The "Slashdot Community" as we call ourselves, should stick to our ideals. If we identify something as being bad, be it MS... we should not hesitate to bash them...
You make a good point - however if Slashdot were to publish their server logs it would show something like 70% of their visitors use windows. (I believe one of the admins or possibly Taco once said something to this effect) Kind of throws the whole unified community theory out the window.
I do agree the editors should try to be consistent though. A better argument is that Slashdot shouldn't have posted this from Katz given that they have posted several pro-breakup articles in the past, rather than just mindlessly bashing MS, even if it is consistent. Or at least come forth that they are changing their editorial postition on this specific matter.
I'm afraid I have to agree with that one. I realize a lot of you think it was circumstantial, but that's not the way I remember history. Microsoft's stock was directly affected by that ruling - it lost what, a quarter of its value in the week that followed?
Whatever you think of MS, they were commonly seen as the bellwether of tech companies. A strong Microsoft spurred investment into computer companies in general, whereas Nasdaq took a dive riding on Microsoft's coattails.
The reality is, the stock market is driven by psychology. And what that means is, to paraphrase Alfred Sloan, is that whats good for Microsoft is good for the tech industry in general(in regards to stock prices) And vice-versa. People are fickle and tend to make sweeping generalizations about the computer industry.
Hmm...I remember the days when Macs, Amigas, and Ataris were much more prevalent and Windows 3.1 was only one of a wider choice of popular OS's. I distinctly recall a popular attitude of wanting things to move to a standard platform(I'm talking about average users of word processors and spreadsheets here, not programmers and the like). And I remember Microsoft agressively exploting that sentiment. They were the first to be able to open and save files in other popular formats. Once people realized they had a program that could read different kinds of documents, they wanted that. I remember when people purposely avoided installing the superior OS/2 because they knew Windows 95 would soon be out and be able to support a much wider set of files and devices.
No one is preventing other companies from creating products that can open and save to Microsoft's proprietary file formats. I submit that Open Source software like Star Office and Linux itself will thrive and continue eating up MS's mindshare and market share as they become easier to use and people realize they have a high quality product that can communicate with Windows systems and is also free.
Microsoft indeed does have competition; the dogs of Open Source are nipping at their heels. They will forever be forced to creating products that people perceive to have monetary value and is just going to get harder and harder. The average person will realize they can get all the they need in a computer for free and still be able to communicate with Windows PC's for the most part. Microsoft will be forced to continually supply the very latest bells and whistles to sell their software. Open Source will force them to be innovative and creative, otherwise their dead.
If all computers are blown away, all the geeks will be blown away with them. Unless there's some magical technology I haven't heard about that can fry all devices without also frying the people using them.
I unfortunately live with a Tyler Durden type character who seems to think this scenario is possible, that we will somehow lose all of our technology in some massive crash. At least he is prepared by having lots of guns, stored food, a generator, etc. etc. Personally, I think he is partly insane.
Think about what it would take to truly blow away all the machines. 90% of humanity would be blown away with it. If the remaining 10% were lucky they might be able to scavenge a computer and batteries/generator/fuel to run it, but they won't be building new ones any time soon. With 10% of the population remaining, and out of that maybe.1% that has a technical background, people will be back hunting, gathering, growing, and building log cabins.
I say, lets get a clue now before we blow ourselves away. Because if we somehow did something massive enough to cause the loss of our technology, rebuilding the computers will be way down on our list of concerns.
you made my day with that comment. I've realized most of these people use the piece of paper as a crutch. Its painful to admit that someone could be as good or better of a programmer than you and know about algorithms & compiler theory without having spent 4+ years & $60,000 getting the degree.
The funny thing is, a good self taught programmer who knows his stuff actually found more efficient 'algorithm' to obtain his knowledge. And you are correct - calling a 22 year old with a 4 year degree a computer scientist is stretching things a bit.
Would you pay for content if the infrastructure was secure, inexpensive, and allowed the content to prosper?"
In all actuality, I like many other/. readers I imagine, would pay a small amount each month to keep/. going.
The thing is, I realize that this site provides value to me and I have been to an extent taking a free ride since I have never purchased anything that has been advertised here. Also, I realize slashdot is likely not bringing in nearly as much money now as when ads sold for $34 per 1,000 banner hits. I'm not sure what the going rate is now(anyone?) but I know ads don't make nearly as much as they used to.
Given the fact that advertising is starting to really suck as a revenue model, and the fact that I really would like to see this site keep going, I would be happy to pay a small amount each month as a subscription fee. Especially if the subscribers got some perks the freeloaders didn't.
I am sure many readers wouldn't pay. However, if that was a veiled question, Hemos, I am also sure that many of/.s readers would ante up. I say go for it.
Well, this is an obvious troll, but it does bring some questions to mind.
Although I don't make quite as much as I would working for a bigger company, my place of employment does offer a few perks that I find very hard to give up. Chiefly, my bosses remind me of the aliens who took over the Enterprise in ST and commanded the engineers to "make it go" As long as I "make it go" I can read Slashdot all day long if I choose. They would never be the wiser. Beyond this I get all my computer books either free or at a nicely discounted price. And, perhaps the best perk of all, I can take any and all code I write home with me.
So my question is, how hard is it to take your code home with you as an engineer in the average software or web shop? Hell, I plan on being able to start my own company before long with the pile of code I've amassed.
Chuck really seems to have his trolling down pat. Let's see we have - a fairly observant lead in with a good argument. The purpose of this is to keep you reading. "They're the responses of someone who's been spouting the same party line for the last twenty years" Can't really argue with that, other than if Stallman didn't repeat himself so steadfastly he wouldn't really be the RMS we all know and love.
Then, he throws the obligatory intentional misstatement: Why focus on the distinctions between open-source and free software? Allchin didn't address the distinction.... Pretty much guaranteed to draw a bevy of people screaming how Allchin explicitly drew the distinction between GPL and non GPL code and explained how it was only the GPL code that was Un-American.
Then, he employs the standard technique of quoting out of context, ala "I have no opinion 'intellectual property rights,' and if you are thoughtful you will have none either."
Read the rest of that statement in the original story and you'll see what I mean.
The final part of Chuck's troll demonstrates his knowledge of the community he is trolling. In this case, he knows the/. geeks don't have much respect for the mental capacity of marketroids so he suggests Stallman, a mental giant, is not up to going toe-to-toe with marketers and executives.
I'd have to say, Chuck - you pulled out just about every trick in the book. And judging from the response, I'd say you succeeded.
Microsoft didn't start with the RFC, they took MIT's code and extended it. Had MIT released Kerberos under the GPL, Microsoft would have had much more work to do. It also would be highly interesting to see how they would go about implementing something that was both an RFC and GPL'd. I don't believe this has ever happened.
Also, who is saying that Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos is complying to the standard? Seems awfully non-compliant since you can't authenticate Windows clients with a Unix/Linux server.
Well, as has been mentioned before, that could quite simply mean God was the first programmer to reuse code.
The problem I have with the theory of evolution is that it lacks hard evidence. It is a belief supported by scientists who grope for facts to support their disbelief in God just like many religious people grope for facts to support their belief. When this scientist says that evolution is the only possible explanation, what he really is saying is that evolution is the only widespread scientific hypothesis to date that can accomodate his findings.
God cannot be disproved, so don't even try. Furthermore, He could have planted the evidence of evolution just to trip you up.
The thing I find most troubling about evolution(as a scientific thinker) is that there is virtually no evidence of a transitional species between apes and man. No fossil evidence, and certainly no living evidence. What are the transitional species that exist today?
I'll stick to the hard sciences like chemistry and physics, and computer science, the things I can verify, and be highly sceptical toward hypotheses like evolution, thank you. And I will stick to my beliefs, archaic and ignorant as they may be, you have given me no reason to trade mine for yours.
Darwin vindicated! Scientific creationism cannot be true!
Our genes show that scientific creationism cannot be true. The response to all those who thump their bible and say there is no proof, no test and no evidence in support of evolution is, "The proof is right here, in our genes."
I see no proof in this article. All I see is a report about some scientist claiming to have found the truth.
In fact, based on the tone of the headline("Darwin vindicated!") and the low-class crack("...all those who thump their bible...") I'd say this "impartial" scientist has a serious chip on his shoulder.
Now, someone please show me the actual proof that we have evolved from bacteria and were not created in God's image. I am far from convinced - however I have had several profound religious experiences. I am not ignorant or close-minded. I don't go around saying the world is 6,000 years old. However, a basic tenent of my belief(a belief based on experiencing God) is that we are unique in this universe and are created in His image. If someone could prove to me beyond a doubt my belief is false I would change it, as I value the truth above all.
if you're doing something besides an index search on a large table, stop
...
6.5 and below is a stability nightmare
As a side note, I came up with a program to create a full text index to search a SQL Server 6.5 database, because it didn't have one and doing keyword searches entailed using LIKE %keyword% clauses, forcing a table scan. Then, two weeks after I did that MS came out with SQL 7. I still like my way better because I can do things like stripping single quotes out of the keywords or whatever to match my search function.
I appreciate your comments, you gave me a few ideas. If you go to my bookstore and do a search there are currently five joins being performed for each search. Its still fast, but I'm also always looking at improving things. Also, I've never really fully studied what tuning page-level & row level locking could do for me - I just use the defaults. Unfortunately for me, I've never had a DB guru to turn to - just books, trial & error, and the occassional online epiphany such as yours.
but surely at some point they explained that joins were slower than single table selects, right?
I haven't looked really hard at the slashcode, but I have to take exception to this - in some cases. A select is slowed down by joins, true, but its also slowed down by the size of your tables. The whole purpose of normalization is to reduce the size of your database by eliminating redundant data. Reducing the size of the data searched will then speed up the selects.
For example, if you are an online music store and you have 250,000 music titles in your database, but the vast majority of those titles comes from 7 different record companies, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to repeat the record company name in each title row. I would join the little table to the big table and index the record company id in the title table itself. I do agree with your comments on the sig - that should just be written to the comment and then be done with.
I think slashdots problems are more related to mySQL's locking mechanisms. I have to deal with this sort of thing myself. IMHO, if you have an online database at all, you should completely separate the "read" database from the "update" database. In other words/. should have all the comments posted to another database and implement a once-per-minute table swap with the table used to display comments.
But please, tear apart my above statements to shreds and teach me something new.:>()
I agree, your post should be modded up. I'd even guess that they got the idea to divide the open source community based on the many ridiculous GPL vs. non-GPL licence arguments right here on slashdot.
Re:One thing bothers me...
on
Inside XML
·
· Score: 1
well I assumed they were low budget based on that these all were mostly based on the dialog between the actors with little or no special effects. I stand corrected. Still, I bet these movies could have been done pretty cheaply were it not for the high actor salaries - also, I consider 20 mil to be a "low budget" movie, relatively. Certainly a good investment compared to their gross.
so far has not been discussed a whole lot in this thread, so...
Some of my favorite movies in recent years have been low-budget productions. Like...
Fight Club
Being John Malkovich
High Fidelity
The Matt Damon flicks, esp. Rounders and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Any number of Quentin Tarantino flicks.
In fact, I'd watch any of these over Star Wars: The Phantom Menace any day. Are there some good examples of games that put the gameplay/story ahead of the production? If not, there should be.
in their Interix product. Here's the beginning of the GPL licence for Interix.
The utilities bc, ci, co, cpio, csplit, dc, diff, diff3, gawk, gzip,
gunzip, ident, merge, nl, rcs, rcsdiff, rcsmerge and rlog are covered
under the GNU General Public License, here reproduced.
In accordance with section 3b of this license the source code to those
utilities is available from the Interix World Wide Web site,
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu.
on that same vein, it would be nice to have a "Favorite People" box so we could keep up with the latest postings from interesting people we have encountered.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a good point - however if Slashdot were to publish their server logs it would show something like 70% of their visitors use windows. (I believe one of the admins or possibly Taco once said something to this effect) Kind of throws the whole unified community theory out the window.
I do agree the editors should try to be consistent though. A better argument is that Slashdot shouldn't have posted this from Katz given that they have posted several pro-breakup articles in the past, rather than just mindlessly bashing MS, even if it is consistent. Or at least come forth that they are changing their editorial postition on this specific matter.
Whatever you think of MS, they were commonly seen as the bellwether of tech companies. A strong Microsoft spurred investment into computer companies in general, whereas Nasdaq took a dive riding on Microsoft's coattails.
The reality is, the stock market is driven by psychology. And what that means is, to paraphrase Alfred Sloan, is that whats good for Microsoft is good for the tech industry in general(in regards to stock prices) And vice-versa. People are fickle and tend to make sweeping generalizations about the computer industry.
No one is preventing other companies from creating products that can open and save to Microsoft's proprietary file formats. I submit that Open Source software like Star Office and Linux itself will thrive and continue eating up MS's mindshare and market share as they become easier to use and people realize they have a high quality product that can communicate with Windows systems and is also free.
Microsoft indeed does have competition; the dogs of Open Source are nipping at their heels. They will forever be forced to creating products that people perceive to have monetary value and is just going to get harder and harder. The average person will realize they can get all the they need in a computer for free and still be able to communicate with Windows PC's for the most part. Microsoft will be forced to continually supply the very latest bells and whistles to sell their software. Open Source will force them to be innovative and creative, otherwise their dead.
even his sig is a troll. Its gotten at least 10 replies and 1 parody of it.
I unfortunately live with a Tyler Durden type character who seems to think this scenario is possible, that we will somehow lose all of our technology in some massive crash. At least he is prepared by having lots of guns, stored food, a generator, etc. etc. Personally, I think he is partly insane.
Think about what it would take to truly blow away all the machines. 90% of humanity would be blown away with it. If the remaining 10% were lucky they might be able to scavenge a computer and batteries/generator/fuel to run it, but they won't be building new ones any time soon. With 10% of the population remaining, and out of that maybe .1% that has a technical background, people will be back hunting, gathering, growing, and building log cabins.
I say, lets get a clue now before we blow ourselves away. Because if we somehow did something massive enough to cause the loss of our technology, rebuilding the computers will be way down on our list of concerns.
How interesting that you quote from ESR's book. I think you should surf his site some more, you just might find the person you are looking for.
The funny thing is, a good self taught programmer who knows his stuff actually found more efficient 'algorithm' to obtain his knowledge. And you are correct - calling a 22 year old with a 4 year degree a computer scientist is stretching things a bit.
In all actuality, I like many other /. readers I imagine, would pay a small amount each month to keep /. going.
The thing is, I realize that this site provides value to me and I have been to an extent taking a free ride since I have never purchased anything that has been advertised here. Also, I realize slashdot is likely not bringing in nearly as much money now as when ads sold for $34 per 1,000 banner hits. I'm not sure what the going rate is now(anyone?) but I know ads don't make nearly as much as they used to.
Given the fact that advertising is starting to really suck as a revenue model, and the fact that I really would like to see this site keep going, I would be happy to pay a small amount each month as a subscription fee. Especially if the subscribers got some perks the freeloaders didn't.
I am sure many readers wouldn't pay. However, if that was a veiled question, Hemos, I am also sure that many of /.s readers would ante up. I say go for it.
Although I don't make quite as much as I would working for a bigger company, my place of employment does offer a few perks that I find very hard to give up. Chiefly, my bosses remind me of the aliens who took over the Enterprise in ST and commanded the engineers to "make it go" As long as I "make it go" I can read Slashdot all day long if I choose. They would never be the wiser. Beyond this I get all my computer books either free or at a nicely discounted price. And, perhaps the best perk of all, I can take any and all code I write home with me.
So my question is, how hard is it to take your code home with you as an engineer in the average software or web shop? Hell, I plan on being able to start my own company before long with the pile of code I've amassed.
Then, he throws the obligatory intentional misstatement: Why focus on the distinctions between open-source and free software? Allchin didn't address the distinction.... Pretty much guaranteed to draw a bevy of people screaming how Allchin explicitly drew the distinction between GPL and non GPL code and explained how it was only the GPL code that was Un-American.
Then, he employs the standard technique of quoting out of context, ala "I have no opinion 'intellectual property rights,' and if you are thoughtful you will have none either." Read the rest of that statement in the original story and you'll see what I mean.
The final part of Chuck's troll demonstrates his knowledge of the community he is trolling. In this case, he knows the /. geeks don't have much respect for the mental capacity of marketroids so he suggests Stallman, a mental giant, is not up to going toe-to-toe with marketers and executives.
I'd have to say, Chuck - you pulled out just about every trick in the book. And judging from the response, I'd say you succeeded.
Also, who is saying that Microsoft's implementation of Kerberos is complying to the standard? Seems awfully non-compliant since you can't authenticate Windows clients with a Unix/Linux server.
The problem I have with the theory of evolution is that it lacks hard evidence. It is a belief supported by scientists who grope for facts to support their disbelief in God just like many religious people grope for facts to support their belief. When this scientist says that evolution is the only possible explanation, what he really is saying is that evolution is the only widespread scientific hypothesis to date that can accomodate his findings.
God cannot be disproved, so don't even try. Furthermore, He could have planted the evidence of evolution just to trip you up.
The thing I find most troubling about evolution(as a scientific thinker) is that there is virtually no evidence of a transitional species between apes and man. No fossil evidence, and certainly no living evidence. What are the transitional species that exist today?
I'll stick to the hard sciences like chemistry and physics, and computer science, the things I can verify, and be highly sceptical toward hypotheses like evolution, thank you. And I will stick to my beliefs, archaic and ignorant as they may be, you have given me no reason to trade mine for yours.
Our genes show that scientific creationism cannot be true. The response to all those who thump their bible and say there is no proof, no test and no evidence in support of evolution is, "The proof is right here, in our genes."
I see no proof in this article. All I see is a report about some scientist claiming to have found the truth.
In fact, based on the tone of the headline("Darwin vindicated!") and the low-class crack("...all those who thump their bible...") I'd say this "impartial" scientist has a serious chip on his shoulder.
Now, someone please show me the actual proof that we have evolved from bacteria and were not created in God's image. I am far from convinced - however I have had several profound religious experiences. I am not ignorant or close-minded. I don't go around saying the world is 6,000 years old. However, a basic tenent of my belief(a belief based on experiencing God) is that we are unique in this universe and are created in His image. If someone could prove to me beyond a doubt my belief is false I would change it, as I value the truth above all.
What I meant was that you would overwrite your read table once per minute with your write table, not actually swap them.
6.5 and below is a stability nightmare
As a side note, I came up with a program to create a full text index to search a SQL Server 6.5 database, because it didn't have one and doing keyword searches entailed using LIKE %keyword% clauses, forcing a table scan. Then, two weeks after I did that MS came out with SQL 7. I still like my way better because I can do things like stripping single quotes out of the keywords or whatever to match my search function.
I appreciate your comments, you gave me a few ideas. If you go to my bookstore and do a search there are currently five joins being performed for each search. Its still fast, but I'm also always looking at improving things. Also, I've never really fully studied what tuning page-level & row level locking could do for me - I just use the defaults. Unfortunately for me, I've never had a DB guru to turn to - just books, trial & error, and the occassional online epiphany such as yours.
I haven't looked really hard at the slashcode, but I have to take exception to this - in some cases. A select is slowed down by joins, true, but its also slowed down by the size of your tables. The whole purpose of normalization is to reduce the size of your database by eliminating redundant data. Reducing the size of the data searched will then speed up the selects.
For example, if you are an online music store and you have 250,000 music titles in your database, but the vast majority of those titles comes from 7 different record companies, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to repeat the record company name in each title row. I would join the little table to the big table and index the record company id in the title table itself. I do agree with your comments on the sig - that should just be written to the comment and then be done with.
I think slashdots problems are more related to mySQL's locking mechanisms. I have to deal with this sort of thing myself. IMHO, if you have an online database at all, you should completely separate the "read" database from the "update" database. In other words /. should have all the comments posted to another database and implement a once-per-minute table swap with the table used to display comments.
But please, tear apart my above statements to shreds and teach me something new. :>()
I agree, your post should be modded up. I'd even guess that they got the idea to divide the open source community based on the many ridiculous GPL vs. non-GPL licence arguments right here on slashdot.
Oh, since about 1987.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q= xml+tutorial
well I assumed they were low budget based on that these all were mostly based on the dialog between the actors with little or no special effects. I stand corrected. Still, I bet these movies could have been done pretty cheaply were it not for the high actor salaries - also, I consider 20 mil to be a "low budget" movie, relatively. Certainly a good investment compared to their gross.
Some of my favorite movies in recent years have been low-budget productions. Like...
Fight Club
Being John Malkovich
High Fidelity
The Matt Damon flicks, esp. Rounders and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Any number of Quentin Tarantino flicks.
In fact, I'd watch any of these over Star Wars: The Phantom Menace any day. Are there some good examples of games that put the gameplay/story ahead of the production? If not, there should be.
how is walmart bad to its employees? My understanding was that they made an effort to stock products made in American factories.
The utilities bc, ci, co, cpio, csplit, dc, diff, diff3, gawk, gzip, gunzip, ident, merge, nl, rcs, rcsdiff, rcsmerge and rlog are covered under the GNU General Public License, here reproduced.
In accordance with section 3b of this license the source code to those utilities is available from the Interix World Wide Web site, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu.
I love it. sfu. As in Shut the fuck up, Allchin.
Bugger off, Richard.
slashdotsucks.tv
myslashdotsucks.org
e-slashdotsucks.org
aboutslashdotsucks.org
slashdotsucksonline.org
slashdotsuckscentral.org
Bugger off, Richard.