It might be pretty standard, but it's a stupid thing to sign.
My advice (and no, IANAL, but I have done this before) is simply to strike out the offending clause, put your initials against the deletion and leave it at that.
More likely than not, they won't argue, but be prepared to tough it out if they do. All it really needs is to be handled with confidence. If they argue that the clause isn't intended to be enforced to your disadvantage, all you have to do is ask "in that case, why is it there, and in that form?". If they really do insist on the clause being left there unamended, you probably don't want the job anyway.
In other words, if you behave like a doormat, don't be too surprised if someone walks all over you.
...along with the ability to make money, I presume.
Nonsense. Apple's marketroids could sell ice to the Eskimos. And the people who are attracted by the styling of their hardware will buy it anyway. The beige box market is not the same set of people.
In any case, if Apple really wanted to take on Microsoft, they already have everything they need. All they would have to do is drop the idea of insisting on the customer using their own hardware. If people were allowed to buy a copy of OS X to run on generic Intel or AMD hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if people flocked to it.
There are enough people out there who groan at the constant necessity to prop up a sagging defective-by-design OS, who aren't ready to try Linux, but who have seen enough exposure to Macs to accept them as an alternative. Although I'm not a Mac fanboy, this is a situation I'd be very happy to see.
In any case, basing the whole supposition on "6 out of 10 Americans believe in the devil and hell, 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and life after death, while 92% believe in a personal God." is shaky from the start.
Since many polls would indicate that in, say, Europe, the statistics are reversed, I fail to see how that equates to humans being hardwired for belief in God. On the basis of that statistic, one might with as much validity claim that all Americans are hardwired for stupidity.
But I've seen/usr/people on other boxes too, like DG-unix (Data General - anyone remember them?)
Sure. Aviion and so forth. That was when they were trying to claw back some of the market they were losing with AOS/VS and AOS/VS2. Such was the nature of the Unix trend at that time; in fact the AOS implementations were pretty mature and effective at the time, and their DG-UX always came across as a bit of a cobble.
It wasn't that long ago, though. I was using the DG stuff in 1990, quite late in my sysprogging career by comparison to the old core-memory Burroughs B3700 that I first started on. IIRC, that went out of production in 1976.
How do they work out the Mean Time to Failure anyway? 1.5 million hours in laymanspeak is 171.23 years. I don't know anyone who has had a disk drive that long.;-)
Unless you nicked a box set from a shop, then you haven't taken any goods - ie not theft, it's a civil offence of copyright infringment.
Except that if I obtained someone's key by whatever means, I could easily deprive a legitimate purchaser of the ability to use the product.
Maybe not theft under the law, but the law isn't necessarily made up with common sense in mind.
I'm no fan of Windows (and for that reason I don't choose to use it) but accepting the use of a key you haven't paid for, knowing that it might hurt someone else, is tacky.
If you don't want to pay for Vista (or any other incarnation of Windows) then don't use it. After all, nobody can say there are no alternatives.
How about encoding many bacteria with the same code to increase the longevity?
Well, there are at least 2 answers to that:
(1)The mechanics of cloning DNA require and expect you to use more than one cell. I don't know if I should point this out, but bacteria are very small. If you dropped one on the floor, you would never find it again.:-D
(2) Breeding up lots of cells by itself doesn't necessarily increase longevity of the DNA in their chromosome, and certainly not of plasmids or cosmids. All that might do is introduce levels of corruption, depending on the machinery the species in question has to prevent radical mutations.
Certainly by the time that biological information storage becomes widely practical...
Which, despite the submission, won't be for some time. Given that it is quite common for many bacteria to exchange DNA with others, or even to assimilate "loose" DNA from its environment, I wouldn't lay any odds on the message remaining uncorrupted for long. Also, there is the problem of size; the fact that bacteria typically have a very compact genome works against this as a medium for storage of data (encoded how? 4 bases, remember) of a useful size.
Real, fake or nonexistant, Microsoft still has the edge here.
Indeed. The fact that Microsoft has an unlimited publicity budget puts them a big step ahead of SCO, who used the same tactics to pump their share price. The only option the Linux comunity has is to force MS to put up or shut up.
Regardless of whether law is on the author's side, I would not trust (i.e. buy) any software from a source known to maliciously damage or delete the contents of your hard drive.
The old saw that "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" just doesn't cut any ice.
In any case, you should need a very, *very* good reason to upgrade glibc on any machine. It's not the sort of thing you should capriciously do because the new version is more numerically advanced.
I guess if a packaging system were to be completely bombproof, it should set off all sorts of sirens and other alerts to protect you from yourself, but you can't really blame it for going ahead and trying to do what you tell it to.
Of course what you do have is a rescue environment on the install media which you can use to reinstall the package you messed up, either by doing a chroot into your install, or by passing --root to rpm to get it to install onto the hard disk. I've done this several times and its a simple and quick way to get yourself out of the hole you dug.
And this was indeed pointed out here, where, to spare the/.er I quote:
"If I understood this, you deleted something down/lib that rpm depended on. That's not unrecoverably screwed: you can boot into the rescue CD and bring over the libs or the rpm the libs came from and use rpm2cpio. I have done this in the past, and recovered from it, and my assessment of the proximate cause of the failure was that 1) I was a careless idiot.
RPM being monolithic would help in that situation, but then it's open to you to delete rpm if you're up for deleting shared libs. Likewise Ubuntu is going to have things that can be deleted that will render it equally "unrecoverable". Basically there isn't much to be done to protect a tired or stupid admin using rm as root on important files: but the recovery boot is there to get you out of even very bad trouble.
I don't think we should entirely absolve the wielder of the rm machete from blame even if he didn't ask to be swinging it about."
Since, in all those years, Fedora still hasn't fixed this RPM "feature", chastizing users for having to use --force or --nodeps smacks of hypocrisy.
Over the couple of years that I played with RedHat (and to be fair, it was some time ago: RH5.2 to RH7.0), I kept finding the need to use --force --nodeps with almost every package.
Eventually, I woke up and went back to using Slackware, which handles packages in just as quick and dirty a manner, but is honest about it.
But that said, Slackware is such a good environment for building stuff from source, it's often easier to do just that.
Except, of course, that it has absolutely nothing to do with the thread in question. Sometimes I think Slashdotters have the attention span of a flea.:-|
The real question here is whether it is in the public interest to have a heavily fragmented market of incompatible cellular networking.
Given skype's record, the last thing they should be given access to other networks. They should be forced to clean up their act with the products they already have.
If anybody questions this, I would point them in the direction of all the unanswered threads on the skype forums, particularly with regard to the Linux and OS X clients.
5 dentists isn't a very large sample group anyway...
OK, how about this:
35% of all road accidents are caused by drunk drivers. Therefore, 65% must be caused by sober drivers. Therefore, you're safer driving drunk than sober.:-P
It's ridiculous that you have to dig through gconf to change that setting.
Gconf isn't exactly hard to use. And, by way of comparison, under KDE on this Slackware box, the "start" menu is so gigantically humungous that I find it distinctly non-trivial to even *find* the KDE control centre, which does exactly the same sort of thing, only more colourfully.
Well said. I find the Gnome/KDE flamewars very tedious. Sure, I have used Gnome for a lot longer than I have KDE, but I have used both for many years now, and they both have their deficiencies along with their strengths. If I wanted to start another flamewar, I could probably say that Emacs is the ultimate desktop environment...
...which brings us full-circle back to the original topic of the thread: Maybe Linus should stick to using Emacs.:-D
Incidentally, spatial file management is one of the worst things ever to come out of the "if it agrees with common sense it can't possibly be right" school of interface design.
And also incidentally, you don't have to use it. in gconf-editor: apps -> nautilus -> preferences -> always_use_browser.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be pretty standard, but it's a stupid thing to sign.
My advice (and no, IANAL, but I have done this before) is simply to strike out the offending clause, put your initials against the deletion and leave it at that.
More likely than not, they won't argue, but be prepared to tough it out if they do. All it really needs is to be handled with confidence. If they argue that the clause isn't intended to be enforced to your disadvantage, all you have to do is ask "in that case, why is it there, and in that form?". If they really do insist on the clause being left there unamended, you probably don't want the job anyway.
In other words, if you behave like a doormat, don't be too surprised if someone walks all over you.
...along with the ability to make money, I presume.
Nonsense. Apple's marketroids could sell ice to the Eskimos. And the people who are attracted by the styling of their hardware will buy it anyway. The beige box market is not the same set of people.
In any case, if Apple really wanted to take on Microsoft, they already have everything they need. All they would have to do is drop the idea of insisting on the customer using their own hardware. If people were allowed to buy a copy of OS X to run on generic Intel or AMD hardware, I wouldn't be surprised if people flocked to it.
There are enough people out there who groan at the constant necessity to prop up a sagging defective-by-design OS, who aren't ready to try Linux, but who have seen enough exposure to Macs to accept them as an alternative. Although I'm not a Mac fanboy, this is a situation I'd be very happy to see.
In any case, basing the whole supposition on "6 out of 10 Americans believe in the devil and hell, 7 in 10 believe in angels, heaven and the existence of miracles and life after death, while 92% believe in a personal God." is shaky from the start.
Since many polls would indicate that in, say, Europe, the statistics are reversed, I fail to see how that equates to humans being hardwired for belief in God. On the basis of that statistic, one might with as much validity claim that all Americans are hardwired for stupidity.
But I've seen /usr/people on other boxes too, like DG-unix (Data General - anyone remember them?)
Sure. Aviion and so forth. That was when they were trying to claw back some of the market they were losing with AOS/VS and AOS/VS2. Such was the nature of the Unix trend at that time; in fact the AOS implementations were pretty mature and effective at the time, and their DG-UX always came across as a bit of a cobble.
It wasn't that long ago, though. I was using the DG stuff in 1990, quite late in my sysprogging career by comparison to the old core-memory Burroughs B3700 that I first started on. IIRC, that went out of production in 1976.
How do they work out the Mean Time to Failure anyway? 1.5 million hours in laymanspeak is 171.23 years. I don't know anyone who has had a disk drive that long. ;-)
Unless you nicked a box set from a shop, then you haven't taken any goods - ie not theft, it's a civil offence of copyright infringment.
Except that if I obtained someone's key by whatever means, I could easily deprive a legitimate purchaser of the ability to use the product.
Maybe not theft under the law, but the law isn't necessarily made up with common sense in mind.
I'm no fan of Windows (and for that reason I don't choose to use it) but accepting the use of a key you haven't paid for, knowing that it might hurt someone else, is tacky.
If you don't want to pay for Vista (or any other incarnation of Windows) then don't use it. After all, nobody can say there are no alternatives.
Don't you mean a little different *than* America?
No. He's right, you're wrong. Sorry.
The only success they've had seling to consumers is the XBox.
:-P
You're forgetting the Zune, of course. The brown one.
Well, as a matter of interest, how about a quickie thumbnail survey?
(1) How many Slashdotters have used Microsoft's Search more than once?
(2) How many have ever used it at all?
FWIW, my answers are "not me" and "yup".
How about encoding many bacteria with the same code to increase the longevity?
:-D
Well, there are at least 2 answers to that:
(1)The mechanics of cloning DNA require and expect you to use more than one cell. I don't know if I should point this out, but bacteria are very small. If you dropped one on the floor, you would never find it again.
(2) Breeding up lots of cells by itself doesn't necessarily increase longevity of the DNA in their chromosome, and certainly not of plasmids or cosmids. All that might do is introduce levels of corruption, depending on the machinery the species in question has to prevent radical mutations.
Certainly by the time that biological information storage becomes widely practical...
Which, despite the submission, won't be for some time. Given that it is quite common for many bacteria to exchange DNA with others, or even to assimilate "loose" DNA from its environment, I wouldn't lay any odds on the message remaining uncorrupted for long. Also, there is the problem of size; the fact that bacteria typically have a very compact genome works against this as a medium for storage of data (encoded how? 4 bases, remember) of a useful size.
Real, fake or nonexistant, Microsoft still has the edge here.
Indeed. The fact that Microsoft has an unlimited publicity budget puts them a big step ahead of SCO, who used the same tactics to pump their share price. The only option the Linux comunity has is to force MS to put up or shut up.
Regardless of whether law is on the author's side, I would not trust (i.e. buy) any software from a source known to maliciously damage or delete the contents of your hard drive.
The old saw that "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" just doesn't cut any ice.
In any case, you should need a very, *very* good reason to upgrade glibc on any machine. It's not the sort of thing you should capriciously do because the new version is more numerically advanced.
I guess if a packaging system were to be completely bombproof, it should set off all sorts of sirens and other alerts to protect you from yourself, but you can't really blame it for going ahead and trying to do what you tell it to.
Of course what you do have is a rescue environment on the install media which you can use to reinstall the package you messed up, either by doing a chroot into your install, or by passing --root to rpm to get it to install onto the hard disk. I've done this several times and its a simple and quick way to get yourself out of the hole you dug.
/.er I quote:
/lib that rpm depended on. That's not unrecoverably screwed: you can boot into the rescue CD and bring over the libs or the rpm the libs came from and use rpm2cpio. I have done this in the past, and recovered from it, and my assessment of the proximate cause of the failure was that 1) I was a careless idiot.
And this was indeed pointed out here, where, to spare the
"If I understood this, you deleted something down
RPM being monolithic would help in that situation, but then it's open to you to delete rpm if you're up for deleting shared libs. Likewise Ubuntu is going to have things that can be deleted that will render it equally "unrecoverable". Basically there isn't much to be done to protect a tired or stupid admin using rm as root on important files: but the recovery boot is there to get you out of even very bad trouble. I don't think we should entirely absolve the wielder of the rm machete from blame even if he didn't ask to be swinging it about."
Since, in all those years, Fedora still hasn't fixed this RPM "feature", chastizing users for having to use --force or --nodeps smacks of hypocrisy.
Over the couple of years that I played with RedHat (and to be fair, it was some time ago: RH5.2 to RH7.0), I kept finding the need to use --force --nodeps with almost every package.
Eventually, I woke up and went back to using Slackware, which handles packages in just as quick and dirty a manner, but is honest about it.
But that said, Slackware is such a good environment for building stuff from source, it's often easier to do just that.
The cause for this problem is the existence of different packaging mechanisms on Linux.
Yes, but every right-thinking person knows there's there's only one *right* way to install something on Linux:
cd $SOURCE-TREE;./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && sudo make install
;-)
Excellent, well reasoned reply. Thank you.
:-|
Except, of course, that it has absolutely nothing to do with the thread in question. Sometimes I think Slashdotters have the attention span of a flea.
The real question here is whether it is in the public interest to have a heavily fragmented market of incompatible cellular networking.
Given skype's record, the last thing they should be given access to other networks. They should be forced to clean up their act with the products they already have.
If anybody questions this, I would point them in the direction of all the unanswered threads on the skype forums, particularly with regard to the Linux and OS X clients.
5 dentists isn't a very large sample group anyway...
:-P
OK, how about this:
35% of all road accidents are caused by drunk drivers. Therefore, 65% must be caused by sober drivers. Therefore, you're safer driving drunk than sober.
He's a Slashdotter, why on Earth would he ask someone who knows?
;-)
But he asked what was the *moral* thing to do.
In which case I would have thought a lawyer would be the last person I would ask...
It's ridiculous that you have to dig through gconf to change that setting.
Gconf isn't exactly hard to use. And, by way of comparison, under KDE on this Slackware box, the "start" menu is so gigantically humungous that I find it distinctly non-trivial to even *find* the KDE control centre, which does exactly the same sort of thing, only more colourfully.
Well said. I find the Gnome/KDE flamewars very tedious. Sure, I have used Gnome for a lot longer than I have KDE, but I have used both for many years now, and they both have their deficiencies along with their strengths. If I wanted to start another flamewar, I could probably say that Emacs is the ultimate desktop environment...
:-D
...which brings us full-circle back to the original topic of the thread: Maybe Linus should stick to using Emacs.
Incidentally, spatial file management is one of the worst things ever to come out of the "if it agrees with common sense it can't possibly be right" school of interface design.
And also incidentally, you don't have to use it. in gconf-editor: apps -> nautilus -> preferences -> always_use_browser.
I hate it too.