Have you seen the beast (I haven't)? Or are you reviewing the content based on a second hand report on _yahoo_?
As far as it goes, I agree with another poster who replied - Byrne isn't a publicity hound. I happen to find him interesting and amusing, but many don't, and he's fine with that. 80's art rock isn't for everyone. Comparisons with Dolby are spot on.
I doubt much money was made on this - 1500 copies @ $80 isn't exactly a new industry. (I'm sure nobody lost money, but if amassing capital were the goal, I'm sure Byrne could sell out in a much more profitable fashion.)
As for obvious and cheap, well, art is in the eye of the beholder (and the bank account of the art dealer), but if it is so obvious and cheap, why didn't someone else do it first?
... please remember to belittle folks on slashdot, so as to make sure they (the unwashed masses) are discouraged from such simple details as explicating what one was actually named to people interested in the results. Lord knows that because _I_ don't want to be remembered properly, nobody else should be.
Damn, I'd hate it if I did anything cool and someone noticed.
(Moderators:... Oh, fuck it. You're going to do whatever it is you do.)
You're right, it isn't a statement that can be legitimately compared to Debian's statements. That would be because Debian is not a company.
I _love_ Debian. This laptop I'm writing this on is running Debian (Thinkpad 570, -unstable, to be precise.) One of the big wins with Debian is precisely that it can make such a social contract. Companies cannot, and stay viable.
That Mandrake is willing to go this far is a wonderful point for them, and we should applaud them.
I'm vaguely reminded of a time in college when I was lambasted for only offering a couple of hours a week at a charity. When I pointed out that dedicating more time would likely result in me flunking out, thus losing my loans, thus moving somewhere else and not being able to give a couple of hours a week to the project, I was ridiculed for lack of dedication.
Having read books such as Cyberpunk and Takedown and watched that doco "Freedom Downtime" I've drawn the conclusion that Kevin appears to be more "misguided" than dangerous and also more "attention seeking" than a model hacker for script kiddies to chase after.
I don't mean to be an asshole but...
You've consumed enough media to form an opinion, have you?
Thank god we have such watchdogs.
(I think Kevin was an asshole. Not that he 'deserved what he got', but he was a jerk. More power to him on writing books and whatnot.)
I suspect you also have strong opinions on the best round to use to take down a PCP taking psycho killer, no?
Under NT4, if I recall correctly, select an app, and then shift-right-click on it (maybe it is control), and you should see a "Run as..." entry, or something similar (I think this is right - I remember that the icon had to be selected first, and then you did something, else it wouldn't work). I know it was there, but annoying to find.
I missed that this isn't a CS class, sorry about that.
How much theory does one need when it appears that the most common database implementation these days involves nothing more complicated than "SELECT * FROM Authors"?
I see people using DBs for this and honestly, if that's all you're doing, it is pretty pointless to use an RDBMS for it - the overhead and complexity outweighs the value that you're not using. 5 lines of perl and a flat file are going to be fine for you. I know people do it every day, but it strikes me as silly.
As a rule of thumb that I use, if you're not worried about ACID, don't have more than 30-40K records, don't need to routinely ask questions involving multiple dimensions of data, and don't think you'll ever get to the point where any of the above are true, I don't see the point of using an RDMBS at all.
I worked for a company with an extremely expensive Oracle installation (think Enterprise license on a multiprocessor box) that used it for various web applications. The schema had about 15 tables, and the most complicated query was a join involving two of them. And they accessed it via CGI, so the authentication startup cost (not trivial, on Oracle) hit was taken on every request. It made me crazy.
I agree with your feeling about the tools, however, you seem to be explaining a view about teaching database _access_ (not to be confused with MS Access) methods, as in, the front ends and programmatic interfaces.
I believe the question was, as the titlebar says, "SQL vs. Access for Learning Database Concepts". APIs are not concepts, at least not in this context.
I'd assert that both Access and [insert SQL RDBMS here] are crap for a theory class. A real SQL database is less crappy, but unless doing nothing but teaching people to think about FKs and joins is the goal, the class should start on the chalk board. Explain set theory, have people work out the problems on paper. _Then_ introduce them, a week or two on, to a real SQL database (doesn't matter which, that much, so long as it is featureful, which would still push Access out) - you're teaching theory, who cares about extentions and APIs?
Afte that, move on to some of the nonrelational models, before they get too comfortable.
And also, as a mini-rant, I have to say that the use of foreign keys has *never* been necessary in any db I've designed
I hope you're trolling, and not actually deploying software.
This statement is analogous to "I have to say, I've never seen the use of backups to be needed on any filesystem I've worked with."
And unless you're doing hardcore statistical analysis, *never* allow nulls.
What the hell are you talking about? Quick - what's your employer's mother's sister's middle name? Hm, maybe that's a null value.
I won't even begin to get in to the evil I've seen applications do to work around stupid NOT NULL declarations...
To get back to the original conversation (and here I agree with the troll), I'm a big fan of textual design. I graphical tools (Visio, etc.) useful when I'm coming in to a preexisting project, but when designing, or modifying, I do prefer vi as a modelling tool. I'm not going to play a how-many-tables dick swinging game, but I will say I administer multiple complex databases for multiple clients under postgres, mysql, and oracle.
Dealing with gui tools hides a lot you need to know. ER relationships make nice pictures, but what's that trigger doing?
Oh wait, this is Slashdot, and anything vaguely tech-related that bashes Bush or Republicans gets listed...
If I am not mistaken, this article is about software enabling gerrymandering. Given that Republicans run things at the moment, it is forgivable to wonder if bashing a technology is somehow synonymous with bashing a party.
Given many other stories about serious problems with our electoral system on many, many levels, I think this view is wrong, but it is reasonable to disagree. I can see a variety of responses. Some of them I don't like. I advocate a strong, fair, transparent system. both for elections and electoral groups. (why should Catholics tell me which district to pray in?)
But bitching about the story for the content of the comments the stories attract is just missing the point.
I'm not sure that I'm disagreeing with you, either.
I _want_ to play with this stuff, but don't currently have the tools. I'm not likely to have dead body parts sitting around, so I suppose I can't provide a comprehensive answer. All I was getting at was that refactored horse hooves apparently are good, in the minds of current, state of the art scanners, when said refactored hooves are used to fool said scanner by someone with access to Google, access to a grocery store, access to a hardware store , and a motive.
Finding a pulse via software shouldn't be that hard. However, trusting biometrics is not the same thing.
Well, the manufacturers of palm/retina scanners generally do include a feature that detects if the bodypart being scanned has a pulse. So you can't fool these scanners just by cutting off someone's hand or ripping out their eyeball.
Um, someone needs to tell that to the manufacturers.
I can't find a reference at the moment, but there was a nice report recently by someone who has been playing with fooling fingerprint scanners for a long time that the cost of tricking one is now about $20 and 15 minutes, no clever expertise needed. I've been meaning to try it out - the only thing I'm lacking is a fingerprint scanner. In any case, apparently, nobody looks for a pulse on commonly used hardware.
Of course the presence/absence of a diety or three is non-provable.
What I was getting at was that it is exactly as non-provable as my invisible intangible monkey, and I wonder why people will accept on faith one, but not the other (culture and history, of course, which is why my monkey now tells me to write a big, thick book about him...)
Umm, why would a "simple" solution require a bunch of skill to implement? Perhaps you meant to say "complex" solutions, which do typically require skill. Simple ones should not require specialized skill- or else they're not simple.
I think the poster was creating an implicit comparison between various types of admins. Installation, configuration and maintenence of Spamassassin is simple for a skilled admin, while it may not be for an inexperienced one. It is a simple solution because well, it is, if you know what you're doing. If you don't, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to solve the problem.
There are easy comparisons to other fields. For instance, changing the brakes in a modern car is simple. It happens thousands of times every day, and there are entire franchise operations set up to do it. And yet, if I were to sit down with a random 2003 model car, it would be hard for me, perhaps beyond me (I dunno, I used to change my brakes on my 1984 Civic with no problem, but I suspect the braking systems are as overengineered as the rest of the car these days.).
Atheism in and of itself however is a leap of faith, because there is no evidence that a higher authority doesn't exist.
In nearly every other human endeavor, the triumph over demands to prove negatives has been overcome. For instance, few people would accept the assertion that there is a giant, invisible, intangible monkey on my head which tells me the secrets of life, even though they can't prove there isn't one. Why is it that you (and many others) wish to demand one here?
In true form for throwaway articles like this, products are compared poorly:
Each product was tested with a different stream of mail, so the number of messages received varied, but all received enough messages to assess their capabilities.
Can you imagine someone writing "Oracle, Sybase and Postgres were compared. While the data and workloads were different, all products performed enough work to assess thier capabilities."
All the products except Brightmail and SpamAssassin allow end-users to add senders to the domain whitelist themselves.
I don't know anything about Brightmail. Spamassassin end user whitelists entries can be set up in a number of ways.
And all the products but SpamAssassin use dynamic updates to keep up with the evolving technologies spammers use to circumvent less sophisticated filters.
As aluded to in the summary, this is false with modern versions of Spamassassin, which uses Baysian filtering. (The author later says he couldn't get it working.
However, it took more than 10 times as long to install and configure SpamAssassin as it did any of the other products. [...] But just because the software is installed does not mean it will work -- filtering criteria must be added manually, and until that's done nothing is filtered out. Getting the various configuration files edited properly so that the whole package worked was not simple. Documentation was difficult to find, and not always easy to follow.
While it is true that one must be comfortable with a text editor to configure Spamassassin, thus perhaps putting it out of reach of point-and-click admins and technical journalists, I also wouldn't be prone to put my mail servers in the hands of either of those groups of people.
It looks for keywords in the subject or body of e-mails, but is frustrated by words not in the dictionary, such as "V!agra," or words that contain invisible HTML characters.
While I am not sure what tests appeared in which version, I'm pretty sure 2.44 handled off-by-one works such as V!agra. I have no idea what he's talking about when he says "invisible HTML characters", but it does seem to point to a certain technical incompetence, similar to the ostritch belief - "If I can't see you, then you can't see me."
This is not to say Spamassassin is the easiest thing in the world to deal with. I happen to love it, because of the extreme flexibility.
I just get sick of tech journos who decide that because a tool doesn't have a gui and they don't want to take the time to configure it, it sucks.
I have no problem with exit polls, no problem with the news reporting it, no problem with the news spinning it however they want. That's free speech. _Official_ disclosure of incremental results before voting is the problem.
I'm all for instant tabulation, precincts should all report in at exactly the same time.
Then you're agreeing with me. No incremental disclosure, certainly no "real time" disclosure.
I just don't see how this really has anything to do with it.
The great-grandparent poster was advocating "real time results" so that everyone could watch a spinner that incremented as people voted. I was pointing out what a bad idea that is. That's my only point.
think it has more to do with replacing aging mechanical voting machines than with the integrity of the election process (which if they really cared about, would not be left entirely to an ad hoc patchwork of local laws)
A patchwork, in imperfect worlds, is preferable, I think. This massive replacement of old voting systems is a top down federal level thing, and look at what's happening.
Fraud will always be attempted, and will sometimes work. I'd rather have a large patchwork of different systems that had to be attacked in different ways than one monoculture that all potentially falls to a successful attack.
Hm, where has that monoculture vs. diversity argument come up before?
On one hand they are breaking the law (no matter how unjustified it may seem)...I mean, if you walk into a shop and steal CDs... we all know what will happen.
Sorry to flog the dead mammal, but people need to remember:
Copyright infringement is not theft.
They are two legally distinct concepts, and conflating them is RIAA propaganda.
Many places do not want customers taking pictures on their premises for various reasons. The MPAA just gave them a fairly cheap method of making it a felony to do so, and deputized the staff to enforce it. All for a low, low royalty fee...
OK, there's one advantage if the results can be seen in "real time," e.g. over the day, while elections are still running. Because then the knowledge that the current results are very close to each other (think Gore-Bush) might have an influence on who decides to actually go voting later in the day.
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
If the race is probably going to go to one side or another, fewer people are likely to turn out. What does "probably" mean? Well, just turn on CNN, or Fox, or... and they'll tell you.
See the problem?
And that's before you get in to less subtle ways of, um, freelance electioneering.
Allowing any knowledge of how an election is going while it is still happening gives people an opportunity to undermine it.
Re:Full text searching improved and other goodness
on
PostgreSQL 7.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Does PostgreSQL have a good GUI component for direct database manipulation?
Several. Take your pick. (Check the administrative link off the nav, and also look through the developer tools.)
I understand that PostgreSQL requires cygwin to run on a Windows platform. Since my company is a Windows shop for now (I have not yet been able to convince them to move to Linux) this is an important issue for me. How big of a performance hit is there for running through the cygwin interface? In other words, is PostgreSQL faster than MySQL in Windows?
Can't help you here, I've never done it. Sorry.
Are there plans to go to a native Windows platform?
Yes. There are technical hurdles, but it is actively being worked on. Check out the list, if you're interested.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as it goes, I agree with another poster who replied - Byrne isn't a publicity hound. I happen to find him interesting and amusing, but many don't, and he's fine with that. 80's art rock isn't for everyone. Comparisons with Dolby are spot on.
I doubt much money was made on this - 1500 copies @ $80 isn't exactly a new industry. (I'm sure nobody lost money, but if amassing capital were the goal, I'm sure Byrne could sell out in a much more profitable fashion.)
As for obvious and cheap, well, art is in the eye of the beholder (and the bank account of the art dealer), but if it is so obvious and cheap, why didn't someone else do it first?
Damn, I'd hate it if I did anything cool and someone noticed.
Or did you have a different point in mind?
I used to live there. That doesn't matter. Why would you give your DNA up? Don't do it.Fight anyone who wants you to do so.
You're right, it isn't a statement that can be legitimately compared to Debian's statements. That would be because Debian is not a company.
I _love_ Debian. This laptop I'm writing this on is running Debian (Thinkpad 570, -unstable, to be precise.) One of the big wins with Debian is precisely that it can make such a social contract. Companies cannot, and stay viable.
That Mandrake is willing to go this far is a wonderful point for them, and we should applaud them.
I'm vaguely reminded of a time in college when I was lambasted for only offering a couple of hours a week at a charity. When I pointed out that dedicating more time would likely result in me flunking out, thus losing my loans, thus moving somewhere else and not being able to give a couple of hours a week to the project, I was ridiculed for lack of dedication.
Depends on how you count, I suppose. The Great Wall cost an awful lot of lives.
What's the cheapest per-distance massive engineering project? I know that's the wrong metric for a lot of things, but is still interesting.
I don't mean to be an asshole but...
You've consumed enough media to form an opinion, have you?
Thank god we have such watchdogs.
(I think Kevin was an asshole. Not that he 'deserved what he got', but he was a jerk. More power to him on writing books and whatnot.)
I suspect you also have strong opinions on the best round to use to take down a PCP taking psycho killer, no?
How much theory does one need when it appears that the most common database implementation these days involves nothing more complicated than "SELECT * FROM Authors"?
I see people using DBs for this and honestly, if that's all you're doing, it is pretty pointless to use an RDBMS for it - the overhead and complexity outweighs the value that you're not using. 5 lines of perl and a flat file are going to be fine for you. I know people do it every day, but it strikes me as silly.
As a rule of thumb that I use, if you're not worried about ACID, don't have more than 30-40K records, don't need to routinely ask questions involving multiple dimensions of data, and don't think you'll ever get to the point where any of the above are true, I don't see the point of using an RDMBS at all.
I worked for a company with an extremely expensive Oracle installation (think Enterprise license on a multiprocessor box) that used it for various web applications. The schema had about 15 tables, and the most complicated query was a join involving two of them. And they accessed it via CGI, so the authentication startup cost (not trivial, on Oracle) hit was taken on every request. It made me crazy.
I believe the question was, as the titlebar says, "SQL vs. Access for Learning Database Concepts". APIs are not concepts, at least not in this context.
I'd assert that both Access and [insert SQL RDBMS here] are crap for a theory class. A real SQL database is less crappy, but unless doing nothing but teaching people to think about FKs and joins is the goal, the class should start on the chalk board. Explain set theory, have people work out the problems on paper. _Then_ introduce them, a week or two on, to a real SQL database (doesn't matter which, that much, so long as it is featureful, which would still push Access out) - you're teaching theory, who cares about extentions and APIs?
Afte that, move on to some of the nonrelational models, before they get too comfortable.
I hope you're trolling, and not actually deploying software.
This statement is analogous to "I have to say, I've never seen the use of backups to be needed on any filesystem I've worked with."
And unless you're doing hardcore statistical analysis, *never* allow nulls.
What the hell are you talking about? Quick - what's your employer's mother's sister's middle name? Hm, maybe that's a null value.
I won't even begin to get in to the evil I've seen applications do to work around stupid NOT NULL declarations...
To get back to the original conversation (and here I agree with the troll), I'm a big fan of textual design. I graphical tools (Visio, etc.) useful when I'm coming in to a preexisting project, but when designing, or modifying, I do prefer vi as a modelling tool. I'm not going to play a how-many-tables dick swinging game, but I will say I administer multiple complex databases for multiple clients under postgres, mysql, and oracle.
Dealing with gui tools hides a lot you need to know. ER relationships make nice pictures, but what's that trigger doing?
If I am not mistaken, this article is about software enabling gerrymandering. Given that Republicans run things at the moment, it is forgivable to wonder if bashing a technology is somehow synonymous with bashing a party.
Given many other stories about serious problems with our electoral system on many, many levels, I think this view is wrong, but it is reasonable to disagree. I can see a variety of responses. Some of them I don't like. I advocate a strong, fair, transparent system. both for elections and electoral groups. (why should Catholics tell me which district to pray in?)
But bitching about the story for the content of the comments the stories attract is just missing the point.
[Bill O'Really]
[N/T]. I'm too used to K5.
I _want_ to play with this stuff, but don't currently have the tools. I'm not likely to have dead body parts sitting around, so I suppose I can't provide a comprehensive answer. All I was getting at was that refactored horse hooves apparently are good, in the minds of current, state of the art scanners, when said refactored hooves are used to fool said scanner by someone with access to Google, access to a grocery store, access to a hardware store , and a motive.
Finding a pulse via software shouldn't be that hard. However, trusting biometrics is not the same thing.
That's all I was getting at.
BTW, there's not 'd' in his name.
Um, someone needs to tell that to the manufacturers.
I can't find a reference at the moment, but there was a nice report recently by someone who has been playing with fooling fingerprint scanners for a long time that the cost of tricking one is now about $20 and 15 minutes, no clever expertise needed. I've been meaning to try it out - the only thing I'm lacking is a fingerprint scanner. In any case, apparently, nobody looks for a pulse on commonly used hardware.
For methods, see google.
Of course the presence/absence of a diety or three is non-provable.
What I was getting at was that it is exactly as non-provable as my invisible intangible monkey, and I wonder why people will accept on faith one, but not the other (culture and history, of course, which is why my monkey now tells me to write a big, thick book about him...)
I think the poster was creating an implicit comparison between various types of admins. Installation, configuration and maintenence of Spamassassin is simple for a skilled admin, while it may not be for an inexperienced one. It is a simple solution because well, it is, if you know what you're doing. If you don't, perhaps you shouldn't be trying to solve the problem.
There are easy comparisons to other fields. For instance, changing the brakes in a modern car is simple. It happens thousands of times every day, and there are entire franchise operations set up to do it. And yet, if I were to sit down with a random 2003 model car, it would be hard for me, perhaps beyond me (I dunno, I used to change my brakes on my 1984 Civic with no problem, but I suspect the braking systems are as overengineered as the rest of the car these days.).
See the distinction?
In nearly every other human endeavor, the triumph over demands to prove negatives has been overcome. For instance, few people would accept the assertion that there is a giant, invisible, intangible monkey on my head which tells me the secrets of life, even though they can't prove there isn't one. Why is it that you (and many others) wish to demand one here?
Each product was tested with a different stream of mail, so the number of messages received varied, but all received enough messages to assess their capabilities.
Can you imagine someone writing "Oracle, Sybase and Postgres were compared. While the data and workloads were different, all products performed enough work to assess thier capabilities."
All the products except Brightmail and SpamAssassin allow end-users to add senders to the domain whitelist themselves.
I don't know anything about Brightmail. Spamassassin end user whitelists entries can be set up in a number of ways.
And all the products but SpamAssassin use dynamic updates to keep up with the evolving technologies spammers use to circumvent less sophisticated filters.
As aluded to in the summary, this is false with modern versions of Spamassassin, which uses Baysian filtering. (The author later says he couldn't get it working.
However, it took more than 10 times as long to install and configure SpamAssassin as it did any of the other products. [...] But just because the software is installed does not mean it will work -- filtering criteria must be added manually, and until that's done nothing is filtered out. Getting the various configuration files edited properly so that the whole package worked was not simple. Documentation was difficult to find, and not always easy to follow.
While it is true that one must be comfortable with a text editor to configure Spamassassin, thus perhaps putting it out of reach of point-and-click admins and technical journalists, I also wouldn't be prone to put my mail servers in the hands of either of those groups of people.
It looks for keywords in the subject or body of e-mails, but is frustrated by words not in the dictionary, such as "V!agra," or words that contain invisible HTML characters.
While I am not sure what tests appeared in which version, I'm pretty sure 2.44 handled off-by-one works such as V!agra. I have no idea what he's talking about when he says "invisible HTML characters", but it does seem to point to a certain technical incompetence, similar to the ostritch belief - "If I can't see you, then you can't see me."
This is not to say Spamassassin is the easiest thing in the world to deal with. I happen to love it, because of the extreme flexibility.
I just get sick of tech journos who decide that because a tool doesn't have a gui and they don't want to take the time to configure it, it sucks.
I'm all for instant tabulation, precincts should all report in at exactly the same time.
Then you're agreeing with me. No incremental disclosure, certainly no "real time" disclosure.
I just don't see how this really has anything to do with it.
The great-grandparent poster was advocating "real time results" so that everyone could watch a spinner that incremented as people voted. I was pointing out what a bad idea that is. That's my only point.
think it has more to do with replacing aging mechanical voting machines than with the integrity of the election process (which if they really cared about, would not be left entirely to an ad hoc patchwork of local laws)
A patchwork, in imperfect worlds, is preferable, I think. This massive replacement of old voting systems is a top down federal level thing, and look at what's happening.
Fraud will always be attempted, and will sometimes work. I'd rather have a large patchwork of different systems that had to be attacked in different ways than one monoculture that all potentially falls to a successful attack.
Hm, where has that monoculture vs. diversity argument come up before?
Sorry to flog the dead mammal, but people need to remember:
Copyright infringement is not theft.
They are two legally distinct concepts, and conflating them is RIAA propaganda.
-j
No, that's a big, big disadvantage, and should be avoided at all costs. Results should not be available before the polls close. If they are, all sorts of tricks can be played, in both close and not-so-close races.
If the race is probably going to go to one side or another, fewer people are likely to turn out. What does "probably" mean? Well, just turn on CNN, or Fox, or... and they'll tell you.
See the problem?
And that's before you get in to less subtle ways of, um, freelance electioneering.
Allowing any knowledge of how an election is going while it is still happening gives people an opportunity to undermine it.
Several. Take your pick. (Check the administrative link off the nav, and also look through the developer tools.)
I understand that PostgreSQL requires cygwin to run on a Windows platform. Since my company is a Windows shop for now (I have not yet been able to convince them to move to Linux) this is an important issue for me. How big of a performance hit is there for running through the cygwin interface? In other words, is PostgreSQL faster than MySQL in Windows?
Can't help you here, I've never done it. Sorry.
Are there plans to go to a native Windows platform?
Yes. There are technical hurdles, but it is actively being worked on. Check out the list, if you're interested.
w