I'm aware of that, kid; it's just that I never referred to "most people saying 'remove the shadow'", just my personal reaction, and nothing I suggested involved clipping the shadow itself (which isn't easy), and at no point was I replying on a personal experience in which I could have misinterpreted a "remove the shadow" proposal.:-)
Hm, almost. Mozilla has a patent on "Making webpages load automatically when you drag them down from the address bar, but then making you have to hit 'go' or 'return' in later versions and destroying all evidence of the original functionality."
They implement this in FireFox, and, so far, have successfully prevented Microsoft from implementing the second part.
The irony being that in the US the space program considered too important to trust to the free market. President Kennedy had vowed that private enterprise would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, we'd still be waiting.
That wasn't so much a sign that free market forces were unable, but that they were unwilling. In the 1960s, private companies couldn't find something in space capable of generating resources sufficient to make such a program self-sustaining. And NASA still hasn't either.
The relevant comparison would be, could private companies do it, if the government paid them the value it placed upon completion of various goals, when they were completed? [1] In other words, what if NASA had started "crowdsourcing" 40 years earlier? I think the answer is less obvious.
[1] This is actually similar to Robin Hanson's "futarchy" idea: instead of having the national legislature set policies, it can simply define a function that weights each national goal: literacy, space exploration, economic growth, etc., and then implement the policies that prediction markets predict will maximize this function. "Vote on values, bet on beliefs."
I think I mostly agree, but now you seem to be equivocating in what you mean by "free speech". You earlier seemed to be arguing that significant scientific discoveries are "impossible" if the general society lacks free speech rights. But I think now you're saying it's only necessary that the small subset of scientific intellectuals needs to have the free speech rights.
And remember, it wasn't even the "scientific community" in general that had free speech, but the subset within that, that was working on physics-related projects of national importance. Biology-related projects of national importance? Nope. Physics-related projects of non-importantce? Nope.
I'm not knowledgeable about the fraction of discoveries that were "theoretical" vs "engineering" in the S/U. However, to the extent that they were able to understand nature well enough to do what they did, and before others, that is difficult science.
Both islamic and stalinist countries violently suppress free speech, consequently having almost no scientific breakthrough.
I was about to give a counterexample, but you did it for me. The Soviet Union -- a Stalinist society, had several significant scientific breathroughs: independent discovery of the atom bomb, first orbital probe, first pictures of the far side of the moon, etc.
Anti-free speech societies can have technological progress, as long as they "cut it out, when the truth starts to matter"[1]. The Soviet Union gives an excellect contrast for "selective rationality": while the public could be kept from revolting, even with Lysenko-driven agriculture, getting the a-bomb and into space was "too important" to let adherence to Marxist ideas about quantum theory or the superiority of communist organizational methods get in the way.
(Great discussion of this in the recent release, The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan, btw.)
[1]This is great advice too: "What do you believe, when being wrong has consequences? Why don't you believe that now?"
heh, that's what contracts have come down to today: they all make you agree to ridiculous terms that they don't ever actually intend to enforce against you, except as leverage.
It's not just in telecom. It's in credit cards too: "We can raise your interest rates whenever we feel like it, even on 'fixed' rates. We normally won't, but what they heck, you might annoy us some day."
Or my apartment. "You have to notify us 60 days in advance for a moveout." "Hey, here's my notice today, 60 days in advance." "Oh, we're not ready, come back tomorrow." "If I come back tomorrow, penalities attach." "Oh, don't worry about that silly thing, that's just in case."
I'm all for flexible languages... but... in this case, promoting that kind of sloppiness makes it impossible when you want to convey the meaning of the original definition of "literally".
Before, "really" meant "literally", now people use "really" just to mean "very".
Now "literally" just means "figuratively".
What do we go to now? "Actually"? And then how long until that term gets used metaphorically?
And how long until "metaphorically" gets used "metaphorically"?
"[A politician*] is someone who can do in one language, what Yasser Arafat can only do in two." -- i.e. say the opposite thing to different crowds without them figuring it out
*I don't know if it was referring to a specific politician (maybe Pat Buchanan) or the job of a politician in general.
Applicant: I'd like to program for your phones. Hiring Manager: Okay, what can you program on? Applicant: The iPhone. Hiring Manager: And what else? Applicant: Nothing, just that. Hiring Manager: Well, we're only hiring for non-iPhone programmers. Applicant: Yes, but I currently have a job. Hiring Manager: Uh huh... Applicant: And I've got a offer waiting for me at Verizon... Hiring Manager:WAIT! WHAT DO YOU WANT? WHEN CAN YOU START?
Maybe we could ask them to tell us what we look like, and that would patch up some of our theories about the earth's history!
First, we need to figure out how to send information faster than light... and communicate that request without any knowledge of what stimuli are meaningful to them:-/
And while I certainly understand the point you and she are making, I have long wondered at what point does a commonly misused word simply become redefined?
So would you say it begs the question of when a misuse becomes the definition?;-)
What I've always admired about that particular illusion is that, even though you think e.g. "it's the shadow that's making them look different!", you can keep deleting things from the image that you think are causing the illusion, all the way down to the point where only those two squares are left, and they will still look different the whole time.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Actually, the problem arose specifically because I did exactly what the install instructions said. If, for example, I had ignored the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED step[1] to install Grub on the MBR, the Linux failure would have been "sandboxed" to a separate hard drive, and I would have been able to load Windows and download and burn all the CDs they listed[2], exactly as I had intended when I installed the third HD as part of my careful plan to try Ubuntu.
But you're right: it is pretty irresponsible to follow Ubuntu install instructions:-/
[1] Yes, I am intentionally mocking the phrasing of the recommendation to do the critical step that fucked up my whole experience.
[2] Of course, that probably wouldn't have told them anything they didn't already know, but whatever.
After skimming through it again, I'm still impressed with how friendly and helpful the Ubuntu users were to such an obvious pratt.
Please list the things they suggested which you think were helpful or friendly. (Remember: nothing they suggested fixed the problem without taking unnecessarily drastic steps.)
Truth:- After you rendered your computer unable to boot,
I rendered it unable to load an OS. I would have been able to still load Windows (and burn CDs!) if I hadn't followed the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice to install GRUB on the mbr.
and didn't see fit to download any bootable operating system,
Because I couldn't. Ubuntu disabled my CD burner, remember?
Kinda tricky fixing a problem with no operating system available.
Then remind me, briefly, why "have a separate, reliable OS CD, such as Windows, available when attempting to install" wasn't in the install instructions on the website.
And the computer was at no time bricked.
Yes, because of pedants such as yourself, I have switched to calling it "near-bricked" because I couldn't do anything with the computer except re-install OSes that can't load. At no time did I say "bricked". Stop being a drama queen.
Truth:- When you vaguely mentioned some of the things you had tried,
Vaguely?
I said tried re-installing several times --> they said the problem was that I need to "try" reinstalling. I said I verified the burn --> They suggested checking if the CD burned properly.
(Minor digression: You've really got to hand it to the genius that thought of that one. Somehow, despite each and every file I have ever downloaded getting each bit perfectly transcribed by the time I tried to use it, and despite the CD burn being verified, and despite the ENTIRE install process being completely functional up to this point, someone comes up with the genius idea that somehow the downloading/burning process had an error in just the right way to have my problem and then output a valid error message. You can't make this stuff up.)
I listed the specific commands I tried, based on the exact link a poster gave me himself --> He claimed not to understand what I did.
No, nothing was vague except maybe leaving out that I peformed the crippling, rare, unheard-of practice of installing Linux on a non-primary hard drive. Everyone knows that you're only supposed to install Linux to the PRIMARY hard drive of a computer you'd feel comfortable throwing away if something went wrong.
Truth:- They asked for any information including which version of Windows you had, and you ranted. and got surprisingly defensive.
The computer never got a chance to load any OS. They demanded to know one of the OSes and seriously believed that not giving that information impeded their ability to know what to do.
To this day, no one has any story, even an implausible one, why the Windows version determines the appropriate procedure for a Stage 1.5 error 25 on Grub.
If I got defensive, it was because of the general attitude of, "Couldn't install? Yep, got another Windows user. Let's see how we can pin this on Windows."
The Ubuntu guys asked you to download another copy on a different computer and use the checksum
Yes, and I already said I verified that. As for why I can't burn things on a disabled computer, see above, or use your reasoning faculties.
Probably because it costs quite a bit of computing time to recognise faces and number plates in gajillions of images... It's all about money in the end.
I don't know, this seems like a prime task for Amazon's mturk. How much can someone do in an hour? At $1.20/hr, that comes to... ?
p.s. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE SWITCH OFF THAT FUCKING DELAY BETWEEN POSTS!
Sure, once they turn off advertising for subscribers:-P
It was on Breezy Badger, and happened in January '06. Just look up UbuntuDupe on the ubuntu forums. (Yes, I was rude, but look at it from my perspective: I had just, in effect, disabled my computer as a "thanks" for helping end MS's domination, and nobody would read my posts, follow up when I tried anything, or suggest anything that wasn't extremely time-consuming.)
And just to clarify why I still post about this:
I am NOT saying "Ubuntu sucks because the version available in January '06 sucked."
I'm saying, "Ubuntu sucks, because why the hell would you ever release a version capable of disabling someone's computer altogether WITHOUT listing required tools for such a scenario as 'required', yet claim it's for beginners? Why would you ever HIGHLY RECOMMEND that someone disable the precautions they took to insure that a Linux failure would not spread to the other OS? Why should I believe further assurances, when the past ones were so flimsy?"
Today, I know to have some Live CD available in case Grub fails and no one knows how to diagnose Error 25 at stage 1.5. So I don't have that problem to fear. But then, if the designers show that kind of lack of caution on the most critical part, what does that say about the rest?
This is common to all tech support. Further, it is the right way to do things
Really? It's common to all tech support to ignore everything the client says and recommend doing exactly what they say they did which didn't work?
Have you ever provided support to anyone?
All the time. Not in any formal setting (e.g. as a "tech support rep") but I have trained others on software and hardware and had to troubleshoot their problems they run into with it.
Your problems show the real problem with Linux. Random people on some forum somewhere were able to drive you away from the distro.
Er, not quite.
What drove me away was the fact that:
-Despite following the install instruction to the letter -Despite reserving the Linux install to a separate hard drive -Despite following the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice to install Grub on the MBR
the install didn't work AND
-kept me from doing anything on the command line when it got the error -locked me out of Windows, and therefore any use of my computer, and therefore near-bricking it -the only way to recover it would be use things I can't access UNTIL I RECOVER IT or go miles out of my way -"knowledgeable" Ubuntu forum members gave completely clueless suggestions that ignored what I posted and didn't follow up when I was able to try their advice.
As you can see, the "random people on some forum" were a teeny tiny part of the massive fuckup that was my attempt to "join the Linux community". And I'm a reasonably intelligent computer user!
Whenever I recommend something to someone that I think will benefit them, but that is unfamiliar to them, I would make damn sure that the usage instructions would be complete (which they weren't) and that they'd have the appropriate tools if something went wrong (which Ubuntu didn't do).
So no, it was a muck bigger failure on Ubuntu's part than you imply.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware of that, kid; it's just that I never referred to "most people saying 'remove the shadow'", just my personal reaction, and nothing I suggested involved clipping the shadow itself (which isn't easy), and at no point was I replying on a personal experience in which I could have misinterpreted a "remove the shadow" proposal. :-)
I hate to say it, but I think most people, when they say "remove the shadow" mean as if the lighting itself were changed.
I hate to say it, but that's not responsive to anything I said.
Hm, almost. Mozilla has a patent on "Making webpages load automatically when you drag them down from the address bar, but then making you have to hit 'go' or 'return' in later versions and destroying all evidence of the original functionality."
They implement this in FireFox, and, so far, have successfully prevented Microsoft from implementing the second part.
The irony being that in the US the space program considered too important to trust to the free market. President Kennedy had vowed that private enterprise would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, we'd still be waiting.
That wasn't so much a sign that free market forces were unable, but that they were unwilling. In the 1960s, private companies couldn't find something in space capable of generating resources sufficient to make such a program self-sustaining. And NASA still hasn't either.
The relevant comparison would be, could private companies do it, if the government paid them the value it placed upon completion of various goals, when they were completed? [1] In other words, what if NASA had started "crowdsourcing" 40 years earlier? I think the answer is less obvious.
[1] This is actually similar to Robin Hanson's "futarchy" idea: instead of having the national legislature set policies, it can simply define a function that weights each national goal: literacy, space exploration, economic growth, etc., and then implement the policies that prediction markets predict will maximize this function. "Vote on values, bet on beliefs."
I think I mostly agree, but now you seem to be equivocating in what you mean by "free speech". You earlier seemed to be arguing that significant scientific discoveries are "impossible" if the general society lacks free speech rights. But I think now you're saying it's only necessary that the small subset of scientific intellectuals needs to have the free speech rights.
And remember, it wasn't even the "scientific community" in general that had free speech, but the subset within that, that was working on physics-related projects of national importance. Biology-related projects of national importance? Nope. Physics-related projects of non-importantce? Nope.
I'm not knowledgeable about the fraction of discoveries that were "theoretical" vs "engineering" in the S/U. However, to the extent that they were able to understand nature well enough to do what they did, and before others, that is difficult science.
Both islamic and stalinist countries violently suppress free speech, consequently having almost no scientific breakthrough.
I was about to give a counterexample, but you did it for me. The Soviet Union -- a Stalinist society, had several significant scientific breathroughs: independent discovery of the atom bomb, first orbital probe, first pictures of the far side of the moon, etc.
Anti-free speech societies can have technological progress, as long as they "cut it out, when the truth starts to matter"[1]. The Soviet Union gives an excellect contrast for "selective rationality": while the public could be kept from revolting, even with Lysenko-driven agriculture, getting the a-bomb and into space was "too important" to let adherence to Marxist ideas about quantum theory or the superiority of communist organizational methods get in the way.
(Great discussion of this in the recent release, The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan, btw.)
[1]This is great advice too: "What do you believe, when being wrong has consequences? Why don't you believe that now?"
heh, that's what contracts have come down to today: they all make you agree to ridiculous terms that they don't ever actually intend to enforce against you, except as leverage.
It's not just in telecom. It's in credit cards too: "We can raise your interest rates whenever we feel like it, even on 'fixed' rates. We normally won't, but what they heck, you might annoy us some day."
Or my apartment. "You have to notify us 60 days in advance for a moveout." "Hey, here's my notice today, 60 days in advance." "Oh, we're not ready, come back tomorrow." "If I come back tomorrow, penalities attach." "Oh, don't worry about that silly thing, that's just in case."
I'm all for flexible languages ... but ... in this case, promoting that kind of sloppiness makes it impossible when you want to convey the meaning of the original definition of "literally".
Before, "really" meant "literally", now people use "really" just to mean "very".
Now "literally" just means "figuratively".
What do we go to now? "Actually"? And then how long until that term gets used metaphorically?
And how long until "metaphorically" gets used "metaphorically"?
Two words: money.
Well, make that three: control.
Interestingly, once I heard something like:
"[A politician*] is someone who can do in one language, what Yasser Arafat can only do in two." -- i.e. say the opposite thing to different crowds without them figuring it out
*I don't know if it was referring to a specific politician (maybe Pat Buchanan) or the job of a politician in general.
Applicant: I'd like to program for your phones.
Hiring Manager: Okay, what can you program on?
Applicant: The iPhone.
Hiring Manager: And what else?
Applicant: Nothing, just that.
Hiring Manager: Well, we're only hiring for non-iPhone programmers.
Applicant: Yes, but I currently have a job.
Hiring Manager: Uh huh...
Applicant: And I've got a offer waiting for me at Verizon...
Hiring Manager:WAIT! WHAT DO YOU WANT? WHEN CAN YOU START?
You're saying, it's illegal to tell people what semiprimes the government knows the factors of?
Hm, I generally go with: "Oh, you don't need the key; just factor the semiprime. What, you bad at math or something?"
Maybe we could ask them to tell us what we look like, and that would patch up some of our theories about the earth's history!
... and communicate that request without any knowledge of what stimuli are meaningful to them :-/
First, we need to figure out how to send information faster than light
And while I certainly understand the point you and she are making, I have long wondered at what point does a commonly misused word simply become redefined?
;-)
So would you say it begs the question of when a misuse becomes the definition?
I think PCs will cause higher cancer rates.
Hm, was I talking about "personal computers" or Proponents of Cesium?
What I've always admired about that particular illusion is that, even though you think e.g. "it's the shadow that's making them look different!", you can keep deleting things from the image that you think are causing the illusion, all the way down to the point where only those two squares are left, and they will still look different the whole time.
;-)
Maybe make an animation demonstrating that?
JonBailey already did you the favor.
... my opponents' instead. ;-)
Please read my opponents' posts before responding. It's fun. It's like reading my posts but
Your post advocates a:
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Actually, the problem arose specifically because I did exactly what the install instructions said. If, for example, I had ignored the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED step[1] to install Grub on the MBR, the Linux failure would have been "sandboxed" to a separate hard drive, and I would have been able to load Windows and download and burn all the CDs they listed[2], exactly as I had intended when I installed the third HD as part of my careful plan to try Ubuntu.
:-/
But you're right: it is pretty irresponsible to follow Ubuntu install instructions
[1] Yes, I am intentionally mocking the phrasing of the recommendation to do the critical step that fucked up my whole experience.
[2] Of course, that probably wouldn't have told them anything they didn't already know, but whatever.
After skimming through it again, I'm still impressed with how friendly and helpful the Ubuntu users were to such an obvious pratt.
Please list the things they suggested which you think were helpful or friendly. (Remember: nothing they suggested fixed the problem without taking unnecessarily drastic steps.)
Truth:- After you rendered your computer unable to boot,
I rendered it unable to load an OS. I would have been able to still load Windows (and burn CDs!) if I hadn't followed the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice to install GRUB on the mbr.
and didn't see fit to download any bootable operating system,
Because I couldn't. Ubuntu disabled my CD burner, remember?
Kinda tricky fixing a problem with no operating system available.
Then remind me, briefly, why "have a separate, reliable OS CD, such as Windows, available when attempting to install" wasn't in the install instructions on the website.
And the computer was at no time bricked.
Yes, because of pedants such as yourself, I have switched to calling it "near-bricked" because I couldn't do anything with the computer except re-install OSes that can't load. At no time did I say "bricked". Stop being a drama queen.
Truth:- When you vaguely mentioned some of the things you had tried,
Vaguely?
I said tried re-installing several times --> they said the problem was that I need to "try" reinstalling.
I said I verified the burn --> They suggested checking if the CD burned properly.
(Minor digression: You've really got to hand it to the genius that thought of that one. Somehow, despite each and every file I have ever downloaded getting each bit perfectly transcribed by the time I tried to use it, and despite the CD burn being verified, and despite the ENTIRE install process being completely functional up to this point, someone comes up with the genius idea that somehow the downloading/burning process had an error in just the right way to have my problem and then output a valid error message. You can't make this stuff up.)
I listed the specific commands I tried, based on the exact link a poster gave me himself --> He claimed not to understand what I did.
No, nothing was vague except maybe leaving out that I peformed the crippling, rare, unheard-of practice of installing Linux on a non-primary hard drive. Everyone knows that you're only supposed to install Linux to the PRIMARY hard drive of a computer you'd feel comfortable throwing away if something went wrong.
Truth:- They asked for any information including which version of Windows you had, and you ranted. and got surprisingly defensive.
The computer never got a chance to load any OS. They demanded to know one of the OSes and seriously believed that not giving that information impeded their ability to know what to do.
To this day, no one has any story, even an implausible one, why the Windows version determines the appropriate procedure for a Stage 1.5 error 25 on Grub.
If I got defensive, it was because of the general attitude of, "Couldn't install? Yep, got another Windows user. Let's see how we can pin this on Windows."
The Ubuntu guys asked you to download another copy on a different computer and use the checksum
Yes, and I already said I verified that. As for why I can't burn things on a disabled computer, see above, or use your reasoning faculties.
Probably because it costs quite a bit of computing time to recognise faces and number plates in gajillions of images... It's all about money in the end.
... ?
:-P
I don't know, this seems like a prime task for Amazon's mturk. How much can someone do in an hour? At $1.20/hr, that comes to
p.s. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE SWITCH OFF THAT FUCKING DELAY BETWEEN POSTS!
Sure, once they turn off advertising for subscribers
It was on Breezy Badger, and happened in January '06. Just look up UbuntuDupe on the ubuntu forums. (Yes, I was rude, but look at it from my perspective: I had just, in effect, disabled my computer as a "thanks" for helping end MS's domination, and nobody would read my posts, follow up when I tried anything, or suggest anything that wasn't extremely time-consuming.)
And just to clarify why I still post about this:
I am NOT saying "Ubuntu sucks because the version available in January '06 sucked."
I'm saying, "Ubuntu sucks, because why the hell would you ever release a version capable of disabling someone's computer altogether WITHOUT listing required tools for such a scenario as 'required', yet claim it's for beginners? Why would you ever HIGHLY RECOMMEND that someone disable the precautions they took to insure that a Linux failure would not spread to the other OS? Why should I believe further assurances, when the past ones were so flimsy?"
Today, I know to have some Live CD available in case Grub fails and no one knows how to diagnose Error 25 at stage 1.5. So I don't have that problem to fear. But then, if the designers show that kind of lack of caution on the most critical part, what does that say about the rest?
This is common to all tech support. Further, it is the right way to do things
Really? It's common to all tech support to ignore everything the client says and recommend doing exactly what they say they did which didn't work?
Have you ever provided support to anyone?
All the time. Not in any formal setting (e.g. as a "tech support rep") but I have trained others on software and hardware and had to troubleshoot their problems they run into with it.
The difference is, I'm successful at it.
Your problems show the real problem with Linux. Random people on some forum somewhere were able to drive you away from the distro.
Er, not quite.
What drove me away was the fact that:
-Despite following the install instruction to the letter
-Despite reserving the Linux install to a separate hard drive
-Despite following the HIGHLY RECOMMENDED advice to install Grub on the MBR
the install didn't work AND
-kept me from doing anything on the command line when it got the error
-locked me out of Windows, and therefore any use of my computer, and therefore near-bricking it
-the only way to recover it would be use things I can't access UNTIL I RECOVER IT or go miles out of my way
-"knowledgeable" Ubuntu forum members gave completely clueless suggestions that ignored what I posted and didn't follow up when I was able to try their advice.
As you can see, the "random people on some forum" were a teeny tiny part of the massive fuckup that was my attempt to "join the Linux community". And I'm a reasonably intelligent computer user!
Whenever I recommend something to someone that I think will benefit them, but that is unfamiliar to them, I would make damn sure that the usage instructions would be complete (which they weren't) and that they'd have the appropriate tools if something went wrong (which Ubuntu didn't do).
So no, it was a muck bigger failure on Ubuntu's part than you imply.