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Where's the lawsuit? If not, the GPL might as well not exist.

Nobody in the tech world seems to grasp that defending your legal rights costs money. Every time Slashdot does a story about another round of Cease and Desist letters, we get a ton of posts saying, in effect, "That's obviously lame, people should just ignore them." But the sad fact is, you don't know how lame any legal action is until you've gotten legal advice. Nor can you take legal action without that overpaid guy in the suit.

Well, if you're very smart and very patient, you can represent yourself in Small Claims Court. But that's not applicable to this kind of issue.

At least SysAdmin (even if pretty clueless sometimes as an entity) and Linux magazine are still worth reading. Both contain enough code to keep the old brain cells churning.

And it was so sad that Web Techniques turned into a load of old wank aimed at PHBs - that, and TJP were the only ones I happily paid for.

Anyone else got any (reasonably priced) recommendations for geek mags that still keep the ol' brain cells working?

.02

cLive ;-)

<i>His blind friends shouldn't have to beg for someone to come over and help them when signing up for a new website.

By providing assistance, he wouldn't fix the problem- just perpetuate it. Sometimes providing a work around just helps the underlying problem survive and grow ever-larger.</I>

When I have offered to help, I received a response similar to what Minna Kirai posted. I also participated in a brief exchange of e-mail with Randall Swartz, who authored Ravaged by Robots to alert him to this problem. Many entities, including Slashdot and Yahoo!, have implemented this concept apparently without thought for its impact on blind people.

Nobody ever discloses any evidence before discovery. Ever.

are you sure about that?

Sure.

Look here and here. Both of these websites mention what postgreSQL (and Oracle)offers that mysql is lacking as well as how to migrate to PostgreSQL. Keep in mind I am not a database administrator or do I consider myself a sql guru. I only use them to write web enabled apps as a hobby and not in a corporate environment.

However it was rumoured that postgreSQL lacked real backup tools to fix a corrupt database. I believe this might of been fixed but was an issue 3 years ago. This is the only downside I see. Both Mysql and Oracle have tools to fix such a problem. Maybe someone who is reading this who is more familiar with administering databases can comment on this.

I've been a member of Salon for quite a while and did what I could to support them. I would be sorry to see it go. I think it's funny that people think Salon is "left". I mean, if it is left, what is the Boston Phoenix or the Village Voice?

I also would be sorry, and more pertinently to Slashdot, because I think their design for semi-automated publishing was kind of neat, and it is one of the last examples of a house doing their own development work I know of. That is a dwindling group.

While I cannot address the questions of rent for their offices -- which if true, I agree seem excessive -- I think "the end of the dot-com bubble" means more than the crashing of way-out business models, excessive spending, and such. I mean, when MoTown was starting up, they were excessive in parties, liquor, etc

To me, these companies are failing as much because of deflation in the information technology industry as anything else. That deflation is caused:

• partly because of low interest rates in the economy
• partly because the hardware component of the industry is now commodity-based and people have an expectation that prices should drop, for those and telecommunications costs
• partly because programming labor is cheaper and more widely available
• partly because non-IT businesses are fiercely cutting costs, including moving to shrinkwrap solutions for their IT needs, even if they are not a good match
• partly because the Internet marketplace has long had expectations that things there should be free or available at modest charges.

The last effect is a subtle, I think. Since good news coverage and similar entertainment is now available on the Internet and cheaply, any premium or brick-and-mortar company has to deal with not so much with e-business competition but with the expectation that new can be had for much less. Why subscribe to the New York Times paper when most of what's good about it is available online for zip?

I think whatever happens to Salon is part of a trend, because what we earn for doing information technology is diminishing and will continue to diminish.

http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/05/hong / /A>

- H

The issue that the authors are worried about isn't that their profits will be decreased, but that their sales will be decreased.

Now, at first glance, those two seem to be the same thing, but they're not. The problem is that an author's future is driven by his present as measured by the publisher. If an author writes a novel that is published and sells 500,000 copies, when the author submits their next novel to the publisher, the publisher will look at the author's track record and base their offer on what they expect to be able to sell. If the publisher sells 300,000 copies, 200,000 of which are resold used, then the same 500,000 people have bought the author's book, but the publisher only sees sales of 300,000 copies -- so the next book by that author will get a lower offer from the publisher, if it's accepted at all.

With the ongoing compression of the midlist -- authors whose work sells steadily but not outstandingly are finding it harder to get book contracts, and the compensation they get when they do continues to fall -- drops in the publishers' sales figures because of heavily-pushed used book sales doesn't just impact their current income, it affects their income for everything they write in the future.

Midlist authors are already losing out on the store shelves, where you find half the shelves or racks loaded with copies of the three most recently-published books by blockbuster authors like Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton, and two-thirds of the rest filled with a dozen indistinguishable romance titles, '[Soon to be a | Novelization of the | Based on Characters from the] Major Motion Picture' titles, copies of the fourth or fifth volume in a few fantasy series, the latest two or three of the hundreds of Star Trek novels, and waaay down at the bottom, tucked away in a corner, a couple of midlist titles. And when the midlist titles don't sell well, the store doesn't order them, and the publisher downgrades the author when they try to sell their next novel.

Prominently-featured used book sales don't just help kill an author's royalties on the book you're buying; they help kill the author's future income and salability of their work.

PostgreSQL is an ACID compliant database. MySQL is not (unless that has changed recently--if so please let me know).
ACID (an acronymn for Atomicity Consistency Isolation Durability) is a 'keyword' that business professionals generally look for when evaluating databases. Frankly, non-ACID databases aren't taken very seriously, even if they are used by the likes of Yahoo and Slashdot (like MySQL is).
Here is a quick description of what it means to be ACID compliant:
1. Atomicity is an all-or-none proposition. Suppose you define a transaction that contains an UPDATE, an INSERT, and a DELETE statement. With atomicity, these statements are treated as a single unit, and thanks to consistency (the C in ACID) there are only two possible outcomes: either they all change the database or none of them do. This is important in situations like bank transactions where transferring money between accounts could result in disaster if the server were to go down after a DELETE statement but before the corresponding INSERT statement.

2. Consistency guarantees that a transaction never leaves your database in a half-finished state. If one part of the transaction fails, all of the pending changes are rolled back, leaving the database as it was before you initiated the transaction. For instance, when you delete a customer record, you should also delete all of that customer's records from associated tables (such as invoices and line items). A properly configured database wouldn't let you delete the customer record, if that meant leaving its invoices, and other associated records stranded.

3. Isolation keeps transactions separated from each other until they're finished. Transaction isolation is generally configurable in a variety of modes. For example, in one mode, a transaction blocks until the other transaction finishes. In a different mode, a transaction sees obsolete data (from the state the database was in before the previous transaction started). Suppose a user deletes a customer, and before the customer's invoices are deleted, a second user updates one of those invoices. In a blocking transaction scenario, the second user would have to wait for the first user's deletions to complete before issuing the update. The second user would then find out that the customer had been deleted, which is much better than losing changes without knowing about it.

4. Durability guarantees that the database will keep track of pending changes in such a way that the server can recover from an abnormal termination. Hence, even if the database server is unplugged in the middle of a transaction, it will return to a consistent state when it's restarted. The database handles this by storing uncommitted transactions in a transaction log. By virtue of consistency (explained above), a partially completed transaction won't be written to the database in the event of an abnormal termination. However, when the database is restarted after such a termination, it examines the transaction log for completed transactions that had not been committed, and applies them.


It is difficult to trust mission critical data to a database that does not guarantee that it will complete not screw up (short of a bug, of course), this such compliance--even when it is more political than technical--is very important.

In case you don't know what ACID means:
A: Atomicity
C: Consistency
I: Isolation
D: Durability

1. Atomicity is an all-or-none proposition. Suppose you define a transaction that contains an UPDATE, an INSERT, and a DELETE statement. With atomicity, these statements are treated as a single unit, and thanks to consistency (the C in ACID) there are only two possible outcomes: either they all change the database or none of them do. This is important in situations like bank transactions where transferring money between accounts could result in disaster if the server were to go down after a DELETE statement but before the corresponding INSERT statement.

2. Consistency guarantees that a transaction never leaves your database in a half-finished state. If one part of the transaction fails, all of the pending changes are rolled back, leaving the database as it was before you initiated the transaction. For instance, when you delete a customer record, you should also delete all of that customer's records from associated tables (such as invoices and line items). A properly configured database wouldn't let you delete the customer record, if that meant leaving its invoices, and other associated records stranded.

3. Isolation keeps transactions separated from each other until they're finished. Transaction isolation is generally configurable in a variety of modes. For example, in one mode, a transaction blocks until the other transaction finishes. In a different mode, a transaction sees obsolete data (from the state the database was in before the previous transaction started). Suppose a user deletes a customer, and before the customer's invoices are deleted, a second user updates one of those invoices. In a blocking transaction scenario, the second user would have to wait for the first user's deletions to complete before issuing the update. The second user would then find out that the customer had been deleted, which is much better than losing changes without knowing about it.

4. Durability guarantees that the database will keep track of pending changes in such a way that the server can recover from an abnormal termination. Hence, even if the database server is unplugged in the middle of a transaction, it will return to a consistent state when it's restarted. The database handles this by storing uncommitted transactions in a transaction log. By virtue of consistency (explained above), a partially completed transaction won't be written to the database in the event of an abnormal termination. However, when the database is restarted after such a termination, it examines the transaction log for completed transactions that had not been committed, and applies them.

(Some parts copied from here .)

Or maybe

Webber

Kind of like "Flipper," but best used only for websites because, like dolphins, they can go down out of sight from time to time without warning.

Canthandlehighvolumeupdateswithoutcorruption

Kind of rolls off the tongue doesn't it?

And yes, I have used MySQL and yes, I have seen what happens to a MySQL database from time to time even with proper maintenance and yes, transactions are not optional.

Best wishes to them on naming their dolphin though.

* ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability
See this link for more info.

I always thought that this article described a way thats pretty simple, and easy to use / develop.
Cheers.

From the posts, SQL-Ledger uses a pgsql backend and NOLA uses a MySQL backend.

I'm not sure what others think, but I for one would be very scared about using MySQL as a mission-critical backend.

Several articles comparing the two (a good one here) have come up with the same basic complaints, MySQL might be fast in overall, but it fails 3 out of 4 of the basic ACID tests (Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). So it's extremely fault intolerent.

PostgreSQL is fully ACID compliant and is thus a more reliable backend.

Yes, there are plug-in table managers for MySQL that are ACID compliant, but it's nicer to know that the core product already meets these basic requirements for a robust database.

So be sure you take a look at technology behind the systems before committing your critical systems to them.

Karma whore? Sure. I guess. But I'm already at 50, so what do I care? I'm just saving you from doing a Google search on "Powazek".

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Web Techniques is running an interview this month with Google's director of technology. It's short, but it does give a little bit of insight into how their engine works. Among other things, he says Google's long-term goal is to use native language as its default input method.

Web Techniques is running an interview this month with Google's director of technology. It's short, but it does give a little bit of insight into how their engine works. Among other things, he says Google's long-term goal is to use native language as its default input method.

Good luck getting your rough estimate based on IP addresses. I think it's great that you're eschewing cookies; go for cache friendliness.

True, but... you can defend your trademark without being an asshole. There was an excellent article in Webtechniqes about this very topic, written by an intellectual property lawyer. A few crucial quotes:

" While lawyers have an obligation to a court to say things in documents that are reasonably based on the law and fact, they have no such obligation when sending the proverbial nasty letter. "

" Rather than litigate against your best customers, license them to use your mark in connection with their fan sites. You maintain control of the trademark; your fan uses that mark strictly in conformance with your corporate trademark policy, and you now have an evangelist instead of an enemy. "

" Every time one of these legal actions backfires against an overreaching lawyer and his or her client or company, I always ask myself, "What were they thinking?" The answer usually turns out to be that they weren't. "

I have a column on this very issue (linking as "trespass to chattels") in the current issue of Web Techniques . One of things I discuss there, in the context of streamlinking, is that a better solution to these issues generally is for developers to use links generated on the fly or session-specific permissions if they want to block linking.

This may not be a solution for Register.com, as it has to follow standard protocols for the implementation of Whois, but we shouldn't let this Register.com precedent carry over to other scenarios. For standard linking problems, the better solution is to use code to prevent linking, not court orders.

I have a column on this very issue (linking as "trespass to chattels") in the current issue of Web Techniques . One of things I discuss there, in the context of streamlinking, is that a better solution to these issues generally is for developers to use links generated on the fly or session-specific permissions if they want to block linking.

This may not be a solution for Register.com, as it has to follow standard protocols for the implementation of Whois, but we shouldn't let this Register.com precedent carry over to other scenarios. For standard linking problems, the better solution is to use code to prevent linking, not court orders.

Your criteria is "small, fast, and compatible" not to mention "freely hacked"

Yet BSD is a BETTER choice based on your criteria.
Small - PicoBSD is a fully functioning Unix OS on a floppy.
Fast - BSD on benchmarks runs FASTER than linux. 10-30% faster.
Compatible - The result of the X86Open group (creation of a common binary format for X86 unixes) was a Linux ELF format. Thusly products like FreeBSD can run Linux binaries. And, FreeBSD can run Quake III linux binaries FASTER than Linux does. And, it is well known and accepted that NetBSD is ported to more platforms.

And, "freely hackable", the BSD license allows the user of the code to commericalize their product without the worry of having to release the IP the company uses in the product. The code is MUCH more free to do what a human wants to than other licenses.

Looking at 2 'linux' projects that are willing to admit they used the pioneering work of NetBSD are the dreamcast port (acknolodge the boot code is NetBSD inspired) and Linux on WinCE

Linux may 'work well', but in the world of computer code, the BSD tree is BETTER!

Thanks for all the comments on the article in Web Techniques (even the flames).

One point of the article that seems to have been largely missed here on Slashdot and in the comments sent to my personal e-mail (bret at lextext dot com), was in regard to whether there is a role to be played by the public domain in open or free software development (or any other creative endeavor for that matter), as I think we as a society benefit from a richly endowed public domain

The primary point in the article was not that we should find ways to make competing licenses compatible, but to ask whether there would come a time at which it might be appropriate to drop the "copyleft' and GPL-style licenses altogether. It could be that the answer is no, and that there are good reasons that the answer is no , but I thought it was a fair question to ask. Self-perpetuation of the movement, one of the prime reasons for a copyleft license, may no longer be threatened by dropping the license.

I appreciate the notion, expressed here and elsewhere, that there's no free speech without an enforcement mechanism and the obvious analogy to the enforcement capabilities made possible by copyleft licenses. But if there is a community of developers dedicated to contributing to the public domain, there is no regulatory force (like the state, in the free speech analogy) that is going to prevent that. Only market forces, greed and sloth, stand in the way of perpetuating and growing the public domain. Are those factors sufficiently great to warrant building in an enforcement mechanism? Are there concerns that I'm missing that warrant maintaining the licensing restrictions? If there are legitimate concerns justifying maintaining copleft licenses, might those concerns be outweighed by the potential benefits in dropping all barriers to collaboration?

These are issues that obviously can't be solved in a 2000 word column, but by raising them I hoped to get the kind of feedback that I've seen here. Thanks for that. Any additional comments on the ideas raised in my column and underscored above would be most welcome.

-- Bret

IBM claims that AIX is in fact the number 1 os, according to an add in the issue of WebTechniques I got today! (pg. 15). Its for the "new" pSeries 640 Unix Rack Servers (for thoes of you who wont read the magazine any quicker than you will follow a link!)

The fine print in the add goes on to say:

Rated #1 Unix operating system: D.H. Brown Operating System Scorecard, 3/24/2000.

Besides the web-safety limitations of color selections, web designers should also be cognizant of what visitors who are color-blind will see (a subject near and dear to my heart). Webtechniques has a great article on this subject. Particularly interesting is their description of how to simulate color-blindness in order to view your own design efforts.

Besides the web-safety limitations of color selections, web designers should also be cognizant of what visitors who are color-blind will see (a subject near and dear to my heart). Webtechniques has a great article on this subject. Particularly interesting is their description of how to simulate color-blindness in order to view your own design efforts.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

Bugger. Slashdot ate my A HREF Tag. Sorry.

The article is at http://www.webtechniques .com/archives/1998/05/engelschall/

Although I found a list of some browsers, I did not find a page which describes behavior of various cell phone browsers. Anyone notice such a page?

Why bother with letter DoubleClick decide to remove their cookies? Do it yourself! In WebTechniques, Randal Schwartz wrote an Anonymizing Proxy server in Perl that can run as a console app in the background that you can use to strip out all your cookies (as he wrote it), or, with a slight modification, you can have it strip out only DoubleClicks's cookies.

The original column is at http://www.stonehenge.com /merlyn/WebTechniques/col11.html (code here), and he updated it (a "Preforking, compressing proxy" (code)) last February. He also wrote a "Cookie Jar" (code here) application that can be used for the same purpose.

They all run on *nix, of course, but I have gotten the original proxy server running on a Win95 box and on WinNT boxes using ActivePerl.

Check it out. Take control for yourself--don't rely on their ridiculous "opt-out" option. Fight back.

darren