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Indymedia isn't supposed to "promote dissent", it's supposed to a collectively run media outlet for passionate, radicalandaccurate news.
That and should have been an or. The terms of your conjunction are incompatible.
I mean, it's all very nice to have an opinion, but if you are so dumb and misinformed to confound it with news, and then to accept every piece of rumour and opinion as it was fact, you perpetrate a scam on those who are as dumb and misinformed as yourself.
You shouldn't be 'balanced' to do news that's usually Newspeak for 'politically correct'. It is better to be correct than balanced. But that requires one to dig deeper for the truth, and that's hard when our society (global, not only US) has became so stupid, polarised and accomodated that it won't spend enough time and money to evaluate facts one dig, instead wasting all its resources to buy sound bytes and then analyse them with little but prejudice and half-truths.
So what? If it's still a standard, we have to live with that for so long as software patents are allowed. Meanwhile, it's one more reason to have it in (firm|hard)ware instead of hardware.
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I'm not saying that Windows was the best operating system out there, or the first one to target consumers instead of research. I'm just saying that it was the most popular. Because it was the most popular, it allowed the consumer level PC market grow to the point to which scale economies start to kick in. Improved manufacturing techniques are one reason for the reason why we can get computers for 500 dollars now a days
Are you dense or what?
As I said, computers of old were cheap without the need for MS Windows. Sinclairs and their like were even cheaper than US$ 500.00. Even when going graphical, GEM and DesqView/X needed less resources, as did MS's own OS/2 and MS/X, and now the X Window System-based OSs.
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this time with research) Neal Stephenson wrote
He's not a source. He's just a misguided commentator. So you ended up not doing research at all.
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The only reason Torvalds had cheap hardware was Microsoft
Please learn History. Yes, there is a History of Computing, even with at least one academic journal.
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True, but none of them took off.
Not true. Sinclairs, TRS-80s and others were quite popular, and there was even at least one very popular OS, CP/M, used extensively by several vendors until MS copied it.
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Computers only became affordable to most people when there was a large enough market created.
Not true. Sinclairs and TRS-80s, not to mention Commodores and others, were cheaper than IBM PCs and their clones. It was just that IBM validated the market and some interfaces like the ISA bus and RLL disks. This would have happened to someone else without MS or with an honest MS, even the IBM PC itself with, say, the CP/M-86 which was even said to have been a better OS at the time, and by a more honest company.
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With the introduction of Windows, a GUI based operating system that could be installed on non-apple computers, people could start using computers with out lots of training.
GEM was there first, and even had ISVs. DesqView/X was more standards-compliant, and more capable too. Only they were either more honest, or lacking a monopoly to leverage.
If you can't be bothered to research, please refrain from giving your impressions.
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Perhaps because this will also create native technology and bring more jobs (directly and indirectly)?
Not compared to, say, basic education investments -- basic education is a mess in Brazil.
Space programs are a question of political pride, not efficiency. Even the US and Europe don't benefit much from theirs, some of the money could perhaps be better spent elsewhere. It all started for propaganda and military purposes.
Now besides pride it could be also not wanting to be dependent on India, China, Russia, the US or Europe. But I gather these five are diverse enough for the world not needing a country like Brasil sending rockets to space when our (yes, I'm Brazilian) children can't even read properly.
It is not true that no one ever did anything with Date's and Darwen's ideas on a relational language. Check, for instance, the category I edit at the Open Directory, or even Darwen's own The Third Manifesto website with its list of projects.
Probably the poster is confused about the nature of Tutorial D. As it names indicate, it is but an example of a possible 'D', and one targeted at instruction at that. This accounts for its COBOLishness. It is possible to implement a non-Tutorial D that is completely faithful to the Relational Model and the Third Manifesto, yet has a distinct flavour.
For example, Alphora Dataphor implements D4, which was a compliant D until having had to incorporate SQL NULLs quite recently, and it has a Pascal flavour to it; Opus and Duro are C-like; there was a guy wanting to implement a C#-like D-flat language; Alfredo Novoa is implementing Tutorial D itself in MS.Net; and so on.
By the way, it is interesting that until now the more ambitious projects, that seem to be Alphora's and Mr Novoa's, are in MS.Net. Time for the free software community to rise to the challenge!
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QT's commercial license is cheap enough for anyone who's serious
Yet it is not free software unless you are on a free platform. Granted, whomever wants to develop on a proprietary platform should be prepared to shell out money; however it might be blocking for a small or individual developer, or perhaps someone from a poor country, who wants to go cross-platform.
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in practive it is very rare that professional-quality software can be built or distributed for free, hence GPL trips over a very early stumbling block
With copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL, you at least have a defence against software hoarding. Non-copyleft licenses will do nothing as to being 'very rare that professional-quality software can be [...] distributed for free', and indeed less, as dual-licensing strategies won't work.
But you are thinking about price, not freedom. Because of the possibility of dual-licensing, it is more probable that one gets paid to do copyleft than non-copyleft. As for building something for free has nothing to do with freedom in software, only with gratuity of programming services.
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I assure you that Word and Excel are industry standards.
So pray tell me what is your definition of industry standards. No, tell me your definition of industry. Does a file format that is not documented and isn't even fully implemented by more than a monopolist company make a industry?
The day MS fully documents their file formats, then they will have a chance at having some standards compliance. Until them, OpenOffice.org's file formats is being considered for a real, honest-to-God ISO standard.
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I just checked the logs on my Windows 2000 laptop and it was last restarted on August 30
That's what's so funny about MS advocates, their low level of expectations. Un*x can run for years, even when you update software and reconfigure stuff.
I'm just a non-US American (from Minas Gerais, BR in fact), but AFAIK protectionism, and thus high costs of living and doing business, started with Woodrow Wilson's protection for farmers.
All kinds of protectionism ultimately hurt the poor, who pay higher to protect a few. There are no reasonable moral excuses for it.
This is a (perhaps) necessary evil.
The right thing to do would be to port Compiere to ISO SQL. The problem is that at the moment only IBM DB2 is standards-compliant. PostgreSQL comes close, but fails miserably on some important accounts for inertia: AUTOCOMMIT, CONSTRAINT... NOT DEFERRABLE INITIALLY IMMEDIATE, lack of SQL/PSM...
Excuse my ignorance, but why WebDAV? Isn't it supposed to be just a poor man's implementation of WebNFS, to be phased out for WebNFS for files and IMAP for email?
In principle, coeteris paribus - that is, assuming the same fabrication process - RISC platforms are more energy-efficient than x86 for the same performance levels.
This is true in particular of the ARM platform, but also of the PowerPC and, perhaps in minor degrees, others like MIPS or SPARC.
So if you could get yourself an ARM box (like the NetWinder, or even something more recent - ask at debian-arm@lists.debian.org for example) you're set. The Pegasos PPC boxes are also worthy a look, fanless too.
I suppose you meant '2 to 16' users, but where does this '16' number comes from?
Perhaps one can have a bad system with lots of PCI slots and USB ports to accomodate that much users, but is that viable? Does that exist? Typically this needs to be cheap, commodity hardware, thus the usual maximum of four.
When MS Access 1.0 was launched, MS's Access team said MS's ultimate vision was to have everything in the system relationally stored - which makes sense, see stuff like Gnome Storage.
Problem is, MS Access (and MS SQL Server, and their engines Jet and......I forget) are poor implementations of SQL, and SQL isn't relational at all. SQL is a misimplementation of a few of the relational ideas carrying severe arbitrary limitations.
Most probably MS will never come to push this until they get the relational theory right. But with the MS Access and MS SQL Server pushing the party line of 'SQL is relational, but objects are better', they most probably will never get there.
Perhaps Gnome Storage has a better chance, because PostgreSQL is such a nimble system. But it still is SQL. Rel looks like being a potentially conceptually better solution as far as the data language side goes, but it still needs a huge amount of work on the storage engine side.
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There's a system that exists already and that's not vaporware. ReiserFS 4.
Problem is, Reiser's ultimate vision is a throwback to 30 years ago's hierarchical database systems, before we had the relational general theory of data manipulation.
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SQL doesn't fit that well with filesystems, btw. Relational databases work great with rigid categories
Please don't mix SQL and relational. Despite all hype, SQL was never relational, and has given up being relational since at least ISO SQL:1999.
The relational model doesn't suffer from SQL self-inflicted arbitrary limitations.
Someone said we should judge a newspaper by the quality of their stories on some subject we know well.
These are US stories, but one of them touches my own homecountry, Brazil. The story is so ridiculously, childishly, radically leftist - to the point of gross partidarism and distortion of reality, including the promotion of a radical, violent group like MST who wants to overthrow a constitutional, democratically-elected government and estabilish a marxist dictatorship - that it readily discredits the whole list as hate-promoting trash.
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If someone's too stupid to be able to spell their own address correctly, maybe I don't want to know them.
It's more complicated than that... we sysadmins and DBAs like to have consistent data. And ultimately, you want to avoid garbage in the database just to keep it reasonably useful with a high signal-to-noise ration.
Slashdot Mirror
That and should have been an or. The terms of your conjunction are incompatible.
I mean, it's all very nice to have an opinion, but if you are so dumb and misinformed to confound it with news, and then to accept every piece of rumour and opinion as it was fact, you perpetrate a scam on those who are as dumb and misinformed as yourself.
You shouldn't be 'balanced' to do news that's usually Newspeak for 'politically correct'. It is better to be correct than balanced. But that requires one to dig deeper for the truth, and that's hard when our society (global, not only US) has became so stupid, polarised and accomodated that it won't spend enough time and money to evaluate facts one dig, instead wasting all its resources to buy sound bytes and then analyse them with little but prejudice and half-truths.
Are you dense or what?
As I said, computers of old were cheap without the need for MS Windows. Sinclairs and their like were even cheaper than US$ 500.00. Even when going graphical, GEM and DesqView/X needed less resources, as did MS's own OS/2 and MS/X, and now the X Window System-based OSs.
He's not a source. He's just a misguided commentator. So you ended up not doing research at all.
Unwarranted for reasons already given.
Please learn History. Yes, there is a History of Computing, even with at least one academic journal.
Not true. Sinclairs, TRS-80s and others were quite popular, and there was even at least one very popular OS, CP/M, used extensively by several vendors until MS copied it.
Not true. Sinclairs and TRS-80s, not to mention Commodores and others, were cheaper than IBM PCs and their clones. It was just that IBM validated the market and some interfaces like the ISA bus and RLL disks. This would have happened to someone else without MS or with an honest MS, even the IBM PC itself with, say, the CP/M-86 which was even said to have been a better OS at the time, and by a more honest company.
GEM was there first, and even had ISVs. DesqView/X was more standards-compliant, and more capable too. Only they were either more honest, or lacking a monopoly to leverage.
If you can't be bothered to research, please refrain from giving your impressions.
You mean the CAD market. AutoCAD is simply the MS IE of CADs.
It is, when you don't have enough money or competence. Brazil hasn't.
Not compared to, say, basic education investments -- basic education is a mess in Brazil.
Space programs are a question of political pride, not efficiency. Even the US and Europe don't benefit much from theirs, some of the money could perhaps be better spent elsewhere. It all started for propaganda and military purposes.
Now besides pride it could be also not wanting to be dependent on India, China, Russia, the US or Europe. But I gather these five are diverse enough for the world not needing a country like Brasil sending rockets to space when our (yes, I'm Brazilian) children can't even read properly.
What does this has to do with variables?
So keep your skills, but please add some technical and theoretical fundaments.
A proposal: publish something of your current work. If it's sound, it goes up to DMoz. If not, it gets dissed.
Have you grokked the relational model already? Last time I checked you didn't, and you keep talking 'tables' instead of 'relations'.
It is not true that no one ever did anything with Date's and Darwen's ideas on a relational language. Check, for instance, the category I edit at the Open Directory, or even Darwen's own The Third Manifesto website with its list of projects.
Probably the poster is confused about the nature of Tutorial D. As it names indicate, it is but an example of a possible 'D', and one targeted at instruction at that. This accounts for its COBOLishness. It is possible to implement a non-Tutorial D that is completely faithful to the Relational Model and the Third Manifesto, yet has a distinct flavour.
For example, Alphora Dataphor implements D4, which was a compliant D until having had to incorporate SQL NULLs quite recently, and it has a Pascal flavour to it; Opus and Duro are C-like; there was a guy wanting to implement a C#-like D-flat language; Alfredo Novoa is implementing Tutorial D itself in MS.Net; and so on.
By the way, it is interesting that until now the more ambitious projects, that seem to be Alphora's and Mr Novoa's, are in MS .Net. Time for the free software community to rise to the challenge!
So you can with the GNU GPL, it only has to stay free.
And this benefits everyone, as opposed to the software hoarding enabled by the BSD license.
Yet it is not free software unless you are on a free platform. Granted, whomever wants to develop on a proprietary platform should be prepared to shell out money; however it might be blocking for a small or individual developer, or perhaps someone from a poor country, who wants to go cross-platform.
With copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL, you at least have a defence against software hoarding. Non-copyleft licenses will do nothing as to being 'very rare that professional-quality software can be [...] distributed for free', and indeed less, as dual-licensing strategies won't work.
But you are thinking about price, not freedom. Because of the possibility of dual-licensing, it is more probable that one gets paid to do copyleft than non-copyleft. As for building something for free has nothing to do with freedom in software, only with gratuity of programming services.
So pray tell me what is your definition of industry standards. No, tell me your definition of industry. Does a file format that is not documented and isn't even fully implemented by more than a monopolist company make a industry?
The day MS fully documents their file formats, then they will have a chance at having some standards compliance. Until them, OpenOffice.org's file formats is being considered for a real, honest-to-God ISO standard.
That's what's so funny about MS advocates, their low level of expectations. Un*x can run for years, even when you update software and reconfigure stuff.
I'm just a non-US American (from Minas Gerais, BR in fact), but AFAIK protectionism, and thus high costs of living and doing business, started with Woodrow Wilson's protection for farmers.
All kinds of protectionism ultimately hurt the poor, who pay higher to protect a few. There are no reasonable moral excuses for it.
This is a (perhaps) necessary evil. The right thing to do would be to port Compiere to ISO SQL. The problem is that at the moment only IBM DB2 is standards-compliant. PostgreSQL comes close, but fails miserably on some important accounts for inertia: AUTOCOMMIT, CONSTRAINT ... NOT DEFERRABLE INITIALLY IMMEDIATE, lack of SQL/PSM...
Excuse my ignorance, but why WebDAV? Isn't it supposed to be just a poor man's implementation of WebNFS, to be phased out for WebNFS for files and IMAP for email?
In principle, coeteris paribus - that is, assuming the same fabrication process - RISC platforms are more energy-efficient than x86 for the same performance levels.
This is true in particular of the ARM platform, but also of the PowerPC and, perhaps in minor degrees, others like MIPS or SPARC.
So if you could get yourself an ARM box (like the NetWinder, or even something more recent - ask at debian-arm@lists.debian.org for example) you're set. The Pegasos PPC boxes are also worthy a look, fanless too.
Yet another hierarchical DB as a filesystem?
This is dumb. It is high time we should have a truly RDBMS (*not* SQL!) as *the* storage engine for all systems, with POSIX as a compatibility option.
I suppose you meant '2 to 16' users, but where does this '16' number comes from?
Perhaps one can have a bad system with lots of PCI slots and USB ports to accomodate that much users, but is that viable? Does that exist? Typically this needs to be cheap, commodity hardware, thus the usual maximum of four.
And both this business interests were supposed to be some form of 'counterculture'.
The West rejected Yaweh, and all it's got is Mammon now.
When MS Access 1.0 was launched, MS's Access team said MS's ultimate vision was to have everything in the system relationally stored - which makes sense, see stuff like Gnome Storage.
...I forget) are poor implementations of SQL, and SQL isn't relational at all. SQL is a misimplementation of a few of the relational ideas carrying severe arbitrary limitations.
Problem is, MS Access (and MS SQL Server, and their engines Jet and...
Most probably MS will never come to push this until they get the relational theory right. But with the MS Access and MS SQL Server pushing the party line of 'SQL is relational, but objects are better', they most probably will never get there.
Perhaps Gnome Storage has a better chance, because PostgreSQL is such a nimble system. But it still is SQL. Rel looks like being a potentially conceptually better solution as far as the data language side goes, but it still needs a huge amount of work on the storage engine side.
Problem is, Reiser's ultimate vision is a throwback to 30 years ago's hierarchical database systems, before we had the relational general theory of data manipulation.
Please don't mix SQL and relational. Despite all hype, SQL was never relational, and has given up being relational since at least ISO SQL:1999.
The relational model doesn't suffer from SQL self-inflicted arbitrary limitations.
Someone said we should judge a newspaper by the quality of their stories on some subject we know well.
These are US stories, but one of them touches my own homecountry, Brazil. The story is so ridiculously, childishly, radically leftist - to the point of gross partidarism and distortion of reality, including the promotion of a radical, violent group like MST who wants to overthrow a constitutional, democratically-elected government and estabilish a marxist dictatorship - that it readily discredits the whole list as hate-promoting trash.
It's more complicated than that... we sysadmins and DBAs like to have consistent data. And ultimately, you want to avoid garbage in the database just to keep it reasonably useful with a high signal-to-noise ration.