Posts by Antony Curtis 9 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
Monty had been trying to buy Innobase for years before Innobase finally sold out to Oracle. I remember how angry Monty was for that: He had expected that Heikki would at least had allowed MySQL to put in a competing offer.
There has been no double standard. InnoDB was never owned by MySQL and the online hot backup was something which had to be purchased from Innobase.
As a computing professional, I have to put a concrete value as to how much my time is worth.
For the absence of headaches that Apple's laptops and operating system have given me over the years, I have chosen them because the extra cost to buy their stuff is less than the cost of the time I would have spent with machines and software from elsewhere.
In a nutshell: I choose Apple because it is cheaper.
The cheapest and quickest way to make hydrogen gas is by steam cracking. Burn methane gas and put the hot exhaust gases through some kind of catalyst and recover the hydrogen. This means that for every cubic foot of hydrogen gas produced, up to two cubic feet of methane is burnt.
At that point, it makes much more sense just to compress the methane gas and burn it in a simple internal combustion engine. In the overall scheme of things, you'd consume less methane and there are no funky alloys and ceramics to dispose of at the end of the vehicle's life.
Hydrogen just makes no sense.
In my opinion, software publishers, music labels etc, should all replace faulty discs and here is the reason why:
You have purchased a license to use the copyrighted works and you have not actually purchased anything else. Faulty media has not expired your license to enjoy the copyrighted works.
Many years ago, I was reinstalling my PC and the 2nd install floppy for Lotus 123 was bad - I blame the floppy drive because I never cleaned it. However, Lotus Corp happily sent me a replacement disk in exchange for sending them the faulty disk and enough postage for them to send me a replacement. That seems very fair and reasonable to me.
I think that any company selling works and who will not replace faulty media should inform people that they are purchasing the whole works and should therefore treat the media as a master - ie, the buyer can make further copies, resell, etc etc because they are owners of the works. In doing so, they don't need to furnish the new owner with replacement copies should their master fail.
Sony will make it such that developing 'DRM' software will be unprofitable - or at least, no company in their right mind would be willing to license to Sony or to any other litigious RIAA cardholding member.
Sony would be forced to develop something in-house or have to work with operating system vendors, such as Microsoft, to develop a next-version OS which no one will want because of it's in-built cripple-ware.
With luck, everyone will abandon the whole sorry mess and everything would revert to the "Innocent until proven guilty" honor system. Like as like not, people who intend to pirate music would do so regardless of any technical limitation imposed upon them as they will find a workaround. The rest of us, the majority of people, don't pirate music and don't appreciate being treated as if we were already assumed to be criminals.
Call me "old fashioned" if you like but in my opinion, if a web server were to host a file with "Content-type: video/avi" and it actually serves a binary executable, I would expect the web browser to display an empty rectangle with perhaps a red X through it with a message saying that the data was corrupted rather than it try to decide what the file was and run it.
I would expect it to do the same if the data cannot be decoded using only the content-type information as provided by the server and if that information was somehow out of step with the data stream, it should fail and display an error message.
Alas, I know that this will never happen.
What you have to remember is that this is an idea supported by many Anti-Evolutionists and Flat-Earth supporters. In a Flat-Earth scenario, the 747 just has to be in the air and it will be able to shoot down any missile in boost phase by line of sight.
Isn't that simple?
Now don't try to convince these people that the world is a oblique spheroid and that the planet may get in the way of their line of sight or they may accuse you of being a Darwin-loving Jesus-hating terrorist.
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