When PostgreSQL in a fault tolerant cluster starts to become more mainstream, I'm going to start looking at moving that direction.
I guess you could claim to be in PregreSQL mode? (-:
Left outer joins coming up in the next release, live backups/mirroring in place, and yes you canpublish your benchmarks. Lookin' good...
...and wrong in important foundational ways [long]
on
The Hacker Ethic
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· Score: 2
Creativity does not feature prominently in the Protestant ethic, the typical creations of which are the government agency and the monasterylike business enterprise.
Reformation and Renaissance went hand in hand. Understand the Protest, and you understand much about Protestant ethics.
If you're looking for the source of monasterylike business, wouldn't it be obvious to start looking in a monastic culture, rejection of which was a significant part of the Protest?
If you're looking for dependence on a central authority ("government"), what better place to start than one of the biggest and most ruthlessly centralised governments ever: the papacy - rejection of which was a significant part of the Protest? Is Mr Gates half-jokingly called ``Pope Bill'' for his creativity?
You could also make a good case for the ``monasterylike'' business having arisen from the centrally-focussed Empire-style cultures of Britain and such as Napoleon.
Go back through the history of the time (1600s) and pick out successful inventors, artists and other technically creative people. Now consider the proportion who were Protestant (and so presumably subject to the Protestant Work Ethic) against the proportion of Protestants in the general populace. Amazing, isn't it?
It wasn't that the Medievel Church suppressed research or anything (as long as it didn't threaten to step on their theological toes) but that the PWE was absent from that culture. Another interesting comparison is the religious affiliation of countries in which inventive people lived vs the head-count of inventors.
The hacker work ethic has an advantage of sorts over both systems. The core operative process of the Medievel Church was unthinking submission to ritual obligations. Two key words there, ``unthinking'' and ``submission.'' Where thinking did happen, all too often it was along the lines of how to rort the system, and of course since the motivation was centralised and externally applied rather than distributed and internalised, opportunities were legion.
Another natural consequence of external motivation is that it quickly became drudge. You can easily make a person hate some activity that they previously loved, by forcing them to do it (conceptually at gunpoint). This completely undermines the motivation.
The equivalent core of the Protestant Work Ethic was the satisfaction of having diligently and intelligently represented your Creator in your life and work, and as long as it stayed that way it worked splendidly. However, as it became increasingly replace by lip-service, it increasingly mimicked the system it was supposedly fighting.
These days it is generally (yes, there are exceptions) quite difficult to separate Protestant and Catholic at a glance, because as the Protestant motivation becames more Medievel, so does the consequent behaviour.
Enter the Hacker Work Ethic. In some ways there are distinct advantages over the Protestant Work Ethic, in that the range of thinking is broader; in some ways there is lossage such as in the accountability department.
This is - in the short-term view at least - not always a disadvantage, since a lot of hardworking ethical Protestants were/are ruthlessly taken advantage of by government agencies and monasterylike businesses. The less-bound hacker and the not-at-all-bound cracker (who is a hacker only in the same sense - as Eric Raymond so neatly put it - as a car thief is an automotive engineer) do not so readily fall victim to such manipulation. In the longer term, hackers closer to the PWE are more reliable, more dependable from the POV of those considering using their work.
I'll enthusiastically take either in preference to the me-first me-too grab-everything-you-can world-owes-me-a-living attitude which so pervades society today.
In other words, they want things to be as encrypted and secretive and copy-proof as possible. If they can get more control of a system by adding a V-Chip, so be it. Whatever it takes to get more control - so they can abuse and/or sublet that control - Microsoft will do. At all levels.
IBM have seen this one coming. Read their peace-love-linux ads carefully and you will see that IBM have learnt about Microsoft since M$ upended the chessboard halfway through passionfingering OS/2. Did you know that Windows NT was originally called OS/2 NT, and the name only changed when lots of copies of Windows 3.0 were sold?
Committment to Linux and open standards is IBM's answer. ``Keep the playing field level (and the chess-board upright) and we'll do OK,'' seems to be their reasoning. A far cry from IBM of the '70s. Microsoft, OTOH, want hidden decisions, secret b*llsh*t ingredients, maximum authority, endless pain for users and tech support people.
Sorry if this sounds rantish, but that's Microsoft's basic motivation for doing the V-Chip. At least, it's the only reason which dovetails with the temperament of the beast.
Expect to see one in CE next. ``I'm sorry, your PalmPC is low on licencing. Please plug it in to a registered Microsoft licence recharging station and keep your fingers clear of your wallet until recharge is complete, in case your credit cards implode.''
Right now it's still a bit of a black art getting BSD & Linux boxes to be peers with NDS & Active Directory.
Actually, it can be a black art getting ADS to work at all - even under Windows - and when it is switched on, it tends to throw other DNS services into the bushes and jump in after them. Many Win2000 [note: it's already obselete] saturated sites disable it. So if Maxtor ship their little black boxes with ADS enabled, they may shoot themselves in the foot rather seriously.
The last time I checked, there wasn't any sort of high frequency clock signal running down my spine.
I can introduce you to one of several cousins who generally have the effect of sending high-freqency signals not only along your spine, but along nerves you never knew you had before - if the ``mike'' in your email address does stand for michael. Youngest candidate is about 15, oldest is about 30. Warning: they're more likely to stop your clock than start it, if the old ticker isn't in good shape or the old blood supply is a bit lean... (-:
MySQL does suck in some areas (row-level locking is a new feature, for example, and until MaxSQL, transactions will be only a dream) but unlike MS-SQL, it's relatively easy to improve. Likewise PostgreSQL, which already does a significant number of things that MS-SQL doesn't, and lots of them much faster as well - and is easy to improve.
But if your application is mostly reads, and structurally simple (many, even most, DB apps are), why on Earth would you bother with the expensive, proprietary and resource-thirsty MS-SQL, even now, even three years ago? So you have to rewrite two or three JOIN statements? Oooooh, whip me with chains, that is so difficult a task, I impress even myself with my ability to complete it! Big fat hairy deal.
My issue is that some _tables_alone_ will have 500,000+ rows (with pos[s]ibly ten people accessing the database at the same time) by the end of the year (some tables are growing by 20,000 rows a month).
The PostgreSQL people are currently discussing the most elegant way to back out the 500,000,000th transaction, so I wouldn't let sheer volume frighten you... except that I would be keeping good and regular backups of that Access DB handy, and would hurry to have another solution (any solution that works) to hand for the day Access spits the dummy for the final time.
Ten simultaneous transactions is no big whoopee, even through ODBC, unless those ten don't count a horde of unmentioned read-only internet users. If you're pulling stuff out of the Web end, you can avoid ODBC anyway, and use a PERL or PHP module instead (even under Windows).
Using PostgreSQL instead of Access as a back end will have you using something with less proprietary SQL extensions when the time comes to seriously scale up. That means that dropping in (say) an Oracle server shouldn't be as much of a big deal as replacing an Access or MS-SQL server.
One of the benefits of Access it that the entire database can be deployed (on a windows box at least) with just one file! There is no need to install an RDBMS.
You can actually put more than the database in one file, but it means that when the one file becomes corrupted, you're sunk. Also, the ``connect directly to file'' bit does actually need whole mess of other stuff out there in DLL hell - and so MS-ASP - and so IIS - and so Windows on the server. The file doesn't know anything, you're not really connecting directly to it, but to a server on the ISP, albeit possibly built into ASP.
Can the same be accomplished with MySQL?
Yes. And with PostgreSQL. Copy the whole shebang onto a virtual disk and deploy that. You can even compress it for transport (zeroing the unused chunks helps compression lots). You can include a full MySQL (or PostgreSQL) implementation on the VD and run either or both as a user, and connect from any webserver, not just InternetInformationShredder. The VD trick requires special software under Windows, and usually mount permission under (Li|U)n[iu]x so you can do:
mount -t reiserfs -o loop everything.disk ownpersonalSQLdb
Unix can outpackage Windows any day. With three utilities tied behind its back! (-:
The tool he wants is here and the ODBC so widely feared above ceases to be an issue.
Why not just use a client/server application written totally in Access if you are concerned with compatibility issues? This is quite simple to do and will provide you with the ability to use local temporary tables which can greatly increase speed when manipulating large amounts of data.
...or in other words, Access sucks over a network?
PS, Access will often lock up or lose the plot if you truly are working with large amounts of data. Better to do data reduction at the server end first, it increases your survival prospects.
Access is just being used as the front end. [...] Access is definitely not good for multiusers dbs, unless you have a backend to it.
It seems to me, that (at runtime, anyway), we're pretty close to dealing with stone soup here. If you're only after a front end, why not use (now here's the brilliant bit) a front end? Why use the saw from a Swiss Army Fork instead? There are bazillions of nice, neat GUI frontends, from Python and Ruby RAD tools through PERL-based Web front-ends. Go visit FreshMeat and have a bit of a browse.
Jet is the mechanism for using native Access file format (.MDB) - which Microsoft is actually phasing out.
That needed phasing out from the day it was invented. Even after buying Fox and integrating some of the speedups from FoxBase into the JET engine, it was still one of the worst-chosen ancronyms in history.
Sad that it took - what? - about eight years of customers screaming at them before M$ decided to go client/server, and you can bet there will be JET-oriented backwards-compatible barnacles in the code until doomsday, to say nothing of new ASP-ish remote-disablement code.
Access is one of the better practical arguments out there for Linus Torvalds' approach to backwards compatibility.
How would you filter a combo box after an item is chosen from another combo box,
Generally with JavaScript, although XUL can do a better job. Also, if you're working in Windows land, where every user is considered a moron, you would be doing data entry ``wizard'' style, with very few questions per page, so you could probably find an excuse to make a new page after the first combo box and before the second, thus bypassing the needs for client-side scripting.
I hate these MF's and will never ever use their stupid lame ass plugin.
MF's == Microsoft Friends? (-:
I'd rather slashdot or redhat start something like this... then I'll voluntarily install it.
Actually Akamai would probably do a pretty reasonable job of it. The trick would be to fetch your root-servers file from them, and then they handball the query to a regular root-server if it's not an akamai domain.
I imagine that many large corporations would like to have, for example, an ``ibm'' or ``ford'' TLD. You would have to step around existing TLDs and leave all of the two-letter TLDs blank for future countries.
Sadly, ICANN would promptly release more TLDs ``due to popular pressure'' that clashed with the new ones.
Yeah, well, it takes all kinds to make the world spin. Send them an sfx containing a shortcut and PSCP.EXE; if they're too thick to type ``pscp file luser@server:'' then they can click on the shortcut to do the post - how hard is that?
PSCP, like the interactive version (PuTTY), runs on all known Windows (win32s and beyond) and doesn't have any DLLs (or indeed any install) to cause the traditional tragedy-of-errors that happens so often on WIndows at install time.
AFAIK, there is no Open-licence SSH server for Windows - if anyone knows better, please email me *now* and tell me!
Why not just split each division of Microsoft it about 4 or 6 roughly equal chunks (Nanosoft I to Nanosoft V?), give them all euqal rights to the existing Microsoft codebase (each gets Word, Each gets Windows, etc), with a mandatory fine of 1/3 of each company's assets if there was any evidence of collusion between them after six months?
Then they can hone their anti-competitive skills on one another. Spectator sport!...or Spectre Sport...?
The big problem would be dividing Bill up without killing him. But Bill vs Steve would be hilarious...
If MS did make Windows free, and Office as well, it would increase their market coverage even more. Then after (say) three years, when they'd erased just about everyone else from the market and moved a serious number of people to ASP-managed desktops with their new free-beer products, they'd start charging again, and charging and charging and charging until they had their pound of flesh taken from about the heart, and the blood, and probably a few vertebrae as well. Else we'll remote-disable you.
Sounds funny but in reality it would be ultimate pain.
All hail Emperor William III, King of the World, Lord of the Blue Screens, Baron of Hackery, Duke DeBug, Purveyor of the Stray Pointer and Leaker of RAM.
It already is free for non-commercial use, and for some commecrial use as well. It's just that the relationship is not as formal as Bill would like it to be... (-:
If the AAAS presents the proper scientific perspective to the case, to cut through the mush thrown out by the lawyers and paid scientists from either side, then they would be much more impartial that what exists now.
Excellent point!
If the other side says "there is a great amount of debate in the scientific community about evolution" then the AAAS scientist can be in a perfect, non-biased position to refute that.
Terrible pity, you were doing so well. Not only is there a great amount of debate in the scientific community (e.g. between ``catastrophists'' [a relative term in this case] like SJ Gould and ``Orthodox'' Darwinians), but the evidence points squarely away from evolution in practically every instance.
For example, there are no proto-turtles, yet there are millions of turtle fossils. What happened? Was there an organism that went around collecting and eating proto-turtle shells and leaving everything else alone?
In this case, the AAAS rep would almost certainly be lying. Not a good thing in a court, although it is in reality pandemic.
Maybe it's a good thing that justice won't be blinded by ignora[n]ce
That depends on what you mean by ignorance. The judges will be better informed on many technical matters. They will be better misinformed where the AAAS conflicts with observable reality. I guess it's a nett win, but it remains to be seen.
Another consideration might be that if large greedy corporations (-: yes, Bill, there is more than one:-) were concerned enough about the judge's understanding, they might pay even more to see that certain technical aspects were emphasised or explained more creatively to the judge. (-: It is the American Way, afer all, just ask Bill's mate Jim about that:-)
On x86 linux, sigh,/ME wants an ARM so I can throw away all of my fans. Using complex Java is unlucky, generally cuts me back to 30-90 minutes between deaths, but JavaScript and ordinary HTML, such as it is, seem to be endlessly reliable. Running 3 snapshots, one 0.6, one 0.7 and one post-0.7 on 3 different boxes (2xAMD-K6-300, 1xIntel-Celery-800).
But if Sparc is as easy to make for as you claim elsewhere (and I see Mozilla runs on Mac), you should be able to fetch a Mozilla source snapshot and do make to produce your own. Surely only stuff like file IO and threading would risk being at all Solaris-specific?
``We're sorry, but we have forsaken mere text and moved on to greater things. We hope to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft's Wizard technology and forsake information altogether.
``If you have trouble seeing, please purchase a 200DPI 48-inch monitor and corresponding RAM farm. If you are blind, stiff shit. We aren't, and we can't be bothered coding for it. And don't try using deafness as an excuse to avoid our digital muzak!''
I could use one of the best features of Mozilla and make the fucking Text bigger than 10px on my 15" Monitor with a 1024x768 resolution
Didn't you know that ``four point Unreadable'' font is the new internet standard?
Nevertheless the site renders correctly only in IE.
Welcome to planet Microsoft. Please do not adjust your reality. Any errors you see are merely incompatibilities left over from the original reality, and will be dealt with in the next release. Or the one after. Soon, anyway. Or maybe we need to reformat and reinstall your mind. Please choose one option while we play shell games with the labels on the buttons. Did you know that your licence to use Microsoft's patented OK button has expired? Please choose one of the following options to update your licence: [Cancel]
That way, they'll spend their time whinging at Microsoft because feature X doesn't work under Windows 2000 any more, or feature Y let in Mr Nasty Crackerman, instead of telling us how to run our lives... that way they'll be acheiving their own kinds of fulfillment and not really bothering anyone else. No, not even ``what, me listen?'' Afred E. Gates and co.
Add that to the fact that the area immediately under the barrel's mouth, and the area under the capsule's flight path until it reached high atmosphere, would be regularly devastated by the sonic boom, and the fact that the elictricity neccesary to power such a maglev tunnel would be prohibitively expensive, and you'll find that this plan, while it sounds nice at first, is not going to fly.
Perhaps I should mention that it doesn't actually have to fly, as such, just fall past the planet faster than it falls onto it. (-:
That said, the use in a magcannon would not be firing things at orbital velocities; the cannon would be firing things at only a few thousand miles per hour. The business end would be at the top of a mountain, a couple of miles above sea level, having run up a nice straight Western ridge, and would be hurling capsules into reasonably thin air; you would either use a tunnel at or near vacuum, or suffer the drag of full pressure at lower speeds/altitudes working up to high speeds and altitudes. The idea is to do the hardest part (getting started and getting above most of the atmosphere) on the ground, as it were, so making the actual flying bits much lighter and smaller.
The big problems would be dissipating the heat from the power source and maglev track if you launch stuff often enough to be profitable. Perhaps run a power station from the waste heat? Once you had run it for a few years and built yourself a powersat, the first big problem would be over 80% smaller.
BUT what's actually being discussed by the original poster is not a magcannon, but a laser ablation launcher. Part of the purpose of rocket fuel is to provide energy, the other part is to provide reaction mass. By providing the energy from a ground-based laser instead of lofted fuel, the reaction can be made denser (means smaller so lighter and cheaper vehicle) and cheaper (water or even rock(!)).
Laser ablation is usually teamed with a magcannon to fling the payload into the air in the path of the laser, but there is no particular reason not to use an airborne launching platform like a modified 747, other than most pilots being nervous about flying through the field of fire of a really big laser...
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you could claim to be in PregreSQL mode? (-:
Left outer joins coming up in the next release, live backups/mirroring in place, and yes you can publish your benchmarks. Lookin' good...
Reformation and Renaissance went hand in hand. Understand the Protest, and you understand much about Protestant ethics.
If you're looking for the source of monasterylike business, wouldn't it be obvious to start looking in a monastic culture, rejection of which was a significant part of the Protest?
If you're looking for dependence on a central authority ("government"), what better place to start than one of the biggest and most ruthlessly centralised governments ever: the papacy - rejection of which was a significant part of the Protest? Is Mr Gates half-jokingly called ``Pope Bill'' for his creativity?
You could also make a good case for the ``monasterylike'' business having arisen from the centrally-focussed Empire-style cultures of Britain and such as Napoleon.
Go back through the history of the time (1600s) and pick out successful inventors, artists and other technically creative people. Now consider the proportion who were Protestant (and so presumably subject to the Protestant Work Ethic) against the proportion of Protestants in the general populace. Amazing, isn't it?
It wasn't that the Medievel Church suppressed research or anything (as long as it didn't threaten to step on their theological toes) but that the PWE was absent from that culture. Another interesting comparison is the religious affiliation of countries in which inventive people lived vs the head-count of inventors.
The hacker work ethic has an advantage of sorts over both systems. The core operative process of the Medievel Church was unthinking submission to ritual obligations. Two key words there, ``unthinking'' and ``submission.'' Where thinking did happen, all too often it was along the lines of how to rort the system, and of course since the motivation was centralised and externally applied rather than distributed and internalised, opportunities were legion.
Another natural consequence of external motivation is that it quickly became drudge. You can easily make a person hate some activity that they previously loved, by forcing them to do it (conceptually at gunpoint). This completely undermines the motivation.
The equivalent core of the Protestant Work Ethic was the satisfaction of having diligently and intelligently represented your Creator in your life and work, and as long as it stayed that way it worked splendidly. However, as it became increasingly replace by lip-service, it increasingly mimicked the system it was supposedly fighting.
These days it is generally (yes, there are exceptions) quite difficult to separate Protestant and Catholic at a glance, because as the Protestant motivation becames more Medievel, so does the consequent behaviour.
Enter the Hacker Work Ethic. In some ways there are distinct advantages over the Protestant Work Ethic, in that the range of thinking is broader; in some ways there is lossage such as in the accountability department.
This is - in the short-term view at least - not always a disadvantage, since a lot of hardworking ethical Protestants were/are ruthlessly taken advantage of by government agencies and monasterylike businesses. The less-bound hacker and the not-at-all-bound cracker (who is a hacker only in the same sense - as Eric Raymond so neatly put it - as a car thief is an automotive engineer) do not so readily fall victim to such manipulation. In the longer term, hackers closer to the PWE are more reliable, more dependable from the POV of those considering using their work.
I'll enthusiastically take either in preference to the me-first me-too grab-everything-you-can world-owes-me-a-living attitude which so pervades society today.
In other words, they want things to be as encrypted and secretive and copy-proof as possible. If they can get more control of a system by adding a V-Chip, so be it. Whatever it takes to get more control - so they can abuse and/or sublet that control - Microsoft will do. At all levels.
IBM have seen this one coming. Read their peace-love-linux ads carefully and you will see that IBM have learnt about Microsoft since M$ upended the chessboard halfway through passionfingering OS/2. Did you know that Windows NT was originally called OS/2 NT, and the name only changed when lots of copies of Windows 3.0 were sold?
Committment to Linux and open standards is IBM's answer. ``Keep the playing field level (and the chess-board upright) and we'll do OK,'' seems to be their reasoning. A far cry from IBM of the '70s. Microsoft, OTOH, want hidden decisions, secret b*llsh*t ingredients, maximum authority, endless pain for users and tech support people.
Sorry if this sounds rantish, but that's Microsoft's basic motivation for doing the V-Chip. At least, it's the only reason which dovetails with the temperament of the beast.
Expect to see one in CE next. ``I'm sorry, your PalmPC is low on licencing. Please plug it in to a registered Microsoft licence recharging station and keep your fingers clear of your wallet until recharge is complete, in case your credit cards implode.''
Actually, it can be a black art getting ADS to work at all - even under Windows - and when it is switched on, it tends to throw other DNS services into the bushes and jump in after them. Many Win2000 [note: it's already obselete] saturated sites disable it. So if Maxtor ship their little black boxes with ADS enabled, they may shoot themselves in the foot rather seriously.
I can introduce you to one of several cousins who generally have the effect of sending high-freqency signals not only along your spine, but along nerves you never knew you had before - if the ``mike'' in your email address does stand for michael. Youngest candidate is about 15, oldest is about 30. Warning: they're more likely to stop your clock than start it, if the old ticker isn't in good shape or the old blood supply is a bit lean... (-:
Want to bet on that? (-:
MySQL does suck in some areas (row-level locking is a new feature, for example, and until MaxSQL, transactions will be only a dream) but unlike MS-SQL, it's relatively easy to improve. Likewise PostgreSQL, which already does a significant number of things that MS-SQL doesn't, and lots of them much faster as well - and is easy to improve.
But if your application is mostly reads, and structurally simple (many, even most, DB apps are), why on Earth would you bother with the expensive, proprietary and resource-thirsty MS-SQL, even now, even three years ago? So you have to rewrite two or three JOIN statements? Oooooh, whip me with chains, that is so difficult a task, I impress even myself with my ability to complete it! Big fat hairy deal.
The PostgreSQL people are currently discussing the most elegant way to back out the 500,000,000th transaction, so I wouldn't let sheer volume frighten you... except that I would be keeping good and regular backups of that Access DB handy, and would hurry to have another solution (any solution that works) to hand for the day Access spits the dummy for the final time.
Ten simultaneous transactions is no big whoopee, even through ODBC, unless those ten don't count a horde of unmentioned read-only internet users. If you're pulling stuff out of the Web end, you can avoid ODBC anyway, and use a PERL or PHP module instead (even under Windows).
Using PostgreSQL instead of Access as a back end will have you using something with less proprietary SQL extensions when the time comes to seriously scale up. That means that dropping in (say) an Oracle server shouldn't be as much of a big deal as replacing an Access or MS-SQL server.
You can actually put more than the database in one file, but it means that when the one file becomes corrupted, you're sunk. Also, the ``connect directly to file'' bit does actually need whole mess of other stuff out there in DLL hell - and so MS-ASP - and so IIS - and so Windows on the server. The file doesn't know anything, you're not really connecting directly to it, but to a server on the ISP, albeit possibly built into ASP.
Yes. And with PostgreSQL. Copy the whole shebang onto a virtual disk and deploy that. You can even compress it for transport (zeroing the unused chunks helps compression lots). You can include a full MySQL (or PostgreSQL) implementation on the VD and run either or both as a user, and connect from any webserver, not just InternetInformationShredder. The VD trick requires special software under Windows, and usually mount permission under (Li|U)n[iu]x so you can do:
Unix can outpackage Windows any day. With three utilities tied behind its back! (-:
The tool he wants is here and the ODBC so widely feared above ceases to be an issue.
...or in other words, Access sucks over a network?
PS, Access will often lock up or lose the plot if you truly are working with large amounts of data. Better to do data reduction at the server end first, it increases your survival prospects.
It seems to me, that (at runtime, anyway), we're pretty close to dealing with stone soup here. If you're only after a front end, why not use (now here's the brilliant bit) a front end? Why use the saw from a Swiss Army Fork instead? There are bazillions of nice, neat GUI frontends, from Python and Ruby RAD tools through PERL-based Web front-ends. Go visit FreshMeat and have a bit of a browse.
That needed phasing out from the day it was invented. Even after buying Fox and integrating some of the speedups from FoxBase into the JET engine, it was still one of the worst-chosen ancronyms in history.
Sad that it took - what? - about eight years of customers screaming at them before M$ decided to go client/server, and you can bet there will be JET-oriented backwards-compatible barnacles in the code until doomsday, to say nothing of new ASP-ish remote-disablement code.
Access is one of the better practical arguments out there for Linus Torvalds' approach to backwards compatibility.
Generally with JavaScript, although XUL can do a better job. Also, if you're working in Windows land, where every user is considered a moron, you would be doing data entry ``wizard'' style, with very few questions per page, so you could probably find an excuse to make a new page after the first combo box and before the second, thus bypassing the needs for client-side scripting.
MF's == Microsoft Friends? (-:
Actually Akamai would probably do a pretty reasonable job of it. The trick would be to fetch your root-servers file from them, and then they handball the query to a regular root-server if it's not an akamai domain.
I imagine that many large corporations would like to have, for example, an ``ibm'' or ``ford'' TLD. You would have to step around existing TLDs and leave all of the two-letter TLDs blank for future countries.
Sadly, ICANN would promptly release more TLDs ``due to popular pressure'' that clashed with the new ones.
> Alot of people wont use scp.
Yeah, well, it takes all kinds to make the world spin. Send them an sfx containing a shortcut and PSCP.EXE; if they're too thick to type ``pscp file luser@server:'' then they can click on the shortcut to do the post - how hard is that?
PSCP, like the interactive version (PuTTY), runs on all known Windows (win32s and beyond) and doesn't have any DLLs (or indeed any install) to cause the traditional tragedy-of-errors that happens so often on WIndows at install time.
AFAIK, there is no Open-licence SSH server for Windows - if anyone knows better, please email me *now* and tell me!
Why not just split each division of Microsoft it about 4 or 6 roughly equal chunks (Nanosoft I to Nanosoft V?), give them all euqal rights to the existing Microsoft codebase (each gets Word, Each gets Windows, etc), with a mandatory fine of 1/3 of each company's assets if there was any evidence of collusion between them after six months?
...or Spectre Sport...?
Then they can hone their anti-competitive skills on one another. Spectator sport!
The big problem would be dividing Bill up without killing him. But Bill vs Steve would be hilarious...
If MS did make Windows free, and Office as well, it would increase their market coverage even more. Then after (say) three years, when they'd erased just about everyone else from the market and moved a serious number of people to ASP-managed desktops with their new free-beer products, they'd start charging again, and charging and charging and charging until they had their pound of flesh taken from about the heart, and the blood, and probably a few vertebrae as well. Else we'll remote-disable you.
Sounds funny but in reality it would be ultimate pain.
All hail Emperor William III, King of the World, Lord of the Blue Screens, Baron of Hackery, Duke DeBug, Purveyor of the Stray Pointer and Leaker of RAM.
Excellent point!
Terrible pity, you were doing so well. Not only is there a great amount of debate in the scientific community (e.g. between ``catastrophists'' [a relative term in this case] like SJ Gould and ``Orthodox'' Darwinians), but the evidence points squarely away from evolution in practically every instance.
For example, there are no proto-turtles, yet there are millions of turtle fossils. What happened? Was there an organism that went around collecting and eating proto-turtle shells and leaving everything else alone?
In this case, the AAAS rep would almost certainly be lying. Not a good thing in a court, although it is in reality pandemic.
That depends on what you mean by ignorance. The judges will be better informed on many technical matters. They will be better misinformed where the AAAS conflicts with observable reality. I guess it's a nett win, but it remains to be seen.
Another consideration might be that if large greedy corporations (-: yes, Bill, there is more than one :-) were concerned enough about the judge's understanding, they might pay even more to see that certain technical aspects were emphasised or explained more creatively to the judge. (-: It is the American Way, afer all, just ask Bill's mate Jim about that :-)
Was that a definition? (-:
On x86 linux, sigh, /ME wants an ARM so I can throw away all of my fans. Using complex Java is unlucky, generally cuts me back to 30-90 minutes between deaths, but JavaScript and ordinary HTML, such as it is, seem to be endlessly reliable. Running 3 snapshots, one 0.6, one 0.7 and one post-0.7 on 3 different boxes (2xAMD-K6-300, 1xIntel-Celery-800).
But if Sparc is as easy to make for as you claim elsewhere (and I see Mozilla runs on Mac), you should be able to fetch a Mozilla source snapshot and do make to produce your own. Surely only stuff like file IO and threading would risk being at all Solaris-specific?
``We're sorry, but we have forsaken mere text and moved on to greater things. We hope to follow in the footsteps of Microsoft's Wizard technology and forsake information altogether.
``If you have trouble seeing, please purchase a 200DPI 48-inch monitor and corresponding RAM farm. If you are blind, stiff shit. We aren't, and we can't be bothered coding for it. And don't try using deafness as an excuse to avoid our digital muzak!''
ALL MY BASE ARE BELONG TO TEN
...oh, wait, there's a couple of sixteens over here... and a whole mess of eights on the PDP-11 in the corner...
Didn't you know that ``four point Unreadable'' font is the new internet standard?
Welcome to planet Microsoft. Please do not adjust your reality. Any errors you see are merely incompatibilities left over from the original reality, and will be dealt with in the next release. Or the one after. Soon, anyway. Or maybe we need to reformat and reinstall your mind. Please choose one option while we play shell games with the labels on the buttons. Did you know that your licence to use Microsoft's patented OK button has expired? Please choose one of the following options to update your licence: [Cancel]
Sorry, I'll be good now.
That way, they'll spend their time whinging at Microsoft because feature X doesn't work under Windows 2000 any more, or feature Y let in Mr Nasty Crackerman, instead of telling us how to run our lives... that way they'll be acheiving their own kinds of fulfillment and not really bothering anyone else. No, not even ``what, me listen?'' Afred E. Gates and co.
Perhaps I should mention that it doesn't actually have to fly, as such, just fall past the planet faster than it falls onto it. (-:
That said, the use in a magcannon would not be firing things at orbital velocities; the cannon would be firing things at only a few thousand miles per hour. The business end would be at the top of a mountain, a couple of miles above sea level, having run up a nice straight Western ridge, and would be hurling capsules into reasonably thin air; you would either use a tunnel at or near vacuum, or suffer the drag of full pressure at lower speeds/altitudes working up to high speeds and altitudes. The idea is to do the hardest part (getting started and getting above most of the atmosphere) on the ground, as it were, so making the actual flying bits much lighter and smaller.
The big problems would be dissipating the heat from the power source and maglev track if you launch stuff often enough to be profitable. Perhaps run a power station from the waste heat? Once you had run it for a few years and built yourself a powersat, the first big problem would be over 80% smaller.
BUT what's actually being discussed by the original poster is not a magcannon, but a laser ablation launcher. Part of the purpose of rocket fuel is to provide energy, the other part is to provide reaction mass. By providing the energy from a ground-based laser instead of lofted fuel, the reaction can be made denser (means smaller so lighter and cheaper vehicle) and cheaper (water or even rock(!)).
Laser ablation is usually teamed with a magcannon to fling the payload into the air in the path of the laser, but there is no particular reason not to use an airborne launching platform like a modified 747, other than most pilots being nervous about flying through the field of fire of a really big laser...