[0068]Charging for the various bundles may be by bundle and by duration. For example, the Office bundle may be $1.00 per hour, the Gaming bundle may be $1.25 per hour and the Browsing bundle may be $0.80 per hour. The usage charges may be abstracted to "units/hour" to make currency conversions simpler. Alternatively, a bundle may incur a one-time charge that is operable until changed or for a fixed usage period. Other pricing techniques are apparent.emphasis added
The key words are "for example", you can't pick on clearly made-up pricing structures when prefaced with the words "for example". You can't really even argue with the concept that some pay-per-usage uses may cost more than others, which is the entire concept this item in the patent application is trying to express.
Pay-per-use has been on the radar of MS and others for a long time, ever since internet access became ubiquitous, enabling remote activation/de-activation of software.
That the original poster felt that a contrived pricing structure used as an example in a patent application was a commitment to pricing structures in the near-term is just ridiculous. I heard that limosuine companies have a pricing model that has customers paying more or less for rides of similar length/duration, based on the car they choose (i.e. sedans rent out for less than stretch limos, whinc rent out for less than stretch "novelty" cars (Hummers, etc.)), bus companies charge more for renting larger busses compared with smaller busses for the same time/distance, etc.
There is nothing here to justify a patent - if this can't get tossed out, I weep for our patent system.
This reminds me of the College Basketball Tournement that is supposed to bring corporations to their knees as the final four basket ball games are being played - it never happens, yet every year broadcasters announce the impending Billion Dollar plus hit to our economy due to the college basketball season championship.
It seems pretty reasonable, really - HP wants folks to compare on features, not price, since HP has a big infrastructure to support, and their competitor doesn't. Their competitor, of course, wants to focus on their greatest strength, price. For as long as I've been working in IT, it has been common for pricellists to be marked "Confidential", and I tend to think HP has the right to keep their confidential documents confidential.
I once worked at a large grocery chain, and while competiton is great, when an employee at a competitor tried to "offer" our management a peek at their upcoming weekly specials, my employer's reaction was swift and absolute - not only was there no interest, they called the police and started an investigation, working with their competitor to identify the wanna-be industrial spy.
The corporate price list is meaningless, it is the quoted price that comes at the end of an offer that matters, which could be way below the "list price," due to end-of month/quarter/year sales quotas. The other folks should work to compete on features - that's how you win.
She had private email, known only to her husband and children? OMG!
She should absolutely use her official email for all correspondence, including campaign and private (non-government) correspondence... Except, oh yeah, the acceptable usage policies of the Alaskan government forbid the use of government computers for personal and campaign uses...
This woman is out of control and must be stopped - she has to break the law like the rest of us do, then we can get her for that!
Dell is paying $5/license for these netbooks for WinXP Home. The support needed for WinXP Home will be leveraged on the last how-many years of WinXp Home support they already have developed. Ubuntu had to be configured, deployed, documented, and supported a new. It takes very little effort to imagine it costs Dell $5 (or more) per netbook to support that platform.
I ordered my netbook with WinXP Home, assuming I can download the install ISO from Dell after these units ship - seems a safe bet, and I'll be able to try both OS and see which is best for that platform.
I know how to use HTML "dumbass" - I simply failed to account for slashdot "scrubbing" my input for "faulty" HTML (I assume it was viewed as an empty tag).
To think you stayed up so late to add "nothing" to the discussion, Annonymous Coward indeed...
That should read "Threatened to take him hostage (is not the same as) Taking him hostage - the title is misleading. I had a less than and greater than that were scrubbed out of the final posting - sorry.
What happened to Tom DeLay when he was charged, but not convicted? He was forced out because, wait for it, the Republicans have less tolerant rules regarding corruption than the Democrats. If you think back, the Democrats were harping on about how the Republicans had to follow the rules they laid down - when the Democrats took over, those tougher standards were among the first to go!
BTW, the money in the fridge was marked - there was no practical doubt about the origin of the monies in his freezer.
What about his trip during Katrina to recover documents from his residence? http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/seattle_post-intelligencer_ap_-_washington_dc/
That was an old tape - she was aksed if she was interested in the VP job, and she said it depends, "what is the VP job"? I'm used to be ing very active. This was *months* before she was vetted by McCain's people as a possible VP for McCain.
If MSNBC ran that as "current tape", shame on them - they should just pledge their loyalty to Obama and stop pretending.
Was the cop fired? The Bloomberg article discusses how she fired a commissioner that served in her cabinet who later said he was pressured to fire a trooper (her ex-inlaw). She did not fire the cop.
Do you honestly think that we should be teaching creationism in science class?
You have assumed she wanted creationism taught in Science class, why not include it in another class, say a World Religion class (where they carefully avoid *endorsing* any particular religion and simply survey the beliefs of several religions)?
Really, what do you expect for *less* than $600 plus construction work?
Open the window?
It sounds like you are looking at $1,000 total, stop complaining and start fixing the problem.
Your only real "technical" alternative is to explore virtualization solutions (Hyper-V, VMware, Xen, etc.) and run less hardware, but without proper air conditioning, anything you run will likely overheat, and will most likely involve buying a newer server or two, that support hardware-assisted virtualization.
Dude, for $1K, you're getting off cheap. What's next, how do I avoid the electric bills for the additional air conditioner?
Final thought, consider colocating the servers elsewhere and call it a day, but how long will it take to burn through your magic $600 or $1,000 limit?
As a recovering COBOL Programmer (MVS/XA, IMS/DB, CICS, DB/2, VSAM, JCL;^) I find it hard to believe that coding COBOL programs is "cheaper" in any real, absolute sense. If you are comparing "KLOC", then yes, COBOL is cheaper, because each line is "easier", but it likely does less work than a "higher-level"language line of code would do...
Comparing LOC per function point, not sure - it seems that we have lower expectaions/goals for COBOL code, so function points don't really compare.
Is it because programmers are cheaper for COBOL, ignoring function points and KLOC? Perhaps, but that ignores the likely greater number of cheaper COBOL programmers.
COBOL, Mainframes, and timesharing technologies have been on the way out for my entire career (I've been in IT since the late 80's), and the driver seems to be fashion, and it's saving grace is always that these proven technologies have stood the test of time and still work just fine, thank you very much.
Also, I refuse to believe that it would take half a year to cut state worker salaries to minimum wages - they can accomodate annual salary increases can't they?
Actually, since the House Speaker controls the cameras in the House, C-SPAN didn't have a feed to cover this... Still the story got out. The Speaker did permit (grudgingly, I assume) interviews in the "speakers lobby"...
As I understand it, C-SPAN has no control over what it can film/air from the floor of the House of Representatives.
Greenland used to be green, and Iceland used to be covered in Ice, but then the automobile and the carbon credit were invented, and the environment (which had never changed previously) suddenly reversed itself, and now their names are but mocking jokes to man's care taking of the planet.
It's not that hard to find Open Source/Ubuntu systems on the Dell US site:
Open www.dell.com, choose "For Home", then click "Laptop" from the drop-down menu. Open Source systems are linked under the heading "PC Operating Systems" on the left side menu (bottom of menu).
Or, www.dell.com, choose "For Office > Small Business", then click "Desktop" from the drop-down menu. Open Source systems are listed under "FreeDOS and Linux Desktops"
Now, as for the selection of systems, I'm happy with the systems they offer ($WORK just bought a fleet of new "N Series" desktops (Optiplex 755n to be exact), and there was a fine selection of hardware/upgrades available (including ATI discrete graphics cards)...
If they really wanted to hide them, they could have done a much better job of it... I think if I were truely looking for a system with no OS/Ubuntu, I could find it quite easily.
Quite simply it is the wya they choose to work, they assumed no one would really question it (IMHO).
To provide you with a firm quote for a given zip code, they'd have to either allow customer support/sales people access to the real billing engine, or maintain a seperate parallel system that shares the same calculation engine used for production billing. If they were to do that, all they can really answer is what the phone would cost if you were billed *today*, not what it will be in thirty days, when you get your first bill.
At issue is the fact that the carriers pass-thru the taxes and fees our government imposes on them, even when the Gov't tries to force them not to (the carriers don't want to appear greedy when the Gov't raises taxes, they want the Gov't to appear greedy).
I think it would be fair for the carriers to be able to provide sample tax rates for various plans, but with the caveat that an individual's taxes may be more or less, based on their circumstance, location, etc. In that case, what is the real value? Seems to me the original caller could calculate the taxes fairly well by taking his current bill, caling the carrier nad having them explain how each tax is calculated, set fees would remain the same, proportional fees increase as the cost of the service increases.
Is it just me, or are many slashdot postings from a bunch of whiners? Why hound the poor salse person at the kiosk in the mall, if it is important to you, and they can't answer your question move on - you seem to be trying to trick them into an answer when they clearly have none to give.
WTF, is Atlanta one voting district? You imply that all residents in the 8,000 square miles that make up Atlanta vote in one place, and all their ballots need to be in one place to be counted. This problem can easily be solved in parallel..
I contend you haven't really thought it through - the majority of the world's population votes in ways that don't rely on advanced, touch-screen voting machines... They seem to do OK.
Paper is well understood, trusted, and easy to work with. Heck, to make them voter-friendly, we could make the ballots in large print and give voters one of those big neon "BINGO" markers to indicate their choices, that would help make the voting process more familiar.
Uhm, the Conservative Party is distinct from the Democratic, Green, and any other party, including the Republican party. The Republican party can claim to be "conservative" (small "c"), the same as the Green party can claim to be "democratic" (again, small "d").
Most Conservatives I am familiar with think the Democrates and Republicans are too much alike to discern a difference.
Most Democrats I am familiar with think the Republicans are incomprehensible, and that Conservatives are the more extreme members of the Republican party.
I don't know enough Republicans to make any gereral statements about them...
Slashdot Mirror
From the Patent Application:
The key words are "for example", you can't pick on clearly made-up pricing structures when prefaced with the words "for example". You can't really even argue with the concept that some pay-per-usage uses may cost more than others, which is the entire concept this item in the patent application is trying to express.
Pay-per-use has been on the radar of MS and others for a long time, ever since internet access became ubiquitous, enabling remote activation/de-activation of software.
That the original poster felt that a contrived pricing structure used as an example in a patent application was a commitment to pricing structures in the near-term is just ridiculous. I heard that limosuine companies have a pricing model that has customers paying more or less for rides of similar length/duration, based on the car they choose (i.e. sedans rent out for less than stretch limos, whinc rent out for less than stretch "novelty" cars (Hummers, etc.)), bus companies charge more for renting larger busses compared with smaller busses for the same time/distance, etc.
There is nothing here to justify a patent - if this can't get tossed out, I weep for our patent system.
But isn't this just a contrived "media" event?
This reminds me of the College Basketball Tournement that is supposed to bring corporations to their knees as the final four basket ball games are being played - it never happens, yet every year broadcasters announce the impending Billion Dollar plus hit to our economy due to the college basketball season championship.
Stories from 2003 and 2007
What a load of rubbish...
It seems pretty reasonable, really - HP wants folks to compare on features, not price, since HP has a big infrastructure to support, and their competitor doesn't. Their competitor, of course, wants to focus on their greatest strength, price. For as long as I've been working in IT, it has been common for pricellists to be marked "Confidential", and I tend to think HP has the right to keep their confidential documents confidential.
I once worked at a large grocery chain, and while competiton is great, when an employee at a competitor tried to "offer" our management a peek at their upcoming weekly specials, my employer's reaction was swift and absolute - not only was there no interest, they called the police and started an investigation, working with their competitor to identify the wanna-be industrial spy.
The corporate price list is meaningless, it is the quoted price that comes at the end of an offer that matters, which could be way below the "list price," due to end-of month/quarter/year sales quotas. The other folks should work to compete on features - that's how you win.
I saw this in a James Bond movie several years ago - this is nothing new:
Scene from Tomorrow Never Dies
She had private email, known only to her husband and children? OMG!
She should absolutely use her official email for all correspondence, including campaign and private (non-government) correspondence... Except, oh yeah, the acceptable usage policies of the Alaskan government forbid the use of government computers for personal and campaign uses...
This woman is out of control and must be stopped - she has to break the law like the rest of us do, then we can get her for that!
He got rid of $6 items that were cluttering up the area, and they didn't have to pay for disposal...
Now, how much will the gov't spend to prosecute this thief, and attempt to reclaim their $120K of stolen property? A half-million dollars?
Seems like a waste, but I guess they can't let the precedent stand.
Dell is paying $5/license for these netbooks for WinXP Home. The support needed for WinXP Home will be leveraged on the last how-many years of WinXp Home support they already have developed. Ubuntu had to be configured, deployed, documented, and supported a new. It takes very little effort to imagine it costs Dell $5 (or more) per netbook to support that platform.
I ordered my netbook with WinXP Home, assuming I can download the install ISO from Dell after these units ship - seems a safe bet, and I'll be able to try both OS and see which is best for that platform.
I know how to use HTML "dumbass" - I simply failed to account for slashdot "scrubbing" my input for "faulty" HTML (I assume it was viewed as an empty tag).
To think you stayed up so late to add "nothing" to the discussion, Annonymous Coward indeed...
That should read "Threatened to take him hostage (is not the same as) Taking him hostage - the title is misleading. I had a less than and greater than that were scrubbed out of the final posting - sorry.
Threatened to take him hostage Taking him hostage - the title is misleading.
Here in US, most repairmen won't leave until you sign for the work, as I understand it. If your not satisfied, don't sign for the job.
"She's also a creationist, anti-abortion, anti-contraception (!), all of which adds up to someone that Hillary supporters will have a hard time with."
Around here, we call them "Catholics" - got a bunch of them too, they're nice folks too.
I think Hillary supporters will be OK with her - I suspect many of them are also "Catholic" and won't be offended by her personal beliefs...
What happened to Tom DeLay when he was charged, but not convicted? He was forced out because, wait for it, the Republicans have less tolerant rules regarding corruption than the Democrats. If you think back, the Democrats were harping on about how the Republicans had to follow the rules they laid down - when the Democrats took over, those tougher standards were among the first to go!
BTW, the money in the fridge was marked - there was no practical doubt about the origin of the monies in his freezer.
What about his trip during Katrina to recover documents from his residence? http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/seattle_post-intelligencer_ap_-_washington_dc/
That was an old tape - she was aksed if she was interested in the VP job, and she said it depends, "what is the VP job"? I'm used to be ing very active. This was *months* before she was vetted by McCain's people as a possible VP for McCain.
If MSNBC ran that as "current tape", shame on them - they should just pledge their loyalty to Obama and stop pretending.
Was the cop fired? The Bloomberg article discusses how she fired a commissioner that served in her cabinet who later said he was pressured to fire a trooper (her ex-inlaw). She did not fire the cop.
Do you honestly think that we should be teaching creationism in science class?
You have assumed she wanted creationism taught in Science class, why not include it in another class, say a World Religion class (where they carefully avoid *endorsing* any particular religion and simply survey the beliefs of several religions)?
'
Really, what do you expect for *less* than $600 plus construction work?
Open the window?
It sounds like you are looking at $1,000 total, stop complaining and start fixing the problem.
Your only real "technical" alternative is to explore virtualization solutions (Hyper-V, VMware, Xen, etc.) and run less hardware, but without proper air conditioning, anything you run will likely overheat, and will most likely involve buying a newer server or two, that support hardware-assisted virtualization.
Dude, for $1K, you're getting off cheap. What's next, how do I avoid the electric bills for the additional air conditioner?
Final thought, consider colocating the servers elsewhere and call it a day, but how long will it take to burn through your magic $600 or $1,000 limit?
As a recovering COBOL Programmer (MVS/XA, IMS/DB, CICS, DB/2, VSAM, JCL ;^) I find it hard to believe that coding COBOL programs is "cheaper" in any real, absolute sense. If you are comparing "KLOC", then yes, COBOL is cheaper, because each line is "easier", but it likely does less work than a "higher-level"language line of code would do...
Comparing LOC per function point, not sure - it seems that we have lower expectaions/goals for COBOL code, so function points don't really compare.
Is it because programmers are cheaper for COBOL, ignoring function points and KLOC? Perhaps, but that ignores the likely greater number of cheaper COBOL programmers.
COBOL, Mainframes, and timesharing technologies have been on the way out for my entire career (I've been in IT since the late 80's), and the driver seems to be fashion, and it's saving grace is always that these proven technologies have stood the test of time and still work just fine, thank you very much.
Also, I refuse to believe that it would take half a year to cut state worker salaries to minimum wages - they can accomodate annual salary increases can't they?
Actually, since the House Speaker controls the cameras in the House, C-SPAN didn't have a feed to cover this... Still the story got out. The Speaker did permit (grudgingly, I assume) interviews in the "speakers lobby"...
As I understand it, C-SPAN has no control over what it can film/air from the floor of the House of Representatives.
Greenland used to be green, and Iceland used to be covered in Ice, but then the automobile and the carbon credit were invented, and the environment (which had never changed previously) suddenly reversed itself, and now their names are but mocking jokes to man's care taking of the planet.
It's not that hard to find Open Source/Ubuntu systems on the Dell US site:
Open www.dell.com, choose "For Home", then click "Laptop" from the drop-down menu. Open Source systems are linked under the heading "PC Operating Systems" on the left side menu (bottom of menu).
Or, www.dell.com, choose "For Office > Small Business", then click "Desktop" from the drop-down menu. Open Source systems are listed under "FreeDOS and Linux Desktops"
Now, as for the selection of systems, I'm happy with the systems they offer ($WORK just bought a fleet of new "N Series" desktops (Optiplex 755n to be exact), and there was a fine selection of hardware/upgrades available (including ATI discrete graphics cards)...
If they really wanted to hide them, they could have done a much better job of it... I think if I were truely looking for a system with no OS/Ubuntu, I could find it quite easily.
Exactly.
Those BASTARDS!
Quite simply it is the wya they choose to work, they assumed no one would really question it (IMHO).
To provide you with a firm quote for a given zip code, they'd have to either allow customer support/sales people access to the real billing engine, or maintain a seperate parallel system that shares the same calculation engine used for production billing. If they were to do that, all they can really answer is what the phone would cost if you were billed *today*, not what it will be in thirty days, when you get your first bill.
At issue is the fact that the carriers pass-thru the taxes and fees our government imposes on them, even when the Gov't tries to force them not to (the carriers don't want to appear greedy when the Gov't raises taxes, they want the Gov't to appear greedy).
I think it would be fair for the carriers to be able to provide sample tax rates for various plans, but with the caveat that an individual's taxes may be more or less, based on their circumstance, location, etc. In that case, what is the real value? Seems to me the original caller could calculate the taxes fairly well by taking his current bill, caling the carrier nad having them explain how each tax is calculated, set fees would remain the same, proportional fees increase as the cost of the service increases.
Is it just me, or are many slashdot postings from a bunch of whiners? Why hound the poor salse person at the kiosk in the mall, if it is important to you, and they can't answer your question move on - you seem to be trying to trick them into an answer when they clearly have none to give.
How Michael Moore of you...
WTF, is Atlanta one voting district? You imply that all residents in the 8,000 square miles that make up Atlanta vote in one place, and all their ballots need to be in one place to be counted. This problem can easily be solved in parallel..
I contend you haven't really thought it through - the majority of the world's population votes in ways that don't rely on advanced, touch-screen voting machines... They seem to do OK.
Paper is well understood, trusted, and easy to work with. Heck, to make them voter-friendly, we could make the ballots in large print and give voters one of those big neon "BINGO" markers to indicate their choices, that would help make the voting process more familiar.
Yeah, but aside from that, why not? ;^)
Uhm, the Conservative Party is distinct from the Democratic, Green, and any other party, including the Republican party. The Republican party can claim to be "conservative" (small "c"), the same as the Green party can claim to be "democratic" (again, small "d").
Most Conservatives I am familiar with think the Democrates and Republicans are too much alike to discern a difference.
Most Democrats I am familiar with think the Republicans are incomprehensible, and that Conservatives are the more extreme members of the Republican party.
I don't know enough Republicans to make any gereral statements about them...