Well, from what I've understood it'll always be easier to see planets that are huge and either a short distance from star or in a very elliptical orbit, so they'll be overrepresented. Also those in plane with the star, but that goes for small and big planets alike. But when we get a little more data, we can probably get good estimates by taking say the closest 1000 ly of stars (the most distant detected is already at 21500 ly) where we can see both small and large planets, longer orbital times etc. to get a representative sample than trying to extrapolate from all the planets found.
If you followed that to the ultimate conclusion then there'd be no taxes, no government or any other public function. Failed states like Somalia is your ideal. Every society since the dawn of civilization has had shared resources and shared responsibilities, the only difference is that with money we're now taking it in through taxes instead of labor. Extreme libertarians like you are essentially anti-democratic, because you reject any authority the people (demos) has. You demand the right to live among a people, yet you refuse to obey democratically passed laws. Public property is our collective property, if you don't want to be part of that collective then fine by me but don't trespass. Let's see how long you'd last...
I guess to me it's strongly correlated with how universal in space and time the results are. It's fairly easy to do science which is good science as such, but just either very constricted, navel gazing or void of any fundamental insights. Of course case studies are to the soft sciences what experiments are to the hard sciences, but I don't see how studying ancient Egyptians will ever yield anything significant outside the field of ancient Egyptians. Understanding the fundamental particles and forces of the universe is extremely lasting knowledge and any insights or applications you can find can be used by all of humanity forever. To take one example, Magnetic resonance imaging is very useful in medicine, less than 40 years old and depends on a deep understanding of nuclear magnetic resonance.
True, some thing won't be practically useful now or in the future but how would you know that if you haven't discovered what it can and can't do? To me it's a little bit like handing an illiterate forest tribe a laptop without telling him anything about it, I doubt they'd find it useful because they'd have no idea what to use it for or even the knowledge or concepts to begin using it. The same goes for things that appear to be extremely costly, if you went back 50 years and tried to explain modern computers to an economist he'd short circuit because the cost would be beyond the GDP of the world many times over at the price/performance ratio he is used to. I have no idea what the first laser cost but I'm sure it was massive, today you can get them for next to nothing to use as a laser pointer or in every DVD player or PC with optical drive. But I guess many people are like the stock market, "long term" is what happens next year and equally short-sighted too.
You obviously have no idea how grocery stores work. There is nobody up front pushing a sale, but they have marketing teams that agonize over the placement of products to maximize profits.
If you're talking about that level of indirection there's tons of people working on placement, packaging design, advertisements and there's lots of people in purchasing, distribution, facility management and so on who make similar minor contributions to the margins. But as we were talking about salesmen making big commissions, grocery stores are pretty much at the opposite end of that scale. There are some store owners and managers doing well, but there's always money in management while the people you are talking about are paid quite normal wages.
That's true, but it's still possible that the relative values to the company are being miscalculated. If you fired that sales guy, could some other sales guy paid half as much sell the product just as well? My guess is that often the answer is "yes".
That very much depends on what your selling and to who. The grocery store essentially doesn't have a salesman, but most retail outlets do. But then you usually have a prebuilt product that you buy off the shelf, the salesman is just there to give you the push under pretense of being your guide. Don't get me wrong, they might point you in the right direction but usually towards a high-margin, full price product. Still it's fairly easy to be a competent salesman and rather hard to be a stellar one. Something like producing a graphics card is high on engineers, but all in all low on sales pitch - the review sites will tear you a new one with benchmarks if it doesn't perform.
Selling a complex solution to a customer with complex needs is a whole different ballgame. It's not like the engineer's view that they are selling a piece of hardware or software or whatever - though it certainly helps to have a flashy demostration of how you'd solve other problems or better yet a sales case that smoothes away all the things you can't do. In reality, you might know what tool you'll be using but the complete solution doesn't exist yet. What you're selling is the impression of having understood the client's needs, having the tools, the experience, the competence, support, stability and commitment to deliver and follow up a good solution. Practically you can't measure it until it's done and even so there's no comparable benchmark so say whether this is better or worse than they would ultimately end up with going with another vendor.
It's surprisingly hard to hit that right line of rose-tinted reality that actually conveys confidence. The people on the other side of the table have heard the tales of how this will solve all your problems and give free blowsjobs before, they're not buying it. At the same time, if you undersell or focus too much on potential problems or limitations or complexity, you're not winning any cases either. The really good salesman will give you an outline, a sketch, then fill it up with all the good things that says, yes we can deliver on this. We don't know all the details yet, but we are capable of ironing out the details and working around any issues. There's a few people that are simply killers at closing that kind of deals, which means millions swing depending on whose side they're on. Consider it a bit like sports stars, it's definitely not linear pay at the top.
Yes, but the point is to measure lies not stress. If the person is stressed because their job or freedom is on the line, is it because they are falsely accused or guilty? I know I'd be pretty stressed out because I know mistakens happen and sometimes innocents get shafted. I'm not sure adding stress into the equation would make it harder to fake.
Embarassing (sic), in that, "Yes we screwed up, and we shouldn't have." or embarassing (sic) as in, "Oh shit, open source really isn't any better than security through obfuscation!"?
Well the old "many eyes" argument is getting embarrassing when it's obvious that all the eyes are on the front door while the window is wide open. As usual, it was not the VCS that was compromised, because many people at least casually look at commits, often it has to pass through a mailing list and often getting commit access is hard. Becoming a rouge committer is high risk/low yield, same with hacking a committer's computer. Hacking the VCS server would probably lead to the code changes showing up in diffs so that's not very subtle either.
But then there's the downstream and binary builds. A few packagers, mirror maintainers and distro maintainers might look at these but hardly anybody else. A good example is the Debian OpenSSL fiasco a few years back. There's this one, that got caught. How many of these go unnoticed? How many really checks that nothing bad happened between the upstream VCS and the binary running on my server? How many makes sure the source and binary posted really match and compile to the same MD5 and won't just disregard it as different compiler versions and flags? Extremely few. Like in this case, it was no good checking the MD5 because it was also compromised...
I think I recognize this story, most likely they got other people that can be an Online Content Producer but probably no one to be their web/IT-guru. So you get squeezed into that role, but do you know what happens when the times get better? They hire more writers and you don't get to return because you're the one that knows all the systems and everything. Trust me there's always some immediate concern which means they need you and your institutional knowledge even though they say it's only temporary. The part I'm not so sure of is whether you'd just like better recognition and pay for it, or if it's that you don't want to do it, because you got limited playing room and can't pursue both at once.
If you want to move up, at the very least go to your boss and say that with all the responsibility you're taking you'd like a better title, but then you're pretty much branding yourself in the direction you say you don't want to go. If you really want to be a writer, then maybe having that on your CV isn't such a bad thing even if you did lots of other non-writing activity? Wait for the economy to get a little better then get a job that actually matches your job description. I don't think being a little honest with your employer hurts either, that yes you can manage the job but this is not the sort of work that makes you happy. Managers with a clue will understand what this means, you have the professional ethics to do it but you'll be leaving for another position if this goes on. And even if you have a bad manager, they don't like to cut important staff either because normally during a downturn they don't get to rehire, so lots of headache for them making things go round. Except the even more irrational ones, but then you probably don't want to work there anyway...
In our race to the bottom of the price bucket lots of things have to be cut and guess where they cut first, you guessed it, in support. With Oracle support you do not get script readers in India or the Philippines you get an Oracle engineer on the phone ready to tackle the problem with you until the problem is solved and they will bring in whatever other resources are required.
Well, I don't know if you'll be getting engineer or script readers but I did a little stats on their SUPPORT positions: Chile: 78 US: 71: India: 70 Romania: 28 Egypt: 16 China: 11 Rest of world: 47
Well doh, that would be comparing blueberries to watermelons. But I've been been working with a product that supports both SQL Server and Oracle so production databases of about equal size, equal hardware and equal content. I develop queries to show something at one client site, then reuse it at a different client site with a different database system. In short, two equally smart database systems should perform about the same. What I'm saying is that in my experience Oracle often generates very poor execution plans, and fiddling with it to make Oracle do it "right" that others manage just fine on their own is not treating it as a black box, it's tedious and unnecessary micromanagement to overcome product shortcomings.
You use Oracle because you *have to*. Not because it is pretty.
Oracle is past that and way into user-unfriendly in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, if you write queries that are exactly how Oracle likes them it's fast and solid, but I've worked with SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL as well and the management tools are easier, the query optimizer is more flexible and the error messages more helpful. Particularly that Oracle wants queries their way, I've reused queries that run in seconds on SQL Server and take minutes on Oracle but hardly if ever the other way around. It can always be fixed by tweaking the query but it seems Oracle needs 10x as much tweaking as any other database. It makes Oracle DBA/devs their own little ivory tower and I'd love to see it come crumbling down, because they're floating on their own bubble of "nobody would dare run their ultra-critical systems on anything but Oracle".
Not really, it's more like the sales opening rush except it happens all day long. The fastest gets something that's almost a guaranteed prize, but he has to be faster than everyone else. If he gets there just a little too late, the opportunity is lost. But that should be possible to deduct from the current stock movement if you're too late or not. However, I was under the impression that this was done to death already.
I know some people are opposed to every new word, but personally I think tweet is one of the better. It was obviously established as a word long before Twitter, at least as far back as 1942. The analogy between a short chirp and a short message works very well with very low probability of confusion, particularly since birds tend to do it all the time for no apparent reason and Twitter users... well, you get the idea. It works in Norwegian too, we have translated to tweet (birds) which is to "kvitre" and people use either that or "tvitre" to be more similar to English. I'm fairly sure this one is here to stay just as "to chat" or "to text", even if something else than Twitter becomes the way to do it.
Here's a more accurate version: Anyone writing code that doesn't validate input needs to find a new line of work.
How often does this happen in a one-developer situation (outside newbie projects)? The problem is that there's supposed to be exactly one sanitizing layer, for example if you percent encode or HTML encode or whatever twice, you often get a wrong result like "Barnes & Noble" instead of what you expected. Every function validating everything is likely to be both a performance killer and the results being plain wrong. On the drawing board it's easy, draw a big line and say dirty strings on this side, clean strings on the other and a sanitizing layer in the middle. But in practice nobody notices if you don't, a string is a string is a string because someone forgot or took a shortcut, in many cases being completely oblivious to the problem. In an application with heavy user interaction, I'd almost be tempted to have a dirty string and clean string subclass. But I figure someone will just cast it to a clean string to make it work anyway.
2.) you are more afraid of the government than pedophiles and terrorists are
Well, what do you think dies first? Freedom and democracy or small like-minded groups of criminals? No government, not even the neo-fascist ones we're heading towards are going to stop that. Some easy catches will be caught and made an example of, but there'll still be dark corners of the net and the terrorists control millions of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and continue to spread most of their poison legally under freedom of speech. Some are probably well-meaning I guess, even though they're willing to hand over everyone's freedoms if you say the right words. Others are purposely pushing it ahead of their own agenda like the copyright organizations. But either way, they won't succeed and they'll destroy the civil liberties of the average citizen in the progress.
Community: "It's not pinin,' it's passed on! SCO is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late company! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolical processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an EX-COMPANY!"
SCO: "I'm not dead yet"
At least IBM, Novell etc. got the pockets to handle it. A smaller company could have been legally torpedoed by this, even if they eventually won some what, 8 years down the road now?
The huge majority of the market is laptops. Of the people that don't want laptops, most of those do it because they want large - for relative values of large - towers with big hot cpus, big hot gpus, many hdds and so on. The intersection of small and !mobile is very slim outside the HTPC market.
The comment by Ron (emphasis by me) is the best and deserves a +5, Funny:
I'm surprised to see so many people claiming Nepomuk gives them no added value. Personally, I find the promise of Nepomuk, KDE 4 and semantic desktop enthrilling. Unfortunately this has been so for the past 2 years.
Development seems to me to be heading in the right direction - semantic desktop sounds the more natural way to deal with entities in the computer. But people are used to the traditional way of interaction with the machine, the switch to a novel way is hard to make. Moreover, Nepomuk services are now being developed, and immediate benefits are not apparent. Until the framework and services become more stable and reliable, and the benefits become more prominent, objection to Nepomuk will stay. The point is, at this point of time Nepomuk may be a nuisance, but it is injustifiablly wrong to judge it now. If Nepomuk development fulfills the dreams presented here and elsewhere, these critics of today might find they have been wrong all along, and by a long shot - they might find out that semantic desktop interaction is the right way of doing things. It feels attitude towards Nepomuk now is as has been to KDE 4 in the beginning. That it is immature and present creates problems, that would subside as it matures and the advantages become more present.
Productively, it seems that there should be a better (i.e. more apparent) UI to disable Strigi and Nepomuk - perhaps as a question dialog at install time or when the computer is under heavy load/RAM usage because of Strigi. That people have to actively seek the system settings option might be a fault in this case.
KDE is not free of problems - in fact I can't use it right now. I was greatly disappointed in finding that Kubuntu 9.10 on an old machine with 512MB of RAM is hardly usable. Battery life on my laptop is not satisfactory, and I can't install KDE on Windows for some reason. But the promise, and the hard work of all involved keep me assured that one day I'll be able to use my computers to their fullest using KDE (on Linux. And not any other DE). So this is thanks and keep up the good work.
Gee, no apparent benefits, if fact it's so resource hungry you can't use it, but you wonder why people don't like it... really?
Definitely not true. There's a lot of support to implement the MERGE command from the SQL standard. It's been proposed a few times, but it's more difficult than it sounds to implement. From here:
On more research, yes that seems to be my bad. It was probably a very borked implementation attempt I read the discussion of, the subtle difference between "NO WAY" and "NOT *THIS* WAY" was lost at that point I guess.
We can't skip joining to any of the other tables, because those are inner joins. That's an implementation restriction which I hope will be lifted in PostgreSQL 9.1, but some more logic is needed to make that safe.
Not sure exactly how he's going to pull that off since a join can remove rows, but if you join on a unique index you should be able to do it just using the index without touching the table itself which should be very fast.
They have tried. But the databases evolved so much faster than the language specification, especially when it comes to anything past plain SQL like triggers. Hell, even such a thing as automatic numbering is done differently in almost every database. Some things they just don't *want* to implement on ideological reasons, like "UPDATE OR INSERT" or "CREATE IF NOT EXISTS" in PostgreSQL at least. PostgreSQL is definitely on the better side of that though, Oracle is pretty much last so I don't know what to tell you, it'll never happen. It's more likely PostgreSQL will grow into an Oracle than that Oracle will ever support the standards as well as PostgreSQL does. By the way, one thing I've noticed with them is that they're very clear on pointing out what they don't support of the standard or if they do anything extra compared to the standard, that's *very* nice even if it's likely unportable anyway...
you read a lot of these psychos that go nuts have been "working it up" by intensely playing for hours then go out, adrenaline pumping and play it "live".
Yes, you read stuff written by misinformed loonies parroting paranoid phobias invented by ignorant activists with an agenda.
If it takes one person to prove it DOES happen, you should look at the school shooting in Germany by Tim Kretschmer. Obsessed by horror and FPS games, here's a quote from the Times Online:
Kretschmer also played Counter-Strike, another game featuring gunplay, and TacticalOps, a special forces action game" Remarkable parallels emerged between the video game and the 17-year-old's rampage.
In the game it is essential to hijack cars to move around. Kretschmer hijacked a car, held a pistol to the driver's head and asked: Should I have fun and pick off some more drivers? Characters in the game, which is made by the French company Ubisoft and has sold 2.9m copies, wear black camouflage uniforms - the clothing Kretschmer wore on Wednesday.
Most sinister of all, Far Cry 2's killer uses a Beretta 92 handgun, the weapon fired 112 times by Kretschmer. The game, which carries an 18 certificate in Britain, includes sequences in which the aiming, firing and reloading of a Beretta are portrayed in vivid detail. It also rewards players who shoot their victims in the head, the style of killing chosen by Kretschmer.
Kretschmer also played Counter-Strike, another game featuring gunplay, and TacticalOps, a special forces action game, both of which have a 16 certificate in Britain.
That's the game he played the night before the shooting. Yes, he's 0,000003% of the people who bought Far Cry 2 but don't say it never happens because it does.
Well, you may run into the fact that WINE doesn't implement every windows API, not even close. Only the most important ones and the most important features, usually the ones that hit their bug counter with "popular software X" doesn' work. Obscure applications have a tendency to use obscure functions, so I wouldn't bet on it running custom software without testing extensively. Moreso, you could get very little attention trying to get anything you need fixed so you might have to do a lot of it yourself.
Quite often, actually. I supplement it with WINE and VirtualBox and a Win7 machine for games.
Perhaps there is an industry that has been where the music industry was decades ago and survived. Perhaps is even stronger.
Software development has a huge custom software market that music doesn't. Most embedded markets, console markets and Apple sell through heavy hardware tie-in, even when there's no DRM you can't practically use it without the hardware.
Music on the other hand is approaching a market value of zero, let's take Spotify as an example. A fairly popular band here in Norway was streamed 130000 times and got 180 NOK. An average salary is 440.000 NOK/year, so that means they'll need 318 million streamings/year to pay one band member. The average person in Norway across all groups listens to music 82 minutes a day, from what statistic I found. Let's say 3 minutes a song, that works out to about 27 streamings. Now there's about 4.8 million people here, so even if everyone listened to that one band every day that only works out to 130 million streamings. The entire country can support less than half a mucisian on that revenue model. Music alone as a revenue source just doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
They probably did an email survey with subject "Have you been scammed?". 28% that answer useless unsolicited mail probably have been scammed.
Well, from what I've understood it'll always be easier to see planets that are huge and either a short distance from star or in a very elliptical orbit, so they'll be overrepresented. Also those in plane with the star, but that goes for small and big planets alike. But when we get a little more data, we can probably get good estimates by taking say the closest 1000 ly of stars (the most distant detected is already at 21500 ly) where we can see both small and large planets, longer orbital times etc. to get a representative sample than trying to extrapolate from all the planets found.
If you followed that to the ultimate conclusion then there'd be no taxes, no government or any other public function. Failed states like Somalia is your ideal. Every society since the dawn of civilization has had shared resources and shared responsibilities, the only difference is that with money we're now taking it in through taxes instead of labor. Extreme libertarians like you are essentially anti-democratic, because you reject any authority the people (demos) has. You demand the right to live among a people, yet you refuse to obey democratically passed laws. Public property is our collective property, if you don't want to be part of that collective then fine by me but don't trespass. Let's see how long you'd last...
I guess to me it's strongly correlated with how universal in space and time the results are. It's fairly easy to do science which is good science as such, but just either very constricted, navel gazing or void of any fundamental insights. Of course case studies are to the soft sciences what experiments are to the hard sciences, but I don't see how studying ancient Egyptians will ever yield anything significant outside the field of ancient Egyptians. Understanding the fundamental particles and forces of the universe is extremely lasting knowledge and any insights or applications you can find can be used by all of humanity forever. To take one example, Magnetic resonance imaging is very useful in medicine, less than 40 years old and depends on a deep understanding of nuclear magnetic resonance.
True, some thing won't be practically useful now or in the future but how would you know that if you haven't discovered what it can and can't do? To me it's a little bit like handing an illiterate forest tribe a laptop without telling him anything about it, I doubt they'd find it useful because they'd have no idea what to use it for or even the knowledge or concepts to begin using it. The same goes for things that appear to be extremely costly, if you went back 50 years and tried to explain modern computers to an economist he'd short circuit because the cost would be beyond the GDP of the world many times over at the price/performance ratio he is used to. I have no idea what the first laser cost but I'm sure it was massive, today you can get them for next to nothing to use as a laser pointer or in every DVD player or PC with optical drive. But I guess many people are like the stock market, "long term" is what happens next year and equally short-sighted too.
You obviously have no idea how grocery stores work. There is nobody up front pushing a sale, but they have marketing teams that agonize over the placement of products to maximize profits.
If you're talking about that level of indirection there's tons of people working on placement, packaging design, advertisements and there's lots of people in purchasing, distribution, facility management and so on who make similar minor contributions to the margins. But as we were talking about salesmen making big commissions, grocery stores are pretty much at the opposite end of that scale. There are some store owners and managers doing well, but there's always money in management while the people you are talking about are paid quite normal wages.
That's true, but it's still possible that the relative values to the company are being miscalculated. If you fired that sales guy, could some other sales guy paid half as much sell the product just as well? My guess is that often the answer is "yes".
That very much depends on what your selling and to who. The grocery store essentially doesn't have a salesman, but most retail outlets do. But then you usually have a prebuilt product that you buy off the shelf, the salesman is just there to give you the push under pretense of being your guide. Don't get me wrong, they might point you in the right direction but usually towards a high-margin, full price product. Still it's fairly easy to be a competent salesman and rather hard to be a stellar one. Something like producing a graphics card is high on engineers, but all in all low on sales pitch - the review sites will tear you a new one with benchmarks if it doesn't perform.
Selling a complex solution to a customer with complex needs is a whole different ballgame. It's not like the engineer's view that they are selling a piece of hardware or software or whatever - though it certainly helps to have a flashy demostration of how you'd solve other problems or better yet a sales case that smoothes away all the things you can't do. In reality, you might know what tool you'll be using but the complete solution doesn't exist yet. What you're selling is the impression of having understood the client's needs, having the tools, the experience, the competence, support, stability and commitment to deliver and follow up a good solution. Practically you can't measure it until it's done and even so there's no comparable benchmark so say whether this is better or worse than they would ultimately end up with going with another vendor.
It's surprisingly hard to hit that right line of rose-tinted reality that actually conveys confidence. The people on the other side of the table have heard the tales of how this will solve all your problems and give free blowsjobs before, they're not buying it. At the same time, if you undersell or focus too much on potential problems or limitations or complexity, you're not winning any cases either. The really good salesman will give you an outline, a sketch, then fill it up with all the good things that says, yes we can deliver on this. We don't know all the details yet, but we are capable of ironing out the details and working around any issues. There's a few people that are simply killers at closing that kind of deals, which means millions swing depending on whose side they're on. Consider it a bit like sports stars, it's definitely not linear pay at the top.
Yes, but the point is to measure lies not stress. If the person is stressed because their job or freedom is on the line, is it because they are falsely accused or guilty? I know I'd be pretty stressed out because I know mistakens happen and sometimes innocents get shafted. I'm not sure adding stress into the equation would make it harder to fake.
Embarassing (sic), in that, "Yes we screwed up, and we shouldn't have." or embarassing (sic) as in, "Oh shit, open source really isn't any better than security through obfuscation!"?
Well the old "many eyes" argument is getting embarrassing when it's obvious that all the eyes are on the front door while the window is wide open. As usual, it was not the VCS that was compromised, because many people at least casually look at commits, often it has to pass through a mailing list and often getting commit access is hard. Becoming a rouge committer is high risk/low yield, same with hacking a committer's computer. Hacking the VCS server would probably lead to the code changes showing up in diffs so that's not very subtle either.
But then there's the downstream and binary builds. A few packagers, mirror maintainers and distro maintainers might look at these but hardly anybody else. A good example is the Debian OpenSSL fiasco a few years back. There's this one, that got caught. How many of these go unnoticed? How many really checks that nothing bad happened between the upstream VCS and the binary running on my server? How many makes sure the source and binary posted really match and compile to the same MD5 and won't just disregard it as different compiler versions and flags? Extremely few. Like in this case, it was no good checking the MD5 because it was also compromised...
I think I recognize this story, most likely they got other people that can be an Online Content Producer but probably no one to be their web/IT-guru. So you get squeezed into that role, but do you know what happens when the times get better? They hire more writers and you don't get to return because you're the one that knows all the systems and everything. Trust me there's always some immediate concern which means they need you and your institutional knowledge even though they say it's only temporary. The part I'm not so sure of is whether you'd just like better recognition and pay for it, or if it's that you don't want to do it, because you got limited playing room and can't pursue both at once.
If you want to move up, at the very least go to your boss and say that with all the responsibility you're taking you'd like a better title, but then you're pretty much branding yourself in the direction you say you don't want to go. If you really want to be a writer, then maybe having that on your CV isn't such a bad thing even if you did lots of other non-writing activity? Wait for the economy to get a little better then get a job that actually matches your job description. I don't think being a little honest with your employer hurts either, that yes you can manage the job but this is not the sort of work that makes you happy. Managers with a clue will understand what this means, you have the professional ethics to do it but you'll be leaving for another position if this goes on. And even if you have a bad manager, they don't like to cut important staff either because normally during a downturn they don't get to rehire, so lots of headache for them making things go round. Except the even more irrational ones, but then you probably don't want to work there anyway...
In our race to the bottom of the price bucket lots of things have to be cut and guess where they cut first, you guessed it, in support. With Oracle support you do not get script readers in India or the Philippines you get an Oracle engineer on the phone ready to tackle the problem with you until the problem is solved and they will bring in whatever other resources are required.
Well, I don't know if you'll be getting engineer or script readers but I did a little stats on their SUPPORT positions:
Chile: 78
US: 71:
India: 70
Romania: 28
Egypt: 16
China: 11
Rest of world: 47
Looks like Chile is the new India...
Well doh, that would be comparing blueberries to watermelons. But I've been been working with a product that supports both SQL Server and Oracle so production databases of about equal size, equal hardware and equal content. I develop queries to show something at one client site, then reuse it at a different client site with a different database system. In short, two equally smart database systems should perform about the same. What I'm saying is that in my experience Oracle often generates very poor execution plans, and fiddling with it to make Oracle do it "right" that others manage just fine on their own is not treating it as a black box, it's tedious and unnecessary micromanagement to overcome product shortcomings.
You use Oracle because you *have to*. Not because it is pretty.
Oracle is past that and way into user-unfriendly in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, if you write queries that are exactly how Oracle likes them it's fast and solid, but I've worked with SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL as well and the management tools are easier, the query optimizer is more flexible and the error messages more helpful. Particularly that Oracle wants queries their way, I've reused queries that run in seconds on SQL Server and take minutes on Oracle but hardly if ever the other way around. It can always be fixed by tweaking the query but it seems Oracle needs 10x as much tweaking as any other database. It makes Oracle DBA/devs their own little ivory tower and I'd love to see it come crumbling down, because they're floating on their own bubble of "nobody would dare run their ultra-critical systems on anything but Oracle".
Not really, it's more like the sales opening rush except it happens all day long. The fastest gets something that's almost a guaranteed prize, but he has to be faster than everyone else. If he gets there just a little too late, the opportunity is lost. But that should be possible to deduct from the current stock movement if you're too late or not. However, I was under the impression that this was done to death already.
I know some people are opposed to every new word, but personally I think tweet is one of the better. It was obviously established as a word long before Twitter, at least as far back as 1942. The analogy between a short chirp and a short message works very well with very low probability of confusion, particularly since birds tend to do it all the time for no apparent reason and Twitter users... well, you get the idea. It works in Norwegian too, we have translated to tweet (birds) which is to "kvitre" and people use either that or "tvitre" to be more similar to English. I'm fairly sure this one is here to stay just as "to chat" or "to text", even if something else than Twitter becomes the way to do it.
Here's a more accurate version: Anyone writing code that doesn't validate input needs to find a new line of work.
How often does this happen in a one-developer situation (outside newbie projects)? The problem is that there's supposed to be exactly one sanitizing layer, for example if you percent encode or HTML encode or whatever twice, you often get a wrong result like "Barnes & Noble" instead of what you expected. Every function validating everything is likely to be both a performance killer and the results being plain wrong. On the drawing board it's easy, draw a big line and say dirty strings on this side, clean strings on the other and a sanitizing layer in the middle. But in practice nobody notices if you don't, a string is a string is a string because someone forgot or took a shortcut, in many cases being completely oblivious to the problem. In an application with heavy user interaction, I'd almost be tempted to have a dirty string and clean string subclass. But I figure someone will just cast it to a clean string to make it work anyway.
2.) you are more afraid of the government than pedophiles and terrorists are
Well, what do you think dies first? Freedom and democracy or small like-minded groups of criminals? No government, not even the neo-fascist ones we're heading towards are going to stop that. Some easy catches will be caught and made an example of, but there'll still be dark corners of the net and the terrorists control millions of people in Afghanistan and Pakistan and continue to spread most of their poison legally under freedom of speech. Some are probably well-meaning I guess, even though they're willing to hand over everyone's freedoms if you say the right words. Others are purposely pushing it ahead of their own agenda like the copyright organizations. But either way, they won't succeed and they'll destroy the civil liberties of the average citizen in the progress.
That and the dead parrot schene combined:
Community: "It's not pinin,' it's passed on! SCO is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late company! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed him to the perch he would be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolical processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an EX-COMPANY!"
SCO: "I'm not dead yet"
At least IBM, Novell etc. got the pockets to handle it. A smaller company could have been legally torpedoed by this, even if they eventually won some what, 8 years down the road now?
The huge majority of the market is laptops. Of the people that don't want laptops, most of those do it because they want large - for relative values of large - towers with big hot cpus, big hot gpus, many hdds and so on. The intersection of small and !mobile is very slim outside the HTPC market.
The comment by Ron (emphasis by me) is the best and deserves a +5, Funny:
I'm surprised to see so many people claiming Nepomuk gives them no added value. Personally, I find the promise of Nepomuk, KDE 4 and semantic desktop enthrilling. Unfortunately this has been so for the past 2 years.
Development seems to me to be heading in the right direction - semantic desktop sounds the more natural way to deal with entities in the computer. But people are used to the traditional way of interaction with the machine, the switch to a novel way is hard to make. Moreover, Nepomuk services are now being developed, and immediate benefits are not apparent. Until the framework and services become more stable and reliable, and the benefits become more prominent, objection to Nepomuk will stay. The point is, at this point of time Nepomuk may be a nuisance, but it is injustifiablly wrong to judge it now. If Nepomuk development fulfills the dreams presented here and elsewhere, these critics of today might find they have been wrong all along, and by a long shot - they might find out that semantic desktop interaction is the right way of doing things. It feels attitude towards Nepomuk now is as has been to KDE 4 in the beginning. That it is immature and present creates problems, that would subside as it matures and the advantages become more present.
Productively, it seems that there should be a better (i.e. more apparent) UI to disable Strigi and Nepomuk - perhaps as a question dialog at install time or when the computer is under heavy load/RAM usage because of Strigi. That people have to actively seek the system settings option might be a fault in this case.
KDE is not free of problems - in fact I can't use it right now. I was greatly disappointed in finding that Kubuntu 9.10 on an old machine with 512MB of RAM is hardly usable. Battery life on my laptop is not satisfactory, and I can't install KDE on Windows for some reason.
But the promise, and the hard work of all involved keep me assured that one day I'll be able to use my computers to their fullest using KDE (on Linux. And not any other DE). So this is thanks and keep up the good work.
Gee, no apparent benefits, if fact it's so resource hungry you can't use it, but you wonder why people don't like it... really?
Definitely not true. There's a lot of support to implement the MERGE command from the SQL standard. It's been proposed a few times, but it's more difficult than it sounds to implement. From here:
On more research, yes that seems to be my bad. It was probably a very borked implementation attempt I read the discussion of, the subtle difference between "NO WAY" and "NOT *THIS* WAY" was lost at that point I guess.
For now, the more interesting part is this part:
We can't skip joining to any of the other tables, because those are inner joins. That's an implementation restriction which I hope will be lifted in PostgreSQL 9.1, but some more logic is needed to make that safe.
Not sure exactly how he's going to pull that off since a join can remove rows, but if you join on a unique index you should be able to do it just using the index without touching the table itself which should be very fast.
They have tried. But the databases evolved so much faster than the language specification, especially when it comes to anything past plain SQL like triggers. Hell, even such a thing as automatic numbering is done differently in almost every database. Some things they just don't *want* to implement on ideological reasons, like "UPDATE OR INSERT" or "CREATE IF NOT EXISTS" in PostgreSQL at least. PostgreSQL is definitely on the better side of that though, Oracle is pretty much last so I don't know what to tell you, it'll never happen. It's more likely PostgreSQL will grow into an Oracle than that Oracle will ever support the standards as well as PostgreSQL does. By the way, one thing I've noticed with them is that they're very clear on pointing out what they don't support of the standard or if they do anything extra compared to the standard, that's *very* nice even if it's likely unportable anyway...
you read a lot of these psychos that go nuts have been "working it up" by intensely playing for hours then go out, adrenaline pumping and play it "live".
Yes, you read stuff written by misinformed loonies parroting paranoid phobias invented by ignorant activists with an agenda.
If it takes one person to prove it DOES happen, you should look at the school shooting in Germany by Tim Kretschmer. Obsessed by horror and FPS games, here's a quote from the Times Online:
Kretschmer also played Counter-Strike, another game featuring gunplay, and TacticalOps, a special forces action game"
Remarkable parallels emerged between the video game and the 17-year-old's rampage.
In the game it is essential to hijack cars to move around. Kretschmer hijacked a car, held a pistol to the driver's head and asked: Should I have fun and pick off some more drivers? Characters in the game, which is made by the French company Ubisoft and has sold 2.9m copies, wear black camouflage uniforms - the clothing Kretschmer wore on Wednesday.
Most sinister of all, Far Cry 2's killer uses a Beretta 92 handgun, the weapon fired 112 times by Kretschmer. The game, which carries an 18 certificate in Britain, includes sequences in which the aiming, firing and reloading of a Beretta are portrayed in vivid detail. It also rewards players who shoot their victims in the head, the style of killing chosen by Kretschmer.
Kretschmer also played Counter-Strike, another game featuring gunplay, and TacticalOps, a special forces action game, both of which have a 16 certificate in Britain.
That's the game he played the night before the shooting. Yes, he's 0,000003% of the people who bought Far Cry 2 but don't say it never happens because it does.
Well, you may run into the fact that WINE doesn't implement every windows API, not even close. Only the most important ones and the most important features, usually the ones that hit their bug counter with "popular software X" doesn' work. Obscure applications have a tendency to use obscure functions, so I wouldn't bet on it running custom software without testing extensively. Moreso, you could get very little attention trying to get anything you need fixed so you might have to do a lot of it yourself.
Have you ever used open-source software?
I run Linux as my primary desktop.
Do you find it inferior to commercial software?
Quite often, actually. I supplement it with WINE and VirtualBox and a Win7 machine for games.
Perhaps there is an industry that has been where the music industry was decades ago and survived. Perhaps is even stronger.
Software development has a huge custom software market that music doesn't. Most embedded markets, console markets and Apple sell through heavy hardware tie-in, even when there's no DRM you can't practically use it without the hardware.
Music on the other hand is approaching a market value of zero, let's take Spotify as an example. A fairly popular band here in Norway was streamed 130000 times and got 180 NOK. An average salary is 440.000 NOK/year, so that means they'll need 318 million streamings/year to pay one band member. The average person in Norway across all groups listens to music 82 minutes a day, from what statistic I found. Let's say 3 minutes a song, that works out to about 27 streamings. Now there's about 4.8 million people here, so even if everyone listened to that one band every day that only works out to 130 million streamings. The entire country can support less than half a mucisian on that revenue model. Music alone as a revenue source just doesn't work.