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Comment Re:its fair turn around (Score 1) 1172

First, nobody really cares about the news wing of Fox News. Anyone can read a 3-graf bit about a car bombing in Mosul or a new ambassador to Sri Lanka. So, why are you even discussing it?

What everyone sees at Fox News is the commentators, the opinion sections. And they see that their version of "fair and balanced" (equal time for both sides) is not the same as Fox News's version of "fair and balanced" (a conservative counterweight to what they perceive as a generally more liberal media.)

Go read the things Pat Buchanan, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Andrew Napolitano, Ann Coulter, Susan Estrich, Judith Miller, Grover Norquist, et al write in the Opinion section of Fox News's websites. Now try to find even a semblance of a liberal equivalent to that there.

Fox News has tried to take this weird high road of saying their station itself is "fair and balanced", when clearly what they meant when they kicked it off was "we are balancing ourselves against Meet The Press and MSNBC and the New York Times, etc." Which is a perfectly legitimate position.

The problem is I think they've bastardized it terribly by becoming a mouthpiece for the Republican Party even at its most wrongheaded, and I don't see nearly enough independent thinking, compromise, or moderation on their part. I don't agree with everything the Democratic Party does, and I let my Congressman (Mr. Ron Paul himself) know. But the whipping in line of a media outlet by a single party is really impressive, nobody at FOX News is ever off-message - and that's precisely the problem. There's no inner debate, not even a hint of "well, maybe we're wrong, maybe there is more than one side to this, maybe it's not black and white", and without that, I think calling Fox News "fair and balanced" is a farce.

There are plenty of liberal equivalents to this, of course, but they're just little blogs and DailyKos and The Progressive and the like. None of them are on cable TV. None of them have the weight of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's prodigious checkbook behind them. That's why we laugh when hear what FOX News has to say. You can be biased, you can even be transparent in it, but if you're big business, don't expect people to just nod their heads uncritically.

Comment Re:Vendor Hype Orange Alert (Re:hmm) (Score 1) 381

The solution to this is to use a table-valued function instead of a scalar and then CROSS APPLY it to the rest of your data set:

http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3845381/T-SQL-Best-Practices--Dont-Use-Scalar-Value-Functions-in-Column-List-or-WHERE-Clauses.htm

Or, as stated, just use a view. Scalar UDFs are good for setting SQL variables based on today's date or a customer ID one-time; not much else. Indeed, a shame.

Comment Re:bad design (Score 1) 381

No, the problem is that the "real issues" you are talking about are things that 99% of your typical DBAs will never see in their lifetime, because they work at a church or a pharmacy or a box factory.

It's great that Facebook and Google and eBay need map-reduce and Erlang and something more scalable than SQL Server Express or Berkeley DB. But they are the exception, not the rule. Excoriating people for pointing that out is, at best, irrelevant and at worst harmful to the idea of alternative data storage mechanisms.

I'm not picking on you directly, I see it as a larger symptom, that somehow because SQL/RBDMS is not ideal for certain projects, that it should be abandoned at all levels, sooner rather than later, even though there's 40+ years of RDBMS architecture manuals, best practices, knowledge bases, 3rd party apps, "SQL for Dummies", and so on to help the involuntary DBA succeed without having to figure out Cassandra.

I guess my concern is that a lot of small businesses and shops will see something like this, will think, "You know, our Access database sucks," and try to port themselves over to this, and guess what? The learning curve here is a lot steeper than SQL (the *academic* side of SQL-alternatives is just now getting into 3rd gear), the business case for it is pretty poor in most cases, and you'll end up with a lot of people wasting time trying to get Erlang processes going instead of just migrating to MySQL and keep on carrying on. There's way too much "Rah, Rah, Death to SQL" being attached to these new things, and to me it seems overblown.

But you know, I'm optimistic. 5 years from now, it may be a different ball game altogether, and then us DBAs just have more things to learn and to do.

Comment Re:Probably intentional. (Score 1) 543

Wow.

First off, the major issue people have with video game violence is that it leads to desensitization - people who are less emotional about video game deaths tend to show less emotional response when presented with actual real-life violence. So, way to get the basic premise wrong.

Secondly, you get the other basic part of the premise wrong, which is that "brains making disconnects" between video games and real life is a formative experience - you aren't innately born with it - and that since video games are primarily played by children, they're worried that they are short-circuiting that very disconnect that most people develop.

Thirdly, way to co-opt their " the type of people that X" argumentation style, which makes your point just as invalid as theirs.

Fourthly, way to use yourself as a "plural of anecdote is data" fallacy.

C'mon, I know that I personally am not affected by video game violence (I generally avoid those types of games), but that doesn't mean no one else is, or that the CUMULATIVE effect of video game violence might (or might not) lead to increased real world violence.

Being dismissive of that sort of thing because you just can't see yourself doing it means we might as well not have the fields of anthropology or psychology or economics. Why bother trying to learn how other people act, right?

How fucking unscientific.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 346

So ... back to the original point (and the original article): for the most common of those "non-computer computers" (cellphone, camcorder, camera, GPS, music/video player) is 256MB sufficient?

Will a 250GB drive be sufficient in 2020? Most likely not, except as a kind of portable drive. Bandwidth expansion, data preservation, increased resolution and fidelity, customer demands, and the increasing integration and synchronization between devices that you directly acknowledge will push us towards bigger and bigger drives.

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