The difference between a trainee programmer and an experienced one - is that experienced programmers make mistakes at a far faster rate, trainee programmers tend to agonise over their's!
For my first 2 computer languages (the second was FORTRAN IV), I wrote my first program before the first class.
I the last 20 years, I have programmed in 6 new computer languages without ever attending more programming courses.
I am now having to apply concepts about compilers I thought of while thinking about FORTRAN 40 years ago. Why do you have to define things before you use them? - you don't! so long as they are defined before you execute them... even at run time!
Actually on the absolute scale of temperature, all negative temperatures are hotter than all positive temperatures! I learnt this about 40 years ago, it is not exactly cutting edge physics.
The sign assigned to temperature relates to how an increase in energy affects the entropy (loosely: a measure of disorder, or uncertainty) of a system. Consider a 2 state system with a positive even number of identical particles. When all particles are in the ground state you have minimum entropy and the lowest non-negative temperature. When you have an equal number of particles in both states, you have the maximum entropy and the highest temperature. As soon as you move one more particle into the higher energy state, the total entropy of the system drops, so now the temperature is defined as negative - as now adding energy now decreases entropy!
PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) runs on Microsoft as well as Linux, and (AFAICT) outperforms SQL Server. However, any serious server stuff runs on Linux.
I run Linux at home for both desktop & server stuff - I am a developer.
PostgreSQL has had ACID compliance built in from the beginning. MySQL added it much later.
Over the last 18 years I have 3 times gone searching on the Internet for comparisons - each time PostgreSQL came out better than MySQL!
PostgreSQL is more standards compliant than MySQL, and has far fewer gotchas (unintended consequences of doing something that seemed so straightforward).
I have the misfortune to have a client with an application backed by MySQL.
Your comment reminds me about a pregnant woman who phoned her doctor saying she had contractions - her doctor said come in when they get to 3 minutes apart - when she phoned a while later saying they were still only a minute or so apart, she was told to come in immediately! You might find that PostgreSQL is already in advance of 'MemSQL'!
More seriously, unless you say what features you think MemSQL is ahead off PostgreSQL, you are sounding very much like a troll.
The appropriate database software depends very much on the specific use case, for most real world requirements you are likely to find PostgreSQL a good choice.
Once his belly is full, he is interested in other things...
/////////////
When one starts off using computers, one's needs are simple. However, when one starts using them in more diverse use cases, then one needs greater sophistication in a Desktop Environment than a novice might be prepared to cope with.
So while GNOME 3 & Unity might be fine for novices, they are an anathema to people like myself.
Therefore what suits a member of a "lost tribe", is not appropriate for serious computer use, and forcing the same simplified Linux Desktop Environment on everybody, tends to drive serious users elsewhere.
I now use xfce, but would love an enhanced GNOME 2 Desktop Environment, as I find GNOME 3 (and its ilk) a disaster. Customisability allows people to adapt a Desktop Environment to their workflow and style of working, which is good - over simplification and reduced Customisability, that tries to force all users to do things the same way, is counter productive (to put it mildly).
Apologies, I realized that! But I forgot to acknowledge it - me bad.
//////////// The following is not for the humour impaired!/////////////
Though I must strongly disagree with your sig!!! The neutrinos are not mutating, they simply can't decide which gender to settle on!
As 'evidence' that neutrinos have gender...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/304.short
[...]
Recently, however, the case for sterile neutrinos has grown stronger, bolstered by a new analysis of data from nuclear reactors. So last month 60 physicists from around the world gathered to hash out the arguments for and against the existence of sterile neutrinos and to try to decide whether it's worth staging a dedicated experiment to settle the matter.
[...]
I started using gender appropriate language, long before this PC business became the scourge it is today. My motivation was that it did not seem appropriate to to use 'he' or 'his' in situations where gender was not relevant.
Often 'he' is used in a phrase that clearly applies to everyone in a group, so we end up with phrases that apply to an individual, just look at rules applying to multi player games.
Also I don't see the point of mentioning gender unless it is relevant to the discussion, so using 'he/she' mentions 2 genders. What if the individual was born with no genitalia, some people are, so to be politically correct we should not exclude them - so now we need to use 'he/she/it'. But what about people with characteristics of both male & female (but we should not use the word female as its last 4 letters are 'male' - if we are to object to using fireman on the basis that the last 3 letters are 'man') the mind boggles. If you do any research on the gender statistics of babies, you will find that a small but significant number of people are born not clearly of either gender, or that they are born of apparently one gender but naturally transform into the other.
"Consider the captain of a warship, his primary responsibility is keep afloat. He will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
Clearly this would apply to most, if not all captains, regardless of gender. so it would be better written as:
"Consider the captain of a warship, their primary responsibility is keep afloat. They will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
but not the following, as it implies that warships each have several captains or that it might not apply when a warship only has one captain, at any rate it looks clumsy:
"Consider the captains of warships, their primary responsibility is keep afloat. They will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
but the following is even more clumsy:
"Consider the captains of warships, his/her primary responsibility is keep afloat. He/she will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
///////////////
Most people are totally unaware, that a small but significant proportion of people are born neither clearly female nor male. Also some people are born as 'clearly' female and change into males at puberty. Of course which gender you identify with is controlled by your brain, and this might be at odds with your physical characteristics - this is more widely known, so I won't do additional research here.
ttp://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003269.htm
[...]
If the process that causes this fetal tissue to become "male" or "female" is disrupted, ambiguous genitalia can develop. The genitalia makes it difficult to easily identify the infant as male or female. The extend of the ambiguity varies. In very rare instances, the physical appearance may be fully developed as the opposite of the genetic sex. For example, a genetic male may have developed the appearance of a normal female.
[...]
Aside from the apparent presumption that “normalizing” surgeries are necessarily good, I suspect that ethicists have ignored the question of intersex treatment because like most people they assume the phenomenon of intersexuality to be exceedingly rare. It is not. But how common is it? The answer depends, of course, on how one defines it. Broadly speaking, intersexuality constitutes a range of anatomical conditions in which an individual’s anatomy mixes key masculine anatomy with key feminine anatomy. One quickly runs into a problem, however, when trying to define “key” or “essential
'he' is traditionally for both male & female, and is the greatest subset of 'he' & 'she' - but using 'their', 'them', and 'they' is more appropriate for referring to one or more people of potentially mixed, unknown, ambiguous, or non existent, gender.
I am sorry, but I must now sue you for intellectual property theft - as I had previously thought of replacing 'person' with 'perchild' for exactly the same reasoning...
I use one box to admin my home network, support a web site on a remote machine, and develop software for a university. I typically have one session up for 10 days or more.
Having multiple virtual desktops allows me to have windows set up for different aspects of projects where each one has a well defined focus.
Auto hiding panels allows me to use more screen real estate for other things. I already use multiple tabs on web browsers (Firefox, seamonkey, and epiphany), on directory windows, and terminals.
Where do I put applets, if not on panels? I don't want applets always to be visible, but I want to be able to see/use them quickly.
I tried GNOME 3 when it first came out, it may have improved since then. However, I found it did not support my workflow patterns, but xfce seemed the best alternative. Now, I don't trust GNOME, as I think it is too risky to use GNOME 3 in case they decide to remove useful features - to some extent this started in GNOME 1, but not so dramatically as going from GNOME 2. to GNOME 3.
As far as I remember, GNOME 3 had buttons and areas that where for particular purposes, and a background you could not change.
I have switched to xfce - I looked at KDE 4, but it too had been nobbled.
I was forced to make drastic and unnecessary changes in the way I worked - GNOME 2 did mostly what I wanted. Then I had spend time to investigate alternatives to GNOME 3, and then learn how to customise xfce. Now what I have is superior to GNOME 3, but not as good as GNOME 2.
If GNOME 3 had been called 'Fashionida' or some such, and they had simply improved GNOME 2 without sabotaging any of its value - I would still be using GNOME, and the people who like the GNOME 3 style could also be happy. The main problem with GNOME 3 is that it is _NOT_ an improvement on GNOME 2.
I was very glad I had no clients that relied on GNOME 2 features!
I have heard that you can sorta run virtual desktops on Microsoft boxen, but never ever seen a Microsoft box with them. Yet I saw a Unix box with virtual desktops 1994, now Microsoft has had only about 18 years to catch up...
with xfce, you can run applications from a menu that pops up when you right click the background - though I have not enabled that feature, as I have the equivalent of Microsoft's start menu (kinda) on an auto hiding menu bar
GNOME 3 is unusable for serious users: cluttered background, no applets on panels, no customisation of panels, lots more. Now I use xfce: I have 25 virtual desktops (though only half of them in use at the moment), each virtual desktop in use has between 1 & 5 windows, and I have 2 highly customised panels that auto hide. I have a 30" monitor. I do software development.
GNOME 3 on a desktop is for sheeple, and I don't think I'd actually want it on a tablet either...
I still think that Microsoft's Window's 8 is going to be a bigger disaster than Microsoft's Vista! Corporates an't gonna like it, a lot of retraining to do, new copies of software to buy...
Slashdot Mirror
Look up discrete mathematics!
I remember one course when most theorems started with provided that 1 + 1 does not equal zero, and they were not joking!
The difference between a trainee programmer and an experienced one - is that experienced programmers make mistakes at a far faster rate, trainee programmers tend to agonise over their's!
Of my first 3 FORTRAN programs I wrote before submitting them at the same time, 2 worked perfectly!
Since then, most of my first programs in a new language don't work.
Nah!
For my first 2 computer languages (the second was FORTRAN IV), I wrote my first program before the first class.
I the last 20 years, I have programmed in 6 new computer languages without ever attending more programming courses.
I am now having to apply concepts about compilers I thought of while thinking about FORTRAN 40 years ago. Why do you have to define things before you use them? - you don't! so long as they are defined before you execute them... even at run time!
Actually on the absolute scale of temperature, all negative temperatures are hotter than all positive temperatures! I learnt this about 40 years ago, it is not exactly cutting edge physics.
The sign assigned to temperature relates to how an increase in energy affects the entropy (loosely: a measure of disorder, or uncertainty) of a system. Consider a 2 state system with a positive even number of identical particles. When all particles are in the ground state you have minimum entropy and the lowest non-negative temperature. When you have an equal number of particles in both states, you have the maximum entropy and the highest temperature. As soon as you move one more particle into the higher energy state, the total entropy of the system drops, so now the temperature is defined as negative - as now adding energy now decreases entropy!
http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v103/i1/p20_1
PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) runs on Microsoft as well as Linux, and (AFAICT) outperforms SQL Server. However, any serious server stuff runs on Linux.
I run Linux at home for both desktop & server stuff - I am a developer.
What about students who need to do assignments about child abuse - they would be breaking such a law!
Clearly this is a blatant copying of Apple's iPhone 5, not withstanding it was done more than a year earlier.
You must realise that if people do things like Apple does, then it is a copy of Apple - regardless of their order in time.
After all Apple is innovative, they thought of rounded corners, nobody else could have thought about that independently!
[smilies omitted, due to budget constraints]
performance, reliability, ease of development...
see http://www.postgresql.org/
PostgreSQL has had ACID compliance built in from the beginning. MySQL added it much later.
Over the last 18 years I have 3 times gone searching on the Internet for comparisons - each time PostgreSQL came out better than MySQL!
PostgreSQL is more standards compliant than MySQL, and has far fewer gotchas (unintended consequences of doing something that seemed so straightforward).
I have the misfortune to have a client with an application backed by MySQL.
Your comment reminds me about a pregnant woman who phoned her doctor saying she had contractions - her doctor said come in when they get to 3 minutes apart - when she phoned a while later saying they were still only a minute or so apart, she was told to come in immediately! You might find that PostgreSQL is already in advance of 'MemSQL'!
More seriously, unless you say what features you think MemSQL is ahead off PostgreSQL, you are sounding very much like a troll.
The appropriate database software depends very much on the specific use case, for most real world requirements you are likely to find PostgreSQL a good choice.
IF (you think recursion should come under conditional branching)
....see the parent post for the correct answer!
....exit this recursion!
ELSE
No!
See my post replying to this!
When a man is hungry, he needs food.
/////////////
Once his belly is full, he is interested in other things...
When one starts off using computers, one's needs are simple. However, when one starts using them in more diverse use cases, then one needs greater sophistication in a Desktop Environment than a novice might be prepared to cope with.
So while GNOME 3 & Unity might be fine for novices, they are an anathema to people like myself.
Therefore what suits a member of a "lost tribe", is not appropriate for serious computer use, and forcing the same simplified Linux Desktop Environment on everybody, tends to drive serious users elsewhere.
I now use xfce, but would love an enhanced GNOME 2 Desktop Environment, as I find GNOME 3 (and its ilk) a disaster. Customisability allows people to adapt a Desktop Environment to their workflow and style of working, which is good - over simplification and reduced Customisability, that tries to force all users to do things the same way, is counter productive (to put it mildly).
Have you seen anything of Microsoft's Windows' 8 'GUI'??? :-)
Apologies, I realized that! But I forgot to acknowledge it - me bad.
//////////// The following is not for the humour impaired! /////////////
Though I must strongly disagree with your sig!!! The neutrinos are not mutating, they simply can't decide which gender to settle on!
As 'evidence' that neutrinos have gender...
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6054/304.short
[...]
Recently, however, the case for sterile neutrinos has grown stronger, bolstered by a new analysis of data from nuclear reactors. So last month 60 physicists from around the world gathered to hash out the arguments for and against the existence of sterile neutrinos and to try to decide whether it's worth staging a dedicated experiment to settle the matter.
[...]
[Smilies omitted, due to budget constraints!]
I started using gender appropriate language, long before this PC business became the scourge it is today. My motivation was that it did not seem appropriate to to use 'he' or 'his' in situations where gender was not relevant.
///////////////
Often 'he' is used in a phrase that clearly applies to everyone in a group, so we end up with phrases that apply to an individual, just look at rules applying to multi player games.
Also I don't see the point of mentioning gender unless it is relevant to the discussion, so using 'he/she' mentions 2 genders. What if the individual was born with no genitalia, some people are, so to be politically correct we should not exclude them - so now we need to use 'he/she/it'. But what about people with characteristics of both male & female (but we should not use the word female as its last 4 letters are 'male' - if we are to object to using fireman on the basis that the last 3 letters are 'man') the mind boggles. If you do any research on the gender statistics of babies, you will find that a small but significant number of people are born not clearly of either gender, or that they are born of apparently one gender but naturally transform into the other.
"Consider the captain of a warship, his primary responsibility is keep afloat. He will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
Clearly this would apply to most, if not all captains, regardless of gender. so it would be better written as:
"Consider the captain of a warship, their primary responsibility is keep afloat. They will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
but not the following, as it implies that warships each have several captains or that it might not apply when a warship only has one captain, at any rate it looks clumsy:
"Consider the captains of warships, their primary responsibility is keep afloat. They will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
but the following is even more clumsy:
"Consider the captains of warships, his/her primary responsibility is keep afloat. He/she will be very conscious of this when faced with a possible engagement with superior forces."
Most people are totally unaware, that a small but significant proportion of people are born neither clearly female nor male. Also some people are born as 'clearly' female and change into males at puberty. Of course which gender you identify with is controlled by your brain, and this might be at odds with your physical characteristics - this is more widely known, so I won't do additional research here.
ttp://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/003269.htm
[...]
If the process that causes this fetal tissue to become "male" or "female" is disrupted, ambiguous genitalia can develop. The genitalia makes it difficult to easily identify the infant as male or female. The extend of the ambiguity varies. In very rare instances, the physical appearance may be fully developed as the opposite of the genetic sex. For example, a genetic male may have developed the appearance of a normal female.
[...]
http://www.isna.org/articles/ambivalent_medicine
[...]
Frequency of Intersexuality
Aside from the apparent presumption that “normalizing” surgeries are necessarily good, I suspect that ethicists have ignored the question of intersex treatment because like most people they assume the phenomenon of intersexuality to be exceedingly rare. It is not. But how common is it? The answer depends, of course, on how one defines it. Broadly speaking, intersexuality constitutes a range of anatomical conditions in which an individual’s anatomy mixes key masculine anatomy with key feminine anatomy. One quickly runs into a problem, however, when trying to define “key” or “essential
'he' is traditionally for both male & female, and is the greatest subset of 'he' & 'she' - but using 'their', 'them', and 'they' is more appropriate for referring to one or more people of potentially mixed, unknown, ambiguous, or non existent, gender.
I am sorry, but I must now sue you for intellectual property theft - as I had previously thought of replacing 'person' with 'perchild' for exactly the same reasoning...
I use one box to admin my home network, support a web site on a remote machine, and develop software for a university. I typically have one session up for 10 days or more.
Having multiple virtual desktops allows me to have windows set up for different aspects of projects where each one has a well defined focus.
Auto hiding panels allows me to use more screen real estate for other things. I already use multiple tabs on web browsers (Firefox, seamonkey, and epiphany), on directory windows, and terminals.
Where do I put applets, if not on panels? I don't want applets always to be visible, but I want to be able to see/use them quickly.
I tried GNOME 3 when it first came out, it may have improved since then. However, I found it did not support my workflow patterns, but xfce seemed the best alternative. Now, I don't trust GNOME, as I think it is too risky to use GNOME 3 in case they decide to remove useful features - to some extent this started in GNOME 1, but not so dramatically as going from GNOME 2. to GNOME 3.
As far as I remember, GNOME 3 had buttons and areas that where for particular purposes, and a background you could not change.
I have switched to xfce - I looked at KDE 4, but it too had been nobbled.
I was forced to make drastic and unnecessary changes in the way I worked - GNOME 2 did mostly what I wanted. Then I had spend time to investigate alternatives to GNOME 3, and then learn how to customise xfce. Now what I have is superior to GNOME 3, but not as good as GNOME 2.
If GNOME 3 had been called 'Fashionida' or some such, and they had simply improved GNOME 2 without sabotaging any of its value - I would still be using GNOME, and the people who like the GNOME 3 style could also be happy. The main problem with GNOME 3 is that it is _NOT_ an improvement on GNOME 2.
I was very glad I had no clients that relied on GNOME 2 features!
I have heard that you can sorta run virtual desktops on Microsoft boxen, but never ever seen a Microsoft box with them. Yet I saw a Unix box with virtual desktops 1994, now Microsoft has had only about 18 years to catch up...
with xfce, you can run applications from a menu that pops up when you right click the background - though I have not enabled that feature, as I have the equivalent of Microsoft's start menu (kinda) on an auto hiding menu bar
consider xfce - as Linus says: "xfce is better than GNOME 3, but not as good as GNOME 2"
my xfce desktops look remarkably like my GNOME 2 ones, though there are obvious differences
GNOME 3 is unusable for serious users: cluttered background, no applets on panels, no customisation of panels, lots more. Now I use xfce: I have 25 virtual desktops (though only half of them in use at the moment), each virtual desktop in use has between 1 & 5 windows, and I have 2 highly customised panels that auto hide. I have a 30" monitor. I do software development.
GNOME 3 on a desktop is for sheeple, and I don't think I'd actually want it on a tablet either...
I still think that Microsoft's Window's 8 is going to be a bigger disaster than Microsoft's Vista!
Corporates an't gonna like it, a lot of retraining to do, new copies of software to buy...
Internet Explorer is a security nightmare, even without considering any problems with plugins.
Much better to use Firefox with Flashblock & NoScript installed!
GIF: Get In First?