I doubt they would be killing them off if they were profitable. I do a lot of work in the virtualization and VDI space (not all of it by choice, mind you) and I have never run into anyone even asking about Oracle in those regards. AFAIK the only thing that could be considered really successful is Virtual Box and it's sticking around, thank [omnipotent bearded deity #4].
The problem here is that profitable is NOT always the same as important, useful, or any number of other virtues essential to technological progress.
Sun provided a lot of important products - Java being one of their most prominent examples. But profitable, it wasn't.
A lot of things that make you profitable actually make you less useful. Stuff like arbitrary tricks to ensure vendor lock-in, expensive products that winnow out potential contributors because they cannot afford the buy-in, developing a protective and antagonistic attitude that mean that only those with a compelling need or external pressure will even want to attempt to become part of the process.
Look at the various platform developer packages over the years for an example. The free-to-cheap stuff tends to coincide with successful platforms. Only rarely do expensive development systems result in a large and thriving development community.
How about decades of programming in various environments with blatant differences in quality based on work ethic. FYI there's a fuckton of information and research on this.
Brilliant!.
Your statement fits the bill perfectly: random off the top of your head examples cherry picked at random from unverifiable sources.
Well played sir! Well played.
And posting as AC to boot. Bonus points for style!
Well, if you want specific examples, one of the items I was specifically thinking of the time was the IBM VSAM program logic manual circa 198x. Or do you have to have the actual IBM SCXX publication order code before you'll be satisfied? Prime Computer did some very entertaining documentation as well - being based in Massachusetts, they liked to spike their docs with references to HP Lovecraft's New England and Miskatonic University. The Commodore Amiga group had a lot of run as well. I have an A1000 computer with the paw imprint of Jay Miner's dog embossed on the inside of the lid.
On the flip side, SCO (before they changed owners and starting suing Linux) was so grim I turned and walked away from it. Intuit is no fun at all. Oracle and HP have abominable search engines, but your call is VERY important to them. And I have to be paid pretty well to sit and feel my life leaching away waiting for them to serve all their other customers because the documentation was written in Mordor and is neither entertaining nor informative.
There are a number of horribly expensive and unfunny program products I've dealt with and discarded over the years. I purposely refrain from recalling their names because I don't want to summon the other unpleasant memories that would rise like bile along with their names.
As to who has the better work ethic, I don't give a damn. All I care about is what they do to my work experience. And my experience has been that the more the developers enjoyed their jobs, the more enjoyable - and productive - my job becomes.
Shush. You know what I mean. (Though I have watched some of old-actually-season-1. I thought it was extremely dull. I haven't gotten around to watching any of the *later* old-DW, though.)
Of all the Doctors, it embarrasses me to admit I like the original one the least. He was a lying, pompous cowardly old weasel, or such was his affectation, anyway. Then again, he'd apparently spent several hundred years wearing out what may have been his original body and that's enough to make anyone's joints ache.
The first season of any TV show tends to be a bit rough, though. It got better. Helps if you can enjoy budget special-effects.
And it really is. People have been cracking jokes for ages and it's nice to see it official. I like it when real projects are run by real people complete with sense of humour.
Actually, I get concerned when projects/products come from people without humor. Because my experience is that the more "serious" they are, the lower the quality of what they deliver.
Even stodgy old IBM's best products seemed to come accompanied by technical docs written with geek quotes in them.
As for a “lot of inequity” - we should not live in a winner takes all, class bound gilded society – that takes away the incentive for hard work.
The paradox of extremes. In a communistic society, there's no reason to work hard because your can get the same rewards without exertion. In what we simplistically call a "capitalistic" society there's no reason to work hard because the people who got there first will deny you the benefits anyway.
I use quotes around "capitalistic" because the term is routinely expanded to include aspects of business and philosophy that have nothing to do with how you raise and use capital.
I was surprised to read some of your comments. When I've dealt with database performance problems, it's often not an inefficient piece of SQL that's the cause but the back and forth of vast quantities of data between the database and the app layer that is the problem. Only a change to the law of physics is going to fix that, or doing the processing in the right place. All modern databases are a lot more than simple data stores, they are also data processing engines.
A lot of if depends on what type of application you are dealing with. When the applications are web applications, there's a limit to how much heavy computation you want done anywhere, since the response should be as close to real-time as possible. As a corollary to that, in most cases, there should be a 1-1 correspondence between displayed records and retrieved records. This may require advance (batch) computation to be done and/or de-normalization of the database, or even use of a non-SQL datastore.
For offline batch processes, the rules change. However, just because something can be done more efficiently when confined to the DB server doesn't always make it more cost-effective. Competent PL/SQL people are in short supply (especially when the DBA lays down the law and refuses to double up as an applications programmer), whereas it's fairly easy to find people trained in C#, Java, Python or even COBOL. As a result, overall operational cost and system reliability often favors shovelling records back and forth across the LAN despite its less optimal use of the database machine (and LAN) itself. In fact, I worked in one shop where people who were over-eager to develop stored procedures were slapped down.
There's no one correct answer for everything. There are, however answers that occasion cause for regret. Back circa Y2K, a lot of local shops bought into Java EJBS where Session EJBs invoked stored procedures for the dirty work. The original EJB architecture had its drawbacks independent of the database component, but those shops have abandoned that approach for reasons unrelated to the warts in EJBs.
Well, there's also the other side. The spying gives you valuable information, that any good psychopath^Wbusiness man can use, to raise his profits.
"American" enough for you?
There are certain counter-intuitive practices that the USA was once known for holding as ideals. We didn't bribe or take bribes. We didn't torture or keep secret prisons. We didn't spy on our own people, interfere with their free travel, or otherwise indulge in the oppressive practices of countries we condemned.
We were never as good at holding these ideals as we deluded ourselves, but we did manage to put up a good front.
In the movies, the villains sneer at the good guys for being soft and impractical, and in the end, they lose. Movies are a bad model for real life, but it is true that if you demolish a reputation for square dealing just to be "practical", that there can be practical costs. And that a reputation once lost can be very hard to rebuild.
So the Nobel Peace Prize = "I HATE AMERICA" Prize.
Not really. It's meant to be a prize for making the world more peaceful. Giving it to Obama was nuts, and it's now not clear if this prize has any point any more.
No. Giving it to Obama was controversial. Giving it to Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, and not giving it to Gandhi, now that was, is and will ever be nuts. Another nuts (read stupid) decision? Giving it to Al Gore while completely ignoring Holocaust savior and survivor Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 Jewish children during WII (acts for which she was detained, tortured, sentenced to death but miraculously survived.)
The Nobel Peace price not about peace. It's about political posturing.
Some of us maintained that Obama got the Nobel Prize for "not being Bush". Unfortunately, it turned out that Obama is Bush. Right down to the funny ears.
Sendler didn't actually do anything that specifically promoted the cause of world peace, although certainly she deserved some equally prestigious award.
Gandhi's eligibility is stronger, but his major claim to fame has to do with peacefully liberating his own country, not so much the world. On the other hand, I have no problem seeing Nelson Mandela with a Nobel. For whatever else he did in his life, he managed to forge a peaceful post-apartheid South Africa when virtually everyone expected a bloodbath. And while that, too was mostly intra-national, I'm sure his neighbour countries appreciated it. To say nothing of the example he set.
Arafat, on the other hand, was involved in peace, but still surreptitiously dabbled in war. Weasel. Better than nothing, I suppose.
In the end, all we really demonstrate is that popularity and "sending messages" count for more than actual accomplishment, even at the rarefied level of the Nobel Prizes, whether Peace or other.
Stored procedures can be very efficient sometimes, but often, they just add additional load to the DBMS server that could have been distributed among application servers...
This, however, is mostly nonsense. It's true that stored procedures may add load to the DBMS, however it's equally true they may significantly reduce the overhead. What's more efficient - transferring 1M rows to an application server and handle it there (often submitting the result back to the DBMS as a parameter for the next query), or just process it locally within a stored procedure? Not to mention that the "application servers" usually manipulate the data using languages that are very poor match for such operations (which is basically everything except for SQL).
The first line of defense against loading the DBMS server is to start with intelligent queries and organization. Logic should avoid chewing through millions of rows in a programmed manner no matter which machine the chewing is done on. The DBMS is optimized for information retrieval and updating, and stored procedures can potentially interfere with that optimization. So rule 1 is to reduce what gets acted on. If you do that, the relative overhead of pushing it out to client machines is less of an issue and even the fact that the client machines are probably going to be less powerful won't matter as much, because there will typically be more of them to share the computing load. Because they're also likely to be less expensive machines, the next cost per computation is often lower as well if the DB server's CPUs are being efficiently used.
If you had poor development practice (and the fact that you are saying that "stored procedure code is also not as likely to be version-controlled" strongly suggests this), then sure - it might be nightmare. But it's not a fault of stored procedures but purely your fault.
I'm not going to accept fault on that, because I don't do stored procedures except in cases of compelling need. But whereas applications in C# and Java are typically managed by an IDE and bound to a Version Control System, every database system I've had to clean up after basically had someone editing the procedure in the equivalent of Windows Notepad and jamming the code straight into the database with no local project management at all. A few DBMS's have the ability to retrieve earlier generations of database objects, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
In short, I'm making my recommendations based on what I commonly come in and find has been going on, not on what would be the case in an ideal world.
PostreSQL's ancestry is more related to the (probably defunct now) commercial Ingres database manager.
At one time I'd heard rumors that all 3 had common roots, but (officially, at least), Oracle claims to be totally self-designed.
Ingres took a vertical turn several years back, being bundled with various financial applications. Although it's rarely heard of these days, their website has been updated fairly recently.
I wroked in a place with about 5,000 lines of PL-SQL. That was a nightmare.
OTOH, Oracle need not fear people using pirate copies: there are so many bugs that without being signed up for an expensive support program, your system will never fly.
PostgreSQL is about the closest open-source equivalent to Oracle. Reputedly, they both come from the same parent. At any rate, converting PL-SQL to its PostgreSQL equivalent is no walk in the park, but is a lot easier than a lot of other conversions.
Regardless, if you discover your developers have been indulging in extensive use of stored procedures, you should immediately escort them out the door. I'm speaking from bitter experience.
Stored procedures can be very efficient sometimes, but often, they just add additional load to the DBMS server that could have been distributed among application servers. Stored procedure code is also not as likely to be version-controlled and restoring code backups means a database restore. Also, splitting logic between the application server and database server can result in even the most trivial mods requiring a time (money) consuming "treasure hunt" to locate where the affected code is and careful co-ordination of the mods between the two serves.
Last, but hardly least is the fact if you do want to switch out DBMS products, it's going to be very, very expensive, since not only the aforementioned PL-SQL would have to be rewritten, but the applications would likely be seriously traumatized as well.
My only advice is to remember that, when it comes to operating a business, IT workers are helpful but it is the managers^W CEOs who do the grunt work and take the real risks.
NULL Is one of the most abused characteristics of just about any RDBMS.
I always caution people that NULL is the data equivalent of NaN. Use it ONLY when you have no actual data to put there and want to know that there's no data there. If it's really blank, put blank.
One of the most horrific things that the Bush Administration did post 9/11 was declare that, in effect, you cease to be an American Citizen once you leave the confines of the USA.
If you would, please expand on that. I don't think that is correct, at least not at face value.
If I had nothing better to do with my time, I'd dig out exact details. Most of the readily-available discussion of this is found on left-leaning websites, and I don't like using biased sources. However, recent attempts to expand that declaration by the Obama administration make references to the original declaration which can be pursued by anyone who's interested.
Here are 2 of the more objective items I dredged up.
But whether or not literally American law extends beyond the borders of the USA, there is no doubt that effectively it does so. You can see that in the influence that the USA has had on shaping foreign copyright laws, as a prime example.
Countries negotiate all sorts of treaties, defense, trade, human rights. I don't think there is much special about that.
In the case of making the world's copyright laws an extension of the constitution of the Kingdom of Disney, a lot of people have noted that Don Corleone could learn a thing or two about negotiation from the USA.
Then, of course, there's the matter that apparently a mere hint from certain quarters was capable of major interference with the free international travel of an elected head of state.
Morality, no, it doesn't lose its meaning. Legal rights are another question. As many Europeans, and others around the world, are so fond of reminding Americans - the reach of American law does not extend beyond its borders. But that is a two way street. The power to label action as criminal and prosecute may end at the border (to varying degrees*), but so does the power to protect, and the legal protections of the US Constitution.
*Some international law is considered to have in essence universal jurisdiction.
One of the most horrific things that the Bush Administration did post 9/11 was declare that, in effect, you cease to be an American Citizen once you leave the confines of the USA. That is, many of your rights and privileges no longer apply. Never before in the history of the USA do I know of a case like that. Even in the far more primitive days of the Roman Empire such things were not held to be true.
Of course, a lot of the alleged rights and privileges of American Citizens within the USA got lost as well, but not as explicit policy.
But whether or not literally American law extends beyond the borders of the USA, there is no doubt that effectively it does so. You can see that in the influence that the USA has had on shaping foreign copyright laws, as a prime example.
Agreed, even if it wasn't full of ads, printing a paper magazine to discuss multimedia machines that could better display the content is insane.
Paper computer magazines haven't made any sense for quite a while now.
Well, when Linux Journal went paperless, I dropped my subscription. I own an eReader and there's a lot of stuff I'd rather read that way, but technical magazines are an exception.
PCWeek's website has always been pretty useless to me, however. I haven't actually laid hands on the print edition for a long while, but it used to be a lot better compared to its online edition.
I would say true mainframes don't really exist anymore because there is no drive to design a computer that way anymore. The modern mainframe is really just a high performance server and exists from an infatuation with the term mainframe.
I would say rather that high-performance servers are functional equivalent to mainframes. But these days I use the term "mainframe" to refer to IBM iSeries and zSeries machines. All of the other old-line "mainframe" vendors are now either in the PC/server business or extinct, as far as I know.
The main thing that keeps these products distinct is that they carry forward the architecture and software from the days when mainframes really were systems whose capabilities were in a class by themselves.
Have you ever actually laid eyes on a mainframe? You seem to be confusing them with low-budget HPC clusters. IBM is the largest mainframe vendor and I can assure you that they are not "a bunch of PC servers with Infiniband."
They use processors unique to mainframes; they don't even use IBM's POWER CPUs. They certainly don't use "PC" processors. The internal I/O architecture is also unique to the box. (This is why they were, for many, many, years, the king of transaction processing; they had some unique advantages over the PC/UNIX way of doing I/O.) Externally, they can talk several different protocols; communication to the "outside world" is mostly TCP/IP, and communication to peripherals is done via FICON (mainframe I/O over Fibre Channel), although Linux partitions can use FCP. (SCSI over Fibre Channel.)
I don't think the boxes can talk infiniband at all. Why would they? That's mainly an HPC protocol, and you'd be a complete blithering idiot to be running HPC applications on a really-expensive business-oriented transaction-processing monster.
Back around Y2K, our primary mainframe ran 4 600MHz processors. The PC norm at that time was about 1 GHz, although it's not an apples-to-apples speed comparison. I don't know what chips they were using by that time, although IBM has been known to customise both POWER and Motorola MC68K CPU dies. Since IBM preferred microcode-based systems, the actual physical CPU circuitry wasn't a direct reflection on the higher level instruction set. Back in the 1980s they had a "desktop" mainframe that was based on one stock MC68000 and one MC68000 with a custom S/370 mask. The Motorola MC68K had a lot of architectural similarities to the S/370 instruction set. Sadly, the machine never caught on.
The single biggest asset that the S/360 and its descendants had were their channel controllers. They were essentially independent RISC CPUs that had DMA capabilities. On some machines, they were simply microcode routines, but on the more advanced ones, they were independent co-processors. These days we are used to intelligent peripheral interfaces and high-performance DMA, but back then, it was pretty radical. Additionally, the heavy lifting on peripherals was done by the peripheral control units, which not only disburdened the primary CPU from low-level I/O tasks, it also made the OS I/O code more portable and the drivers much simpler.
In short, you could make a mainframe entirely from off-the shelf hardware. Especially now that a lot of the peripheral devices are using interfaces that are PC-interchangeable. Moreso when you consider than an actual zSeries emulator is available as open-source software (Project Hercules).
The primary distinction, however, is cultural. IBM never told its mainframe clients to "try powering it off and back on again" as a routine means of resolving problems. Mainframes and mainframe OS's are expected to be robust. And re-booted (IPL'ed) no more often than once a week for maintenance, if that often.
The Mainframe isn't dead, however it isn't as widely used as it once was. They are still new Mainframes being made, and any true Computer Scientist would drool to get their hands on one.
Probably not, actually. A mainframe is a business machine. What most Computer Scientists would probably salivate over is a supercomputer. And these days, supercomputers are generally assembled from PC components.
Not that mainframes don't still have utility. But their primary audience is companies large enough (and old enough) to have significantly bought into IBM's technological stack.
As a % of income, rich people pay maybe 1% sales tax, while poor people pay 5-10% sales tax or more.
% of income is a worthless metric. If your income is 95% spent on subsistence, even a 2% tax is onerous. If your income is spent 5% on subsistence and 95% on savings and non-essential expenses, even a 20% tax may not be onerous (except emotionally).
I hope no one needs help in figuring out which of the above are rich and which are poor.
It's "fascinating" that St Pete schools make the top 5 twice. No team from England, France, Germany, or India? Hmmm...
University of Central Florida ranked 48, that's gotta hurt anyone outside of China, the former USSR, and whatever other teams didn't just say "hey I know some C, WTF!"
I did a double-take, since "St Pete" to me, means Tampa Bay, and these institutions are both in the OTHER (Russian) "St Pete", it appears.
I had a short, if enjoyable time at UCF and attended one of their ACM contest planning meetings back when they were serious contenders. They approached it with all the determination of the Invasion of Normandy.
I don't have much use for programming contests, myself, since practical programming isn't something that easily adapts to such short time frames, but it's still pretty sad that there are no US top 10 contenders.
Not too long ago The Economist noted the lack of new graduates in India to take up the development jobs the outsourcing companies had on offer. Comments from an individual outsourcer seemed to support that...
I'd take this one with a mine of salt, and speculate that by "developer" they mean "someone who wants to be a developer", without consideration of whether they have experience or training.
--dave
It doesn't help much to have a population of 1 billion people if 90% of them are subsistence farmers with caste and class that make it difficult or even impossible to even get into college.
It's probably not quite that bad, and upward mobility in India has, I think, improved a lot these days - in part, no doubt to the fact that a lot of people have expanded into computer technology.
Nevertheless, comparing raw population figures or projected population growth between the US and India is not something I'd recommend doing.
Might actually be an improvement for Orlando, depending on how far inland the water goes. Always preferred Tampa/St. Petersburg for a visit because you get beaches to go with the weather.
Look at many maps of Florida and you'll notice that once you get south of Orlando (or east, for the most part), there are cross-hatch markings on the map. The biggest one will be marked "Everglades".
The actual line between land and sea on the southern coast is as much hypothetical as it is real, since it's mostly just a matter of mangrove swamps on the boundary between the fresh waters of the Everglades flowing into the Florida Bay. Lower the sea level 2 feet and the amount of land in the Keys would probably double. Raise it 2 feet and they'd virtually disappear.
I think it has been said that if you raise the sea level 30 feet, Kissimmee becomes oceanfront property. Looking south.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt they would be killing them off if they were profitable. I do a lot of work in the virtualization and VDI space (not all of it by choice, mind you) and I have never run into anyone even asking about Oracle in those regards. AFAIK the only thing that could be considered really successful is Virtual Box and it's sticking around, thank [omnipotent bearded deity #4].
The problem here is that profitable is NOT always the same as important, useful, or any number of other virtues essential to technological progress.
Sun provided a lot of important products - Java being one of their most prominent examples. But profitable, it wasn't.
A lot of things that make you profitable actually make you less useful. Stuff like arbitrary tricks to ensure vendor lock-in, expensive products that winnow out potential contributors because they cannot afford the buy-in, developing a protective and antagonistic attitude that mean that only those with a compelling need or external pressure will even want to attempt to become part of the process.
Look at the various platform developer packages over the years for an example. The free-to-cheap stuff tends to coincide with successful platforms. Only rarely do expensive development systems result in a large and thriving development community.
How about decades of programming in various environments with blatant differences in quality based on work ethic. FYI there's a fuckton of information and research on this.
Brilliant!.
Your statement fits the bill perfectly: random off the top of your head examples cherry picked at random from unverifiable sources.
Well played sir! Well played.
And posting as AC to boot. Bonus points for style!
Well, if you want specific examples, one of the items I was specifically thinking of the time was the IBM VSAM program logic manual circa 198x. Or do you have to have the actual IBM SCXX publication order code before you'll be satisfied? Prime Computer did some very entertaining documentation as well - being based in Massachusetts, they liked to spike their docs with references to HP Lovecraft's New England and Miskatonic University. The Commodore Amiga group had a lot of run as well. I have an A1000 computer with the paw imprint of Jay Miner's dog embossed on the inside of the lid.
On the flip side, SCO (before they changed owners and starting suing Linux) was so grim I turned and walked away from it. Intuit is no fun at all. Oracle and HP have abominable search engines, but your call is VERY important to them. And I have to be paid pretty well to sit and feel my life leaching away waiting for them to serve all their other customers because the documentation was written in Mordor and is neither entertaining nor informative.
There are a number of horribly expensive and unfunny program products I've dealt with and discarded over the years. I purposely refrain from recalling their names because I don't want to summon the other unpleasant memories that would rise like bile along with their names.
As to who has the better work ethic, I don't give a damn. All I care about is what they do to my work experience. And my experience has been that the more the developers enjoyed their jobs, the more enjoyable - and productive - my job becomes.
Shush. You know what I mean. (Though I have watched some of old-actually-season-1. I thought it was extremely dull. I haven't gotten around to watching any of the *later* old-DW, though.)
Of all the Doctors, it embarrasses me to admit I like the original one the least. He was a lying, pompous cowardly old weasel, or such was his affectation, anyway. Then again, he'd apparently spent several hundred years wearing out what may have been his original body and that's enough to make anyone's joints ache.
The first season of any TV show tends to be a bit rough, though. It got better. Helps if you can enjoy budget special-effects.
Because it's funny?
And it really is. People have been cracking jokes for ages and it's nice to see it official. I like it when real projects are run by real people complete with sense of humour.
Actually, I get concerned when projects/products come from people without humor. Because my experience is that the more "serious" they are, the lower the quality of what they deliver.
Even stodgy old IBM's best products seemed to come accompanied by technical docs written with geek quotes in them.
As for a “lot of inequity” - we should not live in a winner takes all, class bound gilded society – that takes away the incentive for hard work.
The paradox of extremes. In a communistic society, there's no reason to work hard because your can get the same rewards without exertion. In what we simplistically call a "capitalistic" society there's no reason to work hard because the people who got there first will deny you the benefits anyway.
I use quotes around "capitalistic" because the term is routinely expanded to include aspects of business and philosophy that have nothing to do with how you raise and use capital.
I was surprised to read some of your comments. When I've dealt with database performance problems, it's often not an inefficient piece of SQL that's the cause but the back and forth of vast quantities of data between the database and the app layer that is the problem. Only a change to the law of physics is going to fix that, or doing the processing in the right place. All modern databases are a lot more than simple data stores, they are also data processing engines.
A lot of if depends on what type of application you are dealing with. When the applications are web applications, there's a limit to how much heavy computation you want done anywhere, since the response should be as close to real-time as possible. As a corollary to that, in most cases, there should be a 1-1 correspondence between displayed records and retrieved records. This may require advance (batch) computation to be done and/or de-normalization of the database, or even use of a non-SQL datastore.
For offline batch processes, the rules change. However, just because something can be done more efficiently when confined to the DB server doesn't always make it more cost-effective. Competent PL/SQL people are in short supply (especially when the DBA lays down the law and refuses to double up as an applications programmer), whereas it's fairly easy to find people trained in C#, Java, Python or even COBOL. As a result, overall operational cost and system reliability often favors shovelling records back and forth across the LAN despite its less optimal use of the database machine (and LAN) itself. In fact, I worked in one shop where people who were over-eager to develop stored procedures were slapped down.
There's no one correct answer for everything. There are, however answers that occasion cause for regret. Back circa Y2K, a lot of local shops bought into Java EJBS where Session EJBs invoked stored procedures for the dirty work. The original EJB architecture had its drawbacks independent of the database component, but those shops have abandoned that approach for reasons unrelated to the warts in EJBs.
Well, there's also the other side. The spying gives you valuable information, that any good psychopath^Wbusiness man can use, to raise his profits.
"American" enough for you?
There are certain counter-intuitive practices that the USA was once known for holding as ideals. We didn't bribe or take bribes. We didn't torture or keep secret prisons. We didn't spy on our own people, interfere with their free travel, or otherwise indulge in the oppressive practices of countries we condemned.
We were never as good at holding these ideals as we deluded ourselves, but we did manage to put up a good front.
In the movies, the villains sneer at the good guys for being soft and impractical, and in the end, they lose. Movies are a bad model for real life, but it is true that if you demolish a reputation for square dealing just to be "practical", that there can be practical costs. And that a reputation once lost can be very hard to rebuild.
So the Nobel Peace Prize = "I HATE AMERICA" Prize.
Not really. It's meant to be a prize for making the world more peaceful. Giving it to Obama was nuts, and it's now not clear if this prize has any point any more.
No. Giving it to Obama was controversial. Giving it to Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, and not giving it to Gandhi, now that was, is and will ever be nuts. Another nuts (read stupid) decision? Giving it to Al Gore while completely ignoring Holocaust savior and survivor Irena Sendler who saved 2,500 Jewish children during WII (acts for which she was detained, tortured, sentenced to death but miraculously survived.)
The Nobel Peace price not about peace. It's about political posturing.
Some of us maintained that Obama got the Nobel Prize for "not being Bush". Unfortunately, it turned out that Obama is Bush. Right down to the funny ears.
Sendler didn't actually do anything that specifically promoted the cause of world peace, although certainly she deserved some equally prestigious award.
Gandhi's eligibility is stronger, but his major claim to fame has to do with peacefully liberating his own country, not so much the world. On the other hand, I have no problem seeing Nelson Mandela with a Nobel. For whatever else he did in his life, he managed to forge a peaceful post-apartheid South Africa when virtually everyone expected a bloodbath. And while that, too was mostly intra-national, I'm sure his neighbour countries appreciated it. To say nothing of the example he set.
Arafat, on the other hand, was involved in peace, but still surreptitiously dabbled in war. Weasel. Better than nothing, I suppose.
In the end, all we really demonstrate is that popularity and "sending messages" count for more than actual accomplishment, even at the rarefied level of the Nobel Prizes, whether Peace or other.
Stored procedures can be very efficient sometimes, but often, they just add additional load to the DBMS server that could have been distributed among application servers...
This, however, is mostly nonsense. It's true that stored procedures may add load to the DBMS, however it's equally true they may significantly reduce the overhead. What's more efficient - transferring 1M rows to an application server and handle it there (often submitting the result back to the DBMS as a parameter for the next query), or just process it locally within a stored procedure? Not to mention that the "application servers" usually manipulate the data using languages that are very poor match for such operations (which is basically everything except for SQL).
The first line of defense against loading the DBMS server is to start with intelligent queries and organization. Logic should avoid chewing through millions of rows in a programmed manner no matter which machine the chewing is done on. The DBMS is optimized for information retrieval and updating, and stored procedures can potentially interfere with that optimization. So rule 1 is to reduce what gets acted on. If you do that, the relative overhead of pushing it out to client machines is less of an issue and even the fact that the client machines are probably going to be less powerful won't matter as much, because there will typically be more of them to share the computing load. Because they're also likely to be less expensive machines, the next cost per computation is often lower as well if the DB server's CPUs are being efficiently used.
If you had poor development practice (and the fact that you are saying that "stored procedure code is also not as likely to be version-controlled" strongly suggests this), then sure - it might be nightmare. But it's not a fault of stored procedures but purely your fault.
I'm not going to accept fault on that, because I don't do stored procedures except in cases of compelling need. But whereas applications in C# and Java are typically managed by an IDE and bound to a Version Control System, every database system I've had to clean up after basically had someone editing the procedure in the equivalent of Windows Notepad and jamming the code straight into the database with no local project management at all. A few DBMS's have the ability to retrieve earlier generations of database objects, but it's the exception rather than the rule.
In short, I'm making my recommendations based on what I commonly come in and find has been going on, not on what would be the case in an ideal world.
PostreSQL's ancestry is more related to the (probably defunct now) commercial Ingres database manager.
At one time I'd heard rumors that all 3 had common roots, but (officially, at least), Oracle claims to be totally self-designed.
Ingres took a vertical turn several years back, being bundled with various financial applications. Although it's rarely heard of these days, their website has been updated fairly recently.
I wroked in a place with about 5,000 lines of PL-SQL. That was a nightmare.
OTOH, Oracle need not fear people using pirate copies: there are so many bugs that without being signed up for an expensive support program, your system will never fly.
PostgreSQL is about the closest open-source equivalent to Oracle. Reputedly, they both come from the same parent. At any rate, converting PL-SQL to its PostgreSQL equivalent is no walk in the park, but is a lot easier than a lot of other conversions.
Regardless, if you discover your developers have been indulging in extensive use of stored procedures, you should immediately escort them out the door. I'm speaking from bitter experience.
Stored procedures can be very efficient sometimes, but often, they just add additional load to the DBMS server that could have been distributed among application servers. Stored procedure code is also not as likely to be version-controlled and restoring code backups means a database restore. Also, splitting logic between the application server and database server can result in even the most trivial mods requiring a time (money) consuming "treasure hunt" to locate where the affected code is and careful co-ordination of the mods between the two serves.
Last, but hardly least is the fact if you do want to switch out DBMS products, it's going to be very, very expensive, since not only the aforementioned PL-SQL would have to be rewritten, but the applications would likely be seriously traumatized as well.
My only advice is to remember that, when it comes to operating a business, IT workers are helpful but it is the managers^W CEOs who do the grunt work and take the real risks.
FTFY
NULL Is one of the most abused characteristics of just about any RDBMS.
I always caution people that NULL is the data equivalent of NaN. Use it ONLY when you have no actual data to put there and want to know that there's no data there. If it's really blank, put blank.
One of the most horrific things that the Bush Administration did post 9/11 was declare that, in effect, you cease to be an American Citizen once you leave the confines of the USA.
If you would, please expand on that. I don't think that is correct, at least not at face value.
If I had nothing better to do with my time, I'd dig out exact details. Most of the readily-available discussion of this is found on left-leaning websites, and I don't like using biased sources. However, recent attempts to expand that declaration by the Obama administration make references to the original declaration which can be pursued by anyone who's interested.
Here are 2 of the more objective items I dredged up.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42337.pdf
Salon, of course, is more sensationalist, but here's their take on it: http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detention_bill/
But whether or not literally American law extends beyond the borders of the USA, there is no doubt that effectively it does so. You can see that in the influence that the USA has had on shaping foreign copyright laws, as a prime example.
Countries negotiate all sorts of treaties, defense, trade, human rights. I don't think there is much special about that.
In the case of making the world's copyright laws an extension of the constitution of the Kingdom of Disney, a lot of people have noted that Don Corleone could learn a thing or two about negotiation from the USA.
Then, of course, there's the matter that apparently a mere hint from certain quarters was capable of major interference with the free international travel of an elected head of state.
Morality, no, it doesn't lose its meaning. Legal rights are another question. As many Europeans, and others around the world, are so fond of reminding Americans - the reach of American law does not extend beyond its borders. But that is a two way street. The power to label action as criminal and prosecute may end at the border (to varying degrees*), but so does the power to protect, and the legal protections of the US Constitution.
*Some international law is considered to have in essence universal jurisdiction.
One of the most horrific things that the Bush Administration did post 9/11 was declare that, in effect, you cease to be an American Citizen once you leave the confines of the USA. That is, many of your rights and privileges no longer apply. Never before in the history of the USA do I know of a case like that. Even in the far more primitive days of the Roman Empire such things were not held to be true.
Of course, a lot of the alleged rights and privileges of American Citizens within the USA got lost as well, but not as explicit policy.
But whether or not literally American law extends beyond the borders of the USA, there is no doubt that effectively it does so. You can see that in the influence that the USA has had on shaping foreign copyright laws, as a prime example.
Everyone's a foreigner to somewhere, right?
We prefer the term "potential enemy combatant".
Agreed, even if it wasn't full of ads, printing a paper magazine to discuss multimedia machines that could better display the content is insane.
Paper computer magazines haven't made any sense for quite a while now.
Well, when Linux Journal went paperless, I dropped my subscription. I own an eReader and there's a lot of stuff I'd rather read that way, but technical magazines are an exception.
PCWeek's website has always been pretty useless to me, however. I haven't actually laid hands on the print edition for a long while, but it used to be a lot better compared to its online edition.
I would say true mainframes don't really exist anymore because there is no drive to design a computer that way anymore. The modern mainframe is really just a high performance server and exists from an infatuation with the term mainframe.
I would say rather that high-performance servers are functional equivalent to mainframes. But these days I use the term "mainframe" to refer to IBM iSeries and zSeries machines. All of the other old-line "mainframe" vendors are now either in the PC/server business or extinct, as far as I know.
The main thing that keeps these products distinct is that they carry forward the architecture and software from the days when mainframes really were systems whose capabilities were in a class by themselves.
Have you ever actually laid eyes on a mainframe? You seem to be confusing them with low-budget HPC clusters. IBM is the largest mainframe vendor and I can assure you that they are not "a bunch of PC servers with Infiniband."
They use processors unique to mainframes; they don't even use IBM's POWER CPUs. They certainly don't use "PC" processors.
The internal I/O architecture is also unique to the box. (This is why they were, for many, many, years, the king of transaction processing; they had some unique advantages over the PC/UNIX way of doing I/O.)
Externally, they can talk several different protocols; communication to the "outside world" is mostly TCP/IP, and communication to peripherals is done via FICON (mainframe I/O over Fibre Channel), although Linux partitions can use FCP. (SCSI over Fibre Channel.)
I don't think the boxes can talk infiniband at all. Why would they? That's mainly an HPC protocol, and you'd be a complete blithering idiot to be running HPC applications on a really-expensive business-oriented transaction-processing monster.
Back around Y2K, our primary mainframe ran 4 600MHz processors. The PC norm at that time was about 1 GHz, although it's not an apples-to-apples speed comparison. I don't know what chips they were using by that time, although IBM has been known to customise both POWER and Motorola MC68K CPU dies. Since IBM preferred microcode-based systems, the actual physical CPU circuitry wasn't a direct reflection on the higher level instruction set. Back in the 1980s they had a "desktop" mainframe that was based on one stock MC68000 and one MC68000 with a custom S/370 mask. The Motorola MC68K had a lot of architectural similarities to the S/370 instruction set. Sadly, the machine never caught on.
The single biggest asset that the S/360 and its descendants had were their channel controllers. They were essentially independent RISC CPUs that had DMA capabilities. On some machines, they were simply microcode routines, but on the more advanced ones, they were independent co-processors. These days we are used to intelligent peripheral interfaces and high-performance DMA, but back then, it was pretty radical. Additionally, the heavy lifting on peripherals was done by the peripheral control units, which not only disburdened the primary CPU from low-level I/O tasks, it also made the OS I/O code more portable and the drivers much simpler.
In short, you could make a mainframe entirely from off-the shelf hardware. Especially now that a lot of the peripheral devices are using interfaces that are PC-interchangeable. Moreso when you consider than an actual zSeries emulator is available as open-source software (Project Hercules).
The primary distinction, however, is cultural. IBM never told its mainframe clients to "try powering it off and back on again" as a routine means of resolving problems. Mainframes and mainframe OS's are expected to be robust. And re-booted (IPL'ed) no more often than once a week for maintenance, if that often.
The Mainframe isn't dead, however it isn't as widely used as it once was. They are still new Mainframes being made, and any true Computer Scientist would drool to get their hands on one.
Probably not, actually. A mainframe is a business machine. What most Computer Scientists would probably salivate over is a supercomputer. And these days, supercomputers are generally assembled from PC components.
Not that mainframes don't still have utility. But their primary audience is companies large enough (and old enough) to have significantly bought into IBM's technological stack.
As a % of income, rich people pay maybe 1% sales tax, while poor people pay 5-10% sales tax or more.
% of income is a worthless metric. If your income is 95% spent on subsistence, even a 2% tax is onerous. If your income is spent 5% on subsistence and 95% on savings and non-essential expenses, even a 20% tax may not be onerous (except emotionally).
I hope no one needs help in figuring out which of the above are rich and which are poor.
It's "fascinating" that St Pete schools make the top 5 twice. No team from England, France, Germany, or India? Hmmm...
University of Central Florida ranked 48, that's gotta hurt anyone outside of China, the former USSR, and whatever other teams didn't just say "hey I know some C, WTF!"
I did a double-take, since "St Pete" to me, means Tampa Bay, and these institutions are both in the OTHER (Russian) "St Pete", it appears.
I had a short, if enjoyable time at UCF and attended one of their ACM contest planning meetings back when they were serious contenders. They approached it with all the determination of the Invasion of Normandy.
I don't have much use for programming contests, myself, since practical programming isn't something that easily adapts to such short time frames, but it's still pretty sad that there are no US top 10 contenders.
...his new features need to be done "yesterday"
If you explained the flow of time to him, you would be accused of not being a team player.
Well, after all, "All You Have To Do Is..."
Not too long ago The Economist noted the lack of new graduates in India to take up the development jobs the outsourcing companies had on offer. Comments from an individual outsourcer seemed to support that...
I'd take this one with a mine of salt, and speculate that by "developer" they mean "someone who wants to be a developer", without consideration of whether they have experience or training.
--dave
It doesn't help much to have a population of 1 billion people if 90% of them are subsistence farmers with caste and class that make it difficult or even impossible to even get into college.
It's probably not quite that bad, and upward mobility in India has, I think, improved a lot these days - in part, no doubt to the fact that a lot of people have expanded into computer technology.
Nevertheless, comparing raw population figures or projected population growth between the US and India is not something I'd recommend doing.
Might actually be an improvement for Orlando, depending on how far inland the water goes. Always preferred Tampa/St. Petersburg for a visit because you get beaches to go with the weather.
Look at many maps of Florida and you'll notice that once you get south of Orlando (or east, for the most part), there are cross-hatch markings on the map. The biggest one will be marked "Everglades".
The actual line between land and sea on the southern coast is as much hypothetical as it is real, since it's mostly just a matter of mangrove swamps on the boundary between the fresh waters of the Everglades flowing into the Florida Bay. Lower the sea level 2 feet and the amount of land in the Keys would probably double. Raise it 2 feet and they'd virtually disappear.
I think it has been said that if you raise the sea level 30 feet, Kissimmee becomes oceanfront property. Looking south.