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Comment Re:Would not be a loss (Score 0) 278

MySQL is the Visual Basic of databases - clumsy and of poor quality, used most strongly by people who don't know any better. I would be delighted to see MySQL fail as a project and have its mindshare go to projects that are superior, like PostgreSQL.

Agreed. There's an excellent list of MySQL "gotchas" that illustrates just how bad it is - http://sql-info.de/en/mysql/gotchas.html
The list only applies to <5.0 versions - anyone know a similar list for >=5.0 ?

Comment Re:New ads (Score 0) 837

horrible? I thought it was really *really* good. Not only does it help kill the stereotype, but makes the Mac commercials much less effective as well.

I disagree.

If they were trying to counter the message of the original Apple ads, they failed miserably, because they completely missed their point. The Apple ads are basically saying "Macs are for people who want to do things better, than everyone else (the PCs) - more interesting, more fun and less effort". These ads are targeted at people who want to stand out of the crowd, or at least go their own way. The Microsoft ads on the other hand are saying "be a sheep, join EVERYONE in doing the same thing", which - to the crowd the original ads were aimed at - is the exact thing they want to avoid.

But one might argue, that these ads were actually addressed to a different group of people - the sheep. But the sheep don't need ads - they'll simply follow everyone else. Worse yet - the ads might actually make them aware of what they're doing by blindly following the others and make them stop.

In conclusion - FAIL.

Security

EFF To Appeal Court Order Vs. Subway Hack Demo 189

snydeq sends along InfoWorld coverage of the EFF's plans to appeal a US District Court order that kept three MIT students from presenting detailed flaws in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority e-ticketing system at Defcon. And an anonymous reader points out that the MBTA, in addition to triggering the Streisand Effect, released in open court more information on vulnerabilities (PDF) than the students had any intention of presenting. See Exhibit 1 to this court filing.
Security

Child-Suitable Alternatives To Passwords? 895

An anonymous reader writes "Two months ago I donated my old PC to my little sister, who is 7 — I had promised she would get her own computer as soon as she can read and write properly. I then proceeded to answer her questions about how it works, as far as she inquired, and tried to let her make some choices when installing Debian (she can already use GNOME). As I explained password protection and encryption to her, I was pleasantly surprised when she insisted on protection measures being as strong as possible, so that no one else can screw with her computer. She knows that my younger brother has to endure strict parental control software that was installed on his machine without his consent. The significant problem is that she cannot permanently memorize abstract passwords, even if they are her own creation. I talked with a teacher who assured me that this is common at her age. My parents would probably be able to guess non-abstract passwords. What mechanism of identifying herself does the Slashdot crowd suggest?"
Linux

Hardy Heron Alpha 4 Released 272

LarryBoy writes "Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) alpha 4 was released Friday and Ars Technica has a look at what's new in the latest builds of Hardy Heron. 'Although many of the significant architectural features like PulseAudio and GIO are still in transitional stages and aren't fully functional yet, Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 4 is still very impressive. I'm a big fan of D-Bus and I'm very pleased to see it being adopted throughout the entire desktop stack in core components.'"
Mozilla

Weave... Mozilla Is Trying To Be More Social 156

Cassanova writes "Weave is the newest Mozilla Labs project. It allows the user to save browser settings on Mozilla servers (Favorites, sessions, passwords, etc.) and load them from anywhere. With this project, Mozilla is trying to be an online services provider, which is an important step. But can Mozilla labs get over the privacy issues?"
Data Storage

Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives 780

An anonymous reader writes "Seagate has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company mislead customers by selling them hard disk drives with less capacity than the company advertised. The suit states that Seagate's use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte" was misleading and inaccurate: whereby 1GB = 1 billion bytes. In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes — a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."
Media

Submission + - NBC Chief, "Apple 'destroyed' music pricing (appleinsider.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: With the most colorful description yet, NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker on Sunday urged colleagues to take a stand against Apple's iTunes, charging that the digital download service was undermining the ability of traditional media companies to set profitable rates for their content online.

"We know that Apple has destroyed the music business — in terms of pricing — and if we don't take control, they'll do the same thing on the video side,"

Microsoft

ISO Says No To Microsoft's OOXML Standard 315

qcomp writes "The votes are in and Microsoft has lost for now, reports the FFII's campaign website OOXML. The 2/3 majority needed to proceed with the fast-track standardization has not been achieved. Now the standard will head to the ballot resolution meeting to address the hundreds of technical comments submitted along with the votes." Here is yesterday's speculation as to how the vote would turn out.

Linux Foundation Calls for 'Respect for Microsoft' 486

kripkenstein writes "Jim Zemlin (executive director for the Linux Foundation) gave a talk at LinuxWorld saying that the open source community should stop poking fun at Microsoft. From the VNU article: 'Open source vendors have to recognize that Windows is here to stay and that together with Microsoft it will form a duopoly in the market for operating systems. This also requires that the Linux community respects Microsoft rather than ridicule it. "There are some things that Windows does pretty well," Zemlin said. Microsoft for instance has excelled in marketing the operating system, and has a good track record in fending off competition.'"

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