Unless your 200 years old, there's lots of it you didn't pay for either.
If you travel to a different city or state, and use facilities paid for by that city/state, do you feel guilty? They're happy to have you, spending money at local businesses.
That's where my spare time has been going. I can replace a toilet, do basic wiring and plumbing, tile, and I'm slowly picking up woodworking (so I can make our own furniture, rather than setting for pressboard specials from Ikea or spending huge dollars on the high quality stuff).
While I think it's a good thing to get into home improvement and general handy-work, be careful. You have to do some research and study before you get started. For example, not many people know that vermiculite insulation (looks like shiny styrofoam, and is suspected to be in millions of houses) in homes installed between 1920 and 1990 may have a nasty form of asbestos. Don't go up to the attic and start shifting the stuff around to put in new electrical circuts, etc.
The last 4 days, while my wife and daughter were out of town, I started removing the stuff from the attic. Wearing a respirator, rubber boots, and disposable coveralls, running a big hepa air purifier, gently removing this stuff after misting it down has to have been one of the most miserable experiences of my life. I highly recommend paying the professionals to do it if you can afford the $6000-$8000 to have it done.
This same friend worked at Radical Entertainment, also in Vancouver. Twice, actually.
The first time, they fired a bunch of people after they had problems with their publisher (ESPN/Disney, I believe).
The second time, they started firing people again, as they didn't have alot of projects on the go (this was just after Simpson's Road Rage was published). A bunch of people jumped ship to head to other companies. Radical management was pissed off, but I can't imagine why; create fear, and the best people jump ship.
Re:I am a game prrogrammer. My thoughts on EA
on
EA Games: The Human Story
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I have a friend who works for EA here in Vancouver. He was in "crunch mode" for about two weeks, then they hit alpha, and he went back to his regular schedule.
I have it, and have tried it out. Ran into an apparent bug with creating tablespaces. But I am going to try the newer beta.
As for data integrity, we use InnoDB for our busy website. It has lots of foreign keys, and transactions wrap every block of DML. ACID transactions all the way. That MySQL sometimes changes your data quietly to make it fit into a column, well, there's a workaround for that. It sucks, but it's livable. At the time we migrated, Postgres did not have the features we needed, and we could do away with triggers, stored procedures, views, subqueries, etc.
I have played with Beta 8, and the optimizer is much improved, and I am aware of Slony-I. And I did mention that a Windows port is in the works (it is in Beta 8, and I have it installed on my work machine)
I wouldn't put it in production just yet, however. Beta is not production-ready. I wouldn't put MySQL 4.1.7 (production) in production either. I am going to let it settle down for a few months.
I am pushing to replace a commercial database with Postgres - I really admire the technology, and all the features that Postgres has and MySQL doesn't. But I wouldn't risk it just yet - need to wait till 8.0 solidifies a bit.
1) Yes. Very bad. The developers believe the application should check all data before sending it to the database. I've posted my displeasure with this on the MySQL mailing lists, and have been told politely to "live with it".
2) Wasn't aware that it did. Most table types are now in the basic download.
3) Not sure
You could ask similar questions of Oracle (or any other DBMS), like,
Does Oracle still require a 1.2+ gigabyte footprint? Yup, getting bigger all the time.
Is Oracle still more complex to set up than any Linux distribution? Yah. And try Real Application Clusters (RAC).
Does Oracle still require you to spend $600 on books to get the important information about what's going on under the hood? Yes. I bought a 1000-page monster the other day, and the list price was $100 CDN. The DBA handbook, written by the same guy, is also 1000 pages, and will cost about the same (not out for another month).
Does Oracle still charge $40,000 per CPU for a perpetual Enterprise License?
Is Oracle still slow and bloated compared to MySQL? Yes. All those extra, needless features that 1-in-50 databases add bloat and slowness.
For Postgres,
Does Postgres still make really bad optimizer choices if the data-types being compared aren't identical? Last I checked.
Does Postgres have a decent replication engine, or standby database option? Yah, if you want to spend almost as much on support as you would on an Oracle Enterprise license for 1 CPU. There are others, but I'm not sure I would throw them into a production environment. Oracle Standby and MySQL replication have both been flawless for us.
Does Postgres have a native Windows port yet? Not yet, but I hear it's coming.
Does Postgres still have a mailing list full of the most informed, polite people you could ever hope to answer your questions? Yup.
No database is perfect. MySQL is a small, fast database and we are running our 2-million hit per day website off of it, and it's been flawless and significantly faster than Oracle was way back on 8i. We code around the strangeness.
I looked at my favorite computer store and found that the cheapest processor was an AMD Duron 1.6ghz, at $76 CDN or $60 US, and it wasn't even in stock. VIA makes a really cheap CPU, I believe, which might be usable.
Motherboard will cost at least the same, as will RAM. Don't forget the HD, and CD ROM.
Assume the graphics card, ethernet and sound are on the motherboard.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but manufacturers are going for faster-better, and so are consumers. The really cheap, low-powered no-frills stuff is for special applications, and generally difficult to find even for people who are capable of assembling such stuff.
I do believe, however, that a manufacturer with deep pockets who can get a significant discount from OEMs based on volume could pull it off.
And this is probably why Japan has the cool toys - they fanatically upgrade. A friend that worked there said there were certain days where all the working but marginally obsolete toys were put out on the sidewalk for garbage pickup.
If you have consumers that want the newest, greatest thing, then new products aren't as risky.
If you have consumers that will hold onto something for 10 years, then you won't sell as many new fangled gadgets.
I play Yahoo Towers, and once in a while you would come across some guy that played super fast, making perfect Yahoos, etc. Obviously a bot. Yah, there's cheating at Yahoo.
No, steal all you are going to before you give notice. Or at least stop pilfering two days before your last day.
You don't want someone saying, as you walk out the door for the last time, "Hey, where's my laptop?" You'll be watched closely as your departure date draws near.
To paraphrase some of the comments by developers etc on the Postgres mailing list, if this database had any commercial value left to the company, they'd still be holding onto it.
By releasing it, they've shown how valueless it really is. To quote Tom Lane (whole post here)
"If they thought they could still make a dime off it, they'd have kept it. Since they don't think they can, what is a rational assumption about the value of the code to the rest of us?"
I suspect they are hoping some free development will make it relevant once again, and possibly boost consulting services, and the sale of other products that rely on it.
This guy is all about TV. High definition. Content delivered on hard drives. 100-megabit internet connections at home. Nothing he said was that radical, or that interesting.
People listen to him because he got rich selling his company to Yahoo during the.com boom.
He got rich, and now people think he has some sort of unique insight. I think he just got lucky with the timing.
Re:Hard and tedious are different things
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Actually, it's problems solved in polynomial time vs non-deterministic polynomial time. Your two examples are both problems that can be solved in polynomial time.
It's not simple math. IE find two prime factors to a very very large number. Guesses are made to find the factors. But even though guesses are polynomial in amongst themselves, the number of guesses you need to make before you hit on a solution is non-deterministic. Thus it's NP (non-deterministic polynomial time).
Yah, and Intel is doing dual core on the Itanium. I don't know many people that shell out for such an exotic CPU at home; I do know people that bought an Opteron for home, however.
In essence, it sounds like the AMD dual core technology will be introduced so that it is available for consumers (at the high end), where Intel will introduce theirs for corporations looking to buy servers.
" Spoken from the mouth of someone who doesnt have a clue.."
Bet your a popular guy at work.
It's harder to add them because,
1) Commercial databases are still far more feature rich than open source. Oracle still owns the database space. Thus, adding more databases means big licencing fees. Apache is still free, as is Tomcat.
2) It's more complex to set up replication (which is what you need when adding a new database). than it is to add another web or application server. Single or multi-master? If single-master, then what if the master dies? Multi-master, then how do you deal with conflicts.
"Ever seen a database having rows locked by 100 different web servers becouse they DIDN'T use any form of stored procedures?"
No, because I think it's stupid to give web servers access to the database. And it's a huge security hole. Rewrite the URL and an harmless select becomse a "drop table". Web servers access an API on the middle tier, where business logic resides.
In addition, stored procedures can lock rows as well. Locked rows are locked rows, regardless of who does it.
Ever seen a stored procedure fail silently after a table change? Ever tried to debug a stored procedure? Show me a good code editor for a stored procedure language, and I'll show you 10 for any "application" language.
We looked at them. Either way too expensive, or they had weird "features" that killed performance (thinking specifically of Matisse, that locked all indexes on a table on insert/update/delete).
Hibernate is the way to go to avoid the impedance between OO and RDBMS.
It's also been argued that there is no such thing as a relational database; a SQL database is a SQL database, not a relational database (ie no SQL database implements domains). Fabian Pascal has belaboured the point in several books, and I tend to agree.
It would be better if that logic was stored in stateless Session EJBs; one place for all that logic that can be accessed from anywhere.
Throw in Hibernate to get rid of the SQL-specifics of the database and reduce the OO-RDBMS nightmare.
I actually do more Java coding than database management (I've set it up so it's pretty much self managing); I wouldn't let it get all over the place, because I would be the person writing the session beans.
Actually, I'm a DBA who is responsible for about 20,000 lines of stored procedure code that I did not originally write, and I still think they are a bad idea.
Data constraints in the database, and appliation logic in the application.
Stored Procedures are hidden logic, and they're difficult to write, debug and maintain. In some databases, they are nearly impossible to debug without the equivilent of printf statements.
You also place more burden on the database, and lose the ability to scale horizontally. It's easier to add more web/app servers to you site than it is to add more databases.
Not sure I agree with the point about them being tied to a specific database; I don't think it's practical to write vendor-neutral SQL, so you will always have functions like TO_DATE vs DATE_FORMAT to worry about.
Use foriegn keys, check constraints and strongly typed columns to preserve your data. Keep the application logic outside your database.
A coffee shop in Victoria, BC, called McBeans was sued by McDonalds for trademark infringement. Apparently anything starting with a "Mc" is fair game especially if McDonalds is thinking about using the name for one of it's products
Slashdot Mirror
Unless your 200 years old, there's lots of it you didn't pay for either.
If you travel to a different city or state, and use facilities paid for by that city/state, do you feel guilty? They're happy to have you, spending money at local businesses.
That's where my spare time has been going. I can replace a toilet, do basic wiring and plumbing, tile, and I'm slowly picking up woodworking (so I can make our own furniture, rather than setting for pressboard specials from Ikea or spending huge dollars on the high quality stuff).
While I think it's a good thing to get into home improvement and general handy-work, be careful. You have to do some research and study before you get started. For example, not many people know that vermiculite insulation (looks like shiny styrofoam, and is suspected to be in millions of houses) in homes installed between 1920 and 1990 may have a nasty form of asbestos. Don't go up to the attic and start shifting the stuff around to put in new electrical circuts, etc.
The last 4 days, while my wife and daughter were out of town, I started removing the stuff from the attic. Wearing a respirator, rubber boots, and disposable coveralls, running a big hepa air purifier, gently removing this stuff after misting it down has to have been one of the most miserable experiences of my life. I highly recommend paying the professionals to do it if you can afford the $6000-$8000 to have it done.
"My code at 48 hours is still as good as code I've done when I just begin."
Are you bragging about the code you write at 48 hours, or disparaging the code you write when you begin?
True - every EA shop is different as well.
This same friend worked at Radical Entertainment, also in Vancouver. Twice, actually.
The first time, they fired a bunch of people after they had problems with their publisher (ESPN/Disney, I believe).
The second time, they started firing people again, as they didn't have alot of projects on the go (this was just after Simpson's Road Rage was published). A bunch of people jumped ship to head to other companies. Radical management was pissed off, but I can't imagine why; create fear, and the best people jump ship.
I have a friend who works for EA here in Vancouver. He was in "crunch mode" for about two weeks, then they hit alpha, and he went back to his regular schedule.
This is in Canada, tho, and there are specific rules for high-tech industry and it does not exclude overtime.
I have it, and have tried it out. Ran into an apparent bug with creating tablespaces. But I am going to try the newer beta.
As for data integrity, we use InnoDB for our busy website. It has lots of foreign keys, and transactions wrap every block of DML. ACID transactions all the way. That MySQL sometimes changes your data quietly to make it fit into a column, well, there's a workaround for that. It sucks, but it's livable. At the time we migrated, Postgres did not have the features we needed, and we could do away with triggers, stored procedures, views, subqueries, etc.
I have played with Beta 8, and the optimizer is much improved, and I am aware of Slony-I. And I did mention that a Windows port is in the works (it is in Beta 8, and I have it installed on my work machine)
I wouldn't put it in production just yet, however. Beta is not production-ready. I wouldn't put MySQL 4.1.7 (production) in production either. I am going to let it settle down for a few months.
I am pushing to replace a commercial database with Postgres - I really admire the technology, and all the features that Postgres has and MySQL doesn't. But I wouldn't risk it just yet - need to wait till 8.0 solidifies a bit.
1) Yes. Very bad. The developers believe the application should check all data before sending it to the database. I've posted my displeasure with this on the MySQL mailing lists, and have been told politely to "live with it".
2) Wasn't aware that it did. Most table types are now in the basic download.
3) Not sure
You could ask similar questions of Oracle (or any other DBMS), like,
Does Oracle still require a 1.2+ gigabyte footprint? Yup, getting bigger all the time.
Is Oracle still more complex to set up than any Linux distribution? Yah. And try Real Application Clusters (RAC).
Does Oracle still require you to spend $600 on books to get the important information about what's going on under the hood? Yes. I bought a 1000-page monster the other day, and the list price was $100 CDN. The DBA handbook, written by the same guy, is also 1000 pages, and will cost about the same (not out for another month).
Does Oracle still charge $40,000 per CPU for a perpetual Enterprise License?
Is Oracle still slow and bloated compared to MySQL? Yes. All those extra, needless features that 1-in-50 databases add bloat and slowness.
For Postgres,
Does Postgres still make really bad optimizer choices if the data-types being compared aren't identical? Last I checked.
Does Postgres have a decent replication engine, or standby database option? Yah, if you want to spend almost as much on support as you would on an Oracle Enterprise license for 1 CPU. There are others, but I'm not sure I would throw them into a production environment. Oracle Standby and MySQL replication have both been flawless for us.
Does Postgres have a native Windows port yet? Not yet, but I hear it's coming.
Does Postgres still have a mailing list full of the most informed, polite people you could ever hope to answer your questions? Yup.
No database is perfect. MySQL is a small, fast database and we are running our 2-million hit per day website off of it, and it's been flawless and significantly faster than Oracle was way back on 8i. We code around the strangeness.
I looked at my favorite computer store and found that the cheapest processor was an AMD Duron 1.6ghz, at $76 CDN or $60 US, and it wasn't even in stock. VIA makes a really cheap CPU, I believe, which might be usable.
Motherboard will cost at least the same, as will RAM. Don't forget the HD, and CD ROM.
Assume the graphics card, ethernet and sound are on the motherboard.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but manufacturers are going for faster-better, and so are consumers. The really cheap, low-powered no-frills stuff is for special applications, and generally difficult to find even for people who are capable of assembling such stuff.
I do believe, however, that a manufacturer with deep pockets who can get a significant discount from OEMs based on volume could pull it off.
And this is probably why Japan has the cool toys - they fanatically upgrade. A friend that worked there said there were certain days where all the working but marginally obsolete toys were put out on the sidewalk for garbage pickup.
If you have consumers that want the newest, greatest thing, then new products aren't as risky.
If you have consumers that will hold onto something for 10 years, then you won't sell as many new fangled gadgets.
I play Yahoo Towers, and once in a while you would come across some guy that played super fast, making perfect Yahoos, etc. Obviously a bot. Yah, there's cheating at Yahoo.
Do I really care? No, I go play someone else.
No, steal all you are going to before you give notice. Or at least stop pilfering two days before your last day.
You don't want someone saying, as you walk out the door for the last time, "Hey, where's my laptop?" You'll be watched closely as your departure date draws near.
To paraphrase some of the comments by developers etc on the Postgres mailing list, if this database had any commercial value left to the company, they'd still be holding onto it.
By releasing it, they've shown how valueless it really is. To quote Tom Lane (whole post here)
"If they thought they could still make a dime off it, they'd have kept it. Since they don't think they can, what is a rational assumption about the value of the code to the rest of us?"
I suspect they are hoping some free development will make it relevant once again, and possibly boost consulting services, and the sale of other products that rely on it.
This guy is all about TV. High definition. Content delivered on hard drives. 100-megabit internet connections at home. Nothing he said was that radical, or that interesting.
.com boom.
People listen to him because he got rich selling his company to Yahoo during the
He got rich, and now people think he has some sort of unique insight. I think he just got lucky with the timing.
Actually, it's problems solved in polynomial time vs non-deterministic polynomial time. Your two examples are both problems that can be solved in polynomial time.
It's not simple math. IE find two prime factors to a very very large number. Guesses are made to find the factors. But even though guesses are polynomial in amongst themselves, the number of guesses you need to make before you hit on a solution is non-deterministic. Thus it's NP (non-deterministic polynomial time).
"Here is a really cool security book that made me lose half a night's sleep when I first got it."
What? Full of pictures of naked women? Men?
Yah, and Intel is doing dual core on the Itanium. I don't know many people that shell out for such an exotic CPU at home; I do know people that bought an Opteron for home, however.
In essence, it sounds like the AMD dual core technology will be introduced so that it is available for consumers (at the high end), where Intel will introduce theirs for corporations looking to buy servers.
is my Etch A Sketch. I mean, I never have to plug that damned thing in.
I think it runs Linux (rock solid, but the UI is pretty sketchy, pardon the pun). Not sure if it's Gnome or KDE, tho.
" Spoken from the mouth of someone who doesnt have a clue.."
Bet your a popular guy at work.
It's harder to add them because,
1) Commercial databases are still far more feature rich than open source. Oracle still owns the database space. Thus, adding more databases means big licencing fees. Apache is still free, as is Tomcat.
2) It's more complex to set up replication (which is what you need when adding a new database). than it is to add another web or application server. Single or multi-master? If single-master, then what if the master dies? Multi-master, then how do you deal with conflicts.
"Ever seen a database having rows locked by 100 different web servers becouse they DIDN'T use any form of stored procedures?"
No, because I think it's stupid to give web servers access to the database. And it's a huge security hole. Rewrite the URL and an harmless select becomse a "drop table". Web servers access an API on the middle tier, where business logic resides.
In addition, stored procedures can lock rows as well. Locked rows are locked rows, regardless of who does it.
Ever seen a stored procedure fail silently after a table change? Ever tried to debug a stored procedure? Show me a good code editor for a stored procedure language, and I'll show you 10 for any "application" language.
We looked at them. Either way too expensive, or they had weird "features" that killed performance (thinking specifically of Matisse, that locked all indexes on a table on insert/update/delete).
Hibernate is the way to go to avoid the impedance between OO and RDBMS.
It's also been argued that there is no such thing as a relational database; a SQL database is a SQL database, not a relational database (ie no SQL database implements domains). Fabian Pascal has belaboured the point in several books, and I tend to agree.
It would be better if that logic was stored in stateless Session EJBs; one place for all that logic that can be accessed from anywhere.
Throw in Hibernate to get rid of the SQL-specifics of the database and reduce the OO-RDBMS nightmare.
I actually do more Java coding than database management (I've set it up so it's pretty much self managing); I wouldn't let it get all over the place, because I would be the person writing the session beans.
Actually, I'm a DBA who is responsible for about 20,000 lines of stored procedure code that I did not originally write, and I still think they are a bad idea.
Data constraints in the database, and appliation logic in the application.
Stored Procedures are hidden logic, and they're difficult to write, debug and maintain. In some databases, they are nearly impossible to debug without the equivilent of printf statements.
You also place more burden on the database, and lose the ability to scale horizontally. It's easier to add more web/app servers to you site than it is to add more databases.
Not sure I agree with the point about them being tied to a specific database; I don't think it's practical to write vendor-neutral SQL, so you will always have functions like TO_DATE vs DATE_FORMAT to worry about.
Use foriegn keys, check constraints and strongly typed columns to preserve your data. Keep the application logic outside your database.
A coffee shop in Victoria, BC, called McBeans was sued by McDonalds for trademark infringement. Apparently anything starting with a "Mc" is fair game especially if McDonalds is thinking about using the name for one of it's products
McDonalds lost, fortunately.
Wow - do you have "Loser" tattooed on your forehead, or do you let your personality announce the fact?
/. why not go outside your double-wide, and get some of those rusted-out cars towed off your front lawn.
Instead of posting on