I have never been able to tell which niche MySQL is supposed to occupy. Is there really a niche where it doesn't matter if the database is corrupted?
Nice troll. Of course there is no such niche. However, not all database applications require full ATOMicity and constraints in order to maintain their integrity. Most web applications are of this nature. For these kinds of applications, MySQL blows away other database engines.
But ACID features and transactions are at the very core of what constitutes a database;
No, they are not. The basic feature of a database is that it structures and stores your data for later retrieval. Transactions are tools that assist in maintaining database integrity; they are not database integrity itself. (And, by the way, MySQL supports transactions).
Personally I prefer PostgreSQL because MySQL uses a bastardized version of SQL.
No, it does not. It uses ANSI SQL 2, entry level. It actually goes further than entry level. It, like PostgreSQL and every other database engine in existence supports proprietary add-ons. These are useful to DBA's, but terrible for programmers to use.
I wouldn't even call MySQL a "database" since it doesn't have triggers, rollbacks, stored procedures or nested selects!
You may not call it one for those reasons. However, you would be speaking your own little private language. First of all, being a database has nothing to do with those factors. Being a database is only about storing data. NTFS, your filing cabinet, a card catalog, and OpenLDAP are all databases.
Furthermore, MySQL does have rollbacks and will soon have support for triggers, stored procedures, and nested selects.
CEOs make 419 times as much as the average worker, and CEO pay is rising five times faster than profits. Payroll taxes mean working people don't take home much more than 20 years ago. Bill Gates's fortune is 1.4 million times larger than the median family income.
Uh, so?
I mean really. As long as you are getting wealthier, does it bother you that someone else is getting a lot (and I do not mean to minimize the disparity, so I will repeat A LOT) richer?
What bothers me about Bill Gates is how he is getting richer. Not the fact that he is getting richer or that he is getting richer at a significantly greater rate than I am.
If I put a dollar value (imaginary money?) on everything I did, *I'd* be Bill Gates. Come on, folks, not everything comes down to money, and it's kind of a flaw in our culture, IMNSHO, that nothing is seen as important unless you can dollar-figure quantify it, package it, and sell it.
You are so totally wrong. EVERYTHING you do has value. Money is nothing more than an attempt to quantify that value. Your choice to take a bath instead of shower has some value to you. We do not tend to quantify that value with money since it has no value to anyone but you. However, the choice you make to shower or bathe versus going au naturale does have value. And the easiest way to quantify that is through terms like, "I would buy him some soap if only he would shower!" In other words, the cost of soap is clearly what your bathing is worth to me. In other words, money is a unit of value measurement just as sure as meters are units of distance measurement. and everything has value.
The greatest lie of our market-based system is that time equals money, in all circumstances.
Actually, it is the greatest truth of any economic system. And it is an understatement.
Money is nothing more than an attempt at an objective measure of value with the underlying assumption is that there is no objective measure of value. Time has value. A smile has value. Everything has value.
Each of us, however, values everything differently. This fact is something so very fundamental, yet it is something socialism and communism miss entirely. Though money helps us translate our valuations into a rough average, capitalism recognizes this is a rough average. For this reason, under capitalism, all transactions make everyone involved richer.
Let's look at a simple example. I have a piece of chocolate cake and you have a piece of vanilla cake. Unfortunately, I hate chocolate and you hate vanilla. How much do you think the chocolate cake is worth to me? How much the vanilla cake? If I saw the two side-by-side in a store, I would probably pay $2 for the vanilla and $0 for the chocolate. Assuming the chocolate cake was all I had in this world, we would say I hate no net worth. Furthermore, assuming the reverse was true for you, you would also have no net worth. In the economic universe consisting of the two of us, we have a total net worth of $0. The minute we trade cakes, however, our individual net worths jump to $2 and the entire net worth of our universe to $4 (until we eat the cakes!).
My point? My point is that every decision we make has value. That includes how we spend our time. Choosing to spend time doing X instead of Y has value. You cannot escape it. You wallow in self-pity instead of take the $7/hour job at McDonald's after getting laid off because wallowing in self-pity is worth more to you than $7/hour. And because money is the only thing close to a quantification of the value we place on our decisions--including on how we spend time--time is in fact money.
By code review and education - yes. By a machine applying an arbitrary set of rules - no, of course not. If it were possible for the language designers to know in advance exactly what 'stupid' consists of for any given programming task, and it were possible to write a compiler to enforce this, then most programmers would be out of a job.
I have seen it work successfully in many environments now for six years. This is a vast change from what I have seen at shops using less strict languages, especially C++.
I can't imagine that such a way of organizing programmers - a separation into 'architects' and 'monkeys' - could ever really work. At my last employer there was something a bit like this, and the architects got cut off from what it was really like to use the product and produced horribly baroque designs, while some of the monkeys wrote code of unusably poor quality.
Why the hell would you have your architects doing the usability engineering? You should have usability engineers (aka information architects) handling that job.
But I don't have enough experience to say for sure that this division won't work - maybe you have experience of successfully programming in such an environment?
Yes, I do. On time, on budget, multimillion dollar projects. Consistently.
FWIW, if you did want a language that mapped well to your chosen 'architecture', it's much more likely to be C++ or even Perl rather than Java.
No way in hell. First of all, Perl is a monstrosity. It was designed to be a monstrosity. It needed to be a monstrosity to support the job of sys admins who needed to focus on their jobs, not focus on becoming programmers. I have never met maintainable Perl code. It simply is one of the worst languages in existence for large-scale programming.
Second of all, C++ has lots of fun tools that let developers escape from the architects' designs and hang themselves. This makes it very difficult to model business problems.
Java supports only a rather simplistic view of the world - your chosen design might naturally require multiple inheritance (or virtual inheritance), for example
For business applications, multiple inheritance is NEVER needed. In those few instances where you might be tempted to use it, delegation works just fine. Now, I will grant that MI could be useful in other problem domains. Use a different language for those problem domains. C#'s support for delegates is a nice touch in this area, but it does not expand the problem domain.
But not the weird dates. This was exactly the example that made me think 'what an overengineered crock'. Can you honestly say that the typical application requires support for non-Western calendars?
Business application? Yes, it should. If you have any desire for your app too be used in the middle east or orient, should not hard code your calendar. I will grant that there is a bunch of deprecated crap in the whole Date setup that confuses the issue, but I would not drop support for multiple calendars.
The design does do what it is supposed to. You can code all Western applications without knowing shit about the full capabilities of the Date/Calendar construct. Yet you leave your application capable of supporting other calendars at the same time.
I seriously doubt it. All major metrics such as adoption in companies, teaching in education, and adoption by programmers suggests it is continuously growing. Furthermore, the only potential competitor on the market is C# which, while not an inferior clone, is a clone. Jumping languages is a hard task. C# will capture the windows client development market and the microsoft people who never adopted Java in the first place. It is hard to see what will compell people already in the Java camp to move to C#.
The language is awkward and unexpressive; its main appeal seems to be in preventing stupid programmers from doing things their brains can't understand (like multiple inheritance). But we all know that you cannot prevent the programmer from writing bad code. OK, pointer safety and garbage collection is useful, but c'mon, practically every other language apart from C and C++ has this too, and C++ is pretty safe if you program it carefully and use the STL.
You can succesfully prevent coders from being stupid. The difference between C and Java is that you have to be an expert to write good C code; you have to be an expert to write bad Java code. What you want from a language is a language that maps well to architectural models so that your architects are making the decisions, not your immature and inexperienced code monkeys. Java is that language. C# is almost that language.
And the libraries: urgh. They all seem to be designed by committee and make QBASIC look elegant. The standard date library for example, or database access.
The libraries, in general, are actually quite well designed. Especially the database access API. The problem is, novice coders don't generally understand that there are things like non-western calendaring systems, multi-byte character sets, and alternate forms for displaying dates. These libraries make sure such novice programmers do not code a company into a box.
Java claims to be cross-platform, but it only does this by creating a whole new platform on top which has to be installed first. And the JDK is one of the least portable programs you'll find on a modern system. As for being vendor independent: don't make me laugh. Java is just as dependent on Sun as Windows is on Microsoft
There is no way to get cross-platform behavior without installing a virtual machine. Whether you call that VM a browser, an emulator, or a VM is irrelevant. And Java really has no dependence on Sun. It is much more dependent on IBM than Sun.
Java has succeeded because it solves real programming issues for large-scale software development.
This is the mantra of every criminal wishing to disguise their actions as civil disobedience. You could argue the Sept 11th hijackers were practicing civil disobedience using your flawed logic.
No, civil disobedience does not involve acting immorally. Your examples are very poorly chosen for a variety of reasons.
Morality does not change; perceptions of morality change. And if you are suggesting mine and others perceptions of morality on this issue need to change, you need to be more specific what it is that needs to change.
Civil disobedience is taking the moral high ground by breaking the law. This jerk breaks the law by doing the immoral. That is NOT civil disobedience. It is thuggery.
That's actually quite false, though it is a common European misconception. Our problem is that we are a country that too quickly moves our problems into the courtroom. A C&D letter does not actually imply that the person sending it has any legal case; it simply means they took the time to try to intimidate you into believing they do.
This is not civil disobedience, it is common thievery.
Civil disobedience would be to copy your DVD's and store them in a safe space as backups.
Civil disobedience would be to use Microsoft Office on your laptop and desktop.
In other words, civil disobedience is doing things that might be illegal but still carry the full force of morality. Your acts are both illegal and immoral.
There is a very good reason it is not happening--there is no reason for movie theatres to go this route. Movie theatres barely survive as it is. The ticket prices exist solely to avoid losing their shirts. They break even or make money off of concessions. The movie studios, however, get very, very, very rich off the ticket prices.
Yet the movie studios are pushing digital theatres--a move that will cost theatres dearly and provide really no benefit to the movie-going public. I am much more concerned about a big screen, decent sound, and stadium seating than I am about whether or not my movie is digital video.
Movie studios want digital movie theatres because it will drastically reduce the cost of distribution. The irony is that it could lead to more screenings of non-studio works. IMHO, that is the true benefit of digital movie theatres. But it is not one that is going to give one theatre a competitive advantage over another.
I was replying to a post talking about how MS acknowledges that the CLI cannot support all languages. The fact of the matter is that it suffers from the same faults as the JVM.
Nevertheless, we already have this--the Java VM and Java language specification. Many languages now compile to Java byte code and can be written to use Java libraries.
It turns out doing this is really hard. The CLS does nothing new. It is just the way Microsoft is marketing it. In the end, it is not really a good thing for anyone but operating systems developers... most companies do not like a proliferation of languages running around anyways and the migration to a new language is fairly painful.
f you're a teenager, Web designer, film editor or visual arts major, or even a loving Grandma, it's great that the iMac allows you to create your own DVDs, organize and edit digital pictures, play CDs or convert MP3's, turn home videotapes into high-quality edited films. What's less clear is whether or not the public -- especially that critical middle-class chunk of it -- wants to do those things on a computer, or is confident about its ability to use machinery that's still more complicated and problematic than its makers seem able to admit.
Katz clearly has his head up his ass, because this article indicates he has completely missed the amazing sales in the middle of a recession of digital cameras and digital video as well as portable music devices. These are not gadgets being purchased by Linux dweebs; these are gadgets being purchased by everyone and these gadgets demand a PC in order to fulfill their purposes. Apple simply wants to be the obvious choice for that PC.
The desktop metaphor is based on the idea that in the west we look for information left to right, top to bottom. Being in the upper left hand corner is much more natural. If you do not believe me, go use a Mac for a week and see what happens. At most, you look for things in their "Windows location" for a few hours. I personally go back and forth between both operating systems about equally after having used Windows for most of the past 7 years. On Windows, I always end up looking for things in the "Mac location"; I never look for things on the Mac in the "Windows location." That says a lot to me about who got it right.
Oh, and the dock is really nothing like the task bar.
Think a little more about WHAT THE ARTICLE SAYS, dummy! It speculates that A NATIVE API version of MS Office is in preparation. (not that a version has yet to appear) A native (COCOA) version of Office will have much code that is translatable to GNUstep which is a NeXTstep clone that runs on free Unices.
You really should get a clue before you get out your flamethrower. Cocoa does not make a GUI app portable to other UNIX boxes. Cocoa apps are not X Window apps; they therefore cannot run UNIX systems for whom X Window is the only GUI. For the app to be portable to another UNIX, either the app would have to be an X Window app (and thus not Cocoa) or the target UNIX would have to support Aqua (wouldn't Apple's legal team have a field day with this one?)
You're 100% right on one point: YOU REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS ARGUMENT
Both of you understand the argument. Unfortunately, you, AC (and the original poster), do not understand Mac OS X.
Just because OS X is UNIX does not mean that porting GUI apps is a simple recompile. It is true for non-GUI apps. X Window apps can also easily be ported to OS X apps since you can, if you want, run a window manager on your OS X box.
One of OS X's gifts to the world, however, is the end of the reign X Window on UNIX. The GUI environment under OS X is Aqua. Anyone writing for the Mac writes their GUI as an Aqua GUI (Java apps are Aqua). You cannot easily port an Aqua app to the X Window System.
Who the hell uses the cheap mouses that come with any computer you buy? I use my two-button optical mouse just fine under OS X. And I have had to buy one for all of my Intel boxes as well.
Have the electrician who is wiring your phones do it. A lot of times these guys run cat3 for phone, you can get him to run cat5 for both phone and ethernet and get it all over with at once.
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Nice troll. Of course there is no such niche. However, not all database applications require full ATOMicity and constraints in order to maintain their integrity. Most web applications are of this nature. For these kinds of applications, MySQL blows away other database engines.
But ACID features and transactions are at the very core of what constitutes a database;
No, they are not. The basic feature of a database is that it structures and stores your data for later retrieval. Transactions are tools that assist in maintaining database integrity; they are not database integrity itself. (And, by the way, MySQL supports transactions).
No, it does not. It uses ANSI SQL 2, entry level. It actually goes further than entry level. It, like PostgreSQL and every other database engine in existence supports proprietary add-ons. These are useful to DBA's, but terrible for programmers to use.
I wouldn't even call MySQL a "database" since it doesn't have triggers, rollbacks, stored procedures or nested selects!
You may not call it one for those reasons. However, you would be speaking your own little private language. First of all, being a database has nothing to do with those factors. Being a database is only about storing data. NTFS, your filing cabinet, a card catalog, and OpenLDAP are all databases.
Furthermore, MySQL does have rollbacks and will soon have support for triggers, stored procedures, and nested selects.
Uh, so?
I mean really. As long as you are getting wealthier, does it bother you that someone else is getting a lot (and I do not mean to minimize the disparity, so I will repeat A LOT) richer?
What bothers me about Bill Gates is how he is getting richer. Not the fact that he is getting richer or that he is getting richer at a significantly greater rate than I am.
You are so totally wrong. EVERYTHING you do has value. Money is nothing more than an attempt to quantify that value. Your choice to take a bath instead of shower has some value to you. We do not tend to quantify that value with money since it has no value to anyone but you. However, the choice you make to shower or bathe versus going au naturale does have value. And the easiest way to quantify that is through terms like, "I would buy him some soap if only he would shower!" In other words, the cost of soap is clearly what your bathing is worth to me. In other words, money is a unit of value measurement just as sure as meters are units of distance measurement. and everything has value.
Actually, it is the greatest truth of any economic system. And it is an understatement.
Money is nothing more than an attempt at an objective measure of value with the underlying assumption is that there is no objective measure of value. Time has value. A smile has value. Everything has value.
Each of us, however, values everything differently. This fact is something so very fundamental, yet it is something socialism and communism miss entirely. Though money helps us translate our valuations into a rough average, capitalism recognizes this is a rough average. For this reason, under capitalism, all transactions make everyone involved richer.
Let's look at a simple example. I have a piece of chocolate cake and you have a piece of vanilla cake. Unfortunately, I hate chocolate and you hate vanilla. How much do you think the chocolate cake is worth to me? How much the vanilla cake? If I saw the two side-by-side in a store, I would probably pay $2 for the vanilla and $0 for the chocolate. Assuming the chocolate cake was all I had in this world, we would say I hate no net worth. Furthermore, assuming the reverse was true for you, you would also have no net worth. In the economic universe consisting of the two of us, we have a total net worth of $0. The minute we trade cakes, however, our individual net worths jump to $2 and the entire net worth of our universe to $4 (until we eat the cakes!).
My point? My point is that every decision we make has value. That includes how we spend our time. Choosing to spend time doing X instead of Y has value. You cannot escape it. You wallow in self-pity instead of take the $7/hour job at McDonald's after getting laid off because wallowing in self-pity is worth more to you than $7/hour. And because money is the only thing close to a quantification of the value we place on our decisions--including on how we spend time--time is in fact money.
It's native.
I run Quicken on Unix. I use Mac OS X.
I have seen it work successfully in many environments now for six years. This is a vast change from what I have seen at shops using less strict languages, especially C++.
I can't imagine that such a way of organizing programmers - a separation into 'architects' and 'monkeys' - could ever really work. At my last employer there was something a bit like this, and the architects got cut off from what it was really like to use the product and produced horribly baroque designs, while some of the monkeys wrote code of unusably poor quality.
Why the hell would you have your architects doing the usability engineering? You should have usability engineers (aka information architects) handling that job.
But I don't have enough experience to say for sure that this division won't work - maybe you have experience of successfully programming in such an environment?
Yes, I do. On time, on budget, multimillion dollar projects. Consistently.
FWIW, if you did want a language that mapped well to your chosen 'architecture', it's much more likely to be C++ or even Perl rather than Java.
No way in hell. First of all, Perl is a monstrosity. It was designed to be a monstrosity. It needed to be a monstrosity to support the job of sys admins who needed to focus on their jobs, not focus on becoming programmers. I have never met maintainable Perl code. It simply is one of the worst languages in existence for large-scale programming.
Second of all, C++ has lots of fun tools that let developers escape from the architects' designs and hang themselves. This makes it very difficult to model business problems.
Java supports only a rather simplistic view of the world - your chosen design might naturally require multiple inheritance (or virtual inheritance), for example
For business applications, multiple inheritance is NEVER needed. In those few instances where you might be tempted to use it, delegation works just fine. Now, I will grant that MI could be useful in other problem domains. Use a different language for those problem domains. C#'s support for delegates is a nice touch in this area, but it does not expand the problem domain.
But not the weird dates. This was exactly the example that made me think 'what an overengineered crock'. Can you honestly say that the typical application requires support for non-Western calendars?
Business application? Yes, it should. If you have any desire for your app too be used in the middle east or orient, should not hard code your calendar. I will grant that there is a bunch of deprecated crap in the whole Date setup that confuses the issue, but I would not drop support for multiple calendars.
The design does do what it is supposed to. You can code all Western applications without knowing shit about the full capabilities of the Date/Calendar construct. Yet you leave your application capable of supporting other calendars at the same time.
I seriously doubt it. All major metrics such as adoption in companies, teaching in education, and adoption by programmers suggests it is continuously growing. Furthermore, the only potential competitor on the market is C# which, while not an inferior clone, is a clone. Jumping languages is a hard task. C# will capture the windows client development market and the microsoft people who never adopted Java in the first place. It is hard to see what will compell people already in the Java camp to move to C#.
The language is awkward and unexpressive; its main appeal seems to be in preventing stupid programmers from doing things their brains can't understand (like multiple inheritance). But we all know that you cannot prevent the programmer from writing bad code. OK, pointer safety and garbage collection is useful, but c'mon, practically every other language apart from C and C++ has this too, and C++ is pretty safe if you program it carefully and use the STL.
You can succesfully prevent coders from being stupid. The difference between C and Java is that you have to be an expert to write good C code; you have to be an expert to write bad Java code. What you want from a language is a language that maps well to architectural models so that your architects are making the decisions, not your immature and inexperienced code monkeys. Java is that language. C# is almost that language.
And the libraries: urgh. They all seem to be designed by committee and make QBASIC look elegant. The standard date library for example, or database access.
The libraries, in general, are actually quite well designed. Especially the database access API. The problem is, novice coders don't generally understand that there are things like non-western calendaring systems, multi-byte character sets, and alternate forms for displaying dates. These libraries make sure such novice programmers do not code a company into a box.
Java claims to be cross-platform, but it only does this by creating a whole new platform on top which has to be installed first. And the JDK is one of the least portable programs you'll find on a modern system. As for being vendor independent: don't make me laugh. Java is just as dependent on Sun as Windows is on Microsoft
There is no way to get cross-platform behavior without installing a virtual machine. Whether you call that VM a browser, an emulator, or a VM is irrelevant. And Java really has no dependence on Sun. It is much more dependent on IBM than Sun.
Java has succeeded because it solves real programming issues for large-scale software development.
No, civil disobedience does not involve acting immorally. Your examples are very poorly chosen for a variety of reasons.
Morality does not change; perceptions of morality change. And if you are suggesting mine and others perceptions of morality on this issue need to change, you need to be more specific what it is that needs to change.
Civil disobedience is taking the moral high ground by breaking the law. This jerk breaks the law by doing the immoral. That is NOT civil disobedience. It is thuggery.
That's actually quite false, though it is a common European misconception. Our problem is that we are a country that too quickly moves our problems into the courtroom. A C&D letter does not actually imply that the person sending it has any legal case; it simply means they took the time to try to intimidate you into believing they do.
Civil disobedience would be to copy your DVD's and store them in a safe space as backups.
Civil disobedience would be to use Microsoft Office on your laptop and desktop.
In other words, civil disobedience is doing things that might be illegal but still carry the full force of morality. Your acts are both illegal and immoral.
Yet the movie studios are pushing digital theatres--a move that will cost theatres dearly and provide really no benefit to the movie-going public. I am much more concerned about a big screen, decent sound, and stadium seating than I am about whether or not my movie is digital video.
Movie studios want digital movie theatres because it will drastically reduce the cost of distribution. The irony is that it could lead to more screenings of non-studio works. IMHO, that is the true benefit of digital movie theatres. But it is not one that is going to give one theatre a competitive advantage over another.
I was replying to a post talking about how MS acknowledges that the CLI cannot support all languages. The fact of the matter is that it suffers from the same faults as the JVM.
It turns out doing this is really hard. The CLS does nothing new. It is just the way Microsoft is marketing it. In the end, it is not really a good thing for anyone but operating systems developers... most companies do not like a proliferation of languages running around anyways and the migration to a new language is fairly painful.
f you're a teenager, Web designer, film editor or visual arts major, or even a loving Grandma, it's great that the iMac allows you to create your own DVDs, organize and edit digital pictures, play CDs or convert MP3's, turn home videotapes into high-quality edited films. What's less clear is whether or not the public -- especially that critical middle-class chunk of it -- wants to do those things on a computer, or is confident about its ability to use machinery that's still more complicated and problematic than its makers seem able to admit.
Katz clearly has his head up his ass, because this article indicates he has completely missed the amazing sales in the middle of a recession of digital cameras and digital video as well as portable music devices. These are not gadgets being purchased by Linux dweebs; these are gadgets being purchased by everyone and these gadgets demand a PC in order to fulfill their purposes. Apple simply wants to be the obvious choice for that PC.
That makes sense.
The desktop metaphor is based on the idea that in the west we look for information left to right, top to bottom. Being in the upper left hand corner is much more natural. If you do not believe me, go use a Mac for a week and see what happens. At most, you look for things in their "Windows location" for a few hours. I personally go back and forth between both operating systems about equally after having used Windows for most of the past 7 years. On Windows, I always end up looking for things in the "Mac location"; I never look for things on the Mac in the "Windows location." That says a lot to me about who got it right.
Oh, and the dock is really nothing like the task bar.
It is called history. If Cocoa were OpenStep, it would be called OpenStep. It is not because it is a proprietary API derived from OpenStep.
Cocoa, the native API for Mac OS X, is not X11-based. It is not OpenStep.
You really should get a clue before you get out your flamethrower. Cocoa does not make a GUI app portable to other UNIX boxes. Cocoa apps are not X Window apps; they therefore cannot run UNIX systems for whom X Window is the only GUI. For the app to be portable to another UNIX, either the app would have to be an X Window app (and thus not Cocoa) or the target UNIX would have to support Aqua (wouldn't Apple's legal team have a field day with this one?)
You're 100% right on one point: YOU REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS ARGUMENT
Both of you understand the argument. Unfortunately, you, AC (and the original poster), do not understand Mac OS X.
One of OS X's gifts to the world, however, is the end of the reign X Window on UNIX. The GUI environment under OS X is Aqua. Anyone writing for the Mac writes their GUI as an Aqua GUI (Java apps are Aqua). You cannot easily port an Aqua app to the X Window System.
Who the hell uses the cheap mouses that come with any computer you buy? I use my two-button optical mouse just fine under OS X. And I have had to buy one for all of my Intel boxes as well.
Fiber is probably a waste of time, but maybe not.