Yeah, I know it sounds silly, but when I go to the movies, it's like $9 just to get in the damn door. ANd I had to trek my ass there, and back. I've got an investment, and I figure its still better than anything I can watch on TV. Plus i just like the theater, nothing like DTS sound in a nearly empty theater (nearly empty so folks arn't talking on their cell phones).
Smeone else asked, it was "What Lies Beneath", corny, lame, telegraphed. The ONLY thing that kept me in the theater was Harrison Ford being a baddie, at least that was new.
Geez, I hope it's better. That was the worst movie I've ever personally seen. Only one of 2 movies I almost walked out on.
In some ways, maybe this isn't a bad thing. I think it was Richard Jenni, commenting on all the remakes of old movies and TV shows: "I don't know why they make remakes on all these classic movies. I mean, they're already great. What do you think you can add? Why don't they remake bad movies. Why doesnt' somebody remake, say BioDome, but make it FUNNY."
There has been talk of that, that she's going to her own series. At least she has a real love for the Bond franchise - I've read various interviews on how she saw Ursula "Honey Rider" Andress in a Bond film and wanted to be a Bond girl ever since. She seems legit in that, considering she just came off a great role in Monster's Ball and pretty much has an open shot on roles now. Her introduction scene (I haven't seen D.A.D. yet) pretty much matches Ursula's entrance, right down to the knife on her side.
Whats worse for me is all the tie in stuff, and thats been bad for years. Bond drive a BMW? Hah. At least now he drives the (pseudo) British Aston-Martin (A-M and Jaguar owned by Ford for years, some would say saved by Ford...) But now we have Bond's fave Vodka, Bond's fave razor, Bond's fave rectal itch ointment... I'm not watching a movie, I'm watching a 90 minute commercial.
Sun has wavered on the whole x86 thing. At first there was to be no Solaris x86 whatsoever, then saying it would be only on Sun hardware (essentially the LX50, i'm not sure if it was named that yet) then eventually saying it would have universal support as they did before.
In part, I don't really blame them for the whole "only on our hardware" thing. x86 margins are razor thin, and OS support essentially means you have to support everything under the sun (umm, sorry about that one). By limiting Solaris to the LX50, they'd lower their device driver and general support costs. They eventually backtracked under all the pressure, and made it a general solution.
Heh, this sounds bad. I'm not implying that Lula is a problem. I personally lean left politically (I hate the Democrats in this years elections for essentially falling down) and I like him. I think the problem is other countries' perception of him, including the US's. I'm embarrassed soemtimes at how we interfere in other countries' internal affairs, including democratic elections, in name of freedom.
Actually all of South America is, mostly being pulled down from Argentina, which is one of Brasil's big trade partners. Brasil is actually not doing too bad, relatively. One part of their problems is they elected Lula, definitely a leftist. Early in his career as a trade union leader he talked about defaulting on the international debt, made a lot of folks nervous. As a politician, he's not so radical, he's a pretty smart guy and his newer views reflect that. Bush hates the fact that he got elected, unfortunately the US has a bad history about interfering in south American elections, and specifically in Brasil (ever see 8 Days in September?).
Anyways, saving money is always good, financial crisis or no. By going to Linux they:
Save money on software licences.
Get away from the MS upgrade cycle of forced upgrades.
Have control over their documents and formats.
Not have their computing infrastructure controlled by a foreign company, especially one that seems to be in bed with the American government.
Sure there will be problems along the way, but their analysis must have shown that on balance, this was the better way to go. This is a bank, they must have analyzed this pretty carefully.
Anyone want to explain to me how a whopping 9 boxes is considered a "big" account?
They're still in the early stages, they're consolodating to 9 machines, 9 huge machines. One consolodation converts 41 servers dwn to 3, which I think is a bad sign for MS, since this is a big machine and administration savings. The fact that you can consolodate down to 9 machines is also significant.
From the article:
The long-term strategy is to
phase out Windows completely. Linux is also being used to replace Windows on desktops.
"We had about 70,000 Windows server and desktop licences and eight NT networks serving Europe,"
The eventual 70,000 seats is the big news. They're not doing it all at once, they're going to do the servers first, the issues are more known there. They're doing a staged rollout, which is what they should do.
Valid point, but there are migration costs with versions of Windows as well. I just got moved to XP and Office XP after being on NT 4.0 on my desktop, and NT 2K on my work laptop. I'm still looking for some things, trying to get the OS configured right. The menus in XP are different as well. I don't have the default XP desktop thankfully, they rolled out the NT2K backwards compatible style desktop, so it's not that much of a shock.
this is different from MS Office how? I had the Concept virus on Word 6, when I ran it on Solaris (under WABI). They also hit Mac Word 6.
In the blurb, they mentioned the Java security model, which if it works for Applets (and it more or less does, after the first buggy implementations) it should be OK for the "fewer things can attack us" macro stuff.
Try to explain: (int * ac, char ** av) in 100 words or less!
For a beginners example, you don't need to. int main(void) works just as well. Also removes some of the charcount.
the exit(EXIT_SUCCESS), though correct in form, is a bit verbose for something that you use as a code example, and can just be exit(0) especially since you use the equivalent System.exit(0) in Java.
If you wanted it real slim, though wrong, you could withhold the #include's. You'd get warnings on compile, but it would link fine. You could also scotch the exit(), though without it you'd get undefined behavior. Some systems would be OK and just give unknown exit values to the shell, some might have problems. Most DOS code defines main as void main(...)
Oops, we now include backup features. They already do. Nothing intricate, but they hae backup stuff.
And you don't need to piss off MS to have them try to destroy you. Ask Citrix, Spyglass, or Stac, the makers of Stacker, or a bunch of other companies I can't think of off the top of my head.
Zilog tried to trademark Z (as in Z80), and Intel tried to trademark i (as in i486) when they got into their pissing match with AMD. Judge slapped them both down, and we get as a result way cool marketing names like Pentium (root: penta, 5, which is technically applicable only to Pentium and Pentium Pro, Pentium II, III, and 4 are all 6th gen processors) and Itanium.
During the Z80 case, the judge essentially said "If I let you do this, all I need is 25 other companies doing this and we have trademarked the English alphabet". Kind of true, the 240Z dates back to 1970, Zilog only started as a company in 1974, but if Zilog won, then there's no 'Z' car.
The other fun thing is Microsoft talking about how firm a trademark that Windows is - especially since there were windowing systems named windows, like XWindows - yet arguing in court that the pre-existing Internet Explorer trademark was weak, because it was too generic.
They're just going after little fish, ones that haven't gone through the MS approval process. If MS went after someone who'd actually fight this, they might weaken the trademark. If it's found in court to be too generic, it might be thrown out entirely. I'm surprised Billy decided to tread this thin ice. IANAL rules apply.
Hmm, still IIS. Try www.netcraft.com to get the site. Real men would just telnet to it, do a GET. Or a wget -S...
ASP pages tend to have a lot of COM/OCX/ActiveX crap on it, so while you do have the ChiliASP parser, the real power is in COM objects which aren't on Linux.
Open Source does NOT equate better security. Never think so, never say so, never tell anyone this again. It's pure bullshit. Security is a disciplined mindset. And the opensource mindset is "someone will look at this and email me a patch if i fucked up". Lovely.
I agree, I don't think Open Source has the security benefits that folks liked to say. The "many eyes" thing assumes that folks are looking... and know what they see, and can do something constructive about it. My grandma isn't debugging kernel drivers. Of course there is a subset of folks who can, but everybody is always looking for a 'magic bullet' and OS isn't it. It helps, but everybody is looking for a free lunch that isn't there. Take the gains that you do get, and go from there.
But with open source, you have that debug option. It isn't just that everybody in the world can fix the code and you'll receive it perfect, but that you can fix your code. That allows turnaround, granted you need the skillset in house to do it. But that is tremendously powerful option.
The other thing it does it helps you develop. You don't have to guess what this function does, you can take it apart and see. I was programming an Apache module, needed to find out if a function was being called on startup or during normal server operation. It wasn't documented. So I looked at the code, found out. Yah, it was work, and I would have preferred it being documented, but i had the option. I wouldn't have with say, IIS.
As far as the mindset goes, I agree. But how does a company doing checkbox marketing forcing stuff out on deadline have that mindset. Microsoft has said in court that it's software is so riddled with bugs that releasing th source would cause major problems. It has also said that older versions of the software are so buggie, that folks hsould replace them because just owning them is a security risk. Granted, both of those statements also furthered other Microsoft ends (releasing code would help interoperability, and possible replacements, ditching the win9x kernel means new OS sales). But they send code out with bugs, and they have terrible design decisions (Outlook is WAY too scriptable for soemthing that receives things from unknown sources.
Free software is free if you don't value your time. Nobody should pick up Linux and say "this is free, I'll never spend another penny on software or support, ever". Those that say so are either idiots or zealots selling their own agenda. It's just not true. Wise people would do a cost analysis, and for certain classes of jobs (servers in genral, for certain classes of users 'desktops' are cheaper as well) Linux is a cheaper overall solution. Not free, but cheaper.
People tend to like absolutes. "Linux is free, things get debugged quick". "Microsoft is easy to use". "Linux is hard to use." "Microsoft software is buggy and can be rooted in seconds". I'ts all a mix... Keep your mind open, pick the best tool for the job.
Re:Opera 7 beta has also been released long ago
on
Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 2
To be honest, the "why didn't you post this" stuff seems unfounded at times. People forget that slashdot never pretended to be an evenhanded news site. It's justa couple guys posting stories that they liked. It grew past what they intended it to be, but they never said they'd grow it to be an evenhanded site. To be honest, there is no evenhanded news medium, ever. There is always going to editorial bias. Be aware of it, and chose your news outlets wisely.
Mozilla has matured past the "world is my debugger" stage, at least in this respect
Things aren't kept out of preferences just for "this is Mozilla, you should accept no prefs box for certain tweaks". Some new things are, the feature is in but there's no UI. Some things are in testing phase, so only should be turned on by folks specifically testing that feature.
Many things are kept out so not to clutter the preferences dialog, to make things that should only be touched by folks who know what they're doing can only be touched by folks who know what they're doing. I agree with hiding this in this case, I just think it should default to off, and only people who know how to hack a prefs file (doesn't necessarily mean they understand all the ramifications, but it's a filter of some sort) can do this. It does have bandwidth ramifications, and should be defaulted off.
Check out Matthew Thomas' weblog for UI debates, including several on the bloat of the Prefs box.
They have done this. I forgot the names, but some larger company screwed some smaller one by DOS'ing them with IFRAMEs. The home page (maybe some others) on the big company's site had some number (more than 1 I think) of 1x1 pixel IFRAMEs that loaded in the home page of the other site. So every hit to big company's page resulted in a drain on the resources of the smaller site, until it was essentially DOS'ed. I don't remember the legalities of what followed, but would have been an interesting court case.
You are ignoring the costs of production, marketing
Why do CDs cost more than tapes? Tapes are much more complicated to manufacture, yet cost less. Even ingoring the complexity of a tape, there are fewer and fewer tapes sold, making for decreased economies of scale, so they should be pricier, yet cost $1-$2 cheaper, always. You market the albium (and the singer, but thats another diatribe) not the medium, so that has no bearing on costs.
Who creates the marketing needs? The labels themselves. In the need for bigger and bigger blockbusters, each album now has to sell a million records or it will never make back the initial costs. It's only the bottom line now (one could argue it's ALWAYS been just the bottom line) so you have musicians being marketed as products now, not artists. Witness "American Idol", "Making the Band". NSync, 98 degrees, NKOTB, New Edition, 3rd Bass - all manufactured bands. Created not by the artists but by the labels. They wanted a quick buck from these guys, so instead of having the guys start small and build a fan base, you spend and market the hell out of them to get name recognition, and hope that the music is good enough that some folks even might buy it. The musicians not good enough? Well, ask Milli Vanilli if that stood in their way. They were cute, they got on stage. Hmm, my point in all this rambling? The marketing cost monster is a problem, but it's one of the labels' own creation.
Public Enemy released There's a Poison Going On on Atomic Pop, an internet only label (which has since gone under). It cost $8 to download, $10 if you wanted a physical CD, which had a value add - an autograph by Chuck D. (which I have - there's a good way to have people spend money, give them a value add). The same CD cost $18 at Virgin megastore. What costs, marketing or otherwise, did they do to warrant the $8-10 markup, esentially a 100% markup?
I'm not defending piracy. Dorks who say "well I'm stealing this because they're ripping off the artists!' are just rationalizing bullshit artists. But the recording industry also has it's faults. If they didn't price CDs well past their production costs, there would be less incentive to steal (though the stealing would still be equally morally wrong). This is just one of those situations where nobody is completely clean, and having either side talking about how dirty the other side is doesn't clean anybody up much.
I work in a trading firm, we're huge on Solaris. But we're also looking into Linux on IA32, IA64, and PowerPC (on a Power4 p690). Don't know what the migration will be like, but I can tell you a lot of folks are interested in the cost/speed advantages of Linux.
One thing I think folks forget is that its not an all or nothing thing. Sure some folks need 9 nines, but a lot of folks that use Solaris RIGHT NOW don't. They can get away with Beowulf clusters and all that fun stuff. Can Sun live with this smaller customer base, those that need 9 nines and can't use the failovers and clusters available with Linux. Hmm, I don't know, interesting to see this play out.
Most string classes I've ever seen cache the size so you don't have to do a strlen(), you get it from the cache. essentially 'pascallizing' the string, costing you a couple extra bytes (I'm sure the length is an int, not a char) but as in all optimizations, it's a size/speed tradeoff. Remember that in C++ you can filter all operations that affect the internal data so the 'cached' size will always be current. (well, you can put up a big "DON"T TOUCH" sign, if people really want to get to the data, they can always cast...)
Re:how about running MySQL under Cygwin?
on
Fun With Wine
·
· Score: 2
It's not exactly what you asked for, but PostgreSQL has been installable from the default Cygwin setup tool for quite some time. You have to install cygipc though.
There is as much DOS in the NT kernel as there is OS/400 in the NT kernel.
There is as much DOS in the NT kernel as there is VAX VMS in the . . . . oh wait.
Re:Command line interface and real-time control go
on
MS-DOS 1981-2002 RIP
·
· Score: 2
The Windows scripting host is more of the home for VBScript automation of the Explorer environment and apps, it can't really be used as a command line shell, i think he was looking for something more like that.
WSH is good for spreading viruses tho, and most anti-virus companies say to disable it unless you find you really need it
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know it sounds silly, but when I go to the movies, it's like $9 just to get in the damn door. ANd I had to trek my ass there, and back. I've got an investment, and I figure its still better than anything I can watch on TV. Plus i just like the theater, nothing like DTS sound in a nearly empty theater (nearly empty so folks arn't talking on their cell phones).
Smeone else asked, it was "What Lies Beneath", corny, lame, telegraphed. The ONLY thing that kept me in the theater was Harrison Ford being a baddie, at least that was new.
when it was called Event Horizon
Geez, I hope it's better. That was the worst movie I've ever personally seen. Only one of 2 movies I almost walked out on.
In some ways, maybe this isn't a bad thing. I think it was Richard Jenni, commenting on all the remakes of old movies and TV shows:
"I don't know why they make remakes on all these classic movies. I mean, they're already great. What do you think you can add? Why don't they remake bad movies. Why doesnt' somebody remake, say BioDome, but make it FUNNY."
There has been talk of that, that she's going to her own series. At least she has a real love for the Bond franchise - I've read various interviews on how she saw Ursula "Honey Rider" Andress in a Bond film and wanted to be a Bond girl ever since. She seems legit in that, considering she just came off a great role in Monster's Ball and pretty much has an open shot on roles now. Her introduction scene (I haven't seen D.A.D. yet) pretty much matches Ursula's entrance, right down to the knife on her side.
Whats worse for me is all the tie in stuff, and thats been bad for years. Bond drive a BMW? Hah. At least now he drives the (pseudo) British Aston-Martin (A-M and Jaguar owned by Ford for years, some would say saved by Ford...) But now we have Bond's fave Vodka, Bond's fave razor, Bond's fave rectal itch ointment... I'm not watching a movie, I'm watching a 90 minute commercial.
Sun has wavered on the whole x86 thing. At first there was to be no Solaris x86 whatsoever, then saying it would be only on Sun hardware (essentially the LX50, i'm not sure if it was named that yet) then eventually saying it would have universal support as they did before.
In part, I don't really blame them for the whole "only on our hardware" thing. x86 margins are razor thin, and OS support essentially means you have to support everything under the sun (umm, sorry about that one). By limiting Solaris to the LX50, they'd lower their device driver and general support costs. They eventually backtracked under all the pressure, and made it a general solution.
One part of their problems is they elected Lula
Heh, this sounds bad. I'm not implying that Lula is a problem. I personally lean left politically (I hate the Democrats in this years elections for essentially falling down) and I like him. I think the problem is other countries' perception of him, including the US's. I'm embarrassed soemtimes at how we interfere in other countries' internal affairs, including democratic elections, in name of freedom.
Anyways, saving money is always good, financial crisis or no. By going to Linux they:
Sure there will be problems along the way, but their analysis must have shown that on balance, this was the better way to go. This is a bank, they must have analyzed this pretty carefully.
They're still in the early stages, they're consolodating to 9 machines, 9 huge machines. One consolodation converts 41 servers dwn to 3, which I think is a bad sign for MS, since this is a big machine and administration savings. The fact that you can consolodate down to 9 machines is also significant.
From the article:
The eventual 70,000 seats is the big news. They're not doing it all at once, they're going to do the servers first, the issues are more known there. They're doing a staged rollout, which is what they should do.
Valid point, but there are migration costs with versions of Windows as well. I just got moved to XP and Office XP after being on NT 4.0 on my desktop, and NT 2K on my work laptop. I'm still looking for some things, trying to get the OS configured right. The menus in XP are different as well. I don't have the default XP desktop thankfully, they rolled out the NT2K backwards compatible style desktop, so it's not that much of a shock.
this is different from MS Office how? I had the Concept virus on Word 6, when I ran it on Solaris (under WABI). They also hit Mac Word 6.
In the blurb, they mentioned the Java security model, which if it works for Applets (and it more or less does, after the first buggy implementations) it should be OK for the "fewer things can attack us" macro stuff.
Try to explain: (int * ac, char ** av) in 100 words or less!
For a beginners example, you don't need to.
int main(void) works just as well. Also removes some of the charcount.
the exit(EXIT_SUCCESS), though correct in form, is a bit verbose for something that you use as a code example, and can just be exit(0) especially since you use the equivalent System.exit(0) in Java.
If you wanted it real slim, though wrong, you could withhold the #include's. You'd get warnings on compile, but it would link fine. You could also scotch the exit(), though without it you'd get undefined behavior. Some systems would be OK and just give unknown exit values to the shell, some might have problems. Most DOS code defines main as void main(...)
Oops, we now include backup features.
They already do. Nothing intricate, but they hae backup stuff.
And you don't need to piss off MS to have them try to destroy you. Ask Citrix, Spyglass, or Stac, the makers of Stacker, or a bunch of other companies I can't think of off the top of my head.
Zilog tried to trademark Z (as in Z80), and Intel tried to trademark i (as in i486) when they got into their pissing match with AMD. Judge slapped them both down, and we get as a result way cool marketing names like Pentium (root: penta, 5, which is technically applicable only to Pentium and Pentium Pro, Pentium II, III, and 4 are all 6th gen processors) and Itanium.
During the Z80 case, the judge essentially said "If I let you do this, all I need is 25 other companies doing this and we have trademarked the English alphabet". Kind of true, the 240Z dates back to 1970, Zilog only started as a company in 1974, but if Zilog won, then there's no 'Z' car.
The other fun thing is Microsoft talking about how firm a trademark that Windows is - especially since there were windowing systems named windows, like XWindows - yet arguing in court that the pre-existing Internet Explorer trademark was weak, because it was too generic.
They're just going after little fish, ones that haven't gone through the MS approval process. If MS went after someone who'd actually fight this, they might weaken the trademark. If it's found in court to be too generic, it might be thrown out entirely. I'm surprised Billy decided to tread this thin ice. IANAL rules apply.
Hmm, still IIS. Try www.netcraft.com to get the site. Real men would just telnet to it, do a GET. Or a wget -S...
ASP pages tend to have a lot of COM/OCX/ActiveX crap on it, so while you do have the ChiliASP parser, the real power is in COM objects which aren't on Linux.
Open Source does NOT equate better security. Never think so, never say so, never tell anyone this again. It's pure bullshit. Security is a disciplined mindset. And the opensource mindset is "someone will look at this and email me a patch if i fucked up". Lovely.
I agree, I don't think Open Source has the security benefits that folks liked to say. The "many eyes" thing assumes that folks are looking... and know what they see, and can do something constructive about it. My grandma isn't debugging kernel drivers. Of course there is a subset of folks who can, but everybody is always looking for a 'magic bullet' and OS isn't it. It helps, but everybody is looking for a free lunch that isn't there. Take the gains that you do get, and go from there.
But with open source, you have that debug option. It isn't just that everybody in the world can fix the code and you'll receive it perfect, but that you can fix your code. That allows turnaround, granted you need the skillset in house to do it. But that is tremendously powerful option.
The other thing it does it helps you develop. You don't have to guess what this function does, you can take it apart and see. I was programming an Apache module, needed to find out if a function was being called on startup or during normal server operation. It wasn't documented. So I looked at the code, found out. Yah, it was work, and I would have preferred it being documented, but i had the option. I wouldn't have with say, IIS.
As far as the mindset goes, I agree. But how does a company doing checkbox marketing forcing stuff out on deadline have that mindset. Microsoft has said in court that it's software is so riddled with bugs that releasing th source would cause major problems. It has also said that older versions of the software are so buggie, that folks hsould replace them because just owning them is a security risk. Granted, both of those statements also furthered other Microsoft ends (releasing code would help interoperability, and possible replacements, ditching the win9x kernel means new OS sales). But they send code out with bugs, and they have terrible design decisions (Outlook is WAY too scriptable for soemthing that receives things from unknown sources.
Free software is free if you don't value your time.
Nobody should pick up Linux and say "this is free, I'll never spend another penny on software or support, ever". Those that say so are either idiots or zealots selling their own agenda. It's just not true. Wise people would do a cost analysis, and for certain classes of jobs (servers in genral, for certain classes of users 'desktops' are cheaper as well) Linux is a cheaper overall solution. Not free, but cheaper.
People tend to like absolutes. "Linux is free, things get debugged quick". "Microsoft is easy to use". "Linux is hard to use." "Microsoft software is buggy and can be rooted in seconds". I'ts all a mix... Keep your mind open, pick the best tool for the job.
Umm, they have had a story on Opera 7 though not on the actual release.
To be honest, the "why didn't you post this" stuff seems unfounded at times. People forget that slashdot never pretended to be an evenhanded news site. It's justa couple guys posting stories that they liked. It grew past what they intended it to be, but they never said they'd grow it to be an evenhanded site. To be honest, there is no evenhanded news medium, ever. There is always going to editorial bias. Be aware of it, and chose your news outlets wisely.
Mozilla has matured past the "world is my debugger" stage, at least in this respect
Things aren't kept out of preferences just for "this is Mozilla, you should accept no prefs box for certain tweaks". Some new things are, the feature is in but there's no UI. Some things are in testing phase, so only should be turned on by folks specifically testing that feature.
Many things are kept out so not to clutter the preferences dialog, to make things that should only be touched by folks who know what they're doing can only be touched by folks who know what they're doing. I agree with hiding this in this case, I just think it should default to off, and only people who know how to hack a prefs file (doesn't necessarily mean they understand all the ramifications, but it's a filter of some sort) can do this. It does have bandwidth ramifications, and should be defaulted off.
Check out Matthew Thomas' weblog for UI debates, including several on the bloat of the Prefs box.
They have done this. I forgot the names, but some larger company screwed some smaller one by DOS'ing them with IFRAMEs. The home page (maybe some others) on the big company's site had some number (more than 1 I think) of 1x1 pixel IFRAMEs that loaded in the home page of the other site. So every hit to big company's page resulted in a drain on the resources of the smaller site, until it was essentially DOS'ed. I don't remember the legalities of what followed, but would have been an interesting court case.
Hmm, smaller gets Tiger Woods a couple or 3 or 10 million a year...
You are ignoring the costs of production, marketing
Why do CDs cost more than tapes? Tapes are much more complicated to manufacture, yet cost less. Even ingoring the complexity of a tape, there are fewer and fewer tapes sold, making for decreased economies of scale, so they should be pricier, yet cost $1-$2 cheaper, always. You market the albium (and the singer, but thats another diatribe) not the medium, so that has no bearing on costs.
Who creates the marketing needs? The labels themselves. In the need for bigger and bigger blockbusters, each album now has to sell a million records or it will never make back the initial costs. It's only the bottom line now (one could argue it's ALWAYS been just the bottom line) so you have musicians being marketed as products now, not artists. Witness "American Idol", "Making the Band". NSync, 98 degrees, NKOTB, New Edition, 3rd Bass - all manufactured bands. Created not by the artists but by the labels. They wanted a quick buck from these guys, so instead of having the guys start small and build a fan base, you spend and market the hell out of them to get name recognition, and hope that the music is good enough that some folks even might buy it. The musicians not good enough? Well, ask Milli Vanilli if that stood in their way. They were cute, they got on stage. Hmm, my point in all this rambling? The marketing cost monster is a problem, but it's one of the labels' own creation.
Public Enemy released There's a Poison Going On on Atomic Pop, an internet only label (which has since gone under). It cost $8 to download, $10 if you wanted a physical CD, which had a value add - an autograph by Chuck D. (which I have - there's a good way to have people spend money, give them a value add). The same CD cost $18 at Virgin megastore. What costs, marketing or otherwise, did they do to warrant the $8-10 markup, esentially a 100% markup?
I'm not defending piracy. Dorks who say "well I'm stealing this because they're ripping off the artists!' are just rationalizing bullshit artists. But the recording industry also has it's faults. If they didn't price CDs well past their production costs, there would be less incentive to steal (though the stealing would still be equally morally wrong). This is just one of those situations where nobody is completely clean, and having either side talking about how dirty the other side is doesn't clean anybody up much.
I work in a trading firm, we're huge on Solaris. But we're also looking into Linux on IA32, IA64, and PowerPC (on a Power4 p690). Don't know what the migration will be like, but I can tell you a lot of folks are interested in the cost/speed advantages of Linux.
One thing I think folks forget is that its not an all or nothing thing. Sure some folks need 9 nines, but a lot of folks that use Solaris RIGHT NOW don't. They can get away with Beowulf clusters and all that fun stuff. Can Sun live with this smaller customer base, those that need 9 nines and can't use the failovers and clusters available with Linux. Hmm, I don't know, interesting to see this play out.
You've got . . . root!
Most string classes I've ever seen cache the size so you don't have to do a strlen(), you get it from the cache. essentially 'pascallizing' the string, costing you a couple extra bytes (I'm sure the length is an int, not a char) but as in all optimizations, it's a size/speed tradeoff. Remember that in C++ you can filter all operations that affect the internal data so the 'cached' size will always be current. (well, you can put up a big "DON"T TOUCH" sign, if people really want to get to the data, they can always cast...)
It's not exactly what you asked for, but PostgreSQL has been installable from the default Cygwin setup tool for quite some time. You have to install cygipc though.
There is as much DOS in the NT kernel as there is OS/400 in the NT kernel.
There is as much DOS in the NT kernel as there is VAX VMS in the . . . . oh wait.
The Windows scripting host is more of the home for VBScript automation of the Explorer environment and apps, it can't really be used as a command line shell, i think he was looking for something more like that.
WSH is good for spreading viruses tho, and most anti-virus companies say to disable it unless you find you really need it