Not yet, but the class action lawsuit will likely change that.
Only for those consumers who are in the jurisdiction of the court that handles the class action lawsuit. The only lawsuit that's been filed so far is in California, so if it goes to court and is settled/ruled upon and one of the conditions is that Sony must replace the non-CDs then you can only benefit if you're in California. It's possible that the terms of the settlement (if they settle out of court) could be broader, but that's not a guarantee.
The odds of them doing that as part of the settlement, however, is somewhere between slim and none. You're much more likely to see $3 off another Sony/BMG non-CD. Which will itself be DRM'd, just with a different kind of DRM.
this initiative will not seriously gain steam until the big companies around the world begin to adopt them
Very true. However, realize that virtually all of the Fortune 500 have government contracts. As states adopt the requirement to use OpenDocument, those companies will have to as well, at least to some extent.
Additionally, some of the companies listed as participating in the summit are Fortune 500 themselves -- IBM (#10), Sun Microsystems (#194), Intel (#50), Oracle (#220). Nokia is a foreign company, while Google and CA should be on next years list (a maybe for CA).
That doesn't mean that they'll switch off Office of course, but it does mean that they're likely to support OpenDocument in some degree, if only by purchasing a plugin for Office to export the formats.
I have no problem. DRM only works for Microsoft Windows
No, sometimes it also FUBARs the hardware. One of the last CDs I bought could not be read by my DVD-RW drive (an NEC; hardly an uncommon brand). As far as the hardware was concerned the disk did not exist, or at least had no readable data on it.
Thankfully my wife's PC had a different drive on it -- it could read the disk. Just had to do the archaic and little-known "hold down shift while inserting the disk" to avoid the DRM that was on it.
Oh, and no -- there was no indication anywhere on the outside packaging that there was DRM on the CD.
it does not say what Amazon's cut, if any, is other than their normal profit.
Amazon's cut is exactly that -- whatever profit they make on the sale of items. Plus the inevitable "shipping and handling" fees (if any).
The cash donations go 100% to the hospitals. Gabe, Tycho, and various others volunteer their time to do whatever administrivia is needed. But by having virtually all of it done through Amazon, and shipped directly to the hospitals there really isn't much (the first year they did this they had everything shipped to them... they had to get storage facilities and get a fleet of volunteers to move stuff; but even then it was 100% contribution, with them paying/getting donated the overhead).
What, the 486SX had plenty of features, the new-fangled features on a Pentium M are just bells and whistles?
Compare the latest and greatest GPUs with those a couple generations back -- adding shaders, an entire shading language, and so forth would be roughly equivalent to adding the ability to do complex numbers in a CPU core.
About the closest thing you could compare in modern CPUs is advanced floating point capabilities (e.g. -- MMX/SSE/Altivec), and they're still not on the same scale.
but it seems that GPUs are destined to waste all the power [watts] modern CPUs are saving
This is largely because of the completely different design methods and timelines in the two fields.
CPUs are designed pretty close to the transistor level. They optimize the crap out of them, and try to do the most work with the least transistors. You have a lot of flexibility in changing the die size, the power consumption, and so forth. You can also ramp up the clock speeds to insane levels -- 3-4 GHz currently. This at the expense of time -- you generally only produce one new CPU core every 3-4 years, with various tweaks in between to increase speed, add small features, etc.
GPUs are designed at the block level. Need an shader? Plop -- here's the shader block. Need another? Plop. Identical. Sure, you could combine a bunch of transistors between the two, but that's far below the block level. Obviously the downside here is that you're going to have huge transistor counts, lots of waste (in power/heat and die size), and so forth. But the GPU market moves at a rapid pace right now -- entirely new cores every year or so. With a round of fairly mild tweaks on that core 6-9 months down the road. Clock speeds are low (a few hundred MHz, with the fastest now approaching a GHz), but each clock tick is doing a LOT of work (mostly parallelized).
I suspect GPUs will eventually hit the wall with their current design methods, but that won't be until they stop adding new features every cycle. We hit that particular "wall" with CPUs several decades ago -- the features being added now are relatively minor in comparison. Right now if Nvidia or ATI were to change design strategies they'd be run over by the other one.
I believe in the literal translation of the Bible.
I presume that you mean that you believe that the Bible is the literal word of God -- the rest of your statements support that. Using the word "translation" there is a bit confusing because...
If we say that it is open to interpretation because it only has some nice stories, then what parts do we follow and what parts are just there as example?
So you're reading the original Hebrew and Greek texts? Because anything else is an interpretation. Or do you think that one particular translation (into language of your choice) is the correct and ordained one? If so, which?
And if you do read the original Hebrew and Greek texts... well, first -- congradulations. Second, how do you understand them? See, the problem is that the ancient dialect of Hebrew that was used was a bit... ambiguous. It did not capture the entirety of human language, and was essentially the equivalent of modern day shorthand. In modern translations the exact same source word can be translated to wildly different English words.
The AMD chip is more expensive and uses less power than the Intel chip? Isn't it usually the other way around?
AMD chips have been the "low power" leaders for quite some time now -- at least 2 years. Pretty much since the introduction of the Athlon XP models.
As for the price difference -- yes, the Athlon64 X2 chips are more expensive than their Intel "counterparts", but if you look at the benchmarks or the design you'll see why -- the Intel chips are a rush job and poorly (but cheaply) designed. You don't get anywhere near the performance of the AMD design though, and Intel's already stated that this won't change until mid 2006.
Trust me, Dell is screaming bloody murder over this -- since the superiority of the Athlon64 X2 chips is completely undeniable, more and more of the server market is now shifting to AMD. And Dell is still purely Intel. Thing is, even if Dell was willing to break their allegience, it's doubtful that AMD could fulfill the quantities that Dell would want. They just don't have the fab capacity. And unless that changes, there's little reason for Dell to anger Intel (and lose some of the vast discounts that they get from Intel in the process).
Oracle's MERGE INTO construct is a nice thing for certain cases, but it certainly doesn't help your frustration with INSERT vs UPDATE -- MERGE INTO basically fuses the two of them, plus a SELECT statement. The very different syntax between them remains.
The nice thing about MERGE INTO, at least from an OCI standpoint, is that you can reuse bind names. So if you're simply trying to do a "make it so" statement (not caring if it's an update or insert w/ a unique key; you just want the data to be there damnit) then you use the same bind names in all three places (select clause, insert clause, update clause) and you only have to do the binds and provide the data once -- not three times. And the whole thing is done over on the DB, which reduces round trips and should speed things up.
there are lots of good frameworks around SQL that make it so that writing SQL is becoming a thing of the past
Such as? I'm honestly unfamiliar with any of them. The perpetual issue is that SQL (and RDBMS in general) are set oriented, while most programmers think in purely algebraic terms. The two don't play nice together.
would like to see SQL treated like HTTP - nobody writes HTTP. It's a protocol.
But it's not a protocol -- it's a language. SQL is infinitely more flexible than HTTP. Maybe you meant HTML or XML -- it's a lot closer to either of those than it is to HTTP. And even then they're completely different -- they're hierarchical, which SQL is inherently not.
Am I using this specific table like a flat file? Yes. There is no rule that says I can't.
Abusing the crap out of a design method does not make it a valid design. You even say you're using this table like a flat file -- so you've invalidated the entire purpose behind putting it into a table. Use a flat file. It'll be faster in every regard, use less space in every regard, and be easier to interface with.
Right tool, right job. You propose some shit like this in the real world, you deserve to be fired.
On the other hand, using rows instead of columns complicates any interesting data manipulation you're going to do on your web quiz signifigantly
No, it simplifies them. RDBMS's make it very easy to do things on a row basis, not so much on a column basis. It is utterly trivial to get "usefull" [sic] data out of a table structure that's properly designed, but nightmarish to get it if it's not. For instance, if you have 100 columns how do you answer the question "what percentage of respondants answered at least 80% of all questions?". You can't easily. And if you add or remove a question then you will have to touch a great deal more code than if you had implemented the table sanely in the first place.
he OPs point stands - these are not normalization issues
Yes they are! This is practically a poster child of normalization (or lack thereof). In fact it's an utterly trivial example of normalization that doesn't actually raise any difficult issues over speed, accessibility, etc. where you often run into problems with normalization.
is a real weakness of the relational model compared to OO design
There's a vast difference between relational databases and object oriented databases. I've yet to see anyone (including Oracle) do objects-in-relational decently. And SQL is inherently a relational paradigm -- you wouldn't want to use it for an OODB because it would just be inappropriate.
It would have been interesting if they did the test with an older video card as well, like a GeForce3 series.
Not really. The video card was irrelevant to the test -- all the high vs low benchmarks showed was that if you're GPU bound then your memory latency has virtually no impact whatsoever. An older video card would've just been GPU bound at lower resolutions (for most of the games they tested, the lower resolution test would've been GPU bound by itself; BF2 wouldn't even run on a GF3).
If you're a gamer, you really should try to be GPU bound when possible -- as long as the lowest frame rate you get is high enough to avoid hitching and stutter (generally 45-50 fps). Otherwise you probably spent too much on your video card.
Note that some games simply don't become GPU bound. But most do.
Sorry, I call BS on your entire post. The difference in latencies here is miniscule -- it's not like we're talking about having the CPU wait 2 clock cycles vs 30 clock cycles. It's closer to 13 vs 25 (not exact, but the magnitude of difference is close). That just doesn't matter that much -- the reality is that if you have a cache miss then you're looking at 20-30 cycles (or, more likely, 40-60 cycles) of stall while you fetch the data from main memory.
The kind of changes you're talking about require vastly faster memory. Not the kind of latency differences being discussed here at all. Both of these are "high latency" compared to what would be needed for your theoretical redesign of the entire software stack. And even then, you just become utterly and completely screwed if you have to hit virtual memory, possibly more so than you are now because you've re-orchestrated everything around the idea that latency is a non issue.
Oh, and latency is getting worse, not better, and has been for a long, long time. CPU speeds long ago outstripped the speeds of our fastest memory (well, fastest while still not costing absurd amounts of money...), and the newer memory formats (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, RDRAM, etc) have higher latencies in exchange for greater bandwidth.
Can't you just disable Javascript or are they opening the popups some other way?
Far too many websites utilize JS to simply disable it. And yes, I'm aware of the NoScript extension, but last I checked it had binary behavior on websites (enable/disable JS per site), which still doesn't help.
How's about disabling the new window call if it refers to another site? That would stop them... at least for a short time.
Or, alternately, disable onClick being able to create a new window... Yes, I clicked on the website. I didn't click on a link though. Shoo!
It most certainly IS illegal to _REQUIRE_ someone's SSN to do business.
Really? Where's that written in the US Code?
From the SSA's website: "If a business or other enterprise asks you for your SSN, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested."
Government agencys are far more regulated in their usage and requests for SSN's. Private companies are not regulated whatsoever -- although if they fail to protect your SSN then they will run afoul of other laws.
therefore porting Qt to Windows will have legal consequences
You better tell them that then, since they're the ones providing the library.
Their licensing scheme is pretty simple and quite explicit -- if you want to develop commercial software, then you have to buy a commercial license from them. If you want to develop GPL software then you can use the GPL licensed copy of the library. This does restrict you to the GPL for a license, but I feel that it's a perfectly reasonable requirement.
I generally dislike GPL'd libraries; the LGPL is better in most cases, but their dual licensing scheme covers the issues with a GPL'd library moderately reasonably. It's not perfect -- if you want to release your code under BSD/MIT or another OSS license you cannot, nor can you simply contribute it to the public domain (at least not without buying a license and forcing everyone who wants to compile your code to do the same), but it's better than not having an Open version of the library at all. Especially cross-platform.
Under whose radar? Blizzard announced that they were going to be doing this near the beginning of this year, and they've been reasonably upfront about it. There have been multiple forum postings as well.
IF they want to prevent cheating, watch for behaviour patterns
They do that as well. But, funny thing, guess which is more effective?
And, frankly, the amount of whining and tin foil hat complaining going on over this is just ridiculous. They do not expose any private data at any point in time. The sniffing occurs only while you are playing the game, it does not negatively impact any other programs, all "gathered" data is hashed and compared purely on the client side, and only if the hashed data matches a list of "known bad" hashes is an indicator (again, only an indicator -- not the raw, unhashed data) sent back to Blizzard.
If you want to complain, then complain about the possibility of false positives. Hash functions, by their very nature, do not ensure uniqueness. Multiple values will hash to the same value. I haven't seen a technical discussion of the hashing function, so it may be exceptionally rare, but it's still possible.
And no, I don't play WoW or any other Blizzard game at this time. And I'm not a fanboy. I'm just tired of people blowing this out of proportion -- it just dilutes the response against real privacy/security threats.
The problem with Oracle is, it doesn't scale at all. It is meant to do grid computing, but can't really do anything smaller.
Man... all those Oracle customers that aren't running grid/cluster must be just plain stupid then.
A minimal installation of Oracle 10g takes ~800MB of memory, and will take over ten hours to install on a machine with 512MB ram
You're full of it. A brand new install of 10g Enterprise Edition, accepting all the defaults, takes 256MB of memory on a 512MB system and takes nowhere near 10 hours to install (not even half of that). And I know this from personal experience, since I've installed 10G EE on several boxes here at work (and I keep telling my bosses that I'm not an admin and know nothing about being an Oracle admin, so I'm quite sure I could be more efficient about both the install footprint and time).
Oh, and you're telling me that MySQL takes up 8 MB of memory based on your own statements. I sincerely doubt that.
Is Oracle the right solution for your case? No, probably not. But that doesn't validate your statements.
Oracle is a rubbish dinosaur that hasnt aged all that well
And this is insightful?
It's a baseless accusation. The poster doesn't even attempt to provide any proof for it. Oracle is continuously leads the pack in benchmarks, it has more features than you can shake a stick at, is incredibly stable, and has features that MySQL is just starting to catch up with (wow, MySQL finally got views! How wonderfully 1980s.)
coz IBM said if it dont do what you want, work round to it. Oracle said, ok we'll patch it.
So suddenly not adding features and refusing to respond to your userbase is a good thing? No wonder IBM's lost most of the market outside of mainframes and minis.
MySQL is excellent for what it is, a website database server
Well this much is true at least. But I still wouldn't use it much beyond a toy website. PostgreSQL or Firebird are better for the same price -- both in features and in stability/reliability.
cant see many php developers going to the trouble of using oracle
The trouble? You clearly don't know what you're talking about now. Oracle is far easier/better to write SQL for since it's both more flexible and closer to the SQL "standard" (and that's a pretty sad statement). There's also far more information out there for help with Oracle than there is with MySQL, not to mention that Oracle is something very useful to put on your resume/CV -- MySQL isn't totally unknown anymore, but Oracle is still better as far as that goes.
Now if you want to rightfully bash Oracle then talk about their miserable installer and bundled administration tools. They suck. They've always sucked. And they're not getting better IMO. Oracle's on a buying spree right now, and I so wish that they'd buy out Quest Software and bundle TOAD (Windows) or tORA (*nix) with their servers. The Java crap they use now blows. The other (and related) issue is that administering an Oracle server can be a daunting task, and there's not a great deal of (free) literature available for it. Oragle 10g has made strides here with the database doing a lot of self-fixing and tuning, but it could be better (or at least better documented). Of course, one reason that MySQL doesn't need as much here is because there simply as much that can be done to it. Flexibility has a price.
I was hoping to get more of a The Serpent and the Rainbow breakdown of the drugs/herbs/poisons involved in the Haitian voodoo practices.
RTFA. The first few pages talk about the history and "science" behind zombies.
I found it to be well written, interesting, and humorous (the last portion, which talks about zombies in pop culture). And it even references the fact that you can download the original Night of the Living Dead for free from http://www.archive.org/!
Being as most creatures don't come with light-emitting organs as standard equipment, this speculation falls short of an explanation.
Ah, so being able to see the shadow of a predator wouldn't be advantageous? Or, inversely, the shadow of prey?
Although, frankly, the more likely explanation is that the organism wasn't trying to avoid a predator, it was trying to increase its energy intake by moving toward the light (or, in the case of a predator, move to an area that's more likely to have prey because of the light). We know cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years and they can do this.
No, just narrower. A disadvantage, like tunnel vision.
Um, no. Being able to refine your visual capabilities is generally an advantage. The previous mutation just said "light/dark". Now you can say "light/dark in THAT direction". You don't think that's an advantage?
Oh, and tunnel vision isn't necessarily a disadvantage. In humans it literally focuses your vision on the threat at hand (and yes, I've had it before). In other animals, such as birds of prey, it's an evolutionary advantage that allows them to concentrate on finding and killing prey.
Outside of data structures (or oddball stuff involving well-known addresses), why would you ever pass a pointer around instead of a reference?
External function calls is a perpetual one. Many libraries, especially those with C roots, still pass pointers. If you're doing any mucking with C-style stdio, file descriptors, directory descriptors, stat, networking, etc. -- it's all pointers. All of this you can (and probably should) wrap in a smart pointer class.
Many design patterns work well with pointers (factory for example). Again, smart pointers to the rescue.
It's not like they'll suddenly be allowed to buy out Verizon and create another monopoly on that scale.
[...]
Today we have Cell Phones and VoIP.
The latter is exactly the reason why they might be allowed to make such an aquisition. Maybe not of Verizon, but perhaps BellSouth or Sprint or MCI/Worldcomm. Heck, they can even site cable companies as competition.
Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of the cell phones in the US are controlled by Baby Bells. And it wouldn't be many mergers before the majority of the data lines could be controlled by a single entity. Heck, MCI/Worldcomm alone has some rather key lines that cross the Mississippi. They're not the only ones, but if they were to lock your data out of their network I think you'd notice (if you're in the continental US at least).
I don't think it's too likely, but I also dislike the amount of consolidation that's gone on in the telecomm and media industries in the past decade. Some consolidation was inevitable, but in my inexpert opinion it's gone way too far, with too little consideration for the customers.
Re:"Ma Bell" should be called "Big Brother" instea
on
Ma Bell is Back
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I suggest that if there is anyone who does not want the police to come to your door at their whim claiming to have received an emergency call and demanding to come in and do a warrantless search, that you also have your telephone lines disconnected.
I suggest that you move to another country.
Your "solution" won't work. What if someone calls 911 and gives your house address? Or, better yet, if someone calls 911 on a cell phone and the cell E911 services locate the call at your house (correctly or not)?
Want this to not happen? Move. To another country. Or at least somewhere with better telephone service.
Slashdot Mirror
Not yet, but the class action lawsuit will likely change that.
Only for those consumers who are in the jurisdiction of the court that handles the class action lawsuit. The only lawsuit that's been filed so far is in California, so if it goes to court and is settled/ruled upon and one of the conditions is that Sony must replace the non-CDs then you can only benefit if you're in California. It's possible that the terms of the settlement (if they settle out of court) could be broader, but that's not a guarantee.
The odds of them doing that as part of the settlement, however, is somewhere between slim and none. You're much more likely to see $3 off another Sony/BMG non-CD. Which will itself be DRM'd, just with a different kind of DRM.
this initiative will not seriously gain steam until the big companies around the world begin to adopt them
Very true. However, realize that virtually all of the Fortune 500 have government contracts. As states adopt the requirement to use OpenDocument, those companies will have to as well, at least to some extent.
Additionally, some of the companies listed as participating in the summit are Fortune 500 themselves -- IBM (#10), Sun Microsystems (#194), Intel (#50), Oracle (#220). Nokia is a foreign company, while Google and CA should be on next years list (a maybe for CA).
That doesn't mean that they'll switch off Office of course, but it does mean that they're likely to support OpenDocument in some degree, if only by purchasing a plugin for Office to export the formats.
I have no problem. DRM only works for Microsoft Windows
No, sometimes it also FUBARs the hardware. One of the last CDs I bought could not be read by my DVD-RW drive (an NEC; hardly an uncommon brand). As far as the hardware was concerned the disk did not exist, or at least had no readable data on it.
Thankfully my wife's PC had a different drive on it -- it could read the disk. Just had to do the archaic and little-known "hold down shift while inserting the disk" to avoid the DRM that was on it.
Oh, and no -- there was no indication anywhere on the outside packaging that there was DRM on the CD.
it does not say what Amazon's cut, if any, is other than their normal profit.
Amazon's cut is exactly that -- whatever profit they make on the sale of items. Plus the inevitable "shipping and handling" fees (if any).
The cash donations go 100% to the hospitals. Gabe, Tycho, and various others volunteer their time to do whatever administrivia is needed. But by having virtually all of it done through Amazon, and shipped directly to the hospitals there really isn't much (the first year they did this they had everything shipped to them... they had to get storage facilities and get a fleet of volunteers to move stuff; but even then it was 100% contribution, with them paying/getting donated the overhead).
What, the 486SX had plenty of features, the new-fangled features on a Pentium M are just bells and whistles?
Compare the latest and greatest GPUs with those a couple generations back -- adding shaders, an entire shading language, and so forth would be roughly equivalent to adding the ability to do complex numbers in a CPU core.
About the closest thing you could compare in modern CPUs is advanced floating point capabilities (e.g. -- MMX/SSE/Altivec), and they're still not on the same scale.
but it seems that GPUs are destined to waste all the power [watts] modern CPUs are saving
This is largely because of the completely different design methods and timelines in the two fields.
CPUs are designed pretty close to the transistor level. They optimize the crap out of them, and try to do the most work with the least transistors. You have a lot of flexibility in changing the die size, the power consumption, and so forth. You can also ramp up the clock speeds to insane levels -- 3-4 GHz currently. This at the expense of time -- you generally only produce one new CPU core every 3-4 years, with various tweaks in between to increase speed, add small features, etc.
GPUs are designed at the block level. Need an shader? Plop -- here's the shader block. Need another? Plop. Identical. Sure, you could combine a bunch of transistors between the two, but that's far below the block level. Obviously the downside here is that you're going to have huge transistor counts, lots of waste (in power/heat and die size), and so forth. But the GPU market moves at a rapid pace right now -- entirely new cores every year or so. With a round of fairly mild tweaks on that core 6-9 months down the road. Clock speeds are low (a few hundred MHz, with the fastest now approaching a GHz), but each clock tick is doing a LOT of work (mostly parallelized).
I suspect GPUs will eventually hit the wall with their current design methods, but that won't be until they stop adding new features every cycle. We hit that particular "wall" with CPUs several decades ago -- the features being added now are relatively minor in comparison. Right now if Nvidia or ATI were to change design strategies they'd be run over by the other one.
I believe in the literal translation of the Bible.
I presume that you mean that you believe that the Bible is the literal word of God -- the rest of your statements support that. Using the word "translation" there is a bit confusing because...
If we say that it is open to interpretation because it only has some nice stories, then what parts do we follow and what parts are just there as example?
So you're reading the original Hebrew and Greek texts? Because anything else is an interpretation. Or do you think that one particular translation (into language of your choice) is the correct and ordained one? If so, which?
And if you do read the original Hebrew and Greek texts... well, first -- congradulations. Second, how do you understand them? See, the problem is that the ancient dialect of Hebrew that was used was a bit... ambiguous. It did not capture the entirety of human language, and was essentially the equivalent of modern day shorthand. In modern translations the exact same source word can be translated to wildly different English words.
The AMD chip is more expensive and uses less power than the Intel chip? Isn't it usually the other way around?
AMD chips have been the "low power" leaders for quite some time now -- at least 2 years. Pretty much since the introduction of the Athlon XP models.
As for the price difference -- yes, the Athlon64 X2 chips are more expensive than their Intel "counterparts", but if you look at the benchmarks or the design you'll see why -- the Intel chips are a rush job and poorly (but cheaply) designed. You don't get anywhere near the performance of the AMD design though, and Intel's already stated that this won't change until mid 2006.
Trust me, Dell is screaming bloody murder over this -- since the superiority of the Athlon64 X2 chips is completely undeniable, more and more of the server market is now shifting to AMD. And Dell is still purely Intel. Thing is, even if Dell was willing to break their allegience, it's doubtful that AMD could fulfill the quantities that Dell would want. They just don't have the fab capacity. And unless that changes, there's little reason for Dell to anger Intel (and lose some of the vast discounts that they get from Intel in the process).
Oracle MERGE which seems like a nice way to go.
Oracle's MERGE INTO construct is a nice thing for certain cases, but it certainly doesn't help your frustration with INSERT vs UPDATE -- MERGE INTO basically fuses the two of them, plus a SELECT statement. The very different syntax between them remains.
The nice thing about MERGE INTO, at least from an OCI standpoint, is that you can reuse bind names. So if you're simply trying to do a "make it so" statement (not caring if it's an update or insert w/ a unique key; you just want the data to be there damnit) then you use the same bind names in all three places (select clause, insert clause, update clause) and you only have to do the binds and provide the data once -- not three times. And the whole thing is done over on the DB, which reduces round trips and should speed things up.
there are lots of good frameworks around SQL that make it so that writing SQL is becoming a thing of the past
Such as? I'm honestly unfamiliar with any of them. The perpetual issue is that SQL (and RDBMS in general) are set oriented, while most programmers think in purely algebraic terms. The two don't play nice together.
would like to see SQL treated like HTTP - nobody writes HTTP. It's a protocol.
But it's not a protocol -- it's a language. SQL is infinitely more flexible than HTTP. Maybe you meant HTML or XML -- it's a lot closer to either of those than it is to HTTP. And even then they're completely different -- they're hierarchical, which SQL is inherently not.
Am I using this specific table like a flat file? Yes. There is no rule that says I can't.
Abusing the crap out of a design method does not make it a valid design. You even say you're using this table like a flat file -- so you've invalidated the entire purpose behind putting it into a table. Use a flat file. It'll be faster in every regard, use less space in every regard, and be easier to interface with.
Right tool, right job. You propose some shit like this in the real world, you deserve to be fired.
On the other hand, using rows instead of columns complicates any interesting data manipulation you're going to do on your web quiz signifigantly
No, it simplifies them. RDBMS's make it very easy to do things on a row basis, not so much on a column basis. It is utterly trivial to get "usefull" [sic] data out of a table structure that's properly designed, but nightmarish to get it if it's not. For instance, if you have 100 columns how do you answer the question "what percentage of respondants answered at least 80% of all questions?". You can't easily. And if you add or remove a question then you will have to touch a great deal more code than if you had implemented the table sanely in the first place.
he OPs point stands - these are not normalization issues
Yes they are! This is practically a poster child of normalization (or lack thereof). In fact it's an utterly trivial example of normalization that doesn't actually raise any difficult issues over speed, accessibility, etc. where you often run into problems with normalization.
is a real weakness of the relational model compared to OO design
There's a vast difference between relational databases and object oriented databases. I've yet to see anyone (including Oracle) do objects-in-relational decently. And SQL is inherently a relational paradigm -- you wouldn't want to use it for an OODB because it would just be inappropriate.
It would have been interesting if they did the test with an older video card as well, like a GeForce3 series.
Not really. The video card was irrelevant to the test -- all the high vs low benchmarks showed was that if you're GPU bound then your memory latency has virtually no impact whatsoever. An older video card would've just been GPU bound at lower resolutions (for most of the games they tested, the lower resolution test would've been GPU bound by itself; BF2 wouldn't even run on a GF3).
If you're a gamer, you really should try to be GPU bound when possible -- as long as the lowest frame rate you get is high enough to avoid hitching and stutter (generally 45-50 fps). Otherwise you probably spent too much on your video card.
Note that some games simply don't become GPU bound. But most do.
Sorry, I call BS on your entire post. The difference in latencies here is miniscule -- it's not like we're talking about having the CPU wait 2 clock cycles vs 30 clock cycles. It's closer to 13 vs 25 (not exact, but the magnitude of difference is close). That just doesn't matter that much -- the reality is that if you have a cache miss then you're looking at 20-30 cycles (or, more likely, 40-60 cycles) of stall while you fetch the data from main memory.
The kind of changes you're talking about require vastly faster memory. Not the kind of latency differences being discussed here at all. Both of these are "high latency" compared to what would be needed for your theoretical redesign of the entire software stack. And even then, you just become utterly and completely screwed if you have to hit virtual memory, possibly more so than you are now because you've re-orchestrated everything around the idea that latency is a non issue.
Oh, and latency is getting worse, not better, and has been for a long, long time. CPU speeds long ago outstripped the speeds of our fastest memory (well, fastest while still not costing absurd amounts of money...), and the newer memory formats (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, RDRAM, etc) have higher latencies in exchange for greater bandwidth.
Can't you just disable Javascript or are they opening the popups some other way?
Far too many websites utilize JS to simply disable it. And yes, I'm aware of the NoScript extension, but last I checked it had binary behavior on websites (enable/disable JS per site), which still doesn't help.
How's about disabling the new window call if it refers to another site? That would stop them... at least for a short time.
Or, alternately, disable onClick being able to create a new window... Yes, I clicked on the website. I didn't click on a link though. Shoo!
It most certainly IS illegal to _REQUIRE_ someone's SSN to do business.
Really? Where's that written in the US Code?
From the SSA's website:
"If a business or other enterprise asks you for your SSN, you can refuse to give it. However, that may mean doing without the purchase or service for which your number was requested."
Government agencys are far more regulated in their usage and requests for SSN's. Private companies are not regulated whatsoever -- although if they fail to protect your SSN then they will run afoul of other laws.
therefore porting Qt to Windows will have legal consequences
You better tell them that then, since they're the ones providing the library.
Their licensing scheme is pretty simple and quite explicit -- if you want to develop commercial software, then you have to buy a commercial license from them. If you want to develop GPL software then you can use the GPL licensed copy of the library. This does restrict you to the GPL for a license, but I feel that it's a perfectly reasonable requirement.
I generally dislike GPL'd libraries; the LGPL is better in most cases, but their dual licensing scheme covers the issues with a GPL'd library moderately reasonably. It's not perfect -- if you want to release your code under BSD/MIT or another OSS license you cannot, nor can you simply contribute it to the public domain (at least not without buying a license and forcing everyone who wants to compile your code to do the same), but it's better than not having an Open version of the library at all. Especially cross-platform.
Warden was stealth/sleazed in under the radar
Under whose radar? Blizzard announced that they were going to be doing this near the beginning of this year, and they've been reasonably upfront about it. There have been multiple forum postings as well.
IF they want to prevent cheating, watch for behaviour patterns
They do that as well. But, funny thing, guess which is more effective?
And, frankly, the amount of whining and tin foil hat complaining going on over this is just ridiculous. They do not expose any private data at any point in time. The sniffing occurs only while you are playing the game, it does not negatively impact any other programs, all "gathered" data is hashed and compared purely on the client side, and only if the hashed data matches a list of "known bad" hashes is an indicator (again, only an indicator -- not the raw, unhashed data) sent back to Blizzard.
If you want to complain, then complain about the possibility of false positives. Hash functions, by their very nature, do not ensure uniqueness. Multiple values will hash to the same value. I haven't seen a technical discussion of the hashing function, so it may be exceptionally rare, but it's still possible.
And no, I don't play WoW or any other Blizzard game at this time. And I'm not a fanboy. I'm just tired of people blowing this out of proportion -- it just dilutes the response against real privacy/security threats.
The problem with Oracle is, it doesn't scale at all. It is meant to do grid computing, but can't really do anything smaller.
Man... all those Oracle customers that aren't running grid/cluster must be just plain stupid then.
A minimal installation of Oracle 10g takes ~800MB of memory, and will take over ten hours to install on a machine with 512MB ram
You're full of it. A brand new install of 10g Enterprise Edition, accepting all the defaults, takes 256MB of memory on a 512MB system and takes nowhere near 10 hours to install (not even half of that). And I know this from personal experience, since I've installed 10G EE on several boxes here at work (and I keep telling my bosses that I'm not an admin and know nothing about being an Oracle admin, so I'm quite sure I could be more efficient about both the install footprint and time).
Oh, and you're telling me that MySQL takes up 8 MB of memory based on your own statements. I sincerely doubt that.
Is Oracle the right solution for your case? No, probably not. But that doesn't validate your statements.
Oracle is a rubbish dinosaur that hasnt aged all that well
And this is insightful?
It's a baseless accusation. The poster doesn't even attempt to provide any proof for it. Oracle is continuously leads the pack in benchmarks, it has more features than you can shake a stick at, is incredibly stable, and has features that MySQL is just starting to catch up with (wow, MySQL finally got views! How wonderfully 1980s.)
coz IBM said if it dont do what you want, work round to it. Oracle said, ok we'll patch it.
So suddenly not adding features and refusing to respond to your userbase is a good thing? No wonder IBM's lost most of the market outside of mainframes and minis.
MySQL is excellent for what it is, a website database server
Well this much is true at least. But I still wouldn't use it much beyond a toy website. PostgreSQL or Firebird are better for the same price -- both in features and in stability/reliability.
cant see many php developers going to the trouble of using oracle
The trouble? You clearly don't know what you're talking about now. Oracle is far easier/better to write SQL for since it's both more flexible and closer to the SQL "standard" (and that's a pretty sad statement). There's also far more information out there for help with Oracle than there is with MySQL, not to mention that Oracle is something very useful to put on your resume/CV -- MySQL isn't totally unknown anymore, but Oracle is still better as far as that goes.
Now if you want to rightfully bash Oracle then talk about their miserable installer and bundled administration tools. They suck. They've always sucked. And they're not getting better IMO. Oracle's on a buying spree right now, and I so wish that they'd buy out Quest Software and bundle TOAD (Windows) or tORA (*nix) with their servers. The Java crap they use now blows. The other (and related) issue is that administering an Oracle server can be a daunting task, and there's not a great deal of (free) literature available for it. Oragle 10g has made strides here with the database doing a lot of self-fixing and tuning, but it could be better (or at least better documented). Of course, one reason that MySQL doesn't need as much here is because there simply as much that can be done to it. Flexibility has a price.
I was hoping to get more of a The Serpent and the Rainbow breakdown of the drugs/herbs/poisons involved in the Haitian voodoo practices.
RTFA. The first few pages talk about the history and "science" behind zombies.
I found it to be well written, interesting, and humorous (the last portion, which talks about zombies in pop culture). And it even references the fact that you can download the original Night of the Living Dead for free from http://www.archive.org/!
Being as most creatures don't come with light-emitting organs as standard equipment, this speculation falls short of an explanation.
Ah, so being able to see the shadow of a predator wouldn't be advantageous? Or, inversely, the shadow of prey?
Although, frankly, the more likely explanation is that the organism wasn't trying to avoid a predator, it was trying to increase its energy intake by moving toward the light (or, in the case of a predator, move to an area that's more likely to have prey because of the light). We know cyanobacteria have been around for billions of years and they can do this.
No, just narrower. A disadvantage, like tunnel vision.
Um, no. Being able to refine your visual capabilities is generally an advantage. The previous mutation just said "light/dark". Now you can say "light/dark in THAT direction". You don't think that's an advantage?
Oh, and tunnel vision isn't necessarily a disadvantage. In humans it literally focuses your vision on the threat at hand (and yes, I've had it before). In other animals, such as birds of prey, it's an evolutionary advantage that allows them to concentrate on finding and killing prey.
Outside of data structures (or oddball stuff involving well-known addresses), why would you ever pass a pointer around instead of a reference?
External function calls is a perpetual one. Many libraries, especially those with C roots, still pass pointers. If you're doing any mucking with C-style stdio, file descriptors, directory descriptors, stat, networking, etc. -- it's all pointers. All of this you can (and probably should) wrap in a smart pointer class.
Many design patterns work well with pointers (factory for example). Again, smart pointers to the rescue.
It's not like they'll suddenly be allowed to buy out Verizon and create another monopoly on that scale.
[...]
Today we have Cell Phones and VoIP.
The latter is exactly the reason why they might be allowed to make such an aquisition. Maybe not of Verizon, but perhaps BellSouth or Sprint or MCI/Worldcomm. Heck, they can even site cable companies as competition.
Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of the cell phones in the US are controlled by Baby Bells. And it wouldn't be many mergers before the majority of the data lines could be controlled by a single entity. Heck, MCI/Worldcomm alone has some rather key lines that cross the Mississippi. They're not the only ones, but if they were to lock your data out of their network I think you'd notice (if you're in the continental US at least).
I don't think it's too likely, but I also dislike the amount of consolidation that's gone on in the telecomm and media industries in the past decade. Some consolidation was inevitable, but in my inexpert opinion it's gone way too far, with too little consideration for the customers.
I suggest that if there is anyone who does not want the police to come to your door at their whim claiming to have received an emergency call and demanding to come in and do a warrantless search, that you also have your telephone lines disconnected.
I suggest that you move to another country.
Your "solution" won't work. What if someone calls 911 and gives your house address? Or, better yet, if someone calls 911 on a cell phone and the cell E911 services locate the call at your house (correctly or not)?
Want this to not happen? Move. To another country. Or at least somewhere with better telephone service.
Hey, in modern English, all pronouns are gender-neutral! I don't want to offend anybody.
:)
Have your GF read the comment and see if she isn't offended