Ok.. I've read it. I have no idea what made you believe that your proposed use falls under the aegis of fair use, but it's pretty clear that nothing in section 107 or 108 gives any provision for the type of copying you're proposing.
Now, since you're obviously incapable of reading the links you yourself provide, and since you're under some sort of delusion that books are "licensed" to you, I'm going to be extremely charitable and pretend like you're trolling me.
They can't force you to buy multiple copies if you already own a license to use/listen/read it.
When I buy a book, I don't get a "license" for that book. I buy a copy of the book. I imagine that someday, I will get a license, but it hasn't happened yet, thank god. I sure as fuck don't look forward to the day when I do get a license, and I can only hope that my "book license" doesn't resemble the bull-shit that are software license today.
I'll ask a friend for a copy of their original, and that I'll have no compunction about doing so.
What, exactly, makes you believe you're allowed to make another copy of a CD, when your first one wears out or is destroyed? At what point did we start to believe that we owned a copy of the information on the CD, instead of owning a copy of the representation of the information?
I'm not kidding here, either; what makes you think you bought the bits for perpetuity, instead of one copy of the representation of those bits, and only for as long as that representation lasts? At what point did copyright law stop being about the copies of the representation of the information, and start to be about the information itself?
The thing that you have to remember is that once you begin to believe that you've bought a copy of the information, instead of a copy of the representation of the information, we're suddenly much closer to the dark future warned of by Stallman. We suddenly find ourself in a situation where you pay for the information itself, instead paying for a representation of the information. We're suddenly talking about the information itself no longer being free.
The copyright law is totally f*cked, but it does do one thing -- information, today, is free -- it's the representation of the information that's not free. Once we start paying for the information itself, and stop paying for the representation, information stops being free.
You CAN make as many copys for personal use as you want, as long as you legally own a one copy.
That's great. Super. Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with downloading electronic copies made by someone else. Even if you own a copy of an album, what makes you think you can download a copy someone else made?
If you own a copy of a book, what makes you think you can download an electronic copy of that same book, when that electronic copy was made by someone else?
If you have a crappy old worn-out VHS copy of 'The 39 Steps', that doesn't give you the right to rip an mpeg-4 copy off a friend's DVD player.
It's a shitty set of laws, and as pb said, they don't have any basis in morality or the constitution. Tough shit. Harlan Ellison is the copyright holder -- he get's to decide who can make copies, within the set of guidelines known as fair use. You don't. Tough shit.
And, do you know what? I think Harlan Ellison is fundementally right. You dropped your paperback book in the tub? Tough shit -- buy another one. You have it in hardcover, and your friend has an electronic version, and now you want an electronic version too? Tough shit -- go buy one. Nine-tenth's of Harlan Ellison's titles are no longer in print, and not available in any used book store you can find? But some guy has scanned them all in with a decent OCR? Tough shit -- you can't have 'em. Too bad. You don't own the copyright. He does. Too bad.
Where exactly did people get the idea that they were buying the information, and not a single copy of the representation of the information?
At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want?"
It's called copyright law because it's a law that governs who has the right to copy the information. Buying one copy of a work doesn't give you the right to copy it -- that's the point of copyright. Owning a copy of a song on CD doesn't give you the right to download a copy of the song on Napster. Why the hell ever gave anyone the idea it would work that way? You might believe you "deserve" a copy in any format you want, as long as you've already bought one copy. There are laws that exempt you when you make copies of your own copies for personal use. But that never meant that you have the right to copy the information from anywhere in any damn format you might feel you want.
If you leave your copy of a vinyl record on the radiator and melt it, you don't get a free pass to copy someone else's CD, "since you already own the information." You're just fucked, and you have to buy a new copy. Tough shit.
Buying a copy of a book in paperback doesn't give you the right to get a copy of the book in electronic format, too. I'm glad you wish it did, because I wish it did, too. But it doesn't. If you want it in electronic format, you can buy it in electronic format, or type it in yourself for your own personal use. Too bad for you if the book is not available in electronic format; too bad for you if your friend already typed in a copy, and would be willing to give you a copy. Copyright is there to decide who has the right to copy, and you don't. Tough shit.
There's nothing stop any platform from implementing an OpenGL driver
In particular, at the time Farenheit was announced, there was nothing stopping SGI from releasing a decent hardware-accellerated OpenGL driver development kit for Win95.
I don't really know any of the history, except what I read on news groups at the time. Certainly, someone with the "real" history can fill in where I'm wrong (which might be everything). But, here's what I do remember:
At the time, Microsoft was actively heel-dragging on their own hardware accelerated OpenGL implentation on Win95, and using the delay to promote D3D for all it was worth. Back then, SGI still had a reputation for awesome workstations with kick-ass 3D graphics, and had just partnered with Nintendo to develop the graphics tech for their new game platform. They were the 800 pound gorilla in the 3D market, and it looked like they were in a position to jump into PC hardware. Then, SGI started to display their "Cosmo" OpenGL implementation on Win95, and if I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of talk that once SGI got into the market, OpenGL on the PC would be the path of the future -- D3D would be dead and gone, and Microsoft would be stuck with a cross-flatform accelerated 3D API.
But then, SGI didn't release Cosmo. And there was a few months delay, where each day they said "we'll release it soon, and when we do, we'll destroy Direct 3D on Windows." And, during that delay, Microsoft continued to improve Direct 3D -- their API's got better, and their relationship with the hardware vendors grew stronger.
After even more delay, at last SGI and Microsoft came out with a joint announcement -- they were going to write the magical graphics language -- backwards compatible with OpenGL, and Direct 3D, and Open Inventor, and Java 3D, and XML, and VRML, and... well, I exagerating there, but not by much. It was pretty clear that the Farenheit stuff was pie-in-the-sky technology.
It was also pretty clear that it was a carrot that Microsoft dangled in from of SGI's face, to get SGI to stop working on OpenGL for Windows. Instead of SGI partnering with other hardware companies to working on complicated 3D video drivers that Microsoft would almost certainly work to actively break in every new implementation of Windows, Microsoft offered SGI a chance to work on a new graphics API, one that Microsoft offered to embrace across the entire Windows platform. Farenheit was the Microsoft-approved road into the PC hardware for SGI. And like most Microsoft-approved roads, this one lead straight to hell.
It is very difficult to understand why a company like SGI would partner with a company like Microsoft. Perhaps at the time, SGI didn't realize how ubiquitous hardware accelerated 3-D graphics were going to become; they still saw it as a small and lucrative niche market that Microsoft would quickly grow bored with, and cede back to SGI. Perhaps SGI did look into the future, and saw accelerated 3D on the PC becomming commodity hardware, with no value to the SGI business model. Perhaps they also saw that most 3D applications on the PC would be commodity games, also with no real value for SGI. Maybe SGI realized Farenheit was just a way for SGI to politely step out of the PC market altogether, and they went down that path willingly.
Let's see if I have this right. You don't want to use Microsoft SQL Server on a Win2K box, and you'd rather use MySQL on a Linux box. You make no mention at all why you want to do this.
I have no clue what kind of application you have -- what the nature of your data is, or the nature of the front end is. I have absolutely no idea why you think a web browser front end, PHP middleware, and MySQL back end is the superior solution. (Or, perhaps by PHP front end, you were refering to that GTK/PHP toolkit mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago, and you want all the users to have a Linux box on their desk. I don't know.) I have absolutely no idea why you believe Microsoft SQL Server and a MS Access front end to be an inferior solution.
What I do know are these things. MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server are two vastly different applications. As a DBA, you are obviously aware that on a technical level, Microsoft SQL Server is the vastly superiour database. In a shop that is almost entirely Microsoft, with only a few Mac's, the MS SQL Server is going to vastly easier to keep running, unless you plan on hiring consultants or tech's dedicated to keeping the only linux box alive.
Face it... they're on completely different planes -- the only place that MySQL beats MS SQL is on speed, on only a subset of the queries that MySQL is able to perform. You won't find any other comparisons of the two databases, becuase MySQL simply will never, ever be able to do any of the things that MS SQL does, and does well. A fair, unbiased consumer reports comparison of the two databases would be nothing but hundreds or thousands of checkboxes that give MS SQL two or three or four stars, and give a little "N/A -- not available" mark to MySQL. It would be a joke.
I'll freely admit that there are many places why MySQL is useful. The standard Linux or BSD box, running Apache/mod_perl/PHP, with a MySQL database is a tottally rocking deal. If you're a decent Unix hacker, it's easy to keep running, it's extrodinarily flexible, it's easy to learn to use, and it's fairly well documented. For 98% of the websites out there, it's plenty good enough. You can even set one up in your office on a spare pentium 75, just to try stuff out before going live with it. I love the combo, and it's what we use on a lot of the sites we develop at work. But for the people who need it or want to pay for it, we use a real database. MySQL is a great database for developers who are aware that it is not a great database, and can explain why.
But for running a dedicated database machine, hooked up exclusively to a group of MS Windows clients running a MS Access front end, in an office where the DBA isn't smart enough to make ODBC work, and the DBA's boss only uses Mac's, I can't think of a single reason you'd want to use MySQL. Not one. Having a wierd box in the corner running a wierd database on a wierd operating system that only one guy in the office understands, duct-taped up to a bunch of Windows clients, seem like the perfect recipe for a maintenance disaster a few years down the road. What a crappy idea.
That isn't a problem. Naturally, Security only works when you can trust the user not to do anything stupid to circumvent it. Users should only be running programs that respect the level of security the user desires.
In particular, users shouldn't be compiling their own programs -- users can not be trusted to write code that respects the level of security they desire. Security is very complicated, and it is impossible for any mere computer user to understand all the nuances of writing a program that respects security. Similarly, the user should never attempt to use free programs, since without money exchanging hands, you have guarantee that the program respects security. Instead, users should only be purchasing pre-compiled programs from a reputable vendor, with the all the assurance that vendor gives that the application comes pre-configured to respect the level of security that the user desires.
Obviously, e-mail readers should continue be able to conveniently run programs sent to the user, but it's the users responsibility to make sure that those programs came from a reputable vendor, and aren't just some free program that may not respect the level of security the user desires.
I realize that holes will continue to be discovered in programs written by even the best, most respected vendors, and some of those holes will allow crackers to run arbitrary code to compromise a system. But again, it is the users responsibility to make sure that only representatives of trusted companies will be able to connect to the users machine, since only those representatives may be trusted to respect the correct level of security the user desirers. The importance of this can not be over-emphasized -- if a user allows anyone in the world to connect to a machine, the user has no way to ensure that only programs pre-configured to respect level of security the user desires will be run on the machine.
It is extremely important that all programs come pre-configured to respect the level of security the user desires. Users can not be trusted to manually configure all of the programs that they run, since each of those programs would obviously need a different set of dialog boxes and configuration files to manually configure their security levels. Users often get inexplicably bored viewing the hundreds of interesting and creative ways vendors choose to represent the unique and disparate security policies that vendors choose to implement. Only by using programs pre-configuring to the correct security level can the user be assured that he is recieving the correct level of security, so that the user can rest easily, knowing his computer is secure.
There are two reasons Linux users are so hard on Indrema.
The first reason is simple. Anyone who's even heard of Indrema is critical of it, and outside of the Linux community, no-one has even heard of the lousy thing.
The second reason is more complex. Most projects fail. In the closed world, most projects go into failure mode before the marketing department gets a hold of them. Most heavily marketed closed source stuff is either already some distance down the production path, or has some venture capitalists leaning very hard on the project to make sure it starts to move down that path very soon.
Open source stuff generally hops onto the marketing path very early. There's a lot of pressure in open source to get the world interested in you, but much less pressure to get something done -- check out the hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of projects on sourceforge that have version 0.1alpha of some code up, and empty mailing archives.
Linux users have become very, very cynical about project announcements -- even more so than Microsoft users. Simply put, I don't believe Indrema will ever happen, because in my world, projects that get to the marketing stage and then never happen are the rule, rather than the exception. The rest of the world will be far less critical, because in their world projects that get to the marketing stage and then never happen are the exception, rather than the rule.
Of course, it should be noted that game companies usually work a lot more like most open source projects -- a lot of hype early, and too often a product that never gets delivered. As a result, Linux gamers are probably the most cynical people on the planet, and with good reason...
Role based security... can easily be implemented at the application level using Unix's current security model. This is a stupid feature to add.
This is so true. In fact, all security should be taken care of at the application level anyhow. All applications should just be written to know what you're supposed to be able to do, and then prevent you from doing things you're not supposed to do.
For example, you shouldn't be able to rename the "C:\Windows" directory on your computer. All programs that allow you to rename files -- like Windows Explorer, or command.com, or Microsoft Word, should have special logic built into them to check if you're modifying the "C:\Windows" directory, and they should pop up a little paperclip to ask if you really want to do that.
Is that the kind of "application level" security you're talking about?
All religions will teach you that you MUST respect the views of others.
My religion sure as hell doesn't -- in fact, my religion allows me to say that your views are the deranged rantings of a stupid fathead.
You apparently want to live in a country where "socially aware" groups have more freedom "focussed" on them, while groups like the NRA would get "less" freedom. Fuck you. I don't want you to decide who gets your shitty brand of "freedom" and who doesn't.
You're not free if you have to ask permission. Duh.
when I release software I right I am sure to use not only a BSD style license but my own language which specifies what I consider fair use.
Oh goody. Just what the world needs -- more poorly thought out, legally incomprehensible licenses.
I have no idea what your license might actually be. But if its anything like the plethora of "modified" license I've seen out there, there's a pretty good chance it boils down to "you're only allowed to use this software if you're willing to ignore this ill-concieved license."
Think very, very carefully before you start to release code under your own license. With few exceptions for otherwise popular software (like Perl or TeX or Python), I avoid using software with some author's hacked out, personalized license. It's often far to difficult to discern the authors intent for the license (which matters to me), and its often impossible for me to discern the legal implications of the license. Only in the most popular software do I often find enough auxiliary information to let me know if I can even use the software. Far too often, it's not worth the trouble to find out.
Joy:....the fact that we can easily get access to music is of no use if the music industry falls apart.
O'ReillyIsn't that somewhat alarmist? The fact is there are certainly studies that show that people are buying more music as a result of free sampling.
Joy:I'm more concerned, as I said, with the book industry.
O'Reilly:Yeah, well I'm a publisher and I'm not concerned about that one... what about software?
Joy:Well, software is a safe harbor that's morphing into a service.
So... the publisher isn't worried about the publishing industry. The software developer isn't worried about the software industry. Free sampling may increase music sales.
So who, exactly, are the copyright laws protecting here?
The most convincing arguments that we live in a positive-sum world are to be found in technological progress
Economically speaking, technological progress is not a good example -- its the only example we don't live in a zero sum world. Your gold example wasn't just a bad example, it was actually an incorrect example, for exactly the reason outlined above.
I have absolutely no idea what you think you're trying to explain through the nucear holocaust thing, though...
How cold does it get in the Netherlands? For that matter, how cold does it get in Detroit?
Remember, most winters we (Minneapolis) get a few days a year where the temp hits -25F (about -30C). I don't care how much salt you put into that water -- you're not going to do anything to keep it from freezing hard. If anything, Global Warming is just going to make that worse...
like the average joe is qualified to choose [a hospital] in the first place
You believe the average person should be "protected" from himself, by disallowing the choices you feel may be too difficult for him, and which affect him alone.
Of course, this assumes that there is no actual cruelty occuring.
Dude, have you seen the site? They put a kitten in a wide-mouth glass mason jar, and took a photo. In another photo, they've covered a full grown cat with a clear pyrex mixing bowl.
Guess what? None of that is cruel. It's not even close. You can't hurt a kitten by putting it in a wide-mouth mason jar for the few seconds it takes to snap a photo. Hell, if you have a laid back kitten, or you've pumped it full of enough catnip before hand, the kitten probably won't even care.
The cat under the pyrex bowl probably did care, of course -- after the photo was snapped, and the bowl taken off,the cat probably expressed its extreme displeasure by rolling over, or going to sleep on top of the refridgerator, or by sitting on the window sill for a while.
Seriously, there's nothing on the site that indicates any kind of cruelty to anything. Putting a pyrex bowl over your cat for a few seconds is no more cruel to the cat than the cat is cruel to you by kneading your chest with its sharp pointy claws while you're trying to read the newspaper. The cat's certainly not hurt, and is at the worst slightly annoyed with you for a few minutes. Big deal. There's real stuff to be concerned about in the world.
I thought it would have been common sense to just make sure there was no shipping traffic below the bridge, then cut the cord...
You can't just leave a few hundred pounds of scrap metal in the bottom of the bay! That's one of the purest bodies of water on the planet -- no-one has ever indiscriminately thrown trash in there.
I consider the average IQ on slashdot to be about 85. Isn't it nice that in an enlightened age like ours, we can "guess" and "feel" and "consider", instead of taking the time to get off our asses and find the truth?
The most horrible thing about slashdot is that there's no mechanism to discover who the real trolls are.
I'm not reffering to Urban Existentialist, or Kiss the Blade, or New Lover's Arrival. I'm referring to the social misfits that keep moderating up the posts of these people.
I'd love to shake the hand of the guy who posted the above as +1 insightful. He's the reason I read slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok.. I've read it. I have no idea what made you believe that your proposed use falls under the aegis of fair use, but it's pretty clear that nothing in section 107 or 108 gives any provision for the type of copying you're proposing.
Now, since you're obviously incapable of reading the links you yourself provide, and since you're under some sort of delusion that books are "licensed" to you, I'm going to be extremely charitable and pretend like you're trolling me.
They can't force you to buy multiple copies if you already own a license to use/listen/read it.
When I buy a book, I don't get a "license" for that book. I buy a copy of the book. I imagine that someday, I will get a license, but it hasn't happened yet, thank god. I sure as fuck don't look forward to the day when I do get a license, and I can only hope that my "book license" doesn't resemble the bull-shit that are software license today.
Book license -- what a fucking dumb ass.
I'll ask a friend for a copy of their original, and that I'll have no compunction about doing so.
What, exactly, makes you believe you're allowed to make another copy of a CD, when your first one wears out or is destroyed? At what point did we start to believe that we owned a copy of the information on the CD, instead of owning a copy of the representation of the information?
I'm not kidding here, either; what makes you think you bought the bits for perpetuity, instead of one copy of the representation of those bits, and only for as long as that representation lasts? At what point did copyright law stop being about the copies of the representation of the information, and start to be about the information itself?
The thing that you have to remember is that once you begin to believe that you've bought a copy of the information, instead of a copy of the representation of the information, we're suddenly much closer to the dark future warned of by Stallman. We suddenly find ourself in a situation where you pay for the information itself, instead paying for a representation of the information. We're suddenly talking about the information itself no longer being free.
The copyright law is totally f*cked, but it does do one thing -- information, today, is free -- it's the representation of the information that's not free. Once we start paying for the information itself, and stop paying for the representation, information stops being free.
You CAN make as many copys for personal use as you want, as long as you legally own a one copy.
That's great. Super. Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with downloading electronic copies made by someone else. Even if you own a copy of an album, what makes you think you can download a copy someone else made?
If you own a copy of a book, what makes you think you can download an electronic copy of that same book, when that electronic copy was made by someone else?
If you have a crappy old worn-out VHS copy of 'The 39 Steps', that doesn't give you the right to rip an mpeg-4 copy off a friend's DVD player.
It's a shitty set of laws, and as pb said, they don't have any basis in morality or the constitution. Tough shit. Harlan Ellison is the copyright holder -- he get's to decide who can make copies, within the set of guidelines known as fair use. You don't. Tough shit.
And, do you know what? I think Harlan Ellison is fundementally right. You dropped your paperback book in the tub? Tough shit -- buy another one. You have it in hardcover, and your friend has an electronic version, and now you want an electronic version too? Tough shit -- go buy one. Nine-tenth's of Harlan Ellison's titles are no longer in print, and not available in any used book store you can find? But some guy has scanned them all in with a decent OCR? Tough shit -- you can't have 'em. Too bad. You don't own the copyright. He does. Too bad.
Where exactly did people get the idea that they were buying the information, and not a single copy of the representation of the information?
At what point did everyone start to believe "as long as I've got one legal copy, I can make as many copies of as many damn times as I want, in any format I want?"
It's called copyright law because it's a law that governs who has the right to copy the information. Buying one copy of a work doesn't give you the right to copy it -- that's the point of copyright. Owning a copy of a song on CD doesn't give you the right to download a copy of the song on Napster. Why the hell ever gave anyone the idea it would work that way? You might believe you "deserve" a copy in any format you want, as long as you've already bought one copy. There are laws that exempt you when you make copies of your own copies for personal use. But that never meant that you have the right to copy the information from anywhere in any damn format you might feel you want.
If you leave your copy of a vinyl record on the radiator and melt it, you don't get a free pass to copy someone else's CD, "since you already own the information." You're just fucked, and you have to buy a new copy. Tough shit.
Buying a copy of a book in paperback doesn't give you the right to get a copy of the book in electronic format, too. I'm glad you wish it did, because I wish it did, too. But it doesn't. If you want it in electronic format, you can buy it in electronic format, or type it in yourself for your own personal use. Too bad for you if the book is not available in electronic format; too bad for you if your friend already typed in a copy, and would be willing to give you a copy. Copyright is there to decide who has the right to copy, and you don't. Tough shit.
All your copyright are belong to us.
There's nothing stop any platform from implementing an OpenGL driver
In particular, at the time Farenheit was announced, there was nothing stopping SGI from releasing a decent hardware-accellerated OpenGL driver development kit for Win95.
I don't really know any of the history, except what I read on news groups at the time. Certainly, someone with the "real" history can fill in where I'm wrong (which might be everything). But, here's what I do remember:
At the time, Microsoft was actively heel-dragging on their own hardware accelerated OpenGL implentation on Win95, and using the delay to promote D3D for all it was worth. Back then, SGI still had a reputation for awesome workstations with kick-ass 3D graphics, and had just partnered with Nintendo to develop the graphics tech for their new game platform. They were the 800 pound gorilla in the 3D market, and it looked like they were in a position to jump into PC hardware. Then, SGI started to display their "Cosmo" OpenGL implementation on Win95, and if I remember correctly, there was quite a bit of talk that once SGI got into the market, OpenGL on the PC would be the path of the future -- D3D would be dead and gone, and Microsoft would be stuck with a cross-flatform accelerated 3D API.
But then, SGI didn't release Cosmo. And there was a few months delay, where each day they said "we'll release it soon, and when we do, we'll destroy Direct 3D on Windows." And, during that delay, Microsoft continued to improve Direct 3D -- their API's got better, and their relationship with the hardware vendors grew stronger.
After even more delay, at last SGI and Microsoft came out with a joint announcement -- they were going to write the magical graphics language -- backwards compatible with OpenGL, and Direct 3D, and Open Inventor, and Java 3D, and XML, and VRML, and... well, I exagerating there, but not by much. It was pretty clear that the Farenheit stuff was pie-in-the-sky technology.
It was also pretty clear that it was a carrot that Microsoft dangled in from of SGI's face, to get SGI to stop working on OpenGL for Windows. Instead of SGI partnering with other hardware companies to working on complicated 3D video drivers that Microsoft would almost certainly work to actively break in every new implementation of Windows, Microsoft offered SGI a chance to work on a new graphics API, one that Microsoft offered to embrace across the entire Windows platform. Farenheit was the Microsoft-approved road into the PC hardware for SGI. And like most Microsoft-approved roads, this one lead straight to hell.
It is very difficult to understand why a company like SGI would partner with a company like Microsoft. Perhaps at the time, SGI didn't realize how ubiquitous hardware accelerated 3-D graphics were going to become; they still saw it as a small and lucrative niche market that Microsoft would quickly grow bored with, and cede back to SGI. Perhaps SGI did look into the future, and saw accelerated 3D on the PC becomming commodity hardware, with no value to the SGI business model. Perhaps they also saw that most 3D applications on the PC would be commodity games, also with no real value for SGI. Maybe SGI realized Farenheit was just a way for SGI to politely step out of the PC market altogether, and they went down that path willingly.
I don't know.
Let's see if I have this right. You don't want to use Microsoft SQL Server on a Win2K box, and you'd rather use MySQL on a Linux box. You make no mention at all why you want to do this.
I have no clue what kind of application you have -- what the nature of your data is, or the nature of the front end is. I have absolutely no idea why you think a web browser front end, PHP middleware, and MySQL back end is the superior solution. (Or, perhaps by PHP front end, you were refering to that GTK/PHP toolkit mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago, and you want all the users to have a Linux box on their desk. I don't know.) I have absolutely no idea why you believe Microsoft SQL Server and a MS Access front end to be an inferior solution.
What I do know are these things. MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server are two vastly different applications. As a DBA, you are obviously aware that on a technical level, Microsoft SQL Server is the vastly superiour database. In a shop that is almost entirely Microsoft, with only a few Mac's, the MS SQL Server is going to vastly easier to keep running, unless you plan on hiring consultants or tech's dedicated to keeping the only linux box alive.
Face it... they're on completely different planes -- the only place that MySQL beats MS SQL is on speed, on only a subset of the queries that MySQL is able to perform. You won't find any other comparisons of the two databases, becuase MySQL simply will never, ever be able to do any of the things that MS SQL does, and does well. A fair, unbiased consumer reports comparison of the two databases would be nothing but hundreds or thousands of checkboxes that give MS SQL two or three or four stars, and give a little "N/A -- not available" mark to MySQL. It would be a joke.
I'll freely admit that there are many places why MySQL is useful. The standard Linux or BSD box, running Apache/mod_perl/PHP, with a MySQL database is a tottally rocking deal. If you're a decent Unix hacker, it's easy to keep running, it's extrodinarily flexible, it's easy to learn to use, and it's fairly well documented. For 98% of the websites out there, it's plenty good enough. You can even set one up in your office on a spare pentium 75, just to try stuff out before going live with it. I love the combo, and it's what we use on a lot of the sites we develop at work. But for the people who need it or want to pay for it, we use a real database. MySQL is a great database for developers who are aware that it is not a great database, and can explain why.
But for running a dedicated database machine, hooked up exclusively to a group of MS Windows clients running a MS Access front end, in an office where the DBA isn't smart enough to make ODBC work, and the DBA's boss only uses Mac's, I can't think of a single reason you'd want to use MySQL. Not one. Having a wierd box in the corner running a wierd database on a wierd operating system that only one guy in the office understands, duct-taped up to a bunch of Windows clients, seem like the perfect recipe for a maintenance disaster a few years down the road. What a crappy idea.
That isn't a problem. Naturally, Security only works when you can trust the user not to do anything stupid to circumvent it. Users should only be running programs that respect the level of security the user desires.
In particular, users shouldn't be compiling their own programs -- users can not be trusted to write code that respects the level of security they desire. Security is very complicated, and it is impossible for any mere computer user to understand all the nuances of writing a program that respects security. Similarly, the user should never attempt to use free programs, since without money exchanging hands, you have guarantee that the program respects security. Instead, users should only be purchasing pre-compiled programs from a reputable vendor, with the all the assurance that vendor gives that the application comes pre-configured to respect the level of security that the user desires.
Obviously, e-mail readers should continue be able to conveniently run programs sent to the user, but it's the users responsibility to make sure that those programs came from a reputable vendor, and aren't just some free program that may not respect the level of security the user desires.
I realize that holes will continue to be discovered in programs written by even the best, most respected vendors, and some of those holes will allow crackers to run arbitrary code to compromise a system. But again, it is the users responsibility to make sure that only representatives of trusted companies will be able to connect to the users machine, since only those representatives may be trusted to respect the correct level of security the user desirers. The importance of this can not be over-emphasized -- if a user allows anyone in the world to connect to a machine, the user has no way to ensure that only programs pre-configured to respect level of security the user desires will be run on the machine.
It is extremely important that all programs come pre-configured to respect the level of security the user desires. Users can not be trusted to manually configure all of the programs that they run, since each of those programs would obviously need a different set of dialog boxes and configuration files to manually configure their security levels. Users often get inexplicably bored viewing the hundreds of interesting and creative ways vendors choose to represent the unique and disparate security policies that vendors choose to implement. Only by using programs pre-configuring to the correct security level can the user be assured that he is recieving the correct level of security, so that the user can rest easily, knowing his computer is secure.
There are two reasons Linux users are so hard on Indrema.
The first reason is simple. Anyone who's even heard of Indrema is critical of it, and outside of the Linux community, no-one has even heard of the lousy thing.
The second reason is more complex. Most projects fail. In the closed world, most projects go into failure mode before the marketing department gets a hold of them. Most heavily marketed closed source stuff is either already some distance down the production path, or has some venture capitalists leaning very hard on the project to make sure it starts to move down that path very soon.
Open source stuff generally hops onto the marketing path very early. There's a lot of pressure in open source to get the world interested in you, but much less pressure to get something done -- check out the hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of projects on sourceforge that have version 0.1alpha of some code up, and empty mailing archives.
Linux users have become very, very cynical about project announcements -- even more so than Microsoft users. Simply put, I don't believe Indrema will ever happen, because in my world, projects that get to the marketing stage and then never happen are the rule, rather than the exception. The rest of the world will be far less critical, because in their world projects that get to the marketing stage and then never happen are the exception, rather than the rule.
Of course, it should be noted that game companies usually work a lot more like most open source projects -- a lot of hype early, and too often a product that never gets delivered. As a result, Linux gamers are probably the most cynical people on the planet, and with good reason...
Role based security... can easily be implemented at the application level using Unix's current security model. This is a stupid feature to add.
This is so true. In fact, all security should be taken care of at the application level anyhow. All applications should just be written to know what you're supposed to be able to do, and then prevent you from doing things you're not supposed to do.
For example, you shouldn't be able to rename the "C:\Windows" directory on your computer. All programs that allow you to rename files -- like Windows Explorer, or command.com, or Microsoft Word, should have special logic built into them to check if you're modifying the "C:\Windows" directory, and they should pop up a little paperclip to ask if you really want to do that.
Is that the kind of "application level" security you're talking about?
All religions will teach you that you MUST respect the views of others.
My religion sure as hell doesn't -- in fact, my religion allows me to say that your views are the deranged rantings of a stupid fathead.
You apparently want to live in a country where "socially aware" groups have more freedom "focussed" on them, while groups like the NRA would get "less" freedom. Fuck you. I don't want you to decide who gets your shitty brand of "freedom" and who doesn't.
You're not free if you have to ask permission. Duh.
Who was president from the time Reagan left office in 1988 until George Bush Sr. took office in 1989 then?
when I release software I right I am sure to use not only a BSD style license but my own language which specifies what I consider fair use.
Oh goody. Just what the world needs -- more poorly thought out, legally incomprehensible licenses.
I have no idea what your license might actually be. But if its anything like the plethora of "modified" license I've seen out there, there's a pretty good chance it boils down to "you're only allowed to use this software if you're willing to ignore this ill-concieved license."
Think very, very carefully before you start to release code under your own license. With few exceptions for otherwise popular software (like Perl or TeX or Python), I avoid using software with some author's hacked out, personalized license. It's often far to difficult to discern the authors intent for the license (which matters to me), and its often impossible for me to discern the legal implications of the license. Only in the most popular software do I often find enough auxiliary information to let me know if I can even use the software. Far too often, it's not worth the trouble to find out.
Joy: ....the fact that we can easily get access to music is of no use if the music industry falls apart.
O'Reilly Isn't that somewhat alarmist? The fact is there are certainly studies that show that people are buying more music as a result of free sampling.
Joy: I'm more concerned, as I said, with the book industry.
O'Reilly: Yeah, well I'm a publisher and I'm not concerned about that one... what about software?
Joy: Well, software is a safe harbor that's morphing into a service.
So... the publisher isn't worried about the publishing industry. The software developer isn't worried about the software industry. Free sampling may increase music sales.
So who, exactly, are the copyright laws protecting here?
The most convincing arguments that we live in a positive-sum world are to be found in technological progress
Economically speaking, technological progress is not a good example -- its the only example we don't live in a zero sum world. Your gold example wasn't just a bad example, it was actually an incorrect example, for exactly the reason outlined above.
I have absolutely no idea what you think you're trying to explain through the nucear holocaust thing, though...
But in order to get to your bed, first you have to get half way to your bed.
And once you get half way, you'll have to go half of the distance remaining, and you'll still be only 3/4 of the way to your bed.
But once you get 3/4 of the way to your bed, you'll have to go half of the remaining distance again, and then only be 7/8 of the way...
I feel bad for you... you'll need an infinite amount of time to get to your bed.
How cold does it get in the Netherlands? For that matter, how cold does it get in Detroit?
Remember, most winters we (Minneapolis) get a few days a year where the temp hits -25F (about -30C). I don't care how much salt you put into that water -- you're not going to do anything to keep it from freezing hard. If anything, Global Warming is just going to make that worse...
like the average joe is qualified to choose [a hospital] in the first place
You believe the average person should be "protected" from himself, by disallowing the choices you feel may be too difficult for him, and which affect him alone.
That's why you are a socialist, and I am not.
Of course, this assumes that there is no actual cruelty occuring.
Dude, have you seen the site? They put a kitten in a wide-mouth glass mason jar, and took a photo. In another photo, they've covered a full grown cat with a clear pyrex mixing bowl.
Guess what? None of that is cruel. It's not even close. You can't hurt a kitten by putting it in a wide-mouth mason jar for the few seconds it takes to snap a photo. Hell, if you have a laid back kitten, or you've pumped it full of enough catnip before hand, the kitten probably won't even care.
The cat under the pyrex bowl probably did care, of course -- after the photo was snapped, and the bowl taken off,the cat probably expressed its extreme displeasure by rolling over, or going to sleep on top of the refridgerator, or by sitting on the window sill for a while.
Seriously, there's nothing on the site that indicates any kind of cruelty to anything. Putting a pyrex bowl over your cat for a few seconds is no more cruel to the cat than the cat is cruel to you by kneading your chest with its sharp pointy claws while you're trying to read the newspaper. The cat's certainly not hurt, and is at the worst slightly annoyed with you for a few minutes. Big deal. There's real stuff to be concerned about in the world.
Why do you call yourself shoe boy? Because you wear shoes?
I thought it would have been common sense to just make sure there was no shipping traffic below the bridge, then cut the cord...
You can't just leave a few hundred pounds of scrap metal in the bottom of the bay! That's one of the purest bodies of water on the planet -- no-one has ever indiscriminately thrown trash in there.
I consider average height 5'10" - 6'1"
I consider the average IQ on slashdot to be about 85. Isn't it nice that in an enlightened age like ours, we can "guess" and "feel" and "consider", instead of taking the time to get off our asses and find the truth?
So you're about an inch shorter, and just a little heavier, than a pro football player like Randy Moss. Do you bench more than 400 lbs., too?
'Course, 6'3" isn't exactly a "normal" height.
The most horrible thing about slashdot is that there's no mechanism to discover who the real trolls are.
I'm not reffering to Urban Existentialist, or Kiss the Blade, or New Lover's Arrival. I'm referring to the social misfits that keep moderating up the posts of these people.
I'd love to shake the hand of the guy who posted the above as +1 insightful. He's the reason I read slashdot.