do you really want to keep programming in hard-to-compile-elusive-error-message-generating-2nd-generation scripting languages?
Thank you, thank you for pointing that out! I've written SP's in Oracle, MSSQL, MySql, and PostgreSQL and they're all horrible, non-standard, difficult to debug, poorly documented, exhibit seemingly arbitrary limitations, and are so completely different from one another you might as well be writing in a different language. MySQL was a particular bother to learn, because of the necessity to escape the whole script ("delimiter %%" anyone?) because the command line interpreter wasn't designed to accommodate multiple statements directly, and the documentation has not caught up with the new feature set. Uggh. I've also had PostgreSQL functions slow down to the point of uselessness, only to be miraculously revived on recompiling. And while most DB's have reasonable query analysis tools to pinpoint problems in specific queries and views, the tools for analyzing SP's tend to be much less refined.
I use sp's, functions, and triggers because they're useful, and having then in the database means they only have to be developed and maintained in one place, but I'll never think of them as a simple solution.
I would volunteer for the beer project you mentioned. I would like to develop some m4d5kiLlz in that particular field. Oh, and good luck with the software thing too!:)
I assume you're referring to the cows as the victims, because vCJD (what the human victims get) is not subtle, and can't easily be "hidden." From Wikipedia:
The first symptom of CJD is rapidly progressive dementia, leading to memory loss, personality changes and hallucinations. This is accompanied by physical problems such as speech impairment, jerky movements (myoclonus), balance and coordination dysfunction (ataxia), changes in gait, rigid posture, and seizures. The duration of the disease varies greatly, but sporadic (non-inherited) CJD can be fatal within months or even weeks
Otherwise, I agree, there's a lot of motivation for beef producers to not report suspected but unproven cases.
a simple query should bring up their posts and then you could delete them or at least the body of the message.
Of course it wouldn't take out replies or quoted text.
I can completely understand the/. decision to not delete posts on request. I read Slashdot as much for the comments, as for the articles. If they deleted posts in the middle, it would seriously affect the "logic flow" (I know, the term "logic" in this context is a stretch) of the comments. That's why I read without filters-- not because I want to read all the psychotic drivel in down-modded posts, but so I can discern the thought process that motivates the comments that follow.
If Slashdot were to delete one poster's comments, it would take away the context in which the post was made, making reading it like listening to just one side of a phone conversation. In fact, I could imagine an inspired troll where you try to post in a certain way to elicit a set of responses, and then delete the troll posts in between to completely change the conversation. Ugggh... I'm starting to think like some of those Idle emailers.
They're not trying "to do damage to China," they're trying to enlist more computers into botnets to spread email that sells fake \/iaGrA pills and penile enhancements to stupid people, and possibly to redirect unwitting browsers to ad-sponsored pages. It's motivated by Greed! It's the new (inter)nationalism, and unfortunately it knows no national boundaries.
This is not flamebait! The poster is right-- blissful ignorance is sweet and grandmotherly and all, but it doesn't work in the real world, and it opens up grandma to be being scalped. It's lucky it was even possible to reinstall Windows (or did she have to buy another copy?) after nimrod-nephew wiped her machine to install Ubuntu. There's a saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but this case proves that no knowledge is even worse. It's OK to explain it to grandma... if she's learning how to use a scanner, digital camera, and all the new geneology software, I'll bet she'll figure it out pretty quickly. And maybe she'll bitch-slap nephew for messing up her machine in the first place.
You have a lofty goal, but it's unfortunately not a solution. I work at a desk on the 8th floor with a large window that overlooks a huge (and largely accessible) pedestrian mall-like area, and I would estimate at least 5% (1 in 20) of those I see have some form of disability-- amputations, infirmities of age, auto/sports/war/medical injuries, crutches, casts, wheelchairs, walkers, canes (and don't even get me started with the women who hobble themselves with high-heeled shoes). These people work, bank, shop, travel, visit their stock brokers (who also work in my building), socialize, and dine out.
Spinal injuries don't come close to defining "the disabled" just as the subset "complete blindness" doesn't come close to defining the full group of visually impaired.
Using funds that pay to make the world more accessible to the disabled in order to fund a cure to spinal injuries would not improve their condition at all, but would limit their access. Ditto with Web accessibility-- it's not done as a token gift of mercy to a handicapped person-- it's done to allow a large subset of the population to get the tasks of their life done.
Bingo. You're right. Stored procedures are a royal PITA, until the first time the data is hit by two or more different systems. In a small, ~20-30 table database that's serviced by one (possibly Web) front-end, it's arguably easier to write the data integrity handling code right into the front-end. My experience is it's easier to handle foreign key integrity in the code than it is to write the exception handling required to handle it in the database.
But, as soon as there's another system using the data, all the data integrity code needs to be recreated, and likely in another language. That's when all those niceties, like built-in foreign key integrity, and stored procedures for update and transforms, become precious.
I do believe MySQL figured out a large percentage of their users actually fall into the first group-- single application (think blogs and bbs's and shopping carts), single language, where the data will never be accessed from elsewhere. Why include the infrastructure for features that will never be used? They don't really need a grown up DBMS (I know-- they need SQLite, but MySQL can't recommend that), they need something fast, cheap, and reliable. Drizzle seems like just the ticket.
And as for prepared statements, they don't have to be "part" of the database itself-- they can be part of the front-end language. I have used them in Perl DBI (in MySQL 3.x I think) quite a while before they were formally built into MySQL. I don't think they increased performance, but they're much more secure.
They don't build "this sort of audit logging (changing, data changing, etc.)" into the database because there are a million different types of audits that need to be done, depending on the situation, business requirements, programmer skills and requirements, management CYA, government regulation, accounting requirements, backups and data security, binary logging for replication, etc., etc., and no database could anticipate them all. Sorry, someone will always have to write database auditing if they need it-- there's no shortcut.
I'm going to pass up moderating to reply to your post. It's interesting that I, coming from the completely opposite direction-- liberal, mostly Dem-- had the same reaction to Obama caving on this issue. I do believe he did it to keep his "centrist" credentials, but like you I believe it's wrong and contrary to the Constitution. I can't vote for anyone who voted for rescinding habeas corpus for the Guantanamo detainees (which interestingly the Supreme Court has recently taken strides to reinstate), and I can't vote for someone who voted to renew-- and strengthen-- FISA. And I have to tell you friend, I'm glad to hear the same sentiment from the other side of the aisle. It makes me feel a bit less cynical. Maybe a Ron Paul/Ralph Nader ticket could make a difference. Are there any politicians left who own their own words-- or votes?
Re:People are accustomed to bait-and-switch langua
on
The Privacy Paradox
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
People are accustomed to private sector speech meaning its exact opposite
You're absolutely right about this (I tried to mod you up, but my points had timed out). Watch any advertisement on TV and while the voice over is promising one thing, the 6 point type scrolling at the bottom is "clarifying" and negating the points-- or, in the words of Tom Waits, "the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." I've noticed even my children no longer trust the words "cheap," and worse, "free," and assume any ad using those words is for something that costs a lot. Perhaps the researchers have discovered something about the way we interpret language in an age of letter-of-the-law linguistics.
It's not "copies" they're talking about, it's "forgeries" that look as if they were painted by a great artist, but weren't. A "copy" would have almost no value, because that would mean there's another-- the original. A forgery, on the other hand, looks like it could have been painted by a master, but wasn't. Given what a work of art reveals about the artist's world view, the original has a far greater value than a forgery which attempts only to look as if it were created by a different-- and more in demand-- artist.
A painting isn't just the sum of the characteristics of the finished, surviving piece. From an engineer's point of view, we can make much better paintings now than they could 400 years ago-- through science and wider trade patterns we have better pigments, better methods of preparation, better colorfast characteristics, better brushes and tools, cleaner and better protective coatings, and even better canvas and paper. That doesn't mean there's any reason to recreate all of the world's paintings. What makes a Monet worth 50 million dollars is:
It is beautiful.
It was painted by Monet, whose vision changed the way we (or at least artists) look at the world.
It was painted after painting X and before painting Z in the artist's career.
It was painted during a specific time and place in history, during which other specific and identifiable events-- political, social, art historical, and even personal to the life of the artist-- were also happening.
It has survived through today, and been shown in specific places to specific persons.
All of these things add to the value of a work of art.
I believe the "art world" is full of shysters and posers, and there's way too much money involved for the market to ever be considered rational. But that doesn't mean the works don't have value in and of themselves, and it's that value which forgeries dilute and exploit for profit.
The Tandy 100 had no storage (plug in a cassette tape if you want to run or save a program), a 300 baud (maybe went up to 1200 baud) modem with cups that fit over the phone handset (which are no longer common), something like 256K of RAM, and a 24 x 8 character text only display. No network. No storage, no lighted display, no mouse, no pointing device or any kind, no USB ports, no sound, no wireless, no network software. They stopped making them because people stopped buying them. Sure the batteries lasted a long time. They had nothing to do. I believe we can stop romanticizing them.
Gates only wrote the BASIC interpreter (which almost no one used), and licensed the operating system-- a CPM alternative, because the guy who wrote CPM wouldn't talk to IBM-- from elsewhere (Seattle Computers?). He was a lucky guy in the right place at the right time. IBM *invented* the PC-- meaning they made the market for it. Since then he's been prescient enough to recognize trends (windowing GUI's, the internet browser, office applications, email) after the fact and hop onto the bandwagon soon enough to own the bandwagon in a short time.
I have my own thoughts about Gates' wealth, but please don't give him credit for things he most certainly didn't do.
Interesting. Your post made me think how there's a lot of documented "looking the other way" in cases of vigilantism. The courts seem to tolerate a little "excess" when someone's a sworn defender of another's "rights." From citizens lynching suspected rapists to Guantanamo, our legal system-- both the prosecutors and the courts-- seems to look the other way. And if the vigilantes also wear ties and cuff links, heck, they're even allowed to join the country club. MediaDefender are vigilanes, pure and simple. I don't believe much will come of this-- maybe some new paragraph in a regulation somewhere.
You really don't need a dual core with 2GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate to send e-mail, write letters, track expenses, and surf the web a bit.
You're right about the average business user's need for desktop horsepower, but you overlooked the main consumer of business MIPS today, and that's Symantec Anti Virus. We used to depend on Windows version updates to slow everything down so we could upgrade our hardware, but now we just have to upgrade Symantec. I wonder if any of that work could be off-loaded to the GPU? Hey, wait, I'm going to go file a patent on that!
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, thank you for pointing that out! I've written SP's in Oracle, MSSQL, MySql, and PostgreSQL and they're all horrible, non-standard, difficult to debug, poorly documented, exhibit seemingly arbitrary limitations, and are so completely different from one another you might as well be writing in a different language. MySQL was a particular bother to learn, because of the necessity to escape the whole script ("delimiter %%" anyone?) because the command line interpreter wasn't designed to accommodate multiple statements directly, and the documentation has not caught up with the new feature set. Uggh. I've also had PostgreSQL functions slow down to the point of uselessness, only to be miraculously revived on recompiling. And while most DB's have reasonable query analysis tools to pinpoint problems in specific queries and views, the tools for analyzing SP's tend to be much less refined.
I use sp's, functions, and triggers because they're useful, and having then in the database means they only have to be developed and maintained in one place, but I'll never think of them as a simple solution.
I would volunteer for the beer project you mentioned. I would like to develop some m4d5kiLlz in that particular field. Oh, and good luck with the software thing too! :)
It looks like they posted her password too! Jeeeze...
I assume you're referring to the cows as the victims, because vCJD (what the human victims get) is not subtle, and can't easily be "hidden." From Wikipedia:
Otherwise, I agree, there's a lot of motivation for beef producers to not report suspected but unproven cases.
I can completely understand the /. decision to not delete posts on request. I read Slashdot as much for the comments, as for the articles. If they deleted posts in the middle, it would seriously affect the "logic flow" (I know, the term "logic" in this context is a stretch) of the comments. That's why I read without filters-- not because I want to read all the psychotic drivel in down-modded posts, but so I can discern the thought process that motivates the comments that follow.
If Slashdot were to delete one poster's comments, it would take away the context in which the post was made, making reading it like listening to just one side of a phone conversation. In fact, I could imagine an inspired troll where you try to post in a certain way to elicit a set of responses, and then delete the troll posts in between to completely change the conversation. Ugggh... I'm starting to think like some of those Idle emailers.
They're not trying "to do damage to China," they're trying to enlist more computers into botnets to spread email that sells fake \/iaGrA pills and penile enhancements to stupid people, and possibly to redirect unwitting browsers to ad-sponsored pages. It's motivated by Greed! It's the new (inter)nationalism, and unfortunately it knows no national boundaries.
The masses are huddled away from their keyboards so they let me post frost?
Thanks for the laugh. I don't agree with your comment, but it's funny enough to have made coffee blow out my nose.
This is not flamebait! The poster is right-- blissful ignorance is sweet and grandmotherly and all, but it doesn't work in the real world, and it opens up grandma to be being scalped. It's lucky it was even possible to reinstall Windows (or did she have to buy another copy?) after nimrod-nephew wiped her machine to install Ubuntu. There's a saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but this case proves that no knowledge is even worse. It's OK to explain it to grandma... if she's learning how to use a scanner, digital camera, and all the new geneology software, I'll bet she'll figure it out pretty quickly. And maybe she'll bitch-slap nephew for messing up her machine in the first place.
You have a lofty goal, but it's unfortunately not a solution. I work at a desk on the 8th floor with a large window that overlooks a huge (and largely accessible) pedestrian mall-like area, and I would estimate at least 5% (1 in 20) of those I see have some form of disability-- amputations, infirmities of age, auto/sports/war/medical injuries, crutches, casts, wheelchairs, walkers, canes (and don't even get me started with the women who hobble themselves with high-heeled shoes). These people work, bank, shop, travel, visit their stock brokers (who also work in my building), socialize, and dine out.
Spinal injuries don't come close to defining "the disabled" just as the subset "complete blindness" doesn't come close to defining the full group of visually impaired.
Using funds that pay to make the world more accessible to the disabled in order to fund a cure to spinal injuries would not improve their condition at all, but would limit their access. Ditto with Web accessibility-- it's not done as a token gift of mercy to a handicapped person-- it's done to allow a large subset of the population to get the tasks of their life done.
Bingo. You're right. Stored procedures are a royal PITA, until the first time the data is hit by two or more different systems. In a small, ~20-30 table database that's serviced by one (possibly Web) front-end, it's arguably easier to write the data integrity handling code right into the front-end. My experience is it's easier to handle foreign key integrity in the code than it is to write the exception handling required to handle it in the database.
But, as soon as there's another system using the data, all the data integrity code needs to be recreated, and likely in another language. That's when all those niceties, like built-in foreign key integrity, and stored procedures for update and transforms, become precious.
I do believe MySQL figured out a large percentage of their users actually fall into the first group-- single application (think blogs and bbs's and shopping carts), single language, where the data will never be accessed from elsewhere. Why include the infrastructure for features that will never be used? They don't really need a grown up DBMS (I know-- they need SQLite, but MySQL can't recommend that), they need something fast, cheap, and reliable. Drizzle seems like just the ticket.
And as for prepared statements, they don't have to be "part" of the database itself-- they can be part of the front-end language. I have used them in Perl DBI (in MySQL 3.x I think) quite a while before they were formally built into MySQL. I don't think they increased performance, but they're much more secure.
They don't build "this sort of audit logging (changing, data changing, etc.)" into the database because there are a million different types of audits that need to be done, depending on the situation, business requirements, programmer skills and requirements, management CYA, government regulation, accounting requirements, backups and data security, binary logging for replication, etc., etc., and no database could anticipate them all. Sorry, someone will always have to write database auditing if they need it-- there's no shortcut.
Thank you for that, though you almost caused Scotch to blow painfully out of my nose. Have the mods no sense of humor?
But, does this constitute evil? So far so good. My gmail account is my real name anyway. I'll be looking out for the evil...
I'm going to pass up moderating to reply to your post. It's interesting that I, coming from the completely opposite direction-- liberal, mostly Dem-- had the same reaction to Obama caving on this issue. I do believe he did it to keep his "centrist" credentials, but like you I believe it's wrong and contrary to the Constitution. I can't vote for anyone who voted for rescinding habeas corpus for the Guantanamo detainees (which interestingly the Supreme Court has recently taken strides to reinstate), and I can't vote for someone who voted to renew-- and strengthen-- FISA. And I have to tell you friend, I'm glad to hear the same sentiment from the other side of the aisle. It makes me feel a bit less cynical. Maybe a Ron Paul/Ralph Nader ticket could make a difference. Are there any politicians left who own their own words-- or votes?
You're absolutely right about this (I tried to mod you up, but my points had timed out). Watch any advertisement on TV and while the voice over is promising one thing, the 6 point type scrolling at the bottom is "clarifying" and negating the points-- or, in the words of Tom Waits, "the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." I've noticed even my children no longer trust the words "cheap," and worse, "free," and assume any ad using those words is for something that costs a lot. Perhaps the researchers have discovered something about the way we interpret language in an age of letter-of-the-law linguistics.
Some is untranslatable. How do you spell \/!/\G3RRRA in German?
Sometimes you have to recompile your kernel to get the virus to run. Just check the mailing lists. It's definitely doable!
A painting isn't just the sum of the characteristics of the finished, surviving piece. From an engineer's point of view, we can make much better paintings now than they could 400 years ago-- through science and wider trade patterns we have better pigments, better methods of preparation, better colorfast characteristics, better brushes and tools, cleaner and better protective coatings, and even better canvas and paper. That doesn't mean there's any reason to recreate all of the world's paintings. What makes a Monet worth 50 million dollars is:
All of these things add to the value of a work of art.
I believe the "art world" is full of shysters and posers, and there's way too much money involved for the market to ever be considered rational. But that doesn't mean the works don't have value in and of themselves, and it's that value which forgeries dilute and exploit for profit.
D'Oh. You're right. I wasn't wearing my sarcasm detector-- whooshed right over my head.
The Tandy 100 had no storage (plug in a cassette tape if you want to run or save a program), a 300 baud (maybe went up to 1200 baud) modem with cups that fit over the phone handset (which are no longer common), something like 256K of RAM, and a 24 x 8 character text only display. No network. No storage, no lighted display, no mouse, no pointing device or any kind, no USB ports, no sound, no wireless, no network software. They stopped making them because people stopped buying them. Sure the batteries lasted a long time. They had nothing to do. I believe we can stop romanticizing them.
Gates only wrote the BASIC interpreter (which almost no one used), and licensed the operating system-- a CPM alternative, because the guy who wrote CPM wouldn't talk to IBM-- from elsewhere (Seattle Computers?). He was a lucky guy in the right place at the right time. IBM *invented* the PC-- meaning they made the market for it. Since then he's been prescient enough to recognize trends (windowing GUI's, the internet browser, office applications, email) after the fact and hop onto the bandwagon soon enough to own the bandwagon in a short time.
I have my own thoughts about Gates' wealth, but please don't give him credit for things he most certainly didn't do.
This sounds just like my son's old Athlon 2.7 processor. Just be sure to use lots of thermal paste, and don't forget to plug in the fan-- ever!
Interesting. Your post made me think how there's a lot of documented "looking the other way" in cases of vigilantism. The courts seem to tolerate a little "excess" when someone's a sworn defender of another's "rights." From citizens lynching suspected rapists to Guantanamo, our legal system-- both the prosecutors and the courts-- seems to look the other way. And if the vigilantes also wear ties and cuff links, heck, they're even allowed to join the country club. MediaDefender are vigilanes, pure and simple. I don't believe much will come of this-- maybe some new paragraph in a regulation somewhere.