Probabilities of independent events are not cumulative......otherwise, a very large number of individuals who commute by car would have accumulated a probability of having an accident far in excess of 100% every year.
Concider this:
What is the probability that the next coin-flip comes up heads? 50%... After I flip heads, what is the next probability for getting heads? It is still 50%. The next coin flip getting heads? 50% again.
Now, the probability of three consequtive coin flips getting all heads is 12.5%
You've still failed to address the simple question of what happens when a particular body (for example, a government agency) mandates the use of ODF, MS Office doesn't support it, and someone else does? I'm failing to see how government contracts getting awarded to Sun, IBM, or some other vendor supporting an ODF implementation is just part of Microsoft's nefarious plan to profit by killing ODF.
Government mandates typically stipulate that all product selections are products which have more than one manufacturer. That was one of IBM and Microsoft's goals when they both produced OS/2 - hence why there were both IBM versions of OS/2 (1.1, 1.3) and Microsoft versions of OS/2 (1.0, 1.2)...
Of course nowadays, mandates are made to be broken. Windows is used extensively in the US Government, both military and civil, even though there is only one manufacturer: Microsoft.
It doesn't really matter what gets mandated by whom; there will be ways that a multi-billion-dollar bank account balance can side-step the rule. Microsoft is perfectly aware of this.
I believe that for ODF to take off, the source code to this plugin should never be released... and that a plugin for the upcoming Office should never be released too.
Why? Because if people must use ODF, they cannot use Microsoft's "latest-and-greatest" version unless Microsoft themselves develops ODF compatibility. This would seriously impact them where it hurts - their revenue. People who must have ODF will not upgrade.
And to ensure this, the plugin must be closed source.
(Of course, they can have some kind of Shared-Source licensing in the same way that Microsoft promotes, and offer to open it to Microsoft on that basis... Make sure that the license includes some nice juicy NDA provisions and has a viral clause which taints all who walks within 100ft of the source...)
You make an interesting point except that... "Microsoft OS/2 1.2" was Microsoft's flagship product at that time. So your argument kind of falls flat on it's face.
It is the most recent example of which Microsoft has inflicted upon myself. Soon after that, I was no longer a Microsoft customer. (except thought the illegal tying of DOS+Windows licenses to processors which occurred in the 486 and early Pentium era)
Paint up a flatbed truck which has a mini-crane for lifting vehicles to look "official". And get some kind of uniform.
Cruise around areas which have parking meters and if you see a nice car, park next to it and pick it up and drive off. 30 seconds maybe.
Chances are, no one will bat an eyelid or ask a question. And because people are good at completely ignoring the mundane (Someone Elses Problem), no witnesses when you do it in daylight hours.
I won't be surprised if people are already doing this.
well, if we're on the giving msft credit where credit is due bandwagon:: dhcp kicks the crap out of bootp.
Not according to wikipedia...
Microsoft introduced DHCP on their NT server with Windows NT version 3.5 in late 1994. (Despite its billing as "a new feature from Microsoft", DHCP did not originate from Microsoft.)
does Microsoft spend money pissing off customers by inserting a "if (doctype == "odf") { then sleep(600); }" statement in their code, or do they spend their money on other things?
If you compare how to add a printer and how to print in OS/2 1.2 and Windows 3.0, I would say that Microsoft does spend money pissing off customers.
That's free market competition... and that's good for us lowly consumers in the long run. Microsoft cannot "kill" ODF, unless it release a clearly superior competing technical standard.
I think Microsoft can quite easily "kill" ODF just by their sheer market dominance. If their ODF import and export filters are broken enough such that ODF documents imported into Office are all rendered wrong and/or print garbled.... And then all they have to do is not fix it for years until ODF is dead. All the while, they can claim that their product supports ODF but isn't their own format that much better?
Ever since the 80486 was launched, there was the BSWAP instruction (0x0f, 0xC8 | reg) which takes only 1 clock cycle to execute. It reverses the byte order of a 32-bit register. (also can be used in 16bit code as a hack way of doubling the number of available 16bit registers)
I cannot see how the byte order can be an expensive issue... Now, laziness is another matter alltogether!
OS/2 actually had a neat solution for this senerio.
A process can allocate pages of memory from the operating system, fill it with data before giving those pages to another process (who becomes responsible for freeing the memory back to the operating system). OS/2 had a number of API calls to make this easy... Allocate memory marked as "giveable"... fill it with data... post it in a message queue... operating system posts message to consumer and has given the memory to the consumer... consumer does something with it... comsumer frees the memory back to the operating system for reuse. OS/2-style zero-copy inter-process communication.
That way, it is clear who owns the memory... In a similar way, such handovers can be done to implement zero copy for all kinds of things...
As an OS/2 user during the 1990s, I would say that Apple would be better serve their own self interests by writing an application compatibility service for Windows XP (in a similar way to MicroSoft's SFU addon).
This would allow applications written for x86 MacOS to run unmodified on Windows. Tempt application developers to write apps for OS X as they can now run on the two major platforms.
Apple can introduce a few minor bugs in this addon which would cause applications to randomly and inexplicably crash. Only release updates and bug fixes every 3 months or so. Fail to fix some minor longstanding memory leak which causes the machine to crumple to its knees after extended use.
They can put it down to the undocumented nature of the WinXX api that it is impossible to write a perfect shim, so why dones't the user switch to running OS X.
But as far as I know, in a trial, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. When it comes to an appeal, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent.
It is the defendant's duty in an appeal to prove that the findings of fact and final judgement in the trial are wrong.
For Microsoft, the trial is already over. They have been found guilty. This is an appeal, they have to either subject themselves to remedies or prove their innocence.
You are using an inconsistant (and possibly very flawed) definition as to what consitiutes a derivative work - perhaps you work for The SCO Group? (joke)
The GPL requires that the source code is made available to all entities to which the binary is distributed to. This doesn't mean that the company has to put their source codes on a public FTP site but it may mean that every entity which has ownership of any machine which the code runs on has to have access to the source code if so requested. If the company itself owns the machine, then it means that the company must have access to the source code. If the derivative works is supplied by an external contractor, it means that the external contractor must abide by the terms of the GPL and give the company the source code and the code must be correctly licensed as distribution from one entity to another has occurred.
These conditions do not prevent a company from making use of any GPL software... it does prevent contractors and software vendors from using GPL software as part of the works they supply to another company without including all the source code, correctly licensed.
If you are a contractor providing software products to other companies and don't wish to give away your secret source to your customers, I can see why you may dislike the GPL. The spirit and intent of the GPL: anyone receiving GPL derivied works from another entity is entitled to the source. It is a pro-community license.
(opinions are my own, I will not discuss further on this thread)
If you don't like a company's EULA, don't buy from them!
And just how do we get to read the EULA for a paticular company's product without purchasing it? I, for one, am not blessed with ability to read the EULA from the CD enclosed within a shrinkwrapped cardboard box... No matter how long I press the box against my forehead.
So you are saying that if I execute "tar -cf/dev/sa0/boot/kernel-2.6.14-gentoo-r5" and make a copy of the Linux kernel, which is GPL, onto another device, I have to track down all the contributors to the Linux kernel and get permission to do that? OMG! Every Linux user on the planet is infringing!
Please read the full text of the GPL, specifically version 2 of the GPL (which MySQL open-source release is licensed under), before you utter such garbage again.
But you can keep going back to the small claims court.
Imagine, you can keep buying the same software and keep going around the merry go around again and again. If the judge asks, the only reason you need give is that "I thought it was a new version,"
You do not lose your rights to sue again for another occurance of injustice in the small claims court. In a class action suit, usually one of the settlement terms is that you can never file a claim against that company ever again.
IMO, class action suits was an invention of the lawyers and big corporations for their mutual benefit.
You're missing my point entirely. I was pointing out that MySQL AB is one of Innobase's customers. MySQL AB is also their largest customer, which means the company has at least a little bit of input into what direction that InnoDB gets developed into. Why isn't MySQL AB pushing Innobase to add this as a new feature, especially considering that it would probably cost the company nothing to do so?
Well it won't cost nothing.
We may suggest an idea to them and they say that they want to hire X number more employees to do it. Or for some reason, they don't think that implementing the idea is worth their while. For whatever reason (which I do not know), it hasn't happened yet. Sure MySQL invited them to many developer meetings but Innobase has always been an independent operation. It was interesting to find out what stuff they planned to work on and we told them what stuff we thought would be cool...
However, if someone came to us with an open checkbook saying they will spend so much money on such a feature, we can then go to Innobase and say "Hey, theres a customer who will pay this much... will you do it now?" Then it is up to them.
Of course, this is all hypothetical wishywashy stuff because I am a developer. I am not on the commercial side of the operation so I don't know any of the nitty gritty details.
(opinions are my own, not of my employer nor anyone else)
this means that if I add a column to a table I won't have to spend hours copying the data back & forth under the covers
Support for this is being implemented but it does rely on the storage engine to know what to do. Otherwise, the fallback is to do it the old slow way.
it means no more gotchas - with broken date handling, exception handling, type conversions, value truncations, etc. it means that individuals clients shouldn't be able to turn off strict mode.
Good suggestions. I'll try to make sure that they're not forgotten.
it means that non-strict mode should be deprecated - and gone in a few years
This would mean breaking backward compatibility - something that I think will be undesirable. There are some embedded applications which do not benefit from strict mode for example.
it means that the optimizer should be able to handle very complex joins and almost always come back with the very best possible query
This is the "holy grail" of database systems... What may seem trivial to us to decide what query plan is best may be non-trivial to calculate. There may be a large number of optimal paths but the optimum one may be very hard to deduce due to local minimas. Many databases have such large and complex query optimizers that the query plans have to be precalculated and cached. MySQL has a skilled query optimizer team and I am sure they will do great stuff.
oracle-style range partitioning: this means that you can using mysql for large reporting & warehousing applications.
Already actively in development and may be previewed in the 5.1 tree.
query parallelism: need to be able to split reporting query work across CPUs. These large queries, often scanning a 100,000+ rows can typically get linear performance improvements in my experience from query parallelism.
Only available in MySQL Cluster to a limited degree. Tricky to make a general solution but it is something we are aware of.
federation: the ability to redirect a query against a table to another database to be resolved. This allows you to define reference tables on one database, then share them across many.
Already available and in 5.0 tree, although improvements are possible.
query failover: the ability for the mysql client to automatically reroute a query to a failover server. This allows you to provide failover without any code changes at the application layer.
AFAIK, JDBC connector already provides this and I think the.Net connector as well. The C client I think has not implemented it yet but it is something we know about.
If you have the time and the money, here is a new hobby for you....
1. Buy lots of software at your local big-name retail outlet. 2. In your excitement, rip open the boxes and get access to the EULA. 3. If the EULA is on the CD, open the CD case, load the CD and get to the EULA. 4. Disagree with it. 5. Return the software in opened packaging, for a full refund. 6. If your big-name retail outlet refuses then the software vendor *must* refund it, 7. No you will not pay for shipping. You will happily throw it all in the trash can if they refund the money. 8. If they don't want to refund, take them to small claims court. 9. Argue that the full EULA should have been visible on the outside of the packaging in reasonable size type. 10. If you are vision impaired, argue that the Braile EULA should be on the packaging too or that typeface should be large print.
Remeber to keep copies of your receipts and correspondences!
I guess what I'm asking is why MySQL doesn't just step up and develop it's own GOOD storage db solution, with transactions and all the nice stuff that InnoDB provided and solidDB will provide?
Creating a GOOD storage engine is not easy... if it was, everyone would have one already and there would be thousands of them out there. Meanwhile, I think partnering with people who already have a proven solution is a good way to deliver choices to the end users quickly. The MySQL Users Conference is only a week away, there will be lots of exciting announcements and presentations.
(opinions are my own, not of my employer nor anyone else)
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Probabilities of independent events are not cumulative...
Concider this:
What is the probability that the next coin-flip comes up heads? 50%...
After I flip heads, what is the next probability for getting heads? It is still 50%.
The next coin flip getting heads? 50% again.
Now, the probability of three consequtive coin flips getting all heads is 12.5%
Government mandates typically stipulate that all product selections are products which have more than one manufacturer. That was one of IBM and Microsoft's goals when they both produced OS/2 - hence why there were both IBM versions of OS/2 (1.1, 1.3) and Microsoft versions of OS/2 (1.0, 1.2)
Of course nowadays, mandates are made to be broken. Windows is used extensively in the US Government, both military and civil, even though there is only one manufacturer: Microsoft.
It doesn't really matter what gets mandated by whom; there will be ways that a multi-billion-dollar bank account balance can side-step the rule. Microsoft is perfectly aware of this.
I believe that for ODF to take off, the source code to this plugin should never be released ... and that a plugin for the upcoming Office should never be released too.
Why? Because if people must use ODF, they cannot use Microsoft's "latest-and-greatest" version unless Microsoft themselves develops ODF compatibility. This would seriously impact them where it hurts - their revenue. People who must have ODF will not upgrade.
And to ensure this, the plugin must be closed source.
(Of course, they can have some kind of Shared-Source licensing in the same way that Microsoft promotes, and offer to open it to Microsoft on that basis... Make sure that the license includes some nice juicy NDA provisions and has a viral clause which taints all who walks within 100ft of the source...)
You make an interesting point except that... "Microsoft OS/2 1.2" was Microsoft's flagship product at that time.
So your argument kind of falls flat on it's face.
It is the most recent example of which Microsoft has inflicted upon myself. Soon after that, I was no longer a Microsoft customer. (except thought the illegal tying of DOS+Windows licenses to processors which occurred in the 486 and early Pentium era)
Don't bother with all the high-tech stuff.
Paint up a flatbed truck which has a mini-crane for lifting vehicles to look "official". And get some kind of uniform.
Cruise around areas which have parking meters and if you see a nice car, park next to it and pick it up and drive off. 30 seconds maybe.
Chances are, no one will bat an eyelid or ask a question. And because people are good at completely ignoring the mundane (Someone Elses Problem), no witnesses when you do it in daylight hours.
I won't be surprised if people are already doing this.
Not according to wikipedia...
If you compare how to add a printer and how to print in OS/2 1.2 and Windows 3.0, I would say that Microsoft does spend money pissing off customers.
Ok...
Suppose that they do implement an adequate ODF import/export filter.
But it takes 10 minutes to import or export a simple 5 page document.
That would keep only the determined using it... everyone else will stick to Microsoft's preferred format because it loads and saves in seconds.
I think Microsoft can quite easily "kill" ODF just by their sheer market dominance. If their ODF import and export filters are broken enough such that ODF documents imported into Office are all rendered wrong and/or print garbled.... And then all they have to do is not fix it for years until ODF is dead. All the while, they can claim that their product supports ODF but isn't their own format that much better?
Just the cynic in me typing...
Ever since the 80486 was launched, there was the BSWAP instruction (0x0f, 0xC8 | reg) which takes only 1 clock cycle to execute. It reverses the byte order of a 32-bit register. (also can be used in 16bit code as a hack way of doubling the number of available 16bit registers)
I cannot see how the byte order can be an expensive issue... Now, laziness is another matter alltogether!
Um...Sorry to break it to you but...
"Terrestrial gravity" is, by definition, the gravity experienced on Earth, 3rd planet of our solar system.
If they meant the Moon (as in, the large body orbiting the Earth) they would have written "Luna gravity".
For Mars, it would be "Martian gravity".
For Jupiter, it would be "Jovian gravity"
Strangely enough, whenever I describe what makes a good British Steak and Kidney pie to Americans, they turn as green as the gecko in those adverts.
OS/2 actually had a neat solution for this senerio.
A process can allocate pages of memory from the operating system, fill it with data before giving those pages to another process (who becomes responsible for freeing the memory back to the operating system). OS/2 had a number of API calls to make this easy... Allocate memory marked as "giveable"... fill it with data... post it in a message queue... operating system posts message to consumer and has given the memory to the consumer... consumer does something with it... comsumer frees the memory back to the operating system for reuse. OS/2-style zero-copy inter-process communication.
That way, it is clear who owns the memory... In a similar way, such handovers can be done to implement zero copy for all kinds of things...
As an OS/2 user during the 1990s, I would say that Apple would be better serve their own self interests by writing an application compatibility service for Windows XP (in a similar way to MicroSoft's SFU addon).
This would allow applications written for x86 MacOS to run unmodified on Windows. Tempt application developers to write apps for OS X as they can now run on the two major platforms.
Apple can introduce a few minor bugs in this addon which would cause applications to randomly and inexplicably crash. Only release updates and bug fixes every 3 months or so. Fail to fix some minor longstanding memory leak which causes the machine to crumple to its knees after extended use.
They can put it down to the undocumented nature of the WinXX api that it is impossible to write a perfect shim, so why dones't the user switch to running OS X.
How is that as an "Embrace and extend" idea?
IANAL...
But as far as I know, in a trial, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
When it comes to an appeal, you are presumed guilty until proven innocent.
It is the defendant's duty in an appeal to prove that the findings of fact and final judgement in the trial are wrong.
For Microsoft, the trial is already over. They have been found guilty. This is an appeal, they have to either subject themselves to remedies or prove their innocence.
You are using an inconsistant (and possibly very flawed) definition as to what consitiutes a derivative work - perhaps you work for The SCO Group? (joke)
... it does prevent contractors and software vendors from using GPL software as part of the works they supply to another company without including all the source code, correctly licensed.
The GPL requires that the source code is made available to all entities to which the binary is distributed to. This doesn't mean that the company has to put their source codes on a public FTP site but it may mean that every entity which has ownership of any machine which the code runs on has to have access to the source code if so requested. If the company itself owns the machine, then it means that the company must have access to the source code. If the derivative works is supplied by an external contractor, it means that the external contractor must abide by the terms of the GPL and give the company the source code and the code must be correctly licensed as distribution from one entity to another has occurred.
These conditions do not prevent a company from making use of any GPL software
If you are a contractor providing software products to other companies and don't wish to give away your secret source to your customers, I can see why you may dislike the GPL. The spirit and intent of the GPL: anyone receiving GPL derivied works from another entity is entitled to the source. It is a pro-community license.
(opinions are my own, I will not discuss further on this thread)
And just how do we get to read the EULA for a paticular company's product without purchasing it?
I, for one, am not blessed with ability to read the EULA from the CD enclosed within a shrinkwrapped cardboard box... No matter how long I press the box against my forehead.
So you are saying that if I execute "tar -cf
Please read the full text of the GPL, specifically version 2 of the GPL (which MySQL open-source release is licensed under), before you utter such garbage again.
(definitly my own opinions, seriously.)
IANAL, Class action suits can only be done once.
But you can keep going back to the small claims court.
Imagine, you can keep buying the same software and keep going around the merry go around again and again.
If the judge asks, the only reason you need give is that "I thought it was a new version,"
You do not lose your rights to sue again for another occurance of injustice in the small claims court. In a class action suit, usually one of the settlement terms is that you can never file a claim against that company ever again.
IMO, class action suits was an invention of the lawyers and big corporations for their mutual benefit.
Well it won't cost nothing.
We may suggest an idea to them and they say that they want to hire X number more employees to do it. Or for some reason, they don't think that implementing the idea is worth their while. For whatever reason (which I do not know), it hasn't happened yet. Sure MySQL invited them to many developer meetings but Innobase has always been an independent operation. It was interesting to find out what stuff they planned to work on and we told them what stuff we thought would be cool...
However, if someone came to us with an open checkbook saying they will spend so much money on such a feature, we can then go to Innobase and say "Hey, theres a customer who will pay this much... will you do it now?"
Then it is up to them.
Of course, this is all hypothetical wishywashy stuff because I am a developer. I am not on the commercial side of the operation so I don't know any of the nitty gritty details.
(opinions are my own, not of my employer nor anyone else)
I never see the point of the class action suits... Big wow, each member gets a $10 voucher.
Better to attack the company with millions of small cuts.
They would bleed more.
Support for this is being implemented but it does rely on the storage engine to know what to do. Otherwise, the fallback is to do it the old slow way.
Good suggestions. I'll try to make sure that they're not forgotten.
This would mean breaking backward compatibility - something that I think will be undesirable. There are some embedded applications which do not benefit from strict mode for example.
This is the "holy grail" of database systems... What may seem trivial to us to decide what query plan is best may be non-trivial to calculate. There may be a large number of optimal paths but the optimum one may be very hard to deduce due to local minimas. Many databases have such large and complex query optimizers that the query plans have to be precalculated and cached. MySQL has a skilled query optimizer team and I am sure they will do great stuff.
Already actively in development and may be previewed in the 5.1 tree.
Only available in MySQL Cluster to a limited degree. Tricky to make a general solution but it is something we are aware of.
Already available and in 5.0 tree, although improvements are possible.
AFAIK, JDBC connector already provides this and I think the
If you have the time and the money, here is a new hobby for you....
1. Buy lots of software at your local big-name retail outlet.
2. In your excitement, rip open the boxes and get access to the EULA.
3. If the EULA is on the CD, open the CD case, load the CD and get to the EULA.
4. Disagree with it.
5. Return the software in opened packaging, for a full refund.
6. If your big-name retail outlet refuses then the software vendor *must* refund it,
7. No you will not pay for shipping. You will happily throw it all in the trash can if they refund the money.
8. If they don't want to refund, take them to small claims court.
9. Argue that the full EULA should have been visible on the outside of the packaging in reasonable size type.
10. If you are vision impaired, argue that the Braile EULA should be on the packaging too or that typeface should be large print.
Remeber to keep copies of your receipts and correspondences!
Creating a GOOD storage engine is not easy
(opinions are my own, not of my employer nor anyone else)