People who think that Access or MSSQL is even in the same league as Oracle have never used Oracle (or don't know how to). In my opinion, even Postgres (possibly the second best RDBMS in the world) isn't in the same league as Oracle. Yes, Oracle is a big, awkward cuss, extremely difficult to configure and requiring specialist management. Oracle would not be a cheap solution even if the software was free. This doesn't mean it's not a good solution. It has stability and security to a degree that is just completely different.
Of course, anything on an MS Windows platform has stability and security problems... but it's not only the platform that contributes to such things. If you're dealing with a database which tracks things that matter, then only a very robust database will do. Use Oracle if you can afford it, Postgres if you can't.
And if you don't have the skills, hire someone who does - it will be cheaper in the long run.
OK, I know everyone has already replied to this, but...
2. no compatibility issues - again these cost money; by constantly being up-to-date, we have no risk of not being able to read that vital document.
If you use open, non-proprietary formats for your data, you have no risk of not being able to read that vital document. If you use closed, proprietary formats, you always run the risk of not being able to read that vital document. Remember documents don't cease to be valuable after three days. Can you guarantee you closed subscription software can read the documents that another vendor's closed subscription software produced three years ago? You can't. The only way to protect your data is always to use only open, non-proprietary data formats.
3. better budgeting. If we know that our software will cost $x/year, every year, we can budget for that. There is then no risk of unseen costs.
There's no financial difference between this and using Open Source software with a good support contract. Certainly no benefit to the user.
4. reduced impact on cashflow. Subscriptions mean that there is a lower initial cost - this means there is more money available to develop the business *now*.
If you go down the open source road, you don't need to pay anything up front. You can start your support contract at the point where you believe the business risks justify it.
I'd like to see you actually argue against Allchin's point by using facts or at least opinions.
Alchin claimed two things:
Open source stifles innovation.
This is demonstrably arrant nonsense. The whole Internet is built on Open Source software and was innovated through Open Source software. The claim that software developed as part of research projects somehow doesn't count is nonsense. If the source is open, it's open source.
However, one of the most important innovations in recent computing, the World Wide Web, isn't the result of a research program. It was created at a research centre, yes, but one whose research was into sub-atomic physics. The World Wide Web was developed to solve an administrative problem. It is open source in the classic sense of scratching the developer's itch.
Open source is bad for the intellectual-property business.
I can't refute this and neither would I try to. Businesses based on information hiding and artificial scarcity are going to get caned.
They're going to get caned anyway. Basic economic theory demonstrates that price varies directly with scarcity. There is no natural scarcity in goods which can be copied at marginal cost. Businesses built on artificial scarcity will fail and should fail. It just isn't a stable economic platform.
This sort of stupid arrogance makes everyone outside the United States of America extremely irritated. Wisconsin does not have jurisdiction over the Internet. The United States of America does not have jurisdiction over the Internet. All eReferee need do is move to Europe, Asia, or anywhere remotely sensible, and continue trading under their own domain name.
But it doesn't look like they're going to budge on their ideologies, which is a pity. Ideologies don't put bread on the table. Unless you're Richard Stallmann, who seems to have somehow managed it. But anyway, until Debian loosen up, I'll be recommending Mandrake as the superior distribution.
Hmmm... I'm just in the process of rolling out Debian onto all our (previously Mandrake 7.2) machines. Why? Much better install, much better package management, much better stability, much easier administration. There must be something that makes Mandrake a 'superior' distribution in your eyes, but speaking as someone who has been using Linux for eight years and delivering Linux solutions to corporate customers for six, I can't think of one.
I don't find this at all surprising. Many commercial businesses (IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Be, Acorn to name a few) have tried to develop a new mass market operating system kernel over the past decade. Only Microsoft has had any success, and theirs isn't very good. In the same period a loose anarchic collection of volunteers have produced Linux. If you didn't think Linux was better than what the commercial economy can produce. you wouldn't be persuading your clients to use it. So it shouldn't surprise you that the non-commercial distribution is measurably better than the commercial ones.
(assuming we define usable as meaning capable of displaying a Slashdot page reasonably correctly )
no
no
no NO!
Sorry, but not Slashdot. Slashdot produces the most disgusting, broken, brain-dead, horrible HTML imaginable. It's nearly as bad as things produced with FrontPage. As long as soi-disant Web designers can rely on browsers tolerating their incompetence, we'll have incompetent Web designers. What we need is a browser which, when fed crud, throws an exception. This may sound extreme but it's the only way we can get a half-decent Web.
But we are forgetting the golden rule of the GPL. There will be (in theory) hundreds of coders, artists, and designers working on the
free server, which should make it a better game than the pay-servers.
The thing that will make the for pay servers work is bandwidth. A game is no good unless it's fast and responsive, and for a multi-player game with a central server architecture to be responsive, the central server has to have lots of bandwidth. The maps may be free, the graphics may be free, but the bandwidth for surely isn't free. And if you set up a server in your University dorm room, by the time you've got a decent number of players on the University is going to come knocking on your door to take it down again.
Sure I expect there will be free servers, and I'm sure some people will enjoy playing on them. But the performance will be intermittent and patchy. Without some income, the server operators aren't going to be able to afford the sort of bandwidth that gives consistently good performance.
In short, there's room for both free and for-pay servers in this market.
Microsoft Question 5: XML has never been core to Java; rather Sun has attempted to bolt it onto the side after the fact. For example... there is no way to generate XML from a
JDBC ResultSet.
For future reference, one country (Sweden?) HAS switched from left-handed driving to right-handed driving
It was Sweden, yes. They did it at Midnight on a Saturday.
Terrifyingly, though, an African country (I think Uganda) also switched from driving on the left to driving on the right, and the change was made (wait for it) '...gradually...'
Most security holes come down to two things. One is allowing unvalidated input from untrusted users to be passed to any sort of general purpose command interpreter. This was a prime source of holes in early CGI scripts; for example, if you ask a user for an email address and then use the mail utility to send mail to it, and the user types me@mydomain.com; cat 'hax0r::0:0:lee7 hax0rs ownz you sux0rs:/:/bin/sh' >>/etc/passwd then you've just lost your machine.
The other is accepting unchecked amounts of input from untrusted users. Remember that C (unlike, for example, Pascal, Java or LISP) does no bounds checking, so you have to implement bounds checking yourself.
Then you're reasonably safe. But to be safer still, don't use C to write daemons which take input from untrusted third parties, and don't run daemons as root - give each it's own separate role account.
Java is controlled by the Java Community Process, *NOT* Sun and there are lots of companies on the JCP!
Well, speaking as another Java evangelizer, there is just no way I could possibly sign up to Sun's soi-disant 'Community Process'. There's nothing 'community' about this - you have to, for example, grant Sun (not 'the community') an irrevocable license to use and distribute (under whatever terms they like) everything you do - and Sun (not 'the community') may even assign those rights to anyone they please!
I very much like Java, and I'm betting the future of my company on it - but there's no way you can claim that it is controlled by an open process. It is controlled by Sun, and Sun have not demonstrated they have anything but very narrow selfish commercial interests in their management of it. The 'community process' is a gossamer-thin device to enable Sun to pretend to the market that they are committed to open systems. If it weren't, Sun would set up a not-for-profit trust which would own the IPR licences, and would allow the community to elect the board of that not-for-profit.
...even though there are many (5 viable) options in the linux world of office suites - which one is most complete, fast, compatable - compared to MS Office...
Unfortunately, the one that matched up was ApplixWare. It is a brilliant product: mature, stable, feature rich, extensible. Unlike StarOffice it gives you multiple windows in the context of the window manager you choose. Also unlike StarOffice, it performs well on older machines with limited memory. It has been far and away the best office suite for Linux, and if it really does fold we will all be worse off.
I really enjoy the IOCCC, and every year I download the results and play with them. Some are startlingly clever, like the flight simulator a couple of years ago. Writing these obfuscated programs is a special skill, and, yes, it is a form of craftsmanship within the context of the competition. And, of course, the people who can write these little gems have to be brilliant programmers first.
But in all normal circumstances, obfuscated code in any language is bad code. The whole purpose of highlevel languages is to communicate with human beings, not to communicate with the machine: to communicate with the programmer who is to come after you, who has to debug your code, or port it, or update it because some library it uses is obsolete and some of the API has been deprecated or dropped. That programmer may of course be you.
Code that can't be picked up by someone else in six months time - someone possibly less skilled than yourself, and read, and understood, and modified, is poorly crafted. Bad workmanship. If you can't understand this, you aren't going to be a successful member of any development team, either commercial or open source.
Enjoy the IOCCC as a cort of cross between puzzle games, satire, and poetry. A very special kind of programming - a very skilled kind of programming - but one which has virtually no carry-over into the real world.
I agree that's incompetent, but it isn't the problem in this case. I can ping all of them; they're alive, and the router on the subnet is alive. Their problem appears to be that their reverse DNS tables are shagged, so the servers don't know their own identities. Mind you, that incompetent too, but it's a different kind of incompetent.
True stoneage thinking Re:Too bad it's not native
on
Crusoe As Server CPU
·
· Score: 3
Seems to me that it'd be pretty cool to write to the native Crusoe architecture rather than going through the x86 ``emulation''. Does anyone know if it's even possible to bypass the emulation at all, and write native machine code?
True stoneage thinking. Me not know how to use computer. Me know how to use hammer. Me use computer as hammer. See! 'pooter is useful!
Yes, you can write native machine code for one particular Crusoe chip. After all, the code morphing layer is written in native code. The next Crusoe chip that comes along won't be able
run your code, because the internals will have changed. Transmeta don't want to be in the position of Intel, having to build backward compatability into their chips. They won't do it. So in six months you'll have to compile your program for the next Crusoe... and the next... and the next... and you'll have to support users using all those versions, so you'll need to keep a machine with each version in house...
no-one can afford to support every possible platform and configuration.
If you stick to the published specifications, you automatically support every conforming browser out there and it costs much less. This is obvious, really, to everyone except Web designers
About twenty-four years ago, when the business I was running then went belly up and I was a teany bit desperate for cash, I took a job as cleaner at the local slaughterhouse. Wait, it gets better...
There was a drain which ran from the part of the building where animals were killed through under the yard and out to the sewer. This drain was known as 'the blood drain' because what it carried was mostly blood... and anonymous bits of animal which got cut out immediately in the killing room because they might taint the carcase. One very hot day in July, the blood drain blocked up... and in the end I had to clear it by lying on my stomach in the yard, reaching up the drain at full length of my arm, to pull nameless bits of semi-putrescent substance out of the pipe with my hand.
Nothing you ever do at a desk will be remotely as bad as that.
Linus Torvalds personally owns the name (and is the registered holder of the registered trademark) 'Linux'. Whether intentionally or not, by alledging wrongdoing by 'Linux', Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach LLP are in effect alledging wrongdoing by Linus himself. Now I don't know whether Linus was one of the people given 'community shares' when VA Linux Systems did it's IPO (he certainly deserved to be), but he clearly isn't either an officer or an employee of theirs, and clearly isn't responsible for any dishonesty which may have been involved.
So this use of the name maybe make sense when you think about it, but for a law firm it's extremely careless and almost certainly actionable. And given that we know Linus does act against improper uses of his trademark, I see in my crystal ball another large chunk of the Linus Torvalds Personal Pension Fund coming on a check with 'Milberg' on the top...
They can go through their patent file and go for anything in Linux that looks remotely like some patent they have.
Which will do them precisely how much good? Apart from the US and Japan, no technologically advanced country recognises software patents. So Mandrake (in France) is invulnerable, SuSE (in Germany) is invulnerable, Debian is invulnerable anyway because it can put it's servers overseas, and gues what, you might just find RedHat relocating to Wales.
I don't see how Microsoft can prevent individual developers doing Linux work in their spare time in the US, and even if they can there are enough Linux hackers in Europe to keep the flame alive.
Of course it may be illegal to sell Linux in the US, but how is that going to stop you downloading it?
I don't listen to MP3s; I rarely watch movies and don't expect to do so on my computer. All the closed source software I have (very little) is properly licensed and paid for. I am not a criminal. Having hardware copy protection on my computer does not benefit me at all, and it doesn't benefit the media industry at all (because I'm not stealing from them and I don't intend to).
If I have hardware copy protection in my computer, and it works perfectly always, I'm still paying for extra complexity that I don't want and don't need. If it fails, then I lose my valuable work. I don't like:
The assumption that I am a criminal;
The assumption that it's reasonable to require me to pay for protection for someone else against my presumed criminality;
The fact that if their protection misfunctions or fails I get to lose my data.
The Question
As I understand it, IBM is a big player in this game. IBM is genuinely putting a lot of effort into making relationships with the Open Source community. This move is (in my opinion) going to badly hurt the Open Source community. Can we put effective pressure on IBM to publicly renounce it?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, anything on an MS Windows platform has stability and security problems... but it's not only the platform that contributes to such things. If you're dealing with a database which tracks things that matter, then only a very robust database will do. Use Oracle if you can afford it, Postgres if you can't.
And if you don't have the skills, hire someone who does - it will be cheaper in the long run.
If you use open, non-proprietary formats for your data, you have no risk of not being able to read that vital document. If you use closed, proprietary formats, you always run the risk of not being able to read that vital document. Remember documents don't cease to be valuable after three days. Can you guarantee you closed subscription software can read the documents that another vendor's closed subscription software produced three years ago? You can't. The only way to protect your data is always to use only open, non-proprietary data formats.
There's no financial difference between this and using Open Source software with a good support contract. Certainly no benefit to the user.
If you go down the open source road, you don't need to pay anything up front. You can start your support contract at the point where you believe the business risks justify it.
Alchin claimed two things:
This is demonstrably arrant nonsense. The whole Internet is built on Open Source software and was innovated through Open Source software. The claim that software developed as part of research projects somehow doesn't count is nonsense. If the source is open, it's open source.
However, one of the most important innovations in recent computing, the World Wide Web, isn't the result of a research program. It was created at a research centre, yes, but one whose research was into sub-atomic physics. The World Wide Web was developed to solve an administrative problem. It is open source in the classic sense of scratching the developer's itch.
I can't refute this and neither would I try to. Businesses based on information hiding and artificial scarcity are going to get caned.
They're going to get caned anyway. Basic economic theory demonstrates that price varies directly with scarcity. There is no natural scarcity in goods which can be copied at marginal cost. Businesses built on artificial scarcity will fail and should fail. It just isn't a stable economic platform.
This sort of stupid arrogance makes everyone outside the United States of America extremely irritated. Wisconsin does not have jurisdiction over the Internet. The United States of America does not have jurisdiction over the Internet. All eReferee need do is move to Europe, Asia, or anywhere remotely sensible, and continue trading under their own domain name.
Hmmm... I'm just in the process of rolling out Debian onto all our (previously Mandrake 7.2) machines. Why? Much better install, much better package management, much better stability, much easier administration. There must be something that makes Mandrake a 'superior' distribution in your eyes, but speaking as someone who has been using Linux for eight years and delivering Linux solutions to corporate customers for six, I can't think of one.
I don't find this at all surprising. Many commercial businesses (IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Be, Acorn to name a few) have tried to develop a new mass market operating system kernel over the past decade. Only Microsoft has had any success, and theirs isn't very good. In the same period a loose anarchic collection of volunteers have produced Linux. If you didn't think Linux was better than what the commercial economy can produce. you wouldn't be persuading your clients to use it. So it shouldn't surprise you that the non-commercial distribution is measurably better than the commercial ones.
no no no NO!
Sorry, but not Slashdot. Slashdot produces the most disgusting, broken, brain-dead, horrible HTML imaginable. It's nearly as bad as things produced with FrontPage. As long as soi-disant Web designers can rely on browsers tolerating their incompetence, we'll have incompetent Web designers. What we need is a browser which, when fed crud, throws an exception. This may sound extreme but it's the only way we can get a half-decent Web.
The thing that will make the for pay servers work is bandwidth. A game is no good unless it's fast and responsive, and for a multi-player game with a central server architecture to be responsive, the central server has to have lots of bandwidth. The maps may be free, the graphics may be free, but the bandwidth for surely isn't free. And if you set up a server in your University dorm room, by the time you've got a decent number of players on the University is going to come knocking on your door to take it down again.
Sure I expect there will be free servers, and I'm sure some people will enjoy playing on them. But the performance will be intermittent and patchy. Without some income, the server operators aren't going to be able to afford the sort of bandwidth that gives consistently good performance.
In short, there's room for both free and for-pay servers in this market.
here's one I prepared earlier.
[simon@forth simon]$ grep cvs /etc/services
cvspserver 2401/tcp # CVS client/server operations
cvspserver 2401/udp # CVS client/server operations
It was Sweden, yes. They did it at Midnight on a Saturday. Terrifyingly, though, an African country (I think Uganda) also switched from driving on the left to driving on the right, and the change was made (wait for it) '...gradually...'
Except that Microsoft's DNS is now being provided by Akamai on (apparently) Linux 2.1 servers. See this story in The Register.
The other is accepting unchecked amounts of input from untrusted users. Remember that C (unlike, for example, Pascal, Java or LISP) does no bounds checking, so you have to implement bounds checking yourself.
If you do the equivalent of:
char buffer[ BUFFLEN];int i = 0;
while( ! feof( stdin))
{
buffer[ i++] = getchar();
}
buffer[ i] = '\0';
That's going to lead to a buffer overrun which someone can exploit. If you do the equivalent of:
char buffer[ BUFFLEN];int i = 0;
int maxinput = BUFFLEN - 1;
while( ! feof( stdin) && i < maxinput)
{
buffer[ i++] = getchar();
}
buffer[ i] = '\0';
Then you're reasonably safe. But to be safer still, don't use C to write daemons which take input from untrusted third parties, and don't run daemons as root - give each it's own separate role account.
Well, speaking as another Java evangelizer, there is just no way I could possibly sign up to Sun's soi-disant 'Community Process'. There's nothing 'community' about this - you have to, for example, grant Sun (not 'the community') an irrevocable license to use and distribute (under whatever terms they like) everything you do - and Sun (not 'the community') may even assign those rights to anyone they please!
I very much like Java, and I'm betting the future of my company on it - but there's no way you can claim that it is controlled by an open process. It is controlled by Sun, and Sun have not demonstrated they have anything but very narrow selfish commercial interests in their management of it. The 'community process' is a gossamer-thin device to enable Sun to pretend to the market that they are committed to open systems. If it weren't, Sun would set up a not-for-profit trust which would own the IPR licences, and would allow the community to elect the board of that not-for-profit.
Unfortunately, the one that matched up was ApplixWare. It is a brilliant product: mature, stable, feature rich, extensible. Unlike StarOffice it gives you multiple windows in the context of the window manager you choose. Also unlike StarOffice, it performs well on older machines with limited memory. It has been far and away the best office suite for Linux, and if it really does fold we will all be worse off.
Says it all. I've used them all, and in My experience Xerces is relaible, as fast as any, and has the right license.
I really enjoy the IOCCC, and every year I download the results and play with them. Some are startlingly clever, like the flight simulator a couple of years ago. Writing these obfuscated programs is a special skill, and, yes, it is a form of craftsmanship within the context of the competition. And, of course, the people who can write these little gems have to be brilliant programmers first.
But in all normal circumstances, obfuscated code in any language is bad code . The whole purpose of highlevel languages is to communicate with human beings, not to communicate with the machine: to communicate with the programmer who is to come after you, who has to debug your code, or port it, or update it because some library it uses is obsolete and some of the API has been deprecated or dropped. That programmer may of course be you.
Code that can't be picked up by someone else in six months time - someone possibly less skilled than yourself, and read, and understood, and modified, is poorly crafted. Bad workmanship. If you can't understand this, you aren't going to be a successful member of any development team, either commercial or open source.
Enjoy the IOCCC as a cort of cross between puzzle games, satire, and poetry. A very special kind of programming - a very skilled kind of programming - but one which has virtually no carry-over into the real world.
I agree that's incompetent, but it isn't the problem in this case. I can ping all of them; they're alive, and the router on the subnet is alive. Their problem appears to be that their reverse DNS tables are shagged, so the servers don't know their own identities. Mind you, that incompetent too, but it's a different kind of incompetent.
True stoneage thinking. Me not know how to use computer. Me know how to use hammer. Me use computer as hammer. See! 'pooter is useful!
Yes, you can write native machine code for one particular Crusoe chip. After all, the code morphing layer is written in native code. The next Crusoe chip that comes along won't be able run your code, because the internals will have changed. Transmeta don't want to be in the position of Intel, having to build backward compatability into their chips. They won't do it. So in six months you'll have to compile your program for the next Crusoe... and the next... and the next... and you'll have to support users using all those versions, so you'll need to keep a machine with each version in house...
True stone-age thinking.
If you stick to the published specifications, you automatically support every conforming browser out there and it costs much less. This is obvious, really, to everyone except Web designers
There was a drain which ran from the part of the building where animals were killed through under the yard and out to the sewer. This drain was known as 'the blood drain' because what it carried was mostly blood... and anonymous bits of animal which got cut out immediately in the killing room because they might taint the carcase. One very hot day in July, the blood drain blocked up... and in the end I had to clear it by lying on my stomach in the yard, reaching up the drain at full length of my arm, to pull nameless bits of semi-putrescent substance out of the pipe with my hand.
Nothing you ever do at a desk will be remotely as bad as that.
So this use of the name maybe make sense when you think about it, but for a law firm it's extremely careless and almost certainly actionable. And given that we know Linus does act against improper uses of his trademark, I see in my crystal ball another large chunk of the Linus Torvalds Personal Pension Fund coming on a check with 'Milberg' on the top...
It couldn't happen to a more deserving cause!
Which will do them precisely how much good? Apart from the US and Japan, no technologically advanced country recognises software patents. So Mandrake (in France) is invulnerable, SuSE (in Germany) is invulnerable, Debian is invulnerable anyway because it can put it's servers overseas, and gues what, you might just find RedHat relocating to Wales.
I don't see how Microsoft can prevent individual developers doing Linux work in their spare time in the US, and even if they can there are enough Linux hackers in Europe to keep the flame alive.
Of course it may be illegal to sell Linux in the US, but how is that going to stop you downloading it?
I don't listen to MP3s; I rarely watch movies and don't expect to do so on my computer. All the closed source software I have (very little) is properly licensed and paid for. I am not a criminal. Having hardware copy protection on my computer does not benefit me at all, and it doesn't benefit the media industry at all (because I'm not stealing from them and I don't intend to).
If I have hardware copy protection in my computer, and it works perfectly always, I'm still paying for extra complexity that I don't want and don't need. If it fails, then I lose my valuable work. I don't like:
The Question
As I understand it, IBM is a big player in this game. IBM is genuinely putting a lot of effort into making relationships with the Open Source community. This move is (in my opinion) going to badly hurt the Open Source community. Can we put effective pressure on IBM to publicly renounce it?
I'm Technical Director (which is CTO in UK-Speak) because I