If only there were some sort of body of legal precedent that allowed two parties to write down the salient details of an agreement in such a fashion as to make it reasonably binding...
Snark aside, the only 'right' answer to this question is the one that was agreed upon when the price was named. Longer support contract = more expensive. Shorter = cheaper. Option to pay per-hour or per-incident thereafter, and for how long thereafter, also preferably specified.
Some people make a business of charging crazy money, backed by the assurance that they'll still be there to hold your hand in 20 years. Some people sell you a box for $20 and tell you that they hope it doesn't break your computer. Certain consumer protection laws on the low end aside, any support term is a valid offering, supposing that it is priced properly.
Oh, I can't blame HP at all for being upset. My point about the 'very awkward' bit is that HP is, in a sense, both a vendor to highly desireable customers and in the position of being a squeezable 'customer' themselves.
HP likely makes a tidy profit on every IA64 box they ship, certainly compared to the x86 stuff; but their business is very much at the mercy of Intel and the small number of enterprise software vendors who still supply IA64 products and support. Even in the best case, where all the companies that HP depends on are also making out quite well on the IA64 customers, there may still come a time when, because some companies' margins in that market shrink faster than others, certain important companies will bail and leave HP holding the bag.
Worst case, one or more of the other vendors view the IA64 market as actively worth killing(as Oracle seems to here) or wish to take advantage of HP having a greater dependence on it than they do(as may have been the case with Intel's demand for development cash).
When you have a group of locked-in customers, you want to be their vendor, not just one of their vendors who is also a locked-in customer of some of the other vendors...
Thankfully,. there is a much more polite term for 'slow and works poorly under clouds'.
Just use the phrase "High Altitude and Long Endurance(HALE) Platform", slap an optics module into the nose, and watch the spooks line up to wave cash in your face...
Honestly, WebOS still stacks up pretty well(except for application availability obviously) with Android despite having stagnated while Google was sprinting for quite a few months now. I'm not sufficiently familiar with iOS to comment on that.
Ok, new plan. Figure out a way to get HP to purchase IKEA.
Let's put it this way: Were that to happen, Ikea furniture would stop being named $NORDIC_NONSENSE_WORD$ $SIMPLE DESCRIPTION OF PURPOSE$ and start having names sufficiently complex to be described in 20 pages of tables(seriously, pages 1-2 through 1-21, inclusive)...
I can only assume that Itanium is at the (very awkward) 'nobody gives a damn, except for a few very-deep-pocketed legacy customers who are willing to pay crazy money to avoid migrating' stage....
On the plus side, if the caffeine is the causative agent, supplementation would be pretty easy.
The one positive side effect of the (otherwise dreadful) fad for leaching perfectly good caffeine out of wholesome caffeinated goods is that it creates a supply of the relatively pure stuff that can be added to things deprived by nature of their rightful share...
Apparently the answer is 'yes'; but are you really allowed to pout like a spoiled child who just lost a little-league game when you are on the board of a multibillion dollar multinational corporation? Even the anodyne say-nothing drivel issued by professional PR flacks is less obnoxious, and something cleverer would sound less horribly self-pitying.
The surprising thing is not that Social 2.0 Mobile Enterprise BuzzCloud App-centric bullshit is shoving everything that it can get its sticky little fingers on to every 3rd party with questionable security and a dire privacy policy that it can find; but that they seem to be so incompetent at it.
Exfiltrating the data in the clear is certainly easy enough(luckily 'mobile' frequently means 'even if I were competent enough, my crypto-crippled appliance wouldn't let me control outbound traffic anyway') but it makes it likely that, sooner or later, somebody is going to sniff some packets at their router and we'll get a little story about exactly how much exfiltration your ghastly little app is doing.
It's like corruption. Even when everybody knows that it is happening, it is still considered crass to get caught with your hand in the cookie jar. You are supposed to pretend to care.
This sort of vulnerability is exactly why I avoid storing passwords in hash form. I always store passwords in plain text form. It's much more secure.
Y'know what fools the black-hats every time? Store the passwords in plaintext; but require all users to create a password consisting of exactly 64 hexadecimal characters... Even better, we all know that users hate security, so more user hatred = more secure. And this system is Super Secure.
Purely for the lulz alone, I would have loved to been in the position to distribute a faked, nonfunctional, version of that CRL update, signed with the very certificate that it was supposed to be revoking...
Haven't you always wanted to forge closer ties with the dynamic marketing and legal-arbitrage entrepreneurs at the Russian Business Network? Now, LinkedIn is proud to announce your exciting, and mandatory, chance to do just that!
Given that their 'APIs are intrinsically copyrighted, even if implementations are entirely distinct' theory was both novel and potentially wildly dangerous to the entire software industry, I say fuck 'em.
If you are on a network that already features Flame, you should probably just wipe and reinstall now.
Otherwise, that security update was probably Microsoft's emergency blacklisting of the signing keys that were used to make the Flame components pass as MS-signed software...
My point is that, inevitably those oscillations hurt some people in visible ways. There are also positive effects; but it bleeds, it leads and human-interest sob stuff are always highly visible.
City on an upswing? Here's a story about some colorful local business/resident of 40 years who cannot pay his now tripled rent and is being driven out to make way for a Starbucks and a 'Social Enterprise Incubator'. Artists are hunted down and slain by yuppies, etc, etc.
City on a downswing? Here's an abandoned building, a business going out of business, and a kid who got shot by crack dealers or something, complete with a quote from Police HQ about how terrible budget cuts are for the cops' toy fund.
People don't say(or even necessarily believe) in as many words that "I desire stasis forever and a statistically perfect equilibrium"; but deviations can be painful in quite visible ways for some, even as they are exciting for others.
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city.
Now they are complaining that the affluent people are moving back in.
I wish they'd make up their mind.
Do they want the upper/middle incomes to leave the city, or stay in the city? Either way, it appears they will wine about it.
There are arguably several things at play here:
Most simply, there isn't a single 'they', so 'they' are always going to sound kind of incoherent, since 'they' are a number of distinct groups with distinct interests.
In addition, it is quite likely that 'they' are complaining because what 'they' really want is a permanent settlement at some equilibrium point between squalor and gentrification, where the really scary crime and abandoned buildings are gone; but the local families who go way back, artistists, and (less noisy) students haven't been entirely driven out by the gentrification that they were the shock troops for. Unfortunately for 'them' that equilibrium point simply may not be a stable one. If it isn't, you'll see a constant ebb and flow, overshoot/undershoot, and a constant sense of dissatisfaction(since, even if things are oscillating around the ideal point, they'll still appear to be trending the wrong way a considerable portion of the time...)
The Eiffel Tower is also probably not the best example because French 'IP' law is rather odd by American standards. They take their 'moral rights' stuff seriously.
It isn't my bubble, it's my empirical observation(as a smirking atheist no less). Scientists, as a population, are certainly less religious(and less enthused with the cruder fundamentalisms when they are religious) than the population at large; but there exist plenty of religious scientists who have productive careers and plenty of other, also productive, scientists who successfully entertain some crackpot theory or other while also doing real work.
How, exactly, humans handle these curious feats of compartmentalization is an interesting question, into which I have no useful insight whatsoever; but that they can and (sometimes) do is simply a matter of historical fact.
Now that it doesn't actually have to not-burn-up-on-reentry or anything, a modestly talented model aircraft hobbyist could probably have it looking good as new in a weekend.
I suspect that, had they had to get that wingtip flight rated again, the bill might have come in considerably higher...
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If only there were some sort of body of legal precedent that allowed two parties to write down the salient details of an agreement in such a fashion as to make it reasonably binding...
Snark aside, the only 'right' answer to this question is the one that was agreed upon when the price was named. Longer support contract = more expensive. Shorter = cheaper. Option to pay per-hour or per-incident thereafter, and for how long thereafter, also preferably specified.
Some people make a business of charging crazy money, backed by the assurance that they'll still be there to hold your hand in 20 years. Some people sell you a box for $20 and tell you that they hope it doesn't break your computer. Certain consumer protection laws on the low end aside, any support term is a valid offering, supposing that it is priced properly.
Oh, I can't blame HP at all for being upset. My point about the 'very awkward' bit is that HP is, in a sense, both a vendor to highly desireable customers and in the position of being a squeezable 'customer' themselves.
HP likely makes a tidy profit on every IA64 box they ship, certainly compared to the x86 stuff; but their business is very much at the mercy of Intel and the small number of enterprise software vendors who still supply IA64 products and support. Even in the best case, where all the companies that HP depends on are also making out quite well on the IA64 customers, there may still come a time when, because some companies' margins in that market shrink faster than others, certain important companies will bail and leave HP holding the bag.
Worst case, one or more of the other vendors view the IA64 market as actively worth killing(as Oracle seems to here) or wish to take advantage of HP having a greater dependence on it than they do(as may have been the case with Intel's demand for development cash).
When you have a group of locked-in customers, you want to be their vendor, not just one of their vendors who is also a locked-in customer of some of the other vendors...
Thankfully,. there is a much more polite term for 'slow and works poorly under clouds'.
Just use the phrase "High Altitude and Long Endurance(HALE) Platform", slap an optics module into the nose, and watch the spooks line up to wave cash in your face...
Honestly, WebOS still stacks up pretty well(except for application availability obviously) with Android despite having stagnated while Google was sprinting for quite a few months now. I'm not sufficiently familiar with iOS to comment on that.
Ok, new plan. Figure out a way to get HP to purchase IKEA.
Let's put it this way: Were that to happen, Ikea furniture would stop being named $NORDIC_NONSENSE_WORD$ $SIMPLE DESCRIPTION OF PURPOSE$ and start having names sufficiently complex to be described in 20 pages of tables(seriously, pages 1-2 through 1-21, inclusive)...
I can only assume that Itanium is at the (very awkward) 'nobody gives a damn, except for a few very-deep-pocketed legacy customers who are willing to pay crazy money to avoid migrating' stage....
When the system breaks, at least getting connected to tech support in India won't seem like such a bad thing...
On the plus side, if the caffeine is the causative agent, supplementation would be pretty easy.
The one positive side effect of the (otherwise dreadful) fad for leaching perfectly good caffeine out of wholesome caffeinated goods is that it creates a supply of the relatively pure stuff that can be added to things deprived by nature of their rightful share...
Apparently the answer is 'yes'; but are you really allowed to pout like a spoiled child who just lost a little-league game when you are on the board of a multibillion dollar multinational corporation? Even the anodyne say-nothing drivel issued by professional PR flacks is less obnoxious, and something cleverer would sound less horribly self-pitying.
Truly, drugs are nature's hugs.(and parasitic filarial nematodes are nature's psycho abusive stepparents...)
Better ping; but more packet fragmentation.
Canada, Canada... I don't think that we properly understand each other.
It's not about the money anymore, it's too late for your damn sales figures. It's about respect.
You always were one of our top earners, kid; but that wasn't good enough for you. You had to go mouthing off against the MAFIAA, against the family...
Option #4: An obscure RFC describing the implementation of TCP/IP on a 5.56x45 'jumbo frame' physical layer is drafted.
Are you suggesting that power should be accompanied by responsibility?
Why do you hate America, you godless communist?
The surprising thing is not that Social 2.0 Mobile Enterprise BuzzCloud App-centric bullshit is shoving everything that it can get its sticky little fingers on to every 3rd party with questionable security and a dire privacy policy that it can find; but that they seem to be so incompetent at it.
Exfiltrating the data in the clear is certainly easy enough(luckily 'mobile' frequently means 'even if I were competent enough, my crypto-crippled appliance wouldn't let me control outbound traffic anyway') but it makes it likely that, sooner or later, somebody is going to sniff some packets at their router and we'll get a little story about exactly how much exfiltration your ghastly little app is doing.
It's like corruption. Even when everybody knows that it is happening, it is still considered crass to get caught with your hand in the cookie jar. You are supposed to pretend to care.
This sort of vulnerability is exactly why I avoid storing passwords in hash form. I always store passwords in plain text form. It's much more secure.
Y'know what fools the black-hats every time? Store the passwords in plaintext; but require all users to create a password consisting of exactly 64 hexadecimal characters... Even better, we all know that users hate security, so more user hatred = more secure. And this system is Super Secure.
Purely for the lulz alone, I would have loved to been in the position to distribute a faked, nonfunctional, version of that CRL update, signed with the very certificate that it was supposed to be revoking...
Haven't you always wanted to forge closer ties with the dynamic marketing and legal-arbitrage entrepreneurs at the Russian Business Network? Now, LinkedIn is proud to announce your exciting, and mandatory, chance to do just that!
Given that their 'APIs are intrinsically copyrighted, even if implementations are entirely distinct' theory was both novel and potentially wildly dangerous to the entire software industry, I say fuck 'em.
If you are on a network that already features Flame, you should probably just wipe and reinstall now.
Otherwise, that security update was probably Microsoft's emergency blacklisting of the signing keys that were used to make the Flame components pass as MS-signed software...
No, I don't think that they are that stupid.
My point is that, inevitably those oscillations hurt some people in visible ways. There are also positive effects; but it bleeds, it leads and human-interest sob stuff are always highly visible.
City on an upswing? Here's a story about some colorful local business/resident of 40 years who cannot pay his now tripled rent and is being driven out to make way for a Starbucks and a 'Social Enterprise Incubator'. Artists are hunted down and slain by yuppies, etc, etc.
City on a downswing? Here's an abandoned building, a business going out of business, and a kid who got shot by crack dealers or something, complete with a quote from Police HQ about how terrible budget cuts are for the cops' toy fund.
People don't say(or even necessarily believe) in as many words that "I desire stasis forever and a statistically perfect equilibrium"; but deviations can be painful in quite visible ways for some, even as they are exciting for others.
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city.
Now they are complaining that the affluent people are moving back in. I wish they'd make up their mind. Do they want the upper/middle incomes to leave the city, or stay in the city? Either way, it appears they will wine about it.
There are arguably several things at play here:
Most simply, there isn't a single 'they', so 'they' are always going to sound kind of incoherent, since 'they' are a number of distinct groups with distinct interests.
In addition, it is quite likely that 'they' are complaining because what 'they' really want is a permanent settlement at some equilibrium point between squalor and gentrification, where the really scary crime and abandoned buildings are gone; but the local families who go way back, artistists, and (less noisy) students haven't been entirely driven out by the gentrification that they were the shock troops for. Unfortunately for 'them' that equilibrium point simply may not be a stable one. If it isn't, you'll see a constant ebb and flow, overshoot/undershoot, and a constant sense of dissatisfaction(since, even if things are oscillating around the ideal point, they'll still appear to be trending the wrong way a considerable portion of the time...)
The Eiffel Tower is also probably not the best example because French 'IP' law is rather odd by American standards. They take their 'moral rights' stuff seriously.
It isn't my bubble, it's my empirical observation(as a smirking atheist no less). Scientists, as a population, are certainly less religious(and less enthused with the cruder fundamentalisms when they are religious) than the population at large; but there exist plenty of religious scientists who have productive careers and plenty of other, also productive, scientists who successfully entertain some crackpot theory or other while also doing real work.
How, exactly, humans handle these curious feats of compartmentalization is an interesting question, into which I have no useful insight whatsoever; but that they can and (sometimes) do is simply a matter of historical fact.
Now that it doesn't actually have to not-burn-up-on-reentry or anything, a modestly talented model aircraft hobbyist could probably have it looking good as new in a weekend.
I suspect that, had they had to get that wingtip flight rated again, the bill might have come in considerably higher...