Interesting factoid: I learned more about submachine guns from Stargate SG-1 than ever I learned from video games. Maybe we should arrest people who watch Stargate, too? Hamilton: Colonel O'Neill has no idea of what we're trying to accomplish here. He's too busy polishing his M-16. O'Neill: (overhearing) Actually, it's a P-90.
The only way in which SQL Server surpasses Oracle is the UI, which isn't too hard since Oracle's UI is terrible. As far as actual database technology goes, while I do think Oracle is somewhat overrated, it's still pretty hard to beat.
More advanced that PostgreSQL? Hardly! Especially versions before SQL 2005. MS SQL still used row locking for updates until 2005, which meant it was horrible under load and impossible to scale to high levels of concurrency. Oracle and PostgreSQL both used MVCC since the very beginning and never suffered from such problems. PostgreSQL added transaction log shipping for backup / hot spare situations with its 8.0 release. MS added that feature 8 months later. I've used all 3 databases quite extensively and could ramble on for a while about the mess of built-in stored procedures in SQL server, lack of UTF-8 support, defaulting to case-insensitive queries, the lack of extensible authentication methods, and so on.
The other downside of SQL 2005 is that it embeds a bunch of unneeded junk, such as the.NET CLR (which itself is a huge memory hog), and wastes RAM that could be used for caching data.
Just a small nitpick. SQL Server is a great DB server, and it shouldn't be discounted simply because it's from Microsoft. If you're stuck on Windows, SQL server is an okay DB server.
It has nothing to do with the Microsoft name. It wouldn't matter if it were still called Sybase, it simply doesn't measure up against the competition in the medium-to-high end space. It's all right for low-to-medium end applications (the stuff most people unfortunately use Access databases for), but I certainly wouldn't use it to track Russian nuclear weapons. I'd put PostgreSQL as solid medium contender.
Exchange still uses the Jet engine. Its limit is 1,900 concurrent connections.
Not quite. Exchange uses Jet Blue, as do AD and other things embedded in Windows (DHCP server, WINS, etc.). It was strictly for MS-only internal use until Windows 2000, when it was renamed Extensible Storage Engine and the API was made available.
Diebold is using Jet Red. Jet Red is what MS Access uses, as well as the "Microsoft Jet DB Engine" ODBC source that many crappy third-party VB apps use.
Despite sharing the same name (though Jet Blue was renamed, Exchange still refers to it as simply "Jet" in a few places), there's almost nothing in common between the two. Blue/ESE is a lot more fault-tolerant than Red, but concurrent access must be provided by a server application running on top of it -- multiple apps can't open the database file directly at once. That's probably a good thing, since Red/MS Access's cooperative concurrency scheme is what's responsible for most of the corruption issues people have with it.
Jet Blue/ESE is nowhere near the design of say, Oracle or PostgreSQL, or even MSSQL for that matter. It's about on the level of version 3 or 4 of MySQL (using MyISAM, not InnoDB), or perhaps SQLite.
Jet Red/MS Access is just plain garbage and should never be used. Shame on you, Diebold. Shame!
Years ago I used TurboTax once and I had to laugh when, after completing the questionnaire and filling out my return, it popped up and tried to sell me "TurboTax State (Texas edition)".
Hint for those who haven't lived in Texas: there is no state income tax
Now there's hideously easy to figure out secret questions on there.
I agree with you, I hate "security questions". At least most sites that use them let you specify the answers when you create the account, so I can treat it like an additional password and put in something random that's not related to the question asked.
In the end, they just said they were mandated by the federal government to do this. Does anyone know if this is true? What item in law mandates this?
That's a lie, because I know for a fact that not all banks (including some major national chains) use them. Which is fine by me, I'm happy to take responsibility for my own security by choosing strong a password and verifying the SSL cert before I log in.
Or a small failsafe firmware in a ROM chip that knows just enough to get the device into a state where the flash firmware can be updated. That's what Cisco does on all their routers so that you'll always have a way to start over if you hose it by loading the wrong image or something.
You only have to restart things that cache a copy of the time zone data and can't be convinced to re-read that file with a HUP
It's not really up to the program itself -- libc handles the timezones and as far as I know there's not an API that allows an application to tell it to re-read the files.
Other things I tried (Apache, Samba) seemed to do okay with a reload command
Apache I'm pretty sure implements reload by exec()-ing itself, which effectively is the same as killing and restarting it. I'm not sure what Samba does but I suspect it's something similar if it caused the timezones to refresh.
Depends on the type of HDTV. If it's a CRT, sure, you probably won't notice much of a difference. With an LCD on the other hand, the difference is immediately noticeable, even on a modest sized display.
Sweet. I've got a DVD-A120 that I still use all the time. Slightly bigger than most of the players nowadays, and none of the fancy features (MP3, DVD-RW support, etc), but it's got component out and still works like a champ all these years later.
In contrast I've been through a couple 2005-2006 model "el cheapo" players in the other room, and had family members have problems with even mid-range players produced recently. After about a year or so, they just start having glitches and artifacts, even on discs in pristine condition. Pop them in the old Panasonic and they play fine.
I would never run IIS on a DC, but we do have a dedicated WSUS server:)
I actually don't use the policy for user initiated updates -- we do it all on a schedule. Just thought it might come in handy for home users or smaller shops (though those probably let users run as admin anyway).
Hehe as a non pro XP user i had noticed too that logging in as an unprivileged user does not notify you of any updates. I'm really constantly amazed about the lag between windows and the other OSes out there, when astroturfing and online debates stop, and real work needs to get done. Hope vista is way better, for you vista users.
I don't use XP a lot but do maintain a network of them at work. It makes sense though, why notify a user of updates that said user won't be able to install anyway? (for lack of admin rights)
There is a group policy option that allows the update service to display updates to normal users (and elevate privileges for the install). I don't know if the home version of XP includes the group policy editor, but even if it doesn't the option should be able to be enabled via a registry edit.
Not necessarily. For a long time after XP came out, we would always rebuild new machines that came in with it as 2000, just so that all the desktops were consistent.
Even now that we're using XP (finally, within the last year), we always rebuild it as a fresh install anyway. OEM installs suck.
Any machine that comes in with Vista preloaded probably won't even be booted into the OS. Just straight into the XP install and wipe the drive.
Which one were you using? The citibank one (at least the flash-based version I use because I'm not running windows) allows you to specify the expiration date, and I think it defaults to the end of the month.
If you have Win2000/XP clients with the ODBC driver, it's even possible to have it use the Kerberos ticket the user got at login to authenticate with, a la integrated authenication with MSSQL.
Great for migrating access DBs into a real database server when they hit the point where they really start suffering.
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It's even worse than that! Not only did Jesus have a hammer, but was born and raised in the Middle East!
Does G.W. know about this?!?!
Why is the parent comment not at +5 Funny and/or Insightful yet?
Well of course Hammer Time would ensue! That's what they get for using the wrong words. What they should have said was:
"Hold! What you are doing is wrong! Why do you do this thing?"
O'Neill: (overhearing) Actually, it's a P-90.
I still miss the MP5A5s though...
I think the GP was referring to the evil law firm.
More advanced that PostgreSQL? Hardly! Especially versions before SQL 2005. MS SQL still used row locking for updates until 2005, which meant it was horrible under load and impossible to scale to high levels of concurrency. Oracle and PostgreSQL both used MVCC since the very beginning and never suffered from such problems. PostgreSQL added transaction log shipping for backup / hot spare situations with its 8.0 release. MS added that feature 8 months later. I've used all 3 databases quite extensively and could ramble on for a while about the mess of built-in stored procedures in SQL server, lack of UTF-8 support, defaulting to case-insensitive queries, the lack of extensible authentication methods, and so on.
The other downside of SQL 2005 is that it embeds a bunch of unneeded junk, such as the
It has nothing to do with the Microsoft name. It wouldn't matter if it were still called Sybase, it simply doesn't measure up against the competition in the medium-to-high end space. It's all right for low-to-medium end applications (the stuff most people unfortunately use Access databases for), but I certainly wouldn't use it to track Russian nuclear weapons. I'd put PostgreSQL as solid medium contender.
It was strictly for MS-only internal use until Windows 2000, when it was renamed Extensible Storage Engine and the API was made available.
Minor correction, it was renamed in 2000 and the DLL was distributed with Windows 2000, but the API documentation wasn't published until 2005.
Exchange still uses the Jet engine. Its limit is 1,900 concurrent connections.
Not quite. Exchange uses Jet Blue, as do AD and other things embedded in Windows (DHCP server, WINS, etc.). It was strictly for MS-only internal use until Windows 2000, when it was renamed Extensible Storage Engine and the API was made available.
Diebold is using Jet Red. Jet Red is what MS Access uses, as well as the "Microsoft Jet DB Engine" ODBC source that many crappy third-party VB apps use.
Despite sharing the same name (though Jet Blue was renamed, Exchange still refers to it as simply "Jet" in a few places), there's almost nothing in common between the two. Blue/ESE is a lot more fault-tolerant than Red, but concurrent access must be provided by a server application running on top of it -- multiple apps can't open the database file directly at once. That's probably a good thing, since Red/MS Access's cooperative concurrency scheme is what's responsible for most of the corruption issues people have with it.
Jet Blue/ESE is nowhere near the design of say, Oracle or PostgreSQL, or even MSSQL for that matter. It's about on the level of version 3 or 4 of MySQL (using MyISAM, not InnoDB), or perhaps SQLite.
Jet Red/MS Access is just plain garbage and should never be used. Shame on you, Diebold. Shame!
On NPR they gave a figure that the TurboTax servers were processing like 40 per second.
40 tax returns per second? That's nothing! Call me when their servers can process 40 libraries of congress per second.
Years ago I used TurboTax once and I had to laugh when, after completing the questionnaire and filling out my return, it popped up and tried to sell me "TurboTax State (Texas edition)".
Hint for those who haven't lived in Texas: there is no state income tax
Now there's hideously easy to figure out secret questions on there.
I agree with you, I hate "security questions". At least most sites that use them let you specify the answers when you create the account, so I can treat it like an additional password and put in something random that's not related to the question asked.
In the end, they just said they were mandated by the federal government to do this. Does anyone know if this is true? What item in law mandates this?
That's a lie, because I know for a fact that not all banks (including some major national chains) use them. Which is fine by me, I'm happy to take responsibility for my own security by choosing strong a password and verifying the SSL cert before I log in.
Or a small failsafe firmware in a ROM chip that knows just enough to get the device into a state where the flash firmware can be updated. That's what Cisco does on all their routers so that you'll always have a way to start over if you hose it by loading the wrong image or something.
Everyone knows you don't decode the chevrons, you encode them.
Except of course for the seventh one, which you lock.
You only have to restart things that cache a copy of the time zone data and can't be convinced to re-read that file with a HUP
It's not really up to the program itself -- libc handles the timezones and as far as I know there's not an API that allows an application to tell it to re-read the files.
Other things I tried (Apache, Samba) seemed to do okay with a reload command
Apache I'm pretty sure implements reload by exec()-ing itself, which effectively is the same as killing and restarting it. I'm not sure what Samba does but I suspect it's something similar if it caused the timezones to refresh.
(why does Java not simply trust the underlying OS to report time accurately?).
Probably because it has to run on Windows which has absolutely horrendous date/time (and time zone) handling.
What they should have done is roll their own timekeeping for Windows but use the system facilities on more sane OSes.
Depends on the type of HDTV. If it's a CRT, sure, you probably won't notice much of a difference. With an LCD on the other hand, the difference is immediately noticeable, even on a modest sized display.
It probably does what most spyware does and submits the data as HTTP requests.
Good luck blocking that in a large corporate environment.
(Panasonic DVD-A110, IIRC)
Sweet. I've got a DVD-A120 that I still use all the time. Slightly bigger than most of the players nowadays, and none of the fancy features (MP3, DVD-RW support, etc), but it's got component out and still works like a champ all these years later.
In contrast I've been through a couple 2005-2006 model "el cheapo" players in the other room, and had family members have problems with even mid-range players produced recently. After about a year or so, they just start having glitches and artifacts, even on discs in pristine condition. Pop them in the old Panasonic and they play fine.
Guess they just don't make 'em like they used to.
I would never run IIS on a DC, but we do have a dedicated WSUS server :)
I actually don't use the policy for user initiated updates -- we do it all on a schedule. Just thought it might come in handy for home users or smaller shops (though those probably let users run as admin anyway).
Hehe as a non pro XP user i had noticed too that logging in as an unprivileged user does not notify you of any updates. I'm really constantly amazed about the lag between windows and the other OSes out there, when astroturfing and online debates stop, and real work needs to get done. Hope vista is way better, for you vista users.
I don't use XP a lot but do maintain a network of them at work. It makes sense though, why notify a user of updates that said user won't be able to install anyway? (for lack of admin rights)
There is a group policy option that allows the update service to display updates to normal users (and elevate privileges for the install). I don't know if the home version of XP includes the group policy editor, but even if it doesn't the option should be able to be enabled via a registry edit.
Not necessarily. For a long time after XP came out, we would always rebuild new machines that came in with it as 2000, just so that all the desktops were consistent.
Even now that we're using XP (finally, within the last year), we always rebuild it as a fresh install anyway. OEM installs suck.
Any machine that comes in with Vista preloaded probably won't even be booted into the OS. Just straight into the XP install and wipe the drive.
Which one were you using? The citibank one (at least the flash-based version I use because I'm not running windows) allows you to specify the expiration date, and I think it defaults to the end of the month.
If you have Win2000/XP clients with the ODBC driver, it's even possible to have it use the Kerberos ticket the user got at login to authenticate with, a la integrated authenication with MSSQL.
Great for migrating access DBs into a real database server when they hit the point where they really start suffering.
But last I checked, b-trees are always balanced no matter what.
No, b-trees are not always balanced. In fact, there's a whole field of research dedicated to optimal methods for balancing them.
Certain types of binary trees, such as red-black trees, are always balanced, but they pay a price in terms of higher overhead on inserts.