Cockeysville (and most of the rest of Baltimore County north of the Beltway) is a very yuppified and safe area. Lacking any real crimes to solve, the local constabulatory amuses themselves by pedantically enforcing traffic laws and severely overreacting to any minor infraction they may observe or be called in on. I've personally seen 8 to 10 cars respond to a simple shoplifting arrest.
He also makes a good point about closed source drivers. As much as it pains people here to hear it, I (as a user) don't really care how the driver was developed if it turns into a simple difference between having a laptop with something working or not working.
Exactly. I have no problem at all with binary-only drivers, on the conditions that the vendor doesn't charge extra for them and updates them as frequently as they update the Windows drivers. IMHO, working drivers are part of what I paid for when I bought the hardware.
If a hardware vendor officially supports Linux, they'll likely get my business over a competitor who doesn't, regardless of whether their drivers are GPL or not. If Firaxis ported CivIII to Linux, you wouldn't be whining that it wasn't open source, would you?
Were you *blind* when you bought that case? It's hideous.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Of course it's not as nice as my Silverstone Glacier, but it looks a damn site better than a standard beige box.
It's not the best looking of the small formfactor boxes, but it's one of the few that has 2 5.25 drive bays, which was a must-have feature for my friend. She thinks the system rocks, and it's her opinion that counts.
We CANT come up with a replacement that is as safe, effective and DEADLY to tanks as [the A-10].
Sure we CAN. We WON'T. Big difference. We have the technology to build a better A-10; what we lack is the political will to do it.
The A-10 is ugly, unsophisticated, cheap, and subsonic. Never mind that these are exactly the qualities you want in a close-air support aircraft, it isn't "sexy" enough for the Air Force brass (and the Congresscritters who write the checks). They want sleek, supersonic birds with ultra-high-tech glass cockpits and $80M price tags, regardless of how effective they're actually going to be over the battlefield.
Of course the brass is out of touch with reality. The pilots know better: more pilots apply to fly the A-10 than any other aircraft in the inventory except for the F-15.
The programs you cited never attained orbit. They explored other planets/moons, and thus had different (lesser) thurst requirements.
WTF are you smoking?
The Mercury program started with suborbital flights (John Glenn) and proceded to full orbital flights (Allan Sheppard)
The Gemini program was a stepping-stone for Apollo, designed to refine the technology and techniques (Orbital docking, etc). All of the Gemini missions were conducted in Earth orbit.
Apollo orbited the Earth before orbiting the Moon (which is itself orbiting the Earth).
FYI, it takes MORE energy to leave orbit than it does to get to orbit. An object in orbit is below escape velocity and is still captive in the gravity field it is orbiting. An interplanetary mission needs to EXCEED escape velocity and is not captive in it's parent gravity field.
Total comes to $497. If you didn't care about cosmetics, you could go even cheaper by using a generic case and a basic motherboard, or use the difference to upgrade to a PVR250 capture card and a larger hard drive.
If the techies can't put it in layman's terms, they don't understand the material well enough themselves
That's BS, to a certian extent. Sure, you can take a highly technical subject and present a SUMMARY of the general concept in layman's terms. However, the knowledge imparted this way does not give the layperson a sufficient understanding of the subject to make informed decisions about it, or for them to understand all the implications.
To make an analogy, I can easily explain driving to my 7-year-old in terms she can understand: "this pedal makes the car go faster, this pedal makes it stop, this wheel makes it turn" and so forth.
However, having heard this watered-down summary of how to drive does not enable her to operate a motor vehicle safely, nor or does it give her the knowledge to make informed decisions to questions like "is it safe to change lanes now, or should I let that truck pass me first?"
You could easily have a standard for water/liquid cooling of standard rackmount gear. Really all you need to specify is standard dimensions for the intake and outlet connectors and a flow rate / pressure range -- after that, the specifics of the internal plumbing are up to the vendor. The external cooling system provides the pressure, flow, cooling, and filtering according to spec.
Amen to that! It's always boggled my mind why every single electronic gizmo on my desk needs a wall wart running at a different voltage with it's own unique connector. It would make SO much sense to have a standardized connector which provides a common set of voltages.
If everyone in the industry can agree to make internal PC components (Hard drives, CD/DVD rom drives, etC) that use the standard ATX 4-pin molex connector, why the hell can't the industry agree on a standard for small external devices too?
Hell, even a single VENDOR can't make up it's mind what to use -- I've got 3 Linksys devices sitting on my desk (router, WAP, and switch) and they all use mutually incompatible power supplies. You'd think that they'd standardize on a single PS type unit to streamline inventory and overhead.
"Wow, your service sucks. We'll be buying from competitors in the future."
That only works if the competition doesn't suck as bad or worse. There are a small number of top-tier hardware vendors, and IME they all suck to more or less the same extent. The only difference is they suck in different ways at different times.
Switching vendors probably won't get you any better service -- it will just complicate your support problems, as now you have 2 different sets of machines to support instead of just one.
Reads to me like you have the right to join a well regulated militia.
I suggest you read Federalist 29, Concerning the Militia, if you have any doubt as to what the Founding Fathers meant by the words "well-regulated":
To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire
the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss.
It's crystal clear that the historical context of "Well regulated" means "trained and equipped".
Limiting campaign spending is limiting free speech, period
Bullshit. There are legitimate reasons to limit how campaign funds are spent which do not impact legitimate free speech.
Should a candidate be able to pay people to vote for him? Should a candidate be able to bribe a media outlet into not running his opponent's ads? Should a candidate be able to pay his opponent to dropping out of the race?
The reality is that large campaign contributions are de-facto legalized bribes. Do you honestly believe that somone who donates $100,000 or more to a politician (or to a political party) doesn't expect to get something back?
So what you're saying is that you believe you should be free to insult anyone you like (much like you just called me a violent idiot) and they should have no recourse
You are a violent neanderthal.
You are free to return the insult. That is an appropriate response. If you ask me to step outside, I'll tell you to grow up. Unlike you, I don't need to prove my masculinity -- I'm quite secure in it. My son is all the proof of my manhood I require. I don't want to fight and don't particuarly like to fight -- but don't think for a moment that this means that I don't know *how* to fight.
If you take a swing at me or lay hands on me, I *will* defend myself. I don't fight for fun or to prove a point -- I fight only in self-defense or in defense of someone I care about.
When I have to fight, my only objective is to end it as quickly as possible with as little risk to myself as possible. This means that I don't fight fair and I don't hold back -- if I have a weapon (and I usually do), I will use it, and I won't hesitate to use every dirty trick I know to disable my opponent.
Most firearms, handguns and so-called "assault weapons" are designed specifically to kill or wound people. They aren't for hunting, they are weapons designed for use against other people.
Yep. And your point is?
To put it bluntly, there are times when it necessary and justifiable to use deadly force against other people -- for instance, to stop them from harming you or someone you care about.
If we were living some fairy tale liberal utopia where everyone respected everyone else's rights, it might be a different story. Unfortunately, in the real world, there are violent sociopathic individuals who wouldn't think twice about killing or raping someone just for the thrill of it.
It's not even remotely plausible. MS-SQL is descended from Sybase SQL Server (Now Adaptive Server Enterprise). Since reneging on their contract with Sybase, MS has seriously re-engineered the codebase to optimize it for Windows. IMHO, MS-SQL is so tightly wired in to the Windows internals that it would be impossible to port it to any another OS.
The latest version of Sybase ASE (12.5.3) has back-ported a lot of the Transact-SQL extensions that Microsoft introduced, which makes it a good choice for anyone who doesn't want their data beholden to the beast of Redmond. Migrating a db from MS-SQL to Sybase isn't point-and-click, but it's pretty painless in most cases.
Many "formal design methods" have seen extensive use in the real world: Z, the B method, VDM, CSP, and SCR to name just a few. These are not "ivory tower". They work. They have delivered lower defect rates in the same or less time and cost as informal methods.
Lower, yes, but not zero. The initial analogy was comparing software development to bridge building. Bridge collapses are exceedingly rare, because the engineering is mature and the process is proven: if you follow the process, you have a near-100% chance of building a bridge that won't fall down, and doing it in a predictable amount of time and money.
The same cannot be said about software development. It is possible to deliver nearly flawless software for truly critical applications (EG: control systems for aircraft and nuclear power), but it's virtually impossible to accurately predict how long it's going to take to complete (other than saying "a very long time" and "a whole lot of money".
A faculty member would be crazy to trade a little sex for a career; most people in academia are not this dumb.
People are people. Smart people are just as prone to do foolhardy things as stupid ones. Maybe even moreso, because smarter people are more likely to think that they're smart enough not to get caught. If they're careful and discrete, they get often away with it. Sometimes they get caught, and this can result in a messy spectacle like the ones you describe.
Sex is an extremely powerful primal urge that's hard-wired in to our bodies. "Thinking with the little head" isn't just a cliche, it's a real phenomonon.
"nowadays"? You say that as though you remember a time when it was perfectly acceptable to publically suggest that a woman just go down on a prof if she wants better grades.
Oh come on. Don't act as if it never happens. Trading sex for grades is as old as the educational system itself. And talking about it is just as old. The only thing different is that instead of the pub or the locker room, we can talk about it on the intraweb.
Did you know that there are formal methods for software design
... that don't work...
You hit the nail right on the head.
Bridge building, as an engineering discipline, is at least 2300 years old -- there are surviving Roman bridges which were built ~300BCE. ENIAC, the first electronic computer, was built in 1946; so the discipline of software engineering is, at most, 59 years old.
Most "formal design methods" are ivory-tower theories that have little relationship to the real world, and, for the most part, have never been PROVEN correct. Like Economics, Software Engineering theories are, more often than not, thinly disguised political ideologies as opposed to hard science.
As it stands now, there isn't a development methodolgy where you can say "If I follow this process EXACTLY, I'm 100% guaranteed to get working software in a predictable amount of time". In my 16 years in the field, my observation has been that even the best formal methodologies work less than 50% of the time, even when followed to the letter.
Whenever defending gay marriage or simplified divorces, you must keep in mind that you are making a case against the high value placed on the traditional family
Your problem is that your are asking the wrong questions.
The questions we need to be askin are not "should we allow gay people to get married", or "is it a good idea", or "is it moral", or even "is it in the best interest of society/children/whoever".
The question is, simply, "is it CONSTITUTIONAL for a state to deny a marriage license to two people of the same gender".
Another important question we should be asking is, "Does a law restricting marriage to the Christian definition of that institution constitute an establishment of religion by the state".
I use MySQL as the backend for a message board I run from my home
And of course that experience translates directly into designing, implementing, and administering a mission-critical enterprise level OLTP system. This is typical MySQL attitude -- it works OK for my little toy project, so therefore it must be good enough for anything.
Message boards are write-once, read many. Your transaction mix is going to be something like 99% select and 1% insert, with negligible numbers of updates and deletes. You don't have to worry about concurrency, locking, or the myriad of other details that affect a real transaction processing system.
Maybe he spent a lot of time cleaning up a legacy (read: developers bailed long ago) database application that was consistantly hitting bugs that wouldn't have existed if the DB had been safeguarding the app layer from screwing up too bad. That kind of experience tends to lead to a fairly nontrivial amount of anger over bad databases (and, worse, refusal of app developers to use readily available good ones).
Got it in one. Sounds like you've been in the same boat.
I can't tell you how much of my life has been frittered away cleaning up messes caused by people who didn't know how to use a database properly (or how to use a proper database).
Because it lacks certian key RDBMS features and has badly broken implementations of others, MySQL teaches database developers bad habits -- they never bother to learn *WHY* you need those features, and more importantly *WHEN* you need to use them. As the old saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.
It's bad enough when a developer implements a bad db design in an RDBMS because he doesn't know any better. It's worse when the tool he's using FORCES him to implement a bad design.
It's faster than everything else because it doesn't have all the data integrity features that a RDBMS does
Because after all, who really cares about data integrity?
So what if the accounting system is off by $12,000,000? It's fast.
Who cares if the customers actually get the products they ordered? It's fast.
Who cares if we bill our customers for the right amount? It's fast.
However, I stick everything into the application layer, so MySQL lacking these features doesn't bother me a bit.
Yes, because it's so much more professional and a more efficient use of your time and employer's money to hack together a half-assed system rather than learning how to use a tested and proven one that someone else wrote.
Scheduled DB backups and logging in the application layer keeps me from needing any transaction or rollback features.
This statement just demonstrates the fact that you have no clue what transactions are for, or how and when to use them.
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If a hardware vendor officially supports Linux, they'll likely get my business over a competitor who doesn't, regardless of whether their drivers are GPL or not. If Firaxis ported CivIII to Linux, you wouldn't be whining that it wasn't open source, would you?
Of course it's not as nice as my Silverstone Glacier, but it looks a damn site better than a standard beige box.
It's not the best looking of the small formfactor boxes, but it's one of the few that has 2 5.25 drive bays, which was a must-have feature for my friend. She thinks the system rocks, and it's her opinion that counts.
The A-10 is ugly, unsophisticated, cheap, and subsonic. Never mind that these are exactly the qualities you want in a close-air support aircraft, it isn't "sexy" enough for the Air Force brass (and the Congresscritters who write the checks). They want sleek, supersonic birds with ultra-high-tech glass cockpits and $80M price tags, regardless of how effective they're actually going to be over the battlefield.
Of course the brass is out of touch with reality. The pilots know better: more pilots apply to fly the A-10 than any other aircraft in the inventory except for the F-15.
The Mercury program started with suborbital flights (John Glenn) and proceded to full orbital flights (Allan Sheppard)
The Gemini program was a stepping-stone for Apollo, designed to refine the technology and techniques (Orbital docking, etc). All of the Gemini missions were conducted in Earth orbit.
Apollo orbited the Earth before orbiting the Moon (which is itself orbiting the Earth).
FYI, it takes MORE energy to leave orbit than it does to get to orbit. An object in orbit is below escape velocity and is still captive in the gravity field it is orbiting. An interplanetary mission needs to EXCEED escape velocity and is not captive in it's parent gravity field.
- Asus T2-P Deluxe Barebones ($158)
- Celeron D 320 ($73)
- Western Digital WD80JD 80GB HDD ($61)
- Kingston 512M PC3200 RAM($46)
- NEC 16X Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW ($52)
- Hauppauge WinTV150 ($72)
- ASUS GE-Force MX4000 64M w/ SVideo Out ($35)
Total comes to $497. If you didn't care about cosmetics, you could go even cheaper by using a generic case and a basic motherboard, or use the difference to upgrade to a PVR250 capture card and a larger hard drive.To make an analogy, I can easily explain driving to my 7-year-old in terms she can understand: "this pedal makes the car go faster, this pedal makes it stop, this wheel makes it turn" and so forth.
However, having heard this watered-down summary of how to drive does not enable her to operate a motor vehicle safely, nor or does it give her the knowledge to make informed decisions to questions like "is it safe to change lanes now, or should I let that truck pass me first?"
If everyone in the industry can agree to make internal PC components (Hard drives, CD/DVD rom drives, etC) that use the standard ATX 4-pin molex connector, why the hell can't the industry agree on a standard for small external devices too?
Hell, even a single VENDOR can't make up it's mind what to use -- I've got 3 Linksys devices sitting on my desk (router, WAP, and switch) and they all use mutually incompatible power supplies. You'd think that they'd standardize on a single PS type unit to streamline inventory and overhead.
Switching vendors probably won't get you any better service -- it will just complicate your support problems, as now you have 2 different sets of machines to support instead of just one.
Should a candidate be able to pay people to vote for him? Should a candidate be able to bribe a media outlet into not running his opponent's ads? Should a candidate be able to pay his opponent to dropping out of the race?
The reality is that large campaign contributions are de-facto legalized bribes. Do you honestly believe that somone who donates $100,000 or more to a politician (or to a political party) doesn't expect to get something back?
You are free to return the insult. That is an appropriate response. If you ask me to step outside, I'll tell you to grow up. Unlike you, I don't need to prove my masculinity -- I'm quite secure in it. My son is all the proof of my manhood I require. I don't want to fight and don't particuarly like to fight -- but don't think for a moment that this means that I don't know *how* to fight.
If you take a swing at me or lay hands on me, I *will* defend myself. I don't fight for fun or to prove a point -- I fight only in self-defense or in defense of someone I care about.
When I have to fight, my only objective is to end it as quickly as possible with as little risk to myself as possible. This means that I don't fight fair and I don't hold back -- if I have a weapon (and I usually do), I will use it, and I won't hesitate to use every dirty trick I know to disable my opponent.
To put it bluntly, there are times when it necessary and justifiable to use deadly force against other people -- for instance, to stop them from harming you or someone you care about.
If we were living some fairy tale liberal utopia where everyone respected everyone else's rights, it might be a different story. Unfortunately, in the real world, there are violent sociopathic individuals who wouldn't think twice about killing or raping someone just for the thrill of it.
The latest version of Sybase ASE (12.5.3) has back-ported a lot of the Transact-SQL extensions that Microsoft introduced, which makes it a good choice for anyone who doesn't want their data beholden to the beast of Redmond. Migrating a db from MS-SQL to Sybase isn't point-and-click, but it's pretty painless in most cases.
The same cannot be said about software development. It is possible to deliver nearly flawless software for truly critical applications (EG: control systems for aircraft and nuclear power), but it's virtually impossible to accurately predict how long it's going to take to complete (other than saying "a very long time" and "a whole lot of money".
Sex is an extremely powerful primal urge that's hard-wired in to our bodies. "Thinking with the little head" isn't just a cliche, it's a real phenomonon.
Bridge building, as an engineering discipline, is at least 2300 years old -- there are surviving Roman bridges which were built ~300BCE. ENIAC, the first electronic computer, was built in 1946; so the discipline of software engineering is, at most, 59 years old.
Most "formal design methods" are ivory-tower theories that have little relationship to the real world, and, for the most part, have never been PROVEN correct. Like Economics, Software Engineering theories are, more often than not, thinly disguised political ideologies as opposed to hard science.
As it stands now, there isn't a development methodolgy where you can say "If I follow this process EXACTLY, I'm 100% guaranteed to get working software in a predictable amount of time". In my 16 years in the field, my observation has been that even the best formal methodologies work less than 50% of the time, even when followed to the letter.
The questions we need to be askin are not "should we allow gay people to get married", or "is it a good idea", or "is it moral", or even "is it in the best interest of society/children/whoever".
The question is, simply, "is it CONSTITUTIONAL for a state to deny a marriage license to two people of the same gender".
Another important question we should be asking is, "Does a law restricting marriage to the Christian definition of that institution constitute an establishment of religion by the state".
And no, that is not an ad hominim fallacy. You are an idiot because you're wrong. That's just pointing out an observable fact.
An example of an ad hominim fallacy would be: everything you say is wrong because you are an idiot.
See the difference? Probably not, because you're an idiot.
Message boards are write-once, read many. Your transaction mix is going to be something like 99% select and 1% insert, with negligible numbers of updates and deletes. You don't have to worry about concurrency, locking, or the myriad of other details that affect a real transaction processing system.
I can't tell you how much of my life has been frittered away cleaning up messes caused by people who didn't know how to use a database properly (or how to use a proper database).
Because it lacks certian key RDBMS features and has badly broken implementations of others, MySQL teaches database developers bad habits -- they never bother to learn *WHY* you need those features, and more importantly *WHEN* you need to use them. As the old saying goes, when your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.
It's bad enough when a developer implements a bad db design in an RDBMS because he doesn't know any better. It's worse when the tool he's using FORCES him to implement a bad design.
So what if the accounting system is off by $12,000,000? It's fast.
Who cares if the customers actually get the products they ordered? It's fast.
Who cares if we bill our customers for the right amount? It's fast.
Yes, because it's so much more professional and a more efficient use of your time and employer's money to hack together a half-assed system rather than learning how to use a tested and proven one that someone else wrote. This statement just demonstrates the fact that you have no clue what transactions are for, or how and when to use them.