So every SQL database, Oracle included, has to have some way of keeping transaction order, which is to say which transaction got there 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. This is part of ACID and it cannot be ignored. Oracle and others solved the problem by using a synthetic number. Oracle's "number" type is not a recognized IEEE standard like an INT or a FLOAT, DOUBLE etc. It i stored using a proprietary scheme in the DB that Oracle guarantees to be correct when it is accessed and it is completely portable. The last estimate I saw ( I rarely look ) was that pushing Oracle to its absolute limits was that it would take ~ 141 years to wrap around. Personally I am not going to be alive then and I doubt Oracle will be either.
In postGres they use a 32 bit unsigned int to keep tract of this. Now 2^32 is 4,294,967,296 transactions, which is a very large number indeed, but when you get into extremely hi volume transaction environments this can get used up pretty fast, like in a few days fast! Since the number is unsigned and postGres is written in C ( although I don't think it matters ) when you hit INT MAX it wraps back to 1!!! and that is a disaster. In older versions it just kept going and corrupting your data and there was really no way out of it, you were just hosed. In the latest version, the database will only go so far and it will force itself down before it wraps around AND will refuse to come up until the vacuum process is complete. On VERY large tables this can take days!
Now the guys who write PG are no dummies. They recognized this and came up with a process called VACUUM, it does many things and it will reset the TXID and keep you safe. In most every application this is fine. In Extreme transaction environments where you build up billions of rows very quickly you have to set the VACUUM process to it's most aggressive level to keep up with inbound transactions and it just kills performance and your TX rate falls into the basement.
Hey, so I am going let the invective roll right on by...
Is Oracle a huge turd throwing ape? That is not an unfair analogy and in some ways I agree with you.
I have been in the database business for a very long time and I have watched them come and go. Some self destructing and others just fading into obscurity but the one thing that I have observed over the years is that the database is pretty much at the heart of anything non trivial. There are only TWO RDBMS's that have stood the test of time and that is Oracle and DB2.
That is a good because something that important cannot be flavor of the month like so many programming languages and frameworks are these days.
In a perfect world we would have infinite choice and they all would work as good as the other and software patents would not exist. Sadly, Elvis isn't making records anymore and there is no Santa Clause.
I feel your pain. The problem is the ambiguity across platforms. It is very much akin to representing the absence of information, ie: null, there is nothing there since that is very different from zero ( 0 ) since zero is a value. Perhaps one day though.
You cannot deny that he built a huge empire on something as banal as a database. Arguably the best RDBMS pretty much ever and where is the competition?
I use Oracle extensively. I am a DBA and of all the alternatives out there ( and I have tried most of them ) the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly. Perhaps postGres will eclipse Oracle one day, but not unless they get some serious money behind the project and that probably won't happen because no one wants to pump the millions of dollars it would take into a project that cannot even fix the TXID problem, and make no mistake about it, it is a problem. Also if someone dumps that kind of money into a project they expect some kind of ROI. There might be a few white knights that have that kind of money but they are few and far between and most can find more worthy causes to spend that kind of money on. Don't get me wrong, postGres is a fine DB but it has some faults that make it not so attractive.
Larry understands how to stitch technology together around a DB better than most anyone else I have seen. Arguably Microsoft gets it, but they are stuck running in the windows universe which despite a lot of progress is still broken. You cannot run MS-SQL Server across hundreds of Intel machines and expect it to hold together, but they ave built and end to end ecosystem and MS-SQL Server is tightly integrated, but you can't drop it on a Z-Series mainframe under either IBM's native OS or Linux. PostGres has the same problem but they are moving to fix that, but I am not sure they really understand the problem. Of the other DB's out there ( Mongo, Hadoop, et all. ) that you can do that with, they don't support things like ACID which, like it or not, is pretty much a requirement in way to many situations.
The facts speak for themselves. If Oracle really sucked as a Database it would not be in the vast number spaces that it occupies. You can cap on Larry Ellison all you want, question his lineage, say he is an ego maniacal asshole, but you have to give the man his due. He built a company that does have the answer to almost all the spaces where a DB matters and he built a business that relentlessly pursues those spaces to the betterment of their stock holders and 98% of the people and organizations that use their products.
This is really great for doing cpu intensive jobs but what seems to never get any love is moving massive amounts of data around. We need to put as much effort into buss bandwidth as we are with cpu's.
There may be object-oriented versions of Pascal now, but that's not the original language any more than C++ is C.
Wow have you been living under a rock? Delphi first released by the now defunct Borland and now released by
Embarcadero Technologies
is probably the best RAD language on the market, bar none.
On top of that it now generates native code for Windows, OSX, IOS, and Android. They even had a Linux version for a while called KyLix.
It is OOP Pascal and it is the fastest compiler on the market and generates native binaries for all the platforms. The resulting binaries are amazingly fast and are generally on par with C,C++ AND Java. You can write them as GUI apps or console apps, take your pick. The runtime is royalty free and their ultimate version comes with drivers for just about every SQL database on the planet.
This has been a known Achilles heel for stealth technology since it first came out.
Take a cheap Furuno surface search radar play around with the main frequency and the pulse repetition frequency, and not by a lot, and all of the sudden things that never painted before suddenly appear.
This is one of the main principles of mine detection sonar. You can make fairly large changes in the output frequency to really tune the thing once you know the relative size and shape of the target you are searching for. Torpedo's do the same thing. The search on a relatively low frequency then when the algorithm thinks it has something it switches to frequencies typically 10 to 20 times higher for high resolution aiming. The exact same principles could be applied. AWACS could search and much lower frequencies then vector fighters in with the ability to not change the frequencies a lot, but lower them down to just above the thresholds for the very small antennas. Close enough and no matter how the target is shaped you will get a return.
You sir are a completely uninformed and obviously blind to history moron.
Banks playing fast and loose with depositor's money caused the financial crisis, just like it caused in 1929.
In response the government passed both Securities Act of 1933 and the Glass-Steagall Act the prohibited commercial banks ( those banks that hold customer deposits ) to prevent such insanity as using customer funds to gamble on highly speculative and extremely risky business investments.
You would have think we would have learned from the Savings and Loan crisis, yes that bit of lunacy that cost the tax payers billions of dollars when we decided to deregulate savings and loan institutions.
Then just a few years ago Glass-Steagall was basically gutted and the party was on! Banks put their customers money into all sorts of hairball shit like derivatives and other such insanity. Combine that with making loans to people to buy houses they had no business making loans to and here we go again. Free Market they cried from the rooftops! Adam Smiths invisible hand they cried from the rooftops of their palaces! Just let the market be free and we will all prosper they told us.
And what happened? Pure greed took over from regulation and it damn near bankrupted the country, a very few people got mega rich, a bunch more got filthy rich and a number more made a killing. The result of which forced us to sell billions of securities to the likes of China and anyone else we could beg. The national debt is really beyond belief.
A free market is good but unfortunately the market does not take into account the dishonesty of man. In China they take you out and shoot you for shit like the CEO's of those huge banks did and all the little minions that were in on it. What did those people get? Huge bonuses, golden parachutes and the rest of us got stuck holding the bag.
So you pull your head out of your ass, walk out of the echo chamber and really learn what is happening around you.
PostGres compares ok on a lot of workloads, but when the rubber really hits the road that is when it starts to fall apart.
They must fix the TXID ID problem. It will now at least shut down when it is getting close to rolling over, but the vacuum process will just kill your performance in very high transaction workloads. Not that Oracle would not have the same problem if they were using a 32 bit number for the value, but with the size of the ID Oracle uses this won't happen for ~ 140 years.
Immovability... PostGres gets some great performance but it does so at the cost of the data files being so close to the metal that you can't move them to another host that is not exactly the same as it is moving from. If that is not true you have to do an SQLDUMP of the data. That is a fairly fatal flaw in my opinion.
So yes you can use PG in place of Oracle, to a point, but after that point it just does not perform as required.
I migrated a PG DB to Oracle 11g EE and it runs quite smoothly. The application would quickly overwhelm PG without some serious changes to the PG code.
Yeah that's reassuring and all. The WC3 takes security very seriously as well as do the makers of Mozilla, IE, Chrome, Opera, Safari et al. but never the less we still have drive by's, we still have machines with AV software, anti-malware, Sand Boxing software etc installed and they still get through and steal whatever they want.
Javascript is a language that scares the hell out of anyone who takes security seriously. You can shove text at any object and presto that is now executable code, oh yay!!! Your code ( yeah I looked ) is full of the convention of function( "function{}" ) and that is just as bad as PHP taking links to remote servers as parameters to functions. Do you really think this is going to survive in the wild? Really dude this is injection just waiting to happen. I applaud your cleverness, but this "software" is going to get ass raped and your reputation is going to be ruined.
There are better ways to do this. Doing this in the web browser as it currently exists is just foolish. I am building an application frame ( appFrame ) that can run actual applications free from the asshattery that is HTML and CSS.
This thing has access to my hard drive, to fucking save files!!!!
This thing will never, ever, be used anywhere I have a say about. This is ripe for someone to hook it from another page and write shit to anywhere on your hard disk that you have permission to write to. Drive By's were bad enough but now we have opened the flood gates. The script kiddies and the black hast are going to have a field day owning anyone who runs this.
The Browser is bad enough as it is with "precisely formed" URL's being able to rape your machine, and now this. Some PHB is going mandate this and the number of machines and networks jacked is going to be quite a show.
No one has been able to successfully sand box a browser. The browser was never ever supposed to be able to access the local machine directly, but in the name of the all mighty cloud we keep tearing down barrier after barrier and no one is saying anything about it, we just keep changing chairs while the band plays.
Spreadsheets are great tools for accounts and they have made their life a lot easier. But you are right, they are evil because suddenly accountants started using them to do things that should have been done in databases etc. But I think we have only ourselves to blame if you really think about it.
I mostly agree with what this guy says with the exception of Quatro by the old Borland. Quattro by all accounts was eating Lotus Development and Microsoft's lunch in the spreadsheet department. It had WYSIWYG natively before either of them ( 123's was an add-on and excell didn't even have one) and it worked beautifully. Embedded graphs were there, Multiple Sheets and a function library that was richer than either of the others.
Then the Look & Feel lawsuit hit. Jim Mansey ( if he stood in front of me today, I would punch him hard and punch him again even harder ) after having let 123 rest on it's laurels took Borland to court, in Boston. Borland eventual prevailed but not until it had spent most all it's cash and suffered the basic abandonment of Quattro by the marketplace because of the suit.
That really was the beginning of the end for innovation in the spreadsheet world. Excel has turned into a bloated beast that no one really likes, but it is the only thing left in the marketplace ( Don't get me wrong I wholly support Open / Libre Office but they will never overtake Excel as the simply have to play catchup constantly ) that anyone can field. Quattro still exists but the last release was about 2 years ago
While I agree with some of what you say, I cannot help but disagree completely with:>/p>
Something optimized specifically for compilers and modern programming languages.
Such ideas are a complete waste of machine resources, ram, registers, and cpu cycles et al. "Modern Languages" have to do more than should ever be required to account for programmer laziness. Dynamic typing? Takes up huge amounts of resources to have to constantly figure out what the type of EVERY variable it encounters. Virtual Machines? More splitting of cpu time because none of those "modern" languages know how to deal w/multiple cores, hell we barely have languages that can deal with multiple cpu's as it is.
FSB speeds rarely, if ever, exceed 450MHZ and then the cpu is in a pretty much constant wait state for data. Disk I/O is still pretty damn slow when compared to everything else. SSD's have contributed a large amount in improving that but they still make the whole system wait. Network I/O still crawls in comparison unless you are using very specialized and very expensive technology that is mostly reserved for things like mainframes ( think IBM's Deep Blue ).
I dream of going back to big full height drives with the sort of data densities we have now backed down a couple of notches. Separate read and write heads. Elevator seeking and writing so that you can read in a terabyte on one rotation. Running on a parallel buss that clocks a byte of data onto the buss every clock cycle and connected by fiber optics.
Just imagine 64 or 128 fiber strands connecting every component. Experimental rates are over 100 terabytes per second, for a single fiber!!!!! Imagine even just 10% percent of that inside your machine! Your bus capable of signaling at 10 TBS!!! The CPU would be the component everyone is waiting for!!!
Now just imagine a machine that with a very efficient language like C without all the cruft that things like Java, Python, PHP and all those other "modern" bring to the table.
And of course one must imagine what a Beowulf cluster of those would be like...
Being from the Delphi camp for many years, I too recommend this, but they need to get the install worked out. Also they need to get LLDB worked out on the Mac because trying to load in another version of XCode to sit beside the latest for just the debugger is a royal pain in the ass.
Your position is not only short sighted but ignorant. Precedent precedes many many things. Think about the precedent this sets for someplace like Oklahoma where they push hard to denounce science and only want to teach that the earth and everything else was created in 6 days. Teachers have to push back just as hard and now they can be summarily dismissed if they don't fall into line.
Were you ever a Novell CNE? The term of course means, Abnormal End, but it is rare to see the usage outside of the Netware ecosystem.
As to Pascal Programs failing gracefully and not taking the entire system with it... I think that might have been the advent of actual protected mode operation -v- declaration and discipline. In my early days of my programming career first learning how to use pointers effectively I would routinely crash my machine by running a pointer into the OS space ( MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x ) on 8088 machines and corrupting all sorts of data and code structures.
Having programming now fr more years that I care to admit to at times I have seen the proliferation of the mind set that simply ignores things like structure and massive abuse of the OOP model. These days you start looking through code and see variables created on an ad-hoc basis for no other reason than laziness when 20 minutes of code refactoring would have solved the problem and the system would have made far more sense and in the end would ave performed faster and been more logically cohesive.
As a matter of fact Watterson never licensed any part of C&H for anything. The guy could have made a medium to large sized fortune if he had, but to him the integrity of the strip was FAR more important. The only reason it is running is certain places is because King Features Syndicate has the right to redistribute the comic.
I was a huge fan of the strip. I mean I knew it had to happen at some point, but I was heartbroken when it stopped.
When my son was born I named him Calvin ( my maternal grandfather ), but the running joke is that he was named after the character. When he was two 3 weeks old, a woman who lived in the same building took a white One-Z and hand painted a beautiful Hobs on it. He is 13 now and it is framed on his bedroom wall.
It is called analyzing your project and mapping the thing out before you write a single line of code. Programming is a discipline as well as an art and a science.
I was once talking to a guy and he as complaining the compiler kept erroring out on "symbol table is full". I asked to look at his code and OMG he was declaring variables by the butt load, but the thing of it was they were all subtle variations of the same thing, and lots and lots of structs. So I should him how to make a linked list of a single of structs with variants. I explained that with little effort these would be declared on the heap and that running out of space in the symbol table would be a thing of the past. Also he was no longer limited by the stack and that he had all the memory the machine could muster for variables.
These days troubleshooting code has become such a chore simply because languages these days let you declare variables anywhere so you have to track down where things declared just to figure out what is happening and dynamically typed languages are the absolute worst thing to come along simply because they only add to the confusion since the compiler or intepreter has to try and determine intent and they all pretty much suck at doing it.
I have written pascal programs in excess of 100K lines broken up into many modules and I actually find them easier to debug than other so called modern languages simple because the discipline of declaration forces you to really think things through, rather than just popping things in here and there in an ad-hoc manner.
Since it is open source and has all those goodies it would seem to me that increasing the volume size capabilities would not be nearly as tall an order as starting over from scratch.
Well someone has yet another personal project they want us all to take seriously. Really? I mean Really?
Of the numerous file systems out there, and I have tried a whole boat load of them, the one that is the most mature, most reliable, arguably the fastest is... Wait for it... From the company that everyone loves to hate...
Is NSS from Novell. It has more posix features then all of the rest of them, it is insanely fast, it provides undelete and complete repeatability and Novell has open sourced it. Nuff said.
What you are describing is a Software Engineer not an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer or any other kind of civil engineer. I work with a boat load of civil engineers who are extraordinarily competent in their distinct skill set. They can do some prototyping in matlab and a few other things but when it comes to writing actual software they just need to step very far away from the compiler because their minds don't think in those spheres.
You can do this in C. C comes with EVERY Linux distribution so no additional parts or bits required. If you can do this, you really can do most anything and further more you will understand some of the more advanced concepts of computer programming, one of the most important is Memory Management. Now I know that with languages like Java you are far removed from those concepts bust just understanding what you have to do to manage your memory footprint will help you in those languages as well since you will have a much clearer understanding of what is going on under the hood. If you push a few boundaries you will understand some of less obvious parts of other languages.
Slashdot Mirror
Happy to share, and I have posted a link as well.
So every SQL database, Oracle included, has to have some way of keeping transaction order, which is to say which transaction got there 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc. This is part of ACID and it cannot be ignored. Oracle and others solved the problem by using a synthetic number. Oracle's "number" type is not a recognized IEEE standard like an INT or a FLOAT, DOUBLE etc. It i stored using a proprietary scheme in the DB that Oracle guarantees to be correct when it is accessed and it is completely portable. The last estimate I saw ( I rarely look ) was that pushing Oracle to its absolute limits was that it would take ~ 141 years to wrap around. Personally I am not going to be alive then and I doubt Oracle will be either.
In postGres they use a 32 bit unsigned int to keep tract of this. Now 2^32 is 4,294,967,296 transactions, which is a very large number indeed, but when you get into extremely hi volume transaction environments this can get used up pretty fast, like in a few days fast! Since the number is unsigned and postGres is written in C ( although I don't think it matters ) when you hit INT MAX it wraps back to 1!!! and that is a disaster. In older versions it just kept going and corrupting your data and there was really no way out of it, you were just hosed. In the latest version, the database will only go so far and it will force itself down before it wraps around AND will refuse to come up until the vacuum process is complete. On VERY large tables this can take days!
Now the guys who write PG are no dummies. They recognized this and came up with a process called VACUUM, it does many things and it will reset the TXID and keep you safe. In most every application this is fine. In Extreme transaction environments where you build up billions of rows very quickly you have to set the VACUUM process to it's most aggressive level to keep up with inbound transactions and it just kills performance and your TX rate falls into the basement.
This link explains it better than I can. PostGres Wrap Around Problem
Hey, so I am going let the invective roll right on by...
Is Oracle a huge turd throwing ape? That is not an unfair analogy and in some ways I agree with you.
I have been in the database business for a very long time and I have watched them come and go. Some self destructing and others just fading into obscurity but the one thing that I have observed over the years is that the database is pretty much at the heart of anything non trivial. There are only TWO RDBMS's that have stood the test of time and that is Oracle and DB2.
That is a good because something that important cannot be flavor of the month like so many programming languages and frameworks are these days.
In a perfect world we would have infinite choice and they all would work as good as the other and software patents would not exist. Sadly, Elvis isn't making records anymore and there is no Santa Clause.
I feel your pain. The problem is the ambiguity across platforms. It is very much akin to representing the absence of information, ie: null, there is nothing there since that is very different from zero ( 0 ) since zero is a value. Perhaps one day though.
But here is the problem...
You cannot deny that he built a huge empire on something as banal as a database. Arguably the best RDBMS pretty much ever and where is the competition?
I use Oracle extensively. I am a DBA and of all the alternatives out there ( and I have tried most of them ) the only thing that comes even close is DB2 with postGres running a close third and depending on your POV, catching up fairly quickly. Perhaps postGres will eclipse Oracle one day, but not unless they get some serious money behind the project and that probably won't happen because no one wants to pump the millions of dollars it would take into a project that cannot even fix the TXID problem, and make no mistake about it, it is a problem. Also if someone dumps that kind of money into a project they expect some kind of ROI. There might be a few white knights that have that kind of money but they are few and far between and most can find more worthy causes to spend that kind of money on. Don't get me wrong, postGres is a fine DB but it has some faults that make it not so attractive.
Larry understands how to stitch technology together around a DB better than most anyone else I have seen. Arguably Microsoft gets it, but they are stuck running in the windows universe which despite a lot of progress is still broken. You cannot run MS-SQL Server across hundreds of Intel machines and expect it to hold together, but they ave built and end to end ecosystem and MS-SQL Server is tightly integrated, but you can't drop it on a Z-Series mainframe under either IBM's native OS or Linux. PostGres has the same problem but they are moving to fix that, but I am not sure they really understand the problem. Of the other DB's out there ( Mongo, Hadoop, et all. ) that you can do that with, they don't support things like ACID which, like it or not, is pretty much a requirement in way to many situations.
The facts speak for themselves. If Oracle really sucked as a Database it would not be in the vast number spaces that it occupies. You can cap on Larry Ellison all you want, question his lineage, say he is an ego maniacal asshole, but you have to give the man his due. He built a company that does have the answer to almost all the spaces where a DB matters and he built a business that relentlessly pursues those spaces to the betterment of their stock holders and 98% of the people and organizations that use their products.
This is really great for doing cpu intensive jobs but what seems to never get any love is moving massive amounts of data around. We need to put as much effort into buss bandwidth as we are with cpu's.
There may be object-oriented versions of Pascal now, but that's not the original language any more than C++ is C.
Wow have you been living under a rock? Delphi first released by the now defunct Borland and now released by Embarcadero Technologies is probably the best RAD language on the market, bar none.
On top of that it now generates native code for Windows, OSX, IOS, and Android. They even had a Linux version for a while called KyLix.
It is OOP Pascal and it is the fastest compiler on the market and generates native binaries for all the platforms. The resulting binaries are amazingly fast and are generally on par with C,C++ AND Java. You can write them as GUI apps or console apps, take your pick. The runtime is royalty free and their ultimate version comes with drivers for just about every SQL database on the planet.
That problem would not exist if people new how to use a database.
This has been a known Achilles heel for stealth technology since it first came out.
Take a cheap Furuno surface search radar play around with the main frequency and the pulse repetition frequency, and not by a lot, and all of the sudden things that never painted before suddenly appear.
This is one of the main principles of mine detection sonar. You can make fairly large changes in the output frequency to really tune the thing once you know the relative size and shape of the target you are searching for. Torpedo's do the same thing. The search on a relatively low frequency then when the algorithm thinks it has something it switches to frequencies typically 10 to 20 times higher for high resolution aiming. The exact same principles could be applied. AWACS could search and much lower frequencies then vector fighters in with the ability to not change the frequencies a lot, but lower them down to just above the thresholds for the very small antennas. Close enough and no matter how the target is shaped you will get a return.
You sir are a completely uninformed and obviously blind to history moron.
Banks playing fast and loose with depositor's money caused the financial crisis, just like it caused in 1929.
In response the government passed both Securities Act of 1933 and the Glass-Steagall Act the prohibited commercial banks ( those banks that hold customer deposits ) to prevent such insanity as using customer funds to gamble on highly speculative and extremely risky business investments.
You would have think we would have learned from the Savings and Loan crisis, yes that bit of lunacy that cost the tax payers billions of dollars when we decided to deregulate savings and loan institutions.
Then just a few years ago Glass-Steagall was basically gutted and the party was on! Banks put their customers money into all sorts of hairball shit like derivatives and other such insanity. Combine that with making loans to people to buy houses they had no business making loans to and here we go again. Free Market they cried from the rooftops! Adam Smiths invisible hand they cried from the rooftops of their palaces! Just let the market be free and we will all prosper they told us.
And what happened? Pure greed took over from regulation and it damn near bankrupted the country, a very few people got mega rich, a bunch more got filthy rich and a number more made a killing. The result of which forced us to sell billions of securities to the likes of China and anyone else we could beg. The national debt is really beyond belief.
A free market is good but unfortunately the market does not take into account the dishonesty of man. In China they take you out and shoot you for shit like the CEO's of those huge banks did and all the little minions that were in on it. What did those people get? Huge bonuses, golden parachutes and the rest of us got stuck holding the bag.
So you pull your head out of your ass, walk out of the echo chamber and really learn what is happening around you.
PostGres compares ok on a lot of workloads, but when the rubber really hits the road that is when it starts to fall apart.
They must fix the TXID ID problem. It will now at least shut down when it is getting close to rolling over, but the vacuum process will just kill your performance in very high transaction workloads. Not that Oracle would not have the same problem if they were using a 32 bit number for the value, but with the size of the ID Oracle uses this won't happen for ~ 140 years.
Immovability... PostGres gets some great performance but it does so at the cost of the data files being so close to the metal that you can't move them to another host that is not exactly the same as it is moving from. If that is not true you have to do an SQLDUMP of the data. That is a fairly fatal flaw in my opinion.
So yes you can use PG in place of Oracle, to a point, but after that point it just does not perform as required.
I migrated a PG DB to Oracle 11g EE and it runs quite smoothly. The application would quickly overwhelm PG without some serious changes to the PG code.
Yeah that's reassuring and all. The WC3 takes security very seriously as well as do the makers of Mozilla, IE, Chrome, Opera, Safari et al. but never the less we still have drive by's, we still have machines with AV software, anti-malware, Sand Boxing software etc installed and they still get through and steal whatever they want.
Javascript is a language that scares the hell out of anyone who takes security seriously. You can shove text at any object and presto that is now executable code, oh yay!!! Your code ( yeah I looked ) is full of the convention of function( "function{}" ) and that is just as bad as PHP taking links to remote servers as parameters to functions. Do you really think this is going to survive in the wild? Really dude this is injection just waiting to happen. I applaud your cleverness, but this "software" is going to get ass raped and your reputation is going to be ruined.
There are better ways to do this. Doing this in the web browser as it currently exists is just foolish. I am building an application frame ( appFrame ) that can run actual applications free from the asshattery that is HTML and CSS.
This thing has access to my hard drive, to fucking save files!!!!
This thing will never, ever, be used anywhere I have a say about. This is ripe for someone to hook it from another page and write shit to anywhere on your hard disk that you have permission to write to. Drive By's were bad enough but now we have opened the flood gates. The script kiddies and the black hast are going to have a field day owning anyone who runs this.
The Browser is bad enough as it is with "precisely formed" URL's being able to rape your machine, and now this. Some PHB is going mandate this and the number of machines and networks jacked is going to be quite a show.
No one has been able to successfully sand box a browser. The browser was never ever supposed to be able to access the local machine directly, but in the name of the all mighty cloud we keep tearing down barrier after barrier and no one is saying anything about it, we just keep changing chairs while the band plays.
ROFLMAO!
Spreadsheets are great tools for accounts and they have made their life a lot easier. But you are right, they are evil because suddenly accountants started using them to do things that should have been done in databases etc. But I think we have only ourselves to blame if you really think about it.
1. Rewrite your code [joelonsoftware.com]
I mostly agree with what this guy says with the exception of Quatro by the old Borland. Quattro by all accounts was eating Lotus Development and Microsoft's lunch in the spreadsheet department. It had WYSIWYG natively before either of them ( 123's was an add-on and excell didn't even have one) and it worked beautifully. Embedded graphs were there, Multiple Sheets and a function library that was richer than either of the others.
Then the Look & Feel lawsuit hit. Jim Mansey ( if he stood in front of me today, I would punch him hard and punch him again even harder ) after having let 123 rest on it's laurels took Borland to court, in Boston. Borland eventual prevailed but not until it had spent most all it's cash and suffered the basic abandonment of Quattro by the marketplace because of the suit.
That really was the beginning of the end for innovation in the spreadsheet world. Excel has turned into a bloated beast that no one really likes, but it is the only thing left in the marketplace ( Don't get me wrong I wholly support Open / Libre Office but they will never overtake Excel as the simply have to play catchup constantly ) that anyone can field. Quattro still exists but the last release was about 2 years ago
While I agree with some of what you say, I cannot help but disagree completely with:>/p>
Something optimized specifically for compilers and modern programming languages.
Such ideas are a complete waste of machine resources, ram, registers, and cpu cycles et al. "Modern Languages" have to do more than should ever be required to account for programmer laziness. Dynamic typing? Takes up huge amounts of resources to have to constantly figure out what the type of EVERY variable it encounters. Virtual Machines? More splitting of cpu time because none of those "modern" languages know how to deal w/multiple cores, hell we barely have languages that can deal with multiple cpu's as it is.
FSB speeds rarely, if ever, exceed 450MHZ and then the cpu is in a pretty much constant wait state for data. Disk I/O is still pretty damn slow when compared to everything else. SSD's have contributed a large amount in improving that but they still make the whole system wait. Network I/O still crawls in comparison unless you are using very specialized and very expensive technology that is mostly reserved for things like mainframes ( think IBM's Deep Blue ).
I dream of going back to big full height drives with the sort of data densities we have now backed down a couple of notches. Separate read and write heads. Elevator seeking and writing so that you can read in a terabyte on one rotation. Running on a parallel buss that clocks a byte of data onto the buss every clock cycle and connected by fiber optics.
Just imagine 64 or 128 fiber strands connecting every component. Experimental rates are over 100 terabytes per second, for a single fiber!!!!! Imagine even just 10% percent of that inside your machine! Your bus capable of signaling at 10 TBS!!! The CPU would be the component everyone is waiting for!!!
Now just imagine a machine that with a very efficient language like C without all the cruft that things like Java, Python, PHP and all those other "modern" bring to the table.
And of course one must imagine what a Beowulf cluster of those would be like...
Being from the Delphi camp for many years, I too recommend this, but they need to get the install worked out. Also they need to get LLDB worked out on the Mac because trying to load in another version of XCode to sit beside the latest for just the debugger is a royal pain in the ass.
Your position is not only short sighted but ignorant. Precedent precedes many many things. Think about the precedent this sets for someplace like Oklahoma where they push hard to denounce science and only want to teach that the earth and everything else was created in 6 days. Teachers have to push back just as hard and now they can be summarily dismissed if they don't fall into line.
Be very careful what you wish for.
Hmm you user the term ABEND
Were you ever a Novell CNE? The term of course means, Abnormal End, but it is rare to see the usage outside of the Netware ecosystem.
As to Pascal Programs failing gracefully and not taking the entire system with it... I think that might have been the advent of actual protected mode operation -v- declaration and discipline. In my early days of my programming career first learning how to use pointers effectively I would routinely crash my machine by running a pointer into the OS space ( MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x ) on 8088 machines and corrupting all sorts of data and code structures.
Having programming now fr more years that I care to admit to at times I have seen the proliferation of the mind set that simply ignores things like structure and massive abuse of the OOP model. These days you start looking through code and see variables created on an ad-hoc basis for no other reason than laziness when 20 minutes of code refactoring would have solved the problem and the system would have made far more sense and in the end would ave performed faster and been more logically cohesive.
As a matter of fact Watterson never licensed any part of C&H for anything. The guy could have made a medium to large sized fortune if he had, but to him the integrity of the strip was FAR more important. The only reason it is running is certain places is because King Features Syndicate has the right to redistribute the comic.
I was a huge fan of the strip. I mean I knew it had to happen at some point, but I was heartbroken when it stopped.
When my son was born I named him Calvin ( my maternal grandfather ), but the running joke is that he was named after the character. When he was two 3 weeks old, a woman who lived in the same building took a white One-Z and hand painted a beautiful Hobs on it. He is 13 now and it is framed on his bedroom wall.
Remember the old days of 64K code and data AND segment offset, and LIM sepc?
Wow, really?
It is called analyzing your project and mapping the thing out before you write a single line of code. Programming is a discipline as well as an art and a science.
I was once talking to a guy and he as complaining the compiler kept erroring out on "symbol table is full". I asked to look at his code and OMG he was declaring variables by the butt load, but the thing of it was they were all subtle variations of the same thing, and lots and lots of structs. So I should him how to make a linked list of a single of structs with variants. I explained that with little effort these would be declared on the heap and that running out of space in the symbol table would be a thing of the past. Also he was no longer limited by the stack and that he had all the memory the machine could muster for variables.
These days troubleshooting code has become such a chore simply because languages these days let you declare variables anywhere so you have to track down where things declared just to figure out what is happening and dynamically typed languages are the absolute worst thing to come along simply because they only add to the confusion since the compiler or intepreter has to try and determine intent and they all pretty much suck at doing it.
I have written pascal programs in excess of 100K lines broken up into many modules and I actually find them easier to debug than other so called modern languages simple because the discipline of declaration forces you to really think things through, rather than just popping things in here and there in an ad-hoc manner.
Nope, not trolling..
Since it is open source and has all those goodies it would seem to me that increasing the volume size capabilities would not be nearly as tall an order as starting over from scratch.
YASF or Yet Another File System.
Well someone has yet another personal project they want us all to take seriously. Really? I mean Really?
Of the numerous file systems out there, and I have tried a whole boat load of them, the one that is the most mature, most reliable, arguably the fastest is... Wait for it... From the company that everyone loves to hate...
Is NSS from Novell. It has more posix features then all of the rest of them, it is insanely fast, it provides undelete and complete repeatability and Novell has open sourced it. Nuff said.
What you are describing is a Software Engineer not an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer or any other kind of civil engineer. I work with a boat load of civil engineers who are extraordinarily competent in their distinct skill set. They can do some prototyping in matlab and a few other things but when it comes to writing actual software they just need to step very far away from the compiler because their minds don't think in those spheres.
Write all the parts...:
You can do this in C. C comes with EVERY Linux distribution so no additional parts or bits required. If you can do this, you really can do most anything and further more you will understand some of the more advanced concepts of computer programming, one of the most important is Memory Management. Now I know that with languages like Java you are far removed from those concepts bust just understanding what you have to do to manage your memory footprint will help you in those languages as well since you will have a much clearer understanding of what is going on under the hood. If you push a few boundaries you will understand some of less obvious parts of other languages.