I recently helped my nephew and a bunch of his housemates share an existing SBC DSL connection with various of machines, consisting of a Win2K PC and some Macs running OS 9 and OS X. The owner of the connection had been using an iMac running OS 9 and EnterNet.
Sidebar: so obviously the Mac/EnterNet combination works, even though SBC doesn't "support" Macs. What that comes down to is they don't want the expense of hiring extra support people with Mac expertise. If you can get by with informal support from the Mac community, that's not a big deal. I found more than enough info online. Which says a lot, since I never work with Macs and am pretty ignorant of their basics.
I guess I've already answered your question, but I have to finish the story. We bought a Linksys Cable/DSL router with built-in PPoE, DHCP, and a password protected web server for administration. Just like SBC, LinkSys does not support Macs. I thought I could make it work without any handholding. In the end I was right, but a bit of pain and frustration intervened.
I wasted a lot of time trying to understand why the router shut down whenever connected to its web server. (One misleading theory was that there was some kind of security issue between the Sun Java running on the router and the Microsoft Java running on the Mac. Unfortunately I didn't have the disk space to install Mozilla.) After several hours of this, it finally dawned on me that the router was broken. Back to the store for a replacement, and things went smoothly after that.
Plugging in most of the machines (the PC and the OS 9 Macs) was pretty simple. Just needed a basic knowledge of DHCP as implemented on those platforms.
Plugging in the OS X machine was unreal! The system detected the DHCP server and configured itself without being told to. Instantly online.
I think there's an important implication here: don't bother with EnterNet. Get a router, even if you don't plan to share the connection. They're worth their cost just for the software that's built into them. And despite the "no Mac support" attitude of the manufacturers, they do play well with Macs. Just be sure to buy one from a physical store, in case it turns out to be DOA.
Yes, and it is a good thing. Because Free software can evolve indpendently of corporate timetables, it will evolve at a much more natural pace. One thing Microsoft can do nothing about is the fact that Free software is always moving forward (on average, of course).
That picture is much too black and white. Yes, corporations often impose silly deadlines on their development teams. But if the only alternative is the "we'll release it when we're finished" attitude, the Corporate Timetables are actually a good thing.
There's more to a successful product than quality engineering.
Every product has a finite window of opportunity. If you miss that window, all your potential users have gone on without you, using some other product to satisfy their needs.
Look at Mozilla. That project has been wandering in the wilderness since 1998. If they had produced a useful, stable product back in 1999, when Internet Explorer still only had half the market, people might have resisted the pressure to switch.
In 2003, IE has ninety-six percent of the market. That's a huge mass of people who have every motivation not to switch back. So what if Mozilla is now technically superior? There are a zillion web apps that are designed around IE's quirks and "innovations". Users of these apps will never switch back -- and Mister Bill gets to dictate how web browsers "should" work. Depresssing thought.
Notwithstanding language on the CD label... this letter will confirm that use by you of the software received is governed by the electronic license embedded in the product setup...
Sounds like someone realized they'd stepped into a legal/political minefield, and none too soon.
It sounds to me like somebody in Redmond wanted to hand out XP freebies, but didn't have the budget to buy retail or volume license. (Yes, it's just Microsoft buying from itself. But license costs still come out of the department budget.) So they found an internal MSDN subscription with some extra activation keys, and used those. Probably internal MSDN license aren't as expensive as other licenses.
Distro disks with that "bound by attached license" warnings are familiar to anybody with an MSDN subscription. This is Microsoft's warning that you don't have permission to resell these disks. Of course, plenty of subscribers ignore this warning, judging from the underprice copies of XP I see on EBay.
Been to China [com.com] recently? How about India [rediff.com]?
Ouch. Good point. We in the west, particularly the U.S., tend to think the technological world begins and ends with us. Whereas China or India each outnumber us 5 to 1. And both countries have their share of techies. Still...
I used to be part of the team that created Kylix. Now, you can use Kylix for many kinds of development, but where it really shines is developing GUI applications. So I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that Borland created Kylix mainly to tap into the impending boom in Linux desktop apps.
Except that the boom never happened. There was a reasonable demand for Linux software in a lot of places, including South and East Asia (with their 2 billion potential users). But nothing like a boom.
Probably the day will come when there are more computer users in the East than in the West. But it's not going to be for a few years yet. And when that day comes, I suspect the systems will be much better suited for conditions in that part of the world than anything we're using now.
Besides, suppose there was a sudden surge in demand for computers from the East. Hundreds of thousand of desktop systems at once. Where would they buy them? Not from HP or Sun. They'd buy x86 boxes, made in white box factories. Probably Asian factories.
You're right about the "what is it" factor. Too many Slashdot articles assume that everybody has heard about Fink, or Joe, or Sesquipedialian Architectures.
But I don't think this kind of announcement duplicates anything at Freshmeat. (What's Freshmeat?) That site is for people who already run specific platforms, and are curious to see what's being developed for those platforms. But you don't have to be a OS X enthusiast to be interested in the doings of the Fink team.
It's tempting to blame the usual politics and infighting and general flakiness for Gnome's "instability". But if Gnome were at all important to HP (or to Sun, or to the other corporate backers of the Gnome Foundation), they'd pony up the money or the programmer expertise needed to stabilize it.
Or just accepted its current level of stability. I'm no expert, and I'm not even a Gnome fan, but the Gnome appears to me to be at least as stable as CDE!
You have to look at the reasons so many people jumped on the Gnome or KDE bandwagon starting around 1999. They'd been fighting with Microsoft for access to the desktop for a long time. They saw the sudden emergence of open source desktops as one last chance to offer a serious competitor to Windows.
Which it wasn't. Microsoft won the desktop wars a long time ago. There will always be people struggling to offer alternatives to the Microsoft monopoly. (At least I hope there will.) But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.
And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated. It won't see any more drastic expansions until the next Big Idea (a solution to the last mile problem? cheap mobile computing? if I knew I'd be off building it) makes its splash.
Division by zero is completely meaningless. Yes there are cases where division by zero creates a removable singularity, and for continuity's sake you can define a new curve/sequence/function/whatever with the convenient value. But that doesn't make the division meaningful...
I should stay away from this issue: my math stinks, and we're getting into a weird area of philosophy. Oh well...
You're assuming that the familiar logical system of Calculus 101 is the only way of defining concepts like "zero" and "infinity". But that's not true. There are alternate approaches that I'm not qualified to get into (basically, some mathematicians are trying to resolve the ambiguities Newton tapdanced around when he invented Calculus).
And even if you don't get into that kind of quibble, division by zero is only undefined in the limited context of "standard" real numbers. It makes perfect sense to define division by zero in the context of complex numbers.
Right you are. More precisely, ISAM is a technique for managing data. Pretty good definition here.
PD's suggestion is a good one if you can re-engineer your existing database. If that's not an option (too much legacy code) then you do indeed need some kind of compatibility layer. But you should be searching for PL/B compatibility layers, 'cause that's the system that defines the file format. Here's one I found by Googling "PL/B ISAM". There are probably others.
Or you could write your own JDBC driver for PL/B ISAM. That's assuming you have the time, the expertise, and feel up to investigating the PL/B standard. Oh, and also assuming the standard explicitly defines ISAM file format, and doesn't leave it up to the vendor. You'll have to buy a copy of the standard (that's how standard comitttees support themselves) to find out.
I do thank GamerGeek for asking this question. PL/B seems to have been around for about 30 years without my ever running across it. More trivia to clog up my brain...
Why is it so obvious that Rout is mentally ill? Lots of people have silly theories. I've seen "proofs" that Pi is a rational number, that humans are all descended from Martians, that the international monetary system is a conspiracy of Jews, freemasons, Catholics, and the British Royal family... Perfectly "normal" people believe this crap. Hell, more than one popular TV show celebrates it! And some well meaning fools waste a lot of time trying to debunk silly theories. Which is a lost cause -- this stuff comes from a need to believe, and need to feel important. Very basic human desires, and not symptoms of mental illness!
The nice thing about conspiracy theories: they make it unnecessary for you to acknowledge any criticism of your beliefs. Can't patent your perpetual motion machine? It's a conspiracy of physicists. Can't get a permit to operate a chemical factory in a residential neighborhood? It's a conspiracy of environmentalists! Can't play your stereo loud as you would like? It's a conspiracy of classical music fanatics!
My favorite satire of this attitude is Ed Subitsky's satire of Velikoskyism, "Worlds In Collusion". (Printed in the National Lampoon a long time ago. Don't know where else it's available.) Among other assertions, Subitsky asserts that refrigerators don't really need electricity -- it's all a conspiracy to make you pay your utility bill. If you look in the secret compartment, you'll find the real source of the coolness: ice cubes!
The BeOS file system has a lot of interesting features (I especially like the built-in file typing), but it's hardly a database metaphor. Perhaps you're thinking of the fact that the file system is journalling, a concept you usually associate with databases. But any serious file system has journalling these days.
Never heard of XP2FS. There's the open-source flight simulator, but I don't suppose that's what you meant.
Paging system? Whatever. Let's not trot out the tired old "it works best for me, so anybody who doesn't use it is an idiot" argument.
Good examples. They're not deeply integrated into popular GUIs, but you're right, people do use them.
Also, "channel metaphor" would seem to describe the virtual consoles on most Linux and a lot of Unix systems. I know text-mode diehards who insist that virtual consoles are more practical than any GUI.
One of the big design mistakes in early Windows was not making the book metaphor (I prefer to think of it as tabs that access specific windows in an app) a basic feature of the GUI. Instead, it provides that stupid MDI concept, which doesn't include a simple way to switch between app windows. But many application and framework developers (Intuit and Borland come to mind) were quick to add on this functionality -- which shows how useful it is.
Lots of people are working on various z-axis metaphors. But I don't believe they'll be practical until displays get a lot better. Like an affordable display that's also a table or wall surface.
Like you, I tend to work with one window maximized, though I tend to rely on the taskbar (which I keep permanently visible at the bottom of the display) more than alt-tab. ("Background" apps like IM and Winamp go into the clock area so as not to distract.) That's often a pain, because in my work there's a lot of multitasking (in the human sense). But even 21" monitors aren't really big enough to have multiple apps open at once, unless the apps are really simple (file manager, IM, etc.). Perhaps if I could afford multiple monitors. I know a guy who uses four at once, and that strikes me as just barely enough!
Yeah, I've seen the nicer Apple monitors -- and felt lust in my heart. Way out of my price range.
The filesystem-is-a-database methaphor exists, but I can't see it catching on. Not that it's a bad idea, but consider the paradigm shift! I'm afraid the file cabinet metaphor is locked in, along with QWERTY keyboards, letter-digit notation in spreadsheets, and other conventions that have too many established users to be replaced -- no matter the advantages of the replacement.
Well, any user interface starts out as some kind of metaphor. The dominant file system organization, for example, borrows the ideas of files and folders from simple paper filing systems. By the same token, the overlapping windows GUI is just a metaphor for a desk with a lot of papers on it. So your question really devolves into this one: what other good GUI metaphors are there? I can't think of any, but then I'm pretty bad at thinking visually.
Not quite offtopic: back in the late 70s, some workstation designers decided they could do an intuitive user interface without waiting for bitmap displays to become affordable. The result was the form-based user interface of the CTOS operating system, which ran on special proprietary hardware. Of course, like most proprietary systems, it was driven from the marketplace by IBM compatibles. Too bad, really.
In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth's own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.
I'm reminded of that persistent myth about drains and the Coriolis Force. I'm told that in equatorial contries, tourists can find entrepreneurs who will "demonstrate" the precise location of the equator with a tub that drains clockwise in one location, and counterclockwise a few feet away. If you ask one of these guys about another entrepreneur that lives a few miles north or south that has the same demo, he'll gravely inform you that the other guy is a fraud!
It can be pretty hard to tell the liar from the true believer!
Good point, but only of interest to a low end web site, which can probably get by with MySQL. If a web site is successful enough to need a better database server, it's also successful enough to need a dedicated host. And if you have your own host, you can install anything you want on it.
Problem is, most sites start with MySQL, and stay with it long after they've outgrown it.
It's a little sad that this guy thinks the entire sector hinges on this one company.
He's probably right. How many really successful Dotcoms are still out there? Being able to trade even one more promising stock would make a lot of difference. There's a lot of punctuated equilibrium in the stock market.
Amusing that Brin attributes the IPO delay to "laziness". Lazy people don't produce the kind of technology Google keeps coming up with! I think the real story is that they're all enjoying themselves too much to worry about cashing in. Refreshing that somebody isn't obsessed with retiring at 35 -- which Brin certainly could.
Uhm, you did notice that one of the benefits on the list is stock options? Which, being pre-IPO, are particularly valuable. But they're not worth anything if Google never goes public. If Google employees have to choose between free catered lunches and 6- or 7-figure payouts, which do you think they'll choose?
As an AC has already pointed out, Netcraft somehow resolves whitehouse.gov to a Akamai server in the UK. Hence the Energis netblock. If you look up the correct IP number of this site (198.137.240.92) and feed it to a whois server, you get some more authoritative info:
OrgName: Executive Office Of The President USA
OrgID: EXOP
Address: Room NEOB 4208
Address: 725 17th Street NW
City: Washington
StateProv: DC
PostalCode: 20503
Country: US
TechHandle: WDR1-ARIN
TechName: Reynolds, William
TechPhone: +1-202-395-6975
TechEmail: william_d._reynolds@oa.eop.gov
If I'm reading this correctly, the block belongs to something called EOPNET, which is probably the IS department of the Executive Office of the President.
Except that Slashdot doesn't use MySQL for a lot of its content. Roughly half is generated HTML. (Half in terms of page access counts, not actual content.) Also, Slashdot is careful to avoid using advanced queries. On top of that, they have to throw a lot of hardware at the problem. Which is not only expensive, but leads to integrity issues.
By the time I got to it, any attempt to access Modpenguin produced a stream of MySQL errors.
Attention, content-management hackers. MySQL appeals, because it's open-source, it's easy to set up, and it handles very simple queries quickly. THESE ARE ITS ONLY VIRTUES. Once your web site starts getting traffic, you have to start looking at a real DBMS that optimizes complex queries and scales worth a damn. Here's one, and another, and yet another.
Who said anything about "much later"? The specific wording (how many times do I have to point out the specific wording) is "rapidly allocates and deallocates" (italics mine). A lot of object-oriented systems (like Borland's component libraries) do this, because they briefly instantiate small objects for all kinds of purposes.
Conspiracy theorists might think that this bug was invented solely to screw up Java programs, which also follow this model. But Java runtimes usually have their own memory manager, so they'd probably not be affected.
I guess MFC programs would also be immune. MFC pretends to be an object-oriented library, but that doesn't extend much past the syntax of the API. Perhaps that's why Microsoft didn't spot this earlier.
Are you saying I'm a bad driver? Fking socialist, I know how fast I can drive safely. It's those stupid hippies in their VW busses that are dangeours. And people who drive 63 miles an hour in the fast lane. And all these cameras and radars are against the constitution. I don't care what it says, the fking light was green! Well, maybe yellow. BUT I AM NOT STRESSED!
Slashdot Mirror
Sidebar: so obviously the Mac/EnterNet combination works, even though SBC doesn't "support" Macs. What that comes down to is they don't want the expense of hiring extra support people with Mac expertise. If you can get by with informal support from the Mac community, that's not a big deal. I found more than enough info online. Which says a lot, since I never work with Macs and am pretty ignorant of their basics.
I guess I've already answered your question, but I have to finish the story. We bought a Linksys Cable/DSL router with built-in PPoE, DHCP, and a password protected web server for administration. Just like SBC, LinkSys does not support Macs. I thought I could make it work without any handholding. In the end I was right, but a bit of pain and frustration intervened.
I wasted a lot of time trying to understand why the router shut down whenever connected to its web server. (One misleading theory was that there was some kind of security issue between the Sun Java running on the router and the Microsoft Java running on the Mac. Unfortunately I didn't have the disk space to install Mozilla.) After several hours of this, it finally dawned on me that the router was broken. Back to the store for a replacement, and things went smoothly after that.
Plugging in most of the machines (the PC and the OS 9 Macs) was pretty simple. Just needed a basic knowledge of DHCP as implemented on those platforms.
Plugging in the OS X machine was unreal! The system detected the DHCP server and configured itself without being told to. Instantly online.
I think there's an important implication here: don't bother with EnterNet. Get a router, even if you don't plan to share the connection. They're worth their cost just for the software that's built into them. And despite the "no Mac support" attitude of the manufacturers, they do play well with Macs. Just be sure to buy one from a physical store, in case it turns out to be DOA.
And of course criminals have no place in law enforcement. </sarcasm>
There's more to a successful product than quality engineering. Every product has a finite window of opportunity. If you miss that window, all your potential users have gone on without you, using some other product to satisfy their needs.
Look at Mozilla. That project has been wandering in the wilderness since 1998. If they had produced a useful, stable product back in 1999, when Internet Explorer still only had half the market, people might have resisted the pressure to switch.
In 2003, IE has ninety-six percent of the market. That's a huge mass of people who have every motivation not to switch back. So what if Mozilla is now technically superior? There are a zillion web apps that are designed around IE's quirks and "innovations". Users of these apps will never switch back -- and Mister Bill gets to dictate how web browsers "should" work. Depresssing thought.
It sounds to me like somebody in Redmond wanted to hand out XP freebies, but didn't have the budget to buy retail or volume license. (Yes, it's just Microsoft buying from itself. But license costs still come out of the department budget.) So they found an internal MSDN subscription with some extra activation keys, and used those. Probably internal MSDN license aren't as expensive as other licenses.
Distro disks with that "bound by attached license" warnings are familiar to anybody with an MSDN subscription. This is Microsoft's warning that you don't have permission to resell these disks. Of course, plenty of subscribers ignore this warning, judging from the underprice copies of XP I see on EBay.
I used to be part of the team that created Kylix. Now, you can use Kylix for many kinds of development, but where it really shines is developing GUI applications. So I'm not giving away any secrets when I say that Borland created Kylix mainly to tap into the impending boom in Linux desktop apps.
Except that the boom never happened. There was a reasonable demand for Linux software in a lot of places, including South and East Asia (with their 2 billion potential users). But nothing like a boom.
Probably the day will come when there are more computer users in the East than in the West. But it's not going to be for a few years yet. And when that day comes, I suspect the systems will be much better suited for conditions in that part of the world than anything we're using now.
Besides, suppose there was a sudden surge in demand for computers from the East. Hundreds of thousand of desktop systems at once. Where would they buy them? Not from HP or Sun. They'd buy x86 boxes, made in white box factories. Probably Asian factories.
That Microsoft shouldn't have won the desktop wars? You think only people with superior products ever get to dominate the marketplace? Get real!
But I don't think this kind of announcement duplicates anything at Freshmeat. (What's Freshmeat?) That site is for people who already run specific platforms, and are curious to see what's being developed for those platforms. But you don't have to be a OS X enthusiast to be interested in the doings of the Fink team.
Or just accepted its current level of stability. I'm no expert, and I'm not even a Gnome fan, but the Gnome appears to me to be at least as stable as CDE!
You have to look at the reasons so many people jumped on the Gnome or KDE bandwagon starting around 1999. They'd been fighting with Microsoft for access to the desktop for a long time. They saw the sudden emergence of open source desktops as one last chance to offer a serious competitor to Windows.
Which it wasn't. Microsoft won the desktop wars a long time ago. There will always be people struggling to offer alternatives to the Microsoft monopoly. (At least I hope there will.) But the notion that massive numbers of users were going to forsake Windows in favor of Java boxes or Sun workstations or HP workstation, or whatever is just a pipe dream.
And even if it were possible, there's no longer any point. The traditional "personal" computer market is saturated. It won't see any more drastic expansions until the next Big Idea (a solution to the last mile problem? cheap mobile computing? if I knew I'd be off building it) makes its splash.
You're assuming that the familiar logical system of Calculus 101 is the only way of defining concepts like "zero" and "infinity". But that's not true. There are alternate approaches that I'm not qualified to get into (basically, some mathematicians are trying to resolve the ambiguities Newton tapdanced around when he invented Calculus).
And even if you don't get into that kind of quibble, division by zero is only undefined in the limited context of "standard" real numbers. It makes perfect sense to define division by zero in the context of complex numbers.
PD's suggestion is a good one if you can re-engineer your existing database. If that's not an option (too much legacy code) then you do indeed need some kind of compatibility layer. But you should be searching for PL/B compatibility layers, 'cause that's the system that defines the file format. Here's one I found by Googling "PL/B ISAM". There are probably others.
Or you could write your own JDBC driver for PL/B ISAM. That's assuming you have the time, the expertise, and feel up to investigating the PL/B standard. Oh, and also assuming the standard explicitly defines ISAM file format, and doesn't leave it up to the vendor. You'll have to buy a copy of the standard (that's how standard comitttees support themselves) to find out.
I do thank GamerGeek for asking this question. PL/B seems to have been around for about 30 years without my ever running across it. More trivia to clog up my brain...
Why is it so obvious that Rout is mentally ill? Lots of people have silly theories. I've seen "proofs" that Pi is a rational number, that humans are all descended from Martians, that the international monetary system is a conspiracy of Jews, freemasons, Catholics, and the British Royal family... Perfectly "normal" people believe this crap. Hell, more than one popular TV show celebrates it! And some well meaning fools waste a lot of time trying to debunk silly theories. Which is a lost cause -- this stuff comes from a need to believe, and need to feel important. Very basic human desires, and not symptoms of mental illness!
My favorite satire of this attitude is Ed Subitsky's satire of Velikoskyism, "Worlds In Collusion". (Printed in the National Lampoon a long time ago. Don't know where else it's available.) Among other assertions, Subitsky asserts that refrigerators don't really need electricity -- it's all a conspiracy to make you pay your utility bill. If you look in the secret compartment, you'll find the real source of the coolness: ice cubes!
Never heard of XP2FS. There's the open-source flight simulator, but I don't suppose that's what you meant.
Paging system? Whatever. Let's not trot out the tired old "it works best for me, so anybody who doesn't use it is an idiot" argument.
Also, "channel metaphor" would seem to describe the virtual consoles on most Linux and a lot of Unix systems. I know text-mode diehards who insist that virtual consoles are more practical than any GUI.
One of the big design mistakes in early Windows was not making the book metaphor (I prefer to think of it as tabs that access specific windows in an app) a basic feature of the GUI. Instead, it provides that stupid MDI concept, which doesn't include a simple way to switch between app windows. But many application and framework developers (Intuit and Borland come to mind) were quick to add on this functionality -- which shows how useful it is.
Lots of people are working on various z-axis metaphors. But I don't believe they'll be practical until displays get a lot better. Like an affordable display that's also a table or wall surface.
Like you, I tend to work with one window maximized, though I tend to rely on the taskbar (which I keep permanently visible at the bottom of the display) more than alt-tab. ("Background" apps like IM and Winamp go into the clock area so as not to distract.) That's often a pain, because in my work there's a lot of multitasking (in the human sense). But even 21" monitors aren't really big enough to have multiple apps open at once, unless the apps are really simple (file manager, IM, etc.). Perhaps if I could afford multiple monitors. I know a guy who uses four at once, and that strikes me as just barely enough!
Yeah, I've seen the nicer Apple monitors -- and felt lust in my heart. Way out of my price range.
The filesystem-is-a-database methaphor exists, but I can't see it catching on. Not that it's a bad idea, but consider the paradigm shift! I'm afraid the file cabinet metaphor is locked in, along with QWERTY keyboards, letter-digit notation in spreadsheets, and other conventions that have too many established users to be replaced -- no matter the advantages of the replacement.
Not quite offtopic: back in the late 70s, some workstation designers decided they could do an intuitive user interface without waiting for bitmap displays to become affordable. The result was the form-based user interface of the CTOS operating system, which ran on special proprietary hardware. Of course, like most proprietary systems, it was driven from the marketplace by IBM compatibles. Too bad, really.
It can be pretty hard to tell the liar from the true believer!
Problem is, most sites start with MySQL, and stay with it long after they've outgrown it.
Amusing that Brin attributes the IPO delay to "laziness". Lazy people don't produce the kind of technology Google keeps coming up with! I think the real story is that they're all enjoying themselves too much to worry about cashing in. Refreshing that somebody isn't obsessed with retiring at 35 -- which Brin certainly could.
Uhm, you did notice that one of the benefits on the list is stock options? Which, being pre-IPO, are particularly valuable. But they're not worth anything if Google never goes public. If Google employees have to choose between free catered lunches and 6- or 7-figure payouts, which do you think they'll choose?
Except that Slashdot doesn't use MySQL for a lot of its content. Roughly half is generated HTML. (Half in terms of page access counts, not actual content.) Also, Slashdot is careful to avoid using advanced queries. On top of that, they have to throw a lot of hardware at the problem. Which is not only expensive, but leads to integrity issues.
Attention, content-management hackers. MySQL appeals, because it's open-source, it's easy to set up, and it handles very simple queries quickly. THESE ARE ITS ONLY VIRTUES . Once your web site starts getting traffic, you have to start looking at a real DBMS that optimizes complex queries and scales worth a damn. Here's one, and another, and yet another.
Conspiracy theorists might think that this bug was invented solely to screw up Java programs, which also follow this model. But Java runtimes usually have their own memory manager, so they'd probably not be affected.
I guess MFC programs would also be immune. MFC pretends to be an object-oriented library, but that doesn't extend much past the syntax of the API. Perhaps that's why Microsoft didn't spot this earlier.
Are you saying I'm a bad driver? Fking socialist, I know how fast I can drive safely. It's those stupid hippies in their VW busses that are dangeours. And people who drive 63 miles an hour in the fast lane. And all these cameras and radars are against the constitution. I don't care what it says, the fking light was green! Well, maybe yellow. BUT I AM NOT STRESSED!