I don't consider most CMSs to be particularly mature, for exactly this reason.
Rationale: There are thousands, if not millions of small businesses worldwide that would benefit from a CMS-based website where they had to do precisely zero management. Where the business owner clicks "Sign Up", chooses a template (from a decent selection), messes with it as s/he likes and adds content without once having to write a single line of PHP - and preferably without even writing any HTML. Such businesses typically don't have the money to contract a web developer much beyond the initial setup, so usually wind up with one of the following:
1. A totally static site that never gets updated. 2. A CMS-driven site that gets compromised and is abused to sell viagra. (You seen how often a typical PHP CMS requires security updates?) 3. Cobbling something together themselves that looks like arse.
There are - to my knowledge - three or four companies offering such a service. AFAIK, one is a startup using Drupal version 7 (which I believe is still in beta) - the others seem to have built their own CMS.
They built their own CMS despite there being dozens out there. I wonder why that could be?
Contrary to popular believe, any publicity is NOT good publicity. Anyone willing to even propose such a blatant risk to the lives of their customers isn't a company I will ever do business with.
You'd better tell Ryanair that. They are possibly the only company I've ever met which has turned appalling customer service into an art form of which they are proud.
Holocaust deniers treat the whole thing like a religion - they've already decided what they believe to be true, and even if you invented a time machine and took them on a tour of the Nazi extermination camps, finishing off with a few months in Auschwitz in the early-mid 1940s they still wouldn't believe you.
However tempting talk of violence is, it'll have exactly the same effect as it has on religion - it makes the belief stronger, and will be (ab)used by the victim as evidence of them being right.
Which is precisely what the first judge interpreted Singh to mean, and precisely what he appealed against. The Court of Appeal held that his comment was an opinion piece rather than an assertion of fact, and therefore not something the court should interfere in.
Congratulations, you've just invented a system which no half-decent solicitor will touch with a bargepole if they can possibly help it. It'll be left to the newly-qualified still wet behind the ears people who are likely to do more harm than good.
Well, if you want a Linux distribution with a long release cycle, use Debian. But by the time your version is getting to the end of its cycle, it's going to start looking pretty aged.
Probably not a problem for a server, but for a desktop (where the state of the Linux desktop is still very much in flux) it makes some sense.
Actually, I suspect it's more to do with neighbourly suspicion - historically, most of the European countries have been at war with each other for most of the last millennium. There's no guarantee that the better competition will be from the same country.
They're there to help the artisan vintners, cheesemakers and other food manufacturers. It's to prevent the giant companies spotting a product is becoming popular and make their own version for half the price (and a quarter the quality) and giving it the same name. I promise you that real Parmesan bears absolutely no resemblance to the bits removed from a verruca scraper that are put in tubs and used to be sold as Parmesan but are now usually called italian-style hard cheese.
Usually the law surrounding these "can't be named X" not only demands that the product is made in a particular area, but also that it's made in a particular fashion.
(FWIW, I think Cheddar should be given AOC status. But I live in Somerset so I would say that;).
Much like the DRAC4 and 5 cards then. They provide a Java-based viewer to the console during boot (which I'm 90% certain is effectively a framegrabber and VNC under the hood). The only minor issue is that Dell don't seem to be able to write a half-decent interface to fire up the viewer which isn't horrendously sensitive to web browser versions.
Once you go for the 3 year NBD warranty, the price starts to look a lot less competitive. The only reason I'm buying Dell is that I have an account manager who's prepared to offer me good discounts on the list price even though we're a small business - without those discounts, I really would have trouble justifying buying their kit over any others.
If it's anything like all their previous DRAC cards, the web interface has this awkward tendency to be so browser-specific that a relatively minor upgrade to your browser can break it, the CLI is so poorly documented they may as well just replace the user manual with a single sheet of paper that just says "Look, we just put this here to fill a line item, we don't actually expect anybody to use it".
One could also say that the bigger problem with most religions isn't so much the existence of God as the placating individuals into thinking there is one and making them follow a strict set of rules decided upon by said religion.
Most of those rules make a huge amount of sense if you're in charge of a large enough tribe who live in the middle of the desert, policing hasn't been invented, nor has imprisonment.
Well, since I use Linux I do not need to make illegal copies, nor do I have the time for that because free software is released at such a fast rate that I have no hope to learn to use all of it in my lifetime
Your argument - that much commercial software still doesn't have equivalents in Linux is true, but misses the point. I would interpret Haxamanish's words to mean: I do not need to make illegal copies because all the software that I care about has free equivalents. Therefore Haxamanish is a Linux user, has no need to pirate software and (one assumes) objects to being labelled as one who does.
(On a side note, how the Hell does a Linux user pirate software in the first place when there's so little pirateable commercial software for Linux? Or was the original troll equating pirates with Linux users simply because neither pay for their software?)
I'm referring specifically to the retailer, the last point in the chain as it were. The Tescos, the Safeways, the Wal-Marts of this world.
Such legislation seldom covers the purchase of several thousand Playstations in the business-to-business transactions taking place between manufacturer, distributor and reseller - don't know about Australian law specifically but AFAIK these are usually "buyer beware" as far as the law is concerned.
When I have an empirical proof that god exists, I will believe. For the moment, I have empirical proof that gravity exists, and Hawking simply extrapolated the laws of physics to the extreme, then came up with the big bang theory, and the theory still holds today.
No theist theory holds. It's all there to explain what we can't understand. And when we get to understand, we say "well, you know, God may have played a role anyway"...
But try to convince 90% of the human race that what I say is true. I may have a hard time.
This is going to sound fantastically patronising, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Some people (naming no names, but I will say that I've met a few) seem to find the very idea that there may be things they don't understand quite scary. So much so, in fact, that if you ever uncover (be it accidentally or intentionally) even the suggestion that they may have misunderstood something, they'll have a wholly animal reaction - fight or flight.
It's remarkably difficult to hold an intelligent conversation with such people because as soon as you say anything that goes against what they've already decided, their response will be to either ignore you or go on the offensive. I would hazard a guess that your 90% (though I don't believe the numbers are as high as that, I'm certain there are quite a few) are - to a greater or lesser extent - such people.
Reading between the lines, I think a far bigger problem most atheists have isn't so much the "God did it" explanation as the institution of religion that's built up around it.
If your company regularly has information going around that could quickly sink it, you probably need to think about your internal security (and maybe even your business model) a little more carefully.
All the documentation there mentioned the trader, not the manufacturer. I'd assume that traders have some sort of agreement with their own suppliers, where that leaves them if the manufacturer decides to retrospectively remove features is anyone's guess.
Oh, very much in so. An EULA is a blatant attempt to turn a business-to-consumer transaction (which in many countries has all sorts of legal protections) into the legal equivalent of a business-to-business transaction (which in many countries has very few legal protections - if you're a business you're meant to have the good sense to exercise due diligence and hire a lawyer if necessary).
What the world really needs is a judgement in a first-world country in a court which makes binding decisions acknowledging this and telling the big company in no uncertain terms where to stick their EULA. Though very few individuals have the money to chase something all the way to such a court, and any director with half a brain will settle out of court as soon as it becomes apparent that something like this may happen.
It's a bit of a weird situation for the law though, isn't it?
That sums it up beautifully.
While consumer law in many countries explicitly bars terms which say "you can't sue us", I seriously doubt it accounts for products which may be updated over the course of their lifetime in this fashion.
For one thing, much of it was probably written long before user-updateable firmware became common, in which case the idea that it might even be physically possible to disable a feature post-release would be totally alien.
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I don't consider most CMSs to be particularly mature, for exactly this reason.
Rationale: There are thousands, if not millions of small businesses worldwide that would benefit from a CMS-based website where they had to do precisely zero management. Where the business owner clicks "Sign Up", chooses a template (from a decent selection), messes with it as s/he likes and adds content without once having to write a single line of PHP - and preferably without even writing any HTML. Such businesses typically don't have the money to contract a web developer much beyond the initial setup, so usually wind up with one of the following:
1. A totally static site that never gets updated.
2. A CMS-driven site that gets compromised and is abused to sell viagra. (You seen how often a typical PHP CMS requires security updates?)
3. Cobbling something together themselves that looks like arse.
There are - to my knowledge - three or four companies offering such a service. AFAIK, one is a startup using Drupal version 7 (which I believe is still in beta) - the others seem to have built their own CMS.
They built their own CMS despite there being dozens out there. I wonder why that could be?
Contrary to popular believe, any publicity is NOT good publicity. Anyone willing to even propose such a blatant risk to the lives of their customers isn't a company I will ever do business with.
You'd better tell Ryanair that. They are possibly the only company I've ever met which has turned appalling customer service into an art form of which they are proud.
Holocaust deniers treat the whole thing like a religion - they've already decided what they believe to be true, and even if you invented a time machine and took them on a tour of the Nazi extermination camps, finishing off with a few months in Auschwitz in the early-mid 1940s they still wouldn't believe you.
However tempting talk of violence is, it'll have exactly the same effect as it has on religion - it makes the belief stronger, and will be (ab)used by the victim as evidence of them being right.
Which is precisely what the first judge interpreted Singh to mean, and precisely what he appealed against. The Court of Appeal held that his comment was an opinion piece rather than an assertion of fact, and therefore not something the court should interfere in.
Congratulations, you've just invented a system which no half-decent solicitor will touch with a bargepole if they can possibly help it. It'll be left to the newly-qualified still wet behind the ears people who are likely to do more harm than good.
British law is "loser pays", there's usually no need to sue for defence cost.
(IANAL. There may be some nuances here of which I am unaware).
You could say the same thing about "Protestants and Catholics", "Muslims and Christians" or even "Theists and Atheists". For exactly the same reasons.
Well, if you want a Linux distribution with a long release cycle, use Debian. But by the time your version is getting to the end of its cycle, it's going to start looking pretty aged.
Probably not a problem for a server, but for a desktop (where the state of the Linux desktop is still very much in flux) it makes some sense.
Actually, I suspect it's more to do with neighbourly suspicion - historically, most of the European countries have been at war with each other for most of the last millennium. There's no guarantee that the better competition will be from the same country.
These laws aren't there to help consumers.
They're there to help the artisan vintners, cheesemakers and other food manufacturers. It's to prevent the giant companies spotting a product is becoming popular and make their own version for half the price (and a quarter the quality) and giving it the same name. I promise you that real Parmesan bears absolutely no resemblance to the bits removed from a verruca scraper that are put in tubs and used to be sold as Parmesan but are now usually called italian-style hard cheese.
Usually the law surrounding these "can't be named X" not only demands that the product is made in a particular area, but also that it's made in a particular fashion.
(FWIW, I think Cheddar should be given AOC status. But I live in Somerset so I would say that ;).
Much like the DRAC4 and 5 cards then. They provide a Java-based viewer to the console during boot (which I'm 90% certain is effectively a framegrabber and VNC under the hood). The only minor issue is that Dell don't seem to be able to write a half-decent interface to fire up the viewer which isn't horrendously sensitive to web browser versions.
Once you go for the 3 year NBD warranty, the price starts to look a lot less competitive. The only reason I'm buying Dell is that I have an account manager who's prepared to offer me good discounts on the list price even though we're a small business - without those discounts, I really would have trouble justifying buying their kit over any others.
If it's anything like all their previous DRAC cards, the web interface has this awkward tendency to be so browser-specific that a relatively minor upgrade to your browser can break it, the CLI is so poorly documented they may as well just replace the user manual with a single sheet of paper that just says "Look, we just put this here to fill a line item, we don't actually expect anybody to use it".
One could also say that the bigger problem with most religions isn't so much the existence of God as the placating individuals into thinking there is one and making them follow a strict set of rules decided upon by said religion.
Most of those rules make a huge amount of sense if you're in charge of a large enough tribe who live in the middle of the desert, policing hasn't been invented, nor has imprisonment.
Haxamanish's original words were:
Well, since I use Linux I do not need to make illegal copies, nor do I have the time for that because free software is released at such a fast rate that I have no hope to learn to use all of it in my lifetime
Your argument - that much commercial software still doesn't have equivalents in Linux is true, but misses the point. I would interpret Haxamanish's words to mean: I do not need to make illegal copies because all the software that I care about has free equivalents. Therefore Haxamanish is a Linux user, has no need to pirate software and (one assumes) objects to being labelled as one who does.
(On a side note, how the Hell does a Linux user pirate software in the first place when there's so little pirateable commercial software for Linux? Or was the original troll equating pirates with Linux users simply because neither pay for their software?)
I think we may be talking at cross-purposes here.
I'm referring specifically to the retailer, the last point in the chain as it were. The Tescos, the Safeways, the Wal-Marts of this world.
Such legislation seldom covers the purchase of several thousand Playstations in the business-to-business transactions taking place between manufacturer, distributor and reseller - don't know about Australian law specifically but AFAIK these are usually "buyer beware" as far as the law is concerned.
When I have an empirical proof that god exists, I will believe. For the moment, I have empirical proof that gravity exists, and Hawking simply extrapolated the laws of physics to the extreme, then came up with the big bang theory, and the theory still holds today.
No theist theory holds. It's all there to explain what we can't understand. And when we get to understand, we say "well, you know, God may have played a role anyway"...
But try to convince 90% of the human race that what I say is true. I may have a hard time.
This is going to sound fantastically patronising, but I'm going to say it anyway.
Some people (naming no names, but I will say that I've met a few) seem to find the very idea that there may be things they don't understand quite scary. So much so, in fact, that if you ever uncover (be it accidentally or intentionally) even the suggestion that they may have misunderstood something, they'll have a wholly animal reaction - fight or flight.
It's remarkably difficult to hold an intelligent conversation with such people because as soon as you say anything that goes against what they've already decided, their response will be to either ignore you or go on the offensive. I would hazard a guess that your 90% (though I don't believe the numbers are as high as that, I'm certain there are quite a few) are - to a greater or lesser extent - such people.
Reading between the lines, I think a far bigger problem most atheists have isn't so much the "God did it" explanation as the institution of religion that's built up around it.
Indeed. But AIUI Aussie consumer law means the customer's supposed to go back to the retailer, not the manufacturer.
The fact that in this case the manufacturer is squarely responsible for the bait and switch is neither here nor there.
The keyword here is "many".
Sony have sold several million PS3s. They've probably sold a few thousand that wound up being used for Linux.
If your company regularly has information going around that could quickly sink it, you probably need to think about your internal security (and maybe even your business model) a little more carefully.
All the documentation there mentioned the trader, not the manufacturer. I'd assume that traders have some sort of agreement with their own suppliers, where that leaves them if the manufacturer decides to retrospectively remove features is anyone's guess.
Oh, very much in so. An EULA is a blatant attempt to turn a business-to-consumer transaction (which in many countries has all sorts of legal protections) into the legal equivalent of a business-to-business transaction (which in many countries has very few legal protections - if you're a business you're meant to have the good sense to exercise due diligence and hire a lawyer if necessary).
What the world really needs is a judgement in a first-world country in a court which makes binding decisions acknowledging this and telling the big company in no uncertain terms where to stick their EULA. Though very few individuals have the money to chase something all the way to such a court, and any director with half a brain will settle out of court as soon as it becomes apparent that something like this may happen.
There's a forum linked elsewhere - in essence, Sony's argument was "you can't sue us, the EULA says so" and the judge agreed.
It's a bit of a weird situation for the law though, isn't it?
That sums it up beautifully.
While consumer law in many countries explicitly bars terms which say "you can't sue us", I seriously doubt it accounts for products which may be updated over the course of their lifetime in this fashion.
For one thing, much of it was probably written long before user-updateable firmware became common, in which case the idea that it might even be physically possible to disable a feature post-release would be totally alien.