Yes, Apple switched too quickly. When IBM announced their "GHz Fairy" technology, Intel and AMD shut down their R&D labs and admitted that they have no future plans whatsoever to enhance their own chips. Yes, by switching to a company whose current products are no matching for the CPUs that IBM may or may not release next year or the year after, they have truly doomed themselves.
I respect RMS because he's nearly always right. Yes, he's loud. Yes, he's obnoxious. Neither of those change the fact that almost everything he warns us about turns out to be true. That alone is why I listen to what he has to say even if I don't always like the way he delivers the message. Sooner or later his predictions are almost guaranteed to happen, so you might as well hear him out and start preparing.
Even if you don't agree with RMS, surely you can agree that he keeps the issue of Free-versus-Open in the spotlight, and that a discussion of their relative merits is a good thing. It's OK - if unlikely - to really analyze what it is he's saying and come to different conclusions. Ignore him at your own peril, though.
No Support - what happens if your developers run into an issue with the product or your production system goes offline. Who do you call for support?
Whoever you paid for your commercial MySQL or PostgreSQL support contract, of course.
There are many Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 specialists on the market.
So your contention is that a high rate of turnover in the support of those applications is good?
As an early adopter of software you take on the risk while others (including competitors) learn from your mistakes.
MySQL and PostgreSQL were publically released 11 and 17 years ago, respectively. If that's your idea of "early adopter", then may I also suggest other hip new technologies you might wish to investigate, such as TCP/IP, VGA graphics, and transistor-based memory?
The problem with FoxPro is that people come to depend on it, and start building their internal applications around it without realizing that it doesn't scale.
I don't mean that it doesn't scale well, but that it simply doesn't scale at all. Since it's not a database, but a single-threaded client app that reads and writes files off a fileserver instead of making remote queries, doubling the number of users doubles the amount of network bandwidth you have to use. If twenty people are accessing the same 1GB "table" concurrently, then heaven help you all.
My company depends on a FoxPro app. Without it, we go out of business. I was hired to write a web application to allow customers to access our FoxPro data, and ended up having to write a hideously complicated n-tier system where we have one VMWare image for each concurrent query we wish to be able to run. Yeah, you read that right: since the FoxPro client libraries are single-threaded, if we want the ability to execute 10 simultaneous queries, then we have to run 10 load-balanced VMWare images to service them.
So, I eventually wrote a system to copy the table files onto my local system, use a modified version of the xbase package to render them in PostgreSQL's "copy from" format, and them load them onto a pgsql server. It's more complicated in some ways than the native FoxPro query setup, but the upshot is that our queries now run between 100 and 1,000 times faster on average. Yes, those numbers are from actual profiling runs. Some queries that used to take 60 seconds (!!!) now run in a few milliseconds.
If FoxPro is the answer, then the question needs to be taken out and shot. It has our company in a stranglehold and we're doing everything we can to get out from under this twisted nightmare from hell. I honestly think you'd be better off writing applications in Excel, and that's not something I'd say lightly.
3.5) original author releases Happy Open Device 2000 and abandons Happy Open Device 1000 to the scrapheap of obsolete hardware
If they're so antisocial that they won't even allow you to fix the hardware you own, what makes you think they'll suddenly be warm and fuzzy and give you free patches to download?
Honestly, people. How many times do we have to learn this lesson before it sticks?
I guess you were never too keen on the term "ideal", were you?
Yes, ideal DRM is impossible, blah, blah, and so on. Yes, I know that. The idea behind hypothetical scenarios is that you can discuss things that don't exist to weigh their pros and cons without having to actually build the thing.
Thank you. Linus dislikes IP issues, which is fine, but tends to ignore them until they come back to haunt him and everyone around him, which is not. I don't like toll roads, but that doesn't mean I can just drive through tollgates like they don't exist.
RMS deals with issues by confronting them. Linus deals with the same issues by avoiding them. And yet, it's fashionable to laugh at RMS for being out of touch with reality. Go figure.
Because to the extent that your computer is an extension of your mind, DRM is a "restraining bolt" that determines what you can or cannot say or think about,
I think you (and the people who modded him "Funny", too) misunderstood him. Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) can be a bad tool for companies to use against their customers, but could actually have legitimate uses for those customers themselves. I think companies would like the ability to use Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) so that, say, their customer database couldn't be copied off of their LAN. A doctor's office would like the ability to keep medical data from being accessible to non-employees. Etc., etc., etc.
GPG is an extremely handy tool, but it only implements security, not Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). I can send my accountant an encrypted accounts file, for example, but have to trust that he won't redistribute it. With ideal DRM, I don't have to trust him.
Still, I'm not pro-DRM by any means. Just sayin' that I can see applications where you and I could benefit from it, too.
PS: I plan to keeping referring to DRM as Digital Restrictions Management until Google sees it my way. Any assistance is appreciated.
Just because you wrote it doesn't mean the manufacturer has to give you provisions to alter it on their machine.
You misspelled "your", as in "my machine that I bought and paid for".
Your argument seems to be, then, that the hardware manufacturers have the right to use my software as a selling point for their devices, then restrict my ability to use my own software as I see fit. To be honest, any manufacturer that avoids GPLv3ed software because it wouldn't allow them to do that is a hopeless sociopath that we're better off without.
Look at how well Linux has done in embedded devices (the slug as well as many other Linksys appliances.)
Exactly. They made the WRT54G an open system, with the exception of some device drivers that they probably couldn't legally release, and it's sold them hundreds of thousands of units. They are a prime example of a company who understands that openness translates directly into sales, and I congratulate them for it.
It's been long postulated on Slashdot, by a multitude of posters, that an effective way to remove spam is by setting up a payment system.
It's also been long postulated on Slashdot, by a multitude of posters, that the Earth is flat. Stupid ideas don't magically become un-stupid simply because enough people believe in them.
There are many effective anti-spam measures out there, today, that we can use. I even wrote an article about how I eliminated spam from my system with near-zero risk of false positives. And yet, a major ISP like AOL can only focus on the idea of making spam a profit center.
From now on, every time an AOL user complains to me about spam, I'm going to tell them that AOL probably got paid for it, and ask them if they got a check for their share of the profit. If they think it's fair to levy a one-sided tax on me for no legitimate reason, then I guess I can play that game, too. Call it "JSG's Gullibility Cuts Both Ways Surcharge".
I guess that means that we're all dogs to our herd/clan/mob bosses?
First, don't work too hard to build a local idiom into a full-blown analogy. Second, yeah, pretty much.
Any man who believes that freedom of speech places no responsibility on the speaker should try telling their wife or girlfriend that she has a fat butt. Before you do, though, remember that the jury probably won't convict her, regardless of whether you're expected to make a full recovery.
Not in this case. I think the correct word for costing your company more money and good will then you're worth, resulting in a firing, is "example".
Losing your job because your office building burned down and your employer doesn't want to rebuild is tragic. Losing your job because you don't have the common sense God gives a dog is just plain stupid and not really something worth pitying.
What's worse is that he doesn't sound like he learned a single thing from the episode.
Using it with Rosetta may be "passable"...it's just not going to cut it in the long run.
My wife has an iMac, but we don't follow the details that closely. Have you actually seen Photoshop under emulation, or are you just speculating that it will be unusable for you? You may be 100% correct, but I don't know enough about it to make the call.
tent is supposed to be a guarantee - the due diligence should have been done before the patent was granted. Now, no business based on a patent has any reason to believe that their business is safe, or that they will recoup the costs of their investment until the courts decide so.
One the one hand, that's just wrong. I somehow doubt this is the first set of patents to ever be invalidated.
On the other hand, W00T! Software patents were just marked as really, really stupidly risky things to base a business model on. Hallelujah! I hope this precedent gets used and abused far and wide, since it looks like one giant step closer to software patents being discarded altogether. Oh happy day!
If the military distributed their binaries as part of the software controlling a missile. Would they have to include source code in the warhead?
Yeah, I got the joke and laughed. You raise a good question, though: doesn't this mean we can no longer sell our weapons without distributing the full source code as well? I mean, when we sell a radar unit right now, I imagine we only give them the hardware (but don't have any real idea, to be honest). Do we necessarily want to give away the complete source code to the control software as well?
I could see arguments on both side of that. I guess if they're running a pure-propietary application on a Linux system, then they're not obligated to hand over the code to that part. If they do use GPL components in the control application, though, then that's a bit different. Of course, you can replace a lot of GNU stuff with BSD equivalents, so maybe that's not a big deal either.
Anyone else thought this through for more than the two minutes I spent on it?
I went to prison for 2 years in 2002 of a 12 year sentence on a crime I didn't commit.
From "The Shawsank Redemption":
Red: Why'd you do it?
Andy: I didn't, since you ask.
Red: Hell, you'll fit right in, then. Everyone's innocent in here, don't you know that? Heywood! What are you in for, boy?
Heywood: Didn't do it! Lawyer [screwed] me!
Red: See?
A friendly word of advice from someone in "regular society": you'll get a lot farther by saying "I did something stupid and won't do it again" than by pleading innocence. Whether you actually are is completely immaterial. The fact is that almost no one will believe an ex-con who claims they didn't do it, but many people will give a second chance to someone who screwed up and accepts it.
When I asked him what law I was breaking, he refused to answer, but demanded my ID and told me I was now going to have a "record with the FBI."
Mistake one: giving him your personal information. First, you're under no obligation to identify yourself. Second, how do you know he was a federal agent? That seems like a good way for a ID thief to get detailed information from a tourist they'll never see again.
More spam is stopped because of RBLs now than any other method.
And your point is? With IPv6, every end customer would receive a/64 (or is it/48? I forget) netblock. Instead of querying the DNSBL for a single IP address, like we do now with IPv4, you'd query it for the 64-bit network prefix (ignoring the host bits at the end). I'm not sure why that would be an insurmountable problem.
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
on
Hard Drive Memory Lane
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· Score: 1
Why couldn't you use a 2400 baud modem?
Re:Scoffing Posts Are From Those With Sort/No Memo
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Hard Drive Memory Lane
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· Score: 1
I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!
Are you sure it was that bad? I remember benchmarking the floppy in my Amiga 1000 in 1985 at 20KB/s, or 1MB/50s. I realize that "in the '80s" includes 1980, and a lot changed between then and '85, but I still wouldn't think my floppy drive would have been twice as fast as your hard drive.
Of course, the Amiga's floppy was about roughly 70 times faster than that of the Commodore 64 it replaced (20KB/s versus 300B/s (!!!)), so anything's possible.
If you're comfortable with the fact that every email you send, every mailing list you sign up for, every love note your MOTAS sends you, is living in your boss's hardware, then sure, why not.
Even if you love your job, though, consider that you may still want to gripe about it to a friend sometime. Would you be comfortable explaining to your boss why your complaints were sent out through his system?
Keep your own server. It's good practice, in several senses.
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Yes, Apple switched too quickly. When IBM announced their "GHz Fairy" technology, Intel and AMD shut down their R&D labs and admitted that they have no future plans whatsoever to enhance their own chips. Yes, by switching to a company whose current products are no matching for the CPUs that IBM may or may not release next year or the year after, they have truly doomed themselves.
Even if you don't agree with RMS, surely you can agree that he keeps the issue of Free-versus-Open in the spotlight, and that a discussion of their relative merits is a good thing. It's OK - if unlikely - to really analyze what it is he's saying and come to different conclusions. Ignore him at your own peril, though.
Whoever you paid for your commercial MySQL or PostgreSQL support contract, of course.
There are many Oracle, SQL Server and DB2 specialists on the market.
So your contention is that a high rate of turnover in the support of those applications is good?
As an early adopter of software you take on the risk while others (including competitors) learn from your mistakes.
MySQL and PostgreSQL were publically released 11 and 17 years ago, respectively. If that's your idea of "early adopter", then may I also suggest other hip new technologies you might wish to investigate, such as TCP/IP, VGA graphics, and transistor-based memory?
You misspelled "hell no".
The problem with FoxPro is that people come to depend on it, and start building their internal applications around it without realizing that it doesn't scale.
I don't mean that it doesn't scale well, but that it simply doesn't scale at all. Since it's not a database, but a single-threaded client app that reads and writes files off a fileserver instead of making remote queries, doubling the number of users doubles the amount of network bandwidth you have to use. If twenty people are accessing the same 1GB "table" concurrently, then heaven help you all.
My company depends on a FoxPro app. Without it, we go out of business. I was hired to write a web application to allow customers to access our FoxPro data, and ended up having to write a hideously complicated n-tier system where we have one VMWare image for each concurrent query we wish to be able to run. Yeah, you read that right: since the FoxPro client libraries are single-threaded, if we want the ability to execute 10 simultaneous queries, then we have to run 10 load-balanced VMWare images to service them.
So, I eventually wrote a system to copy the table files onto my local system, use a modified version of the xbase package to render them in PostgreSQL's "copy from" format, and them load them onto a pgsql server. It's more complicated in some ways than the native FoxPro query setup, but the upshot is that our queries now run between 100 and 1,000 times faster on average. Yes, those numbers are from actual profiling runs. Some queries that used to take 60 seconds (!!!) now run in a few milliseconds.
If FoxPro is the answer, then the question needs to be taken out and shot. It has our company in a stranglehold and we're doing everything we can to get out from under this twisted nightmare from hell. I honestly think you'd be better off writing applications in Excel, and that's not something I'd say lightly.
3.5) original author releases Happy Open Device 2000 and abandons Happy Open Device 1000 to the scrapheap of obsolete hardware
If they're so antisocial that they won't even allow you to fix the hardware you own, what makes you think they'll suddenly be warm and fuzzy and give you free patches to download?
Honestly, people. How many times do we have to learn this lesson before it sticks?
Don't worry: some of us got it. You're not the only one who can't figure out what the heck Martin Fink is trying (or not!) to tell us.
Yes, ideal DRM is impossible, blah, blah, and so on. Yes, I know that. The idea behind hypothetical scenarios is that you can discuss things that don't exist to weigh their pros and cons without having to actually build the thing.
RMS deals with issues by confronting them. Linus deals with the same issues by avoiding them. And yet, it's fashionable to laugh at RMS for being out of touch with reality. Go figure.
I think you (and the people who modded him "Funny", too) misunderstood him. Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) can be a bad tool for companies to use against their customers, but could actually have legitimate uses for those customers themselves. I think companies would like the ability to use Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) so that, say, their customer database couldn't be copied off of their LAN. A doctor's office would like the ability to keep medical data from being accessible to non-employees. Etc., etc., etc.
GPG is an extremely handy tool, but it only implements security, not Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). I can send my accountant an encrypted accounts file, for example, but have to trust that he won't redistribute it. With ideal DRM, I don't have to trust him.
Still, I'm not pro-DRM by any means. Just sayin' that I can see applications where you and I could benefit from it, too.
PS: I plan to keeping referring to DRM as Digital Restrictions Management until Google sees it my way. Any assistance is appreciated.
You misspelled "your", as in "my machine that I bought and paid for".
Your argument seems to be, then, that the hardware manufacturers have the right to use my software as a selling point for their devices, then restrict my ability to use my own software as I see fit. To be honest, any manufacturer that avoids GPLv3ed software because it wouldn't allow them to do that is a hopeless sociopath that we're better off without.
Look at how well Linux has done in embedded devices (the slug as well as many other Linksys appliances.)
Exactly. They made the WRT54G an open system, with the exception of some device drivers that they probably couldn't legally release, and it's sold them hundreds of thousands of units. They are a prime example of a company who understands that openness translates directly into sales, and I congratulate them for it.
It's also been long postulated on Slashdot, by a multitude of posters, that the Earth is flat. Stupid ideas don't magically become un-stupid simply because enough people believe in them.
There are many effective anti-spam measures out there, today, that we can use. I even wrote an article about how I eliminated spam from my system with near-zero risk of false positives. And yet, a major ISP like AOL can only focus on the idea of making spam a profit center.
From now on, every time an AOL user complains to me about spam, I'm going to tell them that AOL probably got paid for it, and ask them if they got a check for their share of the profit. If they think it's fair to levy a one-sided tax on me for no legitimate reason, then I guess I can play that game, too. Call it "JSG's Gullibility Cuts Both Ways Surcharge".
First, don't work too hard to build a local idiom into a full-blown analogy. Second, yeah, pretty much.
Any man who believes that freedom of speech places no responsibility on the speaker should try telling their wife or girlfriend that she has a fat butt. Before you do, though, remember that the jury probably won't convict her, regardless of whether you're expected to make a full recovery.
Not in this case. I think the correct word for costing your company more money and good will then you're worth, resulting in a firing, is "example".
Losing your job because your office building burned down and your employer doesn't want to rebuild is tragic. Losing your job because you don't have the common sense God gives a dog is just plain stupid and not really something worth pitying.
What's worse is that he doesn't sound like he learned a single thing from the episode.
My wife has an iMac, but we don't follow the details that closely. Have you actually seen Photoshop under emulation, or are you just speculating that it will be unusable for you? You may be 100% correct, but I don't know enough about it to make the call.
One the one hand, that's just wrong. I somehow doubt this is the first set of patents to ever be invalidated.
On the other hand, W00T! Software patents were just marked as really, really stupidly risky things to base a business model on. Hallelujah! I hope this precedent gets used and abused far and wide, since it looks like one giant step closer to software patents being discarded altogether. Oh happy day!
Yeah, I got the joke and laughed. You raise a good question, though: doesn't this mean we can no longer sell our weapons without distributing the full source code as well? I mean, when we sell a radar unit right now, I imagine we only give them the hardware (but don't have any real idea, to be honest). Do we necessarily want to give away the complete source code to the control software as well?
I could see arguments on both side of that. I guess if they're running a pure-propietary application on a Linux system, then they're not obligated to hand over the code to that part. If they do use GPL components in the control application, though, then that's a bit different. Of course, you can replace a lot of GNU stuff with BSD equivalents, so maybe that's not a big deal either.
Anyone else thought this through for more than the two minutes I spent on it?
No, but they darn well better not remove the "Download my source!" link from the web interface.
I was just Googling for the same information, and it seems that the CDC agrees with you (page 5, table 3).
From "The Shawsank Redemption":
Red: Why'd you do it?
Andy: I didn't, since you ask.
Red: Hell, you'll fit right in, then. Everyone's innocent in here, don't you know that? Heywood! What are you in for, boy?
Heywood: Didn't do it! Lawyer [screwed] me!
Red: See?
A friendly word of advice from someone in "regular society": you'll get a lot farther by saying "I did something stupid and won't do it again" than by pleading innocence. Whether you actually are is completely immaterial. The fact is that almost no one will believe an ex-con who claims they didn't do it, but many people will give a second chance to someone who screwed up and accepts it.
Mistake one: giving him your personal information. First, you're under no obligation to identify yourself. Second, how do you know he was a federal agent? That seems like a good way for a ID thief to get detailed information from a tourist they'll never see again.
Put four of these in a spare box. Price before tax+shipping: $480 for over a terrabyte of storage.
And your point is? With IPv6, every end customer would receive a /64 (or is it /48? I forget) netblock. Instead of querying the DNSBL for a single IP address, like we do now with IPv4, you'd query it for the 64-bit network prefix (ignoring the host bits at the end). I'm not sure why that would be an insurmountable problem.
Why couldn't you use a 2400 baud modem?
Are you sure it was that bad? I remember benchmarking the floppy in my Amiga 1000 in 1985 at 20KB/s, or 1MB/50s. I realize that "in the '80s" includes 1980, and a lot changed between then and '85, but I still wouldn't think my floppy drive would have been twice as fast as your hard drive.
Of course, the Amiga's floppy was about roughly 70 times faster than that of the Commodore 64 it replaced (20KB/s versus 300B/s (!!!)), so anything's possible.
Even if you love your job, though, consider that you may still want to gripe about it to a friend sometime. Would you be comfortable explaining to your boss why your complaints were sent out through his system?
Keep your own server. It's good practice, in several senses.