This picture of the European flag must be a couple a years old. There are now 15 stars, three have been added for Sweden, Finland and Austria which joined the EU in 1995 IIRC.
Actually, no this is not the case. Unlike the USA, the number of stars on the EU flag does not represent the number of members.
According to the official EU site "The number of stars is fixed, twelve being the symbol of perfection and unity."
Say what you like about 12 being the symbol of perfection and unity, but there is (and will only be) 12 stars.
I've only ever worked on one project where the database size went over a gigabyte, and that was for UtiliCorp (domestic gas supply sub). Of course, whether the smaller ones would really benefit from this kind of technology is open to debate. But not here.
A gigabyte is not a large database. At all. It's tiny! Anything approaching a terabyte, and you're going to start wanting serious fault tolerance on it... most likely use BCV. RAM is not going to support this. Performance on DB's in order of a few GB's is easy, just index lots of stuff:) -- Performance becomes an issue in a database about 500GB in size, generally, and this is too big to put into RAM. So, the performance gain of putting anything in RAM is moot, in this case.
Plus, what business is going to sign off against all their data being stored in fragile RAM?
Getting fired for suggesting a production system do this sounds fair!
In my experience, working at a consultancy will give you the opportunity to work in many places. The bad side of this is that you don't get to choose them. Where I work we sign documents saying we will go where we are told. That's fantastic for young people who don't mind being told they are going to be leaving for Hong Kong next week for 6 months, but not so good if you want to be able to go wherever you want.
I would go as far to say that most consultancies (ex-Big5 variety) will give you less freedom to go where you want when you want.
If you don't like tech journo, you could review books. A friend of mine does that for Wrox, just sends back changes he would make. He loves it, esepcially when I rang him recently and he told me he was in Bali. On holidays? Kind of... he was still working but was earning at the same time.
I forgot to mention it's also got a picture of itself underneath the main text. It's not very exciting, just a picture of an iPaq and a bluetooth card. Took so long to appear I didn't realise it was there originally! Also, it seems to have timed out half way down. Poor little thing.
Mind you, 610 hits and still going... I'm impressed. It must have had 500 in 5 minutes.
I'm sure that this poor little beastie will buckle sooner rather than later, here's what it said: (Plus a hit counter underneath, at 165 when I visited)
---
This server is running from a Compaq iPaq 3765 running the Familiar distribution of the linux operating system. The http server is thttpd which can be found here. Furthermore, this server is completely wireless. The only cable plugged in is a power cord to replenish the battery.
Remember those dongles you had to put on your parallel port to get AutoCAD to work? Well, I remember getting around that (not actually the AutoCAD one, was for another app) by copying the circuitry inside the dongle... it was really simple, just a couple of wires looping back. Does this mean a soldering iron is illegal? What about the circuit board, or the wire? Or what if I employed someone else to do it? Are they themselves illegal (how does that work!?) since I'm just using them as a tool.
And, if the copy protection is so lame that it's trivial to break, doesn't that mean that general purpose things can be used to break the protection, and that's just mad. Think of password protected software... is a dictionary illegal since I might try to type in every word in it to gain access so I can copy it.
You've got a chick running your security?! There's your problem... and, she ain't no geek-chick, which would be fine. She probably heard that computing was the way to go, got her daddy to pay her MCSE fees and went and lapped up some cash.
Get the right tool for the right job... in this case you want a paranoid geek! (really!)
Well, you could refuse the EULA and get your money back. Same with Office, when you read the EULA you can disagree with it and return the product for a full refund -- but it's a hassle and a half.
I'm sure you could also inspect the EULA before you purchase if you wanted to.
You'll be waiting a very long time, unfortunately. Moz isn't better for a consumer, maybe for a geek... but the important thing is that for the consumer it works with every site. They don't care about HTML standards, they just want to be able to order their books, and read their hotmail knowing it will work.
OfficeXP on Win2k on my machine (256MB machine) uses 9888K with nothing open. That's more than 10% less than 11MB's... not that much more than the quoted 7 of this "XP Killer"
Crikey, you figured that out after two semesters. I guess I wasted 4 years of my life doing a degree in it all then... I must never have cottoned on to how well expert systems such as Mycin and Dendral actually perform.
You think programming is just the "intelligence of the programmer"? Guess again -- many people have AI systems running which program themselves, coming out with emergent behaviour which the programmer never expected.
Do you really think that a person can simplify circuit boards to their simplest form by themselves? I thought not. I know that Julian Miller can't, but that using his Cartesian Genetic Programming he's managed to wirte programs that do just that. Thus proved that a computer program can ultimetaly be more than the sum of its external inputs.
And you think that a number that you think of is truly random?
If a computer cycled through numbers and chose one of them the next time disc I/O was requested, this would be as random as anything you like. Sure, it can be repeated, but so can anything that goes on in my head.
What I'm saying is just because you don't understand why you choose a seemingly random number doesn't mean it's actually random. You know all those tricks about people being made to pick a random number (David Blaine style) and it's known to other people -- well, they would have though their choice is random.
You really think they will *never* be thrown away? What if you die, and your grandchildren find these heap of junk Commodore 64's in your basement -- they'll throw them away.
Eventually, it'll all be got rid of -- and if it really is special and ends up in a museum, then it's got to be worth a hell of a lot more than a recycling fee... so then it doesn't matter.
You can't go on forever throwing things in landfill, your country will fill up. Just like you can't burn too much oil and expect the environment not to turn on you (unless your GW Bush).
Filling the world with crap is a bad thing, it's something that people have to take a responsibility for, not just let it be someone elses problem
I spilled a whole cup of hot chocolate into my Dell Latitude C600 only yesterday. The keyboard seems to be sealed and took the brunt of it, without leaking much (only what spilled over the edge of the keyboard downwards).
Hot chocolate streamed out from the floppy drive, but the machine didn't turn off. So, I turned it off quickly and brought it to the people at work that deal with idiots like me. The nice chap there opened it up, inspected it to find the RAM boards were dry, as was the hard disc. The right hand side of the unit was a bit wet, so he cleaned it up with alcohol. The floppy drive, although encrusted with chocolate at this point amazingly pulled through and still works. All that was replaced was the keyboard which was totally knackered. And even if it wasn't, it smelled really badly.
I was impressed as to how well it stood up, especially since it's a plasticy Dell. I really with they'd build the casing like a Compaq Armada.
But there's still an odour of burnt chocolate from it...
There isn't, and for a while there won't be.
on
CRM for Linux?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
CRM on Linux (or any Free OS) is a long way off. It's not a technical reason, it's just that CRM is a very expensive business (Think $30k for a Siebel licence (per seat) and then the big servers that sit behind it. I've seen Siebel implementations that use 6 E10K's to drive it. Really.
Problem is, big businesses are going to want to use Oracle on Solaris, and since they do, people like Siebel, SAP and Oracle (with their own CRM offerings) are always going to tune (and tie) their systems to Oracle on Sun (almost always.)
So, for the moment, the only way you're going to see enterprise level CRM software on Linux is through a browser front end.
It really sucks, since all that's needed is a fairly thin client to get Siebel working on Linux. Come to think of it, that part of it couldn't be that hard to port... but it still leaves you tied server-wise.
According to Accenture, it will... but earlier
on
The Internet Shifts East
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Accenture -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)
They're not often wrong.
The figures reckon that one billion people in China will be connecting to the Web by the year 2007. It sounds a it optomistic to me, and what exactly does "connecting to the web" mean. Someone who owns a PC and is connected... or just someone who uses a CyberCafe? I wonder if in China "people per IP" would be much higher than in Europe or America.
That's a bit like saying "The Pentium II is not the one to watch for -- it's Deschutes"
McKinley *is* Itanium. Like Coppermine is Pentium (III I think).
Remember Katmai was the original PII -- well, Merced is the initial Itanium, and the second generation of Itanium is McKinley.
So, it's pretty pointless to say Itanium may never be released because (a) Merced is already here. And, (b) is you consider Merced not properly released, but McKinley to be so, Itanium is still properly released!
Perhaps he meant the security which companies such as Visa employ. CC's themselves aren't very secure (in terms of fraud) but you can bet Visa's systems are rock solid. You may hear that blah-blah.com's web site was cracked open are CC numbers got at, but that's nothing to do with Visa's own database security (which, incedentally rund DB2) -- so is Ellison saying the US Government should move to DB2?!:-)
Sure, but lets face it -- if you were controlling a network with Outlook clients, you'd just use regular exchange... it's easier to manage than giving POP/IMAP as well, one less thing to worry about.
And, the whole point of Exchange is that I can schedule meetings with someone else, and maintain a server side to-do list etc.
If I were a sysadmin, I'd just tell the minority (i.e. Unix people at my place) to use the Exchange web client.
But it would be nicer just to be able to use Evolution:-)
I like Evolution... really, I do. Except, I can't use it. We use Exchange at work, and there's nothing I can do to make Evolution work.
I think Ev v1 was roadmapped to integrate with Exchange -- since it doesn't it's not a viable option for corporates who primarily use Windows, but have people using Unix.
But, Exchange is not the be-all and end-all, tight integration with Lotus Domino would be excellent. Lots of big corporations use Notes heavily, and require a Windows client (Domino web services aren't great)
Perhaps an open standard for groupware (discussion, IM, calendar, to-do etc.) could be adopted, and through that Exchange/Notes -> new standard could be employed, aloowing other people to bring integration with whatever groupware server they want to Evolution and other clients?
Could be a very bad idea, but it's just off the top of my head!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no this is not the case. Unlike the USA, the number of stars on the EU flag does not represent the number of members. According to the official EU site "The number of stars is fixed, twelve being the symbol of perfection and unity."
Say what you like about 12 being the symbol of perfection and unity, but there is (and will only be) 12 stars.
Former? That's like saying you were a former murderer
Once a DBA, always a DBA!
A gigabyte is not a large database. At all. It's tiny! Anything approaching a terabyte, and you're going to start wanting serious fault tolerance on it... most likely use BCV. RAM is not going to support this. Performance on DB's in order of a few GB's is easy, just index lots of stuff :) -- Performance becomes an issue in a database about 500GB in size, generally, and this is too big to put into RAM. So, the performance gain of putting anything in RAM is moot, in this case.
Plus, what business is going to sign off against all their data being stored in fragile RAM?
Getting fired for suggesting a production system do this sounds fair!
> Stiff lower lip and all that rot
Only if you're standing on your head! It's a stiff *upper* lip you're thinking of.
Been practising your Engrish, have you? You seem to have mastered it! :)
In my experience, working at a consultancy will give you the opportunity to work in many places. The bad side of this is that you don't get to choose them. Where I work we sign documents saying we will go where we are told. That's fantastic for young people who don't mind being told they are going to be leaving for Hong Kong next week for 6 months, but not so good if you want to be able to go wherever you want.
I would go as far to say that most consultancies (ex-Big5 variety) will give you less freedom to go where you want when you want.
If you don't like tech journo, you could review books. A friend of mine does that for Wrox, just sends back changes he would make. He loves it, esepcially when I rang him recently and he told me he was in Bali. On holidays? Kind of... he was still working but was earning at the same time.
I forgot to mention it's also got a picture of itself underneath the main text. It's not very exciting, just a picture of an iPaq and a bluetooth card. Took so long to appear I didn't realise it was there originally! Also, it seems to have timed out half way down. Poor little thing.
Mind you, 610 hits and still going... I'm impressed. It must have had 500 in 5 minutes.
I'm sure that this poor little beastie will buckle sooner rather than later, here's what it said: (Plus a hit counter underneath, at 165 when I visited)
---
This server is running from a Compaq iPaq 3765 running the Familiar distribution of the linux operating system. The http server is thttpd which can be found here. Furthermore, this server is completely wireless. The only cable plugged in is a power cord to replenish the battery.
Remember those dongles you had to put on your parallel port to get AutoCAD to work? Well, I remember getting around that (not actually the AutoCAD one, was for another app) by copying the circuitry inside the dongle... it was really simple, just a couple of wires looping back. Does this mean a soldering iron is illegal? What about the circuit board, or the wire? Or what if I employed someone else to do it? Are they themselves illegal (how does that work!?) since I'm just using them as a tool.
And, if the copy protection is so lame that it's trivial to break, doesn't that mean that general purpose things can be used to break the protection, and that's just mad. Think of password protected software... is a dictionary illegal since I might try to type in every word in it to gain access so I can copy it.
Stop the madness!!!
You've got a chick running your security?! There's your problem... and, she ain't no geek-chick, which would be fine. She probably heard that computing was the way to go, got her daddy to pay her MCSE fees and went and lapped up some cash.
Get the right tool for the right job... in this case you want a paranoid geek! (really!)
You're wrong :-)
Well, you could refuse the EULA and get your money back. Same with Office, when you read the EULA you can disagree with it and return the product for a full refund -- but it's a hassle and a half.
I'm sure you could also inspect the EULA before you purchase if you wanted to.
You'll be waiting a very long time, unfortunately. Moz isn't better for a consumer, maybe for a geek... but the important thing is that for the consumer it works with every site. They don't care about HTML standards, they just want to be able to order their books, and read their hotmail knowing it will work.
OfficeXP on Win2k on my machine (256MB machine) uses 9888K with nothing open. That's more than 10% less than 11MB's... not that much more than the quoted 7 of this "XP Killer"
Can anyone beat that?
Crikey, you figured that out after two semesters. I guess I wasted 4 years of my life doing a degree in it all then... I must never have cottoned on to how well expert systems such as Mycin and Dendral actually perform.
You think programming is just the "intelligence of the programmer"? Guess again -- many people have AI systems running which program themselves, coming out with emergent behaviour which the programmer never expected.
Do you really think that a person can simplify circuit boards to their simplest form by themselves? I thought not. I know that Julian Miller can't, but that using his Cartesian Genetic Programming he's managed to wirte programs that do just that. Thus proved that a computer program can ultimetaly be more than the sum of its external inputs.
And you think that a number that you think of is truly random?
If a computer cycled through numbers and chose one of them the next time disc I/O was requested, this would be as random as anything you like. Sure, it can be repeated, but so can anything that goes on in my head.
What I'm saying is just because you don't understand why you choose a seemingly random number doesn't mean it's actually random. You know all those tricks about people being made to pick a random number (David Blaine style) and it's known to other people -- well, they would have though their choice is random.
You really think they will *never* be thrown away? What if you die, and your grandchildren find these heap of junk Commodore 64's in your basement -- they'll throw them away.
Eventually, it'll all be got rid of -- and if it really is special and ends up in a museum, then it's got to be worth a hell of a lot more than a recycling fee... so then it doesn't matter.
You can't go on forever throwing things in landfill, your country will fill up. Just like you can't burn too much oil and expect the environment not to turn on you (unless your GW Bush).
Filling the world with crap is a bad thing, it's something that people have to take a responsibility for, not just let it be someone elses problem
Rubbish! (Unless this is new!)
I worked at Sun before, and microsoft.com was deinfitely not blocked.
How else would we have been able to get Internet Explorer for Solaris? (Yes, some people at Sun use IE for Solaris.)
There's loads of times when a Sun developer might need to look at MSDN, for example. And, Java support guys would definitely need access to MSDN.
I spilled a whole cup of hot chocolate into my Dell Latitude C600 only yesterday. The keyboard seems to be sealed and took the brunt of it, without leaking much (only what spilled over the edge of the keyboard downwards).
Hot chocolate streamed out from the floppy drive, but the machine didn't turn off. So, I turned it off quickly and brought it to the people at work that deal with idiots like me. The nice chap there opened it up, inspected it to find the RAM boards were dry, as was the hard disc. The right hand side of the unit was a bit wet, so he cleaned it up with alcohol. The floppy drive, although encrusted with chocolate at this point amazingly pulled through and still works. All that was replaced was the keyboard which was totally knackered. And even if it wasn't, it smelled really badly.
I was impressed as to how well it stood up, especially since it's a plasticy Dell. I really with they'd build the casing like a Compaq Armada.
But there's still an odour of burnt chocolate from it...
Shoudn't that be "Austin Powers: Dr Ye Baby, Ye!"
CRM on Linux (or any Free OS) is a long way off. It's not a technical reason, it's just that CRM is a very expensive business (Think $30k for a Siebel licence (per seat) and then the big servers that sit behind it. I've seen Siebel implementations that use 6 E10K's to drive it. Really.
Problem is, big businesses are going to want to use Oracle on Solaris, and since they do, people like Siebel, SAP and Oracle (with their own CRM offerings) are always going to tune (and tie) their systems to Oracle on Sun (almost always.)
So, for the moment, the only way you're going to see enterprise level CRM software on Linux is through a browser front end.
It really sucks, since all that's needed is a fairly thin client to get Siebel working on Linux. Come to think of it, that part of it couldn't be that hard to port... but it still leaves you tied server-wise.
Accenture -- formerly Andersen Consulting -- reckon this will happen by 2007. It's worth a read... especially the links at the bottom talking about cultural pollution (not necessarily in a negative sense!)
They're not often wrong.
The figures reckon that one billion people in China will be connecting to the Web by the year 2007. It sounds a it optomistic to me, and what exactly does "connecting to the web" mean. Someone who owns a PC and is connected... or just someone who uses a CyberCafe? I wonder if in China "people per IP" would be much higher than in Europe or America.
That's a bit like saying "The Pentium II is not the one to watch for -- it's Deschutes"
McKinley *is* Itanium. Like Coppermine is Pentium (III I think).
Remember Katmai was the original PII -- well, Merced is the initial Itanium, and the second generation of Itanium is McKinley.
So, it's pretty pointless to say Itanium may never be released because (a) Merced is already here. And, (b) is you consider Merced not properly released, but McKinley to be so, Itanium is still properly released!
Confusing? Yes.
Any clearer? I hope so!
David
Perhaps he meant the security which companies such as Visa employ. CC's themselves aren't very secure (in terms of fraud) but you can bet Visa's systems are rock solid. You may hear that blah-blah.com's web site was cracked open are CC numbers got at, but that's nothing to do with Visa's own database security (which, incedentally rund DB2) -- so is Ellison saying the US Government should move to DB2?! :-)
Sure, but lets face it -- if you were controlling a network with Outlook clients, you'd just use regular exchange... it's easier to manage than giving POP/IMAP as well, one less thing to worry about.
:-)
And, the whole point of Exchange is that I can schedule meetings with someone else, and maintain a server side to-do list etc.
If I were a sysadmin, I'd just tell the minority (i.e. Unix people at my place) to use the Exchange web client.
But it would be nicer just to be able to use Evolution
I like Evolution... really, I do. Except, I can't use it. We use Exchange at work, and there's nothing I can do to make Evolution work.
I think Ev v1 was roadmapped to integrate with Exchange -- since it doesn't it's not a viable option for corporates who primarily use Windows, but have people using Unix.
But, Exchange is not the be-all and end-all, tight integration with Lotus Domino would be excellent. Lots of big corporations use Notes heavily, and require a Windows client (Domino web services aren't great)
Perhaps an open standard for groupware (discussion, IM, calendar, to-do etc.) could be adopted, and through that Exchange/Notes -> new standard could be employed, aloowing other people to bring integration with whatever groupware server they want to Evolution and other clients?
Could be a very bad idea, but it's just off the top of my head!
Dave