petrilli

I believe a summary is best stated as "See, we're doing something!" Doing something, and doing the right thing, are very different things, but one is simple, and the other requires thought and risk management.

You can imagine which is rewarded and which is punished. Not just by politicians and bureaucrats, but by the public as well. The general public is also responsible for this absurdity by not being willing to accept some risk as being unavoidable.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think 'I know, I'll use regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." Jamie Zawinski on alt.religion.emacs

<prepackaged food> may lead to chronic illness. Seems sane. The problem is that ramen isn't JUST crappy salty over-processed 100% artificially flavored desiccated food. In Japan, ramen is a real food.

It seems a bit disingenuous to say that Apple is "blocking" it. They may be working against it -- and probably are -- but blocking implies Apple has some magical veto. It might be hard to believe, but this sort of thing is pretty normal in the capitalist wunderland.

Obviously if he's coding, he's not a TRUE architect. :)

Which part of "no" is difficult to comprehend? I'd express it in one letter, but I've not figured out how yet.

The problem, as I've seen in a few big organizations, is that everyone thinks they need an "all singing, all dancing" piece of software (like SAP or Siebel, for example), which has 18-quadrillion knobs to adjust. The problem is, nobody has the slightest clue how to adjust those knobs to fit your business, but the sales person convinces the customer that somehow, magically, it will be a perfect fit.

What ends up happening? The customer has to change their business to match the "default" behavior of the infinitely flexible software, because nobody can overcome it's intrinsic infinite complexity.

Sadly, his consideration for where to go is probably "where am I least likely to be shot?"

I suspect he'd be happier with Cryptlib. It's a much saner toolkit, and already has most of a CA built in.

No, I didn't say there wasn't a place for "deeper analysis", but let's be real and not compare science with "literary criticism".

So basically you can be someone who provides insight to 99% of the population who doesn't want to delve into the neuroses of "film criticism", or you can be a self-important blowhard who seems to mostly talk to himself in the dark. Most "film" is not cinema, and not art in a "deep" form. It is entertainment. To pretend that it contains more meaning than that is nothing but mental masturbation.

Who knew CNN had Captain Obvious working for them?

My personal view is that Solaris is now, like Oracle's database products, officially irrelevant to the future. While they will continue to be purchased for large sums of money by people who must, like COBOL, they will not shape anyone's idea of the future. ZFS had a huge impact on file system development, but I suspect no such future innovation is in store for Solaris.

People who argue that we need to kill infidels also are making comments consistent with their world-view, however it's hardly what most people would argue is "freedom".

You probably know, but the reason there are multiple passes is because once a page is typeset, you can't go back and "fix" it. TeX is very page-centric. So references, for example, aren't "knowable" until you've typeset all the pages. Then the next pass goes through and updates the forward references.

It could be done another way, but in the era that TeX was developed, it would have required more memory than was realistically available most of the time. I find that once I've run it twice, I can get away with single runs usually after that until I'm ready for the "definitive" version. Until then, I'm less concerned with whether the cross-reference is right, than whether there is a cross-reference in that location at all.

Before people get too bent out of shape/excited, the data within the files is just people's names and counts as well as the URL to their profile. All of these profiles were already public.

The introduction of hstore actually lets you do this natively. I think it's partially that PostgreSQL people tend not to try and use the hammer as a screw driver, but maybe that's just me.

Or maybe sometimes MySQL is a screw driver being used as a hammer?

A better question would be: who uses MySQL as anything but a glorified key-value store when reaching large sizes? I personally have been involved in trying to use MySQL as a "real database" in the 10-100TB range and let me tell you, it's not pretty. I'm not sure about the open source PostgreSQL, but I know Greenplum has petabyte level warehouses running on a distributed version of it.

A few observations:

1) MyISAM's performance is highly dependent on certain idiosyncrasies of a lot of applications. Using MyISAM in this day and age is a very bad idea. InnoDB at least gets closer to real database behavior.

2) The "query optimizer" is insulting at best and actively impeding getting things right if you use it for much more than simple queries. Something that's more along the lines of what really large databases (as opposed to KV stores) get used for can implode the server.

Personally, I think too many people try and stick things in relational databases that don't belong there simply because they've got the hammer in their hand and it's easier than pulling out a screwdriver.

That sounds like any other KV store then. One of the usefulnesses (wow that's actually a word) of Redis is that it has all the rich data types and operations that are atomic. At that point, if you're not going to use them, why not look at TokyoCabinet, or something similar?

The brilliant Jon Postel was speaking of the implementation and design of open standards. Flash may be ubiquitous, but it would never be called a standard by anyone subscribing to the IETF rules-of-the-road.

BTW, Apple also does not implement Wordstar and WordPerfect readers, nor do they accept TARGA images. As much as I do wish 1) Adobe had a version of Flash that didn't suck; 2) Apple supported it, let's not attempt to invoke Jon's memory for this kind of stuff.