I think we disagree about what is a helpful solution. You're expecting a golden email to appear, outlining how to fix the problem. Realistically, a bunch of emails will collect - like the one you've defamed - that we have to weld together to create the silver platter.
The email I've apparently defamed said this:
The governments of the world need to make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their extended families to death. Until then, they will always find ways to fill our inboxes with garbage.
Now, for some reason you seem to believe that The original idea is sound, it just needs some more tweaking to make it work. I strongly disagree that people who behave in a slightly antisocial way deserve to be tortured to death, along with their families. Nothing about the original idea is sound. It's suggesting a horrible regression of society in order to combat a trivial inconvenience to all but the terminally stupid. (I also don't think it was a serious suggestion, so a non-serious reply is entirely expected.)
Another way of learning more about something is making a suggestion and listening to feedback.
A satirical, euphemistic response is feedback. It tells the person making the suggestion that they are hopeless underinformed on the issue. They can get all pissy about the fact that a serious discussion about a complicated issue actually requires that you have some idea of what you're talking about, or they can realise that they've made a naive suggestion (likely without bothering to check if anyone else has already done so) and go and learn more about the issues.
Honestly, it takes you more time to criticize them than it does to ignore it.
Yes, it is criticism: but it's constructive criticism (unless your ego is too large to be able to view it as such). I would also point out that many more people see these responses than just the original poster. If sending a quick form in response prevents even 2 or 3 other people from sending in their similarly flawed, over-simplistic "solutions", then it's actually saved the list members some time. They don't need to read the additional suggestions in the first place, and nobody has to spend time composing a nice polite email explaining basic things to them.
Lastly, you also admit that combating the spam problem through legislative means requires the cooperation of essentially every nation on the planet. Given the number of vastly more pressing issues which also require cooperation but have failed to obtain it, any suggestion that spam will be the issue that consolidates the world's governments and dictators is utterly absurd.
And if you really think spam is such a massive issue that is has the potential to work this miracle, I think you need to take a step back. Spam is an inconvenience, but it's hardly life-threatening. It's just part of the cost of doing business on the internet.
So basically my stance is this: this entire discussion is absurd!
I was specifically referring to the case of third-party.deb's for a particular release. There's no guarantee that a package that's in one release of Debian will still exist in the next; which implies at some point during the lifecycle of "testing" it would be removed.
Or in other words: the people that made that list are actively involved in trying to find ways to fight spam, and use it to stomp useless suggestions (which have all been suggested before) which either do nothing to address the problem or are completely impractical. Then would you mind helping these people? Simply ridiculing them is alienating a mind that is willing to work on the problem. It's extremely counter-productive.
The people who get the canned response are themselves being counter-productive. They haven't bothered to read the list archives or do any of their own research on the subject, or they would already know that their suggestion is useless. These sorts of minds are not a useful resource to apply to the problem.
I see your point! Surely if we can prevent people from mugging other people, we can prevent people from spamming others as well! Surely even you are aware of the statistics. Somewhere around 95% of all email sent is spam. Now, even in San Francisco you don't get mugged 95% of the time you walk out your door.
I for one would much rather have 95% of my email time wasted by spam than to be mugged even 0.01% of the time. They're not even close to being on the same scale.
However, you're being anarchistically unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you're trying to be part of the problem.
I don't know where you got the impression that I'm unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. My original response in this thread was an (apparently misguided) effort to convince you that a humourous canned response is entirely appropriate for messages like the one which started the thread ("just make it legal to kill spammers and their families!"), and that doing so isn't in any way being a "part of the problem."
I (and many others) would be quite willing to hear about new methods for combatting spam. You may be correct in saying I'm anarchistically unwilling to hear completely impractical and unworkable "solutions" which just cause more problems and don't do anything to actually address the issue.
Fear is an effective tool of management.
But not all that effective. Ignoring the ethical and practical problems of the death penalty (false positives, anyone?), statistics have shown time and again that the threat of capital punishment doesn't reduce the rate of serious crimes by a significant amount compared to the threat of imprisonment. People commit crimes like these because either they're emotionally or mentally unstable, or because they believe they won't be caught.
Further, while you may like the idea of living in a society where you can be executed simply for sending someone an email they didn't want, I'm going to go ahead and hope that the majority continue to oppose that particular point of view.
Finally, you seem to be under the impression that the magic satirical response form is an either/or solution. It hasn't occurred to you that maybe it's only used for obviously unhelpful suggestions, and ones which might actually have some merit spawn intelligent, informed debate on the topic?
Cattle aren't slaughtered either, they're harvested. See, I can use the word too. That doesn't make the act any different. What exactly is the difference between growing lettuce to be killed for food, compared to raising cows to be killed for food? If something doesn't show any obvious signs of discomfort proof that they don't feel it? Sounds a lot like claims that fishing isn't cruel to fish because they don't feel pain from the hooks.
That said, I have no desire to "attack or invalidate" any way of life; I have vegan (or at least vegetarian) leanings myself. It just annoys me when people make it all sound so simple and black and white, and imply that people who don't make the same choices as them are somehow being "unethical" (or even "illogical").
I'm going to take a few guesses here about how you live, but it's clear that you use computers, so it's likely they you also use cars (whether private or public transport), most likely you purchase foods made available in various convenient ways (maybe even with plastic shrinkwrap!), and so forth -- all things which do harm to other living things in various way, directly and indirectly.
If you really wanted to reduce harm to others as much as possible right now, you'd be living a vegan subsistence lifestyle. So what you mean is, "reducing harm to others as much as possible right now at this moment of your life without sacrificing too many of my comforts is the most logical and ethical thing you can do."
Also, while I won't argue the ethical point at all, I think it's reasonable to say that the logical thing to do in many cases is to put yourself first. Say you're driving along in your greenhouse gas spewing auto on a cliff road, and some sort of wildlife strays onto the road in front of you. You can't brake in time to avoid killing it, and the other lane has an oncoming vehicle which you'll certainly hit if you swerve that way.
By your reckoning, the logical thing to do would be to drive over the edge of the cliff. Certain death for you, but it does reduce the harm to others as much as possible at that moment of your life.
Sorry, but I don't think suicide is the logical option here.
You might want to block email addresses with ' and non FQDN HELOs as well These can be quite useful, though you will run into legitimate servers which say hello using only a bare hostname. Depending on your mood you can try to convince their postmaster to fix their server config, but it's usually easier to just add their IP to a whitelist.
Another very useful thing to do (if you don't already) is to refuse mail service from anything claiming to be from your own domain. A lot of spam engines seem to use either the domain name, the name of the mail server they're talking to, or your mail server's IP address in their HELO.
So, make sure your system trusts your own IP addresses, and then reject anyone that claims to be one of your own servers. So far today (just under 6 hours) we've rejected 177 messages from people claiming to be our own server, versus 13 with a non-FQDN hostname in their HELO. No legitimate server will ever do this, and it provides a low-cost way to refuse some of the stupider spambots.
That people have created a system of ridiculing people searching for a solution tells me that we're getting further from a solution. It also makes me begin to suspect that the people making/using that list are spammers attempting to stomp all attempts to find a solution. The response is mostly designed for cases where people see the same old "solutions" propose time and again by technically illiterate folk who think that they've found a simple and easy solution that all the experts have somehow missed. It converts something repetitive and tedious into something that's at least a little bit amusing.
Or in other words: the people that made that list are actively involved in trying to find ways to fight spam, and use it to stomp useless suggestions (which have all been suggested before) which either do nothing to address the problem or are completely impractical.
Spam is a crime. It wastes other people's time and money. It's petty theft. It's no better than walking up to someone and mugging them. I see your point! Surely if we can prevent people from mugging other people, we can prevent people from spamming others as well! Oh, wait... we can't even protect the physical safety of people from others who live in the same society and under the same code of laws as them.
We need to either find a way of tracking them or find a way of screening them out. I'm open to solutions. I've spent considerable thought on the problem, and I don't have any ideas short of blacklisting (which isn't feasible.) That's because it's a complex problem with no simple solution, just like many of the other problems we're currently unable to solve. You aware that many, many people are trying to find ways to eliminate or at least reduce the problem? And many of these people seem to be a good deal more intelligent than you, but haven't come up with a silver bullet.
But the internet's been doing a pretty good job so far at surviving.
I would beg to differ. Your link contains a message from someone who's mail service was being overwhelmed by spam connections, and he improved his system so it's able to automatically block (at the network level) the major problems. It actually sounds like this problem resulted in him increasing the efficiency of his mail system.
Hardly a good example of spam "breaking the internet", or a demonstration that the internet isn't surviving.
Finally: the humorous canned response was a reply to someone who suggested we make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their families. It's nice that you're so serious about wanting to stop spam, but I don't think anyone expected a serious reply to that proposal.
That seems a bit harsh on the fruits and vegetables. Or is it okay to slaughter them for food because you don't consider them to be "intelligent"?
Also, while I applaud your decision to respect the sanctity of living things and all that, do keep in mind that the only reason you're able to do so and still enjoy all the benefits of modern life that you have is because other humans have chosen to further their own interests at the expense of other living things.
And you can bet your vegan ass that a primitive tribe of natural-living animal-lovers would have been decimated by competing tribes which were a little more pragmatic about the nature of life.
I don't know about tracking fish groups, but you could certainly herd them in the right direction (i.e. into the fishing nets).
<tinfoil racism> One wonders if the Japanese will call a sudden end to whaling... at about the same time schools of sharks start chasing whales toward the Japanese coastline where they beach themselves. </tinfoil racism>
It's not so hard to visualize the baby seal[1] with its limbs torn apart, flailing desperately in an unimaginably painful - yet entirely futile - attempt to escape the shark as it comes around for another pass. It's absolutely horrific.
Of course, you'll probably excuse the shark's behaviour because it's "just an animal" and it's "doing what its instincts tell it to" in order to survive. Well, humans are animals too, and we do what we think will benefit us. You think the shark would hesitate to experiment on humans if it was able to and thought it'd gain from doing so?
Not that I actually disagree with you. It is awful, but it's not as black and white as you paint it.
[1] - or substitute for your preferred prey animal.
Microsoft got its foot in the door in the age before "replicators". They aggressively use their near-monopoly to maintain their position even post-replicator, however the hold they have is beginning to be eroded by competition, largely by open source.
Once it gets to the point where the vast majority of businesses can freely choose something other than Microsoft without making life harder for themselves -- primarily in terms of software and document formats compatibility -- Microsoft will increasingly become a niche player, albeit in a fairly large niche.
While most people using Windows/IIS/ASP.NET/C#/MSSQL aren't going to change any time soon, a significant slice of Microsoft's income pie comes from Windows/Office. When this is eroded by free platforms they'll be left earning their living from server-side solutions. (Which I think they'll do just fine at.)
Why would getting this cheap stop you from paying full price elsewhere?
Because he didn't get this cheap; he paid full price, and then saw it being sold at a far, far lower price elsewhere. Now his reasoning is: why bother paying full price for a piece of software, when it may be available "on special" later?
I think it's a reasonably common reaction; you buy a product and then see it on sale the next week, and you feel like you get ripped off. But, you need to remember that when you bought it, you thought it was worth the price you paid for it (or else you wouldn't have bought it). It's still the same product you were happy with before you saw it cheaper, so you haven't been ripped off or cheated in any way.
This is the crux of the matter. The question is: if you buy a computer from HP which has Windows pre-installed (and included in the price) and you don't want to use Windows on it, can you get a refund for it?
I haven't seen an authoritative answer to this question and it doesn't seem to be mentioned in TFA, but it's the most important one. The Windows EULA you need to agree before you can use it says if you don't agree to it, you can return it to the manufacturer (HP) for a refund.
If HP honour that, that's fine. You can return the unused OS and get your money back.
If HP doesn't honour it, then they're violating their own license agreement (by bundling Windows, its EULA becomes part of HP's licensing terms). And for that, they need to be sued into oblivion.
Congratulations, you've just highlighted the problem.
The % of people who want to use an OS other than Windows is higher than the % who would want to use their own gas in their new car; yet it's the tiny number of people in the second group that are catered to.
It's more to do with the source of the.deb you're double-clicking. If it's been built for the distribution you're using -- and for the same version -- then it's simple, and could easily work how you've described it (I think many of the front-ends can in fact do what you're describing). In reality, if you're installing a random package from somewhere on the net, it's probably not going to have been built against the version you're using.
For example, a.deb may be built for Debian stable (but I run testing on my notebook so it's unlikely to work for me); or for a particular Ubuntu release; or for another distribution altogether. This makes things pretty complicated. Few programs are self-contained, and naming conventions differ amongst distributions. Further, often the version number of a supporting library is important. All this means that you need to create multiple.deb's or.rpm's for each distribution you want to target.
In general, it seems any sufficiently popular open source software will be "ported" to the more popular distributions (and sometimes the less popular), either by the author or by users of that distro. I think the nicest way of doing that is by setting up an additional repository which users can add to their sources.list or similar (using a GUI, of course) rather than having to download a package file. This way you can stay up to date just by running your normal package management utility. If it remains popular, it's likely to eventually wind up part of the distribution, which is ideal for open source software.
For proprietary apps, the most popular method currently seems to be "magical binary installers" or custom installation scripts which do who-knows-what, just like on Windows. The difference is most people running Linux like the package management system (unless they use a RPM-based distro, of course:D), and rather dislike these installers (I'm one of these people). There's no reason proprietary apps couldn't also be packaged for each flavour and distribution (by volunteers perhaps, or perhaps people paid with a free copy of the app) and downloadable via an additional package repository, but that doesn't currently seem to happen very much.
I'm hoping that as the market share of Linux distributions grows, this will become more common. I think there's room for small companies who specialise in packaging proprietary apps for specific flavours of Linux; and large vendors like RedHat could provide this service for their distros as well. This would allow vendors to say "we support Ubuntu x.x" and mean "it can be installed and managed like every other piece of software, and installs its files where you expect to find them".
Many proprietary apps already have a single installation that will function in a cut-down "trial mode" if you don't have a license, and activate all the features if you do. So these apps could be added to a publically available repository without problem.
Another approach would be to have the package-fetcher (e.g. apt-get) be able to provide a password/serial number to the repository, and only people with a valid serial get to download the software.
It's somewhat more of a philosophical issue more than anything else.
The main difference between Windows and a Linux distribution is the word "distribution" - it's a whole bunch of applications and libraries, all neatly packaged in order to work together. You want a new application that does foo and bar? You open your package management app (e.g. aptitude) and search for "foo bar", and you get a list of available apps. You tell it to install it, and it downloads it (and any libraries or additional apps it requires) and installs them.
This is all works because of the "open source" philosophy: each distribution is able to put together a whole bunch of apps specifically to work nicely on their system.
Windows was designed with a different approach: proprietary, self-contained applications. In this case, you search the internet for "foo bar" and download an executable and run it (probably with admin rights, so it can be installed system-wide) and hope it does what you expect it to do.
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. The "Linux distribution" method makes system-wide upgrades easy, and deploying applications across a bunch of computers borderline trivial. On Windows, every program has its own method for updating it, and doing large installs of applications and keeping them up to date is difficult (there's Group Policy, but that only works with MSIs and even then only ones which can do unattended installs; or expensive system management solutions like Altiris).
It would appear that the majority of the "Linux" developers subscribe to the open source approach, and not many people want to take the time and effort to make a self-contained magical binary to install their program.
There's also the fact that creating an installer for the various versions of Windows is a smaller task than creating an installer for the various distributions of Linux; and, because of the different approaches from the start, there's lots of third-party software for producing magical installers for Windows.
That bug thread is hilarious. It sounds like Jeff Johnson's departure is the best thing that could possibly happen to any project.
Comment #22 From Jeff Johnson on 2004-06-25 08:13 EST [reply]
Yes, %_netsharedpath is the designed behavior for handling
RO mount points in rpm.
The RO mount is the source of the problem. Configure
rpm and use appropriately with RO/usr is the answer.
Other problems, like "corrupted" rpmdb, are derivative on
the correct use and configuration. Screaming about the
symptom when the cure for the cause has been described
is, well, pointless.
Now will you please leave this bug closed?
(Posted as someone who came to Linux with RedHat 6, then gave Debian a try when I upgraded to a brand new system and needed to reinstall -- and discovered RH's braindead package "management" wasn't actually normal, and never touched the wretched thing again.)
Slashdot Mirror
The email I've apparently defamed said this:
The governments of the world need to make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their extended families to death. Until then, they will always find ways to fill our inboxes with garbage.Now, for some reason you seem to believe that The original idea is sound, it just needs some more tweaking to make it work. I strongly disagree that people who behave in a slightly antisocial way deserve to be tortured to death, along with their families. Nothing about the original idea is sound. It's suggesting a horrible regression of society in order to combat a trivial inconvenience to all but the terminally stupid. (I also don't think it was a serious suggestion, so a non-serious reply is entirely expected.)
Another way of learning more about something is making a suggestion and listening to feedback.A satirical, euphemistic response is feedback. It tells the person making the suggestion that they are hopeless underinformed on the issue. They can get all pissy about the fact that a serious discussion about a complicated issue actually requires that you have some idea of what you're talking about, or they can realise that they've made a naive suggestion (likely without bothering to check if anyone else has already done so) and go and learn more about the issues.
Honestly, it takes you more time to criticize them than it does to ignore it.Yes, it is criticism: but it's constructive criticism (unless your ego is too large to be able to view it as such). I would also point out that many more people see these responses than just the original poster. If sending a quick form in response prevents even 2 or 3 other people from sending in their similarly flawed, over-simplistic "solutions", then it's actually saved the list members some time. They don't need to read the additional suggestions in the first place, and nobody has to spend time composing a nice polite email explaining basic things to them.
Lastly, you also admit that combating the spam problem through legislative means requires the cooperation of essentially every nation on the planet. Given the number of vastly more pressing issues which also require cooperation but have failed to obtain it, any suggestion that spam will be the issue that consolidates the world's governments and dictators is utterly absurd.
And if you really think spam is such a massive issue that is has the potential to work this miracle, I think you need to take a step back. Spam is an inconvenience, but it's hardly life-threatening. It's just part of the cost of doing business on the internet.
So basically my stance is this: this entire discussion is absurd!
I was specifically referring to the case of third-party .deb's for a particular release. There's no guarantee that a package that's in one release of Debian will still exist in the next; which implies at some point during the lifecycle of "testing" it would be removed.
The people who get the canned response are themselves being counter-productive. They haven't bothered to read the list archives or do any of their own research on the subject, or they would already know that their suggestion is useless. These sorts of minds are not a useful resource to apply to the problem.
I see your point! Surely if we can prevent people from mugging other people, we can prevent people from spamming others as well! Surely even you are aware of the statistics. Somewhere around 95% of all email sent is spam. Now, even in San Francisco you don't get mugged 95% of the time you walk out your door.I for one would much rather have 95% of my email time wasted by spam than to be mugged even 0.01% of the time. They're not even close to being on the same scale.
However, you're being anarchistically unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you're trying to be part of the problem.I don't know where you got the impression that I'm unwilling to hear any kind of solution out. My original response in this thread was an (apparently misguided) effort to convince you that a humourous canned response is entirely appropriate for messages like the one which started the thread ("just make it legal to kill spammers and their families!"), and that doing so isn't in any way being a "part of the problem."
I (and many others) would be quite willing to hear about new methods for combatting spam. You may be correct in saying I'm anarchistically unwilling to hear completely impractical and unworkable "solutions" which just cause more problems and don't do anything to actually address the issue.
Fear is an effective tool of management.But not all that effective. Ignoring the ethical and practical problems of the death penalty (false positives, anyone?), statistics have shown time and again that the threat of capital punishment doesn't reduce the rate of serious crimes by a significant amount compared to the threat of imprisonment. People commit crimes like these because either they're emotionally or mentally unstable, or because they believe they won't be caught.
Further, while you may like the idea of living in a society where you can be executed simply for sending someone an email they didn't want, I'm going to go ahead and hope that the majority continue to oppose that particular point of view.
Finally, you seem to be under the impression that the magic satirical response form is an either/or solution. It hasn't occurred to you that maybe it's only used for obviously unhelpful suggestions, and ones which might actually have some merit spawn intelligent, informed debate on the topic?
Cattle aren't slaughtered either, they're harvested. See, I can use the word too. That doesn't make the act any different. What exactly is the difference between growing lettuce to be killed for food, compared to raising cows to be killed for food? If something doesn't show any obvious signs of discomfort proof that they don't feel it? Sounds a lot like claims that fishing isn't cruel to fish because they don't feel pain from the hooks.
That said, I have no desire to "attack or invalidate" any way of life; I have vegan (or at least vegetarian) leanings myself. It just annoys me when people make it all sound so simple and black and white, and imply that people who don't make the same choices as them are somehow being "unethical" (or even "illogical").
I'm going to take a few guesses here about how you live, but it's clear that you use computers, so it's likely they you also use cars (whether private or public transport), most likely you purchase foods made available in various convenient ways (maybe even with plastic shrinkwrap!), and so forth -- all things which do harm to other living things in various way, directly and indirectly.
If you really wanted to reduce harm to others as much as possible right now, you'd be living a vegan subsistence lifestyle. So what you mean is, "reducing harm to others as much as possible right now at this moment of your life without sacrificing too many of my comforts is the most logical and ethical thing you can do."
Also, while I won't argue the ethical point at all, I think it's reasonable to say that the logical thing to do in many cases is to put yourself first. Say you're driving along in your greenhouse gas spewing auto on a cliff road, and some sort of wildlife strays onto the road in front of you. You can't brake in time to avoid killing it, and the other lane has an oncoming vehicle which you'll certainly hit if you swerve that way.
By your reckoning, the logical thing to do would be to drive over the edge of the cliff. Certain death for you, but it does reduce the harm to others as much as possible at that moment of your life.
Sorry, but I don't think suicide is the logical option here.
Another very useful thing to do (if you don't already) is to refuse mail service from anything claiming to be from your own domain. A lot of spam engines seem to use either the domain name, the name of the mail server they're talking to, or your mail server's IP address in their HELO.
So, make sure your system trusts your own IP addresses, and then reject anyone that claims to be one of your own servers. So far today (just under 6 hours) we've rejected 177 messages from people claiming to be our own server, versus 13 with a non-FQDN hostname in their HELO. No legitimate server will ever do this, and it provides a low-cost way to refuse some of the stupider spambots.
Or in other words: the people that made that list are actively involved in trying to find ways to fight spam, and use it to stomp useless suggestions (which have all been suggested before) which either do nothing to address the problem or are completely impractical. Spam is a crime. It wastes other people's time and money. It's petty theft. It's no better than walking up to someone and mugging them. I see your point! Surely if we can prevent people from mugging other people, we can prevent people from spamming others as well! Oh, wait... we can't even protect the physical safety of people from others who live in the same society and under the same code of laws as them. We need to either find a way of tracking them or find a way of screening them out. I'm open to solutions. I've spent considerable thought on the problem, and I don't have any ideas short of blacklisting (which isn't feasible.) That's because it's a complex problem with no simple solution, just like many of the other problems we're currently unable to solve. You aware that many, many people are trying to find ways to eliminate or at least reduce the problem? And many of these people seem to be a good deal more intelligent than you, but haven't come up with a silver bullet. But the internet's been doing a pretty good job so far at surviving.
I would beg to differ. Your link contains a message from someone who's mail service was being overwhelmed by spam connections, and he improved his system so it's able to automatically block (at the network level) the major problems. It actually sounds like this problem resulted in him increasing the efficiency of his mail system.
Hardly a good example of spam "breaking the internet", or a demonstration that the internet isn't surviving.
Finally: the humorous canned response was a reply to someone who suggested we make it legal to hunt down and torture spammers and their families. It's nice that you're so serious about wanting to stop spam, but I don't think anyone expected a serious reply to that proposal.
That seems a bit harsh on the fruits and vegetables. Or is it okay to slaughter them for food because you don't consider them to be "intelligent"?
Also, while I applaud your decision to respect the sanctity of living things and all that, do keep in mind that the only reason you're able to do so and still enjoy all the benefits of modern life that you have is because other humans have chosen to further their own interests at the expense of other living things.
And you can bet your vegan ass that a primitive tribe of natural-living animal-lovers would have been decimated by competing tribes which were a little more pragmatic about the nature of life.
That's just the story they tell you, because nobody wants to admit the truth: your grandfather was a Jew.
I don't know about tracking fish groups, but you could certainly herd them in the right direction (i.e. into the fishing nets).
<tinfoil racism> One wonders if the Japanese will call a sudden end to whaling... at about the same time schools of sharks start chasing whales toward the Japanese coastline where they beach themselves. </tinfoil racism>
Who woulda thunk you could fit so much worm in so little cricket?!
It's not so hard to visualize the baby seal[1] with its limbs torn apart, flailing desperately in an unimaginably painful - yet entirely futile - attempt to escape the shark as it comes around for another pass. It's absolutely horrific.
Of course, you'll probably excuse the shark's behaviour because it's "just an animal" and it's "doing what its instincts tell it to" in order to survive. Well, humans are animals too, and we do what we think will benefit us. You think the shark would hesitate to experiment on humans if it was able to and thought it'd gain from doing so?
Not that I actually disagree with you. It is awful, but it's not as black and white as you paint it.
[1] - or substitute for your preferred prey animal.
But then the commies will develop their own remote control sharks and set them hunting our good USA RC sharks.
Microsoft got its foot in the door in the age before "replicators". They aggressively use their near-monopoly to maintain their position even post-replicator, however the hold they have is beginning to be eroded by competition, largely by open source.
Once it gets to the point where the vast majority of businesses can freely choose something other than Microsoft without making life harder for themselves -- primarily in terms of software and document formats compatibility -- Microsoft will increasingly become a niche player, albeit in a fairly large niche.
While most people using Windows/IIS/ASP.NET/C#/MSSQL aren't going to change any time soon, a significant slice of Microsoft's income pie comes from Windows/Office. When this is eroded by free platforms they'll be left earning their living from server-side solutions. (Which I think they'll do just fine at.)
Because he didn't get this cheap; he paid full price, and then saw it being sold at a far, far lower price elsewhere. Now his reasoning is: why bother paying full price for a piece of software, when it may be available "on special" later?
I think it's a reasonably common reaction; you buy a product and then see it on sale the next week, and you feel like you get ripped off. But, you need to remember that when you bought it, you thought it was worth the price you paid for it (or else you wouldn't have bought it). It's still the same product you were happy with before you saw it cheaper, so you haven't been ripped off or cheated in any way.
And like Google's "Upgrade to IE7" page!
Your awk method doesn't actually work, because it embeds the single-quote in the argument to wget.
The correct solution would've been simply:
This is the crux of the matter. The question is: if you buy a computer from HP which has Windows pre-installed (and included in the price) and you don't want to use Windows on it, can you get a refund for it?
I haven't seen an authoritative answer to this question and it doesn't seem to be mentioned in TFA, but it's the most important one. The Windows EULA you need to agree before you can use it says if you don't agree to it, you can return it to the manufacturer (HP) for a refund.
If HP honour that, that's fine. You can return the unused OS and get your money back.
If HP doesn't honour it, then they're violating their own license agreement (by bundling Windows, its EULA becomes part of HP's licensing terms). And for that, they need to be sued into oblivion.
Congratulations, you've just highlighted the problem.
The % of people who want to use an OS other than Windows is higher than the % who would want to use their own gas in their new car; yet it's the tiny number of people in the second group that are catered to.
I remember when all the cool games came on a floppy disc which you booted from to run the game. No need for a stinkin' OS. Alley Cat, anyone?
It's more to do with the source of the .deb you're double-clicking. If it's been built for the distribution you're using -- and for the same version -- then it's simple, and could easily work how you've described it (I think many of the front-ends can in fact do what you're describing). In reality, if you're installing a random package from somewhere on the net, it's probably not going to have been built against the version you're using.
.deb may be built for Debian stable (but I run testing on my notebook so it's unlikely to work for me); or for a particular Ubuntu release; or for another distribution altogether. This makes things pretty complicated. Few programs are self-contained, and naming conventions differ amongst distributions. Further, often the version number of a supporting library is important. All this means that you need to create multiple .deb's or .rpm's for each distribution you want to target.
:D), and rather dislike these installers (I'm one of these people). There's no reason proprietary apps couldn't also be packaged for each flavour and distribution (by volunteers perhaps, or perhaps people paid with a free copy of the app) and downloadable via an additional package repository, but that doesn't currently seem to happen very much.
For example, a
In general, it seems any sufficiently popular open source software will be "ported" to the more popular distributions (and sometimes the less popular), either by the author or by users of that distro. I think the nicest way of doing that is by setting up an additional repository which users can add to their sources.list or similar (using a GUI, of course) rather than having to download a package file. This way you can stay up to date just by running your normal package management utility. If it remains popular, it's likely to eventually wind up part of the distribution, which is ideal for open source software.
For proprietary apps, the most popular method currently seems to be "magical binary installers" or custom installation scripts which do who-knows-what, just like on Windows. The difference is most people running Linux like the package management system (unless they use a RPM-based distro, of course
I'm hoping that as the market share of Linux distributions grows, this will become more common. I think there's room for small companies who specialise in packaging proprietary apps for specific flavours of Linux; and large vendors like RedHat could provide this service for their distros as well. This would allow vendors to say "we support Ubuntu x.x" and mean "it can be installed and managed like every other piece of software, and installs its files where you expect to find them".
Many proprietary apps already have a single installation that will function in a cut-down "trial mode" if you don't have a license, and activate all the features if you do. So these apps could be added to a publically available repository without problem.
Another approach would be to have the package-fetcher (e.g. apt-get) be able to provide a password/serial number to the repository, and only people with a valid serial get to download the software.
It's somewhat more of a philosophical issue more than anything else.
The main difference between Windows and a Linux distribution is the word "distribution" - it's a whole bunch of applications and libraries, all neatly packaged in order to work together. You want a new application that does foo and bar? You open your package management app (e.g. aptitude) and search for "foo bar", and you get a list of available apps. You tell it to install it, and it downloads it (and any libraries or additional apps it requires) and installs them.
This is all works because of the "open source" philosophy: each distribution is able to put together a whole bunch of apps specifically to work nicely on their system.
Windows was designed with a different approach: proprietary, self-contained applications. In this case, you search the internet for "foo bar" and download an executable and run it (probably with admin rights, so it can be installed system-wide) and hope it does what you expect it to do.
Both approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. The "Linux distribution" method makes system-wide upgrades easy, and deploying applications across a bunch of computers borderline trivial. On Windows, every program has its own method for updating it, and doing large installs of applications and keeping them up to date is difficult (there's Group Policy, but that only works with MSIs and even then only ones which can do unattended installs; or expensive system management solutions like Altiris).
It would appear that the majority of the "Linux" developers subscribe to the open source approach, and not many people want to take the time and effort to make a self-contained magical binary to install their program.
There's also the fact that creating an installer for the various versions of Windows is a smaller task than creating an installer for the various distributions of Linux; and, because of the different approaches from the start, there's lots of third-party software for producing magical installers for Windows.
That bug thread is hilarious. It sounds like Jeff Johnson's departure is the best thing that could possibly happen to any project.
Comment #22 From Jeff Johnson on 2004-06-25 08:13 EST [reply](Posted as someone who came to Linux with RedHat 6, then gave Debian a try when I upgraded to a brand new system and needed to reinstall -- and discovered RH's braindead package "management" wasn't actually normal, and never touched the wretched thing again.)