Meanwhile I'll be gaming on my phone and won't want to yank down the notification bar by accident.
It's right to allow full screen as an option for apps. App writers just need to think more before using it.
I'm fine with offering the USER this option. By all means let the app writer express a preference as well. However, the end user should be able to override the app setting.
Re:Oh, great, exactly what I don't want...
on
Ubuntu Phone OS Unveiled
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'd argue that Android doesn't go far enough.
It is really annoying to be running an app playing some video full screen and in order to adjust the screen brightness I must: 1. Hit home to get out of the app. 2. Access the quick settings menu in the upper right. 3. Adjust the brightness. 4. Open the recently-used list to find the app and go back.
The only reason this is necessary is because Android allows apps to run full screen and block access to the notification bar. If I'm on a 10" tablet, I don't mind having a few pixels of mostly black space set aside so that I can still have notifications. By all means make it configurable, but I want to be able to keep apps from blocking access to it.
I doubt it, unless you do something to otherwise void your warranty.
Despite what you read on forums all over the place, rooting a device does not affect its warranty. Mistreating the hardware does, and that can potentially include things that you can do via software.
With ChromeOS you can just flip the switch back, and it re-enables secure boot. When you boot it up if you haven't actually changed the OS partition it will simply remove root access (disables certain functions in crosh, won't flash arbitrary images in recovery). If you did change the OS partition then the boot will fail and it will go into recovery mode, in which case you need to stick in a USB drive with a valid official recovery image on it (you can download these from Google), and then it will flash back to factory condition.
The only thing that gets really messy is if you flash the firmware, which requires both flipping the switch and removing the case (there is another switch). If you do that you can potentially brick your device - that doesn't void your warranty per se, but the manufacturer isn't obligated to help you flash it back either.
If you want a car analogy, changing your radio cannot void your warranty on its own, but if your new radio dumps a huge surge into the electrical system they don't have to fix it. You can replace your spark plugs but if in the process you break your pistons they don't have to fix that either. However, if you also notice that your water pump is leaking after doing all of this they DO have to fix your water pump, since you didn't do anything to break that. After they're done the car might not work, and they don't have to do anything further as long as they fix the stuff that broke due to manufacturing defects and not due to abuse.
Oh, and your rights under the law and what a manufacturer helpfully goes along with are two different things. You can have a completely valid warranty and yet end up having to sue the manufacturer because they want to abuse you. Being right and winning in court are also two different things, though often they tend to go together.
Keep in mind that ChromeOS does one thing - it runs the Chrome browser.
So, other than the login screen being a tiny bit different (but working the same), it works just like Chrome on any other platform, including on windows. Lots of people run Chrome on Windows, so why would they be put off by Chrome on ChromeOS.
Google basically said that if all you're going to do is launch a browser 95% of the time anyway, then you can cut out all the junk that just tends to break and make the entire rest of the OS a shell around the browser. You just flip it open, click add user, punch in your gmail username/password, and you're off. Everything is sandboxed as is always the case in Chrome, and the OS gives you full disk encryption with the syncing of all settings to the cloud. The OS uses secure boot, so no viruses/etc. All this means that ChromeOS devices are basically interchangeable - using another person's device is no different than using your own, and if you lose it you just get another one. You get all the security/backups/etc of a well-done corporate laptop out of the box.
I suspect long-term there will be convergence, but when you think about it a laptop and a phone/tablet are very different experiences.
The former has a usable keyboard and a trackpad. The latter has a touch screen, GPS, and accelerometers.
While it is the latest fashion to try to make one-size-fits-all UIs, I don't think anybody has figured out a way to make this work well. Unless apps are all written to handle either UI you end up needing a separate app ecosystem as well.
ChromeOS is based on Gentoo, but they use a Gentoo feature that lets you direct the package installs to a chroot. So, they basically build the entire distro from source cross-compiled for the target processor, but with only those packages needed in production. That does not include a toolchain, and it doesn't even include the package manager. Unless you looked pretty carefully you'd never know that it was based off of Gentoo.
You could of course build ChromiumOS (the open source version of ChromeOS) with the toolchain included. Keep in mind that Chrome tends to run on fairly slow hardware, so if your goal is to put Gnome/KDE/etc on the thing you're probably better off just building it that way on another system.
ChromeOS also does not use the live Gentoo package repository - they are basically a fork, pulling in updated packages from time to time. That makes sense since they are not a rolling-release-based distro like Gentoo.
I believe Gentoo was chosen because it offered them a lot of flexibility - they can easily tune the dependencies for individual packages and so on, while having all the benefits of using an established distro for all the stuff they didn't care to tweak. Gentoo also has some pretty good cross-compilation tools.
This is because the $45k figure is both misleading, and a regression.
Apparently the AMT exemption last year for joint incomes was $74k. This year it will be $45k unless it is raised - the level it was in 2000. They pass a law each year setting a one-year-only rate for the AMT, the logic being that raising it for all time would be "expensive" despite the fact that they're going to do it anyway.
The way the tax laws work is this. Figure out your regular taxes as you always do. Then take your gross income and subtract the AMT exemption and then calculate 26% of that number. That is your AMT tax due. You then pay whichever sum is larger, which for most people tends to be the ordinary income taxes.
So, yes, a married couple making $45k MIGHT be hit by the AMT, but only if their deductions exceeded their income so that they didn't have any tax due at all otherwise. A more realistic scenario is a couple making something closer to $100k. The AMT for such a couple would be about $17k, so if the regular taxes worked out to less than that they would have to pay AMT. That is still only 17% of their income.
They'll raise the exemption for sure, at least to the 2011 figures. It just is a matter of how much chaos they cause before then.
Oh, and if you're getting a refund you're going it wrong. I owe money every year by design, so I'm in no rush to get my return in. As long as you don't owe too much you can reduce your withholding without penalty. If you do owe too much then you have to pay interest on the money you failed to withhold. However, the rules aren't that harsh - as long as you withhold as much as you actually owed the year prior you'll never see a penalty.
Actually, micro-USB is more rugged than full size USB. I've yet to break a micro-USB connector, but I've broken several full-size ones.
Micro-USB is also designed to break on the peripheral side (which is often just a cable), and not on the host side. Full-sized USB tends to break on the host side. Since I tend not to replace my computer cases at the rate I'm going just about all my front USB ports on my desktop are going to end up being extension cables run from the back.
Yup. Of course the 5 lbs of weight that would result might put off buyers.
I don't get the gripe with micro USB. It would make more sense to just have that used for everything including peripherals - the full-size USB connectors are prone to breaking and are more cumbersome. There is no reason your PC can't use a micro USB connector. For the transition period, just use dongles.
Maybe, but until the Nexus 10 came along there really wasn't a decently supported 10" option for tablets that was less expensive than the iPad.
The other factor is that some of those 7" tablets might be second tablets bought by those who already have 10" tablets. There is way more growth in tablets than PCs right now, but I don't really see anybody getting rid of their PC - they just already have one so they don't need a new one.
When I bought a tablet I looked at the 7" ones and figured that they are barely any larger than my phone, so what is the point? I already have a 4.5" phone I carry everywhere with me.
The guy did admit to his mistake, read the entire thread.
Linus over-reacted, and in any segment of society other than Slashdot-land that would be completely obvious.
Look, Linus has written good code, and his pragmatic approach to managing the kernel has been exemplary. His human interaction skills used to be better, and honestly I have to say that they suck right now. He really comes across as the girl in high school that is beautiful and treats everybody like garbage because she knows she can get away with it.
Whatever, he certainly hasn't earned my respect with this thread. If others feel differently, well, whatever. They're entitled to their opinions and I'll treat them professionally regardless of whether they merit it.
I didn't see any insults in the developer's response. It seemed like he was more curious over why PulseAudio had anything to do with V4L. I agree with Linus that the return codes shouldn't change, but it seemed like the developer was curious more than he was malicious. It isn't like he marked a bug closed as WONTFIX.
4. Linus, as witness and police chief, tells Dude A to STFU, take responsibility or he'll haul his ass in for fucking up and trying to weasel out of it....Simple enough?
If a police officer treated somebody in the way Linus treated his developer and was recorded, he would likely be out of a job, doubly so if he were the police chief.
Police officers are supposed to control the situation, not scream obscenities.
You're also neglecting the fact that Linus has a relationship with the kernel maintainer, and it is in his interest to maintain that relationship. If Linus really feels like he is just so saturated with help that he'd rather drive people away than deal with them in a respectful way, then he'll get his wish if he keeps it up.
The guy who made the commit wasn't a fool - he made a mistake. If he was a fool, then Linus was a fool to grant him commit access.
Not a just a fool, a knave.
And what is this "commit access" of which you speak? Linux isn't developed using CVS you know.
With git "commit access" basically just means trusting somebody to submit patches.
The fact is that this patch ended up in the final kernel tarball. That means that (perhaps indirectly) Linus trusted this guy to OK patches without any further review. So, either the guy is competent (and therefore not a fool), or Linus decided to trust an incompetent person (and thus Linus is a fool).
The bottom line is that even the best people make mistakes. That doesn't mean that you don't take steps to fix and prevent mistakes. However, name calling doesn't really accomplish that.
That is quite interesting claim, considering how many people he has been able to attract to work on his project, without paying them any money.
My sense is that this behavior has been getting worse with time. I suspect that if he treated people this way back when nobody had heard of him that today still nobody would have heard of him.
Do you like working with bad programmers if you yourself know that you are a good one and always have to cleanup the mess others do? Wouldn't you love to have a boss that kicks out those who cause the mess?
I'd love to have a boss that kicks out such people, assuming that he couldn't work with them to improve their skills. I would not love to have a boss who screams at such people in public.
There are managers who are abusive like that to varying degrees in my workplace. Anybody who is competent does anything they can do to avoid working for them. And people who are competent are in sufficient demand that they can basically choose their assignments. If one gets assigned to the abusive manager due to a re-org they just take on extra duties working for others and let their work for the abusive manager slide as much as they can get away with, until they effectively end up working for others anyway. The abusive manager ends up under-delivering, and this eventually catches up with them.
Even in a workplace where you pay your workers it pays to be nice to them. Even sociopaths can treat people nicely, if only to manipulate them.
Mistreating people will eventually come back to haunt you. Linus doesn't do it quite so often, and in the past he didn't really do it much at all. However, if this becomes a trend he WILL find it harder to get people to work with him. The result will be more projects run like Android, where they fork the kernel first, become popular, and then Linus is basically forced to mainline the patches whether he likes them or not or risk becoming irrelevant.
Seriously. I wonder what kind of mistakes qualify for beatings in his household, and when they decide to just cut their losses and kill the other in their sleep...?
If getting the burgers right is more important than treating your spouse with respect, then your priorities are SERIOUSLY out of whack.
If it was a test kernel, then things break. That's why we test them.
If this was a release kernel, then no patch should be made that isn't a fix for an identified regression. If that is the policy then obviously this broke it. However, I suspect that people play fast and loose with patches on linux release candidates all the time, and this is just the guy who made the most recent mistake.
Quality is a process, not the result of yelling at people who make mistakes.
I understand exactly what went wrong with this patch, and I'd certainly never want to become a kernel committer with that kind of attitude in place. Sooner or later everybody makes mistakes - how a leader deals with failure is a clear testimony to their character. This isn't the kind of behavior that inspires anything but fear. There are a billion FOSS projects I can work on, or I can start my own. Why would I work on the project where some famous person can flame me in public when I make an inevitable mistake?
Jesus christ when did people become such pussies that telling them to shut the fuck up is comparable to public execution?
It probably started around the time they started letting peasants buy guns. If you consistently treat people like this in a workplace you manage you might just get to witness a public execution firsthand.
So simply being a nice person is now manipulative because it makes people like you? Do you even realise what you're saying?
There is nothing nice about causing harm for no reason to other people (users in this case) while smiling and talking politely.
If somebody rear-ends my car at a light, they have caused me harm. Do I therefore get out of my car and start screaming at him to "punish" him for his sins? No, I simply call the police to have a report created, and exchange insurance info. It will no doubt cost the guy money, and his insurance company will no doubt give him incentive not to repeat the incident. But, the fact is that it was an accident - that is why we call them accidents.
People mess up - it is a defining characteristic of humanity. Sometimes they even mess up and don't realize that they messed up. If you can't deal with this, then go do the rest of the human race a favor and have yourself committed.
And as far as "for no reason" goes, read the entire thread. There actually was a reason for the patch, and the reason was a good one. The implementation was incorrect, but the intent was not malicious.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile I'll be gaming on my phone and won't want to yank down the notification bar by accident.
It's right to allow full screen as an option for apps. App writers just need to think more before using it.
I'm fine with offering the USER this option. By all means let the app writer express a preference as well. However, the end user should be able to override the app setting.
I'd argue that Android doesn't go far enough.
It is really annoying to be running an app playing some video full screen and in order to adjust the screen brightness I must:
1. Hit home to get out of the app.
2. Access the quick settings menu in the upper right.
3. Adjust the brightness.
4. Open the recently-used list to find the app and go back.
The only reason this is necessary is because Android allows apps to run full screen and block access to the notification bar. If I'm on a 10" tablet, I don't mind having a few pixels of mostly black space set aside so that I can still have notifications. By all means make it configurable, but I want to be able to keep apps from blocking access to it.
I doubt it, unless you do something to otherwise void your warranty.
Despite what you read on forums all over the place, rooting a device does not affect its warranty. Mistreating the hardware does, and that can potentially include things that you can do via software.
With ChromeOS you can just flip the switch back, and it re-enables secure boot. When you boot it up if you haven't actually changed the OS partition it will simply remove root access (disables certain functions in crosh, won't flash arbitrary images in recovery). If you did change the OS partition then the boot will fail and it will go into recovery mode, in which case you need to stick in a USB drive with a valid official recovery image on it (you can download these from Google), and then it will flash back to factory condition.
The only thing that gets really messy is if you flash the firmware, which requires both flipping the switch and removing the case (there is another switch). If you do that you can potentially brick your device - that doesn't void your warranty per se, but the manufacturer isn't obligated to help you flash it back either.
If you want a car analogy, changing your radio cannot void your warranty on its own, but if your new radio dumps a huge surge into the electrical system they don't have to fix it. You can replace your spark plugs but if in the process you break your pistons they don't have to fix that either. However, if you also notice that your water pump is leaking after doing all of this they DO have to fix your water pump, since you didn't do anything to break that. After they're done the car might not work, and they don't have to do anything further as long as they fix the stuff that broke due to manufacturing defects and not due to abuse.
Oh, and your rights under the law and what a manufacturer helpfully goes along with are two different things. You can have a completely valid warranty and yet end up having to sue the manufacturer because they want to abuse you. Being right and winning in court are also two different things, though often they tend to go together.
Good point.
Keep in mind that ChromeOS does one thing - it runs the Chrome browser.
So, other than the login screen being a tiny bit different (but working the same), it works just like Chrome on any other platform, including on windows. Lots of people run Chrome on Windows, so why would they be put off by Chrome on ChromeOS.
Google basically said that if all you're going to do is launch a browser 95% of the time anyway, then you can cut out all the junk that just tends to break and make the entire rest of the OS a shell around the browser. You just flip it open, click add user, punch in your gmail username/password, and you're off. Everything is sandboxed as is always the case in Chrome, and the OS gives you full disk encryption with the syncing of all settings to the cloud. The OS uses secure boot, so no viruses/etc. All this means that ChromeOS devices are basically interchangeable - using another person's device is no different than using your own, and if you lose it you just get another one. You get all the security/backups/etc of a well-done corporate laptop out of the box.
I suspect long-term there will be convergence, but when you think about it a laptop and a phone/tablet are very different experiences.
The former has a usable keyboard and a trackpad. The latter has a touch screen, GPS, and accelerometers.
While it is the latest fashion to try to make one-size-fits-all UIs, I don't think anybody has figured out a way to make this work well. Unless apps are all written to handle either UI you end up needing a separate app ecosystem as well.
ChromeOS is based on Gentoo, but they use a Gentoo feature that lets you direct the package installs to a chroot. So, they basically build the entire distro from source cross-compiled for the target processor, but with only those packages needed in production. That does not include a toolchain, and it doesn't even include the package manager. Unless you looked pretty carefully you'd never know that it was based off of Gentoo.
You could of course build ChromiumOS (the open source version of ChromeOS) with the toolchain included. Keep in mind that Chrome tends to run on fairly slow hardware, so if your goal is to put Gnome/KDE/etc on the thing you're probably better off just building it that way on another system.
ChromeOS also does not use the live Gentoo package repository - they are basically a fork, pulling in updated packages from time to time. That makes sense since they are not a rolling-release-based distro like Gentoo.
I believe Gentoo was chosen because it offered them a lot of flexibility - they can easily tune the dependencies for individual packages and so on, while having all the benefits of using an established distro for all the stuff they didn't care to tweak. Gentoo also has some pretty good cross-compilation tools.
This is because the $45k figure is both misleading, and a regression.
Apparently the AMT exemption last year for joint incomes was $74k. This year it will be $45k unless it is raised - the level it was in 2000. They pass a law each year setting a one-year-only rate for the AMT, the logic being that raising it for all time would be "expensive" despite the fact that they're going to do it anyway.
The way the tax laws work is this. Figure out your regular taxes as you always do. Then take your gross income and subtract the AMT exemption and then calculate 26% of that number. That is your AMT tax due. You then pay whichever sum is larger, which for most people tends to be the ordinary income taxes.
So, yes, a married couple making $45k MIGHT be hit by the AMT, but only if their deductions exceeded their income so that they didn't have any tax due at all otherwise. A more realistic scenario is a couple making something closer to $100k. The AMT for such a couple would be about $17k, so if the regular taxes worked out to less than that they would have to pay AMT. That is still only 17% of their income.
They'll raise the exemption for sure, at least to the 2011 figures. It just is a matter of how much chaos they cause before then.
Oh, and if you're getting a refund you're going it wrong. I owe money every year by design, so I'm in no rush to get my return in. As long as you don't owe too much you can reduce your withholding without penalty. If you do owe too much then you have to pay interest on the money you failed to withhold. However, the rules aren't that harsh - as long as you withhold as much as you actually owed the year prior you'll never see a penalty.
Actually, micro-USB is more rugged than full size USB. I've yet to break a micro-USB connector, but I've broken several full-size ones.
Micro-USB is also designed to break on the peripheral side (which is often just a cable), and not on the host side. Full-sized USB tends to break on the host side. Since I tend not to replace my computer cases at the rate I'm going just about all my front USB ports on my desktop are going to end up being extension cables run from the back.
Yup. Of course the 5 lbs of weight that would result might put off buyers.
I don't get the gripe with micro USB. It would make more sense to just have that used for everything including peripherals - the full-size USB connectors are prone to breaking and are more cumbersome. There is no reason your PC can't use a micro USB connector. For the transition period, just use dongles.
Maybe, but until the Nexus 10 came along there really wasn't a decently supported 10" option for tablets that was less expensive than the iPad.
The other factor is that some of those 7" tablets might be second tablets bought by those who already have 10" tablets. There is way more growth in tablets than PCs right now, but I don't really see anybody getting rid of their PC - they just already have one so they don't need a new one.
When I bought a tablet I looked at the 7" ones and figured that they are barely any larger than my phone, so what is the point? I already have a 4.5" phone I carry everywhere with me.
...to my knowledge you have never done anything important...
Wow, and considering the amount of knowledge you've demonstrated in your recent slashdot posts, your assessment really concerns me. :)
If that were true, then there would be no way something like this could get into a production kernel without multiple rounds of testing.
If you're depending on perfect programmers to make sure that things work, then you're doing something wrong.
The guy did admit to his mistake, read the entire thread.
Linus over-reacted, and in any segment of society other than Slashdot-land that would be completely obvious.
Look, Linus has written good code, and his pragmatic approach to managing the kernel has been exemplary. His human interaction skills used to be better, and honestly I have to say that they suck right now. He really comes across as the girl in high school that is beautiful and treats everybody like garbage because she knows she can get away with it.
Whatever, he certainly hasn't earned my respect with this thread. If others feel differently, well, whatever. They're entitled to their opinions and I'll treat them professionally regardless of whether they merit it.
Read the entire thread.
I didn't see any insults in the developer's response. It seemed like he was more curious over why PulseAudio had anything to do with V4L. I agree with Linus that the return codes shouldn't change, but it seemed like the developer was curious more than he was malicious. It isn't like he marked a bug closed as WONTFIX.
Judges don't scream at people and use the F-word. They don't need to, and neither does Linus.
4. Linus, as witness and police chief, tells Dude A to STFU, take responsibility or he'll haul his ass in for fucking up and trying to weasel out of it....Simple enough?
If a police officer treated somebody in the way Linus treated his developer and was recorded, he would likely be out of a job, doubly so if he were the police chief.
Police officers are supposed to control the situation, not scream obscenities.
You're also neglecting the fact that Linus has a relationship with the kernel maintainer, and it is in his interest to maintain that relationship. If Linus really feels like he is just so saturated with help that he'd rather drive people away than deal with them in a respectful way, then he'll get his wish if he keeps it up.
The guy who made the commit wasn't a fool - he made a mistake. If he was a fool, then Linus was a fool to grant him commit access.
Not a just a fool, a knave.
And what is this "commit access" of which you speak? Linux isn't developed using CVS you know.
With git "commit access" basically just means trusting somebody to submit patches.
The fact is that this patch ended up in the final kernel tarball. That means that (perhaps indirectly) Linus trusted this guy to OK patches without any further review. So, either the guy is competent (and therefore not a fool), or Linus decided to trust an incompetent person (and thus Linus is a fool).
The bottom line is that even the best people make mistakes. That doesn't mean that you don't take steps to fix and prevent mistakes. However, name calling doesn't really accomplish that.
> but he has horrible taste in human interaction
That is quite interesting claim, considering how many people he has been able to attract to work on his project, without paying them any money.
My sense is that this behavior has been getting worse with time. I suspect that if he treated people this way back when nobody had heard of him that today still nobody would have heard of him.
Do you like working with bad programmers if you yourself know that you are a good one and always have to cleanup the mess others do? Wouldn't you love to have a boss that kicks out those who cause the mess?
I'd love to have a boss that kicks out such people, assuming that he couldn't work with them to improve their skills. I would not love to have a boss who screams at such people in public.
There are managers who are abusive like that to varying degrees in my workplace. Anybody who is competent does anything they can do to avoid working for them. And people who are competent are in sufficient demand that they can basically choose their assignments. If one gets assigned to the abusive manager due to a re-org they just take on extra duties working for others and let their work for the abusive manager slide as much as they can get away with, until they effectively end up working for others anyway. The abusive manager ends up under-delivering, and this eventually catches up with them.
Even in a workplace where you pay your workers it pays to be nice to them. Even sociopaths can treat people nicely, if only to manipulate them.
Mistreating people will eventually come back to haunt you. Linus doesn't do it quite so often, and in the past he didn't really do it much at all. However, if this becomes a trend he WILL find it harder to get people to work with him. The result will be more projects run like Android, where they fork the kernel first, become popular, and then Linus is basically forced to mainline the patches whether he likes them or not or risk becoming irrelevant.
Seriously. I wonder what kind of mistakes qualify for beatings in his household, and when they decide to just cut their losses and kill the other in their sleep...?
If getting the burgers right is more important than treating your spouse with respect, then your priorities are SERIOUSLY out of whack.
Was this a test kernel, or a release kernel?
If it was a test kernel, then things break. That's why we test them.
If this was a release kernel, then no patch should be made that isn't a fix for an identified regression. If that is the policy then obviously this broke it. However, I suspect that people play fast and loose with patches on linux release candidates all the time, and this is just the guy who made the most recent mistake.
Quality is a process, not the result of yelling at people who make mistakes.
I understand exactly what went wrong with this patch, and I'd certainly never want to become a kernel committer with that kind of attitude in place. Sooner or later everybody makes mistakes - how a leader deals with failure is a clear testimony to their character. This isn't the kind of behavior that inspires anything but fear. There are a billion FOSS projects I can work on, or I can start my own. Why would I work on the project where some famous person can flame me in public when I make an inevitable mistake?
Jesus christ when did people become such pussies that telling them to shut the fuck up is comparable to public execution?
It probably started around the time they started letting peasants buy guns. If you consistently treat people like this in a workplace you manage you might just get to witness a public execution firsthand.
Uh, Linus might have good taste in patches, but he has horrible taste in human interaction. Anybody who doesn't think so has equally horrible taste.
The guy who made the commit wasn't a fool - he made a mistake. If he was a fool, then Linus was a fool to grant him commit access.
So simply being a nice person is now manipulative because it makes people like you? Do you even realise what you're saying?
There is nothing nice about causing harm for no reason to other people (users in this case) while smiling and talking politely.
If somebody rear-ends my car at a light, they have caused me harm. Do I therefore get out of my car and start screaming at him to "punish" him for his sins? No, I simply call the police to have a report created, and exchange insurance info. It will no doubt cost the guy money, and his insurance company will no doubt give him incentive not to repeat the incident. But, the fact is that it was an accident - that is why we call them accidents.
People mess up - it is a defining characteristic of humanity. Sometimes they even mess up and don't realize that they messed up. If you can't deal with this, then go do the rest of the human race a favor and have yourself committed.
And as far as "for no reason" goes, read the entire thread. There actually was a reason for the patch, and the reason was a good one. The implementation was incorrect, but the intent was not malicious.