I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source RDBMS community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Postgersql into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 7.2.5, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the SQL 2000 servers which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed web frontends for SQL 7 and SQL 2000 for 8 plus years. I don't believe in "big iron" apps like oracle or ingres because, contrary to popular belief, SQL 2000 is just as scalable and enterprise-ready. Plus, now that Ingres is shareware GPL any apps you wrote querying the database would have to be GPL also, and our proprietary content-management and human resources systems are just too valuable for that!
So I set up Postgersql on a Linux mainframe running the new 2.4.22 kernel (I had optimized it myself with gcc 3.1). I knew Postgersql was not remotely ready for true enterprise-level applications, but I thought it would be good for the intranet this division was running. Sadly, I was disappointed.
First off, Postgersql requires that it be run as root. This is a definite security problem, and I'm not sure why it's set up this way; MS SQL has been able to run as a less priviledged account for more than a decade now. What's worse, postgersql requires a full reboot of the server just to do something simple like alter a table.
Once we had that figured out, I was surprised at how slow and non-responsive postgers was. After only a few minutes with only one database added, the server started swapping and ground to a halt. I had to log on from a serial console and kill all the processes by hand. When I started it back up (very cautiously), it turns out that postgersql does no transaction look-aheads, so all the data we had entered was lost!
As things stand now, I can understand using Postgersql in academia to
run simple "SELECT * FROM 'employees'" style queries,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby RDBMS, SQL 2000 is your only choice.
Prof made a rough statement, student called him out on it, prof. pointed out that there's no universal and objective way to measure "complexity" and that if you're worrying about the actual numbers he used you're missing the entire point of his statement.
I have been a coder for many years in embedded systems work, and also in the web area.
*cough* sure *cough*
"Hey, twiddlingbits, when you're through blowing that new forth system onto that prom, could you come look at this Cold Fusion template? It doesn't seem to connect to the database right..."
Just a thought on all the inevitable "free vs. free" threads here: what gets him in trouble is that he gave away binaries gratis. If he just wanted to say "if you want x-chat for Windows, pay me $20" (or whatever) and he sends the buyer the binaries and source if requested. This would be fine, since the GPL doesn't require you to distribute binaries and source to anyone in particular if you don't want to.
This is only a problem because he released binaries without charging for them. So, this might be an example of how distributing free (beer) actually gets in the way of distributing free (speech).
imo tbh you can't be GPL compliant, use and compile 3rd party GPL code, and charge people money for it without the expressed consent of the contributing authors.
Huh?
A vendor's right to sell software is important and one of the rights the GPL was designed to protect. It's totally within my rights to, say, compile apache and sell it to you as long as I provide you the source and don't restrict your redistribution rights as outlined in the GPL.
Now if it was a big corporation, trying to make a profit off of GPL'ed code, I'd see a problem, but this is just silly.
Why? A big corporation's right to brand, support, and sell free software to make a profit is just as important and fundamental as my right to use free software as a hobby. There's nothing anti-GPL about big corporations or about making a profit off of software (hell, GNU still charges a few grand to get a CD of all their stuff). Conversely, there's nothing particularly pro-GPL about a programmer giving away software without charging money for it. Either activity can be done in accordance with the GPL or in contravention of it.
It never crashes on me, features always work as expected with other features and the interface does rock.
So, do you never user bullets, alter tables' sizes, change a region's font, change regions to bold/italic/etc, or paste from other applications?
For me, about 1 time in 20 I use them, the last bullet is in a different style/size than the others, the table suddenly takes up the width of the entire page and even forces the page into landscape, the whole region becomes Times New Roman, the whole region becomes size 2, and the document's margins disappear, respectively (and actually widening a table has caused the document's margins to disappear, also).
I'm sure OOo has these problems too; I've given up on WYSIWYG document editors entirely and now write my papers in ascii and mark them up in TeX.
The only thing I want is to be able to do nothing but play music.
OK, to pull this back on topic, can you really say with a straight face that people copying MP3's of music you've recorded is somehow keeping you from getting enough money to keep playing music?
Gee... a little ticked that people aren't buying your CD's? I don't know what to tell you; I only cleared $2k on cd sales in the past year but made a lot on gigs.
Relax. It's not our music. We make it; we don't own it. Realizing that helps a lot.
Guess what, the RIAA cannot stop you, as much as it would like to, from releasing your own music for all to share.
Eh? Why do you think they want to shut down p2p networks? They're not stupid; they know downloads help their sales.
They shut them down precisely to keep musicians from releasing our own music for all to share. That is what really scares them: not "piracy" but the fact that people like me are able to get exposure for our music without going through their tollbooth.
We don't need music middle-men anymore. We don't need A&R execs telling us what's good enough for us to hear anymore. We don't need million-dollar studios to produce studio-quality audio anymore. The music industry is an industry that no longer has a purpose. Let the artists create and try to sell their stuff and get famous. I don't need someone between me and the musician anymore.
Peoeple survived long before music was available for the masses at all, and something tells me you cna survive without music.
Actually, primates sang long before we spoke, and "music for the masses" was precisely what music was for most of human history.
In fact, the idea that music has monetary value is a very recent aberration from the normal way humans have treated music for millenia.
You know how Mozart got famous in Vienna? He visted the Vatican, heard Allegri's Miserere Mei once (it's about 20 minutes long), and wrote out from memory all of the music to it when he got back so the Vienna choir could sing it. He also changed a few things he didn't like about it.
That's how music used to be: people sang, people played, people listened. When they heard something they liked, they took it; when they heard something they thought they could improve, they improved it. This whole notion that an artist, or worse yet, a publisher, "owns" music is a novelty and, hopefully, won't last too long.
Under the modern copyright system, Mozart could not have written half of his symphonies and almost none of his chamber music or operas. Ditto Haydn, and much more so Beethoven. And Bach... well, Bach pretty much wouldn't have a portfolio left except maybe a few keyboard pieces. Composers "pirated" each other rampantly, and the result was some of the greatest art mankind ever saw.
Hmmm... how many great composers have we had since music publishers started inventing this idea that they "own" music? Can anybody think of one? John Tesh? Andrew Lloyd Webber? That's the tone-deaf crap we're left with when we all buy in to the lie that it's "just music" and that copying other musicians is "theft".
Why should a musician, much less a publisher, have a "right" to make money selling a license to hear their music? I say, kill all copy restrictions on music. Let those who are in it for the quick buck get forced out when it's not profitable anymore and leave making music to those of us who do it because we love it. People will keep making great music: they did for thousands of years before they started charging money for it. They'll keep doing it.
But that's the thing: XP didn't succeed ME it succeeded 2000. ME was the last one based on the win32 kernel and runtime; 2000 and XP were based on the winnt kernel and runtime.
*shrug* 10 bites on/. isn't too bad for an old piece of bait. Sure, it's nowhere near as good as "Ways to tell your son is a computer hacker" or whatever it was called, but as trolls go this is one of the best ones which is why you keep seeing it.
Or, in other words, "I haven't tried Gnumeric but rather than accept the possibility that you're right and it's better than Excel, I'm going to imply that you're either an idiot or a liar based on the fact that Open Office Calc, a completely different product, is not as good as Excel."
But seriously, try Gnumeric some time. It's better than Excel by a long shot; Gnumeric has more features, more stability and a much more intuitive interface.
It's pretty obvious that Dvorak chose #3 for one or more features that he uses frequently.
If only it were that easy. But, it's not. For whatever reason, every version of Office since 2000 (and I've installed these more times than I care to count) requires access to the installation medium the first time each separate application is run and the first time certain features are used, even if you tell the installer to install everything onto hard disk.
If you know a way to make this problem stop, please do tell me (but don't just say "well you must not have told the installer to install onto the disk", because I did).
Slashdot Mirror
What's stopping you from encrypting XML?
Since when do focus groups work for free?
The point of GP joke was "anyone can think of encryption that he (ie, the person doing the thinking) cannot crack."
Sort of like Groucho Marx's "no club that would accept me" paradox.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source RDBMS community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Postgersql into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 7.2.5, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the SQL 2000 servers which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed web frontends for SQL 7 and SQL 2000 for 8 plus years. I don't believe in "big iron" apps like oracle or ingres because, contrary to popular belief, SQL 2000 is just as scalable and enterprise-ready. Plus, now that Ingres is shareware GPL any apps you wrote querying the database would have to be GPL also, and our proprietary content-management and human resources systems are just too valuable for that!
So I set up Postgersql on a Linux mainframe running the new 2.4.22 kernel (I had optimized it myself with gcc 3.1). I knew Postgersql was not remotely ready for true enterprise-level applications, but I thought it would be good for the intranet this division was running. Sadly, I was disappointed.
First off, Postgersql requires that it be run as root. This is a definite security problem, and I'm not sure why it's set up this way; MS SQL has been able to run as a less priviledged account for more than a decade now. What's worse, postgersql requires a full reboot of the server just to do something simple like alter a table.
Once we had that figured out, I was surprised at how slow and non-responsive postgers was. After only a few minutes with only one database added, the server started swapping and ground to a halt. I had to log on from a serial console and kill all the processes by hand. When I started it back up (very cautiously), it turns out that postgersql does no transaction look-aheads, so all the data we had entered was lost!
As things stand now, I can understand using Postgersql in academia to run simple "SELECT * FROM 'employees'" style queries, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby RDBMS, SQL 2000 is your only choice.
You consider Windows CE real "embedded systems" work. I understand now.
I think that statement speaks for itself.
OTOH, there are times when
is a perfectly valid thing to want to do.GCC still kvetches about it if you do it, though, and I do tend to do (literal == variable) for just that reason...
Prof made a rough statement, student called him out on it, prof. pointed out that there's no universal and objective way to measure "complexity" and that if you're worrying about the actual numbers he used you're missing the entire point of his statement.
*cough* sure *cough*
"Hey, twiddlingbits, when you're through blowing that new forth system onto that prom, could you come look at this Cold Fusion template? It doesn't seem to connect to the database right..."
Just a thought on all the inevitable "free vs. free" threads here: what gets him in trouble is that he gave away binaries gratis. If he just wanted to say "if you want x-chat for Windows, pay me $20" (or whatever) and he sends the buyer the binaries and source if requested. This would be fine, since the GPL doesn't require you to distribute binaries and source to anyone in particular if you don't want to.
This is only a problem because he released binaries without charging for them. So, this might be an example of how distributing free (beer) actually gets in the way of distributing free (speech).
Huh?
A vendor's right to sell software is important and one of the rights the GPL was designed to protect. It's totally within my rights to, say, compile apache and sell it to you as long as I provide you the source and don't restrict your redistribution rights as outlined in the GPL.
Why? A big corporation's right to brand, support, and sell free software to make a profit is just as important and fundamental as my right to use free software as a hobby. There's nothing anti-GPL about big corporations or about making a profit off of software (hell, GNU still charges a few grand to get a CD of all their stuff). Conversely, there's nothing particularly pro-GPL about a programmer giving away software without charging money for it. Either activity can be done in accordance with the GPL or in contravention of it.
So, do you never user bullets, alter tables' sizes, change a region's font, change regions to bold/italic/etc, or paste from other applications?
For me, about 1 time in 20 I use them, the last bullet is in a different style/size than the others, the table suddenly takes up the width of the entire page and even forces the page into landscape, the whole region becomes Times New Roman, the whole region becomes size 2, and the document's margins disappear, respectively (and actually widening a table has caused the document's margins to disappear, also).
I'm sure OOo has these problems too; I've given up on WYSIWYG document editors entirely and now write my papers in ascii and mark them up in TeX.
Don't you mean the Firefox Suite?
OK, to pull this back on topic, can you really say with a straight face that people copying MP3's of music you've recorded is somehow keeping you from getting enough money to keep playing music?
Gee... a little ticked that people aren't buying your CD's? I don't know what to tell you; I only cleared $2k on cd sales in the past year but made a lot on gigs.
Relax. It's not our music. We make it; we don't own it. Realizing that helps a lot.
Eh? Why do you think they want to shut down p2p networks? They're not stupid; they know downloads help their sales.
They shut them down precisely to keep musicians from releasing our own music for all to share. That is what really scares them: not "piracy" but the fact that people like me are able to get exposure for our music without going through their tollbooth.
We don't need music middle-men anymore. We don't need A&R execs telling us what's good enough for us to hear anymore. We don't need million-dollar studios to produce studio-quality audio anymore. The music industry is an industry that no longer has a purpose. Let the artists create and try to sell their stuff and get famous. I don't need someone between me and the musician anymore.
Actually, primates sang long before we spoke, and "music for the masses" was precisely what music was for most of human history.
In fact, the idea that music has monetary value is a very recent aberration from the normal way humans have treated music for millenia.
You know how Mozart got famous in Vienna? He visted the Vatican, heard Allegri's Miserere Mei once (it's about 20 minutes long), and wrote out from memory all of the music to it when he got back so the Vienna choir could sing it. He also changed a few things he didn't like about it.
That's how music used to be: people sang, people played, people listened. When they heard something they liked, they took it; when they heard something they thought they could improve, they improved it. This whole notion that an artist, or worse yet, a publisher, "owns" music is a novelty and, hopefully, won't last too long.
Under the modern copyright system, Mozart could not have written half of his symphonies and almost none of his chamber music or operas. Ditto Haydn, and much more so Beethoven. And Bach... well, Bach pretty much wouldn't have a portfolio left except maybe a few keyboard pieces. Composers "pirated" each other rampantly, and the result was some of the greatest art mankind ever saw.
Hmmm... how many great composers have we had since music publishers started inventing this idea that they "own" music? Can anybody think of one? John Tesh? Andrew Lloyd Webber? That's the tone-deaf crap we're left with when we all buy in to the lie that it's "just music" and that copying other musicians is "theft".
Why should a musician, much less a publisher, have a "right" to make money selling a license to hear their music? I say, kill all copy restrictions on music. Let those who are in it for the quick buck get forced out when it's not profitable anymore and leave making music to those of us who do it because we love it. People will keep making great music: they did for thousands of years before they started charging money for it. They'll keep doing it.
But that's the thing: XP didn't succeed ME it succeeded 2000. ME was the last one based on the win32 kernel and runtime; 2000 and XP were based on the winnt kernel and runtime.
So the win32 models went:
And the winnt models went:
It vexes me...
That irritated me: the upgrade to Windows 98 was called Windows ME, while the update to Windows NT was called Windows 2000.
Then again, I just went from Gentoo 1.4 to Gentoo 2004.1, and I seem to recall RedHat skipped from 3 to 6 or something like that.
*shrug* 10 bites on /. isn't too bad for an old piece of bait. Sure, it's nowhere near as good as "Ways to tell your son is a computer hacker" or whatever it was called, but as trolls go this is one of the best ones which is why you keep seeing it.
And I had just used my mod points...
Or, in other words, "I haven't tried Gnumeric but rather than accept the possibility that you're right and it's better than Excel, I'm going to imply that you're either an idiot or a liar based on the fact that Open Office Calc, a completely different product, is not as good as Excel."
But seriously, try Gnumeric some time. It's better than Excel by a long shot; Gnumeric has more features, more stability and a much more intuitive interface.
If only it were that easy. But, it's not. For whatever reason, every version of Office since 2000 (and I've installed these more times than I care to count) requires access to the installation medium the first time each separate application is run and the first time certain features are used, even if you tell the installer to install everything onto hard disk.
If you know a way to make this problem stop, please do tell me (but don't just say "well you must not have told the installer to install onto the disk", because I did).
Umm... as far as I've seen Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet program out there and about 2 or 3 generations ahead of Excel.
Which reminds me, ever tried to open a Gnumeric spreadsheet in Excel or an OOo document in Word? As you said, quite an experience...