It seems that the overwhelming tone of the slashdot story as well as most of the comments consider the idea of engineers doing management do be a bad thing. This I fail to understand. I'm only 26 and have only been in the professional workforce (i.e. not a job as a service tech or some crap) for about 5 years. One thing I have learned (and it's a lesson I take from my dad as well) is that it is in one's best interest to do some "management" work.
Likewise, managers need to get their hands dirty on a regular basis. If non-management employee's aren't helping the manager do his job and/or if the manager does not know the field his employees are working in then there is a horrible process inefficiency. A basic college (or hell even high-school where I went) economics course will tell you that in a perfect market it is quite likely that if you're inefficient then another company will come along and eat your lunch.
You see it happen all the time with companies too. Look at Microsoft for instance. At some point they managed (hah) to make a company full of middle-managers. Microsoft as of late does not seem to be able to write good software. They are not working as a team.
Contrast with Apple's software division. It is obvious to this outside observer that the programmers and managers are working together. I could speculate that a lot of this had to do with Avi Tevanian (VP of Software at Apple). Avi is a programmer who worked is way in to an executive position. Unfortunately, Avi has left. However, don't take this too seriously because I read some other rumors/speculation that perhaps it was time for him to go.
It's hard to judge as an outsider on anything and I realize that this is simply two anecdotal examples about software companies (not engineering firms) but I believe it's an accurate enough portrayal for my purposes. The point is that when companies start getting top-heavy and managers aren't getting their hands dirty and workers aren't having active dialog with management then the ability of the company to produce it's products goes south.
try cayenne, especially if you have a little WebObjects background.
Just reading the documentation for Cayenne makes it look damn promising. I see they even carried over EOEditingContext as DataContext. Most of the other ORM frameworks seem to lack this. That includes Rails. I've read some of the Rails tutorials and thought.. gee, that's nice but it looks a little cobbled together compared with EO.
( and even more so if you think hibernate is it and a bit )
No, I do not think Hibernate is it. A commercial app we use for time sheet entry happens to use it and it did help to have the.xml files that modeled the database when I went to make an EOModel to read from it. I had a look at some of the Hibernate documentation and quickly realized it didn't compare with EO. Apparently someone else who worked on the app had similar thoughts because it appears that not all of the app is written using hibernate. The parts that import/export lots of data seem to use raw SQL queries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hibernate to me appeared to be more of a way to serialize data to a database than a true object-relational mapper.
For what it's worth I've only been using EO for about 1.5 years. Early in 2005 I had to write a task order management app from scratch in under a month to meet the requirements of a contract we had just won. D2W was a lifesaver. I swear I've tried to explain D2W to people and they don't get it. them: "Oh, you mean it generates pages for you.. Well _____ does that." Me: "No, you don't get it. It doesn't really generate them; it makes them up on the fly." Them: "Well how is that different?" Me: "Because without doing anything you can view most of the data in your DB." Them: "I don't get it." Me: Download it! Use it! Follow a D2W tutorial or two.
Just got a new coworker and I've been having her shadow me to get a feel for how to work with it. We are working on converting an old FoxPro-based program to WO for a client. A lot of it was figuring out how things are related (let's just say FoxPro isn't as stringent as EO is). However, as we started getting entities in there and getting the app going I watched her eyes just light up when she saw how we went from EOModeler to functioning website in 10 seconds flat.
Of course, not everything is easy in D2W land. In paritcular you really need to pay attention to maintaining the object graph. And it's also highly important (under penalty of totally farking your database) that you don't map any two class properties to the same underlying piece of data.
Anyway.. enough EO evangelizing. I'll have to have a look at Cayenne when I get a chance. As for the topic, let me just say that whatever Hibernate does, EO has been doing that plus more for 10-15 years. Patent-worthy novel idea my ass.
Enterprise Objects certainly implements everything described by that patent and a bit more because it provides a data access controller layer (not just a data model layer). Not to mention I've had some limited experience viewing someone else's hibernate-based code. EO/WO is so much better than Hibernate can ever hope to be.
Your argument boils down to the big bad meanie corporations have structured the law in their favor so we need to pass more legislation to combat this. It's an eye for an eye mentality. Everyone winds up blind.
Can I ask, what specifically is it about current federal law that is structured in favor of local ISPs? I think maintaining the status quo of localities granting rights of way to cable TV and telco companies and then setting the rules as to what they are allowed to do makes the most sense.
I remember from an earlier version of this bill that my fear was not the "loss" of net neutrality but the true loss of local control over local rights of way. That right there is what kills net neutrality. Even if the net neutrality amendment had passed we would still be worse off than before.
Essentially the argument I'm seeing here is that since the federal government is going to take over responsibility for granting rights of way to telcos then they'll also need to enforce a net neutrality provision. Just what we need, more federal bureaucracy. Here's an idea: wouldn't it have been better to fight the real issue in the first place which was the removal of the rights of the localities? It seems that this issue has been entirely lost in the shuffle.
I'm not surprised either. So-called net neutrality provisions were a smokescreen from the telcos from the beginning. As all the RBOCs have bought each other up and the cable companies have merged they want to deal less and less with localities. Paying off a few congressmen is so much easier than several locals.
So, congratulations Slashdot. You've just been hoodwinked into fighting an issue you were destined to lose while letting the underlying problem go unchecked. I hope you're happy.
as a bonus, add right-click (or whatever the hell you Mac people do).
We Mac people have a menu-bar at the very top of the screen outside of all other windows. It is contextually sensitive. That is, when you are in Safari (web browser) you have File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Window, Help. But in Mail you have File, Edit, View, Mailbox, Message, Format, Window.
Furthermore, if the focus is in a text entry box (as indicated by the blue focus ring) the choices in the edit menu like cut/copy/paste all light up. Or if you're in Mail and have a message header (in the list) selected the choices in the Message menu light up and the choices in the Edit menu do things like cut/copy/paste the entire message itself.
It pretty much removes the need to use contextual menus at all at the expense of having to move to the top of the screen. Of course, OS X (the only version of Mac I've ever used) does have contextual menus so you can avoid having to bang the mouse to the top of the screen to do something. However, the contextual menus tend to be pared down and only offer the most common options. For less regular tasks one can use the menubar as has always been available in Mac OS.
This menubar behavior is rather odd if you're used to menubars inside of windows and also rather odd when you realize it's contextual and not just a static bunch of choices. Once you get used to it though you tend to wonder why other systems don't implement it.
While on the subject, NeXT had an even more interesting menu system. It was Mac-like in that the menubar was contextual except that it wasn't a menubar at the top of the screen nor was it visible in a window. Instead you simply clicked the mouse button (NeXT was by default a 1-button system) in the empty space on the desktop and the current application's contextually sensitive menu would appear. This worked because the desktop wasn't a desktop in the sense of Mac OS or Windows but instead just displayed the background.
I do believe Apple has gotten it right with OS X. Right-click (or hold control while clicking) to get a contextual menu if you're a power user. If you're just learning you don't even need to know about mouse buttons, you just plunk the whole thing down. Everything you could possibly want to do is in the menubar. Furthermore, if you're really a power user you can memorize the key combinations because nearly everything has one and the common ones are standard across all apps.
Forcing users to learn to right-click in order to use an app is poor design.
I think it is you who is missing the basic concept of our government. It is the office of the President, not the prime minister. The President is not supposed to be congress's puppet. GP is correct that later 20th century presidents have given up too much authority to congress.
Now what you're probably thinking of is the president doing things that haven't explicitly been authorized by congress (for instance, this NSA call logging thing). That is, however, well within the scope of his powers.
It works the other way too though. A lot has been said about the office of the president needing a line-item veto to avoid spending money on pork projects. This is actually not true. The president can effectively line item veto anything he wants simply by not implementing the program. Remember, the office of the president is the executive branch of the government.
In practice of course due to politicing we have a situation where the president wants to stay on the good side of his party and of congress and so he implements everything they say. On the other hand, one thing I've noticed about Bush is that he doesn't seem particularly concerned about his approval ratings. This is, in fact, one of the qualities I like about him. I didn't elect him to represent me. I elected my congressmen and senators for that. I elected the president to make executive decisions about what should and should not be done.
I seriously hope the next crop of presidential candidates carries this forward. What I'm really hoping for is that the democrats will run a candidate with a back bone for a change. Living in Virginia I'd sort of like to see Mark Warner run. He seemed to do a good job here the past 4 years. Too bad he turned the reigns over to a party-line idiot (Kaine). Even worse was that the opposition (Kilgore) was another party-line idiot. I voted for neither.
The movie with Brosnan and Russo isn't the original Thomas Crowne Affair. The original is with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.
This is, however, one of the few movies where I liked the newer one a lot better than the older one. The old one was a straight up late 60s action flick. The new one was a very intelligent movie (with only a passing resemblence to the original).
The easiest way to keep the Telephone/Cable companies from getting a tiered internet is to keep the government the hell out of it. Don't pass any bills which supplant local control with federal control. Don't pass any bills which supplant peering agreements (simple contract law) with federal laws.
In short, congress should keep its hands off the internet! Seriously, it should just stay the hell away from it. As soon as congress starts passing laws regulating what can and cannot be done it's all over. The first step will be a net neutrality law that will be championed by some as a victory for the internet. Of course, it won't be because it will either have riders or will be attached as a rider to a bill that is not at all a victory for the internet. The next step is for companies to start lobbying for exceptions to the law.
It's analogous to our tax code. As a congress critter you can add more taxes so you have a bone to throw to the lobbyists in the form of tax breaks. Anytime we try to "tax the rich" we wind up screwing the middle class one way or another. The federal government needs to get out of this socialist mindset. It's not just the Democrats either. The Republicans are getting real bad about this; I believe they introduced this whole federalization of the telephone and cable companies in the first place.
The only way I see this happening is if we all take part in policing ourselves. This will remove the need for the government nanny. This is currently how the Internet works. Everyone makes a gentleman's agreement to peer with one another. Occasionally you have little spats about how one company's traffic is worth more than another's and sometimes a peering agreement is terminated. After a few days it's all back up though because no one can afford to lose that business.
To put my points of view into perspective, I am an avid sailboat racer (no, I don't own my own boat but I do crew on one). Sailboat racing is a gentleman's sport. There are a set of well defined rules but there are no referees to enforce them. If someone fouls you then you protest them (which is actually done by flying a red flag and yelling the word "PROTEST"). The protested party can then do one of two things. If he realizes he screwed up he can do two complete turns as a penalty to acknowledge your protest. When you have seen him complete his second turn you may elect to take down your red flag (if you can still see him). If he thinks you are totally wrong he can ignore you and arrange to meet you in the protest room after the race (often times days after the race). Perhaps after the race but before the protest meeting he has a chat with you. And perhaps he consults a rulebook or someone else to see if he really was in the wrong so he can just withdraw and save face.
If the race isn't particularly important or if there is a question on whether he truly fouled you then perhaps you don't protest him at all. Perhaps you give him some slack. You might meet him in the bar after the race and say, hey, you fouled me out there buddy, don't do it again.
This works well because pretty much everyone knows everyone. The point I'm making here is that smaller groups of people can much more effectively police themselves. In the internet provider case it's a reasonable number of companies all in it for themselves and highly concerned about maintaining at least a working relationship with their peers. This is what capitalism is supposed to be. A gentleman's agreement to do the best for yourself while maintaining your relationships with others.
The internet is this form of capitalism. The more socialism we impose on it, the more screwed up it's going to get just like nearly everything else in this country. You make one little socialist change and someone finds a way to take advantage of it. So you make another one, and someone takes advantage of that. Then another, and another. Pretty soon you're more locked down than China because for the socialist system to wor
The bill wasn't about net neutrality. The bill was primarily about creating federal cable/telco franchises and removing control from the localities. In order to drum up support FOR this abomination of a bill some legislators decided to add "Net Neutrality" provisions to it. Basically you get fucked up the ass (federal cable/telco franchises) but they give you a little vaseline (codifying into law the concept of net neutrality).
Note that net neutrality is NOT the current law. There is no law governing net neutrality. Hear that? It's all currently based on peering agreements which work well because the federal government is NOT involved. Get your head out of your ass!
Essentially, anyone who wants this bill to pass is saying "Please use vaseline while you fuck me up the ass".
Once they Tel&CableCos can charge for tiers, then they will bill the muni-wireless, and other wireless carriers, prohibitive fees for use of the wireless network's "on and off" ramps to the wired and Tel&CableCos monopoly controled TCP/IP internet! There is no way that anyone should support the Tel&CableCos requests for power. The only way they can gain this power is by gift of a corrupt and dishonest congress!
There is currently NO network neutrality law. NONE. It does not exist. The whole "savetheinternet.com" website is BULL SHIT. What keeps the net neutral is the peering agreements between ISPs. That is all. There are also some FCC guidlines (note: NOT laws) that encourage neutral peering agreements.
What's really happening here is that a bunch of socialists want the federal government to be the nanny of the internet. They want to pass a law making network neutrality mandatory so that the federal government can have oversight. This increases the feds ability to control the internet.
Peering agreements are working FINE. The private sector has and can deal with this issue without government intervention. This is the same "save the children" crap we see all the time. Writing a network neutrality law won't save the internet. What it will do is put control into the federal government's hands so the next round of lobbyists can lobby for exceptions to the neutrality law. This is the next move by the telcos. They _want_ the net neutrality law but want to make you think they don't. A net neutrality law that they can get an exception to means that while their competitors won't have an exception, they will. That means they'll get government sponsored competitive advantage.
By keeping the status quo (no net neutrality law, only guidelines) we keep the government out of it and the private companies will work out what is best for themselves. Currently the best thing for an internet company to do is peer with everyone they can because not doing so means they'll have displeased customers when "_____.com" doesn't work.
But you go right ahead, continue to be deluded into thinking that we must "save the internet" by giving the federal government more control over it. Because you know more federal government control has always improved things.
As you have pointed out the ISPs currently have peering agreement contracts which already ensure network neutrality. So why do we need congress to pass a law to do it? I should point out (in case you didn't gather it from my last post) that the proposed law isn't removing an already existing net neutrality law but is actually creating a new law for net neutrality where one didn't exist before.
The large ones that are calling for tollbooths are not going to get them simply because no one is going to want to peer with them if they are throttling traffic. The current system of peering agreements works well and will continue to work well.
Also, your truck parking analogy is flawed. Or maybe it's halfway reasonable but you don't understand what really prevents someone from parking a truck in front of my driveway. You see, the roads are public land and so the rules of the road are defined by the public (i.e. the government).
The net is not public land. Sure, the wires are indeed running through public land but this is a local issue and not a federal issue. The worst part of this bill has nothing to do with net neutrality but rather the portions which dictate the federal government decides who gets to operate cable companies on local land.
<p style=cynical> You see, both the democrats and the republicans took money from all kinds of lobbyists. The main purpose of this bill is to remove control from localities of local cable contracts. I believe this was something the republicans introduced. However, the democrats have now gone off on this tirade of saving net neutrality and so they want to codify the net neutrality rules as law. Believe me, the cable companies won't care because they still win as they don't have to deal with those pesky localities when running cables through their land. The net neutrality issue is a smoke screen to get people worked up about what amounts to a meaningless issue. The real issue here is the removal of more state and local rights and the addition of more socialist federal government bureaucracy. <p>
IF the Republicans pass this bill through it will cause masses of internet users to vote them out of office in the next election. The US internet user wants their internet access on every side to remain free! This is an attack by an industry on the Freedoms of Internet Access and by doing this it is a direct attack on the Freedoms of Speech! What are YOU going to do about this TODAY?"
The more I read about this the more I wish congress would not pass it with the net neutrality provisions. You see, we currently do NOT have any law that states providers must not give preferential treatment to packets. What we do have is a set of FCC guidelines which strongly suggest this.
Yes, that's right. Nothing currently prevents a provider from not having net neutrality. Yet for the most part they all do although I hear Comcast already throttles non-HTTP traffic to make sure HTTP traffic has priority. The real question is if a net neutrality law (which we have not had) is really desirable. So far we've gotten along without one. Why pass one now?
If we were to pass a law, who enforces it? I suppose the FCC. That's great. Then we'd have a bunch of government bureaucrats deciding what an internet provider can and can't do. That'll help ensure innovation. Just look at the government's track record.
Rick Boucher may sincerely believe that the federal government must be the nanny watching out for the big evil internet providers. Maybe he doesn't realize that while this may ensure continued competition in the internet content market that this is going to stifle competition in the internet service provider market.
This net neutrality thing smacks of socialism. A few telcos float the idea that they might think about prioritizing traffic based on contracts (which is as of now currently within their rights to do) and the socialists in congress immediately try to pass a provision to codify net neutrality into law.
My take on this is that the internet is still young. Let's see what happens! See what happens if ISPs start prioritizing traffic. There may be advantages to it. Or there may not be. If it really turns out to be bunk I assure you that people will switch ISPs and/or complain loudly. Let's keep the government out of it for now.
I am no anti-GPL troll. Indeed you are correct that you won't be forced into releasing your source code to the outside world if you only distribute your binaries within your company.
You are wrong though to say that the GPL does not apply. It still applies but has no effect since the copyright holder is the company and the company won't be distributing the app to anyone other than the company itself.
It does, however, bring up interesting points when subsidiary companies are involved. If the app is installed on a machine by a subsidiary company I would have to say that it has been distributed to the subsidiary company and thus the subsidiary must now be allowed to have source code under the terms of the GPL. If the subsidiary is later sold, what then?
Also, what constitutes distribution? I could probably make a case that a company employee having the software installed on his company desktop is still distribution only to the company itself. But what about the company allowing an employee to install the software on his home computer? Has the software now been distributed from the company (as a corporate legal entity) to the employee (as a separate human legal entity)?
This can very quickly turn in to a complex system where there is not necessarily a clear cut legal answer. Such is the nature of most anything though.
This does not necessarily mean that using GPLed software is a bad choice but you should be aware that your view is quite simplistic and based on a set of very well defined conditions. I would highly recommend not using GPLed software for anything you may want or need to distribute under different terms.
Data integrity != transactions, each database write in Myisam is just the same as an Oracle write, with the same OS calls. The only gain from transactions is grouping of multiple changes into 1 operation so they all-execute or none-execute. Which gains you nothing if you only make changes to *one* table at a time, or read settings from tables.
In my case I am using WebObjects. It is essentially an ORM (similar to Rails's Active Record) but built around the concept of database transactions instead of Active Record's concept of saving the root of an object hierarchy.
Enterprise Objects (the data access/control portion of WebObjects) functions by having the programmer do inserts, updates, and deletes in what is known as an "editing context" (sort of an OO equivalent of a transaction). Editing contexts can be nested (similar to how you can begin and commit or abort a transaction within another) and when a root editing context is asked to save its changes (equivalent of SQL COMMIT) it opens a transaction, issues all of the insert/update/delete commands, and commits it.
Now, of course I could ignore the transactional functionality and craft my app such that each change results in a call to saveChanges on a root editing context. Except I don't want to do this because I've written my app using Direect2Web and the UI for direct to web just doesn't mesh with the old-school concept of having one web page to edit one table.
What I have instead is an interface where the user is effortlessly traversing the database. The UI is not task based but rather based on the underlying data store. Now you'd think that Joe User wouldn't be able to figure this out but the surprising thing I've found is that I start hearing of users doing things I never even intended to happen. I do start each user out at a home page with a list of common tasks but from there the user traverses the object graph in a natural way.
I couldn't even imagine using MySQL for this. Without transactions I'd have to be a lot more careful with my validation routines. With transactions I can depend on the fact that when (not if) I make a mistake the DB will catch me. And I know the DB will catch me because in order to easily access related data I need to model the relationships in EOModeler. When creating DB tables from EOModeler I automatically get the proper deferred foreign key constraints that fire upon transaction commit which happens at the end of the editing context's saveChanges method.
Aside from transactions though, I really don't use any of the more advanced features of PostgreSQL. Ironically, Apple supplies a (closed source) MySQL plugin for EO but not a PostgreSQL plugin. I must admit I was a little leery of that because in this case I could not expect to reasonably abide by the terms of the GPL (even if I'm distributing within my own company) because I simply do not have the source to Apple's adaptor (even to distribute within my own company). That was a risk I could not take. Couple that with the fact that WO really works best with a transactional DB and MySQL is simply out of the question.
It should also be noted that the open source alternatives to WebObjects based on the old Objective-C interface (WO 4.5) both use PostgreSQL almost exclusively.
So you can even make a closed source product, sell it under whatever license you like, distribute the mysql client in DLL form, and you are free to do whatever under whatever license you like. He was careful to say "link to", without mentioning that its not necessary to link to the MySQL library.
How can you avoid linking to the MySQL client library and still use MySQL? The only way to do this would be to reimplement it. Even the JDBC client library is GPL. I am not sure how you (and some other people around here) figure that dynamically loading after app startup somehow differs from having the dynamic linker load a library just before your main function is called. It seems q
Let's look at all of the major postgres serious alternatives. EnterpriseDB et. al. aren't offered as an open source application because the license allows them to insert their own proprietary extensions. This leads to fragmentation.
So what? I can choose to use EntrerpriseDB or I can tell them to shove their closed source product straight up their ass.
GPL a bad thing? I think not. If it is, sometimes it's the less of two evils.
Which two evils? The GPL is definitely not evil. Nor is code forking.
Mmmm'kay... so if there is a performance bottleneak in accessing a table which is essentially constants, the developer decides to simply hard code all that rather than keeping it all in the database. Great. Seen it done many times.
Perhaps I have a skewed view because in my case I'd select the "Share all objects" for the particular entity (table) in EOModeler and all of the constants would be pulled into the shared editing context at startup time.
I am no GPL FUD-monger. I've got some patches in the Linux kernel (GPL). Some patches to WINE that have since been mostly replaced (now LGPL, was WINE license, I agreed to the LGPL change). Finally, I have a pretty significant amount of code in wxWidgets (wxWindows license which is LGPL with an exception to allow static linking).
My main reason for choosing PostgreSQL over MySQL was my use of WebObjects which is essentially an ORM based around the concept of transactions (except in the object model it's known as an "editing context"). A secondary concern was that if my internal project were to go commercial (and it's possible) I would like the freedom to license it as I see fit. Keep in mind that I actually DO believe in a lot of what Stallman says, including the part about it being unethical to distribute a binary without source. However, I sometimes disagree with the particular implementation of that belief which is embodied in the GPL. So a secondary concern for choosing PostgreSQL over MySQL was definitely the licensing of the client libraries.
I should also point out that if you read the GPL more closely you'd realize that dynamic linking does not in fact remove the requirement to license your linked code under the GPL. That is what the LGPL is for. However, I note from another post in this thread that MySQL apparently has an EXCEPTIONS file detailing what other licenses are allowed.
On the topic of the LGPL (and now I'm getting off the subject) it's worth noting that it is a common misconception that the LGPL requires dynamic linking. What the LGPL actually requires is a means for the end user to relink against a newer version of the LGPLed library. This is generally accomplished via dynamic linking but can also be accomplished by distributing an archive (.a) file or a collection of object (.o) files that can be relinked with an updated version of the library using the static link editor.
The GPL on the other hand does not state anything like this as the GPL strictly requires the entire work to be buildable from source.
MyISAM was never designed with transactions in mind. It performs its intended function excellently. Not all data is useful to keep in some kind of transaction context - take for example a table mapping UPC codes to product names and descriptions: it will never need to change in a transaction so having transactional overhead would be wasteful.
This is typical LAMP programmer thinking. What do I need transactions and data integrity in a database for? I'll just code the checks into my application. I prefer instead to put checks both in the database and in the application.
(4) "MySQL is free"
* Only if your application which links against the client library is also GPL.
Myth used to scare people away from opensource GPL code.
This is no myth. MySQL's client libraries are definitely GPL. If you link to them you must abide by the terms of the GPL. Alternatively, you can purchase a license from MySQL AB. MySQL AB spins this up so much saying that they are open source but what they really mean is that they are open so long as you are open.
I'll stick with PostgreSQL. Unlike MySQL, PostgreSQL is a serious alternative to Oracle or MS SQL. It is also BSD licensed and thus there are zero restrictions on its usage within a commercial product and there is no need to purchase a commercial license.
MySQL is okay for the LAMP mentality but when you start getting in to ORM/ERM (Object/Entity relational mapping) with packages like Rails's Active Record or WebObjects's Enterprise Objects you need a more serious database. As another poster has pointed out in this thread I give it only a few more years before mainstream open source web development moves into the ORM camp.
First of all I will say you have some legimate gripes with the power adaptor and the keys leaving marks on the screen. It's obviously too late now because I'm sure your Titanium PowerBook is out of warranty but you could have gotten the power adaptor replaced for free. Some time after the Aluminum PowerBooks (AlBooks) came out Apple changed the plug design a bit to include strain relief. I believe the marks on the screen though are not rubber but are skin oils. Apple also corrected this with the AlBooks by leaving more of a gap between the display and keyboard. You can however buy some soft cloth protectors to put between the halves of the laptop before you close it if it bugs you. Or you can just take a soft cloth and wipe the screen off from time to time.
As for the power adaptor taking up 3 outlets I have no idea what you are talking about. If your power strip has the outlets positioned side by side then it takes up one. If they are positioned one on top of the other then you can just plug it in to the outlet on the end of the strip. If neither of these is acceptable you can just use the included extension cable.
As for the icons I guess to each his own. I find the icons in OS X to be soft and visually appealing. They are brightly colored and do stand out but I don't feel they "scream" at you like the icons on Windows XP tend to nor do they just fade into the background like the icons on Fedora Core tend to.
And as for the design, I guess again to each his own. Personally I like the use of metal and the clean cut look. I am not sure how one can describe any of Apple's designs (save for the iMac and the iPod mini) as flamboyant. I find them to be more minimalistic.
As another reply to your post stated there is a project called "Q" that is a QEMU front end for OS X. I tried installing XP on it the other day and unfortunately it failed halfway through install. At least it was the second phase of install though (when it is registering COM components and such).
However, I did have success building WINE. I did not, however, use Darwine but instead grabbed normal Wine from CVS then applied a patch to context_i386.c to add support for Darwin.
Solitaire works. Minesweeper works. Pinball almost works (too slow to play). However, winedbg did not work and attempting to install IE didn't work either. But hey, it was worth a shot. I'm sure with a bit more work, winedbg could be made to work again and for all I know that work could already be done in the Darwine CVS.
Even the smallest handbag I can recall seeing a woman carry would have have ample room for a cell phone and an iPod or a cell phone and a PDA.
Try carrying around anything more than a cell phone in your pants pockets. The iPod may be small (and indeed they are now smaller than the old 20 GB 2nd gen one I have) but even an iPod nano is almost too big to stuff into a pocket with a cell phone.
Personally, I leave my iPod connected to my car stereo unless I know I'm going on a walk. If I'm doing that I can leave my cell phone at home or in the car and replace it with my iPod. Or possibly I have a jacket on and I can put the iPod and/or cell phone in my coat pocket.
It almost makes me wish that it wasn't a faux pas for a man to walk around with a hand bag. Ever seen the Seinfeld episode? "It's not a purse! It's a European carry all!"
About the best I can do is carry my laptop bag with me. However, it barely has enough room for the laptop (17" powerbook) and power adapter. However, I can squeeze my cell pohe, iPod, laptop power adapter, and USB data cable in there. But that is all. The good thing is that professionally it is the modern equivalent of a briefcase and has enough room to store some letter sized pages inside of it if need be. Therefore, I don't get odd looks if I go into a meeting with it and don't look like some hip young dude who wants to break with convention and carry a man purse and/or backpack.
Re:...the same features we delivered seven years a
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Windows 95 Turns 10
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Monad turns the command line into an object oriented environment where instead of having to do error prone parsing through text piped though app after app, you treat the output from one app as one or more.NET objects on which you can execute methods, examine properties, and pass them to other applications for further processing.
That sounds like Python or even PERL to me. Maybe you should "get a clue" that Monad isn't particularly new in the sense that no one else has done it but rather new in the sense that Microsoft will finally be providing a decent interactive scripting language with a rich library of code (the.NET stuff).
I still don't understand why they call it a shell though. To me it seems more like just another scripting language that's somewhat better tuned for interactive use than other scripting languages but not quite as much as a real shell (like zsh or even bash).
Don't get me wrong though. I'm quite excited that a decent interactive scripting language will now be included with Windows. This was one of the biggest downfalls to Win32 IMO. At least on Unix you always have/bin/sh which isn't great but is workable. And most modern Unix have Python available which is even better. Fortunately, Python is available for Win32 and is easy to install. There is even a commercial product that provides a CLR version of Python that has access to all the.NET functionality.
It is very easy to write a WebObjects app that does everything with what are called "component actions". Even if one were to store the Session id in a cookie (wosid) it still wouldn't provide linkable URLs because performing the exact same action multiple times results in a different URL (a number is incremented each time).
To implement deep linkable URLs one would have to implement Direct Actions; doable so long as you are okay with doing things depending on values from GET/PUT (that is the stuff after the ? mark in a URL). If that's not sufficient then one needs to write his own subclass of WORequestHandler if he wants to do different things depending on what's in the path part of the URL.
By avoiding all of this and using WebObjects component actions the web developers doing the Apple store can make changes very rapidly.
WebObjects is a whole different beast from something like PHP or ASP. Both of those are merely mostly static pages with some level of dynamism at the page level. WebObjects is fully dynamic at the site level.
This has to do with their use of WebObjects for the online store. While it's not impossible to provide bookmarkable URLs it's a whole lot more difficult than the standard WO behavior where the URLs are all generated on the fly on a per-session basis.
In fact, as far as I'm aware WebObjects has absolutely _zero_ concept of translating URLs into any sort of file system path. For that you have to write a new request handler.
By default you get wo and wa. So http://example.com/Example.woa/wa/foo/bar actually looks for a method named bar() in a class named foo whereas http://example.com/Example.woa/wo/lkSsfAF42oiu48S9 D2R0A/1.2.3.4 looks for the session with the hash lkS.... and then figures out which page the user is coming from and calls a method in its class based on which element (A HREF or INPUT button or whatever) the user clicked. It knows which element the user clicked because the HREF for that element is that 1.5.3.4.2.1 crap based off of its location in the WO component.
If you are really curious you can now download WebObjects for free as it's now part of the Xcode 2.1 tools. Documentation is online as well.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that the overwhelming tone of the slashdot story as well as most of the comments consider the idea of engineers doing management do be a bad thing. This I fail to understand. I'm only 26 and have only been in the professional workforce (i.e. not a job as a service tech or some crap) for about 5 years. One thing I have learned (and it's a lesson I take from my dad as well) is that it is in one's best interest to do some "management" work.
Likewise, managers need to get their hands dirty on a regular basis. If non-management employee's aren't helping the manager do his job and/or if the manager does not know the field his employees are working in then there is a horrible process inefficiency. A basic college (or hell even high-school where I went) economics course will tell you that in a perfect market it is quite likely that if you're inefficient then another company will come along and eat your lunch.
You see it happen all the time with companies too. Look at Microsoft for instance. At some point they managed (hah) to make a company full of middle-managers. Microsoft as of late does not seem to be able to write good software. They are not working as a team.
Contrast with Apple's software division. It is obvious to this outside observer that the programmers and managers are working together. I could speculate that a lot of this had to do with Avi Tevanian (VP of Software at Apple). Avi is a programmer who worked is way in to an executive position. Unfortunately, Avi has left. However, don't take this too seriously because I read some other rumors/speculation that perhaps it was time for him to go.
It's hard to judge as an outsider on anything and I realize that this is simply two anecdotal examples about software companies (not engineering firms) but I believe it's an accurate enough portrayal for my purposes. The point is that when companies start getting top-heavy and managers aren't getting their hands dirty and workers aren't having active dialog with management then the ability of the company to produce it's products goes south.
Just reading the documentation for Cayenne makes it look damn promising. I see they even carried over EOEditingContext as DataContext. Most of the other ORM frameworks seem to lack this. That includes Rails. I've read some of the Rails tutorials and thought.. gee, that's nice but it looks a little cobbled together compared with EO.
No, I do not think Hibernate is it. A commercial app we use for time sheet entry happens to use it and it did help to have the .xml files that modeled the database when I went to make an EOModel to read from it. I had a look at some of the Hibernate documentation and quickly realized it didn't compare with EO. Apparently someone else who worked on the app had similar thoughts because it appears that not all of the app is written using hibernate. The parts that import/export lots of data seem to use raw SQL queries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Hibernate to me appeared to be more of a way to serialize data to a database than a true object-relational mapper.
For what it's worth I've only been using EO for about 1.5 years. Early in 2005 I had to write a task order management app from scratch in under a month to meet the requirements of a contract we had just won. D2W was a lifesaver. I swear I've tried to explain D2W to people and they don't get it. them: "Oh, you mean it generates pages for you.. Well _____ does that." Me: "No, you don't get it. It doesn't really generate them; it makes them up on the fly." Them: "Well how is that different?" Me: "Because without doing anything you can view most of the data in your DB." Them: "I don't get it." Me: Download it! Use it! Follow a D2W tutorial or two.
Just got a new coworker and I've been having her shadow me to get a feel for how to work with it. We are working on converting an old FoxPro-based program to WO for a client. A lot of it was figuring out how things are related (let's just say FoxPro isn't as stringent as EO is). However, as we started getting entities in there and getting the app going I watched her eyes just light up when she saw how we went from EOModeler to functioning website in 10 seconds flat.
Of course, not everything is easy in D2W land. In paritcular you really need to pay attention to maintaining the object graph. And it's also highly important (under penalty of totally farking your database) that you don't map any two class properties to the same underlying piece of data.
Anyway.. enough EO evangelizing. I'll have to have a look at Cayenne when I get a chance. As for the topic, let me just say that whatever Hibernate does, EO has been doing that plus more for 10-15 years. Patent-worthy novel idea my ass.
Enterprise Objects certainly implements everything described by that patent and a bit more because it provides a data access controller layer (not just a data model layer). Not to mention I've had some limited experience viewing someone else's hibernate-based code. EO/WO is so much better than Hibernate can ever hope to be.
Your argument boils down to the big bad meanie corporations have structured the law in their favor so we need to pass more legislation to combat this. It's an eye for an eye mentality. Everyone winds up blind.
Can I ask, what specifically is it about current federal law that is structured in favor of local ISPs? I think maintaining the status quo of localities granting rights of way to cable TV and telco companies and then setting the rules as to what they are allowed to do makes the most sense.
I remember from an earlier version of this bill that my fear was not the "loss" of net neutrality but the true loss of local control over local rights of way. That right there is what kills net neutrality. Even if the net neutrality amendment had passed we would still be worse off than before.
Essentially the argument I'm seeing here is that since the federal government is going to take over responsibility for granting rights of way to telcos then they'll also need to enforce a net neutrality provision. Just what we need, more federal bureaucracy. Here's an idea: wouldn't it have been better to fight the real issue in the first place which was the removal of the rights of the localities? It seems that this issue has been entirely lost in the shuffle.
I'm not surprised either. So-called net neutrality provisions were a smokescreen from the telcos from the beginning. As all the RBOCs have bought each other up and the cable companies have merged they want to deal less and less with localities. Paying off a few congressmen is so much easier than several locals.
So, congratulations Slashdot. You've just been hoodwinked into fighting an issue you were destined to lose while letting the underlying problem go unchecked. I hope you're happy.
Agreed. I didn't say allowing users to right-click is bad design. I said forcing users to do it is bad design.
We Mac people have a menu-bar at the very top of the screen outside of all other windows. It is contextually sensitive. That is, when you are in Safari (web browser) you have File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Window, Help. But in Mail you have File, Edit, View, Mailbox, Message, Format, Window.
Furthermore, if the focus is in a text entry box (as indicated by the blue focus ring) the choices in the edit menu like cut/copy/paste all light up. Or if you're in Mail and have a message header (in the list) selected the choices in the Message menu light up and the choices in the Edit menu do things like cut/copy/paste the entire message itself.
It pretty much removes the need to use contextual menus at all at the expense of having to move to the top of the screen. Of course, OS X (the only version of Mac I've ever used) does have contextual menus so you can avoid having to bang the mouse to the top of the screen to do something. However, the contextual menus tend to be pared down and only offer the most common options. For less regular tasks one can use the menubar as has always been available in Mac OS.
This menubar behavior is rather odd if you're used to menubars inside of windows and also rather odd when you realize it's contextual and not just a static bunch of choices. Once you get used to it though you tend to wonder why other systems don't implement it.
While on the subject, NeXT had an even more interesting menu system. It was Mac-like in that the menubar was contextual except that it wasn't a menubar at the top of the screen nor was it visible in a window. Instead you simply clicked the mouse button (NeXT was by default a 1-button system) in the empty space on the desktop and the current application's contextually sensitive menu would appear. This worked because the desktop wasn't a desktop in the sense of Mac OS or Windows but instead just displayed the background.
I do believe Apple has gotten it right with OS X. Right-click (or hold control while clicking) to get a contextual menu if you're a power user. If you're just learning you don't even need to know about mouse buttons, you just plunk the whole thing down. Everything you could possibly want to do is in the menubar. Furthermore, if you're really a power user you can memorize the key combinations because nearly everything has one and the common ones are standard across all apps.
Forcing users to learn to right-click in order to use an app is poor design.
I think it is you who is missing the basic concept of our government. It is the office of the President, not the prime minister. The President is not supposed to be congress's puppet. GP is correct that later 20th century presidents have given up too much authority to congress.
Now what you're probably thinking of is the president doing things that haven't explicitly been authorized by congress (for instance, this NSA call logging thing). That is, however, well within the scope of his powers.
It works the other way too though. A lot has been said about the office of the president needing a line-item veto to avoid spending money on pork projects. This is actually not true. The president can effectively line item veto anything he wants simply by not implementing the program. Remember, the office of the president is the executive branch of the government.
In practice of course due to politicing we have a situation where the president wants to stay on the good side of his party and of congress and so he implements everything they say. On the other hand, one thing I've noticed about Bush is that he doesn't seem particularly concerned about his approval ratings. This is, in fact, one of the qualities I like about him. I didn't elect him to represent me. I elected my congressmen and senators for that. I elected the president to make executive decisions about what should and should not be done.
I seriously hope the next crop of presidential candidates carries this forward. What I'm really hoping for is that the democrats will run a candidate with a back bone for a change. Living in Virginia I'd sort of like to see Mark Warner run. He seemed to do a good job here the past 4 years. Too bad he turned the reigns over to a party-line idiot (Kaine). Even worse was that the opposition (Kilgore) was another party-line idiot. I voted for neither.
The movie with Brosnan and Russo isn't the original Thomas Crowne Affair. The original is with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway.
This is, however, one of the few movies where I liked the newer one a lot better than the older one. The old one was a straight up late 60s action flick. The new one was a very intelligent movie (with only a passing resemblence to the original).
The easiest way to keep the Telephone/Cable companies from getting a tiered internet is to keep the government the hell out of it. Don't pass any bills which supplant local control with federal control. Don't pass any bills which supplant peering agreements (simple contract law) with federal laws.
In short, congress should keep its hands off the internet! Seriously, it should just stay the hell away from it. As soon as congress starts passing laws regulating what can and cannot be done it's all over. The first step will be a net neutrality law that will be championed by some as a victory for the internet. Of course, it won't be because it will either have riders or will be attached as a rider to a bill that is not at all a victory for the internet. The next step is for companies to start lobbying for exceptions to the law.
It's analogous to our tax code. As a congress critter you can add more taxes so you have a bone to throw to the lobbyists in the form of tax breaks. Anytime we try to "tax the rich" we wind up screwing the middle class one way or another. The federal government needs to get out of this socialist mindset. It's not just the Democrats either. The Republicans are getting real bad about this; I believe they introduced this whole federalization of the telephone and cable companies in the first place.
The only way I see this happening is if we all take part in policing ourselves. This will remove the need for the government nanny. This is currently how the Internet works. Everyone makes a gentleman's agreement to peer with one another. Occasionally you have little spats about how one company's traffic is worth more than another's and sometimes a peering agreement is terminated. After a few days it's all back up though because no one can afford to lose that business.
To put my points of view into perspective, I am an avid sailboat racer (no, I don't own my own boat but I do crew on one). Sailboat racing is a gentleman's sport. There are a set of well defined rules but there are no referees to enforce them. If someone fouls you then you protest them (which is actually done by flying a red flag and yelling the word "PROTEST"). The protested party can then do one of two things. If he realizes he screwed up he can do two complete turns as a penalty to acknowledge your protest. When you have seen him complete his second turn you may elect to take down your red flag (if you can still see him). If he thinks you are totally wrong he can ignore you and arrange to meet you in the protest room after the race (often times days after the race). Perhaps after the race but before the protest meeting he has a chat with you. And perhaps he consults a rulebook or someone else to see if he really was in the wrong so he can just withdraw and save face.
If the race isn't particularly important or if there is a question on whether he truly fouled you then perhaps you don't protest him at all. Perhaps you give him some slack. You might meet him in the bar after the race and say, hey, you fouled me out there buddy, don't do it again.
This works well because pretty much everyone knows everyone. The point I'm making here is that smaller groups of people can much more effectively police themselves. In the internet provider case it's a reasonable number of companies all in it for themselves and highly concerned about maintaining at least a working relationship with their peers. This is what capitalism is supposed to be. A gentleman's agreement to do the best for yourself while maintaining your relationships with others.
The internet is this form of capitalism. The more socialism we impose on it, the more screwed up it's going to get just like nearly everything else in this country. You make one little socialist change and someone finds a way to take advantage of it. So you make another one, and someone takes advantage of that. Then another, and another. Pretty soon you're more locked down than China because for the socialist system to wor
The bill wasn't about net neutrality. The bill was primarily about creating federal cable/telco franchises and removing control from the localities. In order to drum up support FOR this abomination of a bill some legislators decided to add "Net Neutrality" provisions to it. Basically you get fucked up the ass (federal cable/telco franchises) but they give you a little vaseline (codifying into law the concept of net neutrality).
Note that net neutrality is NOT the current law. There is no law governing net neutrality. Hear that? It's all currently based on peering agreements which work well because the federal government is NOT involved. Get your head out of your ass!
Essentially, anyone who wants this bill to pass is saying "Please use vaseline while you fuck me up the ass".
There is currently NO network neutrality law. NONE. It does not exist. The whole "savetheinternet.com" website is BULL SHIT. What keeps the net neutral is the peering agreements between ISPs. That is all. There are also some FCC guidlines (note: NOT laws) that encourage neutral peering agreements.
What's really happening here is that a bunch of socialists want the federal government to be the nanny of the internet. They want to pass a law making network neutrality mandatory so that the federal government can have oversight. This increases the feds ability to control the internet.
Peering agreements are working FINE. The private sector has and can deal with this issue without government intervention. This is the same "save the children" crap we see all the time. Writing a network neutrality law won't save the internet. What it will do is put control into the federal government's hands so the next round of lobbyists can lobby for exceptions to the neutrality law. This is the next move by the telcos. They _want_ the net neutrality law but want to make you think they don't. A net neutrality law that they can get an exception to means that while their competitors won't have an exception, they will. That means they'll get government sponsored competitive advantage.
By keeping the status quo (no net neutrality law, only guidelines) we keep the government out of it and the private companies will work out what is best for themselves. Currently the best thing for an internet company to do is peer with everyone they can because not doing so means they'll have displeased customers when "_____.com" doesn't work.
But you go right ahead, continue to be deluded into thinking that we must "save the internet" by giving the federal government more control over it. Because you know more federal government control has always improved things.
As you have pointed out the ISPs currently have peering agreement contracts which already ensure network neutrality. So why do we need congress to pass a law to do it? I should point out (in case you didn't gather it from my last post) that the proposed law isn't removing an already existing net neutrality law but is actually creating a new law for net neutrality where one didn't exist before.
The large ones that are calling for tollbooths are not going to get them simply because no one is going to want to peer with them if they are throttling traffic. The current system of peering agreements works well and will continue to work well.
Also, your truck parking analogy is flawed. Or maybe it's halfway reasonable but you don't understand what really prevents someone from parking a truck in front of my driveway. You see, the roads are public land and so the rules of the road are defined by the public (i.e. the government).
The net is not public land. Sure, the wires are indeed running through public land but this is a local issue and not a federal issue. The worst part of this bill has nothing to do with net neutrality but rather the portions which dictate the federal government decides who gets to operate cable companies on local land.
<p style=cynical> You see, both the democrats and the republicans took money from all kinds of lobbyists. The main purpose of this bill is to remove control from localities of local cable contracts. I believe this was something the republicans introduced. However, the democrats have now gone off on this tirade of saving net neutrality and so they want to codify the net neutrality rules as law. Believe me, the cable companies won't care because they still win as they don't have to deal with those pesky localities when running cables through their land. The net neutrality issue is a smoke screen to get people worked up about what amounts to a meaningless issue. The real issue here is the removal of more state and local rights and the addition of more socialist federal government bureaucracy. <p>
The more I read about this the more I wish congress would not pass it with the net neutrality provisions. You see, we currently do NOT have any law that states providers must not give preferential treatment to packets. What we do have is a set of FCC guidelines which strongly suggest this.
Yes, that's right. Nothing currently prevents a provider from not having net neutrality. Yet for the most part they all do although I hear Comcast already throttles non-HTTP traffic to make sure HTTP traffic has priority. The real question is if a net neutrality law (which we have not had) is really desirable. So far we've gotten along without one. Why pass one now?
If we were to pass a law, who enforces it? I suppose the FCC. That's great. Then we'd have a bunch of government bureaucrats deciding what an internet provider can and can't do. That'll help ensure innovation. Just look at the government's track record.
Rick Boucher may sincerely believe that the federal government must be the nanny watching out for the big evil internet providers. Maybe he doesn't realize that while this may ensure continued competition in the internet content market that this is going to stifle competition in the internet service provider market.
This net neutrality thing smacks of socialism. A few telcos float the idea that they might think about prioritizing traffic based on contracts (which is as of now currently within their rights to do) and the socialists in congress immediately try to pass a provision to codify net neutrality into law.
My take on this is that the internet is still young. Let's see what happens! See what happens if ISPs start prioritizing traffic. There may be advantages to it. Or there may not be. If it really turns out to be bunk I assure you that people will switch ISPs and/or complain loudly. Let's keep the government out of it for now.
I am no anti-GPL troll. Indeed you are correct that you won't be forced into releasing your source code to the outside world if you only distribute your binaries within your company.
You are wrong though to say that the GPL does not apply. It still applies but has no effect since the copyright holder is the company and the company won't be distributing the app to anyone other than the company itself.
It does, however, bring up interesting points when subsidiary companies are involved. If the app is installed on a machine by a subsidiary company I would have to say that it has been distributed to the subsidiary company and thus the subsidiary must now be allowed to have source code under the terms of the GPL. If the subsidiary is later sold, what then?
Also, what constitutes distribution? I could probably make a case that a company employee having the software installed on his company desktop is still distribution only to the company itself. But what about the company allowing an employee to install the software on his home computer? Has the software now been distributed from the company (as a corporate legal entity) to the employee (as a separate human legal entity)?
This can very quickly turn in to a complex system where there is not necessarily a clear cut legal answer. Such is the nature of most anything though.
This does not necessarily mean that using GPLed software is a bad choice but you should be aware that your view is quite simplistic and based on a set of very well defined conditions. I would highly recommend not using GPLed software for anything you may want or need to distribute under different terms.
In my case I am using WebObjects. It is essentially an ORM (similar to Rails's Active Record) but built around the concept of database transactions instead of Active Record's concept of saving the root of an object hierarchy.
Enterprise Objects (the data access/control portion of WebObjects) functions by having the programmer do inserts, updates, and deletes in what is known as an "editing context" (sort of an OO equivalent of a transaction). Editing contexts can be nested (similar to how you can begin and commit or abort a transaction within another) and when a root editing context is asked to save its changes (equivalent of SQL COMMIT) it opens a transaction, issues all of the insert/update/delete commands, and commits it.
Now, of course I could ignore the transactional functionality and craft my app such that each change results in a call to saveChanges on a root editing context. Except I don't want to do this because I've written my app using Direect2Web and the UI for direct to web just doesn't mesh with the old-school concept of having one web page to edit one table.
What I have instead is an interface where the user is effortlessly traversing the database. The UI is not task based but rather based on the underlying data store. Now you'd think that Joe User wouldn't be able to figure this out but the surprising thing I've found is that I start hearing of users doing things I never even intended to happen. I do start each user out at a home page with a list of common tasks but from there the user traverses the object graph in a natural way.
I couldn't even imagine using MySQL for this. Without transactions I'd have to be a lot more careful with my validation routines. With transactions I can depend on the fact that when (not if) I make a mistake the DB will catch me. And I know the DB will catch me because in order to easily access related data I need to model the relationships in EOModeler. When creating DB tables from EOModeler I automatically get the proper deferred foreign key constraints that fire upon transaction commit which happens at the end of the editing context's saveChanges method.
Aside from transactions though, I really don't use any of the more advanced features of PostgreSQL. Ironically, Apple supplies a (closed source) MySQL plugin for EO but not a PostgreSQL plugin. I must admit I was a little leery of that because in this case I could not expect to reasonably abide by the terms of the GPL (even if I'm distributing within my own company) because I simply do not have the source to Apple's adaptor (even to distribute within my own company). That was a risk I could not take. Couple that with the fact that WO really works best with a transactional DB and MySQL is simply out of the question.
It should also be noted that the open source alternatives to WebObjects based on the old Objective-C interface (WO 4.5) both use PostgreSQL almost exclusively.
How can you avoid linking to the MySQL client library and still use MySQL? The only way to do this would be to reimplement it. Even the JDBC client library is GPL. I am not sure how you (and some other people around here) figure that dynamically loading after app startup somehow differs from having the dynamic linker load a library just before your main function is called. It seems q
So what? I can choose to use EntrerpriseDB or I can tell them to shove their closed source product straight up their ass.
Which two evils? The GPL is definitely not evil. Nor is code forking.
Perhaps I have a skewed view because in my case I'd select the "Share all objects" for the particular entity (table) in EOModeler and all of the constants would be pulled into the shared editing context at startup time.
I am no GPL FUD-monger. I've got some patches in the Linux kernel (GPL). Some patches to WINE that have since been mostly replaced (now LGPL, was WINE license, I agreed to the LGPL change). Finally, I have a pretty significant amount of code in wxWidgets (wxWindows license which is LGPL with an exception to allow static linking).
My main reason for choosing PostgreSQL over MySQL was my use of WebObjects which is essentially an ORM based around the concept of transactions (except in the object model it's known as an "editing context"). A secondary concern was that if my internal project were to go commercial (and it's possible) I would like the freedom to license it as I see fit. Keep in mind that I actually DO believe in a lot of what Stallman says, including the part about it being unethical to distribute a binary without source. However, I sometimes disagree with the particular implementation of that belief which is embodied in the GPL. So a secondary concern for choosing PostgreSQL over MySQL was definitely the licensing of the client libraries.
I should also point out that if you read the GPL more closely you'd realize that dynamic linking does not in fact remove the requirement to license your linked code under the GPL. That is what the LGPL is for. However, I note from another post in this thread that MySQL apparently has an EXCEPTIONS file detailing what other licenses are allowed.
On the topic of the LGPL (and now I'm getting off the subject) it's worth noting that it is a common misconception that the LGPL requires dynamic linking. What the LGPL actually requires is a means for the end user to relink against a newer version of the LGPLed library. This is generally accomplished via dynamic linking but can also be accomplished by distributing an archive (.a) file or a collection of object (.o) files that can be relinked with an updated version of the library using the static link editor.
The GPL on the other hand does not state anything like this as the GPL strictly requires the entire work to be buildable from source.
This is typical LAMP programmer thinking. What do I need transactions and data integrity in a database for? I'll just code the checks into my application. I prefer instead to put checks both in the database and in the application.
This is no myth. MySQL's client libraries are definitely GPL. If you link to them you must abide by the terms of the GPL. Alternatively, you can purchase a license from MySQL AB. MySQL AB spins this up so much saying that they are open source but what they really mean is that they are open so long as you are open.
I'll stick with PostgreSQL. Unlike MySQL, PostgreSQL is a serious alternative to Oracle or MS SQL. It is also BSD licensed and thus there are zero restrictions on its usage within a commercial product and there is no need to purchase a commercial license.
MySQL is okay for the LAMP mentality but when you start getting in to ORM/ERM (Object/Entity relational mapping) with packages like Rails's Active Record or WebObjects's Enterprise Objects you need a more serious database. As another poster has pointed out in this thread I give it only a few more years before mainstream open source web development moves into the ORM camp.
First of all I will say you have some legimate gripes with the power adaptor and the keys leaving marks on the screen. It's obviously too late now because I'm sure your Titanium PowerBook is out of warranty but you could have gotten the power adaptor replaced for free. Some time after the Aluminum PowerBooks (AlBooks) came out Apple changed the plug design a bit to include strain relief. I believe the marks on the screen though are not rubber but are skin oils. Apple also corrected this with the AlBooks by leaving more of a gap between the display and keyboard. You can however buy some soft cloth protectors to put between the halves of the laptop before you close it if it bugs you. Or you can just take a soft cloth and wipe the screen off from time to time.
As for the power adaptor taking up 3 outlets I have no idea what you are talking about. If your power strip has the outlets positioned side by side then it takes up one. If they are positioned one on top of the other then you can just plug it in to the outlet on the end of the strip. If neither of these is acceptable you can just use the included extension cable.
As for the icons I guess to each his own. I find the icons in OS X to be soft and visually appealing. They are brightly colored and do stand out but I don't feel they "scream" at you like the icons on Windows XP tend to nor do they just fade into the background like the icons on Fedora Core tend to.
And as for the design, I guess again to each his own. Personally I like the use of metal and the clean cut look. I am not sure how one can describe any of Apple's designs (save for the iMac and the iPod mini) as flamboyant. I find them to be more minimalistic.
As another reply to your post stated there is a project called "Q" that is a QEMU front end for OS X. I tried installing XP on it the other day and unfortunately it failed halfway through install. At least it was the second phase of install though (when it is registering COM components and such).
However, I did have success building WINE. I did not, however, use Darwine but instead grabbed normal Wine from CVS then applied a patch to context_i386.c to add support for Darwin.
Solitaire works. Minesweeper works. Pinball almost works (too slow to play). However, winedbg did not work and attempting to install IE didn't work either. But hey, it was worth a shot. I'm sure with a bit more work, winedbg could be made to work again and for all I know that work could already be done in the Darwine CVS.
Are you joking?
Even the smallest handbag I can recall seeing a woman carry would have have ample room for a cell phone and an iPod or a cell phone and a PDA.
Try carrying around anything more than a cell phone in your pants pockets. The iPod may be small (and indeed they are now smaller than the old 20 GB 2nd gen one I have) but even an iPod nano is almost too big to stuff into a pocket with a cell phone.
Personally, I leave my iPod connected to my car stereo unless I know I'm going on a walk. If I'm doing that I can leave my cell phone at home or in the car and replace it with my iPod. Or possibly I have a jacket on and I can put the iPod and/or cell phone in my coat pocket.
It almost makes me wish that it wasn't a faux pas for a man to walk around with a hand bag. Ever seen the Seinfeld episode? "It's not a purse! It's a European carry all!"
About the best I can do is carry my laptop bag with me. However, it barely has enough room for the laptop (17" powerbook) and power adapter. However, I can squeeze my cell pohe, iPod, laptop power adapter, and USB data cable in there. But that is all. The good thing is that professionally it is the modern equivalent of a briefcase and has enough room to store some letter sized pages inside of it if need be. Therefore, I don't get odd looks if I go into a meeting with it and don't look like some hip young dude who wants to break with convention and carry a man purse and/or backpack.
That sounds like Python or even PERL to me. Maybe you should "get a clue" that Monad isn't particularly new in the sense that no one else has done it but rather new in the sense that Microsoft will finally be providing a decent interactive scripting language with a rich library of code (the .NET stuff).
I still don't understand why they call it a shell though. To me it seems more like just another scripting language that's somewhat better tuned for interactive use than other scripting languages but not quite as much as a real shell (like zsh or even bash).
Don't get me wrong though. I'm quite excited that a decent interactive scripting language will now be included with Windows. This was one of the biggest downfalls to Win32 IMO. At least on Unix you always have /bin/sh which isn't great but is workable. And most modern Unix have Python available which is even better. Fortunately, Python is available for Win32 and is easy to install. There is even a commercial product that provides a CLR version of Python that has access to all the .NET functionality.
As I've posted before it's merely convenience.
It is very easy to write a WebObjects app that does everything with what are called "component actions". Even if one were to store the Session id in a cookie (wosid) it still wouldn't provide linkable URLs because performing the exact same action multiple times results in a different URL (a number is incremented each time).
To implement deep linkable URLs one would have to implement Direct Actions; doable so long as you are okay with doing things depending on values from GET/PUT (that is the stuff after the ? mark in a URL). If that's not sufficient then one needs to write his own subclass of WORequestHandler if he wants to do different things depending on what's in the path part of the URL.
By avoiding all of this and using WebObjects component actions the web developers doing the Apple store can make changes very rapidly.
WebObjects is a whole different beast from something like PHP or ASP. Both of those are merely mostly static pages with some level of dynamism at the page level. WebObjects is fully dynamic at the site level.
This has to do with their use of WebObjects for the online store. While it's not impossible to provide bookmarkable URLs it's a whole lot more difficult than the standard WO behavior where the URLs are all generated on the fly on a per-session basis.
In fact, as far as I'm aware WebObjects has absolutely _zero_ concept of translating URLs into any sort of file system path. For that you have to write a new request handler.
By default you get wo and wa. So http://example.com/Example.woa/wa/foo/bar actually looks for a method named bar() in a class named foo whereas http://example.com/Example.woa/wo/lkSsfAF42oiu48S9 D2R0A/1.2.3.4 looks for the session with the hash lkS.... and then figures out which page the user is coming from and calls a method in its class based on which element (A HREF or INPUT button or whatever) the user clicked. It knows which element the user clicked because the HREF for that element is that 1.5.3.4.2.1 crap based off of its location in the WO component.
If you are really curious you can now download WebObjects for free as it's now part of the Xcode 2.1 tools. Documentation is online as well.