Exactly! The only people that are really upset with voter turnout are the people in the mainstream media. After all, they would like to buy and sell votes the same way that they buy and sell Coca-Cola. They can't imagine anything more wonderful than a world where they can fill the prospective voter's mind up with influences and then turn him/her loose on a point and click voting world. That way the potential voter could participate in politics without having to leave their armchair even for a moment. Click here to purchase a Big Mac, Click here to vote for President.
Quite frankly this idea scares the heck out of me. At least with the current system even the people who disagree with me have spent the time it takes to at least find out where the polls are.
There is no way to determine competence short of a mind reading device, so your idea is not practical.
Actually when talking about political competence there is a easy, inexpensive, and nearly sure-fire way of determining competence.
Competent people vote.
If a person can not take enough interest in their surroundings to spend 30 minutes casting their vote, then they are clearly incompetent, and the political system is better off without their participation. We don't need more people voting for candidates based on issues like the candidate's hairdo.
It is especially critical that these people not vote in their local elections, where they might actually make a difference. Competent voters know that local politics make the biggest difference in their lives anyhow. A bad president has many checks and balances, a local Sheriff is another story altogether.
That's why I am not interested in people being able to vote online. Voting should require some of your time, and it should require that the potential voter have enough foresight to a) know where the polls are, and b) know when the different election days are.
Other than that I am all for making voting information publicly available in any shape or form that they candidates can dream up (and that doesn't include blocking traffic:). I am also for educating prospective voters so that they too can participate in the process. Once people begin voting, they almost always start actually paying attention to the issues as well, and they may even become a better person from the experience.
And the improvement of our citizens is good for everyone.
Yes, us youngsters are going to save the world. We are going to unleash the power of the net and make the entire world a better place. And then we'll change the name of the U. S. of A. to Shangrila and everyone will get a free iMac.
The problems with the current political landscape are more the fault of TV media than anything else. The Lincoln-Douglas debates went on for days and every American that could read eventually read a copy of them. Nowadays all the average American knows about the politics is what they hear in the 30 second soundbites between television commercials. Americans have become addicted to the "quick fix," and would rather burn cars and trash coffee shops than go through the painful effort of politics.
The good news is that for the people that are actually intelligent enough to vote the current system works just fine. Special interest groups get what they want out of the system because they take the time to vote. It's quite simple really.
As for the rest of the article, it's clearly ridiculous. Neighborhood chat rooms? Are you joking? Heck, I can walk right out my front door and actually talk to my neighbors (and frequently do). And politics is still an important topic amongst Americans. The last thing that the U.S. needs is one more barrier between the people in our communities. The Internet is great for creating artificial communities like/., but there is no reason to make artificial communities out of our actual communities.
And as for your idea of voting from our PCs, quite frankly that is the last thing that I want. I am all for having political information be net-accessible, but I think that the actual voting should require that you take some time out of your day. After all, the problem isn't that we need more voters, the problem is that we need more informed voters. If voting were easier all we would do is increase the importance of things like the physical appearance of the candidate and how well he forms "sound bites." People would sit down at their PC and vote for the candidate that looked the "coolest."
Eventually the Net generation will realize that they need to vote (and be active in politics) to be heard, and they will get out and vote. They will give up their scruffy clothes, and their organized acts of violence in the name of "protest" and they will instead simply walk down tho the local elementary school and cast their vote. They will especially pay attention to the local elections because they will have learned that that is where they have the most influence, and where they can make the biggest impact. Of course, by then they will be Senior Citizens, but that is the way of things.
People don't complain about the execution speed of Python or Perl because nobody touts either Python or Perl as being fast. When you are working with a scripting language you are optimizing your development time, not execution time.
The Open Source community has long been skeptical of Java for many very good reasons. For example, as you yourself state many of the core Java libraries are painfully inefficient. Another problem with Java is that it has been touted from it's inception as a "Write Once Run Anywhere" language, and yet the Linux and BSD versions of Java have historically been late, buggy, and incomplete. In other words, Java has been a "Write Once, Run On Solaris Or Windows" language up until very recently. Perl and Python both work very well on the Free Unixes, and (speaking as someone who tried Java first) generally performed as well or nearly as well as the more complicated Java. For example, Perl will completely destroy Java if the task includes a lot of text manipulation. And comparing a GUI written in Python/Tkinter (or better yet wxPython) to a GUI written in Swing is ridiculous (or has been until recently on the free Unixes). The Python GUI would almost certainly use less memory, and be more responsive.
The killer has been that Java has historically had all the speed of an interpretted language and all the complexity of C++, hardly a compelling combination. This is just starting to change, but it will be some time before Java loses its stigma. In the meantime the hackers that have chosen Perl or Python have very little reason to switch. They are, by in large, quite happy with their choices. And it really isn't that hard to implement a solution in Python (or Perl) and then optimize the slow bits in C.
In other words, the operating system is a complete commodity and it's cost can be folded into "Services" as a whole. Linux invented this business model, Sun is running with it with Free Solaris, and after a deep breath, Microsoft will survive having it's OS division broken off.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, their other big cash cow, MS Office, is also soon to become a commodity. It might take a few years, but Linux and the Gnome Foundation are looking to cut off Microsoft's air supply completely. A Free, cross-platform, component-based, office suite is soon going to be available, and Microsoft is going to suffer. The fact that Microsoft has become addicted to astronomical profit margins and a constant increase in their stock price will only exacerbate the problem. They can't let go of either Windows or MS Office (because it would affect their revenue too much in the short term), and yet they aren't going to be able to compete with capable free software products forever (especially at their current price structure).
In the end it is going to be practically impossible to make money selling commodity software. But that's OK, software will still get written, it simply will be written by hardware or service based "solution providers."
Re:Illegal... but should it be?
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I used to live in Lima, Peru, where they force everyone to vote by fining non-voters. And my naive former self used to think that this was a good idea, but I don't think so anymore.
You see, in Peru everyone voted, but not everyone took the time to become educated about the issues. Because of this they were easily taken in by the most transparent of lies. After all, the average Peruvian doesn't have the education necessary to make complex economic value judgements. And the average American doesn't either. That's why factors like how tall the candidate is actually matter.
The secret of the US system is that the fanatics don't have more votes than you do, they simply are more likely to vote. That's why the senior citizen vote is so important. Senior citizens have been around long enough to know that their vote is worth casting. They read up on the issues, and they go out to the polls en masse. Educated people also tend to vote.
The rest of the populace assumes that their voice can't be heard, and so they whine and complain, but don't vote.
As for the fact that the person who raises the most money often wins. Well, with our current fund raising laws, this shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, with a cap on the amount an individual can give the politician with the most money generally has the most supporters.
My personal observation is that Americans that get involved in politics generally realize that they do have a voice, and the people that complain generally don't take the time to vote. The few exceptions to this rule are those that hold opinions that are so unpopular that we all should be glad that they don't win. Even the far out loonies have an influence that is far greater on politics than those that don't vote.
I think that I covered that. MS would almost certainly have their own non-GPLed libraries. However, one would only have to copy those to your distribution of choice and you would be off and running.
Technically it wouldn't even be much of a feat. Heck, Linux has been running random SCO binaries for years. Running Linux binaries is a piece of cake (provided that the proper libraries could be copied from the MS Linux CD).
Now, there very well could be legal ramifications should Microsoft license MS Office (and it's closed libs) in an unfriendly matter, but that is a political rather than technical question.
The question therefore would be how Microsoft could change Linux sufficiently so that MS Office would only run on their version.
Fortunately, for Linuxers, they can't. Any changes that they make to the kernel or any of the system libraries would require that they also release source code to their changes. Sure, they would almost certainly need to create their own libraries for things like win32 and such, but that would just mean that the Linuxer that wanted to run Office on his Debian GNU/Linux box would need to copy Office and the other necessary libs over to his Debian box.
I suppose that it is theoretically possible that they could change the license to MS Office for Linux so that it was only legal to run it on MS Linux, but that wouldn't make it any less technically possible to run MS Office for Linux on your distribution of choice, it would only make it illegal to do so.
It goes without saying that Microsoft won't release MS Office under the GPL, but that doesn't mean that it won't work under any Linux distribution with the right set of libraries. Heck, my guess is that within a week MS Office for Linux would run on FreeBSD.
Of course, this is all just fun and games. Microsoft isn't going to release MS Office for Linux, if they are behind this particular story (which is doubtful) they are simply doing it to cut down industry enthusiasm for Sun's new GPLed StarOffice. An announcement like this is just the thing to freeze deployment of StarOffice on Linux. After all, why waste time deploying StarOffice on your Linux boxes when "in just a bit" you can have MS Office?
Not that I would personally rate this particular story very high above a net hoax. One anonymous developer somewhere in Israel does not convince me that Microsoft has seen the light. Especially since this move would almost certainly seriously undercut Microsofts hopes for Windows 2000 on everyone's desktop.
Yes, the MySQL folks have created their own set of benchmarks because they do poorly in the standard benchmarks created by the rest of the industry.
The reason for this is quite obvious, as Monty himselfs says in the article:
MySQL 3.22 is for example not very good for mixed inserts + selects on the same table
So because MySQL does so poorly on the TPC standard benchmarks, they created their own. Now, if the PostgreSQL guys can be considered biased for using industry standard benchmarks, then I can't imagine the word for MySQL's benchmarks. Whatever the word might be, it would have to be far stronger than simply "biased." First of all MySQL's benchmarks run as one single process. In other words, if your "real world" consists of multiple clients then MySQL's benchmark is nowhere near "real world."
In other words MySQL's benchmarks are customed tailored to highlight MySQL's strengths, while ignoring the strengths of most other databases.
I have said it once, and I will say it again. If your database is going to be mostly read-only, and if you aren't worried about the myriad of features that PostgreSQL has that MySQL doesn't, well then, you would be better off using MySQL. If, on the other hand, you will be both writing and reading from your tables (at the same time), or if you need transactions and ACID capabilities then PostgreSQL is a far better choice.
The sad part (for MySQL anyway) is that PostgreSQL can be set up so that it competitive as a read-only database. It takes a little more work (clustered indexes, disabling fsync, etc.), but it is do-able. If you need PostgreSQL's features, however, MySQL is not going to get you there.
My father is a lawyer, and he is addicted to WordPerfect for much the same reasons that the Engineering community is addicted to LaTeX. He has years of templates and experience using them, and his brain is now hardwired with WordPerfect key shortcuts. Not too mention the fact that, in many ways, WordPerfect is better suited to the creation of legal documents than say MS Word.
Documents are a big deal to lawyers, and they want to get them exactly right. Their idea of exactly right is quite a bit different than most people's idea of exactly right. WordPerfect allows them to get their documents to look like they feel they should. I have no idea why their sense of document aesthetics is so weird, but I personally think that it has something to do with the funny sized paper they use.
Exactly, Corel is going to end up as a classic case of "too little, too late." Their waning marketshare on Windows is not going to save them. Outside the legal profession PerfectOffice users are about as likely to upgrade to MS Office as they are to buy the newest version of PerfectOffice. And on the Linux side there is little chance that they are going to be able to compete with the coming Gnome Office/StarOffice juggernaut. A component based Free Software office suite is going to clean up in the Linux sphere. It will be included with all of the distributions, and will become a critical part of the GNU/Linux infrastructure.
That leaves Corel with some nice graphics programs, in a market that appears to be moving in Adobe's favor. I would be getting out too.
You can install the necessary debs by hand. Check out man dpkg if you aren't sure how this works. Or you could do what I do and simply change the line in/etc/apt/sources.list to unstable long enough to:
apt-get install php4
This will get php4, and whatever other packages are necessary, and then you can switch back to stable.
Either way there is no sense building the packages by hand.
Hmmm... does Linux support hot-swappable system boards? Does it scale well up to 64 processors? No and no. Comparing Solaris and Linux is a futile pastime. They came from different roots, and are meant for different jobs. Perhaps Solaris is a little slow on x86 machines, but Linux has the advantage that it has been developed specifcally on this architecturefor years. Most of Solaris's devlopment is geared toward running on high-end Sparc's, not lowly x86's.
Which is why Solaris will continue to be used on the high end for a very long time. However, this does not change the fact that for most people Linux is faster.
This is not a slam on Solaris. Solaris has been tuned for hardware an order of magnitude more powerful than the one to four processor boxes where Linux shines.
When the put a 64 processor Sparc on my desk maybe then I will start to worry about how well Linux runs on it. In the meantime Linux will probably be my desktop and development system of choice:).
I actually had read enough of the AS3AP test to assume that you ran the multi-user tests alongside the single user tests. Other than test 2 of the multi-user tests (Information retrieval) PostgreSQL should have killed MySQL. The second that you start combining writes with those reads MySQL's performance decreases dramatically.
Which is basically why I use PostgreSQL. I have found that I can even get PostgreSQL nearly up to MySQL's pure read performance simply by tuning the DB, indexing it properly, and vacuuming. Just the addition of subselects is worth the upgrade. To say nothing of stored procedures, triggers, or rules. Used correctly these mechanisms not only speed development, but they allow you to access your data quickly and easily. For example, complex queries can be made extremely fast simply by coding in the necessary stored procedures.
Combine PostgreSQL's many strengths with a top-notch development team and the most useful mailing lists I have ever encountered and you have a winning project.
Of course, even if Troll Tech satisfies the FSF crowd and goes GPL compliant, that wont exactly improve the situation from commercial software standpoint. GNOME/GTK is almost entirely LGPL and thus very friendly for commercial development, while a GPL equivalent Qt would require payment for commercial proprietary development. Exchanging Motif/CDE for another proprietary royalty encumbered toolkit might not be as palatable as exchanging it for a free one.
That is as succinctly put as possible. Although I would point out that if QT was GPLed at least the free software critics would be mollified. As it stands now QT's licensing makes Gnome a better platform for both commercial and free software development. The free software advocates appreciate Gnome's well understood license (and the fact that Gnome is bundled with Debian GNU/Linux), and the commercial folk appreciate the fact that they can use and modify Gnome without having to worry about licensing fees.
This is especially true now that Gnome has reach a point where it is essentially stable, mature, and full-featured. The Gnome folks took the time to nail the infrastructure first, and so they don't have to worry about things like KDE's switch from DCOP to KParts. The fact that Gnome is Corba based is also a plus in the eyes of companies like Sun, HP, or IBM.
The most important factor, in this particular case however, was almost certainly the license.
Any tests that you might have done prior to 6.5.3 are ridiculously outdated at this point. And the difference between 6.5.3 and 7.0.2 is quite noticeable.
PostgreSQL has come a long way since the versions that you are talking about.
Let me preface my remarks by stating that I am a huge PostgreSQL fan. I personally believe that the added features that you get with PostgreSQL are very important, and so I am not very interested in MySQL.
That being said the benchmarks in question definitely play to PostgreSQL's strengths and MySQL's weaknesses. The AS3AP (which is the test where PostgreSQL was pitted against MySQL) involves transactions. PostgreSQL has some very sophisticated support for transactions (MVCC) and MySQL has their kludge interface to Sleepycat's DBM. That alone would explain the numbers.
Which only goes to show what everyone has been saying forever. If you don't need transactions or subselects then MySQL will make you very happy. If you do, well then, you might want to try another product.
Microsoft's biggest competitor in this particular arena is not Lotus, Corel, or IBM, and it certainly isn't StarOffice or any of the other Linux office suites. Microsoft's biggest competitor is older versions of their own software. In the past Microsoft has been able to change document formats (and other fun stuff) to force people to upgrade, but with a freely available alternative (with decent import filters) Microsoft has to be careful of such tactics.
After all, if you are being forced to switch Office suites, which would you rather switch to, the freely available office suite (with free upgrades), or the office suite that is guaranteed to cost you $400/seat + upgrade costs every two years forever.
As Gnome Office continues to get better and better Microsoft is going to have a harder and harder time justifying their outrageous prices.
The ususal "fundamentalists" in this case not only control the wording of the GPL (which at the end-users preference can be retro-active), but they are itching for a case that will provide legal precedence for enforcement of the GPL.
If I were part of the KDE team, which I am not, I would put some serious thought into rectifying their problems between the QPL and the GPL as outlined by the fundamentalists in the FSF. Like it or not, when it comes to the GPL the FSF calls the shots.
The KDE/QT folk might be clever folk when it comes to writing code, but when it comes to writing software licenses they have been incredibly dense, and it is coming back to bite them.
This particular announcement is a perfect example. KDE/QT should have become the standard desktop, but their licensing "issues" have cost them the support of some of the biggest powerhouses in the business. Sun, for example, is basically donating the entire StarOffice Suite, and all future modifications to the Gnome effort. That will no doubt include the services of a whole pile of full-time engineers working on Gnome. Those engineers could have been working on KDE, but they won't be.
Aside from all of that, there is a good chance that Sun, HP, IBM et al. chose Gnome for technical reasons. Yes, I realize that KDE 2.0 has KParts, but bonobo is already here, and it works now. The KDE-ers that talk about the instability of Gnome are almost certainly running RedHat's ancient version of Gnome combined with Enlightenment. HelixCode's version of Gnome combined with Sawfish is an entirely different kettle of fish, and it already has Bonobo.
The most important consideration, however, is almost certainly licensing related. Gnome's LGPL is not only unambiguous, but it is also Commercial Software friendly. KDE, on the other hand is neither as clearly legal, nor as commercially friendly.
There is no substitute yet for a human when it comes to intelligent filtering. Squid, Perl, and ipchains goes a long way, but there really isn't a substitute for scanning the log files.
I set up something similar for public use for my troop of Boy Scouts. After explaining to them how their privileges would go away (and their parents would be notified) if they disobeyed the rules, and showing them how easy it was for me to monitor what they were surfing (a quick example involving a simple Perl script and the squid access log) they were off and running.
The system has been surprisingly automatic, and it has had the added consequence of getting several of the boys interested in tools like Perl, Squid, and Linux.
However, it wouldn't work at all if there wasn't an intelligent person manning the switches. Much of the tedium can be removed from the job, but your computer is not going to make value judgements for you. No matter how fancy your porn detection algorithms are there will be a way around them, or worse yet, there will be web sites that generate false positives. But if you put an actual human in the mix, then you can make the type of useful system that the poster above mentions.
There are all sorts of things that you can expect to be able to do on any Unix-like OS. You expect X-Windows, NFS, vi, etc. Yet at one time or another most of the Unix "standards" had some sort of competition.
Miguel is proposing to standardize Linux (and Unix as well) simply by creating Free software that is so cool that it becomes ubiquitous. Instead of writing their own HTML widget, XML parser, Address book, text editor widget, etc. programmers will simply borrow the GNOME widgets. Programmers will do this because GNOME is free, comes with source code, and because GNOME can be installed anywhere.
GNOME will simply become one more layer in the existing framework that is UNIX. Some people won't use it in much the same way that some Linuxers don't use X-Windows. But most of the new software will happily use these shared components in much the same way that they happily use the existing shared Unix libraries.
Very well said, especially the comment about declaring martial law. However, the situation is not nearly as dark as you portray. First off, I would argue that under the circumstances walking around in a "load bearing harness" and carrying a gas mask could very well be considered "reasonable cause." The rule of law does not require that our policemen become idiots. This character was clearly looking for trouble in a very dangerous situation. One in which the policemen are in very real danger. Mob violence is a very real and very explosive thing. This clown was actively seeking violence, and yet the police treated him quite fairly and decently for all of that.
Furthermore, there is nothing sinister about the police asking suspiscious people to identify themselves and their possessions, in fact this is standard police procedure. They can legally ask to see your ID, or see what is in your backpack. They can also legally ask you to open your trunk or let them inside your house. They can't force you to comply without a search warrant, but it never hurts to ask:). Many criminals willingly give permission for searches that would be illegal otherwise. If you can't be bothered to learn what your rights are, then I would suggest not becoming a criminal.
The suspects own accounts show that he was, in fact, conspiring to incite a riot. Any honest citizen, even one dressed in a load bearing harness, would have almost certainly been spared the paddy wagon just by apologizing to the police and leaving what was clearly a dangerous area. That's why the police were there, they were protecting innocent citizens by keeping them out of harm's way.
I personally wouldn't stand for the government declaring martial law every time that there was a political gathering. Martial law should not be easy to invoke as a protection against abuse. The police in this particular encounter did a marvelous job of balancing their duty to protect the citizenry with their duty to uphold this particular person's rights. The police broke no laws, and violated no one's rights.
The author of this particular piece can't say the same for himself.
There are, thank goodness, images of both frozen and even unstable available. See: cdimage.debian.org for more information.
In fact, if you are new to Debian I would strongly recommend checking out the frozen iso images. Installation has improved tremendously, and you'll end up with substantially newer packages.
Just remember that Debian is designed in such a way that you only install it once. So when you get tired of upgrading your RPM based distros piecemeal, wade through a Debian install and learn the power of apt-get.
Hmm... I would bet that the same thing could be done with mgetty fairly easily. That way I wouldn't have to pay for a special Caller-ID box, I would have yet another excuse to tinker with my Linux box, and I could say that my solution "ran on Linux."
Now just imagine a beowulf cluster of those babies!
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! The only people that are really upset with voter turnout are the people in the mainstream media. After all, they would like to buy and sell votes the same way that they buy and sell Coca-Cola. They can't imagine anything more wonderful than a world where they can fill the prospective voter's mind up with influences and then turn him/her loose on a point and click voting world. That way the potential voter could participate in politics without having to leave their armchair even for a moment. Click here to purchase a Big Mac, Click here to vote for President.
Quite frankly this idea scares the heck out of me. At least with the current system even the people who disagree with me have spent the time it takes to at least find out where the polls are.
Actually when talking about political competence there is a easy, inexpensive, and nearly sure-fire way of determining competence.
Competent people vote.
If a person can not take enough interest in their surroundings to spend 30 minutes casting their vote, then they are clearly incompetent, and the political system is better off without their participation. We don't need more people voting for candidates based on issues like the candidate's hairdo.
It is especially critical that these people not vote in their local elections, where they might actually make a difference. Competent voters know that local politics make the biggest difference in their lives anyhow. A bad president has many checks and balances, a local Sheriff is another story altogether.
That's why I am not interested in people being able to vote online. Voting should require some of your time, and it should require that the potential voter have enough foresight to a) know where the polls are, and b) know when the different election days are.
Other than that I am all for making voting information publicly available in any shape or form that they candidates can dream up (and that doesn't include blocking traffic :). I am also for educating prospective voters so that they too can participate in the process. Once people begin voting, they almost always start actually paying attention to the issues as well, and they may even become a better person from the experience.
And the improvement of our citizens is good for everyone.
Yes, us youngsters are going to save the world. We are going to unleash the power of the net and make the entire world a better place. And then we'll change the name of the U. S. of A. to Shangrila and everyone will get a free iMac.
The problems with the current political landscape are more the fault of TV media than anything else. The Lincoln-Douglas debates went on for days and every American that could read eventually read a copy of them. Nowadays all the average American knows about the politics is what they hear in the 30 second soundbites between television commercials. Americans have become addicted to the "quick fix," and would rather burn cars and trash coffee shops than go through the painful effort of politics.
The good news is that for the people that are actually intelligent enough to vote the current system works just fine. Special interest groups get what they want out of the system because they take the time to vote. It's quite simple really.
As for the rest of the article, it's clearly ridiculous. Neighborhood chat rooms? Are you joking? Heck, I can walk right out my front door and actually talk to my neighbors (and frequently do). And politics is still an important topic amongst Americans. The last thing that the U.S. needs is one more barrier between the people in our communities. The Internet is great for creating artificial communities like /., but there is no reason to make artificial communities out of our actual communities.
And as for your idea of voting from our PCs, quite frankly that is the last thing that I want. I am all for having political information be net-accessible, but I think that the actual voting should require that you take some time out of your day. After all, the problem isn't that we need more voters, the problem is that we need more informed voters. If voting were easier all we would do is increase the importance of things like the physical appearance of the candidate and how well he forms "sound bites." People would sit down at their PC and vote for the candidate that looked the "coolest."
Eventually the Net generation will realize that they need to vote (and be active in politics) to be heard, and they will get out and vote. They will give up their scruffy clothes, and their organized acts of violence in the name of "protest" and they will instead simply walk down tho the local elementary school and cast their vote. They will especially pay attention to the local elections because they will have learned that that is where they have the most influence, and where they can make the biggest impact. Of course, by then they will be Senior Citizens, but that is the way of things.
People don't complain about the execution speed of Python or Perl because nobody touts either Python or Perl as being fast. When you are working with a scripting language you are optimizing your development time, not execution time.
The Open Source community has long been skeptical of Java for many very good reasons. For example, as you yourself state many of the core Java libraries are painfully inefficient. Another problem with Java is that it has been touted from it's inception as a "Write Once Run Anywhere" language, and yet the Linux and BSD versions of Java have historically been late, buggy, and incomplete. In other words, Java has been a "Write Once, Run On Solaris Or Windows" language up until very recently. Perl and Python both work very well on the Free Unixes, and (speaking as someone who tried Java first) generally performed as well or nearly as well as the more complicated Java. For example, Perl will completely destroy Java if the task includes a lot of text manipulation. And comparing a GUI written in Python/Tkinter (or better yet wxPython) to a GUI written in Swing is ridiculous (or has been until recently on the free Unixes). The Python GUI would almost certainly use less memory, and be more responsive.
The killer has been that Java has historically had all the speed of an interpretted language and all the complexity of C++, hardly a compelling combination. This is just starting to change, but it will be some time before Java loses its stigma. In the meantime the hackers that have chosen Perl or Python have very little reason to switch. They are, by in large, quite happy with their choices. And it really isn't that hard to implement a solution in Python (or Perl) and then optimize the slow bits in C.
Unfortunately for Microsoft, their other big cash cow, MS Office, is also soon to become a commodity. It might take a few years, but Linux and the Gnome Foundation are looking to cut off Microsoft's air supply completely. A Free, cross-platform, component-based, office suite is soon going to be available, and Microsoft is going to suffer. The fact that Microsoft has become addicted to astronomical profit margins and a constant increase in their stock price will only exacerbate the problem. They can't let go of either Windows or MS Office (because it would affect their revenue too much in the short term), and yet they aren't going to be able to compete with capable free software products forever (especially at their current price structure).
In the end it is going to be practically impossible to make money selling commodity software. But that's OK, software will still get written, it simply will be written by hardware or service based "solution providers."
I used to live in Lima, Peru, where they force everyone to vote by fining non-voters. And my naive former self used to think that this was a good idea, but I don't think so anymore.
You see, in Peru everyone voted, but not everyone took the time to become educated about the issues. Because of this they were easily taken in by the most transparent of lies. After all, the average Peruvian doesn't have the education necessary to make complex economic value judgements. And the average American doesn't either. That's why factors like how tall the candidate is actually matter.
The secret of the US system is that the fanatics don't have more votes than you do, they simply are more likely to vote. That's why the senior citizen vote is so important. Senior citizens have been around long enough to know that their vote is worth casting. They read up on the issues, and they go out to the polls en masse. Educated people also tend to vote.
The rest of the populace assumes that their voice can't be heard, and so they whine and complain, but don't vote.
As for the fact that the person who raises the most money often wins. Well, with our current fund raising laws, this shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, with a cap on the amount an individual can give the politician with the most money generally has the most supporters.
My personal observation is that Americans that get involved in politics generally realize that they do have a voice, and the people that complain generally don't take the time to vote. The few exceptions to this rule are those that hold opinions that are so unpopular that we all should be glad that they don't win. Even the far out loonies have an influence that is far greater on politics than those that don't vote.
So vote before you complain.
I think that I covered that. MS would almost certainly have their own non-GPLed libraries. However, one would only have to copy those to your distribution of choice and you would be off and running.
Technically it wouldn't even be much of a feat. Heck, Linux has been running random SCO binaries for years. Running Linux binaries is a piece of cake (provided that the proper libraries could be copied from the MS Linux CD).
Now, there very well could be legal ramifications should Microsoft license MS Office (and it's closed libs) in an unfriendly matter, but that is a political rather than technical question.
The question therefore would be how Microsoft could change Linux sufficiently so that MS Office would only run on their version.
Fortunately, for Linuxers, they can't. Any changes that they make to the kernel or any of the system libraries would require that they also release source code to their changes. Sure, they would almost certainly need to create their own libraries for things like win32 and such, but that would just mean that the Linuxer that wanted to run Office on his Debian GNU/Linux box would need to copy Office and the other necessary libs over to his Debian box.
I suppose that it is theoretically possible that they could change the license to MS Office for Linux so that it was only legal to run it on MS Linux, but that wouldn't make it any less technically possible to run MS Office for Linux on your distribution of choice, it would only make it illegal to do so.
It goes without saying that Microsoft won't release MS Office under the GPL, but that doesn't mean that it won't work under any Linux distribution with the right set of libraries. Heck, my guess is that within a week MS Office for Linux would run on FreeBSD.
Of course, this is all just fun and games. Microsoft isn't going to release MS Office for Linux, if they are behind this particular story (which is doubtful) they are simply doing it to cut down industry enthusiasm for Sun's new GPLed StarOffice. An announcement like this is just the thing to freeze deployment of StarOffice on Linux. After all, why waste time deploying StarOffice on your Linux boxes when "in just a bit" you can have MS Office?
Not that I would personally rate this particular story very high above a net hoax. One anonymous developer somewhere in Israel does not convince me that Microsoft has seen the light. Especially since this move would almost certainly seriously undercut Microsofts hopes for Windows 2000 on everyone's desktop.
Yes, the MySQL folks have created their own set of benchmarks because they do poorly in the standard benchmarks created by the rest of the industry.
The reason for this is quite obvious, as Monty himselfs says in the article:
So because MySQL does so poorly on the TPC standard benchmarks, they created their own. Now, if the PostgreSQL guys can be considered biased for using industry standard benchmarks, then I can't imagine the word for MySQL's benchmarks. Whatever the word might be, it would have to be far stronger than simply "biased." First of all MySQL's benchmarks run as one single process. In other words, if your "real world" consists of multiple clients then MySQL's benchmark is nowhere near "real world."
In other words MySQL's benchmarks are customed tailored to highlight MySQL's strengths, while ignoring the strengths of most other databases.
I have said it once, and I will say it again. If your database is going to be mostly read-only, and if you aren't worried about the myriad of features that PostgreSQL has that MySQL doesn't, well then, you would be better off using MySQL. If, on the other hand, you will be both writing and reading from your tables (at the same time), or if you need transactions and ACID capabilities then PostgreSQL is a far better choice.
The sad part (for MySQL anyway) is that PostgreSQL can be set up so that it competitive as a read-only database. It takes a little more work (clustered indexes, disabling fsync, etc.), but it is do-able. If you need PostgreSQL's features, however, MySQL is not going to get you there.
My father is a lawyer, and he is addicted to WordPerfect for much the same reasons that the Engineering community is addicted to LaTeX. He has years of templates and experience using them, and his brain is now hardwired with WordPerfect key shortcuts. Not too mention the fact that, in many ways, WordPerfect is better suited to the creation of legal documents than say MS Word.
Documents are a big deal to lawyers, and they want to get them exactly right. Their idea of exactly right is quite a bit different than most people's idea of exactly right. WordPerfect allows them to get their documents to look like they feel they should. I have no idea why their sense of document aesthetics is so weird, but I personally think that it has something to do with the funny sized paper they use.
Exactly, Corel is going to end up as a classic case of "too little, too late." Their waning marketshare on Windows is not going to save them. Outside the legal profession PerfectOffice users are about as likely to upgrade to MS Office as they are to buy the newest version of PerfectOffice. And on the Linux side there is little chance that they are going to be able to compete with the coming Gnome Office/StarOffice juggernaut. A component based Free Software office suite is going to clean up in the Linux sphere. It will be included with all of the distributions, and will become a critical part of the GNU/Linux infrastructure.
That leaves Corel with some nice graphics programs, in a market that appears to be moving in Adobe's favor. I would be getting out too.
You can install the necessary debs by hand. Check out man dpkg if you aren't sure how this works. Or you could do what I do and simply change the line in /etc/apt/sources.list to unstable long enough to:
apt-get install php4
This will get php4, and whatever other packages are necessary, and then you can switch back to stable.
Either way there is no sense building the packages by hand.
Hmmm... does Linux support hot-swappable system boards? Does it scale well up to 64 processors? No and no. Comparing Solaris and Linux is a futile pastime. They came from different roots, and are meant for different jobs. Perhaps Solaris is a little slow on x86 machines, but Linux has the advantage that it has been developed specifcally on this architecturefor years. Most of Solaris's devlopment is geared toward running on high-end Sparc's, not lowly x86's.
Which is why Solaris will continue to be used on the high end for a very long time. However, this does not change the fact that for most people Linux is faster.
This is not a slam on Solaris. Solaris has been tuned for hardware an order of magnitude more powerful than the one to four processor boxes where Linux shines.
When the put a 64 processor Sparc on my desk maybe then I will start to worry about how well Linux runs on it. In the meantime Linux will probably be my desktop and development system of choice :).
I actually had read enough of the AS3AP test to assume that you ran the multi-user tests alongside the single user tests. Other than test 2 of the multi-user tests (Information retrieval) PostgreSQL should have killed MySQL. The second that you start combining writes with those reads MySQL's performance decreases dramatically.
Which is basically why I use PostgreSQL. I have found that I can even get PostgreSQL nearly up to MySQL's pure read performance simply by tuning the DB, indexing it properly, and vacuuming. Just the addition of subselects is worth the upgrade. To say nothing of stored procedures, triggers, or rules. Used correctly these mechanisms not only speed development, but they allow you to access your data quickly and easily. For example, complex queries can be made extremely fast simply by coding in the necessary stored procedures.
Combine PostgreSQL's many strengths with a top-notch development team and the most useful mailing lists I have ever encountered and you have a winning project.
Of course, even if Troll Tech satisfies the FSF crowd and goes GPL compliant, that wont exactly improve the situation from commercial software standpoint. GNOME/GTK is almost entirely LGPL and thus very friendly for commercial development, while a GPL equivalent Qt would require payment for commercial proprietary development. Exchanging Motif/CDE for another proprietary royalty encumbered toolkit might not be as palatable as exchanging it for a free one.
That is as succinctly put as possible. Although I would point out that if QT was GPLed at least the free software critics would be mollified. As it stands now QT's licensing makes Gnome a better platform for both commercial and free software development. The free software advocates appreciate Gnome's well understood license (and the fact that Gnome is bundled with Debian GNU/Linux), and the commercial folk appreciate the fact that they can use and modify Gnome without having to worry about licensing fees.
This is especially true now that Gnome has reach a point where it is essentially stable, mature, and full-featured. The Gnome folks took the time to nail the infrastructure first, and so they don't have to worry about things like KDE's switch from DCOP to KParts. The fact that Gnome is Corba based is also a plus in the eyes of companies like Sun, HP, or IBM.
The most important factor, in this particular case however, was almost certainly the license.
There is a PDF for the upcoming Addison-Wesley book, by none other than PostgreSQL's Bruce Momjian, available here.
Any tests that you might have done prior to 6.5.3 are ridiculously outdated at this point. And the difference between 6.5.3 and 7.0.2 is quite noticeable.
PostgreSQL has come a long way since the versions that you are talking about.
Let me preface my remarks by stating that I am a huge PostgreSQL fan. I personally believe that the added features that you get with PostgreSQL are very important, and so I am not very interested in MySQL.
That being said the benchmarks in question definitely play to PostgreSQL's strengths and MySQL's weaknesses. The AS3AP (which is the test where PostgreSQL was pitted against MySQL) involves transactions. PostgreSQL has some very sophisticated support for transactions (MVCC) and MySQL has their kludge interface to Sleepycat's DBM. That alone would explain the numbers.
Which only goes to show what everyone has been saying forever. If you don't need transactions or subselects then MySQL will make you very happy. If you do, well then, you might want to try another product.
Microsoft's biggest competitor in this particular arena is not Lotus, Corel, or IBM, and it certainly isn't StarOffice or any of the other Linux office suites. Microsoft's biggest competitor is older versions of their own software. In the past Microsoft has been able to change document formats (and other fun stuff) to force people to upgrade, but with a freely available alternative (with decent import filters) Microsoft has to be careful of such tactics.
After all, if you are being forced to switch Office suites, which would you rather switch to, the freely available office suite (with free upgrades), or the office suite that is guaranteed to cost you $400/seat + upgrade costs every two years forever.
As Gnome Office continues to get better and better Microsoft is going to have a harder and harder time justifying their outrageous prices.
The ususal "fundamentalists" in this case not only control the wording of the GPL (which at the end-users preference can be retro-active), but they are itching for a case that will provide legal precedence for enforcement of the GPL.
If I were part of the KDE team, which I am not, I would put some serious thought into rectifying their problems between the QPL and the GPL as outlined by the fundamentalists in the FSF. Like it or not, when it comes to the GPL the FSF calls the shots.
The KDE/QT folk might be clever folk when it comes to writing code, but when it comes to writing software licenses they have been incredibly dense, and it is coming back to bite them.
This particular announcement is a perfect example. KDE/QT should have become the standard desktop, but their licensing "issues" have cost them the support of some of the biggest powerhouses in the business. Sun, for example, is basically donating the entire StarOffice Suite, and all future modifications to the Gnome effort. That will no doubt include the services of a whole pile of full-time engineers working on Gnome. Those engineers could have been working on KDE, but they won't be.
Aside from all of that, there is a good chance that Sun, HP, IBM et al. chose Gnome for technical reasons. Yes, I realize that KDE 2.0 has KParts, but bonobo is already here, and it works now. The KDE-ers that talk about the instability of Gnome are almost certainly running RedHat's ancient version of Gnome combined with Enlightenment. HelixCode's version of Gnome combined with Sawfish is an entirely different kettle of fish, and it already has Bonobo.
The most important consideration, however, is almost certainly licensing related. Gnome's LGPL is not only unambiguous, but it is also Commercial Software friendly. KDE, on the other hand is neither as clearly legal, nor as commercially friendly.
There is no substitute yet for a human when it comes to intelligent filtering. Squid, Perl, and ipchains goes a long way, but there really isn't a substitute for scanning the log files.
I set up something similar for public use for my troop of Boy Scouts. After explaining to them how their privileges would go away (and their parents would be notified) if they disobeyed the rules, and showing them how easy it was for me to monitor what they were surfing (a quick example involving a simple Perl script and the squid access log) they were off and running.
The system has been surprisingly automatic, and it has had the added consequence of getting several of the boys interested in tools like Perl, Squid, and Linux.
However, it wouldn't work at all if there wasn't an intelligent person manning the switches. Much of the tedium can be removed from the job, but your computer is not going to make value judgements for you. No matter how fancy your porn detection algorithms are there will be a way around them, or worse yet, there will be web sites that generate false positives. But if you put an actual human in the mix, then you can make the type of useful system that the poster above mentions.
There are all sorts of things that you can expect to be able to do on any Unix-like OS. You expect X-Windows, NFS, vi, etc. Yet at one time or another most of the Unix "standards" had some sort of competition.
Miguel is proposing to standardize Linux (and Unix as well) simply by creating Free software that is so cool that it becomes ubiquitous. Instead of writing their own HTML widget, XML parser, Address book, text editor widget, etc. programmers will simply borrow the GNOME widgets. Programmers will do this because GNOME is free, comes with source code, and because GNOME can be installed anywhere.
GNOME will simply become one more layer in the existing framework that is UNIX. Some people won't use it in much the same way that some Linuxers don't use X-Windows. But most of the new software will happily use these shared components in much the same way that they happily use the existing shared Unix libraries.
Very well said, especially the comment about declaring martial law. However, the situation is not nearly as dark as you portray. First off, I would argue that under the circumstances walking around in a "load bearing harness" and carrying a gas mask could very well be considered "reasonable cause." The rule of law does not require that our policemen become idiots. This character was clearly looking for trouble in a very dangerous situation. One in which the policemen are in very real danger. Mob violence is a very real and very explosive thing. This clown was actively seeking violence, and yet the police treated him quite fairly and decently for all of that.
Furthermore, there is nothing sinister about the police asking suspiscious people to identify themselves and their possessions, in fact this is standard police procedure. They can legally ask to see your ID, or see what is in your backpack. They can also legally ask you to open your trunk or let them inside your house. They can't force you to comply without a search warrant, but it never hurts to ask :). Many criminals willingly give permission for searches that would be illegal otherwise. If you can't be bothered to learn what your rights are, then I would suggest not becoming a criminal.
The suspects own accounts show that he was, in fact, conspiring to incite a riot. Any honest citizen, even one dressed in a load bearing harness, would have almost certainly been spared the paddy wagon just by apologizing to the police and leaving what was clearly a dangerous area. That's why the police were there, they were protecting innocent citizens by keeping them out of harm's way.
I personally wouldn't stand for the government declaring martial law every time that there was a political gathering. Martial law should not be easy to invoke as a protection against abuse. The police in this particular encounter did a marvelous job of balancing their duty to protect the citizenry with their duty to uphold this particular person's rights. The police broke no laws, and violated no one's rights.
The author of this particular piece can't say the same for himself.
There are, thank goodness, images of both frozen and even unstable available. See: cdimage.debian.org for more information.
In fact, if you are new to Debian I would strongly recommend checking out the frozen iso images. Installation has improved tremendously, and you'll end up with substantially newer packages.
Just remember that Debian is designed in such a way that you only install it once. So when you get tired of upgrading your RPM based distros piecemeal, wade through a Debian install and learn the power of apt-get.
Hmm... I would bet that the same thing could be done with mgetty fairly easily. That way I wouldn't have to pay for a special Caller-ID box, I would have yet another excuse to tinker with my Linux box, and I could say that my solution "ran on Linux."
Now just imagine a beowulf cluster of those babies!