I've wondered how long it would be before games would figure out that they're really a platform.... You wait, the mailer is next. Then of course, we'll need a browser (Mozilla makes both easy) and then you will need to have the ability to change your IP filtering rules while in-game.... Next thing you know it'll be QuakeOS service pack 10 with the Web server built into the chain gun.
There are a number of sites that I only view in Mozilla, because the experience is much smoother there (aint-it-cool-news is a good example, as their talkback is so badly put together that if your browser doesn't incrementally render tables, you're doomed to wait minutes). Obviously I'll have to view this particular page in Mozilla...;-)
I find myself asking quite often, "why is Python specifically a Perl rival and visa versa?" In other words, why do the two sets of language advocates spend so much time talking to eachother in heated tones?
I think it comes down to two different ways that people think and create. Those (like me) who find Perl to be intuitive and graceful are the people who picture a large working system, and then dive down to the lowest level of detail to begin implimenting it in a sort of fugue, where many small details may intersect and become larger modules.
Python programmers appear to me to be people who see a large system as a collection of modules (or objects) from the start and who will then begin to impliment those modules in a relatively serial fashion.
Does this mean that one is better than the other? Of course not, but I do think that having a language that addresses both sets of people is either a challenge of a higher order than the already herculean task of writing a good programming language, or is impossible. Once you get past the simple arguments of white space vs. dollar signs, you Python and Perl are not that different. I would cite the following ways in which they do differ a strengths and weaknesses of BOTH languages:
Python must reserve words for the language from the variable and function namespace. This means that in Python you are not free to choose the variable names you might want. On the other hand, in Perl, you can use $while as a variable, and that can be syntactically confusing.
Python has well-integrated, firmly define objects as a core piece of the language. Perl's loose object definition means that you have more work to do (hence, not everthing is or needs to be an object in Perl), but the flexibility to impliment an object the way you need to is greater.
Perl integrates regular expressions as a core language feature, making them available in such ways as "split/\s+,/, $string". This adds the often complex and difficult to read regular expression syntax to more Perl code than in any other language (with the exceptions of sed and awk). Python ends up being much more visually attractive, but the limitations in quoting and escaping (e.g. There's Only One Way To Do It) and the extra object syntax tends to push people away from using the power of regex (or re) to it's fullest. (also, nothing matches the ease of subexpression handling in Perl regex, but that too tends to lead to difficulty in reading)
I suppose the difference in typing strategies is a big one, but each has their advantages and drawbacks.
Overall, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what the other camp wants and is doing....
Unix is not a platform of innovation.
Take the biggest development in all software markets in the last five years: the internet.
Unix was a platform for Internet innovation 15 years ago, and Web innovation 8 years ago. What Internet innovations would you be refering to IN THE LAST 5 YEARS? EMACS 21.20030341458587? NcFTP? All of the really cutting edge work (Apache's sub-projects, IPv6, component development models, high end filesystems, etc) are all either being developed as cross-platform projects that UNIX is only one target for, or UNIX (and Linux) are playing catch-up on (e.g. journaling filesystems).
Why put a comment next to it? Why not in the regexp?
s{ < (?# Match the beginning of the tag) (?!$okay_tags) (?# Match all non-ok tags) .* (?# Match anything after them) ?> (?# But only until the first >) }{}gxi;
I loved screamers for the fact that it kept PKD's story basically intact (having had to change the political landscape and put it further in the future because the real world did not turn out to be as PKD had written). If you didn't like the movie, you would likely not have liked the short story ("Second Variety"). Personally I thought that it made a fine SF/Horror movie. I hated the ending, but what can you do, it's Hollywood.
I certainly liked Total Recall better as a stand-alone movie, but when it comes to keeping Dick's vision intact, Screamers wins hands down (hell, there wasn't even a bad guy in "We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale").
What did you think of other SF/Horror films? Do you dislike the genere? Do you only enjoy the ones with big budgets? Or, was there something in this film that bothered you particularly?
What exactly is being kept atomic, if not an ordered set of accesses?
From the MySQL site:
" It only means that you can be sure that while each specific update is running no other user can interfere with it and that there will never be an automatic rollback (which can happen on transaction based systems if you are not very careful). MySQL also guarantees that there will not be any dirty reads."
What it really comes down to, is MySQL is a much lower level database than, say, Sybase. Sybase gives you a lot of high level tools for doing in-database programming. MySQL sacrifices this for speed, and thus you actually have to understand what you're doing in order to program for it correctly. If you do know what you're doing, there really isn't any end-result that you cannot achieve (including arbitrary levels of data integrity).
The question is very simillar to: do you want to code in Java or C? Java provides all sorts of safety mechanisms so that stupid programmers don't write elevator control programs that turn the brakes off and drop the cable. C is fast enough to write large systems in and still have them respond in faster-than-geologic time. Same goes for high level databases and MySQL. MySQL gives you plenty of really nice rope with which nearly any knot can be tied, including a hangman's noose. C compilers also tend to be a hell of a lot easier to install and maintain than a Java VM/RTE, which makes the comparison even more accurate.
I see a lot of standard "I don't like Perl 'cause it's ugly" and "Perl is line noise" sort of comments that I've been seeing since before anyone had ever heard of the language (back in '91). The following links are places that y'all should prowl before trying to discuss what perl "should be". You certainly don't have to like the language, but before discussing the things that make the language usable you should understand what it's TRYING to do.
I just want to point out the insanity of this letter. It begins and ends with statements to the effect of, "you can't distribute this message because it's Apple confidential."
Am I missing something, or is that totally unsupportable? After all, the recipient has not asked for this letter. They have not signed a non-disclosure with Apple. What the hell gives Apple the right to restrict distribution of this letter? I can see claiming copyright over the contents, but fair use does allow for reproducing small sections or paraphrasing and summarizing.
Of course, what appears here is neither small sections nor a summary.... Oh, and for those in the cheap seats: I am not a professional. Don't try this at home.
Interestingly forward comments. I have to agree that legality or not, discussion of matters that do not directly impact national security and do not directly harm others should be protected by the first ammendment. I think, in the long run, this is a hollow bill. I really don't think that it would pass the first constitutional challenge, and the ACLU would be all over it like blue on a cop.
I do want to say something about the anti-drug fervor in this country, though. I agree strongly with the current practice of removing smoking from public places. I agree strongly with drunk-driving laws. I feel that people should have to go through competency testing if their job has a chance of taking my life in their hands.
However, the horrors of controled substances mostly come from three sources:
1. Economic disputes among distributors are not resolvable in the courts. Thus, the drive-by-shooting. You saw it during prohabition, and now you're seeing it in the drug war. No suprise.
2. Lack of education or addiction treatment and fear of persecution lead to a lot of unnecessary harm and even death. Every time someone dies of an overdose I blame the War On Drug(user)s. This is not wholy true; some of these people would have died anyway, but it's true far too often. If you want to see how bad drug education in this country is, go around asking people if LSD is addictive. I bet over half say yes....
3. Stupidity. Honestly, let's just come right out and say it: alcohol abuse kills. More people die every year as a result of drunk driving than all of the heroin overdoses combined. Why? Because there are people out there who don't value life, and alcohol makes them even less likely to think about consequences. This is a reason to censure, restrict and in some cases lock these people up, but not to bring back prohabition. I want my Tequila, dammit, because it's one of the coolest tasting things ever. If you take it away, I will find a Mexican source and smuggle it in.
The moral of the story is that making a substance illegal does one and only one thing: it creates an illegal industry out of the manufacture and distribution of that substance. That industry will have all of the problems associated with it that every illegal industry has since societies were first formed.
In order to avoid this, you put tight controls on the use of the substance (e.g. what Holland has done with hemp and several other substances). You control how, when and where the substance is used, but you ALLOW IT TO BE USED LEGALLY. If you do this, you suddenly take CONTROL over the substance. You can regulate and tax the industry. You can require that it not be used in certain places and industries. You can even let doctors perscribe it when they feel it's neccesary (60 minutes had a great feature once about a doctor that lost his license for perscribing large doses of opiates and other narcottics. When the revoked his license, his patients, who were not addicted to the drugs, but needed them in order to avoid chronic pain were now unable to get the medication that they needed, and one even commited suicide rather than deal with the pain again).
Here's something that I proposed earlier, but it got lost in the noise.
Simply run a web site that indexes files (of any sort) by size and MD5 checksum (perhaps of the first 1K and then of the whole file). Then, you modify an gnutella client so that it can interact with the web browser (via plugin) and retrieve the name, MD5 and length of the file you want and then download it. The wonderful part is that now you have a reliable way to index, so you can begin REVIEWING.
Reviewed content really is the way to go. Let's say, for example, that what I really want is cat pictures. I come across a file called "pussy5.jpg". Do I download it? Even if it's not junk, it's probably not what I was looking for. Instead, what you do is search through a Web site that indexes by content type and find the best-reviewed files. Thus, I safely discover that pussy5.jpg is in fact EXACTLY what I want, but that cat-stretch.gif is most certainly NOT.
The even better tactic is to replace plain files with "gnutella-format", which would be a predefined sequence of mime encapsulations. The payload is in the last enclosure, but previous enclosures could contain all sorts of useful info including description, author, distributor, copyright info, etc. Also, it would be nice if gnutella clients that are SERVING a file allow for searches based on MD5 checksum (which would require pre-computing the checksums on start-up, but if you do it in a lazy fashion, that's not too bad).
Someone wanna start the world's most popular Web site? You could even act on behalf of the recording industry by marking which files are known copyright violations so that offending clients could semi-automatically scan for them in their caches and delete them. If clients choose not to do this, then it's clearly on the head of the recording industry to go chase them down and prosecute, but you've done your duty for kink and country.
An indexed, colated, reviewed gnutella is definitely the way of the future.
Here's an article that explains why mySQL is not a real RDBMS since it's support for transactions are lacking.
This is just wrong. Not all RDBMS' are ACID, thus MySQL is an RDBMS, but it is not ACID. Of course, if you have a look at the MySQL site, there's some good commentary on why transactions are not required in the general case, and specifically are not included in MySQL. What it comes down to, is the ACID definition makes an assumption: atomicity is required in RDBMS' (I don't agree, but am willing to concede that it's required for most RDBMS applications), and transactions are the correct path to atomicity.
This latter assumption is argued against by MySQL. MySQL supports atomicity without transactions. This flies in the face of traditional RDBMS dogma, which certainly does piss a lot of people off. But, in the final analysis, what did you need transactions for? Sure, I can come up with the pathalogical case, and that's when you use Sybase or Oracle or PostgreSQL or any other transactional RDBMS. On the other hand, for 99.9% of the cases, atomicity is sufficient and for about half of those, more that sufficient.
Please, don't try to get people to believe that transactions are required in order to a) be an RDBMS or b) meet the needs of business. It's really very confusing to most people and totally unrequired. What's more, I find that the following things are required in most circumstances, and very few products besides MySQL supply them:
Ease of installation (under Red Hat Linux, the MySQL install consists of downloading 3 files and typing "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" Compare this to the ultra-frustrating pseudo-user-interface of the Oracle install. Even PostgreSQL was a major pain to install (though nothing comes close to Oracle).
Ease of administration. MySQL keeps each table as several on-disk files. This means that if you want to move the indexes for a particular table to another disk, you type:
Good tools. MySQL comes with a simple command-line SQL program, and just to point out the value of MySQL by a single example, this tool has command-line history and editing (through the readline library) as well as tablename completion. Why does Oracle's sqlplus (or sqlminus, as I prefer to call it) still not have this?
Speed. This is really the killer. MySQL is the fastest database out there. Except in some very pathalogical cases, MySQL is general 2-10 times faster than other databases for given operations.
The real question is: why are we still having this debate? If you're running an open source-fiendly environement, you should be using PostgreSQL or MySQL. Look at the features of both and decide what makes sense for you. In most cases, I think that choice should be MySQL, but hey, the right tool for the job should always be the top concern.
Of course, the unicorn and the number of replicants were big hints, but there are two larger ones.
Most obvious is the other blade runner's last line "You've done a man's job, sir." I think that one speaks for itself.
Also, a strong point is made of always showing replicants (even animals) at some point or another with red-eye (a lens-generated optical illusion where the color of the retina is brought out by a combination of angle and lighting, common in flash-photography). Deckard is the only "human" that we see this effect on....
I was so pissed about this film. The studio decided that it was a bomb because the test audience didn't get it. Instead of requiring that it be butchered, they could have clued into the fact that it was perfect for the college audience (probably the only people in the audience who walked away saying "wow") and marketed it heavily. It came out the same week as E.T., which could have been perfect. Instead of letting it get drowned in E.T.'s wake, it could have been played up as the dark underdog, which would have had the mid-80s fuck-authority types flocking to this film. As it stands everyone that I know who was a punk in the mid-80s loved this film, but many did not "discover" it until later.
On an almost unrelated point, if you like P.K.Dick, you should check out Screamers. They butchered the ending into a standard Hollywood thing, but the rest of the movie is remarkably P.K.D. The original took place on earth in a USSR vs US war. The movie moves to outer-space and takes place on a mining colony, but it's the same story right down to the dolls....
The point is that in 2000 Bill Gates is richer than he was in 1999, but that doesn't affect the quality of life of someone who last year had the spending power to buy 1 car, 15,000 eggs and a pet dog and has roughly the same spending power this year. I guarantee that guy isn't looking at Bill Gates saying "damn, he's worth 20% more this year, and I'm only worth 5% more!" He's looking at his life and saying "why didn't *I* become a trillionare? I could have dropped out of Harvard!" The difference is that if Bill were worth slightly less this year, it still wouldn't matter. The purchasing power of the rich will always be beyond the purchasing power of the non-rich, by definition. What really matters to the overall health of a nation is the QUALITY OF LIFE in the middle-class (because middle-class is what the poor can actually strive to become). That quality of life has been improving over the last few years. Thus statements like "the rich are getting richer" don't hold much meaning.
Linux in the context of obsolesense can be thought of as just a UNIX variant. UNIX in general has been called obsolete for about 15 years now. The funny thing is that no one comes up with anything to replace it. Here are the basic reasons:
Complexity -- UNIX is baroque, true. However, the alternative would be to create a single, consistent way of addressing problems as varied as job collaberation and control, complex searching, security management, user customizability, and many other features. UNIX addresses each one of these separately, and each solution is tried and tested over the long haul.
Flexibility -- Let's take the example of mail. Many people feel that mail should be pretty. Fine, I can agree in as far as that goes. However, every attempt that I've seen to make mail reading pretty has resulted in a fraction of the number of features as "ugly" mail readers such as pine, mutt, vm and mh. Why? Because those other tools take advantage of the rich, but ugly traditions of UNIX (pine and mutt through the shell and external editors, vm through EMACS and mh through being just a command-line set of tools). In order to write a pretty mail reader that does not take advantage of those traditions you must replace gargantuan amounts of UNIX's features within your mail reader, which is not what you wanted. Things like OLE and Bonobo are attempts to bring the world of the modular to the world of the pretty. On the Microsoft side, they're being used wrong though. For example, do Word and Outlook share the same spell-checker through OLE? Nope. Why? mutt, EMACS, and many other UNIX programs share ispell (or aspell for that matter) without breaking a sweat....
Text -- Text is the fundamental unit of exchange under UNIX, and try as the rest of the world might, complex, tagged, bagged data-streams will never be able to match the signal/waste ratio of pipes and text.
Well, I guess I've firmly pegged myself as old-school. You whipper-snappers go ahead and take your best shot.
Funny thing is that the system that had a shot of replacing UNIX was Windows NT. NT is a solid, well-designed operating system which inherits the best ideas of VMS and Mach. It could have been a real UNIX-killer, but in the end Microsoft's marketing engine saw to it that Win32 was slapped on top of it like a fresh coat of sea-sludge. Given a much more careful and thoughtful layering of UNIX-like, VMS-like, Mach-like and Windows-like subsystems on top of NT's "microkernel", UNIX might actually have had a run for it's money. As it stands, the only thing keeping NT afloat is a marketing engine that dwarfs several sections of the United States Federal Government.
Perhaps the right solution is to have Mozilla not fall for it. For example, one way that I know of that people do this is to have/index.html be a blank page with a META REFRESH or REDIRECT tag pointing to the real homepage. Why not have Mozilla detect the combination of "back" and META REFRESH or REDIRECT and simply not obey the tag?
The other solution would be to take pages out of the history list when they contain a META REDIRECT REFRESH. That would also cause the back button to work as expected, perhap arguably more like expected.
Do either of these solutions break any reasonable practices?
"All 48 clients were connected to a Hewlett-Packard ProCurve 8000M switch using 100Mbit/s full-duplex connections."
This certainly is not a real-world situation.
"Our test server was a dual-CPU capable Hewlett-Packard NetServer E60 fitted with a 550MHz Pentium III processor and 768MB of RAM"
Not too bad. This is the sort of box that I'd buy if I was stacking a rack of these things. However, the fact that this was an HP system which was not pre-loaded (and thus not pre-configured for performance) with Linux is typical but annoying. I'd love to see benchmarks of the sort that really matter. Also, why two NICs (dual NICs are useless in most production environments unless you have a back-end data network, which is a very different load picture than these folks were seeing).
Some food for thought: what is a transaction? Their FAQ doesn't seem to cover exactly what it is. If all they're testing is static page serving, it's about as useful a test as seeing how fast it can delete files....
I actually work for a company that's pushing computers in the (and as the) classroom as an idea, and so I was intrigued by this article. It has some good points (though, it's quoting Clifford Stoll....) The basic premise that under 4th grade, kids aren't ready for computers seems interesting, and I'd be willing to entertain it (I'm a computer professional who didn't own his own computer until high school).
The thing that I don't like about the article is it makes sweeping blanket statements about computing in schools with no distinction for:
What grade-levels it's talking about
What sorts of courses it's talking about
Where the problem is one of teacher learning curve vs. the inappropriateness of the computer
Thus, I have to come to the conclusion that this article is meant less to be informative on the issue than to scare up some good sound-bytes ("computers are bad, mmOK?").
Here's some ways in which I think computers in the classroom are inappropriate:
At low grade levels, kids should master other skills first. Learn to write and read, and THEN learn to use a computer.
Don't have a kid sit in front of a computer all day long. The cited impact to posture notwithstanding, I would worry about social interaction mostly
Never think that a computer IS the teacher. I don't want to be a sales droid, but one of the things that I think my company does right is that we allow the teacher to work THROUGH the computer, instead of trying to get the computer to teach the students.
This is annoying. Why is it that everyone tests the highest-end hardware possible? I'd really love to see the performance of a 2-processor 2u server with less than 1GB RAM and processor speeds of less than 700MHz. Why? Because if I'm going to buy a rack of 20, that's what I'll be buying. I don't waste money on the bleeding edge when I can get more for less with stability.
Of course, in the MS world, you probably need 8GB RAM and 4 processors to run a Web server....
"The family at the median point of incomes in the U.S.A. works something like fifteen weeks more per year than in 1975 for the same amount of goods, meanwhile the top one percent of incomes has doubled their share of the national wealth."
Woefully, this sort of lie works on most people. I doubt if the poster even realized that they were lying, as the numbers are basically accurate as far as they go. The problem is that the standard "rich are getting richer" line only works if you compare the present day with an economically depressed time period. If you were to compare today to the time just before the stock market drop in 1987, you would find that the rich have gotten poorer. If you were to compare today to 1930, you would find that your numbers paint a comparitively rosy picture.
Wealth is a poor benchmark. It really doesn't matter how much money Bill Gates has, for example, as long as joe blow on the street can buy enough eggs and milk to feed his family. Thus, measures of cost of living vs. income per region and per neigborhood are usually the best way to determine just how people are doing. Looked at in this way, the situation has only started to get bad where I am (Boston area) recently, due to housing prices mostly.
Of course, it's always easier to say "McDonalds is ruining our world." In reality, population is our single largest problem, and has been for about a century. Just about every activist issue (from polution to deforestation to energy-production to impersonal global corps.) has its roots in population growth. If you want to work for something that will better the human condition, work for population control. There are basically three ways to do this:
Teach birth control early and often, and create incentives for single-child homes
Have more wars / kill people in some other way
You may feel that either one is a bad idea for various reasons, but that really is about the only way you can do it. Of course either method can be coupled with a strong dictatorship (or other totalitarian state) for more sure results, but I don't recommend it.
When was goto added to Java? When I went to Guy Steele's talk at MIT back 2 years ago, he said that Java didn't have a goto (to which he got a rousing cheer from the audience). Was this part of a later specification?
I've read through some of the reference (I'm honestly curious if those who didn't use winzip to read it had to agree to some silly click-wrap) and here's some high points:
The reference basically ignores Java while making lots of comparisons to C and C++. Interesting, since the language obviously derives a lot of its structure from Java moreso than C and C++.
Coctothorpe will have Perl/Java/Python-like library access.
Unlike Java, Coctothorpe will have a goto (which I consider neutral, since I've had to use gotos at times). The sickening thing is that unlike Perl, Coctothorpe will not allow labeled breaks, and instead recommends using goto for breaking out of nested loops!
It will have C-style #ifdef/#endif
The word "Microsoft" appears only 10 times in the body of the text.
Didn't they invent the language? Does GM give its' cars away for free?
Cars and programming languages have a very different tradition. AT&T Bell Labs is the creator of two of the most popular programming languages in the world: C and C++. The development of both of these languages is guided by the appropriate ANSI committe. Ditto FORTRAN, ADA and many other languages which are managed through standards. Languages like Python, Perl, Scheme and TCL are not managed through standards, but their reference implimentations are open source, and thus wide open to the community.
That leaves two newcommers as the tidings of an unfortunate trend: Java and Coctothorpe. These languages are strictly managed by their "owners" (as if one can own a language in the first place). This leaves the future somewhat uncertain for those of us who have always assumed that it was obvious to all that open standards are the way you manage a programming language.
It's fairly moot anyhow. The correct response to Coctothorpe is to evaluate it's usefulness and, if it is deemed worthy, write a GCC front-end for it or (if it's interpreted-only like Java) then a run-time implimentation can be written and open sourced. Until our government (which in the case of intellectual property is rapidly becoming the UN) gets stupid and declares languages patentable, we're OK implimenting our own Java and Coctothorpe.
Slashdot Mirror
I've wondered how long it would be before games would figure out that they're really a platform.... You wait, the mailer is next. Then of course, we'll need a browser (Mozilla makes both easy) and then you will need to have the ability to change your IP filtering rules while in-game.... Next thing you know it'll be QuakeOS service pack 10 with the Web server built into the chain gun.
There are a number of sites that I only view in Mozilla, because the experience is much smoother there (aint-it-cool-news is a good example, as their talkback is so badly put together that if your browser doesn't incrementally render tables, you're doomed to wait minutes). Obviously I'll have to view this particular page in Mozilla... ;-)
I think it comes down to two different ways that people think and create. Those (like me) who find Perl to be intuitive and graceful are the people who picture a large working system, and then dive down to the lowest level of detail to begin implimenting it in a sort of fugue, where many small details may intersect and become larger modules.
Python programmers appear to me to be people who see a large system as a collection of modules (or objects) from the start and who will then begin to impliment those modules in a relatively serial fashion.
Does this mean that one is better than the other? Of course not, but I do think that having a language that addresses both sets of people is either a challenge of a higher order than the already herculean task of writing a good programming language, or is impossible. Once you get past the simple arguments of white space vs. dollar signs, you Python and Perl are not that different. I would cite the following ways in which they do differ a strengths and weaknesses of BOTH languages:
Overall, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding of what the other camp wants and is doing....
Unix was a platform for Internet innovation 15 years ago, and Web innovation 8 years ago. What Internet innovations would you be refering to IN THE LAST 5 YEARS? EMACS 21.20030341458587? NcFTP? All of the really cutting edge work (Apache's sub-projects, IPv6, component development models, high end filesystems, etc) are all either being developed as cross-platform projects that UNIX is only one target for, or UNIX (and Linux) are playing catch-up on (e.g. journaling filesystems).
Why put a comment next to it? Why not in the regexp?
.* (?# Match anything after them)
s{
< (?# Match the beginning of the tag)
(?!$okay_tags) (?# Match all non-ok tags)
?> (?# But only until the first >)
}{}gxi;
I loved screamers for the fact that it kept PKD's story basically intact (having had to change the political landscape and put it further in the future because the real world did not turn out to be as PKD had written). If you didn't like the movie, you would likely not have liked the short story ("Second Variety"). Personally I thought that it made a fine SF/Horror movie. I hated the ending, but what can you do, it's Hollywood.
I certainly liked Total Recall better as a stand-alone movie, but when it comes to keeping Dick's vision intact, Screamers wins hands down (hell, there wasn't even a bad guy in "We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale").
What did you think of other SF/Horror films? Do you dislike the genere? Do you only enjoy the ones with big budgets? Or, was there something in this film that bothered you particularly?
From the MySQL site:
You can also read more about how to cope without commit/rollback on the MySQL site.What it really comes down to, is MySQL is a much lower level database than, say, Sybase. Sybase gives you a lot of high level tools for doing in-database programming. MySQL sacrifices this for speed, and thus you actually have to understand what you're doing in order to program for it correctly. If you do know what you're doing, there really isn't any end-result that you cannot achieve (including arbitrary levels of data integrity).
The question is very simillar to: do you want to code in Java or C? Java provides all sorts of safety mechanisms so that stupid programmers don't write elevator control programs that turn the brakes off and drop the cable. C is fast enough to write large systems in and still have them respond in faster-than-geologic time. Same goes for high level databases and MySQL. MySQL gives you plenty of really nice rope with which nearly any knot can be tied, including a hangman's noose. C compilers also tend to be a hell of a lot easier to install and maintain than a Java VM/RTE, which makes the comparison even more accurate.
Enjoy!
The above is also found in it's original form at use.perl.org. use.perl.org is a great site, and also based on Slash (the slashdot.org engine).
I just want to point out the insanity of this letter. It begins and ends with statements to the effect of, "you can't distribute this message because it's Apple confidential."
Am I missing something, or is that totally unsupportable? After all, the recipient has not asked for this letter. They have not signed a non-disclosure with Apple. What the hell gives Apple the right to restrict distribution of this letter? I can see claiming copyright over the contents, but fair use does allow for reproducing small sections or paraphrasing and summarizing.
Of course, what appears here is neither small sections nor a summary.... Oh, and for those in the cheap seats: I am not a professional. Don't try this at home.
Interestingly forward comments. I have to agree that legality or not, discussion of matters that do not directly impact national security and do not directly harm others should be protected by the first ammendment. I think, in the long run, this is a hollow bill. I really don't think that it would pass the first constitutional challenge, and the ACLU would be all over it like blue on a cop.
I do want to say something about the anti-drug fervor in this country, though. I agree strongly with the current practice of removing smoking from public places. I agree strongly with drunk-driving laws. I feel that people should have to go through competency testing if their job has a chance of taking my life in their hands.
However, the horrors of controled substances mostly come from three sources:
1. Economic disputes among distributors are not resolvable in the courts. Thus, the drive-by-shooting. You saw it during prohabition, and now you're seeing it in the drug war. No suprise.
2. Lack of education or addiction treatment and fear of persecution lead to a lot of unnecessary harm and even death. Every time someone dies of an overdose I blame the War On Drug(user)s. This is not wholy true; some of these people would have died anyway, but it's true far too often. If you want to see how bad drug education in this country is, go around asking people if LSD is addictive. I bet over half say yes....
3. Stupidity. Honestly, let's just come right out and say it: alcohol abuse kills. More people die every year as a result of drunk driving than all of the heroin overdoses combined. Why? Because there are people out there who don't value life, and alcohol makes them even less likely to think about consequences. This is a reason to censure, restrict and in some cases lock these people up, but not to bring back prohabition. I want my Tequila, dammit, because it's one of the coolest tasting things ever. If you take it away, I will find a Mexican source and smuggle it in.
The moral of the story is that making a substance illegal does one and only one thing: it creates an illegal industry out of the manufacture and distribution of that substance. That industry will have all of the problems associated with it that every illegal industry has since societies were first formed.
In order to avoid this, you put tight controls on the use of the substance (e.g. what Holland has done with hemp and several other substances). You control how, when and where the substance is used, but you ALLOW IT TO BE USED LEGALLY. If you do this, you suddenly take CONTROL over the substance. You can regulate and tax the industry. You can require that it not be used in certain places and industries. You can even let doctors perscribe it when they feel it's neccesary (60 minutes had a great feature once about a doctor that lost his license for perscribing large doses of opiates and other narcottics. When the revoked his license, his patients, who were not addicted to the drugs, but needed them in order to avoid chronic pain were now unable to get the medication that they needed, and one even commited suicide rather than deal with the pain again).
Here's something that I proposed earlier, but it got lost in the noise.
Simply run a web site that indexes files (of any sort) by size and MD5 checksum (perhaps of the first 1K and then of the whole file). Then, you modify an gnutella client so that it can interact with the web browser (via plugin) and retrieve the name, MD5 and length of the file you want and then download it. The wonderful part is that now you have a reliable way to index, so you can begin REVIEWING.
Reviewed content really is the way to go. Let's say, for example, that what I really want is cat pictures. I come across a file called "pussy5.jpg". Do I download it? Even if it's not junk, it's probably not what I was looking for. Instead, what you do is search through a Web site that indexes by content type and find the best-reviewed files. Thus, I safely discover that pussy5.jpg is in fact EXACTLY what I want, but that cat-stretch.gif is most certainly NOT.
The even better tactic is to replace plain files with "gnutella-format", which would be a predefined sequence of mime encapsulations. The payload is in the last enclosure, but previous enclosures could contain all sorts of useful info including description, author, distributor, copyright info, etc. Also, it would be nice if gnutella clients that are SERVING a file allow for searches based on MD5 checksum (which would require pre-computing the checksums on start-up, but if you do it in a lazy fashion, that's not too bad).
Someone wanna start the world's most popular Web site? You could even act on behalf of the recording industry by marking which files are known copyright violations so that offending clients could semi-automatically scan for them in their caches and delete them. If clients choose not to do this, then it's clearly on the head of the recording industry to go chase them down and prosecute, but you've done your duty for kink and country.
An indexed, colated, reviewed gnutella is definitely the way of the future.
This is just wrong. Not all RDBMS' are ACID, thus MySQL is an RDBMS, but it is not ACID. Of course, if you have a look at the MySQL site, there's some good commentary on why transactions are not required in the general case, and specifically are not included in MySQL. What it comes down to, is the ACID definition makes an assumption: atomicity is required in RDBMS' (I don't agree, but am willing to concede that it's required for most RDBMS applications), and transactions are the correct path to atomicity.
This latter assumption is argued against by MySQL. MySQL supports atomicity without transactions. This flies in the face of traditional RDBMS dogma, which certainly does piss a lot of people off. But, in the final analysis, what did you need transactions for? Sure, I can come up with the pathalogical case, and that's when you use Sybase or Oracle or PostgreSQL or any other transactional RDBMS. On the other hand, for 99.9% of the cases, atomicity is sufficient and for about half of those, more that sufficient.
Please, don't try to get people to believe that transactions are required in order to a) be an RDBMS or b) meet the needs of business. It's really very confusing to most people and totally unrequired. What's more, I find that the following things are required in most circumstances, and very few products besides MySQL supply them:
- Ease of installation (under Red Hat Linux, the MySQL install consists of downloading 3 files and typing "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" Compare this to the ultra-frustrating pseudo-user-interface of the Oracle install. Even PostgreSQL was a major pain to install (though nothing comes close to Oracle).
- Ease of administration. MySQL keeps each table as several on-disk files. This means that if you want to move the indexes for a particular table to another disk, you type:
- mv tablename.MYI
/another/disk/somewhere /another/disk/somewhere/tablename.MYI .
- Good tools. MySQL comes with a simple command-line SQL program, and just to point out the value of MySQL by a single example, this tool has command-line history and editing (through the readline library) as well as tablename completion. Why does Oracle's sqlplus (or sqlminus, as I prefer to call it) still not have this?
- Speed. This is really the killer. MySQL is the fastest database out there. Except in some very pathalogical cases, MySQL is general 2-10 times faster than other databases for given operations.
The real question is: why are we still having this debate? If you're running an open source-fiendly environement, you should be using PostgreSQL or MySQL. Look at the features of both and decide what makes sense for you. In most cases, I think that choice should be MySQL, but hey, the right tool for the job should always be the top concern.ln -s
Of course, the unicorn and the number of replicants were big hints, but there are two larger ones.
Most obvious is the other blade runner's last line "You've done a man's job, sir." I think that one speaks for itself.
Also, a strong point is made of always showing replicants (even animals) at some point or another with red-eye (a lens-generated optical illusion where the color of the retina is brought out by a combination of angle and lighting, common in flash-photography). Deckard is the only "human" that we see this effect on....
I was so pissed about this film. The studio decided that it was a bomb because the test audience didn't get it. Instead of requiring that it be butchered, they could have clued into the fact that it was perfect for the college audience (probably the only people in the audience who walked away saying "wow") and marketed it heavily. It came out the same week as E.T., which could have been perfect. Instead of letting it get drowned in E.T.'s wake, it could have been played up as the dark underdog, which would have had the mid-80s fuck-authority types flocking to this film. As it stands everyone that I know who was a punk in the mid-80s loved this film, but many did not "discover" it until later.
On an almost unrelated point, if you like P.K.Dick, you should check out Screamers. They butchered the ending into a standard Hollywood thing, but the rest of the movie is remarkably P.K.D. The original took place on earth in a USSR vs US war. The movie moves to outer-space and takes place on a mining colony, but it's the same story right down to the dolls....
The only reference that I can find to goto in Java is this.
The point is that in 2000 Bill Gates is richer than he was in 1999, but that doesn't affect the quality of life of someone who last year had the spending power to buy 1 car, 15,000 eggs and a pet dog and has roughly the same spending power this year. I guarantee that guy isn't looking at Bill Gates saying "damn, he's worth 20% more this year, and I'm only worth 5% more!" He's looking at his life and saying "why didn't *I* become a trillionare? I could have dropped out of Harvard!" The difference is that if Bill were worth slightly less this year, it still wouldn't matter. The purchasing power of the rich will always be beyond the purchasing power of the non-rich, by definition. What really matters to the overall health of a nation is the QUALITY OF LIFE in the middle-class (because middle-class is what the poor can actually strive to become). That quality of life has been improving over the last few years. Thus statements like "the rich are getting richer" don't hold much meaning.
- Complexity -- UNIX is baroque, true. However, the alternative would be to create a single, consistent way of addressing problems as varied as job collaberation and control, complex searching, security management, user customizability, and many other features. UNIX addresses each one of these separately, and each solution is tried and tested over the long haul.
- Flexibility -- Let's take the example of mail. Many people feel that mail should be pretty. Fine, I can agree in as far as that goes. However, every attempt that I've seen to make mail reading pretty has resulted in a fraction of the number of features as "ugly" mail readers such as pine, mutt, vm and mh. Why? Because those other tools take advantage of the rich, but ugly traditions of UNIX (pine and mutt through the shell and external editors, vm through EMACS and mh through being just a command-line set of tools). In order to write a pretty mail reader that does not take advantage of those traditions you must replace gargantuan amounts of UNIX's features within your mail reader, which is not what you wanted. Things like OLE and Bonobo are attempts to bring the world of the modular to the world of the pretty. On the Microsoft side, they're being used wrong though. For example, do Word and Outlook share the same spell-checker through OLE? Nope. Why? mutt, EMACS, and many other UNIX programs share ispell (or aspell for that matter) without breaking a sweat....
- Text -- Text is the fundamental unit of exchange under UNIX, and try as the rest of the world might, complex, tagged, bagged data-streams will never be able to match the signal/waste ratio of pipes and text.
Well, I guess I've firmly pegged myself as old-school. You whipper-snappers go ahead and take your best shot.Funny thing is that the system that had a shot of replacing UNIX was Windows NT. NT is a solid, well-designed operating system which inherits the best ideas of VMS and Mach. It could have been a real UNIX-killer, but in the end Microsoft's marketing engine saw to it that Win32 was slapped on top of it like a fresh coat of sea-sludge. Given a much more careful and thoughtful layering of UNIX-like, VMS-like, Mach-like and Windows-like subsystems on top of NT's "microkernel", UNIX might actually have had a run for it's money. As it stands, the only thing keeping NT afloat is a marketing engine that dwarfs several sections of the United States Federal Government.
Perhaps the right solution is to have Mozilla not fall for it. For example, one way that I know of that people do this is to have /index.html be a blank page with a META REFRESH or REDIRECT tag pointing to the real homepage. Why not have Mozilla detect the combination of "back" and META REFRESH or REDIRECT and simply not obey the tag?
The other solution would be to take pages out of the history list when they contain a META REDIRECT REFRESH. That would also cause the back button to work as expected, perhap arguably more like expected.
Do either of these solutions break any reasonable practices?
Some food for thought: what is a transaction? Their FAQ doesn't seem to cover exactly what it is. If all they're testing is static page serving, it's about as useful a test as seeing how fast it can delete files....
The thing that I don't like about the article is it makes sweeping blanket statements about computing in schools with no distinction for:
Thus, I have to come to the conclusion that this article is meant less to be informative on the issue than to scare up some good sound-bytes ("computers are bad, mmOK?").
Here's some ways in which I think computers in the classroom are inappropriate:
This is annoying. Why is it that everyone tests the highest-end hardware possible? I'd really love to see the performance of a 2-processor 2u server with less than 1GB RAM and processor speeds of less than 700MHz. Why? Because if I'm going to buy a rack of 20, that's what I'll be buying. I don't waste money on the bleeding edge when I can get more for less with stability.
Of course, in the MS world, you probably need 8GB RAM and 4 processors to run a Web server....
Woefully, this sort of lie works on most people. I doubt if the poster even realized that they were lying, as the numbers are basically accurate as far as they go. The problem is that the standard "rich are getting richer" line only works if you compare the present day with an economically depressed time period. If you were to compare today to the time just before the stock market drop in 1987, you would find that the rich have gotten poorer. If you were to compare today to 1930, you would find that your numbers paint a comparitively rosy picture.
Wealth is a poor benchmark. It really doesn't matter how much money Bill Gates has, for example, as long as joe blow on the street can buy enough eggs and milk to feed his family. Thus, measures of cost of living vs. income per region and per neigborhood are usually the best way to determine just how people are doing. Looked at in this way, the situation has only started to get bad where I am (Boston area) recently, due to housing prices mostly.
Of course, it's always easier to say "McDonalds is ruining our world." In reality, population is our single largest problem, and has been for about a century. Just about every activist issue (from polution to deforestation to energy-production to impersonal global corps.) has its roots in population growth. If you want to work for something that will better the human condition, work for population control. There are basically three ways to do this:
- Teach birth control early and often, and create incentives for single-child homes
- Have more wars / kill people in some other way
You may feel that either one is a bad idea for various reasons, but that really is about the only way you can do it. Of course either method can be coupled with a strong dictatorship (or other totalitarian state) for more sure results, but I don't recommend it.When was goto added to Java? When I went to Guy Steele's talk at MIT back 2 years ago, he said that Java didn't have a goto (to which he got a rousing cheer from the audience). Was this part of a later specification?
- The reference basically ignores Java while making lots of comparisons to C and C++. Interesting, since the language obviously derives a lot of its structure from Java moreso than C and C++.
- Coctothorpe will have Perl/Java/Python-like library access.
- Unlike Java, Coctothorpe will have a goto (which I consider neutral, since I've had to use gotos at times). The sickening thing is that unlike Perl, Coctothorpe will not allow labeled breaks, and instead recommends using goto for breaking out of nested loops!
- It will have C-style #ifdef/#endif
- The word "Microsoft" appears only 10 times in the body of the text.
Hope this helps!Didn't they invent the language? Does GM give its' cars away for free?
Cars and programming languages have a very different tradition. AT&T Bell Labs is the creator of two of the most popular programming languages in the world: C and C++. The development of both of these languages is guided by the appropriate ANSI committe. Ditto FORTRAN, ADA and many other languages which are managed through standards. Languages like Python, Perl, Scheme and TCL are not managed through standards, but their reference implimentations are open source, and thus wide open to the community.
That leaves two newcommers as the tidings of an unfortunate trend: Java and Coctothorpe. These languages are strictly managed by their "owners" (as if one can own a language in the first place). This leaves the future somewhat uncertain for those of us who have always assumed that it was obvious to all that open standards are the way you manage a programming language.
It's fairly moot anyhow. The correct response to Coctothorpe is to evaluate it's usefulness and, if it is deemed worthy, write a GCC front-end for it or (if it's interpreted-only like Java) then a run-time implimentation can be written and open sourced. Until our government (which in the case of intellectual property is rapidly becoming the UN) gets stupid and declares languages patentable, we're OK implimenting our own Java and Coctothorpe.