Not on the Mac it doesn't, there's only one person who's doing the porting work and there's a showstopper bug in the version of GTK that Gimp 2.8 depends on.
If you're making buckets of cash of their produt, pay for the upgrade and quit bitching...wow.
You'd be amazed how many companies in this world aren't making buckets of cash. They're making enough to meet payroll and cover any loans, but beyond that every month is a struggle.
Even when you look at national and even multinational companies, the story frequently doesn't change much. Yes, they cover their expenses every month but for many, it doesn't take a particularly big problem to come bouncing out of nowhere and that's it, thank you and goodnight.
What Wine needs above all else is support from a major application vendor.
Right now, if I recommend running a commercial Windows app under Wine and it doesn't work properly, queries to the app vendor will result in a brief "That's not supported" at best.
As long as this is the norm, Wine is fighting a losing battle in any business environment.
Run up the numbers yourself per-print for a typical inkjet - look at the manufacturer's own figures for estimated cartridge life at 95% coverage, divide that by the cost for a full brace of cartridges and tack on the price for a sheet of photo quality paper.
IME you'll find it usually comes out about the same, maybe slightly dearer than using a major photo processor. But that only tells you part of the story.
It costs about the same provided you have a 0% waste rate and you ignore the cost of the printer and any associated items.
That means no paper jams, no wastage from trial-and-error figuring out optimum settings, no discovering the hard way that colour temperature on screen and on paper are two different things, no ink wasted because you didn't use the printer for a week and it now needs to run a cleaning cycle.
In the real world, you'll probably find this adds 20-30% to your costs. Obviously with practise you can reduce this, but even if you get it down to zero (never going to happen), it's still going to be at a photo finish between you and Costco. And Costco's machine can probably churn out 100 photos in the time it takes your printer to do 10.
You assume that Vimes would have been able to live on substantially less than AM$37/month (assuming he was already saving about AM$1/month and buying a new pair of boots about once every 10-12 months).
In the UK, tuition fees were introduced some years ago - previously the government subsidised your first degree more-or-less 100% (though you still had to find money to live on). The amount the university could demand of students was capped and a student could take out a government-backed loan to cover it; needless to say every single university in the country immediately started charging precisely the level of the cap, no more, no less.
Recently, the cap has been raised quite considerably. The government's logic was that the Free Market would ensure that only the best universities were able to charge the highest fees. It hasn't quite worked like that. AFAIK every single university promptly raised their fees - to the level of the cap.
The bad news is I don't know of any (and I don't think you'll find any) easy, one-shot tool to run across the whole lot that gives you a simple "corrupted yes/no?" answer to lots of different filetypes.
The good news is it'd be reasonably easy to lash together something in bash, kick it off overnight and come back in the morning to a list of probably-corrupted files.
In pseudo-bash (because I haven't the time to write it out and check it works properly), something like this would be a good start:
function checkPdf {
# do something to check a PDF is OK }
FILETYPE=`file $1` case $FILETYPE in
"jpeg" )
checkJpeg $1 || echo $1;;
"PDF )
checkPdf $1 || echo $1;; esac
Then run it with the help of find/home -type f -print0 to check every file in/home. This would give you a list of potentially-corrupted files. Up to you how you deal with it - personally I wouldn't run rm against it in case you find files that can be rescued or that your checks aren't as perfect as you'd like.
For extra credit, determine the expected filetype based on file extension and then use file(1) as your first "is it corrupted?" test - that way you'll spot files that are too corrupted for file(1) to work reliably.
Keyword here: theory. And I mean that in the colloquial sense.
As soon as real-world issues crop up (like "Okay, technically we should shut everything down for a month while we check that it's all safe. But that costs an enormous amount of money; it's far cheaper to falsify records and pretend we've done that, if anything happens we'll all be dead anyway so who cares?" or "Yes, this reactor is totally foolproof and shutting everything down for a month is unnecessary with this design. But it's totally untested in the real world, which means it's such a political hot potato that no politician in their right mind will let it happen"), you've got problems.
So, who's got suggestions that don't fall down in the real world?
Usually your solicitor does that due diligence, that's why you hire them. But their diligence wouldn't extend to this and BT aren't obliged to provide a phone line capable of broadband.
And I can tell you an exchange right now that's only enabled for plain ADSL.
No ADSL2 of any description, no unbundled services. It was one of the later ones to be enabled for ADSL in summer 2004.
It's not in the middle of nowhere - it's serving a small village on the outskirts of a larger town, only 3.9 miles away from the town exchange that's enabled for FTTC. I doubt it's the only one of its kind.
Not always as simple as that. We've got a fairly densely populated country; it's common to find villages on the outskirts of towns - perhaps only a few km from the town centre - that have their own telephone exchange that was only enabled for ADSL relatively recently.
The only way you'd know you were moving into a potential broadband blackhole is if you put the postcode into SamKnows before buying the house. A cursory glance at a map wouldn't necessarily be terribly informative - indeed, it could be downright misleading.
Do you care about your electricity bill at all? If you do, it'll probably be cheaper over the course of 6-12 months to buy a simple NAS box or a cheap atom board and plug in a couple of 2TB hard drives.
In other words, it speaks volumes about the marketing ability of geeks. Just as I said. If I created the worlds greatest network monitoring system and named it "Portable Enterprise Network Information System" it wouldn't matter. Nobody is going to install PENIS in a professional environment.
Not sure about Android, but for the iPhone Configuration Utility lets you:
- Disable installing apps.
- Disable the use of the camera.
- Disable FaceTime.
- Disable screen capture.
- Disable automatic sync while roaming.
- Disable Siri.
- Disable in-app purchasing.
- Force the user to enter an iTunes store password for all purchases.
- Disable multiplayer gaming.
- Disable adding Game Centre friends.
- Disable YouTube.
- Disable the iTunes Store.
- Disable Safari.
- Leave Safari enabled but disable autofill/fraud warning/javascript/popups/cookies
- Disable iCloud backup, sync and photo screen.
- Disable letting diagnostic data being sent to Apple.
- Prevent the user from accepting untrusted TLS certificates.
- Force encrypted backups.
- Disallow explicit music & podcasts.
- Set the maximum allowed rating for movies, TV shows and apps.
- Preconfigure Wifi
- Preconfigure VPN
- Preconfigure email (IMAP, POP or Exchange)
- Preconfigure CalDAV, CardDAV, subscribed calendars.
- Preconfigure X.509 certificates.
Be that as it may, the important question is "Do the features we care about work?". If your employer relies on a number of features that really are Blackberry-exclusive, then obviously you're a bit stuck. But for many businesses, that's not the case.
Both the iPhone and Android can just as easily be integrated into an existing business environment.
Both can be forced to follow corporate policies.
Both can be remotely wiped if lost or stolen.
Both can connect to Exchange - and I mean a full connection, syncing email, calendar and contacts - without having to buy extra software or hardware (which for years was a pre-requisite to get the best out of Blackberries; I don't know if it still is).
Essentially, RIM's unique selling points were on borrowed time the day ActiveSync was made available for licensing. The only amazing thing is the length of time it took for any handset developer to actually integrate it properly.
When you choose what product you're going to use, there's invariably a whole bunch of things being considered. Yes, cost is one of them, but 9 times out of 10 it's actually pretty low down the priority list.
Let's consider small businesses for the time being, because they're the bulk of employers. Businesses that don't have an IT department, or if they do it's a single technician who may or may not have some sort of outside company to fall back on. Their priority list includes:
- Can we get support? (In plain English: If we want to find someone who can set this up for us and provide ongoing management, will we be able to simply pick up the yellow pages and call the first company we find? Or ask around friends and relatives to find someone?)
- Can we do our work? The instant there's one proprietary Windows app involved, you have a problem. It only takes one business-critical Windows app to kill Linux on the desktop stone dead; Wine is a non-starter because even if the app seems to work, telephone calls to the vendor for support will fall on deaf ears even if the problem demonstrably has nothing to do with Wine. Most of these proprietary apps are stupendously expensive - but they integrate so many business processes that migrating off them is even more stupendously expensive.
- Can we manage it centrally? ("Manage centrally" is a little bit more than just LDAP; I'm talking Active Directory equivalence wherever possible).
- Does it work with our existing hardware? (Believe it or not, there are large expensive printers out there that are WinPrinters).
- Where we have to interact with others, can we do so? (Yes, there are still IE-only web apps out there, and they're often found in something provided by franchisors to their franchisees, so even smaller businesses can be IE-dependent).
Cost is on the list, but if the answer to any of the above is "no", then finding some way of making it work will only happen if the cost is absolutely stratospheric.
Quite a few of the smaller ISPs are buying capacity wholesale from larger ISPs anyway, particularly if you're looking at FTTC services. So "switching to someone whose network isn't overburdened" isn't as easy as swapping supplier, you've got to do quite a bit of research.
Not to mention that Google's in-house chefs are a thing of legend. I really don't see what's news here.
Anybody with allergies is going to have a hellish time at Apple's restaurant then.
Engineer: "Does this dish contain nuts?" Chef: "It tastes real good. Don't worry about what's in it." Engineer: "No, seriously, I need to know. Does it contain nuts?" Chef: "Doesn't matter what it contains, it tastes good. Nutritious, too, it'll give you the energy to get through the afternoon." (Engineer eats the dish and spends the rest of the afternoon in hospital).
Frankly, if you touch my daughter and yell at her like this I'll have you arrested for indecent liberties with a child, abuse of a child, and I'll do whatever I can to have you listed on every sexual predator website I can find and basically I'm willing to destroy your life. If a parent acted like this they'd be arrested and the kids taken away. But because "Floyd" watched a 15 minute instructional video, he gets a cardboard badge and the ability to make up any rules he wants and doesn't have to tell anyone what the rules are.
Tell me, who exactly are you going to ask to arrest "Floyd"?
By that definition, there's been very little innovation in the computer industry in the last thirty years. After all, there were touch-screen driven computers around years before Microsoft started pushing their tablet idea, and there were also laptops around long before then.
Innovation does not have to mean "implementing a 100% brand-new, never been done before, never even something similar been attempted before idea". If it did, then we've had no innovation since the days of Charles Babbage.
The GMail migration tools aren't so much poorly QA'd as poorly designed.
They're quite obviously written by developers, for developers, and so "generating a useful, informative error message in plain English" appears to have totally fallen by the wayside.
Slashdot Mirror
He was referring to the design of the microphone used for the icon; this sort of thing
Not on the Mac it doesn't, there's only one person who's doing the porting work and there's a showstopper bug in the version of GTK that Gimp 2.8 depends on.
The showstopper only affects GTK on the Mac.
If you're making buckets of cash of their produt, pay for the upgrade and quit bitching...wow.
You'd be amazed how many companies in this world aren't making buckets of cash. They're making enough to meet payroll and cover any loans, but beyond that every month is a struggle.
Even when you look at national and even multinational companies, the story frequently doesn't change much. Yes, they cover their expenses every month but for many, it doesn't take a particularly big problem to come bouncing out of nowhere and that's it, thank you and goodnight.
What Wine needs above all else is support from a major application vendor.
Right now, if I recommend running a commercial Windows app under Wine and it doesn't work properly, queries to the app vendor will result in a brief "That's not supported" at best.
As long as this is the norm, Wine is fighting a losing battle in any business environment.
You assume Dell would have the good manners to install shovelware through the existing packaging system.
That is one hell of an assumption right there.
Another vote for Costco.
Run up the numbers yourself per-print for a typical inkjet - look at the manufacturer's own figures for estimated cartridge life at 95% coverage, divide that by the cost for a full brace of cartridges and tack on the price for a sheet of photo quality paper.
IME you'll find it usually comes out about the same, maybe slightly dearer than using a major photo processor. But that only tells you part of the story.
It costs about the same provided you have a 0% waste rate and you ignore the cost of the printer and any associated items.
That means no paper jams, no wastage from trial-and-error figuring out optimum settings, no discovering the hard way that colour temperature on screen and on paper are two different things, no ink wasted because you didn't use the printer for a week and it now needs to run a cleaning cycle.
In the real world, you'll probably find this adds 20-30% to your costs. Obviously with practise you can reduce this, but even if you get it down to zero (never going to happen), it's still going to be at a photo finish between you and Costco. And Costco's machine can probably churn out 100 photos in the time it takes your printer to do 10.
You assume that Vimes would have been able to live on substantially less than AM$37/month (assuming he was already saving about AM$1/month and buying a new pair of boots about once every 10-12 months).
There's some truth to this.
In the UK, tuition fees were introduced some years ago - previously the government subsidised your first degree more-or-less 100% (though you still had to find money to live on). The amount the university could demand of students was capped and a student could take out a government-backed loan to cover it; needless to say every single university in the country immediately started charging precisely the level of the cap, no more, no less.
Recently, the cap has been raised quite considerably. The government's logic was that the Free Market would ensure that only the best universities were able to charge the highest fees. It hasn't quite worked like that. AFAIK every single university promptly raised their fees - to the level of the cap.
The bad news is I don't know of any (and I don't think you'll find any) easy, one-shot tool to run across the whole lot that gives you a simple "corrupted yes/no?" answer to lots of different filetypes.
The good news is it'd be reasonably easy to lash together something in bash, kick it off overnight and come back in the morning to a list of probably-corrupted files.
In pseudo-bash (because I haven't the time to write it out and check it works properly), something like this would be a good start:
function checkJpeg {
jpeginfo -c $1 || return 1
return 0
}
function checkPdf {
# do something to check a PDF is OK
}
FILETYPE=`file $1` ;; ;;
case $FILETYPE in
"jpeg" )
checkJpeg $1 || echo $1
"PDF )
checkPdf $1 || echo $1
esac
Then run it with the help of find /home -type f -print0 to check every file in /home. This would give you a list of potentially-corrupted files. Up to you how you deal with it - personally I wouldn't run rm against it in case you find files that can be rescued or that your checks aren't as perfect as you'd like.
For extra credit, determine the expected filetype based on file extension and then use file(1) as your first "is it corrupted?" test - that way you'll spot files that are too corrupted for file(1) to work reliably.
Tell me, have they started travelling around in little things that look like whisky glasses and started developing planet-sized supercomputers?
Keyword here: theory. And I mean that in the colloquial sense.
As soon as real-world issues crop up (like "Okay, technically we should shut everything down for a month while we check that it's all safe. But that costs an enormous amount of money; it's far cheaper to falsify records and pretend we've done that, if anything happens we'll all be dead anyway so who cares?" or "Yes, this reactor is totally foolproof and shutting everything down for a month is unnecessary with this design. But it's totally untested in the real world, which means it's such a political hot potato that no politician in their right mind will let it happen"), you've got problems.
So, who's got suggestions that don't fall down in the real world?
Usually your solicitor does that due diligence, that's why you hire them. But their diligence wouldn't extend to this and BT aren't obliged to provide a phone line capable of broadband.
And I can tell you an exchange right now that's only enabled for plain ADSL.
No ADSL2 of any description, no unbundled services. It was one of the later ones to be enabled for ADSL in summer 2004.
It's not in the middle of nowhere - it's serving a small village on the outskirts of a larger town, only 3.9 miles away from the town exchange that's enabled for FTTC. I doubt it's the only one of its kind.
Not always as simple as that. We've got a fairly densely populated country; it's common to find villages on the outskirts of towns - perhaps only a few km from the town centre - that have their own telephone exchange that was only enabled for ADSL relatively recently.
The only way you'd know you were moving into a potential broadband blackhole is if you put the postcode into SamKnows before buying the house. A cursory glance at a map wouldn't necessarily be terribly informative - indeed, it could be downright misleading.
Do you care about your electricity bill at all? If you do, it'll probably be cheaper over the course of 6-12 months to buy a simple NAS box or a cheap atom board and plug in a couple of 2TB hard drives.
In other words, it speaks volumes about the marketing ability of geeks. Just as I said. If I created the worlds greatest network monitoring system and named it "Portable Enterprise Network Information System" it wouldn't matter. Nobody is going to install PENIS in a professional environment.
I may just have to fork Nagios...
Not sure about Android, but for the iPhone Configuration Utility lets you:
- Disable installing apps.
- Disable the use of the camera.
- Disable FaceTime.
- Disable screen capture.
- Disable automatic sync while roaming.
- Disable Siri.
- Disable in-app purchasing.
- Force the user to enter an iTunes store password for all purchases.
- Disable multiplayer gaming.
- Disable adding Game Centre friends.
- Disable YouTube.
- Disable the iTunes Store.
- Disable Safari.
- Leave Safari enabled but disable autofill/fraud warning/javascript/popups/cookies
- Disable iCloud backup, sync and photo screen.
- Disable letting diagnostic data being sent to Apple.
- Prevent the user from accepting untrusted TLS certificates.
- Force encrypted backups.
- Disallow explicit music & podcasts.
- Set the maximum allowed rating for movies, TV shows and apps.
- Preconfigure Wifi
- Preconfigure VPN
- Preconfigure email (IMAP, POP or Exchange)
- Preconfigure CalDAV, CardDAV, subscribed calendars.
- Preconfigure X.509 certificates.
Be that as it may, the important question is "Do the features we care about work?". If your employer relies on a number of features that really are Blackberry-exclusive, then obviously you're a bit stuck. But for many businesses, that's not the case.
Both the iPhone and Android can just as easily be integrated into an existing business environment.
Both can be forced to follow corporate policies.
Both can be remotely wiped if lost or stolen.
Both can connect to Exchange - and I mean a full connection, syncing email, calendar and contacts - without having to buy extra software or hardware (which for years was a pre-requisite to get the best out of Blackberries; I don't know if it still is).
Essentially, RIM's unique selling points were on borrowed time the day ActiveSync was made available for licensing. The only amazing thing is the length of time it took for any handset developer to actually integrate it properly.
Interesting, looks like Dell used the same design for a time.
Now I think of it, I'm sure the Dell PDUs had serial numbers that looked like APC serial numbers.... I wonder if APC OEM'd the lot?
When you choose what product you're going to use, there's invariably a whole bunch of things being considered. Yes, cost is one of them, but 9 times out of 10 it's actually pretty low down the priority list.
Let's consider small businesses for the time being, because they're the bulk of employers. Businesses that don't have an IT department, or if they do it's a single technician who may or may not have some sort of outside company to fall back on. Their priority list includes:
- Can we get support? (In plain English: If we want to find someone who can set this up for us and provide ongoing management, will we be able to simply pick up the yellow pages and call the first company we find? Or ask around friends and relatives to find someone?)
- Can we do our work? The instant there's one proprietary Windows app involved, you have a problem. It only takes one business-critical Windows app to kill Linux on the desktop stone dead; Wine is a non-starter because even if the app seems to work, telephone calls to the vendor for support will fall on deaf ears even if the problem demonstrably has nothing to do with Wine. Most of these proprietary apps are stupendously expensive - but they integrate so many business processes that migrating off them is even more stupendously expensive.
- Can we manage it centrally? ("Manage centrally" is a little bit more than just LDAP; I'm talking Active Directory equivalence wherever possible).
- Does it work with our existing hardware? (Believe it or not, there are large expensive printers out there that are WinPrinters).
- Where we have to interact with others, can we do so? (Yes, there are still IE-only web apps out there, and they're often found in something provided by franchisors to their franchisees, so even smaller businesses can be IE-dependent).
Cost is on the list, but if the answer to any of the above is "no", then finding some way of making it work will only happen if the cost is absolutely stratospheric.
Quite a few of the smaller ISPs are buying capacity wholesale from larger ISPs anyway, particularly if you're looking at FTTC services. So "switching to someone whose network isn't overburdened" isn't as easy as swapping supplier, you've got to do quite a bit of research.
Not to mention that Google's in-house chefs are a thing of legend. I really don't see what's news here.
Anybody with allergies is going to have a hellish time at Apple's restaurant then.
Engineer: "Does this dish contain nuts?"
Chef: "It tastes real good. Don't worry about what's in it."
Engineer: "No, seriously, I need to know. Does it contain nuts?"
Chef: "Doesn't matter what it contains, it tastes good. Nutritious, too, it'll give you the energy to get through the afternoon."
(Engineer eats the dish and spends the rest of the afternoon in hospital).
Frankly, if you touch my daughter and yell at her like this I'll have you arrested for indecent liberties with a child, abuse of a child, and I'll do whatever I can to have you listed on every sexual predator website I can find and basically I'm willing to destroy your life. If a parent acted like this they'd be arrested and the kids taken away. But because "Floyd" watched a 15 minute instructional video, he gets a cardboard badge and the ability to make up any rules he wants and doesn't have to tell anyone what the rules are.
Tell me, who exactly are you going to ask to arrest "Floyd"?
By that definition, there's been very little innovation in the computer industry in the last thirty years. After all, there were touch-screen driven computers around years before Microsoft started pushing their tablet idea, and there were also laptops around long before then.
Innovation does not have to mean "implementing a 100% brand-new, never been done before, never even something similar been attempted before idea". If it did, then we've had no innovation since the days of Charles Babbage.
The GMail migration tools aren't so much poorly QA'd as poorly designed.
They're quite obviously written by developers, for developers, and so "generating a useful, informative error message in plain English" appears to have totally fallen by the wayside.