So, all of the critics of mysql.org would have absolutely zero problems with them had they called the program and the web site "KewlNewSQL"? After all, it is explicitly allowed in the GPL to do whatever you want with a GPL'd program given that you follow the GPL's requirements about keeping source code available, etc. GPL doesn't require any nofitication or credit to be given to the original authors (except perhaps copywrite notices in the source code must be left intact?), does it?
If not, then it is hypocrisy indeed.
My last company was one everybody in the modern PC world (and UNIX world for that matter) knows about. They used exchange server for everything. When the company was about 2-3 years old, the exchange server crashed, and everybody who had email stored on the server lost 2-3 years of email. Yes, there were backups, but they were all CORRUPTED. M$ loves monolithic
binary databases that require days and days of time to verify once they reach anything other than "toy" size (when they work at all). Plus the fact that you can't (couldn't at that time) do "live" backups produces disincentives for running and checking backups. They sacked the IT guy, who was a really good IT guy -- he was forced to use exchange server by the company execs. They replaced him with a series of clueless IT people. It was a shame.
Re:qualified vs. unqualified stock options?
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IANAA (accountant), but ISOs almost always generate taxable events when you exercise them: the difference between the "fair market value" of the option at the time of exercise and the purchase price of the option is income to the Alternative Minimum Tax calculation. This is one of the great evils of our time, because you (may, depending on your situation) have to pay tax on something that is potentially not liquid (e.g., pre-IPO ISO).
Anybody here ever work for a company that produced software commercially? Would you characterize the software development process at your (former) workplace as well-ordered and non-chaotic? I think that commercial development efforts, for thet most part, are more chaotic than, e.g., Linux, because as schedule milestones loom, the pace gets fast and furious and extremely chaotic. The amount of scrutiny of new code, patches, etc. to Linux far exceeds that of many of the places I've worked, so I think the basic tenet of "commercial == non-chaotic" is bogus to begin with.
Is self-replying bad for karma? Anyway, here's an OSS positive comment: what a perfect reason for open source! Cheat detection becomes truly possible when you can compile the driver yourself! You could then sign a particular driver distribution and build up a web of trust of the "goodness" of a driver. Of course not everybody will want to or be able to inspect the source, but via the OSS rule of an "infinite" supply of contributors, someone will want to/enjoy doing this verification, which would be a valuable service to the community.
You are correct, the blanket statement of "Linux OGL is better than Windows OGL" should be viewed with some skepticism because it's so broad, and certainly should be scrutinized if the origin of the tests is a party that has a stake (personal, financial, ego, whatever) in the outcome.
I'm not saying that benchmarking is useless -- if I want to play the SpaceQuakeBlastemUp game, and a good apples/apples review of currently available versions of drivers/hardware is done, then I get useful information about that game run on those platforms at the time of testing .
However, making the leap from that very specific result to very general ones, which just about every benchmarking article does, is almost always irresponsible and/or misleading.
The one nice thing (well, it cut both ways, but it had good sides) about the PC 3d graphics world is ZD 3dwinbench. Yes, there are numerous flaws and political undertones with it, but at least it's an effort to compare multiple products on the same content and to do cheat detection to keep the vendors honest. Some sort of OGL cheat detection / conformance test for Linux, etc. would be a welcome addition to the benchmarking quagmire.
Any benchmark run by an interested party has to be ignored as biased. I've been on the inside of graphics h/w companies (engineering, both UNIX and PC-based) for 10 years, and have seen time and time again the games vendors play to make themselves look good. The schemes used run from simple to very complex. The simplest method is just to not do apples/apples: manipulate/choose the tests so that the competition goes down the slow path. The more complex ones involve what most people would call "cheating" to increase your scores. Someone already mentioned dropping triangles as one such cheat. Dropping tris that don't light pixels is fine, since they don't change anything, but dropping triangles that light pixels doesn't produce the right picture and is a cheat. The thing is that it's *hard* to determine whether or not a small area triangle (other than zero area) actually lights a pixel, so vendors who do this cheat usually just say that all triangles with area below a particular threshold value are culled. There are infinitely many ways to cheat, and any benchmark, to be taken seriously, must be run by a 3rd, uninterested party, and whatever platform you're running on should have conformance/correction/cheat detection tests. This task becomes even harder when you consider that multiple platforms are involved here.
In conclusion, all that can be gleaned from this benchmark (assuming no intentional cheating is involved) is that the particular versions of the software used on the particular platforms at the time of the testing had the resulting performance. Unless a rigorous and lengthy evaluation process was used to insure that ALL the same level of acceleration was running on ALL the same platforms, these results in terms of comparing the "multimedia performance" of these systems is meaningless.
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So, all of the critics of mysql.org would have absolutely zero problems with them had they called the program and the web site "KewlNewSQL"? After all, it is explicitly allowed in the GPL to do whatever you want with a GPL'd program given that you follow the GPL's requirements about keeping source code available, etc. GPL doesn't require any nofitication or credit to be given to the original authors (except perhaps copywrite notices in the source code must be left intact?), does it? If not, then it is hypocrisy indeed.
> Anyone care to correct me if I'm wrong here? Yes, scratch Matrox and S3.
My last company was one everybody in the modern PC world (and UNIX world for that matter) knows about. They used exchange server for everything. When the company was about 2-3 years old, the exchange server crashed, and everybody who had email stored on the server lost 2-3 years of email. Yes, there were backups, but they were all CORRUPTED. M$ loves monolithic binary databases that require days and days of time to verify once they reach anything other than "toy" size (when they work at all). Plus the fact that you can't (couldn't at that time) do "live" backups produces disincentives for running and checking backups. They sacked the IT guy, who was a really good IT guy -- he was forced to use exchange server by the company execs. They replaced him with a series of clueless IT people. It was a shame.
IANAA (accountant), but ISOs almost always generate taxable events when you exercise them: the difference between the "fair market value" of the option at the time of exercise and the purchase price of the option is income to the Alternative Minimum Tax calculation. This is one of the great evils of our time, because you (may, depending on your situation) have to pay tax on something that is potentially not liquid (e.g., pre-IPO ISO).
Anybody here ever work for a company that produced software commercially? Would you characterize the software development process at your (former) workplace as well-ordered and non-chaotic? I think that commercial development efforts, for thet most part, are more chaotic than, e.g., Linux, because as schedule milestones loom, the pace gets fast and furious and extremely chaotic. The amount of scrutiny of new code, patches, etc. to Linux far exceeds that of many of the places I've worked, so I think the basic tenet of "commercial == non-chaotic" is bogus to begin with.
Is self-replying bad for karma? Anyway, here's an OSS positive comment: what a perfect reason for open source! Cheat detection becomes truly possible when you can compile the driver yourself! You could then sign a particular driver distribution and build up a web of trust of the "goodness" of a driver. Of course not everybody will want to or be able to inspect the source, but via the OSS rule of an "infinite" supply of contributors, someone will want to/enjoy doing this verification, which would be a valuable service to the community.
I'm not saying that benchmarking is useless -- if I want to play the SpaceQuakeBlastemUp game, and a good apples/apples review of currently available versions of drivers/hardware is done, then I get useful information about that game run on those platforms at the time of testing .
However, making the leap from that very specific result to very general ones, which just about every benchmarking article does, is almost always irresponsible and/or misleading.
The one nice thing (well, it cut both ways, but it had good sides) about the PC 3d graphics world is ZD 3dwinbench. Yes, there are numerous flaws and political undertones with it, but at least it's an effort to compare multiple products on the same content and to do cheat detection to keep the vendors honest. Some sort of OGL cheat detection / conformance test for Linux, etc. would be a welcome addition to the benchmarking quagmire.
In conclusion, all that can be gleaned from this benchmark (assuming no intentional cheating is involved) is that the particular versions of the software used on the particular platforms at the time of the testing had the resulting performance. Unless a rigorous and lengthy evaluation process was used to insure that ALL the same level of acceleration was running on ALL the same platforms, these results in terms of comparing the "multimedia performance" of these systems is meaningless.