There have been several intelligent replies to this post already, but no concise summary, and there may still be people out there confused about the issue.
Stored Proceedures are a method of associating functionality with a database in such a way that the database server itself manages the operation of the code. The proceedures may be invoked manually via an SQL statement, or automatically via a trigger.
It is a given that any moderately advanced database application will have some operations which by design need to be close to the data, from the managerial and I/O views.
The salient question is whether a particular design is best served by putting the database server in charge of the proceedures, or by running them in a layer above the database. This upper layer may in fact be on the same machine, and it may be the only object which has direct access to the database. In this case, it would appear to other applications to be the same either way. They make a request, and "stuff happens" that they don't need to worry about.
At this point the answer to the question depends on very specific design requirements of the database and the upper layer. There is no general right answer! In any a "mission critical" enviornment stored proceedures may be prefered because changes to the data structures and code may be tied together more easily. In a "low end" environment, the benefits may be negligable.
I will go out on a limb and propose that if you don't know if you need them, you don't need them. I will also suggest that if you think you "can't" do without them you are probably wrong.
This entire discussion comes down to The Right Tool For The Job, and There's More Than One Way To Do It. It's an important discussion, but no more important than Which Programming Language(s), Which Standard Library, CORBA vs SOAP vs COM, or even UDP vs TCP.
Anyone with a personal stake in the discussion is needlessly burning energy on what often comes down to Academic Wanking.
I've been working at dig.com since April, and we use OpenSSH on all our unix boxes. We use a bunch of other free software, and nobody thinks it's risky or anything. We could certainly afford commercial software if it provided anything we couldn't get in free software.
As it turns out, the prevailing attitude is that with commercial software we have to involve the vendor every time we want to do anything remotely unusual. If we improve the tool, the vendor probably won't support it. If the vendor improves the tool, they will probably require more money and a needlessly complicated upgrade for us to benefit from it.
Stand up to your managers. Don't just tell them that Free Is Better, show them.
Stop saying "I defend my right to shoot my neighbor because if I didn't have a gun I'd stab him" and start saying "I defend my right to bear firearms."
I completely agree that the principles themselves should stand without explination. The problem is that the few people who haven't made their minds up need something to point them in the right direction. The right to bear arms is severely challenged right now, as are many other rights which were sacred to the old white men who founded the US.
Slashdot has its flamewars, but when we talk rationally we tend to agree on a few basic things which we might be tempted to call common sense. These things are not obvious to the rest of the world, and "because I can do it anyway" is one way to begin explaining why prohibition, strong gun control, extreme intellectual property laws, and other victimless crime laws have never worked and never will. The ones who've made up their minds will trot out their "if it saves one kid" and their "we have to do something", but there's hope for the others, and these arguments are a start.
There is another element of your post which I should address. Your original point seemed to be that we should be campaining for our rights to do harmless things instead of defending the implied rights to do what might be destructive things. That is, the right to bear arms, versus the right to use them against others. This distinction is also lost on far too many people.
There are two sides to this. One is the "prohibit everything by default and allow only what is sanctioned" school of security. Why would you want to own a gun? There's nothing good that could come of it. Why would you want to grow that plant? Why would you want to drink that toxin? It's for your own good. This approach to security assumes that the rule-maker knows everything, and that the rules actually restrict the ruled. These are easy assumptions to be trapped in!
The other side of the lost distinction between freedom to choose and freedom to choose poorly is that people assume that there is a way to elect "better" choosers to make the decions for the "worse" choosers. That is, "we" elect
"them" to protect "us" for our own good. The obvious problem with that is that if we are poor choosers we are likely to pick the wrong people. There are many other problems with this, but my post is getting too long and has almost nothing to do with digital vs analog piracy.
The 3000 was great. It was fast and looked good, for its time. What killed 3dfx was that they didn't keep up the pace.
John Carmack warned them (not directly) when he wrote about wanting 32bits through the entire pipe, and 64 soon after. He explained about cumulative round off errors, use of the alpha channel, and other ways in which lots of data makes sense.
Woe be to any who do not heed the word of someone who Knows His Shit.
"IBM's Ice Cube project aims to define a way for end users to easily maintain increasing amounts of data, while also plowing ground for a similar approach to computing systems."
Ice Cube? Lemme guess: They sell a bandwidth package for Internet hosting called "Ice T"
Their bandwidth monitoring and packet sniffer is called "Snoop Dog."
Oh wait...IBM's PS/2 had the MCA bus. Maybe that was a Beastie Boys reference. Maybe IBM has been into Rap and the like for a long time...
Open Source and Free Software are heavily based in the ideals of anarchism and communism, and many of us are athiest or agnostic.
I don't have a problem with this, but _they_ do. This isn't really that funny. It's a clash between the age of pisces and the age of aquarius, much like a similiar clash 2000 years ago, and one 2000 years before that...
Don't take them too seriously, but don't discard them as complete nuts, either. These people are holding views which were sacred to a much wider community in the past. 2000 years from now (if anyone's still around), this will happen again, and _our_ views will be the silly ones.
The focal point of the mirror would have to be far enough away from the surface of the CD so that the angle of incidence is low enough that the laser doesn't bounce off the surface of the plastic. This would make the size of the no-moving-parts CD-ROM drive pretty big.
This device would also be MORE vulnerable to physical shock then current designs due to the difficulty of aiming at that range. Current designs put the lens of the laser within a few mm of the surface, but with a big mirror it'd be more like 10-20cm. It isn't important that the accuracy of the aiming be high, but the precision does need to be so that no tracks are skipped.
This device would be useful for recovery of data from damaged disks, but not for everyday use.
While I'm ill-equipped to evaluate the veracity of the technical elements of your post, I am confident I can shed light on the economic point.
Spreading a single product over a wide range of market demands and pricepoints allows companies like Intel and AMD to spread the cost of making the chips over a wider range of customers. If they didn't sell a crippled chip for slightly more than it cost to make, and a normal chip for way more, then they'd have to make up the profit somewhere else. They'd have to average the profit over their un-crippled products, which means the cheapest part they made would be more expensive than a certain market segment would be willing to pay. That means they'd not get that market segment's money at all, so they'd have to increase their profit margins even more to bring in the same return on investment.
(Venturing into off-topic here...)
It's a little like insurance. Insurance companies will charge everyone as much as they can so they can insure as many people as they can. Own an expensive car? You can probably afford expensive insurance. Nevermind that you may statistically cost the insurance company less (or not, as the case may be).
Much of what we identify with capitalism, religion and government is really just ways of spreading our challenges out so that the pain of any one member of the group is well below his or her threshold of intollerance. This helps the social organism and the individual survive traumas which would otherwise threaten the survival of the individuals and the group.
Now, that's not to say that any of these particular systems is best. Nature adapts, and as long as we exist we will keep improving on what we know. I'm just saying that what looks from first glance to be simple greed actually serves a greater purpose in a bigger context....sometimes.
There is no reason why a text interface should be challenging to people. It's no more difficult to use a text interface than to drive a stick shift or program a VCR...
damn, I think I just defeated my own argument.
It most certainly isn't dead and never was.
on
Unix Isn't Dead
·
· Score: 2
It was resting...and pining for the fjords.
I'm sure John Cleese would back me up on this one.
However, as I've seen with my little sister and her friends (and others of the pre-teen to teen age group), they have "grown up" on free music whenever they want it, so "why buy the CD?". At this young age, none of them had given any thought (nor had I at that age) to Intellectual Property and the other issues regularly discussed in the heyday of Napster.
I hope anyone who buys anything from me does so because they feel what I offer has value and they wish to cooperate with me by exchanging some money for some goods or services. I'd be sickened if I thought I was only paid because people thought they had to pay me.
I don't think trade is something we learn by experience, but rather it's something which springs up naturally from a feeling of respect.
On the other hand, intellectual property is a very strange concept indeed, and I will probably release all of my intellectual or artistic creations as public domain. The amount of work I put into them doesn't change with their popularity. Their value to others may be greater, and I would accept any compensation offered, but once the information is released, it has a life of its own.
The page shows up all bold and centered on mozilla.
As to the actual content, an event like this would last about as long as the time yahoo et all were DDoS'd. The media would play it up as a big deal, and we techs would just fix it.
wav (minus inaudible) -> mp3 will NOT throw anything away because the wav is already has less information than the original wav. That is, nothing needs to be thrown away to make the data fit into 128kbits/s or 192kbits/s or whatever. That is, since the information was lost the first time it doesn't need to be lost again.
that the second mp3 stage will be at a distinctly lower quality than the first mp3 stage? Is there discussion of this somewhere that you can point me to?
This may be redundant since I browse at 4, but I saw no mention in the entire article of the prices of the CPUs and their support hardware.
Pricewatch doesn't list 2.4Ghz P4s yet, but a P4 2.2 mb/cpu combo is $570, and the Athlon 2100 combo is under $300. The fastest Intel mb/cpu combo under $300 listed is 1.9Ghz, which can NOT keep up with an Athlon 2100 setup.
There's certainly more to a purchasing decision than price and performance, and I don't expect every article to cover every angle, but the disparity in price/performance ratios between the companies seems VERY signifiant to me.
Perhaps this article is too targeted for gamers. Business and home users will be more concerned with economy, and professional high-performance users (server/workstation/research) will probably spring for dual processors if raw throughput is so important.
I saw a few comments at threshold 4 saying this would be against the Acceptable Use Policy of a lot of providers, and that it would be better to get dedicated bandwidth (a T1) to do this.
Well, how about it? How much is a T1 these days? Could this pay for itself, or even compete with DSL?
I'm used to seeing full T1s sell for around $1k a month. I would have to recover around $1000 to be breaking even. I'm in downtown Seattle, so I think if this idea took off I'd have a rich pool of potential drive-by customers, but I'd also have a lot of coffee house and bar customers. There are about a dozen bars and coffee houses within 2000 feet of my apartment.
The Joltage site is a little sketchy about financial details, but their hourly rate is $2. They also say that the "hot spot" (me in this case) gets half of the revenue. That means I'd have to accumulate 1000 hours a month combined to recoup the $1000 a month I'd be paying for my T1. If 20 users consistantly used my net for 2.5 hours per business day (of which there are aprox 20 in a month), it would work. Is this realistic?
Right now I don't think it is. All the customers who might be interested already have solutions in place. The only way this could take off would be if they signed up people who already have bandwidth they can give away and who won't suffer if noone uses them. There are a few internet caffes around here who might be interested since they already have net AND they already re-sell it to their existing customers. The overhead would be a little lower for them and it could attract more customers. This project looks tenuous at best.
"if you are living with the parent then your[sic] subject to their rules."
As soon as you phrase the relationship that way, you've converted it into a confrontation. It's not that what you say is false, but that resting on it does a huge disservice to everyone involved. As other posters have already stated, the child gets a clear message that they are expected to do "the wrong thing". Some of them will translate that into "I am a bad kid." It does a disservice to the parents because they have to be on guard at all times now that they've put it up. It also puts up a wall between, not around, the members of the family.
This is true of any relationship. Overprotective boyfriends and girlfriends scare healthy lovers off. Overdefensive companies (how many stables did you use?) frustrate and drive off their best employees. Churches, clubs, and governments are all the same. Relationships built on mutal respect are FAR stronger and more effective than those built on fear or force. The age and genetic relationship of the individuals involved is of minor importance in the analysis.
Any parent who straps a GPS locator on a child over 10 has probably already failed to build the trust which should come naturally from being trustworthy and ever-present.
[Disclaimer: My parents didn't watch me closely, but I ran away to live with my (then 28yo) sister when I was 16 anyway. I'm 28 and have no children of my own yet. My view is clearly biased.]
Slashdot Mirror
There have been several intelligent replies to this post already, but no concise summary, and there may still be people out there confused about the issue.
Stored Proceedures are a method of associating functionality with a database in such a way that the database server itself manages the operation of the code. The proceedures may be invoked manually via an SQL statement, or automatically via a trigger.
It is a given that any moderately advanced database application will have some operations which by design need to be close to the data, from the managerial and I/O views.
The salient question is whether a particular design is best served by putting the database server in charge of the proceedures, or by running them in a layer above the database. This upper layer may in fact be on the same machine, and it may be the only object which has direct access to the database. In this case, it would appear to other applications to be the same either way. They make a request, and "stuff happens" that they don't need to worry about.
At this point the answer to the question depends on very specific design requirements of the database and the upper layer. There is no general right answer! In any a "mission critical" enviornment stored proceedures may be prefered because changes to the data structures and code may be tied together more easily. In a "low end" environment, the benefits may be negligable.
I will go out on a limb and propose that if you don't know if you need them, you don't need them. I will also suggest that if you think you "can't" do without them you are probably wrong.
This entire discussion comes down to The Right Tool For The Job, and There's More Than One Way To Do It. It's an important discussion, but no more important than Which Programming Language(s), Which Standard Library, CORBA vs SOAP vs COM, or even UDP vs TCP.
Anyone with a personal stake in the discussion is needlessly burning energy on what often comes down to Academic Wanking.
Thankyoupleasedrivethrough.
I've been working at dig.com since April, and we use OpenSSH on all our unix boxes. We use a bunch of other free software, and nobody thinks it's risky or anything. We could certainly afford commercial software if it provided anything we couldn't get in free software.
As it turns out, the prevailing attitude is that with commercial software we have to involve the vendor every time we want to do anything remotely unusual. If we improve the tool, the vendor probably won't support it. If the vendor improves the tool, they will probably require more money and a needlessly complicated upgrade for us to benefit from it.
Stand up to your managers. Don't just tell them that Free Is Better, show them.
It's part of their plan to win Wimbledon by turning everyone into Scots so the alien pastries are the only competent tennis players.
"Angus Pudgorny, whatever do ya mean?"
"He wasna so much a man... as he was... a blanc mange."
bah, Christian must have changed it since the last time I checked. Once more I must savor the taste of fresh foot.
If it breaks 98%, it's probably not standard.
Show me what non-standard thing you do that can't be done within the standards without breaking a popular browser?
As someone else pointed out,
/td
/tr
/table
/form
form
table
tr
td input
works.
Not only that, but div tags are an even better way to do layout. Check out my friend's completely table-less site:
http://thatsnice.org/
and check out my table-less weblog:
http://defore.st/
Tables are great for tabular data, but they're not so great for layout.
Stop saying "I defend my right to shoot my neighbor because if I didn't have a gun I'd stab him" and start saying "I defend my right to bear firearms."
I completely agree that the principles themselves should stand without explination. The problem is that the few people who haven't made their minds up need something to point them in the right direction. The right to bear arms is severely challenged right now, as are many other rights which were sacred to the old white men who founded the US.
Slashdot has its flamewars, but when we talk rationally we tend to agree on a few basic things which we might be tempted to call common sense. These things are not obvious to the rest of the world, and "because I can do it anyway" is one way to begin explaining why prohibition, strong gun control, extreme intellectual property laws, and other victimless crime laws have never worked and never will. The ones who've made up their minds will trot out their "if it saves one kid" and their "we have to do something", but there's hope for the others, and these arguments are a start.
There is another element of your post which I should address. Your original point seemed to be that we should be campaining for our rights to do harmless things instead of defending the implied rights to do what might be destructive things. That is, the right to bear arms, versus the right to use them against others. This distinction is also lost on far too many people.
There are two sides to this. One is the "prohibit everything by default and allow only what is sanctioned" school of security. Why would you want to own a gun? There's nothing good that could come of it. Why would you want to grow that plant? Why would you want to drink that toxin? It's for your own good. This approach to security assumes that the rule-maker knows everything, and that the rules actually restrict the ruled. These are easy assumptions to be trapped in!
The other side of the lost distinction between freedom to choose and freedom to choose poorly is that people assume that there is a way to elect "better" choosers to make the decions for the "worse" choosers. That is, "we" elect "them" to protect "us" for our own good. The obvious problem with that is that if we are poor choosers we are likely to pick the wrong people. There are many other problems with this, but my post is getting too long and has almost nothing to do with digital vs analog piracy.
"... used it in an attempt to weave his own little tale about how big government is bad."
No, he sided with the Empire, the biggest government in the galaxy.
The 3000 was great. It was fast and looked good, for its time. What killed 3dfx was that they didn't keep up the pace.
John Carmack warned them (not directly) when he wrote about wanting 32bits through the entire pipe, and 64 soon after. He explained about cumulative round off errors, use of the alpha channel, and other ways in which lots of data makes sense.
Woe be to any who do not heed the word of someone who Knows His Shit.
"IBM's Ice Cube project aims to define a way for end users to easily maintain increasing amounts of data, while also plowing ground for a similar approach to computing systems."
Ice Cube? Lemme guess: They sell a bandwidth package for Internet hosting called "Ice T"
Their bandwidth monitoring and packet sniffer is called "Snoop Dog."
Oh wait...IBM's PS/2 had the MCA bus. Maybe that was a Beastie Boys reference. Maybe IBM has been into Rap and the like for a long time...
Open Source and Free Software are heavily based in the ideals of anarchism and communism, and many of us are athiest or agnostic.
I don't have a problem with this, but _they_ do. This isn't really that funny. It's a clash between the age of pisces and the age of aquarius, much like a similiar clash 2000 years ago, and one 2000 years before that...
Don't take them too seriously, but don't discard them as complete nuts, either. These people are holding views which were sacred to a much wider community in the past. 2000 years from now (if anyone's still around), this will happen again, and _our_ views will be the silly ones.
I was finishing the obvious South Park referencee.
The focal point of the mirror would have to be far enough away from the surface of the CD so that the angle of incidence is low enough that the laser doesn't bounce off the surface of the plastic. This would make the size of the no-moving-parts CD-ROM drive pretty big.
This device would also be MORE vulnerable to physical shock then current designs due to the difficulty of aiming at that range. Current designs put the lens of the laser within a few mm of the surface, but with a big mirror it'd be more like 10-20cm. It isn't important that the accuracy of the aiming be high, but the precision does need to be so that no tracks are skipped.
This device would be useful for recovery of data from damaged disks, but not for everyday use.
Are you suggesting MS's biggest (only?) competition is underwear gnomes?
Hm, Gnomes...perhaps it's time for an underwear theme for Gnome...
While I'm ill-equipped to evaluate the veracity of the technical elements of your post, I am confident I can shed light on the economic point.
Spreading a single product over a wide range of market demands and pricepoints allows companies like Intel and AMD to spread the cost of making the chips over a wider range of customers. If they didn't sell a crippled chip for slightly more than it cost to make, and a normal chip for way more, then they'd have to make up the profit somewhere else. They'd have to average the profit over their un-crippled products, which means the cheapest part they made would be more expensive than a certain market segment would be willing to pay. That means they'd not get that market segment's money at all, so they'd have to increase their profit margins even more to bring in the same return on investment.
(Venturing into off-topic here...)
It's a little like insurance. Insurance companies will charge everyone as much as they can so they can insure as many people as they can. Own an expensive car? You can probably afford expensive insurance. Nevermind that you may statistically cost the insurance company less (or not, as the case may be).
Much of what we identify with capitalism, religion and government is really just ways of spreading our challenges out so that the pain of any one member of the group is well below his or her threshold of intollerance. This helps the social organism and the individual survive traumas which would otherwise threaten the survival of the individuals and the group.
Now, that's not to say that any of these particular systems is best. Nature adapts, and as long as we exist we will keep improving on what we know. I'm just saying that what looks from first glance to be simple greed actually serves a greater purpose in a bigger context....sometimes.
There is no reason why a text interface should be challenging to people. It's no more difficult to use a text interface than to drive a stick shift or program a VCR...
damn, I think I just defeated my own argument.
It was resting...and pining for the fjords.
I'm sure John Cleese would back me up on this one.
I hope anyone who buys anything from me does so because they feel what I offer has value and they wish to cooperate with me by exchanging some money for some goods or services. I'd be sickened if I thought I was only paid because people thought they had to pay me.
I don't think trade is something we learn by experience, but rather it's something which springs up naturally from a feeling of respect.
On the other hand, intellectual property is a very strange concept indeed, and I will probably release all of my intellectual or artistic creations as public domain. The amount of work I put into them doesn't change with their popularity. Their value to others may be greater, and I would accept any compensation offered, but once the information is released, it has a life of its own.
...if the author had closed his h3 tag.
The page shows up all bold and centered on mozilla.
As to the actual content, an event like this would last about as long as the time yahoo et all were DDoS'd. The media would play it up as a big deal, and we techs would just fix it.
I'm not impresseed.
I'll have to check out the link, but...
Yes, wav -> mp3 will throw out "inaudible" data.
mp3 -> wav will not put that data back in.
wav (minus inaudible) -> mp3 will NOT throw anything away because the wav is already has less information than the original wav. That is, nothing needs to be thrown away to make the data fit into 128kbits/s or 192kbits/s or whatever. That is, since the information was lost the first time it doesn't need to be lost again.
What am I missing?
Are you saying that in the conversion
wav -> mp3 -> wav -> mp3
that the second mp3 stage will be at a distinctly lower quality than the first mp3 stage? Is there discussion of this somewhere that you can point me to?
This may be redundant since I browse at 4, but I saw no mention in the entire article of the prices of the CPUs and their support hardware.
Pricewatch doesn't list 2.4Ghz P4s yet, but a P4 2.2 mb/cpu combo is $570, and the Athlon 2100 combo is under $300. The fastest Intel mb/cpu combo under $300 listed is 1.9Ghz, which can NOT keep up with an Athlon 2100 setup.
There's certainly more to a purchasing decision than price and performance, and I don't expect every article to cover every angle, but the disparity in price/performance ratios between the companies seems VERY signifiant to me.
Perhaps this article is too targeted for gamers. Business and home users will be more concerned with economy, and professional high-performance users (server/workstation/research) will probably spring for dual processors if raw throughput is so important.
In any case, I look forward to AMD's next moves.
This sounds a lot like something I've wanted to do for years. Do you have any links to projects like this?
I'm helping with something which could be used to implement what you describe: Coldstore.
I saw a few comments at threshold 4 saying this would be against the Acceptable Use Policy of a lot of providers, and that it would be better to get dedicated bandwidth (a T1) to do this.
Well, how about it? How much is a T1 these days? Could this pay for itself, or even compete with DSL?
I'm used to seeing full T1s sell for around $1k a month. I would have to recover around $1000 to be breaking even. I'm in downtown Seattle, so I think if this idea took off I'd have a rich pool of potential drive-by customers, but I'd also have a lot of coffee house and bar customers. There are about a dozen bars and coffee houses within 2000 feet of my apartment.
The Joltage site is a little sketchy about financial details, but their hourly rate is $2. They also say that the "hot spot" (me in this case) gets half of the revenue. That means I'd have to accumulate 1000 hours a month combined to recoup the $1000 a month I'd be paying for my T1. If 20 users consistantly used my net for 2.5 hours per business day (of which there are aprox 20 in a month), it would work. Is this realistic?
Right now I don't think it is. All the customers who might be interested already have solutions in place. The only way this could take off would be if they signed up people who already have bandwidth they can give away and who won't suffer if noone uses them. There are a few internet caffes around here who might be interested since they already have net AND they already re-sell it to their existing customers. The overhead would be a little lower for them and it could attract more customers. This project looks tenuous at best.
I wish them luck.
"if you are living with the parent then your[sic] subject to their rules."
As soon as you phrase the relationship that way, you've converted it into a confrontation. It's not that what you say is false, but that resting on it does a huge disservice to everyone involved. As other posters have already stated, the child gets a clear message that they are expected to do "the wrong thing". Some of them will translate that into "I am a bad kid." It does a disservice to the parents because they have to be on guard at all times now that they've put it up. It also puts up a wall between, not around, the members of the family.
This is true of any relationship. Overprotective boyfriends and girlfriends scare healthy lovers off. Overdefensive companies (how many stables did you use?) frustrate and drive off their best employees. Churches, clubs, and governments are all the same. Relationships built on mutal respect are FAR stronger and more effective than those built on fear or force. The age and genetic relationship of the individuals involved is of minor importance in the analysis.
Any parent who straps a GPS locator on a child over 10 has probably already failed to build the trust which should come naturally from being trustworthy and ever-present.
[Disclaimer: My parents didn't watch me closely, but I ran away to live with my (then 28yo) sister when I was 16 anyway. I'm 28 and have no children of my own yet. My view is clearly biased.]