I'm guessing you're not a lawyer. If you were, you wouldn't be so certain you know exactly what's in all the contracts you sign or otherwise agree to.
I probably went overboard when I talked about not reading things like rental agreements and job contracts. I have to admit I always read them myself. On the other hand, life is full of contracts and agreements that are not just long and hard to read, but deliberately obfuscated so that even a lawyer finds them hard to deciphers. Here's an interesting interview in which a law professor talks about having her students dissect a credit card agreement that supposedly guarantees a low interest rate. After much parsing and analysis, they finally came to the conclusion that the agreement guarantees nothing, except the bank's right to impose whatever interest rate or incidental fees they feel like imposing. Where's the "meeting of the minds" there?
A warning to anybody who tells themselves, "I may not be a lawyer, but I know the law." Odds are, you know just enough to get yourself in deep trouble.
Heck, you probably don't read documentation either. You still have that extra set of screws left over from when you built that bicycle that rattles kind of funny?
Dude, I write documentation for a living. Which means I probably read a lot of it. Mostly written by idiots who didn't even bother to actually count the number of screws the bicycle was supposed to have.
Of course they're not meant to be read. Most legal documents aren't. Have you read your employment contract? Your rental agreement? Your credit card agreement? But so what? The entire concept of contracts (which the libertarians are so in love with) only works if you accept the legal fiction that everybody reads all the contracts they've committed themselves to. Which is, of course, utterly impossible.
This guy got lucky (if you can call it luck, since he has no chance of defeating Gateway's lawyers) because Gateway never gave him a chance to read the EULA. But if he had had the chance to read it, he would have been legally presumed to have read it. This presumption seems very strange to the non-lawyer, but the whole system of contracts would collapse without it.
That might make sense to somebody who's grown up in on era of X-rated cable. But when Playboy started out, depicting sexual acts was actually illegal in most of the U.S. (In 1972, a guy I knew was arrested for selling an undercover cop a Richard Crumb comic book that would barely rate as softcore nowadays.) Posing as a "lifestyle" mag gave Playboy both social and legal legitimacy it never would have had otherwise.
Not that it was entirely a pose. Playboy has always attracted serious writers, and paid them well. But it was the pictures men bought it for.
Any writing or graphic that is designed to arouse you sexually counts as porn. It doesn't really matter whether it actually depicts sex, real or simulated.
I guess it sounds strange to anybody born after 1980 that Playboy rates as porn. And indeed, they've always insisted they weren't. That's the primary purpose of all that other material: to allow Playboy to pose as a "lifestyle" magazine that happened to have a few tastefully erotic pictures. But nobody's ever taken that pose seriously, as the old "I read it for the articles" joke indicates.
No, the people who write articles for Playboy are serious, big-name writers. (Having "real" journalism, essays, and fiction takes the sting out of being a softcore porn mag.) Whereas the dialog in porn movies is always excruciatingly bad, and the plot — well, the truth is, I've never had the patience to find out if a porn film actually had one.
I guess your neighbor gets off on bad dialog, or he's seriously disturbed. Or maybe he's scripting a porn movie himself and sees no problem in stealing the dialog from an existing porn movie, since nobody listens to it anyway!
And if you reduce downtime, you're more likely to avoid it!
I have nothing against nitpicking, in as much as I do it for a living. But let's not quibble about a choice of words when the words don't really mean anything different.
I don't think it's fair to suggest that resistance to Solaris is just a matter of prejudice. It's more a matter of not being able to find the tools you need. Linux folk often try Solaris, but quickly give up on it because the administrative tools they're familiar with aren't there, and they don't feel like starting over from scratch.
You might call that laziness, but it's deeper than that. As an example let me cite my own experience with implementing a TWiki for my group. I was given an old Sun V20z to run it on, which already had Solaris 10 installed. I tried very hard to get the TWiki running under Solaris. The TWiki itself wasn't that hard (and there's a lot of helpful Solaris info on twiki.org) but I was utterly defeated when I tried to install all the various TWiki plugins I needed.
The problem is that TWiki plugins are written in Perl, and mostly require that you install additional Perl modules. Now Perl itself runs very nicely on Solaris, but it's pretty obvious that few Perl module developers bother to test their work on Solaris. That seems to include the CPAN module (which provides a shell that most Perl developers use to download and install new modules), so you end up downloading the modules by hand. Fortunately, Perl modules always have neat little install scripts...
Oops! A lot of install scripts don't work on Solaris either. OK, installation is not rocket science, you just have to make sure the module files are in the include path. Easy enough, though the results are disturbingly messy. Oh well, as long as it work. Just need to Make a few more modules...
Oops! Here's a module that uses a library written in C. And the library has to compile on a particular C compiler. Solaris has that compiler, but the Solaris version doesn't have all the features the library needs to compile! That's where I gave up.
So I wiped the Solaris partition (feeling a bit like a murderer) and installed Fedora 6. Now, I'm not happy about the rough edges I saw (unforgivable in a distro that's been under development for 13 years!) but I can't complain about the sheer simplicity of installing Perl modules and TWiki plugins on that platform. You give the CPAN shell a list of Perl modules you need, give it permission to also download and install dependencies, and sit back. Then you download the TWiki plugins and run their installers -- some of which use the CPAN shell to install the Perl modules you forgot. Simple and easy.
So, until ZFS is available "in the box" for Linux, it's just not an option for a lot of Linux people. That's not prejudice, that's practically.
It actually will protect Europe from Russian, Chinese, NK, and Iranian launches.
You mean it will attempt to protect. ABM systems have a terrible track record and this one has never been properly tested!
The simple fact is that hitting one free-falling object with another is computationally difficult. With current computer technology, it just can't be done. But this doesn't matter to an administration that only listens to "experts" that tell it what it wants to hear.
So why didn't you simply hang up on him once it was clear he wasn't listening? Yes, it's discourteous, but you don't owe any courtesy to somebody who plainly intends to abuse it.
I don't agree with you, but it's obvious to me (and should he obvious to anybody) that you've expressed an honest opinion. What's more, its am opinion that's widely held. And yet some idiot moderator calls you a "troll".
There's way too much of this. The current moderator pool mostly considers "troll" short for "You're full of shit" and "overrated" short for "shut the fuck up". Taco, we need a new algorithm.
Don't confuse Stalin's authoritarianism with what went on in the U.S. during the war. America didn't suddenly become a dictatorship. There was an actual grass roots consensus that the war had to he won. And one of the biggest reasons the Allies won the war was America's unique role. More than any other participants, Americans came to the war as independently thinking self-sacrificing individuals.
Bullshit. Shea and Wilson were completely serious. If you look through the conspiracy literature of the 60s and 70s you'll find every single idea propounded in this trilogy. Flying saucers. Who killed JFK? Magic numbers. Various LSD-induced visions propounded as serious philosophies. And a lot of this crap was written by Shea and Wilson.
Back around 1975, I read an interview with those two drug-addled bozos. They'd propound some lame conspiracy theory. The interviewer would point out some obvious flaw in their theory. They'd say "Yeah, I guess you're right, but isn't it interesting that..." and proceed with something equally lame. They weren't interested in thinking about any flaws in theirs ideas. They just wanted to propound them faster than sceptics could shoot them down. Which has always been SOP for the Secret Truth crowd.
Nowadays, idiots who are in love with their own ideas and can't be bothered defending them have replaced "but isn't it interesting that" with "lighten up!" It's still a cop out.
Ah yes, the ultimate conspiracy theory book. Proof that your can explain anything if your just assume a big enough conspiracy. Interesting that it still finds an audience in the post-LSD era.
I use Roboform, which doesn't have scripting, but still does a good job of finding the right fields. It's also handy for filling out forms with standard things like name and address. Plus there's a portable version (which I haven't tried) that you can run from a thumb driver. I prefer their PDA software (both Palm and Windows Mobile) that allows you to carry around all your passwords in your pocket, so you always have access to them.
When somebody says "supported on laptops" they probably mean "x86 laptops". A SPARC-based laptop is such a proprietary, specialized piece of hardware to to be irrelevant to the discussion.
Which changes the question from "Why does Sun think it can compete with Apple" to "Why does Sun think there's room in the market for another Phone OS?" Carriers are already complaining that there are too many.
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Ever bought a house? If you think you "fully understand" every word in your mortgage papers, you're fooling yourself.
Famous last words: "I don't need a lawyer! I know my rights!"
In other words, you think that you should be able to get out of a contract by saying, "But I didn't know it meant that!" Consider the consequences.
You read your credit card agreements? And understand them? Than you're smarter than most lawyers.
I probably went overboard when I talked about not reading things like rental agreements and job contracts. I have to admit I always read them myself. On the other hand, life is full of contracts and agreements that are not just long and hard to read, but deliberately obfuscated so that even a lawyer finds them hard to deciphers. Here's an interesting interview in which a law professor talks about having her students dissect a credit card agreement that supposedly guarantees a low interest rate. After much parsing and analysis, they finally came to the conclusion that the agreement guarantees nothing, except the bank's right to impose whatever interest rate or incidental fees they feel like imposing. Where's the "meeting of the minds" there?
A warning to anybody who tells themselves, "I may not be a lawyer, but I know the law." Odds are, you know just enough to get yourself in deep trouble.Dude, I write documentation for a living. Which means I probably read a lot of it. Mostly written by idiots who didn't even bother to actually count the number of screws the bicycle was supposed to have.
Of course they're not meant to be read. Most legal documents aren't. Have you read your employment contract? Your rental agreement? Your credit card agreement? But so what? The entire concept of contracts (which the libertarians are so in love with) only works if you accept the legal fiction that everybody reads all the contracts they've committed themselves to. Which is, of course, utterly impossible.
This guy got lucky (if you can call it luck, since he has no chance of defeating Gateway's lawyers) because Gateway never gave him a chance to read the EULA. But if he had had the chance to read it, he would have been legally presumed to have read it. This presumption seems very strange to the non-lawyer, but the whole system of contracts would collapse without it.
That might make sense to somebody who's grown up in on era of X-rated cable. But when Playboy started out, depicting sexual acts was actually illegal in most of the U.S. (In 1972, a guy I knew was arrested for selling an undercover cop a Richard Crumb comic book that would barely rate as softcore nowadays.) Posing as a "lifestyle" mag gave Playboy both social and legal legitimacy it never would have had otherwise.
Not that it was entirely a pose. Playboy has always attracted serious writers, and paid them well. But it was the pictures men bought it for.
Any writing or graphic that is designed to arouse you sexually counts as porn. It doesn't really matter whether it actually depicts sex, real or simulated.
I guess it sounds strange to anybody born after 1980 that Playboy rates as porn. And indeed, they've always insisted they weren't. That's the primary purpose of all that other material: to allow Playboy to pose as a "lifestyle" magazine that happened to have a few tastefully erotic pictures. But nobody's ever taken that pose seriously, as the old "I read it for the articles" joke indicates.
No, the people who write articles for Playboy are serious, big-name writers. (Having "real" journalism, essays, and fiction takes the sting out of being a softcore porn mag.) Whereas the dialog in porn movies is always excruciatingly bad, and the plot — well, the truth is, I've never had the patience to find out if a porn film actually had one.
I guess your neighbor gets off on bad dialog, or he's seriously disturbed. Or maybe he's scripting a porn movie himself and sees no problem in stealing the dialog from an existing porn movie, since nobody listens to it anyway!
And if you reduce downtime, you're more likely to avoid it!
I have nothing against nitpicking, in as much as I do it for a living. But let's not quibble about a choice of words when the words don't really mean anything different.
I don't think it's fair to suggest that resistance to Solaris is just a matter of prejudice. It's more a matter of not being able to find the tools you need. Linux folk often try Solaris, but quickly give up on it because the administrative tools they're familiar with aren't there, and they don't feel like starting over from scratch.
You might call that laziness, but it's deeper than that. As an example let me cite my own experience with implementing a TWiki for my group. I was given an old Sun V20z to run it on, which already had Solaris 10 installed. I tried very hard to get the TWiki running under Solaris. The TWiki itself wasn't that hard (and there's a lot of helpful Solaris info on twiki.org) but I was utterly defeated when I tried to install all the various TWiki plugins I needed.
The problem is that TWiki plugins are written in Perl, and mostly require that you install additional Perl modules. Now Perl itself runs very nicely on Solaris, but it's pretty obvious that few Perl module developers bother to test their work on Solaris. That seems to include the CPAN module (which provides a shell that most Perl developers use to download and install new modules), so you end up downloading the modules by hand. Fortunately, Perl modules always have neat little install scripts...
Oops! A lot of install scripts don't work on Solaris either. OK, installation is not rocket science, you just have to make sure the module files are in the include path. Easy enough, though the results are disturbingly messy. Oh well, as long as it work. Just need to Make a few more modules...
Oops! Here's a module that uses a library written in C. And the library has to compile on a particular C compiler. Solaris has that compiler, but the Solaris version doesn't have all the features the library needs to compile! That's where I gave up.
So I wiped the Solaris partition (feeling a bit like a murderer) and installed Fedora 6. Now, I'm not happy about the rough edges I saw (unforgivable in a distro that's been under development for 13 years!) but I can't complain about the sheer simplicity of installing Perl modules and TWiki plugins on that platform. You give the CPAN shell a list of Perl modules you need, give it permission to also download and install dependencies, and sit back. Then you download the TWiki plugins and run their installers -- some of which use the CPAN shell to install the Perl modules you forgot. Simple and easy.
So, until ZFS is available "in the box" for Linux, it's just not an option for a lot of Linux people. That's not prejudice, that's practically.
You forgot to mention the possibility that all 10 drives might fail at once. Highly unlikely, perhaps, but not as unlikely as a velociraptor attack!
The simple fact is that hitting one free-falling object with another is computationally difficult. With current computer technology, it just can't be done. But this doesn't matter to an administration that only listens to "experts" that tell it what it wants to hear.
Slashdot so needs this mod: -100: Old and lame!
It's not as if the system actually works!!
So why didn't you simply hang up on him once it was clear he wasn't listening? Yes, it's discourteous, but you don't owe any courtesy to somebody who plainly intends to abuse it.
I don't agree with you, but it's obvious to me (and should he obvious to anybody) that you've expressed an honest opinion. What's more, its am opinion that's widely held. And yet some idiot moderator calls you a "troll".
There's way too much of this. The current moderator pool mostly considers "troll" short for "You're full of shit" and "overrated" short for "shut the fuck up". Taco, we need a new algorithm.
Don't confuse Stalin's authoritarianism with what went on in the U.S. during the war. America didn't suddenly become a dictatorship. There was an actual grass roots consensus that the war had to he won. And one of the biggest reasons the Allies won the war was America's unique role. More than any other participants, Americans came to the war as independently thinking self-sacrificing individuals.
Bullshit. Shea and Wilson were completely serious. If you look through the conspiracy literature of the 60s and 70s you'll find every single idea propounded in this trilogy. Flying saucers. Who killed JFK? Magic numbers. Various LSD-induced visions propounded as serious philosophies. And a lot of this crap was written by Shea and Wilson.
Back around 1975, I read an interview with those two drug-addled bozos. They'd propound some lame conspiracy theory. The interviewer would point out some obvious flaw in their theory. They'd say "Yeah, I guess you're right, but isn't it interesting that..." and proceed with something equally lame. They weren't interested in thinking about any flaws in theirs ideas. They just wanted to propound them faster than sceptics could shoot them down. Which has always been SOP for the Secret Truth crowd.
Nowadays, idiots who are in love with their own ideas and can't be bothered defending them have replaced "but isn't it interesting that" with "lighten up!" It's still a cop out.
Ah yes, the ultimate conspiracy theory book. Proof that your can explain anything if your just assume a big enough conspiracy. Interesting that it still finds an audience in the post-LSD era.
I use Roboform, which doesn't have scripting, but still does a good job of finding the right fields. It's also handy for filling out forms with standard things like name and address. Plus there's a portable version (which I haven't tried) that you can run from a thumb driver. I prefer their PDA software (both Palm and Windows Mobile) that allows you to carry around all your passwords in your pocket, so you always have access to them.
When somebody says "supported on laptops" they probably mean "x86 laptops". A SPARC-based laptop is such a proprietary, specialized piece of hardware to to be irrelevant to the discussion.
Which changes the question from "Why does Sun think it can compete with Apple" to "Why does Sun think there's room in the market for another Phone OS?" Carriers are already complaining that there are too many.
This isn't Wikipedia. I'm allowed to use my critical thinking skills.