(I scanned the comments and didn't see anyone who knows what they are talking about discuss this)
This seems to be the one case for which trademarks were invented: not allowing one company to profit from the reputation of another (as opposed to the various abuses of the system, which is what usually makes the news here).
So, is there no Berne-like treaty for trademarks? Are they country/region specific? Or is China Unicom just looking to stir up trouble?
Note that the referenced number is not people nicking your notebook at the library while you're off finding your biology textbook.
Yeah, I got that much. I couldn't find the 2005 statistics quickly, but for 2003 they have 69 murders and 3,065 robberies total - the laptop thing is still not exactly a staggering number.
Are they shitting me? 48 laptop robberies last year? They had 96 homicides in the same period - I doubt this %266.67 increase in laptop robberies (a rate of increase that hasn't continued, mind you) is at the top of their priority list.
All our work (bioinformatics for a small biotech) is done on postgres (of course, the payroll for 75 people is in Oracle), over the last 6 years I've installed and configured probably over 100 instances of postgres and maybe 5 or 6 of Oracle - and I've spent a lot more total time configuring Oracle.
Man, this shit is coming in fast and thick this year.
I think the "editors" enjoy our quiet desperation - we know this pablum is just about as close to the bottom of the barrel as it gets (not to mention that they seem to have missed the point of the day's theme entirely), and yet are utterly unable to do anything about it.
Angry diatribe or not, there's gonna be a solid 24 hours of this - not to repeat myself - shit.
I'm not sure if Lem's work was the first SF I've read, but it's definitely the first I remember reading (still on the other side of the Iron Curtain at the time), which probably says something in itself.
He was definitely one of the few authors with whom you had to constantly explain to people: "I know it's SF, but it's also 'real' literature!"
To get on-topic, I think that humans constantly categorize and assign labels to things as either a member of a group or outside it, which IS binary.
I think the original point was that this distinction is usually arbitrary, and only derived from evidence so far observed; so we are constantly finding new things that do not fit neatly into the binary distinction.
That creature is a fish|not a fish. That creature is a mammal; or it lays eggs and has a bill, so it is a bird (ummm, bad example, on second thought).
Actually, things changed a bit since Linnaeus' day. We classify organisms by genetic ancestry, not phenotypic traits (and have come to realize that all such classification is essentially arbitrary).
So, if we've traditionally grouped a bunch of organisms together based on some trait, and then discover that 99% of them actually share a common ancestor, while the remaining %1 have developed an identical (even if highly distinctive) trait in parallel - should they be considered as part of the original group? Again, the answer is arbitrary.
When did we drink the Kool-Aid and accept this word as the right term for this kind of activity?
A long time ago; it's even more firmly embedded in popular usage than 'hacker'.
This battle has been fought and lost, and slashdot rants aren't going to fix that. That's what makes it not just a propaganda machine, but a good propaganda machine.
I think we can all agree that, at the very least, Linux SERVERS are better than Windows servers.
Eh, that's not really true - better at what? I'm sure there are plenty of applications where Windows kicks Linux's ass, a blanket "better than" isn't really something you can apply to something as complex as a server OS.
I personally would never consider a Windows environment for any of my work, but that's mainly because I have no desire to be Microsoft's bitch; clearly this is not as important to many people.
If you're still turning up your nose at MySQL, it really isn't as bad as it used to be.
It's true, 5.0 is far closer to being "not a toy database" than any of the previous releases (at least on paper, I haven't had much occasion to use it), but it's not there yet.
What irks me most is the apparent attitude of the MySQL community that if you want basic features like transactions or views, you must be some sort of elitist DB snob, so they don't care what you think, anyway.
That, and their persistent readiness to put convenience before data integrity, make me wonder if MySQL will ever become a database I would consider using; outside the narrow niche of "granular filesystem with a SQL interface" (which, it does kick ass at).
That's right, postgres 7 does not do RENAME on columns!
Column renames have been there since early 7.x days. You are probably thinking of changin column data types, that was the big ALTER COLUMN improvement in 8.
While it's a hassle, I don't think I'd trust any DB to just keep going with the old data after a major release upgrade.
It's true that pg has had issues with logical dumps between version - one that comes to mind is the "serial" column/sequence handling, but most of them were just annoying and easily fixed.
One thing that helps is to install the client tools for the new version first, and do the dumps using those, so your loader will be from the same version as the dumper. I think doing that avoids all these incompatibilities.
I've worked with postgres for about 5 years - the things it can do with querying/indexing I couldn't even dream about in MySQL.
Case insensitive queries are done in the two ways the others mentioned, additionally, you can define operators for them, to save some typing (and yes, indices defined with UPPER() will work with these):
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.text_eqi (text, text) RETURNS boolean AS 'SELECT UPPER($1) = UPPER($2)' LANGUAGE 'sql' STRICT IMMUTABLE;
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.text_nei (text, text) RETURNS boolean AS 'SELECT UPPER($1) != UPPER($2)' LANGUAGE 'sql' STRICT IMMUTABLE;
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.text_gti (text, text) RETURNS boolean AS 'SELECT UPPER($1) > UPPER($2)' LANGUAGE 'sql' STRICT IMMUTABLE;
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION public.text_lti (text, text) RETURNS boolean AS 'SELECT UPPER($1) < UPPER($2)' LANGUAGE 'sql' STRICT IMMUTABLE;
having lots of separate utilities each doing a single simple thing
I've heard this a few time, but never really got the big difference between accessing the utils as "./foobar img.png" vs "./foo --bar img.png", seems like a cosmetic distinction.
One thing I really like about IM is that I don't have to even care about the input format, so when the users upload their random collection of gifs, jpegs, tiffs, 30 meg bmps and picts, I can just give the whole indiscriminate mess to IM and get back a set of nice, shiny, sized and formatted pngs. Of course that still leaves the pdfs, word docs and powerpoint slides.
Where's your evidence? I call bullshit. Millions of people across the world do not eat meat.
My evidence for what? That people eat meat? Just because you can survive without it, cutting out meat completely from your diet is not a healthy option for most people.
Incidentally, "millions of people" is less than a tenth of a percent of the population (depending on how many millions you meant, of course). Millions of people are hugely obese, some of them are even quite healthy - does that mean that being hugely obese is good for you?
I hear you whisper it. Say it loudly. MEAT EATING AND LACK OF EXERCISE.
Pure bullshit. Meat is an essential part of a healthy human diet (the exercise part is true). That a few people can survive without it is no more impressive than me surviving on my died of pizza, chips, and soda - both are unhealthy (mine probably more obviously so, of course).
and with two males one will eventually kill the other over territory
From what I've heard, they can keep several males in a cage, as long as they've never been in contact with a female. You can have half a dozen males living in a cage for weeks, then drop a female in there (happens accidentally sometimes) - five minutes later only one male will still be alive.
Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. I'm sick and tired of people basically torturing their "property" and getting slapped with a $50 fine. People who torture animals should be sent off to Bellevue for extensive psychological testing.
Absolutely, because if they enjoy torturing they probably pose a risk to the people around them. The actual animals I could give a crap about, one way or the other.
Rights are one side of the social contract, something that animals are not even capable of comprehending, much less participating in. You don't want to hurt animals? Fine. You want me not to do it? I can accomodate that (within reason), it costs me nothing. But applying "rights" to animals is just plain silly - morality is a human concept.
For the truth in advertising, I eat meat. It is wrong to eat meat unless the animal from which it came was slaughtered in the most humane way possible.
Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. If animals are so endowed with an abundance of rights, what gives you the right to take their lives for your own enjoyment, regardless of how humanely they were killed?
That's the plain truth of it - we kill animals, grind up their flesh, and turn them into nuggets. Every day. By the millions. And then we have all this handwaving about whether a few thousand lab mice enjoy being inbred to the point of being half-blind and generally barely aware of their surroundings (and growing tumors on top of that).
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be the one case for which trademarks were invented: not allowing one company to profit from the reputation of another (as opposed to the various abuses of the system, which is what usually makes the news here).
So, is there no Berne-like treaty for trademarks? Are they country/region specific? Or is China Unicom just looking to stir up trouble?
Yeah, I got that much. I couldn't find the 2005 statistics quickly, but for 2003 they have 69 murders and 3,065 robberies total - the laptop thing is still not exactly a staggering number.
Are they shitting me? 48 laptop robberies last year? They had 96 homicides in the same period - I doubt this %266.67 increase in laptop robberies (a rate of increase that hasn't continued, mind you) is at the top of their priority list.
OMGWTFLOLRZORZ!!1!!!!!!11!eleventy1
All our work (bioinformatics for a small biotech) is done on postgres (of course, the payroll for 75 people is in Oracle), over the last 6 years I've installed and configured probably over 100 instances of postgres and maybe 5 or 6 of Oracle - and I've spent a lot more total time configuring Oracle.
Don't DC and Marvel have a trademark on that, or something?
I think the "editors" enjoy our quiet desperation - we know this pablum is just about as close to the bottom of the barrel as it gets (not to mention that they seem to have missed the point of the day's theme entirely), and yet are utterly unable to do anything about it.
Angry diatribe or not, there's gonna be a solid 24 hours of this - not to repeat myself - shit.
He was definitely one of the few authors with whom you had to constantly explain to people: "I know it's SF, but it's also 'real' literature!"
I think the original point was that this distinction is usually arbitrary, and only derived from evidence so far observed; so we are constantly finding new things that do not fit neatly into the binary distinction.
That creature is a fish|not a fish. That creature is a mammal; or it lays eggs and has a bill, so it is a bird (ummm, bad example, on second thought).
Actually, things changed a bit since Linnaeus' day. We classify organisms by genetic ancestry, not phenotypic traits (and have come to realize that all such classification is essentially arbitrary).
So, if we've traditionally grouped a bunch of organisms together based on some trait, and then discover that 99% of them actually share a common ancestor, while the remaining %1 have developed an identical (even if highly distinctive) trait in parallel - should they be considered as part of the original group? Again, the answer is arbitrary.
Not saying much, I know, but at least this whole "You got Aqua/Brushed Metal in my Bluecurve" thing doesn't physcially hurt your eyes. Baby steps.
A long time ago; it's even more firmly embedded in popular usage than 'hacker'.
This battle has been fought and lost, and slashdot rants aren't going to fix that. That's what makes it not just a propaganda machine, but a good propaganda machine.
Eh, that's not really true - better at what? I'm sure there are plenty of applications where Windows kicks Linux's ass, a blanket "better than" isn't really something you can apply to something as complex as a server OS.
I personally would never consider a Windows environment for any of my work, but that's mainly because I have no desire to be Microsoft's bitch; clearly this is not as important to many people.
You just do a little better each time.
It's true, 5.0 is far closer to being "not a toy database" than any of the previous releases (at least on paper, I haven't had much occasion to use it), but it's not there yet.
What irks me most is the apparent attitude of the MySQL community that if you want basic features like transactions or views, you must be some sort of elitist DB snob, so they don't care what you think, anyway.
That, and their persistent readiness to put convenience before data integrity, make me wonder if MySQL will ever become a database I would consider using; outside the narrow niche of "granular filesystem with a SQL interface" (which, it does kick ass at).
Column renames have been there since early 7.x days. You are probably thinking of changin column data types, that was the big ALTER COLUMN improvement in 8.
It's true that pg has had issues with logical dumps between version - one that comes to mind is the "serial" column/sequence handling, but most of them were just annoying and easily fixed.
One thing that helps is to install the client tools for the new version first, and do the dumps using those, so your loader will be from the same version as the dumper. I think doing that avoids all these incompatibilities.
Case insensitive queries are done in the two ways the others mentioned, additionally, you can define operators for them, to save some typing (and yes, indices defined with UPPER() will work with these):
I've heard this a few time, but never really got the big difference between accessing the utils as "./foobar img.png" vs "./foo --bar img.png", seems like a cosmetic distinction.
One thing I really like about IM is that I don't have to even care about the input format, so when the users upload their random collection of gifs, jpegs, tiffs, 30 meg bmps and picts, I can just give the whole indiscriminate mess to IM and get back a set of nice, shiny, sized and formatted pngs. Of course that still leaves the pdfs, word docs and powerpoint slides.
I don't think anyone's saying it's a surprise.
My evidence for what? That people eat meat? Just because you can survive without it, cutting out meat completely from your diet is not a healthy option for most people.
Incidentally, "millions of people" is less than a tenth of a percent of the population (depending on how many millions you meant, of course). Millions of people are hugely obese, some of them are even quite healthy - does that mean that being hugely obese is good for you?
It's probably inhumane, that's why we don't do it to humans.
Pure bullshit. Meat is an essential part of a healthy human diet (the exercise part is true). That a few people can survive without it is no more impressive than me surviving on my died of pizza, chips, and soda - both are unhealthy (mine probably more obviously so, of course).
From what I've heard, they can keep several males in a cage, as long as they've never been in contact with a female. You can have half a dozen males living in a cage for weeks, then drop a female in there (happens accidentally sometimes) - five minutes later only one male will still be alive.
Guess nobody explained "animal rights" to them.
Absolutely, because if they enjoy torturing they probably pose a risk to the people around them. The actual animals I could give a crap about, one way or the other.
Rights are one side of the social contract, something that animals are not even capable of comprehending, much less participating in. You don't want to hurt animals? Fine. You want me not to do it? I can accomodate that (within reason), it costs me nothing. But applying "rights" to animals is just plain silly - morality is a human concept.
For the truth in advertising, I eat meat. It is wrong to eat meat unless the animal from which it came was slaughtered in the most humane way possible.
Bullshit. And fuck you for saying so. If animals are so endowed with an abundance of rights, what gives you the right to take their lives for your own enjoyment, regardless of how humanely they were killed?
That's the plain truth of it - we kill animals, grind up their flesh, and turn them into nuggets. Every day. By the millions. And then we have all this handwaving about whether a few thousand lab mice enjoy being inbred to the point of being half-blind and generally barely aware of their surroundings (and growing tumors on top of that).