January 6, 2011 at 1:33 pm
But, Craig, you're still trying to divide a non-pie. :laugh:
Logically, that's nonsense - 'can't be done. To me, you can't take nothing and divide it by anything. There's nothing to divide the amount by.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
January 6, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Thanks to all this talk of 0 as numerator and denominator I've had a song running through my head for hours.
Nothin' from Nothin' leaves Nothin'.
I'd love to see a version of the song with a verse about division.
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January 6, 2011 at 1:53 pm
That's what I meant with "the fuzz" about dividing by zero. Now "the thread" is under its spell. 😀
x / 0 = infinity (to be correct I should put an arrow below the =, to indicate asymptote, but I don't seem to find it on my keyboard :-))
Plain and simple. Divide something by vague placeholder gives just another vague placeholder (at least in the standard (x,y) Euclidian namespace)
It gets interesting when you look at 0 / 0. I don't remember what it actually did, but I think you have to look again at the asymptotes, and that it depends on which direction your looking.
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January 6, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Did anyone hear about Microsoft's Hotmail SQL Server cloud issue?
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January 6, 2011 at 2:08 pm
WayneS (1/6/2011)
Did anyone hear about Microsoft's Hotmail SQL Server cloud issue?
Buck Woody talked a bit about that on Twitter. He tweeted when the database restores were finished.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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January 6, 2011 at 2:09 pm
Yeah I heard about it... 17K users seems like a lot to some, but in the scope of MS's hotmail users that as the article stated was a drop in the bucket.
One has to wonder what actually happened, and if it really was a database issue or something else entirely. It'd be interesting to see the after action reports once it's all sorted out.
Of course this isn't the first time MS has had issues with hotmail. Anyone else remember when they tried to move from apache to IIS the first time around (somewhere around 2000 i think)? It was pretty painful to be a hotmail user until they got things optimized for the new web servers and such.
January 6, 2011 at 2:57 pm
Luke L (1/6/2011)
Yeah I heard about it... 17K users seems like a lot to some, but in the scope of MS's hotmail users that as the article stated was a drop in the bucket.One has to wonder what actually happened, and if it really was a database issue or something else entirely. It'd be interesting to see the after action reports once it's all sorted out.
Of course this isn't the first time MS has had issues with hotmail. Anyone else remember when they tried to move from apache to IIS the first time around (somewhere around 2000 i think)? It was pretty painful to be a hotmail user until they got things optimized for the new web servers and such.
Ah, a "technical issue in the backend is about all that can be dragged out of them."
Guess it was a divide by zero error then. 😉
Get this though, in that same article, the author says:
As I've pointed out several times before, a general-purpose relational database is a poor choice for efficiently managing typical email stores. The industry has proven this time and time again -- most notably in Microsoft's attempt to migrate the Exchange store from ESE to SQL Server: the Exchange team could never make it work as well as ESE.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
January 7, 2011 at 3:44 am
A rash of slowly changing dimension questions!
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic605244-148-1.aspx
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic731253-148-1.aspx
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic665342-148-1.aspx
Maybe my cynicism level is set to 11 , but are the school's back in 🙂
January 7, 2011 at 3:48 am
January 7, 2011 at 4:46 am
mtillman-921105 (1/6/2011)
But, Craig, you're still trying to divide a non-pie. :laugh:Logically, that's nonsense - 'can't be done. To me, you can't take nothing and divide it by anything. There's nothing to divide the amount by.
Actually, to me, this is one of the most real abstract concepts in Math. (to use the word 'real' outside of the mathematical sense).
In other words, I can take my nothing, (pretend to) physically divide it with a knife, and I still have nothing. I don't have MORE nothings, I still have the same nothing, and I can share that nothing with you freely without giving up anything.
Also, I can't take multiple nothings and turn them into something. (look out if I ever figure that trick out) So I don't know how many nothings make up my pie, and therefore when you ask me for a slice of nothing from my pie, I can't do that with any sort of precision.
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January 7, 2011 at 5:00 am
mtillman-921105 (1/6/2011)
My guess is that math is designed to work with quantities. Since zero is not really a quantity, it creates paradoxes. (Zero is odd anyway, it wasn't discovered until much later in our math history. I don't believe the Ancient Greeks used it. It's idea came circa 500 A.D.?)
Yes, arithmetic was designed to work with quantities. But the concept of "none" as quantity is very old, much older than the concept of a fully-fledged base 10 positional notation with a symbol for zero which can be in any position, which is probably what you are thinking of (both the Indians and the Arabs had this in one form or another in the second half of the 5th century AD, which must be where your 500 AD comes from).
The oldest positional notation we know of of was used from about 1600 BC in Babylon; it's a base 60 system; originally it used space as a zero indicator, but evolved to use a three hook symbol and later a two wedge symbol for zero. This was a somewhat defective system, in that trailing zeroes were not written even when the zero symbol became other than space, so that for example the numbers 1, 60, 3600, and 216000 were all written exactly the same
The Greeks certainly had the concpt of zero, and a name for it, and had philosophical arguments about whether or not nothing was anything (actually quite sensible arguments, not like some of the mathematical discussions you will find on the internet today [the hundreds of people on the net disputing Cantor's proof that there is no mapping from the integers onto the reals is one thing that provides clear proof that many people are completely incapable of logic]).
The Indians had a positional system for binary numbers from about somewhere before 200 BC, perhaps even before 500 BC, and that would have been really hard going without a representation for zero! They clearly also had the concept of zero as a quantity back then, as there was a Sanskrit word for it (not for the symbol, for the quantity considered as an abstract quantity). But apart from that old binary system it seems that fully positional notation didn't catch on in India until quite a bit later. They had a fully positional base 10 system with zero by at latest mid 5th century AD, but rather than symbols for digits it used words (at least in the first book that described it, produced in about 458 AD). The Arabs made an all symbol version of this about 500 AD, and this came to Europe via Moorish Spain in the 11th century AD.
Tom
January 7, 2011 at 5:05 am
Dave Ballantyne (1/7/2011)
Maybe my cynicism level is set to 11 , but are the school's back in 🙂
How far does your cynicism scale go?
Or does it just go up to eleven? :-D:cool:
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January 7, 2011 at 5:11 am
Don't forget the Mayans, Tom. While they didn't use it in actual math calculations, they understood the concept of zero, nothing, and the need for a placement device well before most of the Western world (except the Babylonians) and they figured it out independent of other resources.
January 7, 2011 at 5:14 am
Brandie Tarvin (1/7/2011)
Don't forget the Mayans, Tom. While they didn't use it in actual math calculations, they understood the concept of zero, nothing, and the need for a placement device well before most of the Western world (except the Babylonians) and they figured it out independent of other resources.
But apparently they didn't get the concept of 2013 😉
(I hope)
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January 7, 2011 at 5:24 am
Brandie Tarvin (1/6/2011)
The Zero was invented B.C.E. not in C.E. The Arabs get attribution, but they aren't the only culture to have invented the Zero. Here's an interesting link: http://www.mediatinker.com/blog/archives/008821.htmlFYI: I love the pie reference. It makes perfect sense to me. I don't know if that's good or bad. @=)
Interesting url - but whover wrote was apparently unaware of Bêl-bân-aplu's tablet unearthed at Kish: dates from 600 or 700 BC, and uses a three-hook symbol for zero, long before we have any evidence of use of the two-wedge symbol for zero. Also unaware of the early India stuff - Pingala's "sunya" was the more than half a millennium before 458 AD (or if the idea is to have a glyph rather than a word, 458 is too early - that text uses a positional notation with words, not glyphs). It's odd that he claims 458 is conjectural when it's a lot less controversial than the other Indian date he quotes, 628, which he doesn't question at all.
Tom
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