I surely hope I'm not being too paranoid but I'm guessing that the damage won't be limited to the EU countries. Anything that's sold in the EU will probably be the same version that's sold elsewhere just to avoid the hassle and potential legal problems with making two different versions and, say, one of the naughty R-Pis getting into an EU country by mistake. So, potentially, no more Raspberry Pis for anyone (well not any that are all that useful for DiYers), locked down laptops that can't run anything but the OS that came with it for fear of violating the new EU law, the list goes on. Another step down the road to banning user programmable devices and allowing only "appliances" to be sold to consumers.
It's COBOL. Running on an AS/400. Big effin' deal. I'm guessing that the county assessor's opinion of computer technology is "If I haven't used it, it's got to go." [1] COBOL is not exactly dead, but it isn't the programming language du jour. (I've seen recent job ads looking for people with COBOL experience. I could forward some of them to her.) I suspect she'd much happier if the whole system consisted of a single, shared Excel spreadsheet. At least she'd have her mouse to move around.
I predict we'll be seeing a future post about the huge cost overruns, inoperable software, and the crisis in the assessor's office when the conversion to a trendy "non-dead" language on new, overpriced hardware flounders and the lawsuits begin.
[1] - She seems like she might be a kindred spirit with the guy I once worked with whose title of "Director of Computing Technology" would never have prepared you for his daily criticism of each and every computer technology he came in contact with. It was really quite amazing. Nobody--and I mean nobody--in the department could figure out what technology would be graced with his approval.
... more dead cassette entrails wafting in the breeze alongside highways as they die a horrible death on hipsters car cassette players.
I'm not looking forward to the coming onslaught of articles instructing the new cassette aficionados whether one should choose dolby, CrO2, metal, or some combination of the various tape player settings that will never make up for the inevitable "wow" sound that tape gives you as the rollers wear/dry out.
... get seriously pissed off if phone OS developers start making changes like this. At least that's my prediction. You develop a degree of muscle memory after using a phone for a while and it's an annoyance to have to adapt every time a phone developer gets a crazy idea that'll get rolled out without any idea of disruptive it is to the end users. Just because it's "new" and "innovative". What's next? Making Dvorak the default keyboard?
... that enough of their card users have finally wised up and aren't carrying balances--with interest rates that are approaching loan shark and payday loan levels--so they think they'll make up the difference by hitting the stores with higher transaction rates is how they plan on making up the difference in those lost customer interest charges?
Good luck with that. Stores will cut back on what cards they accept. And customers will get pissed off when the cards that are accepted at frequently visited stores keeps changing. Wait until the vendors you've worked with to do automatic payments--your mobile phone vendor, cable service, your tollway toll transponder, etc., etc.--start choosing to drop the use of certain cards and your service is cut off, and you have to pay reconnection fees while scrambling to contact all those vendors to set up new payment plans. Customers going to just love that.
Actually, with healthcare, the patient has virtually no way to know the cost of the services they receive. There were recent articles about how, when hospitals released the fees, the obtuse wording and jargon in the price lists made it almost impossible to know what a visit was going to cost. And it's not like there are that many hospitals near to an individual that they're going to take the time to wade through the confusing price lists to decide which one at which to have their surgery. If it's an emergency situation, you go to where the ambulance takes you costs be damned.
With the absurd rise in deductibles, people may begin taking the time to shop around for a cheaper family physician---if you know exactly what billing codes will be involved in whatever you're planning to have done (and there are no surprises when you get into the examination room) and can drag that information practices' billing staffers. Those are big "if"s.
But the question is: Why would you want to? Are there ARM versions of all the applications that people you might consider running on their R-Pi? If not, then this is an exercise about as pointless as someone successfully running Word on an iWatch.
Oy! I don't think you understood the point of that statement.
I never heard anybody bitch about their iPhone not looking like Windows. Nor have I heard bitching that Android didn't look like Windows. In both cases, users learned those not-Windows interfaces.
I'd love to find a source of ephemerides for their satellites. It'd be interesting to plug it into the GPS coverage software I wrote back in the '80s. Just to see for myself how "useless" the Galileo system is because of this $11B screw-up.
Quite often the companies get tax reductions or outright eliminations for N years and then close up and move somewhere else after N-1 years. IIRC, IBM did that in N. Carolina. Motorola did that in Illinois---more than once: the never really completed Harvard manufacturing plant, abandoning the large, long-lived facility in Schaumburg for Chicago and other suburbs that offered sweet tax deals. I'm sure more examples can be found. This business of playing states (and cities) against each other to receive all sorts of tax breaks, immunity from environmental regulations, etc., should be stopped. Here's hoping that states/cities do more push back like NYC is doing.
Indeed. I've trained myself over the years to ignore random images in the margins of the web pages I'm reading. But it's when they pop up and obscure the content that I'm trying to read that really pisses me off---regardless of whether thy're personalized of not. You know the ones... they pop up or slide across the web page about 5 seconds after you start reading and require you to stop, close the effing ad, and then reread the paragraph you were in the middle of. They're like some guy wearing a sandwich board stepping in between you and a friend while you're trying to hold a conversation. Or when the owner of the web page feels it's oh-so clever to pollute the comments section of their page by injecting ads in between the actual user comments. Yes, personalization is creepy and/or disgusting but it's the constant barrage of interruptions that I really dislike and what makes me less likely to return to a site.
Indeed... My typical workflow is bash (that creates a skeleton.tex file using the doc title, launches the edit/view windows, and updates Makefile) + emacs + make (to run latex/dvi2ps/ps2pdf/etc.) + Okular. For really small documents--depending on the content--it's normally LibreOffice. If I need to interact w/ Word, LibreOffice's "`Save As' to Office-whatever" option works just fine. Importing Office docs--and even Excel spreadsheets (where I'd expect to see the greatest amount of interchange problems)--has only produced weird results a handful of times in the last ten years or so. No Microsoft tax/rent or anywhere to be seen.
... put them out of reach for many people. We got one in our university engineering research group--probably through a grant. The only people using it were students that wanted to play around with the graphics capability in order to gen up a fancier version of a paper. We had a later Mac version (one of the big desktop systems---not the Banana Junior 6000 types) that our draftperson used to create drawings, graphs, plots, etc. for papers we put out. Same deal---likely bought as part of a grant or departmental hardware budget.
The other affect on prices was what happened to peripherals that were used mainly by Macophiles. I needed a SCSI disk drive in those days to hang off a SBC we were going to use for data collection. Because Macs users seemed to have money to burn, I wound up eating upwards of $600 for a 20MB hard drive (that, IIRC, cost more than what we had paid for the 200MB discs we put in Microvaxes)---and I had to look high and low to even get pricing that low. Most mail order outfits suppliers were charging well above that.
Slashdot Mirror
I was unaware that it had a meaning newer than the playground game that was popular when I was in grade school.
Yeah but there's always the chance that he said that because he thinks it's actually saving daylight.
I surely hope I'm not being too paranoid but I'm guessing that the damage won't be limited to the EU countries. Anything that's sold in the EU will probably be the same version that's sold elsewhere just to avoid the hassle and potential legal problems with making two different versions and, say, one of the naughty R-Pis getting into an EU country by mistake. So, potentially, no more Raspberry Pis for anyone (well not any that are all that useful for DiYers), locked down laptops that can't run anything but the OS that came with it for fear of violating the new EU law, the list goes on. Another step down the road to banning user programmable devices and allowing only "appliances" to be sold to consumers.
... people started lining up outside Apple stores with tents and sleeping bags to be sure they're the first to be "blown away"?
Hey... I thought it was Microsoft working with the military that was working on products that will blow us away.
Business BASIC
[ralf]
It's COBOL. Running on an AS/400. Big effin' deal. I'm guessing that the county assessor's opinion of computer technology is "If I haven't used it, it's got to go." [1] COBOL is not exactly dead, but it isn't the programming language du jour. (I've seen recent job ads looking for people with COBOL experience. I could forward some of them to her.) I suspect she'd much happier if the whole system consisted of a single, shared Excel spreadsheet. At least she'd have her mouse to move around.
I predict we'll be seeing a future post about the huge cost overruns, inoperable software, and the crisis in the assessor's office when the conversion to a trendy "non-dead" language on new, overpriced hardware flounders and the lawsuits begin.
[1] - She seems like she might be a kindred spirit with the guy I once worked with whose title of "Director of Computing Technology" would never have prepared you for his daily criticism of each and every computer technology he came in contact with. It was really quite amazing. Nobody--and I mean nobody--in the department could figure out what technology would be graced with his approval.
... the stars will all start going out.
... more dead cassette entrails wafting in the breeze alongside highways as they die a horrible death on hipsters car cassette players.
I'm not looking forward to the coming onslaught of articles instructing the new cassette aficionados whether one should choose dolby, CrO2, metal, or some combination of the various tape player settings that will never make up for the inevitable "wow" sound that tape gives you as the rollers wear/dry out.
Sounds like something Racter might have come up with.
Hah!
A former boss used to have a transponder front panel on his desk set to "7700". Always good for a chuckle when you came to him with a problem.
Chew gum at while boarding. If you see a camera in the seat back, you know what to do.
... would be to develop X-Wing fighters, right?
... get seriously pissed off if phone OS developers start making changes like this. At least that's my prediction. You develop a degree of muscle memory after using a phone for a while and it's an annoyance to have to adapt every time a phone developer gets a crazy idea that'll get rolled out without any idea of disruptive it is to the end users. Just because it's "new" and "innovative". What's next? Making Dvorak the default keyboard?
... that enough of their card users have finally wised up and aren't carrying balances--with interest rates that are approaching loan shark and payday loan levels--so they think they'll make up the difference by hitting the stores with higher transaction rates is how they plan on making up the difference in those lost customer interest charges?
Good luck with that. Stores will cut back on what cards they accept. And customers will get pissed off when the cards that are accepted at frequently visited stores keeps changing. Wait until the vendors you've worked with to do automatic payments--your mobile phone vendor, cable service, your tollway toll transponder, etc., etc.--start choosing to drop the use of certain cards and your service is cut off, and you have to pay reconnection fees while scrambling to contact all those vendors to set up new payment plans. Customers going to just love that.
Actually, with healthcare, the patient has virtually no way to know the cost of the services they receive. There were recent articles about how, when hospitals released the fees, the obtuse wording and jargon in the price lists made it almost impossible to know what a visit was going to cost. And it's not like there are that many hospitals near to an individual that they're going to take the time to wade through the confusing price lists to decide which one at which to have their surgery. If it's an emergency situation, you go to where the ambulance takes you costs be damned.
With the absurd rise in deductibles, people may begin taking the time to shop around for a cheaper family physician---if you know exactly what billing codes will be involved in whatever you're planning to have done (and there are no surprises when you get into the examination room) and can drag that information practices' billing staffers. Those are big "if"s.
But the question is: Why would you want to? Are there ARM versions of all the applications that people you might consider running on their R-Pi? If not, then this is an exercise about as pointless as someone successfully running Word on an iWatch.
Oy! I don't think you understood the point of that statement.
I never heard anybody bitch about their iPhone not looking like Windows. Nor have I heard bitching that Android didn't look like Windows. In both cases, users learned those not-Windows interfaces.
I'd love to find a source of ephemerides for their satellites. It'd be interesting to plug it into the GPS coverage software I wrote back in the '80s. Just to see for myself how "useless" the Galileo system is because of this $11B screw-up.
Define "long run".
Quite often the companies get tax reductions or outright eliminations for N years and then close up and move somewhere else after N-1 years. IIRC, IBM did that in N. Carolina. Motorola did that in Illinois---more than once: the never really completed Harvard manufacturing plant, abandoning the large, long-lived facility in Schaumburg for Chicago and other suburbs that offered sweet tax deals. I'm sure more examples can be found. This business of playing states (and cities) against each other to receive all sorts of tax breaks, immunity from environmental regulations, etc., should be stopped. Here's hoping that states/cities do more push back like NYC is doing.
Indeed. I've trained myself over the years to ignore random images in the margins of the web pages I'm reading. But it's when they pop up and obscure the content that I'm trying to read that really pisses me off---regardless of whether thy're personalized of not. You know the ones... they pop up or slide across the web page about 5 seconds after you start reading and require you to stop, close the effing ad, and then reread the paragraph you were in the middle of. They're like some guy wearing a sandwich board stepping in between you and a friend while you're trying to hold a conversation. Or when the owner of the web page feels it's oh-so clever to pollute the comments section of their page by injecting ads in between the actual user comments. Yes, personalization is creepy and/or disgusting but it's the constant barrage of interruptions that I really dislike and what makes me less likely to return to a site.
Uh... that would be VMSING THE KID.
Indeed... My typical workflow is bash (that creates a skeleton .tex file using the doc title, launches the edit/view windows, and updates Makefile) + emacs + make (to run latex/dvi2ps/ps2pdf/etc.) + Okular. For really small documents--depending on the content--it's normally LibreOffice. If I need to interact w/ Word, LibreOffice's "`Save As' to Office-whatever" option works just fine. Importing Office docs--and even Excel spreadsheets (where I'd expect to see the greatest amount of interchange problems)--has only produced weird results a handful of times in the last ten years or so. No Microsoft tax/rent or anywhere to be seen.
But here come the arguments/complaints about one's "right" to have their digital toy with them at all times in 3... 2...
... is two years old! How will I fit in with such an old "device"?
... put them out of reach for many people. We got one in our university engineering research group--probably through a grant. The only people using it were students that wanted to play around with the graphics capability in order to gen up a fancier version of a paper. We had a later Mac version (one of the big desktop systems---not the Banana Junior 6000 types) that our draftperson used to create drawings, graphs, plots, etc. for papers we put out. Same deal---likely bought as part of a grant or departmental hardware budget.
The other affect on prices was what happened to peripherals that were used mainly by Macophiles. I needed a SCSI disk drive in those days to hang off a SBC we were going to use for data collection. Because Macs users seemed to have money to burn, I wound up eating upwards of $600 for a 20MB hard drive (that, IIRC, cost more than what we had paid for the 200MB discs we put in Microvaxes)---and I had to look high and low to even get pricing that low. Most mail order outfits suppliers were charging well above that.