i agree, it's a fantastic database. i'm porting our ms-sql-server stuff to postgresql ATM.
...but it suffers from a shortcoming that many open source projects have - ease of use.
example: in mssql, i can alter a table definition that has views defined against it, and if the resulting set is still consistent with the dependent views, no problem. in postgresql, i have to *delete* all the views (and i believe some other objects) that depend on the table, alter the table, and then recreate the dependent objects. BIG hassle, especially while you're in the process of developing an application and the data definition changes.
also - and this is no fault of postgres, just pointing this out as an impediment to migration - there are several gotcha's getting MS-Access front ends to work with postgresql:
the handling of booleans is *weird*, and to fix it i had to define my own comparison operator in postgresql between booleans and integers (thanks google).
controls bound to "time" columns are also *weird* - they don't respect the "time" formatting applied to them, and they end up displaying as date+time when the control receives focus. unacceptable for the user to expect a time value and see today's date plus a time value.
it takes some configuring to get the odbc driver to get the data source to behave as Access expects it to.
i think it would aid uptake of postgres greatly if a little attention were paid to providing usable workarounds to these problems, and publicising them. there are a LOT of access front-ends in use in a lot of organizations with windows clients.
there are a couple others that escape me at the moment, but i think they mostly revolve around the flexibility of the schema, like the first example i gave.
...the warm glow of satisfaction spreads from my solar plexus to the extremities of my being... the knowledge that no matter how bizarrely and contrivedly the redmond monkeys dance and fling their crippled poo at the walls, it makes absolutely no difference to me.
thank you RMS, thank you linus, thank you to all the dear, magnificent people who have changed (and are changing) the world for the better.
According to Microsoft, this limitation 'helps [users] stay organized and reduces confusion.'"
this has surely resolved any confusion anyone may have had over the fact that microsoft are douchebags, and it sucks for someone else to have proprietary control over your software.
Re:Whats next for the maker of Doom, Quake and Wol
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Life After Doom
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· Score: 1
And John Romero had a HOT girlfriend.
fake tits and a half-assed "Friends" fashion rip-off do not make a "hot girlfriend", imho
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass and led instead of following.
i've always preferred the "get out of the way" option, leaving the followers and leaders to prance around in their little circle-jerks.
Re:The problem is with *who* the cams are on...
on
Judges Junk Jailcam
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· Score: 1
That's right, all you have to do to enter Arpaio's 'House of Cruelty and Being Treated as an Animal' is be arrested for a crime. The police could be wrong, which is not uncommon, but you've already been treated as if you were guilty by that bastard.
and it's a disgusting indictment of the human race that he's so popular with the imbeciles in his district.
Ask any inmate... they've all been unjustly accused, and are innocent.:rolleyes:
yeah, like those dozens/hundreds of damn bad guys who were just barely spared the death penalty after being cleared by DNA testing.
and those countless prisoners wrongly convicted of lesser crimes getting gang-raped on a regular basis because people like you are content to let innocent men suffer immeasurably just to satisfy your sick, abstract desire for revenge.
Perhaps the solution is to broadcast the cams vs. webcasting them. If more people knew what the conditions were like, they may change their minds about commiting a crime.
Taylor is fond of pointing out that the battle against Linux is an increasingly familiar one. "Before, Linux was this cloud we didn't get, now it is Red Hat, Novell, IBM. We know how to compete with companies. I was high-fiving everyone I could find when Novell bought [German Linux distributor] SuSe. We already won once against Novell."
the "cloud" is still there, my friend - and it's that that you're competing against; not IBM or Novell.
if they want to do anything but be a code monkey, they will need more than "Introduction to Calculus"
a lof of people would be glad to do anything but be a fry-station-monkey.
more options are better. some people don't have the discipline to spend four years learning about crap they have no interest in (cough-me-cough). the northface concept sounds like an excellent compromise.
The point of normal colleges is not entirely to produce a working machine, but to give people exposure to a variety of viewpoints and ideas.
i think you're wrong. that "well-roundedness" part is designed to provide the lubrication for the working machine. it's intended to provide a world-view context that makes you easier to get along with, less likely to start trouble, and put you on the same historical/psychological/behavioral/aesthetic plane as the other worker-bees with whom you work, and in whose midst you breed, consume, and produce.
i like the idea of compartmentalizing education. i'd rather spend two years concentrating on the skillset that i intend to employ professionally, and then, if i feel like it, educate myself on the other stuff.
true, it might make me less "employable" wrt "people skills" etc., but that's my problem. i don't think i'd like a job that depended heavily on that anyway, over the long run. just let me do my stuff and go home, without the water-cooler chit-chat and office politics.
"It was just yesterday that the IT experts of the city explained the strategic benefits of its Linux project to the city administrations of Augsburg and Nuremberg [two other Bavarian cities, Nuremberg is the 2nd largest one].
we can only hope and pray that when they start testing linux in nuremberg that they refer to it as "the nuremberg trials"! and of course, when the penguinistas show up to show their support, that they will be known as "the nuremberg rallies"!
my instinct is to put the logic in one place, and since i need that logic in the code, my preference is to centralize it there instead of duplicating it in the db. this extends even to operations that databases are traditionally used for, like aggregating data.
i'm quite unsure of myself about this, though. at the moment i'm working on a budgeting application, and both performance and productivity are becoming an issue.
example: to aggregate budgets over a time period, i retrieve the budget objects for each budget period individually, and accumulate the aggregate data in code. this takes quite a bit of extra coding, and execution time is quite slow, however; doing aggregation queries in the db would certainly give better performance, and it would be a lot easier to slap together some queries instead of writing all that code.
so, the way i look at it, it comes down to a question of science vs. engineering. the scientific impulse is to adhere to the theories of keeping logic in one place, and respecting the objects' ownership of their data. the engineering impulse is to use the technique which is faster and easier to implement.
i guess at heart i'm more of a scientist than an engineer.
i'd love to hear others' takes on this question, btw.
your threshold for cool is extremely low then. i would classify it as a mildly interesting hack in the implementation, but absolutely not patentable, for fuck's sake.
it's not LIKE OCR technology, it IS OCR technology, applied to a specific case. in other words, this is COMPLETELY obvious, and only an idiot would think that this truly qualifies as a PATENTABLE INVENTION.
the patent system quite plainly has become a tool of fascism, by its most fundamental definition. it's the power of the state used to exert socioeconomic control of the population to the benefit of large business interests. just like the nazis. just like fascist italy. and do NOT invoke godwin on me on this one.
That pretty much sums it up right there. Exactly what do these guys want? Being one of the largest, most proliferated company on the planet isn't enough, apparently.
Don't think this is freaky yet? Check out this article and realize the strategic use of patents in influencing a market. They have all the money to do this too, which is the scariest part. Patents aren't about protection any more, it's about CONTROL.
you fucking COMMUNIST. don't you realize that questioning the concentration of virtually unlimited power in the hands of huge corporations puts you in the same category as that godless red Stalin, who KILLED a bunch of people?
take your hippy class-warfare mentality somewhere else, like FRANCE!
And wow I was into some pretty kinky shit as a 12 year old.
you kids today are so spoiled by this internet thing. when I was 12, we had to FIND our porn, in the woods, faded and wet, and stained by a stranger's spooge.
Do i remember Cairo? How could I forget it. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on you, and my thoughts have been consumed by that moment ever since.
It was hot - the sun in the sky, and the Egyptian counterintelligence on the ground. Very hot indeed. Dust filled the bazaar, crowded with people and the scent of spices. The cameras around my neck (for show, of course) seemed to grow heavier throughout the day, and the perspiration threatened to show through my white linen suit.
I stopped by a stall and pretended to peruse the knives for sale, but under the horn-rimmed sunglasses, my eyes scanned the bazaar. I was worried - you were supposed to be here an hour
ago.
As I turned back into the crowd, I saw you. I will never forget that moment. Your face was mostly covered by the traditional dress of the region, but your eyes were glittering blue jewels that mesmerized me.
I stood unable to move for several seconds. Coming to my senses, I gave the pre-arranged signal: taking the hat from my head, I wiped my forehead and the back of my neck with a handkerchief, exposing the black widow spider design stitched into its corner.
Immediately, you relaxed, smiled with your eyes, turned, and walked into a dark, dusty doorway, and I followed after you.
And so I have followed you ever since. I tried to remain professional, but I was merely denying to myself what I already knew on that first day: I was doomed. It was a classic case of giving way to my heart, and in this business, that is the first step to giving away your life.
In the previous cell - the torture cell - there was nothing but blackness, and agony. Here, there is at least a crack in the ceiling. Light sometimes filters through the perpetual dust, and it falls across me during certain times of the day. In the dustbeams, I still see you. Even after everything, I see you every day, not knowing what thoughts hold court behind that beautiful, mysterious face.
The dysentery has left me quite weak, so I don't often move. There is no water here, and no food. But mostly it is the lack of water. That's what will get me in the end. I've been put here to die. In these final days, I don't think of the apple orchard in Indiana, or of my mother, or of the ice storm that trapped me in the mountains so many years ago. I think only of you, and the bazaar, and that moment I first met you. I think of... CAIRO.
Slashdot Mirror
you know what would look good? a presentation that conveys information INSTEAD OF LOOKING LIKE A FRUSTRATED PIXAR MOVIE.
example: in mssql, i can alter a table definition that has views defined against it, and if the resulting set is still consistent with the dependent views, no problem. in postgresql, i have to *delete* all the views (and i believe some other objects) that depend on the table, alter the table, and then recreate the dependent objects. BIG hassle, especially while you're in the process of developing an application and the data definition changes.
also - and this is no fault of postgres, just pointing this out as an impediment to migration - there are several gotcha's getting MS-Access front ends to work with postgresql:
- the handling of booleans is *weird*, and to fix it i had to define my own comparison operator in postgresql between booleans and integers (thanks google).
- controls bound to "time" columns are also *weird* - they don't respect the "time" formatting applied to them, and they end up displaying as date+time when the control receives focus. unacceptable for the user to expect a time value and see today's date plus a time value.
- it takes some configuring to get the odbc driver to get the data source to behave as Access expects it to.
i think it would aid uptake of postgres greatly if a little attention were paid to providing usable workarounds to these problems, and publicising them. there are a LOT of access front-ends in use in a lot of organizations with windows clients.there are a couple others that escape me at the moment, but i think they mostly revolve around the flexibility of the schema, like the first example i gave.
thank you RMS, thank you linus, thank you to all the dear, magnificent people who have changed (and are changing) the world for the better.
this has surely resolved any confusion anyone may have had over the fact that microsoft are douchebags, and it sucks for someone else to have proprietary control over your software.
fake tits and a half-assed "Friends" fashion rip-off do not make a "hot girlfriend", imho
they might have a long-range clue. this dilemma raises the issue of software patents in a stark way *now*, while policy is still being formed.
can you imagine trying to roll back software patents *after* they've been absorbed into the consciousness (and bottom line) of the german economy?
i've always preferred the "get out of the way" option, leaving the followers and leaders to prance around in their little circle-jerks.
and it's a disgusting indictment of the human race that he's so popular with the imbeciles in his district.
yeah, like those dozens/hundreds of damn bad guys who were just barely spared the death penalty after being cleared by DNA testing.
and those countless prisoners wrongly convicted of lesser crimes getting gang-raped on a regular basis because people like you are content to let innocent men suffer immeasurably just to satisfy your sick, abstract desire for revenge.
you're ignorant and simple.
the "cloud" is still there, my friend - and it's that that you're competing against; not IBM or Novell.
oh man, this is just priceless...
a lof of people would be glad to do anything but be a fry-station-monkey.
more options are better. some people don't have the discipline to spend four years learning about crap they have no interest in (cough-me-cough). the northface concept sounds like an excellent compromise.
i think you're wrong. that "well-roundedness" part is designed to provide the lubrication for the working machine. it's intended to provide a world-view context that makes you easier to get along with, less likely to start trouble, and put you on the same historical/psychological/behavioral/aesthetic plane as the other worker-bees with whom you work, and in whose midst you breed, consume, and produce.
i like the idea of compartmentalizing education. i'd rather spend two years concentrating on the skillset that i intend to employ professionally, and then, if i feel like it, educate myself on the other stuff.
true, it might make me less "employable" wrt "people skills" etc., but that's my problem. i don't think i'd like a job that depended heavily on that anyway, over the long run. just let me do my stuff and go home, without the water-cooler chit-chat and office politics.
we can only hope and pray that when they start testing linux in nuremberg that they refer to it as "the nuremberg trials"! and of course, when the penguinistas show up to show their support, that they will be known as "the nuremberg rallies"!
...i think i just heard ballmer come in his pants all the way over here on the east coast.
i liked it better the first time, when it was called java.
this wouldn't be a problem if the cio's, analysts, and architects would do their jobs correctly and design for platform independence to begin with.
i'm quite unsure of myself about this, though. at the moment i'm working on a budgeting application, and both performance and productivity are becoming an issue.
example: to aggregate budgets over a time period, i retrieve the budget objects for each budget period individually, and accumulate the aggregate data in code. this takes quite a bit of extra coding, and execution time is quite slow, however; doing aggregation queries in the db would certainly give better performance, and it would be a lot easier to slap together some queries instead of writing all that code.
so, the way i look at it, it comes down to a question of science vs. engineering. the scientific impulse is to adhere to the theories of keeping logic in one place, and respecting the objects' ownership of their data. the engineering impulse is to use the technique which is faster and easier to implement.
i guess at heart i'm more of a scientist than an engineer.
i'd love to hear others' takes on this question, btw.
your threshold for cool is extremely low then. i would classify it as a mildly interesting hack in the implementation, but absolutely not patentable, for fuck's sake.
[...]
It's like OCR technology.
it's not LIKE OCR technology, it IS OCR technology, applied to a specific case. in other words, this is COMPLETELY obvious, and only an idiot would think that this truly qualifies as a PATENTABLE INVENTION.
the patent system quite plainly has become a tool of fascism, by its most fundamental definition. it's the power of the state used to exert socioeconomic control of the population to the benefit of large business interests. just like the nazis. just like fascist italy. and do NOT invoke godwin on me on this one.
Don't think this is freaky yet? Check out this article and realize the strategic use of patents in influencing a market. They have all the money to do this too, which is the scariest part. Patents aren't about protection any more, it's about CONTROL.
you fucking COMMUNIST. don't you realize that questioning the concentration of virtually unlimited power in the hands of huge corporations puts you in the same category as that godless red Stalin, who KILLED a bunch of people?
take your hippy class-warfare mentality somewhere else, like FRANCE!
you kids today are so spoiled by this internet thing. when I was 12, we had to FIND our porn, in the woods, faded and wet, and stained by a stranger's spooge.
and even if it didn't - displaying photos by time on a calendar is a motherfucking INVENTION??
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP THE INSANITY!
Do i remember Cairo? How could I forget it. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on you, and my thoughts have been consumed by that moment ever since.
It was hot - the sun in the sky, and the Egyptian counterintelligence on the ground. Very hot indeed. Dust filled the bazaar, crowded with people and the scent of spices. The cameras around my neck (for show, of course) seemed to grow heavier throughout the day, and the perspiration threatened to show through my white linen suit.
I stopped by a stall and pretended to peruse the knives for sale, but under the horn-rimmed sunglasses, my eyes scanned the bazaar. I was worried - you were supposed to be here an hour ago.
As I turned back into the crowd, I saw you. I will never forget that moment. Your face was mostly covered by the traditional dress of the region, but your eyes were glittering blue jewels that mesmerized me.
I stood unable to move for several seconds. Coming to my senses, I gave the pre-arranged signal: taking the hat from my head, I wiped my forehead and the back of my neck with a handkerchief, exposing the black widow spider design stitched into its corner.
Immediately, you relaxed, smiled with your eyes, turned, and walked into a dark, dusty doorway, and I followed after you.
And so I have followed you ever since. I tried to remain professional, but I was merely denying to myself what I already knew on that first day: I was doomed. It was a classic case of giving way to my heart, and in this business, that is the first step to giving away your life.
In the previous cell - the torture cell - there was nothing but blackness, and agony. Here, there is at least a crack in the ceiling. Light sometimes filters through the perpetual dust, and it falls across me during certain times of the day. In the dustbeams, I still see you. Even after everything, I see you every day, not knowing what thoughts hold court behind that beautiful, mysterious face.
The dysentery has left me quite weak, so I don't often move. There is no water here, and no food. But mostly it is the lack of water. That's what will get me in the end. I've been put here to die. In these final days, I don't think of the apple orchard in Indiana, or of my mother, or of the ice storm that trapped me in the mountains so many years ago. I think only of you, and the bazaar, and that moment I first met you. I think of... CAIRO.