As a liberterian you would be advocating a smaller nay an absolutely minimalist government. You would in effect reduce the executive and legislative branches of the government to a bare minimum and allow the judicial branch to become much more powerful. Every dispute would have to be settled in the courts and most of those would have to be settled in the civil courts because there would be a drastic reduction in the number and scope of laws.
Given this I submit that the corporations would be much more powerful then they are today. By eliminating all safety regulations, minimum wages, pollution laws etc you would allow the corporations to make much greater profit then they do now. It would be even more impossible to take them to court given their greater wealth. By reducing power of government you will create a vacuum which will be filled by the corporations. They can grow unchecked and wreak havoc on the world without any resistance whatsoever.
Nevertheless we have ample precedent from the business community itself for the following principle.
"If it costs too much to do the right thing we will do our best not to do it"
Whenever the issue of minimum or living wages is brought up the chamber of commerce immediately goes to washington saying that paying people a decent wage costs too much and they should not be made to do it.
Whenever new pollution laws are being talked about the business community rises up and says it costs too much to clean up their poisons and that they should not be forced to do it.
Whenever osha safety regulations are proposed businesses all chime in "it costs too much to make sure all of our employees are safe".
Given this atmosphere it does not surprise me to see that the younger generation has learned a valuable lesson from their elders. They have in effect said "it costs too much to buy CDs and we should not be forced to buy them". Unfortunately for them they can not bribe politicians to bend to their whims like the chanber can so they have resorted to other tactics.
I don't play tennis so it's unacceptable to me that my taxes go towards building and maintaining tennis courts. I don't have children so it's unacceptable to me that my taxes go to schools.
Unfortunately un the US we don't get to pick and choose how our taxes are spent. You don't "Damn well" get to do jack shit. You pay your taxes and you try to influence your legislators on how the money is spent. In this regard you are damned lucky. Your corporation is the richest and most powerful ornanization on the planet and can buy as many politicians as you want. We will yell and scream that we pay taxes and we want the govt to do this and that but when it comes to delivering the bribes we are powerless.
Your bosses will deliver the bribes and get what they want that's the way the system works.
BTW. I have no qualms about preventing businesses from profiting from govt work. It's supposed to be govt of the people not govt of the corporations. The corps can afford to do their own development without needing the govt. In fact anytime a bunch of CEOs get together they start griping about how inefficient and wasteful govt is and how we ought to just turn over the reigns to business and let them take care of everything. Of course when the time comes to ask for a handout they are first in line.
Given two conflicting testimonies and absent any further evidence you can only rely on your perceptions of who is telling the truth.
The web site in effect states "we don't believe him therefore it's a legend". Given this weak of an argument It's astonishing that you would accept the conclusion of that web site over the testimony of a person who claims to have actually done the deed.
If you have some reason to believe the web site other then "cos I saw it on the web" please enlighten me.
Burden of proof or not the website offers only one explanation as to why they claim this is an urban legend. They don't believe him. All they would have to do is to point out one piece of paper anywhere on this planet that told this story and predated his book and they would have had him.
You don't get to call people liars without offering some evidence to the contrary. They probably did not even contact the man and ask him to prove it. They did not offer to pay for a lie detector test, they did no research at all. They simply said "I don't believe it therefore it's an urban legend".
In the absence of any evidence whatsoever I get to choose who I believe. Present one piece of evidence to contrary and I may change my view.
Speaking of stupid americans. The only reason you don't believe him is because it says so on a web site. You were not there, you have zero knowledge of what may or may not have happened. You have one eyewitness to the story who claims it happened. You have zero eyewitnesses on the scene to contradict him. No matter how you count the evidence there is more evidence to suggest that it did happen then to suggest that it did not happen.
He says he did. Somebody else says he didn't. I guess I get to choose who I believe since I was not there and did not witness the event.
I read the book and saw him on TV he seemed believable to me (I guess con man are like that).
I think I'll choose to believe the man seeing as how these bozos with a web site are unable to provide any evidence whatsoever about this story one way or another. It looks like they don't believe him so they decide it's an urban legend. Hey can I play that game too! I don't believe that the moon landing occured therefore it's an urban legend! Wow this could be fun..
Let me tell you a true story to illustrate exactly how stupid most americans are.
A con man one time rented a guards uniform from a local shop. He went to the airport with a stool and a hand made sign. He parked the stool in front of the night deposit box and hung a sign that said "night deposit box out of order please leave money with guard". He sat there for several hours collecting bags of money and went home.
Not one person said to thenselves "how can a night deposit box be out of order?". Nobody asked for and ID or credentials.
Americans see a sign and obey it, they see a person in uniform and do what he says.
So tell me will americans say "why should I trust microsoft with my credit card?" or will they simply hand over a bag of money to the guy with the guard costume on?
BTW I am seriously not making that story up. It was a con man who later wrote a book about his exploits. Do a search and look for it. I laughed my ass off about the time he ripped off prostitutes at a convention.
Re:Marketing mindset a little strong.
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 2
It's obvious you have never used vi.
My point is that he doesn't HAVE to code anything. He did an awsome thing (something you can't claim) and has proven himself both as a coder and as a manager (something you can't claim). Any two bit asshole idiot like yourself can post on slashdot saying "what has a done recently". I tell you what he has done. He got off his butt and made a difference in the lives of thousands of people. He is till working to shape the future in his image, he is still working his ass off trying to come up with better ideas for how computing should be. He doesn't have to he is rich as hell. He does not have to work another day in his life. He could lie on some private island and have nubile young women bring him drinks. But he works anyway.
What the hell did you do today (besides whine on slashdot that is)?
Re:Marketing mindset a little strong.
on
Sun Launches JXTA
·
· Score: 1
"What the hell?! Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager. "
He wrote Vi. It was while ago but it was very cool. What have you done lately? Anything that comes close to wrting Vi? Maybe managing a good chunk of a huge company like SUN?
He did not give away money only stock which he got for nothing.
The amounts you mention are a miniscule percentage of his wealth I would not praise him for giving a 100 million just like I don't expect praise for giving a beggar a dollar. Neither amount seriously effects our lifestyle and although it does do some good its hardly something extraordinary.
Some of what he gives away he gets back because the recepients are obligated by license to buy his software.
He did not give away one cent until the trial began and people started calling him evil. This pattern is not from the heart but an effort to rehabilitate his image. Maybe it's cheaper then hiring a PR firm it certainly costs less then superbowl commercials. I suspect that as soon as the trial os over he will stop giving away his money. We ought to raise our voices even higher in calling him out and pointing out his evil deeds if it's going to prod him into helping out the less fortunate. Certainly he is in a position no other human being on the planet is.
"It's also worth noting that a great deal of his charitable donations have taken the form of free licenses to Microsoft software. Net cost to BG, zero; net gain from faking out morons like you, incalculable."
Actually he does not actually give money away. he gives away stock. Now he didn't really pay for that stock so the only cost to him is that that's some money he didn't make but could have at some point in the future.
In fact it's all a drop in the bucket anyway. When you are billionaire you can give away 90% of your money and still live like a god. An ordinary person making the average 30-40K per year will hurt seriously if they give away 5% of their money. Bill Gates giving a billion dollars is like me giving a quarter to the bum on the street. It means nothing and I don't notice the loss.
What I wonder about is why charities are taking this blood money in the first place. I guess it all spends the same but to be used as PR props for anethically challaeed individual has got to be humiliating.
I have ran sql server 7.0 before and it's really not a 24X7 system. It frequently needs to be shut down to clear some odd locks. Mostly if the client software crashes in the middle of doing something it's impossible to clear the transaction or the locks without killing the server (I forget which types but about 5 types of locks could not be killed with kill command). Also someimes you had to kick people off to reorganize some tables basically clustering on different indexes. It kept getting confused and gave odd errors which had nothing to do with the problem.
Anyway it was no fun to manage and kicking people off the database always get the management in a huff. I guess it reminded them that they made a huge mistake when they bought the damned thing.
Lots actually. A rule system (every view can be made editable). User defined operators including aggregates. User loadable SP languages (no more SET TERM!) you can use perl if you like. Lots of object oriented stuff. Unlimited row size, easier import and export of text data blah blah. Lots of cool things in postgres.
OTOH it's a royal PITA to install in windows. IB is so much easier to install and manage if you are running windows. And IB/Delphi combo kicks ass.
I am afraid your knowledge is out dated. Postgres has had serials sinse 6.5. By creating a table with serial datatype postgres actually creates a generator and attaches it to the table. BTW generators are much more flexable then autoinc fields because you can prefetch them, there are lots of neat uses for that. since v7.0 postgres has had unlimited row sizes (limited by the OS).
The documentation is one of the best. Second only to the truly awsome php documentation. Go read it yourself.
Rule subsystem. Very powerful in fact arguably more powerful then oracles implementation of views.
- Tons of documentation (look at the book store)
All you need is on the web including the source code.
- Tablespaces and rollback segments for fine grained disk usage distribution
OK
- 24/7 operation: the ability to take portions of the database offline for backup / recovery while keeping other parts up (i.e. tablespaces)
You can do live backups but not live restores. You can however stream a backup from one server to another. Pretty cool.
- Tools support (SQL Navigator, DBArtisan, etc.)
There are plenty of tools as well as ODBC drivers so you can interface it with just about anything. psql is pertty great too one of the best command line tools I have used.
- Heterogeneous data replication
no live replication but it does supports oids and you can roll your own relatively easily if your needs are not too complex. See my comment of streaming backups.
- Text-based indices (intermedia)
I have no idea what this is or why it might be useful.
- XSQL and XML rowsets
Not needed because really it does not belong in a database. Any dork can write a few lines of perl to get the data and turn it into XML.
OK here are some features of postgres that oracle does not.
User definable functions including aggregate functions. You want to define a MAX or MIN on text fields go crazy!.
Loadable stored procedure languages. You can use perl, python, C or the built in language. You can write code in C and run it privledged mode with access to the OS (as the postgres user).
Ability to define your own operators. It also has a very rich set of operators like a operator that says "is this point outside of this circle". In fact the geometric datatypes are freaking awsome.
Ability to define your own objects (kinda) and store them in the database. Very object relational.
unlimited row size. Unlimited length text fields.
Regular expressions in the SQL statements.
I could go on and on but trust me there are problems postgres can solve that oracle can't.
In the history of the world has there ever been a case when stockholders came looking for executives who have personal liability? Of course not. When PSIX (PSI-NET) stock went from $60.00 to nothing what happened to the executives? NOTHING!
The xecutives cached their stock options at $60 and have that money tucked away in some bank or another.
Personal responsibility and personal liability have no place in the corporate world. That's why corporations were invented in the first place to shirk personal responsiblity.
As for everyting else you say it's pure garbage.
Postgres can keep your financials just as well as oracle, mysql, SAP-DB, interbase or whatever. It's fiscally irresponsible to pay for enterprise features if you are not running an enterprise. For the vast majority of the businesses in the world who have less then a couple of hundred employees any open source database if plenty good enough. Lots and lots of businesses worldwide ran interbase and SAPDB for years before they became open source. The idea is to choose the right tool and to manage it properly. I would reccomend a easy to understand and use tool like interbase any day over a complex monster like oracle if the business does not need enterprise features like 32 processors or gigabytes of data.
Stored procedures aren't always appropriate. Worse yet they tie to a database, forever locking you a database vendor, worse even then that Transact sql SUCKS as a programming language. If you put all you logic in transact SQL (I would rather shoot myself first) then you can never ever switch from SQL server. Good for MS sucks for the poor business owner.
The ampersands are just the tip of the iceberg. VB sucks ass as a language. It's obvious you have never done string manipulation with perl or php. Once you learn that then you'll see what I mean.
I have used CF. I used it until 4.5 came out. With 4.5 they raised their prices again. I said to myself. "It looks like they are going to raise their prices with every version what features does it offer that PHP does not which would compell me to upgrade". I thought about it quite a bit and came to the conclusion that it would be better to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
If the lawyer could not have come up with an example no wonder they lost. They gotta get better lawyers.
As a liberterian you would be advocating a smaller nay an absolutely minimalist government. You would in effect reduce the executive and legislative branches of the government to a bare minimum and allow the judicial branch to become much more powerful. Every dispute would have to be settled in the courts and most of those would have to be settled in the civil courts because there would be a drastic reduction in the number and scope of laws.
Given this I submit that the corporations would be much more powerful then they are today. By eliminating all safety regulations, minimum wages, pollution laws etc you would allow the corporations to make much greater profit then they do now. It would be even more impossible to take them to court given their greater wealth. By reducing power of government you will create a vacuum which will be filled by the corporations. They can grow unchecked and wreak havoc on the world without any resistance whatsoever.
Forget Ted Turner Tie a goddamned noose around the neck fo that bastard Rupert Murdock. In my revolution his head would be the first to roll.
In the information age all wars will be fought with programmers. Programmers are the only true freedom fighters.
Nevertheless we have ample precedent from the business community itself for the following principle.
"If it costs too much to do the right thing we will do our best not to do it"
Whenever the issue of minimum or living wages is brought up the chamber of commerce immediately goes to washington saying that paying people a decent wage costs too much and they should not be made to do it.
Whenever new pollution laws are being talked about the business community rises up and says it costs too much to clean up their poisons and that they should not be forced to do it.
Whenever osha safety regulations are proposed businesses all chime in "it costs too much to make sure all of our employees are safe".
Given this atmosphere it does not surprise me to see that the younger generation has learned a valuable lesson from their elders. They have in effect said "it costs too much to buy CDs and we should not be forced to buy them". Unfortunately for them they can not bribe politicians to bend to their whims like the chanber can so they have resorted to other tactics.
I don't play tennis so it's unacceptable to me that my taxes go towards building and maintaining tennis courts. I don't have children so it's unacceptable to me that my taxes go to schools.
Unfortunately un the US we don't get to pick and choose how our taxes are spent. You don't "Damn well" get to do jack shit. You pay your taxes and you try to influence your legislators on how the money is spent. In this regard you are damned lucky. Your corporation is the richest and most powerful ornanization on the planet and can buy as many politicians as you want. We will yell and scream that we pay taxes and we want the govt to do this and that but when it comes to delivering the bribes we are powerless.
Your bosses will deliver the bribes and get what they want that's the way the system works.
BTW. I have no qualms about preventing businesses from profiting from govt work. It's supposed to be govt of the people not govt of the corporations. The corps can afford to do their own development without needing the govt. In fact anytime a bunch of CEOs get together they start griping about how inefficient and wasteful govt is and how we ought to just turn over the reigns to business and let them take care of everything. Of course when the time comes to ask for a handout they are first in line.
"There's a big difference."
I think that was point.
Given two conflicting testimonies and absent any further evidence you can only rely on your perceptions of who is telling the truth.
The web site in effect states "we don't believe him therefore it's a legend". Given this weak of an argument It's astonishing that you would accept the conclusion of that web site over the testimony of a person who claims to have actually done the deed.
If you have some reason to believe the web site other then "cos I saw it on the web" please enlighten me.
Burden of proof or not the website offers only one explanation as to why they claim this is an urban legend. They don't believe him. All they would have to do is to point out one piece of paper anywhere on this planet that told this story and predated his book and they would have had him.
You don't get to call people liars without offering some evidence to the contrary. They probably did not even contact the man and ask him to prove it. They did not offer to pay for a lie detector test, they did no research at all. They simply said "I don't believe it therefore it's an urban legend".
In the absence of any evidence whatsoever I get to choose who I believe. Present one piece of evidence to contrary and I may change my view.
Speaking of stupid americans. The only reason you don't believe him is because it says so on a web site. You were not there, you have zero knowledge of what may or may not have happened. You have one eyewitness to the story who claims it happened. You have zero eyewitnesses on the scene to contradict him. No matter how you count the evidence there is more evidence to suggest that it did happen then to suggest that it did not happen.
He says he did. Somebody else says he didn't. I guess I get to choose who I believe since I was not there and did not witness the event.
I read the book and saw him on TV he seemed believable to me (I guess con man are like that).
I think I'll choose to believe the man seeing as how these bozos with a web site are unable to provide any evidence whatsoever about this story one way or another. It looks like they don't believe him so they decide it's an urban legend. Hey can I play that game too! I don't believe that the moon landing occured therefore it's an urban legend! Wow this could be fun..
Let me tell you a true story to illustrate exactly how stupid most americans are.
A con man one time rented a guards uniform from a local shop. He went to the airport with a stool and a hand made sign. He parked the stool in front of the night deposit box and hung a sign that said "night deposit box out of order please leave money with guard". He sat there for several hours collecting bags of money and went home.
Not one person said to thenselves "how can a night deposit box be out of order?". Nobody asked for and ID or credentials.
Americans see a sign and obey it, they see a person in uniform and do what he says.
So tell me will americans say "why should I trust microsoft with my credit card?" or will they simply hand over a bag of money to the guy with the guard costume on?
BTW I am seriously not making that story up. It was a con man who later wrote a book about his exploits. Do a search and look for it. I laughed my ass off about the time he ripped off prostitutes at a convention.
It's obvious you have never used vi.
My point is that he doesn't HAVE to code anything. He did an awsome thing (something you can't claim) and has proven himself both as a coder and as a manager (something you can't claim). Any two bit asshole idiot like yourself can post on slashdot saying "what has a done recently". I tell you what he has done. He got off his butt and made a difference in the lives of thousands of people. He is till working to shape the future in his image, he is still working his ass off trying to come up with better ideas for how computing should be. He doesn't have to he is rich as hell. He does not have to work another day in his life. He could lie on some private island and have nubile young women bring him drinks. But he works anyway.
What the hell did you do today (besides whine on slashdot that is)?
"What the hell?! Bill Joy isn't a "developer" - he is %100 manager. "
He wrote Vi. It was while ago but it was very cool. What have you done lately? Anything that comes close to wrting Vi? Maybe managing a good chunk of a huge company like SUN?
Once again I will reiterate the following.
He did not give away money only stock which he got for nothing.
The amounts you mention are a miniscule percentage of his wealth I would not praise him for giving a 100 million just like I don't expect praise for giving a beggar a dollar. Neither amount seriously effects our lifestyle and although it does do some good its hardly something extraordinary.
Some of what he gives away he gets back because the recepients are obligated by license to buy his software.
He did not give away one cent until the trial began and people started calling him evil. This pattern is not from the heart but an effort to rehabilitate his image. Maybe it's cheaper then hiring a PR firm it certainly costs less then superbowl commercials. I suspect that as soon as the trial os over he will stop giving away his money. We ought to raise our voices even higher in calling him out and pointing out his evil deeds if it's going to prod him into helping out the less fortunate. Certainly he is in a position no other human being on the planet is.
"It's also worth noting that a great deal of his charitable donations have taken the form of free licenses to Microsoft software. Net cost to BG, zero; net gain from faking out morons like you, incalculable."
Actually he does not actually give money away. he gives away stock. Now he didn't really pay for that stock so the only cost to him is that that's some money he didn't make but could have at some point in the future.
In fact it's all a drop in the bucket anyway. When you are billionaire you can give away 90% of your money and still live like a god. An ordinary person making the average 30-40K per year will hurt seriously if they give away 5% of their money. Bill Gates giving a billion dollars is like me giving a quarter to the bum on the street. It means nothing and I don't notice the loss.
What I wonder about is why charities are taking this blood money in the first place. I guess it all spends the same but to be used as PR props for anethically challaeed individual has got to be humiliating.
I have ran sql server 7.0 before and it's really not a 24X7 system. It frequently needs to be shut down to clear some odd locks. Mostly if the client software crashes in the middle of doing something it's impossible to clear the transaction or the locks without killing the server (I forget which types but about 5 types of locks could not be killed with kill command). Also someimes you had to kick people off to reorganize some tables basically clustering on different indexes. It kept getting confused and gave odd errors which had nothing to do with the problem.
Anyway it was no fun to manage and kicking people off the database always get the management in a huff. I guess it reminded them that they made a huge mistake when they bought the damned thing.
Lots actually. A rule system (every view can be made editable). User defined operators including aggregates. User loadable SP languages (no more SET TERM!) you can use perl if you like. Lots of object oriented stuff. Unlimited row size, easier import and export of text data blah blah. Lots of cool things in postgres.
OTOH it's a royal PITA to install in windows. IB is so much easier to install and manage if you are running windows. And IB/Delphi combo kicks ass.
not true. It's open sourced. You can do whatever you want with it.
I am afraid your knowledge is out dated. Postgres has had serials sinse 6.5. By creating a table with serial datatype postgres actually creates a generator and attaches it to the table. BTW generators are much more flexable then autoinc fields because you can prefetch them, there are lots of neat uses for that. since v7.0 postgres has had unlimited row sizes (limited by the OS).
The documentation is one of the best. Second only to the truly awsome php documentation. Go read it yourself.
Materialized views & snapshots
Rule subsystem. Very powerful in fact arguably more powerful then oracles implementation of views.
- Tons of documentation (look at the book store)
All you need is on the web including the source code.
- Tablespaces and rollback segments for fine grained disk usage distribution
OK
- 24/7 operation: the ability to take portions of the database offline for backup / recovery while keeping other parts up (i.e. tablespaces)
You can do live backups but not live restores. You can however stream a backup from one server to another. Pretty cool.
- Tools support (SQL Navigator, DBArtisan, etc.)
There are plenty of tools as well as ODBC drivers so you can interface it with just about anything. psql is pertty great too one of the best command line tools I have used.
- Heterogeneous data replication
no live replication but it does supports oids and you can roll your own relatively easily if your needs are not too complex. See my comment of streaming backups.
- Text-based indices (intermedia)
I have no idea what this is or why it might be useful.
- XSQL and XML rowsets
Not needed because really it does not belong in a database. Any dork can write a few lines of perl to get the data and turn it into XML.
OK here are some features of postgres that oracle does not.
User definable functions including aggregate functions. You want to define a MAX or MIN on text fields go crazy!.
Loadable stored procedure languages. You can use perl, python, C or the built in language. You can write code in C and run it privledged mode with access to the OS (as the postgres user).
Ability to define your own operators. It also has a very rich set of operators like a operator that says "is this point outside of this circle". In fact the geometric datatypes are freaking awsome.
Ability to define your own objects (kinda) and store them in the database. Very object relational.
unlimited row size. Unlimited length text fields.
Regular expressions in the SQL statements.
I could go on and on but trust me there are problems postgres can solve that oracle can't.
In the history of the world has there ever been a case when stockholders came looking for executives who have personal liability? Of course not. When PSIX (PSI-NET) stock went from $60.00 to nothing what happened to the executives? NOTHING!
The xecutives cached their stock options at $60 and have that money tucked away in some bank or another.
Personal responsibility and personal liability have no place in the corporate world. That's why corporations were invented in the first place to shirk personal responsiblity.
As for everyting else you say it's pure garbage.
Postgres can keep your financials just as well as oracle, mysql, SAP-DB, interbase or whatever. It's fiscally irresponsible to pay for enterprise features if you are not running an enterprise. For the vast majority of the businesses in the world who have less then a couple of hundred employees any open source database if plenty good enough. Lots and lots of businesses worldwide ran interbase and SAPDB for years before they became open source. The idea is to choose the right tool and to manage it properly. I would reccomend a easy to understand and use tool like interbase any day over a complex monster like oracle if the business does not need enterprise features like 32 processors or gigabytes of data.
He's an idiot don't expect him to actually think about things like that.
He thinks that if you disagree about a patent you are a communist. What kind of a moron thinks like that?
Stored procedures aren't always appropriate. Worse yet they tie to a database, forever locking you a database vendor, worse even then that Transact sql SUCKS as a programming language. If you put all you logic in transact SQL (I would rather shoot myself first) then you can never ever switch from SQL server. Good for MS sucks for the poor business owner.
The ampersands are just the tip of the iceberg. VB sucks ass as a language. It's obvious you have never done string manipulation with perl or php. Once you learn that then you'll see what I mean.
coulnd't have said it better my self.
I have used CF. I used it until 4.5 came out. With 4.5 they raised their prices again. I said to myself. "It looks like they are going to raise their prices with every version what features does it offer that PHP does not which would compell me to upgrade". I thought about it quite a bit and came to the conclusion that it would be better to switch.