Customers in general ought not to be held to know FedEx's corporate structure. I did indeed use the Newegg-provided label. As to my prior shipment broke by UPS, of course I realize that there is the potential for scams. I was shipping Christmas presents to myself because it was cheaper and, on average, safer than trying to check them on my return flight. See my other replies in this thread for more on the FedEx $100 insurance situation.
Of course not. None of these companies has ever honored their insurance for me in the past when I've shipped something other than as part of a sale. Moreover, insurance becomes largely irrelevant when you get into the "run over with a truck" territory that this particular shipment was in. Also, FedEx never offered me insurance when I told them what I was shipping and its value. Furthermore, I have had major problems with FedEx in the past, including "overnight" deliveries sitting on a truck in my city for over a week (including food products that were thus rendered worthless). I wasn't about to pay anything extra when I reasonably believed it'd make no difference in how my shipment was treated, before or after its destruction. I'd roughly estimate that FedEx has caused me at least $800 worth of uncompensated losses in the past 5 years, regardless of what insurance or delivery terms I paid for, because of unprofessional and incompetent behavior. Don't ask why I used them for this particular shipment - I will plead insanity and amnesia.
On a side note, apparently FedEx "express" gets you consequential damages whereas regular FedEx ground disclaims them. At least keep that in mind if you use FedEx. I have had better experience with UPS, notwithstanding them not honoring their insurance. And so far, I have had the best experience with DHL, with no problems to date, but I suspect that may largely be due to the frequency with which I use DHL compared to UPS. (That said, I use DHL more than FedEx, so either DHL is way better than FedEx or I am living in a statistical anomaly, a possibility I won't deny.)
There are reasons that Clinton won in '96 other than voters standing behind him. The Republicans ran Bob Dole, who had the charisma of a wooden spoon at best, and gave Clinton at least the fence-sitter vote. It'd likewise be hard to say that Bush won the 2004 election because voters were not distancing themselves from him. It seems more likely to me that the Democrats just got lucky and managed to run the only candidate who couldn't beat Bush. But maybe I'm just cynical.
Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.
On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).
Buyer's remorse is more the immediate, emotional response to a purchase brought on by emotional doubt that the decision you made was the right one. I think that the rational realization after two weeks of pretending to be an old Jedi that you made the wrong decision is more in line with crappy investing or even garden-variety stupidity than with emotion.
Sounds good to me. Bill Clinton gave us something that few Republican presidents ever have: a Republican Congress. I'm just in favor of as little party solidarity between the House, the Senate, and the Executive as possible.:P
And if I did get anal and say "that's not a config file!", of course I would still look in/etc first because I know that what you asked for isn't a binary, library, high-velocity data, or user home directory. But as long as we can agree on init scripts not being configuration, then we can agree that any backronym for/etc that includes the word "configuration" is probably terribly wrong.
I don't think that passwd is any more configuration than init scripts are. It's just data that doesn't change often enough to go in/var. The configuration is more a function of nsswitch.conf and the like. Granted, those things were not present in early Unix, but I'd consider that to be more an indication that they were statically configured (i.e., hardwired). Even if I concede that passwd is configuration, however,/etc/motd is certainly not configuration any more than resume.doc is. It is simply the data that is displayed when a particular program runs.
Configuration tells a program how to act, data is what the program acts on. That's where I get that calling motd configuration leads to calling everything configuration - if you don't draw the line somewhere between/etc/ntp.conf and/etc/motd as being different species, then you can't say that anything is not configuration./etc/motd only tells programs how to act if you consider it to be a character-per-character configuration file for login(1). And if you do that, then/var/mail/yourname becomes an automatically-updated configuration file for mail(1) and/usr/lib/libc.so becomes a configuration file for most of the software on your system.
You have to draw the line somewhere, and I don't see how you can draw it on the outside of motd without it being outside of all files on the system. If you have a better line to draw, then please do draw it for me. In the meantime, I stand by my position that/etc contains configuration et cetera.
That even further solidifies my point. Things without a specific home go in/etc. I wouldn't call my comments "attached to some very modern installation."
That's exactly my point. Not everything in/etc is configuration, but certainly configuration is among the things included there. For instance, passwd is hard to call configuration. The init scripts are hard to call configuration. And motd is hard to call configuration because it's supposed to be the message of the day, which implies something less than static but less often-changing than it would take to deserve a spot in/var (note that Debian currently makes/etc/motd a symlink to/var/run/motd).
The argument about everything being configuration was in response to your point about ntp.conf, which purported by quoting it to be in response to my point about passwd. Just because one thing in/etc is configuration doesn't mean that everything is, and if you call everything in/etc configuration then you run into the slippery slope I described. How do you define "configuration" to include motd, passwd, and init scripts but exclude things that go in/var and shared libraries? The answer is that you don't have to, because/etc is about more than just configuration.
Possibly "configuration, small system helper scripts, and data that doesn't change often" is a good description for/etc, but why not just call it "et cetera" and say that it is the home of anything that doesn't quite belong somewhere else? Where would you put each of passwd, the init scripts, motd, and ntp.conf, if you didn't have/etc to stuff them into?
Re:first post
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That was his point. If '..' is a virtual directory and not an actual entry in the directory, then why does it affect the hardlink count of the directory it points to?
Re:Best description I've seen for /etc...
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 1
I am a rebel. I pronounce it "ets", like if you had more than one et.
I didn't say that "and other stuff that doesn't fit in the others" didn't include configuration. But/etc is more than configuration. What software does/etc/motd configure? If you say "it configures the text to display on login" then you end up with everything that isn't an executable being "configuration." That includes shared libraries, which configure how binaries linked to them behave, and/var/mail/*, which configures what text to display when a user requests his e-mail./etc is/etc because there has to be a place to keep configuration and there has to be a place to keep misc. non-volatile data - sometimes I wish we had/conf and/const or/static, but we have/etc instead.
I used a KFC plastic spork, because that's what I had handy at the time. I can't imagine trying to read Perl without a bucket of greasy chicken to bury my face in between regexps.
Caesar of course spoke the famous line to Brutus in Greek, if legends are to be believed over Shakespeare (not that I trust either to be based on the work of Caesar's assassination-ready stenographer). But the Germans have it right with Kaiser. I personally say Seezer in conversation - I conform myself to the anglicized Latin when speaking in English. But if I went to the Vatican I'd say (or avoid saying?) Cheezer, and if I had a time machine I'd probably make a visit and say Kaiser a few times for effect.
Law is the worst, by far. Law Latin is only superseded by Law French as the most bastardized intersection of languages. Hm...no, maybe the duplication of English and Law French words is worse, but only because it's redundant. IAALS and one of the hardest things for me as I was entering the arena 2-1/2 years ago was dealing with "PRIME-uh FAYSCH-uh" and its ilk. Go figure that, being in one of the few professions that gets to use Latin on a daily basis, we are required to do so incorrectly.
It's et cetera. If you look at the Unix hierarchy, you get:
/bin - binaries
/sbin - system binaries
/dev - devices
/home - user home directories
/lib - libraries
/mnt - temporary mount point
/root - root's home directory in case/home is on another filesystem
/var - variable data, such as databases, news, and mail
/tmp - temporary files
/usr - mostly there because it wouldn't fit on /:P
/etc - stuff that doesn't fit any of the above
It's not about configuration files, either./etc is home to both configuration and system-essential files, such as passwd and motd. I wouldn't call passwd "configuration," and I wouldn't call it "data." It's more "control." But that doesn't matter - the stuff in/etc just wouldn't fit anywhere else. All the backronyms in the world won't change that.
Re:Pronunciation?
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
No, but they did write millions of lines of poetry, much of it with strict forms. If you read a million lines of C with lots of good comments, you'd figure out the syntax before you finished.
Re:Pronunciation?
on
Define - /etc?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm replying to you because you were more polite than the sibling. Just because the word "cetera" is Latin does not mean that it is pronounced with an S sound. In fact, in Latin, it would never have been pronounced that way. In the days of Caesar, it would have been pronounced with a K sound and, as the Latin language evolved into ecclesiastical Latin, it would be pronounced with a CH sound.
The pronunciation with an S sound comes from the way that Latin words have usually been anglicized. Most often, the letters are pronounced as in English but the syllables are accented as in the original Latin.
I can't help that you Brits are developmentally challenged.;) I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did the first time. The author was one of my heroes when I was myself writing seemingly endless college admissions essays.
This is in response to you and the sibling. I am aware of who wrote it - the reason I didn't cite the source is because I assumed that everyone on Slashdot would know it right away. You don't cite things like "vast right-wing conspiracy"[1] or "in Soviet Russia"[2] jokes for the same reason.
Then again, kids these days may not know, so I will be more careful about citing obvious sources in the future.
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I
have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making
them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic
slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time
efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot
bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook
Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a
veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly
defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious
army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the
subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large
suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On
Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of
charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie.
Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear.
I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I
have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last
summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force
demonstration. I bat.400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me
fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy.
I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day
and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I
know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have
performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week;
when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I
successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a
small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On
weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami.
Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down.
I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a
toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San
Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the
Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and
I have spoken with Elvis.
Demanding money with an accompanying threat is still EXTORTION, whether there's an actual lawsuit or not.
I don't think that that word means what you think it does. From Merriam-Webster, extort: to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power. The intimidation here is justifiable because it is the least intimidating way to notify people of their infringement, and the power utilized is neither undue nor illegal. (It goes without saying that sending a letter is not the use of force.) How does a letter that says "Dear Bonker, you are infringing our copyright. We are willing to settle with you, thereby saving both you and ourselves the cost of litigating this matter, for $X [for some reasonable value of X]. Please let us know within 30 days. Love, the RIAA" constitute extortion?
Re:Rails is Doomed
on
Rails Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Everyone knows Haskell is the best language for writing a Fibonnaci generator.
You really do just have to choose the best language based on the problem you are solving. After all, every language is good at one thing, and Fibanacci generators are Haskell's.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Customers in general ought not to be held to know FedEx's corporate structure. I did indeed use the Newegg-provided label. As to my prior shipment broke by UPS, of course I realize that there is the potential for scams. I was shipping Christmas presents to myself because it was cheaper and, on average, safer than trying to check them on my return flight. See my other replies in this thread for more on the FedEx $100 insurance situation.
Of course not. None of these companies has ever honored their insurance for me in the past when I've shipped something other than as part of a sale. Moreover, insurance becomes largely irrelevant when you get into the "run over with a truck" territory that this particular shipment was in. Also, FedEx never offered me insurance when I told them what I was shipping and its value. Furthermore, I have had major problems with FedEx in the past, including "overnight" deliveries sitting on a truck in my city for over a week (including food products that were thus rendered worthless). I wasn't about to pay anything extra when I reasonably believed it'd make no difference in how my shipment was treated, before or after its destruction. I'd roughly estimate that FedEx has caused me at least $800 worth of uncompensated losses in the past 5 years, regardless of what insurance or delivery terms I paid for, because of unprofessional and incompetent behavior. Don't ask why I used them for this particular shipment - I will plead insanity and amnesia.
On a side note, apparently FedEx "express" gets you consequential damages whereas regular FedEx ground disclaims them. At least keep that in mind if you use FedEx. I have had better experience with UPS, notwithstanding them not honoring their insurance. And so far, I have had the best experience with DHL, with no problems to date, but I suspect that may largely be due to the frequency with which I use DHL compared to UPS. (That said, I use DHL more than FedEx, so either DHL is way better than FedEx or I am living in a statistical anomaly, a possibility I won't deny.)
There are reasons that Clinton won in '96 other than voters standing behind him. The Republicans ran Bob Dole, who had the charisma of a wooden spoon at best, and gave Clinton at least the fence-sitter vote. It'd likewise be hard to say that Bush won the 2004 election because voters were not distancing themselves from him. It seems more likely to me that the Democrats just got lucky and managed to run the only candidate who couldn't beat Bush. But maybe I'm just cynical.
Here's what happened when I FedExed my RMA to Newegg, packed very carefully. Note the bent motherboard - I didn't even know you could do that. The good news is that FedEx paid part of my claim ... they paid $100 plus the $8.33 that the FedEx store charged me to fax in the claim forms. The bad news is that they did not refund my original shipping or pay more than $100 on the over $280 of damage that they did. It also took about 4 hours of phone calls to even convince FedEx that I was not the seller, and then they lost my claim in their e-mail system (and did not reply to my e-mails) and closed it out for inactivity after a month or so, until I called them and asked what happened.
On a side note, don't bother with UPS insurance. I insured something when I sent it to myself once, and they broke it and the insurance remedy was to return it to the origination address and ask to see an original purchase receipt to award the insurance claim. If you happened to make something yourself or even received something as a gift, don't insure it when you ship it. And hire a private courier (unless someone has found a common carrier that doesn't suck).
Buyer's remorse is more the immediate, emotional response to a purchase brought on by emotional doubt that the decision you made was the right one. I think that the rational realization after two weeks of pretending to be an old Jedi that you made the wrong decision is more in line with crappy investing or even garden-variety stupidity than with emotion.
Sounds good to me. Bill Clinton gave us something that few Republican presidents ever have: a Republican Congress. I'm just in favor of as little party solidarity between the House, the Senate, and the Executive as possible. :P
And if I did get anal and say "that's not a config file!", of course I would still look in /etc first because I know that what you asked for isn't a binary, library, high-velocity data, or user home directory. But as long as we can agree on init scripts not being configuration, then we can agree that any backronym for /etc that includes the word "configuration" is probably terribly wrong.
I don't think that passwd is any more configuration than init scripts are. It's just data that doesn't change often enough to go in /var. The configuration is more a function of nsswitch.conf and the like. Granted, those things were not present in early Unix, but I'd consider that to be more an indication that they were statically configured (i.e., hardwired). Even if I concede that passwd is configuration, however, /etc/motd is certainly not configuration any more than resume.doc is. It is simply the data that is displayed when a particular program runs.
/etc/ntp.conf and /etc/motd as being different species, then you can't say that anything is not configuration. /etc/motd only tells programs how to act if you consider it to be a character-per-character configuration file for login(1). And if you do that, then /var/mail/yourname becomes an automatically-updated configuration file for mail(1) and /usr/lib/libc.so becomes a configuration file for most of the software on your system.
/etc contains configuration et cetera.
Configuration tells a program how to act, data is what the program acts on. That's where I get that calling motd configuration leads to calling everything configuration - if you don't draw the line somewhere between
You have to draw the line somewhere, and I don't see how you can draw it on the outside of motd without it being outside of all files on the system. If you have a better line to draw, then please do draw it for me. In the meantime, I stand by my position that
That even further solidifies my point. Things without a specific home go in /etc. I wouldn't call my comments "attached to some very modern installation."
That's exactly my point. Not everything in /etc is configuration, but certainly configuration is among the things included there. For instance, passwd is hard to call configuration. The init scripts are hard to call configuration. And motd is hard to call configuration because it's supposed to be the message of the day, which implies something less than static but less often-changing than it would take to deserve a spot in /var (note that Debian currently makes /etc/motd a symlink to /var/run/motd).
/etc is configuration doesn't mean that everything is, and if you call everything in /etc configuration then you run into the slippery slope I described. How do you define "configuration" to include motd, passwd, and init scripts but exclude things that go in /var and shared libraries? The answer is that you don't have to, because /etc is about more than just configuration.
/etc, but why not just call it "et cetera" and say that it is the home of anything that doesn't quite belong somewhere else? Where would you put each of passwd, the init scripts, motd, and ntp.conf, if you didn't have /etc to stuff them into?
The argument about everything being configuration was in response to your point about ntp.conf, which purported by quoting it to be in response to my point about passwd. Just because one thing in
Possibly "configuration, small system helper scripts, and data that doesn't change often" is a good description for
That was his point. If '..' is a virtual directory and not an actual entry in the directory, then why does it affect the hardlink count of the directory it points to?
I am a rebel. I pronounce it "ets", like if you had more than one et.
I didn't say that "and other stuff that doesn't fit in the others" didn't include configuration. But /etc is more than configuration. What software does /etc/motd configure? If you say "it configures the text to display on login" then you end up with everything that isn't an executable being "configuration." That includes shared libraries, which configure how binaries linked to them behave, and /var/mail/*, which configures what text to display when a user requests his e-mail. /etc is /etc because there has to be a place to keep configuration and there has to be a place to keep misc. non-volatile data - sometimes I wish we had /conf and /const or /static, but we have /etc instead.
I used a KFC plastic spork, because that's what I had handy at the time. I can't imagine trying to read Perl without a bucket of greasy chicken to bury my face in between regexps.
Caesar of course spoke the famous line to Brutus in Greek, if legends are to be believed over Shakespeare (not that I trust either to be based on the work of Caesar's assassination-ready stenographer). But the Germans have it right with Kaiser. I personally say Seezer in conversation - I conform myself to the anglicized Latin when speaking in English. But if I went to the Vatican I'd say (or avoid saying?) Cheezer, and if I had a time machine I'd probably make a visit and say Kaiser a few times for effect.
Law is the worst, by far. Law Latin is only superseded by Law French as the most bastardized intersection of languages. Hm...no, maybe the duplication of English and Law French words is worse, but only because it's redundant. IAALS and one of the hardest things for me as I was entering the arena 2-1/2 years ago was dealing with "PRIME-uh FAYSCH-uh" and its ilk. Go figure that, being in one of the few professions that gets to use Latin on a daily basis, we are required to do so incorrectly.
It's et cetera. If you look at the Unix hierarchy, you get:
It's not about configuration files, either. /etc is home to both configuration and system-essential files, such as passwd and motd. I wouldn't call passwd "configuration," and I wouldn't call it "data." It's more "control." But that doesn't matter - the stuff in /etc just wouldn't fit anywhere else. All the backronyms in the world won't change that.
No, but they did write millions of lines of poetry, much of it with strict forms. If you read a million lines of C with lots of good comments, you'd figure out the syntax before you finished.
I'm replying to you because you were more polite than the sibling. Just because the word "cetera" is Latin does not mean that it is pronounced with an S sound. In fact, in Latin, it would never have been pronounced that way. In the days of Caesar, it would have been pronounced with a K sound and, as the Latin language evolved into ecclesiastical Latin, it would be pronounced with a CH sound.
The pronunciation with an S sound comes from the way that Latin words have usually been anglicized. Most often, the letters are pronounced as in English but the syllables are accented as in the original Latin.
I can't help that you Brits are developmentally challenged. ;) I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I did the first time. The author was one of my heroes when I was myself writing seemingly endless college admissions essays.
This is in response to you and the sibling. I am aware of who wrote it - the reason I didn't cite the source is because I assumed that everyone on Slashdot would know it right away. You don't cite things like "vast right-wing conspiracy"[1] or "in Soviet Russia"[2] jokes for the same reason.
Then again, kids these days may not know, so I will be more careful about citing obvious sources in the future.
[1] - Hillary Clinton
[2] - Yakov Smirnoff
I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
.400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me
fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear. I don't perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
But I have not yet gone to college.
I don't think that that word means what you think it does. From Merriam-Webster, extort: to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power. The intimidation here is justifiable because it is the least intimidating way to notify people of their infringement, and the power utilized is neither undue nor illegal. (It goes without saying that sending a letter is not the use of force.) How does a letter that says "Dear Bonker, you are infringing our copyright. We are willing to settle with you, thereby saving both you and ourselves the cost of litigating this matter, for $X [for some reasonable value of X]. Please let us know within 30 days. Love, the RIAA" constitute extortion?
Everyone knows Haskell is the best language for writing a Fibonnaci generator.
You really do just have to choose the best language based on the problem you are solving. After all, every language is good at one thing, and Fibanacci generators are Haskell's. :P
What is a quad Core 2 Duo Xeon? :P