By treating Microsoft as just another enemy, we reduce them in stature to our size. That's just gotta be humiliating for a corporation that has tens of billions of dollars in cash reserves just sitting around gathering interest.
Seriously, although most Greens act like they've ODed on herbs at some stage of their life, that doesn't stop some of them from being very bright dazed naifs. And sometimes they get stuff right for the wrong reasons, too. (-:
Now I want to know what everyone else's excuse is. Self-interest and ordinary stupidity, while attractive for their simplicity and abundance, can't explain it all.
He's listed as NBR's webmaster. lynx -dump -head says this:
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
My guess is that Microsoft is everything that he knows and trusts. As if that weren't obvious from that special faux-sly cluelessness of the article itself.
However, whatever the submitter was smoking is stronger than whatever Francis Till uses. Till actually makes sense, even if he's wrong practically across the board.
A: Not dangerous. Dilute beam falls on fenced-off antennae and is geared to only operate when the ground-station guarantees it's on target (and many other safeguards, most of them independently rigged to fail-safe). You can (and should) carry out agriculture under the antenna arrays.
B: Powersats don't produce radioactive waste, and once up don't require any dangerous or destructive mining, transport or refining for at least a couple of decades. In fact, launching a powersat more or less in one piece with an Orion (huge rocket which runs on a string of nuclear fusion bombs) would produce less radioactive waste than burning enough coal to produce the same amount of energy as the powersat.
C: Yes, I know you didn't ask this one, but I'll answer it anyway. (-: No, they won't fall on your head. They fly high, they can be propelled reactionlessly from their own resources, they're a damn near unmissible target for a missile, and the atmosphere would pretty much shred everything except maybe a central core anyway.
I personally am all for building fission reactors, since they're a lot greener than what we have now, but powersats have other, more exciting implications beyond additional green-ness.
And in answer to the Thor-worshipper: some handiwork your god does, it wore out completely in less than 40 hours! And does he warrant his work? No? I didn't think so. (-:
They'd be even cheaper if it wasn't for patent gougers and the RIAA.
I wonder how little they can build an Energia equivalent for? Twenty $13 million Energia-equivelent launches can put a heck of a lot more hardware up than the Shuttle's piddly 30 tonnes.
Putting 20,000 tons into orbit would cost trillions, an amount even the japanese don't have to spare, especially the way their economy is going.
If you did it today, at retail lift prices, yes. If you did it with 2020 technology in wholesale quantities, no.
The panels will produce lots of electricity. You can drop a wire and a weight, and use that as an electric motor armature, treating the Earth's magnetic field as a stator. Viola, reactionless propulsion (werl, eggsurely and to be completely honest, it reacts against the whole Earth). If the thing eventually gets so decripit that it looks like it's actually going to die, send it off to L5 or prang it into the Moon. BFHD!
Australia has lots of big flat areas you're welcome to drag a Daedelus to in case it blows up.
Just don't forewarn any of the anti-nuke campaigners who are forcing us to subsist on coal fired power stations instead, which literally chuck tonnes of raw uranium out the stack every year.
The spots I'm thinking of are not even any use to the Aboriginals, who can survive in some amazingly desolate places (the few genuines who remain, that is; their city cousins would be dead in two days, tops).
Even if you blew up a Daedalus or few en route, the zero-pollution returns from the big powersats the working ones launch would more than compensate.
I vote that we build two realbang-bangs and put a real station into a real orbit with one, and a real mine and a real slingshot onto the Moon with the other. Far less polluting and far safer than the hundreds of missions they would replace, and they'd shave, oh -- I don't know -- maybe 50 years off the space program?
A fellow developer is switching his MS-SQL-Server-backed app to PostgreSQL. He can make that switch without changing OSes and causing additional the additional disruption to his customer sites of switching OSes. When the time comes to upgrade or at least replace servers, they can save (at one company) ~AUD$13,000 in OS costs and per-seat fees by going from Windows 2000 to Mandriva Linux 2006.0, but switching OSes now would not save them anything up front and would be a trapdoor move (going back would -- if necessary -- be hard, whereas PostgreSQL and MS-SQL-Server services can coexist on the same machine and be fairly simply alternated between as things stand).
For the record, his decision to use PostgreSQL and not MySQL was based on PostgreSQL's stored procedure capabilities, not on politics.
Also for the record, the customer we share is delighted with the savings reaped so far by avoiding the addition of a Windows 2003 Server box to their network and eagerly looking forward to the day when they can delete another expensive humming monster from their rack.
After the PostgreSQL backend port is complete, the developer will be considering making the GUI frontend for the application more portable as well. Everything bar spreadsheet export works under WINE already, but that's a klunky solution.
By dealing with the frontend, backend and OS separately, the developer has made the whole migration more manageable, and more outright feasible in the first place.
Pardon me labouring the point, but MySQL AB have supported OpenServer in the past, without partnering -- AKA supping with the devil -- and AFAICT they didn't need to do it now.
Mickos is a calm, patient, rational individual as are several of the people I know within MySQL AB, but this is not the same as being infallible.
It is indeed a good point, and one which MySQL AB have made themselves. Not enough money to make a substantial difference, and as I understand it Boise Schiller already have their pound of flesh, but nevertheless valid.
MySQL has run on OpenServer all along, even if MySQL AB officially stopped supporting it in 2003.
The issue is that MySQL AB has now partnered with The SCO Group.
Yes, they've tried to be as arm's-length about it as possible (and who wouldn't?), but MySQL AB didn't need to do this at all in order to support OpenServer or UnixWare users.
My pet theory is that MySQL, blinded and distracted by the glitter of gold, have overreached themselves. Fine, if that's the case -- they made a bad decision. Nobody's perfect. And I understand that backing out of the partnership would be expensive and damaging, possibly too much so to risk now.
But, and this is the big but ("I like big buts and I cannot lie...", oops, sorry, </shrek>), in so doing, MySQL AB have irrevocably exposed themselves to The SCO Group and D'ohl MacBride, both of whom have a history of suing their business partners, customers and employers.
This does not fill me with confidence vis-a-vis the future viability of MySQL AB.
The code itself will not die, and perhaps there are even "suicide" or escrow clauses to help guarantee that, but without MySQL AB behind it, a large part of the customer base may dry up. Or -- who knows? -- if the corporation gets it in the neck and the MySQL codebase officially becomes an orphan, the detachment from the corporate apron strings may see deployment skyrocketing. But either way, I would not want to bet my company's future on it. If SCOX decides to take as many "enemy" projects with it as possible when it implodes, it may be able to mess things up for many years en passant.
On the gripping hand, there are a lot of very clever people working for MySQL AB, and they may yet have an ace-in-the-hole which they can't even hint at the existence of yet. If MySQL AB are able to turn around and get a quick judgement against SCOX for some misdemeanour, or otherwise hamstring them, putting their karma on the line as part of the process may well be a worthy risk.
It's difficult to be sad when the prime competitor is Microsoft (the other is SVG), but if they went to the trouble of nailing down all of the corners, they would be protecting Flash's crown as most ubiquitous web animated gaudiness language.
Somewhere along the line, they seem to have lost the plot to that particular story, else a Linux port of Shockwave would have been here two years ago.
Locking competitors out is important because it sells Macromedia's expensive (AUD$760+GST for Dreamweaver 2004) development tools and entrained related products. A working GPLflash would be of enormous benefit to Macromedia. If they had any corporate sense, they'd do a deal with the author(s).
Slashdot Mirror
...Quanta Plus AKA KDEwebdev, but I'm betting that you're also too lazy to change from MS-Windows. (-:
...what constitutes "useful".
What standards exist in the field?
We do the monster MASH!
It's a graveyard smash...
we do the MASH!"
Personally, I'm waiting for someone to strings it and discocver that it's really BASH.NET
By treating Microsoft as just another enemy, we reduce them in stature to our size. That's just gotta be humiliating for a corporation that has tens of billions of dollars in cash reserves just sitting around gathering interest.
...which is also correct... twice a day.
Seriously, although most Greens act like they've ODed on herbs at some stage of their life, that doesn't stop some of them from being very bright dazed naifs. And sometimes they get stuff right for the wrong reasons, too. (-:
Now I want to know what everyone else's excuse is. Self-interest and ordinary stupidity, while attractive for their simplicity and abundance, can't explain it all.
This guy is their own (IIS+ASP.NET) webmaster. Broad range of experience? I think not.
However, whatever the submitter was smoking is stronger than whatever Francis Till uses. Till actually makes sense, even if he's wrong practically across the board.
A: Not dangerous. Dilute beam falls on fenced-off antennae and is geared to only operate when the ground-station guarantees it's on target (and many other safeguards, most of them independently rigged to fail-safe). You can (and should) carry out agriculture under the antenna arrays.
B: Powersats don't produce radioactive waste, and once up don't require any dangerous or destructive mining, transport or refining for at least a couple of decades. In fact, launching a powersat more or less in one piece with an Orion (huge rocket which runs on a string of nuclear fusion bombs) would produce less radioactive waste than burning enough coal to produce the same amount of energy as the powersat.
C: Yes, I know you didn't ask this one, but I'll answer it anyway. (-: No, they won't fall on your head. They fly high, they can be propelled reactionlessly from their own resources, they're a damn near unmissible target for a missile, and the atmosphere would pretty much shred everything except maybe a central core anyway.
I personally am all for building fission reactors, since they're a lot greener than what we have now, but powersats have other, more exciting implications beyond additional green-ness.
And in answer to the Thor-worshipper: some handiwork your god does, it wore out completely in less than 40 hours! And does he warrant his work? No? I didn't think so. (-:
They'd be even cheaper if it wasn't for patent gougers and the RIAA.
I wonder how little they can build an Energia equivalent for? Twenty $13 million Energia-equivelent launches can put a heck of a lot more hardware up than the Shuttle's piddly 30 tonnes.
The Moon is basically grey anyway, and so are the landers, suits and rover. (-:
The panels will produce lots of electricity. You can drop a wire and a weight, and use that as an electric motor armature, treating the Earth's magnetic field as a stator. Viola, reactionless propulsion (werl, eggsurely and to be completely honest, it reacts against the whole Earth). If the thing eventually gets so decripit that it looks like it's actually going to die, send it off to L5 or prang it into the Moon. BFHD!
Australia has lots of big flat areas you're welcome to drag a Daedelus to in case it blows up.
Just don't forewarn any of the anti-nuke campaigners who are forcing us to subsist on coal fired power stations instead, which literally chuck tonnes of raw uranium out the stack every year.
The spots I'm thinking of are not even any use to the Aboriginals, who can survive in some amazingly desolate places (the few genuines who remain, that is; their city cousins would be dead in two days, tops).
Even if you blew up a Daedalus or few en route, the zero-pollution returns from the big powersats the working ones launch would more than compensate.
...are vapour already.
I vote that we build two real bang-bangs and put a real station into a real orbit with one, and a real mine and a real slingshot onto the Moon with the other. Far less polluting and far safer than the hundreds of missions they would replace, and they'd shave, oh -- I don't know -- maybe 50 years off the space program?
Things that go "TWANG! ...wwwaaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaauuugh..." in the night.
...only in reverse.
Parent is right on the money, and it's an epiphanous one-line explanation of Microsoft's politics, too.
...sqlite and gdbm, horses for courses, although I do prefer the elephant by default.
I also install MySQL OOTB for customers to use with their apps, if the customer so specifies.
A fellow developer is switching his MS-SQL-Server-backed app to PostgreSQL. He can make that switch without changing OSes and causing additional the additional disruption to his customer sites of switching OSes. When the time comes to upgrade or at least replace servers, they can save (at one company) ~AUD$13,000 in OS costs and per-seat fees by going from Windows 2000 to Mandriva Linux 2006.0, but switching OSes now would not save them anything up front and would be a trapdoor move (going back would -- if necessary -- be hard, whereas PostgreSQL and MS-SQL-Server services can coexist on the same machine and be fairly simply alternated between as things stand).
For the record, his decision to use PostgreSQL and not MySQL was based on PostgreSQL's stored procedure capabilities, not on politics.
Also for the record, the customer we share is delighted with the savings reaped so far by avoiding the addition of a Windows 2003 Server box to their network and eagerly looking forward to the day when they can delete another expensive humming monster from their rack.
After the PostgreSQL backend port is complete, the developer will be considering making the GUI frontend for the application more portable as well. Everything bar spreadsheet export works under WINE already, but that's a klunky solution.
By dealing with the frontend, backend and OS separately, the developer has made the whole migration more manageable, and more outright feasible in the first place.
Pardon me labouring the point, but MySQL AB have supported OpenServer in the past, without partnering -- AKA supping with the devil -- and AFAICT they didn't need to do it now.
Mickos is a calm, patient, rational individual as are several of the people I know within MySQL AB, but this is not the same as being infallible.
It is indeed a good point, and one which MySQL AB have made themselves. Not enough money to make a substantial difference, and as I understand it Boise Schiller already have their pound of flesh, but nevertheless valid.
MySQL ported to OpenServer long ago. Not a problem.
MySQL have now partnered with SCOX, as a frog partners with a scorpion. Knotty problem.
MySQL has run on OpenServer all along, even if MySQL AB officially stopped supporting it in 2003.
The issue is that MySQL AB has now partnered with The SCO Group.
Yes, they've tried to be as arm's-length about it as possible (and who wouldn't?), but MySQL AB didn't need to do this at all in order to support OpenServer or UnixWare users.
My pet theory is that MySQL, blinded and distracted by the glitter of gold, have overreached themselves. Fine, if that's the case -- they made a bad decision. Nobody's perfect. And I understand that backing out of the partnership would be expensive and damaging, possibly too much so to risk now.
But, and this is the big but ("I like big buts and I cannot lie...", oops, sorry, </shrek>), in so doing, MySQL AB have irrevocably exposed themselves to The SCO Group and D'ohl MacBride, both of whom have a history of suing their business partners, customers and employers.
This does not fill me with confidence vis-a-vis the future viability of MySQL AB.
The code itself will not die, and perhaps there are even "suicide" or escrow clauses to help guarantee that, but without MySQL AB behind it, a large part of the customer base may dry up. Or -- who knows? -- if the corporation gets it in the neck and the MySQL codebase officially becomes an orphan, the detachment from the corporate apron strings may see deployment skyrocketing. But either way, I would not want to bet my company's future on it. If SCOX decides to take as many "enemy" projects with it as possible when it implodes, it may be able to mess things up for many years en passant.
On the gripping hand, there are a lot of very clever people working for MySQL AB, and they may yet have an ace-in-the-hole which they can't even hint at the existence of yet. If MySQL AB are able to turn around and get a quick judgement against SCOX for some misdemeanour, or otherwise hamstring them, putting their karma on the line as part of the process may well be a worthy risk.
It's difficult to be sad when the prime competitor is Microsoft (the other is SVG), but if they went to the trouble of nailing down all of the corners, they would be protecting Flash's crown as most ubiquitous web animated gaudiness language.
Somewhere along the line, they seem to have lost the plot to that particular story, else a Linux port of Shockwave would have been here two years ago.
Locking competitors out is important because it sells Macromedia's expensive (AUD$760+GST for Dreamweaver 2004) development tools and entrained related products. A working GPLflash would be of enormous benefit to Macromedia. If they had any corporate sense, they'd do a deal with the author(s).