Hey if it wasn't for US you would all be speaking German. (Although, that is a helluva lot better than French.) The main job of the US in the world seems to be constantly saving the Europeans from themselves.
God bless our boys who died at Normandy!!
You know who saved Europe from speaking German?
Russia.
Seriously. Go check out maps of the territory involved, the number of deaths on both sides, the number of troops and tanks and planes involved, etc. The Western Front was a sideshow compared to what happened in the East.
Well, true enough, but then every pair of bodies can be said to be orbiting a common center... even, to take an extreme example, Pluto and the Sun. And generalizing, you can say we're all orbiting the common center of the Milky Way... except the Milky Way and all the other nearby galaxies are orbiting their common center... etc.
Maybe in the systems where the weight difference of planet and its moon is smaller, both orbit a point outside of both bodies. Maybe Pluto and Charon do this. Which one is the planet an which one the moon then?
Now that, I would say, is a reasonable standard for "double planet" vs. "planet and moon."
Most scientist are atheists and choose that because its the intellectual thing to do. Most try to prove there is no God. It's funny that people don't understand how people can believe stuff in the Bible but they have no trouble believing in theories in a textbook that can't be proven either.
I have never known, nor known of, a single scientist who tried "to prove there is no God." Scientists try to prove things about the natural world; if some of the things they prove (and they do prove them, quite extensively, before they get to the "textbook" stage) conflict with your belief in a book of fairy tales, that's your problem, not theirs.
If they find a boat then that prooves what.... that people knew how to build boats?
No, you blasphemer! It proves that EVERY WORD IN THE BIBLE IS TRUE!!! And if you don't accept THIS CLEAR PROOF OF THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH OF THE WORD OF GOD, then clearly you are an ATHEIST SATANIST GOD-HATING AMERICA-HATING TERRORIST COMMUNIST... uh... uh... DEMOCRAT!!!!!!!!
<wipes froth off mouth>
Oops, I must have been channeling Jack Chick for a moment. Anyway...
Seriously, of course, "people knew how to build boats" is exactly what it proves, and all it proves. But that won't stop the fundies from reacting as above. A while back, someone -- wish I could remember who it was (maybe I should pray harder?) -- came up with the best answer I've ever heard to the absurd claims made by ideologues masquerading as archaeologists in regards to "proof"-by-artifact of a literal interpretation of the Bible. It goes roughly like this:
Suppose that a thousand years from now, the only record anyone has of the existence of a place called 'Kansas' is in the form of an old book and a couple of ancient film reels describing the improbable adventures of a young girl from this mythical place. Now suppose that a team of archaeolgists digging around in the Great Plains finds an old road sign that, when it is translated our of the archaic language called 'English,' reads 'Welcome to Kansas.' This can only mean one thing...
Every word in the ancient epic called The Wizard of Oz is absolutely true!
Well-roundedness is a matter of opinion; I should perhaps have qualified what I said about "on average" by saying "in my experience..." etc. I don't have anything to cite since I don't suppose anyone's ever actually done a study -- not surprising, since the first thing they'd have to do would be to come up with a definition of "well-rounded" that everyone could agree on.
I do think I'm pretty well-rounded, and have an idea of what constitutes that quality in other people. I've had a lot of life experience -- almost ten years in the service, first as an infantryman and then as a medic, including time in Desert Storm, and being stationed all over the world; working as a civilian EMT in one of the busiest trauma centers in the country; seven years in academia on an urban commuter campus, working my way through school, first as an EMT and then, in a rather dramatic change of careers, as a DBA. I've been married, and divorced. I have a ten-year-old kid. Through it all, I've made a lot of friends, read a lot of books, and paid attention to the world around me. I have a range of interests that many people find astonishing (probably fewer of those people in the/. crowd than in general -- contrary to stereotype, we're a pretty diverse bunch) and can hold a conversation on almost any topic under the sun. I'm not trying to brag here, just to say that when it comes to well-roundedness, I think I have the experience to be a pretty decent judge.;)
To respond to your other claim, yes, I am a little bitter. I kept thinking that University is about learning, but no one gave a damn except me and a few rare individual professors. Finally I threw my hands up in disgust. I just couldn't take all the charade and pretense. From what I hear others say, that's how most of it is. I realize the evidence is anecdotal, but so is yours (unless you're too lazy to share a citation). I share my experience. People always tell me this, "it's the system, you just have to suck it up, tighten your belt and just do it, even though you may not like it, etc. you need that paper."
Actually, no, I wouldn't say that. What I would say is that it's not like that everywhere; that some schools, and some departments, really are a lot better than others; and that the personal enrichment and knowledge gained from earning a degree at a school you like is difficult to match anywhere else. (Granted, if you don't like the school, it can be pretty hellish. I've been in both situations.) There's a reason universities are considered centers of learning and innovation, and it's not just tradition or elitism. The synergy that comes from intelligent, dedicated people working together is a beautiful thing -- and at a good school, you'll find more intelligent, dedicated people per square mile than in any other environment on Earth. You're obviously a thoughtful person, and I urge you not to give up on academia because one school had a few (or even a bunch of) bad apples.
If we considered valid only the kind of critique where we had either positive or neutral feelings about the subject, then we would have no way to critique a significant portion of what we experience. That means we would be blind in regard to, roughly, half of our experience. For where there is joy, there is also suffering. If there is light, there must also be dark. If some people are tall, some must be short.
Feelings are what they are. Just because I feel bad about something does not mean I have switched off my critical thinking ability and that I am now spouting irrational nonsense.
It was the generality of what you said that bothered me, not the negativity. If you'd said, "The university system sucks and here's why," I might have disagreed with you -- or, as I said above, felt that you were judging academia as a whole unfairly based on one example -- but I would have tried to respond to your specific criticisms. Saying just "it's a farce" is pretty much an invitation to snarky answers. That being said, you're right, and I will indeed try to be more careful in the future.
I applaud well-roundedness, but I sneer at how it is "accomplished" by the University system, or maybe I should say, non-accomplished,
While there are certainly well-rounded people who have never had a university education, and very narrow people who have, I would say that on average people with that experience tend to be much better-rounded than those without.
because it's a farce, and I have seen the farce first hand.
Translation: you had a bad experience, couldn't hack it, and now you're bitter.
Let learning come in bursts on demand. Let learning match the demand in a natural way.
If you want the most educated people in our society to be a bunch of drones who only have a narrow grasp of certain corporate-dictated skills and lack the breadth and depth of knowledge to create anything new, ever again... you've got a great idea there!
True learning does not just meet demand; it creates it.
Yes. The Web (love it or hate it) is the preferred platform for delivering... well, just about everything that goes over a network, these days. The days when "website programming" meant throwing together some 1337 Javascript hack to make your personal site flashier and more irritating than everyone else's are long gone, and they're not coming back. For some reason, this seems to bother some people; I'm not sure why.
I find there are a lot of books and resources which each HTML, or teach Slashdot posting, but don't teach you how to close your HTML tags, or use the Preview button...
Note to moderators: parent post is not flamebait. It's an opinion I personally disagree with, but it's reasonable and well-expressed.
Anyway.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for a return to the days of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." What I'd like to see, personally, is a world where no one company dominates; where IBM and Microsoft and Oracle, and Sun and Dell and Apple and HP, and whoever else, are all fighting it out. Where there are lots of reasonable choices for any purchase of hardware, software, or combination thereof. Where people who make good decisions are rewarded, and those who make bad decisions learn their lessons, because their products and/or purchases are evaluated on the basis of performance, not brand name.
Right now, today, in 2004, Microsoft is clearly a dominant and destructive force. If IBM or anyone else can put a dent in their power, then good for them. If at some point IBM returns to its former dominance, or if any of the other companies I named above (or someone else we've never heard of, which is always possible) finds itself in that position, then I'll worry about them.
"We have no permanent allies, only permanent interests."
Well, clearly the Ashcroft DOJ sold out on the Microsoft anti-trust trial, but that was government vs. big business, and you pretty much always expect the Republicans to come down on the business side of that argument. If IBM files its own case against Microsoft, that will be one big business vs. another -- I'm not sure either Republican or Democratic ideology enters into that one.
It doesn't work that way. These things don't happen smoothly. Bigger storms (with bigger storm surges), large flat areas at low elevation suddenly becoming uninhabitable, agricultural disruption... Nobody's talking about massive tidal waves. What they are talking about, very reasonably, is a change in global climate that will require relocation of a significant portion of the people on the planet, and that will cause death and misery on a massive scale.
Most of the world's population centers are built on coastal land. There is no way around this.
Take a look at the way the greater L.A. area (or really, any major coastal city) is built. If we lost a foot of coastline a year, there would still be major disruption. Even if all the people were okay -- which they might well be in the US, but not in poorer countries, I guarantee it -- the economic impact would be staggering.
The mass migration you describe is certainly possible, and if temperatures rise enough to melt enough ice tochange coastlines, it's what will happen. Even if the coastlines don't change, there will still be disruptions, and we'll deal with them. Humanity will survive. Life will go on. That's a good thing.
But millions, perhaps tens or hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of people will die in the ensuing chaos. You may be sanguine about that; I'm not. I've seen mass movement of refugees on a much smaller scale, and trust me, it ain't pretty.
Well, back when I was in the AF and they were first talking about this [shakes cane at all the young whippersnappers] the idea was to have the 747 cruising several miles behind the main battle line ("Forward Edge of the Battle Area", or FEBA, in the then-current jargon), shooting down both surface-to-surface missiles and surface-to-air missiles right after launch. "Many planes airborne around the clock" is an accurate description of modern air warfare, BTW. The reason they're mounting it on such a big plane is because the system is heavy -- laser-armed fighters may be a sexy idea, but we won't be seeing X-Wings or Colonial Vipers any time soon.
You critical mistake was to say something favorable about someone who has dared to criticize our Glorious Leader, and who is therefore clearly an Evil America-Hating Terrorist.
Say, citizen... why do you hate America so much? Are you an Evil America-Hating Terrorist who criticizes our Glorious Leader, too?
My God! How utterly brilliant you are, to remember that plants take in CO2! And how dumb those climatologists are, not to have thought of that!
[sigh]
It seems like this comes up every time there's any scientific controversy on Slashdot: someone pulls out some elementary scientific fact and says, essentially, "Well, all those PhD's must be idiots to even talk about this, because $SOMETHING_I_LEARNED_IN_6TH_GRADE proves they can't possibly be right." Do you really, truly think that climatological modeling doesn't take the carbon cycle into account?
IIRC, the amount of ice in an iceberg that sits above the waterline is exactly the amount by which the volume shrinks when the ice melts, so the waterline remains the same. The main concern about melting ice and sea levels comes from the Antarctic ice cap, most of which sits on land.
OTOH, it's not just about sea levels; it's also about temperature and salinity. Melting the Arctic ice cap might not raise sea levels, but it would dump a whole bunch of cold fresh water into (relatively) warmer, salt water. This could have drastic effects on marine life and on major currents, including the Gulf Stream.
Perhaps I should have said "best known for a work of SF," rather than "primarily an SF writer." In any case, 1984 is SF by any reasonable definition of the term; it is set in a (then) future world which has been drastically altered from the one in which the author lived. (And Big Brother does use some high-tech gizmos to keep any eye on his people, but that's not all that relevant.) Animal Farm, probably his second-best-known work, is unequivocally fantasy. You may persist in moving the goalposts to justify your genre prejudices if you wish, but understand that that's what you're doing.
I've said it before: if I rob a bank, and get away with the largest haul of any bank robbery in history, and rather than keeping all of my ill-gotten gains, I give away some small but meaningful portion of it to charity, and the recipients of my generosity are profoundly grateful for my gift...
Orwell was primarily an SF writer, and Twain dabbled in both SF and fantasy. At least some of Dickens' output was fantasy and horror. Coupland has no insights whatsoever.
I fail to see your point. It's considered to be a small database by any real DBA with database experience. It's not domain specific (football or whatever)...it's a comparison across all RDBMs and their ability to effectively manage datasets. In this case, while 200,000 rows may seem like a lot to you, in database terms, it's a faily small dataset.
I've been working as a DBA for over five years, with DB applications ranging from supply-chain management to e-commerce to bioinformatics; are you going to tell me I'm not a "real DBA with database experience?"
200,000 rows by itself is not a whole lot of data, I agree. But when you start doing lots of multi-table joins, the effective amount of data grows very, very quickly; 200,000 * 5,000 * 1,000 * 500 (a fairly common situation for this particular app) puts you in some serious territory. And my point is, once again, that for this application, which I -- with considerable education (CS grad student specializing in computational biology and data mining) and experience (the aforementioned five years in the field) consider a reasonable test of any DBMS -- MySQL performs very well, and in fact outperforms Oracle. That's all.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey if it wasn't for US you would all be speaking German. (Although, that is a helluva lot better than French.) The main job of the US in the world seems to be constantly saving the Europeans from themselves.
God bless our boys who died at Normandy!!
You know who saved Europe from speaking German?
Russia.
Seriously. Go check out maps of the territory involved, the number of deaths on both sides, the number of troops and tanks and planes involved, etc. The Western Front was a sideshow compared to what happened in the East.
Well, true enough, but then every pair of bodies can be said to be orbiting a common center ... even, to take an extreme example, Pluto and the Sun. And generalizing, you can say we're all orbiting the common center of the Milky Way ... except the Milky Way and all the other nearby galaxies are orbiting their common center ... etc.
Maybe in the systems where the weight difference of planet and its moon is smaller, both orbit a point outside of both bodies. Maybe Pluto and Charon do this. Which one is the planet an which one the moon then?
Now that, I would say, is a reasonable standard for "double planet" vs. "planet and moon."
Most scientist are atheists and choose that because its the intellectual thing to do. Most try to prove there is no God. It's funny that people don't understand how people can believe stuff in the Bible but they have no trouble believing in theories in a textbook that can't be proven either.
I have never known, nor known of, a single scientist who tried "to prove there is no God." Scientists try to prove things about the natural world; if some of the things they prove (and they do prove them, quite extensively, before they get to the "textbook" stage) conflict with your belief in a book of fairy tales, that's your problem, not theirs.
No, you blasphemer! It proves that EVERY WORD IN THE BIBLE IS TRUE!!! And if you don't accept THIS CLEAR PROOF OF THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH OF THE WORD OF GOD, then clearly you are an ATHEIST SATANIST GOD-HATING AMERICA-HATING TERRORIST COMMUNIST
<wipes froth off mouth>
Oops, I must have been channeling Jack Chick for a moment. Anyway
Seriously, of course, "people knew how to build boats" is exactly what it proves, and all it proves. But that won't stop the fundies from reacting as above. A while back, someone -- wish I could remember who it was (maybe I should pray harder?) -- came up with the best answer I've ever heard to the absurd claims made by ideologues masquerading as archaeologists in regards to "proof"-by-artifact of a literal interpretation of the Bible. It goes roughly like this:
Well-roundedness is a matter of opinion; I should perhaps have qualified what I said about "on average" by saying "in my experience ..." etc. I don't have anything to cite since I don't suppose anyone's ever actually done a study -- not surprising, since the first thing they'd have to do would be to come up with a definition of "well-rounded" that everyone could agree on.
/. crowd than in general -- contrary to stereotype, we're a pretty diverse bunch) and can hold a conversation on almost any topic under the sun. I'm not trying to brag here, just to say that when it comes to well-roundedness, I think I have the experience to be a pretty decent judge. ;)
I do think I'm pretty well-rounded, and have an idea of what constitutes that quality in other people. I've had a lot of life experience -- almost ten years in the service, first as an infantryman and then as a medic, including time in Desert Storm, and being stationed all over the world; working as a civilian EMT in one of the busiest trauma centers in the country; seven years in academia on an urban commuter campus, working my way through school, first as an EMT and then, in a rather dramatic change of careers, as a DBA. I've been married, and divorced. I have a ten-year-old kid. Through it all, I've made a lot of friends, read a lot of books, and paid attention to the world around me. I have a range of interests that many people find astonishing (probably fewer of those people in the
To respond to your other claim, yes, I am a little bitter. I kept thinking that University is about learning, but no one gave a damn except me and a few rare individual professors. Finally I threw my hands up in disgust. I just couldn't take all the charade and pretense. From what I hear others say, that's how most of it is. I realize the evidence is anecdotal, but so is yours (unless you're too lazy to share a citation). I share my experience. People always tell me this, "it's the system, you just have to suck it up, tighten your belt and just do it, even though you may not like it, etc. you need that paper."
Actually, no, I wouldn't say that. What I would say is that it's not like that everywhere; that some schools, and some departments, really are a lot better than others; and that the personal enrichment and knowledge gained from earning a degree at a school you like is difficult to match anywhere else. (Granted, if you don't like the school, it can be pretty hellish. I've been in both situations.) There's a reason universities are considered centers of learning and innovation, and it's not just tradition or elitism. The synergy that comes from intelligent, dedicated people working together is a beautiful thing -- and at a good school, you'll find more intelligent, dedicated people per square mile than in any other environment on Earth. You're obviously a thoughtful person, and I urge you not to give up on academia because one school had a few (or even a bunch of) bad apples.
If we considered valid only the kind of critique where we had either positive or neutral feelings about the subject, then we would have no way to critique a significant portion of what we experience. That means we would be blind in regard to, roughly, half of our experience. For where there is joy, there is also suffering. If there is light, there must also be dark. If some people are tall, some must be short.
Feelings are what they are. Just because I feel bad about something does not mean I have switched off my critical thinking ability and that I am now spouting irrational nonsense.
It was the generality of what you said that bothered me, not the negativity. If you'd said, "The university system sucks and here's why," I might have disagreed with you -- or, as I said above, felt that you were judging academia as a whole unfairly based on one example -- but I would have tried to respond to your specific criticisms. Saying just "it's a farce" is pretty much an invitation to snarky answers. That being said, you're right, and I will indeed try to be more careful in the future.
I applaud well-roundedness, but I sneer at how it is "accomplished" by the University system, or maybe I should say, non-accomplished,
While there are certainly well-rounded people who have never had a university education, and very narrow people who have, I would say that on average people with that experience tend to be much better-rounded than those without.
because it's a farce, and I have seen the farce first hand.
Translation: you had a bad experience, couldn't hack it, and now you're bitter.
Let learning come in bursts on demand. Let learning match the demand in a natural way.
... you've got a great idea there!
If you want the most educated people in our society to be a bunch of drones who only have a narrow grasp of certain corporate-dictated skills and lack the breadth and depth of knowledge to create anything new, ever again
True learning does not just meet demand; it creates it.
Heh. Read the original post carefully. ;)
I can think of nothing more likely to start a flamewar on /. than singing the praises of Perl and MySQL in the same story.
<1/2 g>
Yes. The Web (love it or hate it) is the preferred platform for delivering ... well, just about everything that goes over a network, these days. The days when "website programming" meant throwing together some 1337 Javascript hack to make your personal site flashier and more irritating than everyone else's are long gone, and they're not coming back. For some reason, this seems to bother some people; I'm not sure why.
I find there are a lot of books and resources which each HTML, or teach Slashdot posting, but don't teach you how to close your HTML tags, or use the Preview button ...
;)
Oh, hell, you know the rest.
Note to moderators: parent post is not flamebait. It's an opinion I personally disagree with, but it's reasonable and well-expressed.
Anyway.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for a return to the days of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." What I'd like to see, personally, is a world where no one company dominates; where IBM and Microsoft and Oracle, and Sun and Dell and Apple and HP, and whoever else, are all fighting it out. Where there are lots of reasonable choices for any purchase of hardware, software, or combination thereof. Where people who make good decisions are rewarded, and those who make bad decisions learn their lessons, because their products and/or purchases are evaluated on the basis of performance, not brand name.
Right now, today, in 2004, Microsoft is clearly a dominant and destructive force. If IBM or anyone else can put a dent in their power, then good for them. If at some point IBM returns to its former dominance, or if any of the other companies I named above (or someone else we've never heard of, which is always possible) finds itself in that position, then I'll worry about them.
"We have no permanent allies, only permanent interests."
Well, clearly the Ashcroft DOJ sold out on the Microsoft anti-trust trial, but that was government vs. big business, and you pretty much always expect the Republicans to come down on the business side of that argument. If IBM files its own case against Microsoft, that will be one big business vs. another -- I'm not sure either Republican or Democratic ideology enters into that one.
It doesn't work that way. These things don't happen smoothly. Bigger storms (with bigger storm surges), large flat areas at low elevation suddenly becoming uninhabitable, agricultural disruption ... Nobody's talking about massive tidal waves. What they are talking about, very reasonably, is a change in global climate that will require relocation of a significant portion of the people on the planet, and that will cause death and misery on a massive scale.
Most of the world's population centers are built on coastal land. There is no way around this.
Take a look at the way the greater L.A. area (or really, any major coastal city) is built. If we lost a foot of coastline a year, there would still be major disruption. Even if all the people were okay -- which they might well be in the US, but not in poorer countries, I guarantee it -- the economic impact would be staggering.
War. Plague. Famine.
The mass migration you describe is certainly possible, and if temperatures rise enough to melt enough ice tochange coastlines, it's what will happen. Even if the coastlines don't change, there will still be disruptions, and we'll deal with them. Humanity will survive. Life will go on. That's a good thing.
But millions, perhaps tens or hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of people will die in the ensuing chaos. You may be sanguine about that; I'm not. I've seen mass movement of refugees on a much smaller scale, and trust me, it ain't pretty.
Do you really, genuinely, truly believe that Windows has the market share it does because it's that much better than competing products? Really?
Well, back when I was in the AF and they were first talking about this [shakes cane at all the young whippersnappers] the idea was to have the 747 cruising several miles behind the main battle line ("Forward Edge of the Battle Area", or FEBA, in the then-current jargon), shooting down both surface-to-surface missiles and surface-to-air missiles right after launch. "Many planes airborne around the clock" is an accurate description of modern air warfare, BTW. The reason they're mounting it on such a big plane is because the system is heavy -- laser-armed fighters may be a sexy idea, but we won't be seeing X-Wings or Colonial Vipers any time soon.
You critical mistake was to say something favorable about someone who has dared to criticize our Glorious Leader, and who is therefore clearly an Evil America-Hating Terrorist.
... why do you hate America so much? Are you an Evil America-Hating Terrorist who criticizes our Glorious Leader, too?
Say, citizen
Get'im, boys!
My God! How utterly brilliant you are, to remember that plants take in CO2! And how dumb those climatologists are, not to have thought of that!
[sigh]
It seems like this comes up every time there's any scientific controversy on Slashdot: someone pulls out some elementary scientific fact and says, essentially, "Well, all those PhD's must be idiots to even talk about this, because $SOMETHING_I_LEARNED_IN_6TH_GRADE proves they can't possibly be right." Do you really, truly think that climatological modeling doesn't take the carbon cycle into account?
IIRC, the amount of ice in an iceberg that sits above the waterline is exactly the amount by which the volume shrinks when the ice melts, so the waterline remains the same. The main concern about melting ice and sea levels comes from the Antarctic ice cap, most of which sits on land.
OTOH, it's not just about sea levels; it's also about temperature and salinity. Melting the Arctic ice cap might not raise sea levels, but it would dump a whole bunch of cold fresh water into (relatively) warmer, salt water. This could have drastic effects on marine life and on major currents, including the Gulf Stream.
Perhaps I should have said "best known for a work of SF," rather than "primarily an SF writer." In any case, 1984 is SF by any reasonable definition of the term; it is set in a (then) future world which has been drastically altered from the one in which the author lived. (And Big Brother does use some high-tech gizmos to keep any eye on his people, but that's not all that relevant.) Animal Farm, probably his second-best-known work, is unequivocally fantasy. You may persist in moving the goalposts to justify your genre prejudices if you wish, but understand that that's what you're doing.
I've said it before: if I rob a bank, and get away with the largest haul of any bank robbery in history, and rather than keeping all of my ill-gotten gains, I give away some small but meaningful portion of it to charity, and the recipients of my generosity are profoundly grateful for my gift ...
... I'm still a bank robber.
Orwell was primarily an SF writer, and Twain dabbled in both SF and fantasy. At least some of Dickens' output was fantasy and horror. Coupland has no insights whatsoever.
I fail to see your point. It's considered to be a small database by any real DBA with database experience. It's not domain specific (football or whatever)...it's a comparison across all RDBMs and their ability to effectively manage datasets. In this case, while 200,000 rows may seem like a lot to you, in database terms, it's a faily small dataset.
I've been working as a DBA for over five years, with DB applications ranging from supply-chain management to e-commerce to bioinformatics; are you going to tell me I'm not a "real DBA with database experience?"
200,000 rows by itself is not a whole lot of data, I agree. But when you start doing lots of multi-table joins, the effective amount of data grows very, very quickly; 200,000 * 5,000 * 1,000 * 500 (a fairly common situation for this particular app) puts you in some serious territory. And my point is, once again, that for this application, which I -- with considerable education (CS grad student specializing in computational biology and data mining) and experience (the aforementioned five years in the field) consider a reasonable test of any DBMS -- MySQL performs very well, and in fact outperforms Oracle. That's all.