I'm 2/3 of the way to a CS Master's. I've used Oracle, Sybase, and PostgreSQL. And I prefer MySQL.
Would you be so gracious as to say why?
I mean, I've used MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server (very much like Sybase), and Oracle, and I prefer PostgreSQL for most things. And the reason is simple: I can guarantee the integrity of my data with it much more easily than I can with MySQL, and I can afford it.:-)
Not to mention things like the fact that the query language rarely prevents me from doing something I want to do within the database, and when combined with the many languages you can write stored procedures/functions in, there is very little indeed that can't be done with it. I've found MySQL much more limiting.
And as a DBA, PostgreSQL for me is second to none in some situations. Namely, that DDL is transactional! Even Oracle can't make that claim (though I think SQL Server/Sybase can for some DDL, at least).
Good question. At the moment, the things that are keeping me from switching over, are:
* Unbuffered queries - When you're returning a result set that might be (literally!) gigabytes in size, storing the results in RAM is unfortunately, not an option.
Storing a result set that's gigabytes in size in RAM is probably not a good idea in any case.
Caching a query result set is incredibly difficult to do correctly in any case, as you either have to invalidate the entire set when any changes are made to the underlying tables, or you have to run the data involved in any INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs through the search terms used for the query you're caching and modify the cached result set upon a hit. The former is easily replaced by client side caching + rules or triggers on DML (INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs) to the underlying tables, and the latter is likely to have a significant impact on your database update performance.
* MYSQL's optimised count() function.
- "Select Count(*) from table" is very fast on mysql due to internal jiggery-pokery. Postgres is a touch slower unfortunately.
Yes, though you can get a quick approximation by querying the PG schema tables directly:
SELECT CAST(reltuples AS integer) FROM pg_class JOIN pg_namespace ON (pg_class.relnamespace = pg_namespace.oid) where relname = 'tablename' AND nspname = 'schemaname'
---
* Insert LOW_PRIORITY - No equivalent in PG
And no need. LOW_PRIORITY exists because MySQL does full-table locks for DML against MyISAM tables. LOW_PRIORITY ensures that DML doesn't get priority over SELECTs.
PostgreSQL uses MVCC. This means that writers almost never block readers, and hence prioritization of readers over writers isn't necessary. This is one of PostgreSQL's biggest strengths.
* phpmyadmin - phppgadmin is nice, but still missing a few nice things (renaming table fields, or changing data types, for example)
Put in the feature request. Also make sure you check out the current version. PostgreSQL 8.0 will have the ability to change the data type of a column without having to go through gymnastics, but it's possible to make the change even now -- it's just more difficult.
* mysqldiff - An application that takes one database structure, compares it against the current database structure, and outputs the SQL statements required to 'upgrade' the current DB structure to the 'new' DB structure.
This sounds very cool, and since it's open source it may be possible to create a PostgreSQL version of it from the source.
Way back in the day (late 90s), PostgreSQL was quite slow, not all that reliable, and difficult to bring back up after a crash. It was during this time that MySQL became very popular: it was fast, if not terribly robust, but the MySQL developers were very smart by providing tools that would "fsck" your table files so you could bring your database back up after a crash without too much headache (PostgreSQL required a full restore, which took much more time).
What a difference a few years makes! Today, PostgreSQL is fast, extremely robust, and incredibly capable. It scales better than MySQL, preserves data integrity better, and makes it possible to do things that you can't do even in Oracle (for instance, just about all DDL in PostgreSQL is transactional: table creation/deletion, index creation/deletion, user creation/deletion, etc. This means, for instance, that you don't have to have an operator to alter a column's datatype: you just create the new column, copy the data into it, and then drop the old column, all within a single transaction, and if you screw up you can roll the whole thing back). It supports a number of different languages in which one can write stored procedures. The planner is quite good and yet is constantly improving.
About the only thing that PostgreSQL is not is auto-adaptive. That is, one still has to configure it to get optimal performance, same as with any database I've ever seen. The default settings provided in the raw distribution are, well, quite conservative: they're set up so that you can successfully start PostgreSQL even on a small, old system, which means you almost certainly have to tweak the configuration file in order to get truly good performance out of it.
In short, PostgreSQL has gotten very, very good in a relatively short period of time. It's so good compared with the other freely-available databases out there that I can't really think of a compelling reason to use anything else -- it's so good that if you need something more capable then you're going to have to pay big, big money.
And 8.0 will get you native Win32 support (with a point-n-click installer and everything, if I'm not mistaken). With its feature set (especially if you include what's going to be delivered in 8.0), that makes PostgreSQL-win32 a real SQL Server killer, as long as it performs well on that platform.
In short, PostgreSQL deserves very much to win this award, and the PostgreSQL development crew deserves a ton of kudos for producing such a kickass database system. I'm very much hoping that third-party software support for PostgreSQL gets as good as it is for MySQL, because the database engine is certainly deserving of it.
Well the whole reason you have insurance is so that if something bad happens while driving etc you don't have to foot the whole bill yourself.
No, the whole reason most people have insurance is that it's required by law, and you cannot legally drive without it.
That's why this is such a troubling development: automobile insurance is almost impossible to "opt out" of, and is probably impossible to opt out of in some states.
Unfortunatly, the massive cost of liscencing the MVS (OS/390, zOS) operating systems means there is no way that a normal user can run a PC based mainframe. IBM employees can do it, of course.
You can't run the current version of the OS without paying big money (or having the right connections and agreements), but you can run older versions, fortunately.
For instance, you can get MVS 3.8J for free. There's even a prebuilt distribution of it for use with Hercules available. The main page is here, and the ISO image can be downloaded from Jay Maynard's PD software page (the turnkey site's links to downloadable images no longer work).
There are other operating systems, e.g. VM/370, which are also freely available.
Maybe, instead of advocating the destruction of the machines, you can do what we did in Nevada and force the Sec. of State to add a paper trail. It's a lot more work and you don't get to smash things, but it does a lot more good.
And how do you "force" the Sec. of State to add a paper trail? Threaten to not vote for him? When the (unauditable) voting machines themselves will make it impossible to tell how many people actually voted for him and thus remove any real incentive he has to do your bidding?
Sounds like you got lucky, and don't have an evil Sec. of State who cares nothing for the people. If you had someone in the office like that, he would have made sure that the proposal to add a paper trail got "stalled in committee" or some such nonsense, and then proceeded to make sure, through backroom deals with the voting machine manufacturers, that he got elected no matter what the voters demanded.
Your "solution" only works if the guy in power is already a reasonable person.
Prior art doesn't mean shit in the U.S. anymore, even in the courts, and especially to the patent office (who see fit to issue new patents even against things which have been patented in the past!).
And this won't change, either, since it benefits large corporations at the expense of smaller entities, and large corporations are the only entities the U.S. government responds to anymore.
Be that as it may, it's not his job or his place to be conducting surveillance on a superior he thinks isn't working hard enough. I've got zero sympathy for him.
Yep. Because, after all, if your job description says you are supposed to look for computer misuse (and that term happens to include use of the computer for non-business purposes), monitor computer systems to document such misuses, etc., what they really mean is that you're supposed to be doing that to other peons like yourself, not your superiors.
Because, after all, management is exempt from any of the organization-wide policies that govern everyone else, and clearly you deserve to be fired if you have the audacity to believe otherwise.
I mean, you have to be a real moron to believe that the rules should apply to everyone and not just the peons.
so you are saying that Indian engineers are able to do the same work in the same amount of time for less money because of automation?
No, I'm saying that Indian engineers are able to do the same work in the same amount of time for less money because their standard of living is lower, and so they're able to live on less money. Our wages would be lower too if our standard of living were lower. The other factor involved is the exchange rate, which will remain favorable to the U.S. as long as the people in India are busy working for U.S. firms rather than working for themselves.
The main concern isn't India, actually. They supposedly have reasonable labor laws. No, the real concern is countries like China, which reportedly uses prison labor to manufacture goods. Anytime you try to compete against prison labor by being cheaper, you will lose unless you have a significant edge in automation.
...and just jump to the conclusion that the entire US middle class is doomed.
The US middle class is doomed. Why? Because offshoring does not increase efficiency. The people in India aren't more efficient than the people in the U.S.: it takes just as many man-hours for them to accomplish something as it does for someone in the U.S. to accomplish the same thing. Economics is eventually about the exchange of labor: your labor for someone else's.
Ultimately, that's the only thing that really counts. The reason things have gotten cheaper in a global fashion is not because of offshoring, it's because of automation. With automation, one person is able to accomplish much more than they can without it. Automation acts as an efficiency multiplier. Nothing else comes close to matching the efficiency gains to be had from automation.
What offshoring does is to transfer wealth from the people who lose money from it (the people who are no longer employed as a result of their jobs being offshored) to the people who gain money from it: those who own or have major investment in the corporations that are offshoring. People who don't have jobs eventually cannot buy goods and services, and thus the very corporations that are offshoring will eventually lose some of their customers. Unless the corporation takes all of the money it saved and uses it to reduce the price of its products, the average affordability of its products will actually drop. If they take all of the money saved from offshoring and use it to drop the price of their products (in other words, they don't use it to increase their profits), then the average affordability of their products will remain the same.
And if you think about economics in terms of labor transactions, all of that makes a great deal of sense: the price of a product ultimately reflects the total amount of labor required to produce the product -- it cannot sustainably drop below that, and in a competitive marketplace it cannot rise much above that, either. Offshoring does nothing to increase labor efficiency, so it cannot ultimately reduce the price of goods and services.
Put another way, economics is a zero-sum game except for real efficiency gains (due to things like automation). Since offshoring doesn't increase the real efficiency of production, it must be a wealth transfer: someone must lose for someone else to win. The loser in this case is a member of the middle class, whose job disappears in the wave of offshoring. The primary winner is a member of the upper class, who owns a substantial portion of the corporation doing the offshoring. The secondary (temporary) winner is the person who is the recipient of the job being offshored. I say "temporary" because that person's job will be offshored elsewhere as soon as his labor costs are higher than someone else's.
Do you have the same view of outsourcing when it is factories in Pennsylvania losing jobs to South Carolina? Is that wrong?
No. Why? Because both locations are subject to the same labor laws. You know, the ones that specify what minimum wage must be paid, what overtime must be paid, etc.
Offshoring to locations which aren't subject to such labor laws is the problem, because now suddenly you have a group of people (the one you're in) who are living in a system that provides certain protections competing against people who could easily be slaves in the real sense of the word. When your competition is slave labor, and the only variable that can be tweaked to make you competitive is your own standard of living, what exactly do you think is going to happen? Do you really think your standard of living isn't going to drop to match that of the slave? Only a total moron would believe that.
I have no problem with offshoring work as long as the people doing the work are operating under labor laws at least as protective as our own. Otherwise it quickly degenerates into a race to the bottom for the people doing the real work, with the only real variable being the standard of living of those workers. And guess what? Even the things we take for granted right now, like electricity and running water, are things that cost money and are thus subject to being reduced or eliminated in order to make the labor pool cheaper and thus more competitive.
Remember: the cheapest labor is a slave who gets barely enough to eat.
1. Get of your ass and write your senator / Congressmen
2. Vote the bums out.
Simple.
And completely ineffective.
Vote them out to be replaced by whom? The only people who have any chance of being elected are those who get media exposure. The media is owned by a small number of very large corporations -- the very same corporations that are behind this bill to begin with. If you want to have the slightest chance of being elected, you have to do what the corporations want. Fail, and you'll either be ignored or you'll get a lot of bad press (like Dean did -- do you really think the "screaming madman" impression the media gives of him was even close to being an accurate and fair picture of him?). Either way, you won't be elected, because people won't elect someone they don't know about or who they think is a loser, and they get all that information primarily from the media.
No, sorry, this is a rigged game, and there's no way out.
In practice, your single vote is extremely unlikely to change the 'result' of a large election -- if you see that result only as the person who gets elected. But that's not all to the result frof an election -- there's also the number of votes cast for each candidate, winner or loser; and that's something you can always affect.
You can affect the number of votes an unelectable candidate has, sure, but it doesn't make any difference. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
If there are 2 electable candidates (as is usually the case in the U.S.) and 4 unelectable candidates, voting for one of the unelectable candidates influences nothing. It has no influence whatsoever -- you may as well have not voted at all, for the amount of effect that voting for an unelectable candidate has. Doing so will not change the outcome of the election at all, even if you managed to get all the other people like you to do the same. And it won't have any effect at all on the decisions of the winning candidate once he lands in office. After all, he won the election despite the votes for the unelectable candidates, and the other electable candidate came in second, while the unelectable candidates trailed far, far behind.
If you vote for one of the electable candidates then your vote has an influence. Not much, obviously: only one in however many people voted in total, but it does have some. And if you manage to get all the other people like you to do the same, then you and those people can essentially be the deciding factor in which of the two electable candidates wins.
That's the difference between voting for an unelectable candidate and voting for an electable one: the former has absolutely zero effect, while the latter has a small effect. It might not change the outcome in the end, to be sure, but it has a much greater chance of doing so (comparatively speaking). It's the only thing that can make the act of voting worth anything at all.
Certainly a different voting system would yield much different results. But this is the real world, and in the real world, a different voting system simply is not going to happen in the U.S. It can't, because there's no way to get there from here -- the current system simply won't allow it, and revolution can't work. There's nowhere left to go. And so we have no choice but to deal with the fact that voting for an unelectable candidate is exactly the same thing as not voting at all.
And if you vote for someone who's going to win anyway, then your vote for them won't change that fact either.
The problem isn't that there's only one electable candidate. There are usually more than one. The problem is that all electable candidates are undesirable.
So while a vote for an unelectable candidate won't change the fact that they won't be elected, a vote for an electable candidate can.
And the end result is that if you want your vote to have any real influence over the election, you must vote for one of the electable candidates. The problem with this is that the influence your vote has is limited to deciding which electable candidate makes it into office.
Don't you see? If you vote for an unelectable candidate, your voice isn't heard. That's because an unelectable candidate basically cannot win, whether you vote for him or not. And that's because there simply aren't enough people like you to make that candidate electable, because that candidate can't get sufficient media exposure, because that candidate isn't willing to play ball with the corporations.
Like I said, the real world is consistent and unforgiving. When the only people who have any real chance of being elected are the ones who are willing to play ball with the corporations, a vote for anyone else is a vote that will have no effect. That such a vote is "thrown away" isn't misguided belief, it's unforgiving reality. And the act of voting for one of the electable candidates even if they're not your favorite choice isn't an act of playing the lottery, it's the only real chance you have of influencing the election at all.
In essence, the system is rigged and the choices are rigged. This system cannot be changed from within -- the way it's rigged prevents that. It can only be changed from the outside, and that means via revolution. And revolution can't happen because the military (which answers to the government) has too much firepower compared with the civilians, so any attempt at revolution would be lost.
That means that we're screwed. We have no choice but to bend over and take it, because all our other options have been removed from us. Welcome to the real world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you saying that you're only prepared to vote for someone if X million other people will also do so?
No. I'm saying that I'm smart enough to know that if I vote for someone who is unelectable, the fact that I voted for them will not change the fact that they will not be elected.
Sorry, but we live in the real world, and the real world is consistent and unforgiving. Being known to a sufficient number of people is a prerequisite to getting elected. You don't get elected if people don't know about you. It's that simple. And even today, even with the presence of the internet, enough people can't find out about you to elect you unless you get exposure via the mass media, and not enough people will want to vote for you unless you get favorable exposure via the mass media.
And the mass media can expose you in whatever way it wants. It doesn't have to present a complete picture of you to the masses, it can "spin" your image whichever way it sees fit. And it does.
Look at what happened to Howard Dean. Do you think the "screaming maniac" impression of him that the mass media has given people as a result of playing the same clip over and over and over again is a true picture of him? Do you really think it's balanced and fair? I seriously doubt it.
Do you really think the mass media would have portrayed Dean that way if the corporations that own the mass media wanted him to get elected? No, of course it wouldn't have.
And so, it follows that the corporations that own the mass media have to like you enough before they'll give you favorable exposure. And being corporations (and thus uncaring about such things as ethics), they'll insist that you be willing to do their bidding once elected before they do you the "favor" of giving you favorable exposure. They don't even have to spell it out to you. Examples such as Dean are enough to give anyone of any intelligence the hint.
Do you get the picture yet? With the system as it is right now, there is almost no chance that someone who won't play ball with the corporations can get elected. Period. The reason the whole voting machine thing is happening the way it is in the U.S. is that corporations like to be certain -- they want to eliminate any chance of not getting their way.
Support those candidates who aren't in bed with the RIAA (are there such people?)
You basically refute your own statement with your question.:-)
There are people who aren't in bed with the RIAA, etc., but they are essentially "unelectable".
That's because to be electable means that you have to get media exposure, and favorable media exposure at that, since nobody votes for someone they haven't heard of. And guess who happens to own the media? Why, the very same corporations that are also members of the RIAA and/or MPAA!
This is essentially why our government no longer listens to its people, only its corporations.
Software is technology as much as it is art, and as such is subject to the same dependencies that other technologies are subject to.
The nature of technology is to evolve over time. Only the most basic tools we have haven't changed significantly over time: things like the knife, the hammer, etc. Even the screwdriver has seen significant development in the 20th century (Torx screws, for instance).
Only those things for which the underlying rules don't change can remain constant over time. Software is especially vulnerable to change over time because the platforms it depends on, both other pieces of software (like operating systems) and hardware, change significantly over time. 200 years ago, computers weren't even a glimmer in Charles Babbage's eye.
And as much as technology has changed over that period of time, so have the needs of society. And since software is written to fulfull those needs, it's absurd to even ask it to live much longer than a lifetime. About the only kind of software that could possibly live that long would be games, and even then only a select few have that kind of timelessness.
The whole electronic voting setup in the U.S. is just begging to be exploited by the unscrupulous. All they have to do is "convince" the companies that make these machines to put code in them that will randomly change a vote here and a vote there, until the numbers favor whoever "paid" them off.
That's not hard for someone who is unscrupulous and is also already in power to do. Someone who is already in power can grant "favors" to the people in these companies that make decisions, whereas a challenger can only promise future favors. Considering how "business friendly" and "wealth friendly" the current administration has proven itself to be, a promise by said administration to grant favors would be taken very seriously. And since the government today basically answers only to the corporations (especially those that own the media), I think it's unlikely that such "payoffs" would get very much media attention. Furthermore, the administration is in control of a number of agencies that can "guarantee" that anyone at those companies who works on the software in question will not talk. If they try, they'll have an "accident".
Any system that can be exploited ultimately will be, and the more incentive there is to exploit the system the sooner it will happen. In the case of a voting system that is unauditable and easily manipulated, I think there is every reason to believe that it will be exploited in the upcoming election.
The only way to counter it is to make sure that the number of states using them is few enough that they cannot have a meaningful effect on the election.
But so far, only a few states have taken any action against electronic voting machines to my knowledge, and only California has banned their use outright (again, to my knowledge). That's not nearly enough to ensure that the upcoming election is truly fair.
That's why I think Bush will win the upcoming election no matter what the voters actually think -- the current administration is the most ruthless and underhanded I've heard of, and that kind of approach is all that's needed to exploit the obviously vulnerable electronic election system in the U.S.
Tinfoil hat stuff? You bet. But 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway. Tinfoil hat stuff is hard to dismiss if it is internally consistent, agrees better with all the facts, and explains current events better than everything else. As is, I believe, the case here.
A country trades what it can make more efficiently for what it costs more to make. If the US can make either 5 tons of corn or 3 tons of bananas using the same resources, and mexico can make 5 tons of bananas or 3 tons of corn using the same resources, a trade makes sense. Both countries benefit. Nowhere does slave labor make any difference, because we're not trading people, but goods.
You're confused. I am talking about the trade of goods. Those goods don't get made without the expenditure of labor.
Efficiency of manufacture of an item is determined by the total amount of resources it takes to produce a unit of that item. That total includes everything: the cost of materials, the cost of the machinery used to make the item, and the cost of the labor you employ to operate the machinery and manage the operation.
The amount your labor costs has a big impact on how much it costs to manufacture something. And the amount you have to pay your labor is determined primarily by how much it costs for your labor to live: you simply cannot pay someone less than it costs for them to live, because if you try they won't be around long: they'll either work for someone else or, if that's not an option, turn to crime, or perhaps even starve. So you must pay someone, at a minimum, the amount they need to live.
A person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources they have available to them above and beyond that which is necessary to barely survive. The higher a person's standard of living, the more resources they use in their life and thus the more they cost. It's as simple as that.
Competition occurs when more than one entity attempts to manufacture the same type of item, and has the tendency to force the suppliers to minimize the price they charge to their customers.
Now, everyone is trying to minimize their costs, more or less. Manufacturers are trying to minimize their costs so that they can increase the difference between the price they charge and the price they pay to produce the item they sell. They try to maximize their profits. And customers are trying to minimize the price they pay so they can afford to buy more.
Where slave labor comes into the picture is that slave labor is the cheapest form of labor there is: it guarantees that the amount of money being expended on any individual laborer is the bare minimum necessary for that laborer to survive, because the amount of money the employer spends on labor is entirely under his control, and not subject to market forces.
So if you have two manufacturers that are in competition with each other, with one of them employing slave labor and the other not employing slave labor, the one employing slave labor will have lower labor costs. It's that simple. And it means some combination of the following applies:
they can spend extra money on other things to increase the quality of the items they produce
they can sell their items at a lower price than their competition
they can take higher profits than their competition
In short, a manufacturer who employs slave labor is more competitive than a manufacturer who doesn't, when all other things (e.g., technology employed) are the same. In a pure capitalistic system, that manufacturer would "win" and would force all other manufacturers to also employ slave labor, or die as a result of being noncompetitive.
Such a situation is not tolerable. The fact that it's the ultimate result of pure capitalism means that pure capitalism cannot be used to achieve freedom for the masses. At best, it achieves freedom for business owners, for those who have the largest amount of resources available to them.
And yes, corporations can force people to do things at gunpoint, since guns are simply another good that is traded on the open market. The only thing that stops them from doi
Imposing tariffs on imported goods in order to (for example) reduce the demand for goods produced by slave labor is a good thing, even though it means your people are paying more for the goods they buy.
Yup, the best way to help these poor countries is to deny them higher wages, I'm down with that.
Uh, you did notice that I'm talking about slave labor, right? Do you seriously believe that a country that uses forced labor shouldn't have tariffs levied against it?
Slaves don't get "higher wages". They don't get any wages at all in reality, even though they might on paper. That is one of the lessons of the corporate-owned towns of the late 1800s.
And when entire countries' economies are pitted against each other in the competition for providing workers, with the standard of living being the only tweakable variable, what variable do you think those countries are going to tweak? Right: the standard of living. Since a higher standard of living costs more in real terms, the only direction for the standard of living for said competing countries to go is down. That means that countries which have labor protection laws, minimum wages, etc., will lose to those which don't. And those which use free labor will lose to those which use forced labor.
What's with you people who think that capitalism is the end goal? Capitalism is a means to an end. That end should be freedom: freedom from oppression, freedom to do whatever you want (as long as in doing so you don't infringe on the freedom of others), and prosperity for as many people as possible. Unbridled, unchecked capitalism does not result in that: it results in the monopolies of the early 20th century, the corporate-owned slave towns of the late 19th century, and the 18-hour/day sweatshop conditions of the early 20th century. Or do you think the current labor laws, minimum wage, etc. sprang from thin air?
Cheap goods don't do you any good if you're a slave being "paid" barely enough to survive on.
In capitalism, whomever can make the goods at the lowest cost is gonna get the business. If you can't compete, you shouldn't be making those goods.
The problem with this argument is that prison labor is the cheapest form of labor, because prisoners cannot decide that they're not being paid enough, nor do they have a say in what food they eat, what clothes they wear, etc. And they don't have the option of refusing to work, either.
Thus it follows that in capitalism, the most successful businesses will use prison or slave labor. Whether the workers are economic prisoners or legal prisoners makes no difference.
Remember the lesson of the corporate-owned towns of the late 1800s, where the people who worked for the corporation were "charged" more for their housing and food than they were being paid, and thus went further and further into debt? The corporations that ran those towns almost certainly had the cheapest prices. By the simplistic capitalist argument, they should have "won".
The reason Free Software is a good thing is not that it's free-as-in-beer. It's a good thing because it's a labor of love, created and given by people of their own free will. What makes it different from most other things is that it requires almost no capital to produce -- just a cheap computer.
And it's different from most other endeavors that require very little capital as well: it scales better than many such things. It's harder to, say, write an "open-source" novel, because a good story requires cohesiveness that can't be enforced by a compiler. And at the same time, Free Software is more useful. You might read a novel once or twice, but you'll tend to use a piece of software many, many times.
In summary, you have to look at the overall picture before deciding whether or not an action (such as imposing tariffs on imported goods) is a good thing. The reasons matter. Imposing tariffs on imported goods in order to (for example) reduce the demand for goods produced by slave labor is a good thing, even though it means your people are paying more for the goods they buy. Imposing tariffs on imported goods in order to prop up your local monopolies is not a good thing, because monopolies eliminate choice, and thus freedom. Do you see the consistency here?
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Would you be so gracious as to say why?
I mean, I've used MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server (very much like Sybase), and Oracle, and I prefer PostgreSQL for most things. And the reason is simple: I can guarantee the integrity of my data with it much more easily than I can with MySQL, and I can afford it. :-)
Not to mention things like the fact that the query language rarely prevents me from doing something I want to do within the database, and when combined with the many languages you can write stored procedures/functions in, there is very little indeed that can't be done with it. I've found MySQL much more limiting.
And as a DBA, PostgreSQL for me is second to none in some situations. Namely, that DDL is transactional! Even Oracle can't make that claim (though I think SQL Server/Sybase can for some DDL, at least).
Storing a result set that's gigabytes in size in RAM is probably not a good idea in any case.
Caching a query result set is incredibly difficult to do correctly in any case, as you either have to invalidate the entire set when any changes are made to the underlying tables, or you have to run the data involved in any INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs through the search terms used for the query you're caching and modify the cached result set upon a hit. The former is easily replaced by client side caching + rules or triggers on DML (INSERTs, UPDATEs, and DELETEs) to the underlying tables, and the latter is likely to have a significant impact on your database update performance.
Yes, though you can get a quick approximation by querying the PG schema tables directly:
---
And no need. LOW_PRIORITY exists because MySQL does full-table locks for DML against MyISAM tables. LOW_PRIORITY ensures that DML doesn't get priority over SELECTs.
PostgreSQL uses MVCC. This means that writers almost never block readers, and hence prioritization of readers over writers isn't necessary. This is one of PostgreSQL's biggest strengths.
Put in the feature request. Also make sure you check out the current version. PostgreSQL 8.0 will have the ability to change the data type of a column without having to go through gymnastics, but it's possible to make the change even now -- it's just more difficult.
This sounds very cool, and since it's open source it may be possible to create a PostgreSQL version of it from the source.
What a difference a few years makes! Today, PostgreSQL is fast, extremely robust, and incredibly capable. It scales better than MySQL, preserves data integrity better, and makes it possible to do things that you can't do even in Oracle (for instance, just about all DDL in PostgreSQL is transactional: table creation/deletion, index creation/deletion, user creation/deletion, etc. This means, for instance, that you don't have to have an operator to alter a column's datatype: you just create the new column, copy the data into it, and then drop the old column, all within a single transaction, and if you screw up you can roll the whole thing back). It supports a number of different languages in which one can write stored procedures. The planner is quite good and yet is constantly improving.
About the only thing that PostgreSQL is not is auto-adaptive. That is, one still has to configure it to get optimal performance, same as with any database I've ever seen. The default settings provided in the raw distribution are, well, quite conservative: they're set up so that you can successfully start PostgreSQL even on a small, old system, which means you almost certainly have to tweak the configuration file in order to get truly good performance out of it.
In short, PostgreSQL has gotten very, very good in a relatively short period of time. It's so good compared with the other freely-available databases out there that I can't really think of a compelling reason to use anything else -- it's so good that if you need something more capable then you're going to have to pay big, big money.
And 8.0 will get you native Win32 support (with a point-n-click installer and everything, if I'm not mistaken). With its feature set (especially if you include what's going to be delivered in 8.0), that makes PostgreSQL-win32 a real SQL Server killer, as long as it performs well on that platform.
In short, PostgreSQL deserves very much to win this award, and the PostgreSQL development crew deserves a ton of kudos for producing such a kickass database system. I'm very much hoping that third-party software support for PostgreSQL gets as good as it is for MySQL, because the database engine is certainly deserving of it.
Somehow, I don't think the aliens care...they seem to be able to take organs pretty much whenever they want.
No, the whole reason most people have insurance is that it's required by law, and you cannot legally drive without it.
That's why this is such a troubling development: automobile insurance is almost impossible to "opt out" of, and is probably impossible to opt out of in some states.
Er, well, in this case, given who we're talking about, shouldn't this be:
?
You can't run the current version of the OS without paying big money (or having the right connections and agreements), but you can run older versions, fortunately.
For instance, you can get MVS 3.8J for free. There's even a prebuilt distribution of it for use with Hercules available. The main page is here, and the ISO image can be downloaded from Jay Maynard's PD software page (the turnkey site's links to downloadable images no longer work).
There are other operating systems, e.g. VM/370, which are also freely available.
And how do you "force" the Sec. of State to add a paper trail? Threaten to not vote for him? When the (unauditable) voting machines themselves will make it impossible to tell how many people actually voted for him and thus remove any real incentive he has to do your bidding?
Sounds like you got lucky, and don't have an evil Sec. of State who cares nothing for the people. If you had someone in the office like that, he would have made sure that the proposal to add a paper trail got "stalled in committee" or some such nonsense, and then proceeded to make sure, through backroom deals with the voting machine manufacturers, that he got elected no matter what the voters demanded.
Your "solution" only works if the guy in power is already a reasonable person.
666 comments? Now if that isn't totally appropriate given the subject matter, I don't know what is. :-)
And this won't change, either, since it benefits large corporations at the expense of smaller entities, and large corporations are the only entities the U.S. government responds to anymore.
Yep. Because, after all, if your job description says you are supposed to look for computer misuse (and that term happens to include use of the computer for non-business purposes), monitor computer systems to document such misuses, etc., what they really mean is that you're supposed to be doing that to other peons like yourself, not your superiors.
Because, after all, management is exempt from any of the organization-wide policies that govern everyone else, and clearly you deserve to be fired if you have the audacity to believe otherwise.
I mean, you have to be a real moron to believe that the rules should apply to everyone and not just the peons.
Right?
No, I'm saying that Indian engineers are able to do the same work in the same amount of time for less money because their standard of living is lower, and so they're able to live on less money. Our wages would be lower too if our standard of living were lower. The other factor involved is the exchange rate, which will remain favorable to the U.S. as long as the people in India are busy working for U.S. firms rather than working for themselves.
The main concern isn't India, actually. They supposedly have reasonable labor laws. No, the real concern is countries like China, which reportedly uses prison labor to manufacture goods. Anytime you try to compete against prison labor by being cheaper, you will lose unless you have a significant edge in automation.
The US middle class is doomed. Why? Because offshoring does not increase efficiency. The people in India aren't more efficient than the people in the U.S.: it takes just as many man-hours for them to accomplish something as it does for someone in the U.S. to accomplish the same thing. Economics is eventually about the exchange of labor: your labor for someone else's.
Ultimately, that's the only thing that really counts. The reason things have gotten cheaper in a global fashion is not because of offshoring, it's because of automation. With automation, one person is able to accomplish much more than they can without it. Automation acts as an efficiency multiplier. Nothing else comes close to matching the efficiency gains to be had from automation.
What offshoring does is to transfer wealth from the people who lose money from it (the people who are no longer employed as a result of their jobs being offshored) to the people who gain money from it: those who own or have major investment in the corporations that are offshoring. People who don't have jobs eventually cannot buy goods and services, and thus the very corporations that are offshoring will eventually lose some of their customers. Unless the corporation takes all of the money it saved and uses it to reduce the price of its products, the average affordability of its products will actually drop. If they take all of the money saved from offshoring and use it to drop the price of their products (in other words, they don't use it to increase their profits), then the average affordability of their products will remain the same.
And if you think about economics in terms of labor transactions, all of that makes a great deal of sense: the price of a product ultimately reflects the total amount of labor required to produce the product -- it cannot sustainably drop below that, and in a competitive marketplace it cannot rise much above that, either. Offshoring does nothing to increase labor efficiency, so it cannot ultimately reduce the price of goods and services.
Put another way, economics is a zero-sum game except for real efficiency gains (due to things like automation). Since offshoring doesn't increase the real efficiency of production, it must be a wealth transfer: someone must lose for someone else to win. The loser in this case is a member of the middle class, whose job disappears in the wave of offshoring. The primary winner is a member of the upper class, who owns a substantial portion of the corporation doing the offshoring. The secondary (temporary) winner is the person who is the recipient of the job being offshored. I say "temporary" because that person's job will be offshored elsewhere as soon as his labor costs are higher than someone else's.
No. Why? Because both locations are subject to the same labor laws. You know, the ones that specify what minimum wage must be paid, what overtime must be paid, etc.
Offshoring to locations which aren't subject to such labor laws is the problem, because now suddenly you have a group of people (the one you're in) who are living in a system that provides certain protections competing against people who could easily be slaves in the real sense of the word. When your competition is slave labor, and the only variable that can be tweaked to make you competitive is your own standard of living, what exactly do you think is going to happen? Do you really think your standard of living isn't going to drop to match that of the slave? Only a total moron would believe that.
I have no problem with offshoring work as long as the people doing the work are operating under labor laws at least as protective as our own. Otherwise it quickly degenerates into a race to the bottom for the people doing the real work, with the only real variable being the standard of living of those workers. And guess what? Even the things we take for granted right now, like electricity and running water, are things that cost money and are thus subject to being reduced or eliminated in order to make the labor pool cheaper and thus more competitive.
Remember: the cheapest labor is a slave who gets barely enough to eat.
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go in the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
CUSTOMER: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's -- they've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: I feel happy... I feel happy. [whop]
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
Sorry, I just couldn't resist.
(stolen mercilessly from here). Mad props to Monty Python).
And completely ineffective.
Vote them out to be replaced by whom? The only people who have any chance of being elected are those who get media exposure. The media is owned by a small number of very large corporations -- the very same corporations that are behind this bill to begin with. If you want to have the slightest chance of being elected, you have to do what the corporations want. Fail, and you'll either be ignored or you'll get a lot of bad press (like Dean did -- do you really think the "screaming madman" impression the media gives of him was even close to being an accurate and fair picture of him?). Either way, you won't be elected, because people won't elect someone they don't know about or who they think is a loser, and they get all that information primarily from the media.
No, sorry, this is a rigged game, and there's no way out.
You can affect the number of votes an unelectable candidate has, sure, but it doesn't make any difference. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.
If there are 2 electable candidates (as is usually the case in the U.S.) and 4 unelectable candidates, voting for one of the unelectable candidates influences nothing. It has no influence whatsoever -- you may as well have not voted at all, for the amount of effect that voting for an unelectable candidate has. Doing so will not change the outcome of the election at all, even if you managed to get all the other people like you to do the same. And it won't have any effect at all on the decisions of the winning candidate once he lands in office. After all, he won the election despite the votes for the unelectable candidates, and the other electable candidate came in second, while the unelectable candidates trailed far, far behind.
If you vote for one of the electable candidates then your vote has an influence. Not much, obviously: only one in however many people voted in total, but it does have some. And if you manage to get all the other people like you to do the same, then you and those people can essentially be the deciding factor in which of the two electable candidates wins.
That's the difference between voting for an unelectable candidate and voting for an electable one: the former has absolutely zero effect, while the latter has a small effect. It might not change the outcome in the end, to be sure, but it has a much greater chance of doing so (comparatively speaking). It's the only thing that can make the act of voting worth anything at all.
Certainly a different voting system would yield much different results. But this is the real world, and in the real world, a different voting system simply is not going to happen in the U.S. It can't, because there's no way to get there from here -- the current system simply won't allow it, and revolution can't work. There's nowhere left to go. And so we have no choice but to deal with the fact that voting for an unelectable candidate is exactly the same thing as not voting at all.
The problem isn't that there's only one electable candidate. There are usually more than one. The problem is that all electable candidates are undesirable.
So while a vote for an unelectable candidate won't change the fact that they won't be elected, a vote for an electable candidate can.
And the end result is that if you want your vote to have any real influence over the election, you must vote for one of the electable candidates. The problem with this is that the influence your vote has is limited to deciding which electable candidate makes it into office.
Don't you see? If you vote for an unelectable candidate, your voice isn't heard. That's because an unelectable candidate basically cannot win, whether you vote for him or not. And that's because there simply aren't enough people like you to make that candidate electable, because that candidate can't get sufficient media exposure, because that candidate isn't willing to play ball with the corporations.
Like I said, the real world is consistent and unforgiving. When the only people who have any real chance of being elected are the ones who are willing to play ball with the corporations, a vote for anyone else is a vote that will have no effect. That such a vote is "thrown away" isn't misguided belief, it's unforgiving reality. And the act of voting for one of the electable candidates even if they're not your favorite choice isn't an act of playing the lottery, it's the only real chance you have of influencing the election at all.
In essence, the system is rigged and the choices are rigged. This system cannot be changed from within -- the way it's rigged prevents that. It can only be changed from the outside, and that means via revolution. And revolution can't happen because the military (which answers to the government) has too much firepower compared with the civilians, so any attempt at revolution would be lost.
That means that we're screwed. We have no choice but to bend over and take it, because all our other options have been removed from us. Welcome to the real world.
No. I'm saying that I'm smart enough to know that if I vote for someone who is unelectable, the fact that I voted for them will not change the fact that they will not be elected.
Sorry, but we live in the real world, and the real world is consistent and unforgiving. Being known to a sufficient number of people is a prerequisite to getting elected. You don't get elected if people don't know about you. It's that simple. And even today, even with the presence of the internet, enough people can't find out about you to elect you unless you get exposure via the mass media, and not enough people will want to vote for you unless you get favorable exposure via the mass media.
And the mass media can expose you in whatever way it wants. It doesn't have to present a complete picture of you to the masses, it can "spin" your image whichever way it sees fit. And it does.
Look at what happened to Howard Dean. Do you think the "screaming maniac" impression of him that the mass media has given people as a result of playing the same clip over and over and over again is a true picture of him? Do you really think it's balanced and fair? I seriously doubt it.
Do you really think the mass media would have portrayed Dean that way if the corporations that own the mass media wanted him to get elected? No, of course it wouldn't have.
And so, it follows that the corporations that own the mass media have to like you enough before they'll give you favorable exposure. And being corporations (and thus uncaring about such things as ethics), they'll insist that you be willing to do their bidding once elected before they do you the "favor" of giving you favorable exposure. They don't even have to spell it out to you. Examples such as Dean are enough to give anyone of any intelligence the hint.
Do you get the picture yet? With the system as it is right now, there is almost no chance that someone who won't play ball with the corporations can get elected. Period. The reason the whole voting machine thing is happening the way it is in the U.S. is that corporations like to be certain -- they want to eliminate any chance of not getting their way.
You basically refute your own statement with your question. :-)
There are people who aren't in bed with the RIAA, etc., but they are essentially "unelectable".
That's because to be electable means that you have to get media exposure, and favorable media exposure at that, since nobody votes for someone they haven't heard of. And guess who happens to own the media? Why, the very same corporations that are also members of the RIAA and/or MPAA!
This is essentially why our government no longer listens to its people, only its corporations.
The nature of technology is to evolve over time. Only the most basic tools we have haven't changed significantly over time: things like the knife, the hammer, etc. Even the screwdriver has seen significant development in the 20th century (Torx screws, for instance).
Only those things for which the underlying rules don't change can remain constant over time. Software is especially vulnerable to change over time because the platforms it depends on, both other pieces of software (like operating systems) and hardware, change significantly over time. 200 years ago, computers weren't even a glimmer in Charles Babbage's eye.
And as much as technology has changed over that period of time, so have the needs of society. And since software is written to fulfull those needs, it's absurd to even ask it to live much longer than a lifetime. About the only kind of software that could possibly live that long would be games, and even then only a select few have that kind of timelessness.
That's not hard for someone who is unscrupulous and is also already in power to do. Someone who is already in power can grant "favors" to the people in these companies that make decisions, whereas a challenger can only promise future favors. Considering how "business friendly" and "wealth friendly" the current administration has proven itself to be, a promise by said administration to grant favors would be taken very seriously. And since the government today basically answers only to the corporations (especially those that own the media), I think it's unlikely that such "payoffs" would get very much media attention. Furthermore, the administration is in control of a number of agencies that can "guarantee" that anyone at those companies who works on the software in question will not talk. If they try, they'll have an "accident".
Any system that can be exploited ultimately will be, and the more incentive there is to exploit the system the sooner it will happen. In the case of a voting system that is unauditable and easily manipulated, I think there is every reason to believe that it will be exploited in the upcoming election.
The only way to counter it is to make sure that the number of states using them is few enough that they cannot have a meaningful effect on the election.
But so far, only a few states have taken any action against electronic voting machines to my knowledge, and only California has banned their use outright (again, to my knowledge). That's not nearly enough to ensure that the upcoming election is truly fair.
That's why I think Bush will win the upcoming election no matter what the voters actually think -- the current administration is the most ruthless and underhanded I've heard of, and that kind of approach is all that's needed to exploit the obviously vulnerable electronic election system in the U.S.
Tinfoil hat stuff? You bet. But 20 years ago, anyone who suggested that software would be patentable in the future would have been dismissed as a conspiracy theory nutcase. But it happened. 30 years ago, anyone who suggested that the U.S. would pass a law like the USAPATRIOT act would have been laughed out of the room. But it passed anyway. Tinfoil hat stuff is hard to dismiss if it is internally consistent, agrees better with all the facts, and explains current events better than everything else. As is, I believe, the case here.
You're confused. I am talking about the trade of goods. Those goods don't get made without the expenditure of labor.
Efficiency of manufacture of an item is determined by the total amount of resources it takes to produce a unit of that item. That total includes everything: the cost of materials, the cost of the machinery used to make the item, and the cost of the labor you employ to operate the machinery and manage the operation.
The amount your labor costs has a big impact on how much it costs to manufacture something. And the amount you have to pay your labor is determined primarily by how much it costs for your labor to live: you simply cannot pay someone less than it costs for them to live, because if you try they won't be around long: they'll either work for someone else or, if that's not an option, turn to crime, or perhaps even starve. So you must pay someone, at a minimum, the amount they need to live.
A person's standard of living is determined by the amount of resources they have available to them above and beyond that which is necessary to barely survive. The higher a person's standard of living, the more resources they use in their life and thus the more they cost. It's as simple as that.
Competition occurs when more than one entity attempts to manufacture the same type of item, and has the tendency to force the suppliers to minimize the price they charge to their customers.
Now, everyone is trying to minimize their costs, more or less. Manufacturers are trying to minimize their costs so that they can increase the difference between the price they charge and the price they pay to produce the item they sell. They try to maximize their profits. And customers are trying to minimize the price they pay so they can afford to buy more.
Where slave labor comes into the picture is that slave labor is the cheapest form of labor there is: it guarantees that the amount of money being expended on any individual laborer is the bare minimum necessary for that laborer to survive, because the amount of money the employer spends on labor is entirely under his control, and not subject to market forces.
So if you have two manufacturers that are in competition with each other, with one of them employing slave labor and the other not employing slave labor, the one employing slave labor will have lower labor costs. It's that simple. And it means some combination of the following applies:
In short, a manufacturer who employs slave labor is more competitive than a manufacturer who doesn't, when all other things (e.g., technology employed) are the same. In a pure capitalistic system, that manufacturer would "win" and would force all other manufacturers to also employ slave labor, or die as a result of being noncompetitive.
Such a situation is not tolerable. The fact that it's the ultimate result of pure capitalism means that pure capitalism cannot be used to achieve freedom for the masses. At best, it achieves freedom for business owners, for those who have the largest amount of resources available to them.
And yes, corporations can force people to do things at gunpoint, since guns are simply another good that is traded on the open market. The only thing that stops them from doi
Uh, you did notice that I'm talking about slave labor, right? Do you seriously believe that a country that uses forced labor shouldn't have tariffs levied against it?
Slaves don't get "higher wages". They don't get any wages at all in reality, even though they might on paper. That is one of the lessons of the corporate-owned towns of the late 1800s.
And when entire countries' economies are pitted against each other in the competition for providing workers, with the standard of living being the only tweakable variable, what variable do you think those countries are going to tweak? Right: the standard of living. Since a higher standard of living costs more in real terms, the only direction for the standard of living for said competing countries to go is down. That means that countries which have labor protection laws, minimum wages, etc., will lose to those which don't. And those which use free labor will lose to those which use forced labor.
What's with you people who think that capitalism is the end goal? Capitalism is a means to an end. That end should be freedom: freedom from oppression, freedom to do whatever you want (as long as in doing so you don't infringe on the freedom of others), and prosperity for as many people as possible. Unbridled, unchecked capitalism does not result in that: it results in the monopolies of the early 20th century, the corporate-owned slave towns of the late 19th century, and the 18-hour/day sweatshop conditions of the early 20th century. Or do you think the current labor laws, minimum wage, etc. sprang from thin air?
Cheap goods don't do you any good if you're a slave being "paid" barely enough to survive on.
The problem with this argument is that prison labor is the cheapest form of labor, because prisoners cannot decide that they're not being paid enough, nor do they have a say in what food they eat, what clothes they wear, etc. And they don't have the option of refusing to work, either.
Thus it follows that in capitalism, the most successful businesses will use prison or slave labor. Whether the workers are economic prisoners or legal prisoners makes no difference.
Remember the lesson of the corporate-owned towns of the late 1800s, where the people who worked for the corporation were "charged" more for their housing and food than they were being paid, and thus went further and further into debt? The corporations that ran those towns almost certainly had the cheapest prices. By the simplistic capitalist argument, they should have "won".
The reason Free Software is a good thing is not that it's free-as-in-beer. It's a good thing because it's a labor of love, created and given by people of their own free will. What makes it different from most other things is that it requires almost no capital to produce -- just a cheap computer.
And it's different from most other endeavors that require very little capital as well: it scales better than many such things. It's harder to, say, write an "open-source" novel, because a good story requires cohesiveness that can't be enforced by a compiler. And at the same time, Free Software is more useful. You might read a novel once or twice, but you'll tend to use a piece of software many, many times.
In summary, you have to look at the overall picture before deciding whether or not an action (such as imposing tariffs on imported goods) is a good thing. The reasons matter. Imposing tariffs on imported goods in order to (for example) reduce the demand for goods produced by slave labor is a good thing, even though it means your people are paying more for the goods they buy. Imposing tariffs on imported goods in order to prop up your local monopolies is not a good thing, because monopolies eliminate choice, and thus freedom. Do you see the consistency here?