... HOPE is that they would become at least mildly informed... I think everybody who is eligible should be encouraged to vote...
Your logic there seems a little backward. Why not encourage people to inform themselves, and hope that they vote?
... people of the United States elected Bush president...
Interesting that you chose Bush, by the way, when he didn't recieve the popular vote, but your point didn't really need an example, so it still stands:)
... do we really believe no highly qualified individual could possibly be from any other party?
Voting mechanisms are fairly complex. The party system here generally makes the candidates more moderate, and helps people to compromise. There are many different ways of voting and none are really perfect. I think the problem you describe is one related to the way we count votes more than the information available to the public.
obviously feel there is a "right" and a "wrong" decision in issues like these
I was trying to illustrate the difference between people who say "this should be a federal law because of X, Y, and Z" and people who just say "that sounds like a good law, what does federal mean?". Many people don't understand the structure of our government, and so don't recognize the effects of a federal law vs. a state law. I'm sure that some informed people do think that retirement should be a federally controlled redistribution program and not a state controlled program with individual accounts, and I might disagree, but I would respect their opinion.
You're absolutely right, the U.S. is a democratic republic, and I was speaking a little bit too loosely there.
My intent was to refer to the democratic aspect of our country (i.e. your vote counts for something). It would have been awkward and distracting for me to say "... and that's what makes this country a democratic republic", because "republic" had nothing to do with the subject of my post.
In San Diego there's 94.9 which plays music and commercials and nothing else. I think they play fewer commercials, but maybe it's just because their DJs tell us the name of the song and then shut up. I can appreciate the station not wasting their time and mine laughing about some stupid thing.
If I ever hear the "radio laugh" I switch again fast and don't come back soon. And I have a steering-wheel mounted tuner so don't think my hands will be too busy to change stations.
Both parties will oppose it, so it will never really happen. It's the only thing that can really break the two-party system.
Also, it's a little more complicated, so some people will dislike it because they don't understand how it works. However, it's still just as simple to vote.
Yeah, that's why I said everyone has a right to vote. But why do we encourage people who haven't taken the time to inform themselves to vote? If they don't know who to vote for, are you saying they should guess?
Nobody can decide whether you're informed enough to vote except you, and that's what makes this country a democracy.
Just because I have the right to bear arms doesn't mean that I should. I can go out and get a gun, having no idea how to use it, and that's my right, no matter how irresponsible. I have decided that until I have the time to take shooting classes I am not ready to own a gun. However, I would be outraged if someone else made that decision for me. Same with voting.
Why encourage other people to vote? I'd rather be 1 out of 100 registered voters than 1 out of 100 million registered voters.
What we're really doing when we scrape for more votes is we tell the people who have only seen the rhetoric and catch phrases to make a decision.
People who don't understand economics are just not going to make good decisions at the polls. People who do not understand the structure of our government are not going to make good decisions at the polls (Do states have any individual power anymore? Not really, everything is Federal now because not enough voters know the difference. So much for the United States of America.).
People who don't understand these concepts have a right to vote. But why are we encouraging them?
My theory is that when these people do vote, they vote primarily for one party, and that is the party that encourages them to vote. I don't see much altruism in the "get out the vote" crowd at all.
Any major political entity uses rhetoric, propoganda, and myths to achieve their goals. I don't buy from the small amount of evidence that your gave that Republicans are more prone to it than Democrats.
Also, regarding the "constructed markets": some are more constructed than others, and some are more free than others. The reason why people call a free market a free market is because it requires very few rules to function. The only significant rule required is that one person can't forcibly take something from another. 100% free market is not desirable because sometimes a transaction affects more than the people engaged in the transaction (e.g. pollution). And the U.S. is not a free market, because of laws like you mention, but it's closer than many other markets.
I wouldn't think so. Antarctica is actually a continent so there should have been dust. Although it makes sense that the dust may have settled differently because of the climate.
Yup. Even an individual nuke requires very precise timing so that it implodes evenly. If not, it will start to break apart and never achieve the pressure required to detonate. Even when a nuke does detonate it only gets a moderate yield (I think "fat man" was about 15% yield) because it breaks itself apart so fast.
The USPTO is basically just a filter that prevents the courts being bogged down too much with litigation over "you copied my idea"-type lawsuits.
Unfortunately the USPTO is becoming increasingly permissive and filtering out fewer bogus patents, so now we end up with stuff like this that has to be sorted out (in a much more expensive manner) in the courts.
I don't think it has all that much to do with capitalism. Government-sanctioned monopolies don't closely resemble capitalism to me.
Patents are one of those necessary evils that require careful balance and good human judgement. I suppose you could argue they aren't necessary, but nobody has a better alternative.
Too bad we can't run large-scale experiments. The scientist in me wants to eliminate patents and copyrights for 100 years and see what the effects are. However, that may be a tad risky.
That's very frustrating because they were not up-front about the conditions for installation. I agree that copy protection is probably necessary for the commercial game world. However, who wants to go home to find out that there is an intentional conflict with other software?
The only solution that I can think of is that you return games that you're unhappy with. I read an interesting article about how easy it is to win a claim in small claims court if they refuse.
I am not against copy protection. I just want all of the terms of the agreement to be UP-FRONT. They should be listed on the box somewhere, or available in some equally simple way BEFORE PURCHASE.
Maybe you don't agree, but you completely failed to state a case. If you do decide to state a case at some point, at least consider the important things you give up by avoiding stored procedures.
The people that developed Slony-I, a BSD licensed replication daemon, and the people that developed tsearch2, a full-text searching engine, all seem to think that stored procedures are important. I think these products are a landmark achievement in the DB world, since they add critical functionality without modifying the server code at all. These features are living proof of PostgreSQL's flexibility and modularity.
Now, that being said, of course any sufficiently powerful feature can be misused.
Then you should check out PostgreSQL 8.0.0beta1 and it's Point in Time Recovery. You can still do ASCII dumps whenever you want if it makes you feel more comfortable.
And even if you can't trust a database, it's nice when you wake up and the database is still working and 100% consistant. Back ups are important but I'd prefer to spend my workday doing something other than recovering from catastrophe, if I have the option.
If stored procs are a bad thing, wouldn't the following features also be bad?:
(1) triggers (2) constraint triggers (3) functional indexes using a user-defined function, or indexing a user-defined data type (4) user-defined aggregate function (5) user-defined data types
Those are very difficult problems to simply work around. For #3 you just have to take the performance hit and not use the index. For #4 you have to read the entire amount of data into the application and post-process it to get the data you actually need. #1, 2, and 5 all speak for themselves, being basic principles of an RDBMS.
And PostgreSQL 8.0.0beta1 has PITR (point in time recovery) meaning that it should be reasonably simple to revert to a previous state. Hopefully that makes it easier for you to fix it when someone screws it up.
I'd also like to point out that a very advanced replication system, Slony-I, was developed for PostgreSQL using triggers and stored procedures (to work with the replication daemon). So I'm not speaking in abstract terms about potential usefulness, but real-world business needs. What would you do to implement such a replication engine in MySQL? Write some code in the MySQL server and recompile I suppose. Slony actually works across PostgreSQL versions and works on versions of PostgreSQL that were released before Slony was ever conceived. That's the power of stored procedures.
I understand that these features need to be used with care. I understand that some people don't need these features (unfortunately, some people realize they are needed too late). What I don't understand is how software can be missing these features and still call itself an RDBMS. What surprises me even more is when people make a blanket statement condemning these features with absolutely no acknowledgement of their actual uses.
RDBMSs aren't a commodity. They have widely varying prices, feature sets, and behaviors.
PostgreSQL generally tries to be standards complaint where applicable, even in their stored procedure languages (plpgsql is similar to oracle's plsql).
Sure, if it's all the same, choose the lowest common denominator. But if you need a few basic features of an RDBMS, then you just do it the most standards-compliant way you can.
Heck, restricting yourself to an RDBMS is "vendor lock-in" and you might as well just do flat file storage and have the app do all the consistancy checking.
It's a balance. Use a feature if it helps more than it hurts. Stored procedures can be very valuable and you shouldn't disregard them.
Additionally, I don't think that "vendor lock-in" has the same negative tone when I'm supposedly being locked-in to a FOSS database like PostgreSQL.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the client libraries licensed as GPL?
This makes it difficult to develop an application with MySQL support, even under a FOSS license like the BSD license, without paying for a commercial MySQL license. Merely providing a MySQL database driver seems to violate the GPL if the application is not GPL.
As I understand it, this is more restrictive than even proprietary databases. As evidence I point out that PHP includes many database drivers (proprietary and FOSS), but does not bundle the MySQL one anymore.
Also, it creates a significant "grey area" when your language of choice (e.g. PHP) provides a driver. Must the PHP app then be GPL as well?
Am I being confused by FUD or are these real points of confusion and concern?
I am really only concerned with the client libraries. I'm certainly comfortable with the server itself being GPL, and I am grateful to MySQL AB for contributing so much code in a FOSS license. Client libraries are often LGPL, and it confuses me when MySQL AB does not follow that norm.
Either: (a) You're listing complaints about MySQL, in which case I recommend better wording in your future comments; or (b) You're listing complaints about PostgreSQL, in which case I recommend a lot of reading. PostgreSQL doesn't even use threads, it has had rock solid atomic commits for a long time, and has some of the best SQL complaince of any DB.
Any speed advantage MySQL has is only realized by using MyISAM tables rather than InnoDB tables. However, you sacrifice many of MySQLs newer features (like transactions) by using MyISAM.
Other than that, they are reasonably close in speed. However, I trust PostgreSQL to have better worst-case performance, and better query planning.
It depends on many factors and you should examine your application needs. You should also examine factors other than performance. Sometimes the performance might be similar, but PostgreSQL provides many more options that take burden away from the application, meaning that PostgreSQL might be a big performance win.
In a recent project I did that was DB-intensive, it turned out that PostgreSQL was much faster because of complex queries and the reduced amount of processing my application needed to do (with MySQL I needed to transform the data in my application after I got it from MySQL). I was also able to optimize queries by implementing user-defined aggregate functions (which answered some specific needs from my application).
That has been hashed out on the mailing lists time and time again.
PostgreSQL is not a filesystem.
Where is the real use-case? There is a huge amount of extra code and extra bugs, and a minor performance optimization at BEST.
Additionally, PostgreSQL would then not be able to make use of OS disk buffers.
So, it would ONLY be useful as a MINOR performance optimization on PostgreSQL only machines, running NO other applications. All that at the cost of so much code and so many bugs?
You could just as well argue for any application that it should implement it's own OS and filesystem.
That being said, I'm sure that some people benefit from the Orcale feature. I doubt you'll see it in PostgreSQL any time soon though.
Slashdot Mirror
Your logic there seems a little backward. Why not encourage people to inform themselves, and hope that they vote?
Interesting that you chose Bush, by the way, when he didn't recieve the popular vote, but your point didn't really need an example, so it still stands
Voting mechanisms are fairly complex. The party system here generally makes the candidates more moderate, and helps people to compromise. There are many different ways of voting and none are really perfect. I think the problem you describe is one related to the way we count votes more than the information available to the public.
I was trying to illustrate the difference between people who say "this should be a federal law because of X, Y, and Z" and people who just say "that sounds like a good law, what does federal mean?". Many people don't understand the structure of our government, and so don't recognize the effects of a federal law vs. a state law. I'm sure that some informed people do think that retirement should be a federally controlled redistribution program and not a state controlled program with individual accounts, and I might disagree, but I would respect their opinion.
You're absolutely right, the U.S. is a democratic republic, and I was speaking a little bit too loosely there.
My intent was to refer to the democratic aspect of our country (i.e. your vote counts for something). It would have been awkward and distracting for me to say "... and that's what makes this country a democratic republic", because "republic" had nothing to do with the subject of my post.
Interesting, thanks for the reply.
Haha, true. They're just as guilty of repeats as any other station down here. What stations play more variety? I'm open to suggestion.
In San Diego there's 94.9 which plays music and commercials and nothing else. I think they play fewer commercials, but maybe it's just because their DJs tell us the name of the song and then shut up. I can appreciate the station not wasting their time and mine laughing about some stupid thing.
If I ever hear the "radio laugh" I switch again fast and don't come back soon. And I have a steering-wheel mounted tuner so don't think my hands will be too busy to change stations.
Also the resistance to IRV, Instant Run-Off Voting:
http://www.fairvote.org/irv/
Both parties will oppose it, so it will never really happen. It's the only thing that can really break the two-party system.
Also, it's a little more complicated, so some people will dislike it because they don't understand how it works. However, it's still just as simple to vote.
Yeah, that's why I said everyone has a right to vote. But why do we encourage people who haven't taken the time to inform themselves to vote? If they don't know who to vote for, are you saying they should guess?
Nobody can decide whether you're informed enough to vote except you, and that's what makes this country a democracy.
Just because I have the right to bear arms doesn't mean that I should. I can go out and get a gun, having no idea how to use it, and that's my right, no matter how irresponsible. I have decided that until I have the time to take shooting classes I am not ready to own a gun. However, I would be outraged if someone else made that decision for me. Same with voting.
Why encourage other people to vote? I'd rather be 1 out of 100 registered voters than 1 out of 100 million registered voters.
What we're really doing when we scrape for more votes is we tell the people who have only seen the rhetoric and catch phrases to make a decision.
People who don't understand economics are just not going to make good decisions at the polls. People who do not understand the structure of our government are not going to make good decisions at the polls (Do states have any individual power anymore? Not really, everything is Federal now because not enough voters know the difference. So much for the United States of America.).
People who don't understand these concepts have a right to vote. But why are we encouraging them?
My theory is that when these people do vote, they vote primarily for one party, and that is the party that encourages them to vote. I don't see much altruism in the "get out the vote" crowd at all.
Any major political entity uses rhetoric, propoganda, and myths to achieve their goals. I don't buy from the small amount of evidence that your gave that Republicans are more prone to it than Democrats.
Also, regarding the "constructed markets": some are more constructed than others, and some are more free than others. The reason why people call a free market a free market is because it requires very few rules to function. The only significant rule required is that one person can't forcibly take something from another. 100% free market is not desirable because sometimes a transaction affects more than the people engaged in the transaction (e.g. pollution). And the U.S. is not a free market, because of laws like you mention, but it's closer than many other markets.
was it because of the composition of ice vs rock?
I wouldn't think so. Antarctica is actually a continent so there should have been dust. Although it makes sense that the dust may have settled differently because of the climate.
Yup. Even an individual nuke requires very precise timing so that it implodes evenly. If not, it will start to break apart and never achieve the pressure required to detonate. Even when a nuke does detonate it only gets a moderate yield (I think "fat man" was about 15% yield) because it breaks itself apart so fast.
Can you then explain what actually causes the rotational effect then?
The USPTO is basically just a filter that prevents the courts being bogged down too much with litigation over "you copied my idea"-type lawsuits.
Unfortunately the USPTO is becoming increasingly permissive and filtering out fewer bogus patents, so now we end up with stuff like this that has to be sorted out (in a much more expensive manner) in the courts.
I don't think it has all that much to do with capitalism. Government-sanctioned monopolies don't closely resemble capitalism to me.
Patents are one of those necessary evils that require careful balance and good human judgement. I suppose you could argue they aren't necessary, but nobody has a better alternative.
Too bad we can't run large-scale experiments. The scientist in me wants to eliminate patents and copyrights for 100 years and see what the effects are. However, that may be a tad risky.
I doubt that land disputes will be settled by a sporting event.
I hate to say it, but war has no "replacement". Conflict is natural and necessary to any society. War is just the extreme form of a conflict.
After all most negotiations and peace treaties are backed up by the threat of war in some way. And it's dangerous when that threat becomes idle.
That's very frustrating because they were not up-front about the conditions for installation. I agree that copy protection is probably necessary for the commercial game world. However, who wants to go home to find out that there is an intentional conflict with other software?
The only solution that I can think of is that you return games that you're unhappy with. I read an interesting article about how easy it is to win a claim in small claims court if they refuse.
I am not against copy protection. I just want all of the terms of the agreement to be UP-FRONT. They should be listed on the box somewhere, or available in some equally simple way BEFORE PURCHASE.
Maybe you don't agree, but you completely failed to state a case. If you do decide to state a case at some point, at least consider the important things you give up by avoiding stored procedures.
The people that developed Slony-I, a BSD licensed replication daemon, and the people that developed tsearch2, a full-text searching engine, all seem to think that stored procedures are important. I think these products are a landmark achievement in the DB world, since they add critical functionality without modifying the server code at all. These features are living proof of PostgreSQL's flexibility and modularity.
Now, that being said, of course any sufficiently powerful feature can be misused.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as though php supports cursors yet.
- declare.html - fetch.html
..."); ...");
It's just SQL, create a cursor and do a "FETCH" in place of a "SELECT".
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/sql
and
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/sql
pgsql_exec($db,"DECLARE
$res = pgsql_exec($db,"FETCH
$foo = pg_fetch_array($res,0);
Then you should check out PostgreSQL 8.0.0beta1 and it's Point in Time Recovery. You can still do ASCII dumps whenever you want if it makes you feel more comfortable.
And even if you can't trust a database, it's nice when you wake up and the database is still working and 100% consistant. Back ups are important but I'd prefer to spend my workday doing something other than recovering from catastrophe, if I have the option.
Stored procedures are a bad toy.
8 8823
I already answered this once today:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=118195&cid=99
Please give some thought to the implications listed in the post above before you claim that stored procedures are bad.
If stored procs are a bad thing, wouldn't the following features also be bad?:
(1) triggers
(2) constraint triggers
(3) functional indexes using a user-defined function, or indexing a user-defined data type
(4) user-defined aggregate function
(5) user-defined data types
Those are very difficult problems to simply work around. For #3 you just have to take the performance hit and not use the index. For #4 you have to read the entire amount of data into the application and post-process it to get the data you actually need. #1, 2, and 5 all speak for themselves, being basic principles of an RDBMS.
And PostgreSQL 8.0.0beta1 has PITR (point in time recovery) meaning that it should be reasonably simple to revert to a previous state. Hopefully that makes it easier for you to fix it when someone screws it up.
I'd also like to point out that a very advanced replication system, Slony-I, was developed for PostgreSQL using triggers and stored procedures (to work with the replication daemon). So I'm not speaking in abstract terms about potential usefulness, but real-world business needs. What would you do to implement such a replication engine in MySQL? Write some code in the MySQL server and recompile I suppose. Slony actually works across PostgreSQL versions and works on versions of PostgreSQL that were released before Slony was ever conceived. That's the power of stored procedures.
I understand that these features need to be used with care. I understand that some people don't need these features (unfortunately, some people realize they are needed too late). What I don't understand is how software can be missing these features and still call itself an RDBMS. What surprises me even more is when people make a blanket statement condemning these features with absolutely no acknowledgement of their actual uses.
RDBMSs aren't a commodity. They have widely varying prices, feature sets, and behaviors.
PostgreSQL generally tries to be standards complaint where applicable, even in their stored procedure languages (plpgsql is similar to oracle's plsql).
Sure, if it's all the same, choose the lowest common denominator. But if you need a few basic features of an RDBMS, then you just do it the most standards-compliant way you can.
Heck, restricting yourself to an RDBMS is "vendor lock-in" and you might as well just do flat file storage and have the app do all the consistancy checking.
It's a balance. Use a feature if it helps more than it hurts. Stored procedures can be very valuable and you shouldn't disregard them.
Additionally, I don't think that "vendor lock-in" has the same negative tone when I'm supposedly being locked-in to a FOSS database like PostgreSQL.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the client libraries licensed as GPL?
This makes it difficult to develop an application with MySQL support, even under a FOSS license like the BSD license, without paying for a commercial MySQL license. Merely providing a MySQL database driver seems to violate the GPL if the application is not GPL.
As I understand it, this is more restrictive than even proprietary databases. As evidence I point out that PHP includes many database drivers (proprietary and FOSS), but does not bundle the MySQL one anymore.
Also, it creates a significant "grey area" when your language of choice (e.g. PHP) provides a driver. Must the PHP app then be GPL as well?
Am I being confused by FUD or are these real points of confusion and concern?
I am really only concerned with the client libraries. I'm certainly comfortable with the server itself being GPL, and I am grateful to MySQL AB for contributing so much code in a FOSS license. Client libraries are often LGPL, and it confuses me when MySQL AB does not follow that norm.
Your point is not clear to me.
Either:
(a) You're listing complaints about MySQL, in which case I recommend better wording in your future comments; or
(b) You're listing complaints about PostgreSQL, in which case I recommend a lot of reading. PostgreSQL doesn't even use threads, it has had rock solid atomic commits for a long time, and has some of the best SQL complaince of any DB.
Any speed advantage MySQL has is only realized by using MyISAM tables rather than InnoDB tables. However, you sacrifice many of MySQLs newer features (like transactions) by using MyISAM.
Other than that, they are reasonably close in speed. However, I trust PostgreSQL to have better worst-case performance, and better query planning.
It depends on many factors and you should examine your application needs. You should also examine factors other than performance. Sometimes the performance might be similar, but PostgreSQL provides many more options that take burden away from the application, meaning that PostgreSQL might be a big performance win.
In a recent project I did that was DB-intensive, it turned out that PostgreSQL was much faster because of complex queries and the reduced amount of processing my application needed to do (with MySQL I needed to transform the data in my application after I got it from MySQL). I was also able to optimize queries by implementing user-defined aggregate functions (which answered some specific needs from my application).
uses direct / raw i/o
That has been hashed out on the mailing lists time and time again.
PostgreSQL is not a filesystem.
Where is the real use-case? There is a huge amount of extra code and extra bugs, and a minor performance optimization at BEST.
Additionally, PostgreSQL would then not be able to make use of OS disk buffers.
So, it would ONLY be useful as a MINOR performance optimization on PostgreSQL only machines, running NO other applications. All that at the cost of so much code and so many bugs?
You could just as well argue for any application that it should implement it's own OS and filesystem.
That being said, I'm sure that some people benefit from the Orcale feature. I doubt you'll see it in PostgreSQL any time soon though.