I must say I've gotten spoiled by the GUI that's available in Microsoft's SQL Server Enterprise Manager. It's damned nice.
Is that the GUI that rewrites your query when you click "go"? Capitalising keywords is one thing, but rearranging the boolean terms in the WHERE clause, making non-trivial queries unrecognisable after they've been performed, is just obnoxious.
I once saw some sort of client for MS SQL Server not only reformat, but substantially rewrite a query. It completely changed the order and some of the operators in the WHERE clause to suit whatever its own needs are, instead of letting the guy typing the query write it in the easiest way to understand and edit.
The interpreted bytecode setup they have going just doesn't work well and doesn't run fast. For some programs this isn't a problem (ie database frontends) but is killer for programs that do lots of client side computation
I would have said that the opposite is true. In my experience, non-GUI computation in Java is close enough to compiled performance as makes no difference (for my needs, anyway).
On the other hand, Swing on my current machine (700MHz Duron, 192Mb RAM) is as sluggish as it was when the first beta for Java 1.1.x came out and I tried to run it on my 16Mb 486DX2/66.
Telstra is claiming that the changes are meant to provide "improved network performance" because of "severe burden on the network" placed by the "abusers".
I've noticed that the network is very slow today, the day after the notice went out... I can't help but wonder if all the leechers are trying to get it while it's good.
Oh, and I bet that 50kbyte/sec cap you're talking about doesn't go away.
If I understand correctly, the most expensive bandwidth is the overseas bandwidth... the inter-AU bandwidth shouldn't be that expensive. If that's the case, why doesn't Telstra put up a couple TB web cache and require that people use it?
Telstra is already using transparent web proxies.
And you're right - traffic within Australia is considerably cheaper than international traffic. A few years ago Sydney University introduced per-megabyte charging for its students, I believe basically at cost. International traffic was about five times more expensive, at 17c/Mbyte.
But Telstra's quite happy to charge you for Australian traffic at twice that rate - which looks like about ten times as much as it costs wholesale.
Have you ever seen an IME ? The program a Japanese person would use to enter their 10,000 characters ?
You spell out the word phonetically, and press space as you complete each word - the computer will show possible kanji, and you can cycle through them with the space key.
So why can't Unicode take this approach, and encode words in a similar phonetic fashion? Nobody expects a codepoint for every word in English, German and French.
Erm, wasn't that a different product, which was also called Access before the better known product by that name existed? Or are you saying that a terminal emulator evolved into a database?
The $AU doesn't need anyone's help. It's been indexed against the American dollar for the past 24 years (80 AUcents on the US$), so no matter how much gold Australia makes (or digs up), it won't change the currency rates.
Gah? I think maybe your information is a little out of date (maybe a decade or two?)... the $AU is currently at about 52 US cents. In recent years it was usually around the 75-80 US cent area, but in the last few months it's gone a long way down.
It the programmer does not know what the hell he is doing he will write bad code in ANY language!
The problem isn't with programmers who have no idea what they're doing. They don't get the job done at all, and get fired.
It's the guys who know enough Perl to write something useful, but don't know it well enough to make it maintainable by others. Surely there are a lot more of these people out there than completely ignorant coders. I'm probably one of them, and that may well be why I don't like Perl.
Adam Smith capitalism is supposed to be consumer driven,
I promise you that it isn't, and Adam Smith agrees with me. The idea of systematically rebalancing economic power away from the owners of the means of production is one that only arrives after Marx, let alone Smith.
Hang on, where did aphor say anything about "systematically rebalancing economic power away from the owners of the means of production"? He's talking about the basic old supply-and-demand stuff that assumes the consumer has as much market power as the producer - which is rarely (and decreasingly) true these days.
I can understand why you believe that Napster's users are thieves. Napster is unquestionably used almost exclusively for distributing music without the publisher's authorisation.
The real issue, the question that isn't nearly so clear-cut, is whether or not Napster should be held legally responsible for the behaviour of the users of their software.
However, your comments overall seem to suggest that you believe illegality equates to immorality. Have I misunderstood you, or do you truly believe that people should obey laws, no matter how unjust those laws might be?
There's a broader question of whether or not copyright laws actually benefit society more than they cost us, but I wonder if you even consider that to be an issue at all, given your "the law stands above all other considerations" stance.
If something is free, it cannot be a luxury. For a large section of the population, water is a luxury, and it shouldn't be.
Your definition of luxury is... rather odd, to say the least.
Water is a necessity. If something is necessary, it cannot be a luxury. Scarcity doesn't make water a luxury.
Is there any useful, mainstream purpose to this or reason for taking the time to develop it? Or was it solely a "because we/I can" exercise?
I'd say it's the latter. It might be useful for getting around an unfairly restrictive firewall, but you'd have to be desperate.
Is this really primary Slashdot story material? Like much of what is hacked out there, it strikes me as a minor (albiet clever), nearly useless end product with an extremely limited audience that might use it.
It's absolutely slashdot material! It fits perfectly under that whole "news for nerds" thing.
Are there not a plethora of interesting, meaningful software projects out there that could use the talents of folks like this? Is it just a matter of hooking the two parties together somehow (clearly an entire Slashdot topic in and of itself, I realize)?
Well, that is a huge topic - this is a "because it was there" effort, I'm sure, so it's more a question of what the developers find interesting than not being aware of anything better to do...
Will the developers' next accomplishment (making Slashot headlines?) include something similarly as earthshaking, novel, and absurd as "Enlightenment on a Palm III!"
Bah! Enlightenment is nothing but eyecandy; I doubt its users could deal with the strict, bare functionality approach of the Palm GUI.
So pointing out the mistakes of moderators is considered trolling, while being a karma whore isn't?
How have the moderators made a mistake? The story has an error in the URL, the post corrects it - and it does indeed point to the story, not the infamous goatse.cx site - so what's the problem?
I don't care what the poster's motivation was - whether it was intended to be helpful or to be moderated up, the message is useful to anyone who couldn't figure out the mistake for themselves, and should be moderated up accordingly.
I'd expect that this hole will be plugged up by akamaitech as soon as they notice any kind of performance impact on their ad servers. There's no way they could afford to leave an exploit open like that if it could cost them money.
Politicians live and die by the vote, they care about nothing else and will respond to nothing else. They know which segments of society vote and which don't. Those who don't are going to get the short end of the stick from those who do.
Call me cynical, but I suspect those who don't vote are getting the short end of the stick fromt hose who contribute to campaign funds, and those who do vote aren't much better off than those who don't.
As a programmer building a set of GPL'ed PHP scripts for instance, how are you supposed to make sure that nobody takes your code, and uses it to build a closed-source project?
Couldn't somebody make a website out of a derivitive work and never have to open or disclose their code? This type of thing would go against the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL.
OK, if they're modifying your package and selling (or otherwise distributing) it under non-free terms, they'd be violating your licence. But what you describe seems to be quite within the spirit of the GPL: running one web site based on a modified version of your package is use of your package, and the GPL explicitly does not attempt to impose any limitation on use of code, only distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
You make it sound like he's the first stowaway in space or something.
Nope, "Commercial and other paid users must purchase deployment licenses" means it isn't open source.
Duh, The Onion writes about Area Man, not Local Man.
Is that the GUI that rewrites your query when you click "go"? Capitalising keywords is one thing, but rearranging the boolean terms in the WHERE clause, making non-trivial queries unrecognisable after they've been performed, is just obnoxious.
I once saw some sort of client for MS SQL Server not only reformat, but substantially rewrite a query. It completely changed the order and some of the operators in the WHERE clause to suit whatever its own needs are, instead of letting the guy typing the query write it in the easiest way to understand and edit.
I would have said that the opposite is true. In my experience, non-GUI computation in Java is close enough to compiled performance as makes no difference (for my needs, anyway).
On the other hand, Swing on my current machine (700MHz Duron, 192Mb RAM) is as sluggish as it was when the first beta for Java 1.1.x came out and I tried to run it on my 16Mb 486DX2/66.
I've noticed that the network is very slow today, the day after the notice went out ... I can't help but wonder if all the leechers are trying to get it while it's good.
Oh, and I bet that 50kbyte/sec cap you're talking about doesn't go away.
Not quite true - the Disney channel on cable (at least in the past, I haven't had access to it in a year or two) used to use his show as filler.
Telstra is already using transparent web proxies.
And you're right - traffic within Australia is considerably cheaper than international traffic. A few years ago Sydney University introduced per-megabyte charging for its students, I believe basically at cost. International traffic was about five times more expensive, at 17c/Mbyte.
But Telstra's quite happy to charge you for Australian traffic at twice that rate - which looks like about ten times as much as it costs wholesale.
So why can't Unicode take this approach, and encode words in a similar phonetic fashion? Nobody expects a codepoint for every word in English, German and French.
Erm, wasn't that a different product, which was also called Access before the better known product by that name existed? Or are you saying that a terminal emulator evolved into a database?
Why no mention of Triangle and Robert?
Gah? I think maybe your information is a little out of date (maybe a decade or two?) ... the $AU is currently at about 52 US cents. In recent years it was usually around the 75-80 US cent area, but in the last few months it's gone a long way down.
The problem isn't with programmers who have no idea what they're doing. They don't get the job done at all, and get fired.
It's the guys who know enough Perl to write something useful, but don't know it well enough to make it maintainable by others. Surely there are a lot more of these people out there than completely ignorant coders. I'm probably one of them, and that may well be why I don't like Perl.
Have you tried Google's advanced search? Seems to work pretty well to me.
lkcl's diary at Advogato has a few entries regarding the way Samba development has been going, particularly this entry: http://advogato.org/person/l kcl /diary.html?start=67.
Point taken, but that's still got nothing to do with Marx or a system that rebalances power away from the producer.
Ignoring the fact that I've forgotten who said it, the issue is that consumers have less power in the market than they used to have.
Hang on, where did aphor say anything about "systematically rebalancing economic power away from the owners of the means of production"? He's talking about the basic old supply-and-demand stuff that assumes the consumer has as much market power as the producer - which is rarely (and decreasingly) true these days.
I can understand why you believe that Napster's users are thieves. Napster is unquestionably used almost exclusively for distributing music without the publisher's authorisation.
The real issue, the question that isn't nearly so clear-cut, is whether or not Napster should be held legally responsible for the behaviour of the users of their software.
However, your comments overall seem to suggest that you believe illegality equates to immorality. Have I misunderstood you, or do you truly believe that people should obey laws, no matter how unjust those laws might be?
There's a broader question of whether or not copyright laws actually benefit society more than they cost us, but I wonder if you even consider that to be an issue at all, given your "the law stands above all other considerations" stance.
Your definition of luxury is ... rather odd, to say the least.
Water is a necessity. If something is necessary, it cannot be a luxury. Scarcity doesn't make water a luxury.
If that comma has such great significance, can you tell me what significance the other two have?
I'd say it's the latter. It might be useful for getting around an unfairly restrictive firewall, but you'd have to be desperate.
It's absolutely slashdot material! It fits perfectly under that whole "news for nerds" thing.
Well, that is a huge topic - this is a "because it was there" effort, I'm sure, so it's more a question of what the developers find interesting than not being aware of anything better to do...
Bah! Enlightenment is nothing but eyecandy; I doubt its users could deal with the strict, bare functionality approach of the Palm GUI.
How have the moderators made a mistake? The story has an error in the URL, the post corrects it - and it does indeed point to the story, not the infamous goatse.cx site - so what's the problem?
I don't care what the poster's motivation was - whether it was intended to be helpful or to be moderated up, the message is useful to anyone who couldn't figure out the mistake for themselves, and should be moderated up accordingly.
I'd expect that this hole will be plugged up by akamaitech as soon as they notice any kind of performance impact on their ad servers. There's no way they could afford to leave an exploit open like that if it could cost them money.
Call me cynical, but I suspect those who don't vote are getting the short end of the stick fromt hose who contribute to campaign funds, and those who do vote aren't much better off than those who don't.
OK, if they're modifying your package and selling (or otherwise distributing) it under non-free terms, they'd be violating your licence. But what you describe seems to be quite within the spirit of the GPL: running one web site based on a modified version of your package is use of your package, and the GPL explicitly does not attempt to impose any limitation on use of code, only distribution.