It is a patent regarding terminals. Specifically, links to what they refer to as "blocks". "Blocks" that can control things such as the color on a terminal. I'm assuming that doesn't mean filesystem blocks.. so what exactly is it referring to?
The language of the patent clearly releates to teletext. I don't know if you had/have this in the states, but it is a system which sends text pages either in the scan-lines at the beginning of a television frame or in simple dialup systems like the French Minitel or BT's own Prestel. The system is page-oriented, which is what is meant by a 'block' (40 columns by 25 lines of text and crude block graphics).
What I understand this patent to mean is that non-displayed information sent with a page could be used to select further pages which would then be requested from the server. So I think that it does describe hyperlinks adequately. I'm inclined to agree that the patent probably shouldn't have been granted (but if Xanadu was still under wraps at the time you can't claim it as prior art).
The patent was filed in 1980. It was granted, after additions and such, in 1989.
The Register disagrees. It claims that the patent was filed (presumably in the UK) in 1976, which puts it before Xanadu went public. However, note that the BT patent covers hyperlinks which 'would be selected by the operation of a selected key of the keyboard.'. So by my understanding you're OK if you use a mouse.
I can't do that. I can, however, publish the URL's of some pages which Mozilla had damn well better be able to render right, but doesn't: http://www.mozilla.org (they make Mozilla) http://www.mozillazine.org (the main Mozilla info/discussion site out there) http://www.netscape.com (they make a browser based on Mozilla) http://www.aol.com (they own the people who make Mozilla) http://www.w3.org (they make the standards to which Mozilla is supposed to conform)
The show-stopper, though, is tables. I can't get a single page with tables in it to render correctly. Even mozilla.org's homepage doesn't work, much less Slashdot, Sluggy, and almost everything else nowadays. I haven't been able to do this for several milestones now, though at least now it's consistent; the pages always fail (before it was intermittent). Perhaps, rather than a bug in Gecko, this is a compatibility issue; I don't know which is worse.
I've been using M16 nightly builds as my browser of choice for some weeks now. I'm writing this with M16 final. It is, in my experience, more reliable and faster than any Netscape 4.x variant; it renders pages far better and has only very occasional problems. I have never seen it having trouble with a table page, and I challenge you to publish the URL of a valid table page which M16 has trouble with. I simply don't believe you can.
With open source, however, its another story. One of the goals of programming is to develop small, fast, and tight code that leaves as small a footprint as possible. Of course there are numerous examples of bloat ware out there (how many times have you heard "Damn, excel 97 is enormous.. must be because of the flight simulator they included!"), in open source there is no reason why someone should make more bloat than necessary. In other words, with all the talent that is developing open source projects, why should a space-waster make its way in?
I'm not at all convinced. Some of the things out of the IOCCC are amazingly small, so they don't cause code-bloat, and amazingly dense, so that you could never work out what they do by reading the source. Perfect for open-source easter eggs. My favourite is this.
I was disappointed by this list - I thought it was too narrow, too shallow, and overly biased towards numerical algorithms. For a start, I would cliam for number one algorithm of the century the Turing Machine algorithm (Turing, 1936) which made symbolic computation (and thus conputers) possible in the first place.
I was also disappointed not to see a symbolic logic algorithm such as the Resolution Theorem Prover (Robinson, 1965) or Circumscription (McCarthy, 1980). I'd like to have been able to point to something of Jon Barwise' Situation Semantics, but couldn't think of a specific algorithm to highlight.
Last summer I wrote a paper advocating to my colleagues that we open source our core Servlet toolkit. After some discussion they agreed, and the toolkit is now available here. The paper is a purely business argument, and you might like to consider whether any part of it would be useful in your case.
The point at which we finally announced it as Open Source on Freshmeat and on the Java newsgroups was only a month ago, so we haven't really much experience yet; we've had some hundreds of downloads, but as yet absolutely no feedback.
Do I regret open sourcing? Not at all. The only regret I have is that we didn't do it much earlier. In some sense our competition is Lutris' Enhydra. We started work on our toolkit before they did on theirs, and were, at the time, a similar sized team. By open sourcing early, and proselytising widely, Lutris have not only gained themselves huge visibility (and apparent success), they've also been able to develop their toolkit a lot further than we have ours, partly because other people have contributed to it but also, I suspect, because they've got a lot of business as a result of their visibility. This isn't sour grapes - I respect those people, they've started from the same place and been more successful than we have.
As I understand it ICANN is responsible for exactly two things:
Running the root name servers but as I understand it Network Solutions are still actually doing that under contract - and, they're only a few, relatively small, servers - they don't cost a million a year to administer
Resolving disputes but ICANN have contracted that out too. And you ought to be able to make money from that.
So let me get this straight. ICANN need US$4.3 million per year to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time, for free? Nice work if you can get it. I see we're going to have some fun in Yokohama this summer...
The 'International Forum on the White Paper', as it was called, met in a number of places around the world including Geneva (July 24th 1998, where I convened one of the sessions), Singapore and Buenos Aires. So there was a fair degree of international consultation. There may be disagreements about how much that consultation was actually listened to...
Oh, and, by the way, I don't think cheap jibes at Jon Postel's expense do anyone any credit. Jon was (in my opinion) a thoroughly nice guy, and, more to the point, did a tremendous amount of work to get this network we all use up and working. OK, so some of the decisions he made years ago long before anyone realised how commercially significant they were going to turn out to be need to be revised, but that's a fairly normal thing in fast growing technologies.
A long time ago I got pissed off with someone who was posting a series of unpleasant posts on usenet groups under a variety of assumed identities, and was able with a little research to identify him by name as a serving Royal Navy orricer and identify both his work and home phone numbers, which I published on one of the newsgroups concerned.
This was a long time ago, and I don't feel good about it now. I don't know what happened to the guy, but given what he appeared to be up to he might easily have been disciplined or even sacked. In some senses he deserved it, but...
My 'victim' (and this poor dork Rodona Garst) are low-life - nasty, but also pretty stupid. Many of the new generation of Net users simply don't appreciate how the net's resources can be used to collate information about them, how much about themselves they reveal.
There may be many people in Clarkesville, TN reading this story now -/. is widely read, and, significantly, is widely read by journalists who may take up the story. By publishing personal details about them we risk stirring up something like a lynch mob - not necessarily in this case, but the potential is there.
Don't get me wrong - I dislike spammers and scammers and borderline criminal sleazoids as much as anyone, and there's no doubt that this Rodona is a sleazoid. The issue is the power of the medium which is being used against her. Yes, sure, it's the same medium that she has been using against others; but it is also a very powerful medium.
It is, I think, appropriate to make evidence of this sort about this sort of people available to their local police office if you think a crime is being committed (as appears to be the case here); but given that sleazoid lowlife are often not the best balanced of people psychologically, we may be whipping up a storm of hatemail and hate phone calls which may cause harm out of proportion to the crime.
I've put all my fiction on-line, here and, more interestingly, here. People read it, and (occasionally) people write to me and tell me what they thought of it - which I get a hell of a kick out of.
Yes, probably, I could have got some of it published. But it would be a lot of hassle, and would have meant going through a process of being rejected again and again (which is not very good for the self confidence), and I would have been lucky to earn more than a few hundred pounds as a result. Very, very few people make a living out of writing fiction. The way I write it, because I'm not under pressure and don't have deadlines, I enjoy writing. It isn't a job. And I have plenty of time to write software, which I also enjoy and which pays far better.
In every company I've been in, if the fighting's got so bad that you let it leak out to potential customers, the company is finished. Dead. Kaput. Every company has fights, but when senior people are criticising other senior people in public you don't have a team any more. Await implosion.
The most important thing when introducing kids to computers is getting them to structure what they want to do, and to understand the difference between the structure of the problem and the cruft introduced by the programming language. Consequently, the very last languages I would introduce them to are languages like BASIC which does nothing to assist clarity and structure, or PERL which has very unclear syntax.
There's no point in thinking about what languages are currently popular in the industry, because if you're dealing with ten and twelve year olds by the time they're adult something new will have come along. This industry changes rapidly. But the fundamentals don't change; algorithms are algorithms whatever language you write in, and ideas of structure, modularity and granularity are fundamental.
So any of these things would in my opinion be good choices:
Logo - especially for younger children
Scheme - probably for shildren a little older
Smalltalk
Java
I personally play with and hugely enjoy Lego Mindstorms, but I don't really think it's good for kids. The programming system which comes with it is really poor, and none of the programming systems which other people have developed for it really seem suitable for kids - except, possibly, a smalltalk-based one which only runs on Windows and consequently I haven't tried.
Preservation of life is not an absolute moral imperitive, either, as it is often morally acceptable to kill when defending your country or loved ones. Once again, name one culture where this doesn't hold - making an exception to notion of preserving life to defend one's home/family is universally held.
Quakers, Mennonites, Old Order Amish, early Christians. Bhuddists. That's five, there are plenty of others.
There are a number of ethics that are a fixed aspect of human cultures. The family. Preservation of life. Do you know of a culture that does not value the family structure in some sense? Do you know of a culture that encourages random killing of its own?
There's nothing ethical about valuing 'the family', unless the selfish gene is itself considered 'ethical'; furthermore, there are many cultures with notions of 'the family' very different from the modern Western one. As to encouraging random killings, there are tribes in New Guinea where to become accepted as an adult one first has to kill a member of another tribe.
But it doesn't require example to demonstrate that there are no moral absolutes; it's trivial to demonstrate this from first principles, via argumentum ad absurdum. If there were moral absolutes, where would they come from? How would we know them? And how would we distinguish them from cultural constructs?
Oops! The first sentence should read, "One point I feel the author doesn't address adequately are three main 'pragmatic' (as opposed to idealistic) advantages of free software."
(I added the third while I was writing and forgot to update the beginning of the post)
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise.... surprise and fear.... fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise.... and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency.... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our four.... no....
Fundamentally I thought this was a naiive and rather peurile article. Bertrand Meyer may be an expert on object oriented software, but he is no ethicist.
Illustration of this is precisely in his response to ESR's gun advocacy. As seen from this (Eastern) shore of the Atlantic, of course, he's perfectly right that ESR's views on guns are unethical to the verge of sociopathy - but this is precisely because he's wrong to claim that there are moral absolutes, ethical prinicples which are culturally independent. There aren't. Ethical views are at least to some extent culturally determined, and ESRs must be judged within the context of the culture of which he forms a part.
Those people in the southern United States and in South Africa who in the early part of this century passed laws against 'miscegenation' did so for reasons which they viewed as moral - just as significantly moral as Meyer's (or Stallman's) view their arguments on free software.
Whether or not one views ESRs advocacy of gun-ownership as repellent (and I, being a normal European, naturally do), they are logically independent of his views on free software. Of course one could argue that because ESR's ethical judgement on guns is unsound, therefore his ethical judgement on free software must be viewed as suspect. But in this argument 'unsound' simply means 'different from mine', and, more probably, 'different from my unexamined social prejudices'.
However, the ad hominem argument against ESR falls for a more significant reason. Contrary to Meyer's assertion, ESR makes no claims regarding the ethicality or otherwise of free software, merely about its relative efficacy. Even if the argument that ESR was a poor judge of ethics succeeded, it has nothing to say about ESR as a judge of efficacy.
Which leaves, centrally, Meyer's attack on Stahlman. I found this vituperative, spiteful, and full of half truths and distortions which seemed to me deliberate. The third hand, partial and unverifiable account of the dinner party demonstrates spite.
For an example of half-truths, consider the passage in which Meyer states:
It also criticizes many providers of free software such as Apple... the Berkeley Unix Software distribution... and Netscape for not observing the exact GNU definition of "free", or using license terms different from those of GNU.
This passage is, I believe, deliberately misleading. In the document to which Meyer refers, Stallman's only significant objection to the BSD licence is that if a software product makes use of many BSD-licensed modules from many different providers, the concatenation of the advertisement lines may becomes unwieldy; a simple, pragmatic objection, not, as Meyer implies, an ethical one.
What Meyer demonstrates is that his ethical judgement is different from Stallman's, and, separately, from ESR's. That's fine. He is (like everyone else) entitled to his ethical judgement, and he is entitled to try to persuade us to agree with him. Having read his argument, however, the conclusion I reach is that his (Meyer's) arguments are intellectually wanting, his conclusions untenable, and his own intellectual stature (on this evidence) slight.
I suspect (and hope) that he is by now ashamed of this piece. If he isn't, then I'm sorry fo him.
I used to develop Motif software on a machine with 8Mb RAM and 80Mb disk... this distribution is twenty-five megabytes. What on earch have they put in there? Home movies?
Absolutely agree with this (speaking as a boss myself). State the position clearly to your boss. Legally, seeing the software is GPL'd anyway, the company has to release the source to you to incorporate into the on-going project; it's cheaper for them if they do, too, because it's going to cost less of your time to maintain one version than two, and at least some of that saving will happen in Company Time.
But it's also potentially extremely good publicity for the company. 'Our company can provide you with the best possible support for (whatever your software is), because the maintainer actually works for us'. Big press release stuff and hoopla - 'Our committment to Open Source'. Handled right, the company could love this, and you could find yourself increasingly being paid to do what you want to do anyway.
Oh, and - if the company is completely unreasonable, sack it and go and work for a better one.
Some may be interested in comparisons of the major Open Source databases. This article at LinuxPlanet has some good information.
The problem is the article is extremely scrappy, and ill-informed even in what it does cover. For exanple, it says: "POSTgreSQL is based on the commercial Ingres database system". This is completely untrue. Commercial Ingres was based on Berkeley's 'University' Ingres. Postgres was a completely different, later project by the same team at Berkeley which wrote University Ingres, but it doesn't share any code with it and it certainly doesn't share any code with the commercial Ingres product.
It also repeats the old shaggy dog stories about how much faster MySQL is than Postgres, without quoting any benchmarks, or pointing out that this is only true for extremely simple queries.
I haven't actually yet seen a live ILOVEYOU. But my understanding is that it comes as an email with an attachment which has the file-name extension '.vbs'. Anyone who would open an attachment with a filename extension they didn't recognise (oe one they did recognise as being that of a scripting language) is in my opinion to stupid to use a computer.
This is not really a Microsoft issue, frankly, in my opinion. It would not be difficult to write a Perl script which when run mailed itself to everyone in/etc/aliases, $HOME/.mailer-of-choice/address-book, and so on. Then, if you encapsulated that in an email, you would in effect have produced a Linux version of ILOVEYOU. Mind you, of course, I don't know of any Linux mailer which comes out-of-the-box where the default action when an attachment perl script is selected is to run it...
I have news for you: "performance" usually means "speed". As in "fast", which is usually measured by "benchmarks", which do fulfill all the requirements for a "test". One of these benchmarks, in which PostgreSQL loses pitifully to MySQL is here.
Which just shows you can't trust benchmarks, particularly benchmarks posted by vendors. I've used both on real datasets, and my experience is that if you have more than trivial joins in your database (and I've never seen a real database without some non-trivial joins), Postgres will eat MySQL for breakfast.
MySQL just released a very nice book detailing its assorted innards with plenty of in-depth coverage. I've yet to find a book anywhere on PostgreSQL (though one is being written). Online docs are nice, but I need more info before switching from a known (no matter how feature-poor) to an unknown. One book would make a world of difference.
The PostgreSQL user guide is supplied in the distribution as a postscript file which you can print on your local line printer; it runs to 216 pages and is extremely detailed. Of course, you don't get a glossy cover...
There is a database which is free, which has high performance, which is reliable, which runs very well on Linux, which is reasonably easy to secure, which supports proper transactions with proper commits and rollbacks, which has a genuinely open-source license.
It's called PostgreSQL. It outperforms MySQL on just about any test you care to name. Get it.
Slashdot Mirror
The language of the patent clearly releates to teletext. I don't know if you had/have this in the states, but it is a system which sends text pages either in the scan-lines at the beginning of a television frame or in simple dialup systems like the French Minitel or BT's own Prestel. The system is page-oriented, which is what is meant by a 'block' (40 columns by 25 lines of text and crude block graphics).
What I understand this patent to mean is that non-displayed information sent with a page could be used to select further pages which would then be requested from the server. So I think that it does describe hyperlinks adequately. I'm inclined to agree that the patent probably shouldn't have been granted (but if Xanadu was still under wraps at the time you can't claim it as prior art).
The Register disagrees. It claims that the patent was filed (presumably in the UK) in 1976, which puts it before Xanadu went public. However, note that the BT patent covers hyperlinks which 'would be selected by the operation of a selected key of the keyboard.'. So by my understanding you're OK if you use a mouse.
I honestly don't believe you've used it.
I've been using M16 nightly builds as my browser of choice for some weeks now. I'm writing this with M16 final. It is, in my experience, more reliable and faster than any Netscape 4.x variant; it renders pages far better and has only very occasional problems. I have never seen it having trouble with a table page, and I challenge you to publish the URL of a valid table page which M16 has trouble with. I simply don't believe you can.
I'm not at all convinced. Some of the things out of the IOCCC are amazingly small, so they don't cause code-bloat, and amazingly dense, so that you could never work out what they do by reading the source. Perfect for open-source easter eggs. My favourite is this.
I was also disappointed not to see a symbolic logic algorithm such as the Resolution Theorem Prover (Robinson, 1965) or Circumscription (McCarthy, 1980). I'd like to have been able to point to something of Jon Barwise' Situation Semantics, but couldn't think of a specific algorithm to highlight.
[This space intentionally left blank]
Last summer I wrote a paper advocating to my colleagues that we open source our core Servlet toolkit. After some discussion they agreed, and the toolkit is now available here. The paper is a purely business argument, and you might like to consider whether any part of it would be useful in your case.
The point at which we finally announced it as Open Source on Freshmeat and on the Java newsgroups was only a month ago, so we haven't really much experience yet; we've had some hundreds of downloads, but as yet absolutely no feedback.
Do I regret open sourcing? Not at all. The only regret I have is that we didn't do it much earlier. In some sense our competition is Lutris' Enhydra. We started work on our toolkit before they did on theirs, and were, at the time, a similar sized team. By open sourcing early, and proselytising widely, Lutris have not only gained themselves huge visibility (and apparent success), they've also been able to develop their toolkit a lot further than we have ours, partly because other people have contributed to it but also, I suspect, because they've got a lot of business as a result of their visibility. This isn't sour grapes - I respect those people, they've started from the same place and been more successful than we have.
So let me get this straight. ICANN need US$4.3 million per year to do what Jon Postel used to do in his spare time, for free? Nice work if you can get it. I see we're going to have some fun in Yokohama this summer...
Oh, and, by the way, I don't think cheap jibes at Jon Postel's expense do anyone any credit. Jon was (in my opinion) a thoroughly nice guy, and, more to the point, did a tremendous amount of work to get this network we all use up and working. OK, so some of the decisions he made years ago long before anyone realised how commercially significant they were going to turn out to be need to be revised, but that's a fairly normal thing in fast growing technologies.
This was a long time ago, and I don't feel good about it now. I don't know what happened to the guy, but given what he appeared to be up to he might easily have been disciplined or even sacked. In some senses he deserved it, but...
My 'victim' (and this poor dork Rodona Garst) are low-life - nasty, but also pretty stupid. Many of the new generation of Net users simply don't appreciate how the net's resources can be used to collate information about them, how much about themselves they reveal.
There may be many people in Clarkesville, TN reading this story now - /. is widely read, and, significantly, is widely read by journalists who may take up the story. By publishing personal details about them we risk stirring up something like a lynch mob - not necessarily in this case, but the potential is there.
Don't get me wrong - I dislike spammers and scammers and borderline criminal sleazoids as much as anyone, and there's no doubt that this Rodona is a sleazoid. The issue is the power of the medium which is being used against her. Yes, sure, it's the same medium that she has been using against others; but it is also a very powerful medium.
It is, I think, appropriate to make evidence of this sort about this sort of people available to their local police office if you think a crime is being committed (as appears to be the case here); but given that sleazoid lowlife are often not the best balanced of people psychologically, we may be whipping up a storm of hatemail and hate phone calls which may cause harm out of proportion to the crime.
Yes, probably, I could have got some of it published. But it would be a lot of hassle, and would have meant going through a process of being rejected again and again (which is not very good for the self confidence), and I would have been lucky to earn more than a few hundred pounds as a result. Very, very few people make a living out of writing fiction. The way I write it, because I'm not under pressure and don't have deadlines, I enjoy writing. It isn't a job. And I have plenty of time to write software, which I also enjoy and which pays far better.
In every company I've been in, if the fighting's got so bad that you let it leak out to potential customers, the company is finished. Dead. Kaput. Every company has fights, but when senior people are criticising other senior people in public you don't have a team any more. Await implosion.
There's no point in thinking about what languages are currently popular in the industry, because if you're dealing with ten and twelve year olds by the time they're adult something new will have come along. This industry changes rapidly. But the fundamentals don't change; algorithms are algorithms whatever language you write in, and ideas of structure, modularity and granularity are fundamental.
So any of these things would in my opinion be good choices:
I personally play with and hugely enjoy Lego Mindstorms, but I don't really think it's good for kids. The programming system which comes with it is really poor, and none of the programming systems which other people have developed for it really seem suitable for kids - except, possibly, a smalltalk-based one which only runs on Windows and consequently I haven't tried.
Quakers, Mennonites, Old Order Amish, early Christians. Bhuddists. That's five, there are plenty of others.
There's nothing ethical about valuing 'the family', unless the selfish gene is itself considered 'ethical'; furthermore, there are many cultures with notions of 'the family' very different from the modern Western one. As to encouraging random killings, there are tribes in New Guinea where to become accepted as an adult one first has to kill a member of another tribe.
But it doesn't require example to demonstrate that there are no moral absolutes; it's trivial to demonstrate this from first principles, via argumentum ad absurdum. If there were moral absolutes, where would they come from? How would we know them? And how would we distinguish them from cultural constructs?
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise .... surprise and fear .... fear and surprise .... Our two weapons are fear and surprise .... and ruthless efficiency .... Our three weapons are fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency .... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our four .... no ....
Illustration of this is precisely in his response to ESR's gun advocacy. As seen from this (Eastern) shore of the Atlantic, of course, he's perfectly right that ESR's views on guns are unethical to the verge of sociopathy - but this is precisely because he's wrong to claim that there are moral absolutes, ethical prinicples which are culturally independent. There aren't. Ethical views are at least to some extent culturally determined, and ESRs must be judged within the context of the culture of which he forms a part.
Those people in the southern United States and in South Africa who in the early part of this century passed laws against 'miscegenation' did so for reasons which they viewed as moral - just as significantly moral as Meyer's (or Stallman's) view their arguments on free software.
Whether or not one views ESRs advocacy of gun-ownership as repellent (and I, being a normal European, naturally do), they are logically independent of his views on free software. Of course one could argue that because ESR's ethical judgement on guns is unsound, therefore his ethical judgement on free software must be viewed as suspect. But in this argument 'unsound' simply means 'different from mine', and, more probably, 'different from my unexamined social prejudices'.
However, the ad hominem argument against ESR falls for a more significant reason. Contrary to Meyer's assertion, ESR makes no claims regarding the ethicality or otherwise of free software, merely about its relative efficacy. Even if the argument that ESR was a poor judge of ethics succeeded, it has nothing to say about ESR as a judge of efficacy.
Which leaves, centrally, Meyer's attack on Stahlman. I found this vituperative, spiteful, and full of half truths and distortions which seemed to me deliberate. The third hand, partial and unverifiable account of the dinner party demonstrates spite.
For an example of half-truths, consider the passage in which Meyer states:
This passage is, I believe, deliberately misleading. In the document to which Meyer refers, Stallman's only significant objection to the BSD licence is that if a software product makes use of many BSD-licensed modules from many different providers, the concatenation of the advertisement lines may becomes unwieldy; a simple, pragmatic objection, not, as Meyer implies, an ethical one.
What Meyer demonstrates is that his ethical judgement is different from Stallman's, and, separately, from ESR's. That's fine. He is (like everyone else) entitled to his ethical judgement, and he is entitled to try to persuade us to agree with him. Having read his argument, however, the conclusion I reach is that his (Meyer's) arguments are intellectually wanting, his conclusions untenable, and his own intellectual stature (on this evidence) slight.
I suspect (and hope) that he is by now ashamed of this piece. If he isn't, then I'm sorry fo him.
Thanks, I'll wait for a CD.
But it's also potentially extremely good publicity for the company. 'Our company can provide you with the best possible support for (whatever your software is), because the maintainer actually works for us'. Big press release stuff and hoopla - 'Our committment to Open Source'. Handled right, the company could love this, and you could find yourself increasingly being paid to do what you want to do anyway.
Oh, and - if the company is completely unreasonable, sack it and go and work for a better one.
The problem is the article is extremely scrappy, and ill-informed even in what it does cover. For exanple, it says: "POSTgreSQL is based on the commercial Ingres database system". This is completely untrue. Commercial Ingres was based on Berkeley's 'University' Ingres. Postgres was a completely different, later project by the same team at Berkeley which wrote University Ingres, but it doesn't share any code with it and it certainly doesn't share any code with the commercial Ingres product.
It also repeats the old shaggy dog stories about how much faster MySQL is than Postgres, without quoting any benchmarks, or pointing out that this is only true for extremely simple queries.
Finally, it doesn't mention the licenses...
I haven't actually yet seen a live ILOVEYOU. But my understanding is that it comes as an email with an attachment which has the file-name extension '.vbs'. Anyone who would open an attachment with a filename extension they didn't recognise (oe one they did recognise as being that of a scripting language) is in my opinion to stupid to use a computer.
/etc/aliases, $HOME/.mailer-of-choice/address-book, and so on. Then, if you encapsulated that in an email, you would in effect have produced a Linux version of ILOVEYOU. Mind you, of course, I don't know of any Linux mailer which comes out-of-the-box where the default action when an attachment perl script is selected is to run it...
This is not really a Microsoft issue, frankly, in my opinion. It would not be difficult to write a Perl script which when run mailed itself to everyone in
Which just shows you can't trust benchmarks, particularly benchmarks posted by vendors. I've used both on real datasets, and my experience is that if you have more than trivial joins in your database (and I've never seen a real database without some non-trivial joins), Postgres will eat MySQL for breakfast.
The PostgreSQL user guide is supplied in the distribution as a postscript file which you can print on your local line printer; it runs to 216 pages and is extremely detailed. Of course, you don't get a glossy cover...
There is a database which is free, which has high performance, which is reliable, which runs very well on Linux, which is reasonably easy to secure, which supports proper transactions with proper commits and rollbacks, which has a genuinely open-source license.
It's called PostgreSQL. It outperforms MySQL on just about any test you care to name. Get it.