If you really want to claim that NULL is so much 'not a value' that you can't compare it to anything, then do it the man's way and throw a goddamn exception.
You have a select statement that returns 55000 NULLs. How would you field each one of those exceptions? How would you do it correctly?
You can compare numbers. Either A < B or A > B or A = B. If A < B and B &;t C then A < C. Fine, but did you ever hear of Complex Numbers?
SQL NULLs are the worst thing since unslicable bread. They break boolean logic.
It's boolean logic that's broken. More exactly, inapplicable. If the presence of any unknown makes it impossible to represent everything that is known, you've got some serious problems. The real world is rather more complicated than a trite boolean logic world.
This request to define things in the article text is asked time, and time, and time again.
And the definitions are in the commentary. This has the advantage of not biasing the whole thing with somebody's marketing-driven hype. This is part of what makes Slashdot Slashdot.
Programming commercial software must: - Focus on maximizing the feature list and on marketing demands - Protect their intellectual property by providing API's instead of file formats.
Programming Open Source means: - Make sure that the features in the system actually work as intended. - Exploit synergistic effects with other software (interoperability, using the code, piping etc.) - Use well defined file formats instead of APIs.
That looks an awful lot like the distinction between a seller's market and a buyer's market, where the seller's market has been artificially contrived. The problem with APIs is that even with the best of intentions, they are erroneous inconsistent and incomplete. The customer's data, which presumably the customer owns, is stored in a format. It is not stored in an API.
When things go bump in the night, file formats will save your miserable hide, APIs will skin you alive. Notice how Knoppix is essential as a Windows rescue disk. The vendor's rescue disk is usually guaranteed to destroy all of your data.
A paradigm shift is like a mountain, not like a molehill, Microsoft's ads notwithstanding.
Methinks the paradigm shift occurs when big business discovers that it is suicidal not to pay big bucks for free software. There's more money that is lost because your customers and suppliers (and your competitors) cannot interoperate with your expensive software than would be gained from selling software that would interoperate with said expensive software. The paradigm shift is not all that new. Big oil funds the American Petroleum Institute, each thing funded generally benefits the competitors of the fundor as much as the fundor itself. IBM dumps a lot of money into Linux, where the direct beneficiaries are more like RedHat or SuSE. IBM claims they more than get their money back. I'm very sure they do, but have no idea how they measure it.
Methinks the next big market has to do with the supply chain, a chain with more than two links.
The efficiencies of every step have to be multiplied together to calculate the overall system efficiency.
True, sort of, but drawing unwarranted and false conclusions from it. Apply the same argument to low-grade ore being turned into gold. You care a lot more about the efficiencies of the final product than those of the raw materials.
One thing about space and sunlight in space, there's a lot of both. Converting sunlight into useable energy in space doesn't need to be particularly efficient. If nothing else, just put up reflectors and beam the concentrated sunlight to an earth-based facility.
And bugs were simply not accepted - the project wasn't done until the bugs were corrected.
I'm guessing blind here, but I'd bet I'm accurate. Your mother wouldn't consider hiding a bug under the carpet to keep her perfect record. There's a bug. It isn't your bug versus my bug. Regardless, it's our bug. Shifting the blame elsewhere is not acceptable behavior. Communication is always a problem. You open all available communication channels and trust and rely on them as little as possible. I've found that it is impossible for anyone to say exactly what they mean. Add to that the impossibility of accurately understanding what anyone else says.
A generic install of Windows XP or one with SP1 didn't appear to work. Odd.
The security updates are so you can run the latest versions of malware. If you can get the lemmings trained to always install the latest updates, it's possible to introduce holes where no holes existed before. Seems that there was some crack team that couldn't find anything in an IBM mainframe installation. Finally they got some IBM stationary and left behind an innocent looking "PTF". That worked. Updates, especially security updates, should always be viewed with extreme suspicion. Otherwise, you might have been secure, but you can be made insecure.
I remember seeing concepts for the first time as a math grad student while those same concepts were being introduced to third-graders in the "new math".
The concepts do matter. I still remember 3 or 4 of us grad students went "slumming" to an Advanced Calculus class. Sat in the back and kept our mouths shut. The class and the prof were struggling with great difficulty with something. There was a much easier way, but it required some good basic point-set topology. We kept our traps shut. There was nothing productive we could do or say. Continuity is "defined" in terms of epsilons and deltas, ie in a metric space. However, continuity is very fundamental and applies to spaces which are not metrizable. There are topological spaces that are called pathological with very good reason.
if you want an indexed file system, MySQL is the way to go. Many times that's exactly what you really want.
Take a typical MySQL table (MyISAM) and try doing lots of concurrent reads and writes. You'll find that MySQL's habit of locking the entire table on writes really is a downer when it comes to performance. MySQL has a habit of always saying how long it took to do a query. This isn't bragging. It's telling you how long it had things tied up. As long as everything fits into the available time, MySQL will work beautifully. Try to do too much at the same time and you get a traffic jam, just like with real traffic. Slow readers and fast updates means you want to use something else.
Overall, methinks progress is actually made, even though it's about 5 visible steps forward and 4 invisible steps backwards.
I'm old enough to remember when college physics was strictly a sophomore course with calculus as a co-requisite. Reason being that a year of college level math was required prior to attempting calculus. Nowadays, high schools are offering pre-calc and even calculus, so there is at least some improvement, at least in some areas.
How did the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids. They were essentially as intelligent as we are and with fewer or at least different distractions. Lots of good stuff has been lost.
I wouldn't even consider moving business mails onto ANY of the free providers, thats just suicidal, but for personal mails google just wipes the floor with everything else out there.
Hmmmm, a paid gmail for business mails. Sounds very useful and promising.
Considering it's the pop-music scene, probably more the case that each generation of teenagers is seeking its identity, something unique to them. Pop music fits the bill nicely since it wasn't in existence last year. Doing better than last year's is a losing proposition, it has to find some way, any way, to be different. The cure of course is for the current generation's "in" crowd to decide that pop music isn't hip (however the current generation now spells it) any more. If they realize that they are being played for a sucker by the RIAA et al, just might happen.
But I really have to take exception with the whole notion that Linux is only protected by its relative scarcity of use. The detailed forensic analyses of Linux worms, contrasted with detailed forensics of Windows worms
Now there's an unfair comparison.
detailed forensic analyses of Linux worms By rank amateurs it will be ripped apart, workarounds found and ways to stop it. Then the pros get to finish it off, assuming anything is left.
detailed forensics of Windows worms Praytell, how? The pros will accomplish something of course, probably less than the rabble messing with the Linux worms.
For a man-in-the-middle attack to occur, another computer would have to be placed between the user's computer and windowsupdate, and intercept or alter all communications.
And you are perfectly safe so long as any of your communications avoid the man-in-the-middle?
You have to go from point A to point B. Somewhere in the middle you have to ask my agent for directions. At a time of my chosing, my agent will misdirect you. What else would you call this scenario?
Who in the right mind would provide information about their business, let alone anything concrete?
Google is in the information business. They understand information and what conclusions can and will be inferred. Their C*O people don't blab to satisfy someone's idle curiosity about seemingly benign questions. As a guess, Google has, does, and will continue to reveal what makes them number one. But they do so on their own timing. You've listed what's probably the main one, "no evil software". That's just a public statement of existing policy.
My guess would be that this is another elegant marketing trick playing the good guy And if they are the good guy,... Actually methinks they are in a position where they can be and it is very much in their long term interests to actually be the good guy.
What makes Slashdot is its clientele, its commenters, readers and lurkers. The format, software and editors are important of course, which stories and when has an extreme effect on what is the current "in" subject. But I suspect there's many like me. A quick glance at the headlines and on to the comments.
Plus, Slashdot gets to "brand" websites with it's look, feel, and system. No matter how much you skin slashcode, it still feels like slashdot in the end, even if it wasn't intentional. The world-view and priorities affect many "minor" decisions in the coding. The net effect is pervasive and tends to dominate minor things like coding style and programming language. The effects survive multiple generations of hardware and software. Imagine the screams of agony if you could impose IBM's ERP systems on Sun or Sun's ERP systems on IBM. Imagine the disaster if you don't put your best people into implementing SAP. There's too much that is and has to be taken for granted that cannot be taken for granted.
from another response, "implementing the google algorithm inside mysql" Hmmm, could be very interesting. One things about "real" relationational databases has always annoyed me. What do you do when the existing available information is inconsistent? Sure, you can make everything consistent, but only by destroying information, likely critical existing information.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want to claim that NULL is so much 'not a value' that you can't compare it to anything, then do it the man's way and throw a goddamn exception.
You have a select statement that returns 55000 NULLs.
How would you field each one of those exceptions?
How would you do it correctly?
You can compare numbers.
Either A < B or A > B or A = B.
If A < B and B &;t C then A < C.
Fine, but did you ever hear of Complex Numbers?
SQL NULLs are the worst thing since unslicable bread. They break boolean logic.
It's boolean logic that's broken.
More exactly, inapplicable.
If the presence of any unknown makes it impossible to represent everything that is known, you've got some serious problems.
The real world is rather more complicated than a trite boolean logic world.
This request to define things in the article text is asked time, and time, and time again.
And the definitions are in the commentary.
This has the advantage of not biasing the whole thing with somebody's marketing-driven hype. This is part of what makes Slashdot Slashdot.
That looks an awful lot like the distinction between a seller's market and a buyer's market, where the seller's market has been artificially contrived.
The problem with APIs is that even with the best of intentions, they are erroneous inconsistent and incomplete.
The customer's data, which presumably the customer owns, is stored in a format. It is not stored in an API.
When things go bump in the night, file formats will save your miserable hide, APIs will skin you alive. Notice how Knoppix is essential as a Windows rescue disk. The vendor's rescue disk is usually guaranteed to destroy all of your data.
At this point, we will have a paradigm shift.
A paradigm shift is like a mountain, not like a molehill, Microsoft's ads notwithstanding.
Methinks the paradigm shift occurs when big business discovers that it is suicidal not to pay big bucks for free software. There's more money that is lost because your customers and suppliers (and your competitors) cannot interoperate with your expensive software than would be gained from selling software that would interoperate with said expensive software. The paradigm shift is not all that new. Big oil funds the American Petroleum Institute, each thing funded generally benefits the competitors of the fundor as much as the fundor itself. IBM dumps a lot of money into Linux, where the direct beneficiaries are more like RedHat or SuSE. IBM claims they more than get their money back. I'm very sure they do, but have no idea how they measure it.
Methinks the next big market has to do with the supply chain, a chain with more than two links.
The efficiencies of every step have to be multiplied together to calculate the overall system efficiency.
True, sort of, but drawing unwarranted and false conclusions from it.
Apply the same argument to low-grade ore being turned into gold. You care a lot more about the efficiencies of the final product than those of the raw materials.
One thing about space and sunlight in space, there's a lot of both. Converting sunlight into useable energy in space doesn't need to be particularly efficient. If nothing else, just put up reflectors and beam the concentrated sunlight to an earth-based facility.
Recipient" means anyone who receives the Program under this Agreement, including all Contributors.
The new Microsoftspeak?
Sounds substantially more "viral" than the GPL.
My point was that the fact something crashes doesn't make it more or less stable,
Now there's a strange idea of "stable".
And bugs were simply not accepted - the project wasn't done until the bugs were corrected.
I'm guessing blind here, but I'd bet I'm accurate.
Your mother wouldn't consider hiding a bug under the carpet to keep her perfect record.
There's a bug. It isn't your bug versus my bug. Regardless, it's our bug. Shifting the blame elsewhere is not acceptable behavior.
Communication is always a problem. You open all available communication channels and trust and rely on them as little as possible. I've found that it is impossible for anyone to say exactly what they mean. Add to that the impossibility of accurately understanding what anyone else says.
A generic install of Windows XP or one with SP1 didn't appear to work. Odd.
The security updates are so you can run the latest versions of malware.
If you can get the lemmings trained to always install the latest updates, it's possible to introduce holes where no holes existed before. Seems that there was some crack team that couldn't find anything in an IBM mainframe installation. Finally they got some IBM stationary and left behind an innocent looking "PTF". That worked.
Updates, especially security updates, should always be viewed with extreme suspicion. Otherwise, you might have been secure, but you can be made insecure.
Ancient.
I remember seeing concepts for the first time as a math grad student while those same concepts were being introduced to third-graders in the "new math".
The concepts do matter. I still remember 3 or 4 of us grad students went "slumming" to an Advanced Calculus class. Sat in the back and kept our mouths shut. The class and the prof were struggling with great difficulty with something. There was a much easier way, but it required some good basic point-set topology. We kept our traps shut. There was nothing productive we could do or say. Continuity is "defined" in terms of epsilons and deltas, ie in a metric space. However, continuity is very fundamental and applies to spaces which are not metrizable. There are topological spaces that are called pathological with very good reason.
if you want an indexed file system, MySQL is the way to go.
Many times that's exactly what you really want.
Take a typical MySQL table (MyISAM) and try doing lots of concurrent reads and writes. You'll find that MySQL's habit of locking the entire table on writes really is a downer when it comes to performance.
MySQL has a habit of always saying how long it took to do a query. This isn't bragging. It's telling you how long it had things tied up. As long as everything fits into the available time, MySQL will work beautifully. Try to do too much at the same time and you get a traffic jam, just like with real traffic. Slow readers and fast updates means you want to use something else.
Win some. Lose some.
Overall, methinks progress is actually made, even though it's about 5 visible steps forward and 4 invisible steps backwards.
I'm old enough to remember when college physics was strictly a sophomore course with calculus as a co-requisite. Reason being that a year of college level math was required prior to attempting calculus. Nowadays, high schools are offering pre-calc and even calculus, so there is at least some improvement, at least in some areas.
How did the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids. They were essentially as intelligent as we are and with fewer or at least different distractions. Lots of good stuff has been lost.
He theorizes something that already exists!
Caveman makes a wheel is not equivalent to owning a Ferrari.
The devil is in the details and we don't yet have a good feel even for what they are. Skunkworks unk-unk category.
I wouldn't even consider moving business mails onto ANY of the free providers, thats just suicidal, but for personal mails google just wipes the floor with everything else out there.
Hmmmm, a paid gmail for business mails. Sounds very useful and promising.
fractionalization of the American culture
Considering it's the pop-music scene, probably more the case that each generation of teenagers is seeking its identity, something unique to them. Pop music fits the bill nicely since it wasn't in existence last year. Doing better than last year's is a losing proposition, it has to find some way, any way, to be different. The cure of course is for the current generation's "in" crowd to decide that pop music isn't hip (however the current generation now spells it) any more. If they realize that they are being played for a sucker by the RIAA et al, just might happen.
It must be good stuff, it was on the Billboard! [Emphasis added]
Unless teenagers have changed drastically in the last 40+ years, last year's hits are this years garbage. Kinda like last year's high fashion.
Prey is what carnivores eat. To pray is to beg, as here you are begging them to explain.
Begging?
Nah, that was a predator's comment, with a bit of poetic license.
Surprisingly effective.
But I really have to take exception with the whole notion that Linux is only protected by its relative scarcity of use. The detailed forensic analyses of Linux worms, contrasted with detailed forensics of Windows worms
Now there's an unfair comparison.
detailed forensic analyses of Linux worms
By rank amateurs it will be ripped apart, workarounds found and ways to stop it.
Then the pros get to finish it off, assuming anything is left.
detailed forensics of Windows worms
Praytell, how?
The pros will accomplish something of course, probably less than the rabble messing with the Linux worms.
For a man-in-the-middle attack to occur, another computer would have to be placed between the user's computer and windowsupdate, and intercept or alter all communications.
And you are perfectly safe so long as any of your communications avoid the man-in-the-middle?
You have to go from point A to point B. Somewhere in the middle you have to ask my agent for directions. At a time of my chosing, my agent will misdirect you. What else would you call this scenario?
"Damned if they do, Damned if they don't."
Precisely.
So your complaining that when you tried to use windows update, your machine contacted windowsupdate.microsoft.com? I'm confused.
Yes, a man-in-the-middle attack is confusing.
Who in the right mind would provide information about their business, let alone anything concrete?
...
Google is in the information business. They understand information and what conclusions can and will be inferred. Their C*O people don't blab to satisfy someone's idle curiosity about seemingly benign questions. As a guess, Google has, does, and will continue to reveal what makes them number one. But they do so on their own timing. You've listed what's probably the main one, "no evil software". That's just a public statement of existing policy.
My guess would be that this is another elegant marketing trick playing the good guy
And if they are the good guy,
Actually methinks they are in a position where they can be and it is very much in their long term interests to actually be the good guy.
What makes Slashdot is its clientele, its commenters, readers and lurkers. The format, software and editors are important of course, which stories and when has an extreme effect on what is the current "in" subject. But I suspect there's many like me. A quick glance at the headlines and on to the comments.
Plus, Slashdot gets to "brand" websites with it's look, feel, and system.
No matter how much you skin slashcode, it still feels like slashdot in the end, even if it wasn't intentional.
The world-view and priorities affect many "minor" decisions in the coding. The net effect is pervasive and tends to dominate minor things like coding style and programming language. The effects survive multiple generations of hardware and software. Imagine the screams of agony if you could impose IBM's ERP systems on Sun or Sun's ERP systems on IBM. Imagine the disaster if you don't put your best people into implementing SAP. There's too much that is and has to be taken for granted that cannot be taken for granted.
from another response, "implementing the google algorithm inside mysql"
Hmmm, could be very interesting.
One things about "real" relationational databases has always annoyed me. What do you do when the existing available information is inconsistent? Sure, you can make everything consistent, but only by destroying information, likely critical existing information.