As I previously stated, and you seemingly missed, ease of installation is not a factor in any way, shape, or form, for describing MySQL's technical capabilities, or lack thereof, as a RDBMS.
Two of the most important characteristics software can have are ease of installation and ease of use.
It sounds as if your kids are precocious, and that you're basically looking for books that would appeal to "ordinary" smart teens. Here are some of my thoughts:
Maybe they'd like some of the collections of old stories, rather than novels. Many of these are "puzzle" stories, in which our hero discovers a problem and then, quickly, solves it. For example, The Best of Poul Andersen is replete with those. Andersen could get pretty sexual in his longer books, but his short stories were largely free of that.
For Heinlein you'd want true juveniles. Starship Troopers, Time Enough For Love, and Farnham's Freehold are not juveniles...
Dune is dark and intermittently sexual. It starts with the death of the hero's father. Not exactly what you want.
Zelazny's characters are world-weary amoral demigods. Also not what you want.
Larry Niven isn't all bad, but might actually be a bit sophisticated.
H Beam Piper's Gunpowder God books are great fun. I don't see much in them that young folks wouldn't get, perhaps except for about two sentences mentioning sexual scandals -- "carefully hushed up" -- in court.
Robert Silverberg's (?) alternate history book set in an Aztec-dominated America might be good. I think Turtledove eventually wrote a sequel.
Truly young-person-oriented books include a lot of Andre Norton (I loved The Prince Commands, although that's not SF), Heinlein juveniles, and the aforementioned A Wrinkle In Time.
Anne McCaffrey is too sexual.
Gordon Dickson's Dorsai books are grim and glorify war. And some nasty stuff happens. I wouldn't favor them.
David Brin's good stuff is a little slow.
Pournelle's good solely-authored stuff is like Heinlein juveniles, but not quite as good.
In fantasy, I think they might be a little young for Raymond Feist. de Camp's (?) Compleat Enchanter (or Enchanter Compleated), however, would be wonderful, if they have any interest in mythology.
Another Fine Myth by Asprin is hilarious. The sexual stuff is lighthearted enough you shouldn't worry about it.
One of Turtledove's strengths is writing about ADULTS. I'd be suspicious of any of his juveniles.
And for yourself, get Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series.:)
Step two: use it everywhere online and only in a few areas associate it with your real name.
Result: name scrapers pick up your alias/handle and little harm is done. Your actual name is discoverable if someone knows your handle, but in most cases is not important and is not sought.
People running around with their real name up-front are just plain *stupid* and asking for trouble. Basic security, people.
That's completely irrelevant to the question I posed. But thanks anyway.
If the source is obviously not credible, it doesn't matter what lies they make up. And if the source is obviously not credible, anybody who believes it is stupid, and not worth my time.
It really is an IQ test. You didn't pass.
Actually, the one who failed the test is you.
I think the standard Hilary Putnam final examination question works well here, which was:
Part A: Write a question suitable for this class. Part B: Answer it. You will be graded on both parts.
Wouldn't setting up a web-presence to "tell the truth" be counter-effective since it would only enable "name-scammers" to actually fill those accounts with (more) accurate information?
OK. That's an interesting challenge. Joe Blow sets up the website www.joe-blow-from-oshkosh.com, and DateScammer.com scrapes it and changes a few details, while beating him in SEO.
Get your panties in a wad much? My users are happy and they're getting the services they're NOT paying for. Call it what you like, the community grew on my site as a result of it and nobody has an issue with that.
Based on the comments to my blog post on JLove, people DO have an issue with it.
Anyhow, what you just said is that you can't attract customers without lying to them. Some people, upon realizing that, would find another line of business.
I mean, really, if there's a woman out there who wouldn't date me because my name appears in a fake profile on a scam dating site (and they're all scams), then quite honestly, she's too stupid for me to be interested in anyway.
Well, there is that. And indeed the "harm" story I posted was of a Christian who wouldn't date a guy who appeared to be a Jew. Blech.
Still, maybe the next outfit who tries the same approach to page generation will make up some falsehoods that bother you more. So I think these are worthwhile questions to ask.
I'm pretty confident that I am the only, or very close to the only, Curt Monash out there. (People do family trees because of the connection to the Sir John Monash that Monash University was named after.) On the other hand, there are hundreds of search engine hits that really refer to me, one way or the other. So I'm one of the relatively few people who, when he searches on his name, gets 200 straight hits all about him.
But my point on web presence was this -- who cares if you're the 53rd Joe Blow to come up in a search that's simply on your name? Somebody who really wants the Joe Blow who went to Alfred E. Neumann High School in East Overshoe, Montana, where you were President of the Cow-Tipping Club, will likely succeed in finding your page. And that's a GOOD thing for managing your online reputation.
I suspect the idea is that if you maintain your own website, people who are Googling you at random will come across that first, and may not pay attention to the shady results at all. Your name is essentially your very own brand; might as well try to paint it in a decent light.
One virtue of solitaire over most other computer games is that it's not time-based. You can play for exactly as long as you want to. You don't need to finish a level in the time allotted, kill the aliens before they land, play a word before your opponent gets annoyed with you, or anything like that. You have complete control of the gaming schedule.
One can have similar experiences from playing board games vs. computer opponents, or from the crafting aspect of MMOs. But solitaire is by far the simplest way of achieving them.
Too often -- and it sounds as if you're an example of this -- IT thinks it's really the Department of Information Prevention. Your only possible legitimate basis for refusing this effort is cost.
As somebody already pointed out, you can dump their data into a separate data mart, and let them query away to their heart's content.
This data mart could, if you like, reside in the cloud. EnterpriseDB/Elastra is an Oracle-compatible solution that would work well for the size range I'm guessing you're in. If it's multi-terabyte, however, I'd look more at Vertica/Amazon.
Or if the database fits in a single machine's RAM, look at QlikView.
There are many better ways to answer the question than simply saying "No, because you're/I'm stupid."
Ferris Research is one of the leading analyst firms covering email. They outsourced their OWN email to Google Apps, and I followed their example.
DDOS attacks are now a thing of the past for me. The spam filter has JUST enough false positives I sadly have to scan manually, but in fact I've never been greatly inconvenienced by one. The false negatives are fairly mild.
There is no such thing as anti-spam with 100% accuracy both ways.
And by the way, challenge/response is a TERRIBLE idea -- it causes huge amounts of backscatter spam pollution, and it also inconveniences potential customers trying to reach you.
The Four Color Theorem is certainly the first I recall.
Meanwhile, from the department of Old Fogeys -- my advisor got queasy at any proof that wasn't CONSTRUCTIVE. He made me reprove a known preliminary result because it used some Tarski Principle black magic.
At least he let me leave in one non-constructive part, where it was obvious that it could be made constructive with some busy work.
Soon thereafter, he became president of the AMS. At which point I looked at his CV and realized he didn't have a PhD. (If you solve a Hilbert problem, you don't need any stinking degrees...) And suddenly a lot of his approach to being an advisor became more comprehensible...
1. MapReduce makes it very easy to program data transformations, including ones to which relational structures are of little relevance.
2. MapReduce runs in massively parallel mode "for free," without extra programming.
Based on those advantages, MapReduce would indeed seem to have significant uses, including:
* Specialized indexing of large quantities of data. Obviously, MapReduce was built for text indexing of the Web. But it would likely also be useful for, say, preprocessing satellite telemetry or intelligence intercepts, or for doing early steps in large-scale network traffic analysis. MapReduce may not be good for data management, but it looks good for banging stuff into specialized data management systems.
* Computer-scientific research. If you're trying to figure out better ways to, say, digest and analyze huge amounts of astronomical data, MapReduce seems like a great platform. Today's researchers - even the students - aren't nearly as adept at parallel algorithms as one would hope. Perhaps we should take those complications away to let them focus on the unique parts of their work. Breakthrough programming is hard enough anyway, especially if you're trying to do all the work yourself.
TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought
on
Oracle Buys BEA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Interesting point, although I'd phrase it a little differently. Math is all about restating the question until you put it in a form where it can be answered. Often, the restatement is not precisely equivalent to the original result, but rather something stronger, from which the original result quickly follows. (Most people reading here have studied enough math to know whereof I speak on that. And for another example, recall the press coverage of how Fermat's Last Theorem was proved -- what Wiles really did was prove another conjecture that was known to have FLT as a consequence.)
So I would -- er, I would conjecture that the Turing Test was meant as a stronger restatement. I.e., if a machine can pass the Turing Test, than it is intelligent. But the converse is not assumed; there well could be intelligent machines that do not pass the Turing Test. Maybe some day there will be an intelligent Canadian computer that starts every sentence with a characteristic "Click-whizz-whirr" and ends it with "eh?"
This is the rare post where flashing credentials is in order for context. I've been an analyst for a quarter-century. I've been blogging for a couple of years. I was a columnist for Computerworld for a few years, and when that gig went away moved to Network World. So I've seen things from all sides. Here's my take.
Major press get attention. When I got active again as an analyst, I went out of my way to secure a press gig. Nothing gets a vendor's attention like hearing that a major publication wants to talk to it on deadline.
Smart analysts sometimes get bonus attention. Vendors really do like to talk to us in part to pick our brains. Plus they think if we're smart our influence is likely to increase. I love these conversations, because those are exactly the same kinds of vendors who become my customers and pay my bills. I've now had a well-publicized falling out with SAP; but at its peak, that was a great relationship for me. And there wasn't much motivation for them early on besides mutual respect.
Small vendors seek out blog coverage. I get pitched all the time by small companies just hoping for blog coverage. Big companies, however, focus on me more as an analyst. I don't know how common my experience is, however, because I really am a leading source of coverage and indepth analysis for a lot of small companies. (E.g., google on Vertica or Netezza or DATAllegro or Crossbeam Systems or Attensity or Megaputer, and chances are one of my blogs will be an early hit.)
Vendors are idiosyncratic. Sometimes they give you good service, sometimes they don't. Disorganization trumps even relationships. One time Oracle was ignoring me, so I wrote directly to Larry Ellison, who responded. I forwarded the e-mail to then PR-chief Zach Nelson, and asked if he could help with follow-up. All of a sudden he found the time to help me out.:)
Good work wins access. I don't get access because I'm an analyst or blogger. I get insight because I'm recognized -- I like to think accurately! -- as an insightful analyst and blogger. Sometimes the equation is "insight = relationships" or "insight = influentially being listened to." Sometimes it's just "insight = a guy we should be talking with, and the benefits of doing so will probably work themselves out."
Slashdot Mirror
As I previously stated, and you seemingly missed, ease of installation is not a factor in any way, shape, or form, for describing MySQL's technical capabilities, or lack thereof, as a RDBMS.
Two of the most important characteristics software can have are ease of installation and ease of use.
Curt Monash
It sounds as if your kids are precocious, and that you're basically looking for books that would appeal to "ordinary" smart teens. Here are some of my thoughts:
Maybe they'd like some of the collections of old stories, rather than novels. Many of these are "puzzle" stories, in which our hero discovers a problem and then, quickly, solves it. For example, The Best of Poul Andersen is replete with those. Andersen could get pretty sexual in his longer books, but his short stories were largely free of that.
For Heinlein you'd want true juveniles. Starship Troopers, Time Enough For Love, and Farnham's Freehold are not juveniles ...
Dune is dark and intermittently sexual. It starts with the death of the hero's father. Not exactly what you want.
Zelazny's characters are world-weary amoral demigods. Also not what you want.
Larry Niven isn't all bad, but might actually be a bit sophisticated.
H Beam Piper's Gunpowder God books are great fun. I don't see much in them that young folks wouldn't get, perhaps except for about two sentences mentioning sexual scandals -- "carefully hushed up" -- in court.
Robert Silverberg's (?) alternate history book set in an Aztec-dominated America might be good. I think Turtledove eventually wrote a sequel.
Truly young-person-oriented books include a lot of Andre Norton (I loved The Prince Commands, although that's not SF), Heinlein juveniles, and the aforementioned A Wrinkle In Time.
Anne McCaffrey is too sexual.
Gordon Dickson's Dorsai books are grim and glorify war. And some nasty stuff happens. I wouldn't favor them.
David Brin's good stuff is a little slow.
Pournelle's good solely-authored stuff is like Heinlein juveniles, but not quite as good.
In fantasy, I think they might be a little young for Raymond Feist. de Camp's (?) Compleat Enchanter (or Enchanter Compleated), however, would be wonderful, if they have any interest in mythology.
Another Fine Myth by Asprin is hilarious. The sexual stuff is lighthearted enough you shouldn't worry about it.
One of Turtledove's strengths is writing about ADULTS. I'd be suspicious of any of his juveniles.
And for yourself, get Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan series. :)
Step one: produce for yourself a handle.
Step two: use it everywhere online and only in a few areas associate it with your real name.
Result: name scrapers pick up your alias/handle and little harm is done. Your actual name is discoverable if someone knows your handle, but in most cases is not important and is not sought.
People running around with their real name up-front are just plain *stupid* and asking for trouble. Basic security, people.
That's completely irrelevant to the question I posed. But thanks anyway.
Curt Monash
If the source is obviously not credible, it doesn't matter what lies they make up. And if the source is obviously not credible, anybody who believes it is stupid, and not worth my time.
It really is an IQ test. You didn't pass.
Actually, the one who failed the test is you.
I think the standard Hilary Putnam final examination question works well here, which was:
Part A: Write a question suitable for this class.
Part B: Answer it.
You will be graded on both parts.
But thanks for playing.
CAM
Wouldn't setting up a web-presence to "tell the truth" be counter-effective since it would only enable "name-scammers" to actually fill those accounts with (more) accurate information?
OK. That's an interesting challenge. Joe Blow sets up the website www.joe-blow-from-oshkosh.com, and DateScammer.com scrapes it and changes a few details, while beating him in SEO.
I'll have to think about that one.
Curt Monash
Get your panties in a wad much? My users are happy and they're getting the services they're NOT paying for. Call it what you like, the community grew on my site as a result of it and nobody has an issue with that.
Based on the comments to my blog post on JLove, people DO have an issue with it.
Anyhow, what you just said is that you can't attract customers without lying to them. Some people, upon realizing that, would find another line of business.
CAM
to expect a web presence to prevent this name scamming, seeing how Curt Monash has a pretty significant web presence,
and yet he still fell victim. Who knows, it may be the opposite strategy is better.
Well, *I* am not hurt by this. It was way down the list of hits on my name -- because I DO have a big online presence. ;)
Curt Monash
I mean, really, if there's a woman out there who wouldn't date me because my name appears in a fake profile on a scam dating site (and they're all scams), then quite honestly, she's too stupid for me to be interested in anyway.
Well, there is that. And indeed the "harm" story I posted was of a Christian who wouldn't date a guy who appeared to be a Jew. Blech.
Still, maybe the next outfit who tries the same approach to page generation will make up some falsehoods that bother you more. So I think these are worthwhile questions to ask.
Curt Monash
I'm pretty confident that I am the only, or very close to the only, Curt Monash out there. (People do family trees because of the connection to the Sir John Monash that Monash University was named after.) On the other hand, there are hundreds of search engine hits that really refer to me, one way or the other. So I'm one of the relatively few people who, when he searches on his name, gets 200 straight hits all about him.
But my point on web presence was this -- who cares if you're the 53rd Joe Blow to come up in a search that's simply on your name? Somebody who really wants the Joe Blow who went to Alfred E. Neumann High School in East Overshoe, Montana, where you were President of the Cow-Tipping Club, will likely succeed in finding your page. And that's a GOOD thing for managing your online reputation.
Curt Monash
I suspect the idea is that if you maintain your own website, people who are Googling you at random will come across that first, and may not pay attention to the shady results at all. Your name is essentially your very own brand; might as well try to paint it in a decent light.
You got it in one.
Curt Monash
To clarify the typo:
I've actually beaten it at least once each at every level of handicap, even the one where the computer starts w/ 5 stones on a 9x9 board.
I played it intensely for a while. (Link in the post right above.)
...
I've actually beaten it at least once each at every level of handicap, even the one where the computer starts w/ stones on a 9x9 board.
THAT one took a lot of wackily played losses before I sufficiently confused the software to pull it off
IIRC, the game files store state but not history. So somewhere I should have "proof" that I did it, but not a record of how.
CAM
One virtue of solitaire over most other computer games is that it's not time-based. You can play for exactly as long as you want to. You don't need to finish a level in the time allotted, kill the aliens before they land, play a word before your opponent gets annoyed with you, or anything like that. You have complete control of the gaming schedule.
One can have similar experiences from playing board games vs. computer opponents, or from the crafting aspect of MMOs. But solitaire is by far the simplest way of achieving them.
Too often -- and it sounds as if you're an example of this -- IT thinks it's really the Department of Information Prevention. Your only possible legitimate basis for refusing this effort is cost.
As somebody already pointed out, you can dump their data into a separate data mart, and let them query away to their heart's content.
This data mart could, if you like, reside in the cloud. EnterpriseDB/Elastra is an Oracle-compatible solution that would work well for the size range I'm guessing you're in. If it's multi-terabyte, however, I'd look more at Vertica/Amazon.
Or if the database fits in a single machine's RAM, look at QlikView.
There are many better ways to answer the question than simply saying "No, because you're/I'm stupid."
Ferris Research is one of the leading analyst firms covering email. They outsourced their OWN email to Google Apps, and I followed their example.
DDOS attacks are now a thing of the past for me. The spam filter has JUST enough false positives I sadly have to scan manually, but in fact I've never been greatly inconvenienced by one. The false negatives are fairly mild.
There is no such thing as anti-spam with 100% accuracy both ways.
And by the way, challenge/response is a TERRIBLE idea -- it causes huge amounts of backscatter spam pollution, and it also inconveniences potential customers trying to reach you.
CAM
Thanks.
I've having trouble seeing meat there, however. I.e., I haven't detected enough detail to tell me what to think about the generality of their claims.
CAM
I haven't been a graduate student in mathematics since the 1970s. That said:
For a costume party, I'd suggest "Come as your favorite abstraction". That would also be accessible to any non-mathematicians attending.
Kind of like med students' "Come as your favorite syndrome," but not as sick.
The Four Color Theorem is certainly the first I recall.
...) And suddenly a lot of his approach to being an advisor became more comprehensible ...
Meanwhile, from the department of Old Fogeys -- my advisor got queasy at any proof that wasn't CONSTRUCTIVE. He made me reprove a known preliminary result because it used some Tarski Principle black magic.
At least he let me leave in one non-constructive part, where it was obvious that it could be made constructive with some busy work.
Soon thereafter, he became president of the AMS. At which point I looked at his CV and realized he didn't have a PhD. (If you solve a Hilbert problem, you don't need any stinking degrees
The GOVERNMENT has been doing MIND CONTROL experiments to induce VOICES IN THE HEAD using technology that can be combatted by TINFOIL HATS.
Maybe there really are alligators in the sewers too.
GA experiments -- whatever they are -- showing reasoning ability is not an adaptive trait?
I VERY much doubt that's accurate.
At the risk of quoting myself,
Proponents of MapReduce highlight two advantages:
1. MapReduce makes it very easy to program data transformations, including ones to which relational structures are of little relevance.
2. MapReduce runs in massively parallel mode "for free," without extra programming.
Based on those advantages, MapReduce would indeed seem to have significant uses, including:
* Specialized indexing of large quantities of data. Obviously, MapReduce was built for text indexing of the Web. But it would likely also be useful for, say, preprocessing satellite telemetry or intelligence intercepts, or for doing early steps in large-scale network traffic analysis. MapReduce may not be good for data management, but it looks good for banging stuff into specialized data management systems.
* Computer-scientific research. If you're trying to figure out better ways to, say, digest and analyze huge amounts of astronomical data, MapReduce seems like a great platform. Today's researchers - even the students - aren't nearly as adept at parallel algorithms as one would hope. Perhaps we should take those complications away to let them focus on the unique parts of their work. Breakthrough programming is hard enough anyway, especially if you're trying to do all the work yourself.
TIBCO is the logical next candidate to be bought. If not SAP.
Interesting point, although I'd phrase it a little differently. Math is all about restating the question until you put it in a form where it can be answered. Often, the restatement is not precisely equivalent to the original result, but rather something stronger, from which the original result quickly follows. (Most people reading here have studied enough math to know whereof I speak on that. And for another example, recall the press coverage of how Fermat's Last Theorem was proved -- what Wiles really did was prove another conjecture that was known to have FLT as a consequence.)
So I would -- er, I would conjecture that the Turing Test was meant as a stronger restatement. I.e., if a machine can pass the Turing Test, than it is intelligent. But the converse is not assumed; there well could be intelligent machines that do not pass the Turing Test. Maybe some day there will be an intelligent Canadian computer that starts every sentence with a characteristic "Click-whizz-whirr" and ends it with "eh?"
"It's aboot time for me to have a boot now, eh?"
Re: I suspect this article is written by someone with ties to AT&T,
You're wrong.
This is the rare post where flashing credentials is in order for context. I've been an analyst for a quarter-century. I've been blogging for a couple of years. I was a columnist for Computerworld for a few years, and when that gig went away moved to Network World. So I've seen things from all sides. Here's my take.