You won't be surprised to learn that Download.com isn't the only company doing this. There's another one (Wisedownloads, but I'm not about to help their google rankings by posting a link) that occasionally buys up Google ads offering a "Free photoshop alternative!".
This "alternative" is Gimp with an installer that includes about 4 or 5 other "extras". They also offer VLC, equally bundled with rubbish. Looks like a little one-man operation that just does a handful of products that are of interest to a lot of people so I don't think they're doing nmap. Yet.
Meh. IME the majority of those "contractor-per-hour" websites are populated by two groups of people:
1. People in countries where the cost of living is so low they can afford to work for a fraction of minimum wage in any Western country.
2. People who are just getting started, desperate to earn a reputation and will work for a fraction of a liveable wage just to build that reputation up.
The great majority of people who know what they're doing and can command good money from people who respect their knowledge and experience give up because they're hacked off with the incessant competition from 1 and 2.
I've heard of that sort of thing before; I'm told the idea is "inject some intentional slowdowns, we'll remove them later and charge the client $BIGNUM for it".
My chemistry teacher had a BBC Micro sitting in the corner of the lab. I never saw it used, until near the end of the final term when I was 18 (2004). He ran a simulation of the electron cloud round a hydrogen atom, and admitted that he only used the machine once per year for this purpose.
What is it with chemistry teachers not being able to find elegant demonstrations of ideas outside of the BBC Micro? My own chemistry teacher did something similar, as did a chemistry teacher in a school I worked at for a year.
With a system that old you can get away with taking that approach - with today's fascination with having everything somehow connected over the Internet, you simply don't have the luxury of being able to say "It works. Why change it?"
Would add far too much cost to the hard drive, but this is essentially what server-class hardware RAID controllers do. The battery doesn't power the hard disk, it just keeps the cache running.
The cache on a hard disk is often used as write cache - store incoming data in cache, leave actually committing it to disk until a convenient opportunity arises.
32MB of cache doesn't take that long to flush. 1GB, OTOH...
What I meant was "how does adding the magic word 'cloud' resolve the issue? You can't just press a button on the phone marked "Cloud" and have it automagically connect to a centralised, Internet-based management system. There are various online storage systems you can sync your phone to (which is essentially what iCloud is), but in and of themselves they don't intrinsically give you a way that you can log on from a PC in head office and remotely configure everyone's phone."
You can configure FOG with minimal impact on an existing PXE configuration, but it does require some fiddling.
I can't remember the precise details but the long and short of it is you wind up with a generic PXE configuration applied to anything that hasn't been configured by FOG and a PC-specific one applied by means of identify the PC by MAC address. FOG then deals with the latter.
A similar approach is used for VoIP phones. (Though really these should live in their own VLAN - which implies a separate set of IP addresses and as an added benefit it's dead easy to send separate settings to the subnet in ISC DHCPD).
Closer examination almost invariably reveals that they're referring to the work of Gutmann. The thing is, Gutmann's work was entirely theoretical. I have yet to see any evidence that anyone in history has ever successfully recovered any data from a hard disk - any hard disk - that was entirely overwritten with 0's.
But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong.
If you're still being provided with XP in 2011, I assure you there is a very good reason.
The immense likelihood is it's something along the lines of "We've spent the last ten years having staffing levels cut ever tighter. Today we get in at 08:30 and work flat out without a break until 17:30 - no lunch, no gossiping with colleagues, nothing. And we're still falling behind. We don't have the time to support two different desktop operating systems indefinitely - any migration must have a definite end in sight. But business unit X depends on proprietary software which doesn't run under 7. Nope, not even under "XP Mode". That shouldn't be possible, considering how XP mode is basically a virtualised XP machine, but somehow it is. The company that developed it went out of business a long time ago and while we don't like it any more than you do, this product is vital to that business unit and they will not commit any budget towards replacing it. Yes we know that's silly. Yes we know that if they experience a significant issue with the product, they may very well be totally fucked. We've discussed this at the highest levels within the company - they take the attitude that what we have may not be perfect but it broadly works; if that's still a problem for you then by all means raise it up through the chain of command. In fact, please do - it might get us the funding to bring another body on board.
Unfortunately, explaining all this will take at least 5 minutes, I've got another 3 people to hand new PCs over to and they'll demand the same explanation - taking an additional 20 minutes all told. My manager expects me to be back at my desk in 10, my performance review is tomorrow afternoon and I know for a fact he's been making noises about outsourcing the entire department to some outside company for the last six months. My performance isn't monitored by people like you telling him how happy you are, it's monitored by how quickly we can close off calls as they come in.
The biggest joke is that the outsourcing company is either going to make the situation a lot worse or it's going to be rather more expensive than keeping things as they are. Why? Simple. We've cut our budget so tightly that we don't spend anything beyond vital repairs and salary - and as I said, our team is already running at least two men shorter than it should be. So the outsourcing firm can't possibly make any money without either charging rather a lot more than our current budget or letting another 2 people go and having service suffer further.
So the immense likelihood is I won't explain it all. Instead, you'll just get a harried 'no'".
Windows XP is the new IE6. Nobody wants to be stuck with it, yet lots of people are likely to be for some time to come.
Which is why it is funny that he says it is not a pricing problem. It most certainly is.
While he is correct that DRM, when logically and rationally evaluated from the perspective of the informed consumer, severely diminishes the value of the product, he fails to compare the cost and availability of the product.
It isn't a price problem, it's a value problem. The two are subtly different. Gabe's argument is that availability and intrusive DRM negatively impact the value of the game.
What the industry should be doing is concentrating on ways to make the legit product more attractive than the pirated product - instead they're making it less attractive.
From what you've said, it sounds like you're dangerously close to being bitten by the equipment bug.
Don't.
Every amateur photographer goes through this phase - thinking "if I only owned X, my photographs would improve immeasurably". Some never get out.
Every photographer who is in this phase is wrong.
What you need to do is learn about composition and light. Get to the library, hit up Amazon and learn about what makes a good photograph. Expect to take tens of thousands of photographs while you're learning - and accept that you'll never stop learning. Accept that of the thousands of photographs you'll take, possibly 5-10% will be halfway decent and maybe 1-2% will be so good you'll seriously consider having them printed to put on the wall.
Software vendors cannot make good hardware. It's some sort of physical law, shortly after "Conservation of Energy" in the Junior Colour Encyclopaedia of Science.
Hardware vendors cannot make good software. For much the same reason.
Where you run into trouble is when a hardware vendor decides for reasons best known only to themselves "You know what would be really good? If we could bundle a bit more logic into the software...."
> and includes fancy shapes made out of florist paste Muh? I suppose you mean decorating marzipan? Marzipan quality varies a lot, it's true; and the texture of the cheaper stuff can be very off, too.
No, I mean florist paste. It's basically sugar, water and starch. It holds the shape better than marzipan or sugar; it's rather stiffer and dries to something resembling thin card.
It also tastes like thin card. It's bl**dy horrible stuff. But apparently for the sort of thing we're talking about, looks are more important than taste.
You'd be amazed (actually you probably wouldn't) at the number of small businesses that are badly run - either because the owner doesn't really want anything more than a job (and so doesn't really plan for making it into a real business that can stand on its own feet) or because the owner simply doesn't know how.
She couldn't. Groupon won't run the deal unless it's fantastically good - on the order of 60-80% off. On top of that they then take 50% of the coupon cost.
In theory you're supposed to keep the details of all the customers and sell them stuff at a later date - though lots of businesses have reported that this can be nigh-on impossible. The sort of customer who takes you up on a 75% offer is frequently the sort of customer who would never pay full price under any circumstances.
What she should have done was limited it to 100 customers. But I'm given to understand Groupon have this habit of using all sorts of high-pressure tactics to assure you there's no way you'll wind up with more customers you can cope with, and under these circumstances it'd be silly to limit it to 100 customers when prospect number 101 could be the one who keeps coming back.
If you're buying a basic, churned-out-by-the-thousand cupcake from a cheap high-street bakery like Greggs (or for that matter from the supermarket) you will pay 50p-£1.
But there is also a market for a much fancier cake. Where it's made with butter rather than cheap cooking fat, where the chocolate is real, high-quality chocolate rather than cheap cooking stuff, where the flavouring is essence rather than artificial flavouring, where the decorating is done by hand and includes fancy shapes made out of florist paste as well as a generous topping of buttercream.
We're talking the sort of thing you could happily serve to guests at your wedding. The sort of thing that celebrities you see in glossy magazines (but would rather see on milk cartons, if you're in the US) buy. Not the sort of thing you pick up for a cheap sugar rush. These will sell for about £2-3 each.
Slashdot Mirror
You won't be surprised to learn that Download.com isn't the only company doing this. There's another one (Wisedownloads, but I'm not about to help their google rankings by posting a link) that occasionally buys up Google ads offering a "Free photoshop alternative!".
This "alternative" is Gimp with an installer that includes about 4 or 5 other "extras". They also offer VLC, equally bundled with rubbish. Looks like a little one-man operation that just does a handful of products that are of interest to a lot of people so I don't think they're doing nmap. Yet.
Meh. IME the majority of those "contractor-per-hour" websites are populated by two groups of people:
1. People in countries where the cost of living is so low they can afford to work for a fraction of minimum wage in any Western country.
2. People who are just getting started, desperate to earn a reputation and will work for a fraction of a liveable wage just to build that reputation up.
The great majority of people who know what they're doing and can command good money from people who respect their knowledge and experience give up because they're hacked off with the incessant competition from 1 and 2.
I've heard of that sort of thing before; I'm told the idea is "inject some intentional slowdowns, we'll remove them later and charge the client $BIGNUM for it".
I can't quite believe I'm pasting a Dilbert strip here, but it's entirely appropriate:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-02-01/
Can someone explain why ADSL (and for that matter PPPoA) support in F/OSS firmware tends to be so patchy?
You didn't have BBCs if they had a 3.5" floppy drive - they almost invariably had 5.25" floppy drives.
I still wonder where all the resources are wasted in current software.
I occasionally wonder what sort of performance we'd see out of modern PCs if anybody was loopy enough to go into the sort of detail as Braben & Bell.
My chemistry teacher had a BBC Micro sitting in the corner of the lab. I never saw it used, until near the end of the final term when I was 18 (2004). He ran a simulation of the electron cloud round a hydrogen atom, and admitted that he only used the machine once per year for this purpose.
What is it with chemistry teachers not being able to find elegant demonstrations of ideas outside of the BBC Micro? My own chemistry teacher did something similar, as did a chemistry teacher in a school I worked at for a year.
With a system that old you can get away with taking that approach - with today's fascination with having everything somehow connected over the Internet, you simply don't have the luxury of being able to say "It works. Why change it?"
Would add far too much cost to the hard drive, but this is essentially what server-class hardware RAID controllers do. The battery doesn't power the hard disk, it just keeps the cache running.
That's precisely what a hybrid HDD does, except it takes the decision regarding what will benefit most from going in the SSD out of your hands.
The cache on a hard disk is often used as write cache - store incoming data in cache, leave actually committing it to disk until a convenient opportunity arises.
32MB of cache doesn't take that long to flush. 1GB, OTOH...
Not quite what I meant.
What I meant was "how does adding the magic word 'cloud' resolve the issue? You can't just press a button on the phone marked "Cloud" and have it automagically connect to a centralised, Internet-based management system. There are various online storage systems you can sync your phone to (which is essentially what iCloud is), but in and of themselves they don't intrinsically give you a way that you can log on from a PC in head office and remotely configure everyone's phone."
Care to explain that in a bit more detail?
You can configure FOG with minimal impact on an existing PXE configuration, but it does require some fiddling.
I can't remember the precise details but the long and short of it is you wind up with a generic PXE configuration applied to anything that hasn't been configured by FOG and a PC-specific one applied by means of identify the PC by MAC address. FOG then deals with the latter.
A similar approach is used for VoIP phones. (Though really these should live in their own VLAN - which implies a separate set of IP addresses and as an added benefit it's dead easy to send separate settings to the subnet in ISC DHCPD).
I've heard that one from a number of quarters.
Closer examination almost invariably reveals that they're referring to the work of Gutmann. The thing is, Gutmann's work was entirely theoretical. I have yet to see any evidence that anyone in history has ever successfully recovered any data from a hard disk - any hard disk - that was entirely overwritten with 0's.
But when you're still providing us with Windows XP in 2011, you are doing it wrong.
If you're still being provided with XP in 2011, I assure you there is a very good reason.
The immense likelihood is it's something along the lines of "We've spent the last ten years having staffing levels cut ever tighter. Today we get in at 08:30 and work flat out without a break until 17:30 - no lunch, no gossiping with colleagues, nothing. And we're still falling behind. We don't have the time to support two different desktop operating systems indefinitely - any migration must have a definite end in sight. But business unit X depends on proprietary software which doesn't run under 7. Nope, not even under "XP Mode". That shouldn't be possible, considering how XP mode is basically a virtualised XP machine, but somehow it is. The company that developed it went out of business a long time ago and while we don't like it any more than you do, this product is vital to that business unit and they will not commit any budget towards replacing it. Yes we know that's silly. Yes we know that if they experience a significant issue with the product, they may very well be totally fucked. We've discussed this at the highest levels within the company - they take the attitude that what we have may not be perfect but it broadly works; if that's still a problem for you then by all means raise it up through the chain of command. In fact, please do - it might get us the funding to bring another body on board.
Unfortunately, explaining all this will take at least 5 minutes, I've got another 3 people to hand new PCs over to and they'll demand the same explanation - taking an additional 20 minutes all told. My manager expects me to be back at my desk in 10, my performance review is tomorrow afternoon and I know for a fact he's been making noises about outsourcing the entire department to some outside company for the last six months. My performance isn't monitored by people like you telling him how happy you are, it's monitored by how quickly we can close off calls as they come in.
The biggest joke is that the outsourcing company is either going to make the situation a lot worse or it's going to be rather more expensive than keeping things as they are. Why? Simple. We've cut our budget so tightly that we don't spend anything beyond vital repairs and salary - and as I said, our team is already running at least two men shorter than it should be. So the outsourcing firm can't possibly make any money without either charging rather a lot more than our current budget or letting another 2 people go and having service suffer further.
So the immense likelihood is I won't explain it all. Instead, you'll just get a harried 'no'".
Windows XP is the new IE6. Nobody wants to be stuck with it, yet lots of people are likely to be for some time to come.
Which is why it is funny that he says it is not a pricing problem. It most certainly is.
While he is correct that DRM, when logically and rationally evaluated from the perspective of the informed consumer, severely diminishes the value of the product, he fails to compare the cost and availability of the product.
It isn't a price problem, it's a value problem. The two are subtly different. Gabe's argument is that availability and intrusive DRM negatively impact the value of the game.
What the industry should be doing is concentrating on ways to make the legit product more attractive than the pirated product - instead they're making it less attractive.
From what you've said, it sounds like you're dangerously close to being bitten by the equipment bug.
Don't.
Every amateur photographer goes through this phase - thinking "if I only owned X, my photographs would improve immeasurably". Some never get out.
Every photographer who is in this phase is wrong.
What you need to do is learn about composition and light. Get to the library, hit up Amazon and learn about what makes a good photograph. Expect to take tens of thousands of photographs while you're learning - and accept that you'll never stop learning. Accept that of the thousands of photographs you'll take, possibly 5-10% will be halfway decent and maybe 1-2% will be so good you'll seriously consider having them printed to put on the wall.
Software vendors cannot make good hardware. It's some sort of physical law, shortly after "Conservation of Energy" in the Junior Colour Encyclopaedia of Science.
Hardware vendors cannot make good software. For much the same reason.
Where you run into trouble is when a hardware vendor decides for reasons best known only to themselves "You know what would be really good? If we could bundle a bit more logic into the software...."
I didn't comment as to whether or not £2-3 was a good deal. Simply that there was a market for it - people are prepared to pay that.
> and includes fancy shapes made out of florist paste
Muh? I suppose you mean decorating marzipan? Marzipan quality varies a lot, it's true; and the texture of the cheaper stuff can be very off, too.
No, I mean florist paste. It's basically sugar, water and starch. It holds the shape better than marzipan or sugar; it's rather stiffer and dries to something resembling thin card.
It also tastes like thin card. It's bl**dy horrible stuff. But apparently for the sort of thing we're talking about, looks are more important than taste.
You'd be amazed (actually you probably wouldn't) at the number of small businesses that are badly run - either because the owner doesn't really want anything more than a job (and so doesn't really plan for making it into a real business that can stand on its own feet) or because the owner simply doesn't know how.
She couldn't. Groupon won't run the deal unless it's fantastically good - on the order of 60-80% off. On top of that they then take 50% of the coupon cost.
In theory you're supposed to keep the details of all the customers and sell them stuff at a later date - though lots of businesses have reported that this can be nigh-on impossible. The sort of customer who takes you up on a 75% offer is frequently the sort of customer who would never pay full price under any circumstances.
What she should have done was limited it to 100 customers. But I'm given to understand Groupon have this habit of using all sorts of high-pressure tactics to assure you there's no way you'll wind up with more customers you can cope with, and under these circumstances it'd be silly to limit it to 100 customers when prospect number 101 could be the one who keeps coming back.
Depends on the cupcake.
If you're buying a basic, churned-out-by-the-thousand cupcake from a cheap high-street bakery like Greggs (or for that matter from the supermarket) you will pay 50p-£1.
But there is also a market for a much fancier cake. Where it's made with butter rather than cheap cooking fat, where the chocolate is real, high-quality chocolate rather than cheap cooking stuff, where the flavouring is essence rather than artificial flavouring, where the decorating is done by hand and includes fancy shapes made out of florist paste as well as a generous topping of buttercream.
We're talking the sort of thing you could happily serve to guests at your wedding. The sort of thing that celebrities you see in glossy magazines (but would rather see on milk cartons, if you're in the US) buy. Not the sort of thing you pick up for a cheap sugar rush. These will sell for about £2-3 each.