mathematics computer science

What: I studied cell biology/chemistry in college. Mammalian cells are complicated systems with many sub components and many ,many detailed sub-systems. I was reminded of this when learning the Oracle 10g and 11G. This database is a complicated, highly evolved system, with many subsystems that insure the survival of information the way a cell assures the survival of the DNA in the nucleus.

Writer: mattyflynn

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: Oct 7 2009 3:35 AM

What: Think of a standard light switch; the circuit can have two states. It's either closed with electricity flowing trough it or open so no charge can flow. Each byte that makes up a number stored in a computer is ultimately nothing more than a series of tiny electrical switches, with on (closed) and off (open) values. The computer interprets a series of other consecutive on/off values into something interesting for us humans, such as a letter or a number. If the tiny little switch=0, it's off If the tiny little switch=1, it's on

Writer: Timothy Boronczyk

LCC: QA

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Date: Nov 30 2009 3:01 PM

What: There sure is a lot of jargon in this field. Here' my summary of converting data from an operational database to a data warehouse. It goes something like this: Operational data are stored in OLTP software which consists of typical 2 dimensional relational tables. These work well for rapid and constant transactions: updates, insertions and deletions. To build a data warehouse, it's best to have data in a form in which it can be queried and displayed in a multitude of dimensions, which is the objective of having a data warehouse. Thus the conceptual model of the Rubiks cubes. But this is a conceptual model that helps humans visualize several dimensions, the data itself never "exists" in 3 dimensions. Data for a data warehouse are converted into and stored in a form which an OLAP tool can analyze it in a multitude of dimensions. This is the function of the star schema. It is a particular type of relational table structure in which 2 dimensional tables can be analyzed as if they were related to each other in a multitude of dimensions. A visualization crutch for this process might be the conversion that occurs with Origami, in which a 2-d object, a piece of paper, is converted into a 3-d object by systematic folding.

Writer: mattyflynn

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: May 15 2010 2:16 AM

What: "Like DNA, inheritance goes in one direction, from parent to child." This analogy is on page 814 of the 4th edition.

Writer: Ellie Quigley

LCC: QA

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Date: May 19 2010 7:20 AM

What: Once upon a time, I worked on an novel assay format that involved an antibody binding that changed the electrical current through a well. It looked great at time 0. However, the chemistry was so unstable that the linearity of the assay dropped after it sat around for about 30 minutes. An electronic device measured the change in several electoral parameters every 5 seconds for 16 wells. At the end of a 5 minute assay, about 3000 data points were generated for a single linear curve. People trying to make sense of the numbers saw what they wanted in the data. Some saw a line, some didn't. Once, I think I saw a picture of the Virgin Mary Riding a donkey to Bethlehem. But mostly it was an ambiguous mess.

Writer: mattyflynn

LCC: QA

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Date: May 21 2010 12:31 AM

What: "XML is like a Euro for the Internet. If users (people) don't have to spend time and effort converting their data (money) from one format (currency) to another when they move between computer systems (countries), everything will move faster and easier. The Internet economy will heat up, and the cost of doing business on the Internet will go down."

Writer: LucretiaGermanica

LCC: QA

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Date: Jun 8 2010 9:30 AM

What: "Self Describing - Cardboard like XML can have information printed on is. "Contains one TV and cables. Made in Japan". Likewise XML has element and attribute names to describe the contents of the package, the data. Cardboard like XML is a self describing material." The article has more.

Writer: LucretiaGermanica

LCC: QA

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Date: Jun 8 2010 9:34 AM

What: "The truth is that UNIX is like a mirror, it reflects without distortion the personality of the people who write applications for it. Because UNIX has been around for almost 16 years now, its no surprise that a lot of variety has shown up in the way the user interface is handled by applications programmers. "

Writer: M. David Rook

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: Jun 12 2010 7:41 AM

What: "UNIX is like driving clutch instead of automatic...very fast, very powerful, stable on the curves... but the learning curve is steep."

Writer: Not Stated

LCC: QA

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Date: Jun 12 2010 7:41 AM

What: "In a digital image, a pixel translates to a tiny square that makes up the image. If you look at an image very closely, a pixel is like a piece of tile in a mosaic."

Writer: Not Stated

LCC: QA

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Date: Jul 19 2010 2:12 AM

What: I set up a database website and made it searchable by the major search engine bots. All the ip hits and page calls were recorded in MySQL. There are several bots that searched the whole database. The Google-bot is very thorough. It pokes its nose into every nook and cranny and page call possible in the database. It even started searching the database beyond what I wanted indexed. Sorta like a Yenta, getting into all the parts of my site even through I didn't want it to, a Yenta-bot if you will. Compared to the Google-bot, the Yahoo bot is like an alcoholic father who shows up every other week and falls asleep on the couch.

Writer: LucretiaGermanica

LCC: QA

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Date: Aug 10 2010 6:46 AM

What: "He who despises Euclidean Geometry is like a man who, reutrning from foreign parts, disparages his home." I think this guy is one to something. Euclidean Geometry, more specifically geometric proofs, are the basis for logical English ,mathematical logic and spacial reasoning.

Writer: - H.G. Forder

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: Aug 13 2010 4:07 AM

What: Within the Oracle instance, the database files have the complexity and order of a beehive. The tablespace is like The Queen Bee of the Oracle Hive. The tablespace is the Queen Bee and the *.dbf files are her DNA. The worker bees in the instance, the background processes and memory structures have but one purpose; they provide for the access, maintenance and preservation of the *.dbf files. The DNA of the database.

Writer: mattyflynn

LCC: QA

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Date: Oct 11 2010 1:17 AM

What: "Different models reflect different thinking on the part of the designer/analyst. What's really important is the analyst - not the model. A smart analyst with a simple model can work wonders. A powerful model in the hands of an inept analyst is like a toddler with a machine gun."...This page has a nice list of the limits of computer modeling, in this case it's about forest management, but the listed rules are applicable to any kind of computer modeling.

Writer: Not Stated

LCC: QA

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Date: Jan 26 2011 2:01 AM

What: "Premise: Learning logic is like learning statistics. Premise: You can't learn statistics by cramming; you have to study it consistently. Conclusion: You probably can't learn logic by cramming; you have to study it consistently." Maybe. This page is a discussion of reasoning by analogy.

Writer: Vickie Christensen

LCC: QA

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Date: Oct 30 2011 10:44 AM

What: "Every table in your database should have a primary key. A table without the primary key is like an orphan child without the support of parents or a youth without a spouse. You never know what you are missing!"

Writer: Shantanu

LCC: QA

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Date: Dec 16 2011 7:11 PM

What: "a primary key is like a father in house, like only one but there may be a lot of childs just like columns." This is good. If there are children in a house, there must be a father. If there are rows in a table they must have a primary key, otherwise they are orphan rows.

Writer: Ashis Kumar Jena

LCC: QA

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Date: Dec 16 2011 7:15 PM

What: In fact, the social security number is a primary key. By definition a primary key uniquely identifies a record in a database. This idea was necessary before electronic databases so as to keep track of individuals and their personal information. There are many unique identifiers that most people should be familiar with: license plates, finger prints and retinal scans all convey uniqueness.

Writer: LucretiaGermanica

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: Dec 16 2011 7:53 PM

What: "A primary-key is like the license plate on a car. It uniquely identifies a record."

Writer: Not Stated

LCC: QA

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Date: Dec 16 2011 7:28 PM

What: "Primary Keys are like fingerprints: there are no two human beings with identical fingerprints."

Writer: Not Stated

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: Dec 16 2011 7:32 PM

What: "The basic rule of thumb is that Primary and Foreign keys are like a Parent - Child relationship. The Child stores the Parent's id. This way each Parent can have multiple Children. It can get a WHOLE lot more complicated, but this will give you a very good starting approach to most of your database solutions."

Writer: Michael Rodrigues

LCC: QA

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Date: Dec 16 2011 7:36 PM

What: "Word Press is like a popular sports car: It is by far the most-often used installed blogging platform on the planet. A huge community helps support you if you decide to use it, but it's not intended for the Web novice. You need to either gain expertise or hire someone with that expertise. Otherwise, you end up in a ditch."

Writer: Not Stated

LCC: QA

Where: Reference Link Has Evaporated

Date: Feb 29 2012 2:18 PM

What: An xsl template can be compared to a programming function. It is a way of organizing XML styling code so that it is readable and easy to understand. The pharase "" means call the template called type and do the formatting that this templates contains. Once this is understood, and you have experience with using functions in other languages, this part of xsl become easier to work with and apply.

Writer: LucretiaMia

LCC: QA

Where:

Date: Jun 3 2012 11:17 PM

What: Some are close some are far. The ones furthest away will have slower interactions because of distance. See the link for further explanation.

Writer: Jeff Squyres

LCC: QA

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Date: May 14 2013 6:03 PM