If you're interested: the database in question comprises about thirty tables, ranging in size from ~500 rows to over 200,000, with a fair number of three- to five-table joins. I'm not saying by any means that this proves MySQL is faster than Oracle for every query, but I think this is a fair-size test. Granted, it doesn't cover the multi-TB data warehouses which seem to be Oracle's primary claim to fame, but I know that some organizations with much, much larger data needs than my company use MySQL and seem to be happy with it.
What doesn't MySql do well? For starters, it's much slower than Oracle, MS-Sql, and even Foxpro.
I've never used MS SQL Server or Foxpro. But having very recently developed a project on two DBMS tracks (Oracle and MySQL) I can tell you that identical queries on identical schemata with identical data are provably faster with MySQL than with Oracle.
It has no row locking, no transaction support,
This is no longer true.
minimal cross-platform compatibility
Huh? I've successfully migrated several complex databases, and the associated applications, between MySQL servers on Linux, Windows, BSD, and Mac OS X with no problem. And I mean no problem; in most of these cases, I haven't had to make a single change to the architecture, data, or application code. Everything just works.
If you want to criticize MySQL, there are plenty of legitimate grounds to do so. (E.g., the lack of support for views, which in my primary job as a MySQL DBA drives me nuts at least once a week.) Don't just make stuff up.
Oh, bullshit. Despite all the "/. favors platform X over platform Y" memes, the fact of the matter is that/. remains one of the best places to hear about both the merits and defects of just about any OS and/or hardware platform you can name. There is no pro-Apple conspiracy here.
There are certainly those (I'm one of them) who will happily spend mod points to mod down stupid "M4X0Rz 5uX0rz" trolls, but that's not the same thing. As an iBook user, I'm glad to know that I should hold off on the latest software update. A look at the various signal strength posts, most of which are modded "Informative," will tell you that a lot of other people feel the same way.
There was obviously no technical reason Verisign couldn't transfer the domain back to its rightful owner. They make have said there was, but they were, of course, lying. (And, on a tangential rant: the liars at Verisign, like all the other liars at big corporations who routinely lie to cover their fuckups, should go to prison. But they won't.) There is a pathological desire on the part of these corporate pricks to avoid admitting ever that they made a mistake, so they come up with bullshit excuses.
I'd argue that releasing a book for free download is not the same thing as releasing a song for free download; releasing a chapter for free, which O'Reilly very often does, is more closely equivalent. Chapter ~= song; book ~= CD.
To play devil's advocate: no, there is nothing in that degree that guarantees you a paycheck. People whose skills are obsolete and/or are available elsewhere for much less money really don't have any security; we can bitch and moan about it, but that's the way it is.
This is why I propose, in all seriousness, that all those highly <cough> educated <cough> <cough> <hack> hard-working <gasp> <wheeze> MBA's have their jobs outsourced to, oh, say, Eritrea. Because there's nothing they do that someone in the Third World can't do cheaper and, er, um, <cough> better.
I hate to say it, but a lot of people on/. and elsewhere won't be nearly as upset about outsourcing to the Czech Republic as they are about outsourcing to India, although the economic effects will be the same. Why? Two words: skin color.
It's ugly, but the xenophobia I see here toward Indians -- and the fact that hardly any bitches about outsourcing to Eastern Europe, despite the fact that there's plenty of it going on -- convinces me that it's the truth.
Oh, I have no doubt that he's a lot easier to deal with in person. I've known him online for several years but never met him; OTOH, people I do know in person and whose opinions I respect say he's really a very nice guy. But his online persona strikes me as clever but, well, bratty, and not in a cute way.
I have to say, though, that if your opinion of SF is so low that you think only " an elusive sci-fi title (or two)" will make your cut, I'm not terribly optimistic. As someone who reads (and writes) mostly SF but does read a fair amount of other fiction, I'm of the opinion that the crap-to-good-stuff ratio is pretty much equal no matter what section of the bookstore you're browsing. A lot of readers, OTOH, tend to mark down a book simply because it is SF, rather than judging it fairly on its merits. If you're one of them, nothing I or anyone else says is going to help you.
Nebulas are given for works released during the previous year (i.e., the 2003 awards go to 2002 works, etc.) When the work was written doesn't matter -- remember these are primarily literary awards, and it's not uncommon for a book to take several years to be written, and then several more to be published. (I would assume the same is true of scripts, in general, though of course LOTR is kind of a special case.) For those interested in the process, it works like this:
At any time, a SFWA member may nominate a work published a year ago or less at the time of nomination.
At the end of the year, works with sufficient numbers of nominations are placed on the preliminary Nebula ballot.
Early in the following year, SFWA membership votes on the works on the preliminary ballot; in each category, up to a certain maximum number of works -- 5, IIRC, but don't quote me -- are qualified for the final ballot.
The membership then votes on the works on the final ballot, and the awards are determined.
This being science fiction writing, you'll notice there is no "Profit!!!" step in the list. Er, unless you're Peter Jackson. <1/2 g>
So this is why it takes so long, and why the 2003 awards are given for 2002 works in 2004.
I'm not going to flame you, just bring up something you might want to consider: because you work for a startup, your executives are probably not paid an enormous amount of money. Startups do tend to produce good products at a good value, and most of the money they charge goes to paying off R&D costs. The problem is that most drugs aren't produced by startups; they're produced by giant companies that pay their executives enormous salaries (and bonuses, etc.) while continuing to pay the people who do the actual work -- the scientists and production-line workers -- the same amount as the startups do. I have little sympathy for a company that whines about spending $10-$20 million over five years to get a new drug to market when their C*O's each take home more than that in a year.
Which is precisely why the government will never be able to do anything more cheaply over the long term. There is no incentive to streamline. Costs are passed directly on to the consumer/taxpayer, who no longer has a choice in the matter.
Nice theory; doesn't hold up in practice. In practice, the insurance companies pay their executives enormous amounts of money (far, far more than any government official is paid) and rape their customers while whining about how they haaave to increase premiums because of the rising cost of health care... There is no incentive to streamline because none of the bloated pigs is notably better than any other. The average Joe has more control over the workings of his government than he does over the workings of his insurer.
Speaking as someone who wrote electronic insurance filing software for a number of years, I can tell you the US government is already a vast, inefficient bureaucracy when it comes to the relatively small involvement in healthcare it has today (the key word is "relatively"...)
Speaking as someone who worked extensively in health care in both the public and private sectors for many years, I can tell you that at the patient care level, in terms of value per dollar, public and private health care come out about even.
The Linux world is a bazaar. The Windows world is a cathedral, albeit an incompetently-run one. It's disingenuous at best to talk about "The PC World" without making this distinction. Not to mention that the Apple cathedral has a pretty good relationship with the Linux bazaar these days.
They don't need computers. They need the rest of the world to stop shipping them weapons, so that warlords stop giving RPGs to 12 year old kids to slaughter defenseless people(12 year olds because so many adults have been killed there aren't enough left to force into private armies). They also need the countries of the world to stop protecting their agricultural industries, making food so expensive 3rd world countries can't afford to buy it.
Remember that, just as there are desperately poor people in well-off countries, there are also well-off people in desperately poor countries. A stable middle class, no matter how small it may be, would do Ethiopia (and any other country in similar straits) a great deal of good. If F/OSS helps them achieve that goal, then good.
There is no one magic solution to just about any real-world problem. You do what you can, when you can. Every little bit helps.
My pet hypothesis is that whatever is considered sexy is "what rich people look like." For most of human history, being fat was a sign of wealth (and therefore health and fertility) because only rich people consistently had enough to eat. But these days, it takes wealth to be thin -- fattening food is much cheaper than healthy food, and the majority of jobs at any level on the socieconomic scale involve little or no physical labor, so you have to have time and money to exercise. (The part about the jobs is particularly true for women, which may be why the worship of thin-ness is more pronounced in females, although it increasingly occurs in both sexes.) And since wealth is always a sign of reproductive fitness, it's always sexy.
The implication of that line to me was that Linux "looks" more secure because "hackers tend not to target [it]" -- IOW, the old security-through-obscurity argument. But in fact, Linux and other modern Unix variants are demonstrably more secure than Windows because they're more secure.
Well, yeah, and this is certainly a Good Thing. OTOH, the article is light on details and contains at least one tooth-gritting mistake -- "Linux, which hackers tend not to target, looks safe in comparison [emphasis mine]." I'm always glad to see coverage of Linux in the business press, but I do wish they'd make sure they have their facts straight, even if the overall tone of the article is penguin-positive.
How many truly original inventions have been the subject of high-profile patent litigation recently? None that I can think of. It seems to me that the vast majority of patent cases lately have been corporations (corporations don't invent things; people do) trying to milk money out their competitors over unoriginal "inventions" that represent blindingly obvious and/or widely-used technologies that should never have been patented in the first place.
And truly innovative people invent because they want to make the world a better place. If they make money off it, that's gravy, not the motivating force. It's the suits, who have never had an original thought in their lives, who go to court to try to squeeze a few more bucks out of the fruits of the labor of the people with brains.
Surely everyone has to realise that patent officers can't be geniuses in their respective fields, because the genuieses are off inventing and discovering things.
Well, there was this guy named Einstein, ever heard of him?;)
Seriously, no, most patent examiners aren't geniuses, nor should they need to be. They should definitely be technically competent, though. It occurs to me that with all the out-of-work techies, and the flood of tech patents coming through (many of which should never be granted) there's a real opportunity here...
And the system that gives the patent applicant the responsibility for the search for prior art seems absurd to me. Who the hell is going to put effort into finding something that will invaildate his own application?
Yes. It's not just what's being done (and I agree that any jail time is excessive for the offense) but also who's doing it. The MPAA, with their fanatical stand against fair use as well as illegal copying -- and their inability to distinguish between the two; I'm quite sure this case and others like it will come up the next time they're lobbying Congress to restrict what private DVD purchasers can do with their computers and DVD players -- has lost all moral authority in this matter.
If a cop plants evidence to frame an innocent man, or beats the shit out a suspect, or commits some other abuse of authority, everything that officer does from then on will be tainted, no matter if his conduct is appropriate or not. It's the same thing here. Jack Valenti could tell me that Osama bin Laden is a bad guy and I'd feel compelled to check, just to be sure.
You can only say Lindows is "deliberately deceptive" if you believe Microsoft owns the rights to the word "windows" -- which, IMNSGDHO, they don't. I should be able to market a GUI OS called "_indows", where "_" is any letter including "w", if I damn well please, as long as I don't call it "Microsoft Windows". That an army of lawyers and a handful of judges have decided otherwise has nothing to do with sound legal reasoning, and everything to do with endemic technical ignorance in the legal system.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're interested: the database in question comprises about thirty tables, ranging in size from ~500 rows to over 200,000, with a fair number of three- to five-table joins. I'm not saying by any means that this proves MySQL is faster than Oracle for every query, but I think this is a fair-size test. Granted, it doesn't cover the multi-TB data warehouses which seem to be Oracle's primary claim to fame, but I know that some organizations with much, much larger data needs than my company use MySQL and seem to be happy with it.
What doesn't MySql do well? For starters, it's much slower than Oracle, MS-Sql, and even Foxpro.
I've never used MS SQL Server or Foxpro. But having very recently developed a project on two DBMS tracks (Oracle and MySQL) I can tell you that identical queries on identical schemata with identical data are provably faster with MySQL than with Oracle.
It has no row locking, no transaction support,
This is no longer true.
minimal cross-platform compatibility
Huh? I've successfully migrated several complex databases, and the associated applications, between MySQL servers on Linux, Windows, BSD, and Mac OS X with no problem. And I mean no problem; in most of these cases, I haven't had to make a single change to the architecture, data, or application code. Everything just works.
If you want to criticize MySQL, there are plenty of legitimate grounds to do so. (E.g., the lack of support for views, which in my primary job as a MySQL DBA drives me nuts at least once a week.) Don't just make stuff up.
Oh, bullshit. Despite all the "/. favors platform X over platform Y" memes, the fact of the matter is that /. remains one of the best places to hear about both the merits and defects of just about any OS and/or hardware platform you can name. There is no pro-Apple conspiracy here.
There are certainly those (I'm one of them) who will happily spend mod points to mod down stupid "M4X0Rz 5uX0rz" trolls, but that's not the same thing. As an iBook user, I'm glad to know that I should hold off on the latest software update. A look at the various signal strength posts, most of which are modded "Informative," will tell you that a lot of other people feel the same way.
There was obviously no technical reason Verisign couldn't transfer the domain back to its rightful owner. They make have said there was, but they were, of course, lying. (And, on a tangential rant: the liars at Verisign, like all the other liars at big corporations who routinely lie to cover their fuckups, should go to prison. But they won't.) There is a pathological desire on the part of these corporate pricks to avoid admitting ever that they made a mistake, so they come up with bullshit excuses.
Perhaps all the other 2-year-olds are the ones ordering the penis enlargement pills. You'd better get your kid some too, so he can, um, keep up.
;)
I'd argue that releasing a book for free download is not the same thing as releasing a song for free download; releasing a chapter for free, which O'Reilly very often does, is more closely equivalent. Chapter ~= song; book ~= CD.
To play devil's advocate: no, there is nothing in that degree that guarantees you a paycheck. People whose skills are obsolete and/or are available elsewhere for much less money really don't have any security; we can bitch and moan about it, but that's the way it is.
This is why I propose, in all seriousness, that all those highly <cough> educated <cough> <cough> <hack> hard-working <gasp> <wheeze> MBA's have their jobs outsourced to, oh, say, Eritrea. Because there's nothing they do that someone in the Third World can't do cheaper and, er, um, <cough> better.
I hate to say it, but a lot of people on /. and elsewhere won't be nearly as upset about outsourcing to the Czech Republic as they are about outsourcing to India, although the economic effects will be the same. Why? Two words: skin color.
It's ugly, but the xenophobia I see here toward Indians -- and the fact that hardly any bitches about outsourcing to Eastern Europe, despite the fact that there's plenty of it going on -- convinces me that it's the truth.
Oh, I have no doubt that he's a lot easier to deal with in person. I've known him online for several years but never met him; OTOH, people I do know in person and whose opinions I respect say he's really a very nice guy. But his online persona strikes me as clever but, well, bratty, and not in a cute way.
Well, you could do worse than to look up Nebula winners of years past. The list is on the SFWA Web site:
Past Winners of SFWA Nebula Awards
I have to say, though, that if your opinion of SF is so low that you think only " an elusive sci-fi title (or two)" will make your cut, I'm not terribly optimistic. As someone who reads (and writes) mostly SF but does read a fair amount of other fiction, I'm of the opinion that the crap-to-good-stuff ratio is pretty much equal no matter what section of the bookstore you're browsing. A lot of readers, OTOH, tend to mark down a book simply because it is SF, rather than judging it fairly on its merits. If you're one of them, nothing I or anyone else says is going to help you.
Nebulas are given for works released during the previous year (i.e., the 2003 awards go to 2002 works, etc.) When the work was written doesn't matter -- remember these are primarily literary awards, and it's not uncommon for a book to take several years to be written, and then several more to be published. (I would assume the same is true of scripts, in general, though of course LOTR is kind of a special case.) For those interested in the process, it works like this:
So this is why it takes so long, and why the 2003 awards are given for 2002 works in 2004.
Cory Doctorow is like that. Trust me. He's a very clever guy, but not as clever as he thinks he is.
I'm not going to flame you, just bring up something you might want to consider: because you work for a startup, your executives are probably not paid an enormous amount of money. Startups do tend to produce good products at a good value, and most of the money they charge goes to paying off R&D costs. The problem is that most drugs aren't produced by startups; they're produced by giant companies that pay their executives enormous salaries (and bonuses, etc.) while continuing to pay the people who do the actual work -- the scientists and production-line workers -- the same amount as the startups do. I have little sympathy for a company that whines about spending $10-$20 million over five years to get a new drug to market when their C*O's each take home more than that in a year.
Which is precisely why the government will never be able to do anything more cheaply over the long term. There is no incentive to streamline. Costs are passed directly on to the consumer/taxpayer, who no longer has a choice in the matter.
... There is no incentive to streamline because none of the bloated pigs is notably better than any other. The average Joe has more control over the workings of his government than he does over the workings of his insurer.
Nice theory; doesn't hold up in practice. In practice, the insurance companies pay their executives enormous amounts of money (far, far more than any government official is paid) and rape their customers while whining about how they haaave to increase premiums because of the rising cost of health care
Speaking as someone who wrote electronic insurance filing software for a number of years, I can tell you the US government is already a vast, inefficient bureaucracy when it comes to the relatively small involvement in healthcare it has today (the key word is "relatively"...)
Speaking as someone who worked extensively in health care in both the public and private sectors for many years, I can tell you that at the patient care level, in terms of value per dollar, public and private health care come out about even.
The Linux world is a bazaar. The Windows world is a cathedral, albeit an incompetently-run one. It's disingenuous at best to talk about "The PC World" without making this distinction. Not to mention that the Apple cathedral has a pretty good relationship with the Linux bazaar these days.
In the 19th century, the big, lightly populated space between the US East and West Coasts was settled largely by people riding on/in:
a) Horses
b) Airplanes
c) SUV's
d) Trains
e) Ships
Please read the question carefully. There is only one correct answer.
They don't need computers. They need the rest of the world to stop shipping them weapons, so that warlords stop giving RPGs to 12 year old kids to slaughter defenseless people(12 year olds because so many adults have been killed there aren't enough left to force into private armies). They also need the countries of the world to stop protecting their agricultural industries, making food so expensive 3rd world countries can't afford to buy it.
Remember that, just as there are desperately poor people in well-off countries, there are also well-off people in desperately poor countries. A stable middle class, no matter how small it may be, would do Ethiopia (and any other country in similar straits) a great deal of good. If F/OSS helps them achieve that goal, then good.
There is no one magic solution to just about any real-world problem. You do what you can, when you can. Every little bit helps.
My pet hypothesis is that whatever is considered sexy is "what rich people look like." For most of human history, being fat was a sign of wealth (and therefore health and fertility) because only rich people consistently had enough to eat. But these days, it takes wealth to be thin -- fattening food is much cheaper than healthy food, and the majority of jobs at any level on the socieconomic scale involve little or no physical labor, so you have to have time and money to exercise. (The part about the jobs is particularly true for women, which may be why the worship of thin-ness is more pronounced in females, although it increasingly occurs in both sexes.) And since wealth is always a sign of reproductive fitness, it's always sexy.
The implication of that line to me was that Linux "looks" more secure because "hackers tend not to target [it]" -- IOW, the old security-through-obscurity argument. But in fact, Linux and other modern Unix variants are demonstrably more secure than Windows because they're more secure.
Well, yeah, and this is certainly a Good Thing. OTOH, the article is light on details and contains at least one tooth-gritting mistake -- "Linux, which hackers tend not to target, looks safe in comparison [emphasis mine]." I'm always glad to see coverage of Linux in the business press, but I do wish they'd make sure they have their facts straight, even if the overall tone of the article is penguin-positive.
16 GB is the "preferred" requirement; the minimum is 512 MB. Quite a difference.
How many truly original inventions have been the subject of high-profile patent litigation recently? None that I can think of. It seems to me that the vast majority of patent cases lately have been corporations (corporations don't invent things; people do) trying to milk money out their competitors over unoriginal "inventions" that represent blindingly obvious and/or widely-used technologies that should never have been patented in the first place.
And truly innovative people invent because they want to make the world a better place. If they make money off it, that's gravy, not the motivating force. It's the suits, who have never had an original thought in their lives, who go to court to try to squeeze a few more bucks out of the fruits of the labor of the people with brains.
Surely everyone has to realise that patent officers can't be geniuses in their respective fields, because the genuieses are off inventing and discovering things.
;)
...
Well, there was this guy named Einstein, ever heard of him?
Seriously, no, most patent examiners aren't geniuses, nor should they need to be. They should definitely be technically competent, though. It occurs to me that with all the out-of-work techies, and the flood of tech patents coming through (many of which should never be granted) there's a real opportunity here
And the system that gives the patent applicant the responsibility for the search for prior art seems absurd to me. Who the hell is going to put effort into finding something that will invaildate his own application?
Yes. It's not just what's being done (and I agree that any jail time is excessive for the offense) but also who's doing it. The MPAA, with their fanatical stand against fair use as well as illegal copying -- and their inability to distinguish between the two; I'm quite sure this case and others like it will come up the next time they're lobbying Congress to restrict what private DVD purchasers can do with their computers and DVD players -- has lost all moral authority in this matter.
If a cop plants evidence to frame an innocent man, or beats the shit out a suspect, or commits some other abuse of authority, everything that officer does from then on will be tainted, no matter if his conduct is appropriate or not. It's the same thing here. Jack Valenti could tell me that Osama bin Laden is a bad guy and I'd feel compelled to check, just to be sure.
You can only say Lindows is "deliberately deceptive" if you believe Microsoft owns the rights to the word "windows" -- which, IMNSGDHO, they don't. I should be able to market a GUI OS called "_indows", where "_" is any letter including "w", if I damn well please, as long as I don't call it "Microsoft Windows". That an army of lawyers and a handful of judges have decided otherwise has nothing to do with sound legal reasoning, and everything to do with endemic technical ignorance in the legal system.