"Problem is, from an average desktop user's perspective, rebooting X is the same as rebooting the system."
Oh, great, another stupid reason to denounce Linux!
Jesus, some people simply shouldn't be allowed to have computers...
So you have to "reboot" to install a new driver! Big fucking deal! With Windows you have to reboot to FART, for Christ's sake - not to mention total system lockups you can't fix with a simple "reboot" of X.
Should OS's be able to update themselves without restarting ANYTHING? OF COURSE, MORONS! When some of the idiots who write OS's get their head out of their ass and have some fucking clue what an OS should be able to do (hint: there should be no such thing as "applications" - an "application" should just be something the OS knows how to do), maybe we'll see some improvement.
In the meantime, as I've complained about a hundred fucking times, Microsoft pisses away 37 BILLION GODDAMN DOLLARS on a one-time stock prop scheme instead of at least TRYING to make things easier for people...
Compared to This, bringing up the necessity to restart X as a comparison to Windows is just plain fucking STUPID!
(Note: I'm not necessarily screaming at the poster to whom I've responded - I'm screaming about the idiots at Microsoft and the further idiot geeks who design OS's without a clue.)
"Route Force (Vernon) runs North/South and does not intersect with either the airport or the Green Zone."
Problem with this is twofold: first, the US report states specifically that Route Vernon leads to an intersection with Route Irish essentially at the on-ramp to the Airport. Second, how to explain why Sgrena said they entered the Green Zone to get to the road - this is very clear in Klein's interview. If Sgrena is entirely wrong about this, then I might accept it, but there seems to be no reason to believe this. It also does not explain why the fact that they were on Route Vernon is almost completely ignored in the US report except to explain how they got to Route Irish - which is heavily emphasized in the report as being dangerous (as we know it is).
Vis-a-vis the car, as I indicated, I can't find the report I read. A Google search has found this FindLaw page which reports from the Associated Press the following:
Analysis of the gunfire damage to the vehicle is expected to provide crucial information about how close the soldiers were to the car and from what angle they fired. Photos of the car shown on Italian TV show its side windows shattered and bullet holes on the side of the vehicle.
Photos aired by RAI, state TV's main evening news program, showed the light grey Toyota Corolla that Calipari and Sgrena were riding in, which is still in Iraq in the hands of the U.S. military.
The body of the car appeared to have little or no damage on its left side and front, including the lights. A few bullet holes are visible on the right side _ near the wheel and the front door.
Inside, the seats appear to be covered in glass, although the photos of the interior are grainy. A bullet hole also is evident in the back seat on the left side, where Sgrena reportedly was sitting.
As to the wisdom of roadblocking, I wasn't referring to this specific case - I was referring to the fact that using checkpoints and roadblocks is a useless tactic against the resistance and has virtually no effect in the overall strategy against them.
I'm not too concerned about the santizing of the scene, but it certainly works in the US's favor. The Italian analysis of the vehicle won't really determine much other than the general direction the bullets came from relative to the car. I haven't seen the full Italian report on that since it's in Italian - I'm waiting for a translated version to show up on the Net.
My conclusion at this point is that the shooting was an accident at best and totally unnecessary at worst, and worse, that the exoneration of the troops involved will merely continue to cause problems for Iraqi civilians and others in the area. When the Pentagon becomes capable of admitting mistakes - and that is the real fundamental problem - things might change but I'm not holding my breath.
As for whether they passed a checkpoint to get onto the road, according to the Naomi Klein article on her conversation with Sgrena, there is no way to get on this road except by going into the Green Zone (which the Italians claim they did) and then getting onto the road. According to Klein, there is no way to get into the Green Zone without passing at least six checkpoints where your passport is checked.
Here is the quote:
"It was a secured road reserved for top Embassy officials, like obviously like Negroponte. But one thing that's very clear is that if she is on this road, and the way she explains it, she had to go through a U.S. checkpoint in order to get into the Green Zone. You can only access this road through the Green Zone. It's very, very difficult to get into the Green Zone. When I tried to get into the Green Zone, I had to go through six checkpoints -- six different passport checks. So, the idea that the American military didn't know that they were on the road, that they -- that didn't know about their presence is impossible, if she was, in fact, on a road that emerged out of the Green Zone."
Now I have read the US military report (not every word, but I scanned it pretty thoroughly). My comments are as follows:
I notice virtually nothing is said about Route Vernon - everything is centered on Route Irish. The report spends several pages detailing the insurgency operations on Route Irish. Apparently since the airport approach requires turning OFF Route Vernon onto Route Irish for the final approach, this is considered justification for ignoring Route Vernon and however you get on it. I find that interesting and suspicious.
Second, it seems clear from the Naomi Klein interview that the Italians did indeed go into the Green Zone to access Route Vernon. If this is true, then the entire US military story collapses as there is no way these people could be sent to the airport without someone a) knowing who they were and WHY they were being allowed to the Secure Zone at the airport and b) communicating this fact to command at the Airport. (Whether the US personnel in the Green Zone knew it was Sgrena is perhaps a different issue - if not, I'd say their checkpoint identification procedures were extremely sloppy!)
Third, it seems to be irrelevant whether Captain Green, the US liason to the Italian General in command of the operation, was informed as to who was coming or why. The fact is that if they entered the Green Zone and then proceeded to the airport - and especially if it is true that the Italian agents in the car were in near-continuous cell phone contact with their counterparts at the airport (given that there was a plane waiting for them, it would seem obvious that somebody knew about it) - then it is clear that US command HAD to be informed that they were en route to the Airport. The report merely spends a couple pages listing everybody who DIDN'T know anything at all about the operation or their approach "until after the shooting". This is coverup language at its best, quite frankly. Green had to be covered because he was in direct contact with the man in charge of the operation, the Italian General - but that is irrelevant since there is no particular reason Green would have to know who was coming - only that SOMEONE was coming. This is excused by saying he misinterpreted a comment from the General as a direct order not to tell anyone on the US side. Convenient - but not believable since it is not believable that he was the only one who knew they were coming. Again, leaving out the whole early process of how the Italians got on to Route Vernon is the key to the whole story.
Fourth, the Army's account that all rounds fired entered the front and right side of the vehicle has been discounted. Pictures of the vehicle described in the press (according to one report I read today which I can't find now) indicate no evidence of rounds striking the front of the vehicle, only the right side and rear. Sgrena is very clear about being hit from BEHIND
The '60's "love children" caused an economic bust in the '70's? What kind of bullshit is that? Since when were '60's "flower children" in charge of the US economy?
As I recall, it was people like Johnson and Nixon who undermined the gold standard and crashed the "Go-Go" years - which were mostly about people like Bernie Cornfield and Robert Vesco anyway...Not to mention prolonging an expensive failed war...
Not to mention that the Sixties had just as many and varied personalities in it as the current day - you had "peace freaks", you had "revolutionaries" like Abbie Hoffman, you had "drug techies", you had everything.
I sat most of it out in high school, the Army, and unemployment in Connecticut, so I missed most of it. But I've read some of the stuff that came out of it in the political and philosophical realm, so to dismiss it all as "flower children" is just idiotic.
It had its influence as all things do, but today it IS mostly irrelevant - so I suspect Markoff's book is irrelevant, too.
The future belongs to Transhumanism, which is a lot older - and newer - than the Sixties. If you want to look for influences on the past and future, check out "Great Mamo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis. Great read.
"There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist."
That'll be about another fifty years - one hundred tops.
We Transhumans personally think most of the record of your existence should be expunged so others evolving elsewhere in the universe won't get a bad view of our origins...
It'd be like Einstein having to reveal his parents were Jed and Ellie Mae Clampett...(Yes, I know the relationship...)
"I imagine they've pretty much got it down to a science by now."
Must have - Bush is on something...
Though it looks like simply cocaine and alcohol plus various medicines for his recurring skin cancer...
(Or is that AIDS? We ARE still wondering why Jeff Gannon had check-in but not check-out times from the White House Secret Service logs...Who was he servicing in what bedroom in the White House?)
"And everybody on the dark side attacks Groklaw these days, including Ms. O'Gara, not just Daniel Wallace. I'm starting to figure out it's coordinated, not random. They seem to just pass the baton around, taking turns like Nazi interrogators in World War II beating prisoners, so none of them ever got tired but the victim never got a moment's relief, not that it helped them win the war."
As for the syntax, I think when SQL was invented it was around the same time that COBOL was still "cool" - so they borrowed the verbose syntax in the vain hope the result would be "self-documenting".
They failed.
In any event, use a decent SQL IDE that fills in the verbosity - I assume one exists somewhere.
And I think what he meant by "object programmable" (he can correct me if I'm wrong) is like database tables should be objects with embedded methods - which essentially they are with triggers and the like. This is basically what the article said.
My problem with that is OOP languages can be documented. There doesn't appear to be any good way to document an app with a bunch of tables with half the code buried in triggers and the other half buried in GUI forms. I assume some of the UML -type models could handle it but I've never seen anybody actually document a database system this way.
I'm going on the basis of the SCT Banner university management system which is full of Oracle Pro-COBOL and Pro-C code and PL/SQL code tacked onto Oracle Forms full of triggers and retrieval/update behaviors which are totally incomprehensible from an overall system function viewpoint. The documentation is totally written from an end-user viewpoint - how the developers actually manage the system is unknown to me.
I suspect a lot of database stuff is done like that - which means a maintenance nightmare scheduled for the future along with all the whiz-bang buzzwords.
I don't think I'd go so far as to say that there CAN'T be any better theory than the relational model. I don't think the human brain works on the relational model (I could be wrong, but I don't think anybody is in a position to prove that at the moment.) I think we need a decent conceptual processing algorithm or model which would exceed the relational model in expressiveness and precision.
However, it does appear correct to say that the relational model has not been fully applied in existing products and therefore it's premature to suggest that we need to dump it for something else at this juncture - at least if that something else doesn't also provide what the relational model provides - and I haven't heard of any such model.
Not to denigrate the man, his papers go back to 1966 and most of the recent ones have to do with the Sloan Digital Sky Server Data Base (whatever that is).
He has apparently done work in database benchmarking and database modeling, System R, and a variety of other things.
So I'd be inclined to think he knows quite a bit about the history and evolution of current databases - which is what his article is mostly about, as a recap.
But I'm not entirely sure he has any solutions or is even barking up the right tree in his suggestions.
I see no evidence he's on a par with Codd and Date with regard to what is possible with the relational model. I'm not saying he's not, however.
Not being an expert on the current interpretation of the relational model, I wouldn't assume that the needs of analysis necessarily "break" that model.
My limited understanding is that the current crop of SQL languages and database implementation fall short (how much I'm not sure) of what the relational model is capable of. Perhaps that's where we need to start looking for improvements.
In any event, as I've said numerous times before, without some adequate simulation of conceptual processing, it's not likely that the shortcomings of database technology are going to be adequately resolved any time soon. The purpose of all that exists in the database field now is to provide a (very poor) simulation of conceptual and physical reality.
Just last week my boss at City College of San Francisco was "fixing" something in the production database and managed to delete a few thousand records he shouldn't have. He got it back from elsewhere okay, but it shouldn't have happened.
There's a reason developers get development and test databases and DBA's don't allow them to touch production databases.
In defense of my boss, we don't have a snapshot of the production database every night - which you need if you expect your systems people to debug problems in the production database apps. You need live data to reproduce problems frequently, and if you don't have it, you have to muck around in production.
Well, since Microsoft recommends running a separate server for every server function, I imagine they'd say if you want to run two SQL Server databases, you'd best use two SQL Server engines running on two separate Windows Servers on two separate hardware systems - for which of course, you pay for two licenses (and two more for the Windows Servers).
Of course, Oracle with their database layout basically says the same thing - except they want you to put your indexes, your tablespaces, your logs and everything else on at least SEVEN separate servers...
Funny how that works out to mean more licenses to buy...
I view this article as meaning that Microsoft intends to introduce a new "Data Mining Server" - which they will recommend running on yet another Longhorn server running on yet another PC...
This notion of "active databases" seems to me to be interesting but fraught with problems.
Not least of which is the old bugaboo - documentation. How do you document a system composed of myriad triggers scattered on myriad tables in myriad databases communicating over the Net?
All I know from trying to decipher ONE Oracle Forms application at City College of San Francisco is that it is nearly impossible to get a handle on what happens where when. There appears to have been NO effort made by Oracle to enable a coherent method of documenting an application developed with their Forms technology - or of reverse-engineering such an application in order to develop such documentation.
Just printing out a bunch of trigger code and GUI design panels says nothing about how the app actually is supposed to WORK.
Great for obfuscating your proprietary code, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
I was aware of the context.
My complaint was that this is likely to become another "talking point" for Windows trolls.
which are supposed to be the safest and most fuel efficient ever made.
Then he said the jet's systems were Microsoft-based.
So I sent him an email asking: "What's wrong with this picture?" and referencing the Yorktown.
He replied that he was going to research that part some more, but he got the point.
(For the ignorant, the NT-based US Navy ship that had to be towed back to port when NT crashed.)
Second new Ford motto: "Quality is Job - er, where's the Task Manager?"
"End Task"
"The program is not responding. Do you want to end the task?"
"Yes - that's why I clicked 'End Task' - you stupid fucking piece of shit...!"
"Problem is, from an average desktop user's perspective, rebooting X is the same as rebooting the system."
Oh, great, another stupid reason to denounce Linux!
Jesus, some people simply shouldn't be allowed to have computers...
So you have to "reboot" to install a new driver! Big fucking deal! With Windows you have to reboot to FART, for Christ's sake - not to mention total system lockups you can't fix with a simple "reboot" of X.
Should OS's be able to update themselves without restarting ANYTHING? OF COURSE, MORONS! When some of the idiots who write OS's get their head out of their ass and have some fucking clue what an OS should be able to do (hint: there should be no such thing as "applications" - an "application" should just be something the OS knows how to do), maybe we'll see some improvement.
In the meantime, as I've complained about a hundred fucking times, Microsoft pisses away 37 BILLION GODDAMN DOLLARS on a one-time stock prop scheme instead of at least TRYING to make things easier for people...
Compared to This, bringing up the necessity to restart X as a comparison to Windows is just plain fucking STUPID!
(Note: I'm not necessarily screaming at the poster to whom I've responded - I'm screaming about the idiots at Microsoft and the further idiot geeks who design OS's without a clue.)
"Route Force (Vernon) runs North/South and does not intersect with either the airport or the Green Zone."
w s/1110405927318_105815127/?hub=World
Problem with this is twofold: first, the US report states specifically that Route Vernon leads to an intersection with Route Irish essentially at the on-ramp to the Airport. Second, how to explain why Sgrena said they entered the Green Zone to get to the road - this is very clear in Klein's interview. If Sgrena is entirely wrong about this, then I might accept it, but there seems to be no reason to believe this. It also does not explain why the fact that they were on Route Vernon is almost completely ignored in the US report except to explain how they got to Route Irish - which is heavily emphasized in the report as being dangerous (as we know it is).
Vis-a-vis the car, as I indicated, I can't find the report I read. A Google search has found this FindLaw page which reports from the Associated Press the following:
Analysis of the gunfire damage to the vehicle is expected to provide crucial information about how close the soldiers were to the car and from what angle they fired. Photos of the car shown on Italian TV show its side windows shattered and bullet holes on the side of the vehicle.
Ah, I found it - this is the report I read:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNe
Photos aired by RAI, state TV's main evening news program, showed the light grey Toyota Corolla that Calipari and Sgrena were riding in, which is still in Iraq in the hands of the U.S. military.
The body of the car appeared to have little or no damage on its left side and front, including the lights. A few bullet holes are visible on the right side _ near the wheel and the front door.
Inside, the seats appear to be covered in glass, although the photos of the interior are grainy. A bullet hole also is evident in the back seat on the left side, where Sgrena reportedly was sitting.
As to the wisdom of roadblocking, I wasn't referring to this specific case - I was referring to the fact that using checkpoints and roadblocks is a useless tactic against the resistance and has virtually no effect in the overall strategy against them.
I'm not too concerned about the santizing of the scene, but it certainly works in the US's favor. The Italian analysis of the vehicle won't really determine much other than the general direction the bullets came from relative to the car. I haven't seen the full Italian report on that since it's in Italian - I'm waiting for a translated version to show up on the Net.
My conclusion at this point is that the shooting was an accident at best and totally unnecessary at worst, and worse, that the exoneration of the troops involved will merely continue to cause problems for Iraqi civilians and others in the area. When the Pentagon becomes capable of admitting mistakes - and that is the real fundamental problem - things might change but I'm not holding my breath.
As for whether they passed a checkpoint to get onto the road, according to the Naomi Klein article on her conversation with Sgrena, there is no way to get on this road except by going into the Green Zone (which the Italians claim they did) and then getting onto the road. According to Klein, there is no way to get into the Green Zone without passing at least six checkpoints where your passport is checked.
Here is the quote:
"It was a secured road reserved for top Embassy officials, like obviously like Negroponte. But one thing that's very clear is that if she is on this road, and the way she explains it, she had to go through a U.S. checkpoint in order to get into the Green Zone. You can only access this road through the Green Zone. It's very, very difficult to get into the Green Zone. When I tried to get into the Green Zone, I had to go through six checkpoints -- six different passport checks. So, the idea that the American military didn't know that they were on the road, that they -- that didn't know about their presence is impossible, if she was, in fact, on a road that emerged out of the Green Zone."
Now I have read the US military report (not every word, but I scanned it pretty thoroughly). My comments are as follows:
I notice virtually nothing is said about Route Vernon - everything is centered on Route Irish. The report spends several pages detailing the insurgency operations on Route Irish. Apparently since the airport approach requires turning OFF Route Vernon onto Route Irish for the final approach, this is considered justification for ignoring Route Vernon and however you get on it. I find that interesting and suspicious.
Second, it seems clear from the Naomi Klein interview that the Italians did indeed go into the Green Zone to access Route Vernon. If this is true, then the entire US military story collapses as there is no way these people could be sent to the airport without someone a) knowing who they were and WHY they were being allowed to the Secure Zone at the airport and b) communicating this fact to command at the Airport. (Whether the US personnel in the Green Zone knew it was Sgrena is perhaps a different issue - if not, I'd say their checkpoint identification procedures were extremely sloppy!)
Third, it seems to be irrelevant whether Captain Green, the US liason to the Italian General in command of the operation, was informed as to who was coming or why. The fact is that if they entered the Green Zone and then proceeded to the airport - and especially if it is true that the Italian agents in the car were in near-continuous cell phone contact with their counterparts at the airport (given that there was a plane waiting for them, it would seem obvious that somebody knew about it) - then it is clear that US command HAD to be informed that they were en route to the Airport. The report merely spends a couple pages listing everybody who DIDN'T know anything at all about the operation or their approach "until after the shooting". This is coverup language at its best, quite frankly. Green had to be covered because he was in direct contact with the man in charge of the operation, the Italian General - but that is irrelevant since there is no particular reason Green would have to know who was coming - only that SOMEONE was coming. This is excused by saying he misinterpreted a comment from the General as a direct order not to tell anyone on the US side. Convenient - but not believable since it is not believable that he was the only one who knew they were coming. Again, leaving out the whole early process of how the Italians got on to Route Vernon is the key to the whole story.
Fourth, the Army's account that all rounds fired entered the front and right side of the vehicle has been discounted. Pictures of the vehicle described in the press (according to one report I read today which I can't find now) indicate no evidence of rounds striking the front of the vehicle, only the right side and rear. Sgrena is very clear about being hit from BEHIND
Another idiot modded "Insightful"...
The '60's "love children" caused an economic bust in the '70's? What kind of bullshit is that? Since when were '60's "flower children" in charge of the US economy?
As I recall, it was people like Johnson and Nixon who undermined the gold standard and crashed the "Go-Go" years - which were mostly about people like Bernie Cornfield and Robert Vesco anyway...Not to mention prolonging an expensive failed war...
Not to mention that the Sixties had just as many and varied personalities in it as the current day - you had "peace freaks", you had "revolutionaries" like Abbie Hoffman, you had "drug techies", you had everything.
I sat most of it out in high school, the Army, and unemployment in Connecticut, so I missed most of it. But I've read some of the stuff that came out of it in the political and philosophical realm, so to dismiss it all as "flower children" is just idiotic.
It had its influence as all things do, but today it IS mostly irrelevant - so I suspect Markoff's book is irrelevant, too.
The future belongs to Transhumanism, which is a lot older - and newer - than the Sixties. If you want to look for influences on the past and future, check out "Great Mamo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis. Great read.
"There's some possibility that anything we write here may be remembered for as long as humans recognizably exist."
That'll be about another fifty years - one hundred tops.
We Transhumans personally think most of the record of your existence should be expunged so others evolving elsewhere in the universe won't get a bad view of our origins...
It'd be like Einstein having to reveal his parents were Jed and Ellie Mae Clampett...(Yes, I know the relationship...)
Uhm, people who lived in the 1960's didn't necessarily DIE in the 1960's...
Some of them might have lived, oh, at least another ten - even twenty - years...
Well, San Francisco is BETWEEN those places and Berkeley.
We get a lot of the pass-through...
If guys on either end of the line want MONEY, they have to come here...
I wouldn't call Starship "revisionist" - that song about space flight was awesome.
Tim Leary got into computers and space flight once he got out of prison. That's where a lot of that Starship influence came from, I suspect.
Who elevated this to "Insightful"?
It's brain-dead.
Oh, wait, it was the other brain-dead...
I forgot how many of them there are on
"I imagine they've pretty much got it down to a science by now."
Must have - Bush is on something...
Though it looks like simply cocaine and alcohol plus various medicines for his recurring skin cancer...
(Or is that AIDS? We ARE still wondering why Jeff Gannon had check-in but not check-out times from the White House Secret Service logs...Who was he servicing in what bedroom in the White House?)
"Let me know when the human race has eliminated that last one. It should happen slightly after the sun goes cold."
No - it should happen sometime in this century.
Of course, it means eliminating humans - but what's the problem with that?
It's not like they have any intrinsic value, after all.
If you're trying to meet Maureen O'Gara, you're damn right!
But if open source helps me meet Kim Polese over at SpikeSource, then it's all right!
"And everybody on the dark side attacks Groklaw these days, including Ms. O'Gara, not just Daniel Wallace. I'm starting to figure out it's coordinated, not random. They seem to just pass the baton around, taking turns like Nazi interrogators in World War II beating prisoners, so none of them ever got tired but the victim never got a moment's relief, not that it helped them win the war."
Bwahahahahahahah!! Good one, PJ!
As for the syntax, I think when SQL was invented it was around the same time that COBOL was still "cool" - so they borrowed the verbose syntax in the vain hope the result would be "self-documenting".
They failed.
In any event, use a decent SQL IDE that fills in the verbosity - I assume one exists somewhere.
And I think what he meant by "object programmable" (he can correct me if I'm wrong) is like database tables should be objects with embedded methods - which essentially they are with triggers and the like. This is basically what the article said.
My problem with that is OOP languages can be documented. There doesn't appear to be any good way to document an app with a bunch of tables with half the code buried in triggers and the other half buried in GUI forms. I assume some of the UML -type models could handle it but I've never seen anybody actually document a database system this way.
I'm going on the basis of the SCT Banner university management system which is full of Oracle Pro-COBOL and Pro-C code and PL/SQL code tacked onto Oracle Forms full of triggers and retrieval/update behaviors which are totally incomprehensible from an overall system function viewpoint. The documentation is totally written from an end-user viewpoint - how the developers actually manage the system is unknown to me.
I suspect a lot of database stuff is done like that - which means a maintenance nightmare scheduled for the future along with all the whiz-bang buzzwords.
"geek chatting, stupid memes, repetitive jokes and overall fun"
You forgot insults, fucking foul language, uneducated morons, and religious/political fanatics.
Oh, yes, and dupes - of both news and the people who believe it.
Oh, wait, you did refer to "crap"...
Never mind.
I don't think I'd go so far as to say that there CAN'T be any better theory than the relational model. I don't think the human brain works on the relational model (I could be wrong, but I don't think anybody is in a position to prove that at the moment.) I think we need a decent conceptual processing algorithm or model which would exceed the relational model in expressiveness and precision.
However, it does appear correct to say that the relational model has not been fully applied in existing products and therefore it's premature to suggest that we need to dump it for something else at this juncture - at least if that something else doesn't also provide what the relational model provides - and I haven't heard of any such model.
Not to denigrate the man, his papers go back to 1966 and most of the recent ones have to do with the Sloan Digital Sky Server Data Base (whatever that is).
He has apparently done work in database benchmarking and database modeling, System R, and a variety of other things.
So I'd be inclined to think he knows quite a bit about the history and evolution of current databases - which is what his article is mostly about, as a recap.
But I'm not entirely sure he has any solutions or is even barking up the right tree in his suggestions.
I see no evidence he's on a par with Codd and Date with regard to what is possible with the relational model. I'm not saying he's not, however.
Not being an expert on the current interpretation of the relational model, I wouldn't assume that the needs of analysis necessarily "break" that model.
My limited understanding is that the current crop of SQL languages and database implementation fall short (how much I'm not sure) of what the relational model is capable of. Perhaps that's where we need to start looking for improvements.
In any event, as I've said numerous times before, without some adequate simulation of conceptual processing, it's not likely that the shortcomings of database technology are going to be adequately resolved any time soon. The purpose of all that exists in the database field now is to provide a (very poor) simulation of conceptual and physical reality.
Ah, not so fast, cowboy...
Just last week my boss at City College of San Francisco was "fixing" something in the production database and managed to delete a few thousand records he shouldn't have. He got it back from elsewhere okay, but it shouldn't have happened.
There's a reason developers get development and test databases and DBA's don't allow them to touch production databases.
In defense of my boss, we don't have a snapshot of the production database every night - which you need if you expect your systems people to debug problems in the production database apps. You need live data to reproduce problems frequently, and if you don't have it, you have to muck around in production.
Well, since Microsoft recommends running a separate server for every server function, I imagine they'd say if you want to run two SQL Server databases, you'd best use two SQL Server engines running on two separate Windows Servers on two separate hardware systems - for which of course, you pay for two licenses (and two more for the Windows Servers).
Of course, Oracle with their database layout basically says the same thing - except they want you to put your indexes, your tablespaces, your logs and everything else on at least SEVEN separate servers...
Funny how that works out to mean more licenses to buy...
I view this article as meaning that Microsoft intends to introduce a new "Data Mining Server" - which they will recommend running on yet another Longhorn server running on yet another PC...
This notion of "active databases" seems to me to be interesting but fraught with problems.
Not least of which is the old bugaboo - documentation. How do you document a system composed of myriad triggers scattered on myriad tables in myriad databases communicating over the Net?
All I know from trying to decipher ONE Oracle Forms application at City College of San Francisco is that it is nearly impossible to get a handle on what happens where when. There appears to have been NO effort made by Oracle to enable a coherent method of documenting an application developed with their Forms technology - or of reverse-engineering such an application in order to develop such documentation.
Just printing out a bunch of trigger code and GUI design panels says nothing about how the app actually is supposed to WORK.
Great for obfuscating your proprietary code, I suppose.
Well, I suppose we could go back to the original UNIX way of doing things:
Everything is a string of bytes on the hard disk.
No file system at all.
Somehow I don't think that's going to take off. Grep is great - but it's not THAT great.