How come the NYT gets an obligatory 'free registration required' warning while Salon doesn't merit an 'expensive and probably futile registration required' fatal error?
Here's hoping there's another footsoldier of god out there who'll take $25mil in small bills in exchange for Osama's current location.
Bribing 'footsoldiers of God' to fight on the side of 'right': Yeah, that always turns out well:
Bin Laden was trained by the CIA. In the 1980s, the U.S. fought a proxy war against the Soviet Union, using Afghanistan. 8 billion dollars was spent on this covert war (one of several the U.S. was involved in at the time). We armed and trained Islamic fundamentalists to form an international brigade; we encouraged them to come to Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight the Soviets. We wanted a Saudi prince to lead the brigade, for this would give our operation an air of legitimacy. Only Bin Laden answered our call (while other rich Suadis sent money). We celebrated him. He was with us from 1986 to 1989, when the war ended and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then he turned against the U.S. when the Persian Gulf crisis was heating up and when Saudi Arabia invited the U.S. to occupy it.
Galeon remembers what tabs you had open when you exit, and they appear next time you load the app. Great feature that's missing (IIRC) from Mozilla, Phoenix, and many of the other tabbed browsers.
this functionality is available in mozilla, phoenix and netscape via an xul app: tabbrowser extensions.
just set set your home page to 'last page visited' and you're good to go.
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
A classic treatise from the e-pen of noted intellectual Courtney Love.
If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy.
I doubt Love would get out of bed for less than a Hollywood ransom and a noseful of gak. Might luck out with Lanier, though, if you can contact him in Virtuality before the imminent Eighties revival kicks in.
Personally I think Python and Perl are the same toolkit with trivial differences in syntax, and wish language designers would take a leaf out of Mark-Jason Dominus's book and go easy on the theology.
But, FYI, Perl has a coupla thousand killer apps, most of which are available on CPAN.
The Beatles never flamed the Stones. The Stones never dissed the Beatles. And at no time did either party rip on Bob Dylan or badmouth Marvin Gaye. Language designers should celebrate their brethren. Particularly when the similarities so overwhelmingly outnumber the differences.
Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete with Perl in the areas where Perl is best -- it's a battle that's impossible to win, and I don't think it is a good idea to strive for the number of obscure options and shortcuts that Perl has acquired through the years.Guido van Rossum, 7 Jul 1992
When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff, and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that.Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters
It claims (without proof) to be a lot faster than Java: 1.5 - 3 times slower than C (according to this document, the source of much of the following information).
It's all tooled up with both the bad bways of Garbage Collection. Yes, let's hear it, folks, for Mark and Sweep and his old sparring partner Reference Counting. Still doesn't stop it churning perceptibly in the ticker applet. (They claim RT scheduling but that's no good when you're sitting inside IE with JavaScript turned on in a force 9 pr0n gale.) The polyhedra demo is fast and smoothe and reasonably svelte.
'array of array of vector of arse'. Gak! Neither I nor the compiler are amused that dcl is now compulsory.
It can run Limbo source or binaries, not just bytecode.
Dennis Ritchie encourages the development of a C compiler, and maybe the one bundled with Plan 9 has a few tricks up its sleeve. With a gcj-style Dis backend you could install signed X and Gnome/GTK/KDE/Qt (or the unbelievably cool Ion Window Manager) applets to replace the embarrassingly retro interface. How about writing DHTML in Perl or Python instead of JavaScript? Can you say.GNET?
The site's 3 years old and the guy may be talking out of his arse. I'll give him this, though: he sure knows how to diss up C++ with a zeal for hellfire and damnation truly worthy of his dear OS's name:
C++ objects and their complexities are happily left out. There is no polymorphism or tricky exception handling (the difficulty of understanding exception handling caused the
explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket).
It's not every day you download and install an operating system in a couple of seconds (ADSL). Didn't even have to powercycle IE let alone reboot its other OS plugin, Windows. If they don't open the source I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's looking at his/her 1 floppy Linux distro and hatching a cunning plan. What a shame Theo de Raadt's so down on a pocket OpenBSD (reminds me of Guido's antipathy to a Python shared object, Linus's allergy to a kernel debugger). That fireproof sonofabitch would be a perfect fit for plug-in World Domination.
It already has a decent object-oriented system i.e. an optional one (and what it lacks in syntactic sugar can easily be procured from CPAN). Personally, I hardly ever write non OO Perl (and, yes, I'd like to see it graduate from 'decent' to best-of-breed), but there's a bunch of areas - quick'n'dirty CGI, sysadmin scripts, optimizations and general gluing and mucking about - where OO is overkill. Don't forget Perl is a great Unix tool amongst many other things. You can munge the hell out of text with little more than a commandline salvo.
Er, you mean like Safe, which is as old as Java, offers vastly more control than the Java sandbox (it operates at the opcode level), and which, to my knowledge, has never met a script kiddie yet it couldn't politely but firmly kick to the kerb.
Perl has many fine and dandy features because it promiscuously and 'diagonally' soaks up good ideas (Larry has even been spotted flirting with C# of late). You don't have to be a hypocritical hobgoblin to want to make it finer and dandier: just another perl hacker.
His site's a real treasure trove. Great for truffling up odd facts. Like this gem buried in the DMCA:
(4) Nothing in this section shall enlarge or diminish any rights of free speech or the press for activities using consumer electronics, telecommunications, or computing products.
Incidentally, reading Touretzky's wonderfully eloquent and stirring defence of what effectively amounts to civil disobedience, a sudden irony bludgeoned me unconscious like a baby seal: one day this somewhat clichéd story of the little guy taking on the faceless dehumanising monolith and prevailing through resourcefulness and passion will be made into a Hollywood Movie starring Robin Williams as Touretzky, that kid from Jerry Maguire as Jon Johansen, and Alanis Morisette as The American Constitution.
The tagline on the DVD (just above the Oscar garlands)? 'Information Wants to Be Free.'
Check out Ozone. According to the blurb it's a "fully featured, object-oriented database management system completely implemented in Java and distributed under an open source license". And it fully supports XML.
You don't have to fake it. It's thread-safe and (from what I can tell) queues concurrent queries. Again, I'm sure it will develop something more mature, but it's early days yet. You can vote for features and fixes on the SourceForge survey
I gave up dB work a year or two ago. Maybe it was starting with MS Access and enjoying its compact, RAD, toy quality. Unscaleable and inapproriate for Enterprise stuff of course (and making no pretence to such garlands), but fast, small (well, the.mds were small if you compacted them) and fun.
The problem was the inevitable upgrade lead me to MS SQL Server 6.5 (I was stuck on NT at the time). SQL Server had a lot of stuff I was missing in Access - triggers, stored procedures, scaleability - but it also brought a lot of frustrations. The domain aggregate functions were poorer than those offered by Access, which was a pain as I was trying to roll my own OLAP before it all got proprietarized into a Babel of different buyouts and skill-subsets. Its big-iron feel didn't stop it having a ludicrous 255 byte limit on varchar fields. For bigger you had to futz about wastefully amalgamating BLOBs of text with READTEXT/WRITETEXT. Plus it was grotesquely high-maintenance. I didn't want to become a DBA. I just wanted to hack SQL. And wasteful. The 'devices' ('Honey, I bloated the database') were huge and couldn't be shrunk, no matter how svelte the actual data.
By the time I escaped the NT shop I was naively looking to Oracle to save me from these frustrations. Unfortunately, I'll never know the joys or horrors of that particular 'platform', because at 600 Mb for the Linux installation I just bailed out and cried 'Enough of this grotesquely bloated crap!' and pursued XML or BerkeleyDB solutions to anything remoteley persistence-flavoured thereafter. I knew that fast and small were synonyms, but the vendors were growing fat on the antonym line and there was nothing I could do about it. Even MySQL and PostgreSQL were part of the problem. They're all emacs. None of them are vi.
Recently I ran my periodic, wishful, wistful Google-grep for 'fast', 'small' and 'rdbms' and found myself, after rejecting Brian Jepson'sTinySQL as ridiculously small and cute but strictly pedagogical, finally discovering The One.
Hypersonic SQL, a tiny Open Source Java database weighing in at less than 100K, supports correlated subqueries, transactions, referential integrity, indexes, stored procedures and JDBC - everything basically, but GROUP BY, cursors and triggers. I never used cursors myself. I'd rather iterate in Perl. The other two, admittedly are fondly missed, but not life-threatening. It doesn't support failover. But with such a small, developer-friendly codebase anything's possible.
Did I say 'Perl'? 'But it's a Java database', I hear you cry. How can this beast talk Perl? Well, it can't, which is why I'm working on a Perl DBI interface to it talking to a native driver over TCP/IP. If anyone wants to contribute (I wouldn't need to hack it if some brave soul wants to polish up the languishing JNI module in JPL to support embedding Java in Perl on Linux (currently it only works for Win32)), please get in touch. I'm almost certainly way out of my depth and entering a world of pain.
More interesting is the fact that the posts (not for the faint-of-bandwidth) are made up almost entirely of quotations and jokes. Looks like someone effectively 'spammed' the thread with their cookie file (just two days ago). Makes most of the nu-generation sons and daughters of Meept! look like dabbling dilettantes.
1. The only way I can perceive civil discussions happening on sites like this is if... people were required to post under some form of recognizable ID, and... moderators with power kept the conversation on track and kicked out people who attacked ideas or posters personally or strayed off topic.
Sidestepping the undemocratic leanings of this rant, we get to ask ourselves one question. What could be more offtopic than a nontechnical, newbie hack preaching to hackers on the net's numero uno technical weblog?
2. But remember that I express opinions more frequently than anybody on Slashdot
And more verbosely. Must have skipped the pith and wit classes at that journalism school he so clearly (anti-thesis?) never went to.
3. I read all criticism, even flames. I don't believe in many aspects of the moderation system. I set my prefs to everything. To me, steering software is the anti-thesis of community. I consider it self-censorship, a Balkanization of ideas, an effort to smother a human problem with software.
You don't like it, why not hack the source, which is freely available, and remove this offending 'Ba lkanization'. Incidentally, if it wasn't for the filtering system, more people would be exposed to your low-content name-dropping, and you would no longer be able to sustain the impausible boast that you "read all criticism, even flames."
4. I read Freshmeat every day, and marvel at it, understanding hardly anything. It's one of the most interesting places to go on the Web.
If you're too thick to understand it (what's to understand?) why do you continue to read it? Who are you trying to impress?
5. For example, I believe government should have stopped Microsoft much sooner, and should definitely halt the AOL/Time-Warner merger.
Why? I'd be particularly interested to hear what legal basis you think there is for a suit against AOL/Time-Warner, as, I'm sure, would their lawyers. For someone who describes himself as "skittish about labels and parties" and "not a political person" you sure have a sweet tooth for Big Government.
6. But I have to say that my thinking about Libertarianism is a work-in-progress. Maybe the best response is to write about it a bit, and start some discussions.
Maybe if you thought about things before engaging MSWord you might be more esteemed as a writer than a pissweak cluebie.
7. I don't believe most people on Slashdot hate me.
Let's put it to a poll. It's gotta beat "What's your favourite number?" and "Who's your favourite Khan?" anyday.
8. I have been railing against Microsoftism before most of you were programming.
I started in 1981 (with the ZX81). You've been flaming Microsoft for 19 years? Clever boy. Care to post a URL?
9.... many of you would be mortified to know how many people come onto Slashdot to laugh at the nightmare that is Threads. [Ha Ha. Thread Derision: The world's fastest growing spectator sport. I think not.] Rob's moderation systems have definitely made this better, and he thinks quite a bit about this issue.
Compare and contrast with point 3.
10. Slashdot is hiring some professional editors.
Why doesn't it hire a professional writer while it's at it, so you can be swiftly put out of our misery? All these criticisms become null and void if you'd take your talent (everyone has it: even you) outside of this essentially technical forum. CmdrTaco is too honourable and hippyish to bludgeon you to death like a baby seal. Why don't you do the right thing and resign? I see the katzdot domains are still available...
1. This is a classic saga: The morning after AOL-Time-Warner-EMI a 15 year old kid takes on the New World Order. There's something seriously wrong if you're not reading about this off-Slashdot and being briefed by your Granny. Even more important than mirroring the source is mirroring the truth.
2. Who unplugged ESR and RMS and (insert 3-letter guru here)? For once, I'd like to know what they think. The media listens to them. They command influence. Typical: when you need them they're as silent as lambs.
3. ThinkGeek, where's the DeCSS t-shirt? Something like this, but without the acid-casualty background. Memorize it and grafitti it on movie posters. Mugs. Tatoos. Stickers. Screensavers. Flyers. BeerMats. The only cure for the discontents of commodification are more commodities.
4. The human spirit views censorship as damage and routes around it.
This is as offtopic as an offtopic thing with a degree in offtopicness from the Massachusetts Institute of Offtopicality, but the abovementioned site has a link to the funniest and most entertaining thing I've read since Old Man Murray was slashdotted a couple of weeks ago. It's blurbed as follows (for those who prefer to teleport non-blind):
On another lighter note, let me tell you the story of Fry, and how the Internet got him laid. He was in a Yahoo chat room talking to a married woman who lived near him, and they decided to meet. The story isn't as simple as that though, as you will find out if you decide that you feel like reading a true account of a regular [21] year old guy who found out that there is more to life than playing Quake 3. Check out the story here, it's pretty erotic in a perverted Dawson's Creek sort of way.
It's not like I'm running on an Amiga or a Casio E-100 or a Palm Pilot or a Sinclair QL or a Dreamcast or a yawn... I mean, this is a red-hot-one-year-ago (remember how things were a year ago... a month ago... last week... kids today) laptop. i586. MMX. Quake II. WindowMaker. vi. Capisce? 1024x768 pixels of uncut attitude. Every Milestone I have to break it to my baby: the Man from Mozilla says 'No'.
Laptop: Are you on crack? You're saying I have to put up with Netscape 4.07? That heinous piece of crap.
Me: Hey, watch your language, laptop. Don't make me hafta open a can of Lynx on your ass.
Laptop: Alright, alright. Couldn't you just download the source? Pretty please? Me: 20Mb on a 33.3k connection? Buddy, your F00F bug is showing.
Laptop: But Navigator hates Java. The slightest applet brings it to its knees.
Me: I know.
Laptop: Why the hell don't browsers cache DNS lookups? There's some kind of DNS locking going on that causes it to whiteout. On DNS for chrissakes! You look at top and it's got like 96% of the memory.
Me: I know.
Laptop: Try reading Slashdot on that baby. Good luck. Back doesn't mean back on planet Netscape.
Me: I know.
Laptop: Don't get me started on Javascript. Or CSS. Bloat. Speed. Key Bindings.
Anyone remember 'Springtime for Hitler'? The musical in The Producers that had to be extraordinarily bad to make its investors rich? Free ISPs charge a hefty premium for support calls. Dixons came in at £1 a minute when they launched Freeserve. It's down to 50p now, but I can't see it going into freefall.
I've tried Callnet and found the service to be reliably unreliable (in the interests of fairness I should add that I've found at least one paying service - u-net - to be equally bad), but I'm always slightly amused every time the line gutters and the little xmessage I've patched into ppp-off tells me that 'Your modem connection has been lost.' Why? Because these guys are the first people in the history of capitalism to make money deliberately and directly by providing a bad service. The worse the service, the more support calls they get, and thus the greater their revenue stream. They only have to bring the service down for a couple of seconds and their little callcenters go ballistic and the real money - the value-added goldmine, the support cashcow - starts rolling in.
Microsoft make money despite providing an unreliable service. They shouldn't find it hard to adjust to this new business model.
Slashdot Mirror
O RLOWSKI?
How come the NYT gets an obligatory 'free registration required' warning while Salon doesn't merit an 'expensive and probably futile registration required' fatal error?
Bribing 'footsoldiers of God' to fight on the side of 'right': Yeah, that always turns out well:
this functionality is available in mozilla, phoenix and netscape via an xul app: tabbrowser extensions.
just set set your home page to 'last page visited' and you're good to go.
also allows you to reorder tabs by drag 'n' drop.
Dragon Spice
SICP Spice
GOF Spice
K&R Spice
Knuth Spice
Fortunately, Konqueror allows you to disable popups with a single checkbox.
But does it allow you to remove these annoying pop-in Konqueror ads from Slashdot?
Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts.
A classic treatise from the e-pen of noted intellectual Courtney Love.
If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy.
You can't have both.
This one's from the heart of rock'n'roll's Mr Wild, Jared Lanier.
I doubt Love would get out of bed for less than a Hollywood ransom and a noseful of gak. Might luck out with Lanier, though, if you can contact him in Virtuality before the imminent Eighties revival kicks in.
Personally I think Python and Perl are the same toolkit with trivial differences in syntax, and wish language designers would take a leaf out of Mark-Jason Dominus's book and go easy on the theology.
But, FYI, Perl has a coupla thousand killer apps, most of which are available on CPAN.
Industry Standards include:
The Beatles never flamed the Stones. The Stones never dissed the Beatles. And at no time did either party rip on Bob Dylan or badmouth Marvin Gaye. Language designers should celebrate their brethren. Particularly when the similarities so overwhelmingly outnumber the differences.
Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse. Larry Wall, 14 Oct 1998
Frankly, I'd rather not try to compete with Perl in the areas where Perl is best -- it's a battle that's impossible to win, and I don't think it is a good idea to strive for the number of obscure options and shortcuts that Perl has acquired through the years. Guido van Rossum, 7 Jul 1992
When I originally designed Perl 5's OO, I thought about a lot of this stuff, and chose the explicit object model of Python as being the least confusing. So far I haven't seen a good reason to change my mind on that. Larry Wall, 27 Feb 1997 on perl5-porters
If Perl weren't around, I'd probably be using Python right now. Tom Christiansen in comp.lang.perl, 2 Jun 1995
Python is an excellent language for learning object orientation. (It also happens to be my favorite OO scripting language.) Sriram Srinivasan, Advanced Perl Programming
That site links to Swish which in turn links to various demos, one of which stars a geek who looks eerily familiar.
Apart from the occasional CV I never use the filthy format myself, but the specs for this and most other Office file formats are freely available.
You can get them on msdn (membership is free, apparently) if you're that way inclined or better still head over to binary Valhalla Wotsit.
You only have to glance at the specs to see why they're now moving to XML.
It claims (without proof) to be a lot faster than Java: 1.5 - 3 times slower than C (according to this document, the source of much of the following information).
It's all tooled up with both the bad bways of Garbage Collection. Yes, let's hear it, folks, for Mark and Sweep and his old sparring partner Reference Counting. Still doesn't stop it churning perceptibly in the ticker applet. (They claim RT scheduling but that's no good when you're sitting inside IE with JavaScript turned on in a force 9 pr0n gale.) The polyhedra demo is fast and smoothe and reasonably svelte.
'array of array of vector of arse'. Gak! Neither I nor the compiler are amused that dcl is now compulsory.
It can run Limbo source or binaries, not just bytecode.
Dennis Ritchie encourages the development of a C compiler, and maybe the one bundled with Plan 9 has a few tricks up its sleeve. With a gcj-style Dis backend you could install signed X and Gnome/GTK/KDE/Qt (or the unbelievably cool Ion Window Manager) applets to replace the embarrassingly retro interface. How about writing DHTML in Perl or Python instead of JavaScript? Can you say .GNET?
The site's 3 years old and the guy may be talking out of his arse. I'll give him this, though: he sure knows how to diss up C++ with a zeal for hellfire and damnation truly worthy of his dear OS's name:
It's not every day you download and install an operating system in a couple of seconds (ADSL). Didn't even have to powercycle IE let alone reboot its other OS plugin, Windows. If they don't open the source I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's looking at his/her 1 floppy Linux distro and hatching a cunning plan. What a shame Theo de Raadt's so down on a pocket OpenBSD (reminds me of Guido's antipathy to a Python shared object, Linus's allergy to a kernel debugger). That fireproof sonofabitch would be a perfect fit for plug-in World Domination.
I am completely convinced that by version 8 or so, Perl will
Status: Withdrawn
It already has a decent object-oriented system i.e. an optional one (and what it lacks in syntactic sugar can easily be procured from CPAN). Personally, I hardly ever write non OO Perl (and, yes, I'd like to see it graduate from 'decent' to best-of-breed), but there's a bunch of areas - quick'n'dirty CGI, sysadmin scripts, optimizations and general gluing and mucking about - where OO is overkill. Don't forget Perl is a great Unix tool amongst many other things. You can munge the hell out of text with little more than a commandline salvo.
Try version 6.
Er, you mean like Safe, which is as old as Java, offers vastly more control than the Java sandbox (it operates at the opcode level), and which, to my knowledge, has never met a script kiddie yet it couldn't politely but firmly kick to the kerb.
Perl has many fine and dandy features because it promiscuously and 'diagonally' soaks up good ideas (Larry has even been spotted flirting with C# of late). You don't have to be a hypocritical hobgoblin to want to make it finer and dandier: just another perl hacker.
Dr David Touretzky of Carnegie Mellon University, who testified on the 2600 case and was commended by the Court for his "lucid explication" and "candour", has a Gallery of CSS Descramblers, including an English prose version.
His site's a real treasure trove. Great for truffling up odd facts. Like this gem buried in the DMCA:Incidentally, reading Touretzky's wonderfully eloquent and stirring defence of what effectively amounts to civil disobedience, a sudden irony bludgeoned me unconscious like a baby seal: one day this somewhat clichéd story of the little guy taking on the faceless dehumanising monolith and prevailing through resourcefulness and passion will be made into a Hollywood Movie starring Robin Williams as Touretzky, that kid from Jerry Maguire as Jon Johansen, and Alanis Morisette as The American Constitution.
The tagline on the DVD (just above the Oscar garlands)? 'Information Wants to Be Free.'
Those guys probably rejected ads that weren't cool enough.
Yeah, Neville Brody used to do that at The Face.
Last I heard he was working for Macromedia.
Check out Ozone. According to the blurb it's a "fully featured, object-oriented database management system completely implemented in Java and distributed under an open source license". And it fully supports XML.
You don't have to fake it. It's thread-safe and (from what I can tell) queues concurrent queries. Again, I'm sure it will develop something more mature, but it's early days yet. You can vote for features and fixes on the SourceForge survey
Actually GROUP BY has just been added. Support is described as 'limited', but it looks like an active area of development.
I gave up dB work a year or two ago. Maybe it was starting with MS Access and enjoying its compact, RAD, toy quality. Unscaleable and inapproriate for Enterprise stuff of course (and making no pretence to such garlands), but fast, small (well, the .mds were small if you compacted them) and fun.
The problem was the inevitable upgrade lead me to MS SQL Server 6.5 (I was stuck on NT at the time). SQL Server had a lot of stuff I was missing in Access - triggers, stored procedures, scaleability - but it also brought a lot of frustrations. The domain aggregate functions were poorer than those offered by Access, which was a pain as I was trying to roll my own OLAP before it all got proprietarized into a Babel of different buyouts and skill-subsets. Its big-iron feel didn't stop it having a ludicrous 255 byte limit on varchar fields. For bigger you had to futz about wastefully amalgamating BLOBs of text with READTEXT/WRITETEXT. Plus it was grotesquely high-maintenance. I didn't want to become a DBA. I just wanted to hack SQL. And wasteful. The 'devices' ('Honey, I bloated the database') were huge and couldn't be shrunk, no matter how svelte the actual data.
By the time I escaped the NT shop I was naively looking to Oracle to save me from these frustrations. Unfortunately, I'll never know the joys or horrors of that particular 'platform', because at 600 Mb for the Linux installation I just bailed out and cried 'Enough of this grotesquely bloated crap!' and pursued XML or BerkeleyDB solutions to anything remoteley persistence-flavoured thereafter. I knew that fast and small were synonyms, but the vendors were growing fat on the antonym line and there was nothing I could do about it. Even MySQL and PostgreSQL were part of the problem. They're all emacs. None of them are vi.
Recently I ran my periodic, wishful, wistful Google-grep for 'fast', 'small' and 'rdbms' and found myself, after rejecting Brian Jepson's TinySQL as ridiculously small and cute but strictly pedagogical, finally discovering The One.
Hypersonic SQL, a tiny Open Source Java database weighing in at less than 100K, supports correlated subqueries, transactions, referential integrity, indexes, stored procedures and JDBC - everything basically, but GROUP BY, cursors and triggers. I never used cursors myself. I'd rather iterate in Perl. The other two, admittedly are fondly missed, but not life-threatening. It doesn't support failover. But with such a small, developer-friendly codebase anything's possible.
Did I say 'Perl'? 'But it's a Java database', I hear you cry. How can this beast talk Perl? Well, it can't, which is why I'm working on a Perl DBI interface to it talking to a native driver over TCP/IP. If anyone wants to contribute (I wouldn't need to hack it if some brave soul wants to polish up the languishing JNI module in JPL to support embedding Java in Perl on Linux (currently it only works for Win32)), please get in touch. I'm almost certainly way out of my depth and entering a world of pain.
Oh, did I mention? It's 7 times faster than SQL Server.
More interesting is the fact that the posts (not for the faint-of-bandwidth) are made up almost entirely of quotations and jokes. Looks like someone effectively 'spammed' the thread with their cookie file (just two days ago). Makes most of the nu-generation sons and daughters of Meept! look like dabbling dilettantes.
Epic détournement or crude LWP hack? You decide.
1. The only way I can perceive civil discussions happening on sites like this is if... people were required to post under some form of recognizable ID, and... moderators with power kept the conversation on track and kicked out people who attacked ideas or posters personally or strayed off topic.
Sidestepping the undemocratic leanings of this rant, we get to ask ourselves one question. What could be more offtopic than a nontechnical, newbie hack preaching to hackers on the net's numero uno technical weblog?
2. But remember that I express opinions more frequently than anybody on Slashdot
And more verbosely. Must have skipped the pith and wit classes at that journalism school he so clearly (anti-thesis?) never went to.
3. I read all criticism, even flames. I don't believe in many aspects of the moderation system. I set my prefs to everything. To me, steering software is the anti-thesis of community. I consider it self-censorship, a Balkanization of ideas, an effort to smother a human problem with software.
You don't like it, why not hack the source, which is freely available, and remove this offending 'Ba lkanization'. Incidentally, if it wasn't for the filtering system, more people would be exposed to your low-content name-dropping, and you would no longer be able to sustain the impausible boast that you "read all criticism, even flames."
4. I read Freshmeat every day, and marvel at it, understanding hardly anything. It's one of the most interesting places to go on the Web.
If you're too thick to understand it (what's to understand?) why do you continue to read it? Who are you trying to impress?
5. For example, I believe government should have stopped Microsoft much sooner, and should definitely halt the AOL/Time-Warner merger.
Why? I'd be particularly interested to hear what legal basis you think there is for a suit against AOL/Time-Warner, as, I'm sure, would their lawyers. For someone who describes himself as "skittish about labels and parties" and "not a political person" you sure have a sweet tooth for Big Government.
6. But I have to say that my thinking about Libertarianism is a work-in-progress. Maybe the best response is to write about it a bit, and start some discussions.
Maybe if you thought about things before engaging MSWord you might be more esteemed as a writer than a pissweak cluebie.
7. I don't believe most people on Slashdot hate me.
Let's put it to a poll. It's gotta beat "What's your favourite number?" and "Who's your favourite Khan?" anyday.
8. I have been railing against Microsoftism before most of you were programming.
I started in 1981 (with the ZX81). You've been flaming Microsoft for 19 years? Clever boy. Care to post a URL?
9. ... many of you would be mortified to know how many people come onto Slashdot to laugh at the nightmare that is Threads. [Ha Ha. Thread Derision: The world's fastest growing spectator sport. I think not.] Rob's moderation systems have definitely made this better, and he thinks quite a bit about this issue.
Compare and contrast with point 3.
10. Slashdot is hiring some professional editors.
Why doesn't it hire a professional writer while it's at it, so you can be swiftly put out of our misery? All these criticisms become null and void if you'd take your talent (everyone has it: even you) outside of this essentially technical forum. CmdrTaco is too honourable and hippyish to bludgeon you to death like a baby seal. Why don't you do the right thing and resign? I see the katzdot domains are still available...
1. This is a classic saga: The morning after AOL-Time-Warner-EMI a 15 year old kid takes on the New World Order. There's something seriously wrong if you're not reading about this off-Slashdot and being briefed by your Granny. Even more important than mirroring the source is mirroring the truth.
2. Who unplugged ESR and RMS and (insert 3-letter guru here)? For once, I'd like to know what they think. The media listens to them. They command influence. Typical: when you need them they're as silent as lambs.
3. ThinkGeek, where's the DeCSS t-shirt? Something like this, but without the acid-casualty background. Memorize it and grafitti it on movie posters. Mugs. Tatoos. Stickers. Screensavers. Flyers. BeerMats. The only cure for the discontents of commodification are more commodities.
4. The human spirit views censorship as damage and routes around it.
This is as offtopic as an offtopic thing with a degree in offtopicness from the Massachusetts Institute of Offtopicality, but the abovementioned site has a link to the funniest and most entertaining thing I've read since Old Man Murray was slashdotted a couple of weeks ago. It's blurbed as follows (for those who prefer to teleport non-blind):
On another lighter note, let me tell you the story of Fry, and how the Internet got him laid. He was in a Yahoo chat room talking to a married woman who lived near him, and they decided to meet. The story isn't as simple as that though, as you will find out if you decide that you feel like reading a true account of a regular [21] year old guy who found out that there is more to life than playing Quake 3. Check out the story here, it's pretty erotic in a perverted Dawson's Creek sort of way.
I could bring this back ontopic by linking the obligatory Richard Dawkins Astrology 99 buglist, or citing 'the very real phenomenon that the birth days of proficient sports people tend to be distributed very non-uniformly across the seasons' [Dudink, A. (1994), Birth date and sporting success, Nature 368, p.592.], or whiffle on about horoscopes as Dicemanesque Mission Packs.
But how unfunny would that be on an 'It's funny. Laugh.' topic? And anyway, I aint no steenkin' Jon Katz.
It's not like I'm running on an Amiga or a Casio E-100 or a Palm Pilot or a Sinclair QL or a Dreamcast or a yawn... I mean, this is a red-hot-one-year-ago (remember how things were a year ago... a month ago... last week... kids today) laptop. i586. MMX. Quake II. WindowMaker. vi. Capisce? 1024x768 pixels of uncut attitude. Every Milestone I have to break it to my baby: the Man from Mozilla says 'No'.
Laptop: Are you on crack? You're saying I have to put up with Netscape 4.07? That heinous piece of crap.
Me: Hey, watch your language, laptop. Don't make me hafta open a can of Lynx on your ass.
Laptop: Alright, alright. Couldn't you just download the source? Pretty please? Me: 20Mb on a 33.3k connection? Buddy, your F00F bug is showing.Laptop: But Navigator hates Java. The slightest applet brings it to its knees.
Me: I know.
Laptop: Why the hell don't browsers cache DNS lookups? There's some kind of DNS locking going on that causes it to whiteout. On DNS for chrissakes! You look at top and it's got like 96% of the memory.
Me: I know.
Laptop: Try reading Slashdot on that baby. Good luck. Back doesn't mean back on planet Netscape.
Me: I know.
Laptop: Don't get me started on Javascript. Or CSS. Bloat. Speed. Key Bindings.
Me: I'm sure it will come. One day...
Laptop: Yeah. That'd be a freakin Milestone.
... and routes around it.
Anyone remember 'Springtime for Hitler'? The musical in The Producers that had to be extraordinarily bad to make its investors rich? Free ISPs charge a hefty premium for support calls. Dixons came in at £1 a minute when they launched Freeserve. It's down to 50p now, but I can't see it going into freefall.
I've tried Callnet and found the service to be reliably unreliable (in the interests of fairness I should add that I've found at least one paying service - u-net - to be equally bad), but I'm always slightly amused every time the line gutters and the little xmessage I've patched into ppp-off tells me that 'Your modem connection has been lost.' Why? Because these guys are the first people in the history of capitalism to make money deliberately and directly by providing a bad service. The worse the service, the more support calls they get, and thus the greater their revenue stream. They only have to bring the service down for a couple of seconds and their little callcenters go ballistic and the real money - the value-added goldmine, the support cashcow - starts rolling in.
Microsoft make money despite providing an unreliable service. They shouldn't find it hard to adjust to this new business model.