The real question on everybody's mind is: how well does it run Counter-Strike 1.5? I didn't see that test on there.
I agree. It's the only reason I have a Windows partition. Can people please post any Wine vs XP benchmarks they have, along with their machine specs! Also for CS:Source, if anyone has it working. Thanks.
I'm happy to read that Linus appears to have a lot more sense than the FSF people who are so anti-business that they want to sabotage many of the businesses who embraced open source.
How does it sabotage anything? Businesses can continue to use software under GPL v2, Apache License, MIT Licence etc.
What a rude awakening the GPL3 has the potential to foster, as firms go fleeing back to closed source alternatives in order to comply.
Bizarre. Why would anyone 'flee' to a closed source alternative? If someone decides to rerelease their software as GPL v3, then the business can just fork the GPL v2 version and continue adapting it and using it as normal.
You appear to be under the impression that the GPL v3 is automatically going to change the face of the world's GPL software as opposed to being an additional license (one of many) that people can *choose* from. Just as the 'business friendly' LGPL didn't kill off the GPL v2, neither will the DRM restricted GPL v3 kill off the GPL v2 for those that need to live with DRM.
I agree, I'd never heard of "Intelligent Design" before reading the/. articles. No English people I know have ever heard of it either. And as for the "origin and development of life", what has Darwin's theory of evolution got to do with the origin of life? Even Darwin doesn't claim to know that, his theory of natural selection only affects the development of life. I also call major bullshit on this survey.
Surely you know that C++ is a hoax? What you fail to take into account is that people learn from their mistakes. Languages do become easier (though at an expense). For instance a lot of C program instability and security problems come from failing to free() memory or trying to reference null pointers. Modern languages use system based memory allocation with automatic garbage collection. Perl has many ways of doing things, an obscure syntax, and worst a hacker mentality. C and Java programmers are introduced to "style guides" before learning the actual syntax and functions, which enables one programmer to simply read the code of another. Python uses indenting to enforce its own style guide. Your binary example is not cross-platform as it would have to be recoded for every platform. When I was at college we had to program an embedded processor directly in binary using a toggle switch, and it wasn't easy and quite error prone.
Multiple languages leads to a survival of the fittest, with derivative languages borrowing from the previous stronger surviving languages (eg C# from Java). Programmers are lazy and thus driven to make life easier for themselves. Hence they create new or even competing libraries (ala Qt vs GTK)... and languages. And long may it continue.
Greed by the mobile operators really killed WAP. It was over-priced and content-poor. WAP died a deserved death.
However Google isn't being that short-sighted. Opera now do a light-weight fully-featured web browser (HTML, not WML) that will run on a mobile phone, and the upcoming Nokia N90 has WiFi built in. This means you can sit in any WiFi hotspot, which in many areas now means any coffee/fast-food joint (or in enlightened areas municipal services covering the whole city), and browse away on your mobile. Now how long before someone hacks it to run VoIP?:->
The French government is NOT attacking free software.
From the translation kindly provided below, "... government is maintaining that the adoption of this bill is "urgent"..."
Rather groups within the entertainment industry are attacking P2P software that is distributed for free. This is a copyright infringement case. The fact that the industry goons are attacking free software is incidental.
And so? It's not uncommon for governments to slip something so-called incidentally within another bill. The UK government does it, and the EU Commission hid the software patent act in a Fisheries and Agriculture Bill.
It doesn't stop the fact you are wrong on both counts. (1) the government is supporting the Bill hence attacking free software and (b) the fact it's incidental doesn't stop the fact they are doing it.
In effect they are trying to create an anti-DeCSS law, which would effectively cut out all Linux boxes from playing DVDs legally, but could possibly be widened to include censoring search engines such as Google. Co-incidence just before Bluray and the new HD-DVD formats come out?
It is still lacking compared to other free databases such as PostgreSQL and Firebird, but version 5 is a real improvement. (as mentioned, now you have things like triggers, stored procedures, views and sub-queries.) If you use strict mode integrity checking will work reasonably.
When you say lacking, you mean it's lacking for you. The only thing I miss from when I was using Oracle is sub-queries. The rest I never use. It's a bit like the war between Open Office and Word... some people NEED Word because it has a few obscure features that they must have, but for 95% of people Open Office will suffice. It's fast, it's free, works out of the box with most GPL apps and it has all the features most people need. If it wasn't for the SCO deal and InnoDB pulling the rug from under their feet, I would predict a rosy future for MySQL still.
There is a difference between a hydrogen car and a hydrogen fuel cell car. BMW have had a hydrogen powered car for years, and I can't understand Japanese but I assume that the Mazda is also using hydrogen in an internal combustion engine. Not only is this wasteful, as they are half as efficient at using the hydrogen as a fuel cell car, but you get the differential gearing and hence poor acceleration of the traditional internal combustion engine car.
Much better off holding out for a real hydrogen fuel cell car.
A Denial of Service attack denies you access to a service. It doesn't have to crash your box, or take it off the network. Anything that will hang or crash or flood a service (applications are services) is a DoS.
I personally would disagree, though I am open to a reasoned argument. Applications are not services. Applications may be clients, they may be servers, or they may contain both clients and servers. I would posit that a server provides services. For instance if someone froze my instance of Skype then I would call this a DoS as this renders the service of answering Skype calls inoperable. Web browsing does not, imho, count as a service as it is a pure client.
They've been called that since before kiddies found out about pingflooding.
From what I understand, the pingflooding attacks the IRC server. This has trouble maintaining the stream over the virtual connection to the client which then times out. It does not attack the client directly. Or do I have this wrong?
just set up a simple form and use simple php to make it convenient for them to reach you while keeping your email address safely tucked away
All you've done is swapped vigilence in maintaining anti-spam on your inbox to vigilence in protecting your contact form against spammers abusing your email form as a spam gateway. My contact form page gets an attempted hit every couple of days (usually a combination of MIME attachments in the comments field and injecting a BCC field to forward to the recipient) and this is a low volume site. Anyway, your email only has to leak once for it to propagate and it may not necessarily be you that does it. You'll find the spam blocker built into Thunderbird does a good job if you don't want to bother installing Spamassissin/DSPAM on your mail server (at the expense of extra bandwidth and download times).
The GPL discourages collaboration. If you want to encourage collaboration you need a license like BSD. The GPL allows restricted collaboration, but only between GPL fans. The BSD license allows collaboration for everyone.
If you are feeling altrustic, then BSD allows maximum freedom for your code. If you want the world to benefit from your code, but don't want someone ripping off your work and hiding it in a commercial project without paying you anything, then GPL gives you great protection. Even after you release something under the GPL you can still license it to a commercial closed-source enterprise for a fee, like MySQL. It only becomes a nuisance when the project grows and has many contributers as you then need to ask permission from each contributer before you can relicense. On the flip side BSD encourages more forking where the new code is not merged back into the main tree as there is no incentive. If the appropriate license is chosen then I don't think either will encourage collaboration more than the other as the license should reflect the goal of the project. A group writing printer drivers which their respective companies have agreed to make Open Source for pragmatic reasons may not want the same license as a loosely-knit group of graphics programmers wanting to release 3D modelling system. There are plenty of other licenses that can be used, though GPL, BSD and Apache licences currently have the greatest mind-share. There is no such thing as a best license, only the most appropriate one.
What is the real identity of this Dutch ISP XS4ALL? Fighting spammers (though losing appeal), defending the rightsof clients to hyperlink and refusing to be bullied by court orders, and now taking down BotNets. Apparently the founders sold out for millions, but they seem to go well beyond the Google "do no evil" philosophy to pro-actively defending the rights of their customers at considerable risk to themselves. It's the kind of company the deserves to win an awful lot of business.
I would hate to be locked out of my house because of a power cut
Something I would hate more is if a power cut made me lose my work on the computer. I would love to invent a power supply that couldn't be interrupted. I'd call it an Uninterruptable Power Supply, or UPS for short. Wonder if I could patent the idea?
battery charge doesn't last forever
rfid doesn't have batteries, it's powered by the scanner.
There is a very comprehensive FAQ section on the Ning Homepage. Ning appears to be a social app framework written in PHP, hoping to do for social apps much what PHPNuke did for online magazines. It uses its own template language XNHTML, but it's not like developers aren't expected to learn a new one each week these days. It makes it easy to click-and-clone apps, much like Blogger makes it easy to set up your own blog. The business plan is to try and offer a premium service and make money off the back of that. They are clear that you own and code and content that you write, but don't have any license I can see of the framework itself. This is something I'd like to see be made clear. I'd be wary developing something where the rug could be pulled out from under me.
Effectively this would add an option (b) to: (a) source must be provided when distributing but modifications may be kept secret when used privately (b) source must be provided when distributing and modifications must be made public for private usage.
I personally am against adding this option as I don't think this should be encouraged (and I used the word encouraged because authors don't have to use GPL, there are a wide range of licenses, but GPL is popular because of the simplicity and the principles behind it). imho it stifles innovation. It also hinders commercial usage as modifications would have to be publishing immediately whereas developers often have to wait for permission from the company who has paid for the developers time to allow their work to be released under GPL. Finally, if an author has chosen option (b) and others start contributing then it becomes difficult to revert to option (a) as he will need written permission from all contributers before he can change the licence.
In Windows I use TortoiseCVS/SVN. It absolutely rocks. Using Cervisia after using Tortoise is anything but pleasant.
I agree absolutely. I used TortoiseSVN under Windows and it's truly excellent. Cervisia was a huge disapointment but then I found RapidSVN and life is good again in Linux-land.
How about an (buzzword) WYSIWYG (buzzword) webpage layout / HTML editor?
It's amazing that even a decade later the same phrase crops up over and over. HTML = Hyper Text MARK-UP LANGUAGE. It's not WYSIWYG as every browser renders things differently. Even those that use top commercial offerings such as Dreamweaver spend a fair amount of time in 'source' mode to tidy things up.
If you want pretty pages to print out then use Open Office and export as PDF for download/printing. If you want to make web pages look good: (a) write the content and mark it up intelligently and then (b) use CSS stylesheets to make it look good. Firefox has an extension that lets you change the stylesheets and see the changes 'live'. Otherwise what you are describing is a Wiki with a basic HTML edit extension.
Seems a co-incidence that Firefox is apparently levelling off the same time that Opera suddenly releases their browser for free instead of nag-ware. Does Opera still spoof the IE User-Agent string?
I was waiting for someone to mention Hula. And I'm waiting for Hula to support caldav. Hula is a dream to set up and administer. It's been rock solid for me, and soon will have an AJAX webmail interface. As soon as I can use caldav with Sunbird then I can ditch using remote calendars via webdav and rely on Hula completely.
It's difficult to generalise about 'Europe', as each country is so different.The UK is like a chilled out version of the States. France is very socialist where half the country's workforce works for the government (and legally no-one is allowed to work more than 35 hours per week). Germany used to have the best benefits for workers, but the recession there is going to force changes to that. Spain and Italy are poor countries, but if you can secure a US-style wage with a multi-national then you can live there incredibly cheaply (and the food is fantastic). In Holland they are very laid back, and though their economy suffered since the introduction of the Euro they take care of their employees and offer good benefits. It's not uncommon for a Dutch person to speak four or five languages fluently, so don't worry about being able to communicate when you get there.
I hope your visit goes well in November, and during any negotiations try and maximise the number of days holiday you get as once in Europe you will definately be infected by the travel bug.
Wow. +Insightful? This has to be a Troll. Maybe a few more years on this planet will wake you up to the fact that the "happiness" of a Land Rover is shallow and fleeting. That how many "toys" you buy for your kids is not a gauge of your parenting quality, (though I'm sure they appreciate them as a poor replacement for their absent father who's out making more money). And someday you'll wake up and realize the only person more shallow and consumer-society engineered than yourself is your prostitute wife. (Sex for money, right?)
+Insightful? This has to be a Troll. A large percentage of marriages on this planet are arranged marriages, and the suitor is often chosen on the basis of their financial stability. These arranged marriages also have a very low divorce rate, unlike most Western marriages. Someday you'll wake up and realise you've been watching too many Meg Ryan movies, and there are a lot of happy marriages where people have realised the world isn't perfect and sometimes you have to be pragmatic.
Slashdot Mirror
The real question on everybody's mind is: how well does it run Counter-Strike 1.5? I didn't see that test on there.
I agree. It's the only reason I have a Windows partition. Can people please post any Wine vs XP benchmarks they have, along with their machine specs! Also for CS:Source, if anyone has it working. Thanks.
Phillip.
Insightful?
I'm happy to read that Linus appears to have a lot more sense than the FSF people who are so anti-business that they want to sabotage many of the businesses who embraced open source.
How does it sabotage anything? Businesses can continue to use software under GPL v2, Apache License, MIT Licence etc.
What a rude awakening the GPL3 has the potential to foster, as firms go fleeing back to closed source alternatives in order to comply.
Bizarre. Why would anyone 'flee' to a closed source alternative? If someone decides to rerelease their software as GPL v3, then the business can just fork the GPL v2 version and continue adapting it and using it as normal.
You appear to be under the impression that the GPL v3 is automatically going to change the face of the world's GPL software as opposed to being an additional license (one of many) that people can *choose* from. Just as the 'business friendly' LGPL didn't kill off the GPL v2, neither will the DRM restricted GPL v3 kill off the GPL v2 for those that need to live with DRM.
Phillip.
I agree, I'd never heard of "Intelligent Design" before reading the /. articles. No English people I know have ever heard of it either. And as for the "origin and development of life", what has Darwin's theory of evolution got to do with the origin of life? Even Darwin doesn't claim to know that, his theory of natural selection only affects the development of life. I also call major bullshit on this survey.
Phillip.
Surely you know that C++ is a hoax? What you fail to take into account is that people learn from their mistakes. Languages do become easier (though at an expense). For instance a lot of C program instability and security problems come from failing to free() memory or trying to reference null pointers. Modern languages use system based memory allocation with automatic garbage collection. Perl has many ways of doing things, an obscure syntax, and worst a hacker mentality. C and Java programmers are introduced to "style guides" before learning the actual syntax and functions, which enables one programmer to simply read the code of another. Python uses indenting to enforce its own style guide. Your binary example is not cross-platform as it would have to be recoded for every platform. When I was at college we had to program an embedded processor directly in binary using a toggle switch, and it wasn't easy and quite error prone.
Multiple languages leads to a survival of the fittest, with derivative languages borrowing from the previous stronger surviving languages (eg C# from Java). Programmers are lazy and thus driven to make life easier for themselves. Hence they create new or even competing libraries (ala Qt vs GTK)... and languages. And long may it continue.
Phillip.
Greed by the mobile operators really killed WAP. It was over-priced and content-poor. WAP died a deserved death.
:->
However Google isn't being that short-sighted. Opera now do a light-weight fully-featured web browser (HTML, not WML) that will run on a mobile phone, and the upcoming Nokia N90 has WiFi built in. This means you can sit in any WiFi hotspot, which in many areas now means any coffee/fast-food joint (or in enlightened areas municipal services covering the whole city), and browse away on your mobile. Now how long before someone hacks it to run VoIP?
Phillip.
Another thought is that as soon as it really takes hold in a major US city and it works, city planners the nation over will take note.
By which time Verizon et al will have legislation against such municipal services in place on the books everywhere, much like Philadelphia.
Phillip.
The French government is NOT attacking free software.
From the translation kindly provided below, "... government is maintaining that the adoption of this bill is "urgent"..."
Rather groups within the entertainment industry are attacking P2P software that is distributed for free. This is a copyright infringement case. The fact that the industry goons are attacking free software is incidental.
And so? It's not uncommon for governments to slip something so-called incidentally within another bill. The UK government does it, and the EU Commission hid the software patent act in a Fisheries and Agriculture Bill.
It doesn't stop the fact you are wrong on both counts. (1) the government is supporting the Bill hence attacking free software and (b) the fact it's incidental doesn't stop the fact they are doing it.
In effect they are trying to create an anti-DeCSS law, which would effectively cut out all Linux boxes from playing DVDs legally, but could possibly be widened to include censoring search engines such as Google. Co-incidence just before Bluray and the new HD-DVD formats come out?
Phillip.
Don't be fooled, Linux has a long way to go before being a drop-in replacement for Windows on the desktop.
And vice versa.
Phillip.
Man, are they ever hyping this stuff. This story doesn't seem to actually cover anything new, it just hypes AJAX more!
Then you need to get ahead of the game. Start supporting DOM Extended Syntax Transitive Operating System, or DOMESTOS.
Phillip.
It is still lacking compared to other free databases such as PostgreSQL and Firebird, but version 5 is a real improvement. (as mentioned, now you have things like triggers, stored procedures, views and sub-queries.) If you use strict mode integrity checking will work reasonably.
When you say lacking, you mean it's lacking for you. The only thing I miss from when I was using Oracle is sub-queries. The rest I never use. It's a bit like the war between Open Office and Word... some people NEED Word because it has a few obscure features that they must have, but for 95% of people Open Office will suffice. It's fast, it's free, works out of the box with most GPL apps and it has all the features most people need. If it wasn't for the SCO deal and InnoDB pulling the rug from under their feet, I would predict a rosy future for MySQL still.
Phillip.
There is a difference between a hydrogen car and a hydrogen fuel cell car. BMW have had a hydrogen powered car for years, and I can't understand Japanese but I assume that the Mazda is also using hydrogen in an internal combustion engine. Not only is this wasteful, as they are half as efficient at using the hydrogen as a fuel cell car, but you get the differential gearing and hence poor acceleration of the traditional internal combustion engine car.
Much better off holding out for a real hydrogen fuel cell car.
Phillip.
A Denial of Service attack denies you access to a service. It doesn't have to crash your box, or take it off the network. Anything that will hang or crash or flood a service (applications are services) is a DoS.
I personally would disagree, though I am open to a reasoned argument. Applications are not services. Applications may be clients, they may be servers, or they may contain both clients and servers. I would posit that a server provides services. For instance if someone froze my instance of Skype then I would call this a DoS as this renders the service of answering Skype calls inoperable. Web browsing does not, imho, count as a service as it is a pure client.
They've been called that since before kiddies found out about pingflooding.
From what I understand, the pingflooding attacks the IRC server. This has trouble maintaining the stream over the virtual connection to the client which then times out. It does not attack the client directly. Or do I have this wrong?
Phillip.
just set up a simple form and use simple php to make it convenient for them to reach you while keeping your email address safely tucked away
All you've done is swapped vigilence in maintaining anti-spam on your inbox to vigilence in protecting your contact form against spammers abusing your email form as a spam gateway. My contact form page gets an attempted hit every couple of days (usually a combination of MIME attachments in the comments field and injecting a BCC field to forward to the recipient) and this is a low volume site. Anyway, your email only has to leak once for it to propagate and it may not necessarily be you that does it. You'll find the spam blocker built into Thunderbird does a good job if you don't want to bother installing Spamassissin/DSPAM on your mail server (at the expense of extra bandwidth and download times).
Phillip.
The GPL discourages collaboration. If you want to encourage collaboration you need a license like BSD. The GPL allows restricted collaboration, but only between GPL fans. The BSD license allows collaboration for everyone.
If you are feeling altrustic, then BSD allows maximum freedom for your code. If you want the world to benefit from your code, but don't want someone ripping off your work and hiding it in a commercial project without paying you anything, then GPL gives you great protection. Even after you release something under the GPL you can still license it to a commercial closed-source enterprise for a fee, like MySQL. It only becomes a nuisance when the project grows and has many contributers as you then need to ask permission from each contributer before you can relicense. On the flip side BSD encourages more forking where the new code is not merged back into the main tree as there is no incentive. If the appropriate license is chosen then I don't think either will encourage collaboration more than the other as the license should reflect the goal of the project. A group writing printer drivers which their respective companies have agreed to make Open Source for pragmatic reasons may not want the same license as a loosely-knit group of graphics programmers wanting to release 3D modelling system. There are plenty of other licenses that can be used, though GPL, BSD and Apache licences currently have the greatest mind-share. There is no such thing as a best license, only the most appropriate one.
Phillip.
What is the real identity of this Dutch ISP XS4ALL? Fighting spammers (though losing appeal), defending the rights of clients to hyperlink and refusing to be bullied by court orders, and now taking down BotNets. Apparently the founders sold out for millions, but they seem to go well beyond the Google "do no evil" philosophy to pro-actively defending the rights of their customers at considerable risk to themselves. It's the kind of company the deserves to win an awful lot of business.
Phillip.
TV, being linear, forces the ads to the exclusion of anything else, which is annoying in a different way.
Not necessarily.
Phillip.
Keys are a tried and tested, secure and relatively intelligent way to secure a house.
Sure, mechanical locks are secure.
I would hate to be locked out of my house because of a power cut
Something I would hate more is if a power cut made me lose my work on the computer. I would love to invent a power supply that couldn't be interrupted. I'd call it an Uninterruptable Power Supply, or UPS for short. Wonder if I could patent the idea?
battery charge doesn't last forever
rfid doesn't have batteries, it's powered by the scanner.
Phillip.
There is a very comprehensive FAQ section on the Ning Homepage. Ning appears to be a social app framework written in PHP, hoping to do for social apps much what PHPNuke did for online magazines. It uses its own template language XNHTML, but it's not like developers aren't expected to learn a new one each week these days. It makes it easy to click-and-clone apps, much like Blogger makes it easy to set up your own blog. The business plan is to try and offer a premium service and make money off the back of that. They are clear that you own and code and content that you write, but don't have any license I can see of the framework itself. This is something I'd like to see be made clear. I'd be wary developing something where the rug could be pulled out from under me.
Phillip.
Effectively this would add an option (b) to:
(a) source must be provided when distributing but modifications may be kept secret when used privately
(b) source must be provided when distributing and modifications must be made public for private usage.
I personally am against adding this option as I don't think this should be encouraged (and I used the word encouraged because authors don't have to use GPL, there are a wide range of licenses, but GPL is popular because of the simplicity and the principles behind it). imho it stifles innovation. It also hinders commercial usage as modifications would have to be publishing immediately whereas developers often have to wait for permission from the company who has paid for the developers time to allow their work to be released under GPL. Finally, if an author has chosen option (b) and others start contributing then it becomes difficult to revert to option (a) as he will need written permission from all contributers before he can change the licence.
Phillip.
In Windows I use TortoiseCVS/SVN. It absolutely rocks. Using Cervisia after using Tortoise is anything but pleasant.
I agree absolutely. I used TortoiseSVN under Windows and it's truly excellent. Cervisia was a huge disapointment but then I found RapidSVN and life is good again in Linux-land.
Phillip.
How about an (buzzword) WYSIWYG (buzzword) webpage layout / HTML editor?
It's amazing that even a decade later the same phrase crops up over and over. HTML = Hyper Text MARK-UP LANGUAGE. It's not WYSIWYG as every browser renders things differently. Even those that use top commercial offerings such as Dreamweaver spend a fair amount of time in 'source' mode to tidy things up.
If you want pretty pages to print out then use Open Office and export as PDF for download/printing. If you want to make web pages look good: (a) write the content and mark it up intelligently and then (b) use CSS stylesheets to make it look good. Firefox has an extension that lets you change the stylesheets and see the changes 'live'. Otherwise what you are describing is a Wiki with a basic HTML edit extension.
Phillip.
Seems a co-incidence that Firefox is apparently levelling off the same time that Opera suddenly releases their browser for free instead of nag-ware. Does Opera still spoof the IE User-Agent string?
Phillip.
I was waiting for someone to mention Hula. And I'm waiting for Hula to support caldav. Hula is a dream to set up and administer. It's been rock solid for me, and soon will have an AJAX webmail interface. As soon as I can use caldav with Sunbird then I can ditch using remote calendars via webdav and rely on Hula completely.
Phillip.
It's difficult to generalise about 'Europe', as each country is so different.The UK is like a chilled out version of the States. France is very socialist where half the country's workforce works for the government (and legally no-one is allowed to work more than 35 hours per week). Germany used to have the best benefits for workers, but the recession there is going to force changes to that. Spain and Italy are poor countries, but if you can secure a US-style wage with a multi-national then you can live there incredibly cheaply (and the food is fantastic). In Holland they are very laid back, and though their economy suffered since the introduction of the Euro they take care of their employees and offer good benefits. It's not uncommon for a Dutch person to speak four or five languages fluently, so don't worry about being able to communicate when you get there.
I hope your visit goes well in November, and during any negotiations try and maximise the number of days holiday you get as once in Europe you will definately be infected by the travel bug.
Phillip.
Wow. +Insightful? This has to be a Troll. Maybe a few more years on this planet will wake you up to the fact that the "happiness" of a Land Rover is shallow and fleeting. That how many "toys" you buy for your kids is not a gauge of your parenting quality, (though I'm sure they appreciate them as a poor replacement for their absent father who's out making more money). And someday you'll wake up and realize the only person more shallow and consumer-society engineered than yourself is your prostitute wife. (Sex for money, right?)
+Insightful? This has to be a Troll. A large percentage of marriages on this planet are arranged marriages, and the suitor is often chosen on the basis of their financial stability. These arranged marriages also have a very low divorce rate, unlike most Western marriages. Someday you'll wake up and realise you've been watching too many Meg Ryan movies, and there are a lot of happy marriages where people have realised the world isn't perfect and sometimes you have to be pragmatic.
Phillip.