If they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance.
If you assume that MySQL is an important Sun asset that was a significant factor in Oracle deciding to make the deal, then they wouldn't jettison at the first sign of regulatory resistance, especially if they anticipated that there might be some of that.
If you assume that the various critics are right, and MySQL is mostly a threat to Oracle they want to kill rather than maintain, then the uncertainty about the future of MySQL created by the EU's regulatory attention, and the damage it can do to MySQL in the market, is valuable to Oracle and serves the exact same goal that the critics think Oracle would be seeking to advance by buying Sun then killing MySQL. Plus, it lets Oracle blame it on the EU.
So, I fail to see the justification for your conclusion that "if they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance".
The minor corrections that we continuously, yet nearly unconsciously, make while driving would become burdensome when applied to a joystick.
Not necessarily. If a system is using a drive-by-wire system (which this is), rather than direct mechanical linkage, then it doesn't need to have linear response either. Only if you assume linear response does it have to be the case that a stick can't provide a full range and easily support minor corrections.
Oracle can't adopt back any outside fork (as they would no longer have full copyright over it).
That might be a reason they would prefer not to adopt back an outside fork, since they couldn't keep up the dual-licensing model, but if commercial license sales weren't as important as support contracts (or, I suppose, custom applications) that Oracle sold around MySQL, they could have a business model which they could choose to adopt which would allow them to adopt-back a fork. A for-profit company can build business around open-source software that they don't own outright (as, in fact, EnterpriseDB does around PostgreSQL.) Though, of course, the flexibility in how you can manage that is more limited for a GPL product than one with a BSD-style license.
Well, a lot of us are happy with the idea of a database that, you know, works. That doesn't silently discard data. That doesn't make you choose between performance and ACID. That doesn't pull crap like insisting that the wire protocol is licensed under the GPL. That sort of stuff.
The query rewrite system, robust set of built-in types, extensibility, and support for recursive CTEs are also worth consideration.
That being that the commercially licensed version of MySQL funded suns continued development of the GPL'ed MySQL, and oracle would have a conflict of interest in continuing to develop and license a low cost alternative to its high priced core product.
Oracle has for some time continued to develop and license a wide variety of database products at different price points and feature sets, some of which are free (some gratis and at least one libre.) There is an inherent tradeoff with the less expensive (and free) versions in that they only make sense if Oracle thinks they will help other offerings (whether software or services) more than they will hurt sales of higher priced versions, to be sure, but that's no less true of, say, Oracle XE when compared to Oracle's high-end server products than it would be of MySQL.
Anyway, while database & middleware is where Oracle still makes most of its software revenue, most of its growth in software revenue is in applications, not databases & middleware. More in house platforms means more flexibility in building applications while avoiding paying some other vendor a profit premium.
So, I'm not convinced there is a real "conflict of interest" here. Certainly, Oracle's interests in developing MySQL will be different than an independent MySQL AB that didn't do anything buy MySQL and MySQL support would be, much as, frankly, Sun's interests were different, but having a different mix of interests isn't the same as having some kind of intolerable "conflict of interest".
The FT-EV II, which got its world premiere at the event, is a compact electric vehicle designed for short trips. The car retains seats for four passengers despite being much more compact than most other cars, and packs drive-by-wire technology so it can be controlled with a joystick. The car's steering, braking and acceleration can be controlled by hand so foot pedals aren't needed, freeing up space to provide more legroom for the driver.
Note that you can control steering, braking and acceleration by hand on a car with a steering wheel -- I've been in a car that (through aftermarket options) did that (braking and acceleration by way of pedals.) Since my friend, whose car it was, had lost most of both legs, it was something of an essential feature for her.
I suspect that layout would be more familar and convenient to drivers than a joystick, if the main goal is to provide legroom by removing footpedals from the equation.
Company tells people to vote a particular way: Bad. Union tells people to vote a particular way: Good.
A union's relationship to its members is more analogous to a corporation's relationship to its shareholders than a corporation's relationship to its employees. Sure, you can have bad managers (and union leadership are managers of the union, though they have different titles) acting in the managers' self-interest rather than members'/shareholders' shared interest in either case, but a corporation's management doesn't even in theory work in the interest of the employees, it works in the interest of the shareholders.
So there is a pretty big difference between union leadership making recommendations on political actions to the people whose shared interests they are paid to represent, and a corporation's management making recommendation for political action to their "human resources".
How is this any different than, say, the Sierra Club or the FSF urging their members / followers to lobby their politicos on a particular point of view?
The Sierra Club and FSF are voluntary associations of people whose whole bases for association is a common ideology: members of those organizations pay the leaders of those organizations specifically to help them acheive particular shared ideological aims. So, advice from those leaders on steps the members can take to make the money that they pay to acheive those ends be more effective is consistent with the job those members are paying the professional staff of the organization to do. And the members of the Sierra Club and FSF aren't dependent on those organizations, generally, for their livelihood.
AT&T employees aren't, as a general rule, voluntarily paying AT&T management to help them defeat net neutrality, and are, OTOH, dependent on AT&T for their jobs, so the circumstances aren't even remotely parallel.
The problem with mexican flu (that's the name btw.)
Its a name that's been adopted by some official agencies (according to Wikipedia, in the Netherlands, for instance), but its certainly not the name.
H1N1 are the proteins found on the mantle of the virus. The problem is that no human can develop an immune response to either H1 or N1 (as that would be deadly).
Um, humans (including something like a third of adults over 60) do, even without vaccination, have an immune response to H1N1. Children generally don't have any, but its certainly not the case that "no human can develop an immune response" to the H1N1 virus.
The problem is not the flu in the H1N1 form. The problem is that pneumonia might "be infected" and transform into an H1N1 virus.
No, its not. The main concerns are: 1) Its a flu that is so far similar to the seasonal flu, which is mild in effect for most people but very dangerous to the same groups vulnerable to the seasonal flu, and seasonal flu vaccinations do nothing to help against it, so it is critical to get the same people that are most critical to vaccinate against seasonal flu vaccinated against this novel H1N1 strain, 2) There is a concern that the virus itself could mutate into a more dangerous form, as happened with an H1N1 strain which, in its first wave, was similar in effect to seasonal flu in the 1918 flu pandemic.
My understanding is that some research on the particular structure of the novel H1N1 strain at the center of the current pandemic has provided some reasons to think that the risk in #2 is unlikely to materialize.
Is this really the swine flu? If so, it's not bad around here, near Raleigh, NC.
The effects of the "Novel Influenza A (H1N1)" seem to be generally similar to seasonal flu (generally mild, but sometimes deadly particularly to people in particular vulnerable groups); there has been some concern as it became a pandemic that it could become more deadly (the first wave of the 1918 flu pandemic was also mild), though ISTR seeing that the current belief is that it is unlikely to become substantially more deadly; at any rate, the big concern at the moment is ensuring that the same groups for which seasonal flu shots are important have access to immunization against the new variety.
I also work in a regulated industry and recently our CEO sent out a memo suggesting employees write their Congressman about a proposed law that could seriously hurt our business. It doesn't matter where the urging comes from since it's not like the CEO can tell that you've followed his suggestion or not.
That's nice, but here we're not talking about letters to your Congressional representative, we're talking about comments to be filed as part of a formal FCC rulemaking process. Comments filed in a formal rulemaking process are public records. In fact, the FCC has an online search system that lets you search all filed comments, by, among other things, the name of the person or entity filing the comment, and the results include additional information like the mailing address of the filer.
Consequently, especially if you are only worried about positive confirmation (IOW, if you don't mind some false negatives, but want to be fairly immune to false positives), its pretty easy for an employer to check if their employees have followed through on such a "recommendation."
Is this suitable as a general purpose scheduler or is it just for real-time systems?
Its not a scheduler, its a scheduling class for the existing Linux scheduler. A scheduler can support several different scheduling classes for processes. The current Linux scheduler supports two (Round Robin and FIFO) designed for real-time processes as well as the base one for regular processes, as I understand it.
It sounds like something that wouldn't happen if you used commodity PC hardware to set up your own voice mail system.
Yes, if you used commodity PC hardware to set up your own voice mail system, you probably wouldn't have automatic transcription that it would be even theoretically possible for you to directly post your voice mails on the web, so it wouldn't be possible for you to expose information the way you could choose to do with Google Voice.
OTOH, it would be a lot more expensive for the fewer features you would get, so I'm not sure its all that worth it. It would be easier just to use Google voice and not post your own voice mails.
Note that all of these emails are emails for which the URLs were posted by the user on a public website, and which were subsequently (and as a result of that posting) crawled and indexed by search engines.
Oh, noes! Search engines find things that are posted publicly on the internet. The horror!
Yes, and the whole resume should be a size that the hiring manager won't be wasting their time reading it.
Don't these people want to do a good job?
Assuming the job requires any kind of communication skills, screening for applicants who know how to present information so as to provide the necessary information for the audience, and only the necessary information, and to do it concisely, is an example of the hiring manager doing their job properly.
I live in California, Sacramento no less, and one of two things is going to happen eventually. Taxes are going to have to be raised, or massive cuts to services will happen. The problem is that there is no political will to do either
It requires a supermajority to raise taxes and a simple majority to cut authorized services, and sufficient votes in the Legislature don't currently exist to do either except in various means that have low visibility or which can be obfuscated as not really being either one of those even though they, in fact, are.
This is not the same as there being "no political will" to do either, however. Its that California has a Constitutional system which, compared to (for instance) the US federal system, structurally produces impasse very frequently because routine decisions require much broader support (the fact that it also requires a substantial supermajority to pass the annual budget is an example of this, and is also frequently pointed to as a symptom of a lack of political will; its not, particularly, though; other state governments and the federal government don't have as big of a problem with routine tasks not because they have greater "political will", but because they don't, for the most part, have structural rules set up that are quite as effective at preventing action that has majority support.)
There's an incredible entitlement complex in California but there's also this idea that no matter how much money you make it should always be the MORE wealthy who should have to pay for everything.
Not really. You'll find that, by and large, the people advocating for service cuts and voting against tax increases (whether on the wealthy or even regressive taxes like sin tax or general sales tax increases) are not the people arguing for massive spending cuts, not the same people arguing to maintain programs. The problem is not that there is one group of people that wants taxes not to be increased (and, generally, to be decreased) and also wants programs maintained, the problem is that there are two distinct groups of people, one of whom wants no taxes increased and the more progressive taxes reduced, and one of whom want to minimize cuts to programs, and neither of these groups has sufficient votes to enact its own preferences, but each still has sufficient votes to prevent its opposition from being able to have an unqualified success in implementing its preferences, producing all kinds of chaotic, incoherent policy.
If I have to buy a car with a built-in GPS unit or have one installed after-market to get GPS in my car, I simply won't buy a new car.
What if you just had to have a GPS antenna installed in the car with a jack to attach your portable GPS receiver to get optimum reception, which is a much more likely scenario?
So long as you don't mind the lack of support from MS, there's no problem with those licences for the majority of people. It's not a "student" licence, it's "Home office and student", ie general household usage.
Actually, its Home and Student, not "home office and student" and the license prohibits any commercial use. If you are using it in your home office (e.g., in a home-based business) you are violating the license terms. If you are using it when you bring work home from the office, you are violating the license terms.
It can actually become an issue if someone needs radiation therapy ('chemo')
"chemo" refers to chemotherapy, where the patient is poisoned in the hopes that the poison will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. It is a different form of therapy than radiation therapy, in which the patient is subjected to intense doses of radiation in the hopes that the radiation will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. Often, people with cancer will receive both, one after the other, but they aren't the same thing.
I wasn't aiming to point out something outside. It doesn't have to be novel, or advanced.
The post you were responding to was itself responding to someone else saying that large datasets required throwing out "all that normalization stuff" they learned in school.
Using materialized views (whether canned or roll-your-own) in the way you describe (that is, with a normalized base schema to prevent the anomalies normalizations exists to prevent, and appropriate tables and triggers set up to present efficient-to-access materialized views on that base schema) isn't an example of that, since normalization is still used, and still used for the purpose it exists to serve.
I think the point was "It's a TV show about something besides the daily life of being a writer for a TV show: odds are it's going to get nearly everything wrong, it's nothing specific to science."
I think this makes a mistake in being based in the premise that the source of divergence from reality is the writers' ignorance rather than their desire to create a particular kind of art. Shows about the daily life of being a writer for a TV show would be (or, rather, are -- such shows actually exist) probably just as detached from the reality as any other show would be, because what most TV writers are trying to do is write something that presents a compelling story accessible to a broad audience with the particular trappings that relate to the notional theme or genre of the series, not to present a realistic exploration of that theme.
But the test device requires 50 million cats. Where are we gonna get 50 million cats?
Have you seen how rapidly feral cats breed?
The problem isn't getting 50 million cats, its getting 50 million cats into the test device. Producing cats is easy -- they take care of that themselves quite well. Herding, on the other hand...
Right, but in this case the suspension of disbelief can be directly harmful.
No, actual self-delusion can be directly harmful, because it can result in committing resources not warranted by the rationally expected utility (that is, the entertainment value.) Willing suspension of disbelief and self-delusion are actually very different things; and often only the former is needed to enjoy gambling and, thus, to derive entertainment utility from it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you assume that MySQL is an important Sun asset that was a significant factor in Oracle deciding to make the deal, then they wouldn't jettison at the first sign of regulatory resistance, especially if they anticipated that there might be some of that.
If you assume that the various critics are right, and MySQL is mostly a threat to Oracle they want to kill rather than maintain, then the uncertainty about the future of MySQL created by the EU's regulatory attention, and the damage it can do to MySQL in the market, is valuable to Oracle and serves the exact same goal that the critics think Oracle would be seeking to advance by buying Sun then killing MySQL. Plus, it lets Oracle blame it on the EU.
So, I fail to see the justification for your conclusion that "if they were rational they would have jettisoned MySQL at the first sign of EU resistance".
An operating system shouldn't need to touch anything but OS components to do an upgrade install.
Not necessarily. If a system is using a drive-by-wire system (which this is), rather than direct mechanical linkage, then it doesn't need to have linear response either. Only if you assume linear response does it have to be the case that a stick can't provide a full range and easily support minor corrections.
That might be a reason they would prefer not to adopt back an outside fork, since they couldn't keep up the dual-licensing model, but if commercial license sales weren't as important as support contracts (or, I suppose, custom applications) that Oracle sold around MySQL, they could have a business model which they could choose to adopt which would allow them to adopt-back a fork. A for-profit company can build business around open-source software that they don't own outright (as, in fact, EnterpriseDB does around PostgreSQL.) Though, of course, the flexibility in how you can manage that is more limited for a GPL product than one with a BSD-style license.
People selling things lie to (actual and prospective) customers. Film at 11.
(Though I suppose the "...and casually drop it into a conversation on Slashdot" part is, to be fair, a bit novel.)
The query rewrite system, robust set of built-in types, extensibility, and support for recursive CTEs are also worth consideration.
Oracle has for some time continued to develop and license a wide variety of database products at different price points and feature sets, some of which are free (some gratis and at least one libre.) There is an inherent tradeoff with the less expensive (and free) versions in that they only make sense if Oracle thinks they will help other offerings (whether software or services) more than they will hurt sales of higher priced versions, to be sure, but that's no less true of, say, Oracle XE when compared to Oracle's high-end server products than it would be of MySQL.
Anyway, while database & middleware is where Oracle still makes most of its software revenue, most of its growth in software revenue is in applications, not databases & middleware. More in house platforms means more flexibility in building applications while avoiding paying some other vendor a profit premium.
So, I'm not convinced there is a real "conflict of interest" here. Certainly, Oracle's interests in developing MySQL will be different than an independent MySQL AB that didn't do anything buy MySQL and MySQL support would be, much as, frankly, Sun's interests were different, but having a different mix of interests isn't the same as having some kind of intolerable "conflict of interest".
Note that you can control steering, braking and acceleration by hand on a car with a steering wheel -- I've been in a car that (through aftermarket options) did that (braking and acceleration by way of pedals.) Since my friend, whose car it was, had lost most of both legs, it was something of an essential feature for her.
I suspect that layout would be more familar and convenient to drivers than a joystick, if the main goal is to provide legroom by removing footpedals from the equation.
A union's relationship to its members is more analogous to a corporation's relationship to its shareholders than a corporation's relationship to its employees. Sure, you can have bad managers (and union leadership are managers of the union, though they have different titles) acting in the managers' self-interest rather than members'/shareholders' shared interest in either case, but a corporation's management doesn't even in theory work in the interest of the employees, it works in the interest of the shareholders.
So there is a pretty big difference between union leadership making recommendations on political actions to the people whose shared interests they are paid to represent, and a corporation's management making recommendation for political action to their "human resources".
The Sierra Club and FSF are voluntary associations of people whose whole bases for association is a common ideology: members of those organizations pay the leaders of those organizations specifically to help them acheive particular shared ideological aims. So, advice from those leaders on steps the members can take to make the money that they pay to acheive those ends be more effective is consistent with the job those members are paying the professional staff of the organization to do. And the members of the Sierra Club and FSF aren't dependent on those organizations, generally, for their livelihood.
AT&T employees aren't, as a general rule, voluntarily paying AT&T management to help them defeat net neutrality, and are, OTOH, dependent on AT&T for their jobs, so the circumstances aren't even remotely parallel.
Its a name that's been adopted by some official agencies (according to Wikipedia, in the Netherlands, for instance), but its certainly not the name.
Um, humans (including something like a third of adults over 60) do, even without vaccination, have an immune response to H1N1. Children generally don't have any, but its certainly not the case that "no human can develop an immune response" to the H1N1 virus.
No, its not. The main concerns are:
1) Its a flu that is so far similar to the seasonal flu, which is mild in effect for most people but very dangerous to the same groups vulnerable to the seasonal flu, and seasonal flu vaccinations do nothing to help against it, so it is critical to get the same people that are most critical to vaccinate against seasonal flu vaccinated against this novel H1N1 strain,
2) There is a concern that the virus itself could mutate into a more dangerous form, as happened with an H1N1 strain which, in its first wave, was similar in effect to seasonal flu in the 1918 flu pandemic.
My understanding is that some research on the particular structure of the novel H1N1 strain at the center of the current pandemic has provided some reasons to think that the risk in #2 is unlikely to materialize.
The effects of the "Novel Influenza A (H1N1)" seem to be generally similar to seasonal flu (generally mild, but sometimes deadly particularly to people in particular vulnerable groups); there has been some concern as it became a pandemic that it could become more deadly (the first wave of the 1918 flu pandemic was also mild), though ISTR seeing that the current belief is that it is unlikely to become substantially more deadly; at any rate, the big concern at the moment is ensuring that the same groups for which seasonal flu shots are important have access to immunization against the new variety.
Subtraction is not the same thing as division.
10^100 - 10^7 is, to the nearest integer power of 10, 10^100, not 10^93.
10^100 / 10^7, on the other hand, is 10 ^ (100-7), or 10^93, though.
That's nice, but here we're not talking about letters to your Congressional representative, we're talking about comments to be filed as part of a formal FCC rulemaking process. Comments filed in a formal rulemaking process are public records. In fact, the FCC has an online search system that lets you search all filed comments, by, among other things, the name of the person or entity filing the comment, and the results include additional information like the mailing address of the filer.
Consequently, especially if you are only worried about positive confirmation (IOW, if you don't mind some false negatives, but want to be fairly immune to false positives), its pretty easy for an employer to check if their employees have followed through on such a "recommendation."
Its not a scheduler, its a scheduling class for the existing Linux scheduler. A scheduler can support several different scheduling classes for processes. The current Linux scheduler supports two (Round Robin and FIFO) designed for real-time processes as well as the base one for regular processes, as I understand it.
Yes, if you used commodity PC hardware to set up your own voice mail system, you probably wouldn't have automatic transcription that it would be even theoretically possible for you to directly post your voice mails on the web, so it wouldn't be possible for you to expose information the way you could choose to do with Google Voice.
OTOH, it would be a lot more expensive for the fewer features you would get, so I'm not sure its all that worth it. It would be easier just to use Google voice and not post your own voice mails.
Note that all of these emails are emails for which the URLs were posted by the user on a public website, and which were subsequently (and as a result of that posting) crawled and indexed by search engines.
Oh, noes! Search engines find things that are posted publicly on the internet. The horror!
Yes, and the whole resume should be a size that the hiring manager won't be wasting their time reading it.
Assuming the job requires any kind of communication skills, screening for applicants who know how to present information so as to provide the necessary information for the audience, and only the necessary information, and to do it concisely, is an example of the hiring manager doing their job properly.
It requires a supermajority to raise taxes and a simple majority to cut authorized services, and sufficient votes in the Legislature don't currently exist to do either except in various means that have low visibility or which can be obfuscated as not really being either one of those even though they, in fact, are.
This is not the same as there being "no political will" to do either, however. Its that California has a Constitutional system which, compared to (for instance) the US federal system, structurally produces impasse very frequently because routine decisions require much broader support (the fact that it also requires a substantial supermajority to pass the annual budget is an example of this, and is also frequently pointed to as a symptom of a lack of political will; its not, particularly, though; other state governments and the federal government don't have as big of a problem with routine tasks not because they have greater "political will", but because they don't, for the most part, have structural rules set up that are quite as effective at preventing action that has majority support.)
Not really. You'll find that, by and large, the people advocating for service cuts and voting against tax increases (whether on the wealthy or even regressive taxes like sin tax or general sales tax increases) are not the people arguing for massive spending cuts, not the same people arguing to maintain programs. The problem is not that there is one group of people that wants taxes not to be increased (and, generally, to be decreased) and also wants programs maintained, the problem is that there are two distinct groups of people, one of whom wants no taxes increased and the more progressive taxes reduced, and one of whom want to minimize cuts to programs, and neither of these groups has sufficient votes to enact its own preferences, but each still has sufficient votes to prevent its opposition from being able to have an unqualified success in implementing its preferences, producing all kinds of chaotic, incoherent policy.
What if you just had to have a GPS antenna installed in the car with a jack to attach your portable GPS receiver to get optimum reception, which is a much more likely scenario?
Actually, its Home and Student, not "home office and student" and the license prohibits any commercial use. If you are using it in your home office (e.g., in a home-based business) you are violating the license terms. If you are using it when you bring work home from the office, you are violating the license terms.
"chemo" refers to chemotherapy, where the patient is poisoned in the hopes that the poison will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. It is a different form of therapy than radiation therapy, in which the patient is subjected to intense doses of radiation in the hopes that the radiation will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. Often, people with cancer will receive both, one after the other, but they aren't the same thing.
The post you were responding to was itself responding to someone else saying that large datasets required throwing out "all that normalization stuff" they learned in school.
Using materialized views (whether canned or roll-your-own) in the way you describe (that is, with a normalized base schema to prevent the anomalies normalizations exists to prevent, and appropriate tables and triggers set up to present efficient-to-access materialized views on that base schema) isn't an example of that, since normalization is still used, and still used for the purpose it exists to serve.
I think this makes a mistake in being based in the premise that the source of divergence from reality is the writers' ignorance rather than their desire to create a particular kind of art. Shows about the daily life of being a writer for a TV show would be (or, rather, are -- such shows actually exist) probably just as detached from the reality as any other show would be, because what most TV writers are trying to do is write something that presents a compelling story accessible to a broad audience with the particular trappings that relate to the notional theme or genre of the series, not to present a realistic exploration of that theme.
Have you seen how rapidly feral cats breed?
The problem isn't getting 50 million cats, its getting 50 million cats into the test device. Producing cats is easy -- they take care of that themselves quite well. Herding, on the other hand...
No, actual self-delusion can be directly harmful, because it can result in committing resources not warranted by the rationally expected utility (that is, the entertainment value.) Willing suspension of disbelief and self-delusion are actually very different things; and often only the former is needed to enjoy gambling and, thus, to derive entertainment utility from it.