"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
Maybe they wouldn't have gotten so much spam and snide comments, if they would have stuck to actual science.
It does, indeed sound like sour grapes. Just for example: a few days ago, after the recent shooting, they re-printed an opinion piece from Michael Shermer on gun control. And of all people, Shermer should have known better than to write the article he did... he didn't cite sources (although he casually mentioned some without any actual detail), and so on. It was a political smear piece, timed to take advantage of tragedy.
If they had stuck to science themselves, maybe they would not have given people the impression that science was for sale, or up for vote.
What happened was this: the laptops finally came of age, and later Myst versions were distributed via Ubisoft. Ubisoft, in turn, implemented DRM, requiring the CD to be in the drive whenever you played.
Back when, I sent an email to Cyan, complaining about the DRM. A programmer wrote back, saying he, too, thought the DRM was BS but there was nothing he could do about it, because it was the distributor insisting on it, with his bosses' consent.
I vowed never to buy another Myst release. End of story.
I.T. is a little of both... it acts like a big lever, little input massive results.
Yes. My point was that while IT is infrastructure, it is infrastructure in the same way the CEO is. It may not produce profit directly, but it adds value that the company can't do without.
"What you're talking about is a simpleminded approach to business that treats anything other than sales as a cost center to be subject to Eugene Krabs style corner cutting."
That wasn't my argument. I was demonstrating that GP's argument was silly, by reducing it to the absurd. (Reductio ad absurdum.)
"You're a fool. IT is infrastructure and an insurance policy when/if something goes wrong. IT does not produce anything, they do not sell anything, IT has no product for which a customer will pay. That in the eyes of an exec is a drain on the company and therefore will always be the first to get cut when they need a new yacht."
Did you even read what I wrote? Of course it's infrastructure. But... so is the CEO.
The point was that it's essential infrastructure for most businesses today. Ignore that at your peril.
I don't give a damn what an exec thinks. If he thinks he can get away without IT, HE is the fool, not me.
"Keep deluding yourself that IT is a revenue generator. Try pitching that to the VP of IS/IT while he stares at the spreadsheet showing the hundreds of thousands of dollars you requested that quarter to upgrade XYZ."
I'm not deluding myself. When PCs were properly accounted for, showing how they produced results for my company back in 1992, rather than an expense they actually showed $250,000 profit / year. And that's AFTER purchase costs, maintenance, software, and IT were factored in.
Wrong. IT very much *IS* a revenue generator. It's just not an obvious revenue generator.
Most modern businesses of any size cannot operate long without some form of IT. And if their business does not operate, there is no revenue. Strictly speaking, the only thing that "generates" revenue is sales. Depending on your point of view at any given moment, EVERYTHING else in the company could justifiably be labeled as an unnecessary expense. Including the CEO's paycheck.
I've seen this often before. They're cutting their own throats. They may not know it, because what IT does not show up on the books as a positive, but that's what they're doing.
It's also not a very bright move when you consider that former offshorers have been pulling their operations back to the U.S. in droves.
Over the course of the last few years, on the international software contract boards, I have more and more seen posts that say such things as "N. America or Europe Only" for hire.
There have been way too many bad experiences with offshoring. The main complaints have been: [A] Overselling (i.e., the person or firm really had little or no experience in the particular specialty involved), [B] inferior work, and [C] incomplete work (project simply abandoned after a couple of initial payments).
When other corporations are changing direction in a big way, why would they choose to do this? Are they unwilling to learn from the mistakes of others?
"That would seem the obvious answer for civilian areas. I am wondering if there are power, weight or stealth requirements that radar doesn't fit. I would guess a stealth attack drone that you send it to shoot down their fighters would both need to be quite and be able to sense other aircraft. 'Avoid' might be switched to 'intercept' in the article title."
I would guess that radar stealth techniques, if not already applied to missiles, soon will be.
But for "non-stealthed" craft, I would imagine that this would have many civilian uses. After all, until aircraft can reliably locate and avoid other craft automatically, few people will have "flying cars".
"There's nothing in there restricting sale or profit: "This version allows unlimited redistribution for any purpose as long as its copyright notices and the license's disclaimers of warranty are maintained". "Any purpose" includes using your contribution in a derived work that's not open-source at all. That's the whole point of the BSD style licenses."
You are referring to the OLD-style BSD license. Read the Wikipedia quote linked above. The NEW BSD license has a 3rd clause restricting sale for profit without permission.
"BSD style contributions are basically waiving all rights on your code, so of course they accept those too."
No they aren't, and it says so right there in the quote on Wikipedia.
The original author maintains copyright of the code, and nobody else can sell it for profit without the author's permission.
If only MySQL had rights under the BSD license, then what you say would be true. But the original author has those rights, too. So it can't be sold out from under them.
"Should documents then start including snapshots of the site (Wayback Machine-style) in document appendices? It's more work, sure, but it seems to be an obvious solution."
This is simply and purely a failure of Government to properly archive, long-term store, and maintain its records.
Anything cited in a Court decision should be saved, cataloged, and stored in a permanent place. Failure to do so is a big failure, indeed.
"But I don't see it getting any better any time soon, or really ever."
Okay, I get the cynicism. But there's a difference between cynicism and pessimism. I would say that's more pessimistic than cynical.
It has to get better, or we're all SOL. I prefer to believe that if people would simply get off their asses (figuratively speaking) and write or call their representatives and tell them what they really think, a lot of this would go away. Instead, they've been letting corporate interests rule the roost.
I don't believe that's either inevitable, or irreversible.
"When people complain about Postgres' "non-standard SQL", this usually comes from those that have only used MySQL and think it's the standard."
No, actually I made a mistake. It isn't the SQL that I don't like about Postgres, it's the administration. In my opinion, it's obscure and poorly documented. Oh, the documentation is THERE, for sure. But it's written poorly and seems to assume in many places that you have the same knowledge as the Postgres development team.
I have frequently had to go to 3rd-party sources to find out how to do something, even after reading the "official" documentation.
By the way: this new "5 minute delay" between comments SUCKS. I can't even post a correction to a comment without having to wait 5 minutes first. That's an eternity in Slashdot time.
"As long as MariaDB is requiring copyright assignment, there's every reason to believe it will be sold off again the same way MySQL was."
Except the page you link to specifically says they DON'T require it. They also say you can submit using the "new" BSD licence, which allows redistribution, and does NOT allow sale or profit, without permission of the author.
"The powerful don't want to see inflation, it makes their money worth less."
Not true. At least, partially not true.
Inflation makes OUR money worth less. Not theirs. Why? The time delay factor.
See, when the government and the banks inflate the money supply, where does that new money go first? Answer: the banks, the government, and Wall Street.
But it takes time for an inflated money supply to significantly affect prices. During that time, the banks, government, & Wall Street have already used that money... at full value. It isn't until later, by the time it gets into your hands and mine, that we see the bad effects of inflation.
"Now we've switched to Postgres, because MySQL's future is so hazy..."
It's no more hazy than it was when Oracle took it over. The MariaDB project is largely run by ex-MySQL developers... where's the problem? If anything, it was Oracle that muddied the waters. Now things are getting BACK on track.
I like Postgres in some ways, but it has some significant deviations from standard SQL syntax, and other idiosyncracies.
For me (I'm not doing anything "enterprise" at the moment), the slight performance gain of Postgres is not worth putting up with its oddities.
"And how exactly is the capacitative image of the finger copied? Hint: photocopiers don't copy capacitative images. Neither input nor output."
The photocopier doesn't have to copy the "capacitive image". It only needs to copy the ridge pattern. That pattern is then made into a "capacitive image" via the latex mold + moisture.
"Some people seem to think that tricks that worked on Mythbusters 7 years ago work on entirely different technology today."
And according to the report, that's exactly what it did. They didn't JUST use photocopies in the Mythbusters episode, remember. They also used ballistic gel, which has a "capacitive image" similar to skin.
And the more-expensive unit on the door lock they defeated 7 years ago DID use capacitance as part of its scan. This is hardly "new" technology. Apparently, according to TFA, it's merely slightly higher resolution.
"Yes it was an interesting episode of Mythbusters. SEVEN years ago."
Yep. Seven years ago. BUT... if it can be defeated exactly the same way (which according to the report, it was), then even with all that improved technology, THEY'RE STILL NOT ANY BETTER THAN THEY WERE THEN.
That was, in fact, my point. It doesn't matter how much new technology you throw at it. If it doesn't work better, you wasted all that money.
And while we may not have proof, if they were lying, we'll find out. Personally, I think they were just telling it like it is. We'll know soon enough.
Yes, saying the cable thing was "anticompetitive" in a legal sense was exaggeration. Mea culpa. But they HAVE been anticompetitive -- in the reality, as opposed to the legal, sense -- in many areas. I will mention again the price-fixing case they recently lost, and there are other areas where they have really been testing the limits of legality.
"It's like buying a Gillette razor and then complaining that they won't allow you to use Bic blades on the razor."
Right. But just as with cell phones, the difference is that there is in fact pretty open competition. If there were only two companies in the whole industry, then yes, erecting barriers to entry for other companies could easily be ruled "anticompetitive". The fewer the players, the tougher the competitiveness rules.
At least, that's the way it is supposed to be. In the last couple of decades we've seen far too much of the government-corporate revolving-door bullshit.
"Anti-competetive practices aren't usually illegal. Just look all the anti-competitive practiced that lots of other companies have gotten away with for the last few decades."
"Getting away with" something does not mean it isn't illegal. I've seen lots of corporate practices in the last 15 years or so that, in earlier times, would have gotten the prosecuted. There are 2 reasons for that: (a) the laws have changed -- in a bad way -- toward allowing abuses that formerly were not allowed (deregulation), and (b) many existing laws have not been enforced as they should have been.
"Being "bad" isn't illegal,
No shit, Sherlock. I was speaking about whether it is good or bad for the economy in general.
"and in this country rarely results in any kind of government intervention or successful lawsuit.""
TODAY. See the first paragraph above. Things have not always been the way they have the last 10-15 years or so. And there is lots of strong evidence that the deregulation we have seen has done tremendous harm to our economy.
"Yes, it sucks, but what are you going to do about it? Sue them? Haha, good luck with that. "
Um... I have news for you, guy. Apple was recently found guilty of price-fixing. That's an "anticompetitive practice". And it's illegal BECAUSE it's an anticompetitive practice.
Granted, they were only given a slap on the wrist, relatively speaking, but that's another example of (b) above.
"No they aren't."
Hint: they already did, in the price-fixing case, and there are other areas where they're really pushing it. Yes, if they keep it up, sooner or later they're going to be busted, big time.
Slashdot Mirror
"Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again"
Maybe they wouldn't have gotten so much spam and snide comments, if they would have stuck to actual science.
It does, indeed sound like sour grapes. Just for example: a few days ago, after the recent shooting, they re-printed an opinion piece from Michael Shermer on gun control. And of all people, Shermer should have known better than to write the article he did... he didn't cite sources (although he casually mentioned some without any actual detail), and so on. It was a political smear piece, timed to take advantage of tragedy.
If they had stuck to science themselves, maybe they would not have given people the impression that science was for sale, or up for vote.
"That's the legacy of Myst."
But the question was: "What happened?"
What happened was this: the laptops finally came of age, and later Myst versions were distributed via Ubisoft. Ubisoft, in turn, implemented DRM, requiring the CD to be in the drive whenever you played.
Back when, I sent an email to Cyan, complaining about the DRM. A programmer wrote back, saying he, too, thought the DRM was BS but there was nothing he could do about it, because it was the distributor insisting on it, with his bosses' consent.
I vowed never to buy another Myst release. End of story.
Haha. Yes, I've seen that too. But that's really a sales problem, not an IT problem.
"Come buy the new X! It does Y and Z! (Never mind that we don't have Z done yet...)"
I.T. is a little of both ... it acts like a big lever, little input massive results.
Yes. My point was that while IT is infrastructure, it is infrastructure in the same way the CEO is. It may not produce profit directly, but it adds value that the company can't do without.
"What you're talking about is a simpleminded approach to business that treats anything other than sales as a cost center to be subject to Eugene Krabs style corner cutting."
That wasn't my argument. I was demonstrating that GP's argument was silly, by reducing it to the absurd. (Reductio ad absurdum.)
"You're a fool. IT is infrastructure and an insurance policy when/if something goes wrong. IT does not produce anything, they do not sell anything, IT has no product for which a customer will pay. That in the eyes of an exec is a drain on the company and therefore will always be the first to get cut when they need a new yacht."
Did you even read what I wrote? Of course it's infrastructure. But... so is the CEO.
The point was that it's essential infrastructure for most businesses today. Ignore that at your peril.
I don't give a damn what an exec thinks. If he thinks he can get away without IT, HE is the fool, not me.
"Keep deluding yourself that IT is a revenue generator. Try pitching that to the VP of IS/IT while he stares at the spreadsheet showing the hundreds of thousands of dollars you requested that quarter to upgrade XYZ."
I'm not deluding myself. When PCs were properly accounted for, showing how they produced results for my company back in 1992, rather than an expense they actually showed $250,000 profit / year. And that's AFTER purchase costs, maintenance, software, and IT were factored in.
"To enforce this you would need to inspect the contents of encrypted communications. On the same scale as the NSA inspects communications metadata."
Government Surveillance For Sale is even more ominous than Big Brother.
"IT is not a revenue generator."
Wrong. IT very much *IS* a revenue generator. It's just not an obvious revenue generator.
Most modern businesses of any size cannot operate long without some form of IT. And if their business does not operate, there is no revenue. Strictly speaking, the only thing that "generates" revenue is sales. Depending on your point of view at any given moment, EVERYTHING else in the company could justifiably be labeled as an unnecessary expense. Including the CEO's paycheck.
I've seen this often before. They're cutting their own throats. They may not know it, because what IT does not show up on the books as a positive, but that's what they're doing.
It's also not a very bright move when you consider that former offshorers have been pulling their operations back to the U.S. in droves.
Over the course of the last few years, on the international software contract boards, I have more and more seen posts that say such things as "N. America or Europe Only" for hire.
There have been way too many bad experiences with offshoring. The main complaints have been: [A] Overselling (i.e., the person or firm really had little or no experience in the particular specialty involved), [B] inferior work, and [C] incomplete work (project simply abandoned after a couple of initial payments).
When other corporations are changing direction in a big way, why would they choose to do this? Are they unwilling to learn from the mistakes of others?
" Once you've coded around a bug, you have set that bug in code and you are stuck with it."
Name me one DBRMS that is bug-free. I've had to put up with plenty of swearing by Postgres users.
"That would seem the obvious answer for civilian areas. I am wondering if there are power, weight or stealth requirements that radar doesn't fit. I would guess a stealth attack drone that you send it to shoot down their fighters would both need to be quite and be able to sense other aircraft. 'Avoid' might be switched to 'intercept' in the article title."
I would guess that radar stealth techniques, if not already applied to missiles, soon will be.
But for "non-stealthed" craft, I would imagine that this would have many civilian uses. After all, until aircraft can reliably locate and avoid other craft automatically, few people will have "flying cars".
"There's nothing in there restricting sale or profit: "This version allows unlimited redistribution for any purpose as long as its copyright notices and the license's disclaimers of warranty are maintained". "Any purpose" includes using your contribution in a derived work that's not open-source at all. That's the whole point of the BSD style licenses."
You are referring to the OLD-style BSD license. Read the Wikipedia quote linked above. The NEW BSD license has a 3rd clause restricting sale for profit without permission.
"BSD style contributions are basically waiving all rights on your code, so of course they accept those too."
No they aren't, and it says so right there in the quote on Wikipedia.
The original author maintains copyright of the code, and nobody else can sell it for profit without the author's permission.
If only MySQL had rights under the BSD license, then what you say would be true. But the original author has those rights, too. So it can't be sold out from under them.
"Should documents then start including snapshots of the site (Wayback Machine-style) in document appendices? It's more work, sure, but it seems to be an obvious solution."
This is simply and purely a failure of Government to properly archive, long-term store, and maintain its records.
Anything cited in a Court decision should be saved, cataloged, and stored in a permanent place. Failure to do so is a big failure, indeed.
"But I don't see it getting any better any time soon, or really ever."
Okay, I get the cynicism. But there's a difference between cynicism and pessimism. I would say that's more pessimistic than cynical.
It has to get better, or we're all SOL. I prefer to believe that if people would simply get off their asses (figuratively speaking) and write or call their representatives and tell them what they really think, a lot of this would go away. Instead, they've been letting corporate interests rule the roost.
I don't believe that's either inevitable, or irreversible.
"When people complain about Postgres' "non-standard SQL", this usually comes from those that have only used MySQL and think it's the standard."
No, actually I made a mistake. It isn't the SQL that I don't like about Postgres, it's the administration. In my opinion, it's obscure and poorly documented. Oh, the documentation is THERE, for sure. But it's written poorly and seems to assume in many places that you have the same knowledge as the Postgres development team.
I have frequently had to go to 3rd-party sources to find out how to do something, even after reading the "official" documentation.
"I've never hit mySQL professionally. It's a POS."
Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But some very large enterprises use MySQL, and they don't think it's a POS.
Oops. Link missing.
The "new" BSD license.
By the way: this new "5 minute delay" between comments SUCKS. I can't even post a correction to a comment without having to wait 5 minutes first. That's an eternity in Slashdot time.
"As long as MariaDB is requiring copyright assignment, there's every reason to believe it will be sold off again the same way MySQL was."
Except the page you link to specifically says they DON'T require it. They also say you can submit using the "new" BSD licence, which allows redistribution, and does NOT allow sale or profit, without permission of the author.
"The powerful don't want to see inflation, it makes their money worth less."
Not true. At least, partially not true.
Inflation makes OUR money worth less. Not theirs. Why? The time delay factor.
See, when the government and the banks inflate the money supply, where does that new money go first? Answer: the banks, the government, and Wall Street.
But it takes time for an inflated money supply to significantly affect prices. During that time, the banks, government, & Wall Street have already used that money... at full value. It isn't until later, by the time it gets into your hands and mine, that we see the bad effects of inflation.
"Now we've switched to Postgres, because MySQL's future is so hazy..."
It's no more hazy than it was when Oracle took it over. The MariaDB project is largely run by ex-MySQL developers... where's the problem? If anything, it was Oracle that muddied the waters. Now things are getting BACK on track.
I like Postgres in some ways, but it has some significant deviations from standard SQL syntax, and other idiosyncracies.
For me (I'm not doing anything "enterprise" at the moment), the slight performance gain of Postgres is not worth putting up with its oddities.
"And how exactly is the capacitative image of the finger copied? Hint: photocopiers don't copy capacitative images. Neither input nor output."
The photocopier doesn't have to copy the "capacitive image". It only needs to copy the ridge pattern. That pattern is then made into a "capacitive image" via the latex mold + moisture.
"Some people seem to think that tricks that worked on Mythbusters 7 years ago work on entirely different technology today."
And according to the report, that's exactly what it did. They didn't JUST use photocopies in the Mythbusters episode, remember. They also used ballistic gel, which has a "capacitive image" similar to skin.
And the more-expensive unit on the door lock they defeated 7 years ago DID use capacitance as part of its scan. This is hardly "new" technology. Apparently, according to TFA, it's merely slightly higher resolution.
"Yes it was an interesting episode of Mythbusters. SEVEN years ago."
Yep. Seven years ago. BUT... if it can be defeated exactly the same way (which according to the report, it was), then even with all that improved technology, THEY'RE STILL NOT ANY BETTER THAN THEY WERE THEN.
That was, in fact, my point. It doesn't matter how much new technology you throw at it. If it doesn't work better, you wasted all that money.
And while we may not have proof, if they were lying, we'll find out. Personally, I think they were just telling it like it is. We'll know soon enough.
"Actually it's not against the law."
Yes, saying the cable thing was "anticompetitive" in a legal sense was exaggeration. Mea culpa. But they HAVE been anticompetitive -- in the reality, as opposed to the legal, sense -- in many areas. I will mention again the price-fixing case they recently lost, and there are other areas where they have really been testing the limits of legality.
"It's like buying a Gillette razor and then complaining that they won't allow you to use Bic blades on the razor."
Right. But just as with cell phones, the difference is that there is in fact pretty open competition. If there were only two companies in the whole industry, then yes, erecting barriers to entry for other companies could easily be ruled "anticompetitive". The fewer the players, the tougher the competitiveness rules.
At least, that's the way it is supposed to be. In the last couple of decades we've seen far too much of the government-corporate revolving-door bullshit.
"Anti-competetive practices aren't usually illegal. Just look all the anti-competitive practiced that lots of other companies have gotten away with for the last few decades."
"Getting away with" something does not mean it isn't illegal. I've seen lots of corporate practices in the last 15 years or so that, in earlier times, would have gotten the prosecuted. There are 2 reasons for that: (a) the laws have changed -- in a bad way -- toward allowing abuses that formerly were not allowed (deregulation), and (b) many existing laws have not been enforced as they should have been.
"Being "bad" isn't illegal,
No shit, Sherlock. I was speaking about whether it is good or bad for the economy in general.
"and in this country rarely results in any kind of government intervention or successful lawsuit.""
TODAY. See the first paragraph above. Things have not always been the way they have the last 10-15 years or so. And there is lots of strong evidence that the deregulation we have seen has done tremendous harm to our economy.
"Yes, it sucks, but what are you going to do about it? Sue them? Haha, good luck with that. "
Um... I have news for you, guy. Apple was recently found guilty of price-fixing. That's an "anticompetitive practice". And it's illegal BECAUSE it's an anticompetitive practice.
Granted, they were only given a slap on the wrist, relatively speaking, but that's another example of (b) above.
"No they aren't."
Hint: they already did, in the price-fixing case, and there are other areas where they're really pushing it. Yes, if they keep it up, sooner or later they're going to be busted, big time.