Because we don't have the source to IIS, we couldn't check for ourselves, so when people who we trust more then MS (for good reason - they are somewhat unbiased) made an allergation we believed them.
That's the reason Open Source is better - the security expects (or us) could have checked the source, seen no real hole, retested the scenerio, and seen what was really going on.
Not sure about the Army thing - I don't think it makes much sense, unless they were working at a high level of exertion (or high altitude, maybe), for a long time.
It's true abou the athletes, though - and it's very hard to detect, becuase it really is their owne blood. That's one of the reasons (the otehr is EPO abuse) why pro-cyclists get banned for a month of two if their red blood cell count is above a certian level (For "health reasons", but it is really to stop the blood doping)
(Sorry about replying to myself.. I couldn't find a better place to put it)
Since the article is talking about combat situations, I think I misinterpreted some of the issues here. What I said above is still correct, but not neccessarily relevent.
These patches aren't designed for complete nutritional replacement, but for temporary help during crisies.
Modern Combat situations normally last for maybe 48 hour max - anything more than that and I'd say you have more important thing to worry about than food.
However, in a combat situation you need your reflexes to be quick, your senses to be accurate and your judgement to be at it's best. All these things are effected by bad nutrition (and lack of sleep).
Someone in another post mentioned that they expected that adrenelin would keep you alert - not true, and not what you want, anyway. The actual hormonal/chemical adrenelin reaction only lasts for seconds (during the "fight or flight" reflex action), and while this does improve you reflexes and senses (to some degree) it impares your judgement, and leads to a let down afterwards - when you are highly vulnrable.
Unfortunatly, while it is true that not letting your energy levels (depleated though exercise) get too low will help with these problems, the more severe problem is the lack of sleep. I've read studies that show huge losses in reflex speed after around about 16 hours without sleep, and while this may be delayed in various ways, I don't think you could push it out far beyond the 24 hour barrier without chemical help.....
I suspect that these "combat patches" may contain a little more that just vitamns. I find that a little scary. Remember those tests with Speed & LSD during Vietnam?
(I'm not a nutritionist, but I have done the odd long distance sports event, and I know a little about this.)
Already, people involved in extreme athletic events (things like RAAM - the non-stop bicycle race across America) use a totally liquid diet for up to two weeks at a time. One of the main reasons for this is because solid foods are much harder to digest, and for events like these you really, really want to know exactly what is going into your body.
They do use vitamn suplements, though.
In things like the Tour de France they use daily blood testing to see what food you should eat, and it isn't too far fetched to be able to make an educated guess on your nutrition needs from your sweat secretions, using current technology.
Before everyone says "But you'll feel hungry because your stomach will be emtpy" - not true! You'll feel hungry for a while, but liquids and foods with a lot of bulk but low calories (eg, plain salads) will compensate for that, and your stomach will contract.
After a couple of weeks your stomach will feel fine, and a liquid diet, plus these nutrition patches would work really well. You'd still need the liquid for hydration, though.
I'd say 2025 might be pessimistic - at least for the first versions of something like this.
If this is for real, Solaris has some pretty amazing performace.
I'm a little surprised that BSD did so badly though, esp. since people are always boasting on/. about the TCP/IP performance of BSD. Why does the multi-processor effect BSD so badly on NetBench?
Thi s paper compared x86 Solaris, BSD and Linux back in '95.
Summary:
Our results show that:
Linux has the best performance on file metadata operations because it updates metadata asynchronously;
FreeBSD has the best network performance;
Solaris' performance generally lies between that of the other two systems
Please bear in mind it is pretty old, though.
(please don't turn this into a BSD vs Linux flamewar)
Of course, if they had run a benchmark with NT on x86 vs linux (or solaris) on SPARC it would have looked different... as I recall they were benchmarking performance as a web server, and SPARC architecture is a big advantage there.
That's what I'm talking about. Since the (web serving) performace of Linux on x86 was contrained by the TCP/IP stack, I'm wondering if the different hardware of a Sparc would have made much difference - all that extra Bus I/O (if that is what the "architecture advantage is"?) might not have made much difference if the TCP/IP stack got saturated early, like it did on x86.
If it's true, I wonder how NetBSD would do - isn't it's TCP/IP implementation supposed to be superior to that of Linux?
It's FreeBSD that had a performace advantage over Linux on x86. I doubt NetBSD ever did, despite (I assume) sharing the same stack, because of the lack of emphasis on performance in that version of BSD. (A BSD expert might correct me here - is the Network performace of NetBSD & FreeBSD identical?)
How the TCP/IP performance on the Sparc ports compared to the Intel ports of Linux (I'm thinking about the Mindcraft benchmarks here... would the different hardware have made any difference?)
I remember back in '95 or so, when the SPARC port was just "finished" David Millar posted some benchmarks showing it had better TCP/IP than Solaris on the same hardware. Does anyone have that URL (or an updated version?)
You can check on the other authors page here. He (the other author) says he emailed him (this guy here) to check that this is really him (the co-author)
That last sentance wasn't real great grammer, was it?
Because the original version is still under the GPL.
All the original licencees agreed to those provisions, and all they need to do is abide by them.
It's true that any changes you make won't be GPLed, and it is also true that you can change the licence on the GPLed code you wrote, and people must abide by that licence if they download it, but they can always download the original version from somewhere else, which will continue to be GPLed.
Like you said:
Remember, the GPL only limits LICENSEEs, it does not, and can not, limit the OWNER of the software. The only way to do that would be if the owner of the code specifically signed documents placing his work into the public domain. Then, licensing is uneccesary, as anyone can OWN their own copy of the source, as NOONE owns the entire copyright when something is in the public domain.
Where in the GPL is there any provision to allow the user of that code to change licence if you want them to? There isn't (unless you add it in, of course), so you can't force them to change licences without downloading another copy of your program.
I'm pretty impressed! It seems a pretty nice bit of work - joins seem to work okay (I didn't try any out joins, and there is no ANSI 92 syntax, though)
I think the benchmark is crap, though - simply testing how fast you can create a table and an index, and then do an insert might be fair enough, but testing select speed by doing a select * from that table is a bit of a joke. I'd love to see how it performed with a 4-way join and lots of data.
That shouldn't be seen as a flame, though. I'm really, really impressed with this as a whole.
I've done a fair bit of stuff on SQL Server, and while it is limited in that it can only run on NT, it is so much better than Sybase (for instance) that it isn't funny.
For instance, I'm using Sybase Adaptive Server 11.92, and guess what? No row locks, non-ANSI join syntax, and you can't seem to have outer joins where you filter the joined table by another (non-join) field.
SQL Server has wonderful development tools, too - like Query Analyzer. After spending the first year and a half of my working life trying to work out Oracle query plans, MS Query Analyzer was such an amazing revalation.
You are right that there a lot of (surprisingly) big enterprises relying on SQL Server. I think version 7 was a big step forward in this area.
SQL Server still can't match Oracle on joins of more than four table with lots of data, though - of course, not much can really.
Interbase has been available on many non-windows platforms for a long time (15 years+) now. On Win32, they use MS VC++ to compile it.
The short answer for why MSVC was used for InterBase is that we wanted to keep options open to compile the same source on NT for Intel, NT for Alpha (if market demand warranted) and NT for PowerPC (when that operating system existed). Borland compilers only support Intel. Adding compiler-specific #ifdef differences for different flavors of a single operating system seemed inelegant and needlessly complex.
Bill Karwin
The code was never a mess like people have been saying, but it (apparently) has a fair amount of conditional defines for various platforms. That's the stuff they are fixing now, adn why it is taking so long.
This is an email Ann Harrison (president of Interbase) posted on a list back in January:
>Subject: Delivering sources > > >As the opening of the source gets closer, I find myself >wondering more and more about the details. > >Specifically, where to make the tradeoff >between clean code and code now? > >At the moment, there's a single source for InterBase >with magic in the source control tool to deal with >differences between the various environments. The >most significant of those is the use of $ in names. > >Should NewCo make a pass through the code once to >so that the engine is actually, rather than almost, >one code base? Should they go a step further and >use GCC for all platforms? > >At one point, some of the compilers used to build >InterBase did not accept ANSI prototypes. As a >result, every routine has conditionalized prototypes. >They're really ugly and completely useless. Should >NewCo remove them before releasing the code? > >At various times, InterBase has been ported to >platforms that are no longer strategic - like >HP MPE/XL. Should NewCo remove the conditional >code for those platforms? Just the really ugly >ones? > >High level internals documentation is almost >non-existent. Complete documentation would >be (much) larger than the code, so that's not >likely to appear. Should NewCo take the time >to write module by module documentation? A >~30 page overview? > >As you think about these questions, please remember >that you (the knowledgeable InterBase developer) are >not the only user of the source. It's important >that the code that's released be buildable by humans >on all the platforms it runs on. > >Appreciate your thoughts, > >Ann
Sorry the formatting is so screwed up! I hope it clears up some misconceptions, though.
BTW, it's good to see you're not so cynical about Inprise any more, Bruce. I was their sole defender on Technocrat when you posted that story on them a couple of months back.
What is the difference between cold standby & a database server with replication facilities?
I'm thinking of Interbase & Replication, or even Interbase and the database mirroring it has built in. Is there anything else needed for it to be classed as cold-standby at least?
I'd think it would be pretty close to warm standby if you used it with some kind of heartbeat monitor, wouldn't it?
I agree there is a fair way to go before Interbase supports hot standby, though.
Frontbase looks pretty nice - I'd never heard of it, though. Although... it does look a lot like some product the OpenLink ODBC people had. Is it related in any way?
I'm not too sure about the benefits of full ANSI 92 compliance.
For sure, standards are a good thing, but if no one supports them, what's the use?
For instance, take Sybase & Oracle & SQL Server. For simple select, insert & update queries the SQL is farily portable. Once they get a bit complicated you'll probably need to do some fixing to get it to work.
But that isn't the major problem with porting between databases. The real "problem" is the way different DBs have different strengths.
For instance, on Oracle you use cursors all the time, and they work really well. They are fast, efficent and a great way to do some thing.
Try porting them directly to SQL Server or Sybase, and your server will die really quickly - they just don't support the same number of similtanious cursors that Oracle does. Even if they were all ANSI SQL 92 compliant, it won't fix problems like that, which are much more difficult to fix than a few syntax differences.
There is a third-party, non-open source replication tool available fro Interbase 5 and 6 that will handle that data replication stuff you need for failover. The actual server switching I think you might have to write yourself... I suspect you might find there are a lot of people willing to help you.
Supports databases up to 32 TB (!!!) spread over 2GB files and is fast and reliable. (It's been around for 15 years.) The biggest known Interbase DB is over 200GB.
It's is ANSI 92 SQL compliant (well.. as compliant as any DB I've ever seen - better than Oracle for instance), and the support is Amazing
Join the email lists at www.mers.com, and you'll be able to get answers from Ann Harrison (the president of Interbase.com), or from a lot of other people - it's the best support I've even seen.
As for enterpise features - well, apart from large DB support, it has row level locking, transactions, referential integrity, blobs, Multi-Generational commits, stored procedures... ummm... I can't think of what else to say.
Basically, if your Databases are less than 50GB then Interbase is the number 1 choice - above that maybe Oracle would be better, but that isn't exacly open source.
What is the point of this verdict? Is there any way he will ever be able to collect?
Did the Iranians even contest the trial? Perhaps there is someone reading this who knows if a county's assets can be confiscated as payment for a judegement in a civil trial? I doubt it, and I'd say that's about the only way he's ever going to get any money from them.
I posted this on kuro5hin yesterday, on a similar story (about the Playstation2 bypass thing):
I bought a DVD Player (a non-PC one) a couple of weeks back - yeah, I know I'm no longer politically correct.
Anyway, I live in Australia, which is in the Region 4 encoding area, so we can't play US release DVDs, unless you get a Multi-Region player.
In a lot of the shops, they have on the list of features "Multi-Region" as one of the selling points (usually on the non-major brands).
I ended up buying a Toshiba, which isn't Multi-region from a major department store. I asked the assistant "Is this multi-region?", and she didn't even blink. She told me "No, but it only costs $50 to chip it, and most of the Sony Players cost $150+ to chip". She even told me a place where I could get it done.
The multi-region thing is pretty much ignored as far as I can tell. The discs are still encoded, but stores here sell both US and Region 1 discs, and the main selling point seems to be availability (US disks come out sooner) vs extra features (Region 4 disks sometime have more extra-scenes and sometime the sound is better).
Anyway, I didn't realize that some had hidden menus & stuff - that's pretty cool.
Has anyone got one of the Multi-Region Shinco players that play MP3 CDs? How well does the MP3 playback work?
Slashdot Mirror
Because we don't have the source to IIS, we couldn't check for ourselves, so when people who we trust more then MS (for good reason - they are somewhat unbiased) made an allergation we believed them.
That's the reason Open Source is better - the security expects (or us) could have checked the source, seen no real hole, retested the scenerio, and seen what was really going on.
Not sure about the Army thing - I don't think it makes much sense, unless they were working at a high level of exertion (or high altitude, maybe), for a long time.
It's true abou the athletes, though - and it's very hard to detect, becuase it really is their owne blood. That's one of the reasons (the otehr is EPO abuse) why pro-cyclists get banned for a month of two if their red blood cell count is above a certian level (For "health reasons", but it is really to stop the blood doping)
For instance, Deja uses a large cluster of Linux machines to index their News feed.
Their software is custom written, though (Including the databases)
It's the same situation at most search engines - Google uses multiple machines for indexing and searching.
It's going to be a problem finding a commericial database that will allow you to distribute it over multiple Linux machines, though.
(Sorry about replying to myself.. I couldn't find a better place to put it)
Since the article is talking about combat situations, I think I misinterpreted some of the issues here. What I said above is still correct, but not neccessarily relevent.
These patches aren't designed for complete nutritional replacement, but for temporary help during crisies.
Modern Combat situations normally last for maybe 48 hour max - anything more than that and I'd say you have more important thing to worry about than food.
However, in a combat situation you need your reflexes to be quick, your senses to be accurate and your judgement to be at it's best. All these things are effected by bad nutrition (and lack of sleep).
Someone in another post mentioned that they expected that adrenelin would keep you alert - not true, and not what you want, anyway. The actual hormonal/chemical adrenelin reaction only lasts for seconds (during the "fight or flight" reflex action), and while this does improve you reflexes and senses (to some degree) it impares your judgement, and leads to a let down afterwards - when you are highly vulnrable.
Unfortunatly, while it is true that not letting your energy levels (depleated though exercise) get too low will help with these problems, the more severe problem is the lack of sleep. I've read studies that show huge losses in reflex speed after around about 16 hours without sleep, and while this may be delayed in various ways, I don't think you could push it out far beyond the 24 hour barrier without chemical help.....
I suspect that these "combat patches" may contain a little more that just vitamns. I find that a little scary. Remember those tests with Speed & LSD during Vietnam?
(I'm not a nutritionist, but I have done the odd long distance sports event, and I know a little about this.)
Already, people involved in extreme athletic events (things like RAAM - the non-stop bicycle race across America) use a totally liquid diet for up to two weeks at a time. One of the main reasons for this is because solid foods are much harder to digest, and for events like these you really, really want to know exactly what is going into your body.
They do use vitamn suplements, though.
In things like the Tour de France they use daily blood testing to see what food you should eat, and it isn't too far fetched to be able to make an educated guess on your nutrition needs from your sweat secretions, using current technology.
Before everyone says "But you'll feel hungry because your stomach will be emtpy" - not true! You'll feel hungry for a while, but liquids and foods with a lot of bulk but low calories (eg, plain salads) will compensate for that, and your stomach will contract.
After a couple of weeks your stomach will feel fine, and a liquid diet, plus these nutrition patches would work really well. You'd still need the liquid for hydration, though.
I'd say 2025 might be pessimistic - at least for the first versions of something like this.
I bet some people fall for that. You know that dtory will probably take off now and be circulating for days.
You should see if you can get in on any news websites headlines.
Maybe Zdnet would be a tempting target?
More importantly, did you see that Helix shipped their mailer program exactly on schedule? (Down the bottom of the same press release)
This is a classic!
P;-0
If this is for real, Solaris has some pretty amazing performace.
I'm a little surprised that BSD did so badly though, esp. since people are always boasting on /. about the TCP/IP performance of BSD. Why does the multi-processor effect BSD so badly on NetBench?
Thi s paper compared x86 Solaris, BSD and Linux back in '95.
Summary:
Our results show that:
Linux has the best performance on file metadata operations because it updates metadata asynchronously;
FreeBSD has the best network performance;
Solaris' performance generally lies between that of the other two systems
Please bear in mind it is pretty old, though.
(please don't turn this into a BSD vs Linux flamewar)
That's what I'm talking about. Since the (web serving) performace of Linux on x86 was contrained by the TCP/IP stack, I'm wondering if the different hardware of a Sparc would have made much difference - all that extra Bus I/O (if that is what the "architecture advantage is"?) might not have made much difference if the TCP/IP stack got saturated early, like it did on x86.
It's FreeBSD that had a performace advantage over Linux on x86. I doubt NetBSD ever did, despite (I assume) sharing the same stack, because of the lack of emphasis on performance in that version of BSD. (A BSD expert might correct me here - is the Network performace of NetBSD & FreeBSD identical?)
How the TCP/IP performance on the Sparc ports compared to the Intel ports of Linux (I'm thinking about the Mindcraft benchmarks here... would the different hardware have made any difference?)
I remember back in '95 or so, when the SPARC port was just "finished" David Millar posted some benchmarks showing it had better TCP/IP than Solaris on the same hardware. Does anyone have that URL (or an updated version?)
This is from one of the authors of CPHack.
You can check on the other authors page here. He (the other author) says he emailed him (this guy here) to check that this is really him (the co-author)
That last sentance wasn't real great grammer, was it?
Because the original version is still under the GPL.
All the original licencees agreed to those provisions, and all they need to do is abide by them.
It's true that any changes you make won't be GPLed, and it is also true that you can change the licence on the GPLed code you wrote, and people must abide by that licence if they download it, but they can always download the original version from somewhere else, which will continue to be GPLed.
Like you said:
Where in the GPL is there any provision to allow the user of that code to change licence if you want them to? There isn't (unless you add it in, of course), so you can't force them to change licences without downloading another copy of your program.
I'm pretty impressed! It seems a pretty nice bit of work - joins seem to work okay (I didn't try any out joins, and there is no ANSI 92 syntax, though)
I think the benchmark is crap, though - simply testing how fast you can create a table and an index, and then do an insert might be fair enough, but testing select speed by doing a select * from that table is a bit of a joke. I'd love to see how it performed with a 4-way join and lots of data.
That shouldn't be seen as a flame, though. I'm really, really impressed with this as a whole.
I've done a fair bit of stuff on SQL Server, and while it is limited in that it can only run on NT, it is so much better than Sybase (for instance) that it isn't funny.
For instance, I'm using Sybase Adaptive Server 11.92, and guess what? No row locks, non-ANSI join syntax, and you can't seem to have outer joins where you filter the joined table by another (non-join) field.
SQL Server has wonderful development tools, too - like Query Analyzer. After spending the first year and a half of my working life trying to work out Oracle query plans, MS Query Analyzer was such an amazing revalation.
You are right that there a lot of (surprisingly) big enterprises relying on SQL Server. I think version 7 was a big step forward in this area.
SQL Server still can't match Oracle on joins of more than four table with lots of data, though - of course, not much can really.
Interbase has been available on many non-windows platforms for a long time (15 years+) now. On Win32, they use MS VC++ to compile it.
The code was never a mess like people have been saying, but it (apparently) has a fair amount of conditional defines for various platforms. That's the stuff they are fixing now, adn why it is taking so long.
This is an email Ann Harrison (president of Interbase) posted on a list back in January:
Sorry the formatting is so screwed up! I hope it clears up some misconceptions, though.
BTW, it's good to see you're not so cynical about Inprise any more, Bruce. I was their sole defender on Technocrat when you posted that story on them a couple of months back.
What is the difference between cold standby & a database server with replication facilities?
I'm thinking of Interbase & Replication, or even Interbase and the database mirroring it has built in. Is there anything else needed for it to be classed as cold-standby at least?
I'd think it would be pretty close to warm standby if you used it with some kind of heartbeat monitor, wouldn't it?
I agree there is a fair way to go before Interbase supports hot standby, though.
Frontbase looks pretty nice - I'd never heard of it, though. Although... it does look a lot like some product the OpenLink ODBC people had. Is it related in any way?
I'm not too sure about the benefits of full ANSI 92 compliance.
For sure, standards are a good thing, but if no one supports them, what's the use?
For instance, take Sybase & Oracle & SQL Server. For simple select, insert & update queries the SQL is farily portable. Once they get a bit complicated you'll probably need to do some fixing to get it to work.
But that isn't the major problem with porting between databases. The real "problem" is the way different DBs have different strengths.
For instance, on Oracle you use cursors all the time, and they work really well. They are fast, efficent and a great way to do some thing.
Try porting them directly to SQL Server or Sybase, and your server will die really quickly - they just don't support the same number of similtanious cursors that Oracle does. Even if they were all ANSI SQL 92 compliant, it won't fix problems like that, which are much more difficult to fix than a few syntax differences.
Yeah... I know what you mean.
They do seem to be very dedicated, though.. they listened to the community on the licence and everything.
I doubt there will be any problems, but it will be nice when the source is out.
Interbase is a RDBMS, and it is free (beer) now and will be Open Source (MPL) soon (June).
Sorry.. I forgot to talk about failover.
There is a third-party, non-open source replication tool available fro Interbase 5 and 6 that will handle that data replication stuff you need for failover. The actual server switching I think you might have to write yourself... I suspect you might find there are a lot of people willing to help you.
Interbase v6 is in (free beer) beta right now, and will be released under the MPL (Mozilla Public Licence) by Mid-June
You can download the beta now for Linux, Windows or Solaris from Interbase.com or The Interbase Developers Inititive
Supports databases up to 32 TB (!!!) spread over 2GB files and is fast and reliable. (It's been around for 15 years.) The biggest known Interbase DB is over 200GB.
It's is ANSI 92 SQL compliant (well.. as compliant as any DB I've ever seen - better than Oracle for instance), and the support is Amazing
Join the email lists at www.mers.com, and you'll be able to get answers from Ann Harrison (the president of Interbase.com), or from a lot of other people - it's the best support I've even seen.
As for enterpise features - well, apart from large DB support, it has row level locking, transactions, referential integrity, blobs, Multi-Generational commits, stored procedures... ummm... I can't think of what else to say.
Basically, if your Databases are less than 50GB then Interbase is the number 1 choice - above that maybe Oracle would be better, but that isn't exacly open source.
What is the point of this verdict? Is there any way he will ever be able to collect?
Did the Iranians even contest the trial? Perhaps there is someone reading this who knows if a county's assets can be confiscated as payment for a judegement in a civil trial? I doubt it, and I'd say that's about the only way he's ever going to get any money from them.
You can get the Shinco Multi-Region player from Grenfell Hi-Fi in Adelaide for $599. It plays MP3s, too, I believe. I think they'll ship.
Or you can get the Toshiba which you can re-chip to play Multi-Region, and comes with free DVDs for $699 from Myer.
I posted this on kuro5hin yesterday, on a similar story (about the Playstation2 bypass thing):
Anyway, I didn't realize that some had hidden menus & stuff - that's pretty cool.
Has anyone got one of the Multi-Region Shinco players that play MP3 CDs? How well does the MP3 playback work?
Back to basics, hey? You mean the way it used to be embarassing to have a ".com" in your email address?