In greater Vancouver, we have dodgey characters that drive around with hacksaws, decapitating the meters for the change inside. A thousand dollar parking meter gets destroyed for $40 in change.
In Montreal, it will be geeks with hacksaws. Rather than being tossed into a lake, the parking meters will show up in a home-built robot.
Also has punk-busters integrated in it as of the 1.6 patch, so no cheating, and you can kick annoying players. DiCE/EA seem to be interested in patching and adding new maps/content as well.
Won game of the year a year or two ago, and is perfect for that 30-minutes worth of entertainment
"Sure stored procedures can get complicated, then again so can anything if you're fool. Most that I see written today are extremely simple. But anyone who's having nightmares from the complexity of views needs to step away from the keyboard slowly."
We inherited our PL/SQL codebase from a consulting company that wrote it. They take Java objects, pass each member in as a parameter, and then almost each and every method passes back a generic-IO cursor. The dumbest thing I ever saw.
Stored procedures are hidden logic. They are difficult to test. They are difficult to debug. If you change a table that a package relies on, you can invalidate the package, and not find out till exceptions start showing up in your logs.
"Don't take my word for us - read their manual (especially the "design issues" section), then apply all that invaluable Oracle dba experience to a few tests. You might be amazed at how often mysql corrupts your data."
Are you talking about "7.1.1 MySQL Design Limitations/Tradeoffs" or "7.4.1 Design Choices"? Both sections are MyISAM-specific. InnoDB is the only true database engine in the MySQL product. I've been subscribing to the MySQL mailing lists for about 18 months now, and the ten to twenty data-corruption issues I've seen have been with MyISAM (often running 3.23), when the server loses power with MySQL running. InnoDB has binary logs, redo capabilities, and transactions. There have been a few bugs that could potentially cause data-issues under rare circumstances with InnoDB, but we've had issues with Oracle as well (corrupt or invalid indexes, or rows that were no longer accessible).
"You just never realized it before because every time it hits something difficult, complex, confusing, etc it simply takes some weird default action. Isn't quite so bad for read-only applications, but anyone who writes valuable data to mysql without really understanding the product is a fool."
I've loaded one of our databases (about 4 gig) into MySQL (it was about a 2 hour effort to conver the data, and 2 hours to bulk-load it, including the 100 or so indexes and foreign keys). I've run some of the tougher queries that we use against it (10 table joines, 5 of them outer-joins, returning 2 million rows) and it worked fine. I've also loaded the key data from one of our other databases into MySQL, and run our nastiest queries against it, in a threaded environment, where each thread does multiple selects, updates and inserts very large rows with LOBS and the CPU stays pegged at 100% for 20 minutes. It finished in half the time of Oracle, and not a single hiccup.
I've also loaded 40 meg of data via insert statements, including LOB fields, large numbers, and dates. No problems at all.
MySQL and Postgres are both very good database technologies (and I'm an Oracle DBA, managing 3 high-availability Oracle installations).
"MySQL seems to occupy a rather subtle and narrow niche"
The website that you posted this comment to, that offered the review of this book, runs MySQL. You know - the website with it's own effect named after it, the one that handles the load of tens of thousands of geeks while the site they reference in a front-page-story crashes and burns when all/.'s readers go visit it.
Oh yah, Yahoo runs on MySQL. I wouldn't say Yahoo is a small niche; it's a large one, all by itself. With the InnoDB database engine, you have the same row-locking, ACID trasactions that you get with the big databases. Both Slashdot and Yahoo use the InnoDB database engine in MySQL.
You don't have stored procedures, triggers, or views, but as an Oracle DBA who has 12,000 lines of proprietary Oracle-PL/SQL on just one of my three databases, I can say that they cause more problems than they are worth. A nightmare to write, debug, and maintain.
But never the less, views, stored procedures, and all those other features are due out in 4.1 and 5.0.
As for SQL Server, I do know it runs only on Windows (at least Oracle supports Linux, Solaris and Windows as first-tier platforms). MySQL runs well on all the *NIXs, and has had AMD-64 support for several months now via several production-ready versions of 64-bit-Linux. Microsoft has just managed to shlub out some half-assed public beta that won't be ready for general public consumption for 4-8 more months.
Yah, they took liberties with the Ten Commandments, but they didn't change it to The Eleven Commandments, adding "Thou shall wear a bikini on the Sabbath" to get the guys into the theater, and change the Sixth Commandment from "Thou shalt not kill" to "Thou shalt not kill unless you have a really good reason" to allow for bigger fight scenes.
Toronto and Ottawa are nice (and cold in the winter) but the skiing is not good. Halifax and Montreal are interesting. Calgary has a boom going on, and it's cold, and good skiing in the Rockies. Vancouver doesn't get cold in the winter.
I thought about your post a bit, and noticed a couple of issues:
1) Open Source can't replace services that have been moved off-shore. You can't write software to replace a call-center full of people.
2) I suspect that Open Source has played a role in this move-all-jobs-to-India trend. I don't think schools in India are big Microsoft/Solaris users; a high-quality free OS is a much bigger advantage to developers and schools in India than it is to us relatively wealthy people.
but funny. Don't remember where I grabbed this list, but here's 12 Things Not To Say Watching ROTK in the theatre:
1. Stand up halfway through the movie and yell loudly, "Wait...where the hell is Harry Potter?" 2. Block the entrance to the theater while screaming, "YOU.....SHALL....NOT..... PASS!" - After the movie, say "Lucas could have done it better." 3. Play a drinking game where you have to take a sip every time someone says, "the Ring." 4. Point and laugh whenever someone dies. 5. Ask everyone around you if they think Gandalf went to Hogwarts. 6. Finish off every one of Elrond's lines with "Mis..ter Ander-sonnn." 7. When Aragorn is crowned king, stand up and at the top of your lungs sing, "And I did it.... MY way...!" 8. Talk like Gollum all through the movie. At the end, bite off someone's finger and fall down the stairs. 9. Dress up as old ladies and reenact "The Battle of Helms Deep," Monty Python style. 10. When Denethor lights the fire, shout "Barbecue!" 11. In TTT when the Ents decide to march to war, stand up and shout, "RUN FOREST, RUN!" 12. Every time someone kills an Orc, yell: "That's what I'm Tolkien about!" See how long it takes before you get kicked out of the theatre. 13. During a wide shot of a battle, inquire, "Where's Waldo?" 14. Talk loudly about how you heard that there is a single frame of a nude Elf hidden somewhere in the movie. 15. Start an Orc sing-a-long. 16. Come to the premiere dressed as Frankenfurter and wander around looking terribly confused. 17 When they go in the paths of the dead, wait for a tense moment and shout, "I see dead people!" 18. Imitate what you think a conversation between Gollum, Dobby and Yoda would be like. 19. Release a jar of daddy-long-legs into the theater during the Shelob scene. 20. Wonder out loud if Aragorn is going to run for governor of California. 21. When Shelob comes on, exclaim, "Man!Charlotte's really let herself go!"
I agree - great post. If you have the option, you could move to Europe as well - might be a nice change. Don't forget to get involved in municipal, state/provincial and federal/national politics.
You can make life more difficult for corporations by asking tough questions, and making them look stupid and greedy.
ATI All In Wonder cards come with a MultiMedia Center (MMC) that gives you a nice tv-scheduler via Guide Plus+, timeshifting, etc, and you get the added bonus of the multimedia software for your camcorder, etc.
The 9000 AIW card is about $215 CAD, the 9600 is $310 CDN, and the 9800 is $500. There is MPEG-hardware support as well.
and an ATI TV Wonder Pro (not an All-In-Wonder - that one doesn't work with MythTV) - had a horrible time getting modules loaded, etc. All sorts of issues. Spent 2-3 weeks on it, using various distributions. The issue was the chip on the TV Wonder.
Ended up just going back to the ATI Multimedia Center that shipped with the card and Win2k. I don't have shifting, but it's not the end of the world.
SageTV supports the Hauppauge cards - MythTV should be a breeze to get working with one of those.
We bought a book called, "Winning the Food Fight". It's by a chiropractor who went back to school for nutrition because she was tired of seeing kids with a Big Gulp in one hand, and Ritalin in the other.
I've read references to other studies that state sugar, preservatives, colours, etc can have a negative impact on a childs behaviour.
Westerners get fatter, their kids get more hyper, and we just want drugs and other quick fixes.
"Bush is expected to make an announcement towards the middle of next week, proposing a manned mission to Mars as well as a return to the moon.
When is he going? It sounds like a nice trip, and I hope he takes lots of pictures. Too bad the American tax-payer is picking up the tab, tho. In the long run, it makes good economic sense to blast him into outer space.
I think you are misreading the quote - he is saying that highly educated workers shouldn't work for minimum wage; unfort, the context around the quote from the original article made it a bit more obvious.
I'm not trolling, but consider what Open Source does for a country like India or China.
It gives them a legal OS, a legal compiler, documentation, and support, all for free.
If Linux and Gnu (or some equivilent) didn't exist they'd be paying for licences, or pirating the software. Ok - quite a few would pirate the software, as most of Asia has been for the last 10 years.
But without competition from Linux, Microsoft might have put the licence-checker into their software alot sooner than they did with XP. Schools would have had to pay for licences (and paid for the more powerful hardware required to run a Microsoft OS).
This doesn't mean I think Linux is bad; I am in no way stating that we should keep India barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, so to speak. I just wanted to make the point that Gnu/Linux has played a huge role in training software developers in 3rd world countries.
Or am I wrong? Do they run Solaris, XP, 2000, or Mac OS X?
My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer, with 16K. No floppy drive, just a cassette recorder and a ROM-cartridge port on the side. And I got that in grade 8.
Actually, they explicitly say that streaming video/audio is no faster than regular dial-up.
It's garbage. High-speed Internet is available for $10-$15 more a month, all over the place in Canada. A few large providers that compete to offer great service at super low prices. Not sure what AOL could possibly be thinking.
They should stick south of the 49th parallel, where high-speed access suffers from fragmented providers and high-costs.
They are going to have a tough go of it, competing against Telus.
They claim,
"Netscape Online Accelerator uses advanced web acceleration technology to increase the speed of dial up service, using your existing phone jack and modem without the expense of high speed services such as DSL or a cable modem. No additional equipment is required nor is there any waiting for installation"
Sounds like some sort of caching strategy to deliver content faster.
Overall, sounds like a step backwards to me. I'll stick with my Shaw 300KB/second cable-Internet for $30 Canadian a month.
A couple more missing things from the movie relating to Saruman:
I noticed (but didn't mention in my review):
When Gandalf shows up to Isinguard, Merry just finds the orb under the water. I wish Jackson had stuck true to the books, and had Grima Wormtongue throw it from the tower (why didn't Merry notice it sooner, glowing under the water?).
And Aragorn really never took control of the orb in the movie, as he did in the book (the orb being some sort of heirloom to the Kings of Gondor). I remember that in the book, Aragorn manages to wrest control away from Sauron; no such luck in the movie.
The whole fall-of-Saruman isn't really covered well in the movie.
Look, someone's taken a seminal work of fantasy (one of the first of it's kind, and definately an inspiration for almost every fantasy book that's come out since) and made a movie out of it.
I first read the book in the late 1970's, when I was 10-11. Most/.'ers can probably say the same.
When something like that is taken from print to media, it needs to be done properly. To compare it to crap like Krull or Legend isn't the point.
If it was screwed up, you'd probably feel like radical Christians felt when they saw Last Temptation of Christ.
Musicians in Canada are getting compensated by blank media and MP3-player sales as well as by albumn sales.
If the consumer is paying the artist via this levy, does that mean sharing music via a P2P network is now legal for Canadians, so long as they intend to transfer that music to either an MP3 player or some form of media on which the levy has been applied?
That might be an interesting challenge in the Canadian Courts.
Slashdot Mirror
In greater Vancouver, we have dodgey characters that drive around with hacksaws, decapitating the meters for the change inside. A thousand dollar parking meter gets destroyed for $40 in change.
In Montreal, it will be geeks with hacksaws. Rather than being tossed into a lake, the parking meters will show up in a home-built robot.
on their plans, as stated in the other comments, it looks like my job will be secure a bit longer.
Go, be botanists, make guitars, teach math.
"Wonder if there's any spots on that ranch left that can make a good Star Wars movie?
Doubt it - hasn't been one yet.
As simple or complex as you want to make it.
Also has punk-busters integrated in it as of the 1.6 patch, so no cheating, and you can kick annoying players. DiCE/EA seem to be interested in patching and adding new maps/content as well.
Won game of the year a year or two ago, and is perfect for that 30-minutes worth of entertainment
"Sure stored procedures can get complicated, then again so can anything if you're fool. Most that I see written today are extremely simple. But anyone who's having nightmares from the complexity of views needs to step away from the keyboard slowly."
We inherited our PL/SQL codebase from a consulting company that wrote it. They take Java objects, pass each member in as a parameter, and then almost each and every method passes back a generic-IO cursor. The dumbest thing I ever saw.
Stored procedures are hidden logic. They are difficult to test. They are difficult to debug. If you change a table that a package relies on, you can invalidate the package, and not find out till exceptions start showing up in your logs.
"Don't take my word for us - read their manual (especially the "design issues" section), then apply all that invaluable Oracle dba experience to a few tests. You might be amazed at how often mysql corrupts your data."
Are you talking about "7.1.1 MySQL Design Limitations/Tradeoffs" or "7.4.1 Design Choices"? Both sections are MyISAM-specific. InnoDB is the only true database engine in the MySQL product. I've been subscribing to the MySQL mailing lists for about 18 months now, and the ten to twenty data-corruption issues I've seen have been with MyISAM (often running 3.23), when the server loses power with MySQL running. InnoDB has binary logs, redo capabilities, and transactions. There have been a few bugs that could potentially cause data-issues under rare circumstances with InnoDB, but we've had issues with Oracle as well (corrupt or invalid indexes, or rows that were no longer accessible).
"You just never realized it before because every time it hits something difficult, complex, confusing, etc it simply takes some weird default action. Isn't quite so bad for read-only applications, but anyone who writes valuable data to mysql without really understanding the product is a fool."
I've loaded one of our databases (about 4 gig) into MySQL (it was about a 2 hour effort to conver the data, and 2 hours to bulk-load it, including the 100 or so indexes and foreign keys). I've run some of the tougher queries that we use against it (10 table joines, 5 of them outer-joins, returning 2 million rows) and it worked fine. I've also loaded the key data from one of our other databases into MySQL, and run our nastiest queries against it, in a threaded environment, where each thread does multiple selects, updates and inserts very large rows with LOBS and the CPU stays pegged at 100% for 20 minutes. It finished in half the time of Oracle, and not a single hiccup.
I've also loaded 40 meg of data via insert statements, including LOB fields, large numbers, and dates. No problems at all.
What are you talking about?
/.'s readers go visit it.
MySQL and Postgres are both very good database technologies (and I'm an Oracle DBA, managing 3 high-availability Oracle installations).
"MySQL seems to occupy a rather subtle and narrow niche"
The website that you posted this comment to, that offered the review of this book, runs MySQL. You know - the website with it's own effect named after it, the one that handles the load of tens of thousands of geeks while the site they reference in a front-page-story crashes and burns when all
Oh yah, Yahoo runs on MySQL. I wouldn't say Yahoo is a small niche; it's a large one, all by itself.
With the InnoDB database engine, you have the same row-locking, ACID trasactions that you get with the big databases. Both Slashdot and Yahoo use the InnoDB database engine in MySQL.
You don't have stored procedures, triggers, or views, but as an Oracle DBA who has 12,000 lines of proprietary Oracle-PL/SQL on just one of my three databases, I can say that they cause more problems than they are worth. A nightmare to write, debug, and maintain.
But never the less, views, stored procedures, and all those other features are due out in 4.1 and 5.0.
As for SQL Server, I do know it runs only on Windows (at least Oracle supports Linux, Solaris and Windows as first-tier platforms). MySQL runs well on all the *NIXs, and has had AMD-64 support for several months now via several production-ready versions of 64-bit-Linux. Microsoft has just managed to shlub out some half-assed public beta that won't be ready for general public consumption for 4-8 more months.
House of Chains came out in 2003, and it was a great book.
The author is Canadian, and the books are difficult to get in the US (Locus is American).
Yah, they took liberties with the Ten Commandments, but they didn't change it to The Eleven Commandments, adding "Thou shall wear a bikini on the Sabbath" to get the guys into the theater, and change the Sixth Commandment from "Thou shalt not kill" to "Thou shalt not kill unless you have a really good reason" to allow for bigger fight scenes.
Toronto and Ottawa are nice (and cold in the winter) but the skiing is not good. Halifax and Montreal are interesting. Calgary has a boom going on, and it's cold, and good skiing in the Rockies. Vancouver doesn't get cold in the winter.
I thought about your post a bit, and noticed a couple of issues:
1) Open Source can't replace services that have been moved off-shore. You can't write software to replace a call-center full of people.
2) I suspect that Open Source has played a role in this move-all-jobs-to-India trend. I don't think schools in India are big Microsoft/Solaris users; a high-quality free OS is a much bigger advantage to developers and schools in India than it is to us relatively wealthy people.
but funny. Don't remember where I grabbed this list, but here's 12 Things Not To Say Watching ROTK in the theatre:
1. Stand up halfway through the movie and yell loudly, "Wait...where the hell is Harry Potter?"
2. Block the entrance to the theater while screaming, "YOU.....SHALL....NOT..... PASS!" - After the movie, say "Lucas could have done it better."
3. Play a drinking game where you have to take a sip every time someone says, "the Ring."
4. Point and laugh whenever someone dies.
5. Ask everyone around you if they think Gandalf went to Hogwarts.
6. Finish off every one of Elrond's lines with "Mis..ter Ander-sonnn."
7. When Aragorn is crowned king, stand up and at the top of your lungs sing, "And I did it.... MY way...!"
8. Talk like Gollum all through the movie. At the end, bite off someone's finger and fall down the stairs.
9. Dress up as old ladies and reenact "The Battle of Helms Deep," Monty Python style.
10. When Denethor lights the fire, shout "Barbecue!"
11. In TTT when the Ents decide to march to war, stand up and shout, "RUN FOREST, RUN!"
12. Every time someone kills an Orc, yell: "That's what I'm Tolkien about!" See how long it takes before you get kicked out of the theatre.
13. During a wide shot of a battle, inquire, "Where's Waldo?"
14. Talk loudly about how you heard that there is a single frame of a nude Elf hidden somewhere in the movie.
15. Start an Orc sing-a-long.
16. Come to the premiere dressed as Frankenfurter and wander around looking terribly confused.
17 When they go in the paths of the dead, wait for a tense moment and shout, "I see dead people!"
18. Imitate what you think a conversation between Gollum, Dobby and Yoda would be like.
19. Release a jar of daddy-long-legs into the theater during the Shelob scene.
20. Wonder out loud if Aragorn is going to run for governor of California.
21. When Shelob comes on, exclaim, "Man!Charlotte's really let herself go!"
I agree - great post. If you have the option, you could move to Europe as well - might be a nice change. Don't forget to get involved in municipal, state/provincial and federal/national politics.
You can make life more difficult for corporations by asking tough questions, and making them look stupid and greedy.
ATI All In Wonder cards come with a MultiMedia Center (MMC) that gives you a nice tv-scheduler via Guide Plus+, timeshifting, etc, and you get the added bonus of the multimedia software for your camcorder, etc.
The 9000 AIW card is about $215 CAD, the 9600 is $310 CDN, and the 9800 is $500. There is MPEG-hardware support as well.
and an ATI TV Wonder Pro (not an All-In-Wonder - that one doesn't work with MythTV) - had a horrible time getting modules loaded, etc. All sorts of issues. Spent 2-3 weeks on it, using various distributions. The issue was the chip on the TV Wonder.
Ended up just going back to the ATI Multimedia Center that shipped with the card and Win2k. I don't have shifting, but it's not the end of the world.
SageTV supports the Hauppauge cards - MythTV should be a breeze to get working with one of those.
We bought a book called, "Winning the Food Fight". It's by a chiropractor who went back to school for nutrition because she was tired of seeing kids with a Big Gulp in one hand, and Ritalin in the other.
I've read references to other studies that state sugar, preservatives, colours, etc can have a negative impact on a childs behaviour.
Westerners get fatter, their kids get more hyper, and we just want drugs and other quick fixes.
"Bush is expected to make an announcement towards the middle of next week, proposing a manned mission to Mars as well as a return to the moon.
When is he going? It sounds like a nice trip, and I hope he takes lots of pictures. Too bad the American tax-payer is picking up the tab, tho. In the long run, it makes good economic sense to blast him into outer space.
I think you are misreading the quote - he is saying that highly educated workers shouldn't work for minimum wage; unfort, the context around the quote from the original article made it a bit more obvious.
I'm not trolling, but consider what Open Source does for a country like India or China.
It gives them a legal OS, a legal compiler, documentation, and support, all for free.
If Linux and Gnu (or some equivilent) didn't exist they'd be paying for licences, or pirating the software. Ok - quite a few would pirate the software, as most of Asia has been for the last 10 years.
But without competition from Linux, Microsoft might have put the licence-checker into their software alot sooner than they did with XP. Schools would have had to pay for licences (and paid for the more powerful hardware required to run a Microsoft OS).
This doesn't mean I think Linux is bad; I am in no way stating that we should keep India barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, so to speak. I just wanted to make the point that Gnu/Linux has played a huge role in training software developers in 3rd world countries.
Or am I wrong? Do they run Solaris, XP, 2000, or Mac OS X?
My first computer was a Tandy Color Computer, with 16K. No floppy drive, just a cassette recorder and a ROM-cartridge port on the side. And I got that in grade 8.
Who's the young un?
Totally agree.
It's the first game that I've ever finished. I've liked alot of other great games (Sudden Strike, Max Payne, etc), but never got through them.
The Soviet campaign rocked; the British was weak.
Actually, they explicitly say that streaming video/audio is no faster than regular dial-up.
It's garbage. High-speed Internet is available for $10-$15 more a month, all over the place in Canada. A few large providers that compete to offer great service at super low prices. Not sure what AOL could possibly be thinking.
They should stick south of the 49th parallel, where high-speed access suffers from fragmented providers and high-costs.
I've been hearing commercials for Netscape as a broad-band-like ISP in Canada on the radio lately.
They are going to have a tough go of it, competing against Telus.
They claim,
"Netscape Online Accelerator uses advanced web acceleration technology to increase the speed of dial up service, using your existing phone jack and modem without the expense of high speed services such as DSL or a cable modem. No additional equipment is required nor is there any waiting for installation"
Sounds like some sort of caching strategy to deliver content faster.
Overall, sounds like a step backwards to me. I'll stick with my Shaw 300KB/second cable-Internet for $30 Canadian a month.
The fall of Saruman was glossed over in RotK.
A couple more missing things from the movie relating to Saruman:
I noticed (but didn't mention in my review):
When Gandalf shows up to Isinguard, Merry just finds the orb under the water. I wish Jackson had stuck true to the books, and had Grima Wormtongue throw it from the tower (why didn't Merry notice it sooner, glowing under the water?).
And Aragorn really never took control of the orb in the movie, as he did in the book (the orb being some sort of heirloom to the Kings of Gondor). I remember that in the book, Aragorn manages to wrest control away from Sauron; no such luck in the movie.
The whole fall-of-Saruman isn't really covered well in the movie.
Look, someone's taken a seminal work of fantasy (one of the first of it's kind, and definately an inspiration for almost every fantasy book that's come out since) and made a movie out of it.
/.'ers can probably say the same.
I first read the book in the late 1970's, when I was 10-11. Most
When something like that is taken from print to media, it needs to be done properly. To compare it to crap like Krull or Legend isn't the point.
If it was screwed up, you'd probably feel like radical Christians felt when they saw Last Temptation of Christ.
I didn't see one freak... well, I mean dressed in costume. 98% of the people were software developers/artists, so there were some unusual dudes.
Musicians in Canada are getting compensated by blank media and MP3-player sales as well as by albumn sales.
If the consumer is paying the artist via this levy, does that mean sharing music via a P2P network is now legal for Canadians, so long as they intend to transfer that music to either an MP3 player or some form of media on which the levy has been applied?
That might be an interesting challenge in the Canadian Courts.