Much of this genetic information and bio-technology will fall into the hands of new corporatist genetic conglomerates, who already promote conformity and homogeneity and who already wage war against individualism and diversity of expression.
Huh? When you make a statement like this, Jon, you just *have* to back it up with something. Which 'corporatist genetic conglomerates' are waging wars against individualism and diversity of expression? What have they done? You shouldn't make broad, silly comments like that and call it journalism.
If They (whoever you are refering to) are trying to force genetic conformity on us, please give us some shred of evidence! Otherwise, it sounds as though you were just looking through the thesauraus for scary words.
I don't think it's so clear cut that there is an anti-trust case here. Patents are *supposed* to give the owner a time-limited monopoly, so Rambus (if it sucessfully defends the patents, which it has appeared to) isn't doing anything illegal.
Well, in my town, you can pay speeding/parking tickets over the phone with your credit card, and Winnipeg is usually about 5 years or so behind most tech trends, so I imagine it is pretty common.
In fact, for almost all of my bills (including taxes), I've been able to set up either automatic payments from my bank account or my visa. The Canadian gov has had direct deposit for tax returns and GST rebates for years as well so between all that the lines have been slain (for those who wanted them to be) for years before the web even became trendy.
The telephone system and credit cards are the real line slayers and have been around for a long time. Paying from a webpage is just a new variation.
Seriously, it's first sort most of us learn, and it has the cutest name.
One of the profs who teaches an algorithms course at my university always shows his class a program that displays performance graphs as various sorts chew through large data sets. Invariably, most of the students cheer for bubble sort, even though we know it will loose. Favouring the under-dog, I guess:)
I don't know much about the Fortran algorithm, but since Fortran was the first compiled language, I imagine the ideas about compilation and optimization were pretty revolutionary at the time. We may have better ways of doing now-a-days, but it got the whole ball of wax rolling.
Yeah, but in the spirit of things, The Offspring is doing the same thing. Music has been traded off of newsgroups, IRC and webpages for a lot longer than Napster. The main difference is that Napster, as a company, has a really smug attitude. "Oh...we would never dream of encouraging music piracy." The legal grounds may be more grey, but Napster is attempting to make money through the theft of other people's hard work.
The Offspring is doing the same thing (although they aren't seeking millions of dollars in venture capital for the 'Napster T-Shirt Project'). I think band was trying to test and see it Napster really has the same, "It's all about sharing and community" attitude that many of its users do.
Well....I used Pascal in my first couple of years, and I don't seem to have been hampered by it. Thing is, your courses should be teaching you programming concept..."How to program", not "How to program in Language X". If you know one language reasonably well, it is generally pretty easy to jump between languages. Unless you go to an odd-ball like APL:)
My university switched to Java from C++ because of the perception that it is easy to learn, and because they were having problems will people using different compilers. The profs were answering more questions about compiler warts than programming. At least in Java, the warts are relatively standard across various platforms:)
It's also easier for the profs to do interesting graphics assignments, small games n' stuff that are more interesting to most people than, say, printing out Fibonacci numbers.
Anyhoo, my point is, the language taught in the first two years doesn't make a lot of difference.
Actually, Ralph Klein (premier of Alberta, for non-cdns out there) did speak out. He thought they should use the system to datamine for criminal activity. I think Ontaria's premier spoke out against it.
The thing is, the federal government has a privacy commissioner (Bruce Phillips is the guy who opened up the whole ball of wax) and operates under fairly strict restrictions vis a vis data collection and use.
The provinces do not have the same restrictions, and most of them don't have their own privacy commissioner. Bruce Phillips' jurisdiction only covers the federal government, he cannot investigate privacy concerns about provincial governments or private corporations. The provinces, could quite legally collect much more detailed databases and use them for whatever they want. The federal government cannot, wihtout breaking laws anyway.
They aren't getting rid of it. They have said that quite plainly. What is happening is that the database is being broken into pieces so that the data cannot be traced back to individuals.
They need the data exactly for why you said (though it really isn't as sinister as you imply) - because a government needs data on it's citizens to function. They can't blindly assign dollars to programs without studies.
The major complaint (by those who were complaining) was that the information was being gathering for research purposes, but the data could still be traced back to individuals.
HRDC is more or less in charge of all social programs (including employment insurance, pension,...), so it needs to do research to determine the impact of it's programs and where they are needed. Governments need stuff like this to run the programs. The problem was that the data could be traced to individuals and mined.
As it happens though, Canada has a privacy comissioner who's job it is to watch for stuff like this and reasonably strict laws about how the government can gather and use data about its citizens.
Yeah, but he's also claiming his patent covers *all* client/server database models, and that must be nonense. Sybase and Oracle have been around since at least the 80s. Heck, wasn't Sabre using client/server interactions in the 60s?
I wonder what sort of smells they'll come up with to go along with software. Java is a pretty easy call, but what should they use for M$? Freshly print money, or brimstone:)
But asking people to respect copyright laws isn't exactly on par with government sponsored genocide. It isn't even close. If you follow my logic, then my statement is much more akin to me complaining that the Gestapo are searching *my* attic because other people are hiding jews. But, as I said, I would not consider hiding jewish people from persecution the same thing as stealing music. But your "logic", in fact, hiding a nazi war criminal in your attic from the police is the same as hiding jewish people from the german government. Good analogy.
I wasn't rejecting any principles of causality or personal responsiblity. I simply stated that if lawmakers feels compelled to apply restrictions to how people use a service (ie the internet) because a number of people are openly flaunting the law, and stealing from others, then I would be pissed at the people breaking the law, not the government.
I suppose a few generations ago, your ancestors were complaining that the government was going to make stealing cars illegal because that might compel them to actually pay for one?
But it is criminal activity that attracts the attention of the government. The medium is affected, always. Consider the medium of transfering, say, *me* from one city to another. If I choose to use an airplane, I be subjected to a metal detactor, a possible search and my luggage will be sniffed at by dogs. Why? Because other people have used flight for illegal purposes (terrorism and transporting drugs).
If the government starts imposing restrictions on how I use the Internet, I am going to blame Napster, not the law makers.
Search Engines, IRC and the like haven't been targeted yet because while they may be used to violate copyright laws, that isn't their primary purpose. They weren't designed to break the law. Napster, on the other hand, takes an attitude that is just bound to piss off prosecuters. "Oh, we would *never* encourage music piracy. It's our users. It's out of our hands."
My biggest fear now is that *because* of Napster, there are going to be restrictions imposed on how I can surf the net. Isn't it in Australia that all ISPs have to use censorware? I'd hate to see that happen in North America, all because of Napster. (And again, I would blame Napster, not the government, if it happened)
Why wouldn't the government be looking into Napster? It is facilitating the transfer of illegal goods! You can talk all you want about how the 'Genie is out of the bottle' and all, but Napster is all about the transfer of illegal music. People are going to complain about the government trying to tighten up the DCMA, there will probably be a Jon Katz article about it, but they wouldn't be revising the law if Napster wasn't breaking it.
Sure, a few artists have said they don't mind if people transfer their music over Napster, but many haven't. If a band says it is okay, then fine, but if a group doesn't want their music on Napster, it shouldn't be.
If the US gov decides to try to ban peer-to-peer file transfers or force ISPs to store detailed info on what their customers use their bandwidth for, it will be Napster's (and it's user's) fault! They aren't the good guys.
Moving to Canada won't help. Remember: we're the country that starting taxing CDRs to compensate the music industry for all the revenue they loose due to piracy.
No, they don't need to release any changes they make, but from the interview, they plan to be a largely service oriented company. I.e. they will provide a packages PostgresSQL with shiny add-ons like printed manuals and technical support. They must realize that if they want to get the support of a developer community, they are going to have to give back.
I always thought databases would be a good candidate for Open Source development. Since many (most?) of the users are developer-minded already, getting a community should be easier than getting people to rally around it.
What I *hope* this new company will do, if it truly emmulates RHAT, is hire full time developers for the project. Hobbiest coders have contributed tons to linux (heck, they invented it), but I'm sure the OS has benefited immensely from having full-time people working on it as a day job. I'd like to see the same for postgress.
I also agree with the other commenters who point out that postgress doesn't need to be an Oracle killer. There are plenty of medium to large projects that don't require a full scale Oracle system. Postgress can become an important alternative for people who need more than Access (or, arguably MySQL), but don't need Oracle and don't want to use SQL Server.
It seems rather risky. Deliberately hiding stuff from your boss just isn't a good way to run a business.
It's one thing if s/he takes the attitude if it works, he doesn't care about the guys. It's another thing when he says, "I want an NT mail server" and you give him a Linux server, you're asking for trouble. In the really large organizations I've worked in, there is usually a push to standadize stuff. What happens when you get transfered and some MCSE suddenly has to maintain your BSD box?
On the whole though, I like the article. It seemed much more like actualy reporting than hyping one thing or another.
Yeah, about 70% of the web sites my company does are largely read-only with only occasional updates by the site administrators.
I actually haven't had any real problems with SQL Server. (Aside from a frustrating afternoon when I first started using it and didn't realize that it doesn't implement cascading deletes:) ) My biggest complaint is that it is a pain in the ass when you want to transfer a database from one server to another.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just stunned that he actually wrote an entire article without using the phrase 'Post-Columbine' in there anywhere!
(Although he may have, I tend to just skim Jon's articles nowadays)
Much of this genetic information and bio-technology will fall into the hands of new corporatist genetic conglomerates, who already promote conformity and homogeneity and who already wage war against individualism and diversity of expression.
Huh? When you make a statement like this, Jon, you just *have* to back it up with something. Which 'corporatist genetic conglomerates' are waging wars against individualism and diversity of expression? What have they done? You shouldn't make broad, silly comments like that and call it journalism.
If They (whoever you are refering to) are trying to force genetic conformity on us, please give us some shred of evidence! Otherwise, it sounds as though you were just looking through the thesauraus for scary words.
Dana
I still think they should have stuck with 'Sledgehammer' in the end.
Mind you, as a vegetarian, I appreciate the AMD and Intel reaching out to my people....
Celeron...clearly 'celery'
Duron...which I believe is a brand of wheat
It's nice to get a little nod of solidarity from large corporations.
I don't think it's so clear cut that there is an anti-trust case here. Patents are *supposed* to give the owner a time-limited monopoly, so Rambus (if it sucessfully defends the patents, which it has appeared to) isn't doing anything illegal.
Dana
Well, in my town, you can pay speeding/parking tickets over the phone with your credit card, and Winnipeg is usually about 5 years or so behind most tech trends, so I imagine it is pretty common.
In fact, for almost all of my bills (including taxes), I've been able to set up either automatic payments from my bank account or my visa. The Canadian gov has had direct deposit for tax returns and GST rebates for years as well so between all that the lines have been slain (for those who wanted them to be) for years before the web even became trendy.
The telephone system and credit cards are the real line slayers and have been around for a long time. Paying from a webpage is just a new variation.
Dana
"I'm interested to see how they'll make sure I'm Canadian through software."
:)
The software will use DragonSpeak and verify that you repeat the phrase "Roll up the rim to win." correctly.
Ack. Sorry...Canadians in the crowrd will recognize a moderately bad Tim Horton's commercial
Dana
BUBBLE SORT!!!!!!
:)
Seriously, it's first sort most of us learn, and it has the cutest name.
One of the profs who teaches an algorithms course at my university always shows his class a program that displays performance graphs as various sorts chew through large data sets. Invariably, most of the students cheer for bubble sort, even though we know it will loose. Favouring the under-dog, I guess
Dana
I don't know much about the Fortran algorithm, but since Fortran was the first compiled language, I imagine the ideas about compilation and optimization were pretty revolutionary at the time. We may have better ways of doing now-a-days, but it got the whole ball of wax rolling.
Dana
A friend of mine, while trying to update some ancient (truly ancient) Cobol code, ran across a comment that went something like...
:)
"I don't know what this block of code does. It seems to serve no purpose, but if I remove it, the program stops working."
I've been waiting for my chance to borrow it
Yeah, but in the spirit of things, The Offspring is doing the same thing. Music has been traded off of newsgroups, IRC and webpages for a lot longer than Napster. The main difference is that Napster, as a company, has a really smug attitude. "Oh...we would never dream of encouraging music piracy." The legal grounds may be more grey, but Napster is attempting to make money through the theft of other people's hard work.
The Offspring is doing the same thing (although they aren't seeking millions of dollars in venture capital for the 'Napster T-Shirt Project'). I think band was trying to test and see it Napster really has the same, "It's all about sharing and community" attitude that many of its users do.
Dana
Well....I used Pascal in my first couple of years, and I don't seem to have been hampered by it. Thing is, your courses should be teaching you programming concept..."How to program", not "How to program in Language X". If you know one language reasonably well, it is generally pretty easy to jump between languages. Unless you go to an odd-ball like APL :)
:)
My university switched to Java from C++ because of the perception that it is easy to learn, and because they were having problems will people using different compilers. The profs were answering more questions about compiler warts than programming. At least in Java, the warts are relatively standard across various platforms
It's also easier for the profs to do interesting graphics assignments, small games n' stuff that are more interesting to most people than, say, printing out Fibonacci numbers.
Anyhoo, my point is, the language taught in the first two years doesn't make a lot of difference.
Dana
Actually, Ralph Klein (premier of Alberta, for non-cdns out there) did speak out. He thought they should use the system to datamine for criminal activity. I think Ontaria's premier spoke out against it.
The thing is, the federal government has a privacy commissioner (Bruce Phillips is the guy who opened up the whole ball of wax) and operates under fairly strict restrictions vis a vis data collection and use.
The provinces do not have the same restrictions, and most of them don't have their own privacy commissioner. Bruce Phillips' jurisdiction only covers the federal government, he cannot investigate privacy concerns about provincial governments or private corporations. The provinces, could quite legally collect much more detailed databases and use them for whatever they want. The federal government cannot, wihtout breaking laws anyway.
Dana
They aren't getting rid of it. They have said that quite plainly. What is happening is that the database is being broken into pieces so that the data cannot be traced back to individuals.
They need the data exactly for why you said (though it really isn't as sinister as you imply) - because a government needs data on it's citizens to function. They can't blindly assign dollars to programs without studies.
Dana
The major complaint (by those who were complaining) was that the information was being gathering for research purposes, but the data could still be traced back to individuals.
HRDC is more or less in charge of all social programs (including employment insurance, pension,...), so it needs to do research to determine the impact of it's programs and where they are needed. Governments need stuff like this to run the programs. The problem was that the data could be traced to individuals and mined.
As it happens though, Canada has a privacy comissioner who's job it is to watch for stuff like this and reasonably strict laws about how the government can gather and use data about its citizens.
Dana
Yeah, but he's also claiming his patent covers *all* client/server database models, and that must be nonense. Sybase and Oracle have been around since at least the 80s. Heck, wasn't Sabre using client/server interactions in the 60s?
Dana
I wonder what sort of smells they'll come up with to go along with software. Java is a pretty easy call, but what should they use for M$? Freshly print money, or brimstone :)
What do penguins smell like?
Dana
But asking people to respect copyright laws isn't exactly on par with government sponsored genocide. It isn't even close. If you follow my logic, then my statement is much more akin to me complaining that the Gestapo are searching *my* attic because other people are hiding jews. But, as I said, I would not consider hiding jewish people from persecution the same thing as stealing music. But your "logic", in fact, hiding a nazi war criminal in your attic from the police is the same as hiding jewish people from the german government. Good analogy.
I wasn't rejecting any principles of causality or personal responsiblity. I simply stated that if lawmakers feels compelled to apply restrictions to how people use a service (ie the internet) because a number of people are openly flaunting the law, and stealing from others, then I would be pissed at the people breaking the law, not the government.
I suppose a few generations ago, your ancestors were complaining that the government was going to make stealing cars illegal because that might compel them to actually pay for one?
Dana
That was poorly phrased, I'll have to talk to my editor :)
...but they wouldn't be revising the law if Napster weren't bending it and making a mockery out of the copyright laws?
Perhaps I should have said
Dana
But it is criminal activity that attracts the attention of the government. The medium is affected, always. Consider the medium of transfering, say, *me* from one city to another. If I choose to use an airplane, I be subjected to a metal detactor, a possible search and my luggage will be sniffed at by dogs. Why? Because other people have used flight for illegal purposes (terrorism and transporting drugs).
If the government starts imposing restrictions on how I use the Internet, I am going to blame Napster, not the law makers.
Search Engines, IRC and the like haven't been targeted yet because while they may be used to violate copyright laws, that isn't their primary purpose. They weren't designed to break the law. Napster, on the other hand, takes an attitude that is just bound to piss off prosecuters. "Oh, we would *never* encourage music piracy. It's our users. It's out of our hands."
My biggest fear now is that *because* of Napster, there are going to be restrictions imposed on how I can surf the net. Isn't it in Australia that all ISPs have to use censorware? I'd hate to see that happen in North America, all because of Napster. (And again, I would blame Napster, not the government, if it happened)
Dana
Why wouldn't the government be looking into Napster? It is facilitating the transfer of illegal goods! You can talk all you want about how the 'Genie is out of the bottle' and all, but Napster is all about the transfer of illegal music. People are going to complain about the government trying to tighten up the DCMA, there will probably be a Jon Katz article about it, but they wouldn't be revising the law if Napster wasn't breaking it.
Sure, a few artists have said they don't mind if people transfer their music over Napster, but many haven't. If a band says it is okay, then fine, but if a group doesn't want their music on Napster, it shouldn't be.
If the US gov decides to try to ban peer-to-peer file transfers or force ISPs to store detailed info on what their customers use their bandwidth for, it will be Napster's (and it's user's) fault! They aren't the good guys.
Dana
Moving to Canada won't help. Remember: we're the country that starting taxing CDRs to compensate the music industry for all the revenue they loose due to piracy.
Perhaps Mexico?
Dana
No, they don't need to release any changes they make, but from the interview, they plan to be a largely service oriented company. I.e. they will provide a packages PostgresSQL with shiny add-ons like printed manuals and technical support. They must realize that if they want to get the support of a developer community, they are going to have to give back.
Dana
I always thought databases would be a good candidate for Open Source development. Since many (most?) of the users are developer-minded already, getting a community should be easier than getting people to rally around it.
:)
What I *hope* this new company will do, if it truly emmulates RHAT, is hire full time developers for the project. Hobbiest coders have contributed tons to linux (heck, they invented it), but I'm sure the OS has benefited immensely from having full-time people working on it as a day job. I'd like to see the same for postgress.
I also agree with the other commenters who point out that postgress doesn't need to be an Oracle killer. There are plenty of medium to large projects that don't require a full scale Oracle system. Postgress can become an important alternative for people who need more than Access (or, arguably MySQL), but don't need Oracle and don't want to use SQL Server.
My $0.02
Dana
It seems rather risky. Deliberately hiding stuff from your boss just isn't a good way to run a business.
It's one thing if s/he takes the attitude if it works, he doesn't care about the guys. It's another thing when he says, "I want an NT mail server" and you give him a Linux server, you're asking for trouble. In the really large organizations I've worked in, there is usually a push to standadize stuff. What happens when you get transfered and some MCSE suddenly has to maintain your BSD box?
On the whole though, I like the article. It seemed much more like actualy reporting than hyping one thing or another.
Dana
Yeah, about 70% of the web sites my company does are largely read-only with only occasional updates by the site administrators.
:) ) My biggest complaint is that it is a pain in the ass when you want to transfer a database from one server to another.
I actually haven't had any real problems with SQL Server. (Aside from a frustrating afternoon when I first started using it and didn't realize that it doesn't implement cascading deletes
Dana