Do any of these new devices license Apple's handwriting recognition, from the Newton? In fact, the Newton is so old, I wonder if anyone has taken that code and improved it even further? I loved not having to learn Graffiti. I want to buy a new handheld, but I want it to be hyper-intuitive. What about voice commands? Can any of them handle that out-of-the-box yet?
I guess if the only value you see to these tags is as a way to manipulate the search engine results, then yeah, maybe a case could be made to do away with them. But meta tags can be used for a whole lot more -- other people mentioned using them to refresh or redirect pages, but there are other goodies too. For example, I encourage my developers to drop this onto each page: "name='developer' content='Employee Name'" -- it's an ego stroke for developers to be able to show that off to their friends. Also, the copyright can be put into a meta tag. Why? Because it isn't visual, so all the clueless newbies who copy the site with a GUI tool will fail to remove that tag. We catch a few people that way, although only the most stupid.
For a while, at Borland, I had a pretty low-end (but working) content-management system, where I put an expiration date into a meta tag along with an author name, and then had a Perl script that flagged any out of date file and emailed the author. This was brute-force Perl recursing through the htdocs folder and reading in each file, so it wasn't database-backed, but in 1995 my boss thought it was hot. Nowadays there are better ways to do most everything, and meta tags are not required for much, but they are still a very useful option, and allow for some creativity -- regardless of search engines.
EnderWiggnz writes:
DO NOT put an "Objective" section at the top of your resume
mjhans writes: Yes, you have 1" to catch my eye. You don't catch my eye with education
While mjhans has quite a little ego on him, I just need to get it on record that he knows what he's talking about, and EnderWiggnz does not. I can't believe that EnderWiggnz's bad advice is modded up. I'm currently hiring, and I'm going through about 50 resumes each day. The resumes with generic objectives (like "get a job that uses my talents") and the resumes with education at the top (WTF?!?) get trashed pretty quick. I want to see an objective that clearly puts you in my market, or else no objective and a recent job right up front that clearly puts you in my market.
I wouldn't want to try dissapating 900kw of heat into my car's gas tank... but, best of luck to you.
I would imagine that the fuel is stored in a sealed tank, with no oxygen in it. Making it much safer.
How much more likely is the craft to explode if it is shot up? Would one shot that penetrates the tank be a decisive victory in battle? I understand that current military aircraft can withstand quite a beating and still make it back to base. Are these gas-tank-heat-sinks a weapon that can be used against the pilot?
You're not SUPPOSED to test your God. You're just supposed to believe.
That's not Biblical. That's certainly church-ical, though. Sheep want 1 shepherd. They don't want other sheep to lead. But the Bible itself has the Lamentations as basically a huge guide on how to shake your fist at God. Obviously, knowing that an unexamined faith is weak, the Bible wants to promote a stronger, examined faith. But the byproduct, of course, is that some who question their faith will abandon it. That's NOT what a church trying to expand its membership and win converts wants. But I suspect God would just want tested, strong believers. Hence the difference between the Bible and the church.
He suggests the bugs could be using ultraviolet light from the Sun as an energy source. If they are absorbing UV, that would explain the presence of mysterious dark patches on ultraviolet images of the planet.
I think this would be amazing. Whenever there has been a possibility of life before, it has always been microscopic bacteria frozen in rock or ice. Nearly undetectable, and certainly nothing that would visually incite people. But this? Huge swarms that discolor the atmosphere under ultraviolet light? If true, I'd bet that these images become more popular than Cindy Margolis.
I just completed my own multi-user benchmark tests and the great performance of PostgreSQL vs the not so great performance of MySQL with InnoDB was quite revealing.
Well, since MySQL can keep up with Oracle, are you suggesting that Oracle has "not so great performance" and that PostgreSQL can outperform Oracle?
I'm reading these posts and I'm getting the impression that people just don't like Oracle for one reason or another.
I think you're "eavesdropping" on a longstanding developer dispute, and without all the background, it appears to be one thing, when really it is another. My impression is that every database guru respects Oracle. Even if they don't use it, they acknowledge that Oracle works. But the problem is that the PostgreSQL guys take snide jabs at the MySQL guys (right in this thread witness one suggesting that "real" applications use stored procedures, painting any use of MySQL as illegitimate). And the MySQL developers just dumbly hit the ceiling of MySQL's capabilities and keep going -- doing work in code or making kludges. Both sides respect Oracle. Oracle is Switzerland. But neither side respects the other. So when you see comments about both sides taking market from Oracle, that is not about killing Oracle so much as it is trying to find a common ground.
And frankly, I think it is working. I think that mostly sane, clear-headed comments have prevailed here on Slashdot. And that's saying a LOT. I think that both sides need to accept the other as having very legitimate uses. What's more, those uses are different enough that MySQL and PostgreSQL can complement each other. A developer who is willing to use or consider both is a developer who can probably cover just about any conceivable database need. You want a screaming fast Web site that handles huge load? Fine. You want to use Access on the front end but something else on the backend? Fine. You want to build a database to manage a company's finances and process orders? Fine. ALL THREE of those are fully real needs for a database. Oracle can do all three, and it's mostly good at it. PostgreSQL can't give great results for all three scenarios on it's own. MySQL can't either. But if you're willing to consider using both in the areas they're good at, you can do wonderfully.
MySQL wins on only one major front, and as you've noted the degree to which it wins on that front seems to be diminishing: speed.
That's true as long as you only have a couple or fewer users using your MySQL database concurrently and then, only when they are performing very simple selects.
I've heard people swear on their souls that Postgre can stand up to MySQL, I look forward to finding out if this is really true.
Without sounding like I'm flamebaiting you, have you used many databases in your career? Do you know from experience the pros and cons of each? What drawbacks are you talking about?
You didn't sound like you were flamebaiting him much, although I cringed as I read your post, waiting for the usual comment like, "MySQL is garbage even though everyone uses it, PostgreSQL is heaven and only the blessed use it." But you didn't quite do that, although calling MySQL a DBM file is a bit hostile.
So assuming we're being reasonable, here is what each side basically knows (and exaggerates) about the other. MySQL is supposedly feature poor, an awful thing without transactions, foreign keys, subselects, and other features you would find in Oracle. MySQL is for kiddies. Supposedly. Of course, most of the lacking features were implemented long ago or are about to see the light of day in MySQL 4.1. And most MySQL users freely admit they don't even need the features. MySQL gets deployed on fast-as-hell Web sites that only need to store data and display it. MySQL is for that Web site running on a Linux box that sees waaaayy too many SELECT statements during peak seconds. Cause that's what MySQL does best, and much to the disappointment of high-end database gurus, that's ALL most Web sites need. So the tool to do that best wins that market, and the PostgreSQL fans are just sour about that. On the other side, PostgreSQL is supposedly unstable and difficult. And PostgreSQL has some big-assed speed issues. Supposedly. But most of the bugs I've ever heard people complain about are things that were solved a year ago, or more. They just keep getting rehashed. And last time I was lurking through some mailing lists, PostgreSQL had been given a serious speed boost. And the PostgreSQL fans do have a good point in one area: a lot of things Web developers do in code are supposed to be done in the database. But if all you know is MySQL, you're going to become code-heavy when you push MySQL beyond its niche. And some MySQL fans just don't get it, even as they hit the wall.
So there, I've praised and pissed on both databases. What bothers me most about the usual criticisms is how outdated those criticisms are. Try the databases now. They're both kicking serious ass. They're both going to eat into Oracle's markets. Not all of Oracle's markets. But they ARE legit alternatives in some areas.
They call me "un-American" for running a communist OS and bashing captialism at every chance.
But you're a bigger capitalist than they are. They've bought into a monopoly -- the antithesis of a free-market economy. You have supported an open system which fosters free-market competition -- many distributions in competition, window managers in competition, and a huge number of apps that help non-Linux-centric businesses gain an advantage over proprietary competitors.
Linux is capitalism. Great ideas flourish, bad ideas are trounced, poorly marketed but technically superior ideas are salvaged from the source code of dead dot-coms. You're a fucking patriot.
You already have 3 replies to your post that are all good, and at least 2 of those replies ought to be modded up, IMHO. But I have to add a fourth comment that hasn't been put into a reply yet.
there is nothing intuitive about the Windows ui. or the mac ui. or gnome or kde or any of the others. There's nothing intuitive about a steering wheel either. You have to learn it.
This comment really, really hurts your argument. Because it's wrong. And so I'm not sure I trust the rest of your comments. See, usability has a huge number of objective standards that can be met. It's not "fuzzy" except to the people who have no training in it. For example, mapping. Mapping is a usability term that means the control should "map" to the same traits the object has. You have a stove with 4 burners? You should have 4 controls, in the same relative positions as the burners. You want to turn the car clockwise? Turn the wheel clockwise. And that's my issue. You suggest that Linux is simple, but you try to prove it by claiming that intuition with computer interfaces isn't even possible. But your derision that Windows is "click and guess" is actually exactly intuition -- perhaps better stated as "guess and click": you've never used it, but you can make a guess, click, and usually get it right or in the case of bad things, get a dialogue box to allow you to back out (another usability feature called a "forcing function").
The point is this: there are a huge, huge number of objective, measured ways you can qualify "ease of use" and how "intuitive" something is. The Gnome guys know this well enough to have released guidelines for it. Apple knew it well enough to have released HCI guidelines twenty years ago. So this neo-argument that "there is no spoon" just doesn't fly.
And don't get me started on the File menu. That goes back to a study from 1939, before the File menu existed. There is a ton of research behind menus and memory and grouping. Trust me, there are ways to measure this, and Linux is OK but not Joe-user-easy. You and I can surely trot out many Joe-users and developer-moms as examples, but those are exceptions.
Don't even think about claiming that "real" creators would continue to work for free. People need and expect -- and have every right to expect -- to derive revenue from the work they do.
No, they don't. No one has a "right to expect to derive revenue". Hypothetical: I just punched six holes in the concrete blocks in my apartment. I think it's art. I also think that you're obligated to pay me for my art. After all, I have "every right to expect to derive revenue from the work" I do.
I think you're deliberately missing the point. At least I hope so. The alternative is that you're dense. The original poster was suggesting that you should be able to set the price and terms of sale, not that you should be able to extort money from people. If people want to refuse to buy, they can do without the product or find a competiting product. I don't see anything in the original post that implies otherwise.
Wow. Lots of people posting about SuSE who don't appear to actually use it. I want to make just two points. First, while I understand that their installers are not GPL'd, I also understand that this is what makes them a profitable enough company to be stable. I don't want SuSE to be like Mandrake, asking for handouts. I want Linux to survive, and companies teetering on the edge make me uncomfortable. Second, YAST is not new (obviously), so any hype about managing packages is overstated. YAST has done that for a while. But what is new, and -- sorry -- what I and other customers asked for, is the ability to search inside a package for libraries and such. For me personally, I wanted to get Xine and Xmms working from a compile, and there were cascading dependencies. I didn't want to compile everything. So it is NOT that SuSE put that there because they screw up dependencies and have "advanced search" as a bandaid. They have it there (at least in my case) so that I can select a library, get all the sub-dependencies taken care of, and then I only need to use gcc for the app itself.
I admire you both for boldly making false claims about Al Gore's innocence, and for the fact that you are apparently a powerful enough person on slashdot that no one will disagree with you unless they're posting as an AC. But I'm capped, so I'll repeat what the ACs have said with a +1 score. Maybe more people will see it:
What Al Gore actually said was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And that claim is patently false. There is no way to misconstrue it as "factually correct" unless you want to paint yourself as an Al Gore fanboi. Al Gore helped make beneficial infrastructure changes to the Internet, I'll grant him that. And he's a geek -- we're lucky to have him. But don't put him on a pedestal and start inflating his credentials. His credentials are fine as-is.
The company I work for, SST, has a chip that was at one point supposed to be in the Xbox. That fell through, but the chip still works. So even though my company only deals in volume -- maybe 100,000 chips an order -- we've been flooded with calls from script kiddies wanting to chip-mod the Xbox. I guess our chip will let those in Europe play US content, among other things. The Sales people here are amused. The latest was a kid who wanted "5-10 sample chips for a school project." Uh-huh.
Ethics are fundamentally different in the presence or absence of a God. In the absence, ethics are based around pragmatism and as such adaptible. In the presence, ethics are given to us.
Well, it also depends upon whether you're an Old Testament or New Testament believer. In the New Testament, Jesus created a new meta-rule that supercedes all others: act out of love. Actually, he said it a few times a few ways (do unto others, love your neighbor, the greatest of these is love). But what's great about the one meta-rule is that it allows for malleability. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, talks a lot about slavery and homosexuality. But people who believe in Jesus got over slavery and they'll get over homosexuality. It just takes time for them the understand that love takes precedence over a million little rules and requires them to (gasp!) use their own judgement.
One of my biggest difficulties with faith was the conflict between the commandment "thou shall not kill" and the passage, "there is a time to kill." For the longest time I couldn't reconcile them. Once I learned the meta rule, I realized both can exist. Killing is not normally an act of love. But acting out of love for millions of Jews might include putting a gun to Hitler's head and pulling the trigger. Maybe. In any case, I think Jesus had ethics that were adaptable.
I fully expect to be given -- artifically or otherwise -- the right to capitalize on that creation.
Okay, great. Now we have established what you want. What's in it for me?
Lack of jail time.
You're asking me, after all, to give up my easily exercised ability to use that information too should I legally find it out. Unless you give me not just AN incentive to do as you wish, but one that's big enough to make up for the loss I'll suffer of being able to do what I like, I see no reason why I should submit to your wishes.
Because it's in MY head, not yours, and I'm going to the government and saying to them that I'm not giving a brain dump until their laws protect me. I fully expect this to be a power play between content creators and content copiers, and I'm confident that the government will side with creators (well, this isn't even much of a gamble -- the US government has already done this). They know that if they don't, their entire country will suffer a brain drain as the talent goes elsewhere.
And again, for those that see this post and not my previous one, I am no fan of locking up content forever. I firmly believe that Disney needs to get over Mickey Mouse and come up with something new. I believe in a strong, healthy public domain, and that work should fall into the public domain much more quickly than it does now (really, for all practical purposes, it doesn't). I also believe that if an author wants to release content under the Open Content license or even just release all rights and put it into the public domain, they should be free to do so. I am not advocating that every content creator must endure a forced lockdown of their work if they prefer to release it into the wild. But for those that want copyright to protect their work for a limited time, they ought to be able to do that, and have it backed up with rule of law.
[F]undamentally those things which are copyrighted are created by the authors, and they should have the ability to control them.
Oh? How are you getting this? Merely coming up with a creative work doesn't seem to impart control, nor inherently need it to be artifically given.
Well, no control mechanism magically appears when I write a poem or record a song. So you're right that control isn't automatically or fundamentally given upon creating an original work. However, I disagree with the end of your sentence -- the suggestion that it inherently doesn't need to be given is, frankly, wrongheaded. People who create content have repeatedly stated and shown that when their creations have no protection, they go create them elsewhere. Employees who are told that the ideas they come up with over the weekend during NON-work hours somehow belong to the company, well, those employees leave fast. There is a reason why Silicon Valley is in California -- there are laws on the books that protect me from a predatory employer who wants to steal my weekend hobby. So the idea-guys flourish here. Startups abound. And back to content, I create poetry, essays, technical articles, and sometimes graphics. I fully expect to be given -- artifically or otherwise -- the right to capitalize on that creation. I want to present my work in the best light, and in some cases I want to charge for it. If a magazine wants to republish it on the Web, I want my penny-per-page-view. If there is no copyright system in place, it does not create some Kumbaya communal ownership structure. Instead, it gives big companies the ability to appropriate my work and sell it with a million-dollar marketing push that I cannot match, and then all the money for my work goes to them. Fuck that.
Are you, the author, HARMED because I can copy your work. I'm not excluding you from your ability to do things with it.
Yes you are. Part of copyright is -- or dammit, I want laws passed that make it this way -- similar to the limited monopoly concept: I want you deprived of the content if you won't pay for it. I need copyright laws to force you to miss out so that market forces create demand. See, I believe a lot of the "I never would have paid anyway, so what's the harm" questions are bullshit. You will buy it if it's the only way to get it. And if you really won't, then when my product doesn't sell, I'll know I need to lower the price or make a better product. That's not only the system that I believe is currently in place, it's the system I want enforced, and if it's not exactly as I described, then I want it to be that way, and I'm willing to go vote to get people in office who will support that.
Now, after disagreeing with you so much, I want to make one concession: copyright laws go too far right now. Even with my own creations, I don't want my kids to live off of them. I don't want their grandkids to live off of them. I want enough time to sell my book or CD, make some money, and maybe have enough time to sell a greatest hits or compilation or a few reprints. So while I defend the copyright system, I want it completely rolled back to the original copyright system put in place 200 years ago: 14 or 28 years with 1 renewal. That's it. That's all.
Well yikes. I'm nervous to post what could be an unpopular view. But here goes. I do not believe in a mandate of 15-hour days or 7-day work weeks. But I also do not believe in missing deadlines that I took good care and due diligence to plan for. If a developer tells me it'll take a week, and he's buffering for everything he thinks could go wrong, I go back to the CEO and give a commitment that is two or even three times farther out than what the developer estimated. When the developer misses his own target, I get upset but I do not raise hell. However, when the developer doesn't even meet my "padded" deadline, that developer ought to realize some hard work better happen, and fast. I never force or mandate anything, and I do not give impossible deadlines that would cause a developer to constantly be overworked. But if a developer cannot work extra at least short-term to "save face" -- as if they don't care about quality or commitment -- that developer ain't going to last long.
So the question is, does the OP think the boss wants this as a permanent situation? If so, bail and bail fast. That's bad management and no, you won't be able to reform a management team that has such a toxic view of its employees. Just get out. But if the case is that deadlines have been missed, and developers are only being asked to do this short-term, then it may be that the developers need to respond to management with a can-do attitude. Especially if not responding with a can-do attitude is what caused the problems in the first place.
IANAL, but it appears that a BSD licensed equivalent of mpg321 and XMMS plugin would have no legal problems with distribution from a 3rd party non-profit site?
Well, that would make the app compliant with the MP3 patent & license. But it still could not be distributed with a GPL or BSD license, because those suggest that the item can be sold later. SO: you make an MP3 player, and you put it online for free download. That's okay. But then you add a BSD or GPL license to that free download, and you're in trouble -- the license will allow someone who downloads it to sell it later in a CD or something, but the MP3 license prohibits that. See? The GPL and BSD licenses are passing along rights that cannot be passed along. The GPL has it right in its patent clause: if a patent/license limits redistribution, then the product simply cannot be distributed with the GPL. All these programmers who have built MP3 players need to take their licenses, strike out the text that allows others to redistribute it for ANY amount of money, and then get back to work.
I see no problem with getting familiar with those faces in case anything ever does happen.
Here's why I think this is a massive, huge problem: a cop "gets familiar" with my face because I went to a club in a bad part of town, and then is predisposed to assume I'm guilty of a crime on a later date. Let's say YOU are in the database. Let's say you've never been arrested or convicted of ANY crime. And let's say suddenly you're pulled in for a crime you didn't commit. You want to try to convince that cop you're innocent? How good are you going to feel while the cop sits there saying, "uh-huh, sure buddy. Look, it's in the computer and so we know your bad news."
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Do any of these new devices license Apple's handwriting recognition, from the Newton? In fact, the Newton is so old, I wonder if anyone has taken that code and improved it even further? I loved not having to learn Graffiti. I want to buy a new handheld, but I want it to be hyper-intuitive. What about voice commands? Can any of them handle that out-of-the-box yet?
I guess if the only value you see to these tags is as a way to manipulate the search engine results, then yeah, maybe a case could be made to do away with them. But meta tags can be used for a whole lot more -- other people mentioned using them to refresh or redirect pages, but there are other goodies too. For example, I encourage my developers to drop this onto each page: "name='developer' content='Employee Name'" -- it's an ego stroke for developers to be able to show that off to their friends. Also, the copyright can be put into a meta tag. Why? Because it isn't visual, so all the clueless newbies who copy the site with a GUI tool will fail to remove that tag. We catch a few people that way, although only the most stupid.
For a while, at Borland, I had a pretty low-end (but working) content-management system, where I put an expiration date into a meta tag along with an author name, and then had a Perl script that flagged any out of date file and emailed the author. This was brute-force Perl recursing through the htdocs folder and reading in each file, so it wasn't database-backed, but in 1995 my boss thought it was hot. Nowadays there are better ways to do most everything, and meta tags are not required for much, but they are still a very useful option, and allow for some creativity -- regardless of search engines.
While mjhans has quite a little ego on him, I just need to get it on record that he knows what he's talking about, and EnderWiggnz does not. I can't believe that EnderWiggnz's bad advice is modded up. I'm currently hiring, and I'm going through about 50 resumes each day. The resumes with generic objectives (like "get a job that uses my talents") and the resumes with education at the top (WTF?!?) get trashed pretty quick. I want to see an objective that clearly puts you in my market, or else no objective and a recent job right up front that clearly puts you in my market.
How much more likely is the craft to explode if it is shot up? Would one shot that penetrates the tank be a decisive victory in battle? I understand that current military aircraft can withstand quite a beating and still make it back to base. Are these gas-tank-heat-sinks a weapon that can be used against the pilot?
Umm. Isn't combat one of the very few places where you cannot predict the outcome of any engagement with any degree of reliability?
That's not Biblical. That's certainly church-ical, though. Sheep want 1 shepherd. They don't want other sheep to lead. But the Bible itself has the Lamentations as basically a huge guide on how to shake your fist at God. Obviously, knowing that an unexamined faith is weak, the Bible wants to promote a stronger, examined faith. But the byproduct, of course, is that some who question their faith will abandon it. That's NOT what a church trying to expand its membership and win converts wants. But I suspect God would just want tested, strong believers. Hence the difference between the Bible and the church.
From the article:
I think this would be amazing. Whenever there has been a possibility of life before, it has always been microscopic bacteria frozen in rock or ice. Nearly undetectable, and certainly nothing that would visually incite people. But this? Huge swarms that discolor the atmosphere under ultraviolet light? If true, I'd bet that these images become more popular than Cindy Margolis.
Then you spoke without following the second link.
...on the East coast, and soon on the West. So? How was it???
Well, since MySQL can keep up with Oracle, are you suggesting that Oracle has "not so great performance" and that PostgreSQL can outperform Oracle?
I think you're "eavesdropping" on a longstanding developer dispute, and without all the background, it appears to be one thing, when really it is another. My impression is that every database guru respects Oracle. Even if they don't use it, they acknowledge that Oracle works. But the problem is that the PostgreSQL guys take snide jabs at the MySQL guys (right in this thread witness one suggesting that "real" applications use stored procedures, painting any use of MySQL as illegitimate). And the MySQL developers just dumbly hit the ceiling of MySQL's capabilities and keep going -- doing work in code or making kludges. Both sides respect Oracle. Oracle is Switzerland. But neither side respects the other. So when you see comments about both sides taking market from Oracle, that is not about killing Oracle so much as it is trying to find a common ground.
And frankly, I think it is working. I think that mostly sane, clear-headed comments have prevailed here on Slashdot. And that's saying a LOT. I think that both sides need to accept the other as having very legitimate uses. What's more, those uses are different enough that MySQL and PostgreSQL can complement each other. A developer who is willing to use or consider both is a developer who can probably cover just about any conceivable database need. You want a screaming fast Web site that handles huge load? Fine. You want to use Access on the front end but something else on the backend? Fine. You want to build a database to manage a company's finances and process orders? Fine. ALL THREE of those are fully real needs for a database. Oracle can do all three, and it's mostly good at it. PostgreSQL can't give great results for all three scenarios on it's own. MySQL can't either. But if you're willing to consider using both in the areas they're good at, you can do wonderfully.
That is not true. It's another old myth that has been disproven.
You didn't sound like you were flamebaiting him much, although I cringed as I read your post, waiting for the usual comment like, "MySQL is garbage even though everyone uses it, PostgreSQL is heaven and only the blessed use it." But you didn't quite do that, although calling MySQL a DBM file is a bit hostile.
So assuming we're being reasonable, here is what each side basically knows (and exaggerates) about the other. MySQL is supposedly feature poor, an awful thing without transactions, foreign keys, subselects, and other features you would find in Oracle. MySQL is for kiddies. Supposedly. Of course, most of the lacking features were implemented long ago or are about to see the light of day in MySQL 4.1. And most MySQL users freely admit they don't even need the features. MySQL gets deployed on fast-as-hell Web sites that only need to store data and display it. MySQL is for that Web site running on a Linux box that sees waaaayy too many SELECT statements during peak seconds. Cause that's what MySQL does best, and much to the disappointment of high-end database gurus, that's ALL most Web sites need. So the tool to do that best wins that market, and the PostgreSQL fans are just sour about that. On the other side, PostgreSQL is supposedly unstable and difficult. And PostgreSQL has some big-assed speed issues. Supposedly. But most of the bugs I've ever heard people complain about are things that were solved a year ago, or more. They just keep getting rehashed. And last time I was lurking through some mailing lists, PostgreSQL had been given a serious speed boost. And the PostgreSQL fans do have a good point in one area: a lot of things Web developers do in code are supposed to be done in the database. But if all you know is MySQL, you're going to become code-heavy when you push MySQL beyond its niche. And some MySQL fans just don't get it, even as they hit the wall.
So there, I've praised and pissed on both databases. What bothers me most about the usual criticisms is how outdated those criticisms are. Try the databases now. They're both kicking serious ass. They're both going to eat into Oracle's markets. Not all of Oracle's markets. But they ARE legit alternatives in some areas.
But you're a bigger capitalist than they are. They've bought into a monopoly -- the antithesis of a free-market economy. You have supported an open system which fosters free-market competition -- many distributions in competition, window managers in competition, and a huge number of apps that help non-Linux-centric businesses gain an advantage over proprietary competitors.
Linux is capitalism. Great ideas flourish, bad ideas are trounced, poorly marketed but technically superior ideas are salvaged from the source code of dead dot-coms. You're a fucking patriot.
You already have 3 replies to your post that are all good, and at least 2 of those replies ought to be modded up, IMHO. But I have to add a fourth comment that hasn't been put into a reply yet.
This comment really, really hurts your argument. Because it's wrong. And so I'm not sure I trust the rest of your comments. See, usability has a huge number of objective standards that can be met. It's not "fuzzy" except to the people who have no training in it. For example, mapping. Mapping is a usability term that means the control should "map" to the same traits the object has. You have a stove with 4 burners? You should have 4 controls, in the same relative positions as the burners. You want to turn the car clockwise? Turn the wheel clockwise. And that's my issue. You suggest that Linux is simple, but you try to prove it by claiming that intuition with computer interfaces isn't even possible. But your derision that Windows is "click and guess" is actually exactly intuition -- perhaps better stated as "guess and click": you've never used it, but you can make a guess, click, and usually get it right or in the case of bad things, get a dialogue box to allow you to back out (another usability feature called a "forcing function").
The point is this: there are a huge, huge number of objective, measured ways you can qualify "ease of use" and how "intuitive" something is. The Gnome guys know this well enough to have released guidelines for it. Apple knew it well enough to have released HCI guidelines twenty years ago. So this neo-argument that "there is no spoon" just doesn't fly.
And don't get me started on the File menu. That goes back to a study from 1939, before the File menu existed. There is a ton of research behind menus and memory and grouping. Trust me, there are ways to measure this, and Linux is OK but not Joe-user-easy. You and I can surely trot out many Joe-users and developer-moms as examples, but those are exceptions.
I think you're deliberately missing the point. At least I hope so. The alternative is that you're dense. The original poster was suggesting that you should be able to set the price and terms of sale, not that you should be able to extort money from people. If people want to refuse to buy, they can do without the product or find a competiting product. I don't see anything in the original post that implies otherwise.
Wow. Lots of people posting about SuSE who don't appear to actually use it. I want to make just two points. First, while I understand that their installers are not GPL'd, I also understand that this is what makes them a profitable enough company to be stable. I don't want SuSE to be like Mandrake, asking for handouts. I want Linux to survive, and companies teetering on the edge make me uncomfortable. Second, YAST is not new (obviously), so any hype about managing packages is overstated. YAST has done that for a while. But what is new, and -- sorry -- what I and other customers asked for, is the ability to search inside a package for libraries and such. For me personally, I wanted to get Xine and Xmms working from a compile, and there were cascading dependencies. I didn't want to compile everything. So it is NOT that SuSE put that there because they screw up dependencies and have "advanced search" as a bandaid. They have it there (at least in my case) so that I can select a library, get all the sub-dependencies taken care of, and then I only need to use gcc for the app itself.
I admire you both for boldly making false claims about Al Gore's innocence, and for the fact that you are apparently a powerful enough person on slashdot that no one will disagree with you unless they're posting as an AC. But I'm capped, so I'll repeat what the ACs have said with a +1 score. Maybe more people will see it:
What Al Gore actually said was: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And that claim is patently false. There is no way to misconstrue it as "factually correct" unless you want to paint yourself as an Al Gore fanboi. Al Gore helped make beneficial infrastructure changes to the Internet, I'll grant him that. And he's a geek -- we're lucky to have him. But don't put him on a pedestal and start inflating his credentials. His credentials are fine as-is.
The company I work for, SST, has a chip that was at one point supposed to be in the Xbox. That fell through, but the chip still works. So even though my company only deals in volume -- maybe 100,000 chips an order -- we've been flooded with calls from script kiddies wanting to chip-mod the Xbox. I guess our chip will let those in Europe play US content, among other things. The Sales people here are amused. The latest was a kid who wanted "5-10 sample chips for a school project." Uh-huh.
Well, it also depends upon whether you're an Old Testament or New Testament believer. In the New Testament, Jesus created a new meta-rule that supercedes all others: act out of love. Actually, he said it a few times a few ways (do unto others, love your neighbor, the greatest of these is love). But what's great about the one meta-rule is that it allows for malleability. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, talks a lot about slavery and homosexuality. But people who believe in Jesus got over slavery and they'll get over homosexuality. It just takes time for them the understand that love takes precedence over a million little rules and requires them to (gasp!) use their own judgement.
One of my biggest difficulties with faith was the conflict between the commandment "thou shall not kill" and the passage, "there is a time to kill." For the longest time I couldn't reconcile them. Once I learned the meta rule, I realized both can exist. Killing is not normally an act of love. But acting out of love for millions of Jews might include putting a gun to Hitler's head and pulling the trigger. Maybe. In any case, I think Jesus had ethics that were adaptable.
Lack of jail time.
Because it's in MY head, not yours, and I'm going to the government and saying to them that I'm not giving a brain dump until their laws protect me. I fully expect this to be a power play between content creators and content copiers, and I'm confident that the government will side with creators (well, this isn't even much of a gamble -- the US government has already done this). They know that if they don't, their entire country will suffer a brain drain as the talent goes elsewhere.
And again, for those that see this post and not my previous one, I am no fan of locking up content forever. I firmly believe that Disney needs to get over Mickey Mouse and come up with something new. I believe in a strong, healthy public domain, and that work should fall into the public domain much more quickly than it does now (really, for all practical purposes, it doesn't). I also believe that if an author wants to release content under the Open Content license or even just release all rights and put it into the public domain, they should be free to do so. I am not advocating that every content creator must endure a forced lockdown of their work if they prefer to release it into the wild. But for those that want copyright to protect their work for a limited time, they ought to be able to do that, and have it backed up with rule of law.
Well, no control mechanism magically appears when I write a poem or record a song. So you're right that control isn't automatically or fundamentally given upon creating an original work. However, I disagree with the end of your sentence -- the suggestion that it inherently doesn't need to be given is, frankly, wrongheaded. People who create content have repeatedly stated and shown that when their creations have no protection, they go create them elsewhere. Employees who are told that the ideas they come up with over the weekend during NON-work hours somehow belong to the company, well, those employees leave fast. There is a reason why Silicon Valley is in California -- there are laws on the books that protect me from a predatory employer who wants to steal my weekend hobby. So the idea-guys flourish here. Startups abound. And back to content, I create poetry, essays, technical articles, and sometimes graphics. I fully expect to be given -- artifically or otherwise -- the right to capitalize on that creation. I want to present my work in the best light, and in some cases I want to charge for it. If a magazine wants to republish it on the Web, I want my penny-per-page-view. If there is no copyright system in place, it does not create some Kumbaya communal ownership structure. Instead, it gives big companies the ability to appropriate my work and sell it with a million-dollar marketing push that I cannot match, and then all the money for my work goes to them. Fuck that.
Yes you are. Part of copyright is -- or dammit, I want laws passed that make it this way -- similar to the limited monopoly concept: I want you deprived of the content if you won't pay for it. I need copyright laws to force you to miss out so that market forces create demand. See, I believe a lot of the "I never would have paid anyway, so what's the harm" questions are bullshit. You will buy it if it's the only way to get it. And if you really won't, then when my product doesn't sell, I'll know I need to lower the price or make a better product. That's not only the system that I believe is currently in place, it's the system I want enforced, and if it's not exactly as I described, then I want it to be that way, and I'm willing to go vote to get people in office who will support that.
Now, after disagreeing with you so much, I want to make one concession: copyright laws go too far right now. Even with my own creations, I don't want my kids to live off of them. I don't want their grandkids to live off of them. I want enough time to sell my book or CD, make some money, and maybe have enough time to sell a greatest hits or compilation or a few reprints. So while I defend the copyright system, I want it completely rolled back to the original copyright system put in place 200 years ago: 14 or 28 years with 1 renewal. That's it. That's all.
Well yikes. I'm nervous to post what could be an unpopular view. But here goes. I do not believe in a mandate of 15-hour days or 7-day work weeks. But I also do not believe in missing deadlines that I took good care and due diligence to plan for. If a developer tells me it'll take a week, and he's buffering for everything he thinks could go wrong, I go back to the CEO and give a commitment that is two or even three times farther out than what the developer estimated. When the developer misses his own target, I get upset but I do not raise hell. However, when the developer doesn't even meet my "padded" deadline, that developer ought to realize some hard work better happen, and fast. I never force or mandate anything, and I do not give impossible deadlines that would cause a developer to constantly be overworked. But if a developer cannot work extra at least short-term to "save face" -- as if they don't care about quality or commitment -- that developer ain't going to last long.
So the question is, does the OP think the boss wants this as a permanent situation? If so, bail and bail fast. That's bad management and no, you won't be able to reform a management team that has such a toxic view of its employees. Just get out. But if the case is that deadlines have been missed, and developers are only being asked to do this short-term, then it may be that the developers need to respond to management with a can-do attitude. Especially if not responding with a can-do attitude is what caused the problems in the first place.
Well, that would make the app compliant with the MP3 patent & license. But it still could not be distributed with a GPL or BSD license, because those suggest that the item can be sold later. SO: you make an MP3 player, and you put it online for free download. That's okay. But then you add a BSD or GPL license to that free download, and you're in trouble -- the license will allow someone who downloads it to sell it later in a CD or something, but the MP3 license prohibits that. See? The GPL and BSD licenses are passing along rights that cannot be passed along. The GPL has it right in its patent clause: if a patent/license limits redistribution, then the product simply cannot be distributed with the GPL. All these programmers who have built MP3 players need to take their licenses, strike out the text that allows others to redistribute it for ANY amount of money, and then get back to work.
Here's why I think this is a massive, huge problem: a cop "gets familiar" with my face because I went to a club in a bad part of town, and then is predisposed to assume I'm guilty of a crime on a later date. Let's say YOU are in the database. Let's say you've never been arrested or convicted of ANY crime. And let's say suddenly you're pulled in for a crime you didn't commit. You want to try to convince that cop you're innocent? How good are you going to feel while the cop sits there saying, "uh-huh, sure buddy. Look, it's in the computer and so we know your bad news."