I'm sure they will, but even more certain that you and I will never see it. This is Larry Ellison we're talking about. Nothing personal against the guy (I've never used his products or competed against him), but he's not exactly known for his community spirit or cooperating with the other guys.
Sleepycat has more installations than all the rest of them put together, probably by at least an order of magnitude. I mean, as long as we're throwing about useless metrics...
There was a time before the brainwashing when it was considered patently obvious that you get better product when you pay people to build it.
I get paid quite a bit to write Free Software, as do a lot of my friends. The teenage hacker in his mom's basement is terribly '90s; you really need to update your cliches.
Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux.
Yes, Longhorn '08 will probably be spiffy compared to Linux '05. I don't plan to be running Linux '05 then.
Given the fact a *fucking lot* of Open Source applications are copying ideas from Windows, there must be some clever heads at Microsoft.
I know! Just like Apache copied IIS, Sendmail copied Exchange, BSD copied their old network utilities, and Mozilla copied IE. I tell you, it's amazing they ever let us have any of their new toys, since we're just going to steal them right out from under 'em.
What, like Cuba? [...] Sometimes freedom is more important than money..
Were you trying for the Ironic Statement Of The Day trophy, or was that unintentionally idiotic? Yeah, Miami is packed with people who paddled from the People's Paradise because of their irrational desire to obtain less freedom.
I don't think its right to sue a family into oblivion for this. That would be economic waste, in my opinion.
If "economic waste" is the best reason you can think of why it's not right to sue children into oblivion, then your law school desperately needs to upgrade their philosophy curriculum.
Why should Microsoft build applications for an operating system directly competing with their own?
Because "Office for Linux" probably would have prevented "OpenOffice for Linux" from happening, or at least staved it off for another few years. Honestly, do you think Sun would've put much effort into StarOffice way back when if "Office for Solaris" had existed and been compatible with the Windows version?
But no, they got short-term greedy and catalyzed the development of what I think is their single biggest threat. Now that OpenOffice has gotten good enough to allow Unix folk to interact with their Windows-using counterparts, those same Windows users are starting to show interest.
If you migrate 95% of your company from IE/Office to Firefox/OpenOffice, how much incentive is their to stick with Windows? I hope Microsoft is satisfied with the money they've already made, because it seems to me like they're doing everything they can to ruin their future.
SQLite has no advertising clause. postgresql does.
I call your bluff. Here's the entire, unedited PostgreSQL license (source their website):
PostgreSQL Database Management System
(formerly known as Postgres, then as Postgres95)
Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2005, The PostgreSQL Global Development Group
Portions Copyright (c) 1994, The Regents of the University of California
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph and the following two paragraphs appear in all copies.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE AND ITS DOCUMENTATION, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREUNDER IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS.
Where's this advertising clause you speak of? Or did you hear "BSD license" and drag out a decade-old complaint that's long since been addressed? That's as bad as people complaining that MySQL doesn't support transactions, except that's true under certain circumstances whereas your criticism is completely unfounded.
the sqlite license is even less restrictive than postgresql's and so there's less risk.
I'll grant you that public domain is freer than the BSD license. Pray tell, however, what the BSD license would prevent you from doing that public domain would allow, short of claiming that you wrote it?
Total downtime: maybe 10 seconds. The "-L" argument to dump makes a filesystem snapshot, and runs the backup against that snapshot. It's probably not the ideal you were hoping for but it'd certainly help your availability.
OpenBSD: I like it a lot, and love it for security-biased applications, but it still has issues in my opinion. All that secure goodness comes at a price, such as incredibly poor performance on certain hardware configurations when compared to other OSes (such as taking a good 10 minutes from poweron to being logged into Xfce on my aging laptop, rather than 2-3 minutes with Gentoo on the same machine). Is the tradeoff worthwhile? Depending on the intended use, quite possibly so. It's still something to consider.
NetBSD: Nice OS. However, it just "feels strange" to me in ways that I can't really quantify. For example, according to everything I've read, you rebuild the system by crosscompiling it to your own platform (and if I'm wrong, please enlighten me). It always gave me the subconscious impression that it tries really, really hard to prove how cross-platform it is by never really feeling completely at home on any of them. Justified? I don't know. That's just how it seemed to this outsider.
FreeBSD: Nirvana. It's not as portable as NetBSD, but it feels tightly integrated with the underlying hardware. It's not necessarily as secure as OpenBSD, but it adopts many/most of their best practices. The end result is a system that seems to be nearly as secure as OpenBSD in practice, and screamingly fast once you get it pointed in the right direction. I love it, love it, love it, and hope it continues to walk the lines between NetBSD's cleanliness, OpenBSD's correctness, and its own sheer horsepower.
I know I used a lot of hedge words like "seems", "feels", and "impression". That's mainly because I think all three systems are excellent technical accomplishments and I'm not about to commit to saying that one is definitely better than the others. Overall, though, FreeBSD is right for me.
will probably work. It overwrites every available block on your drive with random data, then deallocates them. If anyone knows why that wouldn't work, I'd be interested in hearing it.
Assuming that it does actually do the trick, it might be even better than wiping a single file. Since the whole drive would be filled with random data, there wouldn't be any conspicuous wiped blocks sitting in the middle of an otherwise normal looking filesystem.
My understanding (I haven't programmed in Python much) is that it lacks a lot of the features that make lisp So. Damn. Cool.
However, it does have a lot of the features that many of us liked about Lisp, but in an easier-to-use package (in the opinion of some). Example: trivially ease introspection and metaprogramming. Functions as first-class objects. Native, fast list operations. Elegance.
Maybe "spiritual descendents" was too strong; "strongly influenced by it" might have been better.
Naughty Dog used a variant to write "Jak and Daxter", an extremely popular game for Playstation 2. Many more people use spiritual descendents like Python.
I disagree. The raw numbers were guessable, sure: Moore's Law provides a pretty reasonable guess for lots of things besides transistor count. I don't think more than a handful of people could have guessed the implications, though. I don't remember hearing any prediction about anything resembling modern P2P networks. No sci-fi story I read ever thought of a bookstore that only exists as a warehouse, a shipping company, and a few computers. Futuristic ideas about instant messaging looked a lot more like email or Usenet. I just finished re-reading "Neuromancer", where Gibson's hero was bummed that his ex-girlfriend had stolen three megabytes of RAM.
I predict that 15 years from now I'll have a computer that's a thousand times bigger and faster (and much cheaper) than the black-box Dell sitting next to my desk. I have no idea whatsoever what I'll be using it for, though.
So, if you can hang in there for another 10 years, (don't spend all of your time in the French Quarter!), this will be the increase in human life expectancy.
I don't know, man. Looks like he pretty much nailed that one.
Rewind your brain 15 years and imagine what you'd think if I told you:
Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you're using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you're using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.
That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities - along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you're using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.
There will be a good chance that your computer's operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.
You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.
Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.
Right, because demand for services never increases and population never increases.
So your theory is that the average immigrant to the area brings in less than the average amount of new taxable income and property? Because if that's not true, then doubling the population of an area means at least double the tax base, and if that were the case, then the same tax rate should provide the same number of service dollars per capita.
But that's still not as good as find's -exec option on its own, because find can put the filenames into any part of the command, instead of only at the end.
The main problem with that is that it fork()s once for each file it processes; "-exec rm" 100,000 files and it spawns "rm" 100,000 times. Situations like that are a huge win for xargs, since it would only spawn 100,000/n times, where n is usually much larger than 1.
Here's how to solve your problem (safely!) with xargs:
The "-J{}" says "use {} as the placeholder". A quick test in my home directory generated a single 471 file long command line, which would operate much faster than executing cp 471 times.
That's great. Now, create a directory called " " (empty space). Inside that, create a directory called " -rf " ("-rf" with an empty space on either side). Inside that, create a file named " " (yet another empty space).
Now, watch in horror as find prints "./ -rf/", which it passes dutifully to "rm -f". Since xargs by default passes each word as an individual argument, that expands to:
rm -f./ -rf/
Hope you weren't running as root! The moral of this story is to never, never! use find/xargs without the "-print0" option whenever the command you're executing is destructive. "ls" is probably OK. "rm" definitely isn't.
Swete deal for everyone except the citgizens of San Francisco.
So, how much money would SF get if Lucas finally gave up on the rampant local governmental stupidity and moved to a saner locale instead? Seems like a few percent of something is better than zero percent of nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure they will, but even more certain that you and I will never see it. This is Larry Ellison we're talking about. Nothing personal against the guy (I've never used his products or competed against him), but he's not exactly known for his community spirit or cooperating with the other guys.
Sleepycat has more installations than all the rest of them put together, probably by at least an order of magnitude. I mean, as long as we're throwing about useless metrics...
...says the guy who lists "LaTeX" as a skill on his resume. I guess they don't teach irony in the technical writing classes at Caltech East.
Actually, Emacs is at 0.21.4. At some point in the distant past, they said "ah, forget it" and dropped the leading zero.
I think Debian's taking the opposite tack where they just update the second number every few years as time permits.
I get paid quite a bit to write Free Software, as do a lot of my friends. The teenage hacker in his mom's basement is terribly '90s; you really need to update your cliches.
Even if Microsoft gets Longhorn out in 2008, it will still beat linux.
Yes, Longhorn '08 will probably be spiffy compared to Linux '05. I don't plan to be running Linux '05 then.
I know! Just like Apache copied IIS, Sendmail copied Exchange, BSD copied their old network utilities, and Mozilla copied IE. I tell you, it's amazing they ever let us have any of their new toys, since we're just going to steal them right out from under 'em.
Were you trying for the Ironic Statement Of The Day trophy, or was that unintentionally idiotic? Yeah, Miami is packed with people who paddled from the People's Paradise because of their irrational desire to obtain less freedom.
If "economic waste" is the best reason you can think of why it's not right to sue children into oblivion, then your law school desperately needs to upgrade their philosophy curriculum.
Because "Office for Linux" probably would have prevented "OpenOffice for Linux" from happening, or at least staved it off for another few years. Honestly, do you think Sun would've put much effort into StarOffice way back when if "Office for Solaris" had existed and been compatible with the Windows version?
But no, they got short-term greedy and catalyzed the development of what I think is their single biggest threat. Now that OpenOffice has gotten good enough to allow Unix folk to interact with their Windows-using counterparts, those same Windows users are starting to show interest.
If you migrate 95% of your company from IE/Office to Firefox/OpenOffice, how much incentive is their to stick with Windows? I hope Microsoft is satisfied with the money they've already made, because it seems to me like they're doing everything they can to ruin their future.
I call your bluff. Here's the entire, unedited PostgreSQL license (source their website):
Where's this advertising clause you speak of? Or did you hear "BSD license" and drag out a decade-old complaint that's long since been addressed? That's as bad as people complaining that MySQL doesn't support transactions, except that's true under certain circumstances whereas your criticism is completely unfounded.
I'll grant you that public domain is freer than the BSD license. Pray tell, however, what the BSD license would prevent you from doing that public domain would allow, short of claiming that you wrote it?
A FreeBSD method:
Total downtime: maybe 10 seconds. The "-L" argument to dump makes a filesystem snapshot, and runs the backup against that snapshot. It's probably not the ideal you were hoping for but it'd certainly help your availability.
I'm not sure I agree. The directions for subscribing "root@localhost.localdomain" to their mailing list a few times were clear enough.
NetBSD: Nice OS. However, it just "feels strange" to me in ways that I can't really quantify. For example, according to everything I've read, you rebuild the system by crosscompiling it to your own platform (and if I'm wrong, please enlighten me). It always gave me the subconscious impression that it tries really, really hard to prove how cross-platform it is by never really feeling completely at home on any of them. Justified? I don't know. That's just how it seemed to this outsider.
FreeBSD: Nirvana. It's not as portable as NetBSD, but it feels tightly integrated with the underlying hardware. It's not necessarily as secure as OpenBSD, but it adopts many/most of their best practices. The end result is a system that seems to be nearly as secure as OpenBSD in practice, and screamingly fast once you get it pointed in the right direction. I love it, love it, love it, and hope it continues to walk the lines between NetBSD's cleanliness, OpenBSD's correctness, and its own sheer horsepower.
I know I used a lot of hedge words like "seems", "feels", and "impression". That's mainly because I think all three systems are excellent technical accomplishments and I'm not about to commit to saying that one is definitely better than the others. Overall, though, FreeBSD is right for me.
...as in beer, which makes it pretty much useless for many projects - such as a competitor integrating it into their OS.
Assuming that it does actually do the trick, it might be even better than wiping a single file. Since the whole drive would be filled with random data, there wouldn't be any conspicuous wiped blocks sitting in the middle of an otherwise normal looking filesystem.
However, it does have a lot of the features that many of us liked about Lisp, but in an easier-to-use package (in the opinion of some). Example: trivially ease introspection and metaprogramming. Functions as first-class objects. Native, fast list operations. Elegance.
Maybe "spiritual descendents" was too strong; "strongly influenced by it" might have been better.
Naughty Dog used a variant to write "Jak and Daxter", an extremely popular game for Playstation 2. Many more people use spiritual descendents like Python.
I disagree. The raw numbers were guessable, sure: Moore's Law provides a pretty reasonable guess for lots of things besides transistor count. I don't think more than a handful of people could have guessed the implications, though. I don't remember hearing any prediction about anything resembling modern P2P networks. No sci-fi story I read ever thought of a bookstore that only exists as a warehouse, a shipping company, and a few computers. Futuristic ideas about instant messaging looked a lot more like email or Usenet. I just finished re-reading "Neuromancer", where Gibson's hero was bummed that his ex-girlfriend had stolen three megabytes of RAM.
I predict that 15 years from now I'll have a computer that's a thousand times bigger and faster (and much cheaper) than the black-box Dell sitting next to my desk. I have no idea whatsoever what I'll be using it for, though.
I don't know, man. Looks like he pretty much nailed that one.
Your computer will be roughly 1,000 faster than what you're using today. You will probably have more than 4,000 times the memory, and a fast hard drive that stores over 100,000 times as much as that floppy you're using. You can buy these supercomputers for less than $500 at Wal-Mart.
That computer will be hooked into a self-directed network that was designed by the Department of Defense and various universities - along with nearly 400,000,000 other machines. Your connection to this network will be 10,000 times faster than the 300 baud modem you're using. In fact, it will be fast enough to download high-quality sound and video files in better than realtime.
There will be a good chance that your computer's operating system will have been written by a global team of volunteers, some of them paid by their employers to implement specific parts. Free copies of this system will be available for download over the hyperfast network. You will have free access to the tools required to make your own changes, should you want to.
You will use this mind-bendingly powerful system to view corporate sponsored, community driven messages boards where people will bitch about having to drive cars that are almost unimaginably luxurious compared to what you have today.
Remember: in some fields, the singularity has already happened.
So your theory is that the average immigrant to the area brings in less than the average amount of new taxable income and property? Because if that's not true, then doubling the population of an area means at least double the tax base, and if that were the case, then the same tax rate should provide the same number of service dollars per capita.
The main problem with that is that it fork()s once for each file it processes; "-exec rm" 100,000 files and it spawns "rm" 100,000 times. Situations like that are a huge win for xargs, since it would only spawn 100,000/n times, where n is usually much larger than 1.
Here's how to solve your problem (safely!) with xargs:
The "-J{}" says "use {} as the placeholder". A quick test in my home directory generated a single 471 file long command line, which would operate much faster than executing cp 471 times.
That's great. Now, create a directory called " " (empty space). Inside that, create a directory called " -rf " ("-rf" with an empty space on either side). Inside that, create a file named " " (yet another empty space). Now, watch in horror as find prints "./ -rf /", which it passes dutifully to "rm -f". Since xargs by default passes each word as an individual argument, that expands to:
Hope you weren't running as root! The moral of this story is to never, never! use find/xargs without the "-print0" option whenever the command you're executing is destructive. "ls" is probably OK. "rm" definitely isn't.
So, how much money would SF get if Lucas finally gave up on the rampant local governmental stupidity and moved to a saner locale instead? Seems like a few percent of something is better than zero percent of nothing.