He's all about protecting the First Ammendment. From Wikipedia:
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate the Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.[121]
In 1990, the Florida Supreme Court wanted his sanity checked.
"In 1992, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare the Florida Bar Association unconstitutional. He said that the bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflict with what he called the bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda."
I'm not seeing it on Wikipedia, but I've read that he has filed suit against George Bush as well. He repeatedly files ridiculous law suits that demonstrate he has little working knowledge of how the judicial system is supposed to operate, and abuses his power as an attourney.
He should have been disbarred years and years ago for his tactics. He filed a lawsuit here in Omaha against the police chief for not handing over evidence on a sealed, active investigation on Robert Hawkins. He sues people for not pressing video game angles in criminal investigations, even before any evidence presents itself to suggest it a factor.
He "predicts" people's guilt ahead of time based on video games, and then uses legal threats to enforce those predictions that repeatedly turn out to be false.
He isn't just a nut-job, he is a bully who violates court orders and makes fairly serious threats. I'm shocked Florida has let this guy practice law for decades now.
Hasn't he been disbarred yet? I can say without exageration the man is quite delusional. He should have been disbarred after the 2 Live Crew fisco years back.
Don't iPhones send out an insane number of scans per minute? Isn't that why Duke University banned them from their network, and how that couple had a $3,000 data charge bill from taking their iPhone on a cruise, even though they didn't use it?
The point of diversifying is that one business can dip, without hurting the company on the whole. That is part of the reason Microsoft won't disappear any time soon, even if a major product flops.
Google is primarily an advertising company, but they have all kinds of differnt products and services.
Get your -1 Troll points ready, but unfortunately this is the truth. Sun has a stranglehold on OOo, which often stops developers from contributing code, or playing nice. Because of that, there are a variety of OOo forks out there. China's RedOffice has an Office 2007 ribbon-type sidebar that looks very promising. Symphony's UI is a huge step up over OOo. Go-oo.org and OxygenOffice provide many often requested features, templates, fonts, clip-art, a better solver, etc. NeoOffice seems to be the only one really focusing on solid Mac integration.
All these improvements could be contributed upstream, but because of Sun's tight gripped control, they won't be. Sun isn't just going to hhand it over to Google, and I doubt Google is just going to sell Sun's product, unless Google felt like they had a strong-enough influence in the product's development.
I agree that Google Docs is poor in its execution, but I doubt that OOo is the way to go for them. I see a product like Zimbra, that was developed with the web in mind, not an app forced into a browser, and that is where the future lies.
When Google has an office suite that was designed with a web interface in mind, that works as fast as Zimbra, please let me know.
I think this is a very good idea as well. Right now I wish I had mod points. The kernel is just massive code-wise, not to mention there are tons of legacy bits of code that can be reduced, or just removed, or rewritten but people don't have the time to hunt them all down.
Quite frankly, I'd love to see professors assign this sort of thing as homework to their students. Grab a piece of OSS, and squash a bug. Or give them a reasonable size chunk of code and have them review it.
I used to work for a casino company (the largest in the world at the time, and largely is).
Our slots database didn't just track totals for rewards credits and such, we kept every transaction ever. We can see how long you played at each machine, for how long, when you put money it, when you hit, when you took money out, etc. We know when you want to come in and play, which machines, etc. Consider that for every customer in a casino. Now consider than on a scale of 60 major casinos.
I'm not a DBA, so I was only responsible for resource managing on the servers.
I don't think acquiring Compaq has anything to do with current success. The merger cost tons of money, held up HP for a good two years, and led to Carly's demise as CEO.
HP has done reasonably well since then, but that is akin to saying just because Time Warner has some success now, that doesn't justify the disasterous merged with AOL.
As far as I understand Interbase (and now Firebird) use a versioning approach as opposed to locking. I wonder if this approach is more beneficial with parallel processing, but you're right in that the concern was already relevant given multiple users in a database at once.
I wonder which one has better performance for multiple operations at once.
I'm actually reading the article now, and as he is talking about design for a database taking multiple cores into consideration, etc, I'm wondering if the traditional lock approach used in MySQL (and most SQL databases as far as I know) somewhat kills parallel operations. Wouldn't the interbase approach work better in a parallel environment?
Again, I'm sure this is a stupid question, but perhaps someone could clue me in.
I haven't read the article yet, but that summary terrifies me. I keep hearing how in the modern age we shouldn't think about optimal programming because people have more resources than they need.
Databases need to scale to disgusting large numbers. Memory and disk resources should always be treated as expensive, precious commodities, because they might be plentiful on a simple database on robust hardware, but there are plenty of people out there with massive friggin' databases.
In corporate America, Oracle and MSSQL sadly are king. MySQL has some interesting advantages, one of them is performance over MSSQL, but if they squander that, what will they be left with? And ffrankly, I don't think Sun paid a fortune for MySQL just to piss away opportunities at gaining ground in corporate America.
People seem to forget what a disaster HP/Compaq was, and what a money sink-hole AOL/TW was.
Yahoo has been known to do most of their web development on open platforms and languages. Microsoft's web services often come in third place. By purchasing Yahoo, you either allow Yahoo to remain Yahoo and abandon existing Microsoft services (never going to happen), or you force Yahoo's users into Microsoft services they didn't want (wasting what you just spent billions on), or you basically keep the two companies as seperate companies.
He is rich and did something right I must presume, but bemoaning and belitting the company you are so heavily invested in doesn't boost investor confidence. If you want to raise your stock price how about you say:
"To be honest, it is hard not to see dollar signs when someone offers you $40 a share. For Yahoo to remain independent, they must be pretty confident about their place in the industry and their future. Perhaps Jerry Yang knows something the rest of us don't."
You get your back-handed compliment in, vent some steam, and at the same time hopefully try to convince investors to drive your stock price up.
Creating a split within Yahoo isn't going to help your wallet. At best, you drive the price low enough, and oust the leaders to the point that Microsoft does buy you, but likely it will be at a price lower than where you're at today. If that is your best case scenario, you're just better offer dumping stock today.
Google makes its money off of internet advertising, and they have less than 50% market share in internet advertising.
Microsoft has long held over 95% market share in OS, and likely the same in Office Suites.
One of these two is a massive monopoly who breaks the law and destroys competition. The other embraces open standards and has never directly attacked the competition.
I keep seeing a bunch of Google backlash because of their size, but perhaps we should judge them by their actual record instead.
For all the Google slander articles, I've yet to see any proof that Google is suddenly evil. People bemoan they are in China, but so are AOL/MS/Yahoo, etc. Google was the only one to fight the censorship. They are the only one that shows "These search results are censored" on their page.
In the end they said, "it is better to create in roads in China and hope to fight censorship down the road than to not be in China at all."
Massive corporations get attacked all the time, but while Yahoo and MS were volunteering your private search results to the government, and Yahoo was handling over journalists who talked about democracy, Google was telling the government to screw off and protecting your privacy.
Google did cave once, on repeated orders from a judge to hand over incriminating photos on a kiddie-porn ring in Brazil. Clearly that makes them evil.
I'm sure this all comes across like I'm some slavering fan-boy, but I just want to see some facts. If everyone wants to call Google evil, please provide some.
Really, there is a flea market where you can buy an XBox 360, PS3 and Wii all modded to play cracked games?
Please let me know where, because I smell BS as well.
Almost everyone I have ever met in my life has pirated something on a computer. I don't a single person with a hacked console (aside from myself, and I did it more as a hobby).
Other clients like AMSN manage to do it just fine, and there was a voice and video fork of Gaim way back in the day that did it as well. Gaim asked to fold the fork into mainline, but basically just killed it.
And since AOL is using Jabber these days, MSN and Yahoo are the only two that you really have to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
He wrote a letter to Take Two CEO's mother saying she raised him to be a member of the Hitler Youth.
I wonder how many times he Godwinned himself.
Your post can be summed up as "don't pull a Reiser."
He's all about protecting the First Ammendment. From Wikipedia:
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate the Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.[121]
In 1990, the Florida Supreme Court wanted his sanity checked.
"In 1992, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare the Florida Bar Association unconstitutional. He said that the bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflict with what he called the bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda."
I'm not seeing it on Wikipedia, but I've read that he has filed suit against George Bush as well. He repeatedly files ridiculous law suits that demonstrate he has little working knowledge of how the judicial system is supposed to operate, and abuses his power as an attourney.
He should have been disbarred years and years ago for his tactics. He filed a lawsuit here in Omaha against the police chief for not handing over evidence on a sealed, active investigation on Robert Hawkins. He sues people for not pressing video game angles in criminal investigations, even before any evidence presents itself to suggest it a factor.
He "predicts" people's guilt ahead of time based on video games, and then uses legal threats to enforce those predictions that repeatedly turn out to be false.
He isn't just a nut-job, he is a bully who violates court orders and makes fairly serious threats. I'm shocked Florida has let this guy practice law for decades now.
Hasn't he been disbarred yet? I can say without exageration the man is quite delusional. He should have been disbarred after the 2 Live Crew fisco years back.
Seriously, just read his Wikipedia page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Thompson_(attorney)
I think he needs mental treatment.
Don't iPhones send out an insane number of scans per minute? Isn't that why Duke University banned them from their network, and how that couple had a $3,000 data charge bill from taking their iPhone on a cruise, even though they didn't use it?
The point of diversifying is that one business can dip, without hurting the company on the whole. That is part of the reason Microsoft won't disappear any time soon, even if a major product flops.
Google is primarily an advertising company, but they have all kinds of differnt products and services.
Get your -1 Troll points ready, but unfortunately this is the truth. Sun has a stranglehold on OOo, which often stops developers from contributing code, or playing nice. Because of that, there are a variety of OOo forks out there. China's RedOffice has an Office 2007 ribbon-type sidebar that looks very promising. Symphony's UI is a huge step up over OOo. Go-oo.org and OxygenOffice provide many often requested features, templates, fonts, clip-art, a better solver, etc. NeoOffice seems to be the only one really focusing on solid Mac integration.
All these improvements could be contributed upstream, but because of Sun's tight gripped control, they won't be. Sun isn't just going to hhand it over to Google, and I doubt Google is just going to sell Sun's product, unless Google felt like they had a strong-enough influence in the product's development.
I agree that Google Docs is poor in its execution, but I doubt that OOo is the way to go for them. I see a product like Zimbra, that was developed with the web in mind, not an app forced into a browser, and that is where the future lies.
When Google has an office suite that was designed with a web interface in mind, that works as fast as Zimbra, please let me know.
I think this is a very good idea as well. Right now I wish I had mod points. The kernel is just massive code-wise, not to mention there are tons of legacy bits of code that can be reduced, or just removed, or rewritten but people don't have the time to hunt them all down.
Quite frankly, I'd love to see professors assign this sort of thing as homework to their students. Grab a piece of OSS, and squash a bug. Or give them a reasonable size chunk of code and have them review it.
I used to work for a casino company (the largest in the world at the time, and largely is).
Our slots database didn't just track totals for rewards credits and such, we kept every transaction ever. We can see how long you played at each machine, for how long, when you put money it, when you hit, when you took money out, etc. We know when you want to come in and play, which machines, etc. Consider that for every customer in a casino. Now consider than on a scale of 60 major casinos.
I'm not a DBA, so I was only responsible for resource managing on the servers.
I have a plan that involves the following steps:
1 - A Beowulf Cluster (naturally, it answers the question "will it run Linux?") dedicated to rendering hot grits on a naked Natalie Portman.
2 - In the Soviet Union, Natalie Portman renders you!
3 - This only makes sense to Korean Old People.
4 - ???
5 - Profit!
I don't think acquiring Compaq has anything to do with current success. The merger cost tons of money, held up HP for a good two years, and led to Carly's demise as CEO.
HP has done reasonably well since then, but that is akin to saying just because Time Warner has some success now, that doesn't justify the disasterous merged with AOL.
As far as I understand Interbase (and now Firebird) use a versioning approach as opposed to locking. I wonder if this approach is more beneficial with parallel processing, but you're right in that the concern was already relevant given multiple users in a database at once.
I wonder which one has better performance for multiple operations at once.
I'm actually reading the article now, and as he is talking about design for a database taking multiple cores into consideration, etc, I'm wondering if the traditional lock approach used in MySQL (and most SQL databases as far as I know) somewhat kills parallel operations. Wouldn't the interbase approach work better in a parallel environment?
Again, I'm sure this is a stupid question, but perhaps someone could clue me in.
I haven't read the article yet, but that summary terrifies me. I keep hearing how in the modern age we shouldn't think about optimal programming because people have more resources than they need.
Databases need to scale to disgusting large numbers. Memory and disk resources should always be treated as expensive, precious commodities, because they might be plentiful on a simple database on robust hardware, but there are plenty of people out there with massive friggin' databases.
In corporate America, Oracle and MSSQL sadly are king. MySQL has some interesting advantages, one of them is performance over MSSQL, but if they squander that, what will they be left with? And ffrankly, I don't think Sun paid a fortune for MySQL just to piss away opportunities at gaining ground in corporate America.
People seem to forget what a disaster HP/Compaq was, and what a money sink-hole AOL/TW was.
Yahoo has been known to do most of their web development on open platforms and languages. Microsoft's web services often come in third place. By purchasing Yahoo, you either allow Yahoo to remain Yahoo and abandon existing Microsoft services (never going to happen), or you force Yahoo's users into Microsoft services they didn't want (wasting what you just spent billions on), or you basically keep the two companies as seperate companies.
These two companies were not meant to be merged.
He is rich and did something right I must presume, but bemoaning and belitting the company you are so heavily invested in doesn't boost investor confidence. If you want to raise your stock price how about you say:
"To be honest, it is hard not to see dollar signs when someone offers you $40 a share. For Yahoo to remain independent, they must be pretty confident about their place in the industry and their future. Perhaps Jerry Yang knows something the rest of us don't."
You get your back-handed compliment in, vent some steam, and at the same time hopefully try to convince investors to drive your stock price up.
Creating a split within Yahoo isn't going to help your wallet. At best, you drive the price low enough, and oust the leaders to the point that Microsoft does buy you, but likely it will be at a price lower than where you're at today. If that is your best case scenario, you're just better offer dumping stock today.
Google makes its money off of internet advertising, and they have less than 50% market share in internet advertising.
Microsoft has long held over 95% market share in OS, and likely the same in Office Suites.
One of these two is a massive monopoly who breaks the law and destroys competition. The other embraces open standards and has never directly attacked the competition.
I keep seeing a bunch of Google backlash because of their size, but perhaps we should judge them by their actual record instead.
For all the Google slander articles, I've yet to see any proof that Google is suddenly evil. People bemoan they are in China, but so are AOL/MS/Yahoo, etc. Google was the only one to fight the censorship. They are the only one that shows "These search results are censored" on their page.
In the end they said, "it is better to create in roads in China and hope to fight censorship down the road than to not be in China at all."
Massive corporations get attacked all the time, but while Yahoo and MS were volunteering your private search results to the government, and Yahoo was handling over journalists who talked about democracy, Google was telling the government to screw off and protecting your privacy.
Google did cave once, on repeated orders from a judge to hand over incriminating photos on a kiddie-porn ring in Brazil. Clearly that makes them evil.
I'm sure this all comes across like I'm some slavering fan-boy, but I just want to see some facts. If everyone wants to call Google evil, please provide some.
Really, there is a flea market where you can buy an XBox 360, PS3 and Wii all modded to play cracked games?
Please let me know where, because I smell BS as well.
Almost everyone I have ever met in my life has pirated something on a computer. I don't a single person with a hacked console (aside from myself, and I did it more as a hobby).
http://freshmeat.net/projects/ctris/
I'm sure it is possible.
My favorite terminal based game however is slash'em.
No, I mean console as in terminal based, and text only.
No, Uwe Boll sells me his films for $8 a pop. I guess I'm the high bidder.
There are console-based chat programs you may like.
Other clients like AMSN manage to do it just fine, and there was a voice and video fork of Gaim way back in the day that did it as well. Gaim asked to fold the fork into mainline, but basically just killed it.
And since AOL is using Jabber these days, MSN and Yahoo are the only two that you really have to worry about.