hobb0001

Well known inventors aren't well known because of their great inventions. They're well known because there's a corporate PR department promoting the legend. Ever heard of Thomas Edison? He founded a company named General Electric. Heard of Alexander Graham Bell? AT&T.

The reason fewer people have heard of Wozniak is because he left the company 25 years ago. He doesn't get the same PR treatment from the Apple marketing fund.

Now, here are some bonus questions: You all know who invented the transistor at Bell Labs, but who invented the LASER? How about the microwave oven? FM radio?

Actually, I don't know why few people know who invented the microwave oven, since the inventor was a big-wig at Raytheon. I guess Raytheon doesn't have much of a PR department.

Having your code still work 20 months after you wrote it really isn't much to boast about.

Why aren't capes still around, then?

(They were made for horseback riding, too)

It's more likely that the shutdown was planned to coincide with the SOPA bill. Even though SOPA was unexpectedly derailed, the raid had too much momentum and continued on regardless.

I should acknowledge that these issues apply just as much to a document store as to a relational database. However, you tend to interact with a document store differently, since there is no need for a mapping abstraction. You often just use the database primitives provided, instead of going through a 3rd party. It's akin to manually using SQL in your code, where the database naturally knows what you're asking for.

Since the relational model is very set-oriented, it has always had a particularly hard time dealing with ordered lists. But that's really a minor thing, and is actually something an ORM can do well to abstract.

My real headache with ORM has always been to get it to perform efficiently. For example, say I want to iterate through the GPA's of all the students. To do so, the ORM usually pulls in the full object model for each student - multiplying the cost of the desired operation by 10x or 100x. Now, each ORM tool usually has some tweaky knob or special declaration you can use to have it limit the fields queried, but by the time you figure out the right incantation you may as well have written the SQL yourself.

But wait! The ORM tool often saves you from this sort of overhead by caching the object model in memory. Alas, therein lies my biggest headache with ORM. "There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors."

> However I would actually advise developers to stop and think if they really need MongoDB or the latest fad, because their current relational database, such as PostgreSQL, does a mighty fine job for most of their needs.

Every time I've had to use an ORM, it always became a headache sooner or later. It got to the point where I stopped even trying to perform an automatic mapping; I reverted back to using explicit SQL in my code and avoided the "abstraction" altogether.

With a document store like MongoDB, though, the mapping between object and document is almost seamless. It's actually really quite comfortable.

Really? There's still such a thing as an "FPS fan"? That's sort of like being a fan of black Model-T's, isn't it?

I'm not sure that it will take 20 years to prove that we're only as sentient as the other animals.

FTA:

  That jibes well with Page’s push to whittle down Google’s
  manager bureaucracy, eliminate politicking and rekindle its
  start-up spirit.

I first read that as "pot-licking" and thought, WTF is that? A new managerial term like dogfooding?

Many people have already made the comparison between the mobile wars of the 10's and the PC wars of the 80's, where Google is now playing the role of Microsoft and Apple is now playing the role of, er, Apple.

But what I find ironic is Microsoft's role in this new platform war. Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 has now taken on the role of what was the stodgy old monopoly that only cared to make products for enterprises: IBM and OS/2.

> As for SQL Server, it's a decent platform.

... and purchased from Sybase. Though, to be fair, it has come a long way since then.

What's next? iPad running flash?

tldw? Anyone?

sigh It's so annoying when you have to sit through a hour-long video for what would otherwise be a 5-10 minute read.

I acknowledge your clarification and I agree with what YOU have said, but let me rant a little against the startup mentality that is prevalent here on HN. The general attitude seems to be that you're wasting your one chance at living unless you haven't accomplished something bigger than yourself and have left a legacy. It is a rousing sentiment, but yet, at the end of the day, I can't help but be sobered by the poem Ozymandius. Yes, you've left a legacy, but only for one, maybe two, generations before that too is forgotten:

  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
  Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Speaking of poems, poets would tell you that you've wasted your life unless you've loved; loved so deeply that you die a little when it is lost. So which is it? Legacy? Success? Love? Family?

In the end, I think you've nailed it with your last sentence: living your passions. If your passion is, literally, passion, then love. Make love your life. If your passion is external admiration, then succeed. (Please don't become a doctor or lawyer if your goal is admiration. Only do so if your passion is helping the sick or defending justice.) But to your point, at the end of your life, make sure you don't have a 100" flat-panel TV and a mountain of regrets.

For those of us without ADD, the editorial control over story selection is actually rather nice. (The user commentary, however...)

  > I even tell my dealer to change my tires twice a year

  > I even drilled a hole my wall, and bought a 60 feet cable, at the cost of $300

What?! Is this guy completely oblivious to the way he spends his money?

  > Yep, I am one of the drooling mac fanatics.

Oh. Well, there you have it.

I've always wanted to create a similar fractal zoom into the real number space to illustrate the position of pi. Some sort of Flash or JavaScript thing that would keep generating more digits on the fly and could run forever. I never seem to get get that kind of free time anymore, though...

I have to disagree. Since the advent of blogging, I now prefer that style of writing. For example, the writing style in this article illustrates precisely why I no longer care for the standard journalistic style:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10226746-92.html

Can you imagine a standard technology coverage piece in your daily newspaper saying "kudos to Ubuntu 9.04: you got game"?

BTW, not many people realize this, but SQLite has "pragma" commands that allow you to dial back its HDD synchronization and transactional consistency. I have used "pragma synchronous = 0;" many times to greatly improve the performance of my apps.

The author is obviously a fan of B&D languages. (http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bondage-and-discipline-languag...) There's nothing wrong with preferring a little B&D, but it's a shame that there are still masochists in this day and age that claim other languages are "broken" because they don't spank you often enough.

Not that I've worked with building architects, but I have worked in an HVAC engineering firm that does work with architects. My sense is that the original author's view of a real architect's life is shaped by whatever is shown on TV. In contrast to fictional architects, a real building architect owns her own hard-hat for the almost daily visits to the job site. When something goes wrong with the build, she's involved with coming up with a solution, whether it's really an architectual problem or not. (Example, the cement contractor got a bad batch of cement that isn't curing right. It would take a month for him to get the right aggregate to fix it. Instead of delaying the build, could we make the walls less thick and add in supports elsewhere?)

Also, most real-world architects rarely get to build from scratch. Those types of jobs are the dream jobs and tend to be taken by the owners of the architectual firm.