Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Wow, interesting! (Score 1) 226

If you would have asked me how it would react as it rolled faster and faster, I would have just assumed it would have gotten "rounder" and possibly larger (elastic) due to centrifugal force.

And I'd think for a suitably low coefficient of friction between the band and the ground you'd have been right.

Comment Re:Twas ever thus (Score 1) 139

How about reading TFA? This is not an invasion of privacy at all. It doesn't record any personal data.

If they have access to URLs they have access to anything sent via a GET HTTP request. Are you suggesting that there aren't any websites that collect personal data via GET requests?

Comment Re:And this folks... (Score 1) 571

I agree it's not clear - I took "other parties" to mean legal entities outside the organization, as in the legal definition of "third party". So my reading is that an employee would not be another party.

The definition of propagation makes no mention of "other parties" (it uses "others") and I'd agree that copying within an organization does appear to be covered within that definition as copyrights are required to allow this.

So I read the definition of conveying to be a subset of propagation that specifically excludes intra-organization copying.

Unfortunately the license doesn't provide definitions for terms like "other parties" or "others" so I guess there will be differences of opinion as long as GPLv3 is relevant - which is a shame for such an important license.

Comment Re:And this folks... (Score 1) 571

Your conclusion appears to be at odds with the FAQ on the GNU website Frequently Asked Questions about the GNU Licenses

Does the GPL require that source code of modified versions be posted to the public?

The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.

Thus, the GPL gives permission to release the modified program in certain ways, and not in other ways; but the decision of whether to release it is up to you.

The definition of propagate you've quoted is relevant, though does not in itself mean much without looking at the context in which that definition is used e.g.

You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. You may convey covered works to others for the sole purpose of having them make modifications exclusively for you, or provide you with facilities for running those works, provided that you comply with the terms of this License in conveying all material for which you do not control copyright. Those thus making or running the covered works for you must do so exclusively on your behalf, under your direction and control, on terms that prohibit them from making any copies of your copyrighted material outside their relationship with you.

Conveying under any other circumstances is permitted solely under the conditions stated below. Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes it unnecessary.

Where conveying is defined as

To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.

So in other words an organization can distribute copies of their own code within the organization without the requirement for that code to be licensed under the terms of the GPL. It's only when the work is conveyed (i.e. propagated to another party) that there are additional conditions, and if that other party is a subcontractor, the conditions don't apply.

The license really needs to be read as a whole rather than as selected quotes though, as there are quite a few dependencies between sections.

Comment Re:Some genereal rules (Score 1) 291

Indexes on fields with low cardinality doesn't help much, unless you have bitmap indexes.

This is a misunderstanding that often seems to be repeated - what is more important is the distribution of values, so for example select * from foo where status = 'UNPROCESSED' will make efficient use of a standard b-tree index on status even where status can only be PROCESSED|UNPROCESSED, _if_ the number of rows returned is small compared to the total number of rows in the table. If the field has low-cardinality and an even distribution of values you are correct.

Comment Re:modeling is even more important (Score 1) 291

This is a very relevant point. I think the answer is that you can only tell whether your data is normalized after referring to the system requirements, and even then 2 designers will come up with 2 different models.

For example your design for customer may be fine if you will only envisage selling to individuals in the US, but what if you are dealing with corporations? Do you need to be able to separate out billing, delivery addresses or people? To what extent do you need to model the organizational structure within your customers? Do you need to hold a history of customer information or is it OK to overwrite the address with the current address if someone moves house? What happens if someones name changes e.g. through marriage or obtaining a doctorate degree? And if you need to send out invoices, you'll probably need an immutable version of customer data for legal audit purposes.

In my experience, the answers to some of these questions will not necessarily be clear initially and typically a client will not be able to specify all these requirements without help. It also requires making judgment calls. Which is where we come in as database designers and IMO makes it a fascinating role.

Of course we can go too far and come up with a design such as thing (id, thing_type_id, name, value) thing_type (id, name, value) etc, or even store all the business logic in the database. This can be perfectly valid 3NF and satisfy all business requirements, but there might be one or 2 implementation issues ;-)

I don't have an answer, it's just not fair. :-(

Yes, it's not fair. But it can very satisfying.

Comment Re:modeling is even more important (Score 4, Insightful) 291

Back when those books were written, disk was expensive and not cached, RAM was very expensive, and machines had terrible I/O bottlenecks. Normalization is critical under these circumstances for maximum performance.

Normalization has _nothing_ to do with performance. In relational DB design, performance is usually considered only after you have a normalized model at which point you it's common to denormalize for performance and other implementation-specific reasons.

The parent's first link gives a good description of the purposes of normalization.

Today, these normalization techniques will increase performance but not as much as you might think. Really it is best to concentrate efforts elsewhere, especially for a one-person shop.

As the submitter looks to be using RDBMSs, a knowledge of normalization and relational database design should be required I 'd have thought. However, if their systems were designed around ORDBMS (your posts hint that this is your background) the DB design issues would be different, but the summary doesn't suggest this is the case.

Comment Re:Besides, statistics are wrong (Score 3, Funny) 366

Chances of infection via cats are really minuscule; we do big deal of it because when it happens at the wrong time to a wrong person (pregnant woman; think of the children!) the results catch attention.

Overall, cats most likely should be thanked by great contribution to our civilization - for a few thousand years they guard our supplies.

BTW, up to a certain point (not exceeding certain period of smoking / quiting quickly enough - basically mid-20's) the rates of illnesses associated with smoking are practically identical for non)never)-smokers and (ex)smokers.

This isn't clear to me - are you saying we should, or shouldn't be worried about sharing a joint with a cat?

Comment Re:Scum (Score 1) 312

I personally believe that almost everyone is capable of understanding these simple concepts, they just can't be bothered to think.

Or perhaps you can't imagine that some people gain benefits from taking a less risk-averse attitude towards life than you appear to have. Just a thought.

Slashdot Top Deals

Chemist who falls in acid is absorbed in work.

Working...