I personally feel more of an affinity than dislike for the KDE project. We're
doing the same thing. We're working for the same goal. Doesn't that make us comrades rather than enemies?!?
Really?
I guess it depends on who "we" is, since developers on open source projects tend to have varied motivations and goals, but...
Officially KDE was started to be a better, free-er desktop than CDE.
GNOME was started to be a better, free-er desktop than KDE.
Obviously similar goals, but directly opposed.
Most of the developers may now see each other as fellow-workers in the desktop world, but the creation of GNOME was a direct accusation/insult against KDE. I can't say I would have seen the GNOME team as comrades at that point.
Look at the history of BSD if you want to know why trusting someone who could negatively
affect your work is a bad thing.
And look at all the code that has "GPL version 2.0 or greater" on it, to see that nothing has changed.
Everyone who does that is trusting that the FSF won't put out a GPL 3.0 that takes control of all your code.
I don't think there's a much chance of that happening, but if the KDE guys weren't supposed to trust TT, then we shouldn't trust the FSF with this.
Linus doesn't and nor do I.
The things that typedefs do now, are useful.
For things like templated classes or function pointers, the current typedef is a very useful feature.
But I too would like to be able to define new primitive types more simply.
A time_t is not an int, or long, or whatever. It's just an integral type that ultimately has the same internal representation as one of the basic types.
A new construct such as class FOO<int>;
would do me fine.
Heh, you picked the wrong person to use that argument on:)
As it happens, I'm a technical architect for a major investment back.
I can tell you that none of our inter-bank transactions travel over the internet.
The only transactions that do travel over the internet are from clients, and we have contingency plans for when our website is down.
I guess other banks/countries could be different.
But I'll be honest, I don't even think that having a downtime on financial networks is "bringing the world to it's knees" YMMV
almost seems like a script-kiddie with some real ambition could bring the world to it's knees
Good thing you said "almost"
Come on, do you guys really believe that taking down a large section of the internet could "bring the world to it's knees" ??
As much as it might disappoint many of the geeks here, the internet does not run the world.
The majority of the world does not use the internet.
The world is brought to it's knees by tryannical regimes, corporate greed, and human apathy - not a network outage.
Sharing is about a mutual agreement for the benefit of all.
This is much closer to free-loading.
When you browse/. and your traffic passes through AOL servers, that's fair, it's the way the net works, and heck, AOL's traffic is passing through UUnet's servers, etc. etc.
That's sharing. Cool.
But AOL has provided servers and bandwidth for users of its software to make use of. Anyone who uses Jabber/BeAIM/GAIM/... to access those servers is not sharing, they're free-loading.
They're not giving anything back to AOL.
Now, I don't have a particular problem with it, but it's somewhat akin to finding that a local university has a modem pool that doesn't require logins, and using them.
Sure it's technically feasible, and it might even be legal, but you're taking something that they paid for.
I wouldn't call the optimizer dumb, but it's definately quirky and takes some getting used to, especially if you are used to Oracle. 11.9.2 was a big step forward, especially since it lets you force the use of an index, but there's still room for improvement.
Oh, no. It's dumb.
This is an optimiser that decides that table scanning a table with 3 million rows, is preferable to scanning one with 100k rows.
That to me, is dumb.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "break": do you mean they don't work at all, return different results, or the optimizer just picks the wrong index?
I mean it picks the wrong index, runs for hours and fills up the tempdb.
That's breaking.
We had all our thousands of procs tweaked to run perfectly under Sybase11, and they changed the optimiser so much that it now makes such stupid decisions that we have to forceplan about half our procs just to get them to run again.
That's pathetic.
11.9.2 was a big step forward, especially since it lets you force the use of an index, but there's still room for improvement
I'm not sure what they did in 11.9.2 to help this.
You could index hint in 11.0, but it still doesn't get the optimiser to make decent choices.
We are really relying on forceplan to get query plans that make sense.
We shouldn't have to do that. The point of the optimser is that it should, in the general case, get the query plan right without index hints, and without forceplans. For our app, under sybase12, that is simply not the case.
I can attest to that.
I discovered this same thing while working too late at night.
I was writing code to find the circle through three points.
The formula is pretty simple, but I was sure I was getting bogus results (& I was), so I re-wrote the thing from scratch, using first principles.
Of course it being 2am, I forgot my negatives on the perpendiculars.
The fact that these lines meet at a single point, is a PITA! I was getting a result, that from the output of the program (just a set of co-ordinates) looked right, but the point was not equidistance from the original three vertices.
You know, if I'd done that a couple of years ago, I could have been famous.
But at least this kid had the energy to say, "Wow".
All I thought was: "Hmm, I wonder why that happens, Oh well, back to work"
Strongly agree, with two exceptions.
Oracle beats Sybase with:
BITMAP INDEXES.
Dammit guys, can we please, please, please have them now!
rowid. Ok, it's not a big one, but I'd like it.
My other issues with Sybase are:
Dumb optimiser! Dumb optimiser!
They re-wrote it for 11.9/12, and it broke half our procs!
Dumb optimiser! Dumb optimiser!
It needs to support more implied conditions. Transitive joins are good, but there's a lot more they could do. Particularly relating to indexing on low precision datatypes.
Lack of a good GUI tool.
I'm quite happy with SQSh, but some of our developers like GUIs, and Sybase Central is pretty poor, and DBArtisan is a complete joke.
I agree with your observations, but I think oyur hypothesis is quite wrong.
Sybase has terrible marketing (see also stealth marketing), but that is not a relection on their commitment to the product.
There are two possible ways that ASE could die:
Sybase drops it
They ain't gonna do that.
ASE is a core product, and they're devoting a lot of resources to it.
Sybase goes under.
That's possible, and probably more likely than IBM or Oracle dying, but it's not particularly likely. Sybase is very profitable, and can be expected to remain so.
Regarding the lack of books:
Most of the Oracle books are produced by Oracle press, and don't really sell.
It's just marketing. Sybase should do some of it, but it's more a reflection on Oracle's desire to see books on shelves, than the public demand for them.
Sybase needs to kick their marketing team around a bit, and get them to create a presence, but it's not a huge concern to me.
Sybase has long combined relative ease of use, development, and administration with pretty good performance. Lately, though, it seems Sybase would rather be in a different market -- not sure what market, though.
Sybase is still working in the same market. ASE is now, feature-for-feature much closer to Oracle than it ever has been.
Sybase's core strengths are still there (it's so much easier to use/manage), and the high end features that people have been demanding are improving.
Sybase is a big company.
They are pushing into a number of markets, but they're all related. Their big push is into the mobile database market, and they're doing incredibly well (they have a 60% share).
That doesn't mean that they're abandoning ASE. Sybase has always had interests in a number of products, notably powerbuilder. They're shifting their peripheral efforts sucessfully into them mobile market, but ASE is and will continue to be a core product.
Sybase would be the easiest target, but I'm not sure of their ongoing commitment to Adaptive Server Enterprise.
Stop guessing, and ask them.
ASE is still a core product of Sybase, and will be for a long time to come.
They are putting a lot into ASA, but it's not at the expense of ASE. They've cut back on things like PB, and diverted resources from there into the mobile market.
Sybase is very strongly committed to ASE, and they're releasing newer, better, faster versions, at an accelerated pace. ASE 12.5 is in beta.
And if perl's not your thing, then you could always use jConnect and TomCat, and run JSPs.
But if the boss want's access, then he may well have a reason, so your Sybase ODBC interface is just sitting there ready to go.
I honestly can't imagine why you'd choose mySQL instead, unless you care about OpenSource so much that you let it become major factor in your decision making process at work.
And while OpenSource has practical benefits, what I read of your situation, doesn't suggest they're of much use.
If you let personal prefence and political ideals cloud your view, then you're not doing your job well.
Tasmania had (has?) anti-homosexual laws that were ruled to be in breach of UN Human rights.
It didn't stop them.
We hold illegal immigrants (better known as refugees) in detentions centres that are contrary to both UN human rights declarations AND convensions on the treatment of refugees.
There's still going strong.
Don't expect the UN to actually have any bearing in Australia. The UN is toothless, and the Australian Govt is clueless.
Well there's your problem.
Computer Science is about the science of computing. You look at different approaches to computer programming, you study algorithms, you theorise about how things could/should be done.
That science (or as close to it as we tend to get in computing).
If you just want to know how to pull data from a database and display a graph of it, then most universities have some form of "Information Systems" course that doesn't look at the theory of computing, but only the practice.
In my experience, too many people do CS that should do IS, and too many people do IS that should do Business.
Your defense of the situation could have easily been, "take a look at the link, there's nothing there."
That's hardly an interesting discussion though, is it?
Your approximations of the numbers can be verified by the reader
As can yours.
Of course you refuse to actually state any numbers, but just vaguely refer to "a number" to create the impression that it's widespread.
as well as the gender of the BeOS employee
Well, I'm not sure which "BeOS employee" you're referring to then, because the only one I can see in that discussion is Marco, and unless he's undergone a sex change recently, I think I picked the gender correctly.
one would think you'd be more appreciative.
Gee and making use of the code isn't appreciative?
You expect people to be appreciative of being told to stop doing something that is perfectly legal?
Give me a break.
The GPL provision for porting drivers is generally considered to be a "loophole."
So lets get this straight. We dicussing the fact that developers are enouraging GPL violations by accessing a provision in the GPL that some people consider to be a loophole, but is generally considered to be legally valid.
Donal Becker doesn't like Sun doing it with his drivers
Then he shouldn't have GPL'd them.
The fact that he doesn't like it, while of some moral purpose, is completely irrelevant in a legal discussion.
And as for no one discussing how to circumvent the GPL what do you think "hush -- don't tell" and "don't mention linux and when you get questions about it, deny everything" are referring to?
They're referring to the fact that annoying the zealots is just a PITA.
They're not saying "This is illegal, but we'll do it anyway" they're saying "This is legal, but to stop the all flames, we'd rather not announce it publicly."
Actually, the "deny everything" post was just stupid, but that was hardly the consensus.
You can argue this topic all you want
Oh thankyou gracious lord.
call me a troll if that pleases you
Just calling the facts as I see them.
a number of respected BeDevTalk participants
That number being 2, IIRC. (well probably only one of them is 'respected') (at least one being a Be employee)
Which obviously makes him vastly more qualified to offer legal opinions. think it's illegal
someone contacted the BeOS driver author
"contacted", that's a nice euphamism for flamed.
who then proceeded to remove the link
Well, anything to keep the mailbox from filling with abuse I guess.
a number of BeDevTalk participants
That number being one are basically saying 'violate the GPL
People can complain all they like, but the GPL doesn't prevent the porting of a driver to BeOS.
If people don't want that to happen to their drivers, then they shouldn't place them under the GPL. The "free sharing of code" spirit of the GPL works well. Some people seem to want to scale it back.
The reverse happened to one of my ex-co-workers.
He resigned and went over-seas. A couple of months later he checked his local bank account to find 2 months worth of pay.
Someone had forgotten to process his resignation, so he was still an official employee.
He was too honest for my liking though, and he sent an email to his former boss to let them know.
Oooo...I guess I don't know what I'm talking about then, do I?
Actually you have less clue than the President Elect's underwear, but don't let that stand in the way of a good troll.
"some people on BeDevTalk are trying to figure out way to circumvent the GPL to get a 3com driver going."
How about some people on BeDevTalk are discussing the fact that no matter what linux fanatics who couldn't read a licence if it had 48 point font and lots of pictures, say, it is perfectly legal under the GPL to port GPL'd drivers to a proprietry OS.
No one on devtalk was discussing how to circumvent the GPL, they were discussing the fact that the only reason the driver got canned was because of the barrage of emails from people thought that the best way to show how clueless they are was to spread FUD like yours.
If they're nearby (which is far from guaranteed) then invite them to your Christmas party (or other such event).
Obviously that's hard for people in other countries, (or even states) but free food and alcohol does wonders for me:)
I think that $10 billion is well spent.
Those spammers aren't paying their pink-contract fees!
If UUnet moved all their spammers onto pink contracts, they'd make much a high profit.
"The last part, the unique identifiers based on the time would be the hardest part"
I don't think so.
The idea of creating a "unique"(*) hash based on track length is very old.
There's an Apple tech note on it. I can't find the Tech Note itself, but the same format is used in BeOS, and there's a posting about it here.
(*) Since it is impossible to positively identify a CD based on track length (there is no requirement for uniqueness there) does that invalidate the patent? Aren't patents on the impossible automatically invalid?
Slashdot Mirror
Really?
I guess it depends on who "we" is, since developers on open source projects tend to have varied motivations and goals, but...
Officially KDE was started to be a better, free-er desktop than CDE.
GNOME was started to be a better, free-er desktop than KDE.
Obviously similar goals, but directly opposed.
Most of the developers may now see each other as fellow-workers in the desktop world, but the creation of GNOME was a direct accusation/insult against KDE. I can't say I would have seen the GNOME team as comrades at that point.
--
And look at all the code that has "GPL version 2.0 or greater" on it, to see that nothing has changed.
Everyone who does that is trusting that the FSF won't put out a GPL 3.0 that takes control of all your code.
I don't think there's a much chance of that happening, but if the KDE guys weren't supposed to trust TT, then we shouldn't trust the FSF with this.
Linus doesn't and nor do I.
--
Having only one such programmer is probably reducing their productivity.
--
The things that typedefs do now, are useful.
For things like templated classes or function pointers, the current typedef is a very useful feature.
But I too would like to be able to define new primitive types more simply.
A time_t is not an int, or long, or whatever. It's just an integral type that ultimately has the same internal representation as one of the basic types.
A new construct such as ;
class FOO<int>
would do me fine.
--
As it happens, I'm a technical architect for a major investment back.
I can tell you that none of our inter-bank transactions travel over the internet.
The only transactions that do travel over the internet are from clients, and we have contingency plans for when our website is down.
I guess other banks/countries could be different.
But I'll be honest, I don't even think that having a downtime on financial networks is "bringing the world to it's knees"
YMMV
--
Good thing you said "almost"
Come on, do you guys really believe that taking down a large section of the internet could "bring the world to it's knees" ??
As much as it might disappoint many of the geeks here, the internet does not run the world.
The majority of the world does not use the internet.
The world is brought to it's knees by tryannical regimes, corporate greed, and human apathy - not a network outage.
--
This is much closer to free-loading.
When you browse
That's sharing. Cool.
But AOL has provided servers and bandwidth for users of its software to make use of. Anyone who uses Jabber/BeAIM/GAIM/... to access those servers is not sharing, they're free-loading.
They're not giving anything back to AOL.
Now, I don't have a particular problem with it, but it's somewhat akin to finding that a local university has a modem pool that doesn't require logins, and using them.
Sure it's technically feasible, and it might even be legal, but you're taking something that they paid for.
Sharing is two-way.
This is all one-way.
--
--
Oh, no. It's dumb.
This is an optimiser that decides that table scanning a table with 3 million rows, is preferable to scanning one with 100k rows.
That to me, is dumb.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "break": do you mean they don't work at all, return different results, or the optimizer just picks the wrong index?
I mean it picks the wrong index, runs for hours and fills up the tempdb.
That's breaking.
We had all our thousands of procs tweaked to run perfectly under Sybase11, and they changed the optimiser so much that it now makes such stupid decisions that we have to forceplan about half our procs just to get them to run again.
That's pathetic.
11.9.2 was a big step forward, especially since it lets you force the use of an index, but there's still room for improvement
I'm not sure what they did in 11.9.2 to help this.
You could index hint in 11.0, but it still doesn't get the optimiser to make decent choices.
We are really relying on forceplan to get query plans that make sense.
We shouldn't have to do that. The point of the optimser is that it should, in the general case, get the query plan right without index hints, and without forceplans. For our app, under sybase12, that is simply not the case.
--
I discovered this same thing while working too late at night.
I was writing code to find the circle through three points.
The formula is pretty simple, but I was sure I was getting bogus results (& I was), so I re-wrote the thing from scratch, using first principles.
Of course it being 2am, I forgot my negatives on the perpendiculars.
The fact that these lines meet at a single point, is a PITA! I was getting a result, that from the output of the program (just a set of co-ordinates) looked right, but the point was not equidistance from the original three vertices.
You know, if I'd done that a couple of years ago, I could have been famous.
But at least this kid had the energy to say, "Wow".
All I thought was: "Hmm, I wonder why that happens, Oh well, back to work"
--
Oracle beats Sybase with:
Dammit guys, can we please, please, please have them now!
My other issues with Sybase are:
They re-wrote it for 11.9/12, and it broke half our procs!
It needs to support more implied conditions. Transitive joins are good, but there's a lot more they could do. Particularly relating to indexing on low precision datatypes.
I'm quite happy with SQSh, but some of our developers like GUIs, and Sybase Central is pretty poor, and DBArtisan is a complete joke.
But in terms of bang/buck, Sybase gets my vote.
--
Sybase has terrible marketing (see also stealth marketing), but that is not a relection on their commitment to the product.
There are two possible ways that ASE could die:
They ain't gonna do that.
ASE is a core product, and they're devoting a lot of resources to it.
That's possible, and probably more likely than IBM or Oracle dying, but it's not particularly likely. Sybase is very profitable, and can be expected to remain so.
Regarding the lack of books:
It's just marketing. Sybase should do some of it, but it's more a reflection on Oracle's desire to see books on shelves, than the public demand for them.
Sybase needs to kick their marketing team around a bit, and get them to create a presence, but it's not a huge concern to me.
--
Sybase is still working in the same market. ASE is now, feature-for-feature much closer to Oracle than it ever has been.
Sybase's core strengths are still there (it's so much easier to use/manage), and the high end features that people have been demanding are improving.
Sybase is a big company.
They are pushing into a number of markets, but they're all related. Their big push is into the mobile database market, and they're doing incredibly well (they have a 60% share).
That doesn't mean that they're abandoning ASE. Sybase has always had interests in a number of products, notably powerbuilder. They're shifting their peripheral efforts sucessfully into them mobile market, but ASE is and will continue to be a core product.
I have no concerns about the future of ASE.
--
Stop guessing, and ask them.
ASE is still a core product of Sybase, and will be for a long time to come.
They are putting a lot into ASA, but it's not at the expense of ASE. They've cut back on things like PB, and diverted resources from there into the mobile market.
Sybase is very strongly committed to ASE, and they're releasing newer, better, faster versions, at an accelerated pace. ASE 12.5 is in beta.
I would trust my data in Sybase, without a worry.
--
And if perl's not your thing, then you could always use jConnect and TomCat, and run JSPs.
But if the boss want's access, then he may well have a reason, so your Sybase ODBC interface is just sitting there ready to go.
I honestly can't imagine why you'd choose mySQL instead, unless you care about OpenSource so much that you let it become major factor in your decision making process at work.
And while OpenSource has practical benefits, what I read of your situation, doesn't suggest they're of much use.
If you let personal prefence and political ideals cloud your view, then you're not doing your job well.
--
Tasmania had (has?) anti-homosexual laws that were ruled to be in breach of UN Human rights.
It didn't stop them.
We hold illegal immigrants (better known as refugees) in detentions centres that are contrary to both UN human rights declarations AND convensions on the treatment of refugees.
There's still going strong.
Don't expect the UN to actually have any bearing in Australia. The UN is toothless, and the Australian Govt is clueless.
--
Well there's your problem.
Computer Science is about the science of computing. You look at different approaches to computer programming, you study algorithms, you theorise about how things could/should be done. That science (or as close to it as we tend to get in computing).
If you just want to know how to pull data from a database and display a graph of it, then most universities have some form of "Information Systems" course that doesn't look at the theory of computing, but only the practice.
In my experience, too many people do CS that should do IS, and too many people do IS that should do Business.
--
That's hardly an interesting discussion though, is it?
Your approximations of the numbers can be verified by the reader
As can yours.
Of course you refuse to actually state any numbers, but just vaguely refer to "a number" to create the impression that it's widespread.
as well as the gender of the BeOS employee
Well, I'm not sure which "BeOS employee" you're referring to then, because the only one I can see in that discussion is Marco, and unless he's undergone a sex change recently, I think I picked the gender correctly.
one would think you'd be more appreciative.
Gee and making use of the code isn't appreciative?
You expect people to be appreciative of being told to stop doing something that is perfectly legal?
Give me a break.
The GPL provision for porting drivers is generally considered to be a "loophole."
So lets get this straight. We dicussing the fact that developers are enouraging GPL violations by accessing a provision in the GPL that some people consider to be a loophole, but is generally considered to be legally valid.
Why am I even bothering?
--
Then he shouldn't have GPL'd them.
The fact that he doesn't like it, while of some moral purpose, is completely irrelevant in a legal discussion.
And as for no one discussing how to circumvent the GPL what do you think "hush -- don't tell" and "don't mention linux and when you get questions about it, deny everything" are referring to?
They're referring to the fact that annoying the zealots is just a PITA.
They're not saying "This is illegal, but we'll do it anyway" they're saying "This is legal, but to stop the all flames, we'd rather not announce it publicly."
Actually, the "deny everything" post was just stupid, but that was hardly the consensus.
You can argue this topic all you want
Oh thankyou gracious lord.
call me a troll if that pleases you
Just calling the facts as I see them.
a number of respected BeDevTalk participants
That number being 2, IIRC. (well probably only one of them is 'respected')
(at least one being a Be employee)
Which obviously makes him vastly more qualified to offer legal opinions.
think it's illegal
someone contacted the BeOS driver author
"contacted", that's a nice euphamism for flamed.
who then proceeded to remove the link
Well, anything to keep the mailbox from filling with abuse I guess.
a number of BeDevTalk participants
That number being one
are basically saying 'violate the GPL
People can complain all they like, but the GPL doesn't prevent the porting of a driver to BeOS.
If people don't want that to happen to their drivers, then they shouldn't place them under the GPL. The "free sharing of code" spirit of the GPL works well. Some people seem to want to scale it back.
--
He resigned and went over-seas. A couple of months later he checked his local bank account to find 2 months worth of pay.
Someone had forgotten to process his resignation, so he was still an official employee.
He was too honest for my liking though, and he sent an email to his former boss to let them know.
--
Actually you have less clue than the President Elect's underwear, but don't let that stand in the way of a good troll.
"some people on BeDevTalk are trying to figure out way to circumvent the GPL to get a 3com driver going."
How about some people on BeDevTalk are discussing the fact that no matter what linux fanatics who couldn't read a licence if it had 48 point font and lots of pictures, say, it is perfectly legal under the GPL to port GPL'd drivers to a proprietry OS.
No one on devtalk was discussing how to circumvent the GPL, they were discussing the fact that the only reason the driver got canned was because of the barrage of emails from people thought that the best way to show how clueless they are was to spread FUD like yours.
--
--
Cars are inanimate objects. They have not, can not and never will do anything on their own. More Cars != More Pollution.
Factories are inanimate objects. They have not, can not and never will do anything on their own. More Factories != More Production.
--
Those spammers aren't paying their pink-contract fees!
If UUnet moved all their spammers onto pink contracts, they'd make much a high profit.
--
I don't think so.
The idea of creating a "unique"(*) hash based on track length is very old.
There's an Apple tech note on it. I can't find the Tech Note itself, but the same format is used in BeOS, and there's a posting about it here.
(*) Since it is impossible to positively identify a CD based on track length (there is no requirement for uniqueness there) does that invalidate the patent? Aren't patents on the impossible automatically invalid?
--