I am outraged with MySQL AB after I learnt they do business with SCO. As a result, I plan to migrate my website's databases from MySQL 4.1 to PostgreSQL 8.0/8.1, and I concentrate on PostgreSQL support in my software projects. MySQL is wrong if they believe they can have the support of the free/libre open-source software communities and have relations with SCO at the same time. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system which offers great programmability through its native programming language PL/PgSQL, as well as through several other language bindings (for PHP, Java, Perl, even sh). PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and supported by a community of free software developers, while MySQL is supported by a corporation, MySQL AB, which sells proprietary licenses.
Dr. Ioannidis (who is Greek, like me) is right: I read daily public announcements from universities, as well as some scientific papers, and I have found that most of them are unimportant, wrong or simply motivated by financial reasons (some universities must use all their expenses allowance in order to continue receiving government money). Not only scientific papers are wrong (often the result of vanity), but students dislike studying science and technology. Recently RPI President Jackson called for a national strategy to overcome this problem.
USA must invest more in science, otherwise rival nations. How would you feel to see a communist Chinese flag on Mars? You can prevent this by persuading your representatives to invest more in science and technology.
The first step would be to enact more reasonable copyright and patent laws. Science, like free software benefits from openess, which is now hindered by copyright and patents. Richard M. Stallman has published an article in Nature about this, and you can read it here.
It would be stupid to rebuild a city in a place where it is known it will be hitted again by hurricanes in the long future. The state and federal governments ought to provide free housing, and consider the option to build a new city elsewhere. I would also say, let's build cities only in places that are not endagered by earthquakes and hurricanes every some years. I can't understand why humans keep building cities in locations where earthquakes and hurricanes happen, it's like ensuring that your grandchildren will be endagered in their life because of your (theirs' ancestor) choices.
Although in theory Mac users have access to MSIE because there is a Mac version of it, in practice the do not have any access to MSIE, because the Mac version is unupdated and has many differences with Windows MSIE.
In Greece we have government websites that recomment Mozilla, while the youth of a major political party supports open source and a former minister recently made a statement condemning software patents.
I'm one guy too and I have designed my sites to be 100% compatible with all browsers. It doesn't require too much work. For example, MSIE has problems with some CSS in the body HTML element. My solution? I put the whole page inside a DIV and I used the CSS in the CSS, so MSIE rendered it correctly. Just one example.
The Mac version of MSIE is not the same as the Windows version, and it haven't been updated a long time. Mac MSIE users would still face problems with an MSIE-only website.
According to last month's statistics of my site, 13.9% of its visitors used GNU/Linux and 37.1% used Firefox. MSIE was used only by 41% of the users, while Windows was used by 69%.
I usually copy the most interested deleted Wikipedia entries to my wiki, but I think Wikipedia is already archived automatically by many sites around the world, including the Internet Archive.
...you are free to come to my wiki JnanaBase which has only one policy: You are free to do whatever you want within the minimum possible legal and decency limitations. The goal of the project is to document all information that exists in the universe, thus creating a copy of our brain (we will later organise and manage all that information with some special software we develop). Yes, you can write an article about your business or even a biography for your dog, as long as the information is useful and accurate. We created this project as an alternative to Wikipedia because we believe that there should be no limits in information.
The US Copyright Office asks whether we would have any problem if we were required to use Microsoft Internet Explorer in order to pre-register a work. I sent them an email explaining why this would be a bad thing. Please help me prevent an MSIE-only US Copyright Office website by sending them your views on this issue. Together with more information and links about this issue, you can find my letter on my blog and use it as a base for your letter. The government of Norway recently embraced open formats, it would be a pity to see US government sites to require MSIE!
Wikipedia is based on the old 18th century encyclopedia concept, but this isn't effective in the digital era of the Internet. Many Wikipedia articles are intentionally written for the common people, not containing specialist scientific or rare information you can find in specialist books. For example, Wikipedia's article on quadratic classifiers is a stub written in April (after I raised this issue on their mailing list in February), and their article on software agents, although much improved since I pointed that it was as short as a kid's poem some months before, is still inadequate if you consider that some people study agents for years in universities. Now, what will happen if we go there and improve these articles so much that they contain all the relevant information you can find in computer science and mathematics books, including detailed examples and HOW-TOs, to the extent that these articles become 300-page books? They will remove that extra "unencyclopedic" and "specialist" knowledge, since they believe it should not be part of an encyclopedia. They may move the information to their other wikiprojects, such as Wikibooks. That's bad, because some information will inevitably be duplicated, and duplication leads to ommisions and errors (someone may fix something in Wikibooks, but the fix won't show up in a Wikipedia article which may contain the same information). They believe in old monolithic ideas and they still think in terms of "books", "articles", "pages", something they write and the reader reads in the same monolithic form. They must proceed and understand what the future holds for wikis and the Web, and they must adapt to that future.
The future lies in personalised information. You can see that it's coming if you notice the rise of RSS and you understand why it's so trendy now: People want to control the information they consume. The don't want to read an HTML page which may contain markup and CSS errors, be incompatible with their browser, full of flashy f*cking irrelevant advertisements and whatnot. They prefer RSS which provides an easy-to-parse XML representation of the information they want. Similarily, people use free/libre open-source software because they want to have control over their PCs and their lives, they don't want their software to spy on them nor to control what they can do with their computer with evil technologies like Trusted Computing and stupid DRM. People want freedom and choice. Books and articles are like closed-source software: You cannot control with fine granularity what you want to read. You have a choice between different authors, but that's all, and this isn't true freedom. What if we had a magic piece of paper which could erase the words and phrases we dislike? We could then read exactly what we want to read, from any author. How many times have you bought a 500-page book only to find out later than 75% of its text is unnecessary pseudo-literary decoration? Some people have lots of time and like to read anything they can, others want to invest their time in reading only the absolutely necessary text which contains the information they urgently need. We need a way to have total control over the information that enters our brain, or else we are at the mercy of the author.
In wikis, we need a wiki that can build personalised wiki-articles based on our preferences, getting data and information from a flexible database. This is a multi-step process. We must first create a wiki database which contains all the data we can document, if possible a perfect copy of our brains I would say, then we must develop software to tag its contents and let the user to retrieve the information in any way they like, and if we use a good design there is no need to duplicate any data.
Special software needs to be developed in order to materialise my vision. This software should be based on the concepts of "co
I have studied Computer Science, but my programme included a good amount of system engineering. I regard system engineering, especially real-time systems, much simpler than software engineering. However, be warned that a small bug can have catastrophic effects in real-time hardware-based systems, so if you work as a systems engineer you must be very careful.
Dump Outlook and Windows and install GNU/Linux or a BSD, then write a program to create a symlink to a random sound and re-create it every minute, and configure your mail client to open that symlink as a sound.
My advice is to continue managing your own hardware. Having my own rack hardware in my property and my own dedicated Internet fat pipes, while being able to modify and hack the systems in any way I want is my dream. True, I'm a nerd, but I can't imagine anyone not enjoying changing some RAM or a SCSI hard disk occasionally. It may mean you may have more downtime and maybe even lose some money if your servers support your business, but money isn't everything in this world, there is happiness too, and I personally love to delve deep into hardware.
But because I'm not a yuppie I do not own my own servers, dataroom, and fat pipe. Therefore, when I wanted to start my website, I had to buy the services of a webhosting firm.
I chose WestHost (the link leads to my affiliate page for them, their website is www.westhost.com) which is based in Utah, USA. I have my website hosted there for a year and I really like their immediate support. When you send them an e-mail you can usually except an answer within hours. The services they offer are VPS and dedicated servers, all with ssh access of course, but I am not sure whether they do colocation. It's not a big firm, I think it's family-owned, but they have a beautiful professional datacenter (they have photos somewhere on their site) with P4-3GHz servers with Redhat-based OS (equiped with a nice control panel they have developed) and a very useful forum where existing customers and prospective new customers can discuss, so perhaps you can go there and ask us (the existing customers) about our experiences with them.
Therefore if I was in your shoes, I would first reconsider and try to continue managing my own hardware, and if I could not, then I would ask WestHost whether they can help you.
New London is a small city which had high unemployment and declining population levels lately. In 1996 the Federal Government closed a facility which employed 1500 people there, so something had to be done to boost the local economy, especially in Fort Trumbull.
The NLDC (New London Development Corporation) was authorised by the State in January 1998 to help with the situation. NLDC is a private non-profit entity, but its members are not elected by the people.
The city/NLDC wanted to create a state park with marinas, maybe a parking, and hotels etc, in Fort Trumbull.
In February, the pharmaceutical megacorp Pfizer announced it would build a $300 million research facility next to Fort Trumbull. That would create new jobs, so it was good news.
Oopps! But there was a problem: Some land needed for the state park was the property of individuals. This property included residential homes as well as investment homes. NLDC was authorised to buy the necessary land from the people. That's ok, but there are bad news too: NLDC was authorised by the city to seize property too!
Some people (Kelo et al.) disliked the idea that their beautiful home would be destroyed to allow Pfizer open its facility near there. One of these people was born and lived in their home for their whole lives. NLDC said it would seize their homes and provide compensation. The people remembered the last sentence of the Fifth Amendment: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation". They went to the courts. Their problem is not with the compensation, they don't want higher compensation, it's a matter of principle, about the definition of "public use". Why a Pfizer facility would be of any "public use"? Of course it would be beneficial for the city's economy and create jobs, but is this enough to justify home seizure for "public use"? I personally would say: No! (but IANAL - I am not a lawyer).
Some time the matter reached the Supreme Court of the United States. It decided 5-4 to allow the city/NLDC to seize the property. Too bad: Now corporations have a way to use your land for their factory, if a city government can prove that it would generate more tax revenue, jobs etc than your home. Theoretically the land would still be public property, but in practice some private entity is using it. Do you see the problem? Gov takes your land and allows someone else to use it because it says he can use it more productively than you.
Dissenting Justice O'Connor, J., said in his opinion to the Supreme Court: "Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms. As for the victims, the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result" (I quoted from Supreme Court of United States case 04-108, O'Connor, J., dissenting, 13, in page 39, I added the emphasis myself).
I wrote this overview quickly from my memory after reading most of the 04-108 ruling. I encourage you to read it, too, as it contains many interesting references to other court rulings too.
Linux 2.6.12 has a driver for GSM PCMCIA cards, which will enable GNU/Linux laptop owners to wirelessly surf on the Web via a cellular Internet connection, without the hassle of manually installing the hardware using modprobe and AT commands.
...thanking Debian by contributing to their projects? They are the ones who keep their distribution truly Libre (Free) and community-managed, in contrast with the commercial GNU/Linux distributors. When I will have time I will try to help them with translations. You should do something, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I have covered this news with an article which you can copy under the GFDL or Creative Commons.
I am outraged with MySQL AB after I learnt they do business with SCO. As a result, I plan to migrate my website's databases from MySQL 4.1 to PostgreSQL 8.0/8.1, and I concentrate on PostgreSQL support in my software projects. MySQL is wrong if they believe they can have the support of the free/libre open-source software communities and have relations with SCO at the same time. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system which offers great programmability through its native programming language PL/PgSQL, as well as through several other language bindings (for PHP, Java, Perl, even sh). PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and supported by a community of free software developers, while MySQL is supported by a corporation, MySQL AB, which sells proprietary licenses.
Dr. Ioannidis (who is Greek, like me) is right: I read daily public announcements from universities, as well as some scientific papers, and I have found that most of them are unimportant, wrong or simply motivated by financial reasons (some universities must use all their expenses allowance in order to continue receiving government money). Not only scientific papers are wrong (often the result of vanity), but students dislike studying science and technology. Recently RPI President Jackson called for a national strategy to overcome this problem. USA must invest more in science, otherwise rival nations. How would you feel to see a communist Chinese flag on Mars? You can prevent this by persuading your representatives to invest more in science and technology. The first step would be to enact more reasonable copyright and patent laws. Science, like free software benefits from openess, which is now hindered by copyright and patents. Richard M. Stallman has published an article in Nature about this, and you can read it here.
It would be stupid to rebuild a city in a place where it is known it will be hitted again by hurricanes in the long future. The state and federal governments ought to provide free housing, and consider the option to build a new city elsewhere. I would also say, let's build cities only in places that are not endagered by earthquakes and hurricanes every some years. I can't understand why humans keep building cities in locations where earthquakes and hurricanes happen, it's like ensuring that your grandchildren will be endagered in their life because of your (theirs' ancestor) choices.
Free Software Foundation is also collecting responses on this issue.
Although in theory Mac users have access to MSIE because there is a Mac version of it, in practice the do not have any access to MSIE, because the Mac version is unupdated and has many differences with Windows MSIE.
In Greece we have government websites that recomment Mozilla, while the youth of a major political party supports open source and a former minister recently made a statement condemning software patents.
If their website will require MSIE, it will require the 5.1 version. they say it in their announcement
I'm one guy too and I have designed my sites to be 100% compatible with all browsers. It doesn't require too much work. For example, MSIE has problems with some CSS in the body HTML element. My solution? I put the whole page inside a DIV and I used the CSS in the CSS, so MSIE rendered it correctly. Just one example.
The Mac version of MSIE is not the same as the Windows version, and it haven't been updated a long time. Mac MSIE users would still face problems with an MSIE-only website.
According to last month's statistics of my site, 13.9% of its visitors used GNU/Linux and 37.1% used Firefox. MSIE was used only by 41% of the users, while Windows was used by 69%.
I usually copy the most interested deleted Wikipedia entries to my wiki, but I think Wikipedia is already archived automatically by many sites around the world, including the Internet Archive.
...you are free to come to my wiki JnanaBase which has only one policy: You are free to do whatever you want within the minimum possible legal and decency limitations. The goal of the project is to document all information that exists in the universe, thus creating a copy of our brain (we will later organise and manage all that information with some special software we develop). Yes, you can write an article about your business or even a biography for your dog, as long as the information is useful and accurate. We created this project as an alternative to Wikipedia because we believe that there should be no limits in information.
Google apps don't work well with my Konqueror 3.4.1.
...and in nerdy websites IE comes second or very close to Firefox. That's what the statistics from my site show.
The US Copyright Office asks whether we would have any problem if we were required to use Microsoft Internet Explorer in order to pre-register a work. I sent them an email explaining why this would be a bad thing. Please help me prevent an MSIE-only US Copyright Office website by sending them your views on this issue. Together with more information and links about this issue, you can find my letter on my blog and use it as a base for your letter. The government of Norway recently embraced open formats, it would be a pity to see US government sites to require MSIE!
Re-read my post; it seems you didn't understood what I say.
Wikipedia is based on the old 18th century encyclopedia concept, but this isn't effective in the digital era of the Internet. Many Wikipedia articles are intentionally written for the common people, not containing specialist scientific or rare information you can find in specialist books. For example, Wikipedia's article on quadratic classifiers is a stub written in April (after I raised this issue on their mailing list in February), and their article on software agents, although much improved since I pointed that it was as short as a kid's poem some months before, is still inadequate if you consider that some people study agents for years in universities. Now, what will happen if we go there and improve these articles so much that they contain all the relevant information you can find in computer science and mathematics books, including detailed examples and HOW-TOs, to the extent that these articles become 300-page books? They will remove that extra "unencyclopedic" and "specialist" knowledge, since they believe it should not be part of an encyclopedia. They may move the information to their other wikiprojects, such as Wikibooks. That's bad, because some information will inevitably be duplicated, and duplication leads to ommisions and errors (someone may fix something in Wikibooks, but the fix won't show up in a Wikipedia article which may contain the same information). They believe in old monolithic ideas and they still think in terms of "books", "articles", "pages", something they write and the reader reads in the same monolithic form. They must proceed and understand what the future holds for wikis and the Web, and they must adapt to that future.
The future lies in personalised information. You can see that it's coming if you notice the rise of RSS and you understand why it's so trendy now: People want to control the information they consume. The don't want to read an HTML page which may contain markup and CSS errors, be incompatible with their browser, full of flashy f*cking irrelevant advertisements and whatnot. They prefer RSS which provides an easy-to-parse XML representation of the information they want. Similarily, people use free/libre open-source software because they want to have control over their PCs and their lives, they don't want their software to spy on them nor to control what they can do with their computer with evil technologies like Trusted Computing and stupid DRM. People want freedom and choice. Books and articles are like closed-source software: You cannot control with fine granularity what you want to read. You have a choice between different authors, but that's all, and this isn't true freedom. What if we had a magic piece of paper which could erase the words and phrases we dislike? We could then read exactly what we want to read, from any author. How many times have you bought a 500-page book only to find out later than 75% of its text is unnecessary pseudo-literary decoration? Some people have lots of time and like to read anything they can, others want to invest their time in reading only the absolutely necessary text which contains the information they urgently need. We need a way to have total control over the information that enters our brain, or else we are at the mercy of the author.
In wikis, we need a wiki that can build personalised wiki-articles based on our preferences, getting data and information from a flexible database. This is a multi-step process. We must first create a wiki database which contains all the data we can document, if possible a perfect copy of our brains I would say, then we must develop software to tag its contents and let the user to retrieve the information in any way they like, and if we use a good design there is no need to duplicate any data.
Special software needs to be developed in order to materialise my vision. This software should be based on the concepts of "co
I have studied Computer Science, but my programme included a good amount of system engineering. I regard system engineering, especially real-time systems, much simpler than software engineering. However, be warned that a small bug can have catastrophic effects in real-time hardware-based systems, so if you work as a systems engineer you must be very careful.
Dump Outlook and Windows and install GNU/Linux or a BSD, then write a program to create a symlink to a random sound and re-create it every minute, and configure your mail client to open that symlink as a sound.
My advice is to continue managing your own hardware. Having my own rack hardware in my property and my own dedicated Internet fat pipes, while being able to modify and hack the systems in any way I want is my dream. True, I'm a nerd, but I can't imagine anyone not enjoying changing some RAM or a SCSI hard disk occasionally. It may mean you may have more downtime and maybe even lose some money if your servers support your business, but money isn't everything in this world, there is happiness too, and I personally love to delve deep into hardware.
But because I'm not a yuppie I do not own my own servers, dataroom, and fat pipe. Therefore, when I wanted to start my website, I had to buy the services of a webhosting firm.
I chose WestHost (the link leads to my affiliate page for them, their website is www.westhost.com) which is based in Utah, USA. I have my website hosted there for a year and I really like their immediate support. When you send them an e-mail you can usually except an answer within hours. The services they offer are VPS and dedicated servers, all with ssh access of course, but I am not sure whether they do colocation. It's not a big firm, I think it's family-owned, but they have a beautiful professional datacenter (they have photos somewhere on their site) with P4-3GHz servers with Redhat-based OS (equiped with a nice control panel they have developed) and a very useful forum where existing customers and prospective new customers can discuss, so perhaps you can go there and ask us (the existing customers) about our experiences with them.
Therefore if I was in your shoes, I would first reconsider and try to continue managing my own hardware, and if I could not, then I would ask WestHost whether they can help you.
here is the complete PDF file with the ruling, I found it from The Supreme Court website.
Although I live in the other side of the Atlantic, I wrote about this issue on my blog. I read most of the ruling, and I didn't like it.
Here's what happened:
I wrote this overview quickly from my memory after reading most of the 04-108 ruling. I encourage you to read it, too, as it contains many interesting references to other court rulings too.
Linux 2.6.12 has a driver for GSM PCMCIA cards, which will enable GNU/Linux laptop owners to wirelessly surf on the Web via a cellular Internet connection, without the hassle of manually installing the hardware using modprobe and AT commands.
I always write down all of my passwords, but never on a computer, only on paper.
...thanking Debian by contributing to their projects? They are the ones who keep their distribution truly Libre (Free) and community-managed, in contrast with the commercial GNU/Linux distributors. When I will have time I will try to help them with translations. You should do something, too.