Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The name is Budweiser, and it (the name, at least) is Czech. The original Budweiser is called "Anheuser Busch" or some such in most parts of the world. I'd agree about rather drinking Paulaner out of a plastic bottle, though, even if I still prefer a Jever Pils out of a glass bottle (I happen to prefer beer out of 0.5 liter glass bottles over everything else).
(I guess that is enough proof that I really am german;-)
Frankly, I have often considered emigrating. Actually, it has been a constant theme for the whole of my life, given that my father is an immigrant (from Iran), my parents once considered moving to Canada, and it looked like it would be simply irresponsible to stay in germany during the pogroms of the early to mid 90ies.
The big, big problem is - THERE IS NO REALLY GEEK-FRIENDLY COUNTRY. Why on earth would I want to go the the USA, the land of the DMCA, where unfounded lawsuits are considered a respectable hobby? Mid- and South-America is a huge mess, as far as I understand (I only have first-hand information about Brazil, where an aunt of mine happens to live) Most of mid- and western europe is in exactly the same situation as germany is, and eastern europe tends to be worse. People in huge parts of Africa seem to be busy surviving in the first place (the causes of which deserve their own thread), and my experience taught me that I have trouble getting along in east asia, let alone wanting to spend my life there. Antarctica is obviosly not interesting, and, well, Australia might be, but I just don't know, never been there.
In other words, I agree, I would love to get out of germany. But I do not know where to go from there!
If anybody knows about the perfect society for a geek to live in, please speak up!
There is a "pay EUR 10 before we are allowed to cure you" clause, though. At least, you are not really required to pay it before they take care about you, but given the current confusion after the latest demolition of the health-care system, I wouldn't be surprised is some victim of a traffic accident would die because he had only EUR 9.50 in his wallet...
BTW, as I just recently had to learn, it is amazingly easy to have no health insurance in germany... Not a good thing to learn by example if you happen to be chronically ill (like I am), that much I can tell you...
Heh. Well, it depends. There are, of course, the huge corporations like SAP, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, everything related to government, where critical thinking is not something that will help you career, and it isn't considiered particularly hip socially either. But then again, in many settings it isn't that bad.
Remember that the vacation times, as the rest of the social security system, was not something someone granted us out of favour. People died for it, as you mercians like to put it (and of course it is a simple fact, a lot of people did literally die - shot be the police (no matter who controlled the police, emperor Wilhelm II, the social-democrats, the nazis...), killed in concentration camps, you name it. It's a pity that today nobody seems to care about their own lifes enough, pretty much like the chickening out that prevented the USA from becoming a modern society.
Re:Your job shouldn't be your life.
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
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· Score: 4, Informative
Social security is getting worse. The last step was the "Gesundheitsreform" (health reform) of January 2004, which made the healthcare system a lot worse (at least one death directly due to the changes has been reported, and is currently dealt with in court). The unemployment rate here is as bad as everywhere else, esp. in the IT sector, and the Arbeitsamt ("employment agency", the guys that take your money while you are employed and might perhaps give you a fraction of it back when you aren't) is less willing then ever to help you find a new job, or a way to pay for food - it was also involved in a major political scandal in the last months, which forced the chairman to resign (his successor hasn't been chosen yet), which didn't help either. Going back to Uni is also not an option (at least in my state, north-rhine westfalia, other states already did that or announced to do it in the next years), because it costs EUR 650, in addition to the ~ EUR 150-200 that it cost before, for "long-time" students (about 60% of all students), something explicitly ruled out by the social-democratic party (which has the majority both in NRW and the germany as a whole, together with the green party that promised the same) in the last election. Taxes are going up. The software patents situation is likely going to get a lot worse this year, and copyright law already has in 2003 (and the equivalent of the RIAA has just annouced to massively sue private file sharers). The weather is lousy. Everytime you stand up in a Bus to let some wrinkled old guy take your seat, you wonder if he has been a member of the NSDAP - but that problem tends towards a bilological solution, unlike the militant young nazis that keep beating up foreigners and bombing jewish cemetaries and synangouges. At least they are not the only antisemitits or fascists, at least once per 6 months, some prominent politician or author gets some publicity for being one as well (not always bad publicity, mind you). After the monetary reform (from german Marks to the Euro), a lot of things have become a lot more expensive. You cannot buy beer in cans anymore, because of the 25c "Dosenpfand", cheap beer is now sold in plastic bottles, which sucks. The german pop culture is pretty much a mixture of the worst parts of the american pop culture and some really, really bad german artists. Did I mention that the weather really sucks?
Re:History Channel's dream job
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
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· Score: 2, Insightful
His job might have been a lot less enjoyable after the series of deadly accidents caused by test drivers on german autobahns last year. Of course, the most spectacular case was a BMW driver IIRC, not a Porsche guy, but he probably would be affected by this as well (if he did survive until today and kept able to do the job, that is).
Even in germany, where there is indeed not a hard speed limit for huge parts of the autobahn, when you are involved in an accident, you are automatically at least partially guilty if you went faster than 130km/h. If some bozo causes an accident you are involved in without actually doing anything wrong, but you maxed out your 911, you will at least loose your driver's license, and probably a significant amount of money. In many cases, it gets worse, and righly so.
You mean like guns, coffee, hot dogs, fast food, children's toys...manufactures of these products get sued all the time because their customers use them in ways that were not intended or simply because of improper perceptions of just how far product liability should extend. A recent story in the newspaper detailed a woman who was feeding her 4 year-old grandson a hot dog. She wasn't paying attention and the kid choked to death. She is now suing the hot dog manufacturer.
One important difference is that such events do not affect the world outside the US, except for their amusement value. The customer-hostile HP printers are, however, also sold in civilised parts of the world.
Re:Really? Infamous?
on
Review: KDE 3.2
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Gnome (as well as Gtk) does use OOP, with inheritance, polymorphism and all that. They just decided do it in C, so they had to implement their own object system, called GObject. Object-oriented programs do not neccessarily need an object-oriented language.
Of course, the elegance of the result is still debatable, but fortunately, there are lots of language bindings available.
Interesting. I started with Linux, and mostly switched to BSD (first Open, now Free) about 2 years ago. Come to think of it, I never missed runlevels, and didn't even use them on Linux anyway.
The distinction between single-user and multi-user is all I seem to need (by the way: your posting could be read as if BSD would require a reboot to go single-user. It doesn't, you can use 'init 1' or 'kill -TERM 1'). I don't use xdm or some such however, that might have something to do with that.
You might feel it's not serious software, but SAP runs on MySQL, for example.
Um, no. Did you read the article you linked? The SAP applications do not work with MySQL as the database, but MySQL AB, the producer of the MySQL database system, is working on another database system called MaxDB which is derived from SAPDB, which was an Adabas-derived DBMS from SAP, open-sourced under the GPL some years ago.
Obviously, the ex SAP DB works with SAP, but just because the same development team now develops both of them, that doesn't mean that MySQL does as well.
I'm not so sure about your stored procedure statement, either. If you're trying to develop batabase agnostic software, a reasonable approach is to avoid stored procedures. At least, until there's a widely implemented cross-database stored procedure language, that's a reasonable approach.
True, it would be great if stored procedures would be more portable, but most people developing enterprise applications decide that robustness and speed is more important than dbms-independence, and I tend to agree. Stored procedures (and many other things MySQL lacks, or has only implemented recently after years of telling customers that nobody needs them anyway) are just to usefull, and implementing something like SAP or any huge enterprise system is non-trivial anyway, it doesn't do that much harm to require a specific dbms (or one of several supported ones). Not to mention that it doesn't have to be Oracle or MS SQL, there are several open-source dbms that have all these goodies.
MySQL just traditionally was optimized for a very different niche, simple read-mostly datastores like usually found in web apps, without much need for complex business logic, strong integrity requirements, highly concurrent updates etc. For that use case, it was damn fast. I am not convinced that it is a good idea that they now try to leave that niche (not for the world at large at least, probably it is for MySQL AB), having different tools for different needs is a good thing.
It's not as there hasn't been an Outlook (Express) version for Solaris, you know? I still sometimes use IE 5.0 on my Sun Ultra5, mostly for quick testing.
(On the other hand, as everybody knows, IE is an integral part of windows and could never work on Solaris, HP-UX or Mac OS, just as it would be impossible to create a Windows version without IE, like WinXP-PE)
You do realize that this a written medium? Or is this your way to brag about the leet voice-recognition software you use for/. postings, web articles and e-mail?
By the way, even when you actually pronounce it, XSS has three syllables, cross-site scripting has four.
Basically, it could be replaced with "ssh server enable_some_service", which would even prevent replay attacks (only drawback is that you have to have some port open). There are already many fine ways to tell a computer what to do, including to allow access to some service for a given time - and connecting to a random sequence of disabled ports does not look particularly elegant to me.
Um, dude, you do realize that virii is the proper plural of virus right?
No, I don't. The latin word "virus" has no plural. And if it had, it would not be "virii".
To be honest, I do consider "virii" a "real" word. It is an irregular plural form of the english word "virus". It just is not justified by latin language rules, but then again, it doesn't have to. I just pity the etymologists that wonder about the origins of this form in a few centuries - somehow I doubt that they will consider slashdot trolls and similarly stupid online publications as the real source, although they actually are.
Stories are propaganda,
virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
In the great slashdot tradition of getting fanatic about minor points, I outright refuse to buy a book that uses this stupid, just-plain-wrong pseudo-plural of virus! The proprietary, non-free license doesn't even allow me to release a fixed version of it!
How can he track the correspondence between downloads and purchases and tell if one directly affected the other?
He can't. But he can compare the financial success of his novel to that of other, not publically available, works of the same genre, and if he finds that his did fairly well (which the first book apparently did), this could be taken as an indication that publishing a book online, under a liberal license even and without DRM, at least doesn't hurt dead-tree-version sales that much. Or that he is extraordinarily brilliant and would have had generated insane amounts of profit for his publisher using a traditional publication scheme. I guess either interpretation is OK for him.
Indeed, languages that use tag-bits for type safety benefit greatly from 64-bit-words. Otherwise 32-bit arithmetic can be pathetically slow, because a fixnum effectively isn't 32 bit wide, but typically something like 29t, the rest encodes the type. Once you need numbers bigger than that, you'll get heap-allocated bignums that are expensive to deal with (unless you use some suitable optimization tricks to allow non-tagged representations of the number, then you can get full 32-bit integers. But that can be pretty hard, especially across function boundaries). Fortunatly, there already are commercial 64bit Lisps (and have been for a long time, just not for IA64 or AMD64 of course), and the excellent free SBCL system has a 64bit port for AMD64 (and probably Alpha) in the works.
The need for tag bits is also why OpenGenera, the successor of the operating systems of the Symbolics Lisp Machines (which had 36 bit words, with hardware support for type checking) was implemented on the Alpha, so it could efficiently emulate the custom LispM hardware. Of course, choosing the Alpha of all 64bit platforms has now proven to be in line with a long history of Symbolics making exactly the wrong stategic decisions... There have been rumors about a port of OpenGenera to the 64bit G5 Macs, but they are as yet unconfirmed, and even if it would work out, I doubt that there is any significant market for an OS written in Lisp, running in an emulator, for $5000 per installation, even if it is still a damn impressive system.
Re:All differences aside, such a stance is hypocra
on
XFree86 Alters License
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I also do think that people who deliberatly try to make their licenses non-GPL-compatible (or generally have a problem with their code ending up in an GPLed project) are nuts. What I can understand is being annoyed by the public outcry when some project uses a license that is not GPL-compatible, as if the GPL would somehow be the one holy license all others have to play nice with.
What counts as "derived from"? Just extensions to XFree? You could pretty convincingly argue that stuff that links against standard X libraries isn't a derived work: it could equally use commercial X server libraries, XFree libraries or unrestrictive fd.o or XOuvert libraries.
The definition of "derived work" is pretty much an open question, and one that often triggers flamewars.
As far as I understand, you are right in that a program that can - optionally - be dynamically linked with one of several implementations, it is not considered a derivative by most people. (This was heavily discussed after the recent license change of the MySQL client libraries). If it only works with one implementation, or of course if it is a statically linked binary, the situation is different.
However, the important point is that you can find someone supporting any possible interpretation, so you just cannot be sure how a judge would decide if it ever came that far. It is probably a good idea to be pessimistic about that.
What do I do when I want to box up Debian and have to suddenly include three pages of acknowledgements on the outside of the box?
But you don't. Read the license again. You have to put an acknowledgement in the documentation, in Debians case a file in/usr/share/doc/XFree86 (or whereever they put such things) is perfektly sufficient, and they include the licenses of their packages anyway.
Re:So You Prefer Fragmentation over Cooperation
on
XFree86 Alters License
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Which makes one wonder about the motives of someone who would post such an inane comment actively encouraging such small minded thinking ("we don't use their license, we don't like them, so why should we cooperate!")... unless you are someone who feels threatened by free software in general, or people who differ from your vision of free software in particular, and therefor prefer fragmentation over cooperation.
While I (consiously) use only GPL-compatible licenses myself, I am a firm believer in the importance of Freedom Zero, the freedom of a developer to choose the license terms best suited for him. GPL-compatibility is an important aspect in choosing a license, but not the only one, and if the XFree86 developers think that the additional requirement is more important than GPL-compatibility, more power to them. It's their code, nobody has to use it if they don't like the license, or has to link it with GPLed code (after all, the incompatibility is imposed by the GPL, not the XFree license). They give away the fruits of their work under a free license, one that grants users a lot more freedom than the GPL does, I don't think anyone but an XFree86 hacker is entitled to demand any specific form of licensing from them.
And, frankly, I can understand why some people are a little pissed of, even if I don't share their feelings. From the point of view of a developer using a BSD-style, permissive license, GPLed code is just as impossible to integrate as proprietary code is, so there already is a schism in "the community". Cooperation between GPL and BSD (or rather, copyleft and permissive) projects is effectively a one-way street.
Slashdot Mirror
(I guess that is enough proof that I really am german ;-)
Frankly, I have often considered emigrating. Actually, it has been a constant theme for the whole of my life, given that my father is an immigrant (from Iran), my parents once considered moving to Canada, and it looked like it would be simply irresponsible to stay in germany during the pogroms of the early to mid 90ies.
The big, big problem is - THERE IS NO REALLY GEEK-FRIENDLY COUNTRY. Why on earth would I want to go the the USA, the land of the DMCA, where unfounded lawsuits are considered a respectable hobby? Mid- and South-America is a huge mess, as far as I understand (I only have first-hand information about Brazil, where an aunt of mine happens to live) Most of mid- and western europe is in exactly the same situation as germany is, and eastern europe tends to be worse. People in huge parts of Africa seem to be busy surviving in the first place (the causes of which deserve their own thread), and my experience taught me that I have trouble getting along in east asia, let alone wanting to spend my life there. Antarctica is obviosly not interesting, and, well, Australia might be, but I just don't know, never been there.
In other words, I agree, I would love to get out of germany. But I do not know where to go from there!
If anybody knows about the perfect society for a geek to live in, please speak up!
BTW, as I just recently had to learn, it is amazingly easy to have no health insurance in germany... Not a good thing to learn by example if you happen to be chronically ill (like I am), that much I can tell you...
Remember that the vacation times, as the rest of the social security system, was not something someone granted us out of favour. People died for it, as you mercians like to put it (and of course it is a simple fact, a lot of people did literally die - shot be the police (no matter who controlled the police, emperor Wilhelm II, the social-democrats, the nazis...), killed in concentration camps, you name it. It's a pity that today nobody seems to care about their own lifes enough, pretty much like the chickening out that prevented the USA from becoming a modern society.
Social security is getting worse. The last step was the "Gesundheitsreform" (health reform) of January 2004, which made the healthcare system a lot worse (at least one death directly due to the changes has been reported, and is currently dealt with in court). The unemployment rate here is as bad as everywhere else, esp. in the IT sector, and the Arbeitsamt ("employment agency", the guys that take your money while you are employed and might perhaps give you a fraction of it back when you aren't) is less willing then ever to help you find a new job, or a way to pay for food - it was also involved in a major political scandal in the last months, which forced the chairman to resign (his successor hasn't been chosen yet), which didn't help either. Going back to Uni is also not an option (at least in my state, north-rhine westfalia, other states already did that or announced to do it in the next years), because it costs EUR 650, in addition to the ~ EUR 150-200 that it cost before, for "long-time" students (about 60% of all students), something explicitly ruled out by the social-democratic party (which has the majority both in NRW and the germany as a whole, together with the green party that promised the same) in the last election. Taxes are going up. The software patents situation is likely going to get a lot worse this year, and copyright law already has in 2003 (and the equivalent of the RIAA has just annouced to massively sue private file sharers). The weather is lousy. Everytime you stand up in a Bus to let some wrinkled old guy take your seat, you wonder if he has been a member of the NSDAP - but that problem tends towards a bilological solution, unlike the militant young nazis that keep beating up foreigners and bombing jewish cemetaries and synangouges. At least they are not the only antisemitits or fascists, at least once per 6 months, some prominent politician or author gets some publicity for being one as well (not always bad publicity, mind you). After the monetary reform (from german Marks to the Euro), a lot of things have become a lot more expensive. You cannot buy beer in cans anymore, because of the 25c "Dosenpfand", cheap beer is now sold in plastic bottles, which sucks. The german pop culture is pretty much a mixture of the worst parts of the american pop culture and some really, really bad german artists. Did I mention that the weather really sucks?
Even in germany, where there is indeed not a hard speed limit for huge parts of the autobahn, when you are involved in an accident, you are automatically at least partially guilty if you went faster than 130km/h. If some bozo causes an accident you are involved in without actually doing anything wrong, but you maxed out your 911, you will at least loose your driver's license, and probably a significant amount of money. In many cases, it gets worse, and righly so.
On the other hand, germany is still a shitty place to live, and it's getting worse. Not as bad as the US or Somalia, though.
So, it's weasels all the way down?
Of course, the elegance of the result is still debatable, but fortunately, there are lots of language bindings available.
The distinction between single-user and multi-user is all I seem to need (by the way: your posting could be read as if BSD would require a reboot to go single-user. It doesn't, you can use 'init 1' or 'kill -TERM 1'). I don't use xdm or some such however, that might have something to do with that.
Obviously, the ex SAP DB works with SAP, but just because the same development team now develops both of them, that doesn't mean that MySQL does as well.
True, it would be great if stored procedures would be more portable, but most people developing enterprise applications decide that robustness and speed is more important than dbms-independence, and I tend to agree. Stored procedures (and many other things MySQL lacks, or has only implemented recently after years of telling customers that nobody needs them anyway) are just to usefull, and implementing something like SAP or any huge enterprise system is non-trivial anyway, it doesn't do that much harm to require a specific dbms (or one of several supported ones). Not to mention that it doesn't have to be Oracle or MS SQL, there are several open-source dbms that have all these goodies.MySQL just traditionally was optimized for a very different niche, simple read-mostly datastores like usually found in web apps, without much need for complex business logic, strong integrity requirements, highly concurrent updates etc. For that use case, it was damn fast. I am not convinced that it is a good idea that they now try to leave that niche (not for the world at large at least, probably it is for MySQL AB), having different tools for different needs is a good thing.
(On the other hand, as everybody knows, IE is an integral part of windows and could never work on Solaris, HP-UX or Mac OS, just as it would be impossible to create a Windows version without IE, like WinXP-PE)
By the way, even when you actually pronounce it, XSS has three syllables, cross-site scripting has four.
Basically, it could be replaced with "ssh server enable_some_service", which would even prevent replay attacks (only drawback is that you have to have some port open). There are already many fine ways to tell a computer what to do, including to allow access to some service for a given time - and connecting to a random sequence of disabled ports does not look particularly elegant to me.
To be honest, I do consider "virii" a "real" word. It is an irregular plural form of the english word "virus". It just is not justified by latin language rules, but then again, it doesn't have to. I just pity the etymologists that wonder about the origins of this form in a few centuries - somehow I doubt that they will consider slashdot trolls and similarly stupid online publications as the real source, although they actually are.
Right in one of the first paragraphs:
In the great slashdot tradition of getting fanatic about minor points, I outright refuse to buy a book that uses this stupid, just-plain-wrong pseudo-plural of virus! The proprietary, non-free license doesn't even allow me to release a fixed version of it!
The need for tag bits is also why OpenGenera, the successor of the operating systems of the Symbolics Lisp Machines (which had 36 bit words, with hardware support for type checking) was implemented on the Alpha, so it could efficiently emulate the custom LispM hardware. Of course, choosing the Alpha of all 64bit platforms has now proven to be in line with a long history of Symbolics making exactly the wrong stategic decisions... There have been rumors about a port of OpenGenera to the 64bit G5 Macs, but they are as yet unconfirmed, and even if it would work out, I doubt that there is any significant market for an OS written in Lisp, running in an emulator, for $5000 per installation, even if it is still a damn impressive system.
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear. I also do think that people who deliberatly try to make their licenses non-GPL-compatible (or generally have a problem with their code ending up in an GPLed project) are nuts. What I can understand is being annoyed by the public outcry when some project uses a license that is not GPL-compatible, as if the GPL would somehow be the one holy license all others have to play nice with.
Sorry, typo. This should have been OpenSSL.
As far as I understand, you are right in that a program that can - optionally - be dynamically linked with one of several implementations, it is not considered a derivative by most people. (This was heavily discussed after the recent license change of the MySQL client libraries). If it only works with one implementation, or of course if it is a statically linked binary, the situation is different.
However, the important point is that you can find someone supporting any possible interpretation, so you just cannot be sure how a judge would decide if it ever came that far. It is probably a good idea to be pessimistic about that.
And, frankly, I can understand why some people are a little pissed of, even if I don't share their feelings. From the point of view of a developer using a BSD-style, permissive license, GPLed code is just as impossible to integrate as proprietary code is, so there already is a schism in "the community". Cooperation between GPL and BSD (or rather, copyleft and permissive) projects is effectively a one-way street.