But I guess the library will be on the hook if this new definition makes it through:
Libraries have copyright material and a photocopier. This means that they've made copyright material available for distribution to the same degree as someone with copyright material in a shared folder.
But it's harder to prove ownership of the music/video on the iPod.
"Guilty until proven innocent" seems to be becoming dangerously acceptable for people in reference to digitial media.
If I physically steal someone's CD and sell it on eBay it's traffic of stolen goods. But no one assumes it's not a legal sale, and there would be no onus placed on me to prove that I could rightfully sell this item. Do you have an original sales receipt for every item you've ever sold second-hand?
So, if I list for sale a file that is a copyright work (where I'm not the copyright owner) why is the onus on me to prove that file is licensed to me (and can therefore be resold by first-sale) and it is this license I'm selling?
I'm personally much less concerned with pirates aargh!matey! than I am with how willing people are to give up their rights and freedoms to the benefit of a rich, exploitive oligopoly.
Just because the RIAA would like everyone to believe that every transaction of copyright material that doesn't enrich them is illegal doesn't mean we have to buy into it.
I agree, but there's no way to actually "transfer" ownership of the files. Using iTMS for an example, unless the seller turns over the ID and password for their iTMS account, the buyer is left without the ability to validate a computer to play those files, so I don't think they could ever be transferred off of the iPod. Hopefully the buyer is aware of the limitations.
I was not aware of that... just one more reason not to buy an iPod.
Just more proof that DRM is evil and limits users in ways they are not expecting...If the *AA didn't have it's head up it's arse 10 years ago I suspect none of this would be much other than a passing comment. imho, it is 99% the ineptitude of the *AA (for not using the 'net as a legal distribution channel) that has left us in this mess. The 1% that would illegally copy were already doing so a-la trade-the-tapes (like the boys in metallica did when they were young). My proof for this is the success of the legal on-line vendors even at this late stage of the game. Had they existed from day-1, there would be no more talk about illegal file sharing than there is about illegal software distribution. Sure it exists, and there is the odd headline, but it isn't a daily conversation.
What part of "guilty until proven innocent" sounds right to you?
While our *&!!%# firewall won't let me get to TFA, I will assume that this is only a debate if the iPod is full of legal downloads - Clearly loading copyright material (to which you do not have copyright) onto a device and selling it would not be any more legal if it's an iPod, a cassette tape, or a CDR!
So we must be asking: Is it legal to resell something you rightfully own. Answer? First-Sale doctrine says this is perfectly legit.
Now... if the RIAA wants to continue their legal war, I suppose they could try and get a court order forcing the seller to prove license of each file on any given iPod... but good luck getting a judge to sign that order w/o any grounds for believing that the files on a specific iPod constitute an infringement...
If I list a CD for sale on eBay, everyone assumes it's the original unless otherwise stated, and if anything other than the original arrives it would be a breach of the sales agreement. Same goes here.
Thanx tu my kompewter i dont haf to no nuthin anymor. Teh spel cheker taske care of me... the clacumator doos math... and i only rede them talking books and watch storys on TV.
I guess what we really need to decide is what the education is for. I'm pro teaching 'advanced' maths like calculus as a mandatory - not because I think that 99% of anyone is going to use it again, but because I think it's important to expose children to as many different subjects as possible. How many people use any amount of historical knowledge in their daily lives? On a daily basis who cares what years there was war somewhere, or who ran what campaign etc. How many people need to know the table of elememnts? How many people need to know the characters and plots of some obscure British writer? How many people need to know the names of the bones in the human hand? or what zebras eat? Or the difference between macro and micro economics? or... whatever...
To argue non-use as a reason to remove a subject from the education requirements will ultimately result in no education.
The real problem I find in our (Canadian) education system isn't the subjects being taught - but those that aren't, topics like:
critical thinking
decision making
time management
research/reference (i.e. the art of knowing how to find (out) what you want to know)
These topics are all about how to work smarter and how to learn. The idea is like the old "Give a fish, feed for one day; teach to fish, feed for lifetime"
The existing topics are then furnished as general-knowledge/a-taste, so that everyone starts on a (somewhat) equal footing and has a general base on which to build their knowledge.
So Microsoft's top-3 opponents are Open Source friendly companies
Perhaps there is a pattern, but I don't know that we are drawing the same conclusion:
I think Google chose it's software based on an extreme need to customize and control their environment; They are not in the software sales/distribution/consulting game, and OSS offered them a stable vehicle with which to kick-start their development.
Of the three, I think only Apple and IBM are direct competitors, and I think their decision to use OSS comes from two close, but different perspectives. IBM tried and completely failed to get any kind of foothold in the desktop OS market, and probably lost a bundle of money. The smart management realised that they could spend less on development of an existing product (OSS) and still be able to offer a non-MS alternative for their consultants to bill against. Apple, while looking from a similar point of view, needs (not wants) to offer an alternative OS - that's a part of being Apple. But they're not really interested in using a GPLd product, since as far as I know they still need to sell the OS (i.e. not give away the source).
I think that it's interesting that the three competitors make use of OSS, but I think all three arrived at the decision for different reasons that made strategic sense - not out of some direct need to support OSS.
Sony, Oracle and a host of others have not made (the same) use of OSS and are nonetheless very big and very direct competitors for MS.
So, what I conclude is that there are a lot of companies out there that have decided that it makes business sense to make use of new technologies...
Having worked maintenance-coder in a past life, I can tell you that on review of code to add some new functionality or to tweak some bit of code, bugs and flaws are discovered that (almost) never would have been discovered by users... while not a daily occurence, I suspect that every maintenance coder has found flaws in just this manner...
Many computer security experts disapprove of TC, because it could allow computer manufacturers and software authors increased control to monitor and dictate what users are able to do with their computers, and there are significant concerns that TC would have (or may even covertly be intended to have) a crippling anti-competitive effect on the free software markets, private software development, and the IT market in general
That's as far as I need my mind expanded. I have 100% faith that anything that can be misused will be misused.
Re:Patents In and Of Themselves *Are* Evil
on
The Patent Epidemic
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· Score: 1
The problem with patents is not that they are being granted at all, as some intellectual anarchists would have you believe, it is that they are being granted for entirely obvious "inventions" that are not really inventions at all.
Patents are no more "not evil" than marxism/communism is a viable alternative to democracy/captialism: in a perfect world that doesn't include humans it'll work just great.
The expected outcome of patents is to create more innovation: unfortunately there are additional results (patent trolls, litigation etc) that are not factored in the initial equation. Once a certain critical mass is achieved, the bad outweighs the good (I think we're there now) and the patent system (any patent system) starts to do more damage than good.
besides... the mere fact that people invented stuff before patents tells me that patents fixed a problem where there was none... just another hammer looking for a nail.
It can be done, but it normally isn't done that way.
Most users complain that they need to log in to their computer at all.
This is definately a mind-set issue that linux users (who have forever logged in as user, and su/sudo for priv'd stuff) already have.
Perhaps in time, win-users will gain the same level of understanding that it's for their own good.
Such a dangerous precedent would be akin to forcing OSS to be closed, which could then be attempted further down the road if political opinions shift against OSS.
uh... how exactly would that work? Even if you could legislate that sharing source code was illegal (good luck) in which country would you do this? As OSS is multinational, the most you could do is make OSS illegal in the US, to the detriment of the US and only the US. MS on the otherhand is an American company and if they were required to open/publish their source they would have to...
Forcing MS to open the code is do-able. Making OSS illegal in the US is do-able. Closing OSS is impossible.
The country that offers the LEAST regulation in regards to launching orbitals will be the country that takes in the most tourists in this incredibly expensive (but always getting cheaper) business.
The country that offers the BEST regulation in regards to launching orbitals will be the country that gets to KEEP the business.
We've already seen a couple of shuttles go Kaboom! Judging by some of the foreign airlines accident rate, I wouldn't trust my life in orbit on a Aeroperu or a Cubana orbiter...
Is it really overkill?... We can question whether the no fly list works or not, but looking at ways to keep terrorists off of spacecraft is not unreasonable.
yer kidding right?
The whole point isn't that we should blow up planes in the absence of the terrorists doing it for us... of f*ing course we all want to live in safety... the point is that the list is useless.
It's a good thing the terrorists aren't clever enough to fly using a fake f*ing name!
It's a good thing that the name on your birth certificate is guaranteed unique on this planet and can't be shared with anyone so there's no chance of false-positives.
Gimme a freakin' break: the no-fly list can't possibly work. It's as likely to stop terrorists as DRM is to stop music pirates. Just. Not. Gonna. Work.
And I'm pretty sure that's what he meant with overkill... not that we should do nothing, but do something that might actually have a snowballs-chance-in-hell of working./AngryRantAboutPeopleWhoLetUselessPoliciesLullThem IntoASenseOfWeAreTakingAction!Dammit!
I've got a digital music adapter upstairs in my house which can stream music from my PC to my living room audio system. It works great, but that assumes I have my PC turned on. This is silly, since I have an always-on, network attached storage device. The good old bugaboo, DRM, prevents the digital music adapter from streaming music directly from the NAS device. In fact, even if my PC is running, Windows Media Connect doesn't allow network shares to be streamed, despite that I legally own my music and can, in fact, play the same music if it's stored on the PC itself. Until this sort of issue is sorted out, and it becomes actually--dare we say it--convenient and compelling--the digital home will be the purview of Intel and Microsoft marketing managers who dream of selling more PCs into the home.
(emphasis mine)
Tech doesn't take off because of marketing or limitations or profitability.
Tech takes off because it does something the customer wants. Useless stuff, restrictions and limitations need not apply. If X.2 doesn't do everything X.1 did, people won't adopt, and will wait for someone to come out with X1+2. (X3?)
While I suppose that is generally true in most markets it seems to me in tech it's more extreme. Perhaps this is because technology does stuff for us, or makes our lives easier in a very perceptable way...and since people are generally lazy, only those things that are actually useful will achieve traction in the market.
I can only hope that one day the US threats will become void, since the rest of the world will happily trade with each other and not need the US at all, i.e. the situation reverses and the whole world except the US have trade, and the US becomes isolated and poor.
While I don't quite share your ill-will towards the US (simply don't wish ill on anyone) I do forsee a day when the American influence is severely limited from what it is today.
No empire is forever (ask the Romans, the Brits, the Egyptians, , , ) and so it's just a matter of time until this one also ends.
As a Canadian we've seen the double edged sword that is being the largest trading partner of what is now the largest economy on earth... the threats of cutting off trade, the unilateral sanctions, their ignoring & perpetually appealing trade rulings that don't go in their favour are all part of the price of trading with the ferocious business beast called the USA.
So my predictions for the next super-power? The easy guess is China, and for my own personal sake I hope I'm not around to see how they flex their political muscle if it ever comes true.
The EU is another good guess and one I could be happy with, but I suspect it lacks the cohesion that China has (i.e. political bickering vs resolution to act on something). India and Russia are filled with a combination of promise and corruption that makes them wild-cards, but still unlikely. There's little in the way of economic growth or power in Africa, S.America or the middle-east, so unless there are some drastic changes no power is going to come from there anytime soon. Japan had it's day, though it will probably prosper (along with the rest of south-eastern Asia) if China becomes the next super-power.
This means shorter lines, which usually equates to more customers.
I'm sure someone has a theorm that shows the inverse relationship between line length and the chance that any given person will queue up.
While the too-long line length may be different for everyone, there is a certain length at which no one else will join...
...and then re-printed wherever and whenever the hospital wants?
Call me old-fashioned, but an ink-signature should have no legal standing in an electronic universe...ink for paper, PKI for digital.
You have indicated that paying $0/hr would have the net effect of increasing the bonus from 50%-66% to 75%-80%
The existance or absence of minimum wage has absolutely no effect on your total billing (gross revenue)
Therefore, the stated increase in bonus can only come from the stated decrease in salary.
So I read this to mean that $6.15/hr is worth somewhere between 9%-30%.
So this means that 1% bonus is worth $6.15/.3 = $0.205/hr to $6.15/.09 = $0.683/hr.
So unless all my math skills have left me (and that is possible), this means that you currently end up paying somewhere between 6.15+50*.205 = $16.40/hr to 6.15+66*.683 = $51.228/hr The new model using the pure bonus salary ranges from $0+75*.205 = $15.375 to $0+80*.683 = $54.64/hr.
While the ceiling isn't too bad (about $100k+ annual) the lower end is a little more troublesome (about $30k+ annual).
Since a "bonus" is a very tricky business (oops, we didn't make the grade this time 'round, care to play again?) and since the high-end isn't exactly amazing, I think I'd be inclined to take a sure-thing 'round the $80k mark which is generally quite easily obtained...and if you're taking some risk, you can always consult (where the risk is temporary unemployment, but while employed the payrate is known) you can easily make $100k-$250k in IT.
So, a little more reward (maybe triple the upside?) and depending on how the bonus was calculated (i.e. guarantees) and you just might have something here...
Not for everyone to be sure, but still an interesting model.
Absolutely true. The last place I worked at was willing to buy products at 10x the price, so long as they had garunteed vendor support. Never underestimate how valuable a support contract is when your last parity drive has just failed on your raid and you have no spares left in the building
Fire the CIO.
Ok ok, I don't know the details and maybe it made sense in your specific instance, but for hardware I wouldn't pay 10x for the same thing; just buy 5x the number of required drives, swap your own drives and you'll still be ahead of the game... let's face it: this stuff will be obsolete long before you can't buy more drives.
I'm not sure how this would translate to software... but I've maintained before that this 'having someone to blame' bit is just a sign of weak IT/management. So if you do a cost analysis and determine that the license fees are significant, and the risk assessment shows that there is strong probability (based on existing installations) that the proposed solution set will work then there is abolutely no reason to not strongly consider NOT paying those license fees, which decreases expenses and increases profits and gets you a raise/promoted/more-stocks/increases-stock- value/whatever...
Example: I think just about every internet provider runs some amount of OSS: Apache is probably the most common web-server. So, if you're starting a new provider service, would you discount Apache simply because there's no one to yell at? By buying proprietary software you'd be putting your company at a disadvantage before even opening the doors... turn that around and by adopting OSS before your competition does you can gain an advantage over them.
Worse yet, let's say it's a multi-level problem between fooPackage, barPackage and blahPackage. Now you've got "dualing vendors" on your hands all saying "it's not our problem." Not that that doesn't happen in the commercial world, but a commercial OS vendor (Sun, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) is helpful in mediating those fights.
I'm not going to say that people don't use this as an argument against F/OSS, but it doesn't hold water. The Big Boys will use it's-not-us-it's-them when two bits don't work together, and they'll use it w/o blinking.
The real downside when you're not in OSS land is that while they are arguing over who's going to fix it and who's paying who's bill and what support is covered your system may be down and there's f*all you can do about it. Contrast w/ OSS where if you're unhappy with the support levels and the two competing interests arguing over who's fault it is, you can toss them both and bring in someone to look at the source code... I'm not going to say this is an ideal solution, merely that all things being equal this option exists in OSS and simply doesn't exist if you don't have the source code... If anything, the dualing vendors argument only works against closed-source providers.
Perhaps flash drives don't need to directly compete in the short term for them to gain significant traction in the desktop market:
If (as a previous poster has suggested) 32gb flash drives are available shortly, that will make them of sufficient size to replace the hard disk. This introduces new portable computing possibilities. I can run my OS with my software on (compatable) hardware, regardless of what software they have: think $100 portable with $1500+hardware power...just limited by the existance of hardware. eg:kiosks, homeschool, or workhome without the laptop. Go to a friends house and have everything you need on one flash card.
While the flash doesn't need to replace the hard-drive in the short-term, it can certainly replace the 3.5" floppy/ZIP disk/CDR(w) set of portable media if it hasn't already done so.
AFAIK the flash disks can outperform HDDs, so this may not be a 2006 prediction, but I tend to agree that in the long term all moving parts will be eliminated from the desktop computer...
It's nice that you move directly from a recreational activity that (might) harm the person who engages in it and no one else, to an activity that prematurely ends another's life... good to see we all have a little perspective here on/.
I actually think the analogy isn't too bad: The only reason that pot is illegal and alcohol & tabacco aren't is pretty much an accident of history. There's no actual reason to distinguish between these drugs (and they are all three drugs, but only two are legal)....so it's not so obious to people that it should be illegal, which is why there is relatively high use and even countries where it is actually legal... where exactly is murder legal or tolerated?
I thought it was a nice management overview... deep on meaningless numbers, short on actual reasons to pick one solution over another.
Comparing column name lengths is only important if one falls seriously short (like 5-chars) or if your organisation wants_to_name_all_of_their_columns_with_a_very_lon g_description_so_that_everyone_can_know_what_this_ data_represents. imho, most columns/tables/etc can be effectively named in the order of a dozen characters or less.
I can just see managment deciding that to pick a database based on the chart and not based on things like performance, true scalability (not the glossy version), and as others have pointed out: Application Vendor's recomendation...
I'm not saying mySQL doesn't have a place in the market, just that they compared a Toyota with a Ferrari and discovered that both had doors, wheels and engines, but oddly one cost more...
You pretty much had my exact response up to this line:
I've yet to see any significant evidence justifying this massive interference by the government in the citizen's business. I would actually support patents in limited areas of technology if there were evidence of long term public benefit.
I'm curious:
How would you define "long term public benefit"? imho, public benefit (forget long-term) is rarely seen by anyone - just look at the poor fiscal and envornmental decisions made daily by our leaders of politics and industry...
How would you decide if some innovation was in fact going to provide this benefit? Again, many seemingly useful inventions fall unused (for various reasons) and some of the best successes are complete inventing 'accidents'
Who would define the limits? In essance, this is where we started: patents were supposed to be only for the 'non-obvious', but as TFA clearly states, most invention is the obvious solution, once the appropriate people are requested to investigate/engineer... I suspect that 'scope-creep' would again raise it's ugly head.
My problem with patents isn't that they aren't a good idea on paper, it's all the unintended negative secondary and tertiary effects that wipe out all the original intented positive effects. To state it another way: If the intended direct effect of some action increases the value of something by an arbitrary value of 10, but there are other unintended effects that cause a decrease in value by 20, we've still lost 10. The fact that the original intended effects did provide some value is not sufficient to decide that it's a good plan: you need to consider all factors.
Slashdot Mirror
But I guess the library will be on the hook if this new definition makes it through:
Libraries have copyright material and a photocopier. This means that they've made copyright material available for distribution to the same degree as someone with copyright material in a shared folder.
If I physically steal someone's CD and sell it on eBay it's traffic of stolen goods. But no one assumes it's not a legal sale, and there would be no onus placed on me to prove that I could rightfully sell this item. Do you have an original sales receipt for every item you've ever sold second-hand?
So, if I list for sale a file that is a copyright work (where I'm not the copyright owner) why is the onus on me to prove that file is licensed to me (and can therefore be resold by first-sale) and it is this license I'm selling?
I'm personally much less concerned with pirates aargh!matey! than I am with how willing people are to give up their rights and freedoms to the benefit of a rich, exploitive oligopoly.
Just because the RIAA would like everyone to believe that every transaction of copyright material that doesn't enrich them is illegal doesn't mean we have to buy into it.
Just more proof that DRM is evil and limits users in ways they are not expecting...If the *AA didn't have it's head up it's arse 10 years ago I suspect none of this would be much other than a passing comment. imho, it is 99% the ineptitude of the *AA (for not using the 'net as a legal distribution channel) that has left us in this mess. The 1% that would illegally copy were already doing so a-la trade-the-tapes (like the boys in metallica did when they were young). My proof for this is the success of the legal on-line vendors even at this late stage of the game. Had they existed from day-1, there would be no more talk about illegal file sharing than there is about illegal software distribution. Sure it exists, and there is the odd headline, but it isn't a daily conversation.
While our *&!!%# firewall won't let me get to TFA, I will assume that this is only a debate if the iPod is full of legal downloads - Clearly loading copyright material (to which you do not have copyright) onto a device and selling it would not be any more legal if it's an iPod, a cassette tape, or a CDR!
So we must be asking: Is it legal to resell something you rightfully own. Answer? First-Sale doctrine says this is perfectly legit.
Now ... if the RIAA wants to continue their legal war, I suppose they could try and get a court order forcing the seller to prove license of each file on any given iPod ... but good luck getting a judge to sign that order w/o any grounds for believing that the files on a specific iPod constitute an infringement...
If I list a CD for sale on eBay, everyone assumes it's the original unless otherwise stated, and if anything other than the original arrives it would be a breach of the sales agreement. Same goes here.
I guess what we really need to decide is what the education is for. I'm pro teaching 'advanced' maths like calculus as a mandatory - not because I think that 99% of anyone is going to use it again, but because I think it's important to expose children to as many different subjects as possible. How many people use any amount of historical knowledge in their daily lives? On a daily basis who cares what years there was war somewhere, or who ran what campaign etc. How many people need to know the table of elememnts? How many people need to know the characters and plots of some obscure British writer? How many people need to know the names of the bones in the human hand? or what zebras eat? Or the difference between macro and micro economics? or... whatever...
To argue non-use as a reason to remove a subject from the education requirements will ultimately result in no education.
The real problem I find in our (Canadian) education system isn't the subjects being taught - but those that aren't, topics like:
- critical thinking
- decision making
- time management
- research/reference (i.e. the art of knowing how to find (out) what you want to know)
These topics are all about how to work smarter and how to learn. The idea is like the old "Give a fish, feed for one day; teach to fish, feed for lifetime"The existing topics are then furnished as general-knowledge/a-taste, so that everyone starts on a (somewhat) equal footing and has a general base on which to build their knowledge.
I think Google chose it's software based on an extreme need to customize and control their environment; They are not in the software sales/distribution/consulting game, and OSS offered them a stable vehicle with which to kick-start their development.
Of the three, I think only Apple and IBM are direct competitors, and I think their decision to use OSS comes from two close, but different perspectives.
IBM tried and completely failed to get any kind of foothold in the desktop OS market, and probably lost a bundle of money. The smart management realised that they could spend less on development of an existing product (OSS) and still be able to offer a non-MS alternative for their consultants to bill against.
Apple, while looking from a similar point of view, needs (not wants) to offer an alternative OS - that's a part of being Apple. But they're not really interested in using a GPLd product, since as far as I know they still need to sell the OS (i.e. not give away the source).
I think that it's interesting that the three competitors make use of OSS, but I think all three arrived at the decision for different reasons that made strategic sense - not out of some direct need to support OSS.
Sony, Oracle and a host of others have not made (the same) use of OSS and are nonetheless very big and very direct competitors for MS.
So, what I conclude is that there are a lot of companies out there that have decided that it makes business sense to make use of new technologies ...
Having worked maintenance-coder in a past life, I can tell you that on review of code to add some new functionality or to tweak some bit of code, bugs and flaws are discovered that (almost) never would have been discovered by users ... while not a daily occurence, I suspect that every maintenance coder has found flaws in just this manner...
The expected outcome of patents is to create more innovation: unfortunately there are additional results (patent trolls, litigation etc) that are not factored in the initial equation. Once a certain critical mass is achieved, the bad outweighs the good (I think we're there now) and the patent system (any patent system) starts to do more damage than good.
besides
Introduce your friend to the acronym NDA. (s)he'll thank you from his/her yacht later...
This is definately a mind-set issue that linux users (who have forever logged in as user, and su/sudo for priv'd stuff) already have.
Perhaps in time, win-users will gain the same level of understanding that it's for their own good.
Forcing MS to open the code is do-able. Making OSS illegal in the US is do-able. Closing OSS is impossible.
We've already seen a couple of shuttles go Kaboom! Judging by some of the foreign airlines accident rate, I wouldn't trust my life in orbit on a Aeroperu or a Cubana orbiter...
The whole point isn't that we should blow up planes in the absence of the terrorists doing it for us
It's a good thing the terrorists aren't clever enough to fly using a fake f*ing name!
It's a good thing that the name on your birth certificate is guaranteed unique on this planet and can't be shared with anyone so there's no chance of false-positives.
Gimme a freakin' break: the no-fly list can't possibly work. It's as likely to stop terrorists as DRM is to stop music pirates. Just. Not. Gonna. Work.
And I'm pretty sure that's what he meant with overkill... not that we should do nothing, but do something that might actually have a snowballs-chance-in-hell of working.
Tech doesn't take off because of marketing or limitations or profitability.
Tech takes off because it does something the customer wants. Useless stuff, restrictions and limitations need not apply. If X.2 doesn't do everything X.1 did, people won't adopt, and will wait for someone to come out with X1+2. (X3?)
While I suppose that is generally true in most markets it seems to me in tech it's more extreme. Perhaps this is because technology does stuff for us, or makes our lives easier in a very perceptable way...and since people are generally lazy, only those things that are actually useful will achieve traction in the market.
No empire is forever (ask the Romans, the Brits, the Egyptians, , , ) and so it's just a matter of time until this one also ends.
As a Canadian we've seen the double edged sword that is being the largest trading partner of what is now the largest economy on earth
So my predictions for the next super-power? The easy guess is China, and for my own personal sake I hope I'm not around to see how they flex their political muscle if it ever comes true.
The EU is another good guess and one I could be happy with, but I suspect it lacks the cohesion that China has (i.e. political bickering vs resolution to act on something). India and Russia are filled with a combination of promise and corruption that makes them wild-cards, but still unlikely. There's little in the way of economic growth or power in Africa, S.America or the middle-east, so unless there are some drastic changes no power is going to come from there anytime soon. Japan had it's day, though it will probably prosper (along with the rest of south-eastern Asia) if China becomes the next super-power.
While the too-long line length may be different for everyone, there is a certain length at which no one else will join...
Call me old-fashioned, but an ink-signature should have no legal standing in an electronic universe...ink for paper, PKI for digital.
- You have indicated that you pay $6.15/hr
- You have indicated that paying $0/hr would have the net effect of increasing the bonus from 50%-66% to 75%-80%
- The existance or absence of minimum wage has absolutely no effect on your total billing (gross revenue)
- Therefore, the stated increase in bonus can only come from the stated decrease in salary.
So I read this to mean that $6.15/hr is worth somewhere between 9%-30%.So this means that 1% bonus is worth $6.15/.3 = $0.205/hr to $6.15/.09 = $0.683/hr.
So unless all my math skills have left me (and that is possible), this means that you currently end up paying somewhere between 6.15+50*.205 = $16.40/hr to 6.15+66*.683 = $51.228/hr
The new model using the pure bonus salary ranges from $0+75*.205 = $15.375 to $0+80*.683 = $54.64/hr.
While the ceiling isn't too bad (about $100k+ annual) the lower end is a little more troublesome (about $30k+ annual).
Since a "bonus" is a very tricky business (oops, we didn't make the grade this time 'round, care to play again?) and since the high-end isn't exactly amazing, I think I'd be inclined to take a sure-thing 'round the $80k mark which is generally quite easily obtained...and if you're taking some risk, you can always consult (where the risk is temporary unemployment, but while employed the payrate is known) you can easily make $100k-$250k in IT.
So, a little more reward (maybe triple the upside?) and depending on how the bonus was calculated (i.e. guarantees) and you just might have something here...
Not for everyone to be sure, but still an interesting model.
Fire the CIO. ... but I've maintained before that this 'having someone to blame' bit is just a sign of weak IT/management. So if you do a cost analysis and determine that the license fees are significant, and the risk assessment shows that there is strong probability (based on existing installations) that the proposed solution set will work then there is abolutely no reason to not strongly consider NOT paying those license fees, which decreases expenses and increases profits and gets you a raise/promoted/more-stocks/increases-stock- value/whatever...
Ok ok, I don't know the details and maybe it made sense in your specific instance, but for hardware I wouldn't pay 10x for the same thing; just buy 5x the number of required drives, swap your own drives and you'll still be ahead of the game... let's face it: this stuff will be obsolete long before you can't buy more drives.
I'm not sure how this would translate to software
Example: I think just about every internet provider runs some amount of OSS: Apache is probably the most common web-server. So, if you're starting a new provider service, would you discount Apache simply because there's no one to yell at? By buying proprietary software you'd be putting your company at a disadvantage before even opening the doors... turn that around and by adopting OSS before your competition does you can gain an advantage over them.
I'm not going to say that people don't use this as an argument against F/OSS, but it doesn't hold water. The Big Boys will use it's-not-us-it's-them when two bits don't work together, and they'll use it w/o blinking. The real downside when you're not in OSS land is that while they are arguing over who's going to fix it and who's paying who's bill and what support is covered your system may be down and there's f*all you can do about it. Contrast w/ OSS where if you're unhappy with the support levels and the two competing interests arguing over who's fault it is, you can toss them both and bring in someone to look at the source code... I'm not going to say this is an ideal solution, merely that all things being equal this option exists in OSS and simply doesn't exist if you don't have the source code... If anything, the dualing vendors argument only works against closed-source providers.
Perhaps flash drives don't need to directly compete in the short term for them to gain significant traction in the desktop market:
If (as a previous poster has suggested) 32gb flash drives are available shortly, that will make them of sufficient size to replace the hard disk. This introduces new portable computing possibilities.
I can run my OS with my software on (compatable) hardware, regardless of what software they have: think $100 portable with $1500+hardware power...just limited by the existance of hardware. eg:kiosks, homeschool, or workhome without the laptop. Go to a friends house and have everything you need on one flash card.
While the flash doesn't need to replace the hard-drive in the short-term, it can certainly replace the 3.5" floppy/ZIP disk/CDR(w) set of portable media if it hasn't already done so.
AFAIK the flash disks can outperform HDDs, so this may not be a 2006 prediction, but I tend to agree that in the long term all moving parts will be eliminated from the desktop computer...
It's nice that you move directly from a recreational activity that (might) harm the person who engages in it and no one else, to an activity that prematurely ends another's life ... good to see we all have a little perspective here on /. ...so it's not so obious to people that it should be illegal, which is why there is relatively high use and even countries where it is actually legal... where exactly is murder legal or tolerated?
I actually think the analogy isn't too bad: The only reason that pot is illegal and alcohol & tabacco aren't is pretty much an accident of history. There's no actual reason to distinguish between these drugs (and they are all three drugs, but only two are legal).
Comparing column name lengths is only important if one falls seriously short (like 5-chars) or if your organisation wants_to_name_all_of_their_columns_with_a_very_lo
I can just see managment deciding that to pick a database based on the chart and not based on things like performance, true scalability (not the glossy version), and as others have pointed out: Application Vendor's recomendation...
I'm not saying mySQL doesn't have a place in the market, just that they compared a Toyota with a Ferrari and discovered that both had doors, wheels and engines, but oddly one cost more...
I'm curious:
My problem with patents isn't that they aren't a good idea on paper, it's all the unintended negative secondary and tertiary effects that wipe out all the original intented positive effects. To state it another way: If the intended direct effect of some action increases the value of something by an arbitrary value of 10, but there are other unintended effects that cause a decrease in value by 20, we've still lost 10. The fact that the original intended effects did provide some value is not sufficient to decide that it's a good plan: you need to consider all factors.