When we sandwich a day care center between law enforcement offices in a big federal building it's done out of convenience. (e.g. the Oklahoma City Federal Building)
When foreigners do this to targets we plan on bombing it's because they're cowards. Or because they're religious radicals. Or because they're just plain evil.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of military targets that have civilian facilities JUST to conflate the issue of bombing them. Unfortunately, the full story is often hard to come by.
Check out their home page if you want the executive summary of what their compiler does. (Unless 'vectorizing' is a term you're familar with).
But like another poster said, what do they mean by porting to Linux? Their compiler generates code that runs on Linux, or their compiler runs on Linux generating code for something else? (Or both)
Any number of things could have happened that led the developer to ultimately violate the BSD license without being aware of it.
Ruling out the possibility is completely naive. Somehow I don't think stealing BSD code to include into Linux is all that foolproof of a devious plan -- leading me to believe that it's much more likely an accident. What possible motive could he have had?
Do you really think the developer said to himself "It is clearly worth risking my reputation by violating the easy-to-comply-with BSD license for my own personal gain of giving code away for free!"?
So yes, 10:1 that this was an accident. I'm not ruling out the possibility of malice, just that it's a lot less plausible.
Computer intrusion can be a serious matter, but not all computer intrusions are serious matters.
Paraphrasing another post: I hack an air traffic control system and use it to crash an airplane into a heavily populated area. Thousands die. I can think of a large number of laws on the books right now that would put this person away for life, without ever going into computer crime laws.
Tougher computer crime legislation will do absolutely nothing to prosecute the guilty and only make life difficult for people committing harmless offenses, or even people who are completely innocent.
If someone breaks into someone else's computer, you prosecute them on the actual crimes they've commited, not just the act of breaking in. A kid spray paints his tag on a wall and he gets what? A fine? Community service? A kid defaces a web site and he faces years in federal prison sharing cells with rapists and child molestors who will get out before he does. Give me a break.
CLEARLY THIS SHOWS THAT LINUX IS INFERIOR AND HAS ALWAYS LEECHED OFF OF FREEBSD.
..and..
RED HAT IS EVIL THEY'RE THE NEW MICROSOFT
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
I'd bet 10:1 that the developers did this unintentionally rather than thought "HEE HEE WE'LL RIP OFF OPEN SOURCE CODE AND PUT IT IN ANOTHER OPEN SOURCE PRODUCT AND NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!" *slobber*slobber*
..but passing this bill will turn us into terrorists.
I wonder how many other terrorist groups started out like this. It really puts things into perspective.
In retrospect, it's so obvious that we're becoming society's new scapegoat. Amazingly, some people have held that belief all along (Emmanuel Goldstein, since about 1985)
A close friend of mine spent 6 months in prison after plea-bargaining his case because he committed the destructive act of electronic graffitti.
Oh, and he was treated as an adult even though he was 16 at the time. If the case had gone to trial, he faced 30 years imprisonment and probably a $1 million fine.
He still has to pay a $20,000 fine. He's 18 now.
Kids will be reckless fuckheads. It's a given. There's no reason they need to be imprisoned for life just because of some stupid thing they did that the victims won't remember in 3 weeks anyway.
The laws they're being punished with today seem to have been written with terrorists in mind. Making them even more severe is grounds for every American to practice their 2nd Ammendment rights.
If you find yourself concerned about the quality of the software you're writing, you're in the wrong job.
You seem to be a programmer working a code monkey position. You've suddenly realized this when you say to yourself "the quality of my work is sucking and it pisses me off". Congratulations, you're not a scumbag.
The reality of this is unfortunate. If you complain, they're much more likely to realize that you're not the person they need either. They need someone who took a crash course in ASP and won't care about profit diminishing things like quality, or taking pride in your own work -- something that's much more important to you.
So, are you willing to prostitute yourself? That's exactly what it is. And no one will blame you for saying yes. The only person who you owe anything to is yourself.
School is what you make of it. Learning is entirely your job. You are the only person that can teach yourself. And so on. I hear this all of the time. Given the above, please tell me exactly why I should drop $80,000 on something I should be able to do entirely by myself?
In the end, whatever the justification is for 4 years of bullshit (which may well be fun bullshit), employers want to see a stupid piece of paper. Some people probably believe that this piece of paper proves that they're qualified for their job, but a more common view of the piece of paper is "No one will hire me if I don't have it, so I need to get it, and I need to put up with 16 years of crap to do it".
Granted, this is much more important for some fields like medicine and perhaps law. Unfortunately, as the original poster said, college is big business. You don't have to be a crackpot to believe colleges want to convince every last person on earth to seek "higher education".
As it stands, the only thing a diploma will prove to me that the person knows how to party (and good for them), and that they can memorize.
I'd actually be pretty disappointed to hear that someone spent all of that time and money and studied hard instead of attending some Roman style sex/drug orgies.
Skipping college makes things somewhat inconvenient, but it's nowhere near life ruining as everyone will tell you it is. I'm paid very well at my current job, run a computer consulting business on the side (which may become fulltime), and life is actually pretty good.
Another plus is that I don't have huge student loans to pay off.
This may not work for everyone, but I certainly don't regret my decision yet.
I'm suprised that so many people are not only unsupportive (which is sort of reasonable, if you don't care you don't care), but that they go as far as being outright hostile.
These folks are trying to push the state of the art. You may think they're misguided, you may think they suck, but that doesn't invalidate what they're doing or who they are. They have their dreams and seem like they may just realize them. Who the fuck are any of you to insult them? At least they're trying something.
If X is a better system, it will still be here in spite of Berlin. I don't see why anyone is so threatened. Berlin could be a smash success without ever displacing a single X installation.
Also, competition is good
I'll never understand how some people who scream about civil liberty, free speech, intellectual property issues, and the rejection of old-world dogma/family-values-crap can still be so closed minded about competing open source technologies that they consider a threat to established traditional technology.
You'd think that the general Slashdot reading population would be more supportive of change.
For $2,500/year, I can certify that your Linux box is 100% secure, and do whatever is necessary to make it secure and keep it secure.
If your box is ever hacked, I will dole out $10,000 on the spot.
There, beat that HP.:)
I'm only half serious, but would be glad to work something like this out if there were any takers.
The point of this exercise is to show that you don't need to buy Linux from a big slow vendor to get support. But most of you already knew that.
It's about time
on
IBM Wants Linux
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Now if only all of the other vendors realized that they were selling hardware instead of UNIX, they'd be happy to switch to Linux.
Actually, they probably all have some kind of "ditch-our-crappy-UNIX-for-Linux" roadmap. Some are much further away than others. But it'd be nice if it actually happened.
DirectX is an entire API for 2dD graphics, sound, input, and probably a dozen others (DirectNetwork! DirectSideScroller! etc).
Direct3D is what sucked so much. OpenGL would've been the obvious replacement. The industry even petitioned Microsoft to drop Direct3D in favor of OpenGL. They of course refused. They even had some marketing chick come out and try to say that OpenGL was inferior because of "procedural overhead" (as OpenGL is a procedural API).
So, Direct3D slowly gets better, everyone else suffers because of Microsoft's bullshit.
OpenGL plus OpenAL plus SDL on Linux is probably enough to make a great game.
"Well, see, this is how a Russian mother treats a child who might have ADD. She takes the skin on her their thigh, and then she twists it. Several times. And then the kids don't have ADD anymore. Simple and very effective."
Child abuse is a terrible thing, but a small controlled application of pain can be a great problem solver.
In places like Russia, they have practically zero cases of attention deficit disorder
Interesting. You use the fact that ADD doesn't exist outside of the US as proof of US culture turning kids into mindless zombies (Which I don't necessarily disagree with).
I use this fact as proof that ADD is bullshit.
Case study: My girlfriend was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed Ritalin because she had bad grades. As someone very close to her, I knew very well why she was getting bad grades. School was frankly, very boring. And not only was it boring, but she didn't care. The idea of doing menial drudge work instead of enjoying life wasn't very appealing.
Of course, you say "Well, all kids should love learning. If she finds it boring, she must have ADD!" Guess what? Public schools really are boring! Instead of say, making schools better, we're just prescribing more drugs.
I'm absolutely amazed by what I hear about kids learning in European public schools. If you ask most kids why they put up with such bullshit in the US, they say "Well, yeah, it's totally stupid. But I won't get into a good college if I don't go with it! And then where will I be?!"
We had a coworker come in from the UK (H1B Visa) who was a big South Park fan. We were discussing the episode where all of the kids started coming down with ADD. I mentioned that it was a big problem here. That shocked him. He thought that South Park had made ADD up. He had never heard of ADD until he visited the USA.
"For every kid who really needs Ritalin, you prescribe it to 500,000 kids who don't" -- Chef, South Park
As an aside, I'm suprised the pro-censorship movement is sticking to banning sex and smut and video games. Why don't they promise to eradicate NSYNC and Brittany Spears instead? If they pitched it the right way, I probably wouldn't even realize that I was supporting censorship.:)
Breaking it down, you're saying: "By my RDBMS having many OO features, good application design is unnecessary! Everything's done in the RDBMS!"
I'm positive that's not what you meant. But you phrased it assuming that if someone uses MySQL, they'll just write badly designed applications or simple weblogs.
Design is just as important with MySQL as it is any other RDBMS. And I fully appreciate MySQL for what it is.
So what's the moral here? Shitty applications and shitty developers are everywhere. That's not the fault of the RDBMS they use.
Don't put off learning Zope any longer folks. This is the real deal.
J2EE? ColdFusion?.Net? PHP?! If the thought of using and of those makes you gag, ZOPE IS PERFECT FOR YOU.
I heard about it for years until I sat down and actually looked at it. There's a book from the New Riders out right now ("The Zope Book") that explains it all. Ask management to buy it. Now.
The book isn't necessary. Zope is incredibly simple to use. But I found that the book held my hand just to the point where it got me excited about all of the things it could do, whereas I'd normally lose interest.
The learning curve is incredibly small if you're a web developer with some Python experience. This is no major feat. Learning Python is extremely easy.
Zope has a real open source community, a beautiful design, and is extremely fast to develop. We are definitely doing all of our new sites in Zope. You should consider it. Check it out.
Python is a much more reasonable language for web applications.
And there's no reason it has to gain massive market share to be relevant. If using Python with (say) Zope is our little secret, isn't that just as good?
Our next major site will definitely be Zope based. PHP? Never heard of it.
At all. If you use MySQL for anything more than a teenage girl's weblog, you're asking for trouble the first time your CPU spikes.
Better go inform Yahoo that all of their unscheduled downtime is a direct result from using technology that can only power a teenager's weblog.
We use MySQL because it's stable, fast, easy to use, and doesn't cost us a ridiculous amount of money to run. We've seen one of our systems scale up from 0 queries/sec to 1200 queries/sec on x86.
Statements like this poster's are so frustratingly inaccurate that I've written a paper on dispelling these stupid myths. People can and do and ENJOY getting work done with MySQL. Don't succumb to senseless prejudices.
No joke, I was downloading Loki Demos about 2 hours ago and I said to myself "Hmm, I wonder how Loki is doing.." and in the middle of the download, throughput drops by a factor of 10.
I check slashdot, and right at the top is "LOKI FILES FOR CHAPTER 11". SUCK.
That really is a shame. Loki has a pretty good business model. If there's a company that doesn't deserve to go out of business, it's them.
NOTE: This does NOT MEAN Linux gaming is dead or unprofitable. In these situations, game distributors made money because (IIRC), Loki ported the game for free and simply collected the profits on sales, giving a cut to the publisher/developer.
Before Loki, individuals would basically approach companies (or later be sought out by companies) and asked to do the ports. Greg Alexander, for example, used to leaked quake source to do an svgalib port. It was sent to Carmack, who not only didn't call the FBI, but used it as the base for the official port. That fellow as later contacted by Raven to port Heretic 2, and he eventually turned down the offer to port Soldier of Fortune.
I don't see Linux dying. I think Loki was just unlucky. We'll see.
Whenever Microsoft was asked to comment on the software patents they hold, their response was
noble: "We're only patenting these algorithms so some jackass doesn't come along and patent something trivial, drawing us into a stupid legal battle -- we don't believe that these patents are valid any more than you do." (paraphrased).
Being Microsoft means that lots of people are itching to sue you over anything. Their excuse for patenting algorithms is believable, but are they willing to stick by their beliefs when their monopoly is at stake?
It'd be a damn shame if a company as large and INNOVATIVE and fundamental to the computer industry as Microsoft felt that they could no longer compete with raw talent and great software alone.
I'm stating this so that it's appropriate for people who are less involved with the DMCA backlash and want to know what's going on.
There's a particular provision in the DMCA that bans circumvention devices. A circumvention device is effectively declared to be something that breaks encryption. Distributing such devices is illegal. Hence, court battle.
The DMCA is supposed to update copyright law for the digital age, in the efforts to continue to protect copyright holders.
Not a single one of us disagrees with that. Copyright law is good! We support copyright law and we support the rights of the person who created the work to be allowed to do what they want.
All instances where people have been sued for violating the DMCA, in not one case was anyone's copyright being harmed. It's interesting to note that the copyright holders are not the ones suing, despite claiming that they are acting on copyright holders behalf.
Take the MPAA's DVD lobby, whose members include most major DVD technology vendors. They created the Content Scrambling System to "protect" DVDs. There is no case on record where a copyright holder has used the DMCA to protect their work distributed on DVD from being stolen. What HAS been happening is that the MPAA has sued individuals who want to make independent DVD players. They are using the DMCA to make it impossible to create a competing player without a license from the member group. The damning evidence is that the CSS uses an extremely trivial algorithm (ie, laughable, pathetic, would never be approved by even inexperienced cryptographers), rather than any one of the proven, secure, public domain, military grade algorithms out there to protect their content!
The only thing this does is stifle competition.
If a startup came up with a DVD player that cost 1/10th the price of current market DVD players, do you think the DVD group would give them a license that would put all of their member groups out of business? Of course they wouldn't. That would be very bad business. The innovator cannot release the new product. The consumer loses.
Adobe moved to have Dmitry jailed not because he violated anyones copyright, but because he figured out how Adobe's cryptosystem works. This means that competitors could in theory develop technology that can read eBooks, cutting Adobe entirely out of their exclusive market.
Adobe did not develop anything original-- their content protection system was laughable, but they had the power to act as if they had a patent on it, granted by the DMCA. Adobe naturally moved quickly to jail what would have been a real competitor.
RealNetworks, Inc. just won a case against Streambox, Inc. using the DMCA. Streambox, Inc. sought to compete against RealNetworks by providing an alternative player capable of using RealNetwork's technology. RealNetworks countered this by "encrypting" their content streams, which meant that if StreamBox was able to read it, they would be using a circumvention device.
What "encryption" did they use? They set a single bit in the header that signified a stream was encrypted! The rest of the packet remained cleartext, but the encrypted bit was set. This is analogous to sending a letter to someone by postal mail and checking a box in the upper right corner of the envelope that says "[ ] Encrypted!", and suing anyone who saw the contents of the letter, or more amusingly, suing people who make letter openers.
In all of these cases, the DMCA was used by companies as an alternative to patenting their technologies. And why not? With the DMCA, you don't need to have an original idea. You don't have to even use a good idea. You can use the DMCA for criminal prosecution! You don't even need to sue!
The DMCA is not protecting the copyright holder, piracy continues and will always continue, especially outside of areas where the United States laws do not apply (like China, and Russia, where you can buy pirated software/music on store shelves). Every one of them is violating age old copyright law, and none of them are suffering. The DMCA will do nothing to stop this.
The DMCA is stifling innovation, hurting competition, and jailing innocent people. Researchers, scientists, technology lovers, programmers, etc are being threatened for providing a public service. The DMCA needs to be fixed.
Badass compression algorithm?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 5
Soo.. if pi contained every possible message (ie, was truly random), couldn't you in theory find a specific position where pi prints out say, the Max Payne ISO, and distribute that position to friends?
Then, said friends, start calculating pi from that offset (wasn't there a story on slashdot about calculating any N digit of pi without having to calculate the first N-1 digits). Voila, kickass compression.
Of course, the small snags here are:
Searching pi until you find that right position that matches your Max Payne ISO, which could be located on the far end of infinity.
Distributing what could be a multi-trillion digit number to your friends.
But once you get over these boring details, pi-based-compression can make for some very neat applications
Slashdot Mirror
When we sandwich a day care center between law enforcement offices in a big federal building it's done out of convenience. (e.g. the Oklahoma City Federal Building)
When foreigners do this to targets we plan on bombing it's because they're cowards. Or because they're religious radicals. Or because they're just plain evil.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of military targets that have civilian facilities JUST to conflate the issue of bombing them. Unfortunately, the full story is often hard to come by.
Check out their home page if you want the executive summary of what their compiler does. (Unless 'vectorizing' is a term you're familar with).
But like another poster said, what do they mean by porting to Linux? Their compiler generates code that runs on Linux, or their compiler runs on Linux generating code for something else? (Or both)
I just said that we don't know the full story.
Any number of things could have happened that led the developer to ultimately violate the BSD license without being aware of it.
Ruling out the possibility is completely naive. Somehow I don't think stealing BSD code to include into Linux is all that foolproof of a devious plan -- leading me to believe that it's much more likely an accident. What possible motive could he have had?
Do you really think the developer said to himself "It is clearly worth risking my reputation by violating the easy-to-comply-with BSD license for my own personal gain of giving code away for free!"?
So yes, 10:1 that this was an accident. I'm not ruling out the possibility of malice, just that it's a lot less plausible.
Computer intrusion can be a serious matter, but not all computer intrusions are serious matters.
Paraphrasing another post: I hack an air traffic control system and use it to crash an airplane into a heavily populated area. Thousands die. I can think of a large number of laws on the books right now that would put this person away for life, without ever going into computer crime laws.
Tougher computer crime legislation will do absolutely nothing to prosecute the guilty and only make life difficult for people committing harmless offenses, or even people who are completely innocent.
If someone breaks into someone else's computer, you prosecute them on the actual crimes they've commited, not just the act of breaking in. A kid spray paints his tag on a wall and he gets what? A fine? Community service? A kid defaces a web site and he faces years in federal prison sharing cells with rapists and child molestors who will get out before he does. Give me a break.
Let's anticipate some comments:
CLEARLY THIS SHOWS THAT LINUX IS INFERIOR AND HAS ALWAYS LEECHED OFF OF FREEBSD.
..and..
RED HAT IS EVIL THEY'RE THE NEW MICROSOFT
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
I'd bet 10:1 that the developers did this unintentionally rather than thought "HEE HEE WE'LL RIP OFF OPEN SOURCE CODE AND PUT IT IN ANOTHER OPEN SOURCE PRODUCT AND NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW!" *slobber*slobber*
Wait until you hear both stories
..but passing this bill will turn us into terrorists.
I wonder how many other terrorist groups started out like this. It really puts things into perspective.
In retrospect, it's so obvious that we're becoming society's new scapegoat. Amazingly, some people have held that belief all along (Emmanuel Goldstein, since about 1985)
A close friend of mine spent 6 months in prison after plea-bargaining his case because he committed the destructive act of electronic graffitti.
Oh, and he was treated as an adult even though he was 16 at the time. If the case had gone to trial, he faced 30 years imprisonment and probably a $1 million fine.
He still has to pay a $20,000 fine. He's 18 now.
Kids will be reckless fuckheads. It's a given. There's no reason they need to be imprisoned for life just because of some stupid thing they did that the victims won't remember in 3 weeks anyway.
The laws they're being punished with today seem to have been written with terrorists in mind. Making them even more severe is grounds for every American to practice their 2nd Ammendment rights.
..why Microsoft's Acquisitions department is making technical decisions about the future of Operating Systems?
If you find yourself concerned about the quality of the software you're writing, you're in the wrong job.
You seem to be a programmer working a code monkey position. You've suddenly realized this when you say to yourself "the quality of my work is sucking and it pisses me off". Congratulations, you're not a scumbag.
The reality of this is unfortunate. If you complain, they're much more likely to realize that you're not the person they need either. They need someone who took a crash course in ASP and won't care about profit diminishing things like quality, or taking pride in your own work -- something that's much more important to you.
So, are you willing to prostitute yourself? That's exactly what it is. And no one will blame you for saying yes. The only person who you owe anything to is yourself.
Choose wisely.
School is what you make of it. Learning is entirely your job. You are the only person that can teach yourself. And so on. I hear this all of the time. Given the above, please tell me exactly why I should drop $80,000 on something I should be able to do entirely by myself?
In the end, whatever the justification is for 4 years of bullshit (which may well be fun bullshit), employers want to see a stupid piece of paper. Some people probably believe that this piece of paper proves that they're qualified for their job, but a more common view of the piece of paper is "No one will hire me if I don't have it, so I need to get it, and I need to put up with 16 years of crap to do it".
Granted, this is much more important for some fields like medicine and perhaps law. Unfortunately, as the original poster said, college is big business. You don't have to be a crackpot to believe colleges want to convince every last person on earth to seek "higher education".
As it stands, the only thing a diploma will prove to me that the person knows how to party (and good for them), and that they can memorize. I'd actually be pretty disappointed to hear that someone spent all of that time and money and studied hard instead of attending some Roman style sex/drug orgies.
Skipping college makes things somewhat inconvenient, but it's nowhere near life ruining as everyone will tell you it is. I'm paid very well at my current job, run a computer consulting business on the side (which may become fulltime), and life is actually pretty good.
Another plus is that I don't have huge student loans to pay off.
This may not work for everyone, but I certainly don't regret my decision yet.
Their research department actually exists?! I thought it was just an alias for their acquisitions department.
I'm suprised that so many people are not only unsupportive (which is sort of reasonable, if you don't care you don't care), but that they go as far as being outright hostile.
These folks are trying to push the state of the art. You may think they're misguided, you may think they suck, but that doesn't invalidate what they're doing or who they are. They have their dreams and seem like they may just realize them. Who the fuck are any of you to insult them? At least they're trying something.
If X is a better system, it will still be here in spite of Berlin. I don't see why anyone is so threatened. Berlin could be a smash success without ever displacing a single X installation.
Also, competition is good
I'll never understand how some people who scream about civil liberty, free speech, intellectual property issues, and the rejection of old-world dogma/family-values-crap can still be so closed minded about competing open source technologies that they consider a threat to established traditional technology.
You'd think that the general Slashdot reading population would be more supportive of change.
Check this out..
For $2,500/year, I can certify that your Linux box is 100% secure, and do whatever is necessary to make it secure and keep it secure.
If your box is ever hacked, I will dole out $10,000 on the spot.
There, beat that HP. :)
I'm only half serious, but would be glad to work something like this out if there were any takers.
The point of this exercise is to show that you don't need to buy Linux from a big slow vendor to get support. But most of you already knew that.
Now if only all of the other vendors realized that they were selling hardware instead of UNIX, they'd be happy to switch to Linux.
Actually, they probably all have some kind of "ditch-our-crappy-UNIX-for-Linux" roadmap. Some are much further away than others. But it'd be nice if it actually happened.
It should be OpenGL vs. Direct3D
DirectX is an entire API for 2dD graphics, sound, input, and probably a dozen others (DirectNetwork! DirectSideScroller! etc).
Direct3D is what sucked so much. OpenGL would've been the obvious replacement. The industry even petitioned Microsoft to drop Direct3D in favor of OpenGL. They of course refused. They even had some marketing chick come out and try to say that OpenGL was inferior because of "procedural overhead" (as OpenGL is a procedural API).
So, Direct3D slowly gets better, everyone else suffers because of Microsoft's bullshit.
OpenGL plus OpenAL plus SDL on Linux is probably enough to make a great game.
My girlfriend's point of view:
"Well, see, this is how a Russian mother treats a child who might have ADD. She takes the skin on her their thigh, and then she twists it. Several times. And then the kids don't have ADD anymore. Simple and very effective."
Child abuse is a terrible thing, but a small controlled application of pain can be a great problem solver.
In places like Russia, they have practically zero cases of attention deficit disorder
Interesting. You use the fact that ADD doesn't exist outside of the US as proof of US culture turning kids into mindless zombies (Which I don't necessarily disagree with).
I use this fact as proof that ADD is bullshit.
Case study: My girlfriend was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed Ritalin because she had bad grades. As someone very close to her, I knew very well why she was getting bad grades. School was frankly, very boring. And not only was it boring, but she didn't care. The idea of doing menial drudge work instead of enjoying life wasn't very appealing.
Of course, you say "Well, all kids should love learning. If she finds it boring, she must have ADD!" Guess what? Public schools really are boring! Instead of say, making schools better, we're just prescribing more drugs.
I'm absolutely amazed by what I hear about kids learning in European public schools. If you ask most kids why they put up with such bullshit in the US, they say "Well, yeah, it's totally stupid. But I won't get into a good college if I don't go with it! And then where will I be?!"
We had a coworker come in from the UK (H1B Visa) who was a big South Park fan. We were discussing the episode where all of the kids started coming down with ADD. I mentioned that it was a big problem here. That shocked him. He thought that South Park had made ADD up. He had never heard of ADD until he visited the USA.
"For every kid who really needs Ritalin, you prescribe it to 500,000 kids who don't" -- Chef, South Park
As an aside, I'm suprised the pro-censorship movement is sticking to banning sex and smut and video games. Why don't they promise to eradicate NSYNC and Brittany Spears instead? If they pitched it the right way, I probably wouldn't even realize that I was supporting censorship. :)
I'm afraid your argument isn't convincing.
Breaking it down, you're saying: "By my RDBMS having many OO features, good application design is unnecessary! Everything's done in the RDBMS!"
I'm positive that's not what you meant. But you phrased it assuming that if someone uses MySQL, they'll just write badly designed applications or simple weblogs.
Design is just as important with MySQL as it is any other RDBMS. And I fully appreciate MySQL for what it is.
So what's the moral here? Shitty applications and shitty developers are everywhere. That's not the fault of the RDBMS they use.
Don't put off learning Zope any longer folks. This is the real deal.
J2EE? ColdFusion? .Net? PHP?! If the thought of using and of those makes you gag, ZOPE IS PERFECT FOR YOU.
I heard about it for years until I sat down and actually looked at it. There's a book from the New Riders out right now ("The Zope Book") that explains it all. Ask management to buy it. Now.
The book isn't necessary. Zope is incredibly simple to use. But I found that the book held my hand just to the point where it got me excited about all of the things it could do, whereas I'd normally lose interest.
The learning curve is incredibly small if you're a web developer with some Python experience. This is no major feat. Learning Python is extremely easy.
Zope has a real open source community, a beautiful design, and is extremely fast to develop. We are definitely doing all of our new sites in Zope. You should consider it. Check it out.
Python is a much more reasonable language for web applications.
And there's no reason it has to gain massive market share to be relevant. If using Python with (say) Zope is our little secret, isn't that just as good?
Our next major site will definitely be Zope based. PHP? Never heard of it.
At all. If you use MySQL for anything more than a teenage girl's weblog, you're asking for trouble the first time your CPU spikes.
Better go inform Yahoo that all of their unscheduled downtime is a direct result from using technology that can only power a teenager's weblog.
We use MySQL because it's stable, fast, easy to use, and doesn't cost us a ridiculous amount of money to run. We've seen one of our systems scale up from 0 queries/sec to 1200 queries/sec on x86.
Statements like this poster's are so frustratingly inaccurate that I've written a paper on dispelling these stupid myths. People can and do and ENJOY getting work done with MySQL. Don't succumb to senseless prejudices.
MySQL Myths Debunked
No joke, I was downloading Loki Demos about 2 hours ago and I said to myself "Hmm, I wonder how Loki is doing.." and in the middle of the download, throughput drops by a factor of 10.
I check slashdot, and right at the top is "LOKI FILES FOR CHAPTER 11". SUCK.
That really is a shame. Loki has a pretty good business model. If there's a company that doesn't deserve to go out of business, it's them.
NOTE: This does NOT MEAN Linux gaming is dead or unprofitable. In these situations, game distributors made money because (IIRC), Loki ported the game for free and simply collected the profits on sales, giving a cut to the publisher/developer.
Before Loki, individuals would basically approach companies (or later be sought out by companies) and asked to do the ports. Greg Alexander, for example, used to leaked quake source to do an svgalib port. It was sent to Carmack, who not only didn't call the FBI, but used it as the base for the official port. That fellow as later contacted by Raven to port Heretic 2, and he eventually turned down the offer to port Soldier of Fortune.
I don't see Linux dying. I think Loki was just unlucky. We'll see.
Whenever Microsoft was asked to comment on the software patents they hold, their response was noble: "We're only patenting these algorithms so some jackass doesn't come along and patent something trivial, drawing us into a stupid legal battle -- we don't believe that these patents are valid any more than you do." (paraphrased).
Being Microsoft means that lots of people are itching to sue you over anything. Their excuse for patenting algorithms is believable, but are they willing to stick by their beliefs when their monopoly is at stake?
It'd be a damn shame if a company as large and INNOVATIVE and fundamental to the computer industry as Microsoft felt that they could no longer compete with raw talent and great software alone.
I'm stating this so that it's appropriate for people who are less involved with the DMCA backlash and want to know what's going on.
There's a particular provision in the DMCA that bans circumvention devices. A circumvention device is effectively declared to be something that breaks encryption. Distributing such devices is illegal. Hence, court battle.
The DMCA is supposed to update copyright law for the digital age, in the efforts to continue to protect copyright holders.
Not a single one of us disagrees with that. Copyright law is good! We support copyright law and we support the rights of the person who created the work to be allowed to do what they want.
All instances where people have been sued for violating the DMCA, in not one case was anyone's copyright being harmed. It's interesting to note that the copyright holders are not the ones suing, despite claiming that they are acting on copyright holders behalf.
Take the MPAA's DVD lobby, whose members include most major DVD technology vendors. They created the Content Scrambling System to "protect" DVDs. There is no case on record where a copyright holder has used the DMCA to protect their work distributed on DVD from being stolen. What HAS been happening is that the MPAA has sued individuals who want to make independent DVD players. They are using the DMCA to make it impossible to create a competing player without a license from the member group. The damning evidence is that the CSS uses an extremely trivial algorithm (ie, laughable, pathetic, would never be approved by even inexperienced cryptographers), rather than any one of the proven, secure, public domain, military grade algorithms out there to protect their content!
The only thing this does is stifle competition. If a startup came up with a DVD player that cost 1/10th the price of current market DVD players, do you think the DVD group would give them a license that would put all of their member groups out of business? Of course they wouldn't. That would be very bad business. The innovator cannot release the new product. The consumer loses.
Adobe moved to have Dmitry jailed not because he violated anyones copyright, but because he figured out how Adobe's cryptosystem works. This means that competitors could in theory develop technology that can read eBooks, cutting Adobe entirely out of their exclusive market.
Adobe did not develop anything original-- their content protection system was laughable, but they had the power to act as if they had a patent on it, granted by the DMCA. Adobe naturally moved quickly to jail what would have been a real competitor.
RealNetworks, Inc. just won a case against Streambox, Inc. using the DMCA. Streambox, Inc. sought to compete against RealNetworks by providing an alternative player capable of using RealNetwork's technology. RealNetworks countered this by "encrypting" their content streams, which meant that if StreamBox was able to read it, they would be using a circumvention device.
What "encryption" did they use? They set a single bit in the header that signified a stream was encrypted! The rest of the packet remained cleartext, but the encrypted bit was set. This is analogous to sending a letter to someone by postal mail and checking a box in the upper right corner of the envelope that says "[ ] Encrypted!", and suing anyone who saw the contents of the letter, or more amusingly, suing people who make letter openers.
In all of these cases, the DMCA was used by companies as an alternative to patenting their technologies. And why not? With the DMCA, you don't need to have an original idea. You don't have to even use a good idea. You can use the DMCA for criminal prosecution! You don't even need to sue!
The DMCA is not protecting the copyright holder, piracy continues and will always continue, especially outside of areas where the United States laws do not apply (like China, and Russia, where you can buy pirated software/music on store shelves). Every one of them is violating age old copyright law, and none of them are suffering. The DMCA will do nothing to stop this.
The DMCA is stifling innovation, hurting competition, and jailing innocent people. Researchers, scientists, technology lovers, programmers, etc are being threatened for providing a public service. The DMCA needs to be fixed.
Soo.. if pi contained every possible message (ie, was truly random), couldn't you in theory find a specific position where pi prints out say, the Max Payne ISO, and distribute that position to friends?
Then, said friends, start calculating pi from that offset (wasn't there a story on slashdot about calculating any N digit of pi without having to calculate the first N-1 digits). Voila, kickass compression.
Of course, the small snags here are:
But once you get over these boring details, pi-based-compression can make for some very neat applications