So what's your point? Mine is that apologizing != "groveling." If more IT types could learn how to admit they're wrong gracefully, the world would be a better place IMHO.
Since when does apologizing to someone for your own baseless accusations amount to "groveling"?
From the post in question:
Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we've done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor . . . We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused.
Wow. Way to kiss ass.
You know what would be even more pathetic and embarrassing than this kind of "groveling"? Standing behind claims that you know to be false.
application launch time ARE slower, by a few seconds, compared to XP. especially when opening MS Word or Excel, I'd say more than a few seconds
I often see claims like this and I question them. I don't remember the launch times for Word or Excel 2003, but ever since Office 2007 on XP I've found the applications take no longer than a few seconds to launch, total. In the case of Excel, I can literally double-click the icon, count "one, two, three," and I have a blank spreadsheet. It's not much slower on my Atom-powered Eee PC with slow solid-state drives. If your copies are launching many times slower than that, either your hardware is very out of date, or else you have a very old installation that's bogged down by upgrade cruft. A clean install of Office (after a complete uninstall) should make those problems go away, in my experience.
Replying to undo an accidental moderation that didn't deserve it.
Agreed that "zero day" has almost no meaning these days. Pretty bizarre when companies actually brag about their "zero day exploits" and promise a fix... several days from now?
Also, a shockingly nasty method of murder -- something the KGB was known for. (And what is the FSB but the KGB retooled?) The message is loud and clear for anyone who might be considering following in Litvinenko's footsteps.
Come on, you're talking about ancient history. The 70s? That was the Soviet Union!
What about Alexander Litvienenko? He fled Russia in 2000, was granted asylum in the UK in October 2006, and by November 2006 he was murdered. The killers used a radioactive isotope that would not have been available to the average crazy on the street -- clearly sending a message.
URL shorteners are a scourge. As someone else pointed out, they're only really useful for Twitter, with its artificial post-length constraint. Anyone who links to a tinyurl on an actual Web site (such as Slashdot) should automatically be assumed to be a troll, because the only reason to use an URL shortener is to conceal what you're actually linking to.
Enough with the goddamn excuse culture. You want respect, you earn respect. You want a second chance, then PROVE you deserve it first.
Yeah, but how are they supposed to do that?
By dedicating their lives to hard work... when they can't get jobs?
By dedicating themselves to community service... when the public views them with mistrust and suspicion?
By voluntarily giving restitution money to the victim's family... when they're broke (see first point)?
By joining the army and dying for God and country in the foreign service, far away from the scorn of their fellow Germans... when they have criminal records?
If you're going to make them walk around with a scarlet letter 'M' on their chests for the rest of their lives, just what opportunities will they ever have to redeem themselves?
If the purpose of prison is to reform criminals and give them the opportunity to return to society as productive citizens -- as seems to be the prevailing theory in Germany -- then it is the responsibility of the public to put that theory to the test. You can't send people to prison telling them, "you must reform," then let them out and tell them, "you have not reformed, sorry." One of the fundamental principles of justice in any democratic country is that the accused is allowed to speak up in his own defense, but what you're describing is a sentence from which there is no appeal.
"Destroying market for MySQL" is not the same thing as "destroying market for databases". It means that most people involved migrate from MySQL to some other database. Presumably Oracle would get at least a slice of that pie, especially if they would offer an "enterprise grade support" migration path.
But how does Oracle profit more from your scenario than if it just sold commercial MySQL licenses, honored all the support contracts Sun/MySQL AB has now, and tried to win more MySQL customers?
In other words, why would Oracle kill the golden goose? Just out of spite?
Remember, if Oracle owns MySQL, then every commercial MySQL customer becomes a potential sales lead for Oracle. Sure, Oracle might put more effort behind selling Oracle databases than MySQL databases -- but how is that any different from right now, when MySQL pretty much sells itself? Better to hang on to those names and contact numbers for the day when they need something more advanced than MySQL than to just let them wander off to IBM or Microsoft.
Also remember that a large portion (the majority?) of commercial MySQL licenses are sold to companies that want to ship MySQL databases in embedded systems or other turnkey solutions. I don't know how much an Oracle embedded license costs, but I'm willing to bet it's priced well beyond what would be profitable for many applications. Therefore, outside the world of Web apps and simple departmental databases, the MySQL technology fills a product niche that Oracle has not served well before now.
What about the Berkeley DB they bought? They'll just need postgresql and sqlite next.
And how would Oracle "buy" either of those? And why? PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and SQLite is public domain. Oracle is free to start selling its own version of either package tomorrow, if it felt like it.
Let's see...MySQL brings in ~50M a year, Sun is losing 100M a month. Makes no sense why Oracle would want to delay, except for monopolistic reasons.
Last I heard, Oracle doesn't want to delay. It's the European Commission that wants to delay Oracle.
As for "monopolistic reasons": Between IBM, Microsoft, Teradata, PostgreSQL, etc, how can Oracle possibly be said to have a monopoly on databases?
You seem to be suggesting that Oracle wants to destroy the market for MySQL. As the largest database vendor in the world, how does it benefit Oracle to destroy any market for databases, however large or small?
And that's assuming it's even possible for Oracle to do what you suggest. Even if the goal is merely to destroy the market for low-cost databases, I don't see how Oracle could do that. There is no shortage of low-cost (free) alternatives to MySQL -- PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQLite, the list goes on.
If Oracle doesn't immediately cave in to the European Commission, have you considered the possibility that it might be because Oracle plans to grow the MySQL market, and that even at $100 million/month, it has not yet sacrificed enough profit to make up for all the money it plans to make from MySQL in the coming years?
Re:like the network effect and developer laziness
on
The NoSQL Ecosystem
·
· Score: 1
I think what the GP might have been trying to say is that just about any developer these days will have encountered SQL databases. You'll find high school students with plenty of MySQL experience. It's easier to draw upon that knowledge to write simple SQLite applications than to have to go and learn how to do it in BerkeleyDB (a skillset which only applies to the simple applications and won't help you when you want to write an app that needs more advanced RDBMS features).
Yeah, just beware of being that guy who takes Japanese language classes who obviously obsesses way too much over manga and anime. Everybody I know who has taken a class in that language says there are guys -- repeat that, guys -- in the class who show up on Day One calling everybody "Janice-chan" and whatever. Japanese language students can smell an otaku a mile away, and though those types often show up with some advance knowledge they're generally the equivalent of a boat anchor around the necks of students who want to learn the language the way it's actually spoken.
Do the hundreds of science fiction studies professors who loudly proclaim that sci-fi is just as valid a genre as any other get posts on Slashdot too?
Believe it or not, there are a great many works of fiction that are not genre fiction -- consider, say, Moby-Dick. From that perspective, saying one fiction genre is equal to another is sort of like saying one pizza is the same as any other. You might disagree. You might like pizza from one pizza place better than the others, or one might deliver faster. But all pizzas are, at the end of the day, pizzas. There's not really any point in arguing.
What this study is hoping to help dismiss, on the other hand, is the idea that comics in and of themselves are a genre. There are a lot of people that will tell you that it doesn't matter whether the subject matter of a comic is science fiction, superheroes, Western, mystery, horror, or slice-of-life; the comic has a genre, and that genre is comics. People who know better get fed up with this attitude and are happy to hear about people doing things to change the public consciousness.
What a coincidence. I was just thinking about my dad -- ordinarily a highly intelligent person -- and how he once told me how disappointed he was that I was reading comics, because "I'd forget how to read real books," or some such nonsense. (I was probably about 14 at the time -- a crucial time of life, apparently, when the danger of literary alopecia lurks around every corner.)
What pop seemed to have forgotten was that a large part of the reason why I was reading three or four grades ahead of my class when I first started school was because A.) I had seen the movie Star Wars, and B.) that meant I needed to immerse myself in every Star Wars thing I could possibly get my hands on, especially including comic books.
Remember, there was no way to just watch your favorite movie at home in those days. One of the main ways to get my daily fix of the Force was to revisit the saga in comic book form. And it turns out this was actually a very efficient way to learn how to read. Consider: Having seen the movie in the theater about seven times already, I had pretty much memorized all the lines. The dialogue in the comic books wasn't exactly the same, but before long I could easily follow along with the simple lines and expository captions.
These days I'm revisiting the same trick, reading Franco-Belgian graphic albums as a booster for studying French. My brain is far less able to pick up languages these days than when I was a kid, but the same rules apply with modern French comics as with those Star Wars comics from the 70s, for the most part. The things characters say aren't usually all that complex, and the pictures often give you a hint as to what they might be saying. You can even pick up idioms and colloquialisms that you might not normally be exposed to by a textbook.
I'm glad to see someone's actually doing the research, though. It's probably the only way you would ever convince my dad.
Wait - so you've got two different, incompatible standards (110V and 220V) in the same country?
That's right. But for all intents and purposes, the average consumer will never see anything but a 110V outlet. 220V is only used for major appliances and the sockets are incompatible with everyday consumer products. If you see a 220V socket and don't know what it is, you won't be able to use it (short of jamming a butter knife into it if you're really curious).
Basing a supercomputer on MIPs was short-sighted; even if it offers a a price/performance or power/performance advantage now, in a couple years it won't, because x86 is being improved at a much faster rate.
It wasn't even MIPS. From TFA:
But SiCortex went against conventional wisdom by building its own processors and this decision limited the company's market to early adopters, Conway says. In building its chips, SiCortex obtained intellectual property from several vendors, including MIPS Technologies, and tweaked the design to meet its own needs.
An HPC start-up going into the microprocessor design business now? That really is a fool's errand. Mind you, that's sort of how the ARM processor came to be, but that was a loooonnng time ago.
Not for a movie that cost $200 million to make. By the time you factor in marketing, distribution, etc., the thing barely broke even.
But of course, box office gross doesn't tell the whole story. There are also the subsidiary rights, sublicensing deals, and everything else: toys, videogames, comic books, T-shirts, Taco Bell collector's cups, maybe a ride at Six Flags. Trust me, if I owned the rights to the Terminator franchise, I would have earned a lot more money this year than I have.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool, here you go.
So what's your point? Mine is that apologizing != "groveling." If more IT types could learn how to admit they're wrong gracefully, the world would be a better place IMHO.
Since when does apologizing to someone for your own baseless accusations amount to "groveling"?
From the post in question:
Having narrowed down a specific trigger for this condition we've done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor
. . .
We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience our blog may have caused.
Wow. Way to kiss ass.
You know what would be even more pathetic and embarrassing than this kind of "groveling"? Standing behind claims that you know to be false.
application launch time ARE slower, by a few seconds, compared to XP. especially when opening MS Word or Excel, I'd say more than a few seconds
I often see claims like this and I question them. I don't remember the launch times for Word or Excel 2003, but ever since Office 2007 on XP I've found the applications take no longer than a few seconds to launch, total. In the case of Excel, I can literally double-click the icon, count "one, two, three," and I have a blank spreadsheet. It's not much slower on my Atom-powered Eee PC with slow solid-state drives. If your copies are launching many times slower than that, either your hardware is very out of date, or else you have a very old installation that's bogged down by upgrade cruft. A clean install of Office (after a complete uninstall) should make those problems go away, in my experience.
It was my last one! I either blaze through an entire thread like a rampaging omen of death, or nothing at all.
Replying to undo an accidental moderation that didn't deserve it.
Agreed that "zero day" has almost no meaning these days. Pretty bizarre when companies actually brag about their "zero day exploits" and promise a fix... several days from now?
Also, a shockingly nasty method of murder -- something the KGB was known for. (And what is the FSB but the KGB retooled?) The message is loud and clear for anyone who might be considering following in Litvinenko's footsteps.
...of course I'm not copying and pasting properly.
anyone feel like translating the russian version of the page?
Naturally, there isn't one.
Come on, you're talking about ancient history. The 70s? That was the Soviet Union!
What about Alexander Litvienenko? He fled Russia in 2000, was granted asylum in the UK in October 2006, and by November 2006 he was murdered. The killers used a radioactive isotope that would not have been available to the average crazy on the street -- clearly sending a message.
URL shorteners are a scourge. As someone else pointed out, they're only really useful for Twitter, with its artificial post-length constraint. Anyone who links to a tinyurl on an actual Web site (such as Slashdot) should automatically be assumed to be a troll, because the only reason to use an URL shortener is to conceal what you're actually linking to.
Enough with the goddamn excuse culture. You want respect, you earn respect. You want a second chance, then PROVE you deserve it first.
Yeah, but how are they supposed to do that?
If you're going to make them walk around with a scarlet letter 'M' on their chests for the rest of their lives, just what opportunities will they ever have to redeem themselves?
If the purpose of prison is to reform criminals and give them the opportunity to return to society as productive citizens -- as seems to be the prevailing theory in Germany -- then it is the responsibility of the public to put that theory to the test. You can't send people to prison telling them, "you must reform," then let them out and tell them, "you have not reformed, sorry." One of the fundamental principles of justice in any democratic country is that the accused is allowed to speak up in his own defense, but what you're describing is a sentence from which there is no appeal.
"Destroying market for MySQL" is not the same thing as "destroying market for databases". It means that most people involved migrate from MySQL to some other database. Presumably Oracle would get at least a slice of that pie, especially if they would offer an "enterprise grade support" migration path.
But how does Oracle profit more from your scenario than if it just sold commercial MySQL licenses, honored all the support contracts Sun/MySQL AB has now, and tried to win more MySQL customers?
In other words, why would Oracle kill the golden goose? Just out of spite?
Remember, if Oracle owns MySQL, then every commercial MySQL customer becomes a potential sales lead for Oracle. Sure, Oracle might put more effort behind selling Oracle databases than MySQL databases -- but how is that any different from right now, when MySQL pretty much sells itself? Better to hang on to those names and contact numbers for the day when they need something more advanced than MySQL than to just let them wander off to IBM or Microsoft.
Also remember that a large portion (the majority?) of commercial MySQL licenses are sold to companies that want to ship MySQL databases in embedded systems or other turnkey solutions. I don't know how much an Oracle embedded license costs, but I'm willing to bet it's priced well beyond what would be profitable for many applications. Therefore, outside the world of Web apps and simple departmental databases, the MySQL technology fills a product niche that Oracle has not served well before now.
What about the Berkeley DB they bought? They'll just need postgresql and sqlite next.
And how would Oracle "buy" either of those? And why? PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and SQLite is public domain. Oracle is free to start selling its own version of either package tomorrow, if it felt like it.
Let's see...MySQL brings in ~50M a year, Sun is losing 100M a month. Makes no sense why Oracle would want to delay, except for monopolistic reasons.
Last I heard, Oracle doesn't want to delay. It's the European Commission that wants to delay Oracle.
As for "monopolistic reasons": Between IBM, Microsoft, Teradata, PostgreSQL, etc, how can Oracle possibly be said to have a monopoly on databases?
You seem to be suggesting that Oracle wants to destroy the market for MySQL. As the largest database vendor in the world, how does it benefit Oracle to destroy any market for databases, however large or small?
And that's assuming it's even possible for Oracle to do what you suggest. Even if the goal is merely to destroy the market for low-cost databases, I don't see how Oracle could do that. There is no shortage of low-cost (free) alternatives to MySQL -- PostgreSQL, Firebird, SQLite, the list goes on.
If Oracle doesn't immediately cave in to the European Commission, have you considered the possibility that it might be because Oracle plans to grow the MySQL market, and that even at $100 million/month, it has not yet sacrificed enough profit to make up for all the money it plans to make from MySQL in the coming years?
I think what the GP might have been trying to say is that just about any developer these days will have encountered SQL databases. You'll find high school students with plenty of MySQL experience. It's easier to draw upon that knowledge to write simple SQLite applications than to have to go and learn how to do it in BerkeleyDB (a skillset which only applies to the simple applications and won't help you when you want to write an app that needs more advanced RDBMS features).
I've actually never read any Tintin! I guess I should, though. (Shooting rhinos, what a hoot!)
Yeah, just beware of being that guy who takes Japanese language classes who obviously obsesses way too much over manga and anime. Everybody I know who has taken a class in that language says there are guys -- repeat that, guys -- in the class who show up on Day One calling everybody "Janice-chan" and whatever. Japanese language students can smell an otaku a mile away, and though those types often show up with some advance knowledge they're generally the equivalent of a boat anchor around the necks of students who want to learn the language the way it's actually spoken.
Do the hundreds of science fiction studies professors who loudly proclaim that sci-fi is just as valid a genre as any other get posts on Slashdot too?
Believe it or not, there are a great many works of fiction that are not genre fiction -- consider, say, Moby-Dick. From that perspective, saying one fiction genre is equal to another is sort of like saying one pizza is the same as any other. You might disagree. You might like pizza from one pizza place better than the others, or one might deliver faster. But all pizzas are, at the end of the day, pizzas. There's not really any point in arguing.
What this study is hoping to help dismiss, on the other hand, is the idea that comics in and of themselves are a genre. There are a lot of people that will tell you that it doesn't matter whether the subject matter of a comic is science fiction, superheroes, Western, mystery, horror, or slice-of-life; the comic has a genre, and that genre is comics. People who know better get fed up with this attitude and are happy to hear about people doing things to change the public consciousness.
What a coincidence. I was just thinking about my dad -- ordinarily a highly intelligent person -- and how he once told me how disappointed he was that I was reading comics, because "I'd forget how to read real books," or some such nonsense. (I was probably about 14 at the time -- a crucial time of life, apparently, when the danger of literary alopecia lurks around every corner.)
What pop seemed to have forgotten was that a large part of the reason why I was reading three or four grades ahead of my class when I first started school was because A.) I had seen the movie Star Wars, and B.) that meant I needed to immerse myself in every Star Wars thing I could possibly get my hands on, especially including comic books.
Remember, there was no way to just watch your favorite movie at home in those days. One of the main ways to get my daily fix of the Force was to revisit the saga in comic book form. And it turns out this was actually a very efficient way to learn how to read. Consider: Having seen the movie in the theater about seven times already, I had pretty much memorized all the lines. The dialogue in the comic books wasn't exactly the same, but before long I could easily follow along with the simple lines and expository captions.
These days I'm revisiting the same trick, reading Franco-Belgian graphic albums as a booster for studying French. My brain is far less able to pick up languages these days than when I was a kid, but the same rules apply with modern French comics as with those Star Wars comics from the 70s, for the most part. The things characters say aren't usually all that complex, and the pictures often give you a hint as to what they might be saying. You can even pick up idioms and colloquialisms that you might not normally be exposed to by a textbook.
I'm glad to see someone's actually doing the research, though. It's probably the only way you would ever convince my dad.
Wait - so you've got two different, incompatible standards (110V and 220V) in the same country?
That's right. But for all intents and purposes, the average consumer will never see anything but a 110V outlet. 220V is only used for major appliances and the sockets are incompatible with everyday consumer products. If you see a 220V socket and don't know what it is, you won't be able to use it (short of jamming a butter knife into it if you're really curious).
Do you have different plugs for the different voltages?
Yes.
This does give me pause about upgrading my own Eee though, as I'd completely forgotten that my OS drive was 4GB.
I run XP on my 901. I'm reminded every few Patch Tuesdays, when Windows Update fails for lack of drive space.
Basing a supercomputer on MIPs was short-sighted; even if it offers a a price/performance or power/performance advantage now, in a couple years it won't, because x86 is being improved at a much faster rate.
It wasn't even MIPS. From TFA:
But SiCortex went against conventional wisdom by building its own processors and this decision limited the company's market to early adopters, Conway says. In building its chips, SiCortex obtained intellectual property from several vendors, including MIPS Technologies, and tweaked the design to meet its own needs.
An HPC start-up going into the microprocessor design business now? That really is a fool's errand. Mind you, that's sort of how the ARM processor came to be, but that was a loooonnng time ago.
Not for a movie that cost $200 million to make. By the time you factor in marketing, distribution, etc., the thing barely broke even.
But of course, box office gross doesn't tell the whole story. There are also the subsidiary rights, sublicensing deals, and everything else: toys, videogames, comic books, T-shirts, Taco Bell collector's cups, maybe a ride at Six Flags. Trust me, if I owned the rights to the Terminator franchise, I would have earned a lot more money this year than I have.