As a manager now, I would fire anyone who uses stored procedures. Even if it is "faster."
So answer me this: Now that you've made the investment to move to Oracle, can you reasonably foresee moving back to SQL Server? Seems unlikely to me. So if you'd chosen the right tool for the job in the first place, the migration wouldn't have been a problem and you would have been free to use other right tools where appropriate, e.g. stored procedures -- right?
Really, stored procedures have their place. Oracle tends to over-sell them, but to ignore them completely seems like one more step backward in the last n years of best practices and lessons learned.
Is there anyone here that have experiance with both of these databases that can explain in simple terms why one would go with MySQL over Firebird ?
My understanding is that Firebird is by any measure more sophisticated than MySQL, but it lacks the "critical mass" of users that makes it attractive to people who need to be sure they can get ready support for their software. MySQL is available on just about every cheap hosting provider around, too, which means that a lot of ready-built open source Web apps target MySQL as their database of choice.
Put it to you this way: If the features of MySQL are "good enough" for the application you want -- which arguably goes for most of the Web apps out there -- why would you not choose MySQL? There are times when swimming upstream is a noble effort, but generally all it gets you is tired.
If, on the other hand, you have a specific application for which you need a relational data store and you need higher-end RDBMS features, by all means, choose Firebird. Only I think in those cases most people still choose PostgreSQL, for more or less the same reasons as mentioned above.
Man, I wish I still had all my old Apple books and junk. Stacks and stacks of Softalk magazine... manuals to my assembler of choice (Merlin)... Beneath Apple DOS... manuals for Apple Pascal... all remnants of a really fun age.
AT&T CallVantage VoIP comes configured for voice by default, but if you want to support a fax machine you can tick a box on your Web-based control panel. Mind you: Nowhere have I seen any documentation that says why you wouldn't want to do this all the time, if it's possible. I've checked the box and voice quality sounds pretty much the same. And I haven't actually tried sending a fax, BTW.
Let me guess -- you live in Northern California, right? Many Northern Californians like to forget that there's another large portion of the state down south, and that portion is home to a certain large and influential industry. DiFi would ignore those business interests to her peril.
Using that line of reasoning, one could then say the same about Cheney and Haliburton's past relationship when he became a part of the administration:
"He's not a Haliburton guy. He just used to work for them. Big Deal."
Ummm, it's a little different. The director of communications for the RIAA is the chief marketroid, nothing more. If she wielded real power I'd imagine her title would at least be vice president. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, was the freakin' CEO of Halliburton. He was the proverbial guy at the head of the table, handing out the cigars. God I hope you realize this.
The old Apple ][ Reference Manual included a few pages of technical terms, with definitions. Buried among entries like track, sector, stack, and interrupt was this gem:
featuren. A bug, as described by the marketing department.
3) Your code blew up, and you meant it to blow up, and it's clearly not exploitable.
Since you are not coding specifically for your application to crash (Or I hope not) surely there can be no 3. 2 is as good as it gets
But isn't this the whole point of the exception-handling model of software error recovery? Back in the old days, any bug could potentially take down the whole system, only it didn't matter because the OS wasn't multitasking anyway. Under the exception-handling model, an unforeseen condition generates an exception. You've got two choices: Handle it or don't. If an application exception makes it all the way to the OS level without being handled, it results in an application crash. What it doesn't do, on the other hand, is take down the system (assuming everything else is working right). So while it might be sloppy programming to say to yourself, "this exception will almost certainly never, ever get raised, so I'm just not going to handle it," it seems to me like that would be a legit case of #3, above. If the only possible outcome of a condition is an application crash, then it doesn't seem like an exploitable flaw to me. (But then, I guess it goes back again to whether you agree that an application crash counts as a denial of service. I tend to think not.)
...if I understand this correctly. Basically, a security researcher believes he's found a buffer overflow. However, he has not yet found a way to exploit that overflow because Word keeps crashing.
Actually, according to the Computerworld article, two of the bugs discovered will peg the processor at 100 percent, forcing a cold reboot that potentially will do a lot more damage than just corrupting your Word documents. Whatever your philosophy otherwise, that really is a denial of service.
I never said it had to be applied for. It's automatic upon publishing the work to the public. If you don't publish the work to the public, it's not protected by copyrights
In the United States this isn't true. A work is considered copyrighted upon the moment of creation, whether or not it has been published. Publication used to be the standard, but not for many, many years. Publishing a work, however, makes it easier to establish the legitimacy of your claim to ownership, and actual registration with the copyright office gives you access to more legal remedies.
It amazes me that multiple providers can provide service to small towns in India, but not in the US.
Well, obviously population density is greater in India. What's more, there's probably less regulation and more corruption among low-level government officials. Useful for businesses, perhaps, but not necessarily desirable when it comes to improving quality of life for the average citizen (see India).
I've never once seen porn on the net that I wasn't looking for, not even when I was a wee nipper clicking on everything that I got randomly sent to me without considering what it might be (YMMV).
Really? Wow. Cuz I'm a hacker, I look for a lot of obscure stuff on the Internet, and it seems like half my searches turn up at least one link that shows me hardcore porn. And I'm getting all old and creaky. If I had a 13 year old kid, if anything I'd assume that kid was even more adept at stumbling upon hardcore than I am.
I've not had much luck with my cell phone(Verizon) working above 10,000 feet.
OK, seriously -- how is it that the tiny little transmitter inside a cellular phone is capable of broadcasting a signal over 10,000 feet? That's 33 football fields away.
Mod parent up. The brand of extreme moral relativism that says that it's just the prudes and the "fragile minds" who would want to block access to porn on the Internet is a kind of twisted fundamentalism that doesn't represent the values of most of society. There probably is nothing wrong with kids seeing nekkid bodies. On the other hand, the Internet is rife with hardcore porn that goes waayyyyyyy beyond nudity -- including images of violence, degradation, and deviant behaviors. Even if I agree that 8 years is old enough for a child to understand why a man would want to have sex with a woman, it is absolutely NOT old enough to comprehend why that man would want to strangle the woman while he does it. I'll agree that consenting adults should be free to enjoy whatever they want, so long as it doesn't harm themselves or others. But an 8 year old is simply not capable of being "sex positive." There's nothing wrong with parents wanting to shield their children from hardcore pornographic material.
He doesn't get the driving force behind the people who want these sort of laws. They don't want to reduce the SEM their children see, they want to eliminate it completely and will never be happy otherwise. Which shows just how far out there they really are. You can't uninvent things.
Wait... that's "far out there"? The Internet has replaced the encyclopedia as the #1 place schoolchildren go to get basic facts about most of the topics they study in school. And if parents want their children to be able to use the Internet for that purpose without seeing pictures of highly explicit, extremely graphic sexual acts -- we're not talking Playboy here -- that's "far out there" in your view?
I agree -- for the most part -- that adults should be free to view the sexually explicit material that they love and crave. But it would be unacceptable in just about any community in the United States to put up a billboard depicting hardcore porn on a public street. I think it's reasonable to expect the same standard to apply to the Web. The fact that it is at present unrealistic to expect that standard to apply is another matter.
As for lying on that particular test, well, here's a huge cluestick with your name on it: sick as it may seem, some diseases (such as hep B and C) are far more widespread in homosexuals than in heterosexuals and the questionnaire is an accurate reflection of this sad fact.
The questionnaire is an acknowledgment of a statistical probability, maybe, but it does nothing to establish the presence of disease. Nothing about my being heterosexual makes me immune to hepatitis B. "Less likely" does not mean "risk free." I could still donate blood that is contaminated with the disease. The fact that I have been immunized against hepatitis B, on the other hand, does make me a low risk for hepatitis B transmission as a donor. And a homosexual male could just as easily have been immunized. But, to my recollection, they don't even ask.
To give a counter example, people of African descent are much more likely to have sickle cell disease than people of European descent. People with sickle cell disease are ineligible to give blood. Yet nowhere on the questionnaire does it ask you if you're black. Somehow, however, it is acceptable to screen based on behavior types that are considered "high risk," including homosexuality, rather than screening for the presence of disease. This is enough to suggest to some people that the mandated rules for blood donors seem to be subject to biases that are not rooted in medical science, nor in the actual procedures of blood donation.
I used to be a regular donor (every 12 weeks is the minimum for whole blood donation (as opposed to just plasma) in Australia), until the time I met my boyfriend. It's quite offensive that the Australia Red Cross will ask if you've had male-male sex in the past 12 months, which is an automatic disqualification whether you used a condom or not, but apparently don't seem to care how much unprotected heterosexual sex you may have had. Since they have to test everyone's blood for HIV anyway, they're missing out on a lot of potential donations.
No argument here. I live in San Francisco (you may have heard, there's a lot of gay dudes here). And I'm not joking... the Red Cross here in the U.S. does not want your blood if you've had male-male homosexual sex ever. It's the subject of huge controversy. To be fair, though, they do ask who else you might have had sex with. If you've had sex with intravenous drug users, they don't want your blood either. But to equate every single member of the male gay community as having the exact same lifestyle seems like a bit of a stretch. Or outright discriminatory -- take your pick.
I'm of two minds. I'd really like to hear an open, public debate on this issue: Should you just lie? I mean, why not -- because, as you point out, they test it all anyway.
Yes, but what's the cross-section of those fans with SFX magazine's readers? My guess is that most of those fans are pretty-much exclusively star wars fans, and therefore likely wouldn't read a general scifi magazine like SFX.
Who gives a rat's who reads SFX? We're not talking about fans here, we're talking about real people. And the grandparent's comment stands: "More people dressed up as Wookiees last Halloween than saw Serenity." People. Not SFX readers. People. Period.
I haven't heard anybody say it yet, so... HEY SLASHDOT! Get out there and donate blood!
Donating blood is very easy and doesn't take a whole lot of your time. Typically you're not going to be light-headed or anything after you do it. It's recommended that you eat hearty before and after you donate, but how hard is that?
On the plus side, if you donate blood you are helping save somebody's life. LET ME REPEAT THAT. The blood you donate will be used to try to save somebody's life. There is absolutely no reason to give somebody a blood transfusion unless they've sustained a life-threatening injury. When's the last time you've had a blood transfusion? I've never had one, and I've messed myself up pretty bad. I hate to think about the kind of messed-up I'd need to be to require a pint of blood.
What's more, blood banks are regularly short of supply. Hospitals need blood. I know that in my area, they're always begging for extra Type O. I'm O positive. It's a pretty common blood type -- but that doesn't just mean that there's a lot of available supply. It means there's a lot of demand, too.
Consider this, too. Blood banks have all kinds of rules. Some of them you may agree with and some of them you may not. But the rules are in place. Among those rules: If you're a man who has ever had sex with another man since the 1980s, even just once, they don't want your blood. That's right -- gay dudes aren't supposed to donate. Same goes for people who have injected drugs -- even just once. Same goes if you've had a tattoo or piercing in the last 12 months. Same goes if you've spent more than a few months living in England in the last couple decades (it's the BSE thing). Same goes if you've, like, ever had sex with anybody who's a native of Africa. I'm serious, go offer to donate and look at the questionnaire... the rules are harsh.
The point? Well, let's see. Gay dudes, people with tattoos, people who've gotten laid a lot, and people who have done serious drugs are not allowed to donate. I live in San Francisco. So, holy fuck, just who is donating blood in my town??! Not a joke... I'm actually being serious. It seems to me that there's a pretty strong need for eligible and willing blood donors in my area.
So I donate. I believe you're allowed to do it every 8 weeks, in the U.S.
It's called "Iowa". Eliminate the Iowa caucuses as the "first in the nation" that every Presidential candidate must suck up to (and convince his party to suck up to) and you'll never hear about corn-based ethanol ever again.
You'd have to get rid of agribusiness in the U.S., also. ADM and Monsanto each have a stake in the GMO corn business, for example.
The real question is if "Free Software" is ever going to work in a corporate environment, there's gotta be a point where you allow corporations access to your software and you have to allow them to protect their work in some form.
Huh?! Free Software works in thousands of corporate environments. And all those corporations' work is absolutely protected -- there's nothing that says I have to be able to gain access to the documents on your Web server just because you're running Apache.
What you seem to be saying is that if I release some code under the GPLv3, there's "gotta be a point" where I have to allow a corporation to take my work and incorporate it in a proprietary product, then deny me access to that product. That hardly seems fair. If I wanted you to do that, I would just release my code to the public domain and forget about it. (Or I'd use a more permissive license, such as BSD.) By releasing code under the GPL, I'm saying that you're free to use it but I (and the other people who also want to use it) expect a quid pro quo. We played nice with you, now you have to play nice with us. Basic Golden Rule stuff here.
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So answer me this: Now that you've made the investment to move to Oracle, can you reasonably foresee moving back to SQL Server? Seems unlikely to me. So if you'd chosen the right tool for the job in the first place, the migration wouldn't have been a problem and you would have been free to use other right tools where appropriate, e.g. stored procedures -- right?
Really, stored procedures have their place. Oracle tends to over-sell them, but to ignore them completely seems like one more step backward in the last n years of best practices and lessons learned.
My understanding is that Firebird is by any measure more sophisticated than MySQL, but it lacks the "critical mass" of users that makes it attractive to people who need to be sure they can get ready support for their software. MySQL is available on just about every cheap hosting provider around, too, which means that a lot of ready-built open source Web apps target MySQL as their database of choice.
Put it to you this way: If the features of MySQL are "good enough" for the application you want -- which arguably goes for most of the Web apps out there -- why would you not choose MySQL? There are times when swimming upstream is a noble effort, but generally all it gets you is tired.
If, on the other hand, you have a specific application for which you need a relational data store and you need higher-end RDBMS features, by all means, choose Firebird. Only I think in those cases most people still choose PostgreSQL, for more or less the same reasons as mentioned above.
Man, I wish I still had all my old Apple books and junk. Stacks and stacks of Softalk magazine ... manuals to my assembler of choice (Merlin) ... Beneath Apple DOS ... manuals for Apple Pascal ... all remnants of a really fun age.
AT&T CallVantage VoIP comes configured for voice by default, but if you want to support a fax machine you can tick a box on your Web-based control panel. Mind you: Nowhere have I seen any documentation that says why you wouldn't want to do this all the time, if it's possible. I've checked the box and voice quality sounds pretty much the same. And I haven't actually tried sending a fax, BTW.
Let me guess -- you live in Northern California, right? Many Northern Californians like to forget that there's another large portion of the state down south, and that portion is home to a certain large and influential industry. DiFi would ignore those business interests to her peril.
I voted for Kodos.
Better yet, use sheeple. Nothing identifies you as the champion of the common man better than hyper-elitism.
Ummm, it's a little different. The director of communications for the RIAA is the chief marketroid, nothing more. If she wielded real power I'd imagine her title would at least be vice president. Dick Cheney, on the other hand, was the freakin' CEO of Halliburton. He was the proverbial guy at the head of the table, handing out the cigars. God I hope you realize this.
The old Apple ][ Reference Manual included a few pages of technical terms, with definitions. Buried among entries like track, sector, stack, and interrupt was this gem:
feature n. A bug, as described by the marketing department.
But isn't this the whole point of the exception-handling model of software error recovery? Back in the old days, any bug could potentially take down the whole system, only it didn't matter because the OS wasn't multitasking anyway. Under the exception-handling model, an unforeseen condition generates an exception. You've got two choices: Handle it or don't. If an application exception makes it all the way to the OS level without being handled, it results in an application crash. What it doesn't do, on the other hand, is take down the system (assuming everything else is working right). So while it might be sloppy programming to say to yourself, "this exception will almost certainly never, ever get raised, so I'm just not going to handle it," it seems to me like that would be a legit case of #3, above. If the only possible outcome of a condition is an application crash, then it doesn't seem like an exploitable flaw to me. (But then, I guess it goes back again to whether you agree that an application crash counts as a denial of service. I tend to think not.)
Actually, according to the Computerworld article, two of the bugs discovered will peg the processor at 100 percent, forcing a cold reboot that potentially will do a lot more damage than just corrupting your Word documents. Whatever your philosophy otherwise, that really is a denial of service.
Or, as more than one cop has explained it to me: "Most criminals are stupid."
In the United States this isn't true. A work is considered copyrighted upon the moment of creation, whether or not it has been published. Publication used to be the standard, but not for many, many years. Publishing a work, however, makes it easier to establish the legitimacy of your claim to ownership, and actual registration with the copyright office gives you access to more legal remedies.
Well, obviously population density is greater in India. What's more, there's probably less regulation and more corruption among low-level government officials. Useful for businesses, perhaps, but not necessarily desirable when it comes to improving quality of life for the average citizen (see India).
Really? Wow. Cuz I'm a hacker, I look for a lot of obscure stuff on the Internet, and it seems like half my searches turn up at least one link that shows me hardcore porn. And I'm getting all old and creaky. If I had a 13 year old kid, if anything I'd assume that kid was even more adept at stumbling upon hardcore than I am.
OK, seriously -- how is it that the tiny little transmitter inside a cellular phone is capable of broadcasting a signal over 10,000 feet? That's 33 football fields away.
Mod parent up. The brand of extreme moral relativism that says that it's just the prudes and the "fragile minds" who would want to block access to porn on the Internet is a kind of twisted fundamentalism that doesn't represent the values of most of society. There probably is nothing wrong with kids seeing nekkid bodies. On the other hand, the Internet is rife with hardcore porn that goes waayyyyyyy beyond nudity -- including images of violence, degradation, and deviant behaviors. Even if I agree that 8 years is old enough for a child to understand why a man would want to have sex with a woman, it is absolutely NOT old enough to comprehend why that man would want to strangle the woman while he does it. I'll agree that consenting adults should be free to enjoy whatever they want, so long as it doesn't harm themselves or others. But an 8 year old is simply not capable of being "sex positive." There's nothing wrong with parents wanting to shield their children from hardcore pornographic material.
Wait ... that's "far out there"? The Internet has replaced the encyclopedia as the #1 place schoolchildren go to get basic facts about most of the topics they study in school. And if parents want their children to be able to use the Internet for that purpose without seeing pictures of highly explicit, extremely graphic sexual acts -- we're not talking Playboy here -- that's "far out there" in your view?
I agree -- for the most part -- that adults should be free to view the sexually explicit material that they love and crave. But it would be unacceptable in just about any community in the United States to put up a billboard depicting hardcore porn on a public street. I think it's reasonable to expect the same standard to apply to the Web. The fact that it is at present unrealistic to expect that standard to apply is another matter.
The questionnaire is an acknowledgment of a statistical probability, maybe, but it does nothing to establish the presence of disease. Nothing about my being heterosexual makes me immune to hepatitis B. "Less likely" does not mean "risk free." I could still donate blood that is contaminated with the disease. The fact that I have been immunized against hepatitis B, on the other hand, does make me a low risk for hepatitis B transmission as a donor. And a homosexual male could just as easily have been immunized. But, to my recollection, they don't even ask.
To give a counter example, people of African descent are much more likely to have sickle cell disease than people of European descent. People with sickle cell disease are ineligible to give blood. Yet nowhere on the questionnaire does it ask you if you're black. Somehow, however, it is acceptable to screen based on behavior types that are considered "high risk," including homosexuality, rather than screening for the presence of disease. This is enough to suggest to some people that the mandated rules for blood donors seem to be subject to biases that are not rooted in medical science, nor in the actual procedures of blood donation.
No argument here. I live in San Francisco (you may have heard, there's a lot of gay dudes here). And I'm not joking... the Red Cross here in the U.S. does not want your blood if you've had male-male homosexual sex ever. It's the subject of huge controversy. To be fair, though, they do ask who else you might have had sex with. If you've had sex with intravenous drug users, they don't want your blood either. But to equate every single member of the male gay community as having the exact same lifestyle seems like a bit of a stretch. Or outright discriminatory -- take your pick.
I'm of two minds. I'd really like to hear an open, public debate on this issue: Should you just lie? I mean, why not -- because, as you point out, they test it all anyway.
Who gives a rat's who reads SFX? We're not talking about fans here, we're talking about real people. And the grandparent's comment stands: "More people dressed up as Wookiees last Halloween than saw Serenity." People. Not SFX readers. People. Period.
I haven't heard anybody say it yet, so ... HEY SLASHDOT! Get out there and donate blood!
... the rules are harsh.
... I'm actually being serious. It seems to me that there's a pretty strong need for eligible and willing blood donors in my area.
Donating blood is very easy and doesn't take a whole lot of your time. Typically you're not going to be light-headed or anything after you do it. It's recommended that you eat hearty before and after you donate, but how hard is that?
On the plus side, if you donate blood you are helping save somebody's life. LET ME REPEAT THAT. The blood you donate will be used to try to save somebody's life. There is absolutely no reason to give somebody a blood transfusion unless they've sustained a life-threatening injury. When's the last time you've had a blood transfusion? I've never had one, and I've messed myself up pretty bad. I hate to think about the kind of messed-up I'd need to be to require a pint of blood.
What's more, blood banks are regularly short of supply. Hospitals need blood. I know that in my area, they're always begging for extra Type O. I'm O positive. It's a pretty common blood type -- but that doesn't just mean that there's a lot of available supply. It means there's a lot of demand, too.
Consider this, too. Blood banks have all kinds of rules. Some of them you may agree with and some of them you may not. But the rules are in place. Among those rules: If you're a man who has ever had sex with another man since the 1980s, even just once, they don't want your blood. That's right -- gay dudes aren't supposed to donate. Same goes for people who have injected drugs -- even just once. Same goes if you've had a tattoo or piercing in the last 12 months. Same goes if you've spent more than a few months living in England in the last couple decades (it's the BSE thing). Same goes if you've, like, ever had sex with anybody who's a native of Africa. I'm serious, go offer to donate and look at the questionnaire
The point? Well, let's see. Gay dudes, people with tattoos, people who've gotten laid a lot, and people who have done serious drugs are not allowed to donate. I live in San Francisco. So, holy fuck, just who is donating blood in my town??! Not a joke
So I donate. I believe you're allowed to do it every 8 weeks, in the U.S.
You'd have to get rid of agribusiness in the U.S., also. ADM and Monsanto each have a stake in the GMO corn business, for example.
Turning off that behavior in Nautilus is a matter of selecting one checkbox.
Huh?! Free Software works in thousands of corporate environments. And all those corporations' work is absolutely protected -- there's nothing that says I have to be able to gain access to the documents on your Web server just because you're running Apache.
What you seem to be saying is that if I release some code under the GPLv3, there's "gotta be a point" where I have to allow a corporation to take my work and incorporate it in a proprietary product, then deny me access to that product. That hardly seems fair. If I wanted you to do that, I would just release my code to the public domain and forget about it. (Or I'd use a more permissive license, such as BSD.) By releasing code under the GPL, I'm saying that you're free to use it but I (and the other people who also want to use it) expect a quid pro quo. We played nice with you, now you have to play nice with us. Basic Golden Rule stuff here.