I don't expect instant gratification. I've got several level 60 characters. I have 100+ days played. I've done all the quests at least once. I do all my own leveling although I'm starting to get sick of that. If I roll another class, I might just pay someone to level it. I buy gold from time to time. Raiding gets expensive. A lot of guilds bank everything and expect you to grind gold on your own time. I have zero interest in grinding gold. If I'm not raiding, I'd much rather be in a battlefield.
I spend maybe another $15 a month so that I can spend my time in PvP instead of grinding. If I couldn't do that, I'd cancel my account and never look back.
You forget crafting. The comp prices are based entirely on supply and demand. Without the farmers, the price for many of the comps becomes astronomical.
Yeah, well they don't have to worry about any conflict. You have to actually sell some of the PDFs to conflict with the existing base, and at $30 each, that isn't going to happen.
Actually I wouldn't buy the hardcover books at those prices either. I might be tempted to buy the hardcovers at $15-$20. I'd never pay more than $5-$10 for the PDFs.
The only thing I can figure is that either most of these apparent halfwits are actually underage and worried that they won't be able to buy the next GTA game without telling their parents or that not only do they not have kids, they're so far removed from reality that they think it's a good idea that kids be able to buy whatever they want without having to go through their parents.
Unfortunately, I have the strong suspicion that it's the second reason.
Most of the time I think Jack Thompson is an asshat. He's like the guys in the '80s playing records backwards at different speeds trying to find subliminal satanic messages. I was shocked when I caught myself thinking that he'd finally done something right.
Here's a crazy thought. It's already illegal to sell adult-oriented material to minors in any other format. What's special about video games?
I'm getting old. I can tell this because I read posts like yours and the first thing that comes to mind is that you clearly don't have kids. The second thing that comes to mind is that you don't understand the role of government or how enforcing community standards is necessary for society to function.
25 years ago, there were lots of violent video games. Castle Wolfenstein. Airborne Ranger. Dozens of others. Those games cast the player in the role of the hero. It was like Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, only cooler because you weren't pretending a pine cone was a grenade or a stick was a gun. Besides, nobody ever wanted to be the Indian or the Robber.
Now it's fashionable to cast the player in the role of the anti-hero. We've all grown up and found out the real world isn't quite the place we thought it was when we were 12. We're not perfect, so sometimes we like our heroes to have feet of clay. There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm not in a rush to dis-illusion my children. I certainly don't like the idea of my son pretending to be a gangster working his way up the ranks by jacking cars and killing people.
If a game like GTA had existed 25 years ago, most stores would have refused to carry it at all. The possibility of actually selling it to anyone under 18, regardless of the legality, would have never been considered by any employee that wanted to keep their job. There didn't need to be a law because the community was able to enforce it's own standards.
25 years go by, and now stores will sell anything to a minor unless the cash register prompts for ID. Video games that are clearly marked as mature or adults only are sold to minors without a second thought. It actually required legislation to prevent stores from selling firearms to minors.
Communities are much bigger now. There isn't the same sense of belonging. People don't know their neighbors. They don't look out for each other. There are a lot of chuckleheads that don't put any stock in the idea of community standards. This is where government comes in. Whereas 25 years ago any chucklehead that sold adult material to a minor would have been in the unemployment line the next day, now the only effective deterrent is fines or criminal charges.
And the gaming industry lobbies are neither non-existant or bush-league. They're just smart enough to know that that isn't a fight they can win. If they try, they lose. As soon as some chucklehead in the game industry tries to fight this, one question will shut them down completely: "Why are you trying to sell porn to my children?" There is no response to that question. The only way the gaming industry can avoid legislation is by demonstrating their ability to police themselves. They have a pretty poor track record so far.
Bethesda gave him the ability to call fraud. They shipped nudity in Oblivion after failing to disclose that to the ratings board. That made the difference between a T and M rating. The ESRB slapped Bethesda down in an attempt to save face, but the damage had been done.
The Oblivion incident showed that even after the GTA incident the industry had not taken the steps necessary to effectively police themselves. Give the ESRB some teeth instead of fighting it all the time, and maybe people wouldn't feel it necessary to pass these laws.
The problem is that minors can often just walk in to a store and buy an M-rated game. In many areas, stores are not following the ratings because it is not the law.
Yes, because repurchasing the same content in each new format is not only the best way to spend the money I earn, it's also the best way to guarantee that companies will have high profit margins since they won't have to produce any new content.
This is not a macro virus. This is a buffer overflow reading the data file.
Data files shouldn't contain code? What better place to put the code than in the same file as the data it manipulates? A sandbox wouldn't necessarily meet the needs of the business. A sandbox would probably be ok for Word or PowerPoint. Sandboxing Excel macros would be a huge mistake. Some of the most useful and time saving macros in Excel automate the process of gathering data from disparate sources.
It wasn't their sweat. It was the combination of their detergent and the shirt. Not all of the shirts are the same material from the same manufacturer.
A lot of the newer shirts turn purple instead of orange.
Yeah, because I want to watch a documentary on how they made the game instead of playing it. This is such a non-issue. It's not a big deal to switch disks once in a while.
The first amendment doesn't apply. The developer and publisher exercised their free speech by developing and publishing the game. The cashier at the store is not speaking by selling the game. The purchaser is not speaking by buying the game. The first amendment does not guarantee the right of any individual to listen to any speech.
In the US video games are being singled out because rules are already in place for other forms of media. Minors can not buy adult content in other forms, why do you feel they should be allowed to buy it in video games?
No. The ratings board is an attempt to stave off legislation by showing that industry can regulate itself.
Recent events have demonstrated that the industry has not been successful. Developers continue to include content on the shipping media that is not disclosed to the rating board. Retailers do not enforce the ratings given by the board.
The movie industry was only successful at self regulation after the studios forced theaters to comply. We'll see how well it works for video games
Project, Product, Operation, and various other terms have well defined meanings in software development and project management. Since the thread involves software development and project management, lets not muddy the waters by redefining terms inside a car analogy.
A Project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product or service. Commercial projects can be much easier to manage. When you're paying someone to write a particular feature, they write the feature or you replace them. When you rely on unpaid contributions, you get the features that people want to write instead of the features you need.
Citigroup on the whole is a great place to work. Certain parts of Citigroup are not. IT tends to be one of those parts. The manager already knew who he wanted to hire and was only interviewing other people to avoid complaints.
And for the OP, I'd bet your brother wasn't a Citigroup employee in NY. If he had been, there shouldn't have been any question about his time. If he was working for a third-party providing services for Citigroup, and now would be employed by Citigroup directly, why should his time with the third-party carry over? Sure, it'd be nice, but is it reasonable to expect it?
So far I've never run into a DVD where I couldn't go to the menu to skip any previews. The 30+ second menu intros start to get annoying though.
If the studios make it too hard to get past the previews, it will hurt sales of DVDs. Force me to sit though 20 minutes of previews and commercials to watch a movie on DVD? No. I'd download a rip without previews instead of paying anything for it.
Re:Trees are graphs; M2M is a general graph struct
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 1
You have it backwards. Traversing a graph is an iterative operation. RDBMSs are designed for set operations. Nested sets are much faster for reading than an adjacency list but are also much slower for updating. In a large, highly active tree, nested sets may not meet performance constraints.
To put things in perspective, I have a nested set tree with a ragged hierarchy with 50k nodes. Node level security is in place. A worst case insert currently requires 1.5 seconds. Selecting the descendants of a node and filtering against the ACLs requires.5 seconds for any node in the database. Selecting the descendants iteratively is faster only in the special case of few descendants and takes anywhere from.25 seconds to 20 seconds.
The tree is read more often than it is updated so the nested set meets my performance goals in all current cases while adjacency lists do not meet my goals in some cases.
Apache is not the only way to go in the big leagues. As soon as you throw servlets or beans into the mix, you lose that performance advantage. Perl or PHP or Ruby or Python or Zope or any one of a dozen other frameworks may give you better performance than Java but using a RDMS other than MySQL is a crap shoot with most of those.
What you run depends on what you need to do. For some companies.NET makes more sense than JSP or EJB.
I can be reasonably confident that my 14 year old son is going to have put in some effort to see an R rated film that I haven't approved. I have no such confidence regarding MA rated games. Theaters consistently check ID or refuse entry to those that appear underage. Parental controls on video devices are not easy to bypass. Proper network configuration and logging restrict or at least monitor access via Internet.
My son does chores for his allowance. He mows lawns and does odd jobs in the neighborhood for more money. He can save up enough money in relatively short amount of time to purchase video games on his own. There are a number of stores within easy biking distance where video games can be purchased. Most of the stores are quite willing to sell any video game to anyone with cash in hand.
I encourage a certain amount of independence. I think it's counter-productive to follow a teenager around attempting to control every aspect of their lives. I want my son to be able to think and act for himself. That means that there is opportunity for him to purchase games on his own that I would not purchase for him. He will not be able to hide the fact that he has the game forever, but he doesn't have to. He just has to hide it long enough to beat the game and sell it back for store credit.
I'm not asking the government to parent my kids for me. I'm not asking the retailers to babysit for me. I do recognize that rearing children is everyone's responsibility because no parent, no matter how good a parent they are, can control everything their kids do without destroying whatever spark of initiative and independence the kids may have been born with. This principle is recognized in other areas. It's illegal to sell alcohol to minors. It's illegal to sell pornography to minors. The only reason it isn't illegal for minors to attend R rated films is because the theaters do a decent job policing themselves.
Retailers don't have the same incentive to self-police that theaters do. It may be that legislation is the only way to provide that incentive. If retailers won't step up and voluntarily enforce the ESRB ratings, I fully support enforcement through legislation. Kids will still get mature games, but they'll have to work a lot harder to do it which gives me a lot more opportunity to catch them.
If Sharepoint isn't meeting your needs for documents, you could look at Domino.doc. They each have some benefits and drawbacks. You don't need to shoehorn documents into your source control system.
This is a hot topic in many companies. At my employer, one of the key areas of concern is the use of spreadsheets for budgeting. Currently spreadsheets are used to forecast the variable expenses for much of the business. The numbers from the spreadsheets are loaded into a data mart and from there into a series of warehouses. Each warehouse contains less detail about more of the business than the one before. A project is in place to replace the spreadsheets with a financial planning application from one of our vendors.
I suspect that this project is doomed to failure. A number of similar efforts using various products were undertaken in the past and all failed. There are many reasons why they all failed and most had nothing to do with the actual product. The biggest reason was that the decentralized system using spreadsheets was far more agile. Centralizing the models eliminated spreadsheet errors but took far too much time to update in response to changes in the business practices and environments. Any spreadsheet error large enough to be noticeable would be caught when it was loaded to the data mart and reviewed. Any error that wasn't that large is immaterial. At the top level, a few million dollars is a rounding issue.
I don't see spreadsheets going away any time soon. The models are complex. The business is rather large. The models need to have a circular relationship with the capacity plans. The models can't account for a certain amount of top down budgeting. These factors render centralization largely an exercise in futility.
The killer app is going to be Excel Web Services in Office 2007. That will provide the accountability and auditability while allowing our analysts to continue using Excel.
What you've described is system architecture. That's an entirely different animal. And it's not computer science. You aren't desinging any of the core components. Your hardware is chosen from a list of supported configurations from one of your approved vendors. Your db products are chosen based on their capability to perform the required tasks. Your OS choice is largely based on the hardware and off the shelf software that is part of your solution. The programming language is selected based on your OS, off the shelf software, and availability of programmers versed in that language within your organization.
The part that may be considered writing business apps is a custom front-end or some of the inevitable bits of glue you have stick between components to get them to work together. I suppose you could lump some of the DB work in there too. The APIs are predefined based on your OS and product choices. Actually having to manage threading in your own code is unlikely. In this type of situation, experience is far more important than theory.
Computers scientists are the guys designing the OS or the DB engines. You're an engineer. You take the stuff the propeller heads come up with and make it do something useful in the real world. Be proud of that.
Using a string constant to hold an encryption key is pretty common among programmers new to encryption. It doesn't occur to them that someone is going to look at the string table and spot the key. A simple way to raise the bar is to construct the key on execution. The key can still be determined but it takes a lot more work.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't expect instant gratification. I've got several level 60 characters. I have 100+ days played. I've done all the quests at least once. I do all my own leveling although I'm starting to get sick of that. If I roll another class, I might just pay someone to level it. I buy gold from time to time. Raiding gets expensive. A lot of guilds bank everything and expect you to grind gold on your own time. I have zero interest in grinding gold. If I'm not raiding, I'd much rather be in a battlefield.
I spend maybe another $15 a month so that I can spend my time in PvP instead of grinding. If I couldn't do that, I'd cancel my account and never look back.
You forget crafting. The comp prices are based entirely on supply and demand. Without the farmers, the price for many of the comps becomes astronomical.
Yeah, well they don't have to worry about any conflict. You have to actually sell some of the PDFs to conflict with the existing base, and at $30 each, that isn't going to happen.
Actually I wouldn't buy the hardcover books at those prices either. I might be tempted to buy the hardcovers at $15-$20. I'd never pay more than $5-$10 for the PDFs.
The only thing I can figure is that either most of these apparent halfwits are actually underage and worried that they won't be able to buy the next GTA game without telling their parents or that not only do they not have kids, they're so far removed from reality that they think it's a good idea that kids be able to buy whatever they want without having to go through their parents.
Unfortunately, I have the strong suspicion that it's the second reason.
Most of the time I think Jack Thompson is an asshat. He's like the guys in the '80s playing records backwards at different speeds trying to find subliminal satanic messages. I was shocked when I caught myself thinking that he'd finally done something right.
Here's a crazy thought. It's already illegal to sell adult-oriented material to minors in any other format. What's special about video games?
I'm getting old. I can tell this because I read posts like yours and the first thing that comes to mind is that you clearly don't have kids. The second thing that comes to mind is that you don't understand the role of government or how enforcing community standards is necessary for society to function.
25 years ago, there were lots of violent video games. Castle Wolfenstein. Airborne Ranger. Dozens of others. Those games cast the player in the role of the hero. It was like Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, only cooler because you weren't pretending a pine cone was a grenade or a stick was a gun. Besides, nobody ever wanted to be the Indian or the Robber.
Now it's fashionable to cast the player in the role of the anti-hero. We've all grown up and found out the real world isn't quite the place we thought it was when we were 12. We're not perfect, so sometimes we like our heroes to have feet of clay. There's nothing wrong with that, but I'm not in a rush to dis-illusion my children. I certainly don't like the idea of my son pretending to be a gangster working his way up the ranks by jacking cars and killing people.
If a game like GTA had existed 25 years ago, most stores would have refused to carry it at all. The possibility of actually selling it to anyone under 18, regardless of the legality, would have never been considered by any employee that wanted to keep their job. There didn't need to be a law because the community was able to enforce it's own standards.
25 years go by, and now stores will sell anything to a minor unless the cash register prompts for ID. Video games that are clearly marked as mature or adults only are sold to minors without a second thought. It actually required legislation to prevent stores from selling firearms to minors.
Communities are much bigger now. There isn't the same sense of belonging. People don't know their neighbors. They don't look out for each other. There are a lot of chuckleheads that don't put any stock in the idea of community standards. This is where government comes in. Whereas 25 years ago any chucklehead that sold adult material to a minor would have been in the unemployment line the next day, now the only effective deterrent is fines or criminal charges.
And the gaming industry lobbies are neither non-existant or bush-league. They're just smart enough to know that that isn't a fight they can win. If they try, they lose. As soon as some chucklehead in the game industry tries to fight this, one question will shut them down completely: "Why are you trying to sell porn to my children?" There is no response to that question. The only way the gaming industry can avoid legislation is by demonstrating their ability to police themselves. They have a pretty poor track record so far.
Bethesda gave him the ability to call fraud. They shipped nudity in Oblivion after failing to disclose that to the ratings board. That made the difference between a T and M rating. The ESRB slapped Bethesda down in an attempt to save face, but the damage had been done.
The Oblivion incident showed that even after the GTA incident the industry had not taken the steps necessary to effectively police themselves. Give the ESRB some teeth instead of fighting it all the time, and maybe people wouldn't feel it necessary to pass these laws.
The problem is that minors can often just walk in to a store and buy an M-rated game. In many areas, stores are not following the ratings because it is not the law.
Yes, because repurchasing the same content in each new format is not only the best way to spend the money I earn, it's also the best way to guarantee that companies will have high profit margins since they won't have to produce any new content.
This is not a macro virus. This is a buffer overflow reading the data file.
Data files shouldn't contain code? What better place to put the code than in the same file as the data it manipulates? A sandbox wouldn't necessarily meet the needs of the business. A sandbox would probably be ok for Word or PowerPoint. Sandboxing Excel macros would be a huge mistake. Some of the most useful and time saving macros in Excel automate the process of gathering data from disparate sources.
It wasn't their sweat. It was the combination of their detergent and the shirt. Not all of the shirts are the same material from the same manufacturer.
A lot of the newer shirts turn purple instead of orange.
Yeah, because I want to watch a documentary on how they made the game instead of playing it. This is such a non-issue. It's not a big deal to switch disks once in a while.
The first amendment doesn't apply. The developer and publisher exercised their free speech by developing and publishing the game. The cashier at the store is not speaking by selling the game. The purchaser is not speaking by buying the game. The first amendment does not guarantee the right of any individual to listen to any speech.
In the US video games are being singled out because rules are already in place for other forms of media. Minors can not buy adult content in other forms, why do you feel they should be allowed to buy it in video games?
No. The ratings board is an attempt to stave off legislation by showing that industry can regulate itself.
Recent events have demonstrated that the industry has not been successful. Developers continue to include content on the shipping media that is not disclosed to the rating board. Retailers do not enforce the ratings given by the board.
The movie industry was only successful at self regulation after the studios forced theaters to comply. We'll see how well it works for video games
Project, Product, Operation, and various other terms have well defined meanings in software development and project management. Since the thread involves software development and project management, lets not muddy the waters by redefining terms inside a car analogy.
A Project is a temporary endeavor to create a unique product or service. Commercial projects can be much easier to manage. When you're paying someone to write a particular feature, they write the feature or you replace them. When you rely on unpaid contributions, you get the features that people want to write instead of the features you need.
Citigroup on the whole is a great place to work. Certain parts of Citigroup are not. IT tends to be one of those parts. The manager already knew who he wanted to hire and was only interviewing other people to avoid complaints.
And for the OP, I'd bet your brother wasn't a Citigroup employee in NY. If he had been, there shouldn't have been any question about his time. If he was working for a third-party providing services for Citigroup, and now would be employed by Citigroup directly, why should his time with the third-party carry over? Sure, it'd be nice, but is it reasonable to expect it?
So far I've never run into a DVD where I couldn't go to the menu to skip any previews. The 30+ second menu intros start to get annoying though.
If the studios make it too hard to get past the previews, it will hurt sales of DVDs. Force me to sit though 20 minutes of previews and commercials to watch a movie on DVD? No. I'd download a rip without previews instead of paying anything for it.
You have it backwards. Traversing a graph is an iterative operation. RDBMSs are designed for set operations. Nested sets are much faster for reading than an adjacency list but are also much slower for updating. In a large, highly active tree, nested sets may not meet performance constraints.
.5 seconds for any node in the database. Selecting the descendants iteratively is faster only in the special case of few descendants and takes anywhere from .25 seconds to 20 seconds.
To put things in perspective, I have a nested set tree with a ragged hierarchy with 50k nodes. Node level security is in place. A worst case insert currently requires 1.5 seconds. Selecting the descendants of a node and filtering against the ACLs requires
The tree is read more often than it is updated so the nested set meets my performance goals in all current cases while adjacency lists do not meet my goals in some cases.
Apache is not the only way to go in the big leagues. As soon as you throw servlets or beans into the mix, you lose that performance advantage. Perl or PHP or Ruby or Python or Zope or any one of a dozen other frameworks may give you better performance than Java but using a RDMS other than MySQL is a crap shoot with most of those.
.NET makes more sense than JSP or EJB.
What you run depends on what you need to do. For some companies
I can be reasonably confident that my 14 year old son is going to have put in some effort to see an R rated film that I haven't approved. I have no such confidence regarding MA rated games. Theaters consistently check ID or refuse entry to those that appear underage. Parental controls on video devices are not easy to bypass. Proper network configuration and logging restrict or at least monitor access via Internet.
My son does chores for his allowance. He mows lawns and does odd jobs in the neighborhood for more money. He can save up enough money in relatively short amount of time to purchase video games on his own. There are a number of stores within easy biking distance where video games can be purchased. Most of the stores are quite willing to sell any video game to anyone with cash in hand.
I encourage a certain amount of independence. I think it's counter-productive to follow a teenager around attempting to control every aspect of their lives. I want my son to be able to think and act for himself. That means that there is opportunity for him to purchase games on his own that I would not purchase for him. He will not be able to hide the fact that he has the game forever, but he doesn't have to. He just has to hide it long enough to beat the game and sell it back for store credit.
I'm not asking the government to parent my kids for me. I'm not asking the retailers to babysit for me. I do recognize that rearing children is everyone's responsibility because no parent, no matter how good a parent they are, can control everything their kids do without destroying whatever spark of initiative and independence the kids may have been born with. This principle is recognized in other areas. It's illegal to sell alcohol to minors. It's illegal to sell pornography to minors. The only reason it isn't illegal for minors to attend R rated films is because the theaters do a decent job policing themselves.
Retailers don't have the same incentive to self-police that theaters do. It may be that legislation is the only way to provide that incentive. If retailers won't step up and voluntarily enforce the ESRB ratings, I fully support enforcement through legislation. Kids will still get mature games, but they'll have to work a lot harder to do it which gives me a lot more opportunity to catch them.
If Sharepoint isn't meeting your needs for documents, you could look at Domino.doc. They each have some benefits and drawbacks. You don't need to shoehorn documents into your source control system.
This is a hot topic in many companies. At my employer, one of the key areas of concern is the use of spreadsheets for budgeting. Currently spreadsheets are used to forecast the variable expenses for much of the business. The numbers from the spreadsheets are loaded into a data mart and from there into a series of warehouses. Each warehouse contains less detail about more of the business than the one before. A project is in place to replace the spreadsheets with a financial planning application from one of our vendors.
I suspect that this project is doomed to failure. A number of similar efforts using various products were undertaken in the past and all failed. There are many reasons why they all failed and most had nothing to do with the actual product. The biggest reason was that the decentralized system using spreadsheets was far more agile. Centralizing the models eliminated spreadsheet errors but took far too much time to update in response to changes in the business practices and environments. Any spreadsheet error large enough to be noticeable would be caught when it was loaded to the data mart and reviewed. Any error that wasn't that large is immaterial. At the top level, a few million dollars is a rounding issue.
I don't see spreadsheets going away any time soon. The models are complex. The business is rather large. The models need to have a circular relationship with the capacity plans. The models can't account for a certain amount of top down budgeting. These factors render centralization largely an exercise in futility.
The killer app is going to be Excel Web Services in Office 2007. That will provide the accountability and auditability while allowing our analysts to continue using Excel.
You assume that there won't be code to crash the debugger. That's becoming part of the standard virus toolkit.
What you've described is system architecture. That's an entirely different animal. And it's not computer science. You aren't desinging any of the core components. Your hardware is chosen from a list of supported configurations from one of your approved vendors. Your db products are chosen based on their capability to perform the required tasks. Your OS choice is largely based on the hardware and off the shelf software that is part of your solution. The programming language is selected based on your OS, off the shelf software, and availability of programmers versed in that language within your organization.
The part that may be considered writing business apps is a custom front-end or some of the inevitable bits of glue you have stick between components to get them to work together. I suppose you could lump some of the DB work in there too. The APIs are predefined based on your OS and product choices. Actually having to manage threading in your own code is unlikely. In this type of situation, experience is far more important than theory.
Computers scientists are the guys designing the OS or the DB engines. You're an engineer. You take the stuff the propeller heads come up with and make it do something useful in the real world. Be proud of that.
Using a string constant to hold an encryption key is pretty common among programmers new to encryption. It doesn't occur to them that someone is going to look at the string table and spot the key. A simple way to raise the bar is to construct the key on execution. The key can still be determined but it takes a lot more work.