And if you seriously believe that Mr. Gilmore's reasons were strawmen then you have never tried to convince management to use PostgreSQL over a commercial database. Heck, if you are trying to sell using PostgreSQL to folks who have used MySQL I would add #6 PostgreSQL is slow to the list of arguments that commonly get raised. That assumption is not true either, at least it isn't true in situations where you actually need consistent data. In fact, I have yet to see a case where PostgreSQL doesn't perform better under load than MySQL and I have switched several real applications.
This is news because of the economic implications for Microsoft. Microsoft has historically been able to recruit the best and brightest to work for Microsoft, give them stock options, and essentially let investors pay the developers a ridiculous salary without the costs showing up on Microsoft's books. This, in turn, allowed Microsoft's books to look amazing which generated more interested in MSFT stock. Basically, while Microsoft was growing, it could print its own money. Now that this isn't the case Microsoft is a much less attractive place to work.
This wouldn't be a big deal if the coders at Microsoft couldn't find someplace else to work with higher pay, but that's not the case with the elite at Microsoft. That's why Google has been able to scoop up so many Microsoft employees, and it is also why we have seen a steady stream of Microsoft employees forming their own startups and such.
My experience with Cisco hasn't been very good. I once lost two fiber blades (one was a backup) in a big Catalyst switch bringing down the network in the whole plant. After most of a day troubleshooting with a Cisco tech he agreed to send me two more parts. The catch, they wouldn't arrive for nearly two weeks.
At that point I calmly told the tech that I could get a new HP router for less than I paid per year in maintenance on the Catalyst, and I could have the HP router today. That threat bumped my parts up to overnight shipping.
Cisco gear isn't magical. If I can get something that works nearly as good for 1/5 the price that's what I will do. Having a hot spare pre-configured and ready to go goes a long way towards keeping downtime to a minimum.
My question is, will she sign with a major label and perpetuate the crap we deal with from the RIAA?
She probably will, but that's just because the RIAA still has more marketing muscle than anyone else. However, there is no question that the balance of power is shifting in favor of the artists. The primary reason that the RIAA is so powerful is that historically the RIAA controlled the primary means of marketing music. Unless you signed a deal with a major record label you couldn't get your song played on the radio, you couldn't get yourself professionally recorded, your CDs didn't end up in record stores, and you couldn't play the larger venues.
These days creating, publishing, and distributing your own CDs is ridiculously simple, and it is possible to play in front of thousands of fans over the Internet. If the record labels continue to pretend that they have all of the leverage then we will undoubtedly see a shift towards more popular bands that choose to remain self-produced.
You think 15% is high. Heck, you should see the mortality rates for crossing the Atlantic in 1776. The risks a small businessman face today are nothing compared to what a small businessman faced historically.
I'm sure that the study of economics is fascinating and enlightening. If I recall, America wasn't founded on principles of economics.
Actually, America was founded on principles of economics. Before our Declaration of Independence contained the words "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" John Locke was writing about "Life, Liberty, and Property". Private property is an integral part of the freedoms that we hold dear today.
The problem with your ideas is that they involve taking freedom away from others to do as they see fit with their property. If your dream really was the "American Dream" then it wouldn't need legislation to enforce it. Americans would choose it naturally with the freedom that they already have. What you really want to do is create legislation against corporations and against global markets so that individuals have little choice but to accept your dream as the true "American Dream." Good luck with that.
Here's a little hint though that might help you see corporations for what they really are. Corporations exist so that small individual investors can pool their resources to finance large businesses. Before corporations government (or extremely wealthy individuals) were the only entities that could finance large undertakings. It costs Intel billions of dollars to create a new fab. Thanks to the idea of corporations hundreds of thousands of individual investors can pool their resources together and get the fab built. There's nothing sinister about that. Heck, even in colonial days corporations made up the bulk of the trading companies, and produced for the bulk of the manufactured goods. The fact that a smootbore flintlock rifle was the most intricate piece of machinery that an early American was likely to see in his lifetime was the primary reason that there weren't more corporations. As America created more and more intricate goods it required larger and larger pools of capital. Corporations were the easiest way to raise this capital.
Without corporations there would be *more* concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few, not less.
I guess I don't disagree with that. But my idea of success isn't working for somebody else. They had independent livelihoods in colonial times, mostly up through the late nineteenth century, and that made the free market possible.
Then don't work for someone else. There has never been a time in the history of the world where it was easier to start your own business. The reason that the founding fathers all had "independent" livelihoods is that they were willing to risk moving halfway around the world to a country that was basically giving land away. I live out West because my forefathers didn't get in on the cheap Eastern seaboard land, and so they walked across the country after sailing from Europe. Getting a small business loan is quite a bit simpler than that.
What we have today is a culture of dependency. If our fossil fuels dried up, we'd all die. It's a huge monoculture. There are no corner markets. There are no local farms to supply food. Few people have knowledge or resources to make things like clothes or shoes; all of our "makers" have gone overseas. We work in management jobs or retail jobs, or useless government sinecures, dealing with human-made problems. We pay mortgages for the privelege of living in our homes, which we claim that we "own." We've made basic human needs (inalienable rights?) into a bustling economy for the priveleged, mostly driven by foriegn labor (where they work in abject poverty, supplying for our comfort the work of their hands). That wasn't the American Dream at all.
First of all, that's just how markets work. Take the shoes you are wearing right now, for instance. If you were to make comparable shoes from scratch they would undoubtedly cost you far more than whatever you paid for them, even if you were some sort of wizard cobbler. That's the beauty of a market that allows people to specialize in areas where they are the low cost provider. If you are one of the few people that puts a premium on actually knowing your cobbler you can probably find someone in your community that makes and repairs shoes. My home town has a custom shoe and shoe repair shop and it only has 10,000 inhabitants and is in the middle of nowhere.
As someone that used to work in a manufacturing plant I can tell you one thing. Part of the reason that manufacturing gets moved overseas is that most Americans aren't interested in working in a manufacturing plant. The plant I worked for was "always" hiring despite the fact that it paid good wages and had excellent benefits. When we did find someone that was willing to work in manufacturing and was reliable enough to actually show up every day chances are good that English was their second language. Well over 60% of the workforce was essentially "imported." There are lots of people that apparently believe that "the market" is some sort of conspiracy, but with America's low unemployment rate what it really means is that American's tend to believe that their skills would be more profitably put to use in some other line of work than manufacturing. When you look at the aggregate it is readily apparent that they are right.
You are welcome to work towards any "American Dream" that you want. However, you can't really be surprised when other people choose a different dream than you do.
Mr. Bush is happy outsourcing more American jobs. Are they management jobs? No. They are primarily jobs that belong to people who actually make something with their own hands.
Mr. Bush just has a better grasp of economics than your average slashdotter. He knows that in the long run cconomics is all about bringing as many people into the market as possible. The bigger the market the bigger the rewards for everyone involved. If you don't understand how that can be I would suggest auditing a Econ 101 class at a community college near you. Seriously, it will change the way you look at life.
This article explains why they used biodiesel. Basically they entered the car in the "Tour de Sol" and the race rules required that they not burn gasoline (or diesel in this case). The interesting thing about this design is that it is built around an existing kit car. Heck, the thing's probably street legal.
If you have some prior programming experience the Python Tutorial included with Python is pretty good. There is also Dive Into Python and How to Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning With Python available on the web and in print. In fact the Dive Into Python site has a whole list of freely available books about Python. For whatever reason Python seems to have attracted more than its share of Free documentation.
Once you understand the basic syntax the Python Library that is available with Python generally does a good job of covering the various parts of the built-in Python library. I refer to the Python Library all the time. The info version makes it easy to use as part of Emacs:).
One of the things that are you are likely to find about Python is that studying it away from the computer is likely to be less effective than learning at the computer. Python is highly dynamic, and it is often useful to type code snippets into the command interpreter to see what happens.
It's also important to note that you are aren't likely to rewrite the bubble sort in Python. Python's high level structures mean that someone else has already done this for you:).
If you want better support, then you need to *pay* for it. Dell actually does a pretty good job of providing hardware support, but supporting Windows is a ridiculously expensive proposition, especially considering all of the things that can happen to a Windows box that gets connected to the Internet. Support is expensive, and 15 minutes and help restoring is about all you can expect for what you pay for a Dell.
And I'm sure Microsoft doesn't give OEM's extreme discounts if they agree to ship every machine with XP pre-installed...
Actually, that's a good point. Currently Microsoft does use its market position to "encourage" OEMs to stick with Windows across the board. Thanks to the DOJ case that encouragement doesn't manifest itself in price breaks (as that would get Microsoft in big trouble), but rather it manifests itself in the form of advertising incentives. In the long run it basically works the same. However, what this basically means is that if you are an OEM that is competing with HP, or Dell, or the other few manufacturers that have marketing deals with Microsoft then there is basically no way that you can compete on price and use Microsoft software. That's one of the reasons that barebones and Linux PCs are becoming much more popular over time. Tier-two and tier-three computer resellers realize that the best way to sell hardware that is competitive with Dell and friends is to simply cut Windows (and Windows support) out of the question and sell to folks that, for whatever reason, simply want to purchase hardware.
Right now it make sense economically to simply sell barebones hardware, but over time the added value of Free Software and are going to make a better value proposition than bare hardware that you have to install yourself. This is especially likely to be true when you are talking about computers for non-technical types.
Actually the commoditization of hardware is *precisely* what is going to drive the adoption of Linux in the long run. The price of Windows wasn't such a big deal back when the computer that you really wanted was $2000, but as the price of a computer continues to drop and the margins on hardware continue to get smaller and smaller eventually hardware manufacturers are going to look at cutting the amount that they spend per machine on software.
You'll notice that I didn't mention anything about consumers, and that's important. Joe Sixpack isn't going to decide to switch to Windows. OEM manufacturers like Dell and HP are going to become interested in "marketing" Linux computers. Not only would Linux drastically reduce the manufacturer's software costs, but it would also give the OEM far more leeway to customize the PC to their specifications. Instead of Microsoft making billion dollar deals to decide what goes on the default Windows install Dell and HP could sell desktop space directly.
That line has already been crossed for servers, and pretty much every tier-two and tier-three hardware vendor also has Linux only promotional desktop computers. It's really only a matter of time.
It's still pretty easy to fork PostgreSQL into a commercial offering. I don't want to mislead you. In fact, several of the larger PostgreSQL companies do precisely that. Mammoth, EnterpriseDB, and others all have commercial variants of PostgreSQL, and just about everyone in PostgreSQL core is employed by someone that has a commercial PostgreSQL variant. That's part of the reason that GPLed code ends up outside of PostgreSQL core.
On the plus side, it seems to work fairly well having the talent split up this way. The fact that there are commercial variants isn't such a big deal to me as long as the BSD code keeps getting updated. In the end that's really what it's all about. Basing your work on GPLed software that isn't being updated is worse than basing your work on a piece of BSD software that is being updated, even if there is a chance that commercial variants will draw away important resources. This is especially true if the GPled software is like MySQL where there is little community involvement in the development of the server, and the company makes its money selling a commerically licensed variant.
There is no question that the BSD version of PostgreSQL continues to improve at a dramatic rate, and the fact that several companies are involved in the development of PostgreSQL is nice as well.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense. BSD projects do tend to end up with commercial variants. On the other hand, BSD projects like PostgreSQL also tend to end up with GPL variants. Quite a bit of the stuff at pgfoundy.org can't be included in the base PostgreSQL distribution simply because it would require PostgreSQL be distributed under the GPL.
As long as Tom Lane works for Red Hat I am not particularly concerned that the commercial variants will be substantially better than the BSD licensed core, but there certainly is a risk that the future development of PostgreSQL will happen primarily in a commercial variant.
On the other hand, there is now at least one example of a project that is available under the GPL (MySQL) that is likely to have serious problems similar problems. If you are someone that has a serious investment in MySQL + InnoDB you probably should be very concerned about future development. There is little question that MySQL AB is going to be distracted while it tries to find a way to replace InnoDB without something that it can license commercially going forward.
Having the source code makes these sorts of decisions less risky, but it doesn't do away with the risk altogether.
Closed source applications make use of open source LGPLed libraries all of the time, but GPLed libraries are a completely different beast. If you link a GPLed library then the resulting application must be distributed under the GPL. That's why the BSD folks got so upset with the FSF's readline library. It was released under the GPL and it forced applications that wanted to use it to be GPled as well. These days libedit is mostly a BSD replacement for readline, but there is at least one program that I know of (ncftp) that was released under the GPL simply because it wanted to use readline.
Currently MySQL AB makes most of its money selling commercially licensed copies of MySQL. There are lots of companies that are interested in distributing MySQL without having to abide by (or even think about) the terms of the GPL, and these folks happily pay money for a commercially licensed copy of the MySQL server and client libraries. MySQL currently has contracts with both Innobase and Sleepycat that allows them to sell commercial licenses of the MySQL server with InnoDB and Sleepycat compiled in. This is what allows MySQL AB to be able to distribute a non-GPLed version of the MySQL server. With Oracle owning both Innobase and Sleepycat my guess is that when it comes time to renegotiate these contracts that Oracle will raise the price substantially. Unfortunately for MySQL AB, without these transaction engines MySQL isn't really much of a competitor. First of all, ACID transactions would be gone completely, as would essentially all of the new features that are available in 5.0. The reality of the situation is that the only real reason to pay for MySQL is to be able to distribute the Innobase stuff under a commercial license. When Oracle bought Innobase the MySQL folks started to look seriously at replacing Innodb with Sleepycat's engine, but that's really not a possibility now.
In the long run Oracle's schemes aren't likely to help. Databases are becoming a commodity, and there is little that Oracle can do about it. MySQL gets all of the press now, but that's simply because MySQL AB does a good job marketing MySQL, and not because MySQL is the best Free Software database. In the short run, this change is likely to have a pretty devastating effect on MySQL AB. MySQL AB has been very successful in marketing MySQL, and that has made the difference. Without a useful commercial product that it can sell MySQL AB is going to have a much harder time making money and it is going to have to go back to the drawing board and create its own transaction engine. That gives the rest of the Free Software databases some time to grow, and it gives Oracle a little more time to enjoy the status quo before it has to come up with a long term strategy against Free Software databases.
The ridiculously liberal BSD license is my biggest problem with Postgress, and a reason I will avoid using it or targetting it with anything I write.
What? That doesn't make any sense at all. I can understand people who make sure that they software that "they" write is under some other license than a BSD-style license. Perhaps they want to guarantee end users the right to access and modify the source code (GPL) or perhaps they want to be able to charge for licenses (commercial), or whatever, but the BSD-style licenses are perfect for software that you wish to *use*. You can even reuse BSD-style licensed software with your GPL or commercial software.
What precisely is your concern with BSD-style licensed code?
Oh no, my blog software is going to be stuck with MySQL's limited ability forever! The horror!
I am a huge PostgreSQL bigot, but that doesn't mean that I think that personal blog software needs any sort of fancy storage software. Seriously, anything more than plain text files is probably overkill.
As for database independence, why in the world should you worry about that? PostgreSQL offers pretty much all of the functionality that you are likely to need, and it's Free Software available under the ridiculously liberal BSD license. If you are writing software that would be easier to write using PostgreSQL's features, then you would be a fool to worry about "database independence." You might as well just marry your application to PostgreSQL and be done with it. These days it isn't hard to find hosting that offers PostgreSQL. If some other fool wants to find a way to rewrite your application so that it runs on less capable databases then let them waste their time. Most "database independence" projects basically end up treating all databases as if they were as limited as MySQL, and that's just a big fat waste of time.
The only time that you should *ever* worry about database independence is when you are selling a product that folks might want to run on whatever database system they like best. Then you get the joy of rewriting large parts of PostgreSQL's functionality in your application. What's more, chances are very good that you aren't as talented as Tom Lane, so your implementation will be crappy. The upside is that people will pay you to do this.
Interesting, I thought this was currently accepted. As I recall nuclear fissions dicovery was hailed as a way of explaining the heat of the centre of the Earth. If it isn't happening, what else has kept the Eart hot all these billions of years?
Apparently the mole men living inside the earth drive really big SUVs.
And yet even at Microsoft's ridiculously discounted price only a small fraction of gamers are signed up for Live. In fact, Microsoft has yet to break the 10% barrier. It's a small wonder that Sony wasn't rushing to enable "online" gaming to the same extent that Microsoft has. As of this point there is little evidence that XBox Live will ever be a good investment. It is estimated that Microsoft has spent ove $1 billion dollars in the development and marketing of XBox Live and currently they have only 2 million users (Source).
There is no question that XBox Live is a good deal. The real question is how much longer Microsoft is going to pay people to use its service. When you do the math it is pretty clear that even were Microsoft to get the volume of users that it is aiming for that at current prices Microsoft would still be losing serious amounts of money. At current usage levels XBox Live is like a money vacuum. Unlike Microsoft Sony has to make a profit with the PS3. Sony would be foolish to try and compete with Microsoft's Live service. Creating a comparable service would cost far more money than it is likely to bring in.
Yes, there exists a relatively small group of gamers that is convinced that XBox Live will change the world. So far it isn't happening and until it does Sony is much better off *pretending* that it has an even cooler system waiting in the wings while secretly spending all of its development resources on things that gamers are willing to pay real money for.
The reason that I bring this up is that in the end it is generally economics (and not technology) that decides which systems survive and which systems die. Microsoft is gambling that it can destroy Sony and Nintendo and turn its XBox product into a cash cow before investors start to wonder why MSFT is throwing away billions of their dollars with the XBox. MSFT has a ridiculously high Price/Earnings ratio considering Microsoft's current growth opportunities. The only reason that Microsoft hasn't pulled the plug on the XBox already is that Microsoft doesn't really have any other investments that have the payout potential that a dominant XBox does. Personally, I think that it is a long shot. Worse, it would appear that the online gaming portion of XBox is likely to be one of the bigger losers.
You can keep waiting for the Mac folks to be proven wrong, but chances are good that you'll be waiting a long time. You see, just like biological viruses computer viruses need two things before they will take off. The first thing that they need is an exploitable weakness. The Mac has enough of those that a worm is certainly possible. The second thing that you need is a large enough body of susceptible hosts that the worm can spread. Macs *don't* have that. Without a large body of susceptible hosts the entire population is safe. That's why it doesn't matter that my neighbors don't immunize their children. The fact that their children are susceptible to immunizable diseases doesn't really matter because there aren't enough luddites to create a viable population of carriers.
Interestingly enough, most of the same effects can be had simply by not using Outlook and IE on Windows as these two programs are the main vectors for infection.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough Jason Gilmore has also written a book about MySQL entitled: Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional.
And if you seriously believe that Mr. Gilmore's reasons were strawmen then you have never tried to convince management to use PostgreSQL over a commercial database. Heck, if you are trying to sell using PostgreSQL to folks who have used MySQL I would add #6 PostgreSQL is slow to the list of arguments that commonly get raised. That assumption is not true either, at least it isn't true in situations where you actually need consistent data. In fact, I have yet to see a case where PostgreSQL doesn't perform better under load than MySQL and I have switched several real applications.
Hooray, that's precisely what the DoJ is asking for.
Good for NASA. It's about time they learned something about hubris.
This is news because of the economic implications for Microsoft. Microsoft has historically been able to recruit the best and brightest to work for Microsoft, give them stock options, and essentially let investors pay the developers a ridiculous salary without the costs showing up on Microsoft's books. This, in turn, allowed Microsoft's books to look amazing which generated more interested in MSFT stock. Basically, while Microsoft was growing, it could print its own money. Now that this isn't the case Microsoft is a much less attractive place to work.
This wouldn't be a big deal if the coders at Microsoft couldn't find someplace else to work with higher pay, but that's not the case with the elite at Microsoft. That's why Google has been able to scoop up so many Microsoft employees, and it is also why we have seen a steady stream of Microsoft employees forming their own startups and such.
My experience with Cisco hasn't been very good. I once lost two fiber blades (one was a backup) in a big Catalyst switch bringing down the network in the whole plant. After most of a day troubleshooting with a Cisco tech he agreed to send me two more parts. The catch, they wouldn't arrive for nearly two weeks.
At that point I calmly told the tech that I could get a new HP router for less than I paid per year in maintenance on the Catalyst, and I could have the HP router today. That threat bumped my parts up to overnight shipping.
Cisco gear isn't magical. If I can get something that works nearly as good for 1/5 the price that's what I will do. Having a hot spare pre-configured and ready to go goes a long way towards keeping downtime to a minimum.
She probably will, but that's just because the RIAA still has more marketing muscle than anyone else. However, there is no question that the balance of power is shifting in favor of the artists. The primary reason that the RIAA is so powerful is that historically the RIAA controlled the primary means of marketing music. Unless you signed a deal with a major record label you couldn't get your song played on the radio, you couldn't get yourself professionally recorded, your CDs didn't end up in record stores, and you couldn't play the larger venues.
These days creating, publishing, and distributing your own CDs is ridiculously simple, and it is possible to play in front of thousands of fans over the Internet. If the record labels continue to pretend that they have all of the leverage then we will undoubtedly see a shift towards more popular bands that choose to remain self-produced.
This router purports to cost 1/5 as much as the Cisco gear. For that kind of savings I can afford to pile up replacements.
You think 15% is high. Heck, you should see the mortality rates for crossing the Atlantic in 1776. The risks a small businessman face today are nothing compared to what a small businessman faced historically.
Actually, America was founded on principles of economics. Before our Declaration of Independence contained the words "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" John Locke was writing about "Life, Liberty, and Property". Private property is an integral part of the freedoms that we hold dear today.
The problem with your ideas is that they involve taking freedom away from others to do as they see fit with their property. If your dream really was the "American Dream" then it wouldn't need legislation to enforce it. Americans would choose it naturally with the freedom that they already have. What you really want to do is create legislation against corporations and against global markets so that individuals have little choice but to accept your dream as the true "American Dream." Good luck with that.
Here's a little hint though that might help you see corporations for what they really are. Corporations exist so that small individual investors can pool their resources to finance large businesses. Before corporations government (or extremely wealthy individuals) were the only entities that could finance large undertakings. It costs Intel billions of dollars to create a new fab. Thanks to the idea of corporations hundreds of thousands of individual investors can pool their resources together and get the fab built. There's nothing sinister about that. Heck, even in colonial days corporations made up the bulk of the trading companies, and produced for the bulk of the manufactured goods. The fact that a smootbore flintlock rifle was the most intricate piece of machinery that an early American was likely to see in his lifetime was the primary reason that there weren't more corporations. As America created more and more intricate goods it required larger and larger pools of capital. Corporations were the easiest way to raise this capital.
Without corporations there would be *more* concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few, not less.
Then don't work for someone else. There has never been a time in the history of the world where it was easier to start your own business. The reason that the founding fathers all had "independent" livelihoods is that they were willing to risk moving halfway around the world to a country that was basically giving land away. I live out West because my forefathers didn't get in on the cheap Eastern seaboard land, and so they walked across the country after sailing from Europe. Getting a small business loan is quite a bit simpler than that.
First of all, that's just how markets work. Take the shoes you are wearing right now, for instance. If you were to make comparable shoes from scratch they would undoubtedly cost you far more than whatever you paid for them, even if you were some sort of wizard cobbler. That's the beauty of a market that allows people to specialize in areas where they are the low cost provider. If you are one of the few people that puts a premium on actually knowing your cobbler you can probably find someone in your community that makes and repairs shoes. My home town has a custom shoe and shoe repair shop and it only has 10,000 inhabitants and is in the middle of nowhere.
As someone that used to work in a manufacturing plant I can tell you one thing. Part of the reason that manufacturing gets moved overseas is that most Americans aren't interested in working in a manufacturing plant. The plant I worked for was "always" hiring despite the fact that it paid good wages and had excellent benefits. When we did find someone that was willing to work in manufacturing and was reliable enough to actually show up every day chances are good that English was their second language. Well over 60% of the workforce was essentially "imported." There are lots of people that apparently believe that "the market" is some sort of conspiracy, but with America's low unemployment rate what it really means is that American's tend to believe that their skills would be more profitably put to use in some other line of work than manufacturing. When you look at the aggregate it is readily apparent that they are right.
You are welcome to work towards any "American Dream" that you want. However, you can't really be surprised when other people choose a different dream than you do.
Mr. Bush just has a better grasp of economics than your average slashdotter. He knows that in the long run cconomics is all about bringing as many people into the market as possible. The bigger the market the bigger the rewards for everyone involved. If you don't understand how that can be I would suggest auditing a Econ 101 class at a community college near you. Seriously, it will change the way you look at life.
Which, interestingly enough, is precisely what these kids have put in the vehicle. Here's the link. They pulled the engine out of a junked Jetta.
This article explains why they used biodiesel. Basically they entered the car in the "Tour de Sol" and the race rules required that they not burn gasoline (or diesel in this case). The interesting thing about this design is that it is built around an existing kit car. Heck, the thing's probably street legal.
Can anyone tell me how this is fancier than setting up mailman and creating a mailing list? I am honestly baffled.
If you have some prior programming experience the Python Tutorial included with Python is pretty good. There is also Dive Into Python and How to Think Like A Computer Scientist: Learning With Python available on the web and in print. In fact the Dive Into Python site has a whole list of freely available books about Python. For whatever reason Python seems to have attracted more than its share of Free documentation.
Once you understand the basic syntax the Python Library that is available with Python generally does a good job of covering the various parts of the built-in Python library. I refer to the Python Library all the time. The info version makes it easy to use as part of Emacs :).
One of the things that are you are likely to find about Python is that studying it away from the computer is likely to be less effective than learning at the computer. Python is highly dynamic, and it is often useful to type code snippets into the command interpreter to see what happens.
It's also important to note that you are aren't likely to rewrite the bubble sort in Python. Python's high level structures mean that someone else has already done this for you :).
Good luck.
If you want better support, then you need to *pay* for it. Dell actually does a pretty good job of providing hardware support, but supporting Windows is a ridiculously expensive proposition, especially considering all of the things that can happen to a Windows box that gets connected to the Internet. Support is expensive, and 15 minutes and help restoring is about all you can expect for what you pay for a Dell.
Actually, that's a good point. Currently Microsoft does use its market position to "encourage" OEMs to stick with Windows across the board. Thanks to the DOJ case that encouragement doesn't manifest itself in price breaks (as that would get Microsoft in big trouble), but rather it manifests itself in the form of advertising incentives. In the long run it basically works the same. However, what this basically means is that if you are an OEM that is competing with HP, or Dell, or the other few manufacturers that have marketing deals with Microsoft then there is basically no way that you can compete on price and use Microsoft software. That's one of the reasons that barebones and Linux PCs are becoming much more popular over time. Tier-two and tier-three computer resellers realize that the best way to sell hardware that is competitive with Dell and friends is to simply cut Windows (and Windows support) out of the question and sell to folks that, for whatever reason, simply want to purchase hardware.
Right now it make sense economically to simply sell barebones hardware, but over time the added value of Free Software and are going to make a better value proposition than bare hardware that you have to install yourself. This is especially likely to be true when you are talking about computers for non-technical types.
Actually the commoditization of hardware is *precisely* what is going to drive the adoption of Linux in the long run. The price of Windows wasn't such a big deal back when the computer that you really wanted was $2000, but as the price of a computer continues to drop and the margins on hardware continue to get smaller and smaller eventually hardware manufacturers are going to look at cutting the amount that they spend per machine on software.
You'll notice that I didn't mention anything about consumers, and that's important. Joe Sixpack isn't going to decide to switch to Windows. OEM manufacturers like Dell and HP are going to become interested in "marketing" Linux computers. Not only would Linux drastically reduce the manufacturer's software costs, but it would also give the OEM far more leeway to customize the PC to their specifications. Instead of Microsoft making billion dollar deals to decide what goes on the default Windows install Dell and HP could sell desktop space directly.
That line has already been crossed for servers, and pretty much every tier-two and tier-three hardware vendor also has Linux only promotional desktop computers. It's really only a matter of time.
It's still pretty easy to fork PostgreSQL into a commercial offering. I don't want to mislead you. In fact, several of the larger PostgreSQL companies do precisely that. Mammoth, EnterpriseDB, and others all have commercial variants of PostgreSQL, and just about everyone in PostgreSQL core is employed by someone that has a commercial PostgreSQL variant. That's part of the reason that GPLed code ends up outside of PostgreSQL core.
On the plus side, it seems to work fairly well having the talent split up this way. The fact that there are commercial variants isn't such a big deal to me as long as the BSD code keeps getting updated. In the end that's really what it's all about. Basing your work on GPLed software that isn't being updated is worse than basing your work on a piece of BSD software that is being updated, even if there is a chance that commercial variants will draw away important resources. This is especially true if the GPled software is like MySQL where there is little community involvement in the development of the server, and the company makes its money selling a commerically licensed variant.
There is no question that the BSD version of PostgreSQL continues to improve at a dramatic rate, and the fact that several companies are involved in the development of PostgreSQL is nice as well.
Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense. BSD projects do tend to end up with commercial variants. On the other hand, BSD projects like PostgreSQL also tend to end up with GPL variants. Quite a bit of the stuff at pgfoundy.org can't be included in the base PostgreSQL distribution simply because it would require PostgreSQL be distributed under the GPL.
As long as Tom Lane works for Red Hat I am not particularly concerned that the commercial variants will be substantially better than the BSD licensed core, but there certainly is a risk that the future development of PostgreSQL will happen primarily in a commercial variant.
On the other hand, there is now at least one example of a project that is available under the GPL (MySQL) that is likely to have serious problems similar problems. If you are someone that has a serious investment in MySQL + InnoDB you probably should be very concerned about future development. There is little question that MySQL AB is going to be distracted while it tries to find a way to replace InnoDB without something that it can license commercially going forward.
Having the source code makes these sorts of decisions less risky, but it doesn't do away with the risk altogether.
Closed source applications make use of open source LGPLed libraries all of the time, but GPLed libraries are a completely different beast. If you link a GPLed library then the resulting application must be distributed under the GPL. That's why the BSD folks got so upset with the FSF's readline library. It was released under the GPL and it forced applications that wanted to use it to be GPled as well. These days libedit is mostly a BSD replacement for readline, but there is at least one program that I know of (ncftp) that was released under the GPL simply because it wanted to use readline.
Currently MySQL AB makes most of its money selling commercially licensed copies of MySQL. There are lots of companies that are interested in distributing MySQL without having to abide by (or even think about) the terms of the GPL, and these folks happily pay money for a commercially licensed copy of the MySQL server and client libraries. MySQL currently has contracts with both Innobase and Sleepycat that allows them to sell commercial licenses of the MySQL server with InnoDB and Sleepycat compiled in. This is what allows MySQL AB to be able to distribute a non-GPLed version of the MySQL server. With Oracle owning both Innobase and Sleepycat my guess is that when it comes time to renegotiate these contracts that Oracle will raise the price substantially. Unfortunately for MySQL AB, without these transaction engines MySQL isn't really much of a competitor. First of all, ACID transactions would be gone completely, as would essentially all of the new features that are available in 5.0. The reality of the situation is that the only real reason to pay for MySQL is to be able to distribute the Innobase stuff under a commercial license. When Oracle bought Innobase the MySQL folks started to look seriously at replacing Innodb with Sleepycat's engine, but that's really not a possibility now.
In the long run Oracle's schemes aren't likely to help. Databases are becoming a commodity, and there is little that Oracle can do about it. MySQL gets all of the press now, but that's simply because MySQL AB does a good job marketing MySQL, and not because MySQL is the best Free Software database. In the short run, this change is likely to have a pretty devastating effect on MySQL AB. MySQL AB has been very successful in marketing MySQL, and that has made the difference. Without a useful commercial product that it can sell MySQL AB is going to have a much harder time making money and it is going to have to go back to the drawing board and create its own transaction engine. That gives the rest of the Free Software databases some time to grow, and it gives Oracle a little more time to enjoy the status quo before it has to come up with a long term strategy against Free Software databases.
What? That doesn't make any sense at all. I can understand people who make sure that they software that "they" write is under some other license than a BSD-style license. Perhaps they want to guarantee end users the right to access and modify the source code (GPL) or perhaps they want to be able to charge for licenses (commercial), or whatever, but the BSD-style licenses are perfect for software that you wish to *use*. You can even reuse BSD-style licensed software with your GPL or commercial software.
What precisely is your concern with BSD-style licensed code?
Oh no, my blog software is going to be stuck with MySQL's limited ability forever! The horror!
I am a huge PostgreSQL bigot, but that doesn't mean that I think that personal blog software needs any sort of fancy storage software. Seriously, anything more than plain text files is probably overkill.
As for database independence, why in the world should you worry about that? PostgreSQL offers pretty much all of the functionality that you are likely to need, and it's Free Software available under the ridiculously liberal BSD license. If you are writing software that would be easier to write using PostgreSQL's features, then you would be a fool to worry about "database independence." You might as well just marry your application to PostgreSQL and be done with it. These days it isn't hard to find hosting that offers PostgreSQL. If some other fool wants to find a way to rewrite your application so that it runs on less capable databases then let them waste their time. Most "database independence" projects basically end up treating all databases as if they were as limited as MySQL, and that's just a big fat waste of time.
The only time that you should *ever* worry about database independence is when you are selling a product that folks might want to run on whatever database system they like best. Then you get the joy of rewriting large parts of PostgreSQL's functionality in your application. What's more, chances are very good that you aren't as talented as Tom Lane, so your implementation will be crappy. The upside is that people will pay you to do this.
Apparently the mole men living inside the earth drive really big SUVs.
And yet even at Microsoft's ridiculously discounted price only a small fraction of gamers are signed up for Live. In fact, Microsoft has yet to break the 10% barrier. It's a small wonder that Sony wasn't rushing to enable "online" gaming to the same extent that Microsoft has. As of this point there is little evidence that XBox Live will ever be a good investment. It is estimated that Microsoft has spent ove $1 billion dollars in the development and marketing of XBox Live and currently they have only 2 million users (Source).
There is no question that XBox Live is a good deal. The real question is how much longer Microsoft is going to pay people to use its service. When you do the math it is pretty clear that even were Microsoft to get the volume of users that it is aiming for that at current prices Microsoft would still be losing serious amounts of money. At current usage levels XBox Live is like a money vacuum. Unlike Microsoft Sony has to make a profit with the PS3. Sony would be foolish to try and compete with Microsoft's Live service. Creating a comparable service would cost far more money than it is likely to bring in.
Yes, there exists a relatively small group of gamers that is convinced that XBox Live will change the world. So far it isn't happening and until it does Sony is much better off *pretending* that it has an even cooler system waiting in the wings while secretly spending all of its development resources on things that gamers are willing to pay real money for.
The reason that I bring this up is that in the end it is generally economics (and not technology) that decides which systems survive and which systems die. Microsoft is gambling that it can destroy Sony and Nintendo and turn its XBox product into a cash cow before investors start to wonder why MSFT is throwing away billions of their dollars with the XBox. MSFT has a ridiculously high Price/Earnings ratio considering Microsoft's current growth opportunities. The only reason that Microsoft hasn't pulled the plug on the XBox already is that Microsoft doesn't really have any other investments that have the payout potential that a dominant XBox does. Personally, I think that it is a long shot. Worse, it would appear that the online gaming portion of XBox is likely to be one of the bigger losers.
You can keep waiting for the Mac folks to be proven wrong, but chances are good that you'll be waiting a long time. You see, just like biological viruses computer viruses need two things before they will take off. The first thing that they need is an exploitable weakness. The Mac has enough of those that a worm is certainly possible. The second thing that you need is a large enough body of susceptible hosts that the worm can spread. Macs *don't* have that. Without a large body of susceptible hosts the entire population is safe. That's why it doesn't matter that my neighbors don't immunize their children. The fact that their children are susceptible to immunizable diseases doesn't really matter because there aren't enough luddites to create a viable population of carriers.
Interestingly enough, most of the same effects can be had simply by not using Outlook and IE on Windows as these two programs are the main vectors for infection.