Unfortunately, XPath is strongly focused on solving the wrong problem. We don't need an XML-based query language; there's a reason why programming languages don't use XML as their syntax. No, what we need is for SQL standardization to get a move on, and for the language to be modernized. There's nothing inherently wrong with SQL, it's just that the subset that's cross-platform is really crap.
We also don't really need another "better" piece of database glue that still keeps the query code separate from the query object code. Having your data object build an XML query on the fly isn't going to be any more maintainable than having it build a SQL query on the fly.
What is really needed is an expressive way to access databases using Java to build the queries. I'm thinking of something where you create some kind of query object, then use methods on it to add constraints, select output columns, define sorting, and so on. Something like:
JQuery jq = new JQuery(database); jq.AddOutputColumn('PartNum'); jq.AddOutputColumn('Description'); jq.SetSortOrd er('PartNum');
and so on. You'd have methods for each of the various capability-giving chunks of SQL syntax. The system could then generate XML, SQL or whatever the hell it wanted on the back end, and I wouldn't have to care...
Well, regarding the second point, think of this as a reminder of why you should NEVER EVER store future time and date values as offsets from an epoch time/date, if being one second off is bad for your application.
I just wish it didn't have that silly thumb keyboard... If I want a keyboard, I can plug one in via USB. If I want to type a few characters, an on-screen keyboard works.
You can, in fact, get a lot of improvement from using the digital output. So long as the CD or DVD player is good enough to provide a reliable error-corrected bitstream, you can offload all of the analog processing into your amp. You can then allocate more cash to the amp and make do with a cheaper disc player, and get better sound overall.
It's very common for CD players and DVD players to use bitstream processing for their D/A stages. Personally, I don't like the way it sounds--and yes, I've compared otherwise identical players side by side. So, I run my DVD player's digital output to a Denon AV receiver. Denon use full 24 bit D/A converters and quadratic interpolation. They also use a buffering DAC with adjustable lipsync delay.
I think you misunderstand the sheer awfulness of JDBC.
JDBC only standardizes the interface between the driver and the Java application; the interface between the driver and the SQL database is usually proprietary, via an undocumented database-specific TCP/IP protocol. This means you can't take one vendor's JDBC driver and use it to access another vendor's SQL database.
In fact, it's worse than that--you generally can't take a point release of a vendor's JDBC driver and use it with a different point release of the same vendor's database. For instance, ever time you upgrade your DB2 SQL database, you need to check if you need to install a new DB2 JDBC driver on every single client system.
Except that doesn't express the full horror of it either. Type 1 and 2 JDBC drivers aren't even pure Java--they rely on platform-specific binary code, and can lock you to a single OS even though you're using Java. Often they require a full database client install on the machine that's going to use JDBC, even if you have no use for the client. Type 3 drivers, meanwhile, are pure Java--but they work by talking to an extra process which runs on the SQL server, and then re-issues the request via the secret proprietary protocol.
Basically, the only kind of JDBC drivers that aren't a horrific kludge are Type 4. And even those aren't standardized on the database side, so you can't just use the Sun JDBC implementation to access MySQL, even if MySQL offers a Type 4 driver interface.
So yes, you can't connect to MySQL from a closed-source Java application using JDBC unless you pay money. I don't think that's the biggest thing wrong with MySQL, though...
Please pick up the courtesy cluephone: I quoted from the two definitions in the Oxford Concise OED. Go back and read what I wrote. Paragraph 1, paragraph 2. Two paragraphs, two definitions, two possible derivations.
Yes, multiple dictionaries "agree on the term" in that they agree on its definition. They don't, however, say that it has anything to do with Gypsies. I wasn't arguing that the term meant something else; I was pointing out that your claimed etymology was bogus.
UrbanDictionary takes content anyone posts, so it doesn't prove anything. I could post that "cretin" was insulting to the island of Crete and UrbanDictionary would list that information.
If you want to come up with a citation to support your assertion that gypped has something to do with Gypsies, you'll need to find one in a reputable dictionary. So far you haven't posted any, whereas I've posted the etymological info from the Concise OED, which flatly contradicts you. So, you're the one who needs to research before flaming--and learn to read before replying, too.
The Oxford English Dictionary seems to have a different opinion of the origin of "gypped". It says that "gyp" comes from "gippo" meaning "scullion", the French word "jupeau", and was a 19th Century term for a college servant at Cambridge or Durham universities.
It's also possible that the current meaning derives from "gyp" meaning "pain or severe discomfort", which is another 19th Century word perhaps derived from "gee-up".
They don't even mention the possibility that it has anything to do with Gypsies, nor is it flagged as offensive.
So, your opinion is about as clueless as the people who get all huffy about words like "squaw", "niggardly" or "blackboard".
You play $15/month to have access to other players.
So I'm paying Sony premium prices for access to value that other people are providing, and they're paying Sony for the right to provide it? Somehow you're not convincing me that this is a bargain. It sounds more like a middleman who needs cutting out of the loop...
I buy a PS2 game for $20 or $30, play it for about 30-40 hours over the course of three months, then sell it on eBay when I'm bored with it and get $10 back. Cost of entertainment about 25 cents an hour. And that's for an average game--something like GTA or WipeOut can keep me amused for three times that.
I buy EverQuest for $50 plus $20 for the first month. I play it for 30-40 hours over the course of three months, spending another $40 in fees, then get bored with it. It has zero resale value, because the software companies have cunningly locked MMORPGs so you can't transfer the accounts (or so I read in a review of WoW). Cost of entertainment is therefore about $2 an hour.
So we're talking 8x the price of a regular offline video game.
Even if we assume I would never get bored with the online game, for $20 a month I could pick up a brand new game of my choice every month and never get bored and have more games than I have time to play. I also wouldn't have to deal with assholes randomly killing me for no reason or spewing homophobic trash talk.
So really, the whole MMORPG thing just isn't an appealing proposition. Well, except Puzzle Pirates, that's tempted me a bit, but it's still too expensive.
You can argue all you like about why I ought to want to play MMORPGs more; but the fact is, I have all the equipment needed to play them, and the spare cash, but I still don't find them appealing.
If a CEO embraced a plan to cull 12% of the company's existing customer base in one fell swoop, the board would having him packing his office into boxes the next day.
Bullshit. As a Mac user, I've seen plenty of companies cut their customer base by 12% by dropping Mac support, and none of them ever seem to fire the CEO.
My bank screwed up their web site so it no longer worked with browsers other than IE. Guess what? Nobody lost their job over that either.
To an American company, 12% of the market is inconsequential, apparently.
Well, except Google Desktop Search. And Google Picasa. And Google Toolbar. And Google Earth. And Google Hello. All of which require Windows and help support Ballmer's monopoly.
The article you linked to talks about respected companies. Respect is not the same as liking. Businessmen respect Microsoft's success to date, but that doesn't mean they like Microsoft.
There was a poll around the same time as your (rather dated) cited article, which showed that Microsoft was the #1 vendor businessmen would like never to have to deal with again.
Slashdot Mirror
Oops, yeah. The two look so similar from the box and title, I get 'em confused...
Unfortunately, XPath is strongly focused on solving the wrong problem. We don't need an XML-based query language; there's a reason why programming languages don't use XML as their syntax. No, what we need is for SQL standardization to get a move on, and for the language to be modernized. There's nothing inherently wrong with SQL, it's just that the subset that's cross-platform is really crap.
d er('PartNum');
We also don't really need another "better" piece of database glue that still keeps the query code separate from the query object code. Having your data object build an XML query on the fly isn't going to be any more maintainable than having it build a SQL query on the fly.
What is really needed is an expressive way to access databases using Java to build the queries. I'm thinking of something where you create some kind of query object, then use methods on it to add constraints, select output columns, define sorting, and so on. Something like:
JQuery jq = new JQuery(database);
jq.AddOutputColumn('PartNum');
jq.AddOutputColumn('Description');
jq.SetSortOr
and so on. You'd have methods for each of the various capability-giving chunks of SQL syntax. The system could then generate XML, SQL or whatever the hell it wanted on the back end, and I wouldn't have to care...
Remember "no taxation without representation"? The basic principle on which the revolution was founded?
Well, that one was given up a long time ago.
Well, regarding the second point, think of this as a reminder of why you should NEVER EVER store future time and date values as offsets from an epoch time/date, if being one second off is bad for your application.
I just wish it didn't have that silly thumb keyboard... If I want a keyboard, I can plug one in via USB. If I want to type a few characters, an on-screen keyboard works.
Yeah, just like CD players will disappear and be replaced by SACD and DVD-Audio by 2005.
You can, in fact, get a lot of improvement from using the digital output. So long as the CD or DVD player is good enough to provide a reliable error-corrected bitstream, you can offload all of the analog processing into your amp. You can then allocate more cash to the amp and make do with a cheaper disc player, and get better sound overall.
It's very common for CD players and DVD players to use bitstream processing for their D/A stages. Personally, I don't like the way it sounds--and yes, I've compared otherwise identical players side by side. So, I run my DVD player's digital output to a Denon AV receiver. Denon use full 24 bit D/A converters and quadratic interpolation. They also use a buffering DAC with adjustable lipsync delay.
Wouldn't it be shorter to list the games that women don't play? i.e. "plotless FPS deathmatches".
Get "Simpsons Road Rage". It's basically GTA with Simpsons characters and no gore.
I think you misunderstand the sheer awfulness of JDBC.
JDBC only standardizes the interface between the driver and the Java application; the interface between the driver and the SQL database is usually proprietary, via an undocumented database-specific TCP/IP protocol. This means you can't take one vendor's JDBC driver and use it to access another vendor's SQL database.
In fact, it's worse than that--you generally can't take a point release of a vendor's JDBC driver and use it with a different point release of the same vendor's database. For instance, ever time you upgrade your DB2 SQL database, you need to check if you need to install a new DB2 JDBC driver on every single client system.
Except that doesn't express the full horror of it either. Type 1 and 2 JDBC drivers aren't even pure Java--they rely on platform-specific binary code, and can lock you to a single OS even though you're using Java. Often they require a full database client install on the machine that's going to use JDBC, even if you have no use for the client. Type 3 drivers, meanwhile, are pure Java--but they work by talking to an extra process which runs on the SQL server, and then re-issues the request via the secret proprietary protocol.
Basically, the only kind of JDBC drivers that aren't a horrific kludge are Type 4. And even those aren't standardized on the database side, so you can't just use the Sun JDBC implementation to access MySQL, even if MySQL offers a Type 4 driver interface.
So yes, you can't connect to MySQL from a closed-source Java application using JDBC unless you pay money. I don't think that's the biggest thing wrong with MySQL, though...
And clearly you'd never see IBM spending money developing software from scratch and then releasing it under the GPL, right?
Oh, wait...
Seems to me, mateys, that Dave Barry has done much more to encourage online piracy, arr...
There's also Bush's 30 years of alcohol addiction, of which he himself has provided confirmation.
Please pick up the courtesy cluephone: I quoted from the two definitions in the Oxford Concise OED. Go back and read what I wrote. Paragraph 1, paragraph 2. Two paragraphs, two definitions, two possible derivations.
Yes, multiple dictionaries "agree on the term" in that they agree on its definition. They don't, however, say that it has anything to do with Gypsies. I wasn't arguing that the term meant something else; I was pointing out that your claimed etymology was bogus.
UrbanDictionary takes content anyone posts, so it doesn't prove anything. I could post that "cretin" was insulting to the island of Crete and UrbanDictionary would list that information.
If you want to come up with a citation to support your assertion that gypped has something to do with Gypsies, you'll need to find one in a reputable dictionary. So far you haven't posted any, whereas I've posted the etymological info from the Concise OED, which flatly contradicts you. So, you're the one who needs to research before flaming--and learn to read before replying, too.
The Oxford English Dictionary seems to have a different opinion of the origin of "gypped". It says that "gyp" comes from "gippo" meaning "scullion", the French word "jupeau", and was a 19th Century term for a college servant at Cambridge or Durham universities.
It's also possible that the current meaning derives from "gyp" meaning "pain or severe discomfort", which is another 19th Century word perhaps derived from "gee-up".
They don't even mention the possibility that it has anything to do with Gypsies, nor is it flagged as offensive.
So, your opinion is about as clueless as the people who get all huffy about words like "squaw", "niggardly" or "blackboard".
So I'm paying Sony premium prices for access to value that other people are providing, and they're paying Sony for the right to provide it? Somehow you're not convincing me that this is a bargain. It sounds more like a middleman who needs cutting out of the loop...
Here's a comparison.
I buy a PS2 game for $20 or $30, play it for about 30-40 hours over the course of three months, then sell it on eBay when I'm bored with it and get $10 back. Cost of entertainment about 25 cents an hour. And that's for an average game--something like GTA or WipeOut can keep me amused for three times that.
I buy EverQuest for $50 plus $20 for the first month. I play it for 30-40 hours over the course of three months, spending another $40 in fees, then get bored with it. It has zero resale value, because the software companies have cunningly locked MMORPGs so you can't transfer the accounts (or so I read in a review of WoW). Cost of entertainment is therefore about $2 an hour.
So we're talking 8x the price of a regular offline video game.
Even if we assume I would never get bored with the online game, for $20 a month I could pick up a brand new game of my choice every month and never get bored and have more games than I have time to play. I also wouldn't have to deal with assholes randomly killing me for no reason or spewing homophobic trash talk.
So really, the whole MMORPG thing just isn't an appealing proposition. Well, except Puzzle Pirates, that's tempted me a bit, but it's still too expensive.
You can argue all you like about why I ought to want to play MMORPGs more; but the fact is, I have all the equipment needed to play them, and the spare cash, but I still don't find them appealing.
No, I'm saying that the letters don't aid use of the controller.
Yes you can, you just prefer to allocate the money to Internet access instead of TV.
Bullshit. As a Mac user, I've seen plenty of companies cut their customer base by 12% by dropping Mac support, and none of them ever seem to fire the CEO.
My bank screwed up their web site so it no longer worked with browsers other than IE. Guess what? Nobody lost their job over that either.
To an American company, 12% of the market is inconsequential, apparently.
Well, except Google Desktop Search. And Google Picasa. And Google Toolbar. And Google Earth. And Google Hello. All of which require Windows and help support Ballmer's monopoly.
The article you linked to talks about respected companies. Respect is not the same as liking. Businessmen respect Microsoft's success to date, but that doesn't mean they like Microsoft.
There was a poll around the same time as your (rather dated) cited article, which showed that Microsoft was the #1 vendor businessmen would like never to have to deal with again.
You mis-spelled IBM :-)
Or to put it another way, it's still the slowest language to start up of any major programming language, including Common LISP.
As an aside, I've always found that hard to believe, given that Java's basic types don't include any machine data types such as byte or word.
\In fact, as I recall Java didn't have unsigned bytes at all for the first couple of major releases. Embedded systems my ass.