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The PDP-11 were considered minicomputers, not mainframes, like the IBM System/360. The notion of midrange computing still exists with IBM's iSeries (AS/400), a

The PDP-11 were considered minicomputers, not mainframes, like the IBM System/360. The notion of midrange computing still exists with IBM's iSeries (AS/400), as well mainframes like IBM's zSeries. One could argue that some of these definitions get mushy, but I haven't ever heard disagreements about where the PDPs, AS/400s, and System/360s of the world live in this hierarchy. This seeming error was an early red flag in this article; having some good facts but having an incomplete picture. While some of the historical observations of what computing was is warranted, this same sort of not having a complete enough picture to draw correct conclusions shows up again in some of the main theses presented. Consider the statement about the coarseness of permissions. In many modern database systems this simply isn't true. What is true is that is the fully set of security features offered database systems are 1) not widely understood; 2) not bothered with by developers that choose to implement security elsewhere. Clearly the author spent some time with article and it is well structured, it's simply a matter of the author not having spent as much time getting to the heart of the matter as he/she should have.

majewsky 10y ago
> What is true is that is the fully set of security features offered database systems are 1) not widely understood; 2) not bothered with by developers that choose to implement security elsewhere. That statement applies to the full feature set of modern RDBMSes, not just the security features in particular. I'm always surprised that I seem to be about the only one (or at least one of very few) on my devops team of ~30 who's comfortable with issuing SELECT statements on the production DB to investigate issues (and sometimes UPDATEs to clean up a mess that users made). And that's not even touching all the crazy stuff (stored procedures, triggers, access permissions), just CRUD (or in this case, INSERT-SELECT-UPDATE-DELETE).

majewsky 10y ago

> What is true is that is the fully set of security features offered database systems are 1) not widely understood; 2) not bothered with by developers that choose to implement security elsewhere. That statement applies to the full feature set of modern RDBMSes, not just the security features in particular. I'm always surprised that I seem to be about the only one (or at least one of very few) on my devops team of ~30 who's comfortable with issuing SELECT statements on the production DB to investigate issues (and sometimes UPDATEs to clean up a mess that users made). And that's not even touching all the crazy stuff (stored procedures, triggers, access permissions), just CRUD (or in this case, INSERT-SELECT-UPDATE-DELETE).