How is this not just a publicity stunt? If they have so many artists, they should start their own label.
Yeah that's a good idea... these people Sarah McLaghlan, the Barenaked Ladies, and others could start a label and call it Nettwerk or something. Except it seems like some other chick names Sarah McLachlan and some other band called the Barenaked Ladies already did.
If you're a windows developer who's been wanting to port your software and grab the Mac market, but haven't been willing to buy two computers, isn't this the ultimate developer machine?
We have this thing in the US called States Rights. [blah blah blah blah]. Perhaps you should try to understand this concept and why it came about before you bash the US.
That's all fine and good, except you totally failed to actually address the question. What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries, and they seem to historically have fewer problems than other alternatives.
That in mind, to address your two main concerns:
1. You point out that they can't be mandated at a federal level. I'm confused as to how this is relevant. At some level a system has to be chosen. The parent is questioning the value of choosing an e-voting system regardless of the level of government.
2. You seem quite upset that the parent poster criticised the US. I really enjoyed the bits about your forefathers, and the bits about the state and federal governments not getting along; very passionate -- good effort all round! I guess the only bit I found disconcerting was that the parent poster never mentioned or implied anything about the US, just about electronic voting systems... which can be found in many countries.
At ID 3800, I'm sure he remembers more than me, but I still have nostalgic bad memories of the naked petrified/natalie portman/hot grits guy, the penis-bird dude, the goatse craze, the "let's make the page massively wide" guy just off the top of my head.
If I remember correctly the mysterious space character you sometimes get if you paste a URL into a post as text is his fault. Though in terms of eliminating trolls, Jon Katz being discontinued was probably the most effective fix yet.
The Darwin/FreeBSD thing drives me nuts as well. I've got Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD boxes at home and they each have a totally different flavour. Darwin definitely feels a little more BSD-ish than Linux-ish, and the userland is pretty FreeBSD, but the kernel, the IO system, the init system (in general the entire experience) is different!
It'd be pretty great to get some GPL and BSD zealots together in a room and let them duke it out. Could be a decent spectator sport actually.
Beyold the power of the BSD license, aka. the "please steal this open source code and put it in proprietary software" license.
Most BSD developers specifically choose BSD because of this feature of the licence. They believe in the dissemination of the highest quality code possible without the additional limitation that any project you integrate it into also be open source/free software. I suspect that most would re-word your statement above as "please take this open source code and do whatever you'd like with it, including put it in proprietary software; it means better quality code, which means happier customers, less tech support, and more time spent on developing the features specific to your own software"
GPL advocates, on the other hand, do not see the requirement of any derived work also being GPL as a limitation, but as a benefit. Their goal is to make free software as widespread as possible and to provide free alternatives to commercial software.
I laugh my ass off everytime a BSD zealot claims it is "superior" to the GNU licenses.
Why? Two different licences with entirely different goals. They both happen to use open source models to acheive their goals. One isn't any better than the other, they're suited to different purposes.
Out of curiosity, do you also "laugh your ass off" when someone chosses a Robertson-head screwdriver over a Phillips-head? Or when someone chooses a Honda over a semi-truck? I suppose the Apache, Mozilla, and Perl licences also give you fits of giggles?
For what it's worth, I personally would rather spend my spare time contributing to GPL projects than BSD projects, but I acknowledge that the BSD licence serves a very important purpose and that internet might be a far messier pile of protocols today had it not been for the excellent BSD network stack implementation.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also... some fun reading on -ise vs. -ize. Being Canadian, I have very little doubt that colour, favour, neighbour, centre, litre, metre, judgement, and travelling are the correct spellings, but due to our mixed French-English heritage, I accept that when it comes to -ize vs. -ise, there's probably (like perl) more than one way to do it.
For me, en français, c'est une organisation, but in English it's an organization... but -ise does look prettier, I'll give it that;-)
Recent studies have suggested that symptoms include marked increases in spelling and grammatical errors, citing confusion of near-homonyms in particular.
The fact that everyone handles money and internet access is widespread is irrelevant. The fact that certain segments of the population more frequently use the internet, particularly for leisure (such as punching in serial numbers) is.
Honestly, if you believe that the segment of the population composed of 50-year-old alcoholics and drug addicts on the street is as likely to use a computer as the body of 16 year old high-school students, I the burden of proof is on you.
And if we agree that one group is less likely to be represented in this study, then its results are not representative of the general population. We all have $1 bills and access to the internet; we don't all punch in the serial numbers at the same rate -- hence they are not generally representative.
Amusignly, I'm also a licenced OmniWeb (sometimes) user. Until Safari came along, it was without question, the best browser by far for Mac OS X. When Safari picked up tabs, I switched and stayed away until about the OW 5.0 timeframe. Since then I switch between OmniWeb and Safari on and off and keep my bookmarks in del.icio.us.
I also think it's fantastic that the OmniGroup releases their basic frameworks as open source. Very nice gesture to the community.
Chances are higher they have a computer, which I would suspect means their income is a bit above average. Also the fact that they are entering serial numbers would indicate they have money... and spare time.
Not saying your average hobo doesn't go to the library and enter his cash in every day on the public access terminal, just that significant chunks of the population are missing here, specifically chunks lacking money.
Typically less affluent areas tend to be higher in disease as well, which may make the data less relevant to this study as well -- though I haven't RTFA so I'm not going to try to argue that.
While I agree that China is not a democracy in the same way that those of us in Western Democracies use the word, it's entirely possibly to have a democracy with only one party.
Most Communist states have democratic elections in which each community elects its local representatives who form government. The idea is that a bottom-up system forms where you elect those who will best represent your region and fight for your interests.
Now, when an authoritarian system system forms wherein power is held at the top and the local representatives are essentially puppets who cannot truly represent their region, then pragmatically speaking, your vote was worthless and it is not a democracy.
I would make the point that this has nothing to do with the number of parties though. How much power does your local congress-person have over the federal government? How much difference is there, really, between the Democrats and the Republicans in the US?
That all said, when a government understands that no matter what it does, it'll be re-elected, it's probably more likely to devolve into an authoritarian structure that is not a democracy.
I have not been to China, so I can't judge well for myself how their system really is on the ground. I have spent time in Cuba though, which did give me a different perspective of communism. I would call Cuba a democracy of a different kind. I wouldn't want to live there, but it did open my eyes as to how much the US and Cuban governments are alike when it comes to propaganda, jingoism and lies.
For reference I'm neither American nor Cuban, but a Canadian living in Japan (who spent time living in Mexico and travelling throughout Latin America). I don't know if that makes me unbiased or more biased. I wrote about my impressions at the time. Despite the write-up, I was kissing the ground when I got back to Mexico.:)
While I agree with you that I'd like to see more arrests of this type, corporate-funded bounties are not the answer.
The practical consequences of such a scheme are that the police will have added incentive to pursue crimes/criminals with bounties than those without. This would give large corporations undue influence over the police, who are supposed to be acting in the interests of the community at large.
The logical extreme of this is the privatisation of the police and a 'user pay' scheme, where if you want the burglary of your home investigated, you pay a fee. Services go to the highest bidder, and chances are the multi-national corporations can afford more than you can.
Consider if you'd like your police funded by the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Microsoft, and the banks.
Not that I would enable it if I had kids. If they want to look at naked people, good for them. I don't understand how the same people who'll watch Saving Private Ryan or the latest Freddy movie with their kids will cry bloody murder when Janet Jackson's top comes off on blurry national TV.
Really, what this article is saying is that Apple is only making $450 per low-end iMac sold, based on their own estimates, which are most likely wrong.
Because the $898 worth of parts magically engineered themselves into a computer, set up an assembly line, and assembled themselves into iMacs, made the OS driver updates and general optimisations, and marketed themselves by hiring advertising firms and buying TV spots, then added themselves to the online store and transported themselves to the brick-and-mortar stores.;)
I know you realise this, but reading a lot of comments here, it seems most people don't.
I believe your question was "let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 or something comparable in power and flexibility on Mac OS X" not "let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 on Mac OS X".
While SQL Server has default admin tools that are among the most user-friendly available, admin tools do not an RDBMS make. SQL Server's graphical query modelling tools, for example produce horrificly bad SQL. There are tons of equally friendly tools out there for all of the platforms I listed, sometimes free, sometimes not.
Look, I've worked for years with SQL Server, and have decent experience with both Oracle and Sybase. In the end the friendly tools will never output particularly good SQL and you'll always be dealing with SQL at some level. There are a ton of 3rd party tools (eg. dbartisan/rapidsql from embarcadero) available in this arena -- not just the ones that ship with the app.
As for mysql, it has very legitimate uses -- sites like slashdot and free tools like wordpress do just fine with it. It doesn't have full SQL92 support, and it's certainly not a full-featured general-purpose RDBMS, but if you're dealing with a very simple problem, and it fits your needs, it's a simple, lightweight solution.
And PostgresSQL is great but poorly documented, and without any of the features of SQL Server.
I'll assume you meant "many", since the above statement is patently false. Given that, what feature is it you need that SQL Server has and PostgreSQL doesn't?
You made no statement as to what your actual requirements were aside from being comparable in power and flexibility to SQL Server 2000 -- Oracle, Sybase, and Postgres all fit that bill. MySQL may or may not depending on your needs (which now appear to include cost and whether a big monopoly corporation provides you with tools for it (choose Microsoft, Sybase, Oracle, IBM) which anyone can choose to use or avoid).
If you need.net integration (you never mentioned this originally) then your question should have been "can it run Microsoft SQL Server?" since no other platform has the same level of support for this. If it's XML support, Oracle is fine. PostgreSQL may or may not meet your needs.
So I ask again, what is it you need that SQL Server has that the others don't? There are legitimate requirements that only SQL Server currently supports. That said, no RDBMS is the best solution for every job; and there's no one best all-round general solution. It all depends on your needs.
I would agree that anyone going out of their way to make changes to their software that limit the freedoms of its users to make it more saleable to the Chinese government is definitely worthy of sanctioning at home.
That said, limiting the freedom with which Free Software can be copied is not an acceptable solution; the point is that it should be free. If the Chinese government wants to spend their own time adding censorware to the Linux distributions they use, that's their perogative. I'm against it, but I'm not going to dictate how anyone modifies Linux for their own use. If Red Hat were building custom versions for China, I'd oppose it as much as I oppose what Microsoft is up to.
Rather than try to prevent countries living under repressive regimes from using linux, we should be fighting to expose their citizens to such freedoms as much as possible. We would be far better served by focusing on getting un-hampered versions available to them and ensuring that anonymising/routing software is available so that they can route around government firewalls, avoid snooping, and have access to the same information the rest of us have without being detected by their own government.
The goal is to eliminate repression of free speech. Taking away what little exposure to freedom these people have is not the answer; it will achieve the opposite.
But let me know when I can download thousands of pirated games that run on Mac OS X.
Also, someone please let him know when he can download thousands of anti-spyware/trojan/virus packages to run with his pirated games.
Or let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 or something comparable in power and flexibility on Mac OS X.
Ummm... okay, here's Oracle for OS X. Or maybe you prefer Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server? Or if you want something free, but enterprise quality there's PostgreSQL. Or something free, flexible and fast that's decent enough to power slashdot there's mysql.
SQL Server is decent for small to medium-sized databases, but you're not going to be handling tables mesured in gigabytes in SQL server like in sybase, db2, or oracle. Not unless Microsoft really puts a lot more work into SQL Server and the memory management of Windows itself.
And one more article that seems to indicate it will be possible with Vista, but that XP would require some tricks to get working. I would suspect that if Linux does not yet support it, it will very quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this not just a publicity stunt? If they have so many artists, they should start their own label.
Yeah that's a good idea... these people Sarah McLaghlan, the Barenaked Ladies, and others could start a label and call it Nettwerk or something. Except it seems like some other chick names Sarah McLachlan and some other band called the Barenaked Ladies already did.
You might want to advise the wait staff that he takes no sugar tonight in his coffee, no sugar tonight in his tea.
If you're a windows developer who's been wanting to port your software and grab the Mac market, but haven't been willing to buy two computers, isn't this the ultimate developer machine?
We have this thing in the US called States Rights. [blah blah blah blah]. Perhaps you should try to understand this concept and why it came about before you bash the US.
That's all fine and good, except you totally failed to actually address the question. What is wrong with paper ballots? They work fine in Canada and many other countries, and they seem to historically have fewer problems than other alternatives.
That in mind, to address your two main concerns:
1. You point out that they can't be mandated at a federal level. I'm confused as to how this is relevant. At some level a system has to be chosen. The parent is questioning the value of choosing an e-voting system regardless of the level of government.
2. You seem quite upset that the parent poster criticised the US. I really enjoyed the bits about your forefathers, and the bits about the state and federal governments not getting along; very passionate -- good effort all round! I guess the only bit I found disconcerting was that the parent poster never mentioned or implied anything about the US, just about electronic voting systems... which can be found in many countries.
I'm Canadian, and I'm not. Jerk.
At ID 3800, I'm sure he remembers more than me, but I still have nostalgic bad memories of the naked petrified/natalie portman/hot grits guy, the penis-bird dude, the goatse craze, the "let's make the page massively wide" guy just off the top of my head.
If I remember correctly the mysterious space character you sometimes get if you paste a URL into a post as text is his fault. Though in terms of eliminating trolls, Jon Katz being discontinued was probably the most effective fix yet.
The Darwin/FreeBSD thing drives me nuts as well. I've got Linux, OS X, and FreeBSD boxes at home and they each have a totally different flavour. Darwin definitely feels a little more BSD-ish than Linux-ish, and the userland is pretty FreeBSD, but the kernel, the IO system, the init system (in general the entire experience) is different!
It'd be pretty great to get some GPL and BSD zealots together in a room and let them duke it out. Could be a decent spectator sport actually.
Beyold the power of the BSD license, aka. the "please steal this open source code and put it in proprietary software" license.
Most BSD developers specifically choose BSD because of this feature of the licence. They believe in the dissemination of the highest quality code possible without the additional limitation that any project you integrate it into also be open source/free software. I suspect that most would re-word your statement above as "please take this open source code and do whatever you'd like with it, including put it in proprietary software; it means better quality code, which means happier customers, less tech support, and more time spent on developing the features specific to your own software"
GPL advocates, on the other hand, do not see the requirement of any derived work also being GPL as a limitation, but as a benefit. Their goal is to make free software as widespread as possible and to provide free alternatives to commercial software.
I laugh my ass off everytime a BSD zealot claims it is "superior" to the GNU licenses.
Why? Two different licences with entirely different goals. They both happen to use open source models to acheive their goals. One isn't any better than the other, they're suited to different purposes.
Out of curiosity, do you also "laugh your ass off" when someone chosses a Robertson-head screwdriver over a Phillips-head? Or when someone chooses a Honda over a semi-truck? I suppose the Apache, Mozilla, and Perl licences also give you fits of giggles?
For what it's worth, I personally would rather spend my spare time contributing to GPL projects than BSD projects, but I acknowledge that the BSD licence serves a very important purpose and that internet might be a far messier pile of protocols today had it not been for the excellent BSD network stack implementation.
[sic]
;-)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Also... some fun reading on -ise vs. -ize. Being Canadian, I have very little doubt that colour, favour, neighbour, centre, litre, metre, judgement, and travelling are the correct spellings, but due to our mixed French-English heritage, I accept that when it comes to -ize vs. -ise, there's probably (like perl) more than one way to do it.
For me, en français, c'est une organisation, but in English it's an organization... but -ise does look prettier, I'll give it that
So what affect does it have on humans?
Recent studies have suggested that symptoms include marked increases in spelling and grammatical errors, citing confusion of near-homonyms in particular.
Perhaps you misconstrued my point. I'm not American, and I have just as little faith in the Democrats as I do the Republicans.
(a) That it's disgusting that Oprah ran lies on her show; and
(b) That the US government would be dumb enough to base policy on what they saw on Oprah
The fact that everyone handles money and internet access is widespread is irrelevant. The fact that certain segments of the population more frequently use the internet, particularly for leisure (such as punching in serial numbers) is.
Honestly, if you believe that the segment of the population composed of 50-year-old alcoholics and drug addicts on the street is as likely to use a computer as the body of 16 year old high-school students, I the burden of proof is on you.
And if we agree that one group is less likely to be represented in this study, then its results are not representative of the general population. We all have $1 bills and access to the internet; we don't all punch in the serial numbers at the same rate -- hence they are not generally representative.
Amusignly, I'm also a licenced OmniWeb (sometimes) user. Until Safari came along, it was without question, the best browser by far for Mac OS X. When Safari picked up tabs, I switched and stayed away until about the OW 5.0 timeframe. Since then I switch between OmniWeb and Safari on and off and keep my bookmarks in del.icio.us.
I also think it's fantastic that the OmniGroup releases their basic frameworks as open source. Very nice gesture to the community.
Or download a nightly build of Safari with SVG (for those who're not afraid of beta).
Chances are higher they have a computer, which I would suspect means their income is a bit above average. Also the fact that they are entering serial numbers would indicate they have money... and spare time.
Not saying your average hobo doesn't go to the library and enter his cash in every day on the public access terminal, just that significant chunks of the population are missing here, specifically chunks lacking money.
Typically less affluent areas tend to be higher in disease as well, which may make the data less relevant to this study as well -- though I haven't RTFA so I'm not going to try to argue that.
One political party in power is not Democracy.
:)
While I agree that China is not a democracy in the same way that those of us in Western Democracies use the word, it's entirely possibly to have a democracy with only one party.
Most Communist states have democratic elections in which each community elects its local representatives who form government. The idea is that a bottom-up system forms where you elect those who will best represent your region and fight for your interests.
Now, when an authoritarian system system forms wherein power is held at the top and the local representatives are essentially puppets who cannot truly represent their region, then pragmatically speaking, your vote was worthless and it is not a democracy.
I would make the point that this has nothing to do with the number of parties though. How much power does your local congress-person have over the federal government? How much difference is there, really, between the Democrats and the Republicans in the US?
That all said, when a government understands that no matter what it does, it'll be re-elected, it's probably more likely to devolve into an authoritarian structure that is not a democracy.
I have not been to China, so I can't judge well for myself how their system really is on the ground. I have spent time in Cuba though, which did give me a different perspective of communism. I would call Cuba a democracy of a different kind. I wouldn't want to live there, but it did open my eyes as to how much the US and Cuban governments are alike when it comes to propaganda, jingoism and lies.
For reference I'm neither American nor Cuban, but a Canadian living in Japan (who spent time living in Mexico and travelling throughout Latin America). I don't know if that makes me unbiased or more biased. I wrote about my impressions at the time. Despite the write-up, I was kissing the ground when I got back to Mexico.
While I agree with you that I'd like to see more arrests of this type, corporate-funded bounties are not the answer.
The practical consequences of such a scheme are that the police will have added incentive to pursue crimes/criminals with bounties than those without. This would give large corporations undue influence over the police, who are supposed to be acting in the interests of the community at large.
The logical extreme of this is the privatisation of the police and a 'user pay' scheme, where if you want the burglary of your home investigated, you pay a fee. Services go to the highest bidder, and chances are the multi-national corporations can afford more than you can.
Consider if you'd like your police funded by the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Microsoft, and the banks.
Microsoft and Apple should just build in a complete censorship layer into their OS that can be attributed to a certain user level account.
You're thinking something along the lines of Mac OS X parental controls?
Not that I would enable it if I had kids. If they want to look at naked people, good for them. I don't understand how the same people who'll watch Saving Private Ryan or the latest Freddy movie with their kids will cry bloody murder when Janet Jackson's top comes off on blurry national TV.
Really, what this article is saying is that Apple is only making $450 per low-end iMac sold, based on their own estimates, which are most likely wrong.
;)
Because the $898 worth of parts magically engineered themselves into a computer, set up an assembly line, and assembled themselves into iMacs, made the OS driver updates and general optimisations, and marketed themselves by hiring advertising firms and buying TV spots, then added themselves to the online store and transported themselves to the brick-and-mortar stores.
I know you realise this, but reading a lot of comments here, it seems most people don't.
I believe your question was "let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 or something comparable in power and flexibility on Mac OS X" not "let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 on Mac OS X".
.net integration (you never mentioned this originally) then your question should have been "can it run Microsoft SQL Server?" since no other platform has the same level of support for this. If it's XML support, Oracle is fine. PostgreSQL may or may not meet your needs.
While SQL Server has default admin tools that are among the most user-friendly available, admin tools do not an RDBMS make. SQL Server's graphical query modelling tools, for example produce horrificly bad SQL. There are tons of equally friendly tools out there for all of the platforms I listed, sometimes free, sometimes not.
Look, I've worked for years with SQL Server, and have decent experience with both Oracle and Sybase. In the end the friendly tools will never output particularly good SQL and you'll always be dealing with SQL at some level. There are a ton of 3rd party tools (eg. dbartisan/rapidsql from embarcadero) available in this arena -- not just the ones that ship with the app.
As for mysql, it has very legitimate uses -- sites like slashdot and free tools like wordpress do just fine with it. It doesn't have full SQL92 support, and it's certainly not a full-featured general-purpose RDBMS, but if you're dealing with a very simple problem, and it fits your needs, it's a simple, lightweight solution.
And PostgresSQL is great but poorly documented, and without any of the features of SQL Server.
I'll assume you meant "many", since the above statement is patently false. Given that, what feature is it you need that SQL Server has and PostgreSQL doesn't?
You made no statement as to what your actual requirements were aside from being comparable in power and flexibility to SQL Server 2000 -- Oracle, Sybase, and Postgres all fit that bill. MySQL may or may not depending on your needs (which now appear to include cost and whether a big monopoly corporation provides you with tools for it (choose Microsoft, Sybase, Oracle, IBM) which anyone can choose to use or avoid).
If you need
So I ask again, what is it you need that SQL Server has that the others don't? There are legitimate requirements that only SQL Server currently supports. That said, no RDBMS is the best solution for every job; and there's no one best all-round general solution. It all depends on your needs.
I would agree that anyone going out of their way to make changes to their software that limit the freedoms of its users to make it more saleable to the Chinese government is definitely worthy of sanctioning at home.
That said, limiting the freedom with which Free Software can be copied is not an acceptable solution; the point is that it should be free. If the Chinese government wants to spend their own time adding censorware to the Linux distributions they use, that's their perogative. I'm against it, but I'm not going to dictate how anyone modifies Linux for their own use. If Red Hat were building custom versions for China, I'd oppose it as much as I oppose what Microsoft is up to.
Rather than try to prevent countries living under repressive regimes from using linux, we should be fighting to expose their citizens to such freedoms as much as possible. We would be far better served by focusing on getting un-hampered versions available to them and ensuring that anonymising/routing software is available so that they can route around government firewalls, avoid snooping, and have access to the same information the rest of us have without being detected by their own government.
The goal is to eliminate repression of free speech. Taking away what little exposure to freedom these people have is not the answer; it will achieve the opposite.
But let me know when I can download thousands of pirated games that run on Mac OS X.
Also, someone please let him know when he can download thousands of anti-spyware/trojan/virus packages to run with his pirated games.
Or let me know when I can run SQL Server 2000 or something comparable in power and flexibility on Mac OS X.
Ummm... okay, here's Oracle for OS X. Or maybe you prefer Sybase Adaptive Enterprise Server? Or if you want something free, but enterprise quality there's PostgreSQL. Or something free, flexible and fast that's decent enough to power slashdot there's mysql.
SQL Server is decent for small to medium-sized databases, but you're not going to be handling tables mesured in gigabytes in SQL server like in sybase, db2, or oracle. Not unless Microsoft really puts a lot more work into SQL Server and the memory management of Windows itself.
Oh man... Galactic Cannibal, if that isn't a totally wicked band name, I don't know what is.
And one more article that seems to indicate it will be possible with Vista, but that XP would require some tricks to get working. I would suspect that if Linux does not yet support it, it will very quickly.