I have to disagree, Joe. Bits are easier to move than atoms, if there's connectivity; the advances in telecommunications that Friedman cites have created that connectivity. It is this development that enables many types of bit-moving knowledge work to be done globally, not cheap energy.
But, even if it was cheap energy, rising prices would only slow down globalization, not stop it. Rising oil prices in a market-driven global economy would only result in more dollars available for R&D into energy alternatives, driving more innovation and eventually solutions. Energy would continue to be available.
As recently as 2003, my wife and I were considering a move to Florida. She did the "beachhead" duty, moving to an apartment there first while I worked on putting the house up for sale.
At work, one of the first questions her coworkers had for her was where her apartment was. She asked why, and was told, "Oh, because there are places WE live, and places where THEY live. We just wanna make sure you rented in the right place."
College professors aren't supposed to be wishy-washy and neutral: the reason for tenure is to encourage them to have opinions, even strong ones. It's the interplay of multiple strong opinions, sometimes polar opposites, that makes the university experience useful.
That's why, for example, the University of California not only tolerated, but defended Angela Davis and her pro-Comummunist party views, despite the current "governator" being one Ronald Reagan.
So maybe he didn't say it very well. It's what he believes.
If your freedom is more important than anything else to you, that's fine.
To many other people, however, freedom (in the sense of what? being able to read the source code?) is not the only, or even the most valid business criterion for selecting a database platform.
Feature set, scalability, high availability, performance on large data sets, and availability of both vendor support and a pool of employees experienced in the software are other things that go into making a platform decision.
You can get similar performance out of a properly tweaked MySQL database...
Actually, no. He said in his post that he was primarily interested in geospatial data. Oracle's Spatial option is designed specifically for data like this.
Plus, geospatial data often means huge databases. Oracle's ability to scale is much higher than MySQL's.
The material on the site seems to be user-contributed and not vetted in any way for accuracy. People who think they're "da bomb" in network administration or databases, and who don't have a clue, are posting their opinions as fact.
Anyone who uses this site to prep for a test is setting themselves up to fail, IMO.
I had just joined the computer revolution circa 1976, not with the original MITS Altair 8080 but with a next generation clone of it. My first hangup was that I was all thumbs with a soldering iron, but the motherboard in those days was only a backplane: sockets, traces and a few resistors, nothing else. The CPU was on a card, like anything else.
Well, the S-100 bus was named that because it had 100 pins to the socket, and I had 22 sockets... do the math. I was having a serious anxiety attack.
Then a friend referred me to a local electronics assembly firm that had a wave soldering machine. I connected with the local manager and he put the motherboard and sockets into a metal frame and sent it down a conveyor belt. The underside of the board passed over something that looked like a waterfall of silvery molten lava, and in just a minute, there were 2200 immaculate solder connections (I think I had to touch up 2 of them when I got home)
I showed that board at the local computer club and everyone was just amazed!
Best part, I asked the manager what I owed him and he said nothing, it would cost the company more in paperwork that he would charge for 1 board.
If the academic presses were more progressive, they'd be collaborating with Google instead of fighting it.
One of the issues with using digital sources in research is verifying authenticity.
Imagine that after Google's search engine helps find the academic research you're looking for, you can make a small payment to have a digitally signed excerpt downloaded for local viewing or printing. The digital signature verifies that the content has not been altered anywhere during transmission, that it accurately reflects the original research.
The combination of convenience (excerpting just what you need, and being able to find it quickly) plus authenticity would be a boon to research and a potentially much larger revenue stream to the universities than hardcopy publishing, without restricting the openness of research.
I think that agility is the opposite of what we're driving for in a production system. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a codification of best practices for operating data centers. One of the key tenets is to control changes by a formal release management program: bundle the changes into a release, test the release, and migrate to the release.
The point is that production has to be reliable and stable between releases. Agile methodology is designed to create rapid change cycles, which to me seems to be the opposite goal.
Having said that, the trend toward virtualization and clustering may permit a more agile approach. Change one server in the cluster, validate, switchover, and do the other. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The one case where I can see putting a blog on a resume, is if it's professionally related and the traffic is a testimonial to others' opinions of your expertise. I know people with database-focused blogs that's be crazy not to list their blogs as credentials.
But then, they don't use their blog to wail and gnash their teeth about their personal lives, either.
I was in a situation years ago where I tried to reform from within, and thought I was making progress. In fact, the employer paid for a two day focus group with a representative sample of employees and a paid facilitator, held offsite. We poured our hearts into identifying what was broken and came up with some good suggestions for fixing it -- suggestions that in most cases would not have cost the employer much.
All of the recommendations but 1 (which was trivial) were rejected out of hand, with no explanations. I was gone two months later, after locating a new job first.
I just replaced my two-year-old cell phone with a Samsung A670, which has a camera. I was surprised to find that the sound effect of a shutter clicking, which happens every time you snap a picture, cannot be turned off even with the phone in silent mode. (You can change it to one of four other sounds, all more annoying than the original; but none of these five choices is "silent".)
I was wondering if this was an attempt at addressing privacy issues - people around you would know that you were taking pictures of them.
It's hard to draw the line sometimes as to where the government has a compelling interest in doing something, and where it should the the marketplace decide.
For example, in this case, the collection and archiving of weather data seems to be something it would be useful to do once. Having the government do it also protects against the volatility of companies that go out of business, taking their data with them.
But the publishing of the data on the web in various interesting ways might better be something that commercial enterprises could duke out for themselves in the market, competing to have the best analysis, friendliest interfaces, etc.
I don't think NOAA should try to become another weather.com; just make the raw data accessible for download via FTP or a very spartan-looking web page. Let companies decide what to do with it and how to add value.
"The idea is to use it as one of many ways to verify such sources. As was already posted in the thread, you could also pay a couple bucks to get a transcript of the original report. Libraries are another way to track down such info."
Good point. I've seen people find one web page with one news story, and trust it without doing further corroboration. (It's on the Internet, it must be true, right?)
But having found ONE article via the Internet, even if it's biased, makes it easier to research other sources. Instead of searching "hundreds of reels of microfilm," you know the date, you can go right to the same time period.
I'm most excited by the Google News and other aggregators, because when a story breaks you can see not only the US position (NY Times), but how other countries are reporting it.
I DO have kids. I just don't let them use chain saws unsupervised.
Or rather, I don't let them use chainsaws at all until a certain age. Then I use the chainsaw and let them watch and help. Then I let them use the chainsaw with me close at hand. Then I trust them to use the chainsaw by themselves.
A filter is not an excuse to let kids have access to an ADULT resource (adult in the grownup sense, not in the pr0n sense) in their rooms unsupervised any more than it would be to let them use power tools by themselves until they are of age. It creates a false sense of security and is an abdigation of parental responsibility, IMO.
Putting filtering on Linux doesn't make it better. Filtering still:
a) doesn't work. Kids who want pr0n will find it, or find a way to get around the filters; and b) creates and adversarial relationship between parent and child instead of a collaborative one.
Having parents set up their own filters instead of trusting an outside organization to do it for them almost GUARANTEES that the filters will not be effective. Who has time to be comprehensive on content, given the rate at which new sites are created? The only alternative is to trust some organization that does have the resources to do a more comprehensive job, and even then will not be complete.
The more serious issue is the loss of trust demonstrated by putting filtering software on the computer.
Compounding the problem is the vagueness of policies and incomplete training of personnel. My laptop gave a false positive for TNT a while back, so I had to submit to a secondary search at the security checkpoint. Besides proving that the laptop did indeed boot up, the police officer double-clicked on my trashcan to see what files were there, and checked the dropdown on my browser to see what recent links I had been to.
It didn't look like the officer was following any kind of script, was just nosy. But I was quite steamed about it at the time. (Good thing I had recently cleared both before packing the laptop!)
"In most cases, SBC companies would deploy Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) for new network builds, such as developing subdivisions. While well-suited for new construction, the cost, deployment time and customer inconvenience required for FTTP deployment in existing neighborhoods makes widespread deployment impractical for SBC companies and potentially undesirable for some customers.
In existing neighborhoods, SBC companies would use Fiber to the Node (FTTN) technology to run fiber much deeper in its network to nodes that serve 300 to 500 homes. "
I wonder if this will cause an increase in the demand for new housing in SBC areas, as early adopters and home-based-businesses "trade up" to a new house to get FTTP connectivity? Or will the speed basically be the same regardless, making the effect on real estate prices negligible.
There are many, many considerations beyond those you mentioned. The layout has to conform to fire codes, there should be some flexibility to accomodate changing "missions" of the space, and - woof! - the average person's color choices are seldom optimum.
This is a pricey investment. It's worth interviewing a few designers who specialize in office environments and choose one you feel comfortable with.
As another Seattle-ite, I can predict the results of your obesity study. Of course the city-dwellers will be more lean than the suburbians: natural selection will favor them in that environment. The fat city dwellers couldn't outrun the muggers, climb the hills, or squeeze through the narrow streets. All that would be left are the skinny ones! </tongueincheek>
Oracle's proprietary extension to SQL, PL/SQL, is based on Ada. Its "package" concept borrows the contract/implementation dichotomy. First the public interfaces to the package are declared in the PACKAGE object; then the implementation is defined in the matching PACKAGE BODY.
This enables procedures to be public in scope (present in both PACKAGE and PACKAGE BODY) or private in scope (present in PACKAGE BODY only). Other elements, such as user-defined data types, constants and cursor definitions, can be part of a package as well as procedures and functions. Overloading is supported by creating multiple definitions in the PACKAGE with different "signatures" (name plus calling sequence).
So, yes, this concept is being used every day, though not with the extensive rigor of SPARKS.
If you don't mind substituting one Evil Empire for another (complete with megalomaniacal CEO's), check out Oracle's proposed replacement for Exchange, called Oracle Collaboration Suite. It's centralized in the database, like Exchange will eventually be, so instead of removing virii from dozens of Exchange Servers world wide, you only clean one database. It supports Outlook client, mobile clients, and web-based as well.
"Bounce's chemical composition exactly matches that of a meteorite that hit the ground in Shergotty, India, on Aug. 25, 1865...NASA scientists are convinced Shergotty, EETA79001 and Bounce -- and maybe a couple dozen other Martian rocks that found their way to Earth -- were ejected from Mars by the impact of a large asteroid or comet."
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree, Joe. Bits are easier to move than atoms, if there's connectivity; the advances in telecommunications that Friedman cites have created that connectivity. It is this development that enables many types of bit-moving knowledge work to be done globally, not cheap energy.
But, even if it was cheap energy, rising prices would only slow down globalization, not stop it. Rising oil prices in a market-driven global economy would only result in more dollars available for R&D into energy alternatives, driving more innovation and eventually solutions. Energy would continue to be available.
...he's faster than a speeding bullet. Everybody has issues. :-)
As recently as 2003, my wife and I were considering a move to Florida. She did the "beachhead" duty, moving to an apartment there first while I worked on putting the house up for sale.
At work, one of the first questions her coworkers had for her was where her apartment was. She asked why, and was told, "Oh, because there are places WE live, and places where THEY live. We just wanna make sure you rented in the right place."
2000 - fricken - 3!
College professors aren't supposed to be wishy-washy and neutral: the reason for tenure is to encourage them to have opinions, even strong ones. It's the interplay of multiple strong opinions, sometimes polar opposites, that makes the university experience useful.
That's why, for example, the University of California not only tolerated, but defended Angela Davis and her pro-Comummunist party views, despite the current "governator" being one Ronald Reagan.
So maybe he didn't say it very well. It's what he believes.
If your freedom is more important than anything else to you, that's fine.
To many other people, however, freedom (in the sense of what? being able to read the source code?) is not the only, or even the most valid business criterion for selecting a database platform.
Feature set, scalability, high availability, performance on large data sets, and availability of both vendor support and a pool of employees experienced in the software are other things that go into making a platform decision.
Actually, no. He said in his post that he was primarily interested in geospatial data. Oracle's Spatial option is designed specifically for data like this.
Plus, geospatial data often means huge databases. Oracle's ability to scale is much higher than MySQL's.
The material on the site seems to be user-contributed and not vetted in any way for accuracy. People who think they're "da bomb" in network administration or databases, and who don't have a clue, are posting their opinions as fact.
Anyone who uses this site to prep for a test is setting themselves up to fail, IMO.
I had just joined the computer revolution circa 1976, not with the original MITS Altair 8080 but with a next generation clone of it. My first hangup was that I was all thumbs with a soldering iron, but the motherboard in those days was only a backplane: sockets, traces and a few resistors, nothing else. The CPU was on a card, like anything else.
Well, the S-100 bus was named that because it had 100 pins to the socket, and I had 22 sockets... do the math. I was having a serious anxiety attack.
Then a friend referred me to a local electronics assembly firm that had a wave soldering machine. I connected with the local manager and he put the motherboard and sockets into a metal frame and sent it down a conveyor belt. The underside of the board passed over something that looked like a waterfall of silvery molten lava, and in just a minute, there were 2200 immaculate solder connections (I think I had to touch up 2 of them when I got home)
I showed that board at the local computer club and everyone was just amazed!
Best part, I asked the manager what I owed him and he said nothing, it would cost the company more in paperwork that he would charge for 1 board.
In mainframe culture, that's called "best practices." :-)
If the academic presses were more progressive, they'd be collaborating with Google instead of fighting it.
One of the issues with using digital sources in research is verifying authenticity.
Imagine that after Google's search engine helps find the academic research you're looking for, you can make a small payment to have a digitally signed excerpt downloaded for local viewing or printing. The digital signature verifies that the content has not been altered anywhere during transmission, that it accurately reflects the original research.
The combination of convenience (excerpting just what you need, and being able to find it quickly) plus authenticity would be a boon to research and a potentially much larger revenue stream to the universities than hardcopy publishing, without restricting the openness of research.
delicate DBA shudder
I think that agility is the opposite of what we're driving for in a production system. The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a codification of best practices for operating data centers. One of the key tenets is to control changes by a formal release management program: bundle the changes into a release, test the release, and migrate to the release.
The point is that production has to be reliable and stable between releases. Agile methodology is designed to create rapid change cycles, which to me seems to be the opposite goal.
Having said that, the trend toward virtualization and clustering may permit a more agile approach. Change one server in the cluster, validate, switchover, and do the other. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The one case where I can see putting a blog on a resume, is if it's professionally related and the traffic is a testimonial to others' opinions of your expertise. I know people with database-focused blogs that's be crazy not to list their blogs as credentials.
But then, they don't use their blog to wail and gnash their teeth about their personal lives, either.
I was in a situation years ago where I tried to reform from within, and thought I was making progress. In fact, the employer paid for a two day focus group with a representative sample of employees and a paid facilitator, held offsite. We poured our hearts into identifying what was broken and came up with some good suggestions for fixing it -- suggestions that in most cases would not have cost the employer much.
All of the recommendations but 1 (which was trivial) were rejected out of hand, with no explanations. I was gone two months later, after locating a new job first.
I just replaced my two-year-old cell phone with a Samsung A670, which has a camera. I was surprised to find that the sound effect of a shutter clicking, which happens every time you snap a picture, cannot be turned off even with the phone in silent mode. (You can change it to one of four other sounds, all more annoying than the original; but none of these five choices is "silent".)
I was wondering if this was an attempt at addressing privacy issues - people around you would know that you were taking pictures of them.
It's hard to draw the line sometimes as to where the government has a compelling interest in doing something, and where it should the the marketplace decide.
For example, in this case, the collection and archiving of weather data seems to be something it would be useful to do once. Having the government do it also protects against the volatility of companies that go out of business, taking their data with them.
But the publishing of the data on the web in various interesting ways might better be something that commercial enterprises could duke out for themselves in the market, competing to have the best analysis, friendliest interfaces, etc.
I don't think NOAA should try to become another weather.com; just make the raw data accessible for download via FTP or a very spartan-looking web page. Let companies decide what to do with it and how to add value.
Good point. I've seen people find one web page with one news story, and trust it without doing further corroboration. (It's on the Internet, it must be true, right?)
But having found ONE article via the Internet, even if it's biased, makes it easier to research other sources. Instead of searching "hundreds of reels of microfilm," you know the date, you can go right to the same time period.
I'm most excited by the Google News and other aggregators, because when a story breaks you can see not only the US position (NY Times), but how other countries are reporting it.
I DO have kids. I just don't let them use chain saws unsupervised.
Or rather, I don't let them use chainsaws at all until a certain age. Then I use the chainsaw and let them watch and help. Then I let them use the chainsaw with me close at hand. Then I trust them to use the chainsaw by themselves.
A filter is not an excuse to let kids have access to an ADULT resource (adult in the grownup sense, not in the pr0n sense) in their rooms unsupervised any more than it would be to let them use power tools by themselves until they are of age. It creates a false sense of security and is an abdigation of parental responsibility, IMO.
Putting filtering on Linux doesn't make it better. Filtering still:
a) doesn't work. Kids who want pr0n will find it, or find a way to get around the filters; and
b) creates and adversarial relationship between parent and child instead of a collaborative one.
Having parents set up their own filters instead of trusting an outside organization to do it for them almost GUARANTEES that the filters will not be effective. Who has time to be comprehensive on content, given the rate at which new sites are created? The only alternative is to trust some organization that does have the resources to do a more comprehensive job, and even then will not be complete.
The more serious issue is the loss of trust demonstrated by putting filtering software on the computer.
Compounding the problem is the vagueness of policies and incomplete training of personnel. My laptop gave a false positive for TNT a while back, so I had to submit to a secondary search at the security checkpoint. Besides proving that the laptop did indeed boot up, the police officer double-clicked on my trashcan to see what files were there, and checked the dropdown on my browser to see what recent links I had been to.
It didn't look like the officer was following any kind of script, was just nosy. But I was quite steamed about it at the time. (Good thing I had recently cleared both before packing the laptop!)
I wonder if this will cause an increase in the demand for new housing in SBC areas, as early adopters and home-based-businesses "trade up" to a new house to get FTTP connectivity? Or will the speed basically be the same regardless, making the effect on real estate prices negligible.
There are many, many considerations beyond those you mentioned. The layout has to conform to fire codes, there should be some flexibility to accomodate changing "missions" of the space, and - woof! - the average person's color choices are seldom optimum.
This is a pricey investment. It's worth interviewing a few designers who specialize in office environments and choose one you feel comfortable with.
As another Seattle-ite, I can predict the results of your obesity study. Of course the city-dwellers will be more lean than the suburbians: natural selection will favor them in that environment. The fat city dwellers couldn't outrun the muggers, climb the hills, or squeeze through the narrow streets. All that would be left are the skinny ones!
</tongueincheek>
Oracle's proprietary extension to SQL, PL/SQL, is based on Ada. Its "package" concept borrows the contract/implementation dichotomy. First the public interfaces to the package are declared in the PACKAGE object; then the implementation is defined in the matching PACKAGE BODY.
This enables procedures to be public in scope (present in both PACKAGE and PACKAGE BODY) or private in scope (present in PACKAGE BODY only). Other elements, such as user-defined data types, constants and cursor definitions, can be part of a package as well as procedures and functions. Overloading is supported by creating multiple definitions in the PACKAGE with different "signatures" (name plus calling sequence).
So, yes, this concept is being used every day, though not with the extensive rigor of SPARKS.
If you don't mind substituting one Evil Empire for another (complete with megalomaniacal CEO's), check out Oracle's proposed replacement for Exchange, called Oracle Collaboration Suite. It's centralized in the database, like Exchange will eventually be, so instead of removing virii from dozens of Exchange Servers world wide, you only clean one database. It supports Outlook client, mobile clients, and web-based as well.