when i wrote to protest ANWR drilling... i got back letters explaining that the reps i wrote to "Won't let down the many concerned citizens,"
That sounds like a distortion to me. After all, the reps in massachussetts have never been friendly to this sort of thing. Try sending them letters for something they (and their bribers/lobbyists/pet special interest groups) don't already support and see what you get.
The system does allow sellers to respond to any feedback they receive, so if someone leaves some negative feedback they can always put in their side of the story. It does not affect score, but it does show up when you look at comments like the lawyer was complaining about. It's too bad he did not just use the system for resolving his problem instead of claiming the system has no way to resolve his problem. Perhaps Ebay should countersue him for libel;) ?
Well regardless I am pretty sick of hearing of lawyers who seem to define libel as "anything negative however true." I should also point out that opinions are not libel. If I think Ebay sucks, and say so, then I am stating an opinion. Libel is when someone knowingly and maliciously tells lies in order to harm someone's reputation.
If I think GWB blows goats, and it's not true, but I say he does, I am just a looney. But if I know for a fact he does not blow goats, and say he does, that is libel. If we stripped lawyers of their licenses and made them go back to school when they came up with bullshit like this, taht even a layman can see is a spurious legal argument, maybe we would see less of it.
The difference is that our government is representative (like Rome) and not a direct democracy (like Athens). People do not vote for laws and issues directly in a republic, they vote for people who they hope will defend their interests. In a true democracy, all voters are called upon to vote directly for laws, etc.
And it had been written up FAR in advance of the events that caused them to table it...
As was much of USAPATRIOT. But it never got anywhere until 9/11 hysteria provided an opportunity to get away with everything the congress had always wanted to and more. Everything from preferential contracts to free signs to giant subsidies for various industries got lumped in with all the other disparate laws making up the act, all passed in the name of "Homeland Security" and patriotism.:P
Self-righteous assholes, of course. And you did post in slashdot, so you can pretty much throw a rock in any random direction and hit one.
But seriously, it is called an opinion. In my opinion, and in the opinion of many slashdotters, telemarketers are bottom-feeding scum who deserve whatever happens to them. But college kids wanting to listen to music of bands whose concerts they visit and tshirts and cds they buy are innocent victims of scum-sucking lawyers.
IMNSHO, the spammers and telemarketers cause harm and have many victims, and so do the RIAA. The RIAA is not helping the artists, they steal from the artists, and then try to claim the *fans* who are actually the base from which all their revenue is generated are the true thieves. This is why I agree with suing spammers and disagree with suing college students for mp3 trading. I do agree with dismantling and suing into nonexistence the RIAA, the real pirates.
Of course, that is really how things are in the US, the "haves" choose one method, the "have nots" choose the other.
More like the uneducated choose one and the educated another. If you don't have $20 for court fees, you probbaly don't have a phone, either. Besides, last I checked every court in the US will optionally waive all up-front fees if you can sucessfully plead indigence, and you can always sue for court fees.
The assumption being made here is that if you have 10,000 irate non-customers you have an appropriately higher number of customers who are paying you for something. If not, you do not have a legitemate business model and deserve to fail.
Shouldn't the attorney have just called this poor landscaper up and asked him to stop making calls first?
If you had RTFA, you would know that the attorney did indeed make many attempts to contact the landscaper in question before taking the step of suing him. Unfortunately every line was too busy telemarketing people to be useful for an inbound phone call, and the guy did not respond to snail mail.
It used to be that any number you got for a cell phone was only ever sed for a cell phone (and may even have been in a cell-only exchange). But as we run out of numbers in various areas, and people ditch land-lines for cell phones, many numbers which once were for land lines are being given to cell phones. Of course every land line (even unlisted ones is in some directory (often ancient) which telemarketers use to bug people at random.
Then there is the possibility that the number was given to a business at one time and their sales drones are calling back to get more business from their client, who has since got another phone and not told the sales drones. It happens.
It should also be noted that because people had been doing what the grandparent norwegian was suggesting, in the US it is illegal to do this. Every business reply envelope has the message "penalty for misuse" which means the envelope is only supposed to be used to send stuff back to the originating company. IANAL
basically i think this is more trouble than it is worth and it is best to wait until the OpenBSD team feed back any changes they made to GNU (or opensource) packages in due course.
I would not hold my breath, and even if they did submit this, and the maintainers accepted the changes, and they ported those changes to the linux versions of the changes, and they were applicable to Linux... hmm that is a lot of ifs. I should stop now.
The point is not "lets snag the pages from OpenBSD because they are cool." That does not solve anything, really, though if you want to read them on linux you certainly can. The point is that if any distribution makes decent man pages a priority they can make it happen (or info, or html, or whatever). The OpenBSD team has proven that. One of the pages that does not appear to be in the file I referenced is the afterboot manpage (which is in base33.tgz ). This is a good example of manpages that should come with any system.
The afterboot man page (for the curious) explains *exactly* what you should do to your system upon installing and where to go to configure pretty much anything you wnat to configure. It even explains how you can reconfigure your kernel without having to recompile it;). It has very often been a useful reference for me even long aftre I have been running awhile, as a jumping off point for searches for info.
I thought windows had a built in magnifier feature? Granted I have not used it, but I have noticed a lot of accessability features built into Windows for those who are differently able.
IANAL, but he woudl be on very strong legal ground. Several cases, including this one have said that EULAs cannot be binding specifically because the terms of sale are not disclosed before the sale occurs. You are only bound by the terms of sale disclosed beforehand. And it *is* a sale. If this sale meets the bait and switch criteria, there are specific applicable laws against it which could potentially mean people go to jail over this.
There are also some laws about returning things. Apparently anything bought mail-order has to have *by US law* a 30 day return policy, which is why Dell and many other online companies have one. Software is a sticky point, but I think a good lawyer could find many legal remedies here, and a good judge would quickly see the problem.
I guess I should have included links in my earlier posts.;) If you want to look for a user group or find information about them, look here. For the stores, look here. There is lots of great info on the apple site. It is not all marketing. You can download all the old versions of the apple OSs (or used to be able to) and there is information about hardware, software, consultants, and training. Apple is well aware they have to work a bit harder to advocate their platform. This is why I think we in the Linux community can learn from their examples.
By the way you can also check out their Open Source Offerings and there is a Darwin for x86. It does not give you aqua, it is essentially a BSD, but you could get an idea of the underlying structure. I have never installed it, so YMMV. You can also still check out the linux they left behind.
yes, suse/redhat/debian/mandrake may indeed have resources to fill in the gaps, and i also believe it is their job to do so and feed it back to the authors, after all they get payed to do it! but LFS is not a distro in the traditional sense. it is a means to produce a distro from the sources, for what you need it to do. if you want man pages for all the commands... go ahead and write them! or why not download the OpenBSD ones and insert them into your own distro!
only a big distro company like mentioned before can (realistically) put time and manpower (no pun intended) into touching up the docs, besides the authors. if all programs had a full man page, i would be oober-happy!
But I am not talking about LFS, and neither was the guy who started this discussion. He was saying that doing 5000 distributions detracts from working on the ones we have now. To be fair, I think this is not really properly an indictment of LFS which serves a very different purpose. But indeed of RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, etc.
I know very well what LFS is and is not, and I hope to dispel the idea other posters in this thread seem to have that I am mistaking it for a binary distribution. I think I did an okay job of explaining myself in that respect here. What I was defending is the previous posters' assertion that in the past Linux has had bad man pages, for the reasons you and I seem well aware.
The main problem with "pulling the OpenBSD man pages" as you say, is that they are not directly applicable to Linux. They are directly applicable to OpenBSD. So what would hav eto happen really is that people would hav eto fix the Linux ones. They might read the OpenBSD man pages, but ultimately some things would be different for linux and the man pages would reflect that.
That's another thing, really, in that if distros change something they should document it better. If RedHat's gui tools worked, that is great. But if they don't its time to read the source or some random websites or crawl around at random to find the files that got changed and how.
Anyway I like the idea of LFS and have in fact gone to the trouble of ordering the dead tree version of the book. I am thinking going through it will teach me a lot about making distributions better so I can apply that to distributions I want to make better.
Well, the man pages are available for free download. I had not thought about reading them on Linux, but then I thought "why not? they are a standard format and thay are only tarred and gzipped..."
So I downloaded them from the aforementioned mirror, unpacked them, and found out they were even cattable. (if that is a word... well ok it is not;), but this is/. ).
The reason OpenBSD has good man pages is that its maintainers have set as a goal that the man pages should be adequate documentation and the correct authoritative source for information aout the system. It has even been suggested that the man pages themselves, printed out, make a very nice book for OpenBSD. It's all about priorities. They set two goals: security and decent docs. They did not have a book so they made the man pages their book. I think that is the right way to proceed in any case.
The worms, known as C. elegans, were found in debris in Texas several weeks ago. Technicians sorting through the debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida didn't open the containers of worms and dead moss cells until this week.
Yes, that was one particular can of worms NASA was loathe to open;).
Hmm, looking back, it seems the first release I installed was 2.5 or so on m68k. I don't remember much else about it though, I was playing with a lot of systems at the time.
Re:OpenBSD = Coordinated Innovation
on
OpenBSD 3.3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
They didn't have
man afterboot
then? (Incidentally one of the best man pages you'll ever read. Everyone should have one).
And did they not have xf86config ?
Seems unlikely, but then I have only ever used 2.8+ IIRC.
The biggest hurdle for most people is getting around the idea of BSD "slices." But it makes sense and there are good reasons they did it that way. The installer and help are very good, actually. I would have to say OpenBSD has some of the best docs of any system out there, period.
What is a "Jennifer Rigley" and why should I care?
She is the subject of alt.fan.Jennicam.
=repeat=
Who's on first?
Post?
Ok, if you really want to know, she popularized webcams (hence the jennicam) by being one of the first to publish a website with a link to a camera showing her life on the internet. She was hailed as a pioneer (though this is not entirely true). She was responsible however for the practice becoming popular and many many college girls putting webcams on the internet, later morphing into the subject of spam galore.
Slashdot Mirror
when i wrote to protest ANWR drilling... i got back letters explaining that the reps i wrote to "Won't let down the many concerned citizens,"
That sounds like a distortion to me. After all, the reps in massachussetts have never been friendly to this sort of thing. Try sending them letters for something they (and their bribers/lobbyists/pet special interest groups) don't already support and see what you get.
The system does allow sellers to respond to any feedback they receive, so if someone leaves some negative feedback they can always put in their side of the story. It does not affect score, but it does show up when you look at comments like the lawyer was complaining about. It's too bad he did not just use the system for resolving his problem instead of claiming the system has no way to resolve his problem. Perhaps Ebay should countersue him for libel ;) ?
Well regardless I am pretty sick of hearing of lawyers who seem to define libel as "anything negative however true." I should also point out that opinions are not libel. If I think Ebay sucks, and say so, then I am stating an opinion. Libel is when someone knowingly and maliciously tells lies in order to harm someone's reputation.
If I think GWB blows goats, and it's not true, but I say he does, I am just a looney. But if I know for a fact he does not blow goats, and say he does, that is libel. If we stripped lawyers of their licenses and made them go back to school when they came up with bullshit like this, taht even a layman can see is a spurious legal argument, maybe we would see less of it.
The difference is that our government is representative (like Rome) and not a direct democracy (like Athens). People do not vote for laws and issues directly in a republic, they vote for people who they hope will defend their interests. In a true democracy, all voters are called upon to vote directly for laws, etc.
And it had been written up FAR in advance of the events that caused them to table it...
As was much of USAPATRIOT. But it never got anywhere until 9/11 hysteria provided an opportunity to get away with everything the congress had always wanted to and more. Everything from preferential contracts to free signs to giant subsidies for various industries got lumped in with all the other disparate laws making up the act, all passed in the name of "Homeland Security" and patriotism. :P
OK, who determines "who deserves it"?
Self-righteous assholes, of course. And you did post in slashdot, so you can pretty much throw a rock in any random direction and hit one.
But seriously, it is called an opinion. In my opinion, and in the opinion of many slashdotters, telemarketers are bottom-feeding scum who deserve whatever happens to them. But college kids wanting to listen to music of bands whose concerts they visit and tshirts and cds they buy are innocent victims of scum-sucking lawyers.
IMNSHO, the spammers and telemarketers cause harm and have many victims, and so do the RIAA. The RIAA is not helping the artists, they steal from the artists, and then try to claim the *fans* who are actually the base from which all their revenue is generated are the true thieves. This is why I agree with suing spammers and disagree with suing college students for mp3 trading. I do agree with dismantling and suing into nonexistence the RIAA, the real pirates.
Of course, that is really how things are in the US, the "haves" choose one method, the "have nots" choose the other.
More like the uneducated choose one and the educated another. If you don't have $20 for court fees, you probbaly don't have a phone, either. Besides, last I checked every court in the US will optionally waive all up-front fees if you can sucessfully plead indigence, and you can always sue for court fees.
The assumption being made here is that if you have 10,000 irate non-customers you have an appropriately higher number of customers who are paying you for something. If not, you do not have a legitemate business model and deserve to fail.
Shouldn't the attorney have just called this poor landscaper up and asked him to stop making calls first?
If you had RTFA, you would know that the attorney did indeed make many attempts to contact the landscaper in question before taking the step of suing him. Unfortunately every line was too busy telemarketing people to be useful for an inbound phone call, and the guy did not respond to snail mail.
It used to be that any number you got for a cell phone was only ever sed for a cell phone (and may even have been in a cell-only exchange). But as we run out of numbers in various areas, and people ditch land-lines for cell phones, many numbers which once were for land lines are being given to cell phones. Of course every land line (even unlisted ones is in some directory (often ancient) which telemarketers use to bug people at random.
Then there is the possibility that the number was given to a business at one time and their sales drones are calling back to get more business from their client, who has since got another phone and not told the sales drones. It happens.
It should also be noted that because people had been doing what the grandparent norwegian was suggesting, in the US it is illegal to do this. Every business reply envelope has the message "penalty for misuse" which means the envelope is only supposed to be used to send stuff back to the originating company.
IANAL
basically i think this is more trouble than it is worth and it is best to wait until the OpenBSD team feed back any changes they made to GNU (or opensource) packages in due course.
I would not hold my breath, and even if they did submit this, and the maintainers accepted the changes, and they ported those changes to the linux versions of the changes, and they were applicable to Linux... hmm that is a lot of ifs. I should stop now.
The point is not "lets snag the pages from OpenBSD because they are cool." That does not solve anything, really, though if you want to read them on linux you certainly can. The point is that if any distribution makes decent man pages a priority they can make it happen (or info, or html, or whatever). The OpenBSD team has proven that. One of the pages that does not appear to be in the file I referenced is the afterboot manpage (which is in base33.tgz ). This is a good example of manpages that should come with any system.
The afterboot man page (for the curious) explains *exactly* what you should do to your system upon installing and where to go to configure pretty much anything you wnat to configure. It even explains how you can reconfigure your kernel without having to recompile it ;). It has very often been a useful reference for me even long aftre I have been running awhile, as a jumping off point for searches for info.
aha. yes inverting colours would be important for the colourblind.
I thought windows had a built in magnifier feature? Granted I have not used it, but I have noticed a lot of accessability features built into Windows for those who are differently able.
IANAL, but he woudl be on very strong legal ground. Several cases, including this one have said that EULAs cannot be binding specifically because the terms of sale are not disclosed before the sale occurs. You are only bound by the terms of sale disclosed beforehand. And it *is* a sale. If this sale meets the bait and switch criteria, there are specific applicable laws against it which could potentially mean people go to jail over this.
There are also some laws about returning things. Apparently anything bought mail-order has to have *by US law* a 30 day return policy, which is why Dell and many other online companies have one. Software is a sticky point, but I think a good lawyer could find many legal remedies here, and a good judge would quickly see the problem.
I guess I should have included links in my earlier posts. ;) If you want to look for a user group or find information about them, look here. For the stores, look here. There is lots of great info on the apple site. It is not all marketing. You can download all the old versions of the apple OSs (or used to be able to) and there is information about hardware, software, consultants, and training. Apple is well aware they have to work a bit harder to advocate their platform. This is why I think we in the Linux community can learn from their examples.
By the way you can also check out their Open Source Offerings and there is a Darwin for x86. It does not give you aqua, it is essentially a BSD, but you could get an idea of the underlying structure. I have never installed it, so YMMV. You can also still check out the linux they left behind.
yes, suse/redhat/debian/mandrake may indeed have resources to fill in the gaps, and i also believe it is their job to do so and feed it back to the authors, after all they get payed to do it! but LFS is not a distro in the traditional sense. it is a means to produce a distro from the sources, for what you need it to do. if you want man pages for all the commands... go ahead and write them! or why not download the OpenBSD ones and insert them into your own distro!
only a big distro company like mentioned before can (realistically) put time and manpower (no pun intended) into touching up the docs, besides the authors. if all programs had a full man page, i would be oober-happy!
But I am not talking about LFS, and neither was the guy who started this discussion. He was saying that doing 5000 distributions detracts from working on the ones we have now. To be fair, I think this is not really properly an indictment of LFS which serves a very different purpose. But indeed of RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, etc.
I know very well what LFS is and is not, and I hope to dispel the idea other posters in this thread seem to have that I am mistaking it for a binary distribution. I think I did an okay job of explaining myself in that respect here. What I was defending is the previous posters' assertion that in the past Linux has had bad man pages, for the reasons you and I seem well aware.
The main problem with "pulling the OpenBSD man pages" as you say, is that they are not directly applicable to Linux. They are directly applicable to OpenBSD. So what would hav eto happen really is that people would hav eto fix the Linux ones. They might read the OpenBSD man pages, but ultimately some things would be different for linux and the man pages would reflect that.
That's another thing, really, in that if distros change something they should document it better. If RedHat's gui tools worked, that is great. But if they don't its time to read the source or some random websites or crawl around at random to find the files that got changed and how.
Anyway I like the idea of LFS and have in fact gone to the trouble of ordering the dead tree version of the book. I am thinking going through it will teach me a lot about making distributions better so I can apply that to distributions I want to make better.
ERm.. ok from now on we preview!
Here is the mirror.
Well, the man pages are available for free download. I had not thought about reading them on Linux, but then I thought "why not? they are a standard format and thay are only tarred and gzipped..."
So I downloaded them from the aforementioned mirror, unpacked them, and found out they were even cattable. (if that is a word... well ok it is not ;), but this is /. ).
The reason OpenBSD has good man pages is that its maintainers have set as a goal that the man pages should be adequate documentation and the correct authoritative source for information aout the system. It has even been suggested that the man pages themselves, printed out, make a very nice book for OpenBSD. It's all about priorities. They set two goals: security and decent docs. They did not have a book so they made the man pages their book. I think that is the right way to proceed in any case.
Of course he's real. My roomate's brother has an aunt who talked to a cable guy who dated this girl who swore she saw him at a theatre! :)
The worms, known as C. elegans, were found in debris in Texas several weeks ago. Technicians sorting through the debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida didn't open the containers of worms and dead moss cells until this week.
Yes, that was one particular can of worms NASA was loathe to open ;).
Hmm, looking back, it seems the first release I installed was 2.5 or so on m68k. I don't remember much else about it though, I was playing with a lot of systems at the time.
They didn't have
man afterboot
then? (Incidentally one of the best man pages you'll ever read. Everyone should have one).
And did they not have xf86config ?
Seems unlikely, but then I have only ever used 2.8+ IIRC.
The biggest hurdle for most people is getting around the idea of BSD "slices." But it makes sense and there are good reasons they did it that way. The installer and help are very good, actually. I would have to say OpenBSD has some of the best docs of any system out there, period.
Tron, is that you?
What is the subject of alt.fan.jennicam ?
Jennifer Rigley
What is a "Jennifer Rigley" and why should I care?
She is the subject of alt.fan.Jennicam.
=repeat=
Who's on first?
Post?
Ok, if you really want to know, she popularized webcams (hence the jennicam) by being one of the first to publish a website with a link to a camera showing her life on the internet. She was hailed as a pioneer (though this is not entirely true). She was responsible however for the practice becoming popular and many many college girls putting webcams on the internet, later morphing into the subject of spam galore.