This guy must be an embarrassment even for ZdNet. The crap he comes up with would be ignored if someone came up with it on/. and it should be ignored here, too.
Lets look at a few of his other posts:
The 3.6Ghz P4 isn't remotely performance competitive with the 2.7Ghz G5. What happens is that applications written for x86 run better on x86... Apple didn't go Intel because it's faster and they certainly didn't go Intel because it offers a quicker route to lower power requirements for laptops
but the real killer is where he argues that the Power chip is more secure than the x86 because of some unspecified hardware difference:
However, if an exploitable software problem is found, the exploit itself is no more difficult to write for Linux on x86 than for Windows on x86 because such exploits are hardware, not OS, dependent.
Those hardware weaknesses do not, however, exist in the same way or to the same effect in non Intel chipsets like those of the G5, the UltraSPARC, Cell, or Xenon. As a result finding a part two method on these CPU sets is at least as difficult, if not significantly more so, than part one. That's why there have been hundreds of widely publicized Solaris and MacOS X vulnerabilities for which there are no actual exploits and therefore no victims.
If you still have any respect for this guy, lets look at some more posts:
Resurrection Time?
In which our genius suggests reviving APL to make it easier to program multi-core CPUs.
The JVM back end for GCC you mention describes itself as "highly experimental."
Untrue. The Java-GCC backend can be used now, for significant program. For instance, Fedora 4 ships the Eclipse IDE compiled using GCC.
Sun has said that it has no interest in supporting languages other than Java on the JVM.
Untrue. JDK 6.0 will include an API to use scripting languages directly, and will include a Javascript-on-Java implementation. There is also Project Coyote (scripting languages on Sun's Netbeans IDE), as well as a JSR for Groovy (the JVM based scripting language).
I'm not quote sure why you think "Python is itself a fully interpreted language, so it doesn't count" either. Just because it is fully interperate in it's current, C based implementation doesn't mean that won't change in the future. For instance, if the Parrot VM ever becomes useful then Python will be running under a JIT compiler, just the same as Java. Infact, it would be possible right now to modify Jython to emit Java bytecode, which then could be compiled by the JIT.
(Slightly premature announcement coming up.. but hey - it's Open Source so that's okay, right?)
I've just started a (Java) project to interface to a number of search engines. It might be a good place to start if you feel like doing some coding. See https://argos.dev.java.net/ - there is no release yet but the code is in CVS.
It currently supports Blogdigger, Feedster, Del.icio.us, Google, MSN and Yahoo (and Google Desktop search). I'd like to include Ask.com, too, but they don't provide a programatic interface and I refuse to screen-scrape.
In my opinion none of the other search engines are close to Google in quality of results. I've found (to my surprise) that Ask.com gives me the second best results (they bought the old Teoma search engine, which was always okay. It had an index almost the size of Google's, which neither MSN or Yahoo can match yet.)
There is a bug (in the windows version, although the release notes only note it in the Linux version) that might confuse you if you come across it.
If you have a customised user agent and the java plugin installed, make sure it contains the string "Mozilla/4.0", otherwise you won't be able to start up Mozilla.
Apparently the user agent is passed to the plug-in, and it doesn't know how to handle unknown user-agents (actually it tries to handle them as Netscape 3 and then crashes). Something (in your prefs.js) like:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98;)");
As has been pointed out by others Postgres, MySQL and Berkley DB aren't players in the same area as DB2 and Oracle.
However, there are a couple of other surprising omissions. Sybase ASE 12 is a pretty nice database, and is very competitive feature and platform wise with Oracle and DB2, and probably has a bigger market share than Informix. MS SQL Server 7/2000 is also a very nice database to work with. It's use is growing quickly for good reason - it's fast (on comparable hardware), cheap and the SQL Server development tools kick Oracle's Ass. Ever used MS Query analyzer? It is beautiful.. and comes free with SQL Server licences. You can get third part equivalents for Oracle (eg, from Quest), and they are also nice, but they cost around $10,000 for a site licence.
No, it doesn't run on non-Windows platforms, and yes Oracle on high end Sun hardware will run quicker. However, there are probably less than 5000 companies in the world that need that much power - and MS is going after that, too with MS Windows Data Center.
I'm not a MS weenie - I like an Oracle DB as much as anyone. However, it isn't as far ahead of SQL Server as some of you seem to think - and some of the bugs in it are just as bad as anything you'll see in SQL Server.
Since 1998, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia have been the world's tallest building (not including tower structures like broardcast towers) - 1,483 feet vs 1,450.
Of course, some of these sites might be using more servlets than JSP's, but since JSPs are compiled to servlets there is no performance difference, anyway.
Read Sun's dot-com-builder website on how priceline was built sometime. It's pretty interesting (although full of marketing rubbish).
They needed that 119% growth to break even. Like most other.com's, they are running out of the money they raised in their IPO, but they still need to pay the bills.
Because their profit margins are razor thin, the only way to get enough money to stop the cash-burn is to sell lots of stuff.
That's how they do their estimates of growth: How much growth do we need to break even? 115%? Okay, well if we grow 119%, then we will even make a profit - lets say we are going to do that. Obviously, it has as much resemblance to reality as their initial stock price.
Actually, satellite links are just about the most affordable form of broardband available outside Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane. Telstra cable is way too much, and Optus hasn't cabled anywhere else, but you can get sattelite access for around $40-$50 a month.
Of course, sattelite internet is actually a pretty crap form of 'net access - it is high lag, ties up a phone line, and is only fast one way.
Isn't the purpose of buying a PSX2 so you don't have to play old looking games?
Personally I find games interesting only for short periods of time - then I get bored. Programming, on the other hand is always interesting. I think this is great - think of all the people who got their first programming experience on a C64 with Basic. Now they can hack away on a PS2.. that is very cool.
I'm from Australia, so I can't vote in the election. It is of interest to me, though, because the US goverment is probably as important to Australia as our own (Sad but true).
I tend towards the left side of the centre politically, so there was no way I was really going to be a fan of Harry Browne's political views. After doing some reading in preperation for the K5 interview I was truely shocked at how naive the mans views are, though. I realise that he can afford not to have his idealistic Libertaian views tempered by reality because he isn't goint to win, but I did think he would/should care more about the specific issues rather than the politics.
Take his stance on
environmentalism. I'm sure it is nice from the Libertaian political point of view, but from the environmental point of view it sucks, badly. Rather that go into it, read my about it - I got fairly worked up.
He clearly ;has no idea about intellecual property. Suggesting protecting it by saying use encryption make for a good sound-bite, but doesn't address specific issues like patent reform.
I could go on but I won't. All I'll do is say he sounds just like a hundred other politicions. He just echos the same statements over & over. Read his website - you won't find anything new in the K5 interview, because he doesn't want to say anything. Nothing jumps out and makes me think "Now there is a leader".
...e.g. Collections/containers/algorithms that aren't the abomination that is STL.
I do Java and C++ professionally, and believe me - the STL is the best thing to happen to C++, ever. It makes C++ accessable and almost as easy to program in as Java, and it's performance is wonderful. Not only that, it makes writing reusable code simple, and lets you worry about the logic of your program rather than supporting classes like collections.
If you really thing the STL is an abomination, the either you are using a very early version or your programs are very different to what I write.
Okay, Jeff V. Merkey's company, the Timpanogas Research Group is a Microsoft ISV. Now this doesn't mean anything in itself, but some MS ISVs do have access to the NT code.
Here is a (google cached) post about some problems Merkey had with his open source NDS implementation - Novell wanted him to sign a NDA.
Read this:
The fact that he is working closely with Microsoft and a contributing to Open Source/Linux make TRG a legitimate threat. We may have NDS for NT and Linux, and are working with Caldera and Red Hat, but how are we going to walk that tight-rope of "seeding" NDS into Linux/Open Source market? Are we just going to wait for TRG to put Novell's NDS and NWFS "crown jewels" out as Open Source?
and this:
Jeff and David Gobel (wrote NTFS for MS, now consulting) can create a filter driver for ACL and Trustee management. This will work for NTFS and W2000 (completely new files system and disk structures). That would fill the gap for NDS for NT. Linux would actually be easier to implement. Then NDS would manage data on NT and Linux.
Now if this David Gobel person really did write "NTFS for MS", and now he has some kind of relationship with Merkey, Merkey's company or Linux, there could be a problem.
I'm not really sure of the details (I don't follow the kernel list), but I'm sure someone can expand on this.
Jeff V. Merkey used to work at Novell on Netware. He then left and went and developed something (a cleanroom NDS?) for a startup that had a fairly close relationship with MS. (I think the idea was MS was going to use this to combat Netware - like I said, I'm hazy on the details.)
Anyway, as part of that, (I think) he got access to the NT code, which means potentially MS might have a case, if he signed NDAs
Summary: Jeff V. Merkey had some prior realtionship with MS, which might give them a case. The rest is just hazy memories - I'll dig and try and remember exactly what was going on.
For all those asking (because the site is/.ed) Kylix is Inprise/Borland's version of Delphi (and later C++ Builder) for Linux.
It includeds a (Qt based) visual form designer, an OO-language (Object Pascal), great database tools and a cross platform OO class library called CLX (which supplements the Windows only VCL).
It will support application developement for KDE, GNOME (or at least GNOME aware, but non-GTK apps) and Apache modules.
I believe that Kylix is going to be a breakthough app for the Linux desktop. Many large companies have many apps written in Delphi (and VB). Rewritting these apps in C/C++ isn't an option, and Scripting languages like Python/Perl don't have the tool support for writing these GUI database applications. Kylix is going after that market, and knowing Borland's reputation for writing good programming tools, I'm looking forward to it.
I've been playing with XHTML recently. I found a program (the W3C's HTML Tidy program) that will take normal HTML and convert it automatically to XHTML.
Once you have a webpage in XHTML, you can use all the XML tools on it. For instance, I converted Google search results to XHTML, then used an XSLT stylesheet to convert the result summaries to a RSS file suitable for syndication.
I didn't have to write perl, or compile anything for this to work - it was all done using stylesheets and Tidy.
What's the point of this? I don't know yet - but I am thinking of lots of useful stuff it could be used for. Imagine a site like Slashdot automatically inserting a box of relevent google search results next to every story - no more excuses for not doing research on a story.
Pages I'm looking for are often not designed to exploit search engines anyway. If I'm looking for some technical documentation, it is often just stuck together by someone in a rush, or on a mailing list archive. These pages often don't have optimised META tags, etc, so some engines don't index them well.
Many people are suggesting that making the rules open is good because then everyone will exploit them equally. Perhaps, but that will just make it more difficult to find pages that don't try and get a highly rated search result.
On the other hand, I find Google works pretty well, and how it works is pretty well known.
* Alerts you to potentially offensive incoming messages
So it scans the message for you before you read it, I presume? I smell possible exploits... But then again, anything can be exploited so that's not a big issue.
Yeah, like all those exploits we keep hearing about with mail filters. You know - those things that scan the mail before you read it. Wait... there aren't any exploits for mail filters. Oh well.. it was a good idea.
It makes the arguement against it just a little more difficult. You can hear it now "We can't guarentee 100% security, but this box will log 99% of attempted intrusions"
I find it really, really scary when someone of Bruce Schneier's reputaion has seeming given up on the idea of secure software.
"I got about two-thirds of the way through the book without giving the reader any hope at all", he writes "It was about then that I realized I didn't have the hope to give."
If that is the case, what possible arguements can we muster against things like internet regulation. If we can't have better living through software, then there is a bunch of special interest groups and three leter agencies who would be happy to say "just install this box on every network, and we'll be able to trace all hackers"
Somewhat to my surprise, I found a lot of non-linux people quite concerned about this.
I use GNOME at home, and I program at work in Borland Delphi. Borland is porting Delphi to Linux (Kylix), and it is to use the Qt toolkit, and have some degree of (optional) KDE intergration.
This was all fine until the GNOME-Foundation announcement came up, and then a thread began in borland.delphi.non-technical (I think) about how Borland might be going the wrong way with Kylix. A lot of windows Delphi programmers who were/are planning to port to Linux were very concerned that their apps would (a)"be left behind" or (b)not run at all
It took a lot of explaining to make them understand how you can use KDE apps in GNOME and vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
This guy must be an embarrassment even for ZdNet. The crap he comes up with would be ignored if someone came up with it on /. and it should be ignored here, too.
Lets look at a few of his other posts:
Apple, insecurity, and x86 In this post, Paul comes out with gems like:
but the real killer is where he argues that the Power chip is more secure than the x86 because of some unspecified hardware difference: If you still have any respect for this guy, lets look at some more posts:Resurrection Time? In which our genius suggests reviving APL to make it easier to program multi-core CPUs.
Microsoft to buy Red Hat? Say it ain't so Don't even bother reading this, it is as stupid as the headlines sounds.
Huh? Mactel, for real? "Niagara rocks. You want low power use for a laptop?"
I could go on, but it is too tiresome. Just ignore everything he says and you'll be better off.
I'm not quote sure why you think "Python is itself a fully interpreted language, so it doesn't count" either. Just because it is fully interperate in it's current, C based implementation doesn't mean that won't change in the future. For instance, if the Parrot VM ever becomes useful then Python will be running under a JIT compiler, just the same as Java. Infact, it would be possible right now to modify Jython to emit Java bytecode, which then could be compiled by the JIT.
(Slightly premature announcement coming up.. but hey - it's Open Source so that's okay, right?)
I've just started a (Java) project to interface to a number of search engines. It might be a good place to start if you feel like doing some coding. See https://argos.dev.java.net/ - there is no release yet but the code is in CVS.
It currently supports Blogdigger, Feedster, Del.icio.us, Google, MSN and Yahoo (and Google Desktop search). I'd like to include Ask.com, too, but they don't provide a programatic interface and I refuse to screen-scrape.
In my opinion none of the other search engines are close to Google in quality of results. I've found (to my surprise) that Ask.com gives me the second best results (they bought the old Teoma search engine, which was always okay. It had an index almost the size of Google's, which neither MSN or Yahoo can match yet.)
There is a bug (in the windows version, although the release notes only note it in the Linux version) that might confuse you if you come across it.
If you have a customised user agent and the java plugin installed, make sure it contains the string "Mozilla/4.0", otherwise you won't be able to start up Mozilla.
Apparently the user agent is passed to the plug-in, and it doesn't know how to handle unknown user-agents (actually it tries to handle them as Netscape 3 and then crashes). Something (in your prefs.js) like:
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98;)");
should do the trick.
As has been pointed out by others Postgres, MySQL and Berkley DB aren't players in the same area as DB2 and Oracle.
However, there are a couple of other surprising omissions. Sybase ASE 12 is a pretty nice database, and is very competitive feature and platform wise with Oracle and DB2, and probably has a bigger market share than Informix. MS SQL Server 7/2000 is also a very nice database to work with. It's use is growing quickly for good reason - it's fast (on comparable hardware), cheap and the SQL Server development tools kick Oracle's Ass. Ever used MS Query analyzer? It is beautiful.. and comes free with SQL Server licences. You can get third part equivalents for Oracle (eg, from Quest), and they are also nice, but they cost around $10,000 for a site licence.
No, it doesn't run on non-Windows platforms, and yes Oracle on high end Sun hardware will run quicker. However, there are probably less than 5000 companies in the world that need that much power - and MS is going after that, too with MS Windows Data Center.
I'm not a MS weenie - I like an Oracle DB as much as anyone. However, it isn't as far ahead of SQL Server as some of you seem to think - and some of the bugs in it are just as bad as anything you'll see in SQL Server.
Since 1998, the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia have been the world's tallest building (not including tower structures like broardcast towers) - 1,483 feet vs 1,450.
Amazon.com does. So does eTrade and Priceline
Of course, some of these sites might be using more servlets than JSP's, but since JSPs are compiled to servlets there is no performance difference, anyway.
Read Sun's dot-com-builder website on how priceline was built sometime. It's pretty interesting (although full of marketing rubbish).
They needed that 119% growth to break even. Like most other .com's, they are running out of the money they raised in their IPO, but they still need to pay the bills.
Because their profit margins are razor thin, the only way to get enough money to stop the cash-burn is to sell lots of stuff.
That's how they do their estimates of growth: How much growth do we need to break even? 115%? Okay, well if we grow 119%, then we will even make a profit - lets say we are going to do that. Obviously, it has as much resemblance to reality as their initial stock price.
Actually, satellite links are just about the most affordable form of broardband available outside Sydney, Melbourne & Brisbane. Telstra cable is way too much, and Optus hasn't cabled anywhere else, but you can get sattelite access for around $40-$50 a month.
Of course, sattelite internet is actually a pretty crap form of 'net access - it is high lag, ties up a phone line, and is only fast one way.
Actually, I think Pale Ale is generally considered to be better. I enjoy them both, and Cooper's Dark Ale, too.
Personally I find games interesting only for short periods of time - then I get bored. Programming, on the other hand is always interesting. I think this is great - think of all the people who got their first programming experience on a C64 with Basic. Now they can hack away on a PS2.. that is very cool.
I'm from Australia, so I can't vote in the election. It is of interest to me, though, because the US goverment is probably as important to Australia as our own (Sad but true).
I tend towards the left side of the centre politically, so there was no way I was really going to be a fan of Harry Browne's political views. After doing some reading in preperation for the K5 interview I was truely shocked at how naive the mans views are, though. I realise that he can afford not to have his idealistic Libertaian views tempered by reality because he isn't goint to win, but I did think he would/should care more about the specific issues rather than the politics.
Take his stance on environmentalism. I'm sure it is nice from the Libertaian political point of view, but from the environmental point of view it sucks, badly. Rather that go into it, read my about it - I got fairly worked up.
He clearly ;has no idea about intellecual property. Suggesting protecting it by saying use encryption make for a good sound-bite, but doesn't address specific issues like patent reform.
I could go on but I won't. All I'll do is say he sounds just like a hundred other politicions. He just echos the same statements over & over. Read his website - you won't find anything new in the K5 interview, because he doesn't want to say anything. Nothing jumps out and makes me think "Now there is a leader".
I do Java and C++ professionally, and believe me - the STL is the best thing to happen to C++, ever. It makes C++ accessable and almost as easy to program in as Java, and it's performance is wonderful. Not only that, it makes writing reusable code simple, and lets you worry about the logic of your program rather than supporting classes like collections.
If you really thing the STL is an abomination, the either you are using a very early version or your programs are very different to what I write.
That organic compounds are really just plastics, and have nothing to do with life, DNA or aliens.....
But I'm sure everyone on Slashdot already knew that, though.
Okay, Jeff V. Merkey's company, the Timpanogas Research Group is a Microsoft ISV. Now this doesn't mean anything in itself, but some MS ISVs do have access to the NT code.
Here is a (google cached) post about some problems Merkey had with his open source NDS implementation - Novell wanted him to sign a NDA.
Read this:
and this:
Now if this David Gobel person really did write "NTFS for MS", and now he has some kind of relationship with Merkey, Merkey's company or Linux, there could be a problem.
Also, read http://www.zd net .com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2426902,00.html for some more background (okay, it's ZdNet, so don't take it too seriously!)
Of course, I still don't know the details - just enough to annoy some people if I've got it all wrong!
I'm not really sure of the details (I don't follow the kernel list), but I'm sure someone can expand on this.
Jeff V. Merkey used to work at Novell on Netware. He then left and went and developed something (a cleanroom NDS?) for a startup that had a fairly close relationship with MS. (I think the idea was MS was going to use this to combat Netware - like I said, I'm hazy on the details.)
Anyway, as part of that, (I think) he got access to the NT code, which means potentially MS might have a case, if he signed NDAs
Summary: Jeff V. Merkey had some prior realtionship with MS, which might give them a case. The rest is just hazy memories - I'll dig and try and remember exactly what was going on.
For all those asking (because the site is /.ed) Kylix is Inprise/Borland's version of Delphi (and later C++ Builder) for Linux.
It includeds a (Qt based) visual form designer, an OO-language (Object Pascal), great database tools and a cross platform OO class library called CLX (which supplements the Windows only VCL).
It will support application developement for KDE, GNOME (or at least GNOME aware, but non-GTK apps) and Apache modules.
More info at http://www.borland.com/kylix/
I believe that Kylix is going to be a breakthough app for the Linux desktop. Many large companies have many apps written in Delphi (and VB). Rewritting these apps in C/C++ isn't an option, and Scripting languages like Python/Perl don't have the tool support for writing these GUI database applications. Kylix is going after that market, and knowing Borland's reputation for writing good programming tools, I'm looking forward to it.
I've been playing with XHTML recently. I found a program (the W3C's HTML Tidy program) that will take normal HTML and convert it automatically to XHTML.
Once you have a webpage in XHTML, you can use all the XML tools on it. For instance, I converted Google search results to XHTML, then used an XSLT stylesheet to convert the result summaries to a RSS file suitable for syndication.
I didn't have to write perl, or compile anything for this to work - it was all done using stylesheets and Tidy.
What's the point of this? I don't know yet - but I am thinking of lots of useful stuff it could be used for. Imagine a site like Slashdot automatically inserting a box of relevent google search results next to every story - no more excuses for not doing research on a story.
There's huge possibilities out there.
Pages I'm looking for are often not designed to exploit search engines anyway. If I'm looking for some technical documentation, it is often just stuck together by someone in a rush, or on a mailing list archive. These pages often don't have optimised META tags, etc, so some engines don't index them well.
Many people are suggesting that making the rules open is good because then everyone will exploit them equally. Perhaps, but that will just make it more difficult to find pages that don't try and get a highly rated search result.
On the other hand, I find Google works pretty well, and how it works is pretty well known.
Yeah, like all those exploits we keep hearing about with mail filters. You know - those things that scan the mail before you read it. Wait... there aren't any exploits for mail filters. Oh well.. it was a good idea.
It makes the arguement against it just a little more difficult. You can hear it now "We can't guarentee 100% security, but this box will log 99% of attempted intrusions"
I find it really, really scary when someone of Bruce Schneier's reputaion has seeming given up on the idea of secure software.
If that is the case, what possible arguements can we muster against things like internet regulation. If we can't have better living through software, then there is a bunch of special interest groups and three leter agencies who would be happy to say "just install this box on every network, and we'll be able to trace all hackers"
Somewhat to my surprise, I found a lot of non-linux people quite concerned about this.
I use GNOME at home, and I program at work in Borland Delphi. Borland is porting Delphi to Linux (Kylix), and it is to use the Qt toolkit, and have some degree of (optional) KDE intergration.
This was all fine until the GNOME-Foundation announcement came up, and then a thread began in borland.delphi.non-technical (I think) about how Borland might be going the wrong way with Kylix. A lot of windows Delphi programmers who were/are planning to port to Linux were very concerned that their apps would (a)"be left behind" or (b)not run at all
It took a lot of explaining to make them understand how you can use KDE apps in GNOME and vice versa.
Well, I guess that is a fair point.
Although they are only the beta version. ftp://ftp2.interbase.c om/pub/products/beta6.0/ib_b60_doc.zip
About 10 meg, PDF format.
Mirrored at Interbase2000.org