PostgresSQL has actually improved a lot, but the pricey overhead for new connections makes it unsuitable for client-server environments.
Why aren't you pooling your DB handles? The 90's are over, Shoeboy...
And speaking of Postgres, are you running it on MS or a un*x? Many open-source projects make unix assumptions, ie, that fork is a lightweight operation -- that could be the case here.
And if you're doing something besides an index search on a large table, stop.
Maybe. Are you using a rule- or cost-based query planner? Does the DB have sufficient table analysis for accurate guesses? You need to answer both those questions if you hope to get excellent performance -- blindly indexing everything is just a bad, bad call.
Actually, having a record company id is redundant data. Using the name as the primary key is the proper method. ID's are actually non-relational.
I'm heartily agreeing with you on this count. Particularly with Oracle8, varchar keys can be near as fast as integer keys. And if you can't stomach that (lots of people can't), the next best solution would be mapping tables.
I personally recommend Microsoft SQL server for this sort of application. It's simple, fast, full featured, highly tunable, quite stable (versions 7.0 and above, 6.5 and below is a stability nightmare)
In general, you shouldn't have to worry about DB stability *AT ALL*. If you want to worry about deadlocks, sure, be my guest, use MSSQL/Sybase, but no matter your choice, stability should be primary. The DB needs to stay up for indefinite periods of time; serve data to all comers, and keep it consistent. Your userinfo page testifies to your skill as a DBA; I don't see why you would settle for 'quite'.
I think slashdots problems are more related to mySQL's locking mechanisms. I have to deal with this sort of thing myself. IMHO, if you have an online database at all, you should completely separate the "read" database from the "update" database. In other words/. should have all the comments posted to another database and implement a once-per-minute table swap with the table used to display comments.
That just sounds like rewriting MVCC in the app. I'll stick with Oracle & Postgres - readers don't wait for writers, nor writers for readers. In case you aren't familiar with the concept; the idea is that clients read from versioned copies of the tables; a select that starts at 12:00:00 and finishes at 12:01:00 doesn't see a row update at 12:00:30. Conflicting updates take row locks. Writing your own version of this sounds like a fun way to get inconsistent reads. Why write the code that your DB vendor should have written for you?
This entire issue is news to me. Could you refer me to some more extensive docs? I haven't seen choppy audio & mouse on my linux machines; not since 1.4 when I started. Moreover, why would these 2 devices block on IDE??
I don't have much to go on here...could you give the background to your arguments??
Anyways, if there's one thing you should probably get from XP it's an agressive mentality when programming.
I tried punching co-workers who held back design specs, but that didn't go over so well. Then I told the architect that she could review my schema, "but first she must defeat me in hand-to-hand combat." That didn't go over too well either; moreover, I'm treading the edge of a sexual harrassment lawsuit for that one.
After deciding to back off physical agression for my programming, I channelled my XP agression into non-physical approaches; soon after, one of our directors resigned after "experiencing" a code review I coordinated - he said something about 'the breadth and extent of my profanity offended his religious beliefs in a very deep way'; which is funny, because I'm sure he was agnostic before the meeting... On the other hand, marketing gave me an award for the meeting, calling me "an inspiration for glibness" and thanked me for the (sizeable) additions to their dictionaries.
Things looked good until I made our largest client break down in tears while reviewing case studies over the phone. Meanwhile, the BOFH, the only person with the will and ability to Pair Program with me, is moving on since he feels that my new attitude is infringing on his "turf". They keep "random" drug testing me, under the assumption that my XP energy has an... illicit chemical component, but I'm clean.
With my XP Energy &tm, my productivity, and thus worth to the company, has skyrocketed; meanwhile, so has my company's liability. Things look tense. Could you recommend my next course of action??
What was ground-breaking was showing that people who weren't ignorant downplayed their skills; they "knew what they didn't know."
I really can't understand how it is that you find that ground-breaking.
He makes the flawed assumption that college graduates make a better effort to continuously hone their skills than non-graduates - a claim with little to no evidence, at least none that he has shown.
Your fetish for the degree doesn't make the degree valid! We are trying to prove what qualifies a skilled programmer, who works well on teams and writes stable & maintainable code. Can you prove that CS graduates do this better?!?!
It's a hoop to jump through; a painful, stupid hoop sometimes, but a hoop nonetheless. Get a science or engineering degree from a top-tier school and it says that, at the very least, you know how to work and to think. Skip that process and pretend that it doesn't have any value and it says volumes about you.
It says them to you. I reserve my own judgement until more evidence is in. You define your own hoops.
Now listen. I loved college. I don't begrude the years that I spent there(I went BS Physics). But the outside world is much more complex, and we spend much more time in it than we did in school. Very rapidly, your flock of well-trained graduates discern themselves, and knowing how to learn, rather than what you are taught in uni, is orders of magnitude more important. I have found no way to determine which people working with me are the tinkers, and which are not, solely by their education, much less the tier of their school. How is it you can divine so well people's fates and skills by this small data point??
I trust in top-tier universities to separate wheat from the chaff because I don't know of any other process which is a better way to judge someone just starting out. Can you name one, or do your skills only lend themselves to criticism?
I don't know, what are your hiring needs? How do you find people? What kind of word-of-mouth and reference checks can you do on them? What kind of code testing do you do? Do you mentor beginning employees?
In re: to your other question, I have other skills, but the "Daddy paid for Yale, why can't everyone else do the same" attitude really annoys me.
I still have a standing offer: will anyone have an architect without a degree design a house they would then live in?
Wright's houses are known for problems like, oh, serious leaking roofs. As an architect, he made a great self-promoter.
Flat roofs always have leakage problems. Comes with the territory. Still, Wright gave some of the more...vivid architectural imagery of his time.
I know about Carmack's game work, but I've never seen his code. I don't do game programming, but the little I do know of game programming indicates that well-ordered, maintainable code isn't a high priority--fast running, fast-completed code is. Most game codebases have about a 6 month life span, with no significant updates. In-house commercial software will last for 30 years, with constant updates. How would Carmack do in this environment? I dunno, and since he's stinking rich and happy from working on games, we'll never find out.
Well, since he open-sourced Quake, you could scurry off and find out....
Moreover, Quake appears on 4-5 platforms (Win,Mac,Linux x86,Dreamcast, [PS2?]). That level of portability doesn't come accidentally; moreover, you think snarled code is fast - sometimes it is, but more frequently it's crap. Your 6-month timeline seems a little short, too. A successful engine is licensed out for the next 12 to 18 months; surely there is some support there, and some of the code, and at a minimum the lessons learned thereof, carry over onto the next one...
I believe he's referencing a paper whose subject was "Incompetent people fail to understand that they are incompetent, thus overestimate their skills." Hardly ground-breaking research.
Frankly, I think the previous poster sounds like so many others - a man in state of full cognitive surrender in the face of rampaging hordes of ineptitudes, trusting in universities to seperate the chaff for him. He makes the flawed assumption that college graduates make a better effort to continuously hone their skills than non-graduates - a claim with little to no evidence, at least none that he has shown.
We're still learning how materials act in space over long duration, and that strikes out things you might normally use. [Silver-plated wire, for instance, is a big no-no, but you wouldn't know that unless it was documented.
Why is silver-plated wire a big no-no?
Tell that to the guys who worked on Apollo, eh? They had an unrealistic deadline and met it with four months and eleven days to spare.
Does anyone know Andre's native tongue? His answers, although totally comprehensible to me (it's the coffee), did some..... interesting things with English grammar.
that would say this is a complete travesty of justice. Certain parts of a company shouldn't be deemed 'off limits'.
The FTC is calling this a win b/c of the underlying principle - that one company acquired a property under certain conditions, and another company seeks to take the property and be freed of said conditions -- this is a recipe for front companies, fraud, corporate deception of the worst kind. The FTC is enforcing regs ensuring basic levels of corporate honesty.
In the larger sense, parts of a company can be declared 'off limits' in the same way that certain actions can be declared 'off limits' (eg, selling crack, monopoly, dangerous working conditions). Our legal precedents define regulations-to-protect-the-citizens to constrain the pure capitalist anarchy that makes living in the US such an interesting place. Please try to remember that.
North Carolinians (Carolingians?) can sleep relatively easy though: according to the article, when a pair of hydrogren bombs went down with the plane which was carrying them, "Safety mechanisms designed to prevent unintended or unauthorized detonation served their function, and a historic nuclear catastrophe was averted. But published sources disagree on how close the people of Wayne County came to suffering fiery annihilation." Please don't retrieve this, anyone.
I would retrieve this for bragging right alone.
In seriousness, what's with the fear mongering on/. these days? To be fully specific just to this story, let me point this out: nukes are not easy to blow. They aren't contact explosives! If you drop an unarmed H-bomb on the ground, it doesn't default to "kaboom!" - there are more components in the bomb than just tritium, and their path to lowest chemical rest energy is *not* "configure into the peculiar grouping necessary for high-yield nuclear chain reaction"!
I mean, we didn't send our best physicists to Los Alamos for 2 years because this stuff is easy!! I mean, sure, nowadays anyone with some high-grade plutonium can threaten "the free world", but that's not because accidental explosion is a high risk. To couch it in simpler terms, if you find yourself in a room with a nuclear explosive, shaking it will not gaurantee its detonation, no matter what Hollywood told you.
"The color matches and the text is where is should be"
First I thought you were talking about Word, b/c of your printing comment. I find the MS tools never render sensibly onto a page - I have to spend a few hours hassling it to format correctly. The few times I actually care about how a page prints, I don't dick around with this consumer shit, I go right to the temple of Kunth - TeX. Like you said, better tools.
Then I read the rest, and saw you were wrong about other things:
"Show me the nicest GIMP art, compared with work done in PSP or Photoshop"
I don't have to - it's all over the web. Photoshop was optimal for working with from-camera media; GIMP is optimal for working with pure-digital media, particularly media that will be delivered via screen, eg, the web. So the GIMP already is a better tool when working on the web; I find Photoshop to be a hinderance in these cases.
"Compare a web page produced in flash or dreamweaver, to one created with jed."
Ok, the one created in jed actually renders on non-MS browsers. Honestly, what the fuck are you smoking here? HTML-makers have always spat out horrible HTML; browser vendors have had to work around the "versions" of HTML spewing out of your favorite tools. Furthermore, how often are these pages actually finalized? On my planet, as soon as the designers spit out those tarted-up pages, the developers rip them into template chunks; actual, viewed, pages are generated by scripts. And anything that isn't valid HTML will be choked on....
I agree that some of the later challenges (eg, Golomb rulers) are too esoteric, and that maybe some people will grow out of distributed.net entirely; also that it must be hard to attract new users from the larger body of non-technical people. (the early user body was heavily geek - I remember setting up the RC5 client (nice'd to 20) on 200 linux boxes I had domain over)
But I think you are ruling with "what I think is interesting" onto "what everyone else thinks is interesting". I used to work in a RNA structure analysis lab; I know protein folding is important and difficult but I just can't care. Some people are pure math - apparently you are not; why can't we chalk up unjoinable differences?
They're going to lose their users very quickly unless they re-tool and start doing real work with those cycles.
Assuming, of course, that all those users think just like you.
Let's think here -- all those users joined (without your input) to break encryption algorithms. Why would they suddenly leave in droves because you don't think of that as "real work"?
Please, leave your ego at the door and post again.
and what happens if the magnetic confinement of the plasma inside the TOKAMAK fails?
A large quantity of very hot plasma escapes, cools with an inverse cube relation to the increase in volume, turns into very hot gas; still expands, cools, and if nothing in the room catches fire (from being in the arc of hot plasma); then you will have a group of pissed off Tokamak operators speaking in high, helium voices for a little while.
Stashing something for 10,000 years?? Abandoned salt mines works for me! A half-mile under the earth is pretty fucking far out of sight. In advertently finding it 5000 years later? If we find it later, and society has continued to progress, we'll know what to do with it. If some post-apocalype humans find it, they'll be exposed to a somewhat higher rad count than your normal coal miners - they'll have to relearn the risks of radiation, but it won't be inadvertent, since they have to mine down there. So hopefully they'll be far enough along to deal with it.
I agree with you that to a user, OS crashes and app crashes aren't very distinguishable. As for X, you should use ctrl-alt-bksp to dump the X server and go back to the command line - I have to use it all the time when WindowMaker crashes on me. But I take issue with:
When running Linux instead of windows however you run the risk of doing quite a bit of damage to the file system
during a reset.
I've been doing work with both OS's for 5 years now, and I've never had an ext2 filesystem problem so bad fsck couldn't fix it. Obviously, head crashes don't count. Windows, on the other hand, has required quite a few reinstalls for corrupted fs - and I wonder if the MS tools even find all the problems, considering the bit-rot I see on my windows box (I'm probably just paranoid).
In summary, Windows can still corrupt a filesystem, does a pretty poor job of keeping it consistent even when it's running, and doesn't offer the caching and lazy writes of ext2. How is that a good thing?
Bug free except that they deleted all the accounts!!
Oh the humanity!! I had a dozen planets, a few billion (trillion? anyway, a bunch of zeros) socked away; a missile array so big the Vorlons would notice me again -- GONE!
boohoohoo
I tell you, it's the perfect analogy to door games - you play for a while, beat all your roommates, and then the BBS Op moves or his mom shuts him down or something. Total system failure -- now there's nostalgia.
Slashdot Mirror
And speaking of Postgres, are you running it on MS or a un*x? Many open-source projects make unix assumptions, ie, that fork is a lightweight operation -- that could be the case here. Maybe. Are you using a rule- or cost-based query planner? Does the DB have sufficient table analysis for accurate guesses? You need to answer both those questions if you hope to get excellent performance -- blindly indexing everything is just a bad, bad call. I'm heartily agreeing with you on this count. Particularly with Oracle8, varchar keys can be near as fast as integer keys. And if you can't stomach that (lots of people can't), the next best solution would be mapping tables. In general, you shouldn't have to worry about DB stability *AT ALL*. If you want to worry about deadlocks, sure, be my guest, use MSSQL/Sybase, but no matter your choice, stability should be primary. The DB needs to stay up for indefinite periods of time; serve data to all comers, and keep it consistent. Your userinfo page testifies to your skill as a DBA; I don't see why you would settle for 'quite'.
But I'd rather not see *anyone* trying to conceive in my local market. Just not what I'm there for.
I don't have much to go on here...could you give the background to your arguments??
good eatin', too.
After deciding to back off physical agression for my programming, I channelled my XP agression into non-physical approaches; soon after, one of our directors resigned after "experiencing" a code review I coordinated - he said something about 'the breadth and extent of my profanity offended his religious beliefs in a very deep way'; which is funny, because I'm sure he was agnostic before the meeting... On the other hand, marketing gave me an award for the meeting, calling me "an inspiration for glibness" and thanked me for the (sizeable) additions to their dictionaries.
Things looked good until I made our largest client break down in tears while reviewing case studies over the phone. Meanwhile, the BOFH, the only person with the will and ability to Pair Program with me, is moving on since he feels that my new attitude is infringing on his "turf". They keep "random" drug testing me, under the assumption that my XP energy has an ... illicit chemical component, but I'm clean.
With my XP Energy &tm, my productivity, and thus worth to the company, has skyrocketed; meanwhile, so has my company's liability. Things look tense. Could you recommend my next course of action??
Your fetish for the degree doesn't make the degree valid! We are trying to prove what qualifies a skilled programmer, who works well on teams and writes stable & maintainable code. Can you prove that CS graduates do this better?!?!
It says them to you. I reserve my own judgement until more evidence is in. You define your own hoops.Now listen. I loved college. I don't begrude the years that I spent there(I went BS Physics). But the outside world is much more complex, and we spend much more time in it than we did in school. Very rapidly, your flock of well-trained graduates discern themselves, and knowing how to learn, rather than what you are taught in uni, is orders of magnitude more important. I have found no way to determine which people working with me are the tinkers, and which are not, solely by their education, much less the tier of their school. How is it you can divine so well people's fates and skills by this small data point??
I don't know, what are your hiring needs? How do you find people? What kind of word-of-mouth and reference checks can you do on them? What kind of code testing do you do? Do you mentor beginning employees?In re: to your other question, I have other skills, but the "Daddy paid for Yale, why can't everyone else do the same" attitude really annoys me.
Sure. Are you buying??Moreover, Quake appears on 4-5 platforms (Win,Mac,Linux x86,Dreamcast, [PS2?]). That level of portability doesn't come accidentally; moreover, you think snarled code is fast - sometimes it is, but more frequently it's crap. Your 6-month timeline seems a little short, too. A successful engine is licensed out for the next 12 to 18 months; surely there is some support there, and some of the code, and at a minimum the lessons learned thereof, carry over onto the next one...
Frankly, I think the previous poster sounds like so many others - a man in state of full cognitive surrender in the face of rampaging hordes of ineptitudes, trusting in universities to seperate the chaff for him. He makes the flawed assumption that college graduates make a better effort to continuously hone their skills than non-graduates - a claim with little to no evidence, at least none that he has shown.
At the risk of being called a liar, I can also back this up - I've seen his boot screens, and the only thing they don't do is say "Hello, Lain".
Does anyone know Andre's native tongue? His answers, although totally comprehensible to me (it's the coffee), did some ..... interesting things with English grammar.
In the larger sense, parts of a company can be declared 'off limits' in the same way that certain actions can be declared 'off limits' (eg, selling crack, monopoly, dangerous working conditions). Our legal precedents define regulations-to-protect-the-citizens to constrain the pure capitalist anarchy that makes living in the US such an interesting place. Please try to remember that.
In seriousness, what's with the fear mongering on /. these days? To be fully specific just to this story, let me point this out: nukes are not easy to blow. They aren't contact explosives! If you drop an unarmed H-bomb on the ground, it doesn't default to "kaboom!" - there are more components in the bomb than just tritium, and their path to lowest chemical rest energy is *not* "configure into the peculiar grouping necessary for high-yield nuclear chain reaction"!
I mean, we didn't send our best physicists to Los Alamos for 2 years because this stuff is easy!! I mean, sure, nowadays anyone with some high-grade plutonium can threaten "the free world", but that's not because accidental explosion is a high risk. To couch it in simpler terms, if you find yourself in a room with a nuclear explosive, shaking it will not gaurantee its detonation, no matter what Hollywood told you.
Then I read the rest, and saw you were wrong about other things:
I don't have to - it's all over the web. Photoshop was optimal for working with from-camera media; GIMP is optimal for working with pure-digital media, particularly media that will be delivered via screen, eg, the web. So the GIMP already is a better tool when working on the web; I find Photoshop to be a hinderance in these cases. Ok, the one created in jed actually renders on non-MS browsers. Honestly, what the fuck are you smoking here? HTML-makers have always spat out horrible HTML; browser vendors have had to work around the "versions" of HTML spewing out of your favorite tools. Furthermore, how often are these pages actually finalized? On my planet, as soon as the designers spit out those tarted-up pages, the developers rip them into template chunks; actual, viewed, pages are generated by scripts. And anything that isn't valid HTML will be choked on....But I think you are ruling with "what I think is interesting" onto "what everyone else thinks is interesting". I used to work in a RNA structure analysis lab; I know protein folding is important and difficult but I just can't care. Some people are pure math - apparently you are not; why can't we chalk up unjoinable differences?
Let's think here -- all those users joined (without your input) to break encryption algorithms. Why would they suddenly leave in droves because you don't think of that as "real work"?
Please, leave your ego at the door and post again.
Well graduate, godammit!
Is this Mike Jackson? Or Willie?
Alice: "It's not the magic eye, doofus."
Stashing something for 10,000 years?? Abandoned salt mines works for me! A half-mile under the earth is pretty fucking far out of sight. In advertently finding it 5000 years later? If we find it later, and society has continued to progress, we'll know what to do with it. If some post-apocalype humans find it, they'll be exposed to a somewhat higher rad count than your normal coal miners - they'll have to relearn the risks of radiation, but it won't be inadvertent, since they have to mine down there. So hopefully they'll be far enough along to deal with it.
In summary, Windows can still corrupt a filesystem, does a pretty poor job of keeping it consistent even when it's running, and doesn't offer the caching and lazy writes of ext2. How is that a good thing?
It'll take 5 minutes. Register!
LISP isn't auto-obfuscated, you just hate parentheses.
Oh the humanity!! I had a dozen planets, a few billion (trillion? anyway, a bunch of zeros) socked away; a missile array so big the Vorlons would notice me again -- GONE!
boohoohoo
I tell you, it's the perfect analogy to door games - you play for a while, beat all your roommates, and then the BBS Op moves or his mom shuts him down or something. Total system failure -- now there's nostalgia.