One easier way I've proposed to get a refund for this sort of thing (but unfortunately didn't have the time to try when I got my shiny new Dell laptop two years ago) is the following, which doesn't involve the courts at all:
Buy/setup computer; read license.
Decline license; have auto-installation program wipe your drive. Install Linux.
Take all Windows software media, documentation, and other materials and box them up. Take pictures of the package, and include a packing list of what you're returning. Include a letter explaining that you do not agree to the license, and that you're returning the product for a refund, per the license instructions.
Send the package via certified mail to the vendor (Dell, etc.); make sure someone has to sign for it.
Once you know it's been received (and you have a signature), call up your credit card company (you DID pay by credit--not a check card--right?), and request a $199 hold on the payment to the vendor, explaining that you're following the license regarding returning the product.
The credit card rep will ask you a bunch of questions; I can't remember exactly what they are, but they are very specific yes/no questions; be careful how you answer them (they reps are reading a standard scripted list of questions that is used to determine whether or not you qualify for a refund under credit card consumer protection laws).
The credit card company will put the $199 on hold while they investigate. They may require you to send a letter explaining your request; you may have to use some of the 'responses' listed in this article as justifications for why your claim makes sense, particularly regarding the actual value of the software.
Sit back and watch the mega-corps fight it out. You have your "refund," and all you had to do was follow the license terms. No fuss, no muss, no court, no court costs.
Granted, IANAL, and I haven't tried this (but I for damn sure will next time I buy a computer)... but I had some experience with a credit processing agency and we dealt with these kinds of chargebacks all the time; I see no reason why this wouldn't work.
If your relative is looking for a good textbook for this type of course, check out Basse's A Gift of Fire.
It's been used in a couple of comp sci ethics courses I've taken, and it's got a lot of covereage of current ethical topics and lots of thought experiments/questions.
Overall, a pretty good textbook for such a course.
A bunch of geeks in northern Colorado got together and started their own wireless Coop to solve exactly this problem, but it's probalby not what the poster wants.
But it's still feasible and if you're intersted in setting something like it up, you could talk to the members of the Coop to find out what their experiences were in getting it going.
Thanks "micheal"... you might as well post an "article" called "Is Emacs doomed?" or "Is Debian doomed?"
The author raises some good points and it's not that the discussion shouldn't take place, but the way in which the author has written the article is highly biased and obviously just troll fodder; he's not asking for opinions, he just wants you to read his.
"I hope to get this article on Slashdot or NewsForge..."
He then makes inflamatory statements like "Ask any Debian user and he will shake his head in disbelief that you, as a Mandrake user, have to download 2GB of software every 6 months and then run a risky upgrade just to get your system up-to-date. Silly you!" and " This is the main reason why we have seen so many new Gentoo/Sorcerer users, finally free from the RPM madness!"
Once again, we find the Slashdot editors lacking in any journalistic integrity and asleep at the wheel... and they want us to pay for their incompetence?!
"It's a complicated legal and financial undertaking," Maviglio said, adding that the talks to completely undo the contract could take several weeks. "There are some parts that have already moved forward. We're trying to unwind the whole thing."
The Simpsons, as anyone who has seen even half of a season's worth of episodes knows, is full of constant social commentary...
My favorite three commentary's in recent memory (i.e. the last 4 new episodes):
One week, they're burning all the candy in Springfield, and they put in a Butterfinger bar, and it glows and pops out of the fire, and Chief Wiggum says "Even the fire won't take it."
The next week, the chalkboard gag on the intro was "I will not bite the hand that feeds me Butterfingers."
Marge is sending an email to an old boyfriend, and she clicks send, and it shows all the "wires" of the Internet going into a small shack with an old guy sleeping and flies buzzing around a box with a bunch of wires sticking out of it that says "Cisco Systems."
Finally (and my favorite), there was a copy of Time magazine in one of the episodes and the cover simply said "AOL Rules."
Ahh... you don't get social commentary like that much anymore...
In fact, I've been arguing with CVS for a couple of days; expect NavOnly opt builds on Monday when everyone gets back from the holidays and I can get them posted on ftp.mozilla.org.
This really doensn't answer your cross platform library question, as there have already been a number of good answers to that (I'd suggest checking out NSPR; it's open source, free, heavily tested/stable (Mozilla/Netscape/Netscape's server products/etc. use it), and does all of the cross platform stuff you need, and does it on 30-some odd platforms.
As for cross platform programming practices, check out Mozilla's C++ Portability Guide. Porting the browser to 28 different operating systems, each with their own compilers and each of those compilers with their own quirks has given the Mozilla build engineering team some insight into what to do and what not to do when writing portable code.
This document tells you what those do's and don'ts are, and (more importantly) why.
Well, even though I agree with you that Apple is unlikely to ever do this, I would hope that Apple had enough sense to pre-package something OTHER than YDL with their boxen, if they ever did try to do that...
TerraSoft and its founder has about as much interest in the prosperity of "the community" as Apple does... which (unfortunately) probably means that Apple would approach TS before LinuxPPC, etc. to put YDL on their hardware, being like-minded and all...
All in all, it could add up to some serious badness (tm) for us...
DNS queries can block, but other types of IO don't in NSPR; read the NSPR documentation to figure out how they did this within 'threads' on one process... pretty interesting reading.
My point was simply that people, including you, are wrong about Netscape not being threaded... it's beautifully threaded if you're using Solaris or Irix. LinuxThreads, at the time NS was ported to Linux, weren't up to snuff, and thus they were emulated by NSPR.
In Linux, on the 4.x versions, threads are "faked" by the Netscape Portable Runtime, and thus there really only is one "real" process.
On WinX, threads are not "faked" (or rather, they are calls to Windows' threading system, which... well, could be called "fake").
Mozilla now uses Linux/Pthreads (whatever they're called... multiple processes via the clone() call) instead of creating "lightweight"/"fake" threads in NSPR.
Great... this information could be used to tune one's own firewall to block (unwanted and nosy) portscans from @Home and RoadRunner...
Charter cable here hasn't started doing that (yet), but if I were an @Home/RR customer, that's exactly what I'd do... 'cause you *know* what would happen if we tried to pr0tsc@n them.
Now, obviously the IANA can't release addresses like 192.x and 217-255, but why is 49/50 reserved
What about 58-60?
There are a significant number of useable IP addresses the IANA is just sitting on, and I may be stupid, but I haven't heard of any good reasons for this; maybe someone can enlighten me.
Instead of trying to be fascists about IP addresses, the IANA/ARIN/APNIC/Big-Brother-of-the-Internet should just release the addresses it's sitting on, or get IPv6 out the door; I hate this kind of gestapo crap, where they have to make stupid decisions because of their lack of planning in the first place.
ARIN shouldn't care what I use my IP addresses for, as long as I'm using them...frankly, it's none of their god damn business.
Someone else provided the RichInStyle link so I didn't have to; they said Mozilla was "The best CSS browser available." Mozilla has 110 CSS bugs; your precious IE had 155 bugs.
As for Mozilla crash, sure it crashes. But try reading what I wrote. I said Mozilla won't crash anything other than Mozilla. It won't crash X. It won't crash Linux.
I've seen IE take down NT. Is being able to read that Word doc in IE so valuable to you now?
You seem to defend Microsoft too much...and your "perspective" seems mighty Microsoftian.
Netscape 6 PR1's CSS support blows Microsoft's away; in fact, it has the least number of bugs, and was claimed to have the best CSS support of all the browsers in an article right here on Slashdot. So, you're comment that IE's CSS is better than Netscape's "ever was" is just plain wrong.
Then, you make a big deal about how good OLE/ActiveX is...that's wonderful...and they run on how many platforms again? That's right, one. XPCOM might sound like a rehasing of COM, and maybe it is, but XPCOM runs on at least ten different platforms; that's what makes it a "big deal," and rather cool IMO.
Next on the block: components. IE has them. Mozilla has them. Mozilla's are better. Because I can guarantee you that Mozilla won't crash Gnome or KDE. Mozilla won't crash X. And Mozilla certainly won't crash Linux. IE's track record isn't so stellar.
You seem to be missing the point that people like you are the type of people that allow Microsoft to exist as a monopoly. "It just works better," you cry, and while in some messed up view of things, it might (Windows is more integrated, for instance), what will you say when there is nothing but Windows NT 2005, and you can't run any software but the software MS wants you to run?
I for one, don't want to know find that answer out experimentally.
Is the "new" version of Slashdot crashing the later nightly Mozilla builds for anyone else?
I'm using build 2000050709; just trying at access http://www.slashdot.org/index.pl causes that mozilla build to silently crash. Interestingly enough, m15 (build 2000041811) won't load the new slashdot page at all; it just sits there, proclaiming the page is completely loaded, when the canvas is gray.
Is anyone else seeing this?
More importantly, is this just backlash for that last mozilla story from AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeICQNullSoft, or is this a Slashdot bug?;-)
Slashdot Mirror
We don't HAVE TO BE JUST LIKE THE SPAMMERS (in only six months!)
Click to remove and never hear from this /. user again oulsscs tyhecfz gy pz
kephqfh jt qwuixcdkejmpki bk niomleh n
t u
Ethically, I'm so confused...
- Buy/setup computer; read license.
- Decline license; have auto-installation program wipe your drive. Install Linux.
- Take all Windows software media, documentation, and other materials and box them up. Take pictures of the package, and include a packing list of what you're returning. Include a letter explaining that you do not agree to the license, and that you're returning the product for a refund, per the license instructions.
- Send the package via certified mail to the vendor (Dell, etc.); make sure someone has to sign for it.
- Once you know it's been received (and you have a signature), call up your credit card company (you DID pay by credit--not a check card--right?), and request a $199 hold on the payment to the vendor, explaining that you're following the license regarding returning the product.
- The credit card rep will ask you a bunch of questions; I can't remember exactly what they are, but they are very specific yes/no questions; be careful how you answer them (they reps are reading a standard scripted list of questions that is used to determine whether or not you qualify for a refund under credit card consumer protection laws).
- The credit card company will put the $199 on hold while they investigate. They may require you to send a letter explaining your request; you may have to use some of the 'responses' listed in this article as justifications for why your claim makes sense, particularly regarding the actual value of the software.
- Sit back and watch the mega-corps fight it out. You have your "refund," and all you had to do was follow the license terms. No fuss, no muss, no court, no court costs.
Granted, IANAL, and I haven't tried this (but I for damn sure will next time I buy a computer)... but I had some experience with a credit processing agency and we dealt with these kinds of chargebacks all the time; I see no reason why this wouldn't work.If your relative is looking for a good textbook for this type of course, check out Basse's A Gift of Fire.
It's been used in a couple of comp sci ethics courses I've taken, and it's got a lot of covereage of current ethical topics and lots of thought experiments/questions.
Overall, a pretty good textbook for such a course.
A bunch of geeks in northern Colorado got together and started their own wireless Coop to solve exactly this problem, but it's probalby not what the poster wants.
But it's still feasible and if you're intersted in setting something like it up, you could talk to the members of the Coop to find out what their experiences were in getting it going.
Colorado Wireless Exchange.
Thanks "micheal"... you might as well post an "article" called "Is Emacs doomed?" or "Is Debian doomed?"
The author raises some good points and it's not that the discussion shouldn't take place, but the way in which the author has written the article is highly biased and obviously just troll fodder; he's not asking for opinions, he just wants you to read his.
"I hope to get this article on Slashdot or NewsForge..."
He then makes inflamatory statements like "Ask any Debian user and he will shake his head in disbelief that you, as a Mandrake user, have to download 2GB of software every 6 months and then run a risky upgrade just to get your system up-to-date. Silly you!" and " This is the main reason why we have seen so many new Gentoo/Sorcerer users, finally free from the RPM madness!"
Once again, we find the Slashdot editors lacking in any journalistic integrity and asleep at the wheel... and they want us to pay for their incompetence?!
It boggles the mind...
You mean, they can't just issue a ROLLBACK?
What the hell were they paying Oracle for, then?!
For anyone reading at this low of a threshold, I guess I can't count... nor can I pluralize correctly "commentaries" (sometimes, I so possessive).
Oh well... I hadn't had my morning cup of Dew yet.
- One week, they're burning all the candy in Springfield, and they put in a Butterfinger bar, and it glows and pops out of the fire, and Chief Wiggum says "Even the fire won't take it."
- The next week, the chalkboard gag on the intro was "I will not bite the hand that feeds me Butterfingers."
- Marge is sending an email to an old boyfriend, and she clicks send, and it shows all the "wires" of the Internet going into a small shack with an old guy sleeping and flies buzzing around a box with a bunch of wires sticking out of it that says "Cisco Systems."
- Finally (and my favorite), there was a copy of Time magazine in one of the episodes and the cover simply said "AOL Rules."
Ahh... you don't get social commentary like that much anymore...And I will do so again for 0.9.6.
In fact, I've been arguing with CVS for a couple of days; expect NavOnly opt builds on Monday when everyone gets back from the holidays and I can get them posted on ftp.mozilla.org.
This really doensn't answer your cross platform library question, as there have already been a number of good answers to that (I'd suggest checking out NSPR; it's open source, free, heavily tested/stable (Mozilla/Netscape/Netscape's server products/etc. use it), and does all of the cross platform stuff you need, and does it on 30-some odd platforms.
As for cross platform programming practices, check out Mozilla's C++ Portability Guide. Porting the browser to 28 different operating systems, each with their own compilers and each of those compilers with their own quirks has given the Mozilla build engineering team some insight into what to do and what not to do when writing portable code.
This document tells you what those do's and don'ts are, and (more importantly) why.
Well, even though I agree with you that Apple is unlikely to ever do this, I would hope that Apple had enough sense to pre-package something OTHER than YDL with their boxen, if they ever did try to do that...
TerraSoft and its founder has about as much interest in the prosperity of "the community" as Apple does... which (unfortunately) probably means that Apple would approach TS before LinuxPPC, etc. to put YDL on their hardware, being like-minded and all...
All in all, it could add up to some serious badness (tm) for us...
DNS queries can block, but other types of IO don't in NSPR; read the NSPR documentation to figure out how they did this within 'threads' on one process... pretty interesting reading.
My point was simply that people, including you, are wrong about Netscape not being threaded... it's beautifully threaded if you're using Solaris or Irix. LinuxThreads, at the time NS was ported to Linux, weren't up to snuff, and thus they were emulated by NSPR.
Netscape, on all platforms, is "threaded."
In Linux, on the 4.x versions, threads are "faked" by the Netscape Portable Runtime, and thus there really only is one "real" process.
On WinX, threads are not "faked" (or rather, they are calls to Windows' threading system, which... well, could be called "fake").
Mozilla now uses Linux/Pthreads (whatever they're called... multiple processes via the clone() call) instead of creating "lightweight"/"fake" threads in NSPR.
Great... this information could be used to tune one's own firewall to block (unwanted and nosy) portscans from @Home and RoadRunner...
Charter cable here hasn't started doing that (yet), but if I were an @Home/RR customer, that's exactly what I'd do... 'cause you *know* what would happen if we tried to pr0tsc@n them.
But, according to linux-firewall-tools.com, the following address spaces are reserved by the IANA;
# Refuse addresses defined as reserved by the IANA.
# Note: this list includes the loopback, multicast, & reserved addresses.
# 0.*.*.* - Can't be blocked for DHCP users.
# 1.*.*.*, 2.*.*.*, 5.*.*.*, 7.*.*.*, 23.*.*.*, 27.*.*.*
# 31.*.*.*, 36.*.*.*, 37.*.*.*, 39.*.*.*, 41.*.*.*, 42.*.*.*
# 49-50.*.*.*, 58-60.*.*.*
# 67-127.*.*.*
# 169.254.*.* - Link Local Networks
# 192.0.2.* - TEST-NET
# 197.*.*.*, 217-255.*.*.*
Now, obviously the IANA can't release addresses like 192.x and 217-255, but why is 49/50 reserved
What about 58-60?
There are a significant number of useable IP addresses the IANA is just sitting on, and I may be stupid, but I haven't heard of any good reasons for this; maybe someone can enlighten me.
Instead of trying to be fascists about IP addresses, the IANA/ARIN/APNIC/Big-Brother-of-the-Internet should just release the addresses it's sitting on, or get IPv6 out the door; I hate this kind of gestapo crap, where they have to make stupid decisions because of their lack of planning in the first place.
ARIN shouldn't care what I use my IP addresses for, as long as I'm using them...frankly, it's none of their god damn business.
Someone else provided the RichInStyle link so I didn't have to; they said Mozilla was "The best CSS browser available." Mozilla has 110 CSS bugs; your precious IE had 155 bugs.
As for Mozilla crash, sure it crashes. But try reading what I wrote. I said Mozilla won't crash anything other than Mozilla. It won't crash X. It won't crash Linux.
I've seen IE take down NT. Is being able to read that Word doc in IE so valuable to you now?
You seem to defend Microsoft too much...and your "perspective" seems mighty Microsoftian.
Netscape 6 PR1's CSS support blows Microsoft's away; in fact, it has the least number of bugs, and was claimed to have the best CSS support of all the browsers in an article right here on Slashdot. So, you're comment that IE's CSS is better than Netscape's "ever was" is just plain wrong.
Then, you make a big deal about how good OLE/ActiveX is...that's wonderful...and they run on how many platforms again? That's right, one. XPCOM might sound like a rehasing of COM, and maybe it is, but XPCOM runs on at least ten different platforms; that's what makes it a "big deal," and rather cool IMO.
Next on the block: components. IE has them. Mozilla has them. Mozilla's are better. Because I can guarantee you that Mozilla won't crash Gnome or KDE. Mozilla won't crash X. And Mozilla certainly won't crash Linux. IE's track record isn't so stellar.
You seem to be missing the point that people like you are the type of people that allow Microsoft to exist as a monopoly. "It just works better," you cry, and while in some messed up view of things, it might (Windows is more integrated, for instance), what will you say when there is nothing but Windows NT 2005, and you can't run any software but the software MS wants you to run?
I for one, don't want to know find that answer out experimentally.
I'm using build 2000050709; just trying at access http://www.slashdot.org/index.pl causes that mozilla build to silently crash. Interestingly enough, m15 (build 2000041811) won't load the new slashdot page at all; it just sits there, proclaiming the page is completely loaded, when the canvas is gray.
Is anyone else seeing this?
More importantly, is this just backlash for that last mozilla story from AOLTimeWarnerNetscapeICQNullSoft, or is this a Slashdot bug? ;-)
Output everything to Postscript.
Force them to find an interpreter; there's even ghostscript for Win32.
That's what I do with my physics labs; of course, it's physics with other geeks who know what Postscript actually is, but...
I didn't even get to look at the site before it went down, but I was doing a traceroute, and saw this as the last hop:
www2.portal.redhat.com
AHHHHHHHHHHH!