come on man, haven't you heard of encryption? for christ's sake, you could even do it over SSL. technically this is little different (even less sniffable, even) than using your credit card to pay for something on a website over 802.11b.
Josh: You have me at a bit of a disadvantage, since I'm used to comparing PostgreSQL to proprietary-commercial databases, who I regard as our "real" competition. I don't know that much about SAP-DB and Firebird beyond their literature on their websites.
The only features that we lack which some other FOSS databases have are the ones you mention in questions 1 & 2. Oh, and our native Windows version is due out this summer.
yeah, mySQL is great until you want to move your code over to another system (oracle, db2, scale scale scale). then you realize that they aren't doing you any favors with their crappy built-in types like autonumber which don't translate into anything like the sql standard and lack of query flexibility (no subselects? wtf?!).
mySQL is fine for diddly "select content from blah where id=$SOMENUM" web apps, but the syntax is seriously idiosyncratic. it's like when you program under MFC and you spend all your time on TechNet - when i have to program mySQL i write queries that i think are good and then pick through them with the online documentation until they parse. i find the syntax of postgres much more orthogonal - to go back to the autonumber example above, the equivalent datatype in postgres is the serial, which creates an integer column and a sequence object which can then be operated on just like any other objects of those types. autonumber in mySQL is some kind of ugly data type unto itself, and mySQL makes it hard to do things like manipulate the sequence.
I came to Duke to learn - if I can do that, succeed, and have fun at the same time, what's wrong with it?
nothing really; i myself found lots of things to do with my spare time, like work with student organizations. i won't get started on fraternities which involve buying your friends and humiliating yourselves in forced bonding with these people... oops, there i went. mostly it's that you people are assholes and boring too. i got over fraternity parties real quick when i shared a stairwell with pi-KA and had to wade through ankle-deep trash, beer cans, and vomit every saturday morning. it's astounding; people seem to have such a paucity of imagination that "let's get trashed and hook up to the sounds of Jimmy Buffett," or at least "let's get trashed and do *," is a great way to spend almost every day.
so, er, to summarize: i think it's great when people find things to do outside class, but i think it's totally boring when "things to do" are drinking, hooking up, rinse, repeat. maybe you're not like that, but fraternities definitely encourage that behavior. there's a lot of cool stuff going on around duke, but duke students by and large pay no mind.
However, most engineers will tell you that they aren't the ones with the most work - computer science majors are.
i'll agree with you there - actually, i was a CPS major myself. however,
but I really don't think grade inflation in the rest of the departments is nearly as bad as you, or Rojstaczer state.
i know it is, because i did extensive work in both literature and film and video outside my major. when faran krentcil gets her hideous "mothers against dawson's creek" film rewarded you know something's wrong. i never got anything less than an A- in a literature or f&v course and i worked about a fourth as hard at those as i did in comp. sci.
i'm also not sure that the honors list figures are really telling a valuable story - when you're talking about the top 33% of the class and grades that high on the scale it's somewhat inconclusive - i think most of the inflation is in the center and at the left tail of the normal curve "hump", which is what R. is saying - he's not giving more As, he's just not giving Cs.
Actually, i recently graduated from Duke and can assure you that the Nicholas School of the Environment is not, ah, the most challenging. I've known Ph.D. students from that department who (a) make the most egregious spelling and grammar mistakes and (b) cannot perform any kind of math in a way that denotes understanding (statistical tests, for example, are just magic things they run on data that produce the numbers they want.)
The Duke hard science departments, and especially the School of Engineering, are actually challenging. The kids in that school work hard; in my experience almost all of the frat boys and sororitutes you see partying hard 4 or 5 nights a week are humanities students (sociology and poli. sci being two favorite crap majors). Grade inflation in humanities is just as bad as Rojstaczer implies, but in my courses in computer science and electrical engineering I always felt successful on receiving a B+ or better (and certainly got a few Cs and even a C- in math courses i took prior to buckling down).
get a free account to the SANS Reading Room; they have whitepapers galore and a few more applied guides, including some on nessus and snort, iirc. with a good theoretical background, you should be able to proceed to use documentation for each product you choose in a mostly referential manner.
Nice troll. Your analogy, as best I can parse it, is: "Paper is to books as picture quality is to film." Your analogy doesn't really make sense.
For the sake of addressing the point I think you intended to make, let's try "Print quality is to books as picture quality is to film." Printed information may be said to be digital in the way we process it - either an r is an r or it isn't. Your enjoyment of the book does not diminish until you are unable to resolve the characters. Film is highly analog - you are very capable of appreciating a piece in two different ways depending on the quality of the image - to use your example, The Blair Witch Project gathers a large amount of its impact from the distinctive look of digital video as opposed to 35mm, which is what most feature films are shot in.
A more appropriate analogy would compare video quality to art or an image - say, the difference between your favorite JPG at blown-up 320x240 and 1024x768.
Re:Is this really healthy?
on
To The Pain
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· Score: 1
good troll! nice use of bold text - all that could be desired is a bulleted list and some links, but, hey, you got the 5!
I've been told by Lewis Shiner, one of Gibson's cyberpunk contemporaries, that Gibson actually got his ideas for the book from an episode of Nova on PBS. It would be quite a job to track this down, but I suspect PBS would be very helpful in hopes of a hipness boost.
Slashdot Mirror
come on man, haven't you heard of encryption? for christ's sake, you could even do it over SSL. technically this is little different (even less sniffable, even) than using your credit card to pay for something on a website over 802.11b.
please read the article.
(emphasis mine)yeah, mySQL is great until you want to move your code over to another system (oracle, db2, scale scale scale). then you realize that they aren't doing you any favors with their crappy built-in types like autonumber which don't translate into anything like the sql standard and lack of query flexibility (no subselects? wtf?!).
mySQL is fine for diddly "select content from blah where id=$SOMENUM" web apps, but the syntax is seriously idiosyncratic. it's like when you program under MFC and you spend all your time on TechNet - when i have to program mySQL i write queries that i think are good and then pick through them with the online documentation until they parse. i find the syntax of postgres much more orthogonal - to go back to the autonumber example above, the equivalent datatype in postgres is the serial, which creates an integer column and a sequence object which can then be operated on just like any other objects of those types. autonumber in mySQL is some kind of ugly data type unto itself, and mySQL makes it hard to do things like manipulate the sequence.
I came to Duke to learn - if I can do that, succeed, and have fun at the same time, what's wrong with it?
nothing really; i myself found lots of things to do with my spare time, like work with student organizations. i won't get started on fraternities which involve buying your friends and humiliating yourselves in forced bonding with these people... oops, there i went. mostly it's that you people are assholes and boring too. i got over fraternity parties real quick when i shared a stairwell with pi-KA and had to wade through ankle-deep trash, beer cans, and vomit every saturday morning. it's astounding; people seem to have such a paucity of imagination that "let's get trashed and hook up to the sounds of Jimmy Buffett," or at least "let's get trashed and do *," is a great way to spend almost every day.
so, er, to summarize: i think it's great when people find things to do outside class, but i think it's totally boring when "things to do" are drinking, hooking up, rinse, repeat. maybe you're not like that, but fraternities definitely encourage that behavior. there's a lot of cool stuff going on around duke, but duke students by and large pay no mind.
However, most engineers will tell you that they aren't the ones with the most work - computer science majors are.
i'll agree with you there - actually, i was a CPS major myself. however,
but I really don't think grade inflation in the rest of the departments is nearly as bad as you, or Rojstaczer state.
i know it is, because i did extensive work in both literature and film and video outside my major. when faran krentcil gets her hideous "mothers against dawson's creek" film rewarded you know something's wrong. i never got anything less than an A- in a literature or f&v course and i worked about a fourth as hard at those as i did in comp. sci.
i'm also not sure that the honors list figures are really telling a valuable story - when you're talking about the top 33% of the class and grades that high on the scale it's somewhat inconclusive - i think most of the inflation is in the center and at the left tail of the normal curve "hump", which is what R. is saying - he's not giving more As, he's just not giving Cs.
Actually, i recently graduated from Duke and can assure you that the Nicholas School of the Environment is not, ah, the most challenging. I've known Ph.D. students from that department who (a) make the most egregious spelling and grammar mistakes and (b) cannot perform any kind of math in a way that denotes understanding (statistical tests, for example, are just magic things they run on data that produce the numbers they want.)
The Duke hard science departments, and especially the School of Engineering, are actually challenging. The kids in that school work hard; in my experience almost all of the frat boys and sororitutes you see partying hard 4 or 5 nights a week are humanities students (sociology and poli. sci being two favorite crap majors). Grade inflation in humanities is just as bad as Rojstaczer implies, but in my courses in computer science and electrical engineering I always felt successful on receiving a B+ or better (and certainly got a few Cs and even a C- in math courses i took prior to buckling down).
get a free account to the SANS Reading Room; they have whitepapers galore and a few more applied guides, including some on nessus and snort, iirc. with a good theoretical background, you should be able to proceed to use documentation for each product you choose in a mostly referential manner.
For the sake of addressing the point I think you intended to make, let's try "Print quality is to books as picture quality is to film." Printed information may be said to be digital in the way we process it - either an r is an r or it isn't. Your enjoyment of the book does not diminish until you are unable to resolve the characters. Film is highly analog - you are very capable of appreciating a piece in two different ways depending on the quality of the image - to use your example, The Blair Witch Project gathers a large amount of its impact from the distinctive look of digital video as opposed to 35mm, which is what most feature films are shot in.
A more appropriate analogy would compare video quality to art or an image - say, the difference between your favorite JPG at blown-up 320x240 and 1024x768.
good troll! nice use of bold text - all that could be desired is a bulleted list and some links, but, hey, you got the 5!
I've been told by Lewis Shiner, one of Gibson's cyberpunk contemporaries, that Gibson actually got his ideas for the book from an episode of Nova on PBS. It would be quite a job to track this down, but I suspect PBS would be very helpful in hopes of a hipness boost.
http://booya.dorm.duke.edu/temp/fccm01_pilchard.pd f
Suck that bandwidth up.