> socialized medicine takes healthcare decisions out of individuals' hands
Right, because our current system has nothing like bureaucrats in offices making health decisions instead of doctors.
I'm not a big fan of government-run healthcare either, but the way I see it, the private sector was given a chance, they irredeemably fucked it up, and now it's time to put it into receivership. Basic preventative care should be the province of public health and safety anyway, since it's a cost-saver.
In my IT business, a vast majority of our top tier clients (grossing over US$100 million annually) are still using antiquated software that is still using a relational database backend.
No, antiquated is using a non-relational backend, like raw ISAM. You know what you use to work with ISAM? COBOL. Now COBOL isn't bad for its verbosity, which is what most people complain about, because you can bind most of it to abbreviations in your editor. No, what makes COBOL so awful is that it accumulated so much weird cruft over the years. If you find the word "ALTER" in a COBOL source, go grab a bottle of extra-strength advil, you're going to need it)
(This is all second-hand: I never had to work with it, but I had a housemate that made beaucoup bucks doing COBOL well before Y2K)
Stonebraker has been pushing the concept of column-oriented databases for quite some time now, trying to get someone, ANYONE, to listen that it's superior.
Oh, more than just Stonebraker: column-oriented databases have been getting pushed going on at least a decade, probably two. It comes up every few years in breathless statements like "row storage is obsolete legacy technology". Nevermind that most OLTP demands are a bit more of a hybrid thing, and that vertical partitioning usually does the trick pretty well.
As far as ISAM goes, I think the only thing still using it is MySQL, and I'm pretty sure it's variable-length, so it's closer to VSAM. I guess you could count Paradox and all the other xBase stuff too as still using it. But legacy is legacy, it's hardly an indictment of today's technology.
Concerning "abstract ID numbers", that's probably surrogate keys you're talking about -- which are technically a design flaw (or perhaps a "design smell" to crib an XP term), but they're kind of unavoidable for efficiency (I sure as hell don't want to sling around whole arrays of street/city/state/post in my CRM app). Any proper ORM or even good SQL should keep you from ever having to reference id columns except perhaps in a join (in case you're too cowardly to use NATURAL JOIN, which is actually pretty prudent given the surprises it can hit you with). PostgreSQL tried to get rid of these "rowid keys" with the OID column, but this didn't turn out well, and OID's are heavily deprecated in postgres now. OODBs and "document DBs" like CouchDB usually do a better job at hiding ID columns, but until those address their orthogonality problems, RDBMSs are here to stay, warts and all.
> If Sid Meier wasn't so old school (I get the impression he breaks a lot of (modern?) programming conventions when playing his games)
Civ 4 uses Gamebryo for its graphic engine, and is scripted with Python. That doesn't leave a lot of room for DOS-era conventions. I don't think Sid really programs anymore anyway. Will Wright on the other hand, seems to have a love for home-grown hardwired stuff, and even brags about using "demoscene" type of code in Spore. I pity the maintenance coders on that.
Erlang does not stand for "Ericsson Language". It's named for the the telecom term, which itself was named for A. K. Erlang.
And yeah it's like Prolog, except without horn clauses or backtracking. You know, just like lisp and java.
Re:No You Dim Witted Troll
on
Why Myths Persist
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It is not an article of faith that 1 + 1 = 2. It's the definition of two. Guisseppe Peano and company went to quite a few lengths to come up with more rigorous proofs of obvious things like this.
Newton's laws are hardly an article of faith: they're directly observable, and with a little tweaking to account for space and time variables that were too small to affect Newton's calculations, they fit into a consistent system with reproduceable results.
Feel free to write God into the gaps if you wish. Somehow I doubt this god particularly cares if we supplicate to him in our schools or see nipples on our TV screens.
> Is "HaloIsDumbedDownMarathon" allowed? 'Cause that'd be almost worth getting an XBox for.
Probably too long. But go give Microsoft $400 of your cash so you can register a gamertag that no one will likely see anyway. I'm sure you'll teach 'em a lesson.
Actually, ATI does work with the Linux infrastructure, using GLX and DRM (Direct Rendering Manager, not that other DRM). It's nVidia that goes off and does their own thing. Of course, nVidia just seems to do it better, quite possibly because they control more of the API, but more likely it's all in the driver.
I've always liked ATI's hardware (the X1950 AGP was a real gift to us folks with old boxes) but nVidia's software (objectively speaking, I hate nVidia's software less). At least ATI's build system isn't as bad now, though I still haven't seen a "one-click" script wrapper for it like there is with nVidia.
> Is there a particular reason you need the driver to be open-source?
So it works when the kernel changes their *&^!%@! ABI yet again in the latest patchlevel. To port it to other OS's. So smarter people than me can look at it and find bugs or interoperability problems with it and send vendor updates to it.
I can understand their reasoning -- video cards are more or less big FPU arrays these days, and the actual 3d graphics is all software, so they might not want to expose their secrets. The other problem is that the competition would use it to find potential patent infringement. It's a Nash equilibrium: the first one to open-source loses. If I were to put the number generously at 50,000 extra customers due to OSS, that simply wouldn't cover the potential loss. But the fact is, there aren't any solid numbers as to what the market effect would be, and uncertainty is in a lot of ways worse than outright losing -- at least you can write off the latter on your balance sheet early.
I think Spamhaus could have avoided the issues they are dealing with now by not labeling spammers as spammers, and came up with a more politically correct term that is legally bulletproof.
David Linhardt, DBA e360, is a complete out-and-out spammer -- Spamhaus and others have copious documented proof of this fact. This is not a marketer suing over an erroneous listing, this is a clear-cut "sue to spam" tactic. If we're looking for other terms to describe Linhardt, feel free to pick one or more of these:
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 04, @04:26PM
Browsers have this neat ability to search within a page.
I don't know if there's a single editor here who really is one. The bulk of editors work here is limited to filling in the "from the words-separated-by-dashes dept" field when clicking on the green articles in the firehose. Oh and adding scintillating color text to the end of submissions like like "worth reading".
Seriously, it's the game forums that attract the most vicious frothing screaming animalistic fucktards, and some of them stop chewing their controllers long enough to wander onto slashdot. No point in dignifying them.
> One of the issues I see is that the PS3 has half the system RAM (256 megs) of the 360 (512 megs) so a game like Gears of War that uses all that RAM wouldn't be playable in its current form on the PS3.
I got corrected on this a while back, so I'll pass it on: The 360 has 512 megs that are fully shared with the video, whereas the PS3 has 256M for each of system RAM and video. It doesn't seem to make a lot of difference in the end. They're both nice consoles, and I could afford both... but there's a definite Wife Acceptance Factor problem with getting more than one console in a year.
Funny thing though, I spend more time playing original xbox games (Jade Empire, Halo 2, Psychonauts) on my 360 than 360 titles.
> Of course when there is a war you're expected to go fight.
Forever. Until you die or go crazy. None of this "limited tours of duty" crap that we did with WW2, no sir. It's Warhammer 40K in the corps: life is war, war is life, venerate the immortal emperor.
That's what joining the army now means. Army Strong means huddling in a corner when someone drops a book behind you.
> Even if OOXML gets approved for ISO don't we still have a choice? Won't ODF still be there?
Sure, but will government offices with public records use it? No, they'll choose the "standard".
Frankly, I don't think OOXML is all that satanic, nor is ODF all that perfect, but the latter is definitely more focused on an actual document format rather than encoding all the goofy idiosyncratic semantics of an office app with XML tags. And MS's behavior is definitely not above board here.
> Only a fool would specify an Opteron or a Xeon in a power-critical application.
Google has a power bill slightly higher than most people's home PC's. They don't run their bricks on ARM, do they? Any company with a big data center wants to see its electric bill go down.
> It originally referred to herbs for sale in a shop, as opposed to fresh, growing herbs.
I'm under the impression that it had to do with firewood -- you have to cut it and dry it before burning it. Chopping firewood seems like a far more universal activity of the time. But it certainly got applied to many other things in time, all with the same connotation of convenience, suitability, and uniformity.
It's amazing, and kind of depressing, how many "word origins" sites only serve to repeat long-debunked urban legends.
It's unclear that Seanbaby's martial arts experience would have helped him in boxing. But it's even more telling that Uwe still wouldn't fight him. I think it's pretty well established that Uwe Boll is a complete prick -- but I'd still relish the prospect of him landing a jawbreaker on JT.
> taking something to which you have no right is stealing.
Correct, but if if I steal a CD from a music store, there's certainly punitive fines built into the law, but the store doesn't get to charge me $750 per CD (or is it per track?) just because it feels like it.
Let's also consider that the John Doe lawsuits might not be the most precise legal tool either?
Slashdot Mirror
> if you think "little things" like violations of the "constitution" don't matter i recommend you move to a theocracy.
*snort*. Why move at all in that case?
> socialized medicine takes healthcare decisions out of individuals' hands
Right, because our current system has nothing like bureaucrats in offices making health decisions instead of doctors.
I'm not a big fan of government-run healthcare either, but the way I see it, the private sector was given a chance, they irredeemably fucked it up, and now it's time to put it into receivership. Basic preventative care should be the province of public health and safety anyway, since it's a cost-saver.
In my IT business, a vast majority of our top tier clients (grossing over US$100 million annually) are still using antiquated software that is still using a relational database backend.
No, antiquated is using a non-relational backend, like raw ISAM. You know what you use to work with ISAM? COBOL. Now COBOL isn't bad for its verbosity, which is what most people complain about, because you can bind most of it to abbreviations in your editor. No, what makes COBOL so awful is that it accumulated so much weird cruft over the years. If you find the word "ALTER" in a COBOL source, go grab a bottle of extra-strength advil, you're going to need it)
(This is all second-hand: I never had to work with it, but I had a housemate that made beaucoup bucks doing COBOL well before Y2K)
Stonebraker has been pushing the concept of column-oriented databases for quite some time now, trying to get someone, ANYONE, to listen that it's superior.
Oh, more than just Stonebraker: column-oriented databases have been getting pushed going on at least a decade, probably two. It comes up every few years in breathless statements like "row storage is obsolete legacy technology". Nevermind that most OLTP demands are a bit more of a hybrid thing, and that vertical partitioning usually does the trick pretty well.
As far as ISAM goes, I think the only thing still using it is MySQL, and I'm pretty sure it's variable-length, so it's closer to VSAM. I guess you could count Paradox and all the other xBase stuff too as still using it. But legacy is legacy, it's hardly an indictment of today's technology.
Concerning "abstract ID numbers", that's probably surrogate keys you're talking about -- which are technically a design flaw (or perhaps a "design smell" to crib an XP term), but they're kind of unavoidable for efficiency (I sure as hell don't want to sling around whole arrays of street/city/state/post in my CRM app). Any proper ORM or even good SQL should keep you from ever having to reference id columns except perhaps in a join (in case you're too cowardly to use NATURAL JOIN, which is actually pretty prudent given the surprises it can hit you with). PostgreSQL tried to get rid of these "rowid keys" with the OID column, but this didn't turn out well, and OID's are heavily deprecated in postgres now. OODBs and "document DBs" like CouchDB usually do a better job at hiding ID columns, but until those address their orthogonality problems, RDBMSs are here to stay, warts and all.
> If Sid Meier wasn't so old school (I get the impression he breaks a lot of (modern?) programming conventions when playing his games)
Civ 4 uses Gamebryo for its graphic engine, and is scripted with Python. That doesn't leave a lot of room for DOS-era conventions. I don't think Sid really programs anymore anyway. Will Wright on the other hand, seems to have a love for home-grown hardwired stuff, and even brags about using "demoscene" type of code in Spore. I pity the maintenance coders on that.
Erlang does not stand for "Ericsson Language". It's named for the the telecom term, which itself was named for A. K. Erlang.
And yeah it's like Prolog, except without horn clauses or backtracking. You know, just like lisp and java.
It is not an article of faith that 1 + 1 = 2. It's the definition of two. Guisseppe Peano and company went to quite a few lengths to come up with more rigorous proofs of obvious things like this.
Newton's laws are hardly an article of faith: they're directly observable, and with a little tweaking to account for space and time variables that were too small to affect Newton's calculations, they fit into a consistent system with reproduceable results.
Feel free to write God into the gaps if you wish. Somehow I doubt this god particularly cares if we supplicate to him in our schools or see nipples on our TV screens.
> Is "HaloIsDumbedDownMarathon" allowed? 'Cause that'd be almost worth getting an XBox for.
Probably too long. But go give Microsoft $400 of your cash so you can register a gamertag that no one will likely see anyway. I'm sure you'll teach 'em a lesson.
Actually, ATI does work with the Linux infrastructure, using GLX and DRM (Direct Rendering Manager, not that other DRM). It's nVidia that goes off and does their own thing. Of course, nVidia just seems to do it better, quite possibly because they control more of the API, but more likely it's all in the driver.
I've always liked ATI's hardware (the X1950 AGP was a real gift to us folks with old boxes) but nVidia's software (objectively speaking, I hate nVidia's software less). At least ATI's build system isn't as bad now, though I still haven't seen a "one-click" script wrapper for it like there is with nVidia.
> Is there a particular reason you need the driver to be open-source?
So it works when the kernel changes their *&^!%@! ABI yet again in the latest patchlevel. To port it to other OS's. So smarter people than me can look at it and find bugs or interoperability problems with it and send vendor updates to it.
I can understand their reasoning -- video cards are more or less big FPU arrays these days, and the actual 3d graphics is all software, so they might not want to expose their secrets. The other problem is that the competition would use it to find potential patent infringement. It's a Nash equilibrium: the first one to open-source loses. If I were to put the number generously at 50,000 extra customers due to OSS, that simply wouldn't cover the potential loss. But the fact is, there aren't any solid numbers as to what the market effect would be, and uncertainty is in a lot of ways worse than outright losing -- at least you can write off the latter on your balance sheet early.
David Linhardt, DBA e360, is a complete out-and-out spammer -- Spamhaus and others have copious documented proof of this fact. This is not a marketer suing over an erroneous listing, this is a clear-cut "sue to spam" tactic. If we're looking for other terms to describe Linhardt, feel free to pick one or more of these:
Sigh. Preview would have been nice.
Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 04, @04:26PM
Browsers have this neat ability to search within a page.
I don't know if there's a single editor here who really is one. The bulk of editors work here is limited to filling in the "from the words-separated-by-dashes dept" field when clicking on the green articles in the firehose. Oh and adding scintillating color text to the end of submissions like like "worth reading".
Obviously a global conspiracy.
Seriously, it's the game forums that attract the most vicious frothing screaming animalistic fucktards, and some of them stop chewing their controllers long enough to wander onto slashdot. No point in dignifying them.
> One of the issues I see is that the PS3 has half the system RAM (256 megs) of the 360 (512 megs) so a game like Gears of War that uses all that RAM wouldn't be playable in its current form on the PS3.
... but there's a definite Wife Acceptance Factor problem with getting more than one console in a year.
I got corrected on this a while back, so I'll pass it on: The 360 has 512 megs that are fully shared with the video, whereas the PS3 has 256M for each of system RAM and video. It doesn't seem to make a lot of difference in the end. They're both nice consoles, and I could afford both
Funny thing though, I spend more time playing original xbox games (Jade Empire, Halo 2, Psychonauts) on my 360 than 360 titles.
> Of course when there is a war you're expected to go fight.
Forever. Until you die or go crazy. None of this "limited tours of duty" crap that we did with WW2, no sir. It's Warhammer 40K in the corps: life is war, war is life, venerate the immortal emperor.
That's what joining the army now means. Army Strong means huddling in a corner when someone drops a book behind you.
Or, more like not being able to download things at full speed due to the ISP screwing with your service.
You want your arguments taken seriously? Get some goddam perspective.
There are legal torrents. Comcast is certainly screwing you. That said:
I may not have known Rosa Parks, Rosa Parks wasn't a friend of mine, but I can say with pretty god damn clear certainty that you are no Rosa Parks.
> Even if OOXML gets approved for ISO don't we still have a choice? Won't ODF still be there?
Sure, but will government offices with public records use it? No, they'll choose the "standard".
Frankly, I don't think OOXML is all that satanic, nor is ODF all that perfect, but the latter is definitely more focused on an actual document format rather than encoding all the goofy idiosyncratic semantics of an office app with XML tags. And MS's behavior is definitely not above board here.
> Only a fool would specify an Opteron or a Xeon in a power-critical application.
Google has a power bill slightly higher than most people's home PC's. They don't run their bricks on ARM, do they? Any company with a big data center wants to see its electric bill go down.
> It originally referred to herbs for sale in a shop, as opposed to fresh, growing herbs.
I'm under the impression that it had to do with firewood -- you have to cut it and dry it before burning it. Chopping firewood seems like a far more universal activity of the time. But it certainly got applied to many other things in time, all with the same connotation of convenience, suitability, and uniformity.
It's amazing, and kind of depressing, how many "word origins" sites only serve to repeat long-debunked urban legends.
> there appear to be many people out there who still think that SCOX has value.
Las Vegas is proof that people think slot machines have value. It's speculation, not a value investment.
It's unclear that Seanbaby's martial arts experience would have helped him in boxing. But it's even more telling that Uwe still wouldn't fight him. I think it's pretty well established that Uwe Boll is a complete prick -- but I'd still relish the prospect of him landing a jawbreaker on JT.
And no, I really wasn't drunk when I posted that. Perhaps I should have been though. *sigh*
> taking something to which you have no right is stealing.
Correct, but if if I steal a CD from a music store, there's certainly punitive fines built into the law, but the store doesn't get to charge me $750 per CD (or is it per track?) just because it feels like it.
Let's also consider that the John Doe lawsuits might not be the most precise legal tool either?