Sounds like the guy didn't have enough business sense. You can certainly make money off GPL stuff. Just offer a support contract. If you make a great product, you won't even spend much time supporting the product.
Uh, hmm. People give away their products for free and get surprised (or bitter) when they don't make money. So the solution is... make it so "great" that people don't need support, then offer support contracts. Sounds like big bucks to me.
No, actually, it's the sound of Eazel dying, and Mandrake declaring bankruptcy, and and and....
While the fact that SCO won't likely even support the MD5 summing method (which wouldn't work very well if the code is only "similar" as opposed to "identical") is more damning to them, even describing *where* the two equivilent chunks of code are will not hurt them anymore than they are claiming they have already been hurt.
Yes. If all we did was to run the MD5 summing method on Linux & Sys V, indeed all we would have is a list of matches. Of course, what happens next is what is important:
Authors of the code identified will step forward and explain exactly how they wrote it -- and I expect this would be bad news for SCO.
Someone will compare that to BSD code, and likely find that most violations are actually cases where BSD code is the common factor.
So what this does is give Open Source advocates the ability to go on the offensive, and flatly deny or at least remedy any SCO claim. SCO says "Through AIX, Linux got all of our code!" Fine. We come back and say "All code similarities have been identified, and nothing was copied from SCO."
Happily, because the source code to everything except the Monterey project is out there (and I bet some people have that), and because running the MD5 summing method wouldn't violate any contract, third parties can help resolve this now, without SCO.
I hope you cc'd a leader in the Republican Party (not Hatch, of course). Because you're obviously making a bit of a martyr move here in order to pressure someone to change. That's not bad -- I admire it. But you need someone ELSE in the party to now pressure Hatch on your behalf. If it's just sent to Hatch, he can shrug, bury it, and move on.
HURD is really an amazing system, and actually seems to work decently well these days (actually, I haven't used it in 3 years, but it was starting to stabilize then).
Wow. Even the HURD fanboys haven't run it in 3 years.
Re:Not to say television is all good, but....
on
Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
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· Score: 2, Informative
Apologies for responding to my own post, but just to provide some backup data, here's a link to a paper about the Werther Effect, with lots of studies cited. Anyway, I'm sure other people can post tons more or Google for it.
Re:Not to say television is all good, but....
on
Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I have not read the article, as this kind of voodoo sociology has never interested me.
Dismissive without investigating it first. An educated way to think.
This concept isn't "voodoo" -- it has been around for at least 200 years. Probably longer. It used to be called the Werther's effect, and now it's called Social Proof. You can study it in a controlled environment, and easily predict the way 95% of humans will act. The basic idea behind Social Proof is that people look to their environment for clues as to how to behave, but more importantly, they look to the people in the environment that most closely resemble themselves. You can use this for ill or good -- marketers use it to sway your purchasing decisions, filmmakers use it to shock you into buying a ticket, psychologists use it to help people (mostly with phobias, as videos of people enjoying a feared situation can greatly influence people to overcome their phobia). It's how we model behavior. You can call it voodoo, but people put huge amounts of money into the concept, and get results so good that they keep putting money into it.
My old SuSE 8.0 box, that used 2.4.18, worked just fine, so I think it's something that red hat screwed up. There's a bug in their bugzilla about some people experiencing swap storms so bad it takes 10 minutes for a newline in a shell!
That would be me. My SuSE 8.1 laptop will take about 5+ minutes to alt-tab to an already open shell window, and type "kill -9" whatever. In my experience, it's Kicker. When I kill Kicker, everything goes right back to snappy.
Of course, it takes a while to get this way. My laptop right now has about 35 days of uptime, with Mozilla & Quanta & Konq & a shell window open the entire 35 days. I'm sure there must be some leaky memory in there somewhere....
Overall I think you're right here. Solaris is hard to beat in a server environment. Having worked extensively in a mixed *NIX (Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, *BSD, a bit of OS/X) I'd give the higher end Sun machines the edge without hesitation for servers. Higher end being E450 and above, including the SunFires.
Well, I guess you (and the parent post you responded to) are right, but I would qualify "high end" even more than you did. I think it's a very small (but lucrative) niche now. At the company I currently work at, we purchased an E450 for one of our Web sites. We paid a LOT of money to have Sun people come in & work on it, as part of the support contract. My experience was that they were competent, but underwhelming. What further led to my general underwhelming was to watch one of my employees (edrugtrader here on Slashdot) get together with SlashChick and put together a Linux server that handles the same amount of traffic, but has been running more reliably, more responsively, and much more cheaply. I'm actually envious of their setup. It seems better. My employee got more of what he wanted than I did. I believe I would have been more satisfied doing what he did. But company policy here is no Linux. It sucks, and it's clear how sucky it is nowadays, doing budgets and having to fight for scraps.
So yeah, you're right, Sun has an edge on the higher end. But that high end is sooo high nowadays that I think even our E450 wasn't a good value. You need their top of the line servers and you need to expect they'll be put into heavy use, before you see a good ROI.
Re:Sorta, but not quite right.
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If I were a hiring manager, I would probably stick with experienced programmers if it were a mission-critical app, but someone younger if I were, say, trying to create a new game engine.
Yeah, because all the experience those old grizzlies at ID have from working on game engine after game engine sure hasn't helped them, any.
I would like to see a mod UP point for statement coherency, as i've seen a lot of arguments that i furiously disagreed with, didn't think were all that insightful, but had to mod up for being well-put-together arguments.
Well, if we're going to ask for more kinds of moderation, I've been longing for a "misinformed" rating, so people who spout BS with authority can be moderated to oblivion. Right now, really the only moderation that applies is "overrated" which hardly seems accurate.
That'll push unemployment to about 30%, and destroy about $10 trillion in capital. Fantastic.
I am sad you posted as an AC. You made good points, and should've used a +1 bonus to give the post an initial bump. Perhaps you don't have an account or bonus. Oh well. Even if I don't have mod points, and even if I don't agree with everything you wrote, your post was interesting. Sort of like a cold shower.
Loss of revenue? If a CD is copied then the record company has lost the revenue they would have gained if the CD was purchased by those receiving the copies.
You forgot the maybe. If no copy is made, and it isn't worth it to actually buy it, they don't make any money either.
Ah, but you see that's exactly what they want. It's supply and demand. If they limit supply, they stimulate demand. With copying so prevalent, they've lost the ability to deny access to the product. They can't stimulate demand. They would much rather that nobody buy their product, and they go out of business, than everyone copies the product and they go out of business. At least in the first scenario, they were still in control.
What they may not realize is that even if they can't stimulate demand in old fashioned ways, there may be a new way. One that is not quite "gift culture" but perhaps more like "fan culture" -- exposure and easy accessiblity may cost them some customers, but it also fans the flames of interest for the hard-core group that really appreciates the music. That core group -- if some of the studies other people have mentioned are true -- will buy enough to make up the losses and then some.
So I click the "4 replies beneath your threshold" link to see all the hilarious posts about what SCUM stands for, and there isn't ONE snide comment. Wha? C'mon Slashdot posters, hop to it!
How about Satan Corporation's Universal Malignancy? Or Santa Cruz Uncompetent Marketing (little poetic license here, please)? Or... Stupid Corporation, Unlimited Morons?
Re:Obligatory Smarty plug
on
PHP Cookbook
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· Score: 1
Thanks mlas. Your info was interesting. Too bad the thread is so old that you're not getting moderated as such. Anyway, I have some more questions, which probably won't get answered in such an old thread, but I might as well try.
First, I can see how {$variable|default:"None"} is less visual noise, but to me it appears ugly -- I partly chose PHP for syntax, and I prefer that kind of code to what I see with Smarty. Also, with PHP you can use ASP tags, <% code %> and it conveys a huge advantage -- if you do it right, Dreamweaver will ignore those chunks of code and render the surrounding HTML. This is a great feature that allows designers to actually modify a page without breaking code. Will Dreamweaver similarly ignore {} braces?
But the big, awesome, huge advantage of Smarty is the ease with which you can separate business logic from presentation logic. My dynamic PHP files now tend to look like: "1. Validate GET or POST input, 2. Make appropriate SQL queries, 3. Send raw output to template". If I need to shorten a variable to fit a design, or change a name to all caps, or format a date, that doesn't have to be coded in the same place as my business logic.
And this leads to my second question. It sounds like you just described a typical use for include_once(). In your included file, you put all the code, and in the page itself, you just sprinkle in the variables for the presentation layer. So I'm just stumped -- I'm hearing that only Really Stupid Peopleâ refuse to use a template system, but PHP appears to be able to do the same thing without any template system at all. Am I right? Is there something else I'm missing?
Re:Obligatory Smarty plug
on
PHP Cookbook
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· Score: 1
As a super-simple example, lines like [some code was obviously intended to be here] become {$variable}.
I don't understand this. Why is {$variable} so much easier or less confusing than <?=$variable?>
The last time I was hiring PHP developers (thanks Slashdot!), I had a few people in who did this, and they'd walk me through the code. After looking at it, I'd simply change a few characters to make it use "native" PHP code, and ask, "what's the difference, why did changing a few characters make things so different?" The response I typically got was either, "because this is better," or "the designers said they could work with this better." The first reponse isn't really a reason, and I don't buy the second response, because the differences seemed so slight. So really I have a genuine question: what are the advantages? What am I missing?
The end result is heavy dependence on databases for variable persistance and error-prone algorithm concoctions, a la PHPNuke et. al.
Yes, but PHP has sessions. At my work, we use the session features to do variable persistance. What am I missing? I'm sure I've failed to grasp the crux of your argument.
In Linksys was forced to give out IP they don't wish to divulge it is a huge signal to other companies to steer clear of Linux.
I didn't realize that saying "we don't wish to divulge IP" gave people the right to break the GPL. But in any case, if companies are going to steer clear of Linux because they don't want to honor the GPL, shouldn't the community let them go? Personally, having been through this a few times before on Slashdot, I'm to the point of saying "don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out."
Note that I am not advocating a general exclusionary attitude toward users and newbies. The Linux community is already too elitist in that regard. I'm only referring to those who refuse to honor the GPL.
Well, ESR's ego is so big that he genuinely doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't recognize his genius. Shater's ego is so big that he doesn't care if anyone else thinks he's a genius. Therefore 1 ESR != 1 Shatner, because they're different enough that neither is a subset of the other. 1 ESR implies an extreme superiority complex, while 1 Shatner implies a pretty standard (but amusing) God complex.
I'll consider the code as having been given once I have:
The code, including line numbers, filenames, and the whole sourcefile from UNIXWARE it is based on.
The SCO changelog showing the code goes back a long time.
Linux's changelog showing the code doesn't go back a long time.
For a court, we might add #4: it compiles to the exact same binary as one they've released. If it doesn't, or if they never released the product, then there is no way to prove the code is legit. They could have gone back at any point and altered or added code as desired. Compiling to a known-published binary is the only way to verify.
The microsoft link you provided does NOT recommend it, as you so desperately try to put it.
You're frustrated. I understand. You've been posting as an Anonymous Coward, and just hoping that everyone would defer to your authority on the topic. But you provide no sources to lend credence to your claims, while over the course of six or seven posts, I've provided many sources to support my position. If the one I provided isn't perfect, that's fine. I disagree, and I can read for myself where that article said a secure solution to the authentication problem is to (and I quote) "Host IIS and SQL Server on the Same Machine." But whatever. If we throw that citation out and keep the rest, we've still got quite a compelling case that the world of databases is far bigger than your narrowminded viewpoint would suggest. I'm happy to let Slashdotters read this long, crazy thread and decide for themselves.
Amazing how people go looking for any information, however unrelated, when trying to make their point.
Amusing that you've provided no information, however unrelated, to backup your point.
Looking at all your other posts on the subject I get the distinct impression you've never even worked on another database besides MySQL.
Then you would be wrong.
MySQL has it's place, but your posts are pretty blatant trolls that try to push MySQL as the answer for everything.
I never said that. You are diverting with a classic straw man argument, but it's poorly executed. You probably didn't even know you were doing it.
I can't believe anybody in their right mind would put a DB and a webserver on the same box.
Huh? Microsoft even recommends it in some cases. Hosting companies such as Ventures Online do this. For that matter, they're resellers -- there is another company behind them that provides the servers to them and hundreds of other hosting companies like 100 Megs. And I couldn't find any significant reported problems about this with relation to open-source DBs, such as MySQL or Postgres. It seems the only significant comment that I can find is that putting the DB and Web server on the same box can be slower than giving each their own box. Well, duh. A server farm would be even faster.
That's a serious design flaw, not to mention huge security risk.
Give examples of risks that come from having MySQL and Apache on the same box. Unique risks -- ones that would magically "go away" if the DB were on its own box. I'll go out on a limb and say that you're wrong. If anything, security is better with the DB & webserver on the same box, because logins won't go across ethernet. In fact, Philip Greenspun has a big article about interfacing with a database, and in it he talks about preventing direct connections, and suggests, "But for many Web sites, there is no reason why you can't run the database and Web server on the same box." Because then, you guessed it, the DB doesn't even have to listen on a port or accept any connections via TCP/IP.
5000 queries a sec should be no sweat for most databases.
Show me a site that has real-time transaction processing that can be recovered in the event of a problem. You can't because it cannot be done with MySQL.
Our website run on MS SQL Server and processes upto 5000 queries/sec at peak time and db server isn't even stressed.
You make it sound like you have a server dedicated to MS SQL Server. I don't -- I've got Apache and PHP on the same server, and all apps run & handle load on the same box. So this may be an apples/oranges comparison. However, if your box is also running Apache or IIS, and also makes heavy use of PHP or ASP, then I would like to meet you and have you give me a tour of this server during peak times, so I can see it perform. I've created an email account just for this. It's utopia at outshine dot com. I'll leave that email address active for a couple weeks. Would you contact me? I'll come to where to you are (unless you're really far away).
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, hmm. People give away their products for free and get surprised (or bitter) when they don't make money. So the solution is... make it so "great" that people don't need support, then offer support contracts. Sounds like big bucks to me.
No, actually, it's the sound of Eazel dying, and Mandrake declaring bankruptcy, and and and....
My God. Who put a woman in charge of the FBI?!?
;)
Yes. If all we did was to run the MD5 summing method on Linux & Sys V, indeed all we would have is a list of matches. Of course, what happens next is what is important:
So what this does is give Open Source advocates the ability to go on the offensive, and flatly deny or at least remedy any SCO claim. SCO says "Through AIX, Linux got all of our code!" Fine. We come back and say "All code similarities have been identified, and nothing was copied from SCO."
Happily, because the source code to everything except the Monterey project is out there (and I bet some people have that), and because running the MD5 summing method wouldn't violate any contract, third parties can help resolve this now, without SCO.
I hope you cc'd a leader in the Republican Party (not Hatch, of course). Because you're obviously making a bit of a martyr move here in order to pressure someone to change. That's not bad -- I admire it. But you need someone ELSE in the party to now pressure Hatch on your behalf. If it's just sent to Hatch, he can shrug, bury it, and move on.
Wow. Even the HURD fanboys haven't run it in 3 years.
Apologies for responding to my own post, but just to provide some backup data, here's a link to a paper about the Werther Effect, with lots of studies cited. Anyway, I'm sure other people can post tons more or Google for it.
Dismissive without investigating it first. An educated way to think.
This concept isn't "voodoo" -- it has been around for at least 200 years. Probably longer. It used to be called the Werther's effect, and now it's called Social Proof. You can study it in a controlled environment, and easily predict the way 95% of humans will act. The basic idea behind Social Proof is that people look to their environment for clues as to how to behave, but more importantly, they look to the people in the environment that most closely resemble themselves. You can use this for ill or good -- marketers use it to sway your purchasing decisions, filmmakers use it to shock you into buying a ticket, psychologists use it to help people (mostly with phobias, as videos of people enjoying a feared situation can greatly influence people to overcome their phobia). It's how we model behavior. You can call it voodoo, but people put huge amounts of money into the concept, and get results so good that they keep putting money into it.
That would be me. My SuSE 8.1 laptop will take about 5+ minutes to alt-tab to an already open shell window, and type "kill -9" whatever. In my experience, it's Kicker. When I kill Kicker, everything goes right back to snappy.
Of course, it takes a while to get this way. My laptop right now has about 35 days of uptime, with Mozilla & Quanta & Konq & a shell window open the entire 35 days. I'm sure there must be some leaky memory in there somewhere....
Well, I guess you (and the parent post you responded to) are right, but I would qualify "high end" even more than you did. I think it's a very small (but lucrative) niche now. At the company I currently work at, we purchased an E450 for one of our Web sites. We paid a LOT of money to have Sun people come in & work on it, as part of the support contract. My experience was that they were competent, but underwhelming. What further led to my general underwhelming was to watch one of my employees (edrugtrader here on Slashdot) get together with SlashChick and put together a Linux server that handles the same amount of traffic, but has been running more reliably, more responsively, and much more cheaply. I'm actually envious of their setup. It seems better. My employee got more of what he wanted than I did. I believe I would have been more satisfied doing what he did. But company policy here is no Linux. It sucks, and it's clear how sucky it is nowadays, doing budgets and having to fight for scraps.
So yeah, you're right, Sun has an edge on the higher end. But that high end is sooo high nowadays that I think even our E450 wasn't a good value. You need their top of the line servers and you need to expect they'll be put into heavy use, before you see a good ROI.
Yeah, because all the experience those old grizzlies at ID have from working on game engine after game engine sure hasn't helped them, any.
Well, if we're going to ask for more kinds of moderation, I've been longing for a "misinformed" rating, so people who spout BS with authority can be moderated to oblivion. Right now, really the only moderation that applies is "overrated" which hardly seems accurate.
I am sad you posted as an AC. You made good points, and should've used a +1 bonus to give the post an initial bump. Perhaps you don't have an account or bonus. Oh well. Even if I don't have mod points, and even if I don't agree with everything you wrote, your post was interesting. Sort of like a cold shower.
Ah, but you see that's exactly what they want. It's supply and demand. If they limit supply, they stimulate demand. With copying so prevalent, they've lost the ability to deny access to the product. They can't stimulate demand. They would much rather that nobody buy their product, and they go out of business, than everyone copies the product and they go out of business. At least in the first scenario, they were still in control.
What they may not realize is that even if they can't stimulate demand in old fashioned ways, there may be a new way. One that is not quite "gift culture" but perhaps more like "fan culture" -- exposure and easy accessiblity may cost them some customers, but it also fans the flames of interest for the hard-core group that really appreciates the music. That core group -- if some of the studies other people have mentioned are true -- will buy enough to make up the losses and then some.
So I click the "4 replies beneath your threshold" link to see all the hilarious posts about what SCUM stands for, and there isn't ONE snide comment. Wha? C'mon Slashdot posters, hop to it!
How about Satan Corporation's Universal Malignancy? Or Santa Cruz Uncompetent Marketing (little poetic license here, please)? Or... Stupid Corporation, Unlimited Morons?
Thanks mlas. Your info was interesting. Too bad the thread is so old that you're not getting moderated as such. Anyway, I have some more questions, which probably won't get answered in such an old thread, but I might as well try.
First, I can see how {$variable|default:"None"} is less visual noise, but to me it appears ugly -- I partly chose PHP for syntax, and I prefer that kind of code to what I see with Smarty. Also, with PHP you can use ASP tags, <% code %> and it conveys a huge advantage -- if you do it right, Dreamweaver will ignore those chunks of code and render the surrounding HTML. This is a great feature that allows designers to actually modify a page without breaking code. Will Dreamweaver similarly ignore {} braces?
And this leads to my second question. It sounds like you just described a typical use for include_once(). In your included file, you put all the code, and in the page itself, you just sprinkle in the variables for the presentation layer. So I'm just stumped -- I'm hearing that only Really Stupid Peopleâ refuse to use a template system, but PHP appears to be able to do the same thing without any template system at all. Am I right? Is there something else I'm missing?
I don't understand this. Why is {$variable} so much easier or less confusing than <?=$variable?>
The last time I was hiring PHP developers (thanks Slashdot!), I had a few people in who did this, and they'd walk me through the code. After looking at it, I'd simply change a few characters to make it use "native" PHP code, and ask, "what's the difference, why did changing a few characters make things so different?" The response I typically got was either, "because this is better," or "the designers said they could work with this better." The first reponse isn't really a reason, and I don't buy the second response, because the differences seemed so slight. So really I have a genuine question: what are the advantages? What am I missing?
Yes, but PHP has sessions. At my work, we use the session features to do variable persistance. What am I missing? I'm sure I've failed to grasp the crux of your argument.
I didn't realize that saying "we don't wish to divulge IP" gave people the right to break the GPL. But in any case, if companies are going to steer clear of Linux because they don't want to honor the GPL, shouldn't the community let them go? Personally, having been through this a few times before on Slashdot, I'm to the point of saying "don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out."
Note that I am not advocating a general exclusionary attitude toward users and newbies. The Linux community is already too elitist in that regard. I'm only referring to those who refuse to honor the GPL.
Well, ESR's ego is so big that he genuinely doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't recognize his genius. Shater's ego is so big that he doesn't care if anyone else thinks he's a genius. Therefore 1 ESR != 1 Shatner, because they're different enough that neither is a subset of the other. 1 ESR implies an extreme superiority complex, while 1 Shatner implies a pretty standard (but amusing) God complex.
Put that in your Jargon File and smoke it. :)
For a court, we might add #4: it compiles to the exact same binary as one they've released. If it doesn't, or if they never released the product, then there is no way to prove the code is legit. They could have gone back at any point and altered or added code as desired. Compiling to a known-published binary is the only way to verify.
You're frustrated. I understand. You've been posting as an Anonymous Coward, and just hoping that everyone would defer to your authority on the topic. But you provide no sources to lend credence to your claims, while over the course of six or seven posts, I've provided many sources to support my position. If the one I provided isn't perfect, that's fine. I disagree, and I can read for myself where that article said a secure solution to the authentication problem is to (and I quote) "Host IIS and SQL Server on the Same Machine." But whatever. If we throw that citation out and keep the rest, we've still got quite a compelling case that the world of databases is far bigger than your narrowminded viewpoint would suggest. I'm happy to let Slashdotters read this long, crazy thread and decide for themselves.
Amusing that you've provided no information, however unrelated, to backup your point.
Then you would be wrong.
I never said that. You are diverting with a classic straw man argument, but it's poorly executed. You probably didn't even know you were doing it.
Huh? Microsoft even recommends it in some cases. Hosting companies such as Ventures Online do this. For that matter, they're resellers -- there is another company behind them that provides the servers to them and hundreds of other hosting companies like 100 Megs. And I couldn't find any significant reported problems about this with relation to open-source DBs, such as MySQL or Postgres. It seems the only significant comment that I can find is that putting the DB and Web server on the same box can be slower than giving each their own box. Well, duh. A server farm would be even faster.
Give examples of risks that come from having MySQL and Apache on the same box. Unique risks -- ones that would magically "go away" if the DB were on its own box. I'll go out on a limb and say that you're wrong. If anything, security is better with the DB & webserver on the same box, because logins won't go across ethernet. In fact, Philip Greenspun has a big article about interfacing with a database, and in it he talks about preventing direct connections, and suggests, "But for many Web sites, there is no reason why you can't run the database and Web server on the same box." Because then, you guessed it, the DB doesn't even have to listen on a port or accept any connections via TCP/IP.
See the title of your own post.
During the peak load that I mentioned, we were evenly split between SELECT, INSERT, and UPDATE.
So your original post was indeed apples to oranges.Well now that we now you were comparing apples to oranges, it's irrelevant anyway.
Sure it can be done with MySQL. Amazon is selling the MySQL Transactions and Replication Handbook if you'd like to read up on it.
Sounds like you might want to take your own advice.
You make it sound like you have a server dedicated to MS SQL Server. I don't -- I've got Apache and PHP on the same server, and all apps run & handle load on the same box. So this may be an apples/oranges comparison. However, if your box is also running Apache or IIS, and also makes heavy use of PHP or ASP, then I would like to meet you and have you give me a tour of this server during peak times, so I can see it perform. I've created an email account just for this. It's utopia at outshine dot com. I'll leave that email address active for a couple weeks. Would you contact me? I'll come to where to you are (unless you're really far away).