"Any design problem can be solved by adding an additional level of
indirection, except for too many levels of indirection."
This is known as Cargill's quandry. But - does anyone know who Cargill was?
Yes, but how long is it going to be before *every* PC in the shops has Windows Vista preloaded, so there's no choice? I know someone who is going to need a new laptop pretty soon (old one 5 years old and rather beaten up physically) - I'm thinking of pointing out that she should get a new one real soon now while Win XP is still available. Or will Win XP and Vista co-exist for some time?
Re:SQL is a standard. Is it?
on
SQL Cookbook
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There is a series of official SQL Standards, but the trouble is nobody any longer measures the extent to which database vendors conform to the official standards. Once upon a time NIST used to do this, but that part of their work was cancelled after some lobbying by the big database vendors: naturally they much prefer it if you use their dialect then you get locked in to their product. Who allowed this to happen? I think it was Bill Clinton.
Glad you agree that Foxit is much faster. But I find Adobe v7 slow even when it's started and I want to switch to a new document. On my laptop, especially, it takes ages to load the new file. I've found very few files that Foxit doesn't handle, but maybe I've been lucky.
I'm very surprised that they have chosen to include Adobe Reader V7, I've given up using it on Win XP as it is so bloated and slow, compared to older versions. I've switched to using the Foxit reader, which is equally closed source but also free, and works much better. Anyone else thing Adobe went badly down hill with their recent versions of Adobe Reader?
I think the problem with overloading in languages like C++ and Groovy is that they only allow you to overload existing operators. If you use a more advanced language like Fortran (in any recent standard such as F90/F95/F2003) you find that you can invent your own operators. If, for example, you want a fuzzy matching operator (similar to LIKE in SQL for example) then you can call it.like. - no need to overload == or something that has not quite the right name. If you want set operators no need to overload + and * since their meaning may no tbe quite obvious: just invent.union..intersection. and so on. And of course you can overload these for as many data types as you want.
For scientific and technical work Fortran has so many other advantages over C/C++ that it is no surprise that it is still in widespread use. The odd thing is that many computer nerds don't know about it.
Well the proposed UK card is linked to a database which explicitly will include National Health Service records, and eventually one will need it to get treatment from a doctor or hospital. So effectively the card has it - no doublt mobile readers will come along very soon.
As far as identity theft is concerned: it's already very hard to open a bank account, one needs lots of supporting documentation. This is supposed to be to counteract money-laundering, but identify theft is also harder.
But there's no evidence that the banks will trust the Government's ID card. If it's easy to obtain it won't be trust-worthy, if hard it will cost too much. The Government says it will only cost about 100 pounds (170 Euros, 190 USD), but a recent independent report by the London School of Economics reckons that it will in practice cost around 300 pounds per person. Whether we pay that individually, or out of taxes, it all has to be paid. The database, and the cost, are the major obstacles, to me and many others.
Perhaps you never learned about the history of Europe when the Nazis ran most of it: they were able to round up jews in most countries very efficiently because every person had to be registered and had to declare their religion. Note: I'm not jewish, but who knows next time it might be the atheists that get rounded up.
Secondly: identify theft is mostly another name for credit card theft. I've used my credit card in dozens of other countries many of which make their citizens hold ID cards, and when it's nearly always obvious that I'm a foreigner who's got a passport in my pocket, but *never* had to show that basic form of ID to use my card. I don't believe it will make the slightest difference to such fraud.
Not true - there are lots of exceptions to the general ticketing scheme, for example the Heathrow Express trains, the Eurostar trains from Waterloo and Ashford, and there are lots of private railways carrying tourists, all of which need separate ticket purchases.
I expect you are right, pretty much. These things are mostly a matter of culture, and after two world wars, Europeans clearly have got more tolerant and less likely to declare war on others. Increased travel opportunities are also exposing us to a greater variety of cultures. But it's not clear to me that this necessarily makes us less fervently religious - and recent research suggests that religiosity is partly inherited, so it could just be that the mass migrations of the faithful to the USA and Canada had some effect back home.
You may have forgotten a bit of history: we in Europe used to have lots of religious nuts and bigots of all varieties, but we managed to export them in large numbers to the USA and Canada, starting with the Mayflower. We did this by rather violent means, of which our ancestors ought to have been ashamed. But that's by the way. Anyhow, partly as a result of this transfer of population Europe is a much more tolerant and secular society (even though we have an official state religion in many countries including the UK) - while you in the USA have to cope with the descendents of a long line of religious bigotry.
Yes you may well be right. I don't know much about the details of SMS systems either. It would probably be easier to simply add more capacity to message centers than to get an agreed change to the GSM specification *and* altered firmware in the phones themselves. But in the long term, it seems to me that an SMS broadcast facility would be very valuable, and could be life-saving, in cases where warnings have to be widely circulated in a short period of time.
I'll try to take this up in some forum where there may be experts lurking, and see what the reaction is.
Yes I heard about that, and that seems an excellent use of SMS. But each SMS message occupies the control channel for at least some milliseconds, so sending millions of message fast enough to warn of a tsunami would seem to be difficult without some broadcast mechanism. Here in the UK the number of text messages sent around midnight on 31st December was sufficient to swamp the system and many did not get delivered for several hours.
Are you sure they can do that? I can't see any reference to SMS broadcast in the GSM specifications (though it's a dense document, could easily have missed it). As far as I know the operators currently would have to send out large numbers of SMS messages individually addressed. If the cellphone firmware were modified, then potentially one message could be received by all in range of a given base station. That would indeed be a good way of sending out warnings of tsunamis, lava flows, tornadoes, etc.
I also realised that spam only works because almost nobody responds. Nearly all spam now wants you to click on some web-site. What if there were some free software that we could all download and use, which when our computers were otherwise idle just continually tried to access the URLs listed in all our recent spam messages - if enough people did this, say a few millions of us, then all spam-related web-sites would become unusable because of overload. Wouldn't that tend to put spammers out of business?
Telephone companies try hard to save bandwidth on overseas calls and compress them more than inland calls, but they have to detect calls to fax machines and modems, as the compression messes them up completely. So: can't they just block modem calls to these countries? It would still stop people sending faxes, but would not affect the vast majority of legitimate calls, which I suspect are plain voice calls. Or is this, for some reason, not technically feasible?
I see that "OFCOM strongly prefers to receive responses as email attachments in Microsoft Word format". No doubt all other responses will be ignored - so that disenfranchises all us Linux users right away.
For some things, yes. It has the advantage of good exception-handling mechanisms, which won't be in Fortran until F2002 (and then not as good as Python's). And for high-performance applications, where you want to run on parallel hardware, it's not clear that Python can compete with a fully-compiled language.
But I'm astonished at the range of mis-information on earlier replies in this thread. Most seem to think that Fortran means Fortran77, though just a few mention Fortran90. Most users of the language that I know have switched to Fortran95. It has just about everything C++ has, and more in a few ways: for example in Fortran you can define your own operators, and overload them. In C++ you can only overload an existing operator symbol, which leaves you with a rather small choice. Suppose you want to implement a "like" operator for string matching along the lines of that in SQL: you can define.like. to do it in Fortran, what obscure symbol are you going to choose in C++?
Fortran95 isn't fully compatible with object-oriented programming, but for scientific applications that's often irrelevant.
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"Any design problem can be solved by adding an additional level of indirection, except for too many levels of indirection." This is known as Cargill's quandry. But - does anyone know who Cargill was?
Yes, but how long is it going to be before *every* PC in the shops has Windows Vista preloaded, so there's no choice? I know someone who is going to need a new laptop pretty soon (old one 5 years old and rather beaten up physically) - I'm thinking of pointing out that she should get a new one real soon now while Win XP is still available. Or will Win XP and Vista co-exist for some time?
There is a series of official SQL Standards, but the trouble is nobody any longer measures the extent to which database vendors conform to the official standards. Once upon a time NIST used to do this, but that part of their work was cancelled after some lobbying by the big database vendors: naturally they much prefer it if you use their dialect then you get locked in to their product. Who allowed this to happen? I think it was Bill Clinton.
Glad you agree that Foxit is much faster. But I find Adobe v7 slow even when it's started and I want to switch to a new document. On my laptop, especially, it takes ages to load the new file. I've found very few files that Foxit doesn't handle, but maybe I've been lucky.
I'm very surprised that they have chosen to include Adobe Reader V7, I've given up using it on Win XP as it is so bloated and slow, compared to older versions. I've switched to using the Foxit reader, which is equally closed source but also free, and works much better. Anyone else thing Adobe went badly down hill with their recent versions of Adobe Reader?
For scientific and technical work Fortran has so many other advantages over C/C++ that it is no surprise that it is still in widespread use. The odd thing is that many computer nerds don't know about it.
Well the proposed UK card is linked to a database which explicitly will include National Health Service records, and eventually one will need it to get treatment from a doctor or hospital. So effectively the card has it - no doublt mobile readers will come along very soon. As far as identity theft is concerned: it's already very hard to open a bank account, one needs lots of supporting documentation. This is supposed to be to counteract money-laundering, but identify theft is also harder. But there's no evidence that the banks will trust the Government's ID card. If it's easy to obtain it won't be trust-worthy, if hard it will cost too much. The Government says it will only cost about 100 pounds (170 Euros, 190 USD), but a recent independent report by the London School of Economics reckons that it will in practice cost around 300 pounds per person. Whether we pay that individually, or out of taxes, it all has to be paid. The database, and the cost, are the major obstacles, to me and many others.
Secondly: identify theft is mostly another name for credit card theft. I've used my credit card in dozens of other countries many of which make their citizens hold ID cards, and when it's nearly always obvious that I'm a foreigner who's got a passport in my pocket, but *never* had to show that basic form of ID to use my card. I don't believe it will make the slightest difference to such fraud.
Not true - there are lots of exceptions to the general ticketing scheme, for example the Heathrow Express trains, the Eurostar trains from Waterloo and Ashford, and there are lots of private railways carrying tourists, all of which need separate ticket purchases.
I expect you are right, pretty much. These things are mostly a matter of culture, and after two world wars, Europeans clearly have got more tolerant and less likely to declare war on others. Increased travel opportunities are also exposing us to a greater variety of cultures. But it's not clear to me that this necessarily makes us less fervently religious - and recent research suggests that religiosity is partly inherited, so it could just be that the mass migrations of the faithful to the USA and Canada had some effect back home.
You may have forgotten a bit of history: we in Europe used to have lots of religious nuts and bigots of all varieties, but we managed to export them in large numbers to the USA and Canada, starting with the Mayflower. We did this by rather violent means, of which our ancestors ought to have been ashamed. But that's by the way. Anyhow, partly as a result of this transfer of population Europe is a much more tolerant and secular society (even though we have an official state religion in many countries including the UK) - while you in the USA have to cope with the descendents of a long line of religious bigotry.
Yes you may well be right. I don't know much about the details of SMS systems either. It would probably be easier to simply add more capacity to message centers than to get an agreed change to the GSM specification *and* altered firmware in the phones themselves. But in the long term, it seems to me that an SMS broadcast facility would be very valuable, and could be life-saving, in cases where warnings have to be widely circulated in a short period of time. I'll try to take this up in some forum where there may be experts lurking, and see what the reaction is.
Yes I heard about that, and that seems an excellent use of SMS. But each SMS message occupies the control channel for at least some milliseconds, so sending millions of message fast enough to warn of a tsunami would seem to be difficult without some broadcast mechanism. Here in the UK the number of text messages sent around midnight on 31st December was sufficient to swamp the system and many did not get delivered for several hours.
Are you sure they can do that? I can't see any reference to SMS broadcast in the GSM specifications (though it's a dense document, could easily have missed it). As far as I know the operators currently would have to send out large numbers of SMS messages individually addressed. If the cellphone firmware were modified, then potentially one message could be received by all in range of a given base station. That would indeed be a good way of sending out warnings of tsunamis, lava flows, tornadoes, etc.
I also realised that spam only works because almost nobody responds. Nearly all spam now wants you to click on some web-site. What if there were some free software that we could all download and use, which when our computers were otherwise idle just continually tried to access the URLs listed in all our recent spam messages - if enough people did this, say a few millions of us, then all spam-related web-sites would become unusable because of overload. Wouldn't that tend to put spammers out of business?
Telephone companies try hard to save bandwidth on overseas calls and compress them more than inland calls, but they have to detect calls to fax machines and modems, as the compression messes them up completely. So: can't they just block modem calls to these countries? It would still stop people sending faxes, but would not affect the vast majority of legitimate calls, which I suspect are plain voice calls. Or is this, for some reason, not technically feasible?
I see that "OFCOM strongly prefers to receive responses as email attachments in Microsoft Word format". No doubt all other responses will be ignored - so that disenfranchises all us Linux users right away.
But I'm astonished at the range of mis-information on earlier replies in this thread. Most seem to think that Fortran means Fortran77, though just a few mention Fortran90. Most users of the language that I know have switched to Fortran95. It has just about everything C++ has, and more in a few ways: for example in Fortran you can define your own operators, and overload them. In C++ you can only overload an existing operator symbol, which leaves you with a rather small choice. Suppose you want to implement a "like" operator for string matching along the lines of that in SQL: you can define .like. to do it in Fortran, what obscure symbol are you going to choose in C++?
Fortran95 isn't fully compatible with object-oriented programming, but for scientific applications that's often irrelevant.