From whence comes your bile at IBM? Just because SQL was invented at IBM, doesn't mean that its actually bad, does it? Anyway - I wasn't bringing IBM into my argument. What I was saying was based on what I know SQL can do, and what it can't do.
While there are problems with SQL, 95% of its users are happy as a clam that it exists. The unhappy users are the ones who are pushing the boundaries of what SQL allows and those are the people who know SQL best. When you are writing SQL queries that span 200 lines of code, then, and only then do you begin to scratch at the limits of what SQL allows. Until then, you've only hit the limits of competence.
I've been working with SQL for over 20 years now. I've worked with applications that didn't use RDBMS's. Some of them used flat files. Some of them used hierarchial databases. People who haven't had the same sort of experiences, haven't come to the realization of why SQL was invented - and that results in then making ill-founded statements like "SQL is absolutely the worst database query language ever invented". Utter tosh. SQL has its problems, but its one of the best. That's why it has left its competitors in the dust of time.
I look around at all the frameworks that have evolved to not do SQL (EJB-QL, Hibernate, etc) and I laugh. None of those languages come close to handling the same breath and width of problems that SQL can be used to solve. Whenever I see advocates of these frameworks all puff up with fervour, I feel like shaking them and say "Your emperor has no clothes!". The list of problems these frameworks can't solve is so huge that one wonders why anyone works with them at all. But I suppose, there are plenty of people who work for small businesses who haven't encountered the kind of problems that big enterprises have.
The parent poster that I'm responding to has apparently had an problems porting SQL code. But guess what? Even on the unix platform, applications written in C have had trouble being ported from one Unix to the next. People have worked around it. Nobody goes around arguing that "C is absolutely the worst programming language ever invented".
That's nonsense. The "REAL" backup clause also applies in the case of a hard-disk based backup. You can't really know that the data being backed up will still be useful unless you read it back periodically. All things being equal, the data integrity of tape media over the long-term outstrips that of hard disks. Storing hard disks safely over the long term and handling them requires more care than a tape.
In addition, a lot of tapes come with a read only hardware setting that one needs to consciously move to the read-write setting - which is very useful for data archives. If you try to overwrite a hard drive based archive with new data, there are no such safeguards available to you.
You do have a point that the government should scrutinize things so that citizens are favored. However, the current implementation of the government's policies are counter-productive. Why are illegal immigrants present in plentiful numbers to do menial labor, when US citizens could be filling those job positions too? If there is an error to be made, it should come down on the side of the highly skilled (and legal) immigrants, but this isn't happening. Instead illegal immigrants are being grandfathered into having legal status, while cracking down on legal and highly skilled immigrants who are much more important to the economy because of the dollar amounts that are associated with the work that they do.
Hmm. I come from India, in a place where there are plenty of cobra's and they are killed on sight (i.e - even if they are not causing trouble, because the general idea is that if a cobra doesn't cause trouble today, it will tomorrow). India is a vast place, with a multitude of cultures, so it is possible that in some part of India the situation that you describe does exist. When I searched for this on the web, though, I came up with the following on National Geographic TV:
Hiss of Death
Next Showing: Wednesday 7 October at 8pm
The King Cobra is the largest venomous snake on the planet, but in a small village in northeast Thailand the King Cobra has become a welcome resident. In fact, more than half of the village families keep a cobra as a pet . And so the village is known as Ban Kok Sa Nga - 'Serpent Town'. Many people in Kok Sa Nga make their living from the King Cobra, but in a most unusual way. The men fight these spring-coiled serpents barehanded, while the women dance with fully fanged King Cobras in their mouths. If you thought you'd seen snake wrangling before - you haven't seen nothing until you've seen the snake performers of Kok Sa Nga!!
Perhaps you confused Thailand with India. Or perhaps you are right, and there really is a place like you describe in India. All I could find, though, was the above reference.
Re:How is this different than now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think that would be a valid argument for any well developed business area. I don't think space falls into that category yet, even though the future looks promising. Yes, it would be a problem if, say for example, a TV manufacturer charges the government 10 times more for its product than business would pay for comparable products. But in the rarefield area of space technology, there isn't a good competitive landscape. In certain cases there isn't any candidate who can even bid, because what the government wants, may be pushing the bounds of current technology (military technology for example). In such situations, tightening the screws on your contractor may not be the right approach: if you want a super-kill-bill-gizmo #3, and nobody today can build it because the science or the technology hasn't been developed yet, cost plus is the right kind of contract.
The kind of outsourcing being proposed is in the more mundane (is there anything mundane about space?) areas of space technology, where there are more businesses participating. I don't think that the contractor cost overruns should be tolerated there, because there are more choices of vendors for the government.
....they would refuse to give into the Colbert, and the resulting broohaha will give them publicity that money simply can't buy. The fly in the ointment, of course, is that now the congressman who can impact their funding, is on Colbert's side, so they wouldn't want to piss him off. Of course, he may be a smart congressman too, and may be after the publicity that results from Nasa not giving in - it would certainly raise his public profile.
You are demonstrating the problem with search. The referenced Wikipedia article is good enough to help you fake things at a casual level. It is not good enough for you to do real work with it. There is no discussion in depth of the kind of problems that these techniques are used to solve. If you are working on a problem and trying to apply these techniques, and you run into a show-stopper because you can't figure it out, there isn't enough information in the article to help you figure out whether the technique is inapplicable to your problem, or whether you just need to work on the problem a bit more, perhaps with a different approach. There is no discussion about how tools interact with these techniques. I could go on and on, but thats the point: an expert in the technique who is writing a book on the topic will flesh out all the relevant topics that you would need to know about. As opposed to person searching, who would not even know what they need.
Your comment about the SEI compliance, I'm afraid, demonstrates your naivete. Unless you live and breathe SEI, you don't get to define compliance policies for your organization. Someone else will have defined it for you. And in any organization of respectable size, there will be a huge amount of information to process - something you will never be able to piece together with searches. In practice, most organizations recognize that even a compendium of the relevant policies wont do the trick, and deploy SEI via in person training, and then make the compendium available somewhere in a fashion that lets you find things by content classification. Search may be enabled, but you will rarely use it on documents like these, because when you are going through any one section, you are interested in _everything_ in that section.
The answer to this really depends on the depth of the information that you are looking for. Google is indispensable to my work. Quite often when I'm pushing the envelope, and software isn't working the way its supposed to be, a quick Google search often exposes the fact that someone else wrestled with the same problem, and often, their solution is also documented in the near vicinity of the search hit.
But on the other hand, if I were trying to learn a new technique, like Aspect Oriented Programming, or ray tracing techniques, then finding individual pieces of information via search hits is a poor solution. One has to sit and piece together an entire area of thought and fit it into a coherent whole. A book, where the author has already done this for you, is indispensable in such situations.
The other situation is where the field of knowledge that you're interested in is completely new. In that case, no one has put it all together before. In such situations, you have to go to the source documents. Google can be a help in identifying them there, but it would be a fatal mistake to rely on Google for this. Because, your ultimate objective is the truth, and not Google's page rank algorithm's version of it.
These days, I find that with the pervasiveness of Wikipedia, people tend to think that all their collaboration needs will be met by organizational wiki's. This is again a fallacy - a search-oriented navigational system is inferior to a content / content classification oriented navigational system when one needs information in depth. A wiki will help with the quick stuff - how to get the linker to cooperate when building a particular arcane piece of software. But its not going to help you figure out what you need to be in compliance with your organizations SEI level 3 compliance policies.
Its the difference between building a house without a hammer, and building a house with one. The hammer didn't hammer the nails; the person did. However, the house wouldn't have gotten built without the hammer because its just too difficult to do it otherwise. And thats the point: the database is a tool that makes the difference between catching some criminals and letting them get away scot-free. The title of the story is exactly right.
There's a reason why Galileo is considered the father of modern science. Its because, prior to Galileo, knowledge progressed via increments of dogma. "scientists" of that time, held that heavier bodies fell faster than lighter ones, simply because Aristotle had said so. Nobody challenged this way of doing science until Galileo came along and performed experiments. And that is the crucial contribution that he made: the role of experiment in determining the truth.
Saying that the theory of a flat earth was "largely settled" in 1404, therefore has no bearing on the argument at hand. In 1404, the methods of science didnt exist. Nobody had looked at the existing facts, constructed a theory, and used that theory to conduct experiments to measure predictions against experimental outcomes to validate the theory. People also tend to apply these principles the wrong way when criticizing science. For example, they say that in Newton's time, it was a well settled matter that Force = mass * acceleration, and Einstein showed that this was wrong. Therefore science can be wrong. This is a fallacy because force is indeed mass times acceleration when one looks at all the data that was available in Newton's time. Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were created to explain facts that were observed past Newton's time.
So the true test should be that, today, given all that we know, can a scientific theory be constructed to explain homeopathy, and if so, can we make successful predictions using that theory. If this isn't possible, thats alright - just dont call homeopathy a science. Call it dogma.
I note that circa 200 BC, Eratosthenes announced a number that he considered the circumference of the earth. This was assuming a round earth. His figure has been found to be amazingly accurate given the quality of the measurements that he had access to. However, there was no attempt made to validate this result by correlating this with the results of experiments or other measurements, and so this measure was nothing more than Eratosthenes' opinion. Not science.
I'm afraid the parent post is an example of not seeing the forest because of all the trees.....
Application code should never ever be aware of deployment issues. Making it aware of such things a sure way to ensure nightmares when your environment changes. For example, lets say you have to send mail. You could take the option of always talking to localhost under the assumption that your app will always be deployment on a machine with a mail server. But consider the case when the app is taken and deployed in a production environment with a firewall around it, and to send mail, you have to send mail to another system. Your app breaks. The right way to do this is to externalize the existence of a mail server into some properties / config file that gets updated at application deployment
This is so fundamental, that it seems obvious. Lets apply this philosophy to the case at hand: the application should never ever have to know whether there is a failover server / hot standby / cluster in place or not. It should just assume that its going to execute a statement and if there is a failure, the transaction will rollback. Whether the transaction will error out and rollback depends on the properties of the environment. For example, DB2 can do clustering / HADR (high-availability data replication). And on AIX, you have server clustering solutions like HACMP, transaction checkpointing and partition mobility, and a whole host of other technologies which can intervene to not cause the application to fail in case of a database / database server failure.
If a database server ever introduces an API for making applications aware of failover issues, thats a sure sign that the database architects are asleep at the wheel.
Perhaps its because Sun is already effectively out of the *big*-server market. IBM no longer considers Sun a competitor on the high-end market segment and sees only HP to compete with there. Sun appears to be trying to find a way to find another way of making the revenues they had in the past.
In the good old days, when Sun was making money, they had their guns trained on IBM. These days, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment in their strategy that they are no longer in the same league as IBM. They seem to be aspiring to compete with HP, Dell and *shudder* Gateway. You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.
The bottom line is: yes, its a way to drum up interest in a new product, but they appear to be targetting the lower-end market segment with this gimmick.
I'm afraid you're using the wrong word. A troll is someone who doesnt even believe in the arguments that they are espousing. Their whole purpose is to dump fuel on smoldering embers. This is something that cannot be said of Dijkstra. A polemicist is a more accurate description of who Dijkstra was.
The whole point of assigments is to stimulate the student to understand the subject on their own power. The grading is based on how well the prof thinks that they've done this. A solution to this would be to have a oral quiz based on the contents of the work turned in. If they understand the work, and can demonstrate that they can defend what has been turned in as their work, then who cares where they copied it from? The goals of the assignment have been achieved.
And to those who say that students copying verbatim from other work (or having it created for them) is an unfair assist, I say that this is no different (in effect) from going to the library and researching the matter. As long as the student can defend the work intellectually, who cares - they've learned! And thats the whole point!
Of course, then one might ask - whats the point of the assignments? Do away with them and simply have the oral quizzes. That would save the professors a lot of work. However, this limits the depth of work that can be assigned to students to evaluate them. And it gives the students a tangible goal to work towards.
Dont know about other PostgreSQL features, but the two that you've mentioned are covered by DB2 with great panache. Furthermore, DB2 offers features like federation of multiple types of datasources (XML, other databases, csv files, Domino servers, etc). It has OLAP capabilities, native XML support, and has proven and published TPC benchmarks available. On multiple operating systems and different high-end hardware platforms. Why wouldnt you choose DB2 over PostgreSQL?
Yes, if you want the source to DB2, you arent going to get it. But unless you really want to be in the business of maintaining / fixing problems in a complex database product, why do you care about that?
Why is it that you consider getting caught to be the greater sin? Have you been watching too many heist movies and they have given you the impression that crime is ok as long as you dont get caught?
Not to invoke Godwin's law or anything, but if one were to indeed use any means necessary, then the Nazi's didnt really do anything repugnant with the concentration camps. The Japanese didnt do anything wrong with Pearl Harbor. And Saddam Hussein didnt do anything wrong when he gassed the Kurds. And, using your argument, there wouldnt seem to be anything wrong with the actions of the 9/11 bombers either.
As in all things, there are limits. The ends do not always justify the means because as someone else put it "what good is it if you win the war but lose your soul?".
If Oracle stock was going to tank, the people left holding the stock would have had losses anyway - whether Ellison did insider trading or not. Ellison didnt cause them losses by his insider trading. The shareholders' gripe is that he made money illegally when he shouldnt have. So the judgement is exactly right : the shareholders shouldnt get money because they wouldnt have gotten rich anyway. And Larry Ellison shouldnt have gained that money - so his ill gotten gains should be taken away.
There aren't any. XML databases are a dumb idea, and they will never perform as well as regular relational databases.....
This leads me to believe that you dont understand what modern database technology is all about. The theory is that the database manages the physical data stores and how to retrieve data from the stores, and the application program using the data stores worries about what data it needs. Now, are RDBMS's faster than you directly accessing a flat file whose structure your program knows about? Absolutely not. Yet its a stupid idea in this day and age to architect an application with flat files instead of an RDBMS as a datastore. The benefits in terms of application development time and maintainability are so huge that the slowness that RDBMS's add on are almost always discounted.
Non-XML physical datastores are typically physically non-structured, though the database may impose a logical structure by using indexes and writing out records to the physical files in a specific order. So you can have structured data organization like btrees that your database knows about but which your program doesnt know or care about.
An XML file is explicitly structured. Yes, parsing an XML file may take longer than parsing a "flat" file, but on the other hand, an intelligent database may be able to optimize away the overhead of structuring the data by moving records within the file around that is needed for flat files. Further more, the great advantage of XML is that it is a standards based human readable format. It opens up whole new worlds. Will native XML storage be slower than flat file storage? Maybe. Even so, it is still an improvement over what was there before.
And you should also read up on XQuery. I dont know if "Viper" supports it (unlikely, since the standard is now at W3C candidate recommendation status still), but thats where the wind is blowing with XML data stores. XQuery is SQL for XML structured data. With XQuery support, you should in theory be able to take all XML physical data files that Oracle has and copy it over to DB2 and still make your XQuery based program work without changes because the physical data store has a standard structure (XML) and the query language is also a standard. Dumb idea? Far from it.
Lets face it - Oracle isnt kicking Sun's butt - its IBM. Ever since the dot com bubble burst and IBM finally found its game, the sun has been setting (or eclipsed (ha-ha!)) with IBM stealing more and more of Sun's customers and grabbing new accounts. Part of the problem for Sun is that IBM has the ability to sell solutions. You want a software stack to handle applications? IBM has it (WebSphere, DB2, etc). You want a software stack to manage infrastructure? IBM has that too (all the Tivoli stuff). You want office productivity infrastructure? IBM has that too (Lotus stuff). And along with all these go IBM servers.
This is Sun's attempt to come back into the market by saying - hey - we have a database solution too. Next thing you know, they'll be throwing their support behind (or buying out) a vendor of J2EE containers.....
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From whence comes your bile at IBM? Just because SQL was invented at IBM, doesn't mean that its actually bad, does it? Anyway - I wasn't bringing IBM into my argument. What I was saying was based on what I know SQL can do, and what it can't do.
Au contraire.
While there are problems with SQL, 95% of its users are happy as a clam that it exists. The unhappy users are the ones who are pushing the boundaries of what SQL allows and those are the people who know SQL best. When you are writing SQL queries that span 200 lines of code, then, and only then do you begin to scratch at the limits of what SQL allows. Until then, you've only hit the limits of competence.
I've been working with SQL for over 20 years now. I've worked with applications that didn't use RDBMS's. Some of them used flat files. Some of them used hierarchial databases. People who haven't had the same sort of experiences, haven't come to the realization of why SQL was invented - and that results in then making ill-founded statements like "SQL is absolutely the worst database query language ever invented". Utter tosh. SQL has its problems, but its one of the best. That's why it has left its competitors in the dust of time.
I look around at all the frameworks that have evolved to not do SQL (EJB-QL, Hibernate, etc) and I laugh. None of those languages come close to handling the same breath and width of problems that SQL can be used to solve. Whenever I see advocates of these frameworks all puff up with fervour, I feel like shaking them and say "Your emperor has no clothes!". The list of problems these frameworks can't solve is so huge that one wonders why anyone works with them at all. But I suppose, there are plenty of people who work for small businesses who haven't encountered the kind of problems that big enterprises have.
The parent poster that I'm responding to has apparently had an problems porting SQL code. But guess what? Even on the unix platform, applications written in C have had trouble being ported from one Unix to the next. People have worked around it. Nobody goes around arguing that "C is absolutely the worst programming language ever invented".
I can't think of any IBM product on the "distributed platforms" (i.e not mainframe or i5OS) where the fixpacks are not available for free.
That's nonsense. The "REAL" backup clause also applies in the case of a hard-disk based backup. You can't really know that the data being backed up will still be useful unless you read it back periodically. All things being equal, the data integrity of tape media over the long-term outstrips that of hard disks. Storing hard disks safely over the long term and handling them requires more care than a tape.
In addition, a lot of tapes come with a read only hardware setting that one needs to consciously move to the read-write setting - which is very useful for data archives. If you try to overwrite a hard drive based archive with new data, there are no such safeguards available to you.
You do have a point that the government should scrutinize things so that citizens are favored. However, the current implementation of the government's policies are counter-productive. Why are illegal immigrants present in plentiful numbers to do menial labor, when US citizens could be filling those job positions too? If there is an error to be made, it should come down on the side of the highly skilled (and legal) immigrants, but this isn't happening. Instead illegal immigrants are being grandfathered into having legal status, while cracking down on legal and highly skilled immigrants who are much more important to the economy because of the dollar amounts that are associated with the work that they do.
Hmm. I come from India, in a place where there are plenty of cobra's and they are killed on sight (i.e - even if they are not causing trouble, because the general idea is that if a cobra doesn't cause trouble today, it will tomorrow). India is a vast place, with a multitude of cultures, so it is possible that in some part of India the situation that you describe does exist. When I searched for this on the web, though, I came up with the following on National Geographic TV:
Perhaps you confused Thailand with India. Or perhaps you are right, and there really is a place like you describe in India. All I could find, though, was the above reference.
Quit bragging about uids
I think that would be a valid argument for any well developed business area. I don't think space falls into that category yet, even though the future looks promising. Yes, it would be a problem if, say for example, a TV manufacturer charges the government 10 times more for its product than business would pay for comparable products. But in the rarefield area of space technology, there isn't a good competitive landscape. In certain cases there isn't any candidate who can even bid, because what the government wants, may be pushing the bounds of current technology (military technology for example). In such situations, tightening the screws on your contractor may not be the right approach: if you want a super-kill-bill-gizmo #3, and nobody today can build it because the science or the technology hasn't been developed yet, cost plus is the right kind of contract.
The kind of outsourcing being proposed is in the more mundane (is there anything mundane about space?) areas of space technology, where there are more businesses participating. I don't think that the contractor cost overruns should be tolerated there, because there are more choices of vendors for the government.
....they would refuse to give into the Colbert, and the resulting broohaha will give them publicity that money simply can't buy. The fly in the ointment, of course, is that now the congressman who can impact their funding, is on Colbert's side, so they wouldn't want to piss him off. Of course, he may be a smart congressman too, and may be after the publicity that results from Nasa not giving in - it would certainly raise his public profile.
You are demonstrating the problem with search. The referenced Wikipedia article is good enough to help you fake things at a casual level. It is not good enough for you to do real work with it. There is no discussion in depth of the kind of problems that these techniques are used to solve. If you are working on a problem and trying to apply these techniques, and you run into a show-stopper because you can't figure it out, there isn't enough information in the article to help you figure out whether the technique is inapplicable to your problem, or whether you just need to work on the problem a bit more, perhaps with a different approach. There is no discussion about how tools interact with these techniques. I could go on and on, but thats the point: an expert in the technique who is writing a book on the topic will flesh out all the relevant topics that you would need to know about. As opposed to person searching, who would not even know what they need.
Your comment about the SEI compliance, I'm afraid, demonstrates your naivete. Unless you live and breathe SEI, you don't get to define compliance policies for your organization. Someone else will have defined it for you. And in any organization of respectable size, there will be a huge amount of information to process - something you will never be able to piece together with searches. In practice, most organizations recognize that even a compendium of the relevant policies wont do the trick, and deploy SEI via in person training, and then make the compendium available somewhere in a fashion that lets you find things by content classification. Search may be enabled, but you will rarely use it on documents like these, because when you are going through any one section, you are interested in _everything_ in that section.
The answer to this really depends on the depth of the information that you are looking for. Google is indispensable to my work. Quite often when I'm pushing the envelope, and software isn't working the way its supposed to be, a quick Google search often exposes the fact that someone else wrestled with the same problem, and often, their solution is also documented in the near vicinity of the search hit.
But on the other hand, if I were trying to learn a new technique, like Aspect Oriented Programming, or ray tracing techniques, then finding individual pieces of information via search hits is a poor solution. One has to sit and piece together an entire area of thought and fit it into a coherent whole. A book, where the author has already done this for you, is indispensable in such situations.
The other situation is where the field of knowledge that you're interested in is completely new. In that case, no one has put it all together before. In such situations, you have to go to the source documents. Google can be a help in identifying them there, but it would be a fatal mistake to rely on Google for this. Because, your ultimate objective is the truth, and not Google's page rank algorithm's version of it.
These days, I find that with the pervasiveness of Wikipedia, people tend to think that all their collaboration needs will be met by organizational wiki's. This is again a fallacy - a search-oriented navigational system is inferior to a content / content classification oriented navigational system when one needs information in depth. A wiki will help with the quick stuff - how to get the linker to cooperate when building a particular arcane piece of software. But its not going to help you figure out what you need to be in compliance with your organizations SEI level 3 compliance policies.
Au contraire.
Its the difference between building a house without a hammer, and building a house with one. The hammer didn't hammer the nails; the person did. However, the house wouldn't have gotten built without the hammer because its just too difficult to do it otherwise. And thats the point: the database is a tool that makes the difference between catching some criminals and letting them get away scot-free. The title of the story is exactly right.
There's a reason why Galileo is considered the father of modern science. Its because, prior to Galileo, knowledge progressed via increments of dogma. "scientists" of that time, held that heavier bodies fell faster than lighter ones, simply because Aristotle had said so. Nobody challenged this way of doing science until Galileo came along and performed experiments. And that is the crucial contribution that he made: the role of experiment in determining the truth.
Saying that the theory of a flat earth was "largely settled" in 1404, therefore has no bearing on the argument at hand. In 1404, the methods of science didnt exist. Nobody had looked at the existing facts, constructed a theory, and used that theory to conduct experiments to measure predictions against experimental outcomes to validate the theory. People also tend to apply these principles the wrong way when criticizing science. For example, they say that in Newton's time, it was a well settled matter that Force = mass * acceleration, and Einstein showed that this was wrong. Therefore science can be wrong. This is a fallacy because force is indeed mass times acceleration when one looks at all the data that was available in Newton's time. Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity were created to explain facts that were observed past Newton's time.
So the true test should be that, today, given all that we know, can a scientific theory be constructed to explain homeopathy, and if so, can we make successful predictions using that theory. If this isn't possible, thats alright - just dont call homeopathy a science. Call it dogma.
I note that circa 200 BC, Eratosthenes announced a number that he considered the circumference of the earth. This was assuming a round earth. His figure has been found to be amazingly accurate given the quality of the measurements that he had access to. However, there was no attempt made to validate this result by correlating this with the results of experiments or other measurements, and so this measure was nothing more than Eratosthenes' opinion. Not science.
I'm afraid the parent post is an example of not seeing the forest because of all the trees.....
Application code should never ever be aware of deployment issues. Making it aware of such things a sure way to ensure nightmares when your environment changes. For example, lets say you have to send mail. You could take the option of always talking to localhost under the assumption that your app will always be deployment on a machine with a mail server. But consider the case when the app is taken and deployed in a production environment with a firewall around it, and to send mail, you have to send mail to another system. Your app breaks. The right way to do this is to externalize the existence of a mail server into some properties / config file that gets updated at application deployment
This is so fundamental, that it seems obvious. Lets apply this philosophy to the case at hand: the application should never ever have to know whether there is a failover server / hot standby / cluster in place or not. It should just assume that its going to execute a statement and if there is a failure, the transaction will rollback. Whether the transaction will error out and rollback depends on the properties of the environment. For example, DB2 can do clustering / HADR (high-availability data replication). And on AIX, you have server clustering solutions like HACMP, transaction checkpointing and partition mobility, and a whole host of other technologies which can intervene to not cause the application to fail in case of a database / database server failure.
If a database server ever introduces an API for making applications aware of failover issues, thats a sure sign that the database architects are asleep at the wheel.
Perhaps its because Sun is already effectively out of the *big*-server market. IBM no longer considers Sun a competitor on the high-end market segment and sees only HP to compete with there. Sun appears to be trying to find a way to find another way of making the revenues they had in the past.
In the good old days, when Sun was making money, they had their guns trained on IBM. These days, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgment in their strategy that they are no longer in the same league as IBM. They seem to be aspiring to compete with HP, Dell and *shudder* Gateway. You dont see IBM giving away their AIX operating system for free, do you? And this is despite the fact that AIX soleley exists to exploit IBM hardware (it doesnt run on anything else) and therefore, could legitimately be given away, since IBM's objective is to sell hardware.
The bottom line is: yes, its a way to drum up interest in a new product, but they appear to be targetting the lower-end market segment with this gimmick.
5) Autism is correlated with the type of parents (i.e genetic causes) that prefer cable TV.
I'm afraid you're using the wrong word. A troll is someone who doesnt even believe in the arguments that they are espousing. Their whole purpose is to dump fuel on smoldering embers. This is something that cannot be said of Dijkstra. A polemicist is a more accurate description of who Dijkstra was.
The whole point of assigments is to stimulate the student to understand the subject on their own power. The grading is based on how well the prof thinks that they've done this. A solution to this would be to have a oral quiz based on the contents of the work turned in. If they understand the work, and can demonstrate that they can defend what has been turned in as their work, then who cares where they copied it from? The goals of the assignment have been achieved.
And to those who say that students copying verbatim from other work (or having it created for them) is an unfair assist, I say that this is no different (in effect) from going to the library and researching the matter. As long as the student can defend the work intellectually, who cares - they've learned! And thats the whole point!
Of course, then one might ask - whats the point of the assignments? Do away with them and simply have the oral quizzes. That would save the professors a lot of work. However, this limits the depth of work that can be assigned to students to evaluate them. And it gives the students a tangible goal to work towards.
Dont know about other PostgreSQL features, but the two that you've mentioned are covered by DB2 with great panache. Furthermore, DB2 offers features like federation of multiple types of datasources (XML, other databases, csv files, Domino servers, etc). It has OLAP capabilities, native XML support, and has proven and published TPC benchmarks available. On multiple operating systems and different high-end hardware platforms. Why wouldnt you choose DB2 over PostgreSQL?
Yes, if you want the source to DB2, you arent going to get it. But unless you really want to be in the business of maintaining / fixing problems in a complex database product, why do you care about that?
Why is it that you consider getting caught to be the greater sin? Have you been watching too many heist movies and they have given you the impression that crime is ok as long as you dont get caught?
Not to invoke Godwin's law or anything, but if one were to indeed use any means necessary, then the Nazi's didnt really do anything repugnant with the concentration camps. The Japanese didnt do anything wrong with Pearl Harbor. And Saddam Hussein didnt do anything wrong when he gassed the Kurds. And, using your argument, there wouldnt seem to be anything wrong with the actions of the 9/11 bombers either.
As in all things, there are limits. The ends do not always justify the means because as someone else put it "what good is it if you win the war but lose your soul?".
If Oracle stock was going to tank, the people left holding the stock would have had losses anyway - whether Ellison did insider trading or not. Ellison didnt cause them losses by his insider trading. The shareholders' gripe is that he made money illegally when he shouldnt have. So the judgement is exactly right : the shareholders shouldnt get money because they wouldnt have gotten rich anyway. And Larry Ellison shouldnt have gained that money - so his ill gotten gains should be taken away.
This leads me to believe that you dont understand what modern database technology is all about. The theory is that the database manages the physical data stores and how to retrieve data from the stores, and the application program using the data stores worries about what data it needs. Now, are RDBMS's faster than you directly accessing a flat file whose structure your program knows about? Absolutely not. Yet its a stupid idea in this day and age to architect an application with flat files instead of an RDBMS as a datastore. The benefits in terms of application development time and maintainability are so huge that the slowness that RDBMS's add on are almost always discounted.
Non-XML physical datastores are typically physically non-structured, though the database may impose a logical structure by using indexes and writing out records to the physical files in a specific order. So you can have structured data organization like btrees that your database knows about but which your program doesnt know or care about.
An XML file is explicitly structured. Yes, parsing an XML file may take longer than parsing a "flat" file, but on the other hand, an intelligent database may be able to optimize away the overhead of structuring the data by moving records within the file around that is needed for flat files. Further more, the great advantage of XML is that it is a standards based human readable format. It opens up whole new worlds. Will native XML storage be slower than flat file storage? Maybe. Even so, it is still an improvement over what was there before.
And you should also read up on XQuery. I dont know if "Viper" supports it (unlikely, since the standard is now at W3C candidate recommendation status still), but thats where the wind is blowing with XML data stores. XQuery is SQL for XML structured data. With XQuery support, you should in theory be able to take all XML physical data files that Oracle has and copy it over to DB2 and still make your XQuery based program work without changes because the physical data store has a standard structure (XML) and the query language is also a standard. Dumb idea? Far from it.
Lets face it - Oracle isnt kicking Sun's butt - its IBM. Ever since the dot com bubble burst and IBM finally found its game, the sun has been setting (or eclipsed (ha-ha!)) with IBM stealing more and more of Sun's customers and grabbing new accounts. Part of the problem for Sun is that IBM has the ability to sell solutions. You want a software stack to handle applications? IBM has it (WebSphere, DB2, etc). You want a software stack to manage infrastructure? IBM has that too (all the Tivoli stuff). You want office productivity infrastructure? IBM has that too (Lotus stuff). And along with all these go IBM servers.
This is Sun's attempt to come back into the market by saying - hey - we have a database solution too. Next thing you know, they'll be throwing their support behind (or buying out) a vendor of J2EE containers.....