Reminds me of the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
If this was really true, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because no one would've bothered to fix their slide-rule which "wasn't broke", and then their calculator, and then their Apple IIe -- the Internet wouldn't exist at all.
Remind me again why we need something to fix a potential problem, when we could just wait until it actually becomes a problem?
...and here comes the contradiction...
I realize Comcast is crap,
You don't see that as a problem?
the FCC isn't going to fix that.
Comcast has already throttled and otherwise abused the bandwidth of their users. They have done exactly the kind of bullshit that net neutrality legislation is meant to prevent.
Well, it works both ways. In my entertainment, I'm violence-minded, but in reality, if I were ever to harm another human being, politicians -- especially those who start wars -- would be towards the top of my list.
Businesses only worry about ethics when they might cause a reduction in profits.
I have yet to hear a good argument that this should be the case.
Canada and USA and a lot of other countries trade with Saudia Arabia, I haven't seen them declaring trade embargoes over Saudia Arabia's human rights issues either.
None of which has anything to do with whether RIM is doing the right thing here.
More than that, once installed, it defaults to not being used at all.
You have to actively develop and deploy software which uses and trusts memcached before this is a security hazard.
In other words, while it might be nice if it was secure by default, you now need two groups of people to fuck up at the same time -- system administrators and software developers -- both of whom, as part of their job, are supposed to think about security.
extremely crappy in communicating what they export to the world,
If you're an admin -- particularly one for, say, PBS -- and you're setting up a server, don't you think it'd be worth asking how that server does its communication? And it's not like this is undocumented -- from the wiki page on setting up a server:
By default memcached listens on TCP and UDP ports, both 11211. -l allows you to bind to specific interfaces or IP addresses. Memcached does not spend much, if any, effort in ensuring its defensibility from random internet connections. So you must not expose memcached directly to the internet, or otherwise any untrusted users. Using SASL authentication here helps, but should not be totally trusted.
And maybe I am just "clever", but this was pretty much obvious to me within about two minutes of learning of memcached -- I'm amazed anyone actually ran it this way. Sorry, but this isn't a case of poor UI design -- if you're employed as a system administrator, it's your job to know this shit.
Actually, at the moment, I'm developing this application (for an internship!) without the aid of a DBA or any such thing, which means I'm doing my own autoincrement primary keys.
It also means I have the (possibly unique) perspective of trying to develop the full stack, and seeing just how much useless duplication and make-work there is.
I guess I didn't realize it was quite as bad as you suggest -- that the DBAs were doing autoincrement primary keys. What I suspected, rather, was that the sheer amount of dicking around it takes to even get Oracle to run acceptably (installing WebCenter and ADF both require altering some initial default values), and the actual DBA-type tasks, actually take a significant amount of time, because there's actually that much less that the DB can do to make your life easier.
It's the ultimate extreme of configuration over convention, where even the conventions are mysterious cargo-cult invocations of commands that nobody understands, they just know you have to run them to make it work.
I mean, I actually developed several SQL files, including triggers and stored procedures in addition to table and sequence creation -- all of which were considered legitimate bits of source code, which I stored with my project, and which I spent days developing, debugging, and refining.
And what I discovered was, if what you're describing is accurate, the typical Oracle DBA exists in the Ruby community only as a library call, or more rarely, a script. Which made me all the more frustrated that no such library call or script exists in ADF, only lots of point and click GUIs.
Repeating yourself with a mouse isn't really any less gross than repeating yourself with the keyboard, especially when it results in thousands of lines of XML.
Because in none of my posts I never mentioned HDCP, and yet YOU brought it up.
Your original post was replying to one in which I was clarifying that HDMI is DVI+audio (or, as I've been reminded, DVI-D + audio), in a better form factor, and that HDCP has nothing to do with it. My original point was defending HDMI against people who refuse it simply because they're afraid of HDCP, or of "**AA asslickers", as the guy I was originally responding to was.
So, I guess I brought up the form factor discussion, but the HDCP discussion was there before I was.
Ruby is one of those languages that you learn in addition to another more general language.
Define "general"?
Go is interesting, but also incredibly new, and positions itself as "a systems programming language". Not all programming is systems programming.
V8 is hardly general-purpose -- node.js is interesting, and not the only example, but it also lacks the kind of libraries and bindings you'd expect from a more mature language, at least for that purpose. The biggest problem I have with V8 is the lack of good concurrency primitives, even cooperative multitasking -- it seems to be impossible to pause execution in the middle of a function. (This is, in fact, specific to V8 -- other implementations of JavaScript can do that.)
Lua is designed as a scripting extension to programs written in other languages -- something other languages, like Python and Ruby, can do just as well.
Racket is likely the closest you've suggested, but as a Lisp, it fails in at least one respect: Most people are not likely to be able to pick it up easily, which makes it a difficult choice for, say, a large open source project, or an open source project we would like to become large.
Ruby has much easier syntax, all sorts of Lisp-y features (closures and metaprogramming are easy), all sorts of native bindings (and they're easy to write), and a "killer app" on top of it all. The only thing it's missing as a "general" language is performance, and it's not bad.
It's a well known snarky tactic. It's sophomoric and lends nothing to civilized discussion.
I think actual citations, when they appear, lend quite a lot to a civilized discussion. Credibility, for one.
I can't speak for others, but I ask for sources because I want to know whether or not a claim is true. I enjoy speculation as much as the next guy, but an informed discussion is a much better use of my time than pure speculation.
It may be well known as "snarky", but that doesn't immediately make it invalid.
If you think otherwise, than maybe you should take a communication class or something.
I'm likely to take such a class regardless, but I already know a bald appeal to authority when I see one.
A "citation needed" isn't necessarily an appeal to authority, by the way -- it's a simple request for evidence.
Yes it is, or at least it is in the APA Writing Style. You don't have to cite what is commonly accepted as truth.
Which is not the same as "obvious to me" -- and if your entire thesis is to establish something as truth, stating "It's obvious" isn't good enough.
In particular, if I'm asking for a citation, it may be my own ignorance of the matter, but I don't ask for citations of things that I don't know. I don't know that this is the best university system in the world, which is why I asked.
I'm also not sure why APA is relevant, particularly when the [citation needed] markup is from Wikipedia, which has its own guidelines.
If people don't want to accept that US Universities are some of the best in the world, then they are just being contrarian. No citation needed.
That is almost, but not quite, fractally wrong.
First, you're either backpedaling or strawmanning. The originally contested claim was, "it is likely the best university system in the world." Your current claim is, "US Universities are some of the best in the world." Your claim, if true, would not be sufficient to establish the original claim.
Also, your new claim is either vague or outright wrong. If you are claiming that all US universities are among the best in the world, it's easy to find a counterexample. If you are only claiming that some are, how many are we talking about? It could very well be the case that we only have one good university (which is among the best in the world), and the rest are all mediocre or outright bad. It could also be that every individual university in the US aside from Patriot Bible is better than the rest of the world combined. I doubt either of these is true, but you've told me nothing about where your position lies between those extremes (assuming it is).
But even if your new claim were true, it does not, by itself, say anything about anyone who rejects it. Certainly, people who reject evolution have more reasons to do so than simply being contrarian -- and those are people who outright reject the idea. There are others who don't want to accept it, but are forced to.
Similarly, whether or not someone wants to accept a claim may not have any bearing on whether or not they are willing to question it. I would like to believe that the US has the best universities in the world, but because I want to know, I question. (There is also the fact that my beliefs are not a function of will in the first place, but that is another discussion.)
And because a lengthy analysis and justification like the above shouldn't be required for a casual request for information, I simply say: [citation needed]
I know I'm buried, but I don't know where I can legitimately inject this...
Spend 15 minutes here. If you understand what's going on, you can start taking it more seriously -- pick a language/community (I recommend Ruby), ask around for the best books on the language, and get the fundamentals of the language down. This may not be as instantly gratifying, since you'll be on a commandline most of the time, but it'll work. Then move on to frameworks, pick a solid open source one, and build what you want to build.
Oh, and learn Git, somewhere between learning the language and learning the framework. You're going to need version control, and distributed means it's easier to start with, and it scales. Plus you'll be able to use Github.
Or you could learn just enough to put something together with PHP, but the result is going to be yet another program by a non-technical person. That means bugs, vulnerabilities, inefficiency, classic design mistakes, unmaintainability, and just generally bad things.
The question is, really: Do you want to become technical? Or are you just looking to cut out the technical middleman?
First, SQLite has a niche that isn't going away anytime soon. As a trivial example, it's perfect for anki.
Second, the last thing you want is to have to become a DBA or a sysadmin, or pay for shared hosting, just to get started learning something. SQLite is available as a single command, which can be downloaded as a single binary on Linux, OSX, and Windows (unless it's already in your distro/repository/OS), and databases are just single files, with no maintenance other than (maybe) the occasional vacuum.
The downside is that, while SQLite is easy and intuitive (with great reference documentation) for anyone who already knows SQL, it probably doesn't have many intro books written for it.
Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.
Erm... wait... what?
Wouldn't that be, the software they've written in front of MySQL that knows how to use memcached? I don't see why you'd have to touch the MySQL code itself.
At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle,
Interesting, because Amazon also does Dynamo, which is very decidedly not Oracle.
I can see a few places where it might make sense, because if you have the kind of load to need Oracle, it may be cheaper to pay for Oracle and a DBA to develop something completely custom.
But you don't necessarily need to -- there are all kinds of storage engines out there already, free and otherwise.
I've got to second that. It's not just that most of the projects which use it don't need it, it's that it's a kludge on top of a kludge on top of a kludge that makes IBM's zOS look good.
It's not just that DBAs perform tasks which would otherwise be done by developers or sysadmins. It's that Oracle seems to almost actively encourage the DBA as a profession. A trivial example is the autoincrement column -- even sqlite has one built in, but no, on Oracle, you have to create a sequence first, then that primary key column, then a trigger that inserts the next value from the sequence.
And it's not just the database. The kind of products Oracle tends to acquire seem to be structured to encourage huge apps, any one part of which can be managed by an entire department. I'm just finishing up a project in ADF for the summer, and I've had to use seven distinct languages (a conservative estimate) to do it, woven into a stack as many layers deep.
And you'll have to implement hundreds of random hacks to bring it up to the level of what you get for free with other, competing products, and at the end of it all... My application crashed WebLogic.
No, let me say that again.
My application made WebLogic segfault.
WTF? The entire fucking stack is in a JVM, except the Oracle database itself. How do you segfault that? Unless they're running native code somewhere to optimize it, which would be really sad, considering it takes longer for my app to spin up (once WebLogic is running), and takes at least four to five times as much RAM, as a comparable Ruby on Rails app. But comparisons aside, I managed to segfault WebLogic with application code. I wasn't doing anything that tricky, I just slightly misconfigured ADF...
So not only are they huge, bloated, make-work products, in the sense that their entire purpose seems to be to create little niches of niches of jobs supporting this Enterprise-Level Shit, but it doesn't fucking work.
Yet they sell like hotcakes, because they're enterprisey, whatever that means.
I don't think they're good at marketing in the traditional sense. At this point, I really, honestly, truly suspect blackjack and hookers are responsible for these kinds of business decisions, because I can't see a rational agent wasting that much time and money doing it so horribly wrong.
Anyone who says [citation needed] is not asking for a citation. They are saying "you are wrong".
Instead of pointing out your fallacy, I'll just flat-out tell you: You are wrong. I am a counterexample -- most of the time, when I say "citation needed", I mean exactly what you've suggested -- I doubt what you said, could you please present some evidence?
I am not saying "you are wrong" -- I can doubt, but be open to changing my mind if I receive some new evidence. If I was certain you were wrong, I would've said "Bullshit!" instead.
Besides, things that are obvious do not require a citation just because you disagree with it. Water is wet, no citation needed.
"Water is wet" is a tautology, so no, no citation needed there. But once upon a time, it was also "obvious" that white people were inherently smarter and better. Today, it's still "obvious" that atheists are depressed and immoral. Obviousness is not the metric of whether or not a citation is needed.
I just want you to understand where you're going to end up if you do -- and I don't think it's worth it. I don't think it's effective to essentially remove yourself from technology and society to try to change technology and society.
You didn't answer a single one of my questions. Let's start with this one: Are you actually running gNewSense? If not, why not?
Once you understand the reasons you don't run gNewSense, you'll have an understanding of why I'm willing to compromise and buy hardware which licenses DRM.
If you do run it, we'll just have to work a bit harder to find where you're currently paying them and draw a similar analogy.
I should explain my reasoning a little more, though: I just bought a new monitor. I made sure it supports HDMI, and it does support HDCP. But it's also a fairly high quality monitor, it does exactly what I need. It's likely to make me a more efficient student, and a more efficient software developer when I go back to work.
That's likely to give me more money, which means more money I can spend on independent artists. I can and do buy things like this, and I'm sure my contribution to any one developer involved is more than my recent indirect contribution to HDCP licensing.
And that assumes this money would go to the MPAA -- it doesn't. It goes to Intel, and I run Intel processors lately, too. Should I audit Intel and AMD to find out which of them has fewer ties to the **AA before I buy a CPU? Is ARM any better? Or should I forgo CPUs entirely?
Again, I'm not against boycots, in principal -- I can and do boycott Sony. It's just hard to find a good, new monitor these days that doesn't support HDCP, and it is important for me to have a good monitor -- so I'm stuck.
Are you trolling, or did you actually just do this?
I like HDMI. I just spent two posts explaining why I like HDMI, and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with HDCP.
So why would you ever assume I was defending HDCP?
I agree with you entirely on these points:
Why does it need to exist at all? What is the benefit in having extra encryption applied that does absolutely nothing to improve the quality of the experience?
What does that have to do with what we were talking about?
Again: HDCP works just as well over DVI as HDMI. So if you don't want it, it's exactly as much a reason to avoid DVI as HDMI -- and DisplayPort too, while you're at it. You may as well go back to VGA.
I haven't read Nietzche, so I was avoiding this...
I just looked it up -- I have to preface this with, I don't have time to read the entire thing today, but glancing through, I honestly can't find what you're talking about. The closest seems to be the relationship he describes -- that science "still" cares about truth, and the relationship between science and the ascetic ideal.
He never claims Christianity is the origin of these ideas about truth. He also refers me to other texts to explain what he means by this "ascetic ideal."
And he doesn't explain how he knows these things. He has citations, but he doesn't seem to tie his assertions in the text at all.
Ultimately, it boils down to this: I wasn't asking for a source that agrees with you, no matter how respected. I was asking why they agree with you -- how do you know this, what facts in history are you referring to when you say "The History of Science"?
Umm yeah except one small issue. most new devices and video cards do support DRM and we know windows does.
My computer also supports me replying to you with Goatse. It's not what it's capable of, it's what it's actually used for.
So yes it is an issue, especially when the riaa/mpaa whatever start flagging discs to be unplayable on anything not conforming to their drm.
Then don't buy the discs.
I don't understand why you'd refuse to buy a cable (and yeah, you better refuse DVI, too, so what kind of cable are you using?) because it could one day support DRM. May as well refuse to use a general-purpose computer at all -- exactly what you need to avoid DRM -- because someone could sell you media that can only be played with Windows Media Player. (Sure, it'll be cracked...)
But that's the dirt-simple solution: I tell ordinary users to use DVI or HDMI for video quality, and crank it up to the native resolution of the display -- computers are generally better at scaling than TVs are. I also tell them not to invest in Blu-Ray, Amazon Watch Now, or other such DRM-laden formats. (My position on Blu-Ray would change if a significant number of content producers started producing DRM-free Blu-Ray discs -- which is certainly possible.)
To fight this battle at the level of the fucking cable is retarded, especially when HDCP isn't even about HDMI, and works just as well on DVI and DisplayPort -- what, are you going to use VGA? No, what we want is the actual media, before compression, to be DRM-free. If they want to encrypt that on the way to the TV, they can knock themselves out, I don't care what happens to it once it's out of my box -- I care about being able to edit, re-encode, transfer, and otherwise mess with the content before it ever gets to my video card.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
If this was really true, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because no one would've bothered to fix their slide-rule which "wasn't broke", and then their calculator, and then their Apple IIe -- the Internet wouldn't exist at all.
Remind me again why we need something to fix a potential problem, when we could just wait until it actually becomes a problem?
...and here comes the contradiction...
I realize Comcast is crap,
You don't see that as a problem?
the FCC isn't going to fix that.
Comcast has already throttled and otherwise abused the bandwidth of their users. They have done exactly the kind of bullshit that net neutrality legislation is meant to prevent.
I have absolutely no evidence for this suggestion, but might there also be a connection to high school students with too much time on their hands?
The waves used here are non-visible, sure, but they're shorter than microwaves, closer to what's usually called infrared.
So we likely call them lasers because no one wants to figure out how you'd pronounce iaser?
Well, it works both ways. In my entertainment, I'm violence-minded, but in reality, if I were ever to harm another human being, politicians -- especially those who start wars -- would be towards the top of my list.
Why should RIM care if they make sales?
Because it's the right thing to do.
Businesses only worry about ethics when they might cause a reduction in profits.
I have yet to hear a good argument that this should be the case.
Canada and USA and a lot of other countries trade with Saudia Arabia, I haven't seen them declaring trade embargoes over Saudia Arabia's human rights issues either.
None of which has anything to do with whether RIM is doing the right thing here.
More than that, once installed, it defaults to not being used at all.
You have to actively develop and deploy software which uses and trusts memcached before this is a security hazard.
In other words, while it might be nice if it was secure by default, you now need two groups of people to fuck up at the same time -- system administrators and software developers -- both of whom, as part of their job, are supposed to think about security.
extremely crappy in communicating what they export to the world,
If you're an admin -- particularly one for, say, PBS -- and you're setting up a server, don't you think it'd be worth asking how that server does its communication? And it's not like this is undocumented -- from the wiki page on setting up a server:
By default memcached listens on TCP and UDP ports, both 11211. -l allows you to bind to specific interfaces or IP addresses. Memcached does not spend much, if any, effort in ensuring its defensibility from random internet connections. So you must not expose memcached directly to the internet, or otherwise any untrusted users. Using SASL authentication here helps, but should not be totally trusted.
And maybe I am just "clever", but this was pretty much obvious to me within about two minutes of learning of memcached -- I'm amazed anyone actually ran it this way. Sorry, but this isn't a case of poor UI design -- if you're employed as a system administrator, it's your job to know this shit.
Actually, at the moment, I'm developing this application (for an internship!) without the aid of a DBA or any such thing, which means I'm doing my own autoincrement primary keys.
It also means I have the (possibly unique) perspective of trying to develop the full stack, and seeing just how much useless duplication and make-work there is.
I guess I didn't realize it was quite as bad as you suggest -- that the DBAs were doing autoincrement primary keys. What I suspected, rather, was that the sheer amount of dicking around it takes to even get Oracle to run acceptably (installing WebCenter and ADF both require altering some initial default values), and the actual DBA-type tasks, actually take a significant amount of time, because there's actually that much less that the DB can do to make your life easier.
It's the ultimate extreme of configuration over convention, where even the conventions are mysterious cargo-cult invocations of commands that nobody understands, they just know you have to run them to make it work.
I mean, I actually developed several SQL files, including triggers and stored procedures in addition to table and sequence creation -- all of which were considered legitimate bits of source code, which I stored with my project, and which I spent days developing, debugging, and refining.
And what I discovered was, if what you're describing is accurate, the typical Oracle DBA exists in the Ruby community only as a library call, or more rarely, a script. Which made me all the more frustrated that no such library call or script exists in ADF, only lots of point and click GUIs.
Repeating yourself with a mouse isn't really any less gross than repeating yourself with the keyboard, especially when it results in thousands of lines of XML.
Because in none of my posts I never mentioned HDCP, and yet YOU brought it up.
Your original post was replying to one in which I was clarifying that HDMI is DVI+audio (or, as I've been reminded, DVI-D + audio), in a better form factor, and that HDCP has nothing to do with it. My original point was defending HDMI against people who refuse it simply because they're afraid of HDCP, or of "**AA asslickers", as the guy I was originally responding to was.
So, I guess I brought up the form factor discussion, but the HDCP discussion was there before I was.
Ruby is one of those languages that you learn in addition to another more general language.
Define "general"?
Go is interesting, but also incredibly new, and positions itself as "a systems programming language". Not all programming is systems programming.
V8 is hardly general-purpose -- node.js is interesting, and not the only example, but it also lacks the kind of libraries and bindings you'd expect from a more mature language, at least for that purpose. The biggest problem I have with V8 is the lack of good concurrency primitives, even cooperative multitasking -- it seems to be impossible to pause execution in the middle of a function. (This is, in fact, specific to V8 -- other implementations of JavaScript can do that.)
Lua is designed as a scripting extension to programs written in other languages -- something other languages, like Python and Ruby, can do just as well.
Racket is likely the closest you've suggested, but as a Lisp, it fails in at least one respect: Most people are not likely to be able to pick it up easily, which makes it a difficult choice for, say, a large open source project, or an open source project we would like to become large.
Ruby has much easier syntax, all sorts of Lisp-y features (closures and metaprogramming are easy), all sorts of native bindings (and they're easy to write), and a "killer app" on top of it all. The only thing it's missing as a "general" language is performance, and it's not bad.
Ruby's performance is no good - it's worse than PHP.
No, it's not. Rails may be worse than vanilla PHP, but Ruby is not worse than PHP, and Rails is significantly better than CakePHP.
It's a well known snarky tactic. It's sophomoric and lends nothing to civilized discussion.
I think actual citations, when they appear, lend quite a lot to a civilized discussion. Credibility, for one.
I can't speak for others, but I ask for sources because I want to know whether or not a claim is true. I enjoy speculation as much as the next guy, but an informed discussion is a much better use of my time than pure speculation.
It may be well known as "snarky", but that doesn't immediately make it invalid.
If you think otherwise, than maybe you should take a communication class or something.
I'm likely to take such a class regardless, but I already know a bald appeal to authority when I see one.
A "citation needed" isn't necessarily an appeal to authority, by the way -- it's a simple request for evidence.
Yes it is, or at least it is in the APA Writing Style. You don't have to cite what is commonly accepted as truth.
Which is not the same as "obvious to me" -- and if your entire thesis is to establish something as truth, stating "It's obvious" isn't good enough.
In particular, if I'm asking for a citation, it may be my own ignorance of the matter, but I don't ask for citations of things that I don't know. I don't know that this is the best university system in the world, which is why I asked.
I'm also not sure why APA is relevant, particularly when the [citation needed] markup is from Wikipedia, which has its own guidelines.
If people don't want to accept that US Universities are some of the best in the world, then they are just being contrarian. No citation needed.
That is almost, but not quite, fractally wrong.
First, you're either backpedaling or strawmanning. The originally contested claim was, "it is likely the best university system in the world." Your current claim is, "US Universities are some of the best in the world." Your claim, if true, would not be sufficient to establish the original claim.
Also, your new claim is either vague or outright wrong. If you are claiming that all US universities are among the best in the world, it's easy to find a counterexample. If you are only claiming that some are, how many are we talking about? It could very well be the case that we only have one good university (which is among the best in the world), and the rest are all mediocre or outright bad. It could also be that every individual university in the US aside from Patriot Bible is better than the rest of the world combined. I doubt either of these is true, but you've told me nothing about where your position lies between those extremes (assuming it is).
But even if your new claim were true, it does not, by itself, say anything about anyone who rejects it. Certainly, people who reject evolution have more reasons to do so than simply being contrarian -- and those are people who outright reject the idea. There are others who don't want to accept it, but are forced to.
Similarly, whether or not someone wants to accept a claim may not have any bearing on whether or not they are willing to question it. I would like to believe that the US has the best universities in the world, but because I want to know, I question. (There is also the fact that my beliefs are not a function of will in the first place, but that is another discussion.)
And because a lengthy analysis and justification like the above shouldn't be required for a casual request for information, I simply say: [citation needed]
I know I'm buried, but I don't know where I can legitimately inject this...
Spend 15 minutes here. If you understand what's going on, you can start taking it more seriously -- pick a language/community (I recommend Ruby), ask around for the best books on the language, and get the fundamentals of the language down. This may not be as instantly gratifying, since you'll be on a commandline most of the time, but it'll work. Then move on to frameworks, pick a solid open source one, and build what you want to build.
Oh, and learn Git, somewhere between learning the language and learning the framework. You're going to need version control, and distributed means it's easier to start with, and it scales. Plus you'll be able to use Github.
Or you could learn just enough to put something together with PHP, but the result is going to be yet another program by a non-technical person. That means bugs, vulnerabilities, inefficiency, classic design mistakes, unmaintainability, and just generally bad things.
The question is, really: Do you want to become technical? Or are you just looking to cut out the technical middleman?
You don't have to install anything to use PHP (let your webhoster take care of that),
There are hosts out there which provide Ruby on Rails stacks, so this is irrelevant.
you can see the results immediately in not just a sandbox but *in your actual browser*
You can do that with any language. In fact, this is even faster to set up. Seriously.
For two reasons:
First, SQLite has a niche that isn't going away anytime soon. As a trivial example, it's perfect for anki.
Second, the last thing you want is to have to become a DBA or a sysadmin, or pay for shared hosting, just to get started learning something. SQLite is available as a single command, which can be downloaded as a single binary on Linux, OSX, and Windows (unless it's already in your distro/repository/OS), and databases are just single files, with no maintenance other than (maybe) the occasional vacuum.
The downside is that, while SQLite is easy and intuitive (with great reference documentation) for anyone who already knows SQL, it probably doesn't have many intro books written for it.
Facebook does not really use MySQL but rather MySQL they've rewritten to use as a backing store for their gazillion memcache servers.
Erm... wait... what?
Wouldn't that be, the software they've written in front of MySQL that knows how to use memcached? I don't see why you'd have to touch the MySQL code itself.
At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and telcos use Oracle,
Interesting, because Amazon also does Dynamo, which is very decidedly not Oracle.
I can see a few places where it might make sense, because if you have the kind of load to need Oracle, it may be cheaper to pay for Oracle and a DBA to develop something completely custom.
But you don't necessarily need to -- there are all kinds of storage engines out there already, free and otherwise.
I've got to second that. It's not just that most of the projects which use it don't need it, it's that it's a kludge on top of a kludge on top of a kludge that makes IBM's zOS look good.
It's not just that DBAs perform tasks which would otherwise be done by developers or sysadmins. It's that Oracle seems to almost actively encourage the DBA as a profession. A trivial example is the autoincrement column -- even sqlite has one built in, but no, on Oracle, you have to create a sequence first, then that primary key column, then a trigger that inserts the next value from the sequence.
And it's not just the database. The kind of products Oracle tends to acquire seem to be structured to encourage huge apps, any one part of which can be managed by an entire department. I'm just finishing up a project in ADF for the summer, and I've had to use seven distinct languages (a conservative estimate) to do it, woven into a stack as many layers deep.
And you'll have to implement hundreds of random hacks to bring it up to the level of what you get for free with other, competing products, and at the end of it all... My application crashed WebLogic.
No, let me say that again.
My application made WebLogic segfault.
WTF? The entire fucking stack is in a JVM, except the Oracle database itself. How do you segfault that? Unless they're running native code somewhere to optimize it, which would be really sad, considering it takes longer for my app to spin up (once WebLogic is running), and takes at least four to five times as much RAM, as a comparable Ruby on Rails app. But comparisons aside, I managed to segfault WebLogic with application code. I wasn't doing anything that tricky, I just slightly misconfigured ADF...
So not only are they huge, bloated, make-work products, in the sense that their entire purpose seems to be to create little niches of niches of jobs supporting this Enterprise-Level Shit, but it doesn't fucking work.
Yet they sell like hotcakes, because they're enterprisey, whatever that means.
I don't think they're good at marketing in the traditional sense. At this point, I really, honestly, truly suspect blackjack and hookers are responsible for these kinds of business decisions, because I can't see a rational agent wasting that much time and money doing it so horribly wrong.
You mean, markets which distribute web apps exclusively?
Anyone who says [citation needed] is not asking for a citation. They are saying "you are wrong".
Instead of pointing out your fallacy, I'll just flat-out tell you: You are wrong. I am a counterexample -- most of the time, when I say "citation needed", I mean exactly what you've suggested -- I doubt what you said, could you please present some evidence?
I am not saying "you are wrong" -- I can doubt, but be open to changing my mind if I receive some new evidence. If I was certain you were wrong, I would've said "Bullshit!" instead.
Besides, things that are obvious do not require a citation just because you disagree with it. Water is wet, no citation needed.
"Water is wet" is a tautology, so no, no citation needed there. But once upon a time, it was also "obvious" that white people were inherently smarter and better. Today, it's still "obvious" that atheists are depressed and immoral. Obviousness is not the metric of whether or not a citation is needed.
...erm... wouldn't we expect China to be disproportionately represented, then?
So I should stop trying?
I just want you to understand where you're going to end up if you do -- and I don't think it's worth it. I don't think it's effective to essentially remove yourself from technology and society to try to change technology and society.
You didn't answer a single one of my questions. Let's start with this one: Are you actually running gNewSense? If not, why not?
Once you understand the reasons you don't run gNewSense, you'll have an understanding of why I'm willing to compromise and buy hardware which licenses DRM.
If you do run it, we'll just have to work a bit harder to find where you're currently paying them and draw a similar analogy.
I should explain my reasoning a little more, though: I just bought a new monitor. I made sure it supports HDMI, and it does support HDCP. But it's also a fairly high quality monitor, it does exactly what I need. It's likely to make me a more efficient student, and a more efficient software developer when I go back to work.
That's likely to give me more money, which means more money I can spend on independent artists. I can and do buy things like this, and I'm sure my contribution to any one developer involved is more than my recent indirect contribution to HDCP licensing.
And that assumes this money would go to the MPAA -- it doesn't. It goes to Intel, and I run Intel processors lately, too. Should I audit Intel and AMD to find out which of them has fewer ties to the **AA before I buy a CPU? Is ARM any better? Or should I forgo CPUs entirely?
Again, I'm not against boycots, in principal -- I can and do boycott Sony. It's just hard to find a good, new monitor these days that doesn't support HDCP, and it is important for me to have a good monitor -- so I'm stuck.
Are you trolling, or did you actually just do this?
I like HDMI. I just spent two posts explaining why I like HDMI, and why it has nothing whatsoever to do with HDCP.
So why would you ever assume I was defending HDCP?
I agree with you entirely on these points:
Why does it need to exist at all? What is the benefit in having extra encryption applied that does absolutely nothing to improve the quality of the experience?
What does that have to do with what we were talking about?
Again: HDCP works just as well over DVI as HDMI. So if you don't want it, it's exactly as much a reason to avoid DVI as HDMI -- and DisplayPort too, while you're at it. You may as well go back to VGA.
I haven't read Nietzche, so I was avoiding this...
I just looked it up -- I have to preface this with, I don't have time to read the entire thing today, but glancing through, I honestly can't find what you're talking about. The closest seems to be the relationship he describes -- that science "still" cares about truth, and the relationship between science and the ascetic ideal.
He never claims Christianity is the origin of these ideas about truth. He also refers me to other texts to explain what he means by this "ascetic ideal."
And he doesn't explain how he knows these things. He has citations, but he doesn't seem to tie his assertions in the text at all.
Ultimately, it boils down to this: I wasn't asking for a source that agrees with you, no matter how respected. I was asking why they agree with you -- how do you know this, what facts in history are you referring to when you say "The History of Science"?
Umm yeah except one small issue. most new devices and video cards do support DRM and we know windows does.
My computer also supports me replying to you with Goatse. It's not what it's capable of, it's what it's actually used for.
So yes it is an issue, especially when the riaa/mpaa whatever start flagging discs to be unplayable on anything not conforming to their drm.
Then don't buy the discs.
I don't understand why you'd refuse to buy a cable (and yeah, you better refuse DVI, too, so what kind of cable are you using?) because it could one day support DRM. May as well refuse to use a general-purpose computer at all -- exactly what you need to avoid DRM -- because someone could sell you media that can only be played with Windows Media Player. (Sure, it'll be cracked...)
But that's the dirt-simple solution: I tell ordinary users to use DVI or HDMI for video quality, and crank it up to the native resolution of the display -- computers are generally better at scaling than TVs are. I also tell them not to invest in Blu-Ray, Amazon Watch Now, or other such DRM-laden formats. (My position on Blu-Ray would change if a significant number of content producers started producing DRM-free Blu-Ray discs -- which is certainly possible.)
To fight this battle at the level of the fucking cable is retarded, especially when HDCP isn't even about HDMI, and works just as well on DVI and DisplayPort -- what, are you going to use VGA? No, what we want is the actual media, before compression, to be DRM-free. If they want to encrypt that on the way to the TV, they can knock themselves out, I don't care what happens to it once it's out of my box -- I care about being able to edit, re-encode, transfer, and otherwise mess with the content before it ever gets to my video card.