When I saw the summary title, I immediately thought of paypalsucks.com. However, this is different. Nobody would think that paypalsucks.com was run by Paypal (*), and it is a commentary on paypal, so it is not infringing trademark. Wikipediaart.org sounds like something run by Wikipedia.
Note that Wikipedia Review has never been asked to change their name, for exactly this reason. Nobody could read it for more than about thirty seconds without realizing it's not affiliated with Wikipedia.
What upgrades has ubuntu had to X that may have made it faster? Is it using Xorg 1.6 or something?
Yes, it is. Of course, all sorts of other things might contribute. Upgrades to the kernel, GNOME, major applications, the compiler, or even changes to compiler flags used could have helped.
I'd prefer evidence to a random user's sense of responsiveness:S
Are you aware of any good objective measure of interface "snappiness"? Unfortunately, I'm not. It seems like improving perceived lagginess would be at least as valuable as more easily measured things like boot time or memory usage.
Not *quite* true. Thanks to international treaties, we have to recognize foreign copyrights, though only on terms spelled out in our own laws.
We have to accord foreign works the same protections as domestic works -- but that precisely means we don't have to care about the foreign laws. If something is not copyrightable in the United States, but is in France, then it can be redistributed freely in the United States even if it was created in France by French authors. Same deal if you replace "United States" and "France" with any two other members of the various copyright treaties.
(I'm sure there are exceptions to the above, but that's certainly the general principle.)
And yes, they probably can get copyrights on the scans, even if the underlying material is public domain. Of course, it *should* only apply to the scan. So if you transcribe the words from whatever text yourself, you might be in the clear (depending on your own local laws).
This probably depends on jurisdiction. In the United States, it seems unlikely that a scan would be copyrightable. See Bridgeman v. Corel: since scanning a 2D work involves purely technical considerations, not creativity, it doesn't confer copyright.
Maybe 'unemployed' is the wrong word here. It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
There was official censorship long after the introduction of the printing press. My copy of Don Quixote has a notice of approval by the censor, and its first editions were all printed.
Also, even before the printing press, state censors exercised direct control over all written works, not just implicitly through the works' being written by monks. Medieval Jewish texts certainly needed approval by the Christian censors, for instance, despite their being written by Jewish scribes.
but i always wonder how they do these geographically isolated site changes...
In this case, they don't. They key off what country you say you're from in your profile. If you sign up with a South Korean IP but say you're American, you're fine. If you sign up with an American IP and say you're South Korean, you won't be able to post.
How free are people under Linux? I understand that it's about freedom of information, but when I think about the other possibilities that I might want to have in terms of User Interface manipulation (like the ad seems to suggest) I begin to wonder. Is there an easy (non-code, maybe even scripting) way to change the look of the UI?
On Linux, you're you're free to do whatever you want, guaranteed. What you are not guaranteed is that you're free to do whatever you want easily. That bit we're still working on.
1). Company "X" submits to the Linux project some code changes that will allow Company "X" to hook its proprietary code into the Linux kernel. Completely legal according to the Linux GPL license.
Um, no. According to the interpretation of the FSF and most kernel developers I've heard from, and according to the intent of the license (it's clearer in v3), hooks, plugins, drivers, etc. must be released under the GPL. That's what distinguishes it from the LGPL: you can't combine it with your proprietary code.
You'd have to do it "at arm's length": from userspace, for instance. An OS where you refuse to modify your own kernel isn't going to be very successful. Good luck hooking a userspace program into your scheduler.
Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections.
This statement deliberately confuses what it means to be "free". Free doesn't mean "I can do anything I want." Free means "I have all the basic freedoms required to take advantage of this data, while at the same time it is guaranteed that others will have these freedoms as well."
No, the statement means "the GFDL is not necessarily a free license by the definitions of OSI, Debian, etc.". It's possible to put severe restrictions on derivative works: prohibiting end users from removing or modifying parts of the work, for instance. There are also dodgy restrictions on the use of things like DRM. Because of this, Debian has concluded that the GFDL is a non-free license.
What you dismiss as merely "annoying" astounds me. It is "broken" it does not support SQL in any reasonable way.
I never said otherwise. It still works just fine as a database engine. Possibly even better than PostgreSQL for some things, if the people running the top websites know what they're doing (I hope they do). Databases don't have to fully support SQL to be functional, or even support SQL at all.
You are working around a poorly designed query planner!!!
Sure we are. No arguments there. But apparently that's not enough of an obstacle to stop people from using it. Even people who have a lot of knowledge and experience. So you can complain that MySQL is a pain to use, and I'll agree with that. But that still doesn't answer my (quite narrow) question: do you, or any other PostgreSQL advocates, have any solid evidence that PostgreSQL will actually work for (e.g.) very large websites? Will it scale as well as MySQL on comparably priced hardware?
How about
select * from FOO where BAR in (select bar from froboz where name = xyz);
It won't use an index for BAR!! That is BROKEN. It is indefensible.
In MySQL 4.0, that doesn't even work. Subqueries aren't supported. You'd rewrite it as a join. Not a big deal:
SELECT foo.* FROM foo JOIN froboz ON (foo.bar = froboz.bar) WHERE froboz.name = froboz.xyz;
You'd prefer to use subqueries? Good for you, then use pgsql. That still doesn't answer my questions, it just restates the point (which I explicitly agree with) that MySQL is stupid and annoying.
Populous arguments are useless. If Windows is so bad why does it have a lock on the desktop market.
Because of application compatibility and user ignorance. The people who run these sites are not going to have big long-term problems with compatibility (because they write their own apps) and are likely to be very informed. You think Google decides what technologies to use primarily out of inertia instead of technical merit?
I happen to know the DBA for Wikipedia, Domas Mitzuas. He does know about PostgreSQL -- I think he's said he's had patches accepted by them -- and he doesn't believe it would scale to Wikipedia.
I have, many times, on Slashdot and at employers made very good cases as to why MySQL should not be used. Here's two:
create index myindex on FOO(BAR)
Which will lock the table until it is rewritten. So, when your site is under heavy load, you CAN'T fix it without killing it.
Wrong. You can do it, it's just a pain. Any large MySQL site uses replication with multiple slaves. Take a slave out of replication, add the index, add it back to rotation, let it catch up, repeat for all slaves. Promote a new master, take old master out of rotation, do the same. You now have the new index added with zero downtime.
A pain? Sure. A scalability problem? No. Write a script and it can be done with little effort. This is how Wikipedia does all schema changes. You can even add or remove columns this way -- MySQL uses statement-based replication, so an extra column won't affect replication. So you can add the new column with this procedure, populate it and tell the app to start using it, and if necessary remove any old columns once they're unused. I'm curious -- how would this be done in pgsql without downtime?
select * from FOO where BAR = myudf(xyz)
Even if there is an index on FOO(BAR) MySQL is too STUPID to use it, you get a full table scan.
I'm not clear here, is xyz a column or a constant? If it's a constant, just run myudf() in the application, not the database, and it will certainly be fine. That's mainly a stylistic difference. You usually don't use UDFs in MySQL. Again, not a prohibitive problem. You can't expect MySQL to work well if you use it like pgsql, any more than the contrary.
If it's a column, then I can't imagine any database getting it right without an index scan, if the only index you have is on BAR.
I have a ton of issues I can write about, but suffice to say, the index example is a show stopper for me.
It is not prohibitive. It's a pain. MySQL is a pain to use, that I'll happily agree with. It's stupid. You have to tell it what indexes to use half the time, especially in earlier versions, or else it will decide to do things like filesort a million rows instead of reading ten in order directly from the index (I've seen it happen . ..). A lot of things require some extra work. I'm told this is much less true of most other DBMSes.
But it does scale to very large OLTP workloads. Does PostgreSQL? Who uses it for that kind of workload? I can't say, I don't know enough about PostgreSQL. I'd be interested in hearing actual evidence of it handling very large website workloads. (I assume there are other large workloads it can handle fine; I don't know about those, I'm a web developer.)
Ahh yes I know there's a plug-in that'll give you the same features as IE8's InPrivate, but what I'd rather do is just block anything that matches some keywords or domains (like "pr0n" or "*.pr0n.com") from showing up in my awesome bar/history.
So they only have to look at your config to see what porn sites you visit, instead? I'll go with a "privacy" mode, thanks.
[rant]WRT other accounts, I've got plenty of computers that other people could (and do) use for general web browsing/what have you, but I've gotten sick of explaining to people who simply can't fathom how profiles personalize computers for their users that I don't want other people using mine and logging out of websites like myspace or facebook or igoogle and so on... It's like getting in your car and finding all the seats and mirrors moved around, but apparently I'm the only person I know who gets royally pissed off by that kind of stuff. [/rant]
So use a different profile? Recent versions of Ubuntu have a nifty "guest account" feature that lets you spawn a temporary account before handing the computer to someone else, so they have a fresh profile that it deletes when they log out.
If you're on a 64-bit install, the first will say "Advanced Micro Devices X86-64"; the second will remain "Intel 80386", indicating that Chromium is in fact 32-bit.
(By the way, Slashdot: long runs of spaces do not constitute "too many junk characters" if you're pasting some brief terminal output. WTF. Some spaces removed in the above output so Slashdot doesn't reject it.)
So let's restrict our domain a bit for a moment, say to websites. Google uses MySQL for some of their databases. Yahoo! uses MySQL for some of their databases. So do YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Baidu. That's six of the top ten websites. I couldn't quickly find info on blogger.com or MySpace (too many hits to blogs hosted there!), and presumably live.com and msn.com use MSSQL. That covers all of the Alexa top ten websites. In other words, every top ten website that I was able to find info on uses MySQL, unless it's Microsoft-owned (I didn't even bother checking those).
So tell me: if pgsql is so superior for all purposes, why aren't these places using it instead? Are any of the ten using it at all? What's the biggest website you can find that makes serious use of PostgreSQL? You can't claim that application compatibility or hosting availability are relevant to sites that write their own software and run their own server farms.
I've seen a lot of claims about how much better pgsql is, but somehow big websites aren't using it. Maybe it's more popular in non-web settings? I'm a web developer, so that's what I focus on.
Or maybe, just maybe, pgsql is actually worse than MySQL in some ways that a majority of the top websites have spotted. Just saying.
I've never understood something, which is how information in the public domain is compatible with the GFDL.
The GFDL is compatible with any strictly more lenient terms. If you create a derivative of a GFDL work, it prohibits you from imposing further restrictions on it, but doesn't require you to impose that "viral" aspect of parts of the work that weren't already subject to it. If I combine a GFDL work with a public-domain work and license the result under the GFDL, then anyone can use it under the terms of the GFDL, so that's fine. Nobody said parts of it can't be usable under more generous terms as well. The viral part only says you can't add extra restrictions to the derivative work.
This is covered in the GPL FAQ, although not very explicitly AFAICT.
I don't know if comparable is really accurate in my experience. Most of my coworkers use XP or Vista, I use Ubuntu. They may not have to reboot as frequently as they did in the old days, but I'm the only one seeing the "It has been 192 days since your last reboot" message when I reset my computer.
Is that for technical reasons or cultural ones? A lot of Linux users are in love with their uptime numbers, while most Windows users shut off their computer every day. This might be partly because Linux users are more likely to be running persistent server-like tasks. (I have an SSH server on my desktop, for instance, and some IRC chats I want the logs from.)
Anecdotally, I tend to average maybe a month uptime for my Linux desktop, and had similar figures for XP before I switched to Linux. (I visited evilupdate.com -- now apparently defunct -- to get rid of the Windows Update auto-reboot thing when necessary.) I think it's the users who reboot Windows often, not the system itself that's unstable. But YMMV, of course.
The probability of RAM just plain being defective---failing to operate correctly due to bugs in handling of certain low power states, having actual bad bits, having insufficient decoupling capacitance to work correctly in the presence of power supply rail noise, etc---is probably several hundred thousand orders of magnitude greater
Several hundred thousand orders of magnitude? Are you kidding?
Suppose that there is one cosmic ray particle that strikes the Earth per trillion years (orders of magnitude longer than the Earth will even exist). Suppose further that it strikes a completely random place distributed uniformly over the Earth's surface, and must hit a box one attometer square to flip the bit (orders of magnitude smaller than an atomic nucleus).
A square attometer is (10^-18)^2 = 10^-36 m^2. The Earth's surface is about 10^9 km^2 = 10^15 m^2. The rate of errors would then be about 10^-51 per trillion years, or 10^-63 per year.
This isn't even close to a hundred orders of magnitude below unity, let alone hundreds of thousands. You have to get into questions like "What's the probability that all air on Earth will spontaneously gather in one cubic centimeter over Nebraska, instantly causing all life to die?" to get more than a couple hundred orders of magnitude difference between anything.
(I compute about a 10^-10^50 probability of that happening, by the way, although I'm sure I'm off by a number of orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude. There's a reason entropy involves the natural log of the number of possible microstates: it gets you down to nice small numbers like a googol . ..)
I worked for a company that bought a laptop of every brand, so that when the higher-ups went into meetings with Dell, HP, Apple, etc. they had laptops that weren't made by a competitor. They have had problems like laptops not starting-up the first time due to incompatible software. That was a recent as 6 months ago. My mother-in-law bought a machine that has plenty of Vista-related problems (audio cutting out, USB devices not working, random crashes in explorer) on new mid-range hardware that came with Vista. But I have a neighbor who found it fixed lots of problems with gaming under XP.
On the other hand, my Linux server freezes up and needs to be reset (sometimes even reboot -f doesn't work) every few days due to a kernel bug, probably some unfortunate interaction with the hardware or BIOS. (I'm using no third-party drivers, only stock Ubuntu 8.04.) And hey, in the ext4 discussions that popped up recently, it emerged that some people had their Linux box freeze every time they quit their game of World of Goo. Just yesterday I had to kill X via SSH on my desktop because the GUI became totally unresponsive, and even the magic SysRq keys didn't seem to work. Computers screw up sometimes.
What's definitely true is that Windows 9x was drastically less stable any Unix. Nobody could use it and claim otherwise with a straight face. Blue screens were a regular experience for everyone, and even Bill Gates once blue-screened Windows during a freaking tech demo.
This is just not true of NT. I don't know if it's quite as stable as Linux, but reasonably stable, sure. Nowhere near the hell of 9x. I used XP for several years and now Linux for about two years, and in my experience, they're comparable in stability. The only unexpected reboots I had on a regular basis in XP was Windows Update forcing a reboot without permission. Of course there were some random screwups, as with Linux. And of course some configurations showed particularly nasty behavior, as with Linux (see above). But they weren't common.
Of course, you're right that none of us have statistics on any of this, but we all have a pretty decent amount of personal experience. Add together enough personal experience and you get something approaching reality, with any luck.
IIRC the actual standard has been reduced to 'could be useful to commit a crime'.
I know this is Slashdot, but can you do any better than "IIRC"? Any actual, you know, sources, instead of generic accusations probably grounded in suspicion of everything the government does? A computer "could be useful to commit a crime"; there is no possible way that's an official standard used for conviction in Britain or any other free country. There are going to be a lot more caveats. (Whether people are arrested illegitimately, without regard for whether they've actually broken the law, is a separate question from what the law itself says.)
How many Grandmas do you know that enjoy compiling drivers?
I've used Linux exclusively on my desktop for somewhere over a year and a half, and have administered a Linux server for over two years. I have never had to compile a driver. I've only even had to ever install one driver manually (NVIDIA's binary-only driver, sigh), which is more than I can say for Windows! And the overwhelming majority of times I compiled any software at all that I didn't write myself, it was to get access to development versions for better bug reporting, which your typical grandma doesn't need to do.
I'm not a Mac user myself, but for what it's worth, my own Grandma was able to buy herself a Mac and get it plugged in and running on her own. It's similarly easy with a Windows machine as soon as you figure out where all the plugs go, Windows setup is a breeze.
And is this any different from a Dell with preinstalled Ubuntu?
I'm not going to claim that Linux is quite on par with Windows yet for usability, let alone Mac. But it's not all that far behind at this point. Most users should have no problems at all, especially if they're running on compatible hardware like on Ubuntu Dells. I strongly suspect your average grandma wouldn't have much more trouble moving to Linux than moving to Mac.
(Although Linux at least does have 'SE Linux', AppArmor, Exec Shield, support for ASLR, etc, etc so its more a case that its just not on by default yet.
In which distros? RHEL and Fedora ship SELinux by default, and Ubuntu uses AppArmor. The enterprise distros, in particular, tend to have fairly good security AFAIK. I'd be interested to know how such distros compare with Windows in security.
Try this then - I have the cure for Cancer (all of it), but I will only take the bounty for each one. How much will you give me for breast cancer? Oh and BTW I set my own price.
Go ahead. No one is obliged to share their knowledge with other people for free if they spent a significant amount of resources obtaining it. Researchers need to eat just like anyone else; they need adequate compensation for their time, one way or another. If they don't get enough money to suit them, they're mostly just not going to be able to do the research: they'll have to find some other line of work that actually pays.
Slashdot Mirror
When I saw the summary title, I immediately thought of paypalsucks.com. However, this is different. Nobody would think that paypalsucks.com was run by Paypal (*), and it is a commentary on paypal, so it is not infringing trademark. Wikipediaart.org sounds like something run by Wikipedia.
Note that Wikipedia Review has never been asked to change their name, for exactly this reason. Nobody could read it for more than about thirty seconds without realizing it's not affiliated with Wikipedia.
What upgrades has ubuntu had to X that may have made it faster? Is it using Xorg 1.6 or something?
Yes, it is. Of course, all sorts of other things might contribute. Upgrades to the kernel, GNOME, major applications, the compiler, or even changes to compiler flags used could have helped.
I'd prefer evidence to a random user's sense of responsiveness :S
Are you aware of any good objective measure of interface "snappiness"? Unfortunately, I'm not. It seems like improving perceived lagginess would be at least as valuable as more easily measured things like boot time or memory usage.
Not *quite* true. Thanks to international treaties, we have to recognize foreign copyrights, though only on terms spelled out in our own laws.
We have to accord foreign works the same protections as domestic works -- but that precisely means we don't have to care about the foreign laws. If something is not copyrightable in the United States, but is in France, then it can be redistributed freely in the United States even if it was created in France by French authors. Same deal if you replace "United States" and "France" with any two other members of the various copyright treaties.
(I'm sure there are exceptions to the above, but that's certainly the general principle.)
And yes, they probably can get copyrights on the scans, even if the underlying material is public domain. Of course, it *should* only apply to the scan. So if you transcribe the words from whatever text yourself, you might be in the clear (depending on your own local laws).
This probably depends on jurisdiction. In the United States, it seems unlikely that a scan would be copyrightable. See Bridgeman v. Corel : since scanning a 2D work involves purely technical considerations, not creativity, it doesn't confer copyright.
Maybe 'unemployed' is the wrong word here. It is more that the monks lost control of what the general public was able to read. Suddenly is was no longer possible for the monks to censor religious or political incorrect ideas.
There was official censorship long after the introduction of the printing press. My copy of Don Quixote has a notice of approval by the censor, and its first editions were all printed.
Also, even before the printing press, state censors exercised direct control over all written works, not just implicitly through the works' being written by monks. Medieval Jewish texts certainly needed approval by the Christian censors, for instance, despite their being written by Jewish scribes.
but i always wonder how they do these geographically isolated site changes...
In this case, they don't. They key off what country you say you're from in your profile. If you sign up with a South Korean IP but say you're American, you're fine. If you sign up with an American IP and say you're South Korean, you won't be able to post.
Then use an unpopular open proxy. There is no way in hell that anyone can block all open proxies, there are just too many of them.
Portscan.
How free are people under Linux? I understand that it's about freedom of information, but when I think about the other possibilities that I might want to have in terms of User Interface manipulation (like the ad seems to suggest) I begin to wonder. Is there an easy (non-code, maybe even scripting) way to change the look of the UI?
On Linux, you're you're free to do whatever you want, guaranteed. What you are not guaranteed is that you're free to do whatever you want easily. That bit we're still working on.
It's amazing that before you can offer real, valid criticisms of Linux on Slashdot, you need to qualify it with "but I really love it!"
Fixed.
1). Company "X" submits to the Linux project some code changes that will allow Company "X" to hook its proprietary code into the Linux kernel. Completely legal according to the Linux GPL license.
Um, no. According to the interpretation of the FSF and most kernel developers I've heard from, and according to the intent of the license (it's clearer in v3), hooks, plugins, drivers, etc. must be released under the GPL. That's what distinguishes it from the LGPL: you can't combine it with your proprietary code.
You'd have to do it "at arm's length": from userspace, for instance. An OS where you refuse to modify your own kernel isn't going to be very successful. Good luck hooking a userspace program into your scheduler.
Although GFDL can be a free license, it can also be a non-free license if you choose to use it with some of the optional parts like invariant subsections.
This statement deliberately confuses what it means to be "free". Free doesn't mean "I can do anything I want." Free means "I have all the basic freedoms required to take advantage of this data, while at the same time it is guaranteed that others will have these freedoms as well."
No, the statement means "the GFDL is not necessarily a free license by the definitions of OSI, Debian, etc.". It's possible to put severe restrictions on derivative works: prohibiting end users from removing or modifying parts of the work, for instance. There are also dodgy restrictions on the use of things like DRM. Because of this, Debian has concluded that the GFDL is a non-free license.
What you dismiss as merely "annoying" astounds me. It is "broken" it does not support SQL in any reasonable way.
I never said otherwise. It still works just fine as a database engine. Possibly even better than PostgreSQL for some things, if the people running the top websites know what they're doing (I hope they do). Databases don't have to fully support SQL to be functional, or even support SQL at all.
You are working around a poorly designed query planner!!!
Sure we are. No arguments there. But apparently that's not enough of an obstacle to stop people from using it. Even people who have a lot of knowledge and experience. So you can complain that MySQL is a pain to use, and I'll agree with that. But that still doesn't answer my (quite narrow) question: do you, or any other PostgreSQL advocates, have any solid evidence that PostgreSQL will actually work for (e.g.) very large websites? Will it scale as well as MySQL on comparably priced hardware?
How about
select * from FOO where BAR in (select bar from froboz where name = xyz);
It won't use an index for BAR!! That is BROKEN. It is indefensible.
In MySQL 4.0, that doesn't even work. Subqueries aren't supported. You'd rewrite it as a join. Not a big deal:
SELECT foo.* FROM foo JOIN froboz ON (foo.bar = froboz.bar) WHERE froboz.name = froboz.xyz;
You'd prefer to use subqueries? Good for you, then use pgsql. That still doesn't answer my questions, it just restates the point (which I explicitly agree with) that MySQL is stupid and annoying.
Populous arguments are useless. If Windows is so bad why does it have a lock on the desktop market.
Because of application compatibility and user ignorance. The people who run these sites are not going to have big long-term problems with compatibility (because they write their own apps) and are likely to be very informed. You think Google decides what technologies to use primarily out of inertia instead of technical merit?
I happen to know the DBA for Wikipedia, Domas Mitzuas. He does know about PostgreSQL -- I think he's said he's had patches accepted by them -- and he doesn't believe it would scale to Wikipedia.
I have, many times, on Slashdot and at employers made very good cases as to why MySQL should not be used. Here's two:
create index myindex on FOO(BAR)
Which will lock the table until it is rewritten. So, when your site is under heavy load, you CAN'T fix it without killing it.
Wrong. You can do it, it's just a pain. Any large MySQL site uses replication with multiple slaves. Take a slave out of replication, add the index, add it back to rotation, let it catch up, repeat for all slaves. Promote a new master, take old master out of rotation, do the same. You now have the new index added with zero downtime.
A pain? Sure. A scalability problem? No. Write a script and it can be done with little effort. This is how Wikipedia does all schema changes. You can even add or remove columns this way -- MySQL uses statement-based replication, so an extra column won't affect replication. So you can add the new column with this procedure, populate it and tell the app to start using it, and if necessary remove any old columns once they're unused. I'm curious -- how would this be done in pgsql without downtime?
select * from FOO where BAR = myudf(xyz)
Even if there is an index on FOO(BAR) MySQL is too STUPID to use it, you get a full table scan.
I'm not clear here, is xyz a column or a constant? If it's a constant, just run myudf() in the application, not the database, and it will certainly be fine. That's mainly a stylistic difference. You usually don't use UDFs in MySQL. Again, not a prohibitive problem. You can't expect MySQL to work well if you use it like pgsql, any more than the contrary.
If it's a column, then I can't imagine any database getting it right without an index scan, if the only index you have is on BAR.
I have a ton of issues I can write about, but suffice to say, the index example is a show stopper for me.
It is not prohibitive. It's a pain. MySQL is a pain to use, that I'll happily agree with. It's stupid. You have to tell it what indexes to use half the time, especially in earlier versions, or else it will decide to do things like filesort a million rows instead of reading ten in order directly from the index (I've seen it happen . . .). A lot of things require some extra work. I'm told this is much less true of most other DBMSes.
But it does scale to very large OLTP workloads. Does PostgreSQL? Who uses it for that kind of workload? I can't say, I don't know enough about PostgreSQL. I'd be interested in hearing actual evidence of it handling very large website workloads. (I assume there are other large workloads it can handle fine; I don't know about those, I'm a web developer.)
Ahh yes I know there's a plug-in that'll give you the same features as IE8's InPrivate, but what I'd rather do is just block anything that matches some keywords or domains (like "pr0n" or "*.pr0n.com") from showing up in my awesome bar/history.
So they only have to look at your config to see what porn sites you visit, instead? I'll go with a "privacy" mode, thanks.
[rant]WRT other accounts, I've got plenty of computers that other people could (and do) use for general web browsing/what have you, but I've gotten sick of explaining to people who simply can't fathom how profiles personalize computers for their users that I don't want other people using mine and logging out of websites like myspace or facebook or igoogle and so on... It's like getting in your car and finding all the seats and mirrors moved around, but apparently I'm the only person I know who gets royally pissed off by that kind of stuff. [/rant]
So use a different profile? Recent versions of Ubuntu have a nifty "guest account" feature that lets you spawn a temporary account before handing the computer to someone else, so they have a fresh profile that it deletes when they log out.
Everything on my Ubuntu installation is 64 bit. Every single application. Since I'm using Chromium, I guess that I have V8 in 64 bit.
Wrong. If you're using Chromium, it's 32-bit. Try the following commands on /bin/rm and /usr/bin/chromium-browser (or whatever):
$ readelf -h /bin/rm | grep Machine /usr/bin/chromium-browser | grep Machine
Machine: Intel 80386
$ readelf -h
Machine: Intel 80386
If you're on a 64-bit install, the first will say "Advanced Micro Devices X86-64"; the second will remain "Intel 80386", indicating that Chromium is in fact 32-bit.
(By the way, Slashdot: long runs of spaces do not constitute "too many junk characters" if you're pasting some brief terminal output. WTF. Some spaces removed in the above output so Slashdot doesn't reject it.)
http://www.postgresql.org/
Just saying.
So let's restrict our domain a bit for a moment, say to websites. Google uses MySQL for some of their databases. Yahoo! uses MySQL for some of their databases. So do YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Baidu. That's six of the top ten websites. I couldn't quickly find info on blogger.com or MySpace (too many hits to blogs hosted there!), and presumably live.com and msn.com use MSSQL. That covers all of the Alexa top ten websites. In other words, every top ten website that I was able to find info on uses MySQL, unless it's Microsoft-owned (I didn't even bother checking those).
So tell me: if pgsql is so superior for all purposes, why aren't these places using it instead? Are any of the ten using it at all? What's the biggest website you can find that makes serious use of PostgreSQL? You can't claim that application compatibility or hosting availability are relevant to sites that write their own software and run their own server farms.
I've seen a lot of claims about how much better pgsql is, but somehow big websites aren't using it. Maybe it's more popular in non-web settings? I'm a web developer, so that's what I focus on.
Or maybe, just maybe, pgsql is actually worse than MySQL in some ways that a majority of the top websites have spotted. Just saying.
I've never understood something, which is how information in the public domain is compatible with the GFDL.
The GFDL is compatible with any strictly more lenient terms. If you create a derivative of a GFDL work, it prohibits you from imposing further restrictions on it, but doesn't require you to impose that "viral" aspect of parts of the work that weren't already subject to it. If I combine a GFDL work with a public-domain work and license the result under the GFDL, then anyone can use it under the terms of the GFDL, so that's fine. Nobody said parts of it can't be usable under more generous terms as well. The viral part only says you can't add extra restrictions to the derivative work.
This is covered in the GPL FAQ, although not very explicitly AFAICT.
I don't know if comparable is really accurate in my experience. Most of my coworkers use XP or Vista, I use Ubuntu. They may not have to reboot as frequently as they did in the old days, but I'm the only one seeing the "It has been 192 days since your last reboot" message when I reset my computer.
Is that for technical reasons or cultural ones? A lot of Linux users are in love with their uptime numbers, while most Windows users shut off their computer every day. This might be partly because Linux users are more likely to be running persistent server-like tasks. (I have an SSH server on my desktop, for instance, and some IRC chats I want the logs from.)
Anecdotally, I tend to average maybe a month uptime for my Linux desktop, and had similar figures for XP before I switched to Linux. (I visited evilupdate.com -- now apparently defunct -- to get rid of the Windows Update auto-reboot thing when necessary.) I think it's the users who reboot Windows often, not the system itself that's unstable. But YMMV, of course.
The probability of RAM just plain being defective---failing to operate correctly due to bugs in handling of certain low power states, having actual bad bits, having insufficient decoupling capacitance to work correctly in the presence of power supply rail noise, etc---is probably several hundred thousand orders of magnitude greater
Several hundred thousand orders of magnitude? Are you kidding?
Suppose that there is one cosmic ray particle that strikes the Earth per trillion years (orders of magnitude longer than the Earth will even exist). Suppose further that it strikes a completely random place distributed uniformly over the Earth's surface, and must hit a box one attometer square to flip the bit (orders of magnitude smaller than an atomic nucleus).
A square attometer is (10^-18)^2 = 10^-36 m^2. The Earth's surface is about 10^9 km^2 = 10^15 m^2. The rate of errors would then be about 10^-51 per trillion years, or 10^-63 per year.
This isn't even close to a hundred orders of magnitude below unity, let alone hundreds of thousands. You have to get into questions like "What's the probability that all air on Earth will spontaneously gather in one cubic centimeter over Nebraska, instantly causing all life to die?" to get more than a couple hundred orders of magnitude difference between anything.
(I compute about a 10^-10^50 probability of that happening, by the way, although I'm sure I'm off by a number of orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude. There's a reason entropy involves the natural log of the number of possible microstates: it gets you down to nice small numbers like a googol . . .)
I worked for a company that bought a laptop of every brand, so that when the higher-ups went into meetings with Dell, HP, Apple, etc. they had laptops that weren't made by a competitor. They have had problems like laptops not starting-up the first time due to incompatible software. That was a recent as 6 months ago. My mother-in-law bought a machine that has plenty of Vista-related problems (audio cutting out, USB devices not working, random crashes in explorer) on new mid-range hardware that came with Vista. But I have a neighbor who found it fixed lots of problems with gaming under XP.
On the other hand, my Linux server freezes up and needs to be reset (sometimes even reboot -f doesn't work) every few days due to a kernel bug, probably some unfortunate interaction with the hardware or BIOS. (I'm using no third-party drivers, only stock Ubuntu 8.04.) And hey, in the ext4 discussions that popped up recently, it emerged that some people had their Linux box freeze every time they quit their game of World of Goo. Just yesterday I had to kill X via SSH on my desktop because the GUI became totally unresponsive, and even the magic SysRq keys didn't seem to work. Computers screw up sometimes.
What's definitely true is that Windows 9x was drastically less stable any Unix. Nobody could use it and claim otherwise with a straight face. Blue screens were a regular experience for everyone, and even Bill Gates once blue-screened Windows during a freaking tech demo.
This is just not true of NT. I don't know if it's quite as stable as Linux, but reasonably stable, sure. Nowhere near the hell of 9x. I used XP for several years and now Linux for about two years, and in my experience, they're comparable in stability. The only unexpected reboots I had on a regular basis in XP was Windows Update forcing a reboot without permission. Of course there were some random screwups, as with Linux. And of course some configurations showed particularly nasty behavior, as with Linux (see above). But they weren't common.
Of course, you're right that none of us have statistics on any of this, but we all have a pretty decent amount of personal experience. Add together enough personal experience and you get something approaching reality, with any luck.
IIRC the actual standard has been reduced to 'could be useful to commit a crime'.
I know this is Slashdot, but can you do any better than "IIRC"? Any actual, you know, sources, instead of generic accusations probably grounded in suspicion of everything the government does? A computer "could be useful to commit a crime"; there is no possible way that's an official standard used for conviction in Britain or any other free country. There are going to be a lot more caveats. (Whether people are arrested illegitimately, without regard for whether they've actually broken the law, is a separate question from what the law itself says.)
You know we dont read this shit dont you troll?
A heck of a lot more people read it when it has a child that's +1 Insightful.
How many Grandmas do you know that enjoy compiling drivers?
I've used Linux exclusively on my desktop for somewhere over a year and a half, and have administered a Linux server for over two years. I have never had to compile a driver. I've only even had to ever install one driver manually (NVIDIA's binary-only driver, sigh), which is more than I can say for Windows! And the overwhelming majority of times I compiled any software at all that I didn't write myself, it was to get access to development versions for better bug reporting, which your typical grandma doesn't need to do.
I'm not a Mac user myself, but for what it's worth, my own Grandma was able to buy herself a Mac and get it plugged in and running on her own. It's similarly easy with a Windows machine as soon as you figure out where all the plugs go, Windows setup is a breeze.
And is this any different from a Dell with preinstalled Ubuntu?
I'm not going to claim that Linux is quite on par with Windows yet for usability, let alone Mac. But it's not all that far behind at this point. Most users should have no problems at all, especially if they're running on compatible hardware like on Ubuntu Dells. I strongly suspect your average grandma wouldn't have much more trouble moving to Linux than moving to Mac.
(Although Linux at least does have 'SE Linux', AppArmor, Exec Shield, support for ASLR, etc, etc so its more a case that its just not on by default yet.
In which distros? RHEL and Fedora ship SELinux by default, and Ubuntu uses AppArmor. The enterprise distros, in particular, tend to have fairly good security AFAIK. I'd be interested to know how such distros compare with Windows in security.
Try this then - I have the cure for Cancer (all of it), but I will only take the bounty for each one. How much will you give me for breast cancer? Oh and BTW I set my own price.
Go ahead. No one is obliged to share their knowledge with other people for free if they spent a significant amount of resources obtaining it. Researchers need to eat just like anyone else; they need adequate compensation for their time, one way or another. If they don't get enough money to suit them, they're mostly just not going to be able to do the research: they'll have to find some other line of work that actually pays.