A single, 80 MB shared library? Sounds like bad design to me. Break it up into smaller modules. I cannot imagine an single program would need to use every function provided by your code library.
I am right there with you. How much shared code, other than operating system routines, is present in a typically use scenario? I'd betcha not all that much. And in the days where 256MB of memory is cheap, and 60GB hard drives are growing on trees...
This is part and parcel of the dependency hell problem. Rather than bundle or statically link the libraries they use, Open Source software projects expect a package system, or even worse, the end user, to find the proper version of the library and install it. Other than satisfying some sort of geeky, "code reuse is good" minimalist aesthetic, I don't know what's being accomplished here.
Christ, if you are going to do this, why not create a recompiler that bundles the executable and all of its referenced DLLs into one EXE and be done with it.
As a nice side effect it'd make it a hell of a lot easier to move programs around your disk and between machines... Oh, ok, now I get it.
"Hi, I'm CmdrTaco, I don't read slashdot, I just post new stories. I don't really know why I have other editors, as I usually get around to finding most everything important on my own - though I might be a bit slower."
Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that there is no longer a problem with MSN and Opera. Just loaded MSN in Opera 7.01 - no problem, full content, no -30px cutoff.
This is some great advertising copy. "expertly illuminate"? The prequels are entertaining reads (I thought House Harkonnen was somewhat worse than the others), well in line with co-author Kevin J. Anderson's previous work -- his Star Wars novels, for example -- but to compare them to the original Dune is ludicrous.
Sorry, did end up sounding a bit like a dust cover blurb there.
I don't so much care for the fact that the original Dune garnered a Nebula and a Hugo. The prequels, IMHO are better, more entertaining reads. They certainly owe a lot to Dune, and in fact couldn't exist without Dune.
I found each of the prequels much more engrossing than Dune, and much less prone to the long, tediously nuanced conversations that utterly ruined Dune Messiah, and made for convenient (and too frequent) stopping points in Dune. Perhaps I lack your finely tuned literary tastes, or maybe even the intelligence to follow Herbert's increasingly bizarre plot meanderings. Perhaps I prefer easily digested mind candy over Herbert's 'deep' narrative.
Or maybe it's the iconoclast in me that could give two shits about the continued veneration of Herbert, and can simply appreciate a well told story framed in the Dune universe, for what it is.
I'm more worried about the "prequels". I hate it when someone's name gets tagged on stuff he didn't write. His son has some author write stuff, he puts his name (wich is also his father's name, duh) on it: Profit.
Except for the fact that his son is also a sci-fi author, who actually co-wrote the prequels, and the fact that the prequels, each one of them, are written better than Dune itself.
The prequels are fast paced, well written, clear, fascinating page turners that expertly illuminate the events leading up to those protrayed in the original Dune.
I read Dune long ago in my teens. My girlfriend introduced me to the prequels a few months back. I devoured all four of them - then sat down to read Dune once again. It was anti-climactic.
I just use one of those new fangled file compression utlities that you can apply recursively to the compressed output, resulting in any arbitrary degree of compression one desires.
After at most 10 applications of said compression utility, all emails looks like this: "1"
As I recall, I noted that it was a scroll box, scrolled down, and unchecked everything. - thought it was sleazy, but I caught it.
I avoid using RealPlayer at all these days - I can rest assured that if I have not used it in two weeks , when I fire it up it will ask "There is a new version of Real One player available, would you like to update?".
Anything that needs updating this frequently is a massive POS in my mind.
It's because we have to compete with the Chinese. They in general have a much better undergrad education (in my physics program most of them came in with basically the equivalent of a Master's degree) and are much more highly motivated.
Maintaining individual subscriptions to everything I like and want to pay for on the internet is unworkable. I specifically don't sign up for thing often not because of the price, but because of the aditional overhead of managing yet another subscription (which card did I use, when do they bill me, how much, is it auto-renewed, etc...)
The current situtation is something like being forced to subscribe to every cable channel you watch individually. It would not be workable, as each channel has a radically different value to each individual. It's the same way with web sites. For example, byte.com just went subscription. I read it only for Jerry Pournelle. Now Pournelle is an interesting guy, but paying $12/yr for his column alone just isn't worth it (I don't care about any of the other columnists). Similarly, Imagine if every cable channel cost $10/year, and you had to subscribe individually, and each station handled it's own billing seperately. Sure, I like the Food channel, and might occassionally watch it, but is it worth $10/year? (TNN might be, for the ST:TNG marathons alone).
This is why your cable provider serves as a content aggregater, mediating the different values each customer places each component of it's content. As long as costumers are satisfied with the whole package, for the price they are paying, it doesn't matter if one is an HBO freak or the other is a CNN freak. They balance each other out and both HBO and CNN can pay their bills.
This is why ISPs need to become more like cable companies. They should offer packages which provide pre-paid subscriptions to various high value, or value added content. I could sign up for the news-nut package and get WSJ online, CNN streaming coverage, etc... and it all just goes on my DSL bill. Add in high quality (and add free) internet radio and streaming video and I'd be a happy camper.
This model would work, and I predict it will be the way it works in the future.
Cut and pasted from mozdev for the IE theme: "Compatibility Key: Mozilla 1.0.x; with basic support for Mozilla 1.1.x Mozilla 1.0.x Mozilla 1.1.x/1.2a Mozilla 1.2.1 Mozilla 1.3a Netscape 7.x Phoenix 0.3/0.4"
Read the notes next to the themes at Mozdev next time, they clearly state if a theme works with 1.2 and the 1.3a series. I've had zero problem getting themes to work.
Yes, I read those directions. Still no dice. Just did it now. I am running 1.2.1 - tried to install "Internet Explorer" from mozdev - "The theme you selected was designed for an earlier version of Mozilla". The theme is clearly marked as being compatible with 1.2.1.
Perhaps I need to do an uninstall/reinstall... But this happens on my other PCs as well.
I wish the mozilla team would clean up the skins mess . I downloaded 1.2 recently and couldn't get a single downloaded skin to work. The same happened when I last downloaded phoenix a few weeks ago. I though the idea behind the 1.x release was to stabilize the APIs. If so, why is it so damned hard to have skins that work across multiple releases?
Christ Carmack, stop fucking around. Slip on battery connectors fer chrissake?! Jesus.
I have been following these guys for quite some time and have been frustrated by their slipshod approach to quality. It seems to be borrowed from the software world, were a failure neccessitates nothing more costly than a recompile. I have seen Carmack, time after time, subject thousands of dollars of equipment to risk because of cheap equipment and lack of thorough/rigorous testing.
This is not the first time they've had problems with computer equipment. Last time there was some overheating - because guess what - rockets get hot. Apparently this was just a messy implementation detail that Carmack overlooked.
They've also had problems with an 'altimeter' which was designed for hand held distance measurment (a la a laser speed-gun) - never designed to operate on a hot accelerating rocket. The thing has caused innumerable problems for Carmack due to it's flaky behavior. As far as I know he is still using it, even though it's caused crashes in the past. Why? The real thing is too expensive.
Additionally their testing is erratic and has insufficient controls. Often times between tests Carmack will change serveral variables, run a test - get weird results, and be left scratching his head as to what caused the change. In the real world you try to change as much as possible between tests - that way if it breaks, you know what caused it, without additional testing.
And no, I am not saying I could do it better. Most of these guys are far smarter than I. But it doesn't take smarts to implement some simple practices from the real world of engineering. I hate to see their time, effort, and intelligence wasted on wholly preventable failures like a computer cut-off caused by 'slip-on' battery connectors.
Well, I hope for your sake that "fastmail.fm" (which I've never heard of) stays in business, otherwise, you're gonna be switching email addresses soon, and as anybody with email knows, that's a royal pain in the ass.
Wow, you have never heard of it. It must be shady then. I think I'll go back to yahoo. Thanks.
They made the accounts more restrictive, took away free POP access, and then decided to charge too much for too little.
I looked around and found fastmail.fm - an excellent web/IMAP mail provider which integrates flawlessly with outlook or Mozilla/netscape mail. I pay $20/year and get something like 10 times the space I could get for the same price at yahoo. I also get the very cool email alias feature, where people can mail be at anything@myaccount.fastmail.fm. When web sites ask me for my address I sign up as say "slashdot@myaccount.fastmail.fm" - this way when I get spam I can tell who abused sold my email address, and block it based on the To: address.
Anyway, look around, there are many high quality email providers out there who charge much less than yahoo, and provide a heck of a lot more.
$1.99, I have 30 days to view it, and I can view it as many times as I want in the twenty-four hour period after I first start watching it.
I want to support stuff like this, but I personally think it is a bit pricey for all the restrictions. I could rent this DVD for about the same price at the local movie rental store. I'd get it for about three days. I could watch it whenever I want in that period. It is sure to be higher quality than the download. And even at DSL speeds, walking to the store, paying and returning is bound to be faster than the download (though it only took ten minutes here at work).
As other's have mentionned, I'd like the option to burn a VCD, or just to buy a copy that I can watch any time I feel like (even if it is locked to one PC using DRM).
I am consistently amazed at the digital content providers consistent overpricing of their content - first subscription web services, then e-books, now this. The technology just is not there yet folks to make computer delivery and reading of digital content competitive with the more traditional delivery mechanism. Until such a time as the technology improves, the content providers should be charging *less* not more.
After 10 years of doing development, all of it with databases in the back end, I know people like you very well. People who don't understand databases don't know how to use them, and code all of the logic into the middle tier
I understand relational databases very well. Know how to use them very well, and program tons of code on a very successful platform that locates ALL of it's business logic in the middle tier. This is just good design. Period. It allows for maximal code reuse, and minimized maintenance issues.
In one case that I was involved in, the company closed because their project couldn't be done on time since they decided to listen to this "expert" who spouted off similar stuff like what you're saying.
I know nothing about your project, but I can guarantee you there were more extensive problems than your expert advice. Well designed database schemas which are properly indexed should perform well regardless of where business logic is located. In fact throwing on triggers and relational constraints will tend to slow down performance.
Re:In a perfect world, yes......
on
SQL Fundamentals
·
· Score: 1
... but when you're developing for a highly-scalable database, you want to wring out as much performance as possible. And that means accepting the fact that if you dump all of your application logic into the middle tier, you'll be sacrificing some potential performance gains for portability.
Things like validating user input and maintaining referential integrity don't require much overhead in the middle tier.
Modern RDBMs are highy optimized to search through and locate large amounts of related data. That's what I use them for - and I will use every trick available to me to preformat and massage the data using standard SQL. But once I have the data out of the database, the data is the responsibility of the middle tier, until it is committed back to the database.
There may be some performance enhancements to be had locating some of the business logic in something like a stored procedure, but this is almost always far outweighed by the overhead of maintaining code on multiple platforms and multiple locations. I strive to keep it simple.
I don't ingnore the functionality that standard SQL provides. I use the more complex constructs standard SQL supports all the time to satify complex reporting requirements. This does take advantage of the relational schema to deliver data much more quickly than if I code the logic in the middle tier. This is an appropriate usage of the database tier and it is functionality that flat files will not provide.
I've seen them put all sorts of redundant validation crap in the middle tier because they didn't know about constraints and triggers. I could go on and on...
Validation logic belongs in the middle tier. The storage tier is just that - storage. It shouldn't be smart, and it very definitely should do anything else than storing the data I tell it to store.
Triggers, constraints - bah. All very vendor specific and they lead to application logic being strewn all over the tiers. Application Logic should be in the middle tier, period.
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A single, 80 MB shared library? Sounds like bad design to me. Break it up into smaller modules. I cannot imagine an single program would need to use every function provided by your code library.
-josh
I am right there with you. How much shared code, other than operating system routines, is present in a typically use scenario? I'd betcha not all that much. And in the days where 256MB of memory is cheap, and 60GB hard drives are growing on trees...
This is part and parcel of the dependency hell problem. Rather than bundle or statically link the libraries they use, Open Source software projects expect a package system, or even worse, the end user, to find the proper version of the library and install it. Other than satisfying some sort of geeky, "code reuse is good" minimalist aesthetic, I don't know what's being accomplished here.
-josh
Microsoft re-invents static linking.
Christ, if you are going to do this, why not create a recompiler that bundles the executable and all of its referenced DLLs into one EXE and be done with it.
As a nice side effect it'd make it a hell of a lot easier to move programs around your disk and between machines... Oh, ok, now I get it.
-josh
I'd take this lawyer's spam, wipe my nose with it as if it were so much kleenex and suck it up with the hoover.
-josh
"Hi, I'm CmdrTaco, I don't read slashdot, I just post new stories. I don't really know why I have other editors, as I usually get around to finding most everything important on my own - though I might be a bit slower."
Did read the release. Missed that point.
-josh
Everyone seems to be ignoring the fact that there is no longer a problem with MSN and Opera. Just loaded MSN in Opera 7.01 - no problem, full content, no -30px cutoff.
-josh
This is some great advertising copy. "expertly illuminate"? The prequels are entertaining reads (I thought House Harkonnen was somewhat worse than the others), well in line with co-author Kevin J. Anderson's previous work -- his Star Wars novels, for example -- but to compare them to the original Dune is ludicrous.
Sorry, did end up sounding a bit like a dust cover blurb there.
I don't so much care for the fact that the original Dune garnered a Nebula and a Hugo. The prequels, IMHO are better, more entertaining reads. They certainly owe a lot to Dune, and in fact couldn't exist without Dune.
I found each of the prequels much more engrossing than Dune, and much less prone to the long, tediously nuanced conversations that utterly ruined Dune Messiah, and made for convenient (and too frequent) stopping points in Dune. Perhaps I lack your finely tuned literary tastes, or maybe even the intelligence to follow Herbert's increasingly bizarre plot meanderings. Perhaps I prefer easily digested mind candy over Herbert's 'deep' narrative.
Or maybe it's the iconoclast in me that could give two shits about the continued veneration of Herbert, and can simply appreciate a well told story framed in the Dune universe, for what it is.
-josh
I'm more worried about the "prequels". I hate it when someone's name gets tagged on stuff he didn't write. His son has some author write stuff, he puts his name (wich is also his father's name, duh) on it: Profit.
Except for the fact that his son is also a sci-fi author, who actually co-wrote the prequels, and the fact that the prequels, each one of them, are written better than Dune itself.
The prequels are fast paced, well written, clear, fascinating page turners that expertly illuminate the events leading up to those protrayed in the original Dune.
I read Dune long ago in my teens. My girlfriend introduced me to the prequels a few months back. I devoured all four of them - then sat down to read Dune once again. It was anti-climactic.
-josh
I just use one of those new fangled file compression utlities that you can apply recursively to the compressed output, resulting in any arbitrary degree of compression one desires.
After at most 10 applications of said compression utility, all emails looks like this:
"1"
I never see any spam.
-josh
As I recall, I noted that it was a scroll box, scrolled down, and unchecked everything. - thought it was sleazy, but I caught it.
I avoid using RealPlayer at all these days - I can rest assured that if I have not used it in two weeks , when I fire it up it will ask "There is a new version of Real One player available, would you like to update?".
Anything that needs updating this frequently is a massive POS in my mind.
-josh
It's because we have to compete with the Chinese. They in general have a much better undergrad education (in my physics program most of them came in with basically the equivalent of a Master's degree) and are much more highly motivated.
-josh
Maintaining individual subscriptions to everything I like and want to pay for on the internet is unworkable. I specifically don't sign up for thing often not because of the price, but because of the aditional overhead of managing yet another subscription (which card did I use, when do they bill me, how much, is it auto-renewed, etc...)
The current situtation is something like being forced to subscribe to every cable channel you watch individually. It would not be workable, as each channel has a radically different value to each individual. It's the same way with web sites. For example, byte.com just went subscription. I read it only for Jerry Pournelle. Now Pournelle is an interesting guy, but paying $12/yr for his column alone just isn't worth it (I don't care about any of the other columnists). Similarly, Imagine if every cable channel cost $10/year, and you had to subscribe individually, and each station handled it's own billing seperately. Sure, I like the Food channel, and might occassionally watch it, but is it worth $10/year? (TNN might be, for the ST:TNG marathons alone).
This is why your cable provider serves as a content aggregater, mediating the different values each customer places each component of it's content. As long as costumers are satisfied with the whole package, for the price they are paying, it doesn't matter if one is an HBO freak or the other is a CNN freak. They balance each other out and both HBO and CNN can pay their bills.
This is why ISPs need to become more like cable companies. They should offer packages which provide pre-paid subscriptions to various high value, or value added content. I could sign up for the news-nut package and get WSJ online, CNN streaming coverage, etc... and it all just goes on my DSL bill. Add in high quality (and add free) internet radio and streaming video and I'd be a happy camper.
This model would work, and I predict it will be the way it works in the future.
-josh
It'd be cool if this thing came with a glow in the dark radium face.
-josh
Cut and pasted from mozdev for the IE theme:
"Compatibility Key: Mozilla 1.0.x; with basic support for Mozilla 1.1.x Mozilla 1.0.x Mozilla 1.1.x/1.2a Mozilla 1.2.1 Mozilla 1.3a Netscape 7.x Phoenix 0.3/0.4"
Huh... Who needs glasses.
-josh
Read the notes next to the themes at Mozdev next time, they clearly state if a theme works with 1.2 and the 1.3a series. I've had zero problem getting themes to work.
Yes, I read those directions. Still no dice. Just did it now. I am running 1.2.1 - tried to install "Internet Explorer" from mozdev - "The theme you selected was designed for an earlier version of Mozilla". The theme is clearly marked as being compatible with 1.2.1.
Perhaps I need to do an uninstall/reinstall... But this happens on my other PCs as well.
-josh
I wish the mozilla team would clean up the skins mess . I downloaded 1.2 recently and couldn't get a single downloaded skin to work. The same happened when I last downloaded phoenix a few weeks ago. I though the idea behind the 1.x release was to stabilize the APIs. If so, why is it so damned hard to have skins that work across multiple releases?
-josh
Christ Carmack, stop fucking around. Slip on battery connectors fer chrissake?! Jesus.
I have been following these guys for quite some time and have been frustrated by their slipshod approach to quality. It seems to be borrowed from the software world, were a failure neccessitates nothing more costly than a recompile. I have seen Carmack, time after time, subject thousands of dollars of equipment to risk because of cheap equipment and lack of thorough/rigorous testing.
This is not the first time they've had problems with computer equipment. Last time there was some overheating - because guess what - rockets get hot. Apparently this was just a messy implementation detail that Carmack overlooked.
They've also had problems with an 'altimeter' which was designed for hand held distance measurment (a la a laser speed-gun) - never designed to operate on a hot accelerating rocket. The thing has caused innumerable problems for Carmack due to it's flaky behavior. As far as I know he is still using it, even though it's caused crashes in the past. Why? The real thing is too expensive.
Additionally their testing is erratic and has insufficient controls. Often times between tests Carmack will change serveral variables, run a test - get weird results, and be left scratching his head as to what caused the change. In the real world you try to change as much as possible between tests - that way if it breaks, you know what caused it, without additional testing.
And no, I am not saying I could do it better. Most of these guys are far smarter than I. But it doesn't take smarts to implement some simple practices from the real world of engineering. I hate to see their time, effort, and intelligence wasted on wholly preventable failures like a computer cut-off caused by 'slip-on' battery connectors.
-josh
Well, I hope for your sake that "fastmail.fm" (which I've never heard of) stays in business, otherwise, you're gonna be switching email addresses soon, and as anybody with email knows, that's a royal pain in the ass.
Wow, you have never heard of it. It must be shady then. I think I'll go back to yahoo. Thanks.
-josh
They made the accounts more restrictive, took away free POP access, and then decided to charge too much for too little.
I looked around and found fastmail.fm - an excellent web/IMAP mail provider which integrates flawlessly with outlook or Mozilla/netscape mail. I pay $20/year and get something like 10 times the space I could get for the same price at yahoo. I also get the very cool email alias feature, where people can mail be at anything@myaccount.fastmail.fm. When web sites ask me for my address I sign up as say "slashdot@myaccount.fastmail.fm" - this way when I get spam I can tell who abused sold my email address, and block it based on the To: address.
Anyway, look around, there are many high quality email providers out there who charge much less than yahoo, and provide a heck of a lot more.
-josh
$1.99, I have 30 days to view it, and I can view it as many times as I want in the twenty-four hour period after I first start watching it.
I want to support stuff like this, but I personally think it is a bit pricey for all the restrictions. I could rent this DVD for about the same price at the local movie rental store. I'd get it for about three days. I could watch it whenever I want in that period. It is sure to be higher quality than the download. And even at DSL speeds, walking to the store, paying and returning is bound to be faster than the download (though it only took ten minutes here at work).
As other's have mentionned, I'd like the option to burn a VCD, or just to buy a copy that I can watch any time I feel like (even if it is locked to one PC using DRM).
I am consistently amazed at the digital content providers consistent overpricing of their content - first subscription web services, then e-books, now this. The technology just is not there yet folks to make computer delivery and reading of digital content competitive with the more traditional delivery mechanism. Until such a time as the technology improves, the content providers should be charging *less* not more.
-josh
After 10 years of doing development, all of it with databases in the back end, I know people like you very well. People who don't understand databases don't know how to use them, and code all of the logic into the middle tier
I understand relational databases very well. Know how to use them very well, and program tons of code on a very successful platform that locates ALL of it's business logic in the middle tier. This is just good design. Period. It allows for maximal code reuse, and minimized maintenance issues.
In one case that I was involved in, the company closed because their project couldn't be done on time since they decided to listen to this "expert" who spouted off similar stuff like what you're saying.
I know nothing about your project, but I can guarantee you there were more extensive problems than your expert advice. Well designed database schemas which are properly indexed should perform well regardless of where business logic is located. In fact throwing on triggers and relational constraints will tend to slow down performance.
Things like validating user input and maintaining referential integrity don't require much overhead in the middle tier.
Modern RDBMs are highy optimized to search through and locate large amounts of related data. That's what I use them for - and I will use every trick available to me to preformat and massage the data using standard SQL. But once I have the data out of the database, the data is the responsibility of the middle tier, until it is committed back to the database.
There may be some performance enhancements to be had locating some of the business logic in something like a stored procedure, but this is almost always far outweighed by the overhead of maintaining code on multiple platforms and multiple locations. I strive to keep it simple.
-josh
I don't ingnore the functionality that standard SQL provides. I use the more complex constructs standard SQL supports all the time to satify complex reporting requirements. This does take advantage of the relational schema to deliver data much more quickly than if I code the logic in the middle tier. This is an appropriate usage of the database tier and it is functionality that flat files will not provide.
I've seen them put all sorts of redundant validation crap in the middle tier because they didn't know about constraints and triggers. I could go on and on...
Validation logic belongs in the middle tier. The storage tier is just that - storage. It shouldn't be smart, and it very definitely should do anything else than storing the data I tell it to store.
Triggers, constraints - bah. All very vendor specific and they lead to application logic being strewn all over the tiers. Application Logic should be in the middle tier, period.
-josh