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This whole thread started with the claim that Dumont was "the real inventor" of the airplane, which clearly is an untrue claim, and also quite clearly provocative
Let us see.
Two groups independently invent something. One donates his findings to humankind, widely publicising it. The other tries to keep it secret, patents it, and try to hinder the general availability and use of its invention. BTW, the former created the aileron, the second tried to use flexible wings.
I said nothing about glory. But now that you mention it, who's the more glorious of the two?
Do you know why ailerons are named that? Hint: it is a French word, used by Alberto Santos-Dumont. He was building and selling practical airplanes complete with steering, the Demoiselles, before anyone else.
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The Wright Brothers were three years earlier, and were the first to achieve sustained, controlled, powered flight. That makes it hard to sustain the claim that Dumont was "the real inventor" who "invented the airplane" (as claimed in the post I responded to).
Fair enough.
I would rather say that, as the automobile, there wasn't "one" inventor, but several simultaneous one. Each one contributed a little, until several of them succeeded around the same time.
The fact that the Wright brothers took so long to publicize their feat, whatever their reasons, made Santos-Dumont the one who really influenced the world before the Wright brothers, and prevented them from filing a patent at Europe.
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Invention are not labour, but they are a result
of hard labour, and provide ways to produce
new/better products. So why is it that
labour and products are somehow different?
Labour is one thing, products are a similar thing. But inventions are different, because there is no lack of an idea if it is publicized and widely used. If you employ your labour somehow, it can't be employed otherwise; if one sells you a product, he can't sell it to someone else, and if someone manufactures something with some materials and labour he looses the ability of producing something else with the same pieces of material and of time.
In other words, there is not such a thing as intellectual property. Patents and copyrights are artificial, should expire and benefit the public. They seldom do, and many fortunes that today rely on them to enlarge themselves own their existence to not having had to comply with them originally. A pity I lost the reference to the book that documents this.
Guess what? Brasilians are Americans too. What you call Americans are citizens of the United States of North America. You can't even call yourselves Noth-Americans properly, since this would include Canada and Mexico too.
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talk to us like we're arrogant.
Guess what? Many of the ignorant among you are.
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Americans make all the cool and useful inventions, like [...] Cars (Henry Ford)
All of them? Wow... now, move on. Automobiles were invented by Germans, including one named Benz. Not to mention the Britsh jet engine and radar, the wristwatch by the sames Alberto Santos-Dumont, and the world goes ever on...
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The Wrights did not introduce the use of a catapult until September of 1904 and ONLY because they desired to stop having to reorient their takeoff monorail into the wind when it changed on them. The Wrights flew before that date exclusively on engine-powered takeoffs alone.
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Dumont's first flight of a heavier-than-air vehicle, as opposed to a balloon, was three years after the Wright Brothers.
The Wright brothers used a catapult. Alberto Santos-Dumont's 14-bis took off on its own.
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He could have just sent off to them for the plans...
They were working in secrecy, while Santos-Dumont made a point of inventing for the benefit of humankind. Patents could even be for the benefit of humankind, if patent holders didn't have the rights to forbid the use of their inventions and if the patenting process didn't cause so many people to work in secrecy.
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There were many who build machines that looked like birds and who tried to fly them. Santos Dumont was one of them, and his machine actually got of the ground.
There were many who built machines that looked like birds and who tried to fly them. The Wright brothers were two of them, and their machine had to be catapulted off the ground.
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None of the others, like Santos Dumont or Gustav White, or Samuel Langley, had any idea how to steer an airplane
Wrong. He did know, and thus build his models 15 to 22 after the 14-bis until he got grounded by sickness.
This is a totally unfounded affirmation, he did steer airships and went around Paris in them much before creating the 14-bis.
When you have built only small, missing parts on much that has been done by other people much before you.
When there were other people doing the same thing at the same time with equal or superior success, depending on the measure used.
When these people give away their work to humankind, and you want to have the power of prohibiting everyone's else use of the work for egotistical reasons.
Then yes, it is.
Furthermore, define work. Inventions are inventions, they are not labour or a product or a property.
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You tried to make it sound like the Wright Brothers didn't fly until after Santos Dumont
Read again. I didn't. I said that Santos-Dumont's 14-bis didn't need a catapult, unlike their Flyer.
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you asserted that there were no witnesses to the 1903 flight.
I didn't, that was another person. And if this another person was wrong in letter, was right in spirit.
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the day of the flight, they approached local newspapers and nobody was interested in the story?
Santos-Dumont didn't need to approach the newspapers because he worked in the open. Have you ever thought about how patents hinder progress by causing people to work in secret?
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And by 1906, neither did the Wrights.
Yet they toiled in secret, while Santos-Dumont in the open.
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They built an airplane company that built airplanes. Those are things, not services.
OK, got me here. I just took you on your apparent meaning. Sorry for this.
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They built them to make money, which evidently you consider evil
No, I don't. I consider egotism an evil, and money the root of all sort of evil, but not an evil in itself. Now patents and copyrights are evils, specially in the conditions I explained just above.
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you resort to personal attacks
I didn't, you did. I only reacted to your unhappy "Santos Dumount's plane was crap, and went on the scrap heap of history", and by your dishonest hint that he didn't knew aerodinamics by writing en passant "Wright Brothers, because they understood the concepts of control and aerodynamics".
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It's not patents but intellectual property that is the problem.
There is no "intellectual property". This is just a misnomer to an aggregation of totally unrelated fields of trademarks, copyrights and patents. No intellectual construct is subject to property rights: trademarks are the right to ones' own name, and patents and copyrights are temporary monopolies granted by governments to incentive specific actions.
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With intellectual property though the rights last forever
All three of patents, copyrights and trademarks should expire, patents and copyrights after sometime and trademarks if they get unused. The US Congress has just to stop extending copyrights, which extensions are inconstitutional anyway because they fail to foster "the useful arts".
> While the Wright Brother's first flight wasn't "open to the public", they did have several witnesses
But took years to publicise and demonstrate, because they didn't want to benefit humankind as Alberto Santos-Dumont wanted, but just to make a profit.
> Santos Dumont's public flight was mere seconds of barely controlled flailing around at a time when the Wrights were making figure eight flights around pylons.
Still their flights were secretive, and his were open to the public. He didn't ever need a catapult, and at the time taking off was considered the proof of the pudding.
> The proof is in who made a success of building aircraft after the first one. Santos Dumount's plane was crap, and went on the scrap heap of history. Wright Brothers, because they understood the concepts of control and aerodynamics
Alberto Santos-Dumont's models nrs. 19 to 22, the Demoiselles, were nice, graceful light airplanes that reached 96km/h and were used for travelling around up to 18km. He used them to visit friends in the country, as he used his balloons to go around in Paris. It was small enough to be transportable in an automobile. His idea was that it would be used by private individuals.
> went on to build a highly successful aircraft company based on ever better aircraft.
Good they succeeded where they should have started, at services, instead of robbing everyone else the benefit of the airplane for 17 years.
I wonder why only First-World Westerners are allowed any glories. Even former Pres. Clinton admitted to Santos-Dumont's merits. Your aggressiveness and arrogance shows you are a mostly insecure person.
<flamebait> Why are they so desperate? Because the world is heading towards a new Dark Age, but now instead of Goths and the Roman Papist religious organisation we have Muslims and Copyright Owners. <flamebait>
Seriously, because they believe freedom to be important, and they have spent 20 years' worth of time to create a system to spread freedom, only to have it misnamed, and the new name equaled with cheapness and convenience, but not freedom. Perhaps freedom yes too, but as a convenience, not as a moral absolute.
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Most of that code was donated to the FSF.
Yes, and that necessarily means the former copyright owner wanted it to be part of the GNU system. It has nothing to say about the Linux kernel.
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For some reason, they never bothered to organize a kernel (until Hurd).
That is simply not according to the facts. The historical record is that first RMS thought he would get a kernel donated (Linus & BSD declined to do that) in the short term and Hurd developed in the medium term. For various reasons, including the flakiness of Mach and the unexpected popularity of Linux and the BSDs, work is taking much, much longer than expected.
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If it wasn't for Linus, I'm not sure we'd have a "GNU-OS" yet.
I am sure; indeed we have a GNU OS now, and it is Debian GNU Hurd. It is not ready for lay users, but it is in Debian's unstable and may be part of the next major release, be it named Debian 3.1 or 4.0 or whatever.
Second, without Linux (and perhaps the BSDs) around, Hurd naturally would have gotten much more hacker attention, even if obviously less laymen's attention. Perhaps it would have gotten a better microkernel, ports to other platforms and nice installers. Probably not as nice as current GNU/Linux ones, but then with less fragmentation, forking, in-strifing and proprietariness.
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RMS was a great advocate for years.
He was always a great advocate for hackers and geeks and alternative-style people, and always unable to reach the mainstream, even if that could be more the mainstream's fault than his. Now FSF has other evangelizers, and I personally would love if he could go back to finishing GNU Hurd and specially its Lisp integration. But it seems he may well be needed to preach among the outsiders, geeks and hackers communities for a long time.
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Now he's been totally neutralized by this stupid issue.
It isn't as irrelevant as you make it sound, and may actually be helping the freedom cause. It certainly ain't stupid.
Just to make it clear, the 14-bis was able to take off on its own engine's power, while the Wright Flyer needed to be catapulted.
And BTW, Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was an accomplished inventor, also commissioned Cartier to create the first wristwatch, among more than 100 other inventions.
Having independent income as a prosperous farm-owner, he refused to patent anything so that his inventions would benefit humankind.
He had to fight, and won, the Wright Bros. in Europe too over their attempt to patent the airplane.
He committed suicide when, already broken by seeing his biggest invention misused in The Great War (AKA WWI), he had a triumphal reception in the then-capital Rio de Janeiro during which several well-known Brasilians died in an airplane crash in the Guanabara Bay intended to honour him.
True enough, Debian offers both KDE and Gnome in equal footing. But historically and philosophically Debian is much nearer to Gnome than to KDE.
Remember Debian is about full free software rather than just open source, to the point of calling the main distribution GNU/Linux, building a GNU Hurd distribution, and generally being more strict in the DFSG than OSI is in interpreting its own DFSG derivative, the OSD.
BTW Debian once was even officially aligned with the FSF and full part of the GNU Project. They decided to part ways over the inclusion of proprietary software, but as we get free software alternatives to just about everything, there may arrive the day when it ceases supporting both proprietary software and free software dependant on proprietary stuff.
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AFAIK Sun by no means installs Gnome as default, if that's what you're saying. It's currently a beta-download for Solaris 9, and it isn't that good at the mo'.
True enough, but Sun has already committed to use Gnome in the near future. HP is supposed to follow suit, and probably IBM too.
But then Sun is not quite there in the desktop, nor is Debian. For now RH is the main Gnome champion on the desktop, but both Debian and Sun are striving to reach it. Some Debian derivatives are already there, but they are not nearly as popular as the mothership.
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Very simple: If you implement it in say 10 programming languages, then you have to repeat the implementation up to 10 times. However, if the DB engine handles it, then you only have to implement it *once*.
Excuse me... are you hinting that you use a programming language that cannot make use of sort routines? Which is this brain-damaged language? And Unicode support, you expect that a DBMS will take care of everything and programming languages will not need to know their bytes?
I suspect you are spoiled by too much, perhaps almost exclusive but certainly prepoderant, exposition to the navigational 4GLs of the 1.980s, like xBase, Adabas and the likes of them.
One can create a data language that is computationally complete, and even SQL is so now. Alphora Dataphor D4 and all proposed Ds are also. But still there will be people who will prefer to code in their pet languages, whatever their reasons, and so ordering will always be done as algorithms after presentation of data to the application program or user. One can even have something like ORDER BY without much fuss. What cannot be assumed in ordering in attributes or tuples in the database, because this complicates the whole model and implementation.
I see you refuse to do your reading. Unless you educate yourself, I do not see how this conversation can be useful to anyone...
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tell them that Oracle is full of sh*t
No need, after some experience they learn it by themselves. But then, one who has been warning that there are other, less idiosyncratic implementations of SQL, like IBM DB2 and Berkeley PostgreSQL, certainly gains credibility. And then they start to hear when you ask for better database education, and even consider the possibility of evaluating some D.
It is not convenient to subvert a logical model. As said before, if you need ordering, do it in the host programming language, but do not subvert the logical model. Why mix them up? Why contaminate the logical model with something that can be conveniently done elsewhere?
Sorry to say this, but I suspect you are more interested in defending yourself than in learning. But in case you want to learn indeed, as an exercise you may try to demonstrate any benefits of ordering in the logical level of the database and in the corresponding data language, and why this cannot be done in host language or separte utilities.
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What if I want to process most of it *as* a table instead of as a file(s)? Table operations are often more convinient than file fiddling IMO.
OK, but do so prior to incorporate it into the database. If you want to have an associated tool that knows about files or DBFs or SQL, and that offers facilities to declare data conversions that help in the transfer to a normalised database, so be it. But if you mean to make such a data set part of the database, than you forfeit performance and simplicity, not to mention data integrity. In the long run it is much more convenient to have a correct database.
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Perhaps the idealistic purity has benefits that outweight such limitations, but at this point I don't see them.
The responsability of educating yourself falls on you alone. I already gave you bibliographic indications, you ignore them at your peril. And your customers's.
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current RDBMS
There are no current RDBMS, no matter what SQL vendors tell us. If you want to make conversation and exchange of ideas, please do not ignore information I have offered you. Just to repeat: SQL has inherent, arbitrary logic violations that make it something other, less powerful, more complex than a relational system.
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You don't propose defining every fricken field as an ADT-like thingy, do you?
I am not much into ADTs, so I cannot be very precise. Usually I find OO terminology to be much more complicated and less precise than I would like it to be. But as I understand them, yes. This is fundamental to make the whole database system more logical, easier to use, and would make for error elimination and code reuse. For more details, please read the proposal for type inheritance thru Specialisation by Constraint from Christopher J Date and Hugh Darwen, in either An Introduction to Dabase Systems or The Third Manifesto.
And why do you see a problem with this? It is a database functionality that can do no harm. If a programming language wants to map the database attributes into its own, simpler types and do cross-type operations, fine. It would loose some of the error checking of which the database language is capable, but while it used the database sublanguage to do queries and other constraints.
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"Easier to understand"? If they are completely unfamiliar with your relational overhaul, how the heck can it be easier to understand without boatloads of training?
You only think the relational concepts harder to understand because you are a procedural programmer, and are used to navigational databases. Take someone who either knows the basics of sets and logic, or who is familiar with functional programming, or simply has not exposure to programming, and relational is much simpler.
Specially, relational is simpler for the end user and application programmer because it is totally logical, both in the sense of logical level schema and in the sense of coherent, simple, according to reason. The physical details of SQL and navigational databases are left to DBAs, SysAdmins and system programmers, and all the inconsistencies of SQL are just left behind.
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Ordering and duplicates are sometimes needed for real-world things.
You are wrong on both accounts, ordering and duplicates, but for different reasons.
Ordering is needed only for presentation or programmatic manipulation. A set-oriented language needs no ordering, and would be more optimisable.
Duplicates are not needed at all. If something is counted twice, it should be a counter, never two occurrences.
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you might get a dump from some other system, and sift through it to clean out the duplicates. Until it is cleaned out, you still need the duplicate
Your example is irrelevant, because it is out of the DBMS scope. It is just file processing prior to import into the system. Presumably, if one wants to import such data into a RDBMS, it will need to think about how this data will be programmatically treated when importing into a normalised database, because it will not be possible to do a simple file-to-table load: the data model will necessarily be different.
Now suppose the duplicates are in fact irrelevant, and that one could really just import such a file directly into a relvar in a normalised database. If it was a text file, it would be a simple cat file | sort | uniq. The RDBMS and its data language would not even need to know about this.
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I have enuf on my plate to rant about
Unfortunately, your rants are misguided, because you do not understand what a data model is, the three levels of database schemas, and the relational model. You are thinking as a programmer, and sometimes that is not enough.
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improving Oracle clones.
Guess what? There are none. Because Oracle is just a half-hearted implementation of SQL. If anything, Oracle would be a defective clone of SQL/DS, the IBM product which launched SQL. OK, there are products that strive to have some partial compatibility with Oracle idiosyncrasies, namely SAPdb and PostgreSQL. But thes measure of Oracle compatibility is usually strived for only in the measure it does not get in the way of ISO SQL compliance.
This issue is just one more in which you want better education on fundamentals before ranting...
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I just don't care about any of the issues you raise.
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After several years of using Linux, I decided one day that I was spending too much time tweaking and adjusting Linux. I can afford a Mac, so I bought one. I've lost zero capability and get more done faster.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance... too bad this is not remembered anymore.
The way it is, Apple will become another monopoly, fragmenting the Unix desktop even more if it succeeds, or delay free software victory if it failes.
Now, I have too a Mac and love its silence and low energy comsumption. I love not having paid anything to neither Microsoft nor Intel. And sure Mac OS X is just half proprietary instead of totally proprietary as with MS W32. But even so, it is outrageous that a company that broke so many good promises as Apple did still looks good compared to the most influential company in the world. It sure tells a lot about our society.
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I don't understand why some people get so upset about Apple and OS X.
Broken promises, proprietariness, cost, bloat.
They said it would be open source, and even got OSI certification. But it is software hoarding all the same, because they mostly just relicensed software that originally was under the BSD license, which does not have all the restrictions and strings attached the APSL has. And what they actually released has no use at all, lacking the necessary parts to make a functioning system and being totally uninteresting: old versions of BSD and Mach combined as to take away the leanness of BSD and the flexibility of Mach.
They told everyone to buy Mac OS X 10.0 and they would give the next release for free. Mac OS X 10.0 was unusable, 10.1 beta quality, and now that finally it has an usable version, 10.2, it is full price.
They promised iTools would be forever, and free. Now it has been phased out and we have.mac instead, US$100.00 per year per account.
They promised all G3, and the immediately preceding models, would be supported by Mac OS X. When it finally came out, only G3 and superior were, and now that it has matured, it will not even run without a video upgrade on the original beige G3s.
They used MkLinux to gain Unix experience before buying NeXT, but never made it easy to support. Much driver support for GNU/Linux had to be reverse-engineered.
The GUI is proprietary. Sure, there is OpenStep the standard and GNUStep the interoperable reimplementation, and there is DisplayPDF the standard and DisplayGhostScript the interoperable reimplementation. But all this, and NetInfo, is being deemphasized or poorly documented, Darwin can run on non-Apple hardware but not with the GUI, and all in all they lost a great opportunity to go X Window System and NIS or LDAP, thus being truly standards-compliant.
I would be all for paying for a Mac. But the quality is not the same as before, they having dumped SCSI for flaky IDE -- now with reduced warranties, but to be fair this is not directly their fault --, introduced FireWire with hefty patents royalties and only partially -- initial iMacs and iBooks were USB only --, so that now all sorts of peripherals that should be FireWire are still IDE or, worse, USB.
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You seem to expect O'Reilly to act as a shill for open source.
Knowing that he helped validate the term by organising the Freeware Summit Conference, I do not see why would he be excused of supporting it.
By the way, I am not speaking about open source, but free software. By this I imply that all software should be free as in freedom, not beer.
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Why does O'Reilly's position as a book publisher mandate that he is not allowed an opinion?
He is entitled to an opinion, sure enough. But he has an obligation to give well-reasoned criticism a place. Anyone has, but publishers specially, because they control the mass media. And his choice of email messages he quoted seems to imply that all is well with Mac OS X, but the free software community disagrees, and he ignores it. Picturing himself as an open source advocate, and open source as another name for free software -- which it is not -- he should give the real free software community a say.
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if you'd read the piece, you'd see that it contains criticism of Apple as well as praise.
Which criticism, that is too expensive or incompatible with new gadgetry? This are not the real points, but that it is proprietary. I could have missed such a criticism, because the whole piece is so self-congratulatory I nearly dozed before finishing.
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How would compile-time type checking prevent such?
I am not speaking about variables, but domains; that is, data types. A SaleID and a CustomerID must be, by definition, different data types logically speaking, even if it happens that their physical implementation be the same.
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other developers will look at me cock-eyed if I try that.
Are you such a weakling that will not do anything which is not socially accepted? Who cares if your code is cleaner, faster, more correct, easier to understand?
Slashdot Mirror
Let us see.
Two groups independently invent something. One donates his findings to humankind, widely publicising it. The other tries to keep it secret, patents it, and try to hinder the general availability and use of its invention. BTW, the former created the aileron, the second tried to use flexible wings.
I said nothing about glory. But now that you mention it, who's the more glorious of the two?
Do you know why ailerons are named that? Hint: it is a French word, used by Alberto Santos-Dumont. He was building and selling practical airplanes complete with steering, the Demoiselles, before anyone else.
Fair enough.
I would rather say that, as the automobile, there wasn't "one" inventor, but several simultaneous one. Each one contributed a little, until several of them succeeded around the same time.
The fact that the Wright brothers took so long to publicize their feat, whatever their reasons, made Santos-Dumont the one who really influenced the world before the Wright brothers, and prevented them from filing a patent at Europe.
Labour is one thing, products are a similar thing. But inventions are different, because there is no lack of an idea if it is publicized and widely used. If you employ your labour somehow, it can't be employed otherwise; if one sells you a product, he can't sell it to someone else, and if someone manufactures something with some materials and labour he looses the ability of producing something else with the same pieces of material and of time.
In other words, there is not such a thing as intellectual property. Patents and copyrights are artificial, should expire and benefit the public. They seldom do, and many fortunes that today rely on them to enlarge themselves own their existence to not having had to comply with them originally. A pity I lost the reference to the book that documents this.
Guess what? Brasilians are Americans too. What you call Americans are citizens of the United States of North America. You can't even call yourselves Noth-Americans properly, since this would include Canada and Mexico too.
Guess what? Many of the ignorant among you are.
All of them? Wow... now, move on. Automobiles were invented by Germans, including one named Benz. Not to mention the Britsh jet engine and radar, the wristwatch by the sames Alberto Santos-Dumont, and the world goes ever on...
Interesting. References?
The Wright brothers used a catapult. Alberto Santos-Dumont's 14-bis took off on its own.
They were working in secrecy, while Santos-Dumont made a point of inventing for the benefit of humankind. Patents could even be for the benefit of humankind, if patent holders didn't have the rights to forbid the use of their inventions and if the patenting process didn't cause so many people to work in secrecy.
Sorry for the auto-reply, it is to correct a piece of misinformation.
He actually sold his family's farm after he father got crippled in an accident, then proceeding to Paris to study and work.
Wrong. He did know, and thus build his models 15 to 22 after the 14-bis until he got grounded by sickness.
This is a totally unfounded affirmation, he did steer airships and went around Paris in them much before creating the 14-bis.
When you have built only small, missing parts on much that has been done by other people much before you.
When there were other people doing the same thing at the same time with equal or superior success, depending on the measure used.
When these people give away their work to humankind, and you want to have the power of prohibiting everyone's else use of the work for egotistical reasons.
Then yes, it is.
Furthermore, define work. Inventions are inventions, they are not labour or a product or a property.
Read again. I didn't. I said that Santos-Dumont's 14-bis didn't need a catapult, unlike their Flyer.
I didn't, that was another person. And if this another person was wrong in letter, was right in spirit.
Santos-Dumont didn't need to approach the newspapers because he worked in the open. Have you ever thought about how patents hinder progress by causing people to work in secret?
Yet they toiled in secret, while Santos-Dumont in the open.
OK, got me here. I just took you on your apparent meaning. Sorry for this.
No, I don't. I consider egotism an evil, and money the root of all sort of evil, but not an evil in itself. Now patents and copyrights are evils, specially in the conditions I explained just above.
I didn't, you did. I only reacted to your unhappy "Santos Dumount's plane was crap, and went on the scrap heap of history", and by your dishonest hint that he didn't knew aerodinamics by writing en passant "Wright Brothers, because they understood the concepts of control and aerodynamics".
There is no "intellectual property". This is just a misnomer to an aggregation of totally unrelated fields of trademarks, copyrights and patents. No intellectual construct is subject to property rights: trademarks are the right to ones' own name, and patents and copyrights are temporary monopolies granted by governments to incentive specific actions.
All three of patents, copyrights and trademarks should expire, patents and copyrights after sometime and trademarks if they get unused. The US Congress has just to stop extending copyrights, which extensions are inconstitutional anyway because they fail to foster "the useful arts".
Not.
But took years to publicise and demonstrate, because they didn't want to benefit humankind as Alberto Santos-Dumont wanted, but just to make a profit.
Still their flights were secretive, and his were open to the public. He didn't ever need a catapult, and at the time taking off was considered the proof of the pudding.
Alberto Santos-Dumont's models nrs. 19 to 22, the Demoiselles, were nice, graceful light airplanes that reached 96km/h and were used for travelling around up to 18km. He used them to visit friends in the country, as he used his balloons to go around in Paris. It was small enough to be transportable in an automobile. His idea was that it would be used by private individuals.
Good they succeeded where they should have started, at services, instead of robbing everyone else the benefit of the airplane for 17 years.
I wonder why only First-World Westerners are allowed any glories. Even former Pres. Clinton admitted to Santos-Dumont's merits. Your aggressiveness and arrogance shows you are a mostly insecure person.
<flamebait>
Why are they so desperate? Because the world is heading towards a new Dark Age, but now instead of Goths and the Roman Papist religious organisation we have Muslims and Copyright Owners.
<flamebait>
Seriously, because they believe freedom to be important, and they have spent 20 years' worth of time to create a system to spread freedom, only to have it misnamed, and the new name equaled with cheapness and convenience, but not freedom. Perhaps freedom yes too, but as a convenience, not as a moral absolute.
Yes, and that necessarily means the former copyright owner wanted it to be part of the GNU system. It has nothing to say about the Linux kernel.
That is simply not according to the facts. The historical record is that first RMS thought he would get a kernel donated (Linus & BSD declined to do that) in the short term and Hurd developed in the medium term. For various reasons, including the flakiness of Mach and the unexpected popularity of Linux and the BSDs, work is taking much, much longer than expected.
I am sure; indeed we have a GNU OS now, and it is Debian GNU Hurd. It is not ready for lay users, but it is in Debian's unstable and may be part of the next major release, be it named Debian 3.1 or 4.0 or whatever.
Second, without Linux (and perhaps the BSDs) around, Hurd naturally would have gotten much more hacker attention, even if obviously less laymen's attention. Perhaps it would have gotten a better microkernel, ports to other platforms and nice installers. Probably not as nice as current GNU/Linux ones, but then with less fragmentation, forking, in-strifing and proprietariness.
He was always a great advocate for hackers and geeks and alternative-style people, and always unable to reach the mainstream, even if that could be more the mainstream's fault than his. Now FSF has other evangelizers, and I personally would love if he could go back to finishing GNU Hurd and specially its Lisp integration. But it seems he may well be needed to preach among the outsiders, geeks and hackers communities for a long time.
It isn't as irrelevant as you make it sound, and may actually be helping the freedom cause. It certainly ain't stupid.
Just to make it clear, the 14-bis was able to take off on its own engine's power, while the Wright Flyer needed to be catapulted.
And BTW, Alberto Santos-Dumont, who was an accomplished inventor, also commissioned Cartier to create the first wristwatch, among more than 100 other inventions.
Having independent income as a prosperous farm-owner, he refused to patent anything so that his inventions would benefit humankind.
He had to fight, and won, the Wright Bros. in Europe too over their attempt to patent the airplane.
He committed suicide when, already broken by seeing his biggest invention misused in The Great War (AKA WWI), he had a triumphal reception in the then-capital Rio de Janeiro during which several well-known Brasilians died in an airplane crash in the Guanabara Bay intended to honour him.
True enough, Debian offers both KDE and Gnome in equal footing. But historically and philosophically Debian is much nearer to Gnome than to KDE.
Remember Debian is about full free software rather than just open source, to the point of calling the main distribution GNU/Linux, building a GNU Hurd distribution, and generally being more strict in the DFSG than OSI is in interpreting its own DFSG derivative, the OSD.
BTW Debian once was even officially aligned with the FSF and full part of the GNU Project. They decided to part ways over the inclusion of proprietary software, but as we get free software alternatives to just about everything, there may arrive the day when it ceases supporting both proprietary software and free software dependant on proprietary stuff.
True enough, but Sun has already committed to use Gnome in the near future. HP is supposed to follow suit, and probably IBM too.
But then Sun is not quite there in the desktop, nor is Debian. For now RH is the main Gnome champion on the desktop, but both Debian and Sun are striving to reach it. Some Debian derivatives are already there, but they are not nearly as popular as the mothership.
Excuse me... are you hinting that you use a programming language that cannot make use of sort routines? Which is this brain-damaged language? And Unicode support, you expect that a DBMS will take care of everything and programming languages will not need to know their bytes?
I suspect you are spoiled by too much, perhaps almost exclusive but certainly prepoderant, exposition to the navigational 4GLs of the 1.980s, like xBase, Adabas and the likes of them.
One can create a data language that is computationally complete, and even SQL is so now. Alphora Dataphor D4 and all proposed Ds are also. But still there will be people who will prefer to code in their pet languages, whatever their reasons, and so ordering will always be done as algorithms after presentation of data to the application program or user. One can even have something like ORDER BY without much fuss. What cannot be assumed in ordering in attributes or tuples in the database, because this complicates the whole model and implementation.
I see you refuse to do your reading. Unless you educate yourself, I do not see how this conversation can be useful to anyone...
No need, after some experience they learn it by themselves. But then, one who has been warning that there are other, less idiosyncratic implementations of SQL, like IBM DB2 and Berkeley PostgreSQL, certainly gains credibility. And then they start to hear when you ask for better database education, and even consider the possibility of evaluating some D.
It is not convenient to subvert a logical model. As said before, if you need ordering, do it in the host programming language, but do not subvert the logical model. Why mix them up? Why contaminate the logical model with something that can be conveniently done elsewhere?
Sorry to say this, but I suspect you are more interested in defending yourself than in learning. But in case you want to learn indeed, as an exercise you may try to demonstrate any benefits of ordering in the logical level of the database and in the corresponding data language, and why this cannot be done in host language or separte utilities.
OK, but do so prior to incorporate it into the database. If you want to have an associated tool that knows about files or DBFs or SQL, and that offers facilities to declare data conversions that help in the transfer to a normalised database, so be it. But if you mean to make such a data set part of the database, than you forfeit performance and simplicity, not to mention data integrity. In the long run it is much more convenient to have a correct database.
The responsability of educating yourself falls on you alone. I already gave you bibliographic indications, you ignore them at your peril. And your customers's.
There are no current RDBMS, no matter what SQL vendors tell us. If you want to make conversation and exchange of ideas, please do not ignore information I have offered you. Just to repeat: SQL has inherent, arbitrary logic violations that make it something other, less powerful, more complex than a relational system.
I am not much into ADTs, so I cannot be very precise. Usually I find OO terminology to be much more complicated and less precise than I would like it to be. But as I understand them, yes. This is fundamental to make the whole database system more logical, easier to use, and would make for error elimination and code reuse. For more details, please read the proposal for type inheritance thru Specialisation by Constraint from Christopher J Date and Hugh Darwen, in either An Introduction to Dabase Systems or The Third Manifesto.
And why do you see a problem with this? It is a database functionality that can do no harm. If a programming language wants to map the database attributes into its own, simpler types and do cross-type operations, fine. It would loose some of the error checking of which the database language is capable, but while it used the database sublanguage to do queries and other constraints.
You only think the relational concepts harder to understand because you are a procedural programmer, and are used to navigational databases. Take someone who either knows the basics of sets and logic, or who is familiar with functional programming, or simply has not exposure to programming, and relational is much simpler.
Specially, relational is simpler for the end user and application programmer because it is totally logical, both in the sense of logical level schema and in the sense of coherent, simple, according to reason. The physical details of SQL and navigational databases are left to DBAs, SysAdmins and system programmers, and all the inconsistencies of SQL are just left behind.
You are wrong on both accounts, ordering and duplicates, but for different reasons.
Ordering is needed only for presentation or programmatic manipulation. A set-oriented language needs no ordering, and would be more optimisable.
Duplicates are not needed at all. If something is counted twice, it should be a counter, never two occurrences.
Your example is irrelevant, because it is out of the DBMS scope. It is just file processing prior to import into the system. Presumably, if one wants to import such data into a RDBMS, it will need to think about how this data will be programmatically treated when importing into a normalised database, because it will not be possible to do a simple file-to-table load: the data model will necessarily be different.
Now suppose the duplicates are in fact irrelevant, and that one could really just import such a file directly into a relvar in a normalised database. If it was a text file, it would be a simple cat file | sort | uniq. The RDBMS and its data language would not even need to know about this.
Unfortunately, your rants are misguided, because you do not understand what a data model is, the three levels of database schemas, and the relational model. You are thinking as a programmer, and sometimes that is not enough.
Guess what? There are none. Because Oracle is just a half-hearted implementation of SQL. If anything, Oracle would be a defective clone of SQL/DS, the IBM product which launched SQL. OK, there are products that strive to have some partial compatibility with Oracle idiosyncrasies, namely SAPdb and PostgreSQL. But thes measure of Oracle compatibility is usually strived for only in the measure it does not get in the way of ISO SQL compliance.
This issue is just one more in which you want better education on fundamentals before ranting...
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance... too bad this is not remembered anymore.
The way it is, Apple will become another monopoly, fragmenting the Unix desktop even more if it succeeds, or delay free software victory if it failes.
Now, I have too a Mac and love its silence and low energy comsumption. I love not having paid anything to neither Microsoft nor Intel. And sure Mac OS X is just half proprietary instead of totally proprietary as with MS W32. But even so, it is outrageous that a company that broke so many good promises as Apple did still looks good compared to the most influential company in the world. It sure tells a lot about our society.
Broken promises, proprietariness, cost, bloat.
They said it would be open source, and even got OSI certification. But it is software hoarding all the same, because they mostly just relicensed software that originally was under the BSD license, which does not have all the restrictions and strings attached the APSL has. And what they actually released has no use at all, lacking the necessary parts to make a functioning system and being totally uninteresting: old versions of BSD and Mach combined as to take away the leanness of BSD and the flexibility of Mach.
They told everyone to buy Mac OS X 10.0 and they would give the next release for free. Mac OS X 10.0 was unusable, 10.1 beta quality, and now that finally it has an usable version, 10.2, it is full price.
They promised iTools would be forever, and free. Now it has been phased out and we have .mac instead, US$100.00 per year per account.
They promised all G3, and the immediately preceding models, would be supported by Mac OS X. When it finally came out, only G3 and superior were, and now that it has matured, it will not even run without a video upgrade on the original beige G3s.
They used MkLinux to gain Unix experience before buying NeXT, but never made it easy to support. Much driver support for GNU/Linux had to be reverse-engineered.
The GUI is proprietary. Sure, there is OpenStep the standard and GNUStep the interoperable reimplementation, and there is DisplayPDF the standard and DisplayGhostScript the interoperable reimplementation. But all this, and NetInfo, is being deemphasized or poorly documented, Darwin can run on non-Apple hardware but not with the GUI, and all in all they lost a great opportunity to go X Window System and NIS or LDAP, thus being truly standards-compliant.
I would be all for paying for a Mac. But the quality is not the same as before, they having dumped SCSI for flaky IDE -- now with reduced warranties, but to be fair this is not directly their fault --, introduced FireWire with hefty patents royalties and only partially -- initial iMacs and iBooks were USB only --, so that now all sorts of peripherals that should be FireWire are still IDE or, worse, USB.
And Mac OS X is still bloated.
Enough said?
Knowing that he helped validate the term by organising the Freeware Summit Conference, I do not see why would he be excused of supporting it.
By the way, I am not speaking about open source, but free software. By this I imply that all software should be free as in freedom, not beer.
He is entitled to an opinion, sure enough. But he has an obligation to give well-reasoned criticism a place. Anyone has, but publishers specially, because they control the mass media. And his choice of email messages he quoted seems to imply that all is well with Mac OS X, but the free software community disagrees, and he ignores it. Picturing himself as an open source advocate, and open source as another name for free software -- which it is not -- he should give the real free software community a say.
Which criticism, that is too expensive or incompatible with new gadgetry? This are not the real points, but that it is proprietary. I could have missed such a criticism, because the whole piece is so self-congratulatory I nearly dozed before finishing.
Well then, Google is your friend. Or you can write the authors, or use GhostScript.
I am not speaking about variables, but domains; that is, data types. A SaleID and a CustomerID must be, by definition, different data types logically speaking, even if it happens that their physical implementation be the same.
Are you such a weakling that will not do anything which is not socially accepted? Who cares if your code is cleaner, faster, more correct, easier to understand?