Maybe he wasn't clear enough: "$5k is *still* a lot of money for a student who is hacking something together in their university dorm even when it gets in production as a for free service."
"you are actually trying to argue that MySQL can't work for anything but "toy" sites? Really? Do you not see the total absurdity of your point? Facebook is, itself, the proof that your point is invalid."
Hummm, no. I'm not English native, so I may be wrong, but my reading comprehension doesn't parse his message that way.
What he says is not that MySQL is not capable for anything but toy sites but that MySQL is not the right answer for anything but toy sites. That's not an adherence statement neither to his opinion nor against it, but just what I read.
An example (with a car no less): can you go by car from Beijing to Minneapolis? Surely you can: it will take a lot of driving, weeks within a freigther and quite a lot of money, but it can be done. But is it the right solution in anything but the most bizarre situations?
And no: being the fashionable choice doesn't make it the right one.
"Even approximations of capitalism usually fare better than other systems."
Quite true. The only problem with approximations is that being half-way between two extremes tend to be considered examples about how good your polar choice works.
I.e.: Is Finland, Denmark or even your average European country an example of "mild capitalism" or of "mild communism"? I can tell I do prefer to live in Denmark than in USA and that's because the socialist side of the Denmark system, not its capitalist one.
"Capitalism doesn't depend on government being made of a different class of individuals -- it relies upon government authority being severely restricted to only those domains where coercion is absolutely necessary."
Yes, that's the theory, but once government is made of the same class of individuals than the rest of society they are opened to be seduced by money just like any one else. Even if you start with your ideal government, it is either more or less powerful than a single or a colectivity of capitalists. In the first case, there you have a government too powerful and worth the effort to find individuals to buy within (i.e.: USA), in the second one, those capitalists will be the de facto government, being more powerful than government itself (i.e.: Haiti). In any case, respresentative democracies and republics will unavoidingly evolution towards a mild form of "inverse fascism" (in that it's a corporations-government liason, only lead by corporations instead of government) just as comunist regimes unavoidingly evolution towards tirany.
"Indeed, viewing government as a "capital asset" is innately anti-capitalist because it necessarily deprives others of liberty."
Again, one thing is the theory, a different one reality.
"Once those qualities are gone, you no longer have capitalism."
If that's a valid argument, then we should abandon capitalism in favor of comunism, which is a much better societal system... on paper. The problem with comunism, of course, is that it gets abused... unavoidingly.
Your capitalism comes with its own ways to be unavoidingly abused, the implicit being that somehow government is made of a different class of individuals than society. Hint: it isn't.
"the individual freedom required by free market capitalism"
Quite true. But those in government are no less individuals than anyother else, with their own individual freedom, and it is the exercise of their individual freedom that makes government a capital asset as any other and as such, open to be sold and bought. Which is exactly what happens -therefore, government being manipulated by those owning capital is not a corruption of capitalism but a consequence of its very essence.
"The prosecution will, of course, be digging up evidence that the kid is some kind of Machiavellian criminal mastermind using his inhuman hacking skills to springboard to world domination..."
That's the common (and faulty) perception of the public prosecutions role in our justice system.
Sorry but not. The public prosecution/defense doesn't work in a symmetric way: it's true that defense should look for any legal breach that will allow its client to get rid of charges, but it's false that the prosecution role is trying the opposite, looking for anything within legal boundaries that will get with the trialed bones in jail, the longer the better. The prosecution role is to find the truth and from the truth any legal responsibility that might arise. Just that.
"Software licenses are generally governed by contract law, so I'm not quite clear on what difference you think exists."
It's not so much the difference between license and contract but the fact that you don't get to negotiate its terms. In many jurisdictions that means that *some* clauses might be void while the rest intact. In this case that might mean, for instance, that the "you can distribute the binaries" might be enforceable but the "you can't put further restrictions" can not.
Usually admins, and the bigger the company, the truer this is, don't admin but operate. You'll have to look higher in the food chain to find the culprit.
"And this is the same guy who will have moved on to some other department when the DB containing all the credit cards and passwords ends up on a tweet and the fingers get pointed at the surly cave dwllers who have been telling Pointyhead to prioritize the patch over his ill thought through bullet points."
Not even that. It might even happen that the PHB is still there but then, it has been the turrists and those bad-smelling freaks from IT, and after all, an unavoidable stroke of bad luck, not his guilt. On the other hand, shaving a 0.25% out of benefits because that nonsense of security from the bad-smelling guys from IT two quarters in a row, *that* is *rrrreal* loses that *will* mean get him fired.
Now, think it again. If you were the PHB in question, what would you choose? The option that will surely fire you or the one that may not happen and you'll probably be able to deflect away if it ends happening?
But "the lowest bidder" is the spirit of corporate America!
Obvisouly it is not that Citibank were criminal morons with absolut disregard about their customers, but that the attackers were sophisticate terrorists (and paedophyles, now that we are talking about it).
"So, you're saying, you want people to do illegal things"
No, he isn't saying this. I may add that a police state, History shows, only make sense for the one controlling the police, not the citizens.
And then again, if you want surveillance to track criminals after the fact you should think twice about it: by your (probable) argument, death penalty should be the biggest deterrent to criminality (since it's about the worst thing you can do to the criminal after the fact, which is the vector expolited by tracking too) but still criminal rates are higher in USA, where most states hold death penalty, than in Europe where there's no such a thing.
"As long you have a homogeneous group there is no problem. Once you have multiple groups interacting ("multicultural environment"), you get problems."
Quite true. The question is if it's a better weapon against those problems police or education.
"Apparently you are *not* a student of history, or else you'd know that every single one of the revolutions/uprisings you listed (with some exception for the "Arab Spring") was caused directly or indirectly by a too-large and powerful government that took too many resources away from the citizens"
Apparently it is **you** (see? double asterisks, that's even more remarking that your single asterisks) the one that it is not a student of History, or else you'd know the difference between "government" and "ruling class". Government by the time of both the French and Russian revolutions were almost bankrupted and at the mercy of a rich ruling class which was the one taking away resources from the peasants.
"they had grown powerful enough to not care what the citizens wanted/needed."
It's only that, no, sorry, that was not the case. Government by the days of both the French and Russian revolutions was basically a post-feudalist structure. The king and court were not really so powerful and indeed were basically at the mercy of high nobility ('primus inter pares', you know) and banking resources.
"Gee, just like the times we find ourselves in now"
Yes, more or less the same: a government that does govern no more but it is a puppet at the mercy of a rich and powerful ruling class clearly obfuscated at sustaining the current 'statu quo'.
"wish for worldwide chaos as an opportunity for them to gain power and overthrow Western Capitalism."
What's "Western Capitalims" nowadays? For all that it seems, it looks like puppet governments at the mercy of a powerful ruling class made out of transnational corporations and financial entities, aka fascism.
"Do you really believe that a one-man outfit who produces one unit per week is "more efficient" than a machine shop that produces hundreds or thousands of units per week?"
As long as carbon credits are tied to production, obviously yes: he still produces with a lower carbon fingerprint per produced unit.
"Good chance that the GUI request deals primarily with user-friendly aspects of using the cluster."
Probably but then again, there's no exclusive need to use Linux GUI apps. Maybe he can find native Windows apps or browser-based.
"Have you ever tried substituting Gimp with Image Magick?"
Surely not, but I've used Image Magick when I needed to manage lots of images. In this context, anyway, I'd favour using a Windows native app for image processing, after all, a PNG is a PNG.
"If you are a robot do you mind being treated like one? Do you care if you get treated as fake?"
By whom? If he is neither less robotical nor more authentic than me, then I see no way his will would be considered superior to mine. Then, Kant's categorical imperative is again enough for an acceptable ethic.
"It has to have an X-windows server since we use that remotely from our Windows (yeah, yeah, I know) workstations."
So what? One one hand in order to run Linux graphic apps on Windows you need an X-Window server... on the Windows machine, not the Linux one. On the other hand, how is it that you *must* use GUI-based apps? There's *really* no operational alternatives? (I've been administrating Linux and Unix systems for almost two decades and I never needed -as in "must", GUI-based apps for that).
Slashdot Mirror
"If you put in production then you need to pay."
Maybe he wasn't clear enough: "$5k is *still* a lot of money for a student who is hacking something together in their university dorm even when it gets in production as a for free service."
"the M in LAMP is always MySQL and almost never Postgres"
I think it might be because in most programming languages I know of "M"=="P" returns False.
"you are actually trying to argue that MySQL can't work for anything but "toy" sites? Really? Do you not see the total absurdity of your point? Facebook is, itself, the proof that your point is invalid."
Hummm, no. I'm not English native, so I may be wrong, but my reading comprehension doesn't parse his message that way.
What he says is not that MySQL is not capable for anything but toy sites but that MySQL is not the right answer for anything but toy sites. That's not an adherence statement neither to his opinion nor against it, but just what I read.
An example (with a car no less): can you go by car from Beijing to Minneapolis? Surely you can: it will take a lot of driving, weeks within a freigther and quite a lot of money, but it can be done. But is it the right solution in anything but the most bizarre situations?
And no: being the fashionable choice doesn't make it the right one.
"I think it's scripts all the way down."
Gosh, no! I've been said there's an elephant at the bottom supporting everything else.
"IOW the automated tests only tests what the test was written for."
And that's only if the test is itself bug-free.
"Even approximations of capitalism usually fare better than other systems."
Quite true. The only problem with approximations is that being half-way between two extremes tend to be considered examples about how good your polar choice works.
I.e.: Is Finland, Denmark or even your average European country an example of "mild capitalism" or of "mild communism"? I can tell I do prefer to live in Denmark than in USA and that's because the socialist side of the Denmark system, not its capitalist one.
"Capitalism doesn't depend on government being made of a different class of individuals -- it relies upon government authority being severely restricted to only those domains where coercion is absolutely necessary."
Yes, that's the theory, but once government is made of the same class of individuals than the rest of society they are opened to be seduced by money just like any one else. Even if you start with your ideal government, it is either more or less powerful than a single or a colectivity of capitalists. In the first case, there you have a government too powerful and worth the effort to find individuals to buy within (i.e.: USA), in the second one, those capitalists will be the de facto government, being more powerful than government itself (i.e.: Haiti). In any case, respresentative democracies and republics will unavoidingly evolution towards a mild form of "inverse fascism" (in that it's a corporations-government liason, only lead by corporations instead of government) just as comunist regimes unavoidingly evolution towards tirany.
"Indeed, viewing government as a "capital asset" is innately anti-capitalist because it necessarily deprives others of liberty."
Again, one thing is the theory, a different one reality.
"Once those qualities are gone, you no longer have capitalism."
If that's a valid argument, then we should abandon capitalism in favor of comunism, which is a much better societal system... on paper. The problem with comunism, of course, is that it gets abused... unavoidingly.
Your capitalism comes with its own ways to be unavoidingly abused, the implicit being that somehow government is made of a different class of individuals than society. Hint: it isn't.
"the individual freedom required by free market capitalism"
Quite true. But those in government are no less individuals than anyother else, with their own individual freedom, and it is the exercise of their individual freedom that makes government a capital asset as any other and as such, open to be sold and bought. Which is exactly what happens -therefore, government being manipulated by those owning capital is not a corruption of capitalism but a consequence of its very essence.
"There's a difference between justifies and explains."
Of course there is. It's not me that would say otherwise.
"The prosecution will, of course, be digging up evidence that the kid is some kind of Machiavellian criminal mastermind using his inhuman hacking skills to springboard to world domination..."
That's the common (and faulty) perception of the public prosecutions role in our justice system.
Sorry but not. The public prosecution/defense doesn't work in a symmetric way: it's true that defense should look for any legal breach that will allow its client to get rid of charges, but it's false that the prosecution role is trying the opposite, looking for anything within legal boundaries that will get with the trialed bones in jail, the longer the better. The prosecution role is to find the truth and from the truth any legal responsibility that might arise. Just that.
"No fucking "illness" justifies a total lack of moral, ethics or care for other people."
Except for one which main symptom were "total lack of moral, ethics or care for other people", of course.
"Software licenses are generally governed by contract law, so I'm not quite clear on what difference you think exists."
It's not so much the difference between license and contract but the fact that you don't get to negotiate its terms. In many jurisdictions that means that *some* clauses might be void while the rest intact. In this case that might mean, for instance, that the "you can distribute the binaries" might be enforceable but the "you can't put further restrictions" can not.
"or are they just incompetent?"
Usually admins, and the bigger the company, the truer this is, don't admin but operate. You'll have to look higher in the food chain to find the culprit.
"And this is the same guy who will have moved on to some other department when the DB containing all the credit cards and passwords ends up on a tweet and the fingers get pointed at the surly cave dwllers who have been telling Pointyhead to prioritize the patch over his ill thought through bullet points."
Not even that. It might even happen that the PHB is still there but then, it has been the turrists and those bad-smelling freaks from IT, and after all, an unavoidable stroke of bad luck, not his guilt. On the other hand, shaving a 0.25% out of benefits because that nonsense of security from the bad-smelling guys from IT two quarters in a row, *that* is *rrrreal* loses that *will* mean get him fired.
Now, think it again. If you were the PHB in question, what would you choose? The option that will surely fire you or the one that may not happen and you'll probably be able to deflect away if it ends happening?
"No engineer in their right mind would have suggested keeping generation 1 nuclear plants running 'forever'."
No engineer in their right mind would have forgotten that dirty hacks are forever perennial.
"Regardless of whether reducing the rules was proper or improper, this story is an example of manipulating government, not capitalism."
How is it exactly that manipulating government is not capitalism? Government has become another capital asset as anyother else and managed as such.
But "the lowest bidder" is the spirit of corporate America!
Obvisouly it is not that Citibank were criminal morons with absolut disregard about their customers, but that the attackers were sophisticate terrorists (and paedophyles, now that we are talking about it).
"So, you're saying, you want people to do illegal things"
No, he isn't saying this. I may add that a police state, History shows, only make sense for the one controlling the police, not the citizens.
And then again, if you want surveillance to track criminals after the fact you should think twice about it: by your (probable) argument, death penalty should be the biggest deterrent to criminality (since it's about the worst thing you can do to the criminal after the fact, which is the vector expolited by tracking too) but still criminal rates are higher in USA, where most states hold death penalty, than in Europe where there's no such a thing.
"As long you have a homogeneous group there is no problem. Once you have multiple groups interacting ("multicultural environment"), you get problems."
Quite true. The question is if it's a better weapon against those problems police or education.
"Apparently you are *not* a student of history, or else you'd know that every single one of the revolutions/uprisings you listed (with some exception for the "Arab Spring") was caused directly or indirectly by a too-large and powerful government that took too many resources away from the citizens"
Apparently it is **you** (see? double asterisks, that's even more remarking that your single asterisks) the one that it is not a student of History, or else you'd know the difference between "government" and "ruling class". Government by the time of both the French and Russian revolutions were almost bankrupted and at the mercy of a rich ruling class which was the one taking away resources from the peasants.
"they had grown powerful enough to not care what the citizens wanted/needed."
It's only that, no, sorry, that was not the case. Government by the days of both the French and Russian revolutions was basically a post-feudalist structure. The king and court were not really so powerful and indeed were basically at the mercy of high nobility ('primus inter pares', you know) and banking resources.
"Gee, just like the times we find ourselves in now"
Yes, more or less the same: a government that does govern no more but it is a puppet at the mercy of a rich and powerful ruling class clearly obfuscated at sustaining the current 'statu quo'.
"wish for worldwide chaos as an opportunity for them to gain power and overthrow Western Capitalism."
What's "Western Capitalims" nowadays? For all that it seems, it looks like puppet governments at the mercy of a powerful ruling class made out of transnational corporations and financial entities, aka fascism.
"As a technically minded person (as you must be to be posting on Slashdot), you know that the system of units has absolutely no impact"
Well, it indeed has an impact... at great speed, against Mars surface no less. Ask Mars Climate Orbiter for further references.
"Do you really believe that a one-man outfit who produces one unit per week is "more efficient" than a machine shop that produces hundreds or thousands of units per week?"
As long as carbon credits are tied to production, obviously yes: he still produces with a lower carbon fingerprint per produced unit.
"Whether he keeps his mouth shut about how the algos work or other dodgy goings-on is irrelevant. Non-disclosure is non-disclosure"
Yes... For current and local legal definition for non-disclosure.
"Good chance that the GUI request deals primarily with user-friendly aspects of using the cluster."
Probably but then again, there's no exclusive need to use Linux GUI apps. Maybe he can find native Windows apps or browser-based.
"Have you ever tried substituting Gimp with Image Magick?"
Surely not, but I've used Image Magick when I needed to manage lots of images. In this context, anyway, I'd favour using a Windows native app for image processing, after all, a PNG is a PNG.
"If you are a robot do you mind being treated like one? Do you care if you get treated as fake?"
By whom? If he is neither less robotical nor more authentic than me, then I see no way his will would be considered superior to mine. Then, Kant's categorical imperative is again enough for an acceptable ethic.
"It has to have an X-windows server since we use that remotely from our Windows (yeah, yeah, I know) workstations."
So what? One one hand in order to run Linux graphic apps on Windows you need an X-Window server... on the Windows machine, not the Linux one. On the other hand, how is it that you *must* use GUI-based apps? There's *really* no operational alternatives? (I've been administrating Linux and Unix systems for almost two decades and I never needed -as in "must", GUI-based apps for that).