There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
That's an interesting thought experiment. Let's say civilization fell and rose again, and that future archaeologists came across some of our optical discs. They wouldn't need much beyond 19th-century technology and mathematics to decipher them.
Once cleaned, 1,000-year-old discs would still shimmer the way they do today. Under a microscope (well-developed by the 19th century), pits and lands would be visible. A pit is approximately the same size as a bacterial cell, after all. The pits and lands would form a recognizable pattern. That pattern looks nothing like binary, being a clocked encoding of it. But it's obvious that a CD would spin, so eventually someone clever will realize that information is encoded at clock boundaries.
That having been figured out, these future archaeologists will see repeating patterns of eight units. Presuming that our language came down intact (much like Latin has to us), 19th century cryptanalytical techniques could determine the correspondence of the mysterious 8-pit repeating units to letters. (After all, what is ASCII except a simple substitution cipher?)
ECC information would be gibberish, but it could be ignored. (And once even one Wikipedia backup were deciphered, the ECC information would be understood.)
Of course, there's a huge amount of information on each disc. It'd take a long time to go over even part of one by hand, but it could be done. After all, even in the 17th century, huge logarithm table books were produced.
Once technology advanced a bit, it'd be possible to build an electromechanical system to read and print the contents of CDs. Even Babbage had a workable printer design, and printing telegraph machines emerged by 1910. The hardest part for our future archaeologists would be reading the discs at high speed, for which (I think) they'd need a laser. But maybe the problem would stimulate them, and they'd build lasers before we got around to discovering the things.
Of course, this is just idle speculation, but it's fun!
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
The nice thing about he optical disc form factor is that it decouples the encoding and retrieval technology from the moving parts involves in loading, unloading, and spinning the disc. It's very easy to support additional optical media formats by simply including another kind of laser in the read head.
On the other hand, an eight-inch floppy needs a custom loading mechanism that isn't cost-effective to build anymore, so of course we don't have anything that's backward compatible.
As long as we have optical media at all (and I don't see the idea fading any time soon), the readers will be backwards-compatible all the way back to Red Book audio. I would be amazed if we couldn't read CDs in 100 years, and only moderately surprised if we couldn't read them in 1,000.
You can send requests by constructing normal HTML elements, yes, but you can't read the resulting data. Don't take my word for it: try it and see. If you construct an img element from another domain, you can't read its pixels with canvas. If you construct an iframe with content from another domain, you can't read what's inside. A lot of browser security code, in fact, is dedicated to ensuring that data don't leak across domains.
Reading every law? What about the building code? What about trade duty schedules? What about the tax law (a lot of the complexity of which is actually necessary)? I'm sure you can find many more examples. It's as if you're asking for every computer program to be dictated by telephone. Your request reflects a very naive view, namely that complex societies like ours can be governed by simple laws.
If we actually tried what you suggest, what we'd see is simple legislation. Because these laws would have simple, they couldn't address subtleties and special cases, and as a result, these laws would cause a lot of injustice. Is this the world you'd really like to live in?
I never understood how people like you can see all law as universally bad, and how you actually hope for a "gridlock". Bad government is bad, yes, but good government is also good. You'd argue that all government is bad government, but if you look around, any reasonable person will see that argument is nonsense. Only ideologues maintain that government is always the problem.
Configuring a web server to send the correct content-type header would take all of five minutes. Clearly, Adobe cares more about saving five minutes of web developer time than about preventing identity theft for millions.
I'm not kidding. Web developer pay Adobe. Flash users don't.
I've been worried about Flash security for a long time now. I'd like to point out three features of Flash that bother me.
First, Flash allows a web application to paste data to the clipboard even if the browser itself forbids this. Of the major browsers, only IE allows applications to directly set the clipboard content.
Finally, Flash has its own cookie system. These Flash cookies are hidden from the user, and require special tools to remove.
These features are secure in themselves, but are enablers: they give attackers the means to exploit other vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude fits Adobe's business model. Lax security is as much a feature of Flash as its vector graphics. Flash allows web developers "get shit done" with no regard for the security of the web ecosystem as a whole. Web developers then come to rely on Flash, which increases the adoption of Flash Player among users, which in turn increases the value of Adobe's authoring tools. Being insecure is lucrative, up to the point that the vulnerabilities become so egregious that users disable Flash.
On the other hand, browser vendors seem to take a mostly-conservative approach to security (don't laugh yet): consider XMLHttpRequest: sure, its same-origin restriction on the target URL is inconvenient, and the restriction might have been loosened while remaining secure. But this same prudent restriction has also prevented many attacks. Browser vendors have the right incentives because users have a realistic choice of browsers. Flash is an all-or-nothing affair.
I wish I had an answer. Hopefully, HTML 5 will become widely supported enough that websites won't feel compelled to use Flash for graphics and storage, and eventually Flash's market penetration will sink below the point that web developers can consider it a viable way to circumvent browser security.
There's an old adage that advises, "never try to apply a technical solution to a social problem." It's true here: there were no attacks that an encrypted connection to Facebook would have mitigated; toolbar installation was the user's choice, not some drive-by download; finally, product offers and hidden $10-per-month charges didn't even have anything to do with computing, except incidentally.
While improving technical security is worthwhile, it's not something that would have helped here. You can't solve the dancing bunny problem without preventing users from choosing what to do with their own machines. You'd have to implement draconian and pervasive DRM, and effective give people appliances when before they had general-purpose computers. That's a cure worse than the disease.
This problem is social, and needs a social solution. Legislation is how we collectively solve social problems. There's nothing inherently scary or sinister about law. It makes us civilized. Reading about the exploits of this CEO and the thousands like him, I can't help but think we need a lot more civilization right now.
First, maturity is realizing that not everyone who disagrees with you is a "fuckhead".
Is there a specific name for a typical way of walking? Typical way of breathing? Typical attitude toward others?
As a matter of fact, we have an extensive vocabulary to describe all these things. Try "strolling", "breathing" and "being amicable". In fact, that a concept has a simple name in all languages shows by sort of a reverse Sapir-Whorf route the universality of that concept.
Greed, being a deviant behavior
Greed isn't deviant. In fact, it's rather common, and to some degree, universal. What we call "greed" is just the manifestation of game theory. Every organism acts in its own interest, or more precisely, in the interest of its genes. Organisms do this because they inherited the trait from their ancestors, who were the organisms who spread their genes best. Humans are not above mathematics. It's only natural that we act in our best interests too. But for the most part, we do so by cooperating, because they makes us all better off.
When all is well, we all get along in a state of enlightened self-interest where our self-interest and collective interest balance. But aggressive players can disrupt the game and at least temporarily benefit. Sometimes the gain really is short-term, and the society (system) settles back into a stable state. Other times, a new equilibrium is achieved. In human terms, that new equilibrium usually isn't desirable, and even the aggressors end up worse off. (To pick an example: who did the Trojan War benefit, exactly?)
If we want a stable society in which we can all accrue the maximum personal benefit, we need to push back against those who would destabilize it using short-sighted aggressive behavior. To do that, we need to institute rules that make this behavior less attractive, and we need to institute rules that make society more tolerant to the damage caused by this aggressive behavior.
"Good" and "bad" are inflammatory and irrelevant on this level. Instead, we should be talking about how to prevent society from being damaged by its most aggressive members.
Whenever corporate mismanagement causes some calamity, people invariably decry the people responsible as "greedy bastards", "short-sighted morons", and so on. Although these statements are true, stating them is useless: greed, as a part of human nature, is here to stay. And organizations invariably elevate their most greedy and ambitious members because these are people are the ones who will exploit the rules to their advantage. Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn't harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party's interest to be a good participant in society.
We seem to ignore this principle. Over and over again, we fume and demand that companies and individuals be more responsible and respectful. Yet hardly anyone talks about implementing rules that would actually limit the damage.
A huge number of people believe that if society were just free of constraints, it'd organize itself into an efficient, elegant system and solve all our problems. That's wishful thinking. Greedy people will take advantage of inside connections, of special knowledge, and of outright dishonesty to screw over everyone else. And as much as we'd like to believe that the screwed will respond by researching their own information and leveling the playing field, doesn't actually happen, and won't.
First of all, even if everyone were equally capable, the screwing party has more time to research a particular type of transaction than the screwed party, so the asymmetry is really built-in. Second, not everyone is equally capable. As Larry Summers famously wrote, "There are idiots. Look around." Sometimes people can't help being idiots. Does that mean they deserve to be exploited? How far does that extend? Do people deserve to be exploited because they haven't studied browser security, or because they're not privy to office gossip, or because they don't have the social skills to network their way out of sticky situations?
We're going to keep seeing "X screwed over by powerful greedy person Y" stories until we use political channels to create new regulations that makes it in the best interests of the greedy to play nice with society. We can talk about the form these regulations should take. (IMHO, I think it's pretty clear we need far stronger privacy laws in the US.) What won't work is complaining that corporations are greedy. What won't work is trying to make laws while under the delusion that everyone is a rational actor with full access to relevant information. What might work is a determined effort to restore a sense of fair play and balance to our laws and institutions.
--
tl;dr: greed is a fact of life, and crying about it won't do any good. We need effective and strong regulation to prevent the greed that invariably appears from hurting the rest of us.
Talking about scalability in terms of infinitely fast components is just silly, because no such component can ever exist.
That's my point. You can't talk about the scalability of abstract concepts because they can never actually exist. Only implementations can be scalable. If you want to talk about ratios, then an arbitrarily fast Turing machine can handle as much work offered in as little time desired: that is, it has infinite scalability. Such a concept is clearly nonsense.
Please, limit yourself to the real world instead of trying to embarrass yourself with generalizations to nothingness.
Your instinct is correct in that segmentation is the correct approach. But what you MySQL weenies don't appreciate is that real databases do the segmentation for you. In a real DBMS, it's perfectly reasonable to have a single table with 5 trillion rows, which the database engine will replicate, split, and partition without your having to care about that on the application layer.
That's where the true power is a DBMS starts to become apparent.
Every repository of knowledge can be described relationally. When a programmer claims that a problem doesn't map well to the relational model, what he means is that his mind can't transform the problem into that notation, and that's a deficiency in the programmer, not the data.
That article is a pile of garbage, and until I see further evidence, I'm going to consider its author the same. Besides managementspeak tidbits like "net-net", the article contains such wonderful truisms as:
In summary, blinding performance depends on removing overhead. Such overhead has nothing to do with SQL, but instead revolves around traditional implementations of ACID transactions, multi-threading, and disk management. To go wildly faster, one must remove...overhead. This is possible in either a SQL context or some other context.
Well, yes, that's true in the same way it's true than an integer is either positive or negative. So?
Then Stonebraker proceeds to end the article with two citations, one of which points to an article he wrote himself!
A not directly PL-related paper about a new database architecture, but the authors provide some interesting and possibly controversial perspectives:
They split the application into per-core, single-threaded instances without any communication between them.
Instead of using SQL from an external (web app) process to communicate with the database, they envision embedding Ruby on Rails directly into the database.
They state that most database warehouse tasks rely on pre-canned queries only, so there is no need for ad-hoc querying.
Yes, Stonebraker has rediscovered the stored procedure and the shared-nothing architecture. Does he have any original thoughts?
The scalability issues of sequential execution are entirely implementation driven. There's no conceptual limit as to how fast a Turing machine can shuffle its tape around. You're confusing implementation and idea while simultaneously lecturing others not to do that. You're a sophomoric hypocrite.
Movements founded based on opposition to a technology or idea never succeed in the long run. A sure sign of organizational rot is a name in the form "noX".
Yes, even MySQL isn't that stupid. It's appalling how people will choose between two tools based on supposition and misunderstood rumor without knowing the slightest bit about the actual capabilities of the systems involved.
Of course. But when N is small, it doesn't matter: and I guarantee you, the OP was talking about small N. Besides: the beauty of SQL is that you can easily change the query to pull a range of rows instead of asking for each individually; on the other hand, if the retrieval is hand-coded, it takes a lot longer to change the search strategy.
Relying on a hidden browser-side hack for a financial transaction is just amazingly stupid and unnecessary, even if you don't spot any obvious flaws right away (because someone else will).
And people often do precisely that for affiliate programs. Is it any wonder these programs make up one of the shadier areas of the internet?
Right. Don't forget PostgreSQL too. Really, the problem here is MySQL. Hell, look at the "tips and tricks" comments for this story: they all deal with ways to work around deficiencies in MySQL (and old versions of MySQL at that.)
The guy who recommends using the first two characters of the MD5 hash to select a table is particularly hilarious. Doesn't he realize that's what a database index already does, and that databases (even MySQL) will do that for him?
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That's an interesting thought experiment. Let's say civilization fell and rose again, and that future archaeologists came across some of our optical discs. They wouldn't need much beyond 19th-century technology and mathematics to decipher them.
Once cleaned, 1,000-year-old discs would still shimmer the way they do today. Under a microscope (well-developed by the 19th century), pits and lands would be visible. A pit is approximately the same size as a bacterial cell, after all. The pits and lands would form a recognizable pattern. That pattern looks nothing like binary, being a clocked encoding of it. But it's obvious that a CD would spin, so eventually someone clever will realize that information is encoded at clock boundaries.
That having been figured out, these future archaeologists will see repeating patterns of eight units. Presuming that our language came down intact (much like Latin has to us), 19th century cryptanalytical techniques could determine the correspondence of the mysterious 8-pit repeating units to letters. (After all, what is ASCII except a simple substitution cipher?)
ECC information would be gibberish, but it could be ignored. (And once even one Wikipedia backup were deciphered, the ECC information would be understood.)
Of course, there's a huge amount of information on each disc. It'd take a long time to go over even part of one by hand, but it could be done. After all, even in the 17th century, huge logarithm table books were produced.
Once technology advanced a bit, it'd be possible to build an electromechanical system to read and print the contents of CDs. Even Babbage had a workable printer design, and printing telegraph machines emerged by 1910. The hardest part for our future archaeologists would be reading the discs at high speed, for which (I think) they'd need a laser. But maybe the problem would stimulate them, and they'd build lasers before we got around to discovering the things.
Of course, this is just idle speculation, but it's fun!
The nice thing about he optical disc form factor is that it decouples the encoding and retrieval technology from the moving parts involves in loading, unloading, and spinning the disc. It's very easy to support additional optical media formats by simply including another kind of laser in the read head.
On the other hand, an eight-inch floppy needs a custom loading mechanism that isn't cost-effective to build anymore, so of course we don't have anything that's backward compatible.
As long as we have optical media at all (and I don't see the idea fading any time soon), the readers will be backwards-compatible all the way back to Red Book audio. I would be amazed if we couldn't read CDs in 100 years, and only moderately surprised if we couldn't read them in 1,000.
They'll come in several varieties:
You can send requests by constructing normal HTML elements, yes, but you can't read the resulting data. Don't take my word for it: try it and see. If you construct an img element from another domain, you can't read its pixels with canvas. If you construct an iframe with content from another domain, you can't read what's inside. A lot of browser security code, in fact, is dedicated to ensuring that data don't leak across domains.
Reading every law? What about the building code? What about trade duty schedules? What about the tax law (a lot of the complexity of which is actually necessary)? I'm sure you can find many more examples. It's as if you're asking for every computer program to be dictated by telephone. Your request reflects a very naive view, namely that complex societies like ours can be governed by simple laws.
If we actually tried what you suggest, what we'd see is simple legislation. Because these laws would have simple, they couldn't address subtleties and special cases, and as a result, these laws would cause a lot of injustice. Is this the world you'd really like to live in?
I never understood how people like you can see all law as universally bad, and how you actually hope for a "gridlock". Bad government is bad, yes, but good government is also good. You'd argue that all government is bad government, but if you look around, any reasonable person will see that argument is nonsense. Only ideologues maintain that government is always the problem.
I already know what one-finger interface I'd like to use with Adobe Flash.
Configuring a web server to send the correct content-type header would take all of five minutes. Clearly, Adobe cares more about saving five minutes of web developer time than about preventing identity theft for millions.
I'm not kidding. Web developer pay Adobe. Flash users don't.
I've been worried about Flash security for a long time now. I'd like to point out three features of Flash that bother me.
First, Flash allows a web application to paste data to the clipboard even if the browser itself forbids this. Of the major browsers, only IE allows applications to directly set the clipboard content.
Second, Flash has an XMLHttpRequest equivalent with a lax security policy. Cross-domain retrieval is controlled by an XML control file listing permissible origins.
Finally, Flash has its own cookie system. These Flash cookies are hidden from the user, and require special tools to remove.
These features are secure in themselves, but are enablers: they give attackers the means to exploit other vulnerabilities.
Unfortunately, this cavalier attitude fits Adobe's business model. Lax security is as much a feature of Flash as its vector graphics. Flash allows web developers "get shit done" with no regard for the security of the web ecosystem as a whole. Web developers then come to rely on Flash, which increases the adoption of Flash Player among users, which in turn increases the value of Adobe's authoring tools. Being insecure is lucrative, up to the point that the vulnerabilities become so egregious that users disable Flash.
On the other hand, browser vendors seem to take a mostly-conservative approach to security (don't laugh yet): consider XMLHttpRequest: sure, its same-origin restriction on the target URL is inconvenient, and the restriction might have been loosened while remaining secure. But this same prudent restriction has also prevented many attacks. Browser vendors have the right incentives because users have a realistic choice of browsers. Flash is an all-or-nothing affair.
I wish I had an answer. Hopefully, HTML 5 will become widely supported enough that websites won't feel compelled to use Flash for graphics and storage, and eventually Flash's market penetration will sink below the point that web developers can consider it a viable way to circumvent browser security.
There's an old adage that advises, "never try to apply a technical solution to a social problem." It's true here: there were no attacks that an encrypted connection to Facebook would have mitigated; toolbar installation was the user's choice, not some drive-by download; finally, product offers and hidden $10-per-month charges didn't even have anything to do with computing, except incidentally.
While improving technical security is worthwhile, it's not something that would have helped here. You can't solve the dancing bunny problem without preventing users from choosing what to do with their own machines. You'd have to implement draconian and pervasive DRM, and effective give people appliances when before they had general-purpose computers. That's a cure worse than the disease.
This problem is social, and needs a social solution. Legislation is how we collectively solve social problems. There's nothing inherently scary or sinister about law. It makes us civilized. Reading about the exploits of this CEO and the thousands like him, I can't help but think we need a lot more civilization right now.
First, maturity is realizing that not everyone who disagrees with you is a "fuckhead".
As a matter of fact, we have an extensive vocabulary to describe all these things. Try "strolling", "breathing" and "being amicable". In fact, that a concept has a simple name in all languages shows by sort of a reverse Sapir-Whorf route the universality of that concept.
Greed isn't deviant. In fact, it's rather common, and to some degree, universal. What we call "greed" is just the manifestation of game theory. Every organism acts in its own interest, or more precisely, in the interest of its genes. Organisms do this because they inherited the trait from their ancestors, who were the organisms who spread their genes best. Humans are not above mathematics. It's only natural that we act in our best interests too. But for the most part, we do so by cooperating, because they makes us all better off.
When all is well, we all get along in a state of enlightened self-interest where our self-interest and collective interest balance. But aggressive players can disrupt the game and at least temporarily benefit. Sometimes the gain really is short-term, and the society (system) settles back into a stable state. Other times, a new equilibrium is achieved. In human terms, that new equilibrium usually isn't desirable, and even the aggressors end up worse off. (To pick an example: who did the Trojan War benefit, exactly?)
If we want a stable society in which we can all accrue the maximum personal benefit, we need to push back against those who would destabilize it using short-sighted aggressive behavior. To do that, we need to institute rules that make this behavior less attractive, and we need to institute rules that make society more tolerant to the damage caused by this aggressive behavior.
"Good" and "bad" are inflammatory and irrelevant on this level. Instead, we should be talking about how to prevent society from being damaged by its most aggressive members.
Saying this won't be popular around here, but we already have a perfectly good treatment for wealth addition.
It's called a highly progressive income tax, which includes capital gains.
Whenever corporate mismanagement causes some calamity, people invariably decry the people responsible as "greedy bastards", "short-sighted morons", and so on. Although these statements are true, stating them is useless: greed, as a part of human nature, is here to stay. And organizations invariably elevate their most greedy and ambitious members because these are people are the ones who will exploit the rules to their advantage. Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn't harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party's interest to be a good participant in society.
We seem to ignore this principle. Over and over again, we fume and demand that companies and individuals be more responsible and respectful. Yet hardly anyone talks about implementing rules that would actually limit the damage.
A huge number of people believe that if society were just free of constraints, it'd organize itself into an efficient, elegant system and solve all our problems. That's wishful thinking. Greedy people will take advantage of inside connections, of special knowledge, and of outright dishonesty to screw over everyone else. And as much as we'd like to believe that the screwed will respond by researching their own information and leveling the playing field, doesn't actually happen, and won't.
First of all, even if everyone were equally capable, the screwing party has more time to research a particular type of transaction than the screwed party, so the asymmetry is really built-in. Second, not everyone is equally capable. As Larry Summers famously wrote, "There are idiots. Look around." Sometimes people can't help being idiots. Does that mean they deserve to be exploited? How far does that extend? Do people deserve to be exploited because they haven't studied browser security, or because they're not privy to office gossip, or because they don't have the social skills to network their way out of sticky situations?
We're going to keep seeing "X screwed over by powerful greedy person Y" stories until we use political channels to create new regulations that makes it in the best interests of the greedy to play nice with society. We can talk about the form these regulations should take. (IMHO, I think it's pretty clear we need far stronger privacy laws in the US.) What won't work is complaining that corporations are greedy. What won't work is trying to make laws while under the delusion that everyone is a rational actor with full access to relevant information. What might work is a determined effort to restore a sense of fair play and balance to our laws and institutions.
--
tl;dr: greed is a fact of life, and crying about it won't do any good. We need effective and strong regulation to prevent the greed that invariably appears from hurting the rest of us.
That's my point. You can't talk about the scalability of abstract concepts because they can never actually exist. Only implementations can be scalable. If you want to talk about ratios, then an arbitrarily fast Turing machine can handle as much work offered in as little time desired: that is, it has infinite scalability. Such a concept is clearly nonsense.
Please, limit yourself to the real world instead of trying to embarrass yourself with generalizations to nothingness.
Your instinct is correct in that segmentation is the correct approach. But what you MySQL weenies don't appreciate is that real databases do the segmentation for you. In a real DBMS, it's perfectly reasonable to have a single table with 5 trillion rows, which the database engine will replicate, split, and partition without your having to care about that on the application layer.
That's where the true power is a DBMS starts to become apparent.
Every repository of knowledge can be described relationally. When a programmer claims that a problem doesn't map well to the relational model, what he means is that his mind can't transform the problem into that notation, and that's a deficiency in the programmer, not the data.
That article is a pile of garbage, and until I see further evidence, I'm going to consider its author the same. Besides managementspeak tidbits like "net-net", the article contains such wonderful truisms as:
Well, yes, that's true in the same way it's true than an integer is either positive or negative. So?
Then Stonebraker proceeds to end the article with two citations, one of which points to an article he wrote himself!
This other article, well, here's a summary:
Yes, Stonebraker has rediscovered the stored procedure and the shared-nothing architecture. Does he have any original thoughts?
The scalability issues of sequential execution are entirely implementation driven. There's no conceptual limit as to how fast a Turing machine can shuffle its tape around. You're confusing implementation and idea while simultaneously lecturing others not to do that. You're a sophomoric hypocrite.
There are entire companies built around this idea.
In order words, you traded a database over which you had full control for whichever database the gutted remnants of your mailserver used.
Movements founded based on opposition to a technology or idea never succeed in the long run. A sure sign of organizational rot is a name in the form "noX".
Yes, even MySQL isn't that stupid. It's appalling how people will choose between two tools based on supposition and misunderstood rumor without knowing the slightest bit about the actual capabilities of the systems involved.
So in what way exactly were you left with a mailserver?
Of course. But when N is small, it doesn't matter: and I guarantee you, the OP was talking about small N. Besides: the beauty of SQL is that you can easily change the query to pull a range of rows instead of asking for each individually; on the other hand, if the retrieval is hand-coded, it takes a lot longer to change the search strategy.
And people often do precisely that for affiliate programs. Is it any wonder these programs make up one of the shadier areas of the internet?
Right. Don't forget PostgreSQL too. Really, the problem here is MySQL. Hell, look at the "tips and tricks" comments for this story: they all deal with ways to work around deficiencies in MySQL (and old versions of MySQL at that.)
The guy who recommends using the first two characters of the MD5 hash to select a table is particularly hilarious. Doesn't he realize that's what a database index already does, and that databases (even MySQL) will do that for him?