That seems easy enough to subvert if you know it exists. Just watch for the unplugging of a keyboard, mouse, monitor, or network, throw up a screen demanding a password, and shut down if it's not given.
It's a neat trick, but if Full Disk Encryption products can't deal with this soon, they're pretty stupid.
If the NSA really wanted the data on that drive they may be able to do it.
The point is this is all a nonsense urban legend that actually started on an entirely different type of drive entirely, an MFM drive, with much fuzzier bits, and someone hypothesized that data recover might theoretically be possible even after an overwrite, and you might want to do it with different patterns.
This hypothetical 'might' on much older drives has somehow become the actual literal truth, resulting in people running multiple wipe operations and even physically destroying drives, despite no one ever demonstrating recovery of a once-wiped file in the entire history of computers. Ever. At all. It has never once happened, no actual data recovery firm claims they can do.
In fact, the hypothetical recovery concept is near nonsense anyway. Even if we imagine that hard drives bits are something like ________ wide, and sometimes they write __++++++ and sometimes ------__, resulting in ------++, you can't actually recover from that. You don't know when that ++ got there. For all you know, that was a piece let over from two years ago, and the bit before the wipe was 0. Hell, for all you know, the bit started as +++++++ when the drive was made, and the first low-level format and every single write afterward just wrote to the last 6/8th of the bit, so you don't even know it ever was actually a one at all.
It's the equivalent of asserting that you can look at a dartboard and claim you can find the score of the last game. Uh, no, you can't. You might can see, with a microscope, every single dart that ever hit the board...but that tells you fuck all about the previous score, or who won, or what order they were thrown in.
For data to be recovered from 'before the wipe', you have to imagine that somehow the wipe was fundamentally different than every other write operation that happened before. That all other write operations helpfully left no traces of the previous state behind, but the 0 wipe did.
Before you say 'Well, a lot of places are only written once', I have to point out that a) It's exactly the changing places, the data, that is important. You know, the new stuff that got put over that file you deleted the other day. Recovering a Windows system file that got written to the disk at install and hasn't been written to again is not very useful. And b) all places on a hard drive are written to start with, it's called a low-level format. Before that they hold random 'data', which means there's nice, utterly random 'data' sitting there in the parts of the drive that don't get written to. How you can tell that from parts of the drive that did get written to at some point but somehow not written to in the wipe is a very very very interesting question...
Oh, and it's even worse than that. Because of how hard drives encode data, if you guess on one bit, you'll blow up the entire rest of the byte. If you don't know the value of bit 2, you can't know 3-8 either.
The entire thing is preposterous. The shame is that the only people who've ever called the urban legend what it is were so poorly funded. Someone should set up a Randi Foundation open-donation thing for that...I might kick in $10.
And talking about what the NSA 'might' do is insane. There's all sorts of magical tech the NSA might have, but, as I said, even pretending that hard drives actually had incredibly crappy wandering-all-over-the-drive tracks, which they do not, this would not actually let you put together an actual stream of any particular point in time. All you know is that every bit on the drive was zero at one point (because it was wiped) and not zero at one point (Because it was random before low-level format.). Good job figuring that out.
Many people have accomplished what they've claimed, but then Randi came up with extra tests, until they failed.
Randi very clearly lays out of the bounds of any tests beforehand, and what is considered proof.
If anyone had actually passed that test, they would, you know, sue him, because they were promised payment of a million dollars if they did that. There is an actual contract with actual winning conditions.
But since you've made that claim, you should be able to demonstrate that Randi has, at least once, laid out a test and winning conditions, and then backpeddled once someone actually won.
Or you are a liar and a slanderer who has accused someone of criminal fraud.
He's not interested in "statistics", but demands "undisputable show of magic", but without magic tricks.
Yeah, you moron, because that's what he's testing.
If he let people win by 'statistics', he'd have a constant stream of people claiming they could predict a coin toss 75% of the time....and eventually one of them would happen to do that. Because that's how statistics work.
Certainly a free pilot episode. Perhaps even the first two or three. With none, or almost none, commercials. (Perhaps a quick ten second 'Sponsored by Ford' or whatever.)
At hopefully by then you've pushed 'Like' and you get each episode as it comes out, of, if you're way behind, it just downloads the next three episodes and deletes them and gets more as you go along. With normal amounts of commercials if you don't pay, without any if you did.
There's all sorts of ways to do this.
And it changes the whole paradigm for advertisers and for networks. I suspect that TV networks will be expected to supply all the shows, all the time. No syndication or first-run or exclusivity...advertisers just buy the right to put ads in the show.
In fact, TV networks wouldn't have to set the prices or anything...what could happen is that advertisers simply bid how much they'd like to pay to show you an ad during that show, and you have to 'outbid' them to get rid of that ad. I.e., whoever pays the network the most would decide if there was an ad or not, and what ad it was. (Perhaps there'd be groups you could join and they'd bid on your shows instead to show you less, but very targeted, ads.)
Or, alternately, this could work backwards...TV networks are willing to let someone watch the show for a fee, and advertisers 'buy' that right to resell to you, and you are, essentially, interacting with them. (Or direct if you'll pay.)
There's all sorts of interesting stuff that is utterly impossible because of stupid licensing laws, but, like I said, all it takes is one studio actually starting a series like this.
As for the lack of DRM and playing it anywhere, there's no way in hell it will happen, although it's a sorta stupid problem. And easily solvable:
What they need to do is only distribute stuff with commercials, and then it doesn't matter what DRM you have, you can watch it with commericials, just like over the air. And there's a sorta DRM software that runs on your computer, and only your computer, that will decode the skips of the commercials so you can watch it without.
I said graphic or web designers, you idjit. Graphic designers or web designers. Two separate things.
GIMP is more than enough for web designers. What's keeping them on Windows is the lack of professional web design tools like Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Web. (And while I'm sure someone is about to argue that runs under Wine, the cost of a Windows license pales in comparison to it, so there's not any point even attempting that.)
But GIMP sure as hell not enough for graphic designers. You know, people in the industry of graphic design? Photoshop is the low end of their software.
There are plenty of tools on Linux that are good enough for any dabbler in the field. There are HTML editors good enough for amateurs who've decided to make a web page, and there are image manipulation tools good enough for web designers or whoever wants a quick image.
Which is what I said.
What there are not, however, are the commercial expert tools that professionals in various fields use, or open source software that could be replacements for them. There are obviously exceptions, like Blender, but not many.
My experience thus far is that in-car FM broadcasting kinda sucks,
It all depends on your car. Some cars can do them no problem, some do not have the antenna in a place where it can pick up things inside the cab.
and the UI experience of an MP3 player really sucks.
As opposed to the UI of selecting a song on the radio.
Oh, wait.
An mp3 player functionally is better than a radio even if you don't select any music at all. You could have the damn thing in random, and it still have two advantages over radio: a) only music you selected, and b) no ads or annoy talking people.
Complaining that it's hard to do things that are physically impossible with radio is silly.
And then there's messing with a touch screen at 100 km/h... no.
...if you're going to buy an MP3 player for your car, it shouldn't have a touch screen.
If you have a smartphone you use as an MP3 player, you can either get a dock that has buttons (I have a nice iPhone dock with a remote control.), you can get a bluetooth input/control device (Which is admittedly expensive), or you can just, you know, buy a cheapo physical mp3 player in addition to it. You can get them that plug into cigarette lighters and have FM transmitters. (If that works.) See below for what I used to have.
My primary commuting vehicle has a functional MP3-CD player.
Yeah, mp3 CD is an easy alternative, especially if they can read CD-RWs. Buy a ten pack, and just write different genres to them, and swap them out and rewrite them when you get tired of them.
I used to do the same thing with SD cards. I had a cigarette lighter FM transmitter that read them, and I had about 5 128meg or 256meg cards (Collected mostly for free from people who upgraded their camera memory.) that had two or three albums on them on them I'd swap out before my drive.
But, hell, even normal CDs are better than the radio.
I mean, I sometimes have to drive my grandmother places, and her car doesn't have any inputs, and just normal CD (and tape deck) support. I could put in a tape adapter, I guess, but in actuality I just stuck in a CD.
Listening to the radio in the car is the epoch of laziness, unless you actually want to listen to the radio. Which can happen...perhaps you like the commentary or want traffic reports. But otherwise, it's just crazy.
And I say this as someone who doesn't have a working tape deck or CD player or inputs on his car radio, and took apart his broken tape deck to hijack the audio inputs so he could rig up an AUX in. (After the cigarette lighter thingy broken and I really wanted to hook in my iPhone directly.)
I spent like three hours of work avoiding the radio in my car...people who complain about what the radio plays but can't seem to spend the five minutes and trivial money it would take them to figure something out are idiots. CD, mp3 or otherwise, mp3 players, aux in or FM, whatever. But don't sit there and listen to the crap on the radio for the 1000th time like an idiot.
I think the general climate of/. is usually that there are zero disadvantages to open source, that it's advantageous in every way, and if your firm does not find this it's because your firm is peopled by idiots.
No, that's the strawman that people argue against. Absolutely no one here actually argues that, at all.
There are specific proprietary systems that if your company decides to use now they're probably populated by idiots. For example, a company that standardizes on Outlook Express as their mail client should probably just die. Or one that uses MS Exchange just for email...WTF?
Then again, there are specific open source systems that if your company decides to use now they're probably populated by idiots. Sendmail leaps to mind.
Other than that, you should use the tool best suited for the job and the cheapest. 90% of the time on a server, that's Linux or a BSD.
And probably 50% of the time for office drones, of people who flip between a web browser, an email client, and Word...if people actually looked at it, Linux would be the best choice.
Do not cite exceptions, or why that can't possibly work all the time or how you need some other application, I said 50% of the time. I am aware that sometimes they need programs that only work under Windows, or only under IE6. (Although that decision itself was made by idiots, who have been located the hard way as MS drops support for IE6 so that shit no longer works which is why you don't do that 'require proprietary interfaces' in the first place.)
For graphic or web designers or whatever, it's probably closer to 10% of the time they could use Linux, because the tools aren't there, and most people know this. (And hence people will argue against a strawman 'GIMP is nowhere near photoshop'...we know that.)
At this point, on slashdot, discussions about Windows involve one group of people inventing the other side, just imagining that the other side demands everyone use Linux all the time, for everyone, and them arguing against that. Meanwhile absolutely no one, or at most some trolls, are actually stating that.
I'm always baffled by the people who listen to the radio in their car, period.
Can they not afford one of those FM broadcasting MP3 players? Or something to hook their mp3 player into? Everyone has an mp3 player, right? They're like 20 dollars. If you can't afford them, you can't really afford a car.
I mean, for the price of one tank of car, you can never again listen to the radio in the car. Never again listen to ads, never again listen to 'popular' song that you hear every 30 minutes and are ready to kill someone to make them stop.
I just don't get it. People spend 10 dollars to be entertained for 2 hours at a movie theater, but won't spend twice that be be entertained during the 50,000 hours that they will drive in their car. Pay attention to the actual world you live in, run a cost/benefit analysis, and spend 20 dollars and ten minutes hooking it up, and ten minutes every week loading new music (or podcasts, or audio books) on it, to make every single trip you ever take better for you, you idiots.
I don't buy a car every 2.1 years (which is, according to a recent car salesman I bumped into, the national average).
That cannot possibly be true. I've never met anyone who buys cars more often than every other year, and two-year cycle people are the crazy rare exceptions.
There'd have to be a hell of a lot people out there buying cars every year to bring the average down to 2.1.
Have you considered the idea that the used car salesman was lying to you? (Crazy thought, I know.)
In my book, the difference between good art and bad art is the message, the idea communicated. The main thing isn't really the beauty of the sounds or the colors or the shapes, although it's important too. The most important thing in art is whether there is some new idea communicated, some new inspiration, something to be said, informed, accused, called out, whatever. Pretty colors with no idea inside is just a pretty bottle with no wine inside.
Bingo.That is what art is. Art is a second level of communication, a second level of symbols, besides the obvious ones.
It can still be 'art' if it's not a particularly deep level of communication.
I mean, I look my Mtn Dew(1) bottle, and there's art. It's all angular, and I guess it's trying to convey a sense of speed or jaggedness or something which is the second level, beyond the obvious 'product name and triangles' that is the first level message. Not incredibly deep art, but, then again, it's a logo, we don't really expect that much from it, and 99% of the people oily notice it subconsciously anyway.
But we do expect more from music. Almost all the second level message from pop music are 'Happy!'. 'Sad!', or 'Dance!', which are incredibly simplistic messages, but is what happens when you aim the second level at the lowest common denominator. A very simplistic emotional message at exactly a single magnitude, carefully calculated to fit an average person. Thanks to the record companies, that's where all music is aimed.
We don't get anything like the Beatles' song 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' which hypnotizes people until they jolt awake to 'Hear Comes The Sun'. You can like that or not, but it sure as hell is good art.
Good art is just 'good at being art', it doesn't mean you like it. In fact, if someone doesn't understand and dislike the second level message, it's probably failed as art.
People who like pop music think the criticisms of it are aimed by people who don't like it, and, while there are plenty of reasons to dislike some pop songs (Although it's usually just overexposure.), the fact is, pop song are deliberately designed to have almost no second level message at all besides the blandest single emotion, while being horribly overengineered at the first level, and thus are barely art at all.
1) Yes, that is apparently the name of that drink now. Mtn Dew. Someone has stolen an N, A, O, I, and U. Maybe they left AN IOU for that. (I must apologize for the lame pun.)
You don't want Doctor Who at the same time as the US air date. You want it at the same time as the UK air date.
There are all sorts of subscription models that make sense, but they seem unwilling to even consider.
For example, how about selling DVDs in advance? People could buy a DVD at the start of the season, get an empty package, and get streaming without commercials a day early, and have a DVD mailed every month or so and fill up the box. (Or you could buy at any time and get DVDs to that moment.) This would seem perfect for cult TV shows that sell huge amounts of DVDs but don't have amazing ratings.
How about letting people download encrypted TV shows in advance to computers, with commercials, and then releasing the key at the moment the show airs? They could even do the right local commercials so the advertisers get their money, and have DRM to delete the show after a week. It looks exactly like broadcast TV, but, hey, you don't need cable or receive digital TV or anything, and you could do it the next day if you'd missed it. Software to do this could even be embedded in DVRs...imagine if you could scroll backwards and pick a show 'to record' that already aired, and be told it would show up in an hour or so. Or if you pick too many shows at once it downloads one of them instead of recording. (Or, hell, it just downloads them regardless, and just pretends to show them live.)
Which, yes, people would crack it...which would give them a digital copy of the show with commercials, as opposed to a digital copy of the show without commercials that they can already download illegally, so that's hardly a loss for the network. The episodes could, however, have perfect encryption before the show airs...that's not DRM, that's just actual encryption you can't get past without the key.
Combine those two ideas, and people with 'advance DVDs' could get with a downloaded copy without commercials. You buy an advance DVD, your DVR (Which has access to that information.) starts downloading that show in advance, without commercials, and shows you that instead of the on-air show. Just magically. And that copy stays on your DVR until you delete it, and you can go get it again if you want.
The problem is that industry is a mess of contracts and people who use them as excuses to avoid doing anything at all to change the system. It is, frankly astonishing that Hulu happened at all, but they really are pushing to not have that be the television paradigm.
In fact, because of all the contracts between broadcasters and networks, the first people to do stuff like this are probably going to have to be a cable network, who don't have agreements with broadcasters about commercials, with a new series with contracts specifically written for handling stuff like this.
And it's going to totally fuck up syndication deals too, but, frankly, those are on the way out. No one's going to watch reruns like that in the future...they'll just demand 'An episode of BtVS I haven't seen in a while' and get that episode with instantly inserted ads from the people who hold the 'syndication rights'. They're not just going to fill the extra airwaves with old shows. It will function more like 'free, ad supported, on demand programming'. (Which will actually work a lot better for the advertisers, but is going to be nearly impossible to figure out how to do for current shows, legally.)
'I promise you that you're allowed to do enough queries.'
That's sorta what I meant by that.
There are two classic mistakes of SQL programmers:
1) Not having the server do any filtering. You need four columns from a single row? Just SELECT * FROM table, and then filter yourself. Do that SELECT for all ten records you need.
If at any point, you're getting more rows than you need, you're almost certainly doing it wrong. If you don't know how to make SQL filter that way, then look it up, no one expects you to remember all that. (Feel free to have some smaller extra fields, though, if you think you might need them. Nothing is more annoying than constantly editing in and out fields of a query as you use them later or not. That sort of optimization goes at the end.)
This way, obviously, causes insanely poor performance, and people cautioning against it leads to:
2) People afraid to do any query. One, maybe two, and that's it. Under worse circumstances this results in it functionally not being SQL, because they query each entire table once, and stick it in an array somewhere. They'd never even consider doing a sub-query. (OTOH, half the people seem to think JOINs, inexplicably, are free. I don't understand that logic.)
No. You really can do complicated queries, you can do lots of queries, you can even do recursive querying. Three fourths of the problem with #1 people isn't the 'queries', it's moving all that data around in memory. It's not the amount of queries, it's the size of the results, and the fact you then have to loop through it in your program to find it.
That's not to say you shouldn't an SQL query as 'costly', but it's no more costly than looping over an array of 100 strings and doing a compare with each. It's something you don't want to do for no reason, but it's fine if you have a reason. Most programming languages have some sort of timing ability...if you don't believe me, test how long a statement takes.
Of course, a lot of programmers are working on shittily designed databases, where it might actually be pretty costly to run queries.
Column-oriented databases are the first databases.
Many very old code still uses something like that, using a file for each column, and just writing each field direct to record_number*file_multiplier, where each column is in its own file.
This allows a lot of neat tricks. You need almost no file locking, assuming that writing a range of bytes in a file is atomic, which is a reasonably safe assumption. (You still have to lock on adding records.) You can backup easily, or fix errors, although it's very hard to have consistency errors anyway.
It was the best method of the time. Certainly better than just one file, which made adding new columns utterly impossible. And you can have additional non-fixed-record-size files if you really need them, but only use them when you need them.
And then, tada, we invented RDBMSes. Which work better than that in 99.99999% of the cases.
You actually hit the nail on the head as to why some people use NoSQL stuff...they don't really understand how to use a database to do 3D stuff, or hierarchical stuff. (Hint, you have an id column and a parent_id column, and recurs. I promise you that you're allowed to do enough queries.)
And the easiest way to do a 'third dimension' is just to have a field specifying 'in what dimension' a record is, obviously with an index, and filtering on it. Using multiple tables would get somewhat unwieldy, but I can see that if the dataset is huge and you'd never need to get records from multiple dimensions at once.
Of course, I'm not sure why people move to NoSQL, because you can't do hierarchical stuff or 3 dimensional stuff or anything like that in NoSQL either.
The problem is that a lot of people describing how NoSQL stuff works seem to have no idea how RDBMSes work to start with. Whereas I, OTOH, only have the vaguest idea of how column-oriented work, but I do know what is possible in RDBMSes, and know most of the NoSQL examples that people give are trivially easy in RDBMS. (Even the ones I think of.)
I know what column-oriented databases are, I had a sarcasm failure. I hadn't realized so many people lower in this discussion actually didn't know how NoSQL stuff worked, or I wouldn't have satirized the whole thing by pretending not to know.
And you realize what he described makes no sense to use a column-oriented database for, right? He's basically taken something that should be in a perfectly normal RDBMS and made it twice as complicated. He's described a one dimensional array of data, and decided to access it sideways. Using something utterly unsuited for that.
Which is, you know, what a lot of NoSQL stuff is used for, stuff that works perfectly find in a RDBMS.
Neither does what you describe. If your database can't handle enough data to return a column consisting of an intersection of a single year and a single region, you either need to stop using sqlite or learn how to make indexes. Considering there are only 7 billion people on the earth, it's hard to see how census data could possibly contain enough data to make an RDBMS impractical.
Yeah, but it's hard to figure out how to do that differently, and all RPGs have that problem to some extent...why are you screwing around getting a cat out of a tree when the fate of the world is in the balance?
I didn't say ME had fixed all realism problems with RPGs.;) Just one where, inexplicably, the protagonist is played as 'evil' and has absolutely no motive for what he's doing. (And, no, tiny rewards of cash are not reasonable reasons to do that sort of nonsense.)
And they did that by not letting you play evil, but in a way that almost no one notices, because you can still play as 'violent immoral jerkass', an utter antihero, but still have entirely in-character behavior the entire time you are saving everyone.
NoSQL stuff is useful in weird extreme fringe cases, where you need to access data in essentially random ways. Digg, Facebook, and Google all NoSQL databases, and I think the first two use Cassandra.
Specifically, you kinda make your own rows. It's like having permanent multiple JOINs that you can access instantly, from what I understand. (This is what this article is talking about, it's now unlimited.)
Essentially, it's a giant blob of data that exists, and you draw lines on it in advance that are your results, and you can get those result instantly, at the cost of being unable to decide to get other results in real time.
Many of the products let you have them on different servers, so you can have a 'people who have voted for this Digg' table or something, on the server that handles that thing.
I'm not entirely sure how it works, but that's basically it. Oh, and the fact they talk about 'columns' and 'rows' is just utter stupidity in naming to confuse everyone. Basically, they simply tend to keep each column as a file, which allows them to do what I mentioned above..copy needed columns, and just needed columns, to other servers.
It's really weird, and, like I said, only relevant for giant giant databases. There's no way that google could do a full text search on a RDBMS, regardless if it fits in Oracle. What it can do is make a 'column' for each word, and a 'row' for each URL, put different columns on different servers, and that actually works in the non-relational database they use, when there's no way in hell that would work on a RDBMS.
However, more importantly for slashdot, a fuckload of fools think that SQL is somehow 'retarded' and that NoSQL is 'awesome, dude', so they like to play with it, usually by spewing out some crap PHP or Perl or something that works about a tenth as well as just using an RDBMS would work. If they actually understood how to use an RDBMS, that is.
The vast majority of cases though where I've seen people using something like Cassandra or Big Table were ill advised. A properly optimized RDBMS with correctly designed schema can handle all but a few edge cases. Most of the hype these tools are generating is based on a lack of real understanding of how to properly use databases combined with people believing myths about other technologies and helped along by the industry's short memory span.
Indeed, and there are edge cases, like Facebook, or Google, or whatever. The edge cases are gigantic databases that are accessed in certain specific way.
There are probably less edge cases than actual NoSQL codebases, which is pretty surreal. There are more actual products then the number of people who need the products.
And 99.99% of the people playing with them don't need them at all.
Rule of thumb: If you ever have to decide whether or not you need NoSQL or not...you don't. Because the actual databases that would be better off under NoSQL are operating inside corporations where individuals don't ever make that sort of decisions anyway.
The real joke is people using them in ways that are actually slower than any RDBMS, but they think it's 'easier', usually because they never bothered to learn how JOINs work, and don't understand that it's perfectly fine to make a dozen SQL queries on a web page...that's what indexes are for. (Someone should ask them to estimate how many SQL queries a slashdot page takes.)
No one answers 'tens of thousand' question questionnaires. At 5 seconds a question, that's 28 hours for 20,000 questions. (And let's not even hypothesis how long the damn results would take to read.)
Alternately, you think you need more than one field a question, which means you are doing it wrong.
I don't know what you mean 'careful redesign into a relational structure' either. A sane design might be to remove the person's info to another table, if people answer more than one questionaire(1), but if that information is taking up more than 15 columns, you are doing it wrong there also.
1) Which we know they don't, because they don't have time. They're still answering your last insanely massive questionaire.
That is possibly the stupidest design imaginable. You wouldn't be storing each DNA sequence in a field. DNA is full of variable length stuff, so that one slight insertion or deletion or change between species would result in the rest of the fields being offset, which would a) be hell to actually update, and b) entirely pointless because you can't compare them or search for them as fields.
I'm not entirely sure what you would be doing, but it wouldn't be that. I'm not entirely sure what the Jurassic Park people were trying to do...I know they had to 'patch' some DNA, both to cause the lysine defect and to fix gaps in the record. (Inexplicably with frog DNA instead of bird DNA.) I don't know that a 'database' really makes any sense for either of those, but even if you do need some sort of database, putting individual DNA in fields would render it unusable.
What really should have been done is 'decompiling' to some sort of 'machine language' and then editing, with diffs to frog DNA and merges to patches they wished to apply, and 'recompiling'. (Which is not even slightly possible even today, as we barely know what any DNA does, but it's called suspension of disbelief.)
Cassandra doesn't have "tables", and Cassandra's rows and columns have nothing to do with the rows and columns you're used to in SQL databases. Until the Cassandra people fix their stupid nomenclature, you will continue to be confused.
Fixed that for you.
As an aside what sort of logic led to calling them 'columns' and 'rows' when they don't exist in tables? Do they not grasp that the entire concept of tables is, to quote the first sentence in Wikipedia, 'a means of arranging data in rows and columns.', and that if you don't have 'tables', you don't have 'columns' and 'rows'? That is what a table is.
Oh, wait, they're NoSQL people. They should be classified over with the functional programmers and the microkernel guys in the 'Everything computer programming does that actually works in the real world is wrong' group.
Wow, it's almost like you've invented databases, but rotated 90 degrees so that every single existing programming paradigm fails and you have to invent new ones to loop through columns.
Instead of what every other database does, load the rows you want, and just those rows. With nicely named headers that get used to label the parts of each row. Oh, and types that vary per column.
And indexes on columns...wait, let me guess, you can now index rows...although that can't actually work, programmaticly, because the columns aren't stored next to each other, so locating a value in a specific row can't tell how to retrieve that entire column..WAIT!
Did this just exchange the meaning of rows and columns in some sort of mindfuck, but left everything the same?
This is making more and more sense for Bizarro, but not really for anyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
That seems easy enough to subvert if you know it exists. Just watch for the unplugging of a keyboard, mouse, monitor, or network, throw up a screen demanding a password, and shut down if it's not given.
It's a neat trick, but if Full Disk Encryption products can't deal with this soon, they're pretty stupid.
If the NSA really wanted the data on that drive they may be able to do it.
The point is this is all a nonsense urban legend that actually started on an entirely different type of drive entirely, an MFM drive, with much fuzzier bits, and someone hypothesized that data recover might theoretically be possible even after an overwrite, and you might want to do it with different patterns.
This hypothetical 'might' on much older drives has somehow become the actual literal truth, resulting in people running multiple wipe operations and even physically destroying drives, despite no one ever demonstrating recovery of a once-wiped file in the entire history of computers. Ever. At all. It has never once happened, no actual data recovery firm claims they can do.
In fact, the hypothetical recovery concept is near nonsense anyway. Even if we imagine that hard drives bits are something like ________ wide, and sometimes they write __++++++ and sometimes ------__, resulting in ------++, you can't actually recover from that. You don't know when that ++ got there. For all you know, that was a piece let over from two years ago, and the bit before the wipe was 0. Hell, for all you know, the bit started as +++++++ when the drive was made, and the first low-level format and every single write afterward just wrote to the last 6/8th of the bit, so you don't even know it ever was actually a one at all.
It's the equivalent of asserting that you can look at a dartboard and claim you can find the score of the last game. Uh, no, you can't. You might can see, with a microscope, every single dart that ever hit the board...but that tells you fuck all about the previous score, or who won, or what order they were thrown in.
For data to be recovered from 'before the wipe', you have to imagine that somehow the wipe was fundamentally different than every other write operation that happened before. That all other write operations helpfully left no traces of the previous state behind, but the 0 wipe did.
Before you say 'Well, a lot of places are only written once', I have to point out that a) It's exactly the changing places, the data, that is important. You know, the new stuff that got put over that file you deleted the other day. Recovering a Windows system file that got written to the disk at install and hasn't been written to again is not very useful. And b) all places on a hard drive are written to start with, it's called a low-level format. Before that they hold random 'data', which means there's nice, utterly random 'data' sitting there in the parts of the drive that don't get written to. How you can tell that from parts of the drive that did get written to at some point but somehow not written to in the wipe is a very very very interesting question...
Oh, and it's even worse than that. Because of how hard drives encode data, if you guess on one bit, you'll blow up the entire rest of the byte. If you don't know the value of bit 2, you can't know 3-8 either.
The entire thing is preposterous. The shame is that the only people who've ever called the urban legend what it is were so poorly funded. Someone should set up a Randi Foundation open-donation thing for that...I might kick in $10.
And talking about what the NSA 'might' do is insane. There's all sorts of magical tech the NSA might have, but, as I said, even pretending that hard drives actually had incredibly crappy wandering-all-over-the-drive tracks, which they do not, this would not actually let you put together an actual stream of any particular point in time. All you know is that every bit on the drive was zero at one point (because it was wiped) and not zero at one point (Because it was random before low-level format.). Good job figuring that out.
Many people have accomplished what they've claimed, but then Randi came up with extra tests, until they failed.
Randi very clearly lays out of the bounds of any tests beforehand, and what is considered proof.
If anyone had actually passed that test, they would, you know, sue him, because they were promised payment of a million dollars if they did that. There is an actual contract with actual winning conditions.
But since you've made that claim, you should be able to demonstrate that Randi has, at least once, laid out a test and winning conditions, and then backpeddled once someone actually won.
Or you are a liar and a slanderer who has accused someone of criminal fraud.
He's not interested in "statistics", but demands "undisputable show of magic", but without magic tricks.
Yeah, you moron, because that's what he's testing.
If he let people win by 'statistics', he'd have a constant stream of people claiming they could predict a coin toss 75% of the time....and eventually one of them would happen to do that. Because that's how statistics work.
Certainly a free pilot episode. Perhaps even the first two or three. With none, or almost none, commercials. (Perhaps a quick ten second 'Sponsored by Ford' or whatever.)
At hopefully by then you've pushed 'Like' and you get each episode as it comes out, of, if you're way behind, it just downloads the next three episodes and deletes them and gets more as you go along. With normal amounts of commercials if you don't pay, without any if you did.
There's all sorts of ways to do this.
And it changes the whole paradigm for advertisers and for networks. I suspect that TV networks will be expected to supply all the shows, all the time. No syndication or first-run or exclusivity...advertisers just buy the right to put ads in the show.
In fact, TV networks wouldn't have to set the prices or anything...what could happen is that advertisers simply bid how much they'd like to pay to show you an ad during that show, and you have to 'outbid' them to get rid of that ad. I.e., whoever pays the network the most would decide if there was an ad or not, and what ad it was. (Perhaps there'd be groups you could join and they'd bid on your shows instead to show you less, but very targeted, ads.)
Or, alternately, this could work backwards...TV networks are willing to let someone watch the show for a fee, and advertisers 'buy' that right to resell to you, and you are, essentially, interacting with them. (Or direct if you'll pay.)
There's all sorts of interesting stuff that is utterly impossible because of stupid licensing laws, but, like I said, all it takes is one studio actually starting a series like this.
As for the lack of DRM and playing it anywhere, there's no way in hell it will happen, although it's a sorta stupid problem. And easily solvable:
What they need to do is only distribute stuff with commercials, and then it doesn't matter what DRM you have, you can watch it with commericials, just like over the air. And there's a sorta DRM software that runs on your computer, and only your computer, that will decode the skips of the commercials so you can watch it without.
I said graphic or web designers, you idjit. Graphic designers or web designers. Two separate things.
GIMP is more than enough for web designers. What's keeping them on Windows is the lack of professional web design tools like Dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression Web. (And while I'm sure someone is about to argue that runs under Wine, the cost of a Windows license pales in comparison to it, so there's not any point even attempting that.)
But GIMP sure as hell not enough for graphic designers. You know, people in the industry of graphic design? Photoshop is the low end of their software.
There are plenty of tools on Linux that are good enough for any dabbler in the field. There are HTML editors good enough for amateurs who've decided to make a web page, and there are image manipulation tools good enough for web designers or whoever wants a quick image.
Which is what I said.
What there are not, however, are the commercial expert tools that professionals in various fields use, or open source software that could be replacements for them. There are obviously exceptions, like Blender, but not many.
My experience thus far is that in-car FM broadcasting kinda sucks,
It all depends on your car. Some cars can do them no problem, some do not have the antenna in a place where it can pick up things inside the cab.
and the UI experience of an MP3 player really sucks.
As opposed to the UI of selecting a song on the radio.
Oh, wait.
An mp3 player functionally is better than a radio even if you don't select any music at all. You could have the damn thing in random, and it still have two advantages over radio: a) only music you selected, and b) no ads or annoy talking people.
Complaining that it's hard to do things that are physically impossible with radio is silly.
And then there's messing with a touch screen at 100 km/h... no.
If you have a smartphone you use as an MP3 player, you can either get a dock that has buttons (I have a nice iPhone dock with a remote control.), you can get a bluetooth input/control device (Which is admittedly expensive), or you can just, you know, buy a cheapo physical mp3 player in addition to it. You can get them that plug into cigarette lighters and have FM transmitters. (If that works.) See below for what I used to have.
My primary commuting vehicle has a functional MP3-CD player.
Yeah, mp3 CD is an easy alternative, especially if they can read CD-RWs. Buy a ten pack, and just write different genres to them, and swap them out and rewrite them when you get tired of them.
I used to do the same thing with SD cards. I had a cigarette lighter FM transmitter that read them, and I had about 5 128meg or 256meg cards (Collected mostly for free from people who upgraded their camera memory.) that had two or three albums on them on them I'd swap out before my drive.
But, hell, even normal CDs are better than the radio.
I mean, I sometimes have to drive my grandmother places, and her car doesn't have any inputs, and just normal CD (and tape deck) support. I could put in a tape adapter, I guess, but in actuality I just stuck in a CD.
Listening to the radio in the car is the epoch of laziness, unless you actually want to listen to the radio. Which can happen...perhaps you like the commentary or want traffic reports. But otherwise, it's just crazy.
And I say this as someone who doesn't have a working tape deck or CD player or inputs on his car radio, and took apart his broken tape deck to hijack the audio inputs so he could rig up an AUX in. (After the cigarette lighter thingy broken and I really wanted to hook in my iPhone directly.)
I spent like three hours of work avoiding the radio in my car...people who complain about what the radio plays but can't seem to spend the five minutes and trivial money it would take them to figure something out are idiots. CD, mp3 or otherwise, mp3 players, aux in or FM, whatever. But don't sit there and listen to the crap on the radio for the 1000th time like an idiot.
I think the general climate of /. is usually that there are zero disadvantages to open source, that it's advantageous in every way, and if your firm does not find this it's because your firm is peopled by idiots.
No, that's the strawman that people argue against. Absolutely no one here actually argues that, at all.
There are specific proprietary systems that if your company decides to use now they're probably populated by idiots. For example, a company that standardizes on Outlook Express as their mail client should probably just die. Or one that uses MS Exchange just for email...WTF?
Then again, there are specific open source systems that if your company decides to use now they're probably populated by idiots. Sendmail leaps to mind.
Other than that, you should use the tool best suited for the job and the cheapest. 90% of the time on a server, that's Linux or a BSD.
And probably 50% of the time for office drones, of people who flip between a web browser, an email client, and Word...if people actually looked at it, Linux would be the best choice.
Do not cite exceptions, or why that can't possibly work all the time or how you need some other application, I said 50% of the time. I am aware that sometimes they need programs that only work under Windows, or only under IE6. (Although that decision itself was made by idiots, who have been located the hard way as MS drops support for IE6 so that shit no longer works which is why you don't do that 'require proprietary interfaces' in the first place.)
For graphic or web designers or whatever, it's probably closer to 10% of the time they could use Linux, because the tools aren't there, and most people know this. (And hence people will argue against a strawman 'GIMP is nowhere near photoshop'...we know that.)
At this point, on slashdot, discussions about Windows involve one group of people inventing the other side, just imagining that the other side demands everyone use Linux all the time, for everyone, and them arguing against that. Meanwhile absolutely no one, or at most some trolls, are actually stating that.
If I was worried about being tracked my cell phone would be sitting at home, where I would claim I was the entire time.
I'm always baffled by the people who listen to the radio in their car, period.
Can they not afford one of those FM broadcasting MP3 players? Or something to hook their mp3 player into? Everyone has an mp3 player, right? They're like 20 dollars. If you can't afford them, you can't really afford a car.
I mean, for the price of one tank of car, you can never again listen to the radio in the car. Never again listen to ads, never again listen to 'popular' song that you hear every 30 minutes and are ready to kill someone to make them stop.
I just don't get it. People spend 10 dollars to be entertained for 2 hours at a movie theater, but won't spend twice that be be entertained during the 50,000 hours that they will drive in their car. Pay attention to the actual world you live in, run a cost/benefit analysis, and spend 20 dollars and ten minutes hooking it up, and ten minutes every week loading new music (or podcasts, or audio books) on it, to make every single trip you ever take better for you, you idiots.
I don't buy a car every 2.1 years (which is, according to a recent car salesman I bumped into, the national average).
That cannot possibly be true. I've never met anyone who buys cars more often than every other year, and two-year cycle people are the crazy rare exceptions.
There'd have to be a hell of a lot people out there buying cars every year to bring the average down to 2.1.
Have you considered the idea that the used car salesman was lying to you? (Crazy thought, I know.)
In my book, the difference between good art and bad art is the message, the idea communicated. The main thing isn't really the beauty of the sounds or the colors or the shapes, although it's important too. The most important thing in art is whether there is some new idea communicated, some new inspiration, something to be said, informed, accused, called out, whatever. Pretty colors with no idea inside is just a pretty bottle with no wine inside.
Bingo.That is what art is. Art is a second level of communication, a second level of symbols, besides the obvious ones.
It can still be 'art' if it's not a particularly deep level of communication.
I mean, I look my Mtn Dew(1) bottle, and there's art. It's all angular, and I guess it's trying to convey a sense of speed or jaggedness or something which is the second level, beyond the obvious 'product name and triangles' that is the first level message. Not incredibly deep art, but, then again, it's a logo, we don't really expect that much from it, and 99% of the people oily notice it subconsciously anyway.
But we do expect more from music. Almost all the second level message from pop music are 'Happy!'. 'Sad!', or 'Dance!', which are incredibly simplistic messages, but is what happens when you aim the second level at the lowest common denominator. A very simplistic emotional message at exactly a single magnitude, carefully calculated to fit an average person. Thanks to the record companies, that's where all music is aimed.
We don't get anything like the Beatles' song 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' which hypnotizes people until they jolt awake to 'Hear Comes The Sun'. You can like that or not, but it sure as hell is good art.
Good art is just 'good at being art', it doesn't mean you like it. In fact, if someone doesn't understand and dislike the second level message, it's probably failed as art.
People who like pop music think the criticisms of it are aimed by people who don't like it, and, while there are plenty of reasons to dislike some pop songs (Although it's usually just overexposure.), the fact is, pop song are deliberately designed to have almost no second level message at all besides the blandest single emotion, while being horribly overengineered at the first level, and thus are barely art at all.
1) Yes, that is apparently the name of that drink now. Mtn Dew. Someone has stolen an N, A, O, I, and U. Maybe they left AN IOU for that. (I must apologize for the lame pun.)
You don't want Doctor Who at the same time as the US air date. You want it at the same time as the UK air date.
There are all sorts of subscription models that make sense, but they seem unwilling to even consider.
For example, how about selling DVDs in advance? People could buy a DVD at the start of the season, get an empty package, and get streaming without commercials a day early, and have a DVD mailed every month or so and fill up the box. (Or you could buy at any time and get DVDs to that moment.) This would seem perfect for cult TV shows that sell huge amounts of DVDs but don't have amazing ratings.
How about letting people download encrypted TV shows in advance to computers, with commercials, and then releasing the key at the moment the show airs? They could even do the right local commercials so the advertisers get their money, and have DRM to delete the show after a week. It looks exactly like broadcast TV, but, hey, you don't need cable or receive digital TV or anything, and you could do it the next day if you'd missed it. Software to do this could even be embedded in DVRs...imagine if you could scroll backwards and pick a show 'to record' that already aired, and be told it would show up in an hour or so. Or if you pick too many shows at once it downloads one of them instead of recording. (Or, hell, it just downloads them regardless, and just pretends to show them live.)
Which, yes, people would crack it...which would give them a digital copy of the show with commercials, as opposed to a digital copy of the show without commercials that they can already download illegally, so that's hardly a loss for the network. The episodes could, however, have perfect encryption before the show airs...that's not DRM, that's just actual encryption you can't get past without the key.
Combine those two ideas, and people with 'advance DVDs' could get with a downloaded copy without commercials. You buy an advance DVD, your DVR (Which has access to that information.) starts downloading that show in advance, without commercials, and shows you that instead of the on-air show. Just magically. And that copy stays on your DVR until you delete it, and you can go get it again if you want.
The problem is that industry is a mess of contracts and people who use them as excuses to avoid doing anything at all to change the system. It is, frankly astonishing that Hulu happened at all, but they really are pushing to not have that be the television paradigm.
In fact, because of all the contracts between broadcasters and networks, the first people to do stuff like this are probably going to have to be a cable network, who don't have agreements with broadcasters about commercials, with a new series with contracts specifically written for handling stuff like this.
And it's going to totally fuck up syndication deals too, but, frankly, those are on the way out. No one's going to watch reruns like that in the future...they'll just demand 'An episode of BtVS I haven't seen in a while' and get that episode with instantly inserted ads from the people who hold the 'syndication rights'. They're not just going to fill the extra airwaves with old shows. It will function more like 'free, ad supported, on demand programming'. (Which will actually work a lot better for the advertisers, but is going to be nearly impossible to figure out how to do for current shows, legally.)
'I promise you that you're allowed to do enough queries.'
That's sorta what I meant by that.
There are two classic mistakes of SQL programmers:
1) Not having the server do any filtering. You need four columns from a single row? Just SELECT * FROM table, and then filter yourself. Do that SELECT for all ten records you need.
If at any point, you're getting more rows than you need, you're almost certainly doing it wrong. If you don't know how to make SQL filter that way, then look it up, no one expects you to remember all that. (Feel free to have some smaller extra fields, though, if you think you might need them. Nothing is more annoying than constantly editing in and out fields of a query as you use them later or not. That sort of optimization goes at the end.)
This way, obviously, causes insanely poor performance, and people cautioning against it leads to:
2) People afraid to do any query. One, maybe two, and that's it. Under worse circumstances this results in it functionally not being SQL, because they query each entire table once, and stick it in an array somewhere. They'd never even consider doing a sub-query. (OTOH, half the people seem to think JOINs, inexplicably, are free. I don't understand that logic.)
No. You really can do complicated queries, you can do lots of queries, you can even do recursive querying. Three fourths of the problem with #1 people isn't the 'queries', it's moving all that data around in memory. It's not the amount of queries, it's the size of the results, and the fact you then have to loop through it in your program to find it.
That's not to say you shouldn't an SQL query as 'costly', but it's no more costly than looping over an array of 100 strings and doing a compare with each. It's something you don't want to do for no reason, but it's fine if you have a reason. Most programming languages have some sort of timing ability...if you don't believe me, test how long a statement takes.
Of course, a lot of programmers are working on shittily designed databases, where it might actually be pretty costly to run queries.
Ah, so the answer is 'you think you need more than one field a question'.
I already stated my opinion on that.
Column-oriented databases are the first databases.
Many very old code still uses something like that, using a file for each column, and just writing each field direct to record_number*file_multiplier, where each column is in its own file.
This allows a lot of neat tricks. You need almost no file locking, assuming that writing a range of bytes in a file is atomic, which is a reasonably safe assumption. (You still have to lock on adding records.) You can backup easily, or fix errors, although it's very hard to have consistency errors anyway.
It was the best method of the time. Certainly better than just one file, which made adding new columns utterly impossible. And you can have additional non-fixed-record-size files if you really need them, but only use them when you need them.
And then, tada, we invented RDBMSes. Which work better than that in 99.99999% of the cases.
You actually hit the nail on the head as to why some people use NoSQL stuff...they don't really understand how to use a database to do 3D stuff, or hierarchical stuff. (Hint, you have an id column and a parent_id column, and recurs. I promise you that you're allowed to do enough queries.)
And the easiest way to do a 'third dimension' is just to have a field specifying 'in what dimension' a record is, obviously with an index, and filtering on it. Using multiple tables would get somewhat unwieldy, but I can see that if the dataset is huge and you'd never need to get records from multiple dimensions at once.
Of course, I'm not sure why people move to NoSQL, because you can't do hierarchical stuff or 3 dimensional stuff or anything like that in NoSQL either.
The problem is that a lot of people describing how NoSQL stuff works seem to have no idea how RDBMSes work to start with. Whereas I, OTOH, only have the vaguest idea of how column-oriented work, but I do know what is possible in RDBMSes, and know most of the NoSQL examples that people give are trivially easy in RDBMS. (Even the ones I think of.)
I know what column-oriented databases are, I had a sarcasm failure. I hadn't realized so many people lower in this discussion actually didn't know how NoSQL stuff worked, or I wouldn't have satirized the whole thing by pretending not to know.
And you realize what he described makes no sense to use a column-oriented database for, right? He's basically taken something that should be in a perfectly normal RDBMS and made it twice as complicated. He's described a one dimensional array of data, and decided to access it sideways. Using something utterly unsuited for that.
Which is, you know, what a lot of NoSQL stuff is used for, stuff that works perfectly find in a RDBMS.
Neither does what you describe. If your database can't handle enough data to return a column consisting of an intersection of a single year and a single region, you either need to stop using sqlite or learn how to make indexes. Considering there are only 7 billion people on the earth, it's hard to see how census data could possibly contain enough data to make an RDBMS impractical.
Yeah, but it's hard to figure out how to do that differently, and all RPGs have that problem to some extent...why are you screwing around getting a cat out of a tree when the fate of the world is in the balance?
I didn't say ME had fixed all realism problems with RPGs. ;) Just one where, inexplicably, the protagonist is played as 'evil' and has absolutely no motive for what he's doing. (And, no, tiny rewards of cash are not reasonable reasons to do that sort of nonsense.)
And they did that by not letting you play evil, but in a way that almost no one notices, because you can still play as 'violent immoral jerkass', an utter antihero, but still have entirely in-character behavior the entire time you are saving everyone.
NoSQL stuff is useful in weird extreme fringe cases, where you need to access data in essentially random ways. Digg, Facebook, and Google all NoSQL databases, and I think the first two use Cassandra.
Specifically, you kinda make your own rows. It's like having permanent multiple JOINs that you can access instantly, from what I understand. (This is what this article is talking about, it's now unlimited.)
Essentially, it's a giant blob of data that exists, and you draw lines on it in advance that are your results, and you can get those result instantly, at the cost of being unable to decide to get other results in real time.
Many of the products let you have them on different servers, so you can have a 'people who have voted for this Digg' table or something, on the server that handles that thing.
I'm not entirely sure how it works, but that's basically it. Oh, and the fact they talk about 'columns' and 'rows' is just utter stupidity in naming to confuse everyone. Basically, they simply tend to keep each column as a file, which allows them to do what I mentioned above..copy needed columns, and just needed columns, to other servers.
It's really weird, and, like I said, only relevant for giant giant databases. There's no way that google could do a full text search on a RDBMS, regardless if it fits in Oracle. What it can do is make a 'column' for each word, and a 'row' for each URL, put different columns on different servers, and that actually works in the non-relational database they use, when there's no way in hell that would work on a RDBMS.
However, more importantly for slashdot, a fuckload of fools think that SQL is somehow 'retarded' and that NoSQL is 'awesome, dude', so they like to play with it, usually by spewing out some crap PHP or Perl or something that works about a tenth as well as just using an RDBMS would work. If they actually understood how to use an RDBMS, that is.
The vast majority of cases though where I've seen people using something like Cassandra or Big Table were ill advised. A properly optimized RDBMS with correctly designed schema can handle all but a few edge cases. Most of the hype these tools are generating is based on a lack of real understanding of how to properly use databases combined with people believing myths about other technologies and helped along by the industry's short memory span.
Indeed, and there are edge cases, like Facebook, or Google, or whatever. The edge cases are gigantic databases that are accessed in certain specific way.
There are probably less edge cases than actual NoSQL codebases, which is pretty surreal. There are more actual products then the number of people who need the products.
And 99.99% of the people playing with them don't need them at all.
Rule of thumb: If you ever have to decide whether or not you need NoSQL or not...you don't. Because the actual databases that would be better off under NoSQL are operating inside corporations where individuals don't ever make that sort of decisions anyway.
The real joke is people using them in ways that are actually slower than any RDBMS, but they think it's 'easier', usually because they never bothered to learn how JOINs work, and don't understand that it's perfectly fine to make a dozen SQL queries on a web page...that's what indexes are for. (Someone should ask them to estimate how many SQL queries a slashdot page takes.)
I call bullshit.
No one answers 'tens of thousand' question questionnaires. At 5 seconds a question, that's 28 hours for 20,000 questions. (And let's not even hypothesis how long the damn results would take to read.)
Alternately, you think you need more than one field a question, which means you are doing it wrong.
I don't know what you mean 'careful redesign into a relational structure' either. A sane design might be to remove the person's info to another table, if people answer more than one questionaire(1), but if that information is taking up more than 15 columns, you are doing it wrong there also.
1) Which we know they don't, because they don't have time. They're still answering your last insanely massive questionaire.
That is possibly the stupidest design imaginable. You wouldn't be storing each DNA sequence in a field. DNA is full of variable length stuff, so that one slight insertion or deletion or change between species would result in the rest of the fields being offset, which would a) be hell to actually update, and b) entirely pointless because you can't compare them or search for them as fields.
I'm not entirely sure what you would be doing, but it wouldn't be that. I'm not entirely sure what the Jurassic Park people were trying to do...I know they had to 'patch' some DNA, both to cause the lysine defect and to fix gaps in the record. (Inexplicably with frog DNA instead of bird DNA.) I don't know that a 'database' really makes any sense for either of those, but even if you do need some sort of database, putting individual DNA in fields would render it unusable.
What really should have been done is 'decompiling' to some sort of 'machine language' and then editing, with diffs to frog DNA and merges to patches they wished to apply, and 'recompiling'. (Which is not even slightly possible even today, as we barely know what any DNA does, but it's called suspension of disbelief.)
Cassandra doesn't have "tables", and Cassandra's rows and columns have nothing to do with the rows and columns you're used to in SQL databases. Until the Cassandra people fix their stupid nomenclature, you will continue to be confused.
Fixed that for you.
As an aside what sort of logic led to calling them 'columns' and 'rows' when they don't exist in tables? Do they not grasp that the entire concept of tables is, to quote the first sentence in Wikipedia, 'a means of arranging data in rows and columns.', and that if you don't have 'tables', you don't have 'columns' and 'rows'? That is what a table is.
Oh, wait, they're NoSQL people. They should be classified over with the functional programmers and the microkernel guys in the 'Everything computer programming does that actually works in the real world is wrong' group.
Wow, it's almost like you've invented databases, but rotated 90 degrees so that every single existing programming paradigm fails and you have to invent new ones to loop through columns.
Instead of what every other database does, load the rows you want, and just those rows. With nicely named headers that get used to label the parts of each row. Oh, and types that vary per column.
And indexes on columns...wait, let me guess, you can now index rows...although that can't actually work, programmaticly, because the columns aren't stored next to each other, so locating a value in a specific row can't tell how to retrieve that entire column..WAIT!
Did this just exchange the meaning of rows and columns in some sort of mindfuck, but left everything the same?
This is making more and more sense for Bizarro, but not really for anyone else.
Yes, and millions of humans have no water to drink for decades while that happens. And no water to grow crops.
Stop pointing out obvious shit. We know climate change won't destroy the planet, you morons who think you're so clever pointing that out.
It's just going to kill us