I don't know how widespread these are outside the UK, but ever used one of the self-service checkouts that are appearing? Scan item, bag it, scan next item etc...
Great idea. Except that the whole point is to save time, and these things were clearly never tested by someone in a hurry because it's trivially easy to scan and bag faster than the checkout can keep up. Well, it would be except the damn thing refuses to scan item 2 until item 1 has been bagged and it takes forever to register that item 1 has been bagged.
They're only faster if the supermarket is full of technophobic customers and the checkouts have a queue going out the door.
Depending on the size of your company, you can have 0 unexpected downtime with a single server, if you are lucky.
The key phrase here is "if you are lucky".
The whole point about building a system which is designed to have zero downtime is that it doesn't depend upon luck in order to achieve that level of uptime.
If the people who would otherwise submit standards to ISO and follow standards set by ISO generally think they are irrelevant, they become de facto irrelevant. At least in this field, IMHO, they are remarkably close.
Whereas everything else to date in IT has ultimately become enshrined in an ISO standard, yesno?
National standards bodies? The ones currently lodging the appeals? They are the ones that give ISO its credibility, and if they withdraw their support from ISO and back a new international standards body then ISO is basically finished. I doubt this is an issue important enough for them to do this over, however.
Particularly as standards bodies in the more industrialised countries have by and large remained remarkably quiet on the issue.
...and you wonder why some of us fight to keep the right to bear arms in this country. This is precisely what happens when you allow only police and military to carry weapons...the loss of freedom to the people.
You go use your gun to defend your freedoms against an over-zealous cop who doesn't fully know the law he's enforcing. Come back and let us know how you get on, assuming you're not dead.
Point taken, but how would the unit have looked if it WAS the chap they were looking for and their inaction led to a tube train being blown up. At the end of the day he could have stopped for the armed police, but he ran from them and made a concerted effort to get on a train just days after many innocent people had died. Bad intelligence and a REALLY bad move from this guy was unfortunately a very dangerous move.
If I were told to stop on the NYC subway by a group of armed police and I sprinted full pelt away from them can you clarify what I should expect to happen? I should imagine I would be in hospital or a morgue shortly thereafter.
Except that they were in plain clothes, in an area of London not known for being particularly salubrious and there is plenty of evidence to suggest he wouldn't have heard them.
In common with most reports commissioned by the UK government, they'll take the bits of the Gower Report that they like and implement them while ignoring everything else. Even if the bits that they implement are clearly headlined with "THERE IS NO FREAKING POINT IN EVEN LOOKING AT THIS UNLESS YOU'RE PREPARED TO IMPLEMENT THIS OTHER THING THAT YOU MIGHT FIND SLIGHTLY UNPALATABLE".
ITYM "ISO have lost any respect they may have had within IT".
Seriously, the implications are being blown beyond any sense of proportion. Yes, they're a standards body which can be bribed by the highest bidder to approve a document but unless the whole world knows this and holds them in contempt as a result, it means nothing.
Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant
Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)
I'm sure Microsoft are much happier with the idea of tweaking the XML output in a future service pack then they are with having to compete on a level playing field with OpenOffice.
Way back in the mists of time, the UK telecoms market was a government-granted monopoly - initially granted to the Post Office, later spun out into a separate company.
Go back far enough, and anyone who wanted a telephone was obliged not only to rent the line but also the telephone itself (which was listed on the bill as a separate item that you rented). Someone did take the telco to court over this and won - and today there are any number of telephones on the market you can plug in.
Furthermore, the cable company (another monopoly...) always goes to great pains to stress that the cable box (and/or cable modem) is free, you're just paying for the line it connects to. I don't doubt that these two are related.
The BBC made its own DIRAC codec so that it could keep its standard-def infrastructure but handle high-def camera feeds instead of spending even larger amounts of money tearing out and replacing its infrastructure.
There was another plan, though it appears to have been largely forgotten.
The BBC was at one point seriously considering making large amounts of their archive available over the web:
At the time this was mooted, most of the available codecs required licensing for the server-side component which handled streaming the media. Which is all well and good.
However, the licensing was charged according to the amount of media (either being made available or downloaded; I forget which). Hence the need for a free codec which could be easily streamed.
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
It's a lot more complex than that.
The other half wants you to buy it on DVD but is only prepared to make the DVD available if there's sufficient commercial demand.
Furthermore, I'm given to understand that even a television programme produced entirely inhouse can be an absolute nightmare for licensing. Incidental music is licensed for use in the original broadcast and has to be relicensed or edited out if the programme is released on DVD, repeated or somehow rebroadcast (eg. through iPlayer). Similarly, actors, writers and journalists often retain some of the rights over their work and will want more money if the BBC wants the rights to release the show on DVD or repeat the show indefinitely. Not, therefore, something you write into the initial broadcast license unless you're pretty sure it's something that will be worth releasing on DVD.
Not quite! You must both possess (own or rent) the equipment and use it for the purpose of receiving broadcast television signals (such as watching or recording TV). It doesn't apply to radio and it doesn't apply to a TV used solely for non-TV purposes, such as a games console.
Even though the law of the land may be "innocent until proven guilty", the attitude of the company to which collection is outsourced is the reverse. They will happily take you to court even if you do say "the TV is used solely for non-TV purposes" and IINM you are expected to demonstrate that the TV somehow cannot be used for TV purposes.
There are no software patents in the UK which is where the BBC operates and cares about.
You're quite welcome to produce a free software implementation of h.264 and run it in England without any problems.
Not strictly true.
Patents on software have been granted by the UK patent office and while there is some doubt as to how legally enforceable these would be, to my knowledge (IANAL) there has not yet been a test case.
Every couple of years there is an attempt to extend EU law to include allowing software patents - though it hasn't yet succeeded. Whether or not existing patents (which may or may not be enforceable) would magically become valid as a result of this law is again unknown.
Could someone more familiar with the history post on why they this is their business model?
Plenty of people have competed with Microsoft in the generic x86 OS market. Digital Research (DR-DOS), IBM (OS/2), GEM (though that was a windowing system, not a complete OS), Be (BeOS), NeXT (NeXTStep).
Note that only one of these companies is still around, and they pulled out of the x86 OS market (only to sort-of return with Linux, but even there they're shipping and supporting other people's distributions).
Wouldn't this be like buying a music CD from sony that says on the package "you are only allowed to play this on a sony CD player" Then having sony sue the manufacturer of another cd player that is able to play sony cd's out of the box? Where is/should the line be drawn on what a Eula can dictate? Software on a CD is not too much different from music or video on a CD.
Sony would have the right to do that.
They wouldn't, because it wouldn't be an audio CD according to the standards and Philips own the trademark on the term "Compact Disc".
However, there would be nothing stopping them putting it in the same type of jewel case with a similar insert and not insisting record stores clearly sell it as "not a CD". (See all the CD DRM rubbish).
Of course they shouldn't have to support anyone's hardware but their own. However, if I build a completely original box in my garage which can run OSX, and I sell and support it, why should Apple be allowed to shut me down?
Consider designer goods. I'll give a particular example: Radley make ladies handbags, purses etc. And they're pretty expensive - think upwards of £200 for a handbag.
Now, the profit margin on them is pretty good - no shop owner will deny that (at least privately). So good, in fact, that it's theoretically possible for a shop owner to dramatically cut their prices, undercut everyone else in the market and make a packet. But none of the retailers do this. Or at least not for very long - as soon as Radley hear about some retailer drastically cutting prices, they threaten to cancel that retailer's account so they can't buy any more bags to sell on.
The reason is simple: Radley's business model isn't based upon "sell the best bag you can make for the fairest price". It's based upon "sell the best lifestyle you can" - the buyer is supposed to feel specialÂfor being able to own such a bag. That buyer isn't going to feel special if everyone and their dog has a Radley bag, which is exactly what would happen if the price was dramatically cut.
Something similar is true for practically every other designer item on the market. Sometimes there are legitimate ways for a retailer to get their hands on product to sell at well below recommended price - UK supermarkets have been known to do this with Levi Jeans (which typically sell in the UK for £(price in US$ * 1.3)) - which generally results in a lot of very high publicity legal action. A more familiar example for/. readers may be Lik Sang. It is mildly depressing but nevertheless true to note that in most cases, the manufacturers have won their legal battle. Taking full advantage of globalisation is perfectly acceptable for the manufacturer, it seems, but not for the consumer.
Apple are the designer goods of the computer world.
To make matters worse, companies will often shove network drives down your throat via the domain policy, that, once your password changes, lock you out of everything. Security through inconvenience of your authorized users. Great!
If you don't enforce this, regardless of what you say lots of people will save everything locally and you either wind up having to backup (and be prepared to restore in the case of hardware failure) an inordinate number of PCs or you have people losing data when their PC dies.
...Huh? Don't you mean if you do enforce this...?
Could have worded it more clearly, but the bit I'm referring to enforcing is "shoving the network drives down your throat".
Enforcing password changes is dead easy - block the individual PCs from allowing you to login once your password's expired and/or force the user to change it as part of the login process. That's been possible on a Windows domain since NT 4.
Where are Psystar getting the money from for all this? Because defending a case of this nature is going to be damn expensive and if they're such a small startup the last thing they want to be doing is spending all their money on legal bills.
To make matters worse, companies will often shove network drives down your throat via the domain policy, that, once your password changes, lock you out of everything. Security through inconvenience of your authorized users. Great!
If you don't enforce this, regardless of what you say lots of people will save everything locally and you either wind up having to backup (and be prepared to restore in the case of hardware failure) an inordinate number of PCs or you have people losing data when their PC dies.
This would be substantially more of a problem than dealing with forgotten passwords.
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I don't know how widespread these are outside the UK, but ever used one of the self-service checkouts that are appearing? Scan item, bag it, scan next item etc...
Great idea. Except that the whole point is to save time, and these things were clearly never tested by someone in a hurry because it's trivially easy to scan and bag faster than the checkout can keep up. Well, it would be except the damn thing refuses to scan item 2 until item 1 has been bagged and it takes forever to register that item 1 has been bagged.
They're only faster if the supermarket is full of technophobic customers and the checkouts have a queue going out the door.
Depending on the size of your company, you can have 0 unexpected downtime with a single server, if you are lucky.
The key phrase here is "if you are lucky".
The whole point about building a system which is designed to have zero downtime is that it doesn't depend upon luck in order to achieve that level of uptime.
There's a place where you follow strict orders and shut the fuck up. It's called your job.
Are you purposely trying to get someone to invoke Godwin here? Because that sounds remarkably close to "You are only following orders".
If the people who would otherwise submit standards to ISO and follow standards set by ISO generally think they are irrelevant, they become de facto irrelevant. At least in this field, IMHO, they are remarkably close.
Whereas everything else to date in IT has ultimately become enshrined in an ISO standard, yesno?
National standards bodies? The ones currently lodging the appeals? They are the ones that give ISO its credibility, and if they withdraw their support from ISO and back a new international standards body then ISO is basically finished. I doubt this is an issue important enough for them to do this over, however.
Particularly as standards bodies in the more industrialised countries have by and large remained remarkably quiet on the issue.
Ooh! Good point! Tyrants might do bad things to you!
Quick, lay down and bow before their oppression like a good sheep, lest you be culled from he herd.
100 armed people against the local police force is a riot which makes the news headlines, gets the message across and out to the wider world.
1 armed person against the local police force is just another statistic cooling off in the mortuary.
You go use your gun to defend your freedoms against an over-zealous cop who doesn't fully know the law he's enforcing. Come back and let us know how you get on, assuming you're not dead.
Point taken, but how would the unit have looked if it WAS the chap they were looking for and their inaction led to a tube train being blown up. At the end of the day he could have stopped for the armed police, but he ran from them and made a concerted effort to get on a train just days after many innocent people had died. Bad intelligence and a REALLY bad move from this guy was unfortunately a very dangerous move.
If I were told to stop on the NYC subway by a group of armed police and I sprinted full pelt away from them can you clarify what I should expect to happen? I should imagine I would be in hospital or a morgue shortly thereafter.
Except that they were in plain clothes, in an area of London not known for being particularly salubrious and there is plenty of evidence to suggest he wouldn't have heard them.
In common with most reports commissioned by the UK government, they'll take the bits of the Gower Report that they like and implement them while ignoring everything else. Even if the bits that they implement are clearly headlined with "THERE IS NO FREAKING POINT IN EVEN LOOKING AT THIS UNLESS YOU'RE PREPARED TO IMPLEMENT THIS OTHER THING THAT YOU MIGHT FIND SLIGHTLY UNPALATABLE".
They just want to punish without the burden of actually proving anything.
Those of us who live in the UK see this as business as usual.
ITYM "ISO have lost any respect they may have had within IT".
Seriously, the implications are being blown beyond any sense of proportion. Yes, they're a standards body which can be bribed by the highest bidder to approve a document but unless the whole world knows this and holds them in contempt as a result, it means nothing.
Nice to see that the price for ISO members was high enough to prevent appeals from going through.
There wouldn't have been much point in accepting corruption if they allowed the appeal.
Lots of /.'ers have predicted this as "the beginning of the end for ISO", but really, who outside of /. either knows or cares about the issues at stake?
Microsoft doesn't really give a damn if OOXML passes or not. They just want to be able to say they are standards compliant
Ironically, they are NOT compliant with the version of OOXML that ISO/IEC approved, which isn't the same as the version of OOXML that ECMA originally handed them. (It's not even clear that the ECMA OOXML spec conformed fully to what Microsoft Office does, but that's a moot point now.)
I'm sure Microsoft are much happier with the idea of tweaking the XML output in a future service pack then they are with having to compete on a level playing field with OpenOffice.
Way back in the mists of time, the UK telecoms market was a government-granted monopoly - initially granted to the Post Office, later spun out into a separate company.
Go back far enough, and anyone who wanted a telephone was obliged not only to rent the line but also the telephone itself (which was listed on the bill as a separate item that you rented). Someone did take the telco to court over this and won - and today there are any number of telephones on the market you can plug in.
Furthermore, the cable company (another monopoly...) always goes to great pains to stress that the cable box (and/or cable modem) is free, you're just paying for the line it connects to. I don't doubt that these two are related.
The BBC made its own DIRAC codec so that it could keep its standard-def infrastructure but handle high-def camera feeds instead of spending even larger amounts of money tearing out and replacing its infrastructure.
There was another plan, though it appears to have been largely forgotten.
The BBC was at one point seriously considering making large amounts of their archive available over the web:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/4441205.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1548691/BBC-online-archive-could-come-free-with-licence-fee.html
At the time this was mooted, most of the available codecs required licensing for the server-side component which handled streaming the media. Which is all well and good.
However, the licensing was charged according to the amount of media (either being made available or downloaded; I forget which). Hence the need for a free codec which could be easily streamed.
I think it's even more complex than that as there are commercial arms within the BBC in charge of flogging the content. One part wants to move heaven and earth to get as much content out in as many ways as possible - the other half wants you to buy it on DVD.
It's a lot more complex than that.
The other half wants you to buy it on DVD but is only prepared to make the DVD available if there's sufficient commercial demand.
Furthermore, I'm given to understand that even a television programme produced entirely inhouse can be an absolute nightmare for licensing. Incidental music is licensed for use in the original broadcast and has to be relicensed or edited out if the programme is released on DVD, repeated or somehow rebroadcast (eg. through iPlayer). Similarly, actors, writers and journalists often retain some of the rights over their work and will want more money if the BBC wants the rights to release the show on DVD or repeat the show indefinitely. Not, therefore, something you write into the initial broadcast license unless you're pretty sure it's something that will be worth releasing on DVD.
Not quite! You must both possess (own or rent) the equipment and use it for the purpose of receiving broadcast television signals (such as watching or recording TV). It doesn't apply to radio and it doesn't apply to a TV used solely for non-TV purposes, such as a games console.
Even though the law of the land may be "innocent until proven guilty", the attitude of the company to which collection is outsourced is the reverse. They will happily take you to court even if you do say "the TV is used solely for non-TV purposes" and IINM you are expected to demonstrate that the TV somehow cannot be used for TV purposes.
There are no software patents in the UK which is where the BBC operates and cares about.
You're quite welcome to produce a free software implementation of h.264 and run it in England without any problems.
Not strictly true.
Patents on software have been granted by the UK patent office and while there is some doubt as to how legally enforceable these would be, to my knowledge (IANAL) there has not yet been a test case.
Every couple of years there is an attempt to extend EU law to include allowing software patents - though it hasn't yet succeeded. Whether or not existing patents (which may or may not be enforceable) would magically become valid as a result of this law is again unknown.
Could someone more familiar with the history post on why they this is their business model?
Plenty of people have competed with Microsoft in the generic x86 OS market. Digital Research (DR-DOS), IBM (OS/2), GEM (though that was a windowing system, not a complete OS), Be (BeOS), NeXT (NeXTStep).
Note that only one of these companies is still around, and they pulled out of the x86 OS market (only to sort-of return with Linux, but even there they're shipping and supporting other people's distributions).
Wouldn't this be like buying a music CD from sony that says on the package "you are only allowed to play this on a sony CD player" Then having sony sue the manufacturer of another cd player that is able to play sony cd's out of the box? Where is/should the line be drawn on what a Eula can dictate? Software on a CD is not too much different from music or video on a CD.
Sony would have the right to do that.
They wouldn't, because it wouldn't be an audio CD according to the standards and Philips own the trademark on the term "Compact Disc".
However, there would be nothing stopping them putting it in the same type of jewel case with a similar insert and not insisting record stores clearly sell it as "not a CD". (See all the CD DRM rubbish).
Of course they shouldn't have to support anyone's hardware but their own. However, if I build a completely original box in my garage which can run OSX, and I sell and support it, why should Apple be allowed to shut me down?
Consider designer goods. I'll give a particular example: Radley make ladies handbags, purses etc. And they're pretty expensive - think upwards of £200 for a handbag.
Now, the profit margin on them is pretty good - no shop owner will deny that (at least privately). So good, in fact, that it's theoretically possible for a shop owner to dramatically cut their prices, undercut everyone else in the market and make a packet. But none of the retailers do this. Or at least not for very long - as soon as Radley hear about some retailer drastically cutting prices, they threaten to cancel that retailer's account so they can't buy any more bags to sell on.
The reason is simple: Radley's business model isn't based upon "sell the best bag you can make for the fairest price". It's based upon "sell the best lifestyle you can" - the buyer is supposed to feel specialÂfor being able to own such a bag. That buyer isn't going to feel special if everyone and their dog has a Radley bag, which is exactly what would happen if the price was dramatically cut.
Something similar is true for practically every other designer item on the market. Sometimes there are legitimate ways for a retailer to get their hands on product to sell at well below recommended price - UK supermarkets have been known to do this with Levi Jeans (which typically sell in the UK for £(price in US$ * 1.3)) - which generally results in a lot of very high publicity legal action. A more familiar example for /. readers may be Lik Sang. It is mildly depressing but nevertheless true to note that in most cases, the manufacturers have won their legal battle. Taking full advantage of globalisation is perfectly acceptable for the manufacturer, it seems, but not for the consumer.
Apple are the designer goods of the computer world.
To make matters worse, companies will often shove network drives down your throat via the domain policy, that, once your password changes, lock you out of everything. Security through inconvenience of your authorized users. Great!
If you don't enforce this, regardless of what you say lots of people will save everything locally and you either wind up having to backup (and be prepared to restore in the case of hardware failure) an inordinate number of PCs or you have people losing data when their PC dies.
...Huh? Don't you mean if you do enforce this...?
Could have worded it more clearly, but the bit I'm referring to enforcing is "shoving the network drives down your throat".
Enforcing password changes is dead easy - block the individual PCs from allowing you to login once your password's expired and/or force the user to change it as part of the login process. That's been possible on a Windows domain since NT 4.
Where are Psystar getting the money from for all this? Because defending a case of this nature is going to be damn expensive and if they're such a small startup the last thing they want to be doing is spending all their money on legal bills.
To make matters worse, companies will often shove network drives down your throat via the domain policy, that, once your password changes, lock you out of everything. Security through inconvenience of your authorized users. Great!
If you don't enforce this, regardless of what you say lots of people will save everything locally and you either wind up having to backup (and be prepared to restore in the case of hardware failure) an inordinate number of PCs or you have people losing data when their PC dies.
This would be substantially more of a problem than dealing with forgotten passwords.
My mother's maiden name was ga4EeliY.
Must have been a relief for her to get married and not have to spell that any more.