>
"Open" used to imply something different before "Open Source" because popular.
Yes.
>
It meant that file formats, APIs, ABIs, etc. were well documented.
No! It meant that there was conformance to open standards, that is, standards estabilished by open organisations that congregated users and vendors from all over the world.
>
Many Unix venders used to call their OSs "open" not because they gave away the source, but because everything was documented and accessible to third parties.
No, they were open because they conformed, and still conform, to POSIX, OSI and other relevant open standards.
>
I wonder what kind of environmental hazard is posed by junking thousands of pay phones?
None. Just auction them online, and whatever is left send to Third World countries. When even them have no use for them, junkyard and recycling. After all, what's bad about iron?
Yet I can tell you are committing a serious logical problem in equating SQL to relational.
>
SQL is a query language, not a database system.
A database system is defined by the language it supports. SQL systems are not, and cannot be, relational systems, because SQL violates fundamental principles of the relational model.
>
the kinds of database engines that are sitting underneath SQL are what Microsoft claims they want to put into the file system.
Agreed.
>
you and Alphora's marketing department think that.
Me, Christopher J Date and Hugh Darwen. And everyone I met that knows both the relational model and Dataphor. If you don't believe me, go to their web site.
If you don't know who they are, hint: you should before you say anything about relational databases.
>
evidence that any more "pure" relational query language than SQL is better is thin at best.
Hm? Is set theory and predicate logic enough evidence for you?
>
there are better choices than either SQL
Indeed: the relational model.
>
or some unproven 1960's idea.
Unproven? Let me see. This idea single-handledly changed its field overnight, obsoleted all other practices, forced everyone to redefine not only their ideas but their concepts and the very terms and methods they used to think about databases. There were three successful implementations, and more are coming. It has produced the clearer writings in the field ever, indeed some of the best CS literature ever.
1.960's? OK, let's throw away Math, after all it's how many thousand years old?
>
I think a "true RDBMS" is an absolutely horrible idea for a general purpose file system: it's way too complex and has way too much overhead.
No, you are thinking RDBMS == SQL, and that is not true. SQL is indeed too complex and slow, but that is precisely because it is not relational. It was originally based on some (not all) relational ideas, but since then it has been catapulted back thirty years to pre-relational times.
>
it's been tried before several times and never caught on
You are mistaken. The only true RDBMSs now existing is Alphora Dataphor, and it is not yet a full, portable DBMS. In the past we had IBM BS12 (never a generally available product, pretered for SQL) and Ingres (its QUEL relational language was dumped for SQL). Each of these products have been found to be better to its non-relational counterparts, including SQL.
>
Considering that CDMA 2000 gives you a phased series of technologies to roll out (1X: 144k/s, 1XEV-DO: 2M/s, 1XEV-DV: 4M+/s + simultaneous voice+data) with one investment (instead of three as in GSM's case: one for GSM, one for 2.5G, one for 3G), it becomes economically judicious to use CDMA 2000.
Yes, but then you compare a totally new CDMA network to an already existing GSM & GPRS infrastructure.
So the question is, does it make sense for current CDMA operators to go CDMA 2K? Probably. Does it make sense to GSM operators to keep GSM? Sure enough. Now, does it make sense to new, TDMA or analog operators to go CDMA 2K or GSM? Perhaps CDMA 2K would be the right thing to do cost-wise, but what about the price & availability of the handsets as compared to GSM, GPRS and UMTS ones? And what about Qualcom royalties, do they exist also in GSM 3G?
>
You have to remember that interconnect agreements are mostly a commercial matter. The only reason the US cell scene is so balkanized is that companies like Nextel and AT&T have not allowed it, not because it isn't technically possible.
Not so. In Brasil, if you use CDMA some areas only allow analog roaming, because CDMA isn't universally deployed. Neither with TDMA nor with CDMA you can use your handset outside of USNA, Brasil and the odd country to follow USNA's lead. With GSM you can use your handset just all over the world.
In a word, interconnect agreements are nice, but if you don't have a minimum common denominator you can't even start thinking about them.
>
> as the Okinawa suicides during the invasion proved.
> The only thing that it proves is, that they feared the US soldiers. Unless, you provide some reference for civilians attacking with spikes.
You are right, I messed the events.
The spike training was not applied in Okinawa, only the instructions to suicide. The spike training came later, when it became clear to the military they would not be able to defend mainland.
What the suicides do prove is that they would have fought or suicided. In any case, given that the US most probably did not know they were about to surrender, dropping the bomb might (not necessarily should) be considered having been the right thing to be done.
An additional piece of history about this is that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped because of pedantic language. When the Japanese spokesman briefed the press on the governments' answer to the Allied ultimatum after Hiroshima, he used an archaic word meaning it was being favorably considered. Even the Japanese journalists did not knew the word, and it was translated as meaning the ultimatum was being disregarded. While we can never say for sure what would have happened, had a clear, then-modern word been used the use of the second bomb would not have been a given.
Thanks for the informative answer. I can see now the reasoning.
If you could still answer some points...
>
a GSM-based high-speed standard would have been better. But the only way high-speed GSM would have taken off in India was if someone built a W-CDMA (which is the air interface for high speed GSM) network from scratch, and given European and Japanese experience with W-CDMA 'til now, I'd excuse any business for being slightly scared about this
But is W-CDMA a marketing or a technological problem? If marketing, then either going CDMA 2K 1x is a PHB decision, or a proprietary lock-in. If technological, then I can see the reason for it.
Also remember that business tend to see short-term only, and has made the US stuck to CDMA & TDMA. Europe saw further down the road, and thus gave us GSM.
>
TDMA is the air interface for vanilla GSM. High speed GSM uses W-CDMA as the air interface because TDMA is so damn inefficient.
Yes and no. Yes, TDMA and GSM use time division multiplexing. But when people write TDMA, they mean the US proprietary version, not the European GSM open standard.
>
Anyway, what business does the government have mandating technology? (Europe did this, mind you:-p) All they should sell is spectrum!
Not. Actually Europe mandating an open standard made phones better, cheaper, more useful in Europe and all the rest of the GSM world than in the US, where operators were free to use proprietary protocols.
Just think POSIX versus MS-W32. IT was better when governments would buy only POSIX.
From the same book there is the first-hand account by a black navy worker that simply discredits the whole contention that Port Chicago saw a nuclear explosion. There were huge amounts of explosives there, and they were handled carelessly. Also no radiation after effects.
>
the "we had to drop the A-bomb becauase the invasion would have been worse" story is a remarkably well done piece of propaganda
No. As Galbraith himself points, that the Bomb in itself did not end the War was learned afterwards. This was sure the feeling at the time, even if it was based on flawed evidence.
So if there is any propaganda, it lays on saying the invasion would have been worse instead of we thought the invasion would have been worse. It is a distinction that should be done, but we are at the soundbite era.
>
As far as villagers training with pikes, that's probably on the same level as the bomb drills in US schools where everyone hid under their desk -- something to give ordinary citizens some feeling of security, nothing more.
Not. These civilians were instructed to first resist with spikes, then to commit suicide if failing.
And they really meant it, as the Okinawa suicides during the invasion proved.
>
Firewire is good for external drives, whereas SATA is excellent inside the case.
Why Firewire cannot work inside the case? To me this seems yet another instance of inferior technology taking the spotlight from superior ones.
Too bad SCSI and Firewire are suffering from the herd instinct of the industry... give me them anytime over ATA. I would gladly pay the price for the quality.
>
SATA does not need new drivers, Firewire does. As far as I know, you cannot use Firewire hard drives or practically any other devices in Linux.
>
"parallel and serial ata" meant "old fashioned ribbon cable type ide" and serial ata.
You are obviously right. My fault. And yet I would prefer SCSI and Firewire, both of which give you better external and internal options, and at least SCSI better performance and quality too.
>
compared to UNIX and Linux, XP's stability and security are still ridiculously poor.
Actually things are not so simple. Desktop environments and graphical applications still crash a lot under GNU/Linux, while rarely at MS-W2K. The OS indeed is more stable, but not the GUI.
This in itself is not bad. It would even be good, if they would become a true RDBMS, like Alphora Dataphor or Tutorial D.
Unfortunately, it is bad indeed, because it will be most likely yet another OO DBMS-construction-kit that does not get the basic database concepts right and throws us 30 years back to pre-relational concepts.
You have all the facts right. Yes, MS competitors, including Sun and Oracle (not SUN or ORACLE, these are not acronyms nor abbreviations), have been incredibly stupid, including trying to play MS' game when it is a well-known fact only MS can own its own game.
But you fail in interpretation of the facts. Mostly MS competitors have been more stupid, but less dishonest than MS itself. So yes, MS deserves all the lawsuits and actually some punishment too. But no, there is no point in suing someone for stupidity.
A cursory Google search for Java VM.sharing did not enlighten me much.
But are not value classes a contradiction in terms? After all, a class is but a type or domain. A value is a fundamentally different concept. See Chris Date and Hugh Darwen writings for this, I think they call this the First (or Second?) Great Blunder.
Microsoft Windows was a direct rip-off from Apple, whom Microsoft had befriended by creating applications for their then-nascent platform.
BeOS could not sell their system because MS had exclusivity contracts with OEMs.
IBM codeveloped OS/2 with MS, then the agreement was broken and MS started playing its FUD, exclusive contracts etc.
NeXT had a real industrial strength, OO OS. MS promised that MS WNT was industrial strength, and Cairo would be OO. This, together with exclusive contracts, killed NeXTStep. MS WXP still is not reliable, and Cairo still is not here.
Orange is selling a substandard product that was ripped off from Sendo. MS did not dare sell it under its own brand. Perhaps they will after Orange and others take the flak and correct the bugs.
Sendo has put tremendous effort in making MS WCE useable in a phone, but where denied enough access to source code. Now their work has showed up in HTC.
Spyglass was promised a percentage on MS IE revenue. Then MS IE was bundled with the OS and given away for free, so no revenue to calculate a percentage on.
Sun signed a license agreement with MS in which MS promised to keep Java cross platform. First they tried corrupting Java to make it MS W32-specific, then they stopped distributing it until they could finish their competitor, C#.
Sybase taught MS everything they know about databases, and even shared the source code for their SQL DBMS. MS learned what they could, then broke the partnership.
Other people have added:
Digital Research had the original CP/M, of which MS-DOS was a poor imitation. Later MS played FUD and exclusivity to crush DR-DOS.
Stac Eletronics created the filesystem compression utility when disks were expensive and slow. Microsoft copied parts of Stacker in its Doublespace.
Also mentioned were 3Com (NetBEUI, NetBIOS & SMB), Go!Computing (PenPoint) and Silicon Graphics (OpenGL), but I am not familiar with the details in these cases.
Not offering the preferred language requested. All browsers request a preferred language. Even a monolingual OS such as MS WXP has its browser request a preferred language, in this case the same as the installed OS language. I constantly run into sites, including GNU ones, where my language preferences are ignored, I am presented with, say, German, French or English text when I would rather Portuguese, Spanish, English and French (the order is relevant).
Text files: some sites still offer plain text files instead of HTML. Problem is that text files have fixed size, so they are unreadable in devices as small as my Orange Smartphone (not my fault, my company gave it to me instead of the Handspring Treo I would rather). So I am forced to go to BookRags for HTML versions of Project Gutenberg originals, for example.
>
Netscape screwed over Spyglass by not charging anything for Netscape 1.0 while Netscape was trying to get marketshare and Spyglass was trying to sell its browser engine.
I do not call that screwing, but competition. Now AOL charges nothing for Mozilla, yet no one says they screw MS who charges for MS WXP.
I know that Oracle wants us to forget about the relational model, its history and creators; and that it refuses to comply with ISO SQL. What other crimes they have on them?
Yes, but MS Win was a direct rip-off of the Apple Macintosh System, not of the Xerox Alto. Perhaps we would have had a better MS WXP now if its ancestry had been more than a toy...
Anyway, the point is that MS built a relationship with Apple, then abused it by doing what it asserted it would not do. Granted they have been prompted by Apple being stubborn about leaving off OEMs MS depended on, such as Compaq.
>
It was a joined effort
Yes, but then MS deceived IBM on its commitment to OS/2 until they had MS W16 3.1 ready. Then they refused to make MS W32 an open standard on which OS/2 could compete.
>
Come on... Both have C++ as their predecessor.
Agreed, but apart from the common type system C# has little point in existing other than providing MS its own Java competitor geared to keep and foster a preference for the MS W32 OS. Also, MS tried first to create its own Java quirks to the same effect.
>
a 100% rewrite of SQLServer in v7.0.
It hardly matters, as by then they had learned all they wanted from Sybase. They sucked all the knowledge they wanted, then dumped their partner. As always.
People are greedy like that. Government simply enable peoples' illusion of having something for nothing, or, on more charitable words, government is peoples' Robin Hood.
What happens is that countries become bigger than necessary, and so do their governments. Even the cantons of Switzerland were effectively transformed in provinces when the old Confederation Helvetica was turned into a federation. Not only that, but now we have continental governments (EU, NAFTA, etc) and world government (UN).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes.
No! It meant that there was conformance to open standards, that is, standards estabilished by open organisations that congregated users and vendors from all over the world.
No, they were open because they conformed, and still conform, to POSIX, OSI and other relevant open standards.
None. Just auction them online, and whatever is left send to Third World countries. When even them have no use for them, junkyard and recycling. After all, what's bad about iron?
Yet I can tell you are committing a serious logical problem in equating SQL to relational.
A database system is defined by the language it supports. SQL systems are not, and cannot be, relational systems, because SQL violates fundamental principles of the relational model.
Agreed.
Me, Christopher J Date and Hugh Darwen. And everyone I met that knows both the relational model and Dataphor. If you don't believe me, go to their web site.
If you don't know who they are, hint: you should before you say anything about relational databases.
Hm? Is set theory and predicate logic enough evidence for you?
Indeed: the relational model.
Unproven? Let me see. This idea single-handledly changed its field overnight, obsoleted all other practices, forced everyone to redefine not only their ideas but their concepts and the very terms and methods they used to think about databases. There were three successful implementations, and more are coming. It has produced the clearer writings in the field ever, indeed some of the best CS literature ever.
1.960's? OK, let's throw away Math, after all it's how many thousand years old?
No, you are thinking RDBMS == SQL, and that is not true. SQL is indeed too complex and slow, but that is precisely because it is not relational. It was originally based on some (not all) relational ideas, but since then it has been catapulted back thirty years to pre-relational times.
You are mistaken. The only true RDBMSs now existing is Alphora Dataphor, and it is not yet a full, portable DBMS. In the past we had IBM BS12 (never a generally available product, pretered for SQL) and Ingres (its QUEL relational language was dumped for SQL). Each of these products have been found to be better to its non-relational counterparts, including SQL.
Yes, but then you compare a totally new CDMA network to an already existing GSM & GPRS infrastructure.
So the question is, does it make sense for current CDMA operators to go CDMA 2K? Probably. Does it make sense to GSM operators to keep GSM? Sure enough. Now, does it make sense to new, TDMA or analog operators to go CDMA 2K or GSM? Perhaps CDMA 2K would be the right thing to do cost-wise, but what about the price & availability of the handsets as compared to GSM, GPRS and UMTS ones? And what about Qualcom royalties, do they exist also in GSM 3G?
Not so. In Brasil, if you use CDMA some areas only allow analog roaming, because CDMA isn't universally deployed. Neither with TDMA nor with CDMA you can use your handset outside of USNA, Brasil and the odd country to follow USNA's lead. With GSM you can use your handset just all over the world.
In a word, interconnect agreements are nice, but if you don't have a minimum common denominator you can't even start thinking about them.
Thanks for the informative answer. I can see now the reasoning.
If you could still answer some points...
But is W-CDMA a marketing or a technological problem? If marketing, then either going CDMA 2K 1x is a PHB decision, or a proprietary lock-in. If technological, then I can see the reason for it.
Also remember that business tend to see short-term only, and has made the US stuck to CDMA & TDMA. Europe saw further down the road, and thus gave us GSM.
Yes and no. Yes, TDMA and GSM use time division multiplexing. But when people write TDMA, they mean the US proprietary version, not the European GSM open standard.
Not. Actually Europe mandating an open standard made phones better, cheaper, more useful in Europe and all the rest of the GSM world than in the US, where operators were free to use proprietary protocols.
Just think POSIX versus MS-W32. IT was better when governments would buy only POSIX.
From the same book there is the first-hand account by a black navy worker that simply discredits the whole contention that Port Chicago saw a nuclear explosion. There were huge amounts of explosives there, and they were handled carelessly. Also no radiation after effects.
No. As Galbraith himself points, that the Bomb in itself did not end the War was learned afterwards. This was sure the feeling at the time, even if it was based on flawed evidence.
So if there is any propaganda, it lays on saying the invasion would have been worse instead of we thought the invasion would have been worse. It is a distinction that should be done, but we are at the soundbite era.
Not. These civilians were instructed to first resist with spikes, then to commit suicide if failing.
And they really meant it, as the Okinawa suicides during the invasion proved.
Perhaps I am missing something...
How the open standard, high-volume GSM is more expensive than the proprietary, royalty-ridden, lower-volume CDMA?
In Brasil people are complaining every day that government has chosen TDMA and CDMA over the cheaper, standard GSM.
And with GPRS, GSM get the same data transfer speeds as CDMA.
Why Firewire cannot work inside the case? To me this seems yet another instance of inferior technology taking the spotlight from superior ones.
Too bad SCSI and Firewire are suffering from the herd instinct of the industry... give me them anytime over ATA. I would gladly pay the price for the quality.
Why not? There are drivers. Are them too bad?
If it was (it will not be) a true RDBMS, not a half-baked SQL or OO contraption, it would be safer than anything in existance.
You are obviously right. My fault. And yet I would prefer SCSI and Firewire, both of which give you better external and internal options, and at least SCSI better performance and quality too.
OK, so they use something that is used on some new systems instead of supporting many already existing ones across several different architectures.
Instead they support the incredibly bad parallel port, which is almost IBM PC-compatible exclusive.
Actually things are not so simple. Desktop environments and graphical applications still crash a lot under GNU/Linux, while rarely at MS-W2K. The OS indeed is more stable, but not the GUI.
This in itself is not bad. It would even be good, if they would become a true RDBMS, like Alphora Dataphor or Tutorial D.
Unfortunately, it is bad indeed, because it will be most likely yet another OO DBMS-construction-kit that does not get the basic database concepts right and throws us 30 years back to pre-relational concepts.
An obsolete connector and other yet vapourware...
Why ignore the relevant, modern, already available standard, Firewire AKA IEEE-1394?
THE has been for many years standing for The Hessling Editor, a POSIX clone of IBM XEdit, including Rexx scriptability.
You have all the facts right. Yes, MS competitors, including Sun and Oracle (not SUN or ORACLE, these are not acronyms nor abbreviations), have been incredibly stupid, including trying to play MS' game when it is a well-known fact only MS can own its own game. But you fail in interpretation of the facts. Mostly MS competitors have been more stupid, but less dishonest than MS itself. So yes, MS deserves all the lawsuits and actually some punishment too. But no, there is no point in suing someone for stupidity.
A cursory Google search for Java VM.sharing did not enlighten me much.
But are not value classes a contradiction in terms? After all, a class is but a type or domain. A value is a fundamentally different concept. See Chris Date and Hugh Darwen writings for this, I think they call this the First (or Second?) Great Blunder.
Microsoft Windows was a direct rip-off from Apple, whom Microsoft had befriended by creating applications for their then-nascent platform.
BeOS could not sell their system because MS had exclusivity contracts with OEMs.
IBM codeveloped OS/2 with MS, then the agreement was broken and MS started playing its FUD, exclusive contracts etc.
NeXT had a real industrial strength, OO OS. MS promised that MS WNT was industrial strength, and Cairo would be OO. This, together with exclusive contracts, killed NeXTStep. MS WXP still is not reliable, and Cairo still is not here.
Orange is selling a substandard product that was ripped off from Sendo. MS did not dare sell it under its own brand. Perhaps they will after Orange and others take the flak and correct the bugs.
Sendo has put tremendous effort in making MS WCE useable in a phone, but where denied enough access to source code. Now their work has showed up in HTC.
Spyglass was promised a percentage on MS IE revenue. Then MS IE was bundled with the OS and given away for free, so no revenue to calculate a percentage on.
Sun signed a license agreement with MS in which MS promised to keep Java cross platform. First they tried corrupting Java to make it MS W32-specific, then they stopped distributing it until they could finish their competitor, C#.
Sybase taught MS everything they know about databases, and even shared the source code for their SQL DBMS. MS learned what they could, then broke the partnership.
Other people have added:
Digital Research had the original CP/M, of which MS-DOS was a poor imitation. Later MS played FUD and exclusivity to crush DR-DOS.
Stac Eletronics created the filesystem compression utility when disks were expensive and slow. Microsoft copied parts of Stacker in its Doublespace.
Also mentioned were 3Com (NetBEUI, NetBIOS & SMB), Go!Computing (PenPoint) and Silicon Graphics (OpenGL), but I am not familiar with the details in these cases.
Two more:
Not offering the preferred language requested. All browsers request a preferred language. Even a monolingual OS such as MS WXP has its browser request a preferred language, in this case the same as the installed OS language. I constantly run into sites, including GNU ones, where my language preferences are ignored, I am presented with, say, German, French or English text when I would rather Portuguese, Spanish, English and French (the order is relevant).
Text files: some sites still offer plain text files instead of HTML. Problem is that text files have fixed size, so they are unreadable in devices as small as my Orange Smartphone (not my fault, my company gave it to me instead of the Handspring Treo I would rather). So I am forced to go to BookRags for HTML versions of Project Gutenberg originals, for example.
I do not call that screwing, but competition. Now AOL charges nothing for Mozilla, yet no one says they screw MS who charges for MS WXP.
Could be. Could you elaborate?
I know that Oracle wants us to forget about the relational model, its history and creators; and that it refuses to comply with ISO SQL. What other crimes they have on them?
Yes, but MS Win was a direct rip-off of the Apple Macintosh System, not of the Xerox Alto. Perhaps we would have had a better MS WXP now if its ancestry had been more than a toy...
Anyway, the point is that MS built a relationship with Apple, then abused it by doing what it asserted it would not do. Granted they have been prompted by Apple being stubborn about leaving off OEMs MS depended on, such as Compaq.
Yes, but then MS deceived IBM on its commitment to OS/2 until they had MS W16 3.1 ready. Then they refused to make MS W32 an open standard on which OS/2 could compete.
Agreed, but apart from the common type system C# has little point in existing other than providing MS its own Java competitor geared to keep and foster a preference for the MS W32 OS. Also, MS tried first to create its own Java quirks to the same effect.
It hardly matters, as by then they had learned all they wanted from Sybase. They sucked all the knowledge they wanted, then dumped their partner. As always.