Science likes to tantalize you with incredible possibilities that float just outside your reach;)
Yes, but it's because of work like this that so many miracles do, in fact, happen.
* Ever stop to consider that the thermal density in recent P4/Athlon CPUs is actually higher than the thermal density of a nuclear power plant?
* Speaking of which, how about those nuclear power plants - 1 lb of radioactive material able to provide power for a city for a year or more...
* Power used to light up lights, like those nifty Compact Florescent bulbs that are so power efficient. Exotic power - a Florescent bulb creates an intense radio signal by blasting electricity at thousands of volts (essentially, a spark several inches long) through a vacuum tube, dusted with dust that floresces (glows) as it converts the radio signal into visible light... Fancy that - they cost me about a buck each, and are 4-5 times as efficient as regular incandescent light bulbs.
* Let's not even get into an obvious one - the Internet. Where are you? I'm in California - but it doesn't matter, does it? You can read this merely seconds after I post it, wherever you happen to be...
* I'm about to go jogging in my new running shoes, created from an exotic foam material that springs unnaturally, preventing injuries to my knees and ankles as I jog - they can take a pounding over and over again, yet their cost is only around $40.
* Its not uncommon for me to run in a Gore-tex suit. Comprising of nylon (itself a miracle material from the early 1900s) fabric covering a Mylar membrane with microscopic holes in it. Mylar is, itself, incredible in its strength-weight ratio, but the microscopic holes allow my sweat to evaporate and keep me dry, even when it's raining or the jacket is wet - the holes allow water vapor through while being far too small for liquid water to go through, effectively blocking it.
While science might appear to tantalize with things out of reach, we only remember them because they are out of reach. When you really consider it, the miracles within our grasp are nothing short of incredible.
I'm a programmer. I'm frequently on the road. There have been plenty of times where an emergency happened, and I needed to get on right now!!!!
Towards this end, I wrote a stupid-simple script for my Fedora Core Laptop that essentially is a "war driving" script. Basically, it runs 'iwlist scan' every 5 seconds, and does a pattern match to find unencrypted networks.
Typicaly scenario: I'm in my car, in some god-forsaken town, and I get a call on the cell phone. So, I cruise around the town, paying particular attention to find standard middle-class houses. (small enough to be densely populated, affluent enough to have DSL/Cable Internet)
Give me 5 blocks or so, and I find a spot. I park, login, spend 30 minutes and do the fix, and then go on about my day.
Anything important is encrypted, (imaps, ssh, https) so I don't worry about anybody sniffing my traffic. It's pretty fast, and I do it probably 1 or 2 times per month.
If it were EVERYWHERE, do you think I'd do the whole war-driving routine?
It was meant as a percentage of GNP. This is a case of differing definitions: what is a "Small Business"? My statistics (no, I don't have an online resource) are for "SMB" or "Small-Midsize Business" in comparison to the GNP, which is near 80%.
Your statistics compare SMALL businesses against LARGE, apparently ignoring the "mid" tier altogether. (Havent' read the report in detail, but that's what my first skim seems to indicate)
(sigh)
Perhaps the old adage is correct; There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
While it's sad to see him go, I have to wonder if his legacy isn't the easing of mankind's stress levels but accelerating it to the stratosphere. Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine.
We spend a smaller portion of our monthly budget on food than ever before, even as our average caloric intake has climbed nicely. While the proportion of money spent by the average household has not changed much, the square footage of the average house has shot through the roof.
The actual amount of time spent at work, on average, has been fairly steady, to perhaps dropping some. What we can buy, and what we can do with our income is generally more and better than ever.
Sorry. Go back to 1950. Houses are small, often unheated, or heated only with fireplaces. Air conditioning was still reserved for the "upper classes". TVs, if they existed, were black and white. Telephone coverage was spotty. Racism is/was alive and well. Food was expensive, unless you happened to be a farmer, and then, only certain types of food (what you grew) was cheap.
I wouldn't want to go back, and neither would you. Go back to your relaxed, comfortable computer desk, and enjoy the comforts that they only dreamed of in 1958, and shut up.
Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine. We live according to the schedule of the computer rather than the other way around.
Oh, man. This is just so much ball cheese. Take a look at manufacturing jobs in the 1950s. (You know, manufacturing, that's now highly automated, often done by robots controlled by microprocessors?) An assembly line is essentially a giant machine, often blocks long, comprised of mechanical, electrical, and human parts. Can you imagine seeing this massive bohemoth of a machine, surrounding you, towering above you, two or three stories high? Who's "part of the machine"? Who's lifestyle is more regimented - yours, or theirs?
I write software that manages independent study programs for schools. The software I write enables teachers to teach, in the field, in homestudy programs by automating the generation of legally required progress reports and compliance paperwork. Rather than reducing flexibility, my software empowers teachers with more flexibility and power, saving as much as 10-20 hours per month per teacher doing administrative paperwork, so that they can... teach!
Additionally, I usually work at home, on the couch, with my kids - it's a majority of my worktime. I get a successful career, I get to fly around to visit with clients with whom I have a good, close, friendly relationship, and I do it armed with my laptop and my (digital) cell phone.
The effect isn't one of making either myself or the teachers live to the schedule of the computer, it's freeing us all from any set schedule whatsoever!
I don't imagine that Kilby thought it would lead to less human contact, less face to face time, and less free time for everyone.
Tell this to the ex-manufacturer bloke who now sells insurance, or runs a small business. Small businesses represent more of the US GNP than ever before. Small businesses are, by definition, close to their customers, and thus have more intimate relationships between the staff and the customers.
Next time, have at least some information to comment on before you do so, eh? For a good, economic and environmental "State of the World", I highly recommend "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg.
So, who wants to write it? It doesn't look like it'll be done by the guys now in charge, but if it's submitted as an already-functioning patch, they might go for it. (I, alas, do not have the l337 5ki11z to do this myself)
Re:Do they or do they not have the source legally?
on
Zeta Goes Gold
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Mod me down for going counter to public opinion but you can still freely use your computer without sourcecode.
You are entirely correct. But the open source zealots who help give open source a bad name and strengthen Microsoft's cause would like you to believe otherwise.
This is some good trolling here - not sure why I've decided to bite anyway...
Any movement is defined, at least partially, by its fringe. This is true whether you're talking politics, (go Rush!) Religion, (go Misionaries!) or software. (go Debian!)
You can be very selective, and choose political conservatives who believe in aliens, and that the government is infecting the population with AIDS through airplane exhaust. (Google for comtrails produces this)
It would be very hard to say that conservatives are all about comtrails, aliens, and government conspiracy. Yet, some of the more vocal ones are.
Are you going to see me making a video card from sand? Come on, pal. You're being more fringe in your comments about the fringe than they were in the beginning!
OSS DOES benefit you, even if not immediately. Parent post mention that having the source for Apache doesn't help in any way. Except that it does:
1) Having the source freely available puts lots of plusses on the "supply" side of the economic scale, meaning the costs for obtaining the software will always be low.
2) Having the source freely available creates a culture of mods and patches, which make it much more likely that you'll be able to get much-needed features without having to commission your own software company.
3) Open source software can persist long after the original group or sponsor quits. Thus, we have evolution and ximian, and to a lesser extent, Mozilla. Oh, and don't forget the Firebird DBMS. How many sponsors has PostgreSQL had over the years?
Another example: Microsoft discontinuing VB 6. A stable, workhorse of a programming environment, the "upgrade" was in fact a wholy different language. Without the marketroids running the show, the OSS solution would have been a fork of the codebase, leaving enterprise users free to continue to develop and improve the VB6 codebase.
None of this is new - it's been said many times before. Oh well. You trolled, I bit. I guess you got what you wanted...
I live in the Central Valley of Northern California. It regularly hits > 100 degrees (f) in the summer. Go down 20 feet, though, and you have well water at a nice, comfy 67 degrees year-round.
So, why don't I see any fridges that use that cool water? I would think that a closed-loop system were set up, pumping costs should be minimal - set up a nice, big heat exchanger, and pump cold water out of the ground, thru the exchanger, and back (probably into a different well)
Why wouldn't this work? Why hasn't it been done already?
What will Longhorn include that will make Windows 2000 or Windows XP using businesses want to move?
Security updates. Did you really want something else, or are you just looking for something to jeer at Microsoft?
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Hear here!
I've never understood the fanaticism of database abstraction. There's good reason to hardcode to a specific database, especially if you hardcode to a Free database like PostgreSQL.
You took the words right outta my mouth. I tend to work on large projects, usually the app has its own server (or servers) to work on.
I've hard-coded to Postgres since 7.0 came out, and I've NEVER regretted it. The only problem I've had is when one of my clients demanded "cross-platform".
I had more problems with that sucker than with three others combined. Since I couldn't assume subselects, there was lots of parsed queries that resulted in additional bugs, etc.
Pick a platform, then use it. If the platform is truly free, you aren't "locking" anybody at all, are you?
On one hand, companies are handing over their balls to some 3rd party company, often oversees, via the process of "outsourcing", but yet they're also reading email from their staff to make sure that they don't give away their corporate balls?
As a company, it serves its own best interests. It has always been honorable in doing so.
You will not find Red Hat "stealing" OSS code, compiling it into proprietary work, and not telling anybody. You won't find them attempting to "extend" open code with proprietary extensions without releasing those extensions, too.
They pay for a good, healthy staff of developers that work almost solely on GPL and otherwise released code. They release source binaries as though all their stuff was GPL, even with projects that are BSD-ish licensed.
It's not that difficult to take their source RPMs and create your own "Enterprise Linux", as done by Scientific Linux, Cent O/S, and (my favorite) Whitebox Linux.
I don't like that they don't support good old "RedHat Linux" like they used to, but as a company, RedHat has been nothing but good for the community. If you choose to have a hissy, then enjoy your hissy, and move on to Debian/Gentoo/LFS/Ubuntu/Mandrake/Whatever/YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) to your heart's content.
But, I see no sign that RedHat is doing anything evil at all.
1) Does this mean that we'll soon have VMWare for Mac OS? Having Mac OS 10, Linux, AND Windows on the same laptop would JUST F'CKING ROCK!
2) Since OSX has an OSS underpinning, how easy will it be to hack together drivers for OSX on a Dell? I'm sure that Apple will use a funky BIOS; there's no way Apple is going to use an Intel ref. board. But, how long before some brainy college kid figures out a driver framework?
3) Does this mean I should wait to buy my wife's Apple laptop?
So, you may have saved money on the bottom line, but you have squandered trust the consumer had for you. At some point in the future, you will realize what a valuable commodity this was and how expensive it is to re-acquire.
Next "security" fix out - the automated oxytocin mister! Required for all corporate accounts!
In the UK, the Labour party just got reelected with only 36% of the vote. Yup. That's a minority. Almost 2/3 of the population didn't want them in power.
So, which is better:
A) 4 or 5 candidates, one of which is close to exactly what you would want in a candidate, but, when is elected, represents a minority of the population, (what you describe in the UK) or
B) 2 candidates, neither of which is what you want in a candidate, but you end up voting for one of them, because there's no point in not voting for one or the other, and even though they both suck, you vote for the one that sucks less... (the good ol' USA)
I like the UK way better, myself. I voted for Kerry and Gore, not because I liked either one, but because I disliked Bush more.
Well, if you let your e-mail address expire, and someone else registers it later on, they won't have trouble doing a password request which will allow them into your account, which will contain your personal information.
Yet another good reason to always have a personal email address at a domain name you control. I've used one of two or three domain names for years - when I let an address expire, it's really, REALLY gone. A domain name is cheap, $10/year or less. Most registrars will allow "forward" accounts that you can enable/disable at any time without having to have an independent ISP account.
My current "junk" address is useless@mydomain.com - I've made salespeople laugh when I gave it to them - it's obvious what kind of address they're getting...
I've often thought of writing a script to flood bogus data into scam sites,
What, you haven't already?
Armed with PHP 4, and my Linux laptop, I've done so many times. I hack together some stupid script, maybe using wget or fsockopen(), dump random garbage into the input form on their website, and repeat. Typical scripts will re-dump the form every 2-3 seconds, taking into account connection time, etc.
With screen, an xterm, and a 1.5 Mb DSL line, I've taken scam sites offline numerous times for several hours at a time. (it often takes 30 to 50 instances of the dump script running to do so, however)
A typical script hacked together typically takes me about 20 minutes to create, test, and start.
I'll typically leave it there for a few hours, during which time I'll have made millions of bogus submissions, then quit. (I use that bandwidth, you know) during these few hours,
If you haven't done it yet, either
1) You don't know much about scripting and web forms,
2) you don't have much in the way of guts.
Which is it? Go do it, and see if you can't take a site or two offline for a while!
Last night even UPS wouldn't have saved me. Power was out for 3-4 hours.
Why would 3-4 hours be a problem?
I went to the local office depot/max/base place and picked up a cheapo UPS - the kind made for desktop PCs, with a built-in, 12v lead-acid battery in them. I bought a 500 watt unit, for about $75 USD.
I then pulled out the miniscule battery, and rewired the leads in parallel to three, deep-cycle marine batteries in a home-made rack. I now have some 18 hours of uptime on the batteries.
Overkill? Perhaps - I got the batteries for a song gently used, and figured this was the best way to use them. I have a little server here that's pretty important to my business.
Why are people so fascinated with celebrities? Are your own lives really THAT boring?
Isn't that self evident?
If their lives were filled with excitement and adventure, they would be interested in THAT, wouldn't they? But they aren't, so, their lives, apparently, ARE that boring.
Go listen to Joe Walsh, "Originary Average Guy"...
To get around all the date/time/timestamp confusion, I switched all date functions to integer data types and use *nix epoch to keep time values. I also frequently use a "date" format based on YYYYmmdd when I want to ensure a granularity of a calendar day. This indexes quickly, and works well with the php date() functions. (my language of choice)
And can we please get JDBC to support something like: INSERT $price INTO pricetable where productid = $productid rather than using ?'s and counting which ? to set values to? Hibernate's query language does this, and I really like it.
If I were to change ANYTHING with SQL, it would be to make update and insert syntax the same as update. EG:
Insert into $TABLE set
name='$name',
address='$address',
phone='$phone';
This would make dynamic query generation SO MUCH EASIER and more readable!
SQL by itself doesn't perform. It is based on the database engine, and how good the developer is.
A truth I hold to be self-evident. The language of SQL provides all the tools you need to make your application perform well, as you state.
SQL doesn't really have an API.
Realistically, SQL is an API. It's a highly abstracted interface for communicating between two programs. (your app, and the DB server software)
It is only "cross-platform" if you follow the ANSI SQL standard.
Sorta. See, I can write a script using PHP with a particular SQL call, and do the same thing in Perl, Java, ASP, C, C++, Python, Ruby, and even BASH, on Linux, Windows, Mac, or just about anything else with a tcp stack and a compiler. Sure, SQL implementations are different, with various shortcuts and extensions, but I'd call that cross platform if ever there was one.
Let me ask you this: How often do you see an OSS product (EG: phpwiki) that doesn't offer support for numerous databases?
Slashdot Mirror
"Funny" mods don't contribute to your karma.
Science likes to tantalize you with incredible possibilities that float just outside your reach ;)
Yes, but it's because of work like this that so many miracles do, in fact, happen.
* Ever stop to consider that the thermal density in recent P4/Athlon CPUs is actually higher than the thermal density of a nuclear power plant?
* Speaking of which, how about those nuclear power plants - 1 lb of radioactive material able to provide power for a city for a year or more...
* Power used to light up lights, like those nifty Compact Florescent bulbs that are so power efficient. Exotic power - a Florescent bulb creates an intense radio signal by blasting electricity at thousands of volts (essentially, a spark several inches long) through a vacuum tube, dusted with dust that floresces (glows) as it converts the radio signal into visible light... Fancy that - they cost me about a buck each, and are 4-5 times as efficient as regular incandescent light bulbs.
* Let's not even get into an obvious one - the Internet. Where are you? I'm in California - but it doesn't matter, does it? You can read this merely seconds after I post it, wherever you happen to be...
* I'm about to go jogging in my new running shoes, created from an exotic foam material that springs unnaturally, preventing injuries to my knees and ankles as I jog - they can take a pounding over and over again, yet their cost is only around $40.
* Its not uncommon for me to run in a Gore-tex suit. Comprising of nylon (itself a miracle material from the early 1900s) fabric covering a Mylar membrane with microscopic holes in it. Mylar is, itself, incredible in its strength-weight ratio, but the microscopic holes allow my sweat to evaporate and keep me dry, even when it's raining or the jacket is wet - the holes allow water vapor through while being far too small for liquid water to go through, effectively blocking it.
While science might appear to tantalize with things out of reach, we only remember them because they are out of reach. When you really consider it, the miracles within our grasp are nothing short of incredible.
I'm a programmer. I'm frequently on the road. There have been plenty of times where an emergency happened, and I needed to get on right now!!!!
Towards this end, I wrote a stupid-simple script for my Fedora Core Laptop that essentially is a "war driving" script. Basically, it runs 'iwlist scan' every 5 seconds, and does a pattern match to find unencrypted networks.
Typicaly scenario: I'm in my car, in some god-forsaken town, and I get a call on the cell phone. So, I cruise around the town, paying particular attention to find standard middle-class houses. (small enough to be densely populated, affluent enough to have DSL/Cable Internet)
Give me 5 blocks or so, and I find a spot. I park, login, spend 30 minutes and do the fix, and then go on about my day.
Anything important is encrypted, (imaps, ssh, https) so I don't worry about anybody sniffing my traffic. It's pretty fast, and I do it probably 1 or 2 times per month.
If it were EVERYWHERE, do you think I'd do the whole war-driving routine?
Go ahead. Try Slashdot in the wayback machine.
Slashdot has looked virtually identical since 1998!
It was meant as a percentage of GNP. This is a case of differing definitions: what is a "Small Business"? My statistics (no, I don't have an online resource) are for "SMB" or "Small-Midsize Business" in comparison to the GNP, which is near 80%.
Your statistics compare SMALL businesses against LARGE, apparently ignoring the "mid" tier altogether. (Havent' read the report in detail, but that's what my first skim seems to indicate)
(sigh)
Perhaps the old adage is correct; There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
While it's sad to see him go, I have to wonder if his legacy isn't the easing of mankind's stress levels but accelerating it to the stratosphere. Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine.
We spend a smaller portion of our monthly budget on food than ever before, even as our average caloric intake has climbed nicely. While the proportion of money spent by the average household has not changed much, the square footage of the average house has shot through the roof.
The actual amount of time spent at work, on average, has been fairly steady, to perhaps dropping some. What we can buy, and what we can do with our income is generally more and better than ever.
Sorry. Go back to 1950. Houses are small, often unheated, or heated only with fireplaces. Air conditioning was still reserved for the "upper classes". TVs, if they existed, were black and white. Telephone coverage was spotty. Racism is/was alive and well. Food was expensive, unless you happened to be a farmer, and then, only certain types of food (what you grew) was cheap.
I wouldn't want to go back, and neither would you. Go back to your relaxed, comfortable computer desk, and enjoy the comforts that they only dreamed of in 1958, and shut up.
Computers have done wonders in improving our productivity, but at the cost of making humans part of the machine. We live according to the schedule of the computer rather than the other way around.
Oh, man. This is just so much ball cheese. Take a look at manufacturing jobs in the 1950s. (You know, manufacturing, that's now highly automated, often done by robots controlled by microprocessors?) An assembly line is essentially a giant machine, often blocks long, comprised of mechanical, electrical, and human parts. Can you imagine seeing this massive bohemoth of a machine, surrounding you, towering above you, two or three stories high? Who's "part of the machine"? Who's lifestyle is more regimented - yours, or theirs?
I write software that manages independent study programs for schools. The software I write enables teachers to teach, in the field, in homestudy programs by automating the generation of legally required progress reports and compliance paperwork. Rather than reducing flexibility, my software empowers teachers with more flexibility and power, saving as much as 10-20 hours per month per teacher doing administrative paperwork, so that they can... teach!
Additionally, I usually work at home, on the couch, with my kids - it's a majority of my worktime. I get a successful career, I get to fly around to visit with clients with whom I have a good, close, friendly relationship, and I do it armed with my laptop and my (digital) cell phone.
The effect isn't one of making either myself or the teachers live to the schedule of the computer, it's freeing us all from any set schedule whatsoever!
I don't imagine that Kilby thought it would lead to less human contact, less face to face time, and less free time for everyone.
Tell this to the ex-manufacturer bloke who now sells insurance, or runs a small business. Small businesses represent more of the US GNP than ever before. Small businesses are, by definition, close to their customers, and thus have more intimate relationships between the staff and the customers.
Next time, have at least some information to comment on before you do so, eh? For a good, economic and environmental "State of the World", I highly recommend "The Skeptical Environmentalist" by Bjorn Lomborg.
OS/Apache + Firefox should do this already. Beat Microsoft to the punch.
I thought of this a long time ago and while there's been plenty of debating on it, it's not actually been done. (It was marked as a duplicate of another, later submission, which starts with "This is not a duplicate of..." )
So, who wants to write it? It doesn't look like it'll be done by the guys now in charge, but if it's submitted as an already-functioning patch, they might go for it. (I, alas, do not have the l337 5ki11z to do this myself)
Mod me down for going counter to public opinion but you can still freely use your computer without sourcecode.
You are entirely correct. But the open source zealots who help give open source a bad name and strengthen Microsoft's cause would like you to believe otherwise.
This is some good trolling here - not sure why I've decided to bite anyway...
Any movement is defined, at least partially, by its fringe. This is true whether you're talking politics, (go Rush!) Religion, (go Misionaries!) or software. (go Debian!)
You can be very selective, and choose political conservatives who believe in aliens, and that the government is infecting the population with AIDS through airplane exhaust. (Google for comtrails produces this)
It would be very hard to say that conservatives are all about comtrails, aliens, and government conspiracy. Yet, some of the more vocal ones are.
Are you going to see me making a video card from sand? Come on, pal. You're being more fringe in your comments about the fringe than they were in the beginning!
OSS DOES benefit you, even if not immediately. Parent post mention that having the source for Apache doesn't help in any way. Except that it does:
1) Having the source freely available puts lots of plusses on the "supply" side of the economic scale, meaning the costs for obtaining the software will always be low.
2) Having the source freely available creates a culture of mods and patches, which make it much more likely that you'll be able to get much-needed features without having to commission your own software company.
3) Open source software can persist long after the original group or sponsor quits. Thus, we have evolution and ximian, and to a lesser extent, Mozilla. Oh, and don't forget the Firebird DBMS. How many sponsors has PostgreSQL had over the years?
Another example: Microsoft discontinuing VB 6. A stable, workhorse of a programming environment, the "upgrade" was in fact a wholy different language. Without the marketroids running the show, the OSS solution would have been a fork of the codebase, leaving enterprise users free to continue to develop and improve the VB6 codebase.
None of this is new - it's been said many times before. Oh well. You trolled, I bit. I guess you got what you wanted...
I live in the Central Valley of Northern California. It regularly hits > 100 degrees (f) in the summer. Go down 20 feet, though, and you have well water at a nice, comfy 67 degrees year-round.
So, why don't I see any fridges that use that cool water? I would think that a closed-loop system were set up, pumping costs should be minimal - set up a nice, big heat exchanger, and pump cold water out of the ground, thru the exchanger, and back (probably into a different well)
Why wouldn't this work? Why hasn't it been done already?
What will Longhorn include that will make Windows 2000 or Windows XP using businesses want to move?
Security updates. Did you really want something else, or are you just looking for something to jeer at Microsoft?
Hear here!
I've never understood the fanaticism of database abstraction. There's good reason to hardcode to a specific database, especially if you hardcode to a Free database like PostgreSQL.
You took the words right outta my mouth. I tend to work on large projects, usually the app has its own server (or servers) to work on.
I've hard-coded to Postgres since 7.0 came out, and I've NEVER regretted it. The only problem I've had is when one of my clients demanded "cross-platform".
I had more problems with that sucker than with three others combined. Since I couldn't assume subselects, there was lots of parsed queries that resulted in additional bugs, etc.
Pick a platform, then use it. If the platform is truly free, you aren't "locking" anybody at all, are you?
On one hand, companies are handing over their balls to some 3rd party company, often oversees, via the process of "outsourcing", but yet they're also reading email from their staff to make sure that they don't give away their corporate balls?
How does this make sense?
"It's going to get worse".
Hopefully, that'll save time before you go RTFA...
As a company, it serves its own best interests. It has always been honorable in doing so.
You will not find Red Hat "stealing" OSS code, compiling it into proprietary work, and not telling anybody. You won't find them attempting to "extend" open code with proprietary extensions without releasing those extensions, too.
They pay for a good, healthy staff of developers that work almost solely on GPL and otherwise released code. They release source binaries as though all their stuff was GPL, even with projects that are BSD-ish licensed.
It's not that difficult to take their source RPMs and create your own "Enterprise Linux", as done by Scientific Linux, Cent O/S, and (my favorite) Whitebox Linux.
I don't like that they don't support good old "RedHat Linux" like they used to, but as a company, RedHat has been nothing but good for the community. If you choose to have a hissy, then enjoy your hissy, and move on to Debian/Gentoo/LFS/Ubuntu/Mandrake/Whatever/YALD (Yet Another Linux Distro) to your heart's content.
But, I see no sign that RedHat is doing anything evil at all.
1) Does this mean that we'll soon have VMWare for Mac OS? Having Mac OS 10, Linux, AND Windows on the same laptop would JUST F'CKING ROCK!
2) Since OSX has an OSS underpinning, how easy will it be to hack together drivers for OSX on a Dell? I'm sure that Apple will use a funky BIOS; there's no way Apple is going to use an Intel ref. board. But, how long before some brainy college kid figures out a driver framework?
3) Does this mean I should wait to buy my wife's Apple laptop?
Many, many more questions come out of this....
So, you may have saved money on the bottom line, but you have squandered trust the consumer had for you. At some point in the future, you will realize what a valuable commodity this was and how expensive it is to re-acquire.
Next "security" fix out - the automated oxytocin mister! Required for all corporate accounts!
4 comments as I view, and it's down.
How's this for the ultimate conundrum: the combination of "Nobody RTFA here" and "the Slashdot Effect" taking down sites?
Maybe some people actually DO RTFA besides myself?
(sigh
In the UK, the Labour party just got reelected with only 36% of the vote. Yup. That's a minority. Almost 2/3 of the population didn't want them in power.
So, which is better:
A) 4 or 5 candidates, one of which is close to exactly what you would want in a candidate, but, when is elected, represents a minority of the population, (what you describe in the UK) or
B) 2 candidates, neither of which is what you want in a candidate, but you end up voting for one of them, because there's no point in not voting for one or the other, and even though they both suck, you vote for the one that sucks less... (the good ol' USA)
I like the UK way better, myself. I voted for Kerry and Gore, not because I liked either one, but because I disliked Bush more.
Well, if you let your e-mail address expire, and someone else registers it later on, they won't have trouble doing a password request which will allow them into your account, which will contain your personal information.
Yet another good reason to always have a personal email address at a domain name you control. I've used one of two or three domain names for years - when I let an address expire, it's really, REALLY gone. A domain name is cheap, $10/year or less. Most registrars will allow "forward" accounts that you can enable/disable at any time without having to have an independent ISP account.
My current "junk" address is useless@mydomain.com - I've made salespeople laugh when I gave it to them - it's obvious what kind of address they're getting...
I've often thought of writing a script to flood bogus data into scam sites,
What, you haven't already?
Armed with PHP 4, and my Linux laptop, I've done so many times. I hack together some stupid script, maybe using wget or fsockopen(), dump random garbage into the input form on their website, and repeat. Typical scripts will re-dump the form every 2-3 seconds, taking into account connection time, etc.
With screen, an xterm, and a 1.5 Mb DSL line, I've taken scam sites offline numerous times for several hours at a time. (it often takes 30 to 50 instances of the dump script running to do so, however)
A typical script hacked together typically takes me about 20 minutes to create, test, and start.
I'll typically leave it there for a few hours, during which time I'll have made millions of bogus submissions, then quit. (I use that bandwidth, you know) during these few hours,
If you haven't done it yet, either
1) You don't know much about scripting and web forms,
2) you don't have much in the way of guts.
Which is it? Go do it, and see if you can't take a site or two offline for a while!
Last night even UPS wouldn't have saved me. Power was out for 3-4 hours.
Why would 3-4 hours be a problem?
I went to the local office depot/max/base place and picked up a cheapo UPS - the kind made for desktop PCs, with a built-in, 12v lead-acid battery in them. I bought a 500 watt unit, for about $75 USD.
I then pulled out the miniscule battery, and rewired the leads in parallel to three, deep-cycle marine batteries in a home-made rack. I now have some 18 hours of uptime on the batteries.
Overkill? Perhaps - I got the batteries for a song gently used, and figured this was the best way to use them. I have a little server here that's pretty important to my business.
-Ben
Why are people so fascinated with celebrities? Are your own lives really THAT boring?
Isn't that self evident?
If their lives were filled with excitement and adventure, they would be interested in THAT, wouldn't they? But they aren't, so, their lives, apparently, ARE that boring.
Go listen to Joe Walsh, "Originary Average Guy"...
No, dammit! I was right, after all!
/. is hosted on a MySQL server, I guess it's right...
That geek card goes BACK ON THE TABLE...
Backticks are a MySQL extension... I did some more poking...
Here's a mention of it.
My preferred database, PostgreSQL, which is frequently considered closer to ANSI SQL does not support backticks and returns an error if you attempt to use them.
It's a MySQL thing only. Since
But my head no longer hangs, and I've re-asserted my geek card...
And can we please get JDBC to support something like: INSERT $price INTO pricetable where productid = $productid rather than using ?'s and counting which ? to set values to? Hibernate's query language does this, and I really like it.
If I were to change ANYTHING with SQL, it would be to make update and insert syntax the same as update. EG:This would make dynamic query generation SO MUCH EASIER and more readable!
SQL by itself doesn't perform. It is based on the database engine, and how good the developer is.
A truth I hold to be self-evident. The language of SQL provides all the tools you need to make your application perform well, as you state.
SQL doesn't really have an API.
Realistically, SQL is an API. It's a highly abstracted interface for communicating between two programs. (your app, and the DB server software)
It is only "cross-platform" if you follow the ANSI SQL standard.
Sorta. See, I can write a script using PHP with a particular SQL call, and do the same thing in Perl, Java, ASP, C, C++, Python, Ruby, and even BASH, on Linux, Windows, Mac, or just about anything else with a tcp stack and a compiler. Sure, SQL implementations are different, with various shortcuts and extensions, but I'd call that cross platform if ever there was one.
Let me ask you this: How often do you see an OSS product (EG: phpwiki) that doesn't offer support for numerous databases?