...this project is less than a week old and consists of some theories bandied about by a developer and he's friend (who is providing the crypto knowledge).
Wouldn't have been better to post this when there was actually news to report? Simply because someone has an idea and backs it up with a webpage does not a headline make.
When I read posts like yours I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at how religously people can take the decisions of other people.
What Warrick Allison states is a very valid opinion which myself and many others have had. I've often asked myself, "if I was a developer working for a company whose livelihood depended on being able to sell support for the software I wrote wouldn't I be less motivated to write easy-to-use and bug free code as someone who worked for a company whose lifeline wasn't based on selling support contracts?"
I've never been in that situation but from the attitudes of most OSS developers today usability isn't a key word they are interested in. Frankly I feel that the whole selling support concept only adds the current esoteric nature and general poor documentation of Open Source projects. Second question "Why spend time developing comprehensive training manuals, online help and documenting APIs if you are trying to get users to buy a support contract?". Laziness is a well documented trait of good programmers and bad ones as well, so why would one not expect that programmers would take the easy way out especially when it would be beneficial for their employer?
PS: Exactly what do we have to lose if OSS doesn't make the leap to big business? I'm in it cuz I like it not for the IPO money, aren't you? I hope you realize that VA Linux is a hardware company that sells relatively overpriced servers which has nothing to so with making money on supporting OSS. VA Linux subsidizes its OSS forays by marking up their server prices, which to me seems like an alternate business model to ESRs.
PPS: This isn't a troll, if you disagree, post a response instead of moderating this down and making this place seem more like a mad house for raving zealots instead of a forum for rational discussion.
The difference isn't just the SQL support but more the transaction handling abilities of the DB specifically the ACID properties of the database. The ACIDity of a database is what makes it a RDBMS. Acid properties are
Atomicity: This means that transactions are either fully completed or never begun at all. Any updates that a transaction might make on a system are completed in its entirety. If any error ccurs during the transaction keeping it from completing all its steps then the DB is rolled back to its previous state before the transaction began. E.g. Let's say a transaction consists of money being removed from a checking account and stored in a savings account. If there is an error after the money is removed from the checking account but not stored in the savings account then the transaction can be rolled back to when the money was still in the checking account.
Consistency: This means that the DB is always in a valid state after a transaction. Thus if an error occurs during a transaction, the DB can be rolled back to the last valid state. E.g. From the above example the total amount of money in both accounts is constant and is equal to the sum of both amounts. If an error occurs while transferring money from the checking account to the savings account then the total of both accounts is not consistent with the amounts actually in the accounts. This inconsistency is handled by rolling back the DB to the last consistent state.
Isolation: Each transaction appears to the only one being carried out by the system at that time. If there are two transactions both performing the same function and both running at the same time they will be invisible to each other. This ensures that the system is consistent because if transactions do not run in isolation the they may access data from the DB that is inconsistent due to the fact that some other transaction is in the middle of performing its tasks. E.g. if my paycheck is being deposited in my checking account at the same time as when I am viewing an account summary I will not be able to see the changes being made to my account until the deposit transaction is completed. This stops unsavory things like seeing the total amount in the account remaining constant while the recent deposits field may already contain the deposit.
Durability: Once changes have een made to the DB they are permanent. There are safeguards that will prevent loss of information even in the case of system failure. By logging the steps that each transaction takes the state of the system can be recreated even if the hardware has failed.
Here's an article that explains why mySQL is not a real RDBMS since it's support for transactions are lacking. PostrgreSQL on the other hand supports transactions. For instance, people who use a DB that supports transactions don't have to lock the tables themselves when accessing the DB from their code instead stuff like that is handled by the DB.
PS: Also not all of SQL is supported by mySQL (e.g. Foreign Keys for specifying integrity constraints).
It is interesting that I keep bumping into people who feel that simply because they learned how to program (which anyone can learn on their own) outside of school, then school is somehow useless.
Computer science programs vary widely across the board. At my girlfriend's college half of the junior and senior curriculum is stuff like Intro to C++ and Creating Applications in Visual Basic. While at my school the sophomore classes are Compilers & Translators (last semester we implemented the Unix utility "make" and wrote a Lisp to C translator and they were both due the same week) and Systems & Networks (create your own RPC program and protocol). Also before graduation each student has to work on a senior project which involves shipping a live product to a company. Now with this education I am currently pulling down a decent amount while interning which by current reckoning is as much as most people in industry are making now after a few years of real world experience.
Most of the actual programming syntax I have learned has been on my own time (I know C, C++, Java, Perl, Javascript, VBScript, SmallTalk and VisualBasic). There are various aspects of software engineering and database design I would not have learned without school, either because I would never have come across them while simply hacking or because they would have been too much work and not enough fun to learn on my own. Things like how and why a database should be normalized, how to design and implement grammars, using lex and yacc, how to create a requirements document from informal specifications and then converting the requirements document to a design document with data models and UML diagrams, compiler design and implementation details, various methods of dynamic memory allocation, proper object oriented design and implementation of neural networks. All these things I have learned in school and I still have over a year to go. Before I graduate I plan to take classes in AI (I'm interested in creating Internet Agents), advanced software engineering and next generation database technology (such as OO databases). The things I will learn in these classes are things that I would probably never have come across if I was simply hacking at code and buying O'reilly books to learn what I needed about CS.
Some kids at my school like reminding the freshman students who make comments like yours that our graduates don't use tools but instead make the tools that others use. The language designers, compiler writers and internet architects of this world are college educated. If all you want to do is go out and hack code a college degree is perhaps overkill (then again it widens your marketability - I have been offered positions working on compilers for strongARM chips using C/assembly as well as doing server side integration using Java, XML, Perl, & SQL) but realize this, what seperates usually seperates a Computer Scientist from Code Monkey is usually a college degree.
A little while ago when confronted with articles like this I always felt that most of these stories were situations where the employees were at fault but simply were refusing to claim responsibility. But working in a corporate environment in the past month has made me realize that some of my opinions were that of a naive college student. To put it simply, there are many times when one has to make personal calls, write personal emails or do personal web browsing especially since most of use spend the majority of the daylight hours at work.
Already in the short span of one month that I have been working I've made long distance calls to my girlfriend to confirm her flight, I've called credit agencies about a misunderstanding in my credit report, emailed friends about a software project for school we're working on, made long distance calls to pay bills for my old apartment (I relocated for this job) and more. From what I read in the C|Net article, and a few others in Fortune as well as other places, I put my job in jeopardy by performing any of the above actions. If I had a choice I would still do them again because there's no other time for me to do these things. I'm at work eight to nine hours a day, before I leave the house most offices and agencies are not yet open and by the time I get home they are closed.
My purpose in posting this is to let the people who feel that you deserve to be stung for doing personal things at work realize that there are many situations where you have no choice but to do these things from work. Of course, the alternative is to come into work late or leave work simply to browse the web, make a phonecall or shoot off an email.
PS: I considered posting this as an AC, but decided that if I actually do get nailed for these things, I'd have a suit on my hands since I'm posting this from home.
PPS: All the things I did on the phone I also did online (i.e. surfing credit agency sites, emailing my GF, etc).
Here is a Time magazine article from a year ago about how most of the world (except the U.S.) use cell phones for buying a soda from vending machines, running a car wash, zapping a digital picture to a friend and video conferencing. From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.
From my experience working at a Microsoft Cerified Solutions Provider last summer as well as the fact that I have a few friends working at MSFT plus my former constant perusal of the talkback at ZDNet, I can say unequivocably that there is no subculture of Microsoft fanatics past, present or future.
Heck, even my friends that work there aren't Do Or Die about it, unlike most Slashdotters are with Linux or Open Source. Conversations with them have lead me to believe that this entire MSFT vs. Open Source war is generally one-sided with Slashdotters making mountains out of molehills at every turn.
In my opinion, the Freedom To Innovate Network isn't targetted at the average hacker or software developer. It's a means to gather popular user support from people like my mom's friends who feel that they'll have to stop using PCs once MSFT is broken up since Windows is all they know and (in their opinion) without MSFT they'd still view computers with fear and awe. This demographic is a lot more powerful vote-wise (there are more of them than hackers) and easier to persuade than the developer audience. After all, most of them already feel that MSFT is being targetted not for any wrongdoings but simply for being too successful.
The source code for the troll is probably Slashtroll which I noticed being spammed to some threads today. Your idea has merit, especially if the questions are generated newly each day (preferrably each hour) so that the script doesn't build a database of answers.
Why is it that people always feel that everything has to fit according to statistics or all is not well. Gender imbalance reminds me a lot of the so called Digital Divide...lots of liberal middle class whites who feel that the poor underclass must be forced to be as technically inclined as they are. Frankly, I'm black and I have lived amongst and known black people all my life, and being computer savvy is not high on the average black person's to-do list. No amount of government intervention is going to turn the average poor black person into some cybersurfing, net junkie simply to balance some statistic chart.
Back to the topic at hand, why is it that people feel the need to try to push girls into technical careers? From my experience most females including the ones that are good at Math (both my last two girlfriends got A's in Calculus II but one's an English major while the other is studying criminal justice) do not like technical fields. Frankly the crap about gender imbalance to access computers is a load of bull, this isn't the fifties when women couldn't eat without a man supporting them...any woman worth her salt can get a job and buy a PC or go to the library. The last time I checked the neither CompUSA nor BestBuy was discriminating according to sex. Also, the article describes negative social pressure for women to get into technology, but fails to mention that until the Internet boom of a few short years ago there was negative social pressure for men to get into technology as well. I remember being teased and taunted for being a computer geek while in school and even when I grew older I was still looked upon by others with disdain, off course being uninterested in sports probably didn't help this.
PS: I am very tired of self righteous people who want to mold the world in their own image. Women don't like technical fields, so what? Men don't flock towards positions in elder care, nursing or child care yet I don't see articles bemoaning this.
I submitted this article three days ago but it was refused for some reason, probably because the story also ran on kuro5hin. So far I have read all the posts in this thread and most of them are focussing on DoubleClick which is incidental to the news story instead of discussing the fact that dotcomms are not only selling dotcomm info but are taking out ads to do so.
From the artricle: Toysmart, meanwhile, advertised the sale of its customer list and database in The Wall Street Journal last month after ceasing operations. The company overseeing the sale of Toysmart's assets, the Recovery Group, said several interested parties have bid on the customer information.
I am very worried at this trend, because I have a lot of personal data at CDNow and considering that they are in serious trouble will my personal data also be sold? I have begun to fear for all the dotcomms I have ever bought anything from because the last thing I'd want is for my address, credit card info and shopping habits to be sold by some failed e-business like some email spam list. The fact that the companies are taking out ads to sell our info and hiring agents to do this shows completely that industry self regulation has failed. I sincerely hope the FTC jumps on this like a porkchop in a dog kennel.
What the hell are you talking about? The email bugs are due to MSFT's faulty security model. Shit, I have friends at MSFT who have admitted that the Outlook team got chewed out for not implementing a sandbox model after the I LOVE YOU virus got out. The virus wouldn't have spread if the developers at MSFT had chosen security over perceived usability. Secondly, what exactly do you mean by internet Security Model? Do you mean a restructuring of TCP/IP with security in mind or the use of routers to block certain packets (how this would have stopped I LOVE YOU is beyond me). Frankly both your posts seems like the ravings of a clueless non-techie who is pro-MSFT simply because he has bought the hype. Watch this... I LOVE YOU, Melissa and the others were emails sent by users carrying attachments... No Internet Securiy Model will suddenly be able to tell between programmatically sent email and user created email, unless of course you believe some central authority will be able to direct all the mailservers on the 'net to filter certain emails dynamically. Then what happens when some other 'net protocol becomes widely used for proliferating viruses, e.g. MSFT's.NET .
Finally about your little crack about Joel Klein and billions of dollars, what exactly is your point? MSFT got where it was by commiting crimes and breaking federal laws. The fact that it was making money for a few investors should not change the fact that they should be punished for their crimes. If you're trying to pin the fall of NASDAQ on MSFT...Get a clue. The fall of NASDAQ can be blamed on the fact that the Dot Comm Bubble Has Officially Burst, film at 11.
I'll give my responses to his suggestions first and then ask my own question about the GPL which I hope someone will be able to answer.
1.) Corporations (and everyone) should be required to release the modifications to their source code every six months to a year, if the modified versions are shared with more than, say, three people.
Besides the general unenforcability of this because a.)We will need GPL auditors swoop down on random Fortune 500 IT departments to do on-the-spot checks like for AutoDesk and other expensive proprietary software) b.) The specificity of certain extensions makes them meaningless to anyone but that corporation. (the company I work for has several e-lisp packages for Emacs that simplify many tasks specific to our project) Asking companies to GPL internal code, would simply make the GPL more of an anathema in the corporate world. Which would suck since I use a lot of GPL software at work.
2.) Two piles of code are considered linked if one will crash or cease to provide more than 90% of its functions without the other. Note that this doesn't mean that any piece of software running on a GNU/Linux machine is considered linked to the GPL-protected kernel. If the software can be moved to a different OS, then it doesn't depend on the kernel.
This seems even more unenforcable, how do you quantify 90%? This also seems unreasonable, if I have a script that uses grep in several places to perform a complex task, do I have to GPL the script or all the code invoked in the script, isn't a script by definition something that probably serves a specific task for a specific situation....what would be the point of asking for all scripts that invoke or use GPL code to be GPLed? Also about the "one will cease without the other argument", what exactly will this mean... if I can write a program that uses libraries that are either GPLed or proprietary, does this mean that I have escaped the "one will cease without the other" argument? On the other hand if the author actually means that the GPL code used should be extracted then the program run, more than likely the program will cease to work. After all I have lots of code that is over a thousand lines but would cease to exist if three or four lines would have to be erased.
Now my question: With the rise of the web in general and Application Service Providers specifically...what happens when a website uses modified code to serve it's pages? If Yahoo, eBay or AOL which draw millions of visitors a day use modified GPLed software (e.g. Apache and various modules) there is no way under the current GPL to ask them to return their code modifications and the suggestions by Peter Wayner do not address this (e.g. what if it's one or two people who perform the modification, not three or more).
Here are links to the Retinal Implant Project which was a joint Harvard-MIT collaboration. Another link here(in German)leads to the page of German researchers on the same project. Here's an article that describes the project in a little detail.
Interesting project, it seems they've been working on this for 10 or more years in joint collaboration with several universities in different countries as well as the government.
Why are you arguing semantics? Here's Corel's stock chart, it is currently precipitously down from it's 52 week high of 44 -1/2.
So what if it went up rapidly siz months ago? So did Red Hat, VA Linux and every buzzword compliant dotcomm when Linux and dotcomms were hotter than chinese mustard in hell but currently they are extremely down from their highs.
As for your claim that it's all good for Corel in Canada here's a Canadian Reuters report that says otherwise.
It's a good thing Corel doesn't listen to folks like you, or they would have disappeared back in 1988. . . . You don't work for Adobe by any chance?
Your vehement support of a company that is by all rights on it's way to bankruptcy regardless of facts thrust in your face leads me to believe you have some ulterioir motive to defending Corel, perhaps you are a stockholder or employee?
Wow, MS is recommending interoperability with Solaris using GCC! Personally, I never thought I'd live to see this.
It's not too surprising once you realize the amount of people with *nix backgrounds that they hire. I have three friends who work there and they all either own a Linux box or have hacked Open Source projects at one time or the other.
The problem with MSFT isn't that they are evil or that they are out to screw Open Source but that they truly believe that the Microsoft Way will advance technology and bring the coolest technology to the masses. It is this belief in their rightness that makes them (at least at the developer level) dangerous to Open Source and third parties. After all, if you believe that without MSFT technology the world would be in the dark ages and your mom wouldn't even be able to use a computer without MSFT wizards and GUIs, then you'd begin to have a certain kind of tunnel vision which would border on delusional. Basically what I'm trying to say is this, they don't go out of their way to not be interoperable, it simply is that interoperability never crosses their minds when creating software.
Just out of curiosity, who here thinks there is any chance that MSFT, probably the only software company with billion$ of dollars in cash reserves will either a.)go out of business or b.) quit development on a product in which from variousstatistics is the dominant player in its market.
Secondly, who believes that if AOL fired all the Netscape developers (who outnumber Open-Source contributors) there'd still be a Mozilla? Considering that several laudable open source projects have languished without corporate support including IBM's JFS and almost everything SGI has GPLed for Linux.
Finally from a PointyHairedBoss perspective which is more likely a.)MSFT goes out of business or quits developing IE or b.) AOL decides to stop flogging a dead horse and concedes defeat by keeping IE as its default browser instead of spending money developing a second stringer to IE?
This is not a troll but a genuine counter-opinion, being Open Source does not mean diddly to most PHBs unless there is still someone to point at Apache has the Apache Group while Linux has Red Hat, SuSe, etc...Mozilla has AOL. Almost four years later, it is still primarily a Netscape operation with a minority of Open Source developers. Your argument would not hold sway with most bosses (heck, it didn't hold sway with my project manager and he's a developer) since it is unlikely that they are either a.) going to say "yeah, we can carry on development if it ever gets scrapped by AOL" or b.)We'll trust our entire corporate decision making on the hope that a bunch of random hackers will work on this software in their spare time.
*sigh* The amount of sensationalism associated with slashdot has reached a disturbing level. As others have pointed out the legality of deep linking has already been upheld in court also the RIAA has said that they are not going after the site for linking but for being running a site that indexes illegal material. From the article: An RIAA representative said this case isn't about hyperlinking at all.
"This isn't about automated versus not-automated hyperlinks, this is about what they know and what they don't know," said Steve Fabrizio, the RIAA's senior vice president for legal and business affairs.
"This isn't the RIAA coming out against hyperlinking. This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of. They link to sites that say 'Super Pirated MP3s.' They even have a genre labeled as 'Legal MP3s.'"
After all aiding and abetting is still a crime in the real world so why shouldn't it be one online?
I also have this deep i'm-a-true-techie-this-hurts feeling when I see another lamer get a new Prefab. IBM clone and AOL. I dont feel bad because I'm jealous of their 1ghz Athlon, I feel bad that the market dictates what goes and what dies off...
Hmmm...interesting so instead of the companies that create technology that is easy enough for the average person to use (e.g. Dell, AOL or MSFT) we should force everyone to either learn how to use bash, Emacs and lynx so that your idea of cool tech is preserved?
The original poster asks:This report in Upside Today suggests that big software companies are attracted by the "gated community" model - unsurprisingly as it seems to be classic "help us debug our software and we'll keep the copyright, thanks". Upside (in my opinion, naively) presumes that because this idea is attractive to software companies, who will invest in it, it's obviously going to take off. But is this likely? Who works for gated community projects, and why?
Right to the top of my head people that work for gated community projects are a.) the Blackdown folk who are porting Java to Linux, b.) the people who contribute to Mozilla which will have proprietary extensions added to it as AOL's default browser and c.) anyone who has ever released code under the BSD license (which can be seen as gated community development since the code can be closed by third parties). Your questions seems to smack of someone who equates open source with the GPL. Remember ESR's Cathedra l and the Bazaar, many developers write open source code to scratch an itch and note necessarily to further the ideal of Free Software. After all this is why the Blackdown developers work on Java, they like the language and want a port for it on Linux, and whoever copyrights the software is not a concern as long as they get a quality port of Java to Linux. Frankly, I would place myself as someone who'd work on a gated community program, simply because I'd contribute patches to proprietary code and not care if the became GPL afterwards or not. E.g. I use Visual Studio (as well as Emacs) to develop code, sometimes Intellisense (the drop down box and tooltips that show function arguments, comments and class members while editing code) sometimes freezes up on me and goes away. If I somehow get at the code and patch this I would, and frankly I wouldn't feel that a requirement for my patch to be accepted be that MSFT GPL a few million lines of code that took them years to develop. Also if I did this my itch would be scratched.
The original poster also asked: If it's just for the "bounty" isn't this just programmers working as contractors? Surely for there to be any special open source goodness, these projects must attract collaboration over and above that which is payed for. But are they? And why should I contribute to a gated community rather than a true open source one?
Hmmmm, exactly what does special Open Source goodness mean? I doubt that everyone who has ever contributed a patch or reported a bug has done this out of an altruistic pursuit of goodness. Frankly, software is simply a tool to get a job done and for most software developers that's as far as it goes. So if one had a choice between improving an established product that one uses so as to make it better and getting paid to do it or creating a competing product in one's free time while working at a reqular job...which would the average software developer choose?
Do you think Dell would have had the balls to ship a Linux box if not for the DOJ investigation? OEMs couldn't even preinstall a browser on their Windows boxes without MSFT's say so. Intel quashed a lot of their software plans because of MSFT. Everyone was under their thumb. From the looks of things that were discovered at the trial MSFT basically was dictating what a majority of the computer industry did.
If anyone believes that Dell would risked angering MSFT by selling Linux, a rereading of the Findings of the Fact is in order. MSFT played the OEMs with its Windows pricing scheme and does that played ball (Compaq, Gateway) were charged substantially less than others. IBM on the other hand would have pursued Linux regardless but I'm not so sure about Dell. Here's a Google cache of Bill G commenting on Dell from the MSFT trial days.
PS: I once interviewed with Dell and asked the why they didn't have a comprehensive Linux plan and the response was "We're waiting to see how things go before committing resources. Once someone shows it's a viable plan, we'll jump on it."
Posts like this make me wonder about certain OSS supporters sometimes. Now I'd like to know how on one hand you can bash MSFT in your post yet praise KDE & GNOME for ripping of an idea that MSFT pioneered almost a decade ago with DDE/OLE/COM. The GNOME folk have admitted this and it is clear this is the exact same thing KDE is trying to do. Also your analogy lacks merit, let's try this one. Wouldn't it be cool if some people created a cool technological solution that allowed various seperate apps to talk to each other (e.g. spreadsheet, wordprocessor) seamlessly as well as expanded the infrastructure to include third party software and then created a distributed version of this? Guess what, MSFT did. I hope that puts things in perspective. I'm not an MSFT supporter (even though quite a few of my friends work there) but when people ignore their achievements then praise people for ripping off those same achievements it makes me wonder. After all we were all up in arms when they claimed they invented symbollic links
PS: This is not a troll if you disagree with me post a response.
Okay I just checked out Xanadu and agree that I was wrong, it seems that they have Prior Art. I also looked at Xanadu's paper to the ACM and noticed that several references go back to 1965 or earlier. Could someone please email this link to info@scipher.com and explain to them why taking on BT's case was a lost cause.
This specifically deals with documents stored on servers, sent through a PSTN to a terminal. It would seem to me, that if you asked six random people (i.e. the jury in the civil lawsuit) to equate a web server and a browser to a server and a client, they wouldn't do it.
Why wouldn't they? A webserver is a server, a browser is a way to display stuff on the client.
I just read the patent three times and cannot believe it. It's a real patent filed for in 1980 long before Tim-Berners-Lee proposed the world wide web. To put it simply British Telecom came up with the idea of hyperlinks first, simply not in the context of HTML, but this does not change the fact that they did. To all those claiming this is a sign that patent reform is forthcoming are probably right but for the wrong reasons, in 1980 this was probably an original idea.
As for the MSFT BIOS lock deal with Dell i'm not exactly sure how new this is. My IBM Aptiva i bought in April last year did not come with Windows 98 but instead with an IBM Recovery disk that would only install on my Aptiva 9which i found out much to my chagrin after assembling a new machine and being forced to buy a copy of Windows for it). I am surprised this practice is just getting mention now. It is VERY old news to me and I'm sure it is to other IBM Aptiva users.
Slashdot Mirror
...this project is less than a week old and consists of some theories bandied about by a developer and he's friend (who is providing the crypto knowledge).
:)
Wouldn't have been better to post this when there was actually news to report? Simply because someone has an idea and backs it up with a webpage does not a headline make.
PS: That said, I wish them luck.
When I read posts like yours I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry at how religously people can take the decisions of other people.
What Warrick Allison states is a very valid opinion which myself and many others have had. I've often asked myself, "if I was a developer working for a company whose livelihood depended on being able to sell support for the software I wrote wouldn't I be less motivated to write easy-to-use and bug free code as someone who worked for a company whose lifeline wasn't based on selling support contracts?"
I've never been in that situation but from the attitudes of most OSS developers today usability isn't a key word they are interested in. Frankly I feel that the whole selling support concept only adds the current esoteric nature and general poor documentation of Open Source projects. Second question "Why spend time developing comprehensive training manuals, online help and documenting APIs if you are trying to get users to buy a support contract?". Laziness is a well documented trait of good programmers and bad ones as well, so why would one not expect that programmers would take the easy way out especially when it would be beneficial for their employer?
PS: Exactly what do we have to lose if OSS doesn't make the leap to big business? I'm in it cuz I like it not for the IPO money, aren't you? I hope you realize that VA Linux is a hardware company that sells relatively overpriced servers which has nothing to so with making money on supporting OSS. VA Linux subsidizes its OSS forays by marking up their server prices, which to me seems like an alternate business model to ESRs.
PPS: This isn't a troll, if you disagree, post a response instead of moderating this down and making this place seem more like a mad house for raving zealots instead of a forum for rational discussion.
The difference isn't just the SQL support but more the transaction handling abilities of the DB specifically the ACID properties of the database. The ACIDity of a database is what makes it a RDBMS. Acid properties are
Atomicity:
This means that transactions are either fully completed or never begun at all. Any updates that a transaction might make on a system are completed in its entirety. If any error ccurs during the transaction keeping it from completing all its steps then the DB is rolled back to its previous state before the transaction began. E.g. Let's say a transaction consists of money being removed from a checking account and stored in a savings account. If there is an error after the money is removed from the checking account but not stored in the savings account then the transaction can be rolled back to when the money was still in the checking account.
Consistency:
This means that the DB is always in a valid state after a transaction. Thus if an error occurs during a transaction, the DB can be rolled back to the last valid state. E.g. From the above example the total amount of money in both accounts is constant and is equal to the sum of both amounts. If an error occurs while transferring money from the checking account to the savings account then the total of both accounts is not consistent with the amounts actually in the accounts. This inconsistency is handled by rolling back the DB to the last consistent state.
Isolation:
Each transaction appears to the only one being carried out by the system at that time. If there are two transactions both performing the same function and both running at the same time they will be invisible to each other. This ensures that the system is consistent because if transactions do not run in isolation the they may access data from the DB that is inconsistent due to the fact that some other transaction is in the middle of performing its tasks. E.g. if my paycheck is being deposited in my checking account at the same time as when I am viewing an account summary I will not be able to see the changes being made to my account until the deposit transaction is completed. This stops unsavory things like seeing the total amount in the account remaining constant while the recent deposits field may already contain the deposit.
Durability:
Once changes have een made to the DB they are permanent. There are safeguards that will prevent loss of information even in the case of system failure. By logging the steps that each transaction takes the state of the system can be recreated even if the hardware has failed.
Here's an article that explains why mySQL is not a real RDBMS since it's support for transactions are lacking. PostrgreSQL on the other hand supports transactions. For instance, people who use a DB that supports transactions don't have to lock the tables themselves when accessing the DB from their code instead stuff like that is handled by the DB.
PS: Also not all of SQL is supported by mySQL (e.g. Foreign Keys for specifying integrity constraints).
It is interesting that I keep bumping into people who feel that simply because they learned how to program (which anyone can learn on their own) outside of school, then school is somehow useless.
Computer science programs vary widely across the board. At my girlfriend's college half of the junior and senior curriculum is stuff like Intro to C++ and Creating Applications in Visual Basic. While at my school the sophomore classes are Compilers & Translators (last semester we implemented the Unix utility "make" and wrote a Lisp to C translator and they were both due the same week) and Systems & Networks (create your own RPC program and protocol). Also before graduation each student has to work on a senior project which involves shipping a live product to a company. Now with this education I am currently pulling down a decent amount while interning which by current reckoning is as much as most people in industry are making now after a few years of real world experience.
Most of the actual programming syntax I have learned has been on my own time (I know C, C++, Java, Perl, Javascript, VBScript, SmallTalk and VisualBasic). There are various aspects of software engineering and database design I would not have learned without school, either because I would never have come across them while simply hacking or because they would have been too much work and not enough fun to learn on my own. Things like how and why a database should be normalized, how to design and implement grammars, using lex and yacc, how to create a requirements document from informal specifications and then converting the requirements document to a design document with data models and UML diagrams, compiler design and implementation details, various methods of dynamic memory allocation, proper object oriented design and implementation of neural networks. All these things I have learned in school and I still have over a year to go. Before I graduate I plan to take classes in AI (I'm interested in creating Internet Agents), advanced software engineering and next generation database technology (such as OO databases). The things I will learn in these classes are things that I would probably never have come across if I was simply hacking at code and buying O'reilly books to learn what I needed about CS.
Some kids at my school like reminding the freshman students who make comments like yours that our graduates don't use tools but instead make the tools that others use. The language designers, compiler writers and internet architects of this world are college educated. If all you want to do is go out and hack code a college degree is perhaps overkill (then again it widens your marketability - I have been offered positions working on compilers for strongARM chips using C/assembly as well as doing server side integration using Java, XML, Perl, & SQL) but realize this, what seperates usually seperates a Computer Scientist from Code Monkey is usually a college degree.
A little while ago when confronted with articles like this I always felt that most of these stories were situations where the employees were at fault but simply were refusing to claim responsibility. But working in a corporate environment in the past month has made me realize that some of my opinions were that of a naive college student. To put it simply, there are many times when one has to make personal calls, write personal emails or do personal web browsing especially since most of use spend the majority of the daylight hours at work.
Already in the short span of one month that I have been working I've made long distance calls to my girlfriend to confirm her flight, I've called credit agencies about a misunderstanding in my credit report, emailed friends about a software project for school we're working on, made long distance calls to pay bills for my old apartment (I relocated for this job) and more. From what I read in the C|Net article, and a few others in Fortune as well as other places, I put my job in jeopardy by performing any of the above actions. If I had a choice I would still do them again because there's no other time for me to do these things. I'm at work eight to nine hours a day, before I leave the house most offices and agencies are not yet open and by the time I get home they are closed.
My purpose in posting this is to let the people who feel that you deserve to be stung for doing personal things at work realize that there are many situations where you have no choice but to do these things from work. Of course, the alternative is to come into work late or leave work simply to browse the web, make a phonecall or shoot off an email.
PS: I considered posting this as an AC, but decided that if I actually do get nailed for these things, I'd have a suit on my hands since I'm posting this from home.
PPS: All the things I did on the phone I also did online (i.e. surfing credit agency sites, emailing my GF, etc).
Here is a Time magazine article from a year ago about how most of the world (except the U.S.) use cell phones for buying a soda from vending machines, running a car wash, zapping a digital picture to a friend and video conferencing. From that article as well as others such as this one it looks like the U.S. is lagging behind in technology that is commonplace in almost every other industrialized nation.
From my experience working at a Microsoft Cerified Solutions Provider last summer as well as the fact that I have a few friends working at MSFT plus my former constant perusal of the talkback at ZDNet, I can say unequivocably that there is no subculture of Microsoft fanatics past, present or future.
Heck, even my friends that work there aren't Do Or Die about it, unlike most Slashdotters are with Linux or Open Source. Conversations with them have lead me to believe that this entire MSFT vs. Open Source war is generally one-sided with Slashdotters making mountains out of molehills at every turn.
In my opinion, the Freedom To Innovate Network isn't targetted at the average hacker or software developer. It's a means to gather popular user support from people like my mom's friends who feel that they'll have to stop using PCs once MSFT is broken up since Windows is all they know and (in their opinion) without MSFT they'd still view computers with fear and awe. This demographic is a lot more powerful vote-wise (there are more of them than hackers) and easier to persuade than the developer audience. After all, most of them already feel that MSFT is being targetted not for any wrongdoings but simply for being too successful.
The source code for the troll is probably Slashtroll which I noticed being spammed to some threads today. Your idea has merit, especially if the questions are generated newly each day (preferrably each hour) so that the script doesn't build a database of answers.
This is so called +4 Insightful post is a chain letter that has already been spammed to the current poll and has been debunked on several websites including here..
PS: The post is offtopic as well.
Why is it that people always feel that everything has to fit according to statistics or all is not well. Gender imbalance reminds me a lot of the so called Digital Divide...lots of liberal middle class whites who feel that the poor underclass must be forced to be as technically inclined as they are. Frankly, I'm black and I have lived amongst and known black people all my life, and being computer savvy is not high on the average black person's to-do list. No amount of government intervention is going to turn the average poor black person into some cybersurfing, net junkie simply to balance some statistic chart.
Back to the topic at hand, why is it that people feel the need to try to push girls into technical careers? From my experience most females including the ones that are good at Math (both my last two girlfriends got A's in Calculus II but one's an English major while the other is studying criminal justice) do not like technical fields. Frankly the crap about gender imbalance to access computers is a load of bull, this isn't the fifties when women couldn't eat without a man supporting them...any woman worth her salt can get a job and buy a PC or go to the library. The last time I checked the neither CompUSA nor BestBuy was discriminating according to sex. Also, the article describes negative social pressure for women to get into technology, but fails to mention that until the Internet boom of a few short years ago there was negative social pressure for men to get into technology as well. I remember being teased and taunted for being a computer geek while in school and even when I grew older I was still looked upon by others with disdain, off course being uninterested in sports probably didn't help this.
PS: I am very tired of self righteous people who want to mold the world in their own image. Women don't like technical fields, so what? Men don't flock towards positions in elder care, nursing or child care yet I don't see articles bemoaning this.
I submitted this article three days ago but it was refused for some reason, probably because the story also ran on kuro5hin. So far I have read all the posts in this thread and most of them are focussing on DoubleClick which is incidental to the news story instead of discussing the fact that dotcomms are not only selling dotcomm info but are taking out ads to do so.
From the artricle: Toysmart, meanwhile, advertised the sale of its customer list and database in The Wall Street Journal last month after ceasing operations. The company overseeing the sale of Toysmart's assets, the Recovery Group, said several interested parties have bid on the customer information.
I am very worried at this trend, because I have a lot of personal data at CDNow and considering that they are in serious trouble will my personal data also be sold? I have begun to fear for all the dotcomms I have ever bought anything from because the last thing I'd want is for my address, credit card info and shopping habits to be sold by some failed e-business like some email spam list. The fact that the companies are taking out ads to sell our info and hiring agents to do this shows completely that industry self regulation has failed. I sincerely hope the FTC jumps on this like a porkchop in a dog kennel.
What the hell are you talking about? The email bugs are due to MSFT's faulty security model. Shit, I have friends at MSFT who have admitted that the Outlook team got chewed out for not implementing a sandbox model after the I LOVE YOU virus got out. The virus wouldn't have spread if the developers at MSFT had chosen security over perceived usability. .NET .
Secondly, what exactly do you mean by internet Security Model? Do you mean a restructuring of TCP/IP with security in mind or the use of routers to block certain packets (how this would have stopped I LOVE YOU is beyond me). Frankly both your posts seems like the ravings of a clueless non-techie who is pro-MSFT simply because he has bought the hype. Watch this... I LOVE YOU, Melissa and the others were emails sent by users carrying attachments... No Internet Securiy Model will suddenly be able to tell between programmatically sent email and user created email, unless of course you believe some central authority will be able to direct all the mailservers on the 'net to filter certain emails dynamically. Then what happens when some other 'net protocol becomes widely used for proliferating viruses, e.g. MSFT's
Finally about your little crack about Joel Klein and billions of dollars, what exactly is your point? MSFT got where it was by commiting crimes and breaking federal laws. The fact that it was making money for a few investors should not change the fact that they should be punished for their crimes. If you're trying to pin the fall of NASDAQ on MSFT...Get a clue. The fall of NASDAQ can be blamed on the fact that the Dot Comm Bubble Has Officially Burst, film at 11.
I'll give my responses to his suggestions first and then ask my own question about the GPL which I hope someone will be able to answer.
1.) Corporations (and everyone) should be required to release the modifications to their source code every six months to a year, if the modified versions are shared with more than, say, three people.
Besides the general unenforcability of this because a.)We will need GPL auditors swoop down on random Fortune 500 IT departments to do on-the-spot checks like for AutoDesk and other expensive proprietary software) b.) The specificity of certain extensions makes them meaningless to anyone but that corporation. (the company I work for has several e-lisp packages for Emacs that simplify many tasks specific to our project) Asking companies to GPL internal code, would simply make the GPL more of an anathema in the corporate world. Which would suck since I use a lot of GPL software at work.
2.) Two piles of code are considered linked if one will crash or cease to provide more than 90% of its functions without the other. Note that this doesn't mean that any piece of software running on a GNU/Linux machine is considered linked to the GPL-protected kernel. If the software can be moved to a different OS, then it doesn't depend on the kernel.
This seems even more unenforcable, how do you quantify 90%? This also seems unreasonable, if I have a script that uses grep in several places to perform a complex task, do I have to GPL the script or all the code invoked in the script, isn't a script by definition something that probably serves a specific task for a specific situation....what would be the point of asking for all scripts that invoke or use GPL code to be GPLed? Also about the "one will cease without the other argument", what exactly will this mean... if I can write a program that uses libraries that are either GPLed or proprietary, does this mean that I have escaped the "one will cease without the other" argument? On the other hand if the author actually means that the GPL code used should be extracted then the program run, more than likely the program will cease to work. After all I have lots of code that is over a thousand lines but would cease to exist if three or four lines would have to be erased.
Now my question:
With the rise of the web in general and Application Service Providers specifically...what happens when a website uses modified code to serve it's pages? If Yahoo, eBay or AOL which draw millions of visitors a day use modified GPLed software (e.g. Apache and various modules) there is no way under the current GPL to ask them to return their code modifications and the suggestions by Peter Wayner do not address this (e.g. what if it's one or two people who perform the modification, not three or more).
Here are links to the Retinal Implant Project which was a joint Harvard-MIT collaboration. Another link here(in German)leads to the page of German researchers on the same project. Here's an article that describes the project in a little detail.
Interesting project, it seems they've been working on this for 10 or more years in joint collaboration with several universities in different countries as well as the government.
Why are you arguing semantics? Here's Corel's stock chart, it is currently precipitously down from it's 52 week high of 44 -1/2.
So what if it went up rapidly siz months ago? So did Red Hat, VA Linux and every buzzword compliant dotcomm when Linux and dotcomms were hotter than chinese mustard in hell but currently they are extremely down from their highs.
As for your claim that it's all good for Corel in Canada here's a Canadian Reuters report that says otherwise.
It's a good thing Corel doesn't listen to folks like you, or they would have disappeared back in 1988. . . . You don't work for Adobe by any chance?
Your vehement support of a company that is by all rights on it's way to bankruptcy regardless of facts thrust in your face leads me to believe you have some ulterioir motive to defending Corel, perhaps you are a stockholder or employee?
Wow, MS is recommending interoperability with Solaris using GCC! Personally, I never thought I'd live to see this.
It's not too surprising once you realize the amount of people with *nix backgrounds that they hire. I have three friends who work there and they all either own a Linux box or have hacked Open Source projects at one time or the other.
The problem with MSFT isn't that they are evil or that they are out to screw Open Source but that they truly believe that the Microsoft Way will advance technology and bring the coolest technology to the masses. It is this belief in their rightness that makes them (at least at the developer level) dangerous to Open Source and third parties. After all, if you believe that without MSFT technology the world would be in the dark ages and your mom wouldn't even be able to use a computer without MSFT wizards and GUIs, then you'd begin to have a certain kind of tunnel vision which would border on delusional.
Basically what I'm trying to say is this, they don't go out of their way to not be interoperable, it simply is that interoperability never crosses their minds when creating software.
Just out of curiosity, who here thinks there is any chance that MSFT, probably the only software company with billion$ of dollars in cash reserves will either a.)go out of business or b.) quit development on a product in which from various statistics is the dominant player in its market.
Secondly, who believes that if AOL fired all the Netscape developers (who outnumber Open-Source contributors) there'd still be a Mozilla? Considering that several laudable open source projects have languished without corporate support including IBM's JFS and almost everything SGI has GPLed for Linux.
Finally from a PointyHairedBoss perspective which is more likely a.)MSFT goes out of business or quits developing IE or b.) AOL decides to stop flogging a dead horse and concedes defeat by keeping IE as its default browser instead of spending money developing a second stringer to IE?
This is not a troll but a genuine counter-opinion, being Open Source does not mean diddly to most PHBs unless there is still someone to point at Apache has the Apache Group while Linux has Red Hat, SuSe, etc...Mozilla has AOL. Almost four years later, it is still primarily a Netscape operation with a minority of Open Source developers. Your argument would not hold sway with most bosses (heck, it didn't hold sway with my project manager and he's a developer) since it is unlikely that they are either a.) going to say "yeah, we can carry on development if it ever gets scrapped by AOL" or b.)We'll trust our entire corporate decision making on the hope that a bunch of random hackers will work on this software in their spare time.
*sigh*
The amount of sensationalism associated with slashdot has reached a disturbing level. As others have pointed out the legality of deep linking has already been upheld in court also the RIAA has said that they are not going after the site for linking but for being running a site that indexes illegal material.
From the article:
An RIAA representative said this case isn't about hyperlinking at all.
"This isn't about automated versus not-automated hyperlinks, this is about what they know and what they don't know," said Steve Fabrizio, the RIAA's senior vice president for legal and business affairs.
"This isn't the RIAA coming out against hyperlinking. This is about the fact that the sources MP3Board.com are linking to are blatantly pirate sites which they are aware of. They link to sites that say 'Super Pirated MP3s.' They even have a genre labeled as 'Legal MP3s.'"
After all aiding and abetting is still a crime in the real world so why shouldn't it be one online?
I also have this deep i'm-a-true-techie-this-hurts feeling when I see another lamer get a new Prefab. IBM clone and AOL. I dont feel bad because I'm jealous of their 1ghz Athlon, I feel bad that the market dictates what goes and what dies off...
Hmmm...interesting so instead of the companies that create technology that is easy enough for the average person to use (e.g. Dell, AOL or MSFT) we should force everyone to either learn how to use bash, Emacs and lynx so that your idea of cool tech is preserved?
The original poster asks: This report in Upside Today suggests that big software companies are attracted by the "gated community" model - unsurprisingly as it seems to be classic "help us debug our software and we'll keep the copyright, thanks". Upside (in my opinion, naively) presumes that because this idea is attractive to software companies, who will invest in it, it's obviously going to take off. But is this likely? Who works for gated community projects, and why?
Right to the top of my head people that work for gated community projects are a.) the Blackdown folk who are porting Java to Linux, b.) the people who contribute to Mozilla which will have proprietary extensions added to it as AOL's default browser and c.) anyone who has ever released code under the BSD license (which can be seen as gated community development since the code can be closed by third parties). Your questions seems to smack of someone who equates open source with the GPL. Remember ESR's Cathedra l and the Bazaar, many developers write open source code to scratch an itch and note necessarily to further the ideal of Free Software. After all this is why the Blackdown developers work on Java, they like the language and want a port for it on Linux, and whoever copyrights the software is not a concern as long as they get a quality port of Java to Linux. Frankly, I would place myself as someone who'd work on a gated community program, simply because I'd contribute patches to proprietary code and not care if the became GPL afterwards or not. E.g. I use Visual Studio (as well as Emacs) to develop code, sometimes Intellisense (the drop down box and tooltips that show function arguments, comments and class members while editing code) sometimes freezes up on me and goes away. If I somehow get at the code and patch this I would, and frankly I wouldn't feel that a requirement for my patch to be accepted be that MSFT GPL a few million lines of code that took them years to develop. Also if I did this my itch would be scratched.
The original poster also asked: If it's just for the "bounty" isn't this just programmers working as contractors? Surely for there to be any special open source goodness, these projects must attract collaboration over and above that which is payed for. But are they? And why should I contribute to a gated community rather than a true open source one?
Hmmmm, exactly what does special Open Source goodness mean? I doubt that everyone who has ever contributed a patch or reported a bug has done this out of an altruistic pursuit of goodness. Frankly, software is simply a tool to get a job done and for most software developers that's as far as it goes. So if one had a choice between improving an established product that one uses so as to make it better and getting paid to do it or creating a competing product in one's free time while working at a reqular job...which would the average software developer choose?
Do you think Dell would have had the balls to ship a Linux box if not for the DOJ investigation? OEMs couldn't even preinstall a browser on their Windows boxes without MSFT's say so. Intel quashed a lot of their software plans because of MSFT. Everyone was under their thumb. From the looks of things that were discovered at the trial MSFT basically was dictating what a majority of the computer industry did.
If anyone believes that Dell would risked angering MSFT by selling Linux, a rereading of the Findings of the Fact is in order. MSFT played the OEMs with its Windows pricing scheme and does that played ball (Compaq, Gateway) were charged substantially less than others. IBM on the other hand would have pursued Linux regardless but I'm not so sure about Dell. Here's a Google cache of Bill G commenting on Dell from the MSFT trial days.
PS: I once interviewed with Dell and asked the why they didn't have a comprehensive Linux plan and the response was "We're waiting to see how things go before committing resources. Once someone shows it's a viable plan, we'll jump on it."
Posts like this make me wonder about certain OSS supporters sometimes. Now I'd like to know how on one hand you can bash MSFT in your post yet praise KDE & GNOME for ripping of an idea that MSFT pioneered almost a decade ago with DDE/OLE/COM. The GNOME folk have admitted this and it is clear this is the exact same thing KDE is trying to do.
Also your analogy lacks merit, let's try this one. Wouldn't it be cool if some people created a cool technological solution that allowed various seperate apps to talk to each other (e.g. spreadsheet, wordprocessor) seamlessly as well as expanded the infrastructure to include third party software and then created a distributed version of this? Guess what, MSFT did.
I hope that puts things in perspective. I'm not an MSFT supporter (even though quite a few of my friends work there) but when people ignore their achievements then praise people for ripping off those same achievements it makes me wonder. After all we were all up in arms when they claimed they invented symbollic links
PS: This is not a troll if you disagree with me post a response.
Okay I just checked out Xanadu and agree that I was wrong, it seems that they have Prior Art. I also looked at Xanadu's paper to the ACM and noticed that several references go back to 1965 or earlier. Could someone please email this link to info@scipher.com and explain to them why taking on BT's case was a lost cause.
This specifically deals with documents stored on servers, sent through a PSTN to a terminal. It would seem to me, that if you asked six random people (i.e. the jury in the civil lawsuit) to equate a web server and a browser to a server and a client, they wouldn't do it.
Why wouldn't they? A webserver is a server, a browser is a way to display stuff on the client.
I just read the patent three times and cannot believe it. It's a real patent filed for in 1980 long before Tim-Berners-Lee proposed the world wide web. To put it simply British Telecom came up with the idea of hyperlinks first, simply not in the context of HTML, but this does not change the fact that they did. To all those claiming this is a sign that patent reform is forthcoming are probably right but for the wrong reasons, in 1980 this was probably an original idea.
AOL has submitted it's IMX draft to the IETF and it is available on the Internet at http://aim.aol.com/openim. Here's news of the story on C|Net.
As for the MSFT BIOS lock deal with Dell i'm not exactly sure how new this is. My IBM Aptiva i bought in April last year did not come with Windows 98 but instead with an IBM Recovery disk that would only install on my Aptiva 9which i found out much to my chagrin after assembling a new machine and being forced to buy a copy of Windows for it). I am surprised this practice is just getting mention now. It is VERY old news to me and I'm sure it is to other IBM Aptiva users.