You mean like you deregulated California power plants and electricity distribution ? Yeah, what a great success.
Or the train deregulation in Britain ? Yeah, lots of deads and late trains. The gov. owned train system in France on the other hand is the faster in the world, safe and anyone can afford a ride.
For your information, Russia and many other countries have deregulated under the advises of the US. Now there are 10x more poor peoples and a handfull of overly rich moguls who pillaged the whole economy.
Deregulation is not the answer to all and every problem. It has put enough people in the street to be a considered a dangerous idea at best, the root of all evil at worst.
Windows is not out of DOS ! When someone says "Unix is backward", he/she usually means that the API and concept is backward... as for Windows, the Win API/Windows concepts were designed from scratch in the 80s, and never based on the DOS/BIOS API. Windows is less backward than Unix, for example the WinAPI is natively tied to 2D graphic displays, while on Unix they had to add an extra layer (X-Windows) to handle displays, because GUIs weren't available when Unix was born.
I guess an up-to-date OS would today be 100% object oriented and only programmable in object languages (C++/Object Pascal/Python/Smalltalk/etc.). BeOS is a good example of what a "non-backward" OS can be.
Why ? Maybe because you have obviously never used Delphi before and don't have a clue why Kylix is well worth 999$.
It's not just about IDE (although Bordland IDE is one of the best in the world), it's also about the language (Object Pascal), the cross-platform visual components, the rich documentation, etc...
Well both Europe (as a group of nation, although that's not a country... yet) and former USSR could nuke the whole US right now. Both of ICBM, spying sattelites, strong space launching capabilities, modern planes and weapons, etc.
Now of course that would be a loose-loose game, but as far as "taking the US", this is it ! Don't forget that however strong is an army and weak is the other one, as long as you can't stop ALL the ICBM of the opponent, you still loose.
I would say printed material use more power than reading stuff online, because of the cost involved in cutting the trees/moving the logs/making the paper/printing and folding the book/distibuting the book.
One thing you forgot : sex ! It's great fun, generally as good as a sport session and can help you make great savings on heating;)
Hummm... I like to think we made me what I am (an engineer and a geek) is my abuse of legos when I was a kid. After a while, building and improving stuff became necessary to my psychic balance:)
The point of registering databases with the gov. is to let the gov. check if anything is violating privacy laws - like bankers who used to put rather private infos in their database ("is going thru a divorce" or stuff like that). Since this is a separate agency, they have several times stopped the French gov from merging databases too.
I swear, if you french didn't invent the french fry, I would have nothing more to do with you.
The governement knows what datas are collected, not the datas themselves. If my bank collect infos on what is my familly status, then they have to declare they collect this info to the governement. They don't have to give the gov. their database itself of course !!!
Now I'd rather have the governement have my datas than 1 corporation :
- People choose who get to control the governement, but only a bunch of very rich guy get to choose who control corporations
- The governement purpose is to serve citizen. A corporation purpose is to serve it's owner(s).
Would you rather put your life into the hands of the cops or Microsoft ?
I live in France, I OWN my personnal datas (I can ask any company owning some to delete it or not resell/give it). I can sue any company not following this guideline.
Every web site has to register with a gov. agency what datas are collected and how they are used.
Now I'm curious to know how a privacy policy on a US web site can give me more protection than that...
Well, for one, Intel has a HUGE market following. This means that we will be able to buy Itanium and motherboards everywhere. This also means several vendor will make motherboards, driving prices down and features up. Intel has more and better foundries too (unlike Alpha which is made by Samsung), so higher clock speed can be expected much faster. Supported hardware will be much higher too (his is after all Intel, proponent of the standard PC).
As for software availability, it is baseless on Open source software as you have the source to recompile it. Lastly, IA-64 should arrive on desktop and cheap CPU sometimes later, which means we can all benefit from it. This is quite unlikely to happen with Alpha.
As for the speed difference, wait for some benchmarks on native code first...
In fact this maglev is built fist in China because the one planned for Germany is in serious troubles. The German gov is heavyly subsidizing this small track to make a proof of concept, and also in hope of getting bigger contracts against the French TGV (which use regular railtrack but is much more energy efficient, cheaper and also a bit faster).
Remember, even out of USA you are never safe from the RIAA and MPAA lawyers juridiction. A guy in Norway knows about it...
So download and save the cracking explanations right now, because their web site has a high probability of being taken down, and mirroring will be necessary.
And what about TEXT depicting sexual activity with/between minors ? Are they illegal too ? They are purely work of fiction, yet "they can whet paedophiles appetite". Should it be banned too ?
Then what to do with the classic Nabokov
book "Lolita" ?
If they can make illegal pure work of fiction, then will censorship end ?
Believe me, if they could find a way to know what you are thinking, they would gladly outlaw thinking about a crime too.
The odd thing is that they consider legal to show a fictionnal or even actual child murder, but showing a fictionnal child sexual abuse would be illegal. Sexual abuse are very very wrong, but on a scale of horror it is still less worse than plain murder. At least the victim gets a chance of recovering if they are alive. But of course in the US "murder is right, sex is wrong", which is why owning a gun is easier than teaching about birth control in school.
Let's face it, this is not about protecting children... it's about satisfying the right religious zealots and bringing their idea of "a perfect world" : a world without sex, without disorder, without birth-control of any kind, a world with religion in school, a world without Darwinism, a world where you can't express anything that goes against the bible.
Hum I think he is not even smart enough to be evil. Being evil requires a minimum of intelligence. Bush is probably not evil, but his ignorance and stupidy will cause great evil (and let evil people like Ashcroft do their dirty work).
Anyone remember the movie "Los Angeles 2019" from John Carpenter ? A biggot (obviously republican) president has taken over America, suppresed civil liberties and imposed an heavy religious control over the country... Bush & Ashcroft are a bit early but will nicely make this scenario possible.
MySQL doesn't recognize or enforce foreign keys. But you can still make fields that hold values that are keys to other tables, which, according to my relational DB course, is what you call a "foreign key":-)
I think the MySQL syntax even allows for the keyword "FOREIGN KEY" in table definitions (and they even plan to sometimes save this information somewhere, maybe there's hope !).
That might be an issue if performance were a problem. Most web sites built on MySQL get results plenty fast without having to cache things.
Excuse me to tell it this way : this is a very short sighted answer. Web sites tend to grow, and sometimes they grow big enough that the DB server start crawling to its knees under the load. You can never have to much optimized software. Slashdot needs a 4 CPU system to run MySQL... maybe with queries caching it could do the same job with just one CPU and an extra gig or RAM (forums are a lot of read and just a little of write). That's a lof of money saving !!!
Secondly, so request can still be pretty slow on MySQL. I use it to generate charts from 1000's or record... even with indexes and lots of work on the queries it's somewhat silly to run again and again the same queries when they could be cached.
MySQL's niche is web sites. The web is inherently session-based.
So ? Because it's the web means you don't need rollbacks ? What if, behind the web site, you have e-commerce, statistics manipulations, etc ? What if your user have points they can trade ? Wouldn't that require at least sessions ? What if I'd rather use nested SELECT than code some ugly loops in PHP to do it with several queries ?
Because MySQL is targeted to the Web doesn't mean it is ok to have no professionnal features. people do important things now on the Web (except porn, but then even porn can be good money;)
Actually I don't blame them for the time it took to add transactions - this is IMHO a very difficult feature to add with major implications everywhere. But queries caching and nested SELECT aren't very hard to implement and should be on the "top priority list" :
Query caching is simply a matter of keeping SELECT results somewhere and ditching them when an UPDATE/ROLLBACK comes in. I guess MySQL team is more interested in fixing some obscure bug with DB replication than speeding up their database by several order of magnitude...
As for nested SELECT, why don't we have them yet ? Is it so hard to run QUERY #1, then feed the result into QUERY #2 ? Heck, we all do it ourselves on the client side of MySQL with a loop in PHP/PERL and it takes 5 lines of code... shouldn't take that much to implement in MySQL itself !
Postgresql doens't have 13 full time coders working on it, yet it has much more functionnalities, and according to the latest benchmarks around, has gotten faster than MySQL.
Well those are neat, but they are minor features to most people. Replication and load-balance between slaves is neat, but what's the point to load balance between slaves when MySQL doesn't even cache queries. With web sites running always the same queries again and again, caching queries would gives incredible speed boost and isn't a very hard feature to implement (quite easier than foreign key or transaction IMHO).
Sure things improves in MySQL, but huge missing features are ignored in favor of minor improvements here and there. I'm sorry but full-featured transaction, foreign keys, caching, constraints, nested queries, etc. are what people expect their database to do, and they are very MISSION CRITITAL in many situations. Reworking the table file format yet again is not what I'd call a massive improvement.
I think MySQL developpement is slloooowwwwwwww. You would think a whole company dedicated to MySQL would allow for lots of new features coming out every week.
Well, they have been working on the 3.23 for about half a year and all they managed to do is implement a basic transaction feature. And they didn't even did it really by themselves, they had to take some code from the Berkeley DB and use a different table file format.
I guess by 2017 we can expect to have nested queries, 2045 for row-level-locking and 2078 for true foreign keys... at least Postgresql, with all the its flaws, is improving at a much faster pace and we can expect a whole lot of migration from MySQL to Postgresql sometimes in 2001/2002.
Say you have an e-commerce app... one table with orders, one with customer account.
Now say you allow orders to be passed with or WITHOUT an account (don't want to force people on creating an account first).
you have in your orders table a "customer_account" field, can be NULL or can a foreign key to the customer table.
Now you can do this in MySQL :
SELECT * FROM orders LEFT JOIN customers ON orders.custumer_account=customers.account_name WHERE (blablabla)
And then you have in your results either only orders info (if custumer_account is NULL) or orders AND customers info at the same time. No need for two separated requests...
So LEFT JOINS are quite usefull in any table that has a foreign key that can be NULL.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like you deregulated California power plants and electricity distribution ? Yeah, what a great success.
Or the train deregulation in Britain ? Yeah, lots of deads and late trains. The gov. owned train system in France on the other hand is the faster in the world, safe and anyone can afford a ride.
For your information, Russia and many other countries have deregulated under the advises of the US. Now there are 10x more poor peoples and a handfull of overly rich moguls who pillaged the whole economy.
Deregulation is not the answer to all and every problem. It has put enough people in the street to be a considered a dangerous idea at best, the root of all evil at worst.
Your post is a perfect example of ignorance, bias, xenophobia and racism against European.
Windows is not out of DOS ! When someone says "Unix is backward", he/she usually means that the API and concept is backward... as for Windows, the Win API/Windows concepts were designed from scratch in the 80s, and never based on the DOS/BIOS API. Windows is less backward than Unix, for example the WinAPI is natively tied to 2D graphic displays, while on Unix they had to add an extra layer (X-Windows) to handle displays, because GUIs weren't available when Unix was born.
I guess an up-to-date OS would today be 100% object oriented and only programmable in object languages (C++/Object Pascal/Python/Smalltalk/etc.). BeOS is a good example of what a "non-backward" OS can be.
Why ? Maybe because you have obviously never used Delphi before and don't have a clue why Kylix is well worth 999$.
It's not just about IDE (although Bordland IDE is one of the best in the world), it's also about the language (Object Pascal), the cross-platform visual components, the rich documentation, etc...
Well both Europe (as a group of nation, although that's not a country... yet) and former USSR could nuke the whole US right now. Both of ICBM, spying sattelites, strong space launching capabilities, modern planes and weapons, etc.
Now of course that would be a loose-loose game, but as far as "taking the US", this is it ! Don't forget that however strong is an army and weak is the other one, as long as you can't stop ALL the ICBM of the opponent, you still loose.
I would say printed material use more power than reading stuff online, because of the cost involved in cutting the trees/moving the logs/making the paper/printing and folding the book/distibuting the book.
;)
One thing you forgot : sex ! It's great fun, generally as good as a sport session and can help you make great savings on heating
Hummm... I like to think we made me what I am (an engineer and a geek) is my abuse of legos when I was a kid. After a while, building and improving stuff became necessary to my psychic balance :)
The point of registering databases with the gov. is to let the gov. check if anything is violating privacy laws - like bankers who used to put rather private infos in their database ("is going thru a divorce" or stuff like that). Since this is a separate agency, they have several times stopped the French gov from merging databases too.
I swear, if you french didn't invent the french fry, I would have nothing more to do with you.
I pity you who don't know the French kiss...
Read again my post.
The governement knows what datas are collected, not the datas themselves. If my bank collect infos on what is my familly status, then they have to declare they collect this info to the governement. They don't have to give the gov. their database itself of course !!!
Now I'd rather have the governement have my datas than 1 corporation :
- People choose who get to control the governement, but only a bunch of very rich guy get to choose who control corporations
- The governement purpose is to serve citizen. A corporation purpose is to serve it's owner(s).
Would you rather put your life into the hands of the cops or Microsoft ?
I live in France, I OWN my personnal datas (I can ask any company owning some to delete it or not resell/give it). I can sue any company not following this guideline.
Every web site has to register with a gov. agency what datas are collected and how they are used.
Now I'm curious to know how a privacy policy on a US web site can give me more protection than that...
Well, for one, Intel has a HUGE market following. This means that we will be able to buy Itanium and motherboards everywhere. This also means several vendor will make motherboards, driving prices down and features up. Intel has more and better foundries too (unlike Alpha which is made by Samsung), so higher clock speed can be expected much faster. Supported hardware will be much higher too (his is after all Intel, proponent of the standard PC).
As for software availability, it is baseless on Open source software as you have the source to recompile it. Lastly, IA-64 should arrive on desktop and cheap CPU sometimes later, which means we can all benefit from it. This is quite unlikely to happen with Alpha.
As for the speed difference, wait for some benchmarks on native code first...
Only 200 km/h ? that sounds quite small ! Is that cruse or top speed ? The TGV can speed over 520 km/h and the cruse speed is usually about 330 km/h.
In fact this maglev is built fist in China because the one planned for Germany is in serious troubles. The German gov is heavyly subsidizing this small track to make a proof of concept, and also in hope of getting bigger contracts against the French TGV (which use regular railtrack but is much more energy efficient, cheaper and also a bit faster).
France has a policy of never extrading its own citizen, whoever ask for it.
Remember, even out of USA you are never safe from the RIAA and MPAA lawyers juridiction. A guy in Norway knows about it...
So download and save the cracking explanations right now, because their web site has a high probability of being taken down, and mirroring will be necessary.
And what about TEXT depicting sexual activity with/between minors ? Are they illegal too ? They are purely work of fiction, yet "they can whet paedophiles appetite". Should it be banned too ?
Then what to do with the classic Nabokov
book "Lolita" ?
If they can make illegal pure work of fiction, then will censorship end ?
Believe me, if they could find a way to know what you are thinking, they would gladly outlaw thinking about a crime too.
The odd thing is that they consider legal to show a fictionnal or even actual child murder, but showing a fictionnal child sexual abuse would be illegal. Sexual abuse are very very wrong, but on a scale of horror it is still less worse than plain murder. At least the victim gets a chance of recovering if they are alive. But of course in the US "murder is right, sex is wrong", which is why owning a gun is easier than teaching about birth control in school.
Let's face it, this is not about protecting children... it's about satisfying the right religious zealots and bringing their idea of "a perfect world" : a world without sex, without disorder, without birth-control of any kind, a world with religion in school, a world without Darwinism, a world where you can't express anything that goes against the bible.
Hum I think he is not even smart enough to be evil. Being evil requires a minimum of intelligence. Bush is probably not evil, but his ignorance and stupidy will cause great evil (and let evil people like Ashcroft do their dirty work).
Anyone remember the movie "Los Angeles 2019" from John Carpenter ? A biggot (obviously republican) president has taken over America, suppresed civil liberties and imposed an heavy religious control over the country... Bush & Ashcroft are a bit early but will nicely make this scenario possible.
MySQL doesn't recognize or enforce foreign keys. But you can still make fields that hold values that are keys to other tables, which, according to my relational DB course, is what you call a "foreign key" :-)
I think the MySQL syntax even allows for the keyword "FOREIGN KEY" in table definitions (and they even plan to sometimes save this information somewhere, maybe there's hope !).
That might be an issue if performance were a problem. Most web sites built on MySQL get results plenty fast without having to cache things.
;)
Excuse me to tell it this way : this is a very short sighted answer. Web sites tend to grow, and sometimes they grow big enough that the DB server start crawling to its knees under the load. You can never have to much optimized software. Slashdot needs a 4 CPU system to run MySQL... maybe with queries caching it could do the same job with just one CPU and an extra gig or RAM (forums are a lot of read and just a little of write). That's a lof of money saving !!!
Secondly, so request can still be pretty slow on MySQL. I use it to generate charts from 1000's or record... even with indexes and lots of work on the queries it's somewhat silly to run again and again the same queries when they could be cached.
MySQL's niche is web sites. The web is inherently session-based.
So ? Because it's the web means you don't need rollbacks ? What if, behind the web site, you have e-commerce, statistics manipulations, etc ? What if your user have points they can trade ? Wouldn't that require at least sessions ? What if I'd rather use nested SELECT than code some ugly loops in PHP to do it with several queries ?
Because MySQL is targeted to the Web doesn't mean it is ok to have no professionnal features. people do important things now on the Web (except porn, but then even porn can be good money
Actually I don't blame them for the time it took to add transactions - this is IMHO a very difficult feature to add with major implications everywhere. But queries caching and nested SELECT aren't very hard to implement and should be on the "top priority list" :
Query caching is simply a matter of keeping SELECT results somewhere and ditching them when an UPDATE/ROLLBACK comes in. I guess MySQL team is more interested in fixing some obscure bug with DB replication than speeding up their database by several order of magnitude...
As for nested SELECT, why don't we have them yet ? Is it so hard to run QUERY #1, then feed the result into QUERY #2 ? Heck, we all do it ourselves on the client side of MySQL with a loop in PHP/PERL and it takes 5 lines of code... shouldn't take that much to implement in MySQL itself !
Postgresql doens't have 13 full time coders working on it, yet it has much more functionnalities, and according to the latest benchmarks around, has gotten faster than MySQL.
Well those are neat, but they are minor features to most people. Replication and load-balance between slaves is neat, but what's the point to load balance between slaves when MySQL doesn't even cache queries. With web sites running always the same queries again and again, caching queries would gives incredible speed boost and isn't a very hard feature to implement (quite easier than foreign key or transaction IMHO).
Sure things improves in MySQL, but huge missing features are ignored in favor of minor improvements here and there. I'm sorry but full-featured transaction, foreign keys, caching, constraints, nested queries, etc. are what people expect their database to do, and they are very MISSION CRITITAL in many situations. Reworking the table file format yet again is not what I'd call a massive improvement.
I think MySQL developpement is slloooowwwwwwww. You would think a whole company dedicated to MySQL would allow for lots of new features coming out every week.
Well, they have been working on the 3.23 for about half a year and all they managed to do is implement a basic transaction feature. And they didn't even did it really by themselves, they had to take some code from the Berkeley DB and use a different table file format.
I guess by 2017 we can expect to have nested queries, 2045 for row-level-locking and 2078 for true foreign keys... at least Postgresql, with all the its flaws, is improving at a much faster pace and we can expect a whole lot of migration from MySQL to Postgresql sometimes in 2001/2002.
Say you have an e-commerce app... one table with orders, one with customer account.
Now say you allow orders to be passed with or WITHOUT an account (don't want to force people on creating an account first).
you have in your orders table a "customer_account" field, can be NULL or can a foreign key to the customer table.
Now you can do this in MySQL :
SELECT * FROM orders LEFT JOIN customers ON orders.custumer_account=customers.account_name WHERE (blablabla)
And then you have in your results either only orders info (if custumer_account is NULL) or orders AND customers info at the same time. No need for two separated requests...
So LEFT JOINS are quite usefull in any table that has a foreign key that can be NULL.
You could already do that before with some trickery :
SELECT something, (RAND()*10) as random FROM table ORDER by random LIMIT 1
the *10 is necessary or MySQL would optimize the request and compute RAND() one time for all rows...