Lots of people are confusing SAP, the enterprise application software, with SAP DB, the open source database that SAP develops so customers have a free back end for the expensive SAP application software.
Oracle seems to be the most popular back end for SAP applications, but SAP doesn't trust Oracle not to try to steal its customers for Oracle's own application software. Also, the expense of Oracle's database reduces the amount a company can spend on SAP software. So SAP pays dozens of developers to build a free Oracle alternative.
books should also have some backwards compatibiltiy discussion. for instance: $_POST vs. $HTTP_POST_VARS.
Yup, Luke & Laura talk about the difference between the new $_POST array and $HTTP_POST_VARS, which it replaces, as well as the use of global post variables (which are now disabled by default). They take the reasonable approach of using $HTTP_POST_VARS in their examples because it's most compatible.
I remember in my Turbo Pascal programming days (heh) that a lot of people said that using Units would degrade performance. So I tried it both ways and it never really made a difference, for my applications anyways.
That's a good example of optimization tip that is "true" yet useless. Turbo Pascal used a 64K code segment for each unit, so function calls within the main program were "near" calls and function calls to another unit were "far" calls. Each far call made the code one byte bigger than each near call, and used an extra two bytes of stack space while the call was active. (Rubenking, Turbo Pascal 6.0 Techniques and Utilities.) The processor also had to save the CS register before a far call, then restore it afterward, but the performance difference would probably be measured in millionths of a second - possibly measurable in a big tight loop, but certainly not noticeable in a program that did any useful work.
I don't put much stock in performance tips that are offered without explanation. And in deciding whether to use a tip, I weigh not only the performance trade-offs (near call vs. far call) but also the programming trade-offs (single source file vs. modular code). End-users want reliable functionality, and efficient programming practices often make more difference than code tweaks.
I don't think Monty understands any of this; in the article he seems to say that ACID, rather than being a fundamental principle of relational databases, is just something you need to do because disks are slower than RAM.
In fairness to Monty, it's his interviewer, Peter Wayner, who suggests that ACID is just for keeping RAM and disk synchronized. Monty at one point cautions, "You still need commit/rollback, as this functionality is still very useful on the application level."
Find out about programming contests in your area, maybe sponsored by a college or tech business. Check news:comp.programming.contests on Usenet. Your school may get invitations that are now being filed in the trash because there's no one to give them to. Tell your school's administration you want to field a team. They'll like the possibility of greater glory for your school, and the teamwork and competition are fun.
I volunteered for four years at a public high school that needed a "coach" for a programming team, for an annual competion hosted by the state university. At the time, the school didn't have a teacher who knew enough about programming to invent practice problems and answer questions that weren't answered in their introductory textbook's teacher's edition. They put a call for a volunteer out to the local computer user group I was in, and I volunteered and spent a couple hours a week to help give the kids' hacking a little direction. I showed them a few algorithms and data structures, taught them to partition problems for team competitions, and they showed me the games they were writing in their free time. It was fun for all concerned, and a couple of the guys went on to CMU and MIT.
Programming is often a solitary activity, but as the Extreme Programmers have found, it's fun and productive to do it as a team. Good luck with your group.
They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.
The science curriculum in a lot of schools doesn't seem to have changed much since the 19th century. (Interstellar gas was discovered in 1904.) Thesepageswillgetyoucurrent.
Your child's brain is a mass of neurons that will be ordering itself with tens of thousands of new synapses every day. This self-ordering is based on the child's experience, and the experience that most shapes the child's personal qualities and capacities will be social interaction. You and your wife should be the ones doing the interacting; do not trust this critical job to hired help, which tends to treat infants as houseplants.
Social interaction with infants is not the same as social interaction with adults. It's physical as well as verbal. A baby needs cuddling and holding, and later pat-a-cake and horsey-back rides. A child needs to hear loving voices and see eye contact and facial expressions that help explain the meaning of the words. No television; it teaches only passivity. Your baby doesn't need to hear Mozart, but gentle music is good, and your child will thrive on the rhythm and melody and words and familiar voice of your singing. My singing and guitar playing also relieved my baby's constipation once, but I'm not sure whether that was a sign of relaxation or a comment.
You and your wife cannot both have jobs with long hours. Unless your wife makes a lot more money, it is more practical for her to step back from her career so she can more easily breastfeed and follow the baby's sleep/wake schedule. Depending on her relationship with her employer, her intention regarding future references, and her benefits package, she might want to keep her mommying intentions to herself until after she has exhausted her paid maternity leave. The law guarantees she can have her job after unpaid leave, so she is legally protected in taking time off when the baby is born and making a final decision in a few months about whether to return.
You will need to step back from your hobbies and long hours at work too. You will want to spend as much time as possible with your child, and you'll also need to help your wife. Get used to a less expensive lifestyle (no leisure travel, no dining out) and save money for when your wife's income stops. Budget, get organized, put your affairs in order because no matter how busy you think you are now, you are on vacation compared to after you have a baby.
If you want to have another baby, do it soon after the first. We had trouble getting pregnant at first, but once the machinery started working it stayed in gear, and we (rather unexpectedly) got pregnant again when our first child was nine months old. It seemed difficult at first, but it was great because we were in the routine and the kids (now 6-1/2 and 5) are best friends. I was and am also very close to my brothers who are a year and two years younger.
Speaking of my wife's and my pregnancy, she would say it was in fact her pregnancy and only hers. Women find this point increasingly important as pregnancy progresses and becomes less comfortable. Whatever.
As soon as my first child was born I realized that I'm nothing but a link in a chain. Raising your children is not just the most important thing you'll ever do; it is, in the grand scheme, the only thing you'll ever do. Enjoy it and do it right.
A regional blackout would hardly be less disruptive to civilians (in that region) than a degradation of precision.
Look, my point, which may have been lost (judging by the flamebait mods) in my frustration, is that civilians could be hurt if GPS were blacked out or degraded, and there is no reason to believe that precise GPS can significantly help Iraq. High-precision GPS was designed so our ICBMs (and now cruise missiles and smart bombs) could hit hardened targets like missile silos and command bunkers, or limit collateral damage. But (1) Iraq doesn't need any of those uses, either to defend itself against U.S. forces or to terrorize its civilian enemies, and (2) that kind of use requires guidance systems that Iraq doesn't have.
It's the irrationality of the fear that makes it paranoid. And it's the damage to civilian uses, some of which save lives, that makes the paranoia stupid.
This is another example of the dangerous paranoia you get when earnest idiots get responsibility.
If it weren't for GPS, there'd be nine dead coal miners in Pennsylvania. Precise GPS has never hurt anyone, and has saved lives. It's nice to be able to point to a benefit the U.S. has provided mankind. Count on our jackass government to want to take it back.
If you have rockstar programmers who know the difference between saving keystrokes and saving cpu time, and know that shifting logic load to your DB server is generally a BAD thing, you're going to find that you can almost always do things faster (often much faster) in MySQL.
I hope your "rockstar" programmers are more discriminating in deciding what tasks are best offloaded to clients. If a task requires manipulation of a large amount of data to produce a small result set, it's faster (for the end users) if you do it on the server, because server CPUs are fast and transmission of raw data to clients is slow. Client computer CPUs have lots of spare capacity, but network connections do not.
Yes, Microsoft invested similar amounts in Apple and Borland when they were on the ropes. In those cases, like Corel's, it seemed that Microsoft wanted to keep an appearance of competition in the marketplace. Microsoft doesn't feel as much legal need to maintain those appearances anymore.
Apple and Borland were able to use their new leases on life to focus on profitable market niches. It seems that Corel hasn't been able to find a niche that is sufficiently sheltered from Microsoft's dominance while being profitable enough to carry the company.
We could ask SCO, "fine, you've got the source, show us the alleged Unix IP-infringing code".
SCO's claims aren't limited to source code. SCO makes no claim of copyright infringement, though such a claim would be expected if source code had been stolen. SCO's complaint alleges (1) misappropriation of trade secrets, (2) unfair competition, (3) interference with contract, and (4) breach of contract. The trade secrets that IBM allegedly stole were SCO's "unique know how, concepts, ideas, methodologies, standards, specifications, programming, techniques, UNIX Software Code, object code, architecture, design and schematics that allow UNIX to operate with unmatched extensibility, scalability, reliability and security." (par. 105)
It takes chutzpa for SCO to claim that it could do things with operating systems that IBM couldn't. I predict there will ultimately be a charred and smoking gash in the land where SCO now stands.
Memo to self: When comment is rated (Score:5, Funny), do not take big drink of water before starting to read, or damage to monitor and/or nasal passages may result.
Voyager, not Pioneer, took a "Golden Record" with encoded images, spoken greetings in dozens of languages, a variety of natural and human sounds, and an anthology of music from around the world, including both classical (e.g. Bach) and popular (e.g. Chuck Berry) selections.
The record is 12 inches in diameter and plays at 16 2/3 r.p.m. The long-playing record of the day played at 33 1/3 r.p.m., but Carl Sagan's committee had the foresight to predict that advanced extraterrestrials would get double the music by playing their LPs at half the speed.
Just kidding. Sagan's committee included instructions for playing the record, and even a phonograph needle cartridge. I hope the species that finds it has ears.
Pioneer 10's mission continues. Let's not forget the plaque that Pioneer 10 carries. It was world famous when the probe was launched, because it was mankind's first attempt to communicate beyond the solar system. Carl Sagan designed the plaque to be universally (in the truest sense) comprehensible, at least to any civilization sufficiently advanced to capture it. Next to the map of the probe's origin relative to our galaxy, with its key in binary notation, was an etching of a generic man and woman, superimposed on an outline of Pioneer to give a sense of scale. The man's arm was raised in a gesture that Sagan hoped would suggest friendship. Especially given the public's then-new awareness of threats to humanity's survival as a species, there was something very poignant about this cosmic message in a bottle that had no chance of being seen by anyone for millions of years.
I remember a newspaper cartoon from the day. A man in a business suit and a woman in a dress were looking at the plaque on Pioneer, which was half buried in the ground. The man said to the woman, "They seem very similar to us, except that they don't wear clothes."
Goddard Space Flight Center, outside D.C., had the longest running series of model rocket launches in the country. The twice-a-month launches were well run and closely supervised, but Goddard suspended the program after 9/11. It's a shame; one of my son's earliest memories is a "girl with a green rocket" he saw at a launch I took him to when he was a toddler, and he was excited about flying his own rocket. Now we have to drive 100 miles farther to get to an organized launch.
A few years ago, I bought 3 Dells with Pentium 133s from a company that was upgrading, for $85 each. Non-expandable 32MB RAM, with 810MB hard disk. Resold one, gave another to my preschoolers to bang on, and set the third up as a test server: SuSE Linux was too tight a fit, so I installed FreeBSD (text shell of course), Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It's dandy for learning *nix and testing code. And when I route port 80 to it, I can read the logs and see all the squibs the script kiddies are throwing at Windows boxes.
Folks, the forms are no more complicated than the software. To the extent the forms are more complicated, the software is oversimplifying the law. Save yourself a few bucks and just fill in the forms by hand.
I started watching this trailer with some interest, until about halfway through. Suddenly, a geriatric, slurring scotsman appeared on the screen and delivered a line which destroyed the moment.
I, on the other hand, watched with no interest until Sean Connery appeared. He provides the wry wink that you need in this kind of comic book fantasy, to make it seem like some intelligence may be mixed in with the posing and flashpots.
Everyone's saying this movie is set in Victorian England. Queen Victoria ruled until 1901. That car, and the WWII-style German helmets, don't look "Victorian" to me.
And besides the Victorian anachronisms, why is it never daytime there?
Re:DNA Aging, DNA Rejuvenating?
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 1
Thanks, Google, for saving me the fee of a patent lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of people are confusing SAP, the enterprise application software, with SAP DB, the open source database that SAP develops so customers have a free back end for the expensive SAP application software.
Oracle seems to be the most popular back end for SAP applications, but SAP doesn't trust Oracle not to try to steal its customers for Oracle's own application software. Also, the expense of Oracle's database reduces the amount a company can spend on SAP software. So SAP pays dozens of developers to build a free Oracle alternative.
I don't put much stock in performance tips that are offered without explanation. And in deciding whether to use a tip, I weigh not only the performance trade-offs (near call vs. far call) but also the programming trade-offs (single source file vs. modular code). End-users want reliable functionality, and efficient programming practices often make more difference than code tweaks.
Find out about programming contests in your area, maybe sponsored by a college or tech business. Check news:comp.programming.contests on Usenet. Your school may get invitations that are now being filed in the trash because there's no one to give them to. Tell your school's administration you want to field a team. They'll like the possibility of greater glory for your school, and the teamwork and competition are fun.
I volunteered for four years at a public high school that needed a "coach" for a programming team, for an annual competion hosted by the state university. At the time, the school didn't have a teacher who knew enough about programming to invent practice problems and answer questions that weren't answered in their introductory textbook's teacher's edition. They put a call for a volunteer out to the local computer user group I was in, and I volunteered and spent a couple hours a week to help give the kids' hacking a little direction. I showed them a few algorithms and data structures, taught them to partition problems for team competitions, and they showed me the games they were writing in their free time. It was fun for all concerned, and a couple of the guys went on to CMU and MIT.
Programming is often a solitary activity, but as the Extreme Programmers have found, it's fun and productive to do it as a team. Good luck with your group.
Your child's brain is a mass of neurons that will be ordering itself with tens of thousands of new synapses every day. This self-ordering is based on the child's experience, and the experience that most shapes the child's personal qualities and capacities will be social interaction. You and your wife should be the ones doing the interacting; do not trust this critical job to hired help, which tends to treat infants as houseplants.
Social interaction with infants is not the same as social interaction with adults. It's physical as well as verbal. A baby needs cuddling and holding, and later pat-a-cake and horsey-back rides. A child needs to hear loving voices and see eye contact and facial expressions that help explain the meaning of the words. No television; it teaches only passivity. Your baby doesn't need to hear Mozart, but gentle music is good, and your child will thrive on the rhythm and melody and words and familiar voice of your singing. My singing and guitar playing also relieved my baby's constipation once, but I'm not sure whether that was a sign of relaxation or a comment.
You and your wife cannot both have jobs with long hours. Unless your wife makes a lot more money, it is more practical for her to step back from her career so she can more easily breastfeed and follow the baby's sleep/wake schedule. Depending on her relationship with her employer, her intention regarding future references, and her benefits package, she might want to keep her mommying intentions to herself until after she has exhausted her paid maternity leave. The law guarantees she can have her job after unpaid leave, so she is legally protected in taking time off when the baby is born and making a final decision in a few months about whether to return.
You will need to step back from your hobbies and long hours at work too. You will want to spend as much time as possible with your child, and you'll also need to help your wife. Get used to a less expensive lifestyle (no leisure travel, no dining out) and save money for when your wife's income stops. Budget, get organized, put your affairs in order because no matter how busy you think you are now, you are on vacation compared to after you have a baby.
If you want to have another baby, do it soon after the first. We had trouble getting pregnant at first, but once the machinery started working it stayed in gear, and we (rather unexpectedly) got pregnant again when our first child was nine months old. It seemed difficult at first, but it was great because we were in the routine and the kids (now 6-1/2 and 5) are best friends. I was and am also very close to my brothers who are a year and two years younger.
Speaking of my wife's and my pregnancy, she would say it was in fact her pregnancy and only hers. Women find this point increasingly important as pregnancy progresses and becomes less comfortable. Whatever.
As soon as my first child was born I realized that I'm nothing but a link in a chain. Raising your children is not just the most important thing you'll ever do; it is, in the grand scheme, the only thing you'll ever do. Enjoy it and do it right.
A regional blackout would hardly be less disruptive to civilians (in that region) than a degradation of precision.
Look, my point, which may have been lost (judging by the flamebait mods) in my frustration, is that civilians could be hurt if GPS were blacked out or degraded, and there is no reason to believe that precise GPS can significantly help Iraq. High-precision GPS was designed so our ICBMs (and now cruise missiles and smart bombs) could hit hardened targets like missile silos and command bunkers, or limit collateral damage. But (1) Iraq doesn't need any of those uses, either to defend itself against U.S. forces or to terrorize its civilian enemies, and (2) that kind of use requires guidance systems that Iraq doesn't have.
It's the irrationality of the fear that makes it paranoid. And it's the damage to civilian uses, some of which save lives, that makes the paranoia stupid.
This is another example of the dangerous paranoia you get when earnest idiots get responsibility.
If it weren't for GPS, there'd be nine dead coal miners in Pennsylvania. Precise GPS has never hurt anyone, and has saved lives. It's nice to be able to point to a benefit the U.S. has provided mankind. Count on our jackass government to want to take it back.
Yes, Microsoft invested similar amounts in Apple and Borland when they were on the ropes. In those cases, like Corel's, it seemed that Microsoft wanted to keep an appearance of competition in the marketplace. Microsoft doesn't feel as much legal need to maintain those appearances anymore.
Apple and Borland were able to use their new leases on life to focus on profitable market niches. It seems that Corel hasn't been able to find a niche that is sufficiently sheltered from Microsoft's dominance while being profitable enough to carry the company.
Hell, if people saw their own Slashdot usage, they'd be appalled.
... and I never buy the combo meal. I'll pass on the WiFi until they offer 30 minutes of it with the Dollar Menu.
It takes chutzpa for SCO to claim that it could do things with operating systems that IBM couldn't. I predict there will ultimately be a charred and smoking gash in the land where SCO now stands.
Memo to self: When comment is rated (Score:5, Funny), do not take big drink of water before starting to read, or damage to monitor and/or nasal passages may result.
Voyager, not Pioneer, took a "Golden Record" with encoded images, spoken greetings in dozens of languages, a variety of natural and human sounds, and an anthology of music from around the world, including both classical (e.g. Bach) and popular (e.g. Chuck Berry) selections.
The record is 12 inches in diameter and plays at 16 2/3 r.p.m. The long-playing record of the day played at 33 1/3 r.p.m., but Carl Sagan's committee had the foresight to predict that advanced extraterrestrials would get double the music by playing their LPs at half the speed.
Just kidding. Sagan's committee included instructions for playing the record, and even a phonograph needle cartridge. I hope the species that finds it has ears.
NASA has published a brief history and a depiction of the plaque.
Pioneer 10's mission continues. Let's not forget the plaque that Pioneer 10 carries. It was world famous when the probe was launched, because it was mankind's first attempt to communicate beyond the solar system. Carl Sagan designed the plaque to be universally (in the truest sense) comprehensible, at least to any civilization sufficiently advanced to capture it. Next to the map of the probe's origin relative to our galaxy, with its key in binary notation, was an etching of a generic man and woman, superimposed on an outline of Pioneer to give a sense of scale. The man's arm was raised in a gesture that Sagan hoped would suggest friendship. Especially given the public's then-new awareness of threats to humanity's survival as a species, there was something very poignant about this cosmic message in a bottle that had no chance of being seen by anyone for millions of years.
I remember a newspaper cartoon from the day. A man in a business suit and a woman in a dress were looking at the plaque on Pioneer, which was half buried in the ground. The man said to the woman, "They seem very similar to us, except that they don't wear clothes."
Goddard Space Flight Center, outside D.C., had the longest running series of model rocket launches in the country. The twice-a-month launches were well run and closely supervised, but Goddard suspended the program after 9/11. It's a shame; one of my son's earliest memories is a "girl with a green rocket" he saw at a launch I took him to when he was a toddler, and he was excited about flying his own rocket. Now we have to drive 100 miles farther to get to an organized launch.
A few years ago, I bought 3 Dells with Pentium 133s from a company that was upgrading, for $85 each. Non-expandable 32MB RAM, with 810MB hard disk. Resold one, gave another to my preschoolers to bang on, and set the third up as a test server: SuSE Linux was too tight a fit, so I installed FreeBSD (text shell of course), Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It's dandy for learning *nix and testing code. And when I route port 80 to it, I can read the logs and see all the squibs the script kiddies are throwing at Windows boxes.
Folks, the forms are no more complicated than the software. To the extent the forms are more complicated, the software is oversimplifying the law. Save yourself a few bucks and just fill in the forms by hand.
Everyone's saying this movie is set in Victorian England. Queen Victoria ruled until 1901. That car, and the WWII-style German helmets, don't look "Victorian" to me.
And besides the Victorian anachronisms, why is it never daytime there?
Thanks, Google, for saving me the fee of a patent lawyer.