Only if the cost of migration, plus about a 100-300% contingency margin, is significantly less than the increased license costs over, say, five years. If you spend a million bucks trying to save a million bucks and risk spending three million more in the process, chances are your career is going to be a short one...
Professional liability rates are so low it is absolutely laughable to say that your insurance is a major (like justifying 1/2 your rate) cost. For most purposes in question, for a single tech, it costs around a thousand bucks a year to insure comfortably into the seven-digits, which is FAR more than you'll need for servicing small businesses. That's about seventy-five cents per hour. Larger policies go up more or less geometrically so unless you have a MASSIVE liability exposure (think: tinkering inside one of Google's clusters), your insurance bill is HARDLY a justification for your rates and when it is, it will not merely be appreciated or expected, it will be demanded and of such a nature that you would be absolutely insane to operate without it regardless. If you have reputable E&O for software engineering (that is, if you can find a line of coverage worth purchasing because very, very few in their right minds are offering it at any price), yes, THAT could run up quite a tab, but we're talking bump and scrape liability here, and that's pathetically cheap.
If people are asking why your rates are so high, chances are either a) your services are not appropriate for your customers or b) your rates are not appropriate for your services or c) both. Rather than give them some bullshit line that "But hey, I'm BONDED!" just do like any luxury car salesman would and politely say something to the effect of "perhaps another vendor would be more suitable to your situation," because, if you aren't just blowing smoke, that's probably the literal truth anyway.
I mean, if you're charging $200/hour, you're not fixing grandma's 486 and if you ARE charging someone's grandma $200 for that service you should probably be dragged through the center of town and be beaten with sticks.
...they don't have to track ANYTHING to flag you for an audit. Simply falling outside of statistical parameters will guarantee you an audit....and they won't give two shits about your opinion of federal fiscal policy when they come back and recalulate your income, disallow all your deductions and slap on five years of interest, penalties and a stack of legal fees and attach it to every asset possible as well as force any employer you have until it is paid off to garnish your wages and slap a nice record on your credit reports guaranteeing you won't be able to so much as get a credit account at The Gap.
It's called service "IN-KIND" and it has value. Just because you don't use money in the transaction doesn't mean you haven't generated income.
I mean, think about it, you might as well argue that you performed some service and someone gave you a Ferrari, but god-gosh-golly why would the IRS think that was "income?"
Sure, they aren't going to go after you for fixing the family computers, but if you start bartering to the point where your reported income doesn't remotely match the mean for where you live (or certain easily traceable items like your house(s) and/or car(s)), expect a not-so-friendly vist from your local IRS auditor. But, if you barter in the form "provided xyz service of value: $N to JimBob" and JimBob does the same in kind and you both report it, yes, it is 100% perfectly legal. Obviously, though, none of this applies to fixing your mom's computer in exchange for Apple Betty and Tea. Now, if you provided some service and your mother gave you said Ferrari in exchange, you'd best be making and keeping receipts.
I already said my viewpoint was an American one. You have offered nothing except your repeated personal opinion.
I'm an American as well and, yes, interpretations of facts are all "opinions," including yours.
Quelle suprise.
I might take you seriously if you had yet, after so much wind, name ANYONE inside Russia or any of the former SSRs who had any role whatsoever in the series of events in question without resorting to "oh, the US gave money to xyz."
The USSR (hell, even greater Russia under the Czars) suffered from internal pressure from day one. It was doomed from the beginning. Having been to the former USSR, lived there, studied there, I can certainly say that the view is quite different beyond the armchair and your ideas are not entirely shared on the ground.
I still blame that goddamned theme music and the cheesy Buck Rogers opening sequence. Seriously, I've actually enjoyed the few episodes I've seen, but that opener annoyed me to the point I didn't watch a single episode between the second episode of the first season and, more or less, last week when I finally got the nerve to watch it again.
I wouldn't be surprised if that sappy fscking torchsong crooner drove everyone off... oh, and Scott Bakula's Gore-esque personality. Gawd, at last Jonathan Frakes was nauseating, but Scott Bakula? Yawwwwwwwwwwwn...
Generally, no, such "fields" aren't "indexed," in the usual sense of the term as they usually aren't even stored as "fields" at all. Building an "index" of, effectively, the entire contents of "War and Peace," wrapped it into a gargantuan string, well, that would be pretty useless...
However, I would certainly trust the full-text search algorithms that took the collective incompetence of, say, Oracle or IBM to develop than my own singular incompetence. So, in that sense, yes, I would say there is an advantage, but not because the database structure itself is inherently any better for the purpose unless you did some pretty creative acrobatics with your data model in order to make life easier for the query optimizer. On the other hand, your existing metadata quite certainly would more efficiently used by an RDBMS than just traversing the whole lot start to finish every time.
One poorly written query and you have the potential for a resultset of n^n. Even a modest 100,000 records could produce a query traversing a quadrillion records or more. If the person designing the application thinks that 100,000 XML files would be efficient, I have 100% faith that they would write something like:
Even on a very, very small dataset, do you want to run through n1*n2 or n1/n2 records? Very, very simple.
Imagine: you're in the library of congress. You need not just ONE book, but *A* book with X in the title. So, what's the point of having a database? I mean, we've got all these books and all the information is like there and stuff...
Connection pools are your friend... and rather hard to use without an app server, which kinda spoils all the fun of writing PHP, the point of which is generally being able to avoid having to use one in the first place.
Unless you have a limitless supply of CPUs+RAM, you're going to need connection pooling very, very quickly. Frankly, they're so easy to use, I don't understand why anyone would bother coding a database app without them.
But, for a beginner, this seems to cover some of the more important structural aspects of RDBMS in relation to webapps, not just "look, ma, it's dynamic!" Most of the books out there I've seen seem to just assume you know what you're doing on the SQL side of things and just focus on the PHP/JSP/Whatever side of things, which is just a death sentence for a beginner who has never touched a SQL server...
My point is that those who claim that Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union conveniently ignore decades of work done by others, both American and otherwise. By 1981, the damage had been done. Reagan could have done nothing and the Soviet Union would today still be nothing more than an article of history.
You might as well claim that Louis XVI was responsible for the downfall of the British Empire in America...
True... it's just that it wasn't Reagan who knocked it down. If you were to argue Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, okay, maybe, but Reagan? They didn't increase military spending a single ruble during Reagan's term. By the time he took his first oath of office, they had long since figured out that it was a race not worth running, let alone "winning." By the time Gorbechev entered office, they had largely also figured out that their entire economic system, regardless of their internal and external political pressures, was a failure... and it isn't like Reagan didn't know this. He simply used American fervor to his own political advantage. All the military dalliances of the 80's were utterly pointless in taking down the Soviet Union. However, they made for some sweet sweetheart deals...
Hear, hear... I wish the Reagan mythology were known as such and not taken as fact.
The facts are that the Soviet satellites were crumbling away DECADES before Reagan hit the White House. Think: Hungarian Revolt, 1956; Prague Spring, 1968; Lech Walesa in Gdansk, 1970; Charter 77, duh, 1977... etc. etc....and, one of the best ones of all, Gorby's memoirs where he muses something to the effect of "how on earth could we run a state spanning from the Danube to the Bering Strait while arguing at the highest levels of government about the price of women's pantyhose?"
Yes, it was pantyhose, not Star Wars, behind the fall of the Soviet Union.
Okay, I'll pass on the obvious guffaw from the first statement.
However, this idea that governments don't get liquidated immediately upon failure IS A GOOD THING.
Seriously, there are some things that are handled by government and not the private sector for precisely the reason that if handed to the private sector, whatever service in question might just disappear because of bad management. Some things, say military, counterterrorism, emergency management whatever, you would rather have done badly, but always done, than *poof* not done at all at some arbitrary point in time, which is invariably going to be the worst possible point in time *not* to have something, anything, no matter how shoddy and expensive.
Remember the Great Depression? WWI? WWII? Most of the Federal government as it exists today (by that I mean the leaves of the departments of the executive branch) was created to make sure, as much as is humanly possible, that those three events and the fallout from them are not repeated at least not on our soil. Particularly as regards the depression, many of these government sacred cows exist precisely because of the failings of market capitalism and the inherently brief notice the market gives for when it is going to plunge into catastrophe. Recent history should prove example enough...
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Funny, not too long ago, there was a sense of noblesse oblige--in a sense, yes, you DO have to give something away when you reside in the social stratosphere. This is the same thing that got Martha a major glove-slapping in court when she had her lawyers recite a litany of her charitable contributions and the response was that it is not extraordinary for someone in that position to do those things, but rather it would be extraordinary for such a person _not_ to do those things. It is expected and considered not only foolish (for tax purposes) but, to put it mildly, it is the lowest form of tackiness to be wealthy and yet have no sense of charity. When your money comes from the labor of thousands of other people, yes, you are expected to throw a biscuit here and there.
It's primarily the newly rich that have this attitude of "it's mine, allllll mine" and that's why there is such a long standing disgust from both above and below.
The difference is, humans have been widely consuming things like tea, coffee, tobacco, alcohol and certain narcotics for centuries. We're pretty clear on the long-term effects. Even aspirin took nearly a century after Bayer was introduced before it was established how the hell it works, but it had at least 1300 years of use preceding its commercialization. This stuff? We have no idea...
Considering how seriously employers take undergrad degrees while simultaneously disregarding their actual worth, in most cases, I really don't see much difference between an actual degree--regardless of where it's from--and one written in crayon on the back of a cocktail napkin. Maybe straight out of college with no experience, sure, but when people have a decade or more of experience, I don't care if you graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard. What you've done in the decade since going to Harvard is far more important to me than your fscking bachelor's degree.
Why does it not surprise me that it will take another fscking year for the !$!@#% District of Columbia to come online with this... Isn't that where the damned law was passed in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
Only if the cost of migration, plus about a 100-300% contingency margin, is significantly less than the increased license costs over, say, five years. If you spend a million bucks trying to save a million bucks and risk spending three million more in the process, chances are your career is going to be a short one...
Professional liability rates are so low it is absolutely laughable to say that your insurance is a major (like justifying 1/2 your rate) cost. For most purposes in question, for a single tech, it costs around a thousand bucks a year to insure comfortably into the seven-digits, which is FAR more than you'll need for servicing small businesses. That's about seventy-five cents per hour. Larger policies go up more or less geometrically so unless you have a MASSIVE liability exposure (think: tinkering inside one of Google's clusters), your insurance bill is HARDLY a justification for your rates and when it is, it will not merely be appreciated or expected, it will be demanded and of such a nature that you would be absolutely insane to operate without it regardless. If you have reputable E&O for software engineering (that is, if you can find a line of coverage worth purchasing because very, very few in their right minds are offering it at any price), yes, THAT could run up quite a tab, but we're talking bump and scrape liability here, and that's pathetically cheap.
If people are asking why your rates are so high, chances are either a) your services are not appropriate for your customers or b) your rates are not appropriate for your services or c) both. Rather than give them some bullshit line that "But hey, I'm BONDED!" just do like any luxury car salesman would and politely say something to the effect of "perhaps another vendor would be more suitable to your situation," because, if you aren't just blowing smoke, that's probably the literal truth anyway.
I mean, if you're charging $200/hour, you're not fixing grandma's 486 and if you ARE charging someone's grandma $200 for that service you should probably be dragged through the center of town and be beaten with sticks.
...they don't have to track ANYTHING to flag you for an audit. Simply falling outside of statistical parameters will guarantee you an audit. ...and they won't give two shits about your opinion of federal fiscal policy when they come back and recalulate your income, disallow all your deductions and slap on five years of interest, penalties and a stack of legal fees and attach it to every asset possible as well as force any employer you have until it is paid off to garnish your wages and slap a nice record on your credit reports guaranteeing you won't be able to so much as get a credit account at The Gap.
But hey, go ahead...
It's called service "IN-KIND" and it has value. Just because you don't use money in the transaction doesn't mean you haven't generated income. I mean, think about it, you might as well argue that you performed some service and someone gave you a Ferrari, but god-gosh-golly why would the IRS think that was "income?" Sure, they aren't going to go after you for fixing the family computers, but if you start bartering to the point where your reported income doesn't remotely match the mean for where you live (or certain easily traceable items like your house(s) and/or car(s)), expect a not-so-friendly vist from your local IRS auditor. But, if you barter in the form "provided xyz service of value: $N to JimBob" and JimBob does the same in kind and you both report it, yes, it is 100% perfectly legal. Obviously, though, none of this applies to fixing your mom's computer in exchange for Apple Betty and Tea. Now, if you provided some service and your mother gave you said Ferrari in exchange, you'd best be making and keeping receipts.
I already said my viewpoint was an American one. You have offered nothing except your repeated personal opinion. I'm an American as well and, yes, interpretations of facts are all "opinions," including yours. Quelle suprise.
I might take you seriously if you had yet, after so much wind, name ANYONE inside Russia or any of the former SSRs who had any role whatsoever in the series of events in question without resorting to "oh, the US gave money to xyz." The USSR (hell, even greater Russia under the Czars) suffered from internal pressure from day one. It was doomed from the beginning. Having been to the former USSR, lived there, studied there, I can certainly say that the view is quite different beyond the armchair and your ideas are not entirely shared on the ground.
I still blame that goddamned theme music and the cheesy Buck Rogers opening sequence. Seriously, I've actually enjoyed the few episodes I've seen, but that opener annoyed me to the point I didn't watch a single episode between the second episode of the first season and, more or less, last week when I finally got the nerve to watch it again.
I wouldn't be surprised if that sappy fscking torchsong crooner drove everyone off... oh, and Scott Bakula's Gore-esque personality. Gawd, at last Jonathan Frakes was nauseating, but Scott Bakula? Yawwwwwwwwwwwn...
Generally, no, such "fields" aren't "indexed," in the usual sense of the term as they usually aren't even stored as "fields" at all. Building an "index" of, effectively, the entire contents of "War and Peace," wrapped it into a gargantuan string, well, that would be pretty useless...
However, I would certainly trust the full-text search algorithms that took the collective incompetence of, say, Oracle or IBM to develop than my own singular incompetence. So, in that sense, yes, I would say there is an advantage, but not because the database structure itself is inherently any better for the purpose unless you did some pretty creative acrobatics with your data model in order to make life easier for the query optimizer. On the other hand, your existing metadata quite certainly would more efficiently used by an RDBMS than just traversing the whole lot start to finish every time.
Sure, but, erm, and where would the pool be held?
I suppose under WAMP (as opposed to LAMP) you could shoehorn ODBC into performing "pooling," but, oy vey, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.
But, wait, there's MORE!
...now imagine their algorithm for doing that with said 100k XML files...
One poorly written query and you have the potential for a resultset of n^n. Even a modest 100,000 records could produce a query traversing a quadrillion records or more. If the person designing the application thinks that 100,000 XML files would be efficient, I have 100% faith that they would write something like:
SELECT t1.x, t2.y, t3.z from onetable t1, onetable t2, onetable t3;
Indexing.
Even on a very, very small dataset, do you want to run through n1*n2 or n1/n2 records? Very, very simple.
Imagine: you're in the library of congress. You need not just ONE book, but *A* book with X in the title. So, what's the point of having a database? I mean, we've got all these books and all the information is like there and stuff...
Connection pools are your friend... and rather hard to use without an app server, which kinda spoils all the fun of writing PHP, the point of which is generally being able to avoid having to use one in the first place.
Unless you have a limitless supply of CPUs+RAM, you're going to need connection pooling very, very quickly. Frankly, they're so easy to use, I don't understand why anyone would bother coding a database app without them.
But, for a beginner, this seems to cover some of the more important structural aspects of RDBMS in relation to webapps, not just "look, ma, it's dynamic!" Most of the books out there I've seen seem to just assume you know what you're doing on the SQL side of things and just focus on the PHP/JSP/Whatever side of things, which is just a death sentence for a beginner who has never touched a SQL server...
My point is that those who claim that Reagan was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union conveniently ignore decades of work done by others, both American and otherwise. By 1981, the damage had been done. Reagan could have done nothing and the Soviet Union would today still be nothing more than an article of history.
You might as well claim that Louis XVI was responsible for the downfall of the British Empire in America...
True... it's just that it wasn't Reagan who knocked it down. If you were to argue Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, okay, maybe, but Reagan? They didn't increase military spending a single ruble during Reagan's term. By the time he took his first oath of office, they had long since figured out that it was a race not worth running, let alone "winning." By the time Gorbechev entered office, they had largely also figured out that their entire economic system, regardless of their internal and external political pressures, was a failure... and it isn't like Reagan didn't know this. He simply used American fervor to his own political advantage. All the military dalliances of the 80's were utterly pointless in taking down the Soviet Union. However, they made for some sweet sweetheart deals...
Ah, yes, Latin America. Thank goodness the United States has never done anything less-than-scrupulous there...
*cough*
Seriously... are you serious? I mean, Grenada? Come on...
Hear, hear... I wish the Reagan mythology were known as such and not taken as fact.
...and, one of the best ones of all, Gorby's memoirs where he muses something to the effect of "how on earth could we run a state spanning from the Danube to the Bering Strait while arguing at the highest levels of government about the price of women's pantyhose?"
The facts are that the Soviet satellites were crumbling away DECADES before Reagan hit the White House. Think: Hungarian Revolt, 1956; Prague Spring, 1968; Lech Walesa in Gdansk, 1970; Charter 77, duh, 1977... etc. etc.
Yes, it was pantyhose, not Star Wars, behind the fall of the Soviet Union.
Okay, I'll pass on the obvious guffaw from the first statement.
However, this idea that governments don't get liquidated immediately upon failure IS A GOOD THING.
Seriously, there are some things that are handled by government and not the private sector for precisely the reason that if handed to the private sector, whatever service in question might just disappear because of bad management. Some things, say military, counterterrorism, emergency management whatever, you would rather have done badly, but always done, than *poof* not done at all at some arbitrary point in time, which is invariably going to be the worst possible point in time *not* to have something, anything, no matter how shoddy and expensive.
Remember the Great Depression? WWI? WWII? Most of the Federal government as it exists today (by that I mean the leaves of the departments of the executive branch) was created to make sure, as much as is humanly possible, that those three events and the fallout from them are not repeated at least not on our soil. Particularly as regards the depression, many of these government sacred cows exist precisely because of the failings of market capitalism and the inherently brief notice the market gives for when it is going to plunge into catastrophe. Recent history should prove example enough...
Funny, not too long ago, there was a sense of noblesse oblige--in a sense, yes, you DO have to give something away when you reside in the social stratosphere. This is the same thing that got Martha a major glove-slapping in court when she had her lawyers recite a litany of her charitable contributions and the response was that it is not extraordinary for someone in that position to do those things, but rather it would be extraordinary for such a person _not_ to do those things. It is expected and considered not only foolish (for tax purposes) but, to put it mildly, it is the lowest form of tackiness to be wealthy and yet have no sense of charity. When your money comes from the labor of thousands of other people, yes, you are expected to throw a biscuit here and there.
It's primarily the newly rich that have this attitude of "it's mine, allllll mine" and that's why there is such a long standing disgust from both above and below.
The difference is, humans have been widely consuming things like tea, coffee, tobacco, alcohol and certain narcotics for centuries. We're pretty clear on the long-term effects. Even aspirin took nearly a century after Bayer was introduced before it was established how the hell it works, but it had at least 1300 years of use preceding its commercialization. This stuff? We have no idea...
Considering how seriously employers take undergrad degrees while simultaneously disregarding their actual worth, in most cases, I really don't see much difference between an actual degree--regardless of where it's from--and one written in crayon on the back of a cocktail napkin. Maybe straight out of college with no experience, sure, but when people have a decade or more of experience, I don't care if you graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard. What you've done in the decade since going to Harvard is far more important to me than your fscking bachelor's degree.
...well, they do appear to think that the only pr0n anyone will want is in:
l ar ge
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.female.genitalia.
bastards.
Why does it not surprise me that it will take another fscking year for the !$!@#% District of Columbia to come online with this... Isn't that where the damned law was passed in the first place?
Geezuz...
So, basically it's like a $5,600 version of /. and Fark. ...now where did I put my underpants... /31 //seriously fscking senile already
There are plenty of fan fiction sites that do pretty much that already... probably more than the same for Jeri Ryan.
I read craigslist, man.