"RBL is censorship. If you support RBL, you have to admit that some censorship is ok."
If you use the term "censorship" that broadly, then you should recognize that yes, some censorship is OK. Almost everyone agrees with that at some level, e.g. a parent who might wish to impose some controls on what their own young children are exposed to.
I think a lot of people who are sensitive to the issue of censorship, including myself, have much more of a problem with it when it is backed by the force of law. It's one thing for a group of people to decide to censor something voluntarily; it's quite another when a government imposes this requirement on information being made available to its citizens.
The U.S. Constitution is a good model to consider here, since it guarantees freedom of speech. However, it doesn't guarantee an audience. In the case of RBL, an audience is choosing to ignore certain (primarily commercial) speech. Although you could argue that users of ISPs using RBL have not chosen this individually, if they're unhappy with it they could switch to a different provider.
Once a government gets involved, however, censorship becomes mandated by law and typically applies to all citizens, regardless of their individual wishes. Violation of the law carries the threat of legal sanctions, including being sent to jail. This is backed by the threat of physical violence against one's person, usually by an armed police force. Censorship at this level is much more dangerous and damaging to freedoms.
That said, I think a case can be made that providers using RBL should obtain consent for this from their users. It would be nice if the explicit opt-in/out policies which MAPS itself advocates were available to ISP users, so that they could decide for themselves whether to have their incoming mail filtered through RBL. So in this sense, RBL is not perfect. However, this is an evolving area, and MAPS and similar organizations are filling a need that many people have expressed quite fervently. It's still a far cry from government censorship, and as such is far less objectionable.
This guy was itching to be arrested, and the cop obliged him. What's the problem? Seems to me both sides are happy, and life can continue. Bit of a waste of tax money, but oh well.
Imagine how much whisky SETI@Home could produce...
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...with a massively distributed network of x86 stills!
(a.k.a. imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies!)
> Disney knock off? Nah, it was just standard > Don Bluth style.
I find his style to be too clean-cut, as though he's trying to go for a Disney look (missing his old haunts?) but not quite succeeding. The human characters look as though they've all just been thoroughly scrubbed behind the ears and given a good polish, and brushed their teeth with SparkleFresh(tm). It might work for Beauty and the Beast, but was wrong for Titan A.E., IMO. "Bite" is exactly what it didn't have.
Reading the article, I get the feeling Bluth has his head up his you-know-what. Perhaps he thinks that the same old animating style should continue to sell regardless of originality of style or story, but he's wrong. It's not out of fashion, it's out of steam - perhaps it was once original, but not any more, not by a long shot.
And 3D as a reason for the demise of 2D is a red herring. I didn't see any 3D in the South Park movie, and that didn't hurt it any. Real success in movies, animated or otherwise, even to some extent in mainstream blockbusters, is about creativity and imagination, none of which were evident in Titan A.E.
You made the right decision. As you say, the animation was like a poor Disney knock-off, and the story was a stupefyingly cliched. The only redeeming factor was some of the effects stuff in a few places and towards the end.
Go see X-Men instead, it's fun!
Re:I worked on development of the C# visual interf
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>It's not MS that creates an environment of "us against them"; it's you assholes.
Ultimately, it's Microsoft's actions that people have a problem with, not abstract theorizing about what life is like inside. The latter is merely to try to understand what causes Microsoft, the organization, to behave with such disregard for what its customers really want - attempting to lock them in to non-standard solutions when equally powerful standards exist (DOM/CSS), abandoning entire product lines because they can't control the technology as much as they would like (Java), and inventing new languages to try to gain propietary control back (C#)
Re:Groupthink? Yes! Here's how it happened...
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I agree that to accomplish all sorts of useful and important tasks, major and minor, groups are necessary, and they need to be able to work together, so there's a strong survival and success benefit to groupthink.
But that is also the danger: this quality, that is a natural one which our species has relied on to achieve great things, is capable of being exploited by people who understand it (whether consciously or otherwise), for ends that may be directly opposed to the interests of the larger society in which the group is operating. Raising a barn is one thing, and hard to argue with; forcing a PC manufacturer to pay you based on PCs sold, whether or not it includes your product, is quite another.
Microsoft's groupthink is considered particularly dangerous, with good reason - it has directly led to their success and dominant position, which is a threat to the success of other people and organizations. It is almost certainly not coincidental that Microsoft's particular brand of groupthink is unusually competitive, arrogant and insular, since that is what has helped them achieve their dominant position.
Further, Microsoft's groupthink didn't arise naturally and organically, the way something like Slashdot arguably did. Slashdot posters don't depend on Slashdot for their livelihood, so the same level of control can't be applied to them. CmdrTaco can't send out directives telling Slashdottians how to think - they would be subject to the usual discussion, flames, and apathy. (That's not to say that Linux/Open Source/FSF doctrine doesn't spread via the usual propangandistic techniques, through cult leaders like RMS, ESR and the great Taco himself. It's just that this particular propaganda happens to be Good and Right:O)
But Microsoft's groupthink is a direct result of deliberate and conscious actions taken by its top executives, actions taken to maximize the success of their group, often at the expense of other groups and individuals, to the point of violating laws designed to constrain such behavior. I think Roblimo is correct in assuming that not all companies act so overtly, but Microsoft is, not coincidentally, a counter-example.
>Think carefully before you decide that this somehow doesn't >apply to you. Try to look objectively at your company.
I agree, no-one is immune to groupthink. That doesn't mean one can't be aware of it, and distinguish between good and bad examples of it.
There's some fun stuff about the engineering of groupthink in Part Two of the PBS series, Triumph of the Nerds. Some examples from the above-linked page:
IBM's song #74, circa 1959, sung by the salesmen: "IBM, happy men, smiling all the way, oh what fun it is to sell our products our products night and day. IBM Watson men, partners of TJ. In his service to mankind - that's why we are so gay." I'm sure some readers will think this a joke!
And from Charles Simonyi, variously Chief Programmer / Architect at Microsoft: "It was easier to to to create a new culture with people who are fresh out of school rather than people who came from, from from eh other companies and and and other cultures. You can rely on it you can predict it you can measure it you can optimise it you can make a machine out of it.
And finally, from one of Microsoft's own pages: Microsoft: a View From Inside: "Microsoft looks forward to the day when various annoying defects of reality as we know it shall have been overcome."
I think what worries some people is that they might be considered a defect in Microsoft's Brave New Reality...
Re:Groupthink? Yes! Here's how it happened...
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You got it!
Roblimo assumes unthinkingly that all organizations are as chaotic as Slashdot. However, successful large organizations share a characteristic which can be rather disturbing to us more individual-minded types: they have a culture, which dictates to a large degree how their members behave, even in the absence of orders from above. People behave in ways which they know their peers and superiors will approve of. It's ultimately this herd/peer pressure behavior that leads to, or at least fails to prevent, all human group atrocities - up to and including excessive accusations of conspiracy on Slashdot...
The interesting thing is that really successful organizations often take active steps to encourage this natural human trait, and consciously harness it in the interests of the organization. At Microsoft, for example, this was done to excellent effect by Charles Simonyi. There are descriptions of this in various places, like biographies of Gates, but to give the flavor, here's a quote from Red Herring magazine:
"Microsoft is not a cult of personality, but the company is peculiarly dependent on [Bill Gates]. When Charles Simonyi, Microsoft's chief architect, devised the organizational structure in the early '80s, he made Bill the "metaprogrammer" to whom every group product manager reported. No other software CEO is so intimately involved in his company's product development, because no other software CEO has Bill's combination of technical smarts and business savvy."
The point is, Microsoft's culture, like that of many other organizations, is not an accident - it was carefully created, by the hiring and deliberate indocrination of large numbers of impressionable young programmers, and by building an organizational structure designed to reinforce desired behaviors. One result of this is the attitude described in another message posted to this article: Microsoft programmers "believe they are always right", and are (in general) unlikely to give much weight to opinions outside the organization on which they depend for their livelihood and culture. This is what leads to "embrace and extend", even without specific instructions from above.
>This feature was impressive if only for its incredible lack of content.
The content of this piece was "I, Roblimo, am tired of being accused of being part of a Slashdot conspiracy. I know there's no Slashdot conspiracy, because Slashdot is too chaotic. Come to think of it, other places are chaotic too. Therefore, there are few real conspiracies."
I am afraid Roblimo has been hanging out (virtually or otherwise) with Jon Katz for too long, and has unknowingly assimilated Katzian anti-logic...
MTS is a mechanism for running COM(+) objects in a transactional environment. By itself, it won't be of any benefit to a traditional SQL server system. To benefit from MTS and from running in the kernel, a program would have to rely heavily on COM objects.
Migrating a setup like this to Linux would require (a) standardizing on a component architecture like COM (which might be a good idea), (b) developing an in-kernel MTS equivalent for Linux (perhaps the Linux community could do a better job), and (c) rewriting software such as SQL servers to take advantage of this inevitably Linux-specific feature (OK, now we're fantasizing). This would be an unprecendented architectural change in direction for Linux, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
A semi-feasible alternative might be an in-kernel CORBA transaction server, which incidentally might be of benefit to the Berlin project. But it would be a long time before something like this had any direct effect on database servers on Linux.
Very interesting. I must admit, based on what I've heard and read, I wouldn't have expected MySQL to be capable of supporting "dozens of tables, some of which have tens of millions of rows [...serving] millions of dynamically generated page views per day." You guys should do a story on your setup and submit it to Slashdot - I'm sure there'd be a lot of interest.
Regarding your write performance problem, I've never come across a performance problem that couldn't be solved, although in some cases that might involve custom solutions outside the database. Depending on the nature of the application, you could consider using something like a server program with either memory-resident data or fixed-format data files (perhaps even using MySQL for this limited application), to act as a buffer between the web server and the database. Of course, a lot depends on the details of your application, which I don't know.
I've implemented something like this for a system that had to log information from multiple web sites, where the incoming data rate often exceeded what the database was capable of, and it worked very well. In that case, the data was being accessed in a limited number of predefined summary forms, so maintaining consistency between the external server and the database wasn't a problem. YMMV.
BTW, views are useful for many purposes other than those you suggest. For example, as a large schema evolves, views can be used to support legacy code with the table structure they expect, when the underlying tables may have changed or been split into multiple tables. They can also be very useful during development as a way of reusing queries, i.e. a particular multi-way join that gets used repeatedly can be implemented as a view and then used in other queries. Finally, views can support standard ways of browsing and querying the data using client tools, by users or support personnel who would find the highly normalized underlying schema difficult to deal with.
The feature I suspect I would find most difficult to live without, using MySQL, is enforcement of referential integrity. Also, what about stored procedures? I have the impression it doesn't support them? In more complex systems, more work is done in stored procedures that feed the results of one query into subsequent queries, than is done by stand-alone queries, so doing without stored procedures would be a crippling problem. But I admit I'm now talking about far more complex applications than the target audience for MySQL.
Actually, I don't think I made my point clearly. I agree that guestbooks and applications on that level - which may involve little more than a table or two - are well-suited to MySQL/Postgres, and I agree that there are a lot of those out there.
But the article itself discussed some of the more advanced database features provided by Postgres, which to me implies that it was addressing a wider audience than just the guestbook-writer's guild.
My real point is just that once you get beyond a database with just a few tables, the benefits provided by a commercial database are probably worth the money, even if you're not a mission-critical enterprise systems developer. However, I grant that you'd want something a bit cheaper than Oracle, which is why I mentioned SQL Anywhere.
My other point is that I suspect a lot of people who pick MySQL or Postgre because they're the only free/open tools available, and try to use them for something more than just a guestbook, may not realize what they're missing and how much unnecessary work they have to do just to take care of basic database plumbing issues and error handling.
In fact, the original post I replied to mentioned dBASE/Clipper, which is what really prompted me to respond, because I remember all too well having to deal with some of that basic plumbing with those products. I don't doubt that MySQL and Postgres are an improvement over xBase, but some of the limitations mentioned in the article are serious ones, and will mean that developers have to do more work than they otherwise would to get an error-free and stable system.
Being a user of commercial SQL databases like Oracle, IBM, etc. and not having any direct experience with MySQL or Postgres, I was struck by the number and severity of the limitations mentioned in the article.
Based on this, it seems to me that for all except the most simple tasks, the best tool for the job where real database features matter is going to be a commercial database. Perhaps something like Sybase's SQL Anywhere would make a good but not-too-expensive database for a website.
As the article alluded to, most developers using something like MySQL probably don't even realize what they're missing. The features provided by commercial databases are invaluable time and hassle-savers - enforcing referential integrity, views, triggers, etc. can allow you to forget about entire classes of errors in your code.
And most of these databases (Oracle, IBM, Sybase) are now available for Linux, so you don't have to abandon open source entirely to use them.
...a social misfit or an absent minded fool (e.g. Richard Feynman was neither)
Have you ever read any of Feynman's books, like "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"? I'd say misfit describes him quite well, in the same sense that it does many other brilliant people. And I don't confuse "absent-minded" with fool, having often been accused of being the former, and knowing why.
Regarding the original quote that spawned this debate, it sounds like so much apologism to me.
Actually, I agree, but despite any between-the-lines messages, I thought it was an interesting idea. You could say something similar about managers in most companies: their job is to look at the big picture and not worry about the small details. This doesn't necessarily make them less useful (an arguable point in many cases!) In the case of the best managers or executives, though, their level of focus is invaluable. My previous post was just pawing weakly at the idea that perhaps our wonderful technical skills shouldn't be the envy of everybody else, as we so often seem to assume it should. We're just the janitors and garbagemen of the digital age, digging around amongst the mucky details allowing the rest of the world to serenely pretend they don't exist. Oh well, at least we're well paid!
That's a little like saying that Canada put a man in space (Marc Garneau on NASA's shuttle, 1984) without going to the bother of building any rockets.
Similarly, when it comes to independence, Canada benefitted from America's slipstream. Even a superficial reading of history shows this. For starters, try this page, from which I quote:
The seriousness of the troubles in British North America caused deep concern in Great Britain, where memories of the American Revolution could be recalled. At the request of Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837...
This happened after events like the Montreal Riots of 1837, which while not revolutions in themselves, were certainly violence being used to achieve a political end, which led directly to the actions taken by Queen Victoria.
This resulted in a degree of self-government and local representation which was precisely what the Americans had to fight so hard for, 60 years earlier. Americans tried very hard to achieve a diplomatic solution, but King George III was uncompromising, since he believed his redcoats could keep order against any colonial uprising. He used violence and the threat thereof to collect taxes, and the Americans were forced to use violence to make him stop.
I'm not an American, in fact I'm from another ex-British colony. But as a believer in individual freedoms and rights, I consider the American Revolution to have been fought by some very brave and thoughtful people, who stood up for what they thought was right. In doing so, they had a profound impact for the better on the political thinking of the human race, worldwide.
Your antipathy towards violence is commendable, but it's predicated on the assumption that the parties on both sides of a dispute are reasonable people who can reach a compromise in non-violent ways. This attitude relies heavily on assumptions we take for granted today, such as the rule of law and concepts of individual rights which are exactly what the Americans fought for.
In the 1770's, they had no recourse to such luxuries. If they spoke out non-violently, they risked being hanged for "treason" against the remote British King. Under such circumstances, I'm curious to know what sort of non-violent solutions you favor.
Actually, Einstein is a pretty good example of someone who focused on the bigger picture and was wildly successful for having done so. He was known for not remembering his own phone number. The stereotypical "absentmindedness" of geniuses comes from their focus on larger issues. Perhaps the poster you replied to has a point - perhaps geeks, with our obsessive focus on things like the minutiae of programming language syntax, are really the disadvantaged ones, imprisoned by a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that prevents us from living normal lives...
The thing to notice here is that they were never discouraged from choosing a tech field. They. Just. Didn't.
You're contradicting and pre-empting a lot of research here. The social pressures on girls (and boys, for that matter) to fit certain stereotypical roles are still enormous. All humans are pressured in various ways to conform to societal norms, throughout their lives but with strongest effect during their childhood. The pressures on females are still skewed towards many traditional preconceptions, and there's quite a bit of research to demonstrate how girls are steered away from technical subjects. This bias may be far more societal than genetic. Without knowing more about that, it's wrong to make assumptions about how women's brains are genetically wired.
The conscious gender equalization you refer to has had some good effects, but many of them are in the legal arena, as you allude to: job equality has improved from a legal standpoint, but not always in reality. Try asking some of the women you know about discrimination they've experienced at work. It happens more often than you might think.
We're suffering at the moment from the fact that generations who didn't live through the relatively recent social "revolutions" hear all the politically correct talk, and assume everything's OK. You're being fooled by societal camouflage. You don't have to scratch very deep to find the gender and racial discrimination that still goes on every day.
If you don't see it, perhaps you don't want to, or perhaps you haven't really thought about it. Look around beyond your generation, at the world that you're slotting into, which was created by people with prejudices that might astonish you. Societies change very slowly, even during and after social revolutions. Attitudes are passed through families, churches and communities, and persist with amazing tenacity.
Yes, we've made improvements over the last number of decades. But does that mean we can just stop worrying about it all now? Only if we have no conscience or consciousness.
Although the transaction fees within the e-gold system aren't bad, it's pretty expensive getting money in and out of the system (InExchange/OutExchange). If you put money in and take it out again, you lose about 4%. That's very steep by any standards, except possibly compared to those currency exchange kiosks at airports...
You trust Mattel to maintain your computer?
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"Slashdot gets all fired up about all sorts of hypotheticals then looks stupid when that isn't the case."
That may be true in some cases, but the problem here is not a hypothetical one. This is important because Mattel was installing software which was doing something to or with your computer, which you have a right to know about - but instead of informing you and asking for your consent, they were actually going to some trouble to ensure that you did not find out about it.
Even if it's only downloading info, unless it actually asks me if I want to check for updates, and tells me what information is being transmitted, I find this unacceptable. If you just sit back and accept every "feature" which every large company tries to stuff down your throat, I guarantee you won't like the world we end up with in ten year's time.
Unless you actually *want* every software package to come with a secret auto-updater that makes decisions for you, you should care about this stuff. If we don't reject software like this, secret market-research-gatherering software built into your email program or browser won't be far behind.
Even if you refuse to believe that this could happen, then you should be worried about what will happen when Mattel decides to upgrade your software for you and causes a DLL conflict with some other package you're running. Most corporate environments wouldn't permit this kind of thing - why should we allow it at home?
I wouldn't try to use this kind of application on a public web site today. The applications I'm talking about, described in the "(D)HTML+XML" thread elsewhere in this topic, are for business-to-business use in the financial services sector. Requiring that Javascript be enabled is not a problem in this environment.
"IMHO the switch to browser interfaces was due to laziness and `acceptable level of mediocrity'-style thinking."
The interfaces I'm referring to have evolved from binary GUI systems running across wide-area networks between companies, and the browser solution was chosen to solve problems with this approach. I can tell you from direct experience that the binary GUI approach is not superior, from a development standpoint. And user response to the browser-based applications has been very positive, because we've been able to do much more with the same development resources than we could when developing binary GUIs.
You put your finger on one of the problems with traditional GUIs when you said "some platforms (e.g. Mac OS) are inherently different even in re. very high-level concepts of control flow." You're quite correct. In addition, in the case of both X and Windows (I can't speak to Mac), those high-level concepts are outdated and flawed, and this tends to show through in most GUI frameworks.
By contrast, the Document Object Model is an open standard, which as I mentioned in my original post, is more than you can say for any GUI framework. The DOM provides one of the most high-level, well-abstracted object-oriented user interface models I have come across in more than 10 years of working with GUI frameworks and tools, in a variety of languages.
"But please, in the name of all that is holy, please do not use a JavaScript/Java browser monstrosity. Blecchh."
Our use of Java on the client side is limited to a few strategic components such as the XML combo box and server comms capability. There's no ongoing development in client-side Java. Use of Javascript is similarly encapsulated as much as possible, using a set of generic Javascript view classes. Here's an example of the actual code for our generic view initialization routine:
function loadViews() { with ( this ) { for ( var i in aViews ) aViews[ i ].load( action ); } }
The rest of the view management code is not much more complex than this. It supports pages consisting of multiple independent (sub-)views, such as a typical master/detail display. Many views require no custom Javascript, just the instantiation of the View class with a reference to the corresponding HTML form. In cases where custom behavior is required, the View class can be inherited and extended.
Things like field validation are not coded directly, but rather are driven by XML metadata from the server and processed by a standard set of client-side Javascript routines.
Finally, all this just relates to the user interface. Application logic all resides on the server. There's no significant logic in the UI, and certainly no application logic.
I suspect a lot of negative attitudes about browser interfaces come from people who have watched them evolve from something much more limited, and used for a purpose other than application development. However, if a company had released a product like this targeted at the GUI framework market, it would have quite an impressive list of marketing bullet points, some of which I covered in my original post.
All such choices involve project-specific constraints and a large amount of subjectivity. Don't condemn something out of hand just because it happens to be abused on public web sites by webmasters who delight in inflicting scrolling headlines and animated images on unsuspecting surfers!
We use standard Java, in the form of the java.net.URLConnection class, which does all the work of making an HTTP connection with the server and retrieving data - very little code is involved.
Another useful tool we use is IBM's XML4J, now part of the Apache project. There are a number of useful Java, XML and other tools at the same site (alphaWorks), it's worth browsing around.
You got it - a Java applet that uses HTTP, to avoid problems with firewalls. It's easy enough, since standard Java has the URLConnection class which works fine, if you don't need HTTPS support.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use the term "censorship" that broadly, then you should recognize that yes, some censorship is OK. Almost everyone agrees with that at some level, e.g. a parent who might wish to impose some controls on what their own young children are exposed to.
I think a lot of people who are sensitive to the issue of censorship, including myself, have much more of a problem with it when it is backed by the force of law. It's one thing for a group of people to decide to censor something voluntarily; it's quite another when a government imposes this requirement on information being made available to its citizens.
The U.S. Constitution is a good model to consider here, since it guarantees freedom of speech. However, it doesn't guarantee an audience. In the case of RBL, an audience is choosing to ignore certain (primarily commercial) speech. Although you could argue that users of ISPs using RBL have not chosen this individually, if they're unhappy with it they could switch to a different provider.
Once a government gets involved, however, censorship becomes mandated by law and typically applies to all citizens, regardless of their individual wishes. Violation of the law carries the threat of legal sanctions, including being sent to jail. This is backed by the threat of physical violence against one's person, usually by an armed police force. Censorship at this level is much more dangerous and damaging to freedoms.
That said, I think a case can be made that providers using RBL should obtain consent for this from their users. It would be nice if the explicit opt-in/out policies which MAPS itself advocates were available to ISP users, so that they could decide for themselves whether to have their incoming mail filtered through RBL. So in this sense, RBL is not perfect. However, this is an evolving area, and MAPS and similar organizations are filling a need that many people have expressed quite fervently. It's still a far cry from government censorship, and as such is far less objectionable.
This guy was itching to be arrested, and the cop obliged him. What's the problem? Seems to me both sides are happy, and life can continue. Bit of a waste of tax money, but oh well.
(a.k.a. imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies!)
Here's a white paper which summarizes the UML color modelling ideas, complete with some colored UML diagrams: Developing a UI Design from a UML Color Model
I find his style to be too clean-cut, as though he's trying to go for a Disney look (missing his old haunts?) but not quite succeeding. The human characters look as though they've all just been thoroughly scrubbed behind the ears and given a good polish, and brushed their teeth with SparkleFresh(tm). It might work for Beauty and the Beast, but was wrong for Titan A.E., IMO. "Bite" is exactly what it didn't have.
Reading the article, I get the feeling Bluth has his head up his you-know-what. Perhaps he thinks that the same old animating style should continue to sell regardless of originality of style or story, but he's wrong. It's not out of fashion, it's out of steam - perhaps it was once original, but not any more, not by a long shot.
And 3D as a reason for the demise of 2D is a red herring. I didn't see any 3D in the South Park movie, and that didn't hurt it any. Real success in movies, animated or otherwise, even to some extent in mainstream blockbusters, is about creativity and imagination, none of which were evident in Titan A.E.
Go see X-Men instead, it's fun!
Ultimately, it's Microsoft's actions that people have a problem with, not abstract theorizing about what life is like inside. The latter is merely to try to understand what causes Microsoft, the organization, to behave with such disregard for what its customers really want - attempting to lock them in to non-standard solutions when equally powerful standards exist (DOM/CSS), abandoning entire product lines because they can't control the technology as much as they would like (Java), and inventing new languages to try to gain propietary control back (C#)
But that is also the danger: this quality, that is a natural one which our species has relied on to achieve great things, is capable of being exploited by people who understand it (whether consciously or otherwise), for ends that may be directly opposed to the interests of the larger society in which the group is operating. Raising a barn is one thing, and hard to argue with; forcing a PC manufacturer to pay you based on PCs sold, whether or not it includes your product, is quite another.
Microsoft's groupthink is considered particularly dangerous, with good reason - it has directly led to their success and dominant position, which is a threat to the success of other people and organizations. It is almost certainly not coincidental that Microsoft's particular brand of groupthink is unusually competitive, arrogant and insular, since that is what has helped them achieve their dominant position.
Further, Microsoft's groupthink didn't arise naturally and organically, the way something like Slashdot arguably did. Slashdot posters don't depend on Slashdot for their livelihood, so the same level of control can't be applied to them. CmdrTaco can't send out directives telling Slashdottians how to think - they would be subject to the usual discussion, flames, and apathy. (That's not to say that Linux/Open Source/FSF doctrine doesn't spread via the usual propangandistic techniques, through cult leaders like RMS, ESR and the great Taco himself. It's just that this particular propaganda happens to be Good and Right :O)
But Microsoft's groupthink is a direct result of deliberate and conscious actions taken by its top executives, actions taken to maximize the success of their group, often at the expense of other groups and individuals, to the point of violating laws designed to constrain such behavior. I think Roblimo is correct in assuming that not all companies act so overtly, but Microsoft is, not coincidentally, a counter-example.
>Think carefully before you decide that this somehow doesn't
>apply to you. Try to look objectively at your company.
I agree, no-one is immune to groupthink. That doesn't mean one can't be aware of it, and distinguish between good and bad examples of it.
There's some fun stuff about the engineering of groupthink in Part Two of the PBS series, Triumph of the Nerds. Some examples from the above-linked page:
IBM's song #74, circa 1959, sung by the salesmen: "IBM, happy men, smiling all the way, oh what fun it is to sell our products our products night and day. IBM Watson men, partners of TJ. In his service to mankind - that's why we are so gay." I'm sure some readers will think this a joke!
And from Charles Simonyi, variously Chief Programmer / Architect at Microsoft: "It was easier to to to create a new culture with people who are fresh out of school rather than people who came from, from from eh other companies and and and other cultures. You can rely on it you can predict it you can measure it you can optimise it you can make a machine out of it.
And finally, from one of Microsoft's own pages: Microsoft: a View From Inside: "Microsoft looks forward to the day when various annoying defects of reality as we know it shall have been overcome."
I think what worries some people is that they might be considered a defect in Microsoft's Brave New Reality...
Roblimo assumes unthinkingly that all organizations are as chaotic as Slashdot. However, successful large organizations share a characteristic which can be rather disturbing to us more individual-minded types: they have a culture, which dictates to a large degree how their members behave, even in the absence of orders from above. People behave in ways which they know their peers and superiors will approve of. It's ultimately this herd/peer pressure behavior that leads to, or at least fails to prevent, all human group atrocities - up to and including excessive accusations of conspiracy on Slashdot...
The interesting thing is that really successful organizations often take active steps to encourage this natural human trait, and consciously harness it in the interests of the organization. At Microsoft, for example, this was done to excellent effect by Charles Simonyi. There are descriptions of this in various places, like biographies of Gates, but to give the flavor, here's a quote from Red Herring magazine:
"Microsoft is not a cult of personality, but the company is peculiarly dependent on [Bill Gates]. When Charles Simonyi, Microsoft's chief architect, devised the organizational structure in the early '80s, he made Bill the "metaprogrammer" to whom every group product manager reported. No other software CEO is so intimately involved in his company's product development, because no other software CEO has Bill's combination of technical smarts and business savvy."
The point is, Microsoft's culture, like that of many other organizations, is not an accident - it was carefully created, by the hiring and deliberate indocrination of large numbers of impressionable young programmers, and by building an organizational structure designed to reinforce desired behaviors. One result of this is the attitude described in another message posted to this article: Microsoft programmers "believe they are always right", and are (in general) unlikely to give much weight to opinions outside the organization on which they depend for their livelihood and culture. This is what leads to "embrace and extend", even without specific instructions from above.
>This feature was impressive if only for its incredible lack of content.
The content of this piece was "I, Roblimo, am tired of being accused of being part of a Slashdot conspiracy. I know there's no Slashdot conspiracy, because Slashdot is too chaotic. Come to think of it, other places are chaotic too. Therefore, there are few real conspiracies."
I am afraid Roblimo has been hanging out (virtually or otherwise) with Jon Katz for too long, and has unknowingly assimilated Katzian anti-logic...
Migrating a setup like this to Linux would require (a) standardizing on a component architecture like COM (which might be a good idea), (b) developing an in-kernel MTS equivalent for Linux (perhaps the Linux community could do a better job), and (c) rewriting software such as SQL servers to take advantage of this inevitably Linux-specific feature (OK, now we're fantasizing). This would be an unprecendented architectural change in direction for Linux, and is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
A semi-feasible alternative might be an in-kernel CORBA transaction server, which incidentally might be of benefit to the Berlin project. But it would be a long time before something like this had any direct effect on database servers on Linux.
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary disagrees with you - see their definition of orientate, which dates from 1849.
Although it's true that "object-oriented" is the more common phrase, "orientated" does get used some outside the U.S., I've noticed.
Regarding your write performance problem, I've never come across a performance problem that couldn't be solved, although in some cases that might involve custom solutions outside the database. Depending on the nature of the application, you could consider using something like a server program with either memory-resident data or fixed-format data files (perhaps even using MySQL for this limited application), to act as a buffer between the web server and the database. Of course, a lot depends on the details of your application, which I don't know.
I've implemented something like this for a system that had to log information from multiple web sites, where the incoming data rate often exceeded what the database was capable of, and it worked very well. In that case, the data was being accessed in a limited number of predefined summary forms, so maintaining consistency between the external server and the database wasn't a problem. YMMV.
BTW, views are useful for many purposes other than those you suggest. For example, as a large schema evolves, views can be used to support legacy code with the table structure they expect, when the underlying tables may have changed or been split into multiple tables. They can also be very useful during development as a way of reusing queries, i.e. a particular multi-way join that gets used repeatedly can be implemented as a view and then used in other queries. Finally, views can support standard ways of browsing and querying the data using client tools, by users or support personnel who would find the highly normalized underlying schema difficult to deal with.
The feature I suspect I would find most difficult to live without, using MySQL, is enforcement of referential integrity. Also, what about stored procedures? I have the impression it doesn't support them? In more complex systems, more work is done in stored procedures that feed the results of one query into subsequent queries, than is done by stand-alone queries, so doing without stored procedures would be a crippling problem. But I admit I'm now talking about far more complex applications than the target audience for MySQL.
Don't worry, they're working on that.
But the article itself discussed some of the more advanced database features provided by Postgres, which to me implies that it was addressing a wider audience than just the guestbook-writer's guild.
My real point is just that once you get beyond a database with just a few tables, the benefits provided by a commercial database are probably worth the money, even if you're not a mission-critical enterprise systems developer. However, I grant that you'd want something a bit cheaper than Oracle, which is why I mentioned SQL Anywhere.
My other point is that I suspect a lot of people who pick MySQL or Postgre because they're the only free/open tools available, and try to use them for something more than just a guestbook, may not realize what they're missing and how much unnecessary work they have to do just to take care of basic database plumbing issues and error handling.
In fact, the original post I replied to mentioned dBASE/Clipper, which is what really prompted me to respond, because I remember all too well having to deal with some of that basic plumbing with those products. I don't doubt that MySQL and Postgres are an improvement over xBase, but some of the limitations mentioned in the article are serious ones, and will mean that developers have to do more work than they otherwise would to get an error-free and stable system.
Based on this, it seems to me that for all except the most simple tasks, the best tool for the job where real database features matter is going to be a commercial database. Perhaps something like Sybase's SQL Anywhere would make a good but not-too-expensive database for a website.
As the article alluded to, most developers using something like MySQL probably don't even realize what they're missing. The features provided by commercial databases are invaluable time and hassle-savers - enforcing referential integrity, views, triggers, etc. can allow you to forget about entire classes of errors in your code.
And most of these databases (Oracle, IBM, Sybase) are now available for Linux, so you don't have to abandon open source entirely to use them.
BTW, Clipper was pretty darn good for its time!
...and the digits glowed red too, what more could you ask for???
Have you ever read any of Feynman's books, like "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman"? I'd say misfit describes him quite well, in the same sense that it does many other brilliant people. And I don't confuse "absent-minded" with fool, having often been accused of being the former, and knowing why.
Regarding the original quote that spawned this debate, it sounds like so much apologism to me.
Actually, I agree, but despite any between-the-lines messages, I thought it was an interesting idea. You could say something similar about managers in most companies: their job is to look at the big picture and not worry about the small details. This doesn't necessarily make them less useful (an arguable point in many cases!) In the case of the best managers or executives, though, their level of focus is invaluable. My previous post was just pawing weakly at the idea that perhaps our wonderful technical skills shouldn't be the envy of everybody else, as we so often seem to assume it should. We're just the janitors and garbagemen of the digital age, digging around amongst the mucky details allowing the rest of the world to serenely pretend they don't exist. Oh well, at least we're well paid!
Similarly, when it comes to independence, Canada benefitted from America's slipstream. Even a superficial reading of history shows this. For starters, try this page, from which I quote:
The seriousness of the troubles in British North America caused deep concern in Great Britain, where memories of the American Revolution could be recalled. At the request of Queen Victoria, who came to the throne in 1837...
This happened after events like the Montreal Riots of 1837, which while not revolutions in themselves, were certainly violence being used to achieve a political end, which led directly to the actions taken by Queen Victoria.
This resulted in a degree of self-government and local representation which was precisely what the Americans had to fight so hard for, 60 years earlier. Americans tried very hard to achieve a diplomatic solution, but King George III was uncompromising, since he believed his redcoats could keep order against any colonial uprising. He used violence and the threat thereof to collect taxes, and the Americans were forced to use violence to make him stop.
I'm not an American, in fact I'm from another ex-British colony. But as a believer in individual freedoms and rights, I consider the American Revolution to have been fought by some very brave and thoughtful people, who stood up for what they thought was right. In doing so, they had a profound impact for the better on the political thinking of the human race, worldwide.
Your antipathy towards violence is commendable, but it's predicated on the assumption that the parties on both sides of a dispute are reasonable people who can reach a compromise in non-violent ways. This attitude relies heavily on assumptions we take for granted today, such as the rule of law and concepts of individual rights which are exactly what the Americans fought for.
In the 1770's, they had no recourse to such luxuries. If they spoke out non-violently, they risked being hanged for "treason" against the remote British King. Under such circumstances, I'm curious to know what sort of non-violent solutions you favor.
Actually, Einstein is a pretty good example of someone who focused on the bigger picture and was wildly successful for having done so. He was known for not remembering his own phone number. The stereotypical "absentmindedness" of geniuses comes from their focus on larger issues. Perhaps the poster you replied to has a point - perhaps geeks, with our obsessive focus on things like the minutiae of programming language syntax, are really the disadvantaged ones, imprisoned by a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that prevents us from living normal lives...
You're contradicting and pre-empting a lot of research here. The social pressures on girls (and boys, for that matter) to fit certain stereotypical roles are still enormous. All humans are pressured in various ways to conform to societal norms, throughout their lives but with strongest effect during their childhood. The pressures on females are still skewed towards many traditional preconceptions, and there's quite a bit of research to demonstrate how girls are steered away from technical subjects. This bias may be far more societal than genetic. Without knowing more about that, it's wrong to make assumptions about how women's brains are genetically wired.
The conscious gender equalization you refer to has had some good effects, but many of them are in the legal arena, as you allude to: job equality has improved from a legal standpoint, but not always in reality. Try asking some of the women you know about discrimination they've experienced at work. It happens more often than you might think.
We're suffering at the moment from the fact that generations who didn't live through the relatively recent social "revolutions" hear all the politically correct talk, and assume everything's OK. You're being fooled by societal camouflage. You don't have to scratch very deep to find the gender and racial discrimination that still goes on every day.
If you don't see it, perhaps you don't want to, or perhaps you haven't really thought about it. Look around beyond your generation, at the world that you're slotting into, which was created by people with prejudices that might astonish you. Societies change very slowly, even during and after social revolutions. Attitudes are passed through families, churches and communities, and persist with amazing tenacity.
Yes, we've made improvements over the last number of decades. But does that mean we can just stop worrying about it all now? Only if we have no conscience or consciousness.
Although the transaction fees within the e-gold system aren't bad, it's pretty expensive getting money in and out of the system (InExchange/OutExchange). If you put money in and take it out again, you lose about 4%. That's very steep by any standards, except possibly compared to those currency exchange kiosks at airports...
That may be true in some cases, but the problem here is not a hypothetical one. This is important because Mattel was installing software which was doing something to or with your computer, which you have a right to know about - but instead of informing you and asking for your consent, they were actually going to some trouble to ensure that you did not find out about it.
Even if it's only downloading info, unless it actually asks me if I want to check for updates, and tells me what information is being transmitted, I find this unacceptable. If you just sit back and accept every "feature" which every large company tries to stuff down your throat, I guarantee you won't like the world we end up with in ten year's time.
Unless you actually *want* every software package to come with a secret auto-updater that makes decisions for you, you should care about this stuff. If we don't reject software like this, secret market-research-gatherering software built into your email program or browser won't be far behind.
Even if you refuse to believe that this could happen, then you should be worried about what will happen when Mattel decides to upgrade your software for you and causes a DLL conflict with some other package you're running. Most corporate environments wouldn't permit this kind of thing - why should we allow it at home?
"IMHO the switch to browser interfaces was due to laziness and `acceptable level of mediocrity'-style thinking."
The interfaces I'm referring to have evolved from binary GUI systems running across wide-area networks between companies, and the browser solution was chosen to solve problems with this approach. I can tell you from direct experience that the binary GUI approach is not superior, from a development standpoint. And user response to the browser-based applications has been very positive, because we've been able to do much more with the same development resources than we could when developing binary GUIs.
You put your finger on one of the problems with traditional GUIs when you said "some platforms (e.g. Mac OS) are inherently different even in re. very high-level concepts of control flow." You're quite correct. In addition, in the case of both X and Windows (I can't speak to Mac), those high-level concepts are outdated and flawed, and this tends to show through in most GUI frameworks.
By contrast, the Document Object Model is an open standard, which as I mentioned in my original post, is more than you can say for any GUI framework. The DOM provides one of the most high-level, well-abstracted object-oriented user interface models I have come across in more than 10 years of working with GUI frameworks and tools, in a variety of languages.
"But please, in the name of all that is holy, please do not use a JavaScript/Java browser monstrosity. Blecchh."
Our use of Java on the client side is limited to a few strategic components such as the XML combo box and server comms capability. There's no ongoing development in client-side Java. Use of Javascript is similarly encapsulated as much as possible, using a set of generic Javascript view classes. Here's an example of the actual code for our generic view initialization routine:
function loadViews()
{
with ( this ) {
for ( var i in aViews )
aViews[ i ].load( action );
}
}
The rest of the view management code is not much more complex than this. It supports pages consisting of multiple independent (sub-)views, such as a typical master/detail display. Many views require no custom Javascript, just the instantiation of the View class with a reference to the corresponding HTML form. In cases where custom behavior is required, the View class can be inherited and extended.
Things like field validation are not coded directly, but rather are driven by XML metadata from the server and processed by a standard set of client-side Javascript routines.
Finally, all this just relates to the user interface. Application logic all resides on the server. There's no significant logic in the UI, and certainly no application logic.
I suspect a lot of negative attitudes about browser interfaces come from people who have watched them evolve from something much more limited, and used for a purpose other than application development. However, if a company had released a product like this targeted at the GUI framework market, it would have quite an impressive list of marketing bullet points, some of which I covered in my original post.
All such choices involve project-specific constraints and a large amount of subjectivity. Don't condemn something out of hand just because it happens to be abused on public web sites by webmasters who delight in inflicting scrolling headlines and animated images on unsuspecting surfers!
Sun has an example which uses URLConnection.
Another useful tool we use is IBM's XML4J, now part of the Apache project. There are a number of useful Java, XML and other tools at the same site (alphaWorks), it's worth browsing around.
Finally, here's the XML-related Apache site.
You got it - a Java applet that uses HTTP, to avoid problems with firewalls. It's easy enough, since standard Java has the URLConnection class which works fine, if you don't need HTTPS support.