Is the editorializing in the lead sentence of the article really necessary? If you have an opinion to share; state the fact and save the editorial for a concluding sentence. As it is written, my reflex is to discount the entire post as biased crap.
I agree! I'm no fan of Microsoft but this 'editorial input' really pisses me off.
To me, it reads as "This is how you are to think and feel about this story. Now, here are the facts.."
If this was the kind of news reporting I wanted to read, there are plenty of other sites catering to this style of 'journalism'.
no I wouldn't. You can run a company within ethical bounds.
" that would be a defunct corporation in economical theory."
You might want to talk to your economic professors and get a better understanding..you Have taken advance economic course, right? no? STFU
It just sounds like you don't know how to use OSX. I've never had issues with the same kind of setup you've described.
I thought OSX's strength was that it Just Worked without one having to be a gearhead to use it?
Perhaps you with all your superiority can explain this in such a way that I (a mere peon) might understand.
Pecosdave seems to me to be fairly articulate and intelligent, If someone technically-minded like Pecosdave* can't get it to work, who exactly is OSX aimed at?
Retorts that amount to "Well, *I* don't have any problem with it, you must be stupid" reflect far more unfavourably on you than the person you are being snippy with.
* I'm surmising this from his posts; my assumption may be incorrect
I had just assumed you were American like me, sorry. The point I am making with the "why do you hate America?" comment is that if you see torture, humiliation, degradation, concentration camps, and death by dehydration and heat stroke to be not "cruel and unusual" then the "justice" you seek is antithetical to the American constitutional ideology.
Again I find it hard to disagree with you, although I'd point out that we're still coming up against personal definitions because I agree that death by dehydration and heat stroke are going too far.
I want to see a genuine deterrent and I'm sick of what I perceive to be the soft way we treat prisoners here in NZ and find similarities with the states. I guess I just don't believe in rehabilitation (such as we currently employ) which amounts to little more than an advanced university of criminal behaviour ultimately leading to further abuse of honest citizens upon the inmate's release.
You forgot: and don't look like a Mexican. because he is ignoring many many crimes committed by whites so he can imprison as many brown people as he possibly can.
A fair comment that reveals my ignorance of the full issue. Grishnakh's post is the first I've heard of Sheriff Joe of Arizona and I wasn't aware of the racial controversy. Naturally, as a geek, I want things to be as fair and functional as possible and as such could not support a racist policy such as you describe.
The US constitution demands due process and no cruel or unusual punishment. If you have a problem with that, why do you hate America?
Here we hit more of a symantec issue IMHO; what exactly does one define as 'cruel or unusual'? I suspect my definition differs from yours.
There's also the philosophical (or political?) question of whether one considers prison itself and the loss of one's liberty to be The Punishment for The Crime, or whether prison exists to administer The Punishment for The Crime, with loss of liberty as a given.
As a kiwi I don't hate the US per se, but rather what it is allowing itself to become. I do very much like your constitution.
I think they are more throwing a fit because he crams them into dark green korean war surplus tents in the 115 degree Arizona heat with no cooling and limited water. I think they are more throwing a fit because he also uses hot boxes as additional punishment in those conditions. I think they are more throwing a fit because he is literally running concentration camps here in the US.
Prison is meant to be a deterrent, not a fucking holiday resort. I say Sheriff Joe has it spot-on.
If you don't like the idea of that sort of treatment, you have the same opportunity to avoid it as the rest of us: don't do the crime.
Seriously, short of shooting them I don't see anything that could be done on the end of stopping these people.
I'm with you on this. The softer we are on recidivist criminals the less value we ultimately place on civilised behaviour and the kind of society most of us want.
Another idea for vigilante justice might be to use the security footage to identify the thieves and trace them (they use their own damn cars most of the time as I understand it). They might learn a lesson if they came home to find *every* piece of plumbing and copper in their own home violently removed, especially if the next day they came to their car to find the entire wiring loom missing.
One major obstacle to real improvement is the fact that the Kenya Power and Lighting Company operates a monopoly on electricity sales in Kenya, and there is no incentive for it to reduce costs and improve infrastructure. They posted record profits in 2011, at the same time as electricity prices in the country reached record highs.
Thanks for your informative post. Why is it when one peels back the layers there is almost always something like the situation you mention, making a difficult situation considerably worse?
Capitalism works beautifully up until the point where it doesn't. I (along with everyone else it would seem) am fresh out of any better ideas however.
Maybe I'm a crap businessman - no wait, no maybe about it - but if I was running the KPLC I'd fold those 'record profits' back into the infrastructure if it is in such a deplorable state.
Would that not result in larger longer-term profits as industry and household electricity usage flourishes under a stable electricity supply?
Look, I'm an advocate of nuclear power too, but the idea of directly powering private passenger vehicles with nuclear technology is just madness.
Practicalities aside (you want to make steam to push a turbine for electricity to run an electric motor? In your car?), you've failed to consider the main problem with the idea: people.
There are simply far too many arseholes in the world who would use such a thing to hurt others.
You're dead wrong about temperatures. Most of Kenya is arid and daytime temperatures in some areas frequently approach 40 degrees Celcius in areas such as the Chalbi Desert, Magadi, and the North-Eastern province. Nairobi's weather does not represent the entire country's. Get your facts right, read more about our country before you post.
Thank goodness we've got an AC troll to put everybody right, especially the poor demented fools that actually lived there but somehow failed to realise that they were in fact in 40 degree heat in Nairobi.
What's that you say, you live in Kenya right now?
No, you don't - you're an arrogant, bullshitting, know-it-all AC troll who hasn't the balls to put their name to their post.
I didn't call you a racist, that was a blatant and absurd false accusation on your part.
Well of course you didn't, I'm obviously not the GP and thus your statement makes no sense.
Following your logic, is this the time for me to say that you are making blatant and absurd false accusations that I'm making blatant and absurd false accusations?
What I said was that it was xenophobic to turn to China as a monster to say, this is equivalent to something awful: China.
Wrong. It is not xenophobic or racist at all to demonize a group of people maltreating their own. Jesus, do you think it's xenophobic to reference Tiananmen Square and say "That's fucking horrible! The Chinese government treated its people very badly! That's a horrible situation and I wouldn't want that to happen to me"? Well, guess what? that is the sort of thing people are thinking about when topics arise. It's obviously on people's minds or it wouldn't get mentioned.
Most people don't hate the Chinese, they hate the perceived injustices and governmental cruelty. I say 'perceived' because everyone has their own opinion on the Chinese situation. It doesn't make them racists to use China as a yardstick to measure their own country's behaviour, yet you're determined to see this as an attack on their culture or the people themselves.
People shouting, "zomg! China!" in response to SOPA, which has absolutely nothing to do with China (zero, zilch, nada) are just getting in the way of serious discussion about how stinky it is.
Yeah, they're shouting "zomg! We're gonna turn into China if shit like this gets passed!" which seems perfectly on-topic to me. It's exactly this sort of vile rubbish that over time will leave us with an oppressive government! If you really think this is a statement about anything other than the shitty way their government behaves and the mindless oppression they perpetuate then you're just looking for reason to be offended and my remark that you're a typical PC prick stands.
...and there's the "race card"'s companion card, the "he's playing the race card" card. In my experience, the person making this argument (rather than bothering to argue why something isn't race-related) is the bigger asshole.
Ok, fair comment, however in this case it's pretty obvious that race had no part in this discussion. I believe this should be apparent from the GP's post.
I see the GP has responded similarly which suggests to me he shares my opinion of Aighearach's post. Whilst that doesn't automatically make me correct, it may go some way to illustrating the inappropriateness of Aigherach's 'U R da RAZIST!!1' comments (which I obviously found highly objectionable).
Awesome post, for me, this hit my Linux experience on the head.
I love Linux and all my customer servers run Debian stable. When I came into some money, I thought 'these ex-lease, 3 year-old servers I use for all my clients are just great! I'll use one for my desktop so I can finally be free of this nagging feeling that I'm a sellout for using XP on my main PC'
Well, I tried. I absolutely adore Debian as a server OS but as a desktop it sucks almost as bad as Ubuntu. I was forever farting about with settings and closing hung apps. Hung apps? What's that all about, I'm running Linux, right?
I really wanted this to work - I really, really did. I spent $1,200 on that server (which was about right at the time for an x345 with twin 3.06GHz Xeons, 4GB ECC RAM, dual PSU, dual gbit NICs and six 72GB 15k SCSIs) yet I was realistic and wasn't expecting blinding performance. I just wanted a STABLE, reliable computing platform.
I struggled with the machine for over a year before a dual-HDD failure took down the RAID5 that I'd used for all six disks (yes, I know, RAID5 sucks).. this wasn't a problem as I stored nothing locally, but when this happened I realised I didn't really care enough to bother rebuilding it. I found this a bit shocking as revelations go.
As a small business owner I found I couldn't afford the downtime and distraction that the constant app crashes and minor annoyances caused. I run fleets of Windows and Linux boxes with no trouble but I just couldn't get any lasting joy out of Linux-as-a-desktop. It was whole litany of suck for me. I'm perfectly willing to believe I might have been doing something wrong, but as a professional computer nerd, surely basic stability shouldn't be beyond my grasp? Note that the O/S itself remained stable, most of my problems were to do with the Window Manager and OpenOffice and IceWeasel and the Debian equivalent of Thunderbird, etc. Christ, even changing the sound volume was a nervous exercise!
From where I sit, XP works and when it doesn't, a reboot makes it work. Ugly and horrible but if those are the known limitations then I can work around them. Linux on the desktop just didn't work for me and to hell with the pain it causes me to say so. I'd love to give it another go sometime but until I've got large quantities of personal time to spare I can't see myself getting around to it. XP works, '7 is much the same with some bolt-on shiny-shiny.
If only the Bazaar had the focus that the Cathedral model seems to offer.
Do you now how blindingly stupid and ignorant you sound?
Is this your first day? I understand "Blindingly stupid and ignorant" was the second-choice slogan to "News for nerds, stuff that matters."
Just a sad case of the pot calling the kettle black, I'm afraid.
Geekoid is more than intelligent enough to know better but too damn lazy to act better. He reminds me of those pricks that jump through all sorts of hoops to justify their failure to indicate when driving. Because it's all just too much effort to flick that little plastic stalk..
...it won't end up with some doomsday "zomg we're China" xenophobic nonsense.
Yeah, by all means play the race card. Never mind that the GP's argument had nothing to do with race.
In my country (New Zealand) we're very familiar with your particular flavour of Politically Correct Arsehole. You pricks are always there ready to drown out intelligent conversation by screaming "RACIST!!" without taking a nanosecond to actually understand the argument. You're also usually wrong.
Of course, you won't let that alter your behaviour for even a moment.
because by making their service cheap and easy it literally is easier to buy from Steam than pirate anymore. Too bad the others like the MPAA can't seem to catch that clue.
Hairy, I'm sorry for the 'me-too' post, but IMHO your post deserves a +6 Highly Insightful. I don't care whether this is an original HairyFeet analysis of the situation or not, but it's the first time I've seen a concise summary and it makes a lot of sense. it's an inspired example of a company that understands human nature, exploiting the natural human tendency towards apathy in a way that produces a win-win-win: Valve wins, converting piracy into (some) sales, the pirates win because it's simple and easy and finally the genuine consumers win due to the ease of purchase and the reasonable prices.
(I don't play Valve/Steam games but I'm starting to wonder if perhaps I should)
Yes, you are correct, of course. I am just very, very angry. I think I am conveying that pretty effectively.
OT: This may be more about my reading comprehension than your post, but until I saw your response to Ethanol-fueled, I wasn't sure what the OP had done (specifically) to annoy you so greatly.
As such I was a bit surprised by your post especially as it contrasts with your normal writing style.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the editorializing in the lead sentence of the article really necessary? If you have an opinion to share; state the fact and save the editorial for a concluding sentence. As it is written, my reflex is to discount the entire post as biased crap.
I agree! I'm no fan of Microsoft but this 'editorial input' really pisses me off.
To me, it reads as "This is how you are to think and feel about this story. Now, here are the facts.."
If this was the kind of news reporting I wanted to read, there are plenty of other sites catering to this style of 'journalism'.
Nothing you have to say is of any value, APK.
no I wouldn't. You can run a company within ethical bounds.
" that would be a defunct corporation in economical theory." You might want to talk to your economic professors and get a better understanding..you Have taken advance economic course, right? no? STFU
Actually, why don't YOU shut the fuck up?
Are you this much of a wanker in person as well?
Fuck off!
It just sounds like you don't know how to use OSX. I've never had issues with the same kind of setup you've described.
I thought OSX's strength was that it Just Worked without one having to be a gearhead to use it?
Perhaps you with all your superiority can explain this in such a way that I (a mere peon) might understand.
Pecosdave seems to me to be fairly articulate and intelligent, If someone technically-minded like Pecosdave* can't get it to work, who exactly is OSX aimed at?
Retorts that amount to "Well, *I* don't have any problem with it, you must be stupid" reflect far more unfavourably on you than the person you are being snippy with.
* I'm surmising this from his posts; my assumption may be incorrect
So you're saying that only Breeders deserve full citizenship?
I had just assumed you were American like me, sorry. The point I am making with the "why do you hate America?" comment is that if you see torture, humiliation, degradation, concentration camps, and death by dehydration and heat stroke to be not "cruel and unusual" then the "justice" you seek is antithetical to the American constitutional ideology.
Again I find it hard to disagree with you, although I'd point out that we're still coming up against personal definitions because I agree that death by dehydration and heat stroke are going too far.
I want to see a genuine deterrent and I'm sick of what I perceive to be the soft way we treat prisoners here in NZ and find similarities with the states. I guess I just don't believe in rehabilitation (such as we currently employ) which amounts to little more than an advanced university of criminal behaviour ultimately leading to further abuse of honest citizens upon the inmate's release.
You forgot: and don't look like a Mexican. because he is ignoring many many crimes committed by whites so he can imprison as many brown people as he possibly can.
A fair comment that reveals my ignorance of the full issue. Grishnakh's post is the first I've heard of Sheriff Joe of Arizona and I wasn't aware of the racial controversy. Naturally, as a geek, I want things to be as fair and functional as possible and as such could not support a racist policy such as you describe.
The US constitution demands due process and no cruel or unusual punishment. If you have a problem with that, why do you hate America?
Here we hit more of a symantec issue IMHO; what exactly does one define as 'cruel or unusual'? I suspect my definition differs from yours.
There's also the philosophical (or political?) question of whether one considers prison itself and the loss of one's liberty to be The Punishment for The Crime, or whether prison exists to administer The Punishment for The Crime, with loss of liberty as a given.
As a kiwi I don't hate the US per se, but rather what it is allowing itself to become. I do very much like your constitution.
I think they are more throwing a fit because he crams them into dark green korean war surplus tents in the 115 degree Arizona heat with no cooling and limited water. I think they are more throwing a fit because he also uses hot boxes as additional punishment in those conditions. I think they are more throwing a fit because he is literally running concentration camps here in the US.
Prison is meant to be a deterrent, not a fucking holiday resort. I say Sheriff Joe has it spot-on.
If you don't like the idea of that sort of treatment, you have the same opportunity to avoid it as the rest of us: don't do the crime.
Seriously, short of shooting them I don't see anything that could be done on the end of stopping these people.
I'm with you on this. The softer we are on recidivist criminals the less value we ultimately place on civilised behaviour and the kind of society most of us want.
Another idea for vigilante justice might be to use the security footage to identify the thieves and trace them (they use their own damn cars most of the time as I understand it). They might learn a lesson if they came home to find *every* piece of plumbing and copper in their own home violently removed, especially if the next day they came to their car to find the entire wiring loom missing.
There's none so afraid of theft as a thief.
Angry authoritarian Lesbian Hillary Clinton, is that you?!
Dude, you often argue good points. Snowgirl also makes a good argument here; don't let yourself down with ad-hominems just because you disagree.
It is nassssty to cut. I use nail nippers these days, or a hack saw if I don't have a nail nipper handy.
WTF? Are they for grooming the claws on your pet brontosaurus?
Oh, nail nippers.. sorry! Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly *are* nail nippers?
Good times indeed! Where would we be without our Vitamin M? :-)
One major obstacle to real improvement is the fact that the Kenya Power and Lighting Company operates a monopoly on electricity sales in Kenya, and there is no incentive for it to reduce costs and improve infrastructure. They posted record profits in 2011, at the same time as electricity prices in the country reached record highs.
Thanks for your informative post. Why is it when one peels back the layers there is almost always something like the situation you mention, making a difficult situation considerably worse?
Capitalism works beautifully up until the point where it doesn't. I (along with everyone else it would seem) am fresh out of any better ideas however.
Maybe I'm a crap businessman - no wait, no maybe about it - but if I was running the KPLC I'd fold those 'record profits' back into the infrastructure if it is in such a deplorable state.
Would that not result in larger longer-term profits as industry and household electricity usage flourishes under a stable electricity supply?
Look, I'm an advocate of nuclear power too, but the idea of directly powering private passenger vehicles with nuclear technology is just madness.
Practicalities aside (you want to make steam to push a turbine for electricity to run an electric motor? In your car?), you've failed to consider the main problem with the idea: people.
There are simply far too many arseholes in the world who would use such a thing to hurt others.
You're dead wrong about temperatures. Most of Kenya is arid and daytime temperatures in some areas frequently approach 40 degrees Celcius in areas such as the Chalbi Desert, Magadi, and the North-Eastern province. Nairobi's weather does not represent the entire country's. Get your facts right, read more about our country before you post.
Thank goodness we've got an AC troll to put everybody right, especially the poor demented fools that actually lived there but somehow failed to realise that they were in fact in 40 degree heat in Nairobi.
What's that you say, you live in Kenya right now?
No, you don't - you're an arrogant, bullshitting, know-it-all AC troll who hasn't the balls to put their name to their post.
I didn't call you a racist, that was a blatant and absurd false accusation on your part.
Well of course you didn't, I'm obviously not the GP and thus your statement makes no sense.
Following your logic, is this the time for me to say that you are making blatant and absurd false accusations that I'm making blatant and absurd false accusations?
What I said was that it was xenophobic to turn to China as a monster to say, this is equivalent to something awful: China.
Wrong. It is not xenophobic or racist at all to demonize a group of people maltreating their own. Jesus, do you think it's xenophobic to reference Tiananmen Square and say "That's fucking horrible! The Chinese government treated its people very badly! That's a horrible situation and I wouldn't want that to happen to me"? Well, guess what? that is the sort of thing people are thinking about when topics arise. It's obviously on people's minds or it wouldn't get mentioned.
Most people don't hate the Chinese, they hate the perceived injustices and governmental cruelty. I say 'perceived' because everyone has their own opinion on the Chinese situation. It doesn't make them racists to use China as a yardstick to measure their own country's behaviour, yet you're determined to see this as an attack on their culture or the people themselves.
People shouting, "zomg! China!" in response to SOPA, which has absolutely nothing to do with China (zero, zilch, nada) are just getting in the way of serious discussion about how stinky it is.
Yeah, they're shouting "zomg! We're gonna turn into China if shit like this gets passed!" which seems perfectly on-topic to me. It's exactly this sort of vile rubbish that over time will leave us with an oppressive government! If you really think this is a statement about anything other than the shitty way their government behaves and the mindless oppression they perpetuate then you're just looking for reason to be offended and my remark that you're a typical PC prick stands.
I don't even know or care, I'm speaking generally here.
Can you generalise to the point where anyone objecting to a racially-based argument is automatically wrong and an 'asshole'?
I'm not going out of my way to be a dick, I just feel that there are more shades of grey to this argument than you appear to be suggesting.
...and there's the "race card"'s companion card, the "he's playing the race card" card. In my experience, the person making this argument (rather than bothering to argue why something isn't race-related) is the bigger asshole.
Ok, fair comment, however in this case it's pretty obvious that race had no part in this discussion. I believe this should be apparent from the GP's post.
I see the GP has responded similarly which suggests to me he shares my opinion of Aighearach's post. Whilst that doesn't automatically make me correct, it may go some way to illustrating the inappropriateness of Aigherach's 'U R da RAZIST!!1' comments (which I obviously found highly objectionable).
Awesome post, for me, this hit my Linux experience on the head.
I love Linux and all my customer servers run Debian stable. When I came into some money, I thought 'these ex-lease, 3 year-old servers I use for all my clients are just great! I'll use one for my desktop so I can finally be free of this nagging feeling that I'm a sellout for using XP on my main PC'
Well, I tried. I absolutely adore Debian as a server OS but as a desktop it sucks almost as bad as Ubuntu. I was forever farting about with settings and closing hung apps. Hung apps? What's that all about, I'm running Linux, right?
I really wanted this to work - I really, really did. I spent $1,200 on that server (which was about right at the time for an x345 with twin 3.06GHz Xeons, 4GB ECC RAM, dual PSU, dual gbit NICs and six 72GB 15k SCSIs) yet I was realistic and wasn't expecting blinding performance. I just wanted a STABLE, reliable computing platform.
I struggled with the machine for over a year before a dual-HDD failure took down the RAID5 that I'd used for all six disks (yes, I know, RAID5 sucks).. this wasn't a problem as I stored nothing locally, but when this happened I realised I didn't really care enough to bother rebuilding it. I found this a bit shocking as revelations go.
As a small business owner I found I couldn't afford the downtime and distraction that the constant app crashes and minor annoyances caused. I run fleets of Windows and Linux boxes with no trouble but I just couldn't get any lasting joy out of Linux-as-a-desktop. It was whole litany of suck for me. I'm perfectly willing to believe I might have been doing something wrong, but as a professional computer nerd, surely basic stability shouldn't be beyond my grasp? Note that the O/S itself remained stable, most of my problems were to do with the Window Manager and OpenOffice and IceWeasel and the Debian equivalent of Thunderbird, etc. Christ, even changing the sound volume was a nervous exercise!
From where I sit, XP works and when it doesn't, a reboot makes it work. Ugly and horrible but if those are the known limitations then I can work around them. Linux on the desktop just didn't work for me and to hell with the pain it causes me to say so. I'd love to give it another go sometime but until I've got large quantities of personal time to spare I can't see myself getting around to it. XP works, '7 is much the same with some bolt-on shiny-shiny.
If only the Bazaar had the focus that the Cathedral model seems to offer.
Do you now how blindingly stupid and ignorant you sound?
Is this your first day? I understand "Blindingly stupid and ignorant" was the second-choice slogan to "News for nerds, stuff that matters."
Just a sad case of the pot calling the kettle black, I'm afraid.
Geekoid is more than intelligent enough to know better but too damn lazy to act better. He reminds me of those pricks that jump through all sorts of hoops to justify their failure to indicate when driving. Because it's all just too much effort to flick that little plastic stalk..
...it won't end up with some doomsday "zomg we're China" xenophobic nonsense.
Yeah, by all means play the race card. Never mind that the GP's argument had nothing to do with race.
In my country (New Zealand) we're very familiar with your particular flavour of Politically Correct Arsehole. You pricks are always there ready to drown out intelligent conversation by screaming "RACIST!!" without taking a nanosecond to actually understand the argument. You're also usually wrong.
Of course, you won't let that alter your behaviour for even a moment.
because by making their service cheap and easy it literally is easier to buy from Steam than pirate anymore. Too bad the others like the MPAA can't seem to catch that clue.
Hairy, I'm sorry for the 'me-too' post, but IMHO your post deserves a +6 Highly Insightful. I don't care whether this is an original HairyFeet analysis of the situation or not, but it's the first time I've seen a concise summary and it makes a lot of sense. it's an inspired example of a company that understands human nature, exploiting the natural human tendency towards apathy in a way that produces a win-win-win: Valve wins, converting piracy into (some) sales, the pirates win because it's simple and easy and finally the genuine consumers win due to the ease of purchase and the reasonable prices.
(I don't play Valve/Steam games but I'm starting to wonder if perhaps I should)
don't shoot them jam.
That's gonna be a problem. See, we're fresh out of marmelade and jam's about all we have left to shoot!
Yes, you are correct, of course. I am just very, very angry. I think I am conveying that pretty effectively.
OT: This may be more about my reading comprehension than your post, but until I saw your response to Ethanol-fueled, I wasn't sure what the OP had done (specifically) to annoy you so greatly.
As such I was a bit surprised by your post especially as it contrasts with your normal writing style.