This happened to me, in a slightly different realm. A certain cable company I was using (by lack of other choice) "upgraded" their digital cable service about 6 months ago. Unfortunately, the upgrade was horrible. It limited some of the basic functionality of digital cable drastically (the worst was the guide menu, which shrunk horizontally to one time slot, vertically to 6, down from 3 and 9).
They obviously had something new and better to replace this with: lots and lots of advertising. They started inserting ads everywhere possible. The guide was blanketed with a pay-per-view ad in one corner, a cable service ad in another (go figure, you already have it, and they still have to eat valuable screen space to advertise to you), and an ad they were selling out to local businesses in the third corner, leaving a very small area for the actual guide menu. They also added advertisements to the banner that appears as you change channels.
Unfortunately, the end user had no choice, as the upgrade just happened over the cable feed, and there was no way to control it. The worst of it, though, was that they decided that the new features (advertisements) made it much nicer, I suppose, so they raised the subscription rate about 10% over the already rediculous amounts.
I did spend about 2 hours on the phone, listing specific complaints with them, with the basic response of "tough", to which I promptly cancelled my service and lived without television for a short while. Luckily, I moved soon after, and haven't had quite the same problems here.
Unfortunately, with some of these markets that have such huge barriers to entry, it's tough to do much about the shit some companies want to impose on their users. Too little competition, and only between 2 or 3 companies, really keeps service crappy. Often, the only real control you have is not to partake in their service.
- One of the record stores featured in the article, Amoeba, - sells records primarily from small companies.
Yeah, but, as the article mentions: The nearby Amoeba Records, a warehouse-sized new- and used-record store that has long served as a mecca for Bay Area music enthusiasts, says it hasn't seen any noticeable effect.
The fact that Amoeba (which is a great store, btw) deals so heavily in non-RIAA titles only lends more support to the theory that this is more a result of price fixing than of Napster.
How is this different than any other http proxy, other than it tweaks the text in transit? Sites like Bank of America (the culprit in this case) don't seem to have any problem at all with corporate proxy servers, which, unlike this service, typically store a local copy of the material for caching purposes. Bank of America didn't seem to be concerned with the fact that the service was tweaking their page in transit, more that it was redistributing copyrighted material.
Well, I'd hope that, if there was a flag that set whether a package was installed merely to fulfill dependancies, there would be a way to, after installation, remove that flag if needed.
That way, if you linked against the library yourself, you could easily go remove that flag (thereby preventing that package from ever being removed).
It'd be up to you to go remove that flag if you were going to link against that library, but, as I see it, anyone who is going to be linking against a library themselves would have the know-how to be able to do that. It seems more reasonable to force people to say "Yes, I want to use this package" than to force people to go and remove the unused ones by hand.
While I personally love the debian method of package management, there is one major problem I see with it. The automatic download of dependencies is fantastic (esp. for newbies), and is much, much better than the windows solution of always forcing users to download every dependency of their application, regardless of whether it is already installed. However, there is a major problem that arises specifically out of this, relating to uninstalls.
If you download a debian package, it will also download and install any dependant packages, as it should (imho), but there is no way for the system to know that the dependant package was installed only as a dependancy, not as the desired package. The result is, on package removal, all of the dependant packages are left floating around on the system. Unfortunately, most newbie users are going to have an extremely tough time determining which packages are critical system packages, and which packages are just dependancies for a program they uninstalled 6 months ago.
RPMs and tarballs do not specifically have the same damage as debian packages in this respect, since they force intervention in installing the dependant packages. At least the user knows what is being installed since they are forced to do it, and they might possibly remember down the road.
Ideally, package managers should have some sort of usage/reference counting on packages, so they can delete any non-system dependant packages as users remove packages above them. If nothing else, at least system administrators would be able to tell what packages aren't needed anymore.
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This happened to me, in a slightly different realm. A certain cable company I was using (by lack of other choice) "upgraded" their digital cable service about 6 months ago. Unfortunately, the upgrade was horrible. It limited some of the basic functionality of digital cable drastically (the worst was the guide menu, which shrunk horizontally to one time slot, vertically to 6, down from 3 and 9).
They obviously had something new and better to replace this with: lots and lots of advertising. They started inserting ads everywhere possible. The guide was blanketed with a pay-per-view ad in one corner, a cable service ad in another (go figure, you already have it, and they still have to eat valuable screen space to advertise to you), and an ad they were selling out to local businesses in the third corner, leaving a very small area for the actual guide menu. They also added advertisements to the banner that appears as you change channels.
Unfortunately, the end user had no choice, as the upgrade just happened over the cable feed, and there was no way to control it. The worst of it, though, was that they decided that the new features (advertisements) made it much nicer, I suppose, so they raised the subscription rate about 10% over the already rediculous amounts.
I did spend about 2 hours on the phone, listing specific complaints with them, with the basic response of "tough", to which I promptly cancelled my service and lived without television for a short while. Luckily, I moved soon after, and haven't had quite the same problems here.
Unfortunately, with some of these markets that have such huge barriers to entry, it's tough to do much about the shit some companies want to impose on their users. Too little competition, and only between 2 or 3 companies, really keeps service crappy. Often, the only real control you have is not to partake in their service.
Are they just decorative, or do they serve some function? It almost looks like the back/forward buttons on the Microsoft mice.
- One of the record stores featured in the article, Amoeba, - sells records primarily from small companies.
Yeah, but, as the article mentions: The nearby Amoeba Records, a warehouse-sized new- and used-record store that has long served as a mecca for Bay Area music enthusiasts, says it hasn't seen any noticeable effect.
The fact that Amoeba (which is a great store, btw) deals so heavily in non-RIAA titles only lends more support to the theory that this is more a result of price fixing than of Napster.How is this different than any other http proxy, other than it tweaks the text in transit? Sites like Bank of America (the culprit in this case) don't seem to have any problem at all with corporate proxy servers, which, unlike this service, typically store a local copy of the material for caching purposes. Bank of America didn't seem to be concerned with the fact that the service was tweaking their page in transit, more that it was redistributing copyrighted material.
That way, if you linked against the library yourself, you could easily go remove that flag (thereby preventing that package from ever being removed).
It'd be up to you to go remove that flag if you were going to link against that library, but, as I see it, anyone who is going to be linking against a library themselves would have the know-how to be able to do that. It seems more reasonable to force people to say "Yes, I want to use this package" than to force people to go and remove the unused ones by hand.
If you download a debian package, it will also download and install any dependant packages, as it should (imho), but there is no way for the system to know that the dependant package was installed only as a dependancy, not as the desired package. The result is, on package removal, all of the dependant packages are left floating around on the system. Unfortunately, most newbie users are going to have an extremely tough time determining which packages are critical system packages, and which packages are just dependancies for a program they uninstalled 6 months ago.
RPMs and tarballs do not specifically have the same damage as debian packages in this respect, since they force intervention in installing the dependant packages. At least the user knows what is being installed since they are forced to do it, and they might possibly remember down the road.
Ideally, package managers should have some sort of usage/reference counting on packages, so they can delete any non-system dependant packages as users remove packages above them. If nothing else, at least system administrators would be able to tell what packages aren't needed anymore.