No, thank you. I want some software (security stuff) to stay closed-source forever. I would start to seriously dout the security of Java (right now I have complete faith in it's being 100% vulnerability free) if hackers were allowed to see everything about how it works.
It sounds like you are joking, but one can never tell here - you are joking, right?
Many small businesses don't have a T1. In many areas, DSL/Cable modems are not even close to reliable as a T1 from a prominent provider. Also, the cost differnce between a T1 and DSL/Cable line is usually quite significant, and most often the DSL/Cable connection will provide much better bandwidth.
Oh, so we are talking really small business. I guess it wouldn't be cost effective in that case.
On the other hand when you start getting more simultaneous voice calls: T1 = 24 lines x $20 = $480. We are paying about $250 per T1. And of course the cost of the calls themselves is the major difference.
Plus, of course, the reliability of broadband still isn't nearly at the level of hard telephone lines.
Eh? We have ~100 people, in the three years of using VoIP, we've had exactly one problem: a construction desided that our T1 wasn't important enough to dig around.
How exactly does this lack of reliability manifest itself?
We use the Cisco phones and CallManager, probably not the cheapest option, but it works beautifully.
We have ~100 people, the phones get a separate VLAN on the switched 100MB network. Of the six T1s four are internet traffic and two are for the phones. The switches are powered, so the phone only plugs into the ethernet port; they have a builtin hub for the PC, so each user only needs one port.
I don't remember the exact prices, but I think the backend hardware and installation ran about $10-15K (though I could be way off, I wasn't directly involved with this). The phones were about $300 apiece. Oh and I suppose the PoE costs a bit extra (though not that much compared to regular Cisco switches).
Everyone gets two lines (with the same, real, phone number - it's also very easy to give 8-12 lines with a multitude of numbers to the administrative people) and all the features they can think of. The grown-ups especially enjoy clicking a number on their PC and having the phone dial it - yes, it's the small things that give managers that adorable twinkle in their eye. The thing will even email you your voicemail as sound files, though I've yet to think of a use for this.
I'd say this thing has paid for itself many times over. Just the ability to take a phone and plug it into any live port and have it retain it's "identity" is a huge time saver (not to mention the ability to log into any phone and use it as your own - that's just plain cool).
At one point we had to set up a temporary secondary site for a couple dozen people: being able to just set up a point-to-point VPN link and get net access AND phones out of it, with just a router and switches on the other site was a huge win.
We've also moved buildings since and only had to reconfigure the backend, the individual phones just auto-updated (even though we got a different block of external numbers).
After the initial setup and a week to learn the system, there's basically no maintenance. New accounts take a couple of clicks and someone to walk the phone over. We have a total of 1 and 1/2 IT people, I'm the 1/2 and I've never had to go near the phone system in the last two years.
The problem with the beginnings of life as explained by 'Evolution,' is that they go against basic laws of nature... like Entropy. The natural world does not tend to order itself into highly complex and specific chemical reactions in just the right amounts. The PROBABILITY of everything required coming into the correct order at the same time, same place is so small statistics argue that it simply will not happen.
It sounds like you left half-way through your first biochem class, and never came back. You are using some relevant words, but they are just not arranged in a meaningful manner. Basically, you don't seem to understand how entropy or probability work.
One would be an imbecile to rule out the possibility, even under evolution, that another species/being exists/existed and could have 'helped us along.'
This just begs the question. Who helped that species/being along? At some point you have to have a species evolving on its own (even if it did "intelligently design" other species after that), or that creator has always existed, which means it's god (this is why ID and creationsism are the same thing in the end).
This is a common misdirection - we aren't just trying to ascertain the origins of our life, but life in general. Saying that a pre-existing life-form did it, doesn't help at all.
You ask me to state the "scientific theory of" ID... you are right that "there is no such thing," because science has correctly said it doesn't follow the rules... but as you can see, neither does Evolution's hypothesis on how life began.
Evolution says nothing about the origin of life. The theory of evolution is falsifiable. The current scientific hypotheses of the origin of life on Earth are falsifiable. ID is not falsifiable.
Vista is going to flop, mainly because XP can already do what people need their computers to do. No reason to upgrade.
There are plenty of businesses (ours for example) that said the same thing about moving to XP from 2000, especially since XP was such a step backwards.
If Vista doesn't suck quite as hard as XP, we'll probably be switching at some point, if only for hardware and software compatibility.
I'm not getting it: there's no enemy space craft to shoot, no asteroids to mine... my ship doesn't even seem to have any laser beams, or photon torpedoes, or plasma gatlin guns - nothing!
Guess what? Innodb recovered without any lost data. Twice. This was a driver/hardware/linux issue, not a MySQL issue. We now appear to have a stable set of drivers, and I expect the MySQL database to hit 100% uptime pretty much every month.
That's great, but you kind of expect that sort of thing from a database. That's kind of like saying: Look! MySQL inserted and retrieved a record, twice!
Postgres (last I checked) preferred to let the OS do the data-caching. Thanks, but no thanks.
Why not? In what way is duplicating the OSes work a good thing here?
And no 64-bit version (though I've read a few people have managed to compile one, I wouldn't trust it unless Postgres gave it the thumbs up).
I am not sure what you mean. All decently recent versions (7.3ish through 8.x, I'm guessing earlier, too) build just fine on AMD64 and IA64 (and various commercial UNICES running on their own 64-bit hardware). From what I hear Postgres particularly likes AMD64, performance wise.
MySQL with InnoDB is straighforward (it's use of tablespaces, replication, tuning, and even compiling from source - someone with mediocre Linux skills like myself can do it without issue every time).
So's Postgres (in fact it's a little more straight-forward than MySQL for people with actual Linux skills; MySQL likes to do things the unexpected way every once in a while). I am just wondering if you shouldn't take a look at improving those Linux skills if you are running something large enough to need replication.
1) Triggers are hidden application logic that are very hard to debug, and are easily overlooked or forgotten by developers.
Logic that is "hidden" is what we call "abstraction", it's a Good Thing that allows you to compartmentalize your code.
Business logic (other than defensive logic like unique indexes, primary keys, foreign keys, not-null columns) does not belong in the database. They belong in the middle tier. They also make it much more difficult to move to another database.
And you are sure that the list of "defensive logic" you provided is exhaustive? I have plenty of logic that falls into that category (some of it in triggers, most of it in RULEs) that isn't provided as a built in construct by any database system.
2) Stored procedures are like PERL - it's very easy to make a mess unless you are very careful.
Yeah, programming in general is easy to mess if you don't know what you are doing. Stored procedures encapsulate and abstract common logic so it doesn't need to be replicated by multiple applications using the database. And I am guessing your experience with PERL (whatever that is) is rather limited.
3) Views are a nice feature, but most often used to support business and reporting.
Views are an extermely powerful database feature that is criminally underused most of the time (and has nothing to do with reporting). Oh, and MySQL's popularity probably bears some responsibility for that.
View provide abstraction (again), reuse, portability and some performance benefits as well. Generally, there aren't that many even moderatly complex queries that aren't better implemented as views. Most of the time, there's just no reason why your application should be aware of the relational minutae of your database's design.
If you think MySQL is not a "real" database, it is, and has been since 4.0.
Well nice of you to settle that. As you've pointed out, version 4.0 did not have triggers, stored procedures or views - missing any one of those makes it not a "real database", even if you personally don't use those features. Version 5.0 will have those three (though it will probably take some time for those features to be "validated" in the real world), moving it three steps closer to "real database" status.
It's great that it's getting there, and that the missing features are getting more and more esoteric: cursors, procedural langu
While we're not talking about controlling traditional retail channels, there is no reason why they couldn't control online distribution.
Is there any reason why they should?
Traditional channels are expensive, that's why you need someone with a lot of cash to make the initial investment, and that's why the MPAA has free reign to fuck over both the consumers and the content producers.
Online distribution, on the other hand, costs next to nothing - what purpose would these people serve?
If you are going to spend 7 years on a movie learn english. It is not that hard.
What the hell are you smoking? If you are going to spend 7 years on a movie, you damn better make it in whatever language you want to make it in. Picking you native language doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
At least George Lucas knows how to really direct quality actors.
You must've seen a George Lucas movie that I haven't. George Lucas knows how to waste 300 million dollars on crappy special effects. If there was any actual acting in the last three Star Wars, I must've missed it.
Though the rule covers many businesses that use GPL-licensed software for commercial ends
Well no, it absolutely does not. The GPL covers distribution not use, if it covered use, no one would be able to use GPLed software in a commercial setting.
Closing this "loophole" would amount to drastically changing the philosophy behind the GPL.
Though I do vaguely remember reading something about the new rule being an edge case that covers rather rare circumstances, and not a reinvention of the GPL.
Seirously, taken literally this says that if I run a webapp on a GPLed server or even a GPLed OS, I have to release the source code. Yeah, that would fly.
You'll have no problem obtaining a device capable of reading a CD in 40 years, software to read any file format that ever existed can be obtained from this thing we call "the internet". If it's a particularly esoteric format you might have to spend a little time with it, though with the family fortune at stake that doesn't seem like much.
The main problem is that in 40 years the organic dies on that CDR (I'm assuming) will long have degraded and the disc is completely and utterly unreadable. In fact that only needs about 2 years.
A computer is MUCH more complicated than hammering nails, filing paperwork, or driving a car.
Not for the purposes of general office work. Driving is far more complicated than the basics of a word processor.
But those that never learned how to find it very hard and complicated. Training would help those people to learn and find it less difficult, and make it so that they can use a computer to do their job.
Yeah - that's what the parent said. That's the way in which computers are just like construction, office work, driving, painting, sex, cooking or theoretical physics - you have to learn how to do it before you are any good at it.
The biggest problem is that so many people think that computers are exempt from this rule for some reason.
My favourite game around here is "VP Presentation Ping-Pong": starts out with a 100MB to 250MB presentation [1] sent out to five or so people (only one copy on the server at this point), each one corrects a spelling mistake and sends that back to all five people, which in turn have something else to contribute - you can see how this tends to grow, and of course no old mail is ever deleted (at best it's put in the "trash", but never emptied). What amazes me most is how often the system can actually cope with this - we just need to go around every once in a while and clean out their 8GB mailboxes.
[1] Easily, usually it's a bunch of pictures sized to a 100-200 pixels square, but of course powerpoint still keeps the original size of a few megs each.
The office is filled with foreign concepts that are a pain to learn. For example: the copier, printer, fax machine and shredder all look deceptively alike and it's very hard for a layman to figure out which one he is supposed to be using!
The article tries to blame "jargon" for everything, and that seems to oversimplify the issue a bit. Filesizes are too "computery" for office workers to understand? Well, tough shit - if you want instant world-wide communication via email, you are going to have to learn a new system of measurement. When you order a desk, you don't whine about accidentally putting down "miles" instead of "feet", no one tries to get a "pint" and ends up with a "milliliter" instead.
Most modern people ("modern" being the last couple thousand years) can grasp the concepts of length, volume, weight, and even time - understanding that data has a measurement too, is not too much too ask. It's not "elitist" and it's not a "holier than though" attitude manifesting itself. No one's asking them to know that in common usage kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes, even though technically "kilo" is 1000; just like most people don't know the difference between weight and mass - they don't need to. But a vague awareness that a 100MB file might not be something you just stick into an email - that would be helpful.
Some of the examples in the article make no sense whatsoever - why on earth would "office workers" have the ability to turn off firewalls (I'm really hoping they mean personal firewalls)? That is definitely something they have no reason to worry about.
Oh and 48% don't get filetypes, but 74% know what a firewall does? I'm somewhat skeptical about the latter part.
When Microsoft does the same thing with IE/MSN, then it's called 'anticompetitive' and 'unfair'.
Well, "unfair" is sort of a subjective term, but 'anticompetitive' is exactly what it's called when a monopoly uses it's dominance in such a manner.
Lack of competition when you have no competitors is not exactly my idea of monopolistic behavior.
You have an odd idea of "monopolistic behaviour" then: no competitors == monopoly. And yes, just being a monopoly means that you are not allowed (in theory, anyway) to do some things that companies that are not monopolies can.
Heck, I'm almost ready to make the case in favor of MSN - at least if Yahoo goes down Google won't have a search monopoly.
Just because of the nature of web searching, it would be pretty hard for Google to get an MS-like monopoly on it. There's dosens of search engines that work more than well enough; if Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search disappeared tomorrow, it would have very little effect on people's ability to find stuff on the internet.
Why on Earth would you want config files that look like XML but aren't?
Because they are simpler and easier to edit by hand, when you want to. Tools are nice, but the XML they output tends to be unintelligible to humans (don't know if that's the case here, just often).
There is no reason why tools can't round-trip apache config files properly, either.
Actually, "apache-like" config is a fairly common format, it's just not as fluffy as XML is.
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Your post, on the other hand, was almost as long and had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Which, I supposed, means you should be shot in the head.
They probably felt that 7 wasn't enough and 9 was too many.
That's what, licenses for a cluster of 2 machines with 4 CPUs each?
It sounds like you are joking, but one can never tell here - you are joking, right?
Oh, so we are talking really small business. I guess it wouldn't be cost effective in that case.
On the other hand when you start getting more simultaneous voice calls: T1 = 24 lines x $20 = $480. We are paying about $250 per T1. And of course the cost of the calls themselves is the major difference.
Eh? We have ~100 people, in the three years of using VoIP, we've had exactly one problem: a construction desided that our T1 wasn't important enough to dig around.
How exactly does this lack of reliability manifest itself?
We have ~100 people, the phones get a separate VLAN on the switched 100MB network. Of the six T1s four are internet traffic and two are for the phones. The switches are powered, so the phone only plugs into the ethernet port; they have a builtin hub for the PC, so each user only needs one port.
I don't remember the exact prices, but I think the backend hardware and installation ran about $10-15K (though I could be way off, I wasn't directly involved with this). The phones were about $300 apiece. Oh and I suppose the PoE costs a bit extra (though not that much compared to regular Cisco switches).
Everyone gets two lines (with the same, real, phone number - it's also very easy to give 8-12 lines with a multitude of numbers to the administrative people) and all the features they can think of. The grown-ups especially enjoy clicking a number on their PC and having the phone dial it - yes, it's the small things that give managers that adorable twinkle in their eye. The thing will even email you your voicemail as sound files, though I've yet to think of a use for this.
I'd say this thing has paid for itself many times over. Just the ability to take a phone and plug it into any live port and have it retain it's "identity" is a huge time saver (not to mention the ability to log into any phone and use it as your own - that's just plain cool).
At one point we had to set up a temporary secondary site for a couple dozen people: being able to just set up a point-to-point VPN link and get net access AND phones out of it, with just a router and switches on the other site was a huge win.
We've also moved buildings since and only had to reconfigure the backend, the individual phones just auto-updated (even though we got a different block of external numbers).
After the initial setup and a week to learn the system, there's basically no maintenance. New accounts take a couple of clicks and someone to walk the phone over. We have a total of 1 and 1/2 IT people, I'm the 1/2 and I've never had to go near the phone system in the last two years.
It sounds like you left half-way through your first biochem class, and never came back. You are using some relevant words, but they are just not arranged in a meaningful manner. Basically, you don't seem to understand how entropy or probability work.
One would be an imbecile to rule out the possibility, even under evolution, that another species/being exists/existed and could have 'helped us along.'
This just begs the question. Who helped that species/being along? At some point you have to have a species evolving on its own (even if it did "intelligently design" other species after that), or that creator has always existed, which means it's god (this is why ID and creationsism are the same thing in the end).
This is a common misdirection - we aren't just trying to ascertain the origins of our life, but life in general. Saying that a pre-existing life-form did it, doesn't help at all.
You ask me to state the "scientific theory of" ID... you are right that "there is no such thing," because science has correctly said it doesn't follow the rules... but as you can see, neither does Evolution's hypothesis on how life began.
Evolution says nothing about the origin of life. The theory of evolution is falsifiable. The current scientific hypotheses of the origin of life on Earth are falsifiable. ID is not falsifiable.
Why is it so hard to grasp this?
There are plenty of businesses (ours for example) that said the same thing about moving to XP from 2000, especially since XP was such a step backwards.
If Vista doesn't suck quite as hard as XP, we'll probably be switching at some point, if only for hardware and software compatibility.
You mean I can now procure TV shows from the Internet? I've been waiting for years to be able to do that!
More likely, if you don't know what they are, and you are evaluating database engines, you are underqualified for your job.
How are you supposed to play this?
That's great, but you kind of expect that sort of thing from a database. That's kind of like saying: Look! MySQL inserted and retrieved a record, twice!
Postgres (last I checked) preferred to let the OS do the data-caching. Thanks, but no thanks.
Why not? In what way is duplicating the OSes work a good thing here?
And no 64-bit version (though I've read a few people have managed to compile one, I wouldn't trust it unless Postgres gave it the thumbs up).
I am not sure what you mean. All decently recent versions (7.3ish through 8.x, I'm guessing earlier, too) build just fine on AMD64 and IA64 (and various commercial UNICES running on their own 64-bit hardware). From what I hear Postgres particularly likes AMD64, performance wise.
MySQL with InnoDB is straighforward (it's use of tablespaces, replication, tuning, and even compiling from source - someone with mediocre Linux skills like myself can do it without issue every time).
So's Postgres (in fact it's a little more straight-forward than MySQL for people with actual Linux skills; MySQL likes to do things the unexpected way every once in a while). I am just wondering if you shouldn't take a look at improving those Linux skills if you are running something large enough to need replication.
1) Triggers are hidden application logic that are very hard to debug, and are easily overlooked or forgotten by developers.
Logic that is "hidden" is what we call "abstraction", it's a Good Thing that allows you to compartmentalize your code.
Business logic (other than defensive logic like unique indexes, primary keys, foreign keys, not-null columns) does not belong in the database. They belong in the middle tier. They also make it much more difficult to move to another database.
And you are sure that the list of "defensive logic" you provided is exhaustive? I have plenty of logic that falls into that category (some of it in triggers, most of it in RULEs) that isn't provided as a built in construct by any database system.
2) Stored procedures are like PERL - it's very easy to make a mess unless you are very careful.
Yeah, programming in general is easy to mess if you don't know what you are doing. Stored procedures encapsulate and abstract common logic so it doesn't need to be replicated by multiple applications using the database. And I am guessing your experience with PERL (whatever that is) is rather limited.
3) Views are a nice feature, but most often used to support business and reporting.
Views are an extermely powerful database feature that is criminally underused most of the time (and has nothing to do with reporting). Oh, and MySQL's popularity probably bears some responsibility for that.
View provide abstraction (again), reuse, portability and some performance benefits as well. Generally, there aren't that many even moderatly complex queries that aren't better implemented as views. Most of the time, there's just no reason why your application should be aware of the relational minutae of your database's design.
If you think MySQL is not a "real" database, it is, and has been since 4.0.
Well nice of you to settle that. As you've pointed out, version 4.0 did not have triggers, stored procedures or views - missing any one of those makes it not a "real database", even if you personally don't use those features. Version 5.0 will have those three (though it will probably take some time for those features to be "validated" in the real world), moving it three steps closer to "real database" status.
It's great that it's getting there, and that the missing features are getting more and more esoteric: cursors, procedural langu
Is there anything out there that's actually slower than UFS? Achieving that seem like it would be a real technological feat.
Is there any reason why they should?
Traditional channels are expensive, that's why you need someone with a lot of cash to make the initial investment, and that's why the MPAA has free reign to fuck over both the consumers and the content producers.
Online distribution, on the other hand, costs next to nothing - what purpose would these people serve?
What the hell are you smoking? If you are going to spend 7 years on a movie, you damn better make it in whatever language you want to make it in. Picking you native language doesn't seem like that much of a stretch.
At least George Lucas knows how to really direct quality actors.
You must've seen a George Lucas movie that I haven't. George Lucas knows how to waste 300 million dollars on crappy special effects. If there was any actual acting in the last three Star Wars, I must've missed it.
It's nerdy. Nerdiness is universal.
Though the rule covers many businesses that use GPL-licensed software for commercial ends
Well no, it absolutely does not. The GPL covers distribution not use, if it covered use, no one would be able to use GPLed software in a commercial setting.
Closing this "loophole" would amount to drastically changing the philosophy behind the GPL.
Though I do vaguely remember reading something about the new rule being an edge case that covers rather rare circumstances, and not a reinvention of the GPL.
Seirously, taken literally this says that if I run a webapp on a GPLed server or even a GPLed OS, I have to release the source code. Yeah, that would fly.
"dyes" is of course what I meant there...
The main problem is that in 40 years the organic dies on that CDR (I'm assuming) will long have degraded and the disc is completely and utterly unreadable. In fact that only needs about 2 years.
Not for the purposes of general office work. Driving is far more complicated than the basics of a word processor.
But those that never learned how to find it very hard and complicated. Training would help those people to learn and find it less difficult, and make it so that they can use a computer to do their job.
Yeah - that's what the parent said. That's the way in which computers are just like construction, office work, driving, painting, sex, cooking or theoretical physics - you have to learn how to do it before you are any good at it.
The biggest problem is that so many people think that computers are exempt from this rule for some reason.
[1] Easily, usually it's a bunch of pictures sized to a 100-200 pixels square, but of course powerpoint still keeps the original size of a few megs each.
The article tries to blame "jargon" for everything, and that seems to oversimplify the issue a bit. Filesizes are too "computery" for office workers to understand? Well, tough shit - if you want instant world-wide communication via email, you are going to have to learn a new system of measurement. When you order a desk, you don't whine about accidentally putting down "miles" instead of "feet", no one tries to get a "pint" and ends up with a "milliliter" instead.
Most modern people ("modern" being the last couple thousand years) can grasp the concepts of length, volume, weight, and even time - understanding that data has a measurement too, is not too much too ask. It's not "elitist" and it's not a "holier than though" attitude manifesting itself. No one's asking them to know that in common usage kilobyte refers to 1024 bytes, even though technically "kilo" is 1000; just like most people don't know the difference between weight and mass - they don't need to. But a vague awareness that a 100MB file might not be something you just stick into an email - that would be helpful.
Some of the examples in the article make no sense whatsoever - why on earth would "office workers" have the ability to turn off firewalls (I'm really hoping they mean personal firewalls)? That is definitely something they have no reason to worry about.
Oh and 48% don't get filetypes, but 74% know what a firewall does? I'm somewhat skeptical about the latter part.
Well, "unfair" is sort of a subjective term, but 'anticompetitive' is exactly what it's called when a monopoly uses it's dominance in such a manner.
Lack of competition when you have no competitors is not exactly my idea of monopolistic behavior.
You have an odd idea of "monopolistic behaviour" then: no competitors == monopoly. And yes, just being a monopoly means that you are not allowed (in theory, anyway) to do some things that companies that are not monopolies can.
Heck, I'm almost ready to make the case in favor of MSN - at least if Yahoo goes down Google won't have a search monopoly.
Just because of the nature of web searching, it would be pretty hard for Google to get an MS-like monopoly on it. There's dosens of search engines that work more than well enough; if Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search disappeared tomorrow, it would have very little effect on people's ability to find stuff on the internet.
Because they are simpler and easier to edit by hand, when you want to. Tools are nice, but the XML they output tends to be unintelligible to humans (don't know if that's the case here, just often).
There is no reason why tools can't round-trip apache config files properly, either.
Actually, "apache-like" config is a fairly common format, it's just not as fluffy as XML is.