... then we suddenly become friends, try to get Pakistan and India to stop fighting, and just help us find pesky little suspects in a certain bombing.
Ever notice how quickly Musharraf went from being a naughty man to being a leader who needed our support against his own population, when they disagree with him? It'd be like suddenly backing Iran's leaders just because we want something from them.
Oh, wait, we supported the Taliban? Hmmm. Weird.
So yes. Once a country gets nukes, it gets admitted into the super-non-secret-circle-of-friends-with-nukes. MAD indeed. We want to keep some nations from getting nukes precisely because they know that having them will suddenly gain them this undeserved (but necessary?) respect. N. Korea wasn't liked. If it were to get nukes, we'd suddenly be expected to deal with it as an equal. That hurts our ego.
We were with Eryxma for a while, using their virtual-private-server solution. It was nice for a while, though we didn't particularly care for the redhat installation (we're more slackware-oriented.) The speed varied sometimes drastically on their end; we got blacklisted at least once because someone at some time had been a big-time spammer somewhere on our IP block; and eventually the service was discontinued and we were put out in the cold because they simply couldn't deal with the amount of abuse on their VPS servers: hackers would grab a machine for a month to use it to DDOS, etc. (cheap, trouble-free way to have another ssh-able machine for nefarious... things.) We were rather disappointed.
Don't be fooled: a VPS server is still a shared resource, and you'll still feel like you're living with noisy roommates who want to party all night.
Your mileage will hopefully vary (on the positive side,) but we're now much happier having our little box on a shelf at our ISP. The guy's nice, and the cost of having shelf space is actually less than what we were paying for a slice of a server off in another state.
I can go kick the thing when I'm mad at it. Good feeling.
I'd like to thank them for the name change... it should make life at home and at work a little easier. My girlfriend uses the Firebird Browser as well as the Firebird RDBMS -- in fact, most of us do. (We use Firebird both for our common employment and for our non-employment projects)... makes life interesting to hear "firebird crashed!" coming from anyone in the room.
(Seems most slashdotters are more likely to have used the browser than the database system, and haven't been particularly sympathetic to those of us who use both, and get confused on a daily basis. If you haven't tried the database, and you have a use for one, please do! I'd say it's similar to Postgres functionality-wise, and quite robust. I've not had a crash yet, my users are happy.)
They're both great projects, and I'll be glad to have this out of the way. It's unfortunate there were hurt feelings and a fair amount of bitterness involved. They're also both young projects looking to be recognized -- let's give 'em room to grow, and maybe help out?
Tried Firebird at all? Feature set is pretty much like Postgres (minor variations in emphasis,) easy to install (both under windows and linux, particularly with the RPM, even under slackware) and it handles our load beautifully.
I've got a few C++ programmers, writing a rather fat client (400 distinct screens, hundred or so reports beyond that) using Firebird on the server. Handles our forty or so users just fine, and unlike some other database servers (MySQL), it keeps our data safe.
Also, as it is relevant to this story, Firebird has an embedded version. Same capabilities as the full server (SQL and all,) except that it's in a DLL you bundle with your application, a sort of single-user mode that doesn't require a service running in the background. That's a big advantage. You don't have to change any code for your app to run on the single-user version (but if you start there without planning for multi-user access, you might be in trouble scaling up!)
Oh, and using Firebird doesn't require you to make your app open-source or free, ever. Even using the embedded server, shipping pretty much all of Firebird with your app, it's still free to use.
It's based on Borland's Interbase, the fork occured at Interbase 6-open-source, and has been moving forward steadily. We're all waiting for Firebird 1.5 final (it's in late-stage release candidates, but they're very careful with it) for improved performance and features. But I've been using 1.0 in production environment for what feels like forever, and it's quite stable itself, and quite powerful. Check it out!
-If- there are three more movies made, -and- they need someone to play Chewie, -then- he'll be the one to do it if still around, and he can't refuse. This in no way stipulates that they -must- make three movies, or even that they -will-... only that he would be required to play Chewie if they ever again need someone to do so.
It's a great way to give both actors and the audience some hope for more movies, and it lets them worry a little less about the 'how' of making more movies by already having actors lined up and contracts signed. Sheesh. Can't you boys be a little more skeptical?
i wouldn't say we have a problem with nuclear so much as a problem with non-military nuclear. and i have a feeling it's because we're the only ones who've actually used nukes against anybody -- we've got this stigma, this association between 'nuclear' and 'bomb'. can't be used for anything else now. coal (etc.) industries are more than happy to play off that fear, but i think the public fear came first. it can't have helped that we liked to scare ourselves with nuclear mutant monster movies...
on the other side of the pond, you'll find countries like france who have quite the nuclear arsenal as well (as i recall, france has more of a nuclear arsenal than china, and is third or fourth in the world?) but also get the vast majority (74% or so? that was in my high-school days) of their power from nuclear plants. and they're not worried about it. it was also france that had, what was it called... super-phoenix? to burn the waste from normal nuclear plants to produce extra power from it, along with a different kind of waste, i believe. i do remember the local villagers didn't care for that project too much (what with shipping nuclear waste into the town on a regular basis!) in any case, they don't really mind nuclear power, though they would (from what i can tell) slightly prefer hydro-electric power.
germany, on the other hand, is heading to dismantle and sell its nuclear reactors in favor of... something else. so long as they don't go back to coal, eh, whatever. seems to me the north shores of germany would be an excellent place for hydro-electric power.
it is very much a problem of perception. just don't use the words 'radiation', 'emission', 'atomic', 'split', 'neutron', 'proton', 'electron', 'blast', 'coil',... in the new name. wait, are we afraid of anything technical-sounding? "super-efficient steam engine" maybe?
that's unfortunate... my lego collection gets the bedroom closet, and my girlfriend's gets the bedroom, in front of the dresser. (only in front of her drawers, of course.)
but then saturday she decided she wanted to do sculptures... so it all got moved into the living room, with furniture blocking the front door and whatnot. now one side of the living room has a 3/4 finished space-minifig-sculpture (as it's her first sculpture, we're going for 8x size) and on the other side, my 1/3 completed technic-scale p-38... and no, the flaps don't work yet. come on out of the closet, there's more room out in the open.
and my cat loves to pounce large piles of lego.
birthdays, christmas, half-birthdays... all good occasions to buy at least little sets for the girlfriend. and what with her interest in sculptures, this "return to the basics" will just make it easier.
Oh, look. Sorry, the right to make a backup of software is actually spelled out separately from fair use, which, I'll agree, is rather vague (though we do have case law to work on.)
In the end, all laws and infringements thereof are tested in court. Murder may be illegal, but you still go through a trial to determine if what happened fell under the existing laws -- what's your point? That you should fear to step out your door because something you say or do might later (in court) be determined to be illegal under some law you didn't understand?
Again, the right to make a backup of your software is explicitly given to you in our laws.
Regardless of the availability of lawyers who, like masters of other professions, should know best, you're still responsible for knowing the laws of the land yourself and taking responsibility or consequences (on either side) for the infringement of laws. Your lawyer can't replace you, and his knowledge can't replace yours. It's everyone's duty to know 'diddly.' (If, in fact, 'knowing diddly' is the opposite of 'not knowing diddly.')
You have a right, protected by Congress, to make copies of this sort. It's called 'fair use', and it covers all sorts of stuff. You've purchased the right to use copyrighted material, and you have the right to protect your investment by making a copy.
People who ask to make use of their rights are never in the wrong. Companies that provide products to make it easier for people to make use of their rights are also not in the wrong. This software is legal, its use as advertised is legal, and the people buying it have every right to make use of it for its stated purpose.
You've set up a straw-man argument, implying that the majority of people here believe "you have unlimited rights to do as you wish with purchased copyrighted material" -- you'll find that's not true. If anything, the people here most likely have a better understanding of copyright law than the common public. Why? Because most of them deal with intellectual property day-in and day-out. It's simply not fair to bundle "Free Software advocates" and "hackers" (in the sense you seem to be implying) together.
As to government intervention: government intervention is what gave us copyright law, 'fair use', and the DMCA. Maybe someone can find the details for us, but I'm fairly sure our government has also ruled that there is a conflict between the DMCA and 'fair use' when it comes to DVD's in particular -- and as I recall, it was decided that 'fair use' wins. I really hope someone digs that up for us, I'm heading to bed.
In the end, that's your stuff they're selling to you, or at least your grandchildren's, our society's. Intellectual property, once published, is destined to become ours, collectively. You have every right to archive it as you see fit (protected by 'fair use') considering we can't trust those who produce this stuff to make sure we get what's ours. Extreme? That's the price they pay for copyrights, the price they agree to when they get in the business of producing stuff, whether it be games, music, images, text, video (etc.) or a combination thereof.
... but I cannot convince myself that time has already occured for an infinite amount of time.
I seem to remember there being a concept in physics dealing with the idea that things happening in reverse make a good deal of sense... (Newton's second law, Maxwell equations both being time-invariant)... we could watch the universe in reverse, and feel that it's not all that strange. if you were watching the universe in reverse, not already knowing what was going to happen watching it (that is, no memory of your past) would it be strange to think of it as going on forever?
if the universe is seen as fairly deterministic, then what we experience at any point in time is really just f(t), where f() may be defined over an infinite amount of time. you're accustomed to thinking of f() as a sequence, where the next step depends on the previous (without knowing if there is such a thing as a minimal amount of time, a step value, between states of the universe)... but if you see it simply as a continuous function then perhaps you can see how the universe makes just as much sense infinite amounts of time in the past as it does infinite amounts of time in the future.
but that's just a random guess, based on assumptions and bad memories. move along.
"What the fuck does that mean" was a reference to 'Office Space' (movie,) I'm pretty sure. Printer in question subsequently gets beaten to a messy metallic pulp in an empty field by angry programmers... but thanks anyway. +1 Insightful to you.
... or we could even put on our tinfoil hats and wonder if the government would prefer -not- to ban smoking, or even do too much to prevent it. if something's bad, we usually either ban it or leave it alone (protecting it as freedom of something or other, or, for once, staying out of people's homes)... but instead we tax it up to that "magic level" where it doesn't discourage people too much, and brings in a nice revenue. ethics and consistency be damned.
would you care to give us more examples? i've personally thought that the determination of the authorship of texts was based on things like "whoever wrote this writes like whoever wrote that, and we're fairly sure who wrote one of them, but not the other" and so forth. that's more of an analysis of style and similarity of content...
if you mean something more along the lines of "was this reporter of events being accurate," in historical terms (religious or not) then yes, that probably happens. should we trust -that- analysis? perhaps not.
historical accuracy is interesting in that, unlike something like a report about the performance of a newly created piece of equipment, we don't have (exactly) the opportunity to run our own tests. archeology, maybe... but we aren't actually there, and we can't (usually) recreate the events to experience them again. the same applies to murder investigations, etc.
the whole point of determining authorship was to attempt to get authority -- agreeing that a text was written by someone "in the know" we could trust. but we don't usually (in the case of biblical texts) know much about the authors other than what's in the text itself, in one way or another, or by tradition (which is highly speculative.)
with this stuff, it seems to come down to: if you already admit the truth of the text, then it is self-supportive (stand-alone.) if you don't, you may not ever be convinced that it can (actually or theoretically) support itself.
specifically because you'll now trust their future results?
"wow, last year, they had to admit their product just wasn't up to the task. but now, dang, look at 'em go!"
yes, it's quite human indeed. you don't know what all they're up to -- what seems to be self-defeating isn't always. and sometimes, well, you honestly find out that you're doing the job you had hoped you were doing, trouncing the competition. go figure: you might actually manage to not suck! but you don't get to tell anyone? and your only solution is to pay someone else to announce it? oh, wait, that's not allowed either!
any publicity is good publicity. if you can't get good publicity by announcing your product is good, just say it isn't. close enough. it's not like anyone pays attention anyway.
yeah, but see, we're right about linux and c++. and islam. or... somesuch.
as a c++ programmer, i've found that talking about java is always about a dozen issues at once, regardless of how much you know about the language (and history, etc.) it's not just about the language itself, it's about standards, supporting libraries, performance, interaction with the OS, etc. eventually, you always have to throw in a few other languages for comparison (and to make a point) -- like talking about perl and the many available libraries... and how you can't find anything, but also aren't forced into a particular way of doing things. it's almost never fair, and besides -- we all want our languages for different reasons.
always about trade-offs. by the dozen. maybe we should select religions as if they were a toolset. that could be amusing.
The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive. If the test resulted showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it.
That may be human instinct, but let's be honest: it's not fair either. Either trust the source of information or don't, but don't trust the result of a test based on the result of the test -- circular dependency.
It's much simpler to simply say that this is a linux test by IBM, and may therefore be tainted. Did I mention that it's good to have truly independent testing centers, albeit expensive for them? This whole independent/free media thing is rather important... specifically because of this.
I forgot to mention, though likely nobody cares, that no stable version of Firebird-embedded has been released yet, as it's a branch of the current 1.5 series, which is currently at RC7 (last I checked.) It feels stable to me, but... watch for a slashdot headline about 1.5-stable being released. (Wait, the slashdot crowd would think a new mozilla browser had come out...)
Also to note is the recent (last week?) merger of Firebird and Yaffil, its russian (commercial-product-for-a-while) counterpart. Yaffil code improvements and features will be merged into Firebird as time permits, with obvious considerations of compatibility. I'm personally hoping that expression-based indexing will be one of the first things added, though the Yaffil also made significant progress in optimizing the engine for the things it already did.
The best part is -- new versions of the embedded branch would benefit from the same improvements.
I would welcome a Postgres equivalent. Competition can't hurt, now can it? Is Postgres all that much lighter/heavier weight than Firebird? I saw them more as just emphasizing different feature sets...
That's why I look forward to the completion of a few last (for this) features in Firebird (the database server) -- they have an 'embedded' version that sits in a.dll and acts exactly like the server version as far as the calling program is concerned. It's the same engine code, so the same SQL is supported, the same features available. It can still load UDF libraries (the same ones it loaded as a server) but won't accept connections from other programs. If you want several programs to access the same file at the same time, you'll have to do that yourself. It's already great for building single-user programs to be distributed to clients who wouldn't want a "full-blown" database server running (really, it is, but at least it's not listening to any ports.)
Firebird/Interbase has always been rather small -- 10 meg install, very little memory usage. The main problem porting it to PDA's and other embedded devices was its loopback / inter-process-communication systems. Its shared-memory method wasn't completed (though from what I hear, they have it working in development versions, and the new method speeds up the server quite a bit as well) and it relied on 127.0.0.1 loopback. Windows CE didn't allow for that (no ethernet interfaces at all by default, not even lo) and thus the server couldn't talk to itself. (It tends to use multiple processes.)
Regardless, Firebird will most likely be available for embedded devices soon, run quickly and quietly, and won't be a stripped-down version at all. Code written for large multi-user environments would still work, but you might have to wait a bit longer for your huge reports.
(And yes, I feel fine writing this without being too concerned about vaporware -- it's already proven technology, it's actively worked on, and the Microsoft thing isn't any closer.)
... which is why I find it funny that Microsoft has planned the 'secure pipeline' (or somesuch) to make sure that programs that output digital audio won't have their output captured by other software. beyond the audio-out port on the sound card, there's no security. you can just pipe that stuff right back into the audio-in port and record -- they're not going to disable that feature.
how's the quality? eh. maybe not perfect. unless your sound card has digital-out and digital-in... then it might be rather close to perfect.
so yes. if you, the user, can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or otherwise sense something, then we can most likely build a machine to do the same, and re-output that same sensation. no amount of DRM can prevent it. if nothing else, our brains record a (sometimes good, often not) copy of things. plays, movies... and I don't think they're planning on wiping our brains of "illegal copies of copyrighted content"...
sheesh. we wouldn't have created copyright laws if we thought there were any technological barrier that could effectively enforce the (rarity) value of this content. technology can't. so law tries to. simple.
i seem to remember that even non-open-source programs can still be run through a decompiler (albeit not necessarily legally, thanks to the shrink-wrap license.) and sheesh, some C people can read assembly code just as easily as if it -were- C. it's practically the same thing.
sure, it's not as easy or convenient. and modifying it to do what you like may be an pain. but... a program is a program (and never a true black box.) you can always find out what it's doing, eventually.
besides, have you never seen people obfuscate source code? they could make it -harder- for you to find a trojan in the source code than in the assembly.
the fact that you can get your hands on the binaries themselves is arguably a step above the voting software, in that it's much more obviously accessible. with voting software, you probably have to deal with the voting hardware, the government agency owning/renting it, etc.
(and yes, intel could have made their chips obfuscate the assembly. maybe. you've got ways around that. and yes, hardware is just software in another, less modifiable, state. and therefore hackable. therefore, given enough time, any voting machine can be examined thoroughly.)
so, all of that speculation about an attack -necessarily- also taking out the ftp server at the same time... what was up with that? 20mbps isn't enough to fill up a simple 100mbps local network. if the ds3 was their entire pipe, and the ftp server was in there too, you shouldn't have been able to get to the ftp server.
there's some pipe sizes i wouldn't mind having explained. nice diagram of how one side filled up and the other didn't? completely separate, and people are just dolts?
I don't mean to make this about definitions -- but I'd like to explain what I mean. It probably would have been safer for me to say that relational theory is about algebra, not arithmetics. However, the definition above is confusing: it cites mathematics, as a whole, as being about quantities and magnitudes. Database theory doesn't care about magnitudes: they are only one particular type of value that can be manipulated. Arithmetic (and by their definition, math as a whole) is about specific types of data being manipulated, algebra is mostly about operators, analysis, and general solutions that can often be applied regardless of the underlying datatype.
Relational algebra, therefore, is about more than just the data -- it's about the operators, the joins... Database theory could be taught without even mentioning integers, character strings, dates, etc. I think it's important for students to realize this, and this book in particular makes this very clear (as part of their complaint about implementations often not providing adequate interfaces for user-defined-types, or relying overly heavily on predefined types, especially the "standard" types defined by the SQL language specs.)
That book also presents a (new?) model for object inheritance, including multiple-inheritance. That's important for those people out there being taught object-orientedness in one class, then taught database theory, then thrown out into a world of vendors who claim the two can't be done together, or do they together sloppily.
The book summarizes most everything they've said before, and then adds some. I find that valuable. By now, they're getting a bit cranky about implementations not catching up to their expectations. That can put a lot of people off, but it also serves to burn into the mind of the reader how important theory really is. The book describes the evolution of database theory, its basics, and a complete algebra, with proofs. It is not, however, an example-driven book, like the one I had in college.
I think an example-driven book is much better for teaching database design and normalization. I think the two are fairly distinct ideas though. There's the tool, and there's applying it.
i was fairly sure i remembered that libraries were such that closed-source products could use GPL libraries, so long as they dynamically-linked to them. i'm sure someone will come along to quote us the GPL relevant to this section -- i don't care enough. i've got proprietary bugs to go swat. damn proprietary bugs.
In it, they re-iterate their ideas up until now, integrate other stuff, and show how database concepts are completely orthogonal to the object concepts often brought up: datatypes don't matter for relational theory, but they're important for your final database. There's algebra, and then there's math. Relational theory is about the algebra, database systems are about math across different domains, using that algebra.
If you want a book that clearly states what's wrong with today's RDBMS implementations, go right there. Oh, and SQL is the wrong place to learn db theory.
As to learning database concepts in general -- it really shouldn't take long. The theory is so simple, it's amazing. And yet people -still- don't get it, when the whole thing can be explained in, what, a few minutes?
Access has terrible problems teaching you good sql (even for a bad language, there's such a thing as good coding in sql) -- a lot of what you learn won't port well.
I would recommend grabbing several different free (open-source) database engines, and playing with all of them. Change from day to day. My class in college didn't require us to use any particular system for our homework, though the school provided Access. At work, I was in the middle of converting from a Paradox database to a multi-tiered application using Interbase/Firebird. I wound up using all three for assignments, just... because.
Grab Firebird, Postgresql, maybe Mysql (kinda lacks some of the advanced sql features)... and keep Access around for the graphics ideas (just to show students how a database can be exposed to users in a GUI, how tables are laid out, etc.)
Teach them that database concepts are separate from implementations, teach them some of the things that go wrong with said implementations, and how to work around a problem several different ways. Temp tables, subselects, unions... There are many ways of solving any given problem. Some products will force you into a given solution, but students should be taught the problem-solving skills essential to databases.
And did I mention that aside from db theory, they should be taught how to -get- the information out of users and managers? To find out what a business actually -does- when all they'll tell you is how they do their job right now? Even after you find all that out -- database design is a tricky thing. Many ways to solve a problem. Some allow for future expansion, some less.
I'd suggest a lot of practice building an entire system -- getting requirements, doing the design, and coding some of the queries needed. Not just doing queries on a given design.
Oh, and let students work on each other's designs. Let them yell at each other for making it difficult/impossible to get certain information from a database. That's fun too.
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... then we suddenly become friends, try to get Pakistan and India to stop fighting, and just help us find pesky little suspects in a certain bombing.
Ever notice how quickly Musharraf went from being a naughty man to being a leader who needed our support against his own population, when they disagree with him? It'd be like suddenly backing Iran's leaders just because we want something from them.
Oh, wait, we supported the Taliban? Hmmm. Weird.
So yes. Once a country gets nukes, it gets admitted into the super-non-secret-circle-of-friends-with-nukes. MAD indeed. We want to keep some nations from getting nukes precisely because they know that having them will suddenly gain them this undeserved (but necessary?) respect. N. Korea wasn't liked. If it were to get nukes, we'd suddenly be expected to deal with it as an equal. That hurts our ego.
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We were with Eryxma for a while, using their virtual-private-server solution. It was nice for a while, though we didn't particularly care for the redhat installation (we're more slackware-oriented.) The speed varied sometimes drastically on their end; we got blacklisted at least once because someone at some time had been a big-time spammer somewhere on our IP block; and eventually the service was discontinued and we were put out in the cold because they simply couldn't deal with the amount of abuse on their VPS servers: hackers would grab a machine for a month to use it to DDOS, etc. (cheap, trouble-free way to have another ssh-able machine for nefarious ... things.) We were rather disappointed.
Don't be fooled: a VPS server is still a shared resource, and you'll still feel like you're living with noisy roommates who want to party all night.
Your mileage will hopefully vary (on the positive side,) but we're now much happier having our little box on a shelf at our ISP. The guy's nice, and the cost of having shelf space is actually less than what we were paying for a slice of a server off in another state.
I can go kick the thing when I'm mad at it. Good feeling.
I'd like to thank them for the name change ... it should make life at home and at work a little easier. My girlfriend uses the Firebird Browser as well as the Firebird RDBMS -- in fact, most of us do. (We use Firebird both for our common employment and for our non-employment projects) ... makes life interesting to hear "firebird crashed!" coming from anyone in the room.
(Seems most slashdotters are more likely to have used the browser than the database system, and haven't been particularly sympathetic to those of us who use both, and get confused on a daily basis. If you haven't tried the database, and you have a use for one, please do! I'd say it's similar to Postgres functionality-wise, and quite robust. I've not had a crash yet, my users are happy.)
They're both great projects, and I'll be glad to have this out of the way. It's unfortunate there were hurt feelings and a fair amount of bitterness involved. They're also both young projects looking to be recognized -- let's give 'em room to grow, and maybe help out?
Tried Firebird at all? Feature set is pretty much like Postgres (minor variations in emphasis,) easy to install (both under windows and linux, particularly with the RPM, even under slackware) and it handles our load beautifully.
I've got a few C++ programmers, writing a rather fat client (400 distinct screens, hundred or so reports beyond that) using Firebird on the server. Handles our forty or so users just fine, and unlike some other database servers (MySQL), it keeps our data safe.
Also, as it is relevant to this story, Firebird has an embedded version. Same capabilities as the full server (SQL and all,) except that it's in a DLL you bundle with your application, a sort of single-user mode that doesn't require a service running in the background. That's a big advantage. You don't have to change any code for your app to run on the single-user version (but if you start there without planning for multi-user access, you might be in trouble scaling up!)
Oh, and using Firebird doesn't require you to make your app open-source or free, ever. Even using the embedded server, shipping pretty much all of Firebird with your app, it's still free to use.
It's based on Borland's Interbase, the fork occured at Interbase 6-open-source, and has been moving forward steadily. We're all waiting for Firebird 1.5 final (it's in late-stage release candidates, but they're very careful with it) for improved performance and features. But I've been using 1.0 in production environment for what feels like forever, and it's quite stable itself, and quite powerful. Check it out!
-If- there are three more movies made, -and- they need someone to play Chewie, -then- he'll be the one to do it if still around, and he can't refuse. This in no way stipulates that they -must- make three movies, or even that they -will- ... only that he would be required to play Chewie if they ever again need someone to do so.
It's a great way to give both actors and the audience some hope for more movies, and it lets them worry a little less about the 'how' of making more movies by already having actors lined up and contracts signed. Sheesh. Can't you boys be a little more skeptical?
i wouldn't say we have a problem with nuclear so much as a problem with non-military nuclear. and i have a feeling it's because we're the only ones who've actually used nukes against anybody -- we've got this stigma, this association between 'nuclear' and 'bomb'. can't be used for anything else now. coal (etc.) industries are more than happy to play off that fear, but i think the public fear came first. it can't have helped that we liked to scare ourselves with nuclear mutant monster movies ...
... super-phoenix? to burn the waste from normal nuclear plants to produce extra power from it, along with a different kind of waste, i believe. i do remember the local villagers didn't care for that project too much (what with shipping nuclear waste into the town on a regular basis!) in any case, they don't really mind nuclear power, though they would (from what i can tell) slightly prefer hydro-electric power.
... something else. so long as they don't go back to coal, eh, whatever. seems to me the north shores of germany would be an excellent place for hydro-electric power.
... in the new name. wait, are we afraid of anything technical-sounding? "super-efficient steam engine" maybe?
on the other side of the pond, you'll find countries like france who have quite the nuclear arsenal as well (as i recall, france has more of a nuclear arsenal than china, and is third or fourth in the world?) but also get the vast majority (74% or so? that was in my high-school days) of their power from nuclear plants. and they're not worried about it. it was also france that had, what was it called
germany, on the other hand, is heading to dismantle and sell its nuclear reactors in favor of
it is very much a problem of perception. just don't use the words 'radiation', 'emission', 'atomic', 'split', 'neutron', 'proton', 'electron', 'blast', 'coil',
that's unfortunate ... my lego collection gets the bedroom closet, and my girlfriend's gets the bedroom, in front of the dresser. (only in front of her drawers, of course.)
... so it all got moved into the living room, with furniture blocking the front door and whatnot. now one side of the living room has a 3/4 finished space-minifig-sculpture (as it's her first sculpture, we're going for 8x size) and on the other side, my 1/3 completed technic-scale p-38 ... and no, the flaps don't work yet. come on out of the closet, there's more room out in the open.
... all good occasions to buy at least little sets for the girlfriend. and what with her interest in sculptures, this "return to the basics" will just make it easier.
but then saturday she decided she wanted to do sculptures
and my cat loves to pounce large piles of lego.
birthdays, christmas, half-birthdays
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/117.html
Oh, look. Sorry, the right to make a backup of software is actually spelled out separately from fair use, which, I'll agree, is rather vague (though we do have case law to work on.)
In the end, all laws and infringements thereof are tested in court. Murder may be illegal, but you still go through a trial to determine if what happened fell under the existing laws -- what's your point? That you should fear to step out your door because something you say or do might later (in court) be determined to be illegal under some law you didn't understand?
Again, the right to make a backup of your software is explicitly given to you in our laws.
Regardless of the availability of lawyers who, like masters of other professions, should know best, you're still responsible for knowing the laws of the land yourself and taking responsibility or consequences (on either side) for the infringement of laws. Your lawyer can't replace you, and his knowledge can't replace yours. It's everyone's duty to know 'diddly.' (If, in fact, 'knowing diddly' is the opposite of 'not knowing diddly.')
... and when the company goes out of business?
You have a right, protected by Congress, to make copies of this sort. It's called 'fair use', and it covers all sorts of stuff. You've purchased the right to use copyrighted material, and you have the right to protect your investment by making a copy.
People who ask to make use of their rights are never in the wrong. Companies that provide products to make it easier for people to make use of their rights are also not in the wrong. This software is legal, its use as advertised is legal, and the people buying it have every right to make use of it for its stated purpose.
You've set up a straw-man argument, implying that the majority of people here believe "you have unlimited rights to do as you wish with purchased copyrighted material" -- you'll find that's not true. If anything, the people here most likely have a better understanding of copyright law than the common public. Why? Because most of them deal with intellectual property day-in and day-out. It's simply not fair to bundle "Free Software advocates" and "hackers" (in the sense you seem to be implying) together.
As to government intervention: government intervention is what gave us copyright law, 'fair use', and the DMCA. Maybe someone can find the details for us, but I'm fairly sure our government has also ruled that there is a conflict between the DMCA and 'fair use' when it comes to DVD's in particular -- and as I recall, it was decided that 'fair use' wins. I really hope someone digs that up for us, I'm heading to bed.
In the end, that's your stuff they're selling to you, or at least your grandchildren's, our society's. Intellectual property, once published, is destined to become ours, collectively. You have every right to archive it as you see fit (protected by 'fair use') considering we can't trust those who produce this stuff to make sure we get what's ours. Extreme? That's the price they pay for copyrights, the price they agree to when they get in the business of producing stuff, whether it be games, music, images, text, video (etc.) or a combination thereof.
... but I cannot convince myself that time has already occured for an infinite amount of time.
... (Newton's second law, Maxwell equations both being time-invariant) ... we could watch the universe in reverse, and feel that it's not all that strange. if you were watching the universe in reverse, not already knowing what was going to happen watching it (that is, no memory of your past) would it be strange to think of it as going on forever?
... but if you see it simply as a continuous function then perhaps you can see how the universe makes just as much sense infinite amounts of time in the past as it does infinite amounts of time in the future.
I seem to remember there being a concept in physics dealing with the idea that things happening in reverse make a good deal of sense
if the universe is seen as fairly deterministic, then what we experience at any point in time is really just f(t), where f() may be defined over an infinite amount of time. you're accustomed to thinking of f() as a sequence, where the next step depends on the previous (without knowing if there is such a thing as a minimal amount of time, a step value, between states of the universe)
but that's just a random guess, based on assumptions and bad memories. move along.
"What the fuck does that mean" was a reference to 'Office Space' (movie,) I'm pretty sure. Printer in question subsequently gets beaten to a messy metallic pulp in an empty field by angry programmers ... but thanks anyway. +1 Insightful to you.
... or we could even put on our tinfoil hats and wonder if the government would prefer -not- to ban smoking, or even do too much to prevent it. if something's bad, we usually either ban it or leave it alone (protecting it as freedom of something or other, or, for once, staying out of people's homes) ... but instead we tax it up to that "magic level" where it doesn't discourage people too much, and brings in a nice revenue. ethics and consistency be damned.
would you care to give us more examples? i've personally thought that the determination of the authorship of texts was based on things like "whoever wrote this writes like whoever wrote that, and we're fairly sure who wrote one of them, but not the other" and so forth. that's more of an analysis of style and similarity of content ...
... but we aren't actually there, and we can't (usually) recreate the events to experience them again. the same applies to murder investigations, etc.
if you mean something more along the lines of "was this reporter of events being accurate," in historical terms (religious or not) then yes, that probably happens. should we trust -that- analysis? perhaps not.
historical accuracy is interesting in that, unlike something like a report about the performance of a newly created piece of equipment, we don't have (exactly) the opportunity to run our own tests. archeology, maybe
the whole point of determining authorship was to attempt to get authority -- agreeing that a text was written by someone "in the know" we could trust. but we don't usually (in the case of biblical texts) know much about the authors other than what's in the text itself, in one way or another, or by tradition (which is highly speculative.)
with this stuff, it seems to come down to: if you already admit the truth of the text, then it is self-supportive (stand-alone.) if you don't, you may not ever be convinced that it can (actually or theoretically) support itself.
specifically because you'll now trust their future results?
"wow, last year, they had to admit their product just wasn't up to the task. but now, dang, look at 'em go!"
yes, it's quite human indeed. you don't know what all they're up to -- what seems to be self-defeating isn't always. and sometimes, well, you honestly find out that you're doing the job you had hoped you were doing, trouncing the competition. go figure: you might actually manage to not suck! but you don't get to tell anyone? and your only solution is to pay someone else to announce it? oh, wait, that's not allowed either!
any publicity is good publicity. if you can't get good publicity by announcing your product is good, just say it isn't. close enough. it's not like anyone pays attention anyway.
yeah, but see, we're right about linux and c++. and islam. or ... somesuch.
... and how you can't find anything, but also aren't forced into a particular way of doing things. it's almost never fair, and besides -- we all want our languages for different reasons.
as a c++ programmer, i've found that talking about java is always about a dozen issues at once, regardless of how much you know about the language (and history, etc.) it's not just about the language itself, it's about standards, supporting libraries, performance, interaction with the OS, etc. eventually, you always have to throw in a few other languages for comparison (and to make a point) -- like talking about perl and the many available libraries
always about trade-offs. by the dozen. maybe we should select religions as if they were a toolset. that could be amusing.
The people performing it have a vested financial interest in having it turn out a specific way, notably positive. If the test resulted showed poor reliability, then I would understand trusting it because it would go against the motives of the people performing it.
... specifically because of this.
That may be human instinct, but let's be honest: it's not fair either. Either trust the source of information or don't, but don't trust the result of a test based on the result of the test -- circular dependency.
It's much simpler to simply say that this is a linux test by IBM, and may therefore be tainted. Did I mention that it's good to have truly independent testing centers, albeit expensive for them? This whole independent/free media thing is rather important
I forgot to mention, though likely nobody cares, that no stable version of Firebird-embedded has been released yet, as it's a branch of the current 1.5 series, which is currently at RC7 (last I checked.) It feels stable to me, but ... watch for a slashdot headline about 1.5-stable being released. (Wait, the slashdot crowd would think a new mozilla browser had come out ...)
...
Also to note is the recent (last week?) merger of Firebird and Yaffil, its russian (commercial-product-for-a-while) counterpart. Yaffil code improvements and features will be merged into Firebird as time permits, with obvious considerations of compatibility. I'm personally hoping that expression-based indexing will be one of the first things added, though the Yaffil also made significant progress in optimizing the engine for the things it already did.
The best part is -- new versions of the embedded branch would benefit from the same improvements.
I would welcome a Postgres equivalent. Competition can't hurt, now can it? Is Postgres all that much lighter/heavier weight than Firebird? I saw them more as just emphasizing different feature sets
That's why I look forward to the completion of a few last (for this) features in Firebird (the database server) -- they have an 'embedded' version that sits in a .dll and acts exactly like the server version as far as the calling program is concerned. It's the same engine code, so the same SQL is supported, the same features available. It can still load UDF libraries (the same ones it loaded as a server) but won't accept connections from other programs. If you want several programs to access the same file at the same time, you'll have to do that yourself. It's already great for building single-user programs to be distributed to clients who wouldn't want a "full-blown" database server running (really, it is, but at least it's not listening to any ports.)
Firebird/Interbase has always been rather small -- 10 meg install, very little memory usage. The main problem porting it to PDA's and other embedded devices was its loopback / inter-process-communication systems. Its shared-memory method wasn't completed (though from what I hear, they have it working in development versions, and the new method speeds up the server quite a bit as well) and it relied on 127.0.0.1 loopback. Windows CE didn't allow for that (no ethernet interfaces at all by default, not even lo) and thus the server couldn't talk to itself. (It tends to use multiple processes.)
Regardless, Firebird will most likely be available for embedded devices soon, run quickly and quietly, and won't be a stripped-down version at all. Code written for large multi-user environments would still work, but you might have to wait a bit longer for your huge reports.
(And yes, I feel fine writing this without being too concerned about vaporware -- it's already proven technology, it's actively worked on, and the Microsoft thing isn't any closer.)
... which is why I find it funny that Microsoft has planned the 'secure pipeline' (or somesuch) to make sure that programs that output digital audio won't have their output captured by other software. beyond the audio-out port on the sound card, there's no security. you can just pipe that stuff right back into the audio-in port and record -- they're not going to disable that feature.
... then it might be rather close to perfect.
... and I don't think they're planning on wiping our brains of "illegal copies of copyrighted content" ...
how's the quality? eh. maybe not perfect. unless your sound card has digital-out and digital-in
so yes. if you, the user, can see, hear, smell, taste, touch, or otherwise sense something, then we can most likely build a machine to do the same, and re-output that same sensation. no amount of DRM can prevent it. if nothing else, our brains record a (sometimes good, often not) copy of things. plays, movies
sheesh. we wouldn't have created copyright laws if we thought there were any technological barrier that could effectively enforce the (rarity) value of this content. technology can't. so law tries to. simple.
i seem to remember that even non-open-source programs can still be run through a decompiler (albeit not necessarily legally, thanks to the shrink-wrap license.) and sheesh, some C people can read assembly code just as easily as if it -were- C. it's practically the same thing.
... a program is a program (and never a true black box.) you can always find out what it's doing, eventually.
sure, it's not as easy or convenient. and modifying it to do what you like may be an pain. but
besides, have you never seen people obfuscate source code? they could make it -harder- for you to find a trojan in the source code than in the assembly.
the fact that you can get your hands on the binaries themselves is arguably a step above the voting software, in that it's much more obviously accessible. with voting software, you probably have to deal with the voting hardware, the government agency owning/renting it, etc.
(and yes, intel could have made their chips obfuscate the assembly. maybe. you've got ways around that. and yes, hardware is just software in another, less modifiable, state. and therefore hackable. therefore, given enough time, any voting machine can be examined thoroughly.)
and even then, only paid them with an I.O.U. -- to be payable if they win against IBM ...
so, all of that speculation about an attack -necessarily- also taking out the ftp server at the same time ... what was up with that? 20mbps isn't enough to fill up a simple 100mbps local network. if the ds3 was their entire pipe, and the ftp server was in there too, you shouldn't have been able to get to the ftp server.
there's some pipe sizes i wouldn't mind having explained. nice diagram of how one side filled up and the other didn't? completely separate, and people are just dolts?
it's an honest question, i swear.
Def. of Mathematics
... Database theory could be taught without even mentioning integers, character strings, dates, etc. I think it's important for students to realize this, and this book in particular makes this very clear (as part of their complaint about implementations often not providing adequate interfaces for user-defined-types, or relying overly heavily on predefined types, especially the "standard" types defined by the SQL language specs.)
I don't mean to make this about definitions -- but I'd like to explain what I mean. It probably would have been safer for me to say that relational theory is about algebra, not arithmetics. However, the definition above is confusing: it cites mathematics, as a whole, as being about quantities and magnitudes. Database theory doesn't care about magnitudes: they are only one particular type of value that can be manipulated. Arithmetic (and by their definition, math as a whole) is about specific types of data being manipulated, algebra is mostly about operators, analysis, and general solutions that can often be applied regardless of the underlying datatype.
Relational algebra, therefore, is about more than just the data -- it's about the operators, the joins
That book also presents a (new?) model for object inheritance, including multiple-inheritance. That's important for those people out there being taught object-orientedness in one class, then taught database theory, then thrown out into a world of vendors who claim the two can't be done together, or do they together sloppily.
The book summarizes most everything they've said before, and then adds some. I find that valuable. By now, they're getting a bit cranky about implementations not catching up to their expectations. That can put a lot of people off, but it also serves to burn into the mind of the reader how important theory really is. The book describes the evolution of database theory, its basics, and a complete algebra, with proofs. It is not, however, an example-driven book, like the one I had in college.
I think an example-driven book is much better for teaching database design and normalization. I think the two are fairly distinct ideas though. There's the tool, and there's applying it.
i was fairly sure i remembered that libraries were such that closed-source products could use GPL libraries, so long as they dynamically-linked to them. i'm sure someone will come along to quote us the GPL relevant to this section -- i don't care enough. i've got proprietary bugs to go swat. damn proprietary bugs.
I think you forgot to mention another of their great books -- Foundation for Object / Relational Databases: The Third Manifesto by Chris Date and Hugh Darwen.
... because.
... and keep Access around for the graphics ideas (just to show students how a database can be exposed to users in a GUI, how tables are laid out, etc.)
... There are many ways of solving any given problem. Some products will force you into a given solution, but students should be taught the problem-solving skills essential to databases.
In it, they re-iterate their ideas up until now, integrate other stuff, and show how database concepts are completely orthogonal to the object concepts often brought up: datatypes don't matter for relational theory, but they're important for your final database. There's algebra, and then there's math. Relational theory is about the algebra, database systems are about math across different domains, using that algebra.
If you want a book that clearly states what's wrong with today's RDBMS implementations, go right there. Oh, and SQL is the wrong place to learn db theory.
As to learning database concepts in general -- it really shouldn't take long. The theory is so simple, it's amazing. And yet people -still- don't get it, when the whole thing can be explained in, what, a few minutes?
Access has terrible problems teaching you good sql (even for a bad language, there's such a thing as good coding in sql) -- a lot of what you learn won't port well.
I would recommend grabbing several different free (open-source) database engines, and playing with all of them. Change from day to day. My class in college didn't require us to use any particular system for our homework, though the school provided Access. At work, I was in the middle of converting from a Paradox database to a multi-tiered application using Interbase/Firebird. I wound up using all three for assignments, just
Grab Firebird, Postgresql, maybe Mysql (kinda lacks some of the advanced sql features)
Teach them that database concepts are separate from implementations, teach them some of the things that go wrong with said implementations, and how to work around a problem several different ways. Temp tables, subselects, unions
And did I mention that aside from db theory, they should be taught how to -get- the information out of users and managers? To find out what a business actually -does- when all they'll tell you is how they do their job right now? Even after you find all that out -- database design is a tricky thing. Many ways to solve a problem. Some allow for future expansion, some less.
I'd suggest a lot of practice building an entire system -- getting requirements, doing the design, and coding some of the queries needed. Not just doing queries on a given design.
Oh, and let students work on each other's designs. Let them yell at each other for making it difficult/impossible to get certain information from a database. That's fun too.