So has anyone tried coming up with an RDBMS that uses something other than SQL?
I've been working on a little hobby project using Postgresql, and one thing that struck me was that the whole thing seems rather inefficient, because of all the data conversion going on: if I'm trying to input or extract data from the DB from a C++ program, for instance, it seems that everything basically needs to be converted to ASCII text to fit into a SQL statement. So if I have a bunch of floats, those have to be converted to ASCII strings, and sent to the DB, which then converts them back to floats to be stored internally. Or, if I want to store some binary data in some of the records (along with other formatted data, including ints, strings, and floats), that binary data needs to be converted to base64 or some other ascii representation to be inputted into the DB, which then surely converts it right back to binary.
Then, just to use SQL from the C++ program (or any other language for that matter, whether it's PHP, C, Perl, Python, etc.), you end up using some kind of library which really doesn't do much besides let you set up predefined SQL query templates and then fill in the data, with the library doing these conversions to ascii for you.
It seems like there should be some kind of API where a query can be defined, and then the data passed with this query to the DB without conversions for improved speed. Or am I totally missing something? Just for reference, my background in programming tends to be more in low-level embedded code; RDBMSes are new to me.
Yes, of course, we'd have no chance of moving something that size around with our horribly pathetic technology (compared to what we would be capable of if we hadn't gotten lazy and decided we'd rather play around with finances and selling houses to each other rather than pursue advanced space technology). However, we'd also have no chance of moving around something the size of an Imperial star destroyer or cruiser either, or even a lowly corvette. Heck, we'd have our hands full just trying to get an X-wing fighter out of orbit.
Yes, I was promoting the exponential fees idea here on Slashdot years ago. However, I think your fees are too low; add an extra '0' to each one. If a copyrighted work is so successful that a company wants to keep a monopoly on it for an additional 10 years, $100k is not an unreasonable figure as it should be making many millions of dollars over that time. If it's not profitable enough to justify that fee, then it's not making enough money to keep very many people employed and it should be released into the public domain.
Yes, that actually can be the reason, because a bunch of people are whining about it, so what's your idea of what the reason is? It should be pretty obvious that the people who don't have a problem with it aren't part of this discussion at all.
Yes, Apple is very worrying. However, it is a little early to see how effective Tim Cook is at replacing Jobs. Hopefully, Cook will turn out to be just like Ballmer.
Ok, the part about carburetors makes sense; they're only so adjustable. But with a fuel-injected engine (with engine management computer), why wouldn't you be able to optimize both idling and under-load operation? The computer can change the injector pulsewidths instantly in response to throttle input. The main limiting factor is that engines are stuck with mechanical camshafts which have to be designed for average conditions (since you can't exactly have the lobes reshape themselves at different rpms), but even here variable valve timing has improved things a lot, and this has become pretty commonplace in engines.
Everyone's pissed because they were taught as kids that there were 9 planets in the Solar System, and that the last one had the same name as one of their favority Disney characters. So they're mad that it's been demoted to "dwarf planet", even though they never had a problem before with Ceres being classified that way, and Ceres is much, much closer to us.
No, they wouldn't. They'd be "dwarf planets", at least most of them would, they're really not that large. Even Titan is only half as massive as Mercury (though it has larger volume), so I'm not sure where it'd rank according to the current definition.
No, "exoplanet" is for planets which orbit other stars. What you're thinking of is a "rogue planet", which is a planet that doesn't have a star and just floats through interstellar or intergalactic space. These of course are only theorized.
No, the problem is that if you make being a spheroid sufficient to call an object a "planet" (that, and orbiting the Sun rather than another planet), then instead of 9 planets, suddenly you get a bunch more because you'll have to reclassify the other spheroid sun-orbiting objects (now called "dwarf planets") as full-fledged planets, including Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. Don't forget a few other: Orcus, Quaoar, Sedna, and 2007 OR10, which may very well be classified dwarf planets soon, and there's probably more out there we haven't found yet (that latest one was just discovered in 2007), so we'd be teaching kids increasing numbers of planets all the time.
Even if we kept the "dwarf planet" designation and set Pluto as the lower limit, Eris is both larger and more massive than Pluto so we'd still have 10 planets (until any larger ones are discovered way out where Eris is).
That one wasn't finished with construction however, so of course it was mostly hollow.
Of course, this makes me wonder, if having as much of it complete as they did was sufficient to have the giant laser working (as the rebels found out the hard way), then what'd they need the rest of it (the unfinished portion) for? Just to look good? To have lots more offices for bureaucrats? To have more hangar bays full of TIE fighters to defend against rebel ships too small to easily hit with the giant laser?
I have to agree. It was a pretty good analysis except for that line which really doesn't fit or make sense. After all, we're talking about a spacegoing civilization that has faster-than-light engines, not to mention some absurdly large capital ships. I don't see how having engines capable of moving the Death Star is even remotely as absurd as the whole idea of a death star by itself, with a giant laser, and also ships that can travel FTL and have artificial gravity (even the tiny Millenium Falcon had artificial gravity inside).
Wrong. The government could easily have simply taken over the firm. It happens all the time in other countries, it's called "nationalizing" an industry. It's even happened here in the US: the railroads were nationalized in WWI, control of hundreds of S&Ls was seized in the 80s during the S&L crisis, and the airport screening industry was nationalized into TSA. Of course, that last one didn't work out so well but the others did.
The only problem with shooting them is that their personal money is probably safely tucked into offshore bank accounts. Threatening to torture their soon-to-be-orphan children to death should get them to relinquish those account numbers however.
Lucas never was right in the head, but he did get worse over the years. The only reason the first three movies were any good is because 1) his wife (now ex-wife, since he dumped her after those movies) cleaned up the dialog and scripts, particularly in the first movie, and 2) in the latter two movies, he had other people help with writing and direction. The second movie was the best precisely because he didn't direct it or write it, and the third wasn't bad because he didn't direct it and only helped write it (Kasdan is credited first with the screenplay on IMDB). Heck, if his ex-wife didn't clean up his crappy scriptwriting on the first movie, Star Wars would probably have been forgotten and never spawned any sequels; she's probably the one we really have to thank, and she probably got cut out of all his riches.
Actually, yes it does, when you're talking about language, especially the English language. Language is defined by how people use it. The "proper" usage is defined by how it's used by the people who speak it. So if it is common, by definition, it IS acceptable.
If most people start saying "There is coils", then by definition, it is correct.
Almost all of those are bullshit. Vactrains? Backpack helicopters? Do you see any of those things in use anywhere? Much of that list is just science fiction. I'm talking about real progress that you can see in society around you, on the streets, not some sci-fi ideas that may or may not appear, just like all those "revolutionary" car engines that never made it into production.
Go back 10 years, and compare to today. There just isn't much that's different, except for mobile electronic devices (smartphones, e-readers, tablets). Sure, there's a few small incremental improvements here and there (like GPGPU on your link; but I was watching DivX;-) movies on computers 10 years ago so this isn't exactly a revolutionary change except for people doing large-scale rendering).
The way I see it, the last 10-12 years has basically been a "lost decade".
Wikipedia IS difficult to edit... if you're a moron.
Re:Why not an official Wikipedia editing applicati
on
Why Is Wikipedia So Ugly?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't get this "Wikipedia is Ugly" idea either; I think it looks really good personally. There isn't a bunch of extra flashy crap, just the article text, some tables listing key points concisely, some relevant photos, and finally references at the bottom. Then there's a simple menu on the left, and some tabs to look at the "Talk" page, edit the content, or view the edit history, and a search box plus a link to log in or create an account. What little color there is is muted and very neutral. What's the problem?
I think this is just a bunch of Web 2.0 morons complaining because it hasn't been completely redesigned and uglified for no reason at all, just like Gmail's crappy new interface; change for change's sake.
"Windows" without a GUI? Surely you jest. But we are talking about the company that's made some totally laughable blunders many times, so I guess it isn't totally unfathomable.
Personally, I think Ballmer should not be fired. This is just too much fun to watch; the last thing I want to see is someone really smart and competent take over MS and turning it back into a highly effective monopolist.
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Then why bother with protein at all? Just go eat a bucket of lard.
Lack of fat is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Phooey, I prefer bison meat to cows, and bisons haven't been refined at all, they're basically the same wild animals they were thousands of years ago.
Also, salmon is excellent meat too, and that's totally wild as well.
So has anyone tried coming up with an RDBMS that uses something other than SQL?
I've been working on a little hobby project using Postgresql, and one thing that struck me was that the whole thing seems rather inefficient, because of all the data conversion going on: if I'm trying to input or extract data from the DB from a C++ program, for instance, it seems that everything basically needs to be converted to ASCII text to fit into a SQL statement. So if I have a bunch of floats, those have to be converted to ASCII strings, and sent to the DB, which then converts them back to floats to be stored internally. Or, if I want to store some binary data in some of the records (along with other formatted data, including ints, strings, and floats), that binary data needs to be converted to base64 or some other ascii representation to be inputted into the DB, which then surely converts it right back to binary.
Then, just to use SQL from the C++ program (or any other language for that matter, whether it's PHP, C, Perl, Python, etc.), you end up using some kind of library which really doesn't do much besides let you set up predefined SQL query templates and then fill in the data, with the library doing these conversions to ascii for you.
It seems like there should be some kind of API where a query can be defined, and then the data passed with this query to the DB without conversions for improved speed. Or am I totally missing something? Just for reference, my background in programming tends to be more in low-level embedded code; RDBMSes are new to me.
True, but PHBs repeat the "someone to sue" mantra all the time, regardless of its veracity.
Yes, of course, we'd have no chance of moving something that size around with our horribly pathetic technology (compared to what we would be capable of if we hadn't gotten lazy and decided we'd rather play around with finances and selling houses to each other rather than pursue advanced space technology). However, we'd also have no chance of moving around something the size of an Imperial star destroyer or cruiser either, or even a lowly corvette. Heck, we'd have our hands full just trying to get an X-wing fighter out of orbit.
Yes, I was promoting the exponential fees idea here on Slashdot years ago. However, I think your fees are too low; add an extra '0' to each one. If a copyrighted work is so successful that a company wants to keep a monopoly on it for an additional 10 years, $100k is not an unreasonable figure as it should be making many millions of dollars over that time. If it's not profitable enough to justify that fee, then it's not making enough money to keep very many people employed and it should be released into the public domain.
Yes, that actually can be the reason, because a bunch of people are whining about it, so what's your idea of what the reason is? It should be pretty obvious that the people who don't have a problem with it aren't part of this discussion at all.
Absolutely, especially when these communist ideas are enacted during the administration of Ronald Reagan, that pinko communist!
Yes, Apple is very worrying. However, it is a little early to see how effective Tim Cook is at replacing Jobs. Hopefully, Cook will turn out to be just like Ballmer.
Ok, the part about carburetors makes sense; they're only so adjustable. But with a fuel-injected engine (with engine management computer), why wouldn't you be able to optimize both idling and under-load operation? The computer can change the injector pulsewidths instantly in response to throttle input. The main limiting factor is that engines are stuck with mechanical camshafts which have to be designed for average conditions (since you can't exactly have the lobes reshape themselves at different rpms), but even here variable valve timing has improved things a lot, and this has become pretty commonplace in engines.
Everyone's pissed because they were taught as kids that there were 9 planets in the Solar System, and that the last one had the same name as one of their favority Disney characters. So they're mad that it's been demoted to "dwarf planet", even though they never had a problem before with Ceres being classified that way, and Ceres is much, much closer to us.
No, they wouldn't. They'd be "dwarf planets", at least most of them would, they're really not that large. Even Titan is only half as massive as Mercury (though it has larger volume), so I'm not sure where it'd rank according to the current definition.
No, "exoplanet" is for planets which orbit other stars. What you're thinking of is a "rogue planet", which is a planet that doesn't have a star and just floats through interstellar or intergalactic space. These of course are only theorized.
No, the problem is that if you make being a spheroid sufficient to call an object a "planet" (that, and orbiting the Sun rather than another planet), then instead of 9 planets, suddenly you get a bunch more because you'll have to reclassify the other spheroid sun-orbiting objects (now called "dwarf planets") as full-fledged planets, including Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. Don't forget a few other: Orcus, Quaoar, Sedna, and 2007 OR10, which may very well be classified dwarf planets soon, and there's probably more out there we haven't found yet (that latest one was just discovered in 2007), so we'd be teaching kids increasing numbers of planets all the time.
Even if we kept the "dwarf planet" designation and set Pluto as the lower limit, Eris is both larger and more massive than Pluto so we'd still have 10 planets (until any larger ones are discovered way out where Eris is).
That one wasn't finished with construction however, so of course it was mostly hollow.
Of course, this makes me wonder, if having as much of it complete as they did was sufficient to have the giant laser working (as the rebels found out the hard way), then what'd they need the rest of it (the unfinished portion) for? Just to look good? To have lots more offices for bureaucrats? To have more hangar bays full of TIE fighters to defend against rebel ships too small to easily hit with the giant laser?
I have to agree. It was a pretty good analysis except for that line which really doesn't fit or make sense. After all, we're talking about a spacegoing civilization that has faster-than-light engines, not to mention some absurdly large capital ships. I don't see how having engines capable of moving the Death Star is even remotely as absurd as the whole idea of a death star by itself, with a giant laser, and also ships that can travel FTL and have artificial gravity (even the tiny Millenium Falcon had artificial gravity inside).
Wrong. The government could easily have simply taken over the firm. It happens all the time in other countries, it's called "nationalizing" an industry. It's even happened here in the US: the railroads were nationalized in WWI, control of hundreds of S&Ls was seized in the 80s during the S&L crisis, and the airport screening industry was nationalized into TSA. Of course, that last one didn't work out so well but the others did.
The only problem with shooting them is that their personal money is probably safely tucked into offshore bank accounts. Threatening to torture their soon-to-be-orphan children to death should get them to relinquish those account numbers however.
Lucas never was right in the head, but he did get worse over the years. The only reason the first three movies were any good is because 1) his wife (now ex-wife, since he dumped her after those movies) cleaned up the dialog and scripts, particularly in the first movie, and 2) in the latter two movies, he had other people help with writing and direction. The second movie was the best precisely because he didn't direct it or write it, and the third wasn't bad because he didn't direct it and only helped write it (Kasdan is credited first with the screenplay on IMDB). Heck, if his ex-wife didn't clean up his crappy scriptwriting on the first movie, Star Wars would probably have been forgotten and never spawned any sequels; she's probably the one we really have to thank, and she probably got cut out of all his riches.
Actually, yes it does, when you're talking about language, especially the English language. Language is defined by how people use it. The "proper" usage is defined by how it's used by the people who speak it. So if it is common, by definition, it IS acceptable.
If most people start saying "There is coils", then by definition, it is correct.
Almost all of those are bullshit. Vactrains? Backpack helicopters? Do you see any of those things in use anywhere? Much of that list is just science fiction. I'm talking about real progress that you can see in society around you, on the streets, not some sci-fi ideas that may or may not appear, just like all those "revolutionary" car engines that never made it into production.
Go back 10 years, and compare to today. There just isn't much that's different, except for mobile electronic devices (smartphones, e-readers, tablets). Sure, there's a few small incremental improvements here and there (like GPGPU on your link; but I was watching DivX ;-) movies on computers 10 years ago so this isn't exactly a revolutionary change except for people doing large-scale rendering).
The way I see it, the last 10-12 years has basically been a "lost decade".
Wikipedia IS difficult to edit... if you're a moron.
I don't get this "Wikipedia is Ugly" idea either; I think it looks really good personally. There isn't a bunch of extra flashy crap, just the article text, some tables listing key points concisely, some relevant photos, and finally references at the bottom. Then there's a simple menu on the left, and some tabs to look at the "Talk" page, edit the content, or view the edit history, and a search box plus a link to log in or create an account. What little color there is is muted and very neutral. What's the problem?
I think this is just a bunch of Web 2.0 morons complaining because it hasn't been completely redesigned and uglified for no reason at all, just like Gmail's crappy new interface; change for change's sake.
"Windows" without a GUI? Surely you jest. But we are talking about the company that's made some totally laughable blunders many times, so I guess it isn't totally unfathomable.
Personally, I think Ballmer should not be fired. This is just too much fun to watch; the last thing I want to see is someone really smart and competent take over MS and turning it back into a highly effective monopolist.