Exactly:-) I'm not questioning it on any level as a software engineering decision, but it shows the spirit of the project evolving from decisions that were made because, no matter how stupid they were from the point of view of maintainablity and suitableness for the overall framework, they were cool. It was scriptabe in Lisp! And no, not regular Lisp, but "rep", a dialect no one is likely to know, and which gets no use anywhere else in the project--whose official scripting language was supposedly Guile.
Like the guy in "Almost Famous" says about rock music, the whole reason to love old Gnome is that so many things about it were wonderfully and gloriously dumb. But of course at some point a project that central has to grow up--I'm not criticising the move so much as being nostalgic for the old days.
Nowadays the Linux desktop has gotten to the point that my mom and my wife (who are not into computers by any stretch of the mind) can both use it happily, which would never have been possible back then, when so much of GNU/Linux still showed warts of having been built by a random mix of professional programmers, academics, and teenagers working in their basements. That's tremendous progress and I wouldn't want to go back to those days any more than I would want to go back to my Commodore 64, but in both cases there is still a fondness that lingers on...
For me, Gnome has been offcially hijacked by the suits ever since they switched the window manager from Sawfish to Metacity--very symbolic the move from a fun scriptable-in-Lisp WM to the most staid and prim window manager around.
It's for the best, I guess, since some kind of boring desktop is needed for corporate adoption of Linux. When you think about it there was bound to be a split between those who need a highly standardised environment (for tech support and the like) and people using GNU/Linux as their personal desktop, who want to be able to customise everything and have lots of little amusements. So although I much prefer GTK to QT, I'm going to have to agree with Linus and suggest that people who are not big businesses but just ordinary computer geeks should probably just use KDE.
"UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."
Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something."
Let me get this straight:
Among the things this guy is persuaded of then is that aliens walk among us already, that the US government knows about it and has apparently enough alien technology in its possession to be able to wage war between galaxies (a pretty amazing feat for one little planet, wouldn't you say? Even with a base on our moon!), while still being able to keep the general population persuaded that we have not made contact.
Wasn't Will Smith in that movie? And here I was under the impression that the US was no longer even capable of manned spaceflight (other than hitch-hiking with the Russians).
All chuckling aside, even though according to his Wikipedia biography the man has a long history of UFO advocacy, he's also 82 years old and I am inclined to think that despite a distinguished career the question of senility has to be raised. Still, anyone should count themselves lucky to be giving public speaches at 82 in the first place.
Re:GCC is the Key to Open Source's Success
on
GCC 4.1 Released
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· Score: 1
RMS is in error here, but not because he thinks that software designated Free Software ought not be referred to as Open Source software, but because he thinks that anyone cares.
Hate to make a "me too" post along with some of the others who have replied to this, but I care, and I care enough to vocalise about it anyway.
What I find even more horrifying in your post is that you make the claim that the term Free software is offensive. I cannot fathom how you have come to hold such an attitude, but I can simply recommend that you reflect on it, and whether you really want to go through life holding a view like that, and whatever other views presumably accompany it.
I can't as I have custom software development tools that *only* run on windows.
VMWare might be a solution. Or it might not, depending.
Although I can't imagine it not being ideal, unless performance is absolutely critical (in which case you're already using a multiprocessor box and/or constantly showing CPU loads of 99%, right?). I run (among many other virtual machines) Oracle on Solaris--hardly a light load--on an ancient AMD Duron and it's perfectly acceptable for development work and learning.
Confining Windows to a VM is an absolute joy, because you can save as many separate running machines as your disk space allows, and re-booting and re-installing turn from major hassles into a casual "Slashdot break." I highly recommend a VMWare-on-Linux solution if stability is what you're after--it's not that different from the "reinstall every 18 months" posts you're getting elsewhere, it's just that in this case your computer remains usable while you're reinstalling Windows, and your day-to-day data like e-mail and bookmarks remain in place.
Last week there were complaints here and elsewhere that class-action and criminal prosecutions were slow in coming, with only California and I think New York having responded promptly. This is great news* that this is starting to be prosecuted more widely (as it should be), and encouragement to everyone lobbying elsewhere for lawsuits in their own states/countries.
[*] Technically it's not "great news", it's simply the just application of the law. But when a mega-corporation such as Sony is the spyware distributer, it doesn't take a cynic to fear that justice come second to capital, as was the case for a certain monopolist...
Re: appropriate for all types of workloads
on
New Server Chip Niagara
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Um, yeah, but given that your two most strenuous processes are using 4% and 2% of your CPU respectively, with your machine posting mighty load averages of 0.33, 0.30, 0.18, I think you can safely hold off on upgrading to an 8-core processor any time soon--unless some of those threads aren't sleeping fast enough for you:-)
I'd say it's more a question of 'choose your poison'. There is a learning curve whether one aims at mathematics-based notation schemes or historical computer science notations, and the market has already chosen (30 years ago) which one it prefers.
And not without cause. Human language looks a lot more like modern programming languages than mathematical notation, and a major goal of programming language design is to make it as straightforward as possible to tell the computer what you want it to do. One might object that by that argument Cobol is better than C, but humans, especially experts working in a specific domain, like abbreviations too. Cobol is hated because it doesn't allow you to abbreviate, not because it is hard to read, after all. APL or other such specialised syntaxes are hard to read and they don't fit closely enough with the way non-mathematicians think to be intuitive.
Hear hear! I am a subscriber, but if things remain as bad as they have in the last few months I certainly won't be one again!
Worse yet, if this kind of shoddy editing continues, slashdot.org will no longer be the kind of geek 'meeting of the minds' that it traditionally has been... and that would be a loss for us all.
I can vouch for this... the OO.org 2.0 beta has so far required non-RPM Linux users (or those who want to have a single-user installation of the beta version) to build from source--and I can say that it is a frightening endevour! (This coming from one who has built Gnome from source in the past and who is still daunted by the prospect of building OO.org)[1].
I was recently looking at open source projects that I might contribute to, and-- in my case at least --OO.org was counted out on the basis of build complexity. Cloudscape and other projects are where I've been putting my free time simply because becoming a 'casual contributor' to OO.org seems to be an unduly complicated process.
The solution? Simlplify the build process for the casual coder. This will have the added benefit of helping other Linux distros and UNIX versions more easily support bleeding edge OO.org. And on the development side, potential contributors of the odd functionality (as I would characterise myself) will not be scared off.
As I understand it (probably imperfectly), Linux has gone through the same growing pains in arriving at its current module architecture. I think this is a housekeeping step OpenOffice.org needs to dedicate resources to, and needs to dedicate them NOW, to clean things up to at least the level of the what the 1.x versions had where it was easy to compile[&|]install a single-user version, unlike the 2.Xs where it's a real workout. ---- [1] And this is also from one who also has no problem with contributing Java code despite the recently publicised Java issues in OO.org 2.0.
Holy crap that's hilarious! I thought that IBM's films depicting the Legends of iSeries were funny, but this is just amazing to see coming from a giant corporate entity!
I second the plug for the Perseus Project, which is also for language learners the best means of bridging the gap from beginner/intermediate to advanced in Latin or Ancient Greek.
For those who've already got their Latin down and want a quicker-loading experience, however, I recommend The Latin Library.
I just don't see how Mono is going to help the bottom line in the near term.
I'm not a Mono fan, especially from a free software perspective, but from a commercial perspective, I can see why Novell's management may be keen on the project..NET competes primarily with Java, in other words on server side and enterprise projects. Many PHB's may mandate that these projects be started in.NET, only to realise two years later that they are locked onto Windows NT servers while the company had already invested millions in Sun hardware, AS400s, or mainframes. (Or they just plane realise that they can save money with Linux on x86.) Mono is paving the way for a migration of these projects away from Microsoft, and Novell, offering support for Mono, could make millions if that comes to pass.
I agree with you though that it's not a short term strategy.
The first question to answer is, why is this data in a relational database to begin with? More to the point, is this application the only one that accesses the data, or are there other, non-XML centric databases that make use of the same data? The relational model gives you flexibility that XML does not for dealing with the data in arbitrary and unforeen ways (XML can be quite flexible with XSLT, but a programmer must still intervene for each and every new way you want to use tha data, with a much bigger performance hit). The normalised relational database stores your data in a mathematically sound way that puts the priority on integrity of data independently from its past, present or future structure; XML preserves data structure based on its present use while leaving the door open to moving from that to any arbitrary future use... which of the two ideals is more attractive depends on the nature of the data and how many applications need to use it.
Relational databases with good XML support (my background is DB2 but most major databases should be able to do this) reach a good compromise by giving you acces to normalised relational data as XML (which you can compliment with XSLT it if that's what needs to be done), while preserving it internally reduced to its bare essence as data (according to relational calculus' idea of what constitutes the bare essence of data, anyway.)
On the other hand, for single-app applications, or data that is more file oriented than datum-oriented (databases of XML documents where the document rarely or never needs to be abstracted from the data it contains), XML databases offer simplicity and efficiency by removing the need to work out a relational data model. Why break up your structured documents into a DBA's hand-tuned data model when 99.9% of your queries will just build these data sets back into XML documents (even when DB2, Oracle, and I assume SQL Server can automate this last task)? An XML database can give you more flexibility in querying than an all-XSLT solution, while saving a lot of unnecessary work over an SQL-to-XML solution for what is really an XML-to-XML application.
As I see it, that's the big picture. The actual decision has to come down to your applications. An XML database will be less efficient for non-XML applictions, plain and simple. Querying XML cannot be made as fast as querying relational tables, meaning extra overhead for non-XML apps. But *your* application encurs overhead in turning relational tables into XML (probably via the RDBMS's internal facility), and in transforming it if necessary. The question is therefore: who makes more queries on the database, this application or other non-XML ones? Who will make more queries in 5 years?
If you answer 'others' to either question, use a relational database--their XML support is decent now and will only get better, and they're far more popular in business which is an important CYA factor. If you answer 'your app' or 'other XML-based apps' for both questions, it's time to check out what XML databases have to offer right now. I expect other posts to comment on the current state of the art right now, but you can expect things to only get better as industry support for XQuery et al. improves--but don't expect them to *ever* pass up the relational databases in terms of raw performance, it's impossible. But as the evolution from Assembler to C to Java has shown in programming languages, the day may come when raw performance takes a back seat to other concerns.
Yes, but (unless things have changed since beta69; my download is still in progress), it's not as idiot-proof as installing Solaris 9 was. (Although the hardware support is much better, so the chances of this working on your machine are way higher than with Solaris 9).
It's also surprisingly easy to kill your other operating systems when you install though, so do your homework. (Google "dual-boot" "Solaris 10" etc. and keep reading till you're sure you've filled in all the gaps, and back up just in case). Also of course have a copy of Knoppix and your bootloader configuration around.
Do you trust Red Hat? You need to buy RHEL, and don't expect a free license like Sun is giving out here. Once all of OpenSolaris is out I think this will run parallel to Feodora/Red Hat and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
Have a gander: (Basically I think the answers are "yes", "wait for the source code, this is a binary distribution", and "I don't think so".)
ENTITLEMENT for SOLARIS 10 3/05 OPERATING SYSTEM
THIS ENTITLEMENT EVIDENCES YOUR AUTHORIZED SCOPE OF USE UNDER THE TERMS OF THE SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE SUN SOFTWARE INDICATED BELOW (THE SLA) UNLESS OTHERWISE AGREED IN WRITING BETWEEN YOU AND SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC. (SUN). Capitalized terms not defined in this document have the meanings ascribed to them in the SLA. These terms will supersede any inconsistent or conflicting terms in the SLA.
Licensee/Company: Entity in receipt of Software from an authorized source Beginning Date of License Term: the date of receipt of this Entitlement Software: Solaris 10 3/05 Permitted Use: Commercial Use License Term: Perpetual (subject to termination under the SLA) Licensed Unit: Registered Computer System Licensed unit Count: Unlimited Additional Terms:
1.0 License to Develop. You are authorized to develop software programs utilizing Software. If you desire to develop software programs which incorporate portions of Software ("Developed Programs"), the following provisions apply: (i) you may not modify or add to application programming interfaces associated with Software; (ii) you are not licensed to use fonts within Software to develop printing applications unless you have secured valid licenses from the appropriate font suppliers; (iii) incorporation of portions of Motif in Developed Programs may require reporting of copies of Developed Programs to Sun; and (iv) you will indemnify and defend Sun and its licensors from any claims, including attorneys' fees, which arise from or relate to distribution or use of Developed Programs to the extent these claims arise from or relate to the development performed by you. This Section 1.0 does not apply to the Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 8, Sun Java System Message Queue 3.5, Sun Java System Directory Server 5, and Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE) included in or bundled with the Software. 2.0 Sun Java Studio Enterprise for Evaluation Only. You may only use the Java Studio Enterprise (Studio) bundled or embedded with the Sun Java System Application Server Standard Edition portions of Software for Evaluation Use unless you purchase a separate license from Sun. Studio may contain a time out mechanism.
3.0 Sun Java System Directory Server 5. This Section 3.0 applies only to the Sun Java System Directory Server 5 portion of the Software. 3.1. Definitions. (a) "Directory Instance(s)" means an instance of the Sun Java System Directory Server process, slapd, running on a server. (b) "Entry(ies)" means a single Distinguished Name ("DN") and its associated attributes. (c) "Enterprise Wide" means your entire enterprise network. 3.2 License Grant. Sun grants you a non-exclusive and non-transferable license for the internal use only of Sun Java System Directory Server 5 (Directory Server) (where you control, manage, configure and otherwise use the software) for your internal business use and not for resale or redistribution in any manner and only for the number of Entries for which the corresponding fee has been paid. Subject to the limitations of the previous sentence, you may provide services with Directory Server to users outside of your commercial legal entity, if any; provided that you may not permit any such user to control, manage or configure Directory Server. 3.3 Additional Use Conditions. (a) Directory Server may contain, at no charge, up to an aggregate maximum of 200,000 Entries, across any and all Directory Instances running Enterprise Wide.
For the purposes of this Section 3.3(a) only, Entries exclude Solaris 10 operating system entries that do not define users. (b) You may install and run multiple instances of the Sun Java System Directory Server Console client on multiple computers and platforms for remote and distributed administration of servers and applications.
No, no, they're being totally honest! HP only sets the price (e.g. 40)--it's not their fault the currency units (dollars, euros) aren't equivalent! How can they have any control over the units, it's not like they can be expected to figure out how much a dollar is worth before they set their price, right? I totally believe them that they're hoping as much as European consumers are that the dollar will rise over the euro Real Soon Now(tm).
The gendarmes also act as "State troopers" (and military police, Secret Service, etc.), that is. I just realised that the "they" in parent was a little ambiguous.
La gendarmerie nationale is not the same thing as la police nationale--the latter of whom I would call "the French police". The gendarmerie would be better described as "the French military police", since they are considered part of the armed forces whereas the police are civilian--although they do also take on roles analagous to those of US State troopers.
Explain again why this is a good thing, if those who tweak the system to their advantage are rewarded at the expense of those who work hard and excel at what they do?
I'm sure many will correct me if I'm not hearing you right, but it should be noted that there is a widely-accepted and fully GNU/Linuxy way to have an application housed with its own directory tree (organised however the application wants) in/opt.
The filesystem hierarchy standard also provides/usr/local in cases where the UNIX filesystem hierarchy is adhered to (with/usr or even/. used if the software is included in the default disto/UNIX version).
You still have to know the name of what you want to see its man page. What if you don't remember or never learned ifup--you're not going to just guess it--and man networking will get you nowhere.
(Plus even when you do have the command and man page you still have to see how it fits into the big picture to know when and why to use it--rev's man page is very accurate and comprehensive, but I've still never understood its purpose other than maybe to make writing hint files go faster.)
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly :-) I'm not questioning it on any level as a software engineering decision, but it shows the spirit of the project evolving from decisions that were made because, no matter how stupid they were from the point of view of maintainablity and suitableness for the overall framework, they were cool. It was scriptabe in Lisp! And no, not regular Lisp, but "rep", a dialect no one is likely to know, and which gets no use anywhere else in the project--whose official scripting language was supposedly Guile.
Like the guy in "Almost Famous" says about rock music, the whole reason to love old Gnome is that so many things about it were wonderfully and gloriously dumb. But of course at some point a project that central has to grow up--I'm not criticising the move so much as being nostalgic for the old days.
Nowadays the Linux desktop has gotten to the point that my mom and my wife (who are not into computers by any stretch of the mind) can both use it happily, which would never have been possible back then, when so much of GNU/Linux still showed warts of having been built by a random mix of professional programmers, academics, and teenagers working in their basements. That's tremendous progress and I wouldn't want to go back to those days any more than I would want to go back to my Commodore 64, but in both cases there is still a fondness that lingers on...
For me, Gnome has been offcially hijacked by the suits ever since they switched the window manager from Sawfish to Metacity--very symbolic the move from a fun scriptable-in-Lisp WM to the most staid and prim window manager around.
It's for the best, I guess, since some kind of boring desktop is needed for corporate adoption of Linux. When you think about it there was bound to be a split between those who need a highly standardised environment (for tech support and the like) and people using GNU/Linux as their personal desktop, who want to be able to customise everything and have lots of little amusements. So although I much prefer GTK to QT, I'm going to have to agree with Linus and suggest that people who are not big businesses but just ordinary computer geeks should probably just use KDE.
"UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head."
Mr. Hellyer went on to say, "I'm so concerned about what the
consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just
think I had to say something."
Let me get this straight:
Among the things this guy is persuaded of then is that aliens walk
among us already, that the US government knows about it and has
apparently enough alien technology in its possession to be able to
wage war between galaxies (a pretty amazing feat for one little
planet, wouldn't you say? Even with a base on our moon!), while still
being able to keep the general population persuaded that we have not
made contact.
Wasn't Will Smith in that movie? And here I was under the impression that
the US was no longer even capable of manned spaceflight (other than
hitch-hiking with the Russians).
All chuckling aside, even though according to his Wikipedia
biography the man has a long history of UFO advocacy, he's also 82
years old and I am inclined to think that despite a distinguished
career the question of senility has to be raised. Still, anyone
should count themselves lucky to be giving public speaches at 82 in
the first place.
RMS is in error here, but not because he thinks that software designated Free Software ought not be referred to as Open Source software, but because he thinks that anyone cares.
Hate to make a "me too" post along with some of the others who have replied to this, but I care, and I care enough to vocalise about it anyway.
What I find even more horrifying in your post is that you make the claim that the term Free software is offensive. I cannot fathom how you have come to hold such an attitude, but I can simply recommend that you reflect on it, and whether you really want to go through life holding a view like that, and whatever other views presumably accompany it.
"Hmm, what shall we call a place where souls are purged, a place of
purgation, if you will? Oh, I've got it! How about Pergatory!"
--Gah!
I can't as I have custom software development tools that *only* run on windows.
VMWare might be a solution. Or it might not, depending.
Although I can't imagine it not being ideal, unless performance is absolutely critical (in which case you're already using a multiprocessor box and/or constantly showing CPU loads of 99%, right?). I run (among many other virtual machines) Oracle on Solaris--hardly a light load--on an ancient AMD Duron and it's perfectly acceptable for development work and learning.
Confining Windows to a VM is an absolute joy, because you can save as many separate running machines as your disk space allows, and re-booting and re-installing turn from major hassles into a casual "Slashdot break." I highly recommend a VMWare-on-Linux solution if stability is what you're after--it's not that different from the "reinstall every 18 months" posts you're getting elsewhere, it's just that in this case your computer remains usable while you're reinstalling Windows, and your day-to-day data like e-mail and bookmarks remain in place.
Last week there were complaints here and elsewhere that class-action and criminal prosecutions were slow in coming, with only California and I think New York having responded promptly. This is great news* that this is starting to be prosecuted more widely (as it should be), and encouragement to everyone lobbying elsewhere for lawsuits in their own states/countries.
[*] Technically it's not "great news", it's simply the just application of the law. But when a mega-corporation such as Sony is the spyware distributer, it doesn't take a cynic to fear that justice come second to capital, as was the case for a certain monopolist...
Um, yeah, but given that your two most strenuous processes are using 4% and 2% of your CPU respectively, with your machine posting mighty load averages of 0.33, 0.30, 0.18, I think you can safely hold off on upgrading to an 8-core processor any time soon--unless some of those threads aren't sleeping fast enough for you :-)
\n is cryptic and APL isn't?
I'd say it's more a question of 'choose your poison'. There is a learning curve whether one aims at mathematics-based notation schemes or historical computer science notations, and the market has already chosen (30 years ago) which one it prefers.
And not without cause. Human language looks a lot more like modern programming languages than mathematical notation, and a major goal of programming language design is to make it as straightforward as possible to tell the computer what you want it to do. One might object that by that argument Cobol is better than C, but humans, especially experts working in a specific domain, like abbreviations too. Cobol is hated because it doesn't allow you to abbreviate, not because it is hard to read, after all. APL or other such specialised syntaxes are hard to read and they don't fit closely enough with the way non-mathematicians think to be intuitive.
1) The viaduc de Millau is the world's highest bridge; no one claims it's the longest.
2) The viaduc de Millau is not a suspension bridge in the first place, and this article is about suspension bridges.
Hear hear!
I am a subscriber, but if things remain as bad as they have in the last few months I certainly won't be one again!
Worse yet, if this kind of shoddy editing continues, slashdot.org will no longer be the kind of geek 'meeting of the minds' that it traditionally has been... and that would be a loss for us all.
I can vouch for this... the OO.org 2.0 beta has so far required non-RPM Linux users (or those who want to have a single-user installation of the beta version) to build from source--and I can say that it is a frightening endevour! (This coming from one who has built Gnome from source in the past and who is still daunted by the prospect of building OO.org)[1].
I was recently looking at open source projects that I might contribute to, and-- in my case at least --OO.org was counted out on the basis of build complexity. Cloudscape and other projects are where I've been putting my free time simply because becoming a 'casual contributor' to OO.org seems to be an unduly complicated process.
The solution? Simlplify the build process for the casual coder. This will have the added benefit of helping other Linux distros and UNIX versions more easily support bleeding edge OO.org. And on the development side, potential contributors of the odd functionality (as I would characterise myself) will not be scared off.
As I understand it (probably imperfectly), Linux has gone through the same growing pains in arriving at its current module architecture. I think this is a housekeeping step OpenOffice.org needs to dedicate resources to, and needs to dedicate them NOW, to clean things up to at least the level of the what the 1.x versions had where it was easy to compile[&|]install a single-user version, unlike the 2.Xs where it's a real workout.
----
[1] And this is also from one who also has no problem with contributing Java code despite the recently publicised Java issues in OO.org 2.0.
Holy crap that's hilarious! I thought that IBM's films depicting the Legends of iSeries were funny, but this is just amazing to see coming from a giant corporate entity!
I second the plug for the Perseus Project, which is also for language learners the best means of bridging the gap from beginner/intermediate to advanced in Latin or Ancient Greek.
For those who've already got their Latin down and want a quicker-loading experience, however, I recommend The Latin Library.
I just don't see how Mono is going to help the bottom line in the near term.
.NET competes primarily with Java, in other words on server side and enterprise projects. Many PHB's may mandate that these projects be started in .NET, only to realise two years later that they are locked onto Windows NT servers while the company had already invested millions in Sun hardware, AS400s, or mainframes. (Or they just plane realise that they can save money with Linux on x86.) Mono is paving the way for a migration of these projects away from Microsoft, and Novell, offering support for Mono, could make millions if that comes to pass.
I'm not a Mono fan, especially from a free software perspective, but from a commercial perspective, I can see why Novell's management may be keen on the project.
I agree with you though that it's not a short term strategy.
The first question to answer is, why is this data in a relational database to begin with? More to the point, is this application the only one that accesses the data, or are there other, non-XML centric databases that make use of the same data? The relational model gives you flexibility that XML does not for dealing with the data in arbitrary and unforeen ways (XML can be quite flexible with XSLT, but a programmer must still intervene for each and every new way you want to use tha data, with a much bigger performance hit). The normalised relational database stores your data in a mathematically sound way that puts the priority on integrity of data independently from its past, present or future structure; XML preserves data structure based on its present use while leaving the door open to moving from that to any arbitrary future use... which of the two ideals is more attractive depends on the nature of the data and how many applications need to use it.
Relational databases with good XML support (my background is DB2 but most major databases should be able to do this) reach a good compromise by giving you acces to normalised relational data as XML (which you can compliment with XSLT it if that's what needs to be done), while preserving it internally reduced to its bare essence as data (according to relational calculus' idea of what constitutes the bare essence of data, anyway.)
On the other hand, for single-app applications, or data that is more file oriented than datum-oriented (databases of XML documents where the document rarely or never needs to be abstracted from the data it contains), XML databases offer simplicity and efficiency by removing the need to work out a relational data model. Why break up your structured documents into a DBA's hand-tuned data model when 99.9% of your queries will just build these data sets back into XML documents (even when DB2, Oracle, and I assume SQL Server can automate this last task)? An XML database can give you more flexibility in querying than an all-XSLT solution, while saving a lot of unnecessary work over an SQL-to-XML solution for what is really an XML-to-XML application.
As I see it, that's the big picture. The actual decision has to come down to your applications. An XML database will be less efficient for non-XML applictions, plain and simple. Querying XML cannot be made as fast as querying relational tables, meaning extra overhead for non-XML apps. But *your* application encurs overhead in turning relational tables into XML (probably via the RDBMS's internal facility), and in transforming it if necessary. The question is therefore: who makes more queries on the database, this application or other non-XML ones? Who will make more queries in 5 years?
If you answer 'others' to either question, use a relational database--their XML support is decent now and will only get better, and they're far more popular in business which is an important CYA factor. If you answer 'your app' or 'other XML-based apps' for both questions, it's time to check out what XML databases have to offer right now. I expect other posts to comment on the current state of the art right now, but you can expect things to only get better as industry support for XQuery et al. improves--but don't expect them to *ever* pass up the relational databases in terms of raw performance, it's impossible. But as the evolution from Assembler to C to Java has shown in programming languages, the day may come when raw performance takes a back seat to other concerns.
Yes, but (unless things have changed since beta69; my download is still in progress), it's not as idiot-proof as installing Solaris 9 was. (Although the hardware support is much better, so the chances of this working on your machine are way higher than with Solaris 9).
It's also surprisingly easy to kill your other operating systems when you install though, so do your homework. (Google "dual-boot" "Solaris 10" etc. and keep reading till you're sure you've filled in all the gaps, and back up just in case). Also of course have a copy of Knoppix and your bootloader configuration around.
Do you trust Red Hat? You need to buy RHEL, and don't expect a free license like Sun is giving out here. Once all of OpenSolaris is out I think this will run parallel to Feodora/Red Hat and OpenOffice.org/StarOffice.
Have a gander: (Basically I think the answers are "yes", "wait for the source code, this is a binary distribution", and "I don't think so".)
ENTITLEMENT for
SOLARIS 10 3/05 OPERATING SYSTEM
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No, no, they're being totally honest! HP only sets the price (e.g. 40)--it's not their fault the currency units (dollars, euros) aren't equivalent! How can they have any control over the units, it's not like they can be expected to figure out how much a dollar is worth before they set their price, right? I totally believe them that they're hoping as much as European consumers are that the dollar will rise over the euro Real Soon Now(tm).
Disgusting.
The gendarmes also act as "State troopers" (and military police, Secret Service, etc.), that is. I just realised that the "they" in parent was a little ambiguous.
La gendarmerie nationale is not the same thing as la police nationale--the latter of whom I would call "the French police". The gendarmerie would be better described as "the French military police", since they are considered part of the armed forces whereas the police are civilian--although they do also take on roles analagous to those of US State troopers.
Explain again why this is a good thing, if those who tweak the system to their advantage are rewarded at the expense of those who work hard and excel at what they do?
I'm sure many will correct me if I'm not hearing you right, but it should be noted that there is a widely-accepted and fully GNU/Linuxy way to have an application housed with its own directory tree (organised however the application wants) in /opt.
/usr/local in cases where the UNIX filesystem hierarchy is adhered to (with /usr or even /. used if the software is included in the default disto/UNIX version).
The filesystem hierarchy standard also provides
You still have to know the name of what you want to see its man page. What if you don't remember or never learned ifup--you're not going to just guess it--and man networking will get you nowhere.
(Plus even when you do have the command and man page you still have to see how it fits into the big picture to know when and why to use it--rev's man page is very accurate and comprehensive, but I've still never understood its purpose other than maybe to make writing hint files go faster.)