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Comment Re:Warm LEDs [Re:It only took a century] (Score 2) 348

...silly and ignorant ideas in the article about the color of various light technologies...

Fluorescent lights and LED lights can be manufactured in any color desired; it's simply a matter of choosing the correct phosphors. The fact that lamp manufacturers don't bother to manufacture lamps in a particular color(s) has nothing to do with ESL being any better or worse than other technologies.

Comment Re:"does some spying and reporting on you" (Score 4, Insightful) 635

This will be the least popular (in /. terms) answer to your question; but, it's actually the best one for your business as it avoids adding DRM (or a dongle) to your software but gives you a lever to enforce compliance.

Step 1: Join the BSA.
Step 2: When you detect illegal use of your software, report those firms to the BSA so that the BSA can perform an audit.

I would recommend that you ignore individual users who wouldn't normally be your customers; as, the BSA isn't going to audit them and for those users you are probably not financially out of pocket. That said, if you find that there are lots of individual rogue users, maybe that is indicating demand for a "lite" version of your application that costs 1/10th the full version and is accessible to non-commercial individuals.

Comment Re:I'm not sure I see the need (Score 1) 402

I agree that most employees don't create content in Office; however, the 10% that do create content are the 10% of employees who's productivity and performance are what makes a company successful. So, while 90% of a company's employees can make do with something less than a real PC, the company would quickly fail if PC's and real MS Office were cast to the wayside.

Comment Why is gender important? (Score 5, Insightful) 146

And what is the point of putting her gender in the headline? Are women generally less capable than men and so it's a miracle that she made it to project leader? I don't believe that is the case; so, why emphasise her gender? This is a non-story and shouldn't have made it to the front page of /.

Comment Offloading IT cost onto employees (Score 4, Insightful) 232

Unless the employer provides ongoing cash payments to compensate the employee for use of thier device, this is a way of offloading IT cost onto the shoulders of employees. Add to that the fact that here in Canada, an employee of a company is not allowed to treat the cost fo a computer as a business expense (for tax purpoes), and the reduction in salary experienced by the employee is even greater than the benefit received by the employer.

Comment Re:I'm currently reading TFA... (Score 4, Informative) 223

I can tell you that I can't think of a single IT support org that uses this as a metric

Some years ago, I had a help desk in my organisation that did use this metric as part of how its analysts kept tabs on their performance. It was one metric in an overall package, and the whole team (all the analysts) reviewed the package every week. As I recall, other metrics in the package included Customer Satisfaction, Average Call Length, Number of Calls Back to Users per Agent, Incidents Resovled on First Contact, Incidents Escalated to Second Level, and others.

The help desk team very successfully used the overall metrics package as part analyst self motivation and peer motivation (as well as management oversight). Bob Lewis's piece is provocative journalism: devoid of concrete detail and full of high level innuendo. It doesn't contain sufficent detail (say, by way of actual detailed examples) to allow a typical reader to apply the thoughts he has expressed.

Submission + - Software To Flatten a Photographed Book? (slashdot.org) 1

crath writes: A little over two years ago, Slashdot was asked about "Software To Flatten a Photographed Book? (http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/09/27/199251/software-to-flatten-a-photographed-book)" Well, here we are in Nov. 2011 and from what I can determine we're worse off than in 2009: Snapter--the only commercial software offering--has been removed from the marketplace. Scan Tailor has release a version that does part of what Snapter performed; but, it's still not all there. Is anyone aware of a real soution? I have 400 pictures of a century old family scrapbook that I would like to finish processing; what's holding me back is a lack of software.
Patents

Submission + - You Killed My Tablet. Prepare to Die. (yahoo.com)

NemoinSpace writes: "Now that Spanish Android tablet maker Nuevas Tecnologias y Energias Catala, otherwise known as NT-K, has successfully defended itself against the patent infringement suit filed by Apple, it’s turning the tables on the company."
Space

Submission + - New Telescopes Might See Alien City Lights (discovery.com) 2

RedEaredSlider writes: Forget radio signals. Two scientists, Abraham Loeb, of Harvard University and Edwin Turner, from Princeton University, have said it may be possible with the next generation of telescopes to pick up the lights from cities on alien planets. On Earth, city lights are so bright they can be seen from space — and their spectral signature differs from that of the gases in the atmosphere and the sun. If one were looking at an alien civilization, one would expect to see the same thing.

The reason they proposed this is that aliens may not generate as much radio energy as their technology improves, given that on Earth we bleed less radio energy into space as we have moved to fiber optics.

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