I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into project management and work time allocation. None of the packages on the market at the moment does.
As a result any shared calendar deployment usually descends into meetingitus: a well known corporate debilitating disease where people spend more time in meetings about meetings about meetings instead of doing work. In addition to that if you do not have meetings booked your time is considered a fair game and booking time "to do work" is considered very bad manners.
Now, if your calendar ties up straight into your into the project manager view of how much resource was spent on which part of the project as well as salary, overtime and performance management the shared calendar becomes a completely different ball game. Unfortunately I have yet to see such integration in any calendar package.
Applause to the BOFH that has pushed it through, though I would have done it differently.
Most university IPs are real on a really high speed connected LAN. As a result they get elected to supernode status by most modern P2P applications. As a result the university network becomes a jump point for NAT traversal for all leaches within 30-60ms rtt around it. As a result the resource usage is clearly disproportional to the actual on-campus usage. Essentially all small and medium corporates and home users sitting behind firewalls in the immediate vicinity live off that resource and steal a significant portion of the Ohio University network capacity.
Personally, if I was the admin, I would have tried to QoS P2P down (and net neutrality be damned) to the point where the campus is made equivalent to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately even if the protocols were easier to isolate, that may be quite difficult for a network the size of Ohio State. Most network equipment used at the bandwidths in question cannot do selective delays and probability drops very well. The P2P applications nowdays make the "if the protocols are easier to isolate" statement false anyway. All the developers know that they are committing a resource theft and they go way beyond what is considered spyware tactics to achieve their aims (current Skype is a fine example of this).
So on the balance of things, just banning them to hell is probably the most cost effective options. Congrats and applause. Can we have more of that please. A few more and the net economics will go back to where they belong so people actually start looking at things like multicast and frontline in-local-loop delivery instead emulating it through resource theft.
The porn industry is the favourite target of web interface patent trolls. Nearly every web interface patent troll in the last 5+ years has gone after web porn companies as the first target.
The primary reason is exactly this:Wait.. there are patents in the porn industry? The rest of the web does not take the case seriously and laughs it off until the troll has collected a sufficient war chest to go after bigger guys. At the same time nearly any web business method, antipiracy or ui patent is applicable so you have plenty of targets to chose from.
The mechanism which you describe is used in the porn, ad, etc industries where the small guys have positive cash flow and something can be collected out of them. That is not valid for most small guys in the software industry. Further to this, there are not that many small guys that do stuff that do anything new and UI related. Most just reuse what is supplied to them in the latest SDK and do not do anything new.
As far as the claim size, it is aimed to make Apple seriously consider settling.
If they settle there is enough war chest to pay for a couple of legal daisycutters to be dropped on some small guys (if you find any to drop it in the first place, no small commercial UI companies left around). There will also enough money to lob one big bunkerbuster at Redmond and fight a properly sized claim.
Yes indeed, we have to thank Suez for that. UN started trying to do peacekeeping instead of actively intervening in wars. You are correct - this is the first piecekeeping mandate.
Before that UN tried to actively get involved in war on the ground in Korea: http://korea50.army.mil/history/factsheets/allied. shtml. 15 countries under UN mandate to be more exact with the UN secretary general at the time actively involved in lobbying for troops.
1. French - that I can understand. They just had the railways, post, ports and electricity nationalised. Apparently, they are allowed to while noone else is. British, I can also understand. They just finished nationalising British Rail, British Coal, NHS and a few others. They are allowed to, but noone else is. Now WTF does Israel have to do with all that?
2. The UN of those days was not by any means the amorphous UN we know now. That was prior to the foundation of the league of unaligned states, prior to most members of the Warsaw block being members and it was very clearly pushing one sole line. The line of US, UK, France and a few others. The UN of those days authorised and deployed forces actively engaged in several local conflicts, most notably Korea. The US hates referring to them this way nowdays, but the South in the conflict was known as the "UN Forces" (just read any newspaper of the day). So UN siding with someone prior to mid-1960es cannot be used to signify neither moral superiority nor the world opinion for that matter. All it says that this was US and UK opinion of the day.
The legality of this act was analysed by the British Government legal advisors and their report to the prime minister stated in clear and non-ambiguous terms that Egypt actions are legal provided that it adequately compensates all shareholders (which it was willing to do). As a matter of fact, it was British, French and Israeli government actions which deprived them from their money as they gave Egypt a reason not to pay. Which it gladly did (at least for a while).
This happened during the same decade when British Government nationalised the health service, the railway, large portion the car industry, the mining industry, etc. The french nationalised even more. Neither one of them got invaded for that.
By the standards of the day Egypt was doing what everyone was doing and applying the same rulebook. This is something everyone nowdays grudgingly admits and the declassified documents show that the invader's government were clearly shown this and the decision taken had nothing to do with property theft.
All it had to do was "Oil" and "Access to the Middle East and India". Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
While Israel has been in numerous wars, they've never initiated a war .
Nope.
1956 - Israel invades Egypt jointly with France and UK to take over the recently nationalised Suez Canal. So the truth is that Israel invaded a neighbouring country first, unprovoked and for solely mercantile reasons. From there on it was a more or less tit-for-tat affair all the way to the 70-es.
Playing the devil advocate - I would rather have them manage their nuclear stations safely correctly and being properly trained then having yet another Chernobyl. So if their nuclear espionage stays within the limit of nicking our safety training software for a nuclear plant I would say: Spy more please. And do it more successfully. Please. Pretty please...
While there is enough stats for CPU, stats for IO are considerably more arcane and harder to understand. To add insult to injury some of them are fs dependant or dependant on underlying hardware and drivers. For example the cursed fixed size tables for "stat" do not cover half of the IDE subsystem along with most Compaq/HP RAID controllers. So presenting a graphical view for a user to make decisions on IO priority will be considerably more difficult.
It is hard to recalculate the amount of money which Lenin got from the German government in today's terms but if that was possible at all it was in the billions. That is besides logistics, support and other help like the famous "smuggling of Lenin across Europe in a stamped railway vagon".
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
How uninspiring and unoriginal. Based on my recollections from a brief encounter with Ohio cops 16 years ago I am not surprised in the slightest.
They should come here across the pond to introduce themselves to the most recent inventions in motorist taxation like:
The "Accident Assistance Van" and "Yellow Speed Camera Partnership Van". Both are in use by Sussex police and anyone driving along the A14 and A12 can see them on regular basis.
These vans can be parked with a laser speedgun + CCTV pointed through a window (back, side and front), can be parked behind a hedge with the same laser speedgun + CCTV as the only thing visible on a tripod cabled to the hidden van and most importantly can drive at 3 mph under the speed limit and record the speeds of all who overtake them showing van speed and overtaking vehicle speed.
I have seen them used in every single one of these modes of operation. In fact, out of all my A14 journeys in the last month there has been only one where I have not seen one them. None of them has proper police markings.
It is not a one off. They have circa 10 nuclear icebreakers all of which except the first (Lenin) use the same reactor design.
The only difference here is that you put it on a small dedicated ship and not on a monster the size of some smaller supertankers dedicated to going at 16+ knots through the arctic ice.
In less then 50 years we will have the radioactive waste problem solved. There is a very big landfill where we can dump it. Big. Yellow. Heated to a million degrees C. Right above your head.
So in fact you do not have a 10000 year storage problem. You have "we do not invest enough into the exploration of space" problem. Anything else aside, there is plenty of space to dump stuff or leave it cool off once you leave the confines of the earth atmosphere.
It will also work, while voice is likely to be problematic.
Everything else aside, SAT broadband adds 750ms+ latency and a host of QoS problems. These can only be circumvented by low altitude satellites and new SAT broadband technologies which have not seen any investment for nearly 10 years now. If the airlines create demand for these, it will be a good deal for everyone all around as it will allow internet access around the globe even in the most obscure places. Till then, SMS and GPRS-only is probably a wise decision.
is somehow superior to asking the DBMS for what you need in a single query, letting it optimize the query, and retrieving it all at once.
Dear anonymous coward, you misunderstood me. Totally. You are a classic example of what I mean as a person stuck in the fortran age and obviously making a living of his proud brahiousaurusness.
Yes, I would rather have the damn database do that. I am also happy when it does it without getting into fortran-like stored procedure obscenities within a single statement. Do you like it or not, that is the real level of the stored procedures as defined by the ANSI SQL standard - 20 years behind the rest of software engineering, no object orientation, fully procedural with primitive fortran/cobol like syntax, no inheritance and without even all proper structured programming elements.
There is nothing to be proud in supporting this. I would much rather have proper java, python or even C++ embedded support for stored procedures developed further. This would have allowed to do the same, but within modern development practice (and theory). It is a pity to see MySQL which was the first database engine to introduce that - C++ (in 3.x and Java/Python in 4.x) to descend back into the Jurassic.
How cool would it be to ride a Train from LA to Shanghai or Moscow?
Economically ineffective to the point of insanity is the correct answer. Even with the extra risks incurred shipping by sea is economically more effective than shipping by rail across half of the globe via a railway that sits on top of permafrost.
BAM is a good example of what this means (and only a small portion of it is on top of permafrost). It took 30+ years to build and it will never ever pay back. It was supposed to do exactly this - deliver rail access to Siberian resources and allow for the development of the region. It ended up being delivered "only" 20+ years behind schedule after it became a matter of "national pride" where money does not matter. And what is the final result - nothing. The main rail line across Siberia continues to be the old railway south of the permafrost border built around the turn of the century. BAM did not do a thing to develop the region. But it is a good example of what does it actually mean to build and maintain a viable railway link across the permafrost.
Oh, and by the way, as far as coolness is concerned - it takes "only" 7 days to travel by rail across russia (5+ of them across Siberia). The raillink you propose will take around 10+ days for a passenger express and 30+ days for goods trains. So it will not even be faster than shipping by ship and dealing with loading and unloading operations on both sides.
If the rail link made any sense, it would have collected investment behind itself long ago. As it does not investment goes into supercontainer carriers (the most recent are as big as the biggest supertanker). Like this one: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/6118032 .stm.
To answer your question - who gives a flying f*** about the crust movement. This is the last of your problems.
That tunnel will be the continuation of the "Road of Tears" on the Russian side. This is the Road from Magadan to Kolima and all the way to the Chukotka peninsula which was used to ship convicts to Gulag. If you want to see the state of this road get the documentary Ewan McGregor (of S*** Wars 1,2,3 fame) and his friend did on their BMW bike round the world trip (or the relevant magazine issues with pictures from there). It has been disused since the camps closed for 40+ years now. Most bridges have fallen into the rivers, the tarmac is gone and the road is just a jumble of concrete slabs slowly moved around by the permafrost thawing induced by them.
It will take twice as much money to fix that mess compared to the tunnel with minimal economical benefit. The potential goods flow is very low in the first place. You are shipping from one wilderness to another. How much can that be? In addition to that the total cost of goods shipping will end up being more than offloading them onto ships in Vladivostok and shipping across the Pacific. 6-7000 miles by train with very hight track maintenance expenses (I am not going to even mention trucks, it is silly) is way more than offloading the same goods on a big container ship and shipping across 3-4000 miles of sea.
Same for electricity - shipping electricity 4000+ miles is not cost effective. Gas and Oil probably may have some economical effect, but they do not need a tunnel. There is plenty of experience in running pipelines on the seabed by now. Including by Russians under the Black Sea.
Overall, the project is "hidrostroy" type madness. For the reference - hidrostroy was an organisation in the old USSR which built all the water dams and over the years it become a monstrousity of enormous proportions. It had the power to lobby for enormous insane projects which in turn allowed it to grow more and once again to lobby and so on. The last madness just before the fall was lobbying to divert the river flow of the major siberian rivers 2000 miles south to the Aral sea (which was destroyed by previous hidrostroy projects).
I am fully aware that I would be flamed to death by ACID zealots, but I will again repeat nothing.
We are in 2007. Using non-OO fortran-like obscenities dated 1993 instead of looking at the calendar and getting a grip with reality gives you exactly that - nothing.
There is a reason why banks, govt, etc has been looking more and more at middleware layers on top of databases. You get the same you get with stored procedures while still having modern data and code representation.
Similarly, the little engine that could should have actually looked harder at making things that matter like isolation levels, foreign keys, etc work with all of their engines and not just one. Which they lost to Oracle anyway and which had no means of online backup (within the same license). They did one right thing at one point by introducing stored Java, C++ and Python procedures. It is a pity they did not expand on that and degraded into the fortran age instead.
All I can say - thanks god I changed jobs and I am no longer anywhere near the cretinous gooseberry service.
I remember with extreme "fondness" how our sales and marketing director at the time rang half of the company at 1am after we deployed greylisting on the mailservers and his crotch stopped receiving the necessary stimulation. If something like this would have happened at the time the mayhem would have been complete.
And anyway, this is for the better. At least some people will finally realise that it is not just a device, it is a service as well. And a service which is being provided by a company which you have no legal recourse to deal with and which is generally outside your jurisdiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Some venerable BOFH episodes come to mind (though there it was VAX, not a mainframe).
I do not see a point in a shared calendar if it does not tie up straight into project management and work time allocation. None of the packages on the market at the moment does.
As a result any shared calendar deployment usually descends into meetingitus: a well known corporate debilitating disease where people spend more time in meetings about meetings about meetings instead of doing work. In addition to that if you do not have meetings booked your time is considered a fair game and booking time "to do work" is considered very bad manners.
Now, if your calendar ties up straight into your into the project manager view of how much resource was spent on which part of the project as well as salary, overtime and performance management the shared calendar becomes a completely different ball game. Unfortunately I have yet to see such integration in any calendar package.
Applause to the BOFH that has pushed it through, though I would have done it differently.
Most university IPs are real on a really high speed connected LAN. As a result they get elected to supernode status by most modern P2P applications. As a result the university network becomes a jump point for NAT traversal for all leaches within 30-60ms rtt around it. As a result the resource usage is clearly disproportional to the actual on-campus usage. Essentially all small and medium corporates and home users sitting behind firewalls in the immediate vicinity live off that resource and steal a significant portion of the Ohio University network capacity.
Personally, if I was the admin, I would have tried to QoS P2P down (and net neutrality be damned) to the point where the campus is made equivalent to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately even if the protocols were easier to isolate, that may be quite difficult for a network the size of Ohio State. Most network equipment used at the bandwidths in question cannot do selective delays and probability drops very well. The P2P applications nowdays make the "if the protocols are easier to isolate" statement false anyway. All the developers know that they are committing a resource theft and they go way beyond what is considered spyware tactics to achieve their aims (current Skype is a fine example of this).
So on the balance of things, just banning them to hell is probably the most cost effective options. Congrats and applause. Can we have more of that please. A few more and the net economics will go back to where they belong so people actually start looking at things like multicast and frontline in-local-loop delivery instead emulating it through resource theft.
The primary reason is exactly this:Wait.. there are patents in the porn industry? The rest of the web does not take the case seriously and laughs it off until the troll has collected a sufficient war chest to go after bigger guys. At the same time nearly any web business method, antipiracy or ui patent is applicable so you have plenty of targets to chose from.
No.
The mechanism which you describe is used in the porn, ad, etc industries where the small guys have positive cash flow and something can be collected out of them. That is not valid for most small guys in the software industry. Further to this, there are not that many small guys that do stuff that do anything new and UI related. Most just reuse what is supplied to them in the latest SDK and do not do anything new.
As far as the claim size, it is aimed to make Apple seriously consider settling.
If they settle there is enough war chest to pay for a couple of legal daisycutters to be dropped on some small guys (if you find any to drop it in the first place, no small commercial UI companies left around). There will also enough money to lob one big bunkerbuster at Redmond and fight a properly sized claim.
Yes indeed, we have to thank Suez for that. UN started trying to do peacekeeping instead of actively intervening in wars. You are correct - this is the first piecekeeping mandate.
. shtml. 15 countries under UN mandate to be more exact with the UN secretary general at the time actively involved in lobbying for troops.
Before that UN tried to actively get involved in war on the ground in Korea: http://korea50.army.mil/history/factsheets/allied
1. French - that I can understand. They just had the railways, post, ports and electricity nationalised. Apparently, they are allowed to while noone else is. British, I can also understand. They just finished nationalising British Rail, British Coal, NHS and a few others. They are allowed to, but noone else is. Now WTF does Israel have to do with all that?
2. The UN of those days was not by any means the amorphous UN we know now. That was prior to the foundation of the league of unaligned states, prior to most members of the Warsaw block being members and it was very clearly pushing one sole line. The line of US, UK, France and a few others. The UN of those days authorised and deployed forces actively engaged in several local conflicts, most notably Korea. The US hates referring to them this way nowdays, but the South in the conflict was known as the "UN Forces" (just read any newspaper of the day). So UN siding with someone prior to mid-1960es cannot be used to signify neither moral superiority nor the world opinion for that matter. All it says that this was US and UK opinion of the day.
The legality of this act was analysed by the British Government legal advisors and their report to the prime minister stated in clear and non-ambiguous terms that Egypt actions are legal provided that it adequately compensates all shareholders (which it was willing to do). As a matter of fact, it was British, French and Israeli government actions which deprived them from their money as they gave Egypt a reason not to pay. Which it gladly did (at least for a while).
This happened during the same decade when British Government nationalised the health service, the railway, large portion the car industry, the mining industry, etc. The french nationalised even more. Neither one of them got invaded for that.
By the standards of the day Egypt was doing what everyone was doing and applying the same rulebook. This is something everyone nowdays grudgingly admits and the declassified documents show that the invader's government were clearly shown this and the decision taken had nothing to do with property theft.
All it had to do was "Oil" and "Access to the Middle East and India". Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Nope.
1956 - Israel invades Egypt jointly with France and UK to take over the recently nationalised Suez Canal. So the truth is that Israel invaded a neighbouring country first, unprovoked and for solely mercantile reasons. From there on it was a more or less tit-for-tat affair all the way to the 70-es.
So what if he was?
Playing the devil advocate - I would rather have them manage their nuclear stations safely correctly and being properly trained then having yet another Chernobyl. So if their nuclear espionage stays within the limit of nicking our safety training software for a nuclear plant I would say: Spy more please. And do it more successfully. Please. Pretty please...
Exactly.
While there is enough stats for CPU, stats for IO are considerably more arcane and harder to understand. To add insult to injury some of them are fs dependant or dependant on underlying hardware and drivers. For example the cursed fixed size tables for "stat" do not cover half of the IDE subsystem along with most Compaq/HP RAID controllers. So presenting a graphical view for a user to make decisions on IO priority will be considerably more difficult.
Poor?
It is hard to recalculate the amount of money which Lenin got from the German government in today's terms but if that was possible at all it was in the billions. That is besides logistics, support and other help like the famous "smuggling of Lenin across Europe in a stamped railway vagon".
How uninspiring and unoriginal. Based on my recollections from a brief encounter with Ohio cops 16 years ago I am not surprised in the slightest.
They should come here across the pond to introduce themselves to the most recent inventions in motorist taxation like:
The "Accident Assistance Van" and "Yellow Speed Camera Partnership Van". Both are in use by Sussex police and anyone driving along the A14 and A12 can see them on regular basis.
These vans can be parked with a laser speedgun + CCTV pointed through a window (back, side and front), can be parked behind a hedge with the same laser speedgun + CCTV as the only thing visible on a tripod cabled to the hidden van and most importantly can drive at 3 mph under the speed limit and record the speeds of all who overtake them showing van speed and overtaking vehicle speed.
I have seen them used in every single one of these modes of operation. In fact, out of all my A14 journeys in the last month there has been only one where I have not seen one them. None of them has proper police markings.
We have cameras with loudspeakers for that. No need to put the on the predators.
It is not a one off. They have circa 10 nuclear icebreakers all of which except the first (Lenin) use the same reactor design.
The only difference here is that you put it on a small dedicated ship and not on a monster the size of some smaller supertankers dedicated to going at 16+ knots through the arctic ice.
In less then 50 years we will have the radioactive waste problem solved. There is a very big landfill where we can dump it. Big. Yellow. Heated to a million degrees C. Right above your head.
So in fact you do not have a 10000 year storage problem. You have "we do not invest enough into the exploration of space" problem. Anything else aside, there is plenty of space to dump stuff or leave it cool off once you leave the confines of the earth atmosphere.
With all due respect, Mr Chavez is a copycat.
3 144.stm.
. stm.
El presidente Antonio Bliar's big brother government bought Predator UAV for police use in the Tyneside area 2 years before Mr Chavez http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/605
LA Police deployed them 1 year before him: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5051142
And overall we are much closer to the stage of "Blue thunder, do you copy..." than Mr Chavez. You are giving him too much credit.
It will also work, while voice is likely to be problematic.
Everything else aside, SAT broadband adds 750ms+ latency and a host of QoS problems. These can only be circumvented by low altitude satellites and new SAT broadband technologies which have not seen any investment for nearly 10 years now. If the airlines create demand for these, it will be a good deal for everyone all around as it will allow internet access around the globe even in the most obscure places. Till then, SMS and GPRS-only is probably a wise decision.
I find the second quote on that page more appropriate.
Yep. While the air where I live is relatively clean the light pollution is so high that you can barely see anything below 2-3rd star magnitude.
Dear anonymous coward, you misunderstood me. Totally. You are a classic example of what I mean as a person stuck in the fortran age and obviously making a living of his proud brahiousaurusness.
Yes, I would rather have the damn database do that. I am also happy when it does it without getting into fortran-like stored procedure obscenities within a single statement. Do you like it or not, that is the real level of the stored procedures as defined by the ANSI SQL standard - 20 years behind the rest of software engineering, no object orientation, fully procedural with primitive fortran/cobol like syntax, no inheritance and without even all proper structured programming elements.
There is nothing to be proud in supporting this. I would much rather have proper java, python or even C++ embedded support for stored procedures developed further. This would have allowed to do the same, but within modern development practice (and theory). It is a pity to see MySQL which was the first database engine to introduce that - C++ (in 3.x and Java/Python in 4.x) to descend back into the Jurassic.
Economically ineffective to the point of insanity is the correct answer. Even with the extra risks incurred shipping by sea is economically more effective than shipping by rail across half of the globe via a railway that sits on top of permafrost. BAM is a good example of what this means (and only a small portion of it is on top of permafrost). It took 30+ years to build and it will never ever pay back. It was supposed to do exactly this - deliver rail access to Siberian resources and allow for the development of the region. It ended up being delivered "only" 20+ years behind schedule after it became a matter of "national pride" where money does not matter. And what is the final result - nothing. The main rail line across Siberia continues to be the old railway south of the permafrost border built around the turn of the century. BAM did not do a thing to develop the region. But it is a good example of what does it actually mean to build and maintain a viable railway link across the permafrost. Oh, and by the way, as far as coolness is concerned - it takes "only" 7 days to travel by rail across russia (5+ of them across Siberia). The raillink you propose will take around 10+ days for a passenger express and 30+ days for goods trains. So it will not even be faster than shipping by ship and dealing with loading and unloading operations on both sides. If the rail link made any sense, it would have collected investment behind itself long ago. As it does not investment goes into supercontainer carriers (the most recent are as big as the biggest supertanker). Like this one: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/6118032 .stm.
To answer your question - who gives a flying f*** about the crust movement. This is the last of your problems.
That tunnel will be the continuation of the "Road of Tears" on the Russian side. This is the Road from Magadan to Kolima and all the way to the Chukotka peninsula which was used to ship convicts to Gulag. If you want to see the state of this road get the documentary Ewan McGregor (of S*** Wars 1,2,3 fame) and his friend did on their BMW bike round the world trip (or the relevant magazine issues with pictures from there). It has been disused since the camps closed for 40+ years now. Most bridges have fallen into the rivers, the tarmac is gone and the road is just a jumble of concrete slabs slowly moved around by the permafrost thawing induced by them.
It will take twice as much money to fix that mess compared to the tunnel with minimal economical benefit. The potential goods flow is very low in the first place. You are shipping from one wilderness to another. How much can that be? In addition to that the total cost of goods shipping will end up being more than offloading them onto ships in Vladivostok and shipping across the Pacific. 6-7000 miles by train with very hight track maintenance expenses (I am not going to even mention trucks, it is silly) is way more than offloading the same goods on a big container ship and shipping across 3-4000 miles of sea.
Same for electricity - shipping electricity 4000+ miles is not cost effective. Gas and Oil probably may have some economical effect, but they do not need a tunnel. There is plenty of experience in running pipelines on the seabed by now. Including by Russians under the Black Sea.
Overall, the project is "hidrostroy" type madness. For the reference - hidrostroy was an organisation in the old USSR which built all the water dams and over the years it become a monstrousity of enormous proportions. It had the power to lobby for enormous insane projects which in turn allowed it to grow more and once again to lobby and so on. The last madness just before the fall was lobbying to divert the river flow of the major siberian rivers 2000 miles south to the Aral sea (which was destroyed by previous hidrostroy projects).
Nothing.
I am fully aware that I would be flamed to death by ACID zealots, but I will again repeat nothing.
We are in 2007. Using non-OO fortran-like obscenities dated 1993 instead of looking at the calendar and getting a grip with reality gives you exactly that - nothing.
There is a reason why banks, govt, etc has been looking more and more at middleware layers on top of databases. You get the same you get with stored procedures while still having modern data and code representation.
Similarly, the little engine that could should have actually looked harder at making things that matter like isolation levels, foreign keys, etc work with all of their engines and not just one. Which they lost to Oracle anyway and which had no means of online backup (within the same license). They did one right thing at one point by introducing stored Java, C++ and Python procedures. It is a pity they did not expand on that and degraded into the fortran age instead.
All I can say - thanks god I changed jobs and I am no longer anywhere near the cretinous gooseberry service. I remember with extreme "fondness" how our sales and marketing director at the time rang half of the company at 1am after we deployed greylisting on the mailservers and his crotch stopped receiving the necessary stimulation. If something like this would have happened at the time the mayhem would have been complete. And anyway, this is for the better. At least some people will finally realise that it is not just a device, it is a service as well. And a service which is being provided by a company which you have no legal recourse to deal with and which is generally outside your jurisdiction.