For example, assuming always-on connections, when Aunt Margaret forwards that knee-slapping joke that you've seen a million times already, why not allow the email program to simply forward a link (rather than the entire email, all nicely fungled with "> > > > " marks) to a shared folder.
When you get the email, you already know that it's crap, and thus can delete it without having that email's bits flinging about the network.
Or, even better, the complete and total elimination of spam. See, you can subscribe to a service that you trust to provide namespace services. They don't resolve every Tom, Dick and Harry, unless they meet certain criteria (such as not being a hotbed of spammers). Thus, your email program is set to only allow email in from "trusted" domains. This can be similar to the RBL, or something not quite so, umm... enthusiastic.
My point is that it is possible that this can LESSEN network traffic, if that is specified as one of the goals of the specification. It can eliminate (or at least reduce) redundacy and waste, and possibly eliminate abuse.
Don't get me wrong -- Oracle isn't perfect. It's just among the best of the lot. And, Oracle DBAs (well, good ones) are gods among men, which tends to make Oracle look better than it really is.
For example, Oracle's OCI extensions have some of the most brain-dead things I've ever seen. Why do I care about Oracle's desire to use pointers in >2K CLOB entries? Screw that, put stuff whereever you damn well feel like it -- that's what I paid $80K for the license for! I don't wanna have to think about how Oracle stores stuff. That's it's job, not mine.
But overall, I trust Oracle more than PostgreSQL. However, for my latest projects, my clients won't be able to pay for the Oracle license, so I'm using PostgreSQL -- and not really all that terribly scared about it, I'm just more comfortable with Oracle.
I read your "DNS System is Coming Apart At the Seams" article with pointed interest. It is a topic I frequently harp on in private conversations -- the lack of a human-focused network and network protocols.
I've puzzled over the implications myself, but I'd be interested to hear your opinion -- Is it worthwhile to simply scratch what we have and begin anew, basing the new decisions made on more current assumptions?
For example, hardware is cheap and reliable (as compared to 20 years ago), bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper. Should the networking protocols reflect this new reality?
Features which I believe Oracle has most of the open source competition beat in is clustering (run oracle on x machines and have it load balance), parallelization of queries across CPUs in your cluster (very nice for long running queries), resource management (you can allocate x bytes for y task if you want), the ability to index based on function (index upper(col) for instance) and runtime configuration & status (the v$ tables are scary they are so complete).
Also (at least to me) is replication. AFAIK, there is no compare on PostgreSQL. Dunno about Interbase/Sybase.
Although, I discover that my needs (web backends) are met without using Oracle's bells-and-whistles -- which is why I'll never be a real DBA, just an amateur forever. While I suppose ANY application can be optimized by utilizing Oracle arcana, time-to-market keeps me from dabbling.
But, replication is seriously cool, even for simple web stuff. I like being able to know that my dev DB actually reflects current state (or vice versa, tho that scenario turns my guts to water..:)
Well, I'm really tounge-in-cheek, since I'm a believer enough in IBM to be a shareholder. I'm not sure of the exact date, but IBM removed the head from their ass and started making excellent stuff.
I've got enough IT friends who get all misty-eyed over IBM mainframes to know better than to dis them for real.
But, IBM isn't the omnipresent god-like figure they used to be, back when they had a corporate song-book and all the reps wore blue suits and ties.
It goes even one step further. Oracle + what platform? I don't know any successful enterprise system that DOESN'T use Solaris.
This is a very good point. I thought it sorta went without saying, tho.
I've had some success with Oracle on Redhat (and, actually, works very well for a development or test environment), but for real-live deployment, you go Sun hardware with Solaris, and you pay for the hardware support as well.
(I'm no huge fan of Sun hardware, but these day's it's the best of a bad lot -- shame on SGI for having the bad grace to slowly spiral down the drain. IRIX sucks, but SGI hardware is nice. Of course, this is IMHO.)
This is not unique to Oracle, but I suppose the argument could be made that Oracle is the leader in this.
Complex data selections from one or more tables can simply be retrieved by using SQL*PLUS, application programs or 4GL ORACLE tools (Developer/2000) e.g. FORMS, REPORTS, GRAPHICS.
This covers mostly the completeness of an Oracle solution.
A lot of commercial software products are based on ORACLE RDBMS.
True.
Users of commercial tools e.g. ACCESS, EXCEL have the possibility to access external ORACLE tables in their well known environment.
Not as unique in these days of ODBC. The quality of the middleware tends to be higher with Oracle solutions, however.
ORACLE database tables can be accessed by SQL commands which are embedded in standard programming language programs.
Definitely not unique. PostgreSQL, for example, has hooks in Tcl, Perl, Python, C, C++.
National language support enables developers to design applications with respect to the native language of the users.
I'm not an expert here. I have no experience with I18N solutions in Oracle, but knowing what I do about Oracle as a technology and as a company, I can confidently say that Oracle has best-of-breed solutions in this area.
But, PostgreSQL, with it's world-wide development model, is probably not as far behind as you might think.
ORACLE applications can invoke programs written in third-generation programming languages, i.e. you can call Fortran and C from within ORACLE applications.
No experience here, either. I know that Oracle's embedded Java is highly regarded, but haven't had much of a reason to delve into it (plus, my Java programming is pretty poor)
Applications are portable across platforms. No matter which platform you used for application development, the application will be adapted to your working environment.
This has the ring of untruth -- an application that talks to Oracle on Windows most certainly isn't portable to Unix or MacOS. Perhaps the SQL calls and triggers are portable? That doesn't make sense, either, as SQL is supposed to be portable, and triggers are internal to Oracle.
Data can be shared with more users regardless whether they run their application on the same computer or not.
I don't credit Oracle with this anymore than I credit Internet Explorer for rendering <I> tags as italics. Oracle follows E.F. Codd's RDB spec, and as such it allows for multiple users (which, really, is as much a part of it being Unix based as anything else).
Data can be shared with other applications.
Access to tables or subsets of data can be restricted for particular users depending on their defined role.
This is not unique to Oracle, but is executed well within the environment.
The level of data integrity and recovery in case of errors can be defined by the users requirements.
This is a function of an ACID compliant RDBMS, specifically, the "D" of ACID, Durability. Your data should not be vulnerable to some yahoo tripping over the power cord. However, in practice, this is more dependant on the skill and talent of the DBA than the heroics of the RDBMS (i.e. spec-ing mirrored arrays, good backup policy, sane rollback partitions, and proper disk management (rollbacks on separate disk from data, etc.))
Like it or not, Oracle is worth every penny, assuming you can afford it. If you, or your client, cannot afford the (admittedly) big bucks for an Oracle licencse, there are plenty of free (and Free) solutions available.
What do you get with a 10-30K (or, in my experience, a 50-80K) license? You get Oracle's years of development and expertise in managaging some of the biggest and baddest installations. Think 500-1000 gigabyte DBs in constant use for 15 years.
You get a whole bucketful of trained and talented DBAs (who are worth every damn penny of there high 5- and 6-figure incomes) who grok Oracle syntax.
You get Oracle Corporation's culture (at least, I hope it's still the culture). At Oracle, the technologists create cool stuff and pay the marketing department to find or create a market for said cool stuff, rather than marketing dictating what technologies are created. Thus, when you visit Oracle, you find 3 or 4 products that do nearly similar things, or overlapping technologies. (I think this is a good thing -- others may disagree)
Finally, you get name recognition. Don't laugh this off -- it's worth a lot of money to some people. If I say "Let's do it in Oracle", people respond, "Yeah, that would be best." If I say "Let's do it in PostgreSQL", I hear "Huh?".
It boils down to: If the money is there, spend the money on Oracle, and advertise that fact. If the money isn't there, use PostgreSQL, and just say you have a RDBMS back-end.
(Oh, MySQL isn't a RDBMS in my humble opinion. It's a fine solution for certain problems, but don't confuse a SQL interface to a filesystem with a true ACID-compliant RDBMS. Future versions of MySQL promise to alter this perception, which may change the dynamics.)
... that all this effort we put into finding and communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence will one day surprise us in an unexpected way.
For example -- we're beaming out a message, "Foo". It's whizzing along through space. Ten years later, we develop faster-than-light travel (for this example, I assume something like Dune's "folding space"). We colonize several planets in distant parts of the galaxy.
One day, 200 years later, a distant colony picks up the transmission. Having been colonized by the Moody Loners With Guns segment of our population, they misinterpret the signal (totally unaware of or having forgotten it's origin), return to the source to obliterate Earth.
Or, another example: the signal reaches a planet with intelligent life, but the particular frequency resonates with the bone structure of the creatures and shatters their bodies, killing them instantly.
Or my favorite: the signal reaches a planet inhabited with extremely UN-intelligent life. They assume that it's a foriegn translation of "I Love Lucy".
Actually, I did Perl first, hated the fact that I had to comment every damn line in order to figure out what I had done when I came back to it 3 months later, and went to PHP. At the time, those were my choices -- anybody using Python was doing so out of pure faith, since it was still basically "Guido's dream".
I have since been sufficiently prosthelytized by Python devotees to look at it. I like it well enough, and now install it on all my computers, even tho I don't use it (yet).
Dunno why you say PHP is a knee-jerk reaction to Perl. It's more like an effort to bring the nice parts of Perl (lots of modules and usability) with a Web focus (rather than systems administration) to Apache. I like PHP, but I'm not married to it.
I like Tcl, but for different reasons -- I mostly like its syntax and the fact that it's so easily embedded in other programs. Plus, I use AOLserver, so I *have* to like Tcl:)
The marketing pablum claims that the Blade 100 "shatters the $1000 barrier".
Excuse me, please, but $995 isn't "shattering" the barrier. It's "slipping into the elevator before the doors close".
Sun's network appliance "shatters" the $1000 barrier with a price of $500.
Okay, I'm picking nits over what appears to me to be a pretty nice machine. The price is approachable to a student and to a startup programming shop. But, in reality, does anybody buy low-end Sun's for their famous ability to build desktop workstations? Sun's strength is in glass-room behemoths running 500 Gig Oracle installations. What, do they expect to suddenly overtake Microsoft/Intel in the home market?
I chalk this up to "appease the hackers with a cheap Sun so they'll continue to write portable code".
(But then, Sun's store is now Slashdotted -- I'm thus supremely uninterested in Sun hardware/software solutions, if even *they* can get brought to their knees by a bunch of nerds configuring Blade 100s. What, are they running the site on one of their new Netra's or something???)
"They're both firm as a rock on their issues, and they're both just so goshdarn sincere, you know?""
If Castro is sincere, then G.W. Bush is the poster child for the War on Cocaine.
For all his "imperialist running dog" blather and "evil capitalist conspiracy" dogma, Castro is worth more money than God. For a Communist, he's a pretty damn good Capitalist (Materialist, anyway).
You argument is wrong. Completely wrong, utter nonsense. You're wrong, and, might I add, smell funny.
If the parent can act on the child's behalf, against the child's wishes, then the child can (according to you) appeal to the court on the basis of Constitutional Rights, based on that child having full access to those Constitutional Rights, even as a person might sue DoubleClick for violating their 4th Amendment.
However, a child cannot appeal to the court. Thus, a child does not have full access to Constitutional Rights.
The Bill of Rights is comprised of the first 10 ammendments to the Constitution, and both were published concurrently as a single document. As such, get your historical facts straight before you call me a nimrod.
The Constitution and Bill of Rights are separate documents. The Constitution is dated 1787, the Bill of Rights is dated 1789. I still say you are a nimrod.
The law is a matter of black and white. Interpretation of the law is where the grey areas are both created and dispelled. That process, by the way is set forth in the Constitution. Get your facts straight before you call me a nerd.
If the law is black and white, there would be no need for interpretation. Again, the world is not black and white, but shades of grey. So you're not a nerd -- you're still being a literalist.
But I'm obviously shouting at a wall, here
Don't shout -- you'll damage your voice.
I'll admit to being wrong when you admit to being wrong.
And I know that you are wrong when you state that the law requires responsibilites in exchange for those rights - read the Constitution, this is not at anywhere in the document. Nowhere is it stated that these rights have a minimum age requirement, or that you must do such and so forth to be granted these rights. By committing a criminal act you may place yourself in a position where you may be judicially relieved of certain rights. Don't confuse due process with individual responsibility. Due process is in and of itself a right in this country.
The Constitution is absolutely silent on the matter of pornography. There is not one mention of "pictures of nekkid ladies" in the whole damn thing. Does that mean that pornography is not protected?
The concept of Rights and associated Responsibility is not a constitutional matter, rather a philosophical one. You have the right to Free Speech. You make statements to the effect of "Bill Gates screws goats", and do it as a newspaper columnist in the New York Times. Bill Gates may sue you for libel, and you can't claim Free Speech (or Free Press) -- you have to take responsibility for your actions.
You have the right to bear arms. You do NOT have the right to shoot people indiscriminately. If you shoot somebody in a fit of pique, you must bear the Responsibility.
If you're 12 and make death threats against the President, you do NOT have to bear the full Responsibility. Your parents may bear part of it, you may spend some time in JV -- but you don't go to Federal Prison as an adult might.
BTW, thanks for serving our country.
These are rights of citizenship, which most of us have received as a birthright. That is why the abortion debate is difficult, as it poses the question of when an unborn child attains individual rights separate and distinct from those of the mother. I agree that the debate itself is pointless as both sides are hopelessly intractable, I simply wanted to point out that this is the exact legal point you were attempting to avoid.
I'm not sure what you mean here -- the abortion debate is mainly about at what point a child is considered "alive". If the child is "alive" at conception (this is what I believe, BTW), at no point after that does the woman have the legal right to murder that child. Roe v. Wade judged that during the first three months, the woman and her doctor have full control over whether to abort or not, the second three months, the State may regulate concerning health matters, and in the third, the State may disallow. There is no argument on whether the child has separate and distict rights -- the Texas law was overturned on citation of the 14th amendment's Due Process Clause.
You're wrong, but you have a right to express your opinion.
You either have rights or you do not. Rights are not priviledges, they are not granted. Unless and until you violate the law and consequently have
your rights revoked by a court of law, they remain.
Not true, since juvenilles are not held to the same level of responsiblity as adults (most of the time). If you have a full Right, you must also bear the full Responsibility.
Regardless of what most nerds think, the world is not black and white. There are whole swathes of grey as well.
An 8 year old has the same rights as you or I do. Effectively more, as many juvenile crimes have few lasting penalties.
See above. If they have lesser Responsibilities, they have lesser Rights.
Or maybe, start with the Declaration Of Independance, which states "WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...", which pretty concretely indicates that Rights are present from the moment of creation.
Or did you somehow miss the whole abortion debate?
No, I don't miss the abortion debate. I've found that some people stand on one side, some people stand on another side, and neither group will jump ship for the other side. I'm tired of trying to convice them.
Oh, you mean I missed out on the debate? No -- I've done my duty, fought my battles, and I'm retired from the war.
Oh, and I'm not parroting the Constitution, I'm parroting the Bill of Rights. Get your historical documents straight, you nimrod.
Dunno if I can parry that particular bit of biting reparté, but I'll try. You're simply ugly...
The provisions in the Bill Of Rights restrict the Government's power over the citizenry. Parental rights are long established under rights of guardianship, and are not in any way in conflict with the Bill Of Rights.
So it's perfectly legal for a private company to search your house? Or, to separate my example from trespassing, it's legal for a private company to access my personal information? Don't people sue companies (i.e. DoubleClick) for violating the 4th Amendment?
As for rights of guardianship, where does that come into question? The poster stated that an 8 year old has the same rights as a 30 year old. Under that stance, there are no "guardianship" rights. If that's the case, then the 8 year old has access to the 4th amendment as well as the 1st.
I look at it more philosophically than literally in my original post. But taking the Bill of Rights literally, does
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
mean that Mom can't check under Junior's bed for dope and Playboys unless a judge okays it? I don't think so -- at least, I'm not willing to tell that to Moms across the country. YOU tell 'em that.
But, since you're in favor of 8 year olds getting full Constitutional rights, then you're okay with 8 year olds going to jail for shoplifting candy? If they can claim the rights, they must bear the responsibility as well.
I've seen the news reports concerning this -- I have as yet not formed a rational opinion. The easy way out is "They do adult crime, they do adult time!", but that's not neccessarily justice.
Did that 12 year old push somebody out of a window, assuming they'd just bounce back like Wile E. Coyote? That's not adult thinking -- that child needs some kind of intense therapy (and their TV taken away).
On the other side, if there's a child who seems to have no moral compuction against tossing their kid sister out of a window, well now... it could be we happened to catch a John Wayne Gacy in infancy. Let's not let this kid roam the streets.
I happen to believe that we are born with the notion of right and wrong, and some people are born with a predeliction for choosing "wrong". We call those people sociopaths, and they MUST be kept outside of society.
Initially, the school bureaucracy deferred to those who might have been uncomfortable. The morning after the censorship, Thielen met with the school's principal, a teacher and the director of elementary education. They told him they removed the exhibit because it might make students of color uncomfortable.
I think I see what we're aiming for, here. What we want is to develop the Whiffle Life for children so that they grow up to be Whiffle Adults who are shocked and amazed when they burn their fingers on a stove, and then sue the stove manufacturer for not affixing a warning label to the stovetop.
You know what I think makes "students of color" uncomfortable? Calling them "students of color". Jeez, what the hell's wrong with calling 'em "students"? Crikey, I'm a "person of color", that color just happens to be "extremely pale".
That this child is 8 years old is irrelavant. This is a pretty sophisticated experiment for an 8-year-old, and she should be allowed to present it. Will it make the kids ask questions? Probably -- that's a GOOD thing. Will it make them uncomfortable? Not likely -- do these administrators remember being 8? 8 year olds aren't bothered by much. Witness them causing scenes in Wal-Mart or the grocery store.
Stan Garnett, president of the school board, said the science-fair hubbub underscored two points. First, there's the First Amendment. "If people want to talk about something, it's very rarely appropriate for us to say 'no,'" he said. Also, he said, racism is a sensitive issue. "Maybe it should have been handled differently."
Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them. The issue here is "should this project be tossed out" and to me, the answer is "no".
In breaking news today, the United States Government has been held responsible for the slaughter and oppression of thousands, at home and abroad.
"It's a fair cop," stated Representative Dick Gephardt. "What can I say? I like taking freedom and money from people."
"We've been playing our jackleg politico games for decades now. We've got a 2 trillion dollar budget and all of the guns, so what are you going to do about it?" asked House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Including the massacre at Waco, the Body Count of the United States Government is now calculated as "more than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick" by most normal-thinking people in the country. "But, what can you do? They've got all the money and all the guns," exclaimed housewife Denise Smith.
In other news, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has been given a twirling wedgie by Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Hundreds stood idly by and watched, applauding in the end.
The difference between a whore on the street corner and Senator Hatch is at least the whore is
honest about what she does.
Don't you watch COPS? Whores are NEVER honest about what they do -- it's always either "massage therapy" or a "dating service". The undercover cops have to drag "give me money for sex" out of them.
Regardless, your point stands. Senator Hatch is little more than a guy who wets his finger and sticks it into the wind to find out what he believes... just like 533 other members of Congress.
Sounds great -- when will we be getting a generic SQL interface?
Unfortunately, the time required to abstract out the DB is significant enough that it's better to just pick a DB and go from there. Arsdigita made this decision and went with Oracle. Slashdot made this decision and went with MySQL.
Although there is a SQL "standard", not many DB vendors adhere 100% to the standard (Oracle being the #1 culprit), or only implement 70% of the standard. You can only do so much with SELECT and UPDATE queries -- eventually you really need something like PL/SQL triggers.
Plus (just to rain on your parade a little more), which DB you choose makes a difference. Go with MySQL? Well, now you have to work around the table-locking problem (a HUGE problem if you're dealing with 100s of users). Go with Informix? You've got a different CHAR limit than Oracle.
Abstraction is a neat idea, but unrealistic. By the time you've worked around the abstraction problem, Outlook is on version 1000 and runs circles around your Free implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno -- it depends on how it's designed.
For example, assuming always-on connections, when Aunt Margaret forwards that knee-slapping joke that you've seen a million times already, why not allow the email program to simply forward a link (rather than the entire email, all nicely fungled with "> > > > " marks) to a shared folder.
When you get the email, you already know that it's crap, and thus can delete it without having that email's bits flinging about the network.
Or, even better, the complete and total elimination of spam. See, you can subscribe to a service that you trust to provide namespace services. They don't resolve every Tom, Dick and Harry, unless they meet certain criteria (such as not being a hotbed of spammers). Thus, your email program is set to only allow email in from "trusted" domains. This can be similar to the RBL, or something not quite so, umm... enthusiastic.
My point is that it is possible that this can LESSEN network traffic, if that is specified as one of the goals of the specification. It can eliminate (or at least reduce) redundacy and waste, and possibly eliminate abuse.
Don't get me wrong -- Oracle isn't perfect. It's just among the best of the lot. And, Oracle DBAs (well, good ones) are gods among men, which tends to make Oracle look better than it really is.
For example, Oracle's OCI extensions have some of the most brain-dead things I've ever seen. Why do I care about Oracle's desire to use pointers in >2K CLOB entries? Screw that, put stuff whereever you damn well feel like it -- that's what I paid $80K for the license for! I don't wanna have to think about how Oracle stores stuff. That's it's job, not mine.
But overall, I trust Oracle more than PostgreSQL. However, for my latest projects, my clients won't be able to pay for the Oracle license, so I'm using PostgreSQL -- and not really all that terribly scared about it, I'm just more comfortable with Oracle.
I read your "DNS System is Coming Apart At the Seams" article with pointed interest. It is a topic I frequently harp on in private conversations -- the lack of a human-focused network and network protocols.
I've puzzled over the implications myself, but I'd be interested to hear your opinion -- Is it worthwhile to simply scratch what we have and begin anew, basing the new decisions made on more current assumptions?
For example, hardware is cheap and reliable (as compared to 20 years ago), bandwidth is cheap and getting cheaper. Should the networking protocols reflect this new reality?
Also (at least to me) is replication. AFAIK, there is no compare on PostgreSQL. Dunno about Interbase/Sybase.
Although, I discover that my needs (web backends) are met without using Oracle's bells-and-whistles -- which is why I'll never be a real DBA, just an amateur forever. While I suppose ANY application can be optimized by utilizing Oracle arcana, time-to-market keeps me from dabbling.
But, replication is seriously cool, even for simple web stuff. I like being able to know that my dev DB actually reflects current state (or vice versa, tho that scenario turns my guts to water.. :)
Well, I'm really tounge-in-cheek, since I'm a believer enough in IBM to be a shareholder. I'm not sure of the exact date, but IBM removed the head from their ass and started making excellent stuff.
I've got enough IT friends who get all misty-eyed over IBM mainframes to know better than to dis them for real.
But, IBM isn't the omnipresent god-like figure they used to be, back when they had a corporate song-book and all the reps wore blue suits and ties.
This is a very good point. I thought it sorta went without saying, tho.
I've had some success with Oracle on Redhat (and, actually, works very well for a development or test environment), but for real-live deployment, you go Sun hardware with Solaris, and you pay for the hardware support as well.
(I'm no huge fan of Sun hardware, but these day's it's the best of a bad lot -- shame on SGI for having the bad grace to slowly spiral down the drain. IRIX sucks, but SGI hardware is nice. Of course, this is IMHO.)
Well -- it used to be "nobody got fired for buying IBM" (back in the 70s and 80s).
Since IBM hasn't been such a mover and shaker in 10 years, it's more appropriate to Microsoft.
These kids today -- they think time began in 1991 with Window 3.1 and DOS 5. *sigh* :)
This is not unique to Oracle, but I suppose the argument could be made that Oracle is the leader in this.
This covers mostly the completeness of an Oracle solution.
True.
Not as unique in these days of ODBC. The quality of the middleware tends to be higher with Oracle solutions, however.
Definitely not unique. PostgreSQL, for example, has hooks in Tcl, Perl, Python, C, C++.
I'm not an expert here. I have no experience with I18N solutions in Oracle, but knowing what I do about Oracle as a technology and as a company, I can confidently say that Oracle has best-of-breed solutions in this area.
But, PostgreSQL, with it's world-wide development model, is probably not as far behind as you might think.
No experience here, either. I know that Oracle's embedded Java is highly regarded, but haven't had much of a reason to delve into it (plus, my Java programming is pretty poor)
This has the ring of untruth -- an application that talks to Oracle on Windows most certainly isn't portable to Unix or MacOS. Perhaps the SQL calls and triggers are portable? That doesn't make sense, either, as SQL is supposed to be portable, and triggers are internal to Oracle.
I don't credit Oracle with this anymore than I credit Internet Explorer for rendering <I> tags as italics. Oracle follows E.F. Codd's RDB spec, and as such it allows for multiple users (which, really, is as much a part of it being Unix based as anything else).
This is not unique to Oracle, but is executed well within the environment.
This is a function of an ACID compliant RDBMS, specifically, the "D" of ACID, Durability. Your data should not be vulnerable to some yahoo tripping over the power cord. However, in practice, this is more dependant on the skill and talent of the DBA than the heroics of the RDBMS (i.e. spec-ing mirrored arrays, good backup policy, sane rollback partitions, and proper disk management (rollbacks on separate disk from data, etc.))
Like it or not, Oracle is worth every penny, assuming you can afford it. If you, or your client, cannot afford the (admittedly) big bucks for an Oracle licencse, there are plenty of free (and Free) solutions available.
What do you get with a 10-30K (or, in my experience, a 50-80K) license? You get Oracle's years of development and expertise in managaging some of the biggest and baddest installations. Think 500-1000 gigabyte DBs in constant use for 15 years.
You get a whole bucketful of trained and talented DBAs (who are worth every damn penny of there high 5- and 6-figure incomes) who grok Oracle syntax.
You get Oracle Corporation's culture (at least, I hope it's still the culture). At Oracle, the technologists create cool stuff and pay the marketing department to find or create a market for said cool stuff, rather than marketing dictating what technologies are created. Thus, when you visit Oracle, you find 3 or 4 products that do nearly similar things, or overlapping technologies. (I think this is a good thing -- others may disagree)
Finally, you get name recognition. Don't laugh this off -- it's worth a lot of money to some people. If I say "Let's do it in Oracle", people respond, "Yeah, that would be best." If I say "Let's do it in PostgreSQL", I hear "Huh?".
It boils down to: If the money is there, spend the money on Oracle, and advertise that fact. If the money isn't there, use PostgreSQL, and just say you have a RDBMS back-end.
(Oh, MySQL isn't a RDBMS in my humble opinion. It's a fine solution for certain problems, but don't confuse a SQL interface to a filesystem with a true ACID-compliant RDBMS. Future versions of MySQL promise to alter this perception, which may change the dynamics.)
... that all this effort we put into finding and communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence will one day surprise us in an unexpected way.
For example -- we're beaming out a message, "Foo". It's whizzing along through space. Ten years later, we develop faster-than-light travel (for this example, I assume something like Dune's "folding space"). We colonize several planets in distant parts of the galaxy.
One day, 200 years later, a distant colony picks up the transmission. Having been colonized by the Moody Loners With Guns segment of our population, they misinterpret the signal (totally unaware of or having forgotten it's origin), return to the source to obliterate Earth.
Or, another example: the signal reaches a planet with intelligent life, but the particular frequency resonates with the bone structure of the creatures and shatters their bodies, killing them instantly.
Or my favorite: the signal reaches a planet inhabited with extremely UN-intelligent life. They assume that it's a foriegn translation of "I Love Lucy".
You are probably like me. You want HOT WOMEN and BIG MONEY in your pocket RIGHT NOW!!!!!
I WANT you to MAKE HOT SEX too! If you JOIN OUR BAND of HORNY TEEN SLUTS, you can GET FREE VIAGRA along with your TONER CARTRIDGES in your INBOX!!!!!!
All it takes is $19.95, and you too will be SWIMMING IT HOT BABES and FREE MONEY!!!!
You can tell that I'M NOT LYING because I have a lot of EXCLAIMATION POINTS at the end of my SENTENCES!!!!! That makes it REAL!!!!!!
Actually, I did Perl first, hated the fact that I had to comment every damn line in order to figure out what I had done when I came back to it 3 months later, and went to PHP. At the time, those were my choices -- anybody using Python was doing so out of pure faith, since it was still basically "Guido's dream".
I have since been sufficiently prosthelytized by Python devotees to look at it. I like it well enough, and now install it on all my computers, even tho I don't use it (yet).
Dunno why you say PHP is a knee-jerk reaction to Perl. It's more like an effort to bring the nice parts of Perl (lots of modules and usability) with a Web focus (rather than systems administration) to Apache. I like PHP, but I'm not married to it.
I like Tcl, but for different reasons -- I mostly like its syntax and the fact that it's so easily embedded in other programs. Plus, I use AOLserver, so I *have* to like Tcl :)
The marketing pablum claims that the Blade 100 "shatters the $1000 barrier".
Excuse me, please, but $995 isn't "shattering" the barrier. It's "slipping into the elevator before the doors close".
Sun's network appliance "shatters" the $1000 barrier with a price of $500.
Okay, I'm picking nits over what appears to me to be a pretty nice machine. The price is approachable to a student and to a startup programming shop. But, in reality, does anybody buy low-end Sun's for their famous ability to build desktop workstations? Sun's strength is in glass-room behemoths running 500 Gig Oracle installations. What, do they expect to suddenly overtake Microsoft/Intel in the home market?
I chalk this up to "appease the hackers with a cheap Sun so they'll continue to write portable code".
(But then, Sun's store is now Slashdotted -- I'm thus supremely uninterested in Sun hardware/software solutions, if even *they* can get brought to their knees by a bunch of nerds configuring Blade 100s. What, are they running the site on one of their new Netra's or something???)
If Castro is sincere, then G.W. Bush is the poster child for the War on Cocaine.
For all his "imperialist running dog" blather and "evil capitalist conspiracy" dogma, Castro is worth more money than God. For a Communist, he's a pretty damn good Capitalist (Materialist, anyway).
Wow, we can use that argument? Excellent! Then:
You argument is wrong. Completely wrong, utter nonsense. You're wrong, and, might I add, smell funny.
If the parent can act on the child's behalf, against the child's wishes, then the child can (according to you) appeal to the court on the basis of Constitutional Rights, based on that child having full access to those Constitutional Rights, even as a person might sue DoubleClick for violating their 4th Amendment.
However, a child cannot appeal to the court. Thus, a child does not have full access to Constitutional Rights.
How is this argument bogus?
The Constitution and Bill of Rights are separate documents. The Constitution is dated 1787, the Bill of Rights is dated 1789. I still say you are a nimrod.
If the law is black and white, there would be no need for interpretation. Again, the world is not black and white, but shades of grey. So you're not a nerd -- you're still being a literalist.
Don't shout -- you'll damage your voice.
I'll admit to being wrong when you admit to being wrong.
The Constitution is absolutely silent on the matter of pornography. There is not one mention of "pictures of nekkid ladies" in the whole damn thing. Does that mean that pornography is not protected?
The concept of Rights and associated Responsibility is not a constitutional matter, rather a philosophical one. You have the right to Free Speech. You make statements to the effect of "Bill Gates screws goats", and do it as a newspaper columnist in the New York Times. Bill Gates may sue you for libel, and you can't claim Free Speech (or Free Press) -- you have to take responsibility for your actions.
You have the right to bear arms. You do NOT have the right to shoot people indiscriminately. If you shoot somebody in a fit of pique, you must bear the Responsibility.
If you're 12 and make death threats against the President, you do NOT have to bear the full Responsibility. Your parents may bear part of it, you may spend some time in JV -- but you don't go to Federal Prison as an adult might.
BTW, thanks for serving our country.
I'm not sure what you mean here -- the abortion debate is mainly about at what point a child is considered "alive". If the child is "alive" at conception (this is what I believe, BTW), at no point after that does the woman have the legal right to murder that child. Roe v. Wade judged that during the first three months, the woman and her doctor have full control over whether to abort or not, the second three months, the State may regulate concerning health matters, and in the third, the State may disallow. There is no argument on whether the child has separate and distict rights -- the Texas law was overturned on citation of the 14th amendment's Due Process Clause.
You're wrong. But,then, most people are...
Wow. That's not inflammatory at all.
Just kidding, really, but I've heard both sides of this argument, and I dunno which to believe. "#ifdefs rock!" "#ifdefs suck!"
Thus, I just write everything in PHP and Tcl... :)
Put simply, pish tosh.
Not true, since juvenilles are not held to the same level of responsiblity as adults (most of the time). If you have a full Right, you must also bear the full Responsibility.
Regardless of what most nerds think, the world is not black and white. There are whole swathes of grey as well.
See above. If they have lesser Responsibilities, they have lesser Rights.
No, I don't miss the abortion debate. I've found that some people stand on one side, some people stand on another side, and neither group will jump ship for the other side. I'm tired of trying to convice them.
Oh, you mean I missed out on the debate? No -- I've done my duty, fought my battles, and I'm retired from the war.
Oh, and I'm not parroting the Constitution, I'm parroting the Bill of Rights. Get your historical documents straight, you nimrod.
Dunno if I can parry that particular bit of biting reparté, but I'll try. You're simply ugly...
So it's perfectly legal for a private company to search your house? Or, to separate my example from trespassing, it's legal for a private company to access my personal information? Don't people sue companies (i.e. DoubleClick) for violating the 4th Amendment?
As for rights of guardianship, where does that come into question? The poster stated that an 8 year old has the same rights as a 30 year old. Under that stance, there are no "guardianship" rights. If that's the case, then the 8 year old has access to the 4th amendment as well as the 1st.
I look at it more philosophically than literally in my original post. But taking the Bill of Rights literally, does
mean that Mom can't check under Junior's bed for dope and Playboys unless a judge okays it? I don't think so -- at least, I'm not willing to tell that to Moms across the country. YOU tell 'em that.
But, since you're in favor of 8 year olds getting full Constitutional rights, then you're okay with 8 year olds going to jail for shoplifting candy? If they can claim the rights, they must bear the responsibility as well.
I've seen the news reports concerning this -- I have as yet not formed a rational opinion. The easy way out is "They do adult crime, they do adult time!", but that's not neccessarily justice.
Did that 12 year old push somebody out of a window, assuming they'd just bounce back like Wile E. Coyote? That's not adult thinking -- that child needs some kind of intense therapy (and their TV taken away).
On the other side, if there's a child who seems to have no moral compuction against tossing their kid sister out of a window, well now... it could be we happened to catch a John Wayne Gacy in infancy. Let's not let this kid roam the streets.
I happen to believe that we are born with the notion of right and wrong, and some people are born with a predeliction for choosing "wrong". We call those people sociopaths, and they MUST be kept outside of society.
From the article:
I think I see what we're aiming for, here. What we want is to develop the Whiffle Life for children so that they grow up to be Whiffle Adults who are shocked and amazed when they burn their fingers on a stove, and then sue the stove manufacturer for not affixing a warning label to the stovetop.
You know what I think makes "students of color" uncomfortable? Calling them "students of color". Jeez, what the hell's wrong with calling 'em "students"? Crikey, I'm a "person of color", that color just happens to be "extremely pale".
That this child is 8 years old is irrelavant. This is a pretty sophisticated experiment for an 8-year-old, and she should be allowed to present it. Will it make the kids ask questions? Probably -- that's a GOOD thing. Will it make them uncomfortable? Not likely -- do these administrators remember being 8? 8 year olds aren't bothered by much. Witness them causing scenes in Wal-Mart or the grocery store.
Well, the First Amendment doesn't neccessarily apply to an 8 year old. You don't get Rights until you can accept the Responsibilities that come attached to them. The issue here is "should this project be tossed out" and to me, the answer is "no".
Dateline: Washington, D.C.
In breaking news today, the United States Government has been held responsible for the slaughter and oppression of thousands, at home and abroad.
"It's a fair cop," stated Representative Dick Gephardt. "What can I say? I like taking freedom and money from people."
"We've been playing our jackleg politico games for decades now. We've got a 2 trillion dollar budget and all of the guns, so what are you going to do about it?" asked House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Including the massacre at Waco, the Body Count of the United States Government is now calculated as "more than you can shake a stick at, plus the stick" by most normal-thinking people in the country. "But, what can you do? They've got all the money and all the guns," exclaimed housewife Denise Smith.
In other news, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has been given a twirling wedgie by Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Hundreds stood idly by and watched, applauding in the end.
Don't you watch COPS? Whores are NEVER honest about what they do -- it's always either "massage therapy" or a "dating service". The undercover cops have to drag "give me money for sex" out of them.
Regardless, your point stands. Senator Hatch is little more than a guy who wets his finger and sticks it into the wind to find out what he believes... just like 533 other members of Congress.
Sounds great -- when will we be getting a generic SQL interface?
Unfortunately, the time required to abstract out the DB is significant enough that it's better to just pick a DB and go from there. Arsdigita made this decision and went with Oracle. Slashdot made this decision and went with MySQL.
Although there is a SQL "standard", not many DB vendors adhere 100% to the standard (Oracle being the #1 culprit), or only implement 70% of the standard. You can only do so much with SELECT and UPDATE queries -- eventually you really need something like PL/SQL triggers.
Plus (just to rain on your parade a little more), which DB you choose makes a difference. Go with MySQL? Well, now you have to work around the table-locking problem (a HUGE problem if you're dealing with 100s of users). Go with Informix? You've got a different CHAR limit than Oracle.
Abstraction is a neat idea, but unrealistic. By the time you've worked around the abstraction problem, Outlook is on version 1000 and runs circles around your Free implementation.