I’m surprised. They were massive names in the OS scene until recently. Their lineage can be traced back to Solaris and share many of the cool technologies that Sun developers pioneered. So much so that for the first few years of SmartOS, Linux felt like a hobbyist platform in comparison due to its lack of dtrace, containerisations, ZFS, etc.
Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting interesting Unixes from the public consciousness.
Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don’t think I’ll bother wasting my time on here any more.
I have nothing against buying cases but let’s be honest, if the answer to a genuine solvable hardware problem is to buy more hardware then you have to sympathise with those who complain about the insanity of the current market.
KDE 4 was released in 2008 and has been stable and consistent for more than a decade. That predates Windows 7. So in the same time KDE has been consistent you’ve had had the migration from XP or Vista to Win7. Then Windows 8 and now Windows 10. They’ve all bought massive changes in the UI experience.
If you don’t like KDE then use LXCE or Enlightenment or any of the other Linux desktop environments that have been pretty static (and have been even longer than KDE).
So yeah, there actually is a lot of choice on Linux and not all of it looks dated.
If you don’t change the inode then no restart should be required. There’s definitely a few tools out there that solve this problem without needing to restart httpd.
If the authors are reading this: The home page has some weird width issues going on for me where content starts somewhere off the left of the screen and ends somewhere off the other end. To compound the issue, I cannot scroll to the left.
The problem is you need a boat load of additional code to cover unset. Not just in SQL (syntax is different for NULL than it is for comparing any other type) but often also in your importing language too (eg some languages will cast NULL to a nil value that can actually raise exceptions or even crash your application if not handled correctly).
Capturing those edge cases is non-trivial compared checking the value of a char.
In an idea world your unit tests and CI pipelines would catch all of those but that depends on well written tests. Thus in my experience having fewer hidden traps from the outset is automatically a better design than one that perfectly fits an academic theory but is harder to support in practice.
I’d go further than you and say they should be removed by default on all fields.
Want to know if a Boolean field is unset? Well it’s no longer Boolean because you now have 3 states for that field. So why not use a char, U/Y/N with the default being U?
NULL might have made more sense 30+ years ago when systems were more resource constrained but it doesn’t make sense now for most of the problems people are trying to solve day to day. If anything, it creates more problems.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying they should be removed entirely but rather that they shouldn’t have to be explicitly disabled on every CREATE.
I will say one use case for NULL that is hugely helpful is outer joins and nested queries. However these don’t generate high performance queries so if you’re having to rely on them then you might need to rethink your database schema anyway.
So essentially I don’t disagree with you, I just think you’re being too nice limiting your complaint to string fields.
You can move freely amongst counties in the Schengen Area, which is a subset of EU counties (which itself is a subset of European counties).
> The free movement of persons is a fundamental right guaranteed by the EU to its citizens. It entitles every EU citizen to travel, work and live in any EU country without special formalities.
In theory, yes. But there are a few caveats to that:
1. CERN wouldn’t have been able to patent anything too generalised because there was prior art (Gopher)
2. Thus if the patent was too expensive developers would have just used a similar technology (bare in mind it took quite a few years before the web to evolve from a toy, then something that companies “needed” but it wasn’t contributing massively to their bottom line, to what it is today where a great many businesses sole market is web based).
3. Even if it had somehow became part of industry standard or CERN had achieved a vague patent that prevented similar implementations from coexisting, Europe has this thing called (if I remember the acronym correctly) FRAND patents where patents which are required as part of a standard have to be fairly licensed.
None of this means CERN couldn’t have potentially made a lot from HTML & HTTP. But I also think part of the reason it was the success it was, was because it was a royalty free open specification.
Without wanting to sound dismissive to the massive contribution Tim Berners-Lee, and CERN as a whole, has made to IT; we’d probably have ended up with the same user experience we have today but with Gopher as the base tech. Or maybe something else entirely different from markup perspective, such as something RTF or s-expressions...?
Great technological advancements are rarely the work of one genius in isolation. Usually it requires the imagination of a great many people to be captured. By which point the world is already ready for such an invention so it becomes more of an evolutionary breakthrough rather than a one idea that couldn’t be recreated.
As I said elsewhere when that argument was made; it’s a very tenuous connection. Things named after him isn’t the same as things he was directly involved in.
I love Monty Python but it’s disingenuous to claim they they’re any more “on topic” than a basketball player (and I say this as someone who’s not generally a sports fan).
The only real difference between the two is one is more popular on HN than the other. Which is a real shitty reason to flag an obituary in my opinion.
The reason it was “relevant” is simply because there’s more Monty Python fans on here than basketball fans. Which is fine if we’re talking purely about +votes but it doesn’t justify flagging a submission.
Peer moderation is abused on this site and it’s getting steadily worse. I’m on the verge of giving up on HN entirely, just like many of my other professionals I personally know already have done. Ultimately it will be HNs loss because the quality of content posted will decline.
Linux has come a long way since, which is a large part of the reason why SmartOS has become less relevant. The latter being a great shame because competition breeds innovation and we are losing a lot of interesting interesting Unixes from the public consciousness.
Edit: oh come on. I post this and it almost immediately gets negative karma despite being both factual and informative. A perfect example of the rife abuse of peer moderation on this site. I honestly don’t think I’ll bother wasting my time on here any more.