The British army is one of the culprits, I know this because we've developed software for them and still have to support IE6 to this day. They have plans to do away with it but they just get put back further and further.
The problem is how, in a time of budget cuts, can you possibly justify upgrading every computer in the army to IE6 vs. making sure your soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have body armour, helicopters to avoid IEDs and so forth?
It's just not a priority. The threat of cyber attack causing any actual measurable harm is negligible compared to IEDs etc. - even something on the scale of Wikileaks'/Manning's US cable leaks did less harm to people's lives than the odd IED here or there has done.
Upgrading IE6 is something the army can save for peace time when they get the fuck out of Afghanistan and are sat around with nothing better to do and nothing better to spend their money on.
Well, there is an alternative - use local contractors, but contractors are expensive, so you better have pretty decent margins for this option to be feasible, otherwise I agree, you're delaying the inevitable - your company wont last long if you're going to use ridiculously cheap Asian software development outsourcing operations, as their quality is less than crap.
"How is it "math" if it's a trivial observation ?"
Sometimes you don't need to rtfa to get an idea of the topic at hand, sometimes you don't need to read it to be able to ask valid questions. This is not one of those times, your question is well answered in tfa.
It's mathematical because they found a number of mathematical properties, I can't remember what these are as I read this yesterday on the way home, and I've slept since then, but they were things such as the number of stations being a consistent factor relative to other properties such as line length and that sort of thing. They even tell you what those factors are. There was something like 14 mathematical properties that could be used to count, and/or predict certain properties about a subway network regardless of it's age etc.
Though I suppose you could claim that these ratios and so forth were discovered via trivial observation if you want to be pedantic, and well, great, but in that case just about all math stems from trivial observation based on some arbitrary definition of trivial giving the paradox that if you're implying, as you are from your comment, that something discovered via trivial observation isn't ever math, then no math is necessarily math depending on what you class as trivial.
It doesn't really matter what you deem trivial, at the end of the day it's still math, just as how I might rip a piece of paper in two and observe trivially that I now have two pieces of paper - it still means that ripping said piece of paper in two results in two pieces has a grounding in math trivial or not.
Well, sorry for being pedantic anyway, I'm in one of those moods!
The reasons international governance would be better is the same reason continuous coalition/minority governments give healthier democracies - the only legislation that can be passed is that which is common sense and not controversal. Legislation that is highly controversal like censorship ends up tied up in battles that last for eternity and so never reach agreement for implementation.
It's not use arguing that we should just trust the US because the rest of the world wants to censor the net - the US and even private US corporations are already censoring the net. The US government with it's ICE seizures of legitimate foreign businesses such as Carribean based gambling sites which are completely legal internationally, and only the US takes offence to them, and privately because there have been a number of cases in the US where judges have ruled that sites the target of commercial litigants should indeed have their domains seized.
We already have censorship thanks to the US, and with the onslaught of first the DMCA, then SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and so on and so forth it's only getting worse under US internet dicatorship. I would've agreed with the let the US keep running the show principle in the 90s when common carrier was an established principle, and it otherwise left it the hell alone, but now? There's no way the US can be trusted indefinitely with it anymore, something has to change.
If you're reaching a point where you have such performance problems, and everything that should be indexed is etc. then you have a number of choices:
1) Look into improving the platform - clustering etc.
2) Look into denormalisation, the views can remain in the same state
3) Look at the feasibility one or more of the ACID principles and switching to NoSQL but accept that you will lose integrity/reliability in doing this
The problems you're talking about aren't so much about inherent problems with SQL and RDBMS's, but about dealing with that volume of data in general. The point is with views you can perform optimisations like denormalisation without screwing the interface to the code, which is what you were complaining about.
iPods were always a better example. The restricting of how competitors could interoperate with content on iTunes and tying iTunes so heavily to the iPod whilst having a clear monopoly in the digital media player market, then also leveraging that to shift people over to iPhones was a clear set of monopoly abuses.
"I'm Serbian btw, you did same here (in Yugoslavia)."
Er, actually I think you'll find that was because your contrymen, perhaps even you yourself, thought it would be a fun idea to massacre tens of thousands of civilians and rape even more.
Still, have fun blaming the West over the fact they shut down your multi-year rape/murder session after you wouldn't stop it yourselves despite being given many many chances to do so.
Still, I don't expect you to know any different, most of your countrymen are still oblivious to the reality of what you actually fucking did, still in denial over the fact you were guilty of the most horrendous genocide in Europe since World War II, guilty of genocide that would've made even Hitler fucking proud.
But yes, it's everyone elses fault, it's not like you really laid seige to civilian cities, it's not like you had snipers sniping innocent civilians, it's not like you ethnically cleansed any areas, it's not like you killed off entire families just because they were different to you.
Seriously, a Serbian criticising a Western nation about peace, democracy, and freedom is a bit like Hitler criticising somewhere like New Zealand over human rights violations.
Give up with the fucking propaganda, get a grip, read some non-Serbian sources about what really happened and accept that your country was guilty of the most horrendous crimes in Europe for 50 years. Christ, even read about it from relatively pro-Serbian sources, anywhere but Serbia itself and you'll realise you and your country have absolutely no right whatsoever to criticise anyone else on this sort of thing - if you can't even accept guilt and begin to move on, if you're still in complete denial of the atrocities you commited, then you're in absolutely no place to be criticising anyone else.
Oh, and I forgot to add, perhaps it's also because Google doesn't need to hire shills to troll Slashdot?
It's ironic, your very employment answers your own question - the reason people hate Facebook more than Google is precisely because Facebook hires too many people like you.
Okay so I know you're just another of those high UID, never posted before anti-Google troll-shills but I can answer this question:
"What I cannot understand is why Google gets a free pass on this while slashdotters absolutely hate Facebook."
There are a number of reasons, but for me they are:
Despite all the FUD your PR company likes to spread, for all the theoretical things Google has done wrong over the years I've never actually suffered anything detrimental as a result of Google's theoretically evil actions. I've never suffered spam, I've never had any problems. Contrast this to Facebook and the theoretical problems turn into actual problems - I have had Facebook illegaly sell my data in breach of the UK's data protection act, I have had it recommend people who it could only have associated with me by illegaly gathering data from elsewhere. I know these things for a fact because we're talking about data which I have not stored on Facebooks systems, e-mail addresses that I have only used in certain places and so forth.
Further, whilst Google certainly does do wrong, it also often tries hard to do right, in contrast I can't think of anything positive that's over and above it's business interests that Facebook has done. I've also yet to see anyone quite as obnoxious and who quite so desperately believes his own bullshit as the guy following the discussion at about 49minutes into this documentary:
Oh, it probably doesn't help that Google came from a couple of guys doing some university research, whilst Facebook came from a guy who stole and cheated left right and centre either. That's not really the greatest starting point for a company who wants to get all our data, whether given it honestly, or whether it's obtained it illegaly. On the illegality thing, here's a hint as to what I'm referring to: under the data protection acts of many countries, including (all?) those in Europe, a third party cannot give a company permission to hold your data, yet Facebook uses EXACTLY this method to gather data on people. The previous automatic opt in on allowing apps to gather friends data even if those friends haven't used that app and hence have no relationship with the 3rd party company in question is an example of this.
"False. First of all, SQL is NOT based on mathematically sound principles of relational algebra."
No, you've completely missed the point - I'm not saying SQL is an implementation of, and only of the relational model and nothing more, and nothing less, merely that those are it's foundations. SQL absolutely IS based on the principles of relational algebra - it's still ultimately based on much of the important set theory that underlies that when it comes down to it. The point being that sure, whilst SQL is far from perfect, it at least stems from far more solid principles than many alternative offerings nowadays which don't even consider looking at fairly sound mathematical principles as a starting point and so just end up a mess. This isn't to say you can't use them for anything - it's the same thing as PHP, sure these things "work", but you can't come crying when you inevitably encounter bugs that stem from the fact many such alternatives are poorly designed and have an abysmal foundation to their existence. At the end of the day, SQL RDBMS are still pretty much the most foundationally solid persistent data platforms we have, that are also practical to use and that's my key point here.
It's also worth noting that because of these differing foundations, you can, if you choose to, use the subset of SQL features that do allow you to adhere to the relational model which genuinely does have a mathematically sound foundation. Thus, any issues you have with SQL allowing you to stray away from the relational model are entirely optional. Compared this to the alternatives, and many of these just don't even give you the option of ensuring your data is sound on mathematically sound foundations.
I'd hence argue that you're being rather dishonest in saying "Because SQL simply ignores the relation model and "does what IBM and Oracle always did". That's not the same thing as "implementing the relational model"." as that's simply not true, SQL doesn't ignore the relational model it's entirely based on it, the only difference being that IBM/Oracle et. al. have extended it.
"I really don't think that a language based on relational algebra has to look like SQL. That's like saying that a language with nouns having singular and plural and verbs having tenses has to look like English."
Well, okay, you're right, if we're being pedantic then yes of course you could change it, but fundamentally my intention was that the SQL language is the way it is because it's intended to map closely to the mathematical operations that define relational algebra, precisely because those are it's foundations. If you start to move away from that you lose those foundations, and whilst not entirely the same thing as replacing the SQL language itself, you only have to look at the problems that arise from ORM implementations to see what happens when you move away from those principles - it's okay for some projects, but in many other cases ORM just gets in your way and forces you to mangle your data into a form that no longer makes sense. So yeah, move things around a bit, change a bit of syntax if that's really what you want, but you're still going to need your selection, projection, and your joins and then what? you've got a language that no one knows, isn't supported anywhere, and that ultimately doesn't change anything of any value because it's still just mimicing those core relational operations.
I guess if you want to get right to the crux of my argument it's this - people like the guy who wrote the blog we're talking about seem to think that the only choices between SQL and alternatives are a few features here and there, and whether you like the syntax - they completely miss the point that there's far more to it than that, that theres fundamental differences in the confidence you can have of the underlying data storage methods, in the data retrieval methods and so forth. Many NoSQL implementations basically just do away with one or more of the ACID principles to achieve their speed benefits and so forth, yet many people usin
It depends on the task though, I'd wager 90% of SQL work that is done by developers day to day isn't in such a performance sensitive environment that it needs to favour performance over normalisation, and I agree with the GP, there's far too many developers out there that just don't do it and hence simply don't have the performance excuse. It really is just bad database design as a result of incompetence most the time.
"Why are we still querying our databases by constructing strings of code in a language most closely related to freaking COBOL, which after being constructed have to be parsed for every single query?"
I couldn't agree with you more, this quote makes me want to vomit. Is this really how low the average competence of today's web developer has stooped? Between PHP developers not getting why PHP is a pretty shitly designed and developed language and stuff like this, I barely get how the web even runs anymore.
To answer the original quote, the reason we're "still querying our databases by constructing strings of code in a language most closely related to freaking COBOL, which after being constructed have to be parsed for every single query?" is because SQL is a language based on mathematically sound principles, and which is supported widely, and known widely, and is processed by database engines across the globe that have literally decades of stability behind them, data in them and so forth.
There's absolutely no reason to change SQL, because if you build a new query language that is based on the same mathematically sound principles of relational algebra then it will er... look just like SQL. The fact the kiddie (I can only assume he's a kiddie due to his blatant lack of knowledge and/or experience in the field) who wrote that blog post doesn't get this suggests he should absolutely not be trusted with your data as he'll only lose it.
This is a classic example of someone bitching about something not because it's bad, but because they simply don't understand it and believe that rather than learn about it properly, it's better to bitch and hope you can somehow effect change by bitching.
The advantage of most SQL/RDBMS is that they do adhere to the ACID principles, and for people who want to be able to have some degree of trust in their data source that's pretty fucking important. It's no surprise that they've moved over to MySQL though as it's one of the few RDBMS that is completely shit at adhering to the ACID principles and keeping uptodate with solid, stable implementations of modern database functionality.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
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Diablo III Released
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"It would take somebody to code something emulating a Blizzard D3 server with quite some logic."
Seeing as just about every MMO with a closed source server has had cloned servers created I doubt it'll be too difficult, nor too unlikely.
Google for Ultima Online server source, Everquest server source, Dark Age of Camelot server source, WoW server source - they've all been done.
"In fact, very little respect is afforded there to the engineering of Apple products in general, versus their design and marketing."
That's because frankly none is deserved since the second coming of Apple. From discolouring Macbooks as the result of heat, to Magsafe fire hazard power adapters, to stupidly easily scratched iPod nanos, to cracking iPhone screens due to the construction being too tight such that when the batteries expand as they sometimes did the screen cracked, through to a phone antenna that had a fundamental design flaw. Even on the software there are many pretty awful examples - iTunes being the most obvious, Safari on Windows being perhaps the worst peice of software I've ever had the misfortune to use when it first came out.
For all the things Apple does right, quality hardware engineering just isn't it. There's simply been no end of defects in Apple products for no reason other than focussing just that bit too much on form over function. Their ideas are good, their products look excellent, and their interfaces are a wonder to use, but quality of engineering - both hardware and software - is pretty shocking for a company with so many resources. It's not that they're alone in this, look at Microsoft's RROD problem with the XBox for example, but I'd argue it's definitely Apple's weakest area with most room for improvement.
You can see how flawed the methodology used by TIOBE it is for yourself - search for C Programming which is the term they use in Wikipedia (their 3rd ranked site) and on the first page alone there's only 3 or 4 matches actually related to C programming - the rest are actually other languages - C sharp, C++, Objective C, BCPL, so effectively even their 3rd ranked site is grossly incorrect even on their first page of searches where only about 10% of the results or whatever are actually for the result they're claiming 100% of results are for. I doubt Google and Blogger's search are any better, at least after the first couple of pages of results.
It's hardly a big deal compared to some of what goes on. Britain can at least be proud in the fact it lost the World Cup bid due to not being willing to entertain the gross levels of corruption that plague FIFA even if it did make it the black sheep of world football for being one of the few willing to speak out.
Honestly, this is pretty small fry compared to the outright bribing of officials that the likes of Russia, and Qatar had to carry out to get their blatantly illogical choices accepted for that.
If this is really all anyone can dig up on Britain's olympic bid then I'd wager that makes Britain one of the most honest nations on earth when it comes to bidding for these sorts of events.
"There's nothing nannyesque about the fire department (well apart from them driving away things like the use of fireworks)."
Right, and there's nothing more nannyesque about hospitals or doctors either. I'm not sure what your point is unless you're trying to apply some kind of double standards to produce an argument that makes no sense?
"The police, when seconds count only minutes away. I've had a few things stolen from me, never recovered... pretty much all interactions with police have been failures. So yes, I could do with them being greatly reduced."
Yes because police are an entirely reactionary force and have never done anything that proactively prevents crime or ever acted as a deterrent. They've never caught anyone who left uncaught would gladly have made you a victim too. How do you actually make it as far as you have in life without having even a basic grasp of what the police are there for? Hint: It's not to catch and punish people guilty of every crime in existence, it's the minimise the impact of criminals on society, and the level of impact is pretty proportional to their funding. Decrease funding and the impact goes up, increase it, and it goes down. What you're saying is that police funding should go down, but then when you end up being a victim of more crime what are you going to do say the same thing? "The police aren't helping me, I've still been victim of crime, let's decrease their funding more". For what it's worth I've NEVER had anything stolen from me, but still would gladly see police numbers increase.
"No - you didn't THINK. You just FEAR."
Perhaps you don't fear, and you certainly don't think. But I'm sure whatever you think BasilBrush does, is at least not as bad as the fate you seem to suffer - dwelling in plain dumb ignorance.
"I'm from a poor country, but I can't see how government-sponsored services are beneficial to society."
There's no need for the but, you're from a country that's just not economically strong enough to supply those services to it's citizens. America doesn't have this excuse.
I'm not convinced it's different anywhere else. The same thing happened in The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden - the judge was part of a music industry lobby organisation and was good friends with the music industry lawyer acting for the prosecution. Despite this he was allowed to continue.
It seems judges are allowed to have severe conflict of interest, at least in Northern Europe.
"Such variable results suggest that TIOBE's sampling method isn't all that reliable or accurate to begin with, but I think we all have a pretty good idea what languages people are really using and for what."
They state their methodology on their own site and it's a complete joke, it goes something like this:
A language has to be both Turing complete and have an article on Wikipedia to be considered.
Data is then gathered by simply searching the top 8 searchable sites on the net and results are weighted by order, which from their own page gives:
The figure used from the search results is simply the number of page hits, so articles on blogger such as "Objective C is a terrible language and I'll never use it" would have a 30% weighting towards a hit for Objective C being more popular for example.
But if this wasn't bad enough the queries they use then have arbitrary exceptions and groupings, they list these on their site and it doesn't take more than a second to see how some of the groupings and exceptions are far from incomplete or blatantly flawed.
Then to make things worse they also apply a completely arbitrary, human decided confidence factor to each language, so say they assume searches for C++ are only 90% accurate they apply a 90% accuracy factor. They list the confidence factors on their site but don't explain the methodology for choosing them. Again it doesn't take a second to see how flawed their confidence factors are.
The fact they're a company that needs to make money, and the fact their methodology is so fundamentally flawed and so terribly arbitrary means that if anyone takes anything from TIOBE has to be pretty damn retarded.
The fact that the 2nd - 4th place weighted sites they use (Blogger, Wikipedia, YouTube) are entirely based on user generated content and account for 54% of their weighting, with Google if you're good at SEO taking that up to 84% of the weighting means that it should be pretty easy for a single motivated individual to troll TIOBE's rankings. A few extra blogger accounts and postings coupled with a few insertions into Wikipedia whose search includes discussions not just democratically decided valid content and a few YouTube videos is probably enough to completely sway some of the languages standings quite dramatically I suspect. If anyone is bored then it may be a worthwhile experiment - see if you can pump some arbitrary language you've never even heard of into the top 20 or something!
I've said it before a thousand times but it often gets drowned out in the ever growing amounts of idiocy that are poisoning Slashdot but if you want a more realistic picture of languages that are popular - particularly in terms of what you should learn from a career point of view, then you're far better off just searching job sites, or using sites like Stack Overflow, just don't be suprised when what people are REALLY using is completely different to what TIOBE likes to pretend people are using. Hint: Employers are far and away still looking more for Java, C#, C++, and PHP developers than anything else - iOS development might be growing but it's still only a small fragment of the amount of development going on out there - server side stuff, web stuff, business desktop front ends, university teaching, open source - the fraction of this sort of development being done in Objective C is negligible and this accounts for far and away the majority of development that's done in the world.
Funnily enough it was Ottawa where I had the problems too and I agree, the officers are Toronto are much friendlier and much more welcoming so I like you do exactly the same now - fly into Toronto, and just drive to Ottawa.
That's a problem I have with a lot of these laws including those in the US - they're getting implemented with the intention whether explicitly stated or not that they be used for minor crimes like file sharing. Yet there's a price to these laws - the effect is what you state, and it means the criminals they really should be catching, i.e. child abusers, become much harder to catch, whilst the file sharers continue sharing.
There's a kind of an unspoken honour system on the internet in a way - if you let people file share etc. then those with the abilities will not attack your sites, they will not produce anonymisers, they will not produce technology that disrupts law enforcement, but if you start going after every petty little crime online like that, then expect a response that will benefit file sharers, terrorists, and paedophiles alike. The authorities need to realise that - that the real winners of a war between authorities and those who commit minor crimes will be people who commit serious crimes.
Perhaps this really isn't about minor crimes, but excuse me if I get the feeling that it wouldn't take long for this snooping charter to be used for exactly that which would only crate an arms race which slow moving leglislatures can never hope to win.
Thank you. The less people we have moderating who insist they know the absolute truth of what happened when in reality all they have is some likely 5th hand account from an unobjective press source the better.
Really, if you're going to show that level of inability to pursue rational discussion then could you kindly do Slashdot a favour and always not use or undo your mod points?
The fact is you don't know what happened, the fact you feel the need to insist you know exactly what happened in response to something that IMO was intended somewhat sarcastically implies you have a strong political bias on the subject and political bias is like a fucking terminal disease on this site.
Slashdot Mirror
The British army is one of the culprits, I know this because we've developed software for them and still have to support IE6 to this day. They have plans to do away with it but they just get put back further and further.
The problem is how, in a time of budget cuts, can you possibly justify upgrading every computer in the army to IE6 vs. making sure your soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have body armour, helicopters to avoid IEDs and so forth?
It's just not a priority. The threat of cyber attack causing any actual measurable harm is negligible compared to IEDs etc. - even something on the scale of Wikileaks'/Manning's US cable leaks did less harm to people's lives than the odd IED here or there has done.
Upgrading IE6 is something the army can save for peace time when they get the fuck out of Afghanistan and are sat around with nothing better to do and nothing better to spend their money on.
Well, there is an alternative - use local contractors, but contractors are expensive, so you better have pretty decent margins for this option to be feasible, otherwise I agree, you're delaying the inevitable - your company wont last long if you're going to use ridiculously cheap Asian software development outsourcing operations, as their quality is less than crap.
"Didn't RTFA"
"How is it "math" if it's a trivial observation ?"
Sometimes you don't need to rtfa to get an idea of the topic at hand, sometimes you don't need to read it to be able to ask valid questions. This is not one of those times, your question is well answered in tfa.
It's mathematical because they found a number of mathematical properties, I can't remember what these are as I read this yesterday on the way home, and I've slept since then, but they were things such as the number of stations being a consistent factor relative to other properties such as line length and that sort of thing. They even tell you what those factors are. There was something like 14 mathematical properties that could be used to count, and/or predict certain properties about a subway network regardless of it's age etc.
Though I suppose you could claim that these ratios and so forth were discovered via trivial observation if you want to be pedantic, and well, great, but in that case just about all math stems from trivial observation based on some arbitrary definition of trivial giving the paradox that if you're implying, as you are from your comment, that something discovered via trivial observation isn't ever math, then no math is necessarily math depending on what you class as trivial.
It doesn't really matter what you deem trivial, at the end of the day it's still math, just as how I might rip a piece of paper in two and observe trivially that I now have two pieces of paper - it still means that ripping said piece of paper in two results in two pieces has a grounding in math trivial or not.
Well, sorry for being pedantic anyway, I'm in one of those moods!
The reasons international governance would be better is the same reason continuous coalition/minority governments give healthier democracies - the only legislation that can be passed is that which is common sense and not controversal. Legislation that is highly controversal like censorship ends up tied up in battles that last for eternity and so never reach agreement for implementation.
It's not use arguing that we should just trust the US because the rest of the world wants to censor the net - the US and even private US corporations are already censoring the net. The US government with it's ICE seizures of legitimate foreign businesses such as Carribean based gambling sites which are completely legal internationally, and only the US takes offence to them, and privately because there have been a number of cases in the US where judges have ruled that sites the target of commercial litigants should indeed have their domains seized.
We already have censorship thanks to the US, and with the onslaught of first the DMCA, then SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and so on and so forth it's only getting worse under US internet dicatorship. I would've agreed with the let the US keep running the show principle in the 90s when common carrier was an established principle, and it otherwise left it the hell alone, but now? There's no way the US can be trusted indefinitely with it anymore, something has to change.
If you're reaching a point where you have such performance problems, and everything that should be indexed is etc. then you have a number of choices:
1) Look into improving the platform - clustering etc.
2) Look into denormalisation, the views can remain in the same state
3) Look at the feasibility one or more of the ACID principles and switching to NoSQL but accept that you will lose integrity/reliability in doing this
The problems you're talking about aren't so much about inherent problems with SQL and RDBMS's, but about dealing with that volume of data in general. The point is with views you can perform optimisations like denormalisation without screwing the interface to the code, which is what you were complaining about.
Why not use views?
iPods were always a better example. The restricting of how competitors could interoperate with content on iTunes and tying iTunes so heavily to the iPod whilst having a clear monopoly in the digital media player market, then also leveraging that to shift people over to iPhones was a clear set of monopoly abuses.
Shame no one ever dared slap them for it.
"I'm Serbian btw, you did same here (in Yugoslavia)."
Er, actually I think you'll find that was because your contrymen, perhaps even you yourself, thought it would be a fun idea to massacre tens of thousands of civilians and rape even more.
Still, have fun blaming the West over the fact they shut down your multi-year rape/murder session after you wouldn't stop it yourselves despite being given many many chances to do so.
Still, I don't expect you to know any different, most of your countrymen are still oblivious to the reality of what you actually fucking did, still in denial over the fact you were guilty of the most horrendous genocide in Europe since World War II, guilty of genocide that would've made even Hitler fucking proud.
But yes, it's everyone elses fault, it's not like you really laid seige to civilian cities, it's not like you had snipers sniping innocent civilians, it's not like you ethnically cleansed any areas, it's not like you killed off entire families just because they were different to you.
Seriously, a Serbian criticising a Western nation about peace, democracy, and freedom is a bit like Hitler criticising somewhere like New Zealand over human rights violations.
Give up with the fucking propaganda, get a grip, read some non-Serbian sources about what really happened and accept that your country was guilty of the most horrendous crimes in Europe for 50 years. Christ, even read about it from relatively pro-Serbian sources, anywhere but Serbia itself and you'll realise you and your country have absolutely no right whatsoever to criticise anyone else on this sort of thing - if you can't even accept guilt and begin to move on, if you're still in complete denial of the atrocities you commited, then you're in absolutely no place to be criticising anyone else.
Oh, and I forgot to add, perhaps it's also because Google doesn't need to hire shills to troll Slashdot?
It's ironic, your very employment answers your own question - the reason people hate Facebook more than Google is precisely because Facebook hires too many people like you.
Okay so I know you're just another of those high UID, never posted before anti-Google troll-shills but I can answer this question:
"What I cannot understand is why Google gets a free pass on this while slashdotters absolutely hate Facebook."
There are a number of reasons, but for me they are:
Despite all the FUD your PR company likes to spread, for all the theoretical things Google has done wrong over the years I've never actually suffered anything detrimental as a result of Google's theoretically evil actions. I've never suffered spam, I've never had any problems. Contrast this to Facebook and the theoretical problems turn into actual problems - I have had Facebook illegaly sell my data in breach of the UK's data protection act, I have had it recommend people who it could only have associated with me by illegaly gathering data from elsewhere. I know these things for a fact because we're talking about data which I have not stored on Facebooks systems, e-mail addresses that I have only used in certain places and so forth.
Further, whilst Google certainly does do wrong, it also often tries hard to do right, in contrast I can't think of anything positive that's over and above it's business interests that Facebook has done. I've also yet to see anyone quite as obnoxious and who quite so desperately believes his own bullshit as the guy following the discussion at about 49minutes into this documentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeOlO_2nddY
Still, it's fun watching him squirm.
Oh, it probably doesn't help that Google came from a couple of guys doing some university research, whilst Facebook came from a guy who stole and cheated left right and centre either. That's not really the greatest starting point for a company who wants to get all our data, whether given it honestly, or whether it's obtained it illegaly. On the illegality thing, here's a hint as to what I'm referring to: under the data protection acts of many countries, including (all?) those in Europe, a third party cannot give a company permission to hold your data, yet Facebook uses EXACTLY this method to gather data on people. The previous automatic opt in on allowing apps to gather friends data even if those friends haven't used that app and hence have no relationship with the 3rd party company in question is an example of this.
"False. First of all, SQL is NOT based on mathematically sound principles of relational algebra."
No, you've completely missed the point - I'm not saying SQL is an implementation of, and only of the relational model and nothing more, and nothing less, merely that those are it's foundations. SQL absolutely IS based on the principles of relational algebra - it's still ultimately based on much of the important set theory that underlies that when it comes down to it. The point being that sure, whilst SQL is far from perfect, it at least stems from far more solid principles than many alternative offerings nowadays which don't even consider looking at fairly sound mathematical principles as a starting point and so just end up a mess. This isn't to say you can't use them for anything - it's the same thing as PHP, sure these things "work", but you can't come crying when you inevitably encounter bugs that stem from the fact many such alternatives are poorly designed and have an abysmal foundation to their existence. At the end of the day, SQL RDBMS are still pretty much the most foundationally solid persistent data platforms we have, that are also practical to use and that's my key point here.
It's also worth noting that because of these differing foundations, you can, if you choose to, use the subset of SQL features that do allow you to adhere to the relational model which genuinely does have a mathematically sound foundation. Thus, any issues you have with SQL allowing you to stray away from the relational model are entirely optional. Compared this to the alternatives, and many of these just don't even give you the option of ensuring your data is sound on mathematically sound foundations.
I'd hence argue that you're being rather dishonest in saying "Because SQL simply ignores the relation model and "does what IBM and Oracle always did". That's not the same thing as "implementing the relational model"." as that's simply not true, SQL doesn't ignore the relational model it's entirely based on it, the only difference being that IBM/Oracle et. al. have extended it.
"I really don't think that a language based on relational algebra has to look like SQL. That's like saying that a language with nouns having singular and plural and verbs having tenses has to look like English."
Well, okay, you're right, if we're being pedantic then yes of course you could change it, but fundamentally my intention was that the SQL language is the way it is because it's intended to map closely to the mathematical operations that define relational algebra, precisely because those are it's foundations. If you start to move away from that you lose those foundations, and whilst not entirely the same thing as replacing the SQL language itself, you only have to look at the problems that arise from ORM implementations to see what happens when you move away from those principles - it's okay for some projects, but in many other cases ORM just gets in your way and forces you to mangle your data into a form that no longer makes sense. So yeah, move things around a bit, change a bit of syntax if that's really what you want, but you're still going to need your selection, projection, and your joins and then what? you've got a language that no one knows, isn't supported anywhere, and that ultimately doesn't change anything of any value because it's still just mimicing those core relational operations.
I guess if you want to get right to the crux of my argument it's this - people like the guy who wrote the blog we're talking about seem to think that the only choices between SQL and alternatives are a few features here and there, and whether you like the syntax - they completely miss the point that there's far more to it than that, that theres fundamental differences in the confidence you can have of the underlying data storage methods, in the data retrieval methods and so forth. Many NoSQL implementations basically just do away with one or more of the ACID principles to achieve their speed benefits and so forth, yet many people usin
It depends on the task though, I'd wager 90% of SQL work that is done by developers day to day isn't in such a performance sensitive environment that it needs to favour performance over normalisation, and I agree with the GP, there's far too many developers out there that just don't do it and hence simply don't have the performance excuse. It really is just bad database design as a result of incompetence most the time.
"Why are we still querying our databases by constructing strings of code in a language most closely related to freaking COBOL, which after being constructed have to be parsed for every single query?"
I couldn't agree with you more, this quote makes me want to vomit. Is this really how low the average competence of today's web developer has stooped? Between PHP developers not getting why PHP is a pretty shitly designed and developed language and stuff like this, I barely get how the web even runs anymore.
To answer the original quote, the reason we're "still querying our databases by constructing strings of code in a language most closely related to freaking COBOL, which after being constructed have to be parsed for every single query?" is because SQL is a language based on mathematically sound principles, and which is supported widely, and known widely, and is processed by database engines across the globe that have literally decades of stability behind them, data in them and so forth.
There's absolutely no reason to change SQL, because if you build a new query language that is based on the same mathematically sound principles of relational algebra then it will er... look just like SQL. The fact the kiddie (I can only assume he's a kiddie due to his blatant lack of knowledge and/or experience in the field) who wrote that blog post doesn't get this suggests he should absolutely not be trusted with your data as he'll only lose it.
This is a classic example of someone bitching about something not because it's bad, but because they simply don't understand it and believe that rather than learn about it properly, it's better to bitch and hope you can somehow effect change by bitching.
The advantage of most SQL/RDBMS is that they do adhere to the ACID principles, and for people who want to be able to have some degree of trust in their data source that's pretty fucking important. It's no surprise that they've moved over to MySQL though as it's one of the few RDBMS that is completely shit at adhering to the ACID principles and keeping uptodate with solid, stable implementations of modern database functionality.
"It would take somebody to code something emulating a Blizzard D3 server with quite some logic."
Seeing as just about every MMO with a closed source server has had cloned servers created I doubt it'll be too difficult, nor too unlikely.
Google for Ultima Online server source, Everquest server source, Dark Age of Camelot server source, WoW server source - they've all been done.
"In fact, very little respect is afforded there to the engineering of Apple products in general, versus their design and marketing."
That's because frankly none is deserved since the second coming of Apple. From discolouring Macbooks as the result of heat, to Magsafe fire hazard power adapters, to stupidly easily scratched iPod nanos, to cracking iPhone screens due to the construction being too tight such that when the batteries expand as they sometimes did the screen cracked, through to a phone antenna that had a fundamental design flaw. Even on the software there are many pretty awful examples - iTunes being the most obvious, Safari on Windows being perhaps the worst peice of software I've ever had the misfortune to use when it first came out.
For all the things Apple does right, quality hardware engineering just isn't it. There's simply been no end of defects in Apple products for no reason other than focussing just that bit too much on form over function. Their ideas are good, their products look excellent, and their interfaces are a wonder to use, but quality of engineering - both hardware and software - is pretty shocking for a company with so many resources. It's not that they're alone in this, look at Microsoft's RROD problem with the XBox for example, but I'd argue it's definitely Apple's weakest area with most room for improvement.
You can see how flawed the methodology used by TIOBE it is for yourself - search for C Programming which is the term they use in Wikipedia (their 3rd ranked site) and on the first page alone there's only 3 or 4 matches actually related to C programming - the rest are actually other languages - C sharp, C++, Objective C, BCPL, so effectively even their 3rd ranked site is grossly incorrect even on their first page of searches where only about 10% of the results or whatever are actually for the result they're claiming 100% of results are for. I doubt Google and Blogger's search are any better, at least after the first couple of pages of results.
It's hardly a big deal compared to some of what goes on. Britain can at least be proud in the fact it lost the World Cup bid due to not being willing to entertain the gross levels of corruption that plague FIFA even if it did make it the black sheep of world football for being one of the few willing to speak out.
Honestly, this is pretty small fry compared to the outright bribing of officials that the likes of Russia, and Qatar had to carry out to get their blatantly illogical choices accepted for that.
If this is really all anyone can dig up on Britain's olympic bid then I'd wager that makes Britain one of the most honest nations on earth when it comes to bidding for these sorts of events.
"There's nothing nannyesque about the fire department (well apart from them driving away things like the use of fireworks)."
Right, and there's nothing more nannyesque about hospitals or doctors either. I'm not sure what your point is unless you're trying to apply some kind of double standards to produce an argument that makes no sense?
"The police, when seconds count only minutes away. I've had a few things stolen from me, never recovered... pretty much all interactions with police have been failures. So yes, I could do with them being greatly reduced."
Yes because police are an entirely reactionary force and have never done anything that proactively prevents crime or ever acted as a deterrent. They've never caught anyone who left uncaught would gladly have made you a victim too. How do you actually make it as far as you have in life without having even a basic grasp of what the police are there for? Hint: It's not to catch and punish people guilty of every crime in existence, it's the minimise the impact of criminals on society, and the level of impact is pretty proportional to their funding. Decrease funding and the impact goes up, increase it, and it goes down. What you're saying is that police funding should go down, but then when you end up being a victim of more crime what are you going to do say the same thing? "The police aren't helping me, I've still been victim of crime, let's decrease their funding more". For what it's worth I've NEVER had anything stolen from me, but still would gladly see police numbers increase.
"No - you didn't THINK. You just FEAR."
Perhaps you don't fear, and you certainly don't think. But I'm sure whatever you think BasilBrush does, is at least not as bad as the fate you seem to suffer - dwelling in plain dumb ignorance.
"I'm from a poor country, but I can't see how government-sponsored services are beneficial to society."
There's no need for the but, you're from a country that's just not economically strong enough to supply those services to it's citizens. America doesn't have this excuse.
I'm not convinced it's different anywhere else. The same thing happened in The Pirate Bay trial in Sweden - the judge was part of a music industry lobby organisation and was good friends with the music industry lawyer acting for the prosecution. Despite this he was allowed to continue.
It seems judges are allowed to have severe conflict of interest, at least in Northern Europe.
"Such variable results suggest that TIOBE's sampling method isn't all that reliable or accurate to begin with, but I think we all have a pretty good idea what languages people are really using and for what."
They state their methodology on their own site and it's a complete joke, it goes something like this:
A language has to be both Turing complete and have an article on Wikipedia to be considered.
Data is then gathered by simply searching the top 8 searchable sites on the net and results are weighted by order, which from their own page gives:
Google: 30%
Blogger: 30%
Wikipedia: 15%
YouTube: 9%
Baidu: 6%
Yahoo!: 3%
Bing: 3%
Amazon: 3%
The figure used from the search results is simply the number of page hits, so articles on blogger such as "Objective C is a terrible language and I'll never use it" would have a 30% weighting towards a hit for Objective C being more popular for example.
But if this wasn't bad enough the queries they use then have arbitrary exceptions and groupings, they list these on their site and it doesn't take more than a second to see how some of the groupings and exceptions are far from incomplete or blatantly flawed.
Then to make things worse they also apply a completely arbitrary, human decided confidence factor to each language, so say they assume searches for C++ are only 90% accurate they apply a 90% accuracy factor. They list the confidence factors on their site but don't explain the methodology for choosing them. Again it doesn't take a second to see how flawed their confidence factors are.
Their methodology description is here:
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm
The fact they're a company that needs to make money, and the fact their methodology is so fundamentally flawed and so terribly arbitrary means that if anyone takes anything from TIOBE has to be pretty damn retarded.
The fact that the 2nd - 4th place weighted sites they use (Blogger, Wikipedia, YouTube) are entirely based on user generated content and account for 54% of their weighting, with Google if you're good at SEO taking that up to 84% of the weighting means that it should be pretty easy for a single motivated individual to troll TIOBE's rankings. A few extra blogger accounts and postings coupled with a few insertions into Wikipedia whose search includes discussions not just democratically decided valid content and a few YouTube videos is probably enough to completely sway some of the languages standings quite dramatically I suspect. If anyone is bored then it may be a worthwhile experiment - see if you can pump some arbitrary language you've never even heard of into the top 20 or something!
I've said it before a thousand times but it often gets drowned out in the ever growing amounts of idiocy that are poisoning Slashdot but if you want a more realistic picture of languages that are popular - particularly in terms of what you should learn from a career point of view, then you're far better off just searching job sites, or using sites like Stack Overflow, just don't be suprised when what people are REALLY using is completely different to what TIOBE likes to pretend people are using. Hint: Employers are far and away still looking more for Java, C#, C++, and PHP developers than anything else - iOS development might be growing but it's still only a small fragment of the amount of development going on out there - server side stuff, web stuff, business desktop front ends, university teaching, open source - the fraction of this sort of development being done in Objective C is negligible and this accounts for far and away the majority of development that's done in the world.
I work fo
Funnily enough it was Ottawa where I had the problems too and I agree, the officers are Toronto are much friendlier and much more welcoming so I like you do exactly the same now - fly into Toronto, and just drive to Ottawa.
That's a problem I have with a lot of these laws including those in the US - they're getting implemented with the intention whether explicitly stated or not that they be used for minor crimes like file sharing. Yet there's a price to these laws - the effect is what you state, and it means the criminals they really should be catching, i.e. child abusers, become much harder to catch, whilst the file sharers continue sharing.
There's a kind of an unspoken honour system on the internet in a way - if you let people file share etc. then those with the abilities will not attack your sites, they will not produce anonymisers, they will not produce technology that disrupts law enforcement, but if you start going after every petty little crime online like that, then expect a response that will benefit file sharers, terrorists, and paedophiles alike. The authorities need to realise that - that the real winners of a war between authorities and those who commit minor crimes will be people who commit serious crimes.
Perhaps this really isn't about minor crimes, but excuse me if I get the feeling that it wouldn't take long for this snooping charter to be used for exactly that which would only crate an arms race which slow moving leglislatures can never hope to win.
"Fuck it, I'll undo my mod points."
Thank you. The less people we have moderating who insist they know the absolute truth of what happened when in reality all they have is some likely 5th hand account from an unobjective press source the better.
Really, if you're going to show that level of inability to pursue rational discussion then could you kindly do Slashdot a favour and always not use or undo your mod points?
The fact is you don't know what happened, the fact you feel the need to insist you know exactly what happened in response to something that IMO was intended somewhat sarcastically implies you have a strong political bias on the subject and political bias is like a fucking terminal disease on this site.
"The idea is to stop you from hanging out with the wrong sort of people."
No the idea is to:
1) Prevent people acting as lookouts assisting a criminal
2) To punish people who had the power to report or prevent a crime from not doing so and hence implicitly supporting the crime
Despite this we still jail less people than America does.