Right, so you need a VM... cloud... thing. Actually, in all seriousness, there are a couple known solutions for this: a) seceding / splitting the jurisdiction. (american revolution?) b) millet system. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_(Ottoman_Empire) )
... and comments! Both in the code, and when you commit to the repository. We keep having battles over the intent of laws that are badly worded, vague, or contextual. If we can't solve those problems (as hundreds of years of history will already attest to) then let's at least get them to write down what they were thinking at the time, examples of things they wanted to prevent, things they wanted to protect, areas they thought a law might apply to in the future, etc. Yes, I know, it's hard enough to get legislators to agree on what to do, it's probably actually harder to get them to agree on why they're doing it. (Counter-intuitive, maybe, but I feel a lot of legislation gets passed with everyone agreeing to it having differing reasons for doing so, just as those who disagree do.) Maybe ask them to write unit tests, too.
Also, they should maintain a publicly-visible bug tracker. As problems with laws are identified & voted on, they go up the priority list and get assigned to someone to work until the bugs are fixed.
Also, we should be free to run older versions of the software (legislation) if we want to. Upgrades shouldn't be mandatory. We should be able to fork (secede) and keep going with our own branch. The market will decide which laws are truly good that way.
USPS is also cheaper. As long as people keep using them, their issues don't need to be resolved, because they're clearly meeting the demand. Advertisers, for example, don't want to pay for 100% package delivery quality, and UPS & FEDEX don't offer a "less than perfect" option. USPS also delivers everywhere (in some form or other) -- UPS & FEDEX are free to refuse to deliver to places that aren't economically justifiable to them. The government has a basic need to communicate with people -- mail is the chosen medium. It therefore needs a method of delivery that isn't dependent on the marketplace, which may or may not provide the needed service, may go out of business at just the wrong time, and may charge and arm and a leg for it when it feels it can (right around tax time, census time, etc.) An in-house system takes care of that. I'm not saying USPS is perfect, mind you. But it doesn't exist without reason.
Governments may suck, but how many anarchies do we have on this planet? Somalia? They don't just happen by themselves. People create governments because they see good reasons to. People can be wrong. But the root of the problem is always people, not governments.
By your standard, corporations create nothing. For everything they provide to one group, it must be taken or borrowed from another. (Often the same group, but not always.) It's just a basic rule, government or not. No free lunch.
The microbes in your gut are parasites too -- but mostly helpful ones. Government's more of a symbiosis. When it gets out of balance, that's a problem. But it's not a size thing. There are more foreign cells in your body than your own, yet you're (probably) in balance.
I don't get the states' rights thing. I don't understand why small-government types usually believe: a) the state is "good enough" (not county, town, or neighborhood -- even though these would seem likelier candidates for local control) b) the constitution was originally perfect (what?!?! the founders actually fully expected later revolutions! some wanted laws to auto-expire, because they mistrusted the legislative process so much! why would they have thought their own works perfect, and why should you?)
FWIW, I'm not complaining. I would have missed it too.
Another option would have been to purposefully delay the news until monday; they already shift stories around to deal with slow news days, and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to put the most engaging stories on the front page during the 10-3 hours (work around US timezones), or whenever their readership is already highest. Considering the running jokes about slashdot just reposting digg a few days later, it's not like anyone expects them to pounce on the news within minutes anyway. I won't claim there's no skill involved in good editorial decisions.
I'm actually intrigued by this concept of Slashdot purposefully (assumption: text in current summary implies they did this on purpose) re-posting news to make sure we see it, a form of public-service-announcement. Yes, Slashdot is a news service, but I don't generally see timestamp-based news-services prioritizing/reposting content like this. The main news sources just keep covering the same story over and over again, as if it were evolving by the minute, but that's about it. Interesting.
It's true, I wasn't the DBA for Lawson (on Oracle.) But it was fun to discover how much it kept of its Cobol roots, down to the "padding" fields that you would traditionally leave in records so you could add fields later without having to rewrite the files. (They were still occasionally used that way, even inside Oracle.) I love legacy code. Fun times.
Number of tables isn't exactly an excuse in itself, though the fact that they're poorly documented might be. My current database has (truly) over a thousand distinct tables, but that doesn't mean we couldn't use dictionary tables to find the right ones and quickly assign permissions. But you do have to have good documentation in a useful format to do that, I'll grant you that for sure, and from what I've seen, said documentation is lacking on those ERP's.
You should never give any direct access to your ERP database to anybody
That's slight overkill. I would encourage you to create proper database users, and grant them select/update/insert/delete rights only as appropriate. If you need per-column permissions, create views that hide those columns, and if they need read/write access, provide instead-of triggers on those views to support their needs.
The main reasons I would encourage you not to let users have direct access:
1) Users don't know what they're seeing, they don't know which lookup tables to join to, or they don't understand how the data's organized. They'll write their own reports, come to the wrong conclusions, convince management of their erroneous beliefs, and you'll have to clean up the mess. "I got my data from the database" shouldn't be good enough.
2) Most ERP products (really, most database-backed products) are not built to keep themselves truly logically consistent without the help of some outside application layer. There are lots of reasons for that: developers are taught that databases are just for storage, they don't want to learn procedural SQL, they're trying to be database-agnostic the only way they know how,... Giving users write access means they can easily get all the data out of synch (I don't just mean foreign keys here, thank you) by performing only half of a complex operation the application layer would have guaranteed fully done.
What happened to the well-rounded individual who used to reside between the extremes and could think for himself?
Oh, you mean the collective pipe-dream and fictional character used by our former elites in their own nearly-purely-academic works (we now call them "founding fathers" and "philosophers", I believe?) Said individuals do exist, but they're as rare as they ever were. Nostalgia's a bitch.
While you're rightfully avoiding one pitfall, it's not like we're not already stuck in the other, already-existing potholes of political and media echo-chambers that nullify the good that was supposed to come from democracy and free-press. Scientists might be blind to other opinions? Yes. Congress-critters might be incapable of holding a civilized dialogue, or might use the opinion of their own constituents, to whom they are leaders, as justification? Yeah. The media can broadcast back at us what we already believe and reinforce any existing variations, polarizing and segregating us? Yeah. Scientists are people too! The problem is more fundamental.
Easy. Stop all carbon emissions and atmospheric pollutants, and see what happens over the next few decades. If there's no statistically significant drop in the rate of temperature change, then carbon emissions and other atmospheric pollutants weren't the (sole) cause. Wait, is that what they're already asking us to do? See? They're not asking us to stop polluting because they know it's bad -- they're asking us to stop so they can get the data they need to falsify your claim that pollution isn't the problem. Just good science.
Thanks. Accuracy would require us to also exclude Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc., but re-include resident foreigners for some local elections and convicted felons for some states, and mention the nearly-18 issue... Let's just say it's complicated. I'm at least in the ballpark. Convicted felons and minors can't (generally) freely vote for ISPs with their money, either, so they should be excluded from the equation.
Are you a minor, convicted felon, or illegal alien? No? Then you probably have the right to vote, which means you have a choice.
You're probably thinking it's not a useful choice. Maybe you're one of the lucky few to live in an area served by multiple ISPs. Many aren't; there's a reason for regulating broadband like any other public utility -- it's so expensive to run new lines to setup parallel service that most areas won't ever see more than one provider. And there's really no reason they should; the cost of running new lines just gets passed on to us, the customers, and when competition ultimately succeeds and leads to the defeat of one of the competitors, leaves behind wasteful redundancy.
We're not complaining that we don't have competition in the clean-water market; even areas that privatize the service just privatize bits and pieces (customer service, billing, etc.) on top of a single monolithic operation, with government-mandated quality levels. You don't get different water when you switch water companies, and you shouldn't get a different internet when you switch ISPs, either. The less innovation a service needs to provide (how much innovation do you need in gas, electricity, water, phone service, roads, or broadband access to the internet?), the more the service is about connecting and not creating, the less need there is for competition to get it. Regulation can be sufficient.
Where companies have tried to innovate / value-add to the internet, it's been terrible -- AOL or MSN, anyone? We don't want fancy features on the service itself, we just want good, clean, fast access to any part of the internet, where the real innovation happens. And we don't want to pay for competing companies to fall over each other tearing up streets, putting up poles, running various cables everywhere to get it.
Can we stop with that? It's not like anyone would normally read the whole thing anyway. Have you gone and read any of the other millions of pages of laws that already apply to you? Or thanks to case-law, all those decisions rendered in random cases that might, if brought up by opposing counsel, be construed to apply to you as well? No. You didn't. And you won't.
So how about you let legislators do what they're paid and elected to do, which is write legislation, not fortune cookies or hallmark cards. The goal isn't to be short, nor even particularly readable -- it's to be comprehensive and precise, because it'd suck to be the victim of the activist-judge boogieman or the loophole scam artist. There's really no reason to think that the more important some legislation is considered to be, the shorter and more accessible it ought to be, and there's nothing new about this.
For fuck's sake, the whole point of the republican system of government (as opposed to a direct democracy) was that the common people were too busy, uneducated, disconnected and uninformed to be handling this complex stuff themselves. Complaining about this is like having your clueless customer butt in every few seconds while you try to write complex code to solve their problems, or seal a joint, or do whatever professional work it is you do, telling you that you need to do it in a way they understand.
So, seriously. Let's stop this. It does nothing to advance the overall debate.
é is like the "eh?" in "Let's go see The Phantom Menace, eh?" (canada) è is like the "eh." in "The Phantom Menace? Eh. I'm in no mood to ruin my childhood memories." ê is like an appropriately-angry version of è.
Better late than never? The book we handed to new-hires was "A Guide to SQL, third edition" by Philip J. Pratt. It appears it's gone through quite a few editions since then, and it's been years since I looked at it -- the Amazon reviews may be accurate, it may suck. Sorry!
Validity of your rant aside, please be consistent; too often I hear both this rant ("government is incompetent") coupled with conspiratorial, big-brother, black-helicopter rants that assume the government actually is capable of doing something, sometimes, as long as it's something nefarious. I'm not saying they're not capable of such, nor doing such -- I'm just saying... please, to all of you, be consistent. Either the government can, or it cannot, get its act together.
I wish I could point you to a good book on the subject. Date & Darwen are too theoretical, Celko is too tricksy. You're not an idiot, you're just ignorant, you don't need an idiot's guide; you want to come fully up to speed, no just get your feet wet, you don't need a "in 24 hours" book; you want to know how to use it, not every last option available, you don't want a "complete reference." Looking at the list of books on amazon, none stand out as useful. Maybe I'll just have to write it.
I'm trying to find out what book it was I (permanently) lent to a fellow programmer way-back; when I find out, I'll at least respond. I'm pretty sure it didn't cover "active database" features (triggers, procedures) though. I wish there were a good, database-agnostic way of teaching those, too (for the fundamentals).
In my experience, at least half of the programmers with degrees don't grok databases at all, and should never be given access to the database. It's not just SQL, either. Sure, they can muddle their way through a select, maybe a group-by, they might even attempt a few joins -- but they have absolutely no clue how to design a database properly, what NULL is for, what foreign keys are for, what cascade rules are for, what triggers are for, what views are for, what LEFT vs. RIGHT vs. INNER do (those are the ones they use -- they also have no idea about FULL OUTER, but luckily don't use it, except by accident, in an unqualified join). They're a terror upon the database, and should be kept out until tutored. And then you can teach them about transactions, isolation levels, connection pools, savepoints... It's a whole new world to most programmers, even the ones who *think* they know databases. As far as they're concerned, what their database class taught them, databases are just blind repositories for data, a convenient replacement for some other datastructure like a list, vector, map, or set. Ugh. Maybe it's because they're taught all database systems are the same, and taught the absolute bare-minimum / common-denominator stuff. Maybe it's because they're taught file i/o first, and databases are an after-thought. I don't know why it's so rare to see anyone with a clue.
In an ideal world, identification (username) and authentication (password) would be separate. But that's not the case in the financial world. Every time you use a credit card or cheque, you're leaving behind a trail that contains either your credit card number and security code (if online), or your bank's routing number and your account number. Your one-time authorization for withdrawal has given away the keys to the kingdom! It's like social security numbers in that respect. Only a few services (Discover bank?) allow you to setup single-use identifiers that work around this problem without rebuilding the whole system from scratch. More should. If you need to setup recurring payments, you should be able to tell your bank who's going to be doing it, how often, for (about) how much, and get a number that a hacker could not reuse for some other purpose. (And while you're at it, you make it transportable, so you can redirect that number to your new bank account when you get tired of your old bank screwing up, without having to remember to notify everyone that your bank account number's changed.)
Re:Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but
on
Typing With Your Brain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
I'm curious: what kind of scaling / replication problem did you have?
Scaling: lots of connections, lots of tables, lots of requests, lots of data,... ?
Replication: for sharding, for master / slave, for multi-site, for backups (incremental? hot?),... ?
I ask because I haven't personally profiled FB vs. PG on any of those metrics, and they get enough less market share than other products to make finding such comparisons difficult.
Err... teeth? As originally written, HIPAA did have fines, yes -- but only after they'd gone through a whole slap-on-the-wrist, many-strikes-you're-out process, to "help bring providers into compliance." So... sure. Report them. And they'll get a nasty-gram telling them to please not do that again.
Same in France, mostly because of Algerian terrorists (though I'm sure the ETA and Corsican separatists didn't help.) Military started patrolling public places -- the metro and government buildings, sure, but schools, too. Parking lots near sensitive buildings were blocked off -- I saw some parking spots individually disabled by large boulders. Trashcans were welded shut. In airports (and elsewhere, too, I would assume,) the bomb squad will approach a suspicious bag with a big dome, which they screw down around it, before exploding the bag -- that avoids having to move it off to a pit somewhere, which could trigger a motion sensor.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, so you need a VM ... cloud ... thing. Actually, in all seriousness, there are a couple known solutions for this:
a) seceding / splitting the jurisdiction. (american revolution?)
b) millet system. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_(Ottoman_Empire) )
... and comments! Both in the code, and when you commit to the repository. We keep having battles over the intent of laws that are badly worded, vague, or contextual. If we can't solve those problems (as hundreds of years of history will already attest to) then let's at least get them to write down what they were thinking at the time, examples of things they wanted to prevent, things they wanted to protect, areas they thought a law might apply to in the future, etc. Yes, I know, it's hard enough to get legislators to agree on what to do, it's probably actually harder to get them to agree on why they're doing it. (Counter-intuitive, maybe, but I feel a lot of legislation gets passed with everyone agreeing to it having differing reasons for doing so, just as those who disagree do.) Maybe ask them to write unit tests, too.
Also, they should maintain a publicly-visible bug tracker. As problems with laws are identified & voted on, they go up the priority list and get assigned to someone to work until the bugs are fixed.
Also, we should be free to run older versions of the software (legislation) if we want to. Upgrades shouldn't be mandatory. We should be able to fork (secede) and keep going with our own branch. The market will decide which laws are truly good that way.
Too much, maybe?
USPS is also cheaper. As long as people keep using them, their issues don't need to be resolved, because they're clearly meeting the demand. Advertisers, for example, don't want to pay for 100% package delivery quality, and UPS & FEDEX don't offer a "less than perfect" option. USPS also delivers everywhere (in some form or other) -- UPS & FEDEX are free to refuse to deliver to places that aren't economically justifiable to them. The government has a basic need to communicate with people -- mail is the chosen medium. It therefore needs a method of delivery that isn't dependent on the marketplace, which may or may not provide the needed service, may go out of business at just the wrong time, and may charge and arm and a leg for it when it feels it can (right around tax time, census time, etc.) An in-house system takes care of that. I'm not saying USPS is perfect, mind you. But it doesn't exist without reason.
Governments may suck, but how many anarchies do we have on this planet? Somalia? They don't just happen by themselves. People create governments because they see good reasons to. People can be wrong. But the root of the problem is always people, not governments.
By your standard, corporations create nothing. For everything they provide to one group, it must be taken or borrowed from another. (Often the same group, but not always.) It's just a basic rule, government or not. No free lunch.
The microbes in your gut are parasites too -- but mostly helpful ones. Government's more of a symbiosis. When it gets out of balance, that's a problem. But it's not a size thing. There are more foreign cells in your body than your own, yet you're (probably) in balance.
I don't get the states' rights thing. I don't understand why small-government types usually believe:
a) the state is "good enough" (not county, town, or neighborhood -- even though these would seem likelier candidates for local control)
b) the constitution was originally perfect (what?!?! the founders actually fully expected later revolutions! some wanted laws to auto-expire, because they mistrusted the legislative process so much! why would they have thought their own works perfect, and why should you?)
I can't tell if you're complaining or not
FWIW, I'm not complaining. I would have missed it too.
Another option would have been to purposefully delay the news until monday; they already shift stories around to deal with slow news days, and I wouldn't be surprised if they try to put the most engaging stories on the front page during the 10-3 hours (work around US timezones), or whenever their readership is already highest. Considering the running jokes about slashdot just reposting digg a few days later, it's not like anyone expects them to pounce on the news within minutes anyway. I won't claim there's no skill involved in good editorial decisions.
I'm actually intrigued by this concept of Slashdot purposefully (assumption: text in current summary implies they did this on purpose) re-posting news to make sure we see it, a form of public-service-announcement. Yes, Slashdot is a news service, but I don't generally see timestamp-based news-services prioritizing/reposting content like this. The main news sources just keep covering the same story over and over again, as if it were evolving by the minute, but that's about it. Interesting.
It's true, I wasn't the DBA for Lawson (on Oracle.) But it was fun to discover how much it kept of its Cobol roots, down to the "padding" fields that you would traditionally leave in records so you could add fields later without having to rewrite the files. (They were still occasionally used that way, even inside Oracle.) I love legacy code. Fun times.
Number of tables isn't exactly an excuse in itself, though the fact that they're poorly documented might be. My current database has (truly) over a thousand distinct tables, but that doesn't mean we couldn't use dictionary tables to find the right ones and quickly assign permissions. But you do have to have good documentation in a useful format to do that, I'll grant you that for sure, and from what I've seen, said documentation is lacking on those ERP's.
You should never give any direct access to your ERP database to anybody
That's slight overkill. I would encourage you to create proper database users, and grant them select/update/insert/delete rights only as appropriate. If you need per-column permissions, create views that hide those columns, and if they need read/write access, provide instead-of triggers on those views to support their needs.
The main reasons I would encourage you not to let users have direct access:
1) Users don't know what they're seeing, they don't know which lookup tables to join to, or they don't understand how the data's organized. They'll write their own reports, come to the wrong conclusions, convince management of their erroneous beliefs, and you'll have to clean up the mess. "I got my data from the database" shouldn't be good enough.
2) Most ERP products (really, most database-backed products) are not built to keep themselves truly logically consistent without the help of some outside application layer. There are lots of reasons for that: developers are taught that databases are just for storage, they don't want to learn procedural SQL, they're trying to be database-agnostic the only way they know how, ... Giving users write access means they can easily get all the data out of synch (I don't just mean foreign keys here, thank you) by performing only half of a complex operation the application layer would have guaranteed fully done.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments
The US does show up in the list, if not much. Even James Joyce's Ulysses was banned for a while.
What happened to the well-rounded individual who used to reside between the extremes and could think for himself?
Oh, you mean the collective pipe-dream and fictional character used by our former elites in their own nearly-purely-academic works (we now call them "founding fathers" and "philosophers", I believe?) Said individuals do exist, but they're as rare as they ever were. Nostalgia's a bitch.
While you're rightfully avoiding one pitfall, it's not like we're not already stuck in the other, already-existing potholes of political and media echo-chambers that nullify the good that was supposed to come from democracy and free-press. Scientists might be blind to other opinions? Yes. Congress-critters might be incapable of holding a civilized dialogue, or might use the opinion of their own constituents, to whom they are leaders, as justification? Yeah. The media can broadcast back at us what we already believe and reinforce any existing variations, polarizing and segregating us? Yeah. Scientists are people too! The problem is more fundamental.
Easy. Stop all carbon emissions and atmospheric pollutants, and see what happens over the next few decades. If there's no statistically significant drop in the rate of temperature change, then carbon emissions and other atmospheric pollutants weren't the (sole) cause. Wait, is that what they're already asking us to do? See? They're not asking us to stop polluting because they know it's bad -- they're asking us to stop so they can get the data they need to falsify your claim that pollution isn't the problem. Just good science.
Thanks. Accuracy would require us to also exclude Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, etc., but re-include resident foreigners for some local elections and convicted felons for some states, and mention the nearly-18 issue... Let's just say it's complicated. I'm at least in the ballpark. Convicted felons and minors can't (generally) freely vote for ISPs with their money, either, so they should be excluded from the equation.
Are you a minor, convicted felon, or illegal alien? No? Then you probably have the right to vote, which means you have a choice.
You're probably thinking it's not a useful choice. Maybe you're one of the lucky few to live in an area served by multiple ISPs. Many aren't; there's a reason for regulating broadband like any other public utility -- it's so expensive to run new lines to setup parallel service that most areas won't ever see more than one provider. And there's really no reason they should; the cost of running new lines just gets passed on to us, the customers, and when competition ultimately succeeds and leads to the defeat of one of the competitors, leaves behind wasteful redundancy.
We're not complaining that we don't have competition in the clean-water market; even areas that privatize the service just privatize bits and pieces (customer service, billing, etc.) on top of a single monolithic operation, with government-mandated quality levels. You don't get different water when you switch water companies, and you shouldn't get a different internet when you switch ISPs, either. The less innovation a service needs to provide (how much innovation do you need in gas, electricity, water, phone service, roads, or broadband access to the internet?), the more the service is about connecting and not creating, the less need there is for competition to get it. Regulation can be sufficient.
Where companies have tried to innovate / value-add to the internet, it's been terrible -- AOL or MSN, anyone? We don't want fancy features on the service itself, we just want good, clean, fast access to any part of the internet, where the real innovation happens. And we don't want to pay for competing companies to fall over each other tearing up streets, putting up poles, running various cables everywhere to get it.
Can we stop with that? It's not like anyone would normally read the whole thing anyway. Have you gone and read any of the other millions of pages of laws that already apply to you? Or thanks to case-law, all those decisions rendered in random cases that might, if brought up by opposing counsel, be construed to apply to you as well? No. You didn't. And you won't.
So how about you let legislators do what they're paid and elected to do, which is write legislation, not fortune cookies or hallmark cards. The goal isn't to be short, nor even particularly readable -- it's to be comprehensive and precise, because it'd suck to be the victim of the activist-judge boogieman or the loophole scam artist. There's really no reason to think that the more important some legislation is considered to be, the shorter and more accessible it ought to be, and there's nothing new about this.
For fuck's sake, the whole point of the republican system of government (as opposed to a direct democracy) was that the common people were too busy, uneducated, disconnected and uninformed to be handling this complex stuff themselves. Complaining about this is like having your clueless customer butt in every few seconds while you try to write complex code to solve their problems, or seal a joint, or do whatever professional work it is you do, telling you that you need to do it in a way they understand.
So, seriously. Let's stop this. It does nothing to advance the overall debate.
é is like the "eh?" in "Let's go see The Phantom Menace, eh?" (canada)
è is like the "eh." in "The Phantom Menace? Eh. I'm in no mood to ruin my childhood memories."
ê is like an appropriately-angry version of è.
Better late than never? The book we handed to new-hires was "A Guide to SQL, third edition" by Philip J. Pratt. It appears it's gone through quite a few editions since then, and it's been years since I looked at it -- the Amazon reviews may be accurate, it may suck. Sorry!
Validity of your rant aside, please be consistent; too often I hear both this rant ("government is incompetent") coupled with conspiratorial, big-brother, black-helicopter rants that assume the government actually is capable of doing something, sometimes, as long as it's something nefarious. I'm not saying they're not capable of such, nor doing such -- I'm just saying ... please, to all of you, be consistent. Either the government can, or it cannot, get its act together.
I wish I could point you to a good book on the subject. Date & Darwen are too theoretical, Celko is too tricksy. You're not an idiot, you're just ignorant, you don't need an idiot's guide; you want to come fully up to speed, no just get your feet wet, you don't need a "in 24 hours" book; you want to know how to use it, not every last option available, you don't want a "complete reference." Looking at the list of books on amazon, none stand out as useful. Maybe I'll just have to write it.
I'm trying to find out what book it was I (permanently) lent to a fellow programmer way-back; when I find out, I'll at least respond. I'm pretty sure it didn't cover "active database" features (triggers, procedures) though. I wish there were a good, database-agnostic way of teaching those, too (for the fundamentals).
Don't feel too bad.
In my experience, at least half of the programmers with degrees don't grok databases at all, and should never be given access to the database. It's not just SQL, either. Sure, they can muddle their way through a select, maybe a group-by, they might even attempt a few joins -- but they have absolutely no clue how to design a database properly, what NULL is for, what foreign keys are for, what cascade rules are for, what triggers are for, what views are for, what LEFT vs. RIGHT vs. INNER do (those are the ones they use -- they also have no idea about FULL OUTER, but luckily don't use it, except by accident, in an unqualified join). They're a terror upon the database, and should be kept out until tutored. And then you can teach them about transactions, isolation levels, connection pools, savepoints ... It's a whole new world to most programmers, even the ones who *think* they know databases. As far as they're concerned, what their database class taught them, databases are just blind repositories for data, a convenient replacement for some other datastructure like a list, vector, map, or set. Ugh. Maybe it's because they're taught all database systems are the same, and taught the absolute bare-minimum / common-denominator stuff. Maybe it's because they're taught file i/o first, and databases are an after-thought. I don't know why it's so rare to see anyone with a clue.
In an ideal world, identification (username) and authentication (password) would be separate. But that's not the case in the financial world. Every time you use a credit card or cheque, you're leaving behind a trail that contains either your credit card number and security code (if online), or your bank's routing number and your account number. Your one-time authorization for withdrawal has given away the keys to the kingdom! It's like social security numbers in that respect. Only a few services (Discover bank?) allow you to setup single-use identifiers that work around this problem without rebuilding the whole system from scratch. More should. If you need to setup recurring payments, you should be able to tell your bank who's going to be doing it, how often, for (about) how much, and get a number that a hacker could not reuse for some other purpose. (And while you're at it, you make it transportable, so you can redirect that number to your new bank account when you get tired of your old bank screwing up, without having to remember to notify everyone that your bank account number's changed.)
Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women, Study Finds
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
I'm curious: what kind of scaling / replication problem did you have?
Scaling: lots of connections, lots of tables, lots of requests, lots of data, ... ?
Replication: for sharding, for master / slave, for multi-site, for backups (incremental? hot?), ... ?
I ask because I haven't personally profiled FB vs. PG on any of those metrics, and they get enough less market share than other products to make finding such comparisons difficult.
Err ... teeth? As originally written, HIPAA did have fines, yes -- but only after they'd gone through a whole slap-on-the-wrist, many-strikes-you're-out process, to "help bring providers into compliance." So ... sure. Report them. And they'll get a nasty-gram telling them to please not do that again.
Just to wedge this in: Firebird users often feel the same way. Firebird 2.5 is now available as an official release candidate.
Yes, the database engine. Not the browser. *sigh*
Same in France, mostly because of Algerian terrorists (though I'm sure the ETA and Corsican separatists didn't help.) Military started patrolling public places -- the metro and government buildings, sure, but schools, too. Parking lots near sensitive buildings were blocked off -- I saw some parking spots individually disabled by large boulders. Trashcans were welded shut. In airports (and elsewhere, too, I would assume,) the bomb squad will approach a suspicious bag with a big dome, which they screw down around it, before exploding the bag -- that avoids having to move it off to a pit somewhere, which could trigger a motion sensor.