If they optimize the processor to do really well in Lightwave, for instance, then the application benchmarks will reveal the benefits in a very obvious, and easily duplicated, mannre. For people who need the power for their Lightwave processing needs, then that is absolutely completely suited for them. Synthetic benchmarks, on the other hand, often have a tenuous correlation with real world applications, and are numbers that are largely abstract to most purchasers.
Intel has used the "once compilers catch up..." scam for years, and every time people find themselves with a long obsolete processor by the time the software the theoretically exploits it arrives.
My general practice is to ignore any synthetic benchmarks because they represent no real world value whatsoever: Instead I look to application benchmarks, like compressing divx movies or rendering 3D scenes, if that was the use that I had in plan for my PC.
Inappropriate analogy: You can hardly compare a government site with someone's home. One is a heavily identified, highly sought after target (with potentially millions in profits to the successful intruder), and the other you at best might find out that Bob has a fetish for feet. Hardly a good comparison.
However, why not compare the government to a bank: How would you appreciate a bank that instead of a phone has written notes they send by courier, and their vault is a big sack with a money sign on it in the middle of the customer area. Would you say this is reasonable or responsible security given the context of their job?
Do you really think that these rather amateur (or so it seems) security consultants were the first to find these lapses in security? I highly doubt it. Perhaps it was beneficial that they were so public about it simply because it makes it a lot harder to ignore.
And regarding the IT being busy doing other things: If they can't secure the network then they should _GET_OFF_THE_BLOODY_INTERNET_. I'm 100% serious. There are countless government computers and networks that are theoretically publicly accessible with absolutely no justifiable reason but that it was easier for the IT department.
While I think these guys should be held accountable, at the same time I wonder in the heavy hand of the law is a case of shooting the messenger? Are these people who are so willing to call in the feds equally as willing to actually fix the source of the problem, or are they hoping that by pretending there's no problem it achieves the same effect? Color me a cynic, but I suspect the latter.
The primary assumption is that running a Domain is a better model for everyone. It's not. All of the buggery that is coming out of Redmond now makes life hell for those who need to administer a Workgroup, who need to update clients on the network, but it doesn't mean that was the wrong decision for their office.
You state that running a domain isn't best for everyone, but then revert and claim that Microsoft should cater to those who run with a workgroup because their updates, etc, favor those who run a domain: Microsoft has made it very clear that for centralized security and administration, a domain should be used where more than a few computers are informally thrown together. This is a part of the process of deploying a Windows platform network: Install a domain. Whether you agree with it or not, it is the recommended practice, so you can't fault them when you don't follow it.
The point is, why,, if it is the way every office should be configured, is a domain controller not a part of every Windows NT installation? The point is, why should someone have to spend hundreds of dollars to find out about how to administer an operating environment?
Because Microsoft makes the installation of an office network granular: Some people might have 500 workstations and 3 servers, and another might have 20 servers and 7 workstations. Crying that they don't make one master one-sized-fits-all install is silly. Why doesn't a new car come with the highway to drive it on?
Microsoft, by trying to control the dissemination of information regarding administering their operating environment, has spawned a hoarde of Linux advocates that aren't willing to give Microsof a chance anymore. The information for administering a Linux server is available on the Internet, if you mess it up, it's your own fault. For Micrsoft products, one must choose from the overpriced dead-tree documentation, or the overpriced monkey-certification system.
Okay now you're just going to the bizarre. Microsoft posts as much or more information than anyone, freely available, and regardless: If you're in setting up computers for an office environment then the cost of a "MCSE Training Kit" should be TRIVIAL (and if it seems expensive then you're cutting corners in the wrong places). Note that Microsoft training kits virtually always come with a CD ROM electronic edition as well. The Linux availability of documentation is largely a BS myth: Most online newsgroups are full of those whose only reply to any question is "RTFM!!!!!", and the documentation itself is generally atrocious (because those who do it as a hobby generally aren't focused on writing good documentation).
BS. That's standard open-source "why we aren't accepted" fodder. How about "Exchange has proven itself in the industry, so without a credible competitor it's the natural choice"? I see the other classic "Oh, they just like Outlook because it's included with Office" argument throughout the threads as well: Classic, delusional, self-consoling nonsense. Exchange is a superb groupware solution, with no credible peers, and Outlook is the best, bar none, PIM software on the Windows platform. I would love if there was something better and some good competition, but the laughable nonsense seen here on Slashdot doesn't encourage it.
Corporations care much less about software politics than most of us do. The open source solution has the benefit of getting out of proprietary formats, but I don't think that's very high up on the list of priorities of the people making the decisions.
The second sentence is redundant: Corporations do care if "proprietary formats" have specific advantages or disadvantages, but they don't care when it's just politics (which often it is, particularly with the open source community). If you can say "Well product X offers Z ISO standard functionality, which means that we can use the highly rated Y client for 1/4th the price of Q", then you've offered an advantage. If, on the other hand, you stomp your feet and have a tantrum about how Microsoft added extensions to the extension fields of Kerberos, well then you're just politicking. Every one of these nuances has end results, and if you can't quantify them for the suits, then don't expect to get respect. Sadly, the introverted geeks club (of which I am happily a member) are incredibly incapable of appreciating or estimating the costs of the various factors, but instead approach technical issues with a moral righteousness that turns most people off.
You've touched on the truth, though: The cost of Exchange, even the super Exchange server with thousands of CALs, is trivial chump change to most corporations, and the cost of a couple of sysadmins to administer the mail server far eclipses it in a single year. Tiny shops that are willing to deal with more hiccups and put more elbow grease into it may care about cutting some corners, but no real corporation is going to.
If you'd read, you would understand that there is no domain controller at this site. Can you say "workgroup?" If you'd bothered to read, you would understand there's no NT server at this site.
His point still stands though: Who runs an office environment with multiple Windows machines without a domain? Not having a domain infrastructure is the first big mistake, and a lack of a group policy is just a continuation on it. Without commenting on the specific instance, he is entirely right that there are countless Linux advocates out there who know absolutely nothing about how to properly maintain a Windows office, yet that doesn't stop them from criticizing it.
The classic problem with any well he has an important to make justification is that there are literally countless groups and individuals with a self-professed really important point to make. If you open the gates to this guy, then you open the gates to every environmental crusader, local civic activist, granny Scott who wants a speed bump on her street, and Jimmy Popcorn that wants cell phones banned at the Cineplex. I read the paper today, and I have the ability to seek out any candidates website any time that I want, so I DO NOT WANT TO BE FORCED TO HEAR THEIR MESSAGE. "Opt-out" programs are pure BS, not only because it's a system that people are grossly wary of because of many much more insidious spammers, but also because it's the opposite of what it should be: If people haven't gone to a government website and selected the "email me information from the candidates", then you have no right to presume that they by default want it when the overwhelming majority don't. While people have mentioned that the other forms of advertising cost money, the truth is that I've never paid attention to them either: that calender they send gets chucked in the recycling bin, and the lame one-sided radio ads are completely wasted. When it comes down to election time I watch the debates and read the newspaper rundowns, I don't listen to the same old useless rhetoric being pimped from one side.
While everyone talks about the transfer cost of spam, I think they're missing the point (although it is an important point): The problem with spam is that it steadily increases the risk that actually important messages will be lost amongst the hundreds of spam messages. Already my Hotmail accounts sticks any message with "BTW" or "So..." in the junk mail folder, requiring me to actively scan it for legitimate messages, but I know that I've deleted actually useful messages while mass deleting the latest block of "Thank you for your order" and "Re: My password" spams. This infuriates me. There is absolutely no comparison with paper mail where the ratio of letter sized spam mail is probably only 20% of the ratio of real mail, versus the 500% or so of email spam.
Comparing to the GF4 is useless? Oh, so when I go to the store I have the choice of getting a GF5? Oh, right, they barely even have silicon test samples of the GF5, much less being within months from having a board on the market. At that time there'll very likely be a Radon 9800 Super Pro (the 9700 is on a.15 micron process, so they have a huge opening to create a.13 or small micron die and correspondingly up the frequency, just in time for nvidia's response).
In any case, there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that the NV30 will beat the 9700 : In case you haven't noticed, nvidia's cards have been hitting the wall, and the gap from generation to generation is getting closer and closer together: That's what makes the 9700 so remarkably -> It isn't the traditional "20% better than our mid-season `pro'" model, but rather it is a considerable jump in performance. I'm neither a nvidia or ATI fan (I have a GF3 card in my machine, though I was eyeballing a bargain Radeon 8500 today for it's dual-headed feature), but instead I'm a fan of the best bang for my dollar, and let the loser be damned.
The 200fps thing is just dumb. Play a game like Operation Flashpoint (I'm not going to even mention that people who don't get that Quake 3 benchmarks are simplified synthentic numbers for relative analysis only are morons...whoops, already did) and you'll know why the 9700 is just the beginning.
Should this link us back to the MySQL story?
on
PGP Acquired From NAI
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
You know, the one that talks about MySQL supplanting Oracle....
Warning: Too many connections in/var/www/html/pgp/conn.php on line 7
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in/var/www/html/pgp/conn.php on line 7
I completely agree with this. Using XP I'm continually fighting with idiotic "helpful" things (like "simple file sharing"), and like you I've configured it to be as much like 2000 as possible. Of course the one really nice thing about XP is the very fast boot-up times: My prior Windows 2000 configuration literally took minutes to finish chugging, but with XP it's about 9 seconds.
Sell graphics cards with a price that is very competitive, if not hard to believe, by offering mail-in rebates: A practice which makes no logical sense but is burgeoning in the computer industry (sidenote: Mail-in rebates should be illegal. The non-honoured rate of mail-in rebates is absolutely huge: Whoops, it got lost in the mail, like 98% of your fellow customer's rebates).
After you've gotten many millions of dollars that is technically your customers, and customers start to wise up that rebates are seldom honored, fold up shop.
The fact that the majority of people using Google are still using Windows 98 says volumes: even if Windows 98 is flaky; even if Windows 98 crashes or gives weird errors; even if Microsoft makes something better that promises near-100% compatibility with their old programs -- people aren't switching. The question that must be asked is: why?
Because switching is an investment of time and money, and if someone has a working computer, why bother? The humorous reality is that Microsoft is their own biggest competitor to people upgrading: Even running Windows 98 you can still run IE 6.0, for example. Of course Microsoft has started to see the satisfaction that people have with their current OS, so things like Media Player are now only coming out in new versions for XP, for instance.
Personally I find it very hard to believe that as many people use Windows 2000 as Google reports: Windows 2000 is a `professional' OS, and it was never marketed or really sold to the home population (and it's expensive as well), yet 20% of Google users use it? I have to guess that that 20% is mostly corporate users, or developers.
It gets to be more questionable when they talk about a "SETI@Home" type of distributed application : For something so thoroughly useless, that is nothing more than an absurd waste of electricity (and it is a waste of electricity: Computers are left on when they would have been turned off, and barring that the CPU is actively consuming power rather than the dramatically lower power usage halt instruction which it would be running normally).
This seems like an absurdly irrelevant number study, but it is intriguing from a purely number theory perspective.
In any case, what is the mathematical function for inverting the digits of a decimal value? (i.e. 192 -> 291). I'm not including textual "move the digits around". I hardly am concerned with number theory anymore, but this does intrigue me.
Solving business logic within the database seems like it could get counterproductive in a hurry.
Yet this is exactly the opposite direction that most database designers are taking (and I definitely agree with them): Oracle lets your stored procedures include complex Java functions, and SQL Server is adding the.NET runtime within stored procedures. Why? Because it is appropriate and proper to black box the database from the front end developers. It isn't hiding the soil conditions from the architect, but rather it's stopping the architect from fiddling in the steel mill because he considers himself an expert amateur metallurgist.
Security and stored procedures should never be used in the same sentence, especially when used in web based applications
I could not disagree with this more.
If anyone gets into hat DB even as a user, they can toast your DB by running your SP's.
Yet, ironically, most "component middleware" security advocates have to basically completely open up their database, and then they implement hacked in security systems in the middleware. Of course this means that the database, by design, is completely open to every developer (which is a huge no-no in real team development), and is open for giant faults when each individual developer misinterprets, or creates an adhoc SQL string appended user supplied criteria, etc.
For example in PHP you can check both the referring URL and the script name and a global var in the calling script before allowing any DB access to occur. That gives you three additional layers of security above that of the DB and webserver security
Sure, that's fine and dandy, and of course because that's the domain of that area, then it makes sense (just as it makes sense for a firewall to be responsible for barring non-HTTP). However, having said that, the only security that should be in a component is ancillary security: Any well designed database should be entirely accessible to the end user without them being able to do ANYTHING they can't do via the web interface anyways.
IMHO, views and stored procedures amount to short scripts, and were added to companies making databases at the right time (pre-boom) to make a new class of database that was term'd Enterprise but realy just meant hybrid DB engines with scripting support.
Well, we are talking about relational database management systems, not a "database file". An RDBMS is the middleware between you and the database file, and facilitates crazy, insane features like concurrency control, transactional control, and most importantly security. Both views and stored procedures are very important facets of security in any modern RDBMS as they allow you to hide the internals of your database, and to only provide applications the ability to have certain constrained "I/O windows" into your database (hell, my normal design norm is to only allow interactions with stored procs, which themselves only operate through constrained views). There is nothing gimmicky about these features, and they are crucial for an "enterprise" system.
Mind you, feeding a bunch of data into a read only system to be queried in a high deterministic way is hardly a real demanding task for a database system: As mentioned somewhere else -> They could have used dbase IV and ODBC for that, or IIS 4 + Microsoft Access.
In this case the article specifically talks about Yahoo running mySQL, and they're supposedly looking at eliminating some other jobs currently filled by an Oracle DB with a wider deployment of MySQL.
Having said that, I think that is absolutely ludicrous. PostgreSQL is a serious database system, but, regardless of future potential, mySQL is not. Reading about it running the Yahoo Financial site says more about the quality of the Yahoo Financial site than it does about the quality to the mySQL DBMS.
Has anyone seen anyone selling stereo component sized computer cases? I've considered rolling my own convergence device, but the last thing I want is to have a tower case sitting beside my TV.
Slashdot Mirror
If they optimize the processor to do really well in Lightwave, for instance, then the application benchmarks will reveal the benefits in a very obvious, and easily duplicated, mannre. For people who need the power for their Lightwave processing needs, then that is absolutely completely suited for them. Synthetic benchmarks, on the other hand, often have a tenuous correlation with real world applications, and are numbers that are largely abstract to most purchasers.
Intel has used the "once compilers catch up..." scam for years, and every time people find themselves with a long obsolete processor by the time the software the theoretically exploits it arrives.
My general practice is to ignore any synthetic benchmarks because they represent no real world value whatsoever: Instead I look to application benchmarks, like compressing divx movies or rendering 3D scenes, if that was the use that I had in plan for my PC.
Inappropriate analogy: You can hardly compare a government site with someone's home. One is a heavily identified, highly sought after target (with potentially millions in profits to the successful intruder), and the other you at best might find out that Bob has a fetish for feet. Hardly a good comparison.
However, why not compare the government to a bank: How would you appreciate a bank that instead of a phone has written notes they send by courier, and their vault is a big sack with a money sign on it in the middle of the customer area. Would you say this is reasonable or responsible security given the context of their job?
Do you really think that these rather amateur (or so it seems) security consultants were the first to find these lapses in security? I highly doubt it. Perhaps it was beneficial that they were so public about it simply because it makes it a lot harder to ignore.
And regarding the IT being busy doing other things: If they can't secure the network then they should _GET_OFF_THE_BLOODY_INTERNET_. I'm 100% serious. There are countless government computers and networks that are theoretically publicly accessible with absolutely no justifiable reason but that it was easier for the IT department.
While I think these guys should be held accountable, at the same time I wonder in the heavy hand of the law is a case of shooting the messenger? Are these people who are so willing to call in the feds equally as willing to actually fix the source of the problem, or are they hoping that by pretending there's no problem it achieves the same effect? Color me a cynic, but I suspect the latter.
The primary assumption is that running a Domain is a better model for everyone. It's not. All of the buggery that is coming out of Redmond now makes life hell for those who need to administer a Workgroup, who need to update clients on the network, but it doesn't mean that was the wrong decision for their office.
You state that running a domain isn't best for everyone, but then revert and claim that Microsoft should cater to those who run with a workgroup because their updates, etc, favor those who run a domain: Microsoft has made it very clear that for centralized security and administration, a domain should be used where more than a few computers are informally thrown together. This is a part of the process of deploying a Windows platform network: Install a domain. Whether you agree with it or not, it is the recommended practice, so you can't fault them when you don't follow it.
The point is, why,, if it is the way every office should be configured, is a domain controller not a part of every Windows NT installation? The point is, why should someone have to spend hundreds of dollars to find out about how to administer an operating environment?
Because Microsoft makes the installation of an office network granular: Some people might have 500 workstations and 3 servers, and another might have 20 servers and 7 workstations. Crying that they don't make one master one-sized-fits-all install is silly. Why doesn't a new car come with the highway to drive it on?
Microsoft, by trying to control the dissemination of information regarding administering their operating environment, has spawned a hoarde of Linux advocates that aren't willing to give Microsof a chance anymore. The information for administering a Linux server is available on the Internet, if you mess it up, it's your own fault. For Micrsoft products, one must choose from the overpriced dead-tree documentation, or the overpriced monkey-certification system.
Okay now you're just going to the bizarre. Microsoft posts as much or more information than anyone, freely available, and regardless: If you're in setting up computers for an office environment then the cost of a "MCSE Training Kit" should be TRIVIAL (and if it seems expensive then you're cutting corners in the wrong places). Note that Microsoft training kits virtually always come with a CD ROM electronic edition as well. The Linux availability of documentation is largely a BS myth: Most online newsgroups are full of those whose only reply to any question is "RTFM!!!!!", and the documentation itself is generally atrocious (because those who do it as a hobby generally aren't focused on writing good documentation).
rediculus! Clearley you do'nt know what your talking abowt.
Next, they like to have someone to sue.
BS. That's standard open-source "why we aren't accepted" fodder. How about "Exchange has proven itself in the industry, so without a credible competitor it's the natural choice"? I see the other classic "Oh, they just like Outlook because it's included with Office" argument throughout the threads as well: Classic, delusional, self-consoling nonsense. Exchange is a superb groupware solution, with no credible peers, and Outlook is the best, bar none, PIM software on the Windows platform. I would love if there was something better and some good competition, but the laughable nonsense seen here on Slashdot doesn't encourage it.
Corporations care much less about software politics than most of us do. The open source solution has the benefit of getting out of proprietary formats, but I don't think that's very high up on the list of priorities of the people making the decisions.
The second sentence is redundant: Corporations do care if "proprietary formats" have specific advantages or disadvantages, but they don't care when it's just politics (which often it is, particularly with the open source community). If you can say "Well product X offers Z ISO standard functionality, which means that we can use the highly rated Y client for 1/4th the price of Q", then you've offered an advantage. If, on the other hand, you stomp your feet and have a tantrum about how Microsoft added extensions to the extension fields of Kerberos, well then you're just politicking. Every one of these nuances has end results, and if you can't quantify them for the suits, then don't expect to get respect. Sadly, the introverted geeks club (of which I am happily a member) are incredibly incapable of appreciating or estimating the costs of the various factors, but instead approach technical issues with a moral righteousness that turns most people off.
You've touched on the truth, though: The cost of Exchange, even the super Exchange server with thousands of CALs, is trivial chump change to most corporations, and the cost of a couple of sysadmins to administer the mail server far eclipses it in a single year. Tiny shops that are willing to deal with more hiccups and put more elbow grease into it may care about cutting some corners, but no real corporation is going to.
If you'd read, you would understand that there is no domain controller at this site. Can you say "workgroup?" If you'd bothered to read, you would understand there's no NT server at this site.
His point still stands though: Who runs an office environment with multiple Windows machines without a domain? Not having a domain infrastructure is the first big mistake, and a lack of a group policy is just a continuation on it. Without commenting on the specific instance, he is entirely right that there are countless Linux advocates out there who know absolutely nothing about how to properly maintain a Windows office, yet that doesn't stop them from criticizing it.
Is this a troll?
The classic problem with any well he has an important to make justification is that there are literally countless groups and individuals with a self-professed really important point to make. If you open the gates to this guy, then you open the gates to every environmental crusader, local civic activist, granny Scott who wants a speed bump on her street, and Jimmy Popcorn that wants cell phones banned at the Cineplex. I read the paper today, and I have the ability to seek out any candidates website any time that I want, so I DO NOT WANT TO BE FORCED TO HEAR THEIR MESSAGE . "Opt-out" programs are pure BS, not only because it's a system that people are grossly wary of because of many much more insidious spammers, but also because it's the opposite of what it should be: If people haven't gone to a government website and selected the "email me information from the candidates", then you have no right to presume that they by default want it when the overwhelming majority don't. While people have mentioned that the other forms of advertising cost money, the truth is that I've never paid attention to them either : that calender they send gets chucked in the recycling bin, and the lame one-sided radio ads are completely wasted. When it comes down to election time I watch the debates and read the newspaper rundowns, I don't listen to the same old useless rhetoric being pimped from one side.
While everyone talks about the transfer cost of spam, I think they're missing the point (although it is an important point): The problem with spam is that it steadily increases the risk that actually important messages will be lost amongst the hundreds of spam messages. Already my Hotmail accounts sticks any message with "BTW" or "So..." in the junk mail folder, requiring me to actively scan it for legitimate messages, but I know that I've deleted actually useful messages while mass deleting the latest block of "Thank you for your order" and "Re: My password" spams. This infuriates me. There is absolutely no comparison with paper mail where the ratio of letter sized spam mail is probably only 20% of the ratio of real mail, versus the 500% or so of email spam.
Are they trying to steal from the Worldcom/ Enron/ AOL/ LNUX playbook?
Comparing to the GF4 is useless? Oh, so when I go to the store I have the choice of getting a GF5? Oh, right, they barely even have silicon test samples of the GF5, much less being within months from having a board on the market. At that time there'll very likely be a Radon 9800 Super Pro (the 9700 is on a .15 micron process, so they have a huge opening to create a .13 or small micron die and correspondingly up the frequency, just in time for nvidia's response).
In any case, there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that the NV30 will beat the 9700 : In case you haven't noticed, nvidia's cards have been hitting the wall, and the gap from generation to generation is getting closer and closer together: That's what makes the 9700 so remarkably -> It isn't the traditional "20% better than our mid-season `pro'" model, but rather it is a considerable jump in performance. I'm neither a nvidia or ATI fan (I have a GF3 card in my machine, though I was eyeballing a bargain Radeon 8500 today for it's dual-headed feature), but instead I'm a fan of the best bang for my dollar, and let the loser be damned.
The 200fps thing is just dumb. Play a game like Operation Flashpoint (I'm not going to even mention that people who don't get that Quake 3 benchmarks are simplified synthentic numbers for relative analysis only are morons...whoops, already did) and you'll know why the 9700 is just the beginning.
You know, the one that talks about MySQL supplanting Oracle....
/var/www/html/pgp/conn.php on line 7
/var/www/html/pgp/conn.php on line 7
Warning: Too many connections in
Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in
Error: Could not connect to MySql
I completely agree with this. Using XP I'm continually fighting with idiotic "helpful" things (like "simple file sharing"), and like you I've configured it to be as much like 2000 as possible. Of course the one really nice thing about XP is the very fast boot-up times: My prior Windows 2000 configuration literally took minutes to finish chugging, but with XP it's about 9 seconds.
Cheaper and far more politically correct.
The fact that the majority of people using Google are still using Windows 98 says volumes: even if Windows 98 is flaky; even if Windows 98 crashes or gives weird errors; even if Microsoft makes something better that promises near-100% compatibility with their old programs -- people aren't switching. The question that must be asked is: why?
Because switching is an investment of time and money, and if someone has a working computer, why bother? The humorous reality is that Microsoft is their own biggest competitor to people upgrading: Even running Windows 98 you can still run IE 6.0, for example. Of course Microsoft has started to see the satisfaction that people have with their current OS, so things like Media Player are now only coming out in new versions for XP, for instance.
Personally I find it very hard to believe that as many people use Windows 2000 as Google reports: Windows 2000 is a `professional' OS, and it was never marketed or really sold to the home population (and it's expensive as well), yet 20% of Google users use it? I have to guess that that 20% is mostly corporate users, or developers.
It gets to be more questionable when they talk about a "SETI@Home" type of distributed application : For something so thoroughly useless, that is nothing more than an absurd waste of electricity (and it is a waste of electricity: Computers are left on when they would have been turned off, and barring that the CPU is actively consuming power rather than the dramatically lower power usage halt instruction which it would be running normally).
This seems like an absurdly irrelevant number study, but it is intriguing from a purely number theory perspective.
In any case, what is the mathematical function for inverting the digits of a decimal value? (i.e. 192 -> 291). I'm not including textual "move the digits around". I hardly am concerned with number theory anymore, but this does intrigue me.
No I just have to go count the tiles...
Solving business logic within the database seems like it could get counterproductive in a hurry.
Yet this is exactly the opposite direction that most database designers are taking (and I definitely agree with them): Oracle lets your stored procedures include complex Java functions, and SQL Server is adding the .NET runtime within stored procedures. Why? Because it is appropriate and proper to black box the database from the front end developers. It isn't hiding the soil conditions from the architect, but rather it's stopping the architect from fiddling in the steel mill because he considers himself an expert amateur metallurgist.
Security and stored procedures should never be used in the same sentence, especially when used in web based applications
I could not disagree with this more.
If anyone gets into hat DB even as a user, they can toast your DB by running your SP's.
Yet, ironically, most "component middleware" security advocates have to basically completely open up their database, and then they implement hacked in security systems in the middleware. Of course this means that the database, by design, is completely open to every developer (which is a huge no-no in real team development), and is open for giant faults when each individual developer misinterprets, or creates an adhoc SQL string appended user supplied criteria, etc.
For example in PHP you can check both the referring URL and the script name and a global var in the calling script before allowing any DB access to occur. That gives you three additional layers of security above that of the DB and webserver security
Sure, that's fine and dandy, and of course because that's the domain of that area, then it makes sense (just as it makes sense for a firewall to be responsible for barring non-HTTP). However, having said that, the only security that should be in a component is ancillary security: Any well designed database should be entirely accessible to the end user without them being able to do ANYTHING they can't do via the web interface anyways.
IMHO, views and stored procedures amount to short scripts, and were added to companies making databases at the right time (pre-boom) to make a new class of database that was term'd Enterprise but realy just meant hybrid DB engines with scripting support.
Well, we are talking about relational database management systems, not a "database file". An RDBMS is the middleware between you and the database file, and facilitates crazy, insane features like concurrency control, transactional control, and most importantly security. Both views and stored procedures are very important facets of security in any modern RDBMS as they allow you to hide the internals of your database, and to only provide applications the ability to have certain constrained "I/O windows" into your database (hell, my normal design norm is to only allow interactions with stored procs, which themselves only operate through constrained views). There is nothing gimmicky about these features, and they are crucial for an "enterprise" system.
MapStats
Mind you, feeding a bunch of data into a read only system to be queried in a high deterministic way is hardly a real demanding task for a database system: As mentioned somewhere else -> They could have used dbase IV and ODBC for that, or IIS 4 + Microsoft Access.
In this case the article specifically talks about Yahoo running mySQL, and they're supposedly looking at eliminating some other jobs currently filled by an Oracle DB with a wider deployment of MySQL.
Having said that, I think that is absolutely ludicrous. PostgreSQL is a serious database system, but, regardless of future potential, mySQL is not. Reading about it running the Yahoo Financial site says more about the quality of the Yahoo Financial site than it does about the quality to the mySQL DBMS.
Has anyone seen anyone selling stereo component sized computer cases? I've considered rolling my own convergence device, but the last thing I want is to have a tower case sitting beside my TV.