Back in '84, when I bought a second-hand CP/M system, it ran off a 360K floppy. The guy who sold it told me that "You can buy a 10 Megabyte Winchester hard disk, and then you'll never run out of disk space".
I recently bought a 4 GB flash chip for my Sony-Ericsson W660i phone. Here are the physical dimensions from the product spec: 0.59" x 0.49" x 0.05" (L x W x H). The mind boggles.
You yourself admit "MySQL is made for speed compromising to act like a database" and that is exactly what he is saying too. See, if you're web app doesn't require a full featured database, ie. "If you can fit your problem into what MySQL can handle", then Mysql is a good choice for performance reasons. And even if there's one or two features you need that Mysql doesn't support, then you can do a few hacks to make it work anyway and still be ahead performance-wise.
I use both PostgreSQL and MySQL. I use MySQL in my Web application to display data. A Web application whose sole purpose is to display data fast, is relatively well suited for the MySQL/ISAM paradigm. There's no concern about data corruption in a db that only serves SELECTs. In my production database, I think that data integrity is a rather important issue, never mind the speed of execution. So, I decided at a relatively early stage that MySQL was no option there.
Over time, I've found that although MySQL/ISAM serves simple SELECTs from one table fast enough, the situation deteriorates rapidly if you have to do a join between two or even more tables. Then, PostgreSQL is actually faster, even without substantial trimming. In addition, thanks to the PostgreSQL views and functions, it's quite easy to produce 'flattened' tables from the production database that MySQL can handle in the read-only Web interface.
If you will try to overcome MySQL's shortcomings wrt joins, you may of course follow Rasmus Lerdorf's allegedly misquoted option:
Do a simple query against the MySQL database.
Load the results into a PHP array.
For each result row, do a second query against the database.
That approach has actually been posted here on Slashdot earlier as a way of optimizing MySQL interactions. The guys that go this misguided route probably don't know much about relational databases in the first place, and might actually be better off with a flat-file system.
After initially reading about the article on the PostgreSQL mailing list and getting myself really worked up, I was deliberately skewing the highlights in my submission of the story to/. to make it "interesting" enough to get a good discussion. From your postings in this thread, I take it that the article itself seems to have been written by someone who listened with half an ear to your speech. I hope that you will take issue with the author as well as the editors at Internet News for publishing such a sloppy article in the first place.
As the contributor of this/. story in the first place, I'll like to say that you sum up my own view quite nicely. It's good to see Rasmus Lerdorf himself debunking TFA. I believe him completely when he says that he has been grossly misquoted. If not for this discussion on Slashdot, TFA might have gone down in history as representing the actual views of Rasmus Lerdorf.
BTW, I'm a regular user of both PHP and MySQL as well as PostgreSQL.
Play around with ACID, and you're liable to take a header out the window !!
Dude, that's another kind of ACID. It's database ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability), not the stuff that people got high on in the sixties. Concerning the latter, there actually have been unsubstantiated rumors about people who imagined they could fly and took a dive through the window.
the hemp plant can be farmed in cracks in rocks and 50% of it's mass can be refined into combustible fuel.
Aha -- now I understand why them young folks wear buttons with hemp leaves on them. Hemp power! Yay!
vegetable oil is already being used in existing engines by enterprising brits, as a side benefit their cars smell like delicious fish and chips. in all seriousness though, alcohol and plant oils are renewable and far less damaging to the environment than refining metals.
Processed vegetable oil is used by more than the Brits. The technical term is biodiesel.
I don't know what level of effort is being put into refining magnesium from sea water or sea salt, but this is likely to be very energy-intensive also.
That is a well-known technique that was developed before WWII. Here's an abandoned American plant from that time.
In my home town of Porsgrunn, Norway, the production of magnesium from sea water and dolomite was discontinued a few years ago, mostly because of Chinese competition. The reason for building this factory in Norway in the first place was of course our vast amounts of relatively cheap hydroelectric power. In spite of that, several aluminum smelting plants beside the magnesium plant has been put out of business in the last decade because of the soaring wages and general cost level of our country.
As others have noted, that should be $2 per kilogram, not per pound. Even if that price isn't competitive right now, don't expect the gasoline price to stay that low as the oil is becoming a scarcity.
In a post-fossil-fuel economy, a whole lot of things are neccessarily going to change. I doubt if we can even foresee the magnitude of it today.
The earth fluctuates between being warmer and cooler. It has been much warmer in the past. It has been warm enough, in fact, for peat moss to grow there (though peat moss can grow in relatively chilly conditions).
Actually, the peat moss in the tundra grows every summer, and has done so since the ice retreated some 10,000 years ago. The Siberian climate shows rather extreme temperature differences during the year, ranging from +30C in the summer to -60C in the winter.
What is really important with regards to the permafrost, is the annual mean temperature (AMT). In a region where this is around the freezing point, only 1 degree centigrade difference in the AMT can mean all the difference in the world. If the AMT goes just from -0.5C to +0.5C, the deeper layers of the permafrost will eventually thaw. This is what is happening here.
So what was this frozen peat bog before? How did peat grow in ice?
Your question has already been answered earlier in the thread, but I'll repeat:
Every summer, the top layer of the bog will thaw a couple of feet down, and the growth continues. The peat grows at a pretty constant rate of ~1 mm a year. As the peat started to grow after the last Ice Age, around 11,000 years ago, it will typically add up to a 10 m thick carpet, of which only the uppermost top layer is biologically active, the rest of it being in a deep-frozen state. Now, the carpet has started to thaw up ever deeper each summer, releasing vast amounts of methane that has been trapped in the lower layers of the frozen peat. The methane will for a large part stay above the bog, thus creating a local greenhouse effect that further accelerates the thawing. That is why this is considered a runaway process.
You forgot to mention the biggest damn problem. Why is there gravity in space? everybody in those ships stand upright & walk, and those ships don't have centrifuges or anything??????
These ships will need some serious gravity controllers anyway, as they are accelerating at several thousand G. That kind of acceleration would leave the entire crew as a bloody pulp spread across the back wall of the ship under "normal" circumstances.
#56: "My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice."
A more serious point though is that you can train a kid to do anything like that.
I don't think you can train a kid to do anything remotely like this unless she has a genuine innate knack for it. This is certainly a gifted kid.
From the article:
It began at age 5, when she walked by a computer lab at her school and started wondering about those strange "boxes," the computers and monitors. Later, when she found out what they did, she was amazed.
"When you push a button, something magically appears on the box," she said, recalling the experience.
She eventually persuaded her father to buy a computer, and she demonstrated unexpected aptitude, using Microsoft PowerPoint and other programs.
[...]
"I saw her doing something extraordinary, making presentations," said her father, Amjad Karim, who serves with a U.N. peacekeeping force in Africa and came with his daughter to Microsoft this week. "That made me think that she could use some professional coaching, and she could do better in her future life."
Karim said he is careful not to push his daughter, but wanted to make sure that the opportunities existed for her to pursue her interest.
In my opinion, her father seems very considerate. Probably around 90% of the world's children have good reasons to envy her of such a father. How you can construe this as "raping a child of her youth" is totally beyond me.
doesn't mean you can't start a war of destruction against an innocent party.
This is the dark side of the US legal system that people from more civilised parts of the world don't understand how you can live with. Here in Europe, the greediness and brutality of uncurbed capitalism has been quite efficiently circumscribed for the main part of last century, while you happily let the robber barons screw you (and the rest of the world) in the name of Liberty. Why is that?
The problem is that this isn't considered a "bug" at all by the KDE developers, they must think that it's a feature. Some KNode developer must actually have gone out of his way to implement the surreptitious followup-to behaviour.
There's a workaround using KHotkeys to suppress this ugly misfeature, outlined in this News posting. The main body is in Norwegian, but the explanation shouldn't be hard to follow.
The last time longboats were used in an actual fight, was on the harbor of Bergen in 1429. The fight was against the German Hansa merchants who had by then monopolized Norwegian foreign trade. The German boats were far taller than the longboats, and the Norwegians were unable to board. The onslaught failed miserably, and the entire longboat fleet was sunk.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in '84, when I bought a second-hand CP/M system, it ran off a 360K floppy. The guy who sold it told me that "You can buy a 10 Megabyte Winchester hard disk, and then you'll never run out of disk space".
I recently bought a 4 GB flash chip for my Sony-Ericsson W660i phone. Here are the physical dimensions from the product spec: 0.59" x 0.49" x 0.05" (L x W x H). The mind boggles.
You yourself admit "MySQL is made for speed compromising to act like a database" and that is exactly what he is saying too. See, if you're web app doesn't require a full featured database, ie. "If you can fit your problem into what MySQL can handle", then Mysql is a good choice for performance reasons. And even if there's one or two features you need that Mysql doesn't support, then you can do a few hacks to make it work anyway and still be ahead performance-wise.
I use both PostgreSQL and MySQL. I use MySQL in my Web application to display data. A Web application whose sole purpose is to display data fast, is relatively well suited for the MySQL/ISAM paradigm. There's no concern about data corruption in a db that only serves SELECTs. In my production database, I think that data integrity is a rather important issue, never mind the speed of execution. So, I decided at a relatively early stage that MySQL was no option there.
Over time, I've found that although MySQL/ISAM serves simple SELECTs from one table fast enough, the situation deteriorates rapidly if you have to do a join between two or even more tables. Then, PostgreSQL is actually faster, even without substantial trimming. In addition, thanks to the PostgreSQL views and functions, it's quite easy to produce 'flattened' tables from the production database that MySQL can handle in the read-only Web interface.
If you will try to overcome MySQL's shortcomings wrt joins, you may of course follow Rasmus Lerdorf's allegedly misquoted option:
That approach has actually been posted here on Slashdot earlier as a way of optimizing MySQL interactions. The guys that go this misguided route probably don't know much about relational databases in the first place, and might actually be better off with a flat-file system.
After initially reading about the article on the PostgreSQL mailing list and getting myself really worked up, I was deliberately skewing the highlights in my submission of the story to /. to make it "interesting" enough to get a good discussion. From your postings in this thread, I take it that the article itself seems to have been written by someone who listened with half an ear to your speech. I hope that you will take issue with the author as well as the editors at Internet News for publishing such a sloppy article in the first place.
As the contributor of this /. story in the first place, I'll like to say that you sum up my own view quite nicely. It's good to see Rasmus Lerdorf himself debunking TFA. I believe him completely when he says that he has been grossly misquoted. If not for this discussion on Slashdot, TFA might have gone down in history as representing the actual views of Rasmus Lerdorf.
BTW, I'm a regular user of both PHP and MySQL as well as PostgreSQL.
Play around with ACID, and you're liable to take a header out the window !!
Dude, that's another kind of ACID. It's database ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability), not the stuff that people got high on in the sixties. Concerning the latter, there actually have been unsubstantiated rumors about people who imagined they could fly and took a dive through the window.
I don't think Bill G. or even Steve B. would have put it quite that bluntly in public.
the hemp plant can be farmed in cracks in rocks and 50% of it's mass can be refined into combustible fuel.
Aha -- now I understand why them young folks wear buttons with hemp leaves on them. Hemp power! Yay!
vegetable oil is already being used in existing engines by enterprising brits, as a side benefit their cars smell like delicious fish and chips. in all seriousness though, alcohol and plant oils are renewable and far less damaging to the environment than refining metals.
Processed vegetable oil is used by more than the Brits. The technical term is biodiesel.
an abandoned American plant
Sorry. British. British. British. Not American. British.
That is a well-known technique that was developed before WWII. Here's an abandoned American plant from that time.
In my home town of Porsgrunn, Norway, the production of magnesium from sea water and dolomite was discontinued a few years ago, mostly because of Chinese competition. The reason for building this factory in Norway in the first place was of course our vast amounts of relatively cheap hydroelectric power. In spite of that, several aluminum smelting plants beside the magnesium plant has been put out of business in the last decade because of the soaring wages and general cost level of our country.
As others have noted, that should be $2 per kilogram, not per pound. Even if that price isn't competitive right now, don't expect the gasoline price to stay that low as the oil is becoming a scarcity.
In a post-fossil-fuel economy, a whole lot of things are neccessarily going to change. I doubt if we can even foresee the magnitude of it today.
I liked the 'illustarion' photo. Is that a DeLorean?
Anyone have photos of this? any aerial ones I can overlay on google earth?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_galThe earth fluctuates between being warmer and cooler. It has been much warmer in the past. It has been warm enough, in fact, for peat moss to grow there (though peat moss can grow in relatively chilly conditions).
Actually, the peat moss in the tundra grows every summer, and has done so since the ice retreated some 10,000 years ago. The Siberian climate shows rather extreme temperature differences during the year, ranging from +30C in the summer to -60C in the winter.
What is really important with regards to the permafrost, is the annual mean temperature (AMT). In a region where this is around the freezing point, only 1 degree centigrade difference in the AMT can mean all the difference in the world. If the AMT goes just from -0.5C to +0.5C, the deeper layers of the permafrost will eventually thaw. This is what is happening here.
Just hits me strange.
So what was this frozen peat bog before? How did peat grow in ice?
Your question has already been answered earlier in the thread, but I'll repeat:
Every summer, the top layer of the bog will thaw a couple of feet down, and the growth continues. The peat grows at a pretty constant rate of ~1 mm a year. As the peat started to grow after the last Ice Age, around 11,000 years ago, it will typically add up to a 10 m thick carpet, of which only the uppermost top layer is biologically active, the rest of it being in a deep-frozen state. Now, the carpet has started to thaw up ever deeper each summer, releasing vast amounts of methane that has been trapped in the lower layers of the frozen peat. The methane will for a large part stay above the bog, thus creating a local greenhouse effect that further accelerates the thawing. That is why this is considered a runaway process.
You forgot to mention the biggest damn problem. Why is there gravity in space? everybody in those ships stand upright & walk, and those ships don't have centrifuges or anything??????
These ships will need some serious gravity controllers anyway, as they are accelerating at several thousand G. That kind of acceleration would leave the entire crew as a bloody pulp spread across the back wall of the ship under "normal" circumstances.
5. Stormtroopers being professional soldiers would take careful aim, set up snipers, etc thus all gun fights end with the good guys dying and quickly.
The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord
#56: "My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice."
has nobody ever seen the "Quick Format" option on a windows install?
No, I'll just run an
from the bash prompt.A more serious point though is that you can train a kid to do anything like that.
I don't think you can train a kid to do anything remotely like this unless she has a genuine innate knack for it. This is certainly a gifted kid.
From the article:
In my opinion, her father seems very considerate. Probably around 90% of the world's children have good reasons to envy her of such a father. How you can construe this as "raping a child of her youth" is totally beyond me.
doesn't mean you can't start a war of destruction against an innocent party.
This is the dark side of the US legal system that people from more civilised parts of the world don't understand how you can live with. Here in Europe, the greediness and brutality of uncurbed capitalism has been quite efficiently circumscribed for the main part of last century, while you happily let the robber barons screw you (and the rest of the world) in the name of Liberty. Why is that?
The problem is that this isn't considered a "bug" at all by the KDE developers, they must think that it's a feature. Some KNode developer must actually have gone out of his way to implement the surreptitious followup-to behaviour.
There's a workaround using KHotkeys to suppress this ugly misfeature, outlined in this News posting. The main body is in Norwegian, but the explanation shouldn't be hard to follow.
But a completely different project is KDE which is very open to patches and suggestions.
Oh yeah?
Besides, it's kind of weird that they lost their old backups when they ported the data to a new platform.
Oh well -- I guess that the GP must be trolling.
The last time longboats were used in an actual fight, was on the harbor of Bergen in 1429. The fight was against the German Hansa merchants who had by then monopolized Norwegian foreign trade. The German boats were far taller than the longboats, and the Norwegians were unable to board. The onslaught failed miserably, and the entire longboat fleet was sunk.
Why dot we just buy Microsoft, and open source everyting? It's not like we do not have the cash to do this...
Yeah, right. Our national petroleum fund is about the same size as Bill Gates' personal fortune.