If you're the world's largest and most profitable software company, there's probably some commercial value in not looking like a bunch of idiots who can't plan file formats.
Get practice writing software for people who have fuzzy, ill-defined, and constantly changing business requirements that they themselves don't understand half of the time.
When you as a DBA use anything other than a surrogate primary key, you are making the exceptionally dangerous assumption that the client has the correct understanding of what their model entails, that there will be no exceptions to the rules of that model, and that the model they gave you will never, ever change.
Borrowing from your SSN example, let's say that your client tells you the main way they identify customers is through the SSN, and you go by that, and then there's a case of identity theft and the customer's SSN number has to be changed? Now you've got potentially thousands of records with a bad primary key that you have to change (and mitigate constraint issues as well). What if privacy issues require the company dropping SSN's as an identifier, and now the company will be forbidden from asking customers their SSN's? You'll no longer be able to generate primary keys compatible with the same ones used before.
What truly separates a good DBA from a bad one is the good DBA's ability to anticipate change, design for change, insulate existing stuff from change, and basically save the client from any flaws in their own conceptual model (while making it look like they've followed the client's conceptual model to the letter). A bad DBA simply trusts whatever his client says and believes it to be correct and forever immutable.
If Hormel is right, then there should be tons people who went to concert venues expecting to be ripped off by PayPal and instead ended up getting stoned and seeing jam a band.
Even more ironic, a programming language designed to spare lines of code named after the guy whose signature takes up the most space on the declaration of independence.
"Several UNC students carrying buckets of carolina blue paint have been missing since the big UNC win last night. In seemingly unrelated news, this morning NCSU campus police found several strange-looking piles of ash by the Free Expression Tunnel."
As a NCSU alum (class of 2005), I'm impressed that they've got the earth's largest antimatter beam, but I think but I'd be even more impressed if they finally got the majority of professors to put their class syllabus online.
All these people have technologies that compete with Cocoa+Objective-C. And they are all shipping their stuff with regular expression functionality. Today.
My point is that there are numerous gaping in holes in the functionality of the API and language that Apple has been touting as the future of mac development. With Leopard, Apple spent lots of money to put even more bling on the naked emperor when they should have bought him a cheap suit.
After the sixth version is released, we mac developers still probably won't have an Apple-shipped Cocoa API for regular expressions...sigh.
I guess that giving developers the ability to add cutesy animations to applications is more important than giving those application developers ways to scrape information off the internet and display it to users in useful and innovative ways.
Given that every other desktop development environment and every scripting language ships with built-in regular expressions functionality, Cocoa is starting to look extremely uncompetitive, at least from the standpoint of doing any significant work with strings of text.
"Unit 057, do you promise to not injure Cindy, or through inaction, allow Cindy to come to harm, to obey all her orders except where except where such orders would conflict with the first situation, and will you protect your own existence as long as doing so doesn't conflict with the first two situations?"
Perhaps. But it's also hard to rule out the possibility that the market in the US is stagnant, risk-averse, and unimaginative.
If OLPC succeeds, maybe people in the US will start questioning why they can't bring computers to scouting trips, or why $3000 worth of engineering in a laptop didn't add another $3 of sturdier plastic that would have prevented it from shattering after a fall of only 3ft.
Spielberg first realized the script had been stolen after the security system's boulder had crashed through the Universal Studios cafeteria earlier that day.
These sorority girls really know their makeovers. Once LUG members have been given advice on mascara, making their boobs look bigger, and looking good in a belly shirt no man will be able to resist them!
Applications aren't tied to new OS X versions, are they?
Kinda depends. Apple does release a lot of new things with each OS that make mac developers lives easier and allows applications to be written faster with less lines of code (e.g. Cocoa bindings, Controller Layer, QTKit, etc). If mac developers write their application using those advanced technologies in the next version of the OS to be released, then they may lose compatibility with the previous version of the OS that lacks those features and it may not run on the older OS. So a downside of not upgrading is the inability to run newer applications.
In Leopard (from looking at Apple's *public* site that those with NDA's certainly wouldn't be punished for pointing to) Apple's included stuff like resolution independance and support for complex hardware-accelerated animations in the next version of the OS, so it's likely that new applications are going to make use of these technologies and that old machines that can't support those technologies won't jive with the new applications.
But IMHO they are more focused on recreating the old NeXTStep than creating a welcoming modern desktop environment for desktop users and developers, and I see that as a losing strategy. From what I've remembered from trying it out, I got the feeling that I really had to work to make my Cocoa stuff gnustep compliant and as a Cocoa developer I really don't have the patience for that.
Slashdot Mirror
So the previous yardstick of darkness was a hockey puck?
So "Donkey Kong" and "Konkey Dong" didn't turn out to be the same game, did they?
If you're the world's largest and most profitable software company, there's probably some commercial value in not looking like a bunch of idiots who can't plan file formats.
When I hear the phrase "$2500 tatas", cars isn't the first thing that comes to mind.
Duh. Predators tend to prefer the extremely young, the extremely old, or prey with excessive lip enhancement. You should watch more Animal Planet.
Get practice writing software for people who have fuzzy, ill-defined, and constantly changing business requirements that they themselves don't understand half of the time.
When you as a DBA use anything other than a surrogate primary key, you are making the exceptionally dangerous assumption that the client has the correct understanding of what their model entails, that there will be no exceptions to the rules of that model, and that the model they gave you will never, ever change.
Borrowing from your SSN example, let's say that your client tells you the main way they identify customers is through the SSN, and you go by that, and then there's a case of identity theft and the customer's SSN number has to be changed? Now you've got potentially thousands of records with a bad primary key that you have to change (and mitigate constraint issues as well). What if privacy issues require the company dropping SSN's as an identifier, and now the company will be forbidden from asking customers their SSN's? You'll no longer be able to generate primary keys compatible with the same ones used before.
What truly separates a good DBA from a bad one is the good DBA's ability to anticipate change, design for change, insulate existing stuff from change, and basically save the client from any flaws in their own conceptual model (while making it look like they've followed the client's conceptual model to the letter). A bad DBA simply trusts whatever his client says and believes it to be correct and forever immutable.
It's called a blue screen of death. I've heard it's quite common on IIS.
If Hormel is right, then there should be tons people who went to concert venues expecting to be ripped off by PayPal and instead ended up getting stoned and seeing jam a band.
Does this mean we're going to start seeing pepper spray in first aid kits?
Even more ironic, a programming language designed to spare lines of code named after the guy whose signature takes up the most space on the declaration of independence.
I think a more apropos headline would be:
"Several UNC students carrying buckets of carolina blue paint have been missing since the big UNC win last night. In seemingly unrelated news, this morning NCSU campus police found several strange-looking piles of ash by the Free Expression Tunnel."
As a NCSU alum (class of 2005), I'm impressed that they've got the earth's largest antimatter beam, but I think but I'd be even more impressed if they finally got the majority of professors to put their class syllabus online.
Why should Apple have bothered to add XML support in 10.4 when the guy writing Iconara DOM had an interest in keeping it up to date?
(And yes, XML is another example of a technology that everyone else had that Apple took way too long to implement for Cocoa).
All these people have technologies that compete with Cocoa+Objective-C. And they are all shipping their stuff with regular expression functionality. Today.
My point is that there are numerous gaping in holes in the functionality of the API and language that Apple has been touting as the future of mac development. With Leopard, Apple spent lots of money to put even more bling on the naked emperor when they should have bought him a cheap suit.
After the sixth version is released, we mac developers still probably won't have an Apple-shipped Cocoa API for regular expressions...sigh.
I guess that giving developers the ability to add cutesy animations to applications is more important than giving those application developers ways to scrape information off the internet and display it to users in useful and innovative ways.
Given that every other desktop development environment and every scripting language ships with built-in regular expressions functionality, Cocoa is starting to look extremely uncompetitive, at least from the standpoint of doing any significant work with strings of text.
"Unit 057, do you promise to not injure Cindy, or through inaction, allow Cindy to come to harm, to obey all her orders except where except where such orders would conflict with the first situation, and will you protect your own existence as long as doing so doesn't conflict with the first two situations?"
Get that last game in before your game stops working with your newly created 144-sided dice.
Must be the firewire model.
Perhaps. But it's also hard to rule out the possibility that the market in the US is stagnant, risk-averse, and unimaginative.
If OLPC succeeds, maybe people in the US will start questioning why they can't bring computers to scouting trips, or why $3000 worth of engineering in a laptop didn't add another $3 of sturdier plastic that would have prevented it from shattering after a fall of only 3ft.
Spielberg first realized the script had been stolen after the security system's boulder had crashed through the Universal Studios cafeteria earlier that day.
Imagine if you upload Monty Python episodes to the photocopier and you get a Japanese guy in the tobacco shop asking about hovercrafts full of sushi.
These sorority girls really know their makeovers. Once LUG members have been given advice on mascara, making their boobs look bigger, and looking good in a belly shirt no man will be able to resist them!
Applications aren't tied to new OS X versions, are they?
Kinda depends. Apple does release a lot of new things with each OS that make mac developers lives easier and allows applications to be written faster with less lines of code (e.g. Cocoa bindings, Controller Layer, QTKit, etc). If mac developers write their application using those advanced technologies in the next version of the OS to be released, then they may lose compatibility with the previous version of the OS that lacks those features and it may not run on the older OS. So a downside of not upgrading is the inability to run newer applications.
In Leopard (from looking at Apple's *public* site that those with NDA's certainly wouldn't be punished for pointing to) Apple's included stuff like resolution independance and support for complex hardware-accelerated animations in the next version of the OS, so it's likely that new applications are going to make use of these technologies and that old machines that can't support those technologies won't jive with the new applications.
GNUStep
http://gnustep.org/
But IMHO they are more focused on recreating the old NeXTStep than creating a welcoming modern desktop environment for desktop users and developers, and I see that as a losing strategy. From what I've remembered from trying it out, I got the feeling that I really had to work to make my Cocoa stuff gnustep compliant and as a Cocoa developer I really don't have the patience for that.