Thank you for the informative and thought-provoking post. It's certainly refreshing to see discourse on a level above "I hate MySQL, therefore SQL sucks." You make some good points.
Nevertheless, an RDBMS is still the way to go. You hint at the reason in your last paragraph, actually. The entire NoSQL "movement" is predicated on a confusion of implementation and interface. You describe various problems with the way conventional RDBMSes employ the disk: who said RDBMSes had to use those approaches?
There's nothing stopping a high-quality system from using BigTable-style backing storage when the schema permits, or when the user specifically authorizes that kind of consistency. The problems yo mention are not "intrinsic" to the RDBMS concept, but are rather features of implementations and schemas. Those can be tweaked without throwing the entire system away and starting from scratch.
When an RDBMS improves, all the applications using that system also improve automatically. On the other hand, BigTable will remain BigTable forever: it's a bespoke system from people who were convinced they would never need the power of the relational features a system offers.
Why bother when we have WebGL (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?
Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment. Instead of a fecund atmosphere of competing web extensions, the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.
Browsers themselves implementing experimental, then standardized functionality is a much more viable approach. It's given us all the real improvements to the web to date.
How long will it be until we can kill the plugin mechanism entirely?
Yes, because if he's paid more, he and people like him have more money to spend on the things I make. A race to the bottom is bad for the economy and bad for society.
Furthermore, they had taken good care not to big that aspect of the research up to their Nazi masters, for reasons of self-interest.
"Big" is not a verb. Instead of that useless neologism, the author could have chosen from a set of words with more precise meanings, which ranges from "overstate" to "emphasize". Even "play up" would have worked. Instead, the writer chose the word that conveys the least precise meaning imaginable while forcing readers used to ordinary prose to backtrack two or three times to make sure they read that junk sentence properly.
A certain linear transform that maps function points to orthogonal set of functions that self-convolve onto itself and to "zero" with others.
It might be more useful to provide the typical use case: transforming signals between time and frequency domains for signal processing.
Something totally different. RMS represents energy. Average just position.
Sort-of: you use RMS for energy, sure, but that's because RMS is a type of average. Fundamentally, the average is a mathematical trick we can use to treat a collection of items with various values as if they all had the same value. The "average" used in daily life is called the "arithmetic mean", and is only one of several approaches. It's used for averaging quantities. To pick an example, another kind of average is the harmonic mean, which is used for rates. RMS is just another kind of average, the "quadratic mean", which has the nice property of telling us about the magnitude and variance of a set of numbers that would uselessly cancel each other out with other mathematical tools. (What's the arithmetic mean of the current in an AC line? Not very useful, is it?)
What is a duty cycle?
Come on: you should know this one as a programmer. A "duty cycle" is the portion of time a device spends on, or active. Numerically, it's the ratio of "on" time to "off" time. If you've ever programmed a PC internal speaker to play digital audio, what you've actually done is very the duty cycle to simulate continuous variation using a technique called "pulse width modulation".
How do you apply Kirchoff's law to a circuit?
I dimly recall that this law has something to do with conservation of charges around a circuit, but don't remember anything besides.
How can you make steel conduct heat better, and what are the drawbacks?
Err, just a guess, but alloy it with copper? The drawback would be the expense and reduced strength, I imagine.
What is metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level?
The formation of microscoping, creeping, and growing cracks.
What is Colomb's Law?
You should remember this one from high school physics: it states that static electric charges obey the inverse square law.
They become quantized due to pauli exclusion principle bringing the matter into degenerate state?
Not unless you happen to live in a neutron star. I think the answer the OP was looking for was that they distort and form more complex patterns (like what we call "covalent bonds").
Agreed. Software development is not engineering, though it does share some common attributes and requires a similar mode of thought.
(By the way: I knew the answers to the vast majority of those questions and I'm hardly an engineer myself. Is it possible that you just found rather dumb developers?)
A CEO may pay what His he wishes to His employees and take what He wants. By His accumulation wealth, a CEO has demonstrated His worldly talent and divine favor. Far be it for us to criticize His actions: are we yet men, while He has a golden MBA? While we merely use our power of Speech, does the CEO not expand the language with outflowing of His prodigious mind? Does that not giveth unto him wisdom we know not, and authority we dare not assert?
We should open our hearts to the CEO. We shall work for Him all our waking hours and offer unto him our wives and daughters for His amusement: for we should be honored to have a radiant Being in our lives as the prime-most consideration.
Should we Fail, we deserve whatever punishment the CEO shall mete out for He, as he so frequently reminds us, is infallible. If a CEO's Company should fail, it is our fault for being indolent, and we shall bear that around our necks. All the remaining resources of a failed Company will go to its CEO as compensation for even attempting to deal with filty being like ourselves. Amen.
There's actually a direct spacial mapping from steradians in the visual field to particular areas on the surface of the visual cortex. Under each "pixel" on the surface, if you will, there are several physical layers that each have a specialized function: one detects lines; another circles; another changes in perspective; and another compensates for white point balancing. These layers then send the processed signals to another portion of the brain for interpretation. (It's not a bad architecture, actually.)
Many blind people can still "see" with their memories and their imaginations. What happens in this context is that recorded (or synthesized) sensory inputs are fed back into the same areas that process the higher-level processed signals from the eye's "live" feed. Memory, really is a process of re-perceiving.
It seems plausible that computers could take over the function of not only the retina, but also the visual cortex and send high-level processed signals directly to the area of the brain responsible for interpreting them.
Hell, that might be better than normal vision. Imagine knowing more colors than we are able to naturally perceive, or being able to "see" arbitrarily fine details, as if in a dream. Augmented reality would be trivial.
All that and more might be possible if we bypass the visual cortex.
* covers phone kept indoors at least 6" away from any fabric materials, and at a temperate strictly between 65 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Does not cover battery, bluetooth receiver, flash storage, or LCD screen. Non-transferable.
That's clearly unreasonable and is at odds with what a typical person would expect from a warranty. Sanctity of contract is not absolute: a company shouldn't be able to make up whatever terms of wants for a contract and call it by a name that denotes something only vaguely related.
I agree with you, and more. My comment was intended to be satire. (Check my comment history if you doubt me.)
That so many people took me seriously is really an indictment of how absurdly far right the discussion has moved. If corporations were natural persons, they'd be seemed psychopaths, a danger to themselves and others, and locked up where they couldn't do any harm. It's absolutely preposterous that some people elevate them above a democratically-elected government.
The right to form a corporation is not a natural right. Let's not mistake it for one: freedom of expression, of assembly, and of religion: these are natural rights. Operating as a corporation is a privilege that we grant as a society because we expect to be made better-off overall through investment.
When that bargain ceases to be in society's interest, we must revise it. Corporations must be regulated to counteract their natural tendency to concentrate wealth and distort the political process for the benefit of a few. Arguing that the integrity of a contract or a charter is somehow more valuable than the happiness of real, breathing people is misanthropy.
I can't believe you and at least three other people took my comment seriously. I thought the satire was clear. I was wrong. It really reflects terribly on our society that you could read the bible reference and the "10 hour workday" and think I meant those things in earnest. Only monsters like this man would do that.
Moderators, just moderate my original comment down to -1. I'd rather see it there than at +5 Insightful where someone might get the impression that corporate feudalism is a good thing.
The newspapers business model is based on information scarcity, which is increasingly difficult to enforce today; yet
Newspapers are great to have because they offer better-researched, more compressive, and less biased news and commentary than random blogs. Compare the Huffington Post to the Washington Post.
The New York Times has chosen to cling to the conventional business model as long as possible. But there is a better way: recognize that newspapers are something special, and have worth in society as more than just another business. Endow them and let them self-finance.
A company can do whatever the hell it wants! Nobody forces you to buy these games after all. Between bong hits, you hippies whine that policies like this lead to decreased consumer choice, greater entrenchment of established players, less innovation, and price increases across the board. So what? That's just too bad. The right of a corporation to do anything it wants it spelled out in the Book of Job. If a corporation does it, that makes it right.
Still whining, huh? Are you a successful executive? No? When what business do you have talking about anything, loser? Don't like it? Go read a book, or move to a France, or preferably, impress your boss by putting in 12 hours at work tomorrow instead of the expected 10.
Say we have a community of 100 users: if one person shares a song and everyone else downloads it, then under your theory, the uploader is responsible not only for the damages resulting from his own use, but the damage resulting from everyone else using the song: that is 100 * P, where P is the amount of damage caused by a single use.
If two people share the song, isn't each responsible for half of the total damage? The amount of damage is constant: only the allocation differs. If four people share that song, then the total damage should be allocated proportionally.
Thus, if everyone shares that song, each individual ought to be responsible for damages of P*100 / 100, that is, P again.
The math doesn't change if we use 'the total size of the internet' instead of P: each person only owes damages for his own use because everyone else contributes to the same pool.
Indeed. I'm an American, but I'm familiar with SI units. If I tell a friend that something is about two meters long, he's surprised, but he understands what I mean. That goes for everyone. Even in the US, people intuitively grasp how much a liter is, how heavy a kilogram is, and how long a kilometer is. We seem to have more trouble with temperature and speed though. I'm still a little taken aback when I drive into Canada and see speed limits far higher than what I'm used to.
CO2 takes thousands of years to leave the atmosphere, so we can consider it cumulative. Every bit of fossil fuel CO2 we've used since Watt built his steam engine has contributed to the progression of global warming: it's just that the increase in emissions substantially accelerated in the 20th century, and since the 1950s, our cumulative history has begin to catch up with us.
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences disagrees with you. The American Association for the Advancement of Science disagrees with you. The American Geophysical Union disagrees with you. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration disagrees with you
Typical liberal scum. You think your out-of-touch ivory tower "experts" can beat the common sense my mother and Glenn Beck taught me? You're just scary numbers, charts, and other things Real Americans like me don't understand to trick us. What you really want is to the destroy the America that our founding fathers knew and loved. Benjamin Franklin wouldn't have believed this climate change nonsense. He would have said it's our God-given right to release as much dioxin and carbon dioxide as we want. We've been doing it for 100 years and the world is the same as when our Lord created it.
Anyone who wants to destroy jobs by moving to new technology is a sinner and a tyrant, and wants to turn this great God-loving country of ours into a socialist fascist slavery hell. Thank God for Fox News to tell me the truth.
See, the conservative mindset is that lack of success is a moral failure on the part of the failed. If someone is down on his luck, he must have done something wrong, and therefore must be punished. It's really a modern breed of Calvinism, the religion tenant that God has pre-destinated certain people for heaven and others for hell, and that he demonstrates His grace toward the chosen by handing them with worldly success.
It's a wicked, wicked idea. Society should be built around the idea of helping everyone succeed, not rewarding an arbitrarily-chosen lucky few while punishing everyone else for things that aren't their fault.
You're confusing individual liberty with social justice.
It's not possible to enjoy personal liberty when you are worked to the bone, discarded at a whim, and can't afford medical care for your children. It's not possible to appreciate persona liberty when you're not educated, and it's not possible to rise out of those circumstances when economic opportunity is inherited. Without regulation, capitalism reverts to its natural state: liberty for the very wealthy and feudalism for everyone else, and Republicans have opposed regulation of markets for over a century.
If you really care about maximizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you'll support policies that give everyone a chance to achieve these things. In the process, you'll be amazed by how much people "contribute" in return.
What private company do you expect to fund the GPL and send probes to the outer solar system? Or Hubble, for that matter?
Yes, reasonable people can argue that LEO launches are so routine these days that they should be turned over to private industry. Fine. But there are tons of other NASA programs that have no profit potential whatsoever, yet tremendously enrich humanity culturally and scientifically. Because private industry would never fund these programs, NASA must. And we're better off for it.
Why are we even talking about what conservatives think? The GOP has amply demonstrated that it has no interest in governing the country in good faith. Their entire program is:
When in power: transfer as much wealth as possible to the very rich
When out of power: throw a wrench in the works to make the government look bad enough to vote the GOP back into power
Any conservative argument needs to be critically examined in light of the question, "how does this allow the GOP to continue its looting?" Just look at Chicago economics, Reagan tax cuts, Bush's imperialism, and flagrant anti-union rhetoric. It's not made in good faith.
Conservatives have no interest in the real welfare of the country. This little spat about NASA is merely a disagreement among the foxes about whether to go through the front or the back of the hen-house. It should be an awfully strong hint that the rest of the world is governed by parties to the left of even the left here, and is going better for it.
Can we please stop wasting our time and giving attention to these right-wing lunatics and their pernicious ideas?
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Thank you for the informative and thought-provoking post. It's certainly refreshing to see discourse on a level above "I hate MySQL, therefore SQL sucks." You make some good points.
Nevertheless, an RDBMS is still the way to go. You hint at the reason in your last paragraph, actually. The entire NoSQL "movement" is predicated on a confusion of implementation and interface. You describe various problems with the way conventional RDBMSes employ the disk: who said RDBMSes had to use those approaches?
There's nothing stopping a high-quality system from using BigTable-style backing storage when the schema permits, or when the user specifically authorizes that kind of consistency. The problems yo mention are not "intrinsic" to the RDBMS concept, but are rather features of implementations and schemas. Those can be tweaked without throwing the entire system away and starting from scratch.
When an RDBMS improves, all the applications using that system also improve automatically. On the other hand, BigTable will remain BigTable forever: it's a bespoke system from people who were convinced they would never need the power of the relational features a system offers.
Why bother when we have WebGL (the 3D canvas API) that doesn't require any plugins at all?
Really, the whole browser plugin idea is a grand, failed experiment. Instead of a fecund atmosphere of competing web extensions, the plugin mechanism has just resulted in one or two players achieving dominance and vendor lock-in.
Browsers themselves implementing experimental, then standardized functionality is a much more viable approach. It's given us all the real improvements to the web to date.
How long will it be until we can kill the plugin mechanism entirely?
Yes, because if he's paid more, he and people like him have more money to spend on the things I make. A race to the bottom is bad for the economy and bad for society.
Even more grating:
"Big" is not a verb. Instead of that useless neologism, the author could have chosen from a set of words with more precise meanings, which ranges from "overstate" to "emphasize". Even "play up" would have worked. Instead, the writer chose the word that conveys the least precise meaning imaginable while forcing readers used to ordinary prose to backtrack two or three times to make sure they read that junk sentence properly.
Yuck.
It might be more useful to provide the typical use case: transforming signals between time and frequency domains for signal processing.
Sort-of: you use RMS for energy, sure, but that's because RMS is a type of average. Fundamentally, the average is a mathematical trick we can use to treat a collection of items with various values as if they all had the same value. The "average" used in daily life is called the "arithmetic mean", and is only one of several approaches. It's used for averaging quantities. To pick an example, another kind of average is the harmonic mean, which is used for rates. RMS is just another kind of average, the "quadratic mean", which has the nice property of telling us about the magnitude and variance of a set of numbers that would uselessly cancel each other out with other mathematical tools. (What's the arithmetic mean of the current in an AC line? Not very useful, is it?)
Come on: you should know this one as a programmer. A "duty cycle" is the portion of time a device spends on, or active. Numerically, it's the ratio of "on" time to "off" time. If you've ever programmed a PC internal speaker to play digital audio, what you've actually done is very the duty cycle to simulate continuous variation using a technique called "pulse width modulation".
I dimly recall that this law has something to do with conservation of charges around a circuit, but don't remember anything besides.
Err, just a guess, but alloy it with copper? The drawback would be the expense and reduced strength, I imagine.
The formation of microscoping, creeping, and growing cracks.
You should remember this one from high school physics: it states that static electric charges obey the inverse square law.
Not unless you happen to live in a neutron star. I think the answer the OP was looking for was that they distort and form more complex patterns (like what we call "covalent bonds").
Agreed. Software development is not engineering, though it does share some common attributes and requires a similar mode of thought.
(By the way: I knew the answers to the vast majority of those questions and I'm hardly an engineer myself. Is it possible that you just found rather dumb developers?)
A CEO may pay what His he wishes to His employees and take what He wants.
By His accumulation wealth, a CEO has demonstrated His worldly talent and divine favor. Far be it for us to criticize His actions: are we yet men, while He has a golden MBA? While we merely use our power of Speech, does the CEO not expand the language with outflowing of His prodigious mind? Does that not giveth unto him wisdom we know not, and authority we dare not assert?
We should open our hearts to the CEO. We shall work for Him all our waking hours and offer unto him our wives and daughters for His amusement: for we should be honored to have a radiant Being in our lives as the prime-most consideration.
Should we Fail, we deserve whatever punishment the CEO shall mete out for He, as he so frequently reminds us, is infallible. If a CEO's Company should fail, it is our fault for being indolent, and we shall bear that around our necks. All the remaining resources of a failed Company will go to its CEO as compensation for even attempting to deal with filty being like ourselves. Amen.
There's actually a direct spacial mapping from steradians in the visual field to particular areas on the surface of the visual cortex. Under each "pixel" on the surface, if you will, there are several physical layers that each have a specialized function: one detects lines; another circles; another changes in perspective; and another compensates for white point balancing. These layers then send the processed signals to another portion of the brain for interpretation. (It's not a bad architecture, actually.)
Many blind people can still "see" with their memories and their imaginations. What happens in this context is that recorded (or synthesized) sensory inputs are fed back into the same areas that process the higher-level processed signals from the eye's "live" feed. Memory, really is a process of re-perceiving.
It seems plausible that computers could take over the function of not only the retina, but also the visual cortex and send high-level processed signals directly to the area of the brain responsible for interpreting them.
Hell, that might be better than normal vision. Imagine knowing more colors than we are able to naturally perceive, or being able to "see" arbitrarily fine details, as if in a dream. Augmented reality would be trivial.
All that and more might be possible if we bypass the visual cortex.
Apple should not be permitted to advertise a warranty if that warranty does not cover typical use.
Imagine this advertisement:
(Then, in tiny print:)
That's clearly unreasonable and is at odds with what a typical person would expect from a warranty. Sanctity of contract is not absolute: a company shouldn't be able to make up whatever terms of wants for a contract and call it by a name that denotes something only vaguely related.
I agree with you, and more. My comment was intended to be satire. (Check my comment history if you doubt me.)
That so many people took me seriously is really an indictment of how absurdly far right the discussion has moved. If corporations were natural persons, they'd be seemed psychopaths, a danger to themselves and others, and locked up where they couldn't do any harm. It's absolutely preposterous that some people elevate them above a democratically-elected government.
The right to form a corporation is not a natural right. Let's not mistake it for one: freedom of expression, of assembly, and of religion: these are natural rights. Operating as a corporation is a privilege that we grant as a society because we expect to be made better-off overall through investment.
When that bargain ceases to be in society's interest, we must revise it. Corporations must be regulated to counteract their natural tendency to concentrate wealth and distort the political process for the benefit of a few. Arguing that the integrity of a contract or a charter is somehow more valuable than the happiness of real, breathing people is misanthropy.
I can't believe you and at least three other people took my comment seriously. I thought the satire was clear. I was wrong. It really reflects terribly on our society that you could read the bible reference and the "10 hour workday" and think I meant those things in earnest. Only monsters like this man would do that.
Moderators, just moderate my original comment down to -1. I'd rather see it there than at +5 Insightful where someone might get the impression that corporate feudalism is a good thing.
Dear reader, consider
The New York Times has chosen to cling to the conventional business model as long as possible. But there is a better way: recognize that newspapers are something special, and have worth in society as more than just another business. Endow them and let them self-finance.
It's called vertical integration. We've been here before.
Why does this surprise anyone? Google is merely doing what any powerful company in a lightly-regulated, rapidly maturing market will do.
A company can do whatever the hell it wants! Nobody forces you to buy these games after all. Between bong hits, you hippies whine that policies like this lead to decreased consumer choice, greater entrenchment of established players, less innovation, and price increases across the board. So what? That's just too bad. The right of a corporation to do anything it wants it spelled out in the Book of Job. If a corporation does it, that makes it right.
Still whining, huh? Are you a successful executive? No? When what business do you have talking about anything, loser? Don't like it? Go read a book, or move to a France, or preferably, impress your boss by putting in 12 hours at work tomorrow instead of the expected 10.
Say we have a community of 100 users: if one person shares a song and everyone else downloads it, then under your theory, the uploader is responsible not only for the damages resulting from his own use, but the damage resulting from everyone else using the song: that is 100 * P, where P is the amount of damage caused by a single use.
If two people share the song, isn't each responsible for half of the total damage? The amount of damage is constant: only the allocation differs. If four people share that song, then the total damage should be allocated proportionally.
Thus, if everyone shares that song, each individual ought to be responsible for damages of P*100 / 100, that is, P again.
The math doesn't change if we use 'the total size of the internet' instead of P: each person only owes damages for his own use because everyone else contributes to the same pool.
Indeed. I'm an American, but I'm familiar with SI units. If I tell a friend that something is about two meters long, he's surprised, but he understands what I mean. That goes for everyone. Even in the US, people intuitively grasp how much a liter is, how heavy a kilogram is, and how long a kilometer is. We seem to have more trouble with temperature and speed though. I'm still a little taken aback when I drive into Canada and see speed limits far higher than what I'm used to.
CO2 takes thousands of years to leave the atmosphere, so we can consider it cumulative. Every bit of fossil fuel CO2 we've used since Watt built his steam engine has contributed to the progression of global warming: it's just that the increase in emissions substantially accelerated in the 20th century, and since the 1950s, our cumulative history has begin to catch up with us.
Typical liberal scum. You think your out-of-touch ivory tower "experts" can beat the common sense my mother and Glenn Beck taught me? You're just scary numbers, charts, and other things Real Americans like me don't understand to trick us. What you really want is to the destroy the America that our founding fathers knew and loved. Benjamin Franklin wouldn't have believed this climate change nonsense. He would have said it's our God-given right to release as much dioxin and carbon dioxide as we want. We've been doing it for 100 years and the world is the same as when our Lord created it.
Anyone who wants to destroy jobs by moving to new technology is a sinner and a tyrant, and wants to turn this great God-loving country of ours into a socialist fascist slavery hell. Thank God for Fox News to tell me the truth.
You're a moran.
Brutalizing a man is no way to "teach him to fish", to use your trite [and tripe?] metaphor.
Are you really equating progressive social policies with slavery?
See, the conservative mindset is that lack of success is a moral failure on the part of the failed. If someone is down on his luck, he must have done something wrong, and therefore must be punished. It's really a modern breed of Calvinism, the religion tenant that God has pre-destinated certain people for heaven and others for hell, and that he demonstrates His grace toward the chosen by handing them with worldly success.
It's a wicked, wicked idea. Society should be built around the idea of helping everyone succeed, not rewarding an arbitrarily-chosen lucky few while punishing everyone else for things that aren't their fault.
"Whatever is, is right" is an evil idea.
You're confusing individual liberty with social justice.
It's not possible to enjoy personal liberty when you are worked to the bone, discarded at a whim, and can't afford medical care for your children. It's not possible to appreciate persona liberty when you're not educated, and it's not possible to rise out of those circumstances when economic opportunity is inherited. Without regulation, capitalism reverts to its natural state: liberty for the very wealthy and feudalism for everyone else, and Republicans have opposed regulation of markets for over a century.
If you really care about maximizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you'll support policies that give everyone a chance to achieve these things. In the process, you'll be amazed by how much people "contribute" in return.
Err, the JPL, not the GPL.
What private company do you expect to fund the GPL and send probes to the outer solar system? Or Hubble, for that matter?
Yes, reasonable people can argue that LEO launches are so routine these days that they should be turned over to private industry. Fine. But there are tons of other NASA programs that have no profit potential whatsoever, yet tremendously enrich humanity culturally and scientifically. Because private industry would never fund these programs, NASA must. And we're better off for it.
Why are we even talking about what conservatives think? The GOP has amply demonstrated that it has no interest in governing the country in good faith. Their entire program is:
Any conservative argument needs to be critically examined in light of the question, "how does this allow the GOP to continue its looting?" Just look at Chicago economics, Reagan tax cuts, Bush's imperialism, and flagrant anti-union rhetoric. It's not made in good faith.
Conservatives have no interest in the real welfare of the country. This little spat about NASA is merely a disagreement among the foxes about whether to go through the front or the back of the hen-house. It should be an awfully strong hint that the rest of the world is governed by parties to the left of even the left here, and is going better for it.
Can we please stop wasting our time and giving attention to these right-wing lunatics and their pernicious ideas?