HP and Oracle likely have some sort of contract going on. As you say, going to court where the piece of paper doesn't even exist is absurd. Going to court when the piece of paper exists and explicitly says "Oracle must support Itanium for ever and ever, yes we understand exactly what we're getting into, signed Larry" is equally absurd.
My guess is that the piece of paper exists, but what's on it is open to interpretation. Obviously each company favours the interpretation that's best for them; where you run into difficulty (and lawsuits that go on for so long that by the time they're over, the point has long become moot) is where the interpretations are somehow incompatible.
I have a sneaking suspicion it's got something to do with business customers.
"Buy this optional extra and you can manage Microsoft AV across 10, 100 or even 10,000 desktop PCs as easily as you manage everything else. Fully integrated with Active Directory, you don't even need to install anything extra on your desktop PCs because it's already there!"
It's not a discovery by any stretch. (And JavaScript has been around a bit more than 10 years, I wrote a fairly basic game in an unholy mishmash of JavaScript and HTML circa 1998-1999).
Provided JavaScript is Turing-complete (and there are very few useful languages that aren't), basic computing theory teaches us that it's possible to write more-or-less anything you want in it.
Note the keyword here is possible. Desirable and practical are totally different matters altogether.
Of course we had that with Java applets a few years ago - they didn't really take off.
A number of reasons for this exist: first is there were a couple of implementations of the JVM and they weren't all compatible with each other. Second is that the same version of the same JVM (Sun's at the time) exhibited subtly different behaviour on different platforms - meaning it was fantastically easy to wind up with something that only worked well on one or two platforms. ISTR font handling in the UI was a big killer - there were a few ways to do it and unless you did it a particular way, you wound up with an applet where the widget text was only readable on Windows.
The problem with any idea like this is that tooling up a factory for mass production and R&D are both fantastically expensive. So much so that you need to sell units in enormous quantities to make it back.
The product is inevitably going to cost more than a USB DVD drive and appeal to a much smaller number of people.
No I don't think they are going away. My guess is that Apple doesn't think their users care about #1, and they don't like the fact that #2 competes with iTunes.....
Indeed. The fact that the Macbook Air is selling like hot cakes - indeed, estimates suggest it accounts for 28% of Apple's notebook sales - is neither here nor there. Apple's users want optical drives, and they're prepared to vote with their wallets.
Two things at stake. One of them we can lay squarely at the feet of the customer; the other (those of us who provide IT services) we have largely ourselves to blame for.
1. There's an old adage - there are two types of people in this world; those who take regular backups and those who have never lost data. I'm astonished there's anyone left on the planet who's never lost data, but it appears there's actually quite a few. This is really something to lay squarely at the feet of the people who lose data.
2. Backup is the wrong thing to do. We shouldn't be advising businesses to backup and we shouldn't have been doing so for at least 10 years.
Why do I say this? Well, how often do you find the client's been taking backups religiously - onto tape media that's so obsolete it could take weeks of hunting to find a suitable drive? Or that they've been backing up their data all right - but that data depends on software that isn't part of the backup, developed by a company that went out of business two years ago? Or that a former IT provider set them up with backups some time ago using a piece of proprietary software that hasn't been supported since Windows 2000 and won't even fire up on anything more recent? Or that they can recover their systems just fine - but their systems aren't much use without some extra doohickey plugged into the back, and there's only about 100 of them on the entire planet because they're custom-made?
What we should be advising is "Okay, forget about backup. Think about your business processes. How quickly and easily could you start doing them again in the event of the whole lot burning to the ground? What would you need in place? How easily could you get hold of it? That might be backups, but it might also be physical equipment or knowledge that only one person holds. Write down a plan - it doesn't have to be complicated, for a very small business it might be as simple as "I'll drive down to the store, buy X, Y and Z and recover data" - and go over it, make sure it's still relevant and test it once a year."
This has two enormous advantages:
1. It's much less likely that any of the gotchas mentioned above - or any of the hundreds of others I'm sure anyone commenting can think of - will trip you up. 2. It's much easier for a business to think in terms of their own business, which means you're not asking them to concentrate on something they don't understand and are less likely to see the benefit of.
That's been the case for some years. Many companies will buy up (company name).(anything) for exactly that reason - registrars are fully aware of this and whenever a vaguely interesting CC-TLD becomes available for the general public worldwide (as opposed to being exclusively available for organisations based in that country) will pimp it far and wide.
Lately that's been.co (Colombia); not so long ago it was.eu. Before that it was.tv. No doubt once.co has been milked for all it's worth, something else will be found.
You're far too late - a bunch of British expats have already bought the land and started the process of getting planning permission to build themselves villas and a shopping centre.
Similarly, the only printers iDevices will link to are Apple's proprietary Wireless printers. If you try using a different printer that you already have, you're out of luck.
Generally, the non-Apple ads aren't trying to sell on specifications or features, they're trying to sell the brand. They're trying to make people go into the store and say "I is wantin' an HTC because I is a kool happenin' dude!" or "I want a Nokia because I am a confident, independent woman" because they identify with the role models in the ads (yeuch!). Good luck with that, because the one thing that fanbois and haters have to agree on is that Apple are absolute bloody grand masters at making people say "I want an Apple because the product looks really swish".
Not quite.
I would say that Apple are marketing their product as "the product that does X, Y and Z".
For reasons best known only to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, very few other manufacturers do this. If we look at MP3 players for an example, they existed long before the iPod. But for some reason nobody ran a TV advert saying "Hold your entire music collection in the palm of your hand... find it as easily as this." - outside of a relatively small nerdy contingent, I'll put money on it that 80-90% of the general public had absolutely no idea that there were alternative MP3 players on the market. So they've seen the ad, they walk into a store and say "That's what I'm looking for! An iPod!". Tell me, who else makes MP3 players with any degree of success?
Not if you want to dock it as per the article's suggestion. At the very least you need a maximum size so adaptors to fit the phone in the maximum-size-hole can be made. (Which is exactly what the iPhone/iPod docks do).
If the Android makers could standardize on anything, ie that the port will be on the center bottom, you'd see stuff designed that way since it could work with multiple devices.
Never gonna happen.
If I, as a handset manufacturer, do something like that, what differentiates me from any other Android handset manufacturer? I'm already running out of things to compete on now that I'm using the same platform as everyone else, last thing I need is to reduce that further.
I did some digging on this myself - either I've grossly misunderstood something or the entire payment card industry is more than a little hypocritical.
On the one hand they'll freely advertise you can have a virtual terminal (which is a website into which you can punch people's card numbers much like a proper card machine), how it's much more convenient because you can access it from your laptop wherever you are - you're not obliged to be sitting in your office to process card payments.
Then they'll ask you to sign the PCI-DSS agreement which states you'll only access the system from a PC which dedicated wholly and exclusively for virtual terminal usage - won't even have other software installed and you'll set up a separate segment of your network firewalled from everything else to put this PC on.
It was nineteen fucking ninety six and personal computer users had been worried about computer viruses for about a decade.
They had. But this is Microsoft we're talking about here, and their ability to predict the future has always been notoriously terrible; the great majority of viruses at the time were assembler-written things that did all sorts of clever stuff bypassing the OS entirely - and they were able to do that because memory protection was scant at best on DOS/Win3.x/Win9x. Few viruses even worked in NT, and with a proper security model, how could they?
The world was a different place in the early days of NT 4 - and remember this design dates back to before then, because the design decision would have been made some time before NT 4 was released.
NT 4 was, arguably, the first version of Windows to really enjoy any sort of success in the server room. The Internet was only just starting to attract attention outside of academic circles; it would be some years before it became apparent how bad Windows was security-wise. Microsoft's priority wasn't security, it was making an OS with a sophisticated GUI you could install on a 486 with 16MB of RAM that could act as a server to a whole network. Historically it's always been somewhat quicker to run code in the kernel; NT 4 moved most of the GUI to the kernel for exactly this reason. Security? Why would that even appear on the radar?
I didn't end up accepting as I got a much better offer elsewhere - also, primarily, based on work ethic, personality, general knowledge, etc.... it was a "we'll train you to do what we want you to do, because we can see you're versatile enough and willing to learn" - but the experience was pretty eye-opening.
Doesn't surprise me, but I can see how it would be a shock if you were straight out of college.
Hiring people isn't a science, it's an art. And a bit of a black art at that. You're not just looking for "person who's a whizz with A, B and C". Generally speaking, you're also looking for "person who can be trusted to follow instructions, person who will get on with everyone else in the company, person who has the good grace to recognise their shortcomings and deal with them, person who can learn new ideas." (and probably a whole bunch of other things that you can't put in a job ad or explicitly screen people for because it would get you into legal hot water).
More than a few managers will tack on things like "person who won't make me look bad by being dramatically smarter than I am". (IMV a huge tactical error - any manager who's got a habit of hiring really smart people to do the job very efficiently is going to bask in some serious glory - but it's not unknown by any stretch of the imagination). Most of these extra things I've mentioned can't really be taught - you've either got them or you haven't.
By the time you add all that up, it's really very common to find that "person who's a whizz with A, B and C" would be a terrible fit whereas the person who met all the other criteria could be paired with someone who's really good to act as a mentor and you'll get much better results.
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It's MY tablet. I will have root access. I will boycott companies who try to deny me that control.
That's perfectly OK by the manufacturer.
Costs money and adds complication for precious little benefit.
There is another way.
HP and Oracle likely have some sort of contract going on. As you say, going to court where the piece of paper doesn't even exist is absurd. Going to court when the piece of paper exists and explicitly says "Oracle must support Itanium for ever and ever, yes we understand exactly what we're getting into, signed Larry" is equally absurd.
My guess is that the piece of paper exists, but what's on it is open to interpretation. Obviously each company favours the interpretation that's best for them; where you run into difficulty (and lawsuits that go on for so long that by the time they're over, the point has long become moot) is where the interpretations are somehow incompatible.
I have a sneaking suspicion it's got something to do with business customers.
"Buy this optional extra and you can manage Microsoft AV across 10, 100 or even 10,000 desktop PCs as easily as you manage everything else. Fully integrated with Active Directory, you don't even need to install anything extra on your desktop PCs because it's already there!"
Yeah, I did the same thing with Netscape back in the day. For all the good it did.
Ah, I hadn't fully registered that.
You're quite right - but then you immediately start to run into sandboxing & security issues.
It's not a discovery by any stretch. (And JavaScript has been around a bit more than 10 years, I wrote a fairly basic game in an unholy mishmash of JavaScript and HTML circa 1998-1999).
Provided JavaScript is Turing-complete (and there are very few useful languages that aren't), basic computing theory teaches us that it's possible to write more-or-less anything you want in it.
Note the keyword here is possible. Desirable and practical are totally different matters altogether.
Of course we had that with Java applets a few years ago - they didn't really take off.
A number of reasons for this exist: first is there were a couple of implementations of the JVM and they weren't all compatible with each other. Second is that the same version of the same JVM (Sun's at the time) exhibited subtly different behaviour on different platforms - meaning it was fantastically easy to wind up with something that only worked well on one or two platforms. ISTR font handling in the UI was a big killer - there were a few ways to do it and unless you did it a particular way, you wound up with an applet where the widget text was only readable on Windows.
The problem with any idea like this is that tooling up a factory for mass production and R&D are both fantastically expensive. So much so that you need to sell units in enormous quantities to make it back.
The product is inevitably going to cost more than a USB DVD drive and appeal to a much smaller number of people.
No I don't think they are going away. My guess is that Apple doesn't think their users care about #1, and they don't like the fact that #2 competes with iTunes.....
Indeed. The fact that the Macbook Air is selling like hot cakes - indeed, estimates suggest it accounts for 28% of Apple's notebook sales - is neither here nor there. Apple's users want optical drives, and they're prepared to vote with their wallets.
Two things at stake. One of them we can lay squarely at the feet of the customer; the other (those of us who provide IT services) we have largely ourselves to blame for.
1. There's an old adage - there are two types of people in this world; those who take regular backups and those who have never lost data. I'm astonished there's anyone left on the planet who's never lost data, but it appears there's actually quite a few. This is really something to lay squarely at the feet of the people who lose data.
2. Backup is the wrong thing to do. We shouldn't be advising businesses to backup and we shouldn't have been doing so for at least 10 years.
Why do I say this? Well, how often do you find the client's been taking backups religiously - onto tape media that's so obsolete it could take weeks of hunting to find a suitable drive? Or that they've been backing up their data all right - but that data depends on software that isn't part of the backup, developed by a company that went out of business two years ago? Or that a former IT provider set them up with backups some time ago using a piece of proprietary software that hasn't been supported since Windows 2000 and won't even fire up on anything more recent? Or that they can recover their systems just fine - but their systems aren't much use without some extra doohickey plugged into the back, and there's only about 100 of them on the entire planet because they're custom-made?
What we should be advising is "Okay, forget about backup. Think about your business processes. How quickly and easily could you start doing them again in the event of the whole lot burning to the ground? What would you need in place? How easily could you get hold of it? That might be backups, but it might also be physical equipment or knowledge that only one person holds. Write down a plan - it doesn't have to be complicated, for a very small business it might be as simple as "I'll drive down to the store, buy X, Y and Z and recover data" - and go over it, make sure it's still relevant and test it once a year."
This has two enormous advantages:
1. It's much less likely that any of the gotchas mentioned above - or any of the hundreds of others I'm sure anyone commenting can think of - will trip you up.
2. It's much easier for a business to think in terms of their own business, which means you're not asking them to concentrate on something they don't understand and are less likely to see the benefit of.
That's been the case for some years. Many companies will buy up (company name).(anything) for exactly that reason - registrars are fully aware of this and whenever a vaguely interesting CC-TLD becomes available for the general public worldwide (as opposed to being exclusively available for organisations based in that country) will pimp it far and wide.
Lately that's been .co (Colombia); not so long ago it was .eu. Before that it was .tv. No doubt once .co has been milked for all it's worth, something else will be found.
You're far too late - a bunch of British expats have already bought the land and started the process of getting planning permission to build themselves villas and a shopping centre.
Similarly, the only printers iDevices will link to are Apple's proprietary Wireless printers. If you try using a different printer that you already have, you're out of luck.
There's an app for that.
Generally, the non-Apple ads aren't trying to sell on specifications or features, they're trying to sell the brand. They're trying to make people go into the store and say "I is wantin' an HTC because I is a kool happenin' dude!" or "I want a Nokia because I am a confident, independent woman" because they identify with the role models in the ads (yeuch!). Good luck with that, because the one thing that fanbois and haters have to agree on is that Apple are absolute bloody grand masters at making people say "I want an Apple because the product looks really swish".
Not quite.
I would say that Apple are marketing their product as "the product that does X, Y and Z".
For reasons best known only to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, very few other manufacturers do this. If we look at MP3 players for an example, they existed long before the iPod. But for some reason nobody ran a TV advert saying "Hold your entire music collection in the palm of your hand... find it as easily as this." - outside of a relatively small nerdy contingent, I'll put money on it that 80-90% of the general public had absolutely no idea that there were alternative MP3 players on the market. So they've seen the ad, they walk into a store and say "That's what I'm looking for! An iPod!". Tell me, who else makes MP3 players with any degree of success?
Not if you want to dock it as per the article's suggestion. At the very least you need a maximum size so adaptors to fit the phone in the maximum-size-hole can be made. (Which is exactly what the iPhone/iPod docks do).
If the Android makers could standardize on anything, ie that the port will be on the center bottom, you'd see stuff designed that way since it could work with multiple devices.
Never gonna happen.
If I, as a handset manufacturer, do something like that, what differentiates me from any other Android handset manufacturer? I'm already running out of things to compete on now that I'm using the same platform as everyone else, last thing I need is to reduce that further.
I did some digging on this myself - either I've grossly misunderstood something or the entire payment card industry is more than a little hypocritical.
On the one hand they'll freely advertise you can have a virtual terminal (which is a website into which you can punch people's card numbers much like a proper card machine), how it's much more convenient because you can access it from your laptop wherever you are - you're not obliged to be sitting in your office to process card payments.
Then they'll ask you to sign the PCI-DSS agreement which states you'll only access the system from a PC which dedicated wholly and exclusively for virtual terminal usage - won't even have other software installed and you'll set up a separate segment of your network firewalled from everything else to put this PC on.
AFAICT "not having a case" is absolutely no barrier to using the US legal system to its fullest extent.
They'd be really stupid to source from Samsung,
Really?
It was nineteen fucking ninety six and personal computer users had been worried about computer viruses for about a decade.
They had. But this is Microsoft we're talking about here, and their ability to predict the future has always been notoriously terrible; the great majority of viruses at the time were assembler-written things that did all sorts of clever stuff bypassing the OS entirely - and they were able to do that because memory protection was scant at best on DOS/Win3.x/Win9x. Few viruses even worked in NT, and with a proper security model, how could they?
There is also the theory that 7" is a better size than 9.5" for this market.
Call me cynical but that sounds like a theory borne out of sour grapes to me.
CD's just work.... Booting via USB tends to be one of those things that is spotty
You've just made me feel really old.
(Hint: It didn't used to be this way. Booting off CD used to equally spotty).
Very easily.
The world was a different place in the early days of NT 4 - and remember this design dates back to before then, because the design decision would have been made some time before NT 4 was released.
NT 4 was, arguably, the first version of Windows to really enjoy any sort of success in the server room. The Internet was only just starting to attract attention outside of academic circles; it would be some years before it became apparent how bad Windows was security-wise. Microsoft's priority wasn't security, it was making an OS with a sophisticated GUI you could install on a 486 with 16MB of RAM that could act as a server to a whole network. Historically it's always been somewhat quicker to run code in the kernel; NT 4 moved most of the GUI to the kernel for exactly this reason. Security? Why would that even appear on the radar?
I didn't end up accepting as I got a much better offer elsewhere - also, primarily, based on work ethic, personality, general knowledge, etc.... it was a "we'll train you to do what we want you to do, because we can see you're versatile enough and willing to learn" - but the experience was pretty eye-opening.
Doesn't surprise me, but I can see how it would be a shock if you were straight out of college.
Hiring people isn't a science, it's an art. And a bit of a black art at that. You're not just looking for "person who's a whizz with A, B and C". Generally speaking, you're also looking for "person who can be trusted to follow instructions, person who will get on with everyone else in the company, person who has the good grace to recognise their shortcomings and deal with them, person who can learn new ideas." (and probably a whole bunch of other things that you can't put in a job ad or explicitly screen people for because it would get you into legal hot water).
More than a few managers will tack on things like "person who won't make me look bad by being dramatically smarter than I am". (IMV a huge tactical error - any manager who's got a habit of hiring really smart people to do the job very efficiently is going to bask in some serious glory - but it's not unknown by any stretch of the imagination). Most of these extra things I've mentioned can't really be taught - you've either got them or you haven't.
By the time you add all that up, it's really very common to find that "person who's a whizz with A, B and C" would be a terrible fit whereas the person who met all the other criteria could be paired with someone who's really good to act as a mentor and you'll get much better results.