And everybody still talks about "aliens" thirty five years later.
My personal theory is based on two simple facts: evolution and the inevitability of nanotechnology. My theory is that UFOs are merely Transhumans who arose from a species (proto-human, probably, given the number of different proto-humans running around) on this planet which got intelligent marginally faster than the species that ended up being human. They got technology first, they got nanotechnology first, and did all this probably before humans got written civilization (you'd only need a thousand years or so head start, maybe less - a blink of an eye in historical and evolutionary terms). The nanotech enabled them to leapfrog technologically thousands, scores of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years into the future technologically over the last ten or twenty thousand years of human cultural development.
At this point, they literally could be everywhere here and be doing anything, and we wouldn't know about it - except for the oddball events we call "UFO"s, They could have the technology to edit all human perceptions in realtime, and we'd never know it. As Professor Michio Kaku once said, humans would be like an ant colony living next to a superhighway - the ability to perceive the situation just isn't there.
It's like the Oracle said in "Matrix: Reloaded": "Anytime you've heard stories about vampires, werewolves or aliens, it was some program doing what it's not supposed to."
Even with Drexler's level of nanootech (let alone the possibilities of speculative femtotech or picotech), Transhumans could imbed a Pentium-level processor in every cell in the human body (trillions) which operate as one massive parallel system which could control every perception and reaction of the human brain. In fact, nothing would stop them embedding such processors controlling Drexler's little "cellular robots" into EVERYTHING on the planet - giving them total control of the entire environment humans exist in.
"The Matrix" ain't squat compared to that capability.
Personally I doubt Transhumans would bother. It's merely a speculation to make the point that a Transhuman species with sufficiently ubiquitous nanotechnology and the advanced physics resulting from that capability of accelerated technological development basically could easily behave in a manner that would explain the UFO phenomena and a lot more oddball phenomena besides.
The "alien" explanation is a result of lack of imagination, nothing more. Especially if you believe that the speed of light limits interstellar travel (which I don't, but many UFO skeptics do).
What I think is really happening here is: we're not the top of the food chain. They are. And we're lucky because if they wanted to, they could exterminate the human species in hours.
Retain an attorney, go right down to the nearest Federal courthouse and set up an appointment with a Federal judge. Let him decide how to deal with it. If he tells you to comply, that's it.
No way the FBI can stop you from doing that, regardless of how "secret" the letter is. And if they ARE abusing the Patriot Act, the judge may - not necessarily will - determine that. Or he will refer it up to the "secret" court that deals with these issues.
You might get off the hook, you might not. But it's the only way I see to deal with what are basically "secret police" tactics which are closing in on Gestapo methods.
"their study 'refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species'."
But as a geek Transhumanist, clearly I demonstrate this beyond any question.
Seriously, though, this is no particular surprise to me. I suspect "evolution" - which is a concept ABOUT a phenomena, not a phenomena itself - can use several methods to diversify species. Sex may have been the easiest at some level, other methods at other levels.
So basically what we have here is somebody merely expanding the notion of what "evolution" is and how it works, rather than limiting it to a particular mechanism.
First of all, there's nothing to protect them FROM. Sex is not harmful per se.
Second, they shouldn't be "protected" even if there were such a thing - they should be "trained".
Finally, that was never the motivation anyway - that is just a cover for a bunch of religious assholes to impose their "morality" on everyone else and for a bunch of politicians to seize more power of what people can say or do.
I agree that mass distribution - based on new technology - changed the way music is distributed and appreciated. As I've always said, people pay for ACCESS to music, NOT the music itself.
That said, though, the technology will continue to change.
In my view, the future of music is live (or "pre-recorded live" - like the Tonight Show) concert broadcast over the Internet. This will allow bands to maintain more contact with the fans between albums - or even lead to the demise of the album altogether - why wait for an album when you can SEE the new music being made as it happens in jam sessions? - while reducing (if not eliminating) the expense of physical touring.
CDs and file sharing will become cheap loss leaders intended to get you interested in seeing the band live rather than primary means of distribution and revenue.
Hell, you can't even distinguish the VOICES of most of the female singers (with the odd exception like Jewel). They all SOUND alike - computer processed to blandness. That's why I prefer listening to the Corrs LIVE performances since Andrea's voice sounds better live than it does overly processed. Most bands sound worse live - the Corrs sound BETTER. (Not to mention the visual appeal!)
The "cookie cutter" approach to manufacturing "stars" is also a major reason the industry is dying. The Corrs are superstars everywhere in the world except the US (around 40 million albums sold). Atlantic never did support them in the US seriously. They got big by touring constantly (a label exec called them "the hardest working band on the label - with the exception of Phil Collins") in every country that was buying their records.
But the industry would rather promote some bimbos whose music is forgettable and whose lives end up in the tabloids every week. I have never understood why Shakira - an act that is basically a rehash of Xavier Cugat's old girlfriend, Charo - gets more press in the US than three gorgeous Irish babes who can actually write their own music, play their own instruments, and sing - as well as being backed up by five excellent professional musicians.
The last time CD sales went down - it was because the companies produced fewer releases. Somebody estimated then that if they'd produced the same number of releases and each release sold only eight thousand copies, sales would have been steady.
I'm sure iTunes and the like are changing the marketplace, but 20% seems like a steep drop likely to produced by factors such as the cited reduction in retail outlets more than file sharing.
But of course, reducing choice is what the music industry appears to be all about these days. Never give a primate the option to screw over his fellows - they will always take it, even it ends up cutting their own throats. That option was the DMCA and related IP law.
Whatever you consider "expansive" to be, anyway...
I listen to everything from movie themes to Def Leppard to Enya to Enigma to Phil Collins to Peter Gabriel to New Age to Metallica to Sisters of Mercy to Billy Idol to Kate Bush to Tori Amos to the Corrs. If it's "expansive" in any way, I tend to like it.
I DO NOT listen to rap, R&B, soul, country, western, hip-hop, jazz, grunge, and most teen bimbo pop (making an exception for JoJo - however, hot little fifteen-year-old that she is, she can't match Andrea Corr - who, BTW, has a solo album called "Ten Feet High" coming out end of May while her siblings take a break and have kids.)
"it's far too complex a piece of software for most of us to apparently even know where to begin to write one."
Heh - this probably won't go over well - but...
Rewrite everything in Java...line for line, if necesssary...then compile it with whatever Java JIT compiler produces even semi-decent code.
I mean, do we REALLY want everything critical in OSS written in C and C++ forever?
A humongous project, I'm sure - but if we have to...
As for GCC being huge, well, it's STILL just a set of compilers. However complex it can be, if various projects can take on an OSS Java VM with class libraries as they have, I'm sure they can take on GCC. May take five years or more, but I'm sure it could be rewritten by somebody - especially if one of the big boys like IBM decided to sponsor the project. It would be peanuts for a big company to finance this sort of thing.
The bottom line: in software, NOBODY is indispensable forever, Lock-in only happens when you don't HAVE TO take the time to prevent it. In the corporate world, this is the preferred mode of operation. Not in OSS - where personal desires take priority.
If the OSS community sees OSS going down and they can't develop what they want because nobody will support it because of the effects of EITHER the license or patents, ALL this stuff will get reinvented and damn fast.
If necessary, it will be done in the rest of the world that doesn't adhere to US IP law. Software development will go back to being an underground hacker activity...
Personally I can't think of a better way to stimulate new development than to screw around with developers with new licenses and patents.
Bring it on!
The problem with Stallmand and the FSF is that they think EVERYBODY in OSS thinks like them - even while they continually separate themselves from "Open Source" by denigrating it over "free software".
Pressuring a peripheral company to make drivers for Linux is best done by the people they get their money directly from - not the end users.
I've said all along that IBM, HP and other companies making money off Linux should be supporting - and even financing - driver development by peripheral companies.
And when corporations finally get fed up with Microsoft and start seriously moving to Linux, we will see the peripheral manufacturers tune change dramatically as Dell and the others decide to start selling fully certified Linux machines to those corporations. It will be Dell, HP, IBM and others who force the peripheral manufacturers to produce drivers, not end users or even Linux distros like Red Hat.
HP is already selling large scale desktop Linux deployments. This situation will increase and force the major retailers to demand Linux drivers of their peripheral suppliers.
The end users really don't need to do anything but wait until clueless corporate management finally learns that Microsoft is to damn expensive (when all costs are taken into account) to support any more.
We need one. Dabo might be it - or not - I don't know yet.
There are migration tools to get Access data into MySQL and PostgreSQL. What we need is an easy to use application development environment that can match the ability to generate screens and reports that Access has - without the crap.
Yeah, somebody else on a previous page referred to it, and I looked it up. It looks interesting.
The really interesting part is that's cross-platform and supports most of the OSS databases.
Linux really needs an easy to use "Access killer". Since Dabo supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and there are migration tools from others to migrate Access to OSS databases, this could be a very valuable product.
I haven't compared it yet to Kexi or the OpenOffice BASE, but if Dabo has the full VFP application development capability at some point, this may be a very valuable addition to an OO consultant's tools for getting clients off that Access POS and onto REAL databases with REAL application development front ends.
Well, the proponents here have given examples of relatively large databases being accessed by multiple users with one second query times, so I'd have to say that you give no evidence that FoxPro is "slow" - even relatively, which it probably is.
As for FoxPro's LANGUAGE speed, as opposed to its DATABASE QUERY speed, you may well be right that it's slow. No surprise there, really. Obviously anything written in a modern computer language is going to outperform something written in a language that was designed to support a particular application. SQR isn't all that fast, either, but PeopleSoft and others use it because it eases report generation from databases.
As for the being "ugly", compared to what? And what does that matter if the business functionality is met? "Uglyness" is not a criteria for business value, last I checked - otherwise the industry would never have gotten past green screens...
Ancient, it is - as a DATABASE.
The current interest in FoxPro appears to be primarily because of its development environment for BUSINESS APPLICATIONS - which its proponents say is better than the rest of the stuff Microsoft offers. I can't comment on that since the last time I used FoxPro was in the early nineties and I have no experience with the rest of the Microsoft crap except for Access - which IS a POS in almost all respects.
I think the interesting question is: does Visual FoxPro application development capabilities compare at all with modern application development environments - including new-fangled stuff like Web 2.0 and Ajax front ends to Web services or Java application frameworks?
IIRC, the DV8 superhero (or supervillains, actually, since they started out as villains) comic book had a nutcase named "Bob" who wandered around with the head of an ex-girlfriend under his arm.
Might want to look at the Dabo project - they're a bunch of Visual FoxPro people taking the VFP approach to application development, but supporting modern databases over multiple platforms.
AND they're using Python with the wxPython widget set!
I just got referred to them by a post up page, so I just checked out their site. Looks like an interesting project.
"It is also easier to break big queries into multiple smaller queries in Xbase (FoxPro's original language). The equivalent in SQL is sometimes a big run-on sentence, a multi-breaded sandwich."
That is also one of SQR's (Hyperion's SQL/Report Writer combo language) useful abilities (about the only one aside from its report generation abilities). You can in essence "nest" queries in separate procedures. Depending on how good you are with SQL, you can gain some performance advantages by breaking up queries into sets so that each calling set has fewer rows to deal with. More important than performance advantages is the documentation advantage - rather than trying to interpret some multi-page SQL string, you can see everything as a neat hierarchy of calls to simpler SQL "functions".
I agree that FoxPro as a DATABASE is obsolete these days, compared to PostgreSQL or even MySQL.
I think the primary interest in FoxPro these days is its development environment, which was always leagues ahead of dBASE and others, and according to the Dabo people, way ahead of the rest of Microsoft's development environments - at least for application development. I have no idea if this is true since I haven't used any of them lately. I used FoxPro last back in the early nineties.
And here's what the Dabo people have to say about Microsoft and VFP. Interesting comment that reflects some of the posts here.
"An incredible, powerful and grossly under-marketed tool for developing database apps that run in Microsoft Windows only. Its cursor engine is second to none in terms of power, speed and utility. VFP is a fully object-oriented language, with the ability to design classes both in visual tools as well as code-only. Despite neglect from Microsoft, which makes more money selling less capable tools that have higher licensing fees, development continues, with version 9.0 released in late 2004, and work on an update, code-named Sedna, scheduled for a 2006 release."
The Dabo project looks very interesting, especially because it is cross=platform including Linux. I will be watching its development.
Yes, I used FoxPro back in the early nineties. It was a great product under Fox, but when Microsoft purchased it, they supported it only for a while, then let it languish while they pushed Access (an UTTER POS with all the "reliability" and brain-dead design decisions Microsoft is known for).
I was at a computer show in San Francisco standing at the FoxPro booth actually when I heard that Microsoft had bought them.
But I don't think the "Jet" engine came from Foxpro. I might be wrong about that. I think the Access engine and the FoxPro engines were separate for a long time. A quick Google indicates that Microsoft bought Fox for their "Rushmore" database technology which ended up being included in Jet.
Perens is a wannabe Stallman, so he's not even relevant here.
None of this makes any sense.
First of all, NOTHING has happened as a result of the Novell-Microsoft deal to actually threaten OSS. NOTHING.
It's ALL speculation.
Second, the FSF and Stallman in particular are fanatics who don't care about anything except being "recognized" for "inventing Linux". Stallman recently wouldn't even talk to a journalist with questions about the GPLv3 - and forbade anyone else inside or OUTSIDE of the FSF to talk to him - unless the journalist agreed FIRST to make all references to Linux as "GNU/Linux."
This tell you everything you need to know about Stallman and the FSF right there.
Third, WHATVER MIGHT happen in the future between Microsoft and the OSS movement, the odds of Microsoft being able to seriously damage the spread of Linux, let alone OSS in general, is virtually nil. First, because much OSS development and Linux adoption will occur in foreign countries who have absolutely NO interest in keeping Bill Gates the richest guy in the world, and second, because anything Microsoft does will simply be circumvented BY CODE. While re-coding large sections of OSS to avoid issues with patents or copyrights might slow the advance of OSS, it might actually speed it up - since even more innovation might be required. In the meantime, nobody is going to shut down the delivery or use of OSS even IF Microsoft were to win some sort of - utterly HYPOTHETICAL - court case declaring that one or more patents were violated by one or more products.
Fourth, if Stallman and crew take the GNU utilities out of action because of GPLv3, the OSS community will simply reinvent them - or better ones - which is long overdue in many cases. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. There's nothing about these utilities that make them invulnerable to change. Any license changes will not impact existing tools anyway. As someone else pointed out, how often does "ls" change - and who cares?
Fifth, what happens when the FSF drives itself to ruin with this crap? Will Stallman start demanding PATENTS on FSF tools? That's at least as likely - since his only interest is CONTROL, NOT "freedom", in fact - as Gates managing to sue all of OSS...
I mean, it isn't even rational to consider this. It's all bullshit. Microsoft did this sort of deal for various reasons of its own, none of which are any more likely to pan out to their benefit than Iraq did for Bush (unless you think as I do that the mess in Iraq WAS Bush's intention - for which an argument could be made.)
All we have here are a bunch of greedy morons on one side trying to work some kind of half-ass deal and a bunch of fanatics on the other side using it to drum up support for their own agenda.
BOTH of them do NOT have the future of OSS and its application to the advancement of IT as their motivations.
Meanwhile, Novell puts out a usable Linux distro. It's irrelevant what their management does as long as they don't fuck up the DISTRO (which isn't unlikely, given how most distros are messed up these days.) Dumping SUSE because of this deal is just stupid.
Bottom line: fergeddaboutit.
Linus is right. The GPLv3 is not a good idea as long as it is being used to push a fanatical agenda with no basis in common sense. He's also right in that it is not likely to matter.
Slashdot Mirror
And everybody still talks about "aliens" thirty five years later.
My personal theory is based on two simple facts: evolution and the inevitability of nanotechnology. My theory is that UFOs are merely Transhumans who arose from a species (proto-human, probably, given the number of different proto-humans running around) on this planet which got intelligent marginally faster than the species that ended up being human. They got technology first, they got nanotechnology first, and did all this probably before humans got written civilization (you'd only need a thousand years or so head start, maybe less - a blink of an eye in historical and evolutionary terms). The nanotech enabled them to leapfrog technologically thousands, scores of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years into the future technologically over the last ten or twenty thousand years of human cultural development.
At this point, they literally could be everywhere here and be doing anything, and we wouldn't know about it - except for the oddball events we call "UFO"s, They could have the technology to edit all human perceptions in realtime, and we'd never know it. As Professor Michio Kaku once said, humans would be like an ant colony living next to a superhighway - the ability to perceive the situation just isn't there.
It's like the Oracle said in "Matrix: Reloaded": "Anytime you've heard stories about vampires, werewolves or aliens, it was some program doing what it's not supposed to."
Even with Drexler's level of nanootech (let alone the possibilities of speculative femtotech or picotech), Transhumans could imbed a Pentium-level processor in every cell in the human body (trillions) which operate as one massive parallel system which could control every perception and reaction of the human brain. In fact, nothing would stop them embedding such processors controlling Drexler's little "cellular robots" into EVERYTHING on the planet - giving them total control of the entire environment humans exist in.
"The Matrix" ain't squat compared to that capability.
Personally I doubt Transhumans would bother. It's merely a speculation to make the point that a Transhuman species with sufficiently ubiquitous nanotechnology and the advanced physics resulting from that capability of accelerated technological development basically could easily behave in a manner that would explain the UFO phenomena and a lot more oddball phenomena besides.
The "alien" explanation is a result of lack of imagination, nothing more. Especially if you believe that the speed of light limits interstellar travel (which I don't, but many UFO skeptics do).
What I think is really happening here is: we're not the top of the food chain. They are. And we're lucky because if they wanted to, they could exterminate the human species in hours.
Retain an attorney, go right down to the nearest Federal courthouse and set up an appointment with a Federal judge. Let him decide how to deal with it. If he tells you to comply, that's it.
No way the FBI can stop you from doing that, regardless of how "secret" the letter is. And if they ARE abusing the Patriot Act, the judge may - not necessarily will - determine that. Or he will refer it up to the "secret" court that deals with these issues.
You might get off the hook, you might not. But it's the only way I see to deal with what are basically "secret police" tactics which are closing in on Gestapo methods.
from companies who have demonstrated that their quality control and testing SUCK.
"Get it while it's hot!"
And burn your installation when you do...
No, thanks, I'll wait for the final release - and maybe the first few weeks - or months - of patches - from Kubuntu before I consider upgrading.
And even then, I may "upgrade" back to Mandriva or openSUSE.
unauthorized content... ...is to take the file name and run a GOOGLE search!
Bwahahahahahah!!!
"their study 'refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species'."
But as a geek Transhumanist, clearly I demonstrate this beyond any question.
Seriously, though, this is no particular surprise to me. I suspect "evolution" - which is a concept ABOUT a phenomena, not a phenomena itself - can use several methods to diversify species. Sex may have been the easiest at some level, other methods at other levels.
So basically what we have here is somebody merely expanding the notion of what "evolution" is and how it works, rather than limiting it to a particular mechanism.
Seems to be what?
You gotta love the American educational system...or the lack of Web spellchecking...one or the other...
First of all, there's nothing to protect them FROM. Sex is not harmful per se.
Second, they shouldn't be "protected" even if there were such a thing - they should be "trained".
Finally, that was never the motivation anyway - that is just a cover for a bunch of religious assholes to impose their "morality" on everyone else and for a bunch of politicians to seize more power of what people can say or do.
I agree that mass distribution - based on new technology - changed the way music is distributed and appreciated. As I've always said, people pay for ACCESS to music, NOT the music itself.
That said, though, the technology will continue to change.
In my view, the future of music is live (or "pre-recorded live" - like the Tonight Show) concert broadcast over the Internet. This will allow bands to maintain more contact with the fans between albums - or even lead to the demise of the album altogether - why wait for an album when you can SEE the new music being made as it happens in jam sessions? - while reducing (if not eliminating) the expense of physical touring.
CDs and file sharing will become cheap loss leaders intended to get you interested in seeing the band live rather than primary means of distribution and revenue.
You're right.
Hell, you can't even distinguish the VOICES of most of the female singers (with the odd exception like Jewel). They all SOUND alike - computer processed to blandness. That's why I prefer listening to the Corrs LIVE performances since Andrea's voice sounds better live than it does overly processed. Most bands sound worse live - the Corrs sound BETTER. (Not to mention the visual appeal!)
The "cookie cutter" approach to manufacturing "stars" is also a major reason the industry is dying. The Corrs are superstars everywhere in the world except the US (around 40 million albums sold). Atlantic never did support them in the US seriously. They got big by touring constantly (a label exec called them "the hardest working band on the label - with the exception of Phil Collins") in every country that was buying their records.
But the industry would rather promote some bimbos whose music is forgettable and whose lives end up in the tabloids every week. I have never understood why Shakira - an act that is basically a rehash of Xavier Cugat's old girlfriend, Charo - gets more press in the US than three gorgeous Irish babes who can actually write their own music, play their own instruments, and sing - as well as being backed up by five excellent professional musicians.
The last time CD sales went down - it was because the companies produced fewer releases. Somebody estimated then that if they'd produced the same number of releases and each release sold only eight thousand copies, sales would have been steady.
I'm sure iTunes and the like are changing the marketplace, but 20% seems like a steep drop likely to produced by factors such as the cited reduction in retail outlets more than file sharing.
But of course, reducing choice is what the music industry appears to be all about these days. Never give a primate the option to screw over his fellows - they will always take it, even it ends up cutting their own throats. That option was the DMCA and related IP law.
Expansive minds respond to expansive art.
Whatever you consider "expansive" to be, anyway...
I listen to everything from movie themes to Def Leppard to Enya to Enigma to Phil Collins to Peter Gabriel to New Age to Metallica to Sisters of Mercy to Billy Idol to Kate Bush to Tori Amos to the Corrs. If it's "expansive" in any way, I tend to like it.
I DO NOT listen to rap, R&B, soul, country, western, hip-hop, jazz, grunge, and most teen bimbo pop (making an exception for JoJo - however, hot little fifteen-year-old that she is, she can't match Andrea Corr - who, BTW, has a solo album called "Ten Feet High" coming out end of May while her siblings take a break and have kids.)
"it's far too complex a piece of software for most of us to apparently even know where to begin to write one."
Heh - this probably won't go over well - but...
Rewrite everything in Java...line for line, if necesssary...then compile it with whatever Java JIT compiler produces even semi-decent code.
I mean, do we REALLY want everything critical in OSS written in C and C++ forever?
A humongous project, I'm sure - but if we have to...
As for GCC being huge, well, it's STILL just a set of compilers. However complex it can be, if various projects can take on an OSS Java VM with class libraries as they have, I'm sure they can take on GCC. May take five years or more, but I'm sure it could be rewritten by somebody - especially if one of the big boys like IBM decided to sponsor the project. It would be peanuts for a big company to finance this sort of thing.
The bottom line: in software, NOBODY is indispensable forever, Lock-in only happens when you don't HAVE TO take the time to prevent it. In the corporate world, this is the preferred mode of operation. Not in OSS - where personal desires take priority.
If the OSS community sees OSS going down and they can't develop what they want because nobody will support it because of the effects of EITHER the license or patents, ALL this stuff will get reinvented and damn fast.
If necessary, it will be done in the rest of the world that doesn't adhere to US IP law. Software development will go back to being an underground hacker activity...
Personally I can't think of a better way to stimulate new development than to screw around with developers with new licenses and patents.
Bring it on!
The problem with Stallmand and the FSF is that they think EVERYBODY in OSS thinks like them - even while they continually separate themselves from "Open Source" by denigrating it over "free software".
Pressuring a peripheral company to make drivers for Linux is best done by the people they get their money directly from - not the end users.
I've said all along that IBM, HP and other companies making money off Linux should be supporting - and even financing - driver development by peripheral companies.
And when corporations finally get fed up with Microsoft and start seriously moving to Linux, we will see the peripheral manufacturers tune change dramatically as Dell and the others decide to start selling fully certified Linux machines to those corporations. It will be Dell, HP, IBM and others who force the peripheral manufacturers to produce drivers, not end users or even Linux distros like Red Hat.
HP is already selling large scale desktop Linux deployments. This situation will increase and force the major retailers to demand Linux drivers of their peripheral suppliers.
The end users really don't need to do anything but wait until clueless corporate management finally learns that Microsoft is to damn expensive (when all costs are taken into account) to support any more.
I'm not.
We need one. Dabo might be it - or not - I don't know yet.
There are migration tools to get Access data into MySQL and PostgreSQL. What we need is an easy to use application development environment that can match the ability to generate screens and reports that Access has - without the crap.
Yeah, somebody else on a previous page referred to it, and I looked it up. It looks interesting.
The really interesting part is that's cross-platform and supports most of the OSS databases.
Linux really needs an easy to use "Access killer". Since Dabo supports MySQL and PostgreSQL and there are migration tools from others to migrate Access to OSS databases, this could be a very valuable product.
I haven't compared it yet to Kexi or the OpenOffice BASE, but if Dabo has the full VFP application development capability at some point, this may be a very valuable addition to an OO consultant's tools for getting clients off that Access POS and onto REAL databases with REAL application development front ends.
Well, the proponents here have given examples of relatively large databases being accessed by multiple users with one second query times, so I'd have to say that you give no evidence that FoxPro is "slow" - even relatively, which it probably is.
As for FoxPro's LANGUAGE speed, as opposed to its DATABASE QUERY speed, you may well be right that it's slow. No surprise there, really. Obviously anything written in a modern computer language is going to outperform something written in a language that was designed to support a particular application. SQR isn't all that fast, either, but PeopleSoft and others use it because it eases report generation from databases.
As for the being "ugly", compared to what? And what does that matter if the business functionality is met? "Uglyness" is not a criteria for business value, last I checked - otherwise the industry would never have gotten past green screens...
Ancient, it is - as a DATABASE.
The current interest in FoxPro appears to be primarily because of its development environment for BUSINESS APPLICATIONS - which its proponents say is better than the rest of the stuff Microsoft offers. I can't comment on that since the last time I used FoxPro was in the early nineties and I have no experience with the rest of the Microsoft crap except for Access - which IS a POS in almost all respects.
I think the interesting question is: does Visual FoxPro application development capabilities compare at all with modern application development environments - including new-fangled stuff like Web 2.0 and Ajax front ends to Web services or Java application frameworks?
IIRC, the DV8 superhero (or supervillains, actually, since they started out as villains) comic book had a nutcase named "Bob" who wandered around with the head of an ex-girlfriend under his arm.
Maybe that's where the authors got the name from.
Quick Google found this.
They convert VFP to Delphi.
Can't find anything else, though.
I did find one reference about translating computer languages that said translating FoxPro to C++ speeds up the programs by 300% - no surprise there.
Might want to look at the Dabo project - they're a bunch of Visual FoxPro people taking the VFP approach to application development, but supporting modern databases over multiple platforms.
AND they're using Python with the wxPython widget set!
I just got referred to them by a post up page, so I just checked out their site. Looks like an interesting project.
"It is also easier to break big queries into multiple smaller queries in Xbase (FoxPro's original language). The equivalent in SQL is sometimes a big run-on sentence, a multi-breaded sandwich."
That is also one of SQR's (Hyperion's SQL/Report Writer combo language) useful abilities (about the only one aside from its report generation abilities). You can in essence "nest" queries in separate procedures. Depending on how good you are with SQL, you can gain some performance advantages by breaking up queries into sets so that each calling set has fewer rows to deal with. More important than performance advantages is the documentation advantage - rather than trying to interpret some multi-page SQL string, you can see everything as a neat hierarchy of calls to simpler SQL "functions".
I agree that FoxPro as a DATABASE is obsolete these days, compared to PostgreSQL or even MySQL.
I think the primary interest in FoxPro these days is its development environment, which was always leagues ahead of dBASE and others, and according to the Dabo people, way ahead of the rest of Microsoft's development environments - at least for application development. I have no idea if this is true since I haven't used any of them lately. I used FoxPro last back in the early nineties.
And here's what the Dabo people have to say about Microsoft and VFP. Interesting comment that reflects some of the posts here.
"An incredible, powerful and grossly under-marketed tool for developing database apps that run in Microsoft Windows only. Its cursor engine is second to none in terms of power, speed and utility. VFP is a fully object-oriented language, with the ability to design classes both in visual tools as well as code-only. Despite neglect from Microsoft, which makes more money selling less capable tools that have higher licensing fees, development continues, with version 9.0 released in late 2004, and work on an update, code-named Sedna, scheduled for a 2006 release."
The Dabo project looks very interesting, especially because it is cross=platform including Linux. I will be watching its development.
Yes, I used FoxPro back in the early nineties. It was a great product under Fox, but when Microsoft purchased it, they supported it only for a while, then let it languish while they pushed Access (an UTTER POS with all the "reliability" and brain-dead design decisions Microsoft is known for).
I was at a computer show in San Francisco standing at the FoxPro booth actually when I heard that Microsoft had bought them.
But I don't think the "Jet" engine came from Foxpro. I might be wrong about that. I think the Access engine and the FoxPro engines were separate for a long time. A quick Google indicates that Microsoft bought Fox for their "Rushmore" database technology which ended up being included in Jet.
Stallman and Bush should be personal buddies.
Perens is a wannabe Stallman, so he's not even relevant here.
None of this makes any sense.
First of all, NOTHING has happened as a result of the Novell-Microsoft deal to actually threaten OSS. NOTHING.
It's ALL speculation.
Second, the FSF and Stallman in particular are fanatics who don't care about anything except being "recognized" for "inventing Linux". Stallman recently wouldn't even talk to a journalist with questions about the GPLv3 - and forbade anyone else inside or OUTSIDE of the FSF to talk to him - unless the journalist agreed FIRST to make all references to Linux as "GNU/Linux."
This tell you everything you need to know about Stallman and the FSF right there.
Third, WHATVER MIGHT happen in the future between Microsoft and the OSS movement, the odds of Microsoft being able to seriously damage the spread of Linux, let alone OSS in general, is virtually nil. First, because much OSS development and Linux adoption will occur in foreign countries who have absolutely NO interest in keeping Bill Gates the richest guy in the world, and second, because anything Microsoft does will simply be circumvented BY CODE. While re-coding large sections of OSS to avoid issues with patents or copyrights might slow the advance of OSS, it might actually speed it up - since even more innovation might be required. In the meantime, nobody is going to shut down the delivery or use of OSS even IF Microsoft were to win some sort of - utterly HYPOTHETICAL - court case declaring that one or more patents were violated by one or more products.
Fourth, if Stallman and crew take the GNU utilities out of action because of GPLv3, the OSS community will simply reinvent them - or better ones - which is long overdue in many cases. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. There's nothing about these utilities that make them invulnerable to change. Any license changes will not impact existing tools anyway. As someone else pointed out, how often does "ls" change - and who cares?
Fifth, what happens when the FSF drives itself to ruin with this crap? Will Stallman start demanding PATENTS on FSF tools? That's at least as likely - since his only interest is CONTROL, NOT "freedom", in fact - as Gates managing to sue all of OSS...
I mean, it isn't even rational to consider this. It's all bullshit. Microsoft did this sort of deal for various reasons of its own, none of which are any more likely to pan out to their benefit than Iraq did for Bush (unless you think as I do that the mess in Iraq WAS Bush's intention - for which an argument could be made.)
All we have here are a bunch of greedy morons on one side trying to work some kind of half-ass deal and a bunch of fanatics on the other side using it to drum up support for their own agenda.
BOTH of them do NOT have the future of OSS and its application to the advancement of IT as their motivations.
Meanwhile, Novell puts out a usable Linux distro. It's irrelevant what their management does as long as they don't fuck up the DISTRO (which isn't unlikely, given how most distros are messed up these days.) Dumping SUSE because of this deal is just stupid.
Bottom line: fergeddaboutit.
Linus is right. The GPLv3 is not a good idea as long as it is being used to push a fanatical agenda with no basis in common sense. He's also right in that it is not likely to matter.
Problem with those notions is that "biotechnology" will be subsumed by nanotechnology.
The modifications made to human nature at that point will make any speculations about "bioethics" irrelevant.
Fukuyama doesn't have a clue basically.
The goal of Transhumanism is to STOP BEING HUMAN - with all the problems being human entails.