Ah. No. This generalization is wrong.
No, not necessarily. It is true for developer orientated apps, but not for apps where the users have nothing in common with the developers. The landscape is littered with unmaintained apps that filled a small niche. Sure, the kernel is never going be in that situation. But the smaller bits, well, yes, it does and can happen.
Remember, you are comparing the risk of being abandoned or shafted by a corporation to the risk of being abandoned or shafted by the orignial authors (possibly a corporation) plus its entire community of users, plus yourself.
In many cases it's not much difference. I will never maintain someone's software package. It's a fact. I don't have the skill. Check. The entire community of users may be 100 people in my situation. Sure, it could be 1,000,000 users. If Apache foundation shutdown, I am sure Apache would be fine. But what about, for example this project. What if you relied on that, depended on it, and all now, even though it's open source, it's inactive.
The different between FOSS and proprietary is this: for the former, I don't have to switch. For the latter, I do.
Maybe you don't, but you are the exception. People will have to switch to other packages. Or will want to. Yes, they can technically always hand patch everything. It is a perfect posibility. 100% available. But in practical terms - which is what this about - the effort and cost involved in doing that will almost never be justified if the package in question isn't maintained anymore.
So, to be honest, this kind of argument doesn't impress me. Why, exactly, do I need to switch from sendmail? I don't. I can't envisage needing to any time in the next decade, can you?
I gave that example because I absolutely had to. Sendmail was underperforming qmail by at least 50% in a one particular configuration. I had all manner of people look at it, now one could improve the performance much at all. Migrating a big sendmail installation is a nightmare. Yes, I could have started hacking around in the sendmail source, but that's not the point. The point is that I dont have the technical ability, or the resources timewise to do that effectively, and then forever more maintain my own tree for a major package. Do I find someone else, and hire them to do it, or do I just bite the bullet and migrate to qmail? Real life example where F/OSS fucked me just as hard or harder than proprietary apps.
So, yes. You are right. You never have to switch. But practically, yes, you will have to at some point. Packages will be dependent, platforms will change, hardware will evolve, things will change. And sooner or later a package you like or want to use will become a bigger hassle to maintain than to switch away from. Just like everyone else in the world has to deal with.
The fact is and remains, that for some people, and in many situations, the burden of switching between proprietary apps is still far, far, far less than the burden and lost productivity and time that is spent on F/OSS applications.
Even switching between F/OSS applications isn't fun. Ever had to migrate between sendmail and qmail? Or sendmail and postfix? Or postfix and qmail? All apps are "open" in that the source is still there, but they are both, actually, very proprietary. They all are configured differently, all use their own settings file, file naming conventions, and formats. It's open, but still, completely a mess.
You assume that if you choose a GNU/Linux app once, at one time, that you will stay with that, for all time. That's not the case in the real practical world of software use cases. People change, and their requirements change, and the software changes.
The theoretical, big picture idea that F/OSS is able to be maintained by anyone if the original maintainer disappears or abandons the project is of little use in most cases. I am a programmer, but frankly, if the PHP team stops maintaining PHP3 I am not going to keep up with bugfixes and security patches. I am going to bite the bullet and upgrade to PHP4/5. It's going to be a hassle, I'll have to deal with it. Sure, I could maintain those earlier 3.x builds, but I am not going to. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of effort. It's more work than its worth.
F/OSS is often practical, but trust me, I tell you from experience, it can often be as difficult, time consuming, and expensive to move between F/OSS platforms as from a proprietary solution to a new proprietary solution. It is no gurantee that because an app is free or open that it is flexible and easy to switch in and out of. Quite often proprietary solutions actually convert better between packages: at a client site I was contracted to "upgrade" their Windows based mail server. The replacement mail server package they wanted actually had a built in conversion between the competition and their own. Three clicks, and everything was done. Proprietary yes, but practical, very much so.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
Wait a minute. You are making this false assumption that it's going to be a painful transition. Is it really going to take all that much?
It's a commodity app basically. I am sure the wizards at OSDL will figure it out.
The effort and time users gained by using BitKeeper over CVS for the last few years will surely still far exceed the time and effort it takes to migrate to something else.
In the end, Linus is still vastly ahead of where he was previously.
1. Why would a judge be swayed by public opinion? Isn't that the fear here, that public opinion will be bad against the current government?
2. When will the ban be lifted? Will it be after the citizens vote in elections, perhaps?
3. Just because a judge does it, it's okay?
4. How is a persons right to a fair trial compromised by posting public transcripts?
5. Is it worth protecting the right of one person to be protected from bad publicity if it keeps citizens uninformed about serious, deep running corruption?
In my view, the fundamental problem is that there are significant fears to be faced in the world. But these fears are not new, nor imagined. People look back on older times with a view of the "visions and dreams" that inspired people they ignore the fears they faced. This fear is supposedly newly minted, but in reality, it's ancient.
For example:
My early ancestor (great great great great grandfather) was a reporter who covered the cross-border raids by Panco Villa in the Southern US. My family archives contain sketches and copies of early "photographs" of the carnage of a raid which killed dozens of civilians.
My great grandfather was a military advisor who helped calibrate and tune and build the Maginot line which, during tests, made him virtually deaf in one ear.
My grandparents lived on the east coast of the US, and my grandmother spotted - with a group of about 40 others - a German U-Boat off the coast close enough that a co-worker at the navy yard threw a rock and hit the hull of the ship. Her sisters worked on a farm in rural Maine where the Army brough by German POWs to pick potatoes during the growing season. A farm town with no farm boys isn't much of a town, you know.
My great uncle Joe fought and died in Italy just after Operation Husky, while invading Sicily. Before his death he fought the dreaded Afrika Corps headed by Rommel, and was nearly killed in the first battle of El Almein. He participated in Operation Torch, where he won a Silver Star.
My father grew up a few hundred yards from where a German spy/Nazi party offical landed on the coast with plans to infiltrate the country and court subversive elements inside the country. He lived through the Cuban Missle crisis, huddled in the basement of the newley constructed church which was amoung the first in the nation to have a fallout shelter built in. He volunteered for both Kennedy campaigns (Jack and Bobby). He was outside the draft age when Vietnam heated up, but most of his cousins and nephews ended up going over, and some, not coming back.
My oldest brother was alive when the iron curtain looked to be an indomitable force in the world, and when Reagan was shot, and when the Holy Father was shot.
I was alive and looking skeptically on as my friends and family poured blood money into stocks that they didnt know from scrap paper during the booms times of the 1990's. I was painfully aware to see the fallout - minimal retirement accounts and hard times, joblessness and addiction - that followed throughout the late 90's and early 00's.
What's the point? The point is that if you look retrospectively at history you'll see lots of good memories, and good feelings, and smiling faces. The roaring twenties, the national unity of World War II, the golden age of the post-WWII US economic powerhouse, the space race of the 60's and the promise of better living through technology. The fall of communism and the rise of the investor class throughout the last decades. Prosperity, and economic growth raising all boats. The restoration of American innovation and economic might.
But through all the good the fear was always there. The fear of the Germans, the fear of the Japs, the fear of the Chineese, the communists, the fear of nuclear annihilation, the fear of a silent spring - it was always there. The air-raid drills, the personal crisis, it's always been there.
We look back with the freshness of a new generation, and zero-in on the greatness of our ancestors. We look past their distasteful characteristics, their incredulity on certain matters, and recognize them for the purity of their ideals and the pristine dreams they laid out for their children and grandchildren.
Well, I can say this: I have my dreams. Dreams for economic and personal security for my wife, my unborn daughter, and myself. I have dreams of being part of a great nation, who shares its bounty with those who share our liberal values. I have dreams for a system and nation dedi
Some SEO companies will literally litter the web with a million shitty links to a "Target" website, and use all kinds of nasty methods to get a high pagerank.
I was afraid you'd say somethng like that. That seems to be the consensus.
It sucks to be a consulant who believes in OSS from the ground up, with all thier soul, from a deep level, and then to tell them: "nope, sorry, there exists no open source software that meets your needs, or even comes close. now, let's get that 1.5M quote from Oracle out".
1. I was able to change backends, but Postgres at the time was early and unheard of mostly. I successfully was able to run the system parallel on the Win setup and the Linux setup through some magic network hacks.
2. We tried to work with some abstraction layers, but unfortunately, there really was nothing that could handle the load. The core of the project was written in C, and was just basic function code. Some IFDEFs helped to make things cross-platformish. We really needed to work directly with the mysql client libraries unabstracted to get any significant performance.
3. So true about large datasets. Load 98M rows into a table and try to figure out why a certain select scans the whole table instead of just indicies.. argh.
4. We did prototype, and under simulated load, MySQl was convincingly well behaved. We got near a launch date before our verification checks caught up with us. Things like data going in, and being immediately re-selected out only to be a few bytes off. Drat!
First off, a good database is far more efficent than the filesystem for retrieving random "files"/records. Second, even good filesystems are incredibly bad at handling large number of small files. It's just not efficent. Third, even good filesystems are bad at having a huge number of files open and closed every second.
I take offense to your claim I am incompetent. Most DBA's apparently expect bad performance and crappy software. The setup I describe works and works fine under two proprietary databases. It is fast, reliable, and produces nearly perfectly normalized data. All the design guides for MySQL tell you to "normalize to the nth degree, and then make it practical" meaning to repeat data for the sake of sparing your database server stress. That's garbage. I couldn't afford to waste 25% keyspace, or have 10%-20% data repetition. That's the whole point of relational data. No repeats. Fast access. Complex queries.
I worked with a group of professionals to port an COM+/MSSQL project to PHP/MySQL3.x platform.
A 150GB database is very lower mid-range for a real-world database. Even with very "highly optimized" replacements of stored procedures and well-designed queries to replace views, and every tweak we could find or think of, they could never match the performance the client was used to on the old platform, even with more powerful hardware. After months of tweaking, the project failed, and I had to eat a lot of billable hours. The database choked down with any significant INSERT or UPDATE activity. In testing and demos, it was great - fast and zippy. When we threw the switch for a simulation of a real days work logged from the live system, the world nearly ended -- a 24 hr day of work for the live system took at our best 28 hours. For example, we had problems with queries that should require only indexed fields scanning an entire table for any given query. These are the problems you may never notice if you just run a small website from MySQL, but will hurt you when you have a table with 100M records in it.
I hope and pray that 5.x allows me to port this application. I'd love to get the whole thing end to end on a free platform. (Postgres wouldn't fly with the customer at the time because of vague issues with not knowing the product, not wanting to gamble on another OSS project, etc).
Everything about getting this app to MySQL was a nightmare. It was a complete non-stop cluster.. well.. you can imagine. By the time the project was called off I had devoted my most skilled programmer to looking for bottlenecks in and hacking MySQL code.
We revisited the effort when the 4.x series hit its stride, but were afraid of the chance of failure again. We noticed that hard limits had been raised, and that the client lib was solidly performing, but, well, we never got things to that level where it beat what was already in place.
Right now the database stands at 550GB or so (the server was upgraded to SQL2000 a while back [without incident, I may add]). If had of stuck with MySQL the first time through... I shudder to think where things would be 2+ years later. Failure, in this case, probably saved a lot of trouble.
So, to the educated masses: can anyone speculate about this releases capabilities? The list of requirements would be:
550GB, projected to be 1TB by 2007?
2500 tables
Full-text searching in approximately 1500 tables
Queries that routinely join 25-150 tables
~800 stored procedures
~1500 views
~1000 triggers
500-750 inserts/updates per second average, 20000 inserts per second peak, (approximately 40M new rows per day)
1800-2500 queries per second average, 15000 queries per second peak
Is MySQL 5.x the answer to my prayers? Or just a cruel reminder of why MS software costs what it does?
Funny, because there are plenty of people who give their software away for free, but can afford to eat. After all if their were no copyright things would be a lot cheaper.
Because most of the people who give away their code have day jobs as programmers or IT people in a large organization, often in the intellectual property business.
Without copyright, there would be virtually no creation. The only artists and creative people doing any work would be those sponsored by corporations who sell physical things, those who are independently wealthy, and those who have other means of supporting themselves. The only produced would be part time amateur works. The professional artist would fade away.
Worse yet, you can count on this: the standards-based world we live in now would quickly fade. Small media producers would be nearly quickly killed off. Media producers will insist on locked down black-box only devices which are rented from the producers. A few may collude, but in general, they would all be incompatible after time. Everything from movie playing devices to camcorders to computers would be locked down. Hard legal contracts will be signed to get a cable box. With no protection from blantly obvious infringement the media cartels will simply remove any opportunity for circumvention. Billions of devices will be made obsolote. Consumers will attempt to resist, but when they realize that no alternatives exist, that will be the end of the resistance. Small producers will never be able to get the economies of scale to pay licensing fees to get access to the audiences locked up by proprietary devices.
You can count on other real tangible effects:
1. The large number of remaining jobs that are bsed in the US would dwindle very rapidly as the entire IP based economy would be copied bit for bit overseas. No counting the movie and music industries, advertising, publishing, television, and other related industries would shrink dramatically as their content is mericessily shared and redistributed.
2. The media industry will immediately start making their own black-box proprietary devices that very tightly control content. Devices that when opened destroy themselves. Media that is watermarked and locked to a specific device for all time. The media owners would cease realing media in standard formats - CD, DVD, digital file, etc and release only to entirely closed systems.
3. Trademarks and legitimate patents would suffer greatly, leading to an even more "knock-off" orientated market. Every product would be virtually cloned offshore in a matter of weeks, and stores would begin selling knocks next to the originals. This will see-saw back and forth until finally the knock-off kills off the legitimate product. In the end, development of anything new will virtually cease, since any innovation or modification will be instantly copied and put into production. Consumers will be frequently ripped off, and as such, will consume far less, leading to a large reduction in discrentionary spending.
4. A world mon-culture will accelerate. Distinct cultural shades found the world over will be more and more discarded. Without restriction, a homogenized world culture will seep to all ends of the earth, bringing to each culture the worst of all other cultures, and dulling the finer merits of the native culture. The lowest common denominator culture will be born.
5. The poor the world over will be made even more poor. After some time of decreasing prices, the trend towards proprietary everything is going to be expensive. Simply devices will gone. When previously an analog device would have worked, now, a digital device will be required.
That's assuming the courts decide that's what they want to happen.
Realistically, the courts could say "well, the GPL is invalid, so the code is in the public domain", and literally, all the GPL code out there would be up for grabs.
Don't put words in my mouth.
Fine. Say it yourself. When does a fetus become a person in your view. When does that fetus have rights?
I don't consider abortion murder.
That's fine for you to say that. I can respect your opinion.
But if you consider killing a newborn baby murder - which the law currently does - you need to provide a definition of when, exactly, the difference between abortion and murder begins. If abort a fetus at 8 months, why can't you abort a child born 6 weeks premature after she is home from the hospital? Both are the same age and at the same stage of development. How is one different from the other?
It's a part of her body, why *shouldn't* she be allowed to have it terminated?
You can have your opinion. But the fact remains that what you just said has huge implications. It is okay to kill a fetus because it is helpless. Because it is not able to live on its own. Do not be surprised when people want to kill the disabled, kill the elderly, kill the infirm against their wishes. Why should society pay the cost? Why *shouldn't* they be killed?
With the advancement of medical science, it'll be possible to clone me from a few random cells. Should that be allowed?
I'd say no. Because it opens to many questions and has no good answers.
Various languages I believe are a moot point; our laws are all written in English, and if you don't understand English then you need to learn it. There are concepts in English that don't really translate well at all into other languages (and visa versa).
But we provide some documents in some languages. Why not in a very light format? Or a very old format? Why not Unicode, or EBDIC? Or something else obscure?
What a 64K computer? There are more C64's in circulaton than some models of Mac's.
At what point does the right to an electronic copy end?
I guess what I am saying is: probably 95% of computer owners could open either a Word document or a PDF document. Why go the extra mile for 4%, when you won't go the extra mile for 1%? At point is enough enough?
The earliest baby ever delivered and had a non-infant death was, as far as my research shows, 17 weeks fetal age. That means 2nd trimester, rather early.
Before that, it was 18 weeks, 19 weeks, 20 weeks, etc. Around 24 weeks the chances of healthy development are about 50%.
So you could safely say, that at the start of the second trimester, plus a bit, is when the baby is a seperate human life, right?
Well, what happens when one child is born four or five days closer, and 16 weeks? It is going to happen at some point. Medical development is such that sooner or later, probably sooner, it will happen. Then what? Where all those babies aborted at 16 weeks now considered murdered? Or is it a case by case basis? If it's case by case, then any pre-birth age is acceptable, since you could never know.
I think the difference is at some point the parents stop interferring, and nature independent of the parents takes course. You can always actively sabotage an unwanted pregnancy, but, barring that, there is a point that a baby will be born if no adverse action is taken.
By taking birth control, or abstaining, or whatnot, you are preventing nature from taking root and doing that which is natural. You are preventing fertilization, which is when two diverigent human cell lines unify and produce a new DNA pattern.
I don't think you are going down the right path.. but I can't think of a better or more sensible one.
I am not advocating one way or another, just saying that the definition previously given was bad. "When the fetus can be removed and live on its own" is a horrible definition. If a full-term fetus is delivered but requires immediate care to live, does that count? What about premies, etc.
My whole point is that given medical technology and the uncertainity in it, a definiton based only on viability is bound for failure. Two people under identifical circumstances often end up with very different medical outcomes. A definition of a person based on the skill of a doctor, or luck, or the location of delivery, or anything else variable as such is bound for abuse and misunderstanding. I'd rather see a definiton like "when the cord is cut" than something unable to be defined like previously suggested. At least then everyone involved knows.
I define an unborn child as a fetus at the point where it can be removed from a woman and live. Before that, it is a parasitic tissue and the host should have full control over it.
That is an absurdly bad definition. There is not set time for any given fetus/baby. Some babies can be born extremely prematurely and live and grow up and be perfectly healthly little babies.
My wife runs a website for pregnant ladies (ttc.loungeplace.com), and she recently had a mother lose her baby to premature labor at 24 weeks. Not long after another mother went into premature labor - also at 24 weeks - and the baby is successfully living. Yet another user previously had twins delivered at 26 weeks by c-section. One baby lived, the other died.
As you can see, your definition is impossible to co-oerce into these situations.
How far does that right go? I mean to say, let's say I only have a crappy computer, with 1MB of RAM. OpenOffice doesn't run on it. If the government provides an OO compatible document, what about that? It can't be read on my computer.
And what about various languages, and all that?
I am not convinced we have a right to electronic documents. Dead paper, in english, in a standard font size - that's the most reasonable standard I think we can hold the government to.
I am not conviced 100% otherwise...
my ability access to the information in that document should be guaranteed no matter what, licenses be damned.
Well, I could see that argument, except that, the primary purpose of an electronic document is to store something for printing.
You can represent a printed document in a completely closed format. But that format being closed does not inhibit you from reading, copying, modifying, etc the document as long the government will supply you with a printed copy.
I dont think you have any special right to an electronically modifiable copy of a given document.
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Ah. No. This generalization is wrong.
No, not necessarily. It is true for developer orientated apps, but not for apps where the users have nothing in common with the developers. The landscape is littered with unmaintained apps that filled a small niche. Sure, the kernel is never going be in that situation. But the smaller bits, well, yes, it does and can happen.
Remember, you are comparing the risk of being abandoned or shafted by a corporation to the risk of being abandoned or shafted by the orignial authors (possibly a corporation) plus its entire community of users, plus yourself.
In many cases it's not much difference. I will never maintain someone's software package. It's a fact. I don't have the skill. Check. The entire community of users may be 100 people in my situation. Sure, it could be 1,000,000 users. If Apache foundation shutdown, I am sure Apache would be fine. But what about, for example this project. What if you relied on that, depended on it, and all now, even though it's open source, it's inactive.
The different between FOSS and proprietary is this: for the former, I don't have to switch. For the latter, I do.
Maybe you don't, but you are the exception. People will have to switch to other packages. Or will want to. Yes, they can technically always hand patch everything. It is a perfect posibility. 100% available. But in practical terms - which is what this about - the effort and cost involved in doing that will almost never be justified if the package in question isn't maintained anymore.
So, to be honest, this kind of argument doesn't impress me. Why, exactly, do I need to switch from sendmail? I don't. I can't envisage needing to any time in the next decade, can you?
I gave that example because I absolutely had to. Sendmail was underperforming qmail by at least 50% in a one particular configuration. I had all manner of people look at it, now one could improve the performance much at all. Migrating a big sendmail installation is a nightmare. Yes, I could have started hacking around in the sendmail source, but that's not the point. The point is that I dont have the technical ability, or the resources timewise to do that effectively, and then forever more maintain my own tree for a major package. Do I find someone else, and hire them to do it, or do I just bite the bullet and migrate to qmail? Real life example where F/OSS fucked me just as hard or harder than proprietary apps.
So, yes. You are right. You never have to switch. But practically, yes, you will have to at some point. Packages will be dependent, platforms will change, hardware will evolve, things will change. And sooner or later a package you like or want to use will become a bigger hassle to maintain than to switch away from. Just like everyone else in the world has to deal with.
The fact is and remains, that for some people, and in many situations, the burden of switching between proprietary apps is still far, far, far less than the burden and lost productivity and time that is spent on F/OSS applications.
Even switching between F/OSS applications isn't fun. Ever had to migrate between sendmail and qmail? Or sendmail and postfix? Or postfix and qmail? All apps are "open" in that the source is still there, but they are both, actually, very proprietary. They all are configured differently, all use their own settings file, file naming conventions, and formats. It's open, but still, completely a mess.
You assume that if you choose a GNU/Linux app once, at one time, that you will stay with that, for all time. That's not the case in the real practical world of software use cases. People change, and their requirements change, and the software changes.
The theoretical, big picture idea that F/OSS is able to be maintained by anyone if the original maintainer disappears or abandons the project is of little use in most cases. I am a programmer, but frankly, if the PHP team stops maintaining PHP3 I am not going to keep up with bugfixes and security patches. I am going to bite the bullet and upgrade to PHP4/5. It's going to be a hassle, I'll have to deal with it. Sure, I could maintain those earlier 3.x builds, but I am not going to. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of effort. It's more work than its worth.
F/OSS is often practical, but trust me, I tell you from experience, it can often be as difficult, time consuming, and expensive to move between F/OSS platforms as from a proprietary solution to a new proprietary solution. It is no gurantee that because an app is free or open that it is flexible and easy to switch in and out of. Quite often proprietary solutions actually convert better between packages: at a client site I was contracted to "upgrade" their Windows based mail server. The replacement mail server package they wanted actually had a built in conversion between the competition and their own. Three clicks, and everything was done. Proprietary yes, but practical, very much so.
Now you are stuck. You need to replace what they gave you. Oh, it'll cost you: manpower, lost opportunities, potentially a pile of pesos... Get ready for a painful transition. And as annoying and dangerous as this is for source control in mainline kernel development, there are many, many scenarios where this kind of manuevering will screw you much worse - alienating your customers, stranding years of development, the whole works.
Wait a minute. You are making this false assumption that it's going to be a painful transition. Is it really going to take all that much?
It's a commodity app basically. I am sure the wizards at OSDL will figure it out.
The effort and time users gained by using BitKeeper over CVS for the last few years will surely still far exceed the time and effort it takes to migrate to something else.
In the end, Linus is still vastly ahead of where he was previously.
They need an unbiased jury. If the case is discussed in the media it will develop bias, meaning that the jury will therefore be biased.
Discussion = bias?
When did that become true? If that is true, then why not seal 100% of all court records, all the time, until everyone involved dies? Right?
1. Why would a judge be swayed by public opinion? Isn't that the fear here, that public opinion will be bad against the current government?
2. When will the ban be lifted? Will it be after the citizens vote in elections, perhaps?
3. Just because a judge does it, it's okay?
4. How is a persons right to a fair trial compromised by posting public transcripts?
5. Is it worth protecting the right of one person to be protected from bad publicity if it keeps citizens uninformed about serious, deep running corruption?
In my view, the fundamental problem is that there are significant fears to be faced in the world. But these fears are not new, nor imagined. People look back on older times with a view of the "visions and dreams" that inspired people they ignore the fears they faced. This fear is supposedly newly minted, but in reality, it's ancient.
For example:
My early ancestor (great great great great grandfather) was a reporter who covered the cross-border raids by Panco Villa in the Southern US. My family archives contain sketches and copies of early "photographs" of the carnage of a raid which killed dozens of civilians.
My great grandfather was a military advisor who helped calibrate and tune and build the Maginot line which, during tests, made him virtually deaf in one ear.
My grandparents lived on the east coast of the US, and my grandmother spotted - with a group of about 40 others - a German U-Boat off the coast close enough that a co-worker at the navy yard threw a rock and hit the hull of the ship. Her sisters worked on a farm in rural Maine where the Army brough by German POWs to pick potatoes during the growing season. A farm town with no farm boys isn't much of a town, you know.
My great uncle Joe fought and died in Italy just after Operation Husky, while invading Sicily. Before his death he fought the dreaded Afrika Corps headed by Rommel, and was nearly killed in the first battle of El Almein. He participated in Operation Torch, where he won a Silver Star.
My father grew up a few hundred yards from where a German spy/Nazi party offical landed on the coast with plans to infiltrate the country and court subversive elements inside the country. He lived through the Cuban Missle crisis, huddled in the basement of the newley constructed church which was amoung the first in the nation to have a fallout shelter built in. He volunteered for both Kennedy campaigns (Jack and Bobby). He was outside the draft age when Vietnam heated up, but most of his cousins and nephews ended up going over, and some, not coming back.
My oldest brother was alive when the iron curtain looked to be an indomitable force in the world, and when Reagan was shot, and when the Holy Father was shot.
I was alive and looking skeptically on as my friends and family poured blood money into stocks that they didnt know from scrap paper during the booms times of the 1990's. I was painfully aware to see the fallout - minimal retirement accounts and hard times, joblessness and addiction - that followed throughout the late 90's and early 00's.
What's the point? The point is that if you look retrospectively at history you'll see lots of good memories, and good feelings, and smiling faces. The roaring twenties, the national unity of World War II, the golden age of the post-WWII US economic powerhouse, the space race of the 60's and the promise of better living through technology. The fall of communism and the rise of the investor class throughout the last decades. Prosperity, and economic growth raising all boats. The restoration of American innovation and economic might.
But through all the good the fear was always there. The fear of the Germans, the fear of the Japs, the fear of the Chineese, the communists, the fear of nuclear annihilation, the fear of a silent spring - it was always there. The air-raid drills, the personal crisis, it's always been there.
We look back with the freshness of a new generation, and zero-in on the greatness of our ancestors. We look past their distasteful characteristics, their incredulity on certain matters, and recognize them for the purity of their ideals and the pristine dreams they laid out for their children and grandchildren.
Well, I can say this: I have my dreams. Dreams for economic and personal security for my wife, my unborn daughter, and myself. I have dreams of being part of a great nation, who shares its bounty with those who share our liberal values. I have dreams for a system and nation dedi
Some SEO companies will literally litter the web with a million shitty links to a "Target" website, and use all kinds of nasty methods to get a high pagerank.
In my defense:
1. MySQL appeared to work after initial porting. The issues that came up were deep, and only showed when under real non-simulated load.
2. PHP is really just a small shell of functions for the user to see. The true work was done in regular old C.
3. As far as Oracle, they were talking 1.25 to 1.5M.
I was afraid you'd say somethng like that. That seems to be the consensus.
It sucks to be a consulant who believes in OSS from the ground up, with all thier soul, from a deep level, and then to tell them: "nope, sorry, there exists no open source software that meets your needs, or even comes close. now, let's get that 1.5M quote from Oracle out".
Ohh well.
Thanks for the ideas!
A few quickies:
1. I was able to change backends, but Postgres at the time was early and unheard of mostly. I successfully was able to run the system parallel on the Win setup and the Linux setup through some magic network hacks.
2. We tried to work with some abstraction layers, but unfortunately, there really was nothing that could handle the load. The core of the project was written in C, and was just basic function code. Some IFDEFs helped to make things cross-platformish. We really needed to work directly with the mysql client libraries unabstracted to get any significant performance.
3. So true about large datasets. Load 98M rows into a table and try to figure out why a certain select scans the whole table instead of just indicies.. argh.
4. We did prototype, and under simulated load, MySQl was convincingly well behaved. We got near a launch date before our verification checks caught up with us. Things like data going in, and being immediately re-selected out only to be a few bytes off. Drat!
Anyways, thanks for the response!
First off, a good database is far more efficent than the filesystem for retrieving random "files"/records. Second, even good filesystems are incredibly bad at handling large number of small files. It's just not efficent. Third, even good filesystems are bad at having a huge number of files open and closed every second.
I take offense to your claim I am incompetent. Most DBA's apparently expect bad performance and crappy software. The setup I describe works and works fine under two proprietary databases. It is fast, reliable, and produces nearly perfectly normalized data. All the design guides for MySQL tell you to "normalize to the nth degree, and then make it practical" meaning to repeat data for the sake of sparing your database server stress. That's garbage. I couldn't afford to waste 25% keyspace, or have 10%-20% data repetition. That's the whole point of relational data. No repeats. Fast access. Complex queries.
A 150GB database is very lower mid-range for a real-world database. Even with very "highly optimized" replacements of stored procedures and well-designed queries to replace views, and every tweak we could find or think of, they could never match the performance the client was used to on the old platform, even with more powerful hardware. After months of tweaking, the project failed, and I had to eat a lot of billable hours. The database choked down with any significant INSERT or UPDATE activity. In testing and demos, it was great - fast and zippy. When we threw the switch for a simulation of a real days work logged from the live system, the world nearly ended -- a 24 hr day of work for the live system took at our best 28 hours. For example, we had problems with queries that should require only indexed fields scanning an entire table for any given query. These are the problems you may never notice if you just run a small website from MySQL, but will hurt you when you have a table with 100M records in it.
I hope and pray that 5.x allows me to port this application. I'd love to get the whole thing end to end on a free platform. (Postgres wouldn't fly with the customer at the time because of vague issues with not knowing the product, not wanting to gamble on another OSS project, etc).
Everything about getting this app to MySQL was a nightmare. It was a complete non-stop cluster.. well.. you can imagine. By the time the project was called off I had devoted my most skilled programmer to looking for bottlenecks in and hacking MySQL code.
We revisited the effort when the 4.x series hit its stride, but were afraid of the chance of failure again. We noticed that hard limits had been raised, and that the client lib was solidly performing, but, well, we never got things to that level where it beat what was already in place.
Right now the database stands at 550GB or so (the server was upgraded to SQL2000 a while back [without incident, I may add]). If had of stuck with MySQL the first time through... I shudder to think where things would be 2+ years later. Failure, in this case, probably saved a lot of trouble.
So, to the educated masses: can anyone speculate about this releases capabilities? The list of requirements would be:
550GB, projected to be 1TB by 2007?
2500 tables
Full-text searching in approximately 1500 tables
Queries that routinely join 25-150 tables
~800 stored procedures
~1500 views
~1000 triggers
500-750 inserts/updates per second average, 20000 inserts per second peak, (approximately 40M new rows per day)
1800-2500 queries per second average, 15000 queries per second peak
Is MySQL 5.x the answer to my prayers? Or just a cruel reminder of why MS software costs what it does?
Funny, because there are plenty of people who give their software away for free, but can afford to eat. After all if their were no copyright things would be a lot cheaper.
Because most of the people who give away their code have day jobs as programmers or IT people in a large organization, often in the intellectual property business.
Without copyright, there would be virtually no creation. The only artists and creative people doing any work would be those sponsored by corporations who sell physical things, those who are independently wealthy, and those who have other means of supporting themselves. The only produced would be part time amateur works. The professional artist would fade away.
Worse yet, you can count on this: the standards-based world we live in now would quickly fade. Small media producers would be nearly quickly killed off. Media producers will insist on locked down black-box only devices which are rented from the producers. A few may collude, but in general, they would all be incompatible after time. Everything from movie playing devices to camcorders to computers would be locked down. Hard legal contracts will be signed to get a cable box. With no protection from blantly obvious infringement the media cartels will simply remove any opportunity for circumvention. Billions of devices will be made obsolote. Consumers will attempt to resist, but when they realize that no alternatives exist, that will be the end of the resistance. Small producers will never be able to get the economies of scale to pay licensing fees to get access to the audiences locked up by proprietary devices. You can count on other real tangible effects: 1. The large number of remaining jobs that are bsed in the US would dwindle very rapidly as the entire IP based economy would be copied bit for bit overseas. No counting the movie and music industries, advertising, publishing, television, and other related industries would shrink dramatically as their content is mericessily shared and redistributed. 2. The media industry will immediately start making their own black-box proprietary devices that very tightly control content. Devices that when opened destroy themselves. Media that is watermarked and locked to a specific device for all time. The media owners would cease realing media in standard formats - CD, DVD, digital file, etc and release only to entirely closed systems. 3. Trademarks and legitimate patents would suffer greatly, leading to an even more "knock-off" orientated market. Every product would be virtually cloned offshore in a matter of weeks, and stores would begin selling knocks next to the originals. This will see-saw back and forth until finally the knock-off kills off the legitimate product. In the end, development of anything new will virtually cease, since any innovation or modification will be instantly copied and put into production. Consumers will be frequently ripped off, and as such, will consume far less, leading to a large reduction in discrentionary spending. 4. A world mon-culture will accelerate. Distinct cultural shades found the world over will be more and more discarded. Without restriction, a homogenized world culture will seep to all ends of the earth, bringing to each culture the worst of all other cultures, and dulling the finer merits of the native culture. The lowest common denominator culture will be born. 5. The poor the world over will be made even more poor. After some time of decreasing prices, the trend towards proprietary everything is going to be expensive. Simply devices will gone. When previously an analog device would have worked, now, a digital device will be required.
That's assuming the courts decide that's what they want to happen.
Realistically, the courts could say "well, the GPL is invalid, so the code is in the public domain", and literally, all the GPL code out there would be up for grabs.
Don't put words in my mouth.
Fine. Say it yourself. When does a fetus become a person in your view. When does that fetus have rights? I don't consider abortion murder.
That's fine for you to say that. I can respect your opinion.
But if you consider killing a newborn baby murder - which the law currently does - you need to provide a definition of when, exactly, the difference between abortion and murder begins. If abort a fetus at 8 months, why can't you abort a child born 6 weeks premature after she is home from the hospital? Both are the same age and at the same stage of development. How is one different from the other?
It's a part of her body, why *shouldn't* she be allowed to have it terminated?
You can have your opinion. But the fact remains that what you just said has huge implications. It is okay to kill a fetus because it is helpless. Because it is not able to live on its own. Do not be surprised when people want to kill the disabled, kill the elderly, kill the infirm against their wishes. Why should society pay the cost? Why *shouldn't* they be killed?
With the advancement of medical science, it'll be possible to clone me from a few random cells. Should that be allowed?
I'd say no. Because it opens to many questions and has no good answers.
Whats wrong with that?
Nothing at all. My point is though, by bother with any electronic documents, except maybe PDFs?
Various languages I believe are a moot point; our laws are all written in English, and if you don't understand English then you need to learn it. There are concepts in English that don't really translate well at all into other languages (and visa versa).
But we provide some documents in some languages. Why not in a very light format? Or a very old format? Why not Unicode, or EBDIC? Or something else obscure?
What a 64K computer? There are more C64's in circulaton than some models of Mac's.
At what point does the right to an electronic copy end?
I guess what I am saying is: probably 95% of computer owners could open either a Word document or a PDF document. Why go the extra mile for 4%, when you won't go the extra mile for 1%? At point is enough enough?
The earliest baby ever delivered and had a non-infant death was, as far as my research shows, 17 weeks fetal age. That means 2nd trimester, rather early.
Before that, it was 18 weeks, 19 weeks, 20 weeks, etc. Around 24 weeks the chances of healthy development are about 50%.
So you could safely say, that at the start of the second trimester, plus a bit, is when the baby is a seperate human life, right?
Well, what happens when one child is born four or five days closer, and 16 weeks? It is going to happen at some point. Medical development is such that sooner or later, probably sooner, it will happen. Then what? Where all those babies aborted at 16 weeks now considered murdered? Or is it a case by case basis? If it's case by case, then any pre-birth age is acceptable, since you could never know.
It's extremely, extremely tricky.
I think the difference is at some point the parents stop interferring, and nature independent of the parents takes course. You can always actively sabotage an unwanted pregnancy, but, barring that, there is a point that a baby will be born if no adverse action is taken.
By taking birth control, or abstaining, or whatnot, you are preventing nature from taking root and doing that which is natural. You are preventing fertilization, which is when two diverigent human cell lines unify and produce a new DNA pattern.
I don't think you are going down the right path.. but I can't think of a better or more sensible one.
I am not advocating one way or another, just saying that the definition previously given was bad. "When the fetus can be removed and live on its own" is a horrible definition. If a full-term fetus is delivered but requires immediate care to live, does that count? What about premies, etc.
My whole point is that given medical technology and the uncertainity in it, a definiton based only on viability is bound for failure. Two people under identifical circumstances often end up with very different medical outcomes. A definition of a person based on the skill of a doctor, or luck, or the location of delivery, or anything else variable as such is bound for abuse and misunderstanding. I'd rather see a definiton like "when the cord is cut" than something unable to be defined like previously suggested. At least then everyone involved knows.
I define an unborn child as a fetus at the point where it can be removed from a woman and live. Before that, it is a parasitic tissue and the host should have full control over it.
That is an absurdly bad definition. There is not set time for any given fetus/baby. Some babies can be born extremely prematurely and live and grow up and be perfectly healthly little babies.
My wife runs a website for pregnant ladies (ttc.loungeplace.com), and she recently had a mother lose her baby to premature labor at 24 weeks. Not long after another mother went into premature labor - also at 24 weeks - and the baby is successfully living. Yet another user previously had twins delivered at 26 weeks by c-section. One baby lived, the other died. As you can see, your definition is impossible to co-oerce into these situations.
Thoughts?
How far does that right go? I mean to say, let's say I only have a crappy computer, with 1MB of RAM. OpenOffice doesn't run on it. If the government provides an OO compatible document, what about that? It can't be read on my computer. And what about various languages, and all that? I am not convinced we have a right to electronic documents. Dead paper, in english, in a standard font size - that's the most reasonable standard I think we can hold the government to. I am not conviced 100% otherwise...
my ability access to the information in that document should be guaranteed no matter what, licenses be damned.
Well, I could see that argument, except that, the primary purpose of an electronic document is to store something for printing.
You can represent a printed document in a completely closed format. But that format being closed does not inhibit you from reading, copying, modifying, etc the document as long the government will supply you with a printed copy.
I dont think you have any special right to an electronically modifiable copy of a given document.
I agree. MS has done some damn sleazey things.