Yep, use free software every day at work. Those people (myself included; I have contributed to free software) have chosen to release their product for free. HBO has not.
It's a ridiculous statement to say it's o.k. to take something from me without my permission. Doesn't matter when I choose to release it, where I choose to release it, or how I choose to release it, it's my work and I can do with it as I please. Just because a T.V. show is available in the U.S. and not the U.K. doesn't mean it's o.k. to download it from the U.S. and watch it. I understand you really want to see Rome, or Battlestar Galactica, or whatever. But it's not your property. If you take it from me without compensation, you've stolen something from me. Just because it doesn't involve physical goods, theft is still theft.
Of course I'm probably arguing with a bunch of greedy teenagers here who don't have bills to pay or families to support, so I'm sure my dismay is falling on deaf ears.
Car thieves are miffed because auto makers are now installing locks on all cars.
If you're going to be a thief, don't complain when someone tries to stop you from stealing their stuff. Anyone who complains about this is an immature idiot. HBO spends 10 million dollars to develop, produce, and advertise a show on their premium networks. To recoup the costs, they charge subscribers money. For those that don't wish to subscribe, they sell DVDs in a couple of months, so that you can either buy the DVDs or get them off Netflix or from some other video rental source. HBO makes 20 million dollars from this process. HBO goes on to keep their people employed and continue to make television series and movies....or...
HBO spends 10 million dollars, and everybody steals their content without reimbursing HBO for any of their costs. 10,000 people lose their jobs because HBO declares bankruptcy.
I know this is an extreme case, but I'm tired of all the whining because a company (or even a person) who produces something that you think is valuable enough to at least steal would like to make some money off of it. Yes, I know they're rich, but if you don't like that, stop buying their product. Why exactly should networks, studios, software developers, or anyone else provide anything of value if there's no benefit to them, i.e. no way to make a living?
I'm a software developer, and if my company doesn't get paid for something, I get laid off.
Unlike Linux, it has a nice, fast GUI interface, and it runs Photoshop and Quicktime.
Unlike Linux, you can actually close the laptop lid and put the thing to sleep.
Unlike Linux and Windows, your iPod will work really well (if you think an iPod works well on Windows, try it on a Mac; not the iPod's fault, just the way Windows handles USB devices).
Unlike Windows, it's much more organized, has better tools, and actually supports UNIX tools (including Apache & PHP) natively (sans-Cygwin).
Unlike a Windows laptop, it's light and has great battery life.
Unlike Windows and Linux, you can sync your Bluetooth phone and PDA over Bluetooth. Imagine that, devices that actually talk to one another!
TextMate supports syntax highlighting and some great customizability for almost every language out there. Comes with lots of ObjectiveC, Ruby, and PHP stuff right out of the box.
Unlink Eclipse, TextMate is actually fast and responsive. (Anyone else ever notice that as Eclipse approaches Idea's level of functionality, it gets slower and slower? I'll stick with Idea for Java development, thank you very much.)
You'll actually start doing something *with* your computer, instead of doing something *to* it, and you'll enjoy your computer again.
P.S. My recommendation is for anyone who doesn't have a problem actually paying a little money for a decent product, nor tied his line to RMS's ship of folly. I figure you get what you pay for.
...ten years ago. I stopped using it when the kernel hit 2.6 and Debian was still on 2.2. The whole "ultimate stability" thing is just an excuse--I think Debian can't get their act together and release an updated system.
All the more power to Ubuntu. It's a great system, easy to install and use, and really stable. If Debian can't keep up, let them die in an Darwinian haze.
For all of you out there who don't like Enterprise, I ask you to give it one more shot. I hated the whole temporal war crap and the xindie weapon story line (basically, seasons 1.5 to the end of 3), but the fourth season it awesome. They've got a new producer and better writing, and the stories are much more what you're probably looking for: the beginnings of the Federation, our alliance with the Vulcans, etc.
Just watch one or two fourth season episodes before you write the show off as a disaster.
I've read the PostgreSQL manual, and I don't remember them every encouraging me to create tables in the manner in which you suggest.
I'm no DBA, so I've never heard of a "Type 3 Normal" design. Neither has Google, so if you could point me at a reference online, I'd be interested in checking it out. Granted, I have no details on what your project goals are, or who your target customer is. Most importantly, I have no idea what the size of your database is or the user load on the application.
That said, given that your choices were between Ruby and Python, I can't imagine that it's a massively scaled application, with database replication, server session replication, graceful failover, etc., etc. If you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, maybe you'll let us all know (a) your application, and (b) what person or persons "responsible for the design and implementation of the largest databases used in hospitals and other mission-critical fields across the country" like this design? I'd ask them if they'd ever take their huge Oracle databases and perform dynamic table or schema generation on the fly.
Whenever anyone has come to me wanting to dynamically generate tables and schema, it's typically either been bad design, or trying to apply non-relational data storage requirements to a relational database. Everybody knows you're supposed to save all your data in a relational database, right? Doesn't matter what the format... I fight this battle with management all the time. Everybody and their brother has heard of Oracle, but sometimes just a plain text file does the job nicely.
As an aside, I'm curious how you would generate reporting against your database? I'm guessing you just do a general search against user-supplied fields or something. How ever would you optimize those queries against indexes? Either they are very small tables, or your code must be doing most of the work a standard RDBMS would be doing, calculating possible SELECTs and generating indexes on the fly by interpolating user intent. Again, not knowing the details of your application, this is just a guess. Would definitely pose an interesting problem.
Now, having said all this, if you're just generating tables based on a well-defined set of configuration information entered by the user at installation time, well, that's a different story. I could see how that would be a problem for Rails without being bad database design.
My DBA is an Oracle DBA. Unless you've managed to cluster several hundred PostgreSQL servers, I'd say my DBA can beat up your DBA.
Almost everybody here seems to be missing the point: RDF isn't for you--it's for your computer. The point of RDF and the Semantic Web is to structure knowledge so that programs can interact with one another to perform better, even in some cases simulating intelligent decisions. Unless you're working in developing Semantic Web technology, you should never have to look at an RDF document.
It's not a wiki. It's not a new way to see metadata. It's your softwares' version of the WWW.
I saw this film last weekend and never got the summer blockbuster thing. I saw it as parodying America--we rush in without thinking, blow things up, wreck the place, then say we've made the world safer. It parodys actors to the extreme: just because they make big bucks and are always on the covers of tabloids, somehow they're better equipped than politicians to work towards peaceful international solutions. And its parodys of the puppets tend to be funniest of all.
I do agree Parker and Stone let loose on everyone. The right wing, the left wing, terrorists, and puppets are all fair game. But I don't think blowing up Mt. Rushmore was parodying summer blockbusters. It was a statement that the current U.S. extreme mindsets (liberal and conservative) are doing more to destroy the ideals of the founding fathers than any terrorists ever could.
Who knows, maybe I'm just reading in more than is really there. But I think Parker is a damn smart guy who hides his commentary in humor extremely well.
Oh, and the puppets and the sets were incredible. No wonder they got so burned out making this--it's artwork in and of itself.
Why exactly is the industry focused on cell phones as the point of convergence? Every phone I've ever had has had a terrible UI.
I like having my Palm PC for my calendar and phone book, my phone for calling friends and family, and my iPod for playing music. And I would like them to all talk together (which is the case, except for the iPod).
Is anyone out there serious using Real for anything? Haven't we all gotten sick of the huge marketing machine behind everything they do. Popups everywhere, sales offers out the wazoo. You can't do anything with their software without being hassled about buying something else. They're the worst kind of Internet company.
I used to use their Jukebox software a few years ago. It was great, iTunes years before iTunes. I dumped it only because it kept hassling me to upgrade, buy RealPlayer, buy this, buy that. It was unbearably annoying, and none of it could be shut off.
Honestly, I don't think this is as terrible a thing as Apple might fear. I do agree that they need to nip it in the bud to prevent Microsoft from doing something similar. I can't see a whole lot of competition from Real (right now their acting like spoiled children), and I certainly don't plan to install it on my iPod!
Could somebody once and for all please explain to me the wonderous appeal of Python? As somebody who's been stung one too many times by the freakin' tabs being out of whack, I just don't understand the appeal of Python. It's like Perl crossed with Java, with a smattering of idiocy. Whoever came up with the idea that hiding block delimiters from you would lead to better programming...sheesh! Guido should be ashamed of himself.
Perl is messy but powerful. Java is elegant and great to maintain, but a little long-winded. Personally, I love Objective C: what C++ should have been.
What's the compelling reason to watch anything on television? It's merely a form of entertainment you might enjoy.
I've never found any compelling reason to watch movies or television, aside from entertainment value. Even informational programming, such as documentaries, is much more lightweight in content richness than a book on the subject.
I've got a PS1 and a PS2, and I use the backwards compatibility all the time. PS1 has some great games. Plus, I had a couple dozen games for PS1 when I bought a PS2--my daughter and I still love playing quite a few of them (not the least of which is Krash Karts).
While IANAL, you might also indicate to the faculty that the non-compliant code probably does not conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act or other university guidelines, and is unavailable to blind or otherwise disabled students. Given that you work for a public institution, this could be a significant problem.
I love the idea that the only true way to write software is to sit down with a blank page and start typing away. How many developers out there don't share each others' code?
I don't know many mathematicians who start from scratch on anything. I'm pretty sure ol' Einstein built on the work of others. He was just a little more creative than most.
I have WinXP and FC2 running on the same laptop, and everything seems to be booting just great. One tip I saw online somewhere was to install everything on primary partitions. Granted, you only get four, but that's enough for XP, swap,/boot, and root.
I had nothing but high hopes for Enterprise when it came on the air. Maybe I expected too much, but how about storylines leading in the direction of the founding of the Federation? I think they could do some very interested stories about meeting new alien races, overcoming cultural differences, and moving on towards a confederacy of planets.
While I didn't like the ongoing story line this past season, they could turn it around (noticed a little of that the past couple of weeks). If they bring the Xindi in as allies of the humans against the sphere builders, that could start things in the right direction for the Federation (gotta get the Vulcans involved first, though).
I did like some of the stories this season too, especially the one about Trip's clone and the one with Archer's quantum brain injury. Very creative.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, use free software every day at work. Those people (myself included; I have contributed to free software) have chosen to release their product for free. HBO has not.
It's a ridiculous statement to say it's o.k. to take something from me without my permission. Doesn't matter when I choose to release it, where I choose to release it, or how I choose to release it, it's my work and I can do with it as I please. Just because a T.V. show is available in the U.S. and not the U.K. doesn't mean it's o.k. to download it from the U.S. and watch it. I understand you really want to see Rome, or Battlestar Galactica, or whatever. But it's not your property. If you take it from me without compensation, you've stolen something from me. Just because it doesn't involve physical goods, theft is still theft.
Of course I'm probably arguing with a bunch of greedy teenagers here who don't have bills to pay or families to support, so I'm sure my dismay is falling on deaf ears.
Car thieves are miffed because auto makers are now installing locks on all cars.
...or...
If you're going to be a thief, don't complain when someone tries to stop you from stealing their stuff. Anyone who complains about this is an immature idiot. HBO spends 10 million dollars to develop, produce, and advertise a show on their premium networks. To recoup the costs, they charge subscribers money. For those that don't wish to subscribe, they sell DVDs in a couple of months, so that you can either buy the DVDs or get them off Netflix or from some other video rental source. HBO makes 20 million dollars from this process. HBO goes on to keep their people employed and continue to make television series and movies.
HBO spends 10 million dollars, and everybody steals their content without reimbursing HBO for any of their costs. 10,000 people lose their jobs because HBO declares bankruptcy.
I know this is an extreme case, but I'm tired of all the whining because a company (or even a person) who produces something that you think is valuable enough to at least steal would like to make some money off of it. Yes, I know they're rich, but if you don't like that, stop buying their product. Why exactly should networks, studios, software developers, or anyone else provide anything of value if there's no benefit to them, i.e. no way to make a living?
I'm a software developer, and if my company doesn't get paid for something, I get laid off.
Grow up people.
Dude, what are you doing on Slashdot running Windows? You're going to get yourself killed.
Why is it every time we talk about an open source project, it's "taking off?" To me, that just means it sort-of works, but not really.
Unlike Linux, it has a nice, fast GUI interface, and it runs Photoshop and Quicktime.
Unlike Linux, you can actually close the laptop lid and put the thing to sleep.
Unlike Linux and Windows, your iPod will work really well (if you think an iPod works well on Windows, try it on a Mac; not the iPod's fault, just the way Windows handles USB devices).
Unlike Windows, it's much more organized, has better tools, and actually supports UNIX tools (including Apache & PHP) natively (sans-Cygwin).
Unlike a Windows laptop, it's light and has great battery life.
Unlike Windows and Linux, you can sync your Bluetooth phone and PDA over Bluetooth. Imagine that, devices that actually talk to one another!
TextMate supports syntax highlighting and some great customizability for almost every language out there. Comes with lots of ObjectiveC, Ruby, and PHP stuff right out of the box.
Unlink Eclipse, TextMate is actually fast and responsive. (Anyone else ever notice that as Eclipse approaches Idea's level of functionality, it gets slower and slower? I'll stick with Idea for Java development, thank you very much.)
You'll actually start doing something *with* your computer, instead of doing something *to* it, and you'll enjoy your computer again.
P.S. My recommendation is for anyone who doesn't have a problem actually paying a little money for a decent product, nor tied his line to RMS's ship of folly. I figure you get what you pay for.
...I'll just use AJAX and DHTML. Seems to work faster on most machines anyway.
Try IntelliJ Idea. You get what you pay for.
...ten years ago. I stopped using it when the kernel hit 2.6 and Debian was still on 2.2. The whole "ultimate stability" thing is just an excuse--I think Debian can't get their act together and release an updated system.
All the more power to Ubuntu. It's a great system, easy to install and use, and really stable. If Debian can't keep up, let them die in an Darwinian haze.
For all of you out there who don't like Enterprise, I ask you to give it one more shot. I hated the whole temporal war crap and the xindie weapon story line (basically, seasons 1.5 to the end of 3), but the fourth season it awesome. They've got a new producer and better writing, and the stories are much more what you're probably looking for: the beginnings of the Federation, our alliance with the Vulcans, etc.
Just watch one or two fourth season episodes before you write the show off as a disaster.
I've read the PostgreSQL manual, and I don't remember them every encouraging me to create tables in the manner in which you suggest.
I'm no DBA, so I've never heard of a "Type 3 Normal" design. Neither has Google, so if you could point me at a reference online, I'd be interested in checking it out. Granted, I have no details on what your project goals are, or who your target customer is. Most importantly, I have no idea what the size of your database is or the user load on the application.
That said, given that your choices were between Ruby and Python, I can't imagine that it's a massively scaled application, with database replication, server session replication, graceful failover, etc., etc. If you're willing to put your money where your mouth is, maybe you'll let us all know (a) your application, and (b) what person or persons "responsible for the design and implementation of the largest databases used in hospitals and other mission-critical fields across the country" like this design? I'd ask them if they'd ever take their huge Oracle databases and perform dynamic table or schema generation on the fly.
Whenever anyone has come to me wanting to dynamically generate tables and schema, it's typically either been bad design, or trying to apply non-relational data storage requirements to a relational database. Everybody knows you're supposed to save all your data in a relational database, right? Doesn't matter what the format... I fight this battle with management all the time. Everybody and their brother has heard of Oracle, but sometimes just a plain text file does the job nicely.
As an aside, I'm curious how you would generate reporting against your database? I'm guessing you just do a general search against user-supplied fields or something. How ever would you optimize those queries against indexes? Either they are very small tables, or your code must be doing most of the work a standard RDBMS would be doing, calculating possible SELECTs and generating indexes on the fly by interpolating user intent. Again, not knowing the details of your application, this is just a guess. Would definitely pose an interesting problem.
Now, having said all this, if you're just generating tables based on a well-defined set of configuration information entered by the user at installation time, well, that's a different story. I could see how that would be a problem for Rails without being bad database design.
My DBA is an Oracle DBA. Unless you've managed to cluster several hundred PostgreSQL servers, I'd say my DBA can beat up your DBA.
"dynamically named tables and schemas!?!"
You have got to be kidding me...you're naming database tables and schemas on the fly, from your application?
My DBA just threw up.
Almost everybody here seems to be missing the point: RDF isn't for you--it's for your computer. The point of RDF and the Semantic Web is to structure knowledge so that programs can interact with one another to perform better, even in some cases simulating intelligent decisions. Unless you're working in developing Semantic Web technology, you should never have to look at an RDF document.
It's not a wiki. It's not a new way to see metadata. It's your softwares' version of the WWW.
It's not always about you humans.
I saw this film last weekend and never got the summer blockbuster thing. I saw it as parodying America--we rush in without thinking, blow things up, wreck the place, then say we've made the world safer. It parodys actors to the extreme: just because they make big bucks and are always on the covers of tabloids, somehow they're better equipped than politicians to work towards peaceful international solutions. And its parodys of the puppets tend to be funniest of all.
I do agree Parker and Stone let loose on everyone. The right wing, the left wing, terrorists, and puppets are all fair game. But I don't think blowing up Mt. Rushmore was parodying summer blockbusters. It was a statement that the current U.S. extreme mindsets (liberal and conservative) are doing more to destroy the ideals of the founding fathers than any terrorists ever could.
Who knows, maybe I'm just reading in more than is really there. But I think Parker is a damn smart guy who hides his commentary in humor extremely well.
Oh, and the puppets and the sets were incredible. No wonder they got so burned out making this--it's artwork in and of itself.
Why exactly is the industry focused on cell phones as the point of convergence? Every phone I've ever had has had a terrible UI.
I like having my Palm PC for my calendar and phone book, my phone for calling friends and family, and my iPod for playing music. And I would like them to all talk together (which is the case, except for the iPod).
Is anyone out there serious using Real for anything? Haven't we all gotten sick of the huge marketing machine behind everything they do. Popups everywhere, sales offers out the wazoo. You can't do anything with their software without being hassled about buying something else. They're the worst kind of Internet company.
I used to use their Jukebox software a few years ago. It was great, iTunes years before iTunes. I dumped it only because it kept hassling me to upgrade, buy RealPlayer, buy this, buy that. It was unbearably annoying, and none of it could be shut off.
Honestly, I don't think this is as terrible a thing as Apple might fear. I do agree that they need to nip it in the bud to prevent Microsoft from doing something similar. I can't see a whole lot of competition from Real (right now their acting like spoiled children), and I certainly don't plan to install it on my iPod!
Spoken like a man who's never been offered a job by Microsoft.
Could somebody once and for all please explain to me the wonderous appeal of Python? As somebody who's been stung one too many times by the freakin' tabs being out of whack, I just don't understand the appeal of Python. It's like Perl crossed with Java, with a smattering of idiocy. Whoever came up with the idea that hiding block delimiters from you would lead to better programming...sheesh! Guido should be ashamed of himself.
Perl is messy but powerful. Java is elegant and great to maintain, but a little long-winded. Personally, I love Objective C: what C++ should have been.
Reminds me of those old handheld LCD games that Nintendo started with, before the NES.
What's the compelling reason to watch anything on television? It's merely a form of entertainment you might enjoy.
I've never found any compelling reason to watch movies or television, aside from entertainment value. Even informational programming, such as documentaries, is much more lightweight in content richness than a book on the subject.
I've got a PS1 and a PS2, and I use the backwards compatibility all the time. PS1 has some great games. Plus, I had a couple dozen games for PS1 when I bought a PS2--my daughter and I still love playing quite a few of them (not the least of which is Krash Karts).
While IANAL, you might also indicate to the faculty that the non-compliant code probably does not conform to the Americans with Disabilities Act or other university guidelines, and is unavailable to blind or otherwise disabled students. Given that you work for a public institution, this could be a significant problem.
Isn't this news a tad old? I remember seeing this on /. a few months ago.
I love the idea that the only true way to write software is to sit down with a blank page and start typing away. How many developers out there don't share each others' code?
I don't know many mathematicians who start from scratch on anything. I'm pretty sure ol' Einstein built on the work of others. He was just a little more creative than most.
I have WinXP and FC2 running on the same laptop, and everything seems to be booting just great. One tip I saw online somewhere was to install everything on primary partitions. Granted, you only get four, but that's enough for XP, swap, /boot, and root.
For home users, isn't that enough?
I had nothing but high hopes for Enterprise when it came on the air. Maybe I expected too much, but how about storylines leading in the direction of the founding of the Federation? I think they could do some very interested stories about meeting new alien races, overcoming cultural differences, and moving on towards a confederacy of planets.
While I didn't like the ongoing story line this past season, they could turn it around (noticed a little of that the past couple of weeks). If they bring the Xindi in as allies of the humans against the sphere builders, that could start things in the right direction for the Federation (gotta get the Vulcans involved first, though).
I did like some of the stories this season too, especially the one about Trip's clone and the one with Archer's quantum brain injury. Very creative.