I don't know about your culture, but I've never heard anyone use 'sql server' when they meant 'the database server'. You just don't call it that. I also think it's a pretty dumb product name. You might as well call a web server 'html server'.
People not familiar is Microsoft are probably not taking part in a discussion on HackerNews, let alone a discussion of why their SQL Server product was not ported to *nix.
"""This is just sugar coating for the crap they're covering."""
Yes, please, do reduce an elaborate article discussing technical and business trade-offs into a silly anti-MS rant that wouldn't be out of place in Slashdot circa 1999 for us.
>I had full executive support in investigating a port, but had I brought forth a proposal to proceed I would have faced arguments from many that I was undermining Microsoft’s entire business plan.
See? Read that part "I was undermining Microsoft's entire business plan", please. That also includes the monoculture and the perfect vendor lock in.
The main issue is that you can't easily move to another platform when your entire app / system runs on MS software. If you use Oracle's DB or something else for an app with a DB, you could move away from Windows if you decided to, provided you are ready to and can make the required changes to your app's code.
As for "my rant", it looks like the porting to *NIX was just an idea, not something they were seriously considering. I never expected them to do it because some people would choose not to buy Windows licenses and just buy SQL Server licenses, not both.
That's hardly a rant. It's just the long story of MS vs. the "viral" open source / free software.
"""It seems the author of that article doesn't know that spell checking, translating and understanding text are actually major features of pretty new software, too. """
Actually it seems that everybody reading the article got the same WRONG impression.
The author full well knows what it takes to do a i18n full-featured spell checker.
That is BESIDE the point.
What he says is that doing a basic (lame ass) spell-checker in the 80s used to be a MAJOR undertaking, and now, doing EXACTLY THE SAME is trivial.
His point is not about spell-checking.
It's about modern OS, language, CPU, HD and memory conveniences, vs what one had to deal with in the olden days.
People want their documents (or queries) free of spelling errors. That is their pain and that is the challenge.
The example sentence has misspelled words, hence is within the domain of spell checking. This type of misspelled words are called "homonyms", which are one very common spelling problem. The academic terminology is uninteresting to most users, however.
Or if you mean to posit that "spell checking really means looking up if a word exists in a static dictionary of English", then yes, that's easy and solved, no argument there.
> The example sentence has misspelled words, hence is within the domain of spell checking.
No, it doesn't . It is grammatically incorrect, but all the words are spelled correctly. You're definitely talking about a grammar checker, not a spelling checker.
If you were a teacher marking a student's paper, you would label those as spelling errors, not a grammar errors. The reason is that a different spelling of the words would create the intended sentence. No grammatical variation will do that (reorders, conjugating differently, etc).
In your view, "spelling check" is applied to individual words, to see if they appear in a fixed dictionary (see my other comment about difficulties with choosing this "correct" dictionary in reality, though). I can imagine this view is inviting for programmers, because it's easy to implement, but I doubt anyone else finds useful a definition that says there are no misspellings in "Their coming too sea if its reel."
In my view, "spell check" applies to utterances and roughly means "all words are spelled as per the norm of the language; I can send this document to my boss/customer and they won't laugh at my spelling." It is a more user-centric view, and more complex too, because it covers intent and norms, as opposed to the comforting lookup table for a few hand-picked strings. Modern spell checkers make heavy use of statistical analysis of large text corpora, to reasonably approximate context needed to model such intent.
Once we agree on the terminology, I believe we are in agreement, so let's not split hairs. The "correctly spelled" sentence under question comes from the Wikipedia article on spell checking, by the way.
I can imagine this view is inviting for programmers, because it's easy to implement, but I doubt anyone else finds useful a definition that says there are no misspellings in "Their coming too sea if its reel."
I realize this is just a debate over a definition, so it's not very meaningful, but the fact is, you're on the wrong side of the common definition here. I just tested, and every spell checker that I just checked (Chrome, Firefox, MS Word, TextMate, TextEdit - perhaps some of these rely on the same underlying engine, I'm not sure?) accepts that sentence as not having a spelling error, so clearly there's some use for such a definition.
The grammar checkers, on the other hand, don't like it, but by changing "their" to "they're", they all accept it, despite the fact that it's still garbage. So don't overestimate how good "modern" spell checkers are...though there may be techniques to do a better job, they're not in common use, at least in the most common spell-checking contexts (which, lets be honest, pretty much means MS Word).
There is no question whatever: the sentence contains misspelled words. "They're" is misspelled as "Their", "to" as "too", "see" as "sea", etc.
There is also no non-words. It happens that today's spelling checkers are generally just non-word detectors. This doesn't mean that anyone defines "misspelled" to mean "misspelled in such a way that the result is not a word at all".
And yes, a non-word detector is still very useful, and it's much much easier to make than something that also determines reliably when words are misspelled in ways that produce other words, so there's lots of software out there (perhaps essentially all of it) that contains only a non-word detector.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to define "spelling checker" to include mere non-word detectors. Or for that matter non-common-word detectors. (I expect most spelling checkers will reject "hight", and very sensibly because if someone types that they probably meant "high" or "height" or something -- but it's a perfectly good word, albeit a rare and archaic one.) But there's no way it's correct to say that "sea" isn't misspelled in that sentence merely because the mistake happens to have produced something that's an English word.
The sentence contains misspelled words. The errors in those words happen to make them collide with other existing words. That doesn't change the category of the error.
No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.
"I sea your eyes", "I she your eyes"
If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language. Also, the above are trivial cases. There are tons of edge cases and far more difficult distinctions. Here's an amusing one, that can lead to "Microsoft paperclip" like interactions:
"I gave him the new pink dress as a present" =>
"I gave her the new pink dress as a present"
No, idiotic spell-checker, I do mean him. My friend is a cross-dresser, shut up and let me type.
Such a spellchecker would also be useless for poetry. And if you find poetry obscure, so it doesn't really matter, then such a spellchecker would also be useless for irony. Suddenly, you lose all the hipsters from your potential users (except if they start using it ironically).
Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this --and it's probably a very hard nut to crack, and probably uncrackable in the general case.
> No, it contains correctly spelled words used in place of other desired words.
If you intend to write a word meaning "actually existing as a thing" and spell it "reel", it is monstrously unlikely that you genuinely thought a word meaning "a cylinder on which flexible materials can be wound" was a suitable substitute. If you did, that would be the use of a correctly spelled (but incorrectly selected) word in place of a desired word: a grammatical error, in other words. However, if you just pick the wrong letters to construct a phoneme, as is almost certainly the case here... yep, that's a spelling error.
To put it another way, imagine that the word "reel" didn't actually exist, and I make precisely the same error, substituting an 'e' for an 'a'. All of a sudden, by your argument, what was a grammatical error is now a spelling error. But the mistake I made hasn't changed, so that makes no sense.
> If you want to correct these kind of errors, you must now a lot about natural language.
>...
> Anyway, no spell checker in widespread use attempts this
So? The category of error doesn't change with how difficult it is to fix.
Hey, here's a chance to invent some new terminology!
I would say that Norvig's corrector is a first-order spelling corrector, since it works within the context of a single word.
A second-order corrector would take into account the word before or after it to choose the spelling that is more likely to make sense. ("Their coming" would suggest a correction to "They're coming")
Third-, fourth-, (and so on) order expands the distance of words considered.
It's valid, but less common, and that's why I specifically chose the wording "suggest a correction" instead of "correct". Spell checkers are still no substitute for actual thought.
No, it's spell-checking. Use of the word "reel" in this sentence, for instance, is definitely a spelling error. There's no grammatically valid form of the word "real" spelled with two 'e's. The fact that "reel" happens to be a valid word doesn't mean that its presence in the sentence is due to a grammatical error - it's just an accidental collision.
That no spell checker might be able to catch this specific class of error doesn't change the type of error it is.
"""Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated."""
How good of Foxconn. If only they didn't make ten times the money or more off of each migrant worker while forcing him to work in shitty conditions capitalizing on the fact that they are kind of the only game in town and/or have agreements with fellow factory owners to keep the wages down/conditions bad...
Foxconn - revenue $59.3 billion, profits $2.2 billion (2010). They can't really afford to raise their costs that much. OK, a large part of their revenue might be components, but even then, they aren't exactly rolling in cash.
"""Most software are outdated after a couple of years."""
You'd be surprised. Tons of code runs in production, even in the latest of shiny systems, that was written 10 and 20 and 30 years ago -- either in whole or in parts, refactored etc.
From 1986's NeXT OS that is now OS X Lion and iOS 5, to Bill Joy's TCP/IP, to Emacs.
And tons of enterprise/banking/financial/military systems use ancient code, even 70's COBOL...
To be frank, I also expected to mainly get downvotes from my spur of the moment response.
But the gist of what I was trying to convey is:
It's 2011. The web is inherently tied with javascript.
(The "progressive enhancement" thing in respect to lack of javascript doesn't hold after Ajax and the so-called "Web 2.0", ie since 2005).
Turning js off AND using a left-field browser, is probably pushing it too far, and you don't really get to complain about broken functionality after that.
Look, I'm not counting on web developers providing me with a site that's fully functional without JavaScript. That would be stupid. I have no trouble enabling JavaScript for specific sites that need it.
Opera is a great browser and has good support for HTML5 and CSS3. In fact, since I refuse to live without snappy Mouse Gestures, I don't even really have a choice in my primary browser.
Also, redirecting a browser somewhere without using JavaScript (since it was disabled) should be a reasonably simple operation.
And finally.. Tinfoil? All in all, there was absolutely no reason for that personal attack of yours. So yeah, try to behave.
"""Other cases I can think of are systems where high-throughput or low latency are major requirements but there aren't many of those."""
Actually, I haven't met many cases of systems were high-throughput or low latency are NOT major requirements.
Sure, you can wait for your admin script to do something for half an hour, if it means you get to write it in, say, Python, over some faster language. But you don't want to wait for most things, including most end user software. Here's a list people complain all the time about the slowness of:
1) text editors, programmer editors etc.
2) spreadsheets
3) media players
4) compile times
5) image editing programs
6) web pages/apps
7) mobile apps
8) games
9) file managers
10) IDEs
11) video/multimedia editing
12) sound editing
13) word processors
14) window management
15) databases
16) ftp
17) file management
18) asset management
19) browsers
If there's a program for something, there are people complaining it's slow/bloated.
Well observed, but I think we need to tell apart cases where performance is mandatory and where it is optional. People wouldn't just complain if it was mandatory, it simply wouldn't be a viable product.
We call the generic category "SQL Server" belongs to: database servers, or relational database servers.
No one uses "sql server" for something besides naming that specific MS product.