Blaming Apple's engineers or design staff is at most a reach
No it is not. The iPod includes a limited lifecycle component. The fault for the decision to include that component must rest with either the designers or the management. Why couldn't Apple have used a removable rechargable battery like many cameras have?
If you're buying a product with a 1 year warrenty, realize that you might just have to replace it after that time, or repair it.
That is ridiculous. My $1000 TV came with a 1 year warrenty. Should I expect to replace it after a year? How about my car - that had a 3 year warrenty (from memory) should I expect to replace that once the 3 years is up too?
You seem to be justifying the high cost of replacing the batteries as being reasonable based on Apple design decisions. Don't you see what is wrong with that?
If I ran my car 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, and then complained when the engine blew up I'd be laughed at by the dealer.
Dealer: "You put how many miles on it in 18 months?"
Me: "220,000. Why did it die so soon?"
First of all to put 220,000 miles you'd have to average 75 mph. That's not likely. Secondly, couriers, taxis, and buses would approach that sort of usage and they don't have to replace their vehicles every year (except when they cause accidents, of course). Thirdly, you could still replace whichever parts had worn out without replacing the entire vehicle (unless you really are an idiot, ignored the warning signs, and let the engine completely self-destruct).
Summary: your analogy isn't very good (they almost never are when you compare stuff to cars).
OSS projects have such high quality because OSS projects by their very nature do not include grunt programmers. Grunt programmers have no incentive to work on such projects. That doesn't mean that all computer scientists work on OSS projects, but it inevitably means that all OSS projects are populated by computer scientists of varying degrees of skill and experience
That's the most insightful comment I've seen on Slashdot for quite some time.
I had a CS prof in college (before I dropped that major) who said something like, "A lot of people think programming is art or something like it. The question is, should they?" His view is the programming is like plumbing or carpentry. The skill-set to do it is something you can pick up in trade school. The difference between a computer scientist and a programmer is the difference between a draftsman and an engineer, to put it a different way. And I mean a real engineer, not one of those people with an MCSE certificate.
I agree, but I don't think there are really that many "programmer" jobs around (if you take "programmer" to mean what he says it does). How many companies really produce the sort of design docs necessary to allow a "programmer" to produce a good implementation if they don't also have reasonable design skills? IMHO, most computer science jobs are still a combination of "programmer" and "computer scientist".
Frankly few of the differences between the books and movies have bothered me. I also found the logic behind the changes to Faramir's character quite clear and reasonable. Has it occurred to you that it might be you rather than her that has the "misunderstanding"? I realise that you're not alone in your problems with that decision, but you are certainly in the minority.
note: charging to death to impress your psycho dad is NOT heroic
And yet that's exactly what he did in the books.
It seems to me that some people have slightly "romanticised" memories of the books and tend to pick out things that are different from their interpretation of the story, even when the movie interpretation is not that far from the text.
That was Tolkein's intent. He explicitly wanted Hobbiton to be acutely affected by the events that occured to the east of it. The book itself included it; where does Phillipa Boyens get off screwing it up?
This is a movie. What works in the book may not work in a movie, and it would not in this case. The one major complaint that has come up in many critics' reviews of ROTK is the number and length of the denouement scenes. And you wanted another half an hour or more, including the introduction of several new characters (some of whom are eventually revealed to Saruman and Wormtongue). I guess that is why they are movie makers and you are a movie fan.
Yet on the DVD he says "I don't know what people are talking about" - and it doesn't sound like he is kidding, simply being serious??
I believe he's explained this discrepancy elsewhere as being due to the car being removed by someone else and him not being told until after the FOTR:EE DVD had been done.
So it wasn't a true adaptation then. Can you imagine the outrage if LOTR had of had mearly similar characters and plotline? I doubt Peter Jackson would have escaped alive.
I think I read that all players in New Zealand are multi-region
Not all, but certainly most. You can walk into stores and buy region 1 DVDs (NZ is in region 4). This is not due to any moral stance on region codes, it's just that parellel importing is permitted and even encouraged in NZ. However a law has recently been introduced to parliment that will make parallel importation of DVDs of films intended for cinema release illegal for 9 months after the film has been released internationally. There is a description of the law here.
Yeah, I'll probably do that one day (or change the language setup as the other guy suggested). I'm not saying it's rational, just that it annoys the hell out of me.
Of those I use WinZip and WinAmp (winsock is basically invisible to the user). They are the only two win- prefixed programs of the dozens I use on Windows. It's nowhere near as bad.
The "K" thing really annoys me because it reminds me of script-kiddy language. It is actually a major reason why I haven't seriously used KDE in a long time.
That was from the dictionary.com quote in my post.
I'm picky, while your grasp of the English language ranks with the bottom 26% of the population.
You incorrectly attributed the quote. I guess your ready comprehension is not up to standard. You also assume that the usage panel represents the range of English comprehension. It does not. The fact that any of them accepted it is a good indication that the usage is becomming commonly accepted. In support consider that the American Heritage Dictionary allows that usage, with the note, and Webster's allows it unconditionally.
I guess you think you're pretty funny, all I can say is "don't give up your day job".
Yes, it was decimated -- exactly one-tenth of it was destroyed .
Please note that plenty of words no longer have the exact same meaning they had when they first came into common usage. The common meaning of decimate is now "killing a large proportion of a population". It is also becomming more common to accept it to mean any large scale destruction.
From the link you provided:
This comes under the heading of the truly picky.
From dictionary.com:
Usage Note: Decimate originally referred to the killing of every tenth person, a punishment used in the Roman army for mutinous legions. Today this meaning is commonly extended to include the killing of any large proportion of a group. Sixty-six percent of the Usage Panel accepts this extension in the sentence The Jewish population of Germany was decimated by the war, even though it is common knowledge that the number of Jews killed was much greater than a tenth of the original population. However, when the meaning is further extended to include large-scale destruction other than killing, as in The supply of fresh produce was decimated by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, only 26 percent of the Panel accepts the usage.
SCO have always said that if the company happens to be sold during this whole debacle, then the lawyers get 20% of the proceeds. They haven't said that this will happen (who the hell would buy?) but they have indicated what would happen if it did.
It seems an odd clause though (AFAIK, which isn't much). To me it's an admission that SCO was looking to get bought by IBM. They probably tried a normal approach and when that wasn't taken they tried to bully IBM with the lawsuit. Since IBM have made it clear they're not buying, SCO seem to be making wilder and wilder claims, presumably in an attempt to keep the share price up.
They are also looking at just how bad the radiation threat is likely to be. One of the experiments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. According to this article the radiation level would be about double that faced on the ISS, but still manageable. Amusingly the instrument on the probe used to measure the radiation levels has broken down due to radiation damage caused during the recent massive solar flares.
"I'd prefer there wasn't a closed source driver" is an opinion you are clearly applying only to yourself. "Having a closed source driver is worse than no driver at all" is a blanket statement that will be taken as applying to everyone. If that's not how you meant it you should have been more precise.
I stated my preference that the closed source binary-only driver didn't exist but, if the driver does exist, it's your choice whether you use it or not.
Um, no. You said a closed source driver was worse than no driver at all. That's an entirely different position from "I'd prefer there wasn't a closed source driver".
OK, from the article it seems that merely writing a device driver which uses the kernel module interface automatically makes the code a derived work.
It is very difficult to argue that a device driver is not part of the kernel. An optional part maybe, but still a part of the kernel. It can't really avoid being derived.
Now, what if someone wrote another standard driver interface, separate from the kernel interface, wrote a device driver which implemented that and then wrote a GPL'd interface wrapper which translated the Linux module interface to that of the new standard?
I think this would hold up provided the "standard driver interface" was not Linux specific. If the interface was intended for Linux specifically then the interface itself would be a derived work. Basically you can't use this technique to make an end-run around the GPL if that is clearly your intention. Otherwise you could use it in any GPL situation: eg. extend the Gimp by writing a GPL "interface" to the closed source code you want to add.
Yes, we are talinkg about some binary modules which are compiled before distribution and WHICH SIMPLY DOES NOT EXIST. All "binary only" modules i've seen so far contains at least a short kernel linkage stub which is distributed in source and compiled by the enduser, because this is the only way to ensure that the module is compatible with your running kernel.
What Linus is saying is that if the binary part of the driver is Linux kernel specific, or has been written with the Linux kernel in mind then it is at least a partial derived work. All derived works of a GPL'd product must also be GPL'd, so therefore anyone distributing the binary component must make source available, whether it is currently linked to the kernel or not.
This "grey area" exists because there is no clearly defined boundary defining the seperation between the kernel and the drivers.
Wrong. This "grey area" exists because there has been no legal clarification (legislation or case law) that defines what is and isn't a derived work in this case. But for drivers the area doesn't seem to be very grey: drivers are really part of the kernel in almost all cases as they have no use outside the context of the kernel, and have been written with the kernel in mind. Linus' opinion is that there are some cases where a module may not be a drived work, namely if the code in question was written without any consideration for Linux. This is the case with the Andrew File System, and also with the binary part of the nVidia drivers. However it is not clear if these "exceptions" are really not derived: that is the grey area.
In my lifetime scientists have claimed that artificial inteligences will be so far superior to human inteligences that they will rule the world for us. When would this occur by? Well according to some 1960s AI pioneers, we'd be ruled by AIs by the 1980s.
Got any references for this? When I studied AI (quite a few years ago) I don't remember seeing any claim remotely like this from AI researchers. Plenty of that sort of thing from SF authors, but nothing from AI researchers.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be justifying the high cost of replacing the batteries as being reasonable based on Apple design decisions. Don't you see what is wrong with that?
Summary: your analogy isn't very good (they almost never are when you compare stuff to cars).
Frankly few of the differences between the books and movies have bothered me. I also found the logic behind the changes to Faramir's character quite clear and reasonable. Has it occurred to you that it might be you rather than her that has the "misunderstanding"? I realise that you're not alone in your problems with that decision, but you are certainly in the minority.
Read I think, unless it was in one of TTT:EE docos. It was a while ago though, and there are so many interviews...
It seems to me that some people have slightly "romanticised" memories of the books and tend to pick out things that are different from their interpretation of the story, even when the movie interpretation is not that far from the text.
So it wasn't a true adaptation then. Can you imagine the outrage if LOTR had of had mearly similar characters and plotline? I doubt Peter Jackson would have escaped alive.
Yeah, I'll probably do that one day (or change the language setup as the other guy suggested). I'm not saying it's rational, just that it annoys the hell out of me.
The "K" thing really annoys me because it reminds me of script-kiddy language. It is actually a major reason why I haven't seriously used KDE in a long time.
I guess you think you're pretty funny, all I can say is "don't give up your day job".
Then again you are quite unintentionally funny.From the link you provided:
From dictionary.com:They are also looking at just how bad the radiation threat is likely to be. One of the experiments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. According to this article the radiation level would be about double that faced on the ISS, but still manageable. Amusingly the instrument on the probe used to measure the radiation levels has broken down due to radiation damage caused during the recent massive solar flares.
"I'd prefer there wasn't a closed source driver" is an opinion you are clearly applying only to yourself. "Having a closed source driver is worse than no driver at all" is a blanket statement that will be taken as applying to everyone. If that's not how you meant it you should have been more precise.