Well said. This comparison can be made with many companies making both inkjet and laser printers. Laser printers are much more likely to use standard interfaces, but watch out for the new consumer range ~$100 bw lasers. That new market is starting to use some techniques from the inkjet market. In general, unless you really like printing pictures (which is barely an excuse given the on demand printing many professional shops do now), you should just buy a laser printer. I have vowed never to go back to inkjet and it has been a great decision. There have been laser-based Winprinters for years, but generally only at the very bottom end of the market.
However, in the last couple of years I've seen laser printers which sell for £3-500 which have Windows-only drivers. Canon and Epson in particular are guilty of this one - the days when you could fairly sure that over a certain price point it was pretty much guaranteed to support Postscript are gone.
Its become much *much* worse. The number of classes has increased to over 1700. Documentation is terrible. Code signing has immensely complicated everything.
That had me thinking, actually.
It's all well and good open-sourcing Symbian but if nobody can run their own home-compiled version because their mobile phone refuses to run an unsigned OS image, then you'll have a lot of trouble getting anyone outside of Nokia to put in any development effort.
As I said, that's why prizes are better than patents for rewarding and encouraging inventors. If I understand you correctly, that this is essentially promoting a system of patronage - and it was the drawbacks in that system which copyrights and patents are intended to overcome.
Not that I think patents as they stand are OK, I just think there's a risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In my opinion, if you really want to encourage innovation, patents should only be granted if you can be certain that if the invention was kept secret nobody else is likely to come up with it in the next X years where X is say half the length (10 years?) of the patent monopoly (20+ years?). Some of the best ideas in history have been simple ones which, as soon as you hear them, you think "Now why didn't I think of that?".
Even if you put that to one side, how the devil do you demonstrate that your specific innovation is unlikely to be thought up independently by anyone else at some point in the next 10 years?
However, this product was shrink wrapped. It is difficult to shrink wrap vapour. It is, however, very easy to print a box, stick a CD in there and shrinkwrap it and very difficult to prove that all this happened on or before a particular date.
You mustn't confuse Lexmark Inkjet printers with Lexmark Laser printers.
The laser printers, by and large, speak well-known and reasonably standard languages like Postscript and HP PCL, and the build quality isn't too bad (though it's not a patch on HP or Kyocera).
The inkjets speak proprietary languages, are cheaply thrown together and designed to last about as long as 2-3 cartridges.
(And in the UK, Lexmark make a big thing about how you too can buy a printer from the same company that supplies 70% of the UK's top businesses. Technically correct, but it's a totally different division of the company producing totally different products).
Might this be connected to the constant complaints that the UK is falling behind in most every academic subject? Depends on how hard the exams are.
Generally speaking, the marking is as follows:
40% : Third class. 50% : 2:2 60% : 2:1 70% : First
The work is (or at least it was when I did my degree) engineered so if you can make it to the end of the final year, you'd have to screw up pretty badly to fail altogether. However, the difference between each grade means you'd also have to work pretty damn hard to get a first.
They finally change it after I notify them of the omission. But to these days, I still can't rule out the possibility that the omission was intentional. I mean, if someone in the corporation is obsessed enough to compile a list of all countries, even the ones barely qualified as country, how can (s)he forget to include palestine?
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Or, to put it another way: The world is a very big place. It has over two hundred countries. In my opinion, it is far more likely that somewhere lost in the mists of time is one original list on which all of these were based - and this list may not even have originated on the Internet. It could just as easily be someone blindly typing in a list from a 50-year old encyclopaedia as some sort of anti-semitic conspiracy.
I'd argue that the important issue is how it's dealt with when it's brought to someone's attention. If it's rectified quickly, it was probably an honest mistake. If you get a reply saying "We know. That's intentional" - well, then I'd say you probably have a point.
(For the record, I'm well aware that the Jewish people have been thoroughly pissed on for a few thousand years and it does still go on. But that doesn't mean that everyone who makes a mistake is doing so because they're some sort of half-crazed Nazi).
For the most part, however, women do mature to a point where a good provider is the best choice for her. I hate to tell you this (particularly if you're married), and I can't remember where I got this from so you'll have to take it with as much salt as you thing it deserves, but there is some evidence to suggest that women will often have affairs with the "bad boy" types without protection but stick around with the good provider. Thus the good provider cares for the kids but it's not his genes being passed on.
Anyway, just something to think about when you tuck the kids in tonight.
Considering that they have an open source codebase to work from, which wasn't true of Java at the time, they don't have much of an excuse to write a buggy implementation. They have open source codebases for all sorts of things available to work from (HTML rendering engines immediately spring to mind), yet we don't see that happening yet.
ODF documents should be checkable, and compliant applications should have the opportunity to flag errors on the format.
Who's going to hold Microsoft to task if their implementation isn't compliant with the standard?
And if companies are invited to tender their software product, how many people involved in the tendering process are going to look at the checkbox where Microsoft have ticked "ODF compliance" and say "No. Stop lying"?
This reminds me of the Debian upstream/downstream problem that rears it's head up now and again: if the sources are freely available, does every man and his dog have to distribute the unmodified version if they merely make use of it downstream?! Afraid so. Read the GPL. It is the distributor's responsibility to distribute the source code (modified or otherwise) themselves.
10 or 15 years ago I'd have said that they probably were more used to BSD/public domain licenses (along the lines of "do what you like, we don't care", optionally with an advertising clause) or buying in third-party code (which would have almost certainly expressly forbidden redistributing source code) and it was a simple case of ignorance.
Today, however, I'm not so sure. I've met plenty of developers who don't really understand the GPL or its purpose, but I have difficulty believing an entire team had nobody onboard who understood. Perhaps the team charged with developing the software didn't have much contact with the customer-facing folks who might be asked for the source code?
Oh no, those things are terrible. The coffee always comes out warm, what you need is one of those expresso machines that sit on top of your stove top. I disagree. The problem with the stove-top devices is that they're a devil to keep clean (absolutely vital for good coffee) and it's fantastically easy to burn the coffee with them.
Seriously. You got hired to do his bidding, if he wants to spam let him reap the consequences, make careful note of your objections. Then also admit you're a tool. Unless he's a shelf stacker at his local supermarket, the OP was hired because he has knowledge and understanding which the boss doesn't. Sometimes this knowledge and understanding extends beyond "knowing how to do what the boss wants" into "knowing that what the boss wants is a bad idea".
bullshit, my employer (and I) will support any version of GNU/Linux from the last 18 years for our clients in Chicagoland area, for a price. That I'd like to see. Particularly as the kernel wasn't released to the world until October 1991, and wasn't hugely useable back then.
1) Buy comparable cables from Chinese mfr for ~$3 each.
2) Tart them up with bright/shiny colors, etc.
3) Have third-party lab compare your cable to the Denon.
4) Advertise your $20 cable as just as good/better than the $500 cable.
5) Prrrrrrrrrofit!!
This might work if audiophiles were rational people. But if they were rational people, nobody in their right mind would be trying to sell then the $500 cable in the first place.
Can you imagine what a cell could become if it is "OSS friendly"? Yes, you will most likely not lock your customers into having to use it, but here's a really novel, radical and completely unthinkable idea: They just might want to use your product because it caters to their needs.
I know it is so last century, but how about making a product again that the customer wants to buy instead of trying to force him to buy it with vendor lock-in snares? OSS is actually more like the cellphone market than many people here would like to believe.
The cellphone market has adopted the model of "give away the handset (which is actually pretty expensive), charge for the service (which, after capital investment, is actually pretty cheap to provide). Tie the user in for 12-18 months so you can recoup the cost of the handset".
Open Source proponents suggest giving away the software (expensive) but charging for support (which may be expensive or cheap to provide, depending on a lot of variables). The difference is that software is nowhere near as much of a commodity as cellphone networks - you can't just swap out huge chunks of your infrastructure easily and expect it all to carry on working. This provides a strong disincentive for the customer who's signed a contract to go elsewhere.
Yet that's exactly what a customer can do with a cellphone if they like the handset but not the service provider.
If you write a DRM module that cannot be circumvented even with the possibility of modifying the code and installing a modified module, then what on earth is a hacker to do to get around this? If you succeed in doing this you've violated some of the most basic rules of cryptography and, for that matter, computer science.
That's no fun. Those are mostly really big ideas which seldom appear out of nowhere anyway. How about the really easy stuff? The stuff which could easily have appeared out of nowhere but, for some reason, Microsoft couldn't find anyone to code it out of nowhere?
A paint program.
ZSoft Paintbrush -> MS Paint.
A database to store system settings. After all, a modern system has a lot of settings to store and a hierarchical data structure to hold the lot would make a lot of sense. With the added bonus that such data structures are first year Computer Science stuff, so it's reasonable to expect any developer to be able to get their head around it pretty quickly.
How about just disabling steering, turning it into a large glider? JUST the steering, yeah? So it's a large glider which can't react to turbulence, can't control where it's going and hence can't control where it's going to land.
I think your idea might need more careful consideration.
However there are still 315 people who really should be held for 28 days without charge. Are there enough truely patriotic police to do this though. You jest, but I don't think your average MP understands the seriousness of the matter. S/he gets wrongly held for 28 days, then at the end of it they go back to whatever it was they were doing and there's no harm done.
You or I get held for 28 days - potentially without communication with the outside world, let's not forget that - and when you get out your employer will have given up on you and sought a replacement. Your personnel record will say "Disappeared off the face of the earth one day" - which I'm sure would look just great if an alternate employer contacted them for a reference.
And if you're asked why you left your job - well, I'd love to see the look on the interviewer's face when you say "I was detained under the Terrorism Act and not allowed to contact anyone, so my employer had to find someone else to do the job" but I don't think it's an answer that would do you any favours.
Compensation? What compensation? They'll base compensation on the 28 (or 42) days you were detained, not the repercussions. If the repercussions include "having to sell the house because you can no longer afford it because you lost a £40,000 per year job and had to take a £25,000 per year job", that's your problem.
Slashdot Mirror
However, in the last couple of years I've seen laser printers which sell for £3-500 which have Windows-only drivers. Canon and Epson in particular are guilty of this one - the days when you could fairly sure that over a certain price point it was pretty much guaranteed to support Postscript are gone.
Its become much *much* worse. The number of classes has increased to over 1700. Documentation is terrible. Code signing has immensely complicated everything.
That had me thinking, actually.It's all well and good open-sourcing Symbian but if nobody can run their own home-compiled version because their mobile phone refuses to run an unsigned OS image, then you'll have a lot of trouble getting anyone outside of Nokia to put in any development effort.
Not that I think patents as they stand are OK, I just think there's a risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Even if you put that to one side, how the devil do you demonstrate that your specific innovation is unlikely to be thought up independently by anyone else at some point in the next 10 years?
You mustn't confuse Lexmark Inkjet printers with Lexmark Laser printers.
The laser printers, by and large, speak well-known and reasonably standard languages like Postscript and HP PCL, and the build quality isn't too bad (though it's not a patch on HP or Kyocera).
The inkjets speak proprietary languages, are cheaply thrown together and designed to last about as long as 2-3 cartridges.
(And in the UK, Lexmark make a big thing about how you too can buy a printer from the same company that supplies 70% of the UK's top businesses. Technically correct, but it's a totally different division of the company producing totally different products).
Generally speaking, the marking is as follows:
40% : Third class.
50% : 2:2
60% : 2:1
70% : First
The work is (or at least it was when I did my degree) engineered so if you can make it to the end of the final year, you'd have to screw up pretty badly to fail altogether. However, the difference between each grade means you'd also have to work pretty damn hard to get a first.
Claim up to 300 years.
http://www.smarthouse.com.au/Home_Office/Storage/U9P4F7L2
Really? What are you going to be using to read them in 300 years time?They finally change it after I notify them of the omission. But to these days, I still can't rule out the possibility that the omission was intentional. I mean, if someone in the corporation is obsessed enough to compile a list of all countries, even the ones barely qualified as country, how can (s)he forget to include palestine?
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.Or, to put it another way: The world is a very big place. It has over two hundred countries. In my opinion, it is far more likely that somewhere lost in the mists of time is one original list on which all of these were based - and this list may not even have originated on the Internet. It could just as easily be someone blindly typing in a list from a 50-year old encyclopaedia as some sort of anti-semitic conspiracy.
I'd argue that the important issue is how it's dealt with when it's brought to someone's attention. If it's rectified quickly, it was probably an honest mistake. If you get a reply saying "We know. That's intentional" - well, then I'd say you probably have a point.
(For the record, I'm well aware that the Jewish people have been thoroughly pissed on for a few thousand years and it does still go on. But that doesn't mean that everyone who makes a mistake is doing so because they're some sort of half-crazed Nazi).
So why is the Firefox team assigning this to 'Agent String' or 'Tech Evangelism' again?
I haven't RTFA but at a guess I'd say it's likely that Firefox is being fed broken js/HTML by Hotmail.Anyway, just something to think about when you tuck the kids in tonight.
ODF documents should be checkable, and compliant applications should have the opportunity to flag errors on the format.
Who's going to hold Microsoft to task if their implementation isn't compliant with the standard?And if companies are invited to tender their software product, how many people involved in the tendering process are going to look at the checkbox where Microsoft have ticked "ODF compliance" and say "No. Stop lying"?
That's quite impressive, you've posted the same comment twice in a row and they both got modded +5 insightful.
10 or 15 years ago I'd have said that they probably were more used to BSD/public domain licenses (along the lines of "do what you like, we don't care", optionally with an advertising clause) or buying in third-party code (which would have almost certainly expressly forbidden redistributing source code) and it was a simple case of ignorance.
Today, however, I'm not so sure. I've met plenty of developers who don't really understand the GPL or its purpose, but I have difficulty believing an entire team had nobody onboard who understood. Perhaps the team charged with developing the software didn't have much contact with the customer-facing folks who might be asked for the source code?
1) Buy comparable cables from Chinese mfr for ~$3 each.
2) Tart them up with bright/shiny colors, etc.
3) Have third-party lab compare your cable to the Denon.
4) Advertise your $20 cable as just as good/better than the $500 cable.
5) Prrrrrrrrrofit!!
This might work if audiophiles were rational people. But if they were rational people, nobody in their right mind would be trying to sell then the $500 cable in the first place.I know it is so last century, but how about making a product again that the customer wants to buy instead of trying to force him to buy it with vendor lock-in snares? OSS is actually more like the cellphone market than many people here would like to believe.
The cellphone market has adopted the model of "give away the handset (which is actually pretty expensive), charge for the service (which, after capital investment, is actually pretty cheap to provide). Tie the user in for 12-18 months so you can recoup the cost of the handset".
Open Source proponents suggest giving away the software (expensive) but charging for support (which may be expensive or cheap to provide, depending on a lot of variables). The difference is that software is nowhere near as much of a commodity as cellphone networks - you can't just swap out huge chunks of your infrastructure easily and expect it all to carry on working. This provides a strong disincentive for the customer who's signed a contract to go elsewhere.
Yet that's exactly what a customer can do with a cellphone if they like the handset but not the service provider.
That's no fun. Those are mostly really big ideas which seldom appear out of nowhere anyway. How about the really easy stuff? The stuff which could easily have appeared out of nowhere but, for some reason, Microsoft couldn't find anyone to code it out of nowhere?
A paint program.
ZSoft Paintbrush -> MS Paint.
A database to store system settings. After all, a modern system has a lot of settings to store and a hierarchical data structure to hold the lot would make a lot of sense. With the added bonus that such data structures are first year Computer Science stuff, so it's reasonable to expect any developer to be able to get their head around it pretty quickly.
VMS registry -> Windows registry.
I think your idea might need more careful consideration.
You or I get held for 28 days - potentially without communication with the outside world, let's not forget that - and when you get out your employer will have given up on you and sought a replacement. Your personnel record will say "Disappeared off the face of the earth one day" - which I'm sure would look just great if an alternate employer contacted them for a reference.
And if you're asked why you left your job - well, I'd love to see the look on the interviewer's face when you say "I was detained under the Terrorism Act and not allowed to contact anyone, so my employer had to find someone else to do the job" but I don't think it's an answer that would do you any favours.
Compensation? What compensation? They'll base compensation on the 28 (or 42) days you were detained, not the repercussions. If the repercussions include "having to sell the house because you can no longer afford it because you lost a £40,000 per year job and had to take a £25,000 per year job", that's your problem.