Obviously, if they're getting contract after contract, they are succeeding at one thing.
If that's their only success, that's their only expertise, and not what they claim for expertise.
Unfortunately, it seems a lot of companies over there are good at only one thing these days. And one that one thing never lines up with their marketing.
Yes, when I was looking for "entry level" positions, I was hard pressed to find one that didn't require a doctorate and "eight years of experience" with a given technology.
The job application system, of course, would require this even for technologies that were newer than that.
I ended up doing a lot of work outside my target market (developer) and ended up pigeon-holed into a different line of work (security admin).
That was roughly the situation in the U.S. long ago (at least for lower levels of education), but it was built on the how the culture of the time effectively restricted certain social classes (women) to certain job sets (education), which led to a relatively high number of smart, capable and at least somewhat idealistic applicants for relatively low cost (essentially by forcing greed out of the picture).
This was not, however, a bound relationship, so as the culture changed and employment opportunities broadened, the pool of quality applicants spread out over other jobs, and the educational system didn't adapt to find new ways to draw people in.
The capitalist approach in general is probably the result of someone looking at the above issue and, well, grasping at straws for some way to change things.
I've worked in a different field where my peers were mostly smart (90th percentile plus, we checked), capable (regularly tested), idealistic (audited) and non-greedy people. When polled for why they were working there, no one mentioned money. But when presented with the idea of working without pay, most countered that the requirement of having to pay the bills would force them to work elsewhere. "Greed" can be a relative term, and in the strictest sense you'd probably only find non-greedy people among those who don't have to deal with paying the bills.
Another aspect to all this though, is that even if you take money out of the picture, you're still changing this from one form of capitalism (money based) to another (capable people). After all, capitalism is fundamentally about leveraging resources. By de facto default these days, that resource is assumed to be money, but that's not always the best fit.
Somewhat longer, there's probably a bunch of ways to parse this, such as this being the 26th time (year) they've used version 1, or this is their 26th revision of (the first set of) awards this year, or....
Maybe there should be an award for titles like this.
I seem to recall that some versions of Word don't recognize files from other versions of Word as being "Word format".
When I've had to deal with places that only take "Word format" I've sent them several different versions due to the above (and with a PDF version, too). I've occasionally been thanked for my thoughtfulness.
Of course, keeping around copies of one file in several variations of "Word format" takes up a disproportionate amount of space, so I only generate them as needed.
Abrams directs action/drama videos. Now, they can have a Star Trek theme, or a Star Wars theme, or whatever theme seems appropriate, but they're action/drama. So how much does a Star Wars theme mesh with Abrams' approach to action/drama?
As far as establishing new canon goes, I'm rather more skeptical. I rather get the impression that either consistency is a low priority, or he's having later parts of the video retcon earlier parts, or something.
I, for one, find that Abrams' videos are not to my taste. I expect to skip his take on Star Wars.
Even complete failured it trained of equipment is trained for. The military is taught not to rely on equipment to get the job done. Multiple failures are expected, and can easily happen in any combat situation.
Multiple failures can easily happen in any upgrade situation.
I was with a unit that was heavily into the computer based operations, and one upgrade cycle was particularly frakked. Networking was almost nothing but timeouts, apps wouldn't start, etc. Eventually, I gave the system layout a glance to see if there was something obvious. Among the many things I found in about 10 seconds of looking, was something like:
$ ls -l
---------- 1 root wheel 69 May 5 20xx/etc/resolv.conf
There were far more heinous things done to all the machines on that LAN. And even with all that, we still figured out within the first day how to get our jobs done. Not quickly, and not without a lot of hassle, but we still got it done. A fairly complete fix took a few weeks though.
There are four types of meteor composition; roughly ice, carbon, stone, iron. These types notably differ in how deep they can get into the atmosphere before they shatter (explode), with shatter altitude varying mostly by size. Iron meteors generally get all the way to the surface intact. And any part that hits the ground counts as a meteorite.
Given how many other than alpha-numeric characters there are in the languages I use, I'm not sure I could describe more than a trivial script in an interview. And even that would sound like, well, I'm not sure what it sounds like to HR types; they always get this otherwise glazed expression with their eyes replaced by black voids.
While I see that the US political system has remnants of the inclination to make political parties unofficial, I find it rather odd that only the Democratic-Republican party fields two candidates for many offices.
And then there's the little anecdote that Congress went for the AUMF instead of a Declaration of War because the latter would give the Executive branch "too much power".
The standard/. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
Only 24x365? Well then, yeah, I'd kind of expect them to pull that renting out to 3rd parties on February 29.
They both have terraforming potential; just different problems to overcome. Over the relatively short term, Mars looks closer to falling within what technology and industry may be able to handle.
Venus has a very weak magnetic field induced by the solar wind interacting with its atmosphere (which strips lighter elements like hydrogen in the process). It has no intrinsic magnetic field. Mars has regional magnetic fields locked into segments of its crust left over from when it did have an intrinsic field. Either way, a magnetic field isn't necessary to block solar radiation; a fairly thick atmosphere with an ozone layer has that covered. Before Earth developed an ozone layer it looks like land got too much UV for much of anything to handle, but the oceans were okay.
For long term atmospheric stability over multiple billions of years, a planetary mass object should have at least 20% of Earth's mass, although it may take 30% to be fully stable. Mars, at 10.7% could hold an Earth like atmosphere for a "mere" hundreds of millions of years. Note that hundreds of millions of years is comparable to the Phanerozoic Eon which covers the entire existence of multi-cellular animals, and is also comparable to the expected time before Earth unavoidably goes into a runaway greenhouse effect.
You still have to get several exagrams (Eg) of atmospheric materials from somewhere though, and maintain a much smaller replenishment program if you want Mars to stay habitable for more that several hundred million years.
To precipitate out Venus' atmosphere, you'd need a few hundred zettagrams (Zg) of calcium and/or magnesium to react with the carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonates and/or magnesium carbonates. You'd also need around a hundred or so Zg of hydrogen as Venus is almost completely lacking in that. Any biological processing has no chance of going anywhere without the hydrogen. The solar wind will, of course, slowly strip hydrogen away, so you'd need to maintain a replenishment program for that, too. And then there's that pesky runaway greenhouse forcing from being that close to the sun.
So, in short, terraforming Venus looks to require ~100,000 times as much material as Mars, but can get potentially be made much more similar to Earth.
Mmm. I know someone who was convinced that the world is only 300 years old. Yes, a self-proclaimed Christian. No, I don't know how that's supposed to work. I could ask further, but I value what's left of my sanity.
All the OSs I've run into the the most recent few years fully support UDF. And FUSE (if installed) seems to almost require ZFS be installed as well.
A quick check of flash media locally turns up nothing but UDF. If including optical media, it's split between UDF and ISO-9660. So what doesn't support UDF these days?
Whenever I used a Mac running one of the earlier systems, I always tried to have some lightweight audio app running. It accomplished the samething without all the hassle.
It's not all that accurately worded, but it is relevant. The lack of accuracy is likely due to trying to keep that comment short.
In any case, while Moore's Law is specific to transitor based circuitry, the pattern is applicable to other technologies, such as Kryder's Law which covers rigid magnetic media (hard drives). In fact, looking at these cases in general within a field of technology suggests a more abstract pattern. After all, the original component technologies with which Moore worked when he made his observations have been replaced over the years, some of them multiple times, with the the common thread to all of them being that they ultimately deal with transitors.
If optical technologies get pulled in by the same economic factors that drive Moore's and Kryder's Laws, they'll very like fall into a similar pattern: doubling of a particular characteristic over constant intervals.
Of course, all of this also depends on how how close a class of technology is to its fundamental extreme physical limits. For instance, density of transistors is ultimately limited by the size of atoms; the limit there may be somewhere around a "one molecule transitor." In the particular case of the article, the technology is optical modulators and the measure is switching rates. For that, one limit may be the frequency of the transmitted light. The visible spectrum runs from 384-769 THz, with the higher frequencies more difficult (in general) to generate. All this in turn suggests an upper limit of around 700 trillion switchings per second. With a Moore's or Kryder's Law like rate, say doubling bit rate every two years, today's 10 billion bps goes to 700 trillion in about 33 years.
Been there, done that (this week). All the systems where I've changed out the sshd still have the same key. The key itself is stored in a separate file and isn't going to be affected by changing the binaries.
Upgrade of OS
I just got through a few of those this week as well, and the systems still have the same key. Again, the key file is not part of the OS, and as such it isn't affected.
Serious mucking with hardware configuration
Okay, I haven't seen this one for a while, but I've still gone through it and had the key come through intact. IIRC, the most extreme case was switching a system from running on a sun4c machine to running on a macppc box. I moved the harddrive over, booted from CD, and installed the new binaries from there. When I rebooted from the harddrive, the machine came up with the same key.
The only case I've seen where the key changed was when a machine that wasn't important enough to back-up went down and was replaced with an entirely new machine. The only thing the new box had in common with the old one was the hostname.
Basically, you should only see key changes in extreme circumstances like that, and in the less extreme case of a CNAME changing to point to a different box, you would hope for some warning, too.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
All languages suck. Some suck more than others, some suck in different places or at different times, but they still all suck.
Unless I'm imagining things from the caffeinne wearing off, this would imply that committing to one language as the "One True Way" means committing to sucking.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
In the past, the FBI has at the direction of Congress or the Whitehouse "targeted" groups that were so ill-defined as to include all Americans. In every instance of this (so far), complaints from within the FBI have led to the bureau's investigations being greatly toned down and constrained. However, each case of this has taken years for the corrections to occur. Carnivore has a lot of people ticked off because it looks as though it steps outside of the FBI's defined powers and limitations unless active effort is taken to make sure it doesn't "go too far".
Carnivore also has the issue of making abuse by individuals tremendously scalable. While the FBI as a whole is not likely to be able to take full advantage of the system, individuals within the FBI and in the right place could use it to heap more abuse on the populace than they've ever been able to do before. Basically, organization issues aside, Carnivore has tremendous potential to play into the hands of the corrupt.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
Lowest common demoninator
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 1
I suspect that if web based voting ever did get approved, what we'd see is that the server setups will (mostly) suck. Trying to get almost any organization now to stick with standards is an uphill battle; I can easily picture what you'd get on one of these sites.
This voting site reuqires frames. Please upgrade to a frames capable browser.
This votingsite requires the following plugins... These plugins require IE 2005 alpha prerelese. (Click here to digitally sign the NDA to receive IE 2005 alpha prerelease).
(Typos gratuitously simulated.)
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard yet today. Everybody knows that what they actually do is to use the orbital mind control lasers to activate the Bermuda Triangle....
Must I remind you again? The lasers have been turned off due to technical difficulties.
(Well, okay, what actually happened was that one of the guys in accounting ran off with the budget. The power companies then disconnected the control room for non-payment. As a result, the lasers reset into standby mode, and can't be recontacted as that part of the design was never finished. Meanwhile, the new lasers haven't been launched because they require a Saturn V to get out of the atmosphere.)
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
This is true to a large degree, but glosses over a significant difference between consumer products from The Software Industry and the mass produced output in other categories. Many corporations, large and small, engage in practices that many would consider shady, unethical, or similarly negative. Company X may be exploiting workers in OtherCountry, but that's not what Joe Consumer sees. He sees a Widget from Company X that comes with a money back guarantee. Granted, if Joe isn't satisfied, he's probably not going to take the time to actually get his money back (depending on how expensive the Widget is), but he still doesn't think too badly of Company X because they have a standard practice of "customer satisfaction".
On the other side of things, Company Y in The Software Industry has wonderful internal policies and practices. The employees there get tons of benefits, etc. But the flagship product, SoftWidgets, ships with no warranties, no "customer satisfaction" policies and a "license" that often amounts to legalized censorship. If Joe Consumer is unhappy with SoftWidgets and wants it fixed, or his money back, or any sort of customer satisfaction, he's out of luck. The end result? Joe Consumer feels like he's being exploited, and paying for it.
With practices typified by Company Y being endemic for over 10 years, many people have become reactionary to dealing with any problems with software. If the normal approach to dealing with customer problems doesn't work, turn up the heat. And this is applied categorically.
In this specific case, RedHat shipped a product that made many customers unhappy. And a large number of these people are still fed up with the hostile practices of places like Company Y, so they're dealing with RedHat the same way they would deal with places like Company Y, where such tactics are the only way to get anywhere.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously, if they're getting contract after contract, they are succeeding at one thing.
If that's their only success, that's their only expertise, and not what they claim for expertise.
Unfortunately, it seems a lot of companies over there are good at only one thing these days. And one that one thing never lines up with their marketing.
Yes, when I was looking for "entry level" positions, I was hard pressed to find one that didn't require a doctorate and "eight years of experience" with a given technology.
The job application system, of course, would require this even for technologies that were newer than that.
I ended up doing a lot of work outside my target market (developer) and ended up pigeon-holed into a different line of work (security admin).
That was roughly the situation in the U.S. long ago (at least for lower levels of education), but it was built on the how the culture of the time effectively restricted certain social classes (women) to certain job sets (education), which led to a relatively high number of smart, capable and at least somewhat idealistic applicants for relatively low cost (essentially by forcing greed out of the picture).
This was not, however, a bound relationship, so as the culture changed and employment opportunities broadened, the pool of quality applicants spread out over other jobs, and the educational system didn't adapt to find new ways to draw people in.
The capitalist approach in general is probably the result of someone looking at the above issue and, well, grasping at straws for some way to change things.
I've worked in a different field where my peers were mostly smart (90th percentile plus, we checked), capable (regularly tested), idealistic (audited) and non-greedy people. When polled for why they were working there, no one mentioned money. But when presented with the idea of working without pay, most countered that the requirement of having to pay the bills would force them to work elsewhere. "Greed" can be a relative term, and in the strictest sense you'd probably only find non-greedy people among those who don't have to deal with paying the bills.
Another aspect to all this though, is that even if you take money out of the picture, you're still changing this from one form of capitalism (money based) to another (capable people). After all, capitalism is fundamentally about leveraging resources. By de facto default these days, that resource is assumed to be money, but that's not always the best fit.
Uselessly short answer: Yes
Somewhat longer, there's probably a bunch of ways to parse this, such as this being the 26th time (year) they've used version 1, or this is their 26th revision of (the first set of) awards this year, or....
Maybe there should be an award for titles like this.
I seem to recall that some versions of Word don't recognize files from other versions of Word as being "Word format".
When I've had to deal with places that only take "Word format" I've sent them several different versions due to the above (and with a PDF version, too). I've occasionally been thanked for my thoughtfulness.
Of course, keeping around copies of one file in several variations of "Word format" takes up a disproportionate amount of space, so I only generate them as needed.
Abrams directs action/drama videos. Now, they can have a Star Trek theme, or a Star Wars theme, or whatever theme seems appropriate, but they're action/drama. So how much does a Star Wars theme mesh with Abrams' approach to action/drama?
As far as establishing new canon goes, I'm rather more skeptical. I rather get the impression that either consistency is a low priority, or he's having later parts of the video retcon earlier parts, or something.
I, for one, find that Abrams' videos are not to my taste. I expect to skip his take on Star Wars.
Wasn't that some sort of ancient equivalent of a defense attorney?
Even complete failured it trained of equipment is trained for. The military is taught not to rely on equipment to get the job done. Multiple failures are expected, and can easily happen in any combat situation.
Multiple failures can easily happen in any upgrade situation.
I was with a unit that was heavily into the computer based operations, and one upgrade cycle was particularly frakked. Networking was almost nothing but timeouts, apps wouldn't start, etc. Eventually, I gave the system layout a glance to see if there was something obvious. Among the many things I found in about 10 seconds of looking, was something like:
$ ls -l
---------- 1 root wheel 69 May 5 20xx /etc/resolv.conf
There were far more heinous things done to all the machines on that LAN. And even with all that, we still figured out within the first day how to get our jobs done. Not quickly, and not without a lot of hassle, but we still got it done. A fairly complete fix took a few weeks though.
And they wonder why sailors drink.
There are four types of meteor composition; roughly ice, carbon, stone, iron. These types notably differ in how deep they can get into the atmosphere before they shatter (explode), with shatter altitude varying mostly by size. Iron meteors generally get all the way to the surface intact. And any part that hits the ground counts as a meteorite.
Given how many other than alpha-numeric characters there are in the languages I use, I'm not sure I could describe more than a trivial script in an interview. And even that would sound like, well, I'm not sure what it sounds like to HR types; they always get this otherwise glazed expression with their eyes replaced by black voids.
While I see that the US political system has remnants of the inclination to make political parties unofficial, I find it rather odd that only the Democratic-Republican party fields two candidates for many offices.
And then there's the little anecdote that Congress went for the AUMF instead of a Declaration of War because the latter would give the Executive branch "too much power".
The standard /. car analogy is I bought a car based on the advertising assumption that I could drive it any time I want 24x365. I'd be pretty pissed if I found my garage empty one day and it turns out they've been renting it out to 3rd parties behind my back, after all most customers don't use their cars 24x365 and its industry standard in the crooked fine print to profit off renting customer's cars to 3rd parties, etc etc.
Only 24x365? Well then, yeah, I'd kind of expect them to pull that renting out to 3rd parties on February 29.
They both have terraforming potential; just different problems to overcome. Over the relatively short term, Mars looks closer to falling within what technology and industry may be able to handle.
Venus has a very weak magnetic field induced by the solar wind interacting with its atmosphere (which strips lighter elements like hydrogen in the process). It has no intrinsic magnetic field. Mars has regional magnetic fields locked into segments of its crust left over from when it did have an intrinsic field. Either way, a magnetic field isn't necessary to block solar radiation; a fairly thick atmosphere with an ozone layer has that covered. Before Earth developed an ozone layer it looks like land got too much UV for much of anything to handle, but the oceans were okay.
For long term atmospheric stability over multiple billions of years, a planetary mass object should have at least 20% of Earth's mass, although it may take 30% to be fully stable. Mars, at 10.7% could hold an Earth like atmosphere for a "mere" hundreds of millions of years. Note that hundreds of millions of years is comparable to the Phanerozoic Eon which covers the entire existence of multi-cellular animals, and is also comparable to the expected time before Earth unavoidably goes into a runaway greenhouse effect.
You still have to get several exagrams (Eg) of atmospheric materials from somewhere though, and maintain a much smaller replenishment program if you want Mars to stay habitable for more that several hundred million years.
To precipitate out Venus' atmosphere, you'd need a few hundred zettagrams (Zg) of calcium and/or magnesium to react with the carbon dioxide to form calcium carbonates and/or magnesium carbonates. You'd also need around a hundred or so Zg of hydrogen as Venus is almost completely lacking in that. Any biological processing has no chance of going anywhere without the hydrogen. The solar wind will, of course, slowly strip hydrogen away, so you'd need to maintain a replenishment program for that, too. And then there's that pesky runaway greenhouse forcing from being that close to the sun.
So, in short, terraforming Venus looks to require ~100,000 times as much material as Mars, but can get potentially be made much more similar to Earth.
Mmm. I know someone who was convinced that the world is only 300 years old. Yes, a self-proclaimed Christian. No, I don't know how that's supposed to work. I could ask further, but I value what's left of my sanity.
All the OSs I've run into the the most recent few years fully support UDF. And FUSE (if installed) seems to almost require ZFS be installed as well.
A quick check of flash media locally turns up nothing but UDF. If including optical media, it's split between UDF and ISO-9660. So what doesn't support UDF these days?
Whenever I used a Mac running one of the earlier systems, I always tried to have some lightweight audio app running. It accomplished the samething without all the hassle.
It's not all that accurately worded, but it is relevant. The lack of accuracy is likely due to trying to keep that comment short.
In any case, while Moore's Law is specific to transitor based circuitry, the pattern is applicable to other technologies, such as Kryder's Law which covers rigid magnetic media (hard drives). In fact, looking at these cases in general within a field of technology suggests a more abstract pattern. After all, the original component technologies with which Moore worked when he made his observations have been replaced over the years, some of them multiple times, with the the common thread to all of them being that they ultimately deal with transitors.
If optical technologies get pulled in by the same economic factors that drive Moore's and Kryder's Laws, they'll very like fall into a similar pattern: doubling of a particular characteristic over constant intervals.
Of course, all of this also depends on how how close a class of technology is to its fundamental extreme physical limits. For instance, density of transistors is ultimately limited by the size of atoms; the limit there may be somewhere around a "one molecule transitor." In the particular case of the article, the technology is optical modulators and the measure is switching rates. For that, one limit may be the frequency of the transmitted light. The visible spectrum runs from 384-769 THz, with the higher frequencies more difficult (in general) to generate. All this in turn suggests an upper limit of around 700 trillion switchings per second. With a Moore's or Kryder's Law like rate, say doubling bit rate every two years, today's 10 billion bps goes to 700 trillion in about 33 years.
Been there, done that (this week). All the systems where I've changed out the sshd still have the same key. The key itself is stored in a separate file and isn't going to be affected by changing the binaries.
I just got through a few of those this week as well, and the systems still have the same key. Again, the key file is not part of the OS, and as such it isn't affected.
Okay, I haven't seen this one for a while, but I've still gone through it and had the key come through intact. IIRC, the most extreme case was switching a system from running on a sun4c machine to running on a macppc box. I moved the harddrive over, booted from CD, and installed the new binaries from there. When I rebooted from the harddrive, the machine came up with the same key.
The only case I've seen where the key changed was when a machine that wasn't important enough to back-up went down and was replaced with an entirely new machine. The only thing the new box had in common with the old one was the hostname.
Basically, you should only see key changes in extreme circumstances like that, and in the less extreme case of a CNAME changing to point to a different box, you would hope for some warning, too.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
All languages suck. Some suck more than others, some suck in different places or at different times, but they still all suck.
Unless I'm imagining things from the caffeinne wearing off, this would imply that committing to one language as the "One True Way" means committing to sucking.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
In the past, the FBI has at the direction of Congress or the Whitehouse "targeted" groups that were so ill-defined as to include all Americans. In every instance of this (so far), complaints from within the FBI have led to the bureau's investigations being greatly toned down and constrained. However, each case of this has taken years for the corrections to occur. Carnivore has a lot of people ticked off because it looks as though it steps outside of the FBI's defined powers and limitations unless active effort is taken to make sure it doesn't "go too far".
Carnivore also has the issue of making abuse by individuals tremendously scalable. While the FBI as a whole is not likely to be able to take full advantage of the system, individuals within the FBI and in the right place could use it to heap more abuse on the populace than they've ever been able to do before. Basically, organization issues aside, Carnivore has tremendous potential to play into the hands of the corrupt.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
I suspect that if web based voting ever did get approved, what we'd see is that the server setups will (mostly) suck. Trying to get almost any organization now to stick with standards is an uphill battle; I can easily picture what you'd get on one of these sites.
(Typos gratuitously simulated.)
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
Must I remind you again? The lasers have been turned off due to technical difficulties.
(Well, okay, what actually happened was that one of the guys in accounting ran off with the budget. The power companies then disconnected the control room for non-payment. As a result, the lasers reset into standby mode, and can't be recontacted as that part of the design was never finished. Meanwhile, the new lasers haven't been launched because they require a Saturn V to get out of the atmosphere.)
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
I don't think neutronium counts as a state so much as an unusual element. Hmm, Element Zero...
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."
This is true to a large degree, but glosses over a significant difference between consumer products from The Software Industry and the mass produced output in other categories. Many corporations, large and small, engage in practices that many would consider shady, unethical, or similarly negative. Company X may be exploiting workers in OtherCountry, but that's not what Joe Consumer sees. He sees a Widget from Company X that comes with a money back guarantee. Granted, if Joe isn't satisfied, he's probably not going to take the time to actually get his money back (depending on how expensive the Widget is), but he still doesn't think too badly of Company X because they have a standard practice of "customer satisfaction".
On the other side of things, Company Y in The Software Industry has wonderful internal policies and practices. The employees there get tons of benefits, etc. But the flagship product, SoftWidgets, ships with no warranties, no "customer satisfaction" policies and a "license" that often amounts to legalized censorship. If Joe Consumer is unhappy with SoftWidgets and wants it fixed, or his money back, or any sort of customer satisfaction, he's out of luck. The end result? Joe Consumer feels like he's being exploited, and paying for it.
With practices typified by Company Y being endemic for over 10 years, many people have become reactionary to dealing with any problems with software. If the normal approach to dealing with customer problems doesn't work, turn up the heat. And this is applied categorically.
In this specific case, RedHat shipped a product that made many customers unhappy. And a large number of these people are still fed up with the hostile practices of places like Company Y, so they're dealing with RedHat the same way they would deal with places like Company Y, where such tactics are the only way to get anywhere.
T. M. Pederson
"...and so the moral of the story is: Always Make Backups."