Some previous responses have said "People who can afford smart phones are smart enough to use protection". I'll counter with "People who can afford smart phones can also afford alcohol, and alcohol and urgency will decrease protection usage"
People who come up with responses like that haven't looked at the mobile phone market lately. Sony Ericsson have an Android phone with a 2.5" screen out, and it's pretty cheap (Pretty plasticky too, but that's Sony Ericsson for you). Samsung are producing their own smartphone platform which it seems many - if not all - of their future handsets will run.
IMV, it won't be long before non-smartphones are consigned to the same history book as phones with black & white screens and no camera. 3-5 years at most, very likely considerably less. Why else do you think Microsoft - after letting their mobile platform languish for so long - are suddenly going all out to promote Windows Mobile 7?
Indeed. I've worked in big, regulated companies before and the attitude to almost anything significant was more likely to be "What is the minimum we need to do to comply with the letter of the regulation?" rather than "How can we best do this to serve the customer while remaining competitive?".
Generally speaking, playing catch-up with what everyone else was doing 3-5 years previously while furiously marketing their product so heavily that unless you went to great lengths to inform yourself, you'd never know it.
I dunno - the knives weren't just pointed at DR-DOS. All this came out in the first antitrust trials - any OEM wanting to sell so much as a single box without Windows either paid for Windows anyway or had to pay full price. And the OEM price was such a deep discount that foregoing that discount would effectively block that OEM from selling Windows PCs at a competitive price.
Before Microsoft went all-out on the "let's kill everything on the PC that isn't DOS/Windows" crusade, there was a thriving market for all sorts of applications, many of which either bundled their own GUI, bundled GEM or simply didn't have a GUI at all.
Though I would point out that a big problem (in the UK at least) is that while banks are regulated in theory, it would appear that they can be as damn useless as they like and as long as there are processes in place to deal with it, it doesn't matter.
Even if the processes themselves are damn useless, it still doesn't matter.
Even if the processes are still damn useless after several years have gone by with ample opportunity to fix them, guess what? Doesn't matter.
I don't know about Aussie banks but in the UK, "walking into a branch" to address issues is about as effective as "walking into a tree". You almost invariably find yourself face-to-face with a mindless drone who can do no more than what computer says.
So if you need help with something and computer says no, so does drone.
The only effective thing I've found is to write a letter. These normally go to the few people left in the bank who can still read and write, and they're generally quite helpful.
Nah, the Americans will never accept the idea of the Page 3 girl. Hell, I wouldn't be too surprised if at least one state attempted to outlaw breast feeding because it involved showing breasts to very young children.
My understanding is that doing what you like with something you purchase is not a bizarre new right.
What is bizarre and new (at least as far as the law is concerned) is a product where it is physically possible for the retailer to retain control of it after purchase.
It makes you wonder why they're willing to wait years before they get this up!
When was the last time Microsoft did anything without first letting Apple test the waters? Only company I've ever heard of with a reverse NIH attitude.
The thing that offends me is not this device, per se. It is the waste of resources.
Contrary to appearances, there's only so much money one can spend on air security. There are a huge number of things that can be done to compromise security without ever having to be a passenger, however - and the state of airline security these days is such that most of these things would be substantially easier to do.
For instance: After the recent incident involving bomb-filled printers shipped as cargo, did the Home Secretary in the UK (whose responsibilities ultimately include law & order) order investigation into tightening security around cargo? Did she propose legislation demanding private courier firms check their cargo more carefully? Did she propose finding money (though who knows where from...) to drastically increase the amount of cargo that can be checked on arrival and when passing through the UK?
No. She announced a ban on carrying individual toner cartridges in hand luggage.
I swear our politicians can't separate in their own minds a real bomb from the archetypal bomb about the size and shape of a cannonball, black with the word "bomb" painted in white on it, complete with a fuse that you light and it fizzes as it burns down.
While I don't pretend to be an expert on US politics - not being American and all that - it rather seems to me as an outsider that no matter what a candidate pledges, they invariably under-deliver and what they do deliver takes much longer than the electorate would like.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the whole system of government is set up to ensure that nothing happens fast, and is set up in such a way as to guarantee that no matter who is president, this remains the case.
They said the directory server never worked right and there were a bunch of other glitches, some of them I think hardware-based. It was a big deployment and they even had Apple involvement but it never worked right.
Welcome to the world of commercial server operating systems. Dell will happily sell you a cheap and cheerful server for that sort of money running Windows Server 2008.
Of course, if you want to upgrade to the next version of Windows server when it comes out, you'll need to pay for an upgrade - not sure how much that is but the last time I checked it was not insignificant. And if you have more than 5 client PCs, you'll need to upgrade your CALs as well.
2) Set up times are not faster then Linux. Assuming both have the equivalent skill set experience.
Wouldn't surprise me if they are, actually. I've got years of experience and to get a single Linux box to do everything OS X server is claimed to be able to do out of the box is almost invariably going to require a fair bit of fiddling. And even then, you're not going to have the pretty-pretty UI that OS X provides.
Now that UI may not be terribly important to you, but if you're running a company which happens to have a requirement for a handful of servers, needs some of the features found in a Unix server but doesn't wish to pay for a Unix admin (bearing in mind that relatively few small "We provide support for local businesses!" computer support people handle Linux) I can see it being pretty useful.
That's not an answer to his question. He asked why not start with tight and efficient code?
Fair point.
I think the last time I saw anything tight and efficient was back when the nature of the computer it was running on forced that. IME, code efficiency is inversely proportional to the power of the system on which it is expected to run.
My first thought was "why not write good code to start with?"
That's hilarious, that is. I don't think I have ever in my life seen code start bloated and move towards tight efficiency. Usually you find developers following the age-old rules about "Don't optimise" and "Don't optimise - yet" and by the time it is appropriate to start optimising, the product's already shipped.
This opens up a very interesting can of worms. I wonder how many other companies selling products that vary on a per-customer basis are using this information? Car insurance is another one that springs to mind, particularly if you live in a part of the world where it's compulsory.
We have so many non-governmental organisations which are funded by the taxpayer and accountable to nobody that a recent audit by the new government has resulted in almost 200 being axed. Most of them either never needed to exist in the first place or were doing jobs which would have made infinitely more sense if they came under another, existing department.
Bizarrely, you would think it would be in the interests of the Train Operating Companies for the public to have convenient access to this data - but the association that represents them seems more interested in making a quick buck on licensing Android and iPhone apps.
I'm not so sure. Many of the train companies would - were it not for very generous subsidies - be losing money hand over fist, even when most of their trains are is standing-room only and UK ticket prices are some of the dearest in Europe. Essentially, they can't make an honest profit even when they've got customers coming out of their ears.
In which case, every other potential source of revenue - even if it's something like this which patently should be made available free - needs to be exploited.
"Data in the cloud" is a fancy way of saying "Data on somebody else's storage infrastructure, not mine".
You expect that the company storing the data has a rather fancier storage infrastructure than you can possibly afford, but you can't be certain. You may have visions of the latest, greatest SAN technology complete with multi-site replication and failover capabilities - but for all you know your supplier has a vision of a single Dell server with an external storage array of 16 1TB SATA drives. And for goodness' sake, can someone get down there and re-route that cable? It's the third time this week someone's tripped over it and it's come unplugged. We're just lucky that we haven't got enough customers that anybody really noticed.
This is before you even consider the possibility of human error. We've seen plenty of evidence over the last couple of years of companies who think RAID = backup.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, he doesn't mind. He even thinks they're funny:
You've just slashdotted Chuck Norris' website. Okay, ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, huh?
Some previous responses have said "People who can afford smart phones are smart enough to use protection". I'll counter with "People who can afford smart phones can also afford alcohol, and alcohol and urgency will decrease protection usage"
People who come up with responses like that haven't looked at the mobile phone market lately. Sony Ericsson have an Android phone with a 2.5" screen out, and it's pretty cheap (Pretty plasticky too, but that's Sony Ericsson for you). Samsung are producing their own smartphone platform which it seems many - if not all - of their future handsets will run.
IMV, it won't be long before non-smartphones are consigned to the same history book as phones with black & white screens and no camera. 3-5 years at most, very likely considerably less. Why else do you think Microsoft - after letting their mobile platform languish for so long - are suddenly going all out to promote Windows Mobile 7?
Indeed. I've worked in big, regulated companies before and the attitude to almost anything significant was more likely to be "What is the minimum we need to do to comply with the letter of the regulation?" rather than "How can we best do this to serve the customer while remaining competitive?".
Generally speaking, playing catch-up with what everyone else was doing 3-5 years previously while furiously marketing their product so heavily that unless you went to great lengths to inform yourself, you'd never know it.
I dunno - the knives weren't just pointed at DR-DOS. All this came out in the first antitrust trials - any OEM wanting to sell so much as a single box without Windows either paid for Windows anyway or had to pay full price. And the OEM price was such a deep discount that foregoing that discount would effectively block that OEM from selling Windows PCs at a competitive price.
Before Microsoft went all-out on the "let's kill everything on the PC that isn't DOS/Windows" crusade, there was a thriving market for all sorts of applications, many of which either bundled their own GUI, bundled GEM or simply didn't have a GUI at all.
What, it was so bad that you dare not get rid of it lest it fall into the wrong hands?
I know that feeling.
They didn't have a lot of choice.
Though I would point out that a big problem (in the UK at least) is that while banks are regulated in theory, it would appear that they can be as damn useless as they like and as long as there are processes in place to deal with it, it doesn't matter.
Even if the processes themselves are damn useless, it still doesn't matter.
Even if the processes are still damn useless after several years have gone by with ample opportunity to fix them, guess what? Doesn't matter.
I don't know about Aussie banks but in the UK, "walking into a branch" to address issues is about as effective as "walking into a tree". You almost invariably find yourself face-to-face with a mindless drone who can do no more than what computer says.
So if you need help with something and computer says no, so does drone.
The only effective thing I've found is to write a letter. These normally go to the few people left in the bank who can still read and write, and they're generally quite helpful.
Nah, the Americans will never accept the idea of the Page 3 girl. Hell, I wouldn't be too surprised if at least one state attempted to outlaw breast feeding because it involved showing breasts to very young children.
My understanding is that doing what you like with something you purchase is not a bizarre new right.
What is bizarre and new (at least as far as the law is concerned) is a product where it is physically possible for the retailer to retain control of it after purchase.
It makes you wonder why they're willing to wait years before they get this up!
When was the last time Microsoft did anything without first letting Apple test the waters? Only company I've ever heard of with a reverse NIH attitude.
The thing that offends me is not this device, per se. It is the waste of resources.
Contrary to appearances, there's only so much money one can spend on air security. There are a huge number of things that can be done to compromise security without ever having to be a passenger, however - and the state of airline security these days is such that most of these things would be substantially easier to do.
For instance: After the recent incident involving bomb-filled printers shipped as cargo, did the Home Secretary in the UK (whose responsibilities ultimately include law & order) order investigation into tightening security around cargo? Did she propose legislation demanding private courier firms check their cargo more carefully? Did she propose finding money (though who knows where from...) to drastically increase the amount of cargo that can be checked on arrival and when passing through the UK?
No. She announced a ban on carrying individual toner cartridges in hand luggage.
I swear our politicians can't separate in their own minds a real bomb from the archetypal bomb about the size and shape of a cannonball, black with the word "bomb" painted in white on it, complete with a fuse that you light and it fizzes as it burns down.
While I don't pretend to be an expert on US politics - not being American and all that - it rather seems to me as an outsider that no matter what a candidate pledges, they invariably under-deliver and what they do deliver takes much longer than the electorate would like.
If I didn't know any better, I'd say that the whole system of government is set up to ensure that nothing happens fast, and is set up in such a way as to guarantee that no matter who is president, this remains the case.
Dell's NICs are almost always Intel or Broadcom based IIRC - I'd be surprised if either was an issue for OS X.
They said the directory server never worked right and there were a bunch of other glitches, some of them I think hardware-based. It was a big deployment and they even had Apple involvement but it never worked right.
Isn't the directory server in OS X OpenLDAP?
Welcome to the world of commercial server operating systems. Dell will happily sell you a cheap and cheerful server for that sort of money running Windows Server 2008.
Of course, if you want to upgrade to the next version of Windows server when it comes out, you'll need to pay for an upgrade - not sure how much that is but the last time I checked it was not insignificant. And if you have more than 5 client PCs, you'll need to upgrade your CALs as well.
2) Set up times are not faster then Linux. Assuming both have the equivalent skill set experience.
Wouldn't surprise me if they are, actually. I've got years of experience and to get a single Linux box to do everything OS X server is claimed to be able to do out of the box is almost invariably going to require a fair bit of fiddling. And even then, you're not going to have the pretty-pretty UI that OS X provides.
Now that UI may not be terribly important to you, but if you're running a company which happens to have a requirement for a handful of servers, needs some of the features found in a Unix server but doesn't wish to pay for a Unix admin (bearing in mind that relatively few small "We provide support for local businesses!" computer support people handle Linux) I can see it being pretty useful.
That's not an answer to his question. He asked why not start with tight and efficient code?
Fair point.
I think the last time I saw anything tight and efficient was back when the nature of the computer it was running on forced that. IME, code efficiency is inversely proportional to the power of the system on which it is expected to run.
My first thought was "why not write good code to start with?"
That's hilarious, that is. I don't think I have ever in my life seen code start bloated and move towards tight efficiency. Usually you find developers following the age-old rules about "Don't optimise" and "Don't optimise - yet" and by the time it is appropriate to start optimising, the product's already shipped.
That's very nice for you in London. Areas without cable get ADSL, which maxes out around 20-24Mbps.
I live in a town with 61,000 people, which is apparently not large enough to merit either cable or FTTC.
This opens up a very interesting can of worms. I wonder how many other companies selling products that vary on a per-customer basis are using this information? Car insurance is another one that springs to mind, particularly if you live in a part of the world where it's compulsory.
Can tell you're not from the UK.
We have so many non-governmental organisations which are funded by the taxpayer and accountable to nobody that a recent audit by the new government has resulted in almost 200 being axed. Most of them either never needed to exist in the first place or were doing jobs which would have made infinitely more sense if they came under another, existing department.
Bizarrely, you would think it would be in the interests of the Train Operating Companies for the public to have convenient access to this data - but the association that represents them seems more interested in making a quick buck on licensing Android and iPhone apps.
I'm not so sure. Many of the train companies would - were it not for very generous subsidies - be losing money hand over fist, even when most of their trains are is standing-room only and UK ticket prices are some of the dearest in Europe. Essentially, they can't make an honest profit even when they've got customers coming out of their ears.
In which case, every other potential source of revenue - even if it's something like this which patently should be made available free - needs to be exploited.
How long before they're running Windows Mobile 7?
"Data in the cloud" is a fancy way of saying "Data on somebody else's storage infrastructure, not mine".
You expect that the company storing the data has a rather fancier storage infrastructure than you can possibly afford, but you can't be certain. You may have visions of the latest, greatest SAN technology complete with multi-site replication and failover capabilities - but for all you know your supplier has a vision of a single Dell server with an external storage array of 16 1TB SATA drives. And for goodness' sake, can someone get down there and re-route that cable? It's the third time this week someone's tripped over it and it's come unplugged. We're just lucky that we haven't got enough customers that anybody really noticed.
This is before you even consider the possibility of human error. We've seen plenty of evidence over the last couple of years of companies who think RAID = backup.