Anyone who still does anything serious with Google's products kind of deserves it. Google has been for years putting some product up just to completely discontinue it soon enough. Unlike desktop software, Google discontinuing product means that you really cannot use it anymore. Google is really hurting itself and their image with this shit and ensuring competitors products like from Microsoft will continue to be widely used.
This is not insightful at all. Anyone who read TFA would know that not only is Google planning to release the Android App Inventor as Open Source software, but a non-profit organization will take over management of it. It was a mistake to rely on it in the past because Google could pull it at any time. However, once the code is released it may make sense to "do something serious" with it since they will no longer have that power.
I find it hilarious that that was moderated "Insightful." Actually, Mozilla browsers have always called their UIs "chrome" so I wonder if Google intended to cause confusion by naming their browser that.
If we hadn’t, the web would be a very sorry place today.
I respectfully completely disagree.
I respectfully point out that stating your opinions without any support is less than worthless.
So it's about values? I'd like to think users care mostly about what something does, then maybe the price, before any moral baggage it could possibly bring with it. But while you're at it, if tax breaks by becoming a religion is where you're going with it, it's f'ing genius.
Why such a high horse? It's just software!! It's either useful or it sucks.
It seems that some of Mozilla's values are ease of use, cross-platform support and correct implementation of standards. Is that the "moral baggage" you're referring to? You seem irrationally incensed by the fact that Mozilla has successfully applied their values to produce software that many people find useful.
I'd guess that urine is too salty and acidic to be used directly on a lawn. However, you don't need to kill all the microbes to water your lawn with it.
I assume this is similar to recycling systems used for space missions? Don't they also recycle waste for H20?
Yeah, but it's a lot harder to drill a well in orbit than in Texas. I'm surprised it might be more cost effective than piping or even trucking in water from somewhere else.
It should also be pointed out that the several trademark registries allowed Mojang to register Scrolls months ago. Including US and Sweden (registering it as an EU trademark).
If true, it's disturbing that it's possible to register a trademark for a single, common English word.
The first rule of having a trademark is "don't lose your trademark." This is done by defending it against every potential threat, no matter how tenuous the connection.
Essentially, if you don't defend yourself, then your trademark is automatically weakened.
For example, if your trademark is for a video game called "Elder Scrolls," and you allow a game called "Scrolls," to be published unchecked, then you've effectively stated that the word "Scrolls," and titles including that word, are all acceptable, and cannot be challenged by trademark.
In the end, Zenimax either maintains their current position by forcing Notch to back down, or their trademark is more clearly defined, including restrictions on what Notch can call this and its sequels (if any).
Thus the only losing move is not to play.
When I was a kid, I didn't understand why documentation with my Legos said "Please call them Lego bricks, not Legos." Now I know that's part of their trademark defense policy.
You can't even copyright phrases. You can, however, secure a trademark on unique phrases and words. If it were possible to get a trademark on a single, common word, Microsoft would stop anyone else from using "word" in their names.
That's some of the worst crap I've ever read about saving fuel. Small diesel engines (ala VW) have the ability to get 50+mpg and still have neck-snapping torque. Underpower death-traps my hiney.
It turns out that not only the Slashdot headline, but TFA's headline is extremely misleading. The research is really about how the difference in mass of two vehicles results in more danger to the less massive vehicle. The article body doesn't say anything about power except in one quote from a think tank guy.
There are real pluses and minuses to search results prioritized by economic incentives and it is reasonable for a search engine operator to either allow pay for rank or not. If Google starts to allow you to pay for your rank, just use a different search engine.
It's easy to imagine that a system like this in Oblivion or Fallout could have shaved hours off the average player's actual game-time.
How nice, the game developers are looking for ways to help us spend even less time with their $60 games. I'm so glad they've got our best interests at heart.
Don't get me wrong, I like a well designed inventory as much as anyone, but I'm uncomfortable with the notion that a game developer would have as a goal, making our experience of their game shorter.
To be fair, Bethesda is not one of the companies that's really guilty of cheating us out of game-time like some others I won't name (Infinity Ward). I've never really played a Bethesda game and felt like I didn't get my money's worth.
Are you suggesting that time spent juggling inventory is quality game time? I've spent huge amounts of time doing that and similar management tasks in Bethesda games and I'd certainly welcome an interface that made it less tedious without dumbing it down. I've also spent far more time in each of those games than any official estimates of how long it takes to finish. If Skyrim is half the size and complexity of any of their earlier games, it'll be easily worth the money.
In all of Bethesda's previous games, the answer to that would be an unambiguous 'yes'. They haven't indicated anything to suggest different for Skyrim.
It would indeed by a shame if Bethesda abandoned all their loyal modding fans by putting restrictive DRM on Skyrim. I never play Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, or Fallout NV without many mods that improve on the already excellent games.
just look at android, the development costs for each new version cost HTC who ever is Google's favorite of the week a lot of money. the phones aren't any cheaper than the iphone a lot of times
free software is usually good a decade or so after the retail software has been on the market. something like jboss replacing weblogic
Quality Free Software may lag proprietary except when it comes first, such as web servers. As you point out, there's big money in Android, which only lagged iOS in popularity by a couple of years. The primary reason for Android's quick growth and success is that it's a commercial (as opposed to proprietary) project. If a company has resources and skill, they can develop quality software quickly, whether it's proprietary or Free.
My husband (prof) routinely turns down any students that try to friend him on Facebook. Heck, he's paranoid about having anyone at his school friend him, including his fellow professors. I've also got a similar policy for work - NONE of my current coworkers are on my FB, only ones from previous jobs.
It's sad they felt the need to legislate common sense.
This is certainly way outside the scope of what state legislatures should be considering. If such a specific policy made sense at all, it should probably be at a school or district level. However, I question the idea that it is or should be common sense to avoid all communication with coworkers or students outside of the workplace. Would you never send an email to a coworker outside of work or call her? I don't see why relationships must be carefully compartmentalized between work and non-work.
You must have limited experience, relational model fits only set-based data well. There are plenty of hierarchical data structures for which the relational model is a terrible fit and give abysmal performance for both storage time and queries. I've seen this time and again in my three decades of working with relational databases. A client of mine has been working with medical AI systems for a few years, one early discover was relational model is absolutely an inferior representation for most knowledge base ontologies,
The relational model fits hierarchical data just fine. It's only the awkwardness of SQL that was holding you back or the particular implementation if queries were too slow. Is any of your experience based on a non-SQL relational language?
This is a soft-sell way to get nosql databases into traditional IT situations, where familiarity with SQL will let current support and DBAs say "oh, it's like SQL, but it doesn't have joins. I can do that".
I always did like the sqlite docs, specifically the diagrams of the state machine for each statement.
If the DBAs think it's acceptable to lack joins, perhaps they should look for another job.
Shitty programmers who cannot be bothered to learn how relational databases work or seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they are paid to create systems that not only serve the front end consumer user but also people on the backend business side would advocate NoSQL. If the product/service you are writing has anything to do with money, business users need to have information stored in a relational model that can be easily queried or extracted into a data cube for business analytics. This is why you have data translation layers with data transformation objects (DTOs) in the first place to translate your object model into a relational model and back again.
If you work for a "for profit" company that deals with customer and sales data in any capacity then you need to have people competent people working who have at least a basic understanding of the relational model and transactions. If you work for one of those companies and are advocating NoSQL for data that the business needs for data mining or processing sales then you should either be reeducated or offered the door because you have forgotten who your actually work for.
It has nothing to do with "for profit" status. I work for a non-profit and work with a relational database all day. Observe how widely SQLite (which always has been a relational, SQL-based DBMS) is used, from Firefox to most smart phones. People who know how to use relational databases know they save a lot of development time which would otherwise have to be spent reinventing many wheels.
One area that needs work is language design, since SQL is far from ideal. I'm convinced that most of the complaints NoSQL proponents have against traditional RDBMSes have to do with the SQL language and limitations of specific implementations of the same rather limitations of the relational model. Perhaps UnQL will contribute something in that area, but I doubt it, since it looks too similar to SQL.
The beauty of a nosql store is defined by this query method get(key) it need to be nothing more and nothing less than that. Adding a query language totally defeats this purpose. Not to mention once you commit to using a search mechanism you are tightly bound to it.
For instance I use mongodb but I do not allow anyone to use it's built in search mechanisms other than find by some key within the app itself.
Sticking to this rule allows us to move to something like pure memcached, membase etc as a store by a simple config change.
Now using search capability outside the app is handy but again tightly binds you to the platform.
Yeah, I yearn for that beauty when I use PostgreSQL. If only I had to write pages of new application functionality every time I wanted to search in a different way or add a new kind of thing to my database. Who wants to write a couple of lines of SQL when you can write hundreds of lines of C++?
I've always thought "NoSQL" is a dumb term and idea because it's nothing more than a negative position. Its proponents seem to be anti-SQL, though not necessarily for all the same reasons. In many cases, people seem to be equating SQL with the relational model and abandoning the latter because of deficiencies in the former. UnQL seems to be bringing things full circle in that its designers realize that there's no sense in abandoning the relational model and all work done on query languages so far. It's incredibly ironic though since UnQL is trying to be a superset of SQL. How can you call your database "NoSQL" if the language you use to access it looks almost exactly like SQL?
I thought one of the major driving forces to outsourcing was that human labour was cheaper than mechanization. Provided, of course, that the human labour accepted minimal standards for employment (pay, safety, etc.). And that's exactly what developing nations provided.
And now manufacturers in these nations are talking about increased mechanization in order to circumvent the desire of workers for better conditions of employment. In a lot of respects, it sounds like we (in the western world) just shot ourselves in the head: we shipped out the low skill jobs and we don't have the infrastructure for the high skill jobs needed in highly mechanized factories.
If a Taiwanese company can manufacture everything using robots, a US company can figure out how to do it too. OTOH, China still has a lot more people willing to work for low wages than the US and Foxconn still needs people, if not as many.
We've heard of Peak Oil. I wonder if there's Peak Employment? And have we reached it? There are so many SF stories of robots making people obsolete, of that being such a strong and recurring theme in the genre, that they have to be on to something.
That's like saying zombies and vampires must exist because they're such persistent fixtures in fantasy and horror stories. What fictional zombies, vampires, and robots have in common is that they have some human characteristics but lack others. They have the capability to inspire fear in a way that completely inhuman monsters can't because they can make us question what it means to be human, how to distinguish a human from a non-human or even whether we're being replaced by non-humans.
The robots in factories don't even enjoy the basic motility a microbe does. They may replace a person's job, but they could in no way replace that person and could never be mistaken for a person. Human jobs have been replaced by machines for hundreds of years as technology has made it practical. While this causes temporary distress, it is in most cases a necessary part of the process to increase human productivity using technology. Humans are infinitely more adaptable than any machine, which is why we're able to create and use the machines in the first place. When machines start designing other machines of their own volition, we should start to worry.
Why are the prison control systems connected to the Internet? Who thought that was a good idea?
I don't think anyone is claiming the systems in prisons that control doors are directly connected to the Internet. AFAIK, Stuxnet attacked machines that were not directly connected to the Internet using several attack vectors to jump between disconnected networks and machines. The only way to absolutely prevent any kind of infection would be to disconnect the target machine from all networks (even local only) and prevent anyone from touching it. Needless to say, such a system wouldn't be very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who still does anything serious with Google's products kind of deserves it. Google has been for years putting some product up just to completely discontinue it soon enough. Unlike desktop software, Google discontinuing product means that you really cannot use it anymore. Google is really hurting itself and their image with this shit and ensuring competitors products like from Microsoft will continue to be widely used.
This is not insightful at all. Anyone who read TFA would know that not only is Google planning to release the Android App Inventor as Open Source software, but a non-profit organization will take over management of it. It was a mistake to rely on it in the past because Google could pull it at any time. However, once the code is released it may make sense to "do something serious" with it since they will no longer have that power.
is Chrome.
I find it hilarious that that was moderated "Insightful." Actually, Mozilla browsers have always called their UIs "chrome" so I wonder if Google intended to cause confusion by naming their browser that.
If we hadn’t, the web would be a very sorry place today.
I respectfully completely disagree.
I respectfully point out that stating your opinions without any support is less than worthless.
So it's about values? I'd like to think users care mostly about what something does, then maybe the price, before any moral baggage it could possibly bring with it. But while you're at it, if tax breaks by becoming a religion is where you're going with it, it's f'ing genius.
Why such a high horse? It's just software!! It's either useful or it sucks.
It seems that some of Mozilla's values are ease of use, cross-platform support and correct implementation of standards. Is that the "moral baggage" you're referring to? You seem irrationally incensed by the fact that Mozilla has successfully applied their values to produce software that many people find useful.
Good sir, are you suggesting I piss on my lawn?
I'd guess that urine is too salty and acidic to be used directly on a lawn. However, you don't need to kill all the microbes to water your lawn with it.
Drinking wastewater makes as much sense as watering your lawn with potable water.
No, drinking purified wastewater makes more sense than putting purified water on your lawn.
I assume this is similar to recycling systems used for space missions? Don't they also recycle waste for H20?
Yeah, but it's a lot harder to drill a well in orbit than in Texas. I'm surprised it might be more cost effective than piping or even trucking in water from somewhere else.
It should also be pointed out that the several trademark registries allowed Mojang to register Scrolls months ago. Including US and Sweden (registering it as an EU trademark).
If true, it's disturbing that it's possible to register a trademark for a single, common English word.
The first rule of having a trademark is "don't lose your trademark." This is done by defending it against every potential threat, no matter how tenuous the connection.
Essentially, if you don't defend yourself, then your trademark is automatically weakened.
For example, if your trademark is for a video game called "Elder Scrolls," and you allow a game called "Scrolls," to be published unchecked, then you've effectively stated that the word "Scrolls," and titles including that word, are all acceptable, and cannot be challenged by trademark.
In the end, Zenimax either maintains their current position by forcing Notch to back down, or their trademark is more clearly defined, including restrictions on what Notch can call this and its sequels (if any).
Thus the only losing move is not to play.
When I was a kid, I didn't understand why documentation with my Legos said "Please call them Lego bricks, not Legos." Now I know that's part of their trademark defense policy.
normally copyright single common words?
You can't even copyright phrases. You can, however, secure a trademark on unique phrases and words. If it were possible to get a trademark on a single, common word, Microsoft would stop anyone else from using "word" in their names.
That's some of the worst crap I've ever read about saving fuel. Small diesel engines (ala VW) have the ability to get 50+mpg and still have neck-snapping torque. Underpower death-traps my hiney.
It turns out that not only the Slashdot headline, but TFA's headline is extremely misleading. The research is really about how the difference in mass of two vehicles results in more danger to the less massive vehicle. The article body doesn't say anything about power except in one quote from a think tank guy.
There are real pluses and minuses to search results prioritized by economic incentives and it is reasonable for a search engine operator to either allow pay for rank or not. If Google starts to allow you to pay for your rank, just use a different search engine.
From the article:
How nice, the game developers are looking for ways to help us spend even less time with their $60 games. I'm so glad they've got our best interests at heart.
Don't get me wrong, I like a well designed inventory as much as anyone, but I'm uncomfortable with the notion that a game developer would have as a goal, making our experience of their game shorter.
To be fair, Bethesda is not one of the companies that's really guilty of cheating us out of game-time like some others I won't name (Infinity Ward). I've never really played a Bethesda game and felt like I didn't get my money's worth.
Are you suggesting that time spent juggling inventory is quality game time? I've spent huge amounts of time doing that and similar management tasks in Bethesda games and I'd certainly welcome an interface that made it less tedious without dumbing it down. I've also spent far more time in each of those games than any official estimates of how long it takes to finish. If Skyrim is half the size and complexity of any of their earlier games, it'll be easily worth the money.
In all of Bethesda's previous games, the answer to that would be an unambiguous 'yes'. They haven't indicated anything to suggest different for Skyrim.
It would indeed by a shame if Bethesda abandoned all their loyal modding fans by putting restrictive DRM on Skyrim. I never play Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, or Fallout NV without many mods that improve on the already excellent games.
just look at android, the development costs for each new version cost HTC who ever is Google's favorite of the week a lot of money. the phones aren't any cheaper than the iphone a lot of times
free software is usually good a decade or so after the retail software has been on the market. something like jboss replacing weblogic
Quality Free Software may lag proprietary except when it comes first, such as web servers. As you point out, there's big money in Android, which only lagged iOS in popularity by a couple of years. The primary reason for Android's quick growth and success is that it's a commercial (as opposed to proprietary) project. If a company has resources and skill, they can develop quality software quickly, whether it's proprietary or Free.
My husband (prof) routinely turns down any students that try to friend him on Facebook. Heck, he's paranoid about having anyone at his school friend him, including his fellow professors. I've also got a similar policy for work - NONE of my current coworkers are on my FB, only ones from previous jobs.
It's sad they felt the need to legislate common sense.
This is certainly way outside the scope of what state legislatures should be considering. If such a specific policy made sense at all, it should probably be at a school or district level. However, I question the idea that it is or should be common sense to avoid all communication with coworkers or students outside of the workplace. Would you never send an email to a coworker outside of work or call her? I don't see why relationships must be carefully compartmentalized between work and non-work.
Yeah that's great when your data fits the relational model.
What's your hypothetical data that can't be represented relationally? I haven't come across anything like that yet.
You must have limited experience, relational model fits only set-based data well. There are plenty of hierarchical data structures for which the relational model is a terrible fit and give abysmal performance for both storage time and queries. I've seen this time and again in my three decades of working with relational databases. A client of mine has been working with medical AI systems for a few years, one early discover was relational model is absolutely an inferior representation for most knowledge base ontologies,
The relational model fits hierarchical data just fine. It's only the awkwardness of SQL that was holding you back or the particular implementation if queries were too slow. Is any of your experience based on a non-SQL relational language?
This is a soft-sell way to get nosql databases into traditional IT situations, where familiarity with SQL will let current support and DBAs say "oh, it's like SQL, but it doesn't have joins. I can do that".
I always did like the sqlite docs, specifically the diagrams of the state machine for each statement.
If the DBAs think it's acceptable to lack joins, perhaps they should look for another job.
Shitty programmers who cannot be bothered to learn how relational databases work or seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that they are paid to create systems that not only serve the front end consumer user but also people on the backend business side would advocate NoSQL. If the product/service you are writing has anything to do with money, business users need to have information stored in a relational model that can be easily queried or extracted into a data cube for business analytics. This is why you have data translation layers with data transformation objects (DTOs) in the first place to translate your object model into a relational model and back again.
If you work for a "for profit" company that deals with customer and sales data in any capacity then you need to have people competent people working who have at least a basic understanding of the relational model and transactions. If you work for one of those companies and are advocating NoSQL for data that the business needs for data mining or processing sales then you should either be reeducated or offered the door because you have forgotten who your actually work for.
It has nothing to do with "for profit" status. I work for a non-profit and work with a relational database all day. Observe how widely SQLite (which always has been a relational, SQL-based DBMS) is used, from Firefox to most smart phones. People who know how to use relational databases know they save a lot of development time which would otherwise have to be spent reinventing many wheels.
One area that needs work is language design, since SQL is far from ideal. I'm convinced that most of the complaints NoSQL proponents have against traditional RDBMSes have to do with the SQL language and limitations of specific implementations of the same rather limitations of the relational model. Perhaps UnQL will contribute something in that area, but I doubt it, since it looks too similar to SQL.
The beauty of a nosql store is defined by this query method get(key) it need to be nothing more and nothing less than that. Adding a query language totally defeats this purpose. Not to mention once you commit to using a search mechanism you are tightly bound to it.
For instance I use mongodb but I do not allow anyone to use it's built in search mechanisms other than find by some key within the app itself.
Sticking to this rule allows us to move to something like pure memcached, membase etc as a store by a simple config change.
Now using search capability outside the app is handy but again tightly binds you to the platform.
Yeah, I yearn for that beauty when I use PostgreSQL. If only I had to write pages of new application functionality every time I wanted to search in a different way or add a new kind of thing to my database. Who wants to write a couple of lines of SQL when you can write hundreds of lines of C++?
No flamewar necessary. Oracle is the new evil overlord.
Having backing from Microsoft just makes it irrelevant.
I'm sure Oracle would be offended by your implication that they've only recently become evil.
I've always thought "NoSQL" is a dumb term and idea because it's nothing more than a negative position. Its proponents seem to be anti-SQL, though not necessarily for all the same reasons. In many cases, people seem to be equating SQL with the relational model and abandoning the latter because of deficiencies in the former. UnQL seems to be bringing things full circle in that its designers realize that there's no sense in abandoning the relational model and all work done on query languages so far. It's incredibly ironic though since UnQL is trying to be a superset of SQL. How can you call your database "NoSQL" if the language you use to access it looks almost exactly like SQL?
I thought one of the major driving forces to outsourcing was that human labour was cheaper than mechanization. Provided, of course, that the human labour accepted minimal standards for employment (pay, safety, etc.). And that's exactly what developing nations provided.
And now manufacturers in these nations are talking about increased mechanization in order to circumvent the desire of workers for better conditions of employment. In a lot of respects, it sounds like we (in the western world) just shot ourselves in the head: we shipped out the low skill jobs and we don't have the infrastructure for the high skill jobs needed in highly mechanized factories.
If a Taiwanese company can manufacture everything using robots, a US company can figure out how to do it too. OTOH, China still has a lot more people willing to work for low wages than the US and Foxconn still needs people, if not as many.
We've heard of Peak Oil. I wonder if there's Peak Employment? And have we reached it? There are so many SF stories of robots making people obsolete, of that being such a strong and recurring theme in the genre, that they have to be on to something.
That's like saying zombies and vampires must exist because they're such persistent fixtures in fantasy and horror stories. What fictional zombies, vampires, and robots have in common is that they have some human characteristics but lack others. They have the capability to inspire fear in a way that completely inhuman monsters can't because they can make us question what it means to be human, how to distinguish a human from a non-human or even whether we're being replaced by non-humans.
The robots in factories don't even enjoy the basic motility a microbe does. They may replace a person's job, but they could in no way replace that person and could never be mistaken for a person. Human jobs have been replaced by machines for hundreds of years as technology has made it practical. While this causes temporary distress, it is in most cases a necessary part of the process to increase human productivity using technology. Humans are infinitely more adaptable than any machine, which is why we're able to create and use the machines in the first place. When machines start designing other machines of their own volition, we should start to worry.
Why are the prison control systems connected to the Internet? Who thought that was a good idea?
I don't think anyone is claiming the systems in prisons that control doors are directly connected to the Internet. AFAIK, Stuxnet attacked machines that were not directly connected to the Internet using several attack vectors to jump between disconnected networks and machines. The only way to absolutely prevent any kind of infection would be to disconnect the target machine from all networks (even local only) and prevent anyone from touching it. Needless to say, such a system wouldn't be very useful.