I'm sorry, it's the Writer's Guild, not the Author's guild, and they're a union, but I fail to see what that has to do with bringing what looks to me, (admittedly from well outside the specifics) like a frivolous suit. If they're supposed to "act on his behalf", (and if that doesn't mean "sue the fuckers who cheat him" then what does it mean?), then why, why oh why, sue them for a lousy buck? Either they're responsible for a big chunk of the damages, or for going after damages themselves. Either way, $1 is not going to cover the damages. If he wants performance instead of money, he should sue for that.
It's not strategically smart to sue them for a token amount, whatever people here on/. might think, and could get him in a lot of trouble with a judge, if she doesn't think it's as funny as he does (which she won't).
Seriously, I can't believe that would even get past the registrar.
Because when a flawed machine counts the ballot, every vote tally is suspect, every vote may have been miscounted. This is a much bigger problem than the traditional methods of ballot-box stuffing, because the scope is so much wider.
Okay, so as to A), do you really think he can ask for a non-monetary remedy from the Author's Guild? Who as far as I know, doesn't actually publish works, but instead is supposed to represent authors' interests? He could move or sue to have the Guild assume his claim (if they ever actually agreed to sue on his behalf for this kind of violation), but in that case, why sue them for a buck at all?
B) Generally, precedent applies to damage awards as well as legal questions (at least here in Ontario where I am), so if he wins his dollar, that sets a precedent too. The next claimant has to go before the judge and explain why she deserves more than a dollar, instead of being able to rely on the precedent. So what good then is that precedent to anyone? Sure it gets you a decision on the law, but then it saddles you with a crappy damage award that you have to distinguish. Better to let a claimant with real damages go ahead and make that case law, and get a reasonable decision on the liability and reasonable damages.
I don't buy it. Bringing in the Guild for a dollar is mean-spirited and vexatious, as it won't give Ellison anything substantial, but will cause the Guild to have to go to the expense of defending against the claim, and moving for the claim to be struck, etc. In fact, it's just like sending a dead gopher through the mail, but I'd bet the courts would be much less tolerant of such an act.
Hmm, maybe. In Canada, the winner usually gets the legal fees, it's not really an issue (unless of course, you do something silly like sue for a buck, in which case, the Judge mught award costs against you just to larn you a lesson).
Maybe I got whooshed then. I thought that he wanted $X amount from the main defendant, and a buck from the Guild, instead of asking for $X from the Defendants and letting them sort it out. Frankly, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me, asking $1 just to "set up future cases" strikes me as incredibly wasteful of the system's resources. He should let someone with real damages sue, if that's the case.
It could backfire badly if the Guild is held to be %100 liable. His award would likely be, $1.
But in reality a suit for $1 isn't going to get very far. As Phil06 notes, the law has no patience for trifles. I imagine that the first time a judge looked at that claim, it would get tossed. The general practice is, (and I may have this wrong for his jurisdiction, but I can't imagine why it would be different) to claim whatever your damages are against both defendants, and let them work out who owes how much (if anything). There are trickier issues depending on the nature of the claim and how damages are apportioned to the liable parties, but generally it's much better strategy to let the defendants worry about who is more or less responsible.
There is simply no excuse for teaching a specific program - just how useful is WordPerfect for DOS knowledge anymore? I feel like I hit Shift-F7 in WP a lot. Can't even remember what it was for now.
Though I agree with your main point about teaching to a type of application versus a specific application, I would like to point out that Wordperfect is still around, particularly in law offices. I keep a windows partition on my Macbook specifically to run Wordperfect.
Really? filtering creates trans fats? When I last worked in a restaurant, most people didn't care about trans fats, so maybe they don't do it any more.
I'll concede that it's rare, but not so rare as to still be theoretical. And there's been a growing trend in sending top people to jail just lately, even before the financial crisis came down. I know Canada had a case just last year, in Quebec (appealed to the Supreme Court), where an executive (or maybe a director) was convicted over a workplace safety incident (but alas I don't remember the name of the case). It was, I believe, a first in Canada, but there are more in the courts, and I think there've been some convictions since that haven't been appealed.
We're going to see a lot more of these in the next few years.
Theoretically, any officer of the company who was complicit in the criminal behavior can be held criminally liable as an individual. For some reason, this doesn't always happen. What the hell does it mean to "convict" a company, anyway?
Also, how do you prove that their computerized inventory is infallible?
Let me answer that one: you don't. I'm sure all online inventories have a disclaimer about being up to 24 hours out of date, and I'm also sure, from personal experience, that is' probably because the online inventory is often as much as 24 hours out of date.
And you're neglecting the subset of people for whom it is a good deal. By no means is every extended offer worth the price, but if you pay attention to what they actually give you (and trust the store to give it to you when you need it), it can be very much worth it.
If they can manage to learn how to download and install "pirated" software, then I don't think it's too much to expect them to learn how to run a package manager - which when equipped with a GUI is quite honestly even easier to use than a Mac.
Running a package manager is is easy. Understanding what a dependency is, and why it's important, is not so easy. Fixing problems that arise when you get dependency conflicts thanks to sloppy/hurried/careless packaging, is a nightmare for even an expert user. Sorry, package management is great, when things all work right.
Even when things work well together, the multiple third party dependencies are confusing when everything is thrown together in a list. You fire up your package manager, and search for a package like openoffice or firefox, and get a list of several different files, most of which have the name of the package in the filename. But there's no way to know which of those files you need, Whether you need only one file or all of them or some of them, and no obvious way to know that if you click on one, the package manager will pick the others that you need for you.
Package installation is not a trivial procedure and assumes a lot of knowledge that most users simply aren't going to have. They'll have to search for help, either on their computer or online, and guess what. Help for linux distros is...well it would be horrifying to the average user, even if they didn't end up with some neckbeard screaming at them to "GOOGLE IT!"
Now compare this to installations for the Mac. Google Firefox, one of the first links is to the firefox website, where they have a shiny big button you press to activate your download. Press it, wait for the download to complete. Click on the file you just downloaded, and run it. Disc image is mounted, and a window opens up with a Big firefox icon, and your Application icon, with a big green arrow pointing from one to the other. Drag the firefox icon to the application icon, and wait a few seconds. Firefox is now installed.
the most confusing thing here is what to do with the dmg file afterward. But a few seconds of playing with the file with your cursor will reveal that the "trashcan" gets replaced with the "eject", so eject it. Then decide where to put your files.
That's it. Lots of steps, but very clear markers from one step to the next. Easy-peasy.
Package Management simply can't compare to that, it's economized on steps, but to do so makes a lot of assumptions about your level of knowledge that you don't even realize have been made. The Mac OS doesn't do that. Of course, it has problems of its own, the worst being that the designers are pretty fascist about what a user can do in the gui-space.
Package management seems easy to linux users, because it's a hell of a lot easier than downloading a tarball, extracting, making binaries, making sure they get to the right place, making sure your compiler/linker/etc is the right version, and on and on, but it's not really a simple process.
Are they using Unix systems, or are they using software running on Unix systems? The latter is not that difficult. Interacting with the OS, on the other hand is more difficult. But the more important fact is, it's more time-consuming. Time spent puttering around in the shell or writing scripts, for most people, is time spent not working or playing.
Ah, no, not if they decide not to use the software in question.
Linux developers are going to have to realise one thing eventually: either developers give up the idea that end users need to have expert level knowledge of the systems they run, or there will never be a year of the linux desktop.
The main users of desktop computers are not computer techs, they're not programmers or software designers or computer scientists. They're people who use computers to do other things. Bug reports, research online to fix problems, copypasting mystic incantations on the command line or in a text editor are all activities that take the user away from what they want to do (or are employed to do) with their computers.
It may be that the community simply decides to exclude such users, to state definitively that to use Linux you have to have a proficiency equivalent to an expert user or a beginner developer. That's fine. But that means no linux-on-every-desktop. Nobody but hobbyists and devs have the time to invest in learning to use linux effectively, in the state it's in now (which, admittedly, is pretty good, but not yet good enough).
The other alternative is for the community to accept that end-users don't care about learning more than how to install and run their favourite software, and develop for linux accordingly. In that case, I would bet that end-users would pay money for a free/libre os that works all the time, every time, and is better than windows, not just in reliability but in ease of use. I know I would. In fact, I do, having paid the premium for a Mac, and as far as I'm concerned, it's worth every penny. I'd run a linux box, even pay for a copy of a linux distro, if it meant that I wouldn't have to worry about opening up a terminal and typing sudo vi, ever again. Do I lack the ability? No. I lack the time.
Er, why do you care about this enough to post? I relayed my experience (several years ago, when online shopping wasn't as trusted/popular as it is now) and others have offered explanations for why CC would sell such cheap shitty ram, and I don't disagree with those.
Who cares? Is being right so important to you that you went to newegg, researched the price of some PC-133 ram, checked the shipping price, etc, just so you could come back here and tell someone you don't know just how wrong they are, in front of a few people you also don't know? Is your job that boring? Don't you think that was maybe a little overboard for a thread that had lost momentum, in a stale article, about a company that is going out of business because of its managerial incompetence?
Slashdot Mirror
Or he may be married to another guy.
I'm sorry, it's the Writer's Guild, not the Author's guild, and they're a union, but I fail to see what that has to do with bringing what looks to me, (admittedly from well outside the specifics) like a frivolous suit. If they're supposed to "act on his behalf", (and if that doesn't mean "sue the fuckers who cheat him" then what does it mean?), then why, why oh why, sue them for a lousy buck? Either they're responsible for a big chunk of the damages, or for going after damages themselves. Either way, $1 is not going to cover the damages. If he wants performance instead of money, he should sue for that.
It's not strategically smart to sue them for a token amount, whatever people here on /. might think, and could get him in a lot of trouble with a judge, if she doesn't think it's as funny as he does (which she won't).
Seriously, I can't believe that would even get past the registrar.
Because when a flawed machine counts the ballot, every vote tally is suspect, every vote may have been miscounted. This is a much bigger problem than the traditional methods of ballot-box stuffing, because the scope is so much wider.
Okay, so as to A), do you really think he can ask for a non-monetary remedy from the Author's Guild? Who as far as I know, doesn't actually publish works, but instead is supposed to represent authors' interests? He could move or sue to have the Guild assume his claim (if they ever actually agreed to sue on his behalf for this kind of violation), but in that case, why sue them for a buck at all?
B) Generally, precedent applies to damage awards as well as legal questions (at least here in Ontario where I am), so if he wins his dollar, that sets a precedent too. The next claimant has to go before the judge and explain why she deserves more than a dollar, instead of being able to rely on the precedent. So what good then is that precedent to anyone? Sure it gets you a decision on the law, but then it saddles you with a crappy damage award that you have to distinguish. Better to let a claimant with real damages go ahead and make that case law, and get a reasonable decision on the liability and reasonable damages.
I don't buy it. Bringing in the Guild for a dollar is mean-spirited and vexatious, as it won't give Ellison anything substantial, but will cause the Guild to have to go to the expense of defending against the claim, and moving for the claim to be struck, etc. In fact, it's just like sending a dead gopher through the mail, but I'd bet the courts would be much less tolerant of such an act.
Hmm, maybe. In Canada, the winner usually gets the legal fees, it's not really an issue (unless of course, you do something silly like sue for a buck, in which case, the Judge mught award costs against you just to larn you a lesson).
Maybe I got whooshed then. I thought that he wanted $X amount from the main defendant, and a buck from the Guild, instead of asking for $X from the Defendants and letting them sort it out. Frankly, it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me, asking $1 just to "set up future cases" strikes me as incredibly wasteful of the system's resources. He should let someone with real damages sue, if that's the case.
It could backfire badly if the Guild is held to be %100 liable. His award would likely be, $1.
But in reality a suit for $1 isn't going to get very far. As Phil06 notes, the law has no patience for trifles. I imagine that the first time a judge looked at that claim, it would get tossed. The general practice is, (and I may have this wrong for his jurisdiction, but I can't imagine why it would be different) to claim whatever your damages are against both defendants, and let them work out who owes how much (if anything). There are trickier issues depending on the nature of the claim and how damages are apportioned to the liable parties, but generally it's much better strategy to let the defendants worry about who is more or less responsible.
Tricky lawyers often get bit by their tricks!
Burn it! Burn it!
There is simply no excuse for teaching a specific program - just how useful is WordPerfect for DOS knowledge anymore? I feel like I hit Shift-F7 in WP a lot. Can't even remember what it was for now.
Though I agree with your main point about teaching to a type of application versus a specific application, I would like to point out that Wordperfect is still around, particularly in law offices. I keep a windows partition on my Macbook specifically to run Wordperfect.
Of course, if they default on their payments, who exactly would you send around to collect from Darth Vader?
"Gee, there, Mr. Palpatine sir, I thought we had a deal for those terlets?"
"I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further."
Really? filtering creates trans fats? When I last worked in a restaurant, most people didn't care about trans fats, so maybe they don't do it any more.
Which I'm sure they do, but you can only re-filter that oil so many times before it's just not worth the effort any more.
I'll concede that it's rare, but not so rare as to still be theoretical. And there's been a growing trend in sending top people to jail just lately, even before the financial crisis came down. I know Canada had a case just last year, in Quebec (appealed to the Supreme Court), where an executive (or maybe a director) was convicted over a workplace safety incident (but alas I don't remember the name of the case). It was, I believe, a first in Canada, but there are more in the courts, and I think there've been some convictions since that haven't been appealed.
We're going to see a lot more of these in the next few years.
Theoretically, any officer of the company who was complicit in the criminal behavior can be held criminally liable as an individual. For some reason, this doesn't always happen. What the hell does it mean to "convict" a company, anyway?
Scooter Libby would like to have a word with you.
Also, how do you prove that their computerized inventory is infallible?
Let me answer that one: you don't.
I'm sure all online inventories have a disclaimer about being up to 24 hours out of date, and I'm also sure, from personal experience, that is' probably because the online inventory is often as much as 24 hours out of date.
And you're neglecting the subset of people for whom it is a good deal. By no means is every extended offer worth the price, but if you pay attention to what they actually give you (and trust the store to give it to you when you need it), it can be very much worth it.
At the risk of being modded redundant, I would agree with everything you've said.
this also applies in Canada.
If they can manage to learn how to download and install "pirated" software, then I don't think it's too much to expect them to learn how to run a package manager - which when equipped with a GUI is quite honestly even easier to use than a Mac.
Running a package manager is is easy. Understanding what a dependency is, and why it's important, is not so easy. Fixing problems that arise when you get dependency conflicts thanks to sloppy/hurried/careless packaging, is a nightmare for even an expert user. Sorry, package management is great, when things all work right.
Even when things work well together, the multiple third party dependencies are confusing when everything is thrown together in a list. You fire up your package manager, and search for a package like openoffice or firefox, and get a list of several different files, most of which have the name of the package in the filename. But there's no way to know which of those files you need, Whether you need only one file or all of them or some of them, and no obvious way to know that if you click on one, the package manager will pick the others that you need for you.
Package installation is not a trivial procedure and assumes a lot of knowledge that most users simply aren't going to have. They'll have to search for help, either on their computer or online, and guess what. Help for linux distros is...well it would be horrifying to the average user, even if they didn't end up with some neckbeard screaming at them to "GOOGLE IT!"
Now compare this to installations for the Mac. Google Firefox, one of the first links is to the firefox website, where they have a shiny big button you press to activate your download. Press it, wait for the download to complete. Click on the file you just downloaded, and run it. Disc image is mounted, and a window opens up with a Big firefox icon, and your Application icon, with a big green arrow pointing from one to the other. Drag the firefox icon to the application icon, and wait a few seconds. Firefox is now installed.
the most confusing thing here is what to do with the dmg file afterward. But a few seconds of playing with the file with your cursor will reveal that the "trashcan" gets replaced with the "eject", so eject it. Then decide where to put your files.
That's it. Lots of steps, but very clear markers from one step to the next. Easy-peasy.
Package Management simply can't compare to that, it's economized on steps, but to do so makes a lot of assumptions about your level of knowledge that you don't even realize have been made. The Mac OS doesn't do that. Of course, it has problems of its own, the worst being that the designers are pretty fascist about what a user can do in the gui-space.
Package management seems easy to linux users, because it's a hell of a lot easier than downloading a tarball, extracting, making binaries, making sure they get to the right place, making sure your compiler/linker/etc is the right version, and on and on, but it's not really a simple process.
Are they using Unix systems, or are they using software running on Unix systems? The latter is not that difficult. Interacting with the OS, on the other hand is more difficult. But the more important fact is, it's more time-consuming. Time spent puttering around in the shell or writing scripts, for most people, is time spent not working or playing.
Ah, no, not if they decide not to use the software in question.
Linux developers are going to have to realise one thing eventually: either developers give up the idea that end users need to have expert level knowledge of the systems they run, or there will never be a year of the linux desktop.
The main users of desktop computers are not computer techs, they're not programmers or software designers or computer scientists. They're people who use computers to do other things. Bug reports, research online to fix problems, copypasting mystic incantations on the command line or in a text editor are all activities that take the user away from what they want to do (or are employed to do) with their computers.
It may be that the community simply decides to exclude such users, to state definitively that to use Linux you have to have a proficiency equivalent to an expert user or a beginner developer. That's fine. But that means no linux-on-every-desktop. Nobody but hobbyists and devs have the time to invest in learning to use linux effectively, in the state it's in now (which, admittedly, is pretty good, but not yet good enough).
The other alternative is for the community to accept that end-users don't care about learning more than how to install and run their favourite software, and develop for linux accordingly. In that case, I would bet that end-users would pay money for a free/libre os that works all the time, every time, and is better than windows, not just in reliability but in ease of use. I know I would. In fact, I do, having paid the premium for a Mac, and as far as I'm concerned, it's worth every penny. I'd run a linux box, even pay for a copy of a linux distro, if it meant that I wouldn't have to worry about opening up a terminal and typing sudo vi, ever again. Do I lack the ability? No. I lack the time.
End-users are not responsible for bug-fixes.
Given that you replied to an anonymous coward, I think in this case you got reverse-trolled.
Er, why do you care about this enough to post? I relayed my experience (several years ago, when online shopping wasn't as trusted/popular as it is now) and others have offered explanations for why CC would sell such cheap shitty ram, and I don't disagree with those.
Who cares? Is being right so important to you that you went to newegg, researched the price of some PC-133 ram, checked the shipping price, etc, just so you could come back here and tell someone you don't know just how wrong they are, in front of a few people you also don't know? Is your job that boring? Don't you think that was maybe a little overboard for a thread that had lost momentum, in a stale article, about a company that is going out of business because of its managerial incompetence?
Though it was handy for those people like myself who have never seen the Transformers movie, and never will.