In the same way that I have $50,000 stolen from me every year, you know.
Someone stole $20,000 from me and diverted the funds to the IRS. Someone else stole $10,000 from me and diverted it to Safeway, Albertson's, and Bob's IGA. And I lost another $20,000 to miscellaneous companies in my area.
The culprit? My wife and that damned checkbook.
I'm sure the SPA finds billions and billions of dollars of pirated software. You know. Microsoft pirates McAfee, McAfee pirates Norton, and Norton pirates Microsoft. It's just a good ol' boy network funding each others' habits and getting lawmakers to pass laws requiring those of us outside the little ring of buddies to fund their five-week Hawaii management seminars.
It isn't news anymore. This is one of a thousand stories that tell the story of a slow decline. The United States has neared its completion of Project Mainland China, wherein the Constitution is replaced by Mao's little red book.
I don't see anyone really denying that this is where we're going. The sad part is that the mainstream really doesn't see it as a problem. We're starting to get used to the idea that hey, maybe this Fascist Communism thing really is the ticket for us. Just so long as we don't use the words Fascist and Communist. Say safety and War on Terrorism, and everyone thinks it's just nifty keen.
Don't mod this post. It's just (albeit accurate) nihilistic sarcastic bitter cynicism, and deserves neither a 0 nor better than a 1.
Most people probably don't know who Steve Baker is. He's been in the Linux 3D community for AGES. He started out as a big-time contributor to FlightGear, the open-source and relatively good flight simulator. However, he was working for a big commercial outfit that eventually decided his participation in the project was a conflict of interest, and he had to drop out.
He began developing a 3D library for "toy games," but this was just an elaborate ruse. In fact, the 3D library was quite useful for (you guessed it) the FlightGear project.
Since then, his publically-stated stance of developing this 3D library for games got some notice from game developers that took him seriously, and in the vein of "self-fulfilling prophecies" his libraries became quite good at their officially-stated purpose.
Steve Baker is one of the little heroes in my own personal list of little heroes, which would include a whole lot of names no-one knows despite the fact that they're extremely important in the open source world.
Thanks for the link. I knew I'd heard of another RDBMS, but couldn't remember it.
I don't know anyone who uses Firebird, and I've never used it myself. History says it came from Interbase which, again, I've never used nor known anyone to use. So it's a complete unknown to me. Not saying this is a statistically-relevent fact, I'm sure a lot of people have used it, but I started out my career in a Sybase shop and moved to an Oracle career path, currently hovering somewhere between Oracle and PostgreSQL.
If I were recommending a database to a customer, the known quantity of PostgreSQL would admittedly make me extremely wary of recommending anything else. For me, until proven otherwise, I'll probably recommend:
0. Ultra-simple SQL needs, mostly read-only? MySQL 1. Simple SQL needs? (Pure datastore but transactional nature): PostgreSQL 2. Simple datastore w/ Stored procedures? PostgreSQL 3. Complex RDBMS needs? Perhaps Oracle if you can stand the pain, but Sybase will save you some cash, and PostgreSQL might still be up to task. 4. Ultra-Complex RDBMS needs (replication and database clusters)? Oracle.
This is all OLTP. When you start talking about OLAP, you gotta start thinking all over again.
Sybase definitely, if you use 11.0.3.3. But keep in mind that 11.9.2 and 12.0 aren't free (as in beer or speech) except for development. For production, you need to purchase it.
Sybase 11.0.3.3, which many would say is production level (although lacking row-level locking...) is free (as in beer and only on Linux) for all usage, but you don't get source code, and I'm fairly certain it's not too well-maintained anymore.
And since you're the guy who mostly turned me on to PostgreSQL in the production arena, I prob'ly'll just defer to you on that point. No matter how you slice it, you've got the source code and you can get commercial support. Nice.
MySQL is not a threat to the bigwigs, because they compete in different realms. MySQL is a threat to filesystem-storage and BerkeleyDB.
PostgreSQL is a threat to the bigwigs, however.
This is not to say it won't change. MySQL apparently is trying to implement features that would make it compete with real relational databases, but last I heard, views weren't on the list, so I'm not holding my breath.
Other OSS projects that may be a big threat include SAP DB (used to be Adabas D) and... uh... right. There you go. Reply if you're a real DBA and think there's another competitor in the space of true relational RDBMSs. Hint: If you think MySQL could be on the list, you're not thinking of industrial strength databases.
Congress is really between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the Constitution of our United States says copyright can't be forever. On the other hand, Disney is giving many members lots of cash and nubile young fluffers to make their jobs less dreary.
They have an obligation to pass laws for their paying constituents, but the highest law of the land (Constitution) says they can't do it.
So they have to play this game whereby they pretend they're doing something good for the people of the United States when in fact they're loser lawmakers taking bribes.
On top of all that, they have to maintain a thin sense of professionality so people won't just vote someone else in the next election.
You gotta really feel sorry for those guys. What a tough job. I could never be a bottom-feeding liar for a living, personally.
My (ex) bosses contantly reminded me of how much time I saved them because they could give me a very high-level task (make me a schema that does this, and work with the Java guys so their apps can use it), and I do it... well.
I'm glad to see CEOs saving $10,000 per year to get someone that costs them $30,000 per year in lost productivity, because soon I'll be in a new company, and the CEOs I'm talking about will be the CEOs of my competitors.
If you want to be a scripter, but don't get no respect, perhaps you need to find the job that fits your skills. As a DBA, I find that employers always specify that I must know shell scripting and something else along the lines of Perl.
So I'm a BASH and Perl guru. I have to be not only to get my job done, but also to be employable and to get the respect a DBA gets.
Technology like this does have a GOOD purpose as well as negative uses. This could be a really useful office tool.
Well, I'm just glad that a company with a great track record for using technology for GOOD purposes is the one pushing this onto the consumers.
I have the greatest confidence that this won't be used to lock out OpenOffice users, won't be used to make sure Evolution users can't read the email sent to them, and won't be used to ensure Outlook users can't read the email of non-Outlook-generated emails.
Because there is no history of Microsoft doing exactly these things.
Right?
I hate to be blunt, but don't be so naive. This will not be a good thing.
I had a history professor who loved giving quizzes with off-the-wall "bonus questions" at the end.
The quizzes were given orally.
Question #9: "What is a lager" (most people, myself included, thought he meant "logger" and were confused)
Question #10: "What is a beer brewed in the bottom of the barrel?
It was pretty clear to even non-beer-drinkers like myself (I'm probably more ignorant of beer terminology than most nuns) what was meant by the two questions at this point, and those of us with minimal reasoning skills got the two questions right. It was funny to listen to the whiners that said the questions were unfair.
Except for the fact that I have nothing to do with the VLC project, other than a user that realises it's better than almost any other media player out there. And VLC is a Free (as in speech) GPL project, and doesn't have any budget for astroturfing.
It's very sad that some moderator actually listened to you and did mod the post off-topic, because it's very relevent. VLC is very, very nice.
Except, as I pointed out in my post, it doesn't handle the vast variety of formats mplayer does, so you still can't whack mplayer entirely.
VLC is unquestionably a far better DVD player, if for no other reason, it's not skinnable and just uses your GUI widgets the way an application should.
Everyone knows VNC. It is great. Some don't know that you can run VNC as a java application, so that you can use most any web-enabled workstation to interact with your servers. For a start, here's the Debian package: VNC Java.
Some odd, but possibly interesting artwork, I'll give you fullsize images plus XCF files (equivalent to Photoshop PSD files but for Linux/GIMP) to distribute. Also, I've got a bunch of cool-looking fractals I've generated. You can d/l the parameter file and use Sterling Fractal to generate say 8,000x8,000 JPEGs of these things yourself.
I know, it's not quite like MPEG2 video or anything, but it'll be a couple gig if you play it right.
Also, if you go buy a nice 5 megapixel camera and start taking thousands of pictures, you can fill up a few gig there. My personal picture collection is something like 30GB, and that's with a 3 megapixel camera.
I love it. The space shuttle landing goes to shit in a deadly fashion, and the FBI steps in to let us know:
FBI spokeswoman Angela Bell also said there was no indication of terrorism and that the FBI would have a minor role in the investigation, mainly helping collect evidence.
Well, thanks, FBI. You just get in there and make a reference to terrorism every chance you get, and we'll fall in line like sheep.
Jesus Christ, this is a tragedy, not a political stunt for you and your cronies.
I'll vote for that. I'm sure most of the readers haven't heard of Liquid War. It's a 2D realtime strategy game that is so incredibly simple in concept (probably took a long week to code up and get working) but very, very fun.
Unfortunately, the game's strategy is closer to Go than Chess, so the computer is a pretty lame player.
But fear not! Liquid War has network play! So you can try your hand against other human players, if you can find anyone who's heard of it and is therefore willing to play against you.
Anyone in the Sacramento greater metro area, goto my homepage, find my email, and email me. We'll do a Liquidwar LAN party.
Re:Longtime GNOMEr Ready to Try
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
Why do you have to replace Evolution/Galeon?
Because the whole point is to get a consistent-looking desktop. It's been a while since I ran KDE, so I may be speaking of ignorance, but KDE apps and GNOME apps look different. Galeon and Evolution are both GTK1 (ie: GNOME) apps.
I know it's a minor thing, but seeing three different widget sets (Mozilla, GTK1, GTK2 this year, GTK1, Mozilla, and Motif a few years back... etc etc etc) gets annoying after a few years.
It's a way to stream video content from a server and view it on a client, but as a nice side-effect, it's a DVDCSS-enabled DVD player, and a pretty good one at that. It's not skinnable, it uses your built-in OS widgets, so it's not as ugly as all the other media players. It looks like it belongs on your desktop with all your other apps.
Mplayer seems to have much better DivX/MJPEG/blah/blah support than VLC, however, so you can't just go whacking mplayer from your HDD. Sorry.
Longtime GNOMEr Ready to Try
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been a long-time GNOME user, and I'm just about ready to try something else.
I recently made some new themes for my GNOME2 desktop and was stymied by my GTK1 applications that... well... just wouldn't cooperate.
I'd previously made some GTK1 themes that more-or-less matched the GTK2 ones, but I cannot figure out how to convince GTK1 apps to use certain themes under my GNOME2 desktop environment. It's completely opaque.
There are so many apps I use that are still GTK1 (Galeon, Evolution, GAIM, etc etc etc) that my desktop is just plain ugly right now.
I'm getting fed up, and am trying to find something that will give me a nice even look & feel across applications. My main fear is that KMail and Konquerer won't be good Evolution/Galeon replacements.
In the end, I'll probably go OS/X, but I really hope it doesn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
In the same way that I have $50,000 stolen from me every year, you know.
Someone stole $20,000 from me and diverted the funds to the IRS. Someone else stole $10,000 from me and diverted it to Safeway, Albertson's, and Bob's IGA. And I lost another $20,000 to miscellaneous companies in my area.
The culprit? My wife and that damned checkbook.
I'm sure the SPA finds billions and billions of dollars of pirated software. You know. Microsoft pirates McAfee, McAfee pirates Norton, and Norton pirates Microsoft. It's just a good ol' boy network funding each others' habits and getting lawmakers to pass laws requiring those of us outside the little ring of buddies to fund their five-week Hawaii management seminars.
Wrong.
It isn't news anymore. This is one of a thousand stories that tell the story of a slow decline. The United States has neared its completion of Project Mainland China, wherein the Constitution is replaced by Mao's little red book.
I don't see anyone really denying that this is where we're going. The sad part is that the mainstream really doesn't see it as a problem. We're starting to get used to the idea that hey, maybe this Fascist Communism thing really is the ticket for us. Just so long as we don't use the words Fascist and Communist. Say safety and War on Terrorism, and everyone thinks it's just nifty keen.
Don't mod this post. It's just (albeit accurate) nihilistic sarcastic bitter cynicism, and deserves neither a 0 nor better than a 1.
Much the same way as the amoeba is one step closer to mankind than a virus.
Most people probably don't know who Steve Baker is. He's been in the Linux 3D community for AGES. He started out as a big-time contributor to FlightGear, the open-source and relatively good flight simulator. However, he was working for a big commercial outfit that eventually decided his participation in the project was a conflict of interest, and he had to drop out.
He began developing a 3D library for "toy games," but this was just an elaborate ruse. In fact, the 3D library was quite useful for (you guessed it) the FlightGear project.
Since then, his publically-stated stance of developing this 3D library for games got some notice from game developers that took him seriously, and in the vein of "self-fulfilling prophecies" his libraries became quite good at their officially-stated purpose.
Steve Baker is one of the little heroes in my own personal list of little heroes, which would include a whole lot of names no-one knows despite the fact that they're extremely important in the open source world.
(sigh) Thanks, Steve et al.
re: firebird.sf.net.
Thanks for the link. I knew I'd heard of another RDBMS, but couldn't remember it.
I don't know anyone who uses Firebird, and I've never used it myself. History says it came from Interbase which, again, I've never used nor known anyone to use. So it's a complete unknown to me. Not saying this is a statistically-relevent fact, I'm sure a lot of people have used it, but I started out my career in a Sybase shop and moved to an Oracle career path, currently hovering somewhere between Oracle and PostgreSQL.
If I were recommending a database to a customer, the known quantity of PostgreSQL would admittedly make me extremely wary of recommending anything else. For me, until proven otherwise, I'll probably recommend:
0. Ultra-simple SQL needs, mostly read-only? MySQL
1. Simple SQL needs? (Pure datastore but transactional nature): PostgreSQL
2. Simple datastore w/ Stored procedures? PostgreSQL
3. Complex RDBMS needs? Perhaps Oracle if you can stand the pain, but Sybase will save you some cash, and PostgreSQL might still be up to task.
4. Ultra-Complex RDBMS needs (replication and database clusters)? Oracle.
This is all OLTP. When you start talking about OLAP, you gotta start thinking all over again.
WasterDave, eh? Heh. Okay. I know you!
Sybase definitely, if you use 11.0.3.3. But keep in mind that 11.9.2 and 12.0 aren't free (as in beer or speech) except for development. For production, you need to purchase it.
Sybase 11.0.3.3, which many would say is production level (although lacking row-level locking...) is free (as in beer and only on Linux) for all usage, but you don't get source code, and I'm fairly certain it's not too well-maintained anymore.
And since you're the guy who mostly turned me on to PostgreSQL in the production arena, I prob'ly'll just defer to you on that point. No matter how you slice it, you've got the source code and you can get commercial support. Nice.
MySQL is not a threat to the bigwigs, because they compete in different realms. MySQL is a threat to filesystem-storage and BerkeleyDB.
PostgreSQL is a threat to the bigwigs, however.
This is not to say it won't change. MySQL apparently is trying to implement features that would make it compete with real relational databases, but last I heard, views weren't on the list, so I'm not holding my breath.
Other OSS projects that may be a big threat include SAP DB (used to be Adabas D) and... uh... right. There you go. Reply if you're a real DBA and think there's another competitor in the space of true relational RDBMSs. Hint: If you think MySQL could be on the list, you're not thinking of industrial strength databases.
Congress is really between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, the Constitution of our United States says copyright can't be forever. On the other hand, Disney is giving many members lots of cash and nubile young fluffers to make their jobs less dreary.
They have an obligation to pass laws for their paying constituents, but the highest law of the land (Constitution) says they can't do it.
So they have to play this game whereby they pretend they're doing something good for the people of the United States when in fact they're loser lawmakers taking bribes.
On top of all that, they have to maintain a thin sense of professionality so people won't just vote someone else in the next election.
You gotta really feel sorry for those guys. What a tough job. I could never be a bottom-feeding liar for a living, personally.
I'm a database administrator.
My (ex) bosses contantly reminded me of how much time I saved them because they could give me a very high-level task (make me a schema that does this, and work with the Java guys so their apps can use it), and I do it... well.
I'm glad to see CEOs saving $10,000 per year to get someone that costs them $30,000 per year in lost productivity, because soon I'll be in a new company, and the CEOs I'm talking about will be the CEOs of my competitors.
Problems with Dell products and support may not be universal, but they are definitely not unusual.
Before I get my head bitten off by the literalists, I know this is not from Nethack. Geeez. Let an old man have his fun.
You are lost in a twisty maze of Hack and Rogue versions, all the same. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
If you want to be a scripter, but don't get no respect, perhaps you need to find the job that fits your skills. As a DBA, I find that employers always specify that I must know shell scripting and something else along the lines of Perl.
So I'm a BASH and Perl guru. I have to be not only to get my job done, but also to be employable and to get the respect a DBA gets.
I have the greatest confidence that this won't be used to lock out OpenOffice users, won't be used to make sure Evolution users can't read the email sent to them, and won't be used to ensure Outlook users can't read the email of non-Outlook-generated emails.
Because there is no history of Microsoft doing exactly these things.
Right?
I hate to be blunt, but don't be so naive. This will not be a good thing.
I had a history professor who loved giving quizzes with off-the-wall "bonus questions" at the end.
The quizzes were given orally.
Question #9: "What is a lager" (most people, myself included, thought he meant "logger" and were confused)
Question #10: "What is a beer brewed in the bottom of the barrel?
It was pretty clear to even non-beer-drinkers like myself (I'm probably more ignorant of beer terminology than most nuns) what was meant by the two questions at this point, and those of us with minimal reasoning skills got the two questions right. It was funny to listen to the whiners that said the questions were unfair.
Except for the fact that I have nothing to do with the VLC project, other than a user that realises it's better than almost any other media player out there. And VLC is a Free (as in speech) GPL project, and doesn't have any budget for astroturfing.
It's very sad that some moderator actually listened to you and did mod the post off-topic, because it's very relevent. VLC is very, very nice.
Except, as I pointed out in my post, it doesn't handle the vast variety of formats mplayer does, so you still can't whack mplayer entirely.
VLC is unquestionably a far better DVD player, if for no other reason, it's not skinnable and just uses your GUI widgets the way an application should.
Everyone knows VNC. It is great. Some don't know that you can run VNC as a java application, so that you can use most any web-enabled workstation to interact with your servers. For a start, here's the Debian package: VNC Java.
Also, there is a Java SSH client here: Java SSH Client.
Good stuff, and both have saved me a number of times in the past.
Some odd, but possibly interesting artwork, I'll give you fullsize images plus XCF files (equivalent to Photoshop PSD files but for Linux/GIMP) to distribute. Also, I've got a bunch of cool-looking fractals I've generated. You can d/l the parameter file and use Sterling Fractal to generate say 8,000x8,000 JPEGs of these things yourself.
I know, it's not quite like MPEG2 video or anything, but it'll be a couple gig if you play it right.
Also, if you go buy a nice 5 megapixel camera and start taking thousands of pictures, you can fill up a few gig there. My personal picture collection is something like 30GB, and that's with a 3 megapixel camera.
Well, thanks, FBI. You just get in there and make a reference to terrorism every chance you get, and we'll fall in line like sheep.
Jesus Christ, this is a tragedy, not a political stunt for you and your cronies.
I'll vote for that. I'm sure most of the readers haven't heard of Liquid War. It's a 2D realtime strategy game that is so incredibly simple in concept (probably took a long week to code up and get working) but very, very fun.
Unfortunately, the game's strategy is closer to Go than Chess, so the computer is a pretty lame player.
But fear not! Liquid War has network play! So you can try your hand against other human players, if you can find anyone who's heard of it and is therefore willing to play against you.
Anyone in the Sacramento greater metro area, goto my homepage, find my email, and email me. We'll do a Liquidwar LAN party.
Because the whole point is to get a consistent-looking desktop. It's been a while since I ran KDE, so I may be speaking of ignorance, but KDE apps and GNOME apps look different. Galeon and Evolution are both GTK1 (ie: GNOME) apps.
I know it's a minor thing, but seeing three different widget sets (Mozilla, GTK1, GTK2 this year, GTK1, Mozilla, and Motif a few years back... etc etc etc) gets annoying after a few years.
Not VNC, VLC. Videolan Client.
It's a way to stream video content from a server and view it on a client, but as a nice side-effect, it's a DVDCSS-enabled DVD player, and a pretty good one at that. It's not skinnable, it uses your built-in OS widgets, so it's not as ugly as all the other media players. It looks like it belongs on your desktop with all your other apps.
Mplayer seems to have much better DivX/MJPEG/blah/blah support than VLC, however, so you can't just go whacking mplayer from your HDD. Sorry.
I've been a long-time GNOME user, and I'm just about ready to try something else.
I recently made some new themes for my GNOME2 desktop and was stymied by my GTK1 applications that... well... just wouldn't cooperate.
I'd previously made some GTK1 themes that more-or-less matched the GTK2 ones, but I cannot figure out how to convince GTK1 apps to use certain themes under my GNOME2 desktop environment. It's completely opaque.
There are so many apps I use that are still GTK1 (Galeon, Evolution, GAIM, etc etc etc) that my desktop is just plain ugly right now.
I'm getting fed up, and am trying to find something that will give me a nice even look & feel across applications. My main fear is that KMail and Konquerer won't be good Evolution/Galeon replacements.
In the end, I'll probably go OS/X, but I really hope it doesn't happen.