I think we've arrived at something like agreement on the DBMS point. FYI SQL query optimizers are very different from JIT compilers. The basic reason is the 3-6 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the CPU and that of the I/O. Index creation is too expensive and slow to be done dynamically to answer queries.
I agree that for all its faults COBOL makes screen handling easy. I don't remember the syntax anymore, but it's stupifyingly easy to read/write the fields by name on a form. I've never seen anything so, um, simple in GUI programming or web programming. And I wish the folks who developed HTTP/HTML had heard of a Communication Area and pseudo-converstational connections.
You actually can't do in COBOL everything you can do in C because it lacks explicit pointers. Without pointers you can't reference arbitrary locations in memory. That's why the only CICS system I ever designed had an assembler module for the non-standard stuff.
As for ditching TCP/IP, while I don't doubt Infiniband has its place, your reasoning has a few problems.
Security-through-obscurity is thoroughly discredited. At least, Whitfield Diffie thinks so. David Wheeler's book is online and not a bad place to start if you want to update yourself on security.
If you think "most IP stacks today are about 99.9995% secure" and you (implicitly) agree with my argument that bug counts decrease as code is used, why do you think your infiniband stack will be better?
Using IP doesn't automatically mean the webserver is connected to "the network". That's a design descision. Nothing prevents segregating the networks.
Widely used, well tested software such as your IP stack is bound to be more secure than whatever you would replace it with, despite the fact that the attacker knows what you're using and may even have the source code to it.
If they hacked the security on the web server through IP, they can very likely find a way to hack the security of the database server using a similar exploit.
That's a big if. I don't know what "99.9995% secure" means (what the denominator?) but I don't believe there's ever been an exploit via the TCP stack. It's one of those highly improbable events that, if it ever did happen, would suddenly subject millions of machines to attack. Your database server would be the least of your worries.
Nearly infinitely more likely, I'm sure you agree, is something much more pedestrian: social engineering, MD5 leaks, etc. Whatever it is, it doesn't follow that the same vehicle will exist on the DBMS host, nor should it.
Finally, since we're both fans of simplicity in programming, I leave you with this:
There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.
— C. A. R. Hoare
You didn't hurt my feelings. I haven't written a line of COBOL since the summer of 1988. Rather, I was objecting to arrant nonsense masquerading as authoritative-sounding statements. That kind of thing can harm the reputation of Slashdot, you know.
all ISAMs are relational databases
Any defense you attempt of that proposition will only land you deeper in the tall grass. ISAM can't be "used as" a relational database because it lacks the fundamental facilities.
The most widely accepted informed definition of the relational model is the three-part test Codd described in 1978: structure, operations, and constraints. ISAM includes no algebra and very little in the way of constraint enforcement. It also fails most of Codd's 12 rules.
I think you might mean that ISAM files have keys, and that ISAM files can be arranged in ways that mimic normal forms. The comparison is superficially appealing and logically vacant. Sorry.
However, secure code does not use the SQL front end as such.
Do please tell. I'd especially like to know what "as such" means in that sentence. Googling "isam db2 site:ibm.com" fails to turn up anything relevant. Searching DB2 Documentation for "isam"s turned up nothing.
I'm not against the idea of using stored procedures.... So long as the stored procedures are required to check the format of their parameters
No, that's unnecessary for purposes of security. Again, one of the three legs of the relational model is constraints. The DBMS is perfectly capable — more capable than the stored procedure, more than the application — of preventing inconsistent data from entering the database. It can't ensure correctness; no mere machine can. But only the DBMS can enforce referential integrity and declared constraints versus other contemporaneous processes.
But you're right that if the webserver can only execute stored procedures and has no other rights in the DBMS, then the data are absolutely safe from arbitrary manipulation through SQL injection. (Yes, I understand the procedure could be written to execute its parameters as code. But anyone letting data in any form be executed in a web environment might as well start looking for other work now. Why wait until the fan gets dirty?)
By contrast, no file system offers any such protection. If the webserver can access any part of the file, it can access the whole file. Own the server and you own the data.
SQL is too generic for a secure system
I don't know what that means. I can't even venture a guess. I guess Lisp is too generic too for a secure system. That explains why Paul Graham is sleeping under bridges instead of funding startups.
I'm amazed... you're defending a COBOL as not being crippled... you can do absolutely anything, just need the APIs
I'm not defending COBOL. I can think of a dozen problems with it. I'm ridiculing the crippled/generic taxonomy you proposed. C has no I/O capability and no memory management save static storage and the stack. What can anyone do with such a toy? Exactly the same is true for Java. COBOL on the other hand, like Pascal, at least defines I/O in the language. Even with the stdio library, can you do in C what COBOL does in 64 lines?
Your basic assertion seems to be that a simple system is less vulnerable than a complicated one. While that's partly true, I have to remind you of Einstein's dictum to make things as simple as possible but no simpler. When you recommend eschewing tcp/ip as "too complex", I see an invitation to reinvent it badly. It's not easy to improve on the socket mode
COBOL is a crippled language. [...] COBOL is an insanely retarded language. COBOL is generally only used for processing things. [...] COBOL itself doesn't even store the data. Even though COBOL often has a crippled internal ISAM or possibly can use SQL. More often than not, COBOL is linked to a DB/2 database... which is more of a large scale ISAM as opposed to a SQL server.
Why is this noise modded up? The only true parts of that statement are equally true for C, depending on what "crippled" and "retarded" mean. The rest is best ignored. For example, I'm sure I've heard of C being used for processing things.
DB/2 sprang from System R, IBM's prototype RDBMS. It competed (indeed, competes) with the mother of all "large scale ISAM" systems, IMS. Last I checked, it represented about 20% of the SQL DBMS market in annual sales.
It's too bad more web programmers (and framework designers) don't know more about database security. I have yet to read about a SQL injection exploit that couldn't have been prevented through fairly basic security measures within the DBMS.
Hello? People who earn their pay from ad revenue make up the vast majority of journalists. Where else do you suppose the money to pay salaries at CBS and Time comes from?
I don't see how having an editorial staff standing between the writer and the ad buyer affects whether or not the writer is a journalist.
In the midst of your situation, it may help to remember you aren't responsible for your father's debts, including any issues with the auctions, sales, returns, etc. Don't fill the orders or accept the returns. Don't deal with it; it's not your problem. You have enough to deal with. If anyone asks you what you're going to do about it, tell them: nothing. Remind them the man they have a contract with is no longer here to honor it.
Do NOT threaten to leave. Don't hint at it. Your options are your options, unless you back yourself into a corner.
It's extremely aggressive. Put the shoe on the other foot: when was the last time your boss told you "Do it or you're fired"? How would you react? How would you react if it would't affect your income?
Remember, your job is much more important to you than to your boss. Treat it with respect, not like a poker chip.
In other words, whether hard or electronic copy, when you "buy" a book, you're really just licensing it, to put it in the words you used. There is no "bought."
Not true, else there would be no used book market. That battle was fought with publishers at the turn of the century. (The tune never changes, only the technology.) Publishers were including license agreements in books, setting terms of use that excluded, among other things, resale. The supreme court said if if looks like a sale, it is a sale, "license" notwithstanding.
(The OP asks What Happens When Corporations Become Publishers. I would think we already know, because most books are published and sold by corporations, and have been for a long time.)
Facts, facts. http://reconnectpartnership.com/
In a lot of places, you can drop off any computer equipment at your local Goodwill Industries depot. I dropped of 12 machines one day. (I called ahead.)
Your computer gets recycled and the computer industry pays. (Dell for one contributes some funding.) As it should be.
First of all, FAT is patent encumbered and Microsoft's willing to go to court to protect it; so that's out.
If you honor the patent, you reinforce it. If you ignore it, you weaken it. Millions of Lilliputian cuts make it irrelevant. Why not join in?
Someone needs to make a good file system that matches FAT, but is more extensible.
Well, the thing about FAT is it's recognized by just about every computer on the planet and a lot of non-computers. How are you going to make your post-FAT filesystem accessible to hundreds of millions of Windows computers? If you don't do that, what data exchange problem have you solved?
If you don't care about nonfree OSes, a simple convention would suffice. If the kernel understood that, say, uid==0 && gid=-1 meant the same thing as chmod 777 and that all files created in such a directory got the directory's uid and gid, you'd have everything you want without even touching the fs code.
> Change in the price level, inflation or deflation, is a monetary phenomenon.
No, this is the manipulated effect. The natural effect is due to falling prices as inputs become cheaper and competition maintains or decreases the profit margin.
I can't help you, Matt. You think you know what value is. You think inflation a priori punishes savers. You questioned my math and then didn't refute it. You don't bother to address how banks can operate during deflation. You don't seem to realize why deflation led to farms being repossessed during the depressions 1800-1939. You don't consider that your "solution" has been discredited after widespread historical experience. Your answers are not even wrong.
Here's a basic question: Why is -1% inflation better than +1% inflation? Does the answer change if we double the rate repeatedly?
No industrialized economy has ever stayed on the gold standard. Elected/unelected, capitalist/communist, east/west: Nyet. It's not because of shortsightedness. It's because deflation sucks. You can fight that and dispute it all you like. I tried to illustrate for you why it sucks. This idea you have that there's something natural about economic activity, that's it's not a manmade phenomenon subject to chaos theory, is just gold bug claptrap, nothing more.
$9 = $10 * (1.0 - 0.10) => value of $10 after one year with -10% change in price level (deflation).
$1 = $10 - $9 => nominal loss in value.
-9% => the bank's advertised APR.
$9.10 = $10 * (1.0 + -0.09) => EOY nominal value, what's in your account.
11% = $9.10 / $9.00 => your real return.
Simplifying somewhat, a real return Nominal - Inflation. If inflation is 4% and nominal interest is 7%, the real return is 3%. If inflation is -4%, and nominal 7%, the real return is 11%. To get a real return of 3% when inflation is -4%, nominal is -1% (because 3% = -1% + -4%).
That's the math: the bank pays you a premium over the prevailing changes in the price level — a real return — in exchange for your money. The problem is that you, as the holder of the original $10 in my example, are better off not depositing your money. If you accept the bank's deal, you're left with $9.10. If you ignore the bank, you're left with $10. And $10 beats $9.10 any day of the week, come inflation or deflation. Most people figure that out pretty soon when faced with the prospect, and banks quickly become unable to attract deposits. Etc., etc.
There is no such thing as real deflation from increases in efficiency. Change in the price level, inflation or deflation, is a monetary phenomenon. It's a function of the amount of money chasing the amount of goods and services produced. Holding the money supply constant while the economy grows (or shrinks) is no more "real" than changing the money supply while the economy is unchanged.
What I'm saying is very simple and uncontroversial: the money supply must grow with the economy, else there is deflation, and deflation is unsustainable due to the asymmetry in how interest works in the banking system. It is not a matter of trickery or psychology; it is a recognition of how people behave in the real world.
And, speaking of the real world, I'm also making an unassailable objective case: gold standards were tried and failed over the centuries, and today no government anywhere uses one. If you want to believe that's because governments everywhere prosper by deceiving the governed, I can only point out that they didn't used to.
The rabble about banking ceasing when there is deflation is rubbish.
It's true and it's simple. Suppose it's January and $10 is worth $10. You put your money in the bank. In December, $10 is worth $9 — nominal, of course. The bank collects its, say, $0.90 leaving you with $9.10. That's fair, right? An 11% real return? Deflation allows your $9.10 to by ten cents more than the $10 + time-value-of-money you deposited.
Only one problem: no one will do it. They'll hold onto their $10 and collect the 90 cents in profit while prices are declining. No deposit, no return, no lending, no borrowing, no banking. I'm not making it up: it happened. That's what a banking crisis is, or at any rate (so to speak) what they used to be.
Look, it's only math. You're welcome to believe whatever you want. But if you want to understand what you're talking about instead of making vacant assertions about the government's trickery — that only you and your ever-so-clever friends see through — then do yourself a favor and go find out about it. It's written down. You could read about it in the library should you ever darken the door.
The value of those shoes can't be destroyed by the government printing presses.
Yes, but their illiquidity makes them a poor medium of trade.
I don't understand your comment implying parent has no economic understanding. It sounds like his understanding of economics is what is driving his issue with paper currency.
I'm sure you're right, on both counts.
The OP is flat-out wrong regarding the constitution. The word "gold" appears exactly once, prohibiting the states from coining their own money. It's left to congress to "coin money and regulate the value thereof", full stop. Simple words, not scare tactics.
It's impossible to explain even a tiny part of one Econ 101 lecture in a/. comment. Reference material isn't hard to find for anyone interested enough to want to learn.
The value of money, like anything else, is subject to supply and demand. As the economy grows — through population and productivity — the money supply has to growth with it. If it doesn't, the value of money increases, which by definition is deflation.
(Even gold bugs have to agree with that proposition because they're always the ones talking about the opposite: "debasing" the money i.e. inflation.)
Deflation is a whole subject its own. The basic problem is that banking stops because interest rates are (again, by definition) negative, and no one will deposit money in an account that pays negative rates. It also means your mortgage payments effectively increase, because the bank has the money and you're selling your crops (or earning your wage) at ever-decreasing rates.
The basic problem with the so-called gold standard is that there's only so much gold. The gold supply can't grow with the economy, forcing deflation and its attendant deleterious effects. That effect is more pronounced the faster the economy grows. In the 19th century the US economy experienced high growth — through both immigration and productivity growth as a function of the Industrial Revolution — and in fact suffered four depressions (culminating of course in the Great Depression early in the 20th). These were all in part attributable to the inability (and lack of understanding for the need) to increase the money supply.
But don't take my word for it. We haven't had a depression since 1937. Living standards have improved, measurably, in many ways. The system has flaws, sure, but it works. By contrast, no country has a gold standard today. That doesn't mean it's untested; it was tested by many countries over many years, including by the US. And was found not to work! A simple, obvious, plain fact the gold bugs choose to ignore.
If you want to learn about databases, install mysql with about ten clicks, and read the mysql documention. It's not a puzzle, it's just a process.
That's terrible advice. Relational databases are neither puzzle nor process, they're math and logic. Unlike practically anything else in software, they have a scientific underpinning. Learn the theory. Then apply it.
If you get a copy of MySQL or Microsoft Access and putz with it, You'll sooner or later find your way around, sure enough. But what will you know? How to use version Y of product X. Great. Not only will your knowledge be obsolete in a year, but it's inapplicable everything else. And you'll be whistling in the dark, because you'll know how but not why.
A man that knows how to do something will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.
So. Start with Chris Date's introduction to databases. Just read it. Then get yourself some software and a problem to solve. Don't make something up; find a friend or nonprofit or a small business somewhere, someone you know or that a friend knows, who needs something solved. Ideally it's a report or other batch process, not an interactive data-entry system, because that simplifies your work and lets you focus on the data aspect.
Attack the data end first, carefully, applying what you learned. Diagram your logical model and explain it to the user. (I find people can understand E-R diagrams and normalization well enough to facilitate discussion. Sometimes there are "too many tables", but they usually accept when it needs that, it looks it up there.) Normalize until you're sure you've got it right. That's the "process" that matters.
By the time you're done — before you're done, really — you'll have learned more about database design and application development than most people do in college. You'll actually know something about Relational theory and normalization (not the same thing). And you'll have a reference for your next job.
What they're terrified of is people going back to hard currency.
Terrified? Please. I suppose they're also terrified of all those Econ 101 students learning about what money is, what the value of an exchange is, what value is. Oh, no, I forgot: that's the indoctrination that keeps six billion people in the Matrix. Except for a few laser-eyed gold bugs, that is.
The IRS collects tax on income. Lots of in-kind income is taxable just like cash. It should be, else non-cash income would have a tax advantage, and the whole economy would be encouraged to seek less efficient forms of payment. If you think that's a good idea, talk to my friend who, in Soviet days, got paid in shoes.
Really, it's too bad your comment can't be scored +1 ignorant. Try learning some economics before having an opinion on it. Or at least have the humility not to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later
That's specious. What kind of Open Source project has "support" of the kind that can be "dropped"? Interest and activity wax and wane over time. If it's so big and complex that you'll spend two weeks setting it up, I recommend you figure out whether the community surrounding it is of the kind that you can rely on for guidance.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
Never happened. What project are you thinking of? Firefox is a direct contradiction of that idea.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software
No. I've maintained a free software project for many years, and we don't compete with anyone. We work together to create something that otherwise wouldn't exist. That's all, and that's enough.
commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete
Yeah, except they determine the lifespan. Too bad if you find it useful and they find it nonprofitable. Go ahead and try to get support or source code after that. I'll wait.
treat all McCain voters by some sterotypical image of a bubba in backwoods
"Drill here, drill now" is a nonsolution. So is a gas tax holiday.
Evolution and global warming warming are noncontroversial to literate people.
"Health of the woman" doesn't belong in "quotation marks".
Eliminating earmarks and the corporate income tax and the estate tax will do nothing to solve the budget deficit.
The Republican party has done everything it can in the last 8 years to drive out the thinking person. Look at the election map. Bubba in backwoods is where they won. It's not a sterotype. It's a strategy. Just not a very good one.
Yes. I seem to recall many stories comparing the Republicans' winner-take-all system to the Democrats' voter-share system. Everyone seemed to think McCain would be able to rest up and raise funds while the Democratic contenders exhausted themselves.
I always thought that was foolish and attributed it to the press repeating (as they do so often) a Republican talking point. Media consultants spend a lot of time figuring out how to get free media i.e. press coverage. There's no such thing as bad publicity.
Or, as Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
Well, for one thing, say where you can be found. Your query made me wonder just what you had in mind. Maybe I'd be interested in helping out, but I don't know how to contact you.
Is it possible you believe that? Do you suppose any president could have stayed out of WW II after Pearl Harbor? That the US shouldn't have entered it? That FDR caused it?
I don't understand. How does one say "I don't own a TV" in such a way as you won't interpret the meaning as "I'm proud to announce I'm not one of those TV-swilling low-lifes like you probably are"?
I read this thread because I have the same question. I haven't had a TV for 13 years. I guess that makes me high falutin, too?
The Internet is still new, legally speaking, and you're citing examples of companies pressing their claims. When photocopiers came out, many publishers claimed they were illegal. Digital Audio Tape eventually carried a levy to "compensate" the recording industry. And in 1984 Sony took the VCR to the Supreme Court.
So, yes, there's a long history of the publishing industry pressing unreasonable claims. And losing.
Please, let's not confuse cockeyed claims with settled law. Screenscraping is not legal dubious at all, much less "highly". There's no case anywhere deciding that fat-fingering the data into your file is OK while cutting-and-pasting is not. It's all a question of what is stored and, more important, what is (re)published.
If I took every idiotic court decision as a cautionary tale, I'd have to disconnect my computer from the WWW. If I let my company's lawyers make every decision, nothing would ever get done. We live in a world where we have act, every day, in the presence of uncertainty. The most prudent choice isn't to avoid all risk, but to assess it reasonably.
You agreed with my basic point: facts can't be copyrighted. So would your lawyer and so would their lawyer. My advice to the OP, then, is "go ahead and collect your facts as you see fit". If they scream, explain you have a right to the data and can't get it any other way. If they cut you off, OK. If they threaten to sue -- because surely they'll threaten before they do; they way you to stop, not take you to court to prove a point -- then you find another way. It's not a dilemma of any kind. It's just work.
Nope. *Facts* cannot be copyrighted. That's why data vendors require a licensing agreement limiting what you can do with them.
Besides, I didn't say anything about republication. The OP thought there was some issue with his means of retrieval, whether he fetched the data with FF and hit "save page", or wrote a program to save himself some time.
And by the way, viewing *is* downloading. Whether or not copyright holders have the right to control private use of published information is, at best, unsettled law and at variance with precedent in dead-tree publishing. "pretty much anything" doesn't remotely describe the copyright-holder's control.
Informative? Copyright is a boogey man here. Your comment should never have been modded up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we've arrived at something like agreement on the DBMS point. FYI SQL query optimizers are very different from JIT compilers. The basic reason is the 3-6 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the CPU and that of the I/O. Index creation is too expensive and slow to be done dynamically to answer queries.
I agree that for all its faults COBOL makes screen handling easy. I don't remember the syntax anymore, but it's stupifyingly easy to read/write the fields by name on a form. I've never seen anything so, um, simple in GUI programming or web programming. And I wish the folks who developed HTTP/HTML had heard of a Communication Area and pseudo-converstational connections.
You actually can't do in COBOL everything you can do in C because it lacks explicit pointers. Without pointers you can't reference arbitrary locations in memory. That's why the only CICS system I ever designed had an assembler module for the non-standard stuff.
As for ditching TCP/IP, while I don't doubt Infiniband has its place, your reasoning has a few problems.
Widely used, well tested software such as your IP stack is bound to be more secure than whatever you would replace it with, despite the fact that the attacker knows what you're using and may even have the source code to it.
If they hacked the security on the web server through IP, they can very likely find a way to hack the security of the database server using a similar exploit.
That's a big if. I don't know what "99.9995% secure" means (what the denominator?) but I don't believe there's ever been an exploit via the TCP stack. It's one of those highly improbable events that, if it ever did happen, would suddenly subject millions of machines to attack. Your database server would be the least of your worries.
Nearly infinitely more likely, I'm sure you agree, is something much more pedestrian: social engineering, MD5 leaks, etc. Whatever it is, it doesn't follow that the same vehicle will exist on the DBMS host, nor should it.
Finally, since we're both fans of simplicity in programming, I leave you with this:
There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.
— C. A. R. Hoare
You didn't hurt my feelings. I haven't written a line of COBOL since the summer of 1988. Rather, I was objecting to arrant nonsense masquerading as authoritative-sounding statements. That kind of thing can harm the reputation of Slashdot, you know.
all ISAMs are relational databases
Any defense you attempt of that proposition will only land you deeper in the tall grass. ISAM can't be "used as" a relational database because it lacks the fundamental facilities.
The most widely accepted informed definition of the relational model is the three-part test Codd described in 1978: structure, operations, and constraints. ISAM includes no algebra and very little in the way of constraint enforcement. It also fails most of Codd's 12 rules.
I think you might mean that ISAM files have keys, and that ISAM files can be arranged in ways that mimic normal forms. The comparison is superficially appealing and logically vacant. Sorry.
However, secure code does not use the SQL front end as such.
Do please tell. I'd especially like to know what "as such" means in that sentence. Googling "isam db2 site:ibm.com" fails to turn up anything relevant. Searching DB2 Documentation for "isam"s turned up nothing.
I'm not against the idea of using stored procedures.... So long as the stored procedures are required to check the format of their parameters
No, that's unnecessary for purposes of security. Again, one of the three legs of the relational model is constraints. The DBMS is perfectly capable — more capable than the stored procedure, more than the application — of preventing inconsistent data from entering the database. It can't ensure correctness; no mere machine can. But only the DBMS can enforce referential integrity and declared constraints versus other contemporaneous processes.
But you're right that if the webserver can only execute stored procedures and has no other rights in the DBMS, then the data are absolutely safe from arbitrary manipulation through SQL injection. (Yes, I understand the procedure could be written to execute its parameters as code. But anyone letting data in any form be executed in a web environment might as well start looking for other work now. Why wait until the fan gets dirty?)
By contrast, no file system offers any such protection. If the webserver can access any part of the file, it can access the whole file. Own the server and you own the data.
SQL is too generic for a secure system
I don't know what that means. I can't even venture a guess. I guess Lisp is too generic too for a secure system. That explains why Paul Graham is sleeping under bridges instead of funding startups.
I'm amazed ... you're defending a COBOL as not being crippled ... you can do absolutely anything, just need the APIs
I'm not defending COBOL. I can think of a dozen problems with it. I'm ridiculing the crippled/generic taxonomy you proposed. C has no I/O capability and no memory management save static storage and the stack. What can anyone do with such a toy? Exactly the same is true for Java. COBOL on the other hand, like Pascal, at least defines I/O in the language. Even with the stdio library, can you do in C what COBOL does in 64 lines?
Your basic assertion seems to be that a simple system is less vulnerable than a complicated one. While that's partly true, I have to remind you of Einstein's dictum to make things as simple as possible but no simpler. When you recommend eschewing tcp/ip as "too complex", I see an invitation to reinvent it badly. It's not easy to improve on the socket mode
COBOL is a crippled language. [...] COBOL is an insanely retarded language. COBOL is generally only used for processing things. [...] COBOL itself doesn't even store the data. Even though COBOL often has a crippled internal ISAM or possibly can use SQL. More often than not, COBOL is linked to a DB/2 database... which is more of a large scale ISAM as opposed to a SQL server.
Why is this noise modded up? The only true parts of that statement are equally true for C, depending on what "crippled" and "retarded" mean. The rest is best ignored. For example, I'm sure I've heard of C being used for processing things.
DB/2 sprang from System R, IBM's prototype RDBMS. It competed (indeed, competes) with the mother of all "large scale ISAM" systems, IMS. Last I checked, it represented about 20% of the SQL DBMS market in annual sales.
It's too bad more web programmers (and framework designers) don't know more about database security. I have yet to read about a SQL injection exploit that couldn't have been prevented through fairly basic security measures within the DBMS.
Hello? People who earn their pay from ad revenue make up the vast majority of journalists. Where else do you suppose the money to pay salaries at CBS and Time comes from?
I don't see how having an editorial staff standing between the writer and the ad buyer affects whether or not the writer is a journalist.
In the midst of your situation, it may help to remember you aren't responsible for your father's debts, including any issues with the auctions, sales, returns, etc. Don't fill the orders or accept the returns. Don't deal with it; it's not your problem. You have enough to deal with. If anyone asks you what you're going to do about it, tell them: nothing. Remind them the man they have a contract with is no longer here to honor it.
Do NOT threaten to leave. Don't hint at it. Your options are your options, unless you back yourself into a corner.
It's extremely aggressive. Put the shoe on the other foot: when was the last time your boss told you "Do it or you're fired"? How would you react? How would you react if it would't affect your income?
Remember, your job is much more important to you than to your boss. Treat it with respect, not like a poker chip.
In other words, whether hard or electronic copy, when you "buy" a book, you're really just licensing it, to put it in the words you used. There is no "bought."
Not true, else there would be no used book market. That battle was fought with publishers at the turn of the century. (The tune never changes, only the technology.) Publishers were including license agreements in books, setting terms of use that excluded, among other things, resale. The supreme court said if if looks like a sale, it is a sale, "license" notwithstanding.
(The OP asks What Happens When Corporations Become Publishers. I would think we already know, because most books are published and sold by corporations, and have been for a long time.)
Facts, facts. http://reconnectpartnership.com/ In a lot of places, you can drop off any computer equipment at your local Goodwill Industries depot. I dropped of 12 machines one day. (I called ahead.) Your computer gets recycled and the computer industry pays. (Dell for one contributes some funding.) As it should be.
First of all, FAT is patent encumbered and Microsoft's willing to go to court to protect it; so that's out.
If you honor the patent, you reinforce it. If you ignore it, you weaken it. Millions of Lilliputian cuts make it irrelevant. Why not join in?
Someone needs to make a good file system that matches FAT, but is more extensible.
Well, the thing about FAT is it's recognized by just about every computer on the planet and a lot of non-computers. How are you going to make your post-FAT filesystem accessible to hundreds of millions of Windows computers? If you don't do that, what data exchange problem have you solved?
If you don't care about nonfree OSes, a simple convention would suffice. If the kernel understood that, say, uid==0 && gid=-1 meant the same thing as chmod 777 and that all files created in such a directory got the directory's uid and gid, you'd have everything you want without even touching the fs code.
> Change in the price level, inflation or deflation, is a monetary phenomenon.
No, this is the manipulated effect. The natural effect is due to falling prices as inputs become cheaper and competition maintains or decreases the profit margin.
I can't help you, Matt. You think you know what value is. You think inflation a priori punishes savers. You questioned my math and then didn't refute it. You don't bother to address how banks can operate during deflation. You don't seem to realize why deflation led to farms being repossessed during the depressions 1800-1939. You don't consider that your "solution" has been discredited after widespread historical experience. Your answers are not even wrong.
Here's a basic question: Why is -1% inflation better than +1% inflation? Does the answer change if we double the rate repeatedly?
No industrialized economy has ever stayed on the gold standard. Elected/unelected, capitalist/communist, east/west: Nyet. It's not because of shortsightedness. It's because deflation sucks. You can fight that and dispute it all you like. I tried to illustrate for you why it sucks. This idea you have that there's something natural about economic activity, that's it's not a manmade phenomenon subject to chaos theory, is just gold bug claptrap, nothing more.
$10 BOY deposit
$9 = $10 * (1.0 - 0.10) => value of $10 after one year with -10% change in price level (deflation).
$1 = $10 - $9 => nominal loss in value.
-9% => the bank's advertised APR.
$9.10 = $10 * (1.0 + -0.09) => EOY nominal value, what's in your account.
11% = $9.10 / $9.00 => your real return.
Simplifying somewhat, a real return Nominal - Inflation. If inflation is 4% and nominal interest is 7%, the real return is 3%. If inflation is -4%, and nominal 7%, the real return is 11%. To get a real return of 3% when inflation is -4%, nominal is -1% (because 3% = -1% + -4%).
That's the math: the bank pays you a premium over the prevailing changes in the price level — a real return — in exchange for your money. The problem is that you, as the holder of the original $10 in my example, are better off not depositing your money. If you accept the bank's deal, you're left with $9.10. If you ignore the bank, you're left with $10. And $10 beats $9.10 any day of the week, come inflation or deflation. Most people figure that out pretty soon when faced with the prospect, and banks quickly become unable to attract deposits. Etc., etc.
There is no such thing as real deflation from increases in efficiency. Change in the price level, inflation or deflation, is a monetary phenomenon. It's a function of the amount of money chasing the amount of goods and services produced. Holding the money supply constant while the economy grows (or shrinks) is no more "real" than changing the money supply while the economy is unchanged.
What I'm saying is very simple and uncontroversial: the money supply must grow with the economy, else there is deflation, and deflation is unsustainable due to the asymmetry in how interest works in the banking system. It is not a matter of trickery or psychology; it is a recognition of how people behave in the real world.
And, speaking of the real world, I'm also making an unassailable objective case: gold standards were tried and failed over the centuries, and today no government anywhere uses one. If you want to believe that's because governments everywhere prosper by deceiving the governed, I can only point out that they didn't used to.
It's true and it's simple. Suppose it's January and $10 is worth $10. You put your money in the bank. In December, $10 is worth $9 — nominal, of course. The bank collects its, say, $0.90 leaving you with $9.10. That's fair, right? An 11% real return? Deflation allows your $9.10 to by ten cents more than the $10 + time-value-of-money you deposited.
Only one problem: no one will do it. They'll hold onto their $10 and collect the 90 cents in profit while prices are declining. No deposit, no return, no lending, no borrowing, no banking. I'm not making it up: it happened. That's what a banking crisis is, or at any rate (so to speak) what they used to be.
Look, it's only math. You're welcome to believe whatever you want. But if you want to understand what you're talking about instead of making vacant assertions about the government's trickery — that only you and your ever-so-clever friends see through — then do yourself a favor and go find out about it. It's written down. You could read about it in the library should you ever darken the door.
The value of those shoes can't be destroyed by the government printing presses.
Yes, but their illiquidity makes them a poor medium of trade.
I don't understand your comment implying parent has no economic understanding. It sounds like his understanding of economics is what is driving his issue with paper currency.
I'm sure you're right, on both counts.
The OP is flat-out wrong regarding the constitution. The word "gold" appears exactly once, prohibiting the states from coining their own money. It's left to congress to "coin money and regulate the value thereof", full stop. Simple words, not scare tactics.
It's impossible to explain even a tiny part of one Econ 101 lecture in a /. comment. Reference material isn't hard to find for anyone interested enough to want to learn.
The value of money, like anything else, is subject to supply and demand. As the economy grows — through population and productivity — the money supply has to growth with it. If it doesn't, the value of money increases, which by definition is deflation. (Even gold bugs have to agree with that proposition because they're always the ones talking about the opposite: "debasing" the money i.e. inflation.)
Deflation is a whole subject its own. The basic problem is that banking stops because interest rates are (again, by definition) negative, and no one will deposit money in an account that pays negative rates. It also means your mortgage payments effectively increase, because the bank has the money and you're selling your crops (or earning your wage) at ever-decreasing rates.
The basic problem with the so-called gold standard is that there's only so much gold. The gold supply can't grow with the economy, forcing deflation and its attendant deleterious effects. That effect is more pronounced the faster the economy grows. In the 19th century the US economy experienced high growth — through both immigration and productivity growth as a function of the Industrial Revolution — and in fact suffered four depressions (culminating of course in the Great Depression early in the 20th). These were all in part attributable to the inability (and lack of understanding for the need) to increase the money supply.
But don't take my word for it. We haven't had a depression since 1937. Living standards have improved, measurably, in many ways. The system has flaws, sure, but it works. By contrast, no country has a gold standard today. That doesn't mean it's untested; it was tested by many countries over many years, including by the US. And was found not to work! A simple, obvious, plain fact the gold bugs choose to ignore.
If you want to learn about databases, install mysql with about ten clicks, and read the mysql documention. It's not a puzzle, it's just a process.
That's terrible advice. Relational databases are neither puzzle nor process, they're math and logic. Unlike practically anything else in software, they have a scientific underpinning. Learn the theory. Then apply it.
If you get a copy of MySQL or Microsoft Access and putz with it, You'll sooner or later find your way around, sure enough. But what will you know? How to use version Y of product X. Great. Not only will your knowledge be obsolete in a year, but it's inapplicable everything else. And you'll be whistling in the dark, because you'll know how but not why.
A man that knows how to do something will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.
So. Start with Chris Date's introduction to databases. Just read it. Then get yourself some software and a problem to solve. Don't make something up; find a friend or nonprofit or a small business somewhere, someone you know or that a friend knows, who needs something solved. Ideally it's a report or other batch process, not an interactive data-entry system, because that simplifies your work and lets you focus on the data aspect.
Attack the data end first, carefully, applying what you learned. Diagram your logical model and explain it to the user. (I find people can understand E-R diagrams and normalization well enough to facilitate discussion. Sometimes there are "too many tables", but they usually accept when it needs that, it looks it up there.) Normalize until you're sure you've got it right. That's the "process" that matters.
By the time you're done — before you're done, really — you'll have learned more about database design and application development than most people do in college. You'll actually know something about Relational theory and normalization (not the same thing). And you'll have a reference for your next job.
What they're terrified of is people going back to hard currency.
Terrified? Please. I suppose they're also terrified of all those Econ 101 students learning about what money is, what the value of an exchange is, what value is. Oh, no, I forgot: that's the indoctrination that keeps six billion people in the Matrix. Except for a few laser-eyed gold bugs, that is.
The IRS collects tax on income. Lots of in-kind income is taxable just like cash. It should be, else non-cash income would have a tax advantage, and the whole economy would be encouraged to seek less efficient forms of payment. If you think that's a good idea, talk to my friend who, in Soviet days, got paid in shoes.
Really, it's too bad your comment can't be scored +1 ignorant. Try learning some economics before having an opinion on it. Or at least have the humility not to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
verbage
is not a word, Ms. Palin:
$ grep verbage /usr/share/dict/words | wc
0 0 0
you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later
That's specious. What kind of Open Source project has "support" of the kind that can be "dropped"? Interest and activity wax and wane over time. If it's so big and complex that you'll spend two weeks setting it up, I recommend you figure out whether the community surrounding it is of the kind that you can rely on for guidance.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
Never happened. What project are you thinking of? Firefox is a direct contradiction of that idea.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software
No. I've maintained a free software project for many years, and we don't compete with anyone. We work together to create something that otherwise wouldn't exist. That's all, and that's enough.
commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete
Yeah, except they determine the lifespan. Too bad if you find it useful and they find it nonprofitable. Go ahead and try to get support or source code after that. I'll wait.
treat all McCain voters by some sterotypical image of a bubba in backwoods
"Drill here, drill now" is a nonsolution. So is a gas tax holiday.
Evolution and global warming warming are noncontroversial to literate people.
"Health of the woman" doesn't belong in "quotation marks".
Eliminating earmarks and the corporate income tax and the estate tax will do nothing to solve the budget deficit.
The Republican party has done everything it can in the last 8 years to drive out the thinking person. Look at the election map. Bubba in backwoods is where they won. It's not a sterotype. It's a strategy. Just not a very good one.
Yes. I seem to recall many stories comparing the Republicans' winner-take-all system to the Democrats' voter-share system. Everyone seemed to think McCain would be able to rest up and raise funds while the Democratic contenders exhausted themselves.
I always thought that was foolish and attributed it to the press repeating (as they do so often) a Republican talking point. Media consultants spend a lot of time figuring out how to get free media i.e. press coverage. There's no such thing as bad publicity.
Or, as Oscar Wilde said, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."
Well, for one thing, say where you can be found. Your query made me wonder just what you had in mind. Maybe I'd be interested in helping out, but I don't know how to contact you.
Is it possible you believe that? Do you suppose any president could have stayed out of WW II after Pearl Harbor? That the US shouldn't have entered it? That FDR caused it?
I don't understand. How does one say "I don't own a TV" in such a way as you won't interpret the meaning as "I'm proud to announce I'm not one of those TV-swilling low-lifes like you probably are"?
I read this thread because I have the same question. I haven't had a TV for 13 years. I guess that makes me high falutin, too?
The Internet is still new, legally speaking, and you're citing examples of companies pressing their claims. When photocopiers came out, many publishers claimed they were illegal. Digital Audio Tape eventually carried a levy to "compensate" the recording industry. And in 1984 Sony took the VCR to the Supreme Court.
So, yes, there's a long history of the publishing industry pressing unreasonable claims. And losing.
Please, let's not confuse cockeyed claims with settled law. Screenscraping is not legal dubious at all, much less "highly". There's no case anywhere deciding that fat-fingering the data into your file is OK while cutting-and-pasting is not. It's all a question of what is stored and, more important, what is (re)published.
If I took every idiotic court decision as a cautionary tale, I'd have to disconnect my computer from the WWW. If I let my company's lawyers make every decision, nothing would ever get done. We live in a world where we have act, every day, in the presence of uncertainty. The most prudent choice isn't to avoid all risk, but to assess it reasonably.
You agreed with my basic point: facts can't be copyrighted. So would your lawyer and so would their lawyer. My advice to the OP, then, is "go ahead and collect your facts as you see fit". If they scream, explain you have a right to the data and can't get it any other way. If they cut you off, OK. If they threaten to sue -- because surely they'll threaten before they do; they way you to stop, not take you to court to prove a point -- then you find another way. It's not a dilemma of any kind. It's just work.
Nope. *Facts* cannot be copyrighted. That's why data vendors require a licensing agreement limiting what you can do with them.
Besides, I didn't say anything about republication. The OP thought there was some issue with his means of retrieval, whether he fetched the data with FF and hit "save page", or wrote a program to save himself some time.
And by the way, viewing *is* downloading. Whether or not copyright holders have the right to control private use of published information is, at best, unsettled law and at variance with precedent in dead-tree publishing. "pretty much anything" doesn't remotely describe the copyright-holder's control.
Informative? Copyright is a boogey man here. Your comment should never have been modded up.
my base memory usage running the GENERIC_LAPTOP kernel, X, OpenMotif, and CMUCL is just 70 MB
Yep, and I'll bet you can reduce that substantially, and speed up boot times, but removing devices from the kernel and recompiling.
I/O is a bit slow
look into soft-deps.