[MySQL / PostgreSQL / Interbase] is [better / worse] than [MySQL / PostgreSQL / Interbase] because it [has / doesn't have] [row-level locking / transactions / foreign keys / large [development/user] base]
Hmm...looks like that sentence frame can generate real nonsense like "MySQL is worse than MySQL because it has foreign keys".:-)
In all honesty, why can't people just realize that competition is a good thing? Instead of having one database that tries to be all things for all people, the Open Source Community has several database applications available; choose whatever best suits your needs!
Well, as the sage once said "competition does not
consist of being different than your adversary, but, rather, of being the same". I think the
flame fests really started in this case when mySQL
fans made claims about its appropriateness for a very wide assortment of tasks, and then, when challenged, retreat to the line "well, I don't need to do that anyway, and it works okay for me".
I think PostgreSQL people then get particularly peeved when somebody who last tried it 3 years ago
shouts in public that "PostgreSQL is really slow"
without anything recent to back it up.
Again, what I think we could use here is a fair
competition like the one run by the ICFP people.
What we have now is a lot of people talking past
each other.
In other news, PostgreSQL [postgresql.org] announced that it has all the features that MySQL 4.0 has
Really? When did they add sets and enums, as well as integers with specified storage sizes?
Well, "enum" seems kind of handy as an idiom,
but exactly the same kind of effect can be gotten
with an explicit integrity check in Postgresql.
A similar argument (you can implement the idea
with, e.g., foreign key constraints) applies to
"set". Note that neither of these are generally
available in other database products, and both
have something to do with referential integrity
checks at some level.
As far as "integers with specified storage sizes"
go, I know that postgresql has int2 (same as smallint), int4 (same as int), int8 (aka bigint).
Did you mean something else?
How about a competition? (was Re:Proof, please)
on
MySQL 4.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Postgres has shown time and time again that it blows the shit out of MySQL for any kind of select statement where your 'where' clause is even just slightly more complicated than 'x = y'.
I'm using MySQL to perform selects that join five tables, including one with over 800,000 rows and one with over 5 million rows. It can perform these selects in a fraction of a second, more than adequate performance for my application.
I might be missing something, but I don't see
anything contradictory in these two statements.
If your "where" clause is sufficiently easy and you can take advantage of indexing, you would expect any decent system to
perform reasonably well when it is returning a
handful of rows. Five table joins would only
be scary when you can't toss out the vast majority of your 5 million rows at step one.
MySQL has also been very reliable for me.
One thing that has just occurred to me in this,
round 5,408 of the MySQL-versus-PostgreSQL flame
fest is to ask if anybody has tried to replace
MySQL with PostgreSQL or vice versa in any project that both sides would consider "worthy" in some sense. One problem here, of course, is that if you really wanted an ACID solution, you weren't (aren't?) likely to choose MySQL in the first place. But what if you wanted to use PostgreSQL with the Slashcode; would this port be doable in anything like a reasonable amount of time? If done, could it then be shown that the result was
any different (for better or for worse) than what
you get with the current system?
Another idea would be to borrow an idea from the
functional programming community and do a "database programming contest" like the the annual
ICFP Programming Contest. You could try to find a sponsor and give out cash prizes, or you could get *really* serious (like the ICFP people do) and award year-long bragging rights.
I mean, both PostgreSQL and MySQL fans would probably go to great lengths to avoid having to
refer to the other product as, for example, "the relational database system of choice for for discriminating hackers" in public. Not to mention the possibility that both
of them would have to acknowledge the supremacy
of DB2 or Oracle or something.:-)
However, for real-world development, being able to "cheat" when it's convenient, and mutate a value here and there, can be a real development timesaver. I find languages which don't let you do that to be less practical. Also, for those new to functional programming, starting out with a language that's a little less pure may make things a little easier, and avoid frustration.
So, do you have any thoughts on O'Haskell? When I first saw this, I thought it would take over the world. But, being an academic project, it's development has progressed at a leisurely, academic pace. Which is very unfortunate. oCaml may yet rule the space, as you suggest.
The "surprising angle" of the book you referenced is not all that surprising, except possibly to a total newbie.
Yes, but it was the newbies I was addressing, albeit obliquely.:-)
OK, so the joke wasn't that funny. In any case:
Graphical programs are a perfect application space for pure functional programming.
Absolutely, but the usual imperative style for
this is for-loops galore and more assignment
statements than you can shake a stick at.
It seems many of the more popular CS programs in the world use Scheme as a teaching language. A lot of times, students complain about this, saying they'd prefer to learn about C or another language that is considered "apt for industry."
Yup. And the problem is, those students are right. Curiosity really does kill the cat.
That is, if students really do construe their years in college as training for industrial jobs,
then those future employers will require them to
have had (N+1) years of experience in experience
using a language that was only invented N years
ago. Somehow, they'll get by; the clever cat will get the chance to kill some mice. Then M years from now, they'll be let go for not having M+1 years of experience in the language invented this year. They are the old cats who can no longer (it is thought) learn new tricks. And there's always
a new litter of kittens... There is nothing new here. Of course, if these students view college as just a credential to enter this kind of rat race (or a race to eat rats), then they risk missing out completely on the world of ideas.
In the end, an initial failure of curiosity leads
exactly where lack of curiosity has always led:
a dead end.
I honestly don't know how anybody can stand to learn to live without curiosity, but that is what I see around me every day. And, really, you don't need very much to get started. Suppose you're a
CS major, and you've heard you need to learn Java
to get a "real job". All it takes is the single
spark to ask "Why Java?" Regardless of
whether Java is the One True Answer or not, the
mere action of trying to understand why it is
even an answer will take you much deeper than most
undergraduates I know ever get. It's addictive;
it's fun; it's never boring. Yet real curiosity is so very rare.
The failures brought about by an essential lack of curiosity are all around us. I wish I understood
how people could really be happy that way. Not
because I want to become one of them, but so I
would no longer find them so completely frightening, so alien, so unlikely to care about anything beyond their own comfort.
My advice, based on my personal experience, is to learn Scheme and ML (try SML/NJ). Haskell is interesting, but in some ways too pure (no side effects, completely lazy)
Not to prevent anybody from learning Scheme or ML,
but your comments about Haskell are a bit puzzling. One of the greatest advantages of a
pure functional language is precisely referential transparency, which
does imply no side-effects, at least as we would
think of them conventionally. Laziness has some
very nice properties too (and fits nicely with
transparency); moreover, if you really want more
strictness for some reason, that can be gotten,
too.
A really great text/introduction to Haskell is
Paul Hudak's The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia. Yes, that's right; Hudak's book aims to teach functional programming from the surprising angle of animation, music, graphics, and all the cool-looking stuff you'd expect to see in the latest "Java in 15 days" book.
In fact, there is precious little that PostgreSQL doesn't have.
I'll tell you what PostgresSQL doesn't have compared to DB2, for example.
IBM.
Yup, there's no doubt about it.A major sticking point in the adoption of truly enterprise-wide free software like PostgreSQL (or mySQL) is the
fact that there is *any* risk factor involved in
the support arrangements. IBM, like it or not,
is just not going to go away. I don't think that,
say, Red Hat will go away either, but their support for PostgreSQL in its incarnation as the official Red Hat Database system is more questionable. After all, Great Bridge was (alas)
unable to stay in business by doing PostgreSQL development and support contracts.
It is a wonderful thing that Open Source products
do provide you with the source, but in situations
where you have a major league database system that controls all your customer accounts, and you have
a problem that has to get solved *today*...this
isn't really a niche that is well covered yet for
all Open Source products.
SPECint2000 Base and SPECfp2000 Base are single-threaded applications and the results only tests one CPU. I'd like to see how well it scales in performance at 32 processors. That thing could be one very powerful Oracle database server or an application server.
For what it's worth, the 32 processor 1.3GHz models claim an rPerf of 50.56, and all the
number seem to scale about as you'd expect
(e.g., not quite linear in # of processors).
But, sicko that I am, where I think the Power4 might really get down and dirty is in supercomputing applications. None of this sharing, caring relational database stuff. No
siree; I'm into a much more serious kind of scene. This freaky baby was just built for LINEAR ALGEBRA, friend, and I've heard that she can keep on doing it it all night long! We're talking a *serious* FLOPhouse here, folks. But you've got to talk
dirty to it, something like Hey, take a look at this generalized eigenvalue problem--have you seen a longer or harder one than...
Uh, excuse me; I guess I was losing my composure a bit back there. I've got both hands back on the keyboard now.
But doesn't anybody else ever wonder why there aren't more LINPACK benchmarks posted on alt.sex.stories?
Well, I don't really believe it. There's another company that would probably be biding against IBM if they tried to buy Sun, and they've got significantly deeper coffers as well. (No, it's not MS.)
I think somebody must be underestimating IBM's
resources here, but the only other companies
I could strain to think of that would buy Sun
right now in terms of fit would be Fujitsu, Siemens, or GE. The first one has (I think) the best fit given its investment in SPARC, but I have no idea of whether they could or would want to buy the company. Siemens is (I think) the only big European contender to anything like this, while GE can, as
always, do whatever the heck it likes.
I am a lawyser, but this is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, contact an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
[Completely irrelevant aside: if somebody claims
to be a "lawyser", shouldn't they be dispensing
"legsal advice" or maybe "legal advuice" or something like that?]
Uhh, no. That's not the law. There is certainly a breach of contract when an employee does not get paid, but in the absence of prior intent not to pay, it's generally not a crime.
OK, so how high a standard do you need for "intent" here? Here's what I think is an
ordered list of possibilities as enunciated
by a typical dot com executive; where would
a judge start to laugh in your face?
"We really expected the VCs to give us the
next round given our previous contract. Maybe
we can make payroll if sales pick up a bit..."
"The VCs have cut us off, and we have no sales,
but if we don't hire these techs we have no
chance..."
"The VCs have cut us off, but they did approve
my spiffy severance package. That doesn't leave
enough for next month's payroll, but we need a
new sysadmin..."
"The VCs have cut us off, we're stiffing our creditors, and I took the last of the cash as
my bonus, but I need a tech to make this place
seem lively enough to attract a buyer..."
"The chapter 11 filing doesn't come until the
fifteenth, but I need a couple of warm bodies
around here so I have plausible deniability when
f*ckedcompany.com pre-announces our reduction in
force..."
"Talk about your desperately deluded future ex-employees! While there's no money to even think about paying her boyfriend, what the heck? I'm not going to return that last favor in kind, but I'm in a generous mood just now..."
I'm guessing you have to get all the way to the
chapter 11 filing case to nail down intent; am
I right?
If a company stock trades at below $1 for a some period(I thought it was 30 days?), they are delisted from NASDAQ. There's more to this rule than that, I think there is also a $50 million market capitalization and maybe some other stuff.
The listing requirements are a bit more involved than that, but in the case
of LNUX, you'd need either a minimum bid price of $1 per share and $10 million in shareholders' equity (and a couple of trivial requirements),
or $3 per share and $50 million in market cap
if there is no equity available to shareholders.
So far, so good...but if the price skates below
a buck, life is not going to be very happy.
Stocks trading under $5 are generally considered high risk and few investors will touch them.
There are many risks, the bid/ask spreads are
large relative to share prices, such stocks are
much more likely to become untradable or illiquid...but a really important part of the
picture is that they aren't marginable (you can't
borrow money against them) and, at least much
of the time, aren't easily shortable.
But being delisted from the exchange is a sign that the vultures are circling. Companies almost never recover from that position.
Specifically, reverse stock splits almost never
work; in some cases, a company with de-listed
stock might be bought out by a firm that goes
onto greater glory, or at least a stock price
comfortably above a buck a share.
Redhat is doing fine, they are still up around $3 with market cap over $500 million
Uh, any company with a quarterly net loss of $21M on revenues of $21M is not doing fine.
That *sounds* reasonable, but it might not be.
it all depends on how you lose the $21M. In
the case of Red Hat, almost all of that was
amortized "good will" rather than a cash hemorrhage. Basically, when you say at time 1
that Cygnus Solutions is worth close to a billion
dollars in stock, and now you know it isn't, you
have to write down the difference somehow, even
though it has no effect on your cash flow or your
continuing operations. Red Hat's operations are
in decent-ish shape, but it will take them a long
time to get rid of the goodwill overhang.
Re:Good or bad... - in all seriousness
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yay. ANOTHER big corporate merger.
Call me paranoid, but IMO this is just getting ridiculous. I lost all faith in the government's enforcement of the concept of anti-trust when they let AOL and Time Warner merge. Of course, (HP + Compaq)
Well, first of all, note that the government did take an intense interest in the AOL/TW merger, and did in fact force them to make some (limited) concessions for the sake of preserving competition.
And this is the key point: the feds don't (or shouldn't) get involved in mergers like this unless they threaten competition in certain markets. It would be very tough to come down hard on HP/Compaq in this regard because the only market where their merger could have virtually *any* negative impact on competition is the most competitive market on the planet: commodity PC hardware. Indeed, there was some chance that, absent a merger, both companies would have been out of consumer PCs The merger might actually help save a competitor. Seriously, I think the only PC firm that could really draw fire for a merger these days is Dell itself, and they quite frankly do not need to merge with anybody. Coming from the other direction, the only companies HP would have significant anti-trust issues with would be in printing and imaging, and I don't think we're likely to see much of that.
All that being said, I'm not sure that this merger will really end up achieving much. Combined PC sales for the two firms are not likely to be any higher than for the two separate companies, and while they could layoff some more people, I can't see them becoming Dell or anything. It could even hurt some. Barron's a couple of weeks ago pointed out that HP's printer business (especially ink and toner) was the company's cash cow, but one that could potentially bring in even more money if HP *didn't* compete in the PC market (they currently lose a lot of printer sales on bundling deals they don't get because they're a direct competitor in the commodity PC market). HPaq will not be getting out of PCs, so unless they keep or grow their market share, the printer bundling argument starts to become more potent.
It strikes me that the cable companies will have a great opportunity o take over @Home's infrastructure for cents on the dollar.
Well, one cable company will certainly have that opportunity, namely, ATT,
since they will emerge as @Home's biggest creditor when Excite@Home is forced into bankruptcy. The long story there is that ATT did a bunch of infrastructure building for @Home when the latter lost their (once robust) cash stream from Excite. See Cringely's column this week for more on that angle. Note, however, that Cringely also assumes that broadband is a dead/dying proposition at this moment in time. I'm pretty sure he's wrong about that.
A few articles at The Register [theregister.co.uk] have talked about how MS will be "building SQL Server into the OS - effectively making the file system a relational database." This will greatly improve efficiency, and concentrate them into one database format instead of a mixture. And its even probably legal.
Words fail me here. There are many beautiful reasons why a relational model makes perfect sense for a file system, and, for that matter, why the notion of "file" itself might be changed for the better in such a system. And, if there is any advantage to monopoly, it is that a tyrant with good ideas can actually make them work.
The problem is, of course, that the good idea is the notion of a relational file system. SQL is, was, and forever shall be a disgusting hack. Everybody who does research in databases knows this, and almost everybody who works with SQL on non-trivial things knows this, too. And MS knows this as well. Indeed, they could, if they wanted, implement the relational model in a nice, clean way and support it with a query language that's less Cobol-esque and they could make everybody use it. The problem is, though, that this doesn't maximize market share by ripping apart its competitors like kleenex pinatas. To do that, you have to first embrace, then extend, then spend a decade to clean up the mess you made in the first place. In other words, SQL Server in the OS is the quintessential Microsoft move. But, hey, at least it does solve the file associations problem in a slightly less dorky way...
More importantly, who thinks cable internet access is going to stay priced low after the DSL providers all fold? (or have any provision for having more then one IP address, or support anything other then Wintel, and if your lucky Mac...)
Well, first off, I doubt that they will *all* fold; the Baby Bells will still sell it. As for support of anything but Wintel, I think you might end up being a bit surprised. Mac owners are pretty "boutiquey" people (i.e., they've got the cash) and whine loudly when things don't go their way. (I know; I'm one of them.:-)) Now, since the way of the Mac in the OS X world will essentially be FreeBSD, I'm pretty sure that the combination of Mac plus BSD/Linux users will be big enough to tolerate, if not hand-hold.
As far as prices go, I think there's also good news in that cable companies are feeling intense pressure from the dish. In the long run, I think they're on the losing end of the battle as far as broadcast programming is concerned, but probably in better shape for internet access until everything goes wireless. In the mean time, they really will need the market share, and I don't think they'll have time to get especially greedy.
Since I have hacked perl since 1991, I am very surprised to be saying this. I love perl, but
for a long time, I have wanted a cleaner, shinier perl. Python has always struck me as a cleaner, shinier something, but not a replacement for perl.
There are other languages that might also live in this role, but I couldn't really commit to Haskell, and O'Caml doesn't really fit all of my uses either (alas).
Now, when I heard about the Perl6 effort, I had hopes for the very best, and a year ago at this time I was downright optimistic. But it now looks like it will realistically be another year before anything real is on the table. So, while I really do like Perl5, I now have more than a vague dissatisfaction with the aspects of perl that I thought were going to change (for the better) by now. Laziness and Hubris are important principles
of programming, but Restlessness is a surprisingly
important motivating force for programmers. I will confess that I have grown somewhat restless.
In the mean time, I blundered into Thomas and Hunt's Programming Ruby, and found, to my surprise, about 95% of what I wanted from Perl6.
(There was recently a Slashdot thread about Ruby,
but it was worse than useless, unfortunately.) I personally believe that the benefits of OOP are vastly over-rated, so the claim that Ruby is "really OO" doesn't impress me very much. What
does impress me is the general cleanliness of the
design, the potential for terse code, the very impressive dynamic capabilities of the language, and the willingness to steal blatantly from Perl (or any other language) when the advantage was clear. Ruby seems to be a language that thrives
on the fact that lifting a good solution is much, much better than re-inventing a (possibly bad) one. But the real key, of course, is that Ruby
really does provide More than One Way to Do It. (Although people may talk about the "Ruby Way",
I'm not sure I see anything like a uniform style
in Ruby snippets I have seen.) At this moment in time, it may well be the most Pragmatic language of all, albeit not the most practical. If Ruby
were to become noticably more practical (e.g., having a larger set of libraries and more (English) Documentation), I'm not confident that Perl would continue to be ascendent in many of its niches.
I can't believe I said that; if I'm lucky, maybe only the "right" people will read it.:-)
Would I pay an average of $.25 a month for Slashdot, CNet, CNN, NYTimes, Playboy, Yahoo, ESPN, SciAm, Gamasutra, Google, and 100 others? Yeah I might if they were on one bill.
Fortunately for you, the media and telecomm titans are working 80-hour weeks to accomplish the remaining mergers that will make this possible, albeit at a slightly higher price to the consumer.:-)
More seriously, it does get to be an incredible
nuisance to juggle even a half-dozen snail mail
periodical subscriptions, and I agree that people
will only agree to pay for content when it is
made one-stop subscriptions for content rather than piecemeal subscriptions or dime-at-a-time micropayments. And I do think there is some
hope for that.
Re:Very few language succeed..
on
Why not Ruby?
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· Score: 2
The "scripting language niche" is quite already filled by Perl and Python..
IMHO Ruby is more readable than Perl (not difficult!) but it competes head to head against Python, and there are many more Python users than Ruby users..
I would say that the odds are against Ruby, we'll see..
Well, I guess there are three comments to make here.
I think the notion of a scripting language niche
as such has really lost all meaning. Given the
fact that 10K+ line programs exist in pretty much
any "scripting" language that got anywhere at all,
I'm really not convinced that there is any interesting distinction to be made here anymore.
When plotting world domination, your current market share is certainly important, but really
no more so than your growth rate relative to the
overall rate of growth in the dominion. The number of Ruby adherants today is tiny, but the
growth rate is pretty stunning. Of course, if
the latter levels off in the next year or two,
there won't be much to say. I would like to point
out, however, that Python hung out for a surprisingly long time in what might be called its "single digits with no obvious influence on the race" stage. Now, *why* that was is another question entirely...
People on slashdot never seem to understand what
competition is. Ruby is really not that much
like Python, or really that much like Perl, although it has obviously borrowed ideas from both. As the saying goes, "Competition does not exist of being different from other, but, rather,
from being the same". Now, I've been looking at
Ruby for only a couple of weeks, and I have to say that it is very different from other so-called scripting languages. The real
key differences that Ruby brings to the table isn't "real object orientation" or any such stuff,
but its use os abstract iterators, the well-supported notion of mix-in classes and an aim towards the terseness of Perl but with a systematic reduction in the amount of "huh?" surprise at the effects of your code.
Now, I have been a Perl programmer since the 4.036
days, and I will undoubtedly continue to use it
a lot. But, at least in one interview, Larry Wall
himself noted that the design and ideas behind Ruby were deep and yet not merely academic curiosities. I, for one, have been waiting a long
time for a language that could afford the creation
of code as succinct as Perl's without some of the
collateral weirdness. (Random example of the day: I *hate* the fact that things as useful as "chomp" have nearly useless values.)
In the mean time, I don't know about you, but
I'm having a blast learning new things and finding
out what I do and don't appreciate about the old.
return values
You forget that most college kids are the ones providing the files to share, and most colleges turn a blind eye to such practices.
Probably true on the "who is sharing files" part,
but not really true on the "blind eye" part. I
know that here at Mizzou they do not really care
who *downloads* files, but that they certainly do
everything they can to prevent people from sharing
and/or serving other files (e.g., napster; note that they do packet analysis to defeat this, not just silly port-blocking). And the reason for that isn't (really) just to be killjoys, but because *before* they did this, almost all of the available bandwidth going off campus was used for this kind of thing, and it really just isn't the mission of the university.
Too bad that there is no competiton in the cable market. You use the cable provider that serves the area you live in. The only way you can choose a different provider is by moving, not a simple and easy thing to do.
I don't see this as being a permanent situation.
First of all, you really do have the option of
going with a dish. Second, competition with satellite TV (and other factors) have lead to the
construction of much more flexible and capable
digital cable systems. These days, this only
means that you get the ability to fork over
an absurd amount of money to EvilCable Inc. for
"digital service", but down the line, I expect that people will realize that they can (and should) expect such a system to support multiple
providers over a single cable.
Until then, just don't watch TV. It's not like
there's much of anything *good* on these days...
Here, at the time of the passing of its co-creator, I see a great out-pouring of
nostalgia for Usenet of old. I also see
the posts of many people who were not lucky
enough to have seen it at its zenith. I
think the one most amazing aspect of Usenet
was not merely that you could get fast answers
to pressing technical questions, but that you
had direct access to some real giants of that
day, and see a little bit about how they think.
It wasn't just that there was more signal, in
some cases the signal came from the creator of
whatever it was you were asking about. Even if they worked for a Big Important Company. So if you asked an interesting question in comp.sys.mac.hypercard, chances were good that somebody from Apple would respond. Alexander Stepanov used to respond to traffic about the C++ STL. World experts at your fingertips everywhere! It should have been paradise!
And I have to say that by and large we really blew it. It wasn't just the spam, or even the massive
flamefests. It was really the corrosive effects of ignorance and greed. Take Tom Christiansen (most recently tchrist@mox.perl.com). Not always a bunch of rainbows and smiles, he, but an incredibly well-informed individual whose contributions to Usenet are the stuff of legend. Apparently chased away from Usenet for good by one too many "gimme gimme" question and one too many displays of horrible netiquette. A real tragedy.
This was around the time I discovered Slashdot,
and saw what looked like a more clueful albeit
imperfect mirror of the Spirit of Usenet. I was
quite cheered when I found out that tchrist himself was becoming a key contributor. It might
be a new geek paradise! But, of course, that didn't happen. Tom got chased away again by a bunch of cretins.
And, getting back to the idea of an elegy for
Ellis, I believe the final straw there was some
jerk maligning Jon Postel when his obituary
came up in this forum. Much worse than spam.
Re:Wasn't the suit in federal court?
on
Fortune on Rambus
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· Score: 3
This is why companies bother to pick and choose what states they incorporate in...a texan company I used to work for (and is laying of more people as we speak) was incorporated in the state of Delaware, because Delaware has wonderful laws concerning corporations.
Of which the most wonderful law is that you can
incorporate in Delaware without having to live
there.:-)
More seriously, there are some tax advantages,
which a number of "incorporate your firm in Delaware" websites will cheerily mention.
But one of the more important advantages in the
long term is that the court system there is very fair and very predictable in its application of corporate law. Precedent really
controls the rulings, and there is a large body and long history of precedent in the state.
Anbody who questions the role of the Lisa in advancing the GUI can find more than ample evidence in the 5000 pages of texts linked to from the above page.
The differences between the Lisa and Xerox Alto and Star are very significant.
Man, I never thought I'd get old enough to get
a lump in my throat over this stuff. The very
first time I saw a demo of the Lisa was when
they were auctioning one off (as a special item)
at the Channel 2 Auction (WGBH) in Boston. I
and I'll bet half the geek youth of the city desperately wanted the thing at almost any price.
The early warning sign that the Lisa itself wasn't going to be box that changed computing was when
the final auction price for the Lisa didn't quite
come up to retail, as I recall. The only three Lisas I ever saw "working" were all, oddly enough,
given over to secretaries doing word processing.
In as similar vein, the only Xerox Stars I ever
saw "in the wild" belonged to the typing pool at
the West Haven (CT) VA hospital. Neither I nor
anybody who thought they were special had any access to them, and I think the typing staff actually preferred Wang dedicated word processors
to these, so they weren't often used...
Nobody knew what to do with this stuff in the early 80s, and I'm convinced that not much progress would have been made if Jobs hadn't been the slave driver he was to get the original Mac
done.
Anybody else remember that distinctive chunk-chunk-chunk sound the old mac floppy drives made? Maybe they'll include it as a system sound in OSX for the "nostalgia" theme.;)
Well, if you're going to go that far (synthesizing Old Tyme floppy drive sounds for computers that now no longer have floppy drives), then why
don't we simulate the use of video RAM for copying
disks like DiskCopy used to, and write random garbage to the top of the screen during, say, CD-ROM burning?:-)
Explanation for the Perplexed
When the Mac was
first released, it had only 128KB of RAM and one
400 KB floppy drive. To copy a floppy, which you
frequently had to do since there was no hard drive to boot from much less hold files, you used a utility called DiskCopy, which would prompt you to swap floppy disks back and forth until your disk had been copied. This could take...forever. So an important optimization of the procedure was adopted by DiskCopy: the utility would use dedicated video memory to hold another ~20K or so
of content during the copy operation. Doing this meant that you would have binary trash written to part of your monitor.
Life was grand.:-) Maybe next time, I'll tell
you how Lode Runner addiction nearly kept me out of grad school...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm...looks like that sentence frame can generate real nonsense like "MySQL is worse than MySQL because it has foreign keys". :-)
Well, as the sage once said "competition does not consist of being different than your adversary, but, rather, of being the same". I think the flame fests really started in this case when mySQL fans made claims about its appropriateness for a very wide assortment of tasks, and then, when challenged, retreat to the line "well, I don't need to do that anyway, and it works okay for me". I think PostgreSQL people then get particularly peeved when somebody who last tried it 3 years ago shouts in public that "PostgreSQL is really slow" without anything recent to back it up.
Again, what I think we could use here is a fair competition like the one run by the ICFP people. What we have now is a lot of people talking past each other.
Really? When did they add sets and enums, as well as integers with specified storage sizes?
Well, "enum" seems kind of handy as an idiom, but exactly the same kind of effect can be gotten with an explicit integrity check in Postgresql. A similar argument (you can implement the idea with, e.g., foreign key constraints) applies to "set". Note that neither of these are generally available in other database products, and both have something to do with referential integrity checks at some level.
As far as "integers with specified storage sizes" go, I know that postgresql has int2 (same as smallint), int4 (same as int), int8 (aka bigint). Did you mean something else?
I might be missing something, but I don't see anything contradictory in these two statements. If your "where" clause is sufficiently easy and you can take advantage of indexing, you would expect any decent system to perform reasonably well when it is returning a handful of rows. Five table joins would only be scary when you can't toss out the vast majority of your 5 million rows at step one.
One thing that has just occurred to me in this, round 5,408 of the MySQL-versus-PostgreSQL flame fest is to ask if anybody has tried to replace MySQL with PostgreSQL or vice versa in any project that both sides would consider "worthy" in some sense. One problem here, of course, is that if you really wanted an ACID solution, you weren't (aren't?) likely to choose MySQL in the first place. But what if you wanted to use PostgreSQL with the Slashcode; would this port be doable in anything like a reasonable amount of time? If done, could it then be shown that the result was any different (for better or for worse) than what you get with the current system?
Another idea would be to borrow an idea from the functional programming community and do a "database programming contest" like the the annual ICFP Programming Contest. You could try to find a sponsor and give out cash prizes, or you could get *really* serious (like the ICFP people do) and award year-long bragging rights.
I mean, both PostgreSQL and MySQL fans would probably go to great lengths to avoid having to refer to the other product as, for example, "the relational database system of choice for for discriminating hackers" in public. Not to mention the possibility that both of them would have to acknowledge the supremacy of DB2 or Oracle or something. :-)
So, do you have any thoughts on O'Haskell? When I first saw this, I thought it would take over the world. But, being an academic project, it's development has progressed at a leisurely, academic pace. Which is very unfortunate. oCaml may yet rule the space, as you suggest.
Yes, but it was the newbies I was addressing, albeit obliquely. :-)
OK, so the joke wasn't that funny. In any case:
Absolutely, but the usual imperative style for this is for-loops galore and more assignment statements than you can shake a stick at.
Yup. And the problem is, those students are right. Curiosity really does kill the cat. That is, if students really do construe their years in college as training for industrial jobs, then those future employers will require them to have had (N+1) years of experience in experience using a language that was only invented N years ago. Somehow, they'll get by; the clever cat will get the chance to kill some mice. Then M years from now, they'll be let go for not having M+1 years of experience in the language invented this year. They are the old cats who can no longer (it is thought) learn new tricks. And there's always a new litter of kittens... There is nothing new here. Of course, if these students view college as just a credential to enter this kind of rat race (or a race to eat rats), then they risk missing out completely on the world of ideas. In the end, an initial failure of curiosity leads exactly where lack of curiosity has always led: a dead end.
I honestly don't know how anybody can stand to learn to live without curiosity, but that is what I see around me every day. And, really, you don't need very much to get started. Suppose you're a CS major, and you've heard you need to learn Java to get a "real job". All it takes is the single spark to ask "Why Java?" Regardless of whether Java is the One True Answer or not, the mere action of trying to understand why it is even an answer will take you much deeper than most undergraduates I know ever get. It's addictive; it's fun; it's never boring. Yet real curiosity is so very rare.
The failures brought about by an essential lack of curiosity are all around us. I wish I understood how people could really be happy that way. Not because I want to become one of them, but so I would no longer find them so completely frightening, so alien, so unlikely to care about anything beyond their own comfort.
Not to prevent anybody from learning Scheme or ML, but your comments about Haskell are a bit puzzling. One of the greatest advantages of a pure functional language is precisely referential transparency, which does imply no side-effects, at least as we would think of them conventionally. Laziness has some very nice properties too (and fits nicely with transparency); moreover, if you really want more strictness for some reason, that can be gotten, too.
A really great text/introduction to Haskell is Paul Hudak's The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia. Yes, that's right; Hudak's book aims to teach functional programming from the surprising angle of animation, music, graphics, and all the cool-looking stuff you'd expect to see in the latest "Java in 15 days" book.
Try it; you may well like it.
Yup, there's no doubt about it.A major sticking point in the adoption of truly enterprise-wide free software like PostgreSQL (or mySQL) is the fact that there is *any* risk factor involved in the support arrangements. IBM, like it or not, is just not going to go away. I don't think that, say, Red Hat will go away either, but their support for PostgreSQL in its incarnation as the official Red Hat Database system is more questionable. After all, Great Bridge was (alas) unable to stay in business by doing PostgreSQL development and support contracts.
It is a wonderful thing that Open Source products do provide you with the source, but in situations where you have a major league database system that controls all your customer accounts, and you have a problem that has to get solved *today*...this isn't really a niche that is well covered yet for all Open Source products.
For what it's worth, the 32 processor 1.3GHz models claim an rPerf of 50.56, and all the number seem to scale about as you'd expect (e.g., not quite linear in # of processors).
But, sicko that I am, where I think the Power4 might really get down and dirty is in supercomputing applications. None of this sharing, caring relational database stuff. No siree; I'm into a much more serious kind of scene. This freaky baby was just built for LINEAR ALGEBRA, friend, and I've heard that she can keep on doing it it all night long! We're talking a *serious* FLOPhouse here, folks. But you've got to talk dirty to it, something like Hey, take a look at this generalized eigenvalue problem--have you seen a longer or harder one than...
Uh, excuse me; I guess I was losing my composure a bit back there. I've got both hands back on the keyboard now.
But doesn't anybody else ever wonder why there aren't more LINPACK benchmarks posted on alt.sex.stories?
I think somebody must be underestimating IBM's resources here, but the only other companies I could strain to think of that would buy Sun right now in terms of fit would be Fujitsu, Siemens, or GE. The first one has (I think) the best fit given its investment in SPARC, but I have no idea of whether they could or would want to buy the company. Siemens is (I think) the only big European contender to anything like this, while GE can, as always, do whatever the heck it likes.
[Completely irrelevant aside: if somebody claims to be a "lawyser", shouldn't they be dispensing "legsal advice" or maybe "legal advuice" or something like that?]
OK, so how high a standard do you need for "intent" here? Here's what I think is an ordered list of possibilities as enunciated by a typical dot com executive; where would a judge start to laugh in your face?
I'm guessing you have to get all the way to the chapter 11 filing case to nail down intent; am I right?
The listing requirements are a bit more involved than that, but in the case of LNUX, you'd need either a minimum bid price of $1 per share and $10 million in shareholders' equity (and a couple of trivial requirements), or $3 per share and $50 million in market cap if there is no equity available to shareholders. So far, so good...but if the price skates below a buck, life is not going to be very happy.
There are many risks, the bid/ask spreads are large relative to share prices, such stocks are much more likely to become untradable or illiquid...but a really important part of the picture is that they aren't marginable (you can't borrow money against them) and, at least much of the time, aren't easily shortable.
Specifically, reverse stock splits almost never work; in some cases, a company with de-listed stock might be bought out by a firm that goes onto greater glory, or at least a stock price comfortably above a buck a share.
That *sounds* reasonable, but it might not be. it all depends on how you lose the $21M. In the case of Red Hat, almost all of that was amortized "good will" rather than a cash hemorrhage. Basically, when you say at time 1 that Cygnus Solutions is worth close to a billion dollars in stock, and now you know it isn't, you have to write down the difference somehow, even though it has no effect on your cash flow or your continuing operations. Red Hat's operations are in decent-ish shape, but it will take them a long time to get rid of the goodwill overhang.
Well, first of all, note that the government did take an intense interest in the AOL/TW merger, and did in fact force them to make some (limited) concessions for the sake of preserving competition.
And this is the key point: the feds don't (or shouldn't) get involved in mergers like this unless they threaten competition in certain markets. It would be very tough to come down hard on HP/Compaq in this regard because the only market where their merger could have virtually *any* negative impact on competition is the most competitive market on the planet: commodity PC hardware. Indeed, there was some chance that, absent a merger, both companies would have been out of consumer PCs The merger might actually help save a competitor. Seriously, I think the only PC firm that could really draw fire for a merger these days is Dell itself, and they quite frankly do not need to merge with anybody. Coming from the other direction, the only companies HP would have significant anti-trust issues with would be in printing and imaging, and I don't think we're likely to see much of that.
All that being said, I'm not sure that this merger will really end up achieving much. Combined PC sales for the two firms are not likely to be any higher than for the two separate companies, and while they could layoff some more people, I can't see them becoming Dell or anything. It could even hurt some. Barron's a couple of weeks ago pointed out that HP's printer business (especially ink and toner) was the company's cash cow, but one that could potentially bring in even more money if HP *didn't* compete in the PC market (they currently lose a lot of printer sales on bundling deals they don't get because they're a direct competitor in the commodity PC market). HPaq will not be getting out of PCs, so unless they keep or grow their market share, the printer bundling argument starts to become more potent.
Well, one cable company will certainly have that opportunity, namely, ATT,
since they will emerge as @Home's biggest creditor when Excite@Home is forced into bankruptcy. The long story there is that ATT did a bunch of infrastructure building for @Home when the latter lost their (once robust) cash stream from Excite. See Cringely's column this week for more on that angle. Note, however, that Cringely also assumes that broadband is a dead/dying proposition at this moment in time. I'm pretty sure he's wrong about that.
Words fail me here. There are many beautiful reasons why a relational model makes perfect sense for a file system, and, for that matter, why the notion of "file" itself might be changed for the better in such a system. And, if there is any advantage to monopoly, it is that a tyrant with good ideas can actually make them work.
The problem is, of course, that the good idea is the notion of a relational file system. SQL is, was, and forever shall be a disgusting hack. Everybody who does research in databases knows this, and almost everybody who works with SQL on non-trivial things knows this, too. And MS knows this as well. Indeed, they could, if they wanted, implement the relational model in a nice, clean way and support it with a query language that's less Cobol-esque and they could make everybody use it.
The problem is, though, that this doesn't maximize market share by ripping apart its competitors like kleenex pinatas. To do that, you have to first embrace, then extend, then spend a decade to clean up the mess you made in the first place. In other words, SQL Server in the OS is the quintessential Microsoft move. But, hey, at least it does solve the file associations problem in a slightly less dorky way...
Well, first off, I doubt that they will *all* fold; the Baby Bells will still sell it. As for support of anything but Wintel, I think you might end up being a bit surprised. Mac owners are pretty "boutiquey" people (i.e., they've got the cash) and whine loudly when things don't go their way. (I know; I'm one of them.
As far as prices go, I think there's also good news in that cable companies are feeling intense pressure from the dish. In the long run, I think they're on the losing end of the battle as far as broadcast programming is concerned, but probably in better shape for internet access until everything goes wireless. In the mean time, they really will need the market share, and I don't think they'll have time to get especially greedy.
But, of course, I could be completely wrong...
Since I have hacked perl since 1991, I am very surprised to be saying this. I love perl, but for a long time, I have wanted a cleaner, shinier perl. Python has always struck me as a cleaner, shinier something, but not a replacement for perl. There are other languages that might also live in this role, but I couldn't really commit to Haskell, and O'Caml doesn't really fit all of my uses either (alas).
Now, when I heard about the Perl6 effort, I had hopes for the very best, and a year ago at this time I was downright optimistic. But it now looks like it will realistically be another year before anything real is on the table. So, while I really do like Perl5, I now have more than a vague dissatisfaction with the aspects of perl that I thought were going to change (for the better) by now. Laziness and Hubris are important principles of programming, but Restlessness is a surprisingly important motivating force for programmers. I will confess that I have grown somewhat restless.
In the mean time, I blundered into Thomas and Hunt's Programming Ruby, and found, to my surprise, about 95% of what I wanted from Perl6. (There was recently a Slashdot thread about Ruby, but it was worse than useless, unfortunately.) I personally believe that the benefits of OOP are vastly over-rated, so the claim that Ruby is "really OO" doesn't impress me very much. What does impress me is the general cleanliness of the design, the potential for terse code, the very impressive dynamic capabilities of the language, and the willingness to steal blatantly from Perl (or any other language) when the advantage was clear. Ruby seems to be a language that thrives on the fact that lifting a good solution is much, much better than re-inventing a (possibly bad) one. But the real key, of course, is that Ruby really does provide More than One Way to Do It. (Although people may talk about the "Ruby Way", I'm not sure I see anything like a uniform style in Ruby snippets I have seen.) At this moment in time, it may well be the most Pragmatic language of all, albeit not the most practical. If Ruby were to become noticably more practical (e.g., having a larger set of libraries and more (English) Documentation), I'm not confident that Perl would continue to be ascendent in many of its niches.
I can't believe I said that; if I'm lucky, maybe only the "right" people will read it. :-)
Fortunately for you, the media and telecomm titans are working 80-hour weeks to accomplish the remaining mergers that will make this possible, albeit at a slightly higher price to the consumer. :-)
More seriously, it does get to be an incredible nuisance to juggle even a half-dozen snail mail periodical subscriptions, and I agree that people will only agree to pay for content when it is made one-stop subscriptions for content rather than piecemeal subscriptions or dime-at-a-time micropayments. And I do think there is some hope for that.
Well, I guess there are three comments to make here.
Now, I have been a Perl programmer since the 4.036 days, and I will undoubtedly continue to use it a lot. But, at least in one interview, Larry Wall himself noted that the design and ideas behind Ruby were deep and yet not merely academic curiosities. I, for one, have been waiting a long time for a language that could afford the creation of code as succinct as Perl's without some of the collateral weirdness. (Random example of the day: I *hate* the fact that things as useful as "chomp" have nearly useless values.)
In the mean time, I don't know about you, but I'm having a blast learning new things and finding out what I do and don't appreciate about the old. return values
Probably true on the "who is sharing files" part, but not really true on the "blind eye" part. I know that here at Mizzou they do not really care who *downloads* files, but that they certainly do everything they can to prevent people from sharing and/or serving other files (e.g., napster; note that they do packet analysis to defeat this, not just silly port-blocking). And the reason for that isn't (really) just to be killjoys, but because *before* they did this, almost all of the available bandwidth going off campus was used for this kind of thing, and it really just isn't the mission of the university.
I don't see this as being a permanent situation. First of all, you really do have the option of going with a dish. Second, competition with satellite TV (and other factors) have lead to the construction of much more flexible and capable digital cable systems. These days, this only means that you get the ability to fork over an absurd amount of money to EvilCable Inc. for "digital service", but down the line, I expect that people will realize that they can (and should) expect such a system to support multiple providers over a single cable.
Until then, just don't watch TV. It's not like there's much of anything *good* on these days...
And I have to say that by and large we really blew it. It wasn't just the spam, or even the massive flamefests. It was really the corrosive effects of ignorance and greed. Take Tom Christiansen (most recently tchrist@mox.perl.com). Not always a bunch of rainbows and smiles, he, but an incredibly well-informed individual whose contributions to Usenet are the stuff of legend. Apparently chased away from Usenet for good by one too many "gimme gimme" question and one too many displays of horrible netiquette. A real tragedy.
This was around the time I discovered Slashdot, and saw what looked like a more clueful albeit imperfect mirror of the Spirit of Usenet. I was quite cheered when I found out that tchrist himself was becoming a key contributor. It might be a new geek paradise! But, of course, that didn't happen. Tom got chased away again by a bunch of cretins.
And, getting back to the idea of an elegy for Ellis, I believe the final straw there was some jerk maligning Jon Postel when his obituary came up in this forum. Much worse than spam.
Of which the most wonderful law is that you can incorporate in Delaware without having to live there. :-)
More seriously, there are some tax advantages, which a number of "incorporate your firm in Delaware" websites will cheerily mention. But one of the more important advantages in the long term is that the court system there is very fair and very predictable in its application of corporate law. Precedent really controls the rulings, and there is a large body and long history of precedent in the state.
Man, I never thought I'd get old enough to get a lump in my throat over this stuff. The very first time I saw a demo of the Lisa was when they were auctioning one off (as a special item) at the Channel 2 Auction (WGBH) in Boston. I and I'll bet half the geek youth of the city desperately wanted the thing at almost any price. The early warning sign that the Lisa itself wasn't going to be box that changed computing was when the final auction price for the Lisa didn't quite come up to retail, as I recall. The only three Lisas I ever saw "working" were all, oddly enough, given over to secretaries doing word processing.
In as similar vein, the only Xerox Stars I ever saw "in the wild" belonged to the typing pool at the West Haven (CT) VA hospital. Neither I nor anybody who thought they were special had any access to them, and I think the typing staff actually preferred Wang dedicated word processors to these, so they weren't often used...
Nobody knew what to do with this stuff in the early 80s, and I'm convinced that not much progress would have been made if Jobs hadn't been the slave driver he was to get the original Mac done.
Well, if you're going to go that far (synthesizing Old Tyme floppy drive sounds for computers that now no longer have floppy drives), then why don't we simulate the use of video RAM for copying disks like DiskCopy used to, and write random garbage to the top of the screen during, say, CD-ROM burning? :-)
Explanation for the Perplexed
When the Mac was first released, it had only 128KB of RAM and one 400 KB floppy drive. To copy a floppy, which you frequently had to do since there was no hard drive to boot from much less hold files, you used a utility called DiskCopy, which would prompt you to swap floppy disks back and forth until your disk had been copied. This could take...forever. So an important optimization of the procedure was adopted by DiskCopy: the utility would use dedicated video memory to hold another ~20K or so of content during the copy operation. Doing this meant that you would have binary trash written to part of your monitor.
Life was grand. :-) Maybe next time, I'll tell
you how Lode Runner addiction nearly kept me out of grad school...