Teachers could NOT keep up with the kids in computer classes, which left a whole slew of kids "left behind" per se (thanks Bush).
Maybe it's me, but this sounds to be more of a problem with the teachers (and possibly the local school board) than anything Bush has done...
The federal government somehow gets blame or credit for the condition of public schools, but people forget that public schools are really local institutions. Only about 7% of Elementary and Secondary education funding comes from the Federal government. School policies and curriculums are set at the local and state level; The Federal government can ususally only make recommendations or support specific programs.
If your school's policies are stupid, chances are your local government is the responsible party, not the federal government. The good thing about this, however, is that it's pretty easy for you to go voice your opinion at your local school board meeting. Flying to D.C. to have a chat with the President is a little more difficult.
Why do development methods make resounding success less likely?
Because they waste a lot of time by imposing procedures that do not create value (i.e. working, tested, maintainable code). Of course, those procedures are ususally designed to make sure that catostrophic failures don't occur, so they're important. Using a development methodology is like taking an insurance policy out on your project...you can't spend as much time designing, coding and testing (so it costs you more), but what you end up with will probably be good enough (so at least you get something).
One of the things that must occur when you move from a artistic/tradesman style of production to a engineer style of production is that you have to trade a little bit of quality for a lot of consistancy. This is why mass produced furniture costs less than hand-crafted stuff. The hand crafted stuff is slightly different from item to item, and sometimes mistakes are made and you have to throw out big hunks of furniture (which makes it more expensive), but the product that you get in the end is much better. However, unlike furniture, there is no aesthetic appeal to hand-crafted software. Most software projects are done to solve business problems, which means most software projects have to live by the same rules as every other business venture. Ok, for a minute now, everyone put on a suit and pretend you're an MBA.
You have a $1,000,000 budget for the coming year. Your goal, as an executive, is to turn that money into something worth more than $1,000,000. The additional amount you get is called the Return on Investment (ROI). The ROI for the S&P 500 index has historically been 11%, and most companies will not embark on a project with an ROI of less than 25% (or so).
But ROI is not the only thing to consider when deciding whether or not to start a new project. The other thing to consider is risk. What are the chances that you're actually going to get your 25% back? What if, in addition to not making any money, you actually lose money by spending $1,000,000 dollars over the course of a year and getting nothing in return?
And here is where the software development methology steps in. Software development methodologies help to eliminate risk by setting down guidelines that help to ensure that a project will not fail. Even if it means that you take 20% longer than you would if you didn't use the methodology, and even if the product that you get in the end isn't quite as good, at least you have something that works.
What software development methodologies do is limit the bounds on the ROI for a project. They make it less likely that the project will be a resounding success, and they make it less likely that the project will be an utter failure. This, in turn, allows the planners to plan and the bean counters to count thier beans, and that is a tradeoff that they will gladly make.
It's predictabilty that businesses value. Not efficiency. Not quality. Not even raw cost. All of those things are secondary to the issues of "How much of my money will I get back?" and "Are you sure?"
So your saying they made sure the control group had an identical diet SANS the extra calories from coffee.
No, I'm saying they probably found the same effect regardless of other factors such as soft drink and snack intake. i.e. People who drink 6 cups of coffee a day, and no sugared soft drinks, are just as likely to get diabetes as someone who drinks 6 cups of coffee a day in addition to 3 Mountian Dews and Jelly Donut.
These kinds of things could easily be found using a survey.
The researchers also found that for men, those who drank more than six cups of caffeinated coffee per day reduced their risk for type 2 diabetes by more than 50 percent compared to men in the study who didn't drink coffee.
Six cups of coffee contain a total of 810mg of Caffeine. That's the same as 14 Mountian Dews. If you're drinking 6 cups of coffee a day, you won't get diabetes because you'll be dead of a heart attack at age 35!
Usually the point of doing studies like this is to eliminate independent variables like that. I'm sure that in addition to questions like "How much coffee do you drink in a day?", there were questions like "What is your average daily sugar consumption?" and "How many soft drinks do you drink in a day?"
Most of the time, the hardest part in conducting any experiment is identifying and eliminating all the independent variables (except for the one you're trying to test, of course). In the case of Diabetes, sugar intake is a pretty obvious one.
It is a widely accepted engineering maxim that systems should be designed so that it is difficult to use them improperly. This is why (for example) a 110 volt plug will not fit in a 220 volt outlet. Developers who are concerned about the quality of the software they make would do well to follow this rule, and not just for security reasons. You should verify input data as early and as rigorously as possible wherever you can. Take advantage of things like XML validation and text box constraints to make it hard for users to enter bad data. And always follow the Fail-Fast principle...if something goes wrong: Complain! Loudly!. Don't let the user continue working if something has gone wrong. It's better to crash than to produce an erronous result.
Just a little advice from a developer who's made enough mistakes to know better.
"That definition"? You mean the definition the IRS uses to determine if a business gained or lost captial in a year? Yeah, that's wacky way to describe it...
Look, if you want to treat the profit from your business as "salary" because it makes it easier for you to handle the fact that you hate Captialism and yet you benefit from it, fine. But the reason you (and 99% of the rest of the world) gets up in the morning and goes to work is to make money. When you punish people for doing that by trying to make everything "equal" you remove a large portion of the incentive for people to work hard, take risks, and generally make the world a slightly better place by doing thier job well. "Equal" markets don't work; If you don't belive me ask Mikhail Gorbachev.
Without inequalities in the market there would be no opportunity for profit, but that doesn't mean there would be no opportunity to make money. You'd make money based on the work you do, not based on your status in the marketplace.
Creating competitive advantages for yourself and your company is the entire point of a business! Nobody works 10 hours a day for 40 years so they can break even. If you can't make a profit doing something than (from a business standpoint) it's not worth doing. What would I retire on if I spent my entire career breaking even?...and developers wonder why they get laid-off. 9 times out of 10 they don't even have the simplest understanding of profit and loss. Your job is not to create a product...your job is to make money. The quality of "the work that you do" is defined in terms of dollars and nothing else.
Well maybe some of these libetarians should find out what Adam Smith was really about. His model of capitalism is based in an agrarian society with independent artisans and traders. His idea of a free market is exactly that - where everyone has equal access to market and equal information.
Equal and Free are not the same thing. A free market is one in which individuals are not prohibited from taking action based on their own personal information, opinion and resources. "Equal access to market and equal information" flies in the face of a Free market because in order to make everything equal, you have to take from some in order to give to others.
Without inequalities in the market, there would be no oppertunity for profit, and no motivation for anyone to do anything. Adam Smith was most certianly not talking about an "equal" market. That is much closer to Marx's notion of "From each according to his abilities, To each according to his needs". And if you want to know why that is bad, follow the link in my signature...
Corporate America has as much to do with the Adam Smith model as the Bolshevist U.S.S.R. It's not even related to Marx' model of capitalism, for in Corporate America, capital is as alientated from controlling the means of production as labor is. Instead, what you have is a management class which calls the shots and enriches itself at the expense of both workers and owners - can you say Enron, Adelphi, Worldcom etc etc.
I hate to break it to you pal, but EVERY sizable human society since the dawn of time has had those two classes of people: The Workers, and The Leaders. That's not a product of capitalism or corporate fraud, or Adam Smith...it's a product of human nature, and it will never go away.
One of the benefits of capitalism is that it introduces a third class of people...the middle class. They actually have enough money and education to become sucessful without needing the support or approval of the established elite. You, yourself are an example of this very principal. Just as you are free to run your company as you see fit, so is every large American corporation. They do not "owe" you or anyone else a job, and you are not forced to hire people who do not fit into your organization.
Here's a question I always wish I could ask managers, whenever the topic of 'outsourcing' comes up: if dealing with programmers overseas is more appealing to the bottom line, why not let your programmers work from home for 50-80% of their current in-office pay?
Oh there's a fantastic idea. All I need to do now is figure out how to live without paying for food, clothing or rent and I'll be all set.
Do we really need to go over this again? Repeat after me: You cannot compete with 3rd world labor costs. Ok, now just the guys! Good, now just the girls...Oh right, there's no girls here.
The only way you're going to be able to keep your job is to do something that offshore workers can't do. What is that, you ask? Well, you could start my actually caring about the business that you work for. Too many IT people are so concerned about the technical aspects of thier jobs that they don't take the time to learn (and care about) how the business they work for actually makes money. This may have been OK in the late 90's, but IT people are getting the harsh reminder now that the reason that you have a job is not to play with the latest technology...it's to make money.
It's your job as an IT professional to bridge the gap between business and technology. You need to be thinking about things like Return on Investment. You need to be thinking about the business needs of your customer...keeping in mind that your customer is probably not a techie like you and only cares about things like "How much does it cost", and "Will it work with what I have now" and not whether or not it runs on Linux. Most importantly, you need to be thinking about money first and technology second. Only someone who is physically present at your place of employment is going to have enough information to make decisions based on those priorities, which is why people who ignore them are finding their jobs shipped overseas.
It's good to see that Slashdot has completely turned into a full-fledged Bush bashing site. For a while there I was getting concerned that it might just waver on the border between leftist propaganda and actual, informative techie news. My vote for the new slogan is "News for Nerds. Republicans Suck!"
Seriously people, if I want political news and analysis, I'll go somehereelse. Don't make Slashdot what it isn't.
After all, unless you are simply playing games on the PDA, it probably needs to interact with a database somewhere and I can assure you, just about every common task that you may encounter is discussed in depth. The show you how to bind controls to data, retrieve it from a Web Service, retrieve it from a SQL Server on a local network, use SQL CE to take advantage of replication and using XML as a Data Access technology.
So, if I'm reading this right, the way this is supposed to work is:
1) You bind your GUI controls to a SQL server database using the SQL CE library installed on your PDA.
2) When a GUI control needs to update the data, or refresh it's view of the data, it performs a query using SQL CE.
3) SQL CE then transforms that request into an XML document, sends it over a (presumably) wireless network connection, to SQL Server.
4) SQL Server then processes the request, generates an XML response, and then the whole thing runs in reverse until the response gets back to the control, which can then update itself with the new information.
Is this really the way this thing is supposed to work? Please somebody tell me that I'm reading this wrong.
SQL statements are great when you're trying to optimize for query efficency, but they're awful when you're trying to optimize for network latency/bandwidth. This is because SQL is based on the idea that you perform operations over a persistant connection, because establishing that connection and performing the query is usually the bottleneck.
But any wireless developer will tell you that latency/bandwidth is the major bottleneck in a mobile application. When you're sending data over CDMA/GSM networks, the best data rate you can hope for is 192kbps, and forget about low latency. This means you have to package your requests in a big bundle and do them all at once. Which means you need something a little more coarse-grained than SQL.
I suppose if you assume that your application will always have 802.11 access, this could be a good model. But otherwise you're going to be waiting 5-10 seconds every time you click a button, change a setting, or scroll down through a list. Which means nobody is going to actually use your application because it's a grand waste of time.
The way I see it, inventions are of their time. No one person can claim all the glory for anything.
This kind of attitude is why schoolchildren can't remember the name of the first person to walk on the moon, or name the the first 5 U.S. Presidents. The the dilution of historical fact is a very dangerous thing, which is why Orwell warned us about it in 1984.
Personal achievement must be remembered. The accomplishments of individuals, especially in the US, helps to define the national culture. People like Charles Lindburg and John Glenn should be remembered because they risked their lives so that the rest of us could benefit from it. If the Spirit of St. Louis went down in the North Atlantic, it would have been Mr. Lindburg's mother standing over an empty grave. He has to be remembered for taking that chance and rewarded for being sucessful.
Will you please do my job for me, as I am too fat/lazy to pick up the phone and call an electrician. Besides, my special dialing wand hasn't arrived yet and, technically, I shouldn't be using the phone at all for medical reasons. Tell you what! To make it extra fun, I won't tell you where I am or any local laws that might apply to my situation. Let the endless speculation begin!
Oh, and please hurry! I'm trying to leave early today and my boss wants an answer first thing in the morning.
Re:There's still something that separates us
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 1
It's that we understand, deep down, that doing so would be a disaster.
Right. That's the whole point of telling them how you feel.
Platonic female friends are evil. They drain away your soul, leaving you in the enternal limbo of relationship purgatory. And at the same time, they ensure that you don't ever look for companionship elsewhere by instiling a false hope in you that one day, she'll see the light. The result is that a good 5 or 10 years goes by in which you do nothing but lust after a girl you can't have.
As the saying goes, you have to shit or get off the pot. Better that you never talk to her again than to endure a decade or two of silent, longing pain. I mean, if you can't have her, why do you want her around as a constant reminder of the fact that you can't have her? At least when she's gone, you can attempt to find someone who actually will find you attractive and not want to be "just friends".
And hey, there is a slim chance (a very slim chance) that she's willing to give a more serious relationship a try. You never know....at least, you won't know unless you ask, and either way, you'll be better off.
Re:There's still something that separates us
on
We Are All Nerds Now
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
You're desprately in love with your "friend" of 10 years, only she doesn't know it. It tears you up inside but you can rest assured that you will never, ever work up the balls to say anything. You will just continue to listen to her complaints about how her boyfriend is a jerk and how she can't seem to find "a nice guy like you".
Goddamnit! I just lost two "Respect for Humanity" points. And I'll tell you, nowadays, those suckers are hard to come by.
Have these people totally lost thier minds? Have they really become so wrapped up in fighting the Politically Correctness war that they don't understand how amazingly lame this is?
Of course, this is a perfect example of why hate crime laws are bad, bad news. Equal protection? Who needs that! Only minorities with well funded PACs deserve justice in this country. I mean, they've been mistreated for so long we've got to give them something, right? The 14th Amendment sounds good to me...we weren't really using it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Teachers could NOT keep up with the kids in computer classes, which left a whole slew of kids "left behind" per se (thanks Bush).
Maybe it's me, but this sounds to be more of a problem with the teachers (and possibly the local school board) than anything Bush has done...
The federal government somehow gets blame or credit for the condition of public schools, but people forget that public schools are really local institutions. Only about 7% of Elementary and Secondary education funding comes from the Federal government. School policies and curriculums are set at the local and state level; The Federal government can ususally only make recommendations or support specific programs.
If your school's policies are stupid, chances are your local government is the responsible party, not the federal government. The good thing about this, however, is that it's pretty easy for you to go voice your opinion at your local school board meeting. Flying to D.C. to have a chat with the President is a little more difficult.
Why do development methods make resounding success less likely?
Because they waste a lot of time by imposing procedures that do not create value (i.e. working, tested, maintainable code). Of course, those procedures are ususally designed to make sure that catostrophic failures don't occur, so they're important. Using a development methodology is like taking an insurance policy out on your project...you can't spend as much time designing, coding and testing (so it costs you more), but what you end up with will probably be good enough (so at least you get something).
One of the things that must occur when you move from a artistic/tradesman style of production to a engineer style of production is that you have to trade a little bit of quality for a lot of consistancy. This is why mass produced furniture costs less than hand-crafted stuff. The hand crafted stuff is slightly different from item to item, and sometimes mistakes are made and you have to throw out big hunks of furniture (which makes it more expensive), but the product that you get in the end is much better. However, unlike furniture, there is no aesthetic appeal to hand-crafted software. Most software projects are done to solve business problems, which means most software projects have to live by the same rules as every other business venture. Ok, for a minute now, everyone put on a suit and pretend you're an MBA.
You have a $1,000,000 budget for the coming year. Your goal, as an executive, is to turn that money into something worth more than $1,000,000. The additional amount you get is called the Return on Investment (ROI). The ROI for the S&P 500 index has historically been 11%, and most companies will not embark on a project with an ROI of less than 25% (or so).
But ROI is not the only thing to consider when deciding whether or not to start a new project. The other thing to consider is risk. What are the chances that you're actually going to get your 25% back? What if, in addition to not making any money, you actually lose money by spending $1,000,000 dollars over the course of a year and getting nothing in return?
And here is where the software development methology steps in. Software development methodologies help to eliminate risk by setting down guidelines that help to ensure that a project will not fail. Even if it means that you take 20% longer than you would if you didn't use the methodology, and even if the product that you get in the end isn't quite as good, at least you have something that works.
What software development methodologies do is limit the bounds on the ROI for a project. They make it less likely that the project will be a resounding success, and they make it less likely that the project will be an utter failure. This, in turn, allows the planners to plan and the bean counters to count thier beans, and that is a tradeoff that they will gladly make.
It's predictabilty that businesses value. Not efficiency. Not quality. Not even raw cost. All of those things are secondary to the issues of "How much of my money will I get back?" and "Are you sure?"
So your saying they made sure the control group had an identical diet SANS the extra calories from coffee.
No, I'm saying they probably found the same effect regardless of other factors such as soft drink and snack intake. i.e. People who drink 6 cups of coffee a day, and no sugared soft drinks, are just as likely to get diabetes as someone who drinks 6 cups of coffee a day in addition to 3 Mountian Dews and Jelly Donut.
These kinds of things could easily be found using a survey.
The researchers also found that for men, those who drank more than six cups of caffeinated coffee per day reduced their risk for type 2 diabetes by more than 50 percent compared to men in the study who didn't drink coffee.
Six cups of coffee contain a total of 810mg of Caffeine. That's the same as 14 Mountian Dews. If you're drinking 6 cups of coffee a day, you won't get diabetes because you'll be dead of a heart attack at age 35!
Usually the point of doing studies like this is to eliminate independent variables like that. I'm sure that in addition to questions like "How much coffee do you drink in a day?", there were questions like "What is your average daily sugar consumption?" and "How many soft drinks do you drink in a day?"
Most of the time, the hardest part in conducting any experiment is identifying and eliminating all the independent variables (except for the one you're trying to test, of course). In the case of Diabetes, sugar intake is a pretty obvious one.
Death to the IRS....Viva La VAT!!!
It is a widely accepted engineering maxim that systems should be designed so that it is difficult to use them improperly. This is why (for example) a 110 volt plug will not fit in a 220 volt outlet. Developers who are concerned about the quality of the software they make would do well to follow this rule, and not just for security reasons. You should verify input data as early and as rigorously as possible wherever you can. Take advantage of things like XML validation and text box constraints to make it hard for users to enter bad data. And always follow the Fail-Fast principle...if something goes wrong: Complain! Loudly!. Don't let the user continue working if something has gone wrong. It's better to crash than to produce an erronous result.
Just a little advice from a developer who's made enough mistakes to know better.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
"That definition"? You mean the definition the IRS uses to determine if a business gained or lost captial in a year? Yeah, that's wacky way to describe it...
Look, if you want to treat the profit from your business as "salary" because it makes it easier for you to handle the fact that you hate Captialism and yet you benefit from it, fine. But the reason you (and 99% of the rest of the world) gets up in the morning and goes to work is to make money. When you punish people for doing that by trying to make everything "equal" you remove a large portion of the incentive for people to work hard, take risks, and generally make the world a slightly better place by doing thier job well. "Equal" markets don't work; If you don't belive me ask Mikhail Gorbachev.
Well, it depends what you mean by profit. I run a business doing taxes for people. I make money off it, but I consider that a salary, not profit.
Wow. I'm glad I'm not one of your customers, because the IRS considers that profit.
Without inequalities in the market there would be no opportunity for profit, but that doesn't mean there would be no opportunity to make money. You'd make money based on the work you do, not based on your status in the marketplace.
Creating competitive advantages for yourself and your company is the entire point of a business! Nobody works 10 hours a day for 40 years so they can break even. If you can't make a profit doing something than (from a business standpoint) it's not worth doing. What would I retire on if I spent my entire career breaking even?...and developers wonder why they get laid-off. 9 times out of 10 they don't even have the simplest understanding of profit and loss. Your job is not to create a product...your job is to make money. The quality of "the work that you do" is defined in terms of dollars and nothing else.
Well maybe some of these libetarians should find out what Adam Smith was really about. His model of capitalism is based in an agrarian society with independent artisans and traders. His idea of a free market is exactly that - where everyone has equal access to market and equal information.
Equal and Free are not the same thing. A free market is one in which individuals are not prohibited from taking action based on their own personal information, opinion and resources. "Equal access to market and equal information" flies in the face of a Free market because in order to make everything equal, you have to take from some in order to give to others.
Without inequalities in the market, there would be no oppertunity for profit, and no motivation for anyone to do anything. Adam Smith was most certianly not talking about an "equal" market. That is much closer to Marx's notion of "From each according to his abilities, To each according to his needs". And if you want to know why that is bad, follow the link in my signature...
Corporate America has as much to do with the Adam Smith model as the Bolshevist U.S.S.R. It's not even related to Marx' model of capitalism, for in Corporate America, capital is as alientated from controlling the means of production as labor is. Instead, what you have is a management class which calls the shots and enriches itself at the expense of both workers and owners - can you say Enron, Adelphi, Worldcom etc etc.
I hate to break it to you pal, but EVERY sizable human society since the dawn of time has had those two classes of people: The Workers, and The Leaders. That's not a product of capitalism or corporate fraud, or Adam Smith...it's a product of human nature, and it will never go away.
One of the benefits of capitalism is that it introduces a third class of people...the middle class. They actually have enough money and education to become sucessful without needing the support or approval of the established elite. You, yourself are an example of this very principal. Just as you are free to run your company as you see fit, so is every large American corporation. They do not "owe" you or anyone else a job, and you are not forced to hire people who do not fit into your organization.
Here's a question I always wish I could ask managers, whenever the topic of 'outsourcing' comes up: if dealing with programmers overseas is more appealing to the bottom line, why not let your programmers work from home for 50-80% of their current in-office pay?
Oh there's a fantastic idea. All I need to do now is figure out how to live without paying for food, clothing or rent and I'll be all set.
Do we really need to go over this again? Repeat after me: You cannot compete with 3rd world labor costs. Ok, now just the guys! Good, now just the girls...Oh right, there's no girls here.
The only way you're going to be able to keep your job is to do something that offshore workers can't do. What is that, you ask? Well, you could start my actually caring about the business that you work for. Too many IT people are so concerned about the technical aspects of thier jobs that they don't take the time to learn (and care about) how the business they work for actually makes money. This may have been OK in the late 90's, but IT people are getting the harsh reminder now that the reason that you have a job is not to play with the latest technology...it's to make money.
It's your job as an IT professional to bridge the gap between business and technology. You need to be thinking about things like Return on Investment. You need to be thinking about the business needs of your customer...keeping in mind that your customer is probably not a techie like you and only cares about things like "How much does it cost", and "Will it work with what I have now" and not whether or not it runs on Linux. Most importantly, you need to be thinking about money first and technology second. Only someone who is physically present at your place of employment is going to have enough information to make decisions based on those priorities, which is why people who ignore them are finding their jobs shipped overseas.
While the first and second rules of Fight Club are "Don't talk about Fight Club", I believe the 14th rule of Fight Club is:
Don't make a crap-ass game about Fight Club.
I see a lot of you have been breaking the rules...
but will it also result in limiting sun light or producing clouds that trap heat?
I would think that lots of clouds would block sunlight and make the earth cooler. Isn't that the idea behind nuclear winter?
It's good to see that Slashdot has completely turned into a full-fledged Bush bashing site. For a while there I was getting concerned that it might just waver on the border between leftist propaganda and actual, informative techie news. My vote for the new slogan is "News for Nerds. Republicans Suck!"
Seriously people, if I want political news and analysis, I'll go somehere else. Don't make Slashdot what it isn't.
After all, unless you are simply playing games on the PDA, it probably needs to interact with a database somewhere and I can assure you, just about every common task that you may encounter is discussed in depth. The show you how to bind controls to data, retrieve it from a Web Service, retrieve it from a SQL Server on a local network, use SQL CE to take advantage of replication and using XML as a Data Access technology.
So, if I'm reading this right, the way this is supposed to work is:
1) You bind your GUI controls to a SQL server database using the SQL CE library installed on your PDA.
2) When a GUI control needs to update the data, or refresh it's view of the data, it performs a query using SQL CE.
3) SQL CE then transforms that request into an XML document, sends it over a (presumably) wireless network connection, to SQL Server.
4) SQL Server then processes the request, generates an XML response, and then the whole thing runs in reverse until the response gets back to the control, which can then update itself with the new information.
Is this really the way this thing is supposed to work? Please somebody tell me that I'm reading this wrong.
SQL statements are great when you're trying to optimize for query efficency, but they're awful when you're trying to optimize for network latency/bandwidth. This is because SQL is based on the idea that you perform operations over a persistant connection, because establishing that connection and performing the query is usually the bottleneck.
But any wireless developer will tell you that latency/bandwidth is the major bottleneck in a mobile application. When you're sending data over CDMA/GSM networks, the best data rate you can hope for is 192kbps, and forget about low latency. This means you have to package your requests in a big bundle and do them all at once. Which means you need something a little more coarse-grained than SQL.
I suppose if you assume that your application will always have 802.11 access, this could be a good model. But otherwise you're going to be waiting 5-10 seconds every time you click a button, change a setting, or scroll down through a list. Which means nobody is going to actually use your application because it's a grand waste of time.
The way I see it, inventions are of their time. No one person can claim all the glory for anything.
This kind of attitude is why schoolchildren can't remember the name of the first person to walk on the moon, or name the the first 5 U.S. Presidents. The the dilution of historical fact is a very dangerous thing, which is why Orwell warned us about it in 1984.
Personal achievement must be remembered. The accomplishments of individuals, especially in the US, helps to define the national culture. People like Charles Lindburg and John Glenn should be remembered because they risked their lives so that the rest of us could benefit from it. If the Spirit of St. Louis went down in the North Atlantic, it would have been Mr. Lindburg's mother standing over an empty grave. He has to be remembered for taking that chance and rewarded for being sucessful.
Dear Slashdot Readers,
Will you please do my job for me, as I am too fat/lazy to pick up the phone and call an electrician. Besides, my special dialing wand hasn't arrived yet and, technically, I shouldn't be using the phone at all for medical reasons. Tell you what! To make it extra fun, I won't tell you where I am or any local laws that might apply to my situation. Let the endless speculation begin!
Oh, and please hurry! I'm trying to leave early today and my boss wants an answer first thing in the morning.
It's that we understand, deep down, that doing so would be a disaster.
Right. That's the whole point of telling them how you feel.
Platonic female friends are evil. They drain away your soul, leaving you in the enternal limbo of relationship purgatory. And at the same time, they ensure that you don't ever look for companionship elsewhere by instiling a false hope in you that one day, she'll see the light. The result is that a good 5 or 10 years goes by in which you do nothing but lust after a girl you can't have.
As the saying goes, you have to shit or get off the pot. Better that you never talk to her again than to endure a decade or two of silent, longing pain. I mean, if you can't have her, why do you want her around as a constant reminder of the fact that you can't have her? At least when she's gone, you can attempt to find someone who actually will find you attractive and not want to be "just friends".
And hey, there is a slim chance (a very slim chance) that she's willing to give a more serious relationship a try. You never know....at least, you won't know unless you ask, and either way, you'll be better off.
You forgot one:
5) You have a platonic female friend
You're desprately in love with your "friend" of 10 years, only she doesn't know it. It tears you up inside but you can rest assured that you will never, ever work up the balls to say anything. You will just continue to listen to her complaints about how her boyfriend is a jerk and how she can't seem to find "a nice guy like you".
Goddamnit! I just lost two "Respect for Humanity" points. And I'll tell you, nowadays, those suckers are hard to come by.
Have these people totally lost thier minds? Have they really become so wrapped up in fighting the Politically Correctness war that they don't understand how amazingly lame this is?
Of course, this is a perfect example of why hate crime laws are bad, bad news. Equal protection? Who needs that! Only minorities with well funded PACs deserve justice in this country. I mean, they've been mistreated for so long we've got to give them something, right? The 14th Amendment sounds good to me...we weren't really using it anyway.
It would probably also stop the bullet. This isn't an AK-47 we're taking about...