because though MySQL has been promising UTF-8 for years, they just don't seem to understand it well enough to ever deliver.
Unicode is announced in MySQL v. 4.1 (I think). Is that for real? I mean: will it really work?
I am currently using MySQL for a web-site. We need to introduce a bunch of new international alphabets (no! please no!). I'm not sure whether to wait for a UTF-8 version of MySQL or to just plain switch to Postgres.
Although in the long-term, it would be nice if we could trust companies enough to use BSD-based licenses, right now we can't trust big business farther than we can throw them.
As a result, a strong and uncompromising stance is the only thing that will protect Free software. And that is the stance you have taken.
Things would be very different today, right now, if the GPL didn't exist, or if it had been allowed to be watered down by a series of little compromises.
Are you sure that they are producing enough electricity from solar panels to actually produce hydrogen!?!
My problem with this hydrogen stuff is the same old question of where you get the electricity to produce the damn stuff. I don't know what the solution is, but it would be too bad to have to build a ton of nuclear reactors. I'm not sure that it's worse than oil dependency, but it sure isn't great.
Yes, which is why Jackson's remedy -- splitting the company up -- was the only one that made sense in the long run. Microsoft has never complied in any meaningful way with any lesser penalty, and there's no reason to believe they ever will.
Right. Money and bundling rules will never be enough.
The proprietary info isn't really the problem, neither is bundling, as such. I mean, in an ideal, non-monopolistic world, bundling wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
The deal is, for lawyers to figure out a legal description of the problem that goes beyond just saying "M$ sucks". And that legal description has to be based in laws that were written long before computers... (Well, I'm thinking of US laws, EU laws are of course newer, but you get the idea...) So the legal case probably won't ever precisely address what seem like the obvious real issues. It is kind of like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.
Wait until the next version of Windows comes out. That way if there is a negative decision for MS, they won't really be selling the incriminated software anymore. Instead they will be selling other software that takes advantage of their monopoly in some other, but equally devious way.
The article really should have tried to do a quick comparison with other package management systems, though I guess that is what/. is going to do anyway.
Did you read the article? They say Echelon "played a key role". I would say that the $27 million they paid to an informant, and the fact that the guy was sick played a larger role.
Exactly. The Echelon bit is just a way of getting us used to having Big Brother around and evening thinking that he is a quite likeable guy, once you get to know him.
While in reality, it was just regular intelligence work that got the job done.
Think of the payoffs they could hand out to informants with what it is costing to keep our soldiers in the Persian Gulf, getting ready to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9-11.
And if Echelon is such a great anti-terr'rist tool, why hasn't it been used to prove that the iraqis were hooked up with Al Quaida?
Is this kind of like the spinning ice-skater effect? (Sorry about lack of precise tech vocabulary...) If you're spinning and you stick your arms out, you slow down, and then pull them back in, you speed up.
If this is going on, then I would be quite reassured, because it would be a drag if the earth just slowed down so much that it stopped. One morning you wake up and the sun isn't moving anymore! 11:00 a.m. for the rest of eternity. Or: worse, the earth stops during the night, and you never even wake up... That would really, really suck.
That is why I am betting on the ice-skater effect to save humanity. Please do not explain why I am wrong.
Why do you think the world has as much peace as it has? It's the called the US Military.
This is not correct. There are currently around 40 armed conflicts going on in the world. Just because no one is shooting mortars at your suburban home does not mean that the world is a peaceful place.
They have this new stuff out, called gasoline. It isn't really like a fuel cell, it takes a special kind of converter that involves explosions and a lot of turning. The advantage over plugging in is that it is easy to carry a lot of the stuff. When you run out, you just pour some more in and keep going.
Two other great advantages:
The only by-product is some smoke (CO, I think, but I'll have to check).
It is derived from some stuff in the ground, mostly in the Middle East, so it's cheap and easy to get!
Somebody should check this out! Do a google on it...
Its also about choice. Its frustrating to go to buy a CD, especially if you are like me and you are old and you want to buy a CD that came out 15 years ago, and you can't find it. Why would I go to the store to look for a CD that I KNOW isn't there, when I can do a quick search and find a reasonably decent copy in 5 to 30 minutes.
It definitely seems that over the last 10 or 15 years, the total selection that you run into in most stores has gone way down. Unless you live in a big city and have accessed to specialized stores, you just keep running into the same junk albums, with rarely anything more than a couple of years old. And if you do have access to a specialized music store, odds are that half of the interesting stuff is used...
It seems to me that the music store chains (esp. those in malls!) have really hurt the market. It's true: to find a lot of stuff, you actually have to go on-line.
The docs are text/XML, but they wrap them with DRM, which is just like any other encryption except that it has meta-info/rules included. To get at the text/XML, you have to be authorized via the DRM system on the machine. Palladium provides hardware that makes the DRM system less vulnerable to hacks.
DRM + Palladium at the hardware level sounds like a hell of a lot of work just to finally get good ol' *nix style file permissions into Windows.
Great! Now I'll know sooner what the latest pop culture craze is so I can "be different" and follow everyone else to stay popular!
Except now popularity will last about 6 hours, tops, before some new wave of pop culture replaces it. By the time craze "X" hits the craze detector, all the really cool people will already be onto craze "Y", which will be detected a few hours later.
It's like the whole "avant-garde/in-style/out-of-style/retro/back-in-s tyle" cycle managed by a Perl script in an infinite loop.
It is kind of like the stock market craze and the theory that "all the information you need to know about a stock is contained in the market itself" (ie. in the stock's chart). Enough people start believing that theory, and the stocks quit behaving rationally.
The analysis only works if your tool doesn't start modifying the data you are analyzing. If this thing ever caught on, it would quickly become meaningless, because everybody wants to be part of whatever craze is going on. Every morning you check which words are hip, you put them on your website... etc. etc.
You are right about feedback: the buzz would become a terrible din. That said, it is a cool idea.
I can't believe all you smart people aren't figuring this thing out.
The consumer gets charged every time (of course). The merchant doesn't pay a flat fee or a percentage to the Peppercoin. P-coin just has some kind of algorithm that allows them to directly pocket some of the transactions, rather than passing them on to the merchant.
I don't know what the advantage of this is, but then again, I didn't even RTFA!
Really, why should you, or anyone else care if Google maintains their lead unless you happen to be employed by them?
I hate brand loyalty myself. It is generally a negative reflex that gets you in trouble. That said, here is why I might still root for Google:
Google happens to be one of those successful anomalies where what is truly the best product from a technical point of view, or from a specialists point of view, or whatever, also happens to be a huge public success and occupy a near monopolistic role. It's kinda refreshing!
Here is what would be "bad", IMHO: some other search engine becomes successful for the wrong reasons that appeal to Joe Sixpack but end up having a negative impact on the web. (I can't really see what that impact could be, but I trust the MBA's to come up with something that would really piss everybody off.)
So while I don't particularly care about the Google corporation, I'm just glad that what seems to be a decent outfit is king of the hill. Capitalism, or even Web Capitalism, doesn't always promote the highest quality product (cf. Micorsoft), so we should be glad when it does.
Or how about the e-mail system (MSN, btw) in Bridget Jones? To build suspense, or to make it more like spoken dialogue, or whatever, the words come out one at a time in huge letters.
Just because I have an old machine doesn't mean I can't make productive use of it. All right, I can't do gaming, but my Pentium 333 machine suffices for everything else.
You are probably more productive since you can't do gaming on your box. I know that any game on whatever box I'm working on definitely cuts way into my productivity (as does access to/.).
Slashdot Mirror
Unicode is announced in MySQL v. 4.1 (I think). Is that for real? I mean: will it really work?
I am currently using MySQL for a web-site. We need to introduce a bunch of new international alphabets (no! please no!). I'm not sure whether to wait for a UTF-8 version of MySQL or to just plain switch to Postgres.
Any thoughts?
Things would be very different today, right now, if the GPL didn't exist, or if it had been allowed to be watered down by a series of little compromises.
That's easy! Get the guy who built the automatic Tetris playing machine (here). If you can play good Tetris, you can obviously drive ok.
This is true. I run Apache, but constantly get all kinds of requests for MS Office stuff.
If you get a new hippocampus, do you have to get a new motherboard too?
My problem with this hydrogen stuff is the same old question of where you get the electricity to produce the damn stuff. I don't know what the solution is, but it would be too bad to have to build a ton of nuclear reactors. I'm not sure that it's worse than oil dependency, but it sure isn't great.
Right. Money and bundling rules will never be enough.
The deal is, for lawyers to figure out a legal description of the problem that goes beyond just saying "M$ sucks". And that legal description has to be based in laws that were written long before computers... (Well, I'm thinking of US laws, EU laws are of course newer, but you get the idea...) So the legal case probably won't ever precisely address what seem like the obvious real issues. It is kind of like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.
Wait until the next version of Windows comes out. That way if there is a negative decision for MS, they won't really be selling the incriminated software anymore. Instead they will be selling other software that takes advantage of their monopoly in some other, but equally devious way.
Good luck to the EU on this one though...
The article really should have tried to do a quick comparison with other package management systems, though I guess that is what /. is going to do anyway.
Exactly. The Echelon bit is just a way of getting us used to having Big Brother around and evening thinking that he is a quite likeable guy, once you get to know him.
While in reality, it was just regular intelligence work that got the job done.
Think of the payoffs they could hand out to informants with what it is costing to keep our soldiers in the Persian Gulf, getting ready to attack a country that had nothing to do with 9-11.
And if Echelon is such a great anti-terr'rist tool, why hasn't it been used to prove that the iraqis were hooked up with Al Quaida?
Is this kind of like the spinning ice-skater effect? (Sorry about lack of precise tech vocabulary...) If you're spinning and you stick your arms out, you slow down, and then pull them back in, you speed up.
If this is going on, then I would be quite reassured, because it would be a drag if the earth just slowed down so much that it stopped. One morning you wake up and the sun isn't moving anymore! 11:00 a.m. for the rest of eternity. Or: worse, the earth stops during the night, and you never even wake up... That would really, really suck.
That is why I am betting on the ice-skater effect to save humanity. Please do not explain why I am wrong.
There is also the problem of suns that orbit other suns. If your "planet" is a light source, then I'm sorry, it ain't no planet in my book.
This is not correct. There are currently around 40 armed conflicts going on in the world. Just because no one is shooting mortars at your suburban home does not mean that the world is a peaceful place.
They have this new stuff out, called gasoline. It isn't really like a fuel cell, it takes a special kind of converter that involves explosions and a lot of turning. The advantage over plugging in is that it is easy to carry a lot of the stuff. When you run out, you just pour some more in and keep going.
Two other great advantages:
Somebody should check this out! Do a google on it...
Business integrity is an oxymoron.
It definitely seems that over the last 10 or 15 years, the total selection that you run into in most stores has gone way down. Unless you live in a big city and have accessed to specialized stores, you just keep running into the same junk albums, with rarely anything more than a couple of years old. And if you do have access to a specialized music store, odds are that half of the interesting stuff is used...
It seems to me that the music store chains (esp. those in malls!) have really hurt the market. It's true: to find a lot of stuff, you actually have to go on-line.
Example of too little protection:
The GPL is outlawed, so that it is illegal to prohibit people reusing your code and not providing the source and the same rights, etc.
DRM + Palladium at the hardware level sounds like a hell of a lot of work just to finally get good ol' *nix style file permissions into Windows.
What I want to know is: where in Word do you type
and ?Except now popularity will last about 6 hours, tops, before some new wave of pop culture replaces it. By the time craze "X" hits the craze detector, all the really cool people will already be onto craze "Y", which will be detected a few hours later.
It's like the whole "avant-garde/in-style/out-of-style/retro/back-in-s tyle" cycle managed by a Perl script in an infinite loop.
The analysis only works if your tool doesn't start modifying the data you are analyzing. If this thing ever caught on, it would quickly become meaningless, because everybody wants to be part of whatever craze is going on. Every morning you check which words are hip, you put them on your website... etc. etc.
You are right about feedback: the buzz would become a terrible din. That said, it is a cool idea.
The consumer gets charged every time (of course). The merchant doesn't pay a flat fee or a percentage to the Peppercoin. P-coin just has some kind of algorithm that allows them to directly pocket some of the transactions, rather than passing them on to the merchant.
I don't know what the advantage of this is, but then again, I didn't even RTFA!
I hate brand loyalty myself. It is generally a negative reflex that gets you in trouble. That said, here is why I might still root for Google:
Google happens to be one of those successful anomalies where what is truly the best product from a technical point of view, or from a specialists point of view, or whatever, also happens to be a huge public success and occupy a near monopolistic role. It's kinda refreshing!
Here is what would be "bad", IMHO: some other search engine becomes successful for the wrong reasons that appeal to Joe Sixpack but end up having a negative impact on the web. (I can't really see what that impact could be, but I trust the MBA's to come up with something that would really piss everybody off.)
So while I don't particularly care about the Google corporation, I'm just glad that what seems to be a decent outfit is king of the hill. Capitalism, or even Web Capitalism, doesn't always promote the highest quality product (cf. Micorsoft), so we should be glad when it does.
Or how about the e-mail system (MSN, btw) in Bridget Jones?
To build suspense, or to make it more like spoken dialogue, or whatever, the words come out one at a time in huge letters.