In fact Apple is the company "we" have always had problems with. The FSF, for a long time, has Apple because of their "look & feel" lawsuits.
One might say Apple has invented the concept of software patents, and thus has been one of the few companies to have been boycotted by the free software community; this in contrast to MSFT, of which one may say many bad things but not (yet) that they have been using patents in evil ways.
Even though the boycott ended in 1995, I have always remained very suspicious w.r.t. Apple, and once more they affirm their "culture".
I can only confirm this. I have a 32s, a 17b and also, alas, bought a HP49g+. I wish I had bought an 48sx instead. On paper the 49g+ has more, but it just doesn't feel like a real HP. From the picture, this new 33s is of the same lower quality. Not to mention the insane V shape of the keys. What is that good for?
People don't want to hear bad news, they don't want to change their comfortable way of life and give up their SUV toys. Therefore people keep rationalizing that measurements could be false, or warming is happening but it is not due to human causes etc. etc.
While I am not yet convinced that the warming has a human cause and am annoyed by those that bluntly claim so while the statistical and scientific evidence cannot proof it yet, I think it is extremely stupid and shortsighted to not act as if it might be true. Yes it is not certain, but there is a good chance that we are seeing an extreme speed of temperature rise which is caused by humans. Just to be sure we should take measures to stop it. It also has some other beneficial side effects such as leaving some oil and wealth for future generations, i.e. just being decent and responsible also for the future of mankind.
How egoistic and selfish many are. I don't know if this is a typical slashdot thing, or because it is because slashdot is mainly populated by americans and if the general opinion/mentality in the US is such. If I talk about it with people here (in Switzerland or elsewhere in europe) I can hardly find anyone who doubts a human caused greenhouse effect. Some, like me, think it goes too far to claim it as an abolute truth, but almost anyone thinks it might be and thus it is a good idea to behave a bit more responsible and try to reduce CO2 emissions and save some oil for future generations.
Throwing more CPU doesn't help much. The problem is the disks and how these are handled. With concurrent transactions the efficiency of locking, caching and parsing of queries is crucial.
Of course, one could "reengineer" mysql into a kind of oracle or postgresql. However, given that these two already exist, why waste time and money to do that?
As for those that need/want something cheap/open/simple, postgresql already does all you want. It is irritating to see how plain and simple inertia leads to rebuilding a second postgresql instead of directly using what is better and available.
To be "stable", that is in principle new functions are not added to 2.4 but to 2.6 or 2.7 now that 2.6 has been released).
Some backporting in a very limited fashion is not a problem, but if it gets too extensive, then what is the point? To keep 2.4 stable while added lots of new stuff from 2.6 takes a great deal of care and effort. Effort better spent in making 2.6 just as stable as 2.4, so that everyone is profiting from it and we all can move on and up to 2.6.
This custom backporting IMO is work spent by Red Hat which, instead, does not at all benefit the community. For the same money they could work on 2.6 instead, then move their customers to 2.6 sooner and everyone would benefit.
I don't think you can compare spectrum to Internet. The main difference being that I can easily "shield" myself from parts of the Internet, i.e. I can choose where to connect to by linking a cable to A and not to B.
It is not so easy to shield myself from radiowaves and connect to some other network using some other protocol if I want to. If my neighbour uses protocol X to connect to A, he may block me to connect to B using protocol Y; chances are that me trying and failing, will block him too.
I.e. the less "directed" nature of a large part of the spectrum does require at least some regulation. I don't say that the current policies are OK, however no regulation at all will lead to chaos, not to speak of health risks for strong fields in some frequencies.
An intermediate and reasonable form of regulation might be to mandate adherence to certain well behaved protocols, but allow anyone as long as they do not violate the protocols to use the (part of the) spectrium freely.
Just to confirm this irony: I know as a matter of fact that all new internal software development in the major swiss banks uses java exclusively, except for some parts of mainframe software.
UBS is also moving towards java on the mainframe (using websphere) for a part of their mainframe development.
We are talking thousands of developers here in very large corporations. Surely these few corporations are not the only ones, many more must be betting entirely on Java for their enterprise software development.
Since many of the older projects used C or C++, the fact that java already catched up almost with C and C++ on sourceforge means that of the projects starting now, by far the largest part must be java projects.
When I was on vacation in Massachusets (and in Canada as well two years later), I found it very confusing and nonsensical that prices are posted without sales tax. In Europe all prices are (by law) put inclusing the equivalent of sales tax. What is the sense to give net prices? It is as if a shoe manufacturer gives prices without profit, then while paying the cashier adds the 300% profit margin.
It is almost like a political (anti-tax) statement to give prices excl. sales tax, to constantly remind people that they are paying taxes.
What I cannot understand either is that you can have such differences in tax regimes within the same country and still have open borders and free trade. I think that you must either check all goods to be able to apply sales tax as soon as goods cross the border from state to state, or eliminate the differences and have people pay sales tax at the origin.
I, for example, live in Switzerland. If I order something in neighbouring Germany, the postal service takes care of me paying the Swiss sales tax (and in Germany I pay without). Within the EU however, you have to pay including the sales tax always from the state where you have ordered the item. The small differences in sales tax between the EU states are compensated directly between the states afterwards.
It is unjust to have people in the same economic block/union (such as the EU or the USA) have very different tax regimes and to give them the easy opportunity for tax evasion. Once democratically determined (i.e. by the majority of the people) that tax must be to fund certain public activities (such as building roads, preventing degrading circumstances such as starving people and people/children without decent healthcare) then it is a very serious crime to not pay tax. It is 100% like stealing. Stealing from society and stealing from honest people that do pay their taxes.
That is utter nonsense, apparently you don't know much about solaris or AIX.
For large systems, with lots of concurrent processes and users and large amounts of SAN and other I/O, Linux is totally unfit compared to the real thing.
Sure you can run Linux fine on a small desktop Sun box or even on a small server, but try it on a medium to large size machine and you're just wasting your expensive hardware.
What makes you so sure that Linux has reached the level of Solaris and the like? Do you know it? Have you run it on the hardware it is intended for and made tests and benchmarks?
You sound like one who has tried solaris-x86 on a peecee and did some quick tests and comparisons to linux such as iozone and other single-user tests and have concluded that solaris is crap.
The x86 version is only for people at home to gain experience with solaris or for educational use, maybe for some developers to have a cheap desktop development system that has the same OS environment as the target. You have completely misunderstood solaris and its purposes.
From an technical viewpoint, where is the fundamental difference? What do we gain by people switching form UNIX to Linux? Who says that switching away from UNIX is unavoidable and if not to Linux it must be WinNT?
To take solaris as an example, but most of the same could be said about AIX and HPUX: almost all open source software running on Linux also runs on UNIX, just the same. It offers the same user environment. And in most cases it offers more mature threading and scaleability. Linux is still trying to catch up with UNIX. It has come close in many areas, but don't try to run it on an E10000.
The only advantage for Linux over UNIX is price (both of the software and of the hardware).
Of course I like switches from UNIX to Linux better than switches from UNIX to WinNT. But I would like switches from WinNT to UNIX or Linux much better. The only thing that counts is UNIX/Linux against WinNT.
Remember, the UNIX world (of which Linux nowadays is a part) suffered because of divisions and internal disagreements. It is important to cooperate and stand united against the enemy now. If this sectarism continues it will damage us all (including Linux). Today it is Linux against UNIX, tomorrow it may be XY-Linux against AB-Linux or whatever.
I don't say all UNIX & Linux variants must assimilate and become the same, but they should strive for the same common goal and together create an attractive platform to fight the real enemy.
I'm sure someone will cook up some perl scripts that handle the splitting and (re)storing in chunks (by IMAP I presume) for you. Should be pretty easy.
The bundling of a media player is just one of many examples. Fact is that MSFT, as a monopolist, can kill any competition it wants by exploiting its monopoly in operating systems to preinstall some new application.
Today it is a media player (and admittedly, real as competition was bad, however quicktime was pretty good), yesterday it was the web browser, and tomorrow? A search engine? An instant messaging probram (oops they already did that)?
They can target and kill whom they want, and that must be stopped. Because in the end that is at the expense of consumers for sure. If you deny that, I must say you are very shortsighted.
Another important issue in this case is opening the operating system interfaces, so that competitors can create compatible software. It was wrong, IMO, to not force them to give the interface-specs away for free, but at least it is better than nothing.
The main message however is that the policy to misuse the monopoly in one market to expand into others is plainly illegal. They try to implement a remedy now, but I think the actions are mainly symbolic at this time. It is the message that counts. If MSFT tries to continue, they can expect heavier fines and other, more effective, measures to comply with.
I've heard before that python got anonymous functions wrong, and it was argued that the problem is that they don't see the scope in the correct way. Could you please elaborate?
Yesterday I wrote a small python script (to learn some of it) and it included this (quicksort):
def sort(l): if len(l) <= 1: return l pivot = l[len(l)/2] i = 0 ll = filter(lambda e: e < pivot, l) le = filter(lambda e: e == pivot, l) lg = filter(lambda e: e > pivot, l) l = sort(ll) l.extend(le) l.extend(sort(lg)) return l
Here the anonymous functions do see their scope (pivot). However, unlike Perl for example, these "functions" really can be only expressions so in that sense they're more limited as.
Just out of curiosity, is that what you meant with "python got it wrong"?
What is often forgotten is that most competitors of MSFT are also US companies, so to limit MSFT's monopoly would harm one US company, but benefit a lot of others many of which are also US companies.
So, the economic balance does not explain the US failure to correct this economically damaging condition, there must have been another reason. Probably plain old bribes, or just stupidity from the part of the Bush government to see the economic benefit to have sound markets with sound competition.
Who are you to generalize about "europeans". yugoslavia has been under communist dictatorship for 40 years and anarchy after the collapse.
Before that the civilized europe had the bad luck of being closer to nazi germany than the US was. Does that make us weak or uncivilized?
Before that, by the way, the "americans" (who are also mainly europeans such as brits, italians, dutch, germans) slaughtered the real americans (indians) in a large scale genocide.
Currently, the US, or better lets say Bush and other warmongers from the fascist right-wing camp, are bringing the western world on the verge of collapse and war by their actions and obsessions in the so called "war against terrorism", i.e. war and blackmail against any nation that does not suit us.
The EU antitrust until now mainly hit european companies. You are just using blind "patriotism" to support a US company, which by the way is mainly damaging other US companies. Incredible and very disturbing that your port got modded to 5/insightful.
It will only really awake a lot of people and organisations for the first time, and make them see how insane it is to make themselves totally dependant on an entity they have nothing to say about.
Yes, it will buy MSFT 1 or 2 years, but in the meantime everyone will fevereshly work on MSFT escape plans.
He wrote he used it a few months. In fact so did I and I came to exactly the same conclusion. He is not flaming but gave some very valid comments on C#.
Please, you learn both Java and C# and you MUST come to the same conclusion: C# is nothing more than a bastardized Java with some "instant short term gratification" features thrown in, at the cost of a loss in consistency and qualtity on the whole.
Indeed, sometimes it is ones duty to break the law: if the law is injust. Just like civilians in Nazi germany should have broken the law, we have the same duty in these times.
In my view the proponents of "intellectual property", the concept alone is hostile to civilisation and humanity, are the real criminals. Civilisation is marked by sharing of information and not withholding it. Those who try to implant ideas and laws that prevent information sharing are perverting civilisation and are enemies of humanity, at the same level as terrorists and other enemies of ours.
Therefore, those who do not break these criminal and dangerous laws, are collaborating with an evil system.
MSFT is fascism in economy: centralized, closed, and even the theoretical goals are self-centered (at least in commumism, while bad in practice, the theory is good).
Open source is democracy in both politics and economy; I cannot see how to make a difference between the two. Economy is part of politics, and democratic politics results in an economy where the ultimate goals are the interests of the people at large, not those of a small group of rulers.
Point is that in India slave labor kind of exists: child labor is widespread, and people of lower castes accept underpaid jobs as a fact of life.
While these 'slaves' are not the ones directly replacing western jobs, they do enable very low cost of living for the people who do, thus enabling them to work for much less as we (in the west) have to.
We can only compete if we do import the same culture, i.e. import a kind of slave labor enabling our white collar workers to accept 30% of todays wages and still have a decent life. Do we really want that to happen?
Japan was a similar problem, however due to the much smaller population we were able to absorb that shock more or less. Japanese, by culture, are prepared to work 6 days a week 10 hours a day or more, and live on 5 sq.meter a person. We cannot and will not compete with such a culture, therefore we do need some means of isolation from it.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact Apple is the company "we" have always had problems with. The FSF, for a long time, has Apple because of their "look & feel" lawsuits.
One might say Apple has invented the concept of software patents, and thus has been one of the few companies to have been boycotted by the free software community; this in contrast to MSFT, of which one may say many bad things but not (yet) that they have been using patents in evil ways.
Even though the boycott ended in 1995, I have always remained very suspicious w.r.t. Apple, and once more they affirm their "culture".
I can only confirm this. I have a 32s, a 17b and also, alas, bought a HP49g+. I wish I had bought an 48sx instead. On paper the 49g+ has more, but it just doesn't feel like a real HP. From the picture, this new 33s is of the same lower quality. Not to mention the insane V shape of the keys. What is that good for?
People don't want to hear bad news, they don't want to change their comfortable way of life and give up their SUV toys.
Therefore people keep rationalizing that measurements could be false, or warming is happening but it is not due to human causes etc. etc.
While I am not yet convinced that the warming has a human cause and am annoyed by those that bluntly claim so while the statistical and scientific evidence cannot proof it yet, I think it is extremely stupid and shortsighted to not act as if it might be true. Yes it is not certain, but there is a good chance that we are seeing an extreme speed of temperature rise which is caused by humans. Just to be sure we should take measures to stop it. It also has some other beneficial side effects such as leaving some oil and wealth for future generations, i.e. just being decent and responsible also for the future of mankind.
How egoistic and selfish many are. I don't know if this is a typical slashdot thing, or because it is because slashdot is mainly populated by americans and if the general opinion/mentality in the US is such. If I talk about it with people here (in Switzerland or elsewhere in europe) I can hardly find anyone who doubts a human caused greenhouse effect. Some, like me, think it goes too far to claim it as an abolute truth, but almost anyone thinks it might be and thus it is a good idea to behave a bit more responsible and try to reduce CO2 emissions and save some oil for future generations.
Throwing more CPU doesn't help much. The problem is the disks and how these are handled. With concurrent transactions the efficiency of locking, caching and parsing of queries is crucial.
Of course, one could "reengineer" mysql into a kind of oracle or postgresql. However, given that these two already exist, why waste time and money to do that?
As for those that need/want something cheap/open/simple, postgresql already does all you want. It is irritating to see how plain and simple inertia leads to rebuilding a second postgresql instead of directly using what is better and available.
To be "stable", that is in principle new functions are not added to 2.4 but to 2.6 or 2.7 now that 2.6 has been released).
Some backporting in a very limited fashion is not a problem, but if it gets too extensive, then what is the point? To keep 2.4 stable while added lots of new stuff from 2.6 takes a great deal of care and effort. Effort better spent in making 2.6 just as stable as 2.4, so that everyone is profiting from it and we all can move on and up to 2.6.
This custom backporting IMO is work spent by Red Hat which, instead, does not at all benefit the community. For the same money they could work on 2.6 instead, then move their customers to 2.6 sooner and everyone would benefit.
See this bug. I have the same PDC20265 hardware and had constant crashes until I read this bug and downgraded to 2.4.
I don't think you can compare spectrum to Internet. The main difference being that I can easily "shield" myself from parts of the Internet, i.e. I can choose where to connect to by linking a cable to A and not to B.
It is not so easy to shield myself from radiowaves and connect to some other network using some other protocol if I want to. If my neighbour uses protocol X to connect to A, he may block me to connect to B using protocol Y; chances are that me trying and failing, will block him too.
I.e. the less "directed" nature of a large part of the spectrum does require at least some regulation. I don't say that the current policies are OK, however no regulation at all will lead to chaos, not to speak of health risks for strong fields in some frequencies.
An intermediate and reasonable form of regulation might be to mandate adherence to certain well behaved protocols, but allow anyone as long as they do not violate the protocols to use the (part of the) spectrium freely.
Just to confirm this irony: I know as a matter of fact that all new internal software development in the major swiss banks uses java exclusively, except for some parts of mainframe software.
UBS is also moving towards java on the mainframe (using websphere) for a part of their mainframe development.
We are talking thousands of developers here in very large corporations. Surely these few corporations are not the only ones, many more must be betting entirely on Java for their enterprise software development.
Since many of the older projects used C or C++, the fact that java already catched up almost with C and C++ on sourceforge means that of the projects starting now, by far the largest part must be java projects.
When I was on vacation in Massachusets (and in Canada as well two years later), I found it very confusing and nonsensical that prices are posted without sales tax. In Europe all prices are (by law) put inclusing the equivalent of sales tax. What is the sense to give net prices? It is as if a shoe manufacturer gives prices without profit, then while paying the cashier adds the 300% profit margin.
It is almost like a political (anti-tax) statement to give prices excl. sales tax, to constantly remind people that they are paying taxes.
What I cannot understand either is that you can have such differences in tax regimes within the same country and still have open borders and free trade. I think that you must either check all goods to be able to apply sales tax as soon as goods cross the border from state to state, or eliminate the differences and have people pay sales tax at the origin.
I, for example, live in Switzerland. If I order something in neighbouring Germany, the postal service takes care of me paying the Swiss sales tax (and in Germany I pay without). Within the EU however, you have to pay including the sales tax always from the state where you have ordered the item. The small differences in sales tax between the EU states are compensated directly between the states afterwards.
It is unjust to have people in the same economic block/union (such as the EU or the USA) have very different tax regimes and to give them the easy opportunity for tax evasion. Once democratically determined (i.e. by the majority of the people) that tax must be to fund certain public activities (such as building roads, preventing degrading circumstances such as starving people and people/children without decent healthcare) then it is a very serious crime to not pay tax. It is 100% like stealing. Stealing from society and stealing from honest people that do pay their taxes.
Then use "run as" to grant the problematic but trusted programs extra rights.
That is utter nonsense, apparently you don't know much about solaris or AIX.
For large systems, with lots of concurrent processes and users and large amounts of SAN and other I/O, Linux is totally unfit compared to the real thing.
Sure you can run Linux fine on a small desktop Sun box or even on a small server, but try it on a medium to large size machine and you're just wasting your expensive hardware.
What makes you so sure that Linux has reached the level of Solaris and the like? Do you know it? Have you run it on the hardware it is intended for and made tests and benchmarks?
You sound like one who has tried solaris-x86 on a peecee and did some quick tests and comparisons to linux such as iozone and other single-user tests and have concluded that solaris is crap.
The x86 version is only for people at home to gain experience with solaris or for educational use, maybe for some developers to have a cheap desktop development system that has the same OS environment as the target. You have completely misunderstood solaris and its purposes.
From an technical viewpoint, where is the fundamental difference? What do we gain by people switching form UNIX to Linux? Who says that switching away from UNIX is unavoidable and if not to Linux it must be WinNT?
To take solaris as an example, but most of the same could be said about AIX and HPUX: almost all open source software running on Linux also runs on UNIX, just the same. It offers the same user environment. And in most cases it offers more mature threading and scaleability. Linux is still trying to catch up with UNIX. It has come close in many areas, but don't try to run it on an E10000.
The only advantage for Linux over UNIX is price (both of the software and of the hardware).
Of course I like switches from UNIX to Linux better than switches from UNIX to WinNT. But I would like switches from WinNT to UNIX or Linux much better. The only thing that counts is UNIX/Linux against WinNT.
Remember, the UNIX world (of which Linux nowadays is a part) suffered because of divisions and internal disagreements. It is important to cooperate and stand united against the enemy now. If this sectarism continues it will damage us all (including Linux). Today it is Linux against UNIX, tomorrow it may be XY-Linux against AB-Linux or whatever.
I don't say all UNIX & Linux variants must assimilate and become the same, but they should strive for the same common goal and together create an attractive platform to fight the real enemy.
I'm sure someone will cook up some perl scripts that handle the splitting and (re)storing in chunks (by IMAP I presume) for you. Should be pretty easy.
The bundling of a media player is just one of many examples. Fact is that MSFT, as a monopolist, can kill any competition it wants by exploiting its monopoly in operating systems to preinstall some new application.
Today it is a media player (and admittedly, real as competition was bad, however quicktime was pretty good), yesterday it was the web browser, and tomorrow? A search engine? An instant messaging probram (oops they already did that)?
They can target and kill whom they want, and that must be stopped. Because in the end that is at the expense of consumers for sure. If you deny that, I must say you are very shortsighted.
Another important issue in this case is opening the operating system interfaces, so that competitors can create compatible software. It was wrong, IMO, to not force them to give the interface-specs away for free, but at least it is better than nothing.
The main message however is that the policy to misuse the monopoly in one market to expand into others is plainly illegal. They try to implement a remedy now, but I think the actions are mainly symbolic at this time. It is the message that counts. If MSFT tries to continue, they can expect heavier fines and other, more effective, measures to comply with.
Yesterday I wrote a small python script (to learn some of it) and it included this (quicksort):
Here the anonymous functions do see their scope (pivot). However, unlike Perl for example, these "functions" really can be only expressions so in that sense they're more limited as. Just out of curiosity, is that what you meant with "python got it wrong"?What is often forgotten is that most competitors of MSFT are also US companies, so to limit MSFT's monopoly would harm one US company, but benefit a lot of others many of which are also US companies.
So, the economic balance does not explain the US failure to correct this economically damaging condition, there must have been another reason. Probably plain old bribes, or just stupidity from the part of the Bush government to see the economic benefit to have sound markets with sound competition.
Who are you to generalize about "europeans". yugoslavia has been under communist dictatorship for 40 years and anarchy after the collapse.
Before that the civilized europe had the bad luck of being closer to nazi germany than the US was. Does that make us weak or uncivilized?
Before that, by the way, the "americans" (who are also mainly europeans such as brits, italians, dutch, germans) slaughtered the real americans (indians) in a large scale genocide.
Currently, the US, or better lets say Bush and other warmongers from the fascist right-wing camp, are bringing the western world on the verge of collapse and war by their actions and obsessions in the so called "war against terrorism", i.e. war and blackmail against any nation that does not suit us.
The EU antitrust until now mainly hit european companies. You are just using blind "patriotism" to support a US company, which by the way is mainly damaging other US companies. Incredible and very disturbing that your port got modded to 5/insightful.
It will only really awake a lot of people and organisations for the first time, and make them see how insane it is to make themselves totally dependant on an entity they have nothing to say about.
Yes, it will buy MSFT 1 or 2 years, but in the meantime everyone will fevereshly work on MSFT escape plans.
He wrote he used it a few months. In fact so did I and I came to exactly the same conclusion. He is not flaming but gave some very valid comments on C#.
Please, you learn both Java and C# and you MUST come to the same conclusion: C# is nothing more than a bastardized Java with some "instant short term gratification" features thrown in, at the cost of a loss in consistency and qualtity on the whole.
Indeed, sometimes it is ones duty to break the law: if the law is injust. Just like civilians in Nazi germany should have broken the law, we have the same duty in these times.
In my view the proponents of "intellectual property", the concept alone is hostile to civilisation and humanity, are the real criminals. Civilisation is marked by sharing of information and not withholding it. Those who try to implant ideas and laws that prevent information sharing are perverting civilisation and are enemies of humanity, at the same level as terrorists and other enemies of ours.
Therefore, those who do not break these criminal and dangerous laws, are collaborating with an evil system.
no text
MSFT is fascism in economy: centralized, closed, and even the theoretical goals are self-centered (at least in commumism, while bad in practice, the theory is good).
Open source is democracy in both politics and economy; I cannot see how to make a difference between the two. Economy is part of politics, and democratic politics results in an economy where the ultimate goals are the interests of the people at large, not those of a small group of rulers.
Point is that in India slave labor kind of exists: child labor is widespread, and people of lower castes accept underpaid jobs as a fact of life.
While these 'slaves' are not the ones directly replacing western jobs, they do enable very low cost of living for the people who do, thus enabling them to work for much less as we (in the west) have to.
We can only compete if we do import the same culture, i.e. import a kind of slave labor enabling our white collar workers to accept 30% of todays wages and still have a decent life. Do we really want that to happen?
Japan was a similar problem, however due to the much smaller population we were able to absorb that shock more or less. Japanese, by culture, are prepared to work 6 days a week 10 hours a day or more, and live on 5 sq.meter a person. We cannot and will not compete with such a culture, therefore we do need some means of isolation from it.
See the *twm family tree.