A toner cartridge is just a plastic box full of wet ink (for an inkjet) or dry toner (for a laser), right?
Wrong.
If you're Lexmark, it also contains a chip which does various (patented) things that the printer uses to confirm it's got a genuine Lexmark cartridge installed. Abracadabra, you can now use patent protection to ensure that only your exorbitantly expensive cartridges get used.
Windows '9x turned me off Windows for life
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
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· Score: 1
Way back when I was in university, I did a placement year as IT technician at a school.
Now, if you've ever been a humble IT technician you'll know that the average technician frequently does not have the authority to do anything particularly interesting. This place was particularly bad because my own manager at the time was actively opposed to more-or-less anything that could make life easier. He wasn't hugely keen on scripting the boring work away, and suggesting that we license Ghost nearly gave him fits.
And he'd acquired a network of about 80-100 PCs running Windows '95 and '98 authenticating against an NT 4 domain. "Nightmare of Brobdingnagian Proportions" more or less covers it.
Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue, fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this":-)
Thing is, I know of at least one other installation that was reputed to have stayed up for a long time - much like the GP asserts.
My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.
That's because it is not an IMAP client. Which anyone who's ever used Outlook in conjunction with Exchange will tell you.
Outlook is a sales tool used by Microsoft to sell you Exchange, and as such it is an Exchange client which connects to IMAP as an afterthought. It's great for people who want a communications mechanism comprising telephone, meetings and appointments and email all in one rather than just a simple email client - and more often than not, those people are the senior managers who chose Exchange.
Thing is, Microsoft are in a tough position. Partly because of their size.
Publicly-traded companies are generally under immense pressure to grow the business. But in Microsoft's case, how would they grow it?
They're as close to saturation point as they'll get with PCs. Which realistically leaves servers, smartphones and the embedded market. All places where Linux is much stronger, and where "we're going to crush linux! ugh ugh ugh!" "Look out for that chair!" doesn't impress anyone.
Server 2008 is for MS only shops, SQL Server is an also-ran to Oracle, Postgres and MySQL, IIS is just a joke. Unless it is an MS product it does not go on IIS. We have far more linux boxes than MS ones, and most of those MS ones are VMs. Letting MS software touch metal is crazy.
Hate to break the news to you but (with the exception of people who want to develop a database-driven application) NOBODY chooses a database because of its features.
They choose a database because it's the only one (or one of a small number) which is supported by the application they want to run. And there are thousands of business applications that only support MS SQL on the backend. SQL Server may be a joke if you're used to dealing with multi-terabyte datasets but 99% of businesses in this world aren't dealing with multi-terabyte datasets.
Ditto IIS. Unless you're developing your own application, an HTTP server is going to be chosen on two criteria:
1. What does the application I want to run support? 2. If I have a choice, which am I most familiar with?
More often than not, commercial applications either require IIS or come bundled with their own web server (which is frequently a pre-configured Apache...)
Honestly, Evolution is getting reversed because we save the "stupid" from getting killed. The news covers the death of a moron as "a tragedy" instead of , "and there's at least another idiot we dont have to deal with anymore"
Our society encourages Stupidity because the risk of death is reduced or removed. Let these idiots die, leave their bodies there as a warning to others.
AFAIK, the technology as it stands right now allows the moron to call for help.
It does not allow the ranger to establish ahead of time if it's a moron who's crying for help or an experienced hiker with all the appropriate equipment who just happened to be unlucky.
At this stage it's going to take one hell of a trick to pull that off though. Assange's opponents don't have all that much credibility left, so even if someone does have major legitimate dirt on the guy it's gonna be a heck of a job getting public opinion on their side.
Then they'll frame him - convincingly - for something which nobody would publicly stand up and defend the guy. Child porn or fiddling's the obvious one, though there are others.
True, but there's a lot of con-artists in this world trying to pass off inferior alternatives. Only way to guarantee you get real, high quality whale semen is to swim out with a wetsuit, a bucket and a very large fleshlight.
What else should we expect from the same company that brought us PlaysForSure, which doesn't always "Play For Sure".
Come on. That name was a blatant attempt to introduce FUD into a marketplace where previously there had been none. In this case, the FUD was "How can I be sure my MP3 player will play tracks I buy?"
Given the number of legitimate online music stores that operated at the time, the correct answer to that would have been "What are you talking about? You can't buy music online anyway!"
The only game I have tried through Games for Windows Live is Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II and it has yet to ever be able to connect - it always returns error 0x81051911. The troubleshooting steps Microsoft has you go through include everything from port forwarding a half dozen ports to resetting your TCP/IP stack.
That's not troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is when you log exactly what's going on, dig through the logs, work out what the error is and then propose a solution based upon that. Or, if you personally aren't equipped to do that, the system provides some means for you to submit the logs to someone who is.
What you're describing is "Choose a random item from a list of half-a-dozen or so things which seem to make some sort of sense based on the error code, try it, lather rinse and repeat until success. If no success, think about what else might make sense (or - more likely seeing as relatively few people have full source access and even fewer really understand all the things that are likely to be going on - make wild guesses)".
This is the entertainment industry we're talking about here. Their business model didn't become "try to legislate things to work the way you want" in the last few years - indeed, they've been objecting to recorded music since the dawn of recorded music.
Why FM? People don't listen to the radio, people use the radio as a background piece of music.
The RIAA are well aware of that, they hope that you hear a piece in the background you like, seek it out and buy it.
Myself I can't remember the last time I had a phone which didn't have an FM radio buried somewhere in the functionality, so it's not like it's unusual. However, I also can't remember ever listening to the radio on my phone. The fact that they usually require crappy proprietary earphones that come with the phone and get lost 20 minutes later probably has something to do with that.
Can't think why it couldn't start some sort of noise to alert the driver - heck, with a modern ECU it could probably bring the car to a slow, controlled stop.
Do they not take peoples' driving licenses away for drink driving in the US?
Here in the UK, I'd be looking at a more-or-less guaranteed 12 month ban (possibly up to three years) for a first offence - even if I did live in the middle of nowhere and have no viable public transport to get to work. Stories like yours are much rarer.
Thing is, yum and urpmi were fairly late to the game in Redhat - yum originated in YellowDog and urpmi originated in Mandrake. I went from Slakware to Redhat and - when I learned about urpmi - to Mandrake. When I went back to redhat a few years later, I couldn't believe that RedHat still couldn't automatically install dependencies in order.
Which is why pretty much all "should we go bankrupt, we'll turn off the DRM" promises are worthless. What are you going to do if they don't comply?
Something else which a lot of people (who perhaps don't understand business) need to realise:
If the company goes into administration, the original directors - the ones who stood up and promised "should we go bankrupt, we'll turn off the DRM" are out of a job. Regardless of whether or not they want to instruct their engineers to disable the DRM, they no longer have authority to. New directors are appointed by the administrators and it's their job to get the best possible outcome for the shareholders - be it selling the business as a going concern or winding it up and selling the assets. "Turning off the DRM" is likely to be so low on the priorities list that it'll never happen.
In the UK you have the Sale of Goods Act, which demands that goods must last a "reasonable time" from purchase ("reasonable" obviously depending on the type of product. You wouldn't expect an oil filter to last several years, for example) and the statue of limitations is six years. If the product fails within this "reasonable time", it's down to the retailer to repair or replace - though if you go direct to the manufacturer as a warranty return, then when they've replaced it you no longer have the item you bought from the retailer so they no longer have any obligation to you.
AIUI, EU law dictates that we have something like this but doesn't prescribe a 6 year statute of limitations.
So if your shiny new sofa falls to pieces after 18 months and the store says "1 year warranty! Can't touch us!" you can - at least in theory - sue them.
Thing is, most retailers can and will say "Out of warranty! Can't touch us!" and most people will say to themselves "Bugger. Suppose there's not much I can do, but I'm not buying the replacement from them." Failure to honour these rights is rife within the retail industry, and Trading Standards usually only step in with the most blatant violations (such as big signs in a physical store saying "No returns, go to the manufacturer").
Particularly if you bought something in a store that has a policy of "original receipts only" - and uses thermal paper for receipts that tends to fade to nothing in 3-6 months
Nah, the rocket launcher was good for that but the BFG rather less so. The BFG wasn't actually a particularly good weapon because it was so slow to fire.
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Lexmark are (in)famous for this.
A toner cartridge is just a plastic box full of wet ink (for an inkjet) or dry toner (for a laser), right?
Wrong.
If you're Lexmark, it also contains a chip which does various (patented) things that the printer uses to confirm it's got a genuine Lexmark cartridge installed. Abracadabra, you can now use patent protection to ensure that only your exorbitantly expensive cartridges get used.
Way back when I was in university, I did a placement year as IT technician at a school.
Now, if you've ever been a humble IT technician you'll know that the average technician frequently does not have the authority to do anything particularly interesting. This place was particularly bad because my own manager at the time was actively opposed to more-or-less anything that could make life easier. He wasn't hugely keen on scripting the boring work away, and suggesting that we license Ghost nearly gave him fits.
And he'd acquired a network of about 80-100 PCs running Windows '95 and '98 authenticating against an NT 4 domain. "Nightmare of Brobdingnagian Proportions" more or less covers it.
Sorry, I call bullshit. A known issue, fixed only in 1999, would prevent Windows 95 and 98 from going over 49.7 days of uptime (2^32 milliseconds). Much hilarity ensued back in the day since "how could anyone have noticed / run into this" :-)
Thing is, I know of at least one other installation that was reputed to have stayed up for a long time - much like the GP asserts.
My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.
Outlook is a piss poor imap client
That's because it is not an IMAP client. Which anyone who's ever used Outlook in conjunction with Exchange will tell you.
Outlook is a sales tool used by Microsoft to sell you Exchange, and as such it is an Exchange client which connects to IMAP as an afterthought. It's great for people who want a communications mechanism comprising telephone, meetings and appointments and email all in one rather than just a simple email client - and more often than not, those people are the senior managers who chose Exchange.
Thing is, Microsoft are in a tough position. Partly because of their size.
Publicly-traded companies are generally under immense pressure to grow the business. But in Microsoft's case, how would they grow it?
They're as close to saturation point as they'll get with PCs. Which realistically leaves servers, smartphones and the embedded market. All places where Linux is much stronger, and where "we're going to crush linux! ugh ugh ugh!" "Look out for that chair!" doesn't impress anyone.
Server 2008 is for MS only shops, SQL Server is an also-ran to Oracle, Postgres and MySQL, IIS is just a joke. Unless it is an MS product it does not go on IIS. We have far more linux boxes than MS ones, and most of those MS ones are VMs. Letting MS software touch metal is crazy.
Hate to break the news to you but (with the exception of people who want to develop a database-driven application) NOBODY chooses a database because of its features.
They choose a database because it's the only one (or one of a small number) which is supported by the application they want to run. And there are thousands of business applications that only support MS SQL on the backend. SQL Server may be a joke if you're used to dealing with multi-terabyte datasets but 99% of businesses in this world aren't dealing with multi-terabyte datasets.
Ditto IIS. Unless you're developing your own application, an HTTP server is going to be chosen on two criteria:
1. What does the application I want to run support?
2. If I have a choice, which am I most familiar with?
More often than not, commercial applications either require IIS or come bundled with their own web server (which is frequently a pre-configured Apache...)
We rescue these morons.
Honestly, Evolution is getting reversed because we save the "stupid" from getting killed. The news covers the death of a moron as "a tragedy" instead of , "and there's at least another idiot we dont have to deal with anymore"
Our society encourages Stupidity because the risk of death is reduced or removed. Let these idiots die, leave their bodies there as a warning to others.
AFAIK, the technology as it stands right now allows the moron to call for help.
It does not allow the ranger to establish ahead of time if it's a moron who's crying for help or an experienced hiker with all the appropriate equipment who just happened to be unlucky.
At this stage it's going to take one hell of a trick to pull that off though. Assange's opponents don't have all that much credibility left, so even if someone does have major legitimate dirt on the guy it's gonna be a heck of a job getting public opinion on their side.
Then they'll frame him - convincingly - for something which nobody would publicly stand up and defend the guy. Child porn or fiddling's the obvious one, though there are others.
There are, but they don't guarantee that the person writing the code that runs on them is any smarter than the office cheese plant.
True, but there's a lot of con-artists in this world trying to pass off inferior alternatives. Only way to guarantee you get real, high quality whale semen is to swim out with a wetsuit, a bucket and a very large fleshlight.
Supermarket wine frequently does - myself I try to find an independent wine merchant who's running the business for the love of it.
You'll pay more-or-less the same money but the difference in taste is vast.
What else should we expect from the same company that brought us PlaysForSure, which doesn't always "Play For Sure".
Come on. That name was a blatant attempt to introduce FUD into a marketplace where previously there had been none. In this case, the FUD was "How can I be sure my MP3 player will play tracks I buy?"
Given the number of legitimate online music stores that operated at the time, the correct answer to that would have been "What are you talking about? You can't buy music online anyway!"
The only game I have tried through Games for Windows Live is Warhammer 40K Dawn of War II and it has yet to ever be able to connect - it always returns error 0x81051911. The troubleshooting steps Microsoft has you go through include everything from port forwarding a half dozen ports to resetting your TCP/IP stack.
That's not troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is when you log exactly what's going on, dig through the logs, work out what the error is and then propose a solution based upon that. Or, if you personally aren't equipped to do that, the system provides some means for you to submit the logs to someone who is.
What you're describing is "Choose a random item from a list of half-a-dozen or so things which seem to make some sort of sense based on the error code, try it, lather rinse and repeat until success. If no success, think about what else might make sense (or - more likely seeing as relatively few people have full source access and even fewer really understand all the things that are likely to be going on - make wild guesses)".
How well will that work when Google (or any search engine, for that matter) successfully implements:
Did you mean: ${NAME} (date of birth: ${DATE}), ${NAME} (date of birth: ${DATE}) or ${SLIGHTLY_DIFFERENT_SPELLING_OF_NAME} ?
Probably.
This is the entertainment industry we're talking about here. Their business model didn't become "try to legislate things to work the way you want" in the last few years - indeed, they've been objecting to recorded music since the dawn of recorded music.
Why FM? People don't listen to the radio, people use the radio as a background piece of music.
The RIAA are well aware of that, they hope that you hear a piece in the background you like, seek it out and buy it.
Myself I can't remember the last time I had a phone which didn't have an FM radio buried somewhere in the functionality, so it's not like it's unusual. However, I also can't remember ever listening to the radio on my phone. The fact that they usually require crappy proprietary earphones that come with the phone and get lost 20 minutes later probably has something to do with that.
If it didn't pose an inconvenience, it wouldn't be a punishment.
Can't think why it couldn't start some sort of noise to alert the driver - heck, with a modern ECU it could probably bring the car to a slow, controlled stop.
Do they not take peoples' driving licenses away for drink driving in the US?
Here in the UK, I'd be looking at a more-or-less guaranteed 12 month ban (possibly up to three years) for a first offence - even if I did live in the middle of nowhere and have no viable public transport to get to work. Stories like yours are much rarer.
Thing is, yum and urpmi were fairly late to the game in Redhat - yum originated in YellowDog and urpmi originated in Mandrake. I went from Slakware to Redhat and - when I learned about urpmi - to Mandrake. When I went back to redhat a few years later, I couldn't believe that RedHat still couldn't automatically install dependencies in order.
Which is why pretty much all "should we go bankrupt, we'll turn off the DRM" promises are worthless. What are you going to do if they don't comply?
Something else which a lot of people (who perhaps don't understand business) need to realise:
If the company goes into administration, the original directors - the ones who stood up and promised "should we go bankrupt, we'll turn off the DRM" are out of a job. Regardless of whether or not they want to instruct their engineers to disable the DRM, they no longer have authority to. New directors are appointed by the administrators and it's their job to get the best possible outcome for the shareholders - be it selling the business as a going concern or winding it up and selling the assets. "Turning off the DRM" is likely to be so low on the priorities list that it'll never happen.
Depends on the country you're in.
In the UK you have the Sale of Goods Act, which demands that goods must last a "reasonable time" from purchase ("reasonable" obviously depending on the type of product. You wouldn't expect an oil filter to last several years, for example) and the statue of limitations is six years. If the product fails within this "reasonable time", it's down to the retailer to repair or replace - though if you go direct to the manufacturer as a warranty return, then when they've replaced it you no longer have the item you bought from the retailer so they no longer have any obligation to you.
AIUI, EU law dictates that we have something like this but doesn't prescribe a 6 year statute of limitations.
So if your shiny new sofa falls to pieces after 18 months and the store says "1 year warranty! Can't touch us!" you can - at least in theory - sue them.
Thing is, most retailers can and will say "Out of warranty! Can't touch us!" and most people will say to themselves "Bugger. Suppose there's not much I can do, but I'm not buying the replacement from them." Failure to honour these rights is rife within the retail industry, and Trading Standards usually only step in with the most blatant violations (such as big signs in a physical store saying "No returns, go to the manufacturer").
The receipt lifetime?
Particularly if you bought something in a store that has a policy of "original receipts only" - and uses thermal paper for receipts that tends to fade to nothing in 3-6 months
Nah, the rocket launcher was good for that but the BFG rather less so. The BFG wasn't actually a particularly good weapon because it was so slow to fire.