I picked it up on a whim while shopping for managed DirectX books at borders the other day after picking it up (literally) and reading though a few of the essays. This one's full of not only good observations about software development, BUT also has several good articles about geeks in businesss, and how they interact with the dreaded non-technical management types.
This is worth the money just to pick up and have someone rationally present alterantive viewpoints. For instance, I would LOVE to have a company adopt the no-bonuses policy coupled with salary advancements and promotion as an alternative. In every company I have ever worked for, bonuses have caused huge amounts of turmoil and I agree with the premise that everyone would be happier (and more creative) without the kind of intellectual sword of damacles a late or missing promised bonus program can cause in an IT shop. I watched a Peoplesoft shop come very close to falling apart after management decided not to pay promised bonuses one year, and I think that while this is in every way a problem of management, I agree with the essay's author that fault or not the whole process becomes a huge demotivator in place of an intentioned boost.
Again, the above is just one example from one essay in this volume. Agree or disagree with the points of view contained in the book, but the act of thinking about the problems that are presented here are going to happen along the course of most projects anyway, and I like to take things head-on.
I understand most of the articles are available online, but I this is one technical book that is actually fireside readable (IMHO) so I picked up the dead tree edition.
Highly recommended to IT folk
-chitlenz
Re:Wow, look at all the MS haters ...
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Effective C#
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· Score: 1
I agree with you on the database nullref problem, but I mean the hack works, and all languages have problems as they grow. The big problem I have with Java is performance, at least from our perspective. That and we need control of the 3D hardware to render reconstructions (as in, your heart), and working through the Java OpenGL interface really wasn't an option.
I admit to having fairly ignored Java, after dealing with Sun for several years, and being fed up with having it rammed down my throat by both them and Oracle. I mean, I understand what you are saying in that there are better tools for Java, etc, at the moment, but we are a small enough company that we are having to plan years out to make sure we can support our framework with a minimum amount of people, and that means choosing as close to a single platform as we can (which is why we compromised on C# from c++). As it is, I rebuilt one of our apps, a fairly compilcated DICOM port server, into VS2005 from VS2003 and it worked right off, even with several older components included. That's the kind of ease of translation small companies need to suceed (and prosper).
-chitlenz
Re:Wow, look at all the MS haters ...
on
Effective C#
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· Score: 1
1)C# is ANSI standard, if MS decides to close THEIR part of the standard off and make it proprietary (read j#) I'd have to make that decision then, but I'm confident that with Novell's backing, mono is going to keep ANSI c# with at least the 1.1 runtime ports working fine for the forseeable future. Out of all this take away, my application works today on 2 platforms, if MS wants to change something in the future, I can choose to go forward with them or choose to stay where I am.
2) Mono is NOT smoke and mirrors, it works. And the good third party compilers check windows builds for mono compliance if you install it (mono for windows).
3) I dunno what you're talking about size limits. We have no issues to date with builds of 350k per dll. I haven't messed with VB for 10 years or so, so no comment on its performance.
--chitlenz
Re:Wow, look at all the MS haters ...
on
Effective C#
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There were several poorly implemented replication features that more seamlessly worked within.NET for whatever reason. Things have gotten much simpler overall to get the actual applciation to more easily do what what you want it to do. The c++ rewrite had a much longer lead time, we actually knew this since we did start into a rewrite of 2 of our 8 applcaitions (at the time). It's not a question of incompetence, its a question of shortcuts, and.NET has LOTS of them, with 3rd parties adding lots more.
-chitlenz
Wow, look at all the MS haters ...
on
Effective C#
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· Score: 4, Interesting
C# is a GREAT language, this is coming from a long history in Oracle/Unix/Linux. I don't understand where people got the idea that it won't work on Linux either. We're coding 3-monitor full screen 3d MRI analysis applications in it, and I can assure you that it has accelerated our developement time over the last iteration created with Borland C++ Builder. Ironically, it took 8 years to write the last version of our software in Builder, and 6 months to completely rewrite it with enhancements in c#. That, consequently, was with both the lead developers having no experience with the language (I was a C++ folk, and he'd been using Delphi, so we settled on C# since it was essentially the next evolution of Delphi).
It's no joke, and I'll be buying this book just to have it. I've also picked up most of the Deitel series of books on c#, and of course the O'reilly books. The c# cookbook is another GREAT reference. Anyone interested in starting with C# should check www.codeproject.com for examples. Also, along with a rude admonishment to the MS haters for not having researched the topic (MS dependant indeed), check www.omnicore.com for a native crossplatform compiler for c#. It's cheap too, but doesn't do forms support just yet (when it does, I'll probably move from VS just to get free cross-platform compatability).
Yeah this is I believe a relatively new thing for them. We were stuck in 7.52 at the time, with no upgrade path in sight due to legal issues, a problem I might add that is very common in implementations.
Even so, unless I'm mistaken , OTB tools are similar to Data Mover which used to hardcore suck, I don't know about now.
Our problem was one of replicating subsets of a large dataset that were not necessarily single tables, and the target was not a Peoplesoft install either (in other words, PS -> remote data warehouse project), so it probably wouldn't have applied anyway.
Whew, that's a lot of ground to cover, but here goes...
C# fits the bill for the strongly typed functions you mentioned, and there are a LOT of code shortcuts you can make via canned components. These typically come inline with whatever your particular standards commitee has set forth as the mean, and there are many competent component vendors for.NET that can cut literally years out of your dev cycle.
Almost all the good databases do replication well today, with a side note that this is a seriously underused function of the databases themselves.
I think any of the modern database architectures can deal with 64-bit definitions, and oracle should allow for strong typing via pl/sql. This approach may require 64-bit native versions of Oracle though, which may or may not exist for your target platform in some current version (is 10g for amd64 out yet?). Since the backend can inherently handle the extended primitive sizing (I'm pretty sure here), and since these primtives can be 'compiled' into pl/sql packages within the Oracle framework to give them some sense of propriety, that'd be the direction I'd choose. Probably on AMD64.
Odds are pretty good you can just use SQLNET for transport. It's pretty much hella fast, so I've never bothered overcomplicating the network layer in my app design. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SQLNET can indeed probably understand type translation natively. Thus your 32 bit development box under your desk should have no problem establishing a trust relationship with a 64 bit solaris box or whatever, and to allow that node to exchange data seamlessly.
The network tie-ins are an interesting point. I've never been a huge fan of branching too far away from strict IP based network topologies, but granted I don't manage 10k machines either. SQL Server definitely directly integrates with AD, not sure about Novell. Oracle definitely integrates with Novell, not sure about MS =) probably MS too tho, at least on their Oracle for windows servers.
The statistical analysis functions of your design area classic case for the Data Warehouse. The good news is you can probably make that kind of high-order math function work in any of the current backend vendors, and something like Cognos can help you make great strides quickly (or SAS, etc.). I find that it's important to remember that the simple way is usually the best way in these cases, that is, if you are not in the commerical software business and you have the money for it, there's lots of good packages for sale. The more interesting alternate re: your project (to me) would be to just sit down with pl/sql and write it heh. But then, I code, so I tend to see code based solutions as the end with the most clarity (and the added benefit, ESPECIALLY in math functions, that everyone has to crosscheck each other's code when you write it, and you can by result usually minimize errors and other logic trainwrecks). In math fields, precision is king, and who do ya love baybee if it ain't you?
A last note, post architecture, is that ANY product is only as good as the DBA tuning and designing it. That , in a nutshell, is why most projects fail. I pose that hardware performance needs are equal to the skill of the people tuning your system, so the better the people the cheaper the hardware (not an original idea, but one with truth). Warning, this is NOT a bad thing. In fact, in many companies, bad DBAs become good dbas over time as they learn the system. Each system is an individual entity, and as entities, a good DBA becomes familiar with the inner workings of his/her charge. There's no such thing as overkill here, there's only having enough, or not having enough capacity as well. Beg borrow or steal the best gear you can, set a sunset target of 5 years if you can. Eventually, if the whole thing's a fiasco, someone's going to need that extra capacity to work in, and if it all goes perfectly you get... well 5 damn years of uptime heh. Trust m
Re:A difference between "DBA" and "clown"
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The Future of Databases
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· Score: 3, Informative
I live in the middle. Im a DBA Architect, which means I both design and build the databases our company uses. Add to that, we're a small company, and we design very specialized software in a way that not many people can do so I also wear the hat of C# coder. I understand both sides of this fence, and have actually been in the odd position of fighting for both points of view. A good DBA is responsible for all of the flexible information that makes a modern corp. run. Think about that. All the paper, all the reports, your payroll, everything worth owning informationwise within a company is in a database somewhere. HELL YES these guys live at corporate hq. That said, in a healthy company, the DBAs and devs are able to debate rather than fight. One particularly obstinate Peoplesoft lead dev in my past and I have become very good friends over the years through this kind of argument, so its not all bad =)
My sympathy, however, does indeed go out to the poor devs who get stuck with some tool that doesn't really understand, or even want to understand, his position as an admin. Too many people slipped into the field with dollars in their eyes in the 90s, and it's led to some truly spectacular screwups. Essentailly, in my mind, almost every single failed ERP implementation could and should be blamed on insufficient database administration, and there are LOTS of flameouts there.
The upside... hehe maybe.. is that corporate scrutiny of their IT staff is at an all time high! So if they really suck that bad, their days are probably numbered.
Regarding materialized views, I think the biggest problem I have with them is the annoyance of persitant errosion of performance. These cost. A LOT. And the more you add, the more it costs, especially if the tables are ERP-sized. Just for a frame of reference here, I will presume that you are dealing with very large sets of data to be getting those kinds of performance gains from this, lets say 100M rows. The MVIEW, if it's not a one off, is going to cycle every time the parent table(s) are modified or addressed to build that subset. Yes, it can be timed, but again the idea is one of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again, we are dealing with very large datasets here and every one of those is typically an individual entity with its own particular quirks, but in tests with Peoplesoft a few years ago in 9i, we noticed that you will indeed take a hit if you let these get out of control in population. To add to this, the entire concept of MVIEWS kind of defies data normalization rules by duplicating data in the first place, since an MVIEW is of course a physical entity.
To reverse all that tho, these were discussions for a time when databases needed to be tuned at very granular levels because hardware was very expensive, and today it simply isn't. I will stand by the argument that materialized views are an unnecessary evil that can, today, be avoided by buying better hardware, for the most part.
Moore's law is not a law, its more of a shamanistic prophecy, but I did your example load of 500M+ rows per day on Sunfire v880 machines for 5 years using regular generic StoreEdge racks, with subsecond respose times to 250 users (OLTP). Most problems with ANY query can be tuned with either A) better code or B) better indexes. Hardware is a last resort in a way, but we already think of it as almost a disposable commodity. I'm about to implement 2 6TB plus installations running single Sun 40z database servers with attached Netapp storage containers. Building a simple resultset of any size is becoming very trivial on this kind of modern hardware, and will be the death of shortcuts before long.
Clusters is a whole topic unto itself, but RAC and Grid architectures are actually both more stable and more progresssive on Oracle than DB2 atm. The entrire idea is becoming more of a sit anywhere and select like it's local phenomenon, where the 'network' of databases are all aware of each other and know how to automatically retrieve pertinent data from wherever it lives and make it all seem like it just magically happened. Clusters are all about redundancy and processing power, but once machine power hits critical mass (I think it's soon) and each node is capable of huge amounts of stable processing, the next step is to stop storing so much redundant trash and just have each piece of data live one place. This is Oracle's Grid.
SQL makes sense from a DBA Developer point of view, I mean that's kind of the best way I can explain it. It's kind of like how C++ is immediately attunable to some ppl, while say VB is not, etc. I think in as lot of ways it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy in that pro-DBAs I think tend to think of their "flock" of tables in terms of SQL based transactions at this point. Remember that SQL was intended to offset COBOL functions, and that all of the weird crap from there had to be carried over...
Regarding Resier, I would pose that a filesystem is not truly organized in a way that makes sense from a data point of view. That is, reiser is using a database ideology, albeit an internal one, to organize what are typically very small sets of data. Remember that the concept of relational databases dates to the early 1970s (I think Codd was early 70s?), and that a lot of different 'better ways' have been tried. A good question to example this is, ok resier can organize a million files on disk, but what about 50 trillion? How fast does it search through them then? Does the 'dancing tree' model still hold up under load? From 10,000 simultaneous users? All this said, Reiser IS actually a killer choice for organizing datafiles used by a database, I've actually implemented several Oracle installs on linux/reiser to much success =)
On a future note, I DO think that Oracle in particualr is making strides towards a kind of Database Appliance type thing, where the DB and OS are the same thing. They had a project with Sun a few years ago called like Heavy Iron or Big Iron or somesuch PR BS name that basically was the idea of selling a database/OS hybrid that installed pretuned on Sun gear. That is the future of databases right there. And Ellison knows it, which is why Oracle is so gung-ho for Linux lately. In a serious environment, noone would really consider a database server to perform any other services other than those related directly to database functions, so its about time someone over at Oracle woke up and released an Oracle/Linux pre-tuned and optimized Distribution.
Object Programmable reflects the idea that we will (someday OMG) eventually be able to easily (and that's the key there) extend the actual cores of the databases themselves to accomodate extraneous OS level functions. It would be really nice, too, if this model actual compiled this time, unlike stored procedures in their early day (where they were basically a JIT script language, and in lots of systems like SQL Server still are). A good for instance here is, I'm both a programmer and a DBA. My particular field is medical visualization for Radiology, so essentially I have to organize huge sets of patient data in a way that I can do things like, well, volumetrically render your skull to see if you have a lesion, etc. Today, I have to pull this to the workstation, organize the dataset, and render the scene from the dataset onto the stage. Because of the flowing nature of our data (that is to say, this isn't like a game where you can pre-cache models on the local workstations since every patient is a different model), I would like a way to tie direct3d to a pre-render engine at the database layer so that all I would have to provide to a client like a web page is the end product. I'm working with MS SQL atm, so I'll use it as an example, a typical MRI image of your chest comes out of a scanner in some stupidly high resolution. That scan typically contains voxel data which is defines by the mm thickness of the slice. Your POV as an end user over the web is, 'all I care about is this one particualr diagnostic output', or one image lets say. To actually GET that image may or may not require that a set of transforamtions be applied to a large subset of slices in any particular study. It would be really nice to not have to add external services (another app), and instead be able to directly and natively be able to access the inner workings of the database engine to do this directly, instead of offloading it to the local OS. Obj
As a 15 year DBA, currently we are working with some of the would-be far reaching (to most people) concepts described in this paper. The idea of a TRUE SQL Debugger is like, so big it's sick. Quest offers some tools that kinda sorta do this for Oracle systems, but a true realtime debugger would save me YEARS of work during my career as a SQL coder. For an Idea of scale, The last replication project I wrote for an employer propogated over Oracle DB_LINKS via triggers to synchronize a dataset in two cities, log it, and do something with errors. Because this particular system was a Peoplesoft installation, it was a subset of 6800 tables and 15k lines of code give or take some triggers, with NO debugger. OMG, it's like a "finally" moment to have someone even claim to be fixing this soon in their architecture.
Next, there was some inane reference to reiserfs above, which clearly ignores what a database fundamentaly both is, and is becoming. It really began (and I hate to admit this as a former Solaris/Oracle admin) with SQL Server 7 and Oracle 8, and the concept that a database should be object programmable. Reiser is not going to be streaming still frames of image data fast enough to a remote client to rebuild seamlessly into a movie, for instance. Or recalculate all of a company's business logic for point of sale systems so that, for instance, the wrong type of credit card gets rejected, or so a supply chain gets populated, the list is endless. Reiser, and for that matter VFS and the other myriad of database enhanced filesystems, are tools. Good ones, but tools...
It's interesting to note that MS has finally figured out that the "n-tier" was a dumb idea. It's almost like, well you take all this shit, then sell it through a middle man, but expect to not have to pay him anything for brokering. Like, duh. We actively benchamrked this process, in fact, and discovered that it does, not suprisingly, take time to pass data through an extra server.
Workflow is life. It's what make this page exist (SD is I believe run in MySQL). The idea of publishing-subscribers with atomic transactions is hardly new, but I agree with the authors that this is the direction of the market, simply because businesses now are getting spread all over. Read - If your job just went to India, learn to be a DBA, cuz when all that shit they sent over there comes back, you can bet its going to be a mess (and is a mess actually already, which is why, in particular, people in ERP fields that intertwine with mine(as a DBA) demand and recieve very large salaries, 200$US an hour is not unusual). The reason this particular ramble is relevant, is because lots of global companies are either looking at, or are already implementing, the idea of data grids, where all the data servers inside a global network stay in sync. Suzy the secretary checks out a document in Baltimore, and that document flags as in use in Madrid through transactional replication within a kind of database trust-relationship network. It's a very very good way for companies with lots of data to keep it all together, but today it's still a pain in the ass to manage.
Vertical partioning is pretty much worthless except to data warehousing installations, most of whom are probably running on strong equipment already (to have that much data). Not to mention, I believe (I'd have to check, since it's not a feature I'd really use) Oracle's 10G product allows for this already if you really want it. Materialized views is another point here that raises my hackles. This guy is writing about the wonder of materialized views and column partitions, which ARE a cool performance cheat in large systems, but make no mistake that by the time you get to this point, you are probably rearranging deck chairs on the titanic anyway. Essentially Materialized views precache SQL resultsets into a temporary table which gets constantly updated so it can always provide a full resultset without having to parse the parent table. This is processor and space expensive. Vertical par
And what strikes me right off (because of my field) is, if a 'hibernation' state can be easily and mobily achieved, you could save a LOT of critical cases by slowing them down right at the point of injury or on the ambulance, maybe even before moving them. That would have a definite positive benefit for sure, though thinking about flying through space in slo-mo is a cool vision too, for sure. =)
As the lead developer on a PACS system (this involves capture images for radiological diagnostics) we have been working to evolve a lot of these technologies and adapt them more towards desktop use. MRI in particular captures image data with volumetric depth and allows for relatively easy conversion to 3d volumetric models. Add some basic surface analysis and you get texture modelling of 3d surfaces in realtime, for instance Terarecon's Aquarius stations (http://www.terarecon.com) have the capability to use live data captured from a patient still in an MRI bore to allow the extraction of live models (as in watch your heart beat), and future versions will be able to 'live-simulate' heart attacks, etc. Terarecon is a competitor of ours, but their site has some cool examples =)
For us, VR is an inevitablity, but CAVE environments are impractical. Today, we use high end (5MP) flat panels to lay out diagnostic workstations in something similar to the 'Minority Report' layout, minus the panel transparency. This guy (article author) is looking at VR applications essentially in researched industrial design, which is cool and all, but what's important to note is that in order for someone other than a labrat to be comfortable with the environment it has to become a lot more comfortable to the average guy. That is, VR needs to emulate life a lot better than it does today in its interfaces. Convincing a non-techie to put on ANYTHING (glove, helmet,etc.) ain't gonna happen for a workspace that will be used 12 hours a day by one person. The important thing missing still is ergonomics and practicality.
The cool thing though, is that TRUE VR is very close to reality today, that is to say that we can very accurately (to the mm, soon to be to the micron) recreate a simulated space within you today, and use that data to effectively represent you on a computer. Its actually kinda creepy since when you texture a skull study it really looks like the person you scanned heh. I keep meaning to scan me and turn me into a Doom3 model (muahahaha).
Anyway, good article, but not so relevant to the real world just yet IMHO. The best hope for entertainment VR is indeed still the CAVE systems. I dunno where they got 400k from, I can build a cave for around 20k, including everything. Maybe they included the cost of the building too or something.
I remember seeing a RAM-Cacheing scheme for Oracle a few years ago that had the same claims. In actuality Microsoft, for all the love they'll have here, allows you to do this exact thing in a Dataset object within.NET. There are several solutions to this kind of problem, but the.NET way is the one I'll focus on here.
The CommandBehavior.SequentialAccess descendant of the SelectCommand Class in C# can be assigned in a way that allows binary objects, or otherwise... data..etc., to 'stream' in a way back and forth in realtime within the relational Dataset objects created at app instantiation. Essentially,.NET allows for the same type of action by instantiating a 'database' within the Client-side apps by building a schema of sorts, up through and including relational refernces such as foreign keys. At this point, we have a 'database' of RAM (dataset) that can now be resynched via ports to any other client or server using the same architecture.
I do this today to provide a distribution network for doctors who need access from several places to a pool of active patient data. This is a data volume of Serveral Terrabytes per location, so I assure you that we are discussing the same scale here as the article.
Consequently, the TPC benchmarks show 3,210,540 TpCM as the current posted record for AIX on a Big Blue machine, so their numbers are skewed if not wrong. Most processes, including those using binaries, can be proceduralized at the back end anyway, thus make call -> server -> stored_procedure ->return (); be the flow, with all data living inside of RAM, and sorts happening in 'real-time', that is from a pinned table into another location in memory at the server layer, returning into a dataset that is kept in RAM on the client.
I don't really see anything revolutionary about all this, correct me if I'm mistaking something?
We've been using the beta of 10 for about 3 months now in testing with Oracle at our site. It's pretty, that's for sure, with it's nice Gnome facelift and all, but I think essentially that Linux and Solaris fill different roles, at least for us.
Linux feels a lot more like a general purpose OS than Solaris, and 10 while friendlier is still very much rooted in the proprietary Solaris tradition.
To sum it up, this is good for Solaris users who can throw away the whole CDE/Openwin experience and replace it with something refreshingly cleaner, however we were going to adopt 10 anyway. It seems to me that Sun is going to have to really dig and build new things rather than merely say 'hey we're OSS now too!' and expect Linux users to suddenly flock their way.
Looking Glass is an excellent example of software people could see as a reason to change platforms, and IMHO Sun should focus on this type of admittedly risky innovation instead of attempting to lure existing Linux users into a Solaris world. Someday, all these marketing guys are going to realize that there's more to an OS than just a name, and that actually creating something new is the best approach to picking up market share (OSX == good example).
All that said, ZFS is a really cool thing if it works as spec'd, however ZFS is NOT in open beta AFAIK, and it has not been released to us little guy partners as of yet (though I'm betting they've started testing at the larger shops), so all we have here to go on so far is a marketing claim of improved i/o that could be true, false, or in that grey area salespeople like to use where the whole thing ran great!.... once.... in a lab... and it isn't reproducable to the average joe...
I know at least 2 ppl that broke 6-figures last year playing that game and selling the cash they made from item sales to yantis (the 1000lb gorilla of the everquest auctions).
In fact, EQ item sales have caused the rise of sweatshops of players to farm cashworthy loot as mentioned on/. before....
http://games.slashdot.org/games/03/11/24/0141243 .s html
Using URU, The Sims, and 'Mythica' as examples is a bit of a stetch. These were all 'odd' in the sense that they tried to go in radically different gameplay/theme directions from the standard fantasy/scifi staple of the genre. That plus URU and Sims are like non-combat? wtf? And Mythica was rumored to be frought with internal conflicts between the dev. team and the MS mothership, so no big shock there.
I mean the answer is in the question about these, but lemme know when World of Warcraft gets canned mmk?
The problem for consoles is they are in a fixed hardware configuration for a LONG period of time. For instance, the PS2 is now creeping into year 3 with no appreciable quality changes...
There seems to be a turning point every few years where the market leans back to making really REALLY good pc games over console.
With Doom3, UT2k4, World of Warcraft, Everquest2, Half Life 2, etc. all coming out over the next few months for PC, its set to be another rebound year where the PC leaps ahead of consoles in technology and quality by enough of a margin to keep the cycle going.
Technology doesn't stop evolving to wait for Sony(MS, Nintendo)'s Next Big Thing that they can mass produce cheaply.
Biohazard was written by the head of the Russian bioweaponeering program in the 80s-90s. There are literally pictures of him standing with a bunch of scientists in places like Plum Island (i thiknk its actually in Arkansas at the Pine Bluff facility) during one of the many "goodwill" tours the USSR and the US had during treaty negotiations after the cold war.
This book is SCARY. Apparently, the chimera virus so easily discounted earlier in this post is very real, and was an attempt to mix ebola and smallpox and seal it in gelatinized capsules to make it airborne and able to survive the explosion of delivery by bombs. Why bother? Because their research was based on whatever was considered INCURABLE in the west. Several accidents in russian experiments are well documented, and show up in old news reports as "food poisoning" or other polically correct reasons for mass deaths in suburban areas. Apparently in one case, someone got drunk and forgot to put the air filters back on at an Anthrax plant and killed a bunch of folx.
2 points: someone noted that this is small scale research. This is incorrect, as Ken Alibek notes that weaponized germs have to be produced by the TON in order to keep the stockpile of arms fresh enough for maximum impact. Think about what a TON of ebola would do to anywhere. Second, where did all this shit go? He documents how at least one of the starving workers at a smallpox plant slipped out with a live vial (from a lvl4 facility) to try to sell it as a supplemental income. In lots of cases, noone knows where it all went.
The upside is that it mostly doesn't work as effectively as it's billed. Spraying an agent would probably only infect a small number of people, since delivery of a live virus is apparently a very hard thing to accomplish effectively.
www.arena.net is the site setup for the refugees from blzzard who are working on Guild Wars, which loosly follows this model. It's an Everquest-like mmorpg, but has no monthly fee, and instead relies on repeat expansion buys to pay the bills.
When I was a LOT younger than I am now, I used to work for Sound Warehouse in the vinyl section. To this day, I still mix to relax in the afternoons after work (apparently most people seem to get jittery at 140bpm... not me, heh). LFO was one of the pioneers of the rave scene in the early 90s. Seriously great music, really took me back to even go through their catalog and see some of the old rare stuff that I'd spend all day looking for as a kid. Oh my god, Baby Ford =) I still remember Chilren of the Revolution when it first came out, really cool really powerful track. I remember we got a promo vinyl of it for the store and listened to it at insane volumes after close.
These things are priceless, HIGHLY recommended site. Notable for all the shit it doesn't have, like popups or annoying flash navigation bars.
Slashdot Mirror
I picked it up on a whim while shopping for managed DirectX books at borders the other day after picking it up (literally) and reading though a few of the essays. This one's full of not only good observations about software development, BUT also has several good articles about geeks in businesss, and how they interact with the dreaded non-technical management types.
This is worth the money just to pick up and have someone rationally present alterantive viewpoints. For instance, I would LOVE to have a company adopt the no-bonuses policy coupled with salary advancements and promotion as an alternative. In every company I have ever worked for, bonuses have caused huge amounts of turmoil and I agree with the premise that everyone would be happier (and more creative) without the kind of intellectual sword of damacles a late or missing promised bonus program can cause in an IT shop. I watched a Peoplesoft shop come very close to falling apart after management decided not to pay promised bonuses one year, and I think that while this is in every way a problem of management, I agree with the essay's author that fault or not the whole process becomes a huge demotivator in place of an intentioned boost.
Again, the above is just one example from one essay in this volume. Agree or disagree with the points of view contained in the book, but the act of thinking about the problems that are presented here are going to happen along the course of most projects anyway, and I like to take things head-on.
I understand most of the articles are available online, but I this is one technical book that is actually fireside readable (IMHO) so I picked up the dead tree edition.
Highly recommended to IT folk
-chitlenz
I agree with you on the database nullref problem, but I mean the hack works, and all languages have problems as they grow. The big problem I have with Java is performance, at least from our perspective. That and we need control of the 3D hardware to render reconstructions (as in, your heart), and working through the Java OpenGL interface really wasn't an option.
I admit to having fairly ignored Java, after dealing with Sun for several years, and being fed up with having it rammed down my throat by both them and Oracle. I mean, I understand what you are saying in that there are better tools for Java, etc, at the moment, but we are a small enough company that we are having to plan years out to make sure we can support our framework with a minimum amount of people, and that means choosing as close to a single platform as we can (which is why we compromised on C# from c++).
As it is, I rebuilt one of our apps, a fairly compilcated DICOM port server, into VS2005 from VS2003 and it worked right off, even with several older components included. That's the kind of ease of translation small companies need to suceed (and prosper).
-chitlenz
1)C# is ANSI standard, if MS decides to close THEIR part of the standard off and make it proprietary (read j#) I'd have to make that decision then, but I'm confident that with Novell's backing, mono is going to keep ANSI c# with at least the 1.1 runtime ports working fine for the forseeable future. Out of all this take away, my application works today on 2 platforms, if MS wants to change something in the future, I can choose to go forward with them or choose to stay where I am.
2) Mono is NOT smoke and mirrors, it works. And the good third party compilers check windows builds for mono compliance if you install it (mono for windows).
3) I dunno what you're talking about size limits. We have no issues to date with builds of 350k per dll. I haven't messed with VB for 10 years or so, so no comment on its performance.
--chitlenz
There were several poorly implemented replication features that more seamlessly worked within .NET for whatever reason. Things have gotten much simpler overall to get the actual applciation to more easily do what what you want it to do. The c++ rewrite had a much longer lead time, we actually knew this since we did start into a rewrite of 2 of our 8 applcaitions (at the time). It's not a question of incompetence, its a question of shortcuts, and .NET has LOTS of them, with 3rd parties adding lots more.
-chitlenz
C# is a GREAT language, this is coming from a long history in Oracle/Unix/Linux. I don't understand where people got the idea that it won't work on Linux either. We're coding 3-monitor full screen 3d MRI analysis applications in it, and I can assure you that it has accelerated our developement time over the last iteration created with Borland C++ Builder. Ironically, it took 8 years to write the last version of our software in Builder, and 6 months to completely rewrite it with enhancements in c#. That, consequently, was with both the lead developers having no experience with the language (I was a C++ folk, and he'd been using Delphi, so we settled on C# since it was essentially the next evolution of Delphi).
It's no joke, and I'll be buying this book just to have it. I've also picked up most of the Deitel series of books on c#, and of course the O'reilly books. The c# cookbook is another GREAT reference. Anyone interested in starting with C# should check www.codeproject.com for examples. Also, along with a rude admonishment to the MS haters for not having researched the topic (MS dependant indeed), check www.omnicore.com for a native crossplatform compiler for c#. It's cheap too, but doesn't do forms support just yet (when it does, I'll probably move from VS just to get free cross-platform compatability).
-chitlenz
Yeah this is I believe a relatively new thing for them. We were stuck in 7.52 at the time, with no upgrade path in sight due to legal issues, a problem I might add that is very common in implementations.
Even so, unless I'm mistaken , OTB tools are similar to Data Mover which used to hardcore suck, I don't know about now.
Our problem was one of replicating subsets of a large dataset that were not necessarily single tables, and the target was not a Peoplesoft install either (in other words, PS -> remote data warehouse project), so it probably wouldn't have applied anyway.
--chitlenz
Whew, that's a lot of ground to cover, but here goes...
.NET that can cut literally years out of your dev cycle.
... well 5 damn years of uptime heh. Trust m
C# fits the bill for the strongly typed functions you mentioned, and there are a LOT of code shortcuts you can make via canned components. These typically come inline with whatever your particular standards commitee has set forth as the mean, and there are many competent component vendors for
Almost all the good databases do replication well today, with a side note that this is a seriously underused function of the databases themselves.
I think any of the modern database architectures can deal with 64-bit definitions, and oracle should allow for strong typing via pl/sql. This approach may require 64-bit native versions of Oracle though, which may or may not exist for your target platform in some current version (is 10g for amd64 out yet?). Since the backend can inherently handle the extended primitive sizing (I'm pretty sure here), and since these primtives can be 'compiled' into pl/sql packages within the Oracle framework to give them some sense of propriety, that'd be the direction I'd choose. Probably on AMD64.
Odds are pretty good you can just use SQLNET for transport. It's pretty much hella fast, so I've never bothered overcomplicating the network layer in my app design. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SQLNET can indeed probably understand type translation natively. Thus your 32 bit development box under your desk should have no problem establishing a trust relationship with a 64 bit solaris box or whatever, and to allow that node to exchange data seamlessly.
The network tie-ins are an interesting point. I've never been a huge fan of branching too far away from strict IP based network topologies, but granted I don't manage 10k machines either. SQL Server definitely directly integrates with AD, not sure about Novell. Oracle definitely integrates with Novell, not sure about MS =) probably MS too tho, at least on their Oracle for windows servers.
The statistical analysis functions of your design area classic case for the Data Warehouse. The good news is you can probably make that kind of high-order math function work in any of the current backend vendors, and something like Cognos can help you make great strides quickly (or SAS, etc.). I find that it's important to remember that the simple way is usually the best way in these cases, that is, if you are not in the commerical software business and you have the money for it, there's lots of good packages for sale. The more interesting alternate re: your project (to me) would be to just sit down with pl/sql and write it heh. But then, I code, so I tend to see code based solutions as the end with the most clarity (and the added benefit, ESPECIALLY in math functions, that everyone has to crosscheck each other's code when you write it, and you can by result usually minimize errors and other logic trainwrecks). In math fields, precision is king, and who do ya love baybee if it ain't you?
A last note, post architecture, is that ANY product is only as good as the DBA tuning and designing it. That , in a nutshell, is why most projects fail. I pose that hardware performance needs are equal to the skill of the people tuning your system, so the better the people the cheaper the hardware (not an original idea, but one with truth). Warning, this is NOT a bad thing. In fact, in many companies, bad DBAs become good dbas over time as they learn the system. Each system is an individual entity, and as entities, a good DBA becomes familiar with the inner workings of his/her charge. There's no such thing as overkill here, there's only having enough, or not having enough capacity as well. Beg borrow or steal the best gear you can, set a sunset target of 5 years if you can. Eventually, if the whole thing's a fiasco, someone's going to need that extra capacity to work in, and if it all goes perfectly you get
I live in the middle. Im a DBA Architect, which means I both design and build the databases our company uses. Add to that, we're a small company, and we design very specialized software in a way that not many people can do so I also wear the hat of C# coder. I understand both sides of this fence, and have actually been in the odd position of fighting for both points of view. A good DBA is responsible for all of the flexible information that makes a modern corp. run. Think about that. All the paper, all the reports, your payroll, everything worth owning informationwise within a company is in a database somewhere. HELL YES these guys live at corporate hq. That said, in a healthy company, the DBAs and devs are able to debate rather than fight. One particularly obstinate Peoplesoft lead dev in my past and I have become very good friends over the years through this kind of argument, so its not all bad =)
... hehe maybe.. is that corporate scrutiny of their IT staff is at an all time high! So if they really suck that bad, their days are probably numbered.
My sympathy, however, does indeed go out to the poor devs who get stuck with some tool that doesn't really understand, or even want to understand, his position as an admin. Too many people slipped into the field with dollars in their eyes in the 90s, and it's led to some truly spectacular screwups. Essentailly, in my mind, almost every single failed ERP implementation could and should be blamed on insufficient database administration, and there are LOTS of flameouts there.
The upside
--chitlenz
Regarding materialized views, I think the biggest problem I have with them is the annoyance of persitant errosion of performance. These cost. A LOT. And the more you add, the more it costs, especially if the tables are ERP-sized. Just for a frame of reference here, I will presume that you are dealing with very large sets of data to be getting those kinds of performance gains from this, lets say 100M rows. The MVIEW, if it's not a one off, is going to cycle every time the parent table(s) are modified or addressed to build that subset. Yes, it can be timed, but again the idea is one of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again, we are dealing with very large datasets here and every one of those is typically an individual entity with its own particular quirks, but in tests with Peoplesoft a few years ago in 9i, we noticed that you will indeed take a hit if you let these get out of control in population. To add to this, the entire concept of MVIEWS kind of defies data normalization rules by duplicating data in the first place, since an MVIEW is of course a physical entity.
To reverse all that tho, these were discussions for a time when databases needed to be tuned at very granular levels because hardware was very expensive, and today it simply isn't. I will stand by the argument that materialized views are an unnecessary evil that can, today, be avoided by buying better hardware, for the most part.
Moore's law is not a law, its more of a shamanistic prophecy, but I did your example load of 500M+ rows per day on Sunfire v880 machines for 5 years using regular generic StoreEdge racks, with subsecond respose times to 250 users (OLTP). Most problems with ANY query can be tuned with either A) better code or B) better indexes. Hardware is a last resort in a way, but we already think of it as almost a disposable commodity. I'm about to implement 2 6TB plus installations running single Sun 40z database servers with attached Netapp storage containers. Building a simple resultset of any size is becoming very trivial on this kind of modern hardware, and will be the death of shortcuts before long.
Clusters is a whole topic unto itself, but RAC and Grid architectures are actually both more stable and more progresssive on Oracle than DB2 atm. The entrire idea is becoming more of a sit anywhere and select like it's local phenomenon, where the 'network' of databases are all aware of each other and know how to automatically retrieve pertinent data from wherever it lives and make it all seem like it just magically happened. Clusters are all about redundancy and processing power, but once machine power hits critical mass (I think it's soon) and each node is capable of huge amounts of stable processing, the next step is to stop storing so much redundant trash and just have each piece of data live one place. This is Oracle's Grid.
-- chitlenz
SQL makes sense from a DBA Developer point of view, I mean that's kind of the best way I can explain it. It's kind of like how C++ is immediately attunable to some ppl, while say VB is not, etc. I think in as lot of ways it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy in that pro-DBAs I think tend to think of their "flock" of tables in terms of SQL based transactions at this point. Remember that SQL was intended to offset COBOL functions, and that all of the weird crap from there had to be carried over...
Regarding Resier, I would pose that a filesystem is not truly organized in a way that makes sense from a data point of view. That is, reiser is using a database ideology, albeit an internal one, to organize what are typically very small sets of data. Remember that the concept of relational databases dates to the early 1970s (I think Codd was early 70s?), and that a lot of different 'better ways' have been tried. A good question to example this is, ok resier can organize a million files on disk, but what about 50 trillion? How fast does it search through them then? Does the 'dancing tree' model still hold up under load? From 10,000 simultaneous users? All this said, Reiser IS actually a killer choice for organizing datafiles used by a database, I've actually implemented several Oracle installs on linux/reiser to much success =)
On a future note, I DO think that Oracle in particualr is making strides towards a kind of Database Appliance type thing, where the DB and OS are the same thing. They had a project with Sun a few years ago called like Heavy Iron or Big Iron or somesuch PR BS name that basically was the idea of selling a database/OS hybrid that installed pretuned on Sun gear. That is the future of databases right there. And Ellison knows it, which is why Oracle is so gung-ho for Linux lately. In a serious environment, noone would really consider a database server to perform any other services other than those related directly to database functions, so its about time someone over at Oracle woke up and released an Oracle/Linux pre-tuned and optimized Distribution.
Object Programmable reflects the idea that we will (someday OMG) eventually be able to easily (and that's the key there) extend the actual cores of the databases themselves to accomodate extraneous OS level functions. It would be really nice, too, if this model actual compiled this time, unlike stored procedures in their early day (where they were basically a JIT script language, and in lots of systems like SQL Server still are). A good for instance here is, I'm both a programmer and a DBA. My particular field is medical visualization for Radiology, so essentially I have to organize huge sets of patient data in a way that I can do things like, well, volumetrically render your skull to see if you have a lesion, etc. Today, I have to pull this to the workstation, organize the dataset, and render the scene from the dataset onto the stage. Because of the flowing nature of our data (that is to say, this isn't like a game where you can pre-cache models on the local workstations since every patient is a different model), I would like a way to tie direct3d to a pre-render engine at the database layer so that all I would have to provide to a client like a web page is the end product. I'm working with MS SQL atm, so I'll use it as an example, a typical MRI image of your chest comes out of a scanner in some stupidly high resolution. That scan typically contains voxel data which is defines by the mm thickness of the slice. Your POV as an end user over the web is, 'all I care about is this one particualr diagnostic output', or one image lets say. To actually GET that image may or may not require that a set of transforamtions be applied to a large subset of slices in any particular study. It would be really nice to not have to add external services (another app), and instead be able to directly and natively be able to access the inner workings of the database engine to do this directly, instead of offloading it to the local OS. Obj
"The 'next great advancement' in databases will be when I can setup 2 or more Microsoft servers."
This actually works too. Stably too, go figure.
--chitlenz
As a 15 year DBA, currently we are working with some of the would-be far reaching (to most people) concepts described in this paper. The idea of a TRUE SQL Debugger is like, so big it's sick. Quest offers some tools that kinda sorta do this for Oracle systems, but a true realtime debugger would save me YEARS of work during my career as a SQL coder. For an Idea of scale, The last replication project I wrote for an employer propogated over Oracle DB_LINKS via triggers to synchronize a dataset in two cities, log it, and do something with errors. Because this particular system was a Peoplesoft installation, it was a subset of 6800 tables and 15k lines of code give or take some triggers, with NO debugger. OMG, it's like a "finally" moment to have someone even claim to be fixing this soon in their architecture.
Next, there was some inane reference to reiserfs above, which clearly ignores what a database fundamentaly both is, and is becoming. It really began (and I hate to admit this as a former Solaris/Oracle admin) with SQL Server 7 and Oracle 8, and the concept that a database should be object programmable. Reiser is not going to be streaming still frames of image data fast enough to a remote client to rebuild seamlessly into a movie, for instance. Or recalculate all of a company's business logic for point of sale systems so that, for instance, the wrong type of credit card gets rejected, or so a supply chain gets populated, the list is endless. Reiser, and for that matter VFS and the other myriad of database enhanced filesystems, are tools. Good ones, but tools...
It's interesting to note that MS has finally figured out that the "n-tier" was a dumb idea. It's almost like, well you take all this shit, then sell it through a middle man, but expect to not have to pay him anything for brokering. Like, duh. We actively benchamrked this process, in fact, and discovered that it does, not suprisingly, take time to pass data through an extra server.
Workflow is life. It's what make this page exist (SD is I believe run in MySQL). The idea of publishing-subscribers with atomic transactions is hardly new, but I agree with the authors that this is the direction of the market, simply because businesses now are getting spread all over. Read - If your job just went to India, learn to be a DBA, cuz when all that shit they sent over there comes back, you can bet its going to be a mess (and is a mess actually already, which is why, in particular, people in ERP fields that intertwine with mine(as a DBA) demand and recieve very large salaries, 200$US an hour is not unusual). The reason this particular ramble is relevant, is because lots of global companies are either looking at, or are already implementing, the idea of data grids, where all the data servers inside a global network stay in sync. Suzy the secretary checks out a document in Baltimore, and that document flags as in use in Madrid through transactional replication within a kind of database trust-relationship network. It's a very very good way for companies with lots of data to keep it all together, but today it's still a pain in the ass to manage.
Vertical partioning is pretty much worthless except to data warehousing installations, most of whom are probably running on strong equipment already (to have that much data). Not to mention, I believe (I'd have to check, since it's not a feature I'd really use) Oracle's 10G product allows for this already if you really want it. Materialized views is another point here that raises my hackles. This guy is writing about the wonder of materialized views and column partitions, which ARE a cool performance cheat in large systems, but make no mistake that by the time you get to this point, you are probably rearranging deck chairs on the titanic anyway. Essentially Materialized views precache SQL resultsets into a temporary table which gets constantly updated so it can always provide a full resultset without having to parse the parent table. This is processor and space expensive. Vertical par
And what strikes me right off (because of my field) is, if a 'hibernation' state can be easily and mobily achieved, you could save a LOT of critical cases by slowing them down right at the point of injury or on the ambulance, maybe even before moving them. That would have a definite positive benefit for sure, though thinking about flying through space in slo-mo is a cool vision too, for sure. =)
-chitlenz
http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CEServlet?process= SunStore&cmdViewProduct_CP&catid=116125
specifically...
We use them exclusively now for large scale visualization systems (MRI).
The v40z is a monster, check the review at anandtech
-chitlenz
ps - run win2k3 great =)
As the lead developer on a PACS system (this involves capture images for radiological diagnostics) we have been working to evolve a lot of these technologies and adapt them more towards desktop use. MRI in particular captures image data with volumetric depth and allows for relatively easy conversion to 3d volumetric models. Add some basic surface analysis and you get texture modelling of 3d surfaces in realtime, for instance Terarecon's Aquarius stations (http://www.terarecon.com) have the capability to use live data captured from a patient still in an MRI bore to allow the extraction of live models (as in watch your heart beat), and future versions will be able to 'live-simulate' heart attacks, etc. Terarecon is a competitor of ours, but their site has some cool examples =)
For us, VR is an inevitablity, but CAVE environments are impractical. Today, we use high end (5MP) flat panels to lay out diagnostic workstations in something similar to the 'Minority Report' layout, minus the panel transparency. This guy (article author) is looking at VR applications essentially in researched industrial design, which is cool and all, but what's important to note is that in order for someone other than a labrat to be comfortable with the environment it has to become a lot more comfortable to the average guy. That is, VR needs to emulate life a lot better than it does today in its interfaces. Convincing a non-techie to put on ANYTHING (glove, helmet,etc.) ain't gonna happen for a workspace that will be used 12 hours a day by one person. The important thing missing still is ergonomics and practicality.
The cool thing though, is that TRUE VR is very close to reality today, that is to say that we can very accurately (to the mm, soon to be to the micron) recreate a simulated space within you today, and use that data to effectively represent you on a computer. Its actually kinda creepy since when you texture a skull study it really looks like the person you scanned heh. I keep meaning to scan me and turn me into a Doom3 model (muahahaha).
Anyway, good article, but not so relevant to the real world just yet IMHO. The best hope for entertainment VR is indeed still the CAVE systems. I dunno where they got 400k from, I can build a cave for around 20k, including everything. Maybe they included the cost of the building too or something.
Just my 2cents -- chitlenz
I remember seeing a RAM-Cacheing scheme for Oracle a few years ago that had the same claims. In actuality Microsoft, for all the love they'll have here, allows you to do this exact thing in a Dataset object within .NET. There are several solutions to this kind of problem, but the .NET way is the one I'll focus on here.
... data..etc., to 'stream' in a way back and forth in realtime within the relational Dataset objects created at app instantiation. Essentially, .NET allows for the same type of action by instantiating a 'database' within the Client-side apps by building a schema of sorts, up through and including relational refernces such as foreign keys. At this point, we have a 'database' of RAM (dataset) that can now be resynched via ports to any other client or server using the same architecture.
The CommandBehavior.SequentialAccess descendant of the SelectCommand Class in C# can be assigned in a way that allows binary objects, or otherwise
I do this today to provide a distribution network for doctors who need access from several places to a pool of active patient data. This is a data volume of Serveral Terrabytes per location, so I assure you that we are discussing the same scale here as the article.
Consequently, the TPC benchmarks show 3,210,540 TpCM as the current posted record for AIX on a Big Blue machine, so their numbers are skewed if not wrong. Most processes, including those using binaries, can be proceduralized at the back end anyway, thus make call -> server -> stored_procedure ->return (); be the flow, with all data living inside of RAM, and sorts happening in 'real-time', that is from a pinned table into another location in memory at the server layer, returning into a dataset that is kept in RAM on the client.
I don't really see anything revolutionary about all this, correct me if I'm mistaking something?
-chitlenz
We've been using the beta of 10 for about 3 months now in testing with Oracle at our site. It's pretty, that's for sure, with it's nice Gnome facelift and all, but I think essentially that Linux and Solaris fill different roles, at least for us.
.... once .... in a lab... and it isn't reproducable to the average joe...
Linux feels a lot more like a general purpose OS than Solaris, and 10 while friendlier is still very much rooted in the proprietary Solaris tradition.
To sum it up, this is good for Solaris users who can throw away the whole CDE/Openwin experience and replace it with something refreshingly cleaner, however we were going to adopt 10 anyway. It seems to me that Sun is going to have to really dig and build new things rather than merely say 'hey we're OSS now too!' and expect Linux users to suddenly flock their way.
Looking Glass is an excellent example of software people could see as a reason to change platforms, and IMHO Sun should focus on this type of admittedly risky innovation instead of attempting to lure existing Linux users into a Solaris world. Someday, all these marketing guys are going to realize that there's more to an OS than just a name, and that actually creating something new is the best approach to picking up market share (OSX == good example).
All that said, ZFS is a really cool thing if it works as spec'd, however ZFS is NOT in open beta AFAIK, and it has not been released to us little guy partners as of yet (though I'm betting they've started testing at the larger shops), so all we have here to go on so far is a marketing claim of improved i/o that could be true, false, or in that grey area salespeople like to use where the whole thing ran great!
I'm guessing we'll all know in about 2 months.
-chitlenz
Is a non-end user actor?
For some reason I have this vision of Gary Bussey making a drug deal...
heh - chitlenz
I know at least 2 ppl that broke 6-figures last year playing that game and selling the cash they made from item sales to yantis (the 1000lb gorilla of the everquest auctions).
/. before ....
3 .s html
In fact, EQ item sales have caused the rise of sweatshops of players to farm cashworthy loot as mentioned on
http://games.slashdot.org/games/03/11/24/014124
-chitlenz
Using URU, The Sims, and 'Mythica' as examples is a bit of a stetch. These were all 'odd' in the sense that they tried to go in radically different gameplay/theme directions from the standard fantasy/scifi staple of the genre. That plus URU and Sims are like non-combat? wtf? And Mythica was rumored to be frought with internal conflicts between the dev. team and the MS mothership, so no big shock there.
I mean the answer is in the question about these, but lemme know when World of Warcraft gets canned mmk?
-chitlenz
The problem for consoles is they are in a fixed hardware configuration for a LONG period of time. For instance, the PS2 is now creeping into year 3 with no appreciable quality changes ...
There seems to be a turning point every few years where the market leans back to making really REALLY good pc games over console.
With Doom3, UT2k4, World of Warcraft, Everquest2, Half Life 2, etc. all coming out over the next few months for PC, its set to be another rebound year where the PC leaps ahead of consoles in technology and quality by enough of a margin to keep the cycle going.
Technology doesn't stop evolving to wait for Sony(MS, Nintendo)'s Next Big Thing that they can mass produce cheaply.
-chitlenz
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385 334966/qid=1079632818/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-04375 66-8960154?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
Biohazard was written by the head of the Russian bioweaponeering program in the 80s-90s. There are literally pictures of him standing with a bunch of scientists in places like Plum Island (i thiknk its actually in Arkansas at the Pine Bluff facility) during one of the many "goodwill" tours the USSR and the US had during treaty negotiations after the cold war.
This book is SCARY. Apparently, the chimera virus so easily discounted earlier in this post is very real, and was an attempt to mix ebola and smallpox and seal it in gelatinized capsules to make it airborne and able to survive the explosion of delivery by bombs. Why bother? Because their research was based on whatever was considered INCURABLE in the west. Several accidents in russian experiments are well documented, and show up in old news reports as "food poisoning" or other polically correct reasons for mass deaths in suburban areas. Apparently in one case, someone got drunk and forgot to put the air filters back on at an Anthrax plant and killed a bunch of folx.
2 points: someone noted that this is small scale research. This is incorrect, as Ken Alibek notes that weaponized germs have to be produced by the TON in order to keep the stockpile of arms fresh enough for maximum impact. Think about what a TON of ebola would do to anywhere. Second, where did all this shit go? He documents how at least one of the starving workers at a smallpox plant slipped out with a live vial (from a lvl4 facility) to try to sell it as a supplemental income. In lots of cases, noone knows where it all went.
The upside is that it mostly doesn't work as effectively as it's billed. Spraying an agent would probably only infect a small number of people, since delivery of a live virus is apparently a very hard thing to accomplish effectively.
-chitlenz
www.arena.net is the site setup for the refugees from blzzard who are working on Guild Wars, which loosly follows this model. It's an Everquest-like mmorpg, but has no monthly fee, and instead relies on repeat expansion buys to pay the bills.
Sounds like this may get tested this year.
-chitlenz
Darlness... nice.
Don't get any on you heh.
When I was a LOT younger than I am now, I used to work for Sound Warehouse in the vinyl section. To this day, I still mix to relax in the afternoons after work (apparently most people seem to get jittery at 140bpm... not me, heh). LFO was one of the pioneers of the rave scene in the early 90s. Seriously great music, really took me back to even go through their catalog and see some of the old rare stuff that I'd spend all day looking for as a kid. Oh my god, Baby Ford =) I still remember Chilren of the Revolution when it first came out, really cool really powerful track. I remember we got a promo vinyl of it for the store and listened to it at insane volumes after close.
These things are priceless, HIGHLY recommended site. Notable for all the shit it doesn't have, like popups or annoying flash navigation bars.
Wow, good call by Warp to do this =)
-chitlenz