Vaporware generally happens when a management group mis-represents the product as being ready or feasable when it is neither.
In my experience, management more often sets unrealistic goals out of sheer ineptitude. But people general assume malice where stupidity is a sufficient explanation.
This is less likely in OSS...
Lots of OSS project promote themselves to death. Look at all the blurbs the KDE people are always putting out. And KDE's at least a non-profit. MySQL AB is a for-profit business. Just because they don't commoditize software doesn't mean they don't have something to sell.
The rest of your message is so weird, I can't even conceive of how to address it. The linux version of the product must exist, despite the absence of screen shots, because they quote people who've "obviously" seen it? Even though they have no screen shots? Jeez, you wanna wanna buy a bridge?
My God. The kludge that would not die! I thought we did away with memory models when we finally got rid of protected mode. But nooo. People still want to squeeze a few more bits out of their memory systems. Somebody call an exorcist!
JPEG a screen full of text, and tell me it looks good.... JPEG2000 prolly won't do good on text screens either (again, it's not what it's designed for)...
Since we're talking JPEG versus JPEG2000, why are we even talking about text?
In case you hadn't noticed MySQL AB is a business, not a charity. Just because they don't sell software doesn't mean they have no incentive to generate buzz.
regular JPEG is much faster (although the quality isn't nearly as good)
I guess I've never seen any graphics that actually showed up this difference in quality. (Links anyone?) Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I wouldn't think that any improvement on JPEGs would be noticable on a typical monitor, where the pixel density is almost always less than 100 dpi.
Commercial printers could use that extra image quality, but that's not the kind of software most of us would have contact with.
A product that's just been announced is not vaporware. The term implies deception and without knowing the real status of the project....
Yep, that's my understanding of the word too.
...there needs to be an announced release date or some sort of an obvious show stopper...
Well, I admit that "we'll have this done someday" isn't quite as blatant as "coming (insert mythical date here)!" But neither strikes me as particularly honest.
And with all of the screenshots, I am pretty sure they actually have a product in development...no use in doing so many mock ups of a product for a simple "coming soon" page...
"No use"? The purpose of a vaporware announcement is to generate buzz. You sound pretty buzzful to me.
If you want half a dozen screenshots for a mythical product, give me half a day I'll create the phony GUI using Delphi or Visual Studio. Which, come to think of it, is almost certainly what they did. Why else no Linux screenshots? If they had them, they'd certainly show them, given the Linux bias of the typical MySQL user.
Unlike the typical Slashdot reviewer, Michael skipped the usual lame regurgitation of the contents and simply told us what was good and bad about the book. Other reviewers take note!
It's depressing that Michael's description of the book is basically negative, but still touts it as a complete preparation for the CCNA exam. Which suggests that the exam is basically pretty lame. I guess the comparison with the Capital of Nairobi (about $2 billion dollars, I think) is all too apt! In both cases, you're memorizing trivial facts without really understanding.
Any, since Slashdot is spamming for Barnes&Noble, I might as well spam for Amazon. And no, I don't want to argue about patents.
...is still vaporware. Why all this noise over a tool that doesn't even have a release date?
The usually reason for making an announcement like this is to make people focus on your hypothetical feature instead of the real features of competing product. Which is not very honest. Which is why we dump on companies like Microsoft and Oracle when they do it. So why is MySQL any different?
Actually, I thought TNG rather improved after Saint Gene left, taking his cliches and warm fuzzies with him. You started getting some more sophisticated plots and interesting ideas.
(Gene Roddenbery wasn't a total hack, but he wasn't the creative genius Trekkies like to paint him as. His role in TOS series was mainly to sell the product to the network -- most of the creative work was done by other people. But like all Hollywood hucksters, St. Gene was skilled at grabbing the credit.)
Then in the last season or two, they started skimping badly on the writing budget. Writers complained about being forced to share credits (and thus payment) and even having their story ideas ripped off with no payment at all. They also lost interest in playing with ideas, which is the basis of all good SF.
Many Trekkies (that's the word, live with it) don't seem to have minded the corniness of the early TNG and the hackiness of the late TNG and all the other series. They only started to complain with the repitition got really blatant. But for me, every Star Trek after TOS was mostly crap, relieved by occasional good stories. (Which sounds bad, but is pretty much like genre fiction in general.) The good stories started to dry up a couple of seasons into Voyager. That was the end of Star Trek for me.
It has never made sense to me that most desktops use internal power supplies. Back in 1984, Convergent Technologies (a defunct hardware company, not the current ISP) was selling systems with external power supplies. These didn't have any fancy cooling system either -- they were just low-power jobs, like a laptop PS. If you needed more power than one unit provided, you plugged in more units as required. The system unit was itself modular, so plugs were never an issue.
Then the PC and AT came along, defining the commodity computer we use to this day. The concept of "IBM compatible" has gotten more flexible over the years, but we're still stuck with some of the design decisions Big Blue made a generation ago -- including that damned power supply!
It does seem strange that address obfuscation works at all. As ThenAgain points out, it doesn't take that must code to turn "dubya(at)whitehouse.gov" into "dubya@whitehouse.gov" (oops!).
And yet obfuscation seems to work quite well, at least in my experience. How can this be?
I can think of two big reasons. The first is that deobfuscation is harder than it looks. It's not just a matter of applying the reveral -- you also need to recognize which reversal to supply (dubyaNOSPAMwhitehouseNONEgov, dubya at whitehouse dot gov, dubyaFSCKSPAM@whitehouse.gov....)
The second reason is the spam culture. The spam industry does not seem to attract a lot of creative, intelligent people. I suppose there must be people working on abvanced spambots, or who send out thousand of random emails with webbug links. But I never seem to encounter them. I suspect that most spambots are sent out by unscrupulous people who don't care about how many invalid addresses are on their lists. It doesn't matter when your customers naive schmucks who answered a "10 million email addresses for only $500!" ad. Which they probably got through spam!
Incidentally, you obfuscate your mailto: links without forcing people to deobfuscate by hand. Jim Tuckek has written a handy little Javascript generator that uses a simple encryption to store an address in a hard-to-access form, then translates it back to text as needed.
I had heard of the 5th amendment. Sounds like a real good idea. Enforcing it would seem to be problematic.
Your theory about how the courts work is very interesting. If your theory is valid, all you need is determination, and you're sure to get adequate damages from any government agency that abuses your constitutional rights. But theories, no matter how well constructed, can only be validated or invalidated by testing them in the real world. Judging from all the news I've read about computer seizures, you need a new theory.
Really the question is if you ever get your machines back.
Judging from every story I've ever read, the Feds always hang onto "evidence" machines for years upon years. Which is effectively the same as confiscating them. Good reason to have offsite backups -- unless they take those too.
In other threads, people have suggested that the Feds didn't understand how IP addresses work, and raided the wrong network. I suppose that's possible, but I think it unlikely, especially since they must know about the crack being traced to a user in Europe. It's more likely that they know or suspect that the HP guys have copies of the stolen source, and the raid is just a way to "send a message" to others who might consider downloading it.
Technically, computers get seized so the cops can gather evidence, which is supposed to lead to some kind of punishment if all the due process requirements are met. But as often as not, the seizure itself is the only punishment metted out, and is obviously meant as such. Which is pretty scary, when you consider your total lack of recourse when you are punished in this manner.
Let me see if I understand the pedigree thing. Assuming you're talking about dogs, each dog and his documented ancestors is represented by a bit of text -- call it a dog box. Each dog box is related to the dog boxes for its mom and pop. If the pop dog box is above the mom dog box, then their puppy's dog box is vertically centered between the top of the pops dog box and the bottom of the mom's dog box. And slightly to the right, of course.
Did I get that right? In which case, end of problem. That's easy enough to do with CSS. Probably too hard to position the dog boxes by hand, but I could certainly write a perl script to generate the necessary HTML and CSS. Or you could do it with text boxes in a word processor, and drive the whole thing with macros, though that'd be less fun. If you're interested, unmangle my email address.
I still have an emergency backup system that's a 286 with a Herc mono screen.
Good god, I have one of those, although it's not currently in working order. It was my first DOS desktop. The Hercules clone that came with it turned out to be a dud, and destoyed the monitor before dying itself. (The ease with which you could zap pre-VGA monitors is a thing to behold.) I replaced it with this fancy Hercules card that had a really cool soft font feature. Never found any software that used it, though.
Not having CGA was a pain, until I found a TSR that would emulate a CGA adapter in grayscale. Used to look at EGA monitors hungrily, but couldn't afford them. By the time the price came down, it was time to dump the whole system in favor of a 386/VGA system.
What emergencies are you keeping your 286 for? An unexpected need to play DOS text-mode games?
I don't understand the bit about halfspace. Any decent word processor knows how to do odd linespacing, superscripts, etc.
I take your point about a typewriter being the only practical tool if you need to fill out a lot of hard-copy forms. But who is giving you all these forms to fill out? You should discuss modern alternatives with them.
One last nostalgic note: HP and Intel did a contest which turned up the oldest PC still in active use (in western Europe, anyway). The idea behind the contest was supposedly to emphasize the importance of upgrading your systems. Seems to have demonstrated exactly the opposite.
You mean they still taught typewriting in the late 80s? Jeez.
Counting letters wasn't so bad. But counting lines so you left a proper bottom margin was something I always forgot to do. Finally started using backing sheets with margin marks drawn in orange magic marker.
There is no impact-printing device that I feel the tiniest bit of nostalgia for. When I started tech writing in the 80s, we produced most manuals on daisy-wheel printers that quickly broke down under such a heavy load. And somehow it seemed impossible to find repair people who weren't total idiots.
One company I worked for decided to get some really early laser printers. They were clumsy beasts -- somebody seemed to have taken a Canon personal copier, replaced the scan glass with a laser, and mated the whole thing to this huge system box, which turned DVI codes into laser movement. Despite its basic ugliness, I almost bowed down and worshiped the thing, because I knew it would replace all those nasty, slow, unreliable impact printers.
A healthy, active adult needs about 2,000 calories to function. The bare minimum to survive without severe impairment is about 1,500 calories. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, almost 800 million people fail to achieve that basic requirement. I can't seem to find hard figures for the 2,000 calorie level, but I don't think it's a majority. Then you have to add in all the people who get enough calories but don't have access to a balanced diet. For example, there are a lot of people going blind because they don't get enough Vitamin A. How many? I can quote some scary statistics from various developing countries, but I can't find any global figures.
Maybe I'm not correct in thinking these numbers add up to "most people". But we're still talking a figure in the billions. Meanwhile, the developed world destroys millions of tons of "surplus" food every year. This is uncomfortably similar to what the English did to the Irish.
If you want sources, Google for relevent terms like "hunger". You'll have to decide for yourself which sources are authoritative.
I personally prefer a "real" IDE. But the last time I was involved with the Java world, there was a heavy prejudice against them. Then again, that was a few years ago, and I guess the landscape has changed. Certainly Java IDEs are a lot more solid now than they were in 1999.
Nokia seems to be thrashing around for better language support. They started with the Symbian SDK, which uses Visual C++ as an IDE. Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE. Then they seem to have decided that they needed better IDEs, so they made expensive deals with Borland's C++ and Java business units. (These BUs are part of one small company, but in a very real sense they're direct competitors.) Now they seem to think that a good scripting language is the missing link.
I was at Borland when the C++ effort started scaling up, and there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who thought that there was going to be a huge demand for personal device apps. Obviously there's the same feeling at Nokia, only more so. I suspect that this market is not living up to expectation -- the only apps that generate any buzz are phonecams and games, and there's only so much market for those. Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.
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The rest of your message is so weird, I can't even conceive of how to address it. The linux version of the product must exist, despite the absence of screen shots, because they quote people who've "obviously" seen it? Even though they have no screen shots? Jeez, you wanna wanna buy a bridge?
My God. The kludge that would not die! I thought we did away with memory models when we finally got rid of protected mode. But nooo. People still want to squeeze a few more bits out of their memory systems. Somebody call an exorcist!
In case you hadn't noticed MySQL AB is a business, not a charity. Just because they don't sell software doesn't mean they have no incentive to generate buzz.
Commercial printers could use that extra image quality, but that's not the kind of software most of us would have contact with.
If you want half a dozen screenshots for a mythical product, give me half a day I'll create the phony GUI using Delphi or Visual Studio. Which, come to think of it, is almost certainly what they did. Why else no Linux screenshots? If they had them, they'd certainly show them, given the Linux bias of the typical MySQL user.
It's depressing that Michael's description of the book is basically negative, but still touts it as a complete preparation for the CCNA exam. Which suggests that the exam is basically pretty lame. I guess the comparison with the Capital of Nairobi (about $2 billion dollars, I think) is all too apt! In both cases, you're memorizing trivial facts without really understanding.
Any, since Slashdot is spamming for Barnes&Noble, I might as well spam for Amazon. And no, I don't want to argue about patents.
Anybody try the flash cards?
The usually reason for making an announcement like this is to make people focus on your hypothetical feature instead of the real features of competing product. Which is not very honest. Which is why we dump on companies like Microsoft and Oracle when they do it. So why is MySQL any different?
(Gene Roddenbery wasn't a total hack, but he wasn't the creative genius Trekkies like to paint him as. His role in TOS series was mainly to sell the product to the network -- most of the creative work was done by other people. But like all Hollywood hucksters, St. Gene was skilled at grabbing the credit.)
Then in the last season or two, they started skimping badly on the writing budget. Writers complained about being forced to share credits (and thus payment) and even having their story ideas ripped off with no payment at all. They also lost interest in playing with ideas, which is the basis of all good SF.
Many Trekkies (that's the word, live with it) don't seem to have minded the corniness of the early TNG and the hackiness of the late TNG and all the other series. They only started to complain with the repitition got really blatant. But for me, every Star Trek after TOS was mostly crap, relieved by occasional good stories. (Which sounds bad, but is pretty much like genre fiction in general.) The good stories started to dry up a couple of seasons into Voyager. That was the end of Star Trek for me.
Then the PC and AT came along, defining the commodity computer we use to this day. The concept of "IBM compatible" has gotten more flexible over the years, but we're still stuck with some of the design decisions Big Blue made a generation ago -- including that damned power supply!
That's 2 out of dozens -- or is it hundreds?
Good point. However, lawyers don't work for free. Ready to contribute to a legal fund?
And yet obfuscation seems to work quite well, at least in my experience. How can this be?
I can think of two big reasons. The first is that deobfuscation is harder than it looks. It's not just a matter of applying the reveral -- you also need to recognize which reversal to supply (dubyaNOSPAMwhitehouseNONEgov, dubya at whitehouse dot gov, dubyaFSCKSPAM@whitehouse.gov....)
The second reason is the spam culture. The spam industry does not seem to attract a lot of creative, intelligent people. I suppose there must be people working on abvanced spambots, or who send out thousand of random emails with webbug links. But I never seem to encounter them. I suspect that most spambots are sent out by unscrupulous people who don't care about how many invalid addresses are on their lists. It doesn't matter when your customers naive schmucks who answered a "10 million email addresses for only $500!" ad. Which they probably got through spam!
Incidentally, you obfuscate your mailto: links without forcing people to deobfuscate by hand. Jim Tuckek has written a handy little Javascript generator that uses a simple encryption to store an address in a hard-to-access form, then translates it back to text as needed.
Your theory about how the courts work is very interesting. If your theory is valid, all you need is determination, and you're sure to get adequate damages from any government agency that abuses your constitutional rights. But theories, no matter how well constructed, can only be validated or invalidated by testing them in the real world. Judging from all the news I've read about computer seizures, you need a new theory.
{idiot}
Lightspeed does sound interesting, but there's no mention of it on the Cheapass site. The only source I can find is a flaky game retailer.
In other threads, people have suggested that the Feds didn't understand how IP addresses work, and raided the wrong network. I suppose that's possible, but I think it unlikely, especially since they must know about the crack being traced to a user in Europe. It's more likely that they know or suspect that the HP guys have copies of the stolen source, and the raid is just a way to "send a message" to others who might consider downloading it.
Technically, computers get seized so the cops can gather evidence, which is supposed to lead to some kind of punishment if all the due process requirements are met. But as often as not, the seizure itself is the only punishment metted out, and is obviously meant as such. Which is pretty scary, when you consider your total lack of recourse when you are punished in this manner.
Did I get that right? In which case, end of problem. That's easy enough to do with CSS. Probably too hard to position the dog boxes by hand, but I could certainly write a perl script to generate the necessary HTML and CSS. Or you could do it with text boxes in a word processor, and drive the whole thing with macros, though that'd be less fun. If you're interested, unmangle my email address.
Not having CGA was a pain, until I found a TSR that would emulate a CGA adapter in grayscale. Used to look at EGA monitors hungrily, but couldn't afford them. By the time the price came down, it was time to dump the whole system in favor of a 386/VGA system.
What emergencies are you keeping your 286 for? An unexpected need to play DOS text-mode games?
I don't understand the bit about halfspace. Any decent word processor knows how to do odd linespacing, superscripts, etc.
I take your point about a typewriter being the only practical tool if you need to fill out a lot of hard-copy forms. But who is giving you all these forms to fill out? You should discuss modern alternatives with them.
One last nostalgic note: HP and Intel did a contest which turned up the oldest PC still in active use (in western Europe, anyway). The idea behind the contest was supposedly to emphasize the importance of upgrading your systems. Seems to have demonstrated exactly the opposite.
Counting letters wasn't so bad. But counting lines so you left a proper bottom margin was something I always forgot to do. Finally started using backing sheets with margin marks drawn in orange magic marker.
There is no impact-printing device that I feel the tiniest bit of nostalgia for. When I started tech writing in the 80s, we produced most manuals on daisy-wheel printers that quickly broke down under such a heavy load. And somehow it seemed impossible to find repair people who weren't total idiots.
One company I worked for decided to get some really early laser printers. They were clumsy beasts -- somebody seemed to have taken a Canon personal copier, replaced the scan glass with a laser, and mated the whole thing to this huge system box, which turned DVI codes into laser movement. Despite its basic ugliness, I almost bowed down and worshiped the thing, because I knew it would replace all those nasty, slow, unreliable impact printers.
Maybe I'm not correct in thinking these numbers add up to "most people". But we're still talking a figure in the billions. Meanwhile, the developed world destroys millions of tons of "surplus" food every year. This is uncomfortably similar to what the English did to the Irish.
If you want sources, Google for relevent terms like "hunger". You'll have to decide for yourself which sources are authoritative.
I personally prefer a "real" IDE. But the last time I was involved with the Java world, there was a heavy prejudice against them. Then again, that was a few years ago, and I guess the landscape has changed. Certainly Java IDEs are a lot more solid now than they were in 1999.
I was at Borland when the C++ effort started scaling up, and there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who thought that there was going to be a huge demand for personal device apps. Obviously there's the same feeling at Nokia, only more so. I suspect that this market is not living up to expectation -- the only apps that generate any buzz are phonecams and games, and there's only so much market for those. Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.
That's an Itanium OS. This is an Athlon system.