Australia's high court has ruled that the financial publishers Dow Jones can be sued in the Australian state of Victoria over an article that appeared on their website.
If things will g that way, soon it will be obvious that national or local laws cannot be applied to anything international. Specifically, local laws cannot be applied to Internet business.
You cannot have a little bit of globalization. You either have it all or not all. Otherwise it's ugly.
GPL is the only way for commercial contributors to protect IP from being hijacked by competitors. Any BSD contribution is usually done for advertisement (demo) purposes.
But open source licensing is not the only way to make business on Linux platform. Loot at Oracle, for example.
Making software for Linux 3rd party distributions is not the only business with Linux technology. Microsoft can port their GUI to Linux and sell it as Microsoft Linux, why not?
And, of course, Linux is not the only open source OS. It's not finally decided and Microsoft still can come with new MS OS based on BSD - like Apple did.
Once we list here well designed, easy to use, rapid to program, fast to run, possible to compile FP languages, then don't forget about Oz/Mozart programming language and system.
The preformance of the FPL programmers working with very extremely complex requirements will always outrun the performance of C programmers. And that is more important than the runtime performance (remember Javaistic argumets about cheap and fast hardware resources?). There are many cases when run-time performance of FP programs will be better than C one, as most of low level details are already optimized and hidden in libraries and interpreters, while C programmers are still moving through lots of errors and mistakes in their reinventing the wheel projects.
The only problem is that all stupid managers, after reading commercials, don't want anythng else, but only C, Java and VB. I heard about projects where people use XML syntax for interpreted Lisp or Scheme code because they can tell the boss: "look, boss, it's not Lisp, it's just XML". Managers today just love XML and usually buy the trick. No wonder there is an official project of "flat" and XML notations for Curry, the language with Haskell and Prolog ideas.
All right. Corporate users are protected by the corporate IT stuff. ISP users are protected (somehow) too, depends on ISP they pay their fee.
Personal home server owners are usually protected by the definition of their skills. Who is left? People without job, without home servers and even without home ISP accounts. So? Who will care about those poor souls? I doubt there may be any lobby to push a law to protect such users. Therefore, there is no way to kill the spam as a business.
I predict that in one or two year free email account will be dead as most of people use it anyway just to subscribe for spam.
I have a similar idea: lets create as many free (Yahoo, Hotmail, Netscape.net) account as we can. And lets publish their addresses on forums, chat roms and other public places. In two weeks all of them will be full of spam. If we do it intensively - in 1 month Yahoo, Hotmail and Netscape.net will be overloaded and stop their work. Their sysadmins will have to do something better about filtering otherwise free email account business (is it a business anyway) will be gone.
Once (actually 2 years ago) Microsoft support reps told us to use VC 4.0 without any MFC if we want to create reliable NT services. I cannot publish any official docs or refs, but that time that was the official advise as a part of thier official support program.
Physics is irrelevant for venture-capitalistsIt doesn't matter will the thing fly or not - it is much more important to get some funding, part of which is very essential for personal bonuses and loans.
The time of Internet bubles is over. The time of bubles is not over yet.
I heard from Rational University course instructors that Rational software itself is made without any using of Rational software itself.
That was a very good illustration. And a very good advise: UML is good, Rational is good to learn UML, but once you know UML then the usage Rational will only make you development process worse.
First, what I don't like in Rational is very ugly UI, which has not been designed - it has been "rationally" evolved from prototypes (that's waht RUP is about, isn't it?). I think the term "usability" is unknown in Rational development team.
Second, Rational products are very badly integrated to work togethers.
Finally, I hate all those license servers and inability of Rational salespeople to help to install them.
Conclusion is to use Togethersoft - it doesn't pretend to automate all your thinking process. Instead, it helps you with your software development. And if you need really some serious analyse of requirements then do it with traditional knowledge management systems - at least you can do lots with rule-based verification .
I use LyX also all the time, but unless I have to send the document or I have to edit the received one: no surprise most of people around me do not know what's the heck is TeX and use obsolete MSWord.doc or improved OOo.sxw format (HTML in the best case).
LyX would have much more chances on Linux arena if it would get better and out of the box export/import with such formats as RTF, DOC, SXW, HTML. Until that LyX will exist only between enthusiasts.
On the other side, if a hard copy is all you need then LyX is the best word processor. It helps you to think in styles, rather than in sinlge characters. I wish OOo (OpenOffice.org) will improve the style management, which is horrible now in both MS Word and Open/Star Office.
With journalling file system the simple mirrorring (RAID-1) is more than enough. The mirrorring will protect you from hardware failure of a disk, while journalling will help in software failure situations.
By the way, SCSI by itself will not help, unless you do RAID-N of more than 1 disks. You need SCSI for linear performance, not for safity.
I wonder noone mentioned the poor public education. $200 per box? It's a perfect price for schools! I am going to talk to the principal - my kid complains they don't have enough computer classes b/c there is not enough of computers.... Jeez, is it 21st century or it's a middle age?
1. It is a myth that Java is a cross platform technology. It works mostly on win32, with serious bugs on macos9, with some bugs on macosx, stable only on a server side on most of Unix and Linux/x86 platforms. It doesn't work well on Linux/non-x86 platforms or doesn't work at all.
2. Java will never be fast. CPU becomes faster and instead of AWK we have SWING, later we'll have SOAP based UI, later SOAP over EJB (or EJB over SOAP?). Besides, Java is an interpreter - it's never been design to be fast.
3. Java is not RAD. You have to compile your code => your development process is slow.
4. Java will never become a desktop environment. Remember Netscape? They have tried to rewrite it on java. What's happened? The project is failed. And even ownership of Sun, Java inventr, did not help. Desktop is much more complicated then just a web browser.
5. Java is an interpreter of compiled code - that the most insane invention I've ever met
The major problem with this case is that most of Americans don't understand that American laws has nothing to do with activities and businesses outside of USA.
On the positive side, this case demonstrates (one more time) to the world how crazy America can go internationally.
This is, unfortunately, an issue with several open source projects.
You may mean PHP, I guess? I agrre, it's complete mess of spaghetti.
But in a defence of open source project (especially based on something else than on proprietary java) I would address you to Zope. You'll find a very good technology design without all that EJBish overbloating.
When you run Zope, please check you memory. Compare it to what you have with Struts/JBoss on an equal load and equal functions (and equal dev time). In my case the difference was 10 MB vs 100 MB for a mid size applications.
After that compare you code just to enjoy that your application code in Zope is even more readable and better mainanable than in Struts.
I began to hate EJB specifically and Java generally when I've been introduced to Zope and Python.
Window is generic with respect to transparent glass, but not with respect to operating systems.
A window, as movable part of siplay responsible for displaying a part of UI, was appeared before MS registered that tradmeark (if remember in Xerox's and Apple's first GUIs. Till now window is used to name such UI display areas disregarding to the vendor. Do you think X Windows and Macos systems all those years violated the law? I don't think so.
But what make sense is that Windows is trademark of the specific operating system.
As for Apple, you are right, I don't have any apples on my computers unless they are from Apple corp. However, If I would create a software for an apple genetic analysis or a apple fruit shape calculation or a apple aggricultural product accounting, then do you think I will violate the law by calling it Apple somithing software? I don't think so.
Let's try more fuzzy situation. I create an instant messager specially for a community of people growing apples. Can I call my company Apple Communications? You get my point - registering any common words from any (not only english) dictionary is wrong.
What PostgreSQL does really need is a better marketiing. Today 90% of enterprise programmers on a question "Why Oracle [Sybase, MSSQL, DB2]? Why not open source database in you project?" usually answer: "MySQL? We've tried. Doesn't really work for our projects." And if you try further "Did you try PostgreSQL?" then they counter-ask "Postgres-who?"
Too bad. When Internet burned tons of startup money, they hired lots of "so-called programmers" to do web-development stuff. No wonder that MySQL and PHP (and Linux!) was typically a choice. Who cares about transactions? Who cares about aspect separation? Just show the first home page to the boss!
The positive outcome: big bosses heard about Linux. Could Linux be where it is now without those so-called programmers? I doubt so. Professional Services from IBM and Microsoft would decide for you what technology to use after your boss has decided what partnership contract to sign.
But that wasn't the only way to "educate" big bosses about Linux: startup boom sparked Linux marketing boom creating OSDN, and others, including Slashdot. As a result, Linux is not self-selling itself: everyone loves Linux therefore Linux is protecting your investments. Crowd effect.
Could it be possible would Linux be really bad? No. Why it didn't happened to PostgreSQL? I think b/c PostgreSQL-based few companies didn't care about marketing. Or cared wrong. Or didn't have money to care. Compared to what? To Linux. Try to find some subject about Linux using google - besides mail-lists you've got many official documents, FAQs, HOWTOs, learning courses, support companies. Try to do it for PostgreSQL - mostly mail-lists and few official docs.
With improved better marketing PostgreSQL may become in one or two years as Linux today. Without good marketing only PostgreSQL developers, few enthusiasts and some Slashdot readers will know that not all open-source databases are so bad.
My own experience shows, that OOP paradigm should be neither ignored or overused. Languages, like Python, help you to use OOP only when you really need it. Similar way, DBMS, like PostgreSQL, helps you to use objects in your databases only when you really need them, and according with SQL'92 standard.
OORDBMS, offenly stays for ODBMS databases, with some SQL interface extensions. Primary such systems are designed for persistence of serialized objects. Therefore they inherit all problems related to ODBMS, and first of all - lack of theoretical support (OOP is based on heuristics), lack of ad-hoc queries, lack of reflection mechanisms, very tight-coupling, lack of on-the-fly db schema changes, lack of consistent replication, and so on, and so on. In few words, it's easy to use OORDBMS as ODBMS, but you cannot use OORDBMS as RDBMS (without additional SQL-compatible transaction manager) - it's ODBMS by it's nature.
In ORDBMS PostgreSQL relations are first class objects with all theoretical support of relational algebra, while inheritance and ADT are just addons. You can use ORDBMS as RDBMS (that's the way most of use use in real life), but you cannot use it as ODBMS (without additional OR-mapping manager) - it's RDBMS by its nature.
As for whether or not Windows is a registered trademark in Russia or not, I have to say I'd be very, very surprised if it is not. And if it isn't , then someone in Russia ought to go and register that trademark NOW.
Forget it. Russia uses a different alphabyte and there is no way to get Windows registered in Russia using that alphabyte. It might be registered as "Okna" (just written in cyrillic), but if so - most of Russian will laugh to the death upon it. Besides, same as in Nitherlands, Russian gov will not approve a common Russian word for a trademark - they are more corrupted than in America, but less stupid.
Apple uses ATI chips in its Power and other Books. With various level of a success in Linux/PPC and Xfree86, though - most of people complain about DRI. But it's out of the box - nothing was downloaded from ATI, although ATI people say they help Xfree86 hackers with the code and consulting.
Slashdot Mirror
Australia's high court has ruled that the financial publishers Dow Jones can be sued in the Australian state of Victoria over an article that appeared on their website. If things will g that way, soon it will be obvious that national or local laws cannot be applied to anything international. Specifically, local laws cannot be applied to Internet business.
You cannot have a little bit of globalization. You either have it all or not all. Otherwise it's ugly.
But open source licensing is not the only way to make business on Linux platform. Loot at Oracle, for example.
Making software for Linux 3rd party distributions is not the only business with Linux technology. Microsoft can port their GUI to Linux and sell it as Microsoft Linux, why not?
And, of course, Linux is not the only open source OS. It's not finally decided and Microsoft still can come with new MS OS based on BSD - like Apple did.
The preformance of the FPL programmers working with very extremely complex requirements will always outrun the performance of C programmers. And that is more important than the runtime performance (remember Javaistic argumets about cheap and fast hardware resources?). There are many cases when run-time performance of FP programs will be better than C one, as most of low level details are already optimized and hidden in libraries and interpreters, while C programmers are still moving through lots of errors and mistakes in their reinventing the wheel projects.
The only problem is that all stupid managers, after reading commercials, don't want anythng else, but only C, Java and VB. I heard about projects where people use XML syntax for interpreted Lisp or Scheme code because they can tell the boss: "look, boss, it's not Lisp, it's just XML". Managers today just love XML and usually buy the trick. No wonder there is an official project of "flat" and XML notations for Curry, the language with Haskell and Prolog ideas.
Changing the value of the variable is not less bad habit. It's like goto (changing the address pointer) is bad.
Use Functional Programming instead.
I predict that in one or two year free email account will be dead as most of people use it anyway just to subscribe for spam.
I have a similar idea: lets create as many free (Yahoo, Hotmail, Netscape.net) account as we can. And lets publish their addresses on forums, chat roms and other public places. In two weeks all of them will be full of spam. If we do it intensively - in 1 month Yahoo, Hotmail and Netscape.net will be overloaded and stop their work. Their sysadmins will have to do something better about filtering otherwise free email account business (is it a business anyway) will be gone.
Once (actually 2 years ago) Microsoft support reps told us to use VC 4.0 without any MFC if we want to create reliable NT services. I cannot publish any official docs or refs, but that time that was the official advise as a part of thier official support program.
The time of Internet bubles is over. The time of bubles is not over yet.
That was a very good illustration. And a very good advise: UML is good, Rational is good to learn UML, but once you know UML then the usage Rational will only make you development process worse.
First, what I don't like in Rational is very ugly UI, which has not been designed - it has been "rationally" evolved from prototypes (that's waht RUP is about, isn't it?). I think the term "usability" is unknown in Rational development team.
Second, Rational products are very badly integrated to work togethers.
Finally, I hate all those license servers and inability of Rational salespeople to help to install them.
Conclusion is to use Togethersoft - it doesn't pretend to automate all your thinking process. Instead, it helps you with your software development. And if you need really some serious analyse of requirements then do it with traditional knowledge management systems - at least you can do lots with rule-based verification .
round-trip was the reason we abonded Rational and switched to Together
LyX would have much more chances on Linux arena if it would get better and out of the box export/import with such formats as RTF, DOC, SXW, HTML. Until that LyX will exist only between enthusiasts.
On the other side, if a hard copy is all you need then LyX is the best word processor. It helps you to think in styles, rather than in sinlge characters. I wish OOo (OpenOffice.org) will improve the style management, which is horrible now in both MS Word and Open/Star Office.
Did you try Xemacs? :)
By the way, SCSI by itself will not help, unless you do RAID-N of more than 1 disks. You need SCSI for linear performance, not for safity.
I agree. That's why projects like (X)Emacs, Lynx and Midnight Commander still exist and will never die.
I wonder noone mentioned the poor public education. $200 per box? It's a perfect price for schools! I am going to talk to the principal - my kid complains they don't have enough computer classes b/c there is not enough of computers. ... Jeez, is it 21st century or it's a middle age?
Don't you know about mke2fs -j ? Don't you know about mirroring of 2 cheap disks?
First thing you need for computer reliability is your brains. Money and high-end things are secondary.
1. It is a myth that Java is a cross platform technology. It works mostly on win32, with serious bugs on macos9, with some bugs on macosx, stable only on a server side on most of Unix and Linux/x86 platforms. It doesn't work well on Linux/non-x86 platforms or doesn't work at all. 2. Java will never be fast. CPU becomes faster and instead of AWK we have SWING, later we'll have SOAP based UI, later SOAP over EJB (or EJB over SOAP?). Besides, Java is an interpreter - it's never been design to be fast. 3. Java is not RAD. You have to compile your code => your development process is slow. 4. Java will never become a desktop environment. Remember Netscape? They have tried to rewrite it on java. What's happened? The project is failed. And even ownership of Sun, Java inventr, did not help. Desktop is much more complicated then just a web browser. 5. Java is an interpreter of compiled code - that the most insane invention I've ever met
On the positive side, this case demonstrates (one more time) to the world how crazy America can go internationally.
You may mean PHP, I guess? I agrre, it's complete mess of spaghetti.
But in a defence of open source project (especially based on something else than on proprietary java) I would address you to Zope. You'll find a very good technology design without all that EJBish overbloating.
When you run Zope, please check you memory. Compare it to what you have with Struts/JBoss on an equal load and equal functions (and equal dev time). In my case the difference was 10 MB vs 100 MB for a mid size applications.
After that compare you code just to enjoy that your application code in Zope is even more readable and better mainanable than in Struts.
I began to hate EJB specifically and Java generally when I've been introduced to Zope and Python.
Linux/PPC geeks hate Apple b/c it keeps in secret details of its hardware from Linux/PPC developers.
And all linux geeks hate BSD ... b/c BSD is dead (don't you know that?).
A window, as movable part of siplay responsible for displaying a part of UI, was appeared before MS registered that tradmeark (if remember in Xerox's and Apple's first GUIs. Till now window is used to name such UI display areas disregarding to the vendor. Do you think X Windows and Macos systems all those years violated the law? I don't think so.
But what make sense is that Windows is trademark of the specific operating system.
As for Apple, you are right, I don't have any apples on my computers unless they are from Apple corp. However, If I would create a software for an apple genetic analysis or a apple fruit shape calculation or a apple aggricultural product accounting, then do you think I will violate the law by calling it Apple somithing software? I don't think so.
Let's try more fuzzy situation. I create an instant messager specially for a community of people growing apples. Can I call my company Apple Communications? You get my point - registering any common words from any (not only english) dictionary is wrong.
Too bad. When Internet burned tons of startup money, they hired lots of "so-called programmers" to do web-development stuff. No wonder that MySQL and PHP (and Linux!) was typically a choice. Who cares about transactions? Who cares about aspect separation? Just show the first home page to the boss!
The positive outcome: big bosses heard about Linux. Could Linux be where it is now without those so-called programmers? I doubt so. Professional Services from IBM and Microsoft would decide for you what technology to use after your boss has decided what partnership contract to sign.
But that wasn't the only way to "educate" big bosses about Linux: startup boom sparked Linux marketing boom creating OSDN, and others, including Slashdot. As a result, Linux is not self-selling itself: everyone loves Linux therefore Linux is protecting your investments. Crowd effect.
Could it be possible would Linux be really bad? No. Why it didn't happened to PostgreSQL? I think b/c PostgreSQL-based few companies didn't care about marketing. Or cared wrong. Or didn't have money to care. Compared to what? To Linux. Try to find some subject about Linux using google - besides mail-lists you've got many official documents, FAQs, HOWTOs, learning courses, support companies. Try to do it for PostgreSQL - mostly mail-lists and few official docs.
With improved better marketing PostgreSQL may become in one or two years as Linux today. Without good marketing only PostgreSQL developers, few enthusiasts and some Slashdot readers will know that not all open-source databases are so bad.
PostgreSQL is not OORDBMS, it ORDBMS - and that is a benefit of it. There are plenty of document on Internet explaining it from different angles.
Here is what make PostgreSQL ORDBMS different than other RDBMS.
The Third Manifesto us the best book covering the subject.
My own experience shows, that OOP paradigm should be neither ignored or overused. Languages, like Python, help you to use OOP only when you really need it. Similar way, DBMS, like PostgreSQL, helps you to use objects in your databases only when you really need them, and according with SQL'92 standard.
OORDBMS, offenly stays for ODBMS databases, with some SQL interface extensions. Primary such systems are designed for persistence of serialized objects. Therefore they inherit all problems related to ODBMS, and first of all - lack of theoretical support (OOP is based on heuristics), lack of ad-hoc queries, lack of reflection mechanisms, very tight-coupling, lack of on-the-fly db schema changes, lack of consistent replication, and so on, and so on. In few words, it's easy to use OORDBMS as ODBMS, but you cannot use OORDBMS as RDBMS (without additional SQL-compatible transaction manager) - it's ODBMS by it's nature.
In ORDBMS PostgreSQL relations are first class objects with all theoretical support of relational algebra, while inheritance and ADT are just addons. You can use ORDBMS as RDBMS (that's the way most of use use in real life), but you cannot use it as ODBMS (without additional OR-mapping manager) - it's RDBMS by its nature.
Forget it. Russia uses a different alphabyte and there is no way to get Windows registered in Russia using that alphabyte. It might be registered as "Okna" (just written in cyrillic), but if so - most of Russian will laugh to the death upon it. Besides, same as in Nitherlands, Russian gov will not approve a common Russian word for a trademark - they are more corrupted than in America, but less stupid.
Apple uses ATI chips in its Power and other Books. With various level of a success in Linux/PPC and Xfree86, though - most of people complain about DRI. But it's out of the box - nothing was downloaded from ATI, although ATI people say they help Xfree86 hackers with the code and consulting.