That said, it's really not nice to aim your death threats at secretaries and customer service people.
It's not nice to aim death threats at anybody. But secretaries and customer service people are the official representatives of the company, not innocent bystanders. If a company treats you badly, those people are the ones to express your anger to because they are the company during their working hours. If they don't like what the company is doing and the kind of reaction they are getting from customers, they can change jobs.
Whether you actually choose to do that or not is another matter (e.g., airline check-in counter clerks can screw you in bad ways, so you should be careful).
I find it interesting how enviromentalalists want to preserve the status-quo. Yet, by doing so, they could be seen as slowing (or stopping even) the natural process of evolution.
As an environmentalist, I really don't give a damn about "the natural process of evolution", and I would dispute that there even is such a thing.
What I care about is that I know that our species is adapted to the environmental status quo and that's why I want to preserve it. In fact, that's the "natural" goal for any species, it's just that we happen to have brains to help us with that.
And the environmental status quo includes a very specific set of climatic conditions, as well as a very specific and complex ecology. If our environment changes significantly, ants, rats, and cockroaches may thrive, but humans probably will disappear. I don't know about you, but that's something I want to avoid.
Maybe, we are just one of the many challenges an entire bio-sphere goes through. And thus, evolution has played it's part yet again.
We are humans--we have choices in these matters. We can choose to change the environment until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans and some other species takes over, or we can choose to maintain an environment in which we know we can survive as a species. I prefer the latter choice.
the planet has been through a lot more than us, we may destroy humanity, but the planet would survive
You are absolutely right: life on earth will survive no matter what humans do. And humans will be extinct long before the environment changes enough to threaten the planetary ecosystem.
That's why environmentalists are ultimately not concerned with protecting the environment for its own sake, they are concerned with protecting the environment to keep the planet habitable for humans and to stop wasting what must amount to trillions of dollars in valuable resources every year.
Every species or ecosystem that disappears is a tremendous loss of knowledge and information, something that we can never recover. That knowledge and information has enormous value, and we are just squandering it for trivial short-term gains. And any species or ecosystem that disappears may be something that our surival depends on in ways we don't even know about.
And indeed the planet has been through bigger things than we can produce... how about the entire atmosphere being flooded with oxygen, killing off most forms of life on the planet due to intoxication?
Quite right. And the organisms that produced that oxygen mostly perished in the process. And they didn't have to be very advanced to do that either.
But humans have evolved brains. The function of brains is to predict the possible consequences of our actions so that we can survive better. That includes not doing things that are likely to be harmful to ourselves. And one of the most harmful things we can do to ourselves is to change the climate and to kill off species and ecosystems.
We can't kill the planet, but we can commit mass suicide and make ourselves extinct. Maybe you relish that thought, I don't.
Environmentalists don't have such knee-jerk reactions to the destruction of ecosystems or species: they want to preserve ecosystems and species when it makes biological sense.
With your sarcasm, however, you display the typical level of ignorance of people who couldn't care less about the environment, or even about human health and welfare a generation down the road.
As for an uninvolved party -- that's not true. AT&T sold all rights on the source code in question to Novell, who then sold it (with strings) to the company that is now SCO. So they are an involved party, albeit several purchases removed
Well, if they didn't get from AT&T what they thought they were getting, they can ask for their money back from AT&T and get licenses. But it doesn't make any sense for them to try to attack a contract that was legally and correctly entered into between UC and AT&T. Whatever rights AT&T gave away to UC as part of the settlement, they did so voluntarily.
Since the transmit power levels and frequencies are all set differently in different parts of the world, the closed-source software is needed to restrict people's control over the hardware.
How does not giving out the source "restrict people's control over the hardware"? Finding out where parameters like power levels and frequencies are stored is usually quite simple, with source or without. In many cases, all you need to do is compare two different versions of the driver.
People who rely on keeping source closed for security or safety are really asking for trouble.
As a result, this doesn't surprise me at all. I think it's probably the only way modern WiFi will be supported under Linux.
Vendors shouldn't put huge amounts of intelligence into the driver anyway. The best kind of WiFi is something that looks like a wireless bridge and either plugs directly into the Ethernet port, or just looks like a wired Ethernet card with some configuration options. Let's hope vendors will move to those configurations as embedding more intelligence becomes cheaper.
Put the LIMIT 1000 (TOP 1000 in SQLServer), and SQLServer goes sub-second, MySQL takes... wait for it... 25 minutes.
I'm sorry that you seem to have been under the mistaken assumption that mySQL and SQLServer are even products in the same category. They absolutely aren't, and that should have been clear to anybody with any experience with databases from the start. You cannot deploy mySQL as a general-purpose, full-blown SQL database server. But you can use it with lots of applications that are written for it and it will handle common, simple SQL queries. Think of mySQL more like the Access database engine.
You're right. The fact that it will silently accept bad data, and change it to something else, means it's unreliable.
So does Perl. So does C/C++, the language that PostgreSQL itself is written in. So do, in fact, most of the software systems we use every day.
All things being equal, it's good to have languages and libraries with carefully-designed type systems and with type systems that conform to known standards. But just because mySQL is different and more lenient doesn't make it "unreliable", it just means you have to use it differently.
And if you wanted to be consistent about this sort of thing, you should reject PostgreSQL as well because it is written in one of the languages most conducive to creating unreliable software: C/C++.
No, sweeping exceptions under the carpet and failing to provide an integrated and robust transaction management facility means that it is exceedingly difficult to build a reliable application using it.
Which really isn't much different than simply saying it's unreliable.
That is completely different. The UNIX file system doesn't have transaction management at all, yet people build robust applications on top of it.
No - it's popular because it has been trivial to develop trivial apps on
Quite right. And most applications are, in fact, trivial, so a trivial database that makes implementing trivial applications is a good thing. And that's why mySQL continues to be popular.
And because most of its advocates aren't familiar enough with database technology to weigh the differences between mysql and postgresql.
I'm sure there are many people who pick mySQL because they don't understand database technologies--and they don't have to understand them because mySQL apparently gets their job done sufficiently well.
I'm also sure that there are many people like you who pick PostgreSQL because they don't understand how to make good engineering tradeoffs and build good applications on top of databases that don't have all the bells and whistles. Yours is a different level of ignorance, but it's ignorance all the same.
An E-mail tax just can't be implemented, and the infrastructure for collecting it would be horrendous.
A much better initiative would be some kind of electronic cash micropayment system, perhaps run by the US Postal Service. Then, the recipients themselves could require a micropayment stamp for any mail they are going to read (a few cents, maybe).
What if it also means that any crime that the employee commits forces the company to be involved as well...
Yes, indeed. So, if you agree to software license agreements while "at home", e.g., for Sun's "free" Java download, you may well be subjecting your company to them. Ditto if you use illegally copied software at home.
I'm not sure what you mean by "backfire"--it's not clear that companies have much of a choice in this. They do have a choice in exercising their intellectual property rights against employees, but their legal obligations don't disappear just because they fail to do so.
Why use PostgreSQL over MySQL? [...] Because they care about your data, [...] Here is huge list of MySQL Gotcha's that absolutely floored me
Just because mySQL fails to implement many parts that standard SQL programmers consider important doesn't mean it's unreliable.
Reliability and performance depend on many factors. A database may have bullet-proof transactioning and backups, but if it's so complex that people deploy it incorrectly, that won't do you any good. And even a limited database whose memory footprint and cost you can afford is better that some hugely expensive or memory hungry behemoth that you simply can't use.
The real question is: when implementing my system, how much effort and money does it take to achieve a required level of performance and reliability on top of a given database. MySQL does a lot less than the other systems, but it may still often be a better tradeoff in that space than PostgreSQL or Oracle. In fact, that's probably why it's so popular.
Software professionals are usually "exempt" employees. The "duties test" for exempt employees is something like:
Professional: performs original and creative work or work requiring advanced knowledge normally acquired through a prolonged course of specialized academic study; a professional exempt employee's work cannot be standardized with respect to time - examples given in the regulations include physician, attorney, CPA, engineer, architect, scientist (geologist, botanist, physicist, zoologist, chemist, etc.), registered nurse, and teacher at any educational institution
One of the consequences of being an exempt employee is that you don't get paid for overtime. IANAL, but it follows pretty logically that pretty much anything you do "at home" might be considered overtime and anything you do during that time belongs to your employer. You may be able to make an argument that that isn't the case if what you do "on your own time" is clearly completely unrelated to your job (e.g., an Apple employee that develops new cookie recipes). But writing a piece of Macintosh software seems pretty job-related for an Apple software engineer.
In any case, this is standard policy at high-tech companies. Of course, it is pretty stupid for a company like Apple to enforce it in a case like this.
But forget about starting up a software business while you are employed somewhere--if you try, you really have to sit down and write a contractual agreement with your employer first, or you have the potential of running into big trouble later on.
The difference is that UNIX and Linux developers generally don't claim to be innovating. Instead, they implement tried-and-true, open standards.
Microsoft claims they are innovating. That's how they are marketing their stuff. That's how they see themselves. And, worse yet, they are reinventing the bad ideas.
It's hard to come up with anything new in operating systems. Just about anything has been tried and suggested before. The only thing that distinguishes different people and projects is how well they know the past and how honest they are about it.
PHP is just a language, and doesn't really give you much in the way of DB stuff... You usually have to roll your own application, and then you have security things that you need to attend to.
PHP isn't "just a language", it's an entire platform that includes many tools for designing and implementing database-based applications.
Furthermore, PHP already has many applications available for it, applications which for Access or Rekall, you'd have to build yourself.
The meat in "Java-based systems" is good old C and C++ software. Sun's "Java desktop" is Gnome with a Java runtime shipping with it. Sun's "Java server" stuff is a C kernel with C userland stuff and a Java runtime.
Sun loves to attach the name "Java" to anything they can, to cover up the fact that what people actually do with Java is pretty limited. In that sense, they aren't all that different from Microsoft and ".NET".
This is good for AMD, giving them additional credibility and sales in the short term. But it doesn't address Sun's long-term problems: they aren't competitive in terms of hardware and they can't make money from Java.
Apart from the legal loopholes in Microsoft's license that are big enough to drive a truck through, much more worrisome is the fact that Microsoft asserts that they are getting a patent on an XML Schema. What is the novelty in that schema? It's a standard XML representation of well-known word processing data structures and concepts.
This would be a very bad precedent. Microsoft is really trying to push the limits of patentability and testing what they can get away with. Their patent application on.NET APIs is a similar trial balloon.
That is something open source and free software developers should really worry about.
I don't know whether Microsoft's patent license complies with the letter of the GPL, but it certainly does not comply with the intent. In practice, the combination of licensing and modification restrictions Microsoft imposes means that they can effectively revoke the license whenever they like.
By keeping you from sublicensing and modifying the specification, Microsoft retains nearly complete control.
Yes, you may be able to write interoperable software under the 2003 specification, but Microsoft can turn around, make a minor modfication in 2004, and you can't update your software to read the new files. Microsoft can kill whatever piece of software they like at just about any time they like.
The GNU license contains the clauses it does for good reasons: without them, free software just doesn't make much sense.
....seems like all you have to do is put a notice in the code about using the spec.
You can't sublicense or transfer the license. That means that Microsoft can stop new implementations any time they choose by simply changing the license on their web site. They may even be able to do that retroactively.
Is the job of the government to provide high speed internet service to homes?
The job of the government is to provide whatever we, the people, want it to provide. It's quite common to task governments with running businesses when the private sector has failed to deliver.
if it's directly the government's service, there is a large potential for filtering or other restrictions on access, and a much greater threat for logging one's activities. I do not like this idea.
Utah has the kind of government its voters elected. I don't like that government, you may not like it, but they do. As long as it's within the Constitution, they are free to do that.
I wouldn't want my telephone, television, newspaper, radio, or internet access to come from one extremely powerful group who would have a significant interest in manipulating information for their own benefit.
Well, that's exactly what you are getting when you leave those things to big businesses. Government-run services are preferable in my opinion. In fact, "government run" doesn't mean "centralized"--this kind of effort is an excellent candidate for being run at a city/town level.
I prefer government-run to big-business-run. At least governments are accountable to voters. The best situation is, of course, to have lots of little, independent companies. But that isn't always achievable.
Slashdot Mirror
That said, it's really not nice to aim your death threats at secretaries and customer service people.
It's not nice to aim death threats at anybody. But secretaries and customer service people are the official representatives of the company, not innocent bystanders. If a company treats you badly, those people are the ones to express your anger to because they are the company during their working hours. If they don't like what the company is doing and the kind of reaction they are getting from customers, they can change jobs.
Whether you actually choose to do that or not is another matter (e.g., airline check-in counter clerks can screw you in bad ways, so you should be careful).
This fields has decades of history. A good starting point, should you like to explore it, is here.
I find it interesting how enviromentalalists want to preserve the status-quo. Yet, by doing so, they could be seen as slowing (or stopping even) the natural process of evolution.
As an environmentalist, I really don't give a damn about "the natural process of evolution", and I would dispute that there even is such a thing.
What I care about is that I know that our species is adapted to the environmental status quo and that's why I want to preserve it. In fact, that's the "natural" goal for any species, it's just that we happen to have brains to help us with that.
And the environmental status quo includes a very specific set of climatic conditions, as well as a very specific and complex ecology. If our environment changes significantly, ants, rats, and cockroaches may thrive, but humans probably will disappear. I don't know about you, but that's something I want to avoid.
Maybe, we are just one of the many challenges an entire bio-sphere goes through. And thus, evolution has played it's part yet again.
We are humans--we have choices in these matters. We can choose to change the environment until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans and some other species takes over, or we can choose to maintain an environment in which we know we can survive as a species. I prefer the latter choice.
the planet has been through a lot more than us, we may destroy humanity, but the planet would survive
You are absolutely right: life on earth will survive no matter what humans do. And humans will be extinct long before the environment changes enough to threaten the planetary ecosystem.
That's why environmentalists are ultimately not concerned with protecting the environment for its own sake, they are concerned with protecting the environment to keep the planet habitable for humans and to stop wasting what must amount to trillions of dollars in valuable resources every year.
Every species or ecosystem that disappears is a tremendous loss of knowledge and information, something that we can never recover. That knowledge and information has enormous value, and we are just squandering it for trivial short-term gains. And any species or ecosystem that disappears may be something that our surival depends on in ways we don't even know about.
And indeed the planet has been through bigger things than we can produce... how about the entire atmosphere being flooded with oxygen, killing off most forms of life on the planet due to intoxication?
Quite right. And the organisms that produced that oxygen mostly perished in the process. And they didn't have to be very advanced to do that either.
But humans have evolved brains. The function of brains is to predict the possible consequences of our actions so that we can survive better. That includes not doing things that are likely to be harmful to ourselves. And one of the most harmful things we can do to ourselves is to change the climate and to kill off species and ecosystems.
We can't kill the planet, but we can commit mass suicide and make ourselves extinct. Maybe you relish that thought, I don't.
Environmentalists don't have such knee-jerk reactions to the destruction of ecosystems or species: they want to preserve ecosystems and species when it makes biological sense.
With your sarcasm, however, you display the typical level of ignorance of people who couldn't care less about the environment, or even about human health and welfare a generation down the road.
As for an uninvolved party -- that's not true. AT&T sold all rights on the source code in question to Novell, who then sold it (with strings) to the company that is now SCO. So they are an involved party, albeit several purchases removed
Well, if they didn't get from AT&T what they thought they were getting, they can ask for their money back from AT&T and get licenses. But it doesn't make any sense for them to try to attack a contract that was legally and correctly entered into between UC and AT&T. Whatever rights AT&T gave away to UC as part of the settlement, they did so voluntarily.
Since the transmit power levels and frequencies are all set differently in different parts of the world, the closed-source software is needed to restrict people's control over the hardware.
How does not giving out the source "restrict people's control over the hardware"? Finding out where parameters like power levels and frequencies are stored is usually quite simple, with source or without. In many cases, all you need to do is compare two different versions of the driver.
People who rely on keeping source closed for security or safety are really asking for trouble.
As a result, this doesn't surprise me at all. I think it's probably the only way modern WiFi will be supported under Linux.
Vendors shouldn't put huge amounts of intelligence into the driver anyway. The best kind of WiFi is something that looks like a wireless bridge and either plugs directly into the Ethernet port, or just looks like a wired Ethernet card with some configuration options. Let's hope vendors will move to those configurations as embedding more intelligence becomes cheaper.
Put the LIMIT 1000 (TOP 1000 in SQLServer), and SQLServer goes sub-second, MySQL takes... wait for it... 25 minutes.
I'm sorry that you seem to have been under the mistaken assumption that mySQL and SQLServer are even products in the same category. They absolutely aren't, and that should have been clear to anybody with any experience with databases from the start. You cannot deploy mySQL as a general-purpose, full-blown SQL database server. But you can use it with lots of applications that are written for it and it will handle common, simple SQL queries. Think of mySQL more like the Access database engine.
You're right. The fact that it will silently accept bad data, and change it to something else, means it's unreliable.
So does Perl. So does C/C++, the language that PostgreSQL itself is written in. So do, in fact, most of the software systems we use every day.
All things being equal, it's good to have languages and libraries with carefully-designed type systems and with type systems that conform to known standards. But just because mySQL is different and more lenient doesn't make it "unreliable", it just means you have to use it differently.
And if you wanted to be consistent about this sort of thing, you should reject PostgreSQL as well because it is written in one of the languages most conducive to creating unreliable software: C/C++.
No, sweeping exceptions under the carpet and failing to provide an integrated and robust transaction management facility means that it is exceedingly difficult to build a reliable application using it.
Which really isn't much different than simply saying it's unreliable.
That is completely different. The UNIX file system doesn't have transaction management at all, yet people build robust applications on top of it.
No - it's popular because it has been trivial to develop trivial apps on
Quite right. And most applications are, in fact, trivial, so a trivial database that makes implementing trivial applications is a good thing. And that's why mySQL continues to be popular.
And because most of its advocates aren't familiar enough with database technology to weigh the differences between mysql and postgresql.
I'm sure there are many people who pick mySQL because they don't understand database technologies--and they don't have to understand them because mySQL apparently gets their job done sufficiently well.
I'm also sure that there are many people like you who pick PostgreSQL because they don't understand how to make good engineering tradeoffs and build good applications on top of databases that don't have all the bells and whistles. Yours is a different level of ignorance, but it's ignorance all the same.
An E-mail tax just can't be implemented, and the infrastructure for collecting it would be horrendous.
A much better initiative would be some kind of electronic cash micropayment system, perhaps run by the US Postal Service. Then, the recipients themselves could require a micropayment stamp for any mail they are going to read (a few cents, maybe).
What if it also means that any crime that the employee commits forces the company to be involved as well...
Yes, indeed. So, if you agree to software license agreements while "at home", e.g., for Sun's "free" Java download, you may well be subjecting your company to them. Ditto if you use illegally copied software at home.
I'm not sure what you mean by "backfire"--it's not clear that companies have much of a choice in this. They do have a choice in exercising their intellectual property rights against employees, but their legal obligations don't disappear just because they fail to do so.
Why use PostgreSQL over MySQL? [...] Because they care about your data, [...] Here is huge list of MySQL Gotcha's that absolutely floored me
Just because mySQL fails to implement many parts that standard SQL programmers consider important doesn't mean it's unreliable.
Reliability and performance depend on many factors. A database may have bullet-proof transactioning and backups, but if it's so complex that people deploy it incorrectly, that won't do you any good. And even a limited database whose memory footprint and cost you can afford is better that some hugely expensive or memory hungry behemoth that you simply can't use.
The real question is: when implementing my system, how much effort and money does it take to achieve a required level of performance and reliability on top of a given database. MySQL does a lot less than the other systems, but it may still often be a better tradeoff in that space than PostgreSQL or Oracle. In fact, that's probably why it's so popular.
One of the consequences of being an exempt employee is that you don't get paid for overtime. IANAL, but it follows pretty logically that pretty much anything you do "at home" might be considered overtime and anything you do during that time belongs to your employer. You may be able to make an argument that that isn't the case if what you do "on your own time" is clearly completely unrelated to your job (e.g., an Apple employee that develops new cookie recipes). But writing a piece of Macintosh software seems pretty job-related for an Apple software engineer.
In any case, this is standard policy at high-tech companies. Of course, it is pretty stupid for a company like Apple to enforce it in a case like this.
But forget about starting up a software business while you are employed somewhere--if you try, you really have to sit down and write a contractual agreement with your employer first, or you have the potential of running into big trouble later on.
learn some history kid. sun's been in situations like this before and they'll get out of it again.
I've been using Sun machines since their beginning. Care to explain when Sun has been in situations like this?
The difference is that UNIX and Linux developers generally don't claim to be innovating. Instead, they implement tried-and-true, open standards.
Microsoft claims they are innovating. That's how they are marketing their stuff. That's how they see themselves. And, worse yet, they are reinventing the bad ideas.
It's hard to come up with anything new in operating systems. Just about anything has been tried and suggested before. The only thing that distinguishes different people and projects is how well they know the past and how honest they are about it.
Word was copied in part from Xerox, in part from WordPerfect and the like.
PHP is just a language, and doesn't really give you much in the way of DB stuff... You usually have to roll your own application, and then you have security things that you need to attend to.
PHP isn't "just a language", it's an entire platform that includes many tools for designing and implementing database-based applications.
Furthermore, PHP already has many applications available for it, applications which for Access or Rekall, you'd have to build yourself.
The meat in "Java-based systems" is good old C and C++ software. Sun's "Java desktop" is Gnome with a Java runtime shipping with it. Sun's "Java server" stuff is a C kernel with C userland stuff and a Java runtime.
Sun loves to attach the name "Java" to anything they can, to cover up the fact that what people actually do with Java is pretty limited. In that sense, they aren't all that different from Microsoft and ".NET".
This is good for AMD, giving them additional credibility and sales in the short term. But it doesn't address Sun's long-term problems: they aren't competitive in terms of hardware and they can't make money from Java.
Apart from the legal loopholes in Microsoft's license that are big enough to drive a truck through, much more worrisome is the fact that Microsoft asserts that they are getting a patent on an XML Schema. What is the novelty in that schema? It's a standard XML representation of well-known word processing data structures and concepts.
.NET APIs is a similar trial balloon.
This would be a very bad precedent. Microsoft is really trying to push the limits of patentability and testing what they can get away with. Their patent application on
That is something open source and free software developers should really worry about.
I don't know whether Microsoft's patent license complies with the letter of the GPL, but it certainly does not comply with the intent. In practice, the combination of licensing and modification restrictions Microsoft imposes means that they can effectively revoke the license whenever they like.
By keeping you from sublicensing and modifying the specification, Microsoft retains nearly complete control.
Yes, you may be able to write interoperable software under the 2003 specification, but Microsoft can turn around, make a minor modfication in 2004, and you can't update your software to read the new files. Microsoft can kill whatever piece of software they like at just about any time they like.
The GNU license contains the clauses it does for good reasons: without them, free software just doesn't make much sense.
You can't sublicense or transfer the license. That means that Microsoft can stop new implementations any time they choose by simply changing the license on their web site. They may even be able to do that retroactively.
Is the job of the government to provide high speed internet service to homes?
The job of the government is to provide whatever we, the people, want it to provide. It's quite common to task governments with running businesses when the private sector has failed to deliver.
if it's directly the government's service, there is a large potential for filtering or other restrictions on access, and a much greater threat for logging one's activities. I do not like this idea.
Utah has the kind of government its voters elected. I don't like that government, you may not like it, but they do. As long as it's within the Constitution, they are free to do that.
I wouldn't want my telephone, television, newspaper, radio, or internet access to come from one extremely powerful group who would have a significant interest in manipulating information for their own benefit.
Well, that's exactly what you are getting when you leave those things to big businesses. Government-run services are preferable in my opinion. In fact, "government run" doesn't mean "centralized"--this kind of effort is an excellent candidate for being run at a city/town level.
I prefer government-run to big-business-run. At least governments are accountable to voters. The best situation is, of course, to have lots of little, independent companies. But that isn't always achievable.