The specifics may be incorrect. I am working from memory here on something that happened 8 years ago. But the experience overall was exactly as I described it. Useless error messages with just numbers, no support from the company that wrote the product, etc. I did contact technical support correctly, they didn't answer.
Well, just for another perspective to balance this out, I found BeOS' hardware support to be pretty poor and the operating system pretty much left you high-and-dry if your hardware wasn't perfectly supported. To whit, I tried to get a modem to work with BeOS back in the day (1999 or so) and if I recall correctly (it's been a long time), I was getting very generic error dialogs ("Error 0xFFFFFFFF occurred") with no other useful diagnostics whatsoever. I vaguely remember playing with some settings and getting rid of the messages but the modem never worked. The operating system would "think" it was working (no error messages, the OS would show that I had connected to the ISP), but it would never transmit any data. There were literally ZERO tools to help me diagnost this, and the OS refused to give me ANY information at all on what was going on.
I distinctly remember thinking that it was very, very much like Windows in this regard. Linux was awesome because the operating system could give you a wealth of information about what it was doing, so that if you put time into it, you could diagnose and fix pretty much any problem. The tools were there for you. With BeOS and Windows, where the tools and logging would be, was simply a big empty void. There was nothing you could do if your hardware was not perfectly supported. You could not figure out what was wrong. The operating system had no facilities to support any kind of diagnosis of the problem.
I never expected BeOS to support every piece of hardware out there. But then again, I *did* expect it to, since it was such a new and unsupported OS, provide tools to the user to let them solve problems. But BeOS didn't, and for this reason, I think that it was not a very good OS. Sure it had nice pretty demos, but I'm guessing that Be the company focused all of their efforts on the code paths necessary to enable the pretty demos, and left all of the other critically useful (and underrated) aspects of the operating system unimplemented.
Perhaps with enough time, they could have addressed that. But BeOS, as it was, was only a cute toy, in my opinion.
It was not. The five hours I spent trying to get a simple modem to work in BeOS, with no OS diagnostics to guide me, and very poor support from BeOS the company, was all the proof I needed that BeOS wasn't all it was hyped up to be. I can understand that Be did not have the resources to support every piece of hardware under ths sun, but I found it inexcusable that their support for diagnostics was so incredibly rudimentary. At the time, with Linux (this was 1999 or so), if I had a problem with some hardware I could either read the source (OK Be could never match this since it was proprietary and closed-source so that's not quite fair), or look at the copious amount of system logging that would generally point to the problem (stuff in dmesg, kernel logs,/var/log/messages, lots of tools and documentation to help me out). With BeOS, I was getting pop-up dialogs that just said stuff like "Error 0xFFFFFFFF occurred", with absolutely no useful information whatsoever. It was impossible for me to diagnose the problem no matter how hard I might try because the operating system just wasn't going to give me enough information to go on.
Also BeOS the company didn't respond at all to my requests for help with this. They provided zero technical support to me. Emails went unanswered.
Maybe BeOS had some nice architecture, but there is more to an OS than its handling of threads - much, much more, and I think that BeOS was not even close to ready for prime time. And the developers clearly had glossed over many aspects of an operating system (such as the aforementioned error diagnostics) to get to the pretty demos that the OS was capable of.
I read up on Objective-C once, thinking it sounded like it would be really good. The thing I can't understand is, why they deviated so much from the "standard" C syntax. I can't remember all the details, it's been years since I read a tutorial on Objective-C with an eye towards starting to use it for my projects, but I remember being very turned off by the fact that the language, for no apparent reason, completely changes the way method invocations are written.
Here I looked it up on Wikipedia, here's an example of what I mean:
A function in both C and Objective-C follows this general form:
int do_something(int i) { return square_root(i); }
with int do_something(int) as the prototype.
When this is implemented as a method, this becomes:
What the heck? Why throw C syntax out the window for methods?
To be honest, this was enough to make me pass on Objective-C. If I had a pressing need to use Obective-C over C++, I would take the time to become good enough with Objective-C's wonky syntax to make this a non-issue. But it was enough of a barrier that I gave up on Objective-C and stuck with C++.
By the way, your response is ridiculous in many ways. I don't feel like I should have to point these obvious things out to you but I guess I do:
1. The GP sounds like he understands template metaprogramming very well. Nothing about his post suggests that he either a) says that he is an "expert" (as you are suggesting he does), or b) *isn't* enough of an expert to have formed a valid opinion on the subject.
2. Clearly the GP used the word "impossible" to mean "very difficult". You're being pedantic by suggesting that he literally meant it is impossible to debug.
3. It's only because of lots and lots of dedicated effort by Boost developers that Boost's very-complex template metaprogramming techniques work on a wide variety of popular compilers. I would be willing to bet quite a bit that they had to jump through many hoops to find least-common-denominator solutions that worked on all compilers. I believe that this makes the GP's point perfectly. This kind of programming relies too much on subtle complexities of the language definition and while the Boost authors were willing to put lots of work into making these things work on various C++ compilers, I wouldn't want to do that and wouldn't choose to use a library that may force me to do the same (which might happen if I decide to extend Boost's implementation).
4. Once again by "useless" the GP clearly meant "requiring much more work to decipher than other more conventional error messages". Once again you dismiss his point by interpreting it completely literally.
My rule of thumb as a developer: whatever you do, make sure that the next guy who wants to work with it doesn't have to get a Ph.D. in the subject in order to continue your work. In other words, keep your implementation simple and as mainstream as possible, so that it can easily be picked up by anyone. Template metaprogramming fails this utterly.
I consider myself to be an "expert C++ developer" and I agree with the GP's comments on Boost. Your "my truths are self-evident except to the lazy" arguments do not convince me.
I have not seen anything that template metaprogramming can do that can't be done using other "saner" (in my opinion) techniques. Perhaps the template metaprogramming approach can at times produce *terser* solutions, but I don't think that they are any better than more verbose non-template-metaprogramming-based solutions.
Terse solutions are in my opinion often *less valuable* than more verbose solutions, because the latter are generally more approachable. Of course verbosity can be taken too far, and there's definitely a balance to be struck.
Here is an example of template metaprogramming code straight from Wikipedia:
template <int N> struct Factorial { enum { value = N * Factorial<N - 1>::value }; };
// Factorial<4>::value == 24 // Factorial<0>::value == 1 void foo() { int x = Factorial<4>::value;// == 24 int y = Factorial<0>::value;// == 1 }
(this code defines a template which forces the compiler to compute factorials instead of computing them at runtime)
I don't see anything about this that is in any way more readable or maintainable than the non-template-metaprogramming solution also posted on Wikipedia:
int factorial(int n) { if (n == 0) return 1; return n * factorial(n - 1); }
void foo() { int x = factorial(4);// == (4 * 3 * 2 * 1) == 24 int y = factorial(0);// == 0! == 1 }
(interestingly, this exact question was given to me recently on an interview programming test (write C++ code to compute factorials at compile time instead of runtime); it was the only question on the test that I couldn't answer; I said basically "I know the solution has something to do with templates and partial template specialization but I don't know the syntax of partial template specialization well enough to write this" - I'm still waiting to hear if I got the job, and hoping that not knowing partial template specialization very well won't be the deciding factor, but to be honest, if this is the kind of stuff they're doing, I don't really want to work there anyway)
I find the recursive implementation much easier to read and understand.
And this is a simple example. Really hairy template stuff like this:
(taken from some Boost template metaprogramming documentation)
... that stuff is completely unreadable and I would never want code like that in any project I worked on.
Note that I have absolutely no problem with people using solutions like this in their code, I would never try to limit someone from solving a problem in a way that was best for them. The thing that bugs me, is that Boost and its techniques look like they are going to become "standard" C++, which means that anyone who writes C++ code in the future is going to have to deal with this stuff. I would like template metaprogramming much more if it wasn't something looming on the horizon that the C++ standard and common usage of C++ is eventually going to force upon me.
You can limit yourself to a subset of C++ that is actually pretty nice. When I write C++ code I try to make it look as much like Java as I can; you can get pretty close and end up with something pretty readable and maintainable. But if you use every feature of the C++ language you will indeed end up with a mess.
Heavy use of templates, especially with template meta-programming, goes in the opposite direction, of trying to use every nuance of the most complicated features in C++, which is why I find it to be intolerable.
Thank you for that, your post is right on the money. C++ template metaprogramming is just a horrible, horrible idea, and because Boost is so fundamentally geared towards template metaprogramming, I have to refuse to ever use Boost wherever I get to make the decision. It's unfortunate because the Boost library is very closely tied to the "future" of C++ (I believe that large parts of it are going to be incorporated in the C++ standard soon, and I suspect that C++ and Boost will become more and more intertwined as time goes on). This sucks because it means that as time goes on C++ is going to get less and less useable. Why can't they just leave a good thing alone?
I wonder if Sony sees the USA as its primary market, where they expect they need to sell large volumes, so they lower the price in the USA to an unsustainable level but make up for it in other regions of the world where they overcharge? I am beginning to form a theory after living here in NZ for six months and seeing how things are priced here, that things might be so cheap in the USA because companies are selling products there at a loss in order to compete in what they consider to be the most important market, and having to, like I said, make their product more expensive elsewhere to make up for it.
It's the only reason that I could find to account for the fact that, as an example, NZ Air charges less to USA customers flying a round trip starting in the USA, than for a flight on the exact same dates but starting instead from NZ. The exact same number of miles are flown, from the same airports, just in opposite directions. And the tickets originating in the USA are much cheaper. It makes no sense at all, unless I assume that NZ Air just wants to try to sell to a USA market where price competition is higher so they have no choice but to sell at a lower price there, but make up for it by selling at a higher price here.
If there is another theory on the reason behind this, I'd love to hear it.
It's been kind of fun reading this little personal flamefest between you two. Probably because you're both so pathetic that it makes me feel really good about myself.
> Hopefully someone picks up the slack, I'd pay a few bucks a month to keep using Myth without the scraping.
That is such a funny thing to hear from a MythTV user. I cannot even count the number of times I heard the MythTV crowd say things like "TiVo SUCKS because you have to pay for the guide data! That stuff should be free! I would cut my own legs off before I'd pay for guide data because paying for guide data is THE BIGGEST EVIL IN THE WORLD!!!!"... etc.
Now that the "free" guide data is gone, all the "I refuse to pay $12 per month for guide data" types are probably chiming in unison about how they'd "pay for the data if only this evil zap2it company gave me the option instead of just shutting off my feed of waah waah".
Not saying you're one of these people, maybe you always were willing to pay for guide data. But there were ALOT of MythTV users that fit the freeloader description.
But the editor was Zonk. Did you really expect anything except incredible mediocrity from that bonehead? He and K "flamebait" Dawson have really really lowered the standards around here...
He was responding to your supposition that if the case really had merit, Kaplan would have filed his claim in a "real" court instead of small claims court, which is a position you once again assert in response to his response to you.
In his response to you he explains what the benefits of small claims court are for the parties involved, and also that one party can request that the case be taken out of small claims court if the request is filed in a timely manner.
You completely ignore the possibility that Kaplan didn't want to have to involve lawyers and the expense thereof when he felt that the judgements that small claims court can award would be sufficient to satisfy him.
If it's true that anyone bringing a suit that they feel confident in winning would win more and better judgements in non-small-claims court, then why would ANYONE ever file a claim in small claims court? The only reason would be that they didn't think they had a good claim. If you're saying that the only people who file claims in small claims court are people who think they have a weak case, then I think this is patently absurd. Small claims court has many benefits (as explained by in the post we are arguing about) that can easily explain why someone would file a claim there.
As to what that post convinced me of; it convinced me that there are aspects to small claims court that make it an attractive place for someone suing for small sums of money to take their case to. And it also convinced me that the defendant could have moved the case out of small claims court if they'd made any effort to do so. Both of which directly contradict your assertions, and lead me to believe that your arguments are weak.
The thing is, I think that "bloggers" do believe that they live in a magical fairyland where a) they get to say whatever they want, and b) everyone will care about it and it will be important just because it was posted on a website in a "blog". It seems so obvious from the self-hyping and self-importance that this whole "blogging" thing has going on.
Maybe I'm just jaded because I don't read any "blogs" (unless Slashdot counts as one - does it?) and so I just don't get what the big deal is and who so many people feel like it's some kind of "revolution" in journalism, where it just looks to me like nothing new whatsoever. We've had the many-to-many communication channels of the internet for decades now. Blogs are nothing special.
Strawman? Flamebait? You have to be kidding me. The GP post was concise, informative, and very convincing.
You, on the other hand, only have your own supposition about what was in the best interests of the parties involved to support your paranoid claims. Also you make the laughable argument that the loser of this little tussle will be happy to give away his $7,500 because he's getting "coverage" for his "cause".
I think there are some strawman arguments and some flamebait going on here, but it's not in the GP post, it's in yours.
Repeatedly, you fail to understand when someone is using a gross analogy to illustrate a point. You are taking people's words far too literally without trying to understand the obvious points that they are trying to make. You so completely miss the point of the post you are responding to in every post you make (and I've read several from you on these boards) that I gotta wonder if you even want to understand what other people are trying to say.
By the way, people can definitely be addicted to eating, I didn't mean to imply that they couldn't. I just mentioned biological processes like eating to respond to the GP's ridiculous assertion that he or she is addicted to living. My point was only that just because you feel compelled to do something (like eating when you are hungry) it doesn't mean that this is an addiction, but that doesn't mean that being compelled to do something is never an addiction.
Addiction is obviously a very difficult to define concept, and there are alot of grey areas. However, people like you who summarily dismiss the concept do nothing to contribute to the meaningful discussion of the topic.
Here's a very loose definition that might work for you: addiction is any overwhelming feeling of compulsion to perform an activity other than natural biological functions (like eating). A person who is addicted to an activity has a recognizable set of behaviors that indicate the addiction, such as participating in the activity to the exclusion of other activities, hiding the behavior from others, and being unable to stop thinking about the activity even when you are not doing it.
I personally have had all of these and more with some gaming I have done and I considered myself addicted at the time. I had great difficulty in extracting myself from these addictions. Dismiss me if you want to, but it's very clear to me that gaming addiction is real.
I think that you can request a refund from the manufacturer if you don't agree with the EULA. But, I really am just guessing on that. If you can't get a refund for the product because you didn't agree to the EULA, then I would expect the court to look very favorably on you if you sue.
Yes you can. You can reject the product and send it back to the vendor for a refund. I'm *assuming* from what I've read on this that you do have this right, because it's what the judge suggests that the customer should have done in the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 decision.
I suppose you could send it back with a letter asking that the EULA terms be modified to meet your requirements, but I hightly doubt that any company would bother to follow through on this kind of contract negotiation. They'd just cancel the order and move on.
In the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 judgement linked to a few posts up, the judge explicitly says that using the product in the face of a EULA that you were aware of and didn't read, is enough to demonstrate that you accept the terms of the EULA.
In other words, the judge explicitly shoots down the concept that many people put forth that, "if I didn't sign the EULA, it doesn't apply."
Look a few posts up. There is a link to the summary of the judgement in a case of a consumer suing Gateway 2000 that is relevent. It looks to me like the judgement was that the EULA was enforceable. The basic gist was, the consumer can see that there is a EULA there, and if they don't read it, they are accepting that it may present terms that they would find unfavorable. The plaintiff (Hill) tried 6 or 7 different ways to argue that they weren't bound by the contract terms that were present in the box but that they hadn't agreed to before the purchase, and the judge shot down each one. The reasoning seems to be that the courts recognize that it's impractical to expect every bit of legalese to be read to or by the consumer and then agreed to by them (most people wouldn't have the patience to wait 5 minutes for the salesperson to read off legal terms each time they wanted to buy a product). So it's reasonable for the box to arrive with extra terms enclosed, given that the consumer has the right to reject the product if they don't like the terms and get a refund.
As to your point about the software manufacturer being unable to enforce any license agreement because your transaction was with the store that sold the software to you and not the manufacturer... I'm guessing that it comes down to this: the store sells you the hard copy of the software, but the right to use the software - i.e. copy it into your computer's memory or onto its hard drive - can only be granted by the software maker. So the software company has a hook for any conditions they want to add to your use of the software.
But, I am not a lawyer either so, this is all just conjecture based on my own personal understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
The specifics may be incorrect. I am working from memory here on something that happened 8 years ago. But the experience overall was exactly as I described it. Useless error messages with just numbers, no support from the company that wrote the product, etc. I did contact technical support correctly, they didn't answer.
Well, just for another perspective to balance this out, I found BeOS' hardware support to be pretty poor and the operating system pretty much left you high-and-dry if your hardware wasn't perfectly supported. To whit, I tried to get a modem to work with BeOS back in the day (1999 or so) and if I recall correctly (it's been a long time), I was getting very generic error dialogs ("Error 0xFFFFFFFF occurred") with no other useful diagnostics whatsoever. I vaguely remember playing with some settings and getting rid of the messages but the modem never worked. The operating system would "think" it was working (no error messages, the OS would show that I had connected to the ISP), but it would never transmit any data. There were literally ZERO tools to help me diagnost this, and the OS refused to give me ANY information at all on what was going on.
I distinctly remember thinking that it was very, very much like Windows in this regard. Linux was awesome because the operating system could give you a wealth of information about what it was doing, so that if you put time into it, you could diagnose and fix pretty much any problem. The tools were there for you. With BeOS and Windows, where the tools and logging would be, was simply a big empty void. There was nothing you could do if your hardware was not perfectly supported. You could not figure out what was wrong. The operating system had no facilities to support any kind of diagnosis of the problem.
I never expected BeOS to support every piece of hardware out there. But then again, I *did* expect it to, since it was such a new and unsupported OS, provide tools to the user to let them solve problems. But BeOS didn't, and for this reason, I think that it was not a very good OS. Sure it had nice pretty demos, but I'm guessing that Be the company focused all of their efforts on the code paths necessary to enable the pretty demos, and left all of the other critically useful (and underrated) aspects of the operating system unimplemented.
Perhaps with enough time, they could have addressed that. But BeOS, as it was, was only a cute toy, in my opinion.
It was not. The five hours I spent trying to get a simple modem to work in BeOS, with no OS diagnostics to guide me, and very poor support from BeOS the company, was all the proof I needed that BeOS wasn't all it was hyped up to be. I can understand that Be did not have the resources to support every piece of hardware under ths sun, but I found it inexcusable that their support for diagnostics was so incredibly rudimentary. At the time, with Linux (this was 1999 or so), if I had a problem with some hardware I could either read the source (OK Be could never match this since it was proprietary and closed-source so that's not quite fair), or look at the copious amount of system logging that would generally point to the problem (stuff in dmesg, kernel logs, /var/log/messages, lots of tools and documentation to help me out). With BeOS, I was getting pop-up dialogs that just said stuff like "Error 0xFFFFFFFF occurred", with absolutely no useful information whatsoever. It was impossible for me to diagnose the problem no matter how hard I might try because the operating system just wasn't going to give me enough information to go on.
Also BeOS the company didn't respond at all to my requests for help with this. They provided zero technical support to me. Emails went unanswered.
Maybe BeOS had some nice architecture, but there is more to an OS than its handling of threads - much, much more, and I think that BeOS was not even close to ready for prime time. And the developers clearly had glossed over many aspects of an operating system (such as the aforementioned error diagnostics) to get to the pretty demos that the OS was capable of.
I read up on Objective-C once, thinking it sounded like it would be really good. The thing I can't understand is, why they deviated so much from the "standard" C syntax. I can't remember all the details, it's been years since I read a tutorial on Objective-C with an eye towards starting to use it for my projects, but I remember being very turned off by the fact that the language, for no apparent reason, completely changes the way method invocations are written.
Here I looked it up on Wikipedia, here's an example of what I mean:
A function in both C and Objective-C follows this general form:
int do_something(int i)
{
return square_root(i);
}
with int do_something(int) as the prototype.
When this is implemented as a method, this becomes:
- (int) do_something: (int) i
{
return [self square_root: i];
}
What the heck? Why throw C syntax out the window for methods?
To be honest, this was enough to make me pass on Objective-C. If I had a pressing need to use Obective-C over C++, I would take the time to become good enough with Objective-C's wonky syntax to make this a non-issue. But it was enough of a barrier that I gave up on Objective-C and stuck with C++.
By the way, your response is ridiculous in many ways. I don't feel like I should have to point these obvious things out to you but I guess I do:
1. The GP sounds like he understands template metaprogramming very well. Nothing about his post suggests that he either a) says that he is an "expert" (as you are suggesting he does), or b) *isn't* enough of an expert to have formed a valid opinion on the subject.
2. Clearly the GP used the word "impossible" to mean "very difficult". You're being pedantic by suggesting that he literally meant it is impossible to debug.
3. It's only because of lots and lots of dedicated effort by Boost developers that Boost's very-complex template metaprogramming techniques work on a wide variety of popular compilers. I would be willing to bet quite a bit that they had to jump through many hoops to find least-common-denominator solutions that worked on all compilers. I believe that this makes the GP's point perfectly. This kind of programming relies too much on subtle complexities of the language definition and while the Boost authors were willing to put lots of work into making these things work on various C++ compilers, I wouldn't want to do that and wouldn't choose to use a library that may force me to do the same (which might happen if I decide to extend Boost's implementation).
4. Once again by "useless" the GP clearly meant "requiring much more work to decipher than other more conventional error messages". Once again you dismiss his point by interpreting it completely literally.
My rule of thumb as a developer: whatever you do, make sure that the next guy who wants to work with it doesn't have to get a Ph.D. in the subject in order to continue your work. In other words, keep your implementation simple and as mainstream as possible, so that it can easily be picked up by anyone. Template metaprogramming fails this utterly.
I consider myself to be an "expert C++ developer" and I agree with the GP's comments on Boost. Your "my truths are self-evident except to the lazy" arguments do not convince me.
// == 24 // == 1
// == (4 * 3 * 2 * 1) == 24 // == 0! == 1
I have not seen anything that template metaprogramming can do that can't be done using other "saner" (in my opinion) techniques. Perhaps the template metaprogramming approach can at times produce *terser* solutions, but I don't think that they are any better than more verbose non-template-metaprogramming-based solutions.
Terse solutions are in my opinion often *less valuable* than more verbose solutions, because the latter are generally more approachable. Of course verbosity can be taken too far, and there's definitely a balance to be struck.
Here is an example of template metaprogramming code straight from Wikipedia:
template <int N>
struct Factorial
{
enum { value = N * Factorial<N - 1>::value };
};
template <>
struct Factorial<0>
{
enum { value = 1 };
};
// Factorial<4>::value == 24
// Factorial<0>::value == 1
void foo()
{
int x = Factorial<4>::value;
int y = Factorial<0>::value;
}
(this code defines a template which forces the compiler to compute factorials instead of computing them at runtime)
I don't see anything about this that is in any way more readable or maintainable than the non-template-metaprogramming solution also posted on Wikipedia:
int factorial(int n)
{
if (n == 0)
return 1;
return n * factorial(n - 1);
}
void foo()
{
int x = factorial(4);
int y = factorial(0);
}
(interestingly, this exact question was given to me recently on an interview programming test (write C++ code to compute factorials at compile time instead of runtime); it was the only question on the test that I couldn't answer; I said basically "I know the solution has something to do with templates and partial template specialization but I don't know the syntax of partial template specialization well enough to write this" - I'm still waiting to hear if I got the job, and hoping that not knowing partial template specialization very well won't be the deciding factor, but to be honest, if this is the kind of stuff they're doing, I don't really want to work there anyway)
I find the recursive implementation much easier to read and understand.
And this is a simple example. Really hairy template stuff like this:
BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT((
boost::is_same<
twice<add_pointer_f, int>::type
, int**
>::value
));
(taken from some Boost template metaprogramming documentation)
... that stuff is completely unreadable and I would never want code like that in any project I worked on.
Note that I have absolutely no problem with people using solutions like this in their code, I would never try to limit someone from solving a problem in a way that was best for them. The thing that bugs me, is that Boost and its techniques look like they are going to become "standard" C++, which means that anyone who writes C++ code in the future is going to have to deal with this stuff. I would like template metaprogramming much more if it wasn't something looming on the horizon that the C++ standard and common usage of C++ is eventually going to force upon me.
You can limit yourself to a subset of C++ that is actually pretty nice. When I write C++ code I try to make it look as much like Java as I can; you can get pretty close and end up with something pretty readable and maintainable. But if you use every feature of the C++ language you will indeed end up with a mess.
Heavy use of templates, especially with template meta-programming, goes in the opposite direction, of trying to use every nuance of the most complicated features in C++, which is why I find it to be intolerable.
Thank you for that, your post is right on the money. C++ template metaprogramming is just a horrible, horrible idea, and because Boost is so fundamentally geared towards template metaprogramming, I have to refuse to ever use Boost wherever I get to make the decision. It's unfortunate because the Boost library is very closely tied to the "future" of C++ (I believe that large parts of it are going to be incorporated in the C++ standard soon, and I suspect that C++ and Boost will become more and more intertwined as time goes on). This sucks because it means that as time goes on C++ is going to get less and less useable. Why can't they just leave a good thing alone?
I wonder if Sony sees the USA as its primary market, where they expect they need to sell large volumes, so they lower the price in the USA to an unsustainable level but make up for it in other regions of the world where they overcharge? I am beginning to form a theory after living here in NZ for six months and seeing how things are priced here, that things might be so cheap in the USA because companies are selling products there at a loss in order to compete in what they consider to be the most important market, and having to, like I said, make their product more expensive elsewhere to make up for it.
It's the only reason that I could find to account for the fact that, as an example, NZ Air charges less to USA customers flying a round trip starting in the USA, than for a flight on the exact same dates but starting instead from NZ. The exact same number of miles are flown, from the same airports, just in opposite directions. And the tickets originating in the USA are much cheaper. It makes no sense at all, unless I assume that NZ Air just wants to try to sell to a USA market where price competition is higher so they have no choice but to sell at a lower price there, but make up for it by selling at a higher price here.
If there is another theory on the reason behind this, I'd love to hear it.
It's been kind of fun reading this little personal flamefest between you two. Probably because you're both so pathetic that it makes me feel really good about myself.
> Hopefully someone picks up the slack, I'd pay a few bucks a month to keep using Myth without the scraping.
... etc.
That is such a funny thing to hear from a MythTV user. I cannot even count the number of times I heard the MythTV crowd say things like "TiVo SUCKS because you have to pay for the guide data! That stuff should be free! I would cut my own legs off before I'd pay for guide data because paying for guide data is THE BIGGEST EVIL IN THE WORLD!!!!"
Now that the "free" guide data is gone, all the "I refuse to pay $12 per month for guide data" types are probably chiming in unison about how they'd "pay for the data if only this evil zap2it company gave me the option instead of just shutting off my feed of waah waah".
Not saying you're one of these people, maybe you always were willing to pay for guide data. But there were ALOT of MythTV users that fit the freeloader description.
But the editor was Zonk. Did you really expect anything except incredible mediocrity from that bonehead? He and K "flamebait" Dawson have really really lowered the standards around here ...
He was responding to your supposition that if the case really had merit, Kaplan would have filed his claim in a "real" court instead of small claims court, which is a position you once again assert in response to his response to you.
In his response to you he explains what the benefits of small claims court are for the parties involved, and also that one party can request that the case be taken out of small claims court if the request is filed in a timely manner.
You completely ignore the possibility that Kaplan didn't want to have to involve lawyers and the expense thereof when he felt that the judgements that small claims court can award would be sufficient to satisfy him.
If it's true that anyone bringing a suit that they feel confident in winning would win more and better judgements in non-small-claims court, then why would ANYONE ever file a claim in small claims court? The only reason would be that they didn't think they had a good claim. If you're saying that the only people who file claims in small claims court are people who think they have a weak case, then I think this is patently absurd. Small claims court has many benefits (as explained by in the post we are arguing about) that can easily explain why someone would file a claim there.
As to what that post convinced me of; it convinced me that there are aspects to small claims court that make it an attractive place for someone suing for small sums of money to take their case to. And it also convinced me that the defendant could have moved the case out of small claims court if they'd made any effort to do so. Both of which directly contradict your assertions, and lead me to believe that your arguments are weak.
The thing is, I think that "bloggers" do believe that they live in a magical fairyland where a) they get to say whatever they want, and b) everyone will care about it and it will be important just because it was posted on a website in a "blog". It seems so obvious from the self-hyping and self-importance that this whole "blogging" thing has going on.
Maybe I'm just jaded because I don't read any "blogs" (unless Slashdot counts as one - does it?) and so I just don't get what the big deal is and who so many people feel like it's some kind of "revolution" in journalism, where it just looks to me like nothing new whatsoever. We've had the many-to-many communication channels of the internet for decades now. Blogs are nothing special.
Strawman? Flamebait? You have to be kidding me. The GP post was concise, informative, and very convincing.
You, on the other hand, only have your own supposition about what was in the best interests of the parties involved to support your paranoid claims. Also you make the laughable argument that the loser of this little tussle will be happy to give away his $7,500 because he's getting "coverage" for his "cause".
I think there are some strawman arguments and some flamebait going on here, but it's not in the GP post, it's in yours.
Please take your political flamebait somewhere else. Thank you.
Oh my god you keep doing it. Please stop.
Repeatedly, you fail to understand when someone is using a gross analogy to illustrate a point. You are taking people's words far too literally without trying to understand the obvious points that they are trying to make. You so completely miss the point of the post you are responding to in every post you make (and I've read several from you on these boards) that I gotta wonder if you even want to understand what other people are trying to say.
By the way, people can definitely be addicted to eating, I didn't mean to imply that they couldn't. I just mentioned biological processes like eating to respond to the GP's ridiculous assertion that he or she is addicted to living. My point was only that just because you feel compelled to do something (like eating when you are hungry) it doesn't mean that this is an addiction, but that doesn't mean that being compelled to do something is never an addiction.
Addiction is obviously a very difficult to define concept, and there are alot of grey areas. However, people like you who summarily dismiss the concept do nothing to contribute to the meaningful discussion of the topic.
Here's a very loose definition that might work for you: addiction is any overwhelming feeling of compulsion to perform an activity other than natural biological functions (like eating). A person who is addicted to an activity has a recognizable set of behaviors that indicate the addiction, such as participating in the activity to the exclusion of other activities, hiding the behavior from others, and being unable to stop thinking about the activity even when you are not doing it.
I personally have had all of these and more with some gaming I have done and I considered myself addicted at the time. I had great difficulty in extracting myself from these addictions. Dismiss me if you want to, but it's very clear to me that gaming addiction is real.
I think that you can request a refund from the manufacturer if you don't agree with the EULA. But, I really am just guessing on that. If you can't get a refund for the product because you didn't agree to the EULA, then I would expect the court to look very favorably on you if you sue.
Is it really true that any illegal term in any contract invalidates the whole contract and not just that part?
How do you know this?
Yes you can. You can reject the product and send it back to the vendor for a refund. I'm *assuming* from what I've read on this that you do have this right, because it's what the judge suggests that the customer should have done in the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 decision.
I suppose you could send it back with a letter asking that the EULA terms be modified to meet your requirements, but I hightly doubt that any company would bother to follow through on this kind of contract negotiation. They'd just cancel the order and move on.
In the Hill vs. Gateway 2000 judgement linked to a few posts up, the judge explicitly says that using the product in the face of a EULA that you were aware of and didn't read, is enough to demonstrate that you accept the terms of the EULA.
In other words, the judge explicitly shoots down the concept that many people put forth that, "if I didn't sign the EULA, it doesn't apply."
Look a few posts up. There is a link to the summary of the judgement in a case of a consumer suing Gateway 2000 that is relevent. It looks to me like the judgement was that the EULA was enforceable. The basic gist was, the consumer can see that there is a EULA there, and if they don't read it, they are accepting that it may present terms that they would find unfavorable. The plaintiff (Hill) tried 6 or 7 different ways to argue that they weren't bound by the contract terms that were present in the box but that they hadn't agreed to before the purchase, and the judge shot down each one. The reasoning seems to be that the courts recognize that it's impractical to expect every bit of legalese to be read to or by the consumer and then agreed to by them (most people wouldn't have the patience to wait 5 minutes for the salesperson to read off legal terms each time they wanted to buy a product). So it's reasonable for the box to arrive with extra terms enclosed, given that the consumer has the right to reject the product if they don't like the terms and get a refund.
... I'm guessing that it comes down to this: the store sells you the hard copy of the software, but the right to use the software - i.e. copy it into your computer's memory or onto its hard drive - can only be granted by the software maker. So the software company has a hook for any conditions they want to add to your use of the software.
As to your point about the software manufacturer being unable to enforce any license agreement because your transaction was with the store that sold the software to you and not the manufacturer
But, I am not a lawyer either so, this is all just conjecture based on my own personal understanding.