Every manager will profit from being able to make his own custom reports from company databases available to him. There are many databases in each company and the reporting abilities of current business software are very limited. Manager who can do a custom report for himself and even make it into a well generated web page for presentation to his superiors will definitely have an edge in his job.
Where in this galaxy is there a "manager" who is capable of writing a "custom report for himself"?
I deal with people who have Bachelor's, Master's, MD's, and PhD's, and they can't even do basic stuff like point and click. Hell, I've dealt with "computer" guys [sporting Bachelor's and Master's in "computer" fields, like math, EE, etc.] who are utterly clueless.
If you're with an outfit that has managers who are smart [and competent] enough to write their own "custom reports", then I'd say: Go very, very long on whatever stock options they've granted you.
If you later wish to use those values, you can't just read them back from the registers. You have to have "shadow" registers which cache the last value written to the real hardware registers.
That does sound like an incredible pain in the ass.
Is this just bad design, or are there economic reasons for doing this? Perhaps e.g. "R/W register memory" is vastly more expensive than "Write-Only register memory"?
For a minimally qualified lawyer that works in the appropriate field, rates are probably in the neighborhood of $100 - 200 hour. I'd love to know who it is that you've seen charge five grand an hour. He must have the best clients ever.
The drunk who finished dead last in his law school class at the very worst law school in the state, who had to pay someone to take the bar exam for him, and who's about to lose his license to practice law because he can't write a contract that's gramatically or syntactically correct, is gonna charge you $200/hr for the five minutes it takes him to plead the mercy of the court in a traffic court speeding ticket case.
Qualified "Intellectual Property Rights" lawyers are the creme de la creme of the profession - the guys who graduate #1 in their class at places like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. They practice in buildings that have security like Fort Knox: You can't even get inside to shake their hands without some serious connections who will vouch for you.
Of course, maybe we're quibbling about the semantics of the word "Qualified". Or maybe you're willing to bullshit your way into a meeting on false pretenses [which, quite frankly, is not necessarily a bad way to go, if you've got the balls to pull it off]. But these dudes will NOT knowingly fuck around with some worthless graduate student loser - their time is WAY too valuable.
Why oh why do people have such a hard time paying a few hundred bucks to a lawyer in circumstances where they could possibly suffer thousands of dollars in damage?
A few hundred? Where? In Bangalore?
My guess would be that the entry level for getting 15 minutes of ear time from a minimally qualified "Intellectual Property Rights" lawyer, who is a member of the bar in an American state [or the District of Columbia] is gonna be about $5,000.
And that would be if you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who could vouch for you - to the extent that they could assure him that listening to you for 15 minutes wouldn't be an utter and complete waste of his time.
Be for real. Graduate students don't have that kind of money or those kinds of connections [or at least they didn't when I was in graduate school - maybe times have changed].
If I were the kid, I almost certainly wouldn't sign the agreement [I'd flip hamburgers before I'd sign away my IP rights - hell, in this neck of the woods, if you need a summer job, you can make $20/hr hanging dry wall], but if I did sign the damned thing, I would insist on adding addendums listing every conceivable piece of IP I could ever imagine working on in my career, and I would make duplicates of the addendums [one for me and one for them], and both I and their legal department would sign [with a signature] every page of both copies of the addendums.
But again, I almost certainly wouldn't go to work for a company whose only offer is to turn me into some kind of an Intellectual Property Rights Slave - it's bad enough that, as an "employee", you're nothing but a Wage Slave in the first place. Fuck that shit.
Look, if you've got all this free time on your hands [and, by the way, how do you get all this free time - aren't you supposed to be studying for your exams or working on your dissertation?], then grow some balls, start your own business, and be the owner of your own time and your intellectual property.
Back to your problems: I've never looked at the two systems you mention, but I would suggest rethinking your data management approach at the same time you are thinking about vendors. If you want blobs over 4GB, what you want is to store metadata in the RDBMS and the data block on disk as a file. The reason most RDBMS's set the blob limit to 32kB (not 32MB) by default is to discourage mass storage of untyped data in the database.
Right - I don't have any problem with a classical RDBMS serving as not much more than a front end to a file system [although, at that point, you're essentially dealing with little more than what M$FT has been touting as "WinFS" lo these many years].
The problem is that, as far as I know, there is no standard [non-proprietary] way to store a "file pointer" in a classical RDBMS package. That gets back to the ASCII-ish nature of classical RDBMSs and their access languages [SQL and VB in particular]: They're great if all you have is very ASCII-ish [poorly typed] data [e.g. names, street addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, SSNs, etc.], but the minute you throw something at them that needs to be strongly typed [e.g. "what follows is a pointer to a file in the NTFS file system that lives on the D: drive" or "what follows is a pointer to a symbolic link to a file that was mounted from an NFS share on a server that resides across an FDDI line to a server farm in Lower Gondwanaland"], then you're just screwed.
With the data sizes you're talking about, I don't think that any common means of db optimization will allow for particularly fast queries and I suspect that that requirement isn't applicable to the raw data. When I did scientific computing at Fermilab in the early '90's, we left the raw data on tape and created a whole series of databases for analyzed results. We used a 64-bit physical/virtual addressing system to generate references back to the taped data blocks, but pretty much left the raw data alone after processing.
Nowadays, everybody is bumping up against the 2^32 barrier.
For instance, the new standard in audio recording is 24-bit [i.e. 3 byte] samples at 192K samples per second. But then a single channel comes in at
(3 bytes per sample) X (192,000 samples per second) X (60 seconds per minute) X (60 minutes per hour) = more than 2GB per hour
And that's just one channel for one hour; if you're doing something like 5+1 [surround sound] audio, you're looking at more than 12GB per hour [and God forbid that your studio session should go ten or twelve hours at a time].
Now SQL blobs max out at 4GB [2^32 bytes], and Java is an equally 32-bit language. For instance, nothing like the following will work in even the most recent versions of Java:
public class SixtyFourBit
{
public static void main (String [] theCommandLineArgument)
{
long theLong = 1;
theLong <<= 32;
theLong += 1;
long [] theLongArray = new long[theLong];
for(long i = 0; i < theLong; i++)
{
theLongArray[i] = i;
}
}
}
So if you want to have any hope of getting at data that is inherently 64-bit in nature, then you need something like a very recent version of C++ [at least as recent as the 1998 standard], or C# itself.
PS: You mention some time at Fermilab; I think they're using Objectivity at CERN, which is what caught my attention in the first place.
Knuth is rather profoundly "red state"-ish.
on
Donald Knuth On NPR
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I want to hear a good old "Proud to be American" conservative commentator screaming at me and telling me how to think!
Yes, this is how God ____loved the world: _He Gave his ____Only Child; ____So that all ____People with faith in him can Escape destruction and ____Live a full life; now and forever.
If your current relational database schema is either 1) small flat files or 2) a few big tables with most/all of the data stored in "blob" columns: i.e. blobs, clobs, byte arrays, or big varchars. You might be a candidate for an XML database. I'd get two experienced DBA's to agree there was no realistic way to normalize the data, first, but that's me.
We're doing "scientific" computing, and we're finding that classical "SQL/RDBMSs" just don't cut the mustard:
CLASSICAL RDBMSs: Essentially "ASCII" languages [SQL, VB, Java], with the idea of "typing" thrown in as an afterthought SCIENTIFIC: Needs very strong typing not found in ASCII languages like "SQL" [e.g. Intel/AMD 96-bit doubles, Altivec 128-bit doubles, Sparc 128-bit doubles, LabVIEW 128-bit timestamps, etc]
CLASSICAL RDBMSs: Very 32-bit in nature. Examples: SQL blobs max out at 2^32 bytes, Java can't take 64-bit longs as array counters, etc. SCIENTIFIC: HUGE datasets; easily break the 2^32 barrier; 64-bit language support a must
Classical SQL/RDBMSs are fine as long as your data is very ASCII-ish and very short [e.g. first name, last name, street address, zip code, phone number, SSN, etc]. But as soon as you start dealing with very large datasets containing strongly typed data, you're SOL with a classical RDBMS.
Anyway, two systems we had been thinking about were Objectivity and Caché. Any thoughts?
Obviously it would be nice if we could get the standard functionality you'd expect from a mature RDBMS package: Seamless backup to a failsafe server, seamless integration with a tape backup system like BackupExec or ArcServe, seamless integration with an industry standard authentication service like ActiveDirectory or Novell Directory Services, etc.
But if you define "medical breakthrough" as something along the lines of "a chemical [non-mechanical] agent that cures [not just treats the symptoms of] a disease [as opposed to a mechanical injury, like a broken bone, or a blocked artery]", then the hundreds of billions [trillions?] of dollars spent on "medical research" in the post WWII era by the western world has been, for all intents and purposes, an utter and complete waste of money.
And if the "cure" for Type I Diabetes described here is nothing more than a partial pancreatic transplant in combination with an aggressive regimen of anti-rejection drugs, then I wouldn't classify it as a "medical" breakthrough - rather, it's just a new surgical technique.
PS: If you [or a loved one] ever get really, really sick, keep in mind that the only person who stands a chance in hell of doing anything beneficial for you is a surgeon, not a medical doctor.
PPS: Antibiotics, the true "medical" breakthrough of the 20th century, are primarily a tool of the surgeon, not the medical doctor.
When I did software testing (a task that I hated), I quickly broke an RDBMS application with just a simple series of adding and removing items from a user-manipulable working set of data objects. Moreover, I even broke the UI layer and dumped myself into a lower level of the RDBMS shell that was supposedly inaccessible to users. The developers grew to hate me so much for finding bugs in their code and the RDBMS vendor's code that I was moved to another job (YAY!).
The fundamental problem here is that you were more intelligent than your developers [which, in turn, seems to have been because your developers were morons].
The trick for beta Testing is to get as many eyes on it as possible who know that this isn't a completed or stable product. and are able to try funky things to break it.
I agree with that statement.
However, what you've described takes an enormous amount of time and effort and [background] knowledge, to the extent that "try(ing) funky things to break it" could very well become a full time job. Hell, just spending the time necessary to read the documentation [and surf the web looking for "gotchas"], solely for the purpose of figuring out how to INSTALL a piece of software, is d@mned near a full time job.
But in the real world, people get paid to do full time jobs - in fact, they even get paid to do part-time jobs. And if their job title is something like "Senior Testing Engineer for Quality Control", then they get paid sh1tl0ads of money.
If you want to see what filesystems are like when you add database features, look up some BeFS documentation from BeOS.
An awful lot of stuff [some of it more than a little nefarious] can be accomplished with NTFS streams.
Sadly, they are among the best kept secrets in all of M$FTdom; sometimes I even wonder whether any of the in-house developers at M$FT are aware that they exist.
You could easily build a nice little well-insulated work shack out in the back yard with no more than several thousand dollars worth of supplies from Home Depot or Lowes. Then just run an [buried] power line* out there and you're ready to go.
Have the wifie instruct the progeny on the cardinal rule: "Remember, no one interrupts Daddie when he is out back working in his cottage..."
*Your choice of buried CAT6 -vs- 802.11g wireless.
An extra benefit has been the ability to aid my sister (who recently had a stroke) in her recovery.
Sounds from your note like you're maybe 35-ish.
I sincerely hope that you were the youngest and she was the oldest - maybe 15 or 20 years older than you [although, even then, 50-55 would still be waayyy too young to have to experience such a debilitating event].
Continental drift. The undying lands ended up at the north pole.
OF THE FLIGHT OF THE NOLDOR
...but Galadriel, the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day tall and valiant among the contending princes, was eager to be gone. No oaths she swore, but the words of Fëanor concerning Middle-earth had kindled in her heart, for she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will...
Now Fëanor led the Noldor northward, because his first purpose was to follow Morgoth... But as the mind of Fëanor cooled and took counsel, he perceived overlate that all these great companies would never overcome the long leagues in the north, nor cross the seas at the last, save with the aid of ships... He resolved now therefore to persuade the Teleri, ever friends to the Noldor, to join with them... But the Teleri were unmoved by aught that he could say...
Then Fëanor grew wrathful, for he still feared delay... [w]hen he judged that his strength was enough, he went to the Haven of the Swans and began to man the ships that were anchored there and to take them away by force. But the Teleri withstood him... Then swords were drawn, and a bitter fight was fought upon the ships... at last the Teleri were overcome, and a great part of their mariners that dwelt in Alqualondë were wickedly slain...
Then the Noldor drew away their white ships and manned their oars as best they might, and rowed them north along the coast... and the sea rose in wrath aginst the slayers, so that many of the ships were wrecked and those in them drowned... Nonetheless the greater part of the Noldor escaped...
After they had marched for a great while in the unmeasured night, they came at length to the northern confines of the Guarded Realm, upon the borders of the empty waste of Araman which were mountainous and cold. There they beheld suddenly a dark figure standing high upon a rock... the voice was heard speaking the curse and prophecy which is called the Prophecy of the North, and the Doom of the Noldor...
...To evil end all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass... Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow...
Then many quailed; but Fëanor hardened his heart and said: 'We have sworn, and not lightly. This oath we will keep...' So the main host held on, and swiftly the evil that was foretold began its work.
The Noldor came at last far into the north of Arda; and they saw the first teeth of ice that floated in the sea, and knew that they were drawing nigh to the Helcaraxë... and there none yet had dared to tread save the Valar only and Ungoliant... Therefore Fëanor halted and the Noldor debated what course they should now take... the Helcaraxë they deemed impassable, whereas the ships were too few... Therefore it came into the heart of Fëanor and his sons to seize all the ships and depart suddenly... and Fëanor slipped away secretly with all whom he deemed true to him, and went aboard, and put out to sea, and left Fingolfin in Araman...
But when they were landed, Maedhros the eldest of his sons, and on a time the friend of Fingon ere Morgoth's lies came between, spoke to Fëanor, saying: 'Now what ships and rowers will you spare to return, and whom shall they bear hither first? Fingon the valiant?'
Then Fëanor laughed as one fey, and he cried: 'None and none! What I have left behind I count now no loss; needless baggage on the road it has proved... Let the ships burn!' Then Maedhros alone stood aside, but Fëanor caused fire to be set to the white ships of the Teleri...
And Fingolfin and his people saw the light afar off, red beneath the clouds, and they knew that they were betrayed... and led by Fingolfin and his sons, and by Finrod and Galadriel, they dared to pass into the bitterest North; and finding no other way they endured at last the terror of the Helcaraxë and the cruel hills of ice...
Take me, for example. I'm looking to cut much of my consumption, including moving closer to work to cut my commute, possibly putting a throttle restrictor plate in my car, buying fluorescent lights, and even trying to build a small wind/solar generator. I love technology, and I'd love to see how it can be used to reduce demands for power rather than just being able to make more power more cheaply (conservation arguably being the better side of the energy coin). I'm even interested in how folks conserve other things too - I'm always amazed at how many plastic (or paper) bags the grocer insists on giving me every week and how much waste society generates in the form of packaging.
Boy, I loved Yahoo back then. I suppose I stopped using Yahoo as my search engine when that message went away. If Yahoo had used its internet portal identity with Google's search capabilities, they would've been an unstoppable Juggernaut.
While almost all the other.com's were.bombing, Yahoo very quietly amassed an enormous portfolio of once high-flying search engines [on pennies to the dollar, compared to their pre-crash values]:
"ptr == 0" must give the same result as "ptr == NULL", always.
One of the most common errors [and among the very most difficult to debug] in the C-languages, is the 1X equals sign ["="] assignment operator typed in place of the 2X equals sign ["=="] comparison operator:
if(ptr = NULL) [mis-typed, but will compile]
if(ptr == NULL)
A long time ago, there was a movement to switch the constant over to left side so as to avoid the possible typing error:
I've never programmed for "Websphere" before, but I had always thought that it was part of IBM's big [massive?] "Java as Middleware" initiative - a few years back, they were putting some serious muscle into marketing multi-million dollar AS400 boxen to compete in that arena [systems that, for all intents and purposes, were really more mainframe-ish than boxen-ish].
Is the gist of this news item that IBM is abandoning Java for PHP? [And yes, I did skim TFA.]
The only problem is that SciFi couples it with Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis on Friday nights. So, when one should be out partying with an actual human girl, he is staying at home addicted to 3 hours of very good television.
Don't forget the all-new episodes of Andromeda - that makes a total of 4 consecutive hours of SciFi every Friday night.
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Every manager will profit from being able to make his own custom reports from company databases available to him. There are many databases in each company and the reporting abilities of current business software are very limited. Manager who can do a custom report for himself and even make it into a well generated web page for presentation to his superiors will definitely have an edge in his job.
Where in this galaxy is there a "manager" who is capable of writing a "custom report for himself"?
I deal with people who have Bachelor's, Master's, MD's, and PhD's, and they can't even do basic stuff like point and click. Hell, I've dealt with "computer" guys [sporting Bachelor's and Master's in "computer" fields, like math, EE, etc.] who are utterly clueless.
If you're with an outfit that has managers who are smart [and competent] enough to write their own "custom reports", then I'd say: Go very, very long on whatever stock options they've granted you.
If you later wish to use those values, you can't just read them back from the registers. You have to have "shadow" registers which cache the last value written to the real hardware registers.
That does sound like an incredible pain in the ass.
Is this just bad design, or are there economic reasons for doing this? Perhaps e.g. "R/W register memory" is vastly more expensive than "Write-Only register memory"?
Make all registers readable! Write-only registers are a pain in the #$@#$%^!
I know a little about assembly language at the processor level, but next to nothing about e.g. PCI-bus negotiation.
Is there such a thing as e.g. "write-only" memory when you're dealing with device drivers? Maybe when you're doing DMA stuff to upload data to RAM?
Or was your post intended to be tongue-in-cheek?
For a minimally qualified lawyer that works in the appropriate field, rates are probably in the neighborhood of $100 - 200 hour. I'd love to know who it is that you've seen charge five grand an hour. He must have the best clients ever.
The drunk who finished dead last in his law school class at the very worst law school in the state, who had to pay someone to take the bar exam for him, and who's about to lose his license to practice law because he can't write a contract that's gramatically or syntactically correct, is gonna charge you $200/hr for the five minutes it takes him to plead the mercy of the court in a traffic court speeding ticket case.
Qualified "Intellectual Property Rights" lawyers are the creme de la creme of the profession - the guys who graduate #1 in their class at places like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. They practice in buildings that have security like Fort Knox: You can't even get inside to shake their hands without some serious connections who will vouch for you.
Of course, maybe we're quibbling about the semantics of the word "Qualified". Or maybe you're willing to bullshit your way into a meeting on false pretenses [which, quite frankly, is not necessarily a bad way to go, if you've got the balls to pull it off]. But these dudes will NOT knowingly fuck around with some worthless graduate student loser - their time is WAY too valuable.
Why oh why do people have such a hard time paying a few hundred bucks to a lawyer in circumstances where they could possibly suffer thousands of dollars in damage?
A few hundred? Where? In Bangalore?
My guess would be that the entry level for getting 15 minutes of ear time from a minimally qualified "Intellectual Property Rights" lawyer, who is a member of the bar in an American state [or the District of Columbia] is gonna be about $5,000.
And that would be if you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who could vouch for you - to the extent that they could assure him that listening to you for 15 minutes wouldn't be an utter and complete waste of his time.
Be for real. Graduate students don't have that kind of money or those kinds of connections [or at least they didn't when I was in graduate school - maybe times have changed].
If I were the kid, I almost certainly wouldn't sign the agreement [I'd flip hamburgers before I'd sign away my IP rights - hell, in this neck of the woods, if you need a summer job, you can make $20/hr hanging dry wall], but if I did sign the damned thing, I would insist on adding addendums listing every conceivable piece of IP I could ever imagine working on in my career, and I would make duplicates of the addendums [one for me and one for them], and both I and their legal department would sign [with a signature] every page of both copies of the addendums.
But again, I almost certainly wouldn't go to work for a company whose only offer is to turn me into some kind of an Intellectual Property Rights Slave - it's bad enough that, as an "employee", you're nothing but a Wage Slave in the first place. Fuck that shit.
Look, if you've got all this free time on your hands [and, by the way, how do you get all this free time - aren't you supposed to be studying for your exams or working on your dissertation?], then grow some balls, start your own business, and be the owner of your own time and your intellectual property.
If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away...
Run.
Very fast.
Do not look back.
Back to your problems: I've never looked at the two systems you mention, but I would suggest rethinking your data management approach at the same time you are thinking about vendors. If you want blobs over 4GB, what you want is to store metadata in the RDBMS and the data block on disk as a file. The reason most RDBMS's set the blob limit to 32kB (not 32MB) by default is to discourage mass storage of untyped data in the database.
Right - I don't have any problem with a classical RDBMS serving as not much more than a front end to a file system [although, at that point, you're essentially dealing with little more than what M$FT has been touting as "WinFS" lo these many years].
The problem is that, as far as I know, there is no standard [non-proprietary] way to store a "file pointer" in a classical RDBMS package. That gets back to the ASCII-ish nature of classical RDBMSs and their access languages [SQL and VB in particular]: They're great if all you have is very ASCII-ish [poorly typed] data [e.g. names, street addresses, zip codes, phone numbers, SSNs, etc.], but the minute you throw something at them that needs to be strongly typed [e.g. "what follows is a pointer to a file in the NTFS file system that lives on the D: drive" or "what follows is a pointer to a symbolic link to a file that was mounted from an NFS share on a server that resides across an FDDI line to a server farm in Lower Gondwanaland"], then you're just screwed.
With the data sizes you're talking about, I don't think that any common means of db optimization will allow for particularly fast queries and I suspect that that requirement isn't applicable to the raw data. When I did scientific computing at Fermilab in the early '90's, we left the raw data on tape and created a whole series of databases for analyzed results. We used a 64-bit physical/virtual addressing system to generate references back to the taped data blocks, but pretty much left the raw data alone after processing.
Nowadays, everybody is bumping up against the 2^32 barrier.
For instance, the new standard in audio recording is 24-bit [i.e. 3 byte] samples at 192K samples per second. But then a single channel comes in at
And that's just one channel for one hour; if you're doing something like 5+1 [surround sound] audio, you're looking at more than 12GB per hour [and God forbid that your studio session should go ten or twelve hours at a time].Now SQL blobs max out at 4GB [2^32 bytes], and Java is an equally 32-bit language. For instance, nothing like the following will work in even the most recent versions of Java:
So if you want to have any hope of getting at data that is inherently 64-bit in nature, then you need something like a very recent version of C++ [at least as recent as the 1998 standard], or C# itself.PS: You mention some time at Fermilab; I think they're using Objectivity at CERN, which is what caught my attention in the first place.
I want to hear a good old "Proud to be American" conservative commentator screaming at me and telling me how to think!
Sorry to burst your bubble:
If your current relational database schema is either 1) small flat files or 2) a few big tables with most/all of the data stored in "blob" columns: i.e. blobs, clobs, byte arrays, or big varchars. You might be a candidate for an XML database. I'd get two experienced DBA's to agree there was no realistic way to normalize the data, first, but that's me.
We're doing "scientific" computing, and we're finding that classical "SQL/RDBMSs" just don't cut the mustard:
Classical SQL/RDBMSs are fine as long as your data is very ASCII-ish and very short [e.g. first name, last name, street address, zip code, phone number, SSN, etc]. But as soon as you start dealing with very large datasets containing strongly typed data, you're SOL with a classical RDBMS.Anyway, two systems we had been thinking about were Objectivity and Caché. Any thoughts?
Obviously it would be nice if we could get the standard functionality you'd expect from a mature RDBMS package: Seamless backup to a failsafe server, seamless integration with a tape backup system like BackupExec or ArcServe, seamless integration with an industry standard authentication service like ActiveDirectory or Novell Directory Services, etc.
Thanks for any advice you can offer!
Somebody's been watching too much Atlantis.
NOVELL SUPPORT: "Thank you for calling Novell Support. How may I be of assistance to you today?"
CUSTOMER: "Uh, my syslogs are telling me that I've got a problem with something called [insert hard sibilant here]-en".
NOVELL SUPPORT: "Sir, is that [insert hard sibilant here]-en with an 'X' or [insert hard sibilant here]-en with a 'Z'?"
CUSTOMER: "Huh?"
Why?
Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen... Zen... Xen...
Novell Marketing, the biggest bunch of punching bags in the history of the technology industry, has gotta be asking themselves, "Why us?"
Seriously, without antibiotics, has there been ANY medical advance in the past 50+ years?
For all intents and purposes, the answer is no.
Of course, the pedant would argue the semantics of the word "medical", and offer up examples like
But if you define "medical breakthrough" as something along the lines of "a chemical [non-mechanical] agent that cures [not just treats the symptoms of] a disease [as opposed to a mechanical injury, like a broken bone, or a blocked artery]", then the hundreds of billions [trillions?] of dollars spent on "medical research" in the post WWII era by the western world has been, for all intents and purposes, an utter and complete waste of money.And if the "cure" for Type I Diabetes described here is nothing more than a partial pancreatic transplant in combination with an aggressive regimen of anti-rejection drugs, then I wouldn't classify it as a "medical" breakthrough - rather, it's just a new surgical technique.
PS: If you [or a loved one] ever get really, really sick, keep in mind that the only person who stands a chance in hell of doing anything beneficial for you is a surgeon, not a medical doctor.
PPS: Antibiotics, the true "medical" breakthrough of the 20th century, are primarily a tool of the surgeon, not the medical doctor.
When I did software testing (a task that I hated), I quickly broke an RDBMS application with just a simple series of adding and removing items from a user-manipulable working set of data objects. Moreover, I even broke the UI layer and dumped myself into a lower level of the RDBMS shell that was supposedly inaccessible to users. The developers grew to hate me so much for finding bugs in their code and the RDBMS vendor's code that I was moved to another job (YAY!).
The fundamental problem here is that you were more intelligent than your developers [which, in turn, seems to have been because your developers were morons].
The trick for beta Testing is to get as many eyes on it as possible who know that this isn't a completed or stable product. and are able to try funky things to break it.
I agree with that statement.
However, what you've described takes an enormous amount of time and effort and [background] knowledge, to the extent that "try(ing) funky things to break it" could very well become a full time job. Hell, just spending the time necessary to read the documentation [and surf the web looking for "gotchas"], solely for the purpose of figuring out how to INSTALL a piece of software, is d@mned near a full time job.
But in the real world, people get paid to do full time jobs - in fact, they even get paid to do part-time jobs. And if their job title is something like "Senior Testing Engineer for Quality Control", then they get paid sh1tl0ads of money.
If you want to see what filesystems are like when you add database features, look up some BeFS documentation from BeOS.
An awful lot of stuff [some of it more than a little nefarious] can be accomplished with NTFS streams.
Sadly, they are among the best kept secrets in all of M$FTdom; sometimes I even wonder whether any of the in-house developers at M$FT are aware that they exist.
You could easily build a nice little well-insulated work shack out in the back yard with no more than several thousand dollars worth of supplies from Home Depot or Lowes. Then just run an [buried] power line* out there and you're ready to go.
Have the wifie instruct the progeny on the cardinal rule: "Remember, no one interrupts Daddie when he is out back working in his cottage..."
*Your choice of buried CAT6 -vs- 802.11g wireless.
An extra benefit has been the ability to aid my sister (who recently had a stroke) in her recovery.
Sounds from your note like you're maybe 35-ish.
I sincerely hope that you were the youngest and she was the oldest - maybe 15 or 20 years older than you [although, even then, 50-55 would still be waayyy too young to have to experience such a debilitating event].
But what, then, happened to all the elves?
Continental drift. The undying lands ended up at the north pole.
OF THE FLIGHT OF THE NOLDOR
Now Fëanor led the Noldor northward, because his first purpose was to follow Morgoth... But as the mind of Fëanor cooled and took counsel, he perceived overlate that all these great companies would never overcome the long leagues in the north, nor cross the seas at the last, save with the aid of ships... He resolved now therefore to persuade the Teleri, ever friends to the Noldor, to join with them... But the Teleri were unmoved by aught that he could say...
Then Fëanor grew wrathful, for he still feared delay... [w]hen he judged that his strength was enough, he went to the Haven of the Swans and began to man the ships that were anchored there and to take them away by force. But the Teleri withstood him... Then swords were drawn, and a bitter fight was fought upon the ships... at last the Teleri were overcome, and a great part of their mariners that dwelt in Alqualondë were wickedly slain...
Then the Noldor drew away their white ships and manned their oars as best they might, and rowed them north along the coast... and the sea rose in wrath aginst the slayers, so that many of the ships were wrecked and those in them drowned... Nonetheless the greater part of the Noldor escaped...
After they had marched for a great while in the unmeasured night, they came at length to the northern confines of the Guarded Realm, upon the borders of the empty waste of Araman which were mountainous and cold. There they beheld suddenly a dark figure standing high upon a rock... the voice was heard speaking the curse and prophecy which is called the Prophecy of the North, and the Doom of the Noldor...
Then many quailed; but Fëanor hardened his heart and said: 'We have sworn, and not lightly. This oath we will keep...' So the main host held on, and swiftly the evil that was foretold began its work.The Noldor came at last far into the north of Arda; and they saw the first teeth of ice that floated in the sea, and knew that they were drawing nigh to the Helcaraxë... and there none yet had dared to tread save the Valar only and Ungoliant... Therefore Fëanor halted and the Noldor debated what course they should now take... the Helcaraxë they deemed impassable, whereas the ships were too few... Therefore it came into the heart of Fëanor and his sons to seize all the ships and depart suddenly... and Fëanor slipped away secretly with all whom he deemed true to him, and went aboard, and put out to sea, and left Fingolfin in Araman...
But when they were landed, Maedhros the eldest of his sons, and on a time the friend of Fingon ere Morgoth's lies came between, spoke to Fëanor, saying: 'Now what ships and rowers will you spare to return, and whom shall they bear hither first? Fingon the valiant?'
Then Fëanor laughed as one fey, and he cried: 'None and none! What I have left behind I count now no loss; needless baggage on the road it has proved... Let the ships burn!' Then Maedhros alone stood aside, but Fëanor caused fire to be set to the white ships of the Teleri...
And Fingolfin and his people saw the light afar off, red beneath the clouds, and they knew that they were betrayed... and led by Fingolfin and his sons, and by Finrod and Galadriel, they dared to pass into the bitterest North; and finding no other way they endured at last the terror of the Helcaraxë and the cruel hills of ice...
historic nominal prices
Huh?
Take me, for example. I'm looking to cut much of my consumption, including moving closer to work to cut my commute, possibly putting a throttle restrictor plate in my car, buying fluorescent lights, and even trying to build a small wind/solar generator. I love technology, and I'd love to see how it can be used to reduce demands for power rather than just being able to make more power more cheaply (conservation arguably being the better side of the energy coin). I'm even interested in how folks conserve other things too - I'm always amazed at how many plastic (or paper) bags the grocer insists on giving me every week and how much waste society generates in the form of packaging.
Good grief. Have you considered Thorazine?
Boy, I loved Yahoo back then. I suppose I stopped using Yahoo as my search engine when that message went away. If Yahoo had used its internet portal identity with Google's search capabilities, they would've been an unstoppable Juggernaut.
While almost all the other .com's were .bombing, Yahoo very quietly amassed an enormous portfolio of once high-flying search engines [on pennies to the dollar, compared to their pre-crash values]:
So I wouldn't count them out just yet.Having glanced at Krowne's missive, I'd have no choice but to support McHenry in whatever it was he said.
"ptr == 0" must give the same result as "ptr == NULL", always.
One of the most common errors [and among the very most difficult to debug] in the C-languages, is the 1X equals sign ["="] assignment operator typed in place of the 2X equals sign ["=="] comparison operator:
A long time ago, there was a movement to switch the constant over to left side so as to avoid the possible typing error: I guess they don't teach that anymore.I've never programmed for "Websphere" before, but I had always thought that it was part of IBM's big [massive?] "Java as Middleware" initiative - a few years back, they were putting some serious muscle into marketing multi-million dollar AS400 boxen to compete in that arena [systems that, for all intents and purposes, were really more mainframe-ish than boxen-ish].
Is the gist of this news item that IBM is abandoning Java for PHP? [And yes, I did skim TFA.]
The only problem is that SciFi couples it with Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis on Friday nights. So, when one should be out partying with an actual human girl, he is staying at home addicted to 3 hours of very good television.
Don't forget the all-new episodes of Andromeda - that makes a total of 4 consecutive hours of SciFi every Friday night.
And there are some very hot chicks on that show.