Document ID, word number, word. There's no reason why you'd need to represent
a single document in a single row. In fact you'd probably not want to,
because this structure allows for easier subexpression searching.
You can represent literally every finite object dataset as a set of triples (object-number,variable-within-object-number,value), and in fact all you need is a single number to encode the pair (object-number,variable-within-object-number), using a Cantor enumeration for example. This is a poor abstraction of the problem domain however.
In the case of the (doc-id,word-pos,word-value) table, what is a primary key?
If you go through all 7 possibilities, I think you'll find that the only
primary key is the triple (doc-id,word-pos,word-value) itself. Also, the only single valued function in this design is (doc-id,word-pos) - word-value.
This suggests that relational algebra offers no simplification or benefit over pure brute force search for all queries.
The only sound reason for deviating from the relational model and its rules
is that your (reasonably priced) relational database server has shortcomings,
typically related to dealing with large datasets in clusters, situations in
which relational database solutions typically don't scale well and a
compromise is needed.
That's unfortunately incorrect. The Codd model is not as fundamental as you imply. It is a finite dimensional model, suitable for when your data is naturally representable as a finite number of attributes such as name, address, etc. If there are N attributes, then each record is representable as a point in an N dimensional cartesian product.
Perhaps the simplest example where that assumption fails is when representing a free text document as a bag of words, which is a standard representation for information retrieval applications (eg the google web index). In this case, the natural data representation is infinite dimensional, ie there can be abitrarily many attributes in a document. In such applications, even defining meaningful schemas as done in RDBMS's is impossible.
Google would not have amounted to anything had they tried to work with relational models.
I find it interesting that you claim cloud computing is nisunderstood, but didn't take the opportunity to set the record straight on what cloud computing truly is and why it its bad reputation should be undeserved.
You may well be deluding yourself thinking it is something more than what it actually is.
Along those lines, it would be a lot easier to simply
limit absolutely the number of patents awarded each year, say to 100 across all disciplines and industries altogether. That would force a ruthless culling on merits.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. The patent office should collect fees from thousands of hopeful inventors, and spend a year deliberating behind closed doors, then announce the 100 patent winners at a ceremony, like the Nobel prizes (in science, not politics). Most inventors would lose out, but the benefit to society would largely outweigh the fees they paid.
Ask yourself why Nobel prizes (in science) are impressive and why they wouldn't be if there were thousands of them each year in every field.
It sounds like a lose/lose/win... Either you get the phone ringing, taking up
your time and business and pulling you away from your customers walking in
the door, to the point you change your name... or you take advantage of the
opportunity, and open yourself up to being sued for the name.
...or you set up an automatic answering machine:
"Welcome to the Apple Shop. We specialize in cider and cider related products.
If you would like help with your computer, press 1.
For any other enquiries regarding cider products, press 2.
...
1. "The Apple Shop does not sell computer products. Please wait to be transferred to Apple customer service in Norwich. You will be charged 30p for this transfer."
Yo, I heard you like to put text editors in your friends' text editors, when you hear that they like text editors, so they can edit text while they're editing text. Here's a text editor you can put in the text editor you put in your friends' text editors, so you can put text editors in text editors while putting text editors in your friends' text editors which they can use to edit text while they edit text.
Let's give a 5 year old a really sharp knife. With a really sharp knife, the kid can't delude himself, thinking it's a toy when it's not. With a really sharp knife in his hands, the danger is rubbed in his face so he doesn't forget it, ever, after he stupidly puts the blade in his mouth on an assumption that it's a popsicle. Not.
The flaw in your argument is this: There will always be a whole bunch of inexperienced people on the internet, and they shouldn't be penalized permanently just to teach them a lesson (you think 10 years from now, everybody will know about privacy? What about the kids who are born today, and will be surfing the net 10 years from now? They sure won't know).
The immediate problem with the EFF's proposal is that there are lots of coding languages out there, at varying levels of abstraction and convenience. Do you have to submit a program in C, or can you submit a program in Matlab, or maybe is a UML diagram enough? In fact, it can be argued that the formal lawyer-speak that is used for describing patents today are already a form of executable code, that is intended to run on a patent examiners' hardware.
Then there's the question of what should the outputs and inputs look like.
If say I patent a method of optimization, ie to find the maximum of a function.
Should I write a small test program that uses my method to find the maximum of the curve y = x - x^2 ? That's a trivial problem that merely _illustrates_ one trivial application of the claimed method. It doesn't even _prove_ that my claimed method of optimization is bug free, since it might well give the wrong value for some other function that I conveniently didn't code for. Now think about how a patent on face recognition could be coded up...
No, patents are simply a bad idea, and should not be granted, period. Any interim suggestions to improve the signal to noise will only encourage the pro patent lobby. If requiring code turns out to improve patent quality just a tiny bit, they'll use that to claim victory: "see, patents aren't evil, the rules just have to be tuned a little bit".
Yeah, we know. And these days, all kids are winners and get medals just for showing up at a sporting event. That's what's wrong with this country. It's all feel good crap and devaluing genuine excellence, because god forbid some fat loser might feel left out.
I'll get modded down for this, but those drone pilots and keyboard cowboys _should_ feel left out. They're doing work that any 15 year old kid could do if you told them it was just a video game. That's not impressive, that's not medal worthy. If they want recognition of their peers, they should get off their ass and become real fighter pilots, or real tank commanders, or real platoon leaders and _then_ do something medal worthy. People do it every day - hell, even in real life there are cops and firefighters out there who deserve their medals.
When you promote mediocrity, then you _encourage_ mediocrity.
so the materials wouldn't be
taken back to earth, they'd be used in space.
Like I said, it doesn't matter where they'd be used. As long as the metals remain on the asteroid, their actual value is zero. It's only when delivery occurs to some client who pays for them that their actual value becomes nonzero. That client takes delivery some place convenient, where it's going to be cheaper to steal/confiscate/tax those materials. Thus, there's no need to control mining operations all the way out there.
BTW, it's only expensive to send raw materials up the gravity well. It would be rather cheap to deliver raw materials such as metals from space down to Earth, albeit quite dangerous if the reentry trajectories are miscalculated.
There's a bunch more reasons, but namely the progress bar's main purpose is
to show you that the whole system isn't locked up, which they've been doing
well for the past 30 years or so.
Well put. When faced with a tool that has been around for 30 years, the question shouldn't be "why is that tool still failing to do X?". The mere fact it's been in use for 30 years shows that it's doing _something_ right. So the question should be "what has it been doing right which can explain why it's still around after 30 years?"
Why would anyone stop them? Just wait until they try to bring any of it back down to Earth (*), and then take it off them by force.
(*) or anywhere else they would want to send the metals. Basically, metals are useless if they stay on the asteroid, and they can only become valuable if they are brought to some location where there are (or will be) people. Take the stuff off them wherever that is.
Well, Steve Jobs didn't want a keypad on his iPhone, so I guess he didn't think it was cool enough for a phone, directly contradicting John Karlin's life work in the psychology of telephone design. But we know Karlin was cool too, so now there's the obvious question, who was cooler? Because I need to know if keypads on a phone is hot or not.
Why should you ask me whom you should trust? I know whom I trust, and I expect you to know whom you trust. Trust is a personal thing, a device that helps you organize your own knowledge. Facts are external, verifiable things.
In any discussion, feel free to complement any verifiable facts being discussed with other verifiable facts you know are missing and relevant. Others will appreciate your effort.
At that point, how do I know he didn't leave out
other important data which completely changes the meaning of the data?
The same way you know *anything*. All facts are incomplete in some way. You go through the facts *you* have and make sure they are all consistent. Any inconsistencies get put on a separate pile to be questioned or ignored. As time goes by, new facts emerge, and some of these allow you to move some things from one pile to the other.
You didn't think critical thinking was something you can just get by watching a TV program and drinking beer, did you?
I'd mod you up if I could. The media focus too much on personality cults, and will try to create them if they don't exist. That misses the point completely. Only facts create a strong reason for people to act. One guy's personality alone doesn't.
Wikipedia's great contribution is to be among the few outlets that give us raw unadulterated facts, not some journalist's idea of a good story.
As long as they continue to do this, they deserve full support.
Nothing else matters.
I don't know what you're talking about. When I browse the web in Emacs, I can spell check the web page, query Wolfram Alpha, launch wikipedia in another buffer, and do symbolic calculations in Maxima, all while reading a pdf in yet another buffer. Sometimes I even respond to emails.
Processing big data is as much about moving the data around, and minimising
latency in this movement as the raw processing speed. so a language that lets
you express things efficiently will win in the end.
If by expressing things efficiently you mean easy for the programmer to write, then you're wrong. What matters (doubly so for big data) is full control over the machine's resources, ie how data is laid out in memory, good control over i/o etc. While this has always been the key to fast performance, big data is plagued by big-oh asymptotics. For example, if you can lay out your data structures efficiently enough to keep everything in cache, your running time can easily gain a factor of ten, ie 1 day instead of 10 days. Ask Google or Facebook if they care about that...
Scripting languages have their place where performance doesn't matter _enough_ to optimize, eg your local supermarket chain trying to datamine their customers in time for the end of the month.
Why would Fortran be any faster than any other compiled language?
Because the language is simpler, so the compiler can make assumptions and generate better automatic optimizations. C/C++ are much harder to optimize (=generate optimal assembly instructions).
Which God died and said that you have a moral right to take whatever you want
if someone doesn't want to sell it to you?
Morality doesn't come into it. As you know, all publications enter the public domain after some time, which currently is very long. This means that most publishing companies and authors will die before their books are scheduled to enter the public domain. These publishers and authors are only interim caretakers of the works. The public domain is the real owner forever after.
Therefore, we need volunteers to preserve these books in the meantime, until their copyright expiries, so that they can be entered into the public domain in due course. Due to the lengths of time involved, which are long enough for world wars and revolutions to sweep the globe, the only way to have a reasonable chance of reverting the books into the public domain is if many people independently preserve these books by all means necessary, especially highly redundant digital archives.
They had a team of chimpanzees and a team of experts. The results were that
the chimpanzees did better than the experts.
That experiment was so unfair! They actually picked really smart chimpanzees.
Anonymous
Desk #2, Room 24, Level 16,
Department of Economics,
William H. Sewell Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1393
University of Wisconsin
Applications compiled with a particular compiler do not inherently fall under
the copyright license which covers that compiler's implementation, because no
copying of the compiler code is involved.
Except for bundled include files, which clearly fall under the compiler vendor's copyright.
For languages such as C, it is impossible to write nontrivial programs without making use of include files. In special cases, such as with the standard system libraries, it may be legal to rewrite them from scratch to include in one's programs, as we've seen in the Google/Oracle lawsuit.
But in general, and for other languages which aren't as standardized and widely used as C, even rewriting one's own version of the compiler include files would likely break copyright protections, as these are original works. An exception in the license would definitely be needed, I believe.
Actually, even within the C family, if we take C++, the STL is largely implemented as include files. So every modern C++ program that makes use of the STL includes large sections of code under the compiler vendor's copyright. Rewriting those files verbatim isn't allowed, and reimplementing them from scratch is a major undertaking no applications developer could afford.
However, I agree with your explanation of dynamic linking issues.
Slashdot Mirror
You can represent literally every finite object dataset as a set of triples (object-number,variable-within-object-number,value), and in fact all you need is a single number to encode the pair (object-number,variable-within-object-number), using a Cantor enumeration for example. This is a poor abstraction of the problem domain however.
In the case of the (doc-id,word-pos,word-value) table, what is a primary key? If you go through all 7 possibilities, I think you'll find that the only primary key is the triple (doc-id,word-pos,word-value) itself. Also, the only single valued function in this design is (doc-id,word-pos) - word-value. This suggests that relational algebra offers no simplification or benefit over pure brute force search for all queries.
That's unfortunately incorrect. The Codd model is not as fundamental as you imply. It is a finite dimensional model, suitable for when your data is naturally representable as a finite number of attributes such as name, address, etc. If there are N attributes, then each record is representable as a point in an N dimensional cartesian product.
Perhaps the simplest example where that assumption fails is when representing a free text document as a bag of words, which is a standard representation for information retrieval applications (eg the google web index). In this case, the natural data representation is infinite dimensional, ie there can be abitrarily many attributes in a document. In such applications, even defining meaningful schemas as done in RDBMS's is impossible.
Google would not have amounted to anything had they tried to work with relational models.
You may well be deluding yourself thinking it is something more than what it actually is.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. The patent office should collect fees from thousands of hopeful inventors, and spend a year deliberating behind closed doors, then announce the 100 patent winners at a ceremony, like the Nobel prizes (in science, not politics). Most inventors would lose out, but the benefit to society would largely outweigh the fees they paid.
Ask yourself why Nobel prizes (in science) are impressive and why they wouldn't be if there were thousands of them each year in every field.
"Welcome to the Apple Shop. We specialize in cider and cider related products.
If you would like help with your computer, press 1.
For any other enquiries regarding cider products, press 2.
1. "The Apple Shop does not sell computer products. Please wait to be transferred to Apple customer service in Norwich. You will be charged 30p for this transfer."
2. "Apple Shop. Hello, how may I help hou?"
There, FTFY.
Yo, I heard you like to put text editors in your friends' text editors, when you hear that they like text editors, so they can edit text while they're editing text. Here's a text editor you can put in the text editor you put in your friends' text editors, so you can put text editors in text editors while putting text editors in your friends' text editors which they can use to edit text while they edit text.
If you use the right operating system, you can remap all keys to anything you like. I use Emacs.
The flaw in your argument is this: There will always be a whole bunch of inexperienced people on the internet, and they shouldn't be penalized permanently just to teach them a lesson (you think 10 years from now, everybody will know about privacy? What about the kids who are born today, and will be surfing the net 10 years from now? They sure won't know).
A few of the inhabitants were drunk at the time, and incapable of leaping into the Great Beyond.
Then there's the question of what should the outputs and inputs look like. If say I patent a method of optimization, ie to find the maximum of a function. Should I write a small test program that uses my method to find the maximum of the curve y = x - x^2 ? That's a trivial problem that merely _illustrates_ one trivial application of the claimed method. It doesn't even _prove_ that my claimed method of optimization is bug free, since it might well give the wrong value for some other function that I conveniently didn't code for. Now think about how a patent on face recognition could be coded up...
No, patents are simply a bad idea, and should not be granted, period. Any interim suggestions to improve the signal to noise will only encourage the pro patent lobby. If requiring code turns out to improve patent quality just a tiny bit, they'll use that to claim victory: "see, patents aren't evil, the rules just have to be tuned a little bit".
Yeah, we know. And these days, all kids are winners and get medals just for showing up at a sporting event. That's what's wrong with this country. It's all feel good crap and devaluing genuine excellence, because god forbid some fat loser might feel left out.
I'll get modded down for this, but those drone pilots and keyboard cowboys _should_ feel left out. They're doing work that any 15 year old kid could do if you told them it was just a video game. That's not impressive, that's not medal worthy. If they want recognition of their peers, they should get off their ass and become real fighter pilots, or real tank commanders, or real platoon leaders and _then_ do something medal worthy. People do it every day - hell, even in real life there are cops and firefighters out there who deserve their medals.
When you promote mediocrity, then you _encourage_ mediocrity.
Like I said, it doesn't matter where they'd be used. As long as the metals remain on the asteroid, their actual value is zero. It's only when delivery occurs to some client who pays for them that their actual value becomes nonzero. That client takes delivery some place convenient, where it's going to be cheaper to steal/confiscate/tax those materials. Thus, there's no need to control mining operations all the way out there.
BTW, it's only expensive to send raw materials up the gravity well. It would be rather cheap to deliver raw materials such as metals from space down to Earth, albeit quite dangerous if the reentry trajectories are miscalculated.
Well put. When faced with a tool that has been around for 30 years, the question shouldn't be "why is that tool still failing to do X?". The mere fact it's been in use for 30 years shows that it's doing _something_ right. So the question should be "what has it been doing right which can explain why it's still around after 30 years?"
(*) or anywhere else they would want to send the metals. Basically, metals are useless if they stay on the asteroid, and they can only become valuable if they are brought to some location where there are (or will be) people. Take the stuff off them wherever that is.
Well, Steve Jobs didn't want a keypad on his iPhone, so I guess he didn't think it was cool enough for a phone, directly contradicting John Karlin's life work in the psychology of telephone design. But we know Karlin was cool too, so now there's the obvious question, who was cooler? Because I need to know if keypads on a phone is hot or not.
Facts do not have editorial bias. You're confusing facts and commentary, raw materials and interpretations.
In any discussion, feel free to complement any verifiable facts being discussed with other verifiable facts you know are missing and relevant. Others will appreciate your effort.
The same way you know *anything*. All facts are incomplete in some way. You go through the facts *you* have and make sure they are all consistent. Any inconsistencies get put on a separate pile to be questioned or ignored. As time goes by, new facts emerge, and some of these allow you to move some things from one pile to the other.
You didn't think critical thinking was something you can just get by watching a TV program and drinking beer, did you?
Wikipedia's great contribution is to be among the few outlets that give us raw unadulterated facts, not some journalist's idea of a good story. As long as they continue to do this, they deserve full support. Nothing else matters.
I don't know what you're talking about. When I browse the web in Emacs, I can spell check the web page, query Wolfram Alpha, launch wikipedia in another buffer, and do symbolic calculations in Maxima, all while reading a pdf in yet another buffer. Sometimes I even respond to emails.
If by expressing things efficiently you mean easy for the programmer to write, then you're wrong. What matters (doubly so for big data) is full control over the machine's resources, ie how data is laid out in memory, good control over i/o etc. While this has always been the key to fast performance, big data is plagued by big-oh asymptotics. For example, if you can lay out your data structures efficiently enough to keep everything in cache, your running time can easily gain a factor of ten, ie 1 day instead of 10 days. Ask Google or Facebook if they care about that...
Scripting languages have their place where performance doesn't matter _enough_ to optimize, eg your local supermarket chain trying to datamine their customers in time for the end of the month.
Because the language is simpler, so the compiler can make assumptions and generate better automatic optimizations. C/C++ are much harder to optimize (=generate optimal assembly instructions).
Morality doesn't come into it. As you know, all publications enter the public domain after some time, which currently is very long. This means that most publishing companies and authors will die before their books are scheduled to enter the public domain. These publishers and authors are only interim caretakers of the works. The public domain is the real owner forever after.
Therefore, we need volunteers to preserve these books in the meantime, until their copyright expiries, so that they can be entered into the public domain in due course. Due to the lengths of time involved, which are long enough for world wars and revolutions to sweep the globe, the only way to have a reasonable chance of reverting the books into the public domain is if many people independently preserve these books by all means necessary, especially highly redundant digital archives.
That experiment was so unfair! They actually picked really smart chimpanzees.
Anonymous
Desk #2, Room 24, Level 16,
Department of Economics,
William H. Sewell Social Science Building
1180 Observatory Drive
Madison, WI 53706-1393
University of Wisconsin
Except for bundled include files, which clearly fall under the compiler vendor's copyright.
For languages such as C, it is impossible to write nontrivial programs without making use of include files. In special cases, such as with the standard system libraries, it may be legal to rewrite them from scratch to include in one's programs, as we've seen in the Google/Oracle lawsuit.
But in general, and for other languages which aren't as standardized and widely used as C, even rewriting one's own version of the compiler include files would likely break copyright protections, as these are original works. An exception in the license would definitely be needed, I believe.
Actually, even within the C family, if we take C++, the STL is largely implemented as include files. So every modern C++ program that makes use of the STL includes large sections of code under the compiler vendor's copyright. Rewriting those files verbatim isn't allowed, and reimplementing them from scratch is a major undertaking no applications developer could afford.
However, I agree with your explanation of dynamic linking issues.