If everyone in the world has access to the information then why bother paying for the degree?
Why do people pay for MCSE and similar certifications?
As long as I can prove my understanding of the knowledge then why should I pay a particular university to vouch for me?
As long as they can rely on universities and certifying organizations to vouch for people, at least as a first filter, why would hiring companies put more effort into letting candidates "prove their knowledge" in the first stage of the review process?
Oracle buying Sun -- the question is not whether this is a surprise, but why it didn't happen long before now. And, importantly, if the FTC will block it on the grounds that it would create too close to a monopoly in the DB market.
How? In terms of sales, MySQL is a rounding error, and won't budge Oracle from their mid-to-high-40's position. In terms of developer usage, it MySQL + Oracle is just over 50%. MySQL + Oracle isn't anything like a monopoly.
The only way to get an instant DB monopoly by merger would be if Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft underwent a three-way merger. Which is somewhat unlikely.
By buying Sun, Oracle also gets a hardware operation. But Oracle has no experience in the hardware business.
But Sun does. And, you know, all those people who work for Sun and constitute that experience are, when the deal is complete, Oracle employees, Oracle just needs to keep them and leverage their experience. This isn't entirely unheard of in acquisitions -- you acquire a firm that has experience you want, and then keep the people with the experience in a position to make use of it. Its not always just about acquiring an IP portfolio. Heck, sometimes its as much about acquiring the people and their experience as the IP portfolio. Two notable examples of this are acquisitions of Steve Jobs-run firms -- Apple's acquisition of NeXT and Disney's acquisition of Pixar.
Lest we forget. Christianity has been the defacto force of progressive-ism many times in U.S. history.
For all of American history, "Christianity" has included the overwhelming majority of the population. Certain subgroups of Christianity have, at time, been powerful forces of progressivism, but at every time for which that was true they were opposed by powerful subsets of Christianity, as well.
Well, you're both right, and both wrong. Latin Rite Roman Catholics (Who represnt 98% of Roman Catholics) leave that part out of the Lords prayer (which is almost certenly what the GP was refering to), but they do use it as a part of their liturgical rite.
Actually, you're wrong, because the "part of their liturgical rite" where it is used is called "The Lord's Prayer". The difference, such as it is, is that that part is separated from the other part of the prayer that is recited by the whole assembly by an interlocution by the priest ("Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day/In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ") that occurs after the "...deliver us from evil" line of the prayer. (see, e.g., this description of the Order of the Mass.)
I'm doubtful about the numbers in the summary and title. 100 Megawatts would require over a square mile of collecting area at noon on a cloudless day, yet the entire country is only one fifth that size. Perhaps the power plant is in a neighboring country and the power gets pumped in from across the border?
The project is on the same 740 acre (~1.15 sq. mi.) extraterritorial holding on which the Vatican Radio's transmitters are located. Its in the secord paragraph of TFA.
You know, I'm all for renewable power, but, aren't there a whole lot of starving people that this money could be feeding? Diseases to cure? Good to do? kinda thought that churches operated under the do good platform...
There will be a lot more people dying prematurely from starvation and other avoidable causes if global warming isn't checked. That aside, its hardly as if the Roman Catholic Church is uninvolved in feeding or providing medical care to the needy. On the more general "platform" issue, one could RTFA:
The Germany-born Benedict has been outspoken on environmental issues since becoming pope in 2005. During an address for World Peace Day in 2006, he said: "The destruction of the environment, its improper or selfish use, and the violent hoarding of the Earth's resources cause grievances, conflicts and wars, precisely because they are the consequences of an inhumane concept of development."
The Vatican listed pollution as one of seven "social" sins in an effort last year to update the cardinal vices that date to the 6th century.
"You offend God not only by stealing, taking the Lord's name in vain or coveting your neighbor's wife but also by wrecking the environment," Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary, said then.
More recently the Vatican has put words into actions.
The 5,000-square-meter roof of the Paul VI auditorium -- built in 1971 by Pier Luigi Nervi, the architect who designed Milan's Pirelli Tower -- was covered with 2,400 solar panels to produce 300 kilowatt hours of energy a year, enough for 100 households, cutting carbon-dioxide emissions by about 225 tons.
Either everyone has lots of houses, they plan to fire up another 6-7 radiostations, or some engineers went a little nuts with the Church's charge card.
Or, we could RTFA, and find:
The Vatican, advantaged by its small size, will count on revenue and solar aid from Italy after 2014. That's when the new plant is scheduled to turn the enclave into an electricity exporter to the nation that surrounds it.
Sort of like "free starter version of Oracle (minus as many useful features as we can get away with)".
That's called "Oracle Database Express Edition", and I can't imagine that they want another one of those, but with less commonality with the main Oracle DB.
You can always find a better quality solution if you're willing to pay enough, but as value is roughly modeled as utility/cost, with utility including quality, and cost including both monetary value as well as time and incidental costs (like training) your value will tend to plummet as your costs go up even if your quality goes up as well.
Value should be modeled as utility minus cost, not utility/cost. "Bang for the buck", though, is something like value/cost (equivalently: utility/cost - 1, which is similar to your value model but the "- 1" is important, because "bang for the buck" has a meaningful zero point).
Really, how do you insure this endeavor? A private company even attempting such a thing on the smallest of storms becomes incredibly liable.
Not if they spend much less money than the liability they would avoid to simply lobby Congress to craft laws categorically immunizing them from liability.
Is there any anti-trust factors to this? Oracle, being a dominant database player, and buying up the biggest open source database?
Oracle has nothing near a monopoly in the database market, and I'm not sure on what terms MySQL is the biggest open-source database; I'm pretty sure SQLite is the most widely used open-source database, and Postgres the one closest to Oracle/DB2 in terms of features.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 2, Informative
"Eclipse" is when the Sun is blocked/hidden/occulted
I think you mean occluded. "occulted" is when you wave a dead chicken at it at midnight.
No, "occulted" means exactly what the previous poster used it to mean. The root of "occult" mean to hide from view, and while the noun and adjective forms in general use have wandered off to refer to specific things because those things are usually hidden, the verb form remains much closer to the root. (See, e.g., here, or any other decent dictionary.)
I'd say a much bigger concern is going to be how films done in 3D transition to DVD/bluray. If directors start shooting their films differently in order to take advantage of 3D imagery, how much intention will be lost when the film is converted to 2D?
Quite a lot, which will (a) give people a reason to go to the theatre to see movies, and (b) provide an incentive for the development and adoption, within a decade or so, of whatever the successor to today's home viewing technology turns out to be, supporting home 3D viewing. "Replicating the theater experience at home" is, as always, about hitting a moving target.
Given that this is a 'deal' and not a gift, what exactly does Microsoft give up/pay in return for no longer being monitored by regulators?
They give up their right to oppose any extension of the Final Judgement due to expire this year which would leave them without being monitored by regulators on November 12, 2009, when the previous two-year extension of the judgement is due to expire. Under this agreement, the Final Judgement would be extended by another 18 months from the currently scheduled expiration, with another 18 month extension possible.
Gregg Keizer reports that federal and state regulators have struck a deal with Microsoft under which any version of Windows released after May 2011 will not be subject to the scrutiny mandated by a 2002 antitrust settlement. As previously promised, however, Windows 7 will be put under the microscope.
That's not what the document says, however. It says that a "Windows client operating system" commercially released after the final judgement expires (whether that is May 11, 2011 or 18 months later given the provision allowing another 18-month extension) would not be subject to the final judgement (unsurprising -- that's naturally what "expires" means.) It also says that Windows 7 is already under review. It also says that: "If there is a reasonable expectation that a new version of Windows will be distributed commercially prior to the expiration of the Final Judgments, however, Plaintiffs would consider, after discussion with Microsoft, whether and to what extent pre-release review of the new version of Windows would be necessary and appropriate."
So the agreement is not an agreement either that no Microsoft operating system released after May 11, 2011 will be subject to scrutiny (since it allows another 18-month extension to the Final Judgement, and only states that no Microsoft operating system released after the expiration of the Final Judgement will be subject to the terms of the Final Judgement), or (as I have seen it characterized elsewhere) that no Microsoft operating system released after Windows 7, period, will be subject to scrutiny under the Final Judgement.
Berkeley isn't the university where the wealthy kids go. It's actually fairly affordable (at the in-state rate), especially considering the education you get there.
It--the university, not the city--also isn't all that liberal, at least in the last couple of decades.
The politically active portion of the population of the city is particularly liberal, though, but that's more due to middle-aged, high-income professionals that are ex-hippies that never really changed more than necessary to get by and people who have gravitated to the city because of its reputation than it is to do with the student body on campus.
I wish I could figure out why this is so, given that XML was already a standard when JSON was invented, and is widely supported and just as compact.
Because XML isn't as compact in most real-world cases (which don't involve only one parent entity with a one-character name with exclusively empty children, meaning you have a much higher ratio of wasted characters in end tags than in your carefully-chosen example.) And because in JavaScript, JSON from a trusted source is trivially parseable with eval(), whereas XML takes more work.
Object-oriented modeling tacitly assumes an ontology where the world is made out of objects. Objects are treated as complexes of properties, divided into essentials and accidents.
This is mostly true of C++/Java style OOP, Smalltalk-style (or, as I like to think of it, "real") OOP doesn't, as an ideal, have essentials beyond objectness.
Relational modeling assumes an ontology where the world is made out of facts (i.e., relations).
"Relations" in the relational model are not facts, they are proper sets of facts of the same form (or, stated another way, with the same essential characters and different particular characteristics.) [In SQL, they aren't proper sets, but bags, but SQL and the relational model are two different things.]
Relational modeling assumes a break-down into categories of facts (represented by relations) that is very similar to break down into classes and instances in the least flexible implementations of the OO paradigm. Insofar as there is an impedance mismatch, its largely an artifact of implementation details in specific "relational" systems vs. specific "OO" systems, rather than a fundamental incompatibility in the models.
I don't think you're really getting at what you mean here. How is the verbose "clear"?
Noting that there is a trade-off between concision and clarity does not mean that verbosity is clear, it means that there are situations when the most concise expression may not be the most clear. It is perfectly consistent with the observation that the most concise expression may at times also be the most clear, and that being more verbose may not always add clarity.
I understand you're trying to get at how most programmers find the more concise, expressive code much harder to understand, and seem to only be able to understand code when all of the operations are at very low level.
I don't think (a) that's what GP is getting at, or (b) that's true in the first place. Most programmers, IME, find the code written in the syntax which they are most familiar easiest to understand, and code written in unfamiliar syntax harder to understand. Since more programmers are familiar with languages with Algol-derived syntax (either procedural languages like C or OO languages with similar syntax like Java), code that is written in that syntax, or in other syntax with constructs that mimic that syntax, are readily understood, while, e.g., Lisp code presents more of a barrier. But this has nothing to do with what is concise; different concepts are expressed most concisely in either idiom, and languages which adopt constructs popularized in functional languages with non-Algol-derived syntax and present them with a syntax that is more accessible to those familiar with Algol-derived syntax (e.g., Ruby, Python, etc.) are often particularly praised for their expressiveness and clarity by people who would shun the languages from which they are adopting features.
I'd imagine this has something to do with an attempt to crack down on the drug running cartels that threaten to grow so powerful as to destabilize the government. A threatened government is a dangerous thing.
Well, except that the cartels aren't becoming any stronger. What has happened recently that has led to the escalation of violence is that the government has gotten strong (or simply motivated) enough to work against the cartels, rather than being completely in bed with them. The cartels have, as a result, increased the violence against the government, the citizenry, and tourists in an effort to get the government to go back to the way things had worked for quite some decades previously.
A threatened criminal enterprise that is used to having carte blanche is also a dangerous thing.
Their war on drugs is powered by our war on drugs. In fact, it is our war on drugs, only exported across the border. During prohibition of alcohol we had an elevated level of violence in this country -- the current system is much more efficient, at least if you live in the USA.
No, its not. While Mexico is far worse than the US, their is a huge impact in this country in terms of violence, and economic costs on top of that, from the war on drugs, which is the main reason that the US has more people in prison (either as an absolute number or proportion of the population) than any other country except, maybe, China (China's published statistics are lower than the US, but they have wide areas of exclusion that are included in most countries statistics, so its not directly comparable.)
Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard.
Okay, so the three other "operating systems" Vista is specifically compared to are: 1) Linux, 2) open source, and 3) Apple Leopard
There's a couple of problems with this. First, "open source" isn't an operating system, its a licensing model. Second, Linux isn't an operating system, its an OS kernel which is included in many operating systems. Third, Linux-based OS's and Leopard aren't the most secure non-Windows OS's on the planet (specially designed, narrow-niche, security-focussed operating systems are, naturally.)
It seems to me that this is pure marketing fluff, an empty, unsupported claim of superiority over generalized threats that Microsoft fears they are losing mindshare to in the marketplace.
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Why do people pay for MCSE and similar certifications?
As long as they can rely on universities and certifying organizations to vouch for people, at least as a first filter, why would hiring companies put more effort into letting candidates "prove their knowledge" in the first stage of the review process?
How? In terms of sales, MySQL is a rounding error, and won't budge Oracle from their mid-to-high-40's position. In terms of developer usage, it MySQL + Oracle is just over 50%. MySQL + Oracle isn't anything like a monopoly.
The only way to get an instant DB monopoly by merger would be if Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft underwent a three-way merger. Which is somewhat unlikely.
But Sun does. And, you know, all those people who work for Sun and constitute that experience are, when the deal is complete, Oracle employees, Oracle just needs to keep them and leverage their experience. This isn't entirely unheard of in acquisitions -- you acquire a firm that has experience you want, and then keep the people with the experience in a position to make use of it. Its not always just about acquiring an IP portfolio. Heck, sometimes its as much about acquiring the people and their experience as the IP portfolio. Two notable examples of this are acquisitions of Steve Jobs-run firms -- Apple's acquisition of NeXT and Disney's acquisition of Pixar.
For all of American history, "Christianity" has included the overwhelming majority of the population. Certain subgroups of Christianity have, at time, been powerful forces of progressivism, but at every time for which that was true they were opposed by powerful subsets of Christianity, as well.
Actually, you're wrong, because the "part of their liturgical rite" where it is used is called "The Lord's Prayer". The difference, such as it is, is that that part is separated from the other part of the prayer that is recited by the whole assembly by an interlocution by the priest ("Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day/In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ") that occurs after the "...deliver us from evil" line of the prayer. (see, e.g., this description of the Order of the Mass.)
The project is on the same 740 acre (~1.15 sq. mi.) extraterritorial holding on which the Vatican Radio's transmitters are located. Its in the secord paragraph of TFA.
There will be a lot more people dying prematurely from starvation and other avoidable causes if global warming isn't checked. That aside, its hardly as if the Roman Catholic Church is uninvolved in feeding or providing medical care to the needy. On the more general "platform" issue, one could RTFA:
Or, we could RTFA, and find:
That's called "Oracle Database Express Edition", and I can't imagine that they want another one of those, but with less commonality with the main Oracle DB.
Value should be modeled as utility minus cost, not utility/cost. "Bang for the buck", though, is something like value/cost (equivalently: utility/cost - 1, which is similar to your value model but the "- 1" is important, because "bang for the buck" has a meaningful zero point).
You know that for many programmers, that's sort of like saying "not quite as humid as Death Valley", right?
Not just "other people", generally, but specifically telling competitors how they should market products against Microsoft's.
Not if they spend much less money than the liability they would avoid to simply lobby Congress to craft laws categorically immunizing them from liability.
Oracle has nothing near a monopoly in the database market, and I'm not sure on what terms MySQL is the biggest open-source database; I'm pretty sure SQLite is the most widely used open-source database, and Postgres the one closest to Oracle/DB2 in terms of features.
No, "occulted" means exactly what the previous poster used it to mean. The root of "occult" mean to hide from view, and while the noun and adjective forms in general use have wandered off to refer to specific things because those things are usually hidden, the verb form remains much closer to the root. (See, e.g., here, or any other decent dictionary.)
Quite a lot, which will (a) give people a reason to go to the theatre to see movies, and (b) provide an incentive for the development and adoption, within a decade or so, of whatever the successor to today's home viewing technology turns out to be, supporting home 3D viewing. "Replicating the theater experience at home" is, as always, about hitting a moving target.
They give up their right to oppose any extension of the Final Judgement due to expire this year which would leave them without being monitored by regulators on November 12, 2009, when the previous two-year extension of the judgement is due to expire. Under this agreement, the Final Judgement would be extended by another 18 months from the currently scheduled expiration, with another 18 month extension possible.
That's not what the document says, however. It says that a "Windows client operating system" commercially released after the final judgement expires (whether that is May 11, 2011 or 18 months later given the provision allowing another 18-month extension) would not be subject to the final judgement (unsurprising -- that's naturally what "expires" means.) It also says that Windows 7 is already under review. It also says that: "If there is a reasonable expectation that a new version of Windows will be distributed commercially prior to the expiration of the Final Judgments, however, Plaintiffs would consider, after discussion with Microsoft, whether and to what extent pre-release review of the new version of Windows would be necessary and appropriate."
So the agreement is not an agreement either that no Microsoft operating system released after May 11, 2011 will be subject to scrutiny (since it allows another 18-month extension to the Final Judgement, and only states that no Microsoft operating system released after the expiration of the Final Judgement will be subject to the terms of the Final Judgement), or (as I have seen it characterized elsewhere) that no Microsoft operating system released after Windows 7, period, will be subject to scrutiny under the Final Judgement.
It--the university, not the city--also isn't all that liberal, at least in the last couple of decades.
The politically active portion of the population of the city is particularly liberal, though, but that's more due to middle-aged, high-income professionals that are ex-hippies that never really changed more than necessary to get by and people who have gravitated to the city because of its reputation than it is to do with the student body on campus.
Because XML isn't as compact in most real-world cases (which don't involve only one parent entity with a one-character name with exclusively empty children, meaning you have a much higher ratio of wasted characters in end tags than in your carefully-chosen example.) And because in JavaScript, JSON from a trusted source is trivially parseable with eval(), whereas XML takes more work.
This is mostly true of C++/Java style OOP, Smalltalk-style (or, as I like to think of it, "real") OOP doesn't, as an ideal, have essentials beyond objectness.
"Relations" in the relational model are not facts, they are proper sets of facts of the same form (or, stated another way, with the same essential characters and different particular characteristics.) [In SQL, they aren't proper sets, but bags, but SQL and the relational model are two different things.]
Relational modeling assumes a break-down into categories of facts (represented by relations) that is very similar to break down into classes and instances in the least flexible implementations of the OO paradigm. Insofar as there is an impedance mismatch, its largely an artifact of implementation details in specific "relational" systems vs. specific "OO" systems, rather than a fundamental incompatibility in the models.
Noting that there is a trade-off between concision and clarity does not mean that verbosity is clear, it means that there are situations when the most concise expression may not be the most clear. It is perfectly consistent with the observation that the most concise expression may at times also be the most clear, and that being more verbose may not always add clarity.
I don't think (a) that's what GP is getting at, or (b) that's true in the first place. Most programmers, IME, find the code written in the syntax which they are most familiar easiest to understand, and code written in unfamiliar syntax harder to understand. Since more programmers are familiar with languages with Algol-derived syntax (either procedural languages like C or OO languages with similar syntax like Java), code that is written in that syntax, or in other syntax with constructs that mimic that syntax, are readily understood, while, e.g., Lisp code presents more of a barrier. But this has nothing to do with what is concise; different concepts are expressed most concisely in either idiom, and languages which adopt constructs popularized in functional languages with non-Algol-derived syntax and present them with a syntax that is more accessible to those familiar with Algol-derived syntax (e.g., Ruby, Python, etc.) are often particularly praised for their expressiveness and clarity by people who would shun the languages from which they are adopting features.
Well, except that the cartels aren't becoming any stronger. What has happened recently that has led to the escalation of violence is that the government has gotten strong (or simply motivated) enough to work against the cartels, rather than being completely in bed with them. The cartels have, as a result, increased the violence against the government, the citizenry, and tourists in an effort to get the government to go back to the way things had worked for quite some decades previously.
A threatened criminal enterprise that is used to having carte blanche is also a dangerous thing.
No, its not. While Mexico is far worse than the US, their is a huge impact in this country in terms of violence, and economic costs on top of that, from the war on drugs, which is the main reason that the US has more people in prison (either as an absolute number or proportion of the population) than any other country except, maybe, China (China's published statistics are lower than the US, but they have wide areas of exclusion that are included in most countries statistics, so its not directly comparable.)
Okay, so the three other "operating systems" Vista is specifically compared to are:
1) Linux,
2) open source, and
3) Apple Leopard
There's a couple of problems with this. First, "open source" isn't an operating system, its a licensing model. Second, Linux isn't an operating system, its an OS kernel which is included in many operating systems. Third, Linux-based OS's and Leopard aren't the most secure non-Windows OS's on the planet (specially designed, narrow-niche, security-focussed operating systems are, naturally.)
It seems to me that this is pure marketing fluff, an empty, unsupported claim of superiority over generalized threats that Microsoft fears they are losing mindshare to in the marketplace.