Actually a partial collapse of the bench did happen in August 2005, taking ~11 acres (second to last paragraph). As for the deaths, I'm repeating what the park ranger told me. Maybe he was telling the truth, or maybe he wanted to scare tourists and exaggerated it, but it looks like others have heard the same. Are you just getting your info from Google, or do you have some first-hand knowledge of the situation?
That's very cool, but frankly it would scare the shite out of me if I could look down and see molten lava through the cracks in the surface I'm standing on. Fall through and it's instant death, and lava rock is relatively brittle.
However, to spare you from going through an entire page on that "religion", here's the related excerpt:
Heh, better yet, download the really funny Southpark Episode on scientology from Xenu.net (free and legal, thanks to Matt Stone and Trey Parker). This is the one that asks Tom Cruise to come out of the closet ~forty times...
Interesting story about this. I recently moved to Hawaii, and some friends related to me a few months ago about their visit to Volcano National Park last January, when they were allowed to actually hike right up to the lava flowing into the ocean. They said they could come as close as 10 feet away before the radiant heat of the liquid rock became too much. And it's a beautiful sight at night, with red streaks of lava on the hillside in the distance, flowing about a half mile across the flat shelf (or bench, as geologists call it) from the base of the hill into the ocean. So of course I wanted to go see this too, b/c how often do you get to see real, molten lava, right out of the earth's mantle??? Anyone who thinks this isn't interesting to geeks should think again!
So I finally got a chance to go with some friends last Friday, day after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the park rangers had closed the trail a mile and a half from the lava flow, saying that a bench had collapsed into the ocean several months ago, taking 14 hikers with it, who were never found. I can only imagine that they either drowned, were incinerated, or were buried alive by the landslide, or some ungodly combination of the three. There are also a lot of signs at the park with pictures of a bench breaking off into the ocean and an unfortunate stick figure hiker falling in with it, but the pics are out of scale and make the bench look like a rather small edge of land by the sea, easily steered clear of.
Anyway, it was a disappointment b/c I really wanted to see the lave up close. My friends and I debated a bit about sneaking out across the lava fields anyway, which would have been quite easy to do since the ranger station was over a mile back down the road, and there were no rangers guarding the trail or anywhere near. We figured we would just stay a good 50 yards or more inland, away from these fragile "benches". We didn't care so much about seeing the lave go into the ocean as we did about just seeing it flowing across the ground.
But in the end we decided to turn back and head home, and return another day. Only yesterday did I see in the news that a ~40-acre bench had broken off into the ocean. Holy moly, 40 acres! And that was only three days after we almost snuck out on this exact bench, not realizing its massive size! I also discovered that that bench that took the 14 hikers with it was actually ~12 acres, certainly not easily steered clear of. Further, like an iceberg, the lava flowing across the surface of the bench is only a fraction of the total flow, as most of it flows down the hill, hits the bench at the base of the hill, and seeps into tunnels which spread out over a wider swath than the surface flow, and through which it continues its flow to the ocean. These hollow tunnels, combined with the porous brittleness of hardened lava rock and erosion from the ocean water seaping into the bench causes large sections to crumble and break off periodically.
It's all quite fascinating, but the moral of the story is, kids, when the park ranger at a volcano tells you not to do something but doesn't volunteer the details or say why, trust him anyway and don't do it!
What's with the kid that always crosses the finish line last and somehow always gets perceived as the leader?
B/c he's the 600lb whale of the class, and everyone is so amazed and stupefied that he actually finished the 100yd dash that his accomplishment vastly overshadows that of all the other kids who finished several hours ago.
There are companies that truly believe in open source and its philosophy and there are companies like sun. This is a hail-marry effort to stop their impending demise.
Why are so many/.'ers anti-Sun? It's not like Sun is a convicted monopoly that uses ruthless and illegal tactics to foist shitty products on the world. Their products may be expensive (or were), but they're also really good. In fact, Sun is one of several fronts against Microsoft, which include Linux, OSS, BSD, IBM, maybe HP, maybe Apple, and others. Why do we see OpenSolaris as Sun attempting pressure Red Hat and not Microsoft??? Windows gained ground against Unix b/c Unix was expensive, until Linux with its massive developer community matured enough to offer a good, free (and Free) alternative. Now OpenSolaris is offering another similar alternative, partly to Linux, but more cosmically important, to Windows. Yet/. is nevertheless filled with people castigating Sun, and who have lost sight of the forest for the trees. Priorities, people.
In short, comments convey concepts and explanations, not mechanical descriptions.
Right, so your comments should probably explain what and why, not how and why. The exception is if you're doing something tricky or unusual and you think some reader may not interpret the code entirely correctly in determining how, so you might add the how explanation as well.
That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows,
Interesting. Maybe it's not the Supreme Court deciding elections that we need to be worrying about... Maybe this is another reason why Diebold is so resistant to voter-verified paper trails.
this super hyped version of the next generation of Windows has gradually had all of its most attractive features stripped out of it just for the sake of getting it out of the door quickly.
If MS is losing money on every X360, then they'll lose 3x that with my units.
MS will lose even more if you don't buy a 360 at all. But of course, this is Slashdot where MS purchases require justification, no matter how contorted.
Anybody have any real background info on why the company developing the Transrelational
No, but Date sure tortur, er teases his readers about it quite a bit in his writings. What's the company's name, and are you sure it is even a company and not just an ad-hoc group of computer scientists? I've just assumed the delay was due to figuring out the finer details, as I suspect it's not as simple to design and implement as Date may have alluded. Would certainly be cool if they open-sourced the TR concepts, though...
True, but the purpose of the relational database is to prevent the 'garbage in' part. It relies upon the Data Admin or Data Architect (not the DBA, which is different) knowing the data in the problem domain thoroughly enough to design the database and its constraints so that garbage is not accepted, and the only data that goes in does so according to well-considered business rules and to the relational algebra of the model. Putting data integrity constraints in the db means that every app that connects with that db is forced to adhere to the same constraints, so that even if the app developers on one particular app screw up and forget to validate a particular input field correctly, the bad data is still prevented by the DB's constraints. The DB will throw an error and the app will fail on the insert, and good developers will build into their apps try/catch logic and other methods of gracefully handling such errors. The DA and DBA's job responsibility is maintaining and ensuring data integrity, and building the constraints into the DB is the method of assuring that. In a nutshell, there should never be 'garbage in', and hence no 'garbage out' either.
I teach at a community college and our enrollment numbers are down in our IT programs. We have found that many have the perception that there are few IT jobs.
With a tip of the hat to Alan Kay and the greats who made the IT industry, maybe you should teach your students that the best way to perceive the IT job market is to create it. One of the best things about the IT field, at least the software development side, is the low barriers to entry (a computer, internet connection, and willingness to experiment), and the relative ease and lack of startup capital required to make a good idea into a viable business. Try appealing to your students' idealistic side, get them to experiment with coming up iwth ideas and then prototyping, and encourage them to run with it.
It's a bit simpler - Oracle is for anyone who knows what data integrity is and requires it, MySQL is for anyone else. PostgreSQL is the free, acceptable alternative to Oracle.
1. Does Oracle need InnoDB? Would Oracle gain features or capabilities they don't already have by incorporating it into their database? If so, then perhaps we're looking at a fork.
2. If InnoDB is forked, does MySQL have the developer talent to continue advancing InnoDB, or will the OSS community do it for them, or will it stagnate?
1. No HD-DVD or Blu-Ray- whatever happens with this media format debacle, the people with the new 360 out now wont have it.
That seems more and more to be a non-issue. It's not like there's an accepted standard for next-gen DVD anyway. Blue-Ray seems to have an edge, but it's not even production yet, Sony's BR copy-protection is getting so much criticism that the kind of people that the details of next-gen DVD matters to may not even want BR for that reason. Sony muddied the market a few days or so ago by talking about Red-Ray or some such derivative of Blue-Ray. HD-DVD has more lenient copy restrictions but no one is sure how close it is to production either, and it has less space than Blue-Ray. In short, the whole next-gen DVD technology and market is currently a mess, and no one is sure how it will work out. In the meantime, DVD is will be fine for most purposes, and if a game or movie needs more room, the publisher can use multiple DVD's. Yes, switching mid-game/movie is a bit annoying, but not the end of the world.
Getting Dell to ship AMD Boxes has nothing to do with marketing and EVERYTHING to do with Intel's anti-trust behaviour, and back-room dealings.
It also has to do with the fact that Intel's technology simply isn't competitive with AMD's, and that analysts are predicting it won't even have a chance at being competitive again till 2009. Advertising side-deals or no, Dell can't afford to support the losing side that long. Dell may be able to sell Intel servers for cheaper up front, but Opteron's cost savings in power consumption and performance negate that advantage. Sun, HP, IBM, Newisys and other OEM's are about to start eating Dell's lunch with Opteron, Intel has failed to supply an answer, so now Dell's (sane) alternatives are constrained to one - add AMD to the mix.
Of course it was entirely tied to Microsoft's platform and browser, which was why you didn't see it much on public websites,
Actually I think it was b/c of the much-maligned ActiveX security vulnerabilities. There are plenty of ActiveX-less websites that are coded solely for IE anyway, so lack of platform-independence is not really the issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a partial collapse of the bench did happen in August 2005, taking ~11 acres (second to last paragraph). As for the deaths, I'm repeating what the park ranger told me. Maybe he was telling the truth, or maybe he wanted to scare tourists and exaggerated it, but it looks like others have heard the same. Are you just getting your info from Google, or do you have some first-hand knowledge of the situation?
That's very cool, but frankly it would scare the shite out of me if I could look down and see molten lava through the cracks in the surface I'm standing on. Fall through and it's instant death, and lava rock is relatively brittle.
However, to spare you from going through an entire page on that "religion", here's the related excerpt:
Heh, better yet, download the really funny Southpark Episode on scientology from Xenu.net (free and legal, thanks to Matt Stone and Trey Parker). This is the one that asks Tom Cruise to come out of the closet ~forty times...
Interesting story about this. I recently moved to Hawaii, and some friends related to me a few months ago about their visit to Volcano National Park last January, when they were allowed to actually hike right up to the lava flowing into the ocean. They said they could come as close as 10 feet away before the radiant heat of the liquid rock became too much. And it's a beautiful sight at night, with red streaks of lava on the hillside in the distance, flowing about a half mile across the flat shelf (or bench, as geologists call it) from the base of the hill into the ocean. So of course I wanted to go see this too, b/c how often do you get to see real, molten lava, right out of the earth's mantle??? Anyone who thinks this isn't interesting to geeks should think again!
So I finally got a chance to go with some friends last Friday, day after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, the park rangers had closed the trail a mile and a half from the lava flow, saying that a bench had collapsed into the ocean several months ago, taking 14 hikers with it, who were never found. I can only imagine that they either drowned, were incinerated, or were buried alive by the landslide, or some ungodly combination of the three. There are also a lot of signs at the park with pictures of a bench breaking off into the ocean and an unfortunate stick figure hiker falling in with it, but the pics are out of scale and make the bench look like a rather small edge of land by the sea, easily steered clear of.
Anyway, it was a disappointment b/c I really wanted to see the lave up close. My friends and I debated a bit about sneaking out across the lava fields anyway, which would have been quite easy to do since the ranger station was over a mile back down the road, and there were no rangers guarding the trail or anywhere near. We figured we would just stay a good 50 yards or more inland, away from these fragile "benches". We didn't care so much about seeing the lave go into the ocean as we did about just seeing it flowing across the ground.
But in the end we decided to turn back and head home, and return another day. Only yesterday did I see in the news that a ~40-acre bench had broken off into the ocean. Holy moly, 40 acres! And that was only three days after we almost snuck out on this exact bench, not realizing its massive size! I also discovered that that bench that took the 14 hikers with it was actually ~12 acres, certainly not easily steered clear of. Further, like an iceberg, the lava flowing across the surface of the bench is only a fraction of the total flow, as most of it flows down the hill, hits the bench at the base of the hill, and seeps into tunnels which spread out over a wider swath than the surface flow, and through which it continues its flow to the ocean. These hollow tunnels, combined with the porous brittleness of hardened lava rock and erosion from the ocean water seaping into the bench causes large sections to crumble and break off periodically.
It's all quite fascinating, but the moral of the story is, kids, when the park ranger at a volcano tells you not to do something but doesn't volunteer the details or say why, trust him anyway and don't do it!
What's with the kid that always crosses the finish line last and somehow always gets perceived as the leader?
B/c he's the 600lb whale of the class, and everyone is so amazed and stupefied that he actually finished the 100yd dash that his accomplishment vastly overshadows that of all the other kids who finished several hours ago.
There are companies that truly believe in open source and its philosophy and there are companies like sun. This is a hail-marry effort to stop their impending demise.
/.'ers anti-Sun? It's not like Sun is a convicted monopoly that uses ruthless and illegal tactics to foist shitty products on the world. Their products may be expensive (or were), but they're also really good. In fact, Sun is one of several fronts against Microsoft, which include Linux, OSS, BSD, IBM, maybe HP, maybe Apple, and others. Why do we see OpenSolaris as Sun attempting pressure Red Hat and not Microsoft??? Windows gained ground against Unix b/c Unix was expensive, until Linux with its massive developer community matured enough to offer a good, free (and Free) alternative. Now OpenSolaris is offering another similar alternative, partly to Linux, but more cosmically important, to Windows. Yet /. is nevertheless filled with people castigating Sun, and who have lost sight of the forest for the trees. Priorities, people.
Why are so many
All the more reason to give it, might even save them a life of delusion.
As someone who's never been interviewed by the Java Posse, and probably never will be, I second your recommendation. Great podcast!
In short, comments convey concepts and explanations, not mechanical descriptions.
Right, so your comments should probably explain what and why, not how and why. The exception is if you're doing something tricky or unusual and you think some reader may not interpret the code entirely correctly in determining how, so you might add the how explanation as well.
That's not possible for Diebold's machines, which use Microsoft Windows,
Interesting. Maybe it's not the Supreme Court deciding elections that we need to be worrying about... Maybe this is another reason why Diebold is so resistant to voter-verified paper trails.
this super hyped version of the next generation of Windows has gradually had all of its most attractive features stripped out of it just for the sake of getting it out of the door quickly.
No, for the sake of just getting it out the door.
Stop laughing, this is really serious threat!
If MS is losing money on every X360, then they'll lose 3x that with my units.
MS will lose even more if you don't buy a 360 at all. But of course, this is Slashdot where MS purchases require justification, no matter how contorted.
Anybody have any real background info on why the company developing the Transrelational
No, but Date sure tortur, er teases his readers about it quite a bit in his writings. What's the company's name, and are you sure it is even a company and not just an ad-hoc group of computer scientists? I've just assumed the delay was due to figuring out the finer details, as I suspect it's not as simple to design and implement as Date may have alluded. Would certainly be cool if they open-sourced the TR concepts, though...
But remember: garbage in, garbage out.
True, but the purpose of the relational database is to prevent the 'garbage in' part. It relies upon the Data Admin or Data Architect (not the DBA, which is different) knowing the data in the problem domain thoroughly enough to design the database and its constraints so that garbage is not accepted, and the only data that goes in does so according to well-considered business rules and to the relational algebra of the model. Putting data integrity constraints in the db means that every app that connects with that db is forced to adhere to the same constraints, so that even if the app developers on one particular app screw up and forget to validate a particular input field correctly, the bad data is still prevented by the DB's constraints. The DB will throw an error and the app will fail on the insert, and good developers will build into their apps try/catch logic and other methods of gracefully handling such errors. The DA and DBA's job responsibility is maintaining and ensuring data integrity, and building the constraints into the DB is the method of assuring that. In a nutshell, there should never be 'garbage in', and hence no 'garbage out' either.
I teach at a community college and our enrollment numbers are down in our IT programs. We have found that many have the perception that there are few IT jobs.
With a tip of the hat to Alan Kay and the greats who made the IT industry, maybe you should teach your students that the best way to perceive the IT job market is to create it. One of the best things about the IT field, at least the software development side, is the low barriers to entry (a computer, internet connection, and willingness to experiment), and the relative ease and lack of startup capital required to make a good idea into a viable business. Try appealing to your students' idealistic side, get them to experiment with coming up iwth ideas and then prototyping, and encourage them to run with it.
Or,
GNSQL's Not a SQL Query Language language.
what?!? No blue screen of death?
For the last time, it's not a PC... really!
It's a bit simpler - Oracle is for anyone who knows what data integrity is and requires it, MySQL is for anyone else. PostgreSQL is the free, acceptable alternative to Oracle.
A few questions come to mind:
1. Does Oracle need InnoDB? Would Oracle gain features or capabilities they don't already have by incorporating it into their database? If so, then perhaps we're looking at a fork.
2. If InnoDB is forked, does MySQL have the developer talent to continue advancing InnoDB, or will the OSS community do it for them, or will it stagnate?
1. Come up with business idea. /. readers to build it for you.
2. Post thinly-disguised request for
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
1. No HD-DVD or Blu-Ray- whatever happens with this media format debacle, the people with the new 360 out now wont have it.
That seems more and more to be a non-issue. It's not like there's an accepted standard for next-gen DVD anyway. Blue-Ray seems to have an edge, but it's not even production yet, Sony's BR copy-protection is getting so much criticism that the kind of people that the details of next-gen DVD matters to may not even want BR for that reason. Sony muddied the market a few days or so ago by talking about Red-Ray or some such derivative of Blue-Ray. HD-DVD has more lenient copy restrictions but no one is sure how close it is to production either, and it has less space than Blue-Ray. In short, the whole next-gen DVD technology and market is currently a mess, and no one is sure how it will work out. In the meantime, DVD is will be fine for most purposes, and if a game or movie needs more room, the publisher can use multiple DVD's. Yes, switching mid-game/movie is a bit annoying, but not the end of the world.
Getting Dell to ship AMD Boxes has nothing to do with marketing and EVERYTHING to do with Intel's anti-trust behaviour, and back-room dealings.
It also has to do with the fact that Intel's technology simply isn't competitive with AMD's, and that analysts are predicting it won't even have a chance at being competitive again till 2009. Advertising side-deals or no, Dell can't afford to support the losing side that long. Dell may be able to sell Intel servers for cheaper up front, but Opteron's cost savings in power consumption and performance negate that advantage. Sun, HP, IBM, Newisys and other OEM's are about to start eating Dell's lunch with Opteron, Intel has failed to supply an answer, so now Dell's (sane) alternatives are constrained to one - add AMD to the mix.
Of course it was entirely tied to Microsoft's platform and browser, which was why you didn't see it much on public websites,
Actually I think it was b/c of the much-maligned ActiveX security vulnerabilities. There are plenty of ActiveX-less websites that are coded solely for IE anyway, so lack of platform-independence is not really the issue.
I hope this comes to a quick near death like when Java was cool.
I think you mean Java applets. Java is alive and well on the server.