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Comment Re:10/90 (Score 1) 354

I have been sitting on an android update for my phone for probably the last 3 weeks. I just never notice it when it's convenient to update. I once went 9 months with a pending update because I didn't have enough free space to download it. There's no way to prevent software from having bugs, but a better update model could reduce their longevity in the wild.

Comment Re:The entire premise is pure BS (Score 1) 294

I used to think that was a good argument, but then I worked with enough organizations to understand that they are all so far from operating at maximum efficiency that paying 20% more than they need to for an employee is the least of their worries. Hell, they are probably carrying all sorts of absurd dead weight in nepotism, and people promoted into incompetency, or simple 'bad hires' who looked good in the interview who haven't been detected yet or need to go through some kind of drawn out HR firing process. They are so far away from caring about the efficiency of 20% salary. Think about it.

Sexism is alive and well, and definitely impacts who is considered 'most competent' in the hiring process. I think /. would agree that most companies hiring developers don't even have an effective method of vetting their skills, much less have hiring managers capable of working around their own biases.

Submission + - Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Ridicules Government Plans To Ban Encryption 1

Mickeycaskill writes: Jimmy Wales has said government leaders are "too late" to ban encryption which authorities say is thwarting attempts to protect the public from terrorism and other threats.

The Wikipedia founder said any attempt would be "a moronic, very stupid thing to do" and predicted all major web traffic would be encrypted soon.
Wikipedia itself has moved towards SSL encryption so all of its users' browsing habits cannot be spied on by intelligence agencies or governments.

Indeed, he said the efforts by the likes of the NSA and GCHQ to spy on individuals have actually made it harder to implement mass-surveillance programs because of the public backlash against Edward Snowden's revelations and increased awareness of privacy.

Wales also reiterated that his site would never co-operate with the Chinese government on the censorship of Wikipedia.

"We’ve taken a strong stand that access to knowledge is a principle human right," he said.

Comment Re:For starters... (Score 2) 842

Let me clarify - money isn't be-all measurement of effort. If it was, you are probably not putting any "effort" into the friendship either because the sums of money you spend on them relative to your income are so tiny that the corresponding figure on their part would buy nothing. Sometimes a person really struggles just to have time free from their own problems and pursuits to attend your event, for example.

Comment Re:HP/MPE had a hierarchical database, too (Score 1) 166

Yet Epic uses a single node per customer for all but a handful of its customers (Kaiser), and runs all of the customer's applications off that one server. The fact that they were able to do this was a major selling point, not a "limitation".

For Kaiser, they set up logical geographic nodes and built their own sync system to update the network of nodes on demand.

Comment Re:MUMPS is nothing special (Score 1) 166

In safety-critical systems where invalid data could kill someone, using a typeless, schema-less system with nonstandard language conventions as a starting point seems irresponsible. Why not start with a normalized relational database and a language designed to encapsulate and protect data from inadvertent data-entry or programming errors?

Because performance. Yes, Epic had to put extra work in to essentially build their own version of the SQL server black box, but now they are very difficult to compete with.

Epic doesn't use the Cache SQL API. Instead, they built an API on top of objectscript that stores fields safely. They have a staggering amount of code written in objectscript, and while it's true that "nothing will stop you" from writing directly to the underlying data oddly enough that doesn't seem to be an issue because developers can learn how to follow best practices.

Comment Re:HP/MPE had a hierarchical database, too (Score 1) 166

There is nothing a hierarchical database can do that relational databases don't do better.

That's rather absolute. It seems performance is an area that hierarchical can be better, at least in certain use cases:

http://www.intersystems.com/assets/datamart_wp-ee478edf530b40311ef506615c0da74d.pdf

Conclusion
In tests simulating a data analysis application typical for a telecommunications software firm, Caché was 41% faster than Oracle when creating a data mart of mobile phone information. When the resulting data mart was queried using SQL, Caché’s response times ranged from 1.8 to 513 times faster. Clearly, Caché’s unique multidimensional data engine make it a good choice for applications that require rapid analysis of large amounts of data.

Comment Re:MUMPS was designed for a different world (Score 1) 166

As a computer scientist, I was appalled by certain features of the language, particularly the ability to change a running program by executing a variable. That's a security nightmare, since you could effectively read a string (stored as a global or input from the console) and then execute it as MUMPS code.

Do you spend a lot of time being appalled? Many languages have this capability, including SQL and the C variants.

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