There is already a standardized way to do this, but nobody is using it.
The ICRA (formerly know as RSAC) defines a meta tag that allows a web site to indicate the level of violence, nudity, etc. that is on a page, or a site, or a directory of a site. It is easy, unbiased, and self-reporting. Internet Explorer supports it. I don't know if any other browsers do. All of the off-the-shelf parental control programs support it. But I don't see any sites adding these labels to their pages. Why not?
Maybe I should email the search engines and ask them to support it in their searches. Google already has a safety setting in the image search.
What the heck? This whole thread is FUD! If you want to restart a service in Windows, select the service in the service control manager, and click "stop" then "start" or "restart."
The real benefit that Linux has over Windows is that you can update the executable on disk without corrupting the in-memory image. That's a feature of the file system and the use of memory mapping though. Both operating systems have the ability to stop/start/restart services, and both require you to do so to take advantage of an update.
Copyright law reserves the rights of distribution and modification to the copyright holder.
Copyright does not reserve the right of modification, only distribution. A modification is called a "derived work" but copyright does not prevent you from creating derived works. It only prevents distributing them. And that brings us back to the original problem, which is that if you run your own server then you aren't distributing them.
How can anyone rightfully say that just announcing an idea without having at the minimum a justification for how to implement the idea is worth more than $0? Ideas don't have value. Words don't have value. Business plans don't have value. What has value is the ability to convert anything INTO a marketable resource.
You are exactly right: ideas are worth zero. But before you go off on a tirade, you need to understand what a patent is. Patents must describe an implementation of an idea. Ideas themselves are not patentable. This is a misconception that comes up a lot.
Have you read this patent an determined that it is just an idea patent and does not describe an implementation? If so, then I don't understand why the company isn't filing a countersuit claiming that the patent is bogus.
And yes, I'm giving the patent office the benefit of the doubt at the moment. They probably don't deserve it, but don't go off about how this patent is just an idea and is worthless unless you know that is the case.
Your reasoning is interesting, but it goes against the rules of economics.
Switch to a-la-carte and do you really think any channel is going to allow themselves to be priced for under a buck a month?
Sellers don't choose their price based on what sounds good. They choose it based on the supply/demand curve. If they make more money at 50 cents per month than $5 per month than so be it. The best estimate we could make would be to look at what they get now. In my area $40/month for basic cable with about 80 stations is 50 center per month. So yes, under a buck a month is a good guess. While HBO, Showtime, etc may deman closer to $5 a month like they do now. If I may speculate: since supply is infinite (shows do cost money, but the cost is not proportional to the number of viewers), and demand is finite, so prices will likely be low.
A lot of channels right now are subsidized by other channels that whatever media conglomerate that owns them requires the cable company to include as part of a package of other, more popular channels...These channels will be gone under a-la-carte pricing.
That does figure into the equation, but there is no reason that the new pricing scheme will impact them at all. This type of thing happens in other markets every day. The local food market subsidizes my purchase of milk and eggs by selling them at or below cost to attract customers. Customers COULD go into the store and buy only milk and eggs and try to make the store lose money. But that's what the media company wants - to promote the new channel and make it popular, raising demand while keeping supply fixed, which raises the price. So the companies will do just fine here.
A related example to that one is stuff like PBS which is required to be carried and is subsidized by non-profits and by the government. That wouldn't change in this pricing model. PBS could still be subsized and the consumer won't even know it.
What you're going to end up with is a bunch of lowest common denominator, mainstream channels that are as driven by the cable equivalent of "ratings"...
Actually, that's how all channels are now. Ratings = more viewers = more advertiser dollars. Actually, I wonder if some channels will actually become FREE in the hopes of selling ads. (I guess that didn't work in newspapers and magazines, but they are cheap.)
you can argue that it's the free market, blah blah blah, and that's true, but...that made Titanic the #1 movie of all time and Britney Spears the #1 selling music artist of the past few years. Do you really want to be relying on your fellow customers to support the channels...?
I know that you are obviously a much better consumer than everyone else, with better tastes. That's because you read Slashdot.:-) But you rely on your fellow man constantly. If you don't like the programming, there's an opening at a low-budget UHF TV station for you. This is why Family Guy was cancelled as was Futurama, and why Sci Fi couldn't afford Farscape. AND it is why Family Guy came back and Farscape is now in syndication. The companies will learn, the consumers will learn, and the market will shift, but it won't fall apart. Besides, there's always bittorrent and anime.:-)
Totally off the wall: I am curious what cheap TV programming was never available before, that might become available now.
You know, that may seem like a trolly smart-alec comment, but it is VERY true. I am experimenting with the same type of real-time video stuff that these guys are doing (locating people, swords, guns, etc.) and I'm doing it under Windows for this exact reason.
I've never understood why none of the GC languages (none that I know of: Java and.NET) allow this pattern to work. It is EXTREMELY useful! Just because the runtime uses GC doesn't mean you couldn't mark an object for immediate disposal when it leaves scope. Both Java and C# have a mechanism for doing this, but it requires explicitly freeing the object (which defeats the purpose of the pattern).
The xxx tld was a better idea. Is the urban legend that it was struck down by the US conservative Christian right correct, or Slashdot propoganda? Even if this were possible, it would probably don the same fate.
There's a myriad of HTPC cases, but very few chips and motherboards.
I am very disappointed with the availability of "alternative" platforms. Very few places sell the VIA C3 chips. The VIA C7 only exists in press releases. Some companies sell the chips but not the motherboards! Most of the motherboards have on board video that doesn't include DVI/HDMI which makes them no good for home theater anyway. The Transmeta Crusoe is a good option, in theory, but I've never found any place that sells them.
I've been looking for a CPU+mobo combo for a few weeks and I am getting very frustrated. My 54 watt AMD Athlon 1Ghz overheats no matter what case I have, since it sits in an entertainment center. If somebody made a DVD player with Mozilla, MPEG-4 support, and a hard drive I wouldn't even need a PC.
Mario Kart is mostly unchanged from system to system. Yet people will shell-out (pun intended!) money for the same game for each new console they get. The RIAA would love to change formats every 3 years and have people re-purchase their whole collection of cassettes/CDs/DVDs/holo-cubes. Fortunately for consumers, audio technology does not change as quickly as video gaming.
I guess this doesn't apply to the DS, but we really should expect manufacturers to have backward compatibility. It worked great for Sony with the PS2. But people should boycott the XBOX 360 until it supports all the XBOX games in their collection.
I hope that Yahoo and MSN and whomever don't start doing this. Then we will be back to the olden days of submitting pages to every search engine.
Perhaps we need a standard. A protocol for submitting data to an index, and a central repository for those submissions. Web sites could submit to this index, then search engines could subscribe to it to build an index.
Yeah, there are lots of insane oversimplifications of Slashdot. And you are right that law, as it is written, is not that bad. The motivation for money makes the USPTO grant patents on stupid things, and recent court decisions (such as patenting business methods) has really screwed things up.
A few comments about your 5 points:
1/2( I don't think obviousness is the biggest problem we have today. It is the large mass of prior art that the USPTO doesn't seem to notice. I poke at the USPTO but it isn't just the US anymore.
3) There is lots of prior art and the USPTO seems to ignore it. As I understand it they don't even look for prior art when evaluating a patent. Now, I'm not a patent examiner so I don't know why they throw out or ignore most of what they do -- but if it is reasonably considered prior art by the practitioners and industry experts, it should be prior art to the USPTO.
5) This is really sad though. If inventors (companies really) request patents just to stop other offensive patents then the system isn't serving a purpose anymore.
Ohhhhhh so what goes around comes around!!! Extend copyright = no problem. Allow stupid patents = no problem. "Oh wait... you mean, we have to live and work in this country where we made these stupid IP laws?"
I hope the injunction seeds and they all lose their blackberries to government folly. And hopefully the people will stand up and say this isn't fair. Maybe the fed will finally take a look at the state of patent law.
What Linksys is doing is not sustaininable. Principle: You can't hold back technology (without a patent, and even then, not forever).
Imagine that I found a way to make normal steel 10x stronger by doing something easy that anyone can do. It would effectively turn $60/unit steel into $600/unit steel. Now, the company is having trouble selling their $600 steel. So they modify their $60 steel so that the chemical no longer works.
The company has won, right?
No - another company will start selling the old $60 steel + the chemical treatment for $300. Win-win for consumers and companies. Technology has advanced. Ready for this folks? This system is called "The free market" (oohs and ahhs from the crowd).
If the only difference between a $60 router and a $600 router is firmware, then you can Linksys change their router so that the firmware update won't work. That is fine. But someone else will make a router where the firmware update does work. And they will sell that for more. They can't make a technological advantage just vanish by not selling it.
AJAX is great. It means that web deployed applications are now almost as good as the regular applications we've been using for over 10 years! Just imagine: We can enhance Javascript to support more OO features and reflection and add JIT and it will become just like Java! Yaaay! Then we can add support for stronger typing and compiling to native code, and then it will be just like C! Yaay!
It is funny to watch technology reinvent itself in fast-forward.
I work for a company that did AJAX long before it was called AJAX. And now that it is the next hot thing they are moving away from it. Why? Because they already learned the lesson that everyone else is about to figure out: AJAX is a b*stard to code and maintain. It is easier to write a client-server application in a traditional language and web deploy it than to write this crazy JavaScript + XML + HTML + DHTML + CSS stuff.
Java and.NET natively support this. For other languages there are plenty of frameworks that will add that capability.
The only people who I see putting this argument forward are people who don't have children.
Really? I'm glad you know who on Slashdot does and does not have children. Perhaps you should talk to any one of the many parents I know. Unfortunately, they don't post to Slashdot.:-(
You can't be with a kid (especially age 13+) 24 hours a day to monitor them...
Nobody is telling you to be with your kid 24/7. We aren't talking about kids sneaking away to play violent games in the stores or arcades. That's not what this law does. The issue is kids buying games and bringing them home. Are you saying that, as a parent, you don't know what games your kids are playing at home? Don't you know what TV they watch? And what books they read?
The only time you wouldn't know what they are playing is when they are at their friend's houses. But you should be following-up with the parent for your child's safety anyway. My mom always followed-up on what I did at my friends' homes. She got to know the parents well before I was in their home.
I see this point made often, and it is correct in principle. But the rug got pulled out from under me when I started finding that in-tree drivers were falling behind too! The last 2 SCSI cards that I've used have been removed, added, re-removed, then re-added into the kernel because nobody was maintaining them. If even the kernel developers can't keep up, then who can?
There are developers (myself included) who would write drivers if there were a stable API to do it with. As-is, it is very intimidating and even if I do write one, I certainly wouldn't want to have to maintain it.
I wish this ruling did mean that you can edit out EULAs, but IMHO it doesn't. Had Kraus (the developer) coded an EULA screen into the product, or even verbally stated that he was licensing the product to the TitleServ, then the case would have been completely different. The way SCOTUS said that the only changes that can be made to a copyrighted piece of software are changes that are made "as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a 18 machine," and used "in no other manner."
Changing the EULA or disagreeing with it may or may not be considered "an essential step." This is an interesting case, but the courts managed to carefully avoid any impact on EULAs.
Having a stable API for writing drivers is a completely separate issue from having binary-only drivers. The article summary makes them seem like one thing. Having a stable API would seriously improve the quality of the drivers because developers would not have to constantly modify drivers just to keep them working properly.
Many drivers suffer quality issues or are just abandoned because drivers must be changed to work with each new kernel. That is time that could be spent stabilizing them, improving them, or writing new drivers. It is probably the single biggest hurdle to getting a broad range of driver support for Linux.
For some drivers we already do have an API. For example, sound cards can use ALSA instead of coding directly to the kernel. Driver quality and quantity improved significantly because of ALSA. The same thing goes with SANE. The only problem there is that SCSI and USB support has been lagging.
I don't want to go somewhere where the floor will fall out from underneath me.
As someone who has been developing software for 10 years, I recommend not worrying about things like that. Your skill isn't "Open source software development" so if the business model fails then it doesn't matter to your long-term prospects. If you worry too much about that then you will get stuck developing boring B2B systems for some fortune 500 company and wondering why you got into software.
Unless you have 3 kids and a sick parent to care for, don't worry about the company's long-term prospects. Think about how to best improve your skills and make sure you are having fun. Finding a new job is a pain, but finding one that is exciting and interesting is worth every bit of effort. Let the business people worry about keeping the money flowing. You worry about delivering high-quality output and enjoying it.
I would like to cut through the phony unrealistic responses.
I keep seeing posts saying "I won't pay $8 for a movie" even though that is what 4 million people do every day. Today you pay $8 to go to a theater, wait in line, watch 20 minutes of previews, watch 10 minutes of commercials, listen to cell phones and annoying people... Yet suddenly $8 is too much to pay. Oh, right: I post on Slashdot, so nobody must know that I once bought a Brittany Spears CD or that I watch anything other than the Sci Fi channel. Oh the horror!
Another poster said that they would only pay $2.99 because they would rather rent. That makes some sense. Except that the very same poster points out that they currently pay more than $2.99 and that they must also include the price of gas, the chance of the rental store being out of stock, and the time involved in finding the movie.
Maybe asking people what they would pay for a product is just not a realistic way to determine what it is really worth. People say $8 isn't worth it, then the go buy it anyway.
I have yet to encounter a DBMS that didn't have an efficient, straightforward way to get the ID after an insert, but YMMV. However, the INSERT/UPDATE issue is a fundamental syntactical problem and it really should be fixed. INSERT and UPDATE do almost the same thing, yet have completely different syntax.
INSERT INTO someTable (fld1,fld2) VALUES ("foo","bar") UPDATE someTable SET fld1=foo, fld2=bar
It is REALLY annoying when you have to write some code that generates a SQL statement because you must code for two completely different syntaxes. Someone replied about the Oracle MERGE which seems like a nice way to go.
Fortunately though, there are lots of good frameworks around SQL that make it so that writing SQL is becoming a thing of the past. I would like to see SQL treated like HTTP - nobody writes HTTP. It's a protocol. Let it be. Just use the tools. I guess it will never go away though...
I know everyone complains about how MS lacks innovation, but this is a good example of BUSINESS innovation. Virtualization isn't new. I've used it before, seen it before. But MS bought an existing product, then wrapped it up nice and pretty and easy, and presented it as a solution to a major problem. And it is getting widely adopted. My office uses virtual servers constantly to simulate production environments for development: it saves time, money, and effort.
I never even considered virtualization of servers or development environments until I learned about MS Virtual PC and MS Virtual Server. Norton Ghost or dd dumps were all that I knew. So Microsoft is doing something right, and they will be perceived as the innovator and the winner here. They will be selling that you can virtualize servers to save time and money, and companies will buy it. They won't even know that this originated in the *nix world.
I look forward to seeing what the next leap in this technology is. I suspect we are just beginning to see some novel uses for it.
It is very interesting to see that Hastert is very much a politician. Nothing in his blog says anything about law. He is talking about how oil companies shouldn't be rewarded since they aren't investing in America or doing anything to lower oil prices. But why does the speaker of the house of representatives care about oil prices or investing in America? It isn't his job to punish or reward anyone for anything. His job is to create and update laws to protect the citizens: not to promote investment in America, or fight injustice.
Still, it is early to tell. I would very much like to see what these guys on Capitol Hill think about each day. Maybe representation will return to the people after all?
Am I the only gamer who likes slow response times? If I am playing a game with a 30-60fps frame rate, I don't mind a 16-33ms "fade" between frames. It makes the image seem smoother without actually losing a frame. I wonder if it is better on the eyes too. Most things in the physical world don't pop around at any frame rate - they move.
Slashdot Mirror
There is already a standardized way to do this, but nobody is using it.
The ICRA (formerly know as RSAC) defines a meta tag that allows a web site to indicate the level of violence, nudity, etc. that is on a page, or a site, or a directory of a site. It is easy, unbiased, and self-reporting. Internet Explorer supports it. I don't know if any other browsers do. All of the off-the-shelf parental control programs support it. But I don't see any sites adding these labels to their pages. Why not?
Maybe I should email the search engines and ask them to support it in their searches. Google already has a safety setting in the image search.
What the heck? This whole thread is FUD! If you want to restart a service in Windows, select the service in the service control manager, and click "stop" then "start" or "restart."
The real benefit that Linux has over Windows is that you can update the executable on disk without corrupting the in-memory image. That's a feature of the file system and the use of memory mapping though. Both operating systems have the ability to stop/start/restart services, and both require you to do so to take advantage of an update.
Have you read this patent an determined that it is just an idea patent and does not describe an implementation? If so, then I don't understand why the company isn't filing a countersuit claiming that the patent is bogus.
And yes, I'm giving the patent office the benefit of the doubt at the moment. They probably don't deserve it, but don't go off about how this patent is just an idea and is worthless unless you know that is the case.
A related example to that one is stuff like PBS which is required to be carried and is subsidized by non-profits and by the government. That wouldn't change in this pricing model. PBS could still be subsized and the consumer won't even know it.
Actually, that's how all channels are now. Ratings = more viewers = more advertiser dollars. Actually, I wonder if some channels will actually become FREE in the hopes of selling ads. (I guess that didn't work in newspapers and magazines, but they are cheap.) I know that you are obviously a much better consumer than everyone else, with better tastes. That's because you read Slashdot.Totally off the wall: I am curious what cheap TV programming was never available before, that might become available now.
You know, that may seem like a trolly smart-alec comment, but it is VERY true. I am experimenting with the same type of real-time video stuff that these guys are doing (locating people, swords, guns, etc.) and I'm doing it under Windows for this exact reason.
I've never understood why none of the GC languages (none that I know of: Java and .NET) allow this pattern to work. It is EXTREMELY useful! Just because the runtime uses GC doesn't mean you couldn't mark an object for immediate disposal when it leaves scope. Both Java and C# have a mechanism for doing this, but it requires explicitly freeing the object (which defeats the purpose of the pattern).
The xxx tld was a better idea. Is the urban legend that it was struck down by the US conservative Christian right correct, or Slashdot propoganda? Even if this were possible, it would probably don the same fate.
There's a myriad of HTPC cases, but very few chips and motherboards.
I am very disappointed with the availability of "alternative" platforms. Very few places sell the VIA C3 chips. The VIA C7 only exists in press releases. Some companies sell the chips but not the motherboards! Most of the motherboards have on board video that doesn't include DVI/HDMI which makes them no good for home theater anyway. The Transmeta Crusoe is a good option, in theory, but I've never found any place that sells them.
I've been looking for a CPU+mobo combo for a few weeks and I am getting very frustrated. My 54 watt AMD Athlon 1Ghz overheats no matter what case I have, since it sits in an entertainment center. If somebody made a DVD player with Mozilla, MPEG-4 support, and a hard drive I wouldn't even need a PC.
Mario Kart is mostly unchanged from system to system. Yet people will shell-out (pun intended!) money for the same game for each new console they get. The RIAA would love to change formats every 3 years and have people re-purchase their whole collection of cassettes/CDs/DVDs/holo-cubes. Fortunately for consumers, audio technology does not change as quickly as video gaming.
I guess this doesn't apply to the DS, but we really should expect manufacturers to have backward compatibility. It worked great for Sony with the PS2. But people should boycott the XBOX 360 until it supports all the XBOX games in their collection.
I hope that Yahoo and MSN and whomever don't start doing this. Then we will be back to the olden days of submitting pages to every search engine.
Perhaps we need a standard. A protocol for submitting data to an index, and a central repository for those submissions. Web sites could submit to this index, then search engines could subscribe to it to build an index.
Yeah, there are lots of insane oversimplifications of Slashdot. And you are right that law, as it is written, is not that bad. The motivation for money makes the USPTO grant patents on stupid things, and recent court decisions (such as patenting business methods) has really screwed things up.
A few comments about your 5 points:
1/2( I don't think obviousness is the biggest problem we have today. It is the large mass of prior art that the USPTO doesn't seem to notice. I poke at the USPTO but it isn't just the US anymore.
3) There is lots of prior art and the USPTO seems to ignore it. As I understand it they don't even look for prior art when evaluating a patent. Now, I'm not a patent examiner so I don't know why they throw out or ignore most of what they do -- but if it is reasonably considered prior art by the practitioners and industry experts, it should be prior art to the USPTO.
5) This is really sad though. If inventors (companies really) request patents just to stop other offensive patents then the system isn't serving a purpose anymore.
Ohhhhhh so what goes around comes around!!! Extend copyright = no problem. Allow stupid patents = no problem. "Oh wait... you mean, we have to live and work in this country where we made these stupid IP laws?"
I hope the injunction seeds and they all lose their blackberries to government folly. And hopefully the people will stand up and say this isn't fair. Maybe the fed will finally take a look at the state of patent law.
What Linksys is doing is not sustaininable. Principle: You can't hold back technology (without a patent, and even then, not forever).
Imagine that I found a way to make normal steel 10x stronger by doing something easy that anyone can do. It would effectively turn $60/unit steel into $600/unit steel. Now, the company is having trouble selling their $600 steel. So they modify their $60 steel so that the chemical no longer works.
The company has won, right?
No - another company will start selling the old $60 steel + the chemical treatment for $300. Win-win for consumers and companies. Technology has advanced. Ready for this folks? This system is called "The free market" (oohs and ahhs from the crowd).
If the only difference between a $60 router and a $600 router is firmware, then you can Linksys change their router so that the firmware update won't work. That is fine. But someone else will make a router where the firmware update does work. And they will sell that for more. They can't make a technological advantage just vanish by not selling it.
AJAX is great. It means that web deployed applications are now almost as good as the regular applications we've been using for over 10 years! Just imagine: We can enhance Javascript to support more OO features and reflection and add JIT and it will become just like Java! Yaaay! Then we can add support for stronger typing and compiling to native code, and then it will be just like C! Yaay!
.NET natively support this. For other languages there are plenty of frameworks that will add that capability.
It is funny to watch technology reinvent itself in fast-forward.
I work for a company that did AJAX long before it was called AJAX. And now that it is the next hot thing they are moving away from it. Why? Because they already learned the lesson that everyone else is about to figure out: AJAX is a b*stard to code and maintain. It is easier to write a client-server application in a traditional language and web deploy it than to write this crazy JavaScript + XML + HTML + DHTML + CSS stuff.
Java and
The only time you wouldn't know what they are playing is when they are at their friend's houses. But you should be following-up with the parent for your child's safety anyway. My mom always followed-up on what I did at my friends' homes. She got to know the parents well before I was in their home.
There are developers (myself included) who would write drivers if there were a stable API to do it with. As-is, it is very intimidating and even if I do write one, I certainly wouldn't want to have to maintain it.
IANAL.
I wish this ruling did mean that you can edit out EULAs, but IMHO it doesn't. Had Kraus (the developer) coded an EULA screen into the product, or even verbally stated that he was licensing the product to the TitleServ, then the case would have been completely different. The way SCOTUS said that the only changes that can be made to a copyrighted piece of software are changes that are made "as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a 18 machine," and used "in no other manner."
Changing the EULA or disagreeing with it may or may not be considered "an essential step." This is an interesting case, but the courts managed to carefully avoid any impact on EULAs.
Having a stable API for writing drivers is a completely separate issue from having binary-only drivers. The article summary makes them seem like one thing. Having a stable API would seriously improve the quality of the drivers because developers would not have to constantly modify drivers just to keep them working properly.
Many drivers suffer quality issues or are just abandoned because drivers must be changed to work with each new kernel. That is time that could be spent stabilizing them, improving them, or writing new drivers. It is probably the single biggest hurdle to getting a broad range of driver support for Linux.
For some drivers we already do have an API. For example, sound cards can use ALSA instead of coding directly to the kernel. Driver quality and quantity improved significantly because of ALSA. The same thing goes with SANE. The only problem there is that SCSI and USB support has been lagging.
Unless you have 3 kids and a sick parent to care for, don't worry about the company's long-term prospects. Think about how to best improve your skills and make sure you are having fun. Finding a new job is a pain, but finding one that is exciting and interesting is worth every bit of effort. Let the business people worry about keeping the money flowing. You worry about delivering high-quality output and enjoying it.
I would like to cut through the phony unrealistic responses.
I keep seeing posts saying "I won't pay $8 for a movie" even though that is what 4 million people do every day. Today you pay $8 to go to a theater, wait in line, watch 20 minutes of previews, watch 10 minutes of commercials, listen to cell phones and annoying people... Yet suddenly $8 is too much to pay. Oh, right: I post on Slashdot, so nobody must know that I once bought a Brittany Spears CD or that I watch anything other than the Sci Fi channel. Oh the horror!
Another poster said that they would only pay $2.99 because they would rather rent. That makes some sense. Except that the very same poster points out that they currently pay more than $2.99 and that they must also include the price of gas, the chance of the rental store being out of stock, and the time involved in finding the movie.
Maybe asking people what they would pay for a product is just not a realistic way to determine what it is really worth. People say $8 isn't worth it, then the go buy it anyway.
I have yet to encounter a DBMS that didn't have an efficient, straightforward way to get the ID after an insert, but YMMV. However, the INSERT/UPDATE issue is a fundamental syntactical problem and it really should be fixed. INSERT and UPDATE do almost the same thing, yet have completely different syntax.
INSERT INTO someTable (fld1,fld2) VALUES ("foo","bar")
UPDATE someTable SET fld1=foo, fld2=bar
It is REALLY annoying when you have to write some code that generates a SQL statement because you must code for two completely different syntaxes. Someone replied about the Oracle MERGE which seems like a nice way to go.
Fortunately though, there are lots of good frameworks around SQL that make it so that writing SQL is becoming a thing of the past. I would like to see SQL treated like HTTP - nobody writes HTTP. It's a protocol. Let it be. Just use the tools. I guess it will never go away though...
I know everyone complains about how MS lacks innovation, but this is a good example of BUSINESS innovation. Virtualization isn't new. I've used it before, seen it before. But MS bought an existing product, then wrapped it up nice and pretty and easy, and presented it as a solution to a major problem. And it is getting widely adopted. My office uses virtual servers constantly to simulate production environments for development: it saves time, money, and effort.
I never even considered virtualization of servers or development environments until I learned about MS Virtual PC and MS Virtual Server. Norton Ghost or dd dumps were all that I knew. So Microsoft is doing something right, and they will be perceived as the innovator and the winner here. They will be selling that you can virtualize servers to save time and money, and companies will buy it. They won't even know that this originated in the *nix world.
I look forward to seeing what the next leap in this technology is. I suspect we are just beginning to see some novel uses for it.
It is very interesting to see that Hastert is very much a politician. Nothing in his blog says anything about law. He is talking about how oil companies shouldn't be rewarded since they aren't investing in America or doing anything to lower oil prices. But why does the speaker of the house of representatives care about oil prices or investing in America? It isn't his job to punish or reward anyone for anything. His job is to create and update laws to protect the citizens: not to promote investment in America, or fight injustice.
Still, it is early to tell. I would very much like to see what these guys on Capitol Hill think about each day. Maybe representation will return to the people after all?
Am I the only gamer who likes slow response times? If I am playing a game with a 30-60fps frame rate, I don't mind a 16-33ms "fade" between frames. It makes the image seem smoother without actually losing a frame. I wonder if it is better on the eyes too. Most things in the physical world don't pop around at any frame rate - they move.