Let us take a fictional model as an example. We'll call it the laser jet 200.
We have: Laser jet 200: plain printer. Laser jet 200n: exactly the same as the 200 but with inbuilt networking. Only it's sold as a separate model, which means you need to find space in the warehouse for two almost identical pritnters. Laser jet 200dn: exactly the same as the 200n but comes with the optional duplex unit pre-fitted. Three almost identical printers in the warehouse. Laser jet 200dtn: as dn but with the optional extra paper tray in the box. Four almos identical printers in the warehouse. By now, inventory's a pig. What if you suddenly find nobody wants the dtn model but the dn model sells like hot cakes? You have a warehouse full of printers that nobody wants and the aggravating thing is each printer is 5 minutes work away from being turned into one everybody wants. Laser jet 200 MFP: printer is identical to the 200 but a scanner is bolted on top to make it a multi function unit. Laser jet 200 MFP(f): Now they've fitted a modem to give it fax capabilities. Laser jet 200 MFP(f) Special Edition: A 200 dtn with scanner unit and modem fitted at the factory.
Repeat for a printer aimed at small workgroups, larger workgroups and big departments. Repeat again for colour printers aimed at groups of varying size.
This is technically true. However, I haven't forgotten the hours it took me to hand-edit my XFree86.conf long after it had become unnecessary to do so for single-monitor configurations.
When I finally got a configuration I was happy with, I found that I had to be very careful to keep hold of that configuration file no matter what else I did - whether it was upgrading or moving to a different distribution altogether. It was the only way to be sure I could get it to work again.
It was having to go through this same dance every time I wanted to use a new peripheral that drove me away from desktop linux. Granted, most of those issues have long since evaporated - but it's disappointing to learn that some still exist.
That's a very good point - systems that take a.doc file and automatically put it into a database while extracting data from it for search purposes are endemic in the recruitment industry and in HR. If those systems haven't been updated to support.docx - while it's tempting to say "they should update them then!" that's not really the sort of thing a prospective candidate is in a very strong position to argue.
There are upgrades that rapidly become difficult to live without (eg. when Microsoft were changing their file format subtly with every version of Office up to '97), there are upgrades that you'd be well advised not to ignore (eg. when an old piece of software is a piece of chicken wire security wise and the developers decide they're not going to patch any more holes that show up in it), there are vertical markets where they don't force you to upgrade but they jack up the price of support for the older version as an encouragement.
But causing features to evaporate from under you with about a week's notice and you being utterly powerless to do anything about it is pretty rare. Except, that is, when it's a web application. (Particularly a web application from Google).
There is no such concept as "create documents in MS Office formats" in Google Docs; your sentence doesn't make any sense. You create a document or a spreadsheet, give it a name and that's it - exactly how or where it's saved isn't something you as the user worry about.
It only becomes necessary to worry about it when you need to get the document out of Google Docs and give it to someone else.
This isn't necessarily the end of the world because, as Google have pointed out, there is a compatibility pack available from Microsoft which allows older versions of Office to open.docx files.
There is, however, one minor issue which appears to have entirely gone over Google's head. The only time anyone's likely to use this export facility is when you're sending the document to someone outside your company and whose computers you have precisely zero control or influence over. If they don't have the compatibility pack installed, the generally accepted polite thing to do is re-send in a format they can open. It is not to ask to speak to their IT department and tell those guys how to do their job.
You could teach the basics of assembler and possibly even processor design on an ARM quite happily. You certainly **wouldn't** want to teach GPU design, but that's the part that's really closed off.
Seriously, his only objection is "the hardware itself is closed"?
This is intended to be sold into schools, not top-end engineering facilities. Nobody's going to design the next ARM killer at the age of 15. They're going to be getting the idea of breaking problems down into their component parts and developing structured solutions to them. For which this is perfect.
Perhaps the 230V CFL bulbs in Europe warm up more quickly? I've never seen a bulb as bad as you describe, and I've had various fittings with energy savers in for years.
I refer the honourable gentleman to the ITIL guidelines which cover this sort of thing. In brief: developers do not even get access to live systems, much less carry out updates on them.
(Much of this is based on somewhat rusty memories; please correct any mistakes I've made)
Developers package their applications according to an agreed process and hand the packaged application over to an operations team whose job it is to update the live systems.
This update must not be acted upon unless and until the update has been carried out successfully in on a test environment - which is again separate to the developers' environment and is meant to mimic the live environment as closely as possible. ("Successfully" in this case means it installs cleanly and the updated version passes an agreed set of tests, including user acceptance tests). Ideally you'd have a separate test team who vouch for the build.
Yes it's slow and cumbersome. But it's not intended to be quick, it's intended to ensure that the IT department is not at home to Mr. Cock Up.
Yes, it updates over the air (and always has). BUT phones that are abandoned in terms of updates while they're still in contract are endemic in the Android world - there's dozens of Android handsets but a lot of them will be lucky to see a single major upgrade over their lifetime. The best you can do is:
- Choose a phone that hasn't already obviously been abandoned from a manufacturer that has a good history of providing updates.
OR
- Root the thing, unlock the bootloader where necessary and install Cyanogen. Watch your warranty evaporate as you do this.
Taking this approach is well and good if you're an individual who wants a photo as a souvenir.
If you're a textbook publisher and you want well lit, high quality photos you can include in a textbook - and you're going to need hundreds of such photos because it's an art history book - you realistically have two choices:
- Hire a couple of photographers (Eeeks! Expensive)
- Send them to every museum you can think of that has works that are worth photographing.
- Ask them to take photos as discreetly as possible. With a couple of studio flashes, a good quality lens, an SLR and a tripod. And keep going back when they inevitably get kicked out until they've built up enough photographs.
- In the case of sculptures, remove them from their glass cases and spend ages arranging the lighting so the whole thing appears clearly without getting thrown out and/or arrested.
OR
- Buy photographs that the museum has already got at the fee the museum wants, on the understanding that the photographs will go into a printed book for students to look at.
I'd say the second one is a lot cheaper, and a lot less likely to guarantee you'll never work with a museum again.
Bit of a shame you're an AC and so many won't see what you've said - but you're absolutely right. As soon as you start to run the business on web-based applications, you find you have to run your IT to the beat of someone else's drum.
Things start to get messy when one application will only work in IE 8 or below (and not firefox/chrome) and another won't work in any version of IE below 9. Though I suppose you could always put an icon on the desktop that fires up Chrome for just a specific application.
Depends on the size of the business. You can't do that (roll out a standard image) without buying a separate license for Windows, which means that it's pretty much limited to larger businesses. Small businesses tend to take what the computer comes with.
I wonder if you could modify something originally intended for a car?
Newer aftermarket stereos often have aux input, a USB port for flash sticks and sometimes you'll find they've already paid Apple for iPod connectivity so you wouldn't have to. You can even find models with remote control support, though if you want to use existing remote controls I think you'll have to reverse engineer how the manufacturer's done it and make your own adaptor. This should be perfectly doable, however, as there's an existing industry that does exactly this so the steering-wheel remote controls you find built into many modern cars can be adapted to function with the aftermarket head unit. You might even be able to find a company that'll work with you to do the job just for the fun of it.
They're dead easy to wire in - they come with a fairly straightforward loom already there and there's a range of plugs on the market so you could build your own loom, fit a standard plug to it and when the manufacturer discontinues the stereo, put in another one that's close enough with minimal extra modification. They're already in a steel case so I don't imagine shielding will be a big deal.
They're also cheap enough that you should be able to pick something suitable up for a fifth, maybe even a tenth of the obsolete units you don't like.
The only thing I'm not sure about is getting FAA certification...
There are four things at issue that need to be dealt with:
1. A Linux distribution that is a doddle to set up and manage and comes with tools to manage everything from a single PC to ten thousand assorted PCs and laptops. "Boot everything off the network" fails horribly when you're dealing with laptops that are only sporadically connected to the network; cfengine and puppet are noble ideas but they're designed by people who only have the vaguest idea of how GPOs in Active Directory are used (clue: virtually every conceivable thing you could ever want to configure in Windows can be set up by ticking the appropriate box and assigning the result of this to a group of users or PCs. Whether you like it or not, there's an entire army of Windows admins out there who can't or won't deal with anything drastically different from this and "I can set this up for your company and the licensing is cheaper. But if I get run over by a bus, there's probably only about two other people in this town who can help you." is an incredibly poor selling point).
2. A means of dealing with existing Windows-only software. Virtualising this onto a genuine Windows system is clearly the way to go; the only question is do you run it on the host PC or from a server in a datacenter somewhere?
3. A sensible way to deal with the enormous number of organisations that provide solutions to narrowly defined problems that assume a Windows-based PC sits on the person's desk. There's an enormous number of these out there, they mostly deal with relatively small things and each on their own is probably of little consequence - but you add it all up and it's a death by a thousand cuts.
4. A whacking great dose of humility. Nobody buys a computer because they want a big box on their desk that churns out indecipherable error messages, they buy it to carry out a task. It's a tool. And every time it gets in the way of carrying out their task and instead churns out an indecipherable error message - or worse, doesn't churn out any error message but just sits there not doing the task - it's a Problem and must be seen as such.
Sure, you could (on Unix at least) limit yourself to encrypting/tmp,/home,/var (in case some dozy app developer decided to write passwords out to a logfile), / (in case some dozy application requires a plaintext password in/etc) and the swap partition. But by this point you may as well encrypt the lot and have done with.
Depending on the precise version of OS X, the shell environment mixes & matches certain BSD and GNU utilities. grep(1) in versions prior to Mountain Lion is GNU; gzip(1) is the GNU version as opposed to the GNU-compatible BSD version.
As regards developer tools, make(1) is GNU but cc(1) is Clang.
One of the biggest reasons for having lots of children is because so many die in infancy.
Something similar was the case in the Western world as recently as the late 19th century - while it may be difficult to dig out reliable records, things like old family bibles are a great way to learn about children who only lived maybe a couple of years. If your family has anything like this, you might be surprised how many aunts and uncles you would have if they'd all survived.
Slashdot Mirror
Let us take a fictional model as an example. We'll call it the laser jet 200.
We have:
Laser jet 200: plain printer.
Laser jet 200n: exactly the same as the 200 but with inbuilt networking. Only it's sold as a separate model, which means you need to find space in the warehouse for two almost identical pritnters.
Laser jet 200dn: exactly the same as the 200n but comes with the optional duplex unit pre-fitted. Three almost identical printers in the warehouse.
Laser jet 200dtn: as dn but with the optional extra paper tray in the box. Four almos identical printers in the warehouse. By now, inventory's a pig. What if you suddenly find nobody wants the dtn model but the dn model sells like hot cakes? You have a warehouse full of printers that nobody wants and the aggravating thing is each printer is 5 minutes work away from being turned into one everybody wants.
Laser jet 200 MFP: printer is identical to the 200 but a scanner is bolted on top to make it a multi function unit.
Laser jet 200 MFP(f): Now they've fitted a modem to give it fax capabilities.
Laser jet 200 MFP(f) Special Edition: A 200 dtn with scanner unit and modem fitted at the factory.
Repeat for a printer aimed at small workgroups, larger workgroups and big departments. Repeat again for colour printers aimed at groups of varying size.
Not necessarily a problem. Most web-based email systems put the public IP address of the client PC that sent the email in the headers somewhere.
You don't need to go that far.
It was pretty obvious the stalker was known to his victim. If he sent an email from home, the IP address of their router would be in the headers.
If there was an accurate entry in a geo IP database, that gives you the town.
Now, if you don't live anywhere near that town but you have a friend who does - sounds like a hell of a coincidence.
Who said EA had packaged an engine update with this?
As it stands it's a story of "justice system gone mad".
Take away the bit about the guy having a girlfriend, and it's "filthy pervert let out of prison early by soft judge".
I can't see the Daily Mail passing up an opportunity to run the latter story, which would suggest that the part about the girlfriend at least is true.
This is technically true. However, I haven't forgotten the hours it took me to hand-edit my XFree86.conf long after it had become unnecessary to do so for single-monitor configurations.
When I finally got a configuration I was happy with, I found that I had to be very careful to keep hold of that configuration file no matter what else I did - whether it was upgrading or moving to a different distribution altogether. It was the only way to be sure I could get it to work again.
It was having to go through this same dance every time I wanted to use a new peripheral that drove me away from desktop linux. Granted, most of those issues have long since evaporated - but it's disappointing to learn that some still exist.
That's a very good point - systems that take a .doc file and automatically put it into a database while extracting data from it for search purposes are endemic in the recruitment industry and in HR. If those systems haven't been updated to support .docx - while it's tempting to say "they should update them then!" that's not really the sort of thing a prospective candidate is in a very strong position to argue.
It's actually remarkably rare.
There are upgrades that rapidly become difficult to live without (eg. when Microsoft were changing their file format subtly with every version of Office up to '97), there are upgrades that you'd be well advised not to ignore (eg. when an old piece of software is a piece of chicken wire security wise and the developers decide they're not going to patch any more holes that show up in it), there are vertical markets where they don't force you to upgrade but they jack up the price of support for the older version as an encouragement.
But causing features to evaporate from under you with about a week's notice and you being utterly powerless to do anything about it is pretty rare. Except, that is, when it's a web application. (Particularly a web application from Google).
Have you ever used Google Docs?
There is no such concept as "create documents in MS Office formats" in Google Docs; your sentence doesn't make any sense. You create a document or a spreadsheet, give it a name and that's it - exactly how or where it's saved isn't something you as the user worry about.
It only becomes necessary to worry about it when you need to get the document out of Google Docs and give it to someone else.
This isn't necessarily the end of the world because, as Google have pointed out, there is a compatibility pack available from Microsoft which allows older versions of Office to open .docx files.
There is, however, one minor issue which appears to have entirely gone over Google's head. The only time anyone's likely to use this export facility is when you're sending the document to someone outside your company and whose computers you have precisely zero control or influence over. If they don't have the compatibility pack installed, the generally accepted polite thing to do is re-send in a format they can open. It is not to ask to speak to their IT department and tell those guys how to do their job.
That was, what, twenty years ago?
You could teach the basics of assembler and possibly even processor design on an ARM quite happily. You certainly **wouldn't** want to teach GPU design, but that's the part that's really closed off.
Seriously, his only objection is "the hardware itself is closed"?
This is intended to be sold into schools, not top-end engineering facilities. Nobody's going to design the next ARM killer at the age of 15. They're going to be getting the idea of breaking problems down into their component parts and developing structured solutions to them. For which this is perfect.
Perhaps the 230V CFL bulbs in Europe warm up more quickly? I've never seen a bulb as bad as you describe, and I've had various fittings with energy savers in for years.
Yeah - you spend an arm and a leg.
I've got a daylight simulation CFL on my desk lamp which comes up pretty much instantly, but the bulb is about £6 or thereabouts.
I refer the honourable gentleman to the ITIL guidelines which cover this sort of thing. In brief: developers do not even get access to live systems, much less carry out updates on them.
(Much of this is based on somewhat rusty memories; please correct any mistakes I've made)
Developers package their applications according to an agreed process and hand the packaged application over to an operations team whose job it is to update the live systems.
This update must not be acted upon unless and until the update has been carried out successfully in on a test environment - which is again separate to the developers' environment and is meant to mimic the live environment as closely as possible. ("Successfully" in this case means it installs cleanly and the updated version passes an agreed set of tests, including user acceptance tests). Ideally you'd have a separate test team who vouch for the build.
Yes it's slow and cumbersome. But it's not intended to be quick, it's intended to ensure that the IT department is not at home to Mr. Cock Up.
The Android process is a bad joke.
Yes, it updates over the air (and always has). BUT phones that are abandoned in terms of updates while they're still in contract are endemic in the Android world - there's dozens of Android handsets but a lot of them will be lucky to see a single major upgrade over their lifetime. The best you can do is:
- Choose a phone that hasn't already obviously been abandoned from a manufacturer that has a good history of providing updates.
OR
- Root the thing, unlock the bootloader where necessary and install Cyanogen. Watch your warranty evaporate as you do this.
Taking this approach is well and good if you're an individual who wants a photo as a souvenir.
If you're a textbook publisher and you want well lit, high quality photos you can include in a textbook - and you're going to need hundreds of such photos because it's an art history book - you realistically have two choices:
- Hire a couple of photographers (Eeeks! Expensive)
- Send them to every museum you can think of that has works that are worth photographing.
- Ask them to take photos as discreetly as possible. With a couple of studio flashes, a good quality lens, an SLR and a tripod. And keep going back when they inevitably get kicked out until they've built up enough photographs.
- In the case of sculptures, remove them from their glass cases and spend ages arranging the lighting so the whole thing appears clearly without getting thrown out and/or arrested.
OR
- Buy photographs that the museum has already got at the fee the museum wants, on the understanding that the photographs will go into a printed book for students to look at.
I'd say the second one is a lot cheaper, and a lot less likely to guarantee you'll never work with a museum again.
just like when they made sure that the world didn't fall over at the turn of the millenium.
Back then there was a clear deadline that we all knew about and no practical way to stave it off.
Bit of a shame you're an AC and so many won't see what you've said - but you're absolutely right. As soon as you start to run the business on web-based applications, you find you have to run your IT to the beat of someone else's drum.
Things start to get messy when one application will only work in IE 8 or below (and not firefox/chrome) and another won't work in any version of IE below 9. Though I suppose you could always put an icon on the desktop that fires up Chrome for just a specific application.
Depends on the size of the business. You can't do that (roll out a standard image) without buying a separate license for Windows, which means that it's pretty much limited to larger businesses. Small businesses tend to take what the computer comes with.
Then you're missing something:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/libyan-peace-rally-slams-terrorism-offers-apology-for-attack_n_1881798.html
I wonder if you could modify something originally intended for a car?
Newer aftermarket stereos often have aux input, a USB port for flash sticks and sometimes you'll find they've already paid Apple for iPod connectivity so you wouldn't have to. You can even find models with remote control support, though if you want to use existing remote controls I think you'll have to reverse engineer how the manufacturer's done it and make your own adaptor. This should be perfectly doable, however, as there's an existing industry that does exactly this so the steering-wheel remote controls you find built into many modern cars can be adapted to function with the aftermarket head unit. You might even be able to find a company that'll work with you to do the job just for the fun of it.
They're dead easy to wire in - they come with a fairly straightforward loom already there and there's a range of plugs on the market so you could build your own loom, fit a standard plug to it and when the manufacturer discontinues the stereo, put in another one that's close enough with minimal extra modification. They're already in a steel case so I don't imagine shielding will be a big deal.
They're also cheap enough that you should be able to pick something suitable up for a fifth, maybe even a tenth of the obsolete units you don't like.
The only thing I'm not sure about is getting FAA certification...
There are four things at issue that need to be dealt with:
1. A Linux distribution that is a doddle to set up and manage and comes with tools to manage everything from a single PC to ten thousand assorted PCs and laptops. "Boot everything off the network" fails horribly when you're dealing with laptops that are only sporadically connected to the network; cfengine and puppet are noble ideas but they're designed by people who only have the vaguest idea of how GPOs in Active Directory are used (clue: virtually every conceivable thing you could ever want to configure in Windows can be set up by ticking the appropriate box and assigning the result of this to a group of users or PCs. Whether you like it or not, there's an entire army of Windows admins out there who can't or won't deal with anything drastically different from this and "I can set this up for your company and the licensing is cheaper. But if I get run over by a bus, there's probably only about two other people in this town who can help you." is an incredibly poor selling point).
2. A means of dealing with existing Windows-only software. Virtualising this onto a genuine Windows system is clearly the way to go; the only question is do you run it on the host PC or from a server in a datacenter somewhere?
3. A sensible way to deal with the enormous number of organisations that provide solutions to narrowly defined problems that assume a Windows-based PC sits on the person's desk. There's an enormous number of these out there, they mostly deal with relatively small things and each on their own is probably of little consequence - but you add it all up and it's a death by a thousand cuts.
4. A whacking great dose of humility. Nobody buys a computer because they want a big box on their desk that churns out indecipherable error messages, they buy it to carry out a task. It's a tool. And every time it gets in the way of carrying out their task and instead churns out an indecipherable error message - or worse, doesn't churn out any error message but just sits there not doing the task - it's a Problem and must be seen as such.
The operating system itself isn't the problem.
Sure, you could (on Unix at least) limit yourself to encrypting /tmp, /home, /var (in case some dozy app developer decided to write passwords out to a logfile), / (in case some dozy application requires a plaintext password in /etc) and the swap partition. But by this point you may as well encrypt the lot and have done with.
Not entirely true.
Depending on the precise version of OS X, the shell environment mixes & matches certain BSD and GNU utilities. grep(1) in versions prior to Mountain Lion is GNU; gzip(1) is the GNU version as opposed to the GNU-compatible BSD version.
As regards developer tools, make(1) is GNU but cc(1) is Clang.
One of the biggest reasons for having lots of children is because so many die in infancy.
Something similar was the case in the Western world as recently as the late 19th century - while it may be difficult to dig out reliable records, things like old family bibles are a great way to learn about children who only lived maybe a couple of years. If your family has anything like this, you might be surprised how many aunts and uncles you would have if they'd all survived.