It's the brand name here that's important, not so much the product. Companies change with the times. In 30 years, we might not be using PCs, but odds are Microsoft, IBM et al. will still be around, selling something else, banking on their brand name, not the product itself. They're not just going to remain static and simply push one product. When PCs die, they'll be there with something else.
50 years might be an epoch in technological terms, to huge businesses like Microsoft, IBM, etc., it's not all that much. I would bet they'll still be around in 2040, and they'll still be recognied by their brand name, while their original products (Windows, PCs, etc.) will likely be forgotten. But that won't matter, 'causepeople will be hooked on the brand name, not the product itself, which is much more valuable.
As for Red Hat, who knows. Odds are, they won't be exclusive to Linux for their entire existance, and while I'd be somewhat surprised if they made it to 2040, if they did, yeah, linux would be long gone, but they'd just be selling something else. Maybe red hats, who knows.
But which do you think Microsoft is more concerned with -- getting a bit of money in five years or getting a lot of moneyo ver the course of the next couple of decades?
That's what I was getting at. It's the long, long run that's important here, not five years down the line.
They do stand to gain something out of the deal, though -- a generation of kids brought up using Red Hat Linux instead of Microsoft Windows would definitely help them out in the long run.
The five-years from now is nothing. When we're talking long run, we should be looking over the next 30, 40, 50 years. Nobody's looking for any money in 5 years, they're all thinking, "how can we get these kids hooked on our products so that for the rest of their lives, they're buying from us?" It's what every advertising agency is trying to do when it advertises to kids and teens -- it tries to hook them on a product for the rest of their consuming days.
Not much difference here, but at least Red Hat is an alternative to the beast.
To think they stand to gain nothing in the long run is foolish.
Setting your username, password and workgroup in the Windows Share section of KControl seems to help, at least if you only have one username, password and workgroup to use.
Isn't stability the responsibility of the coder? It's not going to matter what language you use if you can't code for shit. Take a someone who knows C++ inside and out and you'll get code that's just as "stable" as something similar done in Ada or any other language for that matter. Languages aren't "stable", it's the person using them and how they code. (Of course, some languages may make this easier by supplying garbage collection and what not, but in the end, it's still about the user...)
Remove the bloat. Most linux distro's ship with way to many useless programs.
These "useless" programs must be useful to someone. Maybe not everyone, but certainly someone. If you don't want to use them, don't install them. The option is a checkbox away in most distro installs.
Dump the command line.
Granted, most users don't give a shit about the command line, or even know such a thing exists for that matter. Most of linux's power comes from the shell, though. Once you get used to it, you start to feel kind of God like.
And if you're admining a system, I'll take a shell any day over some Windows manager snap-ins or whatever the hell they're called. I don't want to be restricted to what some UI designer's whimsey.
Dump open-source.
Once the source is out there it can really be taken back, so dumping OSS is kind of impossible. Even if, for whatever imaginary reason, the Linux kernel suddenly became closed-source, all of the previous versions would still be OSS, and development would just continue along another fork.
[Desktop users] do not want to compile anything.
If a setup process involved compiling but the user couldn't see it, would that make it better? What would be the difference? In Windows, a setup.exe file unpacks some stuff, moves it around, writes some registry settings. What if some executable in linux unpacked some source code, compiled it and put it where it should go? Would that make things better for you, MCSE?
A universal gui system. Linux needs ONE gui.
First of all, choice is a good thing. Unlike Microsoft, where you're stuck with the GUI they give you, at least with UNIX-like systems you're free to choose from any number of GUIs, then proceed to configure them exactly how you want them. Right now I'm using KDE with Mosfet's Liquid engine, some NeXT-ish stuff and a bit of quartz thrown in. I like it. Other people might not, but they can roll their own. Choice.
Now, about having ONE GUI -- you mean like Windows 2000 and XP? (Okay, so can modify XP to look like 2000, but I doubt most users even know that option exists.)
Make upgrading the software easier. Desktop users need an easy way to upgrade the kernel.
This depends on the distro you're using (or if you've rolled your own), but it really isn't that hard. Here's what I do (yes, I do run Red Hat, 'cause I'm kind of attached to it. Bite me.):
1. Download a new kernel.
2. # rpm -ivh kernel*.rpm
3. Reboot.
If you're still clammoring for a GUI to do that for you, KDE and Gnome have nice package managers that will let you click your way through it. If you're using Grub, you don't even really have to do any config editing, especially with RH 7.2's kernel upgrades...
Get a good web browser.
What's wrong with Konqueror? (I don't use Gnome, so I don't know how it's browser is.) Back in the day, we used lynx and we liked it.
And that Mozilla version number stab is utter bull shit. Version numbers are arbitrary. If MSFT released their next version of IE as IE 2002, would that suddenly mean it was 2002 times better than IE 1.0? Would you compare SuSE 7.3 to RH 7.2 based on version numbers?
Proper office programs
Indeed. They're getting there. KOffice isn't terrible, and OpenOffice is okay.
These programs should be able to import all MS formats
Oh, right, you mean those MS formats that Microsoft doesn't provide specs for? Reverse engineering those things doesn't happen overnight. And I can't see MSFT suddenly opening that sort of thing up. (I can, however, see MSFT making arbitrary changes to the formats whenever reverse engineers get close...)
Backward compatibility
Not all Win16, DOS and even Win32 apps run on WinNT, 2000 and XP.
And Linux is backwardly compatible. Stuff that worked on kernel 2.2 and older work fine on 2.4. Just get the source and re-compile it. Oh, wait, source code is useless, I forgot.
J
Re:I expect Gamecube to win this war
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 1
I doubt you'll see Square running away from Sony any time soon. Sony just invested some 14 billion yen in Square, about 19% worth of the company's stocks, making them Square's second largest investor.
There are a lot of filesystems that rarely need to be defragged. Most high performance filesystems don't really need it at all. When was the last time you defragmented a NTFS drive, or an ext2 drive? (Which is not to say it's never done, but I've never had to do it.)
If this is the case, then why does SourceForge have a job listing on their jobs page asking for a DBA that can "oversee and deploy the transition from Postgres to Oracle"? The listing also mentions "[keeping] the databases functional for the 200,000 users that use the site on a day-to-day basis." Why would a new version of SourceForge, which they are apparently selling as standalone software, already have 200,000 users?
The job listing is specifically listed as "SourceForge.net Database Administrator", not "Sourceforge 3.0 Enterprise Edition DBA/Developer" or whatever.
Doesn't this indicate at least in some way that they're planning on ditching PostgreSQL for (gasp) non-free software?
One of the PostgreSQL developers was telling me about a database he once designed. The details are a bit hazy and second-hand, but I believe it was originally using Ingres, which was what piqued his interest in PgSQL.
Anyways, the system basically handled a few gigs a day or so of data from GPS satellites and such. It basically crunched numbers and stored results in an effort to figure out how much the earth's tectonic plates were moving from day to day. I would imagine that this system handled many, many rows and transactions daily. I'm pretty sure they moved away from Ingres to PgSQL, which they're probably still using now.
It's not exactly a commercial application, but it is an RDBMS that handles a lot of data, and apparently worked quite well.
It might have been an acronym back in the day, but now it's just Visual Basic.
It's an easy langauge on the surface, but it can get a lot more complex as you go deeper.
The thing is, though, is that the way one goes about writing VB apps is loads different from writing, say, a driver or a command-line driven tool.
I know quite a few people who started out with VB and had a hell of a time switching to anything else. The syntax is somewhat distant from most langauges, which usually take their lead from C (C++, Java, a good deal of PHP, etc.), and the goto-ish design of most VB apps isn't the greatest way to start learning to code. (I know it's all based on handlers and whatnot, but I've seen VB coders actually put hidden controls in an app because they didn't know they could write their own functions! And what's with the insane amount of globals most VB coders use?!)
Anyways, wouldn't it be nicer to start off with a non-proprietary langauge and get new CS students out of the mindset that everything and anything to do with computers immediately means Microsoft?
I'll point this out right now -- I didn't major in CS, I majored in CIS. Please don't laugh, it was a while ago, and the price was right.
I wanted to take CS for the longest time, but when it came time to actually go off to college and university, things changed, shit happened, and I ended up with an I between the C and the S.
Anyways, from what I understood at the time, wasn't CS supposed to be about lofty, theoretical-type stuff like crazy algorithms, AI and the minute details of how a computer actually works in the first place.
I was talking to someone the other night who was in CS at a university in, shall we say, south-west-Ontario. What are they taking in their first semester?
Visual Basic 6.0.
Now, since I didn't actually take CS per se, maybe I shouldn't say anything, but wtf? VB? Is that really the language anybody would want to start off with, let alone CS majors?!
VB is simple and powerful and all and makes for decent RAD, but sweet baby jesus, should universities start off with it for CS?
Going from a more "traditional" learning language like C or Pascal to VB is dumbing down to me. I can see Java these days what with the OO and all, but VB just baffles me.
And since the only True Sources of Star Wars Canon are the films and whatever Lukas himself says, all of this stuff is subject to change, including the whole Thrawn thing and anything dealing with Fett's history. So we could all be massively wrong about everything. I mean, having Anakin build C3PO in TPM pretty much destroyed a ton of supposed Star Wars history in one fell swoop, totally going against most of the Droids comics and such.
If you haven't already, theforce.net has a list of Ep 2 characters and a condensed version of all that they know about each of 'em. This list was pulled together from various interviews, rumors (some verified by spies, others unverified), and such. If you're not afraid of spoilers, check it out at http://www.theforce.net/episode2/characters/. They specifically mention both Jango and Boba. Not that this is solid evidence as to what will be in Ep 2, but from what I know of theforce.net, they're usually good about this kind of stuff.
According to the popular theories, the clones are basically a precursor to the Empire's stormtrooper army. Basically, the theory goes that the entire stormtrooper army is really just a bunch of clones of one guy, specifically, Boba Fett, or rather, Fett's father.
Apparently, Boba Fett is actually the clone of Jango Fett, who in turn was used as the "father" of the clone army.
Why the big deal with clones? Well, based on the post-original trilogy Heir To The Empire books, the Emperor is pretty adept at controlling large groups of people. Of course, the droid armies used in TPM are useless 'cause they aren't alive, and the Emperor can't control them directly. However, he could control a large group of clones. Something to do with the Force, I guess.
So the clone wars is apparently the beginning of the end for the Republic, with the Emperor (or Senator Palpatine at any rate) at the head of the clone army.
A lot of post-original trilogy stuff from Dark Horse Comics and the novels and such played with clones constantly. In the wicked-cool Dark Empire comics series from Dark Horse, the Emperor returned in a clone of himself. The blue flash the erupted as Vader tossed the Emperor down a shaft at the end of Return of the Jedi was apparently the Emperor's consciousness being released, on its way to a new clone.
The Heir to the Empire series also had a bunch of clones, including clone generators and such. A Jedi clone in that series (Joruus C'Boath, or something to that effect), tried to replace the Emperor as head of the crumbling Empire. I think Luke was cloned, too, as Luuke or something, an evil clone of some sorts.
According to the books and comics, clones are pretty unstable folk and prone to insanity. Joruus was pretty insane.
It's been a while since I've read any of that stuff, though, so I might be a bit cloudy on the details. But that's what I make from most of the lore and the rumors going around.
I recommend checking out http://www.theforce.net. (Check out the Knightquest film if you get a chance -- amazing for a fan flick.)
There's a big difference between the number of MSN users and the number of users using servers with that Apache mod on them. It's not like any big pro-OSS/FS sites like Sourceforge or the site you're looking at now block out IE users.
That Apache mod was more of a joke. I mean, how many web sites running on Apache servers actually use it?
Early PS2 releases were known to be somewhat buggy. Several games like Madden 2001 and Tekken Tag Tourament were known to cause regular lockups way back during the PS2 release. This was later fixed in subsequent versions. The shitty thing is is that you can't tell one version from the next, and I think the license even says they can change the game without notice, so if you get a buggy one, you're out of luck when they release a fixed edition.
I rented one of the buggy TTTs a few weeks ago. I could barely play an entire game without it locking up.
The recent Gauntlet title, Dark Legacy, has also locked up my machine on a few occaisons.
I'd recommend using -iv to install rather than upgrade. That way, you'd still be able to boot the old kernel just in case something does wonky with the new kernel. (Assuming you didn't make boot floppies with the old kernel, but at least this way, if you lose or misplace the floppy, you still have the kernel itself on your hdd.)
"The Qt/X11 Free Edition is provided with no support and no warranty.
The Qt Free Edition is provided under both the Q Public License ("QPL") and the GPL. This specifies that you may freely use the Qt Free Edition for:
Running software developed by others (e.g. KDE)
Development of open source/non-proprietary software
The Qt Professional / Enterprise Editions are available for development of commercial/proprietary software. If you wish to evaluate Qt/X11 for commercial use, please see the Evaluation information."
You don't need to be much of a lawyer to understand that.
Note: I use PostgreSQL. I have little faith in MySQL, although I once used it for a project many moons ago. Hopefully it has improved since then.
no proper transactions
Yes it does! [mysql.com] If you use certain table types.
I'd appreciate it more if it was the default table type and I didn't have to worry about it.
no subselects
This is a nice feature, but *not* necessary. Many times a proper JOIN can be used instead. Alternately you just use multiple SQLs. However, this is the one missing feature of MySQL that I want the most.
Agreed.
no foreign keys
You don't need foreign keys to maintain referential integrity. A proper GUI, among many other things, can enforce this anyway. It is a nice feature, but definitely not needed in a well designed system. Further they slow down performance and I have seen projects where they are not used because of this.
Which would I rather do? A ton of extra code to enforce something the database should be doing in the first place? Personally, I don't want to waste my time coding something that should be a basic feature of any database system. I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here. A well designed system should include a proper database management system.
views
These can be nice too, but I personally never use them. They are simply not required in any project I've ever seen. Actually I think views are confusing because they mask the real tables. I think this is a style issue more than anything else, YMMV.
I use them now and again, and they're pretty useful. I can get away with not using them if there aren't too many users on a system, but what if I have multiple admins or database users that need to see some data on a table but not necessarily all of the data? This is more of a backend thing and could be worked around in the application itself, of course, but if I have multiple developers working on a project and I'd rather they see only what they need to see, views are extremely useful.
How can this be a "mission critical" SQL database?
How about better performance [mysql.com].
You're actually quoting MySQL's own benchmarks? Of course they're going to make it look like MySQL rules the planet. Do you also trust all of Microsoft's benchmarks? Or Oracle's? Unless the benchmarks are done by a third party, I wouldn't put too much faith in them.
While waiting through the slashdotting, I noticed Free Dmitry and and anti-DMCA links on your google-cached web site.
I don't think we're going to get a better chance to find out what happens to both than by asking a guy who not only time travelled regularly, but near the end of TNG was able to manipulate time itself.
So, my questions -- is Dmitry finally free for real in the future, and if so, how did it happen? And don't say "holodeck" or "transporter" because that's cheap.
Next -- is legislation in the future as bad as it is now? I mean, if you circumvent a Klingon holo-copy control mechanism, would you be thrown in a detention cell on Kronos and be force fed Gahk (or whatever the hell those worm things are called) without starbail or startrial for a few staryears?
What gives? Enquiring minds with no sense of reality want to know.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the brand name here that's important, not so much the product. Companies change with the times. In 30 years, we might not be using PCs, but odds are Microsoft, IBM et al. will still be around, selling something else, banking on their brand name, not the product itself. They're not just going to remain static and simply push one product. When PCs die, they'll be there with something else.
50 years might be an epoch in technological terms, to huge businesses like Microsoft, IBM, etc., it's not all that much. I would bet they'll still be around in 2040, and they'll still be recognied by their brand name, while their original products (Windows, PCs, etc.) will likely be forgotten. But that won't matter, 'causepeople will be hooked on the brand name, not the product itself, which is much more valuable.
As for Red Hat, who knows. Odds are, they won't be exclusive to Linux for their entire existance, and while I'd be somewhat surprised if they made it to 2040, if they did, yeah, linux would be long gone, but they'd just be selling something else. Maybe red hats, who knows.
J
But which do you think Microsoft is more concerned with -- getting a bit of money in five years or getting a lot of moneyo ver the course of the next couple of decades?
That's what I was getting at. It's the long, long run that's important here, not five years down the line.
J
They do stand to gain something out of the deal, though -- a generation of kids brought up using Red Hat Linux instead of Microsoft Windows would definitely help them out in the long run.
The five-years from now is nothing. When we're talking long run, we should be looking over the next 30, 40, 50 years. Nobody's looking for any money in 5 years, they're all thinking, "how can we get these kids hooked on our products so that for the rest of their lives, they're buying from us?" It's what every advertising agency is trying to do when it advertises to kids and teens -- it tries to hook them on a product for the rest of their consuming days.
Not much difference here, but at least Red Hat is an alternative to the beast.
To think they stand to gain nothing in the long run is foolish.
J
J
Setting your username, password and workgroup in the Windows Share section of KControl seems to help, at least if you only have one username, password and workgroup to use.
J
I wasn't really refering specifically to Ada when I mentioned GC, just languages in general that have such features, i.e. Java, etc.
J
ftp://mirror.chpc.utah.edu has it, too, and I'm getting wicked speeds from Toronto.
J
Isn't stability the responsibility of the coder? It's not going to matter what language you use if you can't code for shit. Take a someone who knows C++ inside and out and you'll get code that's just as "stable" as something similar done in Ada or any other language for that matter. Languages aren't "stable", it's the person using them and how they code. (Of course, some languages may make this easier by supplying garbage collection and what not, but in the end, it's still about the user...)
J
How about Maoism?
J
Trolling, but I'll bite...
experienced MCSE
See: oxymoron
Remove the bloat. Most linux distro's ship with way to many useless programs. These "useless" programs must be useful to someone. Maybe not everyone, but certainly someone. If you don't want to use them, don't install them. The option is a checkbox away in most distro installs.
Dump the command line.
Granted, most users don't give a shit about the command line, or even know such a thing exists for that matter. Most of linux's power comes from the shell, though. Once you get used to it, you start to feel kind of God like.
And if you're admining a system, I'll take a shell any day over some Windows manager snap-ins or whatever the hell they're called. I don't want to be restricted to what some UI designer's whimsey.
Dump open-source.
Once the source is out there it can really be taken back, so dumping OSS is kind of impossible. Even if, for whatever imaginary reason, the Linux kernel suddenly became closed-source, all of the previous versions would still be OSS, and development would just continue along another fork.
[Desktop users] do not want to compile anything.
If a setup process involved compiling but the user couldn't see it, would that make it better? What would be the difference? In Windows, a setup.exe file unpacks some stuff, moves it around, writes some registry settings. What if some executable in linux unpacked some source code, compiled it and put it where it should go? Would that make things better for you, MCSE?
A universal gui system. Linux needs ONE gui.
First of all, choice is a good thing. Unlike Microsoft, where you're stuck with the GUI they give you, at least with UNIX-like systems you're free to choose from any number of GUIs, then proceed to configure them exactly how you want them. Right now I'm using KDE with Mosfet's Liquid engine, some NeXT-ish stuff and a bit of quartz thrown in. I like it. Other people might not, but they can roll their own. Choice.
Now, about having ONE GUI -- you mean like Windows 2000 and XP? (Okay, so can modify XP to look like 2000, but I doubt most users even know that option exists.)
Make upgrading the software easier. Desktop users need an easy way to upgrade the kernel.
This depends on the distro you're using (or if you've rolled your own), but it really isn't that hard. Here's what I do (yes, I do run Red Hat, 'cause I'm kind of attached to it. Bite me.):
1. Download a new kernel.
2. # rpm -ivh kernel*.rpm
3. Reboot.
If you're still clammoring for a GUI to do that for you, KDE and Gnome have nice package managers that will let you click your way through it. If you're using Grub, you don't even really have to do any config editing, especially with RH 7.2's kernel upgrades...
Get a good web browser.
What's wrong with Konqueror? (I don't use Gnome, so I don't know how it's browser is.) Back in the day, we used lynx and we liked it.
And that Mozilla version number stab is utter bull shit. Version numbers are arbitrary. If MSFT released their next version of IE as IE 2002, would that suddenly mean it was 2002 times better than IE 1.0? Would you compare SuSE 7.3 to RH 7.2 based on version numbers?
Proper office programs
Indeed. They're getting there. KOffice isn't terrible, and OpenOffice is okay.
These programs should be able to import all MS formats
Oh, right, you mean those MS formats that Microsoft doesn't provide specs for? Reverse engineering those things doesn't happen overnight. And I can't see MSFT suddenly opening that sort of thing up. (I can, however, see MSFT making arbitrary changes to the formats whenever reverse engineers get close...)
Backward compatibility
Not all Win16, DOS and even Win32 apps run on WinNT, 2000 and XP.
And Linux is backwardly compatible. Stuff that worked on kernel 2.2 and older work fine on 2.4. Just get the source and re-compile it. Oh, wait, source code is useless, I forgot.
J
I doubt you'll see Square running away from Sony any time soon. Sony just invested some 14 billion yen in Square, about 19% worth of the company's stocks, making them Square's second largest investor.
J
There are a lot of filesystems that rarely need to be defragged. Most high performance filesystems don't really need it at all. When was the last time you defragmented a NTFS drive, or an ext2 drive? (Which is not to say it's never done, but I've never had to do it.)
J
If this is the case, then why does SourceForge have a job listing on their jobs page asking for a DBA that can "oversee and deploy the transition from Postgres to Oracle"? The listing also mentions "[keeping] the databases functional for the 200,000 users that use the site on a day-to-day basis." Why would a new version of SourceForge, which they are apparently selling as standalone software, already have 200,000 users? The job listing is specifically listed as "SourceForge.net Database Administrator", not "Sourceforge 3.0 Enterprise Edition DBA/Developer" or whatever.
i d=7438&group_id=1#dba.
Doesn't this indicate at least in some way that they're planning on ditching PostgreSQL for (gasp) non-free software?
The exact listing can be seen at http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doc
This stuff was brought up on the PostgreSQL lists. I'm hoping Tim Perdue will chime in, as he apparently frequents the lists.
J
One of the PostgreSQL developers was telling me about a database he once designed. The details are a bit hazy and second-hand, but I believe it was originally using Ingres, which was what piqued his interest in PgSQL.
Anyways, the system basically handled a few gigs a day or so of data from GPS satellites and such. It basically crunched numbers and stored results in an effort to figure out how much the earth's tectonic plates were moving from day to day. I would imagine that this system handled many, many rows and transactions daily. I'm pretty sure they moved away from Ingres to PgSQL, which they're probably still using now.
It's not exactly a commercial application, but it is an RDBMS that handles a lot of data, and apparently worked quite well.
J
It might have been an acronym back in the day, but now it's just Visual Basic.
It's an easy langauge on the surface, but it can get a lot more complex as you go deeper.
The thing is, though, is that the way one goes about writing VB apps is loads different from writing, say, a driver or a command-line driven tool.
I know quite a few people who started out with VB and had a hell of a time switching to anything else. The syntax is somewhat distant from most langauges, which usually take their lead from C (C++, Java, a good deal of PHP, etc.), and the goto-ish design of most VB apps isn't the greatest way to start learning to code. (I know it's all based on handlers and whatnot, but I've seen VB coders actually put hidden controls in an app because they didn't know they could write their own functions! And what's with the insane amount of globals most VB coders use?!)
Anyways, wouldn't it be nicer to start off with a non-proprietary langauge and get new CS students out of the mindset that everything and anything to do with computers immediately means Microsoft?
J
I'll point this out right now -- I didn't major in CS, I majored in CIS. Please don't laugh, it was a while ago, and the price was right.
I wanted to take CS for the longest time, but when it came time to actually go off to college and university, things changed, shit happened, and I ended up with an I between the C and the S.
Anyways, from what I understood at the time, wasn't CS supposed to be about lofty, theoretical-type stuff like crazy algorithms, AI and the minute details of how a computer actually works in the first place.
I was talking to someone the other night who was in CS at a university in, shall we say, south-west-Ontario. What are they taking in their first semester?
Visual Basic 6.0.
Now, since I didn't actually take CS per se, maybe I shouldn't say anything, but wtf? VB? Is that really the language anybody would want to start off with, let alone CS majors?!
VB is simple and powerful and all and makes for decent RAD, but sweet baby jesus, should universities start off with it for CS?
Going from a more "traditional" learning language like C or Pascal to VB is dumbing down to me. I can see Java these days what with the OO and all, but VB just baffles me.
J
640K is still quite a lot you know.....
I'll say! 640K should be enough for anybody!
J
It is just a theory, as good as the next.
And since the only True Sources of Star Wars Canon are the films and whatever Lukas himself says, all of this stuff is subject to change, including the whole Thrawn thing and anything dealing with Fett's history. So we could all be massively wrong about everything. I mean, having Anakin build C3PO in TPM pretty much destroyed a ton of supposed Star Wars history in one fell swoop, totally going against most of the Droids comics and such.
If you haven't already, theforce.net has a list of Ep 2 characters and a condensed version of all that they know about each of 'em. This list was pulled together from various interviews, rumors (some verified by spies, others unverified), and such. If you're not afraid of spoilers, check it out at http://www.theforce.net/episode2/characters/. They specifically mention both Jango and Boba. Not that this is solid evidence as to what will be in Ep 2, but from what I know of theforce.net, they're usually good about this kind of stuff.
J
According to the popular theories, the clones are basically a precursor to the Empire's stormtrooper army. Basically, the theory goes that the entire stormtrooper army is really just a bunch of clones of one guy, specifically, Boba Fett, or rather, Fett's father.
Apparently, Boba Fett is actually the clone of Jango Fett, who in turn was used as the "father" of the clone army.
Why the big deal with clones? Well, based on the post-original trilogy Heir To The Empire books, the Emperor is pretty adept at controlling large groups of people. Of course, the droid armies used in TPM are useless 'cause they aren't alive, and the Emperor can't control them directly. However, he could control a large group of clones. Something to do with the Force, I guess.
So the clone wars is apparently the beginning of the end for the Republic, with the Emperor (or Senator Palpatine at any rate) at the head of the clone army.
A lot of post-original trilogy stuff from Dark Horse Comics and the novels and such played with clones constantly. In the wicked-cool Dark Empire comics series from Dark Horse, the Emperor returned in a clone of himself. The blue flash the erupted as Vader tossed the Emperor down a shaft at the end of Return of the Jedi was apparently the Emperor's consciousness being released, on its way to a new clone.
The Heir to the Empire series also had a bunch of clones, including clone generators and such. A Jedi clone in that series (Joruus C'Boath, or something to that effect), tried to replace the Emperor as head of the crumbling Empire. I think Luke was cloned, too, as Luuke or something, an evil clone of some sorts.
According to the books and comics, clones are pretty unstable folk and prone to insanity. Joruus was pretty insane.
It's been a while since I've read any of that stuff, though, so I might be a bit cloudy on the details. But that's what I make from most of the lore and the rumors going around.
I recommend checking out http://www.theforce.net. (Check out the Knightquest film if you get a chance -- amazing for a fan flick.)
Man, I know too much about this crap.
J
There's a big difference between the number of MSN users and the number of users using servers with that Apache mod on them. It's not like any big pro-OSS/FS sites like Sourceforge or the site you're looking at now block out IE users.
That Apache mod was more of a joke. I mean, how many web sites running on Apache servers actually use it?
J
Early PS2 releases were known to be somewhat buggy. Several games like Madden 2001 and Tekken Tag Tourament were known to cause regular lockups way back during the PS2 release. This was later fixed in subsequent versions. The shitty thing is is that you can't tell one version from the next, and I think the license even says they can change the game without notice, so if you get a buggy one, you're out of luck when they release a fixed edition.
I rented one of the buggy TTTs a few weeks ago. I could barely play an entire game without it locking up.
The recent Gauntlet title, Dark Legacy, has also locked up my machine on a few occaisons.
J
You're worried that if you get hit by a truck, your wife will start using Windows and Microsoft products again?
Now that's hard core.
J
I'd recommend using -iv to install rather than upgrade. That way, you'd still be able to boot the old kernel just in case something does wonky with the new kernel. (Assuming you didn't make boot floppies with the old kernel, but at least this way, if you lose or misplace the floppy, you still have the kernel itself on your hdd.)
J
"The Qt/X11 Free Edition is provided with no support and no warranty.
The Qt Free Edition is provided under both the Q Public License ("QPL") and the GPL. This specifies that you may freely use the Qt Free Edition for:
- Running software developed by others (e.g. KDE)
- Development of open source/non-proprietary software
The Qt Professional / Enterprise Editions are available for development of commercial/proprietary software. If you wish to evaluate Qt/X11 for commercial use, please see the Evaluation information."You don't need to be much of a lawyer to understand that.
J
Note: I use PostgreSQL. I have little faith in MySQL, although I once used it for a project many moons ago. Hopefully it has improved since then.
no proper transactions
Yes it does! [mysql.com] If you use certain table types.
I'd appreciate it more if it was the default table type and I didn't have to worry about it.
no subselects
This is a nice feature, but *not* necessary. Many times a proper JOIN can be used instead. Alternately you just use multiple SQLs. However, this is the one missing feature of MySQL that I want the most.
Agreed.
no foreign keys
You don't need foreign keys to maintain referential integrity. A proper GUI, among many other things, can enforce this anyway. It is a nice feature, but definitely not needed in a well designed system. Further they slow down performance and I have seen projects where they are not used because of this.
Which would I rather do? A ton of extra code to enforce something the database should be doing in the first place? Personally, I don't want to waste my time coding something that should be a basic feature of any database system. I'm not going to re-invent the wheel here. A well designed system should include a proper database management system.
views
These can be nice too, but I personally never use them. They are simply not required in any project I've ever seen. Actually I think views are confusing because they mask the real tables. I think this is a style issue more than anything else, YMMV.
I use them now and again, and they're pretty useful. I can get away with not using them if there aren't too many users on a system, but what if I have multiple admins or database users that need to see some data on a table but not necessarily all of the data? This is more of a backend thing and could be worked around in the application itself, of course, but if I have multiple developers working on a project and I'd rather they see only what they need to see, views are extremely useful.
How can this be a "mission critical" SQL database?
How about better performance [mysql.com].
You're actually quoting MySQL's own benchmarks? Of course they're going to make it look like MySQL rules the planet. Do you also trust all of Microsoft's benchmarks? Or Oracle's? Unless the benchmarks are done by a third party, I wouldn't put too much faith in them.
J
While waiting through the slashdotting, I noticed Free Dmitry and and anti-DMCA links on your google-cached web site.
I don't think we're going to get a better chance to find out what happens to both than by asking a guy who not only time travelled regularly, but near the end of TNG was able to manipulate time itself.
So, my questions -- is Dmitry finally free for real in the future, and if so, how did it happen? And don't say "holodeck" or "transporter" because that's cheap.
Next -- is legislation in the future as bad as it is now? I mean, if you circumvent a Klingon holo-copy control mechanism, would you be thrown in a detention cell on Kronos and be force fed Gahk (or whatever the hell those worm things are called) without starbail or startrial for a few staryears?
What gives? Enquiring minds with no sense of reality want to know.
J