You won't see any cheap Chinese knock-offs in the west for two reasons:
1. Patents. 2. Cheap chinese knock-offs are only cheap if they're being made by the million. Which it's vanishingly unlikely would happen with a tape drive.
> Unless tape has improved in the last 20 years, it has has an archival life of a decade or two.
Bit of a shame that tape drives are generally only compatible within a couple of generations of the same tape technology.
LTO, for instance, mandates that the tape drive is able to read and write tapes of its own generation and the one immediately before it, and read tapes two generations back. Which means that an LTO4 drive is not mandated to be able to read an LTO1 tape.
Welcome to the wonderful world of hardware manufacturing. This is why many companies don't announce a damn thing until the product is already on its way to the retailers.
Must say I disagree with the benefits you raise on a couple of core points.
Another interesting comparison is the time it takes to develop and maintain internal macros. Microsoft used to be far better at this than OOo, but at this point OOo is at least as good. Maybe better: have not done this kind of programming for a long time, but it seems like OOo offers a stronger set of developer tools out of the box.
Can you take an Excel spreadsheet with internal macros and reliably run it in Libre/OpenOffice? Haven't tried myself, but if the answer is "no", you've just locked out every single company that's got some clever sod in Finance who's spent the last few years developing a whole bunch of clever spreadsheets.
Hint: This includes virtually every company that has a dedicated finance team.
I'm not going to get into the argument as to whether it's wise for that to have been allowed to happen; the fact is it has.
Yet another point of comparison is the ease with which external apps could be developed to work with the data files these office suites produce, such as grepping across ten years of archived files for any reference to a specific invoice number, etc. Oh, wait... you cannot do that on a Microsoft platform, the proprietary file formats get in the way...
You're so far away from a selling point there that I'm not sure you could see one if you had a telescope.
"It's hypothetically possible for a third party company to write applications that read your files without requiring a copy of Office, were they of a mind to do so" isn't a particularly good selling point. Particularly when Office itself provides APIs for third-party developers to plug into and a whole lot of developers have been merrily doing so for well over a decade.
The problem you've got is that nobody buys Office because they want Office.
Seriously. It sounds totally wrong but I guarantee you Microsoft have not made a single sale of Office to anyone who wanted Office because there is no such thing as someone who wants Office.
Oh sure, they'll tell you they want Office, but what they actually want is the ability to write letters, draft proposals, produce the accounts and reliably open and save the letters, proposals and accounts that they need to share with others. If you could sell them a genie in a magic lamp who'd do all that for them - quickly, efficiently, accurately, without misunderstandings and interact with their colleagues, suppliers and customer's genies, so all you have to do is say "Genie, write me a sales letter for widget X and send it to the list you'll find on my desk" - even if the genie was double the price of Office, you'd still destroy it inside two years.
Since when does anyone run OpenOffice on a server?
Probably since OpenOffice has command line options allowing you to run it without any sort of user interface, instead integrating it with other applications to do clever things to documents automagically.
Why don't you use something like DeepFreeze or Rollback? It costs a little cash, but it'll probably reduce the number of grey hairs your kids give you.
We don't fund universities the same way you guys in the US do.
Universities are rather more academic than colleges and students pay a contribution toward the cost, the rest being met by the taxpayer. Foreign students have to pay the full whack, no subsidies for them.
It's important to note that even though the taxpayer is paying for a large chunk of the fees, the university operates entirely independently of the government. It makes its own rules, devises its own admission policies, reaches its own decisions and the government doesn't get any say in how it functions. In essence it's a business that mostly targets customers who will be getting help to buy the product.
I'm no expert in these things, but AFAIK the process goes something like this:
Test your idea in a petri dish. If it works, continue.
Test your idea in an animal. If it works, continue.
Test your idea in another type of animal. If it works, continue.
Test your idea in a small handful of healthy humans at very small doses. If it doesn't cause them any harm, continue.
Test your idea in a larger number of healthy humans at slightly higher doses. If it doesn't cause them any harm, continue.
Test your idea in a handful of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue. (This is going to be awkward. Ethical clearance is an important part of any medical testing; there's little chance of getting ethical clearance of using this in place of existing treatments for cancer patients because if it doesn't work, you've delayed them treatment that could have worked. You could possibly use it in conjunction with, or in patients for whom existing treatments haven't worked, but then there's the question of is the treatment more/less effective when the cancer's progressed that far? Or if it's given in conjunction with existing treatments? Sure you can devise tests to deal with these issues, but they won't be as simple as "administer drug, keep a list of who's had it and what the results were".)
Test your idea in a large number of sick humans. If it works better than existing treatments, continue.
Release your treatment into the market.
Each of these steps can take months. Some of it's political and administrative wrangling, some of it's just that the test itself will take some time before you can be sure of the results. A drug can fail at any one of these stages and it's back to the drawing board (or maybe the test tube).
The whole process takes years. Yet newspapers often start reporting about "miracle cure" drugs that have only just completed the first round of live animal trials. Which is why you hear about all sorts of miracle cures that never see the light of day.
That's pretty small as it is, going smaller so soon seems a bit unnecessary?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? But if you take apart an iPhone, there's really not much left once you've removed the display and battery. The micro SIM slot takes up a surprising proportion of the space on the board; I can see how making it slightly smaller would increase space for the battery.
> by now everyone should have caught up as parts became cheaper(they did, right?)
They did indeed. Driven by small widescreen LCD televisions, the cost of 1366x768 screens plummeted.
Now, the PC industry is heavily driven by cost. Basically every commodity PC manufacturer is in a race to the bottom to see who can build a computer the cheapest. It's been this way for some years now - there's a reason a cheap laptop feels like it's constructed out of cheese.
Which means that if the 1366x768 16:9 television panel costs $20 and the 1280x800 16:10 is $24 (numbers pulled out of thin air), the laptop manufacturer will go for the cheaper part unless they're pretty certain that the more expensive part will result in a laptop that can easily be sold for a little bit more.
My guess is the "technical solution" they need to investigate isn't "How on earth do we persuade our network to block a phone?", it's "Okay, how do we integrate a process to do this with our existing systems and processes?"
Strikes me that the Raspberry Pi designers are as much at fault here - to my mind it looked like a perfectly nice case that was spoiled by an odd board design that didn't have the sockets all lined up relative to each other.
I would dearly love to know how you define "nice" as applied to their printers. No better than any other manufacturer - frequently worse - and the only way I can make sense of the drivers is that HP's driver engineers have got some sort of a sweepstake going on along the lines of "How terrible can we make the driver before we start to see significant customer backlash?"
YOU want to replace the battery. If sales figures are anything to go by, the rest of the world does not.
And why should they? 9 times out of 10, when the battery fails the item itself is already reaching the end of its useful life anyway. I don't think I've ever bought a spare battery for a cellphone, nor do I know anyone else who has (not that I've asked).
Can the best tech design company in the world design a way for you to change the battery more easily? Sure they can. But all engineering involves trade-offs; Apple have evidently decided that "ability for the end-user to easily change the battery" is a trade-off worth making.
Ah, slashdot. The place where you can indignantly call someone wrong because they've told you to do something that's impossible, only to have a whole bunch of people who've already done it explain that you, in fact, are the person in the wrong.
To my knowledge these devices don't work on iPhones, yet, but anything in plain-text or enciphered weakly would still be a concern if physical access to the device is gained.
Your knowledge is wrong. The manufacturer has a list of supported phones, and every iOS device is on there. It even claims "iOS physical extraction, decoding & real-time decryption"; which suggests that either they've found a weakness, they have a backdoor in or they're making overblown claims and it simply tries a dictionary attack.
I have no idea how much they cost, whether the manufacturer has any qualms about selling them to whoever wants to buy or if they're sufficiently widespread that someone suitably unscrupulous could easily buy secondhand, borrow or steal one.
In the UK, which I believe is the focus of this discussion.
But even then it's not as simple as the GP makes out. It's illegal to keep a vehicle on the public highway without insurance (following a recent change in the law called "continuous insurance"), which means that while in theory if you've got a policy that allows you to drive any car you can drive a car that is not specifically insured, you can't park it on the street.
Not to mention that yes I can get a car insurance policy that will cover me to drive any car. But that's not quite what it says. It actually requires me to first have a car that I insure myself, and then to request that I have "driving other vehicles" cover on my policy. "Driving other vehicles" cover will usually only cover me if the other vehicle is specifically insured (albeit insured in someone else's name and with their consent...). It won't allow me to drive a vehicle that is not in any way insured.
I think motor trade policies might be different, but unless you're a motor trader you won't have one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
You won't see any cheap Chinese knock-offs in the west for two reasons:
1. Patents.
2. Cheap chinese knock-offs are only cheap if they're being made by the million. Which it's vanishingly unlikely would happen with a tape drive.
> Unless tape has improved in the last 20 years, it has has an archival life of a decade or two.
Bit of a shame that tape drives are generally only compatible within a couple of generations of the same tape technology.
LTO, for instance, mandates that the tape drive is able to read and write tapes of its own generation and the one immediately before it, and read tapes two generations back. Which means that an LTO4 drive is not mandated to be able to read an LTO1 tape.
RTFA. LTFS - made possible in LTO5 - allows you to mount a tape like it's a disk. No need for specific software.
The tapes themselves are cheap. The drives that use them are not.
I gave up. If you're going to be that verbose, don't write it all out in powerpoint slides.
Welcome to the wonderful world of hardware manufacturing. This is why many companies don't announce a damn thing until the product is already on its way to the retailers.
Must say I disagree with the benefits you raise on a couple of core points.
Another interesting comparison is the time it takes to develop and maintain internal macros. Microsoft used to be far better at this than OOo, but at this point OOo is at least as good. Maybe better: have not done this kind of programming for a long time, but it seems like OOo offers a stronger set of developer tools out of the box.
Can you take an Excel spreadsheet with internal macros and reliably run it in Libre/OpenOffice? Haven't tried myself, but if the answer is "no", you've just locked out every single company that's got some clever sod in Finance who's spent the last few years developing a whole bunch of clever spreadsheets.
Hint: This includes virtually every company that has a dedicated finance team.
I'm not going to get into the argument as to whether it's wise for that to have been allowed to happen; the fact is it has.
Yet another point of comparison is the ease with which external apps could be developed to work with the data files these office suites produce, such as grepping across ten years of archived files for any reference to a specific invoice number, etc. Oh, wait... you cannot do that on a Microsoft platform, the proprietary file formats get in the way...
You're so far away from a selling point there that I'm not sure you could see one if you had a telescope.
"It's hypothetically possible for a third party company to write applications that read your files without requiring a copy of Office, were they of a mind to do so" isn't a particularly good selling point. Particularly when Office itself provides APIs for third-party developers to plug into and a whole lot of developers have been merrily doing so for well over a decade.
The problem you've got is that nobody buys Office because they want Office.
Seriously. It sounds totally wrong but I guarantee you Microsoft have not made a single sale of Office to anyone who wanted Office because there is no such thing as someone who wants Office.
Oh sure, they'll tell you they want Office, but what they actually want is the ability to write letters, draft proposals, produce the accounts and reliably open and save the letters, proposals and accounts that they need to share with others. If you could sell them a genie in a magic lamp who'd do all that for them - quickly, efficiently, accurately, without misunderstandings and interact with their colleagues, suppliers and customer's genies, so all you have to do is say "Genie, write me a sales letter for widget X and send it to the list you'll find on my desk" - even if the genie was double the price of Office, you'd still destroy it inside two years.
Since when does anyone run OpenOffice on a server?
Probably since OpenOffice has command line options allowing you to run it without any sort of user interface, instead integrating it with other applications to do clever things to documents automagically.
Why don't you use something like DeepFreeze or Rollback? It costs a little cash, but it'll probably reduce the number of grey hairs your kids give you.
We don't fund universities the same way you guys in the US do.
Universities are rather more academic than colleges and students pay a contribution toward the cost, the rest being met by the taxpayer. Foreign students have to pay the full whack, no subsidies for them.
It's important to note that even though the taxpayer is paying for a large chunk of the fees, the university operates entirely independently of the government. It makes its own rules, devises its own admission policies, reaches its own decisions and the government doesn't get any say in how it functions. In essence it's a business that mostly targets customers who will be getting help to buy the product.
Sky will not, in a million years, be forcibly closed down. No chance.
What **might** happen is Murdoch's family being forced to sell a large number of their shares in BSkyB.
I'm no expert in these things, but AFAIK the process goes something like this:
Each of these steps can take months. Some of it's political and administrative wrangling, some of it's just that the test itself will take some time before you can be sure of the results. A drug can fail at any one of these stages and it's back to the drawing board (or maybe the test tube).
The whole process takes years. Yet newspapers often start reporting about "miracle cure" drugs that have only just completed the first round of live animal trials. Which is why you hear about all sorts of miracle cures that never see the light of day.
Maybe the OP felt his vendors were taking the piss out of him?
That's pretty small as it is, going smaller so soon seems a bit unnecessary?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? But if you take apart an iPhone, there's really not much left once you've removed the display and battery. The micro SIM slot takes up a surprising proportion of the space on the board; I can see how making it slightly smaller would increase space for the battery.
> When are we going to get an improvement in screen resolution ?!? And fuck the iPad3.
Were I to hazard a guess, I'd say "About 12-18 months after Apple releases a laptop with drastically improved screen resolution".
> by now everyone should have caught up as parts became cheaper(they did, right?)
They did indeed. Driven by small widescreen LCD televisions, the cost of 1366x768 screens plummeted.
Now, the PC industry is heavily driven by cost. Basically every commodity PC manufacturer is in a race to the bottom to see who can build a computer the cheapest. It's been this way for some years now - there's a reason a cheap laptop feels like it's constructed out of cheese.
Which means that if the 1366x768 16:9 television panel costs $20 and the 1280x800 16:10 is $24 (numbers pulled out of thin air), the laptop manufacturer will go for the cheaper part unless they're pretty certain that the more expensive part will result in a laptop that can easily be sold for a little bit more.
My guess is the "technical solution" they need to investigate isn't "How on earth do we persuade our network to block a phone?", it's "Okay, how do we integrate a process to do this with our existing systems and processes?"
Not easily they can't - you need to change the phone's IMEI number, which on many modern phones is way beyond the ability of your average smack-head.
Strikes me that the Raspberry Pi designers are as much at fault here - to my mind it looked like a perfectly nice case that was spoiled by an odd board design that didn't have the sockets all lined up relative to each other.
I would dearly love to know how you define "nice" as applied to their printers. No better than any other manufacturer - frequently worse - and the only way I can make sense of the drivers is that HP's driver engineers have got some sort of a sweepstake going on along the lines of "How terrible can we make the driver before we start to see significant customer backlash?"
We want to be able to replace the battery.
YOU want to replace the battery. If sales figures are anything to go by, the rest of the world does not.
And why should they? 9 times out of 10, when the battery fails the item itself is already reaching the end of its useful life anyway. I don't think I've ever bought a spare battery for a cellphone, nor do I know anyone else who has (not that I've asked).
Can the best tech design company in the world design a way for you to change the battery more easily? Sure they can. But all engineering involves trade-offs; Apple have evidently decided that "ability for the end-user to easily change the battery" is a trade-off worth making.
DOS BATCH is turing complete, so is windows batch programming.
So is Intercal, that doesn't mean I want to do anything particularly complicated in it.
Ah, slashdot. The place where you can indignantly call someone wrong because they've told you to do something that's impossible, only to have a whole bunch of people who've already done it explain that you, in fact, are the person in the wrong.
To my knowledge these devices don't work on iPhones, yet, but anything in plain-text or enciphered weakly would still be a concern if physical access to the device is gained.
Your knowledge is wrong. The manufacturer has a list of supported phones, and every iOS device is on there. It even claims "iOS physical extraction, decoding & real-time decryption"; which suggests that either they've found a weakness, they have a backdoor in or they're making overblown claims and it simply tries a dictionary attack.
I have no idea how much they cost, whether the manufacturer has any qualms about selling them to whoever wants to buy or if they're sufficiently widespread that someone suitably unscrupulous could easily buy secondhand, borrow or steal one.
In the UK, which I believe is the focus of this discussion.
But even then it's not as simple as the GP makes out. It's illegal to keep a vehicle on the public highway without insurance (following a recent change in the law called "continuous insurance"), which means that while in theory if you've got a policy that allows you to drive any car you can drive a car that is not specifically insured, you can't park it on the street.
Not to mention that yes I can get a car insurance policy that will cover me to drive any car. But that's not quite what it says. It actually requires me to first have a car that I insure myself, and then to request that I have "driving other vehicles" cover on my policy. "Driving other vehicles" cover will usually only cover me if the other vehicle is specifically insured (albeit insured in someone else's name and with their consent...). It won't allow me to drive a vehicle that is not in any way insured.
I think motor trade policies might be different, but unless you're a motor trader you won't have one of those.