Third, RACIST? What the hell? Can you PLEASE explain that, because I REALLY don't get that one. Honestly, I haven't a clue where you got that and really want to know.
The gp didn't mean that Seinfeld was a racist, but that the show starred Seinfeld *and* a racist, referring to the Michael Richards (Kramer) incident described here:
1 second exposure to 160 degree water = third degree burns:
That depends on the quantity of water. For the same reason that the white-hot sparks from a sparkler don't send you to the hospital, a small splash of boiling water soaking through your clothes isn't going to transfer enough heat to your skin to damage it.
I'm not saying the woman in the lawsuit wasn't burned, I'm just saying that "1 second exposure to 160 degree water" not only isn't well-enough defined to declare that it causes third degree burns, but is specifically misleading in the example of spilling coffee in one's lap in a car.
My other objection to such approaches is, if you wanted a nonhuman intelligence from neural networks that you don't really understand (the workings of), you can always go get one from the pet store. Nicely put. And if you want to build a human intelligence from scratch, you can always make one in your home lab (e.g., the bedroom.)
We don't know what makes consciousness emerge from a bundle of neurons, but we all know how to build one that works.
[Firefox users] actually are even smaller in terms of online spending If that's true (and it probably depends on your market whether it is true), one possible reason might be: A number of websites only WORK with IE.
Yesterday I tried to spend $680 at a website, and the checkout page got into a poorly-coded JavaScript field-confirmation loop that I couldn't get out of without killing Firefox. (Which itself is a Firefox bug; I should be able to get away from a site regardless of the JavaScript dialogs it's throwing in my face. If someone knows of something else to try, let me know.)
They lost my business, but if I were determined I would have booted into Windows and shopped with IE, which is probably all they tested with. Voila, IE users spend more than Firefox users.
In other news, I'm much more likely to answer a question correctly if it's asked to me in English rather than in Portuguese. I'm "broken" when it comes to Portuguese, so my Brazilian friends give up and ask me questions in English instead. So I should conclude that there are no Portuguese questions...?
Did you verify that 5.0.45 contains the two bugs you listed before claiming that it does? I tested them here and both of them appear to have been fixed.
I'm not saying MySQL quality control is as good as I'd like (I'm pretty grumbly about it lately, actually), but both bugs have "Can't Repeat" status, and indeed I can't repeat them with 5.0.45. Both bug reports have received feedback from developers, which is more than I can say for a lot of bugs I have reported in other open source programs.
> I mean, even the most basic test suite would have easily caught these.
No, a test suite that tested for these exact things would have caught them. From what I have seen, MySQL is pretty good about adding test cases to their suite when they fix bugs or add new features.
I'm sure you can list troublesome bugs in 5.0.45, but those aren't two of them.
Thank you for the clarification. So "large objects" == BLOBs. (So why not call them BLOBs?) Not replicating them is a meaningful restriction, but not one that comes up in my application.
As far as schema changes, the argument goes like this: replication is only necessary on productions systems. Schema on production systems should be static. If you're changing your schema, you probably did something wrong.
Why anyone modded the parent Informative, I have no idea, but I'd like to respond to this:
If you don't even know what large objects are, why do you have a problem with this?
[...]
MySQL doesn't have inheritence, you're not losing anything.
It's the law of least surprise. Every exception to "set it up and forget about it" is something our programming team is going to have to keep in mind. That's why it almost doesn't matter what "large objects" are in PostgreSQL, or whether we're using inheritance now.
From other postings, which were actually informative, it sounds like "large object" means something in PostgreSQL that might not come up for us in practice, and that the schema changes not being replicated can be worked around (by expressing them with "execute script", documented in the Slony project). Those two being the only issues I noticed in Slony, we could probably reasonably work with it.
What do PostgreSQL users do for replication? I'm a MySQL admin who would really like to be able to switch to PostgreSQL, but we need to be able to have several slaves hanging off a master, and have everything replicated in as real-time as possible (but asynchronously) to the slaves. I have spent some time looking for how to do this in PostgreSQL but have found each solution lacking. The "most popular free" one, according to the PostgreSQL faq, is "Slony-I", but from what I could find it doesn't replicate schema changes to the slaves. What happens to your replication when the slaves sees an update to a column/table that doesn't exist on the slave? Slony also doesn't replicate "large objects"; I don't know what they are, but as a MySQL admin who has been replicating our databases for many years, I have a hard time imagining adjusting to limitations like these.
Most of the other options I found were abandonware, undocumented, didn't work with PostgreSQL 8.x, etc. I looked at commercial solutions, but they were similarly a mess. Specifically, here is my survey:
* pgpool -- Max 2 servers, and they're not really in sync---commands like now() or rand() will be executed independently on the mirrored machines, causing them to have different data.
* Slony I -- DB schema changes not replicated, nor are "large objects"
* PGCluster -- Synchronous multi-master. We don't want synchronous, and don't need multi-master. Documentation patchy, didn't appear to be currently maintained.
* CommandPrompt "Mammoth" -- Documentation "in the works". PostgreSQL 8.0.7. Tables can't use "inheritance". Schema changes not replicated (at least not table creation, not sure about the rest). Only 1 db replicated, not all dbs. Tables must have primary keys. Have to list tables in config file.
* Bizgres/GreenPlum -- Buzzword-compliant website, but website was broken when I looked for details. The "Community" is inactive---forum is barely used, questions are unanswered.
* PostgrSQL Replicator -- Poorly documented. Only mentions up to 7.x. "News" is from 2001.
I'm not ragging on PostgreSQL: I'd really like to be able to migrate to it. I just fear that when replication is done in a third-party fashion, it loses the tight integration with the dbms necessary to make it work truly seamlessly, and that it isn't maintained as well as the core product.
Perhaps this comment is off-topic, since the post is about a new release of PostgreSQL, not asking for questions about its individual features. But this is the one feature I look for in each new release, and the fact that I couldn't find any good solution makes me wonder if it's because I missed the one great one that people actually use.
The reason Lisp and Scheme are so "powerful" is that you, as a programmer, have direct access to the program's parse tree at all times. (You can even alter the parse tree at compile time with macros, which is really modifying the compiler to suit your program.)
Not in Scheme you don't. Functions may be first-class, but they're opaque.
Lisp and Scheme are only superficially similar. They share a (virtual lack of) syntax, but the split was early and definitive.
The Big Deal with Scheme isn't its syntax---I find its everything-looks-like-a-list syntax annoying at best. And when compared with built-in facilities in other languages (e.g., hashes, regular expressions, string-interpolation, object-orientation), Scheme's built-in list parser is a toy. An occasionally handy time-saver, but not a Big Deal.
The Big Deal with Scheme is first-class functions, tail-call optimization, call/cc, and all the Alice in Wonderland playground those things imply. By all means write a compiler for Scheme, but the time savings gained during parsing will be nothing, nada, zero, compared with the fun that implementing the actual language features brings.
The Big Deal with Scheme is a that a language with so little (this is one of its features) can contain so much power and all-out fun.
If I'm watching a show, that's what I'm doing, and that's the only thing I want to be doing. I don't want compelling commercials, because it will break my train of thought in the middle of watching my show.
So if the advertisers succeed in what they are trying for (i.e., getting me to stop watching the show to buy something), I'll just have to stop watching shows.
I know content producers have to make money somehow, so charge me money already. (Oh wait, you already do...who gets their content for free over the air anymore?) If there were a $5/month option to remove all commercials from all DirecTV channels, I'd pay it. What is the advertising revenue on those channels divided by the subscribers, anyway? If networks (including cable networks) gave up their advertising revenue and charged subscribers, how much would it come to a month? Someone must know. I know I sure don't spend $5 on products advertised that I'm not going to spend on them anyway.
I have money, I don't have unlimited attention.
Relevant aside: The state fair is in town. On Tuesdays, kids get in free and rides are a dollar, so my father is taking my niece on Tuesday. You save a couple of dollars, and have to share the park with a teeming mass of screaming kids. I'd much rather go on a day where they charge twenty dollars to get in---imagine how nice and quiet it would be!
> Searching in english will turn up the western view of Tiananman mostly, and little else.
Unless you're on the Chinese version of Google. I am searching in English, and the 3 pages of "tiananmen square" turn up zero pictures of the event.
Page 5 of your search had two pictures, the same, from the same blog site, where the picture doesn't appear to be anymore. The other 8 pages of your search had nothing about the massacre.
My biggest reluctance to moving away from TiVo is it's got the most usefully laid out remote I've ever used for watching video. When I watch a DVD or VHS I miss my TiVo remote terribly. What do people who set up their own box do for a remote----are there IR receiver cards that would let me use my TiVo remote, or am I stuck with something third-party?
Folks that are still using 1.3 are missing out on enormous strides forward. The "it still works fine, why should I upgrade" crowd are completely welcome to remain where they are, and we're not going to compel to move, but they are going to miss out on all sorts of cool things, in the name of "it's good enough already." Their loss, not ours.
I haven't upgraded because most new security problems reported in Apache are for the 2.0.x branch, not the 1.3.x branch.
You say I'm missing out on enormous strides forward, but aren't I also missing out on numerous security problems? I'm not being argumentative, I really am interested in hearing the Apache developer's side of things. (E.g., perhaps the issues have been overstated, perhaps they exist in 1.3 also but aren't being discovered, etc.)
Re:Too bad the installation is failing for people.
on
Quake 4 Linux
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· Score: 1
> You should be able to exchange them at the store
Worked for me. 2nd CD bad, store exchanged it, Windows install went fine, I'd forgotten how much fun Quake can be. It rocks.
Now, if I could successfully install it on (64-bit) Linux and not get segfaults, that would be nice. (And a native 64-bit version would be REALLY nice.) But no conspiracy theories are required to explain why disc 2 wouldn't install.
Re:So much for the internet surviving a nuclear wa
on
Tier One ISPs Dying
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· Score: 1
And England doesn't have to print the name of their country on postal stamps. So what? I don't get bitter every time I see USA on my stamps just because some other country doesn't...
> Yeah, but even 20 year old databases supported transactions, views, etc. And they didn't: > - silently truncate the amount in your account because it was too large for the column
The article you're responding to is about MySQL 5.0, in which that misfeature can be disabled. (It's a fair complaint, but worth pointing out that it's been addressed. You may as well complain that MySQL doesn't have stored procedures.)
> - silently install to myisam because it couldn't find innodb, then ignore > your attempts to rollback
I don't know if they've fixed that, but really, how often have you incorrectly installed the system so it doesn't support innodb without immediately discovering that?
> - silently truncate varchars (customer name) which could prevent data matches
Same misfeature as point 1, fixed in MySQL 5.0.
> - etc
Please elaborate. "Etc." is FUD.
> [the reason for using MySQL] can't be cost
You may be surprised how much of a difference free is over a few grand for a lot of companies. Especially when experimenting with some new thing. In addition to being a difference in amount, free is a difference in kind.
> the legal cost to confirm that will easily exceed the oracle cost.
That's rubbish. MySQL is gpl'd, and for a gigantic number of uses that means zero cost, zero legal troubles, forever.
The last time we priced Oracle was a couple of years ago, but the pricing was ridiculous. And on top of paying the money for the software, and the support, you have to manage licences. One of the nicest things to me about moving to open source software was that the software authors *want* you to install and use it. There's no more barrier than "apt-get install <foo>". Not having anything in the way between you and installing the software saves real money, even if the software weren't zero-cost. In an emergency you're trying to set up a new server, you don't want to be hunting for a license key or faxing for an installation key or validating something over the phone. (I've never installed Oracle, maybe it's less of a headache than dozens of other pieces of proprietary software I've worked with.)
Why reverse engineering the smb protocol should be considered a good thing, while reverse engineering the protocol bitkeeper uses is beyond me
Linus (and some of the rest of the kernel community) was using a tool that was given to them by someone who is easy to piss off. They wanted to keep using it, and thought it reasonable to not piss him off.
Tridgell pissed Larry off, and Larry took it away. There's nothing unreasonable about Linus saying, "Tridge, don't piss him off [even if it's legal to do so]," because he wanted to continue using Larry's gift.
This is nothing like Microsoft and SMB, because nobody was depending on Microsoft being nice to them.
Why people keep saying that Linus is now against reverse engineering are ignoring a lot of what happened.
You know Linux is a clone of Unix because Linus couldn't run Unix on his 386 machine. He wasn't pleased that he couldn't do something and he worked around it. Why can't someone be displeased with other proprietary systems and create workarounds for them?
Larry says, "This is costing us too much." Linus, his friend, says, "Okay, then stop doing it." This doesn't imply that Linus disapproves of reverse engineering.
Linus didn't seem pleased (from what I've read) about how this particular reverse-engineering so irritated Larry that it blew the whole freeish-BK deal, but that's a far cry from declaring that reverse engineering itself is unethical.
(And, as other posters have pointed out, it's just silly to call writing Linux a matter of reverse-engineering.)
Why I'm even commenting when the SlashDot article was the most idiotic, misleading article I've ever seen here, and that's saying something, I don't know...
I AM often looking at something while I'm fast-forwarding: I'm looking to see when the commercials are over.
If they didn't think I was looking at the screen while I was fast-forwarding, they wouldn't try to put ads there.
I'm not looking for "free tv", nor am I getting it with satellite tv and a tivo subscription.
I would pay a monthly surplus to have the "don't even record commercials at all" feature; they can give that money to the advertisers if they want to. I just don't want to look at ads.
If they cover a portion of the fast-forward screen with ads, that's the end of my tivo...
Slashdot Mirror
starring a Microsoft shill & a racist.
Third, RACIST? What the hell? Can you PLEASE explain that, because I REALLY don't get that one. Honestly, I haven't a clue where you got that and really want to know.
The gp didn't mean that Seinfeld was a racist, but that the show starred Seinfeld *and* a racist, referring to the Michael Richards (Kramer) incident described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Richards#Laugh_Factory_incident
1 second exposure to 160 degree water = third degree burns:
That depends on the quantity of water. For the same reason that the white-hot sparks from a sparkler don't send you to the hospital, a small splash of boiling water soaking through your clothes isn't going to transfer enough heat to your skin to damage it.
I'm not saying the woman in the lawsuit wasn't burned, I'm just saying that "1 second exposure to 160 degree water" not only isn't well-enough defined to declare that it causes third degree burns, but is specifically misleading in the example of spilling coffee in one's lap in a car.
If you can't buy them, then doesn't that mean that this *isn't* a slashvertisement?
Maybe it's news for nerds just because they're cool.
We don't know what makes consciousness emerge from a bundle of neurons, but we all know how to build one that works.
Yesterday I tried to spend $680 at a website, and the checkout page got into a poorly-coded JavaScript field-confirmation loop that I couldn't get out of without killing Firefox. (Which itself is a Firefox bug; I should be able to get away from a site regardless of the JavaScript dialogs it's throwing in my face. If someone knows of something else to try, let me know.)
They lost my business, but if I were determined I would have booted into Windows and shopped with IE, which is probably all they tested with. Voila, IE users spend more than Firefox users.
In other news, I'm much more likely to answer a question correctly if it's asked to me in English rather than in Portuguese. I'm "broken" when it comes to Portuguese, so my Brazilian friends give up and ask me questions in English instead. So I should conclude that there are no Portuguese questions...?
Did you verify that 5.0.45 contains the two bugs you listed before claiming that it does? I tested them here and both of them appear to have been fixed.
I'm not saying MySQL quality control is as good as I'd like (I'm pretty grumbly about it lately, actually), but both bugs have "Can't Repeat" status, and indeed I can't repeat them with 5.0.45. Both bug reports have received feedback from developers, which is more than I can say for a lot of bugs I have reported in other open source programs.
> I mean, even the most basic test suite would have easily caught these.
No, a test suite that tested for these exact things would have caught them. From what I have seen, MySQL is pretty good about adding test cases to their suite when they fix bugs or add new features.
I'm sure you can list troublesome bugs in 5.0.45, but those aren't two of them.
"Intellitext" was the last straw that sent me to Firefox's NoScript extension. The web has been a much nicer place since I started using it.
For me and my friends in high-school dying to program something, anything, there was a whole world in there.
Or you updated your production system?
That argument mistakes a bug for a feature.
[...]
It's the law of least surprise. Every exception to "set it up and forget about it" is something our programming team is going to have to keep in mind. That's why it almost doesn't matter what "large objects" are in PostgreSQL, or whether we're using inheritance now.
From other postings, which were actually informative, it sounds like "large object" means something in PostgreSQL that might not come up for us in practice, and that the schema changes not being replicated can be worked around (by expressing them with "execute script", documented in the Slony project). Those two being the only issues I noticed in Slony, we could probably reasonably work with it.
What do PostgreSQL users do for replication? I'm a MySQL admin who would really like to be able to switch to PostgreSQL, but we need to be able to have several slaves hanging off a master, and have everything replicated in as real-time as possible (but asynchronously) to the slaves. I have spent some time looking for how to do this in PostgreSQL but have found each solution lacking. The "most popular free" one, according to the PostgreSQL faq, is "Slony-I", but from what I could find it doesn't replicate schema changes to the slaves. What happens to your replication when the slaves sees an update to a column/table that doesn't exist on the slave? Slony also doesn't replicate "large objects"; I don't know what they are, but as a MySQL admin who has been replicating our databases for many years, I have a hard time imagining adjusting to limitations like these.
Most of the other options I found were abandonware, undocumented, didn't work with PostgreSQL 8.x, etc. I looked at commercial solutions, but they were similarly a mess. Specifically, here is my survey:
* pgpool -- Max 2 servers, and they're not really in sync---commands like now() or rand() will be executed independently on the mirrored machines, causing them to have different data.
* Slony I -- DB schema changes not replicated, nor are "large objects"
* PGCluster -- Synchronous multi-master. We don't want synchronous, and don't need multi-master. Documentation patchy, didn't appear to be currently maintained.
* CommandPrompt "Mammoth" -- Documentation "in the works". PostgreSQL 8.0.7. Tables can't use "inheritance". Schema changes not replicated (at least not table creation, not sure about the rest). Only 1 db replicated, not all dbs. Tables must have primary keys. Have to list tables in config file.
* Bizgres/GreenPlum -- Buzzword-compliant website, but website was broken when I looked for details. The "Community" is inactive---forum is barely used, questions are unanswered.
* PostgrSQL Replicator -- Poorly documented. Only mentions up to 7.x. "News" is from 2001.
I'm not ragging on PostgreSQL: I'd really like to be able to migrate to it. I just fear that when replication is done in a third-party fashion, it loses the tight integration with the dbms necessary to make it work truly seamlessly, and that it isn't maintained as well as the core product.
Perhaps this comment is off-topic, since the post is about a new release of PostgreSQL, not asking for questions about its individual features. But this is the one feature I look for in each new release, and the fact that I couldn't find any good solution makes me wonder if it's because I missed the one great one that people actually use.
Not in Scheme you don't. Functions may be first-class, but they're opaque.
Lisp and Scheme are only superficially similar. They share a (virtual lack of) syntax, but the split was early and definitive.
The Big Deal with Scheme isn't its syntax---I find its everything-looks-like-a-list syntax annoying at best. And when compared with built-in facilities in other languages (e.g., hashes, regular expressions, string-interpolation, object-orientation), Scheme's built-in list parser is a toy. An occasionally handy time-saver, but not a Big Deal.
The Big Deal with Scheme is first-class functions, tail-call optimization, call/cc, and all the Alice in Wonderland playground those things imply. By all means write a compiler for Scheme, but the time savings gained during parsing will be nothing, nada, zero, compared with the fun that implementing the actual language features brings.
The Big Deal with Scheme is a that a language with so little (this is one of its features) can contain so much power and all-out fun.
If I'm watching a show, that's what I'm doing, and that's the only thing I want to be doing. I don't want compelling commercials, because it will break my train of thought in the middle of watching my show.
So if the advertisers succeed in what they are trying for (i.e., getting me to stop watching the show to buy something), I'll just have to stop watching shows.
I know content producers have to make money somehow, so charge me money already. (Oh wait, you already do...who gets their content for free over the air anymore?) If there were a $5/month option to remove all commercials from all DirecTV channels, I'd pay it. What is the advertising revenue on those channels divided by the subscribers, anyway? If networks (including cable networks) gave up their advertising revenue and charged subscribers, how much would it come to a month? Someone must know. I know I sure don't spend $5 on products advertised that I'm not going to spend on them anyway.
I have money, I don't have unlimited attention.
Relevant aside: The state fair is in town. On Tuesdays, kids get in free and rides are a dollar, so my father is taking my niece on Tuesday. You save a couple of dollars, and have to share the park with a teeming mass of screaming kids. I'd much rather go on a day where they charge twenty dollars to get in---imagine how nice and quiet it would be!
> Searching in english will turn up the western view of Tiananman mostly, and little else.
Unless you're on the Chinese version of Google. I am searching in English, and the 3 pages of "tiananmen square" turn up zero pictures of the event.
Page 5 of your search had two pictures, the same, from the same blog site, where the picture doesn't appear to be anymore. The other 8 pages of your search had nothing about the massacre.
What do you use for a remote?
My biggest reluctance to moving away from TiVo is it's got the most usefully laid out remote I've ever used for watching video. When I watch a DVD or VHS I miss my TiVo remote terribly. What do people who set up their own box do for a remote----are there IR receiver cards that would let me use my TiVo remote, or am I stuck with something third-party?
> You can kick around the tires (so to speak)
Thank you for that clarification: I thought Ruby was a physical thing that actually had tires.
Which is confusing, because it apparently rides on rails.
Folks that are still using 1.3 are missing out on enormous strides forward. The "it still works fine, why should I upgrade" crowd are completely welcome to remain where they are, and we're not going to compel to move, but they are going to miss out on all sorts of cool things, in the name of "it's good enough already." Their loss, not ours.
I haven't upgraded because most new security problems reported in Apache are for the 2.0.x branch, not the 1.3.x branch.
You say I'm missing out on enormous strides forward, but aren't I also missing out on numerous security problems? I'm not being argumentative, I really am interested in hearing the Apache developer's side of things. (E.g., perhaps the issues have been overstated, perhaps they exist in 1.3 also but aren't being discovered, etc.)
> You should be able to exchange them at the store
Worked for me. 2nd CD bad, store exchanged it, Windows install went fine, I'd forgotten how much fun Quake can be. It rocks.
Now, if I could successfully install it on (64-bit) Linux and not get segfaults, that would be nice. (And a native 64-bit version would be REALLY nice.) But no conspiracy theories are required to explain why disc 2 wouldn't install.
I'd rather get an X-ray than have brain surgery.
And England doesn't have to print the name of their country on postal stamps. So what? I don't get bitter every time I see USA on my stamps just because some other country doesn't...
> Yeah, but even 20 year old databases supported transactions, views, etc. And they didn't:
> - silently truncate the amount in your account because it was too large for the column
The article you're responding to is about MySQL 5.0, in which that misfeature can be disabled. (It's a fair complaint, but worth pointing out that it's been addressed. You may as well complain that MySQL doesn't have stored procedures.)
> - silently install to myisam because it couldn't find innodb, then ignore
> your attempts to rollback
I don't know if they've fixed that, but really, how often have you incorrectly installed the system so it doesn't support innodb without immediately discovering that?
> - silently truncate varchars (customer name) which could prevent data matches
Same misfeature as point 1, fixed in MySQL 5.0.
> - etc
Please elaborate. "Etc." is FUD.
> [the reason for using MySQL] can't be cost
You may be surprised how much of a difference free is over a few grand for a lot of companies. Especially when experimenting with some new thing. In addition to being a difference in amount, free is a difference in kind.
> the legal cost to confirm that will easily exceed the oracle cost.
That's rubbish. MySQL is gpl'd, and for a gigantic number of uses that means zero cost, zero legal troubles, forever.
The last time we priced Oracle was a couple of years ago, but the pricing was ridiculous. And on top of paying the money for the software, and the support, you have to manage licences. One of the nicest things to me about moving to open source software was that the software authors *want* you to install and use it. There's no more barrier than "apt-get install <foo>". Not having anything in the way between you and installing the software saves real money, even if the software weren't zero-cost. In an emergency you're trying to set up a new server, you don't want to be hunting for a license key or faxing for an installation key or validating something over the phone. (I've never installed Oracle, maybe it's less of a headache than dozens of other pieces of proprietary software I've worked with.)
Joel Arant does the same thing. The liner notes even say, "Making copies for non-commercial use is expressly encouraged."
Why reverse engineering the smb protocol should be considered a good thing, while reverse engineering the protocol bitkeeper uses is beyond me
Linus (and some of the rest of the kernel community) was using a tool that was given to them by someone who is easy to piss off. They wanted to keep using it, and thought it reasonable to not piss him off.
Tridgell pissed Larry off, and Larry took it away. There's nothing unreasonable about Linus saying, "Tridge, don't piss him off [even if it's legal to do so]," because he wanted to continue using Larry's gift.
This is nothing like Microsoft and SMB, because nobody was depending on Microsoft being nice to them.
Why people keep saying that Linus is now against reverse engineering are ignoring a lot of what happened.
Larry says, "This is costing us too much." Linus, his friend, says, "Okay, then stop doing it." This doesn't imply that Linus disapproves of reverse engineering.
Linus didn't seem pleased (from what I've read) about how this particular reverse-engineering so irritated Larry that it blew the whole freeish-BK deal, but that's a far cry from declaring that reverse engineering itself is unethical.
(And, as other posters have pointed out, it's just silly to call writing Linux a matter of reverse-engineering.)
Why I'm even commenting when the SlashDot article was the most idiotic, misleading article I've ever seen here, and that's saying something, I don't know...
I AM often looking at something while I'm fast-forwarding: I'm looking to see when the commercials are over.
If they didn't think I was looking at the screen while I was fast-forwarding, they wouldn't try to put ads there.
I'm not looking for "free tv", nor am I getting it with satellite tv and a tivo subscription.
I would pay a monthly surplus to have the "don't even record commercials at all" feature; they can give that money to the advertisers if they want to. I just don't want to look at ads.
If they cover a portion of the fast-forward screen with ads, that's the end of my tivo...