I'm not really much into data modelling theory and such, but I do have two perspectives from which to view this dispute:
I've done several years of application programming using SQL
I've also implemented the (XQuery-derived) query processing module for a native XML database
In my former life as a application programmer, I really liked SQL. It allowed some pretty complicated computation to be done in the query, and very concisely in many cases compared to doing the same thing in, say, C++. For example, things like grouping are very nice for many application purposes.
In my current job, I'm hoping to create an XML query language that supports the same sort of capabilities as SQL. Our XML query language implementation has decent path/predicate, sorting, and output structuring capabilities, mostly derived from earlier drafts of XQuery.
My feeling about XQuery 1.0 is that it is extremely bloated. XML seems really simple; querying it shouldn't be all that complicated, should it? But the XQuery committee has created several hundred pages of specifications for the new language. This seems excessive, to say the least. We basically have implemented a subset of an earlier version (with paths, predicates, sorting, XML construction, a few dozen functions), and stopped tracking what they were doing. This is kind of unfortunate, but we really don't have the resources to support his behemoth in all its awesome grandeur.
We just want a language that lets programmers efficiently access our database. I think we're on the right track. I'm not at all sure that XQuery is going to wind up as a long-term success, partly because of its bloat factor.
My favorite illustration of the XQuery bloat is this: early versions (up to about April 2002) of the XQuery language description contained this sentence in the introduction:
It is designed to be a small, easily implementable language in which queries are concise and easily understood.
Starting in August 2002, this was changed to:
It is designed to be a language in which queries are concise and easily understood.
The "small, easily implementable" part got smothered up by the avalanche of features they were adding.
You know, at first read I thought this said "India". Like maybe they were worried about recent reports that the outsourcing trend was slacking off.
Maybe the state of Indiana wants to get in on the offshore outsourcing business anyway. It wouldn't be the first time somebody confused North America with India.
You know, it should be possible to make a really powerful solar furnace from a large collection of junk CDs (arrange them in a parabolic shape, point at the sun, place object to be heated at the focus).
You could then use it to dispose of other useless leftovers, like old computers, mystery meat from the cafeteria, etc. Not that this is something schools should be encouraging, but it's summer vacation and kids need something to do.:)
Maybe I can get my kids to donate their collection of old AOL CDs to an experiment...
The article claims that "security jitters" are keeping corporate types from travelling, thus hurting attendance. Is it possible that the TSA's reign of terror against airline passengers is more responsible?
Should we throw out the constitutional privacy protections?
Which "constitutional privacy protections" are you referring to? It's a myth that the constitution contains a right to privacy. At best we are secure against unreasonable search and seizures and use of our property for housing troops. Any rights beyond those (physical privacy) rights are usually inferred from documents outside the constitution, if at all.
This guy's point seems a little weak. If you made an analogy to publishing, what he's saying is something like "the alphabet has existed for a long time, Shakespeare is in the public domain, therefore Tom Clancy's new novel should be free for all to copy."
There are legitimate ethical questions about patenting life forms, but I don't think that it's really so much of an intellectual-property issue. Patenting the genome of an existing organism sounds like it should be wrong, until you realize that mapping isn't obvious at all (as far as I know, since I'm just a computer programmer).
I also found the argument about open-source software having fewer bugs to be kind of lame. How many of you will be doing code-reviews on Wheat 2.0, even if the source code is under the GPL? (Besides, the "source" is arguably available anyway; the original is all written in assembly code anyway:)
The article says:
Several problems need to be worked out before fuel cells are a viable commercial technology, says Allen Nogee, principal analyst with InStat/MDR in Scottsdale, Arizona. For one thing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has to decide if fuel cells will be allowed on airplanes, he says.
Given the way laptops are used by business travellers, and where they generally need long battery life, this is probably a stopper for the whole thing.
You know, this actually has a chance of being effective, unlike the anti-spam laws. Spyware is pretty useless if it doesn't report home on its spy results, so it should be possible to trace programs that violate the law back to those responsible.
Of course, the definition of "spyware" is critical. Legislatures in the past have had a hard time defining computer-related terms without making them too broad (for example, is your web browser spyware? After all, it's sending cookies back to all kinds of web sites!)
I'd like to nominate Mr. Coffee, possibly the world's most important robot. Millions of people couldn't get out of bed in the morning if their coffeemaker weren't up before them, getting the morning brew ready.
I last tried it about a year ago, and found myself constantly annoyed. It seemed to lock up and lose my settings a lot. How's it looking these days? Surely there's somebody out there in slashdot-land using this thing...
Although now that I think of it, they could also kowtow to modern sensibilities vis-a-vis gender and religion by retitling it:
The Hypothetical Person-Week
Since all the blather about "internet time" in the intervening years, I'm surprised they didn't re-release it under a new title: The Mythical Man-Week.
To "become a spacefaring race" you need to be able to get somewhere out of the solar system in less than a human lifetime.
Precisely. And we can't do that, not for a trillion dollars. Space is a really big, empty, unfriendly place, and there isn't much there that we can really use, except in our imaginations.
Mars will be harder to live on than the bottom of the ocean, and there's arguably less practical benefit from the Mars base, even in the long run. What are we going to do, start importing food from Mars?
Asteroid mining sounds kind of cool, until you calculate what it will cost to bring the stuff back to earth (or whereever the consumers are). We can't just drop it on their heads, it has to be delivered somehow, and the shipping costs will be (ahem) astronomical.
Again, I think that manned space travel has been a big bust. It has great gee-whiz appeal, but no demonstrated utility to human lives otherwise.
the discoveries made by sending humans into space in the 1960s allow us now to build those satellites
Actually, the rocket technology that launches satellites was probably driven more by nuclear war preparations than by the manned spaceflight program.
We don't use Saturn V's to launch satellites. We actually don't even use the shuttle for that much. Mostly they're launched on medium-sized disposable rockets like Ariane, Delta, Titan, and so on.
You know, back when I was a kid (in the 60's, during the Gemini/Apollo era), I thought space was the coolest thing ever. It seemed a sure thing, and a good thing, that we'd be colonizing other planets within a few years.
Of course, it didn't happen. It turns out that just hoisting enough life-support for a person for a few days into orbit costs more than most people earn in their lifetimes. The benefits of going to the moon, building the space station, and other manned ventures have turned out to be in two areas:
* Spinoff technologies
* Psychological side-effects
That is, none of the actual benefits of space travel have come from the space part, more from the preparation and the coolness factor. The real practical advantages have all come from unmanned craft, mostly communication satellites.
So, why don't we get more excited and/or spend more money on terrestrial exploration? There is better mapping of Venus than there is of the ocean floor these days.
I'm not trying to denigrate anybody's dreams or anything, and I recognize the value of science for its own sake, but maybe blowing another $100 billion on a one-time put-a-guy-on-Mars mission isn't really a good idea. Let's try to find some more practical way to spend our budget surplus (*cough*). How about curing diseases, for example? Bill Gates has personally increased the funding for research in diseases like malaria by a significant factor; why can't our government fund this kind of stuff more?
Pardon my grumblings....I'm just disillusioned in my old age. (where's my space ship, dammit!:)
Editting and peer review serve an important purpose in publishing; they are a way to filter incorrect or irrelevant information out so that they typical (less-informed) reader doesn't have to deal with it (or doesn't get misled by it).
That said, it's also good to have channels that don't have any filters on them. The web is the best such channel ever invented. Anybody can publish given minimal resources. Whether anybody ever sees what you publish is a different problem, but it won't happen because it's been editted.
In some sense, a Google pagerank rating is the ultimate in "reviewing" (if not exactly "peer review"), since it lets a large number of other web sites vote on how worthy your writing is. On the other hand, many high-ranked pages are from cranks, or are hate-speech (like Google's first hit for "Jew"). This is kind of thing would generally never happen in a peer-reviewed journal.
I've met plenty of women who blow me away in science in math
Actually, I'm married to one (my wife has a PhD), and my daughter is another (just graduated valedictorian of her high-school class with 1600 SAT). I'm a comparative slacker within my own family, but I'm still more of a hacker than my wife, or than my daughter will likely be (at least I hope she doesn't grow up to be as maladjusted as I am:)
From the article:
In July 2002, the Credits file contained information on 418 developers. With two exceptions, all were male.
Anyone who thinks there's little difference between the way men's and women's brains work should consider this statistic. I don't think that societal expectations, peer pressure, or discrimination can account for the 200-to-1 ratio in this case. It's probably safe to conclude that the kernel-hacker gene resides on the Y chromosome.
Slashdot Mirror
-- Voltaire, 1770
I've done several years of application programming using SQL
I've also implemented the (XQuery-derived) query processing module for a native XML database
In my former life as a application programmer, I really liked SQL. It allowed some pretty complicated computation to be done in the query, and very concisely in many cases compared to doing the same thing in, say, C++. For example, things like grouping are very nice for many application purposes.
In my current job, I'm hoping to create an XML query language that supports the same sort of capabilities as SQL. Our XML query language implementation has decent path/predicate, sorting, and output structuring capabilities, mostly derived from earlier drafts of XQuery.
My feeling about XQuery 1.0 is that it is extremely bloated. XML seems really simple; querying it shouldn't be all that complicated, should it? But the XQuery committee has created several hundred pages of specifications for the new language. This seems excessive, to say the least. We basically have implemented a subset of an earlier version (with paths, predicates, sorting, XML construction, a few dozen functions), and stopped tracking what they were doing. This is kind of unfortunate, but we really don't have the resources to support his behemoth in all its awesome grandeur.
We just want a language that lets programmers efficiently access our database. I think we're on the right track. I'm not at all sure that XQuery is going to wind up as a long-term success, partly because of its bloat factor.
My favorite illustration of the XQuery bloat is this: early versions (up to about April 2002) of the XQuery language description contained this sentence in the introduction:
It is designed to be a small, easily implementable language in which queries are concise and easily understood.
Starting in August 2002, this was changed to:
It is designed to be a language in which queries are concise and easily understood.
The "small, easily implementable" part got smothered up by the avalanche of features they were adding.
Maybe the state of Indiana wants to get in on the offshore outsourcing business anyway. It wouldn't be the first time somebody confused North America with India.
You could then use it to dispose of other useless leftovers, like old computers, mystery meat from the cafeteria, etc. Not that this is something schools should be encouraging, but it's summer vacation and kids need something to do. :)
Maybe I can get my kids to donate their collection of old AOL CDs to an experiment...
The article claims that "security jitters" are keeping corporate types from travelling, thus hurting attendance. Is it possible that the TSA's reign of terror against airline passengers is more responsible?
Which "constitutional privacy protections" are you referring to? It's a myth that the constitution contains a right to privacy. At best we are secure against unreasonable search and seizures and use of our property for housing troops. Any rights beyond those (physical privacy) rights are usually inferred from documents outside the constitution, if at all.
There are legitimate ethical questions about patenting life forms, but I don't think that it's really so much of an intellectual-property issue. Patenting the genome of an existing organism sounds like it should be wrong, until you realize that mapping isn't obvious at all (as far as I know, since I'm just a computer programmer).
I also found the argument about open-source software having fewer bugs to be kind of lame. How many of you will be doing code-reviews on Wheat 2.0, even if the source code is under the GPL? (Besides, the "source" is arguably available anyway; the original is all written in assembly code anyway :)
Several problems need to be worked out before fuel cells are a viable commercial technology, says Allen Nogee, principal analyst with InStat/MDR in Scottsdale, Arizona. For one thing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has to decide if fuel cells will be allowed on airplanes, he says.
Given the way laptops are used by business travellers, and where they generally need long battery life, this is probably a stopper for the whole thing.
Of course, the definition of "spyware" is critical. Legislatures in the past have had a hard time defining computer-related terms without making them too broad (for example, is your web browser spyware? After all, it's sending cookies back to all kinds of web sites!)
I'd like to nominate Mr. Coffee, possibly the world's most important robot. Millions of people couldn't get out of bed in the morning if their coffeemaker weren't up before them, getting the morning brew ready.
Me, too. They could have said "a new map of the 3-mile-wide comet" instead.
And I'm 46 years old. How about you?
I last tried it about a year ago, and found myself constantly annoyed. It seemed to lock up and lose my settings a lot. How's it looking these days? Surely there's somebody out there in slashdot-land using this thing...
It really is turtles all the way down.
The features have been named Left Foot and Right Foot in a new map of the comet, which is roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) wide.
That's one big map!
Although now that I think of it, they could also kowtow to modern sensibilities vis-a-vis gender and religion by retitling it:
The Hypothetical Person-Week
Since all the blather about "internet time" in the intervening years, I'm surprised they didn't re-release it under a new title:
The Mythical Man-Week.
Precisely. And we can't do that, not for a trillion dollars. Space is a really big, empty, unfriendly place, and there isn't much there that we can really use, except in our imaginations.
Mars will be harder to live on than the bottom of the ocean, and there's arguably less practical benefit from the Mars base, even in the long run. What are we going to do, start importing food from Mars?
Asteroid mining sounds kind of cool, until you calculate what it will cost to bring the stuff back to earth (or whereever the consumers are). We can't just drop it on their heads, it has to be delivered somehow, and the shipping costs will be (ahem) astronomical.
Again, I think that manned space travel has been a big bust. It has great gee-whiz appeal, but no demonstrated utility to human lives otherwise.
Actually, the rocket technology that launches satellites was probably driven more by nuclear war preparations than by the manned spaceflight program. We don't use Saturn V's to launch satellites. We actually don't even use the shuttle for that much. Mostly they're launched on medium-sized disposable rockets like Ariane, Delta, Titan, and so on.
Of course, it didn't happen. It turns out that just hoisting enough life-support for a person for a few days into orbit costs more than most people earn in their lifetimes. The benefits of going to the moon, building the space station, and other manned ventures have turned out to be in two areas:
* Spinoff technologies
* Psychological side-effects
That is, none of the actual benefits of space travel have come from the space part, more from the preparation and the coolness factor. The real practical advantages have all come from unmanned craft, mostly communication satellites.
So, why don't we get more excited and/or spend more money on terrestrial exploration? There is better mapping of Venus than there is of the ocean floor these days.
I'm not trying to denigrate anybody's dreams or anything, and I recognize the value of science for its own sake, but maybe blowing another $100 billion on a one-time put-a-guy-on-Mars mission isn't really a good idea. Let's try to find some more practical way to spend our budget surplus (*cough*). How about curing diseases, for example? Bill Gates has personally increased the funding for research in diseases like malaria by a significant factor; why can't our government fund this kind of stuff more?
Pardon my grumblings....I'm just disillusioned in my old age. (where's my space ship, dammit! :)
I'll believe that when they infect my refrigerator. Oops, looks like they already got that week-old bottle of milk...darn...
"Our source code is our only intellectual property," said [MS spokesman] Barley
So have all of their thousands of software patents been invalidated, or are they about to donate them to the public domain?
That said, it's also good to have channels that don't have any filters on them. The web is the best such channel ever invented. Anybody can publish given minimal resources. Whether anybody ever sees what you publish is a different problem, but it won't happen because it's been editted.
In some sense, a Google pagerank rating is the ultimate in "reviewing" (if not exactly "peer review"), since it lets a large number of other web sites vote on how worthy your writing is. On the other hand, many high-ranked pages are from cranks, or are hate-speech (like Google's first hit for "Jew"). This is kind of thing would generally never happen in a peer-reviewed journal.
Actually, I'm married to one (my wife has a PhD), and my daughter is another (just graduated valedictorian of her high-school class with 1600 SAT). I'm a comparative slacker within my own family, but I'm still more of a hacker than my wife, or than my daughter will likely be (at least I hope she doesn't grow up to be as maladjusted as I am :)
Anyone who thinks there's little difference between the way men's and women's brains work should consider this statistic. I don't think that societal expectations, peer pressure, or discrimination can account for the 200-to-1 ratio in this case. It's probably safe to conclude that the kernel-hacker gene resides on the Y chromosome.
They're called towels.