RTFA, dude. It says that previous versions only required that you own the previous version (disk and license key). OK, maybe that's wrong, but if you're going to disagree with an article, you can fucking well disagree with what it actually says, rather than wasting our time.
I've never had to deal with the licensing issue: the only time I've ever upgraded a system was when I was working for a company that developed Windows software and had one of those MSDN site licenses. I have had the unfortunate experience of trying to upgrade, just because I hoped to save the hassle of reinstalling and reconfiguring all my applications. Turned out to be easier to reinstall everything from scratch.
I just bought a Motion Tablet that's supposed to be Vista compatible, and comes with a free Vista upgrade whenever that comes out. If I can't reinstall from scratch, and the upgrade is as nasty as my previous experiences (must remember to clone the hard disk first!) I might just have to forgo the Vista Experience.
Yes, but in Clovertown they only computer when they're done with the milking...
Come to think of it, is Clovertown a real place? It's my understanding that Intel and AMD uses geographic codenames to avoid litigation. So there must be a real place called Clovertown. Except Wikipedia (which is compulsive about dumping geographic databases) doesn't have anything.
But there's nothing to say we still have to give you the job. If you want to be pedantic we'll hire you for 5 minutes and then fire you.
Pah, another amateur lawyer. Legally, firing somebody is not that simple. Yeah, technically you can fire folks for any number of reasons. In the real business world, firing people is not something you do if you can avoid it. For one thing, it's is expensive, because you need to document that you did everything correctly. If you don't document a termination carefully, you could end up getting in legal trouble for what someone claims you did, and have no proof that you acted correctly.
(I'm actually speaking from personal experience, and no, I'm not going to share the details.)
The fact is, this dude's problem is not "bait and switch". That's when somebody knowingly makes a substitution. No sane manager is going to start a new hire out by screwing him: it's formula for disaster. What obviously happened was the manager making promises that the HR department doesn't feel bound to honor. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing — not an uncommon thing in large organizations.
Confrontation is a lose-lose here. If the potential employee goes in thinking, "They're out to screw me!" it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: either he'll walk away from a job he disrupted his life to take, or he'll start a new job totally pissed off at the people he works for (not a formula for professional success!). For their part, the company has invested a lot of effort into hiring this guy, and made business plans on the assumption he was going to start work. They have a vested interest in making him happy, even if they show the usual bureaucratic stupidity in fulfilling their own interests.
So forget about who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. The dude needs to express his disappointment, respectfully but firmly, to both the HR bureaucrats and the manager that made him the negated offer. Everybody here has motivation to work out a comprimise; nobody should waste time being self-righteous.
Please. It's hard enough to enforce the rules we already have. Detecting "loops" amongst the millions of domains that exist would be fiendishly expensive — and the cost of fighting the resulting lawsuits would be even more expensive.
Which reminds me how we got into this stupid mess in the first place. When the web first took off, TLDs cost $50 a year. This outraged a lot of technohippies with too much time on their hands, so they crusaded for more competition in the registry field. And they got it. So now you can register a domain for a few bucks, and you can get discounts for registering a large number of domains at once. So domain squatters pull out the dictionary and the typo generation software, and grab all the likely domains. So now you can renew your domain for a few bucks a year — but for any really useful domain name, you'll have to spend thousands just to get it.
The smart thing would have been to keep the $50 annual fee or even raised it. (Yeah, Network Solutions didn't deserve that much. So what? If that bugs you, make them pay a cut to charity or something.) If you really need a top level domain, you can afford that much. If your pockets aren't that deep, get a second-level domain from your hosting provider. The one I used in those days gave me one for free.
So now that we've "fixed" the original problem, you want to fix the fix? Let's leave bad enough alone.
Although [Solaris] is currently certified for Intel processors, Intel will dedicate developers to help Sun fine-tune the software for advanced features on its processors such as hardware support for virtualization, storage and I/O. Intel makes its chip features available to developers as open standards, but help from Intel is expected to allow Sun to faster and better support those features its software.
You'll have to be more specific. Do you mean the bit about it being more difficult to navigate to the parent directory? That's not a bug: too much malware gets installed that way. Or do you mean th stupidity about putting the URL history in the drop down box? That's the sort of "user experience" fuckup that happens all the time when designers do think things through. Microsoft is particularly bad this way (mainly because they rely too much on focus groups when they should be analyzing the overall process) but I see it everywhere. I recently had to turn off automatic form entry in Firefox 2.0 because it was almost impossible to enter a new value that shared an initial substring with an old value.
SpamAssasin has almost no false positives or false negatives, but the increased volume of spam has still caused headaches.
Either you're very good at tuning Spam Assassin or you get a different class of spam than I do. Or maybe your users aren't reporting everything to you.
My new hosting provider provides Spam Assassin. (So the DreamHost meltdown wasn't a total loss.) False Positives are indeed zero, or close to it (I still get the spam delivered to a special folder so I can scan the subjects; I can't afford even a single false positive.) But it still misses a half dozen spams every day.
And yes indeed, most of it is penny stock P&D crap. For a while, I was adding the latest "hot" stock to my message filters, but they change so often it's not worth the hassle.
As for penny stock investors getting ripped off: who cares? It's a fucking risky kind of investment in any case. If you're betting your savings on it, you need to consider joining Gambler's Anonymous; you're going to lose your stake eventually, with or without P&D scammers. Anyway, with everybody getting so many P&D spams, I'm sceptical that enough people are fooled to affect the stock price. I suspect that most penny stock spammers are themselves getting scammed. "Explode your profits with our patented StockPlus software!"
You're getting ahead of yourself. First you declare yourself sovereign ruler of these islands, using some fancy Latin pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo. Then you spend a couple decades trying to establish a casino and a data haven, and a couple of other lame business that for some reason have to be in the middle of nowhere. It's only after you do all these things that you can offer to sell off your "principality" for some absurd sum.
Actually, Sun has long since stopped being a SPARC-only company. They officially admitted the stupidity of ignoring the x86/x64 marketplace a couple years ago, and brought back Andrew Bechtolsheim to design a line of x64 servers.
Plants are protein too. What you mean to say is that dogs are carnivores and therefore higher on the food chain. Every time you convert food by feeding it to an animal, you lose 90% of your biomass. So if you grow dog meat by feeding your dogs rabbits which you feed grass, then you have to grow 100 pounds of grass to grow 1 pound of dog meat. Better to eat the 10 pounds of rabbit yourself.
This is not exactly advanced science: I learned it in sixth grade. If slashdotters don't know know what a food chain is, either schools have declined since my day, or slashdotters don't retain anything that isn't in comic book form.
Apples and oranges. Ubuntu was never a closed-source product, and the people who put it together were motivated by the desire to put together a better Linux bistro that they always knew they'd have to give away. Solaris/SunOS has been a closed-source product, and a significant revenue source for Sun, since 1982. (Let's not quibble about whether Solaris and SunOS are the "same OS".) Sun giving away Solaris, either by opening part of the source or by giving away free media and licenses, is a major shift for them. "Desperation" might be too strong a word, but Sun is certainly going through some collective soul searching.
It wasn't so long ago that, Sun had a religious devotion to their own hardware platform (SPARC), OS (Solaris), and application platform (Java). They weren't just infatuated with these technologies, they believed they had to control them. Hence the long battle over opening up Java, which is usually described as "open-sourcing" Java, but is actually more about opening up management of the Java platform spec. Key people in Sun resisted these changes for years, unwilling to share control over the future of these technologies. And if Sun weren't losing money hand over fist, these people would still be having their way.
They won't back such a game because such games just don't sell very well anymore.
I still think that companies like CBS Paramount have an aversion to any product that requires actual brain cells. That's the main reason ST has gotten so freaking awful. But you're right: there isn't a big market for "deskchair adventure" games any more.
There's something to be said for the "head first" approach, which uses humor and graphics to reinforce learning. But there's a limit to what you can teach that way. In the case of SQL, you could write an HF book to make the basic concepts easier to grasp, but once you started getting into the really complicated and abstract stuff, all that gonzo exposition just gets in the way.
Anyway, the HF books are very calculated in the way to use humor for teaching. That's not true for most humor in computer textbooks, which are written by nerds who are so in love with their own jokes they allow them to distract from the book's primary purpose.
Actually, there is humor in Knuth. If you look up "Infinite recursion" in the index, you'll get a cross reference, to "Recursion, Infinite". Needless to say, that second entry is also a cross-reference.
Despite my sober attitude, I've been known to sneak in a bit of sly humor into my technical writing. In my last book (OK, my only book that wasn't an anonymous manual), I managed to work a reference to Alphonse and Gaston into a discussion of deadlock. There's also a reference to Dragon Ball that so far nobody seems to have spotted.
But to do that sort of thing professionally, you have to be sly so it comes in under the radar and doesn't distract. Which only makes the joke that much funnier!
It's not a bone dry college text book, but it was written with a dedication to professionalism that can make a technical book tedious and will certainly keep it from becoming a classic.
So in order to be a classic, a technical book has to have all the digressions and cheap humor that plague the O'Reilly books? A classic technical work is useful, not entertaining. If you want entertainment, read a novel.
Why is it offtopic? Whenever we get poorly written reviews (and that's most of the time) everybody bitches and flames at length. It's only fair to note when the reviewer actually knows what they're doing.
To give you a horrible taste, it mentions V'ger, from the first Star Trek movie, in connection with the Borg's origin. Looking back on the whole story from the last mission gives you an 'ohhh' moment, but it's not that great a payoff for the amount of time you spend in the dark.
IMHO, "ohhh" moments are the biggest reason Star Trek is unsalvagable. Too many people who write for the Trekverse think they have to explain some stupid little detail from TOS or the early movies. In fact, most of the issues that "need" resolving are there because the premise kept changing (remember the United Earth Space Probe Authority?) or because the writers didn't even understand the premise (the author of "Balance of Terror" obviously didn't know that the show was about interstellar travel, and probably didn't even understand the word "interstellar").
When they resurrected Star Trek back in 1979, they made the very logical decision to simply abandon the details of the Trekverse that were there for no compelling reason, such as making all the aliens look like humans in weird makup. But then literal-minded fans insisted on an "explanation" for the Klingon Head Ridge Mystery and other such bullshit.
Face it trekkies, Star Trek is dead — and you killed it.
What's to apologize for? When TOS series was still on the air, everybody (audience, writers, critics) agreed that Spock/Nimoy was the #1 babe magnet for the show. Women found the whole supercool hyperlogical scientist schtik thoroughly sexy. And when they started do scripts where he had to battle his inner illogical human, it just got more intense.
Or maybe you're apologizing for the image of Kirk with the torn shirt. Well, most video games with benefit from a little honest homoeroticism...
So don't do an action game. The Trekverse would be a good place to set an old-fashioned adventure game.
Alas, CBS Paramount will never back such a game. Like all the big media companies, they have no faith in any entertainment that requires actual thinking by the audience to think.
Slashdot Mirror
RTFA, dude. It says that previous versions only required that you own the previous version (disk and license key). OK, maybe that's wrong, but if you're going to disagree with an article, you can fucking well disagree with what it actually says, rather than wasting our time.
I've never had to deal with the licensing issue: the only time I've ever upgraded a system was when I was working for a company that developed Windows software and had one of those MSDN site licenses. I have had the unfortunate experience of trying to upgrade, just because I hoped to save the hassle of reinstalling and reconfiguring all my applications. Turned out to be easier to reinstall everything from scratch.
I just bought a Motion Tablet that's supposed to be Vista compatible, and comes with a free Vista upgrade whenever that comes out. If I can't reinstall from scratch, and the upgrade is as nasty as my previous experiences (must remember to clone the hard disk first!) I might just have to forgo the Vista Experience.
And yet somehow, all those big companies manage to stay in business without your support.
Why do Slashdotters find it so hard to get past the assumption that everybody thinks they way they do?
Yes, but in Clovertown they only computer when they're done with the milking...
Come to think of it, is Clovertown a real place? It's my understanding that Intel and AMD uses geographic codenames to avoid litigation. So there must be a real place called Clovertown. Except Wikipedia (which is compulsive about dumping geographic databases) doesn't have anything.
Believe it or not, very few desktops have that kind of technology.
What a stupid statistic. It costs $50+/month to get cable. That's only cheap if you watch a lot of it. Some of us have lives.
Pah, another amateur lawyer. Legally, firing somebody is not that simple. Yeah, technically you can fire folks for any number of reasons. In the real business world, firing people is not something you do if you can avoid it. For one thing, it's is expensive, because you need to document that you did everything correctly. If you don't document a termination carefully, you could end up getting in legal trouble for what someone claims you did, and have no proof that you acted correctly.
(I'm actually speaking from personal experience, and no, I'm not going to share the details.)
The fact is, this dude's problem is not "bait and switch". That's when somebody knowingly makes a substitution. No sane manager is going to start a new hire out by screwing him: it's formula for disaster. What obviously happened was the manager making promises that the HR department doesn't feel bound to honor. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing — not an uncommon thing in large organizations.
Confrontation is a lose-lose here. If the potential employee goes in thinking, "They're out to screw me!" it's going to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: either he'll walk away from a job he disrupted his life to take, or he'll start a new job totally pissed off at the people he works for (not a formula for professional success!). For their part, the company has invested a lot of effort into hiring this guy, and made business plans on the assumption he was going to start work. They have a vested interest in making him happy, even if they show the usual bureaucratic stupidity in fulfilling their own interests.
So forget about who's the good guy and who's the bad guy. The dude needs to express his disappointment, respectfully but firmly, to both the HR bureaucrats and the manager that made him the negated offer. Everybody here has motivation to work out a comprimise; nobody should waste time being self-righteous.
Please. It's hard enough to enforce the rules we already have. Detecting "loops" amongst the millions of domains that exist would be fiendishly expensive — and the cost of fighting the resulting lawsuits would be even more expensive.
Which reminds me how we got into this stupid mess in the first place. When the web first took off, TLDs cost $50 a year. This outraged a lot of technohippies with too much time on their hands, so they crusaded for more competition in the registry field. And they got it. So now you can register a domain for a few bucks, and you can get discounts for registering a large number of domains at once. So domain squatters pull out the dictionary and the typo generation software, and grab all the likely domains. So now you can renew your domain for a few bucks a year — but for any really useful domain name, you'll have to spend thousands just to get it.
The smart thing would have been to keep the $50 annual fee or even raised it. (Yeah, Network Solutions didn't deserve that much. So what? If that bugs you, make them pay a cut to charity or something.) If you really need a top level domain, you can afford that much. If your pockets aren't that deep, get a second-level domain from your hosting provider. The one I used in those days gave me one for free.
So now that we've "fixed" the original problem, you want to fix the fix? Let's leave bad enough alone.
You'll have to be more specific. Do you mean the bit about it being more difficult to navigate to the parent directory? That's not a bug: too much malware gets installed that way. Or do you mean th stupidity about putting the URL history in the drop down box? That's the sort of "user experience" fuckup that happens all the time when designers do think things through. Microsoft is particularly bad this way (mainly because they rely too much on focus groups when they should be analyzing the overall process) but I see it everywhere. I recently had to turn off automatic form entry in Firefox 2.0 because it was almost impossible to enter a new value that shared an initial substring with an old value.
Either you're very good at tuning Spam Assassin or you get a different class of spam than I do. Or maybe your users aren't reporting everything to you.
My new hosting provider provides Spam Assassin. (So the DreamHost meltdown wasn't a total loss.) False Positives are indeed zero, or close to it (I still get the spam delivered to a special folder so I can scan the subjects; I can't afford even a single false positive.) But it still misses a half dozen spams every day.
And yes indeed, most of it is penny stock P&D crap. For a while, I was adding the latest "hot" stock to my message filters, but they change so often it's not worth the hassle.
As for penny stock investors getting ripped off: who cares? It's a fucking risky kind of investment in any case. If you're betting your savings on it, you need to consider joining Gambler's Anonymous; you're going to lose your stake eventually, with or without P&D scammers. Anyway, with everybody getting so many P&D spams, I'm sceptical that enough people are fooled to affect the stock price. I suspect that most penny stock spammers are themselves getting scammed. "Explode your profits with our patented StockPlus software!"
You're getting ahead of yourself. First you declare yourself sovereign ruler of these islands, using some fancy Latin pseudo-legal mumbo-jumbo. Then you spend a couple decades trying to establish a casino and a data haven, and a couple of other lame business that for some reason have to be in the middle of nowhere. It's only after you do all these things that you can offer to sell off your "principality" for some absurd sum.
Plants are protein too. What you mean to say is that dogs are carnivores and therefore higher on the food chain. Every time you convert food by feeding it to an animal, you lose 90% of your biomass. So if you grow dog meat by feeding your dogs rabbits which you feed grass, then you have to grow 100 pounds of grass to grow 1 pound of dog meat. Better to eat the 10 pounds of rabbit yourself.
This is not exactly advanced science: I learned it in sixth grade. If slashdotters don't know know what a food chain is, either schools have declined since my day, or slashdotters don't retain anything that isn't in comic book form.
Apples and oranges. Ubuntu was never a closed-source product, and the people who put it together were motivated by the desire to put together a better Linux bistro that they always knew they'd have to give away. Solaris/SunOS has been a closed-source product, and a significant revenue source for Sun, since 1982. (Let's not quibble about whether Solaris and SunOS are the "same OS".) Sun giving away Solaris, either by opening part of the source or by giving away free media and licenses, is a major shift for them. "Desperation" might be too strong a word, but Sun is certainly going through some collective soul searching.
It wasn't so long ago that, Sun had a religious devotion to their own hardware platform (SPARC), OS (Solaris), and application platform (Java). They weren't just infatuated with these technologies, they believed they had to control them. Hence the long battle over opening up Java, which is usually described as "open-sourcing" Java, but is actually more about opening up management of the Java platform spec. Key people in Sun resisted these changes for years, unwilling to share control over the future of these technologies. And if Sun weren't losing money hand over fist, these people would still be having their way.
Well, I hope it turns out to be something that requires actual thought. But if it's your typical MMORPG, it's be mostly about Action.
Gee, thanks for that image!
There's something to be said for the "head first" approach, which uses humor and graphics to reinforce learning. But there's a limit to what you can teach that way. In the case of SQL, you could write an HF book to make the basic concepts easier to grasp, but once you started getting into the really complicated and abstract stuff, all that gonzo exposition just gets in the way.
Anyway, the HF books are very calculated in the way to use humor for teaching. That's not true for most humor in computer textbooks, which are written by nerds who are so in love with their own jokes they allow them to distract from the book's primary purpose.
Actually, there is humor in Knuth. If you look up "Infinite recursion" in the index, you'll get a cross reference, to "Recursion, Infinite". Needless to say, that second entry is also a cross-reference.
Despite my sober attitude, I've been known to sneak in a bit of sly humor into my technical writing. In my last book (OK, my only book that wasn't an anonymous manual), I managed to work a reference to Alphonse and Gaston into a discussion of deadlock. There's also a reference to Dragon Ball that so far nobody seems to have spotted.
But to do that sort of thing professionally, you have to be sly so it comes in under the radar and doesn't distract. Which only makes the joke that much funnier!
Finally, an explanation for the fact that the Enterpise isn't shaped like traditional spaceships!
Why is it offtopic? Whenever we get poorly written reviews (and that's most of the time) everybody bitches and flames at length. It's only fair to note when the reviewer actually knows what they're doing.
IMHO, "ohhh" moments are the biggest reason Star Trek is unsalvagable. Too many people who write for the Trekverse think they have to explain some stupid little detail from TOS or the early movies. In fact, most of the issues that "need" resolving are there because the premise kept changing (remember the United Earth Space Probe Authority?) or because the writers didn't even understand the premise (the author of "Balance of Terror" obviously didn't know that the show was about interstellar travel, and probably didn't even understand the word "interstellar").
When they resurrected Star Trek back in 1979, they made the very logical decision to simply abandon the details of the Trekverse that were there for no compelling reason, such as making all the aliens look like humans in weird makup. But then literal-minded fans insisted on an "explanation" for the Klingon Head Ridge Mystery and other such bullshit.
Face it trekkies, Star Trek is dead — and you killed it.
What's to apologize for? When TOS series was still on the air, everybody (audience, writers, critics) agreed that Spock/Nimoy was the #1 babe magnet for the show. Women found the whole supercool hyperlogical scientist schtik thoroughly sexy. And when they started do scripts where he had to battle his inner illogical human, it just got more intense.
Or maybe you're apologizing for the image of Kirk with the torn shirt. Well, most video games with benefit from a little honest homoeroticism...
So don't do an action game. The Trekverse would be a good place to set an old-fashioned adventure game.
Alas, CBS Paramount will never back such a game. Like all the big media companies, they have no faith in any entertainment that requires actual thinking by the audience to think.