An incompetent DBA can lose data in any RDBMS of his or her choosing, surely.
Indeed. However, most people rely on the fact that the database server itself won't lend a willing hand in the destruction of your data by feeding you incorrect information from SELECT commands.
MS SQL Server is alive and kicking and pervasive throughout enterprise computing. With proper care, it can be as reliable and strong as Oracle and leagues stronger than MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Reliable is not random data loss. If SELECTs and ORDER BY ops are not returning all the data they should, there is something seriously wrong, and the best DBA in the world probably can't do a damn thing about it. One would expect that some esoteric features might be buggy, but one that is as ubiquitous as SELECT? RDBMS's live and die by the data integrity they provide -- I wouldn't run MySQL for a mission critical system that could not ever lose or corrupt data because it was never made for that. MS SQL and Oracle are both designed to do this, and if MS SQL can't deliver, I'd call that a pretty big reliability problem.
It, of course, depends on what you're encoding. WMA has been long known to add artifacts to certain kinds of sounds during the encoding process, such as pre-echo. Some sounds, like drums, can be quite distorted by this, although obviously in the case of the article, some of the listeners actually liked the pre-echo -- "On MP3Pro, I could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and the bassoon".
That must be why people are sticking with Windows 95 or Windows 98 on their P75-P166's instead of constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest. It works "well enough" for most people. The danger of a monopoly is best illustrated by the monopoly IBM had on mainframes. They had no real reason to innovate, so they merely trickled features to customers to get the revenue rather than really trying to provide what the customer wanted. Doesn't matter if you're subscribing to the license or flat-out purchasing it, the result will be the same. Put enough on the plate that people will be tempted to buy the upgrade but not enough to satiate their appetite for a long time.
Microsoft is winning? Judge Jackson, against all expectations, handed them their ass. The appeals court, against all expectations, upheld Jackson's Findings Of Fact _and_ the guilty verdict for criminal monopoly maintenance. Microsoft is _guilty_. They did not get away.
They 'got off' on all the counts that involved software competitors. The appeals court shot holes through the allegations that Microsoft illegally used their monopoly to kill Netscape because the DoJ didn't prove there was a separate market for webbrowsers. The parts that are left are the rotten deals they forced on OEMs and such. I have a nasty feeling that any remedies will have little or no effect since Microsoft is constantly changing their business dealings with those OEMs and the anti-competitive stuff they did back then is very different from the anti-competitive stuff they're doing now.
Microsoft are going to be _hosed_ with due process of law. Call that 'winning'? Cos I don't.
The problem I see is the remedies for the anti-competitive behaviour with their dealings with OEMs and ISPs is likely to be very different in scope than the remedy for brutally clubbing a competitor by giving away your software for free for years and then integrating it into the operating system to finish them off. Both could probably be fixed by trying to stimulate competition in the marketplace, but I doubt the court will try to go that way this time around. It'll probably try to make Microsoft reform their licensing practices instead.
Although, perhaps the sweetest irony of it all is that after Microsoft insisted time and time again that removing Internet Explorer from Windows would break Windows, Microsoft intends to offer just that in Windows XP, perhaps as nothing more than a peace offering to try and get the states and DoJ off their backs.
Microsoft is winning on the legal front. Hey, I've even heard jokes that were when Microsoft got broken up the two companies were going to be, Legal, and everything else. Having states drop out is not a good thing on this case. But there needs to be more than just this case going on.
Well, if this case is any indication, Microsoft Legal would go down in flames. The decision by the appeals court criticised Microsoft's defense time and time again. Microsoft is winning, not because of their legal team, but instead despite it, but because the prosecution isn't doing a very good job of coming up with sufficient evidence to prove that MS is doing what they claim.
No, I think the joke would work much better as Microsoft Marketing, and the rest of the company. All jokes aside, however, I think Microsoft would likely be benefited by splitting up rather than hurt by it. The end result would probably be that both divisions would try things they would have otherwise avoided in fear of competing against themselves, and most likely make even more money. Look at the "Baby Bells", and the effect of that split-up. If you want to see Microsoft hurt, asking them to be split up won't further your purpose. I don't think it's even a suitable remedy, since there's virtually no reason to believe that two Microsofts would stimulate more competition than just one Microsoft.
Remember that the aim of this lawsuit isn't to punish Microsoft but to remedy the anti-trust situation that Microsoft has created by their actions. I honestly think that points number 1 and 2 that GNU has proposed would do better than virtually any of the other recommendation that has been put forward. It would allow Microsoft to continue "innovating" and developing their products, however they would be required to document EVERYTHING, and would not be able to litigate against those who made compatible products unless they used Microsoft copyrighted code illegally. The end result would be that Microsoft developers would be happier, Microsoft's competitors would have better tools to compete with Microsoft on a level playing field, and it would negate the complaints of many competitors that Microsoft has an unfair advantage since they control both the OS and applications and can make whatever modification they need to either to make their own products work better (even if damages the performance of competitors products). I do not agree with point three, however, since this is a remedy for Microsoft's actions, not for hardware manufacturers.
The only body that I can think would be hurt by this would be Microsoft, in that they would have to invest in more employees to document the currently undocumented interfaces. The pain would only be temporary, as when the documentation on the currently undocumented interfaces is complete, only slightly more people would be needed to maintain documentation for new products and existing ones.
The really sad thing is that it isn't new with the recording industry. Companies that make all their money off sales of copyrighted items have been actively trying to forbid the resale of their items after first sale for years. I remember a news story on slashdot about a book publishing group bullying Amazon for offering used books on their website next to the new ones. Amazon eventually caved in and put an artificial separation between them. Microsoft actively prohibits the resale of OEM versions of their products via the licensing agreement on their products.
Quite frankly, all of this is bullshit. You can't tell me what I can and cannot do with an item after I bought it. If I want to resell the item, I should be able to without any legal restrictions on me. The copyright holder already made his or her money off the sale. If I want to tear it into tiny little bits and give a small piece to each of my friends, that, too, should be my right. After all, I paid for it, so it's now my property, and the seller's property rights to the item should've ended when they agreed to sell it to me at the stated price.
Not to mention you go to a theatre at 7:30 to see a movie at 8:00 which doesn't really start until 8:15, and then subjects you to stupid movie trailer advertising until 8:30. And why do we put up with it? Because it's the only way you can see the movie at it's inital release. Even if you buy the video or DVD, they still subject you to 10-20 minutes of advertising and "FBI Warnings".
Incidentally, EFnet did fix most of the problems with channel takeovers and nick colliding by adding timestampping. No longer can you ride splits for ops, or nick collide to get someone's nick. Hell, you can't even get ops on a split server anymore. The only tool left to the script kiddie is DoS attacks, which no network is immune to.
I think part of the problem is too few servers are running the latest hybrid server that supports all the newest timestamping features, so the morons are still DoSing servers that are linked to those server to get them to delink to get ops on them and ride it back in.
Yes, and many people have pointed out that those lawsuits that can be called without the company approving of the lawyer attacking someone do not include trademark. Only the company that holds the trademark is capable of litigating to maintain it's status. Those lawsuits where the lawyers act on behalf of a company without contacting them usually revolve around "unfair" and comparitive advertising. They are substancially different, since in the case of advertising, it can be said that the lawyer isn't working for the company but for the general public, whereas with trademark law in virtually any country, the only entity you could possibly be working for would be the company that holds the trademark.
Well, I think he deserves some kind of punishment, but what the prosecutors are proposing is absolutely stupid. We have someone who didn't act out of malice but rather just made a stupid decision, and they want to throw him in jail for a ridiculously long term. A more proper remedy to this would probably be something like community service and/or a small fine ($1,000-$5,000). There's no reason to turn a kid that would otherwise be a healthy member of society into a hardened criminal by throwing him in jail. He needs a slap on the wrist, not jail time.
If anything this is a case of the prosecutor and employer wanting to make an example of him. Utter stupidity.
Actually it doesn't tell you service pack, only revision and build (which is constant through the entire release cycle -- service packs don't modify it). It would only be useful if you were beta testing, and might be something MS developers use internally.
I remember Ctrl-P hanging the kernel in an IO problem loop[...]
What on earth are you talking about? Ctrl-P turned on printer echo, and the reason it hangs most systems was the fact that the printer was usually either off or there was no printer, so DOS was waiting for the printer to signal it was ready to receive. However, most versions of DOS would eventually timeout the operation if you waited long enough (or had print.exe loaded resident). Your system wasn't hung, it was busy-waiting.
That would be a cross linked cluster. FAT is infamous for causing that when the FATs only get partially updated. chkdsk/scandisk are usually able to fix them without much data loss. The only FAT corruption problem more common than crosslinks were "lost clusters" (allocated but unassigned clusters).
You don't see people putting their 4 digit bank pin on a post it note, right?
Not on a post-it-note, but I have seen people write it on their cards, or on another place in their wallet or purse. The entire stupidity of password changing regimes comes from the fact that without motivation, users seem to do a piss poor job at choosing passwords. As the IT password policy gets more strict, the users find new ways of subvirting the system to keep their "easy to remember" passwords.
Well, there was always the story of the Novell Netware server that was "lost" for four years, and turned out that it was built into a wall by accident. They only discovered it because they decided to audit all their equipment and couldn't find a server that they obviously had running.
The point isn't to have a pretty bootup, but to remove the useless information that's obtainable via other, more reliable, means. Do I really care about copyrights and versions of all the components on bootup? Not really. It might be handy having everything in one place with dmesg, but it's still too cluttered. I'd rather have information only on drivers probing hardware and the results it gets, and so on... You know, the stuff that's useful for diagnosing problems.
If nothing else, announcing module load/init should be output at debug priority, not informational priority. Debugging a non-working system would be the only real reason most people would ever need to see that.
The problem with this is that Debian doesn't backport bugfixes. Look at the stable version of sendmail, it's 8.9.3 whereas the 11.x series have been out for ages, and a zillion bugs have been fixed since 8.9.3 . Same thing with postgresql. Same thing with proftpd. It's not the need for the latest and greatest features, it's the need for the bugfixes and then maybe a feature or two that was introduced into the upstream three years ago.
There is a very good reason for this -- fixing bugs or adding features can often cause regression problems with either unrelated modules or user developed code. I've been bitten by such problems in the past, even with Debian, once because of the updated PHP release in which a security fix broke otherwise working code for entirely mysterious reasons (turns out arrays in an object with named elements stored in the session were broken by the update). By not fixing non-critical bugs and not adding non-critical features, it helps maintain the stability of the install as a whole.
Cyberlink was also developing a Linux version of their PowerDVD software, which eventually turned into something for use with embeded systems, only, too. If I believed in conspiracy theories, I would think something was going on here.
One of the major problems people have with this is not that it's a Microsoft 'innovation', it's that for a website to be immune to smart tags, you need to opt-out via meta tags on the page itself. I imagine far fewer people would have a problem that is opt-in. Simply disabling the feature by default doesn't quite cut it, either, because I'm sure that if it's turned off by default, MS will go out of their way to make it easy to turn on, whereas if it was turned on by default, they'd bury it somewhere in the long "Advanced" options list.
The idea of "Smart Tags" may not suck, but the implementation that MS has chosen does.
All this code really does is link to the Microsoft APIs. This doesn't make it an "open" format, because you cannot independantly reimplement the functionality of the APIs without Microsoft's "magic" DLLs and libraries. The APIs are open, the format itself and codecs are not. You will likely never see an WMA player on a non-supported operating system. Even the embeded player codecs are distributed in binary (ELF) format and can only decode 1 minute of data without properly purchasing licenses from Microsoft. There is absolutely nothing "open" about this, it's regular proprietary technology that is being heavily guarded, because as I said, failure to do so would probably undermine or weaken their "Digital Rights Manglement" selling feature to studios.
Re:the SIS chips are cool ...and linux support too
on
nVidia nForce
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· Score: 1
I've had the opposite experience with Linux and SIS based boards. The ones I've seen had some nasty problems with the SiS IDE controller that would lock up the system spontaneously when mounting CDs, or other IDE-based tasks. There were "phantom" SiS900 LAN adaptors detected (with no visible option to turn it off in the BIOS), and generally looked to me like a very shoddy board. About the only board I've never had a problem with are Intel chipset-based boards, since Intel has made a policy of documenting their chipsets and errata publically, the support for these boards in the Linux kernel seems exceptionally stable.
Why? If you're looking for an incredible integrated video and sound capabilities, the nForce will likely be the only decent choice. This chipset seems more aimed at middle end machines built by OEMs where the user doesn't really care what's in it, or for compact systems that need to take as little space as possible. The SiS chipset seems far more for traditional power users who want to swap out any of their components. I dont' think people who buy the nForce will be the same people who would've bought a SiS735 based board. It will, however, raise the bar against some of SiS's other chipsets that feature integrated video, audio and LAN, and force them to create more powerful video and audio in their chipsets.
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Indeed. However, most people rely on the fact that the database server itself won't lend a willing hand in the destruction of your data by feeding you incorrect information from SELECT commands.
MS SQL Server is alive and kicking and pervasive throughout enterprise computing. With proper care, it can be as reliable and strong as Oracle and leagues stronger than MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Reliable is not random data loss. If SELECTs and ORDER BY ops are not returning all the data they should, there is something seriously wrong, and the best DBA in the world probably can't do a damn thing about it. One would expect that some esoteric features might be buggy, but one that is as ubiquitous as SELECT? RDBMS's live and die by the data integrity they provide -- I wouldn't run MySQL for a mission critical system that could not ever lose or corrupt data because it was never made for that. MS SQL and Oracle are both designed to do this, and if MS SQL can't deliver, I'd call that a pretty big reliability problem.
American Registry for Internet Numbers. They fill the same role as RIPE does in Europe, etc.
It, of course, depends on what you're encoding. WMA has been long known to add artifacts to certain kinds of sounds during the encoding process, such as pre-echo. Some sounds, like drums, can be quite distorted by this, although obviously in the case of the article, some of the listeners actually liked the pre-echo -- "On MP3Pro, I could hear the valves closing on the clarinet and the bassoon".
That must be why people are sticking with Windows 95 or Windows 98 on their P75-P166's instead of constantly upgrading to the latest and greatest. It works "well enough" for most people. The danger of a monopoly is best illustrated by the monopoly IBM had on mainframes. They had no real reason to innovate, so they merely trickled features to customers to get the revenue rather than really trying to provide what the customer wanted. Doesn't matter if you're subscribing to the license or flat-out purchasing it, the result will be the same. Put enough on the plate that people will be tempted to buy the upgrade but not enough to satiate their appetite for a long time.
Although, perhaps the sweetest irony of it all is that after Microsoft insisted time and time again that removing Internet Explorer from Windows would break Windows, Microsoft intends to offer just that in Windows XP, perhaps as nothing more than a peace offering to try and get the states and DoJ off their backs.
No, I think the joke would work much better as Microsoft Marketing, and the rest of the company. All jokes aside, however, I think Microsoft would likely be benefited by splitting up rather than hurt by it. The end result would probably be that both divisions would try things they would have otherwise avoided in fear of competing against themselves, and most likely make even more money. Look at the "Baby Bells", and the effect of that split-up. If you want to see Microsoft hurt, asking them to be split up won't further your purpose. I don't think it's even a suitable remedy, since there's virtually no reason to believe that two Microsofts would stimulate more competition than just one Microsoft.
Remember that the aim of this lawsuit isn't to punish Microsoft but to remedy the anti-trust situation that Microsoft has created by their actions. I honestly think that points number 1 and 2 that GNU has proposed would do better than virtually any of the other recommendation that has been put forward. It would allow Microsoft to continue "innovating" and developing their products, however they would be required to document EVERYTHING, and would not be able to litigate against those who made compatible products unless they used Microsoft copyrighted code illegally. The end result would be that Microsoft developers would be happier, Microsoft's competitors would have better tools to compete with Microsoft on a level playing field, and it would negate the complaints of many competitors that Microsoft has an unfair advantage since they control both the OS and applications and can make whatever modification they need to either to make their own products work better (even if damages the performance of competitors products). I do not agree with point three, however, since this is a remedy for Microsoft's actions, not for hardware manufacturers.
The only body that I can think would be hurt by this would be Microsoft, in that they would have to invest in more employees to document the currently undocumented interfaces. The pain would only be temporary, as when the documentation on the currently undocumented interfaces is complete, only slightly more people would be needed to maintain documentation for new products and existing ones.
Quite frankly, all of this is bullshit. You can't tell me what I can and cannot do with an item after I bought it. If I want to resell the item, I should be able to without any legal restrictions on me. The copyright holder already made his or her money off the sale. If I want to tear it into tiny little bits and give a small piece to each of my friends, that, too, should be my right. After all, I paid for it, so it's now my property, and the seller's property rights to the item should've ended when they agreed to sell it to me at the stated price.
Not to mention you go to a theatre at 7:30 to see a movie at 8:00 which doesn't really start until 8:15, and then subjects you to stupid movie trailer advertising until 8:30. And why do we put up with it? Because it's the only way you can see the movie at it's inital release. Even if you buy the video or DVD, they still subject you to 10-20 minutes of advertising and "FBI Warnings".
Yes, and many people have pointed out that those lawsuits that can be called without the company approving of the lawyer attacking someone do not include trademark. Only the company that holds the trademark is capable of litigating to maintain it's status. Those lawsuits where the lawyers act on behalf of a company without contacting them usually revolve around "unfair" and comparitive advertising. They are substancially different, since in the case of advertising, it can be said that the lawyer isn't working for the company but for the general public, whereas with trademark law in virtually any country, the only entity you could possibly be working for would be the company that holds the trademark.
If anything this is a case of the prosecutor and employer wanting to make an example of him. Utter stupidity.
Actually it doesn't tell you service pack, only revision and build (which is constant through the entire release cycle -- service packs don't modify it). It would only be useful if you were beta testing, and might be something MS developers use internally.
That would be a cross linked cluster. FAT is infamous for causing that when the FATs only get partially updated. chkdsk/scandisk are usually able to fix them without much data loss. The only FAT corruption problem more common than crosslinks were "lost clusters" (allocated but unassigned clusters).
Well, there was always the story of the Novell Netware server that was "lost" for four years, and turned out that it was built into a wall by accident. They only discovered it because they decided to audit all their equipment and couldn't find a server that they obviously had running.
Whoa.... Head hurts.... Too much circular logic...
If nothing else, announcing module load/init should be output at debug priority, not informational priority. Debugging a non-working system would be the only real reason most people would ever need to see that.
There is a very good reason for this -- fixing bugs or adding features can often cause regression problems with either unrelated modules or user developed code. I've been bitten by such problems in the past, even with Debian, once because of the updated PHP release in which a security fix broke otherwise working code for entirely mysterious reasons (turns out arrays in an object with named elements stored in the session were broken by the update). By not fixing non-critical bugs and not adding non-critical features, it helps maintain the stability of the install as a whole.
Which means they were too cheap to do a proper form letter, and this is more or less just to intimidate people into co-operating.
Cyberlink was also developing a Linux version of their PowerDVD software, which eventually turned into something for use with embeded systems, only, too. If I believed in conspiracy theories, I would think something was going on here.
The idea of "Smart Tags" may not suck, but the implementation that MS has chosen does.
All this code really does is link to the Microsoft APIs. This doesn't make it an "open" format, because you cannot independantly reimplement the functionality of the APIs without Microsoft's "magic" DLLs and libraries. The APIs are open, the format itself and codecs are not. You will likely never see an WMA player on a non-supported operating system. Even the embeded player codecs are distributed in binary (ELF) format and can only decode 1 minute of data without properly purchasing licenses from Microsoft. There is absolutely nothing "open" about this, it's regular proprietary technology that is being heavily guarded, because as I said, failure to do so would probably undermine or weaken their "Digital Rights Manglement" selling feature to studios.
I've had the opposite experience with Linux and SIS based boards. The ones I've seen had some nasty problems with the SiS IDE controller that would lock up the system spontaneously when mounting CDs, or other IDE-based tasks. There were "phantom" SiS900 LAN adaptors detected (with no visible option to turn it off in the BIOS), and generally looked to me like a very shoddy board. About the only board I've never had a problem with are Intel chipset-based boards, since Intel has made a policy of documenting their chipsets and errata publically, the support for these boards in the Linux kernel seems exceptionally stable.
Why? If you're looking for an incredible integrated video and sound capabilities, the nForce will likely be the only decent choice. This chipset seems more aimed at middle end machines built by OEMs where the user doesn't really care what's in it, or for compact systems that need to take as little space as possible. The SiS chipset seems far more for traditional power users who want to swap out any of their components. I dont' think people who buy the nForce will be the same people who would've bought a SiS735 based board. It will, however, raise the bar against some of SiS's other chipsets that feature integrated video, audio and LAN, and force them to create more powerful video and audio in their chipsets.