It is not about what it gives MySQL, but users. I for one want standards compliance so that I can change DBMSs as a user, or port my software as a vendor.
> the commercial solutions are hard to setup, unstable and terribly difficult to maintain, and this is after a small fortune has been invested in making them work
This is simply not true about Digital (now Oracle) RDB on VMS clusters, nor about IBM DB2. Perhaps not even about Oracle 9. I mean the unstability and difficulty part, price is high obviously.
Obviously part of the difficulty and price is inherent to the problem, as there are not only products but lotsa services associated.
> Not to knock the open source solution, but it's hard to beleive that something that is infrequently used and difficult to understand will be truly production quality if you want to use it for money.
PostgreSQL is pretty mature, with a commercially supported 2-years old solution having just been freed, and thus in widening use.
Even if you take SCO's 'facts' at face value, all it would amount to is a vindication of FSF's copy rights assignment policy, created exactly to prevent such claims.
> That is a far cry from gaining power through a free and fair ballot.
Yet the ballot, especially if minoritary, doesn't allow for a revolution against democracy itself.
Whatever the means, the ends where the same: a totalitarist state, even if misnamed communist.
> the USSR was responsible for the deaths of approx 20m (most during the stalin purges), that is only a 3rd of the amount required to meet the order of magnitude
Yet it makes it thrice as much as Nazism, even without accounting for Stalin share of responsibility in the War.
> the population of China was approx 7 times that of Germany and the countries Germany controlled
That still would make it proportionally higher, even without accounting for China's role on the Asian Southeast and Korea.
> what has totalitarian dictatorships got to do with a democratically elected government?
That specific government was part of a war to establish totalitarianism, or at least perceived as being so.
>
When a foreign word is anglicized, it typically loses its accents.
If it can gain a workable pronunciation without them, yes. But nee without accent becomes something like [ni:], which I not so humbly suggest isn't quite nice.
About Reference.com, it isn't enough of an authority.
So you are asserting that all leftwing Governments around the world (regardless of how they came to power), were controlled / subverted by the KGB?
Actually I think I was too lax with words. Certainly social democrats in Europe weren't controlled by the KGB, even if the KGB now and then certainly used some of their elements.
So substitute 'revolutionary socialist' for 'leftist', and then I stand by my words. With the exceptions, obviously, of China, Yugoslav and Albania which broke with URSS and the Comintern after having became totalitarist states themselves, which is hardly a redeeming grace... nevertheless, I will continue to use leftist in what follows, since nowadays social democrats have became the effective center at both Europe and Latin America, and 'revolutionary socialists' having simply too many letters for a/. post.
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Please provide the evidence to back up the above assertation where the leftish Government has been democratically elected in a free ballot?
The means of gaining power are immaterial... it just happened at the time, after the Cuban missile crisis, that the ballot was the Comintern tatic for Latin America. It is a tribute to democracy that it survived these elections (also in Argentina and Brazil), the consequent military internal reaction, and returned eventually as dictatorship failed to take roots.
But if you widen your scope of consideration, you can see that leftist troops were welcomed in Vietnam, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe... yet they quickly became totalitarist.
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Yes in left wing dictatorships it has lead (in most cases) to a very high number of deaths, then again, in right wing dictatorship it has (in most cases) led to a very high number of deaths.
[...]
> The commonality between the 2? They are dictatorships.
Actually one should differentiate between an autocratic dictatorship and a totalitarist one. With this in mind, the equivalent of the sovietic regime and its followers isn't the Franco-style integrist regime and its Latin American counterparts, but Nazism. I am at a loss at finding a leftist equivalent to the autocratic rightist dictatorship, if memory don't fail me they all became totalitarist states in various degrees, with Poland and Yugoslav perhaps being the milder ones.
Many rightist autocratic dictatorships never became murderous to the scale of the Spanish Civil War or the Pinochet regime; Brazil being the clear example here. Nearly all of them reverted to democratic rules, the longest living perhaps being the Franco regime at Spain; while the leftist rule typically took at least 40 years, and still endures to one-fifth of the World's population.
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Can you provide information on *any* left wing government that has produced an order of magnitude more deaths than that of the Nazi party in Germany?
Take China or the Soviet Union at your choice. OK, perhaps the 'order of magnitude' part is not fair given both countries were individually more populous each then Germany, but still they killed more -- and worse, without even needing wars or singling out a racial minority; they killed their own people simply for not conforming.
I forget the exact numbers, but while Germany killed some 6M Jews, Gypsies, Sodomites and some assorted others, URSS killed around 20M Russians and China, more than 60M Han with the combination of forced mass migrations, hunger, summary judgements and plain political assassination.
Now if you add to Nazi deaths the ones incurred in war, you will have to count all the revolutionary wars, both classic and guerrilla, caused by the KGB, its antecessors in the URSS and its equivalents in China and elsewhere; and you should probably split some of Nazi deaths with the URSS, since the Ribentropp-Molotov pact actually enabled Hitler to actually begin the War!
Actually not. I am just extrapolating from known facts, such as Allende's Ministers of State supporting the leftist armed rebellions by units of Chilean armed forces against themselves... there are many other elements to consider, like the striking parallels with other countries' Histories, like mine own Brazil.
Sure one can't be absolutely sure. But people act on probabilities; at the time, the probability of a sovietic revolution in Chile just seemed to big to ignore...
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you appear to be totally discounting the fact that the Allende was democratically elected in a free and fair ballot
No, I am not. Actually what happened was that he got only 30% of the vote; Chilean constitution at the time requested the Congress to choose the President if no candidate got 50%. The Congress, split between almost equal parts left, center and right -- just as the presidential vote --, decided to award the Presidency to the candidate with more votes, forgetting the center and right were traditionally allies and the left couldn't be trusted to respect the Constitution and the electorate, as it actually despised 'burgeois democracy'. So Allende and his people tried to revolutionise Chile, despite having received just a presidential mandate... again I refer you to Carlos Rangel's work.
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You appear to still believe in the Domino theory, I thought that line of thinking was long extinct when it proved to be so wrong.
Events in Southeastern Asia proved it right, with Laos and Cambodja falling straight after South Vietnam and leftist guerillas persisting in the area to this day; similarly Chile, Nicaragua and other countries had their leftist guerillas and subversives supported by Cuba. This was a worldwide pattern directly attributable to the Comintern strategy.
Just because one is monoglot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanglophone it doesn't mean one shouldn't try to write accents when necessary... nee doesn't mean anything, the French word meaning born being nee in the feminine, masculine ne.
>
Running a 10 year old linux on a 10 year old computer is just as interesting as running DOS or Win3.0 on it, though only half as useful. (Mod me down if you must, but linux was still very much a toy for comp sci students back then)
Not really. While GNU/Linux was nowhere nearly as useful as it is today, it could already do things MS Windows can't do today. More importantly, it did so with decent performance and reliability and a compatible API, what means you probably can run much modern software there. Now try running modern software on MS Windows 3.0, or even finding old software to run on it...
> Sounds fabulous. Where can I find some? Not, sadly, amongst the products of this particular self-delusional subjective irrational story-weaving species
Nice point, and made with a touch of poetry at that.
But things aren't really so dire. Actually while comprehensive knowledge is inherently impossible, real even if imperfect knowledge is possible indeed -- se for example Francis A Schaeffer's He is There and He is not Silent, a Christian study on the three fields of Philosophy, namely Metaphics, Ethics and, more germane to this thread, Epistemology.
>
I can certainly see how the coup forestalled more violence and other evils...
Yes, like in another Cuba, with its mass imprisonments, exile and killings, as well as exportation of mercenaries to help in revolutions in America and Africa. Or better yet, as in North Korea, China, the URSS or whichever other equivalent.
>
crucial design factor. It's a bandwidth issue. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth a true Big Brother system would need?
Yet had Allende's revolution been allowed to continue, him or his successors would certainly have either put the system to less noble uses, or at least its components after dismantled...
Is a fascist dream to pass the government to a freely elected successor after stamping down the attempt to turn the country into a stalinist dictatorship, possibly hereditary like Cuba or North Korea? Perhaps, after all that's what happened with the most famous fascist after the Duce, namely Franco...
>
the Pinochet regime destroyed the system because they didn't like the principles of freedom and egalitarianism it was based on?
No, but I don't doubt it. I am not trying to write Pinochet's hagiography, as leftists do with Allende. But you have to be really naive to think the KGB and its Chilean affiliate would do any better if Allende were permitted to continue handing Chile to the URSS.
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proceeded on their quest to murder as much as possible of the opposition?
Get your facts straight. The leftist opposition was persecuted and very often murdered, but this is still better than squashing or killing all opposition as has been done behind the Iron Curtain, and would certainly been done in Chile as well.
Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario is a nice eye-opener.
>
some people believe that both Chile's and Cuba's economies would have been much better off if it hadn't been for the fact that the US spent huge resources destabilizing them.
Yes, and some people still believe Stalin was a nice guy.
In fact, even if the US really helped ejecting Allende and boycotts Cuba to this day, most of Chile's woes were, and Cuba's are, self-inflicted. While the Soviet Union endured, it subsidised Cuba with the equivalent of at least US$ 10G per annuum, or US$ 1K per inhabitant, by doubling the market price of sugar cane it imported from and halving the price of petrol it exported to Cuba; Castro had promised to rid Cuba of supposedly US-serving sugar cane monoculture that accounted for 80% of its economy, and ended up turning it into a URSS-serving monoculture accounting for 90% of its economy.
Obviously the economy is not as important as the suppression of opponents, the creation of a URSS beachhead in America and specially the establishment of a de facto absolutist, hereditary monarchy. Which Pinochet hasn't done, in fact passing the power peacefully to a civilian successor when his fears of a leftist revolution had been allayed.
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Allende on the other hand was democratically elected
But what he tried was a violent, inconstitutional revolution. And BTW, he lacked even popular legitimacy to do so, having been elected with only 30% of the valid votes due to a division in the opposition.
>
still had to endure massive CIA interference, and was murdered thanks to the CIA
Stop blaming the CIA. While it helped, the power was taken by the Chilean military. Same in Brazil, Argentina and most other countries were a leftist revolution has been preempted, short of banana republics like Granado.
>
so much for the US government caring about democracy
If you take into account that Cuba, China, North Vietnam and North Korea are still dictatorships, and that the URSS endured 70 years and the Iron Curtain 40, while Chile's, Brazil's and most other countries' US-allied dictatorships endured 20 years or less, with the notable exceptions of the autoctone regimes of Portugal and Spain; then indeed the US cared for democracy, even if out of the self-interest motive of the Domino Theory, which incidentally was proven right.
You should give Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario a try.
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this case you needed violence to ensure thirteen years of oppressive military dictatorship and frequent murder of members of the opposition
How is that even comparable to the much more numerous killings perpetrated in the much longer dictatorship in Cuba, which is the nearer example of what-would-have-happened?
This taking only Latin America into account... don't even get me started about the Iron and Bamboo Curtains countries.
It is true two wrongs don't make a right, but in this case I fear it was really choosing the lesser evil.
Check Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario.
>
there was a chance that the KGB could have gained control
Thank you for seeing the point. People in the US can't really get a notion of how much leftist brainwashing takes place south of the Rio Grande, or across the pond... I always have a laugh when I see US people complaining about the "liberal" bias in their own communication channels.
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how much of a chance that was we will never know
If XX century History is any guide, I'd say 99,999... percent chance.
>
This lead to the deaths of thousands of Chileans under the rule of Pinochet.
Again if the XX century History is to be taken in account, probably a leftist government would have caused at least an order of magnitude more deaths. And this because Pinochet's rule was easily the worst military government in South America, the Brazilian case in special being notable by the relatively low levels of violence employed by the military and their government.
Check Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario.
Supposing you were right (I happen to disagree), the natural (and planned) course of the socialist revolution he was leading would have created a perhaps richer, but certainly no more democratic Cuba... even if Allende himself would have needed to be assassinated by hard-core revolutionaires later.
If you can get past the leftist hagiography that clouds real History, Chile was already in destabilization phase of a typical revolution, with Ministers of State helping armed socialist rebellions in the armed forces against their own constitutional power, just as Brizola's and Preste's groups had tried in Jango's Brazil ten years earlier.
A very interesting book that unveils this and others Latin American legends is Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario by Carlos Rangel, a rightist Venezuelan journalist.
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Every chilean person I met (righties, no less, I'm not talking lefties like if there was any alive today) feared Pinochet as much as the devil.
Just check the news: there are always Pinochet followers ready to defend him at Chile.
Have you considered the possibility that the perceptions of Chileans living abroad is biased by the fact that they or their parents left Chile as exiles? A sad situation, but not a proof they are in the right.
But supposing you were right, and I agree Pinochet isn't quite a nice guy, how would him be worse than a Cuba-style KGB-sponsored government is that I fail to see. In the balance of the XX century, the left has killed more than the right easily.
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Why is this "Orwellian and Big Brother[ish]"? You seem to forget that the "CIA sponsored coup" was actually a pretty bloody affair itself
Two wrongs don't make a right...
Actually, if it is a fact that CIA sponsored this specific coup, it is also a fact that Chile was in economic, social, political and juridical disarray due to Allende's allies trying to turn it into a richer, southern Cuba, with KGB aid. Between KGB and CIA, I'll side with CIA every time.
Pacifism fails to reckon sometimes you need violence to forestall even more violence and other evils.
>
The absence of totalitarian control is a crucial design factor.
In theory yes, but what if Allende had succeeded in turning Chile in a southern Cuba? I bet KGB or whatever would want a try at finding its way around the initial design constraints...
>
Beer is the most freedom-loving person you could hope to imagine.
So were most of the leftists I've know. There is even a name for them: useful innocents.
a system like Google, despite being inaccurate, is more useful than a table/SQL based system.
Now, Google *is* a database! What is the difference?! It may not use tables and SQL, but that's pretty much immaterial... SQL has its limitations, but something like Google can and should be implemented over a relational system.
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one can create a system that automatically looks for words and indexes them, that happens to use SQL, but it's a stretch to say that that's a feature of the mechanism.
But I never said that. What I am trying to say is that while SQL has its limitations, a relational system can be used to index content in a much more powerful and flexible way than simply indexes-over-hierarchy we have today, while preserving the legacy interfaces. This power is a relational feature.
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You might just as well say that a BSD DBM system can replace a hierarchy.
> Which it can. Because there's nothing stopping anyone writing some autoindexer that inserts words in nice indexed DBM files. But that's not what springs to mind when someone talks about a DBM based file system.
You are messing the physical and logical levels. Relational systems, and SQL to a measure, present a logical interface. The back-end storage can be DBM, a graph, ISAM files, even SQL itself; but the real juice is the logical interface. It is on the logical interface that human interfaces are built; in this case, Storage can present a Gnome Google-like search interface to a SQL database, in parallel with a legacy filesystem interface, at the same time as it can allow richer queries.
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a Google search isn't what people are refering to when they're talking about a SQL based file system.
A Google-like search isn't excluded by SQL, why it should be?
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There's the structured (keyword/value at a minimum, with more complex structures possible) system, which is based on relational database tables, and there's the unstructured system, which is based, for want of a better word, on Google.
You are definetly mixing levels. To repeat, Google is but an interface. It does have structured data, as in file types, domains, language etc associated with each page. There is no reason it can't be stored either relationally or in SQL, preferrably relationally.
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The relational database tables that make up a structured system could be plain ASCII files. They could be DBM files. They could be in PostgreSQL, MySQL, or even Oracle. They could be in Excel spreadsheets.
SQL is not relational. Tables are not relations. MySQL is not SQL, even Oracle is not proper SQL.
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I believe it's doomed because it requires that file objects be categorised, and be categorised largely manually. A computer simply isn't going to know what.MOV files contain films by Spielberg.
This is stupid. Today a user has to save a file with a name in a place in a hierarchy. It is even easier for a system to suggest the input of a few fields according to the type of the file... not to mention several file types carry their own info.
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Yes, on a technical level, I *can*, despite your comments, find ways to cleanly hierarchically categorise my files. The fact that I don't isn't because it's a hierarchy, it's because it's a huge amount of effort even given the best tools to do the job.
Tools haven't nothing to do with it, but the fact that different users, and even the same user at different times and moods, want to put the same info at different nodes, or several ones at the same time. It is simply a pain.
Google isn't accurate in the kind of terms we're talking about here.
Then I fear we are not communicating... what are your terms? For me, Google is a database, and it gives (or should give) accurate answers according to its contents.
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I can do a search on a keyword and find websites that have little or nothing to do with that keyword.
Because that keyword is related to those websites in Google's database...
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It's "good enough", not "accurate".
So what would be accurate? Actually, if what you want is "a perfect answer to my query", that doesn't exist by no fault of Google or its database, but simply because no such answer exists... probably even you query is an approximation only of what you really need, and there's no guarantee a correct answer exists and is attainable.
You have to define your scope before you can talk meaningfully.
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I've said an inaccurate system is preferable to an accurate but manually maintained one. A hierarchical system is an example of the latter, not the former. Unfortunately, an table based system is ALSO an example of the latter, not the former.
So what's the problem? None I can see... an SQL system can be more automated than a hierarchy, while at the same time enabling richer manual data entry if desired and much richer user interaction.
In fact, while a hierarchy has to be completely manually maintained, with automatic indexes only pointing to specific nodes in it, a database can combine automatic metadata and indexes with manually maintained, but optional, metada.
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But a system that has a "search box" but requires users set up keywords for every single object they store just will not cut it.
No such thing needed. You already have to place things in a hierarchy and give them name. Now suppose one really wants to keep the user interface for file creation stable. No problem, just present a hierachy to the user, and allow him to give names as before. Only, capture all this information in a relational (or SQL) database -- the fs interface was maintained for the user, but with the addition of richer querying capabilities. No harm done, much gained.
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I have difficulty enough categorising files and putting them in nice, neat, little directories, despite having a dozen ways of doing it and despite two decades (1983 Apple Lisa) to present of sustained, focussed, user interface development, and even longer of trial and error. How is a table based system (SQL is a misnomer, it's merely an interface, it isn't the mechanism) going to help?
Simple, by not needing a hierarchy to categorise. For example, I maintain some categories in DMoz, including -- guess it -- Computers/Software/Databases/Relational.
Now in a relational system, I could say simply Relational -- all the rest is implied, and unnecessary. I could still put it in a specific place in the hierarchy, but this would be merely a presentation gimmick, without imposing storage constraints.
Now suppose Relational also has a Psicology meaning, as it probably has. No problem, Informatics and Relational would be specific enough for me, and still less trouble than going over the hierarchy.
In practice, the URL string itself, the title of the referred page, the URL name and the explanation associated with it all would be automatically part of the database, so that a query like Relational and Manifesto would give me even more specific resources, without neither requiring nor ruling out subdirectories navigation.
You have to understand relations and hierarchies aren't realy comparable... relations are richer; they can store hierarchies, and so enable everything hierarchies do, without their ass
In databases we have the Closed World Assumption. The database is a logical system full of predicates; it thus represents a set of assertions. Whatever is there, is assumed to be true; whatever isn't, is assumed to be false
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The problem with focussing on an accurate database is that it takes huge amounts of maintenance, and cannot be done automatically.
Yet metadata culled from automatic processes -- naming of Office documents, tags in audio, text and video files, keywords from text files -- is usually good enough. What SQL is bringing is a little bit more structure, and thus power, depending on the data model implemented.
So what's the problem, exactly? How SQL, or Storage, would "discourage use"? I'd much rather give five or so keywords to a new document than find its place in the hierarchy.
Slashdot Mirror
> what does compatibility gain mySQL?
It is not about what it gives MySQL, but users. I for one want standards compliance so that I can change DBMSs as a user, or port my software as a vendor.
> the commercial solutions are hard to setup, unstable and terribly difficult to maintain, and this is after a small fortune has been invested in making them work
This is simply not true about Digital (now Oracle) RDB on VMS clusters, nor about IBM DB2. Perhaps not even about Oracle 9. I mean the unstability and difficulty part, price is high obviously.
Obviously part of the difficulty and price is inherent to the problem, as there are not only products but lotsa services associated.
> Not to knock the open source solution, but it's hard to beleive that something that is infrequently used and difficult to understand will be truly production quality if you want to use it for money.
PostgreSQL is pretty mature, with a commercially supported 2-years old solution having just been freed, and thus in widening use.
Even if you take SCO's 'facts' at face value, all it would amount to is a vindication of FSF's copy rights assignment policy, created exactly to prevent such claims.
BTW, I write copy rights intentionally.
> That is a far cry from gaining power through a free and fair ballot.
Yet the ballot, especially if minoritary, doesn't allow for a revolution against democracy itself.
Whatever the means, the ends where the same: a totalitarist state, even if misnamed communist.
> the USSR was responsible for the deaths of approx 20m (most during the stalin purges), that is only a 3rd of the amount required to meet the order of magnitude
Yet it makes it thrice as much as Nazism, even without accounting for Stalin share of responsibility in the War.
> the population of China was approx 7 times that of Germany and the countries Germany controlled
That still would make it proportionally higher, even without accounting for China's role on the Asian Southeast and Korea.
> what has totalitarian dictatorships got to do with a democratically elected government?
That specific government was part of a war to establish totalitarianism, or at least perceived as being so.
Monty Python's The Holy Grail
Thanks!
If it can gain a workable pronunciation without them, yes. But nee without accent becomes something like [ni:], which I not so humbly suggest isn't quite nice.
About Reference.com, it isn't enough of an authority.
Actually I think I was too lax with words. Certainly social democrats in Europe weren't controlled by the KGB, even if the KGB now and then certainly used some of their elements.
So substitute 'revolutionary socialist' for 'leftist', and then I stand by my words. With the exceptions, obviously, of China, Yugoslav and Albania which broke with URSS and the Comintern after having became totalitarist states themselves, which is hardly a redeeming grace... nevertheless, I will continue to use leftist in what follows, since nowadays social democrats have became the effective center at both Europe and Latin America, and 'revolutionary socialists' having simply too many letters for a /. post.
The means of gaining power are immaterial... it just happened at the time, after the Cuban missile crisis, that the ballot was the Comintern tatic for Latin America. It is a tribute to democracy that it survived these elections (also in Argentina and Brazil), the consequent military internal reaction, and returned eventually as dictatorship failed to take roots.
But if you widen your scope of consideration, you can see that leftist troops were welcomed in Vietnam, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe... yet they quickly became totalitarist.
Actually one should differentiate between an autocratic dictatorship and a totalitarist one. With this in mind, the equivalent of the sovietic regime and its followers isn't the Franco-style integrist regime and its Latin American counterparts, but Nazism. I am at a loss at finding a leftist equivalent to the autocratic rightist dictatorship, if memory don't fail me they all became totalitarist states in various degrees, with Poland and Yugoslav perhaps being the milder ones.
Many rightist autocratic dictatorships never became murderous to the scale of the Spanish Civil War or the Pinochet regime; Brazil being the clear example here. Nearly all of them reverted to democratic rules, the longest living perhaps being the Franco regime at Spain; while the leftist rule typically took at least 40 years, and still endures to one-fifth of the World's population.
Take China or the Soviet Union at your choice. OK, perhaps the 'order of magnitude' part is not fair given both countries were individually more populous each then Germany, but still they killed more -- and worse, without even needing wars or singling out a racial minority; they killed their own people simply for not conforming.
I forget the exact numbers, but while Germany killed some 6M Jews, Gypsies, Sodomites and some assorted others, URSS killed around 20M Russians and China, more than 60M Han with the combination of forced mass migrations, hunger, summary judgements and plain political assassination.
Now if you add to Nazi deaths the ones incurred in war, you will have to count all the revolutionary wars, both classic and guerrilla, caused by the KGB, its antecessors in the URSS and its equivalents in China and elsewhere; and you should probably split some of Nazi deaths with the URSS, since the Ribentropp-Molotov pact actually enabled Hitler to actually begin the War!
Actually not. I am just extrapolating from known facts, such as Allende's Ministers of State supporting the leftist armed rebellions by units of Chilean armed forces against themselves... there are many other elements to consider, like the striking parallels with other countries' Histories, like mine own Brazil.
Sure one can't be absolutely sure. But people act on probabilities; at the time, the probability of a sovietic revolution in Chile just seemed to big to ignore...
No, I am not. Actually what happened was that he got only 30% of the vote; Chilean constitution at the time requested the Congress to choose the President if no candidate got 50%. The Congress, split between almost equal parts left, center and right -- just as the presidential vote --, decided to award the Presidency to the candidate with more votes, forgetting the center and right were traditionally allies and the left couldn't be trusted to respect the Constitution and the electorate, as it actually despised 'burgeois democracy'. So Allende and his people tried to revolutionise Chile, despite having received just a presidential mandate... again I refer you to Carlos Rangel's work.
Events in Southeastern Asia proved it right, with Laos and Cambodja falling straight after South Vietnam and leftist guerillas persisting in the area to this day; similarly Chile, Nicaragua and other countries had their leftist guerillas and subversives supported by Cuba. This was a worldwide pattern directly attributable to the Comintern strategy.
This one flew over my head...
Just because one is monoglot^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hanglophone it doesn't mean one shouldn't try to write accents when necessary... nee doesn't mean anything, the French word meaning born being nee in the feminine, masculine ne.
Not really. While GNU/Linux was nowhere nearly as useful as it is today, it could already do things MS Windows can't do today. More importantly, it did so with decent performance and reliability and a compatible API, what means you probably can run much modern software there. Now try running modern software on MS Windows 3.0, or even finding old software to run on it...
Nice point, and made with a touch of poetry at that.
But things aren't really so dire. Actually while comprehensive knowledge is inherently impossible, real even if imperfect knowledge is possible indeed -- se for example Francis A Schaeffer's He is There and He is not Silent, a Christian study on the three fields of Philosophy, namely Metaphics, Ethics and, more germane to this thread, Epistemology.
Yes, like in another Cuba, with its mass imprisonments, exile and killings, as well as exportation of mercenaries to help in revolutions in America and Africa. Or better yet, as in North Korea, China, the URSS or whichever other equivalent.
Yet had Allende's revolution been allowed to continue, him or his successors would certainly have either put the system to less noble uses, or at least its components after dismantled...
Is a fascist dream to pass the government to a freely elected successor after stamping down the attempt to turn the country into a stalinist dictatorship, possibly hereditary like Cuba or North Korea? Perhaps, after all that's what happened with the most famous fascist after the Duce, namely Franco...
No, but I don't doubt it. I am not trying to write Pinochet's hagiography, as leftists do with Allende. But you have to be really naive to think the KGB and its Chilean affiliate would do any better if Allende were permitted to continue handing Chile to the URSS.
Get your facts straight. The leftist opposition was persecuted and very often murdered, but this is still better than squashing or killing all opposition as has been done behind the Iron Curtain, and would certainly been done in Chile as well.
Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario is a nice eye-opener.
Yes, and some people still believe Stalin was a nice guy.
In fact, even if the US really helped ejecting Allende and boycotts Cuba to this day, most of Chile's woes were, and Cuba's are, self-inflicted. While the Soviet Union endured, it subsidised Cuba with the equivalent of at least US$ 10G per annuum, or US$ 1K per inhabitant, by doubling the market price of sugar cane it imported from and halving the price of petrol it exported to Cuba; Castro had promised to rid Cuba of supposedly US-serving sugar cane monoculture that accounted for 80% of its economy, and ended up turning it into a URSS-serving monoculture accounting for 90% of its economy.
Obviously the economy is not as important as the suppression of opponents, the creation of a URSS beachhead in America and specially the establishment of a de facto absolutist, hereditary monarchy. Which Pinochet hasn't done, in fact passing the power peacefully to a civilian successor when his fears of a leftist revolution had been allayed.
But what he tried was a violent, inconstitutional revolution. And BTW, he lacked even popular legitimacy to do so, having been elected with only 30% of the valid votes due to a division in the opposition.
Stop blaming the CIA. While it helped, the power was taken by the Chilean military. Same in Brazil, Argentina and most other countries were a leftist revolution has been preempted, short of banana republics like Granado.
If you take into account that Cuba, China, North Vietnam and North Korea are still dictatorships, and that the URSS endured 70 years and the Iron Curtain 40, while Chile's, Brazil's and most other countries' US-allied dictatorships endured 20 years or less, with the notable exceptions of the autoctone regimes of Portugal and Spain; then indeed the US cared for democracy, even if out of the self-interest motive of the Domino Theory, which incidentally was proven right.
You should give Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario a try.
How is that even comparable to the much more numerous killings perpetrated in the much longer dictatorship in Cuba, which is the nearer example of what-would-have-happened?
This taking only Latin America into account... don't even get me started about the Iron and Bamboo Curtains countries.
It is true two wrongs don't make a right, but in this case I fear it was really choosing the lesser evil.
Check Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario.
Thank you for seeing the point. People in the US can't really get a notion of how much leftist brainwashing takes place south of the Rio Grande, or across the pond... I always have a laugh when I see US people complaining about the "liberal" bias in their own communication channels.
If XX century History is any guide, I'd say 99,999... percent chance.
Again if the XX century History is to be taken in account, probably a leftist government would have caused at least an order of magnitude more deaths. And this because Pinochet's rule was easily the worst military government in South America, the Brazilian case in special being notable by the relatively low levels of violence employed by the military and their government.
Check Carlos Rangel's Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario.
Supposing you were right (I happen to disagree), the natural (and planned) course of the socialist revolution he was leading would have created a perhaps richer, but certainly no more democratic Cuba... even if Allende himself would have needed to be assassinated by hard-core revolutionaires later.
If you can get past the leftist hagiography that clouds real History, Chile was already in destabilization phase of a typical revolution, with Ministers of State helping armed socialist rebellions in the armed forces against their own constitutional power, just as Brizola's and Preste's groups had tried in Jango's Brazil ten years earlier.
A very interesting book that unveils this and others Latin American legends is Del Buen Salvage al Buen Revolucionario by Carlos Rangel, a rightist Venezuelan journalist.
Just check the news: there are always Pinochet followers ready to defend him at Chile.
Have you considered the possibility that the perceptions of Chileans living abroad is biased by the fact that they or their parents left Chile as exiles? A sad situation, but not a proof they are in the right.
But supposing you were right, and I agree Pinochet isn't quite a nice guy, how would him be worse than a Cuba-style KGB-sponsored government is that I fail to see. In the balance of the XX century, the left has killed more than the right easily.
Two wrongs don't make a right...
Actually, if it is a fact that CIA sponsored this specific coup, it is also a fact that Chile was in economic, social, political and juridical disarray due to Allende's allies trying to turn it into a richer, southern Cuba, with KGB aid. Between KGB and CIA, I'll side with CIA every time.
Pacifism fails to reckon sometimes you need violence to forestall even more violence and other evils.
In theory yes, but what if Allende had succeeded in turning Chile in a southern Cuba? I bet KGB or whatever would want a try at finding its way around the initial design constraints...
So were most of the leftists I've know. There is even a name for them: useful innocents.
Now, Google *is* a database! What is the difference?! It may not use tables and SQL, but that's pretty much immaterial... SQL has its limitations, but something like Google can and should be implemented over a relational system.
But I never said that. What I am trying to say is that while SQL has its limitations, a relational system can be used to index content in a much more powerful and flexible way than simply indexes-over-hierarchy we have today, while preserving the legacy interfaces. This power is a relational feature.
You are messing the physical and logical levels. Relational systems, and SQL to a measure, present a logical interface. The back-end storage can be DBM, a graph, ISAM files, even SQL itself; but the real juice is the logical interface. It is on the logical interface that human interfaces are built; in this case, Storage can present a Gnome Google-like search interface to a SQL database, in parallel with a legacy filesystem interface, at the same time as it can allow richer queries.
A Google-like search isn't excluded by SQL, why it should be?
You are definetly mixing levels. To repeat, Google is but an interface. It does have structured data, as in file types, domains, language etc associated with each page. There is no reason it can't be stored either relationally or in SQL, preferrably relationally.
SQL is not relational. Tables are not relations. MySQL is not SQL, even Oracle is not proper SQL.
This is stupid. Today a user has to save a file with a name in a place in a hierarchy. It is even easier for a system to suggest the input of a few fields according to the type of the file... not to mention several file types carry their own info.
Tools haven't nothing to do with it, but the fact that different users, and even the same user at different times and moods, want to put the same info at different nodes, or several ones at the same time. It is simply a pain.
Then I fear we are not communicating... what are your terms? For me, Google is a database, and it gives (or should give) accurate answers according to its contents.
Because that keyword is related to those websites in Google's database...
So what would be accurate? Actually, if what you want is "a perfect answer to my query", that doesn't exist by no fault of Google or its database, but simply because no such answer exists... probably even you query is an approximation only of what you really need, and there's no guarantee a correct answer exists and is attainable.
You have to define your scope before you can talk meaningfully.
So what's the problem? None I can see... an SQL system can be more automated than a hierarchy, while at the same time enabling richer manual data entry if desired and much richer user interaction.
In fact, while a hierarchy has to be completely manually maintained, with automatic indexes only pointing to specific nodes in it, a database can combine automatic metadata and indexes with manually maintained, but optional, metada.
No such thing needed. You already have to place things in a hierarchy and give them name. Now suppose one really wants to keep the user interface for file creation stable. No problem, just present a hierachy to the user, and allow him to give names as before. Only, capture all this information in a relational (or SQL) database -- the fs interface was maintained for the user, but with the addition of richer querying capabilities. No harm done, much gained.
Simple, by not needing a hierarchy to categorise. For example, I maintain some categories in DMoz, including -- guess it -- Computers/Software/Databases/Relational.
Now in a relational system, I could say simply Relational -- all the rest is implied, and unnecessary. I could still put it in a specific place in the hierarchy, but this would be merely a presentation gimmick, without imposing storage constraints.
Now suppose Relational also has a Psicology meaning, as it probably has. No problem, Informatics and Relational would be specific enough for me, and still less trouble than going over the hierarchy.
In practice, the URL string itself, the title of the referred page, the URL name and the explanation associated with it all would be automatically part of the database, so that a query like Relational and Manifesto would give me even more specific resources, without neither requiring nor ruling out subdirectories navigation.
You have to understand relations and hierarchies aren't realy comparable... relations are richer; they can store hierarchies, and so enable everything hierarchies do, without their ass
Yes, within its constraints.
In databases we have the Closed World Assumption. The database is a logical system full of predicates; it thus represents a set of assertions. Whatever is there, is assumed to be true; whatever isn't, is assumed to be false
Yet metadata culled from automatic processes -- naming of Office documents, tags in audio, text and video files, keywords from text files -- is usually good enough. What SQL is bringing is a little bit more structure, and thus power, depending on the data model implemented.
So what's the problem, exactly? How SQL, or Storage, would "discourage use"? I'd much rather give five or so keywords to a new document than find its place in the hierarchy.
They may think "relational", but usually actually meaning only SQL. Unfortunately SQL is just a corruption from the relational model...