Re:The main issue with XML is performance
on
Effective XML
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· Score: 1
This is the main reason I personally don't believe XML can be used as a functioning database. I see it being used more as a way to transport data across the internet and across different platforms.
XML is not a functioning database. XML is a way to transport data. So your misgivings are due to the fact that you have stumbled across reality.
Well, you can visit savefarscape.com and go into their forums to see all the things that the group has done. But I'll give you a short list from memory, some of which I chipped in to pay for (and many others made FAR more impressive donations than I did):
sent flowers to sci-fi headquarters
sent boatloads of letters to sci-fi headquarters, too
purchased TV ads after the last show to promote savefarscape.com
purchased other TV ads over the course of the last 10 months or so
purchased ad space on the FRONT COVER of Variety magazine
networked at sci-fi conventions to help generate new fans of the show
sent chocolates & gifts (repeatedly) to the show creators & actors
started an advertiser list, and began emailing any company that ran ads during Farscape, thanking them and making sure to purchase their products
policing our own, trying to limit the hatemail and rants that typify other hardcore fan movements (you catch more flies with honey and all that)
a few thousand people actually offered to pitch in about $1,000 US dollars each to finance a movie, but that went nowhere (I think they only accumulated about 3 or 4 million dollars, not enough for a movie, but a really good showing)
Now there is a petition to put the 7 minutes of Saruman back in the film.
I'm afraid this will likely offend some of the hardcore LOTR fans, and they probably have mod points. But I have to put this as clearly and bluntly as possible: Peter Jackson is a better fucking director than you are. You'll get your 7 minutes on the DVD. The theatrical release will already be long. PJ has seen the footage, and you have not. For all of these reasons, leave him alone.
He didn't say they're legally allowed to do whatever they want, he said they *should* be allowed to, because they'd shoot themselves in the foot in the process.
I never claimed he said they're legally allowed to do anything. I suggested that MS won't shoot themselves in the foot, ever, if we let them do whatever they want. I claim that letting MS do whatever they want will not backfire on them, it will backfire on us. Why? Because they will use illegal methods to prevent marketshare erosion. They almost had Apple and Corel buried a while back, but gave them small bailouts to keep the illusion of competition. Left alone, MS will have no reason to even feign competition, leaving Apple and other competitors to wither on the vine. MS has attacked the GPL and open source to the point that it's clear -- to me, at least -- that they intend to void it and pillage the community's work, or else have it declared un-American (and later, anti-European, and so on), thus outlawing the competition. Or they'll tie DRM to hardware, leaving other competing systems at a visible disadvantage. Or they'll do the same things that came out in court already -- strike (illegal) deals with hardware vendors such as Dell and HP that prevent them from pre-installing competitor's products. Left to do whatever they want, it's a small step from there to striking deals with vendors for "exclusive drivers" so that other Operating Systems have no viable means of making hardware work.
In this fashion, as I just described, Microsoft will take advantage of being "allowed to do whatever they want" to the point that they lock in as many people as possible, and the 1% that goes against MS will have a miserable time of it. You need to understand this. If Microsoft is left alone, they will make "donations" to corrupt government officials to pass laws against competitors, they will lock-in hardware vendors with contracts & DRM schemes, they will do anything to keep control. Why? Because if we do what the original poster naively suggested ("let them do whatever they want"), MS will take it far beyond what you could ever imagine.
Then he says, down at the bottom, something of a "disclaimer" which, although I am not a legal specialist, does not sound like it has any legitimacy:
Actually, that disclaimer strikes me as a smart move. He's encouraging legal uses, and since there really ARE legal uses for such software, he's bound to attract it. Especially the way he's presenting the product. And by additionally linking to the RIAA, he can in good faith (I think) go into any courtroom and realistically tell a judge that his product has substantial legal uses, is not primarily devoted to illegal activities, and that he has taken active steps to portray the product in a responsible manner. Although I've not looked over the actual laws, I do believe there is a law that would protect his product because it has "non-infringing" uses.
Meanwhile, I take the view that we should let Microsoft do whatever they want. Let them force hardware makers to bundle WMP9 or IE. That'll only force people to build upon non-MS operating systems, such as Linux or MacOS.
No. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. A US court actually found them guilty, although the punishment was a slap on the wrist. This means that Microsoft has been found to use illegal activities to lock-in customers, so that they cannot switch without substantial (possibly insurmountable) burden. You cannot let them do "whatever," because they will exploit illegal methods to prevent people from "building upon non-MS operating systems."
Don't be a moron. They only own the capital letter 'C', lowercase 'c' is public domain (for now).
First of all, I'm pretty sure that lowercase 'c' falls under "derivative works" and is therefore actionable by SCO. But second of all, in case you haven't followed the thread, we are talking about the capital letter 'C' -- as in, what would happen if Netcraft capitalized it? So... now who's the moron?
Note: this entire sub-thread is a joke, no actual animosity is intended. Punk.
I suggested such a system about nine months ago on Slashdot, and I got nicely shot down. It's gratifying to see that there is now more than one system that does exactly what I was after. Hell, for all I know, Drupal probably existed during the time of the discussion.
Huh. Interesting. I suggested the same thing here on Slashdot about a month ago. I think that, with the Microsoft backing, they've fully intended to completely destroy the GPL and steal our IP from the start. Keep vigilant, SCO wants to blow the house down.
What I would love to see is a 100,000+ lines project written in PHP being mantained by one or two developers.
At SST, our intranet is now about 250,000 lines of PHP code. It has budgeting tools, dynamic org charts, a tasking system with delegates and escalations, a signoff/CMS-lite tool, an automated form-building wizard with db backend that has been used to kill off about 300 paper-based forms, and a few other goodies. At any given time during the workday, there are about 100 simultaneous users logged in and accessing data. We have 3 developers to maintain it. One of our developers has a Java background, and has revised the most frequently-reused code to be more object-oriented, but 90% of our site still uses function calls. So far, everything has been fine. It has been in use since January or February of 2001.
I think it's a little bit disingenuous to accuse Mandrake of not toeing the GPL line line here, or trying somehow to do something extra-legal.
Oh, I agree and that was not at all my intention. In fact, I'm not sure Mandrake is at all disappointed or surprised. I really intended to direct my comment to DenialS. And even if Mandrake DID express dismay at the ISO distributions that are happening, I would not have meant to accuse them of violating the GPL. I merely mean to imply that such restrictions are outside the GPL, and can at best be humbly requested. They can certainly not be enforced, at least not until they switch licenses. If the GPL is causing them discomfort, maybe it ain't best for them. I know I would certainly try to honor whatever license they choose (or find a better company/license if they get too restrictive).
But for a "community" that rhetorically prides itself on its independence, I agree with DenialS that it's disappointing to see people disregard an important test of a public trust.
OK, well here I can't agree. I think it's really naive to think that across the entire planet, you can sway all people to do the same thing, when alternatives that are legal exist. There are very few people I've heard of that can influence entire groups to follow one mindset, and most of them need guns to "help" with enforcement -- David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc. On top of that, the argument that it's legal to distribute these files but not ethical is at best an opinion that you and I share. It is not a fact, and some very reasonable people may find their ethical compass leads them to a different conclusion.
I admit that I'm disappointed with the evident glee that some of my peers appear to be taking in posting public torrents for Mandrake 9.2.
Are you unclear on the concepts behind the GPL and what it stands for?
Agreed. The post by DenialS appears to be in denial about the fact that the GPL expressly permits this. This is legal. If DenialS doesn't like this, he should encourage Mandrake to follow SUSE's model: put a slightly more restrictive license on their installer. They can keep the source open, they just wrap it in a non-GPL license that restricts distribution. I'm fine with this, I use SUSE all the time. I want to comply with reasonable licenses. But the GPL doesn't allow for wink-wink-nudge-nudge restrictions -- Mandrake can't distribute GPL'd products and then be sad/surprised to see that people follow that license.
Right... now who was it that really pioneered the use of USB? Oh, that's right.... It was Apple.
Uhhh... no. USB was an Intel-headed initiative. Apple supported Firewire, which is why we're stuck with two similar but incompatible standards now.
He didn't say that Apple wrote the standard, he said Apple pioneered the use of USB. Are you even aware of what happened at the time? USB was languishing in PC land, because every system had both USB & legacy connections, so no one migrated. Apple converted wholesale -- completely removing support for all legacy ports and switching entirely to USB. It forced the issue. At the time, I was quite furious with Apple. It was, again, Jobs making decisions for everyone else, and too damn bad if you had to re-buy every peripheral you had accumulated. But it was that very thing that caused USB to take off -- manufacturers scrambled to create USB mice and keyboards and other items that Mac users suddenly began demanding.
OSS usually has documentation that is useful. Not Doucumentation which is more marketing than useful.
That was a really good post, except for what I've quoted. Doesn't that seem a bit disingenuous? I am looking at the KDE help files right now, and here is what I see on many pages: "we are looking for someone to write this section." They're not the only ones. Even right in the comments for this article, there are people suggesting that government use of OSS could help solve our documentation problem. I guess you're sort-of right -- our documentation is not "marketing" and is maybe sometimes "useful," but it has to exist first.
According to Assistant Producer Derek French, these articles are BS. You can see in a post he made on the BioWare forums last week (his post is at the bottom), that there are no plans to expand the content. Specifically, he states, "Sorry, but there are no new side quests in the PC version of KotOR." He also claims there is no new dialogue. I don't know how they can add a space station in (with "new story lines") and have no new characters, no new quests, and no new dialogue at all. So, who to believe?
Personally, I think Derek has no idea what he's talking about, as there are now many articles in the press talking about new content and features for KotOR PC. But he could be The One Who Knows Things. If he's right, that sucks.
What an interesting interpretation of copyright law. The MT-32 Emulator team seems to be of the mind that, in the 80s, since people had to register copyrights for punitive damages, lack of registration must mean loss of all other rights, too. But the copyright laws on the books back then did not say, "fail to register and you're screwed." Instead, they said (from memory, this a broad paraphrase), "fix it in tangible form, and you can issue cease & desist letters, reclaim losses, and generally control use of your copyrighted items. But if you would be so kind as to register your work, we'll give you the additional bonus of being able to sue for punitive damages." In other words, you can sue 'em for lots and lots of cash just to hurt 'em, but only if you register.
So Roland didn't register. They can't sue you out of existence. But everything I've learned about copyright says they certainly do still have a copyright, and they can use it to be heavy-handed in court. They have not "lost" the copyright. You guys need a lawyer.
The other reason the roadmap was entertaining? I now know how retro SCOs OSes are. Riotous, riotous stuff. How they had the ya-yas to declare Linux an infant OS in need of their IP is beyond me. Upcoming features? PAM. files larger than 2 gigs. NFS over TCP. The 80's called, they want their features back.
This is unconstitutional in that it makes a distinction between speech for profit and speech with other agendas.
Congress has NO right to say that some speech is bad and other forms are good.
Hmm. You two seem to agree, but I'm not sure that agreement means you are correct. Doesn't Congress make very deliberate, stated distinctions between commercial speech and other types of speech? It seems to me that bans on what companies can claim in their ads is just one of many examples of how the US government controls commercial speech. AND, those laws have been upheld by the courts!
If they want this law to succeed it's all or nothing.
I don't think so. Not based on precedent. It looks like the laws and courts are not on your side, even if First Amendment is.
Slashdot Mirror
XML is not a functioning database. XML is a way to transport data. So your misgivings are due to the fact that you have stumbled across reality.
Well, you can visit savefarscape.com and go into their forums to see all the things that the group has done. But I'll give you a short list from memory, some of which I chipped in to pay for (and many others made FAR more impressive donations than I did):
I'm afraid this will likely offend some of the hardcore LOTR fans, and they probably have mod points. But I have to put this as clearly and bluntly as possible: Peter Jackson is a better fucking director than you are. You'll get your 7 minutes on the DVD. The theatrical release will already be long. PJ has seen the footage, and you have not. For all of these reasons, leave him alone.
I never claimed he said they're legally allowed to do anything. I suggested that MS won't shoot themselves in the foot, ever, if we let them do whatever they want. I claim that letting MS do whatever they want will not backfire on them, it will backfire on us. Why? Because they will use illegal methods to prevent marketshare erosion. They almost had Apple and Corel buried a while back, but gave them small bailouts to keep the illusion of competition. Left alone, MS will have no reason to even feign competition, leaving Apple and other competitors to wither on the vine. MS has attacked the GPL and open source to the point that it's clear -- to me, at least -- that they intend to void it and pillage the community's work, or else have it declared un-American (and later, anti-European, and so on), thus outlawing the competition. Or they'll tie DRM to hardware, leaving other competing systems at a visible disadvantage. Or they'll do the same things that came out in court already -- strike (illegal) deals with hardware vendors such as Dell and HP that prevent them from pre-installing competitor's products. Left to do whatever they want, it's a small step from there to striking deals with vendors for "exclusive drivers" so that other Operating Systems have no viable means of making hardware work.
In this fashion, as I just described, Microsoft will take advantage of being "allowed to do whatever they want" to the point that they lock in as many people as possible, and the 1% that goes against MS will have a miserable time of it. You need to understand this. If Microsoft is left alone, they will make "donations" to corrupt government officials to pass laws against competitors, they will lock-in hardware vendors with contracts & DRM schemes, they will do anything to keep control. Why? Because if we do what the original poster naively suggested ("let them do whatever they want"), MS will take it far beyond what you could ever imagine.
Actually, that disclaimer strikes me as a smart move. He's encouraging legal uses, and since there really ARE legal uses for such software, he's bound to attract it. Especially the way he's presenting the product. And by additionally linking to the RIAA, he can in good faith (I think) go into any courtroom and realistically tell a judge that his product has substantial legal uses, is not primarily devoted to illegal activities, and that he has taken active steps to portray the product in a responsible manner. Although I've not looked over the actual laws, I do believe there is a law that would protect his product because it has "non-infringing" uses.
No. Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. A US court actually found them guilty, although the punishment was a slap on the wrist. This means that Microsoft has been found to use illegal activities to lock-in customers, so that they cannot switch without substantial (possibly insurmountable) burden. You cannot let them do "whatever," because they will exploit illegal methods to prevent people from "building upon non-MS operating systems."
<sarcasm>
Yeah, because what they went with was soooo much better.
</sarcasm>
Do you hear that, mjh? That... is the sound of inevitability.
First of all, I'm pretty sure that lowercase 'c' falls under "derivative works" and is therefore actionable by SCO. But second of all, in case you haven't followed the thread, we are talking about the capital letter 'C' -- as in, what would happen if Netcraft capitalized it? So... now who's the moron?
Note: this entire sub-thread is a joke, no actual animosity is intended. Punk.
Hmm. Are you sure? I thought SCO owned the letter 'C' and all derivative words.
Wow, that probably describes exactly the kind of customer that Red Hat wants to lose.
Ahem... fricking lasers. :)
I suggested such a system about nine months ago on Slashdot, and I got nicely shot down. It's gratifying to see that there is now more than one system that does exactly what I was after. Hell, for all I know, Drupal probably existed during the time of the discussion.
Huh. Interesting. I suggested the same thing here on Slashdot about a month ago. I think that, with the Microsoft backing, they've fully intended to completely destroy the GPL and steal our IP from the start. Keep vigilant, SCO wants to blow the house down.
At SST, our intranet is now about 250,000 lines of PHP code. It has budgeting tools, dynamic org charts, a tasking system with delegates and escalations, a signoff/CMS-lite tool, an automated form-building wizard with db backend that has been used to kill off about 300 paper-based forms, and a few other goodies. At any given time during the workday, there are about 100 simultaneous users logged in and accessing data. We have 3 developers to maintain it. One of our developers has a Java background, and has revised the most frequently-reused code to be more object-oriented, but 90% of our site still uses function calls. So far, everything has been fine. It has been in use since January or February of 2001.
Whew. Some of us have been experiencing this. It's nice to see some data to back up what I've been living through.
And unfortunately for Sun's bottom line, some of us won't forget the bad they've done us.
Oh, I agree and that was not at all my intention. In fact, I'm not sure Mandrake is at all disappointed or surprised. I really intended to direct my comment to DenialS. And even if Mandrake DID express dismay at the ISO distributions that are happening, I would not have meant to accuse them of violating the GPL. I merely mean to imply that such restrictions are outside the GPL, and can at best be humbly requested. They can certainly not be enforced, at least not until they switch licenses. If the GPL is causing them discomfort, maybe it ain't best for them. I know I would certainly try to honor whatever license they choose (or find a better company/license if they get too restrictive).
OK, well here I can't agree. I think it's really naive to think that across the entire planet, you can sway all people to do the same thing, when alternatives that are legal exist. There are very few people I've heard of that can influence entire groups to follow one mindset, and most of them need guns to "help" with enforcement -- David Koresh, Jim Jones, etc. On top of that, the argument that it's legal to distribute these files but not ethical is at best an opinion that you and I share. It is not a fact, and some very reasonable people may find their ethical compass leads them to a different conclusion.
Agreed. The post by DenialS appears to be in denial about the fact that the GPL expressly permits this. This is legal. If DenialS doesn't like this, he should encourage Mandrake to follow SUSE's model: put a slightly more restrictive license on their installer. They can keep the source open, they just wrap it in a non-GPL license that restricts distribution. I'm fine with this, I use SUSE all the time. I want to comply with reasonable licenses. But the GPL doesn't allow for wink-wink-nudge-nudge restrictions -- Mandrake can't distribute GPL'd products and then be sad/surprised to see that people follow that license.
He didn't say that Apple wrote the standard, he said Apple pioneered the use of USB. Are you even aware of what happened at the time? USB was languishing in PC land, because every system had both USB & legacy connections, so no one migrated. Apple converted wholesale -- completely removing support for all legacy ports and switching entirely to USB. It forced the issue. At the time, I was quite furious with Apple. It was, again, Jobs making decisions for everyone else, and too damn bad if you had to re-buy every peripheral you had accumulated. But it was that very thing that caused USB to take off -- manufacturers scrambled to create USB mice and keyboards and other items that Mac users suddenly began demanding.
That was a really good post, except for what I've quoted. Doesn't that seem a bit disingenuous? I am looking at the KDE help files right now, and here is what I see on many pages: "we are looking for someone to write this section." They're not the only ones. Even right in the comments for this article, there are people suggesting that government use of OSS could help solve our documentation problem. I guess you're sort-of right -- our documentation is not "marketing" and is maybe sometimes "useful," but it has to exist first.
According to Assistant Producer Derek French, these articles are BS. You can see in a post he made on the BioWare forums last week (his post is at the bottom), that there are no plans to expand the content. Specifically, he states, "Sorry, but there are no new side quests in the PC version of KotOR." He also claims there is no new dialogue. I don't know how they can add a space station in (with "new story lines") and have no new characters, no new quests, and no new dialogue at all. So, who to believe?
Personally, I think Derek has no idea what he's talking about, as there are now many articles in the press talking about new content and features for KotOR PC. But he could be The One Who Knows Things. If he's right, that sucks.
What an interesting interpretation of copyright law. The MT-32 Emulator team seems to be of the mind that, in the 80s, since people had to register copyrights for punitive damages, lack of registration must mean loss of all other rights, too. But the copyright laws on the books back then did not say, "fail to register and you're screwed." Instead, they said (from memory, this a broad paraphrase), "fix it in tangible form, and you can issue cease & desist letters, reclaim losses, and generally control use of your copyrighted items. But if you would be so kind as to register your work, we'll give you the additional bonus of being able to sue for punitive damages." In other words, you can sue 'em for lots and lots of cash just to hurt 'em, but only if you register.
So Roland didn't register. They can't sue you out of existence. But everything I've learned about copyright says they certainly do still have a copyright, and they can use it to be heavy-handed in court. They have not "lost" the copyright. You guys need a lawyer.
Hilarious! SCO is its own worst enemy.
Hmm. You two seem to agree, but I'm not sure that agreement means you are correct. Doesn't Congress make very deliberate, stated distinctions between commercial speech and other types of speech? It seems to me that bans on what companies can claim in their ads is just one of many examples of how the US government controls commercial speech. AND, those laws have been upheld by the courts!
I don't think so. Not based on precedent. It looks like the laws and courts are not on your side, even if First Amendment is.