There is a serious, fundamental flaw in the FAQ (and, in fact, in RMS's thinking). It is best captured in the following question from the FAQ:
Since many people call it "Linux", doesn't that make it right?
We don't think that the popularity of an error makes it the truth.
The fundamental flaw is the name equals credit. In fact, what people call something is a popularity contest. If people call the system Linux, then it *is* Linux. That does not change the truth of who the major contributors of the system are in any way.
In fact, the FAQ recognizes the absurdity of using a name as a forum for giving credit:
Many other projects contributed to the system as it is today; it includes TeX, X11, Apache, Perl, and many more programs. Don't your arguments imply we have to give them credit too? (But that would lead to a name so long it is absurd.)
What we say is that you ought to give the system's principal developer a share of the credit. The principal developer is the GNU Project.
If you feel even more strongly about giving credit where it is due, you might feel that some secondary contributors also deserve credit in the system's name. If so, far be it from us to argue against it. If you feel that X11 deserves credit in the system's name, and you want to call the system GNU/X11/Linux, please do. If you free that Perl simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go ahead.
Since a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point, you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions. There is no one obvious right place to set the threshold, so wherever you set it, we won't argue against it.
If names are proper tools for giving credit, then this argument holds up. However, this argument shows just how absurd it is to use names as tools for giving credit. That's why movies have short names like The Matrix and a whole list of credits at the end. Furthermore, if the GNU people had any sense of brand awareness whatsoever, they would know that names by credit generally make shitty brands anyways.
The bottom line is that the FSF should drop this GNU/Linux bullshit. It serves no purpose other than to make them look bad and make a huge mockery out of the entire open source and free software crowds.
I would love to see a solution that lets you run a laptop hoem dir off a network share even when not connected to the network like Windows 2000 allows. Basically, Win2k lets you mark network directories like your home directory for offline access. It synchronizes and thus whether or not you are on the network is transparent to you.
It is up again. I was redoing the site and then got sidetracked. I probably won't get the site redone for another year, but you can now access the timeline at the original URL.
I do have a tendency to get out of relationships where the decision making process tends to be unilateral.
Who said anything about the relationship decision-making process being unilateral? We are talking about one decision about a gift.
As long as there's TWO people that are getting married and TWO people having a baby or engaging themselves or whatever, there are to voices to be heard.
Can I be in the room when you tell a woman that "TWO people are having a baby"? It should prove quite entertaining. Yes, two people conceived the baby and two people are responsible for its upbringing, but only one of those people is going to share her body for nine months with another being and only one of those people are going to have her privates ripped apart when the being decides to be born.
With respect to the issue at hand, however, we are not talking about who is going to do the dishes tonight. We are talking about a gift being given by one for the other. As a general rule, giving a gift is not about the giver. When the issue at hand is one of the single most significant gifts of a lifetime, then really, the giver should be focused entirely on what the recipient wants and not their own petty political issues.
If my logic is not required, my counterpart can go find someone whose logic he/she DOES require. And I hope my partner thinks the same.
That is absurd reasoning on your part. Very few single decisions in any relationship are 50/50 propositions. Very few are also 100/0. Most are 60/40, 75/25, or even 90/10. Sometimes one partner is on the weighted end, sometimes the other is. An engagement ring is an example of what should be a 90/10 decision in favor of the woman. A house is an example of what should be a 50/50 decision.
Over the course of a healthy relationship, the give and take approaches 50/50. I doubt anyone is truly in a relationship that has averaged to 50/50. I am willing to bet no one has ever been in a relationship in which every decision was based on equal consideration of each partner's desires.
Doesn't open and respectful communication make your partner happy?
Of course. But so does patronizing them. And that is exactly what you are suggesting.
Saying that she wants one hence she needs one to me means that you view your girlfriend as an almost non-sentient being that is incapable of abstract thought. In my own girlfriends case this would be an insult.
That's just a load of shit. Getting engaged is not a logical thing. It is an affair of the heart. You don't take your girlfriend aside and say, "I know you want a diamond, but..." followed by a litany of logical reasons why she should not want what she wants. It does not matter if you are right, and it is especially bad if you are wrong.
What she wants on this issue is right. Period. Your logic is not required. There are only two times when this is true. When you get married and when she is pregnant.
You cannot go against nature.
Because when you do
Go against nature
It's part of nature too
A well cut diamond is beautiful. You may think it is ugly. Fine. But there is nothing magic about your belief they are ugly just because your belief runs against the preaching of foreign diamond cartels.
The point here being that more people should quit doing what they're doing just because the rest does it too
In many cases, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this behavior. There are so many decisions in life, you often need to go with the flow to keep sane. That includes making decisions because those around you make the same ones and making decisions because they are contrary to the decisions made by those around you.
In this case, for whatever reason, his girlfriend wants the diamond. That is the only salient point in this discussion.
What's a good substitute for diamonds? My girlfriend understands my thoughts regarding diamonds, but deep down, I'm sure she would like a diamond. Even a small one.
I think you have answered your own question. You are buying this gift for her to express your love. What matters is what she wants--your political sensitivities be damned.
Is the need for diamonds a manufactured demand? Yes. A few years ago, less than 5% of Japanese engagements involved rings. Today, after a concerted marketing effort by diamond companies, diamond rings are part of most engagements.
Manufactured desire or not, however, a diamond is what your girlfriend desires. Therefore a diamond is what you should buy her.
...diamonds have no resale value. Naddah. Zilch. They'll sell you the shit, but damn it, they're not taking it back at any price
Actually, this is not true. First, diamonds do have resale value. More important, however, you can find jewelers who will take back the diamonds. I got the ring for my wife from such a jeweler.
Because you reduced this very complex question of human rights, laws of "war" (where war is arbitrary defined) and more into a baseball game.
Analogies exist exactly for the sake of taking a very complex subject and referencing common essential elements in a more simple subject.
You are comparing the POWs and the government, like they were two equal teams, with equal equipment, with a well known set of rules that applies equally to the teams, and that is something that you watch for entertainment.
Actually, I am not talking about the POW's at all. I am talking about the people being illegally detained by the government since 9/11. The rules are well known. It is called the constitution. The other side simply has not gotten its chance at the plate yet.
If you reply, please stick to that subject.
So far I have had no problem sticking to the subject. Not sure why you felt you needed to add this bit of advice.
This, dear, was the most stupid analogy I have ever read.
And why is that exactly?
Since it seems beyond you, I will explain further. You see, his claim is that in America you can detain individuals, try them in a military court, and summarily execute them.
Unfortunately for his point, there is no real example of such a thing occurring in the USA in modern history. The only skimpy evidence he has to backup his claims are some people recently held in the USA after Sept 11 without due process.
The problem for these facts as evidence is that the whole drama has yet to play itself out. This practice of the Ashcroft dictatorship has not been truly tested in the court system. It will be tested, and it almost certainly will fail. The precedents Ashcroft cites are generally considered to be very narrow in scope and thus not at all applicable to the situation at hand. In fact, it is doubtful Ashcroft even expects it to hold up; they are probably just trying to hold these people as long as they can to keep them out of the terrorism game.
So though what Ashcroft is doing is disgusting and downright evil, it will not hold up to the full process of American constitutional law. America's constitution will eventually vindicate itself against the abusive excesses of the man who lost an election to a dead man. No non-combatant will be tried by a military court, and no one will be summarily executed as the article author claims.
As the tagline read, this article full of faulty premises. Some lovely quotes:
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability.
This stupid legal approach to intellectual property is not limited. Major entertainment companies from all over the world are pushing countries to enact similar laws. In fact, the US is not the only country with such stupid laws. Deep linking, for example, is illegal in the Netherlands. Who is gonna protect the European internet from them?
US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
Thank god! The foreign courts are trying to censor the free speech of US citizens.
Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret.
Can he name one example where such a thing has happened? Sklyarov was interned with due process and eventually set free. True, Ashcroft is testing the bounds of the US constitution by holding suspected foreign terrorists, however:
Except for the POW's, these actions have yet to be tested in a court of law. It is almost certain that the government will lose and these people will be set free.
No one has yet faced a military tribunal.
No one has been executed.
His arguments on this count are like proclaiming that baseball is an unfair sport in the middle of the first inning because only one team ever gets to bat.
Its Chief Executive illegally sold shares when in possession of privileged information about an impending price crash.
In spite of many investigations on this issue, it has never been shown to be true. Furthermore, if it were true, what would it have to do with a private European Internet? Every country ends up electing bad apples into leadership roles. The beauty of a democracy is not the prevention of electing bad people to office, but the ability to recover from having done so.
ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward
Congress is not pleased with the way ICANN behaves. Congress is the biggest current threat to ICANN.
These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution.
The beauty of the Internet is that no one is really setting the rules. Anyways, who would you trust to set the rules? The French government?
It is time to reclaim the net from the Americans.
Reclaim it from the Americans? Is he aware where the net came from?
Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?
The kinds of laws cited by Bill here are few and generally related to things like child porn and molestation. On the other hand, if the laws of all countries apply to the net equally, then it is nearly certain that I am breaking a law every time I do something online. Funny though, that he decries the enforcement of the DMCA on Europeans but then describes a world in which all laws--not just one poorly thought out law--transcend borders.
Once we clear our minds of these erroneous beliefs we can see that the US has no right to determine how the whole Internet is run.
Exactly how is the US dictating how the whole Internet is run? He shows nowhere an example of the US government dictating world Internet use.
Europe is the birthplace of the Web
Where did he craft this illusion?
A trusted network will not stop the Americans - or anyone else - opting out and remaining with their existing unregulated Internet. Just like the survivalists heading out to Oregon with their assault weapons and dried food, those who don't want to be part of the great online civilisation could establish their own enclaves, where they would be free to run the code of their choice
Doesn't he have it wrong? Isn't his network the little survivalist, whacko bunch living outside established civilization?
But inside Europe our values, our principles and our legal system can determine how our part of the Net is run.
What the fuck is European values and principles and legal system? It is painful enough to get Europeans to agree on a freaking currency!
In Europe our copyright laws allow lending of material, and so media players licensed for use within the dataspace would not restrict personal copying or lending, although they would respect other rights.
Using what? A magic DRM fairy that knows when the copying you are doing is an "illegal copying" and when it is a "legal copying"?
Over here, human rights legislation, interpreted by judges who are able to use their intelligence instead of just relying on textual analysis of the Bill of Rights, gives us a much better chance of tying online action to the real world and integrating cyberspace with real space in way that benefits both.
In other words, Bill is saying that the whims of a couple of old French guys is worth more than a long-established, written law.
There is no excuse for a browser to operate on pages that contain broken open and close tags.
Assuming you are correct (I will not debate that since several other posters have done that well enough), your point is a complete non-sequitur.
My point was about support for W3C standards. Supporting broken open/close tags has nothing to do with compliance with those standards since those standards say nothing about what a browser is to do with such tags. The standards simply define what correct is and what the browser should do with correct things. And to that end, the other browsers cannot get things to behave the way they are supposed to when things are correct. Your concern about what IE does when things are wrong is just plain silly.
Which part of it is a lie? Go read any browser comparison. Or, better yet, try viewing any page that is actually standards compliant using XHTML, CSS2, and JavaScript. They look good only on IE (though Mozilla has recently made some huge advances).
What the fuck is this doing getting modded down as a troll? There is nothing "troll" about this post. IE has better support for W3C standards. Maybe these fuckhead moderators should check their facts.
The article claims this is the first of its kind to enable visually impaired and sighted users to compete on a level playing field.
Bullshit!
Because of their text-based UI, muds (which have been around the Internet since the 70's and popular during the late 80's to mid-90's) have always provided such a gaming environment.
Yeah, ignore the fact that, for the longest time, IE was the only browser even close to compliant with Web standards. Even today, OmniWeb sucks with JavaScript, Opera is a buggy piece of shit, and Netscape/Mozilla barfs on complex CSS positioning.
First of all, you changed the topic from database to relational database.
Second of all, most RDBMS's out there are not fully ACID; at least, not as deployed in most environments. Thus, by your arguments (which you have made none since you have not really offered up and citations showing this definition), there are no RDBMS's.
Most applications that use databases have at least one context in which more than a single table is updated at a time. You are describing a very niche usage of databases.
I am describing most content-oriented web sites (like/.) with dynamically driven content coming from a database. This is indeed a niche, but it is a big ass niche.
Furthermore, if most of your operations are read operations and you have a couple of multi-table writes (and thus require transactions), there are in fact ways to maintain database consistency without transactions.
Besides, even if only one insert is done into a single table, it is still possible to get data corruption without transactions. If your write ends up done over more than one page, then you need transactions. Also, it is possible that a page split will occur during insert or update, thus what you think is a single write ends up being multiple writes. You do not control this.
No, but most MySQL table types protect against this situation.
If you are updating the data ever, full ATOMicity is required.
So, if your data model only requires an update against a single table at a time, why do you require ACIDity?
Almost no one uses fully ACID transactions. They are simply too costly. Most people use some form of optimistic concurrency to get around the costs of long-lived transactions. If you are issuing a single update/delete/insert against a single table as part of your transaction, then using MySQL without transaction support and optimistic concurrency checks is not distinguishable from doing the same thing in a database with transaction support.
And, yes, there are entire problem domains--namely most dynamic web sites--in which this form of transaction rules. MySQL is faster than any other database for these kinds of operations and makes the most sense.
The book covers good database design and database application design. It covers normalization, denormalization, object/relational modeling, and distributed application architecture.
Slashdot Mirror
Since many people call it "Linux", doesn't that make it right?
We don't think that the popularity of an error makes it the truth.
The fundamental flaw is the name equals credit. In fact, what people call something is a popularity contest. If people call the system Linux, then it *is* Linux. That does not change the truth of who the major contributors of the system are in any way.
In fact, the FAQ recognizes the absurdity of using a name as a forum for giving credit:
Many other projects contributed to the system as it is today; it includes TeX, X11, Apache, Perl, and many more programs. Don't your arguments imply we have to give them credit too? (But that would lead to a name so long it is absurd.)
What we say is that you ought to give the system's principal developer a share of the credit. The principal developer is the GNU Project.
If you feel even more strongly about giving credit where it is due, you might feel that some secondary contributors also deserve credit in the system's name. If so, far be it from us to argue against it. If you feel that X11 deserves credit in the system's name, and you want to call the system GNU/X11/Linux, please do. If you free that Perl simply cries out for mention, and you want to write GNU/Linux/Perl, go ahead.
Since a long name such as GNU/X11/Apache/Linux/TeX/Perl/Python/FreeCiv becomes absurd, at some point, you will have to set a threshold and omit the names of the many other secondary contributions. There is no one obvious right place to set the threshold, so wherever you set it, we won't argue against it.
If names are proper tools for giving credit, then this argument holds up. However, this argument shows just how absurd it is to use names as tools for giving credit. That's why movies have short names like The Matrix and a whole list of credits at the end. Furthermore, if the GNU people had any sense of brand awareness whatsoever, they would know that names by credit generally make shitty brands anyways.
The bottom line is that the FSF should drop this GNU/Linux bullshit. It serves no purpose other than to make them look bad and make a huge mockery out of the entire open source and free software crowds.
NFS sucks ass, especially if your clients are laptops. The minute the network goes away, your system starts hanging.
I would love to see a solution that lets you run a laptop hoem dir off a network share even when not connected to the network like Windows 2000 allows. Basically, Win2k lets you mark network directories like your home directory for offline access. It synchronizes and thus whether or not you are on the network is transparent to you.
It is up again. I was redoing the site and then got sidetracked. I probably won't get the site redone for another year, but you can now access the timeline at the original URL.
Who said anything about the relationship decision-making process being unilateral? We are talking about one decision about a gift.
As long as there's TWO people that are getting married and TWO people having a baby or engaging themselves or whatever, there are to voices to be heard.
Can I be in the room when you tell a woman that "TWO people are having a baby"? It should prove quite entertaining. Yes, two people conceived the baby and two people are responsible for its upbringing, but only one of those people is going to share her body for nine months with another being and only one of those people are going to have her privates ripped apart when the being decides to be born.
With respect to the issue at hand, however, we are not talking about who is going to do the dishes tonight. We are talking about a gift being given by one for the other. As a general rule, giving a gift is not about the giver. When the issue at hand is one of the single most significant gifts of a lifetime, then really, the giver should be focused entirely on what the recipient wants and not their own petty political issues.
If my logic is not required, my counterpart can go find someone whose logic he/she DOES require. And I hope my partner thinks the same.
That is absurd reasoning on your part. Very few single decisions in any relationship are 50/50 propositions. Very few are also 100/0. Most are 60/40, 75/25, or even 90/10. Sometimes one partner is on the weighted end, sometimes the other is. An engagement ring is an example of what should be a 90/10 decision in favor of the woman. A house is an example of what should be a 50/50 decision.
Over the course of a healthy relationship, the give and take approaches 50/50. I doubt anyone is truly in a relationship that has averaged to 50/50. I am willing to bet no one has ever been in a relationship in which every decision was based on equal consideration of each partner's desires.
Or is this a remarkable view on relationships?
No, it is a terribly naive view of relationships.
As they say, the man who represents himself has a fool for a client.
Of course. But so does patronizing them. And that is exactly what you are suggesting.
Saying that she wants one hence she needs one to me means that you view your girlfriend as an almost non-sentient being that is incapable of abstract thought. In my own girlfriends case this would be an insult.
That's just a load of shit. Getting engaged is not a logical thing. It is an affair of the heart. You don't take your girlfriend aside and say, "I know you want a diamond, but..." followed by a litany of logical reasons why she should not want what she wants. It does not matter if you are right, and it is especially bad if you are wrong.
What she wants on this issue is right. Period. Your logic is not required. There are only two times when this is true. When you get married and when she is pregnant.
You cannot go against nature.
Because when you do
Go against nature
It's part of nature too
A well cut diamond is beautiful. You may think it is ugly. Fine. But there is nothing magic about your belief they are ugly just because your belief runs against the preaching of foreign diamond cartels.
The point here being that more people should quit doing what they're doing just because the rest does it too
In many cases, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this behavior. There are so many decisions in life, you often need to go with the flow to keep sane. That includes making decisions because those around you make the same ones and making decisions because they are contrary to the decisions made by those around you.
In this case, for whatever reason, his girlfriend wants the diamond. That is the only salient point in this discussion.
I think you have answered your own question. You are buying this gift for her to express your love. What matters is what she wants--your political sensitivities be damned.
Is the need for diamonds a manufactured demand? Yes. A few years ago, less than 5% of Japanese engagements involved rings. Today, after a concerted marketing effort by diamond companies, diamond rings are part of most engagements.
Manufactured desire or not, however, a diamond is what your girlfriend desires. Therefore a diamond is what you should buy her.
Actually, this is not true. First, diamonds do have resale value. More important, however, you can find jewelers who will take back the diamonds. I got the ring for my wife from such a jeweler.
Analogies exist exactly for the sake of taking a very complex subject and referencing common essential elements in a more simple subject.
You are comparing the POWs and the government, like they were two equal teams, with equal equipment, with a well known set of rules that applies equally to the teams, and that is something that you watch for entertainment.
Actually, I am not talking about the POW's at all. I am talking about the people being illegally detained by the government since 9/11. The rules are well known. It is called the constitution. The other side simply has not gotten its chance at the plate yet.
If you reply, please stick to that subject.
So far I have had no problem sticking to the subject. Not sure why you felt you needed to add this bit of advice.
And why is that exactly?
Since it seems beyond you, I will explain further. You see, his claim is that in America you can detain individuals, try them in a military court, and summarily execute them.
Unfortunately for his point, there is no real example of such a thing occurring in the USA in modern history. The only skimpy evidence he has to backup his claims are some people recently held in the USA after Sept 11 without due process.
The problem for these facts as evidence is that the whole drama has yet to play itself out. This practice of the Ashcroft dictatorship has not been truly tested in the court system. It will be tested, and it almost certainly will fail. The precedents Ashcroft cites are generally considered to be very narrow in scope and thus not at all applicable to the situation at hand. In fact, it is doubtful Ashcroft even expects it to hold up; they are probably just trying to hold these people as long as they can to keep them out of the terrorism game.
So though what Ashcroft is doing is disgusting and downright evil, it will not hold up to the full process of American constitutional law. America's constitution will eventually vindicate itself against the abusive excesses of the man who lost an election to a dead man. No non-combatant will be tried by a military court, and no one will be summarily executed as the article author claims.
We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability.
This stupid legal approach to intellectual property is not limited. Major entertainment companies from all over the world are pushing countries to enact similar laws. In fact, the US is not the only country with such stupid laws. Deep linking, for example, is illegal in the Netherlands. Who is gonna protect the European internet from them?
US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will.
Thank god! The foreign courts are trying to censor the free speech of US citizens.
Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret.
Can he name one example where such a thing has happened? Sklyarov was interned with due process and eventually set free. True, Ashcroft is testing the bounds of the US constitution by holding suspected foreign terrorists, however:
- Except for the POW's, these actions have yet to be tested in a court of law. It is almost certain that the government will lose and these people will be set free.
- No one has yet faced a military tribunal.
- No one has been executed.
His arguments on this count are like proclaiming that baseball is an unfair sport in the middle of the first inning because only one team ever gets to bat.Its Chief Executive illegally sold shares when in possession of privileged information about an impending price crash.
In spite of many investigations on this issue, it has never been shown to be true. Furthermore, if it were true, what would it have to do with a private European Internet? Every country ends up electing bad apples into leadership roles. The beauty of a democracy is not the prevention of electing bad people to office, but the ability to recover from having done so.
ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward
Congress is not pleased with the way ICANN behaves. Congress is the biggest current threat to ICANN.
These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution.
The beauty of the Internet is that no one is really setting the rules. Anyways, who would you trust to set the rules? The French government?
It is time to reclaim the net from the Americans.
Reclaim it from the Americans? Is he aware where the net came from?
Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?
The kinds of laws cited by Bill here are few and generally related to things like child porn and molestation. On the other hand, if the laws of all countries apply to the net equally, then it is nearly certain that I am breaking a law every time I do something online. Funny though, that he decries the enforcement of the DMCA on Europeans but then describes a world in which all laws--not just one poorly thought out law--transcend borders.
Once we clear our minds of these erroneous beliefs we can see that the US has no right to determine how the whole Internet is run.
Exactly how is the US dictating how the whole Internet is run? He shows nowhere an example of the US government dictating world Internet use.
Europe is the birthplace of the Web
Where did he craft this illusion?
A trusted network will not stop the Americans - or anyone else - opting out and remaining with their existing unregulated Internet. Just like the survivalists heading out to Oregon with their assault weapons and dried food, those who don't want to be part of the great online civilisation could establish their own enclaves, where they would be free to run the code of their choice
Doesn't he have it wrong? Isn't his network the little survivalist, whacko bunch living outside established civilization?
But inside Europe our values, our principles and our legal system can determine how our part of the Net is run.
What the fuck is European values and principles and legal system? It is painful enough to get Europeans to agree on a freaking currency!
In Europe our copyright laws allow lending of material, and so media players licensed for use within the dataspace would not restrict personal copying or lending, although they would respect other rights.
Using what? A magic DRM fairy that knows when the copying you are doing is an "illegal copying" and when it is a "legal copying"?
Over here, human rights legislation, interpreted by judges who are able to use their intelligence instead of just relying on textual analysis of the Bill of Rights, gives us a much better chance of tying online action to the real world and integrating cyberspace with real space in way that benefits both.
In other words, Bill is saying that the whims of a couple of old French guys is worth more than a long-established, written law.
I suggest you go back to elementary school for remedial reading comprehension classes.
Assuming you are correct (I will not debate that since several other posters have done that well enough), your point is a complete non-sequitur.
My point was about support for W3C standards. Supporting broken open/close tags has nothing to do with compliance with those standards since those standards say nothing about what a browser is to do with such tags. The standards simply define what correct is and what the browser should do with correct things. And to that end, the other browsers cannot get things to behave the way they are supposed to when things are correct. Your concern about what IE does when things are wrong is just plain silly.
Which part of it is a lie? Go read any browser comparison. Or, better yet, try viewing any page that is actually standards compliant using XHTML, CSS2, and JavaScript. They look good only on IE (though Mozilla has recently made some huge advances).
What the fuck is this doing getting modded down as a troll? There is nothing "troll" about this post. IE has better support for W3C standards. Maybe these fuckhead moderators should check their facts.
Bullshit!
Because of their text-based UI, muds (which have been around the Internet since the 70's and popular during the late 80's to mid-90's) have always provided such a gaming environment.
Yeah, ignore the fact that, for the longest time, IE was the only browser even close to compliant with Web standards. Even today, OmniWeb sucks with JavaScript, Opera is a buggy piece of shit, and Netscape/Mozilla barfs on complex CSS positioning.
Second of all, most RDBMS's out there are not fully ACID; at least, not as deployed in most environments. Thus, by your arguments (which you have made none since you have not really offered up and citations showing this definition), there are no RDBMS's.
We skipped C++ since it is a relatively new MySQL API. You can, of course, interface with MySQL from C++ using both MySQL++ and the C API.
No, it does not cover replication.
I am describing most content-oriented web sites (like /.) with dynamically driven content coming from a database. This is indeed a niche, but it is a big ass niche.
Furthermore, if most of your operations are read operations and you have a couple of multi-table writes (and thus require transactions), there are in fact ways to maintain database consistency without transactions.
Besides, even if only one insert is done into a single table, it is still possible to get data corruption without transactions. If your write ends up done over more than one page, then you need transactions. Also, it is possible that a page split will occur during insert or update, thus what you think is a single write ends up being multiple writes. You do not control this.
No, but most MySQL table types protect against this situation.
A database is just a collection of data. There are a billion different kinds of databases, some ACID, some not.
So, if your data model only requires an update against a single table at a time, why do you require ACIDity?
Almost no one uses fully ACID transactions. They are simply too costly. Most people use some form of optimistic concurrency to get around the costs of long-lived transactions. If you are issuing a single update/delete/insert against a single table as part of your transaction, then using MySQL without transaction support and optimistic concurrency checks is not distinguishable from doing the same thing in a database with transaction support.
And, yes, there are entire problem domains--namely most dynamic web sites--in which this form of transaction rules. MySQL is faster than any other database for these kinds of operations and makes the most sense.
And, by the way, MySQL DOES support transactions.
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