Um, that happens all the time man. When I bought my house it had a bunch of carpet over the hardwood floors, I had to pay to have it removed. There was a bunch of peeling paint I had to strip and redo. There was a broken water supply system.
You see, in the real world, things aren't always as cheap as we want them to be, nor are they in perfect condition. Sellets have an opinion of how much they want for an item, and buyers have an opinion of how much they'll pay. Once the price has been set, then you haggle over the conditions of the sale.
Another condition of the sale was that we had to pay for insurance for the "title." This protected the house during the 5 minute period between the seller surrenderring the title and us receiving it. I didn't want to pay it, but nobody would deal with us unless we did. I didn't want to pay it, but it wasn't a tax.
One of the conditions of sale for a Windows PC is that it has Windows on it. Because their deal with Microsoft probably demands that they do so. This is to establish partnership between the two, so Microsoft is more accountable and more likely to help the vendor out if and when there's a problem such as hardware compatibility. I guarantee you that a Dell works flawlessly with windows, whereas a noname machine, even if it has "better" parts, might have trouble. The noname vendor just doesn't have any pull. So the "Windows Tax" is better for their business, better for Microsoft, and if you want Windows, it's better for you.
If you don't want Windows...find a vendor that doesn't have the deal. But it's not a fucking "tax" for the vendor to help protect its business and deliver what 90% of the world wants anyway (foolish mortals).
Here are some SPEC results I googled for, commisioned from SUN on their Xeon based Fire V65x, running a single 3.06 GHz Xeon. You'll notice that they, too, disabled Hyperthreading. Obviously, Sun would have wanted these benchies to be as fast as possible. So, probably, the single thread used for SPEC scores is best suited by TURNING HYPERTHREADING OFF.
Meaning, if Apple's results are reliable (which I think they are...levelling both machines by optimizing them for neutral operations and having them run neutral code), they tuned the Dell FOR SPEC. They didn't decrease its performance -- they probably increased it a bit.
LICENSED from Xerox. Apple LICENSED from Xerox. They fucking paid them. It's not IP theft, Xerox knew about it, Xerox didn't care.
What Microsoft did was theft, kinda. But everybody was going there anyway. It doesn't matter who did it first. Other variants include GeOS and Workbench.
Did Linus copy, steal or license for his "UN*X LIKE" environment? Is X licensed, copied or stolen? I don't know. And I'm not going to speculate...one way or another, SCO will find out for us.
I love how Linux/BSD users refer to the price of an operating system as a "tax." Tell me, when you buy a house, do you ask if you have to pay the "foundation tax?" Are you upset about the insidious "chassis tax" when you buy a car, or the diabolical "stiching tax" we have to pay for new shirts?
I mean, come on. The OS on a new machine costs about $50 (okay, $100 if your vendor doesn't have a deal with MS). Is $50 worth your time to download, configure and install an OS, as well as downloading, configuring, and installing any applications you want because you can't buy them at a store?
I have a machine running Gentoo -- but it's a SERVER. Window's SERVER OS is too expensive for a home user, so it was worth the hassle. But it's not worth the hassle to save $50 over the cost of computer that's already running me close to $2000.
Geez. When you read this, are you going to complain about the ".sig" tax?
I disagree. Many companies DO know about code bloat and don't realise how affordable or how worthwhile a custom solution really is.
Think about it: you have a set of metadata you REALLY need inserted in every document you have. MS Word, for whatever reason, doesn't have it. So you end up paying people to stick it anywhere they can -- directory stuctures, headers, cover sheets, etc. Eventually, some snake oiler sells you a document storage and revisioning system which contains the small bit of metadata you needed...along with about 10,000 other features. Now, these features have clever names that make your employees want to play with them. In the end, you have a very messed up database and metadata in several different styles...and nothing's uniform, there's no way to search or query and that's all you needed in the first place.
Or you call Das & Josh. We shake and bake some word macros to maintain a document database, and make a little "TSR" style program to watch document directories for name changes. We write a program based on how your people work, collect the data, and put it into a cheap-o SQL database (let's say Postgres cos I love it). Write a couple reports, put your logo and a cute interface on it, and whammo! There's exactly what you wanted.
Support can be outsourced to a big company, if you want it to be. Or you can have the much better support we offer, as evidenced by the list of our happy clients.
Small business is the new generation of software...even IBM knows it, which is why they keep firing so many people. Eventually, small business is all they'll have left!
Yeah man, like IBM's keeping all of its programmers from 10 years ago, and like any of them will remember what they did! What's important is having the rights to an easy to read codebase, not to get locked into an (expensive) middle man. IBM'd have to retrain somebody, anyway...why not call your local Comp-u-temps and have them send over a clean nosed kid for a quarter of the cost and equivalent results?
Still, I take every job seriously (and my buddy Josh, who I honestly haven't worked with in three years, takes it even moreso) and am always open to support calls from contract work. I took one on the ride back from Baxter State Park last year; debugged it in the car and had uploaded a patch before we hit the Massachusetts line. Find me an IBM 9-5er who'll do that!
Seriously, though -- the "bigger is better" mentality is bullshit when it comes to industrial solutions. What's better is the code that works. What's better is code that's smaller, does exactly what you need it to do, is understandable for the people using it (e.g. no shake and bake generic database solution with big "FIELD2" labels everywhere), and that'll pay for itself in no time.
And when you look at some of the options the "giants" offer small companies -- hundreds of thousands of dollars for a massive, scalable database with backup solutions and redundant power sucking the wall socket dry, just to hold tube sock order forms and today's lunch menu? I think just about anybody on slashdot could write a BETTER, more appropriate solution in about a week based off MySQL and a nice content management system. But of course, we slashtrolls don't spent millions on commercials (money for which, of course, comes out of your "solution")
Um...my VW runs 12s, ass. It's very comfortable, has a decent stereo, no goofy spoilers, a nice paint job and all the electronics word. I guarantee it's nicer than any POS driven by a guy named "Dark Elven." Or is the Drizzt D'Oldsmobile really trikt out?
As for the post score, I don't fucking know. I seriously think the thing is going to get all shitted up. I have a mesh panel on the front of my PC and it's always got shit in it. Pisses me off to no end.
I know our applications will never be on anything other than Windows because that is all the people in my industry use. There is not a single macintosh, unix box, linux box or be box installed at any of our clients' offices and never will be, I guarantee it, because these guys are pumping $50k+ into our software and a windows license is still only $100. Aside from this, the boss would never pay me to write for anything other than Windows -- I had to build our Linux based DNS server in my free time -- and nobody in out programming department showed up for my "how to admin the linux box" training.
With that said -- yeah, the C# naming conventions pissed me off at first, but remember: a lot of the.NET initiative was aimed at not "shocking" the moron VB developers. I hate that fucking language with a passion...and hungarian notation even more...but I can live in their capitalization world if they can deal with me not putting the letters "obj" at the front of every fucking object now that EVERYTHING is an object.
Dude, no developer who's getting paid for it should ever balk over the "cost" of Visual Studio. It has saved me at least two week's time since I started using it, and it's only $600. Write it off.
VS.NET is the last MS program I've purchased since Windows 2000 that I actually felt like I got my money's worth out of. The GUI is beautiful, the key commands are better than any editor save Textpad. It's snappy and once you turn off the dumb "rolling drawer" feature it's quite a good performer. Plus you can pull all sorts of interface tricks to get things right where you want them...
Interfaces are great for managing OBJECTS, but for managing PROCESSES I think delegates are the bee's knees. True, they break OO in some ways. But delegates excell in the things OO has never really been good at: discerning, once and for all, what event fires when and in which order. Creating a manifest of what needs to be done, and being able to manage it through get and set methods like any old property....makes you feel like events and methods are something tanglible, and not just addresses in the command stack. Plus, there are some things that are just too confusing and maddening to do through interfaces. Example: I have a static method of a class which returns a new object of a subclass based on requested input. Occasionally, I need to return a new object of the superclass. How do I know which new() method i'm calling? I can't build an interface for it. My options are to either rely on reflection, which is always slow, clumsy, and half the company doesn't understand it, or pass a delegate a static method in the subclass, which is usually pretty fast.
1) The.NET Framework has a SLIGHTLY smaller footprint than the latest version of Java (46.5 vs 47.3 on my workstation). And it does more stuff -- a lot of the add-on packages for Java, including all of their J2EE crap, parellels what's already in the Framework. Not that it matters...including the framework on an install CD is trivial, and most Windows Update and XP users have it already.
2).NET does NOT integrate the web into windows applications..NET allows users to create web apps in much the same interface as standard windows forms, using a system called WebForms. It also allows regular ASP pages to be compiled into faster versions a la JSP/Servlets. But bringing the web into windows...no, it doesn't really do that, not like you think anyway. Web Services are just a fancy way to perform data transformation. What's cool about.NET is that the IDE supports all sorts of really useful data transformation and reporting mechanisms using SQL/XML/etc built right in...no rolling your own data access methods (though I end up doing it anyway).
3).NET is better than Java for apps that will always be used on a Windows PC, because:
- It has a much faster graphics interface, while maintaining a robust graphics toolkit.
- It has a better messaging mechanism (Events/Delegates are a GODSEND and are the single most useful thing in the framework)
- It interoperates quickly and pretty thoroughly with current COM APIs, and wraps up nicely for use in non-.NET apps
- The Studio environment is faster to work with and has a more mature debugger than any Java IDE I've seen, including Netbeans
- ADO.NET is pretty nicely done, and things like DataAdapters parellel structures I always end up writing in Java anyway.
Anyway, the runtime filesize argument is just crap. The java guys need to get that GUI speed up to par or.NET's going to roll right over them. Eight months ago I'd have never said this, but Java isn't my favorite language anymore. C# is. And even association with the vile and repugnant Microsoft isn't enough to sour it.
To be honest, at least 50-90% of the cost of big software packages goes into maintaining another company, paying that company's CEOs and sales staff, paying for first level support people to misdirect your call and other things that are, to a great degree, unrelated to the quality of the software you're getting.
Think about it: for $100k, you can get package X, which does half of what you need it to do in some areas and twice what you want it to do in others. Or, you can hire me & my buddy Josh for a year. We'll write you a custom piece of software integrating open source tools, work right along with your employees and give you all the code and a support contract for XxX hours over the next YyY years.
If there's an OSS package that already does most of what you need, you can probably hire their developers to customize it for you quickly and at a very minimum expense. You don't even have to tell anybody about your custom code, unless you intend to release the binaries outside your company.
And of course, if you can get three companies that need a similar piece of software, you can invest in a small business that does exactly what you want and split the cost. That's how my friend's firm works...the bills are paid for by the big guys, and anything they sell on top of it is a bonus. As a result, their rates are 1/2 to 1/10th those of their pay-for-our-big-name-CEO competitors.
That's your software revolution: customization, adaptation and competent small businessmen. And it's already happening.
You know, with all that cooling, and the chip running faster than expected, I'll bet Apple is overclocking these things. Why else would a company that's typically prided itself on simplicity of design come out with this case that's a cross between a Kryotech PC and a Boeing turbine?
And I'll bet that mesh front panel's gonna get all gunked up with dust and cat hair. It'll probably look like the air filter I just pulled out of my turbocharged Volkswagen. Ugh. Hope the thermisters know to shut down or slow down the chips!
I took an "Intro to Archeology" class with my wife. At the same time, I was taking 8 bit logic design and assembly.
One of the projects was to design your own pictographic language, which was to be compared against others in the class and there were prizes for first place.
Being a computer geek, the main innovation of my fake language was a system for computing numbers up to 256 on two hands (guess how). This was actually harder than it seems, because we were asked to set the pictograph in a period well before the discovery of the mathematical concept of zero. So, in essence, i had to shift everything down, so the existance of any counting at all (two closed fists) was 1, and a single finger held aloft was 2.
Anyway, after illustrating to my bored TA how one could easily add numbers by performing a bitwise "and" with another counter, I got second place in the contest. My wife got first place, because hers was not so geeky, and instead painted in a caligraphic hand and it looked beautiful.
Truedat. Plus, in OSS, there's often a very coherent problem, which requires a certain solution. If you need a journaling filesystem, you take a filesystem and add journalling. If you think that the solution other people are working in needs advanced metadata more than it needs journalling, you take a filesystem and add advanced metadata. You don't try to add both, at the same time.
And that's what every company I've ever worked for has tried to do. Because it's integrated, package d solutions that make money for software vendors, not apps that do one thing great. I'm writing a word processor right now because I want a word processor that has three things: a big window, a built in thesaurus, and built in MLA markup. I will never be able to sell it, because it does 1/100 of what MS Word does, and MS Word is only $100. Even if it solves peoples' problems, it's just not fancy enough to be worth money.
We have egos at work too. I am not supposed to TOUCH anything my coworkers do, it is THEIR code and THEIRS to command, hands off! Even when I sneak a peek and find obvious bugs, I am not allowed to fix them because it violates territoriality.
This sort of code hording is impossible in OSS, and it's a shame. It's well known in literary circles that the more eyes that grace a page, editorially, the more likely you'll be to have a coherent and gramatically correct work. Code is no different IMO.
Of course, code hording does decrease the inevitable argument over implementation that plague many software houses...and for which OSS is uniquely famous.
No, there isn't. I haven't monkeyed with q-mail since I set it up two years ago. Our phones go down once every two months or so. We've switched vendors twice.
This is why I consider SMTP to be reliable, even if it's not guaranteed. If somebody calls and the phone just rings because our switching system crashed, the phone offers no delivery re-attempt. There's no failure alert. Hell, some systems (I dealt with one yesterday at the power company) just dump you and don't tell your local provider -- you get silence, no hangup beep and wasted minutes on your cell. Then the connecting person just gets pissed off, steams for about an hour, and then calls back. Maybe. We have no record of it either way.
What part of this argument do you feel is worthy of sarcastic rejoinders? Because, you know, usually those are used to mock a false or foolish statement, and I haven't made any.
Well, no. I'm the kind of person who's written a delivery tracking mail server and knows that people expect email to be quickly delivered. And I know that barring failures, it can be. 95% of email we sent out (the headlines of daily and weekly newspapers) was delivered in less than ten seconds. The rest usually took less than an hour...to the point that our server moved mail that took longer than that into a special delivery folder for half-hourly "server missing" retries.
I know that this type of legitimate server use would have been prohibitively difficult to engineer with this "greylist" method. I know that a lot of servers which do a greater volume than ours would just give up. And I know that the 350,000 people who ASKED for us to send them their newspaper every day as soon as the edition was finalized would be pissed if it wasn't out at exactly 2 am...not to mention our customers, who already would assume the "push" hadn't been sent after 15 minutes of inactivity and would double-send.
You gave all these excuses for SMTP, which is bullshit. It doesn't need failure notifcation, delivery notices or alternate routing. SMTP should be a rock solid service that never goes down, never gets bogged, and never fails when the message is properly formatted. In fact, qmail (the core of my mail-send program) already IS all these things. It's more secure and more reliable than any web application server. It may be more reliable than the phone system. So where's the argument? If we can't rely on something solid and reliable like SMTP, what are we supposed to rely on? AIM?
Yeah, well good for your rate of classification error. Mine is 100%...i can always tell whether i'm reading what I consider to be spam and what i consider to be a real email.
Of course, my rate of classification error for what YOU consider to be spam to ME is different. And it's always going to be variable. You've discovered a filter which YOU consider to be good enough. However, as admins, we are hosts to our users. Not lords over them. Therefore, a broad use spam filter should only as good as what our most tolerant user expects.
My email address is all over the web, on dozens of domain registrations and in hundreds of online databases waiting to be sold. My daily spam count is still less than 10 mails per day, due to prudent release of the message and clever address masking like HTML encoding, spaces, and NOSPAM insertions. It is very much worth my time to delete these 10 mails, assured in the fact that I am not missing anything crucial.
Moving stuff to a folder FULL of spam that must be sifted through, checking for your filter's classification errors, is no better than leaving the spam in your inbox. And it's a lot more difficult to manage and support.
Oh yes. There's the bastard operator philosophy we all love so much...if everybody is doing something and it works, you should have no problem turning off that service if it's NOT SUPPOSED to do that. You know, instead of finding a way to help people do things the way that they understand, the way that makes sense, strongarm them into doing what you like.
HTML wasn't supposed to be used for realtime stock quotes, banking software or content generation and control. I dare you to go up to your boss and tell him you're going to turn off those functions. See if you keep your job.
This is fucking SMTP. It doesn't matter that it wasn't SUPPOSED to be a guaranteed delivery system when designed umpteen years ago. It's become one. People expect it to be one. It is relied upon so heavily that a lot of people have email-only PAGERS. And it's become so reliable that the only time email isn't nearly instantaneous is when a server is down or some asshole slows it down. I have used SMTP relay times as a benchmark or internet performance, and I know a lot of you have as well.
I get these chain emails from my brother. They are always some funky scheme to get money that won't work. I'd love to just delete them...but if I do this, he tells my mom I don't answer his email.
She then laces into me like you would not believe...blah blah blah he's your brother and you should love him. I don't need that grief...so instead I respond with a "not interested, no cash right now." Keeps the family happy.
I could see it being more important than this, though. Your boss sends you direct mail HE received and appends a "Should we do this" to the bottom. Or, worse, your marketting team constructs a direct mailing that fails your spam filter (no comments from the peanut gallery...obviously this is a good thing to find out, but this is not the way to find it out). Missing that one email could make somebody VERY angry and put you in danger. I have had messages from my boss/CEO/etc go into my junk folder and found them when cleaning it out.
It is correct for the spam engine to label these as spam email. It would be incorrect for it to delete them before they got to you. And so I subscribe to the school of thought that a single false positive makes any spam filter absolutely worthless. It is very easy to delete a message that gets through the filter. It is impossible to resurrect a mailing you never even knew you got.
So make your own pizza. It's not hard. Buy some frozen crust ($.79 or so) and leave it on the counter before going to work. COme home, roll it out. Can of Furmano's tomato sauce is $.79. Brick of good whole milk mozzerella is $4, i use about half. Then, do it up how you like. I add some grated romano to a half cup of ricotta, black pepper, minced garlic and finely chopped pineapple and put a layer down before the mozz.
10 minutes at 500F and you can kiss PizzaHut goodbye.
Don't let the stodgy food industry keep you or your family from decreasing your communications costs! I spend around $220 per month in those (cell phones for me, my wife & my mom $97, telephone $35, i-net & cable $90) and would love to reduce. But i'm so lazy!
Whoa, my personal preference is Sybase. MySQL, as used by most of the open source projects I've seen, is not a database. it's a data repository. Shit like "SELECT *"s with no joins and one-to-many relationships performed by adding extra columns.
This is text file stuff -- comma delimited stuff. And it doesn't help you learn SQL any more than writing a clever perl script helps you learn software engineering.
Re:Paul DuBois, MySQL
on
Linux Clustering
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
In case anybody's wondering, the target audience for MySQL is people who want to put all their data in a big text file, but use MySQL instead so they can put "SQL" on their resumes below "Programming Languages Known."
Slashdot Mirror
Um, that happens all the time man. When I bought my house it had a bunch of carpet over the hardwood floors, I had to pay to have it removed. There was a bunch of peeling paint I had to strip and redo. There was a broken water supply system.
You see, in the real world, things aren't always as cheap as we want them to be, nor are they in perfect condition. Sellets have an opinion of how much they want for an item, and buyers have an opinion of how much they'll pay. Once the price has been set, then you haggle over the conditions of the sale.
Another condition of the sale was that we had to pay for insurance for the "title." This protected the house during the 5 minute period between the seller surrenderring the title and us receiving it. I didn't want to pay it, but nobody would deal with us unless we did. I didn't want to pay it, but it wasn't a tax.
One of the conditions of sale for a Windows PC is that it has Windows on it. Because their deal with Microsoft probably demands that they do so. This is to establish partnership between the two, so Microsoft is more accountable and more likely to help the vendor out if and when there's a problem such as hardware compatibility. I guarantee you that a Dell works flawlessly with windows, whereas a noname machine, even if it has "better" parts, might have trouble. The noname vendor just doesn't have any pull. So the "Windows Tax" is better for their business, better for Microsoft, and if you want Windows, it's better for you.
If you don't want Windows...find a vendor that doesn't have the deal. But it's not a fucking "tax" for the vendor to help protect its business and deliver what 90% of the world wants anyway (foolish mortals).
Here are some SPEC results I googled for, commisioned from SUN on their Xeon based Fire V65x, running a single 3.06 GHz Xeon. You'll notice that they, too, disabled Hyperthreading. Obviously, Sun would have wanted these benchies to be as fast as possible. So, probably, the single thread used for SPEC scores is best suited by TURNING HYPERTHREADING OFF.
s 20 03q2/cpu2000-20030520-02193.pdf
Meaning, if Apple's results are reliable (which I think they are...levelling both machines by optimizing them for neutral operations and having them run neutral code), they tuned the Dell FOR SPEC. They didn't decrease its performance -- they probably increased it a bit.
http://www.specbench.org/osg/cpu2000/results/re
Just because you put the words "Fast" or "Hyper" in front of a chip's feature doesn't automatically make it faster, as any BIOS hacker knows.
LICENSED from Xerox. Apple LICENSED from Xerox. They fucking paid them. It's not IP theft, Xerox knew about it, Xerox didn't care.
What Microsoft did was theft, kinda. But everybody was going there anyway. It doesn't matter who did it first. Other variants include GeOS and Workbench.
Did Linus copy, steal or license for his "UN*X LIKE" environment? Is X licensed, copied or stolen? I don't know. And I'm not going to speculate...one way or another, SCO will find out for us.
I love how Linux/BSD users refer to the price of an operating system as a "tax." Tell me, when you buy a house, do you ask if you have to pay the "foundation tax?" Are you upset about the insidious "chassis tax" when you buy a car, or the diabolical "stiching tax" we have to pay for new shirts?
I mean, come on. The OS on a new machine costs about $50 (okay, $100 if your vendor doesn't have a deal with MS). Is $50 worth your time to download, configure and install an OS, as well as downloading, configuring, and installing any applications you want because you can't buy them at a store?
I have a machine running Gentoo -- but it's a SERVER. Window's SERVER OS is too expensive for a home user, so it was worth the hassle. But it's not worth the hassle to save $50 over the cost of computer that's already running me close to $2000.
Geez. When you read this, are you going to complain about the ".sig" tax?
I disagree. Many companies DO know about code bloat and don't realise how affordable or how worthwhile a custom solution really is.
Think about it: you have a set of metadata you REALLY need inserted in every document you have. MS Word, for whatever reason, doesn't have it. So you end up paying people to stick it anywhere they can -- directory stuctures, headers, cover sheets, etc. Eventually, some snake oiler sells you a document storage and revisioning system which contains the small bit of metadata you needed...along with about 10,000 other features. Now, these features have clever names that make your employees want to play with them. In the end, you have a very messed up database and metadata in several different styles...and nothing's uniform, there's no way to search or query and that's all you needed in the first place.
Or you call Das & Josh. We shake and bake some word macros to maintain a document database, and make a little "TSR" style program to watch document directories for name changes. We write a program based on how your people work, collect the data, and put it into a cheap-o SQL database (let's say Postgres cos I love it). Write a couple reports, put your logo and a cute interface on it, and whammo! There's exactly what you wanted.
Support can be outsourced to a big company, if you want it to be. Or you can have the much better support we offer, as evidenced by the list of our happy clients.
Small business is the new generation of software...even IBM knows it, which is why they keep firing so many people. Eventually, small business is all they'll have left!
Yeah man, like IBM's keeping all of its programmers from 10 years ago, and like any of them will remember what they did! What's important is having the rights to an easy to read codebase, not to get locked into an (expensive) middle man. IBM'd have to retrain somebody, anyway...why not call your local Comp-u-temps and have them send over a clean nosed kid for a quarter of the cost and equivalent results?
Still, I take every job seriously (and my buddy Josh, who I honestly haven't worked with in three years, takes it even moreso) and am always open to support calls from contract work. I took one on the ride back from Baxter State Park last year; debugged it in the car and had uploaded a patch before we hit the Massachusetts line. Find me an IBM 9-5er who'll do that!
Seriously, though -- the "bigger is better" mentality is bullshit when it comes to industrial solutions. What's better is the code that works. What's better is code that's smaller, does exactly what you need it to do, is understandable for the people using it (e.g. no shake and bake generic database solution with big "FIELD2" labels everywhere), and that'll pay for itself in no time.
And when you look at some of the options the "giants" offer small companies -- hundreds of thousands of dollars for a massive, scalable database with backup solutions and redundant power sucking the wall socket dry, just to hold tube sock order forms and today's lunch menu? I think just about anybody on slashdot could write a BETTER, more appropriate solution in about a week based off MySQL and a nice content management system. But of course, we slashtrolls don't spent millions on commercials (money for which, of course, comes out of your "solution")
Um...my VW runs 12s, ass. It's very comfortable, has a decent stereo, no goofy spoilers, a nice paint job and all the electronics word. I guarantee it's nicer than any POS driven by a guy named "Dark Elven." Or is the Drizzt D'Oldsmobile really trikt out?
As for the post score, I don't fucking know. I seriously think the thing is going to get all shitted up. I have a mesh panel on the front of my PC and it's always got shit in it. Pisses me off to no end.
I know our applications will never be on anything other than Windows because that is all the people in my industry use. There is not a single macintosh, unix box, linux box or be box installed at any of our clients' offices and never will be, I guarantee it, because these guys are pumping $50k+ into our software and a windows license is still only $100. Aside from this, the boss would never pay me to write for anything other than Windows -- I had to build our Linux based DNS server in my free time -- and nobody in out programming department showed up for my "how to admin the linux box" training.
.NET initiative was aimed at not "shocking" the moron VB developers. I hate that fucking language with a passion...and hungarian notation even more...but I can live in their capitalization world if they can deal with me not putting the letters "obj" at the front of every fucking object now that EVERYTHING is an object.
With that said -- yeah, the C# naming conventions pissed me off at first, but remember: a lot of the
Dude, no developer who's getting paid for it should ever balk over the "cost" of Visual Studio. It has saved me at least two week's time since I started using it, and it's only $600. Write it off.
VS.NET is the last MS program I've purchased since Windows 2000 that I actually felt like I got my money's worth out of. The GUI is beautiful, the key commands are better than any editor save Textpad. It's snappy and once you turn off the dumb "rolling drawer" feature it's quite a good performer. Plus you can pull all sorts of interface tricks to get things right where you want them...
Interfaces are great for managing OBJECTS, but for managing PROCESSES I think delegates are the bee's knees. True, they break OO in some ways. But delegates excell in the things OO has never really been good at: discerning, once and for all, what event fires when and in which order. Creating a manifest of what needs to be done, and being able to manage it through get and set methods like any old property....makes you feel like events and methods are something tanglible, and not just addresses in the command stack.
Plus, there are some things that are just too confusing and maddening to do through interfaces. Example: I have a static method of a class which returns a new object of a subclass based on requested input. Occasionally, I need to return a new object of the superclass. How do I know which new() method i'm calling? I can't build an interface for it. My options are to either rely on reflection, which is always slow, clumsy, and half the company doesn't understand it, or pass a delegate a static method in the subclass, which is usually pretty fast.
1) The .NET Framework has a SLIGHTLY smaller footprint than the latest version of Java (46.5 vs 47.3 on my workstation). And it does more stuff -- a lot of the add-on packages for Java, including all of their J2EE crap, parellels what's already in the Framework. Not that it matters...including the framework on an install CD is trivial, and most Windows Update and XP users have it already.
.NET does NOT integrate the web into windows applications. .NET allows users to create web apps in much the same interface as standard windows forms, using a system called WebForms. It also allows regular ASP pages to be compiled into faster versions a la JSP/Servlets. But bringing the web into windows...no, it doesn't really do that, not like you think anyway. Web Services are just a fancy way to perform data transformation. What's cool about .NET is that the IDE supports all sorts of really useful data transformation and reporting mechanisms using SQL/XML/etc built right in...no rolling your own data access methods (though I end up doing it anyway).
.NET is better than Java for apps that will always be used on a Windows PC, because:
.NET's going to roll right over them. Eight months ago I'd have never said this, but Java isn't my favorite language anymore. C# is. And even association with the vile and repugnant Microsoft isn't enough to sour it.
2)
3)
- It has a much faster graphics interface, while maintaining a robust graphics toolkit.
- It has a better messaging mechanism (Events/Delegates are a GODSEND and are the single most useful thing in the framework)
- It interoperates quickly and pretty thoroughly with current COM APIs, and wraps up nicely for use in non-.NET apps
- The Studio environment is faster to work with and has a more mature debugger than any Java IDE I've seen, including Netbeans
- ADO.NET is pretty nicely done, and things like DataAdapters parellel structures I always end up writing in Java anyway.
Anyway, the runtime filesize argument is just crap. The java guys need to get that GUI speed up to par or
To be honest, at least 50-90% of the cost of big software packages goes into maintaining another company, paying that company's CEOs and sales staff, paying for first level support people to misdirect your call and other things that are, to a great degree, unrelated to the quality of the software you're getting.
Think about it: for $100k, you can get package X, which does half of what you need it to do in some areas and twice what you want it to do in others. Or, you can hire me & my buddy Josh for a year. We'll write you a custom piece of software integrating open source tools, work right along with your employees and give you all the code and a support contract for XxX hours over the next YyY years.
If there's an OSS package that already does most of what you need, you can probably hire their developers to customize it for you quickly and at a very minimum expense. You don't even have to tell anybody about your custom code, unless you intend to release the binaries outside your company.
And of course, if you can get three companies that need a similar piece of software, you can invest in a small business that does exactly what you want and split the cost. That's how my friend's firm works...the bills are paid for by the big guys, and anything they sell on top of it is a bonus. As a result, their rates are 1/2 to 1/10th those of their pay-for-our-big-name-CEO competitors.
That's your software revolution: customization, adaptation and competent small businessmen. And it's already happening.
You know, with all that cooling, and the chip running faster than expected, I'll bet Apple is overclocking these things. Why else would a company that's typically prided itself on simplicity of design come out with this case that's a cross between a Kryotech PC and a Boeing turbine?
And I'll bet that mesh front panel's gonna get all gunked up with dust and cat hair. It'll probably look like the air filter I just pulled out of my turbocharged Volkswagen. Ugh. Hope the thermisters know to shut down or slow down the chips!
I do, dumbass. I don't have a seperate desktop!
I took an "Intro to Archeology" class with my wife. At the same time, I was taking 8 bit logic design and assembly.
One of the projects was to design your own pictographic language, which was to be compared against others in the class and there were prizes for first place.
Being a computer geek, the main innovation of my fake language was a system for computing numbers up to 256 on two hands (guess how). This was actually harder than it seems, because we were asked to set the pictograph in a period well before the discovery of the mathematical concept of zero. So, in essence, i had to shift everything down, so the existance of any counting at all (two closed fists) was 1, and a single finger held aloft was 2.
Anyway, after illustrating to my bored TA how one could easily add numbers by performing a bitwise "and" with another counter, I got second place in the contest. My wife got first place, because hers was not so geeky, and instead painted in a caligraphic hand and it looked beautiful.
Truedat. Plus, in OSS, there's often a very coherent problem, which requires a certain solution. If you need a journaling filesystem, you take a filesystem and add journalling. If you think that the solution other people are working in needs advanced metadata more than it needs journalling, you take a filesystem and add advanced metadata. You don't try to add both, at the same time.
And that's what every company I've ever worked for has tried to do. Because it's integrated, package d solutions that make money for software vendors, not apps that do one thing great. I'm writing a word processor right now because I want a word processor that has three things: a big window, a built in thesaurus, and built in MLA markup. I will never be able to sell it, because it does 1/100 of what MS Word does, and MS Word is only $100. Even if it solves peoples' problems, it's just not fancy enough to be worth money.
We have egos at work too. I am not supposed to TOUCH anything my coworkers do, it is THEIR code and THEIRS to command, hands off! Even when I sneak a peek and find obvious bugs, I am not allowed to fix them because it violates territoriality.
This sort of code hording is impossible in OSS, and it's a shame. It's well known in literary circles that the more eyes that grace a page, editorially, the more likely you'll be to have a coherent and gramatically correct work. Code is no different IMO.
Of course, code hording does decrease the inevitable argument over implementation that plague many software houses...and for which OSS is uniquely famous.
No, there isn't. I haven't monkeyed with q-mail since I set it up two years ago. Our phones go down once every two months or so. We've switched vendors twice.
This is why I consider SMTP to be reliable, even if it's not guaranteed. If somebody calls and the phone just rings because our switching system crashed, the phone offers no delivery re-attempt. There's no failure alert. Hell, some systems (I dealt with one yesterday at the power company) just dump you and don't tell your local provider -- you get silence, no hangup beep and wasted minutes on your cell. Then the connecting person just gets pissed off, steams for about an hour, and then calls back. Maybe. We have no record of it either way.
What part of this argument do you feel is worthy of sarcastic rejoinders? Because, you know, usually those are used to mock a false or foolish statement, and I haven't made any.
Well, no. I'm the kind of person who's written a delivery tracking mail server and knows that people expect email to be quickly delivered. And I know that barring failures, it can be. 95% of email we sent out (the headlines of daily and weekly newspapers) was delivered in less than ten seconds. The rest usually took less than an hour...to the point that our server moved mail that took longer than that into a special delivery folder for half-hourly "server missing" retries.
I know that this type of legitimate server use would have been prohibitively difficult to engineer with this "greylist" method. I know that a lot of servers which do a greater volume than ours would just give up. And I know that the 350,000 people who ASKED for us to send them their newspaper every day as soon as the edition was finalized would be pissed if it wasn't out at exactly 2 am...not to mention our customers, who already would assume the "push" hadn't been sent after 15 minutes of inactivity and would double-send.
You gave all these excuses for SMTP, which is bullshit. It doesn't need failure notifcation, delivery notices or alternate routing. SMTP should be a rock solid service that never goes down, never gets bogged, and never fails when the message is properly formatted. In fact, qmail (the core of my mail-send program) already IS all these things. It's more secure and more reliable than any web application server. It may be more reliable than the phone system. So where's the argument? If we can't rely on something solid and reliable like SMTP, what are we supposed to rely on? AIM?
Yeah, well good for your rate of classification error. Mine is 100%...i can always tell whether i'm reading what I consider to be spam and what i consider to be a real email.
Of course, my rate of classification error for what YOU consider to be spam to ME is different. And it's always going to be variable. You've discovered a filter which YOU consider to be good enough. However, as admins, we are hosts to our users. Not lords over them. Therefore, a broad use spam filter should only as good as what our most tolerant user expects.
My email address is all over the web, on dozens of domain registrations and in hundreds of online databases waiting to be sold. My daily spam count is still less than 10 mails per day, due to prudent release of the message and clever address masking like HTML encoding, spaces, and NOSPAM insertions. It is very much worth my time to delete these 10 mails, assured in the fact that I am not missing anything crucial.
Moving stuff to a folder FULL of spam that must be sifted through, checking for your filter's classification errors, is no better than leaving the spam in your inbox. And it's a lot more difficult to manage and support.
Oh yes. There's the bastard operator philosophy we all love so much...if everybody is doing something and it works, you should have no problem turning off that service if it's NOT SUPPOSED to do that. You know, instead of finding a way to help people do things the way that they understand, the way that makes sense, strongarm them into doing what you like.
HTML wasn't supposed to be used for realtime stock quotes, banking software or content generation and control. I dare you to go up to your boss and tell him you're going to turn off those functions. See if you keep your job.
This is fucking SMTP. It doesn't matter that it wasn't SUPPOSED to be a guaranteed delivery system when designed umpteen years ago. It's become one. People expect it to be one. It is relied upon so heavily that a lot of people have email-only PAGERS. And it's become so reliable that the only time email isn't nearly instantaneous is when a server is down or some asshole slows it down. I have used SMTP relay times as a benchmark or internet performance, and I know a lot of you have as well.
Maybe we don't want them to be so accurate.
I get these chain emails from my brother. They are always some funky scheme to get money that won't work. I'd love to just delete them...but if I do this, he tells my mom I don't answer his email.
She then laces into me like you would not believe...blah blah blah he's your brother and you should love him. I don't need that grief...so instead I respond with a "not interested, no cash right now." Keeps the family happy.
I could see it being more important than this, though. Your boss sends you direct mail HE received and appends a "Should we do this" to the bottom. Or, worse, your marketting team constructs a direct mailing that fails your spam filter (no comments from the peanut gallery...obviously this is a good thing to find out, but this is not the way to find it out). Missing that one email could make somebody VERY angry and put you in danger. I have had messages from my boss/CEO/etc go into my junk folder and found them when cleaning it out.
It is correct for the spam engine to label these as spam email. It would be incorrect for it to delete them before they got to you. And so I subscribe to the school of thought that a single false positive makes any spam filter absolutely worthless. It is very easy to delete a message that gets through the filter. It is impossible to resurrect a mailing you never even knew you got.
So make your own pizza. It's not hard. Buy some frozen crust ($.79 or so) and leave it on the counter before going to work. COme home, roll it out. Can of Furmano's tomato sauce is $.79. Brick of good whole milk mozzerella is $4, i use about half. Then, do it up how you like. I add some grated romano to a half cup of ricotta, black pepper, minced garlic and finely chopped pineapple and put a layer down before the mozz.
10 minutes at 500F and you can kiss PizzaHut goodbye.
Don't let the stodgy food industry keep you or your family from decreasing your communications costs! I spend around $220 per month in those (cell phones for me, my wife & my mom $97, telephone $35, i-net & cable $90) and would love to reduce. But i'm so lazy!
Whoa, my personal preference is Sybase. MySQL, as used by most of the open source projects I've seen, is not a database. it's a data repository. Shit like "SELECT *"s with no joins and one-to-many relationships performed by adding extra columns.
This is text file stuff -- comma delimited stuff. And it doesn't help you learn SQL any more than writing a clever perl script helps you learn software engineering.
In case anybody's wondering, the target audience for MySQL is people who want to put all their data in a big text file, but use MySQL instead so they can put "SQL" on their resumes below "Programming Languages Known."
Real men use PostgreSQL.