Who the #)@# ships hundreds of thousands of products but doesn't do something so basic as... I don't know... turn one on and see if the #*^! keyboard works?!
This is the sort of thing (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) Richard Branson writes about in one of his books.
To have a successful business, you do NOT need to have the greatest product on Earth. You just need to be better than the competition. Now, many industries are full of competition, so you'd think that would be really hard - but in fact an incredibly large number of businesses are badly run. So being better than the competition is not necessarily all that difficult.
Bit of a shame this was posted anonymously, because it's 100% true yet many readers filter anonymous cowards. There are few better ways to find out how interesting a software project is to the world at large than releasing it as F/OSS and seeing who - if anyone - picks up on it.
It's something that many of us who advocate F/OSS need to be careful of.
If a company goes to the wall, the idea that all their customers are guaranteed to be SOL is just plain wrong. The likelihood is that some other company will buy their customer list and pick up their products - either to maintain them or to migrate the customers to something else. Getting new customers is a fantastically difficult, expensive, risky operation so to buy a ready-made group of customers who you know need a product that does X because they're already using it is a very efficient way to grow a business.
The customers are fairly unlikely to be left with nothing.
Anyone who's been running a business for any length of time is not only fully aware of this, but is going to consider the "if they collapse, you're stuffed" argument to be somewhat odd, at best.
If a F/OSS project goes to the wall, however, you're pretty much on your own.
BT is truly the master of disingenuous advertising, particularly when it comes to broadband speed and availability.
"FTTC" does not, for instance, mean "Fibre to the cabinet". It means "Fibre to some of the cabinets served by this particular telephone exchange. If your cabinet isn't one of them, sucks to be you."
Similarly "FTTP" means "We're running fibre out from the exchange to a limited area. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in that area, you can get fibre to the premises. Probably."
I predict BT will crow far and wide that they've got FTTP in every telephone exchange in the country by 2014, but that won't mean 300Mbps for all. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
I have a sneaking suspicion that all the manufacturers set up to build a product that would retail at $4-500 and could not possibly break even at less than $350. Which means not only did they have a product that was being pitched too pricey, there was no way of reducing the price without making a whacking great loss.
Amazon, OTOH, have obviously considered that from the off. They'll do fine.
Apple essentially reinvented the market for tablet devices with the iPad. Which is a premium product being sold by a company with a reputation for premium products at a premium price.
Virtually every other major manufacturer looked at it, thought "Hey, we can do something similar" and started selling their product for about the same price - give or take maybe 5-10%. The likes of HP discovered the hard way that they do not have a premium reputation. But the Touchpad sale proved that actually there's huge demand there if the product can be sold not 5-10% cheaper than the iPad, but 50-80%.
Given the development time these things take and the sort of notice you have to give to a big factory to get thousands of anything, Amazon have probably been thinking this for some time.
I can think of at least one way Apple could have dealt with this even if they hadn't relied on the EULA.
In order to have a useful business model, Psystar needed to advertise "runs Mac OS X". Which is a trademark of Apple. Obviously Apple aren't going to sue an authorised reseller for using their trademark, by Psystar were never an authorised reseller.
Other companies have already done something similar to kill grey-market products (cf. Sony and Lik-Sang, Levis and Tescos)
You do realize that there are millions upon millions of qualified individuals available to assist with such an effort, right? And probably on the order of between tens and hundreds of thousands of professional translators out there too, right?
You'd be surprised.
Okay, you need someone who is sufficiently fluent in French and English that they can put together a half-decent translation. Fair enough. I'd agree that there's no shortage of translators.
Really, you need someone who's also sufficiently comfortable with Linux that they can be trusted to ensure that as few errors as possible slip in during the translation process. To put it into context, many publishers paying professionals have difficulty with this - you'd be amazed how many French programmers would much prefer to use the original English version of a reference book for exactly that reason; this reduces the pool of qualified people quite considerably straight away.
Now you need someone who has the time to dedicate to that, the patience to deal with the never-ending stream of questions and criticism that "this paragraph isn't very clear" and the inclination to do all that free of charge.
I think that's exactly the sort of thing the GP was talking about.
There is a lot of talk about "with specialised equipment, wiping with zeroes doesn't wipe" but AFAICT, when actually pressed nobody ever follows that up with "and I know of this data recovery company that can do it". My own research suggests that there was once an academic paper which suggested reading a drive with an electron microscope as being hypothetically possible but didn't actually go ahead and do it; Steve Gibson has posited something similar but I don't think it's ever left the realms of the hypothetical.
You don't even need an app; recent versions of Android integrate just fine using Exchange ActiveSync (which gives you all of this without the need for RIM's product) as does the iPhone.
This is why RIM are watching their business jump off a cliff - they only had one major selling point which was the Exchange integration, by all accounts their phones were nothing special beyond this. Now everyone and his dog has Exchange integration, suddenly it's like "Well big deal. I've can have that with Android, I can have that on an iPhone and with them I don't need to buy anything else; why should I buy the very expensive Blackberry Enterprise Server to plug into Exchange?". RIM haven't really thought of an answer to that one, nor have they come up with some other product I might like to buy instead.
That in itself isn't the joke. Life moves on, technology moves on and if your product doesn't move with it, you're screwed. That should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been in IT for more than 20 minutes. What the big joke is that Microsoft were fairly obviously heading in this direction with ActiveSync two full years before anybody released a phone with ActiveSync support. RIM should have noticed that and said "hang on... if anyone buys into this, where does it leave us?" and it doesn't look like they did.
Replying to myself, but JPEG wouldn't have been possible in 1991. The first public release of the standard was 1992 but I have no idea how long it was before a significant number of useable implementations appeared.
Probably because nobody ever replies with a reasonably affordable solution that is guarenteed to last for atleast 20 years. I do use those 100+ year DVD's (they're not as expensive as TFA implies), but whether I can trust the vendors' claims, I'll just have to wait and see.
Probably because there is no such thing and there never has been.
Twenty years is a hugely long time in IT. If you were to go back twenty years today, that'd take you back to 1991. What sensibly priced technology even existed for archiving a lot of data in 1991? CD-R equipment was (if Wikipedia is to be believed) $10-12,000, so that's out.
What format would you store the data in? JPEG is probably pretty safe, but if you want any means of keeping track of those photos - say some sort of database - what database would you use that existed in 1991 and will still run on a modern PC today? Or - if you can't run the application - can the data be imported into a modern application? I think you'd have to organise it in the filesystem sensibly because that's the only thing you could rely on being able to use.
The advice is - and continues to be - be prepared to migrate your data to something new every few years.
LTE will give 100Mb/s on the move and more if stationary...why exactly do we need this and who is paying ?
How?
Every cell will need backhaul which is going to be either copper or (more likely) fibre, yes? An ADSL line's no good here. And you need 70,000 such cells in London alone.
The majority of telephone exchanges in the UK haven't got FTTC yet, so where is all the fibre they're going to connect these cells to?
I've heard something similar from elsewhere - the thing that isn't very widely known about 4G is it requires at least ten times the number of cells in order to work. Which means the likelihood of seeing a rollout beyond the biggest cities is slim initially, to say the least.
Thing is, those websites (and Groupon in particular) are getting a bit of a reputation.
Local business gets approached by Groupon. The deal is: make a fantastic offer (around 70% off); of the remaining 30% you charge, you keep half, Groupon keep half.
In theory, you turn the influx of customers (that you're heavily subsidising) into regulars. In practise, lots of businesses have found the sort of customer who comes in on a Groupon deal is the sort of customer who never under any circumstances would even dream of coming back at full price.
The reason I think this is that the PC Emulator on the Archimedes emulated something broadly equivalent to a 186 with 640K RAM. Later versions supported EGA graphics. It was useable for fairly undemanding DOS-based applications but I don't think it could run an Excel macro because the first version of Excel to support macros was version 5 - that came out in 1993 and would have required Windows.
A reasonably cutting edge PC of the time would have been a slow Pentium or (more likely) a fast 486 with maybe 4MB RAM. I really don't think that would have been physically possible to emulate in software on any Archimedes.
However, what is possible is Aleph One produced a co-processor board for the Archimedes that had a 486 chip fitted. Plug that in, you'd fire up RISC OS, run a small program and abracadabra! You could run Windows quite happily. Were I a mildly mischievous head of Maths who'd just upgraded his moderately elderly Archimedes with such a card, I would be very tempted to bring it down and wipe the smile off that salesman's face.
ISTR a documentary a few years ago which explored a "human candle" theory - essentially, something on the victim catches fire (maybe their clothing) and the victim - for whatever reason - doesn't put it out. The heat from the fire melts their body fat, which goes on to further fuel the fire. Fat burns quite hot, and in so doing it consumes most of their body; but the absence of other flammable material near the victim means the entire house doesn't go up in smoke.
If this is going to be on the public Internet, I'd question the wisdom of managing it yourself when you've admitted it's not one of your core strengths. Instead, I'd set up a cheap & cheerful shared hosting account - it'll be locked down thoroughly, it'll have a pretty sophisticated set of management tools and if you install phpBB through the management tool there's every chance any security issues will be dealt with by your hosting company. Considering the security history of most PHP forums (dire), managing this yourself when you don't really know how and don't really need to seems to be asking for trouble.
It's quite clear that HMA see their service as a way of doing things that are not illegal through a VPN. There's plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to want to do this, and that's what the service is there for.
It's not there to allow someone to break the law with impunity. So it's not been engineered to be particularly difficult to dig into the logs and figure out who was using the service. So if they get served with a court order saying "Hand over the logs", they have to.
Want something which is a lot harder to be traced? Don't use a commercial VPN service, use something like Tor.
This isn't a story of "HideMyAss selling out". This is a story of "Person uses a service in a way it's not meant to be used and is surprised when it blows up in his face".
Much of the OS? Pretty much all the important bits - an Archimedes would boot quite happily with no hard disk or floppy drive (but it wouldn't be terribly interesting).
There were modules that were stored on disk and could be dynamically loaded and unloaded, much like you get on Linux today. The information on Wikipedia has been somewhat idealised from how it wound up working in real life; these modules frequently provided extra functionality and occasionally you'd find applications that depended on a particular version but didn't provide the actual module so you'd have to hunt down not just the module but the right version of it elsewhere. Certainly up until RISC OS 3.1, the OS didn't have much in the way of a centralised library of modules, nor did it have any means to dynamically load them on demand. The application had to do that. My solution was simply to edit the boot sequence so all the modules that I was likely to want were loaded at boot.
Sort of like the DLL hell you had in the days of Windows '9x, but you couldn't really put the system in such a state that it couldn't easily be rebooted. Usually the worst that would happen is you'd load the wrong version of a module and an application would fail to run.
Apparently later systems were built with the OS on flash ROM, allowing for updates without taking the computer to bits.
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Who the #)@# ships hundreds of thousands of products but doesn't do something so basic as... I don't know... turn one on and see if the #*^! keyboard works?!
This is the sort of thing (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) Richard Branson writes about in one of his books.
To have a successful business, you do NOT need to have the greatest product on Earth. You just need to be better than the competition. Now, many industries are full of competition, so you'd think that would be really hard - but in fact an incredibly large number of businesses are badly run. So being better than the competition is not necessarily all that difficult.
Bit of a shame this was posted anonymously, because it's 100% true yet many readers filter anonymous cowards. There are few better ways to find out how interesting a software project is to the world at large than releasing it as F/OSS and seeing who - if anyone - picks up on it.
It's something that many of us who advocate F/OSS need to be careful of.
If a company goes to the wall, the idea that all their customers are guaranteed to be SOL is just plain wrong. The likelihood is that some other company will buy their customer list and pick up their products - either to maintain them or to migrate the customers to something else. Getting new customers is a fantastically difficult, expensive, risky operation so to buy a ready-made group of customers who you know need a product that does X because they're already using it is a very efficient way to grow a business.
The customers are fairly unlikely to be left with nothing.
Anyone who's been running a business for any length of time is not only fully aware of this, but is going to consider the "if they collapse, you're stuffed" argument to be somewhat odd, at best.
If a F/OSS project goes to the wall, however, you're pretty much on your own.
BT is truly the master of disingenuous advertising, particularly when it comes to broadband speed and availability.
"FTTC" does not, for instance, mean "Fibre to the cabinet". It means "Fibre to some of the cabinets served by this particular telephone exchange. If your cabinet isn't one of them, sucks to be you."
Similarly "FTTP" means "We're running fibre out from the exchange to a limited area. If you happen to be lucky enough to be in that area, you can get fibre to the premises. Probably."
I predict BT will crow far and wide that they've got FTTP in every telephone exchange in the country by 2014, but that won't mean 300Mbps for all. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Alternately, you could simply not use Adobe plugins.
Let's face it, for most people that's a bit like telling them not to have sex if they don't want to get pregnant.
Entirely true, but so un-representative of the real world you might as well save your breath.
This is exactly my point.
I have a sneaking suspicion that all the manufacturers set up to build a product that would retail at $4-500 and could not possibly break even at less than $350. Which means not only did they have a product that was being pitched too pricey, there was no way of reducing the price without making a whacking great loss.
Amazon, OTOH, have obviously considered that from the off. They'll do fine.
Apple essentially reinvented the market for tablet devices with the iPad. Which is a premium product being sold by a company with a reputation for premium products at a premium price.
Virtually every other major manufacturer looked at it, thought "Hey, we can do something similar" and started selling their product for about the same price - give or take maybe 5-10%. The likes of HP discovered the hard way that they do not have a premium reputation. But the Touchpad sale proved that actually there's huge demand there if the product can be sold not 5-10% cheaper than the iPad, but 50-80%.
Given the development time these things take and the sort of notice you have to give to a big factory to get thousands of anything, Amazon have probably been thinking this for some time.
Microsoft have already got legal history of being a monopoly.
Being a monopoly isn't per-se illegal, but abusing it is. So it wouldn't be a great stretch to say "the rules would be different for Microsoft".
I can think of at least one way Apple could have dealt with this even if they hadn't relied on the EULA.
In order to have a useful business model, Psystar needed to advertise "runs Mac OS X". Which is a trademark of Apple. Obviously Apple aren't going to sue an authorised reseller for using their trademark, by Psystar were never an authorised reseller.
Other companies have already done something similar to kill grey-market products (cf. Sony and Lik-Sang, Levis and Tescos)
You do realize that there are millions upon millions of qualified individuals available to assist with such an effort, right? And probably on the order of between tens and hundreds of thousands of professional translators out there too, right?
You'd be surprised.
Okay, you need someone who is sufficiently fluent in French and English that they can put together a half-decent translation. Fair enough. I'd agree that there's no shortage of translators.
Really, you need someone who's also sufficiently comfortable with Linux that they can be trusted to ensure that as few errors as possible slip in during the translation process. To put it into context, many publishers paying professionals have difficulty with this - you'd be amazed how many French programmers would much prefer to use the original English version of a reference book for exactly that reason; this reduces the pool of qualified people quite considerably straight away.
Now you need someone who has the time to dedicate to that, the patience to deal with the never-ending stream of questions and criticism that "this paragraph isn't very clear" and the inclination to do all that free of charge.
I reckon it'd be just as easy to find €15,000.
If it's per-tile, it'd also multiply the energy involved in manufacturing the things.
I think that's exactly the sort of thing the GP was talking about.
There is a lot of talk about "with specialised equipment, wiping with zeroes doesn't wipe" but AFAICT, when actually pressed nobody ever follows that up with "and I know of this data recovery company that can do it". My own research suggests that there was once an academic paper which suggested reading a drive with an electron microscope as being hypothetically possible but didn't actually go ahead and do it; Steve Gibson has posited something similar but I don't think it's ever left the realms of the hypothetical.
And I hate to whore my own company, but I do have a solution that works rather well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKQz6zFQ3Fc
You don't even need an app; recent versions of Android integrate just fine using Exchange ActiveSync (which gives you all of this without the need for RIM's product) as does the iPhone.
This is why RIM are watching their business jump off a cliff - they only had one major selling point which was the Exchange integration, by all accounts their phones were nothing special beyond this. Now everyone and his dog has Exchange integration, suddenly it's like "Well big deal. I've can have that with Android, I can have that on an iPhone and with them I don't need to buy anything else; why should I buy the very expensive Blackberry Enterprise Server to plug into Exchange?". RIM haven't really thought of an answer to that one, nor have they come up with some other product I might like to buy instead.
That in itself isn't the joke. Life moves on, technology moves on and if your product doesn't move with it, you're screwed. That should be fairly obvious to anyone who's been in IT for more than 20 minutes. What the big joke is that Microsoft were fairly obviously heading in this direction with ActiveSync two full years before anybody released a phone with ActiveSync support. RIM should have noticed that and said "hang on... if anyone buys into this, where does it leave us?" and it doesn't look like they did.
Replying to myself, but JPEG wouldn't have been possible in 1991. The first public release of the standard was 1992 but I have no idea how long it was before a significant number of useable implementations appeared.
Probably because nobody ever replies with a reasonably affordable solution that is guarenteed to last for atleast 20 years.
I do use those 100+ year DVD's (they're not as expensive as TFA implies), but whether I can trust the vendors' claims, I'll just have to wait and see.
Probably because there is no such thing and there never has been.
Twenty years is a hugely long time in IT. If you were to go back twenty years today, that'd take you back to 1991. What sensibly priced technology even existed for archiving a lot of data in 1991? CD-R equipment was (if Wikipedia is to be believed) $10-12,000, so that's out.
What format would you store the data in? JPEG is probably pretty safe, but if you want any means of keeping track of those photos - say some sort of database - what database would you use that existed in 1991 and will still run on a modern PC today? Or - if you can't run the application - can the data be imported into a modern application? I think you'd have to organise it in the filesystem sensibly because that's the only thing you could rely on being able to use.
The advice is - and continues to be - be prepared to migrate your data to something new every few years.
LTE will give 100Mb/s on the move and more if stationary ...why exactly do we need this and who is paying ?
How?
Every cell will need backhaul which is going to be either copper or (more likely) fibre, yes? An ADSL line's no good here. And you need 70,000 such cells in London alone.
The majority of telephone exchanges in the UK haven't got FTTC yet, so where is all the fibre they're going to connect these cells to?
I've heard something similar from elsewhere - the thing that isn't very widely known about 4G is it requires at least ten times the number of cells in order to work. Which means the likelihood of seeing a rollout beyond the biggest cities is slim initially, to say the least.
That "state of the art" PC - it wasn't RM, by any chance?
Thing is, those websites (and Groupon in particular) are getting a bit of a reputation.
Local business gets approached by Groupon. The deal is: make a fantastic offer (around 70% off); of the remaining 30% you charge, you keep half, Groupon keep half.
In theory, you turn the influx of customers (that you're heavily subsidising) into regulars. In practise, lots of businesses have found the sort of customer who comes in on a Groupon deal is the sort of customer who never under any circumstances would even dream of coming back at full price.
All joking aside, when was the last time a plane crashed because of a design issue?
I've heard of plenty of crashes due to human error, poor maintenance or terrorism.
"Plane has minor design flaw which causes it to fall out of the sky for no apparent reason", however, doesn't happen.
I suspect your Head of Maths was playing a trick.
The reason I think this is that the PC Emulator on the Archimedes emulated something broadly equivalent to a 186 with 640K RAM. Later versions supported EGA graphics. It was useable for fairly undemanding DOS-based applications but I don't think it could run an Excel macro because the first version of Excel to support macros was version 5 - that came out in 1993 and would have required Windows.
A reasonably cutting edge PC of the time would have been a slow Pentium or (more likely) a fast 486 with maybe 4MB RAM. I really don't think that would have been physically possible to emulate in software on any Archimedes.
However, what is possible is Aleph One produced a co-processor board for the Archimedes that had a 486 chip fitted. Plug that in, you'd fire up RISC OS, run a small program and abracadabra! You could run Windows quite happily. Were I a mildly mischievous head of Maths who'd just upgraded his moderately elderly Archimedes with such a card, I would be very tempted to bring it down and wipe the smile off that salesman's face.
ISTR a documentary a few years ago which explored a "human candle" theory - essentially, something on the victim catches fire (maybe their clothing) and the victim - for whatever reason - doesn't put it out. The heat from the fire melts their body fat, which goes on to further fuel the fire. Fat burns quite hot, and in so doing it consumes most of their body; but the absence of other flammable material near the victim means the entire house doesn't go up in smoke.
If this is going to be on the public Internet, I'd question the wisdom of managing it yourself when you've admitted it's not one of your core strengths. Instead, I'd set up a cheap & cheerful shared hosting account - it'll be locked down thoroughly, it'll have a pretty sophisticated set of management tools and if you install phpBB through the management tool there's every chance any security issues will be dealt with by your hosting company. Considering the security history of most PHP forums (dire), managing this yourself when you don't really know how and don't really need to seems to be asking for trouble.
It's quite clear that HMA see their service as a way of doing things that are not illegal through a VPN. There's plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to want to do this, and that's what the service is there for.
It's not there to allow someone to break the law with impunity. So it's not been engineered to be particularly difficult to dig into the logs and figure out who was using the service. So if they get served with a court order saying "Hand over the logs", they have to.
Want something which is a lot harder to be traced? Don't use a commercial VPN service, use something like Tor.
This isn't a story of "HideMyAss selling out". This is a story of "Person uses a service in a way it's not meant to be used and is surprised when it blows up in his face".
Much of the OS? Pretty much all the important bits - an Archimedes would boot quite happily with no hard disk or floppy drive (but it wouldn't be terribly interesting).
There were modules that were stored on disk and could be dynamically loaded and unloaded, much like you get on Linux today. The information on Wikipedia has been somewhat idealised from how it wound up working in real life; these modules frequently provided extra functionality and occasionally you'd find applications that depended on a particular version but didn't provide the actual module so you'd have to hunt down not just the module but the right version of it elsewhere. Certainly up until RISC OS 3.1, the OS didn't have much in the way of a centralised library of modules, nor did it have any means to dynamically load them on demand. The application had to do that. My solution was simply to edit the boot sequence so all the modules that I was likely to want were loaded at boot.
Sort of like the DLL hell you had in the days of Windows '9x, but you couldn't really put the system in such a state that it couldn't easily be rebooted. Usually the worst that would happen is you'd load the wrong version of a module and an application would fail to run.
Apparently later systems were built with the OS on flash ROM, allowing for updates without taking the computer to bits.