Does it have to nationalism to hold the opinion that in this one specific situation, the US government is a better steward than the UN might be?
That's dependent upon the basis of the opinion. If you can avoid painting things in terms of "good guys and bad guys", as well as provide a solid reason for why the US in particular should serve as steward in this instance (as opposed to some other nation), you might have a valid point. Arguments suggested so far have pointed towards the issue of having extremists around in the UN when they've pointed at anything specific at all. By this reasoning, the US is equally ill-equipped to serve as a non-biased party because the US has more than a few rather extremist agendas of its own.
...is one of the key tongues up Apple's ass. When he bites the bullet and admits their behavior is problematic, you just know you should have sunk your time into reading other Apple-centric blogs instead.
How about supporting efforts to get Big Gov the heck out of the business? Let's face it: the Internet is a far cry from a public utility, and government enforced monopolies are criminal.
What a bunch of unreasoned psuedo-libertarian bullshit. The reason there's precious little *useful* competition in the ISP biz is because a select few companies own the majority of the physical infrastructure that's both practical and speedy. Competing with them means providing alternate infrastructure which is at least as fast and reliable. That means forget satellite, you're going to have to run something physical, and its going to have to go across other peoples' and other business's property -the amount of capital required to do that is insane, as is getting permission from each and every landowner along the way. And if quality of service becomes determined by means of methodically discriminating against packets based on their point of origin, destination, or the type of content being carried, it gets *worse* - you can't reliably hook into other infrastructure and provide decent service. You could build all your infrastructure and reach every location in a given area, but inevitably, you have to hook it up to something else somewhere if you want it to be useful. And it's useless if Something Else is throttling your traffic.
Here, legislation is the only way to be certain that my vote is only for a stop-gap solution.
Correction: the only way to be certain that my vote is *not* only for a stop-gap solution. Quite obviously, using someone else's infrastructure for services limits the possibilities considerably unless you build a physically independent backbone which goes all the same places as the Bad Guys' lines go.
Yes, I understand this comment is probably going to generate dozens of "but I can't get another ISP!" replies, and I preemptively dispute the validity of most of them. I'm living on a Naval installation, and I could drop my current cable provider for a number of DSL providers.
I live in Chicago. In my neighborhood, broadband either comes over Comcast cable or AT&T DSL lines. With the latter, I have the option of switching to SpeakEasy as the service provider but it's still AT&T's infrastructure. If I moved about 3 miles north and.5 miles east, I would have the additional option of RCN cable internet.
Four choices in one of the biggest cities in the United States. The only sound choice is to go SpeakEasy for $30-$50 more a month than the other services. The day AT&T goes tiered, I'm screwed. Here, legislation is the only way to be certain that my vote is only for a stop-gap solution. Unless you want to suggest I start my own company and magically procure capital to build my own infrastructure to compete with what a lot of dickheaded businesses built over decades with the help of tax-derived subsidies. And that of course is a bad solution because it means I can't buy the service I want, it means I have to sell it so that it exists at all.
Really. Tell me about my other options which still involve broadband service. I'm dying to know what I've missed here.
Odd, I got mine Jeopardy-style: "During the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants, they chose this form for Gozer the Traveler."
I feel like we should start with something simple to understand and easily approachable -- a trans-continental express railway from, say, New York to LA, non-stop.
We need affordable, environmentally-friendly ways to get all manner of people around where they already live first, and then connection of local transportation to connect to nearby cities and suburbs. You'll find a tough time getting federal funding behind a two-stop train if there's no practical, affordable way to get people not anywhere New York or LA to make use of it.
America has some serious issues, but economic progress (or otherwise) is dependent upon a myriad of factors having nothing to do with Iraq.
The economic progress of the United States is severely hampered by the ridiculous amount of debt incurred by running the campaign in Iraq -never mind whether or not you agree with our presence there. This is why we're borrowing a crapload of money from China and playing friendly with them on all sorts of levels whereas several decades back we would've dismissed them as a bunch of communists opposed to our way of life. We're now at another nation's mercy because we escalated a long-standing bad habit -spending money we don't have- to a degree unforeseen all in the name of [insert your affiliation's or neast equivalent's most recent understood justification for an extended military presence in Iraq here]. We'll in this postion for a long time because we'd already been spending more than we could afford for a good long while.
Yes, there are other factors contributing to the current woes of the U.S., but to pretend that there are just loads and loads of them which are not at all affected by the Iraq campaign is strictly delusional.
You're right. The company still keeps full copyright ownership of the proprietary code. What I should have said is that the company also loses control over millions of dollars worth of R&D that went into developing the rest of the application, and, by publishing it, loses any competitive advantage it may have had.
That's entirely dependent upon the business model. If you're looking at a traditional "we make money by selling a license and a pre-compiled binary with mysterious voodoo code contained therein", then yes, it's probably not a smart business move. But you're still the folks who own the copyright to your code. You're still the people who wrote it and thus you've got a great head start on anyone else who wants to sell services centered around customizing it -default expert status right out of the gate is an enormous competitive advantage. Same thing applies for support and consulting services.
Many people that say, "information wants to be free" really mean that information should be free to them. If you really believe everything should be free, how about freeing up your credit card information? I'm sure lots of people would love to share with you.
That's a very baseless and decidedly inapt comparison. What exactly are you getting at? All I'm seeing here is cynical disdain for a license that sounds like it doesn't suit your needs. People who GPL their code do it because they own it and that's what they choose to do with it -they perceive it to possibly be useful to others and they would rather that other people not make use of their code in a way with which they themselves disagree fundamentally. People who might look at their code as similarly useful to others but don't have the same concerns can choose a more permissive license. Nobody is forcing you to use GPL code, use the license for your code, or otherwise release your source code, but for whatever reason you sound as though the socialists are taking your front door off the hinges and giving away your personal possessions by lottery.
This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application.
No it doesn't. You (or your company) seem to be confusing copyright ownership with source code distribution. You don't relinquish copyright ownership of code you wrote by incorporating GPL'd code into your application, you're just required to make your source available if you're distributing it with the stuff you didn't write. Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.
HTML docs are served across the internet, and you can download them without applications to use them. That doesn't make them very useful, though. If you're going to be a pedantic dick about things, at least be thorough about it.
The diamond would be historically appropriate and is closer to being brand-neutral (at least relative to the contemporary heavy players) but still lacks meaning as a symbol to most people. Writing out "Super" sounds like the simplest solution, because the abstraction is left up to a word instead of a symbol. You may be on to something here, at least in the land where people give a shit about what things mean.
We could get pickier about it and complain that words are abstracted as a series of symbols when written down, but then I'd be more tempted to be 100% smarmy and push for a meta key which has -what else?- a simple pictogram of a blank keycap on it.
Why? Elsewhere in the world, it's used to designate places of interest, and thus it doesn't make sense given the general function of the key. And "because Apple does it" is a poor reason. What am I missing here?
If by "fixed" you mean, "I didn't understand the conversation and thus aimed to be cute by way of being a disagreeable cuss," I guess that's exactly what you did. The overall point is that Flash is a shitty platform on which to build entire sites: it's not particularly accessible, it's not really crawl-able, and it all relies on loading stuff into a plugin instead of directly to the browser. Flash does some stuff incredibly well -games, animation, and so on- but in a lot of cases out there, there is *no* real advantage in making a whole website in Flash, it's just how Timmy McToolerson learned how to do stuff in his corporate art school "web design" course.
Want to know why nobody *really* jumped at Silverlight? Because Flash abuse sucks enough ass already.
Mod parent flamebait. Linux on the whole is substantially different from 2002 in 2008. I know this for a fact because I started using it in 2004 and it's already changed for the better quite drastically since then, particularly on the desktop side.
However, the person who moves ahead is often a person who works more than what they are paid for. That's because in America we have the FREEDOM to work as much as we want.
We also have the FREEDOM to not work and fall into poverty. There's not much in between.
If this guy wanted to start his own computer company called "Crapple", with a little siluette of a poop on the front, he could. He's just a whiner. Guess what, when you are on the bottom rung of the ladder, or in charge of something big and important, it often takes more than 40 hours of work per week to get your work done. But he is getting an education and building his experience. I'm sure the experience he gained working for a design shop such as apple is PRICELESS. Slavery, pft, we should be so lucky. So now he's gone and thrown it all away because no company in California is every going to hire him. For what, a few grand of "lost wages"? Pft.
Utter bullshit. With this guy working all this time that actually earns him a living and then subsequent hours besides for which he is *not* paid, when the is he going to have time to properly start a company or even take time out to interview elsewhere? If your response is akin to "Well, it's hard work, he'll just have to not sleep or have any time to think or take a dump until the company gets rolling"/"He'll just have to interview with companies that meet his needs", you can spare us it and saunter on back to hypothetical blackboard land.
Why are you guys focusing on bashing the headline instead on the actual problem, which is that highly skilled people are working over time for nothing?
I'll save everyone the trouble - here's your contrarian dickhead answers in advance.
This IS a serious problem because,
- It is so common in the industry that there aren't lots of alternatives.
"Nonsense. If they don't like it, they have the choice of working somewhere else where they find policy more agreeable!"
- The more they work the more others (even in other countries) are forced to work.
"They, too, have the choice of working somewhere else, and are not!"
- Quitting is not a serious option unless you are rich and work for sport.
"It's their choice to stay alive!"
(Seriously, I fail to see how anyone can honestly disagree with your concise summary of broad consequences of such actions. Well done.)
Ooh blah blah hemorrhaging labia majora. This is just as immature as the Mac vs. PC ads, with the difference that the side campaigning against the more successful platform have sound reasoning behind their attack vs. some bullshit "ooh, it's easier" campaign which aims to rope more customers into another proprietary system by means of slander.
Those of you calling for "well do it better, asshole!" miss the point: Apple engages in practices just as bad as Microsoft and yet you're willing to swallow it because it's slick. If you sunk the time you wasted on bitching about the misguided actions of FOSS advocates on laying it to the company for its missteps, Apple might actually stand a chance of presenting a smart, non-end-user-hostile platform, instead of some slick stuff intended to give you an easier way to suck nasty big media cock. You're the folks buying it, so stop pulling a super-comittal-Gruber and start asking real questions. You've got the power to turn this shit around, so don't fuck it up.
Not when you are a customer. Yes, Linux is F/OSS. But if you want users, then treat them as customers. If you ignore people, lose bug reports, call them stupid, tell them to RTFM, or tell them to fix it themselves, don't be surprised when you lose them.
This does not run contrary to my statement. Strictly commercial concerns can and often do ignore "[X] sucks because it isn't exactly like [Y]", "I did such-and-such with [X] and it didn't work; therefore, [X] is the most worthless piece of garbage ever", and so on because they aren't useful criticisms, they're just cranky bitching. The people who stand the chance of changing products and/or policy are the ones who make a reasonable, informative complaint rather than throwing a tantrum when they don't get their way immediately.
Don't mistake this for excusing people in the F/OSS community who act like dicks, because they are indeed out there. But if you go in expecting to be greeted with hostility, it's going to be apparent in your tone, and at best you'll get *polite* hostility in return.
And there is the fundamental problem with Linux -- the "geeks only" attitude of so many of its proponents. The lawyer who wants an office system, the granny who has just heard that they can video-conference with their grandchild halfway around the world, the schoolkid who wants to get their geography assignment done -- most potential Linux users will never have anything to contribute to Linux except advocacy, and as long as any requests for help are met with "fix it yourself" suggestions or a pile of technical gibberish (heck, I am a coder, and I struggle to understand most of the supposed support on offer) then they will stay with other systems whose developers do understand the needs of the non-technical user. That way they'll never be more than potential users, and Linux won't even get their advocacy.
And there is the problem with counter-hubris offered up as constructive criticism: it speaks in absolutes and presupposes that things will never change. If you want people to listen to you, you have to do more than just complain without using swears and epithets, you actually have to say something meaningful and non-rhetorical.
You responded to a select piece of the post which had precious little to do with the overall point and argued against it as though it were a complete statement in it's own right. This is taking statements out of context. It's stupid, and it's wrong.
I didn't make anything up.
You keep talking about some wild mind-reading insinuation, and you keep failing to provide evidence for it (likely because it is, in fact, not there). Either explain it or shut up about it.
No, I was not talking about the thing you think I'm talking about.
Then what is it you're talking about? What is there to your piecemeal half-bakery that isn't about OS installs?
Where in fuck's name are you going with this random nonsense? Are you just wasting my time for shits and giggles?
No. It's hardly random or nonsensical, it's quite pointed. You see, what I'm trying to do is convince you that baseless statements, wild accusations, and other lies aren't just irritating to other people, but also by consequence provide irritation for yourself and are all-around a bad idea. There it is, spelt out for you very clearly. You're of course welcome to disagree if you like, but continuing to defend yourself on this is going to go nowhere.
Please point out the law of nature which somehow prohibits me from only addressing specific points that I'm interested in.
There isn't one, and I never once suggested that there was. You're welcome to respond to whichever points you care to respond, but you need to respond to the actual points presented in their original context, and not bullshit you pretend was there by means of selective cut-and-paste.
and start spouting a bunch of horseshit about operating systems reading minds.
What horseshit? He was clearly insinuating that somehow the OS should be able to read your mind and autoconfigure itself.
The stuff you made up. There's no such insinuation in the original post; in fact, he even talks about configuration options requiring user input in both cases, so your bit about some sentient will-sensitive OS is a lot of stool-coated nonsense - it didn't enter into it until you pulled it out of your ass.
I'm not talking about that particular subject, and the fact that I'm not talking about it is exactly why you initiated this argument. Jesus Christ.
Your accusation of the above non-existent insinuation is clear evidence that you are in fact talking about configuration in operating system install processes, whether or not your response is entirely based on anything presented in the original post. You can believe what you'd like to believe but that doesn't eliminate the fact that you're either lying or delusional.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it have to nationalism to hold the opinion that in this one specific situation, the US government is a better steward than the UN might be?
That's dependent upon the basis of the opinion. If you can avoid painting things in terms of "good guys and bad guys", as well as provide a solid reason for why the US in particular should serve as steward in this instance (as opposed to some other nation), you might have a valid point. Arguments suggested so far have pointed towards the issue of having extremists around in the UN when they've pointed at anything specific at all. By this reasoning, the US is equally ill-equipped to serve as a non-biased party because the US has more than a few rather extremist agendas of its own.
In that case, run in laughing maniacally with one of those round cartoon bombs in hand, I suppose.
does that look like a nice picture ?
That's entirely dependent upon whose brand of pig-headed nationalism you want to subscribe to and whose you want to take a giant shit on.
...is one of the key tongues up Apple's ass. When he bites the bullet and admits their behavior is problematic, you just know you should have sunk your time into reading other Apple-centric blogs instead.
How about supporting efforts to get Big Gov the heck out of the business? Let's face it: the Internet is a far cry from a public utility, and government enforced monopolies are criminal.
What a bunch of unreasoned psuedo-libertarian bullshit. The reason there's precious little *useful* competition in the ISP biz is because a select few companies own the majority of the physical infrastructure that's both practical and speedy. Competing with them means providing alternate infrastructure which is at least as fast and reliable. That means forget satellite, you're going to have to run something physical, and its going to have to go across other peoples' and other business's property -the amount of capital required to do that is insane, as is getting permission from each and every landowner along the way. And if quality of service becomes determined by means of methodically discriminating against packets based on their point of origin, destination, or the type of content being carried, it gets *worse* - you can't reliably hook into other infrastructure and provide decent service. You could build all your infrastructure and reach every location in a given area, but inevitably, you have to hook it up to something else somewhere if you want it to be useful. And it's useless if Something Else is throttling your traffic.
Here, legislation is the only way to be certain that my vote is only for a stop-gap solution.
Correction: the only way to be certain that my vote is *not* only for a stop-gap solution. Quite obviously, using someone else's infrastructure for services limits the possibilities considerably unless you build a physically independent backbone which goes all the same places as the Bad Guys' lines go.
Yes, I understand this comment is probably going to generate dozens of "but I can't get another ISP!" replies, and I preemptively dispute the validity of most of them. I'm living on a Naval installation, and I could drop my current cable provider for a number of DSL providers.
I live in Chicago. In my neighborhood, broadband either comes over Comcast cable or AT&T DSL lines. With the latter, I have the option of switching to SpeakEasy as the service provider but it's still AT&T's infrastructure. If I moved about 3 miles north and .5 miles east, I would have the additional option of RCN cable internet.
Four choices in one of the biggest cities in the United States. The only sound choice is to go SpeakEasy for $30-$50 more a month than the other services. The day AT&T goes tiered, I'm screwed. Here, legislation is the only way to be certain that my vote is only for a stop-gap solution. Unless you want to suggest I start my own company and magically procure capital to build my own infrastructure to compete with what a lot of dickheaded businesses built over decades with the help of tax-derived subsidies. And that of course is a bad solution because it means I can't buy the service I want, it means I have to sell it so that it exists at all.
Really. Tell me about my other options which still involve broadband service. I'm dying to know what I've missed here.
Odd, I got mine Jeopardy-style: "During the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants, they chose this form for Gozer the Traveler."
I feel like we should start with something simple to understand and easily approachable -- a trans-continental express railway from, say, New York to LA, non-stop.
We need affordable, environmentally-friendly ways to get all manner of people around where they already live first, and then connection of local transportation to connect to nearby cities and suburbs. You'll find a tough time getting federal funding behind a two-stop train if there's no practical, affordable way to get people not anywhere New York or LA to make use of it.
America has some serious issues, but economic progress (or otherwise) is dependent upon a myriad of factors having nothing to do with Iraq.
The economic progress of the United States is severely hampered by the ridiculous amount of debt incurred by running the campaign in Iraq -never mind whether or not you agree with our presence there. This is why we're borrowing a crapload of money from China and playing friendly with them on all sorts of levels whereas several decades back we would've dismissed them as a bunch of communists opposed to our way of life. We're now at another nation's mercy because we escalated a long-standing bad habit -spending money we don't have- to a degree unforeseen all in the name of [insert your affiliation's or neast equivalent's most recent understood justification for an extended military presence in Iraq here]. We'll in this postion for a long time because we'd already been spending more than we could afford for a good long while.
Yes, there are other factors contributing to the current woes of the U.S., but to pretend that there are just loads and loads of them which are not at all affected by the Iraq campaign is strictly delusional.
You're right. The company still keeps full copyright ownership of the proprietary code. What I should have said is that the company also loses control over millions of dollars worth of R&D that went into developing the rest of the application, and, by publishing it, loses any competitive advantage it may have had.
That's entirely dependent upon the business model. If you're looking at a traditional "we make money by selling a license and a pre-compiled binary with mysterious voodoo code contained therein", then yes, it's probably not a smart business move. But you're still the folks who own the copyright to your code. You're still the people who wrote it and thus you've got a great head start on anyone else who wants to sell services centered around customizing it -default expert status right out of the gate is an enormous competitive advantage. Same thing applies for support and consulting services.
Many people that say, "information wants to be free" really mean that information should be free to them. If you really believe everything should be free, how about freeing up your credit card information? I'm sure lots of people would love to share with you.
That's a very baseless and decidedly inapt comparison. What exactly are you getting at? All I'm seeing here is cynical disdain for a license that sounds like it doesn't suit your needs. People who GPL their code do it because they own it and that's what they choose to do with it -they perceive it to possibly be useful to others and they would rather that other people not make use of their code in a way with which they themselves disagree fundamentally. People who might look at their code as similarly useful to others but don't have the same concerns can choose a more permissive license. Nobody is forcing you to use GPL code, use the license for your code, or otherwise release your source code, but for whatever reason you sound as though the socialists are taking your front door off the hinges and giving away your personal possessions by lottery.
This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application.
No it doesn't. You (or your company) seem to be confusing copyright ownership with source code distribution. You don't relinquish copyright ownership of code you wrote by incorporating GPL'd code into your application, you're just required to make your source available if you're distributing it with the stuff you didn't write. Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.
HTML docs are served across the internet, and you can download them without applications to use them. That doesn't make them very useful, though. If you're going to be a pedantic dick about things, at least be thorough about it.
The diamond would be historically appropriate and is closer to being brand-neutral (at least relative to the contemporary heavy players) but still lacks meaning as a symbol to most people. Writing out "Super" sounds like the simplest solution, because the abstraction is left up to a word instead of a symbol. You may be on to something here, at least in the land where people give a shit about what things mean.
We could get pickier about it and complain that words are abstracted as a series of symbols when written down, but then I'd be more tempted to be 100% smarmy and push for a meta key which has -what else?- a simple pictogram of a blank keycap on it.
Why? Elsewhere in the world, it's used to designate places of interest, and thus it doesn't make sense given the general function of the key. And "because Apple does it" is a poor reason. What am I missing here?
I can't even begin to fathom why...
If by "fixed" you mean, "I didn't understand the conversation and thus aimed to be cute by way of being a disagreeable cuss," I guess that's exactly what you did. The overall point is that Flash is a shitty platform on which to build entire sites: it's not particularly accessible, it's not really crawl-able, and it all relies on loading stuff into a plugin instead of directly to the browser. Flash does some stuff incredibly well -games, animation, and so on- but in a lot of cases out there, there is *no* real advantage in making a whole website in Flash, it's just how Timmy McToolerson learned how to do stuff in his corporate art school "web design" course.
Want to know why nobody *really* jumped at Silverlight? Because Flash abuse sucks enough ass already.
Mod parent flamebait. Linux on the whole is substantially different from 2002 in 2008. I know this for a fact because I started using it in 2004 and it's already changed for the better quite drastically since then, particularly on the desktop side.
However, the person who moves ahead is often a person who works more than what they are paid for. That's because in America we have the FREEDOM to work as much as we want.
We also have the FREEDOM to not work and fall into poverty. There's not much in between.
If this guy wanted to start his own computer company called "Crapple", with a little siluette of a poop on the front, he could. He's just a whiner. Guess what, when you are on the bottom rung of the ladder, or in charge of something big and important, it often takes more than 40 hours of work per week to get your work done. But he is getting an education and building his experience. I'm sure the experience he gained working for a design shop such as apple is PRICELESS. Slavery, pft, we should be so lucky. So now he's gone and thrown it all away because no company in California is every going to hire him. For what, a few grand of "lost wages"? Pft.
Utter bullshit. With this guy working all this time that actually earns him a living and then subsequent hours besides for which he is *not* paid, when the is he going to have time to properly start a company or even take time out to interview elsewhere? If your response is akin to "Well, it's hard work, he'll just have to not sleep or have any time to think or take a dump until the company gets rolling"/"He'll just have to interview with companies that meet his needs", you can spare us it and saunter on back to hypothetical blackboard land.
Why are you guys focusing on bashing the headline instead on the actual problem, which is that highly skilled people are working over time for nothing?
I'll save everyone the trouble - here's your contrarian dickhead answers in advance.
This IS a serious problem because,
- It is so common in the industry that there aren't lots of alternatives.
"Nonsense. If they don't like it, they have the choice of working somewhere else where they find policy more agreeable!"
- The more they work the more others (even in other countries) are forced to work.
"They, too, have the choice of working somewhere else, and are not!"
- Quitting is not a serious option unless you are rich and work for sport.
"It's their choice to stay alive!"
(Seriously, I fail to see how anyone can honestly disagree with your concise summary of broad consequences of such actions. Well done.)
Ooh blah blah hemorrhaging labia majora. This is just as immature as the Mac vs. PC ads, with the difference that the side campaigning against the more successful platform have sound reasoning behind their attack vs. some bullshit "ooh, it's easier" campaign which aims to rope more customers into another proprietary system by means of slander.
Those of you calling for "well do it better, asshole!" miss the point: Apple engages in practices just as bad as Microsoft and yet you're willing to swallow it because it's slick. If you sunk the time you wasted on bitching about the misguided actions of FOSS advocates on laying it to the company for its missteps, Apple might actually stand a chance of presenting a smart, non-end-user-hostile platform, instead of some slick stuff intended to give you an easier way to suck nasty big media cock. You're the folks buying it, so stop pulling a super-comittal-Gruber and start asking real questions. You've got the power to turn this shit around, so don't fuck it up.
Not when you are a customer. Yes, Linux is F/OSS. But if you want users, then treat them as customers. If you ignore people, lose bug reports, call them stupid, tell them to RTFM, or tell them to fix it themselves, don't be surprised when you lose them.
This does not run contrary to my statement. Strictly commercial concerns can and often do ignore "[X] sucks because it isn't exactly like [Y]", "I did such-and-such with [X] and it didn't work; therefore, [X] is the most worthless piece of garbage ever", and so on because they aren't useful criticisms, they're just cranky bitching. The people who stand the chance of changing products and/or policy are the ones who make a reasonable, informative complaint rather than throwing a tantrum when they don't get their way immediately.
Don't mistake this for excusing people in the F/OSS community who act like dicks, because they are indeed out there. But if you go in expecting to be greeted with hostility, it's going to be apparent in your tone, and at best you'll get *polite* hostility in return.
And there is the fundamental problem with Linux -- the "geeks only" attitude of so many of its proponents. The lawyer who wants an office system, the granny who has just heard that they can video-conference with their grandchild halfway around the world, the schoolkid who wants to get their geography assignment done -- most potential Linux users will never have anything to contribute to Linux except advocacy, and as long as any requests for help are met with "fix it yourself" suggestions or a pile of technical gibberish (heck, I am a coder, and I struggle to understand most of the supposed support on offer) then they will stay with other systems whose developers do understand the needs of the non-technical user. That way they'll never be more than potential users, and Linux won't even get their advocacy.
And there is the problem with counter-hubris offered up as constructive criticism: it speaks in absolutes and presupposes that things will never change. If you want people to listen to you, you have to do more than just complain without using swears and epithets, you actually have to say something meaningful and non-rhetorical.
I didn't take anything out of context.
You responded to a select piece of the post which had precious little to do with the overall point and argued against it as though it were a complete statement in it's own right. This is taking statements out of context. It's stupid, and it's wrong.
I didn't make anything up.
You keep talking about some wild mind-reading insinuation, and you keep failing to provide evidence for it (likely because it is, in fact, not there). Either explain it or shut up about it.
No, I was not talking about the thing you think I'm talking about.
Then what is it you're talking about? What is there to your piecemeal half-bakery that isn't about OS installs?
Where in fuck's name are you going with this random nonsense? Are you just wasting my time for shits and giggles?
No. It's hardly random or nonsensical, it's quite pointed. You see, what I'm trying to do is convince you that baseless statements, wild accusations, and other lies aren't just irritating to other people, but also by consequence provide irritation for yourself and are all-around a bad idea. There it is, spelt out for you very clearly. You're of course welcome to disagree if you like, but continuing to defend yourself on this is going to go nowhere.
Have a nice day.
Here is the post to which you replied: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=617555&cid=24232709. Go back, read it again, and then examine your post in which you clip the tail end of the overview of the install process
Please point out the law of nature which somehow prohibits me from only addressing specific points that I'm interested in.
There isn't one, and I never once suggested that there was. You're welcome to respond to whichever points you care to respond, but you need to respond to the actual points presented in their original context, and not bullshit you pretend was there by means of selective cut-and-paste.
and start spouting a bunch of horseshit about operating systems reading minds.
What horseshit? He was clearly insinuating that somehow the OS should be able to read your mind and autoconfigure itself.
The stuff you made up. There's no such insinuation in the original post; in fact, he even talks about configuration options requiring user input in both cases, so your bit about some sentient will-sensitive OS is a lot of stool-coated nonsense - it didn't enter into it until you pulled it out of your ass.
I'm not talking about that particular subject, and the fact that I'm not talking about it is exactly why you initiated this argument. Jesus Christ.
Your accusation of the above non-existent insinuation is clear evidence that you are in fact talking about configuration in operating system install processes, whether or not your response is entirely based on anything presented in the original post. You can believe what you'd like to believe but that doesn't eliminate the fact that you're either lying or delusional.