Tell your friend to buy a Cadillac instead. I drive a 12 year old Eldorado which I inherited from my father. The thing is built like a tank, but handles like a sports car. Other than the styling (which is admittedly a bit dated), you'd think it was maybe 3 or 4 years old -- all the gizmos and electronics work, the engine and transmission are in great shape, and it has fewer rattles and squeaks than my wife's 1 year old minivan. Yeah, it needs periodic maintenance -- for instance I just had to replace the (original) water pump (after 130K miles!). I fully expect that it will still be on the road when my wife's minivan is ready for the junkyard.
Have you tried a parallel port Ethernet adapter? You should be able to find an old one (Xircom) on Ebay that will work with the Amiga.
Another cheap and easy way to get IP connectivity to your Amiga is PLIP: run the plip daemon on a linux box, then run a null-modem parallel cable from the Linux box to your Amiga's parallel port.
The fact that/. uses MySQL is irrelevant../ is not a mission-critical system -- it too is, at the end of the day, nothing but a toy. It's not a serious business system. There's no significant consequence if a message gets lost or garbled; it doesn't matter that transactions are processed in a certian order; it doesn't really matter if it's security is compromised. In fact,./ has very minimal requirements and there are a lot of other products which would be equally adequate as well: a flatfile system like maildir, an ISAM system like dBase, or a pseudo-relational database like MySQL or MS-Access. If you're building a toy system, a toy database might be sufficient.
MySQL lacks several essential features which necessary to implement a proper client/server application -- stored procedures and transactions most of all. Stored procedures are essential for several reasons: security, performance, and efficiency. Stored procedures have better performance because they are pre-compiled; there's significantly less overhead to call an SP than there is to process an ad-hoc query. Stored procedures make programming more efficent because you can write a single, complex set of queries and re-use it across multiple clients.
Perhaps most importantly, stored procedures have several security advantages. If your database allows ad-hoc queries to run against it, it is vulnerable to an injection attack -- an attacker could potentially run any SQL query he wants against your database (EG: update Account set balance = 1000000 where AccountNumber = 123456). A stored procedure acts similarly to a setuid/setgid program in unix, in that it runs with it's owner's permission instead of the user's. This means that you can allow a user to modify a table in a single, very specific manner that they would otherwise not be allowed to touch. Good security is achieved by defense in depth, and stored procedures give you an additional layer of security.
If cost is a concern, then there are alternatives to Oracle: Postgres is signifiantly closer to being a real database than MySQL; and there are zero-cost licenses available from several of the commerial database vendors. Most notably, Sybase 11.0.3.3 for Linux is available at no cost for any purpose. While a little dated compared to more recent releases, it is still far more mature than any open-source database. Open-source advocacy (zealotry) should never get in the way of making sound engineering decisions.
Java stored procedures are an idea that sounds neat on the surface, but in reality is completely brain-dead.
In an N-tier systems, the client and application tiers can scale horizontally -- if you need more horsepower, you just plant another server in the farm. Databases, on the other hand, only scale vertically (Even the heavyweight commercial enterprise-grade databases have difficulty scaling horizontally)
If your DB server can't handle the load, pretty much your only choice is to buy a bigger one. If this means going from a uniproc machine to a dual proc machine, the cost increment isn't huge; however, the cost of going from a 4-way to an 8-way or larger box is huge.
Java stored procedures just don't scale -- primarily because they suck resources like a pig. Database performance is typically limited by disk I/O and physical memory. If you have to run a Java VM and a bunch of java classes, that's a huge amount of memory that's getting sucked up -- memory that should be used to cache data. In my personal experience, the performance impact is at the order-of-magnitude level.
MySQL is not competitive with Postgres; and Postgres is not competitive with any of the commercial databases. As far as I'm concerned, MySQL is a worthless toy. If you are going to go to the trouble to write a client/server system, do it right and use a REAL database. The extra effort to do it right will pay of the long run.
how high off the ground does one's property extend if they own the land?
The rights you have to your land are determined by the deed to the property. Generally speaking, unless the deed specifically excludes them, you have the right to everything under your property (minerals, groundwater, etc), extending down to the core of the Earth; and everything over it, extending to the edge of the atmosphere. However, international law/treaty recognizes the right of innocent passage and overflight, so unless it was loitering over your property for an extended period of time I doubt there's much you could legally do about it.
There's one major problem with this kind of thing: Sex Offender != Child Molester.
There are plenty of sex crimes that do not involve children. Not all sex crimes are violent. There are still states where perticular sex acts between consenting adults are criminalized. Depending on your definition of "sex crime", a conviction for prostitution (or for using the services of one) could result in that person being branded as a "sex offender".
This kind of list does not differentiate between a serial child molester and the guy who once drunkenly grabbed a girl's ass at a frat party.
Minivan: lets you transport a truly phenominal amount of tech junk - like the rack full of "obsolete" servers you picked up at an auction. Sports cars are fun toys but they lack the essential cargo capacity.
IKEA furniture: a true geek can never have too many bookshelves. If you don't have more books supply doesn't exceed your shelf capacity, you can't really call youself a geek.
Children: incipient geeks waiting to be shown the mysteries of the universe. It's also a great (and socially acceptable) reason to buy more legos, chemistry sets, 100-in-one electronics labs, model rockets, and all other manner of cool geek toys.
EBay is your friend. The market is flooded right with server-grade storage chassis coming in off lease, most of it rack mount.
You can get the bare chassis from the vendor of your choice for under $300. The problem with buying a bare chassis is that you'll have to find the hot-swap sleds seperately, which can be a real PITA, depending on the model. You can get fully populated arrays for under $1000, which even if you throw the drives away is probably cheaper than buying the sleds individually.
For the $3000 the yutzes in the article spent, anyone could pick up a fully populated storage array plus a pair of dual P3 servers. I'd much rather buy 3 year old enterprise-grade server hardware than to cobble together a bunch of OEM parts.
99%+ of security breaches are due to lazy or inept system administrators. A poorly-administered OpenBSD box will be far less secure than a well-administered Windows box. Security, or lack thereof, is almost entirely in the hands of the sysadmin.
Love them or loathe them, that's your decision. The right to decide whether or not to own a gun, is yours and yours alone -- not mine, not the NRA's, not Sarah Brady's, and certianly not Congress's. Conversely, you have no right to prohibit others from making that decision for themselves. Your right to exercise or not exercise any of your rights, be it speech, religion, or any other, is protected. It's when you try and trample on the rights of citizens by supporting and lobbying for un-Constitutional laws to advance your personal agenda, that there is a problem.
We live in a country that gives us the right to choose whether or not we'd like to own guns
Not exactly. You possess a common misunderstanding. Since you appear to have slept through Civics 101, let me provide a refresher. The Constitution does not GIVE us any rights at all. What it does do is limit the ability of the US Government and the governments of the various States to infringe on those rights which all humans already possess. Some rights are so sacrosant that they are explicitly protected, and the government is totally denied the power to take them away (EG "Congress shall make no law...", "... shall not be infringed"). In other cases, rights are protected less vigorously and the government is granted the power to violate them within some rigidly defined parameters and under certian explicit exceptions ("..but upon probable cause...","...without due process...", "...except in cases arising in the land or naval forces..").
What many people (including Congress and even the Supreme Court) seem to forget is this little beauty:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The study I read (can't find the link now, sorry) used battlefield statistics from every major US conflict from Vietnam on up to Desert Storm. They used basically the same methodology the FBI uses for their lethality statistics: in order to be in the study, it had to be a single shot to the chest or abdomin and have killed the soldier on the battlefield (EG, people who survived long enough to make it to the aide station were excluded). Within these paramaters, the M-16 was (IIRC) about 85% lethal, while the AK/SKS family of weapons was down around 70% lethal under the same conditions.
I wish I could find the article again, it was very interesting reading.
I've never had to return fire yet, and I hope I never have to. I have had to point a gun at someone who was trying to break into my home. And no, I didn't lose control of my bowels.
We gun-toting fucktards did create our own nation; it's called the United States of America. Don't like it? There are plenty of countries you can move to where it's illegal for a private citizen to own a firearm. Most of them are third-world shitholes, but I'm sure that won't bother you since you'd be living in a gun-free utopia.
The real-world lethality of a round of ammo is highly complex and often counterintuitive; not all of the mechanisms that increase or decrease lethality are well-understood.
While the kinetic energy (KE = 1/2 M V^2) and momentum (P = MV) have an undeniable relationship to lethality, they are demonstrably not the only factors, as there are real-world comparisons which show rounds with lower KE and momentum which are more lethal than ones with more KE and momentum.
Personally I shoot 9MM; my preferred ammo is 147gr@980fps, compared a more conventional loading of 125gr@1160fps. Real-world statistics show that the 147gr loadout has a slightly better track record of one-shot kills than the 125gr, even though the 147gr has roughly the same momentum and 20% less KE.
The M-16, firing the 5.56 nato round, has roughly 70% as much kinetic energy and momentum as the 7.62 Russian round used by the AK-47. Yet, pradoxically, battlefield statistics from show that the survival rate of people shot with 7.62Rus is significantly higher than that of people shot with 5.56NATO.
Unfortunately, the RIAA wants to have it both ways: when you buy music, they want to sell you a single copy AND a license. When the RIAA was targeting used CD shops, they tried to claim that the doctrine of first sale did not apply because you were in fact buying a non-transferrable license to listen to the music, not the media on which it was delivered.
When they went after cassette tapes, DAT tapes, and now that they are going after MP3s, they present the opposite argument. There's nothing new the RIAA has to offer in the MP3 debate -- it's the same old crap they trotted out when cassettes were introduced, when they successfully buried DAT, and so forth.
Your fair use rights for recorded music have been well defined in case law over the years -- you have the same right to rip an MP3 copy of a CD you own as you do to record it to a cassette tape. Giving a copy of that legally ripped MP3 file to an accquaintance is, (or should be), legally indistinguishable from giving them a cassette you legally recorded.
If you had read the article instead of spouting off, you'd have found that it *IS* just an ion machine and that they authoritativly demonstrated that it does *not* work in a vacuum.
Ah, that would that be the Anarexics Anonymous poster, SMG being thier poster child (along with Callista Flockhart). Who needs a poster of Sarah Michelle Stickgirl when you've got Alyson Hannigan to drool over? Plus, somehow I think that SMG would never take a role that required her to utter the line "And one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute up my pussy."
Funny. I was going to suggest exactly the same thing. I did this about 2 years ago with my incandescent booklight -- $2.00 worth of parts at rat shack gave me a high-intensity red LED and a nice assortment of resistors. 10 minutes with the soldering iron and I had a nice bright red booklite.
An added advantage of this conversion is that batteries last *MUCH* longer. Using the old incandescent bulb, my booklight went through a set of AA batteries a month. 2 years after switching to the LED, I haven't had to replace the batteries yet.
Good to see more 'tutorial' style books coming out - its the real world examples that springboard a beginner's skill level w/ a new language.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Books like this teach you one way of how to do it. They don't teach you why you should do it that way, how it works, or what the trade-offs are for different approaches. A good introductory book needs to tell you both the *how* and the *why*. Unfortunately, good introductory programming books are rarer than bug-free Microsoft Service Packs.
Hire a professional software engineer with lots of experience and you get a well-designed, documented, maintainable, and scalable system. Hire a cheap script monkey to slap some code together for you, and you get an unmaintainable pile of crap that's going to wind up costing you several times as much in the long run.
It may cost more up front to do it right the first time, but it's cheaper than having to live with a piece of crap while you pay someone to reimplement it for the third time. The skill, intelligence, and professionalism of the person building the software is VASTLY more important than the tools they use. You pay for experience because it's valuable.
If you have a db connection pool, you aren't opening a database connection for every page hit -- you are reusing an existing connection. That's the whole point of connection pooling. Opening a new connection to the database is a comparatively expensive operation; having an existing connection service a query request is cheap. Of course, it sounds like you already know this.
Re:Support our troops.
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yeah, support them by bringing them the hell home! Speaking as both a Veteran and a Citizen, this pointless, counterproductive, and un-Constitutional war makes me ill.
Once upon a time, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From where I sit, Dubbya and crew are a bigger theat to our Constitution than Saddam and his cronies. How come Slick Willy gets impeached for getting a hummer in the oval office while Dubbya gets away with wiping his ass with the Constitution?
I will support our troops -- several of whom are members of my family -- by insisting loudly and continuously that they be brought home immediately.
It's a way the politicians can show that they are "doing something" and appear "tough on crime". You don't need to ascribe any deeper motives to big-brotherism than simple vote pandering. From the LE perspective, this just gives them another charge they can pile on to the indictment that they can use as a bargaining chip while negotiating the plea bargain.
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Tell your friend to buy a Cadillac instead. I drive a 12 year old Eldorado which I inherited from my father. The thing is built like a tank, but handles like a sports car. Other than the styling (which is admittedly a bit dated), you'd think it was maybe 3 or 4 years old -- all the gizmos and electronics work, the engine and transmission are in great shape, and it has fewer rattles and squeaks than my wife's 1 year old minivan. Yeah, it needs periodic maintenance -- for instance I just had to replace the (original) water pump (after 130K miles!). I fully expect that it will still be on the road when my wife's minivan is ready for the junkyard.
Another cheap and easy way to get IP connectivity to your Amiga is PLIP: run the plip daemon on a linux box, then run a null-modem parallel cable from the Linux box to your Amiga's parallel port.
MySQL lacks several essential features which necessary to implement a proper client/server application -- stored procedures and transactions most of all. Stored procedures are essential for several reasons: security, performance, and efficiency. Stored procedures have better performance because they are pre-compiled; there's significantly less overhead to call an SP than there is to process an ad-hoc query. Stored procedures make programming more efficent because you can write a single, complex set of queries and re-use it across multiple clients.
Perhaps most importantly, stored procedures have several security advantages. If your database allows ad-hoc queries to run against it, it is vulnerable to an injection attack -- an attacker could potentially run any SQL query he wants against your database (EG: update Account set balance = 1000000 where AccountNumber = 123456). A stored procedure acts similarly to a setuid/setgid program in unix, in that it runs with it's owner's permission instead of the user's. This means that you can allow a user to modify a table in a single, very specific manner that they would otherwise not be allowed to touch. Good security is achieved by defense in depth, and stored procedures give you an additional layer of security.
If cost is a concern, then there are alternatives to Oracle: Postgres is signifiantly closer to being a real database than MySQL; and there are zero-cost licenses available from several of the commerial database vendors. Most notably, Sybase 11.0.3.3 for Linux is available at no cost for any purpose. While a little dated compared to more recent releases, it is still far more mature than any open-source database. Open-source advocacy (zealotry) should never get in the way of making sound engineering decisions.
In an N-tier systems, the client and application tiers can scale horizontally -- if you need more horsepower, you just plant another server in the farm. Databases, on the other hand, only scale vertically (Even the heavyweight commercial enterprise-grade databases have difficulty scaling horizontally)
If your DB server can't handle the load, pretty much your only choice is to buy a bigger one. If this means going from a uniproc machine to a dual proc machine, the cost increment isn't huge; however, the cost of going from a 4-way to an 8-way or larger box is huge.
Java stored procedures just don't scale -- primarily because they suck resources like a pig. Database performance is typically limited by disk I/O and physical memory. If you have to run a Java VM and a bunch of java classes, that's a huge amount of memory that's getting sucked up -- memory that should be used to cache data. In my personal experience, the performance impact is at the order-of-magnitude level.
MySQL is not competitive with Postgres; and Postgres is not competitive with any of the commercial databases. As far as I'm concerned, MySQL is a worthless toy. If you are going to go to the trouble to write a client/server system, do it right and use a REAL database. The extra effort to do it right will pay of the long run.
There are plenty of sex crimes that do not involve children. Not all sex crimes are violent. There are still states where perticular sex acts between consenting adults are criminalized. Depending on your definition of "sex crime", a conviction for prostitution (or for using the services of one) could result in that person being branded as a "sex offender".
This kind of list does not differentiate between a serial child molester and the guy who once drunkenly grabbed a girl's ass at a frat party.
D'oh. That'll teach me to hit preview. Should be: "If you book supply doesn't exceeed your shelf capacity..."
You can get the bare chassis from the vendor of your choice for under $300. The problem with buying a bare chassis is that you'll have to find the hot-swap sleds seperately, which can be a real PITA, depending on the model. You can get fully populated arrays for under $1000, which even if you throw the drives away is probably cheaper than buying the sleds individually.
For the $3000 the yutzes in the article spent, anyone could pick up a fully populated storage array plus a pair of dual P3 servers. I'd much rather buy 3 year old enterprise-grade server hardware than to cobble together a bunch of OEM parts.
99%+ of security breaches are due to lazy or inept system administrators. A poorly-administered OpenBSD box will be far less secure than a well-administered Windows box. Security, or lack thereof, is almost entirely in the hands of the sysadmin.
What many people (including Congress and even the Supreme Court) seem to forget is this little beauty:
. Commit it to memory.I wish I could find the article again, it was very interesting reading.
I've never had to return fire yet, and I hope I never have to. I have had to point a gun at someone who was trying to break into my home. And no, I didn't lose control of my bowels. We gun-toting fucktards did create our own nation; it's called the United States of America. Don't like it? There are plenty of countries you can move to where it's illegal for a private citizen to own a firearm. Most of them are third-world shitholes, but I'm sure that won't bother you since you'd be living in a gun-free utopia.
While the kinetic energy (KE = 1/2 M V^2) and momentum (P = MV) have an undeniable relationship to lethality, they are demonstrably not the only factors, as there are real-world comparisons which show rounds with lower KE and momentum which are more lethal than ones with more KE and momentum.
Personally I shoot 9MM; my preferred ammo is 147gr@980fps, compared a more conventional loading of 125gr@1160fps. Real-world statistics show that the 147gr loadout has a slightly better track record of one-shot kills than the 125gr, even though the 147gr has roughly the same momentum and 20% less KE.
The M-16, firing the 5.56 nato round, has roughly 70% as much kinetic energy and momentum as the 7.62 Russian round used by the AK-47. Yet, pradoxically, battlefield statistics from show that the survival rate of people shot with 7.62Rus is significantly higher than that of people shot with 5.56NATO.
Personally, I don't care if the nuts own guns, even the nuts who wear uniforms and carry badges, so long as I have the capibility to return fire.
When they went after cassette tapes, DAT tapes, and now that they are going after MP3s, they present the opposite argument. There's nothing new the RIAA has to offer in the MP3 debate -- it's the same old crap they trotted out when cassettes were introduced, when they successfully buried DAT, and so forth.
Your fair use rights for recorded music have been well defined in case law over the years -- you have the same right to rip an MP3 copy of a CD you own as you do to record it to a cassette tape. Giving a copy of that legally ripped MP3 file to an accquaintance is, (or should be), legally indistinguishable from giving them a cassette you legally recorded.
Sure you can, if you build your own shuttle. The plans (at least the non-classified bits) are (or should be) available via a FOIA request.
If you had read the article instead of spouting off, you'd have found that it *IS* just an ion machine and that they authoritativly demonstrated that it does *not* work in a vacuum.
Ah, that would that be the Anarexics Anonymous poster, SMG being thier poster child (along with Callista Flockhart). Who needs a poster of Sarah Michelle Stickgirl when you've got Alyson Hannigan to drool over? Plus, somehow I think that SMG would never take a role that required her to utter the line "And one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute up my pussy."
An added advantage of this conversion is that batteries last *MUCH* longer. Using the old incandescent bulb, my booklight went through a set of AA batteries a month. 2 years after switching to the LED, I haven't had to replace the batteries yet.
It may cost more up front to do it right the first time, but it's cheaper than having to live with a piece of crap while you pay someone to reimplement it for the third time. The skill, intelligence, and professionalism of the person building the software is VASTLY more important than the tools they use. You pay for experience because it's valuable.
If you have a db connection pool, you aren't opening a database connection for every page hit -- you are reusing an existing connection. That's the whole point of connection pooling. Opening a new connection to the database is a comparatively expensive operation; having an existing connection service a query request is cheap. Of course, it sounds like you already know this.
Once upon a time, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From where I sit, Dubbya and crew are a bigger theat to our Constitution than Saddam and his cronies. How come Slick Willy gets impeached for getting a hummer in the oval office while Dubbya gets away with wiping his ass with the Constitution?
I will support our troops -- several of whom are members of my family -- by insisting loudly and continuously that they be brought home immediately.
It's a way the politicians can show that they are "doing something" and appear "tough on crime". You don't need to ascribe any deeper motives to big-brotherism than simple vote pandering. From the LE perspective, this just gives them another charge they can pile on to the indictment that they can use as a bargaining chip while negotiating the plea bargain.