It's impossible. These E-ink displays aren't pixel displays (which could show any image), they are segment based (like a cheap calculator, watch, or old LCD game). They can only display what they have been designed to show. Your only choices are for each segment to be dark or light.
Would you have preferred Visual Objective-J++.Net 3.0b MSDN Edition?
The name is not bad. The main thing it does to me is imply Objective-C heritage which is what it is supposed to do. The J could be confused with Java though. Objective-JS would have cleared that up, but then it doesn't sound nearly as close to Objective-C.
This is all the fault of that decision long ago to name JavaScript after Java for marketing reasons.
I'd suggest Objective-ECMA, but that sounds like the test for a skin rash.
The question should be: when was the last time YouTube said they wouldn't keep your home movies forever?
If you just make pessimistic assumptions until you are proven wrong by a legal document (ignoring the possible invalidity of many EULA clauses) then you don't have to worry about this stuff.
Because PBS isn't advertiser funded, it gets its support from private individuals and (to a rather minor extent) the government. While corporations can (and do) donate, it isn't their lifeblood.
I agree with you though. I've seen that episode and it's a fantastic rebuke of the credit card industry.
You're right that this still requires two pictures, but they are taken from the same point of view. You don't have to move the camera, re-focus, etc. To get stereoscopy to look right for human eyes, the cameras need to be just the right distance apart otherwise things look weird or out of scale. I'd imagine you'd have a similar issue with computer processing. To get much depth with parallax I think you need to have the camera shots a good difference apart as well, especially if you are trying to photograph something mostly planar (like Myan carvings on stone temples). This should be able to pick up those finer things easily.
Your bit about the lighting and surface textures, that's the sense I got from the video as well. What they seem to be doing is using the flash to get the correct color of the object. By using that, they can determine how far back on object is set (based on how much darker it is) and that is where the depth comes from (at least at a very basic level).
Still, it's a very neat idea and very approachable. As one of the project people mentions near the end of the video bump maps for games are created by hand. I'd imagine if I could just take two pictures (one with flash, one without) and get some depth information I could play around with that idea very easily on my computer and come up with something neat. Compare that to taking two (or more) shots from different parts, trying to match everything up, etc.
Parallax and stereoscopy both require the camera to be in two (or ideally with parallax more) positions. The ingenious thing about this idea (watch the video, it's good) is that the camera doesn't need to be moved. By taking two shots in the same spot, one with flash and one without, you can get a good depth map.
Now it's not as good as a laser scanner, but it's much cheaper and faster and smaller (since you could use any little camera). It's a very simple but ingenious idea. I'm quite surprised by the amount of detail they are able to get this way.
Of course it could be argued that parallax and stereoscopy are ways of viewing images with pseudo-depth as opposed to taking them (at least for the purpose of this article). Parallax has no real depth, but helps simulate the effect in the brain. Stereoscopy has no depth, but works just like the eyes to give the brain the data it needs to reconstruct the depth.
The idea is for embedded systems that don't have a hard drive. Right now, at least with a normal file system, you have to take the data from flash and copy it into RAM. Even if the flash is mapped into memory, you still have to do this.
Execute in Place means letting the processor read the code directly from the flash (when available) so you don't have to make the (rather pointless) copy in RAM. It obviously wouldn't work in some circumstances (self-modifying code being the obvious one) but it would save embedded system guys on RAM requirements.
Some things already support execute in place. The article says that CramFS supports a version, but it seems as if this version may be able to work on smaller chunks of memory (a page) at a time than the CramFS version (which seems to only work on a full file at a time?).
Of course, all this only works well if your flash is fast enough at reading. If it is relatively fast (compared to your CPU) so you're only waiting a few cycles (perhaps a small overhead compared to RAM) it would be useful. If it was very slow to read (100s more cycles than normal memory) it wouldn't do you much good.
I hope LWN writes an article about this. I'd love to know more.
This is what I was thinking. It's cute that MS wants to improve the image of Vista. It's even cuter that they think getting a big name star in some ads about "breaking through barriers" will work. At least they aren't dumb enough to do a near clone of the Get A Mac ads. And anything with Seinfeld's name sells. Remember Bee Movie? Did you remember it existed 10 minutes ago, or did reading the name make you think for a few seconds before you remembered it ever existed?
But $300 million is a ton of money. How much did Apple spend developing 10.5? Was it over $300 million? How much did they spend on 10.1/Puma, the free point release?
You shouldn't need to spend that much money to tell people your 2 year old product isn't trash.
One of the geniuses bits behind the Apple ads is how simple they are. It's easy to make movies. Adding a new printer works well. Macs do what you want them to. So to combat these simple messages a 5 year old could understand, Microsoft is making a series of ads about breaking through barriers. Sounds like the kind of pseduo-management speak that drives me nuts. I hope the execution is better than the idea sounds, and the rest of Microsoft's campaigns.
This is the problem I would worry about. I know I've had to wait for others to do their job (due to their own procrastination, etc) so I could get something done that was due already. Heck, anyone who has done a team assignment in middle school has had that experience.
I have a simple solution to this: every moment I'm working on your project, including waiting on you (and subordinates) because you didn't do what you said you would, I charge you. I'll bill 3 people at once while I wait around. If we pre-arrange that I won't be working during a specific time (because you're busy or whatever) that's fine. But if I am supposed to be fixing your project and I can't because of you, you're still paying.
Of course, you have to be really really good at your job to be able to get terms like that. That's why pretty much no one would be willing to accept those terms. I know I wouldn't hire someone else with those terms unless I really trusted them. And I wouldn't trust them that much without working with them, which I wouldn't do without....
I'm with you. The "let's all bill based on actual work and not just 40 hours a week thing" is great in theory but unless you're the guy everyone else is always forced to wait on it won't work out.
Right. But you can't see the source. Crossfire is only available with their binary blob driver. Whether that is temporary or permanent wasn't mentioned in the article.
Donate this programmer time to The Kids or whatever.
This is the problem. They already had that to a degree. Since they designed the DLC to be forward compatible, it couldn't have been that bad.
My guess (I may have read this somewhere) is it is the music licensing fees that the cost covers, not the dev time. When the licensed the tracks they were licensed for Rock Band, not Rock Band 2. So to play them in the new game, they needed to re-license them.
Really the only choices were 1 and 3. I'm REALLY glad they chose three. Harmonix is so cool. Now if I could just get the songs from GH 1 and 2 in the game (I know some are DLC, and it would be impossible since they aren't seperated or noted for the extra instruments)...
That would be only interesting if there's any difference.
That's precisely what I want to know. That would give me an indication how mature the drivers are, how much more performance there is to gain, and how much they cared about creating this. I mean is it worth the risks (like the crashes in some games) or if the performance is going to take another 25% jump maybe I just want to wait for the next driver version in September or October.
It's not "segfaulting the system," it's segfaulting the game.
I haven't used Linux for a desktop in a while, so I'm not up on this stuff. When I last messed around with 3D game in Linux segfaulting a game sometimes would take down just the game (and usually X) and sometimes would take down the whole system. For my purpose segfaulting the game might as well have taken down the whole system.
If things have progressed past that in even a tough case like this (controlling two expansion boards) that's a very nice plus.
As for on Windows, I've had it happen many times in the past but it has been quite a while since it took down my system. Even back in '01 I could have to kill Counter Strike and my box (running 2k pro) would survive just fine. These days I don't play many computer games so it's not much of a problem I run into.
I've got to say I'm disappointed they don't provide Crossfire numbers for the same hardware on Windows. It's nice that Crossfire can improve things in some situations and some games that are supported under Linux, but I'd like to know the relative benefit.
That is, when going to Crossfire do both Windows and Linux gain 40 FPS? Or do they both go up 60%? Or does Windows go up by 70% to 100 FPS where Linux only goes up 40% to 80 FPS?
How close are they? That's what I'd like to know.
I also find the "we had no problems except for some segfaults during Quake Wars, and they say that will be fixed in a month or two with the next version" a little worrying. A problem with a driver is a game looking off, or having slow frame rates. Segfaulting the system is not a problem, it's a BIG PROBLEM.
I'm rather conservative. I watch both Colbert and Stewart because I find them both funny. Their bias is quite obvious, but I don't mind. The fact they are open about it (as opposed to trying to pretend to be neutral) makes me like them more.
Rarely do I not find something funny because of my views. I'll disagree with some of the things Stewart says (for example), but I don't take him seriously enough to be put off by it (and it doesn't happen that often).
What they spend most of their time doing, making fun of the media and politicians doing dumb things, works just as well for either party. If they ignored the Dems I would be turned off, but they are always right there to poke fun at Pelosi if she does something notably stupid.
I agree. I keep one-click buying off on Apple and Amazon. I can see how it could be convenient but it seems to too easy to accidently have something like this happen. I like it asking me for my password to confirm the iTunes purchase I'm about to make.
Now a limit would be an interesting idea. You can use one-click on the iTunes store but it won't let you spend more than $20 a week without prompting or something. That would help people.
Of course none of this would help people who click "buy" on $1000 things and then complain that they were sold something for $1000. What else would happen?
I've got to say, I miss Apple's famous control to a degree on this one.
First let me say, they shouldn't have bought this. It's stupid. That one review that said something like "I clicked on buy as a joke and it bought it!"... what else would happens?
But I'd like to see Apple exercise more control. When things are all over the place (like they are with Windows Mobile stuff) I can understand things like this. But Apple put up their store with all sorts of things I don't think they should have had. There are like 6 flashlight apps, and they cost everything from free to a few dollars. There are two beer mug simulators. There was a $1000 app that only showed a picture. That shouldn't have been let on the store.
There are many stories of companies posting updates for their apps and having to wait weeks for the update to appear on the store. People finish apps and they have to wait for QA to pass them before putting them up. But stuff like this goes up nearly instantly (probably because there is basically no QA to do). So the store is flooded with cheap stuff. And apps have really similar names in some cases (Crosswords vs CrossWords vs CrossW0rds, just to make up an example).
I'd have liked to see Apple exercise just a little MORE control over what they posted, at least for the first few weeks or so. But the first thing I notice going on the app store the day it was released was this kind of stuff (same names, 3 flashlight aps, etc.). It just didn't reflect Apple quality/values to me.
DeVry does, or at least did, a few years ago. I should know, I took the class. It was an upper level course, and part of a set of required electives. You had to take COBOL or (something) or (something). I don't even remember if the other two were languages or theory or what. But it was there. All campuses don't have to teach it, it is market driven. Having a very large and old telephone company not to far away means there is some demand for people who have had some exposure to the language.
As some others here have commented, COBOL is amazing. I learned programing through BASIC, HyperScript, C, Java, and other languages. COBOL is so primitive in so many ways. It feels a bit like trying to use your knowledge of Romance languages to decipher how to say something in Japanese.
Now this makes sense, as COBOL was designed so long ago for machines that only had punch-cards and such. But for most any student who learns programing these days to be given COBOL is going to be a huge logical shift.
And that doesn't include the syntax. Ignoring the special columns and such, no modern languages are very close to COBOL's syntax.
It's illegal to secretly record people, especially in their own homes (reasonable expectation of privacy). If you install a little camera in your neighbor's ceiling, you can bet you'll end up in jail. This is the same.
On top of that, there is the computer hacking, not performing the correct service (after all, by "fixing" the computer he made it slower)
And while there is no "right to privacy" explicitly state in American law, the Supreme court essentially created it in rulings during the later half of the 20th century (I want to say this was Roe v. Wade, but it may have been before).
Even if there is no criminal case (which, as I stated above, I'd be quite sure there is) she could always go civil. After all bugging someone else's computer and posting pictures of them undressing on the internet without their knowledge is definitely something you could get a civil judgment for. If that isn't intentional infliction of emotional distress, I'd be pretty surprised.
No kidding. I had a semester of COBOL in college. It was bad. I'd never touched such a primitive computer language before (or after). I'd prefer assembly to COBOL. I understand that next to no one works in COBOL anymore. But let's get serious here.
The article says that California has spend 10 years and $117 million trying to replace their payroll system and haven't really touched it at all.
I'm a Californian (technically). So I'll make you a deal California: I'll program it. I'll do the whole thing for peanuts. Let's say $200,000 a year. With what you've spent I could work on the system for 585 years.
Heck. How about a one time payment of $150,000 and then $0.05 for every paycheck an employee gets. That's fine too.
Will my payroll program be perfect? Nope. But I can make a simple program that does the basics and I can make it work. I can keep expanding it for you. You can switch new blocks of employees over some at a time as I add the features you need for them. You can have people manually cut checks for the rest (or just keep using the old system). For the amount of money you've spent it seems like this has to be workable. I'd think my ideas could be done for a few years and still cost less that what's been spent already.
Heck, make a bunch of students at one of the Cal. Tech. or UC(something something) do it. Make the grad students do it. It would be a great real world project. Plus you've got all those professors who know what they are doing and have had experience working on designing big systems like this (right?). Compared to your 10 year $117 million dollar mess, how bad could it be?
Heck, buy QuickBooks. Pay Intuit $50 million and they'll probably have the perfect system for you ready to go right now.
These projects always end up so terrible. I don't know why the government doesn't just toughen up the "if you ever get paid" clause in the contract. If no one has fixed it, sue for your money back. This style where each company did something but it didn't fix it so they all get paid and nothing useful ever came out hasn't worked very well. If you make the completion side of the deal juicy enough, some big company that can afford the risk will do it and do it right.
I also agree with other posters. I could change it. Let me at it. All I have to do is change some constants. Since they are getting smaller, there won't be any overflows. Then we can run test cases (or just run tests with the real payroll a few times) and we'll see if it works. How much could that possibly cost? Certainly not 10+ months of time. Reverting back to the current wages should be as easy as a redeploy since we know that code is working already.
Explain/describe exists in MySQL, it's just very hard to do.
Is it possible to bring Oracle down? I would think so, it would just take a lot (note: assuming normal hardware, not a large high-power cluster). Is it possible to take MySQL down? Easily. It can be surprisingly easy to lock the server completely. Even when you select off one set of tables (A) and want to insert into another set (B, possibly in a different schema/DB) it is possible to have things locked. It's very easy. We haven't seen a crashing bug in MySQL in a while (fun: a query that formated dates with the date format function could reliably crash MySQL 4.0 or 4.1 (don't remember which).
Does explain help? No. On Oracle it may help. In Postgres it seems to help. I have no experience with MSSQL. In MySQL you have to watch out. While it can be useful, it is very limited.
It's row counts can be horribly useless. It can list 1.2 million rows when in fact it can take a fraction of a second to get the data because it's all in an index in memory.
Worse: it will run the query for you. Under some circumstances (using a subquery can do it, using more than one level of subquery is almost guaranteed to do it) it will just run the inner query and then use that to produce results. This means that describe/explain can lock the database and take hours to return (if you had a query that was bad enough and didn't kill the describe/explain). It's all the fun of running the real query, without the results actually presented to you.
Note: We're using 5.0 (since 5.1 isn't production ready yet). Some of this may be fixed.
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It's impossible. These E-ink displays aren't pixel displays (which could show any image), they are segment based (like a cheap calculator, watch, or old LCD game). They can only display what they have been designed to show. Your only choices are for each segment to be dark or light.
Would you have preferred Visual Objective-J++.Net 3.0b MSDN Edition?
The name is not bad. The main thing it does to me is imply Objective-C heritage which is what it is supposed to do. The J could be confused with Java though. Objective-JS would have cleared that up, but then it doesn't sound nearly as close to Objective-C.
This is all the fault of that decision long ago to name JavaScript after Java for marketing reasons.
I'd suggest Objective-ECMA, but that sounds like the test for a skin rash.
PS: What's with the "nod" tags today?
The question should be: when was the last time YouTube said they wouldn't keep your home movies forever?
If you just make pessimistic assumptions until you are proven wrong by a legal document (ignoring the possible invalidity of many EULA clauses) then you don't have to worry about this stuff.
Because PBS isn't advertiser funded, it gets its support from private individuals and (to a rather minor extent) the government. While corporations can (and do) donate, it isn't their lifeblood.
I agree with you though. I've seen that episode and it's a fantastic rebuke of the credit card industry.
So... people interested and informed in politics?
You're right that this still requires two pictures, but they are taken from the same point of view. You don't have to move the camera, re-focus, etc. To get stereoscopy to look right for human eyes, the cameras need to be just the right distance apart otherwise things look weird or out of scale. I'd imagine you'd have a similar issue with computer processing. To get much depth with parallax I think you need to have the camera shots a good difference apart as well, especially if you are trying to photograph something mostly planar (like Myan carvings on stone temples). This should be able to pick up those finer things easily.
Your bit about the lighting and surface textures, that's the sense I got from the video as well. What they seem to be doing is using the flash to get the correct color of the object. By using that, they can determine how far back on object is set (based on how much darker it is) and that is where the depth comes from (at least at a very basic level).
Still, it's a very neat idea and very approachable. As one of the project people mentions near the end of the video bump maps for games are created by hand. I'd imagine if I could just take two pictures (one with flash, one without) and get some depth information I could play around with that idea very easily on my computer and come up with something neat. Compare that to taking two (or more) shots from different parts, trying to match everything up, etc.
Parallax and stereoscopy both require the camera to be in two (or ideally with parallax more) positions. The ingenious thing about this idea (watch the video, it's good) is that the camera doesn't need to be moved. By taking two shots in the same spot, one with flash and one without, you can get a good depth map.
Now it's not as good as a laser scanner, but it's much cheaper and faster and smaller (since you could use any little camera). It's a very simple but ingenious idea. I'm quite surprised by the amount of detail they are able to get this way.
Of course it could be argued that parallax and stereoscopy are ways of viewing images with pseudo-depth as opposed to taking them (at least for the purpose of this article). Parallax has no real depth, but helps simulate the effect in the brain. Stereoscopy has no depth, but works just like the eyes to give the brain the data it needs to reconstruct the depth.
Yes, but for some odd reason it lacks any kind of image capture support.
The idea is for embedded systems that don't have a hard drive. Right now, at least with a normal file system, you have to take the data from flash and copy it into RAM. Even if the flash is mapped into memory, you still have to do this.
Execute in Place means letting the processor read the code directly from the flash (when available) so you don't have to make the (rather pointless) copy in RAM. It obviously wouldn't work in some circumstances (self-modifying code being the obvious one) but it would save embedded system guys on RAM requirements.
Some things already support execute in place. The article says that CramFS supports a version, but it seems as if this version may be able to work on smaller chunks of memory (a page) at a time than the CramFS version (which seems to only work on a full file at a time?).
Of course, all this only works well if your flash is fast enough at reading. If it is relatively fast (compared to your CPU) so you're only waiting a few cycles (perhaps a small overhead compared to RAM) it would be useful. If it was very slow to read (100s more cycles than normal memory) it wouldn't do you much good.
I hope LWN writes an article about this. I'd love to know more.
This is what I was thinking. It's cute that MS wants to improve the image of Vista. It's even cuter that they think getting a big name star in some ads about "breaking through barriers" will work. At least they aren't dumb enough to do a near clone of the Get A Mac ads. And anything with Seinfeld's name sells. Remember Bee Movie? Did you remember it existed 10 minutes ago, or did reading the name make you think for a few seconds before you remembered it ever existed?
But $300 million is a ton of money. How much did Apple spend developing 10.5? Was it over $300 million? How much did they spend on 10.1/Puma, the free point release?
You shouldn't need to spend that much money to tell people your 2 year old product isn't trash.
One of the geniuses bits behind the Apple ads is how simple they are. It's easy to make movies. Adding a new printer works well. Macs do what you want them to. So to combat these simple messages a 5 year old could understand, Microsoft is making a series of ads about breaking through barriers. Sounds like the kind of pseduo-management speak that drives me nuts. I hope the execution is better than the idea sounds, and the rest of Microsoft's campaigns.
This is the problem I would worry about. I know I've had to wait for others to do their job (due to their own procrastination, etc) so I could get something done that was due already. Heck, anyone who has done a team assignment in middle school has had that experience.
I have a simple solution to this: every moment I'm working on your project, including waiting on you (and subordinates) because you didn't do what you said you would, I charge you. I'll bill 3 people at once while I wait around. If we pre-arrange that I won't be working during a specific time (because you're busy or whatever) that's fine. But if I am supposed to be fixing your project and I can't because of you, you're still paying.
Of course, you have to be really really good at your job to be able to get terms like that. That's why pretty much no one would be willing to accept those terms. I know I wouldn't hire someone else with those terms unless I really trusted them. And I wouldn't trust them that much without working with them, which I wouldn't do without....
I'm with you. The "let's all bill based on actual work and not just 40 hours a week thing" is great in theory but unless you're the guy everyone else is always forced to wait on it won't work out.
Right. But you can't see the source. Crossfire is only available with their binary blob driver. Whether that is temporary or permanent wasn't mentioned in the article.
This is the problem. They already had that to a degree. Since they designed the DLC to be forward compatible, it couldn't have been that bad.
My guess (I may have read this somewhere) is it is the music licensing fees that the cost covers, not the dev time. When the licensed the tracks they were licensed for Rock Band, not Rock Band 2. So to play them in the new game, they needed to re-license them.
Really the only choices were 1 and 3. I'm REALLY glad they chose three. Harmonix is so cool. Now if I could just get the songs from GH 1 and 2 in the game (I know some are DLC, and it would be impossible since they aren't seperated or noted for the extra instruments)...
That's precisely what I want to know. That would give me an indication how mature the drivers are, how much more performance there is to gain, and how much they cared about creating this. I mean is it worth the risks (like the crashes in some games) or if the performance is going to take another 25% jump maybe I just want to wait for the next driver version in September or October.
I haven't used Linux for a desktop in a while, so I'm not up on this stuff. When I last messed around with 3D game in Linux segfaulting a game sometimes would take down just the game (and usually X) and sometimes would take down the whole system. For my purpose segfaulting the game might as well have taken down the whole system.
If things have progressed past that in even a tough case like this (controlling two expansion boards) that's a very nice plus.
As for on Windows, I've had it happen many times in the past but it has been quite a while since it took down my system. Even back in '01 I could have to kill Counter Strike and my box (running 2k pro) would survive just fine. These days I don't play many computer games so it's not much of a problem I run into.
I've got to say I'm disappointed they don't provide Crossfire numbers for the same hardware on Windows. It's nice that Crossfire can improve things in some situations and some games that are supported under Linux, but I'd like to know the relative benefit.
That is, when going to Crossfire do both Windows and Linux gain 40 FPS? Or do they both go up 60%? Or does Windows go up by 70% to 100 FPS where Linux only goes up 40% to 80 FPS?
How close are they? That's what I'd like to know.
I also find the "we had no problems except for some segfaults during Quake Wars, and they say that will be fixed in a month or two with the next version" a little worrying. A problem with a driver is a game looking off, or having slow frame rates. Segfaulting the system is not a problem, it's a BIG PROBLEM.
I'm rather conservative. I watch both Colbert and Stewart because I find them both funny. Their bias is quite obvious, but I don't mind. The fact they are open about it (as opposed to trying to pretend to be neutral) makes me like them more.
Rarely do I not find something funny because of my views. I'll disagree with some of the things Stewart says (for example), but I don't take him seriously enough to be put off by it (and it doesn't happen that often).
What they spend most of their time doing, making fun of the media and politicians doing dumb things, works just as well for either party. If they ignored the Dems I would be turned off, but they are always right there to poke fun at Pelosi if she does something notably stupid.
Really? I was thinking of how scientists recently created a sheep with the brain of a goat.
The story was reported by The Onion, this is just the link I came across for it.
My current MacBook Pro doesn't have a cup holder. They haven't for YEARS.
It does have a potato chip slot, but it only holds one at a time and it seems to make the guys at the local genius bar mad when I use it.
I agree. I keep one-click buying off on Apple and Amazon. I can see how it could be convenient but it seems to too easy to accidently have something like this happen. I like it asking me for my password to confirm the iTunes purchase I'm about to make.
Now a limit would be an interesting idea. You can use one-click on the iTunes store but it won't let you spend more than $20 a week without prompting or something. That would help people.
Of course none of this would help people who click "buy" on $1000 things and then complain that they were sold something for $1000. What else would happen?
I've got to say, I miss Apple's famous control to a degree on this one.
First let me say, they shouldn't have bought this. It's stupid. That one review that said something like "I clicked on buy as a joke and it bought it!"... what else would happens?
But I'd like to see Apple exercise more control. When things are all over the place (like they are with Windows Mobile stuff) I can understand things like this. But Apple put up their store with all sorts of things I don't think they should have had. There are like 6 flashlight apps, and they cost everything from free to a few dollars. There are two beer mug simulators. There was a $1000 app that only showed a picture. That shouldn't have been let on the store.
There are many stories of companies posting updates for their apps and having to wait weeks for the update to appear on the store. People finish apps and they have to wait for QA to pass them before putting them up. But stuff like this goes up nearly instantly (probably because there is basically no QA to do). So the store is flooded with cheap stuff. And apps have really similar names in some cases (Crosswords vs CrossWords vs CrossW0rds, just to make up an example).
I'd have liked to see Apple exercise just a little MORE control over what they posted, at least for the first few weeks or so. But the first thing I notice going on the app store the day it was released was this kind of stuff (same names, 3 flashlight aps, etc.). It just didn't reflect Apple quality/values to me.
DeVry does, or at least did, a few years ago. I should know, I took the class. It was an upper level course, and part of a set of required electives. You had to take COBOL or (something) or (something). I don't even remember if the other two were languages or theory or what. But it was there. All campuses don't have to teach it, it is market driven. Having a very large and old telephone company not to far away means there is some demand for people who have had some exposure to the language.
As some others here have commented, COBOL is amazing. I learned programing through BASIC, HyperScript, C, Java, and other languages. COBOL is so primitive in so many ways. It feels a bit like trying to use your knowledge of Romance languages to decipher how to say something in Japanese.
Now this makes sense, as COBOL was designed so long ago for machines that only had punch-cards and such. But for most any student who learns programing these days to be given COBOL is going to be a huge logical shift.
And that doesn't include the syntax. Ignoring the special columns and such, no modern languages are very close to COBOL's syntax.
It's illegal to secretly record people, especially in their own homes (reasonable expectation of privacy). If you install a little camera in your neighbor's ceiling, you can bet you'll end up in jail. This is the same.
On top of that, there is the computer hacking, not performing the correct service (after all, by "fixing" the computer he made it slower)
And while there is no "right to privacy" explicitly state in American law, the Supreme court essentially created it in rulings during the later half of the 20th century (I want to say this was Roe v. Wade, but it may have been before).
Even if there is no criminal case (which, as I stated above, I'd be quite sure there is) she could always go civil. After all bugging someone else's computer and posting pictures of them undressing on the internet without their knowledge is definitely something you could get a civil judgment for. If that isn't intentional infliction of emotional distress, I'd be pretty surprised.
I've worked on systems that dealt with money, but not real payroll. That said, my comment was meant tongue-in-cheek (at least that part).
No kidding. I had a semester of COBOL in college. It was bad. I'd never touched such a primitive computer language before (or after). I'd prefer assembly to COBOL. I understand that next to no one works in COBOL anymore. But let's get serious here.
The article says that California has spend 10 years and $117 million trying to replace their payroll system and haven't really touched it at all.
I'm a Californian (technically). So I'll make you a deal California: I'll program it. I'll do the whole thing for peanuts. Let's say $200,000 a year. With what you've spent I could work on the system for 585 years.
Heck. How about a one time payment of $150,000 and then $0.05 for every paycheck an employee gets. That's fine too.
Will my payroll program be perfect? Nope. But I can make a simple program that does the basics and I can make it work. I can keep expanding it for you. You can switch new blocks of employees over some at a time as I add the features you need for them. You can have people manually cut checks for the rest (or just keep using the old system). For the amount of money you've spent it seems like this has to be workable. I'd think my ideas could be done for a few years and still cost less that what's been spent already.
Heck, make a bunch of students at one of the Cal. Tech. or UC(something something) do it. Make the grad students do it. It would be a great real world project. Plus you've got all those professors who know what they are doing and have had experience working on designing big systems like this (right?). Compared to your 10 year $117 million dollar mess, how bad could it be?
Heck, buy QuickBooks. Pay Intuit $50 million and they'll probably have the perfect system for you ready to go right now.
These projects always end up so terrible. I don't know why the government doesn't just toughen up the "if you ever get paid" clause in the contract. If no one has fixed it, sue for your money back. This style where each company did something but it didn't fix it so they all get paid and nothing useful ever came out hasn't worked very well. If you make the completion side of the deal juicy enough, some big company that can afford the risk will do it and do it right.
I also agree with other posters. I could change it. Let me at it. All I have to do is change some constants. Since they are getting smaller, there won't be any overflows. Then we can run test cases (or just run tests with the real payroll a few times) and we'll see if it works. How much could that possibly cost? Certainly not 10+ months of time. Reverting back to the current wages should be as easy as a redeploy since we know that code is working already.
Aren't bureaucracies fun?
Explain/describe exists in MySQL, it's just very hard to do.
Is it possible to bring Oracle down? I would think so, it would just take a lot (note: assuming normal hardware, not a large high-power cluster). Is it possible to take MySQL down? Easily. It can be surprisingly easy to lock the server completely. Even when you select off one set of tables (A) and want to insert into another set (B, possibly in a different schema/DB) it is possible to have things locked. It's very easy. We haven't seen a crashing bug in MySQL in a while (fun: a query that formated dates with the date format function could reliably crash MySQL 4.0 or 4.1 (don't remember which).
Does explain help? No. On Oracle it may help. In Postgres it seems to help. I have no experience with MSSQL. In MySQL you have to watch out. While it can be useful, it is very limited.
It's row counts can be horribly useless. It can list 1.2 million rows when in fact it can take a fraction of a second to get the data because it's all in an index in memory.
Worse: it will run the query for you. Under some circumstances (using a subquery can do it, using more than one level of subquery is almost guaranteed to do it) it will just run the inner query and then use that to produce results. This means that describe/explain can lock the database and take hours to return (if you had a query that was bad enough and didn't kill the describe/explain). It's all the fun of running the real query, without the results actually presented to you.
Note: We're using 5.0 (since 5.1 isn't production ready yet). Some of this may be fixed.