Very good comment. What's funny is that when I hear the term "refactoring" it usually means, "Lets clean up the code so that it's more compatible with new features we need to add".
If the code is cleaned up, then new features added, then it really is refactoring.
But I would suspect that new features are added while the "refactoring" is going on, and thus it's not really refactoring.
I have the misfortune of working with a database that is primarily a couple of tables with key-value pairs (not a traditional database model).
There is only one column that can be indexed, and it has to be done with a full text index.
Every once in a while, there is a discussion about moving this mess to something more traditional. I was excited to read the review on this book, but as I read through the review, it seemed like this was more of a "performance tuning guide".
Re-factoring a database is a lot more involved - changing tables, stored procedures, maybe even the underlying database.
The term Database Application is fuzzy and poorly defined. Is it the front end? The stored procedures? The database tables? I would consider a database application to be any part of the code that stores, retrieves, removes or modifies data stored in a database, and the entities that have been defined to store that data.
Using that definition, this book is about tuning, not refactoring.
It's starting to look like I would have saved myself a whole lot of time if I had written the database transaction using JDBC instead of Hibernate
Hibernate is great most of the time, but every Hibernate application I worked on had some JDBC somewhere, and I typically managed my own transactions... With regards to object-hydration, Hibernate (2.x) was an all or nothing, and sometimes I needed something in between for performance reasons.
Obviously, I don't know the problems you face, but I am surprised that a flexible framework like Spring isn't meeting your needs, and that Hibernate is preventing you from using JDBC...
Funny that you should mention Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (though I thought he was only suspected as being behind the hoax). If he was behind it, it would be quite ironic - while he made some members of the scientific community out to be fools, he was made a fool in an equally amusing spiritual hoax (he was quite a spiritualist).
The Cottingly Fairies ranks up there as one of the longest running hoaxes (with some still claiming today that they were real), and ACD was a believer to the extent that he published a book on the subject, called, "The Coming of the Fairies".
Sanya Reid Smith is backed up by Ha-Joon Chan, a "Reader in the Political Economy of Development" at Cambridge (do your credentials match)?
In his book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (which I've read in dead tree form, and thus cannot produce quotes) he backs up Sanya Reid Smith in stating that many countries did not allow drug patents until the 1960's and 1970's (including Canada, Switzerland, etc).
[Quote]It is simple; the loss in royalties is far outweighed by the benefits to the local economy.[/Quote]
This has to be the most ridiculous statment typed with a straight face that I've seen on Slashdot in years. Tell me - what patents library do the multinationals based in Zambia hold? Equador? Bangladesh? For developing countries, patents mean an outflow of money, not an influx.
[Quote]There is a reason that every nation on the planet that has any serious intent to become developed adopts some sort of patent system[/Quote]
You have it backwards (which, considering the quality of the rest of your "reasoning", makes it one of your better argued points). Developed countries implement patent systems once they have something to protect. You don't put expensive alarm systems on mud huts.
It's obvious that you don't understand how 90% of the world lives - your viewpoint is overwhelmed by your economic priviledge.
The fact that these countries had to copy the British inventions to compete shows how their own (patent less) systems failed to promote innovation within their own societies.
Right - because it's much harder to innovate than copy.
From Intellectual Property in Free Trade Agreements, by Sanya Reid Smith:
"If developing countries broaden and lengthen their intellectual property protection beyond their current treaty obligations while they still have reduced capacity to generate their own intellectual property, they can expect to see their royalty outflow increase. For example, according to the Malaysian Governmentâ(TM)s 9th Malaysia Plan, in 2005 there was already estimated to be a net outflow of royalties of US $1.7 billion."
Patents cost developing countries (who rarely have much patented) yet benefit countries where a large number of valuable patents reside.
The Swiss did NOT believe that "you could not patent anything chemical". That is ridiculous
From Intellectual Property in Free Trade Agreements, by Sanya Reid Smith:
"Prior to TRIPS, countries were able to tailor their level of IP protection to suit their level of development. Many of todayâ(TM)s industrialised countries such as the USA, Europe,5 Japan, South Korea and Taiwan did not have high levels of IP protection until it suited them. For example Switzerland did not allow patents on chemicals until 1978; Italy, Sweden and Switzerland did not allow patents on medicines until 1978 and Spain did not allow patents on chemicals or medicines until 1992 because it said it could not afford the higher medicine prices as a result of patents."
I am not sure what planet you live on, but it's not earth, Bizarro Slashdot Poster.
The point was that patents benefit rich, developed countries. Ignoring patents and copyright benefits poor countries (who, by the way, rarely have unions, pensions, or all that other first-world stuff you mentioned).
The World Bank and IMF have made up a fairy tale that the developed countries of the world became rich thanks to free trade and patents, which is crap. They became rich thanks to trade barriers, tariffs and turning a blind eye.
Germany used to be quite famous for making fakes of machines used in the British textile manufacturing effort (right down to copying the name of the manufacturer). Many European countries didn't bother with patent protection as it interferred with their ability to make cheap knock offs.
If Einstein had been a chemist, he wouldn't have been working in the Swiss patent office, because at the time, the Swiss believed that you couldn't patent anything chemical. Canada didn't recongize drug patents until the 1960s (if memory serves).
This rich-country enforcement of patents and copyright is "kicking away the ladder" - most first-world countries conveniently ignored patents during their development, when it was to their economic benefit to be able to rip technology off from more well-to-do nations.
There have been a number of times when candidates have come in with impressive resumes, have been well liked by HR and management interviews, but have scored lower than a college student on the test.
I always do a telephone interview (10-15 minutes) prior to allowing a potential candidate to use the time of other employees. During that interview, I chat with the person to see if they are truely interested, I evaluate their communication skills, and I ask a few technical questions relating to the job and their resume.
I weed out about 80% of the applicants that way without wasting our time, or the applicants time. I usually do that test within a day or two of getting the resume.
This post is absolutely redundant - it's been covered in other posts ad naseum, but I'd like to add my voice to those that say a test is required.
I hired someone 3 or 4 years ago to do light Java development, and work as an Oracle DBA. Her resume looked great. She could talk about the parts of an Oracle database, and said she taught a Java course. I called up her references, and they were all enthusiastic about her. Unfortunately, she couldn't do much with Java or Oracle. She put in long hours, to try to get things done, but ultimately she accomplished little, and myself and the dev manager had to let her go.
From that point on, I came up with a simple test - I provided a schema (a few tables) with data, and asked the candidate to select the data from the table using JDBC. I provided a stub with the connection to the database. They had to write the data to a file on the local file system. If they got to there (and very very few did), I'd ask them to do it as XML using the technology of their choice.
The people that failed this simple test had 10 years of experience with Java, and more using Oracle; an alphabet of acronyms accompanied their Java and database experience, and was topped with a Masters in comp sci from some University (often in a foreign country).
There are a couple of things that astound me:
1) You are going to get found out. At some point, you (should) feel profoundly ashamed for lying to a stranger who has the power of employment over you.
2) It is an employees market (at least where I live). There is no need to artificially inflate your skill set.
I am not sure how this differs from the MSI Wind or Asus EEE.
When the rumours first surfaced (someone caught Michael Dell with one at a conference), there was talk of a touch screen. If that had been the case, then there's the big selling feature.
The Red Queen on the evolutionary benefits of sex (and how it pertains to evolution), by Matt Ridley and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a book on Evolutionary Psychology.
I still think back to both books when I ponder the behaviour of the people around me.
Sun tunnels pipe light in from the roof of a house to the interior ceiling.
They've been around for years, and look more practical than these things. At $229 for a 14" tunnel, and $329 for a 22" tunnel, they look a lot cheaper. There are many manufacturers, as well.
after you've moved this stuff a few times from domicile to domicle.
Add a wife and a couple of kids, a garage full of tools and supplies (because the houses you buy need rennovations), and make sure it's you lugging the heavy boxes; suddenly, those old bits and pieces lose their glitter, and they go on Craigslist for free.
This sounds like the high school football players sitting in a bar, talking about their "glory days" rather than doing something interesting with their lives.
Across the world the last eruption of a super volcano was the Toba volcano in Indonesia. This erupted around 75,000 years ago spewing out tremendous quantities of rock and ash and is thought to have reduced global temperatures by up to 21 degrees centigrade.
From El Wikipedia: "In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is the statement that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the momentum of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the momentum of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain."
Not a big fan of Microsoft, and prior to my current job, I was a DBA for Oracle and MySQL installs. My new job, however, embedded me firmly in a Microsoft-role.
I wasn't prepared to be impressed by SQL Server, but it's ease of use, power, and maintainability are outstanding. The development team uses.NET, and they seem to be really happy with it.
Vista and X360 are consumer-products. Their enterprise stuff seems solid (well, except for Server 2003, which hasn't impressed me much), and there is a lot of market share to take away from Sun and Oracle, which would be a big boost to their bottom line.
I don't think they'll be quietly riding off into the sunset...
The original article claimed a 33% savings in fuel costs. This new article claims a 50% savings under optimal conditions. Interestingly, the greenhouse gas savings are only 10-20%. Where is the logic in that?
The concepts are interesting - they claim speed, and significantly lower disk-space requirements. They have a video on their site explaining the concepts (http://vertica.com/techoverview - you'll need to provide contact info to see it).
But the last time I talked to their sales representative, they did not support triggers, stored procedures, or any sort of high-availability options.
While the concept is interesting, until they roll out what are now standard database features (even MySQL has views, triggers, and stored procedures now), it won't bet taken seriously. Even then, they might go the way of object-oriented database systems (we tried Matisse without much luck - too much locking). Row-based database systems have a lot of momentum.
this would be a good thing for Microsoft. Their stranglehold on the software market has a Windows-based cornerstone.
All of us would reap benefits as well - the pirated copies of Windows in these countries are not patched to get rid of security issue, and many are now zombies in some huge bot network.
Assuming customers kept patches up to date with a legit OS, it could decrease the amount of spam, DDOS attacks, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good comment. What's funny is that when I hear the term "refactoring" it usually means, "Lets clean up the code so that it's more compatible with new features we need to add".
If the code is cleaned up, then new features added, then it really is refactoring.
But I would suspect that new features are added while the "refactoring" is going on, and thus it's not really refactoring.
I have the misfortune of working with a database that is primarily a couple of tables with key-value pairs (not a traditional database model).
There is only one column that can be indexed, and it has to be done with a full text index.
Every once in a while, there is a discussion about moving this mess to something more traditional. I was excited to read the review on this book, but as I read through the review, it seemed like this was more of a "performance tuning guide".
Re-factoring a database is a lot more involved - changing tables, stored procedures, maybe even the underlying database.
The term Database Application is fuzzy and poorly defined. Is it the front end? The stored procedures? The database tables? I would consider a database application to be any part of the code that stores, retrieves, removes or modifies data stored in a database, and the entities that have been defined to store that data.
Using that definition, this book is about tuning, not refactoring.
Actually, the 3M is a bit bigger...
The size of the 3M version is 11.5 x 5 x 2.2 cm (that's about 5 inches by 2 inches by .8 inches for those who haven't evolved).
The Optima is "2 by 4.1 by 0.7 inches, weighing 4.2 ounces."
What we need is a head to head by a reputable, unbiased website.Like Gamespot maybe.
It's starting to look like I would have saved myself a whole lot of time if I had written the database transaction using JDBC instead of Hibernate
Hibernate is great most of the time, but every Hibernate application I worked on had some JDBC somewhere, and I typically managed my own transactions... With regards to object-hydration, Hibernate (2.x) was an all or nothing, and sometimes I needed something in between for performance reasons.
Obviously, I don't know the problems you face, but I am surprised that a flexible framework like Spring isn't meeting your needs, and that Hibernate is preventing you from using JDBC...
Funny that you should mention Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (though I thought he was only suspected as being behind the hoax). If he was behind it, it would be quite ironic - while he made some members of the scientific community out to be fools, he was made a fool in an equally amusing spiritual hoax (he was quite a spiritualist).
The Cottingly Fairies ranks up there as one of the longest running hoaxes (with some still claiming today that they were real), and ACD was a believer to the extent that he published a book on the subject, called, "The Coming of the Fairies".
Sanya Reid Smith is backed up by Ha-Joon Chan, a "Reader in the Political Economy of Development" at Cambridge (do your credentials match)?
In his book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (which I've read in dead tree form, and thus cannot produce quotes) he backs up Sanya Reid Smith in stating that many countries did not allow drug patents until the 1960's and 1970's (including Canada, Switzerland, etc).
[Quote]It is simple; the loss in royalties is far outweighed by the benefits to the local economy.[/Quote]
This has to be the most ridiculous statment typed with a straight face that I've seen on Slashdot in years. Tell me - what patents library do the multinationals based in Zambia hold? Equador? Bangladesh? For developing countries, patents mean an outflow of money, not an influx.
[Quote]There is a reason that every nation on the planet that has any serious intent to become developed adopts some sort of patent system[/Quote]
You have it backwards (which, considering the quality of the rest of your "reasoning", makes it one of your better argued points). Developed countries implement patent systems once they have something to protect. You don't put expensive alarm systems on mud huts.
It's obvious that you don't understand how 90% of the world lives - your viewpoint is overwhelmed by your economic priviledge.
The fact that these countries had to copy the British inventions to compete shows how their own (patent less) systems failed to promote innovation within their own societies.
Right - because it's much harder to innovate than copy.
From Intellectual Property in Free Trade Agreements, by Sanya Reid Smith:
"If developing countries broaden and lengthen their intellectual property protection beyond their current treaty obligations while they still have reduced capacity to generate their own intellectual property, they can expect to see their royalty outflow increase. For example, according to the Malaysian Governmentâ(TM)s 9th Malaysia Plan, in 2005 there was already estimated to be a net outflow of royalties of US $1.7 billion."
Patents cost developing countries (who rarely have much patented) yet benefit countries where a large number of valuable patents reside.
The Swiss did NOT believe that "you could not patent anything chemical". That is ridiculous
From Intellectual Property in Free Trade Agreements, by Sanya Reid Smith:
"Prior to TRIPS, countries were able to tailor their level of IP protection to suit their level of development. Many of todayâ(TM)s industrialised countries such as the USA, Europe,5 Japan, South Korea and Taiwan did not have high levels of IP protection until it suited them. For example Switzerland did not allow patents on chemicals until 1978; Italy, Sweden and Switzerland did not allow patents on medicines until 1978 and Spain did not allow patents on chemicals or medicines until 1992 because it said it could not afford the higher medicine prices as a result of patents."
I am not sure what planet you live on, but it's not earth, Bizarro Slashdot Poster.
The point was that patents benefit rich, developed countries. Ignoring patents and copyright benefits poor countries (who, by the way, rarely have unions, pensions, or all that other first-world stuff you mentioned).
The World Bank and IMF have made up a fairy tale that the developed countries of the world became rich thanks to free trade and patents, which is crap. They became rich thanks to trade barriers, tariffs and turning a blind eye.
copyrights and patents.
Germany used to be quite famous for making fakes of machines used in the British textile manufacturing effort (right down to copying the name of the manufacturer). Many European countries didn't bother with patent protection as it interferred with their ability to make cheap knock offs.
If Einstein had been a chemist, he wouldn't have been working in the Swiss patent office, because at the time, the Swiss believed that you couldn't patent anything chemical. Canada didn't recongize drug patents until the 1960s (if memory serves).
This rich-country enforcement of patents and copyright is "kicking away the ladder" - most first-world countries conveniently ignored patents during their development, when it was to their economic benefit to be able to rip technology off from more well-to-do nations.
There have been a number of times when candidates have come in with impressive resumes, have been well liked by HR and management interviews, but have scored lower than a college student on the test.
I always do a telephone interview (10-15 minutes) prior to allowing a potential candidate to use the time of other employees. During that interview, I chat with the person to see if they are truely interested, I evaluate their communication skills, and I ask a few technical questions relating to the job and their resume.
I weed out about 80% of the applicants that way without wasting our time, or the applicants time. I usually do that test within a day or two of getting the resume.
This post is absolutely redundant - it's been covered in other posts ad naseum, but I'd like to add my voice to those that say a test is required.
I hired someone 3 or 4 years ago to do light Java development, and work as an Oracle DBA. Her resume looked great. She could talk about the parts of an Oracle database, and said she taught a Java course. I called up her references, and they were all enthusiastic about her. Unfortunately, she couldn't do much with Java or Oracle. She put in long hours, to try to get things done, but ultimately she accomplished little, and myself and the dev manager had to let her go.
From that point on, I came up with a simple test - I provided a schema (a few tables) with data, and asked the candidate to select the data from the table using JDBC. I provided a stub with the connection to the database. They had to write the data to a file on the local file system. If they got to there (and very very few did), I'd ask them to do it as XML using the technology of their choice.
The people that failed this simple test had 10 years of experience with Java, and more using Oracle; an alphabet of acronyms accompanied their Java and database experience, and was topped with a Masters in comp sci from some University (often in a foreign country).
There are a couple of things that astound me:
1) You are going to get found out. At some point, you (should) feel profoundly ashamed for lying to a stranger who has the power of employment over you.
2) It is an employees market (at least where I live). There is no need to artificially inflate your skill set.
I am not sure how this differs from the MSI Wind or Asus EEE.
When the rumours first surfaced (someone caught Michael Dell with one at a conference), there was talk of a touch screen. If that had been the case, then there's the big selling feature.
No mention in this sneak peak, however.
The Red Queen on the evolutionary benefits of sex (and how it pertains to evolution), by Matt Ridley and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a book on Evolutionary Psychology.
I still think back to both books when I ponder the behaviour of the people around me.
See The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
See also The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen
The Soviet Union was technically a state-capitalist society, where the government (AKA state) owned the means of production.
Sun tunnels pipe light in from the roof of a house to the interior ceiling.
They've been around for years, and look more practical than these things. At $229 for a 14" tunnel, and $329 for a 22" tunnel, they look a lot cheaper. There are many manufacturers, as well.
after you've moved this stuff a few times from domicile to domicle.
Add a wife and a couple of kids, a garage full of tools and supplies (because the houses you buy need rennovations), and make sure it's you lugging the heavy boxes; suddenly, those old bits and pieces lose their glitter, and they go on Craigslist for free.
This sounds like the high school football players sitting in a bar, talking about their "glory days" rather than doing something interesting with their lives.
You can never go home again.
the explosion of the Toba volcano, in Indonesia, that was believed to take humans to the brink of extinction:
Across the world the last eruption of a super volcano was the Toba volcano in Indonesia. This erupted around 75,000 years ago spewing out tremendous quantities of rock and ash and is thought to have reduced global temperatures by up to 21 degrees centigrade.
Thanks for the post.
From El Wikipedia: "In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is the statement that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the momentum of the particle uncertain; and conversely, that measuring the momentum of a particle precisely makes the position uncertain."
IBM is blowing smoke up our five-hole.
Engineers like to say that their mistakes have the potential to kill people. The guy who drives the bus I take to work could say the same.
In fact, the way the guy drives, I'm sure there are a few dead bodies in his past.
Not a big fan of Microsoft, and prior to my current job, I was a DBA for Oracle and MySQL installs. My new job, however, embedded me firmly in a Microsoft-role.
.NET, and they seem to be really happy with it.
I wasn't prepared to be impressed by SQL Server, but it's ease of use, power, and maintainability are outstanding. The development team uses
Vista and X360 are consumer-products. Their enterprise stuff seems solid (well, except for Server 2003, which hasn't impressed me much), and there is a lot of market share to take away from Sun and Oracle, which would be a big boost to their bottom line.
I don't think they'll be quietly riding off into the sunset...
The original article is here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/08/1735227
The original article claimed a 33% savings in fuel costs. This new article claims a 50% savings under optimal conditions. Interestingly, the greenhouse gas savings are only 10-20%. Where is the logic in that?
which appears to be the front-runner.
The concepts are interesting - they claim speed, and significantly lower disk-space requirements. They have a video on their site explaining the concepts (http://vertica.com/techoverview - you'll need to provide contact info to see it).
But the last time I talked to their sales representative, they did not support triggers, stored procedures, or any sort of high-availability options.
While the concept is interesting, until they roll out what are now standard database features (even MySQL has views, triggers, and stored procedures now), it won't bet taken seriously. Even then, they might go the way of object-oriented database systems (we tried Matisse without much luck - too much locking). Row-based database systems have a lot of momentum.
this would be a good thing for Microsoft. Their stranglehold on the software market has a Windows-based cornerstone.
All of us would reap benefits as well - the pirated copies of Windows in these countries are not patched to get rid of security issue, and many are now zombies in some huge bot network.
Assuming customers kept patches up to date with a legit OS, it could decrease the amount of spam, DDOS attacks, etc.