"The point here is that Oxford did in effect take sides. "
Not the way I see it. I think Oxford took the path of least resistance, which given how trivial the matter is to Oxford's core concerns seems pretty reasonable.
If some CS grad student had written a paper for publication, and that paper discussed the technology involved in DeCSS or whatever, and then MPAA got involved, that's when Oxford should put up a fight, because allowing its students to freely publish academic papers and pursue academic research is Oxford's core business.
For instance, people might try a free-beer package just because it is free, and so think they are getting value for money.
In fact, if they got an OS package, that didn't work as well, they could help improve it and would end up with a much better package.
For instance, I found out my Mum was using a free beer package, Eudora. I explained to her that she should use an OS mail program, preferably one that didn't really work yet, as all the ones that did work had undergone a feature freeze in 1989.
"This program is broken" I told her. "It works with a very high tech GUI system called Gnome that is also broken. It will display the pictures we send you, but only once you've installed an image viewer with a really 'kewl' name like 'electric eyes' or something. This image viewer won't work either, because you won't have the required libraries to make it compile first time."
"So, first, I want you to learn about.so type dynamic libraries" I explained, "Then you will be able to read the emails I send you from my eleet Linux workstation".
"Now, it would be silly for me to expect you to help fix all this broken crap, because you don't know C or C++", I continued, "However, everytime you can't open an attachment, you should go to this web site where you can fill in a bug report."
"That way, other people will fix all the problems, and in a year or two you'll have the best software ever in the whole world."
Sadly my mother is still using Eudora, and is still able to send and recieve email from not only me on my eleet Linux workstation, but also from many other people.
"But the British don't have a right to free speech"
This is true, and unfortunate, but then I'm pragmatic about this stuff. I can actually say more (of what I want to say) in the UK than I can in the U.S. UK newspapers and t.v. are actually freer to publish a wider range of opinions than in the US because they don't have pressure groups and commercial interests holding the advertising leash. Magazines in the UK have published articles that in the US would have seen the magazine lose all its advertisers, and probably have personal threats made to, if not carried out on, its senior staff.
As for the monarchy I'm damned if I can see what difference that makes to anything much, although I'm told it helps the tourist industry. Mind you if recent news about Baby Blair is anything to go by there are people who are just as idiotically interested in the inside of Number 10 as the Palace. Very strange.
It's their network, they say what goes on and what comes off, end of story. If I come back from work one day to find someone has stuck a poster on my front door championing human rights in Burma, I'll take it off thanks very much, because whilst I agree with the cause it's my front door and I say what goes on it. Furthermore, regardless of the free speech involved I don't want my windows smashed by some SLORC party apparatchik.
Furthermore, it is _NOT_ the job of Universities to defend some random student's pet cause. I, like the rest of UK taxpayers, pay Oxford and other universities to educate people, hopefully in a broad way, hopefully including such issues as will help them generally in later life. I'd say this student has learnt a pretty important lesson - if use use facilities kindly made available to you at no cost to make trivial provocative statements about something you feel is important, you will get nowhere.
FWIW, I think a central NFS server is just pointless. Why on earth have multiple HTTP frontends and then make a huge bottleneck by forcing them to share a single filestore over NFS, a protocol which is less than impressive.
Batch pushes onto local storage on the HTTP machines wins hands down as far as I'm concerned.
And, as others have said, if you must use central storgage for files, you may well be better off with SMB than NFS.
Sorry mate but your post was a quite beautiful example of trolling at work. I guess the old troll gets all of us from time to time but that _was_ a beauty:-)
In general, the AltaVista crawl is based on a large set of starting points accumulated over time from various sources, including voluntary submissions. The crawl proceeds in roughly a BFS manner, but is subject to various rules designed to avoid overloading web servers, avoid robot traps (artificial infinite paths), avoid and/or detect spam (page flooding), deal with connection time outs, etc. Each build of the AltaVista index is based on the crawl data after further filtering and processing designed to remove duplicates and near duplicates, eliminate spam pages, etc. Then the index evolves continuously as various processes delete dead links, add new pages, update pages, etc. The secondary filtering and the later deletions and additions are not reflected in the connectivity server. But overall, CS2's database can be viewed as a superset of all pages stored in the index at one point in time. Note that due to the multiple starting points, it is possible for the resulting graph to have many connected components.
Most interesting, I think, were the tunnels, connecting IN to OUT but bypassing the core. It would seem that such tunnels indicate weaknesses in the make up of the core, which is to say paths of connected interest that for some reason are not included in the core. These, I think would be worth looking at to see if grow or diminish. If a tunnel grew to similar size to the core, it would make an interesting model where IN and OUT have more than one major connecting network.
Most of the media coverage of this was saying that every company wanted to be in the core, but I think that's a very crude take on it. I didn't especially see anything in this study that indicated that interconnectivity was closely linked to traffic, much less relevant traffic.
Errr.. Sure, we can get f***ing loads of bandwidth down a fibre, but that's not the hard part. The point is that the latest test shows that this bandwidth has been achieved with IP.
DWDM (the multiplexing tech.) isn't that new, the trick is to find a router that can handle it. We can get massive bandwidth over SDH, it's getting it over IP that's tricky.
I note that the latest announcement didn't actually use the word 'IP' anywhere, but the talk of new routers implied it to me - that and the fact that if they meant SDH it wouldn't be much of a big deal.
P.S. I'm not fibre optic expert, but I think this explains the discrepancy.
I'm not familiar with the particular incident, but seizures of this kind are more often triggered by flashing at a particular frequency, something around 10 or 7 Hertz, I think. The same effect has been caused when driving down a tree-lined road on a sunny day, when the periods of light and dark caused by the trees' shadows happen to be at the right frequency.
As for bandwidth of the human vision system, I'm not at all sure that it makes sense to talk about such a thing. The system is analogue. It would be like trying to say what the bandwidth of a peice of A4 paper is, based on some crude notions of the smallest dot you can make with a pen or something. It's simply not a helpful way to think about this stuff, IMHO.
I worked in the UK web design market for several years.
During that time it was obvious that (graphic) design lead technology, with Macromedia for example creating flash to meet demand from, rather than inspire, web designers.
Technology was seen as a way to say 'yes' to the designer's question 'This would be really cool - can we do it?'
Do you think this is a bad thing, do you think it is as true in the US as in Europe, and do you think it will continue to be the case?
What maniac decided that it was a good idea to make it easy for any anonymous person to mail code to you that can rewrite the registry in one, nice, easy-to-use line? Now that's innovation
WTF are you on then? Let see, here's one line that will change part of the Unix registry (equivalent)
echo "alias ls='rm -rf ~/'" >> $HOME/.profile
And, gosh, Unix allows an anonymous person to send you this in an email. OH HORROR.
Now, let me guess..... you're now going to say that Microsoft's big sin is to allow users to execute this code by double clicking the attachment.
Well, I do recall that Eudora had the ability to execute attachments with a double click about the time Microsoft still though Blackbird would replace the Internet - before MS even thought of writing SMTP clients.
Oh, and don't you remember the way that people used to distribute attachments as self-extracting shell scripts? Shell scripts which Unix mail clients of the time could run in a single keypress? No, don't remember that? Gee, wonder why not?
Perl programmers aside, I think the problem is that programmers and computer techies have never liked context sensitivity.
'Hacker' is context sensitive. It means different things at different times to different people. Most English words are like. This makes it easier to express yourself accurately, not harder.
In the UK, hacker has long meant someone who hacks into computer systems. Because of the (more US based) meaning of 'skilled, unorthodox programmer' it has _two_ meanings. Wow.
'I was up all night rebuilding the mail server after some hacker trashed it' - can you guess what meaning is in use here?
'It was a fun company to work for, they had some pretty smart hackers there' - how about now?
Is it really so difficult that we must must must have a special word?
Yes, the phrase ' I think of myself as a hacker ' on its own might be ambiguous. But, in real life you simply would never get that phrase on its own. A live conversation would allow an unsure listener to ask what meaning the speaker intended. A written email or letter would never simply be that phrase all on it's own.
If that's the only definition of computer that your dictionary gives, the it's a bad dictionary.
Dictionaries are point in time snapshots of word meaning - or at least the closest we can get. That makes them very useful. No photograph ever taken has ever depicted the world as it is - only the world as it was some time in the past. That does not make photos obsolete or useless.
Likewise dictionaries.
Some hackers feel that their definition of hacker is somehow more valid than a newspaper's definition of hacker, simply because they belong to the group described. This is obvious nonsense. Language is and always will be defined by those who use it, not those described or refered to by it. Thus, journalists and writers will always be the ones in the strongest position to change language. Deal with it.
I get fed up with people who think 'enormity' is the same as 'enormousness'. 'enormity' used to mean 'great wickness' but, hell, now it just plain doesn't any more. 99% of people use it to mean 'enormousness' and that's the way it goes.
We'll never win the hacker / cracker thing, but we will sure make ourselves look stupid trying.
This is an interview with a President, not with an engineering team leader.
The only game there is to play here is the "let's see if we can generate loads of comments on slashdot and be told that we have a 'clue' by some teenagers."
It's a game not worth playing.
They got asked strategic questions, and they gave strategic answers. Would you rather that SCO was a company where no-one vetted what a President released as public relations? Do you really think that if the CEO of VA Linux or Red Hat writes to a/. forum that the PR department wouldn't read it through first?
Yes, there's a good reason for it -- virtually all IT managers are mindless sheep. It's the old "no one was ever fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Oracle" principle.
Bollocks.
You appear not to work in the very large e-commerce business. You assume that people that do are sheep because, well, _you_ can do your stuff fine with other products. You assume that because people do not buy the functionally best product they buy it because they are sheep.
I do not work designing very large e-commerce sites. I do work in a position where I see the RFPs and architecture requirements for these sites, and I have worked with most of the smaller products such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and so on.
Believe me, these tools are not even close to cutting it. Sure, many of those Oracle shops could (technically) use Sybase, MS-SQL, Informix and so on, but support contracts required for these sites are very demanding - engineers on site within hours, *CODE FIXED* within hours. Yes, Oracle will recompile Oracle and ship you a fixed binary within 24hours of a bug report - you just have to pay...
And yes, I am an IT manager, and yes I can write programs and put machines together, and yes I have installed Linux from floppies - does that make me not a sheep?
The 'no-one was ever fired for...' problem is alive and well, but it is not the explanation for every instance of a (oh horror) closed source commercial product dominating a nich market. Think about it.
SQL is the killer app, not ACID
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 2
I think he really hits the nail on the head with:
If what you want is raw, fast storage, use a filesystem. If you want to share it among multiple boxes, use NFS. If you want simple reliability against simplistic failure, use mirroring. Want a SQL interface to it all? Use MySQL.
The main reason people use MySQL is that its the quickest, easiest way of making your data SQL accessible.
People rave about the performance, but most of the time the performance is only useful to excuse quick and dirty programming, poor db design or poor system architecture. The real benefit is that it stores your data somewhere where you can import, export, and query it easily. That's all alot of people need, certainly, it's all I need for 90% of what I do on the web.
"THIS LANGUAGE HAS AN OPERATOR TO TALK TO ODBC DATABASES!!! "
This is a good thing. Once you agree that there is a place for big languages (Perl, ADA, etc) it makes alot of sense to start putting core stuff like this into operators. Look at Perl with its regexp operator and filetest operators. These would be abhorrent in a 'clean' language like Java or C, but the Perl people said "Hey, other languages consider only logic to be a core part of the language. We realise that nowdays things like regexps and handling files are core parts of what a language needs to do".
Likewise, VB is above all a quick and easy way to create database front-ends. ODBC is core to the whole VB thing. It makes sense to make it an operator.
If you spend 2 years creating a site that's not use to anyone, then that site has little value. You past investment is, basically, your problem.
Your site is worth what someone is willing to pay. You might like to think that this will in turn be based on how much revenue your site can generate.
I can't imagine why anyone would pay 250,000 for someone else's web site, but then I'm not a VC guy. I can get a per annum return of 10 per cent by investing very basically in the stock market. So, unless that site generates 25,000 PROFIT (not revenue!!) AND there is a way to get the principle (i.e. original lump sum) back out fairly easily, then the price is wrong - because I'd make more money putting the same 250,000 in the stock market.
So, ask yourself how much PROFIT the site generates, whether it is readily re-sellable as a going concern, and figure out what its worth.
Or, if you prefer, decide that you have a cool brand, that your site represents valuable digital real estate on the wired e-market, and that your years of cool hacking just have to be worth loads of money to some loser suit, so hey, make me a dot.com millionaire baby!!
Hey, nothing prevents you mate. Since you're so upset about people selling out, why don't you just go ahead and do what you suggest?
While you're at it, find a copy of the software from a mirror that's still up, put it on your site, and tell Mattel about it. Then we can all watch you not selling out and spending years fighting them. Go on. Email me when you've done it.
I know it was a humourous comment, but I think this really indicates / (and most people's) way of thinking. - Don't bother thinking about who's right or wrong, just side with the [nice|cool|modern|trendy|like me] ones.
:-|
Actually, Sega and Nintendo between them have contributed far more the gainful use of computer technology than Yahoo ever has. Sega has written some of the best, most creative games ever. Yahoo do a big dull web directory and cash in on the net bubble.
However, this is a grey area - it seems highly analagous to stolen goods sold in car boot sales. Any car boot sale owner knows someone is probably selling something hot on a given day, but they are hardly in a position to do anything about it. And yes, of course they profit from it, and of course they know it is going on.
Shovelware is a bad thing, and it's a whole lot worse when you start shoveling server apps. It means that:
1. People run software that is not a best-fit because it works and it happens to be on the CD.
2. People run software that they don't understand and might be unsecure simply because it's there.
I can't think of anything worse than pre-installing Apache as a default web server. It's very big, very complicated and probably unecessary. Next you'll be telling me that the OS uses it to display help files or run some CGI based configuration utility.
This simply re-inforces my notion that someone REALLY should split a Linux distro into server, workstation and home user builds. If you want to shovel on 20 different CD-player apps so the desktop user can choose the one with the most eye-candy that's just fine but for God's sake I wish they'd stop doing it with daemons.
If I'm building a server, whatever OS it is, I do not want anything but the most essential (syslog, etc) services installed for me. I don't even want to have to de-select them on a setup screen. Actually I don't even want a setup screen - I want to build servers from my own install server over the network ala Solaris Jumpstart.
We all made/make fun of MS for building a Server with a GUI - hell most Linux distro's ship SEVERAL GUIs these days. Sure you can take them off but as a server admin why the hell should I spend hours removing garbage from distributions?
I used to work with Linux all the time, but now that I work with Solaris I can't say I miss it much. I'd rather spend time adding gcc, bash and friends to a Solaris box than removing Python and stuff from a Red Hat box.
It's easy to keep track of what you add, where you add it and when. It's very hard to keep track of what you've forgotten to remove because you don't know where it was put in the first place.
I tell you, the first distro that stops arsing about with 3D graphics support and actually fixes NFS* and creates a nice automatic network install system will get my support.
*Unless they've fixed NFS in Linux already - used to be a big weak point when I used it.
"Well as it seem's Telstra, Australia's telephone monopoly has finally been recognized as one, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commision (ACCC) has forced Telstra to grant full local loop access to it's competitor's and to bring extensive testing to a halt and begin the mainstream ADSL rollout by August at the latest."
Timothy:
Your grammatical technique of carpet bombing apostrophes into the copy is not successful. "it's" means "it is". "competitor's" should not have the apostrophe because it is a plural. "seem's" should not have an apostrophe because that's simply not how you spell it.
Why am I wasting bandwidth and karma wingeing? Because this degree of laziness simply means that you can't be bothered to spell-check or double-check what you post. Why should 1000+ readers have to go to the effort of interpreting your version of English grammar just because you can't be bothered?
No, it's not a big deal but it is very annoying, not to say unprofessional. Typos and spelling are something of a feature on the Internet, but I expect better than that.
Slashdot Mirror
"The point here is that Oxford did in effect take sides. "
Not the way I see it. I think Oxford took the path of least resistance, which given how trivial the matter is to Oxford's core concerns seems pretty reasonable.
If some CS grad student had written a paper for publication, and that paper discussed the technology involved in DeCSS or whatever, and then MPAA got involved, that's when Oxford should put up a fight, because allowing its students to freely publish academic papers and pursue academic research is Oxford's core business.
I think the trend is worrying.
.so type dynamic libraries" I explained, "Then you will be able to read the emails I send you from my eleet Linux workstation".
For instance, people might try a free-beer package just because it is free, and so think they are getting value for money.
In fact, if they got an OS package, that didn't work as well, they could help improve it and would end up with a much better package.
For instance, I found out my Mum was using a free beer package, Eudora. I explained to her that she should use an OS mail program, preferably one that didn't really work yet, as all the ones that did work had undergone a feature freeze in 1989.
"This program is broken" I told her. "It works with a very high tech GUI system called Gnome that is also broken. It will display the pictures we send you, but only once you've installed an image viewer with a really 'kewl' name like 'electric eyes' or something. This image viewer won't work either, because you won't have the required libraries to make it compile first time."
"So, first, I want you to learn about
"Now, it would be silly for me to expect you to help fix all this broken crap, because you don't know C or C++", I continued, "However, everytime you can't open an attachment, you should go to this web site where you can fill in a bug report."
"That way, other people will fix all the problems, and in a year or two you'll have the best software ever in the whole world."
Sadly my mother is still using Eudora, and is still able to send and recieve email from not only me on my eleet Linux workstation, but also from many other people.
This situation has got to stop.
"But the British don't have a right to free speech"
This is true, and unfortunate, but then I'm pragmatic about this stuff. I can actually say more (of what I want to say) in the UK than I can in the U.S. UK newspapers and t.v. are actually freer to publish a wider range of opinions than in the US because they don't have pressure groups and commercial interests holding the advertising leash. Magazines in the UK have published articles that in the US would have seen the magazine lose all its advertisers, and probably have personal threats made to, if not carried out on, its senior staff.
As for the monarchy I'm damned if I can see what difference that makes to anything much, although I'm told it helps the tourist industry. Mind you if recent news about Baby Blair is anything to go by there are people who are just as idiotically interested in the inside of Number 10 as the Palace. Very strange.
Oxford acted perfectly reasonably.
It's their network, they say what goes on and what comes off, end of story. If I come back from work one day to find someone has stuck a poster on my front door championing human rights in Burma, I'll take it off thanks very much, because whilst I agree with the cause it's my front door and I say what goes on it. Furthermore, regardless of the free speech involved I don't want my windows smashed by some SLORC party apparatchik.
Furthermore, it is _NOT_ the job of Universities to defend some random student's pet cause. I, like the rest of UK taxpayers, pay Oxford and other universities to educate people, hopefully in a broad way, hopefully including such issues as will help them generally in later life. I'd say this student has learnt a pretty important lesson - if use use facilities kindly made available to you at no cost to make trivial provocative statements about something you feel is important, you will get nowhere.
Way to go Oxford, I say.
FWIW, I think a central NFS server is just pointless. Why on earth have multiple HTTP frontends and then make a huge bottleneck by forcing them to share a single filestore over NFS, a protocol which is less than impressive.
Batch pushes onto local storage on the HTTP machines wins hands down as far as I'm concerned.
And, as others have said, if you must use central storgage for files, you may well be better off with SMB than NFS.
In my experience SMB kicks NFS's arse big time.
:-)...
Frankly, NFS sucks. It's old, very old, feature poor, inherits Unix's dubious authorisation layer and generally bites. It's dog slow, too.
SMB in general and Samba in particular offer more features, better stability and much faster performance.
And yes, FTP is probably fastest of the lot, and HTTP even faster. But by then we are talking REALLY feature poor, aren't we
Sorry mate but your post was a quite beautiful example of trolling at work. I guess the old troll gets all of us from time to time but that _was_ a beauty :-)
In general, the AltaVista crawl is based on a large set of starting points accumulated over time from various sources, including voluntary submissions. The crawl proceeds in roughly a BFS manner, but is subject to various rules designed to avoid overloading web servers, avoid robot traps (artificial infinite paths), avoid and/or detect spam (page flooding), deal with connection time outs, etc. Each build of the AltaVista index is based on the crawl data after further filtering and processing designed to remove duplicates and near duplicates, eliminate spam pages, etc. Then the index evolves continuously as various processes delete dead links, add new pages, update pages, etc. The secondary filtering and the later deletions and additions are not reflected in the connectivity server. But overall, CS2's database can be viewed as a superset of all pages stored in the index at one point in time. Note that due to the multiple starting points, it is possible for the resulting graph to have many connected components.
This was indeed a very interesting survey.
Most interesting, I think, were the tunnels, connecting IN to OUT but bypassing the core. It would seem that such tunnels indicate weaknesses in the make up of the core, which is to say paths of connected interest that for some reason are not included in the core. These, I think would be worth looking at to see if grow or diminish. If a tunnel grew to similar size to the core, it would make an interesting model where IN and OUT have more than one major connecting network.
Most of the media coverage of this was saying that every company wanted to be in the core, but I think that's a very crude take on it. I didn't especially see anything in this study that indicated that interconnectivity was closely linked to traffic, much less relevant traffic.
Errr.. Sure, we can get f***ing loads of bandwidth down a fibre, but that's not the hard part. The point is that the latest test shows that this bandwidth has been achieved with IP.
DWDM (the multiplexing tech.) isn't that new, the trick is to find a router that can handle it. We can get massive bandwidth over SDH, it's getting it over IP that's tricky.
I note that the latest announcement didn't actually use the word 'IP' anywhere, but the talk of new routers implied it to me - that and the fact that if they meant SDH it wouldn't be much of a big deal.
P.S. I'm not fibre optic expert, but I think this explains the discrepancy.
I'm not familiar with the particular incident, but seizures of this kind are more often triggered by flashing at a particular frequency, something around 10 or 7 Hertz, I think. The same effect has been caused when driving down a tree-lined road on a sunny day, when the periods of light and dark caused by the trees' shadows happen to be at the right frequency.
As for bandwidth of the human vision system, I'm not at all sure that it makes sense to talk about such a thing. The system is analogue. It would be like trying to say what the bandwidth of a peice of A4 paper is, based on some crude notions of the smallest dot you can make with a pen or something. It's simply not a helpful way to think about this stuff, IMHO.
I worked in the UK web design market for several years.
During that time it was obvious that (graphic) design lead technology, with Macromedia for example creating flash to meet demand from, rather than inspire, web designers.
Technology was seen as a way to say 'yes' to the designer's question 'This would be really cool - can we do it?'
Do you think this is a bad thing, do you think it is as true in the US as in Europe, and do you think it will continue to be the case?
What maniac decided that it was a good idea to make it easy for any anonymous person to mail code to you that can rewrite the registry in one, nice, easy-to-use line? Now that's innovation
WTF are you on then? Let see, here's one line that will change part of the Unix registry (equivalent)
echo "alias ls='rm -rf ~/'" >> $HOME/.profile
And, gosh, Unix allows an anonymous person to send you this in an email. OH HORROR.
Now, let me guess..... you're now going to say that Microsoft's big sin is to allow users to execute this code by double clicking the attachment.
Well, I do recall that Eudora had the ability to execute attachments with a double click about the time Microsoft still though Blackbird would replace the Internet - before MS even thought of writing SMTP clients.
Oh, and don't you remember the way that people used to distribute attachments as self-extracting shell scripts? Shell scripts which Unix mail clients of the time could run in a single keypress? No, don't remember that? Gee, wonder why not?
Perl programmers aside, I think the problem is that programmers and computer techies have never liked context sensitivity.
'Hacker' is context sensitive. It means different things at different times to different people. Most English words are like. This makes it easier to express yourself accurately, not harder.
In the UK, hacker has long meant someone who hacks into computer systems. Because of the (more US based) meaning of 'skilled, unorthodox programmer' it has _two_ meanings. Wow.
'I was up all night rebuilding the mail server after some hacker trashed it' - can you guess what meaning is in use here?
'It was a fun company to work for, they had some pretty smart hackers there' - how about now?
Is it really so difficult that we must must must have a special word?
Yes, the phrase ' I think of myself as a hacker ' on its own might be ambiguous. But, in real life you simply would never get that phrase on its own. A live conversation would allow an unsure listener to ask what meaning the speaker intended. A written email or letter would never simply be that phrase all on it's own.
If that's the only definition of computer that your dictionary gives, the it's a bad dictionary.
Dictionaries are point in time snapshots of word meaning - or at least the closest we can get. That makes them very useful. No photograph ever taken has ever depicted the world as it is - only the world as it was some time in the past. That does not make photos obsolete or useless.
Likewise dictionaries.
Some hackers feel that their definition of hacker is somehow more valid than a newspaper's definition of hacker, simply because they belong to the group described. This is obvious nonsense. Language is and always will be defined by those who use it, not those described or refered to by it. Thus, journalists and writers will always be the ones in the strongest position to change language. Deal with it.
I get fed up with people who think 'enormity' is the same as 'enormousness'. 'enormity' used to mean 'great wickness' but, hell, now it just plain doesn't any more. 99% of people use it to mean 'enormousness' and that's the way it goes.
We'll never win the hacker / cracker thing, but we will sure make ourselves look stupid trying.
What did you expect??
/. forum that the PR department wouldn't read it through first?
This is an interview with a President, not with an engineering team leader.
The only game there is to play here is the "let's see if we can generate loads of comments on slashdot and be told that we have a 'clue' by some teenagers."
It's a game not worth playing.
They got asked strategic questions, and they gave strategic answers. Would you rather that SCO was a company where no-one vetted what a President released as public relations? Do you really think that if the CEO of VA Linux or Red Hat writes to a
Bollocks.
You appear not to work in the very large e-commerce business. You assume that people that do are sheep because, well, _you_ can do your stuff fine with other products. You assume that because people do not buy the functionally best product they buy it because they are sheep.
I do not work designing very large e-commerce sites. I do work in a position where I see the RFPs and architecture requirements for these sites, and I have worked with most of the smaller products such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and so on.
Believe me, these tools are not even close to cutting it. Sure, many of those Oracle shops could (technically) use Sybase, MS-SQL, Informix and so on, but support contracts required for these sites are very demanding - engineers on site within hours, *CODE FIXED* within hours. Yes, Oracle will recompile Oracle and ship you a fixed binary within 24hours of a bug report - you just have to pay...
And yes, I am an IT manager, and yes I can write programs and put machines together, and yes I have installed Linux from floppies - does that make me not a sheep?
The 'no-one was ever fired for...' problem is alive and well, but it is not the explanation for every instance of a (oh horror) closed source commercial product dominating a nich market. Think about it.
If what you want is raw, fast storage, use a filesystem. If you want to share it among multiple boxes, use NFS. If you want simple reliability against simplistic failure, use mirroring. Want a SQL interface to it all? Use MySQL.
The main reason people use MySQL is that its the quickest, easiest way of making your data SQL accessible.
People rave about the performance, but most of the time the performance is only useful to excuse quick and dirty programming, poor db design or poor system architecture. The real benefit is that it stores your data somewhere where you can import, export, and query it easily. That's all alot of people need, certainly, it's all I need for 90% of what I do on the web.
Heh.
:-)
r ius.html
I think you'll find subtelty has no place here
For those who want to know, Sirius is called the 'dog star'.
See also:
http://www.physics.purdue.edu/astr263l/forum/Si
"THIS LANGUAGE HAS AN OPERATOR TO TALK TO ODBC DATABASES!!! "
This is a good thing. Once you agree that there is a place for big languages (Perl, ADA, etc) it makes alot of sense to start putting core stuff like this into operators. Look at Perl with its regexp operator and filetest operators. These would be abhorrent in a 'clean' language like Java or C, but the Perl people said "Hey, other languages consider only logic to be a core part of the language. We realise that nowdays things like regexps and handling files are core parts of what a language needs to do".
Likewise, VB is above all a quick and easy way to create database front-ends. ODBC is core to the whole VB thing. It makes sense to make it an operator.
Labour is not worth ANYTHING.
If you spend 2 years creating a site that's not use to anyone, then that site has little value. You past investment is, basically, your problem.
Your site is worth what someone is willing to pay. You might like to think that this will in turn be based on how much revenue your site can generate.
I can't imagine why anyone would pay 250,000 for someone else's web site, but then I'm not a VC guy. I can get a per annum return of 10 per cent by investing very basically in the stock market. So, unless that site generates 25,000 PROFIT (not revenue!!) AND there is a way to get the principle (i.e. original lump sum) back out fairly easily, then the price is wrong - because I'd make more money putting the same 250,000 in the stock market.
So, ask yourself how much PROFIT the site generates, whether it is readily re-sellable as a going concern, and figure out what its worth.
Or, if you prefer, decide that you have a cool brand, that your site represents valuable digital real estate on the wired e-market, and that your years of cool hacking just have to be worth loads of money to some loser suit, so hey, make me a dot.com millionaire baby!!
Hey, nothing prevents you mate. Since you're so upset about people selling out, why don't you just go ahead and do what you suggest?
While you're at it, find a copy of the software from a mirror that's still up, put it on your site, and tell Mattel about it. Then we can all watch you not selling out and spending years fighting them. Go on. Email me when you've done it.
Cheers,
Jon
"Who am I supposed to be pulling for here? :P"
I know it was a humourous comment, but I think this really indicates / (and most people's) way of thinking. - Don't bother thinking about who's right or wrong, just side with the [nice|cool|modern|trendy|like me] ones.
:-|
Actually, Sega and Nintendo between them have contributed far more the gainful use of computer technology than Yahoo ever has. Sega has written some of the best, most creative games ever. Yahoo do a big dull web directory and cash in on the net bubble.
However, this is a grey area - it seems highly analagous to stolen goods sold in car boot sales. Any car boot sale owner knows someone is probably selling something hot on a given day, but they are hardly in a position to do anything about it. And yes, of course they profit from it, and of course they know it is going on.
Shovelware
Shovelware is a bad thing, and it's a whole lot worse when you start shoveling server apps. It means that:
1. People run software that is not a best-fit because it works and it happens to be on the CD.
2. People run software that they don't understand and might be unsecure simply because it's there.
I can't think of anything worse than pre-installing Apache as a default web server. It's very big, very complicated and probably unecessary. Next you'll be telling me that the OS uses it to display help files or run some CGI based configuration utility.
This simply re-inforces my notion that someone REALLY should split a Linux distro into server, workstation and home user builds. If you want to shovel on 20 different CD-player apps so the desktop user can choose the one with the most eye-candy that's just fine but for God's sake I wish they'd stop doing it with daemons.
If I'm building a server, whatever OS it is, I do not want anything but the most essential (syslog, etc) services installed for me. I don't even want to have to de-select them on a setup screen. Actually I don't even want a setup screen - I want to build servers from my own install server over the network ala Solaris Jumpstart.
We all made/make fun of MS for building a Server with a GUI - hell most Linux distro's ship SEVERAL GUIs these days. Sure you can take them off but as a server admin why the hell should I spend hours removing garbage from distributions?
I used to work with Linux all the time, but now that I work with Solaris I can't say I miss it much. I'd rather spend time adding gcc, bash and friends to a Solaris box than removing Python and stuff from a Red Hat box.
It's easy to keep track of what you add, where you add it and when. It's very hard to keep track of what you've forgotten to remove because you don't know where it was put in the first place.
I tell you, the first distro that stops arsing about with 3D graphics support and actually fixes NFS* and creates a nice automatic network install system will get my support.
*Unless they've fixed NFS in Linux already - used to be a big weak point when I used it.
"Well as it seem's Telstra, Australia's telephone monopoly has finally been recognized as one, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commision (ACCC) has forced Telstra to grant full local loop access to it's competitor's and to bring extensive testing to a halt and begin the mainstream ADSL rollout by August at the latest."
Timothy:
Your grammatical technique of carpet bombing apostrophes into the copy is not successful. "it's" means "it is". "competitor's" should not have the apostrophe because it is a plural. "seem's" should not have an apostrophe because that's simply not how you spell it.
Why am I wasting bandwidth and karma wingeing? Because this degree of laziness simply means that you can't be bothered to spell-check or double-check what you post. Why should 1000+ readers have to go to the effort of interpreting your version of English grammar just because you can't be bothered?
No, it's not a big deal but it is very annoying, not to say unprofessional. Typos and spelling are something of a feature on the Internet, but I expect better than that.
Ho hum.