My favorite is printers. Ink cartridges for my printer (Epson C82) cost $57.94 for a full set according to Amazon. A brand new C82 costs $58.00, often on sale for cheaper in retail stores, and comes with a full set of ink cartridges. I could maybe understand a cordless phone battery vs. the cordless phone (economy of scale and all) but printers just baffle me.
I recently switched over to Ubuntu for my desktop machine for the same reason I take my car to a mechanic if it breaks down. I've used Debian/Gentoo/RedHat/Caldera and several other flavors of Linux, but in Ubuntu it feels like I get that perfect balance of power and ease of use. Run the installer, and you have a fully functional desktop, office suite, and other desktop apps in a few minutes. A few apt-get commands and you have a dev environment and tool-chain. Nothing prevents you from getting the latest cvs checkout of the new xgl server and compiz and installing it, but you aren't forced to dig through config files or huge arcane command line menu systems.
For reference, I used to do all the work on my own car until I found better ways to use my time. Configuring Debian might be a good use of your time if you are learning to become a network admin or linux dev, but there's a whole world of people out there that have better things to do than learn about apt-get or devfs.
The solution to supporting Quickbooks is not an OSS alternative to it, at least today. Quickbooks has mostly evolved in to a subscription plan software, where you pay annual fees for new versions as the old versions go unsupported very quickly, payroll and tax information updates, support calls, etc. Companies invest a lot of time in to getting everything working in Quickbooks, purchasing or developing add-ons specific to their industry or company, and pouring sunk costs in to the subscription plan. The value of software is not your userbase, but the cost to your userbase to switch to a competitor.
There are several competitors to Quickbooks out there, but due to successful advertising and fear of using a lesser known piece of software (will my accountant be familiar with it? will data entry clerks have more trouble using it?) has given Intuit a good chunk of the market, even though I wouldn't say it's technically superior to the competitors in any aspect.
Re:Just wait until it gets "upgraded" by users
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Looks like I don't get the opportunity to try it:-\, but I am looking for a nice open source (cross-platform) VoIP solution.
Just wait until it gets "upgraded" by users
on
AMD Subpoenas Skype
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· Score: 1
If the whole thing is only relying on the return from an API call, just wait until the program gets modified by someone so the conditional jump becomes a JMP (or the API is hooked to pretend to be an Intel processor) and it works on any processor. If they are using architecture-specific assembly for the realtime encoding/decoding it may be a poorly implemented program, but they have a shred of a case. If it works fine on AMD X2s or other sufficiently fast processors, I'd say the cover is blown.
On big campuses most of the IT infrastructure design and/or management has been outsourced and may rely heavily on external consultants from Cisco, Oracle, etc. If any security holes are found it can become a huge political deal that everyone will be trying to sweep under the carpet.
Yes, it is legal to decompile the software. What you do with the information or what modifications you make to the software afterwards change the legal implications and require a team of lawyers to interpret.
Most document editors have an Autosave feature that saves open documents every couple minutes or so to protect against system failures. An AJAX application can save as often as every keystroke if you like, or to combat bandwidth concerns every other sentence would be perfectly fine. The only "instability" you've pointed to is the aggressive memory allocation system in Firefox, that you can turn off if your browsing habits are different than most people. Storing a back/forward page cache doesn't make the platform more stable, it just makes it faster at the expense of more RAM usage. And can you point out an AJAX application that crashes IE or Firefox? And even when worst comes to worst, you have the redundancy of AJAX applications syncing early and often with the server to resume exactly where you were when you log back in.
The backend most likely will never run on Windows, but last I recall the frontend was capable of compiling on Windows given the right environment setup (the UI is QT based, so you need to compile against QT for Windows). Not sure if there are binaries or if this is even the case anymore, I haven't been on the mailing list for over a year.
Because people do own $8M homes. You could ask the user to confirm the entry any time a home is +-2 standard deviations, but having to confirm a dialog every 20 entries would be tedious and cause users to blindly click through it each time. +-3 std. devs. might not catch errors like this.
Re:Undead Stratholme (with your Boss)
on
WoW the Next "Golf"?
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· Score: 4, Funny
What we need to do is five-man the Baron
I'm glad I play WoW and can understand that, otherwise the connotations could have been awful.
Spam wouldnt be profitable if no one bought any products that it advertises
That's a common myth about spam. Spam will always be profitable as long as you can convince a single client (penis enlargement or Viagra reseller) that it will be a successful marketing campaign for a minimal cost. If 10 billion e-mails go out, and 100 click-throughs are generated (95 of which may have been accidental) along with 0 sales, you can say "I drove 100 visitors to your site, if you had a 1:33 conversion ratio you would have made three sales and had a profitable day. Better work on your website." There's also the advertising concept of mindshare; fill the inboxes with more Cialis ads than Viagra so the next time someone decides to shop around online for that type of product you already eliminated half the competition.
Either that or he has an axe to grind with Microsoft, or has campaign supporters that have a vested interest in seeing ODF deployed across a whole state.
Disclaimer: No factual basis to this postulation whatsoever, but I didn't see any facts in the parent post either.
It's also possible that kids who enjoy street racing might be fond of a street racing video game, instead of two video game fanatics that decided to start street racing after the latest Gran Turismo came out.
Ajax violates this page metaphor, which has some usability gurus in minor fits of apoplexia, Jakob Nielsen included.
AJAX doesn't have to violate the page metaphor, and I actually haven't seen any real examples of people destroying usability like people are running around yelling about. Yes it would be _possible_ to replace all navigation in your site with AJAX just as people have replaced all the navigation in their sites with a Flash menu, but the technology doesn't force you to improperly use it. If your front page has a stock ticker that dynamically updates, is that breaking usability? Also there are certain places you don't want the user to be able to bookmark, like the third page in a five page form they are filling out. The user thinks "Hey I'll just bookmark here and finish this later". Instead you could save the state of everything entered so far and return back to the position they left off at a later point with cookies, and your web app actually knows what's going on. All five pages of the form have the same url (http://www.mysite.com/survey/) so there is no confusion.
Because the flash plug-in would never do something like open a browser hole for popup windows, or not have a binary available for your specific architecture? Non-technical people care about the lack of source code, they just don't directly realize it and instead express it in terms of "that software installs spyware on my machine", "it won't run on my mac", "i lost my product key", etc etc.
Sounds like you should become an investor then, if you have knowledge of what is best for the company beyond what all of those Google shareholders know.
He then asks: "Well, if the website is down, can I still email them?"
If you send an e-mail to user@domain.com and the server hosting domain.com is down, after a certain length of time won't the e-mail bounce back in to your mailbox? Seems like a valid question to me, unless of course they were trying to e-mail user@hotmail.com.
Do you have any sources to cite for the claim that strong encryption is illegal in the US? I hope all these companies aren't breaking the law by offering off-site encrypted storage: http://www.google.com/search?q=encrypted+remote+ba ckup
You might be confusing this with the US restrictions on exporting binary software that supports strong cryptography?
The idea of the 11 billion dollar settlement is they were monetarily harmed, so they are getting compensation but now all that compensation is being written off as bad debt, so there is a reportable loss. The court case took previously intangible damages (the damage from the spammer's activity) and put a tangible dollar figure to it that can go on the books. Of course part of the settlement is punitive damages, but IANAL or a CPA so I can't say for sure how to account for that. If you were to chalk up the spammer's damages to theft loss (just as an example) it would be -11B theft loss + 11B court proceedings -11B bad debts, also figuring in how much of the award was punitive damages that you can't claim as part of the original -11B theft loss.
Not only that, but this company will never pay taxes again for the rest of its existence. Report 11 billion income on the books, cancel the loan and write off 11 billion to bad debt and carry that forward as a loss eternally. The company now permanently operates in the red even though they (might) pull a profit every year, and they can 1099 the guy to screw him over with a non-bankruptable debt to the IRS that will seize his assets, garnish up to 25% of his wages and destroy his credit until he's dead.
I hope no one is on a long-term prepaid subscription for SWG. Halfway through a patch is issued that makes it impossible for you to play, do you get a refund?
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My favorite is printers. Ink cartridges for my printer (Epson C82) cost $57.94 for a full set according to Amazon. A brand new C82 costs $58.00, often on sale for cheaper in retail stores, and comes with a full set of ink cartridges. I could maybe understand a cordless phone battery vs. the cordless phone (economy of scale and all) but printers just baffle me.
I recently switched over to Ubuntu for my desktop machine for the same reason I take my car to a mechanic if it breaks down. I've used Debian/Gentoo/RedHat/Caldera and several other flavors of Linux, but in Ubuntu it feels like I get that perfect balance of power and ease of use. Run the installer, and you have a fully functional desktop, office suite, and other desktop apps in a few minutes. A few apt-get commands and you have a dev environment and tool-chain. Nothing prevents you from getting the latest cvs checkout of the new xgl server and compiz and installing it, but you aren't forced to dig through config files or huge arcane command line menu systems.
For reference, I used to do all the work on my own car until I found better ways to use my time. Configuring Debian might be a good use of your time if you are learning to become a network admin or linux dev, but there's a whole world of people out there that have better things to do than learn about apt-get or devfs.
The solution to supporting Quickbooks is not an OSS alternative to it, at least today. Quickbooks has mostly evolved in to a subscription plan software, where you pay annual fees for new versions as the old versions go unsupported very quickly, payroll and tax information updates, support calls, etc. Companies invest a lot of time in to getting everything working in Quickbooks, purchasing or developing add-ons specific to their industry or company, and pouring sunk costs in to the subscription plan. The value of software is not your userbase, but the cost to your userbase to switch to a competitor.
There are several competitors to Quickbooks out there, but due to successful advertising and fear of using a lesser known piece of software (will my accountant be familiar with it? will data entry clerks have more trouble using it?) has given Intuit a good chunk of the market, even though I wouldn't say it's technically superior to the competitors in any aspect.
I think Wal-Mart proved this theory.
Forbidden
:-\, but I am looking for a nice open source (cross-platform) VoIP solution.
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Looks like I don't get the opportunity to try it
If the whole thing is only relying on the return from an API call, just wait until the program gets modified by someone so the conditional jump becomes a JMP (or the API is hooked to pretend to be an Intel processor) and it works on any processor. If they are using architecture-specific assembly for the realtime encoding/decoding it may be a poorly implemented program, but they have a shred of a case. If it works fine on AMD X2s or other sufficiently fast processors, I'd say the cover is blown.
On big campuses most of the IT infrastructure design and/or management has been outsourced and may rely heavily on external consultants from Cisco, Oracle, etc. If any security holes are found it can become a huge political deal that everyone will be trying to sweep under the carpet.
Yes, it is legal to decompile the software. What you do with the information or what modifications you make to the software afterwards change the legal implications and require a team of lawyers to interpret.
Most document editors have an Autosave feature that saves open documents every couple minutes or so to protect against system failures. An AJAX application can save as often as every keystroke if you like, or to combat bandwidth concerns every other sentence would be perfectly fine. The only "instability" you've pointed to is the aggressive memory allocation system in Firefox, that you can turn off if your browsing habits are different than most people. Storing a back/forward page cache doesn't make the platform more stable, it just makes it faster at the expense of more RAM usage. And can you point out an AJAX application that crashes IE or Firefox? And even when worst comes to worst, you have the redundancy of AJAX applications syncing early and often with the server to resume exactly where you were when you log back in.
The backend most likely will never run on Windows, but last I recall the frontend was capable of compiling on Windows given the right environment setup (the UI is QT based, so you need to compile against QT for Windows). Not sure if there are binaries or if this is even the case anymore, I haven't been on the mailing list for over a year.
Because people do own $8M homes. You could ask the user to confirm the entry any time a home is +-2 standard deviations, but having to confirm a dialog every 20 entries would be tedious and cause users to blindly click through it each time. +-3 std. devs. might not catch errors like this.
What we need to do is five-man the Baron
I'm glad I play WoW and can understand that, otherwise the connotations could have been awful.
He'd only be blind in one eye, and it would be a great excuse to wear an eyepatch with a skull and crossbones.
Spam wouldnt be profitable if no one bought any products that it advertises
That's a common myth about spam. Spam will always be profitable as long as you can convince a single client (penis enlargement or Viagra reseller) that it will be a successful marketing campaign for a minimal cost. If 10 billion e-mails go out, and 100 click-throughs are generated (95 of which may have been accidental) along with 0 sales, you can say "I drove 100 visitors to your site, if you had a 1:33 conversion ratio you would have made three sales and had a profitable day. Better work on your website." There's also the advertising concept of mindshare; fill the inboxes with more Cialis ads than Viagra so the next time someone decides to shop around online for that type of product you already eliminated half the competition.
Somewhat pedantic, but homes in a mild climate ideal for soy crops are more efficiently heated with an electric heat pump than an oil furnace.
Either that or he has an axe to grind with Microsoft, or has campaign supporters that have a vested interest in seeing ODF deployed across a whole state.
Disclaimer: No factual basis to this postulation whatsoever, but I didn't see any facts in the parent post either.
It's also possible that kids who enjoy street racing might be fond of a street racing video game, instead of two video game fanatics that decided to start street racing after the latest Gran Turismo came out.
Ajax violates this page metaphor, which has some usability gurus in minor fits of apoplexia, Jakob Nielsen included.
AJAX doesn't have to violate the page metaphor, and I actually haven't seen any real examples of people destroying usability like people are running around yelling about. Yes it would be _possible_ to replace all navigation in your site with AJAX just as people have replaced all the navigation in their sites with a Flash menu, but the technology doesn't force you to improperly use it. If your front page has a stock ticker that dynamically updates, is that breaking usability? Also there are certain places you don't want the user to be able to bookmark, like the third page in a five page form they are filling out. The user thinks "Hey I'll just bookmark here and finish this later". Instead you could save the state of everything entered so far and return back to the position they left off at a later point with cookies, and your web app actually knows what's going on. All five pages of the form have the same url (http://www.mysite.com/survey/) so there is no confusion.
Because the flash plug-in would never do something like open a browser hole for popup windows, or not have a binary available for your specific architecture? Non-technical people care about the lack of source code, they just don't directly realize it and instead express it in terms of "that software installs spyware on my machine", "it won't run on my mac", "i lost my product key", etc etc.
Sounds like you should become an investor then, if you have knowledge of what is best for the company beyond what all of those Google shareholders know.
He then asks: "Well, if the website is down, can I still email them?"
If you send an e-mail to user@domain.com and the server hosting domain.com is down, after a certain length of time won't the e-mail bounce back in to your mailbox? Seems like a valid question to me, unless of course they were trying to e-mail user@hotmail.com.
Do you have any sources to cite for the claim that strong encryption is illegal in the US? I hope all these companies aren't breaking the law by offering off-site encrypted storage: http://www.google.com/search?q=encrypted+remote+ba ckup
You might be confusing this with the US restrictions on exporting binary software that supports strong cryptography?
The idea of the 11 billion dollar settlement is they were monetarily harmed, so they are getting compensation but now all that compensation is being written off as bad debt, so there is a reportable loss. The court case took previously intangible damages (the damage from the spammer's activity) and put a tangible dollar figure to it that can go on the books. Of course part of the settlement is punitive damages, but IANAL or a CPA so I can't say for sure how to account for that. If you were to chalk up the spammer's damages to theft loss (just as an example) it would be -11B theft loss + 11B court proceedings -11B bad debts, also figuring in how much of the award was punitive damages that you can't claim as part of the original -11B theft loss.
Not only that, but this company will never pay taxes again for the rest of its existence. Report 11 billion income on the books, cancel the loan and write off 11 billion to bad debt and carry that forward as a loss eternally. The company now permanently operates in the red even though they (might) pull a profit every year, and they can 1099 the guy to screw him over with a non-bankruptable debt to the IRS that will seize his assets, garnish up to 25% of his wages and destroy his credit until he's dead.
I hope no one is on a long-term prepaid subscription for SWG. Halfway through a patch is issued that makes it impossible for you to play, do you get a refund?