The difficulty in choosing something like "net worth" is that it is essentially a self'-reported value, unless you want to give monitoring powers to the IRS or some other third party to vet your claims.
This ship has sailed, the government already knows your net-worth. That is a different argument, of course, and I probably agree with you.
And even then, what constitutes to "net worth"? If we're talking assets held minus liabilities owed, then my student loans should keep me tax free for several years after I graduate next summer. What assets would be counted toward calculating net worth? How would I go about determining the value of my books, or my computer software? I know what I paid for my computer 6 years ago, but how much has it depreciated?
It sounds like a daunting task, but it isn't really. Most people make this accounting for insurance and tax purposes already. If you owe more than you own, then you pay no tax.
If, by extension, you're suggesting that people start recording and monitoring what they own and at least the aggregate value of it, similar to what businesses do, I'm all for it. Too many people don't know what they own, or if it's worth anything.
I'm pretty sure that a study would find that some number, say $30,000 single and $50,000 married, covers most people in the united states when it comes to non-accounted assets. Everything else generally is on a ledger somewhere that is already reported to the IRS. You have NO IDEA how much privacy people have lost since Nixon's "Drug War."
The real problem is *what* is taxed. Income is bogus. I don't see why, when I go to work, the money I earn is taxed at a higher rate than the income derived by a rich person's trust fund. No, "income" is a bad tax. What we need is a "net worth" tax. 2 or 3 percent should do it for everyone, including companies, because, companies are people too. They have 1st amendment rights according to SCOTUS, let them pay up as well.
Everyone calculate their net worth and pay 2-3% no exemptions.
I'll ignore the obvious implied ad-hominem (accusing anyone of pedophilia is an attack) and talk about the quote. It is important to be able to discuss sensitive and emotional matters in an unemotional and controversial way. The sub-quote about pedophilia was part of a much larger abstract treatment of social morals and laws around sex and, in fact, did not make any direct claims one way or another. It merely cited a lack of evidence that un-coerced acts caused harm and that it is likely that the coercion, itself, does. Which, given research and a common feeling of "violation" amongst victims isn't all that unreasonable. Also, given the context of the quote, I believe that it was aimed toward maturing adolescents and obviously not about little children, which you seem to want to imply.
Controversial people say controversial things. Things are controversial because they challenge perception. Stupid people react to controversy with hysterics and hatred, intellectual people respond to controversy with reason.
RMS Lives in this world and has an almost perfect record of seeing the problems before everybody else.
He resembles only the anti-social geeks.
Seriously, do you work for a company getting crushed by Linux? Insulting a man, not on his character but by your subjective view of his appearence is almost a text book example of insecurity and ignorance.
Not the kind of guy we want to show the world and hope we make good impressions! Seriously!
To the intellects that will listen, he is quite impressive. You, well, lets leave it at that.
I read a lot of negative comments about RMS and it makes me sick. He is fanatical, sure, but he has a track record of *always* being right before anyone notices.
People should be reminded that the "free" in "free software" applies to freedom and not a monetary consideration. Privacy is an important part of freedom. Cardinal Richelieu: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
The idea is the privacy and private information must remain private because no matter how innocuous, it can be used to restrict your freedom.
RMS is right and we should support him in our own self interest.
common to see employees end up in pissing matches with their internal legal and HR departments over who "owns" a device that has been used for work purposes.
Wrong, absolutely wrong. "Ownership" is not ambiguous. I have a true story. About 30 years ago I worked at a bank. One teller would put a stack of $20bills in his pocket every day. ($2000). Every night, he would take it out of his pocket and put it in his cash draw and settle. I asked him why he did this, he said, "in case I am robbed, I get to keep it."
Back to the phone. If the employee buys the phone and pays the bills, the company has no "rights" to that device. In fact "sarbanes oxley" says that companies should only allow communications over corporate systems. This is why larger companies are starting to provide digital phones for their employees so that they can have access to this information.
At work I always have two laptops. (1) My work laptop. (2) My personal laptop. Never does personal and business cross. Its cleaner that way.
When I was a Junior High School Student participating in an experimental class in the mid 1970s called "Computer Science," it was explained as the science of solving real-world problems on computers. There was REAL thinking involved. There was REAL math involved. It wasn't about hash tables, trees, and so forth. These main-stay algorithms were not the focus of the class, but the tools one develops and uses to solve the real-world problem.
It may be an esoteric point here, but "CS" as is presented at the university level isn't the science of applying computers, it is a review of the science and math created thus far. To teach it they use artificial computers (java VMs and interpreters) because real computers have too much "real computer" in the way.
Self-taught is the only way to get real-computer science knowledge. The schools won't teach it. The schools CAN'T teach it. In the immortal works of Will Hunting, "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."
The database is the hardest place to scale up to higher loads and doing so often involves ridiculous iron. Especially if your storage needs aren't easy to distribute among multiple servers without taking a performance hit. Use simple aka fast queries and you can scale at your application which can easily spread the load among thousands of servers. That has nothing to with ideology.
Here is where we must agree to disagree. "Scalability" is a complex topic and almost any axiom one can dig up is only valid within a very narrow context. There is no valid way to win any such debate because at one end we have the likes of Google and Facebook and at the other end we have Android with embedded SQLite.
Suffice to say, as a general rule, process the data as close to the source as possible. If doing a join in a database makes the query slightly slower, but eliminates having to pipe tons of raw data out to the app and have it do the equivalent of a join, is in most cases a better strategy because it reduces the number of I/O operations to disk and saves network bandwidth. Is this always true? of course not, but most of the time, yes.
99.99% of the web sites can make do with a redundant/failover database strategy. If you know you have needs beyond this, that is a different story. Short of the various wet dreams of scaling like Facebook, you don't need too and as a financial consideration for your enterprise, you don't want too. The solutions that seek to replace a good SQL backend with "NoSQL" drive up the cost of development. If you need that kind of scalability, and few sites really do, then yes go for it because that is an important aspect of your solution. Otherwise, try to be cost conscious and choose a database that does the heavy lifting for you.
No matter, I've managed to install the/pgsql/bin locally using configure/make/make install. Not quite as simple as a unpacking a tar.gz file, but doable.
You are just not looking in the right place. PostgreSQL, just like MySQL has pre-build binaries for popular system. What are you getting on about?
Technically speaking, you used more characters than me:)
I never said that MySQL was particularly hard to get running, just that postgresql wasn't harder.
However, given these two basic "default" installations, my bet is that PostgreSQL will conform better to SQL standard, handle concurrency and transactions better, and be faster under a real load.
you don't have to be a database expert to see that MySQL is still the best supported database back-end for most web application frameworks.
But it helps if you understand the levels of support and can make an educated decision about whether or not it makes a difference. PostgreSQL, by all meaningful measure, is technically a better database. Choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL, IMHO, is a bad decision for a few reasons: (1) Technically, PostgreSQL is universally regarded as a better technology platform in terms of quality, scalability, performance, flexibility, stability, adherence to SQL standards, etc.. (2) Since Oracle purchased MySQL the TCO has been increasing. (3) Also since MySQL was purchased by Oracle, the GPL-ness of the over-all package is becoming in question. Oracle has the right to stop releasing the product as GPL because of they OWN the copyrights and trademarks. It is not community owned like PostgreSQL.
So, PostgreSQL is the better technical choice, therefore you should try to use it. If you decide to use MySQL when PostgreSQL would have had more or less equivalent support, you may be painting yourself in a corner needlessly. If you do nothing to avoid the problem and generally accept and cultivate your own ignorance, then you are a bad engineer.
The database really isn't that important. It only becomes important once a DBA gets their hands on it and starts implementing LOGIC at the database instead of doing the logic in the application and fast, dumb, simple queries at the database.
That is not true at all. In fact wildly wrong. A good database is the tool you use to manage your data. If your system is properly designed, it is part of your application. A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application geometrically increases complexity, or more likely, is ignored at your peril.
Just a simple query: select * from songs where name like 'love%'; Assuming you have a non-trivial amount of songs, i.e. a song web site, this query can show a poorly implemented index. Once you start getting into sub-selects and joins, a good database can do quite well, a bad database, i.e. MySQL will fall down.
People who view the database as nothing but dumb storage usually end up implementing similar features in their code. They won't be as efficient, won't be standard, will cause the data to be processed more than it needs to be, and can't be tested as well as the database's system.
A good architect will know where and when it makes sense to do something in a database verses the application. Ignoring the capabilities of a database for some idealogical purity is ridiculous.
I'm saying that I am sick of postgresql fanboys chiming in on every MySQL story.
If you don't like it, don't read it. Freedom is a wonderful thing. You are free to say you are sick of something, but other people are under no obligation to accommodate you.
I don't have the technical skills to judge the merits of MySQL vs PostgreSQL
Then why would you feel qualified to make a decision about which database to use? This is something I just do not understand. It happens in this industry ALL THE F&^%KING TIME. People admitting that the don't have the skills to make a proper evaluation decide to do it anyway. This is why software and websites suck.I'm an engineer. I am concerned about the decisions I make. If I need to choose a technology, and I have the time, I dive in deep and learn about it. If I don't have the time, I find a couple credible experts and ask for recommendations and and rationale. Ultimately I have to decide, but I would NEVER do it without a basic due diligence.
What you are *really* saying is you think phpmyadmin is better than phppgadmin, which may be perfectly valid. As for "popular," Justin Beeber is currently more "popular" than the Clash.
Not only are you wrong, you are really really wrong here.
Not only can you run PostgreSQL "out of the box" but you can run multiple instances of it with their own directory. You *never* run postgresql as root as it is not allowed.
Install or put postgresql in your path, it is really is this simple:
Now, you can configure your version of postgresql to be on a different port than others, you can run it as any non-privileged user. You can configure it to be occupy a pretty small resource footprint or configure it to be huge. You can put a database on almost any file system.
The No_SQL people are out of their minds. SQL means "structured query language." It is nothing more than a linguistic methodology for accessing data. As we all know, the various databases, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, couchdb, Cassandra et al are storage platforms with access systems. You need to debate the needs of the storage platform for your application because, make no mistake, just about all the "No SQL" databases pretty much have a top-level SQL language interface available for them.
"Relational" data is an access strategy, not a requirement.
PHP has only its members to blame
on
The PHP Singularity
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Years ago I was involved with PHP, and the core developers have no real interest in making anything better, or, more specifically, accepting any criticism. I'm not the only developer to be pissed off when decisions are made "off line" and passed down. There was no sense of community. In conversations with other would be contributors, the general consensus was the PHP was headed up by a bunch of pissy children.
Don't get me wrong, I think PHP is a powerful environment and a lot of things have been done with it, but it suffers from a lack of rigour. If they could decide *what* the hell the language wanted to be, that would be helpful. If they could clean up the extensions API that would be helpful too. PHP's extensions are so powerful but there is no abstraction, your extension is essentially a PHP internal module.
All in all, PHP has had power and potential for years, but the reason why ruby even had a shot was that the PHP project can't get its act together to address, or even acknowledge, its short comings.
Adobe has always struck me as a company long on luck and short on actual execution. Flash sucks, but in the beginning, it sucked less than the alternatives. Rather than making it suck less over time, they kept making it worse. Eventually it sucked more than the alternatives.
Now, you take the "Most popular" mobile platform in the mobile market which continues to grow, and you abandon it to focus on the desktop computing market which continues to shrink.
Yup, these guys at Adobe really realy know what they are doing. Busness 101, NOT!
Sorry for the cheap shot, but in a way it is true. Education is useless without skill, ambition and desire, too many people confuse education with knowledge and ability. I've known very successful high school drop-outs. I've known MBA's working part-time jobs. By asking *us* what she can do with her degree, she's admitted she has no clue. What the hell? You put the time and money into getting a degree and you have no idea what you would do with it? You have one life. Time if of the essence, why would you invest that much time if you didn't have a clue what to do with it when you were done? (Can you tell I have a child in college?)
The answer has always been and always will be, what can you, you bright and shiny special and unique snowflake, do that is mostly better than most other people? That's the question. Answer that question and you have your answer. If the answer is not economically viable, learn to say "Do you want fries with that?" If you are really lucky, you get to like what you do for a living. Even then, you'll hate it a lot of the time.
That applies to EVERYONE, myself included. OK, career forum over, get back to work.
That's true enough, but as often happens an NDA and Non-compete can get quite blurred. The lawyers drawing these things up, draw them in the most one-sided way possible. Both NDAs and Non-Competes are both private law contracts. In fact, the contract I was referring too was supposedly an NDA. The technical difference you site is a construct of convention not of law. An NDA may contain a non-compete and a non-compete often has an NDA, and either one can contain a clause that stipulates the adoption of puppies.
A union will only result in you paying dues to feed an MBA who will be making all the wrong decisions for you. Or, even worse, that MBA will sell your interests to the highest bidder.
Unions may make sense in industries where workers are dime a dozen, all easily replaceable. Programmers (and good engineers in general) are not easy to replace. A programmer's code base may be completely unusable to someone else, especially if the programmer left before finishing the documentation and the code cleanup.
Clearly you have not seen the trends of outsourcing. We need to understand the "MBAs" of the world do not value us beyond merely needing a team of people like "us."
I come from a blue-collar background, my dad was a union iron worker. Trust me, there is a valuable skill set there. Strong guys who can weld, lift heavy equipment, and aren't afraid of extreme hights is, in itself, a fairly self limiting market. Anyway, the union in my view was a positive force for his industry. It set the safety standards, it provided benefits and retirement planning, it provided help for when the iron workers were mistreated. Unlike the teamsters, the iron workers were fairly well run. They partnered with the local construction companies and, in his day, help the business environment get buildings built. Decent pay and benefits and a guarantee of decent workers to employers, why wouldn't an honest business use union workers?
I often argue that our interpretation of capitalism is incorrect. The word "capital" isn't just money. It is anything of value that can be traded. Just as businesses bargain with a capital collective, i.e. the business, banks, and investors join forces to create an entity greater than any one of them as a financial collective, workers' capital, i.e. the work that they do and their skils, is their capital and there is no conflict, in my eyes, when they bargain as a collective.
An engineering union, could be a good move for the industry. It would certainly provide some "push back" against abusive contracts and NDAs.
I've done the consulting bit quite a lot. I got sick of people wanting me to code cheap to get a piece of their idea. On top of that, they want anything I think about whilst I am associated with them. Even further, they want me to indemnify them in case of any patent or copyright issues. Geez.
One clown had a cheezy real estate idea, and had every clause in the book as well as agreement to not work in any related industry. All this for a 4 month proof of concept. I actually laughed at him, and said "I can't sign this, this is ridiculous" He response? We've all heard it "Why, its just a standard contract the lawyers wrote up. We wouldn't enforce any of that stuff unless there was a real problem. We just want the agreement to have teeth."
So, I'm suppose to trust someone who wants an agreement that has "teeth." Clearly he does not trust me, why on earth would I trust him? I said, I have no use for a one sided agreement that has "teeth." If he wanted to add guarantees of value and income, performance on his part, and ownership of the intellectual property jointly developed, beyond mere hourly billing, I might be willing to negotiate a fair contract. He was speechless. He just expected I would sign the contract. I left his crappy contract on the table and walked away.
We software engineers have to unionise or something, this crap has got to stop. The worst part about it, the "business people" think it is perfectly reasonable to create the one-sided and absurd contracts and software engineers HAVE to LEARN that they are dangerous.
I recently switched my wife over from Macintosh to Ubuntu when I got her a new laptop. She was a little disconnected at first, but once she started looking form the menu in the application, it made more sense to her. The transition was fairly easy, I had to do some tricks to get her email over to Thunderbird, but it was doable. After a couple months, she doesn't even miss the mac.
I don't believe that the Linux desktop is any less ready for the desktop than Windows or Mac, in fact, in a lot of ways I think it is a better choice. If it had money and marketing behind it, it would be an easy sell. Alas, since it is free, who has the money.
Anyone who says tablets are not a threat to P.C.s is a moron. OK, in their current form, they are less useful than a laptop. As far as I can see, however, all they *really* need is an additional "master" USB connection and a blue-tooth keyboard. I would give up my laptop immediately when I can get one of these with a big enough screen.
Bill Gates, 64K memory enough? The head of Digital Equipment Corporation didn't believe in the P.C.
Michael Dell's words will prove to be just as ridiculous.
The nature of "threat" is not about "now" it is about the "near future," and the near future is coming fast.
We, as a community, need to ensure that the rights we have with a P.C. are not lost when we switch to tablets.
Slashdot Mirror
The difficulty in choosing something like "net worth" is that it is essentially a self'-reported value, unless you want to give monitoring powers to the IRS or some other third party to vet your claims.
This ship has sailed, the government already knows your net-worth. That is a different argument, of course, and I probably agree with you.
And even then, what constitutes to "net worth"? If we're talking assets held minus liabilities owed, then my student loans should keep me tax free for several years after I graduate next summer. What assets would be counted toward calculating net worth? How would I go about determining the value of my books, or my computer software? I know what I paid for my computer 6 years ago, but how much has it depreciated?
It sounds like a daunting task, but it isn't really. Most people make this accounting for insurance and tax purposes already. If you owe more than you own, then you pay no tax.
If, by extension, you're suggesting that people start recording and monitoring what they own and at least the aggregate value of it, similar to what businesses do, I'm all for it. Too many people don't know what they own, or if it's worth anything.
I'm pretty sure that a study would find that some number, say $30,000 single and $50,000 married, covers most people in the united states when it comes to non-accounted assets. Everything else generally is on a ledger somewhere that is already reported to the IRS. You have NO IDEA how much privacy people have lost since Nixon's "Drug War."
The real problem is *what* is taxed. Income is bogus. I don't see why, when I go to work, the money I earn is taxed at a higher rate than the income derived by a rich person's trust fund. No, "income" is a bad tax. What we need is a "net worth" tax. 2 or 3 percent should do it for everyone, including companies, because, companies are people too. They have 1st amendment rights according to SCOTUS, let them pay up as well.
Everyone calculate their net worth and pay 2-3% no exemptions.
I'm sure he's right about pedophilia as well?
I'll ignore the obvious implied ad-hominem (accusing anyone of pedophilia is an attack) and talk about the quote. It is important to be able to discuss sensitive and emotional matters in an unemotional and controversial way. The sub-quote about pedophilia was part of a much larger abstract treatment of social morals and laws around sex and, in fact, did not make any direct claims one way or another. It merely cited a lack of evidence that un-coerced acts caused harm and that it is likely that the coercion, itself, does. Which, given research and a common feeling of "violation" amongst victims isn't all that unreasonable. Also, given the context of the quote, I believe that it was aimed toward maturing adolescents and obviously not about little children, which you seem to want to imply.
Controversial people say controversial things. Things are controversial because they challenge perception. Stupid people react to controversy with hysterics and hatred, intellectual people respond to controversy with reason.
RMS doesn't live in this world.
RMS Lives in this world and has an almost perfect record of seeing the problems before everybody else.
He resembles only the anti-social geeks.
Seriously, do you work for a company getting crushed by Linux? Insulting a man, not on his character but by your subjective view of his appearence is almost a text book example of insecurity and ignorance.
Not the kind of guy we want to show the world and hope we make good impressions! Seriously!
To the intellects that will listen, he is quite impressive. You, well, lets leave it at that.
I read a lot of negative comments about RMS and it makes me sick. He is fanatical, sure, but he has a track record of *always* being right before anyone notices.
People should be reminded that the "free" in "free software" applies to freedom and not a monetary consideration. Privacy is an important part of freedom.
Cardinal Richelieu:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
The idea is the privacy and private information must remain private because no matter how innocuous, it can be used to restrict your freedom.
RMS is right and we should support him in our own self interest.
common to see employees end up in pissing matches with their internal legal and HR departments over who "owns" a device that has been used for work purposes.
Wrong, absolutely wrong. "Ownership" is not ambiguous. I have a true story. About 30 years ago I worked at a bank. One teller would put a stack of $20bills in his pocket every day. ($2000). Every night, he would take it out of his pocket and put it in his cash draw and settle. I asked him why he did this, he said, "in case I am robbed, I get to keep it."
Back to the phone. If the employee buys the phone and pays the bills, the company has no "rights" to that device. In fact "sarbanes oxley" says that companies should only allow communications over corporate systems. This is why larger companies are starting to provide digital phones for their employees so that they can have access to this information.
At work I always have two laptops. (1) My work laptop. (2) My personal laptop. Never does personal and business cross. Its cleaner that way.
When I was a Junior High School Student participating in an experimental class in the mid 1970s called "Computer Science," it was explained as the science of solving real-world problems on computers. There was REAL thinking involved. There was REAL math involved. It wasn't about hash tables, trees, and so forth. These main-stay algorithms were not the focus of the class, but the tools one develops and uses to solve the real-world problem.
It may be an esoteric point here, but "CS" as is presented at the university level isn't the science of applying computers, it is a review of the science and math created thus far. To teach it they use artificial computers (java VMs and interpreters) because real computers have too much "real computer" in the way.
Self-taught is the only way to get real-computer science knowledge. The schools won't teach it. The schools CAN'T teach it. In the immortal works of Will Hunting, "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."
The database is the hardest place to scale up to higher loads and doing so often involves ridiculous iron. Especially if your storage needs aren't easy to distribute among multiple servers without taking a performance hit. Use simple aka fast queries and you can scale at your application which can easily spread the load among thousands of servers. That has nothing to with ideology.
Here is where we must agree to disagree. "Scalability" is a complex topic and almost any axiom one can dig up is only valid within a very narrow context. There is no valid way to win any such debate because at one end we have the likes of Google and Facebook and at the other end we have Android with embedded SQLite.
Suffice to say, as a general rule, process the data as close to the source as possible. If doing a join in a database makes the query slightly slower, but eliminates having to pipe tons of raw data out to the app and have it do the equivalent of a join, is in most cases a better strategy because it reduces the number of I/O operations to disk and saves network bandwidth. Is this always true? of course not, but most of the time, yes.
99.99% of the web sites can make do with a redundant/failover database strategy. If you know you have needs beyond this, that is a different story. Short of the various wet dreams of scaling like Facebook, you don't need too and as a financial consideration for your enterprise, you don't want too. The solutions that seek to replace a good SQL backend with "NoSQL" drive up the cost of development. If you need that kind of scalability, and few sites really do, then yes go for it because that is an important aspect of your solution. Otherwise, try to be cost conscious and choose a database that does the heavy lifting for you.
No matter, I've managed to install the /pgsql/bin locally using configure/make/make install. Not quite as simple as a unpacking a tar.gz file, but doable.
You are just not looking in the right place. PostgreSQL, just like MySQL has pre-build binaries for popular system. What are you getting on about?
mysql_install_db --basedir=/path/to/mysql/installation --ldata=/your/path/to/database
mysqld --datadir=/your/path/to/database --general-log=logfile
mysqladmin -u root create mydatabase
mysql -u root mydatabase
Technically speaking, you used more characters than me :)
I never said that MySQL was particularly hard to get running, just that postgresql wasn't harder.
However, given these two basic "default" installations, my bet is that PostgreSQL will conform better to SQL standard, handle concurrency and transactions better, and be faster under a real load.
you don't have to be a database expert to see that MySQL is still the best supported database back-end for most web application frameworks.
But it helps if you understand the levels of support and can make an educated decision about whether or not it makes a difference. PostgreSQL, by all meaningful measure, is technically a better database. Choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL, IMHO, is a bad decision for a few reasons: (1) Technically, PostgreSQL is universally regarded as a better technology platform in terms of quality, scalability, performance, flexibility, stability, adherence to SQL standards, etc.. (2) Since Oracle purchased MySQL the TCO has been increasing. (3) Also since MySQL was purchased by Oracle, the GPL-ness of the over-all package is becoming in question. Oracle has the right to stop releasing the product as GPL because of they OWN the copyrights and trademarks. It is not community owned like PostgreSQL.
So, PostgreSQL is the better technical choice, therefore you should try to use it. If you decide to use MySQL when PostgreSQL would have had more or less equivalent support, you may be painting yourself in a corner needlessly. If you do nothing to avoid the problem and generally accept and cultivate your own ignorance, then you are a bad engineer.
The database really isn't that important. It only becomes important once a DBA gets their hands on it and starts implementing LOGIC at the database instead of doing the logic in the application and fast, dumb, simple queries at the database.
That is not true at all. In fact wildly wrong. A good database is the tool you use to manage your data. If your system is properly designed, it is part of your application. A good database will manage concurrency, data integrity, and more. The idea that you move this out into the application geometrically increases complexity, or more likely, is ignored at your peril.
Just a simple query:
select * from songs where name like 'love%';
Assuming you have a non-trivial amount of songs, i.e. a song web site, this query can show a poorly implemented index. Once you start getting into sub-selects and joins, a good database can do quite well, a bad database, i.e. MySQL will fall down.
People who view the database as nothing but dumb storage usually end up implementing similar features in their code. They won't be as efficient, won't be standard, will cause the data to be processed more than it needs to be, and can't be tested as well as the database's system.
A good architect will know where and when it makes sense to do something in a database verses the application. Ignoring the capabilities of a database for some idealogical purity is ridiculous.
I'm saying that I am sick of postgresql fanboys chiming in on every MySQL story.
If you don't like it, don't read it. Freedom is a wonderful thing. You are free to say you are sick of something, but other people are under no obligation to accommodate you.
I don't have the technical skills to judge the merits of MySQL vs PostgreSQL
Then why would you feel qualified to make a decision about which database to use? This is something I just do not understand. It happens in this industry ALL THE F&^%KING TIME. People admitting that the don't have the skills to make a proper evaluation decide to do it anyway. This is why software and websites suck.I'm an engineer. I am concerned about the decisions I make. If I need to choose a technology, and I have the time, I dive in deep and learn about it. If I don't have the time, I find a couple credible experts and ask for recommendations and and rationale. Ultimately I have to decide, but I would NEVER do it without a basic due diligence.
What you are *really* saying is you think phpmyadmin is better than phppgadmin, which may be perfectly valid. As for "popular," Justin Beeber is currently more "popular" than the Clash.
Not only are you wrong, you are really really wrong here.
Not only can you run PostgreSQL "out of the box" but you can run multiple instances of it with their own directory. You *never* run postgresql as root as it is not allowed.
Install or put postgresql in your path, it is really is this simple:
initdb -D /your/path/to/database /home/markw/pgtest/data -l logfile start
pg_ctl -D
createdb mydatabase
psql mydatabase
Now, you can configure your version of postgresql to be on a different port than others, you can run it as any non-privileged user. You can configure it to be occupy a pretty small resource footprint or configure it to be huge. You can put a database on almost any file system.
Anyone who says MySQL is easier is smoking crack.
The No_SQL people are out of their minds. SQL means "structured query language." It is nothing more than a linguistic methodology for accessing data. As we all know, the various databases, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, couchdb, Cassandra et al are storage platforms with access systems. You need to debate the needs of the storage platform for your application because, make no mistake, just about all the "No SQL" databases pretty much have a top-level SQL language interface available for them.
"Relational" data is an access strategy, not a requirement.
Years ago I was involved with PHP, and the core developers have no real interest in making anything better, or, more specifically, accepting any criticism. I'm not the only developer to be pissed off when decisions are made "off line" and passed down. There was no sense of community. In conversations with other would be contributors, the general consensus was the PHP was headed up by a bunch of pissy children.
Don't get me wrong, I think PHP is a powerful environment and a lot of things have been done with it, but it suffers from a lack of rigour. If they could decide *what* the hell the language wanted to be, that would be helpful. If they could clean up the extensions API that would be helpful too. PHP's extensions are so powerful but there is no abstraction, your extension is essentially a PHP internal module.
All in all, PHP has had power and potential for years, but the reason why ruby even had a shot was that the PHP project can't get its act together to address, or even acknowledge, its short comings.
Adobe has always struck me as a company long on luck and short on actual execution. Flash sucks, but in the beginning, it sucked less than the alternatives. Rather than making it suck less over time, they kept making it worse. Eventually it sucked more than the alternatives.
Now, you take the "Most popular" mobile platform in the mobile market which continues to grow, and you abandon it to focus on the desktop computing market which continues to shrink.
Yup, these guys at Adobe really realy know what they are doing. Busness 101, NOT!
Sorry for the cheap shot, but in a way it is true. Education is useless without skill, ambition and desire, too many people confuse education with knowledge and ability. I've known very successful high school drop-outs. I've known MBA's working part-time jobs. By asking *us* what she can do with her degree, she's admitted she has no clue. What the hell? You put the time and money into getting a degree and you have no idea what you would do with it? You have one life. Time if of the essence, why would you invest that much time if you didn't have a clue what to do with it when you were done? (Can you tell I have a child in college?)
The answer has always been and always will be, what can you, you bright and shiny special and unique snowflake, do that is mostly better than most other people? That's the question. Answer that question and you have your answer. If the answer is not economically viable, learn to say "Do you want fries with that?" If you are really lucky, you get to like what you do for a living. Even then, you'll hate it a lot of the time.
That applies to EVERYONE, myself included. OK, career forum over, get back to work.
That's a contract with a non-compete clause.
That's true enough, but as often happens an NDA and Non-compete can get quite blurred. The lawyers drawing these things up, draw them in the most one-sided way possible. Both NDAs and Non-Competes are both private law contracts. In fact, the contract I was referring too was supposedly an NDA. The technical difference you site is a construct of convention not of law. An NDA may contain a non-compete and a non-compete often has an NDA, and either one can contain a clause that stipulates the adoption of puppies.
A union will only result in you paying dues to feed an MBA who will be making all the wrong decisions for you. Or, even worse, that MBA will sell your interests to the highest bidder.
Unions may make sense in industries where workers are dime a dozen, all easily replaceable. Programmers (and good engineers in general) are not easy to replace. A programmer's code base may be completely unusable to someone else, especially if the programmer left before finishing the documentation and the code cleanup.
Clearly you have not seen the trends of outsourcing. We need to understand the "MBAs" of the world do not value us beyond merely needing a team of people like "us."
I come from a blue-collar background, my dad was a union iron worker. Trust me, there is a valuable skill set there. Strong guys who can weld, lift heavy equipment, and aren't afraid of extreme hights is, in itself, a fairly self limiting market. Anyway, the union in my view was a positive force for his industry. It set the safety standards, it provided benefits and retirement planning, it provided help for when the iron workers were mistreated. Unlike the teamsters, the iron workers were fairly well run. They partnered with the local construction companies and, in his day, help the business environment get buildings built. Decent pay and benefits and a guarantee of decent workers to employers, why wouldn't an honest business use union workers?
I often argue that our interpretation of capitalism is incorrect. The word "capital" isn't just money. It is anything of value that can be traded. Just as businesses bargain with a capital collective, i.e. the business, banks, and investors join forces to create an entity greater than any one of them as a financial collective, workers' capital, i.e. the work that they do and their skils, is their capital and there is no conflict, in my eyes, when they bargain as a collective.
An engineering union, could be a good move for the industry. It would certainly provide some "push back" against abusive contracts and NDAs.
I've done the consulting bit quite a lot. I got sick of people wanting me to code cheap to get a piece of their idea. On top of that, they want anything I think about whilst I am associated with them. Even further, they want me to indemnify them in case of any patent or copyright issues. Geez.
One clown had a cheezy real estate idea, and had every clause in the book as well as agreement to not work in any related industry. All this for a 4 month proof of concept. I actually laughed at him, and said "I can't sign this, this is ridiculous" He response? We've all heard it "Why, its just a standard contract the lawyers wrote up. We wouldn't enforce any of that stuff unless there was a real problem. We just want the agreement to have teeth."
So, I'm suppose to trust someone who wants an agreement that has "teeth." Clearly he does not trust me, why on earth would I trust him? I said, I have no use for a one sided agreement that has "teeth." If he wanted to add guarantees of value and income, performance on his part, and ownership of the intellectual property jointly developed, beyond mere hourly billing, I might be willing to negotiate a fair contract. He was speechless. He just expected I would sign the contract. I left his crappy contract on the table and walked away.
We software engineers have to unionise or something, this crap has got to stop. The worst part about it, the "business people" think it is perfectly reasonable to create the one-sided and absurd contracts and software engineers HAVE to LEARN that they are dangerous.
I recently switched my wife over from Macintosh to Ubuntu when I got her a new laptop. She was a little disconnected at first, but once she started looking form the menu in the application, it made more sense to her. The transition was fairly easy, I had to do some tricks to get her email over to Thunderbird, but it was doable. After a couple months, she doesn't even miss the mac.
I don't believe that the Linux desktop is any less ready for the desktop than Windows or Mac, in fact, in a lot of ways I think it is a better choice. If it had money and marketing behind it, it would be an easy sell. Alas, since it is free, who has the money.
Anyone who says tablets are not a threat to P.C.s is a moron. OK, in their current form, they are less useful than a laptop. As far as I can see, however, all they *really* need is an additional "master" USB connection and a blue-tooth keyboard. I would give up my laptop immediately when I can get one of these with a big enough screen.
Bill Gates, 64K memory enough?
The head of Digital Equipment Corporation didn't believe in the P.C.
Michael Dell's words will prove to be just as ridiculous.
The nature of "threat" is not about "now" it is about the "near future," and the near future is coming fast.
We, as a community, need to ensure that the rights we have with a P.C. are not lost when we switch to tablets.