The problem is that we still use jobs, income, and money as a means for distributing food, health care, and other things necessary for life. It'd be great if technology meant more free time, but still enough income to support an average quality of life, but that's not yet the case.
Ireland, being a part of the United Kingdom, was completely subjugated by the British, regardless of what its own representatives voted for. Even if every Irish representative (all 150 or so in the House of Commons) voted unanimously for a measure to stop the famine (like closing the ports that were exporting food nobody could afford to buy, as had happened in previous famines), they would be overwhelmed by the English representatives (500 in the House of Commons), who viewed the Irish as inferior. The decisions that didn't involve Parliament were handled by entirely English officials, who usually held the same belief.
Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine, limited the Government's actual relief because he thought "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". For his policy, he was commemorated in the song The Fields of Athenry. The Public Works were "strictly ordered" to be unproductive—that is, they would create no fund to repay their own expenses.
England, of course, treated the Irish expenses as an Irish problem, and gave practically no charity to support it. Those expenses were passed on to the Irish landowners, who in turn evicted tenants so they'd have to pay less of the debt. Hundreds of thousands of Irish were left poor, starving, homeless, and unemployed. The Irish who did happen to own land were ineligible to receive relief, again as a rule made by the English.
Ireland had a democracy, but their decisions were overruled by their English masters. The US and many other democratic nations are currently fully functional as much as democracy allows: There is indecision, but when decisions are reached, they can be carried out.
Reading that lovely Wikipedia article, I'm told that the Ireland's democracy was led by an official appointed by Britain, because Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom. Their democracy was limited to being a mostly-ineffective group in the House of Commons, and a small number in the House of Lords. Those representatives were separated from their constituents, and even when they were convinced of the immediacy of the problem, were effectively blocked from acting by their English counterparts. Instead, the English enacted laws to further stifle the Irish, such as requiring landowners to give up their land in order to receive any food aid.
A functional but completely powerless democracy is hardly what I'd consider "working".
Weren't we talking about ROI for other _researchers_?
I wasn't. I thought we were talking about "taking what somebody else invested R&D money to develop." I was talking about the ROI for people who fund the research. Furthermore, I'm also using a fairly broad definition of the term "research", to include not just academic investigations, but also more industrial R&D like literature surveys, benchmarking, comparison analysis, testing, and so forth. I'm also trying to argue in such a way as to apply my argument to artistic creations (which I find very close to academic research in methodology and funding sources).
Academic research is far less restricted by IP rules than industry, and I think this is a good thing. I also think that certain IP regulations are too strict (copyright length), while others are too lax (artists giving all ownership to a label via a contract). I'm one of those folks who thinks that we should be able to find a set of laws that fits the current IP situation just right.
Unfortunately, the honor system that works so well in academic research doesn't seem to scale very well to the rest of the world. In academics, there are few enough researchers in any particular field that any copied work will be noticed, and a plagiarizer will be shunned. That provides an economic stimulus to produce original work, and to stay far away from derivative work unless it's clearly noted. Outside academics, the chance of two unrelated researchers working on similar projects is far higher, to the point where plagiarism can be easily and successfully passed off as coincidence.
Oh so it might never happen that company A makes life difficult for company B without appearing directly involved? It happens for lemonade stands, I guess companies who compete on billion dollars' markets do that, too?
Of course they do, but Occam's Razor suggests we look elsewhere for motivation here.
The recommendation was pro- or anti- Google? The commission ruling otherwise makes him either wrong or malicious, in the most significant case of his career. Which helps those with the opposite POV than yours.
Mr. Long recommended the FTC oppose Google's acquisition of AdMob. While the commission was considering what to do, Apple entered the market with iAd, relieving concerns of a monopoly. The commission saw that, and allowed the merger. If Mr. Long was actually promised this job to influence the AdMob decision, why would he still get the job after failing?
A system immersed in bureaucracy and inefficiency and laws in excess is the one where things move only when enough pressure is applied. If anything that prevents honest people from accomplishing much, and helps corrupt ones.
My point was to point out the challenges of government, highlighting why Mr. Long's experience makes him actually qualified for the job he received.
But simple acts of bribery can be performed on both linear or tangled systems, so I call strawman.
To which I'll call non sequitur. I don't deny that bribery is possible, but I do deny that it makes any sense here. Why reward someone after the fact for a failure?
Your theory that a good friend is helpful is cronyism minus the web of interests.
That's not my theory. My theory is that Mr. Long was hired based on his qualifications, and not as the result of any corruption. This is based on the following set of hypotheses:
The American political system is a complicated and overburdened one.
American lawmakers, investigators, and regulators are too busy to hear every complaint and viewpoint.
Said politicians are more inclined to meet with a lobbyist they already know than an unknown one, regardless of the lobbyist's client.
In the 12 years Mr. Long has been in Washington D.C., he has made acquaintances with influential people, making him known rather than unknown.
Mr. Long's personal attitudes toward Google are his own, regardless of any bribe that may or may not have happened.
Mr. Long has experience, as an attorney, with creating persuasive and well-worded arguments for particular viewpoints.
Mr. Long finds no ethical problem using interpersonal relationships for business purposes.
If there is any evidence against those hypotheses, please feel free to present it. If there is any evidence of actual corruption, please present that as well. Until such evidence is shown, I'll have to stick with the simplest explanation, rather than assuming that there was some shady back-room deal, just because one entity who dislikes Google joined another entity who dislikes Google.
So using a finite resource affects the physical world, but I wrote about things that apparently don't affect the physical world... so am I to understand then that R&D funding is an infinite resource? Please tell me where this endless fountain of funding is, so I can pass it on to my long-shot medical researcher friends.
By copying IP without restraint, something is physically taken away from the people who paid for it - they are no longer able to sell the product they paid for, because the sales market is drastically reduced.
Sure, it's comforting to think of information as being completely free and endless, and we'd all love to live in a world where art and science are pursued for their own sake - but that hasn't happened in the past 3000 years, and it's not going to happen anytime soon, either. There is a cost to producing the information that people want so dearly, and whoever foots the bill is going to expect some kind of return on their investment - be it fame, fortune, or simply the satisfaction of knowing their creation is widely used. Unfortunately, only the former two are easily turned into living expenses, and only the last inherently follows freely-duplicated IP.
Are you really as retarded as you are making yourself out to be, or do you actually not understand something this basic?
By using research without paying for it, you aren't piggybacking on another person's discoveries, you're using up the limited* funding in the field. By not paying, and essentially being an unknown factor to the business providing the R&D investment, you are lowering the return on investment for every other researcher. If not through reducing sales of a final product, it's by crowding their publishable papers out with your own, in a given issue of a journal.
* Regardless of how big the wallets are, the investors do need to calculate just how much return they will see from the research projects they are funding. Adding a few hundred extra competitors to a market without accounting for them can be a big difference for the feasibility projection of a project. Add thousands of unaccounted clones & derivatives, and you can have a massive marketability problem that will be extremely hard to track down, and costly to locate and fix.
Randall Long was not a judge. He was an investigator, whose primary cases involving Google ended almost two years ago, didn't do much to hinder the giant, and did very little to help Microsoft (who wasn't really even involved in the cases, either). In his most significant case (the acquisition of AdMob), Mr. Long's recommendation to challenge the deal wasn't even followed by the commission. The FTC's recent investigations have regarded business practices rather than mergers, so Mr. Long wasn't even involved. The theory that this new job is a payout for past favors doesn't make much sense. If he was a crony, he's one of the least-effective ones in history.
There is another theory that is actually supported by facts. The lobbyist position for Mr. Long could simply be a new career as a lobbyist. Contrary to Slashdot's beloved groupthink, politics isn't a deterministic system ruled by logic. It's a complex tangled mess of politicians thinking, protesters complaining, and committees meeting. Rather than have interns read thousands of letters from "concerned member of An Entity", representatives meet with a single person from An Entity, and understand that the single person is directly representing a few thousand people, be them union workers, employees, shareholders, parents, artists, or anyone else. That representative can then explain the perspective of the thousands of people all at once, clearly, and in a manner that irritates the politician much less than a flood of angry letters.
The biggest problem with this tangled mess of politics is getting that representative in an office with the politician in the first place. Most phone calls are handled by interns, with the main goal of "don't bother the politician". If you call, they'll tally your comments and report on it, but don't expect to directly speak to your Congressmen. Letters may only be tallied in samples. With so many bills passing through the legislature and so many lawsuits passing through the judicial system, getting a few moments of time with a politician is nearly impossible.
Almost everybody likes hearing from an old friend, though, even if they're going to be promoting some particular viewpoint. It's here that I think Mr. Long's main qualification for the job lies. He's been in Washington D.C. since 1999, and is (according to the WSJ article) held in high regard. I doubt it's possible to be in that kind of position and not make friends. Making connections certainly isn't the main goal for an FTC attorney, but it happens regardless. I used to work in the medical industry (in IT) and I could probably still get the attention of some of the most senior surgeons if I needed something special, just because I know who to call and what to say.
Now, this isn't to suggest that everything is perfectly moral. Somehow, Mr. Long did manage to fall into a seemingly custom-made position in a company based on the other side of the country. I find it very likely that Microsoft wanted his connections, and made him a ridiculously overpaid offer to join them. The likelihood of a bias against Google just makes the deal better for Microsoft.
The bottom line is that it's more likely this job is an effect of Mr. Long's goals and abilities aligning with Microsoft's goals and needs, rather than being the result of some secret conspiracy.
Then again most of your posts -- even the ones modded up -- are pretty trollish. I expect you'll completely miss the point and include some nice sarcasm in retort.
As should be obvious by now, I find Slashdot's hive mind disgusting. There is little concern for facts or reason, and much support for conspiracy theories and persecution mentalities. I often use sarcasm to illustrate the logical leaps necessary to sustain such theories - such as the need to erase a government agent's memory to make them unsuitable as a lobbyist. Apart from outright sarcasm, I do not intentionally troll. I mean every word I say. That's why I use my name.
But this is wrong! It's completely unacceptable for any employee of the government to act like a human, and remember contacts after leaving a job! Like any simple automaton, his understanding of how regulatory processes work and knowledge of who has what influences should be completely erased, leaving a blank slate equivalent to any poli-sci entry-level candidate.
The fact that his prejudices align with the hiring company's only further illustrates that he could never have been prejudiced on his own, but must have been bought off during his time at the FTC.
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[citation needed], and preferably one that actually covers NoSQL as it's intended for use.
Last time I checked thoroughly (2009), most RDBMSs (MS SQL Server included) could scale across an arbitrarily-large cluster, but for every doubling of the cluster's power, the costs would be around 300% to 400%. When you get to the point of needing billions of rows per table (and yes, there are applications out there that need that, even at relatively small startups), those outpacing costs become prohibitive.
The lax schema isn't about not knowing what you're doing, but about acknowledging that you won't know everything about the data you'll receive. Back when I did server programming, the mantra was "be strict in what you provide, and lax in what you accept". This is that principle applied to databases. Maybe the website you're crawling doesn't have a title, or its address is obviously dynamic. Maybe the medical record's patient has seven different insurance providers. Maybe the passport holder legally doesn't have a surname. When you design a schema for a strict database like an RDBMS, you make certain assumptions about the data you'll get. Those assumptions lead to performance increases if they're accurate, and failure if they're wrong.
MapReduce is the key to performance without assumptions, at lower cost. By moving processing to the data, and replicating the data to multiple nodes, network transfer is reduced greatly. The MapReduce programs are designed to operate on any amount of data they are presented with, so each node in the cluster contributes its available resources, and since the data is spread evenly, most "queries" will be partially processed by every node. Contrast that with RDBMS sharding, where certain servers handle certain shards, and the massive parallelism of the cluster isn't used. Some servers will sit idle while others do all of the work. Note that the parallelism applies generally, to all MapReduce algorithms. This means that you do not need to make as many assumptions about your queries ahead of time, like expecting to only look up a customer by name or phone number (and therefore indexing those).
NoSQL isn't just "not using SQL". It's a different storage paradigm, which comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
NoSQL is a terrible misnomer, in that the difference is far more than just "doesn't use SQL", and there are NoSQL systems that do actually support SQL. It's really just referring to data storage systems that aren't based on relations. That change in paradigm has its advantages (speed (in some cases), scalability, and flexibility) and disadvantages (speed (in some cases), lack of consistency, less restriction on bad programming). Of course, each NoSQL system tries to mitigate the disadvantages, and each RDBMS tries to prove itself better than all of NoSQL's advantages. It's a big fun party involving lots of mud-slinging.
Most NoSQL systems I've worked with are distributed hash tables, in a basic sense. Each value has a key, and that key determines where it's stored on a cluster. Values are not tied to any other values, so things like "foreign-key relations" are silly in a discussion of NoSQL. Rather, the algorithm to retrieve the data does all of the processing to connect data, using massive parallelization across a cluster to handle huge amounts of data at once.
With a traditional RDBMS, the application must fit its data to the schema completely before any data can be stored. This, of course, means that all data in the database can be assumed to be complete. You won't find references that don't exist, which makes queries straightforward.
With NoSQL, the database is treated as a more flexible bucket. Data is dumped in with a key, with little concern for fitting the design of the application's model. This, of course, means a bit more planning at design time, but the data can be arranged to better fit whatever it actually represents. Some details are present, and some aren't, but that's okay. The retrieval algorithm (typically a MapReduce program) should check for the existence of whatever data it needs, and handle errors accordingly. Those MapReduce programs are far more complicated than a simple SQL query, but the database's backend is conceptually simpler as an abstract key/value store. Key/value stores have been around for decades, and studied extensively. They can be made more fault-tolerant and scalable than RDBMS shards, but lack the support for large set-based comparisons.
The comparison to the BASIC-vs-C battles is appropriate. Both BASIC and C serve their purposes well (education and system programming, respectively), but neither should be used where the other is better suited. NoSQL and RDBMSs also both have their places.
And we'd still be able to have the cluster support, scalability, lax schema, and MapReduce algorithms NoSQL currently provides, right? Sometimes those aspects are vital to the application design, and key to the system's overall performance.
Integration with any database encounters the problem of connecting the programmer-centric paradigms (often objects) to the data-centric backend organization, which in an RDBMS is a relation. This problem is solved by ORM. MongoDB users encounter the same ultimate problem, but their backend simply doesn't use relations. It is inaccurate but not wholly inappropriate to say that MongoDB's integration can be eased by an ORM-like solution. The term is abused for the sake of communication.
MongoDB (and other NoSQL databases) are not intended for instantaneous and atomic validity. They are intended for use cases where absolute accuracy doesn't matter, but the parallelism of a cluster running a MapReduce algorithm does. No, it doesn't matter if a hundred messages were missed when the latest trends were calculated. It doesn't matter if a few website crawls were missed when the index is generated. They'll be included next time, and the loss of integrity has a trivial effect on the final result.
Sure, any RDBMS can be finely-tuned for each algorithm it will need to support, and with enough $100,000 machines it'll be able to process the necessary queries. On the other hand, that time and financial investment could be put into programmers to adapt the algorithm into a more scalable system, so when the service goes from 10,000 users to 10,000,000, and you go from having a million rows per table to a few billion, you don't need to spend 1000 times as much on server hardware.
That's the "web scale" hype the NoSQL fans use, and the only problem with its use is that 75% of projects using NoSQL don't really need it, and never will. Many of them will never really grow beyond the need for more than a flat-file store. That's no reason to discourage its development for the 25% of projects that have a shot at growing that big.
The actual problem underlying the O/R mismatch is that there are two high-level tools trying to interact without being perfectly matched. There are no "low-level" tools involved. The simplest solution is to use only a subset of one tool, which is what most ORMs do. The difference between the "problem" and the "better" ORMs is the size of the subsets they implement, and the elegance with which they do it.
The Unity desktop was arguably intended for tablets and phones... so it's only active when connected to a full-size monitor?
I appreciate the concept of a single computing device for everything, and having that device be tiny... but couldn't somebody other than Canonical do it? Please?
But I'm an American! If I'm not told that this will be a momentous breakthrough to give me a battery-free wireless laptop that spews rainbows and puppies and will cost less than a cheeseburger when it's released next year, why should I care about it?
Or, you know... be honest, rather than snubbing your friends. "I don't like using Facebook, but I'm required to, so I only keep business contacts on there. I don't want my boss prying into my personal life."
You raise a very good point, but it should be fairly straightforward to work around it. Arrange with your employer to let you use a different middle name, for all professional social network purposes. Either use the alias or don't include a middle name or initial on business cards, email signatures, or the like. It fulfills their need to have a real person visible for the company, and it helps your need for privacy. It's a win-win, that most likely wasn't considered when the manager wrote the "must use real name" policy.
Slashdot Mirror
That ambulance shouldn't need navigation assistance, anyway!
For the rest of us on /. haven't we had all of our music in FLAC for a decade now? I don't even listen to music much and mine is.
My music is mostly stored in whatever the default is for YouTube videos that I've saved locally. I'm apparently even less of a music fan than you are.
Fun fact: I'm also an audio technician. Yes, I can hear the occasional damaged sound, but I'm not enough of an asshole to care.
The problem is that we still use jobs, income, and money as a means for distributing food, health care, and other things necessary for life. It'd be great if technology meant more free time, but still enough income to support an average quality of life, but that's not yet the case.
Read for yourself.
Ireland, being a part of the United Kingdom, was completely subjugated by the British, regardless of what its own representatives voted for. Even if every Irish representative (all 150 or so in the House of Commons) voted unanimously for a measure to stop the famine (like closing the ports that were exporting food nobody could afford to buy, as had happened in previous famines), they would be overwhelmed by the English representatives (500 in the House of Commons), who viewed the Irish as inferior. The decisions that didn't involve Parliament were handled by entirely English officials, who usually held the same belief.
Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was in charge of the administration of Government relief to the victims of the Irish Famine, limited the Government's actual relief because he thought "the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson". For his policy, he was commemorated in the song The Fields of Athenry. The Public Works were "strictly ordered" to be unproductive—that is, they would create no fund to repay their own expenses.
England, of course, treated the Irish expenses as an Irish problem, and gave practically no charity to support it. Those expenses were passed on to the Irish landowners, who in turn evicted tenants so they'd have to pay less of the debt. Hundreds of thousands of Irish were left poor, starving, homeless, and unemployed. The Irish who did happen to own land were ineligible to receive relief, again as a rule made by the English.
Ireland had a democracy, but their decisions were overruled by their English masters. The US and many other democratic nations are currently fully functional as much as democracy allows: There is indecision, but when decisions are reached, they can be carried out.
Reading that lovely Wikipedia article, I'm told that the Ireland's democracy was led by an official appointed by Britain, because Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom. Their democracy was limited to being a mostly-ineffective group in the House of Commons, and a small number in the House of Lords. Those representatives were separated from their constituents, and even when they were convinced of the immediacy of the problem, were effectively blocked from acting by their English counterparts. Instead, the English enacted laws to further stifle the Irish, such as requiring landowners to give up their land in order to receive any food aid.
A functional but completely powerless democracy is hardly what I'd consider "working".
Ah, the troubles of form.
Weren't we talking about ROI for other _researchers_?
I wasn't. I thought we were talking about "taking what somebody else invested R&D money to develop." I was talking about the ROI for people who fund the research. Furthermore, I'm also using a fairly broad definition of the term "research", to include not just academic investigations, but also more industrial R&D like literature surveys, benchmarking, comparison analysis, testing, and so forth. I'm also trying to argue in such a way as to apply my argument to artistic creations (which I find very close to academic research in methodology and funding sources).
Academic research is far less restricted by IP rules than industry, and I think this is a good thing. I also think that certain IP regulations are too strict (copyright length), while others are too lax (artists giving all ownership to a label via a contract). I'm one of those folks who thinks that we should be able to find a set of laws that fits the current IP situation just right.
Unfortunately, the honor system that works so well in academic research doesn't seem to scale very well to the rest of the world. In academics, there are few enough researchers in any particular field that any copied work will be noticed, and a plagiarizer will be shunned. That provides an economic stimulus to produce original work, and to stay far away from derivative work unless it's clearly noted. Outside academics, the chance of two unrelated researchers working on similar projects is far higher, to the point where plagiarism can be easily and successfully passed off as coincidence.
Oh so it might never happen that company A makes life difficult for company B without appearing directly involved? It happens for lemonade stands, I guess companies who compete on billion dollars' markets do that, too?
Of course they do, but Occam's Razor suggests we look elsewhere for motivation here.
The recommendation was pro- or anti- Google? The commission ruling otherwise makes him either wrong or malicious, in the most significant case of his career. Which helps those with the opposite POV than yours.
Mr. Long recommended the FTC oppose Google's acquisition of AdMob. While the commission was considering what to do, Apple entered the market with iAd, relieving concerns of a monopoly. The commission saw that, and allowed the merger. If Mr. Long was actually promised this job to influence the AdMob decision, why would he still get the job after failing?
A system immersed in bureaucracy and inefficiency and laws in excess is the one where things move only when enough pressure is applied. If anything that prevents honest people from accomplishing much, and helps corrupt ones.
My point was to point out the challenges of government, highlighting why Mr. Long's experience makes him actually qualified for the job he received.
But simple acts of bribery can be performed on both linear or tangled systems, so I call strawman.
To which I'll call non sequitur. I don't deny that bribery is possible, but I do deny that it makes any sense here. Why reward someone after the fact for a failure?
Your theory that a good friend is helpful is cronyism minus the web of interests.
That's not my theory. My theory is that Mr. Long was hired based on his qualifications, and not as the result of any corruption. This is based on the following set of hypotheses:
If there is any evidence against those hypotheses, please feel free to present it. If there is any evidence of actual corruption, please present that as well. Until such evidence is shown, I'll have to stick with the simplest explanation, rather than assuming that there was some shady back-room deal, just because one entity who dislikes Google joined another entity who dislikes Google.
So using a finite resource affects the physical world, but I wrote about things that apparently don't affect the physical world... so am I to understand then that R&D funding is an infinite resource? Please tell me where this endless fountain of funding is, so I can pass it on to my long-shot medical researcher friends.
By copying IP without restraint, something is physically taken away from the people who paid for it - they are no longer able to sell the product they paid for, because the sales market is drastically reduced.
Sure, it's comforting to think of information as being completely free and endless, and we'd all love to live in a world where art and science are pursued for their own sake - but that hasn't happened in the past 3000 years, and it's not going to happen anytime soon, either. There is a cost to producing the information that people want so dearly, and whoever foots the bill is going to expect some kind of return on their investment - be it fame, fortune, or simply the satisfaction of knowing their creation is widely used. Unfortunately, only the former two are easily turned into living expenses, and only the last inherently follows freely-duplicated IP.
Are you really as retarded as you are making yourself out to be, or do you actually not understand something this basic?
By using research without paying for it, you aren't piggybacking on another person's discoveries, you're using up the limited* funding in the field. By not paying, and essentially being an unknown factor to the business providing the R&D investment, you are lowering the return on investment for every other researcher. If not through reducing sales of a final product, it's by crowding their publishable papers out with your own, in a given issue of a journal.
* Regardless of how big the wallets are, the investors do need to calculate just how much return they will see from the research projects they are funding. Adding a few hundred extra competitors to a market without accounting for them can be a big difference for the feasibility projection of a project. Add thousands of unaccounted clones & derivatives, and you can have a massive marketability problem that will be extremely hard to track down, and costly to locate and fix.
By all means, let's dissect this further, then.
Randall Long was not a judge. He was an investigator, whose primary cases involving Google ended almost two years ago, didn't do much to hinder the giant, and did very little to help Microsoft (who wasn't really even involved in the cases, either). In his most significant case (the acquisition of AdMob), Mr. Long's recommendation to challenge the deal wasn't even followed by the commission. The FTC's recent investigations have regarded business practices rather than mergers, so Mr. Long wasn't even involved. The theory that this new job is a payout for past favors doesn't make much sense. If he was a crony, he's one of the least-effective ones in history.
There is another theory that is actually supported by facts. The lobbyist position for Mr. Long could simply be a new career as a lobbyist. Contrary to Slashdot's beloved groupthink, politics isn't a deterministic system ruled by logic. It's a complex tangled mess of politicians thinking, protesters complaining, and committees meeting. Rather than have interns read thousands of letters from "concerned member of An Entity", representatives meet with a single person from An Entity, and understand that the single person is directly representing a few thousand people, be them union workers, employees, shareholders, parents, artists, or anyone else. That representative can then explain the perspective of the thousands of people all at once, clearly, and in a manner that irritates the politician much less than a flood of angry letters.
The biggest problem with this tangled mess of politics is getting that representative in an office with the politician in the first place. Most phone calls are handled by interns, with the main goal of "don't bother the politician". If you call, they'll tally your comments and report on it, but don't expect to directly speak to your Congressmen. Letters may only be tallied in samples. With so many bills passing through the legislature and so many lawsuits passing through the judicial system, getting a few moments of time with a politician is nearly impossible.
Almost everybody likes hearing from an old friend, though, even if they're going to be promoting some particular viewpoint. It's here that I think Mr. Long's main qualification for the job lies. He's been in Washington D.C. since 1999, and is (according to the WSJ article) held in high regard. I doubt it's possible to be in that kind of position and not make friends. Making connections certainly isn't the main goal for an FTC attorney, but it happens regardless. I used to work in the medical industry (in IT) and I could probably still get the attention of some of the most senior surgeons if I needed something special, just because I know who to call and what to say.
Now, this isn't to suggest that everything is perfectly moral. Somehow, Mr. Long did manage to fall into a seemingly custom-made position in a company based on the other side of the country. I find it very likely that Microsoft wanted his connections, and made him a ridiculously overpaid offer to join them. The likelihood of a bias against Google just makes the deal better for Microsoft.
The bottom line is that it's more likely this job is an effect of Mr. Long's goals and abilities aligning with Microsoft's goals and needs, rather than being the result of some secret conspiracy.
Then again most of your posts -- even the ones modded up -- are pretty trollish. I expect you'll completely miss the point and include some nice sarcasm in retort.
As should be obvious by now, I find Slashdot's hive mind disgusting. There is little concern for facts or reason, and much support for conspiracy theories and persecution mentalities. I often use sarcasm to illustrate the logical leaps necessary to sustain such theories - such as the need to erase a government agent's memory to make them unsuitable as a lobbyist. Apart from outright sarcasm, I do not intentionally troll. I mean every word I say. That's why I use my name.
But this is wrong! It's completely unacceptable for any employee of the government to act like a human, and remember contacts after leaving a job! Like any simple automaton, his understanding of how regulatory processes work and knowledge of who has what influences should be completely erased, leaving a blank slate equivalent to any poli-sci entry-level candidate.
The fact that his prejudices align with the hiring company's only further illustrates that he could never have been prejudiced on his own, but must have been bought off during his time at the FTC.
This post has been brought to you by the Slashdot Mockery Foundation, who paid for a recent golfing trip in Europe featuring preteen hookers as caddies. And viewers like you.
It's because you can't be bothered to learn something different.
(not (know (I) (meaning (you))))
[citation needed], and preferably one that actually covers NoSQL as it's intended for use.
Last time I checked thoroughly (2009), most RDBMSs (MS SQL Server included) could scale across an arbitrarily-large cluster, but for every doubling of the cluster's power, the costs would be around 300% to 400%. When you get to the point of needing billions of rows per table (and yes, there are applications out there that need that, even at relatively small startups), those outpacing costs become prohibitive.
The lax schema isn't about not knowing what you're doing, but about acknowledging that you won't know everything about the data you'll receive. Back when I did server programming, the mantra was "be strict in what you provide, and lax in what you accept". This is that principle applied to databases. Maybe the website you're crawling doesn't have a title, or its address is obviously dynamic. Maybe the medical record's patient has seven different insurance providers. Maybe the passport holder legally doesn't have a surname. When you design a schema for a strict database like an RDBMS, you make certain assumptions about the data you'll get. Those assumptions lead to performance increases if they're accurate, and failure if they're wrong.
MapReduce is the key to performance without assumptions, at lower cost. By moving processing to the data, and replicating the data to multiple nodes, network transfer is reduced greatly. The MapReduce programs are designed to operate on any amount of data they are presented with, so each node in the cluster contributes its available resources, and since the data is spread evenly, most "queries" will be partially processed by every node. Contrast that with RDBMS sharding, where certain servers handle certain shards, and the massive parallelism of the cluster isn't used. Some servers will sit idle while others do all of the work. Note that the parallelism applies generally, to all MapReduce algorithms. This means that you do not need to make as many assumptions about your queries ahead of time, like expecting to only look up a customer by name or phone number (and therefore indexing those).
NoSQL isn't just "not using SQL". It's a different storage paradigm, which comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.
NoSQL is a terrible misnomer, in that the difference is far more than just "doesn't use SQL", and there are NoSQL systems that do actually support SQL. It's really just referring to data storage systems that aren't based on relations. That change in paradigm has its advantages (speed (in some cases), scalability, and flexibility) and disadvantages (speed (in some cases), lack of consistency, less restriction on bad programming). Of course, each NoSQL system tries to mitigate the disadvantages, and each RDBMS tries to prove itself better than all of NoSQL's advantages. It's a big fun party involving lots of mud-slinging.
Most NoSQL systems I've worked with are distributed hash tables, in a basic sense. Each value has a key, and that key determines where it's stored on a cluster. Values are not tied to any other values, so things like "foreign-key relations" are silly in a discussion of NoSQL. Rather, the algorithm to retrieve the data does all of the processing to connect data, using massive parallelization across a cluster to handle huge amounts of data at once.
With a traditional RDBMS, the application must fit its data to the schema completely before any data can be stored. This, of course, means that all data in the database can be assumed to be complete. You won't find references that don't exist, which makes queries straightforward.
With NoSQL, the database is treated as a more flexible bucket. Data is dumped in with a key, with little concern for fitting the design of the application's model. This, of course, means a bit more planning at design time, but the data can be arranged to better fit whatever it actually represents. Some details are present, and some aren't, but that's okay. The retrieval algorithm (typically a MapReduce program) should check for the existence of whatever data it needs, and handle errors accordingly. Those MapReduce programs are far more complicated than a simple SQL query, but the database's backend is conceptually simpler as an abstract key/value store. Key/value stores have been around for decades, and studied extensively. They can be made more fault-tolerant and scalable than RDBMS shards, but lack the support for large set-based comparisons.
The comparison to the BASIC-vs-C battles is appropriate. Both BASIC and C serve their purposes well (education and system programming, respectively), but neither should be used where the other is better suited. NoSQL and RDBMSs also both have their places.
And we'd still be able to have the cluster support, scalability, lax schema, and MapReduce algorithms NoSQL currently provides, right? Sometimes those aspects are vital to the application design, and key to the system's overall performance.
Decisions based on cute animals and straw-man arguments without any facts... You must be a manager!
Er...
Um...
Why not learn both, and use whichever's strengths suit the application the best?
Integration with any database encounters the problem of connecting the programmer-centric paradigms (often objects) to the data-centric backend organization, which in an RDBMS is a relation. This problem is solved by ORM. MongoDB users encounter the same ultimate problem, but their backend simply doesn't use relations. It is inaccurate but not wholly inappropriate to say that MongoDB's integration can be eased by an ORM-like solution. The term is abused for the sake of communication.
MongoDB (and other NoSQL databases) are not intended for instantaneous and atomic validity. They are intended for use cases where absolute accuracy doesn't matter, but the parallelism of a cluster running a MapReduce algorithm does. No, it doesn't matter if a hundred messages were missed when the latest trends were calculated. It doesn't matter if a few website crawls were missed when the index is generated. They'll be included next time, and the loss of integrity has a trivial effect on the final result.
Sure, any RDBMS can be finely-tuned for each algorithm it will need to support, and with enough $100,000 machines it'll be able to process the necessary queries. On the other hand, that time and financial investment could be put into programmers to adapt the algorithm into a more scalable system, so when the service goes from 10,000 users to 10,000,000, and you go from having a million rows per table to a few billion, you don't need to spend 1000 times as much on server hardware.
That's the "web scale" hype the NoSQL fans use, and the only problem with its use is that 75% of projects using NoSQL don't really need it, and never will. Many of them will never really grow beyond the need for more than a flat-file store. That's no reason to discourage its development for the 25% of projects that have a shot at growing that big.
The actual problem underlying the O/R mismatch is that there are two high-level tools trying to interact without being perfectly matched. There are no "low-level" tools involved. The simplest solution is to use only a subset of one tool, which is what most ORMs do. The difference between the "problem" and the "better" ORMs is the size of the subsets they implement, and the elegance with which they do it.
And that's the way it is, February 22nd, 2012.
Gesundheit.
So let me get this straight...
The Unity desktop was arguably intended for tablets and phones... so it's only active when connected to a full-size monitor?
I appreciate the concept of a single computing device for everything, and having that device be tiny... but couldn't somebody other than Canonical do it? Please?
But I'm an American! If I'm not told that this will be a momentous breakthrough to give me a battery-free wireless laptop that spews rainbows and puppies and will cost less than a cheeseburger when it's released next year, why should I care about it?
Or, you know... be honest, rather than snubbing your friends. "I don't like using Facebook, but I'm required to, so I only keep business contacts on there. I don't want my boss prying into my personal life."
You raise a very good point, but it should be fairly straightforward to work around it. Arrange with your employer to let you use a different middle name, for all professional social network purposes. Either use the alias or don't include a middle name or initial on business cards, email signatures, or the like. It fulfills their need to have a real person visible for the company, and it helps your need for privacy. It's a win-win, that most likely wasn't considered when the manager wrote the "must use real name" policy.