Please don't take this wrong. I really do mean my comments respectfully and politely. It's been a long day, and I'm not sure I managed to write as sincerely as I intended.
... because on every application I have ever worked on, the Database has always been the performance bottleneck
Wow. We've had very different experiences, then. Sure, there have been plenty of times when the database was the bottle neck. But it seems like I've have more issues with network speeds. And I can think of a few cases where the file system was the issue. At my current day job, the system bus seems to be the most common bottle-neck. Not that we touch databases all that often.
Testing of DB applications is always a problem, because the running of tests generally changes the database, rendering tests unrepeatable without reseting the database.
Isn't that generally considered a "best practice" anyway? I mean, I've pretty much always just taken that as a given. What do you consider a feasible alternative?
Configuring applications to use this database or that database also ends up being a problem for most applications.
OK, now I really have to ask what kind of development environment you're using. That's always seemed like a fairly moderate "no-brainer." Sure, it's mildly inconvenient to make sure connection strings got changed when migrating from dev to test to staging to production, but it's not that big a deal.
Furthermore, while programming in general has continued to progress through many languages, exploring many different ways to describe problems, SQL is still SQL. SQL is fixed in a syntax and written with naming conventions and styles that can best be described as neo-Cobal.
That's one way of looking at it, sure. Maybe you're missing the point, though? I mean, so many other languages and approaches have changed so drastically over the years...maybe SQL hasn't because it's good enough for what it does?
Bottom line: SQL is tedious, ugly, slow, and difficult to test.
Compared to what? Keep in mind its original purpose: letting business users look up algebraic sets while programmers got on with the serious data analysis. It just happened that having a standardized API that made it relatively easy to swap out back-ends turned out to be the easiest way for programmers to do our jobs.
If you really do have access to some magic technology that lets you look up persisted data (in a way that's anywhere near as flexible as SQL) significantly faster than any of the major RDBMSs...why haven't you founded a business on that and made your fortune?
And don't get me started on stored procedures and the difficulty of using source code management with stored procedures.
You definitely need to look into some better tools. File | Save As... to stash your SP's in some directory, add to source control (if it's new), check in.
Last gripe: A traditional Relational database imposes ACID overhead on every application, even if you don't really need it or use it. This is like a programming language that imposes a SORT overhead on all your data structures even if you rarely or never need to sort them.
It's been a while since I had to mess with SQL, but I seem to recall specifying hints about how much transactional consistency I actually needed. I think you may be exaggerating the overhead a smidge. And I'm pretty sure there are ways to work around it. But that's getting way off track.
Why is it that we continue to use a technology based on a 1960's view of a problem when clearly there ARE other solutions and ways to approach said problem?
Two suggestions. 1) It works. And DBA's hate learning new technology. 2) No one's come up with an alternative that's compelling enough to convince more than a tiny fraction of companies to
NoSQL is a horribly misleading term--as the article points out. Unfortunately, they seemed to miss the point as well.
Then again, as most of the follow-up posters demonstrate, what the phrase actually means doesn't seem to be all that well defined. In most cases, AFIACT, it actually means a non-RDBMS database.
I'm not sure why you think google kicked off the NoSQL movenment with Big Table, but a lot of the talks I've watched from Google I/O about database performance on app engine definitely seem to imply that performance was a pretty important factor.
When web developers start doing scratch figures about the seek time performance on disk heads, and they're serious about it being a major limiting performance factor, it's probably worth assuming they have a reason for it. (Especially when TFA mentions that their current implementation runs horribly if they have to access hard drives).
If you're coming from an RDBMS world, the de-normalized philosophy behind Big Table is mind-boggling (at least it is for me, and it's an extremely common source of confusion on the mailing list). Their engineers didn't come up with the idea (or, at least, make something the public became aware of...it's not like they invented column-oriented tables) just to kick off a new buzz word. Not being forced to remember to update 18 copies of the same column in different tables is one of the huge benefits of an RDBMS.
Big Table does offer ACID transactions (which is what the article's really about)...they just scale very poorly. I'm not sure how well they possibly can. If you have three different clients connecting to 3 different data centers scattered around the world, trying to transfer all the money from the same bank account into a Swiss numbered account...that needs ACID enforcement, and you will have a nasty performance hit. Two of those transactions absolutely must fail.
If you have the same scenario, but the clients are trying to update the visitor counter on your blog...it really doesn't matter much if the next few people who check happen to see the wrong number. Making those trade-off decisions up front is part of the pain of writing for that platform.
Maybe the article is describing a way to work around the bank example, but it didn't really sound that way to me. Either way, it'll be interesting to see what they come up with.
Regulate the internet - the regulation is the guarantee of neutrality.
Regulations are a security blanket. Giant corporations get Congress (or the bureaucracies) to write them to protect them against competition. They usually do this after some regulations have failed and some disaster has struck. People think "Oh, good. I'm glad they got the regulations right this time and stick their heads back in the sand.
It's remotely possible that Net Neutrality regulations would wind up benefiting the consumers, but the odds are strongly against it.
It's not so much that we customers will be paying for prioritizing. The real money comes from the web sites that we visit. Comcast lets youtube and hulu pay extra fees to get something resembling the bandwidth that comcast uses to broadcast its line-up. Were you working on a startup that involved streaming video? Sorry, you're out of business.
Do you have a brilliant new MMORPG? Blizzard can pay the ISPs to drop your packets, lag makes your game unplayable, and you're out of business.
For the right price, they could even redirect search queries from Bing to Google. Or whatever.
They scream and moan about how Net Neutrality will destroy innovation on the internet as we know it. The danger of their alternative is that it really could, in all the areas where innovation really matters.
OTOH, I've had long arguments with a friend who owns a web-hosting business. If he isn't allowed to shape traffic in and out of his network, he'll be forced out of business. So this isn't a cut-and-dried black/white issue.
And almost no one outside of/. seems to understand both sides of the issue.
Logical fallacy. Doing it this way IS a logical step in a capitalistic society;
Your basic assumption is wrong. This situation would never have happened under free-market capitalism. (The "capitalism" we have today is much closer to the Democratic Communist ideal that was so popular in the first half of the 20th Century).
that doesn't mean it's actually optimal (pure capitalism isn't),
Do you have any basis for that? The closest the world's ever seen to pure capitalism worked much better than attempts at pure socialism. Trying to balance on the razor's edge between the two seems to be destroying western civilization (if that hasn't happened already).
and a gently regulated free market supposedly looks for these issues and smooths them out.
A communistic market would, on the other hand, have a higher power (Congress) examining the issue and deciding (scientifically) what is best for everyone. A divinistic society would have a higher power (God) sort it out.
Who do you propose to do that "gentle regulation," then?
Don't imply that X isn't capitalistic when it is, and I won't imply that !X is communistic when it's not.
America's economy quit resembling capitalism in 1886, with Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific. The situation today seems (more and more) feudalistic, although the socialist elements are much more obvious on the surface.
I think there are a lot of details you're probably missing. I'm going from the perspective of American copyright, so it doesn't directly apply. Still, the international laws tend to be fairly similar.
I know I should have used a car analogy. I'm sorry.
Let's say I'm some no-name wanna-be who wrote a song, had my no-name band record a demo, and submitted that demo to a record label (no, this isn't the way it generally works in real life). There are 3 different copyrights involved right there. Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.
The situation's probably even worse for an author trying to get a story published. He's almost definitely going to submit several different versions of several different stories before one gets accepted. If s/he has to register for copyrights on each version, s/he'll wind up shelling out more in copyright fees than comes back in royalties until/unless s/he manages to write enough hits to support him/herself and the family. Who's going to stick with it that long?
The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "official" release? What happens when someone tries to register a fork? What if you decide to license the next version of your work as BSD?
Come to think of it, this could have been aimed directly against free software, with Creative Commons just a nice little bit of collateral damage.
In today's world, if you're going to pick up any shreds of truth, you have to look at as many sides of an issue as you can find (maybe especially the ones you disagree with). I was just googling.
Ah, you fell for the old "meat inspection" mistake.
Did you realize that _The Jungle_ was fiction? Upton Sinclair admitted that part was completely made up. He was just trying to contrast a capitalist dystopia with the utopia of Communism. People threw fits over the meat processing plant when the book came out, Congressional inspectors checked them out, and they reported back that there weren't any problems.
People believed the novel more than the government, though, and kept boycotting meat. So the plants lobbied for more regulations and regular inspections to "prove" they were on the up and up. And the people decided to believe the government after it voted itself more power and told them, yet again, that there weren't any problems.
As far as waging war on a grand scale...I'd really prefer a government that managed to avoid those in the first place. Or, at the very least, not wander around the world being a belligerent bully so they have an excuse to pump trillions through the military-industrial complex.
Roads...don't get me started on roads. (The construction work around here is a nightmare).
It turns out that private companies have an incentive to provide quality products. They can work around that incentive by getting the government to cover for them. But the government's incentive is to provide a bad product. Because then we just vote for them to create another bureaucracy and throw more money at it.
And if a department ever actually solves the problem it was formed to fix? Its reason for being goes away. That's why it never happens.
You're right though. There are a few things the government is better suited for than the private sector. Waging war, as you pointed out, is one of them. But it would be much better to keep the government chained down in the basement, fed on food and water, and beat regularly until one of those occasions comes up. Not doing that has let it grow into the ravening behemoth we have today.
Just like picking between cellular providers or big banks. Unregulated markets tend to function more like a cartel than a true open market. Limiting choices and competition instead of enhancing it.
I think the disconnect here is that people assume an "Unregulated market" translates into "Free Market." This isn't surprising, considering how long people have been abusing those terms. But it's still a mistake.
A true free market means simply that people agree to whatever mutually beneficial exchanges they want, without government interference. It would, indeed, be unregulated. But it also takes away all the other government props that the lobbyists have bought into play. No more subsidies, tax breaks, protective tariffs, government contracts, regulations that keep competitors out of markets, legal monopolies (or duopolies), safety nets, limited liability, etc, etc, etc.
We've been listening to the government is bad tripe for 40 years.
But we haven't done anything about it. Instead we've just watched government and big business get more and more open about how intimate their relationship is.
What we got back for it were environmental disasters, economic train wrecks, the concentration of wealth, higher prices, less competition and corporate rule.
Another way of saying pretty much the same thing. But I think we're actually drawing the same conclusion from completely different starting points.
There's nothing free about the market we have today.
This is absolutely correct. Then again, there hasn't been anything remotely free about the market since the Depression. There's never been a truly free market in this country (or pretty much anywhere else on the planet, at least in recorded history).
In a free market, the executives (and investors) at BP would be held fully accountable for the Deepwater Horizon. That includes jail time for the deaths. Banks would never have grown as big as they have. Any excess risk takers would collapse, and the owners would wind up paying out of their pockets. You would be free to use whatever sort of currency you liked--not limited to the worthless fiat federal reserve note that's created out of thin air by a shadowy consortium of international bankers. Again: etc, etc, etc.
The American economy today doesn't even vaguely resemble a free market. I doubt many Americans have much of a grasp on what the term really means. Especially after all these years of central planners who claim they believe in free market principles.
I'm not saying a pure free market would be some sort of utopia. I'm not all that sure it's all that desirable (even though I am absolutely positive that it is the only ethical economic system ever invented). Or even that it's more than theoretically possible. But it might be worth giving it a chance.
What, and this is wrong? I don't want someone to start a religion based around running around stabbing people and have that be constitutionally protected.
What about a religion based on cannibalism and crucifixion?
The precedent has already been set that you can't use religion as an excuse to get away with murder (Charles Manson). But it's also been set that it can be used to justify certain other crimes (e.g. peyote).
Where should the line be drawn?
My suggestion would be wipe out all the "crimes" that are really just Puritans sticking their noses into other people's personal lives and any other "crime" that doesn't have a victim [along with all the laws that exist to force people to buy some product they don't want]. Then the line becomes simple: worship however you want, just don't break the law.
(Yeah, yeah, I know. Like that's gonna happen anytime soon. But we all need dreams).
I think few would disagree that a kindergardener should not be allowed to come to school with "fuck you nigger" on his teeshirt.
I'd disagree. I'd also lead the lynch mob that took care of the little brat's parents. Not that I think they deserve to die...but a few days in a pillory would do them a world of good. It's these tiny little logical, step-by-step infringements of our freedom that have created the sort of no-tolerance insanity that school policies have become.
The protesters during a funeral procession are interrupting the free speech of the people in it, so that's a wash.
Not really. Those protesters are pond scum, but it's undeniably Constitutionally protected free speech. Interrupting someone else's free speech is totally different than creating a law to forbid it.
Good, people are aware that authors have biases, and are willing to question what they hear on the news. That's excellent. There are a couple of instances where the press really ought to be obligated to do things that they aren't doing (for example, they put a huge hype about a suspect for a child molestation case, and then whoops conclusive evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt he's innocent and the redaction is buried somewhere on page D23 or never shown on TV).
Free speech means that, sooner or later, someone else is going to say something you don't like. Yeah, your example sucks, but that's part of the price we pay. Freedom isn't free. Once you accept one Constitutional violation, they'll follow it up pretty much immediately with another. History proves that.
It got pretty much 0 press and had pretty much no effect. When the government owns the schools, the press, and most of the private sector, your country start to look uncomfortably like Soviet Russia.
I think it's a little more involved than that. The Federal Reserve drops interest rates to get banks to borrow more. Theoretically, they're supposed to turn around and invest it in loans so they can earn more than it's costing them. Then the greedy businessmen get their nefarious hands on it (probably through doing something unscrupulous like building something people want to buy and then selling it to them) and it winds up getting invested in some hot new stock/commodity/whatever.
Speculators jump on that trend and drive the price artificially higher, until the bubble bursts and we start blowing up another.
The problem isn't really that greed's just part of human nature. It's that the central planners are manipulating the system by injecting more money (aka inflation) at an interest rate so low that people can't resist.
As a side note, we'd probably be in the middle of hyper-inflation right now if the banks were holding up their end of the bargain. They're borrowing like hot cakes at the current ridiculously low interest rates. But then they're just sitting on that cash (i.e. losing money). Most people seem to think that's to bolster their cash reserve for some unfathomable reason. I suspect it's some sort of shady way for the Fed to keep juggling its smoke and mirrors.
Booms and busts have probably always been with us (not that pretty much anyone has ever tried true free market capitalism, so who knows? It might be the silver bullet for them too). They've just gotten much worse since the Federal Reserve kicked in and the Keynsians got prominent.
But I wasn't talking about booms and busts. I was talking about Black Swan Events (wikipedia has a pretty good explanation). The basic idea is that the market is just too complex for central planners to deal with. Sooner or later, something they can't possibly foresee will come along and collapse their house of cards.
I was under the impression that monetary contraction is widely regarded as one of the factors that contributed to the Great Depression, and that Roosevelt's New Deal (which certainly increased government spending), as the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression so neatly puts it, "either caused or accelerated the recovery".
That's the general wisdom accepted by the mainstream economists who were telling us "don't worry, everything's fine!" right up until the world's economy collapsed.
The fed contracting the money supply (central control) was a huge mistake, and definitely a factor. But the main reason it was a problem was that shop keepers couldn't afford to immediately drop prices, and workers couldn't deal with the inevitable wage cuts. Not to mention that all those bank loans didn't magically deflate at the same time.
If you're really curious, check out Murray Rothbard. There's a link on that page to a PDF of _America's Great Depression_ (really, Slashdot? No <u> tags?). Mainstream economists don't have much respect for the Austrian school, but they're the ones who warned us what was coming. (Full Disclaimer: I haven't found the time to read it yet. It's just one on the subject that my friends keep telling me I absolutely must read Immediately...well, right after Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_).
Many current economists are saying that the currently biggest threat we face, economically, is deflation.
Those are the mainstream economists again. The ones who are telling us heavy inflation (which they consider a good thing) isn't happening, when one of the biggest risks we're really running (according to the Austrians) is hyperinflation. The academic types who sit around on college campuses, pulling new formula out of thin air because, hey, that makes economics look like a hard science. The ones who don't suffer any real consequences when they inevitably blow it.
So it would seem to me that if there is anything we should do to control economic development at this point, it is actually increasing the amount of money in circulation,
As I understand it, we've pretty much doubled it in the past year. Admittedly, the different ways economists have of describing how much money's in circulation make my head spin.
and even printing more money is currently a viable way of doing that.
I think that probably depends on your definition of viable. From many points of view, that's pretty much the definition of "inflation."
The good news is that it looks like we will all soon know how different policies work out: as far as I can tell, current US policy is to keep stimulating the economy by pumping money into it, whereas many countries in the European Union are introducing budget cuts to reduce government debt. We'll see how these opposite policies effect their respective economies.
That really is the way to find out. Except that the EU's tied all their wagons together. Ours is the biggest one, leading the train. If any of us go off the cliff, we're pretty much all going.
Then again, economics really isn't a hard science (no matter what most economists try to pretend). So we should get analysts from all the different schools who'll look back after the dust settles and rationalize whatever happens in a way that "proves" they were right all along.
<shrug>
(For anyone who's curious about other "alternative" economists who have a history of making correct predictions, check out Gary North. He's a bit of a religious nut, but he has an excellent track record).
I can't speak for the original poster. But I disagree with pretty much everything you said so strongly that I couldn't resist putting in my $0.02.
If you accept that the massive influx of government spending is the proper response to a dead economy (I do),
I don't. Massive government spending turned a minor little recession into the Great Depression. It's never helped, and it never will. Central planning the Keynesians love so much has failed time and again.
If something doesn't work, the answer is not to do more of the same thing. Get the government out of the way and let the free market work. (And, no, we have not had anything vaguely resembling a free market since the Depression).
Nothing except a free market economy will ever be able to cope with black swans.
and that it is temporary (god I hope so),
Social Security was a "temporary emergency measure." And it will end, when the Ponzi scheme (which it is) collapses under its own weight. Government never voluntarily gives up any of its power. But go on hoping for change you can believe in.
what specifically are you referring to? The healthcare bill got watered down to the point where all it did was set up a competitive price exchange for healthcare... sort of the Amazon.com of getting sick.
Actually, it got turned into a giant gimme to the insurance companies (who are crying all the way to the bank) and yet another giant bureaucracy that will destroy the quality of health care in this country. Along with tons of extra police-state tidbits like extra taxes on gold.
They passed a toothless wall-street reform act.
That's kind of the point. The people were screaming against the bailouts. The more we learned, the louder we screamed. So they passed this to placate us and promise "This will keep it from ever happening again." And people fell for it. Most Americans are still so brainwashed that they actually trust the "government" to protect them from the "evil corporations."
Regulations like that are just a security blanket. For all intents and purposes, those "evil corporations" have become "the government."
And saying this is as bad as Bush II is going too far. We're not stuck in any new intractable wars,
He's following Bush II's policies pretty much point for point. Along with his handling of accused "enemy combatants"...at least Bush II never sentenced an American citizen to death without any sort of trial. And the war machine's trying really hard to find an excuse to open up another front in Iran. Give it time.
we haven't lost all of our allies,
I suspect that's mainly because they're still buying into the belief that "absolutely anyone would have to be better than Bush" (which I thought, too, until I started to actually listen to what he was--and wasn't--actually saying.
He has managed to insult most of our allies and kiss most of our enemy's asses. Not quite as bad as Bush II, but I think he more than makes up for it elsewhere.
and we haven't had any new worldwide economic collapses.
Not really fair to blame that one totally on Bush (though he definitely deserves a share of the blame). The roots for this one go back to at least Carter's days. And we're pretty much still in the middle of it. (Throwing money at it makes it look like things are improving, but you have to fix the actual problems before you can expect them to go away).
Much as I despise Bush, this collapse is more the fault of the boom-bust cycle that's guaranteed by the Federal Reserve and government interference in the market (in this case, encouraging, and sometimes requiring, banks to take extra risks while promising to protect them when the risks backfire).
Mainstream economists are starting to admit that we're still in serious trouble, and won't be in the clear for a long time. I almost suspect they're finally coming around to the idea that the double-dip the Austrians are predicting just might be possible after all.
One of the claims of the press is that they are the "fourth branch of government" and that they are necessary to keep the people in power honest. Of course that is all BS as the press first serves it's own interests and hides behind a constitutional protection of "freedom of the press".
You're sort of right, there. It has become a 4th branch of government. Meaning that "its" interests are the same as those of the other three branches. Which seem to boil down to "usurping as much power as possible."
We are talking about the international press and they are not obligated in any way to act as responsible stewards of US government information. For the most part, the press is propaganda. It is just not easy to figure out who they are serving as most of the time they fly no flag and take whatever position that leads to the creation of bigger and more sensational stories.
Seems pretty obvious to me. When Lindsay Lohan's trip to rehab is bigger news than the latest death tolls in "our" latest imperialist adventure in Asia, it's hard to ignore the conspiracy theories.
Wikileaks is not a press organization. It is a clearinghouse for folks who are willing to reveal information that they may be sworn to protect.
You have to wonder what would make people willing to violate that sort of oath. Maybe they've come to realize just how evil their lords and masters truly are?
Many of the sources of information on Wikileaks are folks who have committed an act of treason against their country by revealing information that was meant to be kept secret.
This is where you went completely off the deep end. And one of the huge reasons America is in such horrible shape.
Pointing out war crimes is not treason. It's a responsibility. Doing so knowing that you're risking torture and death at the Egyptian version of Gitmo is an extreme act of patriotism. AFAIC, it ranks right up there with having the courage and patriotism to sign the Declaration of Independence.
America's Founding Fathers were traitors and terrorists, too.
A voter who's kept in the dark and does not know what the government is doing cannot vote intelligently. Sure, all governments have to keep secrets. But "ours" has become pathological about classifying absolutely everything.
We're about two steps from being Soviet Russia. Getting the truth out to people the way wikileaks is doing is just about the only thing that might wake up enough people to keep us from taking those steps.
What should happen is that folks who commit treason should be dealt with "old school", drawn, quartered and their body parts spread to the different corners of the realm.
Goose-stepping fascists like you seem to be are exactly the reason the Founding Fathers wrote that minor little clause about "cruel and unusual punishment." I realize that you obviously have absolutely no respect for the Constitution, but here's the catch about that: it is the basis for the federal government's authority. Without it, the United States does not exist.
It has been entertaining to most of us as we have had any skin in the game, it was always someone else s secrets.
I couldn't make heads or tails out of that sentence. I'm tempted to say something insulting about it, but I'm trying my best to keep this reasonable and civil.
The Supreme Court's done so (amended the Constitution) several times. (Even though the Justices really didn't have the authority to do that).
Like those times they've decided "shall not be infringed" actually means "well, don't infringe except when we feel it's reasonable" or "regulate interstate commerce" actually means "do whatever you feel like."
The OP's totally correct. The government decides that it's the source of some right, then takes it away. Happens all the time. Doesn't mean that's what's going on here, but it's still worthwhile to pay attention to history.
Government regulations are what keep you from dying every time you make toast, plug in the kettle, or turn on the TV. They keep you safe on the roads. They stop your house from falling in, from toxic chemicals being found in your food, and thousands upon thousands of other hazards that every day life throws at you.
Most of these regulations are written by the big players in whatever industry they're supposed to be regulating. Why would you think they're protecting your interests?
Those regulations are to make people feel safe. And to actually keep those corporations safe when they screw up royally--they're the reason for that "recall formula" from Fight Club. (There are also a lot of other reasons for those regulations, of course, but those are the ones relevant to this thread).
Then something like this happens (though never before, AFAICT on such a scale), and people never realize that government is incompetent to keep us safe. Something like this is one of the few areas where I'm willing to admit that government regulation may be appropriate (though I'm can't think of anywhere it's authorized in the Constitution, off the top of my head ), even if I doubt it will do any good whatsoever.
But any new regulations need to be radically re-thought from the ground up. Something that actually has teeth that will bite the decision-makers when another disaster strikes due to negligence. Something not written by the usual suspects. Otherwise, we're just sticking our heads back in the sand.
Anything resembling capitalism in this country died with the New Deal.
And it wasn't all that close before that.
This isn't just about regulations, either. As others have pointed out, it's about anything to do with central planning. Incentives, protection from liability, tax breaks, protective tariffs, minimum wages, etc, etc, etc.
We've just all been raised to believe that America is basically a free market economy. Most of us never stop to question whether that's still the case.
(Note: I'm not saying that I think a pure free market economy would necessarily be viable, or even desirable. I'm just sick of people making this particular mistake.
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Please don't take this wrong. I really do mean my comments respectfully and politely. It's been a long day, and I'm not sure I managed to write as sincerely as I intended.
... because on every application I have ever worked on, the Database has always been the performance bottleneck
Wow. We've had very different experiences, then. Sure, there have been plenty of times when the database was the bottle neck. But it seems like I've have more issues with network speeds. And I can think of a few cases where the file system was the issue. At my current day job, the system bus seems to be the most common bottle-neck. Not that we touch databases all that often.
Testing of DB applications is always a problem, because the running of tests generally changes the database, rendering tests unrepeatable without reseting the database.
Isn't that generally considered a "best practice" anyway? I mean, I've pretty much always just taken that as a given. What do you consider a feasible alternative?
Configuring applications to use this database or that database also ends up being a problem for most applications.
OK, now I really have to ask what kind of development environment you're using. That's always seemed like a fairly moderate "no-brainer." Sure, it's mildly inconvenient to make sure connection strings got changed when migrating from dev to test to staging to production, but it's not that big a deal.
Furthermore, while programming in general has continued to progress through many languages, exploring many different ways to describe problems, SQL is still SQL. SQL is fixed in a syntax and written with naming conventions and styles that can best be described as neo-Cobal.
That's one way of looking at it, sure. Maybe you're missing the point, though? I mean, so many other languages and approaches have changed so drastically over the years...maybe SQL hasn't because it's good enough for what it does?
Bottom line: SQL is tedious, ugly, slow, and difficult to test.
Compared to what? Keep in mind its original purpose: letting business users look up algebraic sets while programmers got on with the serious data analysis. It just happened that having a standardized API that made it relatively easy to swap out back-ends turned out to be the easiest way for programmers to do our jobs.
If you really do have access to some magic technology that lets you look up persisted data (in a way that's anywhere near as flexible as SQL) significantly faster than any of the major RDBMSs...why haven't you founded a business on that and made your fortune?
And don't get me started on stored procedures and the difficulty of using source code management with stored procedures.
You definitely need to look into some better tools. File | Save As... to stash your SP's in some directory, add to source control (if it's new), check in.
Last gripe: A traditional Relational database imposes ACID overhead on every application, even if you don't really need it or use it. This is like a programming language that imposes a SORT overhead on all your data structures even if you rarely or never need to sort them.
It's been a while since I had to mess with SQL, but I seem to recall specifying hints about how much transactional consistency I actually needed. I think you may be exaggerating the overhead a smidge. And I'm pretty sure there are ways to work around it. But that's getting way off track.
Why is it that we continue to use a technology based on a 1960's view of a problem when clearly there ARE other solutions and ways to approach said problem?
Two suggestions. 1) It works. And DBA's hate learning new technology. 2) No one's come up with an alternative that's compelling enough to convince more than a tiny fraction of companies to
NoSQL is a horribly misleading term--as the article points out. Unfortunately, they seemed to miss the point as well.
Then again, as most of the follow-up posters demonstrate, what the phrase actually means doesn't seem to be all that well defined. In most cases, AFIACT, it actually means a non-RDBMS database.
I'm not sure why you think google kicked off the NoSQL movenment with Big Table, but a lot of the talks I've watched from Google I/O about database performance on app engine definitely seem to imply that performance was a pretty important factor.
When web developers start doing scratch figures about the seek time performance on disk heads, and they're serious about it being a major limiting performance factor, it's probably worth assuming they have a reason for it. (Especially when TFA mentions that their current implementation runs horribly if they have to access hard drives).
If you're coming from an RDBMS world, the de-normalized philosophy behind Big Table is mind-boggling (at least it is for me, and it's an extremely common source of confusion on the mailing list). Their engineers didn't come up with the idea (or, at least, make something the public became aware of...it's not like they invented column-oriented tables) just to kick off a new buzz word. Not being forced to remember to update 18 copies of the same column in different tables is one of the huge benefits of an RDBMS.
Big Table does offer ACID transactions (which is what the article's really about)...they just scale very poorly. I'm not sure how well they possibly can. If you have three different clients connecting to 3 different data centers scattered around the world, trying to transfer all the money from the same bank account into a Swiss numbered account...that needs ACID enforcement, and you will have a nasty performance hit. Two of those transactions absolutely must fail.
If you have the same scenario, but the clients are trying to update the visitor counter on your blog...it really doesn't matter much if the next few people who check happen to see the wrong number. Making those trade-off decisions up front is part of the pain of writing for that platform.
Maybe the article is describing a way to work around the bank example, but it didn't really sound that way to me. Either way, it'll be interesting to see what they come up with.
That's an interesting bit of knowledge. According to wikipedia, you're right: they tried to switch to Oracle, but it was too slow.
I'm just curious...why was this modded funny?
I'm sure google uses some flavor of RDBMS for some things. But not for their bread-and-butter.
Regulate the internet - the regulation is the guarantee of neutrality .
Regulations are a security blanket. Giant corporations get Congress (or the bureaucracies) to write them to protect them against competition. They usually do this after some regulations have failed and some disaster has struck. People think "Oh, good. I'm glad they got the regulations right this time and stick their heads back in the sand.
It's remotely possible that Net Neutrality regulations would wind up benefiting the consumers, but the odds are strongly against it.
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It's not so much that we customers will be paying for prioritizing. The real money comes from the web sites that we visit. Comcast lets youtube and hulu pay extra fees to get something resembling the bandwidth that comcast uses to broadcast its line-up. Were you working on a startup that involved streaming video? Sorry, you're out of business.
Do you have a brilliant new MMORPG? Blizzard can pay the ISPs to drop your packets, lag makes your game unplayable, and you're out of business.
For the right price, they could even redirect search queries from Bing to Google. Or whatever.
They scream and moan about how Net Neutrality will destroy innovation on the internet as we know it. The danger of their alternative is that it really could, in all the areas where innovation really matters.
OTOH, I've had long arguments with a friend who owns a web-hosting business. If he isn't allowed to shape traffic in and out of his network, he'll be forced out of business. So this isn't a cut-and-dried black/white issue.
And almost no one outside of /. seems to understand both sides of the issue.
Logical fallacy. Doing it this way IS a logical step in a capitalistic society;
Your basic assumption is wrong. This situation would never have happened under free-market capitalism. (The "capitalism" we have today is much closer to the Democratic Communist ideal that was so popular in the first half of the 20th Century).
that doesn't mean it's actually optimal (pure capitalism isn't),
Do you have any basis for that? The closest the world's ever seen to pure capitalism worked much better than attempts at pure socialism. Trying to balance on the razor's edge between the two seems to be destroying western civilization (if that hasn't happened already).
and a gently regulated free market supposedly looks for these issues and smooths them out.
A communistic market would, on the other hand, have a higher power (Congress) examining the issue and deciding (scientifically) what is best for everyone. A divinistic society would have a higher power (God) sort it out.
Who do you propose to do that "gentle regulation," then?
Don't imply that X isn't capitalistic when it is, and I won't imply that !X is communistic when it's not.
America's economy quit resembling capitalism in 1886, with Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific. The situation today seems (more and more) feudalistic, although the socialist elements are much more obvious on the surface.
Because they can tailor the rules to make competition even less likely.
Pretty much the same reason most rules and laws exist today.
I think there are a lot of details you're probably missing. I'm going from the perspective of American copyright, so it doesn't directly apply. Still, the international laws tend to be fairly similar.
I know I should have used a car analogy. I'm sorry.
Let's say I'm some no-name wanna-be who wrote a song, had my no-name band record a demo, and submitted that demo to a record label (no, this isn't the way it generally works in real life). There are 3 different copyrights involved right there. Even if it's only $30 to register those copyrights to keep the labels from stealing the songs...for many "starving artists," that's a week's worth of food.
The situation's probably even worse for an author trying to get a story published. He's almost definitely going to submit several different versions of several different stories before one gets accepted. If s/he has to register for copyrights on each version, s/he'll wind up shelling out more in copyright fees than comes back in royalties until/unless s/he manages to write enough hits to support him/herself and the family. Who's going to stick with it that long?
The situation gets *really* bad when you get into situations like GPL. Do you have to register each "official" release? What happens when someone tries to register a fork? What if you decide to license the next version of your work as BSD?
Come to think of it, this could have been aimed directly against free software, with Creative Commons just a nice little bit of collateral damage.
In today's world, if you're going to pick up any shreds of truth, you have to look at as many sides of an issue as you can find (maybe especially the ones you disagree with). I was just googling.
Ah, you fell for the old "meat inspection" mistake.
Did you realize that _The Jungle_ was fiction? Upton Sinclair admitted that part was completely made up. He was just trying to contrast a capitalist dystopia with the utopia of Communism. People threw fits over the meat processing plant when the book came out, Congressional inspectors checked them out, and they reported back that there weren't any problems.
People believed the novel more than the government, though, and kept boycotting meat. So the plants lobbied for more regulations and regular inspections to "prove" they were on the up and up. And the people decided to believe the government after it voted itself more power and told them, yet again, that there weren't any problems.
As far as waging war on a grand scale...I'd really prefer a government that managed to avoid those in the first place. Or, at the very least, not wander around the world being a belligerent bully so they have an excuse to pump trillions through the military-industrial complex.
Roads...don't get me started on roads. (The construction work around here is a nightmare).
It turns out that private companies have an incentive to provide quality products. They can work around that incentive by getting the government to cover for them. But the government's incentive is to provide a bad product. Because then we just vote for them to create another bureaucracy and throw more money at it.
And if a department ever actually solves the problem it was formed to fix? Its reason for being goes away. That's why it never happens.
You're right though. There are a few things the government is better suited for than the private sector. Waging war, as you pointed out, is one of them. But it would be much better to keep the government chained down in the basement, fed on food and water, and beat regularly until one of those occasions comes up. Not doing that has let it grow into the ravening behemoth we have today.
What other service provider?
Just like picking between cellular providers or big banks. Unregulated markets tend to function more like a cartel than a true open market. Limiting choices and competition instead of enhancing it.
I think the disconnect here is that people assume an "Unregulated market" translates into "Free Market." This isn't surprising, considering how long people have been abusing those terms. But it's still a mistake.
A true free market means simply that people agree to whatever mutually beneficial exchanges they want, without government interference. It would, indeed, be unregulated. But it also takes away all the other government props that the lobbyists have bought into play. No more subsidies, tax breaks, protective tariffs, government contracts, regulations that keep competitors out of markets, legal monopolies (or duopolies), safety nets, limited liability, etc, etc, etc.
We've been listening to the government is bad tripe for 40 years.
But we haven't done anything about it. Instead we've just watched government and big business get more and more open about how intimate their relationship is.
What we got back for it were environmental disasters, economic train wrecks, the concentration of wealth, higher prices, less competition and corporate rule.
Another way of saying pretty much the same thing. But I think we're actually drawing the same conclusion from completely different starting points.
There's nothing free about the market we have today.
This is absolutely correct. Then again, there hasn't been anything remotely free about the market since the Depression. There's never been a truly free market in this country (or pretty much anywhere else on the planet, at least in recorded history).
In a free market, the executives (and investors) at BP would be held fully accountable for the Deepwater Horizon. That includes jail time for the deaths. Banks would never have grown as big as they have. Any excess risk takers would collapse, and the owners would wind up paying out of their pockets. You would be free to use whatever sort of currency you liked--not limited to the worthless fiat federal reserve note that's created out of thin air by a shadowy consortium of international bankers. Again: etc, etc, etc.
The American economy today doesn't even vaguely resemble a free market. I doubt many Americans have much of a grasp on what the term really means. Especially after all these years of central planners who claim they believe in free market principles.
I'm not saying a pure free market would be some sort of utopia. I'm not all that sure it's all that desirable (even though I am absolutely positive that it is the only ethical economic system ever invented). Or even that it's more than theoretically possible. But it might be worth giving it a chance.
You just reminded me of a guy I know who was dating a model he met on WoW, last time I heard from him. I wonder how he's doing these days.
That was just the first article that came up in google. Numbers estimates vary from source to source.
Here's a better source, with pictures, that talks about the numbers discrepancies. (Short version: the park service estimated 1.2 million).
Depends upon how you look at it.
What, and this is wrong? I don't want someone to start a religion based around running around stabbing people and have that be constitutionally protected.
What about a religion based on cannibalism and crucifixion?
The precedent has already been set that you can't use religion as an excuse to get away with murder (Charles Manson). But it's also been set that it can be used to justify certain other crimes (e.g. peyote).
Where should the line be drawn?
My suggestion would be wipe out all the "crimes" that are really just Puritans sticking their noses into other people's personal lives and any other "crime" that doesn't have a victim [along with all the laws that exist to force people to buy some product they don't want]. Then the line becomes simple: worship however you want, just don't break the law.
(Yeah, yeah, I know. Like that's gonna happen anytime soon. But we all need dreams).
I think few would disagree that a kindergardener should not be allowed to come to school with "fuck you nigger" on his teeshirt.
I'd disagree. I'd also lead the lynch mob that took care of the little brat's parents. Not that I think they deserve to die...but a few days in a pillory would do them a world of good. It's these tiny little logical, step-by-step infringements of our freedom that have created the sort of no-tolerance insanity that school policies have become.
The protesters during a funeral procession are interrupting the free speech of the people in it, so that's a wash.
Not really. Those protesters are pond scum, but it's undeniably Constitutionally protected free speech. Interrupting someone else's free speech is totally different than creating a law to forbid it.
Good, people are aware that authors have biases, and are willing to question what they hear on the news. That's excellent. There are a couple of instances where the press really ought to be obligated to do things that they aren't doing (for example, they put a huge hype about a suspect for a child molestation case, and then whoops conclusive evidence proves beyond a shadow of a doubt he's innocent and the redaction is buried somewhere on page D23 or never shown on TV).
Free speech means that, sooner or later, someone else is going to say something you don't like. Yeah, your example sucks, but that's part of the price we pay. Freedom isn't free. Once you accept one Constitutional violation, they'll follow it up pretty much immediately with another. History proves that.
By some estimates, anyway: Peaceful Demonstration.
It got pretty much 0 press and had pretty much no effect. When the government owns the schools, the press, and most of the private sector, your country start to look uncomfortably like Soviet Russia.
I think it's a little more involved than that. The Federal Reserve drops interest rates to get banks to borrow more. Theoretically, they're supposed to turn around and invest it in loans so they can earn more than it's costing them. Then the greedy businessmen get their nefarious hands on it (probably through doing something unscrupulous like building something people want to buy and then selling it to them) and it winds up getting invested in some hot new stock/commodity/whatever.
Speculators jump on that trend and drive the price artificially higher, until the bubble bursts and we start blowing up another.
The problem isn't really that greed's just part of human nature. It's that the central planners are manipulating the system by injecting more money (aka inflation) at an interest rate so low that people can't resist.
As a side note, we'd probably be in the middle of hyper-inflation right now if the banks were holding up their end of the bargain. They're borrowing like hot cakes at the current ridiculously low interest rates. But then they're just sitting on that cash (i.e. losing money). Most people seem to think that's to bolster their cash reserve for some unfathomable reason. I suspect it's some sort of shady way for the Fed to keep juggling its smoke and mirrors.
Booms and busts have probably always been with us (not that pretty much anyone has ever tried true free market capitalism, so who knows? It might be the silver bullet for them too). They've just gotten much worse since the Federal Reserve kicked in and the Keynsians got prominent.
But I wasn't talking about booms and busts. I was talking about Black Swan Events (wikipedia has a pretty good explanation). The basic idea is that the market is just too complex for central planners to deal with. Sooner or later, something they can't possibly foresee will come along and collapse their house of cards.
Gary North explains Black Swan Events much better than I can.
I was under the impression that monetary contraction is widely regarded as one of the factors that contributed to the Great Depression, and that Roosevelt's New Deal (which certainly increased government spending), as the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression so neatly puts it, "either caused or accelerated the recovery".
That's the general wisdom accepted by the mainstream economists who were telling us "don't worry, everything's fine!" right up until the world's economy collapsed.
The fed contracting the money supply (central control) was a huge mistake, and definitely a factor. But the main reason it was a problem was that shop keepers couldn't afford to immediately drop prices, and workers couldn't deal with the inevitable wage cuts. Not to mention that all those bank loans didn't magically deflate at the same time.
If you're really curious, check out Murray Rothbard. There's a link on that page to a PDF of _America's Great Depression_ (really, Slashdot? No <u> tags?). Mainstream economists don't have much respect for the Austrian school, but they're the ones who warned us what was coming. (Full Disclaimer: I haven't found the time to read it yet. It's just one on the subject that my friends keep telling me I absolutely must read Immediately...well, right after Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_).
Many current economists are saying that the currently biggest threat we face, economically, is deflation.
Those are the mainstream economists again. The ones who are telling us heavy inflation (which they consider a good thing) isn't happening, when one of the biggest risks we're really running (according to the Austrians) is hyperinflation. The academic types who sit around on college campuses, pulling new formula out of thin air because, hey, that makes economics look like a hard science. The ones who don't suffer any real consequences when they inevitably blow it.
So it would seem to me that if there is anything we should do to control economic development at this point, it is actually increasing the amount of money in circulation,
As I understand it, we've pretty much doubled it in the past year. Admittedly, the different ways economists have of describing how much money's in circulation make my head spin.
and even printing more money is currently a viable way of doing that.
I think that probably depends on your definition of viable. From many points of view, that's pretty much the definition of "inflation."
The good news is that it looks like we will all soon know how different policies work out: as far as I can tell, current US policy is to keep stimulating the economy by pumping money into it, whereas many countries in the European Union are introducing budget cuts to reduce government debt. We'll see how these opposite policies effect their respective economies.
That really is the way to find out. Except that the EU's tied all their wagons together. Ours is the biggest one, leading the train. If any of us go off the cliff, we're pretty much all going.
Then again, economics really isn't a hard science (no matter what most economists try to pretend). So we should get analysts from all the different schools who'll look back after the dust settles and rationalize whatever happens in a way that "proves" they were right all along.
<shrug> (For anyone who's curious about other "alternative" economists who have a history of making correct predictions, check out Gary North. He's a bit of a religious nut, but he has an excellent track record).
I can't speak for the original poster. But I disagree with pretty much everything you said so strongly that I couldn't resist putting in my $0.02.
If you accept that the massive influx of government spending is the proper response to a dead economy (I do),
I don't. Massive government spending turned a minor little recession into the Great Depression. It's never helped, and it never will. Central planning the Keynesians love so much has failed time and again.
If something doesn't work, the answer is not to do more of the same thing. Get the government out of the way and let the free market work. (And, no, we have not had anything vaguely resembling a free market since the Depression).
Nothing except a free market economy will ever be able to cope with black swans.
and that it is temporary (god I hope so),
Social Security was a "temporary emergency measure." And it will end, when the Ponzi scheme (which it is) collapses under its own weight. Government never voluntarily gives up any of its power. But go on hoping for change you can believe in.
what specifically are you referring to? The healthcare bill got watered down to the point where all it did was set up a competitive price exchange for healthcare... sort of the Amazon.com of getting sick.
Actually, it got turned into a giant gimme to the insurance companies (who are crying all the way to the bank) and yet another giant bureaucracy that will destroy the quality of health care in this country. Along with tons of extra police-state tidbits like extra taxes on gold.
They passed a toothless wall-street reform act.
That's kind of the point. The people were screaming against the bailouts. The more we learned, the louder we screamed. So they passed this to placate us and promise "This will keep it from ever happening again." And people fell for it. Most Americans are still so brainwashed that they actually trust the "government" to protect them from the "evil corporations."
Regulations like that are just a security blanket. For all intents and purposes, those "evil corporations" have become "the government."
And saying this is as bad as Bush II is going too far. We're not stuck in any new intractable wars,
He's following Bush II's policies pretty much point for point. Along with his handling of accused "enemy combatants"...at least Bush II never sentenced an American citizen to death without any sort of trial. And the war machine's trying really hard to find an excuse to open up another front in Iran. Give it time.
we haven't lost all of our allies,
I suspect that's mainly because they're still buying into the belief that "absolutely anyone would have to be better than Bush" (which I thought, too, until I started to actually listen to what he was--and wasn't--actually saying.
He has managed to insult most of our allies and kiss most of our enemy's asses. Not quite as bad as Bush II, but I think he more than makes up for it elsewhere.
and we haven't had any new worldwide economic collapses.
Not really fair to blame that one totally on Bush (though he definitely deserves a share of the blame). The roots for this one go back to at least Carter's days. And we're pretty much still in the middle of it. (Throwing money at it makes it look like things are improving, but you have to fix the actual problems before you can expect them to go away).
Much as I despise Bush, this collapse is more the fault of the boom-bust cycle that's guaranteed by the Federal Reserve and government interference in the market (in this case, encouraging, and sometimes requiring, banks to take extra risks while promising to protect them when the risks backfire).
Mainstream economists are starting to admit that we're still in serious trouble, and won't be in the clear for a long time. I almost suspect they're finally coming around to the idea that the double-dip the Austrians are predicting just might be possible after all.
One of the claims of the press is that they are the "fourth branch of government" and that they are necessary to keep the people in power honest. Of course that is all BS as the press first serves it's own interests and hides behind a constitutional protection of "freedom of the press".
You're sort of right, there. It has become a 4th branch of government. Meaning that "its" interests are the same as those of the other three branches. Which seem to boil down to "usurping as much power as possible."
We are talking about the international press and they are not obligated in any way to act as responsible stewards of US government information. For the most part, the press is propaganda. It is just not easy to figure out who they are serving as most of the time they fly no flag and take whatever position that leads to the creation of bigger and more sensational stories.
Seems pretty obvious to me. When Lindsay Lohan's trip to rehab is bigger news than the latest death tolls in "our" latest imperialist adventure in Asia, it's hard to ignore the conspiracy theories.
Wikileaks is not a press organization. It is a clearinghouse for folks who are willing to reveal information that they may be sworn to protect.
You have to wonder what would make people willing to violate that sort of oath. Maybe they've come to realize just how evil their lords and masters truly are?
Many of the sources of information on Wikileaks are folks who have committed an act of treason against their country by revealing information that was meant to be kept secret.
This is where you went completely off the deep end. And one of the huge reasons America is in such horrible shape.
Pointing out war crimes is not treason. It's a responsibility. Doing so knowing that you're risking torture and death at the Egyptian version of Gitmo is an extreme act of patriotism. AFAIC, it ranks right up there with having the courage and patriotism to sign the Declaration of Independence.
America's Founding Fathers were traitors and terrorists, too.
A voter who's kept in the dark and does not know what the government is doing cannot vote intelligently. Sure, all governments have to keep secrets. But "ours" has become pathological about classifying absolutely everything.
We're about two steps from being Soviet Russia. Getting the truth out to people the way wikileaks is doing is just about the only thing that might wake up enough people to keep us from taking those steps.
What should happen is that folks who commit treason should be dealt with "old school", drawn, quartered and their body parts spread to the different corners of the realm.
Goose-stepping fascists like you seem to be are exactly the reason the Founding Fathers wrote that minor little clause about "cruel and unusual punishment." I realize that you obviously have absolutely no respect for the Constitution, but here's the catch about that: it is the basis for the federal government's authority. Without it, the United States does not exist.
It has been entertaining to most of us as we have had any skin in the game, it was always someone else s secrets.
I couldn't make heads or tails out of that sentence. I'm tempted to say something insulting about it, but I'm trying my best to keep this reasonable and civil.
The Supreme Court's done so (amended the Constitution) several times. (Even though the Justices really didn't have the authority to do that).
Like those times they've decided "shall not be infringed" actually means "well, don't infringe except when we feel it's reasonable" or "regulate interstate commerce" actually means "do whatever you feel like."
The OP's totally correct. The government decides that it's the source of some right, then takes it away. Happens all the time. Doesn't mean that's what's going on here, but it's still worthwhile to pay attention to history.
Government regulations are what keep you from dying every time you make toast, plug in the kettle, or turn on the TV. They keep you safe on the roads. They stop your house from falling in, from toxic chemicals being found in your food, and thousands upon thousands of other hazards that every day life throws at you.
Most of these regulations are written by the big players in whatever industry they're supposed to be regulating. Why would you think they're protecting your interests?
Those regulations are to make people feel safe. And to actually keep those corporations safe when they screw up royally--they're the reason for that "recall formula" from Fight Club. (There are also a lot of other reasons for those regulations, of course, but those are the ones relevant to this thread).
Then something like this happens (though never before, AFAICT on such a scale), and people never realize that government is incompetent to keep us safe. Something like this is one of the few areas where I'm willing to admit that government regulation may be appropriate (though I'm can't think of anywhere it's authorized in the Constitution, off the top of my head ), even if I doubt it will do any good whatsoever.
But any new regulations need to be radically re-thought from the ground up. Something that actually has teeth that will bite the decision-makers when another disaster strikes due to negligence. Something not written by the usual suspects. Otherwise, we're just sticking our heads back in the sand.
Yes, Java's license used to have a clause like that in there.
So did Windows NT's.
No idea about anything resembling modern systems. But it wouldn't surprise me a bit...those aren't designed to be RTOS components.
Anything resembling capitalism in this country died with the New Deal.
And it wasn't all that close before that.
This isn't just about regulations, either. As others have pointed out, it's about anything to do with central planning. Incentives, protection from liability, tax breaks, protective tariffs, minimum wages, etc, etc, etc.
We've just all been raised to believe that America is basically a free market economy. Most of us never stop to question whether that's still the case.
(Note: I'm not saying that I think a pure free market economy would necessarily be viable, or even desirable. I'm just sick of people making this particular mistake.
How did the GPL miss this sort of thing?