That should bring me up to the "screw up" question, so I will now relate a story that showcases my stupidity.
One day I was working on Slashdot's database, and cleaning up a lot of old database entries, when I suddenly
realized I'd forgotten a "WHERE" clause in one of the SQL statements.
Why didn't you just type 'rollback;' ??? Transactions make life easy.
If you're running Netscape 4, upgrade to Mozilla 0.8. Now.
I'd love to, and so would the people that I work with, but we use Netscape's roaming profiles. Neither Netscape nor the Mozilla project has seen fit to add this feature back into Mozilla leaving me and everyone at my workplace stuck with Netscape until we can find another cross-platform browser that supports roaming profiles.
Big companies don't compromise. They send in the lawyers and fight to the death (or until the money runs out). Why should we compromise? As as been shown the "licence file predates the trademark, and it grants rights that cannot be removed." Also they have not chosen to enforce this until now.
well, NASA, according to this article. that a major enough company?
Sure, that's a big company. But a database that's used to send out a couple of email alerts to people hardly qualifies as mission critical. Mission critical would be something that the company relies on for its very survival, or at least something that if it were to go down or become corrupt, would have severely negative consequences that would affect the operation and success of said company.
In addition, why is the editorial on this topic so biased? 'Escape module'? This leads me to suspect that the AC's who flame the editors may be right after all. I find it very disappointing. One would not find that phrase in a professional publication. I suspect the integrity of the editors, when their words appear a few centimetres below an ad for Red Hat.
I'm risking sounding like a troll, but I'm going to say this anyway. Did you, Urban Existentialist, bother to examine what was being said and by whom? Let's break it down for you:
1. "'Escape module'?"... "One would not find that phrase in a professional publication"
Except in the letters section written by people who read the publication. God forbid someone be bound with a little emotion by Microsoft's purchase of Bungie. In case you haven't figured it out yet, Slashdot is made up almost entirely of other peoples submissions and comments. If you'd pay attention to the post, you'd see that the entire thing is quoted from something that Derek Moeller submitted. No Slashdot editors made any comments after the post. When you submit a story that makes it to the front page, then you can say what you damn well please in as professional a manner as you'd like.
2. I suspect the integrity of the editors, when their words appear a few centimetres below an ad for Red
Hat.
Just in case you missed this too, there aren't ANY words from any editors anywhere in the article.
Slashdot has had an editorial policy since day one of posting whatever is submitted to them. You want to see more accurate articles? Then submit something that you've researched and that is interesting. Slashdot isn't CNET. It's isn't ZDNet or CNN, either. Slashdot is Slashdot. If you don't like it, you don't have to be here.
Second:
The submitter, whose comments are in italics, stated that this is the first open source 3D program that he knows of. Michael (of slashdot who posted the storry) then stated after this "There's this and Blender - what other options are there?"
That's why it was a revelation to the poster. I suggest you work on your reading comprehension before rushing to post.
My other suggestions for desperately needed GPL'd software would be a Premiere clone and a full featured multitrack sound editor a la Cool Edit Pro.
Not a Premiere clone but a clone of Avid's Media Composer. I've worked as an editor in post-production houses for over 10 years and I can tell you that Premiere doesn't hold a candle to Media Composer. Of course Avids are expensive and therefore most people may not have access to them to see what the interface is like. I'd be glad to help out any people willing to create a free editing system with interface issues.
Surely the police will fight it. Just imagine what would happen to their income should they not be able to give out any more speeding tickets. The police won't stand for it, I tell you!
I know it's probably a bit too much to expect journalistic integrity out of a site like Slashdot, but can you at least consider the possibility of perhaps posting at least one story that
isn't chock-full of anti Microsoft/MCSE bigotry? In case you've forgotten, Slashdot has a huge readership, and you're likely to alienate a large percentage of that readership (and
by extension, a large percentage of your banner ad viewership) with statements like the one you make about MCSEs. Has anybody ever explained the meaning of the word
"objectivity" to you?
I agree, but posting things here isn't going to help anything. If you really want to let someone know how much it bothers you, then write to the andover.net executives and let them know what you think. Their names, phone numbers, and email addresses are on this page at the bottom under OSDN Corporate Contacts:
Athena is currently available for free download from official distribution sites. Please note that unlike the GNU/GPL licensing schemes often used in Linux products, Athena is 100% commercial,
and we do not allow Athena to be sold or distributed by third parties unless they have been given the right to do so.
Here's a standard Job Interview question I ask: HOW DOES JPEG work? Very simple, and we all use JPEG images all the time.
Here's a standard response: Who cares? Unless you are hiring graphic programmers who are going to be creating JPEG or LZW routines it's irrelivant. I don't have to know how my car works to drive it. Likewise, 99.9% of the people out there don't give a rat's ass how JPEG works when all they are doing is putting an image on a web page.
I work as a database programmer but I've never once had anyone ask me to write out pseudocode on how a SQL parser works.
Right, but the Jews don't recognize Jesus as the son of God and they don't celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Hannukah which isn't really related to Christmas. On top of that Christmas isn't really Christ's birthday. The day was originally a pagan holiday but the Pope moved the celebration of Christ's birthday to the same day as the pagan holiday to help with the acceptance of Christianity. Jesus' birthday was actually several months away from the date of Christmas that we celebrate today.
Let me put it more concretely. Do you put every piece of discarded furniture someone offers you into your living room? Do you accept every "donation" to you of cute puppies and kittens from the humane society?
No, I don't. But when someone does contribute something of value, I don't take that as an opportunity to start berating them and demanding more things of them. Of course they are doing these things for themselves and not directly for the community. That doesn't mean that we have the right to demand they supply more. We should instead be thankful for what they have done. If I were to take a puppy that someone was giving away, it would be rude of me to demand that they should start breeding golden retrievers so I could have one of those, too.
Let's change the names for a moment. What do you think the reaction would be if we were talking about the Linux kernel, or Gnome, or KDE? "Thanks, Linus, et al, for producing this wonderful kernel. Now I want to demand that you do other things for our community because you now owe it to us."
I stand by my original argument. Continuing to demand more from someone who gave something away, and had no obligation to give anything away in the first place, is ungrateful and makes us look like a bunch of selfish children.
What should we ask them to do for us in return for their involvement?
What? I can't believe that this was even asked. IBM donates work that they have spent lots of money and engineering hours on and then you turn around and say, 'Gee, thanks IBM. Now what can you do for us?'
Get real! We should be asking what we can do to help them. They are the ones helping us here and you think we should take that as a sign to hold out our hand and ask what else they can do for us? How ungrateful are you?
I'd use DocBook. DocBook is a system for writing structured documents using SGML and XML. DocBook, provides all the elements you'll need for technical documents of all kinds. A number of computer companies use DocBook for their
documentation, as do several Open Source documentation groups, including the Linux Documentation Project (LDP). With the consistent use of DocBook, these groups can readily share and exchange information. With an
XML-enabled browser, DocBook documents are as accessible on the Web as in print.
The format is used by O'Reilly and Associates and they were one of the original creators of the specifications. You can find more information at these links:
Maybe if you had bothered to look around docbook.org a little more you would have noticed that there is an entire O'Reilly book available online and for free about Docbook and how to use it. You can also purchase the dead trees version from your local bookstore.
Short, to the point, and interesting. Thanks for setting this up Slashdot. I'm disappointed that John didn't answer the first question. It was, by far, the most interesting question posed to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Read it here: http://www.fuckedcompany.com/extras/valinuxemail.c fm
Big companies don't compromise. They send in the lawyers and fight to the death (or until the money runs out). Why should we compromise? As as been shown the "licence file predates the trademark, and it grants rights that cannot be removed." Also they have not chosen to enforce this until now.
Except in the letters section written by people who read the publication. God forbid someone be bound with a little emotion by Microsoft's purchase of Bungie. In case you haven't figured it out yet, Slashdot is made up almost entirely of other peoples submissions and comments. If you'd pay attention to the post, you'd see that the entire thing is quoted from something that Derek Moeller submitted. No Slashdot editors made any comments after the post. When you submit a story that makes it to the front page, then you can say what you damn well please in as professional a manner as you'd like.
Just in case you missed this too, there aren't ANY words from any editors anywhere in the article.Slashdot has had an editorial policy since day one of posting whatever is submitted to them. You want to see more accurate articles? Then submit something that you've researched and that is interesting. Slashdot isn't CNET. It's isn't ZDNet or CNN, either. Slashdot is Slashdot. If you don't like it, you don't have to be here.
2 things:
First:
Blender isn't open source.
Second:
The submitter, whose comments are in italics, stated that this is the first open source 3D program that he knows of. Michael (of slashdot who posted the storry) then stated after this "There's this and Blender - what other options are there?"
That's why it was a revelation to the poster. I suggest you work on your reading comprehension before rushing to post.
Name one major company using MySQL for a mission-critical database.
Oh, like diff and patch. Thanks for the insight. Way to "innovate" there.
Surely the police will fight it. Just imagine what would happen to their income should they not be able to give out any more speeding tickets. The police won't stand for it, I tell you!
First, they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Then they fight you.
Then you win.
- Mahatma Ghandi
The world's human cloning community is approacing the third part.
ArsDigita has a great article on using Oracle as a backend for your mail and ACS as a front end.
http://www.osdn.com/ad_contacts.shtml
Let them know what you think.
Emphasis is theirs.
Linus said 2.4 would be out in December. But December isn't over yet...
I work as a database programmer but I've never once had anyone ask me to write out pseudocode on how a SQL parser works.
Let's change the names for a moment. What do you think the reaction would be if we were talking about the Linux kernel, or Gnome, or KDE? "Thanks, Linus, et al, for producing this wonderful kernel. Now I want to demand that you do other things for our community because you now owe it to us."
I stand by my original argument. Continuing to demand more from someone who gave something away, and had no obligation to give anything away in the first place, is ungrateful and makes us look like a bunch of selfish children.
Get real! We should be asking what we can do to help them. They are the ones helping us here and you think we should take that as a sign to hold out our hand and ask what else they can do for us? How ungrateful are you?
Maybe if you had bothered to look around docbook.org a little more you would have noticed that there is an entire O'Reilly book available online and for free about Docbook and how to use it. You can also purchase the dead trees version from your local bookstore.
Short, to the point, and interesting. Thanks for setting this up Slashdot. I'm disappointed that John didn't answer the first question. It was, by far, the most interesting question posed to them.