Geez, GooberToo, did a MySQL developer kill your father or something? You've posted two giant rants about how MySQL is so unsuitable for anything that it can't possibly work for any serious project. You make it sound like simply installing MySQL causes a server to immediately explode.
You *are* aware that Facebook, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and many other sites use MySQL, yes? Maybe there are better choices (more likely, there are different tradeoffs, but whatever), but MySQL works well enough to power some of the most popular websites in the world. Proof by existence that what you claim is inaccurate.
Really these call center folks are doing you a kindness by sparing you the embarrassment of having to try and repeat a name that is going to be hard for your say.
Hello, thank you for calling Newcomer Computer Company. My name is Sam Francisco. How can I help you?
There is a distinction between a traffic circle and a roundabout. Your objections are true for traffic circles, but not roundabouts. As TFA notes, traffic circles were tried and rejected in the US as early as the 1920s.
I live in New Hampshire, and here all roundabouts are called "traffic circles". (Yes, I'm aware of what the Wikipedia article says -- here in NH, we use NH law and regulations, not Wikipedia. NH has actually been around *longer* then Wikipedia, interestingly enough.) To the south, in Massachusetts, all roundabouts are similarly called "rotaries". Most of these "traffic circles" and "rotaries" fit the criteria given in the Wikipedia article. The Portsmouth Traffic Circle, for example: Incoming traffic must yield to traffic in the circle (but if there is no traffic, there is no stop); traffic enters at an angle; pedestrians are prohibited.
By any name, they can still suffer from one problem the grandparent remarks upon: Under heavy traffic, circles can get in a mode where one entrance is flowing and all the others are stopped waiting for that traffic to cease so they can enter. This is a drawback. The fact that a drawback exists doesn't mean they're unworkable.
Unlike the grandparent, I personally find a 5-way intersection a lot more hectic than a traffic circle. You only have to worry about one complication at a time in a circle. Or if the 5-way is signal controlled, the light cycle takes forever.
You can usually pack a light or 4-way stop into a tighter space than a circle. That can be an issue around here, where things are sometimes built up right to the road. That's not an ideal design, of course, but old cities are full of non-ideal things.
"The teacher had found a kit in a mail-order catalog to convert a plastic file box into an acid bath."
We had one of those, too.
Just about everything anyone made with it let the magic smoke out immediately, though. Made for some pretty neat noise and lights for a few seconds sometimes.
I dunno if that was us or the PCB maker or the teacher. Hell, could have been all three.
1. They could have grouped things more logically without disregarding 30 years of UI conventions (pull-down menus). Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
2. A great many of the things they've done in the ribbon that make sense I've actually had in my Word 97/2000/XP/2003 toolbar for something like a decade now. Yes, the stock Office toolbar had a crap layout. The solution was to fix that, not introduce a whole new everything. See #1.
3. I actually find it takes more mouse clicks when I'm working in the Ribbon than it does with my aforementioned custom toolbars. That's because I have to keep clicking back and forth between Ribbon tabs to get to the functions I actually need, whereas before they were all on the screen at one time.
4. #3 wouldn't be so bad if you could customize the Ribbon, but you can't. (At least, not in 2007. I guess in 2010 you can. If you bought 2007 like we did, too fscking bad.). All that effort at overhauling the UI and they still managed to make things worse.
5. They still have an "Insert" menu. That's a lazy catch-all if ever there was one. Totally misses the point of functional grouping. You should not go to "Insert" and then "Foo", because that means when you're working with other Foo's you'll be in some other tab. Instead have a "Foo" tab (or submenu or whatever) where you create/edit/delete/etc.
6. No next labels for most things means people who are text-oriented rather than picture-oriented have a harder time navigating.
7. No next labels for most things means it's harder to learn what stuff does. You have to point to and maybe even click on each thing, rather than just reading a simple English description.
8. No next labels for most things means you have to resort to trying to describe an icon over the phone. "Click the button that looks like a guy wearing a hat -- but not the one where he has a shovel, too".
9. No option to go back to the old style. In Vista you can still elect to use the menu from Windows 95, if that's what you want. But not Office, no, that would be too good for them. They can make it compatible with file formats from 15 years ago, but they can't make it compatible with human beings!
10. Behind the Ribbon icons, you still frequently encounter the same old tired, confusing, cluttered, mixed-up, poorly-documented dialog boxes that have been in Word for years. Some dialogs still mix settings for Word-as-a-whole vs the-current-document, for example.
11. Instead of dick-twiddling around with UI conventions, they could have been doing something more productive, like making lists in Word sane, or fixing the fscking "Page 1 of 1", "Page 2 of 2" bug that's been in Word since *at least* Word 97. A decade and a half later, and Microsoft still hasn't managed to teach a computer how to count.
Talk battery is nominally -48 VDC, on hook or off. It usually measures a bit lower in practice, due to line losses and the like. It really is a battery, for POTS: Telco COs run everything off batteries, and the phones are powered from them, more-or-less directly.
Ring voltage is AC, not DC. 90 VAC, 20 Hz.
At least, that's what the numbers are in the US. Prolly some other countries are different, I'm guessing.
There is no such thing as "unlimited". It doesn't exist. There are always limits. Sometimes the limits are more deliberately imposed than other times, but they are always there. This is an inescapable part of reality. "Anyone who says differently is selling something."
Thus "unlimited" should be a danger word, like "free" or "forever". Any time you see them, you should immediately realize the sales guy is lying to you, and thus employ extra caution.
I can also say that there were, indeed, deliberate limits on the so-called "unlimited data plans" before. They just were not widely acknowledged or published, and were often inconsistently applied. They usually didn't have a direct billing consequence. Maybe you'd be contacted by someone from the carrier. Maybe they'd just discontinue service without warning. But eventually, someone would notice, and something would happen.
Verizon is actually becoming more honest with this move, admitting up-front that there are limits, and publishing a pricing structure.
Of course, Verizon won't be lowering their prices as a consequence, or improving their corporate policies, or otherwise not sucking. They're a telco. All telcos suck. That principle is only slightly less reliable than "there are always limits".
The people trying to argue that Bush or Obama was worse/better are really not helping. They're both trampling all over the constitution, they've both got us involved in multiple dubious wars, they both have done things that serious stain the reputation of the US (e.g., Gitmo), they've both curtailed the liberty of US citizens. Declaring one better than the other is missing the point.
A "math coprocessor" is just the FPU (Floating Point Unit) of a particular era of microcomputers. The FPU implements machine instructions for floating point math. Before the microcomputer, when machines filled cabinets, you might have an FPU (on one or more circuit boards), you might not. Same with the early micros. Eventually they built the FPU into the same die as the CPU, so no need for a separate chip. The FPU is always tightly coupled to the CPU because it shares the same control unit as the CPU. (A CPU consists of a control unit plus an arithmetic/logic unit.) You can't change the design of one without changing the other.
A GPU is different from an FPU. It doesn't process CPU instructions -- it has its own control unit. GPUs operate independently of the CPU.
Building a CPU into the same die or IC package as the CPU won't prevent you from installing a discrete graphics card. No need to get all upset about it.
Although the tech may eventually get to the point where you won't bother with a discrete graphics card. I suspect we'll eventually see a large package containing CPU, GPU and memory, for performance reasons. One will upgrade them all together.
Before you panic about that: In the early days of minicomputers, CPUs were implemented as many boards containing lots of discrete logic and small scale integration. It was possible to do things like change how the adder was implemented, how memory was accessed, or add whole new machine instructions. You could "upgrade" at that level. That capability was lost with the move to (very) large scale integration. However, things are so much cheaper and faster with (V)LSI that it's worth it.
So if $100 will bring you a new CPU, GPU, and RAM, running 10x faster than what you had before, then yah, I can see it happening, and being a win.
You probably have a valid argument when it comes to cost impact, I'll grant you that. But I'd counter that the upgrade treadmill can also be quite expensive. And while better engineering would cost more, it's one-time cost. Operating and repair costs never stop. Which is not to say it's for everybody. My complaint here would be that those of us who are more forward-thinking don't even have the option of paying more upfront for better engineering. It's planned-obsolesce or nothing.
No, I don't expect anything to change, but I can still bitch about it on the Internet.:)
Roads are not made out of the same stuff that cars are. Phone switches and computers are two different applications of electronic logic.
You are really hung up on this "computers are not communications lines" thing. Please understand that's got nothing to do with my complaint.
Let's go back to the beginning. I'll repeat two of my statements. I'll leave out one you seem to be hung up on.
"Your typical big telco equipment has a lifetime measured in decades. The computer industry could learn a thing or two here."
My complaint is with equipment which becomes unsupported after 5 or so years (or even quicker!). We're forced to replace it with new equipment that achieves the same goal. Telcos design their stuff to last (or used to). I think the computer world could stand to put an eye towards equipment longevity.
While you make a valid point that computers != communications lines, I think the point I'm making still stands. I'll continue your analogy (sustaining the unwritten rule of Slashdot that says all discussions eventually include bad car analogies): If computers are cars, then it's like having to buy a new car every five years because they stopped making parts for the old car, even though the new one doesn't offer any practical improvement. Or compare modern VoIP systems, some models of which are already in phase-out after a five year service life, to a PBX which might be good for decades.
And, yes, the PSTN carries much Internet traffic, using the same technology that's been around for decades. That's kinda my point.
YOUR ANALYSIS IS INTERESTING STOP I THINK YOU RAISE A GOOD POINT STOP MOD PARENT UP STOP
. . . . . . . . . .
(Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame.)
"Television [network] companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience; they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers." -- Douglas Adams
(From "What Have We Got To Lose?"; first appearance in Wired UK #1, 1995; reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt)
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Geez, GooberToo, did a MySQL developer kill your father or something? You've posted two giant rants about how MySQL is so unsuitable for anything that it can't possibly work for any serious project. You make it sound like simply installing MySQL causes a server to immediately explode.
You *are* aware that Facebook, Slashdot, Wikipedia, and many other sites use MySQL, yes? Maybe there are better choices (more likely, there are different tradeoffs, but whatever), but MySQL works well enough to power some of the most popular websites in the world. Proof by existence that what you claim is inaccurate.
Really these call center folks are doing you a kindness by sparing you the embarrassment of having to try and repeat a name that is going to be hard for your say.
Hello, thank you for calling Newcomer Computer Company. My name is Sam Francisco. How can I help you?
There is a distinction between a traffic circle and a roundabout. Your objections are true for traffic circles, but not roundabouts. As TFA notes, traffic circles were tried and rejected in the US as early as the 1920s.
I live in New Hampshire, and here all roundabouts are called "traffic circles". (Yes, I'm aware of what the Wikipedia article says -- here in NH, we use NH law and regulations, not Wikipedia. NH has actually been around *longer* then Wikipedia, interestingly enough.) To the south, in Massachusetts, all roundabouts are similarly called "rotaries". Most of these "traffic circles" and "rotaries" fit the criteria given in the Wikipedia article. The Portsmouth Traffic Circle, for example: Incoming traffic must yield to traffic in the circle (but if there is no traffic, there is no stop); traffic enters at an angle; pedestrians are prohibited.
By any name, they can still suffer from one problem the grandparent remarks upon: Under heavy traffic, circles can get in a mode where one entrance is flowing and all the others are stopped waiting for that traffic to cease so they can enter. This is a drawback. The fact that a drawback exists doesn't mean they're unworkable.
Unlike the grandparent, I personally find a 5-way intersection a lot more hectic than a traffic circle. You only have to worry about one complication at a time in a circle. Or if the 5-way is signal controlled, the light cycle takes forever.
You can usually pack a light or 4-way stop into a tighter space than a circle. That can be an issue around here, where things are sometimes built up right to the road. That's not an ideal design, of course, but old cities are full of non-ideal things.
"The teacher had found a kit in a mail-order catalog to convert a plastic file box into an acid bath."
We had one of those, too.
Just about everything anyone made with it let the magic smoke out immediately, though. Made for some pretty neat noise and lights for a few seconds sometimes.
I dunno if that was us or the PCB maker or the teacher. Hell, could have been all three.
Here are some of my top grips with the Ribbon:
1. They could have grouped things more logically without disregarding 30 years of UI conventions (pull-down menus). Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
2. A great many of the things they've done in the ribbon that make sense I've actually had in my Word 97/2000/XP/2003 toolbar for something like a decade now. Yes, the stock Office toolbar had a crap layout. The solution was to fix that, not introduce a whole new everything. See #1.
3. I actually find it takes more mouse clicks when I'm working in the Ribbon than it does with my aforementioned custom toolbars. That's because I have to keep clicking back and forth between Ribbon tabs to get to the functions I actually need, whereas before they were all on the screen at one time.
4. #3 wouldn't be so bad if you could customize the Ribbon, but you can't. (At least, not in 2007. I guess in 2010 you can. If you bought 2007 like we did, too fscking bad.). All that effort at overhauling the UI and they still managed to make things worse.
5. They still have an "Insert" menu. That's a lazy catch-all if ever there was one. Totally misses the point of functional grouping. You should not go to "Insert" and then "Foo", because that means when you're working with other Foo's you'll be in some other tab. Instead have a "Foo" tab (or submenu or whatever) where you create/edit/delete/etc.
6. No next labels for most things means people who are text-oriented rather than picture-oriented have a harder time navigating.
7. No next labels for most things means it's harder to learn what stuff does. You have to point to and maybe even click on each thing, rather than just reading a simple English description.
8. No next labels for most things means you have to resort to trying to describe an icon over the phone. "Click the button that looks like a guy wearing a hat -- but not the one where he has a shovel, too".
9. No option to go back to the old style. In Vista you can still elect to use the menu from Windows 95, if that's what you want. But not Office, no, that would be too good for them. They can make it compatible with file formats from 15 years ago, but they can't make it compatible with human beings!
10. Behind the Ribbon icons, you still frequently encounter the same old tired, confusing, cluttered, mixed-up, poorly-documented dialog boxes that have been in Word for years. Some dialogs still mix settings for Word-as-a-whole vs the-current-document, for example.
11. Instead of dick-twiddling around with UI conventions, they could have been doing something more productive, like making lists in Word sane, or fixing the fscking "Page 1 of 1", "Page 2 of 2" bug that's been in Word since *at least* Word 97. A decade and a half later, and Microsoft still hasn't managed to teach a computer how to count.
I have more but I'm tired of typing.
I recall reading of at least one plant worker that died due to radiation exposure.
Misinformation does not help the cause of nuclear power.
Talk battery is nominally -48 VDC, on hook or off. It usually measures a bit lower in practice, due to line losses and the like. It really is a battery, for POTS: Telco COs run everything off batteries, and the phones are powered from them, more-or-less directly.
Ring voltage is AC, not DC. 90 VAC, 20 Hz.
At least, that's what the numbers are in the US. Prolly some other countries are different, I'm guessing.
Fair enough. Thanks for the reply.
"Now, there are no real MP3 players... there are the "portable media players", but if I want to watch video on my MP3 player..."
What's wrong with buying a "portable media player" and only using it for music?
Okay, I'm curious: Who is your cable Internet provider?
There is no such thing as "unlimited". It doesn't exist. There are always limits. Sometimes the limits are more deliberately imposed than other times, but they are always there. This is an inescapable part of reality. "Anyone who says differently is selling something."
Thus "unlimited" should be a danger word, like "free" or "forever". Any time you see them, you should immediately realize the sales guy is lying to you, and thus employ extra caution.
I can also say that there were, indeed, deliberate limits on the so-called "unlimited data plans" before. They just were not widely acknowledged or published, and were often inconsistently applied. They usually didn't have a direct billing consequence. Maybe you'd be contacted by someone from the carrier. Maybe they'd just discontinue service without warning. But eventually, someone would notice, and something would happen.
Verizon is actually becoming more honest with this move, admitting up-front that there are limits, and publishing a pricing structure.
Of course, Verizon won't be lowering their prices as a consequence, or improving their corporate policies, or otherwise not sucking. They're a telco. All telcos suck. That principle is only slightly less reliable than "there are always limits".
What are the odds of a file created toady being readable in a 100 years?
Pretty high. If your format is plain text ... ASCII is almost 50 years old.
The hard part is finding a working DECtape drive to read the files.
The people trying to argue that Bush or Obama was worse/better are really not helping. They're both trampling all over the constitution, they've both got us involved in multiple dubious wars, they both have done things that serious stain the reputation of the US (e.g., Gitmo), they've both curtailed the liberty of US citizens. Declaring one better than the other is missing the point.
We desperately need a third option.
A "math coprocessor" is just the FPU (Floating Point Unit) of a particular era of microcomputers. The FPU implements machine instructions for floating point math. Before the microcomputer, when machines filled cabinets, you might have an FPU (on one or more circuit boards), you might not. Same with the early micros. Eventually they built the FPU into the same die as the CPU, so no need for a separate chip. The FPU is always tightly coupled to the CPU because it shares the same control unit as the CPU. (A CPU consists of a control unit plus an arithmetic/logic unit.) You can't change the design of one without changing the other.
A GPU is different from an FPU. It doesn't process CPU instructions -- it has its own control unit. GPUs operate independently of the CPU.
Building a CPU into the same die or IC package as the CPU won't prevent you from installing a discrete graphics card. No need to get all upset about it.
Although the tech may eventually get to the point where you won't bother with a discrete graphics card. I suspect we'll eventually see a large package containing CPU, GPU and memory, for performance reasons. One will upgrade them all together.
Before you panic about that: In the early days of minicomputers, CPUs were implemented as many boards containing lots of discrete logic and small scale integration. It was possible to do things like change how the adder was implemented, how memory was accessed, or add whole new machine instructions. You could "upgrade" at that level. That capability was lost with the move to (very) large scale integration. However, things are so much cheaper and faster with (V)LSI that it's worth it.
So if $100 will bring you a new CPU, GPU, and RAM, running 10x faster than what you had before, then yah, I can see it happening, and being a win.
Zorkmids.
"I thought that Silverlight was just another technology, to be discussed and evaluated like any other."
Mod parent Funny for that one.
Microsoft doesn't have partners. They have future victims.
Quick! Someone call John Crichton!
You probably have a valid argument when it comes to cost impact, I'll grant you that. But I'd counter that the upgrade treadmill can also be quite expensive. And while better engineering would cost more, it's one-time cost. Operating and repair costs never stop. Which is not to say it's for everybody. My complaint here would be that those of us who are more forward-thinking don't even have the option of paying more upfront for better engineering. It's planned-obsolesce or nothing.
No, I don't expect anything to change, but I can still bitch about it on the Internet. :)
Roads are not made out of the same stuff that cars are. Phone switches and computers are two different applications of electronic logic.
You are really hung up on this "computers are not communications lines" thing. Please understand that's got nothing to do with my complaint.
Let's go back to the beginning. I'll repeat two of my statements. I'll leave out one you seem to be hung up on.
"Your typical big telco equipment has a lifetime measured in decades. The computer industry could learn a thing or two here."
My complaint is with equipment which becomes unsupported after 5 or so years (or even quicker!). We're forced to replace it with new equipment that achieves the same goal. Telcos design their stuff to last (or used to). I think the computer world could stand to put an eye towards equipment longevity.
I felt a great disturbance in the 'net... as if a million voices suddenly cried out in bad jokes, and were suddenly posted on Slashdot.
This story should be fun.
While you make a valid point that computers != communications lines, I think the point I'm making still stands. I'll continue your analogy (sustaining the unwritten rule of Slashdot that says all discussions eventually include bad car analogies): If computers are cars, then it's like having to buy a new car every five years because they stopped making parts for the old car, even though the new one doesn't offer any practical improvement. Or compare modern VoIP systems, some models of which are already in phase-out after a five year service life, to a PBX which might be good for decades.
And, yes, the PSTN carries much Internet traffic, using the same technology that's been around for decades. That's kinda my point.
YOUR ANALYSIS IS INTERESTING STOP I THINK YOU RAISE A GOOD POINT STOP MOD PARENT UP STOP
(Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame. Lameness filter is lame.)
"But rising by 3.9C is almost as bad."
You think that's bad -- just think about what would happen if it rose by 7.02F!
"Television [network] companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience; they're in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers." -- Douglas Adams
(From "What Have We Got To Lose?"; first appearance in Wired UK #1, 1995; reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt)