If you run a large system (Sun Enterprise 4500, 6500, or 10000), thousands of which exist in pretty much most major businesses, Oracle *will* run rings around PostgreSQL in terms of
You're quite right, we're not in a democracy, we're in a republic. Democracy (in its pure form) doesn't tend to work because it merely replaces the tyranny of the despot with the tyranny of the majority. The u.s. was created as a balance between congress, judicial and commerical interests precicely to counter the poor effects of "mob rule". Unfortunately the system does go out of balance from time to time (corporations have too much power at this point).
As for referring to being the "least worst", that was a throwback to Winston Churchill, in his explanation of why we choose democracy.
"Actually true anarchy is a better solution... if not practical due to human nature."
Hmm, so a better solution is something that works in a fantasy world? I think Anarchy can't even last because the process of organizational protection that occurs to enforce regional norms will eventually coalesce into a form of policing, which effectively turns into a minimalist state. (Which is based on the philosophy expressed in Robert Nozick's _Anarchy State and Utopia_)
You do realize that in this society, your rights end where another person's (organization's) begin, don't you? It's the least worst alternative from the extremes of totalitarianism and anarchy.. instead of a central authority telling what you can & cannot do, we tell each other that, based on the ground rules set by the government.
We've evolved towards this system over centuries. Do you honestly have a better (workable) idea, beyond "screw the man"?
But surely a corporation does speak with its own voice. Yes, an employee is the mechanism of communication, but I can hardly believe that public statements made by corporate representatives reflect anything but official (collectively determined) company perspective. Surely, someone who stands up and, in his/her company's name states opinions and views which are at odds with the company's perspective would be justifiably fired.
This is an extreme stereotype and only descriptive of a minority of corporations (i.e. those that are large and stupid.)
There are many employees that say things that disagree with their management's views. These people don't get fired, unless of course, they claimed that THEIR views were their company's. Then it's a different story.
www.cluetrain.org also has an interesting perspective on this. The marketplace will evolve to the point that corporations will have to start speaking with a more human voice, or they'll perish. Some companies are already doing this.
But my basic point remains: corporations are in a special position to accumulate power far beyond...
/s/corporations/organizations. "Two heads are better than one". It's not unique to corporations.
A person who both wields an abnormally large amount of power, and has no scruples or social conscience, is traditionally and rightfully despised in America. And yet a corporation is given special help to attain just this status.
Disagree. You're mixing the intent of the "corp == person" law, the reasoning & history behind it with your own observation that a minority of corporations abuse this position. This position is mainly about allowing the corporation to be sued distinctively from its employees, and to allow its existence to transcend the lives of its founders (which actually is very rare in practice). It has little to do with corporations taking moral stances / being socially responsible / having a concentration of power.
Society gives power over capital & human resources to corporations on purpose, because without a societal organism dedicated to making such resources productive, we'd be stuck in a world without economic progress.
Certainly there are other, more effective ways of limiting abuse of corporate power: campaign finance reform, for one.
- "Indeed, are often legally prohibited form taking a moral stance." As it should be. I really question if a corporation -should- be taking moral stances / performing social responsibility. Doing such things falls out of the realm of its own competence, and they can cause more damage than if they just did nothing.
The above assumes that the already do nothing, but that's not true -- they donate to charitable causes & NGO's that *do* make it their #1 competence to help society.
This (very old) argument falls a little flat in that you're claiming that a corporation is some soul-less beast. It's not. A company is made up of people - it's an organization. Taking away legal rights from a group of people just because they band together is kind of a totalitarian perspective.
A corporation is just an organization with a singular purpose entrusted to it by society: combine capital, labor, and knowledge, and make it productive. People have been trying to wrest control of this purpose and make corporations serve more "moral or social" ends, but it never works, plainly because that's not what corporations are supposed to be doing.
If you want to promote your view of morals and/or social/political beliefs, start an NGO.
regarding short procedures / long names.. it was definitely part of the XP philosophy which sort of grew out of the smalltalk philosophy. it fits into the Refactoring idea that you should probably write an explaining method name before you write a comment.. or you should apply "extract method" when your methods are over 20 lines.
"It's a neat idea, a great mental exercise, but I doubt that it will make it past the trendy self-help phase into an accepted way to run a programming department....it will be a long time before the traditional caffeine / overtime / don't-touch-my-code programming paradigm goes away"
I could sum this up as
"mediocrity is easy".
How is pair programming (assuming you aim to do it 75% of the time, a realistic goal) implausible? Sure, it's not easy to just flip a switch and get everyone's egos in sync. It takes a certain kind of mentality to do and some cowboys just don't have it, (but arguably they don't have the skills to be cowboys either..)
Jerry Weinberg once said in Psychology of Computer Programming that "the best coders enjoy other people looking at their code, always hoping to learn new tricks or ways to improve their technique. the worst hide their code. and, typicaly, the best get better, and the worst get poorer..."
Isn't it true that if you don't subject yourself to constant review / incremental improvement, your 31337 skills are going to be less honed?
I agree with you, I use the same excuse too.. "well, everyone else sucks". Really, they do.
But what about teams that have skilled developers, a good leader, but fail out of the business pressuring them to do shoddy work (due to waterfall-esque thinking, etc.) It's common. XP provides a process out of this trap.
Ward Cunningham, a well respected developer and maintainer / creator of the Wiki web (c2.com/cgi/wiki) actually wrote a position paper at OOPSLA 2000 detailing how XP is "genius friendly". Look at http://oopsla.acm.org..
As for the customer being available, XP doesn't necessarily require it, but it's quite clear that you'll get better quality software if they are available. It's about tradeoffs. You want quality software? Sit with your customers, have one dedicated to sitting near your team for ad hoc q&a sessions. You want long turnaround times and frustrating misunderstandings? Talk through documents / weekly meetings.
They don't hand out much.. $300-500 credit limits usually. I know people making a 6-figure income that can't get credit cards because they moved here from Canada 2 years ago and have no credit history.
Abusing people with poor credit / income by charging exhorbant interest rates IS a common and unethical practice.
But giving credit in general to these people isn't.. it's high risk, but, it's a service. They generally don't do this as a rule to "get surrendered assets". Companies actually have little success in this regard.
Yes, you *can* lose your house if you default, but the companies are so draconian about this because of able to reclaim *anything* most of the time (whether for honest reasons or fraud). The road travels both ways...
There's a difference between fraud and defaulting on a loan. The former is a crime, the latter is an unfortunate situation. And most of the time the credit card companies *don't* get their money back in either situation.. that's not to say they shoudln't try.
Credit ratings aren't a means of protection, they're a means of risk management. That doesn't forego the need to regain get the principal it lends out.
The point is that YOU, yes, YOU have a responsibility to ensure you don't become endebted to the point that you go hungry. And we have somewhat of a safety net in welfare in case you fall too hard, but it's not a very good safety net.
Don't whine about how evil creditors are for wanting their money back. That's stupid. It has nothing to do with excessive profit, it has everything to do with their responsibility as creditors. Debt forgiveness is acceptable but shouldn't be the norm.
Honestly, the shortage of programmers that everyone talks about is the shortage for talent. I'm not dissing the guy in the article, he's probably a good programmer, but I honestly believe that people at a certain level of professional development really don't have to worry about being out of a job for more than a couple of weeks, if even.
Is talent born or grown? Difficult to say. People who start programming at an early age (say, age 7) often wind up becoming what we refer to as "talented". Maybe it was always in their bones, or maybe they just spent so much time with so many different / conflicting ways of using a computer that they have a way with the machine.
It's unfortunately my observation is that most CS grads generally don't seem to know their elbow from their arse in developing good, fast, maintainable software. They are either too biased (speed uber alles) or don't know what makes software maintainable (i.e. the four-star programmer mentality. ****foo = i_am_31337();). There are exceptions, of course.
Talented programmers blend a vast mix of knowledge about liberal arts, engineering, and computer science. We really can't stuff all this learning into a 4 year undergraduate degree.
While generally I agree that talent is the only decisive factor, there are lots of talented artists that take a long time to release albums. (Pink floyd comes to mind. Or on a completely opposite note, nine inch nails. Both are extremely talented, even if you don't like what they produce..)
You're quite right that being part of a community can be more rewarding than making profit.
I think the problem some have is when pro-community people start stating that profit is evil.
The shared community resource works when the community is small & enlightened. It doesn't work when it's big and stupid. (The tragedy of the commons).
Hence the need for a dispassionate, cold, profit-driven "market place" to keep things in order. Yeah, it sucks in some ways, but it seems to be the greater lesson of history .
Society uses markets to distribute that which is scarce. A market is a means to distribute resources to those that create or meet the needs of the public.
In information goods, where the cost of reproduction of is negligible (i.e. digital music, software, e-books), the scarcity now turns to the talent, creativity and knowledge required to build those goods. Resources should flow to those individuals that are successful at fulfilling the needs of the market at large.
To allocate these resources, there needs to be a control of some sort as to how they get remunerated. That is why we need some form of intellectual property. One can only ensure remuneration if there's control involved -- whether in law or technology.
This only works in a world where there are still scarce physical resources that can be distributed. Of course, in the world of the nano-assembler, the market is only necessary to prevent people from consuming too much of certain things (to protect rights, the environment, etc.). However, In such a world, the need for property rights more or less goes away.
I would still like to see how Oracle performs on a similar cluster (192 Pentium III's). Most Oracle benchmarks are UNIX. The shared-disk architecture also would probably hurt them (as shared nothing really works well for TPC-C).
The release of 9i will be a *very* intriguing time because they've finally figured out how to get cross-node cache coherency going for read/write & write/write conflicts in Oracle Parallel Server (i.e. no pinging the data store). That *could* lead to a big jump in performance beyond shared-nothing architectures, as the cluster nodes could now collaborate on the caching.
the Eiffel Tower, brooklyn bridge, etc.
arguably the Apple I was "artistic"
art deco buildings straddle the line
etc.
there's been a long tension between form & function, but sometimes they're complementary. to some, beautiful code == maintainable code. (of course, beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all, the perl script on this page isn't exactly what I had in mind..:)
There's a major difference between democracy and republic, even in conversational English.
By arguing that "50 million people can't be wrong", you're basically saying that "mob rules".
Which isn't the way the western world works, or it would turn the "tyranny of a despot" into the "tyranny of the majority". At one point a sizable number of Americans didn't believe in women's rights. If it weren't for a republic, would this have changed?
A republic balances the rules of the people with the rule of the politicians, who (in past) were considered more learned. "It's not that it's the best system, it's that the others are so much worse."
Slashdot Mirror
yes, that is what i mean, and i probably could not have explained it better. cheers.
10%?
By what measure?
The Fortune 500 are much less than 1% of the business world. In terms of economic power, however...
uses TeraData from NCR, last i checked
If you run a large system (Sun Enterprise 4500, 6500, or 10000), thousands of which exist in pretty much most major businesses, Oracle *will* run rings around PostgreSQL in terms of
- performance
- reliability
- managability (distributed)
- maintainance
- parallelism
If you need proof, you need to graduate college.
You're quite right, we're not in a democracy, we're in a republic. Democracy (in its pure form) doesn't tend to work because it merely replaces the tyranny of the despot with the tyranny of the majority. The u.s. was created as a balance between congress, judicial and commerical interests precicely to counter the poor effects of "mob rule". Unfortunately the system does go out of balance from time to time (corporations have too much power at this point).
As for referring to being the "least worst", that was a throwback to Winston Churchill, in his explanation of why we choose democracy.
"Actually true anarchy is a better solution... if not practical due to human nature."
Hmm, so a better solution is something that works in a fantasy world? I think Anarchy can't even last because the process of organizational protection that occurs to enforce regional norms will eventually coalesce into a form of policing, which effectively turns into a minimalist state. (Which is based on the philosophy expressed in Robert Nozick's _Anarchy State and Utopia_)
What, so anarchy is a better alternative?
You do realize that in this society, your rights end where another person's (organization's) begin, don't you? It's the least worst alternative from the extremes of totalitarianism and anarchy.. instead of a central authority telling what you can & cannot do, we tell each other that, based on the ground rules set by the government.
We've evolved towards this system over centuries. Do you honestly have a better (workable) idea, beyond "screw the man"?
But surely a corporation does speak with its own voice. Yes, an employee is the mechanism of communication, but I can hardly believe that public statements made by corporate representatives reflect anything but official (collectively determined) company perspective. Surely, someone who stands up and, in his/her company's name states opinions and views which are at odds with the company's perspective would be justifiably fired.
This is an extreme stereotype and only descriptive of a minority of corporations (i.e. those that are large and stupid.)
There are many employees that say things that disagree with their management's views. These people don't get fired, unless of course, they claimed that THEIR views were their company's. Then it's a different story.
www.cluetrain.org also has an interesting perspective on this. The marketplace will evolve to the point that corporations will have to start speaking with a more human voice, or they'll perish. Some companies are already doing this.
But my basic point remains: corporations are in a special position to accumulate power far beyond...
/s/corporations/organizations. "Two heads are better than one". It's not unique to corporations.
A person who both wields an abnormally large amount of power, and has no scruples or social conscience, is traditionally and rightfully despised in America. And yet a corporation is given special help to attain just this status.
Disagree. You're mixing the intent of the "corp == person" law, the reasoning & history behind it with your own observation that a minority of corporations abuse this position. This position is mainly about allowing the corporation to be sued distinctively from its employees, and to allow its existence to transcend the lives of its founders (which actually is very rare in practice). It has little to do with corporations taking moral stances / being socially responsible / having a concentration of power.
Society gives power over capital & human resources to corporations on purpose, because without a societal organism dedicated to making such resources productive, we'd be stuck in a world without economic progress.
Certainly there are other, more effective ways of limiting abuse of corporate power: campaign finance reform, for one.
- "Indeed, are often legally prohibited form taking a moral stance." As it should be. I really question if a corporation -should- be taking moral stances / performing social responsibility. Doing such things falls out of the realm of its own competence, and they can cause more damage than if they just did nothing.
The above assumes that the already do nothing, but that's not true -- they donate to charitable causes & NGO's that *do* make it their #1 competence to help society.
This (very old) argument falls a little flat in that you're claiming that a corporation is some soul-less beast. It's not. A company is made up of people - it's an organization. Taking away legal rights from a group of people just because they band together is kind of a totalitarian perspective.
A corporation is just an organization with a singular purpose entrusted to it by society: combine capital, labor, and knowledge, and make it productive. People have been trying to wrest control of this purpose and make corporations serve more "moral or social" ends, but it never works, plainly because that's not what corporations are supposed to be doing.
If you want to promote your view of morals and/or social/political beliefs, start an NGO.
regarding short procedures / long names.. it was definitely part of the XP philosophy which sort of grew out of the smalltalk philosophy. it fits into the Refactoring idea that you should probably write an explaining method name before you write a comment .. or you should apply "extract method" when your methods are over 20 lines.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheSourceCodeIsTheDesign
"It's a neat idea, a great mental exercise, but I doubt that it will make it past the trendy self-help phase into an accepted way to run a programming department....it will be a long time before the traditional caffeine / overtime / don't-touch-my-code programming paradigm goes away"
I could sum this up as
"mediocrity is easy".
How is pair programming (assuming you aim to do it 75% of the time, a realistic goal) implausible? Sure, it's not easy to just flip a switch and get everyone's egos in sync. It takes a certain kind of mentality to do and some cowboys just don't have it, (but arguably they don't have the skills to be cowboys either..)
Jerry Weinberg once said in Psychology of Computer Programming that "the best coders enjoy other people looking at their code, always hoping to learn new tricks or ways to improve their technique. the worst hide their code. and, typicaly, the best get better, and the worst get poorer..."
Isn't it true that if you don't subject yourself to constant review / incremental improvement, your 31337 skills are going to be less honed?
I agree with you, I use the same excuse too.. "well, everyone else sucks". Really, they do.
But what about teams that have skilled developers, a good leader, but fail out of the business pressuring them to do shoddy work (due to waterfall-esque thinking, etc.) It's common. XP provides a process out of this trap.
Ward Cunningham, a well respected developer and maintainer / creator of the Wiki web (c2.com/cgi/wiki) actually wrote a position paper at OOPSLA 2000 detailing how XP is "genius friendly". Look at http://oopsla.acm.org ..
As for the customer being available, XP doesn't necessarily require it, but it's quite clear that you'll get better quality software if they are available. It's about tradeoffs. You want quality software? Sit with your customers, have one dedicated to sitting near your team for ad hoc q&a sessions. You want long turnaround times and frustrating misunderstandings? Talk through documents / weekly meetings.
They don't hand out much.. $300-500 credit limits usually. I know people making a 6-figure income that can't get credit cards because they moved here from Canada 2 years ago and have no credit history.
Abusing people with poor credit / income by charging exhorbant interest rates IS a common and unethical practice.
But giving credit in general to these people isn't.. it's high risk, but, it's a service. They generally don't do this as a rule to "get surrendered assets". Companies actually have little success in this regard.
Yes, you *can* lose your house if you default, but the companies are so draconian about this because of able to reclaim *anything* most of the time (whether for honest reasons or fraud). The road travels both ways...
Oh, so we can rationalize fraud now?
There's a difference between fraud and defaulting on a loan. The former is a crime, the latter is an unfortunate situation. And most of the time the credit card companies *don't* get their money back in either situation.. that's not to say they shoudln't try.
(Score: 5, Naive)
I guess we might as well live in in a barter economy, this money stuff causes so much suffering...
Get real please. Human suffering happens. It happens a lot less than in times past, we can work to minimize it, but one can't get rid of it.
Credit ratings aren't a means of protection, they're a means of risk management. That doesn't forego the need to regain get the principal it lends out.
The point is that YOU, yes, YOU have a responsibility to ensure you don't become endebted to the point that you go hungry. And we have somewhat of a safety net in welfare in case you fall too hard, but it's not a very good safety net.
Don't whine about how evil creditors are for wanting their money back. That's stupid. It has nothing to do with excessive profit, it has everything to do with their responsibility as creditors. Debt forgiveness is acceptable but shouldn't be the norm.
Honestly, the shortage of programmers that everyone talks about is the shortage for talent. I'm not dissing the guy in the article, he's probably a good programmer, but I honestly believe that people at a certain level of professional development really don't have to worry about being out of a job for more than a couple of weeks, if even.
Is talent born or grown? Difficult to say. People who start programming at an early age (say, age 7) often wind up becoming what we refer to as "talented". Maybe it was always in their bones, or maybe they just spent so much time with so many different / conflicting ways of using a computer that they have a way with the machine.
It's unfortunately my observation is that most CS grads generally don't seem to know their elbow from their arse in developing good, fast, maintainable software. They are either too biased (speed uber alles) or don't know what makes software maintainable (i.e. the four-star programmer mentality. ****foo = i_am_31337();). There are exceptions, of course.
Talented programmers blend a vast mix of knowledge about liberal arts, engineering, and computer science. We really can't stuff all this learning into a 4 year undergraduate degree.
While generally I agree that talent is the only decisive factor, there are lots of talented artists that take a long time to release albums. (Pink floyd comes to mind. Or on a completely opposite note, nine inch nails. Both are extremely talented, even if you don't like what they produce..)
You're quite right that being part of a community can be more rewarding than making profit.
I think the problem some have is when pro-community people start stating that profit is evil.
The shared community resource works when the community is small & enlightened. It doesn't work when it's big and stupid. (The tragedy of the commons).
Hence the need for a dispassionate, cold, profit-driven "market place" to keep things in order. Yeah, it sucks in some ways, but it seems to be the greater lesson of history .
(score -1 Bullshit)
A high quality album, or piece of software is quite hard to create. "HARD" means
A) risk
B) time
C) money
D) talent
Anyone can whip together a piece of shit easily. A good work requires tremendous effort.
Society uses markets to distribute that which is scarce. A market is a means to distribute resources to those that create or meet the needs of the public.
In information goods, where the cost of reproduction of is negligible (i.e. digital music, software, e-books), the scarcity now turns to the talent, creativity and knowledge required to build those goods. Resources should flow to those individuals that are successful at fulfilling the needs of the market at large.
To allocate these resources, there needs to be a control of some sort as to how they get remunerated. That is why we need some form of intellectual property. One can only ensure remuneration if there's control involved -- whether in law or technology.
This only works in a world where there are still scarce physical resources that can be distributed. Of course, in the world of the nano-assembler, the market is only necessary to prevent people from consuming too much of certain things (to protect rights, the environment, etc.). However, In such a world, the need for property rights more or less goes away.
It was by Spry back when Spry Mosaic was popular, wasn't it?
I didn't buy it, just saw it around stores a lot in 1994. Didn't see the O'Reilly connection then. Maybe I was just blind.
I would still like to see how Oracle performs on a similar cluster (192 Pentium III's). Most Oracle benchmarks are UNIX. The shared-disk architecture also would probably hurt them (as shared nothing really works well for TPC-C).
The release of 9i will be a *very* intriguing time because they've finally figured out how to get cross-node cache coherency going for read/write & write/write conflicts in Oracle Parallel Server (i.e. no pinging the data store). That *could* lead to a big jump in performance beyond shared-nothing architectures, as the cluster nodes could now collaborate on the caching.
the Eiffel Tower, brooklyn bridge, etc.
:)
arguably the Apple I was "artistic"
art deco buildings straddle the line
etc.
there's been a long tension between form & function, but sometimes they're complementary. to some, beautiful code == maintainable code. (of course, beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all, the perl script on this page isn't exactly what I had in mind..
There's a major difference between democracy and republic, even in conversational English.
By arguing that "50 million people can't be wrong", you're basically saying that "mob rules".
Which isn't the way the western world works, or it would turn the "tyranny of a despot" into the "tyranny of the majority". At one point a sizable number of Americans didn't believe in women's rights. If it weren't for a republic, would this have changed?
A republic balances the rules of the people with the rule of the politicians, who (in past) were considered more learned. "It's not that it's the best system, it's that the others are so much worse."