Really? A big portion of the Open Source business is predicated upon this.
As someone who has done a small amount of OS coding, I think the motivation really is to scratch one's own itch.
The OS work I'm doing right now is to adapt software to my specific needs. Of course, I recognize that others may have the same itch, so I release the code.
Because I value craftsmanship in its own right, I also attempt to make it usable for someone other than me (by using standard GUI interfaces, clearly labelling GUI stuff, etc.).
It's not appreciation I'm looking for, it's software that better meets my needs. Because copying software is essentially free, once I have something working for me, it's easy for me to give you a copy too.
Oh, so now we trust the liberal media?
on
SCO Offline
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
It's Feb. 1st everyone... and all of you who have been reading Slashdot know that today MyDoom.A begins it's attack... according to Reuters, SCO has already been hit hard.
Yeah, but we all know about the lying liberal media -- they actually claimed that Iraq didn't give yellowcake to Al Queda while Saddam was harboring Osama -- so rather than trust Reuters, you'd better go to www.sco.com and see for yourself.
What I do is have a hidden link at the top of every page that links to a specially-named missing HTML file in that directory.
Elegant. That takes advantage of the difference between a human and wget. And even better, the human can understanf his AUP, wget can't and keeps banging its head. Elegant.
Tin foil jokes... those are even worse than Slashdotting jokes... I swear if I knew your name and address, I'd come over and beat you to a bloody pulp.
And you still can't understand why some of us don't want our names, addresses, habits and proclivities listed in a database?
Because sometimes the guy who hates jokes becomes the DA / police chief / mayor / Sturmbannfuhrer / Attorney General.
Mormons claim to be Christians, but their theology, doctrines, practices, and beliefs are not.
My imaginary sky-ghost can beat your imaginary sky-ghost because you deluded heathen don't know that eating shellfish or not mutilating newborn boys makes the sky-ghost really pissy!
READ THE PDF people, criminal activity, gang activity, a guy was MURDERED, and schoolies were goofing off on the web during school hours. At a minimum, the last shows a dereliction of duty on the part of the operator of said CyberCafe.....
Obviously there's been MAJOR ISSUES and equally as obviously the owners of the CyberCafes apparently weren't doing enough to deal with the issue.
It's not the job of the CyberCafes to act as police -- the CyberCafes pay taxes that pay for cops and DAs, whose job it is to deal with crime. And where have those cops and DAs been, anyway?
So what you're saying is that existing laws -- against murder and truancy -- were broken, and that rather than enforce those existing laws, Garden Grove chose to pass a new law that would penalize innocent parties and create a financial burden for a business that committed no crime, but had the misfortune of being in an area where the crimes were committed?
Isn't respect for law in general already undermined by Garden Grove's demonstrated inability to enforce existing law? If Garden Grove is unable to effectively prosecute murders or truancies, how can we be expected to believe it will be able to enforce this new law?
This is a typical move by legislators looking to get re-elected for "solving" problems they're really ignoring.
It happens on the left, when Democrats claim credit for dozens of gun control laws that they never get around to fully funding, while ignoring the real problem: criminals ignore laws and circumvent background checks -- because -- surprise! they're criminals.
It happens on the right, when Republicans pass more and more Draconian anti-drug laws (it's double-extra-super illegal to sell drugs within 500 feet of a school!), none of which actually remedy the real problems with drugs: sales to minors and that addicts want to break into my house to steal my stero to sell it for more crack.
It happens on the left with "hate crime" legislation, the ridiculous proposition that killing someone because you don't like his ancestry is a worse crime than killing someone because you want his wallet. Murder's illegal, right? But it's less bad if Karl Klansman kills Willy Whiteman for Willie's wallet than if he kills Bobby Blackman out of racial hate? I'm sure Willy's survivors are comforted by this.
It happens on the right when John Ashcroft tells you with a stright face that we are safer because Tommy Chong's been sent to Federal prison -- prison for God's sake -- for selling glass bongs!
Now tell me, of all the pot-smokers you know, how many started smoking because they thought bongs looked cool and wanted an excuse to use one? Oh right, pot-smoking tends to precede bong-buying? So what do laws against selling drug paraphernalia achieve? Oh right, they let prosecutors get photo-ops on their way to re-election! I feel safer already.
Laws like Garden Grove's don't inconvenience real criminals -- anyone who is not deterred by life prison sentences for murder isn't going to suddenly flee at the prospect of a curfew. It just inconveniences those of us who try to follow the laws; now we can't be out after some arbitrary hour.
Laws like Garden Groves just allow the local legislators to claim they're "doing something" about the problem -- so please re-elect them -- while letting them ignore the real source of the problem and while penalizing law-abiding business owners and citizens with more and more onerous regulations.
I got a grandma whos [sic] hearing has been not so good for years and now around a year ago she got a hearing aid device(not implant) [sic] and you know what? [S]he had gotten used to that small things like reading the paper don't make any noise at all and now it's real hard to get her to keep it on....
Just think of your grandma as a usenet reader who auto-plonks all aol.com posts.
Or, think of your grandma as a Slashdot reader who browses at +4.
Maybe she sees her deafness as something like finally being rewarded after years of having to listen to idiots?
While I agree with a lot of what you are saying, it sounds like this guy is interested in making use of a card file, not a database.
Yeah, he probably is, and yes, he probably can "get away with" it.
And as long as he's the only user, his head will fill in the incomplete parts, he'll mentally catalog exceptions, he'll know what (physical) records are really sub-parts and addenda added to (logical) records when he ran out of space in the main record, etc.
The problem is, if the database turns out to be useful for something, he won't remain the only user. But the new users won't have the extra information the original user carries around in his head.
Eventually the original user will retire or die, and the new users will be left with the gargantuan task of converting his idiolect into a system that works without his intimate involvement. Eventually there will have to be a conversion to a real database, but there will be no algorithms to do the conversion, because the data will be riddles with special exceptions. I've been in these situations, and it's a no-win, because there's no way of knowing what the truth is; the conversion becomes either a series of guesses, or the database designer ends up doing a lot of investigation in the problem domain.
But you're right; if all he's doing is making a Christmas card list, he can get away with using anything.
As far as the MP3 database, please understand I was using it as an example of the complexity lurking in most real things, and I was intentionally eliding the more abstruse qualifications, in order to fit it into a Slashdot post. In doing so, I unintentionally conflated the meaning of "song". I realized this after I posted, but I didn't think it warranted replying to my own post.
I conflated the term "song" by using it to mean both "work or opus" and "title". Basically, my thoughts are similar to yours: there should be (at least) a 1-to-many relationship between a "composition" and a "performance"; the performance is the track so -- implementation detail -- it hold the key of the composition, while the composition has the title of the composition as an attribute. The track also hold the key of the performing artist, or a cardinality reduction table maintains a many-to-many relation between track ("performance") and artists, if we decide we need to represent more than one artist per track -- and in this case we make the cardinality reduction table a "real" table and introduce a "role" attribute that shows what the artist did on the track: sing, play piano, engineer, produce, etc.
CD, album, opus (comprised of several movements), act, opera, cycle of operas, are all ways of arranging a group of tracks in a sequential order; composition-to-track can even be seen a degenerate sequential list usual contain only one element. To what extent these relationships should be individually reified in a table structure, and to what extent different levels in a hierarchy should be represented in single, self-referential table, are judgement calls that are probably better resolved more in terms of implementation efficiency (SQL isn't good at recursive operations, other implementations might be) than any other consideration.
But I think we're mostly in agreement, and I appreciate your insights into the matter.
Does that company now have access to the email even though there is no written contract nor technology use policy?
me look left me look right
me still sees no lawyers.
This is an ethical or moral or legal question (depending on your particular viewpoint).
Slashdot, to the extent it's not a troll-fest and crap-flooder's convention, is a technical forum.
That said, this techie's understanding of the relevant law is that an employee's email, as any other work-product, belongs to the company that paid for the email account and paid the employee for the time the employee spent producing the email.
On the other hand, at one time and place -- Feudal Europe -- "employers" thought they also had the right of droit du seigneur too, so we shouldn't fall into the trap of believing that something is right just because it's legal.
None of those mentioned needing a knowledge of database theory, they allowed you to layout and manipulate data quite easily.
Without a knowledge of database theory, you're going to build a bad database that doesn't scale well.
At the very least, you need to know about database normalization, which comes down to not repeating data (and instead repeating keys to that data).
You'll need to know that even though databases are supposed to be "Fourth Generation Languages" ("4GLs") where you just need specify "what" and not "how", in truth there are still a number of implementation details you'll need to be aware of.
Many of these implementation details are, no surprise, implementation specific, varying from one database (or one version) to another. (Sybase, in particular, departs from many other databases with a number of quirks.) Things like how indices are physically represented, what null really means in your database, the subtle difference between a null that means that a column's value is not known and a null that means a row (as in outer joins) does not exist, how flexible views are (if the database supports views at all, you should use them, as they're one of the few ways to abstract your interface from your implementation in a database), the difference (if any) between a view and a user defined function, how auto-increments are generated and passed around, etc., etc., etc.
On a more general level, you'll find that really designing a database makes you sound like, Pontius Pilate talking to Jesus Christ: you'll be spending a lot of time asking "what is truth".
No, really, I'm being serious. A database is an attempt to model reality at some level of granularity. One of the big question is how granular a view you need to take, and how general or specific various tables need to be.
Consider a "simple" database of MP3s: is a track the same as a song, and is that the same as an opus? What about classical recording that make each movement of an opus a separate track? What about non-classical recordings that have spoken introductory tracks? One "song" or two? Is an album a CD? What about multi-CD albums, with disc one and disc two? Is an artist a attribute of an album or a track or a song? (Answer: a song.) Is a group an artist, or is it a set of artists? (Answer: judgment call, but probably the latter.) Is the composer table a sub-type of the artist table? (Answer: yes) Does your database implementation natively represent sub-typing relationships? (postgresql does, in Sybase you have to implement it yourself.) Is the song title an attribute of the track? (Better not be, if you want to represent different covers of the same song together.)
What you're doing here isn't merely telling the database that you need a bunch of tables: you're describing the "truth" that's in the world -- as you see it, and as clearly as you can see it -- and trying to represent that truth in the database.
Long before I was a professional programmer, long before I ever designed any databases, I happened to pick up a book on a bookstore's remainder table for $4.98. The book was about designing databases, and quite a bit of the text was presented as Socratic dialogues between various stock characters, arguing about "what is truth". It's been too many years for me to recall if I still agree or not with all the arguments presented in that book, but it's take-home point -- that designing databases is a search for the truth -- has stayed with me, so I suppose it was convincing.
I hope that you'll take home a point from this post: designing a database is -- or should be -- a rigorous activity that includes much testing of your hypotheses and much recourse to asking yourself what it is you're really representing -- or are able to represent. It's not something that should -- in real cases -- be easy, and having a tool usually gets in the way of really thinking about what you're designing.
For instance, you can browse, and you can double-click on files, but you can't for example install a.PRC from a ZIP file onto your Palm handheld device this way. It looks like a regular file, smells like a regular file, and tastes like a regular file, except you can't use it just like a regular file. Although, if you explore a ZIP file this way and then drag the.PRC out of the ZIP file onto your desktop, then you can install it. Intuitive, huh?
PowerDesk can do exactly what you want: zip files (to arbitrary recursion depths) are treated as directories with drag and drag and so forth implemented as unseen temporary files.
If I recall correctly, however, it does have some of the performance problems you mention.
Still, it works pretty well, but I no longer use it because it looks ugly and I find PowerDesk's splash screen too annoying.
You have no idea how difficult it is to "just fix it." You're asking developers to write an algorithm that recognizes bad behavior; that recognizes when someone is intentionally playing badly as opposed to unsuccessfully trying to play well.
The Athenians knew how to just fix it. Once a year they'd hold an election; the person getting the most votes -- ostrakons, for the shell or potshard used in voting -- would be ostracized, banished, for a year.
Do it monthly, and I bet you'd see a lot less griefing.
Oh, right, Dean proposed that all computers, whether in an internet cafe or in your home, be equipped with a card reader to scan your national id card* prior to letting you access the internet.
* Ok, inter-operable state-issued id cards.
(Please note, up until hearing about this I was leaning Dean in my search for the right "Anybody But Bush" candidate. But since my major problem with Bush is his administration's willingness to abrogate our civil rights, I want to be sure that the Democrat I vote for will protect our traditional American rights. And Dean had already raised concerns with Vermont's ACLU when he announced that views about privacy would change post 9-11.)
Well, If I were a manufacturer I would charge a good price of 200-300 for the book
For $300 I can buy a Sharp Zaurus which already has a 320x240 display with 65536 shades of "gray". That is, it's full color.
True, it doesn't roll-up, but it does fit into a pant or jacket pocket, and the screen doesn't wear out in "months". (From the article: "Further, 'the life of our organic electronics displays has been already prolonged from "hours to months"'".)
But it does run just about any program you'd care to write, including web browsers and Doom and e-book readers. So I lose the roll-up and gain a full-featured, in color, hand-held computer.
Your price point needs some work.
You could charge 10 bucks (average book price) for new books to add as well.
I beg your pardon? You can't compare e-book prices to hardbacks; the form-factor is even smaller than paperbacks, and so is the production cost. Paperbacks cost about $8.00 these days, and I would expect a cut for eliminating he dead-tree and distribution costs. I'd say $4.00 per book, perhaps somewhat more for the newest releases.
*nix people are NOT more technical by nature. I know DOZENS of Linux "geeks" who compile their own software only because of easy compile scripts and easy packages.
Actually, I suspect *nix people may well be more technical; *nix encourages the idea of (for example) stringing together awk | sed | cut | sort | grep to do things that under Windows would almost always be implemented as a monolithic program.
But let me second (part of) the parent poster's comment: compilation is so ridiculously easy these days on linux-y systems.
I remember when I -- a professional programmer -- hesitated to compile unfamiliar source, because of conflicting headers, non-standard "Standards" (before C++98/C99, everyone and his brother had a different idea of what bool should be), and other gotchas.
These problems have largely disappeared on linux-y systems, thanks mostly to configure scripts. Nowadays, I have no real worries about downloading source I'd never heard of before, and I'm surprised if it doesn't compile cleanly the first time.
Funnily enough, I do most of my compiling not under linux per se, but Cygwin. And most of what I've been doing recently has been cross-compiling, for the SH-1 and the StrongArm processors. Still, I have few problems, mostly because of the configure scripts.
If you've never used a configure script, it compiles a battery of test code in such a way as to test for any particularities of your environment, and adapts the Makefile to your system.
Nor are decent Makefiles limited to linux-y environments; Neil Hodgson, in addition to writing the excellent SciTE editor, also makes the source available with Makefiles that perform flawlessly for a number of compilers -- I was able to compile using the Borland command line compiler "out of the box" using Neil's Borland makefile.
What I dread these days are "Integrated Development Environments" with "projects" or other proprietary replacements for Makefiles. True, the Makefile is a dated and awkward format that goes so far as to (disastrously, if you don't know about it!) make semantic distinctions between spaces and tabs. But it also works most anywhere.
Recently, I took an app written for Qt on some linux distribution, and after a few days of compensating for the fact that it used the 3.x QT libraries and I was using 2.3.3, I was able to cross-compile it under Cygwin for my Sharp Zaurus. Other than implementing Qt 3.x functionality using Qt 2.3.3 classes, the configure script took care of all the work for me.
The parent poster also wrote "Linux is far superior there. But, as it stands, Windows is still a better desktop OS."
With Cygwin under Windows 2000, and a policy of using programs -- like Mozilla -- that are Open and exist in both MS-Windows and Linux -- I really think I have the best of both worlds.
He's helped us all. Don't say that you don't like slashdot.
I didn't say I don't like slashdot. I like it a lot, nd I respect CmdrTaco for his efforts to realize his vision of Slashdot. (And I appreciated getting to an "Excellent Karma" after being here only a month.)
Criticizing one thing that Taco does or does not do is in no way tantamount to disliking Slashdot or CmdrTaco. Indeed, it's a measure of my respect for Taco that I criticized him at all; I would not have been surprised, if, for instance, Darl McBride announced he was a DirecTV subscriber, nor would I have wasted any breath trying to convince Darl McBride to act from his principles.
Too many people these days equate any criticism with enmity or disloyalty. This is especially prevalent in the current U.S. administration: any dissent, any questioning of policy is tarred as giving aid to "the terrorists".
It's because I'm a patriot that I question the "Patriot Act"; it's because I respect Taco and enjoy Slashdot that bother to point out the ideological dimensions of his decision to support DirecTV.
(thanks to people like you who post good comments!). It's a community and the leader may disagree with you. That's OK, right?
Of course it's OK if someone disagrees. Who knows, I might even be wrong. Highly unlikely, of course. <grin> Discussion and debate -- and not down-mods -- are what makes Slashdot so valuable. (And thanks for the praise.)
well, everybody has their hobby horse. i'll bet if i look at your credit card statements, i'll see a raft of purchases from amazon.com....
No, you wouldn't. I avoid buying from Amazon, both because of the "One-Click" patent, and because of some issues with Amazon not removing addresses from their email lists when requested to.
True, I won't return a gift if a relative purchases something from Amazon.
just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean you're required to type on it.
That's a dismissive ad-hominem attack that's designed to suggest my opinions aren't relevant, while at the same not requiring you to present any evidence of that or counter-argument to my opinions. While I congratulate you on your ability to learn from Karl Rove, I'll also suggest that real discussion and debate are more valuable than smirking slams.
As to the issue itself, you are right that we have to choose our battles; some injustices are greater threats than others.
I submit that what DirecTV's barratry is an injustice that deserves our attention. Anytime we allow a private corporation to declare that a particular technology is illegitimate just because it might be used to infringe that business's copyright, we allow any technology that threatens any corporation's bottom line to be arbitrarily declared off-limits.
Smart card programming hardware today, non-DRM'd motherboards tomorrow. This is a major issue, perhaps the central issue, as far as technological freedom is concerned. It's something that every Slashdot reader should rally around.
So yes, we must choose our battles, but how can we not choose this battle?
As far as CmdrTaco is concerned, I was perhaps overly harsh -- I lead from my heart -- in my first post. I respect CmdrTaco and what he has built in Slashdot, and so was even more amazed to learn he subscribes to DirecTV.
I hope that CmdrTaco, aware of his influence and the respect he is accorded, will reconsider his decision to subsidize DirecTV, and consider leading by example in what is nothing less than a fight for out freedoms.
You know, people make the statement that taco is out of touch with the slashdot community, and I dont think anything illustrates this point as much as the fact that he's on dialup.
I've got a better illustration. How about this: I already use DirecTV?
I've vowed not to ever subscribe to DirecTV, because of DirecTV's policy of suing purchasers of smart card programming hardware, regardless of whether or not that hardware was used to intercept DirecTV's transmissions.
That's pure harassment and barratry by a company that knows that even if it loses it can ruin its victims by running up their costs to defend themselves.
And I know about this abuse of process and restraint of trade because I read about it, and the EFF's fight against it, on Slashdot: here and here and here.
But is CmdrTaco taking a stand? Hell no! At the same time the EFF files an amicus brief with the 11th Circuit appeal of DirecTV's suit, CmdrTaco is paying DirectTV $25.00 a month (or whatever the subscription fee is) to sit back and watch reruns of Die Hard II.
And people wonder why "Your Rights Online" keep getting trampled under by Big Corporations and Big Brother -- because even a so-called "geek leader" prefers sitting on his ass as a comfortable couch potato to standing up for a principle.
Really Taco, I expected better from you. Stand up for something -- show some leadership -- and ditch your DirecTV in the most public way you can.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who has done a small amount of OS coding, I think the motivation really is to scratch one's own itch.
The OS work I'm doing right now is to adapt software to my specific needs. Of course, I recognize that others may have the same itch, so I release the code.
Because I value craftsmanship in its own right, I also attempt to make it usable for someone other than me (by using standard GUI interfaces, clearly labelling GUI stuff, etc.).
It's not appreciation I'm looking for, it's software that better meets my needs. Because copying software is essentially free, once I have something working for me, it's easy for me to give you a copy too.
What is a forrest ?
The guy who played Dr. McCoy on Star Trek.
It's Feb. 1st everyone... and all of you who have been reading Slashdot know that today MyDoom.A begins it's attack... according to Reuters, SCO has already been hit hard.
Yeah, but we all know about the lying liberal media -- they actually claimed that Iraq didn't give yellowcake to Al Queda while Saddam was harboring Osama -- so rather than trust Reuters, you'd better go to www.sco.com and see for yourself.
Just to double-check. Of course.
What I do is have a hidden link at the top of every page that links to a specially-named missing HTML file in that directory.
Elegant. That takes advantage of the difference between a human and wget. And even better, the human can understanf his AUP, wget can't and keeps banging its head. Elegant.
Tin foil jokes... those are even worse than Slashdotting jokes... I swear if I knew your name and address, I'd come over and beat you to a bloody pulp.
And you still can't understand why some of us don't want our names, addresses, habits and proclivities listed in a database?
Because sometimes the guy who hates jokes becomes the DA / police chief / mayor / Sturmbannfuhrer / Attorney General.
Mormons claim to be Christians, but their theology, doctrines, practices, and beliefs are not.
My imaginary sky-ghost can beat your imaginary sky-ghost because you deluded heathen don't know that eating shellfish or not mutilating newborn boys makes the sky-ghost really pissy!
What is a dossier??
I dunno either, but I'm sure it's either cool or it's whack.
READ THE PDF people, criminal activity, gang activity, a guy was MURDERED, and schoolies were goofing off on the web during school hours. At a minimum, the last shows a dereliction of duty on the part of the operator of said CyberCafe. ....
Obviously there's been MAJOR ISSUES and equally as obviously the owners of the CyberCafes apparently weren't doing enough to deal with the issue.
It's not the job of the CyberCafes to act as police -- the CyberCafes pay taxes that pay for cops and DAs, whose job it is to deal with crime. And where have those cops and DAs been, anyway?
So what you're saying is that existing laws -- against murder and truancy -- were broken, and that rather than enforce those existing laws, Garden Grove chose to pass a new law that would penalize innocent parties and create a financial burden for a business that committed no crime, but had the misfortune of being in an area where the crimes were committed?
Isn't respect for law in general already undermined by Garden Grove's demonstrated inability to enforce existing law? If Garden Grove is unable to effectively prosecute murders or truancies, how can we be expected to believe it will be able to enforce this new law?
This is a typical move by legislators looking to get re-elected for "solving" problems they're really ignoring.
It happens on the left, when Democrats claim credit for dozens of gun control laws that they never get around to fully funding, while ignoring the real problem: criminals ignore laws and circumvent background checks -- because -- surprise! they're criminals.
It happens on the right, when Republicans pass more and more Draconian anti-drug laws (it's double-extra-super illegal to sell drugs within 500 feet of a school!), none of which actually remedy the real problems with drugs: sales to minors and that addicts want to break into my house to steal my stero to sell it for more crack.
It happens on the left with "hate crime" legislation, the ridiculous proposition that killing someone because you don't like his ancestry is a worse crime than killing someone because you want his wallet. Murder's illegal, right? But it's less bad if Karl Klansman kills Willy Whiteman for Willie's wallet than if he kills Bobby Blackman out of racial hate? I'm sure Willy's survivors are comforted by this.
It happens on the right when John Ashcroft tells you with a stright face that we are safer because Tommy Chong's been sent to Federal prison -- prison for God's sake -- for selling glass bongs!
Now tell me, of all the pot-smokers you know, how many started smoking because they thought bongs looked cool and wanted an excuse to use one? Oh right, pot-smoking tends to precede bong-buying? So what do laws against selling drug paraphernalia achieve? Oh right, they let prosecutors get photo-ops on their way to re-election! I feel safer already.
Laws like Garden Grove's don't inconvenience real criminals -- anyone who is not deterred by life prison sentences for murder isn't going to suddenly flee at the prospect of a curfew. It just inconveniences those of us who try to follow the laws; now we can't be out after some arbitrary hour.
Laws like Garden Groves just allow the local legislators to claim they're "doing something" about the problem -- so please re-elect them -- while letting them ignore the real source of the problem and while penalizing law-abiding business owners and citizens with more and more onerous regulations.
I got a grandma whos [sic] hearing has been not so good for years and now around a year ago she got a hearing aid device(not implant) [sic] and you know what? [S]he had gotten used to that small things like reading the paper don't make any noise at all and now it's real hard to get her to keep it on....
Just think of your grandma as a usenet reader who auto-plonks all aol.com posts.
Or, think of your grandma as a Slashdot reader who browses at +4.
Maybe she sees her deafness as something like finally being rewarded after years of having to listen to idiots?
While I agree with a lot of what you are saying, it sounds like this guy is interested in making use of a card file, not a database.
Yeah, he probably is, and yes, he probably can "get away with" it.
And as long as he's the only user, his head will fill in the incomplete parts, he'll mentally catalog exceptions, he'll know what (physical) records are really sub-parts and addenda added to (logical) records when he ran out of space in the main record, etc.
The problem is, if the database turns out to be useful for something, he won't remain the only user. But the new users won't have the extra information the original user carries around in his head.
Eventually the original user will retire or die, and the new users will be left with the gargantuan task of converting his idiolect into a system that works without his intimate involvement. Eventually there will have to be a conversion to a real database, but there will be no algorithms to do the conversion, because the data will be riddles with special exceptions. I've been in these situations, and it's a no-win, because there's no way of knowing what the truth is; the conversion becomes either a series of guesses, or the database designer ends up doing a lot of investigation in the problem domain.
But you're right; if all he's doing is making a Christmas card list, he can get away with using anything.
As far as the MP3 database, please understand I was using it as an example of the complexity lurking in most real things, and I was intentionally eliding the more abstruse qualifications, in order to fit it into a Slashdot post. In doing so, I unintentionally conflated the meaning of "song". I realized this after I posted, but I didn't think it warranted replying to my own post.
I conflated the term "song" by using it to mean both "work or opus" and "title". Basically, my thoughts are similar to yours: there should be (at least) a 1-to-many relationship between a "composition" and a "performance"; the performance is the track so -- implementation detail -- it hold the key of the composition, while the composition has the title of the composition as an attribute. The track also hold the key of the performing artist, or a cardinality reduction table maintains a many-to-many relation between track ("performance") and artists, if we decide we need to represent more than one artist per track -- and in this case we make the cardinality reduction table a "real" table and introduce a "role" attribute that shows what the artist did on the track: sing, play piano, engineer, produce, etc.
CD, album, opus (comprised of several movements), act, opera, cycle of operas, are all ways of arranging a group of tracks in a sequential order; composition-to-track can even be seen a degenerate sequential list usual contain only one element. To what extent these relationships should be individually reified in a table structure, and to what extent different levels in a hierarchy should be represented in single, self-referential table, are judgement calls that are probably better resolved more in terms of implementation efficiency (SQL isn't good at recursive operations, other implementations might be) than any other consideration.
But I think we're mostly in agreement, and I appreciate your insights into the matter.
Does that company now have access to the email even though there is no written contract nor technology use policy?
me look left
me look right
me still sees no lawyers.
This is an ethical or moral or legal question (depending on your particular viewpoint).
Slashdot, to the extent it's not a troll-fest and crap-flooder's convention, is a technical forum.
That said, this techie's understanding of the relevant law is that an employee's email, as any other work-product, belongs to the company that paid for the email account and paid the employee for the time the employee spent producing the email.
On the other hand, at one time and place -- Feudal Europe -- "employers" thought they also had the right of droit du seigneur too, so we shouldn't fall into the trap of believing that something is right just because it's legal.
Perhaps by asserting that privacy trumps payment you'll be striking a blow for freedom that will be remembered, centuries from now, as the beginning of our liberation from employers who today claim that they can lock employees in warehouses, denying them medical attention or can strip search workers accused of theft.
None of those mentioned needing a knowledge of database theory, they allowed you to layout and manipulate data quite easily.
Without a knowledge of database theory, you're going to build a bad database that doesn't scale well.
At the very least, you need to know about database normalization, which comes down to not repeating data (and instead repeating keys to that data).
You'll need to know that even though databases are supposed to be "Fourth Generation Languages" ("4GLs") where you just need specify "what" and not "how", in truth there are still a number of implementation details you'll need to be aware of.
Many of these implementation details are, no surprise, implementation specific, varying from one database (or one version) to another. (Sybase, in particular, departs from many other databases with a number of quirks.) Things like how indices are physically represented, what null really means in your database, the subtle difference between a null that means that a column's value is not known and a null that means a row (as in outer joins) does not exist, how flexible views are (if the database supports views at all, you should use them, as they're one of the few ways to abstract your interface from your implementation in a database), the difference (if any) between a view and a user defined function, how auto-increments are generated and passed around, etc., etc., etc.
On a more general level, you'll find that really designing a database makes you sound like, Pontius Pilate talking to Jesus Christ: you'll be spending a lot of time asking "what is truth".
No, really, I'm being serious. A database is an attempt to model reality at some level of granularity. One of the big question is how granular a view you need to take, and how general or specific various tables need to be.
Consider a "simple" database of MP3s: is a track the same as a song, and is that the same as an opus? What about classical recording that make each movement of an opus a separate track? What about non-classical recordings that have spoken introductory tracks? One "song" or two? Is an album a CD? What about multi-CD albums, with disc one and disc two? Is an artist a attribute of an album or a track or a song? (Answer: a song.) Is a group an artist, or is it a set of artists? (Answer: judgment call, but probably the latter.) Is the composer table a sub-type of the artist table? (Answer: yes) Does your database implementation natively represent sub-typing relationships? (postgresql does, in Sybase you have to implement it yourself.) Is the song title an attribute of the track? (Better not be, if you want to represent different covers of the same song together.)
What you're doing here isn't merely telling the database that you need a bunch of tables: you're describing the "truth" that's in the world -- as you see it, and as clearly as you can see it -- and trying to represent that truth in the database.
Long before I was a professional programmer, long before I ever designed any databases, I happened to pick up a book on a bookstore's remainder table for $4.98. The book was about designing databases, and quite a bit of the text was presented as Socratic dialogues between various stock characters, arguing about "what is truth". It's been too many years for me to recall if I still agree or not with all the arguments presented in that book, but it's take-home point -- that designing databases is a search for the truth -- has stayed with me, so I suppose it was convincing.
I hope that you'll take home a point from this post: designing a database is -- or should be -- a rigorous activity that includes much testing of your hypotheses and much recourse to asking yourself what it is you're really representing -- or are able to represent. It's not something that should -- in real cases -- be easy, and having a tool usually gets in the way of really thinking about what you're designing.
For instance, you can browse, and you can double-click on files, but you can't for example install a .PRC from a ZIP file onto your Palm handheld device this way. It looks like a regular file, smells like a regular file, and tastes like a regular file, except you can't use it just like a regular file. Although, if you explore a ZIP file this way and then drag the .PRC out of the ZIP file onto your desktop, then you can install it. Intuitive, huh?
PowerDesk can do exactly what you want: zip files (to arbitrary recursion depths) are treated as directories with drag and drag and so forth implemented as unseen temporary files.
If I recall correctly, however, it does have some of the performance problems you mention.
Still, it works pretty well, but I no longer use it because it looks ugly and I find PowerDesk's splash screen too annoying.
LHA wasn't the only out there compression standard I picked up, and still have, in my BBS days.
:
Here's a quick dir *.exe on E:\compression
[snip: 26 decompression programs]
You're my hero!
Even back in the slow-downloading BBS days, you were ready to uncompress any porno that came your way!
Forget Al Gore! It's visionaries like you who created teh IntarWeb!
[For an Orkut invitation] Sure thing. Email me at dojothemouse@mac.com
Oh, you're not fooling us, Mr. Ashcroft!
dojothemouse@mac.com
And neither are you, Michael Eisner!!
I play about a dozen WC III games a week
Water Closet 3 games? Is that some "watersport" you play with Tub Girl?
Dear God. So it was the Athenians who started this whole survivor mess....
If only they hadn't forced Jeff "Anal" Probst to drink hemlock, they'd be around still.
You have no idea how difficult it is to "just fix it." You're asking developers to write an algorithm that recognizes bad behavior; that recognizes when someone is intentionally playing badly as opposed to unsuccessfully trying to play well.
The Athenians knew how to just fix it. Once a year they'd hold an election; the person getting the most votes -- ostrakons, for the shell or potshard used in voting -- would be ostracized, banished, for a year.
Do it monthly, and I bet you'd see a lot less griefing.
Other Indian cities are watching the results closely.
Hell, I'm watching it closely. How is this too different from what presidential candidate Howard Dean proposed for this country?
Oh, right, Dean proposed that all computers, whether in an internet cafe or in your home, be equipped with a card reader to scan your national id card* prior to letting you access the internet.
* Ok, inter-operable state-issued id cards.
(Please note, up until hearing about this I was leaning Dean in my search for the right "Anybody But Bush" candidate. But since my major problem with Bush is his administration's willingness to abrogate our civil rights, I want to be sure that the Democrat I vote for will protect our traditional American rights. And Dean had already raised concerns with Vermont's ACLU when he announced that views about privacy would change post 9-11.)
Can be done on a linux point of view by saying that I also have both worlds, when running linux, by using win4lin.
But win4Lin is almost $90 more than Cygwin, and it doesn't support Windows 2000 or XP. No way I'm going to run Windows 98 ever again, emulated or not.
But thanks for the info; it is an alternative that works for you and, I assume, others.
Well, If I were a manufacturer I would charge a good price of 200-300 for the book
For $300 I can buy a Sharp Zaurus which already has a 320x240 display with 65536 shades of "gray". That is, it's full color.
True, it doesn't roll-up, but it does fit into a pant or jacket pocket, and the screen doesn't wear out in "months". (From the article: "Further, 'the life of our organic electronics displays has been already prolonged from "hours to months"'".)
But it does run just about any program you'd care to write, including web browsers and Doom and e-book readers. So I lose the roll-up and gain a full-featured, in color, hand-held computer.
Your price point needs some work.
You could charge 10 bucks (average book price) for new books to add as well.
I beg your pardon? You can't compare e-book prices to hardbacks; the form-factor is even smaller than paperbacks, and so is the production cost. Paperbacks cost about $8.00 these days, and I would expect a cut for eliminating he dead-tree and distribution costs. I'd say $4.00 per book, perhaps somewhat more for the newest releases.
*nix people are NOT more technical by nature. I know DOZENS of Linux "geeks" who compile their own software only because of easy compile scripts and easy packages.
Actually, I suspect *nix people may well be more technical; *nix encourages the idea of (for example) stringing together awk | sed | cut | sort | grep to do things that under Windows would almost always be implemented as a monolithic program.
But let me second (part of) the parent poster's comment: compilation is so ridiculously easy these days on linux-y systems.
I remember when I -- a professional programmer -- hesitated to compile unfamiliar source, because of conflicting headers, non-standard "Standards" (before C++98/C99, everyone and his brother had a different idea of what bool should be), and other gotchas.
These problems have largely disappeared on linux-y systems, thanks mostly to configure scripts. Nowadays, I have no real worries about downloading source I'd never heard of before, and I'm surprised if it doesn't compile cleanly the first time.
Funnily enough, I do most of my compiling not under linux per se, but Cygwin. And most of what I've been doing recently has been cross-compiling, for the SH-1 and the StrongArm processors. Still, I have few problems, mostly because of the configure scripts.
If you've never used a configure script, it compiles a battery of test code in such a way as to test for any particularities of your environment, and adapts the Makefile to your system.
Nor are decent Makefiles limited to linux-y environments; Neil Hodgson, in addition to writing the excellent SciTE editor, also makes the source available with Makefiles that perform flawlessly for a number of compilers -- I was able to compile using the Borland command line compiler "out of the box" using Neil's Borland makefile.
What I dread these days are "Integrated Development Environments" with "projects" or other proprietary replacements for Makefiles. True, the Makefile is a dated and awkward format that goes so far as to (disastrously, if you don't know about it!) make semantic distinctions between spaces and tabs. But it also works most anywhere.
Recently, I took an app written for Qt on some linux distribution, and after a few days of compensating for the fact that it used the 3.x QT libraries and I was using 2.3.3, I was able to cross-compile it under Cygwin for my Sharp Zaurus. Other than implementing Qt 3.x functionality using Qt 2.3.3 classes, the configure script took care of all the work for me.
The parent poster also wrote "Linux is far superior there. But, as it stands, Windows is still a better desktop OS."
With Cygwin under Windows 2000, and a policy of using programs -- like Mozilla -- that are Open and exist in both MS-Windows and Linux -- I really think I have the best of both worlds.
CmdrTaco has no obligation to do anything.
Of course he doesn't.
He's helped us all. Don't say that you don't like slashdot.
I didn't say I don't like slashdot. I like it a lot, nd I respect CmdrTaco for his efforts to realize his vision of Slashdot. (And I appreciated getting to an "Excellent Karma" after being here only a month.)
Criticizing one thing that Taco does or does not do is in no way tantamount to disliking Slashdot or CmdrTaco. Indeed, it's a measure of my respect for Taco that I criticized him at all; I would not have been surprised, if, for instance, Darl McBride announced he was a DirecTV subscriber, nor would I have wasted any breath trying to convince Darl McBride to act from his principles.
Too many people these days equate any criticism with enmity or disloyalty. This is especially prevalent in the current U.S. administration: any dissent, any questioning of policy is tarred as giving aid to "the terrorists".
It's because I'm a patriot that I question the "Patriot Act"; it's because I respect Taco and enjoy Slashdot that bother to point out the ideological dimensions of his decision to support DirecTV.
(thanks to people like you who post good comments!). It's a community and the leader may disagree with you. That's OK, right?
Of course it's OK if someone disagrees. Who knows, I might even be wrong. Highly unlikely, of course. <grin> Discussion and debate -- and not down-mods -- are what makes Slashdot so valuable. (And thanks for the praise.)
well, everybody has their hobby horse. i'll bet if i look at your credit card statements, i'll see a raft of purchases from amazon.com....
No, you wouldn't. I avoid buying from Amazon, both because of the "One-Click" patent, and because of some issues with Amazon not removing addresses from their email lists when requested to.
True, I won't return a gift if a relative purchases something from Amazon.
just because you own a keyboard doesn't mean you're required to type on it.
That's a dismissive ad-hominem attack that's designed to suggest my opinions aren't relevant, while at the same not requiring you to present any evidence of that or counter-argument to my opinions. While I congratulate you on your ability to learn from Karl Rove, I'll also suggest that real discussion and debate are more valuable than smirking slams.
As to the issue itself, you are right that we have to choose our battles; some injustices are greater threats than others.
I submit that what DirecTV's barratry is an injustice that deserves our attention. Anytime we allow a private corporation to declare that a particular technology is illegitimate just because it might be used to infringe that business's copyright, we allow any technology that threatens any corporation's bottom line to be arbitrarily declared off-limits.
Smart card programming hardware today, non-DRM'd motherboards tomorrow. This is a major issue, perhaps the central issue, as far as technological freedom is concerned. It's something that every Slashdot reader should rally around.
So yes, we must choose our battles, but how can we not choose this battle?
As far as CmdrTaco is concerned, I was perhaps overly harsh -- I lead from my heart -- in my first post. I respect CmdrTaco and what he has built in Slashdot, and so was even more amazed to learn he subscribes to DirecTV.
I hope that CmdrTaco, aware of his influence and the respect he is accorded, will reconsider his decision to subsidize DirecTV, and consider leading by example in what is nothing less than a fight for out freedoms.
You know, people make the statement that taco is out of touch with the slashdot community, and I dont think anything illustrates this point as much as the fact that he's on dialup.
I've got a better illustration. How about this:
I already use DirecTV?
I've vowed not to ever subscribe to DirecTV, because of DirecTV's policy of suing purchasers of smart card programming hardware, regardless of whether or not that hardware was used to intercept DirecTV's transmissions.
That's pure harassment and barratry by a company that knows that even if it loses it can ruin its victims by running up their costs to defend themselves.
And I know about this abuse of process and restraint of trade because I read about it, and the EFF's fight against it, on Slashdot: here and here and here.
But is CmdrTaco taking a stand? Hell no! At the same time the EFF files an amicus brief with the 11th Circuit appeal of DirecTV's suit, CmdrTaco is paying DirectTV $25.00 a month (or whatever the subscription fee is) to sit back and watch reruns of Die Hard II.
And people wonder why "Your Rights Online" keep getting trampled under by Big Corporations and Big Brother -- because even a so-called "geek leader" prefers sitting on his ass as a comfortable couch potato to standing up for a principle.
Really Taco, I expected better from you. Stand up for something -- show some leadership -- and ditch your DirecTV in the most public way you can.