who he/she might have had contact with so that person can get treatment, possibily saving their life and slowing the disease spread. Cows can't tell investigators where they have been and who should be notified.
Regarding the cost, I can't imagine that this would be more expensive that the cost of destroying entire herds of cattle when one cow comes down with a confirmed or probable case of these diseases. Being able to isolate the infected could decrease the numbers needed to be destoyed saving money. The difference is that farms can claim the loss of the animal in insurance which is a sunk cost, versus a preventative cost. This would save money upstream as well in the form of smaller recalls to distributors, which seem to happen more and more frequently in the US.
Internet access isn't a good excuse as a low-bandwidth cellular scanner would be enough to report via SOAP web-service to whatever database; not to mention that every industry has costs-of-doing-business and this will/could be one of those things.
I haven't read enough to comment on the implementation of this plan but on the surface, I can't see why this wouldn't be a good idea from a public health perspective.
In a lot of ancient texts, heaven as it is understood to be "where God was" in many religions/mythologies was refered to as the "heaven of heavens" or the third heaven. (e.g. 2 Corinthians 12:2) In that langauge the first heaven was the "sky", the second heaven being space, and the third being "beyond space." Which many understand as authors communicating it being "not here" and "far away" and "unreachable by natural means" as most didn't consider it to be a "physical" place, particularly the thought that the physical was "less than" the spiritual in vouge at the time. However many readers without over the centruies, over different cultures, interpretations with little/no overarching education on the subject (scientific or theological) would have seen it as being "above the clouds" physically. In addition, as most could not read/write in those days, particularly in Europe, religious art was the lay people's way of communicating relgious ideas, rather than text, and that would have been the natural way to express that idea (angels and things above clouds).
Even today most of modern man in may ways has a really hard time wrapping their mind around the vastness of space (in relgious and scientific categories).
The problem is that a lot of the OSS community breathes the philosophy that "all information should and must be free... except for information about me, which should be confidential or not exist in digestable form at all." While an overstated and oversimplified sumation of reality... if those are two guiding principals, then where the rubber hits the road is quite difficult, if you're designing multipurposed software that doesn't have a very narrow scoped-purpose at design time, and you're really concerned that your work is going to be used in ways that violate either of those provlems. FOSS is a widget... if some company builds gears it has to know that one buyer might be using them to build hospital machinery and the other harpoon guns for whales. If OSS says you can use it, execpt for these purposes, it isn't very free as in freedom anymore.
I often wonder when governments of small markets (state/providence/prefecture or national) if smaller companies like Rapidshare who aren't competing on the level of MS or Google ever consider simply blocking access to that region that has laws/rulings that challenge the profitability of their business model. As much as it seems anti-thetical for a "world wide web" it seems from a business perspective a real option.
Even more so, how would you do it to satisfy the court... block by IP, geotraceroute, TLD, a message saying "Due to Company vs. State, if you are a resident of region, you are not permitted to use this site.... [legalese]...".
Maybe $50 US given the exchange rate since it is a US company. On the other hand, if a weather ballon with valuable/interesting gear landed in my yard, it would be mine, and I imagine that would be the case there too. The guy in the polo shirt saying "can I plz have my ballon back" isn't going to go over too well.
I would think properly mounted in a rack that the rack iteself would provide sufficent RFI sheilding. The fronts and backs acting almost like a faraday cage, and sides being pure metal.
It might decrease IE adoption if major OEMs decide to opt for Opera or Firefox, but it isn't going to show much much more people like alternatives. It is only going to show that the vast majority of users use whatever it comes with and are ultimately indiferent.
The only non-geek folks I know that have ever switched browsers for any reason did so because someone told them they should, so they blindly did it; or got what matched at work because thye were too lazy to learn two different pieces of software; or used whatever the ISP install CD set as the default.
I am just dreading the day when OEMs release their own browsers based (osely on OSS offerings or their own design that are bloated crap like most of their other software pre-loaded, because they know that brand recognition helps drive future sales. "Sorry I only know how to use Dellfox(tm)."
The nicest thing about having a bundled browser is that you could out-of-the-box download whatever one you wanted. Windows doesn't have anything like wget to download the packages over the internet, so if you don't have a browser, you're going to have a hard time getting one. When I was working with NT 3.51 (past its intended lifespan) trying to get drivers off the internet on a clean install sucked pretty bad, as I had to install a browser first to get anywhere.
The biggest problem I see is that IE was non-removable, which does present an issue. Amost all OS packages include a browser these days (FF/Iceweasel in *nix, Safari on Mac, IE on Windows), but the difference is that IE was unremovable.
I'm with them in that MS would not be able to stop OEMs from including other browsers. I think it is going a step-to-far to force MS to not include a browser as a part of it's OS offering given almost all their competitors do. No matter how much you love FF or hate all things Microsoft it seems extremely unreasonable. It also sets a bad precident in that now someone can complain and get other builtin software removed because of the competition issue... think WinZIP, WS_FTP, util you've stripped down the OS (Windows or otherwise) that does next to nothing out of the box and won't lower Windows' cost.
I love Linux, but it seems its' get-adoptors-by-being-free-as-in-beer is exactly what pissed Netscape off when MS started giving IE away, and if Linux ever does get a foothold, regulators could start demanding what packages end up in the "default" install rather than the market, which really sucks.
I think this completely diminishes the "severity" of a pandemic.
In the technical sense it is a disease that is widespread and uncontained; but if this is the benchmark then the common cold and normal flu ought to be raised to this level too, because they have the same wide spreadness and are most dangerous to the same classes of people, the elderly, children and those with immune issues. Every single year the "poultry (normal)" flu kills many, many more people in the exact same way and in the exact same circumstances.
This is only getting attention because of the media hype. The left wants more money to expand government to deal with it, and the right wants money to build a fence to keep things like this from coming from Mexico into the US, and the media is psyched because it's new, has political tie-ins, and came when the meltdown was becoming old-news.
Not only that, are we really surprised? Pigs are biologically similar enough to humans that we use pig organs for some transplants. Having infections that cross the species barrier in this way seem blatantly obvious.
This is just like the free gun-lock they provide when you buy a new firearm. It isn't required (in many places) but it is always given.
They want the tool to be available for people that want to use it. Before everyone says OMG the Chinese are at it again, remember that the US Government (via the Childrens Internet Protection Act) mandates schools and libraries in the public K12 system install filters, and it will be really interesting how that applies to school-furnished laptops. It is the exact same lame "protect the childrens!" mandate only the Chinese expand the scope but make it optional for the equipment owner to implement.
While I abhor censorship, from an implementation perspective it seems like an ISP as an opt-in/opt-out filter that is easy to immediately enable/disable would be far more effective, and easier to implement and has no additional vectors for attack/expoitation than normal HTTP traffic does.
The problem to do that is to make a degree in physics be effectively a computer science degree. They're talking about teaching physics students "enough" programming to do "physics" stuff. Most of their programs are going to be "problem" based, not all encompasing applications to handle complex/dynamic/ever-changing business processes. Every second spent not programming gives the student more time to do other things, and hammering out a quickly implemented application that "works" does well.
Whenever you move to a new language there is a learning curve, best-practices, langauge conventions, new APIs to learn so teaching them something, and doing it well gives them a good start, and they can learn the newer languages once they have some programming experience under the belt.
In my experience (as an anecdote) junior programmers who have solid language experience are quicker and more innovative than programmers who have strong fundamentals but minimal actual lines-of-code experience (not to introduce a necessarily false dichotomy).
I worked at a place that used FileNet, which is now an IBM product, to do this sort of thing. We had millions of scanned documents in the system. I wasn't personally very impressed with it, in that whenever anything "bad" happened, you had to call IBM because finding support online was impossible, and at that they support wasn't very good. It was also a very picky system, those seemed to handle the load well. If you go with it, I strongly encourage doing it for UNIX/Oracle because it screamed "poorly ported" when we used it for Windows/MSSSQL. It has an API for integration, but it is also, poorly documented and would take some time to integrate into your existing business systems.
This is more of a rant at this point, but it is a stop-gap solution that allows people to continue to use outdated business processes storing important data in image formats or in documents scattered about with minimal indexing/search capabilities, rather than analyzable "data" that can lead to "information." I always take the position that if the goal is something on paper, or the goal is to store something that "was" on paper, it is time to rethink the business process to see if we can automate it, or store/present the data electronically in the first place. The old school fights against it, but no one has ever been able to say it wasn't more efficent in the end and enabled IT to say "yes we can" when the next great idea came along versus "here is a stack of papers, figure out $trend."