I believe it is the time limited nature of game play. Once you have tended to your farm, there is nothing left for you to do. This builds up excitement that you will get to play again soon. That excitement keeps people coming back. If you could play FarmVille for hours on end without stopping, the novelty would quickly wear off.
I'm suggesting (and there's a lot of evidence to back me up) that the market would balance itself out, government interference aside.
You don't have to convince me. I farm in a country that does not subsidize its farmers. American subsidies only makes our lives more difficult.
We still have to grow corn though. Believe me, we would much rather grow a profitable crop, but so far I have not heard any suggestions. The OP seemed to think there was a better alternative, so I am all ears (no pun intended).
I'm not so libertarian as to say we'll let the food prices soar and the poor starve; I simply don't think that's what would happen.
You are correct. It is a supply and demand system. We produce so much food that the market can essentially demand any price they want on the food they buy.
What the free market has done is ensured that the poor will not starve, but it pushes the farmers themselves into poverty. The people who produce the most valuable product in the world are some of the poorest people in the world. American farmers fair a little better because the government has recognized the importance of food to the country's well-being.
I think the real question here is: Should farmers or the government be responsible for feeding those less fortunate?
CouchDB is ACID compliant for document transactions.
Or can it actually handle a transaction involving queries and updates over multiple entities/rows?
I realize this is a fundamental feature of relational databases, but NoSQL databases are decidedly not relational. If we look to CouchDB again, the document is the transaction. All of your "rows" and "columns" are stored within the document. You can be certain that all of your entities contained within the document will be saved in a consistent state.
Again, CouchDB is not a relational database. If you need a relational database, I would recommend using one. With that said, there are many applications that do not benefit from relational systems and are much more appropriately implemented on NoSQL databases. It is all about choosing the right tool for the job.
You are absolutely correct. All of the NoSQL databases exist to solve problems that SQL databases do not solve elegantly. (Vertical) scalability is one of those problems, but hardly the only problem. Like you mentioned in your post, one of the more interesting applications of some of the NoSQL databases is the ability to index unstructured data.
The web is an unstructured place. Most web-facing applications can benefit from being able to store unstructured data which is why some of the NoSQL databases are a perfect fit for web development. Yes, you can mathematically provide those services atop SQL, but the implementation is ugly and defeats the purpose of using SQL in the first place.
Ultimately it is about using the right tool for the job. SQL is the right tool for many jobs, but it definitely is not the right tool for every job. The NoSQL movement is interesting because it is pushing the idea to developers that SQL is not always the right tool for the job and that there just might be a better database for your application. It is important that developers be aware that these tools exist so that they can be utilized where appropriate instead of trying to shoehorn every task into a SQL server.
CouchDB was essentially invented at, and receives development efforts from, IBM. If what you say is true, CouchDB and NoSQL by extension should see the success that SQL has received in the past.
That's not what "premature" means. It means doing something too early.
Exactly what I said; optimizing an algorithm before it is shown to be a bottleneck or have any significant impact on application performance is premature optimization.
They should have been caught much earlier than they were.
If it is discovered to be a bottleneck, it should be optimized. It seems the guy before you didn't believe in optimization at all.
Farmers could grow absolutely nothing every third year. But the major expenses would still remain. That means that the price of the food that you do like to eat would have to increase dramatically. Or are you suggesting that food production itself is an obsolete business?
You can do small-scale farming without corn, sure. If you would rather spend your time tending to your garden than reading Slashdot, then we can make it work. If you prefer to outsource the work to agri-business, I do not see any reasonable alternatives.
In my opinion, the most fascinating aspect of computer programming is user interfaces and user interaction. While math certainly still applies, I feel that training in design and psychology would serve you better than mathematics.
Premature optimization is the act of optimizing an algorithm that (usually) achieves no appreciable benefit to the overall application from the optimization. For example, if you have a function that takes 0.5ms to complete and it is only called once in the lifecycle of the application, there is essentially no benefit in optimizing it to run in 0.1ms.
What you did is exactly what those against premature optimization advocate. Write the software first, then go back and identify the bottlenecks and optimize those problem areas as needed. Do not spend hours optimizing an algorithm that does not slow down your application in any meaningful way, it is a waste of time.
But at least there is a market for it, even if that market it using it for things that it should not be used for.
Corn is one of the most expensive crops to grow. It also provides the lowest return on investment. I don't think any farmer enjoys growing corn, but there doesn't seem to be any crop to take its place in the rotation given the constraints I mentioned in my previous post.
Given that corn is a necessary evil in modern agriculture, some enterprising individuals discovered we could at least turn that corn into fuel and do something useful with it. But then everyone started crying that the corn should have been used for food instead. So when they start doing that, everyone starts crying that using corn for food is bad. Farmers just cannot win.
Hell, I recall hearing they're feeding corn to FISH now.
That is not surprising. When I was a kid, corn was the bait of choice when we went fishing. Much more effective than worms.
Iowa and Nebraska farmers could learn to grow something else.
Like what? I am genuinely curious.
You need at least three types of crops in rotation. It is the only way to ensure that the crop returns reasonable yields and remains disease free.
Crops have to be plantable, harvestable, and storable using the same equipment and facilities as all of the other crops in the rotation. This is a simple matter of economics.
There has to actually be a market for the crop. Just because you can grow it, doesn't mean anyone actually wants to buy it.
There is a certain cost attached to putting a seed in the ground, but the end result is many copies of the original seed. There is a certain cost attached to turning an idea into an application, but the end result is many copies of the original idea.
If I want to recoup my initial investment and turn a profit, I have to sell the copies of my seed or application. If I am feeling generous, I could give my seed or application away for free. So far, there is not a whole lot of difference between farming and software development (I do both, incidentally).
But then I discover that my application is encumbered with patents. I can no longer distribute for free or otherwise until I am granted a license from the patent holder(s). I now have to raise the price of my application to you in order to cover the costs of acquiring the patent license.
But wait! Those seeds are patented encumbered as well. I may not duplicate or distribute my seeds in any way without a license from the patent holder(s). I do not have an agreement in front of me at the moment, but I have signed them in the past and they essentially say that you may not replant the seeds or share them with anyone other than approved grain elevators. Sounds kind of like a software license to me.
So yes, there are some physical limitations on the distribution of food. But I think the concept of the two ideas and how patents affect them might be a lot closer than you think.
It is actually a very interesting analogy when you look at it that way. For food, you take a seed, care for it, and it turns into many seeds. For software you take an idea, care for it, and it turns into many applications.
It also works because, just like software, there are many patents on seeds. You cannot just plant any old seed in your field. Often you have to obtain a license to plant a seed. Just like you cannot work on any idea. You might have to obtain a license to "grow" your idea.
Actually, speaking as a farmer myself, most farmers do work for free. The prices food buyers are willing to pay the farmer are just enough to cover the expenses of producing the product, if that. Farming is truly a labour of love. Funnily enough, I turn to my programming job to make a living; which apparently I should also do for free according to your post.
The "shiny new layer" you are referring to is basically NeXTSTEP. Apple may have made a couple of minor interface tweaks to make it familiar to existing Apple customers, but if you wanna get technical, they didn't improve an old OS, they rebranded someone else's.
While property is technically an asset, as long as you need a place to live/work, it is a sunk cost. Unless you decide to live/work on the street in the future, you are never going to see that money again for the life you/your business.
Looking at the commercial property database in my locale, the average small business would be looking around the $400-500,000 range to purchase an office building suitable for a company of that size. $500,000 to a small business is the difference between making the proper acquisitions and becoming the next Google, or staying small forever.
For the homeowner, the money tied up in a home is the difference between making the right investments to build the next Google, or being stuck in a 9-5 job for the rest of life.
So, while I do not disagree that property ownership probably is cheaper in the long run, it seems to me that the opportunity to use that money to build real wealth is lost when purchasing a home/office. Maybe if you are someone like Google you are making so much money that you could not possibly spend it all. Buying property makes sense in that case. But most people and businesses are not anywhere close to being Google.
What they are basically saying is that Youtube does not have any development costs because they do not pay any third-party development firms to work on their software.
But it is not like bandwidth itself costs money. It is always the infrastructure that you are paying for. You can either outsource network building and maintenance to a third party, or you can do it yourself.
It is no different than Google having lawyers and accountants on staff, while smaller companies only hire those people when needed. It is more cost effective for the smaller businesses to only pay for what they use, but larger companies are not bound by those same limitations. I am sure that Youtube does not pay any lawyer firms for any legal issues that arise within their operation also.
You mean like iPhone OS? Call the iPad a gimmick if you want, but it does bring with it a brand new concept on human-computer interaction. One that I feel will carry over into traditional keyboard/mouse computing in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe it is the time limited nature of game play. Once you have tended to your farm, there is nothing left for you to do. This builds up excitement that you will get to play again soon. That excitement keeps people coming back. If you could play FarmVille for hours on end without stopping, the novelty would quickly wear off.
You don't have to convince me. I farm in a country that does not subsidize its farmers. American subsidies only makes our lives more difficult.
We still have to grow corn though. Believe me, we would much rather grow a profitable crop, but so far I have not heard any suggestions. The OP seemed to think there was a better alternative, so I am all ears (no pun intended).
You are correct. It is a supply and demand system. We produce so much food that the market can essentially demand any price they want on the food they buy.
What the free market has done is ensured that the poor will not starve, but it pushes the farmers themselves into poverty. The people who produce the most valuable product in the world are some of the poorest people in the world. American farmers fair a little better because the government has recognized the importance of food to the country's well-being.
I think the real question here is: Should farmers or the government be responsible for feeding those less fortunate?
CouchDB is ACID compliant for document transactions.
I realize this is a fundamental feature of relational databases, but NoSQL databases are decidedly not relational. If we look to CouchDB again, the document is the transaction. All of your "rows" and "columns" are stored within the document. You can be certain that all of your entities contained within the document will be saved in a consistent state.
Again, CouchDB is not a relational database. If you need a relational database, I would recommend using one. With that said, there are many applications that do not benefit from relational systems and are much more appropriately implemented on NoSQL databases. It is all about choosing the right tool for the job.
Many of the NoSQL databases are ACID compliant.
You are absolutely correct. All of the NoSQL databases exist to solve problems that SQL databases do not solve elegantly. (Vertical) scalability is one of those problems, but hardly the only problem. Like you mentioned in your post, one of the more interesting applications of some of the NoSQL databases is the ability to index unstructured data.
The web is an unstructured place. Most web-facing applications can benefit from being able to store unstructured data which is why some of the NoSQL databases are a perfect fit for web development. Yes, you can mathematically provide those services atop SQL, but the implementation is ugly and defeats the purpose of using SQL in the first place.
Ultimately it is about using the right tool for the job. SQL is the right tool for many jobs, but it definitely is not the right tool for every job. The NoSQL movement is interesting because it is pushing the idea to developers that SQL is not always the right tool for the job and that there just might be a better database for your application. It is important that developers be aware that these tools exist so that they can be utilized where appropriate instead of trying to shoehorn every task into a SQL server.
CouchDB was essentially invented at, and receives development efforts from, IBM. If what you say is true, CouchDB and NoSQL by extension should see the success that SQL has received in the past.
Exactly what I said; optimizing an algorithm before it is shown to be a bottleneck or have any significant impact on application performance is premature optimization.
If it is discovered to be a bottleneck, it should be optimized. It seems the guy before you didn't believe in optimization at all.
Automobile manufacturers and banks come to mind.
Farmers could grow absolutely nothing every third year. But the major expenses would still remain. That means that the price of the food that you do like to eat would have to increase dramatically. Or are you suggesting that food production itself is an obsolete business?
You can do small-scale farming without corn, sure. If you would rather spend your time tending to your garden than reading Slashdot, then we can make it work. If you prefer to outsource the work to agri-business, I do not see any reasonable alternatives.
In my opinion, the most fascinating aspect of computer programming is user interfaces and user interaction. While math certainly still applies, I feel that training in design and psychology would serve you better than mathematics.
Premature optimization is the act of optimizing an algorithm that (usually) achieves no appreciable benefit to the overall application from the optimization. For example, if you have a function that takes 0.5ms to complete and it is only called once in the lifecycle of the application, there is essentially no benefit in optimizing it to run in 0.1ms.
What you did is exactly what those against premature optimization advocate. Write the software first, then go back and identify the bottlenecks and optimize those problem areas as needed. Do not spend hours optimizing an algorithm that does not slow down your application in any meaningful way, it is a waste of time.
But at least there is a market for it, even if that market it using it for things that it should not be used for.
Corn is one of the most expensive crops to grow. It also provides the lowest return on investment. I don't think any farmer enjoys growing corn, but there doesn't seem to be any crop to take its place in the rotation given the constraints I mentioned in my previous post.
Given that corn is a necessary evil in modern agriculture, some enterprising individuals discovered we could at least turn that corn into fuel and do something useful with it. But then everyone started crying that the corn should have been used for food instead. So when they start doing that, everyone starts crying that using corn for food is bad. Farmers just cannot win.
That is not surprising. When I was a kid, corn was the bait of choice when we went fishing. Much more effective than worms.
Like what? I am genuinely curious.
There is a certain cost attached to putting a seed in the ground, but the end result is many copies of the original seed. There is a certain cost attached to turning an idea into an application, but the end result is many copies of the original idea.
If I want to recoup my initial investment and turn a profit, I have to sell the copies of my seed or application. If I am feeling generous, I could give my seed or application away for free. So far, there is not a whole lot of difference between farming and software development (I do both, incidentally).
But then I discover that my application is encumbered with patents. I can no longer distribute for free or otherwise until I am granted a license from the patent holder(s). I now have to raise the price of my application to you in order to cover the costs of acquiring the patent license.
But wait! Those seeds are patented encumbered as well. I may not duplicate or distribute my seeds in any way without a license from the patent holder(s). I do not have an agreement in front of me at the moment, but I have signed them in the past and they essentially say that you may not replant the seeds or share them with anyone other than approved grain elevators. Sounds kind of like a software license to me.
So yes, there are some physical limitations on the distribution of food. But I think the concept of the two ideas and how patents affect them might be a lot closer than you think.
It is actually a very interesting analogy when you look at it that way. For food, you take a seed, care for it, and it turns into many seeds. For software you take an idea, care for it, and it turns into many applications.
It also works because, just like software, there are many patents on seeds. You cannot just plant any old seed in your field. Often you have to obtain a license to plant a seed. Just like you cannot work on any idea. You might have to obtain a license to "grow" your idea.
Actually, speaking as a farmer myself, most farmers do work for free. The prices food buyers are willing to pay the farmer are just enough to cover the expenses of producing the product, if that. Farming is truly a labour of love. Funnily enough, I turn to my programming job to make a living; which apparently I should also do for free according to your post.
The "shiny new layer" you are referring to is basically NeXTSTEP. Apple may have made a couple of minor interface tweaks to make it familiar to existing Apple customers, but if you wanna get technical, they didn't improve an old OS, they rebranded someone else's.
While property is technically an asset, as long as you need a place to live/work, it is a sunk cost. Unless you decide to live/work on the street in the future, you are never going to see that money again for the life you/your business.
Looking at the commercial property database in my locale, the average small business would be looking around the $400-500,000 range to purchase an office building suitable for a company of that size. $500,000 to a small business is the difference between making the proper acquisitions and becoming the next Google, or staying small forever.
For the homeowner, the money tied up in a home is the difference between making the right investments to build the next Google, or being stuck in a 9-5 job for the rest of life.
So, while I do not disagree that property ownership probably is cheaper in the long run, it seems to me that the opportunity to use that money to build real wealth is lost when purchasing a home/office. Maybe if you are someone like Google you are making so much money that you could not possibly spend it all. Buying property makes sense in that case. But most people and businesses are not anywhere close to being Google.
What they are basically saying is that Youtube does not have any development costs because they do not pay any third-party development firms to work on their software.
But it is not like bandwidth itself costs money. It is always the infrastructure that you are paying for. You can either outsource network building and maintenance to a third party, or you can do it yourself.
It is no different than Google having lawyers and accountants on staff, while smaller companies only hire those people when needed. It is more cost effective for the smaller businesses to only pay for what they use, but larger companies are not bound by those same limitations. I am sure that Youtube does not pay any lawyer firms for any legal issues that arise within their operation also.
Why not use a dual-sided scanner?
I too am in Canada. 5Mbps DSL for $39.95 per month with no caps.
A popular tax preparation program, installable on Windows systems, is written largely in Python. It is definitely designed for the Joe Sixpack market.
Actually, the page really does look like one those domain parking pages.
You mean like iPhone OS? Call the iPad a gimmick if you want, but it does bring with it a brand new concept on human-computer interaction. One that I feel will carry over into traditional keyboard/mouse computing in the future.