Without SPs your performance won't scale too well - SPs run on the database server, which is (usually) a nice big fast machine with RAID etc. You don't want to offload everything onto the client as the network traffic between client and server can be huge (especially if you're dealing with big tables >1 million rows which aren't really that unusual these days). SPs allow you to do Query->Big fast machine->Result without all the messing about - *especially* if your DB structure changes you can maintain a consistent interface to the underlying data (views are mostly used for this but some of the more complex things will need SPs).
Subqueries are essential... some things just can't be written any other way (short of using multiple temporary tables which is so icky I won't even begin to go there). Especially where you're trying to exclude items from a set - you need a 'where not in' clause which simply can't be done with a join.
I tried it and after much tweaking, reinstalling of drivers, etc. got to float around a blue world with black triangles in it. Not what I'd call an 'interactive experience':-) Oh, and the only people on it (all 5 of them) seem to be a bunch of lamers shouting 'f... you' constantly.
I don't think we're *quite* at William Gibson level yet:-)
Seems to be broken at the moment... it wouldn't let me create a new user. It also slowed down my 1.4gig athlon to a crawl... I'd hate to have to use it on anything slower.
We tried to install Win2k service pack 3 on two test machines to see if it broke anything. It destroyed them, right back to the 'can't find NTLDR' prompt.
Does microsoft answer to all the machines that SP3 breaks? (Some companies might not be as careful as us and could lose important data). No, the EULA explicitly states that they have zero liability even if sp3 triggers World War 3 (before GWB does).
Anyone who uses the 'liability' FUD about MS software deserves shooting. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces (to coin a phrase).
Re:Unenforceable, not illegal
on
Shrinkwrapped Books
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Charities still do this every christmas - they send a bunch of cards with a letter that says 'if you keep these you owe us $10 otherwise send them back at your expense'. To which I respond 'bollocks, it's unsolicited mail & I have no sympathy for charities that try to scam me', then use the free cards to send to people.
That's UCS16... UTF is an encoding, UCS is a character set.
Sensible setups use UFT8, which can encode up to UCS32 - good enough for any languages we're likely to use in the near future (assuming we don't meet aliens with billions of characters in their language).
The advantage of UTF8 is ease of transition - you can still use strcmp, normal "" strings, etc. (compare to the hoops that Win32 has to go through to do UTF16... I tried to convert a program once, and gave up after a month banging my head against a brick wall).
The disadvantage is that it's biased towards western character sets - once you get into things like chinese it takes something like 6 bytes to describe a 4 byte character (btw. 2 byte characters are not enough for chinese. Presumable 'doze uses UTF16 to get around this limitation).
Price doesn't mean a lot. I've worked with contractors on $100,000+ who I wouldn't let near my home network never mind a corporate one.
Meanwhile we have 30 developers ranging from $14,000 to $37,000 and some of them are very skilled (unfortunately not always recognised by management, but that's another thread).
I can't help thinking that if I had the chance I'd quite IT and get a regular job. The crap you have to put up with every day in this industry is just not worth it. You might not get paid much flipping burgers but at least you won't be asked to work a 7 day week and you can actually take a lunch break or even, gasp, a holiday!
Last time I tried to take some of my holiday entitlement I had to cancel at the last minute because my boss changed his mind and refused to let me take it. A week later a memo went round 'Nobody is using their holiday entitlement - why not?'... If I'd had a gun at that moment...
The latest piece of crap was that unless everyone got eye tests at their own expense* they would have 1/3 of their wages docked for that month.
McDonalds here I come.
* They said they'd pay it back but that was two weeks ago and I'm still waiting... this company don't pay their bills, even to their employees.
All news content is 90% opinion and 10% fact... That said, the Times is far from a 'sensational' newspaper, and probably the most respected newspaper in this country. If you were talking about the Daily Mail I might just agree with you.
The execs at Worldcom and Enron are just crooks, and the only reason they aren't bending over in the showers of a maximum security prison at the moment is the protection of the US corporate state (it ceased to be a democracy years ago).
I'd rather just make spam illegal. There's a disturbing trend of non-anonymous spam... quickinspirations.com, for example. They don't hide, just flood the mailservers with connections several times a second, despite being given the 'fuck off' response each time.
All the old netscape plugins work, and even some of the IE ones. At the moment I have:
Java Plug-in 1.4.0 for Netscape Navigator (DLL Helper) Shockwave Flash 6.0 r29 Macromedia Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 8.5 Macromedia Authorware Web Player Netscape plug-in, version 6.0 F1 Adobe Acrobat Plug-In Version 5.00 for Netscape QuickTime Plug-in 5.0.2 Microsoft (R) DRM (ick!) Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library Microsoft® Windows Media Services
Which just about covers everything that I ever use.
MI works well if the only things you inherit are virtual base classes (basically treating them like java interfaces). It's useful for writing event handlers.
Complex answer - some countries (such as the UK) have treaties which make patents enforcible in each others' countries (although such enforcement is apparently rare).
The GPL states that as long as I put my own code under GPL I can use any other GPL code without restriction - thus enforcing the freedom of free software.
Patents directly nullify this - with SELinux I can't modify it and make my own distro, or take the good bits of the code and use it in my own GPL project... making SELinux essentially proprietary.
Rational haven't even ported (properly) their products to VS.NET yet... their 'VS.NET compatible' version of Purify is just an external app that you have to call up and load your EXE in, which sucks hard.
I'm not impressed with their testing software - we paid for Rational Robot (£20,000 - something like 6 months software budget for a small company like ours) and a programmer has been trying to work out how to use it for another 6 months. It still can't test reliably. For that time/money we could have just had the programmer actually doing the damned testing themselves.
The performance thing is pushed because the review sites need something to write about.
They need to start comparing value for value... An athlon 1900 costs the same as a P4 1.6Ghz. The benchmarks wouldn't be so close, then:-)
The main reason I ditched Intel is the whole backward compatility thing.. I was sick of having to buy a new motherboard (and sometimes even a new case) just to get a faster processor. With AMD they're all Socket-A... if you bought an old Duron two years ago you can just stick in the latest Athlon without any extra hassle (except perhaps a BIOS flash).
At work we're entirely AMD now because the Intel line don't support dual processors - a requirement if you're doing development on Win2k.
lynx would probably display the euro if you are using a UTF8 terminal (not that I've ever got one of those to work... something to do with the debian packages being under the impression that the UK is not part of europe, so it doesn't need a euro symbol).
Heh. I went to an MSDN conference where they put together a simple app and was actually put off.net. The thing ran like treacle. They had a multi-user app that was supposed to book cinema tickets and it was taking 30 seconds for the web page to appear.. on a LAN! The whole database backend looked like an explosion at a spagetti factory, too (and no locking, but then I can put that down to the fact that it was only a demo).
God help us if that ever gets popular... you'll need a quad Xeon just to run a small website.
If you must script a GUI use somthing that's been designed for it like TCL (another language I hate but it has its uses).
Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL
on
Perl 6 Synopsis 5
·
· Score: 2
I started using perl many years ago. Back then I really liked it, then they started trying to turn it from a useful scripting language (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, remember... It's for text processing and formatting the output) into some kind of OO wannabee.
Read the old edition 1 camel book - it's clear and concise, easily readable and makes you want to go out and code. I have the latest edition... it's 4 times the size, rambling, and doesn't seem to ever get to the point. There's only 3 pages on the reporting side of perl now - it's like they're ashamed of it or something.
Perl should have been left at what it was good at - there are other languages for large scale programming.
Slashdot Mirror
Without SPs your performance won't scale too well - SPs run on the database server, which is (usually) a nice big fast machine with RAID etc. You don't want to offload everything onto the client as the network traffic between client and server can be huge (especially if you're dealing with big tables >1 million rows which aren't really that unusual these days). SPs allow you to do Query->Big fast machine->Result without all the messing about - *especially* if your DB structure changes you can maintain a consistent interface to the underlying data (views are mostly used for this but some of the more complex things will need SPs).
Subqueries are essential... some things just can't be written any other way (short of using multiple temporary tables which is so icky I won't even begin to go there). Especially where you're trying to exclude items from a set - you need a 'where not in' clause which simply can't be done with a join.
...the ability to delete columns would be nice too.
I tried it and after much tweaking, reinstalling of drivers, etc. got to float around a blue world with black triangles in it. Not what I'd call an 'interactive experience' :-) Oh, and the only people on it (all 5 of them) seem to be a bunch of lamers shouting 'f... you' constantly.
:-)
I don't think we're *quite* at William Gibson level yet
Seems to be broken at the moment... it wouldn't let me create a new user. It also slowed down my 1.4gig athlon to a crawl... I'd hate to have to use it on anything slower.
We tried to install Win2k service pack 3 on two test machines to see if it broke anything. It destroyed them, right back to the 'can't find NTLDR' prompt.
Does microsoft answer to all the machines that SP3 breaks? (Some companies might not be as careful as us and could lose important data). No, the EULA explicitly states that they have zero liability even if sp3 triggers World War 3 (before GWB does).
Anyone who uses the 'liability' FUD about MS software deserves shooting. If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces (to coin a phrase).
Charities still do this every christmas - they send a bunch of cards with a letter that says 'if you keep these you owe us $10 otherwise send them back at your expense'. To which I respond 'bollocks, it's unsolicited mail & I have no sympathy for charities that try to scam me', then use the free cards to send to people.
That's UCS16... UTF is an encoding, UCS is a character set.
Sensible setups use UFT8, which can encode up to UCS32 - good enough for any languages we're likely to use in the near future (assuming we don't meet aliens with billions of characters in their language).
The advantage of UTF8 is ease of transition - you can still use strcmp, normal "" strings, etc. (compare to the hoops that Win32 has to go through to do UTF16... I tried to convert a program once, and gave up after a month banging my head against a brick wall).
The disadvantage is that it's biased towards western character sets - once you get into things like chinese it takes something like 6 bytes to describe a 4 byte character (btw. 2 byte characters are not enough for chinese. Presumable 'doze uses UTF16 to get around this limitation).
Price doesn't mean a lot. I've worked with contractors on $100,000+ who I wouldn't let near my home network never mind a corporate one.
Meanwhile we have 30 developers ranging from $14,000 to $37,000 and some of them are very skilled (unfortunately not always recognised by management, but that's another thread).
I can't help thinking that if I had the chance I'd quite IT and get a regular job. The crap you have to put up with every day in this industry is just not worth it. You might not get paid much flipping burgers but at least you won't be asked to work a 7 day week and you can actually take a lunch break or even, gasp, a holiday!
Last time I tried to take some of my holiday entitlement I had to cancel at the last minute because my boss changed his mind and refused to let me take it. A week later a memo went round 'Nobody is using their holiday entitlement - why not?'... If I'd had a gun at that moment...
The latest piece of crap was that unless everyone got eye tests at their own expense* they would have 1/3 of their wages docked for that month.
McDonalds here I come.
* They said they'd pay it back but that was two weeks ago and I'm still waiting... this company don't pay their bills, even to their employees.
Offtopic? I can't think of any way it could be more *on* topic!
Mods on crack again...
All news content is 90% opinion and 10% fact... That said, the Times is far from a 'sensational' newspaper, and probably the most respected newspaper in this country. If you were talking about the Daily Mail I might just agree with you.
The execs at Worldcom and Enron are just crooks, and the only reason they aren't bending over in the showers of a maximum security prison at the moment is the protection of the US corporate state (it ceased to be a democracy years ago).
I'd rather just make spam illegal. There's a disturbing trend of non-anonymous spam... quickinspirations.com, for example. They don't hide, just flood the mailservers with connections several times a second, despite being given the 'fuck off' response each time.
All the old netscape plugins work, and even some of the IE ones. At the moment I have:
Java Plug-in 1.4.0 for Netscape Navigator (DLL Helper)
Shockwave Flash 6.0 r29
Macromedia Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 8.5
Macromedia Authorware Web Player Netscape plug-in, version 6.0 F1
Adobe Acrobat Plug-In Version 5.00 for Netscape
QuickTime Plug-in 5.0.2
Microsoft (R) DRM (ick!)
Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library
Microsoft® Windows Media Services
Which just about covers everything that I ever use.
MI works well if the only things you inherit are virtual base classes (basically treating them like java interfaces). It's useful for writing event handlers.
Complex answer - some countries (such as the UK) have treaties which make patents enforcible in each others' countries (although such enforcement is apparently rare).
Untrue. The GPL *requires* that the rights that it gives are passed on to all derived GPL code.
This patent has directly overriden this. If I took the patented code and created a GPL app based on it I would be sued for patent infringement.
They have only dropped royalties for SELinux, not apps derived from it.
The GPL states that as long as I put my own code under GPL I can use any other GPL code without restriction - thus enforcing the freedom of free software.
Patents directly nullify this - with SELinux I can't modify it and make my own distro, or take the good bits of the code and use it in my own GPL project... making SELinux essentially proprietary.
Rational haven't even ported (properly) their products to VS.NET yet... their 'VS.NET compatible' version of Purify is just an external app that you have to call up and load your EXE in, which sucks hard.
I'm not impressed with their testing software - we paid for Rational Robot (£20,000 - something like 6 months software budget for a small company like ours) and a programmer has been trying to work out how to use it for another 6 months. It still can't test reliably. For that time/money we could have just had the programmer actually doing the damned testing themselves.
http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.htm
There are a couple of reference implementations & the spec is available so it won't be long before there's a Gimp plugin for it...
The performance thing is pushed because the review sites need something to write about.
:-)
They need to start comparing value for value... An athlon 1900 costs the same as a P4 1.6Ghz. The benchmarks wouldn't be so close, then
The main reason I ditched Intel is the whole backward compatility thing.. I was sick of having to buy a new motherboard (and sometimes even a new case) just to get a faster processor. With AMD they're all Socket-A... if you bought an old Duron two years ago you can just stick in the latest Athlon without any extra hassle (except perhaps a BIOS flash).
At work we're entirely AMD now because the Intel line don't support dual processors - a requirement if you're doing development on Win2k.
lynx would probably display the euro if you are using a UTF8 terminal (not that I've ever got one of those to work... something to do with the debian packages being under the impression that the UK is not part of europe, so it doesn't need a euro symbol).
Heh. I went to an MSDN conference where they put together a simple app and was actually put off .net. The thing ran like treacle. They had a multi-user app that was supposed to book cinema tickets and it was taking 30 seconds for the web page to appear.. on a LAN! The whole database backend looked like an explosion at a spagetti factory, too (and no locking, but then I can put that down to the fact that it was only a demo).
God help us if that ever gets popular... you'll need a quad Xeon just to run a small website.
The CLR has no templates... C++ without templates is not truly C++ - no STL so basically you're down to making C with the occasional class.
Perl for GUI apps? Save us!
If you must script a GUI use somthing that's been designed for it like TCL (another language I hate but it has its uses).
I started using perl many years ago. Back then I really liked it, then they started trying to turn it from a useful scripting language (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, remember... It's for text processing and formatting the output) into some kind of OO wannabee.
Read the old edition 1 camel book - it's clear and concise, easily readable and makes you want to go out and code. I have the latest edition... it's 4 times the size, rambling, and doesn't seem to ever get to the point. There's only 3 pages on the reporting side of perl now - it's like they're ashamed of it or something.
Perl should have been left at what it was good at - there are other languages for large scale programming.