Forget the actual data in the database; I feel the actual *design* of a relational database deserves to be copyrighted. It's an art form! It takes a long time and many changes to the set of tables and their connections before a database reaches the point of being "good." (Let alone "usable" or "well designed".)
When I implement a good database, I certainly don't want anyone else taking my work. I don't care what happens to the data in it... that's my clients' problem.:)
And after JohnCon, come to the Barnstormer's Spring Mainstage. You'll be coming down off your pixie stik high and still have enough attention span to watch a wonderful professionally directed musical!
Only yards away from JohnCon's Gilman Hall in the historic Arellano Theater.
Wow. Remember the early 1990's... back before that "Internet" thing became popular? Back when Boardwatch was all the rage and magazines like Wired didn't even matter?
Seems to me SJG led to the World(tm)'s first run in with the EFF. I guess we ought to all go buy a starter deck (even though we're all recovered addicts and this will just get us hooked againn) just to support the beginning of the end of electronic privacy and the efforts that the EFF have put in to protect us.
-Chris (Okay, so it's off-topic, but I felt it was worthwhile.)
This isn't new. At my university, Microsoft donated several workstations loaded with the latest wizz-bang hardware and Windows NT with all the development tools to the Computer Science department. They were placed in the lab next to our current Linux, Solaris and Mac machines.
The NT boxes never got touched, except to check email once in a while.
So, some enterprising students (or staff?) installed Omni-X on there, and people started using them -- as overpriced Xterms. All that computing power going to waste (or to Distributed.net...:>).
The choice is there, is presented to the students, and both the students and most adminstrators have made their decision... Microsoft is unnecessary. And it will be even less necessary as these developers-to-be move into the workplace. And Microsoft can't do anything about it. It's all too little, too late.
As much as I love linux and credit it for all sorts of things, there are better deals out there than using linux as a router. Granted, I'm sitting on a rh6 box right now that's behind a lrp firewall connected to the internet, there are dedicated boxes for about $100-150 you can get that have three ethernet ports and a modem built in and that do NAT in hardware. It's very slick. It's what I use to connect Mom and Dad to the 'net. They can share a line and both surf at the same time. As great as linux would be for this, if there's ever a power failure, and I'm not around to fix the thing, there's no problem -- since it doesn't have any filesystems mounted, it's just an XXXk eeprom, it just starts back up where it left off. A linux box would take 30 seconds to boot up, get to the fsck failure and wait for input. At which point my parents would be stranded without internet access till I came home from school.
Plus, these boxes are about the size of a mini hub and take the same amount of power. Even though I can get a pretty darn small 486 case, it's still going to be sucking a bit of juice and some serious closet real estate.
I've had a network in my house since circa 1991 (thanks, Invisible Software!) and as extensively as I use linux, it doesn't have THAT much to do with the home networking revolution. If anything, I credit the OS vendors moving networking into the OS (gag...).
When I had to install personal netware on top of all our machines running DOS 4 and 5 with Win3.1, it was a non-trivial task to get files shared. When Win95 allowed point-and-click network browsing with almost ZERO configuration, it became alot easier. Of course, Macs have had this since very early on (and kudos to apple for integrating network hardware, however incompatible with the rest of the world ).
Linux *will* however play an important role once it makes plug-and-play, near-zero-configuration, point-and-click setup the norm. It's close, but not quite.
This isn't a pro-MS post. It's just taming your Linux over-advocacy. Sorry, but nothing personal. I'll never run anything but Linux on my home network servers (well, that free solaris deal is looking better and better....)
Well, not too far from RTP you start to get into Charlotte radio stations, and 99.7 "The Fox" is the greatest radio station I've ever listened to. (Plus, it's the home of John Boy and Billy's Big Show, one of the greatest syndicated shows in the southeast!)
Ahh the joys of a major private university... at my school, half the students carry around cell phones (sprint pcs is cheaper than a landline) and hundreds can be seen swapping stuff with their palms (usually ones that have been decked out with cell modems and the like). These new models will be great because everyone will be able to get one.
"The modules instantaneously install their own software."
It's nice to see widespread use an idea that's been around since the apple II.
Seriously, though, this ought to be convenient.
-Chris
Thank GOD for this article
on
Linux Lite?
·
· Score: 1
I'm a most-time network/sysadmin for a department at a university. We run Linux, IRIX, and a (un?)healthy dose of Windows. As much as I can't stand windows, this article is right about RH's (or any linux distro's) default install.
I've convinced a couple of friends of mine to make the switch to Linux, but the ones who put it on machines with any sort of dedicated network access I *force* to go behind the firewall when they first install. It's almost criminal the number of ways into an out-of-the-box RedHat/Slackware system (the main distributions I've worked with). Finger, systat/netstat, and everything RPC are all completely running -- and not even filtered by tcpwrappers. The worst part is that these things are (99% of the time) completely unnecessary on a workstation.
Granted, I know to go and edit out/etc/inetd.conf and hosts.deny on the very first boot, but these folks don't realize it, and there's no way to tell them it unless you're looking over their shoulder when they install.
What about games? Sony (historically) has a similar game selection to Sega: they're mostly fighting and sports games. Plus a few Final Fantasy-style RPGs. For those of us who prefer basic arcade games and (for lack of a better term) Zelda style RPGs, it doesn't matter that this thing has more connectivity than an iMac II.... it just won't have the software to make the platform worthwhile.
As bummed as I am waiting for that next Nintendo (Dolphin, is that what they're calling it these days?), I'll probably wait for that (even if it DOES do carts instead of the infinitely-more-convenient CD/DVD drive) simply because the games will be closer to home. I don't care about "Football 2000" or "Kick Some Guys Ass IV"; I want to play Super Mario 47, Zelda 24 and Metroid 8.
But it's always fun to get to look at other people's colocated equipment. Usually there's a lot of nifty stuff there that most of us would never even think of getting a chance to see...:)
Well, it does lead one to think of the definitive way for Microsoft to kill Linux.
They develop their own version, release it as L++, base it on C libraries that are incompatible with both libc5 and glibc2 and in various other ways make it flashier but impossible to implement next to real Linux, but claim it's the same.
It should go without saying that they never support this product, fail to mention it on most of their web pages, remove all references to it from their Knowledge Base, charge exorbitant prices for it (while also distributing it free in computer books) and include the 49.7 day bug.
Then, after dividing the market, there's no way Linux could sue them. I mean, Sun has hundreds of lawyers. The best we could do is throw a couple FSF volunteers at them.
In a matter of six months, MS could have Linux deader than OS/2 and be free to force Win2000 upon everyone (because we know Linux people aren't going to bite the bullet and use *BSD).
Conquering The World 101. They've done it before, they'll try it again. Unfortunately.
Not to start a free SQL server war here, but I notice there is a (quite good) book on mSql and MySql, but nothing for PostgreSQL. Are there any plans to cover it in the near future?
Read the "colophon" in each book. They explain the choice of animals. IIRC Edie Freedman is the one who makes the choices, and she deserves a lot of credit for coming up with wittier selections than most of us would pick.
And at some of the more liberal colleges out here, "pot in every imac." But that's a long and sort of messy story, so filling in the blanks is an exercise best left to the reader.
I'll buy that. I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but look at the other acronyms they use and how they conflict with other organizations/standards/etc. I had a suspicion of this when the article was first posted. Of course, there IS no way to determine if they're telling the truth or not...:)
I completely agree with everyone on the lack of public knowledge of the difference between CS and just programming.
The problem, however, is that many colleges and universities ALSO don't know the difference! I go to a school that does recognize the difference, and often it gets frustrating. They want to teach theory and invite students to participate in research using computers (which, in my mind is the goal of CS: "the development of computers as a tool" -- which entails a lot of programming, but is by no means defined as programming).
Those of us who just want to get a degree and move into the workplace (not as programmers, but as hardware designers and such) are starting to see the light and move towards EE or CE.
On a side note, I find it odd that CS is in the "engineering" group of departments at most schools, when it in itself certainly doesn't seem as much like engineering as, say, building a bridge, planning a city, designing an artifical heart or coming up with a robot.
-Chris (who forgets where he was going when he started this post)
Merill Lynch may know shitloads about stock and what they think the company is doing in the long run, but just because a stock is labelled a "strong sell" doesn't mean the company sucks. From a technical standpoint (the one that, I'd imagine, most/.'ers CARE about), SGI is long from dead. That's what the author is saying. And I completely agree with him. I work in a neuroscience department that uses O2's, Indys, and a challenge for processing huge amounts of image data and dumps statistics based on image analysis and some discrete-logic input. The kinds of simulations they run wouldn't run on a PC or Mac, period. The only thing we get PCs for are sticking the output into a LaTeX or Word document to share with others. I love SGI and what they're doing for the community, as well as the products they've already developed on their own. I don't give a flip what Dean Stanley thinks about them as a business prospect, because I know they'll be around long enough for me. -Chris
What's up with the repostings lately? This was one of several designs Intel had a few months ago for weird "iMac competitors." My favorite was the one with the centralized CD-ROM that made it look like a radiation symbol.
Slashdot Mirror
Forget the actual data in the database; I feel the actual *design* of a relational database deserves to be copyrighted. It's an art form! It takes a long time and many changes to the set of tables and their connections before a database reaches the point of being "good." (Let alone "usable" or "well designed".)
:)
When I implement a good database, I certainly don't want anyone else taking my work. I don't care what happens to the data in it... that's my clients' problem.
-Chris
And after JohnCon, come to the Barnstormer's Spring Mainstage. You'll be coming down off your pixie stik high and still have enough attention span to watch a wonderful professionally directed musical!
Only yards away from JohnCon's Gilman Hall in the historic Arellano Theater.
-Chris
Wow. Remember the early 1990's... back before that "Internet" thing became popular? Back when Boardwatch was all the rage and magazines like Wired didn't even matter?
Seems to me SJG led to the World(tm)'s first run in with the EFF. I guess we ought to all go buy a starter deck (even though we're all recovered addicts and this will just get us hooked againn) just to support the beginning of the end of electronic privacy and the efforts that the EFF have put in to protect us.
-Chris
(Okay, so it's off-topic, but I felt it was worthwhile.)
"How many d.net keys does it...."
-Chris
This isn't new. At my university, Microsoft donated several workstations loaded with the latest wizz-bang hardware and Windows NT with all the development tools to the Computer Science department. They were placed in the lab next to our current Linux, Solaris and Mac machines.
:>).
The NT boxes never got touched, except to check email once in a while.
So, some enterprising students (or staff?) installed Omni-X on there, and people started using them -- as overpriced Xterms. All that computing power going to waste (or to Distributed.net...
The choice is there, is presented to the students, and both the students and most adminstrators have made their decision... Microsoft is unnecessary. And it will be even less necessary as these developers-to-be move into the workplace. And Microsoft can't do anything about it. It's all too little, too late.
-Chris
As much as I love linux and credit it for all sorts of things, there are better deals out there than using linux as a router. Granted, I'm sitting on a rh6 box right now that's behind a lrp firewall connected to the internet, there are dedicated boxes for about $100-150 you can get that have three ethernet ports and a modem built in and that do NAT in hardware. It's very slick. It's what I use to connect Mom and Dad to the 'net. They can share a line and both surf at the same time. As great as linux would be for this, if there's ever a power failure, and I'm not around to fix the thing, there's no problem -- since it doesn't have any filesystems mounted, it's just an XXXk eeprom, it just starts back up where it left off. A linux box would take 30 seconds to boot up, get to the fsck failure and wait for input. At which point my parents would be stranded without internet access till I came home from school.
Plus, these boxes are about the size of a mini hub and take the same amount of power. Even though I can get a pretty darn small 486 case, it's still going to be sucking a bit of juice and some serious closet real estate.
I've had a network in my house since circa 1991 (thanks, Invisible Software!) and as extensively as I use linux, it doesn't have THAT much to do with the home networking revolution. If anything, I credit the OS vendors moving networking into the OS (gag...).
When I had to install personal netware on top of all our machines running DOS 4 and 5 with Win3.1, it was a non-trivial task to get files shared. When Win95 allowed point-and-click network browsing with almost ZERO configuration, it became alot easier. Of course, Macs have had this since very early on (and kudos to apple for integrating network hardware, however incompatible with the rest of the world ).
Linux *will* however play an important role once it makes plug-and-play, near-zero-configuration, point-and-click setup the norm. It's close, but not quite.
This isn't a pro-MS post. It's just taming your Linux over-advocacy. Sorry, but nothing personal. I'll never run anything but Linux on my home network servers (well, that free solaris deal is looking better and better....)
-Chris
Well, not too far from RTP you start to get into Charlotte radio stations, and 99.7 "The Fox" is the greatest radio station I've ever listened to. (Plus, it's the home of John Boy and Billy's Big Show, one of the greatest syndicated shows in the southeast!)
-Chris
Ahh the joys of a major private university... at my school, half the students carry around cell phones (sprint pcs is cheaper than a landline) and hundreds can be seen swapping stuff with their palms (usually ones that have been decked out with cell modems and the like). These new models will be great because everyone will be able to get one.
-Chris
"The modules instantaneously install their own software."
It's nice to see widespread use an idea that's been around since the apple II.
Seriously, though, this ought to be convenient.
-Chris
I'm a most-time network/sysadmin for a department at a university. We run Linux, IRIX, and a (un?)healthy dose of Windows. As much as I can't stand windows, this article is right about RH's (or any linux distro's) default install.
/etc/inetd.conf and hosts.deny on the very first boot, but these folks don't realize it, and there's no way to tell them it unless you're looking over their shoulder when they install.
I've convinced a couple of friends of mine to make the switch to Linux, but the ones who put it on machines with any sort of dedicated network access I *force* to go behind the firewall when they first install. It's almost criminal the number of ways into an out-of-the-box RedHat/Slackware system (the main distributions I've worked with). Finger, systat/netstat, and everything RPC are all completely running -- and not even filtered by tcpwrappers. The worst part is that these things are (99% of the time) completely unnecessary on a workstation.
Granted, I know to go and edit out
#include
(okay, I'm done moaning now.)
-Chris
What about games? Sony (historically) has a similar game selection to Sega: they're mostly fighting and sports games. Plus a few Final Fantasy-style RPGs. For those of us who prefer basic arcade games and (for lack of a better term) Zelda style RPGs, it doesn't matter that this thing has more connectivity than an iMac II.... it just won't have the software to make the platform worthwhile.
As bummed as I am waiting for that next Nintendo (Dolphin, is that what they're calling it these days?), I'll probably wait for that (even if it DOES do carts instead of the infinitely-more-convenient CD/DVD drive) simply because the games will be closer to home. I don't care about "Football 2000" or "Kick Some Guys Ass IV"; I want to play Super Mario 47, Zelda 24 and Metroid 8.
-Chris
But it's always fun to get to look at other people's colocated equipment. Usually there's a lot of nifty stuff there that most of us would never even think of getting a chance to see... :)
-Chris
Well, it does lead one to think of the definitive way for Microsoft to kill Linux.
They develop their own version, release it as L++, base it on C libraries that are incompatible with both libc5 and glibc2 and in various other ways make it flashier but impossible to implement next to real Linux, but claim it's the same.
It should go without saying that they never support this product, fail to mention it on most of their web pages, remove all references to it from their Knowledge Base, charge exorbitant prices for it (while also distributing it free in computer books) and include the 49.7 day bug.
Then, after dividing the market, there's no way Linux could sue them. I mean, Sun has hundreds of lawyers. The best we could do is throw a couple FSF volunteers at them.
In a matter of six months, MS could have Linux deader than OS/2 and be free to force Win2000 upon everyone (because we know Linux people aren't going to bite the bullet and use *BSD).
Conquering The World 101. They've done it before, they'll try it again. Unfortunately.
-Chris
Not to start a free SQL server war here, but I notice there is a (quite good) book on mSql and MySql, but nothing for PostgreSQL. Are there any plans to cover it in the near future?
I'd nominate E.Coli for "MS Exchange Sever." I get the same symptoms after being exposed to both.
-Chris
Read the "colophon" in each book. They explain the choice of animals. IIRC Edie Freedman is the one who makes the choices, and she deserves a lot of credit for coming up with wittier selections than most of us would pick.
-Chris
Shows how backwards our school REALLY is. We only have Pepsi machines.
-Chris
(Except for one machine in Psych that they use the profits from to buy gifts for departing grad students each year...)
And at some of the more liberal colleges out here, "pot in every imac." But that's a long and sort of messy story, so filling in the blanks is an exercise best left to the reader.
-Chris
I'll buy that. I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but look at the other acronyms they use and how they conflict with other organizations/standards/etc. I had a suspicion of this when the article was first posted. Of course, there IS no way to determine if they're telling the truth or not... :)
-Chris
I completely agree with everyone on the lack of public knowledge of the difference between CS and just programming.
The problem, however, is that many colleges and universities ALSO don't know the difference! I go to a school that does recognize the difference, and often it gets frustrating. They want to teach theory and invite students to participate in research using computers (which, in my mind is the goal of CS: "the development of computers as a tool" -- which entails a lot of programming, but is by no means defined as programming).
Those of us who just want to get a degree and move into the workplace (not as programmers, but as hardware designers and such) are starting to see the light and move towards EE or CE.
On a side note, I find it odd that CS is in the "engineering" group of departments at most schools, when it in itself certainly doesn't seem as much like engineering as, say, building a bridge, planning a city, designing an artifical heart or coming up with a robot.
-Chris
(who forgets where he was going when he started this post)
The fridge in our computational neuroscience lab has had an IP address assigned to it for months. Why is this one "news"? :)
-Chris
(It's been allocated but certainly not utilized...)
I second what hawk says. I think everyone should avoid any kind of speculation on this unless you have a significant law background.
-Chris
Yeah, but all of them are vulnerable to tooltalkdb rpm attacks... :)
-Chris
Merill Lynch may know shitloads about stock and what they think the company is doing in the long run, but just because a stock is labelled a "strong sell" doesn't mean the company sucks. From a technical standpoint (the one that, I'd imagine, most /.'ers CARE about), SGI is long from dead. That's what the author is saying. And I completely agree with him. I work in a neuroscience department that uses O2's, Indys, and a challenge for processing huge amounts of image data and dumps statistics based on image analysis and some discrete-logic input. The kinds of simulations they run wouldn't run on a PC or Mac, period. The only thing we get PCs for are sticking the output into a LaTeX or Word document to share with others. I love SGI and what they're doing for the community, as well as the products they've already developed on their own. I don't give a flip what Dean Stanley thinks about them as a business prospect, because I know they'll be around long enough for me. -Chris
What's up with the repostings lately? This was one of several designs Intel had a few months ago for weird "iMac competitors." My favorite was the one with the centralized CD-ROM that made it look like a radiation symbol.
-Chris