Perhaps I spoke beyond my expertise. But there is a relatively experienced MySQL programmer who says that multi-field primary keys and indexes for string fields are expensive to use in MySQL.
That's one difference. But query optimization is also a big deal. It's not obvious from simple queries, but MySQL takes a big performance hit if you do anything that involves relations between tables. That's why Slashdot went to indexing posts using a single field, instead of referencing the parent story every time. (It also has the effect of discouraging "first posts" since there's no longer a post #1. But Taco doesn't actually care about that!) I find it hard to take seriously any database that doesn't optimize queries.
Actually, the way trademark infringement works is that you can _only_ go after people whose products compete in the same arena yours do. The idea is to prevent somebody from taking a name or other identifier that's been effectively built up by one company in a particular type of business, and using it to their own benefit.
That's the theory. The practice is a little more complicated. That's because different people define "confusion" and "arena" in different ways. And unless you have the resources to defend your definitions, you're stuck with the other guy's.
Example. Suppose your name is McGorgghrath, and you decide to open a restaurant called McGorgghrath's Fine Haggis. You think you'd be safe, right? McGorgghrath's is "obviously" not McDonald's and a haggis is obviously not a Big Mac, right? Guess again!
The official party line at McDonalds is that any restaurant with a "Mac" or "Mc" name dilutes their trademark. So your restaurant will get a C&D letter tell them that you have to change the name of your restaurant.
I know what you're saying, and you're right: this is stupid and bizarre. What crazy judge would ever accept such a ridiculous legal theory? And if one did, why wasn't it reversed on appeal? The answer is, it's never gone that far. You have a right to your day in court, but that day isn't cheap. Indeed, McDonalds' lawyers will throw as much paperwork at you as they can, to ensure that it will be very expensive indeed. And, alas, the McDonalds of this world have deep pockets -- the McGorgghraths do not.
Paypal doesn't count as a micropayment broker -- it's fee structure just doesn't work unless your transaction is at least 5 bucks. I don't accept a system as supporting micropayments unless it supports literal nickel and dime payments -- and ideally it should support transactions for a fraction of a cent. That's the level you have to reach before people will use your system without worrying about frittering away their rent.
I first heard of micropayments about a decade ago, when DEC started working on Millicent. As the name implies, Millicent was originally intended to handle transactions as small as a thousandth of a cent. A few years ago, they were still around, though they'd scaled down (up?) to a hundredth of a cent.
If I could read any article in the Wall Street Journal for, say, 10 cents per article, I'd probably do so regularly. Right now, my options are to buy a whole issue for a dollar, buy a subscription for $200/year, or go to the public library and wait for the guy with the foil hat to finish with it. None of these options is worth the money/effort, so I only read the Journal when I run across a discarded copy.
OK, maybe those guys don't want me to read their stuff, but the folks at the Times and the Post certainly do. They just haven't tried a delivery method that allows them to make a decent profit doing so. Subscriptions don't work, advertising doesn't work. Micropayments might or might not work -- we won't know for sure until we give it a real try. So far, nobody has done that, and I still don't have a plausible explanation why not.
Hey, I didn't say that it was effective! In point of fact, nytimes.com does turn a small profit, though not nearly enough to justify the amount of effort The Times has put into it.
I quite agree with you. And I've been hearing about micropayments for years before Taco ever dreamt of Slashdot. I've always thought it was the model for selling online content.
Your post got the usual responses "explaining" why micropayment won't work. Tired of that argument. What I want to know is why nobody's seems to want to try them!
A lot more than that. But that's for credit card payments. There's no law that says that every time you give somebody money, you have to pay a commission to a bank. Obviously a microcredit system would have to work in its own channels, not be handled like regular payments.
My pet conspiracy theory is that the banking industry some sabotages micropayment technology, because they don't want to lose all the money they make from credit card transactions. Not just transaction fees -- "float" on the money they're handling, membership and late payment fees from from the consumers. Not to mention interest payments -- 18% and up is nothing to sneer at when the prime rate is 4%. Consumer banking is a huge rip-off, and of course they don't want anybody messing with it.
All they get from that is the name of the ISP and maybe the user's general location. Anything more specific, they have to look in the ISP records -- which are not that accessible.
It would be quicker to *download* our existing knowlegde into the tike so that they don't have to re-discover the entire world, pausing and proding everything and everybody. But nature re-invents the OS almost from scratch for every birth so that they are too incompatable to do a direct transfer.
Lots of behavior is, in your terms, "downloaded". Many species (insects are a good example) have most or all of their behaviors programmed that way. So if we follow your metaphor (I can't treat it as literal, being an atheist), God was purely a geek until He started inventing higher life forms.
Then He got bored with having to do all the programming himself, and decided His creations had to start helping out. They do so by testing themselves against their environment in a long process of self-programming and adaptation. It's not efficient, but what does an Omnipotent Being care about efficiency? He just wants His Works to be interesting!
And anyway, half the fun of being a higher life form is always having some of that little kid inside you -- that part of you that poke and prod at every little thing. And if you can't create fun, what's the point of being God?
Washingtonpost.com and Media Guardian UK both announced recently they will require registration. This may be just the beginning of a mad rush to drop a registration gate on the major news sites.
No, if they were going to start charging, they'd just go ahead and do it. Registration has other purposes, mainly to show advertisers that you have a large and diverse audience.
Some newsppaper sites have indeed started charging for some of their content. But I don't think that this means a shift back to the subscription model, which never did generate enough revenue to matter. More likely, they want to raise the apparent value of content they syndicate to other newspapers.
I know I'm beating a dead horse, but I'll say it again: online content won't succeed until you can pay for it as you consume it. Yes, I mean Micropayments. Lots of pundits have fancy reasons why micropayment can't work, but nobody really knows, because nobody's really tried it.
What's the issue with cookies? Obviously, you want to block most 3rd-party cookies. But to uniformly refuse to use first-party cookies is silly. Unless you don't trust anybody to keep track of when you're visited their web site.
Oh, you don't want anybody keeping track of your activities and transactions? Then you can't use a credit card, you can't write checks, you can't ever show anybody your driver's license or social security card. Which means you can't legally hold a job in the U.S.!
I think cookie-phobia is a sort of an inverse example of what Bruce Schneir calls the Line-Item Fallacy of Security. He's refering to people who think the solution to their security problems is to just buy a bunch of magic technology that will solve their problems for them. But there also seems to be an attitude that some technology is tainted by the evil anti-security/anti-privacy boojum, and by avoiding it you also solve your security problems. Not true. As Schneir keeps saying, security is not a product, it's a process. And of course privacy is an aspect of security.
Cookies are presumed to be evil because they can be used to gather information. But you can't avoid giving out information. The best you can do is avoid giving information to people you don't trust.
What, you don't trust Google? Fine, then configure your browser to only allow cookie settings to trusted sites, and don't add google.com to the list. That way you can at least use Slashdot without logging in.
What, you don't trust Slashdot? Then why are you even using it? They're perfectly capable of tracking your activities on their site without using cookies.
You don't trust your browser to enforce your cookie policy? Then you're already screwed, cause you've been trusting your browser not to not use cookies at all.
It's not about what technology is evil and what isn't. It's about who you trust and who you don't.
I'm not sure I follow. If I get a job through monster, my employer will go out of business 4 years later?
I never got a job through monster, though I used to use it a lot for job searches. Lots of interesting hits. But that's back when the boom was still a boom. Nowadays, they mostly seem to be advertising "work at home" scams. Which is more and more a problem with all the job boards -- with the predictable exception of Craigslist.
To fly it, you'd need a Letter of Authorization because there's no FAA type certification for this aircraft - and unless you're an ex-military pilot, you've basically got no chance of getting an LOA.
I don't think that the buyer is supposed to fly it. Read this part:
The current owner will assemble aircraft making it airworthy, with your choice of paint for 9Million Guaranteed, with a lease back offer paying all maintance, parts, fuel, and an hourly rate to its new owner.
In other words, the current owner probably does have permission to fly the beast, but doesn't have the $9mil needed to make it airworthy. So basically the buyer is paying $10mil, minus whatever they get back for flying time, for the right to put their colors on somebody else's plane. Advertising, in other words.
You're assuming that "What is Unix?" is a technical question. Oddly enough, that's not true, and never has been.
Something is "Unix" if the holder of the trademark says it is. When Unix first went commercial in the early 80s, AT&T defined "Unix" as being any Unix-like OS that ran on their hardware. Nobody else was allowed to call their OS "Unix", even if the OS was simply a port of AT&T Unix to another processor. That's why we have Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX instead of Sun Unix, SGI Unix, and HP Unix.
Nowadays the criteria is a little more logical, but still mostly legal. The "Unix" trademark belongs to The Open Group, and to get a license to use this trademark, you just need to prove that your OS fully implements the Single Unix Specification. You don't even have to have based your source code on an existing Unix implementation.
But there's a catch: how do you prove that you've implemented the SUS? The only way is to run a bunch of expensive compatibility tests. Which you probably won't pass on the first try, because there are a lot of nit-picky little things you have to implement exactly. Some of the OS developers I've worked with at SGI and elsewhere think the necessary changes are very lame, and, if they had a choice, would avoid the whole process.
Naturally, they're overruled by upper management, and Sun, SGI, and HP all now have the right to use the Unix trademark. But they don't really use this right, except for a few references in marketing collatoral. ("Solaris is the leading Unix platform!") Linux could claim to be "real" Unix, if somebody wanted to spend the money to prove compliance with the SUS. But nobody does, because Linux hasn't needed this to be widely accepted.
Slashdot Mirror
Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elvis... it's all the same!
Perhaps I spoke beyond my expertise. But there is a relatively experienced MySQL programmer who says that multi-field primary keys and indexes for string fields are expensive to use in MySQL.
An informative post. Pity you made it as an AC!
If this were another pointless MySQL upgrade, you'd have a point. But this is a real database.
That's one difference. But query optimization is also a big deal. It's not obvious from simple queries, but MySQL takes a big performance hit if you do anything that involves relations between tables. That's why Slashdot went to indexing posts using a single field, instead of referencing the parent story every time. (It also has the effect of discouraging "first posts" since there's no longer a post #1. But Taco doesn't actually care about that!) I find it hard to take seriously any database that doesn't optimize queries.
Firebird has a few minor claims to fame. The big one is that it's a real relational DBMS, not an ISAM driver with a pseudo-relational front-end.
Example. Suppose your name is McGorgghrath, and you decide to open a restaurant called McGorgghrath's Fine Haggis. You think you'd be safe, right? McGorgghrath's is "obviously" not McDonald's and a haggis is obviously not a Big Mac, right? Guess again!
The official party line at McDonalds is that any restaurant with a "Mac" or "Mc" name dilutes their trademark. So your restaurant will get a C&D letter tell them that you have to change the name of your restaurant.
I know what you're saying, and you're right: this is stupid and bizarre. What crazy judge would ever accept such a ridiculous legal theory? And if one did, why wasn't it reversed on appeal? The answer is, it's never gone that far. You have a right to your day in court, but that day isn't cheap. Indeed, McDonalds' lawyers will throw as much paperwork at you as they can, to ensure that it will be very expensive indeed. And, alas, the McDonalds of this world have deep pockets -- the McGorgghraths do not.
I first heard of micropayments about a decade ago, when DEC started working on Millicent. As the name implies, Millicent was originally intended to handle transactions as small as a thousandth of a cent. A few years ago, they were still around, though they'd scaled down (up?) to a hundredth of a cent.
If I could read any article in the Wall Street Journal for, say, 10 cents per article, I'd probably do so regularly. Right now, my options are to buy a whole issue for a dollar, buy a subscription for $200/year, or go to the public library and wait for the guy with the foil hat to finish with it. None of these options is worth the money/effort, so I only read the Journal when I run across a discarded copy.
OK, maybe those guys don't want me to read their stuff, but the folks at the Times and the Post certainly do. They just haven't tried a delivery method that allows them to make a decent profit doing so. Subscriptions don't work, advertising doesn't work. Micropayments might or might not work -- we won't know for sure until we give it a real try. So far, nobody has done that, and I still don't have a plausible explanation why not.
Hey, I didn't say that it was effective! In point of fact, nytimes.com does turn a small profit, though not nearly enough to justify the amount of effort The Times has put into it.
Your post got the usual responses "explaining" why micropayment won't work. Tired of that argument. What I want to know is why nobody's seems to want to try them!
My pet conspiracy theory is that the banking industry some sabotages micropayment technology, because they don't want to lose all the money they make from credit card transactions. Not just transaction fees -- "float" on the money they're handling, membership and late payment fees from from the consumers. Not to mention interest payments -- 18% and up is nothing to sneer at when the prime rate is 4%. Consumer banking is a huge rip-off, and of course they don't want anybody messing with it.
All they get from that is the name of the ISP and maybe the user's general location. Anything more specific, they have to look in the ISP records -- which are not that accessible.
Then He got bored with having to do all the programming himself, and decided His creations had to start helping out. They do so by testing themselves against their environment in a long process of self-programming and adaptation. It's not efficient, but what does an Omnipotent Being care about efficiency? He just wants His Works to be interesting!
And anyway, half the fun of being a higher life form is always having some of that little kid inside you -- that part of you that poke and prod at every little thing. And if you can't create fun, what's the point of being God?
Some newsppaper sites have indeed started charging for some of their content. But I don't think that this means a shift back to the subscription model, which never did generate enough revenue to matter. More likely, they want to raise the apparent value of content they syndicate to other newspapers.
I know I'm beating a dead horse, but I'll say it again: online content won't succeed until you can pay for it as you consume it. Yes, I mean Micropayments. Lots of pundits have fancy reasons why micropayment can't work, but nobody really knows, because nobody's really tried it.
I hate when that happens!
Oh, you don't want anybody keeping track of your activities and transactions? Then you can't use a credit card, you can't write checks, you can't ever show anybody your driver's license or social security card. Which means you can't legally hold a job in the U.S.!
I think cookie-phobia is a sort of an inverse example of what Bruce Schneir calls the Line-Item Fallacy of Security. He's refering to people who think the solution to their security problems is to just buy a bunch of magic technology that will solve their problems for them. But there also seems to be an attitude that some technology is tainted by the evil anti-security/anti-privacy boojum, and by avoiding it you also solve your security problems. Not true. As Schneir keeps saying, security is not a product, it's a process. And of course privacy is an aspect of security.
Cookies are presumed to be evil because they can be used to gather information. But you can't avoid giving out information. The best you can do is avoid giving information to people you don't trust.
What, you don't trust Google? Fine, then configure your browser to only allow cookie settings to trusted sites, and don't add google.com to the list. That way you can at least use Slashdot without logging in.
What, you don't trust Slashdot? Then why are you even using it? They're perfectly capable of tracking your activities on their site without using cookies.
You don't trust your browser to enforce your cookie policy? Then you're already screwed, cause you've been trusting your browser not to not use cookies at all.
It's not about what technology is evil and what isn't. It's about who you trust and who you don't.
...have you met Commander Bond?
I never got a job through monster, though I used to use it a lot for job searches. Lots of interesting hits. But that's back when the boom was still a boom. Nowadays, they mostly seem to be advertising "work at home" scams. Which is more and more a problem with all the job boards -- with the predictable exception of Craigslist.
...both servers seem to be slashdotted. Regular players are probably not happy with you!
...only outlaws will have bombs!
Something is "Unix" if the holder of the trademark says it is. When Unix first went commercial in the early 80s, AT&T defined "Unix" as being any Unix-like OS that ran on their hardware. Nobody else was allowed to call their OS "Unix", even if the OS was simply a port of AT&T Unix to another processor. That's why we have Solaris, IRIX, and HP-UX instead of Sun Unix, SGI Unix, and HP Unix.
Nowadays the criteria is a little more logical, but still mostly legal. The "Unix" trademark belongs to The Open Group, and to get a license to use this trademark, you just need to prove that your OS fully implements the Single Unix Specification. You don't even have to have based your source code on an existing Unix implementation.
But there's a catch: how do you prove that you've implemented the SUS? The only way is to run a bunch of expensive compatibility tests. Which you probably won't pass on the first try, because there are a lot of nit-picky little things you have to implement exactly. Some of the OS developers I've worked with at SGI and elsewhere think the necessary changes are very lame, and, if they had a choice, would avoid the whole process.
Naturally, they're overruled by upper management, and Sun, SGI, and HP all now have the right to use the Unix trademark. But they don't really use this right, except for a few references in marketing collatoral. ("Solaris is the leading Unix platform!") Linux could claim to be "real" Unix, if somebody wanted to spend the money to prove compliance with the SUS. But nobody does, because Linux hasn't needed this to be widely accepted.
If you don't understand the question, no need to answer it.