What luck? A decent test will take a lot of luck out of it. You're going to have to have miraculous luck to be able to text random words read to you without spelling mistakes, text answers to questions while driving in a driving simulator AND still not hit some virtual toddler who dashes in front of your car in such a way that you have only 400 milliseconds press the brake pedal (many normal people's "higher level" visual reaction times are even crappier than that[1], but this is not a test for normals). Or avoid some virtual vehicle doing something crazy. Or realize that an ambulance is legally running the red light (even if you have green, if you hear a siren you should slow down at the lights).
If it's impossible, then nobody will pass the test, and you don't have to worry about it. But if it's not impossible, I will be very happy to share the road with whoever that has enough skill to pass such a difficult test. Three rounds of "Driving through Crazy City" for 30 minutes while texting and on the mobile phone - they have to reach their destination within the time limit too. Basically a very good driver drives a few times through the X different routes and hazards minus the texting, and you take the times from there. If they are as good as that driver while texting, they are good enough for me.
Maybe some crazy Japanese guy[2] will train enough to pass the test;). I wonder if anyone would watch a TV show of top candidates attempting something similar. If anyone succeeds just make the test harder the next season...
Texting while driving has actually been demonstrated to be worse than drunk driving in some experiments.
I'm sure it is worse in most cases - unless you are very drunk...
Texting requires a higher level of multitasking and most drivers have not been trained to text while driving, nor do they practice (under controlled circumstances!) doing it till they are very good at it. BUT I believe a small percentage of people (not all) can learn to text while driving safely.
So perhaps they should: 1) Try to train all learner drivers to text and talk while driving, and have them fail under controlled circumstances. Whether they get good enough or not they will be more aware of how dangerous and difficult it is (especially after killing many dozens in driving simulators). 2) Then have two different driving exams and licenses - if you want the license to text and drive you have to pay more, and you have to pass a very difficult exam (paying for each try!) involving texting while driving (pass = zero spelling mistakes, zero driving mistakes, and not take too long for both driving and texting) and similar difficult stuff. If you pass, you get a different driving license and get to put a special sticker on your car (like the "handicapped" sticker except we're handicapped compared to you;) ).
With that license if you do crash while texting, and it's your fault, you still get the same penalty as everyone else. But the cops can't book you if you do not crash or break any other laws while texting or being on the phone. They can pull you over if you do not have that sticker on- just show them your license. So drive safely and you'll be fine.
People might say it's elitist, but if you are good enough to pass such a test, the rest of the drivers on the road (including me) will be a greater danger to you than you to us!. I would be very happy if more drivers on the road could drive that well. In contrast I see many drivers who can't even stick to their lane when they're not even on the phone or doing anything else but driving.
p.s. some jealous people would probably key your car if you display the sticker...
I find the other way round better. "Server" Linux in a VM and Windows as desktop and host. That way you can run all the Windows games/desktop stuff. I've NEVER had malware problems on my personal Windows machines[1].
IMO Desktop Linux is still crappier than Windows XP/7. "Server Linux" on the other hand is pretty good. Most of the good Linux stuff is server and not desktop. I have to say K3B is pretty darn good. Maybe someone can provide a longer list of Desktop Linux only apps that are better than Windows alternatives.
[1] But I'm the sort of person who uses noscript and runs different firefox profiles using different user accounts (using runas). That way even if the browser is pwned, the malware needs to do privilege escalation from a restricted user account to get more than what that particular browser instance can do. Most malware is not designed for that.
Those cheap data-entry/etc workers can't be doing what most people can't, otherwise they would be paid more. So given a not too stupid interface most people can learn to do stuff faster. There just is a big disconnect between being able to do it, and doing it.
Command lines generally aren't noob friendly. GUIs used to be more noob friendly.
In my opinion the GUIs should still cater for the "noobs", so that people with little experience can mess about with what is visible and still discover stuff. But apparently Microsoft and GNOME have broken that by hidden away a lot of stuff. Perhaps they figure that it's just faster for people to be trained than for them to discover.
The shortcuts on the other hand can be learned over time or via training. I still want those shortcuts though.
That may be the classic example, but FWIW, I hardly ever have a good reason to minimize windows. And why should you or I need to? I click on the exact task button I want to switch to the window I want to use, the GUI raises the window I need to see, and the other window is automatically "underneath" and not in the way. Even when I have 30+ taskbar buttons (double height taskbar), I know where most of my "windows" are. If you don't waste time always closing applications completely and relaunching them (for no good reason other than "neatness"), the windows and buttons stay where they are and you should be able to remember where they are. Much more efficient, until you run low on memory! (but that's more a deficiency in the hardware/software if it can't maintain all the tasks you do better than you can "hold their buttons" in your head- that's human augmentation - you do the light stuff the computer does the heavy stuff).
If minimizing is to view _stuff_ on the desktop, on my home Windows XP machine I have it set up so that pressing: winkey, 1, 1 will have the explorer explore the Desktop. For some reason when I just did that it took longer for Windows XP to display my desktop than it took for me to press that key sequence! The second time was much faster (cached?). One day I will get that SSD drive and then it might be different:).
If it's to view the actual desktop there's winkey+D (I hardly ever use that though).
As for offloaded to the GPU, if you can't see everything under the animated minimizing window till it's near completely done, you can't really start doing much till that happens.
I'm not the OP, but I can give you plenty of examples of why GUIs are superior to CLIs.
1) A GUI can have a CLI, so it can do all the things a CLI can AND more. If it doesn't it is due to crappy GUI designers. 2) Try playing Counterstrike or Starcraft using a CLI - in theory it is possible, but a GUI would still be superior for many things (see 1) also ).
The real problem is most of the current batch of GUI designers suck (or their bosses do). There is no reason why doing things with a GUI should be slower and harder than on a CLI, in fact it can and should be faster (and as game GUIs show, it is possible).
Just look at the top (and even mid-level) gamers using their GUIs - they can sustain very many actions per second. Look at an experienced skilled point-of-sale or "dumb terminal" data-entry worker - they are pretty fast too. They are examples that "normal" people can learn to be skilled and very productive.
But instead a lot of modern GUIs have fancy animations or steps that increase latency- they force you to take more time to do stuff than actually necessary. In many competitive games, if a weapon/skill has a long fancy animation between the time you press a button till it actually fires/activates, that's considered a disadvantage not an advantage! But for some stupid reason in "modern" GUIs such fancy animations are considered a good thing, "make things more like the real world" etc.
If there's going to be any time wasting it should be by the human NOT the computer/UI. The GUI should be efficient so that I have more time to waste on Slashdot or whatever I choose. If your modern GUI is slower at managing tasks than "GNU screen" then it is crap.
A mediocre programmer can make an operating system that can handle 3 tasks well. It's the good ones that make operating systems that can handle 1000 tasks well - max throughput, decent latency.
Similarly any mediocre GUI designer can make a GUI that allows a normal human to manage 1 or 2 tasks well. A good GUI should allow normal humans to do way more than that (if they choose to do so).
FWIW Toyota and Honda have cars that are 80% made in USA by content (including the parts). At one point they might even have been the most American cars;).
The entire string has to be an EXACT IDENTICAL MATCH for success[1]. Not just look similar.
Example of how you might not get the answer even given infinite time, assuming you are not doing a character by character brute force. Just a word not being in your dictionary or unexpected delimiters will cause you to never find the answer. If the person uses dashes as delimiters, and you never try dashes you will NEVER find the answer even if you take infinite time. Even if your generator comes up with the same words but with spaces between them instead of dashes.
In the same way if you make too many assumptions about the structure of the passphrases and you get them wrong, you may never get the answer either. e.g. verb or noun not in the place you expect. Because the exact correct string will never be generated by your scheme.
Therefore if you target "this chicken tastes like shit" style passphrases, it may prevent you from finding even slightly different types of passphrases. Yeah you can target all sorts of styles if you want, but you better have good statistics on which styles really are common, otherwise it won't work and you are better off doing the brute force any word by any word approach.
[1] Strictly speaking if hashing is used you just need something that results in the same hash, but let's ignore that for now OK?
If your IPO goes down, yes that's the sign of an overpriced IPO (if it doesn't move far from it, it's near the right price).
But if you managed to sell your car at a high price and buyers were not tricked or forced into buying it, I doubt you should feel unhappy or guilty. So were the buyers tricked? I don't think most were, they were speculators taking a bet. Maybe you should feel some shame if the price dropped to half or similar... But other than that, enjoy the profits from your sale...
BUT how would the attacker know that? Show me your attack plan. If the phrase is in your phrase dictionary that's great... FWIW google turns up 294 results for "this chicken tastes like shit" that's not what I call a popular phrase.
So it's not that simple from the attacker's point of view once the target is using words and the attacker is trying to make cleverer attacks. Make the wrong assumptions and you may _never_ get the answer. Even not using spaces as the delimiter between words can screw attackers up a lot. Or using semi random delimiters... Or not spelling chicken the way it's spelled in the attacker's dictionary!
For 8 character passwords barring UTF-8 craziness brute force is plain brute force, where in theory given enough computers and time you WILL eventually get the answer. But for the passphrases and dictionary approach you're picking possible paths to brute force. If you pick the wrong paths to try, you will NEVER get the answer even if you take infinite time. To eventually get the answer given infinite time you'd actually have to treat it as a character based password and brute force it character by character.
A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.
Car analogy: If your IPO shoots up a lot, it's like you PAYING someone to list your car for sale at a good price, but instead they under-price it, their close friends buy it and immediately sell it for twice the price.
If the database is compromised it usually means the site is compromised, which means 1) your data in the site/database is already compromised. 2) your passphrases with that site could be compromised no matter how long they are.
What you really should do is use different passwords for different sites or different security levels.
FWIW even a 6 character password is good enough if a crappy site that you don't care much about is more likely to be pwned by some PHP/.Net exploit before the hackers or whoever guess/brute force your password via the login form.
In the case of an IPO it's even worse, you pay lots of money to someone for their supposed expertise in selling the car at a good price for you. They list it at a low price, their friends buy it and resell it for twice the price.
I'm no expert but if the shares don't go up much doesn't that mean they were valued correctly from FB's point of view? Whereas if they were valued low and shot up, FB doesn't benefit as much. It just benefits those who bought/got the stock at the start.
A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.
Can't they pick a different label according to the user or user's IP address? Just like the language or guessed country settings? And if the users log in they can have the entire world labelled the way they want (and perhaps provide more nutjob candidates for the FBI to trick into "terrorist" plots).
Meh, from what I see if you're one of the favoured companies when you screw up big time they'd roll back the trades for you. I bet even someone like me can make a lot of money if my trades got rolled back whenever I screwed up big. And if you screwed up really big you get a bailout and keep your bonus.
Why should they get prosecuted? Why should the algo users keep the money if it wins when they also get to keep the money when it loses? Sounds stupid and unfair to me.
Well MySQL is crap. No surprise SQL Server looks great compared to MySQL.
It's a got a nice feature set on paper which impresses the bosses, but you can't use all of them at the same time. You want X that means you need backend P, which means you can't have Y which needs backend Q. You can run both backends, but then stuff using the backend that doesn't support transactions isn't rolled back...
I've used both PostgreSQL and SQL Server, and I prefer PostgreSQL. What do you really like about SQL server?
I have to use SQL server at work and I personally find transact sql really ugly. There are also other annoyances - but I think I've repressed them for now - I could probably dig them up;).
Overall the engine and backend is not too bad. But it was quite an eye-opener to find out deadlocking can be very common (unless you switch to MVCC ala "snapshot isolation" - which somehow was slower for our app). And also there was a weirdness where a query could take 1 millisecond or 100+ depending on the value of the parameter you used the first time you ran it after a reindex! e.g. reindex, run the query with param=A, run same query with param B. second query takes 1 millisecond. Reindex, run query with param=C, run same query with param B, second query takes more than 100 milliseconds... Same query for all parameters.
Slashdot Mirror
What luck? A decent test will take a lot of luck out of it. You're going to have to have miraculous luck to be able to text random words read to you without spelling mistakes, text answers to questions while driving in a driving simulator AND still not hit some virtual toddler who dashes in front of your car in such a way that you have only 400 milliseconds press the brake pedal (many normal people's "higher level" visual reaction times are even crappier than that[1], but this is not a test for normals). Or avoid some virtual vehicle doing something crazy. Or realize that an ambulance is legally running the red light (even if you have green, if you hear a siren you should slow down at the lights).
;). I wonder if anyone would watch a TV show of top candidates attempting something similar. If anyone succeeds just make the test harder the next season...
If it's impossible, then nobody will pass the test, and you don't have to worry about it. But if it's not impossible, I will be very happy to share the road with whoever that has enough skill to pass such a difficult test. Three rounds of "Driving through Crazy City" for 30 minutes while texting and on the mobile phone - they have to reach their destination within the time limit too. Basically a very good driver drives a few times through the X different routes and hazards minus the texting, and you take the times from there. If they are as good as that driver while texting, they are good enough for me.
Maybe some crazy Japanese guy[2] will train enough to pass the test
[1] See: http://cognitivefun.net/stat/17
and: http://cognitivefun.net/stat/17/chart
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwC544Z37qo#t=5m00s
Texting while driving has actually been demonstrated to be worse than drunk driving in some experiments.
I'm sure it is worse in most cases - unless you are very drunk...
Texting requires a higher level of multitasking and most drivers have not been trained to text while driving, nor do they practice (under controlled circumstances!) doing it till they are very good at it. BUT I believe a small percentage of people (not all) can learn to text while driving safely.
So perhaps they should: ;) ).
1) Try to train all learner drivers to text and talk while driving, and have them fail under controlled circumstances. Whether they get good enough or not they will be more aware of how dangerous and difficult it is (especially after killing many dozens in driving simulators).
2) Then have two different driving exams and licenses - if you want the license to text and drive you have to pay more, and you have to pass a very difficult exam (paying for each try!) involving texting while driving (pass = zero spelling mistakes, zero driving mistakes, and not take too long for both driving and texting) and similar difficult stuff. If you pass, you get a different driving license and get to put a special sticker on your car (like the "handicapped" sticker except we're handicapped compared to you
With that license if you do crash while texting, and it's your fault, you still get the same penalty as everyone else. But the cops can't book you if you do not crash or break any other laws while texting or being on the phone. They can pull you over if you do not have that sticker on- just show them your license. So drive safely and you'll be fine.
People might say it's elitist, but if you are good enough to pass such a test, the rest of the drivers on the road (including me) will be a greater danger to you than you to us!. I would be very happy if more drivers on the road could drive that well. In contrast I see many drivers who can't even stick to their lane when they're not even on the phone or doing anything else but driving.
p.s. some jealous people would probably key your car if you display the sticker...
I find the other way round better. "Server" Linux in a VM and Windows as desktop and host. That way you can run all the Windows games/desktop stuff. I've NEVER had malware problems on my personal Windows machines[1].
IMO Desktop Linux is still crappier than Windows XP/7. "Server Linux" on the other hand is pretty good. Most of the good Linux stuff is server and not desktop. I have to say K3B is pretty darn good. Maybe someone can provide a longer list of Desktop Linux only apps that are better than Windows alternatives.
[1] But I'm the sort of person who uses noscript and runs different firefox profiles using different user accounts (using runas). That way even if the browser is pwned, the malware needs to do privilege escalation from a restricted user account to get more than what that particular browser instance can do. Most malware is not designed for that.
Those cheap data-entry/etc workers can't be doing what most people can't, otherwise they would be paid more. So given a not too stupid interface most people can learn to do stuff faster. There just is a big disconnect between being able to do it, and doing it.
Command lines generally aren't noob friendly. GUIs used to be more noob friendly.
In my opinion the GUIs should still cater for the "noobs", so that people with little experience can mess about with what is visible and still discover stuff. But apparently Microsoft and GNOME have broken that by hidden away a lot of stuff. Perhaps they figure that it's just faster for people to be trained than for them to discover.
The shortcuts on the other hand can be learned over time or via training. I still want those shortcuts though.
That may be the classic example, but FWIW, I hardly ever have a good reason to minimize windows. And why should you or I need to? I click on the exact task button I want to switch to the window I want to use, the GUI raises the window I need to see, and the other window is automatically "underneath" and not in the way. Even when I have 30+ taskbar buttons (double height taskbar), I know where most of my "windows" are. If you don't waste time always closing applications completely and relaunching them (for no good reason other than "neatness"), the windows and buttons stay where they are and you should be able to remember where they are. Much more efficient, until you run low on memory! (but that's more a deficiency in the hardware/software if it can't maintain all the tasks you do better than you can "hold their buttons" in your head- that's human augmentation - you do the light stuff the computer does the heavy stuff).
:).
If minimizing is to view _stuff_ on the desktop, on my home Windows XP machine I have it set up so that pressing: winkey, 1, 1 will have the explorer explore the Desktop. For some reason when I just did that it took longer for Windows XP to display my desktop than it took for me to press that key sequence! The second time was much faster (cached?). One day I will get that SSD drive and then it might be different
If it's to view the actual desktop there's winkey+D (I hardly ever use that though).
As for offloaded to the GPU, if you can't see everything under the animated minimizing window till it's near completely done, you can't really start doing much till that happens.
I'm not the OP, but I can give you plenty of examples of why GUIs are superior to CLIs.
1) A GUI can have a CLI, so it can do all the things a CLI can AND more. If it doesn't it is due to crappy GUI designers.
2) Try playing Counterstrike or Starcraft using a CLI - in theory it is possible, but a GUI would still be superior for many things (see 1) also ).
The real problem is most of the current batch of GUI designers suck (or their bosses do). There is no reason why doing things with a GUI should be slower and harder than on a CLI, in fact it can and should be faster (and as game GUIs show, it is possible).
Just look at the top (and even mid-level) gamers using their GUIs - they can sustain very many actions per second. Look at an experienced skilled point-of-sale or "dumb terminal" data-entry worker - they are pretty fast too. They are examples that "normal" people can learn to be skilled and very productive.
But instead a lot of modern GUIs have fancy animations or steps that increase latency- they force you to take more time to do stuff than actually necessary. In many competitive games, if a weapon/skill has a long fancy animation between the time you press a button till it actually fires/activates, that's considered a disadvantage not an advantage! But for some stupid reason in "modern" GUIs such fancy animations are considered a good thing, "make things more like the real world" etc.
If there's going to be any time wasting it should be by the human NOT the computer/UI. The GUI should be efficient so that I have more time to waste on Slashdot or whatever I choose. If your modern GUI is slower at managing tasks than "GNU screen" then it is crap.
A mediocre programmer can make an operating system that can handle 3 tasks well. It's the good ones that make operating systems that can handle 1000 tasks well - max throughput, decent latency.
Similarly any mediocre GUI designer can make a GUI that allows a normal human to manage 1 or 2 tasks well. A good GUI should allow normal humans to do way more than that (if they choose to do so).
FWIW Toyota and Honda have cars that are 80% made in USA by content (including the parts). At one point they might even have been the most American cars ;).
http://www.cars.com/go/advice/Story.jsp?section=top&subject=ami&story=amMade0611
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/american-cars/story?id=13801165
The entire string has to be an EXACT IDENTICAL MATCH for success[1]. Not just look similar.
Example of how you might not get the answer even given infinite time, assuming you are not doing a character by character brute force. Just a word not being in your dictionary or unexpected delimiters will cause you to never find the answer. If the person uses dashes as delimiters, and you never try dashes you will NEVER find the answer even if you take infinite time. Even if your generator comes up with the same words but with spaces between them instead of dashes.
In the same way if you make too many assumptions about the structure of the passphrases and you get them wrong, you may never get the answer either. e.g. verb or noun not in the place you expect. Because the exact correct string will never be generated by your scheme.
Therefore if you target "this chicken tastes like shit" style passphrases, it may prevent you from finding even slightly different types of passphrases. Yeah you can target all sorts of styles if you want, but you better have good statistics on which styles really are common, otherwise it won't work and you are better off doing the brute force any word by any word approach.
[1] Strictly speaking if hashing is used you just need something that results in the same hash, but let's ignore that for now OK?
That approach would not find "this chicken tastes like shit" even given infinite time.
If your IPO goes down, yes that's the sign of an overpriced IPO (if it doesn't move far from it, it's near the right price).
But if you managed to sell your car at a high price and buyers were not tricked or forced into buying it, I doubt you should feel unhappy or guilty. So were the buyers tricked? I don't think most were, they were speculators taking a bet. Maybe you should feel some shame if the price dropped to half or similar... But other than that, enjoy the profits from your sale...
Vaguely related spoof of the day: http://www.borowitzreport.com/2012/05/17/a-letter-from-mark-zuckerberg/
BUT how would the attacker know that? Show me your attack plan. If the phrase is in your phrase dictionary that's great... FWIW google turns up 294 results for "this chicken tastes like shit" that's not what I call a popular phrase.
So it's not that simple from the attacker's point of view once the target is using words and the attacker is trying to make cleverer attacks. Make the wrong assumptions and you may _never_ get the answer. Even not using spaces as the delimiter between words can screw attackers up a lot. Or using semi random delimiters... Or not spelling chicken the way it's spelled in the attacker's dictionary!
For 8 character passwords barring UTF-8 craziness brute force is plain brute force, where in theory given enough computers and time you WILL eventually get the answer. But for the passphrases and dictionary approach you're picking possible paths to brute force. If you pick the wrong paths to try, you will NEVER get the answer even if you take infinite time. To eventually get the answer given infinite time you'd actually have to treat it as a character based password and brute force it character by character.
Funny thing is: Facebook stock today closed at barely over its opening price. Why?
Because FB didn't get conned?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/opinion/21nocera.html
A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.
Car analogy: If your IPO shoots up a lot, it's like you PAYING someone to list your car for sale at a good price, but instead they under-price it, their close friends buy it and immediately sell it for twice the price.
I disagree. XKCD says 44 bits of entropy. Which is:
2^44 = 1.7592186 Ã-- 10^13
Which to me means a 2000 word dictionary is assumed, and it's: 2000 * 2000 * 2000 * 2000
2000^4 = 1.6 Ã-- 10^13
Which is a more reasonable way of attacking - since the attacker would be selecting words from a dictionary.
If the database is compromised it usually means the site is compromised, which means
1) your data in the site/database is already compromised.
2) your passphrases with that site could be compromised no matter how long they are.
What you really should do is use different passwords for different sites or different security levels.
FWIW even a 6 character password is good enough if a crappy site that you don't care much about is more likely to be pwned by some PHP/.Net exploit before the hackers or whoever guess/brute force your password via the login form.
In the case of an IPO it's even worse, you pay lots of money to someone for their supposed expertise in selling the car at a good price for you. They list it at a low price, their friends buy it and resell it for twice the price.
I'm no expert but if the shares don't go up much doesn't that mean they were valued correctly from FB's point of view? Whereas if they were valued low and shot up, FB doesn't benefit as much. It just benefits those who bought/got the stock at the start.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/21/opinion/21nocera.html
A huge opening-day pop is not a sign of a successful I.P.O., but rather a massively mispriced one. Bankers are rewarding their friends and themselves instead of doing their fiduciary duty to their clients.
The Benz version doesn't sound too bad: http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/mercedes-benz-diesotto-engine
But that was 5 years ago so is it vapour-ware?
You might like reading some of the ones for a related product:
http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/dp/B000I1X6PM
Can't they pick a different label according to the user or user's IP address? Just like the language or guessed country settings? And if the users log in they can have the entire world labelled the way they want (and perhaps provide more nutjob candidates for the FBI to trick into "terrorist" plots).
You might actually do better on Windows Phone 7 than Android if Microsoft is throwing $$$$$ at you to write apps for their struggling platform.
http://techland.time.com/2012/04/06/microsoft-wants-developers-to-create-windows-phones-apps-so-bad-its-paying-them/
Oh I think I didn't get your post. Now I get it... Doh.
;).
Maybe Google doesn't like Apple for some reason
Huh? I think you don't get it. Google's DNS servers are on 8.8.8.8 (and 8.8.4.4).
What the OP is saying is 8.8.8.8 will generally be close to you. So if you use 8.8.8.8 you will get DNS responses fast (if they are cached already).
So for your post to be relevant you should be doing a tracert (or traceroute if on Linux) to 8.8.8.8 not 203.106.85.64.
Meh, from what I see if you're one of the favoured companies when you screw up big time they'd roll back the trades for you. I bet even someone like me can make a lot of money if my trades got rolled back whenever I screwed up big. And if you screwed up really big you get a bailout and keep your bonus.
There was also that infamous case when humans outsmarted the algo but they got prosecuted, convicted and lost their profits: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9d1a74a-d6f3-11df-aaab-00144feabdc0.html
Why should they get prosecuted? Why should the algo users keep the money if it wins when they also get to keep the money when it loses? Sounds stupid and unfair to me.
Well MySQL is crap. No surprise SQL Server looks great compared to MySQL.
It's a got a nice feature set on paper which impresses the bosses, but you can't use all of them at the same time. You want X that means you need backend P, which means you can't have Y which needs backend Q. You can run both backends, but then stuff using the backend that doesn't support transactions isn't rolled back...
And it's not reassuring when they can allow bugs like these out the door:
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=31001
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=32202
Note the similarity between #31001 and #32202 AND that the #31001 bug reappeared a year later!
MySQL is the PHP of databases. Both products seem to be produced by developers who are working on something that is beyond their expertise.
But yeah SQL Management Studio is nice. FWIW psql is decent for a cli, though of course it's not as sophisticated.
I've used both PostgreSQL and SQL Server, and I prefer PostgreSQL. What do you really like about SQL server?
;).
I have to use SQL server at work and I personally find transact sql really ugly. There are also other annoyances - but I think I've repressed them for now - I could probably dig them up
Overall the engine and backend is not too bad. But it was quite an eye-opener to find out deadlocking can be very common (unless you switch to MVCC ala "snapshot isolation" - which somehow was slower for our app). And also there was a weirdness where a query could take 1 millisecond or 100+ depending on the value of the parameter you used the first time you ran it after a reindex! e.g. reindex, run the query with param=A, run same query with param B. second query takes 1 millisecond. Reindex, run query with param=C, run same query with param B, second query takes more than 100 milliseconds... Same query for all parameters.