It's funny how many people are suckered by something like this. Unlike Madoff's scheme or fake pharmaceuticals, this doesn't have the potential to cause great bodily or financial harm.
I don't think the device described by the article could be a data logger. What it describes is something that looks like a 500 GiB USB mass storage device. To be able to put a file on it, there would have to be a file system (probably FAT32).
The design of the device would have to take into account how the file system is structured to avoid completely destroying its structure whenever an addressing wraparound occurred. The interesting question is whether the device actually understands the structure of the file system put on it, or whether it just has some simple address mapping rules that make FAT32 sort of work.
SQL MERGE is a recently added statement that I don't have access to yet. It looks like it does nothing to improve the syntax of UPDATE or INSERT, but simply smashes them into one statement with some extra fluff. It does appear to be useful and I'd use it if I could, but it's another example of the ugliness, irregularity and unnecessary verbosity of SQL syntax.
I didn't say SQL wasn't powerful. I use it every day because it is currently the best tool for dealing with relational data in most cases. However, relational languages can be a lot better. They can be more regular in syntax, allowing a lot more natural and flexible composition and factoring. Can you tell me why an insert and update statement look totally different in SQL?
You're not getting every bit of speed you can muster unless you're in control of what's happening at every level, down to every CPU register, byte in RAM, on a disk (not file), and every cache in between. That approach used to be common when chips were slow and expensive, but not any more because it's just not worth the effort. If you're using a "NoSql solution," you are not in control of every byte at every level.
Just because the relational model SQL is supposed to implement is great doesn't mean we don't need a better replacement for SQL. There are alternatives, but they're so obscure, immature, or incompatible with other commonly used tools that hardly anyone ever considers them.
I use PostgreSQL at work and I'm constantly expanding what I can do with SQL, both as a result of learning and new features that are being added. However, I constantly run into its limitations and extreme ugliness. Even though I work with it every day, I still commonly look up basic syntax because it's so irregular. I'd love to be able to use a better language without giving up all the excellent properties of Postgres, but implementing that would clearly be a huge job and I'm not aware of anyone attempting that.
Neither SQL nor its original incarnation SEQUEL was the first language based on the relational data model. There are also more recent relational languages, such as Tutorial D, though none has gained much popularity and few people know they exist, even in the database management world. We badly need a replacement for SQL that is more flexible and more fully implements the relational model.
SQL definitely sucks as a language. However, the relational model it was intended to expose does not. We need languages that more fully and naturally expose the relational model.
I realize this is probably an attempt at humor, but it's not funny and a lot people still seem to be confused about the issue. Linux is 20 years old, but GNU is 27 years old. There are complete operating systems based on GNU (and not Linux) as well as those based on Linux with very little or no GNU components. The term GNU/Linux only makes sense when one is talking about an operating system based on both of them, which is by far the most common way to use either one of them.
The causation, rate, and effects of climate change are not fully (maybe not even well) understood and we need to keep observing and studying to understand them better. However, regardless of what's causing it, we do have to live with it. Neither denying it's happening nor denying people did it will help us deal with the changes. IMHO, slowing climate change is just one of several very good reasons to increase energy efficiency and move away from fossil fuels, including reducing energy costs, increasing energy security, and reducing many known-harmful pollutants.
Science is not fundamentally a set of facts. It is a set of methods and tools which can help us discover true facts when used properly. Unfortunately, most of us were taught it was just a bunch of facts in school.
I don't think one has to have read any books to be influenced by the attitude that all truth is relative. That attitude is prevalent today, though I'm not sure if it's primarily the result of academic thought about Postmodernism. Couple that with a general mistrust of any authority, and it's no surprise that people have less trouble justifying beliefs without critical thinking.
Popularity is not the same thing as influence and importance. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that if it weren't for Debian, GNU/Linux wouldn't have had a high enough profile for Google to choose it for a mobile platform.
Paul Venezia didn't say that virtualization is an inherently bad thing or that rebooting is always wrong. He did say that if you don't know what's causing a problem on a production system and reboot to fix it, that's the wrong approach.
Yeah, you're right. Just because you have absolutely no idea what caused a problem, you can still determine that it happens at most once a week. It's not as if businesses actually need their servers to be up on the weekend.
This property of modern SSDs is neither positive nor negative by itself. It's a property you'd be thankful for if you were organizing protests in Iran and stored contacts on an SSD. You'd curse it if it were exploited to destroy incriminating photos by someone who'd stalked you or a loved one.
Yeah, I regret giving Sony any of my money for a receiver and speakers a few years ago. Those do still work well and don't have any interoperability problems, but I certainly don't intend to buy anything Sony ever again.
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I don't think customs or TSA agents can take any arbitrary piece of luggage any distance from the border to search it without a warrant or suspicion.
It's funny how many people are suckered by something like this. Unlike Madoff's scheme or fake pharmaceuticals, this doesn't have the potential to cause great bodily or financial harm.
I don't think the device described by the article could be a data logger. What it describes is something that looks like a 500 GiB USB mass storage device. To be able to put a file on it, there would have to be a file system (probably FAT32).
The design of the device would have to take into account how the file system is structured to avoid completely destroying its structure whenever an addressing wraparound occurred. The interesting question is whether the device actually understands the structure of the file system put on it, or whether it just has some simple address mapping rules that make FAT32 sort of work.
SQL MERGE is a recently added statement that I don't have access to yet. It looks like it does nothing to improve the syntax of UPDATE or INSERT, but simply smashes them into one statement with some extra fluff. It does appear to be useful and I'd use it if I could, but it's another example of the ugliness, irregularity and unnecessary verbosity of SQL syntax.
No, I meant SEQUEL. QUEL is quite distinct and appears to have been a superior language when it was created.
I didn't say SQL wasn't powerful. I use it every day because it is currently the best tool for dealing with relational data in most cases. However, relational languages can be a lot better. They can be more regular in syntax, allowing a lot more natural and flexible composition and factoring. Can you tell me why an insert and update statement look totally different in SQL?
It probably changed with HTML 4. I didn't really do much with HTML before that.
You're not getting every bit of speed you can muster unless you're in control of what's happening at every level, down to every CPU register, byte in RAM, on a disk (not file), and every cache in between. That approach used to be common when chips were slow and expensive, but not any more because it's just not worth the effort. If you're using a "NoSql solution," you are not in control of every byte at every level.
Just because the relational model SQL is supposed to implement is great doesn't mean we don't need a better replacement for SQL. There are alternatives, but they're so obscure, immature, or incompatible with other commonly used tools that hardly anyone ever considers them.
I use PostgreSQL at work and I'm constantly expanding what I can do with SQL, both as a result of learning and new features that are being added. However, I constantly run into its limitations and extreme ugliness. Even though I work with it every day, I still commonly look up basic syntax because it's so irregular. I'd love to be able to use a better language without giving up all the excellent properties of Postgres, but implementing that would clearly be a huge job and I'm not aware of anyone attempting that.
Neither SQL nor its original incarnation SEQUEL was the first language based on the relational data model. There are also more recent relational languages, such as Tutorial D, though none has gained much popularity and few people know they exist, even in the database management world. We badly need a replacement for SQL that is more flexible and more fully implements the relational model.
SQL definitely sucks as a language. However, the relational model it was intended to expose does not. We need languages that more fully and naturally expose the relational model.
Yep, it's an a element with no href attribute, something I've never seen before.
Even if RMS has a Slashdot account, I doubt he'd find any fault with this story, which correctly describes the role both Linux and GNU have played.
I realize this is probably an attempt at humor, but it's not funny and a lot people still seem to be confused about the issue. Linux is 20 years old, but GNU is 27 years old. There are complete operating systems based on GNU (and not Linux) as well as those based on Linux with very little or no GNU components. The term GNU/Linux only makes sense when one is talking about an operating system based on both of them, which is by far the most common way to use either one of them.
The causation, rate, and effects of climate change are not fully (maybe not even well) understood and we need to keep observing and studying to understand them better. However, regardless of what's causing it, we do have to live with it. Neither denying it's happening nor denying people did it will help us deal with the changes. IMHO, slowing climate change is just one of several very good reasons to increase energy efficiency and move away from fossil fuels, including reducing energy costs, increasing energy security, and reducing many known-harmful pollutants.
Science is not fundamentally a set of facts. It is a set of methods and tools which can help us discover true facts when used properly. Unfortunately, most of us were taught it was just a bunch of facts in school.
I don't think one has to have read any books to be influenced by the attitude that all truth is relative. That attitude is prevalent today, though I'm not sure if it's primarily the result of academic thought about Postmodernism. Couple that with a general mistrust of any authority, and it's no surprise that people have less trouble justifying beliefs without critical thinking.
Isn't 'Number of descendent distributions' a crappy metric for 'Importance'? Wouldn't something like 'Installed base' be humongously better?
"Installed base" is a great metric if you include the descendent distributions.
Popularity is not the same thing as influence and importance. I don't think it's much of a stretch to imagine that if it weren't for Debian, GNU/Linux wouldn't have had a high enough profile for Google to choose it for a mobile platform.
Paul Venezia didn't say that virtualization is an inherently bad thing or that rebooting is always wrong. He did say that if you don't know what's causing a problem on a production system and reboot to fix it, that's the wrong approach.
Apparently, literary allusions are lost on you.
Yeah, you're right. Just because you have absolutely no idea what caused a problem, you can still determine that it happens at most once a week. It's not as if businesses actually need their servers to be up on the weekend.
This property of modern SSDs is neither positive nor negative by itself. It's a property you'd be thankful for if you were organizing protests in Iran and stored contacts on an SSD. You'd curse it if it were exploited to destroy incriminating photos by someone who'd stalked you or a loved one.
Yeah, I regret giving Sony any of my money for a receiver and speakers a few years ago. Those do still work well and don't have any interoperability problems, but I certainly don't intend to buy anything Sony ever again.
It doesn't sound like they're moving toward fantasy, but toward general reality TV crap.