I doubt you'd need to SHOOT it down (though that might be a lot more entertaining).
No security is so perfect that it can't fall to a sufficiently motivated attacker. I don't know about anybody else, but if I look up the sky one evening and see a big ass advertisement blocking a portion of it, I'm going to become instantly sufficiently movitated.
i guess linus wouldn't make a statement about it now, since there's the lawsuit going on
I think the fact that SCO hasn't actually shown it bears more weight on it having not been removed. It's hard to remove something that isn't there, and it effectively isn't there unless SCO can actually show it to somebody.
Hardly, but if you'd like to show me where I didn't clearly convey the idea "management and marketing are comprised of slobbering morons", I'd certainly be open to some constructive criticism.. But, I might suggest that YOUR post proves another critical problem a lot of the management I ever met has: "I'm a manager, so you must be wrong when you bring me a negative message that I don't agree with". Double the amount of acid dripping from the manadroid's fangs if that message is about that manager. I'm going to assume that "from the business end" means you're in management? If I'm wrong, simply apply this to marketing: most marketers and managers are equal in the level of incompetence displayed when it comes to the logic of any technical request, they're just incompetent in different ways.
But, let me get this straight. YOU manage engineers - people who, by definition, do work that could frequently be characterized as "exhaustively technical" at best, and the problem here is that they don't learn to talk DOWN to you? The problem isn't that you don't learn the basic theory behind whatever the engineer is bringing you, it's that the engineer hasn't dumbed it down which, I might add, is a good way to lose an AWFUL lot in the translation. This is especially true if the engineer in question has been working on something that's not been implemented elsewhere before - that is, they've come up with a whole new idea rather than an improvement on an existing one.
Here's another thought for your poor, haggard business brain to try and comprehend: if your engineers need to learn better communications skills, when is the last time YOU, the person in charge of MANAGING these people, bothered to send them to a class regarding business communication that you KNEW was relevant and of a high enough quality to make a difference (in other words you sent them to an actual CLASS, you didn't send them to a two hour luncheon in the conference room of the local Best Western)?
How in the hell do ideas like this make it long enough to be publicly announced?
Good marketing. Marketing makes decisions independant of intelligence, feasability, or any of the other things that people with a normal IQ would consider important aspects of the plan. Managers know that if the plan somehow succeeds (they're managers, they have no way of guaging the feasability or intelligence of anything more technical than simple addition) they can take credit for lending muscle and support to it. If it fails, they can shift the blame to the engineers for poorly implementing such a "promising" idea.
The engineers pretty much either take it in the end for the stupidity of marketing and management or, if it somehow succeeds, get ignored (this is the best case scenario for any engineer - being ignored).
This concludes your MBA training. You can pick your diploma up from a nearby printer after you've created it in Paint and sent it there.
I think the difference between responsible gun owners and slack-jawed, wild-eyed goobers like you is the fact that the responsible owners can tell the difference between a car and a gun, whereas you whackjobs keep drawing irrelevant parallels between the two.
Unless, of course, Honda has been building consumer vehicles specifically meant to kill things or crash into targets and I haven't heard about it...
The problem was that I wanted to use a remote coloc SMTP server instead of the earthlink one because Earthlink's crummy server kept passing off the e-mail to 1 of something like 26 machines. At any given time, you could pretty much expect 3/4 of those machines to be queuing messages because the dumbasses weren't doing any virus scanning (the "reason" from their oh-so-brilliantly trained technical support: "legitimate attachments might be blocked by the virus scanner"... no shit? Like legitimately infected ones, dumbass?) and the goddamn servers were constantly trying to move thousands and thousands of copies of 400kb infections.
I couldn't even get a straight answer out of the assholes when I just asked if they were blocking it or not at first, I had to verify that I was losing the packets on any port 25 connection going off their network by trying to telnet to various servers, and more or less proved that's what earthlink was doing when I ran some nmaps on loopback that showed 25 open, but showed 25 as closed when I tried to scan the assigned IP instead.
That's what REALLY pissed me off - the morons not even being able to just answer such a simple yes or no question - so I dropped them and gleefully explained why when they asked me why I wanted to cancel. Of course, the rep had no clue what I was babbling about, so I can only imagine what he actually noted as my cancel reason. "Customer is a nerd", maybe.
Absolutely not. I signed a contract that said "internet access". Correct me if I'm wrong, but ICMP is still an internet protocol, is it not?
Earthlink started blocking outbound 25. I dropped the sum'bitches like a bad habit. If I want "web access" I'll go waste my money on AOL. If I signed up for "internet access" you can be damn sure I'd better be getting. I think there's a potential breach of contract case if my ISP decides to start chopping out protocols, depending on other wording in the agreement (and "we can do whatever we want without telling you" isn't absolute in the eyes of a court - those kind of sweeping, general clauses are meant to scare consumers, not withstand a lawsuit).
Yes, the contract allows Comcast to cut off users like that, but do we want them to?
What an easy question. Yes.
These people DO have the capability to take care of themselves. However, they have repeatedly shirked the responsibility of learning the basic tenets of computer use on a connected, global network.
Comcast is cutting these people off and basically walking them through the process of using their computer like they're helpless small children because, frankly, when it comes to computing, they are. There are plenty of resources out there to teach you some very basic safeguards that require only common sense and a few guided mouse clicks to eliminate a huge portion of this problem. These people consistently refuse to use these resources, or simply choose to ignore them when it becomes slightly inconvenient to do otherwise. How many people ran out to find out how to turn off the deep-sixing of executables in Outlook when Microsoft added that feature? Did these idiots run out to find out why their PC was rebooting, how they got infected, and how they could prevent similar attacks in the future when Blaster hit? Of course not. They still don't patch, they still execute attachments, they still download and run crap like Gator, they're still grabbing executables off of Kazaa, and they STILL aren't turning on ICF. I could understand people getting burned once, but these imbeciles are getting burned again and again and again by the same thing over and over. I mean, look how lazy these spam-virus writers are now. They have the ultimate exploit: people with an IQ of about 2 when they're around computers. Shit... the goddamn viruses come with instructions on how to install them now and these morons are STILL getting infected!
Look, I'm sorry, but we don't let mentally retarded people do a lot of dangerous things in "real" life, why should we let the Internet equivalent do the equivalent things on the net? It's not exactlyl a matter of freedom, it's a matter of truly incompetent people repeatedly failing to live up to even the most basic obligations of owning a broadband connection.
I see no problem with this, whatsoever. In fact, I hope they start barring chronic offenders from the network permanently if they can't even take basic care of the connection.
Still weighing in at 145 pounds, I can now hold my own with:
Jen-yoo-ween Scottish Whiskey (80 proof).
Arrogant Bastard Ale.
Guiness
Bodka. Mmmm... bodka soaked pineapples... mmmm.
Eh - everyone's young once. I can now down multiple bottles / glasses of the Coors Light crap with no noticeable effect. Kind of disappointing actually. Makes for a nice drink when I'm out at the bar looking for something refreshing, though I prefer the taste of Yeungling for that now.
IMHO, there are some people who can be safely ignored for a period of time during early developement.
I grew up in a "tough" school that was VERY anti-intellectual. My graduating class consisted of less than 50% of the people that started High School, many of my "peers" are dead or jailed right now. There are several people that I had run-ins with early in life that I wish I'd have been isolated from. Being young and poorly guided, I fought these people physically, ignored school work to engage in "social" interaction with like-minded individuals (the friend of my enemy is my friend), etc. If I'd simply been sheltered from them, I sincerely believe that I could have gotten involved in much more productive interaction with a more intelligent group in HS than I did. I eventually abandoned my "friends" when I realized I wasn't as intellectually stunted as them, and now I'm more or less on my own in the friendship arena even though there were plenty of equals and superiors that I could have latched on to.
I don't think that sheltering children in the early years is a bad thing. Once they've developed a mature enough stance to be taught how to stand up against bullies, bigots, etc. then they can be introduced to the full gamut of the social strucure. However, you have to remember that these people who display extra intellectual prowess above and beyond their peers are effectively skipping HUGE areas of development that the rest of us have gone through. Getting them involved in more challenging material early on and protecting them is crucial to keeping them involved in that material, in my mind.
After a younger me consumed 108 ounces (9 bottles) of Coors Light (I don't drink that watery shit anymore... Arrogant Bastard is my new love) at a local club full of plasticized morons, I got ahhh... slightly... uh... tipsy.
I told my girlfriend's friend who is severly overweight that she'd have much better luck finding a guy if she'd "do something about that fat ass".
Despite this unfortunate incident, my girlfriend says I am much more sociable when I'm drunk, and she prefers me that way.
What I am saying is why can't he purchase one license and use it on all the PCs in his home?
We're not talking music, we're talking software. The difference is in the terms. If the license says "buy one license per CPU", then you can either agree to it and do just that, or you can return it on the grounds that you disagree with the license. If everyone would simply decline the licensing scheme that systems like Windows / Oracle / etc. use, they'd go away. But, people apparently keep buying multiple licenses for multiple machines and so they stay because they're obviously making money (I'm not counting the one-license people who get OEM copies).
And, if you "pirate" the software, all you do is silently add another Windows box to the statistics without making it known that you've declined the license, which just helps Microsoft and the licensing scheme.
Unfortunately I fear this may be the case. I refuse to use any paid music download service if it restricts my right to play the music on any device that I deem appropriate.
Same here, mate. Good policy. I use MMJB to play the radio at CD quality and commercial free and that's it. Vote with your dollars. If they can't sell crappy licensing schemes and "protected" (broken) content, they won't try (or, they'll die off and get replaced by less assinine companies.
Oh for crying out loud. I bow to your superior ability to pick apart technicalities by ignoring context.
I redress my previous statement and reissue it:
"Censorship or not, Dish is fully within the bounds of good taste and civil respect by blocking the unncessarily biased disinformation that Viacom used to attempt to manipulate an uninvolved third party for fincancial gain and flood DishNetwork call centers with calls from misinformed customers."
Happy? Free speech is not absolute. Deal with it. If you're intentionally lying to people to whip them into a frenzy that will only hurt those people at your hand, there's no compelling reason for an intermediary for your voice to continue to let you talk. If you think otherwise, then by all means, go away.
As soon as I saw it, I checked Dish's page (I have Adelphia cable and I was irriated because at first I kept missing parts of the message and I thought Adelphia was playing its customers as pawns against Dish). Apparently, Dish is unhappy over proposed rate hikes from Viacom and isn't rushing headlong into a new contract with them.
It looks like Viacom is just playing Dish's customers for suckers by only telling them part of the story and using menacing terminology (threatened? give me f'in break..) to do it.
No, it's not censorship... jesus christ. Viacom is intentionally scrolling messages to try and turn Dish Network subscribers against Dish Network by making it seem like Dish is "threatening" (I quote) to drop various popular channels such as Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, etc.
I don't think it's unfair to expect Dish to try and block out that kind of obvious bullshit. If the issue really were that simple, then okay, but Viacom is trying to play ignorant consumers against Dish Network by manipulating them with half-truths and menacing terms. I see nothing wrong with Dish trying to defend itself from these flagrant attacks by blotting the messages out.
I know exactly what you MEAN, but I also see what you're SAYING.
I can't help if individual authors flame you when you bring things to their attention, but I also don't think it's appropriate to bring things up that you 1) have no intentions of helping to fix and/or 2) aren't taking to the right people. If an author refuses a courteous suggestion via flame, well, they're an asshole. Unfortunately, the world is full of assholes. You just met a new one today, after all. Not much that can be done about that.
Let's take Apache httpd to illustrate my point perfectly. I know a lot of people who are scared off by the lack of and IIS-like meaningless jumble of widgets. However, Apache is a FAR superior web server - by magnitudes. Where does the problem lie here? With Apache, or with the people who refuse to learn how to use it because it's different from what they're used to?
If Apache's target was originally meant to be the clueless sods that choose to use IIS, then lack of a GUI would be a perfectly legitimate complaint. However, its target audience was and is people who know how to administer a web server and want one of a high quality, so the problem lies with the people who whine about no GUI, not with Apache Group's developers.
The point remains: if you want a system that's meant for the "average joe", then pick one. Is Linux in general as easy to use as Windows? Absolutely not. However, things like Knoppix and Lindows are out there SPECIFICALLY TARGETTING the "clueless" userbase that is comprised of Aunt Tillie and Uncle Ed. If you want to level claims of usability failure against THEM that's fine. Otherwise, unless the UI or docs or whatever are truly atrocious simply as a result of poor programming, leveling those claims against the whole community is not only unfair, it's bound to draw from ire from people like me who don't program things for that kind of audience, yet hear people complain about "it lacks this nicety or that nicety" anyway. My response? Too bad. I didn't make it to do that because I didn't need it to do that. It's GPL, feel free to do it yourself, pay me to do it, or find somebody else who wants to do it for you.
Linux is not a Windows-killer for me. It's a strong system that I can use to meet my needs. A lot of people confuse Linux's purpose as something that involves beating the evil Microsoft. That's not the point. If Microsoft falls over dead as a result of Linux, fine, whatever. But the overall goal here is not to build a Windows-killer. If Knoppix or Lindows or whatever want to do that, okay. Just don't extend that ideal to the entire "Linux community" and CERTAINLY don't complain about lack of a nicety in the same breath that you say you don't want to help*.
* And please note that "helping" doesn't necessarily require that you donate programming experience. Donating time, graphics, administrative functions, etc. is just as helpful as donating code.
Lindows' customers are Lindows' problems. This guy is bitching about percieved "shortcomings" in "the Linux community". If the Linux community can use KB3 without a GUI, then the problem regarding a lack of a GUI is between the keyboard and the chair. In the Lindows environment, since Lindows is trying to make a business model of sanitizing Linux for the masses, this becomes Lindows' problem as well. It is NOT "the Linux community's" problem.
Linux was built for the Unix audience. The Unix audience is concerned with stability, security, and control. Linux delivers beautifully. It just so happens that Linux can also be adapted to usability. HOWEVER, that is NOT the goal of everybody out there developing for Linux systems. Good programming practice should always override things like bloat, confusing/incomplete UIs, poor documentation, etc. However, to say "CD burning software without a GUI?" simply shows that you do not understand the target audience of the application. If somebody wants to adapt that application, go nuts. Do not misconstrue the lack of an EXTRA feature within an otherwise perfectly capable application as a problem when the shortcoming is in a user that obviously wasn't part of the original target audience. Anyone who would like to sell the application to users on usability is more than welcome to adapt it. However, don't imprint your mistaken understanding of the target audience onto the original developers just because YOU think such things need a GUI and YOU decided to sell to "the common man".
The target audience is not always the common user. Get over it people. This attitude that Linux must be made as easy as Mac or Windows systems is almost always tied to the bizarre idea that the driving focus of the system is some anti-Microsoft assault on the desktop. You know what? Windows is a better desktop. Get over it. If you don't like that, go join one of the many distributions that are working to make a highly usable Linux desktop. Either that, or shut up and wait to see what they produce. Don't get in *my* face about how Linux needs to become so much more usable for it to take over the desktop. MAYBE THAT'S NOT MY GOAL JUST BECAUSE IT'S YOURS. Maybe I just want a system that works right and I'm not afraid to learn how to use it. Maybe I don't care about Linux desktop. Maybe I don't care about Aunt Tillie. Maybe I'm not using Linux to prosecute a holy war against Microsoft. Did that ever occur to anybody?
Maybe my development doesn't have the same goals as yours. Deal with it. Don't act like me not meeting YOUR goals for MY project is automatically a failure of some sort.
Which is, again, a major problem with the Linux community (at least, some people within it). I don't, because that's not what I'd like to be doing for hours and hours on end?
Soooo... let me get this straight. YOU think it's a problem because OTHER PEOPLE don't want to do the job YOU just said YOU don't want to do but YOU'RE currently griping about?
Quit your bitching. If you actually thought it was a big enough problem to care about, you WOULD go program something. Shit. You could even *gasp* SELL IT AND MAKE SOME MONEY.
If you don't want to participate in OSS short of using other people's hard work for free, fine. Stop whining about the shortcomings unless you plan on contributing something though. It would be one thing if you were asking someone nicely to do it, but you're not. You're being a whiny bitch and complaining because nobody ELSE programmed something YOU think would be nice to have.
Boo hoo. Cry me a river there big fella. I'm really gonna concern myself because you're complaining that nobody else spent their free time making something for free that other people might think would be "nice" to have.
And before you give me shit about "pushing it to the masses": FOSS is not a commercial venture. The point is to make a useful, open system, not please ever computer-illiterate wonk out there that figured out how to press the power button. You want to get pissy about the CD-burning capbilities in Lindows? Go bitch at Lindows since they're the ones selling the system as "user-friendly", don't direct your ire at the FOSS crowd that has better things to do than worry about ESR's poor "Aunt Tillie" who can't get her goddamn printer to work on a system that wasn't built for her anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash .. is the same in all browsers....
Yea, in all my browsers it's a little icon that says "Click Here to Get the Plugin".
But who said anything about a gun?
Ummm... just you, actually. :^)
I doubt you'd need to SHOOT it down (though that might be a lot more entertaining).
No security is so perfect that it can't fall to a sufficiently motivated attacker. I don't know about anybody else, but if I look up the sky one evening and see a big ass advertisement blocking a portion of it, I'm going to become instantly sufficiently movitated.
i guess linus wouldn't make a statement about it now, since there's the lawsuit going on
I think the fact that SCO hasn't actually shown it bears more weight on it having not been removed. It's hard to remove something that isn't there, and it effectively isn't there unless SCO can actually show it to somebody.
Your post just proves my point.
Hardly, but if you'd like to show me where I didn't clearly convey the idea "management and marketing are comprised of slobbering morons", I'd certainly be open to some constructive criticism.. But, I might suggest that YOUR post proves another critical problem a lot of the management I ever met has: "I'm a manager, so you must be wrong when you bring me a negative message that I don't agree with". Double the amount of acid dripping from the manadroid's fangs if that message is about that manager. I'm going to assume that "from the business end" means you're in management? If I'm wrong, simply apply this to marketing: most marketers and managers are equal in the level of incompetence displayed when it comes to the logic of any technical request, they're just incompetent in different ways.
But, let me get this straight. YOU manage engineers - people who, by definition, do work that could frequently be characterized as "exhaustively technical" at best, and the problem here is that they don't learn to talk DOWN to you? The problem isn't that you don't learn the basic theory behind whatever the engineer is bringing you, it's that the engineer hasn't dumbed it down which, I might add, is a good way to lose an AWFUL lot in the translation. This is especially true if the engineer in question has been working on something that's not been implemented elsewhere before - that is, they've come up with a whole new idea rather than an improvement on an existing one.
Here's another thought for your poor, haggard business brain to try and comprehend: if your engineers need to learn better communications skills, when is the last time YOU, the person in charge of MANAGING these people, bothered to send them to a class regarding business communication that you KNEW was relevant and of a high enough quality to make a difference (in other words you sent them to an actual CLASS, you didn't send them to a two hour luncheon in the conference room of the local Best Western)?
Those nails are building up around your coffin. It looks more and more lately like it's about time to do a sizing...
How in the hell do ideas like this make it long enough to be publicly announced?
Good marketing. Marketing makes decisions independant of intelligence, feasability, or any of the other things that people with a normal IQ would consider important aspects of the plan. Managers know that if the plan somehow succeeds (they're managers, they have no way of guaging the feasability or intelligence of anything more technical than simple addition) they can take credit for lending muscle and support to it. If it fails, they can shift the blame to the engineers for poorly implementing such a "promising" idea.
The engineers pretty much either take it in the end for the stupidity of marketing and management or, if it somehow succeeds, get ignored (this is the best case scenario for any engineer - being ignored).
This concludes your MBA training. You can pick your diploma up from a nearby printer after you've created it in Paint and sent it there.
I think the difference between responsible gun owners and slack-jawed, wild-eyed goobers like you is the fact that the responsible owners can tell the difference between a car and a gun, whereas you whackjobs keep drawing irrelevant parallels between the two.
Unless, of course, Honda has been building consumer vehicles specifically meant to kill things or crash into targets and I haven't heard about it...
The problem was that I wanted to use a remote coloc SMTP server instead of the earthlink one because Earthlink's crummy server kept passing off the e-mail to 1 of something like 26 machines. At any given time, you could pretty much expect 3/4 of those machines to be queuing messages because the dumbasses weren't doing any virus scanning (the "reason" from their oh-so-brilliantly trained technical support: "legitimate attachments might be blocked by the virus scanner"... no shit? Like legitimately infected ones, dumbass?) and the goddamn servers were constantly trying to move thousands and thousands of copies of 400kb infections.
I couldn't even get a straight answer out of the assholes when I just asked if they were blocking it or not at first, I had to verify that I was losing the packets on any port 25 connection going off their network by trying to telnet to various servers, and more or less proved that's what earthlink was doing when I ran some nmaps on loopback that showed 25 open, but showed 25 as closed when I tried to scan the assigned IP instead.
That's what REALLY pissed me off - the morons not even being able to just answer such a simple yes or no question - so I dropped them and gleefully explained why when they asked me why I wanted to cancel. Of course, the rep had no clue what I was babbling about, so I can only imagine what he actually noted as my cancel reason. "Customer is a nerd", maybe.
Would you be willing to pay more for ICMP?
Absolutely not. I signed a contract that said "internet access". Correct me if I'm wrong, but ICMP is still an internet protocol, is it not?
Earthlink started blocking outbound 25. I dropped the sum'bitches like a bad habit. If I want "web access" I'll go waste my money on AOL. If I signed up for "internet access" you can be damn sure I'd better be getting. I think there's a potential breach of contract case if my ISP decides to start chopping out protocols, depending on other wording in the agreement (and "we can do whatever we want without telling you" isn't absolute in the eyes of a court - those kind of sweeping, general clauses are meant to scare consumers, not withstand a lawsuit).
Yes, the contract allows Comcast to cut off users like that, but do we want them to?
What an easy question. Yes.
These people DO have the capability to take care of themselves. However, they have repeatedly shirked the responsibility of learning the basic tenets of computer use on a connected, global network.
Comcast is cutting these people off and basically walking them through the process of using their computer like they're helpless small children because, frankly, when it comes to computing, they are. There are plenty of resources out there to teach you some very basic safeguards that require only common sense and a few guided mouse clicks to eliminate a huge portion of this problem. These people consistently refuse to use these resources, or simply choose to ignore them when it becomes slightly inconvenient to do otherwise. How many people ran out to find out how to turn off the deep-sixing of executables in Outlook when Microsoft added that feature? Did these idiots run out to find out why their PC was rebooting, how they got infected, and how they could prevent similar attacks in the future when Blaster hit? Of course not. They still don't patch, they still execute attachments, they still download and run crap like Gator, they're still grabbing executables off of Kazaa, and they STILL aren't turning on ICF. I could understand people getting burned once, but these imbeciles are getting burned again and again and again by the same thing over and over. I mean, look how lazy these spam-virus writers are now. They have the ultimate exploit: people with an IQ of about 2 when they're around computers. Shit... the goddamn viruses come with instructions on how to install them now and these morons are STILL getting infected!
Look, I'm sorry, but we don't let mentally retarded people do a lot of dangerous things in "real" life, why should we let the Internet equivalent do the equivalent things on the net? It's not exactlyl a matter of freedom, it's a matter of truly incompetent people repeatedly failing to live up to even the most basic obligations of owning a broadband connection.
I see no problem with this, whatsoever. In fact, I hope they start barring chronic offenders from the network permanently if they can't even take basic care of the connection.
This all is just a terrible misunderstanding.
Microsoft wants a fixed revenue-stream for the minimum of possible work.
No, I understood that. That's why I got in hot water with my boss for laughing at the IT Director when he told me they signed up for SA.
That's Schroeder, you goon.
Schroedinger "killed his cat". Schroeder just wanted to kill Lucy.
Careful AC! You might make me cry on my golf pants...
I do now. I didn't then.
Still weighing in at 145 pounds, I can now hold my own with:
Eh - everyone's young once. I can now down multiple bottles / glasses of the Coors Light crap with no noticeable effect. Kind of disappointing actually. Makes for a nice drink when I'm out at the bar looking for something refreshing, though I prefer the taste of Yeungling for that now.
Man - it was my first experience with constant, heavy drinking. AND I ONLY WEIGH 145 FREAKING POUNDS!
Heh.. give me a break - I've since graduatated to a regular beer (as mentioned previously), and can even handle REAL beer in quantities.
I didn't stay a total puss. It was temporary situation that I was able to remedy through.. uh... hard work and dedication.
IMHO, there are some people who can be safely ignored for a period of time during early developement.
I grew up in a "tough" school that was VERY anti-intellectual. My graduating class consisted of less than 50% of the people that started High School, many of my "peers" are dead or jailed right now. There are several people that I had run-ins with early in life that I wish I'd have been isolated from. Being young and poorly guided, I fought these people physically, ignored school work to engage in "social" interaction with like-minded individuals (the friend of my enemy is my friend), etc. If I'd simply been sheltered from them, I sincerely believe that I could have gotten involved in much more productive interaction with a more intelligent group in HS than I did. I eventually abandoned my "friends" when I realized I wasn't as intellectually stunted as them, and now I'm more or less on my own in the friendship arena even though there were plenty of equals and superiors that I could have latched on to.
I don't think that sheltering children in the early years is a bad thing. Once they've developed a mature enough stance to be taught how to stand up against bullies, bigots, etc. then they can be introduced to the full gamut of the social strucure. However, you have to remember that these people who display extra intellectual prowess above and beyond their peers are effectively skipping HUGE areas of development that the rest of us have gone through. Getting them involved in more challenging material early on and protecting them is crucial to keeping them involved in that material, in my mind.
After a younger me consumed 108 ounces (9 bottles) of Coors Light (I don't drink that watery shit anymore... Arrogant Bastard is my new love) at a local club full of plasticized morons, I got ahhh... slightly... uh... tipsy.
I told my girlfriend's friend who is severly overweight that she'd have much better luck finding a guy if she'd "do something about that fat ass".
Despite this unfortunate incident, my girlfriend says I am much more sociable when I'm drunk, and she prefers me that way.
What I am saying is why can't he purchase one license and use it on all the PCs in his home?
We're not talking music, we're talking software. The difference is in the terms. If the license says "buy one license per CPU", then you can either agree to it and do just that, or you can return it on the grounds that you disagree with the license. If everyone would simply decline the licensing scheme that systems like Windows / Oracle / etc. use, they'd go away. But, people apparently keep buying multiple licenses for multiple machines and so they stay because they're obviously making money (I'm not counting the one-license people who get OEM copies).
And, if you "pirate" the software, all you do is silently add another Windows box to the statistics without making it known that you've declined the license, which just helps Microsoft and the licensing scheme.
Unfortunately I fear this may be the case. I refuse to use any paid music download service if it restricts my right to play the music on any device that I deem appropriate.
Same here, mate. Good policy. I use MMJB to play the radio at CD quality and commercial free and that's it. Vote with your dollars. If they can't sell crappy licensing schemes and "protected" (broken) content, they won't try (or, they'll die off and get replaced by less assinine companies.
Oh for crying out loud. I bow to your superior ability to pick apart technicalities by ignoring context.
I redress my previous statement and reissue it:
"Censorship or not, Dish is fully within the bounds of good taste and civil respect by blocking the unncessarily biased disinformation that Viacom used to attempt to manipulate an uninvolved third party for fincancial gain and flood DishNetwork call centers with calls from misinformed customers."
Happy? Free speech is not absolute. Deal with it. If you're intentionally lying to people to whip them into a frenzy that will only hurt those people at your hand, there's no compelling reason for an intermediary for your voice to continue to let you talk. If you think otherwise, then by all means, go away.
As soon as I saw it, I checked Dish's page (I have Adelphia cable and I was irriated because at first I kept missing parts of the message and I thought Adelphia was playing its customers as pawns against Dish). Apparently, Dish is unhappy over proposed rate hikes from Viacom and isn't rushing headlong into a new contract with them.
It looks like Viacom is just playing Dish's customers for suckers by only telling them part of the story and using menacing terminology (threatened? give me f'in break..) to do it.
No, it's not censorship... jesus christ. Viacom is intentionally scrolling messages to try and turn Dish Network subscribers against Dish Network by making it seem like Dish is "threatening" (I quote) to drop various popular channels such as Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, etc.
I don't think it's unfair to expect Dish to try and block out that kind of obvious bullshit. If the issue really were that simple, then okay, but Viacom is trying to play ignorant consumers against Dish Network by manipulating them with half-truths and menacing terms. I see nothing wrong with Dish trying to defend itself from these flagrant attacks by blotting the messages out.
See what I mean?
I know exactly what you MEAN, but I also see what you're SAYING.
I can't help if individual authors flame you when you bring things to their attention, but I also don't think it's appropriate to bring things up that you 1) have no intentions of helping to fix and/or 2) aren't taking to the right people. If an author refuses a courteous suggestion via flame, well, they're an asshole. Unfortunately, the world is full of assholes. You just met a new one today, after all. Not much that can be done about that.
Let's take Apache httpd to illustrate my point perfectly. I know a lot of people who are scared off by the lack of and IIS-like meaningless jumble of widgets. However, Apache is a FAR superior web server - by magnitudes. Where does the problem lie here? With Apache, or with the people who refuse to learn how to use it because it's different from what they're used to?
If Apache's target was originally meant to be the clueless sods that choose to use IIS, then lack of a GUI would be a perfectly legitimate complaint. However, its target audience was and is people who know how to administer a web server and want one of a high quality, so the problem lies with the people who whine about no GUI, not with Apache Group's developers.
The point remains: if you want a system that's meant for the "average joe", then pick one. Is Linux in general as easy to use as Windows? Absolutely not. However, things like Knoppix and Lindows are out there SPECIFICALLY TARGETTING the "clueless" userbase that is comprised of Aunt Tillie and Uncle Ed. If you want to level claims of usability failure against THEM that's fine. Otherwise, unless the UI or docs or whatever are truly atrocious simply as a result of poor programming, leveling those claims against the whole community is not only unfair, it's bound to draw from ire from people like me who don't program things for that kind of audience, yet hear people complain about "it lacks this nicety or that nicety" anyway. My response? Too bad. I didn't make it to do that because I didn't need it to do that. It's GPL, feel free to do it yourself, pay me to do it, or find somebody else who wants to do it for you.
Linux is not a Windows-killer for me. It's a strong system that I can use to meet my needs. A lot of people confuse Linux's purpose as something that involves beating the evil Microsoft. That's not the point. If Microsoft falls over dead as a result of Linux, fine, whatever. But the overall goal here is not to build a Windows-killer. If Knoppix or Lindows or whatever want to do that, okay. Just don't extend that ideal to the entire "Linux community" and CERTAINLY don't complain about lack of a nicety in the same breath that you say you don't want to help*.
* And please note that "helping" doesn't necessarily require that you donate programming experience. Donating time, graphics, administrative functions, etc. is just as helpful as donating code.
Why... do you keep talking... about end users?
Lindows' customers are Lindows' problems. This guy is bitching about percieved "shortcomings" in "the Linux community". If the Linux community can use KB3 without a GUI, then the problem regarding a lack of a GUI is between the keyboard and the chair. In the Lindows environment, since Lindows is trying to make a business model of sanitizing Linux for the masses, this becomes Lindows' problem as well. It is NOT "the Linux community's" problem.
Linux was built for the Unix audience. The Unix audience is concerned with stability, security, and control. Linux delivers beautifully. It just so happens that Linux can also be adapted to usability. HOWEVER, that is NOT the goal of everybody out there developing for Linux systems. Good programming practice should always override things like bloat, confusing/incomplete UIs, poor documentation, etc. However, to say "CD burning software without a GUI?" simply shows that you do not understand the target audience of the application. If somebody wants to adapt that application, go nuts. Do not misconstrue the lack of an EXTRA feature within an otherwise perfectly capable application as a problem when the shortcoming is in a user that obviously wasn't part of the original target audience. Anyone who would like to sell the application to users on usability is more than welcome to adapt it. However, don't imprint your mistaken understanding of the target audience onto the original developers just because YOU think such things need a GUI and YOU decided to sell to "the common man".
The target audience is not always the common user. Get over it people. This attitude that Linux must be made as easy as Mac or Windows systems is almost always tied to the bizarre idea that the driving focus of the system is some anti-Microsoft assault on the desktop. You know what? Windows is a better desktop. Get over it. If you don't like that, go join one of the many distributions that are working to make a highly usable Linux desktop. Either that, or shut up and wait to see what they produce. Don't get in *my* face about how Linux needs to become so much more usable for it to take over the desktop. MAYBE THAT'S NOT MY GOAL JUST BECAUSE IT'S YOURS. Maybe I just want a system that works right and I'm not afraid to learn how to use it. Maybe I don't care about Linux desktop. Maybe I don't care about Aunt Tillie. Maybe I'm not using Linux to prosecute a holy war against Microsoft. Did that ever occur to anybody?
Maybe my development doesn't have the same goals as yours. Deal with it. Don't act like me not meeting YOUR goals for MY project is automatically a failure of some sort.
Which is, again, a major problem with the Linux community (at least, some people within it). I don't, because that's not what I'd like to be doing for hours and hours on end?
Soooo... let me get this straight. YOU think it's a problem because OTHER PEOPLE don't want to do the job YOU just said YOU don't want to do but YOU'RE currently griping about?
Quit your bitching. If you actually thought it was a big enough problem to care about, you WOULD go program something. Shit. You could even *gasp* SELL IT AND MAKE SOME MONEY.
If you don't want to participate in OSS short of using other people's hard work for free, fine. Stop whining about the shortcomings unless you plan on contributing something though. It would be one thing if you were asking someone nicely to do it, but you're not. You're being a whiny bitch and complaining because nobody ELSE programmed something YOU think would be nice to have.
Boo hoo. Cry me a river there big fella. I'm really gonna concern myself because you're complaining that nobody else spent their free time making something for free that other people might think would be "nice" to have.
And before you give me shit about "pushing it to the masses": FOSS is not a commercial venture. The point is to make a useful, open system, not please ever computer-illiterate wonk out there that figured out how to press the power button. You want to get pissy about the CD-burning capbilities in Lindows? Go bitch at Lindows since they're the ones selling the system as "user-friendly", don't direct your ire at the FOSS crowd that has better things to do than worry about ESR's poor "Aunt Tillie" who can't get her goddamn printer to work on a system that wasn't built for her anyway.
Was that "arrogant" enough for you?