If you had a big box you could just install everything on that box. Then either mount the partitions or use run everything remotely with X. Choose a stripped down windowing system and it should be fine on a speedy network. When all else fails use apt or any one of a few dozen remote managemnt systems available for linux.
Somebody severely misunderstands what this open source thing is all about. Here let me try to explain it to you in real terms.
What service was lutris trying to sell? Was it supporting windows? Supporting Microsft office? No it was supporting enhydra and developing enhydra web sites. This was the only technology that they could legitemately claim expertise in. Any other field and they would get crushed by the competition. Somehow it never occured to them the in order to support enhydra it had to be a good AND popular software. So is enhydra a solid product? Well maybe. Is it popular? Not really.
Enhydra was not better then cocoon or jboss. It also was not as popular as those two. As a result somebody had to make it better and somebody had to make it popular. Either that somebody was lutris or the open source developers. I would say that opening up enhydra did make it more popular and did make it better but it still wasn't enough.
Lutris had no choice. There was no money to be made in trying to service a product nobody wants. They either had to support the project and make it better or just throw in the towel. They certainly failed to attact a critical mass of developers and the also failed to get the word out in a significant way. But make no mistake the product as it stood was barely useful and it needed development. If they didn't do it nobody else was going to.
So yes if you have a crappy product then you have to make it better because there is no service dollars. If other people don't get involved then you have to do it yourself.
There is a difference here. If you employ one german tech and send the rest of your money to redmond your country may not be better off (even if the total cost is less). Those 5 techs are going to be german and the money will stay in germany. It will eventually get back to the govt in taxes (some of it anyways) and it will support many other businesses in the meantime. The money sent to Bill Gates will never get spent in germany and probably will never be invested in germany either.
One out of three businesses fail. Imagine if that criterea was applied to the govt. What if one out three govt agencies could simply declare bankrupcy fold the tent and go home. All those veterans with no benefits, all those farmers with no crop insurance, all those elderly with no social security. The reason the corporation does better is because it does less. Corporations don't serve everybody only those who can pay (and usually the ones who can pay the most). The govt works under different rules. Govt programs have to serve without discrimination and they can't simply fail.
Imagine if UPS or fedex was forced to deliver to anyplace in america (including remote places like alaska and hawaii) for the same cost. Coudl they do it more efficiently? I'd doubt it.
" They need to do better than that. Prices need to drop. MS Office should retail under $100. The reality is that the sofware hasn't changed much in over 5 year but the prices seem to be going up with every new release."
If that is not proof of a monopoly I don't know what is.
Somehow the linux world has gotten stuck on these two databases. Recently I went to the web site of one of the linux magazines where they had a writeup about open source databases. Interbase and SAPdb were nto even mentioned. I wrote a letter to the editor complaining and did not even get a response. Open magazine (also owned by VA) did an article on databases where they completely left off interbase and sapdb.
I don't know what their damage is but it's severe. Both interbase and sabdb are time tested and proven databases in use in hundreds of businesses in the world. Yet the open source community continues to obsess about mysql.
P.S. Just the documentation of sapdb and interbase are reason enough to use them.
Postgres has many of the features you are asking for. Their query optimizer is quite excellant for example and the EXPLAIN command gives readable output. They are working on better reporting of the internals but I gather that's not a trivial task.
Re:Does this really warrant a 4.0 release?
on
MySQL 4.0 Released
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· Score: 2
"NT 3.5 had absolutely nothing to do with Windows 3.1"
Except that it had the exact same look and feel and still had lots of 16 bit code. you know minor things like that.
Other then that I agree. Windows has more versions then linux and it's harder to port between them too.
"But they don't use it to fund open-source development."
If they were doing it to fund open source development then theywere fools. The whole idea behind open source is to cut development costs. Maybe their product didn't catch the fancy of open source developers and they had to devote time to building "their" product. If that's the case then they are stuck with those costs no matter what. Now that they have closed off the software they will effectively kick out developers who were working on their product for free. There will be an additional burden on them. You know what webobjects will still kick it's ass and only cost $400.00. They are screwed no matter what.
"BTW, in case you didn't hear, Accenture is laying off big-time."
Big whoop welcome to the economy stupid. The airlines are laying off, the manufacturers are laying off, the telecoms are laying off, the insurance companies are laying off. Times are tough on everyone including consulting companies so what? Does accenture laying off people completely invalidate the computer services industry? Maybe according to you it does.
"Those companies don't fund their R&D on services. That wouldn't work."
They do plenty of R&D in their own way. By and large they are a pure services comapny (the kind you said could never scale beyond a four man mom and pop). Do you see how stupid of a statement that was now? What product does gartner sell? what does ADP sell? they sell consulting and they sell services that's what. I'll say it again it's a billion dollar industry. Lutris couldn't cut it and many companies won't either. like any other sector there are a few large entrenched companies that dominate their sector. All you can do is fight for the crumbs. The same goes for trying to sell boxed software.
"Everyone who's tried this on a larger scale than the "Dave's Software Shop" four-person consulting business has failed or is currently in the process of failing."
What about accenture and other big consulting companies. They make money on only services. All big companies IBM, Oracle and even Microsoft make huge amounts of money on consulting and services. Even hardware manufacturers like dell and compaq are starting to push services as a way to make extra money.
Given that billions of dollars are being made in services by all kinds of comapnies big and small what you really meant to say was that lutris couldn't make money doing it. Maybe lutris didn't understand the services business and maybe it could not compete with the accentures of the world but you can not simply dismiss the entire computer services sector from the failure of one small company.
BTW considering how ineptly they handled this latest round of affairs I doubt they will make any money in products either. They will get crushed on the high end with BEA, IBM and Oracle and on the lower end with jboss, cocoon, orion, webobjects etc. Combine that with the fact most people think they are sleazy and you have a recipe for disaster.
The problem is that IIS is a whole infrastructure. In fact the whole thing is a big ugly mess of tangled mess. That's why IIS is slower then apache/php. I don't know what you mean by "does not work as well as IIS including the whole infrastructure" but it works as it was intended. Currently I can't think of anything I want to do that I can't. I'll give you an actual example of why the "The whole infrastructure" is a horrible thing.
I upgraded my IE to 5.5 sp2 when the nimda virus hit. It broke two things in my system. One it made all of my office 97 applications break (the common dialogs refused to open) and it broke the schedular on my NT 4.0 machine. Since the scheduled tasks were failing silently and because the log system in NT is horrible and pretty much useless there was no visible indication of the failure of the scheduled jobs. I accidentally figured out what was going on two weeks later and I still haven't been able to fix the situation completely.
So this whole infrastructure bullshit is a load of crap as far as I am concerned. Mozilla never broke anything else on my system let alone some crucial thing like the schedular. Every time I patch anything on that stupid windows system I have to go back and work for a day fixing everything that broke. Honestly I can't believe people trust their businesses to this crap.
"Use what works best and Apache does NOT work well on NT. "
BULLSHIT!. It works just fine. I use it and I know plenty of other people who use it without any problems whatsoever. I have never had any problems with it and I must say apache/php combination is noticably faster in my application then IIS/ASP is (that's why I switched).
"I just don't subscribe to that stupid Unix/Linux worship that seems to be so prevalent on this "geek" site"
Those days are long gone. Slashdot is mostly MS trolls (or employees) who mod up any pro MS post to 5 no matter how stupid the post is. This community once cared about unix and once cared about open source but the MS trolls ruined that and now if you want to talk about those things you have to move to another community. That's how these things work. Like minded people hang out together. If you don;t like it here go to any one of the billion pro MS, pro windows communities that exist all over the world. May I suggest ZDNET or Fawcette publications along with the MS sponsered ones. There people will rip your head off if you mention anything not made by MS even if it runs in windows.
And if you choose to stay here don't go around lying by saying things like "apache does not work well on NT". At least tell the truth for gods sake.
Thanks for taking the time explain these things to me (and the rest of slashdot presumably). I hope you stick around because you seem to have a knack for putting complex legal issues into understandable english for the rest of us.
My rant about the legal system was not really about this case (I now understand the action was initiated by Dr. Felten) but just a general critisism of the way we run our judicial system. I have always advocated that for a criminal justice system to be fair and just innocent people ought to be able to enter the system and leave it unscathed (seems logical to me). As a programmer I write lots and lots of code and I understand that it's not always possible to take into account every combination of factors but I do test. I test at every step to make sure my code is behaving properly under unexpected circumstances.
As an insider in the legal system perhaps you can give me your perspective on this. If I chose a thousand random black people and a thousand random white people, a thousand random poor people, and a thousand random rich people and threw them into the legal system by accusing them of some serious crime (say rape) how many of them would avoid jail? How many of them would avoid bankrupcy, how many of them would still have their jobs, wives or kids after it was all over? Keep in mind all of these people are actually innocent. As an outsider my guess is that the poor and the black would suffer much worse consequences then the white and the rich. This is how I test my code by throwing unexpected input into it. I think we ought to regularly test the legal system this way and publish the results from year to year. It would be an eye opening experience.
Yes if he was working for you you would have forced him to use something he does not want to use. As a result of your coersion his web server would be killed by the nimda virus just like every else was (according to him). You then would have blamed him for being an incompetent admin. Because you forced him into IIS it is physically impossible for you to critize IIS (or MS) no matter how insecure their products are so your only alternative is to blame the sysadmin. Anything else would look too much like it was your fault. So you would have written him up or fired him or something.
I would think he is very happy he is not working for you. Just another clueless PHB shoving immature, insecure, expensive and crappy products down the IT dept's throat because of something they read in PC magazine.
Yea I have worked for people like you in the past. It sucked big time. I pity the unfortunate people who are working for you now I hope they see the light sometime soon and bail. Working for clueless PHBs in an IT environment has got to be one of the worst things in the world.
Great explanation. Perhaps you can clear something up for me.
Isn't the fact that the DOJ is even involved suggest that some sort of criminal affair is going on? If this was a civil affair the DOJ would have no part in it. It seems to me the fact that the DOJ is in a position to either drop this or go forward implies that someone made a criminal charge, and the police got involved.
Regardless of the eventual outcome of this criminal investigation this has cost Dr. Felten plenty of time and money and in effect punished him. I am presuming of course the legal system will not apologize and reimburse him for his espenses after dropping the case.
To me this is the greatest shortcoming of our legal system. No matter how innocent you are you will never enter into the legal system and come out of it unscathed. The best you can do is lose a ton of money and time. I have heard of people losing their jobs, wives, children, vast portions of their lives even though were innocent all without compensation of any sort after the dust settles. It's a shame really.
"Just as there are people who believe what they believe becase "Mr. Science teacher told me so". "
Just to be clear.
The VAST majority of the knowledge in your head comes from the fact that someone told you it was true. In your very limited life and travels any knowledge you gained through direct experience is dwarfed by the knowledge you gained from books, tv, radio, internet etc. Do you believe that pluto exists? ever seen it yourself? ever see a picture of it? ever see a video? ever touch it or kick it? ever talk to anybody who has seen it or touched it?
How about bali or bengladesh? ever seen those? How do you know they exist? I tell you how it's because "Mr. Science teacher told you so". That's how humans transmit knowledge from one generation to another and from one human to another. It's this fact which separates us from the animals by and large.
Also not beliving in god requires no faith. None at all. Not beliving in something is the opposite of faith because faith involved beliving in something.
Apparently you are a person who believed that the dictionary is a suitable reference for discussing complex topics like the nature of atheism or the existance of god. I hate to break it to you but life is infinately more complex then can be described in a few sentences in a dictionary.
Take this for example.
Faith: (definition 2.b.1) firm belief in something for which there is no proof.
According to you atheism is a religion because atheists have faith that god does not exist. This is pure bullshit. Atheists don't believe in god because there is no proof of god. They don't believe in god in the same way that they don't believe in the easter bunny or santa clause. It has to do with the lack of proof don't you see. In other words they have no faith and therefore they are atheists.
As for the rest of your post. You apparently believe that proving the existance of god (or the non existance) is somehow similar to geometric proofs. I don't think any further conversation with you on this topic is likely to be reasonable or sane so I'll drop it.
Yet another MS troll rated up insightful. Further proof that slashdot has become a haven for people who hate open source and come here to praise the MS god.
"Obviously if Microsoft includes a JVM, then no users will go out and bother to download the JVM from Sun, IBM or Acme Computing."
If MS had included a JVM as specified by their contract with sun nobody would have cared. That JVM would have been compliant with the standard set by sun. MS willfully broke their contract (who actually believes that MS will honor a contract anyway? eveybody knows those guys are slime buckets) they got sued and they lost. Sorry but that's the reality.
"You really can't have it both ways. If you get to say what goes in Microsoft's products, then I feel it is my moral duty to say what goes into Linux distributions. "
Well you could if Red Hat had a monopoly. They don't so you can't. MS has one (a court said so!) so they have to act differently. Sorry but that's the law.
I don't know about mysql but I have used postgres and SQL server pretty extensively. I much prefer postgres. First of all lock escalation is just a bitch. Sometimes entire tables get locked out I have have to tell people to log out of their desktops to clear the locks. Sometimes you can't even do that and you have to stop the service and restarted it (kicking everybody out).
Postgres has a kick ass rule subsystem whereby you can make any view writable. Postgres allows you to write your own aggregate functions which allow you to do funky things with text fields. Postgres has unlimited row sizes and unlimited text fields (pretty much). Postgres let's you choose which language you want to write your stored procedures in (perl, python, pg/sql or C) all of which are vastly superior to transact-sql.
I could go on and on. If you ask me postgres is much better then ms-sql server.
While it's true that a Union doles out cash to political parties the members of that union usually don't hand out wads of cash (mainly because they have mouths to feed and bills to pay). A corporation on the other hand not only has a lot of money but also has some very rich shareholders. The corporation gives money, the shareholders give money and they also sink unlimited amount of funds into so called think tanks. That along with the soft money funds adds up to a mountain compared to a unions ant hill. Think about it like this.
When was the last time the US chamber of commerce backed a democrat? When was the last time the cato institute backed a democrat?. These organizations are thinly veiled fund raising arms of the republican party and you can give them an infinate amount of money and you don't even have to report it. The corruption in the system is vast and deep.
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If you had a big box you could just install everything on that box. Then either mount the partitions or use run everything remotely with X. Choose a stripped down windowing system and it should be fine on a speedy network. When all else fails use apt or any one of a few dozen remote managemnt systems available for linux.
microsoft: closed minds, closed source, closed fist.
Somebody severely misunderstands what this open source thing is all about. Here let me try to explain it to you in real terms.
What service was lutris trying to sell? Was it supporting windows? Supporting Microsft office? No it was supporting enhydra and developing enhydra web sites. This was the only technology that they could legitemately claim expertise in. Any other field and they would get crushed by the competition. Somehow it never occured to them the in order to support enhydra it had to be a good AND popular software. So is enhydra a solid product? Well maybe. Is it popular? Not really.
Enhydra was not better then cocoon or jboss. It also was not as popular as those two. As a result somebody had to make it better and somebody had to make it popular. Either that somebody was lutris or the open source developers. I would say that opening up enhydra did make it more popular and did make it better but it still wasn't enough.
Lutris had no choice. There was no money to be made in trying to service a product nobody wants. They either had to support the project and make it better or just throw in the towel. They certainly failed to attact a critical mass of developers and the also failed to get the word out in a significant way. But make no mistake the product as it stood was barely useful and it needed development. If they didn't do it nobody else was going to.
So yes if you have a crappy product then you have to make it better because there is no service dollars. If other people don't get involved then you have to do it yourself.
There is a difference here. If you employ one german tech and send the rest of your money to redmond your country may not be better off (even if the total cost is less). Those 5 techs are going to be german and the money will stay in germany. It will eventually get back to the govt in taxes (some of it anyways) and it will support many other businesses in the meantime. The money sent to Bill Gates will never get spent in germany and probably will never be invested in germany either.
One out of three businesses fail. Imagine if that criterea was applied to the govt. What if one out three govt agencies could simply declare bankrupcy fold the tent and go home. All those veterans with no benefits, all those farmers with no crop insurance, all those elderly with no social security. The reason the corporation does better is because it does less. Corporations don't serve everybody only those who can pay (and usually the ones who can pay the most). The govt works under different rules. Govt programs have to serve without discrimination and they can't simply fail.
Imagine if UPS or fedex was forced to deliver to anyplace in america (including remote places like alaska and hawaii) for the same cost. Coudl they do it more efficiently? I'd doubt it.
"Weird. I better catch that UPS guy real quick, cause he obviously won't deliever my letter."
It depends on where you live.
" They need to do better than that. Prices need to drop. MS Office should retail under $100. The reality is that the sofware hasn't changed much in over 5 year but the prices seem to be going up with every new release."
If that is not proof of a monopoly I don't know what is.
Somehow the linux world has gotten stuck on these two databases. Recently I went to the web site of one of the linux magazines where they had a writeup about open source databases. Interbase and SAPdb were nto even mentioned. I wrote a letter to the editor complaining and did not even get a response. Open magazine (also owned by VA) did an article on databases where they completely left off interbase and sapdb.
I don't know what their damage is but it's severe. Both interbase and sabdb are time tested and proven databases in use in hundreds of businesses in the world. Yet the open source community continues to obsess about mysql.
P.S. Just the documentation of sapdb and interbase are reason enough to use them.
Postgres has many of the features you are asking for. Their query optimizer is quite excellant for example and the EXPLAIN command gives readable output. They are working on better reporting of the internals but I gather that's not a trivial task.
"NT 3.5 had absolutely nothing to do with Windows 3.1"
Except that it had the exact same look and feel and still had lots of 16 bit code. you know minor things like that.
Other then that I agree. Windows has more versions then linux and it's harder to port between them too.
"But they don't use it to fund open-source development."
If they were doing it to fund open source development then theywere fools. The whole idea behind open source is to cut development costs. Maybe their product didn't catch the fancy of open source developers and they had to devote time to building "their" product. If that's the case then they are stuck with those costs no matter what. Now that they have closed off the software they will effectively kick out developers who were working on their product for free. There will be an additional burden on them. You know what webobjects will still kick it's ass and only cost $400.00. They are screwed no matter what.
"BTW, in case you didn't hear, Accenture is laying off big-time."
Big whoop welcome to the economy stupid. The airlines are laying off, the manufacturers are laying off, the telecoms are laying off, the insurance companies are laying off. Times are tough on everyone including consulting companies so what? Does accenture laying off people completely invalidate the computer services industry? Maybe according to you it does.
"Those companies don't fund their R&D on services. That wouldn't work."
They do plenty of R&D in their own way. By and large they are a pure services comapny (the kind you said could never scale beyond a four man mom and pop). Do you see how stupid of a statement that was now? What product does gartner sell? what does ADP sell? they sell consulting and they sell services that's what. I'll say it again it's a billion dollar industry. Lutris couldn't cut it and many companies won't either. like any other sector there are a few large entrenched companies that dominate their sector. All you can do is fight for the crumbs. The same goes for trying to sell boxed software.
This device has been around for a while. As a bonus it's cellular therefore is available where GSM is not.
"Everyone who's tried this on a larger scale than the "Dave's Software Shop" four-person consulting business has failed or is currently in the process of failing."
What about accenture and other big consulting companies. They make money on only services. All big companies IBM, Oracle and even Microsoft make huge amounts of money on consulting and services. Even hardware manufacturers like dell and compaq are starting to push services as a way to make extra money.
Given that billions of dollars are being made in services by all kinds of comapnies big and small what you really meant to say was that lutris couldn't make money doing it. Maybe lutris didn't understand the services business and maybe it could not compete with the accentures of the world but you can not simply dismiss the entire computer services sector from the failure of one small company.
BTW considering how ineptly they handled this latest round of affairs I doubt they will make any money in products either. They will get crushed on the high end with BEA, IBM and Oracle and on the lower end with jboss, cocoon, orion, webobjects etc. Combine that with the fact most people think they are sleazy and you have a recipe for disaster.
The problem is that IIS is a whole infrastructure. In fact the whole thing is a big ugly mess of tangled mess. That's why IIS is slower then apache/php. I don't know what you mean by "does not work as well as IIS including the whole infrastructure" but it works as it was intended. Currently I can't think of anything I want to do that I can't. I'll give you an actual example of why the "The whole infrastructure" is a horrible thing.
I upgraded my IE to 5.5 sp2 when the nimda virus hit. It broke two things in my system. One it made all of my office 97 applications break (the common dialogs refused to open) and it broke the schedular on my NT 4.0 machine. Since the scheduled tasks were failing silently and because the log system in NT is horrible and pretty much useless there was no visible indication of the failure of the scheduled jobs. I accidentally figured out what was going on two weeks later and I still haven't been able to fix the situation completely.
So this whole infrastructure bullshit is a load of crap as far as I am concerned. Mozilla never broke anything else on my system let alone some crucial thing like the schedular. Every time I patch anything on that stupid windows system I have to go back and work for a day fixing everything that broke. Honestly I can't believe people trust their businesses to this crap.
"Use what works best and Apache does NOT work well on NT. "
BULLSHIT!. It works just fine. I use it and I know plenty of other people who use it without any problems whatsoever. I have never had any problems with it and I must say apache/php combination is noticably faster in my application then IIS/ASP is (that's why I switched).
"I just don't subscribe to that stupid Unix/Linux worship that seems to be so prevalent on this "geek" site"
Those days are long gone. Slashdot is mostly MS trolls (or employees) who mod up any pro MS post to 5 no matter how stupid the post is. This community once cared about unix and once cared about open source but the MS trolls ruined that and now if you want to talk about those things you have to move to another community. That's how these things work. Like minded people hang out together. If you don;t like it here go to any one of the billion pro MS, pro windows communities that exist all over the world. May I suggest ZDNET or Fawcette publications along with the MS sponsered ones. There people will rip your head off if you mention anything not made by MS even if it runs in windows.
And if you choose to stay here don't go around lying by saying things like "apache does not work well on NT". At least tell the truth for gods sake.
Either way why put up with any sort of a restriction when you can get great free and unlimited databases like interbase, mysql, postgres, or SAPdb.
Thanks for taking the time explain these things to me (and the rest of slashdot presumably). I hope you stick around because you seem to have a knack for putting complex legal issues into understandable english for the rest of us.
My rant about the legal system was not really about this case (I now understand the action was initiated by Dr. Felten) but just a general critisism of the way we run our judicial system. I have always advocated that for a criminal justice system to be fair and just innocent people ought to be able to enter the system and leave it unscathed (seems logical to me). As a programmer I write lots and lots of code and I understand that it's not always possible to take into account every combination of factors but I do test. I test at every step to make sure my code is behaving properly under unexpected circumstances.
As an insider in the legal system perhaps you can give me your perspective on this. If I chose a thousand random black people and a thousand random white people, a thousand random poor people, and a thousand random rich people and threw them into the legal system by accusing them of some serious crime (say rape) how many of them would avoid jail? How many of them would avoid bankrupcy, how many of them would still have their jobs, wives or kids after it was all over? Keep in mind all of these people are actually innocent. As an outsider my guess is that the poor and the black would suffer much worse consequences then the white and the rich. This is how I test my code by throwing unexpected input into it. I think we ought to regularly test the legal system this way and publish the results from year to year. It would be an eye opening experience.
Yes if he was working for you you would have forced him to use something he does not want to use. As a result of your coersion his web server would be killed by the nimda virus just like every else was (according to him). You then would have blamed him for being an incompetent admin. Because you forced him into IIS it is physically impossible for you to critize IIS (or MS) no matter how insecure their products are so your only alternative is to blame the sysadmin. Anything else would look too much like it was your fault. So you would have written him up or fired him or something.
I would think he is very happy he is not working for you. Just another clueless PHB shoving immature, insecure, expensive and crappy products down the IT dept's throat because of something they read in PC magazine.
Yea I have worked for people like you in the past. It sucked big time. I pity the unfortunate people who are working for you now I hope they see the light sometime soon and bail. Working for clueless PHBs in an IT environment has got to be one of the worst things in the world.
You are limited to 5 connections I believe. Re- read the license lest you get inot trouble.
Great explanation. Perhaps you can clear something up for me.
Isn't the fact that the DOJ is even involved suggest that some sort of criminal affair is going on? If this was a civil affair the DOJ would have no part in it. It seems to me the fact that the DOJ is in a position to either drop this or go forward implies that someone made a criminal charge, and the police got involved.
Regardless of the eventual outcome of this criminal investigation this has cost Dr. Felten plenty of time and money and in effect punished him. I am presuming of course the legal system will not apologize and reimburse him for his espenses after dropping the case.
To me this is the greatest shortcoming of our legal system. No matter how innocent you are you will never enter into the legal system and come out of it unscathed. The best you can do is lose a ton of money and time. I have heard of people losing their jobs, wives, children, vast portions of their lives even though were innocent all without compensation of any sort after the dust settles. It's a shame really.
"Just as there are people who believe what they believe becase "Mr. Science teacher told me so". "
Just to be clear.
The VAST majority of the knowledge in your head comes from the fact that someone told you it was true. In your very limited life and travels any knowledge you gained through direct experience is dwarfed by the knowledge you gained from books, tv, radio, internet etc. Do you believe that pluto exists? ever seen it yourself? ever see a picture of it? ever see a video? ever touch it or kick it? ever talk to anybody who has seen it or touched it?
How about bali or bengladesh? ever seen those? How do you know they exist? I tell you how it's because "Mr. Science teacher told you so". That's how humans transmit knowledge from one generation to another and from one human to another. It's this fact which separates us from the animals by and large.
Also not beliving in god requires no faith. None at all. Not beliving in something is the opposite of faith because faith involved beliving in something.
Apparently you are a person who believed that the dictionary is a suitable reference for discussing complex topics like the nature of atheism or the existance of god. I hate to break it to you but life is infinately more complex then can be described in a few sentences in a dictionary.
Take this for example.
Faith: (definition 2.b.1) firm belief in something for which there is no proof.
According to you atheism is a religion because atheists have faith that god does not exist. This is pure bullshit. Atheists don't believe in god because there is no proof of god. They don't believe in god in the same way that they don't believe in the easter bunny or santa clause. It has to do with the lack of proof don't you see. In other words they have no faith and therefore they are atheists.
As for the rest of your post. You apparently believe that proving the existance of god (or the non existance) is somehow similar to geometric proofs. I don't think any further conversation with you on this topic is likely to be reasonable or sane so I'll drop it.
Yet another MS troll rated up insightful. Further proof that slashdot has become a haven for people who hate open source and come here to praise the MS god.
"Obviously if Microsoft includes a JVM, then no users will go out and bother to download the JVM from Sun, IBM or Acme Computing."
If MS had included a JVM as specified by their contract with sun nobody would have cared. That JVM would have been compliant with the standard set by sun. MS willfully broke their contract (who actually believes that MS will honor a contract anyway? eveybody knows those guys are slime buckets) they got sued and they lost. Sorry but that's the reality.
"You really can't have it both ways. If you get to say what goes in Microsoft's products, then I feel it is my moral duty to say what goes into Linux distributions. "
Well you could if Red Hat had a monopoly. They don't so you can't. MS has one (a court said so!) so they have to act differently. Sorry but that's the law.
I don't know about mysql but I have used postgres and SQL server pretty extensively. I much prefer postgres. First of all lock escalation is just a bitch. Sometimes entire tables get locked out I have have to tell people to log out of their desktops to clear the locks. Sometimes you can't even do that and you have to stop the service and restarted it (kicking everybody out).
Postgres has a kick ass rule subsystem whereby you can make any view writable. Postgres allows you to write your own aggregate functions which allow you to do funky things with text fields. Postgres has unlimited row sizes and unlimited text fields (pretty much). Postgres let's you choose which language you want to write your stored procedures in (perl, python, pg/sql or C) all of which are vastly superior to transact-sql.
I could go on and on. If you ask me postgres is much better then ms-sql server.
What you fail to mention is this.
While it's true that a Union doles out cash to political parties the members of that union usually don't hand out wads of cash (mainly because they have mouths to feed and bills to pay). A corporation on the other hand not only has a lot of money but also has some very rich shareholders. The corporation gives money, the shareholders give money and they also sink unlimited amount of funds into so called think tanks. That along with the soft money funds adds up to a mountain compared to a unions ant hill. Think about it like this.
When was the last time the US chamber of commerce backed a democrat? When was the last time the cato institute backed a democrat?. These organizations are thinly veiled fund raising arms of the republican party and you can give them an infinate amount of money and you don't even have to report it. The corruption in the system is vast and deep.