Having left old blighty a few years ago, I have to say that the one aspect of British culture that I really, really miss is Radio 4.
Having a nationwide radio station that you can turn on at any time of the day or night with a 99% certainty of finding something intellectually stimulating and enjoyable can't be beat. (The other 1% is "The Archers")
For those furriners who don't entirely grok what Radio 4 actually is, it's:
Talk Radio - but not in the "Howard Stern" sense.
Consistently very high quality programming.
Shamelessly aimed at smart people.
Influential politically and culturally.
Commercial free (naturally)
Able to make interesting programming out of frankly improbably subjects.
Very appealling to those of us (like most Slashdotters) who are generally curious about the world.
For example, driving several hundred miles each week for a job, I found myself listening to a regular program on vegetables - specifically, the ones you eat. Now I am a geek of the burger+coke variety, and frankly I don't care about this subject one jot. However the program was compulsive listening - it went into depth about, for instance, how the brussels sprout came to be cultivated with lots of (genuinely) interesting historical context.
Listening to radio 4 is rather like visiting a huge combined university, experimental theatre, and comedy club, and wandering blindfolded through the halls, randomly stopping to listen in various rooms.
Yes, perhaps there are things that could have been done better in SP2, but the simple act of filtering inbound connections is a massive step forward in security for Windows users.
I say it's a "massive step forward" because there are literally MILLIONS of windows machines which are never updated, don't run any firewall software, and which are directly connected to broadband ISPs. The people running these boxes truthfully don't know what they're doing in these matters.
Right now, those poeple have NOTHING. Now at least they will have something, albeit limited. This is a major improvement. Even the old XP internet connection firewall, if it had only been enabled by default, would have prevented Blaster from ever happening.
Of course there are some questionable exceptions in the new firewall default configuration, and no doubt the next generation of worms will take advantage of those - but at least the bar has been raised a little higher.
I agree that the solution posted is hackish. However it's not my solution; rather it was implemented by staff consultants with Oracle UK on an Intranet project for British Energy.
I'm not going to engage in a petty debate about my own experience, which by the way is substantial, but your post has proven several of my points.
This comment will cause me to be flamed to death by those who only know PL/SQL etc
You know nothing about database-backed application development. You know nothing about what a database is. You've never used a database, obviously. You've never worked for a real company, have you?
They want you to put your business logic in their stored procedure language because it will only run in their database products
I think you've missed the point of stored procedures. The point of stored procedures is to provide an abstraction layer between the underlying database and applications. Additionally, they are the best place to enforce data integrity and they are extremely useful in implementing row level security.
I completely agree, which is why I said their use was appropriate for things which are 100% to do with the data itself.
Generally a database should be where the data is kept. Nothing else. If there is some functionality which is absolutely 100% to do with how the data is stored, then it *might* make sense to use a stored procedure for it. Better that than filling your actual business logic with the minutae of a particular DBM.
On the other hand, you should never, ever put actual application logic in a stored procedure. The reasons are several. The most important is that stored procedure languages are all, to a greater or lesser extent, crap. This comment will cause me to be flamed to death by those who only know PL/SQL etc, but the fact is it's true. They are not general-purpose programming languages.
Sure, you might not RIGHT NOW want to fork off sendmail from your application, but some day you might. Or, horror of horrors, maybe you'd like to write directly to a system file? Or use a neat SNMP library you found? Although there are twisted, hacker-like ways to do these things in most DBMs they are hardly the model of reliability or professionalism. [1]
Secondly, they tie you in at a fundamental level to a particular database vendor. Database software is generally neither Free nor free. They want you to put your business logic in their stored procedure language because it will only run in their database products. Lock in is bad. OK, you'll be locked in whatever you do, but I'd rather be locked into Java or Python than PL/SQL.
Thirdly, you are losing control of your application's performance. You have very little control over how the code will be optimised or run.
Fourthly, you are breaking abstraction. It is very, very hard to write stored procedures which aren't entirely dominated by the structure of the underlying database.
Finally, assuming you probably will have to have a middle layer between the client and the database anyway, it's a bad idea from a maintainability point of view to bits of the same functionality among your layers.
[1] have you ever written a cron job to run a query to dump a table to a file to be parsed by a Perl script to send an email? You might be an Oracle Portal user.
It's lucky there are two different kinds of CDs really - what if you could record audio on the data ones? People would just buy the data CDs and avoid paying the levy! That would be awful!
..but yet those same city investors were prepared to absorb the cost of the newer British Energy reactors.
So your point seems to be that old nuclear plants were expensive but newer ones are potentially profitable.
(Remember two things: 1. BE has the full cost of decommissioning set aside and 2. BE was profitable for several years before the climate change levy and NETA came along)
Part of the reason the UK nuclear industry is in such a bad financial shape is that the Government makes it pay the "climate change levy", on the basis of the amout of CO2 produced to generate a given amount of elecricity.
But wait; the nuclear industry doesn't emit CO2!
I know this sounds stupid, crazy, unreal, but it's absolutely true. The only major source of electricity in the UK which doesn't contribute to climate change has to pay a climate change tax. This is to the tune of 600 million UK pounds for British Energy. That amount is the difference between a 300 million loss and a 300 million profit for that company.
I was shown this (that is, we actually did it, not just read about it) in a High School physics class. Weren't you?
Re:Aren't we still in an Ice Age?
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Absolutely correct, we are at present still in an ice age which has lasted for about four million years, with (geologically) brief "interglacials" of around 10,000 - 20,000 years every 140,000 years or so.
We are in one of one of those interglacials now, and in fact it has lasted 18,000 years so far - so it's not at all crazy to start looking for signs of the end of it.
This is not the first ice age; there one approx 600 million years ago; another 450 mya; another 300 mya. They each lasted at least a few tens of millions of years. This ice age is young and will likely exist for many millions more years. During this whole time, we can expect the glacial and interglacial cycle to continue.
There are some important points everyone who discusses climate should be aware of:
For most of the history of the Earth, it has been very much warmer than it is now.
For the last four million years, it has, on average, been very much colder than it is now.
A thousand years ago, there was a "medieval warm period" during which global temperatures were significantly warmer than today; to the extent that wine grapes were grown in Southern Scotland.
Five hundred years ago temperatures were significantly colder than today; "the little ice age". Opinions vary as to when the LIA ended; some say aruond 1900, others say it hasn't totally ended yet.
Note that both the MWP and the LIA occurred before the industrial revolution; they were not caused by man.
There is no "normal" temperature.
The current climate has not existed very long, and will not stay the same for very long (and this would be true even if there were no humans).
Before anyone points this out for me - I mistyped "couriell" instead of "courriel" when I posted here, but the Google search itself uses the correct "courriel" so the results are accurate.
From the article: "The ministry's General Commission on Terminology and Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term "courrier electronique" (electronic mail) instead of e-mail".
Interesting definition of "broadly" when it's apparently used 200 times less than "email".
Most people in the more afflent areas of India have several ISPs to choose from. In the less affluent areas frankly there are things likely to be higher up your wish list than a PC and modem.
The portals won't pay ISPs to deliver their traffic. Imagine the cost if they caved in to these Indian ISPs and other ISPs throughout the world decided they'd like to try it too?
Anyway, I doubt it would work. Surely the ISPs existing users have a contractual right to a "best effort" ability to send packets to and receive them from Yahoo's web server, for example? That is in fact what they are paying the ISP for. It is, in fact, the defining service that an ISP offers.
As far as new users are concerned, would you choose a) an ISP who will deny you access to web sites you want to contact, or b) one who will allow you access to anything you want? Simple market forces would mean that people would chose the ISPs which weren't attempting to extort the large portals.
Yahoo not being usable from XXXX ISP would be a much greater problem for XXXX ISP than for Yahoo.
Well, how about one based on the sovreignty of the people and the rights of man rather than on the few pitiful concessions the monarch and her government care to bestow upon us?
"DVDCCA's statutory right to protect its economically valuable trade secret is not an interest that is "more fundamental" than the First Amendment right to freedom of speech"
You know, that old constitution thing you have is pretty cool. I wish we had one.
Content providers have largely given up on asking the end user for money. The fact is, people just aren't willing to pay. Whether this is a rational attitude for people to have is beside the point; people won't pay for the sort of thing they can get for free by switching on their TV.
So instead of looking to the end user, the sites are looking to the ISP. Well, just maybe, some ISPs will pay up. But they will have to raise their charges to the users; and again, the users will be faced with the choice of paying extra for "premium" content, or paying less and having to live without certain sites.
You know what? People will choose not to pay.
What really bothers me about this is that we're getting away from the concept of the location-transparent Internet. Up 'til now, all ISPs have basically been equal, and able to compete with each other on largely fair, equal terms - for instance, how often you get an engaged tone, how polite the helpdesk staff are, etc. But if this idea takes off, you may find yourself stuck with a shitty ISP because they're the only one in your area that pays for access to disney.com. (Not that you would ever be in this situation, which brings me back to my earlier point).
NuSphere didn't decide to call their release of MySQL "MySQL". They decided to call id "NuSphere MySQL". There is a long tradition of this kind of naming of forks in the Free Software world.
> 5. We do not endores forks, but we acknowledge
> that they are not illegal per se.
You need to acknowledge that forks are not illegal or wrong at all. The fact that you even make this comment speaks volumes about your company's attitude.
MySQL AB may be an "open source" company but they certainly aren't a Free Software company.
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Having a nationwide radio station that you can turn on at any time of the day or night with a 99% certainty of finding something intellectually stimulating and enjoyable can't be beat. (The other 1% is "The Archers")
For those furriners who don't entirely grok what Radio 4 actually is, it's:
For example, driving several hundred miles each week for a job, I found myself listening to a regular program on vegetables - specifically, the ones you eat. Now I am a geek of the burger+coke variety, and frankly I don't care about this subject one jot. However the program was compulsive listening - it went into depth about, for instance, how the brussels sprout came to be cultivated with lots of (genuinely) interesting historical context.
Listening to radio 4 is rather like visiting a huge combined university, experimental theatre, and comedy club, and wandering blindfolded through the halls, randomly stopping to listen in various rooms.
And I miss it. Thank goodness for web streaming.
Oh, they won't, no doubt about that.
But I'm anticipating SP2 making it onto new PCs at some point soon.
Yes, perhaps there are things that could have been done better in SP2, but the simple act of filtering inbound connections is a massive step forward in security for Windows users.
I say it's a "massive step forward" because there are literally MILLIONS of windows machines which are never updated, don't run any firewall software, and which are directly connected to broadband ISPs. The people running these boxes truthfully don't know what they're doing in these matters.
Right now, those poeple have NOTHING. Now at least they will have something, albeit limited. This is a major improvement. Even the old XP internet connection firewall, if it had only been enabled by default, would have prevented Blaster from ever happening.
Of course there are some questionable exceptions in the new firewall default configuration, and no doubt the next generation of worms will take advantage of those - but at least the bar has been raised a little higher.
I agree that the solution posted is hackish. However it's not my solution; rather it was implemented by staff consultants with Oracle UK on an Intranet project for British Energy.
This comment will cause me to be flamed to death by those who only know PL/SQL etc
You know nothing about database-backed application development. You know nothing about what a database is. You've never used a database, obviously. You've never worked for a real company, have you?
don't change databases willy-nilly (Of course they don't, they're locked in.)
I completely agree, which is why I said their use was appropriate for things which are 100% to do with the data itself.
On the other hand, you should never, ever put actual application logic in a stored procedure. The reasons are several. The most important is that stored procedure languages are all, to a greater or lesser extent, crap. This comment will cause me to be flamed to death by those who only know PL/SQL etc, but the fact is it's true. They are not general-purpose programming languages.
Sure, you might not RIGHT NOW want to fork off sendmail from your application, but some day you might. Or, horror of horrors, maybe you'd like to write directly to a system file? Or use a neat SNMP library you found? Although there are twisted, hacker-like ways to do these things in most DBMs they are hardly the model of reliability or professionalism. [1]
Secondly, they tie you in at a fundamental level to a particular database vendor. Database software is generally neither Free nor free. They want you to put your business logic in their stored procedure language because it will only run in their database products. Lock in is bad. OK, you'll be locked in whatever you do, but I'd rather be locked into Java or Python than PL/SQL.
Thirdly, you are losing control of your application's performance. You have very little control over how the code will be optimised or run.
Fourthly, you are breaking abstraction. It is very, very hard to write stored procedures which aren't entirely dominated by the structure of the underlying database.
Finally, assuming you probably will have to have a middle layer between the client and the database anyway, it's a bad idea from a maintainability point of view to bits of the same functionality among your layers.
[1] have you ever written a cron job to run a query to dump a table to a file to be parsed by a Perl script to send an email? You might be an Oracle Portal user.
It's lucky there are two different kinds of CDs really - what if you could record audio on the data ones? People would just buy the data CDs and avoid paying the levy! That would be awful!
..but yet those same city investors were prepared to absorb the cost of the newer British Energy reactors.
So your point seems to be that old nuclear plants were expensive but newer ones are potentially profitable.
(Remember two things: 1. BE has the full cost of decommissioning set aside and 2. BE was profitable for several years before the climate change levy and NETA came along)
*shrug* dunno but since BNFL are government owned it seems a bit academic.
British Energy, on the other hand, have billions of pounds in the bank set aside for decommissioning, which they're not allowed to touch.
Part of the reason the UK nuclear industry is in such a bad financial shape is that the Government makes it pay the "climate change levy", on the basis of the amout of CO2 produced to generate a given amount of elecricity.
But wait; the nuclear industry doesn't emit CO2!
I know this sounds stupid, crazy, unreal, but it's absolutely true. The only major source of electricity in the UK which doesn't contribute to climate change has to pay a climate change tax. This is to the tune of 600 million UK pounds for British Energy. That amount is the difference between a 300 million loss and a 300 million profit for that company.
I was shown this (that is, we actually did it, not just read about it) in a High School physics class. Weren't you?
We are in one of one of those interglacials now, and in fact it has lasted 18,000 years so far - so it's not at all crazy to start looking for signs of the end of it.
This is not the first ice age; there one approx 600 million years ago; another 450 mya; another 300 mya. They each lasted at least a few tens of millions of years. This ice age is young and will likely exist for many millions more years. During this whole time, we can expect the glacial and interglacial cycle to continue.
There are some important points everyone who discusses climate should be aware of:
For most of the history of the Earth, it has been very much warmer than it is now.
For the last four million years, it has, on average, been very much colder than it is now.
A thousand years ago, there was a "medieval warm period" during which global temperatures were significantly warmer than today; to the extent that wine grapes were grown in Southern Scotland.
Five hundred years ago temperatures were significantly colder than today; "the little ice age". Opinions vary as to when the LIA ended; some say aruond 1900, others say it hasn't totally ended yet.
Note that both the MWP and the LIA occurred before the industrial revolution; they were not caused by man.
There is no "normal" temperature.
The current climate has not existed very long, and will not stay the same for very long (and this would be true even if there were no humans).
We know at least as much as the people who are buying into SCOX, unless they are committing the criminal offense of insider trading.
You know a program REALLY sucks when...
Before anyone points this out for me - I mistyped "couriell" instead of "courriel" when I posted here, but the Google search itself uses the correct "courriel" so the results are accurate.
couriel OR couriell site:fr 730 results
"courrier electronique" site:fr 1,340 results
From the article: "The ministry's General Commission on Terminology and Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term "courrier electronique" (electronic mail) instead of e-mail".
Interesting definition of "broadly" when it's apparently used 200 times less than "email".
Maybe you are the one percent?
Most people in the more afflent areas of India have several ISPs to choose from. In the less affluent areas frankly there are things likely to be higher up your wish list than a PC and modem.
Anyway, I doubt it would work. Surely the ISPs existing users have a contractual right to a "best effort" ability to send packets to and receive them from Yahoo's web server, for example? That is in fact what they are paying the ISP for. It is, in fact, the defining service that an ISP offers.
As far as new users are concerned, would you choose a) an ISP who will deny you access to web sites you want to contact, or b) one who will allow you access to anything you want? Simple market forces would mean that people would chose the ISPs which weren't attempting to extort the large portals.
Yahoo not being usable from XXXX ISP would be a much greater problem for XXXX ISP than for Yahoo.
Well, how about one based on the sovreignty of the people and the rights of man rather than on the few pitiful concessions the monarch and her government care to bestow upon us?
You know, that old constitution thing you have is pretty cool. I wish we had one.
So instead of looking to the end user, the sites are looking to the ISP. Well, just maybe, some ISPs will pay up. But they will have to raise their charges to the users; and again, the users will be faced with the choice of paying extra for "premium" content, or paying less and having to live without certain sites.
You know what? People will choose not to pay.
What really bothers me about this is that we're getting away from the concept of the location-transparent Internet. Up 'til now, all ISPs have basically been equal, and able to compete with each other on largely fair, equal terms - for instance, how often you get an engaged tone, how polite the helpdesk staff are, etc. But if this idea takes off, you may find yourself stuck with a shitty ISP because they're the only one in your area that pays for access to disney.com. (Not that you would ever be in this situation, which brings me back to my earlier point).
etc etc etc
> that they are not illegal per se.
You need to acknowledge that forks are not illegal or wrong at all. The fact that you even make this comment speaks volumes about your company's attitude.
MySQL AB may be an "open source" company but they certainly aren't a Free Software company.