>
Win32 and the Excel functions are open standards by that definition, but that's not a huge help to the Wine and Gnumeric projects, who have had to do some reverse engineering to make sure their software conforms to the API as implemented by Windows and Excel where that implementation differs from or is a superset of the APIs as published by Microsoft.
No, they aren't, because despite being published their faults don't enable interoperability.
>
there's some outfit in (was it Chicago?) that can read it, probably, but they want more than is in the budget for the project.
So your problem is managerial, not technical.
Your agency could either have budgeted for the preservation by converting to newer or more durable formats and media, even if that means printing; or could shell the money for the said outfit. And refuse new responsibilities until the budget is enough or old responsibilities are waived.
>
That would be something like Digital Research suddenly claiming ownership of Windows, since it's based on DOS, which in turn was based on QDOS, which was a CP/M clone.
This would actually have some merit, since QDOS was a clone of CP/M done by someone who seemed to have source code access to if, if memory doesn't fail me.
>
I am beginning to think that this may be a real turning point in civilization
Actually I think we're heading towards a new Dark Age, but IP is just a part of it. Actually it all comes from human autonomism: man is its own point of reference.
>
far better to be completely ignorant of technology advances
Which advances? There's nothing technological here, just another application. The only news here is that it is Google doing it.
>
when they do not involve 100% of "humankind" during the development process.
I just want to be able to filter out US-specific stuff. Do you want to get every piece of tech news from Brazil or Switzerland or Ghana? And what do you have against humankind, do you want chimp news as well?
Finally, I found no word about if and when Google intends to internationalise this stuff. There are loads of interesting stuf that never gets internationalised.
>
Do you have the vaguest concept of what a "rules engine" is?
Do you have the vaguest concept of what rules are? The exact stuff that is fully translatable into declared integrity constraints.
>
Hint: its got little to do with input validation.
Who said anything about input validation? An integrity constraint can be a type, an attribute type declaration, a relation constraint, a database constraint (whose most popular type is referential integrity), a transition constraint. You seem to think SQL is all that is to relational databases?
>
Your average rules engine has things like this
And all of that can be declared as integrity constraints. All that is left to procedural code is the action to take in case of attempted violation.
>
There is, surprisingly enough, a reason why system architects and system integrators have different job functions to database administrators.
There are bad data and database administrators, and bad system architects and integrators. One of the worst types in both fields is that who mixes ignorance with arrogance, especially if they use their misunderstandings about the foundations of their own jobs, and the nature of other people's jobs, to think they are something.
About clues: _What Not How_ by Chris(topher) J Date, and my own Open Directory categories.
>
in enterprises serious about their data, all data access is via a rules engine
Yes, for everything that currently can't be done in SQL. Fuller compatibility with the SQL standards, and eventually a relational successor to SQL should make the RDBMS its own even more efficient, fully declarative rules engine.
But even with a rule engine, you still want to have all your data in a single database, clustered and (or) distributed as you like.
>
how you think WIPO has created an artifical monopoly for Intel
Copyrights and patents are, by definition, artificial monopolies granted by the powers that be.
WIPO is so to speak the entry ticket of nations to the benefits of the WTO.
Absence of, or weaker copyrights and patents would have enabled other countries to produce their own processor, either compatible with x86 or with any RISC architecture out there. The way it is, only old x86 licensees can manufacture x86-compatible processors; you have to either be such a licensed foundry or hire one of these to make your x86 chips, and even so Intel makes your life as difficult as possible, effectively precluding plug-in compatible chips, forcing x86 vendors to have their own, separate, smaller-volume chipsets and motherboards.
On the other hand, the proprietary MS Windows monopoly precludes less proprietary RISC processors such as MIPS or SPARC (perhaps Alpha or PowerPC; they have or had alternative sources of supply but I'm not sure how open or proprietary ther respective ISAs are) of taking hold. Even when MS WNT supported some RISC architectures, it was a half-hearted support, with even MS itself neither porting all its major apps nor optmising the OS itself, thus making x86 comparatively a safe bet for its customers.
>
what you are accusing Intel/US of is really the same thing that you are defending for China
Not at all. China would produce a MIPS-compatible processor to run free software on it; how that compares to run proprietary software on a proprietary processor? And in fact there are not hints of overt protectionism, only of incentives.
For example, I find no hints that China will play any role similar to the US's in killing Brazilian clones of the Macintosh (a clean room reimplementation).
Finally, even if there was protectionism, the hipocrisy of the First World protectionism in agriculture demands an answer. Two wrongs don't make a right, but if the First World isn't made to taste its own medicine there is little chance it will repent. So while I am all for freedom of trade, speech and movement, the rule of law and justice for all, I would be more understanding of a possible short-term protection to open tech than of the current effectively eternal protection to proprietary products.
>
The decline of RISC can only be contributed to economics and the innovation of Intel/AMD.
Which innovation? Does copying RISC badly counts as innovation?
The economics involved is the network effect that creates more demand for an already proprietary, monopolist product, and the volume decorrent of this lock-in.
>
It is a policy that ASSURES declining quality in the long term
How does the state subsidising a lower-cost, higher-efficiency, open tech assures declining quality?
> This isn't the US government criticizing China, it is Intel. Intel does not have agriculture to protect and is not trying to "protect" American jobs.
It is the US government who keeps the world in line with the WIPO's artificial monopolies, which ensures Intel can keep people from producing compatible chips. So yes, Intel has the help of the US government to protect not US jobs, but US capitals invested in a technology which is actually malefical to the environment and technical progress, being less efficient then its RISC competitors, one of which China is trying to advance.
> A "homegrown only" policy leads to a lack of compettition
China's policy could degenerate in this direction, but I see no indications of that yet. Instead, they are proposing a more efficient chip refusing to compete in the MHz rat race sponsored by Intel, which dissipates tremendous energy without actually producing real benefits; instead we spend energy, put up with noise, have to get air conditioning not to get more or better work done, but to run bloatware... and they take care of bloatware too by going GNU/Linux.
Don't ever believe US corporations, specially not the Wintel duopoly. They have been labelling their proprietary products 'standards' and calling standards-based RISC and POSIX products as proprietary for years, and so have helped killing lotsa good tech, such as Digital Unix and the Alpha just for an example.
> what is stopping the Chinese from changing the source, not rereleasing it, then forcing out binaries to its public?
The GNU GPL. China has to respect copyrights to be able to do trade with the world. Additionally, if they fork they have to maintain it, which is an expensive and doubtful enterprise, and they would have a hard time trying to keep their people from just grabbing the latest versions from the free world.
I could see them trying to enforce things like political police backdoors, and even have general success, but not complete success.
> He's talking about chinese plans to try to grow their own (non x86) chip market through protectionist policies
> The high costs of such a two-pronged approach would make it difficult to compete. "You have to ask yourself this: is there an advantage to having a proprietary standard in your country?"
First, protectionism is everywhere. It is very hipocritical of the US to protect its agriculture and job markets, and then expect everyone else to continue to either import or pay royalties on its chips and software.
Second, this particular piece of protectionism could actually lead to something. If one takes a potentially more efficient and cheaper RISC system, and uses it to run GNU/Linux, he can makes dirty cheap, open systems accessible to millions. One could even see this as a linchpin for the end of proprietary systems dominance, both software and hardware -- yes, x86 is proprietary. In this case, China and its partners in potential would be protecting not a closed market, but a nascent, open industry from dumping, IP claims and similar anticompetitive tatics from US companies.
Now, how MIPS is anymore proprietary than x86 I fail to see. Quite to the contrary.
> Many intranet web applications interface to accounting, stock, POS, banking, quotation and other systems, where integration cannot be accomplished using a database.
Why not?
This just means you lack a database, but instead has a patchwork of them. This is your problem, perhaps due to reliance on off-the-shelf proprietary apps -- in other words, you don't own your data, but Oracle|MS|SAP|PeopleSoft does.
This is a sad situation. In a world where people and organisations really owned their data, I'd want mine in a truly relational, perhaps distributed, RDBMS -- not SQL.
> if they work, and work well, don't touch them, juste do the necessary maintenance.
That's the point, even with free software, who will support old versions? For example, Debian old versions aren't supported at all.
Obviously, the advantage is that if there is a market willing to pay, there can be alternative suppliers of such support, while with proprietary software that's impossible. But AFAIK there isn't much yet of this 'aftermarket' independent support for old versions of free software.
Excuse me, but they just threw freedom out of the window...
In the slides, they say Linux hadn't enough support... hello? Support by whom? Apple should give them any specs they request, and I know for a fact that the GNU/Linux PPC developers, at least the kernel and Debian ones, are killing for a chance to have a go at these babies.
And what about rack-mounted units? Also not having ECC... looks like they wanted the toys and needed excuses to get them.
> Look at all the stuff about MySQL and Linux in the middle. It's as if a Microsoft Marketoid had suddenly taken over the interview. Or someone who didn't understand the difference between many thousands of developers working on Linux and the smaller number that work on MySQL.
He's correct as far as he goes.
MySQL and MS SQL Server actually have the same problem, and it is called SQL; both even go downhill from there.
SQL is simply too complex to implement properly, and it only gets worse when you start with a non-standard implementation. While MySQL benefits from a better OS to run on, it has the more fundamental flaws that its developers don't really understand data in general and the relational model in particular, and it has started with something that wasn't really SQL at all and not a DBMS at all; MS began with something that was a real if weak DBMS, and almost SQL already, and since has hired some pretty good guys and improved impressively.
Eventually MySQL will reach maturity, and with more ports, a more variated and complicated legacy and less understanding, it will have a rougher time developing the future and supporting the past. See that MySQL's current idea of future is SAPdb, which is stuck with Oracle v7 feature parity and less-than-SQL 92 Entry Level compliance.
Obviously PostgreSQL is a better base to build on, it originally was even better than SQL (Ingres QUEL was based on Codd's own Alpha), since it got into the SQL cult it was never as unfaithful as MySQL is now or even SQL Server was, and PostgreSQL was always a real DBMS. Too bad the exposition it gets is so small Mr Gray can't even spell its name or see its superiority.
> To some extent you can think of Codd's relational algebra as an algebra of punched cards. Every card is a record. Every machine is an operator.
Interesting how the guy literally wrote the book on transactions, yet grossly misrepresents Codd's work, which BTW wasn't simply the relational algebra, but even higher level: the relational model of database management, including the relational calculus.
While the algebra is somewhat procedural, the calculus is set-oriented, and they are fully equivalent. The idea is exactly not looking at records and operators, but describe what you want -- just leave the relational system set the procedures to get that in the most efficient way it can.
Incidentally this has a big impact on all Gray is discussing -- without a fairly simple and powerful data model, so much data is basically a waste. He's thinking too low level, including the object stuff he touts, but we will only find use for so much data the day we get proper relational implementations, and this excludes SQL in general and MySQL in particular.
> When we IMPORT goods and services and EXPORT money, the economy is harmed.
This is ridiculous.
Actually when you export money, that is called foreign investment... as foreign return rates are usually way higher in underdeveloped countries, the US investor is bound to make loads of money, which in big part will eventually return to the US.
And when you import goods and services, usually you are getting things for either a lower price or a higher quality than available from the US, and this benefits the US client...
Not to mention all this is good to make the whole world richer, thus easing the North-South tensions.
> You're worried about runtime size and you're recommending Smalltalk?
There are slim Smalltalk implementations, but the real issue is that Smalltalk is conceptually clean. You could take Oberon or whatever; just don't take an ugly hack of a language.
> you can do OO in Perl, although it doesn't force you to.
OO in a procedural language is an ugly hack... that's why Smalltalk or functional languages are so much better.
> These security problems are fixed by switching to a modern language
Agreed...
> like Java or C#
These are *not* really modern languages... they are too much of procedural kludges to do OO, their runtimes are too big and they are too complex. They end up creating many problems.
If you want good languages, not just popular ones, go functional (Lisp, ML or their dialects) or pure OO like Smalltalk.
> I personally reckon the BBC is probably the only thing that has stopped us decending to the unfortunate state the US has found itself in.
Hey, the media is not the most important thing in a society, even today.
I would guess that, even if the American Revolution was theoretically restorative of old saxon freedoms, these freedoms were so long gone that it was actually, well, revolutionary... this opened the way to the influence of the Roman system of law, as opposed to Englands's more faithful clinging to the Common Law.
More generally, England is more faithful to traditions, and thus less prone to err by comission and more prone to err by omission.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they aren't, because despite being published their faults don't enable interoperability.
So your problem is managerial, not technical.
Your agency could either have budgeted for the preservation by converting to newer or more durable formats and media, even if that means printing; or could shell the money for the said outfit. And refuse new responsibilities until the budget is enough or old responsibilities are waived.
This would actually have some merit, since QDOS was a clone of CP/M done by someone who seemed to have source code access to if, if memory doesn't fail me.
Actually I think we're heading towards a new Dark Age, but IP is just a part of it. Actually it all comes from human autonomism: man is its own point of reference.
Actually I find the apathy to be bigger in Europe, combined with vague economical saudosism and political leftism.
All in all it is the whole Western culture going downhill, with Europe leading and the US following on its heels.
Which advances? There's nothing technological here, just another application. The only news here is that it is Google doing it.
I just want to be able to filter out US-specific stuff. Do you want to get every piece of tech news from Brazil or Switzerland or Ghana? And what do you have against humankind, do you want chimp news as well?
Finally, I found no word about if and when Google intends to internationalise this stuff. There are loads of interesting stuf that never gets internationalised.
The Brazilian for one is even better. Google just has to pay for it, since access is public but has a cost.
It may be news-worthy -- for the US. It is not interesting to 90% of humankind until there are plans to expand it out of the US.
Perhaps time to start an "International edition" of /.?
US-only, therefore not interesting.
Do you have the vaguest concept of what rules are? The exact stuff that is fully translatable into declared integrity constraints.
Who said anything about input validation? An integrity constraint can be a type, an attribute type declaration, a relation constraint, a database constraint (whose most popular type is referential integrity), a transition constraint. You seem to think SQL is all that is to relational databases?
And all of that can be declared as integrity constraints. All that is left to procedural code is the action to take in case of attempted violation.
There are bad data and database administrators, and bad system architects and integrators. One of the worst types in both fields is that who mixes ignorance with arrogance, especially if they use their misunderstandings about the foundations of their own jobs, and the nature of other people's jobs, to think they are something.
About clues: _What Not How_ by Chris(topher) J Date, and my own Open Directory categories.
Yes, for everything that currently can't be done in SQL. Fuller compatibility with the SQL standards, and eventually a relational successor to SQL should make the RDBMS its own even more efficient, fully declarative rules engine.
But even with a rule engine, you still want to have all your data in a single database, clustered and (or) distributed as you like.
Copyrights and patents are, by definition, artificial monopolies granted by the powers that be.
WIPO is so to speak the entry ticket of nations to the benefits of the WTO.
Absence of, or weaker copyrights and patents would have enabled other countries to produce their own processor, either compatible with x86 or with any RISC architecture out there. The way it is, only old x86 licensees can manufacture x86-compatible processors; you have to either be such a licensed foundry or hire one of these to make your x86 chips, and even so Intel makes your life as difficult as possible, effectively precluding plug-in compatible chips, forcing x86 vendors to have their own, separate, smaller-volume chipsets and motherboards.
On the other hand, the proprietary MS Windows monopoly precludes less proprietary RISC processors such as MIPS or SPARC (perhaps Alpha or PowerPC; they have or had alternative sources of supply but I'm not sure how open or proprietary ther respective ISAs are) of taking hold. Even when MS WNT supported some RISC architectures, it was a half-hearted support, with even MS itself neither porting all its major apps nor optmising the OS itself, thus making x86 comparatively a safe bet for its customers.
Not at all. China would produce a MIPS-compatible processor to run free software on it; how that compares to run proprietary software on a proprietary processor? And in fact there are not hints of overt protectionism, only of incentives.
For example, I find no hints that China will play any role similar to the US's in killing Brazilian clones of the Macintosh (a clean room reimplementation).
Finally, even if there was protectionism, the hipocrisy of the First World protectionism in agriculture demands an answer. Two wrongs don't make a right, but if the First World isn't made to taste its own medicine there is little chance it will repent. So while I am all for freedom of trade, speech and movement, the rule of law and justice for all, I would be more understanding of a possible short-term protection to open tech than of the current effectively eternal protection to proprietary products.
Which innovation? Does copying RISC badly counts as innovation?
The economics involved is the network effect that creates more demand for an already proprietary, monopolist product, and the volume decorrent of this lock-in.
How does the state subsidising a lower-cost, higher-efficiency, open tech assures declining quality?
> So two wrongs make a right?
Not at all. Just putting things in perspective.
> This isn't the US government criticizing China, it is Intel. Intel does not have agriculture to protect and is not trying to "protect" American jobs.
It is the US government who keeps the world in line with the WIPO's artificial monopolies, which ensures Intel can keep people from producing compatible chips. So yes, Intel has the help of the US government to protect not US jobs, but US capitals invested in a technology which is actually malefical to the environment and technical progress, being less efficient then its RISC competitors, one of which China is trying to advance.
> A "homegrown only" policy leads to a lack of compettition
China's policy could degenerate in this direction, but I see no indications of that yet. Instead, they are proposing a more efficient chip refusing to compete in the MHz rat race sponsored by Intel, which dissipates tremendous energy without actually producing real benefits; instead we spend energy, put up with noise, have to get air conditioning not to get more or better work done, but to run bloatware... and they take care of bloatware too by going GNU/Linux.
Don't ever believe US corporations, specially not the Wintel duopoly. They have been labelling their proprietary products 'standards' and calling standards-based RISC and POSIX products as proprietary for years, and so have helped killing lotsa good tech, such as Digital Unix and the Alpha just for an example.
> what is stopping the Chinese from changing the source, not rereleasing it, then forcing out binaries to its public?
The GNU GPL. China has to respect copyrights to be able to do trade with the world. Additionally, if they fork they have to maintain it, which is an expensive and doubtful enterprise, and they would have a hard time trying to keep their people from just grabbing the latest versions from the free world.
I could see them trying to enforce things like political police backdoors, and even have general success, but not complete success.
> He's talking about chinese plans to try to grow their own (non x86) chip market through protectionist policies
> The high costs of such a two-pronged approach would make it difficult to compete. "You have to ask yourself this: is there an advantage to having a proprietary standard in your country?"
First, protectionism is everywhere. It is very hipocritical of the US to protect its agriculture and job markets, and then expect everyone else to continue to either import or pay royalties on its chips and software.
Second, this particular piece of protectionism could actually lead to something. If one takes a potentially more efficient and cheaper RISC system, and uses it to run GNU/Linux, he can makes dirty cheap, open systems accessible to millions. One could even see this as a linchpin for the end of proprietary systems dominance, both software and hardware -- yes, x86 is proprietary. In this case, China and its partners in potential would be protecting not a closed market, but a nascent, open industry from dumping, IP claims and similar anticompetitive tatics from US companies.
Now, how MIPS is anymore proprietary than x86 I fail to see. Quite to the contrary.
> Many intranet web applications interface to accounting, stock, POS, banking, quotation and other systems, where integration cannot be accomplished using a database.
Why not?
This just means you lack a database, but instead has a patchwork of them. This is your problem, perhaps due to reliance on off-the-shelf proprietary apps -- in other words, you don't own your data, but Oracle|MS|SAP|PeopleSoft does.
This is a sad situation. In a world where people and organisations really owned their data, I'd want mine in a truly relational, perhaps distributed, RDBMS -- not SQL.
I wonder who came up with this indemnification line... I never saw Sun, MS, SCO or IBM offering this for any of their systems. Do they really?
> if they work, and work well, don't touch them, juste do the necessary maintenance.
That's the point, even with free software, who will support old versions? For example, Debian old versions aren't supported at all.
Obviously, the advantage is that if there is a market willing to pay, there can be alternative suppliers of such support, while with proprietary software that's impossible. But AFAIK there isn't much yet of this 'aftermarket' independent support for old versions of free software.
> cost vs. performance (purely)
Excuse me, but they just threw freedom out of the window...
In the slides, they say Linux hadn't enough support... hello? Support by whom? Apple should give them any specs they request, and I know for a fact that the GNU/Linux PPC developers, at least the kernel and Debian ones, are killing for a chance to have a go at these babies.
And what about rack-mounted units? Also not having ECC... looks like they wanted the toys and needed excuses to get them.
> Look at all the stuff about MySQL and Linux in the middle. It's as if a Microsoft Marketoid had suddenly taken over the interview. Or someone who didn't understand the difference between many thousands of developers working on Linux and the smaller number that work on MySQL.
He's correct as far as he goes.
MySQL and MS SQL Server actually have the same problem, and it is called SQL; both even go downhill from there.
SQL is simply too complex to implement properly, and it only gets worse when you start with a non-standard implementation. While MySQL benefits from a better OS to run on, it has the more fundamental flaws that its developers don't really understand data in general and the relational model in particular, and it has started with something that wasn't really SQL at all and not a DBMS at all; MS began with something that was a real if weak DBMS, and almost SQL already, and since has hired some pretty good guys and improved impressively.
Eventually MySQL will reach maturity, and with more ports, a more variated and complicated legacy and less understanding, it will have a rougher time developing the future and supporting the past. See that MySQL's current idea of future is SAPdb, which is stuck with Oracle v7 feature parity and less-than-SQL 92 Entry Level compliance.
Obviously PostgreSQL is a better base to build on, it originally was even better than SQL (Ingres QUEL was based on Codd's own Alpha), since it got into the SQL cult it was never as unfaithful as MySQL is now or even SQL Server was, and PostgreSQL was always a real DBMS. Too bad the exposition it gets is so small Mr Gray can't even spell its name or see its superiority.
> To some extent you can think of Codd's relational algebra as an algebra of punched cards. Every card is a record. Every machine is an operator.
Interesting how the guy literally wrote the book on transactions, yet grossly misrepresents Codd's work, which BTW wasn't simply the relational algebra, but even higher level: the relational model of database management, including the relational calculus.
While the algebra is somewhat procedural, the calculus is set-oriented, and they are fully equivalent. The idea is exactly not looking at records and operators, but describe what you want -- just leave the relational system set the procedures to get that in the most efficient way it can.
Incidentally this has a big impact on all Gray is discussing -- without a fairly simple and powerful data model, so much data is basically a waste. He's thinking too low level, including the object stuff he touts, but we will only find use for so much data the day we get proper relational implementations, and this excludes SQL in general and MySQL in particular.
> When we IMPORT goods and services and EXPORT money, the economy is harmed.
This is ridiculous.
Actually when you export money, that is called foreign investment... as foreign return rates are usually way higher in underdeveloped countries, the US investor is bound to make loads of money, which in big part will eventually return to the US.
And when you import goods and services, usually you are getting things for either a lower price or a higher quality than available from the US, and this benefits the US client...
Not to mention all this is good to make the whole world richer, thus easing the North-South tensions.
> You're worried about runtime size and you're recommending Smalltalk?
There are slim Smalltalk implementations, but the real issue is that Smalltalk is conceptually clean. You could take Oberon or whatever; just don't take an ugly hack of a language.
> you can do OO in Perl, although it doesn't force you to.
OO in a procedural language is an ugly hack... that's why Smalltalk or functional languages are so much better.
> These security problems are fixed by switching to a modern language
Agreed...
> like Java or C#
These are *not* really modern languages... they are too much of procedural kludges to do OO, their runtimes are too big and they are too complex. They end up creating many problems.
If you want good languages, not just popular ones, go functional (Lisp, ML or their dialects) or pure OO like Smalltalk.
> I personally reckon the BBC is probably the only thing that has stopped us decending to the unfortunate state the US has found itself in.
Hey, the media is not the most important thing in a society, even today.
I would guess that, even if the American Revolution was theoretically restorative of old saxon freedoms, these freedoms were so long gone that it was actually, well, revolutionary... this opened the way to the influence of the Roman system of law, as opposed to Englands's more faithful clinging to the Common Law.
More generally, England is more faithful to traditions, and thus less prone to err by comission and more prone to err by omission.