I can't since I also posted a reference to this article. It is truely excellent, everyone must read it. I have saved a copy and shall send it to everyone I know:).
Re:Everyone loves to hate patents, but...
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
You have a utilitarian view on intellectual property which is unproven (only taken for granted by stakeholders) and morally unjust. Please have a look at the first reaction to the article, which also points to this excellent refutal of intellectual property on both practical and moral grounds: http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
No, patents must be rejected on principle
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 1
Please have a look at the first reaction to the article, which points to http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf. It is quite long but, IMO, is an excellent and very thorrow argumentation against all forms of intellectual property, both for practical reasons and for moral and principle reasons.
assuming you want do move your uploads & downloads (e.g. images) from/to your sandbox, you'll probably moving infected files from your sanbox, via the mounted share, into your real environment.
I sympatatize with you. However, such law has not been implemented in many EU countries.
Fact is that the US regularly forces countries around the world to "respect" US laws under threat of economic sanctions. Of course the US is free to choose with whomever it trades.
The problem is that many countries don't have the guts to do without US trade. Many are too small and/or poor to risk that.
For the EU however the case is different. I think it would harm the US just as much as the EU if trade between the two were cut off. There is no reason for the EU to let itself be blackmailed into adopting US interests out of fear for trade sanctions. I can only hope that one day the US threats will become void, since the rest of the world will happily trade with each other and not need the US at all, i.e. the situation reverses and the whole world except the US have trade, and the US becomes isolated and poor.
brainwashers keep repeating it, I won't buy it, never! Intellectual property in all of its forms is immoral, I do not accept it. Copying is never theft. Theft means the originator no longer has the item. The copying of ideas and duplication of bits never is.
I do not believe that an economy based on the concept of intellectual property is guaranteed to be better. Yes, having good ideas and brains should be rewarded, but it does not have to be through state protection. I have good ideas every day on my job (as an independant consultant), I get recognition and good references for that, which enables me to find new and well paid contracts.
A company that is the first, in these fast times, already has a decisive advantage time-wise to profit, they don't need state protection IMHO.
As for the arts: they flourished in the past (highlights in the 18th and 19th centuries w.r.t music/composers, for example) without any state protection. I am 100% convinced that artists don't need to be very rich for them to produce art. In fact, historically, most artists have been rather poor. True art (music, sculpture, drama, literature) doesn't have ANYTHING to do with lots of money. Todays commercialism rather destroys it.
I am 100% convinced that some types of "entertainment" would have to change without state protection, but also that something better would come into its place. Art and entertainment have always existed, 1000s of years before anyone though of the idea of copyrights etc. And yes, it will damage an industry today, but others (e.g. consumer electronics) will grow instead. It has always been like that, the invention of electricity also made a lot of jobs redundant but brought a lot of different (often better) jobs.
Russia is a home of "piracy", that is one of the last areas in the world offering resistance against the evil *AA organizations that are buying laws and corrupting democracy all over the world.
Our only chance for survival of a civilisation is that this criminal industry is sucked empty, their sources of money must be undermined so they can no longer afford to buy laws and politicians all over the world.
I hope Russia stands firm and does not fall for this ongoing WTO blackmail (if you want to join you have to betray your civilians by introducing law such and such).
just as stolen cars are used by criminals, cause using an officially registered car would give them away, they'll use stolen phones. and of course use brute methods to extort the pin-code from the victim so they can use the phone (afterwards killing them to gain time to use the phone before anyone gets the idea the phone has been stolen).
maybe it depends on what you do and the software you happen to run on your computer.
i'm a software developer using various tools on windows. i have 1GB RAM; after a reboot everything runs smooth and fast, but after one day of work i'm starting to see memory problems. even when I kill all programs and shut down as many services as possible, it doesn't help. often i'm too lazy to reboot because i have to reopen so many tools and windows, but actually i should. sometimes after one week it gets unbearable and i reboot.
before this we had windows NT. while NT needed to be rebooted for all kinds of tasks, once it was up and running i could leave it running for many weeks without this memory problem (and we had only 512MB then, 1 year ago). at home I have windows 2000, and it seems to be less memory problems as well (allthough i use it less intensively and long than my XP computer at work).
linux i can leave it running for many months without any noticable problems, memory leaks etc.
I think VMS machines still running (not many) are mainly used for very dedicated single tasks and thus don't need to be rebooted or changed ever, thus enabling these long uptimes. I think once a system stays up for 1 year (many of our solaris systems do) it could also stay up for 10 years if the computing environment remains very static.
There is one drawback: if you never reboot, you cannot be sure that the next reboot succeeds without problems should the need suddenly arise. Especially on machines with many different tasks and software on it, which is being changed all the time, never rebooting may be very risky.
Indeed, and therefore those pushing for the concept of IP and laws to protect and enforce it are enemies of human civilization. I hope one day more people see this, and such organizations and people are seen for what they really are: they belong to the group of worst criminals and enemies of mankind and should be punished for that. I feel that only direct fear and threat can stop them.
Their crimes are even worsened IMHO by the way they corrupt western democracies: bribing politicians and buying laws for their personal interests. Putting whole nations and democracies under pressure and threatening with economic repercussions those countries that do not "obey" or "harmonize" current US law. In any case where two countries with different IP laws meet, harmonization automatically means that those with the most strict and far reaching laws win and have to be implemented everywhere, again under threat of economic repercussions, i.e. blackmail.
I hope to see the day that those people and organizations responsible for their IP crimes (by that I mean implementing such laws, not breaking them) are locked away and harshely punished. Since democracy is corrupted by them, I equal their crimes to high treason which demands long imprinonment and even capital punishment in many countries.
not for most of us. in many countries downloading is legal in any case, its just uploading that isn't. so even if allofmp3.com itself has legal problems, it is not illegal for me (and most other inhabitants of all european countries for example) to download. music industry is spreading lies (FUD) about it however.
apart from that, even if illegal for example in the US (could be), when downloading via p2p you can be tracked quite easily (criminal companies offer music to set you up), but when downloading directly from a website you are almost impossible to track.
Why? If the people really revolt, the criminals can be decapitated just like in the french and russian revolutions. In the end, the people are the strongest.
Any proponent of DRM, patents and copyrights must be tought a lesson, one day they'll be sorry and all their millions of cash won't help them.
The role of the government is to serve the interests of society. Sometimes the interests of society are not served best by letting "the market" run by itself.
If promoting open source would be beneficial to society at large, e.g. because free market mechanisms cannot bring about such a change by itself, then sure it is the job of the state to bring it about. What else do you think a state is for, then to act in the interest of its citizens?!?
Still, java as a language comes close to the speed of C++. So there is less need to "go native". However if you want to, it is no problem. It is hardly more difficult than in TCL (I have used TCL a lot as glue to bind self written modules and available libraries in C together). JNI is not difficult, and we use it too. We don't use it to write our own C modules, because it just isn't worthwhile with Java. But we do use it to bind in existing libraries (such as openssh and some in-house developed networking libraries), and once you know how to do it it doesn't take more time than with similar mechanisms in scripting languages. People have done it for GUI toolkits, e.g. http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/bin/view and http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/java/. There is no technical reason at all that Java can't do the same thing Python can (binding in lots of existing modules) except that the need is hardly there.
So you take the responsiveness of an IDE as a measure for a language? That is nonsense. Indeed, Pythons GUI toolkit is implemented natively, and the default Java GUI toolkit is not. However, there are also native language bindings for Java GUI toolkits, and SWT is a hybrid solution.
You are claiming that Python as glue + C as language to do the heavy work is faster than Java, and in that sense: yes. So in fact you're not comparing Java to Python, but Java to C. As I mentioned, Java is on average 0-30% slower than C++ (and C might be a bit more efficient these days, not much, than C++). However, surely there is not a significant (order of magnitude) difference between Java and C(++). Anyone who claims otherwise does not have up to date information and has probably last tried/benchmarked Java several years ago.
I am a C++ and Java software engineer, working on very large projects for banking applications. We run Java (amongst others) on an MVS (IBM) mainframe, amongst others. As you might know, IBM mainframes are not bought, but paid per used CPU cycle! So we know damn well how efficient Java is. PL/1 is more efficient (it is also more efficient than C) but the difference is NOT significant. In complex programs Java often wins, because of its structure it is easier for programmers to keep track and create correct and efficient solutions. It is the same old story as assembly in theory being more efficient than C, but often resulting in less efficient solutions because for all but small applications it is very hard for a human to come to a good solution.
Nowadays, all new software in our industry is written in Java (at least in the banking industry in europe), because it is the most economic thing for several reasons, a.o. a good trade off in run-time performance and ease of programming and safety.
that is not true. Python is much slower than Java, you must be comparing python to Java from 1999. As a performance and benchmark freak, I always benchmark any language I use. For example, Python is provable slower than Perl, except for some of the built-in (very good) API's which are very rich in Python. But doing basic non-API using stuff in python, such as the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm or other CPU intensive stuff, python is really a scripting language. Perl does some byte-compilation but also is an order of magnitute slower than truely compiled languages such as Java, C++ and C# (Java and C# being just-in-time compiled, which is about as good as compiled in advanced with todays technology, and theoretically could even outperform).
The latter three are about 10% within each others range, most benchmarks I have done indicate C++ is fastest, Java about 0-30% slower, and C# about 10% slower than Java (C# tests done 1 year ago). All tests are library/API neutral, i.e. I did not test the speed of some C++ GUI toolkit such as Qt versus a Java GUI toolkit such as AWT/Swing, but only tested pure language features and "core" stuff.
Claiming that python, clearly an order of magnitude slower than compiled languages, is faster than Java is an absolute joke and proves that you have never done or read some serious benchmarks.
Have you actually done benchmarks? I have, and in many cases the difference varies between -5% (i.e. java a bit faster than C++) and +30%, mostly C++ is about 10% faster than Java.
So whie Java may be slower, it is not at all a order of magnitude slower, in most real world circumstances you won't notice the difference.
By the way, I also benchmarked C# (1 year ago, it may have changed) and found C# to be somewhat slower than Java, again about 10% slower, in most cases. I have tried some basic algorithms and other CPU bound stuff, also allocating objects, manipulating strings, using in-memory "I/O" (memory buffers) etc. There may be differences in some of the standard libraries and/or GUI libraries (such as Swing/AWT which up to release of Java5 was not too fast, but in Java5 it has dramatically improved), but intrinsically Java really is in the same league as C++.
I don't know about netbeans, but I use eclipse (3.0 and 3.1) more than 8 hours a day and it is not slow. I have 1GB of RAM, but next to eclipse I'm running a weblogic (development) instance and lots of other normal office programs, and eclipse works very fast. It is really amazingly fast for such a complex GUI program. It has a very complex with lots of tabs, menus, browsing trees everywhere on the screen, all kept up to date in real time.
Please, give it a serious try since your experience, the non-trivial last of which must be at least several years old. Slowness of Java is really a myth. It is very very irritating to see that myth kept alive by people repeating each other (and of course MSFT) for the last years without being open to review.
Just compare C++ Corba to Java Corba. In C++ Corba, a big issue with any API is, who owns the pointer? If you're not very precise, you risk not freeing memory or freeing it twice. In Java the issue doesn't exist.
As soon as you start with multiple processes passing objects/memory around, this is an extra complication easily leading to errors.
yes, very pragmantic. they have the "wisdom" to put their own interests at first, instead of bowing to a so called superpower telling the rest of the world what to do.
indeed, i know they don't do it because of deep philosophical considerations w.r.t. intellectual property (as I would like, since I reject the whole concept as principle), but still I am glad that at least one significant power on the planet resists the current dreadful trend and does not allow themselves to be intimidated.
China still has sound ideas w.r.t. intellectual property, namely that it is largely harmful. They will benefit from all wasted resources in the parts of the world obsessed with this evil concept, which is hostile to civilisation and development.
especially with global data. of course global data must be minimized in any system, however at least the database can be considered "global data". clustering a database is very expensive, performance wise. even outside the database you may need global data.
for example, we're working on a system where we have some global pool of resources which is used by many concurrent processes. if you would keep this pool of resources (counting down) in the database, we would need a DB which handles many thousands of transactions per second, which is not realistic. keeping it in memory (as a stateful service, i.e. global data/singleton) is the only solution, but is not compatible with clustering.
clustering can be considered "loosely coupled" fault tolerance. a single fault tolerant machine is much faster when synchronizing memory between different processes. in a cluster, synchronized memory access would slow down way too much.
i think clustering only applies to simple systems. many parts of problems just are not suited to be distributed. it is better, IMHO, to distribute functions (i.e put function A on machine 1 and function B on machine 2) than to distribute each function over multiple machines. only a particular class of functions can be distributed easily.
alas, some people (for example in the company where I work) only envisage simple web applications and thus mandate that any application is clustered, creating great headaches and severely restricting sound design.
as seen in global warming (whether human caused or not is not the point here).
the amount of solar energy hitting earth is enormous and is more than we need, the "only" problem is to capture it, either directly with solar panels in deserts, or by tapping its effects: - water power (sun transports water) - wind power
i think with the billions needed to add even more energy from space to our system (bad idea) it should be possible to get a significant amount of energy from the earths deserts.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't since I also posted a reference to this article. It is truely excellent, everyone must read it. :).
I have saved a copy and shall send it to everyone I know
You have a utilitarian view on intellectual property which is unproven (only taken for granted by stakeholders) and morally unjust. Please have a look at the first reaction to the article, which also points to this excellent refutal of intellectual property on both practical and moral grounds: http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf
Please have a look at the first reaction to the article, which points to http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_1.pdf. It is quite long but, IMO, is an excellent and very thorrow argumentation against all forms of intellectual property, both for practical reasons and for moral and principle reasons.
assuming you want do move your uploads & downloads (e.g. images) from/to your sandbox, you'll probably moving infected files from your sanbox, via the mounted share, into your real environment.
I sympatatize with you. However, such law has not been implemented in many EU countries.
Fact is that the US regularly forces countries around the world to "respect" US laws under threat of economic sanctions. Of course the US is free to choose with whomever it trades.
The problem is that many countries don't have the guts to do without US trade. Many are too small and/or poor to risk that.
For the EU however the case is different. I think it would harm the US just as much as the EU if trade between the two were cut off. There is no reason for the EU to let itself be blackmailed into adopting US interests out of fear for trade sanctions. I can only hope that one day the US threats will become void, since the rest of the world will happily trade with each other and not need the US at all, i.e. the situation reverses and the whole world except the US have trade, and the US becomes isolated and poor.
brainwashers keep repeating it, I won't buy it, never! Intellectual property in all of its forms is immoral, I do not accept it. Copying is never theft. Theft means the originator no longer has the item. The copying of ideas and duplication of bits never is.
I do not believe that an economy based on the concept of intellectual property is guaranteed to be better. Yes, having good ideas and brains should be rewarded, but it does not have to be through state protection. I have good ideas every day on my job (as an independant consultant), I get recognition and good references for that, which enables me to find new and well paid contracts.
A company that is the first, in these fast times, already has a decisive advantage time-wise to profit, they don't need state protection IMHO.
As for the arts: they flourished in the past (highlights in the 18th and 19th centuries w.r.t music/composers, for example) without any state protection. I am 100% convinced that artists don't need to be very rich for them to produce art. In fact, historically, most artists have been rather poor. True art (music, sculpture, drama, literature) doesn't have ANYTHING to do with lots of money. Todays commercialism rather destroys it.
I am 100% convinced that some types of "entertainment" would have to change without state protection, but also that something better would come into its place. Art and entertainment have always existed, 1000s of years before anyone though of the idea of copyrights etc. And yes, it will damage an industry today, but others (e.g. consumer electronics) will grow instead. It has always been like that, the invention of electricity also made a lot of jobs redundant but brought a lot of different (often better) jobs.
Russia is a home of "piracy", that is one of the last areas in the world offering resistance against the evil *AA organizations that are buying laws and corrupting democracy all over the world.
Our only chance for survival of a civilisation is that this criminal industry is sucked empty, their sources of money must be undermined so they can no longer afford to buy laws and politicians all over the world.
I hope Russia stands firm and does not fall for this ongoing WTO blackmail (if you want to join you have to betray your civilians by introducing law such and such).
just as stolen cars are used by criminals, cause using an officially registered car would give them away, they'll use stolen phones. and of course use brute methods to extort the pin-code from the victim so they can use the phone (afterwards killing them to gain time to use the phone before anyone gets the idea the phone has been stolen).
maybe it depends on what you do and the software you happen to run on your computer.
i'm a software developer using various tools on windows. i have 1GB RAM; after a reboot everything runs smooth and fast, but after one day of work i'm starting to see memory problems. even when I kill all programs and shut down as many services as possible, it doesn't help. often i'm too lazy to reboot because i have to reopen so many tools and windows, but actually i should. sometimes after one week it gets unbearable and i reboot.
before this we had windows NT. while NT needed to be rebooted for all kinds of tasks, once it was up and running i could leave it running for many weeks without this memory problem (and we had only 512MB then, 1 year ago). at home I have windows 2000, and it seems to be less memory problems as well (allthough i use it less intensively and long than my XP computer at work).
linux i can leave it running for many months without any noticable problems, memory leaks etc.
I think VMS machines still running (not many) are mainly used for very dedicated single tasks and thus don't need to be rebooted or changed ever, thus enabling these long uptimes. I think once a system stays up for 1 year (many of our solaris systems do) it could also stay up for 10 years if the computing environment remains very static.
There is one drawback: if you never reboot, you cannot be sure that the next reboot succeeds without problems should the need suddenly arise. Especially on machines with many different tasks and software on it, which is being changed all the time, never rebooting may be very risky.
Indeed, and therefore those pushing for the concept of IP and laws to protect and enforce it are enemies of human civilization. I hope one day more people see this, and such organizations and people are seen for what they really are: they belong to the group of worst criminals and enemies of mankind and should be punished for that. I feel that only direct fear and threat can stop them.
Their crimes are even worsened IMHO by the way they corrupt western democracies: bribing politicians and buying laws for their personal interests. Putting whole nations and democracies under pressure and threatening with economic repercussions those countries that do not "obey" or "harmonize" current US law. In any case where two countries with different IP laws meet, harmonization automatically means that those with the most strict and far reaching laws win and have to be implemented everywhere, again under threat of economic repercussions, i.e. blackmail.
I hope to see the day that those people and organizations responsible for their IP crimes (by that I mean implementing such laws, not breaking them) are locked away and harshely punished. Since democracy is corrupted by them, I equal their crimes to high treason which demands long imprinonment and even capital punishment in many countries.
not for most of us. in many countries downloading is legal in any case, its just uploading that isn't. so even if allofmp3.com itself has legal problems, it is not illegal for me (and most other inhabitants of all european countries for example) to download. music industry is spreading lies (FUD) about it however.
apart from that, even if illegal for example in the US (could be), when downloading via p2p you can be tracked quite easily (criminal companies offer music to set you up), but when downloading directly from a website you are almost impossible to track.
Why? If the people really revolt, the criminals can be decapitated just like in the french and russian revolutions. In the end, the people are the strongest.
Any proponent of DRM, patents and copyrights must be tought a lesson, one day they'll be sorry and all their millions of cash won't help them.
The role of the government is to serve the interests of society. Sometimes the interests of society are not served best by letting "the market" run by itself.
If promoting open source would be beneficial to society at large, e.g. because free market mechanisms cannot bring about such a change by itself, then sure it is the job of the state to bring it about. What else do you think a state is for, then to act in the interest of its citizens?!?
Still, java as a language comes close to the speed of C++. So there is less need to "go native". However if you want to, it is no problem. It is hardly more difficult than in TCL (I have used TCL a lot as glue to bind self written modules and available libraries in C together). JNI is not difficult, and we use it too. We don't use it to write our own C modules, because it just isn't worthwhile with Java. But we do use it to bind in existing libraries (such as openssh and some in-house developed networking libraries), and once you know how to do it it doesn't take more time than with similar mechanisms in scripting languages. People have done it for GUI toolkits, e.g. http://java-gnome.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/bin/view and http://developer.kde.org/language-bindings/java/. There is no technical reason at all that Java can't do the same thing Python can (binding in lots of existing modules) except that the need is hardly there.
So you take the responsiveness of an IDE as a measure for a language? That is nonsense.
Indeed, Pythons GUI toolkit is implemented natively, and the default Java GUI toolkit is not. However, there are also native language bindings for Java GUI toolkits, and SWT is a hybrid solution.
You are claiming that Python as glue + C as language to do the heavy work is faster than Java, and in that sense: yes. So in fact you're not comparing Java to Python, but Java to C. As I mentioned, Java is on average 0-30% slower than C++ (and C might be a bit more efficient these days, not much, than C++). However, surely there is not a significant (order of magnitude) difference between Java and C(++). Anyone who claims otherwise does not have up to date information and has probably last tried/benchmarked Java several years ago.
I am a C++ and Java software engineer, working on very large projects for banking applications. We run Java (amongst others) on an MVS (IBM) mainframe, amongst others. As you might know, IBM mainframes are not bought, but paid per used CPU cycle! So we know damn well how efficient Java is. PL/1 is more efficient (it is also more efficient than C) but the difference is NOT significant. In complex programs Java often wins, because of its structure it is easier for programmers to keep track and create correct and efficient solutions. It is the same old story as assembly in theory being more efficient than C, but often resulting in less efficient solutions because for all but small applications it is very hard for a human to come to a good solution.
Nowadays, all new software in our industry is written in Java (at least in the banking industry in europe), because it is the most economic thing for several reasons, a.o. a good trade off in run-time performance and ease of programming and safety.
that is not true. Python is much slower than Java, you must be comparing python to Java from 1999. As a performance and benchmark freak, I always benchmark any language I use. For example, Python is provable slower than Perl, except for some of the built-in (very good) API's which are very rich in Python. But doing basic non-API using stuff in python, such as the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm or other CPU intensive stuff, python is really a scripting language. Perl does some byte-compilation but also is an order of magnitute slower than truely compiled languages such as Java, C++ and C# (Java and C# being just-in-time compiled, which is about as good as compiled in advanced with todays technology, and theoretically could even outperform).
The latter three are about 10% within each others range, most benchmarks I have done indicate C++ is fastest, Java about 0-30% slower, and C# about 10% slower than Java (C# tests done 1 year ago).
All tests are library/API neutral, i.e. I did not test the speed of some C++ GUI toolkit such as Qt versus a Java GUI toolkit such as AWT/Swing, but only tested pure language features and "core" stuff.
Claiming that python, clearly an order of magnitude slower than compiled languages, is faster than Java is an absolute joke and proves that you have never done or read some serious benchmarks.
Have you actually done benchmarks? I have, and in many cases the difference varies between -5% (i.e. java a bit faster than C++) and +30%, mostly C++ is about 10% faster than Java.
So whie Java may be slower, it is not at all a order of magnitude slower, in most real world circumstances you won't notice the difference.
By the way, I also benchmarked C# (1 year ago, it may have changed) and found C# to be somewhat slower than Java, again about 10% slower, in most cases. I have tried some basic algorithms and other CPU bound stuff, also allocating objects, manipulating strings, using in-memory "I/O" (memory buffers) etc. There may be differences in some of the standard libraries and/or GUI libraries (such as Swing/AWT which up to release of Java5 was not too fast, but in Java5 it has dramatically improved), but intrinsically Java really is in the same league as C++.
I don't know about netbeans, but I use eclipse (3.0 and 3.1) more than 8 hours a day and it is not slow. I have 1GB of RAM, but next to eclipse I'm running a weblogic (development) instance and lots of other normal office programs, and eclipse works very fast. It is really amazingly fast for such a complex GUI program. It has a very complex with lots of tabs, menus, browsing trees everywhere on the screen, all kept up to date in real time.
Please, give it a serious try since your experience, the non-trivial last of which must be at least several years old. Slowness of Java is really a myth. It is very very irritating to see that myth kept alive by people repeating each other (and of course MSFT) for the last years without being open to review.
Just compare C++ Corba to Java Corba. In C++ Corba, a big issue with any API is, who owns the pointer? If you're not very precise, you risk not freeing memory or freeing it twice. In Java the issue doesn't exist.
As soon as you start with multiple processes passing objects/memory around, this is an extra complication easily leading to errors.
yes, very pragmantic. they have the "wisdom" to put their own interests at first, instead of bowing to a so called superpower telling the rest of the world what to do.
indeed, i know they don't do it because of deep philosophical considerations w.r.t. intellectual property (as I would like, since I reject the whole concept as principle), but still I am glad that at least one significant power on the planet resists the current dreadful trend and does not allow themselves to be intimidated.
China still has sound ideas w.r.t. intellectual property, namely that it is largely harmful. They will benefit from all wasted resources in the parts of the world obsessed with this evil concept, which is hostile to civilisation and development.
especially with global data. of course global data must be minimized in any system, however at least the database can be considered "global data". clustering a database is very expensive, performance wise. even outside the database you may need global data.
for example, we're working on a system where we have some global pool of resources which is used by many concurrent processes. if you would keep this pool of resources (counting down) in the database, we would need a DB which handles many thousands of transactions per second, which is not realistic. keeping it in memory (as a stateful service, i.e. global data/singleton) is the only solution, but is not compatible with clustering.
clustering can be considered "loosely coupled" fault tolerance. a single fault tolerant machine is much faster when synchronizing memory between different processes. in a cluster, synchronized memory access would slow down way too much.
i think clustering only applies to simple systems. many parts of problems just are not suited to be distributed. it is better, IMHO, to distribute functions (i.e put function A on machine 1 and function B on machine 2) than to distribute each function over multiple machines. only a particular class of functions can be distributed easily.
alas, some people (for example in the company where I work) only envisage simple web applications and thus mandate that any application is clustered, creating great headaches and severely restricting sound design.
You can do with labels what you can do with folder, that is you can emulate folders 100% using labels.
You cannot do with folders what you can do with labels.
Essentially, the difference is that you can assign multiple labels to a message, i.e. put it into multiple "folders".
Also using filters you can assign mesage directly a label, and keep them out of your inbox.
I really think the label concept just needs getting used to and to use it properly, it is a superset featurewise of folders.
as seen in global warming (whether human caused or not is not the point here).
the amount of solar energy hitting earth is enormous and is more than we need, the "only" problem is to capture it, either directly with solar panels in deserts, or by tapping its effects:
- water power (sun transports water)
- wind power
i think with the billions needed to add even more energy from space to our system (bad idea) it should be possible to get a significant amount of energy from the earths deserts.