Why are punative damages awarded the plaintiff in any case?
The plaintiff gets 'compensatory' damages to "restore" them to a pre-injury state (to the extent that money can do so). If the point of punative damages is to punish the defendant (which seems to be implied in the word 'punative'), such money should go to government general revenue or to charity--it is more likely (though not guaranteed, I concede) to help society as a whole in those hands.
Like most people when they first heard about the McDonalds case, I thought that it was a stupid verdict. Reading the facts of the case, however, convinces most people otherwise.
Not me. I think that McDonalds was clearly wrong for not complying with safety considerations regarding valid use of their products. But not that this lady was a victim. In fact, she is one of the most stupid persons I've ever heard about.
McDonalds should have been sued by the government, with the money being redirected to a good cause. Not to some stupid person's pocket.
free and open-sourced platform which guarantees backward compatibility
I guess you're not talking about Linux then. Linux sucks at backward compatibility. It can't even hold a device driver compatible for more than a year.
1. Waiters aren't experts. Chefs are. So are computer technicians.
Computer technicians are not experts. They're at the bottom of the knowledge pyramid. They're maintenance monkeys, not experts.
Experts do not work on standardized maintenance procedures that depend solely on encyclopedical knowledge. That's why we have low-wage technicians for, so we can save the experts for important, innovative jobs.
Computer people are always confusing their position, because they think that computers are special. Guess what: that's a freaking lie. Computers are not special. Yes, they're the most complicated piece of technology that the average man can have technical contact with, but there are dozens of fields that require much more knowledge about extremely complicated stuff. Computer people confuse that because they think that their job is the only intelligent job in the planet.
Confusing a maintenance technician with a computer expert is the same thing as confusing a Machinist with a Mechanical Engineer. Or confusing an Electrician with an Electrical Engineer.
Btw: Engineers deal with much more complicated stuff than computer monkeys do. In fact, there are lots of engineering areas that use/develop computers, so they know more about computers than computer dudes. Yet, the worst behaved engineer is not even 1% as arrogant as the average computer guy.
Telling you not to eat lamb is a political action.
Exactly like advocating OSS just for the sake of it.
If the president of a country can do it...
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The Culture of Evasion
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The president of my country and his group broke the law hundreds of times, and covered a lot of crimes, including murder, and got away using the exact same excuse. They just pay someone else to do the dirty work, and when the person is caught, they fire him, acting all honest and justice-seeking for firing someone involved in a wrongdoing. Except that the wrongdoing fitted only to his own interests. Yet they say that the people that got arrested were doing it without their knowledge.
So you won't even be upgrading your OS to MS' next and greatest? If not, I tip my hat. If you will or ever have upgraded, then you're a lying hypocrite. Smple fact is, you learn new ways to do the same old stuff with just about every release of Windows. This is one of many reasons why companies are often slow to adopt; training. Gasp!
Our thread is about ease of use. Not about upgrades. Most changes on different versions of Windows are small and doesn't change the "car ship boat" classification of the OS. You said that there are a lot of types of transport. I said that the public wants a car to go to work, not a fishing boat. An OS upgrade will not change the context of this kind of analogy.
Yet according to you, common sense is all everyone needs and no one had to learn windows in the first place because it's all intuitive; which is 100% contrary to what useability studies say.
Nice strawman, zealot kiddie.
As you changed the subject, I NEED to add this then: whenever I want to solve anything at Windows, it's just a matter of looking around and in five minutes worth of app/menu searching, I found what I wanted. Whenever I want to solve anything at Linux, the sky turns red and the devil starts laughing at my face saying: HA HA HA, WANTED TO GO TO THE PARK TODAY, HUH? NICE TRY, BITCH!.
That's the difference between both OSes: One of them is intuitive, the other is not. One of them is an automated piece of software with a lot of problems, but a lot of planning and standardisation. The other one is a babysitting-needing piece of hardcoded software with no standards.
I'm sorry, but you're completely unrealistic and way out in left field. In other words, it's okay if you have to learn what MS does, but if it's a non-Windows platform then you'll cry and run to mommy about how the big, bad alternate desktop made you learn something again. Get real.
It's not about Microsoft, kiddie bitch. It's about well-made software. It's not about learning. It's about learning something that is WORTH LEARNING. I'll learn about Eclipse, but not about Emacs.
As I said in another part of this thread: I will only learn about important things. I don't give a RATS ASS about X.org configuration file syntax.
Nuff said. If you don't get it as this point...you never will.
No problem, I got it: you're stupid zealot kiddie bitch. Not worth the time.
With computer, everything working fine is the exception and automation screwing up is the rule.
No. And No. And No again. My computer works fine, thank you. I want to care about ARM registers and electronic circuits as that's my job. I'll leave the desktop Operating System to someone who has it as a job. I don't care about the latest choice of manual configuration syntax of some stupid software.
And that's what happens with my Win MCE laptop with good, automated tools: working is the rule, not the exception. I don't have to care about software specifics. It's a no-nonsense work enviroment.
And, since software is deterministic, it goes through the same auto-configure steps and arrives at the same wrong conclusion.
But the environment is not fixed. Most of the times a simple app/OS reload will solve the issue. If not, an 1-hour automated recovery disk will also do the trick. In the meantime, I'll just do something else.
It must be fun to be rich enough to have the option of being ignorant. Guess what ? I don't have that option.
Then you should stop wasting your time configuring X.org and MythTV and using it to make more money and increase your possibilities. That will help you a lot in life. Being ignorant about someting where I'm just a consumer allows me to save time and have money to obtain (time, tuition, etc.) more knowledge related to the things I really care about. You don't need to be knowledgeable about everything to be a smart person.
In fact, if you keep doing someone else's job in everything you do, you won't have time to become smart, you'll die as a bitter person with superficial knowledge about a lot of things but no real knowledge about important stuff.
But trying to hide complexity is not going to work, it simply leads to users who have no idea of causal relationships in their computer and thus have trouble getting it to do what they want.
It works for me and for millions of Windows computers across the globe.
I also like the part of "innovative knowledge" vs. "encyclopedic knowledge"; it means nothing (perhaps you meant creativity vs. knowledge ?) but sure sounds good.
Innovative knowledge: It's like going to college and using the obtained knowledge to invent things. Having good math skills is one good example.
Encyclopedic knowledge: It's like reading specific technical gibberish that anyone learn. Knowing how to configure X.org is a nice example.
You analogy is fairly broken. You 100% made exactly my point. You are incorrectly assuming that all the worlds vehicles function like a car. Surprise! They don't. Perhaps you've heard of tractors? Piston airplanes? Jet airplanes? Boats? Semi-trucks? Tanks? Ships? They are all vehicles (an OS) but each is operated slightly differently.
Whatever. The public wants a car. Not a truck, not a jet, not a boat. They want a car. If you're telling that users are "dumb" because they won't learn to operate an airplane, you're out of your mind. They don't need to operate an airplane in their daily routine. They use a car for it.
If the alternative O.S. of the market is like a ship instead of being like a nice confortable and easy to use car, it's time to acklowledge that the proposed alternative isn't a alternative at all.
And propably get it wrong. After which you have the oh-so-fun time of figuring out where the problem is and how to force the application to trust you.
There's nothing quite as fun as an application that refuses to install because it thinks you don't have enough disk space (since its makers didn't realize that hard disk space would one day be measured in gigabytes), except perhaps a monitor that claims that it can't do over 75 Hz refresh rates (it can), which in turn forces a Windows-user to use the unofficial refresh frequency override in NVidia's drivers, but that won't work unless you have administrator privileges - nice !
Now, admittedly, writing in modelines for XFree is not fun either, but once written, they stay there. The darn thing won't lose its settings or misbehave otherwise. So the difference between an automated system and a manual one is that manual one is hard to use, while an automated one is impossible to fix if it breaks.
Do you walk to work everyday because your car might have an unexpected problem? Do you ride a bike from California to New York, because airplanes sometimes get late at the boarding gate and busses might break in the middle of the trip?
Technological convenience is not about perfection. It's about saving time and/or confort and giving you possibilities. Automated softwares give me the possibility of enjoying life without having to lose time learning (even if it takes two minutes to do it) configuration syntaxes and dealing with software interaction problems. Yes, sometimes these things break. Then I just reinstall them. In the end, I spent less time bothering about my computer than I would have spent if I manually configured everything.
As I said to another guy in the thread: I CAN open my car and fix it. But I WON'T. If my cars starts giving me problems all the time, I'll just replace it. You don't need to prove all the time that you're knowledgeable. Sometimes things need to be objective and dumbed-down. Whoever rejects that needs to spend less time on the computer and worry more about family, work and a career. People need to stop giving computers too much importance, as innovative knowledge is more important than technical encyclopedic knowledge.
I'm sorry, but if you can't pick up Linux in less than 1-days effort (as a user), you're dumb as a door knob. And no amount of tweaking to Linux is going to change that. Dumb is dumb, regardless of which OS you run.
"I'm sorry, but" I'm a mechatronics enginneer. I would have no problem learning anything related to car mechanics. Any kind of mechanics-related technical knowledge would be a really simple task to an enginner of my area. Yet, I wouldn't buy a car that needs me to obtain extra technical knowledge about mechanics and grease-filled parts, just so I can operate it. Even if I wanted to pursue occasional car-fixing/tweaking as a hobby (a nice one, btw), I would not choose a car that needs technical babysitting to be operated.
If you think the issue is about the ability to learning something, you're out of your mind. The whole issue is about the need to learn something. We can extend this kind of "don't wait the world to bend over, learn it" nonsense to most areas of human activity. So "picking up Linux" in less than one day is not important at all if that other O.S. from that other company will give the user a better experience.
My work is primarily related to embedded electronics, wich includes running a lot of Linux and vxWorks kernels inside US$ 10 ARM processors. I really enjoy dealing with theses machines and coding from them. Yet, I don't give a RAT'S ASS about what kind of twisted and stupid syntax (and even worse: inter-software configuration relationships) I'll need to learn "in less than 5 minutes of effort" to properly configure my monitor/wifi/mythTV/sound/whatever in a workstation/desktop. I'll just stick to my always-working Win MCE laptop, thank you.
Learning this kind of cheap encyclopedical knowledge about computers is not about "not being dumb", but about losing your time. I don't give a crap about "the beauty" of "getting in touch with the inner workings of an OS" or any other kind of dumb-tech nonsense. All I want is a machine to run CodeWarrior without having to bother about how will my sound deamon interact with manual configurations of a stupid media player or something like that.
In fact, I'll give a comment back to you: If you can't manage to use Windows without all these imaginary problems that Linux fanatics make jokes about, sorry, but you're dumb as a door knob.
If your car or your power tool worked like MS software does You wouldn't use it, you would return it and ask for something better. MS software do not make life easier... a Mac makes life easier.
A Mac makes me want to punch my LCD 8 times a day. It makes stupid tasks easier to those who are afraid of computer, and important tasks a hell more difficult and frustrating.
Thank cows I managed to sell my old powerbook to some yuppie down the street.
The reason why people buy MS software is first and foremost because they allmost can't buy a PC without it, and second because of the FUD spread by the sales drones...
You say that Linux is not the best OS in the universe... You are of course right... it is however, the best OS available right now on planet earth.
Yeah, right. The quality of the MS product is never a valid point.
You people sound just like those death-to-america radicals, or even worse: those stupid attention-seeking communists from the past.
It's time to wake up: "the enemy" is not as bad as you think.
Wrong. Linux is ready for the desktop for many, many people. It's used daily by many, including my self. It's perfectly able to run a desktop. Desktop use and the specifics given above have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Let me be clear, MythTV != Desktop.
The world of technology is not about anecdotal evidence. Who cares if you or anybody else uses it as their desktop of choice? Technology is not about possibilities, it's about convenience. It works that way inside a user's desktop, and works that way inside a NASA facility. It's all about convenience.
Linux might be "able to run a desktop", but it's still not a convenient choice. It DOES lack a lot of things for it to become convenient.
Now then, the biggest reason Linux isn't ready for the masses' desktop is simple. People know what they know and Linux isn't what they know.
Yeah, sure. It will never be the developer's fault, right? The OSS applications are always perfect. What the hell: if people like you talked that SAME crap at the kernel 2.2 times, where everything desktop-related really sucked (A LOT), what stops you from doing it today, when things got real better?
Face it: the problem will always be the user for you people.
What's really the user's fault is not wanting time sacrifice to use the software with the best (and the first perfect one in history) ideology of mankind. =]
A) It's really not based on Knoppix. Cecil (the maintainer) uses the Knoppix scripts a bit for hardware detection, but the whole thing is custom. It's Knoppix in name only as he says. It's really just a custom Debian Sid distro. B)The next major stable release of Knoppmyth is going to be based on Ubuntu so that it will have better hardware support and be easier to maintain.
Wouldn't it be better if MythTV was just easier to configure, without needing boring sessions of configuring the obvious?
My notebook is a MCE machine with a TV tuner. Only one TV tuner. Not two, not three, one. Guess what happened? Automatic detection, and MCE did not bother me with nonsense debug messages and acknowledgements. It did not made me think about a database server (all I want is to watch TV, damn it), or call command-line utilities.
It just worked, executed the job it was created for: entertaining me. I said entertain, not bore the hell out of me and waste my time.
Then and not until then will my mother think "why do I need this windows for anyway?" and might try linux out on the home computer.
She will never think that because the "MUST REPLACE WINDOWS NOW" ideology is exclusive to people with emotional attachment to Linux. Normal people don't see the word that way. For them, Microsoft is not the enemy that needs to be removed at any cost.
Windows is just a product and as long as is makes user's life easier (even if it's only through familiarity) and it's cheap (or free as in "Dell included it in my PC"), it will be used my the masses. It's not like the average user spends his day thinking "man, I need to replace [whatever product], because [whatever company] is really evil and I hate its founder". And even if he did, he would think about companies and products related to his profession or his interests. And computers are not included in that.
Another thing: Linux fans (as opposed to Linux users) ignore the fact that Linux is not the best operating system in the universe and the first perfect creation of mankind. As much as they think that "MS SUCKZ SUCKZ, DIE BILL GAYTEZZZZ", both Windows and Linux compete in individual features, where one is better than the other, while in other features it's the opposite.
IMHO, Windows is still the better choice for a lot of people. A proof of that we have dozens of bootable CDs created so users can use specific applications, like MythTV, without spending hours configuring the obvious and making application configurations work with daemon configurations, something that needs to be resolved automatically between both softwares, and not manually.
Wow, that's a pretty good argument. I had no idea my point of view was so nuanced. Thanks for bringing this up, instead of creating a strawman or something, which you could have done. If more people communicated in such a dignified and respectful manner, we could accomplish so much more as a people.
It's not possible to point "strawman! strawman!" at me because I was giving an explanation, not an answer. The parent poster made a question, not an argumentation, and I answered it. It's not possible for me to attribute any position (that's what a strawman is) to his message, as my text is not related to any opinion of his.
My storytelling yelling is just an example of why people spread the word as IE is not uninstallable and Safari is, not a strawman.
I guess the difference here then is that WebKit (based on KHTML and KJS from KDE) is actually standards-compliant, robust, and secure, while mshtml.dll is currently the most outdated, insecure, standards-raping pile of web-renderring shit on the face of the earth.
That's a quality (*) difference, not an uninstallation difference.
It would be much better if the original package was well developed, without the need of hand-made configuration and detection scripts inside some custom-made boot cd. KnnopMyth (and all other specific bootable CDs) is just a lame fix for a bigger problem: lack of application quality.
It's time to put the computer to work for us, instead of the opposite. We need programs with better configuration handling and detection. A lot of Linux apps need the user to insert of lot of data that the application could simply obtain automatically.
Why it doesn't? Because there is not a planned structure to accomodate this kind of automation. Those softwares grow by being appended with more and more code, wih no global planning at all.
Need a XYZ functionality? Ok, I'll just append it to the codebase. Why bother planning a good structure to provide abstraction to accomodate these kind of features in an organized way? It's Linux, right?
If the kernel can't even manage to have a HAL, why the hell would the applications bother to organize and plan the code?
Does uninstalling IE and replacing it with Firefox or Opera still break Windows? Because deleting Safari & doing the same on my Mac doesn't break OS X...
Uninstalling IE will not break Windows. What breaks Windows is the removal of Windows web-rendering DLLs, and the same thing happens to MacOS if you remove the system libraries associated to folder and web rendering.
The thing is: People consider to be "perfectly ok" to have a MacOS X system with all those libraries, as "they're a part of the operating system". But when they remove IE, they want every single web-related library removed, because "MICROSHAFT IS EVIL, DIE DIE DIE BILL GATES DIE!!!!! 31337z0r0rz DIEE!!!!".
So, from an unbiased point of view, both situations are identical. But from a biased "M$-SUCKS" point of view, IE can't be uninstalled.
If you're talking about choice, then just uninstall IE using Windows Control Panel, it will remove everything related to the IE application, so your users can exclusively use Firefox. If you're talking about zealotry, then bitch all you want about web dlls, because they are not going away.
Yeah, they did screw up. Parrot will beat CLI for speed in dynamic languages by huge magnitudes of speed because it is designed for them. CLI is optimized for static languages.
1. RTFA. It talks about naive and uninformed (generated by hate) opinions like yours, and says that they are wrong.
2. The CLR is optimized for static languages, but not innefficient for dynamic ones. In fact, that's all the article is about.
I wonder how much this research relates to Intel's renewed desire to become a graphics player.
Whoever modded you up is on crack. Intel is the largest player of the graphics market. It does not develop any kind of "omg 31337 skillz" GPU because the gaming market does not serve its interests. If they wanted to, they would.
You do of course realize that if the old guy has installed this device, he probably realizes that it is driving people nuts, as that is its sole intended purpose?
Your advice is the equivalent of GWB trying to talk politely with Osama, and tell him "hey, dude, you know those planes? They really hurt our feelings, man".
Ended with...what? No more laser pointer? Ambulance? No more old man?
Oh, sorry. I forgot the most important part. =]
Ended with a really bitter yet afraid old man who spent the rest of his life away from the window. No one needed to get his laser pointer because he knew that the next time he did that, he would be propably beaten up again.
For the next years, every single kid that felt something strange (not necessarily related to their eyes) or even just saw him at the window complained about it to their parents, who would show up at his front door with a really bad attitude and a very explicit physical intervention threat.
A guy down the street, with 3 child daughters at home, talked about turning him blind with his own laser (can't see, can't aim), but most people weren't exactly fans of this kind of solution.
He died three years ago, from natural causes (I guess, nobody ever cared to ask about him), and now his son lives there. It's a nice guy, but everyone hates him and threats him like crap, because of what his father did in the past.
The funniest thing about this history is that his "reasons" were revealed (by himself) after the eye accident hapenned, and he ended up with a severely damaged car painting. Even 50-year old soccer moms would stop at his house to destroy his car. It turned up to be a bery constant and funny neighborhood activity.
You might try... oh... I don't know... TALKING to him about it? You know, person to person? And leave your attitude at the door.
If that fails, and it may well do so, go talk to your neighbors. Get about 20 of you. go knock on his door together and POLITELY state that his little toy is driving the entire neighborhood nuts and you'd all really appreciate him turning it off. Bring food. Make it an event. Hell, throw a neighborhood barbecue while you're at it.
Would you do that to someone who is going to steal your house? Seriously. Think about it.
And, BTW: talking to him would only expose you to the statistical danger of wanting to kick his ass and break his elderly bones. You'll never know how these paranoid SOBs will react to your presence.
I used to live close to an elderly paranoid SOB who thought that every single young person in the planet was going to damage his car painting. He bought a 5mW laser pointer and seriously damaged the eyes of two twelve year old brothers (with rich parents who could pay for any painting damage that could be done) because he used to stay all day at the window, targeting younger people's eyes. The worst thing about the whole situation was the fact that these children were fixing their bicycles, in front of their own house, sitting inside their own property.
Other disturbing fact about what happened is that his son once acknowledged that the old man's car was never damaged by anyone. It was just plain paranoia about "possibilities". Later on we found out that while he was young, the now elderly SOB used to damage other people's cars and that was the reason for his paranoia.
The story ended with the kid's father beating the crap out of the old man after being attacked with the laser, while he was standing at his front door, asking about what happened.
Try to behave like a man. Knock on his door, and ask him _politely_ why he thinks he needs to keep you and your friends away from your home.
That's not being a man. It really doesn't matter at all why he wants to keep anyone away from public places. If the device range is invading public space, he is wrong, period.
Real men don't ask about people's reasons for doing illegal actions. First, you should defend yourself. If someone is beating the crap out of your face, you will fight back (breaking his little toy). It's not possible to sue while being beaten. If you can (if it's better to) run away, you call the cops. If the cops don't solve the issue immediately, they sue. If the legal system doesn't works, you take preventive actions to avoid being attacked again.
Being real men is mostly about defending yourself and taking responsability for your own actions. Asking "why are you beating me?" is not acting like a man, it's more like acting like a pussy. NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE, should be obliged to act like babysitters for people envolved in wrongdoings. You're not his relative, he doesn't give a crap about you. There is no need to be polite with proposital agressors.
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McDonalds should have been sued by the government, with the money being redirected to a good cause. Not to some stupid person's pocket.
Experts do not work on standardized maintenance procedures that depend solely on encyclopedical knowledge. That's why we have low-wage technicians for, so we can save the experts for important, innovative jobs.
Computer people are always confusing their position, because they think that computers are special. Guess what: that's a freaking lie. Computers are not special. Yes, they're the most complicated piece of technology that the average man can have technical contact with, but there are dozens of fields that require much more knowledge about extremely complicated stuff. Computer people confuse that because they think that their job is the only intelligent job in the planet.
Confusing a maintenance technician with a computer expert is the same thing as confusing a Machinist with a Mechanical Engineer. Or confusing an Electrician with an Electrical Engineer.
Btw: Engineers deal with much more complicated stuff than computer monkeys do. In fact, there are lots of engineering areas that use/develop computers, so they know more about computers than computer dudes. Yet, the worst behaved engineer is not even 1% as arrogant as the average computer guy.
Exactly like advocating OSS just for the sake of it.
The president of my country and his group broke the law hundreds of times, and covered a lot of crimes, including murder, and got away using the exact same excuse. They just pay someone else to do the dirty work, and when the person is caught, they fire him, acting all honest and justice-seeking for firing someone involved in a wrongdoing. Except that the wrongdoing fitted only to his own interests. Yet they say that the people that got arrested were doing it without their knowledge.
Power corrupts.
Nice strawman, zealot kiddie.
As you changed the subject, I NEED to add this then: whenever I want to solve anything at Windows, it's just a matter of looking around and in five minutes worth of app/menu searching, I found what I wanted. Whenever I want to solve anything at Linux, the sky turns red and the devil starts laughing at my face saying: HA HA HA, WANTED TO GO TO THE PARK TODAY, HUH? NICE TRY, BITCH!.
That's the difference between both OSes: One of them is intuitive, the other is not. One of them is an automated piece of software with a lot of problems, but a lot of planning and standardisation. The other one is a babysitting-needing piece of hardcoded software with no standards.
It's not about Microsoft, kiddie bitch. It's about well-made software. It's not about learning. It's about learning something that is WORTH LEARNING. I'll learn about Eclipse, but not about Emacs.
As I said in another part of this thread: I will only learn about important things. I don't give a RATS ASS about X.org configuration file syntax.
No problem, I got it: you're stupid zealot kiddie bitch. Not worth the time.
And that's what happens with my Win MCE laptop with good, automated tools: working is the rule, not the exception. I don't have to care about software specifics. It's a no-nonsense work enviroment.
But the environment is not fixed. Most of the times a simple app/OS reload will solve the issue. If not, an 1-hour automated recovery disk will also do the trick. In the meantime, I'll just do something else.
Then you should stop wasting your time configuring X.org and MythTV and using it to make more money and increase your possibilities. That will help you a lot in life. Being ignorant about someting where I'm just a consumer allows me to save time and have money to obtain (time, tuition, etc.) more knowledge related to the things I really care about. You don't need to be knowledgeable about everything to be a smart person.
In fact, if you keep doing someone else's job in everything you do, you won't have time to become smart, you'll die as a bitter person with superficial knowledge about a lot of things but no real knowledge about important stuff.
It works for me and for millions of Windows computers across the globe.
Innovative knowledge: It's like going to college and using the obtained knowledge to invent things. Having good math skills is one good example.
Encyclopedic knowledge: It's like reading specific technical gibberish that anyone learn. Knowing how to configure X.org is a nice example.
If the alternative O.S. of the market is like a ship instead of being like a nice confortable and easy to use car, it's time to acklowledge that the proposed alternative isn't a alternative at all.
Technological convenience is not about perfection. It's about saving time and/or confort and giving you possibilities. Automated softwares give me the possibility of enjoying life without having to lose time learning (even if it takes two minutes to do it) configuration syntaxes and dealing with software interaction problems. Yes, sometimes these things break. Then I just reinstall them. In the end, I spent less time bothering about my computer than I would have spent if I manually configured everything.
As I said to another guy in the thread: I CAN open my car and fix it. But I WON'T. If my cars starts giving me problems all the time, I'll just replace it. You don't need to prove all the time that you're knowledgeable. Sometimes things need to be objective and dumbed-down. Whoever rejects that needs to spend less time on the computer and worry more about family, work and a career. People need to stop giving computers too much importance, as innovative knowledge is more important than technical encyclopedic knowledge.
If you think the issue is about the ability to learning something, you're out of your mind. The whole issue is about the need to learn something. We can extend this kind of "don't wait the world to bend over, learn it" nonsense to most areas of human activity. So "picking up Linux" in less than one day is not important at all if that other O.S. from that other company will give the user a better experience.
My work is primarily related to embedded electronics, wich includes running a lot of Linux and vxWorks kernels inside US$ 10 ARM processors. I really enjoy dealing with theses machines and coding from them. Yet, I don't give a RAT'S ASS about what kind of twisted and stupid syntax (and even worse: inter-software configuration relationships) I'll need to learn "in less than 5 minutes of effort" to properly configure my monitor/wifi/mythTV/sound/whatever in a workstation/desktop. I'll just stick to my always-working Win MCE laptop, thank you.
Learning this kind of cheap encyclopedical knowledge about computers is not about "not being dumb", but about losing your time. I don't give a crap about "the beauty" of "getting in touch with the inner workings of an OS" or any other kind of dumb-tech nonsense. All I want is a machine to run CodeWarrior without having to bother about how will my sound deamon interact with manual configurations of a stupid media player or something like that.
In fact, I'll give a comment back to you: If you can't manage to use Windows without all these imaginary problems that Linux fanatics make jokes about, sorry, but you're dumb as a door knob.
Thank cows I managed to sell my old powerbook to some yuppie down the street.
Yeah, right. The quality of the MS product is never a valid point.
You people sound just like those death-to-america radicals, or even worse: those stupid attention-seeking communists from the past.
It's time to wake up: "the enemy" is not as bad as you think.
Linux might be "able to run a desktop", but it's still not a convenient choice. It DOES lack a lot of things for it to become convenient.
My notebook is a MCE machine with a TV tuner. Only one TV tuner. Not two, not three, one. Guess what happened? Automatic detection, and MCE did not bother me with nonsense debug messages and acknowledgements. It did not made me think about a database server (all I want is to watch TV, damn it), or call command-line utilities.
It just worked, executed the job it was created for: entertaining me. I said entertain, not bore the hell out of me and waste my time.
Windows is just a product and as long as is makes user's life easier (even if it's only through familiarity) and it's cheap (or free as in "Dell included it in my PC"), it will be used my the masses. It's not like the average user spends his day thinking "man, I need to replace [whatever product], because [whatever company] is really evil and I hate its founder". And even if he did, he would think about companies and products related to his profession or his interests. And computers are not included in that.
Another thing: Linux fans (as opposed to Linux users) ignore the fact that Linux is not the best operating system in the universe and the first perfect creation of mankind. As much as they think that "MS SUCKZ SUCKZ, DIE BILL GAYTEZZZZ", both Windows and Linux compete in individual features, where one is better than the other, while in other features it's the opposite.
IMHO, Windows is still the better choice for a lot of people. A proof of that we have dozens of bootable CDs created so users can use specific applications, like MythTV, without spending hours configuring the obvious and making application configurations work with daemon configurations, something that needs to be resolved automatically between both softwares, and not manually.
My storytelling yelling is just an example of why people spread the word as IE is not uninstallable and Safari is, not a strawman.
(*) In your opinion.
=]
It's time to put the computer to work for us, instead of the opposite. We need programs with better configuration handling and detection. A lot of Linux apps need the user to insert of lot of data that the application could simply obtain automatically.
Why it doesn't? Because there is not a planned structure to accomodate this kind of automation. Those softwares grow by being appended with more and more code, wih no global planning at all.
Need a XYZ functionality? Ok, I'll just append it to the codebase. Why bother planning a good structure to provide abstraction to accomodate these kind of features in an organized way? It's Linux, right?
If the kernel can't even manage to have a HAL, why the hell would the applications bother to organize and plan the code?
The thing is: People consider to be "perfectly ok" to have a MacOS X system with all those libraries, as "they're a part of the operating system". But when they remove IE, they want every single web-related library removed, because "MICROSHAFT IS EVIL, DIE DIE DIE BILL GATES DIE!!!!! 31337z0r0rz DIEE!!!!".
So, from an unbiased point of view, both situations are identical. But from a biased "M$-SUCKS" point of view, IE can't be uninstalled.
If you're talking about choice, then just uninstall IE using Windows Control Panel, it will remove everything related to the IE application, so your users can exclusively use Firefox. If you're talking about zealotry, then bitch all you want about web dlls, because they are not going away.
2. The CLR is optimized for static languages, but not innefficient for dynamic ones. In fact, that's all the article is about.
3. RTFA!
Best
comparison
ever.
Really
Ended with a really bitter yet afraid old man who spent the rest of his life away from the window. No one needed to get his laser pointer because he knew that the next time he did that, he would be propably beaten up again.
For the next years, every single kid that felt something strange (not necessarily related to their eyes) or even just saw him at the window complained about it to their parents, who would show up at his front door with a really bad attitude and a very explicit physical intervention threat.
A guy down the street, with 3 child daughters at home, talked about turning him blind with his own laser (can't see, can't aim), but most people weren't exactly fans of this kind of solution.
He died three years ago, from natural causes (I guess, nobody ever cared to ask about him), and now his son lives there. It's a nice guy, but everyone hates him and threats him like crap, because of what his father did in the past.
The funniest thing about this history is that his "reasons" were revealed (by himself) after the eye accident hapenned, and he ended up with a severely damaged car painting. Even 50-year old soccer moms would stop at his house to destroy his car. It turned up to be a bery constant and funny neighborhood activity.
And, BTW: talking to him would only expose you to the statistical danger of wanting to kick his ass and break his elderly bones. You'll never know how these paranoid SOBs will react to your presence.
I used to live close to an elderly paranoid SOB who thought that every single young person in the planet was going to damage his car painting. He bought a 5mW laser pointer and seriously damaged the eyes of two twelve year old brothers (with rich parents who could pay for any painting damage that could be done) because he used to stay all day at the window, targeting younger people's eyes. The worst thing about the whole situation was the fact that these children were fixing their bicycles, in front of their own house, sitting inside their own property.
Other disturbing fact about what happened is that his son once acknowledged that the old man's car was never damaged by anyone. It was just plain paranoia about "possibilities". Later on we found out that while he was young, the now elderly SOB used to damage other people's cars and that was the reason for his paranoia.
The story ended with the kid's father beating the crap out of the old man after being attacked with the laser, while he was standing at his front door, asking about what happened.
Real men don't ask about people's reasons for doing illegal actions. First, you should defend yourself. If someone is beating the crap out of your face, you will fight back (breaking his little toy). It's not possible to sue while being beaten. If you can (if it's better to) run away, you call the cops. If the cops don't solve the issue immediately, they sue. If the legal system doesn't works, you take preventive actions to avoid being attacked again.
Being real men is mostly about defending yourself and taking responsability for your own actions. Asking "why are you beating me?" is not acting like a man, it's more like acting like a pussy. NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE, should be obliged to act like babysitters for people envolved in wrongdoings. You're not his relative, he doesn't give a crap about you. There is no need to be polite with proposital agressors.