If Borders in the UK were anything to go by, "entitled to margins" isn't really the problem. There's every possibility the structure of the entire business is such that they essentially have to charge that much or they'll be making a whacking loss.
An example: Virtually every book these days has a barcode, right? The barcode identifies the book, you can either use an existing database or build your own as you acquire stock. You can then scan your stock as it comes in and again at the checkout as it sells. Very easy, barcode scanners are cheap and the software isn't hard to acquire.
Borders used their own specific barcode labels. Which means every book had to have a separate barcode label which they'd have to pay someone £X/hr to apply, which means they had to manage their own unique barcode database, allocate barcodes - essentially they had added a layer of technology to deal with stock management which was almost entirely unnecessary. That layer would have cost money to set up and operate - money that nobody else was spending.
That's an example of one - fairly obvious, because it's customer-facing - silly thing. IME, it's vanishingly unlikely it was the only silly thing they were doing.
Alas, as far as Windows is concerned, the COA sticker (or, more accurately, the number on it) is proof. Nothing else.
If the original receipt is lost and the BSA come knocking at your door (which, let's face it, is unlikely for an individual), you're in trouble.
If the COA sticker is damaged - and they're getting flimsier every year - you need to restore and you're not using a site-license (which uses entirely separate keys - and is also unlikely for an individual), you're also in trouble.
Don't know if you've noticed this lately, but the OEM-sticker is getting cheaper and nastier as years go by - recent versions aren't laminated, they're plain paper sticky on two edges, with a hole torn - not cut - in the middle.
This is only anecdotal, so take it with as much salt as you think it needs - but I tried getting a replacement OEM install key for a damaged label on a Dell server. It was absolutely impossible - Microsoft won't help, Dell don't log the key the system ships with when it goes out and wouldn't let me have a new one. Even though they know full well it shipped with an OEM copy of Windows.
Despite having a perfectly legitimate license (there was only slight damage to the sticker, but enough to make it unreadable), I was left with one choice: buy a new license at full retail price. It seems that this cheap nasty little sticker has an effective value of something like £500 (which IIRC was the full retail price of Windows Server).
Last time I checked, a Time Machine backup disk wasn't bootable. Apple's own recommended solution is to reload from the OS disk and then restore from the Time Machine backup. (Can't remember if the 10.6 install process gives you an option to say "Restore from time machine" as part of the process).
> - I can't make Flash work on Ubuntu, even though I've tried numerous times. It keeps saying something about, "Not enough permission."
Then you aren't really trying. You aren't actually sincerely trying to make it work. You're just trying to make it fail. You just want something to whine about. You're just a troll.
It doesn't get any easier than a vendor repository managed package.
Actually, the OP probably is trying - and I'll tell you precisely what the OP is doing.
S/he is going to a website which demands flash, and if it's not detected, the website brings up a message saying "If you don't have flash, you can download it here."
The OP clicks on the link, which takes them to Adobe's website and searches for Flash for Linux - they get offered the following:
- Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (YUM) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey. - Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (.tar.gz) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey. - Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (.rpm) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey. - Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (.deb) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey. - APT for Ubuntu 9.04+ : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey.
They've got no idea which of the five options is correct, so they probably click on the first option that comes up. Alas, YUM is specific to RedHat-derived distributions (it was originally produced by YellowDog, who distribute a RedHat derivative), so unless they're using a RedHat-derived distribution that uses YUM, that doesn't work. Is the OP's distribution RedHat derived? Do they know enough about Linux to ask themselves that question?
The second option is the tarball. They open that - what's inside the tarball is a single library, libflashplayer.so (I've just downloaded it myself to check). They probably have no idea what to do with that - does Ubuntu have the good sense to put it into/usr/local/lib and restart the browser?
Next on the list is the RPM. Again, doesn't work unless they're on a RedHat-derived distribution.
Okay, now we're onto.deb - and rapidly running out of patience. That actually has a good chance of working if the.rpm didn't. Now I'm typing this on a Mac so I have no idea if it will. Let's assume it doesn't for whatever reason.
Finally (after about an hour of messing around, because the OP doesn't really know what they're doing so has tried opening everything they've downloaded a number of ways) we get to APT for Ubuntu 9.04+. Whatever the hell APT is. Yes, I know what it is, does our OP who just downloaded Ubuntu and hit "next... next... next..." when they installed? Or are they going to assume that APT is something entirely unrelated?
Why is it that a bewildering number of smart people has been indoctrinated into believing that the "free market" is the only solution to everything?
"Intelligence", "Insight", "Common Sense" and "Has memorised so many facts that they can pass for intelligent, even though they can't really apply those facts to anything outside their sphere of experience" are all different things.
Have you seen your average smartphones' implementation of IMAP (SSL or not)?
"Shocking" doesn't even begin to cover it. It's a minor miracle it works at all, and fancy features like IDLE are frequently not supported in any form. Frankly, even if I think it's an absurd reinvention of the wheel, I can see why IMAP on smartphones has never caught on.
AFAICT, many ISPs that supply their own routers are actively looking at (if they're not already) supplying routers which support TR-069 and setting up infrastructure to configure them.
This is a protocol intended for the management of home routers - unlike SNMP, it's got some semblance of security (it's actually based on SOAP over HTTP, optionally HTTPS) - IIRC the CPE initiates the connection and can get things like configuration and firmware upgrades automatically.
I don't see how this is drastically different in concept from cable modems, which are more-or-less invariably heavily managed using DOCSIS.
Welcome to the United Federal Fascist State of America. Please enjoy your stay...
This kinda stuff is totally unacceptable. What law did he break? What was he accused of? Why was he detained? What right do they have to ask such questions? On what planet is a 3 hour detention reasonable?
"Embarrassing the Government" is an unwritten crime in most countries, though it's also a hard one to commit because you usually need to demonstrate publicly in several respected - preferably international - media channels that the government has made an almighty ballsup of something.
Penalties vary from country to country. In some countries, the penalty is simply harassment of a legal - yet annoying - nature for an unspecified period of time. In others, the penalty is death by suicide.
Thing is, there's no such thing as a file format suitable for loading such whacking great images. What application is even going to look at an image that size, let alone display it.
Most of these applications download a drastically scaled-down version of the complete image and as you zoom in they load the relevant bits, scaled appropriately. You never download the complete image.
My brother works in the professional theatre as a technician, and you're absolutely right. All the hard, clever bits involved in the lighting are done way before the first night - when the show is actually going on, the lighting desk (these days it's usually a computer in a specialised case with a few bits of specialised hardware to drive the lights and a bank of sliders) stores a list of every lighting state and the transitions between them, and the lighting technician just presses a button to go from the current state to the next state on cue. S/he will have set up the states and transitions some time previously.
unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.
I bet you anything you like some enterprising soul in most government departments has already tried and established that several essential apps stop working in versions of IE later than 6.
This means that suddenly, upgrading the browser isn't a relatively simple "push it out through existing rollout tools and forget about it" job. It's a full-blown project to get all the other apps updated, which requires sign-off at a higher level and everyone will want their piece of the political pie.
A friend and I have recently been discussing tribalism and an idea he called Monkeysphere - I'll quote him here more-or-less verbatim as he's already written it beautifully:
It's [Monkeysphere] a brilliant concept. It came about when researchers noticed a correlation between primate brain sizes (I forget whether it was the whole brain or a key part of it) and the size of their social groups. It was such a strong correlation that they could actually predict how big a group it would be when presented with a brain they hadn't seen before. This group limit has been termed the Monkeysphere.
One day they were given a rather large brain, and guessed a social group size of 150. You might already have guessed which species this brain came from.
Basically, we cannot cope with the idea of more than 150 people - at least, not AS people. We blur the others out. The supermarket checkouts may as well be staffed by robots for all we care. There are human beings taking away our rubbish every morning, but we don't even think about them. All we think about is the rubbish going out, and then disappearing. Road rage? We simply don't see other drivers as people.
We *have* to work this way, or we'd go mad.
Stereotypes? Racism? That's the Monkeysphere at work. It's much easier to think of a million people far away if we think of them all as the *same* person.
Now apply this logic to any community. Once the community gets big enough (such as in the Free Software world), it essentially divides into such tribes and you wind up with exactly what Shuttleworth's describing.
The sad thing is, if this Monkeysphere idea is accurate, I don't see how such tribalism in the F/OSS world is avoidable. Indeed, it'll only get worse as more organisations jump on the bandwagon.
Thing is, Microsoft is still making a ton of money and businesses that have dropped or are looking at dropping Windows/Office are still very much the exception rather than the rule. The only reason they're even looking at other products is because Wall Street demands growth rather than stagnancy.
Ballmer is pissed not because Microsoft was late, but that they were never able to capture the user's imagination with their tablet technology. Apple got it right because they were able to see the mistakes that Microsoft made compared to their opposition at the time.
Then he's going to be pissed for a long time to come unless he can do some serious turning of the Microsoft ship.
As a company, Microsoft have had a lot of trouble dropping or substantially re-thinking a concept once they've got it. As soon as you say "general-purpose computer", the concept automatically becomes "with 17" screen, keyboard, mouse, being operated by someone who is competent to deal with more-or-less anything that they system can throw at them, running fairly independently of anyone else". Frankly, it's only been since Vista that the "with 17" screen" bit has been dropped, and quite a few official bits of documentation for domains still assume that even non-technical users will be perfectly comfortable doing fairly complicated things with their PC rather than expecting the IT department to do so remotely.
Even if you qualify "general purpose computer" with "that is about ten inches in height, is driven entirely by a finger-operated touchscreen and for most practical uses will never even have a keyboard or external display connected", I guarantee you will still see vestiges of the original idea - and they'll make so little sense that the end result will be horribly clunky and will need to be marketed to hell and back to sell at all.
Not quite as simple as that. Branson licenses the Virgin name and companies operating under the name tend to run fairly independently of one another.
In the UK, there used to be two cable companies which merged, bought Virgin Mobile and with it the rights to use the Virgin brand across their entire business. AFAIK, the relationship between other Virgin companies (including other companies in similar industries but in different parts of the world) may be minimal.
Virgin have recently started expanding their network, and the areas they're particularly interested in expanding are streets like yours where the cable almost but not quite covers every house on the road.
You should contact them and ask if they'd be prepared to reconsider.
Negative word-of-mouth (and painful difficulties) will separate the wheat from the chaff. The solutions that work well will survive. So has it been, so shall it be. The invisible hand may not always work as we wish, but it can still slap down the business models that suck.
Really? So how come there's so many people on/. making a tidy living out of tidying up after software which should never have been conceived, let alone sold - and have been doing so for years?
Does not one need to be inside the bank to use said key? If the criminal has already physically broken into the bank, theft of the few grand inside the ATM is the least of the banks' worries.
So don't interfere with one at a bank. Show up in a uniform with an armoured van to a convenience store.
They'll have to pay some way over the going rate, because quite a few F/OSS developers feel strongly enough that if that happens, they'll walk rather than sign the contract. Didn't one of the Samba developers do exactly that when Novell signed that Microsoft deal?
There's a variant on this scam where you do it slightly more honestly - you get a bunch of cheques printed saying "Bob's Discount Penis Pills" (or words to that effect) in big letters all over them. Perfectly legit cheques, with correct details on and drawn on a bank account that's in credit, there's nothing technically wrong with them.
When you receive orders, you write back explaining that for some obscure reason you can't fulfil the order, and here's a refund cheque. Who's going to stand in front of a cashier and bank a cheque like that?
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If Borders in the UK were anything to go by, "entitled to margins" isn't really the problem. There's every possibility the structure of the entire business is such that they essentially have to charge that much or they'll be making a whacking loss.
An example: Virtually every book these days has a barcode, right? The barcode identifies the book, you can either use an existing database or build your own as you acquire stock. You can then scan your stock as it comes in and again at the checkout as it sells. Very easy, barcode scanners are cheap and the software isn't hard to acquire.
Borders used their own specific barcode labels. Which means every book had to have a separate barcode label which they'd have to pay someone £X/hr to apply, which means they had to manage their own unique barcode database, allocate barcodes - essentially they had added a layer of technology to deal with stock management which was almost entirely unnecessary. That layer would have cost money to set up and operate - money that nobody else was spending.
That's an example of one - fairly obvious, because it's customer-facing - silly thing. IME, it's vanishingly unlikely it was the only silly thing they were doing.
No, the original receipt is proof. Nothing else.
Alas, as far as Windows is concerned, the COA sticker (or, more accurately, the number on it) is proof. Nothing else.
If the original receipt is lost and the BSA come knocking at your door (which, let's face it, is unlikely for an individual), you're in trouble.
If the COA sticker is damaged - and they're getting flimsier every year - you need to restore and you're not using a site-license (which uses entirely separate keys - and is also unlikely for an individual), you're also in trouble.
Don't know if you've noticed this lately, but the OEM-sticker is getting cheaper and nastier as years go by - recent versions aren't laminated, they're plain paper sticky on two edges, with a hole torn - not cut - in the middle.
This is only anecdotal, so take it with as much salt as you think it needs - but I tried getting a replacement OEM install key for a damaged label on a Dell server. It was absolutely impossible - Microsoft won't help, Dell don't log the key the system ships with when it goes out and wouldn't let me have a new one. Even though they know full well it shipped with an OEM copy of Windows.
Despite having a perfectly legitimate license (there was only slight damage to the sticker, but enough to make it unreadable), I was left with one choice: buy a new license at full retail price. It seems that this cheap nasty little sticker has an effective value of something like £500 (which IIRC was the full retail price of Windows Server).
Last time I checked, a Time Machine backup disk wasn't bootable. Apple's own recommended solution is to reload from the OS disk and then restore from the Time Machine backup. (Can't remember if the 10.6 install process gives you an option to say "Restore from time machine" as part of the process).
> - I can't make Flash work on Ubuntu, even though I've tried numerous times. It keeps saying something about, "Not enough permission."
Then you aren't really trying. You aren't actually sincerely trying to make it work. You're just trying to make it fail. You just want something to whine about. You're just a troll.
It doesn't get any easier than a vendor repository managed package.
Actually, the OP probably is trying - and I'll tell you precisely what the OP is doing.
S/he is going to a website which demands flash, and if it's not detected, the website brings up a message saying "If you don't have flash, you can download it here."
The OP clicks on the link, which takes them to Adobe's website and searches for Flash for Linux - they get offered the following:
- Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (YUM) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey.
- Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (.tar.gz) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey.
- Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (.rpm) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey.
- Flash Player 10.1 for Linux (.deb) : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey.
- APT for Ubuntu 9.04+ : System Requirements - Browser Firefox, Mozilla, Seamonkey.
They've got no idea which of the five options is correct, so they probably click on the first option that comes up. Alas, YUM is specific to RedHat-derived distributions (it was originally produced by YellowDog, who distribute a RedHat derivative), so unless they're using a RedHat-derived distribution that uses YUM, that doesn't work. Is the OP's distribution RedHat derived? Do they know enough about Linux to ask themselves that question?
The second option is the tarball. They open that - what's inside the tarball is a single library, libflashplayer.so (I've just downloaded it myself to check). They probably have no idea what to do with that - does Ubuntu have the good sense to put it into /usr/local/lib and restart the browser?
Next on the list is the RPM. Again, doesn't work unless they're on a RedHat-derived distribution.
Okay, now we're onto .deb - and rapidly running out of patience. That actually has a good chance of working if the .rpm didn't. Now I'm typing this on a Mac so I have no idea if it will. Let's assume it doesn't for whatever reason.
Finally (after about an hour of messing around, because the OP doesn't really know what they're doing so has tried opening everything they've downloaded a number of ways) we get to APT for Ubuntu 9.04+. Whatever the hell APT is. Yes, I know what it is, does our OP who just downloaded Ubuntu and hit "next... next... next..." when they installed? Or are they going to assume that APT is something entirely unrelated?
Four problems:
The manufacturer has recently changed the chip they use but has kept the freaking model number exactly the same.
Why is it that a bewildering number of smart people has been indoctrinated into believing that the "free market" is the only solution to everything?
"Intelligence", "Insight", "Common Sense" and "Has memorised so many facts that they can pass for intelligent, even though they can't really apply those facts to anything outside their sphere of experience" are all different things.
Some work well, others expand and contract too much, pop out, fall twenty floors and scare the shit out of anyone nearby.
If you're lucky.
Have you seen your average smartphones' implementation of IMAP (SSL or not)?
"Shocking" doesn't even begin to cover it. It's a minor miracle it works at all, and fancy features like IDLE are frequently not supported in any form. Frankly, even if I think it's an absurd reinvention of the wheel, I can see why IMAP on smartphones has never caught on.
AFAICT, many ISPs that supply their own routers are actively looking at (if they're not already) supplying routers which support TR-069 and setting up infrastructure to configure them.
This is a protocol intended for the management of home routers - unlike SNMP, it's got some semblance of security (it's actually based on SOAP over HTTP, optionally HTTPS) - IIRC the CPE initiates the connection and can get things like configuration and firmware upgrades automatically.
I don't see how this is drastically different in concept from cable modems, which are more-or-less invariably heavily managed using DOCSIS.
Welcome to the United Federal Fascist State of America. Please enjoy your stay...
This kinda stuff is totally unacceptable. What law did he break? What was he accused of? Why was he detained? What right do they have to ask such questions? On what planet is a 3 hour detention reasonable?
"Embarrassing the Government" is an unwritten crime in most countries, though it's also a hard one to commit because you usually need to demonstrate publicly in several respected - preferably international - media channels that the government has made an almighty ballsup of something.
Penalties vary from country to country. In some countries, the penalty is simply harassment of a legal - yet annoying - nature for an unspecified period of time. In others, the penalty is death by suicide.
Thing is, there's no such thing as a file format suitable for loading such whacking great images. What application is even going to look at an image that size, let alone display it.
Most of these applications download a drastically scaled-down version of the complete image and as you zoom in they load the relevant bits, scaled appropriately. You never download the complete image.
My brother works in the professional theatre as a technician, and you're absolutely right. All the hard, clever bits involved in the lighting are done way before the first night - when the show is actually going on, the lighting desk (these days it's usually a computer in a specialised case with a few bits of specialised hardware to drive the lights and a bank of sliders) stores a list of every lighting state and the transitions between them, and the lighting technician just presses a button to go from the current state to the next state on cue. S/he will have set up the states and transitions some time previously.
unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.
I bet you anything you like some enterprising soul in most government departments has already tried and established that several essential apps stop working in versions of IE later than 6.
This means that suddenly, upgrading the browser isn't a relatively simple "push it out through existing rollout tools and forget about it" job. It's a full-blown project to get all the other apps updated, which requires sign-off at a higher level and everyone will want their piece of the political pie.
A friend and I have recently been discussing tribalism and an idea he called Monkeysphere - I'll quote him here more-or-less verbatim as he's already written it beautifully:
It's [Monkeysphere] a brilliant concept. It came about when researchers noticed a correlation between primate brain sizes (I forget whether it was the whole brain or a key part of it) and the size of their social groups. It was such a strong correlation that they could actually predict how big a group it would be when presented with a brain they hadn't seen before. This group limit has been termed the Monkeysphere.
One day they were given a rather large brain, and guessed a social group size of 150. You might already have guessed which species this brain came from.
Basically, we cannot cope with the idea of more than 150 people - at least, not AS people. We blur the others out. The supermarket
checkouts may as well be staffed by robots for all we care. There are human beings taking away our rubbish every morning, but we don't even think about them. All we think about is the rubbish going out, and then disappearing. Road rage? We simply don't see other drivers as people.
We *have* to work this way, or we'd go mad.
Stereotypes? Racism? That's the Monkeysphere at work. It's much easier to think of a million people far away if we think of them all as the
*same* person.
Now apply this logic to any community. Once the community gets big enough (such as in the Free Software world), it essentially divides into such tribes and you wind up with exactly what Shuttleworth's describing.
The sad thing is, if this Monkeysphere idea is accurate, I don't see how such tribalism in the F/OSS world is avoidable. Indeed, it'll only get worse as more organisations jump on the bandwagon.
Thing is, Microsoft is still making a ton of money and businesses that have dropped or are looking at dropping Windows/Office are still very much the exception rather than the rule. The only reason they're even looking at other products is because Wall Street demands growth rather than stagnancy.
That's because "$DEVICE running a modified version of Windows" is the only thing Microsoft understands - even when it makes no sense whatsoever.
Ballmer is pissed not because Microsoft was late, but that they were never able to capture the user's imagination with their tablet technology. Apple got it right because they were able to see the mistakes that Microsoft made compared to their opposition at the time.
Then he's going to be pissed for a long time to come unless he can do some serious turning of the Microsoft ship.
As a company, Microsoft have had a lot of trouble dropping or substantially re-thinking a concept once they've got it. As soon as you say "general-purpose computer", the concept automatically becomes "with 17" screen, keyboard, mouse, being operated by someone who is competent to deal with more-or-less anything that they system can throw at them, running fairly independently of anyone else". Frankly, it's only been since Vista that the "with 17" screen" bit has been dropped, and quite a few official bits of documentation for domains still assume that even non-technical users will be perfectly comfortable doing fairly complicated things with their PC rather than expecting the IT department to do so remotely.
Even if you qualify "general purpose computer" with "that is about ten inches in height, is driven entirely by a finger-operated touchscreen and for most practical uses will never even have a keyboard or external display connected", I guarantee you will still see vestiges of the original idea - and they'll make so little sense that the end result will be horribly clunky and will need to be marketed to hell and back to sell at all.
Oh FFS.
What sort of criminal buys a truck?! You show up in a stolen van, and if the shop assistant comments on it, the usual van is in for servicing.
Not quite as simple as that. Branson licenses the Virgin name and companies operating under the name tend to run fairly independently of one another.
In the UK, there used to be two cable companies which merged, bought Virgin Mobile and with it the rights to use the Virgin brand across their entire business. AFAIK, the relationship between other Virgin companies (including other companies in similar industries but in different parts of the world) may be minimal.
Virgin have recently started expanding their network, and the areas they're particularly interested in expanding are streets like yours where the cable almost but not quite covers every house on the road.
You should contact them and ask if they'd be prepared to reconsider.
... and ignore the rest.
Negative word-of-mouth (and painful difficulties) will separate the wheat from the chaff. The solutions that work well will survive. So has it been, so shall it be. The invisible hand may not always work as we wish, but it can still slap down the business models that suck.
Really? So how come there's so many people on /. making a tidy living out of tidying up after software which should never have been conceived, let alone sold - and have been doing so for years?
Does not one need to be inside the bank to use said key? If the criminal has already physically broken into the bank, theft of the few grand inside the ATM is the least of the banks' worries.
So don't interfere with one at a bank. Show up in a uniform with an armoured van to a convenience store.
They'll have to pay some way over the going rate, because quite a few F/OSS developers feel strongly enough that if that happens, they'll walk rather than sign the contract. Didn't one of the Samba developers do exactly that when Novell signed that Microsoft deal?
There's a variant on this scam where you do it slightly more honestly - you get a bunch of cheques printed saying "Bob's Discount Penis Pills" (or words to that effect) in big letters all over them. Perfectly legit cheques, with correct details on and drawn on a bank account that's in credit, there's nothing technically wrong with them.
When you receive orders, you write back explaining that for some obscure reason you can't fulfil the order, and here's a refund cheque. Who's going to stand in front of a cashier and bank a cheque like that?