This study would have carried more weight if it had included PostgreSQL and IBM's DB2. These two databases do more serious work than MySQL although many believe MySQL is more widely deployed.

"Study"? This is a book review.

Thanks for getting the "WHAT ABOUT POSTGRES" comment that must accompany every Slashdot story submission that mentions MySQL out of the way early, though.

There is no accuracy in coffee that expensive coffee is closer to than Sanka is.

Who says 'accuracy' is a desirable quality of a musical recording?

Certainly not the musicians who "punched in" re-takes of passages where they were unhappy with their first performance, or the producer who demanded that the singer's performance be processed with autotune, or the engineers who applied reverb, compression, and EQ to each recorded part individually, made volume adjustments to everything during mixdown, and then applied more compression and EQ to the finished product, or the CD duplicator that took the 48kHz/24-bit master DAT and transcoded it down to a 44.1kHz,16-bit master...

And don't tell me Fox doesn't know this, their syndication of The Simpson all through high school at 5 & 5:30 on weekdays was very popular.

It's worth pointing out, if it's not already clear to everyone, that daytime scheduling of syndicated content is done by the affiliate station, not by the network. So you may have got a double-dose of The Simpsons at 5:00 and 5:30PM watching Fox 5 WNYW in New York, but a viewer watching Fox-affiliated My13 KCOP in Los Angeles might only get a single episode, at 6:30PM.

"If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!) perhaps we'll see him involved with a new Star Trek TV show with the style and impact of Fringe or Lost."

Oh, you mean it will start off with a compelling premise, but it will eventually become clear that the writers are just making shit up as they go, and soon everyone (Abrams included) will have given up on it and moved on to the next new, compelling premise?

, a Wiley Interscience Publication. Xeroxing the articles under fair use from the library was free for me.

The Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Moment came when I checked online to find out how much it would cost to subscribe to [the Journal of Applied Polymer Sciences]. I thought someone misplaced a decimal point: $23,245 a year is the institutional subscription rate!

Sounds like an equilibrium of supply and demand to me.

Let's say that the JoAPS has five fulltime employees, plus another five people at Wiley Interscience whose duties are split among all their journals. It could easily take half a million dollars a year to keep the journal running. At their current rates, they'd need 20 institutional subscriptions just to break even.

If they sold the journal at a more typical newsstand rate, say $5/issue, how would they make money? Let's see, that would be 20 institutions at $60 a year, plus let's say another 50 institutions that decide to subscribe since it's affordable, plus ten independent polymer science hobbyists such as yourself... hmm, almost 1% of their expenses. I guess there would have to be some layoffs.

As I understand it, New York State already has a tax rule on the books that the customers residing in state should be taxed on downloads when the company delivering it maintains a "digital warehouse" in the state...

"I'm a library worker, so I get lots of questions about our collection when I'm out in the stacks. I'd love to be able to access our online catalog and give patrons more comprehensive guidance without directing them to the reference desk."

Okay, but how does your supervisor feel about that idea?

A reference librarian's entire job is to help patrons find relevant information, and they had to earn a graduate degree in the field in order to get that job. A "library worker", who has been tasked with re-shelving books in the stacks, is not a capable substitute. Even if he/she has a wifi-enabled PDA.

I've worked as a page myself, I know that patrons will always approach the first member of the library staff they spot. But when somebody has a reference question, the only appropriate response is to direct them to a reference librarian for assistance

Every slashdot user can divide 65 TB by the size of a DVD. Unfortunately, full-length movies are NOT a standard measure of storage space. Least of all on slashdot in the context of file-sharing.

Um, why not?

If the allegation is that this server (farm) was used primarily for distributing full-length movies, why would the data NOT be quantified in terms of the number of full-length movies?

By 'new adventure games', they mean 'games that were released 15 years ago'. HTH.

Please stop claiming First Amendment rights when the government is not involved.

Hey! I'm allowed to mischaracterize the First Amendment if I want to! It's a free country! Stop trying to take my rights away!

Bear in mind that MediaSentry has accused a laser printer of sharing music files. Not just alleged, stated that they had proof positive of that laser printer serving up MP3s via a P2P network.

Not arguing against the likelihood that MediaSentry was utterly off base with that accusation, but most high-end and even some mid-level laser printers these days contain embedded general-purpose computers. Sometimes even running Linux.

If a device has a network connection, a CPU, and some storage, it's at least theoretically possible to make that device serve as a P2P filesharing node.

By basing professional hiring decisions on candidates' personal lives and beliefs, employers are effectively legislating people's behavior

Yeah, that's not what 'legislating' means.

Web. Employers that exploit the Web to snoop into and judge people's personal lives infringe on everyone's privacy,

Yeah, that's not what 'infringe' means.

and their actions verge on discrimination.

Yeah, that's not what 'discrimination' means.

We can't debate the issue if we do not agree on the terminology, and there's no reason not to be using the generally-accepted legal meanings of these terms.

A problem-solver comes up with a solution to a specific problem. The genesis of Cello, for example, was one guy saying to himself "I need a windows-based program that can access legal sites in html" and then solving the problem.

Which is not to say Tom Bruce, author of Cello, wasn't ALSO a visionary; the Legal Information Institute he founded in the early days of the web (thus creating the need for his web browser for lawyers' Win3.1 PCs in the first place) is perhaps the foremost reference site on the Constitution of the United States and related issues, and it didn't come to be that way by chance.

Andreesen's vision happened to involve making a pile of money; Bruce's did not.

While we're at it, I think the clock in a CPU is just a useless crutch too.

You're joking, but this is actually more or less true. Computers could be much faster if each instruction could be executed immediately upon the necessary voltage levels arriving at the prerequisite points in the circuit, instead of having to wait a billionth of a second for the traffic lights installed every few microns to turn green.

even the best time stretch dsp tricks produce artefacts. Possibly tolerable in the +- 5% range, but annoying as hell in the +- 50% range.

If the rhythm section can't maintain a tempo within a +/- 50% tolerance, there are bigger problems than the lack of a click track.