``Can't see how he could make it illegal. Anyone who uses a off shore VPN will bypass it. As I work for a US based company I could not log into work legally.''
I don't think I would count on a government that wanted to limit my access to information to be very concerned about whether I would lose my job as a result. Particularly a job that gave me access to information from foreign sources and thus not under the control of said government.
``And the governments don't seem to be under much pressure to actually be open and honest about what the policies they're pushing will actually achieve.''
I think what's missing is a good evaluation of laws and policies, that determines to what extent they are achieving their stated goals and what side effects they have.
It seems to me that, for a lot of issues that people feel strongly about, the point of contention isn't so much whether some proposed legislation addresses a situation that should be addressed, but rather whether the proposed legislation would be effective at ameliorating the situation, and not cause more problems than it solved.
There are some high-profile cases of legislation being repealed because it was perceived as doing more harm than good, such as the Prohibition in the USA. I suspect that there are many more laws that are causing more harm than good, sometimes even achieving the opposite of what their proponents claim to be their purpose. Many political issues that people feel strongly about aren't actually new, but simply keep being debated over and over again. If we regularly reviewed the effects of our laws and policies, perhaps we could strike down more harmful laws and put some of these continuous political debates to rest.
They say that hindsight is 20/20, so let's make use of it!
``The one thing that makes absolutely no sense in all this is that copyright gets extended when new laws come out.''
Looking at how things have worked out in practice, it seems the terms have been chosen in such a way as to make copyright simply not expire. Perhaps the reason for that is that those pushing for the extensions are afraid of what will happen if works do go into the public domain. For example, it might then be found out that this actually _promotes_ the arts and sciences. Obviously, they can't have that, because it would wash away all their argumentation for extending the term.
Perhaps, however, the explanation is much simpler: the difference between a work that you hold the copyright for and a work that is in the public domain is that, in the former case, you are in control, and thus in the best position to profit from the work. In fact, you have a monopoly - nobody else is allowed to do certain potentially profitable things without your permission. Given the choice, who wouldn't prefer to keep control over losing it? If someone has an idea that you approve of, you can always grant them the necessary permissions.
``And, if they had installed some phone-home pingy-thing, they'd be pilloried in the town square by people screaming about that when it came to light, and they'd be decried as violating people's privacy. Geeks on Slashdot frothing at the mouth and wielding torches, cats living with dogs, that kinda stuff.''
I, for one, wouldn't like an automatic phone-home system, just so that Canonical (or whomever makes the distro I am instralling) could more accurately gauge their user base. To me, that's not worth it.
On the other hand, I do participate in the package popularity contest with several of the (Debian and Ubuntu) installations I have performed. Several, but not all. It's opt-in, and I like it that way.
Thanks, that is interesting. In general, I don't put much stock in browser or OS statistics based on a single website, but I would imagine that statistics for the Wikimedia websites are about as good as it gets in terms of giving an idea of the general population out there.
I haven't bricked the Pandora yet, but that may simply be because I haven't gotten my hands on it yet. On the other hand, it's a community effort and it runs Linux and you are invited to contribute to it, so your chances of staying in control of the machine that you bought seem to be a lot better than with the PlayStation and Xbox.
I know what you mean, and I share your pain. This has long been a pet peeve of mine, too.
Interestingly, instances where focus has been stolen from me have markedly decreased in recent years, from where they were a constant annoyance to the point where I almost completely forget about the phenomenon and spend several minutes recovering after it happens.
The reason, it seems to me, is that I have switched to (1) terminal-based apps for most of my activities and (2) tabbed browsing. The result is that I really only have a few windows open at any given time, and I very rarely open new windows. This has made the focus stealing problem almost disappear.
Then I discovered that my next annoyance was window placement. It was never quite right, windows always ended up in the wrong place or overlapping the part of another window I needed most. Then I discovered tiling window managers, and that problem went away, too. I now basically have a bunch of full-screen windows which I can access by keyboard shortcut (e.g. Alt+1 is my terminal, Alt+2 is my browser). I've been using this setup for a few years now, and I have been happy with it.
Perhaps something similar will work for you. Good luck!
``OS 10.6 requires 1 gigabyte; no exceptions. But WIN7 runs well on just 1/2 GB. Apple's OS appears *twice* as bloated.''
I gather you are talking about RAM, not diskspace. But would you perchance have any pointers to reducing Windows 7 disk space usage? It irks me that an OS I rarely use sits there eating up > 10 GB of disk space, but I lack the knowledge of Windows to do something about it. If I could get the disk space
``This is why women steer clear of a lot of IT jobs. They have a much greater sensitivity to interpersonal factors. And when a company, or industry, starts playing behaving like assholes, they leave (or just never show up).''
That, and they just don't want to do IT work to begin with. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of women just aren't interested in computers. In my CS programme at university, the ratio of men to women was about 100:1. Outside university or work, I find that most girls get someone else to fix their computers (i.e. software) for them and have absolutely no interest in learning what they can do about it, whereas most guys try do learn a couple of things about their computers and software even if they aren't in IT.
Given this, I find the number of women I have met who work in IT is actually _greater_ than what I would have expected.
Yes. There is even a sentiment that web developers aren't real developers, despite the fact that web sites have certainly evolved from "static page with perhaps an image or two" to full-blown applications.
Of course, typing in F# (assuming it works the same way as in OCaml, which, as far as I know, it does) is not really implicit, it's just that the types are specified by the operations when they aren't specified explicitly.
If you write
let f x y = x + y
the + says that x and y are ints just as surely as if you had written
let f (x : int) (y : int) = x + y
Still, it is true that, in the first example, the name of the type doesn't occur anywhere. So I think that is what people mean when they say "implicit".
``20% is a very typical overhead for dynamic memory management. Did you think malloc/free costs nothing?''
Many people actually seem to think that, and that only automatic memory management is costly. Out in the real world, of course, managing memory costs resources no matter how you do it, and you can sometimes make huge performance gains by optimizing it. I've seen percentages of time spent on memory management anywhere from 99% in real programs. As always: measure, don't guess.
``Your post underscores the parent's point. Linux has stagnated. Version bumps and DRM2 only get YOUR motor started, and guess what -- you already use Linux.
Underlying systems. General usability. Drivers that work and are supported. Linux has a ways to go.''
People have been making posts like yours for at least 15 years. I don't disagree with you, but I will point out that, in the meantime, Linux has gone from a pet project that a bunch of hackers did just for kicks to a major force that most people have heard of and giant corporations account for in their strategies.
``Linux remains hacker/hobby grade despite efforts by Canonical and others, and now Nvidia and others are starting to flake off.''
Linux is the hacker/hobby grade project that also happens to be pushed by the likes of Google, Oracle, IBM, Dell, HP, and Novell. Not to mention all the big-name corporations that are using it.
``With Apple's non-iPod products providing many users with "just works" systems on decent hardware with functional UI and still providing the *nix capabilities to run the "12 line shell script he uses for grabbing entries from/var/log/messages" someone joked about above, perhaps Linux's foray into mainstream has apexed.''
Perhaps it has. As far as I can tell, Linux desktop share is about the same as OS X desktop share. Some sources have the one higher, others have the other higher. Is OS X not ready for the desktop? For that matter, is Windows ready for the desktop? If "just works" is the criterion, Windows certainly wouldn't be high on my list. Yet it seems to hold at least 90% of the market share on the desktop.
Once again, I don't necessarily disagree with you. I do think you have a couple of your facts wrong, but I won't dispute that Linux doesn't have a huge share of the desktop sphere, nor will I dispute that there are things that could be improved in Linux-land.
However, I am at a loss as to what your point is. You say your parent missed the point. I'm missing it, too. What _is_ your point, really?
To me, the big accomplishment here isn't that someone has managed to make the same source code run on different platforms.
The big accomplishment is that this is something newsworthy.
Ideally, your code should only describe the functionality of your application. What these platforms do is basically the same stuff in any case. There isn't really a good reason why code that does something as non-exotic as this program would _not_ work on every platform that supported the right features.
Somehow, the corporations bringing us all this fine technology have made it so that you pretty much _can't_ write a program that will run on both their device and their competitors'. And not only that, but they've also gotten most of us to accept this as normal.
There is one thing I don't understand, and that is how people get to the point where they actually buy one of these books. Sure, they may turn up in lots of searches, but wouldn't taking a single look at it be enough to determine it is a piece of drivel?
Java is not and never has been groundbreaking and revolutionary. All the features people used to tout about Java back in the day were things that existed before it. A lot of smart people have poured a lot of effort in research related to Java, and the platform has grown stronger as a result, but even most of that seems to be just re-implementing existing ideas for Java.
However, that by no means implies that Java isn't relevant. It has certainly taken the software world by storm, and, as far as I can see, Java is still going strong. People are taking Java courses left and right, either to learn it for the first time or to deepen their understanding. There are so many Java projects that it's hard to find something for those in our company who would prefer to use something else. Even with.NET being backed by a company whose products usually get adopted as a matter of course, I don't see nearly as much demand for.NET knowledge as for Java. Java irrelevant? It sure doesn't seem that way to me.
``In other words, goodbye Flash and Java applets. And die already.''
Personally, I'd much rather have had a good, efficient, open-source plugin for interactive multimedia, based on open standards.
Yes, it's nice that we can emulate that with existing web standards, but, really, why has nobody actually built a good platform specifically tailored for the things we're now using JavaScript, HTML, and HTTP for? Java was close, but too bulky. Flash was great, but proprietary. AJAX is open, but horrible from a technical point of view. Silverlight, I don't know about the technology, but it's basically Microsoft's also-ran. What else have we got, and why is it that no project seems to have gotten it right _and_ taken off, whereas so many things that have taken off haven't gotten it right?
In all this commotion, there is one thing I have been unable to find: numbers on sudden unintended acceleration from outside the USA. I know that Toyota has recalled vehicles around the world, but I haven't seen data on incidents outside the USA. Can anyone provide links to such, just to satisfy my curiosity?
So you're saying that an RDBMS is the right tool for the job if your transactions have enough value, and, if the value per transaction is too low, you won't be able to afford an RDBMS, but you can still go with a NoSQL database? That's an interesting point of view.
So how do you make your system work with NoSQL? As you say in your post, "you lose ACID, indexes, and joins to varying degrees". To me, with my relational view of the world, it seems that you would want to use an RDBMS exactly because of these things. Specifically, the fact that your RDBMS does the hard work of keeping your data consistent for you. Wouldn't you have to implement that all by yourself if you went with a NoSQL system? If so, what realistic expectation can you have to come up with something that is both correct and as performant as an RDBMS which lots of smart people have worked on over the years?
Or is it just that people are throwing consistency out of the window and saying "We can afford to lose a couple of records or have a couple of dangling references here and there, as long as it SCALES". Because I can build something that scales if it doesn't have to maintain ACID, too. The difficulty is in having _both_ ACID and scalability.
I'm still fuzzy on what NoSQL is supposed to be and what it is supposed to bring to the table.
From what I've understood, it's basically a common banner for various different databases that all share the common property of not being relational databases and not providing ACID guarantees.
If so, it seems to me that the whole NoSQL vs. RDMBS debate is about a false dichotomy. There are some applications where a relational database is the right tool for the job, and there are some where a relational database is not the right tool for the job. In some of those latter cases, one of the NoSQL databases may be the right thing.
This is nothing new. Non-relational databases have been used on Unix for a long time, and are even a standard part of POSIX (see for example the manpage for dbm_open). It's also long been known that, for example, Berkeley DB can be a lot faster than an RDBMS - as long as your application doesn't make use of all the features an RDBMS provides. Lots of programs even don't use one of these database systems, but invent their own, custom format. Git is a very successful example of this.
To me, it seems that what we are seeing here is loads of people who had learned to use relational databases for all their storage needs discovering that there are other ways to store data, and that one of those methods may work better than an RDMBS for a particular application. Well, yes. Does that surprise anyone? It sure doesn't surprise me. Does it mean that RDMBSes are now useless? Not at all. Does it mean you should use a non-relational storage system where this makes more sense? Of course! Now, can we please get back to work? I don't see the point of having a holy war over whether RDBMS or NoSQL is better, when common sense says that they both have their uses.
``They can't except that Google is just better at search. Period. Why can't they just accept that and stop stalking the search market?''
It's all about control. For many people, their default search engine is basically their gateway to the World Wide Web, perhaps even the entire Internet. If you control that search engine, this gives you a huge amount of control.
There are many ways to monetize this control. Other people in this discussion have suggested altering the results of queries to favor your (profitable) products. That's certainly one way to make money from search. Another is selling advertising space. I am sure there are many others. Information about who is searching for what has to be worth something, too.
These are pretty much reasons for anyone to be in the search engine business. But Microsoft has yet another reason: fear. Just like, in the past, Microsoft has used the power gained on the desktop market to make a strong entry in other markets, so Google can use the strength it has gained to give Microsoft a hard time in markets where Microsoft currently makes its money. Google has a search engine, but they also have one of the world's most successful e-mail services, the most successful multimedia portal, a successful blogging service, a chat service, groupware services, an office suite, a web browser, and a mobile operating system. The last items, in particular, strike close to home for Microsoft. And considering the mind share that Google has, if I were Microsoft, I, too, would be afraid of this new giant.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a link for that? I'd like to watch it and share it with a few friends.
``Can't see how he could make it illegal. Anyone who uses a off shore VPN will bypass it. As I work for a US based company I could not log into work legally.''
I don't think I would count on a government that wanted to limit my access to information to be very concerned about whether I would lose my job as a result. Particularly a job that gave me access to information from foreign sources and thus not under the control of said government.
``And the governments don't seem to be under much pressure to actually be open and honest about what the policies they're pushing will actually achieve.''
I think what's missing is a good evaluation of laws and policies, that determines to what extent they are achieving their stated goals and what side effects they have.
It seems to me that, for a lot of issues that people feel strongly about, the point of contention isn't so much whether some proposed legislation addresses a situation that should be addressed, but rather whether the proposed legislation would be effective at ameliorating the situation, and not cause more problems than it solved.
There are some high-profile cases of legislation being repealed because it was perceived as doing more harm than good, such as the Prohibition in the USA. I suspect that there are many more laws that are causing more harm than good, sometimes even achieving the opposite of what their proponents claim to be their purpose. Many political issues that people feel strongly about aren't actually new, but simply keep being debated over and over again. If we regularly reviewed the effects of our laws and policies, perhaps we could strike down more harmful laws and put some of these continuous political debates to rest.
They say that hindsight is 20/20, so let's make use of it!
``The one thing that makes absolutely no sense in all this is that copyright gets extended when new laws come out.''
Looking at how things have worked out in practice, it seems the terms have been chosen in such a way as to make copyright simply not expire. Perhaps the reason for that is that those pushing for the extensions are afraid of what will happen if works do go into the public domain. For example, it might then be found out that this actually _promotes_ the arts and sciences. Obviously, they can't have that, because it would wash away all their argumentation for extending the term.
Perhaps, however, the explanation is much simpler: the difference between a work that you hold the copyright for and a work that is in the public domain is that, in the former case, you are in control, and thus in the best position to profit from the work. In fact, you have a monopoly - nobody else is allowed to do certain potentially profitable things without your permission. Given the choice, who wouldn't prefer to keep control over losing it? If someone has an idea that you approve of, you can always grant them the necessary permissions.
``And, if they had installed some phone-home pingy-thing, they'd be pilloried in the town square by people screaming about that when it came to light, and they'd be decried as violating people's privacy. Geeks on Slashdot frothing at the mouth and wielding torches, cats living with dogs, that kinda stuff.''
I, for one, wouldn't like an automatic phone-home system, just so that Canonical (or whomever makes the distro I am instralling) could more accurately gauge their user base. To me, that's not worth it.
On the other hand, I do participate in the package popularity contest with several of the (Debian and Ubuntu) installations I have performed. Several, but not all. It's opt-in, and I like it that way.
Thanks, that is interesting. In general, I don't put much stock in browser or OS statistics based on a single website, but I would imagine that statistics for the Wikimedia websites are about as good as it gets in terms of giving an idea of the general population out there.
I haven't bricked the Pandora yet, but that may simply be because I haven't gotten my hands on it yet. On the other hand, it's a community effort and it runs Linux and you are invited to contribute to it, so your chances of staying in control of the machine that you bought seem to be a lot better than with the PlayStation and Xbox.
I know what you mean, and I share your pain. This has long been a pet peeve of mine, too.
Interestingly, instances where focus has been stolen from me have markedly decreased in recent years, from where they were a constant annoyance to the point where I almost completely forget about the phenomenon and spend several minutes recovering after it happens.
The reason, it seems to me, is that I have switched to (1) terminal-based apps for most of my activities and (2) tabbed browsing. The result is that I really only have a few windows open at any given time, and I very rarely open new windows. This has made the focus stealing problem almost disappear.
Then I discovered that my next annoyance was window placement. It was never quite right, windows always ended up in the wrong place or overlapping the part of another window I needed most. Then I discovered tiling window managers, and that problem went away, too. I now basically have a bunch of full-screen windows which I can access by keyboard shortcut (e.g. Alt+1 is my terminal, Alt+2 is my browser). I've been using this setup for a few years now, and I have been happy with it.
Perhaps something similar will work for you. Good luck!
``OS 10.6 requires 1 gigabyte; no exceptions. But WIN7 runs well on just 1/2 GB. Apple's OS appears *twice* as bloated.''
I gather you are talking about RAM, not diskspace. But would you perchance have any pointers to reducing Windows 7 disk space usage? It irks me that an OS I rarely use sits there eating up > 10 GB of disk space, but I lack the knowledge of Windows to do something about it. If I could get the disk space
``This is why women steer clear of a lot of IT jobs. They have a much greater sensitivity to interpersonal factors. And when a company, or industry, starts playing behaving like assholes, they leave (or just never show up).''
That, and they just don't want to do IT work to begin with. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of women just aren't interested in computers. In my CS programme at university, the ratio of men to women was about 100:1. Outside university or work, I find that most girls get someone else to fix their computers (i.e. software) for them and have absolutely no interest in learning what they can do about it, whereas most guys try do learn a couple of things about their computers and software even if they aren't in IT.
Given this, I find the number of women I have met who work in IT is actually _greater_ than what I would have expected.
Yes. There is even a sentiment that web developers aren't real developers, despite the fact that web sites have certainly evolved from "static page with perhaps an image or two" to full-blown applications.
Of course, typing in F# (assuming it works the same way as in OCaml, which, as far as I know, it does) is not really implicit, it's just that the types are specified by the operations when they aren't specified explicitly.
If you write
the + says that x and y are ints just as surely as if you had written
Still, it is true that, in the first example, the name of the type doesn't occur anywhere. So I think that is what people mean when they say "implicit".
``20% is a very typical overhead for dynamic memory management. Did you think malloc/free costs nothing?''
Many people actually seem to think that, and that only automatic memory management is costly. Out in the real world, of course, managing memory costs resources no matter how you do it, and you can sometimes make huge performance gains by optimizing it. I've seen percentages of time spent on memory management anywhere from 99% in real programs. As always: measure, don't guess.
``Give it a few months for the prices on ipad to come down''
Dude, it's Apple. They don't do that. At least not until the new model is out.
``Your post underscores the parent's point. Linux has stagnated. Version bumps and DRM2 only get YOUR motor started, and guess what -- you already use Linux.
Underlying systems. General usability. Drivers that work and are supported. Linux has a ways to go.''
People have been making posts like yours for at least 15 years. I don't disagree with you, but I will point out that, in the meantime, Linux has gone from a pet project that a bunch of hackers did just for kicks to a major force that most people have heard of and giant corporations account for in their strategies.
``Linux remains hacker/hobby grade despite efforts by Canonical and others, and now Nvidia and others are starting to flake off.''
Linux is the hacker/hobby grade project that also happens to be pushed by the likes of Google, Oracle, IBM, Dell, HP, and Novell. Not to mention all the big-name corporations that are using it.
``With Apple's non-iPod products providing many users with "just works" systems on decent hardware with functional UI and still providing the *nix capabilities to run the "12 line shell script he uses for grabbing entries from /var/log/messages" someone joked about above, perhaps Linux's foray into mainstream has apexed.''
Perhaps it has. As far as I can tell, Linux desktop share is about the same as OS X desktop share. Some sources have the one higher, others have the other higher. Is OS X not ready for the desktop? For that matter, is Windows ready for the desktop? If "just works" is the criterion, Windows certainly wouldn't be high on my list. Yet it seems to hold at least 90% of the market share on the desktop.
Once again, I don't necessarily disagree with you. I do think you have a couple of your facts wrong, but I won't dispute that Linux doesn't have a huge share of the desktop sphere, nor will I dispute that there are things that could be improved in Linux-land.
However, I am at a loss as to what your point is. You say your parent missed the point. I'm missing it, too. What _is_ your point, really?
To me, the big accomplishment here isn't that someone has managed to make the same source code run on different platforms.
The big accomplishment is that this is something newsworthy.
Ideally, your code should only describe the functionality of your application. What these platforms do is basically the same stuff in any case. There isn't really a good reason why code that does something as non-exotic as this program would _not_ work on every platform that supported the right features.
Somehow, the corporations bringing us all this fine technology have made it so that you pretty much _can't_ write a program that will run on both their device and their competitors'. And not only that, but they've also gotten most of us to accept this as normal.
There is one thing I don't understand, and that is how people get to the point where they actually buy one of these books. Sure, they may turn up in lots of searches, but wouldn't taking a single look at it be enough to determine it is a piece of drivel?
``electroinc books have neither a cost advantage nor a "convenience factor".''
They are searchable, aren't they?
And also, for people who move around a lot, electronic books probably have a weight advantage.
Java is not and never has been groundbreaking and revolutionary. All the features people used to tout about Java back in the day were things that existed before it. A lot of smart people have poured a lot of effort in research related to Java, and the platform has grown stronger as a result, but even most of that seems to be just re-implementing existing ideas for Java.
However, that by no means implies that Java isn't relevant. It has certainly taken the software world by storm, and, as far as I can see, Java is still going strong. People are taking Java courses left and right, either to learn it for the first time or to deepen their understanding. There are so many Java projects that it's hard to find something for those in our company who would prefer to use something else. Even with .NET being backed by a company whose products usually get adopted as a matter of course, I don't see nearly as much demand for .NET knowledge as for Java. Java irrelevant? It sure doesn't seem that way to me.
``In other words, goodbye Flash and Java applets. And die already.''
Personally, I'd much rather have had a good, efficient, open-source plugin for interactive multimedia, based on open standards.
Yes, it's nice that we can emulate that with existing web standards, but, really, why has nobody actually built a good platform specifically tailored for the things we're now using JavaScript, HTML, and HTTP for? Java was close, but too bulky. Flash was great, but proprietary. AJAX is open, but horrible from a technical point of view. Silverlight, I don't know about the technology, but it's basically Microsoft's also-ran. What else have we got, and why is it that no project seems to have gotten it right _and_ taken off, whereas so many things that have taken off haven't gotten it right?
In all this commotion, there is one thing I have been unable to find: numbers on sudden unintended acceleration from outside the USA. I know that Toyota has recalled vehicles around the world, but I haven't seen data on incidents outside the USA. Can anyone provide links to such, just to satisfy my curiosity?
So you're saying that an RDBMS is the right tool for the job if your transactions have enough value, and, if the value per transaction is too low, you won't be able to afford an RDBMS, but you can still go with a NoSQL database? That's an interesting point of view.
So how do you make your system work with NoSQL? As you say in your post, "you lose ACID, indexes, and joins to varying degrees". To me, with my relational view of the world, it seems that you would want to use an RDBMS exactly because of these things. Specifically, the fact that your RDBMS does the hard work of keeping your data consistent for you. Wouldn't you have to implement that all by yourself if you went with a NoSQL system? If so, what realistic expectation can you have to come up with something that is both correct and as performant as an RDBMS which lots of smart people have worked on over the years?
Or is it just that people are throwing consistency out of the window and saying "We can afford to lose a couple of records or have a couple of dangling references here and there, as long as it SCALES". Because I can build something that scales if it doesn't have to maintain ACID, too. The difficulty is in having _both_ ACID and scalability.
I'm still fuzzy on what NoSQL is supposed to be and what it is supposed to bring to the table.
From what I've understood, it's basically a common banner for various different databases that all share the common property of not being relational databases and not providing ACID guarantees.
If so, it seems to me that the whole NoSQL vs. RDMBS debate is about a false dichotomy. There are some applications where a relational database is the right tool for the job, and there are some where a relational database is not the right tool for the job. In some of those latter cases, one of the NoSQL databases may be the right thing.
This is nothing new. Non-relational databases have been used on Unix for a long time, and are even a standard part of POSIX (see for example the manpage for dbm_open). It's also long been known that, for example, Berkeley DB can be a lot faster than an RDBMS - as long as your application doesn't make use of all the features an RDBMS provides. Lots of programs even don't use one of these database systems, but invent their own, custom format. Git is a very successful example of this.
To me, it seems that what we are seeing here is loads of people who had learned to use relational databases for all their storage needs discovering that there are other ways to store data, and that one of those methods may work better than an RDMBS for a particular application. Well, yes. Does that surprise anyone? It sure doesn't surprise me. Does it mean that RDMBSes are now useless? Not at all. Does it mean you should use a non-relational storage system where this makes more sense? Of course! Now, can we please get back to work? I don't see the point of having a holy war over whether RDBMS or NoSQL is better, when common sense says that they both have their uses.
``They can't except that Google is just better at search. Period. Why can't they just accept that and stop stalking the search market?''
It's all about control. For many people, their default search engine is basically their gateway to the World Wide Web, perhaps even the entire Internet. If you control that search engine, this gives you a huge amount of control.
There are many ways to monetize this control. Other people in this discussion have suggested altering the results of queries to favor your (profitable) products. That's certainly one way to make money from search. Another is selling advertising space. I am sure there are many others. Information about who is searching for what has to be worth something, too.
These are pretty much reasons for anyone to be in the search engine business. But Microsoft has yet another reason: fear. Just like, in the past, Microsoft has used the power gained on the desktop market to make a strong entry in other markets, so Google can use the strength it has gained to give Microsoft a hard time in markets where Microsoft currently makes its money. Google has a search engine, but they also have one of the world's most successful e-mail services, the most successful multimedia portal, a successful blogging service, a chat service, groupware services, an office suite, a web browser, and a mobile operating system. The last items, in particular, strike close to home for Microsoft. And considering the mind share that Google has, if I were Microsoft, I, too, would be afraid of this new giant.
I was about to write a similar post.
Although this is certainly bad, it doesn't surprise me at all.
And the fact that we've come to _expect_ such vulnerabilities in widely deployed systems is very, very sad.