How much of a speed increase have you (or anyone else) noticed over ext2? Does anyone know how XFS compares to reiserfs or ext3? I'm not necessarily looking for hard-and-fast benchmarks -- just for "does it 'feel' faster"? (OTOH, if you had hard-and-fast benchmarks, that'd be great, too.) Is it a pain (i.e. dump/restore) to convert filesystems over to XFS, or have they come up with some cleverness to convert ext2 partitions?
Lolita isn't pornography, though, and therein lies a big distinction. It's designed to make you think, not to make your dick hard.
A better analogy for this would be selling oregano as cannabis. I believe that there are too many layers of indirection in your analogy. The gov't's stance on child porn (whether it's right or not) is that encouraging pedophiles is a bad thing. Providing pedophiles with an outlet for their desire is a bad thing. In all of the cases you cite, the government has not decreed that "whet[ting] the appetite" in some way other than doing the actual act is illegal, and that is why this is an issue.
Katz, this is way off base, and it seems that this is just another excuse for you to get on your "napster is good and video games don't make criminals out of kids" soapbox. Are you capable of writing an opinion piece that doesn't allude to Columbine and the surrounding fracas?
In any case, I can't see how a Bush administration would be any worse for tech policy than the Clinton administration, which decided right away (in 1993) that criminal copyright infringement needed no profit motive, beginning the steady stream of fair use erosion since; or any worse than the administration of an Al Gore who has spoken at the Microsoft campus three times since 1996, hailing them as "great innovators" and as deserving champions of the new economy. (http://www.vote-smart.org for more.) Furthermore, "pro-business" necessarily means "anti-monopoly", and Ashcroft spoke out against Microsoft when he was on hte Senate Judiciary Committee.
I'm not saying that there's a lot to like about Bush (or Ashcroft). But blaming bad tech law on him -- or on any president -- is hiding your head in the sand and missing the point. Don't bitch about the president -- he is (with a few historical exceptions) little more than a cheerleader for the nation. Write your representatives, since THEY MAKE THE LAW. If you're in academia, make sure to list all of the initials after your name -- they might just make a difference. People need to know that if they support UCITA, then they won't get your vote.
You also need to educate others; if just the technoliterati complain, that's too small a fraction of the electorate to make a dent. We need to educate the general public to these issues to insure that Joe Six-Pack knows that shrink-wrapped software manufacturers may as well be "licensing" him a shrink-wrapped, steaming plate of fecal matter, to ensure that Joe knows that an electronic bnook is artificially, legally different from a dead-trees book. When Joe and all his friend write outraged letters, maybe your representation will think twice about being bought by media and software lobbies.
Schumann died in 1856, and was not Jewish. Perhaps you are thinking of Arnold Schoenberg? He fled Nazi Germany for Los Angeles.
It is odd that many of the greatest (and most nationalistic) composers in the German-speaking world have been Jewish, given the German-speaking world's history of antisemitism (especially in musical circles).
Mendelssohn, for example, whose father had assimilated, saved J.S. Bach's works from obscurity and wrote wonderful Lutheran church and art music, including the incredible "Reformation Symphony". (As a practicing Lutheran, I can vouch for his authenticity of expression and doctrine.) Gustav Mahler, who assimilated, was attacked for his "sensual Semitic ultramodernism" even though his brilliant music was far more conservative of Germanate tradition than that of his Gentile contemporary, Richard Strauss. Both Mendelssohn and Mahler's works were outlawed in Nazi Germany.
The list goes on and on...German culture has been saved, preserved, and perfected by Jews so many times that it is completely incomprehensible how such a pandemic antisemitism could exist for so long.
Voulez-vous dire "L'enfers c'est les autres Français" ou "L'enfers c'est les autres >?"
heh heh..."je deteste la langue des grenouilles"
Sorry, I haven't spoken French at all in a few years.:-)
Re:The only way this could be done. . .
on
Nazis on Napster
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· Score: 2
wrong link for the Jerusalem Report article. Go here
Re:The only way this could be done. . .
on
Nazis on Napster
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· Score: 4
It's not really Wagner's fault that Hitler liked his music, since Wagner was dead before Hitler was born. (I wrote a longer comment about Wagner and his motivations here.)
Wagner's music is not hateful or defamatory. Some critical theorists have tried to demonstrate that it is, but most explanations I've seen don't hold as much water as they would need to. If you want to see real "Nazi opera", look at the works of Hans Pfitzner, whose sole goal in life was to be the court composer to the Third Reich.
Wagner is slowly gaining acceptance in Israel, but Hitler's near-fetishistic obsession with some of Wagner's music (like the Tannhauser overture, which Wagner insisted wsa played whenever he entered a room) has left a lasting tarnish on Wagner in many eyes. Look at this article in Jerusalem Report. While it contains some factual inaccuracies about Wagner's music, it presents some interesting counterpoints from Wagner opponents and Wagner defenders.
I've seen (and read) that web-based "Wagnerbuch" before. While some of it is quite good, he takes serious liberties with many interpretations and cites only the most politicized sources. Very few of the people he cites are actually musicologists; most of them are critical theorists who have gone out of their way to find antisemitism in Wagner.
I'm not defending Wagner so much as I am defending scholarship. It is fine to produce a monograph which seeks to prove that Wagner's every motivation was based on antisemitism, and only cites other sources which back up this claim, ignoring a great deal of other Wagner scholarship, but it is foolish to read this monograph and no differing viewpoints.
BTW, to see why you shouldn't hyphenate "antisemitism", click here. According to that page (with which I am inclined to agree), hyphenating "antisemitism" basically means that you think "Semitic" is meaningful, and that defamation of Jews is based on "their race," which is a worrisome (at best) stance to take.
Wagner's Ring Cycle was written between 1954 and 1876, IIRC. It was also banned -- as degenerate art -- during the Third Reich (along with Wagner's Parsifal) because the general message of the Ring Cycle is that those who attempt to seize power will eventually be brought down by power. The story is taken from the Icelandic (and old German, old Norse, etc.) saga of the Volsungs, which is available from Project Gutenberg.
Hitler mainly liked Wagner because his music was so nationalist, and he (like nearly everyone else in the German-speaking world of the 19th century) failed miserably to rise above the prevailing antisemitism of his day.
Wagner is a very complicated character; he wrote some terribly obscene essays (i.e. "Das Judentum in Musik", which was actually a criticism of Meyerbeer and French Ope'ra), but he actively opposed fascism and religious persecution. The central influence in Wagner's philosophy was not antisemitism, as many are wont to claim, but rather an amalgam of Schopenhauer, early Nietzsche (don't even get started about _Will to Power_, which was written by Nietzsche's sister and which most scholars agree is antithetical to Nietzsche's philosophy), Buddhism and medieval mysticism.
~wog
(Yeah, I'm a CS grad, but I had music history and philosophy majors as an undergrad.)
static methods and fields in Java are particular to a Class object. A Class object is particular to a ClassLoader object. You can have several of the latter.
Granted, this is something that many Java programmers will do only rarely, or will do only in special circumstances, such as when specifying a different security policy for one class than for the rest of an application.
Yes, but you're confusing language design principles with basic OO concepts. I agree that keyword abuse is a problem, and I believe that Smalltalk is more elegant. However, Java is a surprisingly good language, all things considered, and I have been very productive with it.
My point was, and is, simply that Smalltalk offers a mechanism for implementing factory methods, which are also referred to as "class" or "static" methods in OO literature. How Smalltalk implements this, while noble and elegant, is irrelevant to my point: that it is possible to implement the equivalent of a Java "static" method in Smalltalk. I'm even enough of a vocabulary snob to concede to you that it is wrong to call them "static methods," but the fact remains that class methods in Smalltalk and static methods in Java are equivalent. Furthermore, a large enough number of programmers have the concept of "static method" in their vocabulary that I think it is an acceptable, if slightly inaccurate, rendering for the level of discussion that this forum was engaged in.
I did take the test, over five years ago, before they even made the decision to switch to C++ (let alone the actual switch). Computer science, like math, logic, or music, is really "a language". You can learn the basics of a language without writing or speaking it, but practicing communicating in a given language is how you really learn the language. C++ is a hinderance in this regard (like having to learn writing French with your non-dominant hand), which is why it's a bad language for teaching. To really understand binary trees, students need to write programs which use them.
I'll agree with you that learning a different programming paradigm will have an impact on your universe of discourse, but for the AP CS exam, it really doesn't matter what programming paradigm a student has been exposed to. I took the test in Pascal, but I may as well have taken it in MIPS assembly -- for the most part, the algorithms and data structures didn't even require SP, let alone OOP. These algorithms will be the same as long as we're
computing on devices that are equivalent to a Turing machine, regardless of what expression they take.
No. Everything is an object in Smalltalk, including classes. Class methods belong to the class objects. In addition, global variables belong to the Dictionary
object called "Smalltalk". There is no "static" in Smalltalk.
Sorry for being unclear; I concede that that is a more exact explanation. However, I maintain that the difference between methods belonging to a class object (instead of an instance of that class) and static methods is only an implementation/vocabulary detail. If I wanted to implement the Singleton or Factory Pattern, I would use a class method (for getInstance or createFoo, respectively).
Thanks for your thoughts. The reason why I'm "benchmarking drivers" is that one driver, which I am developing, has client-side relation cache and delegates to the native driver for cache misses. I don't think my question was inexact -- I asked for a TPC-C implementation in Java, not for "a db benchmark in Java"; I asked for a particular specific thing, not for a recommendation of a type of thing.
The plan is to compare "apples-to-apples" by comparing my driver on top of a native driver to the native driver alone under a simulated "real" workload, using some benchmark thatmost people in the field will have a frame of reference to. Since I don't have a $50k computer at my immediate disposal, I'm not going to be publishing numbers that are immediately comparable to the published TPC results, but the ratio between the two should be meaningful and the fact that it is TPC-C should let someone know what sort of test it is.
Next is the issue of actually publishing benchmark results. First of all, you cannot publish a full TPC benchmark without it being audited. You can use their data, use their queries, but you cannot publish comprehensive numbers (such as QphD or QthM) because it's not permitted by the TPC. Look at how academic research papers in the database field do it.
I'm not interested in publishing "TPC results" for the purpose of selling hardware or software. I'm interested in saying "On this TPC-C-like workload, the driver with cache performed n times better than the driver without."
Now you get to the issue of publishing a result on ANY database. Not going to happen. Database vendors don't allow anybody to publish any benchmarks of their software under any circumstances, not even for academic reasons. The only people who get around that are people working for the companies, such as the IBM Almaden research people. You can't publish the results very easily, and have your advisor look into what you can use and/or publish.
Well, that's not entirely true. (I am at Wisconsin, the "inspiration" for the benchmark clause since 1983....) Although I was planning to test cached-Postgres vs. uncached-Postgres, DB2 will allow one to publish benchmarks. And if you want to publish relative benchmarks for a system with different parameters/drivers/etc. (as many papers have done), it is pretty straightforward to do it legally: just compare "DBMS A" to "DBMS B". That's what papers that I've read lately have done. However, Oracle-to-Sybase comparisons are not what I'm interested in, as I said.
Thanks for your help, and I'm sorry I wasn't more clear by specifying that I was interested in comparing total throughput of two drivers on the same db. I may wind up only using the db code from TPC-W, but I think in that case, it would be smarter to just write my own benchmark, as "the db code from TPC-W" would have little more credibility/recognizability than "this benchmark with the following constraints...."
It is a reference to an Alan Perlis quote. (Perlis is well-known for his many witty CS epigrams.) The quote is "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon". Some people (me included) feel that the gains you acheive from "sugary" features like operator overloading are not worth the price other people pay in trying to understand and maintain your code if you misuse them.
This is a good point, and I humbly suggest that Java does not meet this criterion. The AP CS exam should switch instead to Python.
Yeah, the problem with Java at the HS level is that you have to teach objects to recovering BASIC programmers.:-) Python is an excellent teaching language, and it would be in my top five choices. I'd be pulling for Scheme above all, except then I'd be modded down as a troll and/or yelled at by some 1337 "c++ h4x0r".
I TAed for a C++ class as an undergrad for three years, and it never ceased to amaze me how many students kept making the same class of mistakes throughout every semester. By contrast, the Scheme class I TAed for had students doing harder work with fewer dumb language-related errors. It is all in the medium in teaching this stuff. C++ is just pedagogically unsound.
Yeah. While we're at it, let's not impose Latin, French, difficult sheet music, The President's physical fitness test, or calculus on them either.
God forbid anybody should be challenged by an AP exam.
You're missing the point. Teaching high-school students Latin is teaching them a language. Teaching high school students computer science is teaching them a sort of epistemology; an entry into a discipline. Teaching students difficult sheet music is teaching them an application of a physical skill and intellectual interpretation.
C++ is the medium, not the message. The class isn't "AP C++", it's "AP Computer Science", and my original point was that C++ is an unnecessary encumberance on learning computer science. I learned French in high school by studying grammar and conversing, not by reading Sartre. The medium can interfere with the message. Why do you think children don't learn to play, say, the oboe or bassoon at a very young age, instead starting on the clarinet? Unnecessary complication gets in the way of learning the basics.
The goal of computer science education is not to churn out C++ coders; rather, it is to churn out people who are capable of describing solution generators rather than merely "solving problems", people who are capable of procedural epistemology, abstraction, and analysis. That is why the language for the AP class ought to be absolutely as simple as possible to convey the concepts. I taught myself Java and implemented LZW in a total of three hours, because I had a strong foundation in the basics. Making students learn computer science via C++ is like making them take the President's physical fitness test in shackles.
I thought it was pretty clear that I was being tongue-in-cheek. I work for a research group whose principal product is over 500,000 lines of C++ code on ten platforms. My code compiles flawlessly with "-Wall -pedantic". I don't think there's an issue of "chops" here.
One of the nice things about Java is that it's not too difficult to write code that works, even though writing good code still requires some skill and consideration. Contrast this to C++, a language with cancer of the semi-colon, in which writing code that works at all can sometimes be impossible.
High school students shouldn't have C++ imposed upon them, because then the medium will interfere with the message. How easy is it to contrast a bad algorithm with a good one when you can't even get the bad one to compile? How do you have time to learn what a hashtable or a Hamilton sequence is when you spend half the semester learning the difference between "const char *" and "char * const"?
I don't hate C++ -- it's not the best designed language, but there are many useful subsets of C++, and combined with engineering discipline, any can produce a successful project. However, it is not a first language. It is not a teaching language, especially in cases (like AP CS was for my little sister) where "C++" basically means "C with cout". A teaching language should be one that a bright student can learn the syntax of in three days, so she can spend the rest of the year learning idioms and concepts that are applicable to CS in general.
Man, you're insane. I'm sure you're a troll, but I can't resist biting here. 75% of pharmaecuticals are applications of compounds found in nature. The only pharmaceuticals which require continued treatment are AIDS-suppression drugs and drugs which alter the brain's chemistry. (The former is because we don't know how to kill AIDS; and people usually can wean themselves off of the latter with behavior modification and cognitive therapy.)
If you're falling for the sort of "health-food store" quackery that says that homeopathic remedies can do anything for you, then you ought to read some Carl Hempel, and think about why "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA".
Sorry, that's ridiculous. How can you raise ire about a patent title when the abstract describes what's actually in the patent? There is nothing in the actual patent text which has anything to do with SQL LIKE queries, which is what RDBMS vendors would be "in an uproar about." You didn't read the patent, you rushed to post something that you thought was pithy, and now you're trying to defend your uninformed posting with an unbelievably spurious argument. I didn't have to "read into" anything; I merely "read" what you posted.
The title and abstract describe what you perceive to be "two utterly different things" because you are coming after this from a semi-technical perspective. To the patent lawyers, "approximate match" may mean "related match" (i.e. a music video of a given CD, as described in the abstract), or any number of other things which do not necessarily coincide with what "approximate database match" means to you.
Language exists to provide a conduit for sharing ideas between people who have a shared world of discourse. The patent was written for patent lawyers (who have their own world of discourse unrelated to yours), not for you. That's why you seem to think that the patent title and abstract are describing different things.
Slashdot Mirror
How much of a speed increase have you (or anyone else) noticed over ext2? Does anyone know how XFS compares to reiserfs or ext3? I'm not necessarily looking for hard-and-fast benchmarks -- just for "does it 'feel' faster"? (OTOH, if you had hard-and-fast benchmarks, that'd be great, too.) Is it a pain (i.e. dump/restore) to convert filesystems over to XFS, or have they come up with some cleverness to convert ext2 partitions?
A better analogy for this would be selling oregano as cannabis. I believe that there are too many layers of indirection in your analogy. The gov't's stance on child porn (whether it's right or not) is that encouraging pedophiles is a bad thing. Providing pedophiles with an outlet for their desire is a bad thing. In all of the cases you cite, the government has not decreed that "whet[ting] the appetite" in some way other than doing the actual act is illegal, and that is why this is an issue.
In any case, I can't see how a Bush administration would be any worse for tech policy than the Clinton administration, which decided right away (in 1993) that criminal copyright infringement needed no profit motive, beginning the steady stream of fair use erosion since; or any worse than the administration of an Al Gore who has spoken at the Microsoft campus three times since 1996, hailing them as "great innovators" and as deserving champions of the new economy. (http://www.vote-smart.org for more.) Furthermore, "pro-business" necessarily means "anti-monopoly", and Ashcroft spoke out against Microsoft when he was on hte Senate Judiciary Committee.
I'm not saying that there's a lot to like about Bush (or Ashcroft). But blaming bad tech law on him -- or on any president -- is hiding your head in the sand and missing the point. Don't bitch about the president -- he is (with a few historical exceptions) little more than a cheerleader for the nation. Write your representatives, since THEY MAKE THE LAW. If you're in academia, make sure to list all of the initials after your name -- they might just make a difference. People need to know that if they support UCITA, then they won't get your vote.
You also need to educate others; if just the technoliterati complain, that's too small a fraction of the electorate to make a dent. We need to educate the general public to these issues to insure that Joe Six-Pack knows that shrink-wrapped software manufacturers may as well be "licensing" him a shrink-wrapped, steaming plate of fecal matter, to ensure that Joe knows that an electronic bnook is artificially, legally different from a dead-trees book. When Joe and all his friend write outraged letters, maybe your representation will think twice about being bought by media and software lobbies.
~wog
It is odd that many of the greatest (and most nationalistic) composers in the German-speaking world have been Jewish, given the German-speaking world's history of antisemitism (especially in musical circles).
Mendelssohn, for example, whose father had assimilated, saved J.S. Bach's works from obscurity and wrote wonderful Lutheran church and art music, including the incredible "Reformation Symphony". (As a practicing Lutheran, I can vouch for his authenticity of expression and doctrine.) Gustav Mahler, who assimilated, was attacked for his "sensual Semitic ultramodernism" even though his brilliant music was far more conservative of Germanate tradition than that of his Gentile contemporary, Richard Strauss. Both Mendelssohn and Mahler's works were outlawed in Nazi Germany.
The list goes on and on...German culture has been saved, preserved, and perfected by Jews so many times that it is completely incomprehensible how such a pandemic antisemitism could exist for so long.
heh heh..."je deteste la langue des grenouilles"
Sorry, I haven't spoken French at all in a few years. :-)
wrong link for the Jerusalem Report article. Go here
Wagner's music is not hateful or defamatory. Some critical theorists have tried to demonstrate that it is, but most explanations I've seen don't hold as much water as they would need to. If you want to see real "Nazi opera", look at the works of Hans Pfitzner, whose sole goal in life was to be the court composer to the Third Reich.
Wagner is slowly gaining acceptance in Israel, but Hitler's near-fetishistic obsession with some of Wagner's music (like the Tannhauser overture, which Wagner insisted wsa played whenever he entered a room) has left a lasting tarnish on Wagner in many eyes. Look at this article in Jerusalem Report. While it contains some factual inaccuracies about Wagner's music, it presents some interesting counterpoints from Wagner opponents and Wagner defenders.
I'm not defending Wagner so much as I am defending scholarship. It is fine to produce a monograph which seeks to prove that Wagner's every motivation was based on antisemitism, and only cites other sources which back up this claim, ignoring a great deal of other Wagner scholarship, but it is foolish to read this monograph and no differing viewpoints.
BTW, to see why you shouldn't hyphenate "antisemitism", click here. According to that page (with which I am inclined to agree), hyphenating "antisemitism" basically means that you think "Semitic" is meaningful, and that defamation of Jews is based on "their race," which is a worrisome (at best) stance to take.
~wog
As others have posted, Wagner died in 1883, and _Parsifal_, his last opera, was finished in 1882.
~wog
Hitler mainly liked Wagner because his music was so nationalist, and he (like nearly everyone else in the German-speaking world of the 19th century) failed miserably to rise above the prevailing antisemitism of his day.
Wagner is a very complicated character; he wrote some terribly obscene essays (i.e. "Das Judentum in Musik", which was actually a criticism of Meyerbeer and French Ope'ra), but he actively opposed fascism and religious persecution. The central influence in Wagner's philosophy was not antisemitism, as many are wont to claim, but rather an amalgam of Schopenhauer, early Nietzsche (don't even get started about _Will to Power_, which was written by Nietzsche's sister and which most scholars agree is antithetical to Nietzsche's philosophy), Buddhism and medieval mysticism.
~wog
(Yeah, I'm a CS grad, but I had music history and philosophy majors as an undergrad.)
Try XML4J, from IBM's alphaworks, or Xerces, from jakarta.apache.org.
Granted, this is something that many Java programmers will do only rarely, or will do only in special circumstances, such as when specifying a different security policy for one class than for the rest of an application.
My point was, and is, simply that Smalltalk offers a mechanism for implementing factory methods, which are also referred to as "class" or "static" methods in OO literature. How Smalltalk implements this, while noble and elegant, is irrelevant to my point: that it is possible to implement the equivalent of a Java "static" method in Smalltalk. I'm even enough of a vocabulary snob to concede to you that it is wrong to call them "static methods," but the fact remains that class methods in Smalltalk and static methods in Java are equivalent. Furthermore, a large enough number of programmers have the concept of "static method" in their vocabulary that I think it is an acceptable, if slightly inaccurate, rendering for the level of discussion that this forum was engaged in.
Yes, haha, IHBT, HAND, etc.
~wog
I'll agree with you that learning a different programming paradigm will have an impact on your universe of discourse, but for the AP CS exam, it really doesn't matter what programming paradigm a student has been exposed to. I took the test in Pascal, but I may as well have taken it in MIPS assembly -- for the most part, the algorithms and data structures didn't even require SP, let alone OOP. These algorithms will be the same as long as we're computing on devices that are equivalent to a Turing machine, regardless of what expression they take.
FWIW, classes are objects in Java, as well.
Thanks for your thoughts. The reason why I'm "benchmarking drivers" is that one driver, which I am developing, has client-side relation cache and delegates to the native driver for cache misses. I don't think my question was inexact -- I asked for a TPC-C implementation in Java, not for "a db benchmark in Java"; I asked for a particular specific thing, not for a recommendation of a type of thing.
The plan is to compare "apples-to-apples" by comparing my driver on top of a native driver to the native driver alone under a simulated "real" workload, using some benchmark thatmost people in the field will have a frame of reference to. Since I don't have a $50k computer at my immediate disposal, I'm not going to be publishing numbers that are immediately comparable to the published TPC results, but the ratio between the two should be meaningful and the fact that it is TPC-C should let someone know what sort of test it is.
I'm not interested in publishing "TPC results" for the purpose of selling hardware or software. I'm interested in saying "On this TPC-C-like workload, the driver with cache performed n times better than the driver without." Well, that's not entirely true. (I am at Wisconsin, the "inspiration" for the benchmark clause since 1983....) Although I was planning to test cached-Postgres vs. uncached-Postgres, DB2 will allow one to publish benchmarks. And if you want to publish relative benchmarks for a system with different parameters/drivers/etc. (as many papers have done), it is pretty straightforward to do it legally: just compare "DBMS A" to "DBMS B". That's what papers that I've read lately have done. However, Oracle-to-Sybase comparisons are not what I'm interested in, as I said.Thanks for your help, and I'm sorry I wasn't more clear by specifying that I was interested in comparing total throughput of two drivers on the same db. I may wind up only using the db code from TPC-W, but I think in that case, it would be smarter to just write my own benchmark, as "the db code from TPC-W" would have little more credibility/recognizability than "this benchmark with the following constraints...."
cheers,
wb
Also see the Largon file entry for syntactic sugar.
I read Sartre, too -- but not in the first year. :-)
I TAed for a C++ class as an undergrad for three years, and it never ceased to amaze me how many students kept making the same class of mistakes throughout every semester. By contrast, the Scheme class I TAed for had students doing harder work with fewer dumb language-related errors. It is all in the medium in teaching this stuff. C++ is just pedagogically unsound.
C++ is the medium, not the message. The class isn't "AP C++", it's "AP Computer Science", and my original point was that C++ is an unnecessary encumberance on learning computer science. I learned French in high school by studying grammar and conversing, not by reading Sartre. The medium can interfere with the message. Why do you think children don't learn to play, say, the oboe or bassoon at a very young age, instead starting on the clarinet? Unnecessary complication gets in the way of learning the basics.
The goal of computer science education is not to churn out C++ coders; rather, it is to churn out people who are capable of describing solution generators rather than merely "solving problems", people who are capable of procedural epistemology, abstraction, and analysis. That is why the language for the AP class ought to be absolutely as simple as possible to convey the concepts. I taught myself Java and implemented LZW in a total of three hours, because I had a strong foundation in the basics. Making students learn computer science via C++ is like making them take the President's physical fitness test in shackles.
I thought it was pretty clear that I was being tongue-in-cheek. I work for a research group whose principal product is over 500,000 lines of C++ code on ten platforms. My code compiles flawlessly with "-Wall -pedantic". I don't think there's an issue of "chops" here.
High school students shouldn't have C++ imposed upon them, because then the medium will interfere with the message. How easy is it to contrast a bad algorithm with a good one when you can't even get the bad one to compile? How do you have time to learn what a hashtable or a Hamilton sequence is when you spend half the semester learning the difference between "const char *" and "char * const"?
I don't hate C++ -- it's not the best designed language, but there are many useful subsets of C++, and combined with engineering discipline, any can produce a successful project. However, it is not a first language. It is not a teaching language, especially in cases (like AP CS was for my little sister) where "C++" basically means "C with cout". A teaching language should be one that a bright student can learn the syntax of in three days, so she can spend the rest of the year learning idioms and concepts that are applicable to CS in general.
~wog
If you're falling for the sort of "health-food store" quackery that says that homeopathic remedies can do anything for you, then you ought to read some Carl Hempel, and think about why "these statements have not been evaluated by the FDA".
Sorry, that's ridiculous. How can you raise ire about a patent title when the abstract describes what's actually in the patent? There is nothing in the actual patent text which has anything to do with SQL LIKE queries, which is what RDBMS vendors would be "in an uproar about." You didn't read the patent, you rushed to post something that you thought was pithy, and now you're trying to defend your uninformed posting with an unbelievably spurious argument. I didn't have to "read into" anything; I merely "read" what you posted.
The title and abstract describe what you perceive to be "two utterly different things" because you are coming after this from a semi-technical perspective. To the patent lawyers, "approximate match" may mean "related match" (i.e. a music video of a given CD, as described in the abstract), or any number of other things which do not necessarily coincide with what "approximate database match" means to you.
Language exists to provide a conduit for sharing ideas between people who have a shared world of discourse. The patent was written for patent lawyers (who have their own world of discourse unrelated to yours), not for you. That's why you seem to think that the patent title and abstract are describing different things.
~wog