As I understand it, it's a slow news day can mean time to post things from the totally unsubstantiated category that's always chock-full of stories thanks to the the only way I'll beat the deadline is to make something up effect.
It's simply bad journalism. The author names PWC as a source of the 'over 90%' figure, but PWC in turn was citing some professor from Hawaii who had looked at 54 spreadsheets and found errors on 49 of them. 54 is a sample so small as to be absolutely meaningless and everyone responsible for the story finding it's way here should hang their heads in shame.
Something often lost in the fray is that some news items aren't really newsworthy. If you ask me, this is one of those. Around 50 applications, out of thousands of appliciations, require a little tweaking after SP2. And of the 50 or so, most are of no concern to the typical Windows user, but are used by people who didn't need Microsoft to tell them what got broken or how to fix it. The rest are games about which Dick or Jane will call technical support immeditiately after applying SP2, and will get walked through simple, immediate fixes. Much ado over nothing.
A thousand pardons. I should have have written has been on MS payroll. It is possible that he is no longer. Regardless, the article fails to mention Reddy having enjoyed a paid relationship with Microsoft.
By the way, he's been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon since 1969, a full professor since 1973 and the Simon University Professor since 1992, so it's not now that he's at Carnegie Mellon, he has been longer than MS has been around.
...I'd ride in any of them rather than walk fifty miles. I hate the if-OSes-were-automobiles type argument because it doesn't really say anything about OSes, or even automobiles. It's a purportedly cute, definitely tired, roundabout way to say 'people who are cool use what I do', but that's all it says.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume you are correct in that PostgreSQL is the BSD of databases. What does that mean, really? At a glance Netcraft data suggest that your site enjoyed better uptime when it sat on Linux. And what it's been doing since it was switched back to FreeBSD is often bested by [gasp] a couple flavors of Windows. Would you refer to a better-than-PostgreSQL solution as the Linux of RDBMSes or the Windows of RDBMSes? And is that why word-to-the-wise.com sits on Linux instead of FreeBSD?;-)
All kidding aside, even were I to accept your assessment that MySQL is the DOS of RDBMSes while PostgreSQL is the end-all, be-all of RDBMSes, it wouldn't alter my position that most product arguments are ultimately along the lines of chocolate is better than strawberry. Most people tend to forgive or deny the shortcomings of the product they know, because they know it, and will tell you that you're cool if you use it, because they use it.
MySQL and PostgreSQL are really no different than debating linux distrubutions and (possibly) operating systems; they have been formulated to do quite different things, and different people favour them for different reasons.
I do believe you are correct, sir. I think it's often that A is better than B arguments are ultimately along the lines of chocolate is better than strawberry or even chocolate is better than OSX. I also believe it must be a slow news day because we've seen this already.
So, the only remaining question is: will Chubby Aftab apologize for the threats now, or wait until she's on O'Reilly next week?
Given her visible track record, I find it unlikely that she'll apologize to anyone for anything, because there's no money in that. This self-proclaimed angel of the internet ought to look a little closer to home and pause a moment to consider where potential visitors will wind up if they simply enter teenangels in their browser's address bar. If ever she does, I'll bet you that instead of admitting her mistake she'll go after the owner of teenangels.com.
...until I see or hear it come from someone who isn't Daniel Lyons. That guy has consistently been on about how "Linux-loving crunchies" should "wake up" because "these guys in Utah are no dummies"... "What SCO wants, SCO gets"... "SCO is on to something"... etc., etc., ad infinitum... As far as I know he has only once briefly entertained the possibility that SCO might be anything but a bunch of shining, white knights, and as far as I'm concerned his copy is of absolutely no value. Unless, that is, you have caged birds or want for toilet paper.
Hooray! Math! That beats the heck out of the 'chocolate is better than strawberry' type arguments that seem to fill the page whenever, you know... MS v AE...
You are worried that someone abuses the black box but you are abusing the absence of a black box by breaking the law.
Let's not forget that he may be abusing the absence of a hidden camera in his bedroom to break the law there too. And he sure could be abusing the absence of a GPS implant in his skull to go places he shouldn't.
It's not just the system mis-used to capture non-criminals that alarms me, but the system used at all to treat people as guilty until proven innocent. If you ask me, it's you if-you're-not-breaking-the-law-you've-got-nothing- to-fear types to blame for the privacy and liberty we've lost thus far.
Why believe the report at all? How many people on the Internet now? How large a sample would be necessary to get an accurate picture of whatever average might be? How many countries would need to be covered? Assuming they did get an accurate picture of how people Brazil spend their time on the 'net, would it be reasonable to assume that that's how people in Japan spend their time on the 'net? Forget their answers, how did they pose the question? Volunteers? Surveys? Web logs? Wire taps? I can't think of any legal method for obtaining an adequate sample. Can you?
How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?
That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box
I think the problem is more a matter of perception than condition. Most casual users who try Linux for the first time go in expecting it to be difficult and find it is just that. And it's no wonder when you consider so much of the press about Linux or what Linux users themselves say. Most of the articles I've read and most of the Linux users I know have expressed that Linux is too difficult, too sophisticated or too something else for the average user. But is it really?
Because my ex isn't computer literate and has primary custody, I want my kids' computer to be setup with something they can install and maintain. My daughter is 9 and my son is 6. I put together a little collection of installation disks and let my daughter have at them. She has, with no other assistance from me, installed and run recent versions of Debian, Fedora, Mandrake and Red Hat, and Windows 98 SE. She needed help to install Windows 2000. She understands that she can run whatever she chooses. She is currently undecided but has narrowed the field to Debian and Fedora. My son said that he likes Fedora and Windows 2000.
I asked my daughter why she chose Linux over Windows. She said It's easier. When I want a new program for Linux I just have to go to google and look and then run yum. As far as general usability she has expressed that Linux and Windows are the same. She clicks a menu item or double-clicks an icon and something runs. She doesn't understand how someone could use one but have difficulties using the other. And it turns out that my son's preference isn't for an OS at all, but for a browser. I had installed the same version of Mozilla on Windows 2000 as my daughter had installed on Fedora.
I could have a search engine running tomorrow, if all it did was link to Google and return hits to my own bannered page.
And if you did you would have a web site that didn't really provide its own content but rather generated it by retrieving data from elsewhere on the Internet. Is this not what google does? But they add value to it, just as you would have to do in order to see any significant traffic.
The Internet is us and we're a bunch that lives just about everywhere and does just about everything. If google, yahoo, Microsoft, SCO, IBM and a hundred like them all disappeared from the face of the planet tomorrow, the Internet would be just fine. What they bring to our table is of insignificant value compared to what we bring. And what value they add has value only because we've invited them to our table. These days too many companies benefiting from access to our Internet are like guests who, having brought passable wine, wish to claim credit for the success of the feast.
If you'd like to set up a site that pulls its content from google, go for it. Just be sure to allow them to take from you what you would take from them. That's how our feast works. We all bring a little something to it and share.
Slashdot Mirror
And on top of all that, it really isn't news anyway. He's been writing that SCO should win for a couple years now. See Why an SCO win is a slam dunk and why you need not care, published in May of 2003.
As I understand it, it's a slow news day can mean time to post things from the totally unsubstantiated category that's always chock-full of stories thanks to the the only way I'll beat the deadline is to make something up effect.
It's simply bad journalism. The author names PWC as a source of the 'over 90%' figure, but PWC in turn was citing some professor from Hawaii who had looked at 54 spreadsheets and found errors on 49 of them. 54 is a sample so small as to be absolutely meaningless and everyone responsible for the story finding it's way here should hang their heads in shame.
Something often lost in the fray is that some news items aren't really newsworthy. If you ask me, this is one of those. Around 50 applications, out of thousands of appliciations, require a little tweaking after SP2. And of the 50 or so, most are of no concern to the typical Windows user, but are used by people who didn't need Microsoft to tell them what got broken or how to fix it. The rest are games about which Dick or Jane will call technical support immeditiately after applying SP2, and will get walked through simple, immediate fixes. Much ado over nothing.
The NY Times article also neglected to mention this little tidbit.
A thousand pardons. I should have have written has been on MS payroll. It is possible that he is no longer. Regardless, the article fails to mention Reddy having enjoyed a paid relationship with Microsoft.
By the way, he's been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon since 1969, a full professor since 1973 and the Simon University Professor since 1992, so it's not now that he's at Carnegie Mellon, he has been longer than MS has been around.
The article fails to mention that Raj Reddy was already on the Microsoft payroll. See this four year old MS article, or poke around where appropriate.
...I'd ride in any of them rather than walk fifty miles. I hate the if-OSes-were-automobiles type argument because it doesn't really say anything about OSes, or even automobiles. It's a purportedly cute, definitely tired, roundabout way to say 'people who are cool use what I do', but that's all it says.
But for the sake of argument, let's assume you are correct in that PostgreSQL is the BSD of databases. What does that mean, really? At a glance Netcraft data suggest that your site enjoyed better uptime when it sat on Linux. And what it's been doing since it was switched back to FreeBSD is often bested by [gasp] a couple flavors of Windows. Would you refer to a better-than-PostgreSQL solution as the Linux of RDBMSes or the Windows of RDBMSes? And is that why word-to-the-wise.com sits on Linux instead of FreeBSD? ;-)
All kidding aside, even were I to accept your assessment that MySQL is the DOS of RDBMSes while PostgreSQL is the end-all, be-all of RDBMSes, it wouldn't alter my position that most product arguments are ultimately along the lines of chocolate is better than strawberry. Most people tend to forgive or deny the shortcomings of the product they know, because they know it, and will tell you that you're cool if you use it, because they use it.
MySQL and PostgreSQL are really no different than debating linux distrubutions and (possibly) operating systems; they have been formulated to do quite different things, and different people favour them for different reasons.
I do believe you are correct, sir. I think it's often that A is better than B arguments are ultimately along the lines of chocolate is better than strawberry or even chocolate is better than OSX. I also believe it must be a slow news day because we've seen this already.
So, the only remaining question is: will Chubby Aftab apologize for the threats now, or wait until she's on O'Reilly next week?
Given her visible track record, I find it unlikely that she'll apologize to anyone for anything, because there's no money in that. This self-proclaimed angel of the internet ought to look a little closer to home and pause a moment to consider where potential visitors will wind up if they simply enter teenangels in their browser's address bar. If ever she does, I'll bet you that instead of admitting her mistake she'll go after the owner of teenangels.com.
...until I see or hear it come from someone who isn't Daniel Lyons. That guy has consistently been on about how "Linux-loving crunchies" should "wake up" because "these guys in Utah are no dummies"... "What SCO wants, SCO gets"... "SCO is on to something"... etc., etc., ad infinitum... As far as I know he has only once briefly entertained the possibility that SCO might be anything but a bunch of shining, white knights, and as far as I'm concerned his copy is of absolutely no value. Unless, that is, you have caged birds or want for toilet paper.
Hooray! Math! That beats the heck out of the 'chocolate is better than strawberry' type arguments that seem to fill the page whenever, you know... MS v AE...
Anyway, minor correction...
1,500 KBps = 12,288,000 bps
12,288,000 / 768 = 16,000
1,500 kBps = 12,000,000 bps
12,000,000 / 768 = 15,625
You are worried that someone abuses the black box but you are abusing the absence of a black box by breaking the law.
Let's not forget that he may be abusing the absence of a hidden camera in his bedroom to break the law there too. And he sure could be abusing the absence of a GPS implant in his skull to go places he shouldn't.
It's not just the system mis-used to capture non-criminals that alarms me, but the system used at all to treat people as guilty until proven innocent. If you ask me, it's you if-you're-not-breaking-the-law-you've-got-nothing- to-fear types to blame for the privacy and liberty we've lost thus far.
The boss of my company is named "Bill". His password for *everything* is "Bill5" and it's not encrypted anywhere.
Please tell me that 'HGP' and 'ORNL' mean nothing to you, or tell Bill to change his passwords.
Bring a girl to defcon? Isn't that like bringing a pizza to a fat farm?
;-)
Seriously, bring her along. If she doesn't like the event, there's plenty for her to do nearby.
Why believe the report at all? How many people on the Internet now? How large a sample would be necessary to get an accurate picture of whatever average might be? How many countries would need to be covered? Assuming they did get an accurate picture of how people Brazil spend their time on the 'net, would it be reasonable to assume that that's how people in Japan spend their time on the 'net? Forget their answers, how did they pose the question? Volunteers? Surveys? Web logs? Wire taps? I can't think of any legal method for obtaining an adequate sample. Can you?
How is any normal person supposed to cope with a distribution that doesn't even bootload all the time?
That's just it, normal people aren't supposed to cope with the distribution at all. I don't know how so many could miss it, but if you even just skim through the obvious pre-install sections of fedora.redhat.com you'll see plenty that makes it clear that Fedora is not meant for everyone. It's meant for people who like working or playing with bleeding-edge components. If you want to work or play with a distribution that doesn't ever bite you and you wound up on fedora.redhat.com, you made a wrong turn somewhere. Try redhat.com, debian.org, slackware.org, suse.com, mandrakesoft.com or any of a number of other sites for which I'll probably get blasted for having failed to include them here. When you land at one go to their download section or on-line store and look for the phrase 'latest stable release'. What you'll find there is meant for everyone and will, generally, work right out of the box
I think the problem is more a matter of perception than condition. Most casual users who try Linux for the first time go in expecting it to be difficult and find it is just that. And it's no wonder when you consider so much of the press about Linux or what Linux users themselves say. Most of the articles I've read and most of the Linux users I know have expressed that Linux is too difficult, too sophisticated or too something else for the average user. But is it really?
Because my ex isn't computer literate and has primary custody, I want my kids' computer to be setup with something they can install and maintain. My daughter is 9 and my son is 6. I put together a little collection of installation disks and let my daughter have at them. She has, with no other assistance from me, installed and run recent versions of Debian, Fedora, Mandrake and Red Hat, and Windows 98 SE. She needed help to install Windows 2000. She understands that she can run whatever she chooses. She is currently undecided but has narrowed the field to Debian and Fedora. My son said that he likes Fedora and Windows 2000.
I asked my daughter why she chose Linux over Windows. She said It's easier. When I want a new program for Linux I just have to go to google and look and then run yum. As far as general usability she has expressed that Linux and Windows are the same. She clicks a menu item or double-clicks an icon and something runs. She doesn't understand how someone could use one but have difficulties using the other. And it turns out that my son's preference isn't for an OS at all, but for a browser. I had installed the same version of Mozilla on Windows 2000 as my daughter had installed on Fedora.
I could have a search engine running tomorrow, if all it did was link to Google and return hits to my own bannered page.
And if you did you would have a web site that didn't really provide its own content but rather generated it by retrieving data from elsewhere on the Internet. Is this not what google does? But they add value to it, just as you would have to do in order to see any significant traffic.
The Internet is us and we're a bunch that lives just about everywhere and does just about everything. If google, yahoo, Microsoft, SCO, IBM and a hundred like them all disappeared from the face of the planet tomorrow, the Internet would be just fine. What they bring to our table is of insignificant value compared to what we bring. And what value they add has value only because we've invited them to our table. These days too many companies benefiting from access to our Internet are like guests who, having brought passable wine, wish to claim credit for the success of the feast.
If you'd like to set up a site that pulls its content from google, go for it. Just be sure to allow them to take from you what you would take from them. That's how our feast works. We all bring a little something to it and share.