Gnutella (the protocol LimeWire uses) is decentralized, but you have to "bootstrap" the client to find your first few peers. I believe LimeWire LLC operates servers to facilitate this, but it could be done any number of ways. If you had a friend whom you knew was always on LimeWire and had a static IP, you could connect to him. The client could also cache the addresses of nodes that had worked in the past, and try them. I don't know exactly how LimeWire does it, but it seems to me LimeWire's failing is that by insinuating itself between its users and the network (for the purposes of operating a business), it makes itself the single point of failure.
One thing about that InformationWeek Analytics report is that it's "peer-based," which I take to mean totally self-selecting and rather informal. It's a poll that relies on people accurately reporting their activities, rather than by observing the market.
And while I saw the headline that SQL Server is overtaking Oracle, the actual article provided nothing to support that assertion. Both databases had the same market share, by their figures.
As for NoSQL, it's not a drop-in replacement for traditional RDBMS systems. Rather, it's gaining traction in use cases where a traditional RDBMS might actually be less efficient/effective than using another method.
That's pretty much the shape of the database market today. On the high end you have Oracle vs. IBM and Microsoft. On the lower end you have PostgreSQL, MySQL, and some other alternatives. And then floating all around this general-purpose core you have a whole bunch of alternatives that are tailored for specific purposes, such as data warehousing. Oracle (or the others) can usually do all this stuff too, just not as well. But you often pay a big premium to be able to do something better than Oracle can. (Teradata ain't cheap.)
But at the end of the day, Oracle is basically the gold standard for most applications. So most businesses, particularly publicly-traded companies, are going to want a pretty thorough explanation why you are going out of your way to avoid the vendor with 43 percent penetration in the market composed of businesses just like yours. "Because Oracle drives a hard bargain" isn't a great excuse, because there are always two sides to every bargaining table, and if you're paying too much for the product then it sounds like you aren't representing the company's needs very well in the negotiations.
The breaking point for me was when I proposed slipping an unplanned feature into a release that was in high demand based on customer feedback. I even offered to code it in my off hours so as not to increase development costs and the QA team was on board with absorbing the testing. But my proposal was summarily rejected without discussion.
No offense, but maybe eight months on the job is too soon for a recent college grad to start proposing out-of-scope feature changes to a high-profile, shipping product midway in the development cycle? Maybe the QA team "was on board," but the manager who rejected your idea was the one would would ultimately have had to own those changes, so it's his job on the line and it's his call to make.
Sun fired everyone that made any kind of money after they bought each company, and Oracle is doing the same.
But to be fair, those folks' necks were on the blocks as soon as merger talks started. It's virtually standard operating procedure to chop the top positions after any merger. It's not just about money; as an organizational principle, you don't need a bunch of "founders" and former C-levels from some start-up you bought hanging around in lame-duck management positions, getting in the way.
I'm not saying Oracle's lead doesn't occasionally narrow, but you need to check the dates on your sources a little more closely. Both those stories you cite are from 2003, and in the computing world that's a loooooonnnng time.
According to more recent data from IDC, Oracle had 43.5 percent of the RDBMS market in 2008. IBM came second with just 21.7 percent -- half Oracle's share. I'm sure there are plenty of happy Microsoft and IBM customers, but Oracle maintains a commanding lead.
Steve Lieber is a nice guy and a talented artist, and his comics are worth reading, but let's put this scenario into a little perspective. This is not a case of Steve posting to 4chan and then all the little 4channers running out to buy his comics.
Point 1: Underground could already be downloaded for free from Lieber's Web site, so it being "pirated" on 4chan wasn't that big of a coup.
Point 2: Comic book companies do not track sales on a daily basis. The sales that went "through the roof" were sales of signed print editions from Lieber's Etsy store.
So rather than a massive vindication of 4chan, "engaging your audience," or anything else, I see this more as a case of: A.) creator makes a product available online; B.) author manages (if inadvertently) to find an effective marketing channel for said product; C.) people who spend most of their time online notice the marketing and buy the product.
Pretty simple, really. Engaging his audience helped, but he would have been happy to engage anybody that came his way to begin with. The problem is, "build it and they will come" doesn't really work on the Web. Lieber lucked out that someone else noticed him and chose to promote his product in a way that he couldn't on his own. He was smart enough to pounce on the opportunity.
The patent in question seems to be for something specific and somewhat different from a regular ol' Linux wireless router, like we all use. Particulars from the patent text (all emphasis mine):
The device acts to provide connectivity between wireless backbone access points
It is a primary objective of the present invention to provide a piece of wireless equipment that can effectively connect a large WAN
Still another objective of the present invention is to provide wireless connections designed for outdoor use and flexible security
There are other particulars, but this seems more like something to provide large-scale outdoor wireless infrastructure than simple home routing. The diagrams also show little pictures of houses being served by multiple routers as described in the patent.
Peanut allergy is a little more than an annoyance. Check the packages of snack foods next time you're in the store. Most of them will have a little note on the side explaining that they were manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts. That's because, for some people, just that small amount of trace peanut dust is enough to send them to the hospital. People with peanut allergies spend a lot of time reading little warnings on packages.
My favorite counter-example: The last episode of "The Prisoner", which has a Beatles song in it. At the time, they got a perpetual license, that has AFAIK covered home video, DVD, streaming, etc., usage too.
British dramas seem to have benefited from a lot more leniency in this area. The theme song to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is an old Eagles song, for example, and I've seen "real" pop music showing up in all kinds of shows. I've always wondered whether their copyright laws/licenses are worded differently than those in the U.S.
Please do. I've dug around for an ISO of the real film, unsuccessfully. It was released with "Signifying Rapper" intact on VHS and, I believe, laserdisc... but I don't think any DVD release has had it.
So what content are they saying they are a rights holder/agent of?
I'm guessing it's the music in the show, even if it's only "short clips."
There have been plenty of instances where movies are held up from home video release because of rights disputes over the music in the film. The animated film Heavy Metal could only be seen on cable TV for many years for that reason. The film Bad Lieutenant cannot be seen in its original version on DVD because a Schooly D song in the movie sampled music without licensing it. Schooly got sued and the filmmakers were forced to pull the song from all video releases, present and future. This stuff happens all the time.
Simply put, neither YouTube or the poster have licensed the music in question.
I reviewed the Web-based versions of Office a while ago for InfoWorld. I was pretty underwhelmed, but browser support wasn't really a problem. Microsoft is officially supporting IE, Firefox, and Safari. In practice, I found Chrome and even Konqueror worked pretty much fine. You get better document rendering and maybe some other goodies if you have Silverlight installed, but it's not necessary.
On the other hand, the functionality you get from Web-based Office is a far cry from what you can do with the desktop versions. The Web-based document viewers are top notch and they render Office docs better than anything else on the market, for any platform (other than Windows Office, obviously). But the editors are completely separate from the viewers and they don't offer much more functionality than Google Docs does.
Errr, I know Wikipedia isn't a primary source, but the first couple of lines of the entry on RTF sums up nicely what I've always understood about RTF:
The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange.
Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification and portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used. RTF specifications are changed and published with major Microsoft Word/Microsoft Office versions.
Research may be about to undergo a paradigm shift, but new, actual treatments, seem to run many years behind, if they see the light of day at all.
I'll grant you this point, but it's probably for the better. Would you rather new treatments were rushed to market without real science to back them, and let patients discover the side effects for themselves?
Need proof? Read Enzyme Nutrition, by Dr. Edward Howell:
No thanks. Howell's theories are outdated and largely unsupported by modern food science.
Antibiotics kill off all the bacteria, good and bad.
This is a popular fallacy, but not all antibiotics are effective on all forms of bacteria -- as anyone who has had to get a prescription for antibiotics from a doctor knows. Doctors choose the antibiotics to use based on the family of bacteria they want to destroy.
Cooking and over processing kill off natural enzymes that would help digest the food.
That might be true, but enzymes are best understood as catalysts for digestion, not essential parts of the process. They can help speed digestion, but their lack won't prevent it. Your stomach is full of hydrochloric acid -- that's going to break down most any food you throw in there. In addition, digestive enzymes don't have to come from food; they are secreted by the salivary glands, the stomach, the pancreas, and glands in the intestines. What's more, there are other ways to make nutrients from food more accessible, and one of them is cooking -- something humans have done to their food since the dawn of human history. The idea that humans should stamp out the fire and go back to eating raw vegetables now is pretty silly, and is based more on modern reactionary vegan movements than on science.
He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything.
You sure about that? According to Wired, Ozzie had everything to do with Azure, and spent his first two years on the job reorganizing the company to produce a services platform for the Web. He's quite clear about his intentions and the direction he was pushing the company in his original memo to Microsoft senior management, which was sent out under Bill Gates's email address. And longtime Microsoft observer Mary-Jo Foley says:
As I discovered during the course of my Red Dog meetings, Ozzie was anything but uninvolved in Red Dog and Azure. In fact, I heard from team members time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.
We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual. And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I think the percentage of people who are willing to enroll in a university out of desire to earn money at a career is far greater than the percentage who are interested in being intellectuals.
I have one friend who is currently enrolled in a creative writing degree at a university and who professes a desire to be a published author... and who reads about four books a year. Will he succeed? Maybe not, but if not it's hardly because he lacks opportunities to practice intellectualism. Similarly, the number of my friends who hold strong opinions on politics far outstrips the number who can honestly claim to regularly read newspapers and magazines, beyond a few things they find on the Web.
On the other hand, other friends have just recently completed their degree programs -- some of them advanced degrees -- and now, so burnt out from their academic study that they've lost all passion for their subjects, they look forward to taking a couple years off as professional bartenders. These are very smart people, but to them the thought of spending the rest of their lives pondering the finer points of some bit of classical knowledge is about as exciting as becoming a tax accountant.
The link between education and the romantic notion of "intellectualism" in modern America is tenuous at best -- but that's just what it is, a romantic notion. Real people's lives are much more dominated by real-world concerns, and I highly doubt pulling all the beer taps out of the pubs is going to change that.
Slashdot Mirror
You should try Facebook sometime; I bet you're loads of fun at a party.
That is a design flaw. Whoever decides which candidate goes on top of the ballot has a lot of influence over the election.
In my jurisdiction the candidates are listed alphabetically by last name. So I guess American fathers are guilty of massive election fraud.
Gnutella (the protocol LimeWire uses) is decentralized, but you have to "bootstrap" the client to find your first few peers. I believe LimeWire LLC operates servers to facilitate this, but it could be done any number of ways. If you had a friend whom you knew was always on LimeWire and had a static IP, you could connect to him. The client could also cache the addresses of nodes that had worked in the past, and try them. I don't know exactly how LimeWire does it, but it seems to me LimeWire's failing is that by insinuating itself between its users and the network (for the purposes of operating a business), it makes itself the single point of failure.
The base LimeWire client is also open source, released under the GPL.
One thing about that InformationWeek Analytics report is that it's "peer-based," which I take to mean totally self-selecting and rather informal. It's a poll that relies on people accurately reporting their activities, rather than by observing the market.
And while I saw the headline that SQL Server is overtaking Oracle, the actual article provided nothing to support that assertion. Both databases had the same market share, by their figures.
As for NoSQL, it's not a drop-in replacement for traditional RDBMS systems. Rather, it's gaining traction in use cases where a traditional RDBMS might actually be less efficient/effective than using another method.
That's pretty much the shape of the database market today. On the high end you have Oracle vs. IBM and Microsoft. On the lower end you have PostgreSQL, MySQL, and some other alternatives. And then floating all around this general-purpose core you have a whole bunch of alternatives that are tailored for specific purposes, such as data warehousing. Oracle (or the others) can usually do all this stuff too, just not as well. But you often pay a big premium to be able to do something better than Oracle can. (Teradata ain't cheap.)
But at the end of the day, Oracle is basically the gold standard for most applications. So most businesses, particularly publicly-traded companies, are going to want a pretty thorough explanation why you are going out of your way to avoid the vendor with 43 percent penetration in the market composed of businesses just like yours. "Because Oracle drives a hard bargain" isn't a great excuse, because there are always two sides to every bargaining table, and if you're paying too much for the product then it sounds like you aren't representing the company's needs very well in the negotiations.
Can't we just...STOP talking about whole groups of people we in reality know nothing about and instead talk about concrete issues and individuals.
That's kind of hard to do if we have to throw out all the well-understood adjectives used to describe those issues and individuals.
The breaking point for me was when I proposed slipping an unplanned feature into a release that was in high demand based on customer feedback. I even offered to code it in my off hours so as not to increase development costs and the QA team was on board with absorbing the testing. But my proposal was summarily rejected without discussion.
No offense, but maybe eight months on the job is too soon for a recent college grad to start proposing out-of-scope feature changes to a high-profile, shipping product midway in the development cycle? Maybe the QA team "was on board," but the manager who rejected your idea was the one would would ultimately have had to own those changes, so it's his job on the line and it's his call to make.
Sun fired everyone that made any kind of money after they bought each company, and Oracle is doing the same.
But to be fair, those folks' necks were on the blocks as soon as merger talks started. It's virtually standard operating procedure to chop the top positions after any merger. It's not just about money; as an organizational principle, you don't need a bunch of "founders" and former C-levels from some start-up you bought hanging around in lame-duck management positions, getting in the way.
I'm not saying Oracle's lead doesn't occasionally narrow, but you need to check the dates on your sources a little more closely. Both those stories you cite are from 2003, and in the computing world that's a loooooonnnng time.
According to more recent data from IDC, Oracle had 43.5 percent of the RDBMS market in 2008. IBM came second with just 21.7 percent -- half Oracle's share. I'm sure there are plenty of happy Microsoft and IBM customers, but Oracle maintains a commanding lead.
Oracle DB is available for OS X? That's news to me? Link to download please?
An oldie but a goodie... here ya go.
Steve Lieber is a nice guy and a talented artist, and his comics are worth reading, but let's put this scenario into a little perspective. This is not a case of Steve posting to 4chan and then all the little 4channers running out to buy his comics.
Point 1: Underground could already be downloaded for free from Lieber's Web site, so it being "pirated" on 4chan wasn't that big of a coup.
Point 2: Comic book companies do not track sales on a daily basis. The sales that went "through the roof" were sales of signed print editions from Lieber's Etsy store.
So rather than a massive vindication of 4chan, "engaging your audience," or anything else, I see this more as a case of: A.) creator makes a product available online; B.) author manages (if inadvertently) to find an effective marketing channel for said product; C.) people who spend most of their time online notice the marketing and buy the product.
Pretty simple, really. Engaging his audience helped, but he would have been happy to engage anybody that came his way to begin with. The problem is, "build it and they will come" doesn't really work on the Web. Lieber lucked out that someone else noticed him and chose to promote his product in a way that he couldn't on his own. He was smart enough to pounce on the opportunity.
The patent in question seems to be for something specific and somewhat different from a regular ol' Linux wireless router, like we all use. Particulars from the patent text (all emphasis mine):
There are other particulars, but this seems more like something to provide large-scale outdoor wireless infrastructure than simple home routing. The diagrams also show little pictures of houses being served by multiple routers as described in the patent.
You should not be printing web pages; the website should provide you with a document to print if information is actually needed in dead-tree form.
Right, so you've never printed a page from Google Maps?
Peanut allergy is a little more than an annoyance. Check the packages of snack foods next time you're in the store. Most of them will have a little note on the side explaining that they were manufactured in a facility that processes peanuts. That's because, for some people, just that small amount of trace peanut dust is enough to send them to the hospital. People with peanut allergies spend a lot of time reading little warnings on packages.
In Schooly D's case, those would be Jimmy Page's legs you'd be breaking.
My favorite counter-example: The last episode of "The Prisoner", which has a Beatles song in it. At the time, they got a perpetual license, that has AFAIK covered home video, DVD, streaming, etc., usage too.
British dramas seem to have benefited from a lot more leniency in this area. The theme song to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is an old Eagles song, for example, and I've seen "real" pop music showing up in all kinds of shows. I've always wondered whether their copyright laws/licenses are worded differently than those in the U.S.
Please do. I've dug around for an ISO of the real film, unsuccessfully. It was released with "Signifying Rapper" intact on VHS and, I believe, laserdisc... but I don't think any DVD release has had it.
So what content are they saying they are a rights holder/agent of?
I'm guessing it's the music in the show, even if it's only "short clips."
There have been plenty of instances where movies are held up from home video release because of rights disputes over the music in the film. The animated film Heavy Metal could only be seen on cable TV for many years for that reason. The film Bad Lieutenant cannot be seen in its original version on DVD because a Schooly D song in the movie sampled music without licensing it. Schooly got sued and the filmmakers were forced to pull the song from all video releases, present and future. This stuff happens all the time.
Simply put, neither YouTube or the poster have licensed the music in question.
Yeah, it's called Open Office. Base does the same thing.
Kinda wishing there was a "-1, Completely False" mod right now. OpenOffice Base doesn't even come remotely close to replacing Access.
I reviewed the Web-based versions of Office a while ago for InfoWorld. I was pretty underwhelmed, but browser support wasn't really a problem. Microsoft is officially supporting IE, Firefox, and Safari. In practice, I found Chrome and even Konqueror worked pretty much fine. You get better document rendering and maybe some other goodies if you have Silverlight installed, but it's not necessary.
On the other hand, the functionality you get from Web-based Office is a far cry from what you can do with the desktop versions. The Web-based document viewers are top notch and they render Office docs better than anything else on the market, for any platform (other than Windows Office, obviously). But the editors are completely separate from the viewers and they don't offer much more functionality than Google Docs does.
Errr, I know Wikipedia isn't a primary source, but the first couple of lines of the entry on RTF sums up nicely what I've always understood about RTF:
The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a proprietary document file format with published specification developed by Microsoft Corporation since 1987 for Microsoft products and for cross-platform document interchange.
Most word processors are able to read and write some versions of RTF. There are several different revisions of RTF specification and portability of files will depend on what version of RTF is being used. RTF specifications are changed and published with major Microsoft Word/Microsoft Office versions.
Research may be about to undergo a paradigm shift, but new, actual treatments, seem to run many years behind, if they see the light of day at all.
I'll grant you this point, but it's probably for the better. Would you rather new treatments were rushed to market without real science to back them, and let patients discover the side effects for themselves?
Need proof? Read Enzyme Nutrition, by Dr. Edward Howell:
No thanks. Howell's theories are outdated and largely unsupported by modern food science.
Antibiotics kill off all the bacteria, good and bad.
This is a popular fallacy, but not all antibiotics are effective on all forms of bacteria -- as anyone who has had to get a prescription for antibiotics from a doctor knows. Doctors choose the antibiotics to use based on the family of bacteria they want to destroy.
Cooking and over processing kill off natural enzymes that would help digest the food.
That might be true, but enzymes are best understood as catalysts for digestion, not essential parts of the process. They can help speed digestion, but their lack won't prevent it. Your stomach is full of hydrochloric acid -- that's going to break down most any food you throw in there. In addition, digestive enzymes don't have to come from food; they are secreted by the salivary glands, the stomach, the pancreas, and glands in the intestines. What's more, there are other ways to make nutrients from food more accessible, and one of them is cooking -- something humans have done to their food since the dawn of human history. The idea that humans should stamp out the fire and go back to eating raw vegetables now is pretty silly, and is based more on modern reactionary vegan movements than on science.
That sucks, but seems what I would expect out of a for profit business. They are really pushed to cut every corner.
Heh... unlike state-funded universities, right?
Say instead that for-profit universities are really pushed to increase enrollment, no matter what those students' long-term prospects for success.
He had little to do with Azure, didn't talk much at company meetings, didn't inspire, didn't do anything.
You sure about that? According to Wired , Ozzie had everything to do with Azure, and spent his first two years on the job reorganizing the company to produce a services platform for the Web. He's quite clear about his intentions and the direction he was pushing the company in his original memo to Microsoft senior management, which was sent out under Bill Gates's email address. And longtime Microsoft observer Mary-Jo Foley says:
As I discovered during the course of my Red Dog meetings, Ozzie was anything but uninvolved in Red Dog and Azure. In fact, I heard from team members time and time again, without Ozzie’s oversight and direct intervention, Red Dog and the broader Azure platform wouldn’t have come together as quickly or comprehensively as they did.
We cannot keep an international presentation on evolutionary biology within a circle of privileged academics, just because we hold to the myth that if you aren't in a university, you aren't interested in being an intellectual.
And once we have that, or maybe concurrently, we need public spaces, free of charge and open to anyone, that people get together to talk about what they've learned, and to learn more. Like a library where talking is encouraged, or a pub without beer.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I think the percentage of people who are willing to enroll in a university out of desire to earn money at a career is far greater than the percentage who are interested in being intellectuals.
I have one friend who is currently enrolled in a creative writing degree at a university and who professes a desire to be a published author... and who reads about four books a year. Will he succeed? Maybe not, but if not it's hardly because he lacks opportunities to practice intellectualism. Similarly, the number of my friends who hold strong opinions on politics far outstrips the number who can honestly claim to regularly read newspapers and magazines, beyond a few things they find on the Web.
On the other hand, other friends have just recently completed their degree programs -- some of them advanced degrees -- and now, so burnt out from their academic study that they've lost all passion for their subjects, they look forward to taking a couple years off as professional bartenders. These are very smart people, but to them the thought of spending the rest of their lives pondering the finer points of some bit of classical knowledge is about as exciting as becoming a tax accountant.
The link between education and the romantic notion of "intellectualism" in modern America is tenuous at best -- but that's just what it is, a romantic notion. Real people's lives are much more dominated by real-world concerns, and I highly doubt pulling all the beer taps out of the pubs is going to change that.