Errr... They refused to attend the hearing in person that they themselves requested! Now they are claiming undue hardhip because they are in a different timezone? What if they were on vacation in Turkey? Would they have asked the office to open at midnight and video conference them in because any other time it would be an "undue hardship" for the timezone the lawyers reside in?
His initial intent is to block anyone blocking ads...
I do not see any actions he took that would support that statement (other than useless ramblings on the site, among other incoherent useless ramblings). As far as the actions he is taking and asking others to take is asking people to block Firefox... not ad blockers (he can't do that), not other browsers, not all other browsers that support ad blockers.
He is, in fact, offering up Opera and IE as alternatives. Opera has a built-in content blocker! Firefox, on the other hand, does not - ABP is an add-on, as you know.
So, no, I do not see how his initial intent was to "block anyone blocking ads" - he'd have to be doing something like what I suggested in my original reply, or blocking all browsers equally. IE has an add-on for blocking content and ads too, and it includes a pop-up blocker by default now as well.
Sorry, but removing or blocking content is not in the W3C spec - what the hell are you talking about, 'web standards'?
The standard where the HTTP server does not exhibit complete control over the HTTP client - that one. Client sends a request to a server for a particular URL; server replies with the content, possibly in HTML format, containing references to other contents possibly on other servers.
There is nothing in any of the W3C standards, including HTTP or HTML, that says that the client has to follow and load all these references that server provides. It is, and always has been, up to the discretion of the client what kind of content it loads and what it renders (if it decides to load it in the first place).
As I mentioned in other posts, I'd love to hear how you cope when all websites are forced into a pay-per-view model.
I don't see this happening - what I see happening is businesses/websites with poor or no business models going out of business - and there is nothing wrong with that.
It seems the guy's a big fan of trying to foil Adblock (specifically) and maybe other adblocking systems.
No, not other adblocking systems - that's my whole point - if so, he wouldn't be asking people to block Firefox using the HTTP headers. How is blocking Firefox (with or without adblock) affecting other browsers like IE or Opera which both have content/ad blockers?
However, if you're going to be part of obtaining content or information from my website, then there are costs that are incurred - bandwidth, processing, data storage.
Likewise on the client side. Someone could be expecting a 3KB HTML page and instead your advertiser could shove down a 600KB flash ad/movie down their pipe. Are you or your advertiser going to reimburse users who have metered bandwidth for this?
The problem is you are using a medium in a way that it was never built or meant to be used. Let's phrase it better - you are whining because the web standards work like they were designed to work. Your problem is - your "business" model doesn't work well in that environment. Let me give you an advice - instead of whining about certain users and certain other users who do this and that and that other thing which are well within bounds of the web standards and protocols - come up with the model that works for you that suits the environment it is operating in. Otherwise this whining is starting to go from looking annoying to plain silly.
To me this looks like a one-person campaign against Firefox and adblock, rather than the concept of blocking ads in any browser. As others have already pointed out, other browsers, including IE, Opera, etc. are well capable of blocking pretty much anything - pop-ups, images, specific sites, flash content, etc.
If this guy was really fighting against all browsers blocking ad content, he would be creating something like a cross-browser DOM/Javascript mechanism to check whether an image ad, flash object, an iframe, or whatever has loaded in the browser (say, after 10-20 seconds after loading the page). If ad content has loaded, then leave the site as normal. If it hasn't, then pull a "curtain" (using DHTML, CSS) over your site content with text on top of it explaining why this virtual curtain has appeared - i.e. until you view the accompanying ads you won't be allowed to view the site.
One can use cookies and added javascript to improve the logic - e.g. maybe allow 10-20 seconds on first page load, but only 3-5 seconds on consequent refreshes of the same page to prevent users from getting 10-20 seconds of page viewing (i.e. stealing).
I guess one could try this and see how far it gets them. It would surely be a lot more effective way of fighting the "theft" of content, as the guy describes.
Linux undoubtedly has more servers than Apple, but there are many, many more desktops in the world than servers. I think that more than makes up the difference.
Again, are you basing or backing up your assertion with anything? Or is that theory fresh out of your you know what?
I don't know about that one - the requirements being a Linux distro having a sane package management system, and MS Windows possessing none of those qualities would probably make it a little hard one would think.
Although I agree it was a nice thought - if MS had a similar service for 3rd party vendors or packagers to upload their work, then generate binaries for Windows XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, 32-bit, 64-bit, etc.; and have a similar simple interface to locate, download and install those apps with a single click... would be great. Not a chance in the world, but that can't keep us from dreaming, can it?
I thought he was being sarcastic there. Because he did indirectly "poke fun" at Windows with those 2 sentences. Can a second source confirm that those 2 sentences were not taken out of context? And if they weren't that he was actually being serious when he said this?
Um, what abour Mac OS X? You know, that "other" OS with a higher market share than Linux?
Want to back that up with anything? Because I didn't see the word "desktop" mentioned anywhere in the article.
But of course, if it's a pro-Apple comment, it automatically gets a +x insightful points. Slashdot user preferences should have an option to adjust the score downwards for pro-Apple comments in non-Apple related stories.
How is this different than apt-get, or even just using Google to search for packages?
You missed the part where it's a build service for developers. If you are a developer and have used or looked at their tools and interface, you'll find it will save you a lot of time, hassle and resources - write your software, upload it, and have it packaged and readily available for multiple distributions on multiple architectures. Your package has dependencies that have been updated by their developers? No problem, the service will automatically trigger to rebuild your package using the updated dependencies. Read more here.
One solution is to serve your content with XML/XSLT doing the transformation on the client side. IE 6, IE 7, and to some extent IE 5 as well as all Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Seamonkey, etc.) support this - so you'll still keep most of your traffic. You'll be missing out on the KHTML/WebKit based browsers and Opera crowd which is not inherently "bad" in general as with enough pressure those browsers will add/improve the XML/XSLT rendering too.
I thought it was obvious that a little guy would patent something he couldn't afford to build so that he could license it to others.
I don't see how that advances science and useful arts. If anything, it acts as a deterrent for "others" to invest. And I don't see how any reason you are giving contradicts the argument that a grant on a 17-year (yes 17, however short you can sugar-code that time period to be) government-backed monopoly shouldn't require some kind of commitment to demonstrating an investment of time and money into what is being patented.
Requiring a working product, rather than a detailed description, would just shut out the little guy who might have the breakthrough idea but not be able to afford to build the product.
Maybe that "little guy" doesn't deserve the patent if he's not going to put that idea into action then - have you thought about that? Government grants you a 17 year monopoly over a novel non-obvious idea in order to encourage you to invest and make that idea a reality without having to worry about the first-comer disadvantage. That's 17 years - that's at least 34 lifetimes in the software industry. Maybe if you are not trying to make the product/service/offering out of your idea - just maybe - you shouldn't deserve a patent.
Now, if you are telling me that some kind of performance requirement will shut out a "little guy" who has an idea but doesn't plan to invest any time or money in it in any way, the only thing that makes your argument touchy-feely is the "little guy" portion. Because guess what, that's the case with the big boys too. Sleeping submarine patents are "bad" whether it's a little guy or an 800-pound gorilla behind it. Besides, get your big players patenting away at several hundred patents per year (which they only plan on using as "IP weapons"), cross-licensing with each other... guess who that ends up hurting - yep your "little guy".
So, I am going to punch someone if I hear the "little guy" argument again with regard to this patent discussion. It doesn't matter what your size is - if society grants you a 17 year monopoly on an idea you'd better show some willingness in a reasonable time to make something out of it, or else you shouldn't deserve that monopoly. As an alternative, the "little guy" is always free to sell his services or ideas to someone or some entity who IS willing to invest the time and money in the invention.
being no programmer at all, i wanted to ask - is this all of the codebase or parts of it ?
Parts... however, important parts. InnoDB itself is a well-designed concept and looks great on paper. But when married to existing MySQL code a lot of limitations and bugs are introduced.
for example, is this limited to the shared code or storage engines ? if the engines, which ones are worst, which are better ? what about first versions of falcon, is that an improvement from code organisational point of view ?
I've only briefly looked at 2 most common ones - MyISAM and InnoDB. There is no "better" or "worse". MyISAM is a more proven solution with less bugs - the code was and to some extent still is written around MyISAM in mind. However, a server crash could cause MyISAM files in an unreadable state for the server. MyISAM also has a lot less features - e.g. none of those "enterprise" stuff they've been touting like transactions and row-level locking.
InnoDB "engine" code is mostly separated out with hooks into what you refer to as the "main" part later on. Some InnoDB features and capabilities are restricted due to MySQL design.
It is important to consider that the "pluggable" storage engine feature in many cases is not a feature at all. It can be an impediment to fully benefiting from any single storage method, as is the case so far with MySQL and InnoDB.
With MySQL, it's about picking the right tool, or your poison - however you want to look at it.
if "main" part is also badly organised, approximately how much of mysql functionality is in there, and how much is in the engine ?
what i meant - if the "main" stuff is acceptable, messy engines (like myisam/innodb) wouldn't be the biggest problem, as falcon, being designed from the scratch, should resolve these problems. if that's the main part, and it is a large part from mysql, that's probably worse.
It's not organized at all and not at all acceptable. The stuff is all over the place. The server was designed with one storage in mind and then had others glued on with a duct tape! Again, InnoDB is great on paper - MySQL cannot use it to its full potential partly because it has to support MyISAM within the same context.
since version 5.1 mysql supports multiple indexes and partitions.
Not sure what this means - they support multiple indexes now too. They are just not used effectively as you would expect from a decent RDBMS. As far as the partitions, 5.1 hasn't come out yet, and the most recent 5.0.xx "stable" release is still filled with critical bugs that prevent 5.0 features from being usable. It looks like they are pressured from the marketing department to get these features out the door without programming them correctly. These "advanced" features should be labeled as experimental at best.
It's a sad day when a comment implying Google and Yahoo search engines are "powered by" MySQL gets a +5 moderation; and then puts Digg in the same category. I thought it was +5 funny, not interesting.
It's this kind of thing that makes me still suspicious of MySQL. I hope that for the next
release - 6.0 or whatever it is - they can make a clean break with historical stupidity, and release a DBMS that gives safe, ANSI-compliant behaviour out of the box.
Your suspicions are correct generally. However, your hopes may have to live a little longer because if the next version of MySQL is based on anything that they have out today you may be in for a disappointment. Here are my real reasons not to use MySQL:
MySQL is not scalable: there is no table partitioning. As your data grows and so does your use of the database, you'll find your options for scalability are very limited to what you can "hack" around on your own. Other RDBMS solutions like Oracle, MSSQL, and yes, even Postgres have anywhere from decent to excellent scalability.
Advertized "enterprise" features are hacked into the stagnant and very monolithic MySQL codebase and frequently do not deliver as advertized. Here are examples: Sub-selects are not well optimized, if at all; indexes cannot be used more than once in the same query to help with optimization; using a combination of triggers and stored procedures within transactions in a medium to high usage environment results in crashes that even MySQL cannot explain; row-level locking only exists if you only have primary key, and no other indexed columns that you need to update, and you are updating using that primary key; does not truly support MVCC - even with InnoDB your selects may block updates and the other way around; replication forces further limitations in concurrency; the list can go on and on. None of these are a problem to any noticeable extent with any of the other "enterprise" RDBMSes.
More on replication: even though MySQL has somewhat elegant solution for replication, besides limiting concurrency (as already mentioned) and introducing serialization, this solution poses additional tricky fundamental problems. For example, it is nearly impossible to implement a true multi-master replicated environment.
No HA solution: Oracle and MSSQL (recently and more limited) offer true HA solutions that can increase your database availability in case of failure, and within the HA environment guarantee the transactions and data the applications were led to believe was successfully manipulated. This cannot be achieved with heartbeat and replication using MySQL, or even Postgres for that matter.
Critical bugs dealing with data consistency: This is not a statistical analysis, but MySQL has had and still has a lot of critical bugs dealing with critical part of the RDBMS - data. e.g., you cannot rely on RDBMS for storing your data if, when queried under certain circumstances, it returns NULLs when it should return the correct data. It is not fully comprehensible how a product released as stable (such as version 5.0) can still have so many critical data-related bugs.
Horrible codebase: If you are at least a decent programmer, please have a look at MySQL code: monolithic, one main file with succession of countless if blocks for parsing, optimizing and running queries; features such as triggers, stored procedures, and replication visibly hacked in to the existing "bad" design. There's very little abstraction that can leave data files in inconsistent and unreadable state in the event of the server crash (mostly MyISAM). And then, just for kicks, please have a look at Postgres source code: well-organized, separated into well-designed components you'll get acquainted with certain satisfaction to components that do parsing, planning, optimization, execution, and other functions. Code is well-commented and, as a programmer, it will give you a certain comfort when dealing with the software. This is a very important point and demonstrates why Postgres, for example, having a solid foundation, can implement advanced features (such as transaction savepoints,
There are things called contracts which point out who the copyright owner is of a certain intellectual property (music). The RIAA cannot claim that it owns royalties of something it does not own.
Doesn't matter. There are laws in many countries that mandate that certain portion of the sale price of a recording device, or a recording medium go to RIAA or their respective equivalent in that country. You could claim all you want that you never recorded or dealt with an RIAA copyrighted content and you never recorded any of it using that device or medium you purchased, but that doesn't exclude you from the RIAA tax - you still have to pay it.
The same general principle could apply to the Internet radio and given that it has successfully worked for the recording devices/media, there is no guarantee that all of a sudden lawmakers in all countries, including the U.S., will come to their senses and deny the RIAA their "right" to purchase their share of legislation.
Elgan points out that Europe is working on making this work. Tellingly, they're not just letting the phones connect to towers normally; they're shielding the cabin and routing connections through dedicated on-plane hardware. This is reasonable as it means you have a single source (the plane's hardware) that can far more efficiently utilize tower frequency space. Furthermore, the cost of making the changes falls on the airlines, who will pass it on to the logical people: the fliers who want to use this service.
I am not well-versed into how the cell towers work - so how will the setup you are describing prevent my cell phone from attempting to transmit signal to the towers on the ground? I thought the cell phones always attempt to connect to multiple visible towers at the same time. Will the towers still need an upgrade where they will refuse the signal if a device is already connected to a certain types of towers - i.e. planes? This does not seem so easy to me either.
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Errr... They refused to attend the hearing in person that they themselves requested! Now they are claiming undue hardhip because they are in a different timezone? What if they were on vacation in Turkey? Would they have asked the office to open at midnight and video conference them in because any other time it would be an "undue hardship" for the timezone the lawyers reside in?
I do not see any actions he took that would support that statement (other than useless ramblings on the site, among other incoherent useless ramblings). As far as the actions he is taking and asking others to take is asking people to block Firefox
He is, in fact, offering up Opera and IE as alternatives. Opera has a built-in content blocker! Firefox, on the other hand, does not - ABP is an add-on, as you know.
So, no, I do not see how his initial intent was to "block anyone blocking ads" - he'd have to be doing something like what I suggested in my original reply, or blocking all browsers equally. IE has an add-on for blocking content and ads too, and it includes a pop-up blocker by default now as well.
The standard where the HTTP server does not exhibit complete control over the HTTP client - that one. Client sends a request to a server for a particular URL; server replies with the content, possibly in HTML format, containing references to other contents possibly on other servers.
There is nothing in any of the W3C standards, including HTTP or HTML, that says that the client has to follow and load all these references that server provides. It is, and always has been, up to the discretion of the client what kind of content it loads and what it renders (if it decides to load it in the first place).
I don't see this happening - what I see happening is businesses/websites with poor or no business models going out of business - and there is nothing wrong with that.
No, not other adblocking systems - that's my whole point - if so, he wouldn't be asking people to block Firefox using the HTTP headers. How is blocking Firefox (with or without adblock) affecting other browsers like IE or Opera which both have content/ad blockers?
Likewise on the client side. Someone could be expecting a 3KB HTML page and instead your advertiser could shove down a 600KB flash ad/movie down their pipe. Are you or your advertiser going to reimburse users who have metered bandwidth for this?
The problem is you are using a medium in a way that it was never built or meant to be used. Let's phrase it better - you are whining because the web standards work like they were designed to work. Your problem is - your "business" model doesn't work well in that environment. Let me give you an advice - instead of whining about certain users and certain other users who do this and that and that other thing which are well within bounds of the web standards and protocols - come up with the model that works for you that suits the environment it is operating in. Otherwise this whining is starting to go from looking annoying to plain silly.
To me this looks like a one-person campaign against Firefox and adblock, rather than the concept of blocking ads in any browser. As others have already pointed out, other browsers, including IE, Opera, etc. are well capable of blocking pretty much anything - pop-ups, images, specific sites, flash content, etc.
If this guy was really fighting against all browsers blocking ad content, he would be creating something like a cross-browser DOM/Javascript mechanism to check whether an image ad, flash object, an iframe, or whatever has loaded in the browser (say, after 10-20 seconds after loading the page). If ad content has loaded, then leave the site as normal. If it hasn't, then pull a "curtain" (using DHTML, CSS) over your site content with text on top of it explaining why this virtual curtain has appeared - i.e. until you view the accompanying ads you won't be allowed to view the site.
One can use cookies and added javascript to improve the logic - e.g. maybe allow 10-20 seconds on first page load, but only 3-5 seconds on consequent refreshes of the same page to prevent users from getting 10-20 seconds of page viewing (i.e. stealing).
I guess one could try this and see how far it gets them. It would surely be a lot more effective way of fighting the "theft" of content, as the guy describes.
Again, are you basing or backing up your assertion with anything? Or is that theory fresh out of your you know what?
I don't know about that one - the requirements being a Linux distro having a sane package management system, and MS Windows possessing none of those qualities would probably make it a little hard one would think.
Although I agree it was a nice thought - if MS had a similar service for 3rd party vendors or packagers to upload their work, then generate binaries for Windows XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, 32-bit, 64-bit, etc.; and have a similar simple interface to locate, download and install those apps with a single click... would be great. Not a chance in the world, but that can't keep us from dreaming, can it?
I thought he was being sarcastic there. Because he did indirectly "poke fun" at Windows with those 2 sentences. Can a second source confirm that those 2 sentences were not taken out of context? And if they weren't that he was actually being serious when he said this?
Yeah yeah yeah - Mac OS X this, OpenSolaris that... In the server room, it's pretty much Windows and Linux - there's your duopoly.
Want to back that up with anything? Because I didn't see the word "desktop" mentioned anywhere in the article.
But of course, if it's a pro-Apple comment, it automatically gets a +x insightful points. Slashdot user preferences should have an option to adjust the score downwards for pro-Apple comments in non-Apple related stories.
You missed the part where it's a build service for developers. If you are a developer and have used or looked at their tools and interface, you'll find it will save you a lot of time, hassle and resources - write your software, upload it, and have it packaged and readily available for multiple distributions on multiple architectures. Your package has dependencies that have been updated by their developers? No problem, the service will automatically trigger to rebuild your package using the updated dependencies. Read more here.
And that is the place to stop reading this discussion thread.
I found Postgres code has similar qualities. I would also nominate Qt 4.x and Reiser4.
One solution is to serve your content with XML/XSLT doing the transformation on the client side. IE 6, IE 7, and to some extent IE 5 as well as all Gecko-based browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Seamonkey, etc.) support this - so you'll still keep most of your traffic. You'll be missing out on the KHTML/WebKit based browsers and Opera crowd which is not inherently "bad" in general as with enough pressure those browsers will add/improve the XML/XSLT rendering too.
And then watch your ISP do packet sniffing to throttle back or even disallow SSH and other encrypted connections beyond limited HTTPS.
Uh, yeah - remember things like contracts?
I don't see how that advances science and useful arts. If anything, it acts as a deterrent for "others" to invest. And I don't see how any reason you are giving contradicts the argument that a grant on a 17-year (yes 17, however short you can sugar-code that time period to be) government-backed monopoly shouldn't require some kind of commitment to demonstrating an investment of time and money into what is being patented.
Maybe that "little guy" doesn't deserve the patent if he's not going to put that idea into action then - have you thought about that? Government grants you a 17 year monopoly over a novel non-obvious idea in order to encourage you to invest and make that idea a reality without having to worry about the first-comer disadvantage. That's 17 years - that's at least 34 lifetimes in the software industry. Maybe if you are not trying to make the product/service/offering out of your idea - just maybe - you shouldn't deserve a patent.
Now, if you are telling me that some kind of performance requirement will shut out a "little guy" who has an idea but doesn't plan to invest any time or money in it in any way, the only thing that makes your argument touchy-feely is the "little guy" portion. Because guess what, that's the case with the big boys too. Sleeping submarine patents are "bad" whether it's a little guy or an 800-pound gorilla behind it. Besides, get your big players patenting away at several hundred patents per year (which they only plan on using as "IP weapons"), cross-licensing with each other... guess who that ends up hurting - yep your "little guy".
So, I am going to punch someone if I hear the "little guy" argument again with regard to this patent discussion. It doesn't matter what your size is - if society grants you a 17 year monopoly on an idea you'd better show some willingness in a reasonable time to make something out of it, or else you shouldn't deserve that monopoly. As an alternative, the "little guy" is always free to sell his services or ideas to someone or some entity who IS willing to invest the time and money in the invention.
Parts... however, important parts. InnoDB itself is a well-designed concept and looks great on paper. But when married to existing MySQL code a lot of limitations and bugs are introduced.
I've only briefly looked at 2 most common ones - MyISAM and InnoDB. There is no "better" or "worse". MyISAM is a more proven solution with less bugs - the code was and to some extent still is written around MyISAM in mind. However, a server crash could cause MyISAM files in an unreadable state for the server. MyISAM also has a lot less features - e.g. none of those "enterprise" stuff they've been touting like transactions and row-level locking.
InnoDB "engine" code is mostly separated out with hooks into what you refer to as the "main" part later on. Some InnoDB features and capabilities are restricted due to MySQL design.
It is important to consider that the "pluggable" storage engine feature in many cases is not a feature at all. It can be an impediment to fully benefiting from any single storage method, as is the case so far with MySQL and InnoDB.
With MySQL, it's about picking the right tool, or your poison - however you want to look at it.
It's not organized at all and not at all acceptable. The stuff is all over the place. The server was designed with one storage in mind and then had others glued on with a duct tape! Again, InnoDB is great on paper - MySQL cannot use it to its full potential partly because it has to support MyISAM within the same context.
Not sure what this means - they support multiple indexes now too. They are just not used effectively as you would expect from a decent RDBMS.
As far as the partitions, 5.1 hasn't come out yet, and the most recent 5.0.xx "stable" release is still filled with critical bugs that prevent 5.0 features from being usable. It looks like they are pressured from the marketing department to get these features out the door without programming them correctly. These "advanced" features should be labeled as experimental at best.
It's a sad day when a comment implying Google and Yahoo search engines are "powered by" MySQL gets a +5 moderation; and then puts Digg in the same category. I thought it was +5 funny, not interesting.
Your suspicions are correct generally. However, your hopes may have to live a little longer because if the next version of MySQL is based on anything that they have out today you may be in for a disappointment. Here are my real reasons not to use MySQL:
Doesn't matter. There are laws in many countries that mandate that certain portion of the sale price of a recording device, or a recording medium go to RIAA or their respective equivalent in that country. You could claim all you want that you never recorded or dealt with an RIAA copyrighted content and you never recorded any of it using that device or medium you purchased, but that doesn't exclude you from the RIAA tax - you still have to pay it.
The same general principle could apply to the Internet radio and given that it has successfully worked for the recording devices/media, there is no guarantee that all of a sudden lawmakers in all countries, including the U.S., will come to their senses and deny the RIAA their "right" to purchase their share of legislation.
Try here.
I am not well-versed into how the cell towers work - so how will the setup you are describing prevent my cell phone from attempting to transmit signal to the towers on the ground? I thought the cell phones always attempt to connect to multiple visible towers at the same time. Will the towers still need an upgrade where they will refuse the signal if a device is already connected to a certain types of towers - i.e. planes? This does not seem so easy to me either.