Do yourself a favor and get a backpack that's DESINGED to carry a laptop.
I've had a Kensington Saddlebag for about 8 years now. It's awesome. The best part is that it doesn't look like a laptop bag, so it's less of an inviting target for miscreants, and makes a great briefcase even when you're not carrying your laptop. Kensington has a version that is more like a sport backpack, which might be better suited to your lifestyle. In any case, Kensington's product line is leaps and bounds better than Targus.
I'd never advise anyone to use Oracle unless they already have a substantial investment in it. Oracle is overpriced and a total bitch to administer. I usually try to convince people to use one of the Sybase databases. For the budget-concious, there's 11.0.3.3 for Linux, which is free of charge for any use. It's a little dated when compared to the newer releases, but it has all the necessary functionality and is totally rock-solid. There's no point in using a hacked-up toy when can get a real enterprise grade database for free.
If you don't mind spending a couple of hundred dollars and don't have a competent DBA on staff, I tell people to use Sybase SQL Anywhere. SQL Anywhere is what MySQL and Postgres wish they were -- ultra-portable, ultra-scalable, and simple to administer. It's not free, but it's still dramatically cheaper than Oracle, DB2, or MS-SQL.
If you had read the link in the grandparent post, you'd see that's not true -- The point was that not only does MySQL just lack features, many of the features that it DOES implement are done wrong.
Excuse me... I should have said "the approach you refered to". Feel better?;)
In the end, I think we're on the same page: it's basically impossible to use any code-based counting mechanism to quantify productivity or error rates in a meaningful way. Attempting to do so just leads programmers to game the system to manipulate the numbers in their favor.
transactions and stored procedures aren't necessary
I guess you think data corruption and SQL injection attacks are above your concern.
I for one will be laughing my ass off when that day arrives
I know I'm feeding a troll... but...
More likely, I will be the one laughing (all the way to the bank) when I get the contract to fix the half-assed, fucked-up mess that some arrogant snot-nosed punk who thought he knew everything left behind after he got his ass fired.
Please, go ahead and keep using MySQL. Keep refusing to learn *WHY* people who have been developing databases since before you were potty-trained insist that transactions and stored procedures are essential. The arrogance and ignorance of people like you is creating business opportunities for people like me.
Your approach is a good start, but what about the case of something like ++i; f(i); versus f(++i)? It would seem to me that if you're going to count anything, you should be counting the number of actual commands; the line f(++i); has two commands -- logically, it should therefore carry twice the weight of f(i).
The fact that you used big O notation and referenced a bubble sort tells me you're still in school.
Considering that I've been out of school and working as a software engineer for over 15 years, I'd say you have much to learn. As long as we're in ad-hominim mode, your comment leads me to believe that you are suffering from some combination of arrogance, ignorance, inexperience, and unprofessionalism; but that's besides the point.
I find mathmatical notation to be clearer and more succinct than the longhand equivilent. "O(n)" is, IMHO, a superior way of saying "scales linearly". All of the really good engineers I've worked with over the years have held the same opinion.
As to not having used MySQL in a long time, that's true. I don't use MySQL because I see no purpose for it. If I need a fast non-relational, non-transactional data store I'll use an ISAM solution. If I need a real relational database I'll use Sybase or Oracle (or MS-SQL if I have no choice, or even PostgreSQL if I have to make an open-source zealot happy). The only time I'd use MySQL was if I needed a semi-relational database with half-assed transactions, no stored procedures or triggers, broken referential integrity, a plethora of non-standard behaviors, and rampant data integrity issues.
If MySQL had stuck to it's original vision of being a SQL frontend to an ISAM database, it might actually be worthwhile. Instead it's become a bastard hybrid that's too bloated to be a good ISAM db and too broken to be a good relational db. I'll admit that there are jobs that MySQL can do well -- however, my professional opinion is that there are better tools for that class of tasks.
Most theoretical work on sorting has assumed randomly-sorted input data
Bullshit. Every textbook comparison of sort algorithm I've ever seen assumes three cases: nearly-sorted data, random data, and inverse-sorted data. Even if bubblesort were the fastest for nearly-sorted data (Working from memory, I'm pretty sure it would run in O(n) as it's best case), it's still O(n^2) for the other two cases. Quicksort, heapsort, and insertion sort all scale differently; but even assuming their best-case performance is worse than bubblesort's best-case, their worst-case performance is FAR better - typically O(n log(n)) or thereabouts. IIRC, The AWK Programming Language has some excellent sample code which graphs the performance of the major sorting algorithms for different kinds of input.
I seem to recall that insertion sort is also O(n) on nearly-sorted input, so it would be a much safer choice than bubblesort for the situation you describe. You have to consider best- and worse- case scenerios as well as the nominal path.
IMHO, bubble sort has no place outside of an instructional setting.
Access has foreign keys, but unless they added it in the latest version, it does not support real transactions. Add to that the fact that it's locking model is fundamentally broken, you have something which is just powerful enough to let you do things with it that you shouldn't. MySQL suffers from the exact same problem.
I shouldn't complain -- I've made a lot of money over the years cleaning up the messes left by inexperienced people who thought Access or MySQL were real databases.
Everyone does not know this, and everyone does not understand it, or I wouldn't have spent a substantial percentage of my carreer cleaning up other people's messes.
That's like asking how a little red wagon compares to a Formula 1 racecar -- there is simply no comparison. The list of missing features in MySQL could fill a book. MySQL is not a true relational database, so comparing it to Oracle, Sybase, DB2, or MS-SQL is like comparing apples and very small rocks. They're not the same thing at all.
It would be more accurate to compare MySQL to dbaseIII, Berkely DB, or Microsoft Access. Against those products, MySQL compares favorably. MySQL performs well for tasks in a narrowly-constrained domain of problems, and is totally incapable of dealing with anything else.
A flawless implementation of a crap algorithm is still crap. I don't care if your bubble-sort routine has no memory leaks or buffer overruns; it still scales O(N^2). Likewise, a so-called "database" which does not implement key features like transactions and stored procedures is fundamentally flawed even if there are zero coding errors.
MySQL may be well-written, but it's still a piece of crap by the standards of any professional DBA.
My point is that from a strict constructionist perspective, there is no Constitutional authority for Congress to pass ANY laws regulating speech. That does not mean that it isn't a good idea to regulate specific types of harmful speech, or that the Founding Fathers were omnicient. It simply means that to be Constitutional, there has to be an amendment modifying the First to define what specific types of speech Congress may make laws to abridge. The fact that they made provision for the Constitution to be further amended is their own admission that they didn't know everything.
Secondly, in the case of libel and slander, there is a significant difference between a law criminalizing slanderous speech, and a law defining the parameters whereby someone may bring a civil suit for damages caused by slanderous speech. Freedom of Speech is not abridged by the latter type of law because there's no prior restraint -- you are free to slander someone to your heart's content, just as they are free to sue the pants off of you for any damage you may have caused them. Having the freedom to do something does not absolve you of the concequences of your actions -- regardless of those actions were verbal or physical.
can you present a cogent argument as to why the Supreme Court was wrong all those times?
The Supreme Court was wrong all those times because the First Amendment, unlike many of the others, has no exemptions, exceptions, or qualifications as to it's scope or applicability - it is a complete and total prohibition against the regulation of speech:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Compare this to the language of the Fifth Amendment:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Reading the Bill of Rights, it seems clear that when the Framers of the Constitution envisioned cases where a right was not protected, they explicitly and narrowly defined the scope of the exception or limitation. Amendments 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 all have explicit exceptions, exclusions, or limitations; 1, 2, 8, 9, and 10 do not.
Since all were written at the same time and by the same group of people, it seems reasonable to conclude that the use of language is consistant across the entire Bill of Rights. Since the authors of the Bill of Rights saw fit to create explicit exceptions to half of the Amendments, the reasonable conclusion is that the reason the other half do not have exceptions is because none were intended. Being that the First Amendment has no qualifications, we have to conclude that the Framers intent was that the protections granted by First Amendment were to be absoloute and without exception.
"Loser Pays" is a *horrible* idea for tort reform. It puts the little guy at an even worse disadvantage. It gives the big guy an even bigger stick with which to threaten the little guy.
Instead of getting sued for $2000 for sharing MP3s, imagine being liable for $2000 in damages plus $20000 in legal fees, over and above what you have to pay your lawyer. With loser pays, there's no incentive for a big corporation NOT to sue -- they already have a platoon of lawyers on retainer, if they're not busy suing someone the company's not getting their money's worth. For a big corp, legal fees are already a sunk cost -- loser pays just gives them more of an incentive to sue so that they can recover what they've already spent on retainers. An individual's legal costs are going to be peanuts compared to what they already spend.
The Romans didn't use cavalry extensively because, given the technology available to them, it not an effective striking force. Roman cavalry was primarly scouts and skirmishers. The Romans had not discovered the stirrip, which was the esential bit of technology necessary to allow a man to fight effectively from horseback.
Chariots were useful in the shock-charge role normally associated with cavalry, however, they were very limited by terrain, far more so than mounted cavalry.
While I have not read Keegan, I have studied the Battle of Agincourt. IIRC, The French knights charged across an open, muddy field, while the English longbowmen were on higher, dryer ground in a stand of trees. The deep mud (so deep that many people drowned in it) slowed down the cavalry charge significantly, allowing the English significantly more time to shoot at them. Furthermore, charging the woods broke up the cavalry line and hampered their mobility. The French lost at Agincourt primarly due to stupidity and arrogance. It was not that cavalry was ineffective against infantry, it was that the specific combination of conditions at Agincourt completely negated the knights' natural advantages.
Re:You know... things just don't amaze me.
on
Message in a Battle
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· Score: 1
The problem with bad effects is that they interfere with your enjoyment of the movie. The movie-watching experience is all about suspension of disbelief. A blatantly obvious mistake or bad effect jars you out of that state of mind momentarily, interrupting your enjoyment of the film. There's a difference between sitting down with and intentionally looking for flaws, and having horrible flaws thrown in your face while you are *trying* to enjoy the movie.
IMHO, Matrix 2 and 3 suffer from the latter problem -- the effects are so jarringly unreal that it's difficult to "stay in the zone" and enjoy the movie. If there was good acting or a good story to back up the effects, it wouldn't be so bad, but the Maxtrices are heavy on the sizzle and light on the steak -- as far as I can tell, the story in the Matrix exists only to segeue between the effects sequences. I didn't find the effects in the Sci-Fi channel version of "Dune" to be nearly as invasive: even though the effects were horrible, I didn't notice them so much because it was the *story*, not the *effects* that held my attention.
I should have qualified my comments to US property law. I can't speak as to the law elsewhere, as I don't own property outside the US. I would have expected the law to be similar under any legal system which is derived from English Common Law, but, assuming you are remembering your high school lessons correctly, that does not appear to be the case.
In any case, my initial observation holds: your property rights are bounded by the deed, both by what it explicitly grants and excludes, and what is implicitly granted and excluded by the applicable laws of the surrounding jurisdiction.
What country are you living in? Wiretapping has been legal for almost as long as there have been phones (at least in the US). It's only for the past 40 or so years that telephone conversations have had any Constitutional protection.
The first Supreme Court ruling on wiretapping, Olmstead vs. US, was issued in 1928. The Olmstead ruling held that warrantless wiretapping was Constitutional, and that evidence gained thereby was admissable. The first limits on wiretapping came in 1934 when the Federal Communications act was passed, which prohibited private parties from tapping phone conversations unless one or more of the parties involved consented. While the two Nardonne v. US rulings (1937 and 1939) further limited the admissibility of evidence obtained via wiretap, the Olmstead ruling remained largely in effect until it was overturned by Katz v. US in 1967.
they can look at your home using an Infra Red Camera and thereby penetrate your property.
Actually, in the US the Supreme Court says that the government can not use sense-enhancing technology (such as infrared cameras) to look into your home without a search warrant. The case is Kyllo vs. US. In the majority ruling, Justice Scalia wrote:
We think that obtaining by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of the home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical "intrusion into a constitutionally protected area" constitutes a search -- at least where (as here) the technology in question is not in general public use.
By the Kyllo test, tracking via cell phone emissions MIGHT already be Constitutional, since (as the article states) the technology is in public use. However, since this feature is (currently) in LIMITED use, it's still somewhat of a grey area. It would probably take another Supreme Court ruling to establish exactly what percentage of the population has to use something before it's use is considered "general". Unless something is done to shut this service down NOW, before it gains widespread use, it will inevitably cross the line into "general" usage, further eroding the protection of your rights offered by the 4th Amendment.
It's probably already too late. If you don't want Big Brother (or your parents, employer, or a deranged stalker) tracking your whereabouts 24/7, turn your damn cell phone off when you aren't making a call or expecting a call.
Funny, the local Cadillac dealership has no problem working on my 12 year old Eldorado. Hell, it's not uncommon to see 20 and 25 year old Caddies driven in for maintenance.
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I've had a Kensington Saddlebag for about 8 years now. It's awesome. The best part is that it doesn't look like a laptop bag, so it's less of an inviting target for miscreants, and makes a great briefcase even when you're not carrying your laptop. Kensington has a version that is more like a sport backpack, which might be better suited to your lifestyle. In any case, Kensington's product line is leaps and bounds better than Targus.
If you don't mind spending a couple of hundred dollars and don't have a competent DBA on staff, I tell people to use Sybase SQL Anywhere. SQL Anywhere is what MySQL and Postgres wish they were -- ultra-portable, ultra-scalable, and simple to administer. It's not free, but it's still dramatically cheaper than Oracle, DB2, or MS-SQL.
If you had read the link in the grandparent post, you'd see that's not true -- The point was that not only does MySQL just lack features, many of the features that it DOES implement are done wrong.
In the end, I think we're on the same page: it's basically impossible to use any code-based counting mechanism to quantify productivity or error rates in a meaningful way. Attempting to do so just leads programmers to game the system to manipulate the numbers in their favor.
More likely, I will be the one laughing (all the way to the bank) when I get the contract to fix the half-assed, fucked-up mess that some arrogant snot-nosed punk who thought he knew everything left behind after he got his ass fired.
Please, go ahead and keep using MySQL. Keep refusing to learn *WHY* people who have been developing databases since before you were potty-trained insist that transactions and stored procedures are essential. The arrogance and ignorance of people like you is creating business opportunities for people like me.
Your approach is a good start, but what about the case of something like ++i; f(i); versus f(++i)? It would seem to me that if you're going to count anything, you should be counting the number of actual commands; the line f(++i); has two commands -- logically, it should therefore carry twice the weight of f(i).
The phrase "prior art" springs to mind.
I find mathmatical notation to be clearer and more succinct than the longhand equivilent. "O(n)" is, IMHO, a superior way of saying "scales linearly". All of the really good engineers I've worked with over the years have held the same opinion.
As to not having used MySQL in a long time, that's true. I don't use MySQL because I see no purpose for it. If I need a fast non-relational, non-transactional data store I'll use an ISAM solution. If I need a real relational database I'll use Sybase or Oracle (or MS-SQL if I have no choice, or even PostgreSQL if I have to make an open-source zealot happy). The only time I'd use MySQL was if I needed a semi-relational database with half-assed transactions, no stored procedures or triggers, broken referential integrity, a plethora of non-standard behaviors, and rampant data integrity issues.
If MySQL had stuck to it's original vision of being a SQL frontend to an ISAM database, it might actually be worthwhile. Instead it's become a bastard hybrid that's too bloated to be a good ISAM db and too broken to be a good relational db. I'll admit that there are jobs that MySQL can do well -- however, my professional opinion is that there are better tools for that class of tasks.
I seem to recall that insertion sort is also O(n) on nearly-sorted input, so it would be a much safer choice than bubblesort for the situation you describe. You have to consider best- and worse- case scenerios as well as the nominal path. IMHO, bubble sort has no place outside of an instructional setting.
Great link. I'll have to bookmark it to send to clueless gits who think MySQL is worth using.
I shouldn't complain -- I've made a lot of money over the years cleaning up the messes left by inexperienced people who thought Access or MySQL were real databases.
Everyone does not know this, and everyone does not understand it, or I wouldn't have spent a substantial percentage of my carreer cleaning up other people's messes.
It would be more accurate to compare MySQL to dbaseIII, Berkely DB, or Microsoft Access. Against those products, MySQL compares favorably. MySQL performs well for tasks in a narrowly-constrained domain of problems, and is totally incapable of dealing with anything else.
A flawless implementation of a crap algorithm is still crap. I don't care if your bubble-sort routine has no memory leaks or buffer overruns; it still scales O(N^2). Likewise, a so-called "database" which does not implement key features like transactions and stored procedures is fundamentally flawed even if there are zero coding errors.
MySQL may be well-written, but it's still a piece of crap by the standards of any professional DBA.
Secondly, in the case of libel and slander, there is a significant difference between a law criminalizing slanderous speech, and a law defining the parameters whereby someone may bring a civil suit for damages caused by slanderous speech. Freedom of Speech is not abridged by the latter type of law because there's no prior restraint -- you are free to slander someone to your heart's content, just as they are free to sue the pants off of you for any damage you may have caused them. Having the freedom to do something does not absolve you of the concequences of your actions -- regardless of those actions were verbal or physical.
Already been done. It's called "Budweiser".
Since all were written at the same time and by the same group of people, it seems reasonable to conclude that the use of language is consistant across the entire Bill of Rights. Since the authors of the Bill of Rights saw fit to create explicit exceptions to half of the Amendments, the reasonable conclusion is that the reason the other half do not have exceptions is because none were intended. Being that the First Amendment has no qualifications, we have to conclude that the Framers intent was that the protections granted by First Amendment were to be absoloute and without exception.
Instead of getting sued for $2000 for sharing MP3s, imagine being liable for $2000 in damages plus $20000 in legal fees, over and above what you have to pay your lawyer. With loser pays, there's no incentive for a big corporation NOT to sue -- they already have a platoon of lawyers on retainer, if they're not busy suing someone the company's not getting their money's worth. For a big corp, legal fees are already a sunk cost -- loser pays just gives them more of an incentive to sue so that they can recover what they've already spent on retainers. An individual's legal costs are going to be peanuts compared to what they already spend.
Chariots were useful in the shock-charge role normally associated with cavalry, however, they were very limited by terrain, far more so than mounted cavalry.
While I have not read Keegan, I have studied the Battle of Agincourt. IIRC, The French knights charged across an open, muddy field, while the English longbowmen were on higher, dryer ground in a stand of trees. The deep mud (so deep that many people drowned in it) slowed down the cavalry charge significantly, allowing the English significantly more time to shoot at them. Furthermore, charging the woods broke up the cavalry line and hampered their mobility. The French lost at Agincourt primarly due to stupidity and arrogance. It was not that cavalry was ineffective against infantry, it was that the specific combination of conditions at Agincourt completely negated the knights' natural advantages.
IMHO, Matrix 2 and 3 suffer from the latter problem -- the effects are so jarringly unreal that it's difficult to "stay in the zone" and enjoy the movie. If there was good acting or a good story to back up the effects, it wouldn't be so bad, but the Maxtrices are heavy on the sizzle and light on the steak -- as far as I can tell, the story in the Matrix exists only to segeue between the effects sequences. I didn't find the effects in the Sci-Fi channel version of "Dune" to be nearly as invasive: even though the effects were horrible, I didn't notice them so much because it was the *story*, not the *effects* that held my attention.
In any case, my initial observation holds: your property rights are bounded by the deed, both by what it explicitly grants and excludes, and what is implicitly granted and excluded by the applicable laws of the surrounding jurisdiction.
The first Supreme Court ruling on wiretapping, Olmstead vs. US, was issued in 1928. The Olmstead ruling held that warrantless wiretapping was Constitutional, and that evidence gained thereby was admissable. The first limits on wiretapping came in 1934 when the Federal Communications act was passed, which prohibited private parties from tapping phone conversations unless one or more of the parties involved consented. While the two Nardonne v. US rulings (1937 and 1939) further limited the admissibility of evidence obtained via wiretap, the Olmstead ruling remained largely in effect until it was overturned by Katz v. US in 1967.
It's probably already too late. If you don't want Big Brother (or your parents, employer, or a deranged stalker) tracking your whereabouts 24/7, turn your damn cell phone off when you aren't making a call or expecting a call.
Funny, the local Cadillac dealership has no problem working on my 12 year old Eldorado. Hell, it's not uncommon to see 20 and 25 year old Caddies driven in for maintenance.