I would agree, if only Windows were set up so that x:\Program Files was a virtual folder to a different partition. Windows blows up? Great, reinstall Windows and, as part of that installation process, have it be able to "reinstall" applications in Program Files w/o actually having to reinstall the app in most cases. Then, we can backup our apps once in a great while, our personal files and data frequently, and Windows' system files somewhere in between, and that a failure in one part does not necessarily require reinstallation of EVERYTHING from original sources/backups (backups, what backups?). Then, make all these virtual directories just hide under "C:\". Heck, one could probably get away with that, too at this point.
Sure, the various underpinnings for some of this are there (i.e., move the drive that "Documents and Settings" sits on, for example), but they're so unmentioned because that would be "too complex" is silly. Set it up right the first time, and it's so flippin' easy for Joe Blow to deal with (i.e., the computer person he hires to fix it for him) that Windows support becomes as easy as it's been promised for almost 20 years now.
Oh, and provide some way, even in the Recovery Console, to deal with a broken Registry in an off-line kind of mode: identify broken data, broken trees, fix/prune, etc.
Hey, St. Patrick's Day is coming up. If you live in Boston, MA, I double-dutch dare you to openly wear an orange tee-shirt with a Union Jack on it and walk around town, especially on the south side of town. I would bet that someone wearing green will "express" their displeasures on you.
In the US, you *can* say inflamatory or negative things about someone else, and it's expected that if the invective is aimed at you, that you respond in a civil fashion, and that the inflammatory speech does not give you license to seek out and beat the shit out of whoever it is that said what it was that pissed you off, justified as it may seem.
Not that it doesn't happen, but smarter people are at least a little more...discreet... in how they exact their revenge.
Yes, but before we called them assassins, and gave them guns. SUre, they may have been sent in against hopeless odds, but if they were crafty enough (or failed and escaped), they lived to see another day. Japan used it for their pilots. It is interesting reading/hearing the accounts of those kamikazee pilots who "failed" their missions.
The walking human antipersonnel mine originated in Lebanon, not the US invasion of Iraq.
For all intensive purposes, it appears that once you indicate you want to be a union member, er, human bomb, your destiny is planned and carried out by others, and you have very little room for failure (the end result is the same. If you don't blow yourself up where you're supposed to, someone else is watching you and will make sure you at least get blown up).
(Sorry, the jab at "union member" is for an old job I had, where a few people had indicated they wanted a Union rep to come out, so postcards were mailed to all potentially eligible members. I, and a few others, didn't return our cards, which said absolutely NOTHING about being a vote to accept/reject union representation, but actually were the ballots. Since a majority of the cards said, "yes, come on out and tell us about the benefits of union membership" were returned, that *was* the vote, according to the NLRB. This, for the freaking white collar staff employees of a branch campus of a major Washington university, who, for the most part, wouldn't know what hard work and hostile management is if it bit them in the ass).
Eminent Domain. Copyright Extension (Congress can now define what "reasonable limits" are, so this could easily be used to hem in the 1st Amendment, too). RICO vs Right-to-Lifers...
The only votes that count for the President are the Electoral College. I don't have a problem with the EC, just that in most states it is a "winner takes all", instead of percentage. I'd argue that the votes should be broken up by the popular vote percentages from each state, but that'll never happen, because it's a "State Right".
"State's Right" is not stopping the One Driver's License To Bind Them All, is it?
But, look at what happened in the Valerie Plame case. A newspaper reporter who had the information, but did not actually publish it, was essentially published for having the information and publicly refusing to say where she got it from, whereas at least two other reporters/media talking heads/fist puppets/whatever, who did blab her name out publicly (but also did not say where they got the info from...), got off with nary a wet willie.
Unless the law has wordage that limits its areas of responsibility as much as it says what it will be used for, it won't take much effort for anyone to use it in areas it wasn't "intended" to be used, and then argue to the court why it applies. Take the laws about RICO, for example. According to the Supreme Court now, if you're acting like the Mob, planning like the Mob, and "influencing" people like the Mob, but you aren't really the Mob, then RICO doesn't apply to you. Great.
as RICO been abused? Oh, yeah, anyone who's been prosecuted under it but not part of the Mob will argue that it was misapplied to them, because, well, it was "intended" to go after the Mob.
Plus, I'm sure the current Supreme Court will let it stand if it's passed (or, more likely, attached to some other must-pass, but completely unrelated, bill), because, well, Congress passed it, so it must be right, and we aren't supposed to "legislate from the bench" anymore.
Might as well have someone draft a bill now that essentially declares a National Terrorism Emergency, that various procedures and laws are on hiatus for the time being, including that pesky Presidential Term Limit amendment... oh, and might as well name a salad dressing after the President, too, like "Chez-tsar Bush", and add in that any "expression negative to the United States, its agents or officials, is punishable under treason and other criminal provisions in the law". Double-plus good! Oh, and throw in some other provisions that limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court for related questions of jurisdiction as well.
Well, despite this, there are still people who like some of the games that suck, even as badly as Masters of Orion III. For the 10% of games that truly suck or the 10% of games which will truly rule, previews are probably spot-on. For most of the other games, there is lots of optimism in the previews, which is fine. Look at a car magazine (Car & Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, AutoWeek) ever? They have *conceptual* drawings of planned/hoped for car designs sometimes years in advance, and car geeks hold on to those images until they start seeing sheet metal. Then there is the whole car show circuit, and a whole nother level of wet dreams and drooling by car nuts.
There is market frustration, like comparing the final iterations of the MR-2 to the current MR-S, for example (it's a small market, yes, but passionate), and wondering why Toyota didn't keep selling the MR2 in the US for as long as it sold in Japan. Yeah, I had a '91 MR2T, and pretty much wish I hadn't sold it, but was "convinced" that it would be the best thing for the Family. Oh well, c'est la vie. Still a modern-looking car, and its design has aged far more than Mitsu 3000GT's design, for example.
Too bad all cars don't cost a uniform price, unlike video/computer games! "Yeah, I'll take that Corvette Z-06 for $49.99, please!"
The CIA is on its own side. It is not on yours, or mine, or anyone else's necessarily. It is not even necessarily on the US government's side sometimes.
well, in a way we do replace what we nuke, but inadvertently or despite our best intentions. Think starlings, rock pigeons, Norway rats, gray squirrels, California sea lions, Himalayan blackberry, Cane toads, etc.
No high quality photos in Google Maps/Earth though of Bremerton Naval Shit^hpyard or Subbase Bangor... I'm suprised that Google has high res ones of Point Loma.
You still don't want to drive around BNS with a camera visible in your car...
Hmm... I remember watching a movie of a study done by NASA to see why impact craters always seem to be circular. They shot high-speed pellets at sintered silica sand blocks, and filmed the results. Didn't matter what they did w.r.t. velocity or angle of impact (short of the absurd, like 5 degrees elevation), they all came out circular. How many ellipsoid craters are found on the moon, for example?
The IRS and California Franchise Board will take care of these things *quite well*.
While the details of what Mozilla.org will have to report to these entities isn't revealed, some metrics are disclosed if you look for them. To maintain the "non-profit" designation (it's not necessarily a 501C type organization), how the money is spent regarding employees, etc. has to fall into certain broad criteria specified by Mozilla.org's Board as well as certain percentages. Because Mozilla.org's "benefit to the community" is a product, and not charity $$$, the reporting requirements are different, too. The wages that people get for working for Mozilla.org, if they're paid, pay the same taxes that other employees pay.
No, what if the rootkit instead was a "Ring-0" level that contained MS' DRM and other security "features" that acted essentially like a bootloader for Windows, and it had some other neato features like phoning home periodically to report what was installed on your computer, allowing access to certain well-paying Trusted Partners to add functionality to it remotely w/o your input or acknowledgement or even take some measure of control, etc.?
In other words, tools of control that make the Sony DRM Rootkit look like trivial child's play.
It may be your computer, after all, but it's THEIR software, right?
If I ever buy a new GM car, it's getting OnStar ripped out of it. Miss a payment? Well, too bad so sad, GMAC has decided that, through OnStar, to remotely disable your car, and report to repoman where it was when you tried to start it, so they can more easily locate it. APB put out for your "summons" by the police? Same thing.
Then perhaps they should release programs on 3.5" floppies again. Copying Office 4.2 on its 90 or so floppy disks was just not an option in 1992. The installation was PAINFUL, but at least could then be run off the file server.
In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares.
No, they did do some things. Rumors of bad sectors on floppies burned in by lasers. Certainly floppies that had sectors marked as bad where the installer/runtime had code to force the disc controller to check for the errors and overlook them if they were found (i.e., intentionally put there), which prevented casual disk to disk copying.
Then HD's came out, and many forms of copy protection that were to stop floppy-floppy copying did not play well with those who wanted to run their games off of the HD. Eventually it was business software that had the worst problems with this, and they were the first ones to give up on it, lower prices to the point where the "fun" of copying programs was reduced, etc. Games came along shortly after. The least obtrusive game copy protections, IMHO, were those that required the manuals. But they were easy enough to defeat programmatically (SoftICE...), too.
Now with CloneCD, DaemonTools, the Internet (availability to NOCD cracks), etc., it seems like the industry should just realize that $50/game in the US probably wouldn't be as profitable as $19.00 and minimal CD protection. Requiring the CD to play a game, if only to keep SecureRom happy (all the media content gets d/l to the HD usually anyways...) sucks. And to think that some of the no-copy stuff is getting pretty sneaky (installing device drivers?) with little/no concern for user's computer, etc.
If they're that paranoid about it, they should just license MS' activation technology and methods, or go full on-line (where they can control the servers).
Veal calfs also don't live to see more than a year of their pitiful existance, either. Perhaps you were referring to living the life more akin to that of a captive dairy cow. Sure, it's a nice twice a day drive from your house in west Beaverton to some point east, where you slog for 45 minutes to go 10 miles along US 26 (on a good day). You have a nice house (that is so much like every other house that is less than 20 years old), a trivial yard, a plethora of trivial "cool things", etc. Except unlike livestock, you do have some freedom of action, even if the short-term consequences may seem to be unacceptable. But you do have a choice. Livestock that do realize that they may have other options than the farmer wants them to have tend to end up in a freezer in little white packages in no time... OK, there was that Merlino ram that was on the lam [sic] for 5 or so years in NZ...
Oh, I don't know. Probably the dysfunctional relationships in their family, school or community will have more impact than anything else.
Basically, it comes down to more a culture that values "I want it now, so you'd better give it to me, or else..." rather than one of "I want it, but I'm not going to get it today, so I'll work my ass off to get it somewhere down the road".
Well, consider these "analysts". They have created a niche in the market where they have some sway and influence in how other people invest their moneys (through them, of course). They are being left out in the cold by Google. In a sense, the analysts are tails that have enjoyed wagging the dog for some time.
Yes, I understand that when I buy shares in a company I'm getting some measure of "ownership", but my investment in the company is quite limited. My expectations for the company should be commensurate. The attitude of some shareholders (Carl Icahn, Kirk Trevorkian, et al) seems to be like they're mad at the state lottery commissions when they buy tickets that don't win. They're in it not only for the $$$, but for control, whether that means providing some sort of guidance for the company to organically make more money (which is probably good), or directing the company to bleed itself of cash for the benefits of the major shareholders (which is...bad) or debt holders.
Gillette doesn't matter anymore, because it got bought by P&G...
Analysts are kind of like mistletoe on an oak tree.
PostGres->Oracle is not nearly as bad as MySQL->anything else. SQLServer->Oracle, SQLServer->DB2, DB2->Oracle, etc. doesn't happen all that much. If only more databases supported DOMAINs, i.e., CREATE DOMAIN UserID as integer.
DeZign for Databases is pretty good at slurping in a database schema from one platform, and after changing the target platform, converting the schema to the desired database system.
As far as "hard to port" SQL, unless you're using MySQL or old versions of databsae apps, this isn't too much of a problem for most SQL heads, even when you throw in database-specific functions or idioms.
And it all depends on how much trigger/stored proc code you have to migrate. Tables/Views are pretty simple to move.
For most application developers, for whom SQL is a 4-letter word, that would be about 0 right there.
Well, that's how most people tend to code on top of databases. I'm sure you can point to lots of great examples as to how this is bad, so fire away.
2) i don't think the objects you work with in code should know how they are stored - this means they don't inherit or mix-in any database code at all. there should be separate classes that handle this.
Great, because your model objects that use ActiveRecord don't know how they're stored in the database, either, short of the interface methods provided to them thru inheritance from ActiveRecord::Base. Nor does ActiveRecord::Base, really. It "mixes in" the storage details for a given adapter as specified in the configuration file. The specific adapter class has all the parameterized/dynamic insert-update-delete SQL in it, if that indeed is what is used. It could just as well be cursor-oriented access directly against the DB's client interfaces as well. Only matters really to the people who code the adapter classes.
a Ticket may consist of data aggregated from several tables; the client code doesn't care about that. the TicketStorage class worries about storage.
But...what if I have another application that hits the database, and can't know about your TicketStorage class? For DBs where stored procs return datasets, it would make more sense to store the logic in the database... Or codge a view that does some of it, too (with instead of triggers to put stuff in the right places). Funny, ActiveRecord can interface with a view just this way, too.
Even better, if you use something like DeZign for Databases, a database-neutral ERD program, it's pretty easy to switch your table schema from one database system to another (stored procs, triggers, etc. are not translated, however...)
People keep talking about this, but be honest: how often does it happen in practice? Not too often.
Slashdot Mirror
I would agree, if only Windows were set up so that x:\Program Files was a virtual folder to a different partition. Windows blows up? Great, reinstall Windows and, as part of that installation process, have it be able to "reinstall" applications in Program Files w/o actually having to reinstall the app in most cases. Then, we can backup our apps once in a great while, our personal files and data frequently, and Windows' system files somewhere in between, and that a failure in one part does not necessarily require reinstallation of EVERYTHING from original sources/backups (backups, what backups?). Then, make all these virtual directories just hide under "C:\". Heck, one could probably get away with that, too at this point.
Sure, the various underpinnings for some of this are there (i.e., move the drive that "Documents and Settings" sits on, for example), but they're so unmentioned because that would be "too complex" is silly. Set it up right the first time, and it's so flippin' easy for Joe Blow to deal with (i.e., the computer person he hires to fix it for him) that Windows support becomes as easy as it's been promised for almost 20 years now.
Oh, and provide some way, even in the Recovery Console, to deal with a broken Registry in an off-line kind of mode: identify broken data, broken trees, fix/prune, etc.
Hey, St. Patrick's Day is coming up. If you live in Boston, MA, I double-dutch dare you to openly wear an orange tee-shirt with a Union Jack on it and walk around town, especially on the south side of town. I would bet that someone wearing green will "express" their displeasures on you.
In the US, you *can* say inflamatory or negative things about someone else, and it's expected that if the invective is aimed at you, that you respond in a civil fashion, and that the inflammatory speech does not give you license to seek out and beat the shit out of whoever it is that said what it was that pissed you off, justified as it may seem.
Not that it doesn't happen, but smarter people are at least a little more...discreet... in how they exact their revenge.
Yes, but before we called them assassins, and gave them guns. SUre, they may have been sent in against hopeless odds, but if they were crafty enough (or failed and escaped), they lived to see another day. Japan used it for their pilots. It is interesting reading/hearing the accounts of those kamikazee pilots who "failed" their missions.
The walking human antipersonnel mine originated in Lebanon, not the US invasion of Iraq.
For all intensive purposes, it appears that once you indicate you want to be a union member, er, human bomb, your destiny is planned and carried out by others, and you have very little room for failure (the end result is the same. If you don't blow yourself up where you're supposed to, someone else is watching you and will make sure you at least get blown up).
(Sorry, the jab at "union member" is for an old job I had, where a few people had indicated they wanted a Union rep to come out, so postcards were mailed to all potentially eligible members. I, and a few others, didn't return our cards, which said absolutely NOTHING about being a vote to accept/reject union representation, but actually were the ballots. Since a majority of the cards said, "yes, come on out and tell us about the benefits of union membership" were returned, that *was* the vote, according to the NLRB. This, for the freaking white collar staff employees of a branch campus of a major Washington university, who, for the most part, wouldn't know what hard work and hostile management is if it bit them in the ass).
Eminent Domain. Copyright Extension (Congress can now define what "reasonable limits" are, so this could easily be used to hem in the 1st Amendment, too). RICO vs Right-to-Lifers...
The only votes that count for the President are the Electoral College. I don't have a problem with the EC, just that in most states it is a "winner takes all", instead of percentage. I'd argue that the votes should be broken up by the popular vote percentages from each state, but that'll never happen, because it's a "State Right".
"State's Right" is not stopping the One Driver's License To Bind Them All, is it?
But, look at what happened in the Valerie Plame case. A newspaper reporter who had the information, but did not actually publish it, was essentially published for having the information and publicly refusing to say where she got it from, whereas at least two other reporters/media talking heads/fist puppets/whatever, who did blab her name out publicly (but also did not say where they got the info from...), got off with nary a wet willie.
Unless the law has wordage that limits its areas of responsibility as much as it says what it will be used for, it won't take much effort for anyone to use it in areas it wasn't "intended" to be used, and then argue to the court why it applies. Take the laws about RICO, for example. According to the Supreme Court now, if you're acting like the Mob, planning like the Mob, and "influencing" people like the Mob, but you aren't really the Mob, then RICO doesn't apply to you. Great.
as RICO been abused? Oh, yeah, anyone who's been prosecuted under it but not part of the Mob will argue that it was misapplied to them, because, well, it was "intended" to go after the Mob.
Plus, I'm sure the current Supreme Court will let it stand if it's passed (or, more likely, attached to some other must-pass, but completely unrelated, bill), because, well, Congress passed it, so it must be right, and we aren't supposed to "legislate from the bench" anymore.
Might as well have someone draft a bill now that essentially declares a National Terrorism Emergency, that various procedures and laws are on hiatus for the time being, including that pesky Presidential Term Limit amendment... oh, and might as well name a salad dressing after the President, too, like "Chez-tsar Bush", and add in that any "expression negative to the United States, its agents or officials, is punishable under treason and other criminal provisions in the law". Double-plus good! Oh, and throw in some other provisions that limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court for related questions of jurisdiction as well.
I know I thought that about Masters of Orion III... boy, what a letdown that was.
Well, despite this, there are still people who like some of the games that suck, even as badly as Masters of Orion III. For the 10% of games that truly suck or the 10% of games which will truly rule, previews are probably spot-on. For most of the other games, there is lots of optimism in the previews, which is fine. Look at a car magazine (Car & Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, AutoWeek) ever? They have *conceptual* drawings of planned/hoped for car designs sometimes years in advance, and car geeks hold on to those images until they start seeing sheet metal. Then there is the whole car show circuit, and a whole nother level of wet dreams and drooling by car nuts.
There is market frustration, like comparing the final iterations of the MR-2 to the current MR-S, for example (it's a small market, yes, but passionate), and wondering why Toyota didn't keep selling the MR2 in the US for as long as it sold in Japan. Yeah, I had a '91 MR2T, and pretty much wish I hadn't sold it, but was "convinced" that it would be the best thing for the Family. Oh well, c'est la vie. Still a modern-looking car, and its design has aged far more than Mitsu 3000GT's design, for example.
Too bad all cars don't cost a uniform price, unlike video/computer games! "Yeah, I'll take that Corvette Z-06 for $49.99, please!"
Or...
Let's eat, out Grandma!
or...
let's eat, out, Grandma!
The CIA is on its own side. It is not on yours, or mine, or anyone else's necessarily. It is not even necessarily on the US government's side sometimes.
well, in a way we do replace what we nuke, but inadvertently or despite our best intentions. Think starlings, rock pigeons, Norway rats, gray squirrels, California sea lions, Himalayan blackberry, Cane toads, etc.
Oh, I don't know. Up until now, no one has wanted to plow down a bunch of this animal's presumed habitat for a palm oil plantation.
No high quality photos in Google Maps/Earth though of Bremerton Naval Shit^hpyard or Subbase Bangor... I'm suprised that Google has high res ones of Point Loma.
You still don't want to drive around BNS with a camera visible in your car...
Hmm... I remember watching a movie of a study done by NASA to see why impact craters always seem to be circular. They shot high-speed pellets at sintered silica sand blocks, and filmed the results. Didn't matter what they did w.r.t. velocity or angle of impact (short of the absurd, like 5 degrees elevation), they all came out circular. How many ellipsoid craters are found on the moon, for example?
The IRS and California Franchise Board will take care of these things *quite well*.
While the details of what Mozilla.org will have to report to these entities isn't revealed, some metrics are disclosed if you look for them. To maintain the "non-profit" designation (it's not necessarily a 501C type organization), how the money is spent regarding employees, etc. has to fall into certain broad criteria specified by Mozilla.org's Board as well as certain percentages. Because Mozilla.org's "benefit to the community" is a product, and not charity $$$, the reporting requirements are different, too. The wages that people get for working for Mozilla.org, if they're paid, pay the same taxes that other employees pay.
No, what if the rootkit instead was a "Ring-0" level that contained MS' DRM and other security "features" that acted essentially like a bootloader for Windows, and it had some other neato features like phoning home periodically to report what was installed on your computer, allowing access to certain well-paying Trusted Partners to add functionality to it remotely w/o your input or acknowledgement or even take some measure of control, etc.?
In other words, tools of control that make the Sony DRM Rootkit look like trivial child's play.
It may be your computer, after all, but it's THEIR software, right?
If I ever buy a new GM car, it's getting OnStar ripped out of it. Miss a payment? Well, too bad so sad, GMAC has decided that, through OnStar, to remotely disable your car, and report to repoman where it was when you tried to start it, so they can more easily locate it. APB put out for your "summons" by the police? Same thing.
Then perhaps they should release programs on 3.5" floppies again. Copying Office 4.2 on its 90 or so floppy disks was just not an option in 1992. The installation was PAINFUL, but at least could then be run off the file server.
In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares.
No, they did do some things. Rumors of bad sectors on floppies burned in by lasers. Certainly floppies that had sectors marked as bad where the installer/runtime had code to force the disc controller to check for the errors and overlook them if they were found (i.e., intentionally put there), which prevented casual disk to disk copying.
Then HD's came out, and many forms of copy protection that were to stop floppy-floppy copying did not play well with those who wanted to run their games off of the HD. Eventually it was business software that had the worst problems with this, and they were the first ones to give up on it, lower prices to the point where the "fun" of copying programs was reduced, etc. Games came along shortly after. The least obtrusive game copy protections, IMHO, were those that required the manuals. But they were easy enough to defeat programmatically (SoftICE...), too.
Now with CloneCD, DaemonTools, the Internet (availability to NOCD cracks), etc., it seems like the industry should just realize that $50/game in the US probably wouldn't be as profitable as $19.00 and minimal CD protection. Requiring the CD to play a game, if only to keep SecureRom happy (all the media content gets d/l to the HD usually anyways...) sucks. And to think that some of the no-copy stuff is getting pretty sneaky (installing device drivers?) with little/no concern for user's computer, etc.
If they're that paranoid about it, they should just license MS' activation technology and methods, or go full on-line (where they can control the servers).
Veal calfs also don't live to see more than a year of their pitiful existance, either. Perhaps you were referring to living the life more akin to that of a captive dairy cow. Sure, it's a nice twice a day drive from your house in west Beaverton to some point east, where you slog for 45 minutes to go 10 miles along US 26 (on a good day). You have a nice house (that is so much like every other house that is less than 20 years old), a trivial yard, a plethora of trivial "cool things", etc. Except unlike livestock, you do have some freedom of action, even if the short-term consequences may seem to be unacceptable. But you do have a choice. Livestock that do realize that they may have other options than the farmer wants them to have tend to end up in a freezer in little white packages in no time... OK, there was that Merlino ram that was on the lam [sic] for 5 or so years in NZ...
Oh, I don't know. Probably the dysfunctional relationships in their family, school or community will have more impact than anything else.
Basically, it comes down to more a culture that values "I want it now, so you'd better give it to me, or else..." rather than one of "I want it, but I'm not going to get it today, so I'll work my ass off to get it somewhere down the road".
Well, consider these "analysts". They have created a niche in the market where they have some sway and influence in how other people invest their moneys (through them, of course). They are being left out in the cold by Google. In a sense, the analysts are tails that have enjoyed wagging the dog for some time.
Yes, I understand that when I buy shares in a company I'm getting some measure of "ownership", but my investment in the company is quite limited. My expectations for the company should be commensurate. The attitude of some shareholders (Carl Icahn, Kirk Trevorkian, et al) seems to be like they're mad at the state lottery commissions when they buy tickets that don't win. They're in it not only for the $$$, but for control, whether that means providing some sort of guidance for the company to organically make more money (which is probably good), or directing the company to bleed itself of cash for the benefits of the major shareholders (which is...bad) or debt holders.
Gillette doesn't matter anymore, because it got bought by P&G...
Analysts are kind of like mistletoe on an oak tree.
How did they get a thermometer inside Tom Delay's head during his indictment hearings?
PostGres->Oracle is not nearly as bad as MySQL->anything else.
SQLServer->Oracle, SQLServer->DB2, DB2->Oracle, etc. doesn't happen all that much. If only more databases supported DOMAINs, i.e., CREATE DOMAIN UserID as integer.
DeZign for Databases is pretty good at slurping in a database schema from one platform, and after changing the target platform, converting the schema to the desired database system.
As far as "hard to port" SQL, unless you're using MySQL or old versions of databsae apps, this isn't too much of a problem for most SQL heads, even when you throw in database-specific functions or idioms.
And it all depends on how much trigger/stored proc code you have to migrate. Tables/Views are pretty simple to move.
For most application developers, for whom SQL is a 4-letter word, that would be about 0 right there.
1) it seems to mirror tables pretty directly;
Well, that's how most people tend to code on top of databases. I'm sure you can point to lots of great examples as to how this is bad, so fire away.
2) i don't think the objects you work with in code should know how they are stored - this means they don't inherit or mix-in any database code at all. there should be separate classes that handle this.
Great, because your model objects that use ActiveRecord don't know how they're stored in the database, either, short of the interface methods provided to them thru inheritance from ActiveRecord::Base. Nor does ActiveRecord::Base, really. It "mixes in" the storage details for a given adapter as specified in the configuration file. The specific adapter class has all the parameterized/dynamic insert-update-delete SQL in it, if that indeed is what is used. It could just as well be cursor-oriented access directly against the DB's client interfaces as well. Only matters really to the people who code the adapter classes.
a Ticket may consist of data aggregated from several tables; the client code doesn't care about that. the TicketStorage class worries about storage.
But...what if I have another application that hits the database, and can't know about your TicketStorage class? For DBs where stored procs return datasets, it would make more sense to store the logic in the database... Or codge a view that does some of it, too (with instead of triggers to put stuff in the right places). Funny, ActiveRecord can interface with a view just this way, too.
Even better, if you use something like DeZign for Databases, a database-neutral ERD program, it's pretty easy to switch your table schema from one database system to another (stored procs, triggers, etc. are not translated, however...)
People keep talking about this, but be honest: how often does it happen in practice? Not too often.