Boy are you naive.
All your pretty constitution is worth less than my role toilet paper when some government agent utters "Terrorism".
You noticed that the DHS started to search laptops on border entry/exit.
If it's encrypted, and you refuse the DHS guy access, the treatment you get depends if you are inmate in the police state or not.
If you are, your IT stuff gets confiscated, and will be kept for a random time.
If you are not, you can fly back home I guess.
That's the newest case that comes to mind.
Older stuff includes being held (as an US citizen) without a trial indefinitly, that example of the US government run youth hostel in Cuba, and so on.
Or take the joys of National Security Letters. You know this joy of every secret state police that ever existed.
Secret courts (like the FISA), or cases closed from public scrutinity by declaring them relevant to national security.
And the bad part here is, because I know a number of Americans, and they are completely nice people, is the fact that from an outside view, if you cover the headings, it's hard to guess who the good guys are and who the bad guys.
Ok, which group with a leader that uses religion as an explanation has killed more people? The US Army in the Middle East or the bad terrorists in the US and EU?
Which organizations don't give a damn about (international) laws?
Basically, clearly the US are the good guys for you, but not because some moral high ground, but because you happen to be US. It's way less so clearcut for an European, but on average the US are probably considered the good guys here still.
I think you don't understand the principles of Open Source. Btw, what do have free services (free as beer) to do with free software to do?
As a person that values opensource and free software, I do pay usually for stuff. I pay for my DSL, I pay for my own servers (I prefer to host myself), I pay sometimes even for software if there is no open alternative.
I've sent the email below to the address mentioned in the trailer of the page:
Hi!
Some minor points:
Large objects:
your page suggests that PostgreSQL does not support large object the way mysql does. In reality it has been supporting large rows for years now. It has the TEXT datatype and the BYTEA datatypes to store texts and binary columns without limits. (Well, both mysql and postgresql do have huge limits on rowsize)
It especially does not do a subset of SQL 92/99, it's rather compliant to SQL 2003. Certainly more so than say mysql, which has been slowly adding SQL support, as you say yourself; notice that Mysql AB in their sales documentation don't claim any SQL conformance,
PostgreSQL does allow selecting data over different databases via dblink, but it's a kludge. OTOH, mysql optimization papers still claim denormalisation as a solution to the fact that MySQL5 only has Nested Loop as an executation strategy for joins. Furthermore, subselects are always materialized.
Speed:
I question your blanket statement that MySQL is very fast on complex queries. As noted above, it's very sensitive to the way a query is formulated, and has basically only the most primitive execution strategies for joins and subselects. Complex queries DO involve usually both of these constructs. You also mention the problem of forking backends for startup speed problems. I'd like to point out that the classical solution to that is to use a connection pool either in your app (as e.g. PHP provides), or use pgpool.
Stability:
Anecdotal evidence. Fact is that mysql crashed data this month in the office, and I've had deployed Postgres95 about a decade ago, and never lost data. Fact is, that MySQL is offering many options where the application can decide to have an unstable/unsafe DB setup (by choosing e.g. MyISAM storage), while the same "performance optimizations" for PostgreSQL are only available via the server config. OTOH, PostgreSQL has only just now become stable enough on 64bit platforms to consider productive usage.
Special Serverside features:
You seem to miss the wealth of features that PostgreSQL provides. E.g. it is one of the most flexible DBs to support updateable/insertable views. Addtionally, it supports vertical table partitioning, etc.
National Language support:
PG can set the language per database and cluster. Actually, it can only set the encoding while creating the database:
I'd question the "state of the art"-ness of Rails. While it has good points, it's a 2-tier website-in-a-box appserver with automatic support for CRUD operations.
Notice, all these keywords are quite compatible with "state of the art", but 2-tier is incompatible.
2-tier is quite nice for many small quick&dirty tasks, but you are basically forced to scale the single DB when your traffic grows. Which, btw, when you take a look at most high-end sites is a loosening battle.
And before somebody comes up with the genial idea of replacing ActiveRecord with some kind of interprocess communication that can be loadbalanced => that's far from trivial, even for Rails gurus.
And that's from my personal laptop. Now some people (with say huge server farms) do care, but they usually do their own customizing down to the level of the BIOS.
The prices in Germany are acceptable (UMTS flatrates are available), and even in Austria they are reasonable for staying connected all time via say a Nokia Communicator.
Yes, it's not there yet, that every kid has it. But prices are starting to become reasonable for professional work.
And the biggest problem is not the price, IMHO, it's the latency issue. HSPDA is only a partial solution, because it's currently available only on some providers, plus it's coverage is a subset of UMTS proper.
For criminal stuff:
You are innocent until proven guilty if you can afford the legal bills.
If you cannot affort it, you are innocent till your public defender snores to loud during your trial.
For civil suits (you know, the ones that can ruin you):
You are innocent as long you have the better lawyer and your arguments are better.
* For the USA, read the PATRIOT act. And consider the fact that the definition of terrorism is getting broader and broader all the time. It's just for the good of the population. Yeah.
* For the USA, consider that attorney fees and costs are usually not awarded to the defendant, even if not guilty. Meaning in fact, that a non-guilty defendant almost certainly looses his income: Being not able to work, no matter if self-employed of employed for some time (while in jail) plus attorney costs does this easily. Now, to win against the police officers any civil compensation, you must have still the money for attorneys, plus you must show that the law enforcement officers clearly had no reason to arrest you. (See how the your chances to win that is low: your economic base has been shattered, and you are expected to carry heavy burdens to prove that they did it on purpose)
* E.g. for Austria, while attorney fees are automatically awarded, the law explicitly states that to get compensation for illegal arrests or jailings, the police had to have absolutly no reason to arrest the suspect. That creates the crazy situation, that a guy that sat years in jail innocently for murder, where the police mishandled the case completly (as in surpressing evidence, ignoring confessions from another suspect, etc.) and where even the state attorney asked the court to grant compensation the judge denied it on the base that the police had reason to suspect the innocent guy.
So basically it's a combination of issues:
* the private person usually has limited resources. And if it does not have limited resources, the state usually tries to take the resources away from the persons (e.g. by locking down accounts for the duration)
* the state has way more resources compared to a single defendant.
* for the private person charged, their whole life is under attack. They might loose their economic life, their liberty, or even their life.
* for the law enforcement guys (police, state attorney, judge), there is basically nothing at stake: Well, it could make their conviction stats worse.
To put it bluntly in extreme letters, how many law enforcment/court people (judges, juries, state attorneys, police officers) where punished in the cases of innocent executed?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, technically, the US is twice over the allowed new debt per year (6% or so if I believe the CIA factbook in 2007)
Boy are you naive. All your pretty constitution is worth less than my role toilet paper when some government agent utters "Terrorism". You noticed that the DHS started to search laptops on border entry/exit. If it's encrypted, and you refuse the DHS guy access, the treatment you get depends if you are inmate in the police state or not. If you are, your IT stuff gets confiscated, and will be kept for a random time. If you are not, you can fly back home I guess. That's the newest case that comes to mind. Older stuff includes being held (as an US citizen) without a trial indefinitly, that example of the US government run youth hostel in Cuba, and so on. Or take the joys of National Security Letters. You know this joy of every secret state police that ever existed. Secret courts (like the FISA), or cases closed from public scrutinity by declaring them relevant to national security. And the bad part here is, because I know a number of Americans, and they are completely nice people, is the fact that from an outside view, if you cover the headings, it's hard to guess who the good guys are and who the bad guys. Ok, which group with a leader that uses religion as an explanation has killed more people? The US Army in the Middle East or the bad terrorists in the US and EU? Which organizations don't give a damn about (international) laws? Basically, clearly the US are the good guys for you, but not because some moral high ground, but because you happen to be US. It's way less so clearcut for an European, but on average the US are probably considered the good guys here still.
I think you don't understand the principles of Open Source. Btw, what do have free services (free as beer) to do with free software to do?
As a person that values opensource and free software, I do pay usually for stuff. I pay for my DSL, I pay for my own servers (I prefer to host myself), I pay sometimes even for software if there is no open alternative.
Free software is not about being free of charge.
yacc
The problem is that such a system is most certainly not workable.
I include the right to play content with free software, for that I have source code and that I can customize for my needs.
Now any software that can access the data raw, by definition can break any DRM.
So basically, yes I'm all for it. Problem is, that such a thing does not exist.
yacc
I've sent the email below to the address mentioned in the trailer of the page:
a tures.html shows the
Hi!
Some minor points:
Large objects:
your page suggests that PostgreSQL does not support large object the
way mysql does. In reality it has been supporting large rows for years
now. It has the TEXT datatype and the BYTEA datatypes to store texts
and binary columns without limits. (Well, both mysql and postgresql do
have huge limits on rowsize)
SQL conformance:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/interactive/fe
details of the SQL conformance for PostgreSQL 8.0, and is (c) 2005,
guess this was available when you researched your comparision.
It especially does not do a subset of SQL 92/99, it's rather compliant
to SQL 2003. Certainly more so than say mysql, which has been slowly
adding SQL support, as you say yourself; notice that Mysql AB in their
sales documentation don't claim any SQL conformance,
PostgreSQL does allow selecting data over different databases via
dblink, but it's a kludge. OTOH, mysql optimization papers still claim
denormalisation as a solution to the fact that MySQL5 only has Nested
Loop as an executation strategy for joins. Furthermore, subselects are
always materialized.
Speed:
I question your blanket statement that MySQL is very fast on complex
queries. As noted above, it's very sensitive to the way a query is
formulated, and has basically only the most primitive execution
strategies for joins and subselects. Complex queries DO involve
usually both of these constructs.
You also mention the problem of forking backends for startup speed
problems. I'd like to point out that the classical solution to that is
to use a connection pool either in your app (as e.g. PHP provides), or
use pgpool.
Stability:
Anecdotal evidence. Fact is that mysql crashed data this month in the
office, and I've had deployed Postgres95 about a decade ago, and never
lost data. Fact is, that MySQL is offering many options where the
application can decide to have an unstable/unsafe DB setup (by
choosing e.g. MyISAM storage), while the same "performance
optimizations" for PostgreSQL are only available via the server
config. OTOH, PostgreSQL has only just now become stable enough on
64bit platforms to consider productive usage.
Special Serverside features:
You seem to miss the wealth of features that PostgreSQL provides. E.g.
it is one of the most flexible DBs to support updateable/insertable
views. Addtionally, it supports vertical table partitioning, etc.
National Language support:
PG can set the language per database and cluster. Actually, it can
only set the encoding while creating the database:
createdb -E UTF8 testdb
createdb -E SQL_ASCII testdb
Hopefully you can update your comparision, don't hesitate to ask if
you have any questions.
yacc
I'd question the "state of the art"-ness of Rails. While it has good points, it's a 2-tier website-in-a-box appserver with automatic support for CRUD operations.
Notice, all these keywords are quite compatible with "state of the art", but 2-tier is incompatible.
2-tier is quite nice for many small quick&dirty tasks, but you are basically forced to scale the single DB when your traffic grows. Which, btw, when you take a look at most high-end sites is a loosening battle.
And before somebody comes up with the genial idea of replacing ActiveRecord with some kind of interprocess communication that can be loadbalanced => that's far from trivial, even for Rails gurus.
yacc
Almost nobody cares for the boot time, IMHO:
andreas@andi-lap:/mnt/disc60> uptime
08:09:00 up 9 days, 22:29, 4 users, load average: 4.77, 4.01, 2.54
And that's from my personal laptop.
Now some people (with say huge server farms) do care,
but they usually do their own customizing down to the level of the BIOS.
yacc
merge tracking is already "implemented". Use svk, which does quite a nice job.
Actually merge tracking is useful enough that it makes sense to use svk in completly online settings.
yacc
What a bullshit.
GPRS/EDGE/UMTS are here and quite useable.
The prices in Germany are acceptable (UMTS flatrates are available), and even in Austria they are reasonable for staying connected all time via say a Nokia Communicator.
Yes, it's not there yet, that every kid has it. But prices are starting to become reasonable for professional work.
And the biggest problem is not the price, IMHO, it's the latency issue. HSPDA is only a partial solution, because it's currently available only on some providers, plus it's coverage is a subset of UMTS proper.
yacc
For criminal stuff: You are innocent until proven guilty if you can afford the legal bills. If you cannot affort it, you are innocent till your public defender snores to loud during your trial. For civil suits (you know, the ones that can ruin you): You are innocent as long you have the better lawyer and your arguments are better.
Ok, some comments
* For the USA, read the PATRIOT act. And consider the fact that the definition of terrorism is getting broader and broader all the time. It's just for the good of the population. Yeah.
* For the USA, consider that attorney fees and costs are usually not awarded to the defendant, even if not guilty. Meaning in fact, that a non-guilty defendant almost certainly looses his income: Being not able to work, no matter if self-employed of employed for some time (while in jail) plus attorney costs does this easily. Now, to win against the police officers any civil compensation, you must have still the money for attorneys, plus you must show that the law enforcement officers clearly had no reason to arrest you. (See how the your chances to win that is low: your economic base has been shattered, and you are expected to carry heavy burdens to prove that they did it on purpose)
* E.g. for Austria, while attorney fees are automatically awarded, the law explicitly states that to get compensation for illegal arrests or jailings, the police had to have absolutly no reason to arrest the suspect. That creates the crazy situation, that a guy that sat years in jail innocently for murder, where the police mishandled the case completly (as in surpressing evidence, ignoring confessions from another suspect, etc.) and where even the state attorney asked the court to grant compensation the judge denied it on the base that the police had reason to suspect the innocent guy.
So basically it's a combination of issues:
* the private person usually has limited resources. And if it does not have limited resources, the state usually tries to take the resources away from the persons (e.g. by locking down accounts for the duration)
* the state has way more resources compared to a single defendant.
* for the private person charged, their whole life is under attack. They might loose their economic life, their liberty, or even their life.
* for the law enforcement guys (police, state attorney, judge), there is basically nothing at stake: Well, it could make their conviction stats worse.
To put it bluntly in extreme letters, how many law enforcment/court people (judges, juries, state attorneys, police officers) where punished in the cases of innocent executed?
yacc