Agreed. I have no problem with the relational model for a wide range of uses, but SQL (as you point out) should be quite uncontroversially regarded as a piss-poor language.
Good point. It seems like there are no good answers where dealing with SQL databases are concerned -- but, unfortunately, we need them quite a lot of the time, because there's no reasonable alternative for many cases.
It's worth noting that there have been some pretty high-profile cases where Oracle was failing to deliver for scaling under heavy load, and companies like EnterpriseDB (a value-added PostgreSQL vendor) provided a PostgreSQL-based solution that saved the day. One such example that comes to mind is the FTD migration a few years back. While the EnterpriseDB deployment of PostgreSQL for FTD wasn't free, it sure as hell was cheaper than maintaining Oracle licenses, and it worked a lot better too -- a pretty big deal when considering the size of the FTD network and the fact this was a Valentine's Day season issue when everybody and his brother is getting some flowers delivered to Mom, Wife, and Mistress at the same time.
re: case study You made a comment that, whatever you consider a "case" to be, you weren't referring to example incidents, since I have made reference to a couple of those but you didn't seem to think that was enough.
re: double-blind study I recommend you buy yourself a dictionary. Look up the word "hyperbole". Realize I'm not talking about the mathematical definition of the term.
I said "cases", not "case studies". I'm afraid I don't have a $400k grant for a double-blind study into the financial obligations incurred by GPL compliance. If you can't read well enough to grasp the very simple explanations I've offered in previous posts, I'm afraid I'll have to chalk this failure to communicate up to your complete lack of reading comprehensions skills, or assume that you've never had to maintain disaster recovery standards in a production environment so that you lack any contextual understanding of the costs involved. That, or you're simply interested in defending the actions of Saint Stallman's little freedom-fighting r3b3lx0rz against all comers and will simply ignore all arguments that dispute that position substantively.
"They never threatened him, merely reminded him of his obligations." Yeah. His "obligations" according to a license that imposes financial obligations on him — obligations that, unfulfilled, make him vulnerable to lawsuit, of which state of affairs they reminded him forcefully with a reminder that they, the FSF, will be the people doing the suing. That's the very definition of a threat. Cluestick: 1, FSF Fanboy: 0.
. . . and, frankly, you should have some code to do something with your replacement string in the shortened Java example, else I could eliminate the print line in my shorter Perl example. In either case, the Perl example has fewer than half as many characters as the Java example, despite the fact I haven't even started throwing out whitespace that exists only for clarity purposes.
Too bad Perl is better at being multiplatform than Java, too — and that Ruby is better at being strongly OO than Java, despite having a strong Perl heritage.
Are you even aware of how a community-based Linux distribution is managed? Have you ever used a package manager? Does the concept of "storage capacity" mean nothing to you? Have you ever heard of terms like "disaster recovery"? Do you know how much bookkeeping is involved in managing an archive of thousands of discrete package versions for a small distro? Are you under the impression that people would be willing to take the chance of being sued because they're a two-person operation and their basement flooded, wiping out the stored copies of six hundred GPLed software packages that haven't been obsolesced within the distro for three years yet? Does everything go exactly as planned in your world?
Good! I think we need exactly that: for people to educate themselves about the elections in which they'll be voting. If you don't have time to educate yourself, don't vote. Voting without knowing something about the election in question is, in my opinion, far more irresponsible than failing to vote at all.
There's a financial burden -- it's just a burden that may be ameliorated by way of fees for the service. For purposes of maintaining a full Linux distribution, though, this is hardly practical.
"The expectation that only the two major parties could be elected in a national election isn't a sign of coruption."
"When ever a third party canidate is elected, unless they are a democrate/republican/independant convert of some sorts, they never get put on commities that they can effect thier agenda. They usualy get stuffed somewere out of the way and unless one of the big parties take thier position, they cannot get anything acomplished."
Okay . . . so what you're saying is that corruption is rampant, but somehow it doesn't affect the electoral process. This, despite the fact that election law is created by the people currently holding office.
"Now, it is easier to change the parties position then get something meaningful done with a third party canidate on a national level."
That might be true, if the parties in question actually pursued policy in keeping with the stated party platforms. Instead, they pursue policy in keeping with the desire to get elected.
The difference is that "most popular" assumes people use it because they like it, as compared with other alternatives. "Most used", meanwhile, only assumes that they use it, regardless of the reasons.
Re:Instant msg-ing messes with grammar? As if! lol
on
It's OK to keep AIMing
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Nonsense. "lol", especially in sans-serif typefaces, is a bird's-eye view of a stick figure zombie. It has nothing to do with laughing.
On the other hand, I did recognize the names of a few countries where voting is compulsory (which hardly counts), and a few where voting is essentially a means of determining who will be rounded up and vanished in the next purge, but there are a few there that, as far as I know, constitute worthwhile examples. I'm a bit skeptical, though, of the percentages reported there: some of those US percentages are too damned high to be believable, and as such I'm not convinced of the Italian percentage either (for instance). In fact, having lived in Italy for a couple years, I'm a bit suspicious of the Italian percentage anyway.
Regardless, I'll stipulate that there are nations where a majority of the eligible population actually shows up at the polls when there's an election. That being the case, I don't see a significant drop in voter turnout since the 1940s that correlates meaningfully with the sort of political problems we've been discussing here. Unless someone can provide useful voter turnout statistics for the US going back 200 years (give or take), I don't think we're likely to have a very useful sample -- and I rather suspect that percentages were much lower 200 years ago in any case, even eliminating women and blacks from the allowed population for calculating percentages.
I don't think there has ever been a nontrivial population in a democratic system wherein a majority of citizens turned out to vote. Unless that was just a clever way of saying "It never ended because it never began," it's wrong.
Where did cmbondi say which party was his/her favorite, or that he/she was upset about an election outcome? Face it: the political system is almost unsalvageably corrupt in the US at this point. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be faced with a realistic expectation that nobody but Democans and Republicrats can win national elections.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I have no problem with the relational model for a wide range of uses, but SQL (as you point out) should be quite uncontroversially regarded as a piss-poor language.
Good point. It seems like there are no good answers where dealing with SQL databases are concerned -- but, unfortunately, we need them quite a lot of the time, because there's no reasonable alternative for many cases.
It's tough to blame those programmers who don't want to use SQL. It's a miserable language. Even one of its principle designers hates it.
It's worth noting that there have been some pretty high-profile cases where Oracle was failing to deliver for scaling under heavy load, and companies like EnterpriseDB (a value-added PostgreSQL vendor) provided a PostgreSQL-based solution that saved the day. One such example that comes to mind is the FTD migration a few years back. While the EnterpriseDB deployment of PostgreSQL for FTD wasn't free, it sure as hell was cheaper than maintaining Oracle licenses, and it worked a lot better too -- a pretty big deal when considering the size of the FTD network and the fact this was a Valentine's Day season issue when everybody and his brother is getting some flowers delivered to Mom, Wife, and Mistress at the same time.
re: case study
You made a comment that, whatever you consider a "case" to be, you weren't referring to example incidents, since I have made reference to a couple of those but you didn't seem to think that was enough.
re: double-blind study
I recommend you buy yourself a dictionary. Look up the word "hyperbole". Realize I'm not talking about the mathematical definition of the term.
re: ad hominum
There's an E in that term.
. . .
I said "cases", not "case studies". I'm afraid I don't have a $400k grant for a double-blind study into the financial obligations incurred by GPL compliance. If you can't read well enough to grasp the very simple explanations I've offered in previous posts, I'm afraid I'll have to chalk this failure to communicate up to your complete lack of reading comprehensions skills, or assume that you've never had to maintain disaster recovery standards in a production environment so that you lack any contextual understanding of the costs involved. That, or you're simply interested in defending the actions of Saint Stallman's little freedom-fighting r3b3lx0rz against all comers and will simply ignore all arguments that dispute that position substantively.
"They never threatened him, merely reminded him of his obligations." Yeah. His "obligations" according to a license that imposes financial obligations on him — obligations that, unfulfilled, make him vulnerable to lawsuit, of which state of affairs they reminded him forcefully with a reminder that they, the FSF, will be the people doing the suing. That's the very definition of a threat. Cluestick: 1, FSF Fanboy: 0.
Isn't it creepy how D programmers, PCLinuxOS users, and Scientologists all seem to have the same bizarre sort of cultish eagerness to them?
. . . and, frankly, you should have some code to do something with your replacement string in the shortened Java example, else I could eliminate the print line in my shorter Perl example. In either case, the Perl example has fewer than half as many characters as the Java example, despite the fact I haven't even started throwing out whitespace that exists only for clarity purposes.
Don't make me golf that. Perl gets much more succinct, and this is just my first (somewhat lazy) attempt:
sub theTruth($) { shift; s/.+/bloated piece of crap/; $_; }If I don't have to do it as a sub, I've got this off the top of my head:
$_ = 'Java'; s/.+/bloated piece of crap/; print;Maybe he meant "before taxes".
Too bad Perl is better at being multiplatform than Java, too — and that Ruby is better at being strongly OO than Java, despite having a strong Perl heritage.
I take it you haven't actually read the cases to which I've linked, where the FSF threatened legal action.
Are you even aware of how a community-based Linux distribution is managed? Have you ever used a package manager? Does the concept of "storage capacity" mean nothing to you? Have you ever heard of terms like "disaster recovery"? Do you know how much bookkeeping is involved in managing an archive of thousands of discrete package versions for a small distro? Are you under the impression that people would be willing to take the chance of being sued because they're a two-person operation and their basement flooded, wiping out the stored copies of six hundred GPLed software packages that haven't been obsolesced within the distro for three years yet? Does everything go exactly as planned in your world?
Good! I think we need exactly that: for people to educate themselves about the elections in which they'll be voting. If you don't have time to educate yourself, don't vote. Voting without knowing something about the election in question is, in my opinion, far more irresponsible than failing to vote at all.
There's a financial burden -- it's just a burden that may be ameliorated by way of fees for the service. For purposes of maintaining a full Linux distribution, though, this is hardly practical.
Crap, I forgot to change the formatting from HTML to plain text. Pretend there are linebreaks in the previous post. It'll be a lot clearer that way.
"The expectation that only the two major parties could be elected in a national election isn't a sign of coruption." "When ever a third party canidate is elected, unless they are a democrate/republican/independant convert of some sorts, they never get put on commities that they can effect thier agenda. They usualy get stuffed somewere out of the way and unless one of the big parties take thier position, they cannot get anything acomplished." Okay . . . so what you're saying is that corruption is rampant, but somehow it doesn't affect the electoral process. This, despite the fact that election law is created by the people currently holding office. "Now, it is easier to change the parties position then get something meaningful done with a third party canidate on a national level." That might be true, if the parties in question actually pursued policy in keeping with the stated party platforms. Instead, they pursue policy in keeping with the desire to get elected.
I have a bit of difficulty remembering the compulsory voting examples -- probably because compulsory voting is a little like voluntary imprisonment.
I take it you haven't read my response, then . . . ?
What's that -- the top half of a stick figure zombie doing jumping jacks?
The difference is that "most popular" assumes people use it because they like it, as compared with other alternatives. "Most used", meanwhile, only assumes that they use it, regardless of the reasons.
Nonsense. "lol", especially in sans-serif typefaces, is a bird's-eye view of a stick figure zombie. It has nothing to do with laughing.
I stand corrected.
On the other hand, I did recognize the names of a few countries where voting is compulsory (which hardly counts), and a few where voting is essentially a means of determining who will be rounded up and vanished in the next purge, but there are a few there that, as far as I know, constitute worthwhile examples. I'm a bit skeptical, though, of the percentages reported there: some of those US percentages are too damned high to be believable, and as such I'm not convinced of the Italian percentage either (for instance). In fact, having lived in Italy for a couple years, I'm a bit suspicious of the Italian percentage anyway.
Regardless, I'll stipulate that there are nations where a majority of the eligible population actually shows up at the polls when there's an election. That being the case, I don't see a significant drop in voter turnout since the 1940s that correlates meaningfully with the sort of political problems we've been discussing here. Unless someone can provide useful voter turnout statistics for the US going back 200 years (give or take), I don't think we're likely to have a very useful sample -- and I rather suspect that percentages were much lower 200 years ago in any case, even eliminating women and blacks from the allowed population for calculating percentages.
I don't think there has ever been a nontrivial population in a democratic system wherein a majority of citizens turned out to vote. Unless that was just a clever way of saying "It never ended because it never began," it's wrong.
Where did cmbondi say which party was his/her favorite, or that he/she was upset about an election outcome? Face it: the political system is almost unsalvageably corrupt in the US at this point. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be faced with a realistic expectation that nobody but Democans and Republicrats can win national elections.