>
If I have created something, it is mine to do with as I will.
Not in my book. Intellectual property has no roots in Ethics, Historical or Philosophical. Copy rights originally are concerned not with Ethics, but with a pragmatic incentive to production. At first it was probably worthwhile, but nowadays it works badly both by excluding the poor and by incentiving the production of trash, creating an artificial scarcity in general and in particular of good stuff.
The jump from copy rights to intellectual property was done without any debate, and thus I tend to consider it a self-serving device from the greedy and rich of this world against the poor, so that the poor wouldn't be able to benefit from the inherent freedom of information to enrich themselves.
The hypocrisy here is that there were no international copy rights or patents, much less so-called intellectual property, when Europe and the US started to get rich in the XVIII and XIX centuries.
>
What you do get from having Mach is a well debugged, small set of OS primitives that the rest of the kernel can call with the performance penalty of a function call rather than a task switch.
As if standard BSD wasn't as good as, and leaner... why one would need the Mach is still the question.
This is the answer I never saw properly answered, and I hoped the article would.
Why combine the loss of performance and added complexity of Mach with the lack of flexibility of a single (BSD) server?
One could be lean with a single BSD server, or flexible with Mach and a multiple server system like the Hurd. But XNU gives one the worst of both worlds as I see it...
>
Yahoo used to be THE place to get organized info on any subject.
Before the Net became too big for categories, and that's not reversible, nor tractable anymore.
>
Maybe they are switching to a better search engine, like DMOZ or Vivisimo?
DMoz ain't a search engine, but a directory just like Yahoo! but less mature if wider. And it is almost stalled face the enormity of the Net, being hierarchical too. It isn't hopeless, but it would need to become database-based, just as Yahoo! needs.
About Vivissimo, is it really as good as Google, and will it prove as resistant to tinkering, or any better?
>
a flawless implementation of a crap algorithm just doesn't scale well
If you assume the problem is the efficiency of the algorithm, but it still treats input as well as to produce correct output. MySQL in the other hand is just bad design, with lotsa gotchas both in SQL compliance and DBMS functionality.
>
XML is not for the semantic markup of texts. That's HTML and its XML equivalents.
Not. XML is just simplified SGML, and SGML is for semantic markup of texts. All else is misuse. Markup of data is just stupid. Binary, tables in sequential files with associated field descriptions, all that can be very simple to parse, proviede there is a DTD, which is no invention of SGML. SGML for data is inefficient processing for computers and too much noise for humans.
What does it mean 'ISO SQL:1999-style stored procedures'? Java, PL/SQL, SQL/PSM?
Stored procedures are a mess, with a de facto ill-defined Java standard trend, a de jure SQL/PSM standard supported by IBM DB2 and not much else, and a proprietary, non-portable PL/SQL supported by Oracle and PostgreSQL.
But anyway I won't consider MySQL when I have PostgreSQL with a much sounder, even if not perfect, approach to fundamentals.
>
I would disagree with reading any deep relation between any of Tolkien's work and Christianity
But it was Tolkien himself who wrote and read that relation, he even wrote a letter to a priest friend that TLoTR was a (Roman) Catholic story.
>
Many religions cover creation, and the Silmarillion has as much in common with them as Christianity.
Yes, many religions cover Creation, but none quite as Genesis and The Silmarillion. Usually non-Judaic creation stories are fanciful, full of magic and that strange mixture of the banal and the sublime so typical of lesser gods. Even if The Silmarillion is more fanciful than Genesis, it is much less than other stories, quite what was to be expected in the situation imagined by Tolkien, of relative forgetfulness of the real Genesis History or Myth (wide sense, history of what could have been, thus possibly real at different levels) but not yes as badly forgotten as in animism and paganism.
>
Tolkien was not so much branched in Romanism, but rather Norse Mythology. His work has been more than heavily influenced by that than anything else.
Not only Norse sagas but also English fairy tales. In fact it was to be a mix of both, trying to create an English saga in order to provide a mythological background to the language he created as a part of his program of dignification for Faerie. So the fundamental influence here is actually English Faerie; the bigger volume of Norse elements in the Middle Earth is due to it being much more extensive and well preserved than Faerie, perhaps because it has been committed to writing at a time when Britain was already romanised.
But as far as fundamental ideas go, the Middle Earth is indeed English and Romanist, not Norse at all. It is clearly not Pagan as a simple Norse branching out should be. The lack of any religious references except the Creation story at the Silmarillion is confusing, but was somewhat explained by Tolkien himself when he said TLoTR was a (Roman) Catholic story and that he had laboured to remove any explicit reference to religion.
putting LOTR and Narnia on the same level is like putting War &
Peace on the same level as Tales from the Brother Grimm.
Was it Tolkien or Lewis that wrote and said that some things are better told
in fairy tales?
"On the same level" means next to nothing. Tolkien's subcreation is much
bigger and richer in detail than Lewis', and has reached a much bigger audience
of much more varied ages and cultures... but to many people, specially children,
Narnia is more rewarding, as it talks more clearly about more important things.
This was by design; while Tolkien held his stories to be (Roman) Catholic ones
at the same time that he worked to purge them of any direct preachiness, thus
confounding analysts at all levels, Lewis said Aslan nearly forced himself into
the Chronicles, quickly dominating them; thus he was communicating a great deal
of what he considered most important in life, and only disguised enough to 'get
past the watchful dragons of the mind' (google that, it is very a nice concept).
>
While both fantasies were written by British authors who were
friends and happened to work together, that's about the end of
that
This is simply not true. They read each other works while they were being
written, criticised each other frankly and used the criticism each received from
the other to improve their works. Lewis' Trilogy of Space even was born out of
a friendly competition with Tolkien that Tolkien failed to fulfill his part
in...
>
Tolkien detested allegory of any kind, whereas the whole Narnia
series were just that.
You clearly doesn't understand what was the very restricted sense of allegory
Tolkien used, and also misread Narnia. Narnia works at several levels:
preparing people to understand better Christianity both as their roots in an age
estranged from its own origins, and a way out of nihilism into deeper, more real
truth; helping people cope with different circumstances of life by example and
counter-example; exalting virtue. There are certainly allegorical elements in
it of the kind Tolkien disliked, but there is much more to Narnia than that.
BTW, you may find all this talk about deeper truth crap. Fact is, it was the
ultimate reality to both Lewis and Tolkien, and even if you never come to
believe it you will never appreciate them fully if you do not understand them.
>
Lewis simply took the Christian mythos and branched out a
bit.
First, if you are using technical words you should use them precisely. There
are no Christian myths. A myth, strictly speaking, is a sacred encenation held
periodically at religious festivals as part of the rites. OK, the Lord's Supper
perhaps is the closest we have to a myth, but not quite. Even about classical
antiquity, what we commonly read or watch or hear are just retelling of myths,
myths being effectively dead together with all the gods of old Paganism in Rome,
Greece, Norseland, Galia, Egypt and the Middle East. There is still myths in
Pagan societies, just that now we don't call them Pagan but animist.
Even in Rome and Greece there is much that is talked about today as myth but
wasn't: poems such as Homer's, sacred stories which weren't meant to be
performed at festivals, traditional oral History.
Second, retelling Christian stories (leaving aside the question of the
natures of these, if History or stories or myth in the wider sense, 'the History
of what could have been) is precisely what Tolkien did in The Silmarillion.
Granted The Silmarillion isn't part of TLoTR, but it is a fundamental background
to it. Plainly speaking, TLoTR pressuposes Genesis, of which The Silmarillion
is but a retelling such as it could be possibly retold by people in the Third
Age of Arda. While Narnia is quite another world but with the same Triune God,
TLoTR is this same world but around
>
if you read his story "Leaf by Niggle", you will find it to be more allegorical than any Narnia story
That is just because we tend to use allegory and allegorical in a wide, imprecise sense. Tolkien, as a philologist, had the precise sense in mind: a one-to-one correlation between characters, objects, situations, places etc in the story and characters, ideas, situations, places in the real world.
Thus, there is nothing allegorical at all in any story of Tolkien I can remember. As for Narnia, there are certainly allegorical elements in it, such as the Emperor Beyond Seas and his son Aslan the lion being God the Father and God the Son. But even relatively preachy characters such as Reepicheep, seemingly designed to show some specific traits of character or ideas, are richer than just showing a one-to-one correlation to something in the real World.
BTW it wasn't only the allegorical side of Narnia that Tolkien disliked, but also the mixing of different mythologies (like Santa Claus appearing in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe). Tolkien himself did some of this, mixing Faerie and Norse elements, but at a far less obvious, more integrated manner.
It should be noted that, even being friends, correligionists (different churches but the same Simple Christianity, as Lewis put it), colleagues and so on, they had initially approached their works much differently. For Lewis it was the development of some mental images he had since very early, and made into stories for children after he did receive some of them seeking refuge from the London bombings; for Tolkien, it was the reworking of some elements of English mythology into a more dignified form, which took the form of a very complete imaginary subcreation (Christian sense) by means of creating languages for the Faerie and such.
No I haven't. I am quite aware about features. But I didn't mean features mostly, I mean quality and design.
While MS SQL Server and Oracle have lotsa features more than PostgreSQL, they are of lower quality coding (as shown by bugs) and design (SQL compliance, simplicity of operation).
>
Not aware of any other database that occupies the limited transaction support / limited ANSI support niche that mysql does.
This ain't a niche but defects. Sizewise I'd compare it to, say, FirstSQL, which is proprietary but conceptually much saner.
Seen lots of intelligent comments about lenght of lines and potential bloat skewing the results, but there is one more issue to consider: design.
No matter how good the coding itself, if the design is broken, the tool is broken, period.
And MySQL has a broken design. So broken that the upgrade path isn't MySQL X or something the like, but MaxSQL -- in fact, rebranded SAPdb. That SAPdb is at most at Oracle v7.2 levels tells lots about MySQL.
I could be more specific, but do your own research in Google -- lack of SQL compliance, lack of features to enable declarative coding at the server instead of procedural client code, and so on.
Now, the interesting part. Suppose MySQL AB would have a sudden insight and repent of their un-SQL, anti-relational ways. Unlikely, you say; yet possible. Now suddenly they have to recode, or change drastically the current code. The resulting tool will be probably much bigger than the current, because SQL is baroque; or even worse than much bigger, because of MySQL backwards compatibility.
The sheer bloat will make even this faulty measure of bugs/KLoC skyrocket. Now, run the comparision again...
Not to say SQL compliance shouldn't be attained. In fact, bloat in the SQL DBMS is a more than good enough tradeoff against bloat in the application. The ideal would be a RDBMS, but while there isn't a MyDataphor a SQL DBMS should do.
Even today, I don't care about comparing to, say, Oracle or MS SQL Server. IBM DB2 would be a better baseline, but best of all the real competitors: PostgreSQL and Alphora Dataphor.
>
A RDBMS for storing user data is nice, but do you want your/sbin or even/usr/bin stored in an RDBMS?
Why not? Provided the RDBMS is the primary storage component in the database. Speaking of that, not only storage: memory could also be organized in a relational manner.
In the end we'd have a situation similar to Lisp hackers' relationship with Emacs: the RDBMS is my OS, [Linux|Hurd|BSD|whatever] is my microkernel. Nicest of all is that we could even have a relational, functional ([Lisp|Scheme|ML|whatever]) language in the same level occupied by C and libc in POSIX.
>
Even with a true database-based system, there has to be a decent way to organize binaries outside of the database.
A relational system would be able to efficiently give any file any number of locations in any number of hierarchical namespaces you choose to.
>
The inclusion of two desktop environments [...] will be confusing to ordinary end users.
Not necessarily so. We have 300K users in the Sao Paulo Telecentros, and even if we do install KDE we know only the tech people who already knew KDE actually use it. All the end users have been presented with Gnome only, and they simply don't care about exploring an alternative. We will probably even exclude KDE from the CD we are preparing, in order to open the way to apps.
>
The real question is how is this affecting sales of ipods since it has already been determined that Apple doesn't make much if any money off of ITMS.
No, the real question is how long Apple will support ITMS once the iPod gets obsolete.
Already been burnt by too many Apple aboutfaces: clones, iTools, Mac OS X supported hardware and upgrade...
>
compressed data was "more prone to read failures" than uncompressed data, by virtue of "the data being closer together on the disk"
Actually there is a grain of truth here. If I had an uncompressed disk with a bad block, I'd loose more, both because there was more data in the bad block and because I tended to loose the whole compressed archive instead of just a file or part of it.
>
We'll see how many current silly beliefs of ours (P!=NP?, "{absolute security|quantum computation|...} is (im)possible", &c.) have elegant refutations which we will hopefully discover in my lifetime. Remember, no one understands the world of quanta and bits yet, and that the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.
You are quite confounded here, young man. Absolute security and quantum computation are quite diffent kinds of impossibles; absolute security will always be impossible because of the human factor, while quantum computation is perhaps just a present impossibility and your former beliefs were just misinformation. But dialetics as you hope is just escapism that has already cost humankind dearly.
While saying that Red Hat or the community in general are for the elimination of copyrights, it should be noted that originally RMS was for their elimination, and that the GNU GPL was seen more of a pragmatic revolutionary tool that would be unncessary once the elimination of copyrights was attained at least in the software domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Not in my book. Intellectual property has no roots in Ethics, Historical or Philosophical. Copy rights originally are concerned not with Ethics, but with a pragmatic incentive to production. At first it was probably worthwhile, but nowadays it works badly both by excluding the poor and by incentiving the production of trash, creating an artificial scarcity in general and in particular of good stuff.
The jump from copy rights to intellectual property was done without any debate, and thus I tend to consider it a self-serving device from the greedy and rich of this world against the poor, so that the poor wouldn't be able to benefit from the inherent freedom of information to enrich themselves.
The hypocrisy here is that there were no international copy rights or patents, much less so-called intellectual property, when Europe and the US started to get rich in the XVIII and XIX centuries.
That I knew. But even him must have some reason or excuse for the bloat besides the thing being his?
Not even with Wine?
As if standard BSD wasn't as good as, and leaner... why one would need the Mach is still the question.
Including a recent Dia?
This is the answer I never saw properly answered, and I hoped the article would.
Why combine the loss of performance and added complexity of Mach with the lack of flexibility of a single (BSD) server?
One could be lean with a single BSD server, or flexible with Mach and a multiple server system like the Hurd. But XNU gives one the worst of both worlds as I see it...
Before the Net became too big for categories, and that's not reversible, nor tractable anymore.
DMoz ain't a search engine, but a directory just like Yahoo! but less mature if wider. And it is almost stalled face the enormity of the Net, being hierarchical too. It isn't hopeless, but it would need to become database-based, just as Yahoo! needs.
About Vivissimo, is it really as good as Google, and will it prove as resistant to tinkering, or any better?
If you assume the problem is the efficiency of the algorithm, but it still treats input as well as to produce correct output. MySQL in the other hand is just bad design, with lotsa gotchas both in SQL compliance and DBMS functionality.
Just that this is the US, not the World. In some countries violence is also considered pornography.
Not. XML is just simplified SGML, and SGML is for semantic markup of texts. All else is misuse. Markup of data is just stupid. Binary, tables in sequential files with associated field descriptions, all that can be very simple to parse, proviede there is a DTD, which is no invention of SGML. SGML for data is inefficient processing for computers and too much noise for humans.
What does it mean 'ISO SQL:1999-style stored procedures'? Java, PL/SQL, SQL/PSM?
Stored procedures are a mess, with a de facto ill-defined Java standard trend, a de jure SQL/PSM standard supported by IBM DB2 and not much else, and a proprietary, non-portable PL/SQL supported by Oracle and PostgreSQL.
But anyway I won't consider MySQL when I have PostgreSQL with a much sounder, even if not perfect, approach to fundamentals.
But it was Tolkien himself who wrote and read that relation, he even wrote a letter to a priest friend that TLoTR was a (Roman) Catholic story.
Yes, many religions cover Creation, but none quite as Genesis and The Silmarillion. Usually non-Judaic creation stories are fanciful, full of magic and that strange mixture of the banal and the sublime so typical of lesser gods. Even if The Silmarillion is more fanciful than Genesis, it is much less than other stories, quite what was to be expected in the situation imagined by Tolkien, of relative forgetfulness of the real Genesis History or Myth (wide sense, history of what could have been, thus possibly real at different levels) but not yes as badly forgotten as in animism and paganism.
Not only Norse sagas but also English fairy tales. In fact it was to be a mix of both, trying to create an English saga in order to provide a mythological background to the language he created as a part of his program of dignification for Faerie. So the fundamental influence here is actually English Faerie; the bigger volume of Norse elements in the Middle Earth is due to it being much more extensive and well preserved than Faerie, perhaps because it has been committed to writing at a time when Britain was already romanised.
But as far as fundamental ideas go, the Middle Earth is indeed English and Romanist, not Norse at all. It is clearly not Pagan as a simple Norse branching out should be. The lack of any religious references except the Creation story at the Silmarillion is confusing, but was somewhat explained by Tolkien himself when he said TLoTR was a (Roman) Catholic story and that he had laboured to remove any explicit reference to religion.
Was it Tolkien or Lewis that wrote and said that some things are better told in fairy tales?
"On the same level" means next to nothing. Tolkien's subcreation is much bigger and richer in detail than Lewis', and has reached a much bigger audience of much more varied ages and cultures... but to many people, specially children, Narnia is more rewarding, as it talks more clearly about more important things. This was by design; while Tolkien held his stories to be (Roman) Catholic ones at the same time that he worked to purge them of any direct preachiness, thus confounding analysts at all levels, Lewis said Aslan nearly forced himself into the Chronicles, quickly dominating them; thus he was communicating a great deal of what he considered most important in life, and only disguised enough to 'get past the watchful dragons of the mind' (google that, it is very a nice concept).
This is simply not true. They read each other works while they were being written, criticised each other frankly and used the criticism each received from the other to improve their works. Lewis' Trilogy of Space even was born out of a friendly competition with Tolkien that Tolkien failed to fulfill his part in...
You clearly doesn't understand what was the very restricted sense of allegory Tolkien used, and also misread Narnia. Narnia works at several levels: preparing people to understand better Christianity both as their roots in an age estranged from its own origins, and a way out of nihilism into deeper, more real truth; helping people cope with different circumstances of life by example and counter-example; exalting virtue. There are certainly allegorical elements in it of the kind Tolkien disliked, but there is much more to Narnia than that.
BTW, you may find all this talk about deeper truth crap. Fact is, it was the ultimate reality to both Lewis and Tolkien, and even if you never come to believe it you will never appreciate them fully if you do not understand them.
First, if you are using technical words you should use them precisely. There are no Christian myths. A myth, strictly speaking, is a sacred encenation held periodically at religious festivals as part of the rites. OK, the Lord's Supper perhaps is the closest we have to a myth, but not quite. Even about classical antiquity, what we commonly read or watch or hear are just retelling of myths, myths being effectively dead together with all the gods of old Paganism in Rome, Greece, Norseland, Galia, Egypt and the Middle East. There is still myths in Pagan societies, just that now we don't call them Pagan but animist.
Even in Rome and Greece there is much that is talked about today as myth but wasn't: poems such as Homer's, sacred stories which weren't meant to be performed at festivals, traditional oral History.
Second, retelling Christian stories (leaving aside the question of the natures of these, if History or stories or myth in the wider sense, 'the History of what could have been) is precisely what Tolkien did in The Silmarillion. Granted The Silmarillion isn't part of TLoTR, but it is a fundamental background to it. Plainly speaking, TLoTR pressuposes Genesis, of which The Silmarillion is but a retelling such as it could be possibly retold by people in the Third Age of Arda. While Narnia is quite another world but with the same Triune God, TLoTR is this same world but around
That is just because we tend to use allegory and allegorical in a wide, imprecise sense. Tolkien, as a philologist, had the precise sense in mind: a one-to-one correlation between characters, objects, situations, places etc in the story and characters, ideas, situations, places in the real world.
Thus, there is nothing allegorical at all in any story of Tolkien I can remember. As for Narnia, there are certainly allegorical elements in it, such as the Emperor Beyond Seas and his son Aslan the lion being God the Father and God the Son. But even relatively preachy characters such as Reepicheep, seemingly designed to show some specific traits of character or ideas, are richer than just showing a one-to-one correlation to something in the real World.
BTW it wasn't only the allegorical side of Narnia that Tolkien disliked, but also the mixing of different mythologies (like Santa Claus appearing in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe). Tolkien himself did some of this, mixing Faerie and Norse elements, but at a far less obvious, more integrated manner.
It should be noted that, even being friends, correligionists (different churches but the same Simple Christianity, as Lewis put it), colleagues and so on, they had initially approached their works much differently. For Lewis it was the development of some mental images he had since very early, and made into stories for children after he did receive some of them seeking refuge from the London bombings; for Tolkien, it was the reworking of some elements of English mythology into a more dignified form, which took the form of a very complete imaginary subcreation (Christian sense) by means of creating languages for the Faerie and such.
No I haven't. I am quite aware about features. But I didn't mean features mostly, I mean quality and design.
While MS SQL Server and Oracle have lotsa features more than PostgreSQL, they are of lower quality coding (as shown by bugs) and design (SQL compliance, simplicity of operation).
This ain't a niche but defects. Sizewise I'd compare it to, say, FirstSQL, which is proprietary but conceptually much saner.
Seen lots of intelligent comments about lenght of lines and potential bloat skewing the results, but there is one more issue to consider: design.
No matter how good the coding itself, if the design is broken, the tool is broken, period.
And MySQL has a broken design. So broken that the upgrade path isn't MySQL X or something the like, but MaxSQL -- in fact, rebranded SAPdb. That SAPdb is at most at Oracle v7.2 levels tells lots about MySQL.
I could be more specific, but do your own research in Google -- lack of SQL compliance, lack of features to enable declarative coding at the server instead of procedural client code, and so on.
Now, the interesting part. Suppose MySQL AB would have a sudden insight and repent of their un-SQL, anti-relational ways. Unlikely, you say; yet possible. Now suddenly they have to recode, or change drastically the current code. The resulting tool will be probably much bigger than the current, because SQL is baroque; or even worse than much bigger, because of MySQL backwards compatibility.
The sheer bloat will make even this faulty measure of bugs/KLoC skyrocket. Now, run the comparision again...
Not to say SQL compliance shouldn't be attained. In fact, bloat in the SQL DBMS is a more than good enough tradeoff against bloat in the application. The ideal would be a RDBMS, but while there isn't a MyDataphor a SQL DBMS should do.
Even today, I don't care about comparing to, say, Oracle or MS SQL Server. IBM DB2 would be a better baseline, but best of all the real competitors: PostgreSQL and Alphora Dataphor.
Why not? Provided the RDBMS is the primary storage component in the database. Speaking of that, not only storage: memory could also be organized in a relational manner.
In the end we'd have a situation similar to Lisp hackers' relationship with Emacs: the RDBMS is my OS, [Linux|Hurd|BSD|whatever] is my microkernel. Nicest of all is that we could even have a relational, functional ([Lisp|Scheme|ML|whatever]) language in the same level occupied by C and libc in POSIX.
A relational system would be able to efficiently give any file any number of locations in any number of hierarchical namespaces you choose to.
Just remember SQL is enough, SQL not being relational.
Actually in Debian Gnome tends to be a little flaky. Nothing that the integration job proposed by Bruce for UL wouldn't be able to fix.
Not necessarily so. We have 300K users in the Sao Paulo Telecentros, and even if we do install KDE we know only the tech people who already knew KDE actually use it. All the end users have been presented with Gnome only, and they simply don't care about exploring an alternative. We will probably even exclude KDE from the CD we are preparing, in order to open the way to apps.
No, the real question is how long Apple will support ITMS once the iPod gets obsolete.
Already been burnt by too many Apple aboutfaces: clones, iTools, Mac OS X supported hardware and upgrade...
URLs?
Actually there is a grain of truth here. If I had an uncompressed disk with a bad block, I'd loose more, both because there was more data in the bad block and because I tended to loose the whole compressed archive instead of just a file or part of it.
You are quite confounded here, young man. Absolute security and quantum computation are quite diffent kinds of impossibles; absolute security will always be impossible because of the human factor, while quantum computation is perhaps just a present impossibility and your former beliefs were just misinformation. But dialetics as you hope is just escapism that has already cost humankind dearly.
While saying that Red Hat or the community in general are for the elimination of copyrights, it should be noted that originally RMS was for their elimination, and that the GNU GPL was seen more of a pragmatic revolutionary tool that would be unncessary once the elimination of copyrights was attained at least in the software domain.
So the question here is: are there alternatives to SpamCop if one wants to continue reporting spam and helping building spam reference corpii?
So who's BT and why should I pay attention to them?