This also shows you that most applications using dbs are not that complex - just updating one row at a time is fine.
This use case is most certainly not fine in mysql, though, due to its refusal to support anything more granular than full table locks.
It's difficult to take a platform seriously when the documentation makes silly rationalizations like "For large tables, table locking is MUCH better than row locking for most applications" which is about the silliest load of crap I've read since they pulled the paragraph from the mysql documentation that explained why you'd never want to use foreign keys (it was removed once mysql began supporting foreign keys).
MySQL's main feature seems to be its immense popular support among people who haven't used any of the alternatives. Not a very compelling endoresement, if you ask me.
You're missing the point. The start of this thread was puzzlement over why, exactly, mysql is so popular in this community when more complete and more robust alternatives exist (like postgresql).
There is no strong motivation to bring mysql's featureset up to the accepted standards for a sql server when we can all just run postgresql and have those features now, in a more mature and well-tested form.
I'm constantly puzzled by the enthusiasm and support shown for mysql and simultaneous aversion to postgresql because both attitudes are clearly not based on technical merit. And, to make matters even more confounding, mysql's popular support and user community rallied behind it long before it was actually capital-F "Free" in the religious sense. So, we can't even settle on mysql's popularity being dogmatic which would be an understandable reason.
I haven't seen anyone in this thread complain that mysql lacks features. I'm just seeing people wondering why we should be motivated to use a deficient product when better alternatives exist.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it deliciously ironic that out of one side of RMS's mouth he complains bitterly about people who refuse to accept his mandate on renaming "Linux" to "GNU/Linux" while also objecting to the old BSD advertising clause?
RMS and the FSF at one time objected to the BSD license for a clause that existed in the BSD license which required people who incorporated BSD code to include credit in any related advertising or documentation.
Personally, I think it's a lot less objectionable to be required to give credit to a resource in an advertisement than it is to giv the FSF authority to rename my projects at their discretion.
How is this any different than the advertising clause which RMS denounced?
Based in San Francisco, EFF is a donor-supported membership organization working to protect our fundamental rights regardless of technology; to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties. Among our various activities, EFF opposes misguided legislation, initiates and defends court cases preserving individuals' rights, launches global public campaigns, introduces leading edge proposals and papers, hosts frequent educational events, engages the press regularly, and publishes a comprehensive archive of digital civil liberties information at one of the most linked-to websites in the world.
And it needs our support to ensure that it is forever capable of supporting us against legislation that seeks to eliminate our rights and privacies.
It's a good deal as long as you get more than $75 worth of value from the benefits provided by carrying the card. The Amex Gold and Amex Platinum (which runs $300/year in annual fee) can return tenfold this amount in value to some people.
From what I've seen, the majority of perks and benefits associated with the premium American Express cards seem targeted at consumers who travel frequently. If you travel for work, these cards can be a great deal.
Not really. The difference here is that OSX gives you a robust, freebsd userland that's standard enough to build damn near everything you can throw down on the disk, including XFree86.
Sounds like the best of both worlds, if you ask me. A mature and mainstream GUI with a healthy number of commercial apps on top of that old, familiar Unix we all love.
Sounds to me like ripping all that out to run LinuxPPC is a downgrade, unless simply having the name "Linux" is the feature you most look for in an OS.
distributed.net can confirm that at least some part of what's being reported
is accurate. We were subpoenaed for information relating to Mr. McOwen's
participation in the RC5-64 project and supplied that information as
requested. We also spoke at length with representatives of the prosecution
to make sure they understood the actual impact of the dnetc software on
the machines and networks in question.
However, part of the subpoena restricts us from commenting on the details
of pending litigation. Especially since we do not know the details or
circumstances of the alleged activity, we do not want to do anything which
would endanger either party's position in this case. We trust that the
community understands our position in this matter.
In the more general sense, not commenting at all on the specifics of this
case, it is never a good idea to run the distributed.net client software
on computers you don't own or administrate. In the four years or so that
we've been in operation we've been dragged in to a handful of situations
where people have lost their jobs, positions, and scholarships by thinking
that forgiveness would be easier to obtain than permission. Nobody,
especially distributed.net, wants to see this happen.
It's important to keep in mind that the literal resource consumption of
the client (which is as close to "zero" as can be) is often not the only
factor important to a business. The existence of prize money with the
RC5-64 project is discomforting to many organizations. One tactic which
has proven to be very effective is to provide an affidavit that you will
donate any winnings to a charity if a client you installed on a company
or university machine finds the winning key. In many cases, this has been
key to a participant receiving permission to run the client on non-owned
resources.
Another frequent stumbling block is with service and support contracts
which prohibit non-certified software running on workstations or servers.
Your university or employer may risk losing support on their equipment if
software is installed that hasn't been explicitly mentioned in the support
agreements.
The bottom line is, always get permission first. It might not be as
difficult to get permission as you think. And if you can't get permission,
don't install the client.
We hope for a speedy and just resolution to this case, whatever that
outcome should be, and that we never have to be involved in another one.
While this may be true, what nerg343 apparantly doesn't realize is that he has no choice of license. He must release pitou under the GPL because pitou is a derivative of ucsim which is GPL'd code. When you use GPL'd code to build your product, you lose the freedom to choose your own license.
It is a violation of the GPL for pitou to not be released using the GPL.
According to the documentation, "pitou is based on an existing freeware GPL'ed 8052 simulator called ucsim". Clearly you can just demand a copy of the source code to pitou from the developer since they are forced to GPL their work since it's derived from an existing GPL'd codebase.
If you'd like a copy of the source, I suggest you simply email the author and demand it. They have no right to withhold the source since they've used GPL'd code.
(This is, of course, assuming that they haven't negotiated an alternative license from the author of the original project.)
To be more precise, you should say: "for customers that already paid them".
That's not precise or particularly accurate. TiVo does not sell the hardware, Sony and Phillips do. Customers who puchase a TiVo PVR have not paid TiVo until they subscribe to the service.
Kerberos work ok within a standard Kerberos environment? No?
And here's why you're clearly not an expert. The answer to your faux rhetorical question is "yes".
Microsoft's Kerb5 implementation in Win2K interoperates with MIT Kerberos quite beautifully.
Moreover, the additions which Microsoft made to the Kerb protocol were compliant with the protocol. Additionally, the changes made only serve to make Kerberos more useful in a windows environment. If you aren't running windows they offer no benefit so there's no incentive for non-windows shops to move away from the MIT (or other vendor's) kerberos implementation.
A key component of "embrace and extend" is that you have to encourage users to migrate to your implementation. None of the extensions Microsoft made to Kerberos do anything to encourage migration.
Why don't you leave the pontificating about Microsoft's use of Kerberos to those of us who actually use Kerberos in a mixed-platform environment?
So GPL is "free" if I'm willing to accept a creative redefinition of the word "free". And I can "use" GPL'd code as long as I'm willing to accept a creative limitation of the word "use".
Gee, what a deal.
You can play with these verbal gymnastics all day long and it won't conceal the fact that GPL'd code is inaccessable to developers unwilling or unable to GPL their own code. Whether this is a feature or a liability is the only difference that your personal perspective makes on the situation.
I'm content to let you appear in this discussion as the clever pundit if you'll let me continue being the one who is being correct.
Yes, it's quite clear that you do not understand patents and trademarks. Why did you feel the need to post to slashdot to tell us, though?
Nobody here cares that you don't understand this stuff. If it bothers you that much, go learn how patents and trademarks work.
Re:Little Known DOOM Feature
on
PanQuake
·
· Score: 4
I did this only once. I made the terrible mistake of using a motley collection of machines to host each of the three views. My main "front" view was my screaming 486DX50 box, but the left and right views were "whatever else I had lying around". I actually nicked the two other monitors from my office for the evening. The unfortunate side effect was that the differing frame rates for the three views was a wonderful way to revisit my last meal after about 10 minutes of play. It was nausea-inducing to the highest degree.
Still very cool to see and be able to do, no matter how unplayable my setup turned out to be.
It seems to me that if a boycott is ineffective because most people don't support it, then that's a great example of the system working exactly as it should.
I agree with you 100% that the DMCA far oversteps the boundaries and is a gross distortion of the concept of intellectual property law. Mainly in the way that it deprecates the concept of 'fair use' and blurs the line between code and data too much. Where you lose me is how this can be used as an argument against copyright/patent law in general.
People should have the right to control how the value they create is used. Metallica believes this, I believe this, and Richard Stallman obviously believes this. Copyright and Patents are the tools we use to protect this right, and they need to exist in some form or we'll lose this basic right.
The Big Myth of the FSF is that end users care at all about the source code of the software they use. End users want to use software that does what they need and does it well. The way to convince users that free and open is better is to ensure that free and open software is superior to the alternatives. If you truly believe that "The War will be won by convincing the end users" then why bother with trying to destroy the capacity to create proprietary software? If free and open is inherently superior, why not just build good software and render the proprietary stuff meaningless by comparison?
Convincing the end users is not a social, educational, or political battle. It's plain darwinism. You'll convince the end user that your methods are better the day those methods produce software which is more useful and beneficial to the user than the alternatives.
For example, in a world without copyright, all programs or algorithms written down in academic publications (or publications of any kind) would be available for all to use.
How is this any different from today, with copyright, where all programs and algorithims written down in academic publications (or publications of any kind) are available for all to use? If you invent an algorithm, and you wish to allow the whole world to use it, the existence or nonexistence of copyright has little effect on your world. Release the algorithim or program to the public domain and all can use it. Copyright doesn't impact your right to do that in any way.
I also disagree quite strongly with your statement that without copyright, protections against proprietary absorbtion would be lessened. Anyone who was around and using computers in the late 70s and early 80s knows exactly what the world of commercial software looks like in the absence of strong copyright protections. Before there was sufficient precedent to establish that software is protected adequately by copyright law, this was a subject of considerable debate and contention. Commercial software vendors, without adequate copyright protections, simply employ even more invasive and cumbersome mechanisims to protect their ability to profit from their labor. Hardware keys (dongles), obfuscation, enforceable end user license agreements, NDA's, and hardware copy protection all existed to fill in the vaccuum and made users' lives far more difficult before we gained adequate copyright protections for software.
A post-copyright world will not be friendly to users, or the FSF.
Bottom line -- if you want to give away the code and algorithims you produce, please do so. But stop with this twisting of logic that implies that your ability to make your code free is in any way helped by eliminating the protections available to those who wish to restrict the distribution of their code and algorithims. Especially since the FSF is one of these groups.
At least admit what you mean is that you want to be able to benefit from the hard work and labor of others no matter what their views on the matter are.
The GPL does nothing of the sort. The GPL is built on copyright protection, and relies heavily on those rights in order to exist. A world with no copyright protections would be very unfriendly to the GPL and the goals it was designed to promote.
Eliminating intellectual property protections would be equally (if not more) harmful to the FSF and the GPL license as it would be to commercial software publishers.
In the absence of copyright, source code would either be public domain or it would be concealed and resricted using other mechanisims. The GPL is quite a bit of text outlining all the various restrictions that apply to GPL'd code which differentiate it from public domain code. GPL doesn't even begin to resemble public domain code, and if GPL advocates were unable to copyright their code, they'd be unable to enforce their goals and views that they currently use the GPL to enforce.
In a world without copyright, there would be no protection from people taking code which is presently GPL'd and using it in proprietary, closed-source projects.
Copyright exists because the world believes that a person should have the ability to control the use of the value they create. At its heart, the GPL promotes the exact same philosophy. Just as copyright protections allow a company to earn a profit from the code it produces, copyright enables a coder to restrict the use of their code to only those people who agree to use the same license (the GPL). In both cases, copyright is being appropriately employed to empower the person who has created the code to make sure that it's used as they wish.
While you may view the goal of the GPL as more worthy than the goal of a commercial software publisher, they're both equal beneficiaries of copyright protections and use those rights similarly.
Without copyright protections, neither would have an easy time promoting their goals, although it would be more difficult to maintain the goals of the GPL than it would be to produce proprietary software with no copyright.
The point is, the GPL doesn't meet the original poster's "in a perfect world" statement. The GPL prevents the person who writes the code from being able to choose the license for the code they write.
The GPL forces subsequent programmers to use the GPL for the code they write. This is the price of interoperability with GPL'd code.
To me, at least, it seems silly to call code "free" when it quite clearly comes with a pricetag attached.
Microsoft's Kerberos and MIT Kerberos are 100% interoperable.
The RFC-complaint extenstion to Microsoft's Kerberos are only useful in a Win2K environment, so there's no incentive to migrate from MIT Kerberos to Microsoft Kerberos for non-Windows users. Without this incentive, it's clearly not an attempt to embrace and extend.
Everything you need to know in order to fully understand the RFC-complaint changes that microsoft made to their Kerberos implementation can be freely found online or in the MSDN materials. A good place to start would be
here.
The changes microsoft made were to make kerberos understand the more flexible security model and ACL scheme in Win2K, and are not at all an attempt to embrace and extend. If you're running Win2K, the changes are crucial. If you're not running Win2K the changes are irrelevant, so they're not going to entice people to migrate away from the MIT implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
Beats me
This use case is most certainly not fine in mysql, though, due to its refusal to support anything more granular than full table locks.
It's difficult to take a platform seriously when the documentation makes silly rationalizations like "For large tables, table locking is MUCH better than row locking for most applications" which is about the silliest load of crap I've read since they pulled the paragraph from the mysql documentation that explained why you'd never want to use foreign keys (it was removed once mysql began supporting foreign keys).
MySQL's main feature seems to be its immense popular support among people who haven't used any of the alternatives. Not a very compelling endoresement, if you ask me.
You're missing the point. The start of this thread was puzzlement over why, exactly, mysql is so popular in this community when more complete and more robust alternatives exist (like postgresql).
There is no strong motivation to bring mysql's featureset up to the accepted standards for a sql server when we can all just run postgresql and have those features now, in a more mature and well-tested form.
I'm constantly puzzled by the enthusiasm and support shown for mysql and simultaneous aversion to postgresql because both attitudes are clearly not based on technical merit. And, to make matters even more confounding, mysql's popular support and user community rallied behind it long before it was actually capital-F "Free" in the religious sense. So, we can't even settle on mysql's popularity being dogmatic which would be an understandable reason.
I haven't seen anyone in this thread complain that mysql lacks features. I'm just seeing people wondering why we should be motivated to use a deficient product when better alternatives exist.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it deliciously ironic that out of one side of RMS's mouth he complains bitterly about people who refuse to accept his mandate on renaming "Linux" to "GNU/Linux" while also objecting to the old BSD advertising clause?
RMS and the FSF at one time objected to the BSD license for a clause that existed in the BSD license which required people who incorporated BSD code to include credit in any related advertising or documentation.
Personally, I think it's a lot less objectionable to be required to give credit to a resource in an advertisement than it is to giv the FSF authority to rename my projects at their discretion.
How is this any different than the advertising clause which RMS denounced?
Based in San Francisco, EFF is a donor-supported membership organization working to protect our fundamental rights regardless of technology; to educate the press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology; and to act as a defender of those liberties. Among our various activities, EFF opposes misguided legislation, initiates and defends court cases preserving individuals' rights, launches global public campaigns, introduces leading edge proposals and papers, hosts frequent educational events, engages the press regularly, and publishes a comprehensive archive of digital civil liberties information at one of the most linked-to websites in the world.
And it needs our support to ensure that it is forever capable of supporting us against legislation that seeks to eliminate our rights and privacies.
When I was your age we had to bang rocks together to get 1's.
It's a good deal as long as you get more than $75 worth of value from the benefits provided by carrying the card. The Amex Gold and Amex Platinum (which runs $300/year in annual fee) can return tenfold this amount in value to some people.
From what I've seen, the majority of perks and benefits associated with the premium American Express cards seem targeted at consumers who travel frequently. If you travel for work, these cards can be a great deal.
What do you mean "finally"? Win2K has this in the form of RUNAS available both from the command line as well as from a shift-rightclick context menu.
Sounds like the best of both worlds, if you ask me. A mature and mainstream GUI with a healthy number of commercial apps on top of that old, familiar Unix we all love.
Sounds to me like ripping all that out to run LinuxPPC is a downgrade, unless simply having the name "Linux" is the feature you most look for in an OS.
However, part of the subpoena restricts us from commenting on the details of pending litigation. Especially since we do not know the details or circumstances of the alleged activity, we do not want to do anything which would endanger either party's position in this case. We trust that the community understands our position in this matter.
In the more general sense, not commenting at all on the specifics of this case, it is never a good idea to run the distributed.net client software on computers you don't own or administrate. In the four years or so that we've been in operation we've been dragged in to a handful of situations where people have lost their jobs, positions, and scholarships by thinking that forgiveness would be easier to obtain than permission. Nobody, especially distributed.net, wants to see this happen.
It's important to keep in mind that the literal resource consumption of the client (which is as close to "zero" as can be) is often not the only factor important to a business. The existence of prize money with the RC5-64 project is discomforting to many organizations. One tactic which has proven to be very effective is to provide an affidavit that you will donate any winnings to a charity if a client you installed on a company or university machine finds the winning key. In many cases, this has been key to a participant receiving permission to run the client on non-owned resources.
Another frequent stumbling block is with service and support contracts which prohibit non-certified software running on workstations or servers. Your university or employer may risk losing support on their equipment if software is installed that hasn't been explicitly mentioned in the support agreements.
The bottom line is, always get permission first. It might not be as difficult to get permission as you think. And if you can't get permission, don't install the client.
We hope for a speedy and just resolution to this case, whatever that outcome should be, and that we never have to be involved in another one.
It is a violation of the GPL for pitou to not be released using the GPL.
If you'd like a copy of the source, I suggest you simply email the author and demand it. They have no right to withhold the source since they've used GPL'd code.
(This is, of course, assuming that they haven't negotiated an alternative license from the author of the original project.)
That's not precise or particularly accurate. TiVo does not sell the hardware, Sony and Phillips do. Customers who puchase a TiVo PVR have not paid TiVo until they subscribe to the service.
Well, at least you're honest.
Kerberos work ok within a standard Kerberos environment? No?
And here's why you're clearly not an expert. The answer to your faux rhetorical question is "yes". Microsoft's Kerb5 implementation in Win2K interoperates with MIT Kerberos quite beautifully. Moreover, the additions which Microsoft made to the Kerb protocol were compliant with the protocol. Additionally, the changes made only serve to make Kerberos more useful in a windows environment. If you aren't running windows they offer no benefit so there's no incentive for non-windows shops to move away from the MIT (or other vendor's) kerberos implementation.
A key component of "embrace and extend" is that you have to encourage users to migrate to your implementation. None of the extensions Microsoft made to Kerberos do anything to encourage migration.
Why don't you leave the pontificating about Microsoft's use of Kerberos to those of us who actually use Kerberos in a mixed-platform environment?
So GPL is "free" if I'm willing to accept a creative redefinition of the word "free". And I can "use" GPL'd code as long as I'm willing to accept a creative limitation of the word "use".
Gee, what a deal.
You can play with these verbal gymnastics all day long and it won't conceal the fact that GPL'd code is inaccessable to developers unwilling or unable to GPL their own code. Whether this is a feature or a liability is the only difference that your personal perspective makes on the situation.
I'm content to let you appear in this discussion as the clever pundit if you'll let me continue being the one who is being correct.
Cheers.
Yes, it's quite clear that you do not understand patents and trademarks. Why did you feel the need to post to slashdot to tell us, though? Nobody here cares that you don't understand this stuff. If it bothers you that much, go learn how patents and trademarks work.
I did this only once. I made the terrible mistake of using a motley collection of machines to host each of the three views. My main "front" view was my screaming 486DX50 box, but the left and right views were "whatever else I had lying around". I actually nicked the two other monitors from my office for the evening. The unfortunate side effect was that the differing frame rates for the three views was a wonderful way to revisit my last meal after about 10 minutes of play. It was nausea-inducing to the highest degree.
Still very cool to see and be able to do, no matter how unplayable my setup turned out to be.
And thanks, Toby, for reminding me that it's been a long while since I've seen Reservoir Dogs.
It seems to me that if a boycott is ineffective because most people don't support it, then that's a great example of the system working exactly as it should.
People should have the right to control how the value they create is used. Metallica believes this, I believe this, and Richard Stallman obviously believes this. Copyright and Patents are the tools we use to protect this right, and they need to exist in some form or we'll lose this basic right.
The Big Myth of the FSF is that end users care at all about the source code of the software they use. End users want to use software that does what they need and does it well. The way to convince users that free and open is better is to ensure that free and open software is superior to the alternatives. If you truly believe that "The War will be won by convincing the end users" then why bother with trying to destroy the capacity to create proprietary software? If free and open is inherently superior, why not just build good software and render the proprietary stuff meaningless by comparison?
Convincing the end users is not a social, educational, or political battle. It's plain darwinism. You'll convince the end user that your methods are better the day those methods produce software which is more useful and beneficial to the user than the alternatives.
How is this any different from today, with copyright, where all programs and algorithims written down in academic publications (or publications of any kind) are available for all to use? If you invent an algorithm, and you wish to allow the whole world to use it, the existence or nonexistence of copyright has little effect on your world. Release the algorithim or program to the public domain and all can use it. Copyright doesn't impact your right to do that in any way.
I also disagree quite strongly with your statement that without copyright, protections against proprietary absorbtion would be lessened. Anyone who was around and using computers in the late 70s and early 80s knows exactly what the world of commercial software looks like in the absence of strong copyright protections. Before there was sufficient precedent to establish that software is protected adequately by copyright law, this was a subject of considerable debate and contention. Commercial software vendors, without adequate copyright protections, simply employ even more invasive and cumbersome mechanisims to protect their ability to profit from their labor. Hardware keys (dongles), obfuscation, enforceable end user license agreements, NDA's, and hardware copy protection all existed to fill in the vaccuum and made users' lives far more difficult before we gained adequate copyright protections for software.
A post-copyright world will not be friendly to users, or the FSF.
Bottom line -- if you want to give away the code and algorithims you produce, please do so. But stop with this twisting of logic that implies that your ability to make your code free is in any way helped by eliminating the protections available to those who wish to restrict the distribution of their code and algorithims. Especially since the FSF is one of these groups.
At least admit what you mean is that you want to be able to benefit from the hard work and labor of others no matter what their views on the matter are.
The GPL does nothing of the sort. The GPL is built on copyright protection, and relies heavily on those rights in order to exist. A world with no copyright protections would be very unfriendly to the GPL and the goals it was designed to promote.
Eliminating intellectual property protections would be equally (if not more) harmful to the FSF and the GPL license as it would be to commercial software publishers.
In the absence of copyright, source code would either be public domain or it would be concealed and resricted using other mechanisims. The GPL is quite a bit of text outlining all the various restrictions that apply to GPL'd code which differentiate it from public domain code. GPL doesn't even begin to resemble public domain code, and if GPL advocates were unable to copyright their code, they'd be unable to enforce their goals and views that they currently use the GPL to enforce.
In a world without copyright, there would be no protection from people taking code which is presently GPL'd and using it in proprietary, closed-source projects.
Copyright exists because the world believes that a person should have the ability to control the use of the value they create. At its heart, the GPL promotes the exact same philosophy. Just as copyright protections allow a company to earn a profit from the code it produces, copyright enables a coder to restrict the use of their code to only those people who agree to use the same license (the GPL). In both cases, copyright is being appropriately employed to empower the person who has created the code to make sure that it's used as they wish.
While you may view the goal of the GPL as more worthy than the goal of a commercial software publisher, they're both equal beneficiaries of copyright protections and use those rights similarly.
Without copyright protections, neither would have an easy time promoting their goals, although it would be more difficult to maintain the goals of the GPL than it would be to produce proprietary software with no copyright.
The GPL forces subsequent programmers to use the GPL for the code they write. This is the price of interoperability with GPL'd code.
To me, at least, it seems silly to call code "free" when it quite clearly comes with a pricetag attached.
Everything you need to know in order to fully understand the RFC-complaint changes that microsoft made to their Kerberos implementation can be freely found online or in the MSDN materials. A good place to start would be here.
The changes microsoft made were to make kerberos understand the more flexible security model and ACL scheme in Win2K, and are not at all an attempt to embrace and extend. If you're running Win2K, the changes are crucial. If you're not running Win2K the changes are irrelevant, so they're not going to entice people to migrate away from the MIT implementation.