Thing is, metro systems actually work very well. Come to any major European city (Paris, London or Barcelona immediately spring to mind) and there are so many stations that there's basically no such thing as NOT strategically close to a stop.
Another idea I had: how should crowdsourcing be organised to damage scientology (I refuse them a capital)?
With great difficulty. You can be pretty certain that as soon as any sort of central authority to manage the crowdsourcing is identifiable, Scientology will target it ruthlessly.
I don't even really see the cost reduction. How much money would it take to keep a table online of flags saying which player has which objects?
Seeing as many of their games are practically identical - carry out (work unit) allowing you to collect (widget), exchange for (currency unit) which you can use to buy (doodad) and when you've done enough, get (upgrade) allowing you to collect (different widget) or carry out a different sort of (work unit) until you run out of widgets to collect, work units to carry out or doodads to buy - the logical way to architect it would be for a single generic server application to deal with everything. In which case an online table of flags would indeed cost nothing extra to manage.
The fact that Zynga seem to think this somehow reduces cost suggests to me that they haven't architected the server side in this fashion.
The rate HP is going, they'll get their wish all right. You don't have to pay any corporate taxes at all when your company doesn't turn a profit - pretty soon you will never have to pay corporate taxes ever again.
Tungsten bulbs reached the point of being a commodity item years ago - there really is very little to choose between one 60W tungsten bulb and another.
Problem is, this means people expect the same thing from CFLs. Why not? They're sold in the same part of the store with similar packaging to do a similar job, many stores only carry one brand and they're outwardly all very similar, it's hard not to make that assumption.
But the actual products vary hugely in terms of quality. The nasty ones behave exactly as you describe; the decent ones don't.
So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
But it's not true. Office has always been a cash cow, and Microsoft have quite clearly decided that anyone who's buying a site license is ripe for the milking. You can't get any of the cheaper "versions aimed at someone who might otherwise go for OpenOffice" under site licensing, which means you have to get the expensive versions with all the features, including those you might not want.
'When I was a kid, you got a big box of bricks and that was it,' says Tracy Bagatelle-Black.
I think it's infinitely more likely that Tracy got instructions in the box, she just totally ignored them. She did such an efficient job of ignoring them that she's forgotten they ever existed.
Rationale: This set of instructions dates from 1968. It shows building the item shown on the front of the box broken down into a number of steps. The late '70s saw Technic coming in (though it wasn't called Technic at the time) and the instructions for Technic sets tend to be more detailed - they tell you precisely which pieces you need in a callout box in every step. The overall instructional style hasn't changed a great deal since, though the parts have.
Lego have included detailed building instructions for decades; there's no shortage of evidence to back this up because Lego have been remarkably relaxed regarding private individuals publishing old instructions for sets long discontinued - see also http://www.peeron.com/
You know how opinion polls work? A nice-sounding young lady calls you up. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions:
Improv, are you worried about the number of people without jobs? (Of course you answer "Yes". Nobody's going to answer "No" to a question like that.)
Do you think people have the right to travel safely? ("Yes")
Does the thought of being on board a hijacked plane worry you? ("Yes")
Do you think it's the government's role to keep citizens safe? ("Yes")
From my point of view, we are in a bloodbath in the technology industry because nearly all the players turned up into lemmon sellers, and the consumers reacted by buying only the brands they learned to trust.
Pretty much a direct side-effect of an industry-wide arms race to lower price - the gross profit margin for more-or-less everyone, including OEMs, distributors and retailers (though except possibly Microsoft) is something stupidly low like 5% on your average PC/laptop.
As a result, we're at the point where the great majority of PC manufacturers are:
- Buying the cheapest hardware they can find to save a couple of cents on a part.
- Having it put together in the cheapest factory they can find, quality be damned.
- Sacking everyone with any experience in terms of dealing with customers - those people are expensive, far better to hire the first person who walks in off the street who'll work for minimum wage. Preferably in a country where there is no minimum wage and the cost of living is so low you'll easily be able to hire people for a quarter what they'd demand in any Western country.
- Putting strict "we'll do the bare minimum to help the customer if things go wrong, even if that may sometimes be illegal" policies in place.
This passes through the whole chain from manufacture to retail. As a result, I'm pretty sure most end-users are starting to treat their PC - and anyone even remotely associated with it - including the company that made it, the company that sold it to them and very possibly the IT support if they're a business user - in much the same way as they treat their phone company.
ie. With deep distrust, half-expecting it to fail horribly any minute whereupon they'll be thrust directly into the fifth circle of Hell complete with fire, brimstone and the occasional demon.
Apple decided many years ago they weren't going to cater to the commodity PC market. Instead, they'd focus on people who want something a bit special. In so doing, every aspect of their business was designed with one explicit goal in mind - make great products that people love using.
Every aspect. From product design & development through to sales, marketing and aftercare, everything is engineered to make the customer feel a little bit special. Even if that means making the product a little more expensive to manufacture, even if that means using slightly different manufacturing methods that nobody else in the industry is using, even if that means spending rather more money on warranty repairs than most other companies would even contemplate, even if that means spending substantially more on your stores to ensure they look a step above everything else in the shopping centre. Doesn't matter. The whole point is to make the customer feel a bit special, that ain't gonna happen if your store looks and feels like an exact replica of the local branch of Currys. (or Best Buy in the US).
All companies are fascists regarding their branding, but usually this only extends to their logo, colours, strapline, product packaging and advertising: they'll have a set of brand usage guidelines that are crystal clear, and company policies that state very clearly that those guidelines must be adhered to at all costs. Apple went a bit further - they decided that everything they did was related to maintaining this brand.
Where it is is very *safe*. Its just weird watching on the outside seeing this massive computing revolution, and a company *choosing* to remain Microsoft's bitch.
They haven't got any choice in the matter. Windows saturated the market to such a huge extent so long ago that the risks and costs associated with trying to loosen Microsoft's grip (and in the process perhaps getting poorer pricing for OEM copies of Windows - in an industry which hasn't seen a decent profit margin in years) simply don't make sense.
Android devices are outselling Windows devices 2:1.
Yep, and about the only people making any profit out of them are Samsung.
We're in the middle of an absolute bloodbath in the domestic technology (PCs, mobile phones, laptops) industry, and it seems the only companies that are avoiding this are those that don't harp on about their product having the Latest Super Intel Core MegaChip, instead focusing on emotion - things like how you can use it to video call your granny or take photos of your friends and family.
There aren't many companies doing that. Apple and Samsung are about the only ones who spring to mind. Even Microsoft's own Surface ads featuring lots of people clicking keyboards onto their Surface - those ads must have cost a fortune, but I'm buggered if I can figure out what emotional benefit they are trying to sell.
Consumer grade hard disks are cheap. Proper redundant storage where you have at least two disks, two power supplies, at least one UPS, at least two paths to reach the disks, the ability for two or more servers to connect to the same disks so if one server fails another can be brought up on short notice, offsite backups.... That's expensive. Very expensive.
Using someone else's service means they can ge economies of scale many businesses can't. Of course there is a risk involved - the main one is that the company you're contracting to faces the exact same set of problems but because how they structure their data centre is commercially sensitive, they'll seldom tell you. It's not unknown to find that they decided not to bother with all that redundancy, instead trusting to luck that they'd not encounter any issues and expecting their customers to take it on blind faith that it'd all be ok.
Not only that - if the biggest employer is the military, it follows that a disproportionately large number of civilians have relatives in the military.
You're going to be trying to win the hearts and minds of people whose brother you've just shot? Yeah, good luck with that.
Not the point. The industry does not need to have its diversity reduced, not from anywhere.
If anything, diversity needs to increase - right now Apple and Samsung are taking pretty much every penny of profit that exists in the smartphone & tablet markets. RIM are floundering horribly - so much so they're openly betting the entire company on a new OS they haven't released yet - and Nokia are pretty much in the last chance saloon with their range of Windows phones.
Many of the other players in the smartphone & tablet market are in a similar position. HP dropped the Touchpad altogether when it became apparent they couldn't compete with Apple; RIM have cut the price of the Playbook to firesale prices but haven't officially discontinued it.
I have mod points, but I'm not going to use them. Instead, I'm going to explain how I believe you're mistaken.
Back in the late 1990's/early 2000's, Microsoft pretty well owned the desktop. (They still do, to a certain extent, but their stranglehold is starting to look a lot weaker) There was, for all practical purposes, no competition on the desktop whatsoever.
(Yes, I know Apple existed, I know it was possible to run a Linux desktop, I know more than a few/.'ers did. Hell, I did. But that's not the point. The number of people who did so as a percentage of the whole market were such a tiny minority that for all intents and purposes, they may as well not have existed).
Anyhow, back to the matter in hand. Office went through several revisions - Office '97, 2000, XP and 2003. For most end-users, there was virtually no difference between any of these versions. It didn't start to get real attention until lots of large organisations started to take OpenOffice seriously. You may or may not like the Ribbon interface, but it does demonstrate that Microsoft are taking Office seriously.
Similarly, Internet Explorer stayed at version 6 for 5 years. It wasn't until Firefox started to gain serious traction that a new team was put together to write IE7, which was released in 2006. Since then we've had two more versions of Internet Explorer and there's a third on the way; but I don't doubt for one minute that had IE 7 crushed the competition back to 2001 levels, there wouldn't have been an IE 8 or 9.
The point I'm making is even if you hate Apple with every fibre of your being, even if you think Ballmer should close down Microsoft and give the money back to the shareholders, probably the worst thing that could possibly happen to the technology industry right now would be for your dreams to come true. The entire industry basically moves forward from companies all cribbing ideas off each other; when there's nobody left to crib ideas from things go very stagnant very quickly.
Because getting the time reliably synchronised on virtual servers is, AFAICT, not a problem that's completely solved right now. ISTR Server 2012 actually made changes to AD to cope with this.
So... let's say I've got a Samba 3 setup with an LDAP backend. Windows systems are using Samba to authenticate and authorise services; Unix systems are ignoring Samba and going straight to LDAP for this.
Does this mean I can't continue to have Unix systems authenticate & authorise against an LDAP backend if I migrate to Samba 4?
Unless I'm misreading the text of GPL v2, a fee can only be charged to cover the cost of the distribution of a program or derived work, not the cost of development.
Of course he's obliged to give the source code away - but only to people he distributes the application to. He's not obliged to make the source code available to anyone who wants a copy, and he's not obliged to distribute it to people who haven't got a copy of the binary.
Thing is, he's not allowed to impose any onerous conditions on you. He could sell it for, say, £1,000,000; you could buy it and then sell it yourself for £100. If you can persuade more than ten thousand people to buy it, you'd make a profit overall. If you could persuade 10,001 people to pay £100 for every one person who pays £1,000,000 to the original author, you'd make more money than them!
This means that it's pretty rare for commercial software to be sold under the GPL; usually it's dual-licensed. But it's not unknown, and as more hobbyist developers start looking at selling packaged apps on platforms like Google Play, I think it may even become more common.
The reason I say it's overkill for domestic is it has a list of features that goes on and on, but probably 95% of them would never be used in a domestic setting. It's also missing some features you would want in domestic - for instance, half-decent ADSL support and AIUI wireless support is somewhat lagging.
pfSense is a fork of m0n0wall - they forked some time ago so I'm not sure how far they've separated.
Mind you, ADSL and wireless support can be surprisingly poor in Linux router distributions - it's amazing how many DSL domestic routers run Linux and yet how poor Linux's own support for most DSL chipsets is.
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, metro systems actually work very well. Come to any major European city (Paris, London or Barcelona immediately spring to mind) and there are so many stations that there's basically no such thing as NOT strategically close to a stop.
Another idea I had: how should crowdsourcing be organised to damage scientology (I refuse them a capital)?
With great difficulty. You can be pretty certain that as soon as any sort of central authority to manage the crowdsourcing is identifiable, Scientology will target it ruthlessly.
I don't even really see the cost reduction. How much money would it take to keep a table online of flags saying which player has which objects?
Seeing as many of their games are practically identical - carry out (work unit) allowing you to collect (widget), exchange for (currency unit) which you can use to buy (doodad) and when you've done enough, get (upgrade) allowing you to collect (different widget) or carry out a different sort of (work unit) until you run out of widgets to collect, work units to carry out or doodads to buy - the logical way to architect it would be for a single generic server application to deal with everything. In which case an online table of flags would indeed cost nothing extra to manage.
The fact that Zynga seem to think this somehow reduces cost suggests to me that they haven't architected the server side in this fashion.
The rate HP is going, they'll get their wish all right. You don't have to pay any corporate taxes at all when your company doesn't turn a profit - pretty soon you will never have to pay corporate taxes ever again.
Tungsten bulbs reached the point of being a commodity item years ago - there really is very little to choose between one 60W tungsten bulb and another.
Problem is, this means people expect the same thing from CFLs. Why not? They're sold in the same part of the store with similar packaging to do a similar job, many stores only carry one brand and they're outwardly all very similar, it's hard not to make that assumption.
But the actual products vary hugely in terms of quality. The nasty ones behave exactly as you describe; the decent ones don't.
So, purchasing decisions are made in the interests of simplicity and giving everybody a standard tool to work with, and I'd be surprised if Microsoft's Enterprise Agreements weren't reasonably competitive with this on a per-user basis, especially when you figure in the additional features and functionality available that Google Apps simply doesn't have.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
But it's not true. Office has always been a cash cow, and Microsoft have quite clearly decided that anyone who's buying a site license is ripe for the milking. You can't get any of the cheaper "versions aimed at someone who might otherwise go for OpenOffice" under site licensing, which means you have to get the expensive versions with all the features, including those you might not want.
You'd better tell Google. They think they publish an API to allow you to do just this.
https://developers.google.com/drive/
Example from 1957:
http://www.peeron.com/scans/213-2/1
Example from 1955:
http://www.peeron.com/scans/236-1/1
Example from 1956:
http://www.peeron.com/scans/1310-1/1
'When I was a kid, you got a big box of bricks and that was it,' says Tracy Bagatelle-Black.
I think it's infinitely more likely that Tracy got instructions in the box, she just totally ignored them. She did such an efficient job of ignoring them that she's forgotten they ever existed.
Rationale: This set of instructions dates from 1968. It shows building the item shown on the front of the box broken down into a number of steps. The late '70s saw Technic coming in (though it wasn't called Technic at the time) and the instructions for Technic sets tend to be more detailed - they tell you precisely which pieces you need in a callout box in every step. The overall instructional style hasn't changed a great deal since, though the parts have.
You mis-remember.
Lego have included detailed building instructions for decades; there's no shortage of evidence to back this up because Lego have been remarkably relaxed regarding private individuals publishing old instructions for sets long discontinued - see also http://www.peeron.com/
You know how opinion polls work? A nice-sounding young lady calls you up. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions:
Improv, are you worried about the number of people without jobs? (Of course you answer "Yes". Nobody's going to answer "No" to a question like that.)
Do you think people have the right to travel safely? ("Yes")
Does the thought of being on board a hijacked plane worry you? ("Yes")
Do you think it's the government's role to keep citizens safe? ("Yes")
Are you in favour of the TSA? ("Er....")
(With apologies to Yes, Minister)
It's not just selling the data that's the issue; it's how you handle it as part of your own internal business processes.
From my point of view, we are in a bloodbath in the technology industry because nearly all the players turned up into lemmon sellers, and the consumers reacted by buying only the brands they learned to trust.
Pretty much a direct side-effect of an industry-wide arms race to lower price - the gross profit margin for more-or-less everyone, including OEMs, distributors and retailers (though except possibly Microsoft) is something stupidly low like 5% on your average PC/laptop.
As a result, we're at the point where the great majority of PC manufacturers are:
- Buying the cheapest hardware they can find to save a couple of cents on a part.
- Having it put together in the cheapest factory they can find, quality be damned.
- Sacking everyone with any experience in terms of dealing with customers - those people are expensive, far better to hire the first person who walks in off the street who'll work for minimum wage. Preferably in a country where there is no minimum wage and the cost of living is so low you'll easily be able to hire people for a quarter what they'd demand in any Western country.
- Putting strict "we'll do the bare minimum to help the customer if things go wrong, even if that may sometimes be illegal" policies in place.
This passes through the whole chain from manufacture to retail. As a result, I'm pretty sure most end-users are starting to treat their PC - and anyone even remotely associated with it - including the company that made it, the company that sold it to them and very possibly the IT support if they're a business user - in much the same way as they treat their phone company.
ie. With deep distrust, half-expecting it to fail horribly any minute whereupon they'll be thrust directly into the fifth circle of Hell complete with fire, brimstone and the occasional demon.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
Apple decided many years ago they weren't going to cater to the commodity PC market. Instead, they'd focus on people who want something a bit special. In so doing, every aspect of their business was designed with one explicit goal in mind - make great products that people love using.
Every aspect. From product design & development through to sales, marketing and aftercare, everything is engineered to make the customer feel a little bit special. Even if that means making the product a little more expensive to manufacture, even if that means using slightly different manufacturing methods that nobody else in the industry is using, even if that means spending rather more money on warranty repairs than most other companies would even contemplate, even if that means spending substantially more on your stores to ensure they look a step above everything else in the shopping centre. Doesn't matter. The whole point is to make the customer feel a bit special, that ain't gonna happen if your store looks and feels like an exact replica of the local branch of Currys. (or Best Buy in the US).
All companies are fascists regarding their branding, but usually this only extends to their logo, colours, strapline, product packaging and advertising: they'll have a set of brand usage guidelines that are crystal clear, and company policies that state very clearly that those guidelines must be adhered to at all costs. Apple went a bit further - they decided that everything they did was related to maintaining this brand.
Where it is is very *safe*. Its just weird watching on the outside seeing this massive computing revolution, and a company *choosing* to remain Microsoft's bitch.
They haven't got any choice in the matter. Windows saturated the market to such a huge extent so long ago that the risks and costs associated with trying to loosen Microsoft's grip (and in the process perhaps getting poorer pricing for OEM copies of Windows - in an industry which hasn't seen a decent profit margin in years) simply don't make sense.
Android devices are outselling Windows devices 2:1.
Yep, and about the only people making any profit out of them are Samsung.
We're in the middle of an absolute bloodbath in the domestic technology (PCs, mobile phones, laptops) industry, and it seems the only companies that are avoiding this are those that don't harp on about their product having the Latest Super Intel Core MegaChip, instead focusing on emotion - things like how you can use it to video call your granny or take photos of your friends and family.
There aren't many companies doing that. Apple and Samsung are about the only ones who spring to mind. Even Microsoft's own Surface ads featuring lots of people clicking keyboards onto their Surface - those ads must have cost a fortune, but I'm buggered if I can figure out what emotional benefit they are trying to sell.
Consumer grade hard disks are cheap. Proper redundant storage where you have at least two disks, two power supplies, at least one UPS, at least two paths to reach the disks, the ability for two or more servers to connect to the same disks so if one server fails another can be brought up on short notice, offsite backups.... That's expensive. Very expensive.
Using someone else's service means they can ge economies of scale many businesses can't. Of course there is a risk involved - the main one is that the company you're contracting to faces the exact same set of problems but because how they structure their data centre is commercially sensitive, they'll seldom tell you. It's not unknown to find that they decided not to bother with all that redundancy, instead trusting to luck that they'd not encounter any issues and expecting their customers to take it on blind faith that it'd all be ok.
Not only that - if the biggest employer is the military, it follows that a disproportionately large number of civilians have relatives in the military.
You're going to be trying to win the hearts and minds of people whose brother you've just shot? Yeah, good luck with that.
Not the point. The industry does not need to have its diversity reduced, not from anywhere.
If anything, diversity needs to increase - right now Apple and Samsung are taking pretty much every penny of profit that exists in the smartphone & tablet markets. RIM are floundering horribly - so much so they're openly betting the entire company on a new OS they haven't released yet - and Nokia are pretty much in the last chance saloon with their range of Windows phones.
Many of the other players in the smartphone & tablet market are in a similar position. HP dropped the Touchpad altogether when it became apparent they couldn't compete with Apple; RIM have cut the price of the Playbook to firesale prices but haven't officially discontinued it.
There are. But how many of them desperately need to run a 3.7 kernel?
I have mod points, but I'm not going to use them. Instead, I'm going to explain how I believe you're mistaken.
Back in the late 1990's/early 2000's, Microsoft pretty well owned the desktop. (They still do, to a certain extent, but their stranglehold is starting to look a lot weaker) There was, for all practical purposes, no competition on the desktop whatsoever.
(Yes, I know Apple existed, I know it was possible to run a Linux desktop, I know more than a few /.'ers did. Hell, I did. But that's not the point. The number of people who did so as a percentage of the whole market were such a tiny minority that for all intents and purposes, they may as well not have existed).
Anyhow, back to the matter in hand. Office went through several revisions - Office '97, 2000, XP and 2003. For most end-users, there was virtually no difference between any of these versions. It didn't start to get real attention until lots of large organisations started to take OpenOffice seriously. You may or may not like the Ribbon interface, but it does demonstrate that Microsoft are taking Office seriously.
Similarly, Internet Explorer stayed at version 6 for 5 years. It wasn't until Firefox started to gain serious traction that a new team was put together to write IE7, which was released in 2006. Since then we've had two more versions of Internet Explorer and there's a third on the way; but I don't doubt for one minute that had IE 7 crushed the competition back to 2001 levels, there wouldn't have been an IE 8 or 9.
The point I'm making is even if you hate Apple with every fibre of your being, even if you think Ballmer should close down Microsoft and give the money back to the shareholders, probably the worst thing that could possibly happen to the technology industry right now would be for your dreams to come true. The entire industry basically moves forward from companies all cribbing ideas off each other; when there's nobody left to crib ideas from things go very stagnant very quickly.
Because getting the time reliably synchronised on virtual servers is, AFAICT, not a problem that's completely solved right now. ISTR Server 2012 actually made changes to AD to cope with this.
So... let's say I've got a Samba 3 setup with an LDAP backend. Windows systems are using Samba to authenticate and authorise services; Unix systems are ignoring Samba and going straight to LDAP for this.
Does this mean I can't continue to have Unix systems authenticate & authorise against an LDAP backend if I migrate to Samba 4?
Unless I'm misreading the text of GPL v2, a fee can only be charged to cover the cost of the distribution of a program or derived work, not the cost of development.
You are misreading the GPL. There's nothing stopping the author selling the product for £1,000,000.
Of course he's obliged to give the source code away - but only to people he distributes the application to. He's not obliged to make the source code available to anyone who wants a copy, and he's not obliged to distribute it to people who haven't got a copy of the binary.
Thing is, he's not allowed to impose any onerous conditions on you. He could sell it for, say, £1,000,000; you could buy it and then sell it yourself for £100. If you can persuade more than ten thousand people to buy it, you'd make a profit overall. If you could persuade 10,001 people to pay £100 for every one person who pays £1,000,000 to the original author, you'd make more money than them!
This means that it's pretty rare for commercial software to be sold under the GPL; usually it's dual-licensed. But it's not unknown, and as more hobbyist developers start looking at selling packaged apps on platforms like Google Play, I think it may even become more common.
The reason I say it's overkill for domestic is it has a list of features that goes on and on, but probably 95% of them would never be used in a domestic setting. It's also missing some features you would want in domestic - for instance, half-decent ADSL support and AIUI wireless support is somewhat lagging.
pfSense is a fork of m0n0wall - they forked some time ago so I'm not sure how far they've separated.
Mind you, ADSL and wireless support can be surprisingly poor in Linux router distributions - it's amazing how many DSL domestic routers run Linux and yet how poor Linux's own support for most DSL chipsets is.