but by doing that, you pay the longterm cost of people just not trusting what you say anymore
Well now that's why you swap presidents / parties every now and then. It gives you a chance to sweep away everybody's accumulated distrust in the old let and put in a clean new hope for everyone to start again with.
Of course, that could wear thin eventually, in which case you'd probably get a generation that had no faith in the entire political system. But let's hope that doesn't happen.
This, in combination with the parts of your post that preceded it, is one of the funniest things I've seen on/. this month. If the Earth needs defending against aliens, I'm calling you.;)
Might be something like "everybody working there must be a union member".
It seems like you might not be wrong. The alert on the SAG website says nothing and all I can find on this gives no actual conditions being violated, but simply that the companies making The Hobbit refuse to sign on to get SAG's approval (contractually speaking). Bear in mind that SAG is a US organization and film production will be primarily based in New Zealand. Peter Jackson states that because actors are actually "independent contractors", then under New Zealand law it would actually be illegal for them to join this union, too.
Incidentally, the exact text from the linked article appears in a Reuter's article here. I don't know who ripped off who, but I suspect Reuters got there first.
Heavenly Creatures was good ( I mistakenly remembered it as "Beautiful Creatures" elsewhere). It has some big similarities to another film called "Fun" which came out a year before. The latter stars a very young Alicia Witt who demonstrates that before TV got hold of her and told her they only wanted her to stand around looking pretty, she was an absolutely great actress.
As far as I know, the only decent films Peter Jackson has ever done were Dead Alive and The Frighteners.
You missed off Meet the Feebles (imo). That's got to be one of the most fucked up films I've ever seen and certainly the only one in which a walrus and a rat driving a Fifties mobster car burst out of the anus of a giant whale (or something). There was also a film called Beautiful Creatures starring a young Kate Winslet which wasn't too bad.
That's what Peter Jackson used to be like. Then he started doing stuff like the Lord of the Rings movies. They're not rubbish, but they're nowhere near as interesting as his early work.
But my main issue with The Hobbit is that Del Torro gave up doing At The Mountains of Madness to do it, which is the first chance we've ever had to see a really big budget Lovecraft adaptation. Hopefully now that Del Torro is no longer involved in The Hobbit, he'll go back to that.
You learn most of the useful stuff in the first year or 2 of any CS degree anyway.
Interesting. For me. when I was at University I found the most useful stuff was in the last couple of years of my degree. The first year seemed to be easy stuff geared toward getting everybody up to the same position. Great for people who start a degree without a good foundation, but not so for those of us who spend the first year not having to think. Final year projects were where I really got some valuable experience and got to show off and work with a tutor on something a bit more challenging.
The thing is, it's true that getting a degree is not the only route to getting somewhere, but it's a route to getting somewhere. So if you have a great business idea or a fantastic job opening available, by all means compare your options and judge accordingly. But don't do nothing and pretend to yourself that by not going to University you're automatically taking another route to success. All you're doing is giving up one route. You still need to find something else to do instead and unless you're Bill Gates or Richard Branson, maybe you wont.
Know how to make money without a degree? Go do it. Sitting on your arse thinking a degree isn't vital to success so by not going to University you'll be a success? Bad logic.
Any thread can also be turned into a bash of blue ball point pens as well, no exceptions. What's your point?
Well, I'm not the OP, but I'd guess the point is that very few threads are going to be twisted into a bash of ball point pens, but rather often they do get twisted into Microsoft bashes.
I bet they'll regret that feature once it's out there. Some people would be gratified to see any visitors they get. But I bet there will be a lot who get freaked out by the information - both those they don't know who they are (some poor girl who gets linked to from 4chan), and those they recognize (stalker ex's, their dad at three in the morning) and when the information gets passed along ("Tracy says you were viewing her beach pictures at 3am, how could you?").
I think Apple has shown the advantage of a closed system; it makes it easier to produce a polished product. Yes, this is an advantage more from the perspective of the people making the product rather than directly to the consumer, but the consumer can still benefit from it.
I don't agree that having a closed system makes it easier to produce a more polished product. I'm interested in why you feel that would be the case.
I have a feeling that you're talking about Apple's role as a guardian of quality and putting forward that the closed nature of the iPad is what allows them this role. I.e. that they are able to filter out bad software.
The thing is, having an imposed guardian of quality (a) has some down sides, but (b), more relevantly to this discussion, only offers advantages when there is no other "guardian of quality". Here we are considering everything in the context of technology provided by the Australian school system. There you have a number of bodies ready to step forward and create the "approved list" of products. And we're talking about commercial software. The Australian school system doesn't need protecting against accidentally purchasing an app that isn't suitable or has a misleading description or contains ad-ware. The Australian school system would be asking a company for a demo of their software and then purchasing licences if it met their needs.
If you're not talking about Closed platforms keeping out unpolished products, then apologies. The other meaning I can think of is that you suggest that the limited nature of a closed system, provides a more stable and predictable platform for software then an open one. For example, Mac OS X is pretty slick. One reason for that (not wishing to detract from the great amount of thought that went into it), is that it only has to run on a very limited range of hardware and can be adjusted accordingly. Linux, though I like it greatly and certainly don't consider myself a novice with it, keeps running afoul of each new graphics card / wireless card / motherboard APCI setting or whatever. Similarly Windows backed by the commercial might of Microsoft and hardware manufacturer's supportive development, gets a lot more hardware cover, but still suffers from everyone installing every 2-bit badly written bit of code on it. But neither of these apply greatly to the scenario we're discussing - professional educational software decided on by the educational community as a whole or an educational body, and rolled out on a limited set of OS's and hardware.
Anyway, I hope this is different to a normal/. argument where two parties attempt to throw ideological dogma at each other. I'm attempting to engage in what you're saying. Also, nice bug photos.
Intel will have an offering which provides equal performance for approximately the same price.
You're joking aren't you? Intel currently owns the highest performance segment of the Desktop chip market. AMD doesn't produce any Desktop chips that can match Intel's best in any impartial benchmarking. But AMD has been confidently out competing Intel on "bang for buck" for some time now. I doubt Intel will suddenly lower prices to AMD's levels. If Intel are going to lower prices to compete, they've had just as much reason to do so for some time already. And don't forget motherboard support. AMD has traditionally been friendlier to separate motherboard and CPU upgrading than Intel which is a hidden cost.
Another question is: does closed have important advantages over openness? The answer is also yes.
Well you see, I said Open had important advantages over Closed and went on to list them. You say that Closed has important advantages over Open and... ?
I would be interested to hear reasons why Closed is better for the School community than Open. Reasons that apply to Closed, but not to Open, logically.
I hate to point this out on a site like Slashdot, but the openness of a platform is not always the most important thing when buying a product like an iPad.
But it is an important thing. Openness results in: greater learning potential due to being able to tweak and study how what you're using works, enforces an open market meaning the barriers to entry are low and anyone with a good idea can get stuck in more easily, prevents price hiking due to competition. Now you can order the importance of those however you like, but they're all good reasons why open is better. "Openness not always the most important thing"? Well that's a statement that's true, but not useful. The question is does openness have important advantages over closed and the answer is yes.:)
And trendiness isn't why the ipad is so popular, either.
In schools? I think trendiness is indeed a reason for their being handed out to pupils. Having worked with people in education who make decisions like this purely on the grounds that something is trendy and because it allows them to go around talking about how radical and innovative they are, I have great confidence in saying that trendiness is a part of roll outs in schools. If you're just shifting the discussion to the general issue of the iPad's popularity rather than these school programs, then that's a different discussion and we should be clear to separate the two.
This isn't me arguing that the books should cost this amount of money (far from it), but why should the book being available in e-format make a difference? How much of the $150 do you think is printing, materials and distribution costs? Really, if you're factoring in these costs, then you're probably going to say the e-book is around $10-15 dollars cheaper, tops. Again, I'm not arguing that $150 isn't overpriced, I'm pointing out that providing it electronically is not much of an argument for why it should be cheaper.
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
I think at least half of them are just excited at being able to be trendy. I've worked in education and a friend's school did this when the buzz was, I forget, not laptops, PSPs or something. Anyway, as an actual teacher rather than someone who got to go to local conferences and talk about being "innovative", his impression of a kid with a new gadget was... rather memorable. In University's, I've heard some right nonsense talked about "mobile learning". Mainly by managers who got to apply for grants on the back of it and go to conferences to talk crap about it to other people who then talked about new educational paradigms. (Sorry, you get lynched if you use out of date buzzwords in Academia. I think they're new pedagogical models or something now).
It's like technology. First you it doesn't exist so you can't use it. Then it exists and the muppets start using it everywhere like a fucking kid that's just learnt a "naughty word". Then people denounce it as not the radical wonder-fixall it was "supposed" to be. Then people settle down and start using it when it's appropriate. We're not at the last phase yet, we're in the muppet stage. There's a lot of good potential in electronic devices in school. A school is unlikely to get Richard Dawkins to give a lecture to a class. But a hundred schools, watching and asking questions electronically, can. There's a lot you can do with interactive quizzes, seeing at a glance which kids are struggling or excelling in real-time, or group work with such devices that's worthwhile. But what they ain't, is a drop-in replacement for manageable class sizes, actual teaching and knowledgable teachers.
Also, the choice of iPad's is a bad idea which goes right back to the real motivation of a lot of these schemes which is for people not doing the actual work to pat themselves on the back and be trendy. If they had any sense, they'd hold off a little and use one of the open platforms as they become available. Aside from saving money (always helpful in schools), they'd be able to have an open platform. If Apple get any kind of lock-in in Education, it will be bad, same as it's bad when any group gets a lock in. Find me one teacher in the UK that you can put a polygraph on who can say the the name "Capita" without their pulse hitting 150, and I'll show you a headmaster who hasn't done any real work in a decade.
Apparently the whole summary is shit. According to the actual statement, someone attempted to impersonate him on Facebook and attempted to get information on the operation. There's nothing to indicate that anyone was stupid enough to actually fall for it. Of course they might have been, but there's nothing that backs up TFS's implication that this actually happened.
Please tell me you're kidding. Anyone suggesting MySql for real work should just be laughed at.
I haven't seen a car analogy yet, so I'm going to be the bastard and first use one. MySQL is like a small engine car. Postgres is a bigger 4x4. If you're driving through town in a 30mph zone, they're equivalent. Once you start going up a steep hill, you see the difference. It's pretty obvious which DB is which car in this analogy. The hill represents either a need for advanced functionality, serious robustness or, in some scenarios more complex than just simple queries, scalability. The thing of it is, that there are a lot of scenarios out there that are just "driving around town in a 30mph zone". I fully agree that Postgres is superior in a number of ways. MySQL is marginally simpler to develop for at an low-professional level. But MySQL is adequate to a lot of people's needs. It doesn't put Postgres down to acknowledge that.
What really confuses me in the GP's post is introducing Firebird to the equation. That's definitely a comment that requires supporting.
The what to the who, now? Dude, if you're using MySQL and you have issues because you can't get past the default storage engine, I can't wait to see what happens when you have to do actual work.
You can't imagine my bemusement with MySQL when I discovered that the tables I had explicitly instructed it to create as InnoDB had silently been converted to MyISAM because InnoDB wasn't enabled on that MySQL server. One of those little quirks of MySQL that make it so charming.:)
Anyway, GP is indulging in a bit of Anus Loquacious. He's saying that "Postgres didn't even support foreign keys until version 5" as if that's a comparison to MySQL version 5. PostgreSQL didn't even have a version 5. It began as a re-write of a previous academic system and begins at version 6.0 and that was released in 1996, fourteen years ago! I'm not sure exactly when foreign keys became supported, but they were in by 7.0 which was released what, in 2000? In any case, that was over ten years ago. So even if you want to compare which database got to a particular function first (which is pretty pointless), Postgres has had it for ten years. MySQL is technically not far behind as InnoDB was first distributed with MySQL about a year later in 2001. But it was far, far from mature back then. Anyway, to summarise, the GP is (a) wrong about (b) an irrelevant argument.
Yep. You got that right on both counts. OpenOffice Base is the only thing that I'm aware of that is similar to Access that could sit on top of Postgres and as you say, it falls short in many respects. Admittedly it's a year since I used it, but I found it pretty flakey and it is certainly much inferior to Access in terms of functionality and intuitiveness.
That said, Access is a tool for throwing open database design to people who don't understand database design and a grand invitation to build a monstrously unmaintainable and ugly kludge of business logic turned into form objects which hang together through a tenuous web of forgotten relationships and functions. It's legitimate selling point is its easy integration with the rest of the MS Office suite and for simple one-person projects it's very friendly and appropriate. My concern with Access is not with the software itself which does what it's supposed to do (at least in the modern incarnations) very well, but rather that only in around 10% of the cases that I've seen it used, should it have been used. If a project's limited enough that Access is an adequate solution, then often you'd be better off getting someone to bang you out a MySQL database and some plugins to connect to it. If a project is not limited enough (or wont remain limited enough) that Access is an adequate solution, then for pity's sake, please don't use it! But of course, people do.
Anyway, the point has to be conceded. If GP is after something that does what Access does, then there's nothing that can compete with Access. All the rest of us can do is say: "that solution is a nice hammer, but before you use it just check your problem is a nail and not a screw?"
I can imagine the headlines now: "Two DBA's shot each other dead yesterday morning after they fell out over the maintainability of column-based conditional triggers. A police officer at the scene remarked: 'If only they had been using MySQL with the default ISAM tables which support no such functionality, then none of this would have happened."
I love the arguments in C++ and DB stories. They're so much better than watching two people slug it out over a football team in a bar.:D
Good. Then all three of you will be cutting checks tomorrow to support the project, right?
If my company becomes more successful, then I will have no problem making donations to Postgres from the company. And I think they deserve it. As a private individual... I've donated to fund projects here and there (such as Wikipedia) and various developers who've written some widget or theme that I've used. I'd feel a bit inadequate donating the sort of money that I am able to privately (around a tenner) to something like Postgres. Sort of like sticking 2 pence in the collection flask for Third World Aid. It's a drop in the ocean. Maybe we could start some pledgebank thing where everyone could agree to donate £5, £10, something, if 500 other people do as well. That way individual contributions are significant.
Ah well, if its good enough in Europe than it must be fine everywhere.
What a Euro centric attitude you are sporting.
Did you actually read my post or is this just a knee-jerk desire to have a go at someone? My post was specifically pointing out that the US is different to Europe, and you make a post telling me that I'm assuming if it's fine in Europe it's fine elsewhere. Severe disconnect between what I wrote and what you understood, there.
Now are you actually going to say: "sorry for having a go at you, I made a mistake", or do we just file this away as another person who was just eagerly looking for an opportunity to criticise someone in the nice safe environment of the Internet?
A bug that has been there for approximately six years, mind you. That's almost always a bad sign. For projects I manage, I operate a priority escalation system. A reported issue might be trivial and get pushed to the bottom for the first couple of weeks. But after that, it's a "minor". Give it another month or so (depends on the project) and I'll bump it up to a "major". If you don't do this, you end up with a lot of cruft and an untidy mindset for the project. Yes, you have to prioritize, no that can't mean that some things are effectively never going to be dealt with. Priority escalation creates a good feel on a project as well, like getting the dishes done that you've meant to do for ages. If management is supportive of you taking the time to fix these older problems (and I am.;) ), then it makes for a healthier project.
Slashdot Mirror
but by doing that, you pay the longterm cost of people just not trusting what you say anymore
Well now that's why you swap presidents / parties every now and then. It gives you a chance to sweep away everybody's accumulated distrust in the old let and put in a clean new hope for everyone to start again with.
Of course, that could wear thin eventually, in which case you'd probably get a generation that had no faith in the entire political system. But let's hope that doesn't happen.
(back then I was barely even trying)
This, in combination with the parts of your post that preceded it, is one of the funniest things I've seen on /. this month. If the Earth needs defending against aliens, I'm calling you. ;)
Might be something like "everybody working there must be a union member".
It seems like you might not be wrong. The alert on the SAG website says nothing and all I can find on this gives no actual conditions being violated, but simply that the companies making The Hobbit refuse to sign on to get SAG's approval (contractually speaking). Bear in mind that SAG is a US organization and film production will be primarily based in New Zealand. Peter Jackson states that because actors are actually "independent contractors", then under New Zealand law it would actually be illegal for them to join this union, too.
Incidentally, the exact text from the linked article appears in a Reuter's article here. I don't know who ripped off who, but I suspect Reuters got there first.
Heavenly Creatures was good ( I mistakenly remembered it as "Beautiful Creatures" elsewhere). It has some big similarities to another film called "Fun" which came out a year before. The latter stars a very young Alicia Witt who demonstrates that before TV got hold of her and told her they only wanted her to stand around looking pretty, she was an absolutely great actress.
As far as I know, the only decent films Peter Jackson has ever done were Dead Alive and The Frighteners.
You missed off Meet the Feebles (imo). That's got to be one of the most fucked up films I've ever seen and certainly the only one in which a walrus and a rat driving a Fifties mobster car burst out of the anus of a giant whale (or something). There was also a film called Beautiful Creatures starring a young Kate Winslet which wasn't too bad.
That's what Peter Jackson used to be like. Then he started doing stuff like the Lord of the Rings movies. They're not rubbish, but they're nowhere near as interesting as his early work.
But my main issue with The Hobbit is that Del Torro gave up doing At The Mountains of Madness to do it, which is the first chance we've ever had to see a really big budget Lovecraft adaptation. Hopefully now that Del Torro is no longer involved in The Hobbit, he'll go back to that.
You learn most of the useful stuff in the first year or 2 of any CS degree anyway.
Interesting. For me. when I was at University I found the most useful stuff was in the last couple of years of my degree. The first year seemed to be easy stuff geared toward getting everybody up to the same position. Great for people who start a degree without a good foundation, but not so for those of us who spend the first year not having to think. Final year projects were where I really got some valuable experience and got to show off and work with a tutor on something a bit more challenging.
The thing is, it's true that getting a degree is not the only route to getting somewhere, but it's a route to getting somewhere. So if you have a great business idea or a fantastic job opening available, by all means compare your options and judge accordingly. But don't do nothing and pretend to yourself that by not going to University you're automatically taking another route to success. All you're doing is giving up one route. You still need to find something else to do instead and unless you're Bill Gates or Richard Branson, maybe you wont.
Know how to make money without a degree? Go do it. Sitting on your arse thinking a degree isn't vital to success so by not going to University you'll be a success? Bad logic.
Any thread can also be turned into a bash of blue ball point pens as well, no exceptions. What's your point?
Well, I'm not the OP, but I'd guess the point is that very few threads are going to be twisted into a bash of ball point pens, but rather often they do get twisted into Microsoft bashes.
I bet they'll regret that feature once it's out there. Some people would be gratified to see any visitors they get. But I bet there will be a lot who get freaked out by the information - both those they don't know who they are (some poor girl who gets linked to from 4chan), and those they recognize (stalker ex's, their dad at three in the morning) and when the information gets passed along ("Tracy says you were viewing her beach pictures at 3am, how could you?").
A world of trouble awaits...
I think Apple has shown the advantage of a closed system; it makes it easier to produce a polished product. Yes, this is an advantage more from the perspective of the people making the product rather than directly to the consumer, but the consumer can still benefit from it.
I don't agree that having a closed system makes it easier to produce a more polished product. I'm interested in why you feel that would be the case.
/. argument where two parties attempt to throw ideological dogma at each other. I'm attempting to engage in what you're saying. Also, nice bug photos.
I have a feeling that you're talking about Apple's role as a guardian of quality and putting forward that the closed nature of the iPad is what allows them this role. I.e. that they are able to filter out bad software.
The thing is, having an imposed guardian of quality (a) has some down sides, but (b), more relevantly to this discussion, only offers advantages when there is no other "guardian of quality". Here we are considering everything in the context of technology provided by the Australian school system. There you have a number of bodies ready to step forward and create the "approved list" of products. And we're talking about commercial software. The Australian school system doesn't need protecting against accidentally purchasing an app that isn't suitable or has a misleading description or contains ad-ware. The Australian school system would be asking a company for a demo of their software and then purchasing licences if it met their needs.
If you're not talking about Closed platforms keeping out unpolished products, then apologies. The other meaning I can think of is that you suggest that the limited nature of a closed system, provides a more stable and predictable platform for software then an open one. For example, Mac OS X is pretty slick. One reason for that (not wishing to detract from the great amount of thought that went into it), is that it only has to run on a very limited range of hardware and can be adjusted accordingly. Linux, though I like it greatly and certainly don't consider myself a novice with it, keeps running afoul of each new graphics card / wireless card / motherboard APCI setting or whatever. Similarly Windows backed by the commercial might of Microsoft and hardware manufacturer's supportive development, gets a lot more hardware cover, but still suffers from everyone installing every 2-bit badly written bit of code on it. But neither of these apply greatly to the scenario we're discussing - professional educational software decided on by the educational community as a whole or an educational body, and rolled out on a limited set of OS's and hardware.
Anyway, I hope this is different to a normal
Regards,
H.
Intel will have an offering which provides equal performance for approximately the same price.
You're joking aren't you? Intel currently owns the highest performance segment of the Desktop chip market. AMD doesn't produce any Desktop chips that can match Intel's best in any impartial benchmarking. But AMD has been confidently out competing Intel on "bang for buck" for some time now. I doubt Intel will suddenly lower prices to AMD's levels. If Intel are going to lower prices to compete, they've had just as much reason to do so for some time already. And don't forget motherboard support. AMD has traditionally been friendlier to separate motherboard and CPU upgrading than Intel which is a hidden cost.
Another question is: does closed have important advantages over openness? The answer is also yes.
Well you see, I said Open had important advantages over Closed and went on to list them. You say that Closed has important advantages over Open and... ?
I would be interested to hear reasons why Closed is better for the School community than Open. Reasons that apply to Closed, but not to Open, logically.
I hate to point this out on a site like Slashdot, but the openness of a platform is not always the most important thing when buying a product like an iPad.
But it is an important thing. Openness results in: greater learning potential due to being able to tweak and study how what you're using works, enforces an open market meaning the barriers to entry are low and anyone with a good idea can get stuck in more easily, prevents price hiking due to competition. Now you can order the importance of those however you like, but they're all good reasons why open is better. "Openness not always the most important thing"? Well that's a statement that's true, but not useful. The question is does openness have important advantages over closed and the answer is yes. :)
And trendiness isn't why the ipad is so popular, either.
In schools? I think trendiness is indeed a reason for their being handed out to pupils. Having worked with people in education who make decisions like this purely on the grounds that something is trendy and because it allows them to go around talking about how radical and innovative they are, I have great confidence in saying that trendiness is a part of roll outs in schools. If you're just shifting the discussion to the general issue of the iPad's popularity rather than these school programs, then that's a different discussion and we should be clear to separate the two.
I wonder if the e-books will cost $150 too.
This isn't me arguing that the books should cost this amount of money (far from it), but why should the book being available in e-format make a difference? How much of the $150 do you think is printing, materials and distribution costs? Really, if you're factoring in these costs, then you're probably going to say the e-book is around $10-15 dollars cheaper, tops. Again, I'm not arguing that $150 isn't overpriced, I'm pointing out that providing it electronically is not much of an argument for why it should be cheaper.
That's even worse!
Meanwhile school administrators and your wife's employer are delighted at the restrictiveness of the device.
I think at least half of them are just excited at being able to be trendy. I've worked in education and a friend's school did this when the buzz was, I forget, not laptops, PSPs or something. Anyway, as an actual teacher rather than someone who got to go to local conferences and talk about being "innovative", his impression of a kid with a new gadget was... rather memorable. In University's, I've heard some right nonsense talked about "mobile learning". Mainly by managers who got to apply for grants on the back of it and go to conferences to talk crap about it to other people who then talked about new educational paradigms. (Sorry, you get lynched if you use out of date buzzwords in Academia. I think they're new pedagogical models or something now).
It's like technology. First you it doesn't exist so you can't use it. Then it exists and the muppets start using it everywhere like a fucking kid that's just learnt a "naughty word". Then people denounce it as not the radical wonder-fixall it was "supposed" to be. Then people settle down and start using it when it's appropriate. We're not at the last phase yet, we're in the muppet stage. There's a lot of good potential in electronic devices in school. A school is unlikely to get Richard Dawkins to give a lecture to a class. But a hundred schools, watching and asking questions electronically, can. There's a lot you can do with interactive quizzes, seeing at a glance which kids are struggling or excelling in real-time, or group work with such devices that's worthwhile. But what they ain't, is a drop-in replacement for manageable class sizes, actual teaching and knowledgable teachers.
Also, the choice of iPad's is a bad idea which goes right back to the real motivation of a lot of these schemes which is for people not doing the actual work to pat themselves on the back and be trendy. If they had any sense, they'd hold off a little and use one of the open platforms as they become available. Aside from saving money (always helpful in schools), they'd be able to have an open platform. If Apple get any kind of lock-in in Education, it will be bad, same as it's bad when any group gets a lock in. Find me one teacher in the UK that you can put a polygraph on who can say the the name "Capita" without their pulse hitting 150, and I'll show you a headmaster who hasn't done any real work in a decade.
Apparently the whole summary is shit. According to the actual statement, someone attempted to impersonate him on Facebook and attempted to get information on the operation. There's nothing to indicate that anyone was stupid enough to actually fall for it. Of course they might have been, but there's nothing that backs up TFS's implication that this actually happened.
Please tell me you're kidding. Anyone suggesting MySql for real work should just be laughed at.
I haven't seen a car analogy yet, so I'm going to be the bastard and first use one. MySQL is like a small engine car. Postgres is a bigger 4x4. If you're driving through town in a 30mph zone, they're equivalent. Once you start going up a steep hill, you see the difference. It's pretty obvious which DB is which car in this analogy. The hill represents either a need for advanced functionality, serious robustness or, in some scenarios more complex than just simple queries, scalability. The thing of it is, that there are a lot of scenarios out there that are just "driving around town in a 30mph zone". I fully agree that Postgres is superior in a number of ways. MySQL is marginally simpler to develop for at an low-professional level. But MySQL is adequate to a lot of people's needs. It doesn't put Postgres down to acknowledge that.
What really confuses me in the GP's post is introducing Firebird to the equation. That's definitely a comment that requires supporting.
The what to the who, now? Dude, if you're using MySQL and you have issues because you can't get past the default storage engine, I can't wait to see what happens when you have to do actual work.
You can't imagine my bemusement with MySQL when I discovered that the tables I had explicitly instructed it to create as InnoDB had silently been converted to MyISAM because InnoDB wasn't enabled on that MySQL server. One of those little quirks of MySQL that make it so charming. :)
Anyway, GP is indulging in a bit of Anus Loquacious. He's saying that "Postgres didn't even support foreign keys until version 5" as if that's a comparison to MySQL version 5. PostgreSQL didn't even have a version 5. It began as a re-write of a previous academic system and begins at version 6.0 and that was released in 1996, fourteen years ago! I'm not sure exactly when foreign keys became supported, but they were in by 7.0 which was released what, in 2000? In any case, that was over ten years ago. So even if you want to compare which database got to a particular function first (which is pretty pointless), Postgres has had it for ten years. MySQL is technically not far behind as InnoDB was first distributed with MySQL about a year later in 2001. But it was far, far from mature back then. Anyway, to summarise, the GP is (a) wrong about (b) an irrelevant argument.
Yep. You got that right on both counts. OpenOffice Base is the only thing that I'm aware of that is similar to Access that could sit on top of Postgres and as you say, it falls short in many respects. Admittedly it's a year since I used it, but I found it pretty flakey and it is certainly much inferior to Access in terms of functionality and intuitiveness.
That said, Access is a tool for throwing open database design to people who don't understand database design and a grand invitation to build a monstrously unmaintainable and ugly kludge of business logic turned into form objects which hang together through a tenuous web of forgotten relationships and functions. It's legitimate selling point is its easy integration with the rest of the MS Office suite and for simple one-person projects it's very friendly and appropriate. My concern with Access is not with the software itself which does what it's supposed to do (at least in the modern incarnations) very well, but rather that only in around 10% of the cases that I've seen it used, should it have been used. If a project's limited enough that Access is an adequate solution, then often you'd be better off getting someone to bang you out a MySQL database and some plugins to connect to it. If a project is not limited enough (or wont remain limited enough) that Access is an adequate solution, then for pity's sake, please don't use it! But of course, people do.
Anyway, the point has to be conceded. If GP is after something that does what Access does, then there's nothing that can compete with Access. All the rest of us can do is say: "that solution is a nice hammer, but before you use it just check your problem is a nail and not a screw?"
I can imagine the headlines now: "Two DBA's shot each other dead yesterday morning after they fell out over the maintainability of column-based conditional triggers. A police officer at the scene remarked: 'If only they had been using MySQL with the default ISAM tables which support no such functionality, then none of this would have happened."
:D
I love the arguments in C++ and DB stories. They're so much better than watching two people slug it out over a football team in a bar.
Good. Then all three of you will be cutting checks tomorrow to support the project, right?
If my company becomes more successful, then I will have no problem making donations to Postgres from the company. And I think they deserve it. As a private individual... I've donated to fund projects here and there (such as Wikipedia) and various developers who've written some widget or theme that I've used. I'd feel a bit inadequate donating the sort of money that I am able to privately (around a tenner) to something like Postgres. Sort of like sticking 2 pence in the collection flask for Third World Aid. It's a drop in the ocean. Maybe we could start some pledgebank thing where everyone could agree to donate £5, £10, something, if 500 other people do as well. That way individual contributions are significant.
Ah well, if its good enough in Europe than it must be fine everywhere.
What a Euro centric attitude you are sporting.
Did you actually read my post or is this just a knee-jerk desire to have a go at someone? My post was specifically pointing out that the US is different to Europe, and you make a post telling me that I'm assuming if it's fine in Europe it's fine elsewhere. Severe disconnect between what I wrote and what you understood, there.
Now are you actually going to say: "sorry for having a go at you, I made a mistake", or do we just file this away as another person who was just eagerly looking for an opportunity to criticise someone in the nice safe environment of the Internet?
You just made my day. Chrome runs wonderfully but I don't trust Google. I'm going to try some of these forks which I hadn't even known were there.
Thanks,
H.
A bug that has been there for approximately six years, mind you. That's almost always a bad sign. For projects I manage, I operate a priority escalation system. A reported issue might be trivial and get pushed to the bottom for the first couple of weeks. But after that, it's a "minor". Give it another month or so (depends on the project) and I'll bump it up to a "major". If you don't do this, you end up with a lot of cruft and an untidy mindset for the project. Yes, you have to prioritize, no that can't mean that some things are effectively never going to be dealt with. Priority escalation creates a good feel on a project as well, like getting the dishes done that you've meant to do for ages. If management is supportive of you taking the time to fix these older problems (and I am. ;) ), then it makes for a healthier project.