It was Franklin and you missed out a couple of words, 'essential' and 'temporary'. It's a warning against giving up an 'essential liberty' in exchange for some 'temporary safety'. You have to make a judgement call on if the specific liberty is essential and if the safety is temporary. You also have to realise that many liberties are or rely on safeties and that some liberties are mutally exclusive. Your liberty to congregate and petition senate for resolution of grievences conflicts with senate's liberty to not have to put up with whingers bothering them all the time with trivial stuff. You and your representative may have different opinions on which of those is more essential.
Wasn't US society originally refered to as "The Great Experiment"? Essentially an experiment in engineering a society.
Has anyone thought to take a look at the results and decide if the experiement was a success or a failure?
Stephen
Re:Database independence
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Looks interesting. It doesn't appear to be 100% accurate though. There are a number of features (e.g. E051-08, E021-06 and E021-04) that it says that Oracle 9 does not have but I know it does, or at least it has something matching the description given (maybe I'm misunderstanding something).
Stephen
Re:Database independence
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Some do, some don't. It's now possible to write 100% ANSI compliant systems in Oracle and MS-SQL amongst others (those are the two I know of for sure, I also know there are others). Obviously you can choose to use non-ANSI compliant code if you so wish. Sometimes there are good reasons to do so, using supplied packages to perform tasks that would otherwise have to be coded is one. As noted earlier, writing your code to fit a particular RDBMS will often result in faster code. It may also give you a faster time to market (don't have to reinvent existing code).
Stephen
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Strange that you should mention PHPBB, the second person to do so. Last year one of my collegues and myself played a big part in porting PHPBB from MySQL to Oracle (building on some earlier work). The major problems didn't come from the SQL (although there were problems there) but rather from the use of non-ANSI datatypes which MySQL used and PHP supports.
We were porting it mostly because, like many enterprise level users, we already had a lot of Oracle inhouse so the marginal license and support cost was virtually nil and we already had the skills to support Oracle (so no retraining costs). The cost of not porting it and so having to run MySQL would have been prohibitive (support, training &c).
Japan also used biological weapons against China prior to and during WWII. Additionally they used Chinese civilians to test new weaons before deploying them in the field. Their principle delivery systems were bombs and artillary shells.
Last I heard it wasn't so much that every person would have an IP address so much as everything you wear, carry or own would have one. Supposedly the idea is that your socks will be able to email your washing machine to get the microwave to remind you to wash them whilst the fridge will IM your PVR with a list of what's in it so it can identify and record cookery shows that use those ingredients, prioritised by how close to the use by date each ingredient is. Meanwhile the coffee maker will be contacting the local stores to get you the best prices for Kopi Luwak then putting a reminder in your GPS enabled PDA so that when you go near the store you get a message telling you to pop in and get some (and whilst you're in there pick up some milk, eggs and your mom's magazine reservations).
EMF from a lot of sources obeys the least squares rule for intensity
I think you might have meant the 'inverse squares rule' (the intensity of an electromagnetic field varies with inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source).
Actually the first thing that came to mind when I saw that was a reminder of a TV science show I saw a while back. Apparently if you have a part of your house where you have very poor cellphone signal a good way to improve it is to stick a length of tinfoil to the wall about level with the height you typically have the phone (i.e. head height for most people). To get the best results try to put it on the wall opposite where the nearest mast is (i.e. if the nearest mast is east of you put it on the western wall) and try to stand very close to the foil. For various reasons I didn't understand when we did them in Electronics and still don't fully understand this improves the signal strength.
Sure, but they get paid a lot more for that one master than the 10.99ukp, or whatever, the CD sells for in the shops. The scenario the grandparent is talking about is that the indie producer is selling copies for whatever retail price, equivalent of the 10.99ukp above. The big distributer then buys a copy and rips it onto their web/bittorrent/whatever site and offers it for free. The producer only gets what they would have gotten from an 'end user'.
I do know some basic plumbing. Thing is, as I said before, this is a rented house. I would be in breach of my tennancy if I carried out any repairs and the landlord pays for any repairs.
Interestingly, last weeks episode of Dr Who on the BBC (shown at 7pm on Saturday, a kids TV slot) had a higher on screen body count than "Terminator" (rated 15, no under 15 year olds allowed, in this country).
Yeah I have seen how much plumbers charge. A few years ago I had a broken pipe (well, technically the tap connecting two pieces of pipe had cracked) and had to call one out at about 17:30. The bill for coming out and capping off the pipe (probably an hour and a half including travel) was more than I earned that day, actually it was closer to what I made in 2 days (and I'm paid well above average for the UK, but below average for my job). Fortunately I am in a private rented house so the landlord had to foot the bill.
Depends on the country/government. Here in the UK the 'Government' (that is the elected parliament) can be sued, the Crown (i.e. the Queen/King), however, cannot. As the Crown is the ultimate authority (has a, virtually never used, right of veto) in theory it is the crown which is the Government and the elected members are just advisors. If the entire 'Government' were ever impeached or deposed then it would be the Crown who would directly rule the country until another 'Government' could be chosen. Indeed, a revolution that opposed only Parliament but supported the Crown would not be inherantly illegal (although it's activities may be illegal).
In practice the Crown virtually never fails to accede to any request from the 'Government' or to sign into law any act. This is part of the "Gentleman's Agreement" between the Crown and Parliament that has been around since the accession of Charles the Second (essentially "You don't disagree with us on anything important and we won't chop your head off.").
Technically the Crown can intercede in any legal action in the country and stop the case (causing it to be dropped), set aside the sentance or issue a summary judgement including sentance. Again, this very rarely happens. The Crown is, because of this power, our final court of appeal, hence when we still had the death penalty the family of the condemned would often write to the Queen requesting clemancy. It has been useful in the past as there are the odd occasion where the 'Government' needs to do something that is right but technically illegal and making it legal would make other things that are wrong legal, the Crown can issue an edict for that specific case without a change to law or a binding precedent.
Wierd things is on the news this morning they had an item about how the Aussie government is so worried about the low level of skilled/semi-skilled workers they they're offering easy immigration and assisted passage to immigrants from the UK (probably other places as well). Apparently they need plumbers desparately and are very short on hair dressers. In the item they interviewed a guy who owns a car crash repair business in Wollongong, he said that he's so behind due to a shortage of staff that pretty much anyone who walks through the door will be given a job.
From that I guess that either there aren't that many unemployed, the unemployed are in different parts of the country than the jobs (although then wouldn't the government just offer them the money to move?) or the unemployed don't want to work in or train for the jobs that are available.
Emphasis on the these days, it's not that long ago we were paying more in pounds than those in the US paid in $. Whether hardware is cheaper here or in the US depends a lot on what you're buying, non-commodity stuff still tends to cost more here. Non-Intel architecture stuff is especially prone to this.
Actually, I didn't make any statements as to you being right or wrong. I was commenting on another issue separate from your assertion (which I feel, based on my own experiences (it's pretty much the same arguement I was hearing in 1994 about why M$-Word would never beat WordPerfect), is incorrect but that's a different matter).
I now believe, based on your further responses, that you're either very paranoid or have poor comprehension of the English language as used by native speakers.
So who's to blame when I write a document in Word 2000 (without using any particularly complex formatting; just bold, italic, a few levels of header and a couple of levels of bulleted list) then email it to other people elsewhere in the organisation and some of them either can't open it or they can but the layout is screwed up because they're using Word 97 (there's 24,000 desktops over 800 sites within an 8 mile radius of the central core in the organisation I work for, IT support have been rolling out Office 2000 from about 3 years now and haven't quite hit every site yet)? That's what my post [re-read it!!] was talking about.
We could blame the Management in IT support for not being able to keep the office suite in step accross 24,000 desktops all within an 8 mile radius. Or we could blame them for not thinking about software in the first place and so allowing everyone to have an individual installation rather than running off the server and having a system for automatic/scripted updates. Or we could blame Microsoft for changing their document format and breaking backwards compatibility, whilst claiming to be maintaining backwards compatibility.
Incidentally, that's a real life example situation that has happened to myself, or others in the section I work in, over the last couple of years. If we use StarOffice/OpenOffice.org to write the document and save as.DOC (Word 2000/97) format then everyone can open it fine.
Heck, yeah! I really miss WordPerfect (the real one before it all got messed up around version 6). I wonder if it would be possible to get it ported to some contemporary OSes and given filters to load/save OO.o and M$-Word files? That would be cool. I started using WP about 13 years ago (WP v5.0 IIRC but I moved to 5.2 for Windows 3.1 when that came out) and thought it was frickin' brilliant. It did what I wanted when, where and how I wanted. The rare occaisions where I did run into problems (usually where I'd been cutting and pasting chunks of text about) a quick switch into Reveal Codes allowed me to soon sort it. I started using Word in 1996 and thought it sucked, but I was stuck with it.
Many documents produced in Word 97 will appear crap in Word 98 (Mac), Word 2000 or Word XP. Some documents produced in Word 2000 won't even open in Word 97, despite them officialy using the same file format.
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It was Franklin and you missed out a couple of words, 'essential' and 'temporary'. It's a warning against giving up an 'essential liberty' in exchange for some 'temporary safety'. You have to make a judgement call on if the specific liberty is essential and if the safety is temporary. You also have to realise that many liberties are or rely on safeties and that some liberties are mutally exclusive. Your liberty to congregate and petition senate for resolution of grievences conflicts with senate's liberty to not have to put up with whingers bothering them all the time with trivial stuff. You and your representative may have different opinions on which of those is more essential.
Stephen
Wasn't US society originally refered to as "The Great Experiment"? Essentially an experiment in engineering a society.
Has anyone thought to take a look at the results and decide if the experiement was a success or a failure?
Stephen
Looks interesting. It doesn't appear to be 100% accurate though. There are a number of features (e.g. E051-08, E021-06 and E021-04) that it says that Oracle 9 does not have but I know it does, or at least it has something matching the description given (maybe I'm misunderstanding something).
Stephen
Some do, some don't. It's now possible to write 100% ANSI compliant systems in Oracle and MS-SQL amongst others (those are the two I know of for sure, I also know there are others). Obviously you can choose to use non-ANSI compliant code if you so wish. Sometimes there are good reasons to do so, using supplied packages to perform tasks that would otherwise have to be coded is one. As noted earlier, writing your code to fit a particular RDBMS will often result in faster code. It may also give you a faster time to market (don't have to reinvent existing code).
Stephen
Strange that you should mention PHPBB, the second person to do so. Last year one of my collegues and myself played a big part in porting PHPBB from MySQL to Oracle (building on some earlier work). The major problems didn't come from the SQL (although there were problems there) but rather from the use of non-ANSI datatypes which MySQL used and PHP supports.
We were porting it mostly because, like many enterprise level users, we already had a lot of Oracle inhouse so the marginal license and support cost was virtually nil and we already had the skills to support Oracle (so no retraining costs). The cost of not porting it and so having to run MySQL would have been prohibitive (support, training &c).
Stephen
Japan also used biological weapons against China prior to and during WWII. Additionally they used Chinese civilians to test new weaons before deploying them in the field. Their principle delivery systems were bombs and artillary shells.
Stephen
I wrote a blog entry about that a few weeks ago.
Stephen
Last I heard it wasn't so much that every person would have an IP address so much as everything you wear, carry or own would have one. Supposedly the idea is that your socks will be able to email your washing machine to get the microwave to remind you to wash them whilst the fridge will IM your PVR with a list of what's in it so it can identify and record cookery shows that use those ingredients, prioritised by how close to the use by date each ingredient is. Meanwhile the coffee maker will be contacting the local stores to get you the best prices for Kopi Luwak then putting a reminder in your GPS enabled PDA so that when you go near the store you get a message telling you to pop in and get some (and whilst you're in there pick up some milk, eggs and your mom's magazine reservations).
Stephen
I think you might have meant the 'inverse squares rule' (the intensity of an electromagnetic field varies with inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source).
Stephen
Actually the first thing that came to mind when I saw that was a reminder of a TV science show I saw a while back. Apparently if you have a part of your house where you have very poor cellphone signal a good way to improve it is to stick a length of tinfoil to the wall about level with the height you typically have the phone (i.e. head height for most people). To get the best results try to put it on the wall opposite where the nearest mast is (i.e. if the nearest mast is east of you put it on the western wall) and try to stand very close to the foil. For various reasons I didn't understand when we did them in Electronics and still don't fully understand this improves the signal strength.
Stephen
This century, of course, being only around 5 years, 4 months and 18 days old.
Stephen
Right no a quasi-theocracy seems closer to the truth from what I've been hearing.
Stephen
Sure, but they get paid a lot more for that one master than the 10.99ukp, or whatever, the CD sells for in the shops. The scenario the grandparent is talking about is that the indie producer is selling copies for whatever retail price, equivalent of the 10.99ukp above. The big distributer then buys a copy and rips it onto their web/bittorrent/whatever site and offers it for free. The producer only gets what they would have gotten from an 'end user'.
Stephen
I do know some basic plumbing. Thing is, as I said before, this is a rented house. I would be in breach of my tennancy if I carried out any repairs and the landlord pays for any repairs.
Stephen
For fixing the Exchange server, would I have to provide my own chainsaw? Exchange is a brilliant idea, very poorly executed.
Stephen
How about Oracle DBAs with good UNIX admin, networking and project management skills?
Stephen
Interestingly, last weeks episode of Dr Who on the BBC (shown at 7pm on Saturday, a kids TV slot) had a higher on screen body count than "Terminator" (rated 15, no under 15 year olds allowed, in this country).
Stephen
Yeah I have seen how much plumbers charge. A few years ago I had a broken pipe (well, technically the tap connecting two pieces of pipe had cracked) and had to call one out at about 17:30. The bill for coming out and capping off the pipe (probably an hour and a half including travel) was more than I earned that day, actually it was closer to what I made in 2 days (and I'm paid well above average for the UK, but below average for my job). Fortunately I am in a private rented house so the landlord had to foot the bill.
Stephen
Depends on the country/government. Here in the UK the 'Government' (that is the elected parliament) can be sued, the Crown (i.e. the Queen/King), however, cannot. As the Crown is the ultimate authority (has a, virtually never used, right of veto) in theory it is the crown which is the Government and the elected members are just advisors. If the entire 'Government' were ever impeached or deposed then it would be the Crown who would directly rule the country until another 'Government' could be chosen. Indeed, a revolution that opposed only Parliament but supported the Crown would not be inherantly illegal (although it's activities may be illegal).
In practice the Crown virtually never fails to accede to any request from the 'Government' or to sign into law any act. This is part of the "Gentleman's Agreement" between the Crown and Parliament that has been around since the accession of Charles the Second (essentially "You don't disagree with us on anything important and we won't chop your head off.").
Technically the Crown can intercede in any legal action in the country and stop the case (causing it to be dropped), set aside the sentance or issue a summary judgement including sentance. Again, this very rarely happens. The Crown is, because of this power, our final court of appeal, hence when we still had the death penalty the family of the condemned would often write to the Queen requesting clemancy. It has been useful in the past as there are the odd occasion where the 'Government' needs to do something that is right but technically illegal and making it legal would make other things that are wrong legal, the Crown can issue an edict for that specific case without a change to law or a binding precedent.
Stephen
Wierd things is on the news this morning they had an item about how the Aussie government is so worried about the low level of skilled/semi-skilled workers they they're offering easy immigration and assisted passage to immigrants from the UK (probably other places as well). Apparently they need plumbers desparately and are very short on hair dressers. In the item they interviewed a guy who owns a car crash repair business in Wollongong, he said that he's so behind due to a shortage of staff that pretty much anyone who walks through the door will be given a job.
From that I guess that either there aren't that many unemployed, the unemployed are in different parts of the country than the jobs (although then wouldn't the government just offer them the money to move?) or the unemployed don't want to work in or train for the jobs that are available.
Stephen
Emphasis on the these days, it's not that long ago we were paying more in pounds than those in the US paid in $. Whether hardware is cheaper here or in the US depends a lot on what you're buying, non-commodity stuff still tends to cost more here. Non-Intel architecture stuff is especially prone to this.
Stephen
Actually, I didn't make any statements as to you being right or wrong. I was commenting on another issue separate from your assertion (which I feel, based on my own experiences (it's pretty much the same arguement I was hearing in 1994 about why M$-Word would never beat WordPerfect), is incorrect but that's a different matter).
I now believe, based on your further responses, that you're either very paranoid or have poor comprehension of the English language as used by native speakers.
Stephen
So who's to blame when I write a document in Word 2000 (without using any particularly complex formatting; just bold, italic, a few levels of header and a couple of levels of bulleted list) then email it to other people elsewhere in the organisation and some of them either can't open it or they can but the layout is screwed up because they're using Word 97 (there's 24,000 desktops over 800 sites within an 8 mile radius of the central core in the organisation I work for, IT support have been rolling out Office 2000 from about 3 years now and haven't quite hit every site yet)? That's what my post [re-read it!!] was talking about.
We could blame the Management in IT support for not being able to keep the office suite in step accross 24,000 desktops all within an 8 mile radius. Or we could blame them for not thinking about software in the first place and so allowing everyone to have an individual installation rather than running off the server and having a system for automatic/scripted updates. Or we could blame Microsoft for changing their document format and breaking backwards compatibility, whilst claiming to be maintaining backwards compatibility.
Incidentally, that's a real life example situation that has happened to myself, or others in the section I work in, over the last couple of years. If we use StarOffice/OpenOffice.org to write the document and save as .DOC (Word 2000/97) format then everyone can open it fine.
Stephen
Heck, yeah! I really miss WordPerfect (the real one before it all got messed up around version 6). I wonder if it would be possible to get it ported to some contemporary OSes and given filters to load/save OO.o and M$-Word files? That would be cool. I started using WP about 13 years ago (WP v5.0 IIRC but I moved to 5.2 for Windows 3.1 when that came out) and thought it was frickin' brilliant. It did what I wanted when, where and how I wanted. The rare occaisions where I did run into problems (usually where I'd been cutting and pasting chunks of text about) a quick switch into Reveal Codes allowed me to soon sort it. I started using Word in 1996 and thought it sucked, but I was stuck with it.
Stephen
Many documents produced in Word 97 will appear crap in Word 98 (Mac), Word 2000 or Word XP. Some documents produced in Word 2000 won't even open in Word 97, despite them officialy using the same file format.
Stephen