You're absolutely right, but unfortunately the world where everyone upgrades their systems so as to remain in support doesn't really exist. There's still plenty of Windows XP systems out there and I don't doubt there will be this time next year.
Hell, only a few months ago I was asked to quote on replacing a Windows 2000 SBS server with something brand new. The business owner was practically slapping himself on the back for being so fantastically clever at getting 9 years life out of a server which he'd bought second-hand. Of course there isn't a direct upgrade path from SBS 2000 to anything remotely modern, so all the money he'd saved would go on consultancy fees to deal with that problem...
Really? So Unix platforms never force you to upgrade?
I could have sworn that back in 2002-2004, I was working on AIX 4 and my employer was thinking about upgrading to AIX 5L - because IBM were about to cut support for 4. This was not particularly straightforward, as not all their old hardware was supported under AIX 5L. They could continue to get support for the hardware - it's amazing what a £multi-million support contract will buy you - but even then it wouldn't buy an extension to support for AIX 4.
Today, AIX 5L 5.2 - the version they'd have upgraded to - has been EOL'd. So has 5.3. They'd have to be on AIX 6 or 7 for support.
I guess they could have moved to Linux - they already had most of the business software running quite happily on Linux. (Not enormously difficult, as the business application was a Pick D3 database). Were they still going today, however - well, the version of Pick they used has been retired, which would suggest that support would be limited. They'd have to upgrade. An upgrade is available, but they don't support the same version of RedHat. So that would require upgrading too.
Outlook is not (and never has been) a POP/IMAP client. It is an Exchange client, and as such offers a hell of a lot more than plain POP or IMAP can.
The reason it supports POP and IMAP is, IMV, a sales decision. Small business owners buy Office, get Outlook, use all the extra features like shared calendars, notes and centralised contacts - none of which seem to work properly, remember that it used to work just fine back when they were working for a larger company and call up their computer literate friend to ask why.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the email aspect of Office 365 (and for that matter Windows SBS not so long ago) is sold. Outlook has already done the hard work of persuading the business owner they need it, and to top the lot, the customer has paid Microsoft (by buying a copy of Office) to sell it.
It's a wonderful sales technique if you can figure it out. The customer pays you and at the same time gives you a free opportunity to subtly persuade them to buy something else from you.
I get that some companies need active directory and exchange but all the 'real' business apps run on some kind of Unix.
They don't, unfortunately.
Oh, sure, the "real" business apps aimed at huge businesses - the banks and insurance companies of this world - they might run on Unix (or even OS/400, or whatever IBM are calling it these days). But there aren't very many of those companies - even walking down your high street, you'd be astonished how many well-known huge corporations with a presence in every town are mostly franchises.
And a franchised operation is not, in technology terms, a huge business. It's lots of small, nominally-independent businesses that while they might run the same software (in cases where the franchisor tells them what to run), it consists of lots of small instances that each serve maybe 1-6 branches, not thousands of branches across the whole country. They seldom report back management information in enormous detail; detailed management information is down to the franchisee to figure out for their own benefit. As long as the franchise fees keep coming in, the franchisor seldom cares how the franchisee does it. (This, by the way, is one of the main differentiating factors between franchises. The more well-known ones are very expensive and tell the franchisee precisely what they have to do right down to the shade of tiles used in the lavatories. Mess up, and the franchisor will send someone down to either sort you out or take away your right to the franchise. The less well-known franchises are cheaper and don't go into this level of detail. Mess up, and the franchisor will simply let your business collapse then find someone else to sell the franchise to).
This means there are a lot more small companies than you might think. And many of those small companies historically have got by with a couple of standalone PCs - their "upgrade path" would have been a Windows server running SBS and the next level up version of their accounts package. Which is exactly the same product only the backend database driver has been swapped out from, say, Jet to SQL Server.
Face it, anything that involves changing how a computer operates - regardless of whether the process for making those changes is automated or manual - introduces risk. You just have to decide how big the risk is, weighed against the alternative.
You'd be amazed how often glitches such as "router at the hotel the boss is staying at is not working properly" becomes "bloody useless IT department, should have outsourced the lot to somewhere with cheaper labour years ago, at least that way I'd be paying for what I'm getting" when the boss can't get at internally-hosted email while on the road.
This doesn't seem to happen anything like as often when the email is outsourced.
Meaning that even if you are regularly providing five-9's - hell, even if you can prove it - nobody believes you.
You mentioned wanting to stick with open standards.
I would point out that if this is ultimately to run as a business, you need to make decisions based on what's best for the business. Which may or may not be something based around open standards.
Making a decision early on and sticking to it dogmatically even when there is no business benefit in doing so - and refusing to even contemplate alternatives simply because they're "not open" sounds dangerously close to operating a religion rather than a business.
The loss is revenue to the owner and/or operator. If the parking is "free" to you, then the cinema is likely subsidizing your parking, and that allows you to park for three hours for free (or perhaps the parking company just allows the first three hours for free hoping people will park longer so they can collect additional revenue). If you exceed this limit, then the cost of your parking is no longer covered, and someone should pay, whether or not you think it's fair. If you don't like those terms, park somewhere else or don't go. There is a cinema that I attend regularly with this exact policy: three hours free to me because the cinema pays the parking company for the first three hours. I exceed this limit sometimes (getting there early, 2.5+ hour movie, etc...) and I pay the overage of a few dollars when I leave. That's fair to me and should be to anyone who appreciates capitalism.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that one should never pay for parking. Obviously if someone provides a service in exchange for money, it's fair that they get their money.
But in the cases we're talking about:
- Nobody's subsidising the parking because there is no opportunity to pay. The parking firm does not charge the landowner and they don't provide any means of paying - your options are park for less than three hours or don't park at all. The parking firm's only source of income is tickets.
- There may well be nowhere else to park within walking distance.
> I don't think you know what "spurious" means. If you pay for three hours and stay 3:15, that's a legitimate overage.
If it's a free car park and it is there for the benefit of cinemagoers, yes I'd say a 15 minute overstay when it's a particularly long film is spurious.
> Also, can private companies issue a ticket in the UK, or are you saying they just request that you pay more with a piece of paper?
Private companies cannot issue a fine.
If they have suffered a loss for which you are responsible, they can ask you to reimburse them for the loss - but in this example, the car park is free. So what's the loss?
I've seen this exact same business model before, but in regards to parking in the UK rather than movies.
The way it works is:
- You park on privately owned land.
- The landowner contracts a third-party company to provide parking management.
- The third-party company invents a spurious reason to ticket you. (eg. "You stayed over three hours in this car park!" when parking at to the cinema to see a film that is 3 hours 15 minutes long).
- The third-party company sends you a series of rude letters demanding you pay a penalty of around £80 or they'll take you to court.
- 60% of the time, victims pay up. Which is a shame, because the only people in the UK who can force you to pay a penalty are government bodies - private companies can't do this. Oh, they can sue for any losses they incur, but if you overstay a free car park by 15 minutes, how exactly do they lose £80?
How's this any different? They're co-opting the legal system for bullying purposes then chickening out as soon as it looks like they might have to talk to a judge.
There's a whole bunch of reasons you wouldn't slap a "Linux Inside" sticker on, and it's more to do with branding than stigma. The biggest one is that Linux is not, and never will be, a word that is wholly and exclusively associated with Google's operating system.
Meaning that if Google were to make a big thing about ChromeOS being Linux-based, there's a very good risk that potential customers would just punch "Linux" into Google if they wanted to know more. What will they do next? Who knows - but it certainly won't be "learn all about ChromeOS". Right now, if I do that the first things that come back are a Wikipedia article that's very heavy on jargon, Ubuntu's homepage and linux.org - a learning resource with a distinct technical flavour. At least two of those will likely scare the living daylights out of someone who's interested in ChromeOS.
The next issue with branding is that Linux does not have a strong brand at all. The brand is what customers look for, and it needs to be properly presented. It would perhaps be a little disingenuous to call branding a science, but there are some things that pretty well everyone who's any good at persuading people to buy something agree on.
Presenting a brand doesn't just mean you have a catchy name and a logo - it's how that logo and name are consistently presented together. You'll never see "Coca-Cola" written in black text with a pale green background, for instance, because Coca-Cola has very strict rules that dictate precisely how their logo is used and those rules are applied religiously to everything that gets a logo slapped on it.
But a brand is more than that. It also refers to pretty much everything an organisation does. You want people to associate your company with quality, you put enormous effort into ensuring every product that goes out the door works as intended. You want people to associate your company with customer service, you make damn sure that you ship promptly, answer questions efficiently and every customer who comes back to you with an issue - no matter how small - is well looked after. You want people to associate your company with having fun, you don't give your staff a uniform of grey suits.
As a brand, Linux is terrible because it encompasses Ubuntu (Linux for humans), Debian (Linux for server admins who value stability over ease of use), RedHat (Linux for server admins who are quite happy to spend money), Android (Linux for mobile phones and tablets) and virtually every set-top PVR under the sun. All of these projects have different - sometimes wildly different - goals. Linux might be a useful term to describe the kernel all these things run, but it will never be a consumer product brand.
> The ancient languages had many words that had different meanings based on context, or similar but different meaning based on phrasing, they were rich, deep, and complex as hell and frankly modern English...isn't.
Err... excuse me. English is full of different meanings based on context. The thing is, today we have a strong written culture and - necessity being the mother of invention - spelling to provide the context we need. Without spelling, ewe wood be righting like this.
Too bad if it does. Their excuses wore out long ago.
They did, but business apps that are tied to specific versions of IE are endemic and quite often it's not as simple as paying money and getting the software updated. We're not talking one or two apps here that need updating; we're talking hundreds if not thousands of applications, some of which quite clearly haven't had any major UI work done in five or ten years.
In the last fortnight, I've seen - and this is in just one small business:
- A web app that requires a specific ActiveX plugin to print - evidently a stylesheet for printing or even generating a PDF is too difficult. This plugin only works on 32-bit versions of IE; under 64-bit versions the plugin installer silently fails to work. (The plugin developer does have a 64-bit version available, but it's commercial software. You can't just download a 64-bit version from the developer's website yourself).
- This web app is provided for franchisees by their franchisor. (I won't name the franchise, but I guarantee you've heard of it). As with any franchise-type arrangement, the franchisee can ask their franchisor nicely but cannot force anything - and in this case, the franchisee simply cannot say "In that case I won't use your tool; I'll find something else to do the same job", using it is a condition of the franchise.
- Several web apps that require you to explicitly click the "broken mode" button in IE - they're generating IE6-only HTML when IE is used but IE isn't detecting this and automatically downgrading.
- Quite often these apps will work just fine with Chrome, Firefox et al. It looks like they're detecting an IE User-Agent string and generating IE-6 specific HTML rather than checking the IE version.
- These apps are provided by a third-party and you have to use them otherwise you can't do business with that third party. The business itself doesn't care about your idealistic attitude that IE-dependant websites must die; they need to meet payroll this month and one of the ways they do this is by working with various third parties.
- Web applications that quite simply do not function in anything but Internet Explorer in any form, no matter what you do with your user-agent string. You'd be amazed (and faintly disturbed) how many project managers read as far as "no need to deploy your own client app" when first considering web development and didn't get the bit about "with careful development, client platform independent".
- Much of this is actually Microsoft's own doing - they purposely encouraged this sort of behaviour back in the days of IE6.
Backups are a solved problem, but lots of people get hung up on having something that backs up the data with little consideration as to why you might want that.
This is how you wind up with holes in your backup process.
In this case, version control covers "oh dear I didn't mean to overwrite/delete that file"; mirroring covers "oh dear the server has just died horribly" and "oh dear the datacentre has been lost to fire". It appears nobody has considered "oh dear an unexpected combination of circumstances has corrupted the version control system and the mirroring has replicated that corruption".
Lots of ISPs have been doing something similar all over the world, for a very simple reason:
The profit margin in providing internet service is miniscule. And people expect more and more from email.
15 years ago, you'd get POP3 and a mailbox quota of maybe 20MB. If you were lucky, you might also get some sort of web-based email, but it was usually pretty primitive by modern standards.
Today, people expect a sophisticated web-based service that they can also use with their smartphone and there's still quite a few people who want to use something like Outlook (and so need IMAP). Yet the profit margin per-customer per-month after you've met the costs in providing a DSL line and backhaul to the Internet is something stupid like £1. They're being expected to setup, support and maintain something comparable with GMail for £1/user/month. Well, less than £1/user/month because you still need to make some profit.
Even a Google Apps for Business account is £2.75 per user per month.
No wonder they want to stop providing email, you simply can't do a good job unless you specialise in it.
The great majority of these routers are running Linux.
It seems to be a dirty little secret of the router world: they're all running Linux (GPLv2), many have ADSL chips and support PPPoE and PPPoA.
Yet the mainline kernel has practically zero support for ADSL chips - none of the drivers have been open-sourced. The documentation for the chips themselves is released to the router manufacturers under NDA, and quite often the manufacturers also get a reference driver (a Linux kernel module).
This means the router manufacturer cannot comply with both the NDA and the GPL. Usually they comply with the NDA and either ignore the GPL or release source that's missing ADSL drivers. So we have the mildly absurd case that OpenWRT and DD-WRT have abysmal ADSL support.
It's even harder in real-world scenarios because more often than not, "We absolutely, categorically cannot afford a failure of any description! We'll spend whatever we need to in order to guarantee this!" rapidly becomes "Maybe we don't need it that badly...." once the costs are presented to management.
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You're absolutely right, but unfortunately the world where everyone upgrades their systems so as to remain in support doesn't really exist. There's still plenty of Windows XP systems out there and I don't doubt there will be this time next year.
Hell, only a few months ago I was asked to quote on replacing a Windows 2000 SBS server with something brand new. The business owner was practically slapping himself on the back for being so fantastically clever at getting 9 years life out of a server which he'd bought second-hand. Of course there isn't a direct upgrade path from SBS 2000 to anything remotely modern, so all the money he'd saved would go on consultancy fees to deal with that problem...
Really? So Unix platforms never force you to upgrade?
I could have sworn that back in 2002-2004, I was working on AIX 4 and my employer was thinking about upgrading to AIX 5L - because IBM were about to cut support for 4. This was not particularly straightforward, as not all their old hardware was supported under AIX 5L. They could continue to get support for the hardware - it's amazing what a £multi-million support contract will buy you - but even then it wouldn't buy an extension to support for AIX 4.
Today, AIX 5L 5.2 - the version they'd have upgraded to - has been EOL'd. So has 5.3. They'd have to be on AIX 6 or 7 for support.
I guess they could have moved to Linux - they already had most of the business software running quite happily on Linux. (Not enormously difficult, as the business application was a Pick D3 database). Were they still going today, however - well, the version of Pick they used has been retired, which would suggest that support would be limited. They'd have to upgrade. An upgrade is available, but they don't support the same version of RedHat. So that would require upgrading too.
Outlook is not (and never has been) a POP/IMAP client. It is an Exchange client, and as such offers a hell of a lot more than plain POP or IMAP can.
The reason it supports POP and IMAP is, IMV, a sales decision. Small business owners buy Office, get Outlook, use all the extra features like shared calendars, notes and centralised contacts - none of which seem to work properly, remember that it used to work just fine back when they were working for a larger company and call up their computer literate friend to ask why.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the email aspect of Office 365 (and for that matter Windows SBS not so long ago) is sold. Outlook has already done the hard work of persuading the business owner they need it, and to top the lot, the customer has paid Microsoft (by buying a copy of Office) to sell it.
It's a wonderful sales technique if you can figure it out. The customer pays you and at the same time gives you a free opportunity to subtly persuade them to buy something else from you.
I get that some companies need active directory and exchange but all the 'real' business apps run on some kind of Unix.
They don't, unfortunately.
Oh, sure, the "real" business apps aimed at huge businesses - the banks and insurance companies of this world - they might run on Unix (or even OS/400, or whatever IBM are calling it these days). But there aren't very many of those companies - even walking down your high street, you'd be astonished how many well-known huge corporations with a presence in every town are mostly franchises.
And a franchised operation is not, in technology terms, a huge business. It's lots of small, nominally-independent businesses that while they might run the same software (in cases where the franchisor tells them what to run), it consists of lots of small instances that each serve maybe 1-6 branches, not thousands of branches across the whole country. They seldom report back management information in enormous detail; detailed management information is down to the franchisee to figure out for their own benefit. As long as the franchise fees keep coming in, the franchisor seldom cares how the franchisee does it. (This, by the way, is one of the main differentiating factors between franchises. The more well-known ones are very expensive and tell the franchisee precisely what they have to do right down to the shade of tiles used in the lavatories. Mess up, and the franchisor will send someone down to either sort you out or take away your right to the franchise. The less well-known franchises are cheaper and don't go into this level of detail. Mess up, and the franchisor will simply let your business collapse then find someone else to sell the franchise to).
This means there are a lot more small companies than you might think. And many of those small companies historically have got by with a couple of standalone PCs - their "upgrade path" would have been a Windows server running SBS and the next level up version of their accounts package. Which is exactly the same product only the backend database driver has been swapped out from, say, Jet to SQL Server.
Never mind MSE - which is only on a subset of Windows computers.
Microsoft have recommended uninstalling a core Windows 7 patch in the last week or so: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2839011
Face it, anything that involves changing how a computer operates - regardless of whether the process for making those changes is automated or manual - introduces risk. You just have to decide how big the risk is, weighed against the alternative.
Actually... yes.
You'd be amazed how often glitches such as "router at the hotel the boss is staying at is not working properly" becomes "bloody useless IT department, should have outsourced the lot to somewhere with cheaper labour years ago, at least that way I'd be paying for what I'm getting" when the boss can't get at internally-hosted email while on the road.
This doesn't seem to happen anything like as often when the email is outsourced.
Meaning that even if you are regularly providing five-9's - hell, even if you can prove it - nobody believes you.
You mentioned wanting to stick with open standards.
I would point out that if this is ultimately to run as a business, you need to make decisions based on what's best for the business. Which may or may not be something based around open standards.
Making a decision early on and sticking to it dogmatically even when there is no business benefit in doing so - and refusing to even contemplate alternatives simply because they're "not open" sounds dangerously close to operating a religion rather than a business.
Google have an awkward habit of developing a product, letting users depend on it then yanking it at short notice.
Granted, that's usually more of a problem with products they give away but even so...
The loss is revenue to the owner and/or operator. If the parking is "free" to you, then the cinema is likely subsidizing your parking, and that allows you to park for three hours for free (or perhaps the parking company just allows the first three hours for free hoping people will park longer so they can collect additional revenue). If you exceed this limit, then the cost of your parking is no longer covered, and someone should pay, whether or not you think it's fair. If you don't like those terms, park somewhere else or don't go. There is a cinema that I attend regularly with this exact policy: three hours free to me because the cinema pays the parking company for the first three hours. I exceed this limit sometimes (getting there early, 2.5+ hour movie, etc...) and I pay the overage of a few dollars when I leave. That's fair to me and should be to anyone who appreciates capitalism.
I'm not for one minute suggesting that one should never pay for parking. Obviously if someone provides a service in exchange for money, it's fair that they get their money.
But in the cases we're talking about:
- Nobody's subsidising the parking because there is no opportunity to pay. The parking firm does not charge the landowner and they don't provide any means of paying - your options are park for less than three hours or don't park at all. The parking firm's only source of income is tickets.
- There may well be nowhere else to park within walking distance.
> I don't think you know what "spurious" means. If you pay for three hours and stay 3:15, that's a legitimate overage.
If it's a free car park and it is there for the benefit of cinemagoers, yes I'd say a 15 minute overstay when it's a particularly long film is spurious.
> Also, can private companies issue a ticket in the UK, or are you saying they just request that you pay more with a piece of paper?
Private companies cannot issue a fine.
If they have suffered a loss for which you are responsible, they can ask you to reimburse them for the loss - but in this example, the car park is free. So what's the loss?
Google Apps for Business also makes money.
I've seen this exact same business model before, but in regards to parking in the UK rather than movies.
The way it works is:
- You park on privately owned land.
- The landowner contracts a third-party company to provide parking management.
- The third-party company invents a spurious reason to ticket you. (eg. "You stayed over three hours in this car park!" when parking at to the cinema to see a film that is 3 hours 15 minutes long).
- The third-party company sends you a series of rude letters demanding you pay a penalty of around £80 or they'll take you to court.
- 60% of the time, victims pay up. Which is a shame, because the only people in the UK who can force you to pay a penalty are government bodies - private companies can't do this. Oh, they can sue for any losses they incur, but if you overstay a free car park by 15 minutes, how exactly do they lose £80?
How's this any different? They're co-opting the legal system for bullying purposes then chickening out as soon as it looks like they might have to talk to a judge.
There's a whole bunch of reasons you wouldn't slap a "Linux Inside" sticker on, and it's more to do with branding than stigma. The biggest one is that Linux is not, and never will be, a word that is wholly and exclusively associated with Google's operating system.
Meaning that if Google were to make a big thing about ChromeOS being Linux-based, there's a very good risk that potential customers would just punch "Linux" into Google if they wanted to know more. What will they do next? Who knows - but it certainly won't be "learn all about ChromeOS". Right now, if I do that the first things that come back are a Wikipedia article that's very heavy on jargon, Ubuntu's homepage and linux.org - a learning resource with a distinct technical flavour. At least two of those will likely scare the living daylights out of someone who's interested in ChromeOS.
The next issue with branding is that Linux does not have a strong brand at all. The brand is what customers look for, and it needs to be properly presented. It would perhaps be a little disingenuous to call branding a science, but there are some things that pretty well everyone who's any good at persuading people to buy something agree on.
Presenting a brand doesn't just mean you have a catchy name and a logo - it's how that logo and name are consistently presented together. You'll never see "Coca-Cola" written in black text with a pale green background, for instance, because Coca-Cola has very strict rules that dictate precisely how their logo is used and those rules are applied religiously to everything that gets a logo slapped on it.
But a brand is more than that. It also refers to pretty much everything an organisation does. You want people to associate your company with quality, you put enormous effort into ensuring every product that goes out the door works as intended. You want people to associate your company with customer service, you make damn sure that you ship promptly, answer questions efficiently and every customer who comes back to you with an issue - no matter how small - is well looked after. You want people to associate your company with having fun, you don't give your staff a uniform of grey suits.
As a brand, Linux is terrible because it encompasses Ubuntu (Linux for humans), Debian (Linux for server admins who value stability over ease of use), RedHat (Linux for server admins who are quite happy to spend money), Android (Linux for mobile phones and tablets) and virtually every set-top PVR under the sun. All of these projects have different - sometimes wildly different - goals. Linux might be a useful term to describe the kernel all these things run, but it will never be a consumer product brand.
Wouldn't that have excluded the former Pope?
> The ancient languages had many words that had different meanings based on context, or similar but different meaning based on phrasing, they were rich, deep, and complex as hell and frankly modern English...isn't.
Err... excuse me. English is full of different meanings based on context. The thing is, today we have a strong written culture and - necessity being the mother of invention - spelling to provide the context we need. Without spelling, ewe wood be righting like this.
The day that the first website was able to detect what client was being used to view it, we were in trouble.
You haven't needed to do that ever if you want to detect IE.
IE automagically turns backslashes in a URL into forward slashes. AFAIK, no other browser does this.
Too bad if it does. Their excuses wore out long ago.
They did, but business apps that are tied to specific versions of IE are endemic and quite often it's not as simple as paying money and getting the software updated. We're not talking one or two apps here that need updating; we're talking hundreds if not thousands of applications, some of which quite clearly haven't had any major UI work done in five or ten years.
In the last fortnight, I've seen - and this is in just one small business:
- A web app that requires a specific ActiveX plugin to print - evidently a stylesheet for printing or even generating a PDF is too difficult. This plugin only works on 32-bit versions of IE; under 64-bit versions the plugin installer silently fails to work. (The plugin developer does have a 64-bit version available, but it's commercial software. You can't just download a 64-bit version from the developer's website yourself).
- This web app is provided for franchisees by their franchisor. (I won't name the franchise, but I guarantee you've heard of it). As with any franchise-type arrangement, the franchisee can ask their franchisor nicely but cannot force anything - and in this case, the franchisee simply cannot say "In that case I won't use your tool; I'll find something else to do the same job", using it is a condition of the franchise.
- Several web apps that require you to explicitly click the "broken mode" button in IE - they're generating IE6-only HTML when IE is used but IE isn't detecting this and automatically downgrading.
- Quite often these apps will work just fine with Chrome, Firefox et al. It looks like they're detecting an IE User-Agent string and generating IE-6 specific HTML rather than checking the IE version.
- These apps are provided by a third-party and you have to use them otherwise you can't do business with that third party. The business itself doesn't care about your idealistic attitude that IE-dependant websites must die; they need to meet payroll this month and one of the ways they do this is by working with various third parties.
- Web applications that quite simply do not function in anything but Internet Explorer in any form, no matter what you do with your user-agent string. You'd be amazed (and faintly disturbed) how many project managers read as far as "no need to deploy your own client app" when first considering web development and didn't get the bit about "with careful development, client platform independent".
- Much of this is actually Microsoft's own doing - they purposely encouraged this sort of behaviour back in the days of IE6.
Maybe I should have worded that more clearly.
Backups are a solved problem, but lots of people get hung up on having something that backs up the data with little consideration as to why you might want that.
This is how you wind up with holes in your backup process.
In this case, version control covers "oh dear I didn't mean to overwrite/delete that file"; mirroring covers "oh dear the server has just died horribly" and "oh dear the datacentre has been lost to fire". It appears nobody has considered "oh dear an unexpected combination of circumstances has corrupted the version control system and the mirroring has replicated that corruption".
Backups have been a solved problem for decades.
Understanding what does and does not constitute a reliable backup is not.
ISTR the original suggestion of "fly to the US and buy it there" accounted for paying any applicable duties on return.
Lots of ISPs have been doing something similar all over the world, for a very simple reason:
The profit margin in providing internet service is miniscule. And people expect more and more from email.
15 years ago, you'd get POP3 and a mailbox quota of maybe 20MB. If you were lucky, you might also get some sort of web-based email, but it was usually pretty primitive by modern standards.
Today, people expect a sophisticated web-based service that they can also use with their smartphone and there's still quite a few people who want to use something like Outlook (and so need IMAP). Yet the profit margin per-customer per-month after you've met the costs in providing a DSL line and backhaul to the Internet is something stupid like £1. They're being expected to setup, support and maintain something comparable with GMail for £1/user/month. Well, less than £1/user/month because you still need to make some profit.
Even a Google Apps for Business account is £2.75 per user per month.
No wonder they want to stop providing email, you simply can't do a good job unless you specialise in it.
The great majority of these routers are running Linux.
It seems to be a dirty little secret of the router world: they're all running Linux (GPLv2), many have ADSL chips and support PPPoE and PPPoA.
Yet the mainline kernel has practically zero support for ADSL chips - none of the drivers have been open-sourced. The documentation for the chips themselves is released to the router manufacturers under NDA, and quite often the manufacturers also get a reference driver (a Linux kernel module).
This means the router manufacturer cannot comply with both the NDA and the GPL. Usually they comply with the NDA and either ignore the GPL or release source that's missing ADSL drivers. So we have the mildly absurd case that OpenWRT and DD-WRT have abysmal ADSL support.
It's even harder in real-world scenarios because more often than not, "We absolutely, categorically cannot afford a failure of any description! We'll spend whatever we need to in order to guarantee this!" rapidly becomes "Maybe we don't need it that badly...." once the costs are presented to management.
How is Skype Out not facilitating outgoing calls?
Germany suffered deflation before it suffered inflation.