Is it cheaper to build wheelchair ramps everywhere in the country, or to hire a delivery service to serve those that have trouble with stairs?
There are much smaller groups in the US that are served by a free market without government intervention. What makes you think this group is any different?
Democracy is a word that indicates a wide degree of citizen participation in either the selection of government officials
The flip side of that coin is that "Democracy" in an absolute sense doesn't mean much. Saying "The United States is a democracy" means only that we have some degree of citizen participation, which is quite a weak statement. Every nation in the world can be construed to be a democracy in that sense.
"Democratic" does have a meaning in a relative sense, however. It does have meaning to say that something could be "more democratic" or "less democratic".
The people who resist calling the United States a democracy do have a point. Consider that, in our government of three branches, one of those branches is about as undemocratic as you could imagine: the judicial branch. The executive branch is indirectly democratic. And originally the Senate was also undemocratic.
I think it's a complex issue. The important message, in my opinion, is that we shouldn't hold up democracy as an ideal that we should seek to attain, but as a careful balance against a government framework and the rule of law.
Exactly. I think it's clearly within google's legal right to choose who they offer advertising space to.
The question is: is google using their advertising space purely for commercial interests, or are they also using it to promote or suppress political ideas?
If google is using their advertising space to promote or suppress political ideas, than that is of interest to their shareholders. If you are holding shares in a company that's promoting something that you disagree with, you might choose to sell those shares.
Also, if google is using their advertising space to promote or suppress political ideas, they should be up-front about it.
Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
They have defined what they mean by that claim already: they have a checksum (256-bit, I think) on every block, and that checksum is checked from the OS when the block is read.
This will catch some errors that might otherwise go uncaught, which is important for servers that move a lot of data around.
It will not catch a memory error at the wrong time, or a processor error that stores the wrong value, or an error in the brain of the person who reads the data from the screen.
That's like saying a car is worth more because the customer was too meek too take a pound of flesh out of the car salesman and his sales manager.
Even a meek person is capable of price shopping.
And you still didn't address the fact that there's absolutely no basis for saying that someone is producing more for society merely by possessing a Ph.D.
The problem with Capitalism (as I see it), is that it seeks the most efficient level of production to maximize profit. However, human beings and societies (that have certain standards of living) are not efficient. You can only maximize one at the expense of the other.
You're confusing production, savings, and consumption. In a free market, you can consume whatever resources you control, and other people are free to lend you more money if you want to consume more. The key is, in the long term in a free market, you can consume as much as you produce, which is often a lot.
"at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences."
I'm not sure whether you were agreeing or disagreeing, but that reinforces my point: The take away from this article is that rails was constantly working against his end requirements, so that even in otherwise ideal circumstances, it didn't allow an experienced developer to solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time.
I'd like to hear more details about the actual project and what caused it to fail.
The fact that the 95 tables predated the Rails rewrite.
I read more into the word "legacy" than you meant by it. It carries a slightly negative connotation, at least to me.
Agreed. It is a big problem with ActiveRecord. AR wants you to structure your tables "just so", and if you have a different structure, then AR is working against you instead of for you.
Yes, if he's able to rewrite to those 95 tables in PHP much faster, that indicates to me that AR is the problem.
Examples of this would be (in database terms) referential integrity, unique values for certain fields or combination of fields.
I agree completely.
More generally, ActiveRecord does not address any interdependence of the tuples or relations at all (except for a few very common cases where they have no alternative).
ActiveRecord is essentially a persistence engine at its core, with it's own OODBMS-like API on top (that is not closed over any useful set of operations). It blindly assumes that objects are independent of eachother, and can be created, updated, or deleted without regard to the rest of the data. There are some special cases that are addressed, but they are far from complete. In general, ActiveRecord does not even know how to handle database errors, even though the SQLSTATE error codes are defined in the SQL standard. It doesn't expect errors aside from the few special cases.
It has no regard at all for potential race conditions with another application accessing the same data. In fact, it assumes that it's the only application accessing the data, and the data therefore really has no meaning outside of the context of the ActiveRecord application.
my guess from reading the article is that it had something to do with the 95 legacy RDBMS tables...
What makes you think the tables are "legacy"? I didn't see the author say he wanted to get rid of them. A database isn't just a persistent store for one application, but must be usable from many applications (which may be written in different languages) and meaningful to all of those applications. If ActiveRecord has a problem using existing data in a well-designed schema, that's a serious problem with ActiveRecord.
Also, if the new app had many integration points with PHP systems, that could be a fun one to work out. You can't, to my knowledge, just include a PHP library in Ruby.;)
A good point. That was probably a big part of the problem right there.
possibly more than one database? (I don't know this to be the case, but with 95 tables, I suspect more than one database)
It's quite possible that's one database. In fact, it may be quite reasonable. 95 tables just means that there are 95 different kinds of facts that you might want to store. That's a somewhat large number if it's one application with a narrow scope, but it's a small number if you take into account the whole business.
Hard to answer without understanding what it is you like about CPAN.
It's a centralized place where you can find high-quality, up-to-date modules, with good documentation (or at least a reasonable synopsis) for almost anything you might want. I just spent about 5 minutes typing in everything I could think of into search.cpan.org, and got a hit for all of them, from YAML to XMPP.
I would certainly like to see more diversity of languages in the open source world. Right now it's almost all a mix of imperative, procedural, and OOP. SQL is the only exception, and a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to code around SQL as much as possible.
I think it's just difficult to justify using one of those languages, unfortunately. Most of what really matters in most projects that I've worked on is not the language at all, but:
* Easy access to all the APIs and protocols that I need to use * documentation * frameworks available for the problem domain, if applicable * the database design
As an example, I think PHP is a bad language in many ways. But it doesn't affect the database design, and it scores high on all the other counts for web projects.
Thank you for your comments though. I will continue learning OCaml, and I'll give clisp a try (I'll get to the others later). I think it will help me be a better programmer, but I don't think it's very practical in the short term. I'll have to be content with that:)
Thanks. After I posted I did indeed find those libraries (I posted quickly, based on what I remembered from OCaml before). It looks like OCaml is the most practical to use out of those listed based on the number of libraries available, tools, and documentation (the base documentation is quite good). I should also spend some time learning how to write OCaml extensions in C, hopefully it's as easy as writing extensions for python or ruby.
I think my standards are a little too high with something like CPAN. I don't think Ruby has anything close to CPAN, especially when it comes to documentation.
why is it you could pull off CDBaby in 2 months in PHP while an expert Rails programmers, including yourself as a second person on the project, could not pull it off on 2 years?
This is a particularly burning question, because it was a rewrite. That means all the requirements were known, and all the details worked out, all the problems solved -- in short, the Ruby programmer's work was cut out for him. All he needed to do was make a more maintainable replacement using the Ruby way in a reasonable amount of time.
That should be the ideal (perhaps boring, but otherwise ideal) client for any programmer! What went wrong?
But the feeling from the article is that he didn't reorganise the site as a Ruby site- the designer, not the programmer, didn't think in terms of Rails.
He didn't discuss in the article how closely he was managing the implementation. If he was telling the Ruby programmer exactly what to do, then I'd understand your point.
But the impression that I walked away with was that he was very open to the new ideas presented by an experienced Ruby developer, and let him do things the Rails way. It was not on track to meet the requirements for the end product after 2 years, so he canceled it.
It seems like the project was set up to be a success from day one: the project requirements were already solidified before it started, the problems were already solved, he was open minded to new ways of thinking, and he hired a real expert to take control of the project. The only problem to be solved was the implied problem that the code was becoming unmaintainable, and he was hoping Rails implemented by an expert could solve that in a reasonable period of time.
The fact that the project failed is not a good case study for Rails.
I've been interested in learning at least one of those languages for a while. Usually what gets in my way is that I can't find the necessary libraries to complete whatever task I'm working on. Can you point me towards the language from your list that has:
* a rich standard library with a good reference * a good extended library like CPAN * easy extension in C * good documentation * easily available compiler, etc.
I don't mind buying a book, as long as I can get somewhere just from the online documentation. Out of the languages you mention, I got the furthest with OCaml. However, if I needed to do something simple like connect to a database and then contact a directory server using LDAP, I'd be lost.
It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.
What I don't understand about this claim is: if it were true, couldn't you build a much better development team by simply hiring all of these "marginalized," under-appreciated females? Surely such a team would outperform the competition.
I do not think he should have been arrested for what was essentially a completely non-violent protest,
There's nothing non-violent about resisting arrest.
The civil disobedience people were smart enough to follow the officers' directions when they showed up. Maybe that's why they actually accomplished something, while nobody will ever care about this guy.
Sure, just as it's possible that U.S. astronauts never actually reached the moon.
There are at least some humans who claim to have been there. We simply have NO DATA AT ALL for MOST of the years for which the article is making claims. If there are a few gaps in knowledge, but they generally extrapolate to a reasonable conclusion, I can buy it. But when you make an absolute, sweeping statement, you should have some data to back it up.
However, it's not all *probable* that the passage was open because knowledgeable explorers (i.e. people that were smart enough to search at opportune times when the ice was likely to be at its lowest point) looked for it on a fairly constant basis.
What's "fairly constant"? Is it every year? Is it even every decade?
All available evidence and historical data point to the passage having been closed continually for at least 400 years
What is that available data? A few voyages? If you have more data than that, please share.
The article is the thing that made a huge sweeping claim that it couldn't back up. Sure, it could be right, but the article didn't say "it could be the first time...".
Of course, eventually, you lose the ability to distinguish layers at all, then you use uranium dating or some other radioactive decay process to provide a date to within a few hundred or thousand years.
What is Uranium dating, and how does it help us in this situation? Carbon in the atmosphere becomes radioactive while in the atmosphere at high altitude, then eventually gets dissolved into water and frozen into ice (at which point it is no longer becoming radioactive, it only decays). Uranium is radioactive the entire time, and even if it is stuck in the ice, that does not affect its radioactivity.
Will you begin to think it possible that maybe this isn't just Sturm and Drang after a few years?
Sure. I am not arguing that this is all normal, or nothing to worry about.
I'm saying that the article's claim was completely unjustified in the article. When they use sensationalist headlines and poor reasoning, it does damage to the credible evidence out there.
It is because of articles like these that I am extremely skeptical of any claims made -- on either side -- of global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it cheaper to build wheelchair ramps everywhere in the country, or to hire a delivery service to serve those that have trouble with stairs?
There are much smaller groups in the US that are served by a free market without government intervention. What makes you think this group is any different?
Democracy is a word that indicates a wide degree of citizen participation in either the selection of government officials
The flip side of that coin is that "Democracy" in an absolute sense doesn't mean much. Saying "The United States is a democracy" means only that we have some degree of citizen participation, which is quite a weak statement. Every nation in the world can be construed to be a democracy in that sense.
"Democratic" does have a meaning in a relative sense, however. It does have meaning to say that something could be "more democratic" or "less democratic".
The people who resist calling the United States a democracy do have a point. Consider that, in our government of three branches, one of those branches is about as undemocratic as you could imagine: the judicial branch. The executive branch is indirectly democratic. And originally the Senate was also undemocratic.
I think it's a complex issue. The important message, in my opinion, is that we shouldn't hold up democracy as an ideal that we should seek to attain, but as a careful balance against a government framework and the rule of law.
Exactly. I think it's clearly within google's legal right to choose who they offer advertising space to.
The question is: is google using their advertising space purely for commercial interests, or are they also using it to promote or suppress political ideas?
If google is using their advertising space to promote or suppress political ideas, than that is of interest to their shareholders. If you are holding shares in a company that's promoting something that you disagree with, you might choose to sell those shares.
Also, if google is using their advertising space to promote or suppress political ideas, they should be up-front about it.
What's the difference between freedom and choice?
Are there memory bus or in-memory check for integrity of data read from ZFS? What about applications?
They have defined what they mean by that claim already: they have a checksum (256-bit, I think) on every block, and that checksum is checked from the OS when the block is read.
This will catch some errors that might otherwise go uncaught, which is important for servers that move a lot of data around.
It will not catch a memory error at the wrong time, or a processor error that stores the wrong value, or an error in the brain of the person who reads the data from the screen.
Actually, in the US, it's to add massive amounts of High-Fructose Corn Syrup. For some reason they seem to think this tastes like sugar
Fructose (sugar from fruit) and sucrose (cane sugar) are both sugars.
It's actually somewhat more natural to use fructose in a drink. A naturally sweet juice is sweet because of fructose, not sucrose.
There may be ulterior motives, or you may prefer one over the other, but fructose is a real sugar.
That's like saying a car is worth more because the customer was too meek too take a pound of flesh out of the car salesman and his sales manager.
Even a meek person is capable of price shopping.
And you still didn't address the fact that there's absolutely no basis for saying that someone is producing more for society merely by possessing a Ph.D.
The problem with Capitalism (as I see it), is that it seeks the most efficient level of production to maximize profit. However, human beings and societies (that have certain standards of living) are not efficient. You can only maximize one at the expense of the other.
You're confusing production, savings, and consumption. In a free market, you can consume whatever resources you control, and other people are free to lend you more money if you want to consume more. The key is, in the long term in a free market, you can consume as much as you produce, which is often a lot.
Or perhaps they aren't doing anything worth more than $40k per year? Why do you automatically assume that they are worth more than the subway clerk?
"at every step, it seemed our needs clashed with Rails' preferences."
I'm not sure whether you were agreeing or disagreeing, but that reinforces my point: The take away from this article is that rails was constantly working against his end requirements, so that even in otherwise ideal circumstances, it didn't allow an experienced developer to solve the problem in a reasonable amount of time.
I'd like to hear more details about the actual project and what caused it to fail.
The fact that the 95 tables predated the Rails rewrite.
I read more into the word "legacy" than you meant by it. It carries a slightly negative connotation, at least to me.
Agreed. It is a big problem with ActiveRecord. AR wants you to structure your tables "just so", and if you have a different structure, then AR is working against you instead of for you.
Yes, if he's able to rewrite to those 95 tables in PHP much faster, that indicates to me that AR is the problem.
Examples of this would be (in database terms) referential integrity, unique values for certain fields or combination of fields.
I agree completely.
More generally, ActiveRecord does not address any interdependence of the tuples or relations at all (except for a few very common cases where they have no alternative).
ActiveRecord is essentially a persistence engine at its core, with it's own OODBMS-like API on top (that is not closed over any useful set of operations). It blindly assumes that objects are independent of eachother, and can be created, updated, or deleted without regard to the rest of the data. There are some special cases that are addressed, but they are far from complete. In general, ActiveRecord does not even know how to handle database errors, even though the SQLSTATE error codes are defined in the SQL standard. It doesn't expect errors aside from the few special cases.
It has no regard at all for potential race conditions with another application accessing the same data. In fact, it assumes that it's the only application accessing the data, and the data therefore really has no meaning outside of the context of the ActiveRecord application.
my guess from reading the article is that it had something to do with the 95 legacy RDBMS tables...
;)
What makes you think the tables are "legacy"? I didn't see the author say he wanted to get rid of them. A database isn't just a persistent store for one application, but must be usable from many applications (which may be written in different languages) and meaningful to all of those applications. If ActiveRecord has a problem using existing data in a well-designed schema, that's a serious problem with ActiveRecord.
Also, if the new app had many integration points with PHP systems, that could be a fun one to work out. You can't, to my knowledge, just include a PHP library in Ruby.
A good point. That was probably a big part of the problem right there.
possibly more than one database? (I don't know this to be the case, but with 95 tables, I suspect more than one database)
It's quite possible that's one database. In fact, it may be quite reasonable. 95 tables just means that there are 95 different kinds of facts that you might want to store. That's a somewhat large number if it's one application with a narrow scope, but it's a small number if you take into account the whole business.
* much i18n
What's wrong with internationalization in RoR?
Hard to answer without understanding what it is you like about CPAN.
:)
It's a centralized place where you can find high-quality, up-to-date modules, with good documentation (or at least a reasonable synopsis) for almost anything you might want. I just spent about 5 minutes typing in everything I could think of into search.cpan.org, and got a hit for all of them, from YAML to XMPP.
I would certainly like to see more diversity of languages in the open source world. Right now it's almost all a mix of imperative, procedural, and OOP. SQL is the only exception, and a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to code around SQL as much as possible.
I think it's just difficult to justify using one of those languages, unfortunately. Most of what really matters in most projects that I've worked on is not the language at all, but:
* Easy access to all the APIs and protocols that I need to use
* documentation
* frameworks available for the problem domain, if applicable
* the database design
As an example, I think PHP is a bad language in many ways. But it doesn't affect the database design, and it scores high on all the other counts for web projects.
Thank you for your comments though. I will continue learning OCaml, and I'll give clisp a try (I'll get to the others later). I think it will help me be a better programmer, but I don't think it's very practical in the short term. I'll have to be content with that
Thanks. After I posted I did indeed find those libraries (I posted quickly, based on what I remembered from OCaml before). It looks like OCaml is the most practical to use out of those listed based on the number of libraries available, tools, and documentation (the base documentation is quite good). I should also spend some time learning how to write OCaml extensions in C, hopefully it's as easy as writing extensions for python or ruby.
I think my standards are a little too high with something like CPAN. I don't think Ruby has anything close to CPAN, especially when it comes to documentation.
why is it you could pull off CDBaby in 2 months in PHP while an expert Rails programmers, including yourself as a second person on the project, could not pull it off on 2 years?
This is a particularly burning question, because it was a rewrite. That means all the requirements were known, and all the details worked out, all the problems solved -- in short, the Ruby programmer's work was cut out for him. All he needed to do was make a more maintainable replacement using the Ruby way in a reasonable amount of time.
That should be the ideal (perhaps boring, but otherwise ideal) client for any programmer! What went wrong?
But the feeling from the article is that he didn't reorganise the site as a Ruby site- the designer, not the programmer, didn't think in terms of Rails.
He didn't discuss in the article how closely he was managing the implementation. If he was telling the Ruby programmer exactly what to do, then I'd understand your point.
But the impression that I walked away with was that he was very open to the new ideas presented by an experienced Ruby developer, and let him do things the Rails way. It was not on track to meet the requirements for the end product after 2 years, so he canceled it.
It seems like the project was set up to be a success from day one: the project requirements were already solidified before it started, the problems were already solved, he was open minded to new ways of thinking, and he hired a real expert to take control of the project. The only problem to be solved was the implied problem that the code was becoming unmaintainable, and he was hoping Rails implemented by an expert could solve that in a reasonable period of time.
The fact that the project failed is not a good case study for Rails.
I've been interested in learning at least one of those languages for a while. Usually what gets in my way is that I can't find the necessary libraries to complete whatever task I'm working on. Can you point me towards the language from your list that has:
* a rich standard library with a good reference
* a good extended library like CPAN
* easy extension in C
* good documentation
* easily available compiler, etc.
I don't mind buying a book, as long as I can get somewhere just from the online documentation. Out of the languages you mention, I got the furthest with OCaml. However, if I needed to do something simple like connect to a database and then contact a directory server using LDAP, I'd be lost.
It's definitely not right now. I believe females do tend to get unfairly marginalized by some parts of tech culture.
What I don't understand about this claim is: if it were true, couldn't you build a much better development team by simply hiring all of these "marginalized," under-appreciated females? Surely such a team would outperform the competition.
I do not think he should have been arrested for what was essentially a completely non-violent protest,
There's nothing non-violent about resisting arrest.
The civil disobedience people were smart enough to follow the officers' directions when they showed up. Maybe that's why they actually accomplished something, while nobody will ever care about this guy.
Sure, just as it's possible that U.S. astronauts never actually reached the moon.
There are at least some humans who claim to have been there. We simply have NO DATA AT ALL for MOST of the years for which the article is making claims. If there are a few gaps in knowledge, but they generally extrapolate to a reasonable conclusion, I can buy it. But when you make an absolute, sweeping statement, you should have some data to back it up.
However, it's not all *probable* that the passage was open because knowledgeable explorers (i.e. people that were smart enough to search at opportune times when the ice was likely to be at its lowest point) looked for it on a fairly constant basis.
What's "fairly constant"? Is it every year? Is it even every decade?
All available evidence and historical data point to the passage having been closed continually for at least 400 years
What is that available data? A few voyages? If you have more data than that, please share.
The article is the thing that made a huge sweeping claim that it couldn't back up. Sure, it could be right, but the article didn't say "it could be the first time...".
Sounds like a good policy to me.
Interesting stuff.
I'd prefer that they would use graphs with absolute scales, but I suppose I'm being too particular at this point.
Of course, eventually, you lose the ability to distinguish layers at all, then you use uranium dating or some other radioactive decay process to provide a date to within a few hundred or thousand years.
What is Uranium dating, and how does it help us in this situation? Carbon in the atmosphere becomes radioactive while in the atmosphere at high altitude, then eventually gets dissolved into water and frozen into ice (at which point it is no longer becoming radioactive, it only decays). Uranium is radioactive the entire time, and even if it is stuck in the ice, that does not affect its radioactivity.
Will you begin to think it possible that maybe this isn't just Sturm and Drang after a few years?
Sure. I am not arguing that this is all normal, or nothing to worry about.
I'm saying that the article's claim was completely unjustified in the article. When they use sensationalist headlines and poor reasoning, it does damage to the credible evidence out there.
It is because of articles like these that I am extremely skeptical of any claims made -- on either side -- of global warming.