The docs (try the user guide) do mention transactions, but I didn't see any detailed discussion of how they handle it....
Honestly, you *might* have to wait until all databases were finished, when performing an update, insert or delete. Otherwise how could it possibly handle a rollback (which the docs do mention, so they're supported)?
This isn't as bad as it sounds, though. It's not as if the databases were updated in sequence; they're all updating at once, so it won't take any longer than if you were using a single database, and not clustering at all. And you still have the huge benefit of huge, myriad-join selects running on the nodes independantly of each other... which is where this would really help my projects out. I don't do many intensive updates/deletes/inserts... it's the reports that do lots all the calculations using data from dozens of tables that start dragging things down.
I'm no expert on how database clustering normally works.. so anyone feel free to jump in here.
Anything with a JDBC driver
on
C-JDBC 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
More details in my post below, but yes -- basically any RDBMS with a JDBC driver is suddenly fair game for clustering. You can even have heterogeneous databases in your cluster!
Cool stuff.
Nonsense... this is an awesome project
on
C-JDBC 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Um... this isn't a database engine (though there *are* database engines written in Java). And I think you're still thinking of Java applets, which is really not a strong point. I'll skip the rant in favor of providing some actual info on the project, though, since it looks really cool.
Here's the homepage, with much better info that the download link above.
Basically, they provide a standard JDBC interface that your application can use normally (no code modification needed at all!). The driver forwards the SQL requests to a central controller that balances them on a cluster of replicated databases (reads are load-balanced and writes are broadcasted).
You can use it with any RDBMS providing a JDBC driver, i.e. almost all existing databases -- anything from Oracle and DB2 to MySql and PostgreSql to, yes, Cloudscape -- anything with a JDBC driver.
Sweet, huh?
It's also highly configurable and extensible (you can even mix *different* kinds of databases in your cluster!), with plug points for adding custom request schedulers, load balancers, connection managers, caching policies, etc.
This could be a godsend for some of my projects. Database access seems to always be the bottleneck that's hardest to fix without complex and expensive solutions.
First, to clear up a few things -- apparently the fact that the victim owned the game isn't really meaningful, because they (killer and victim) played the game together (so where they played doesn't really make a difference). Second, the police investigating the crime *are* saying the reason for the killing was "robbery", not "videogame induced psychosis" or some such nonsense -- it seems like mostly this lawyer who's demonizing the game.
Okay, now onto the interesting part of the discussion. It's nuts to say that the game "caused" the murder. But it's also short-sighted to say that it couldn't possibly have been a factor. Yes, the movies you watch and the games you play affect your state of mind, and your thought patterns. Not necessarily permanently... but they affect it. If they didn't, what would be the point? That's what's cool about a good action flick or videogame -- you get involved; you get an adrenaline rush and a feeling of power. After playing a really immersive game you walk around for a few hours seeing the *real* world in such a different light. Now, most of us have a decent enough moral compass that we know how much of that world you can actually recreate. One of my friends went a little far when we were 10 or so, and shot me with his BB gun, which hurt like hell, and he felt bad (and didn't do that again). That's normal, right? Sure, the "shoot the running target" popped into his head mostly because of the videogames we played -- and he had a lightning-quick trigger finger in the games -- but it was still well in the range of kids learning "that will hurt your friend, and we don't want to hurt our friends". He could just as well have carelessly kicked a soccer ball into my face. Our videogame experiences were balanced off with a lot of normal social interaction, with adults around, where we could learn about peaceful conflict resolution and so on. We didn't solve arguments with hammers.
So the games are not inherently "evil". HOWEVER, if your only role model for living life and resolving conflicts is Manhunt, you're going to be one screwed-up kid.
Bottom line -- with decent parenting, there's no question that a kid can survive any kind of video game... but I suspect a part of decent parenting would be keeping your kid from playing these kinds of realistically violent games, especially where the game requires acting out behavior that is so totally against the morals you're trying to teach them. Yeah, they're going to have to sort out their own way in a morally relative world when they're older (and choices are more complicated); but they'll have a much easier time if they've got the basics down already by the time they get there.
Adult gaming... Personally, I don't play modern shooters (since the first DOOM, really). They make me nauseous. The spinning walls, the gore, the unrelenting tension... I just don't find it fun at all, and I do wonder how good it is for one to frequently engage in virtual brutality like that. But adults gaming is a different animal -- most of us already have basic habits for interacting with others that are pretty worn in. But kids who don't have those habits yet (and the worse their parents/peers/teachers are, the older they may be) just don't need that.
Here's a quasi-parallel situation to think about -- why is it that mothers teach their daughters to be "nice" to their dolls? ("No, honey -- you'll hurt baby's arm if you pull it like that") Because it's practice for dealing with *real* babies, and real other little girls. Pulling hair is bad, soft patting is good, etc.. And in reverse, children of abusive parents often beat up their dolls or toys -- they're just practicing what they've learned (and sadly, they'll frequently abuse their own kids the same way, years later).
Just my thoughts -- sorry if I started rambling a bit.:)
If you're already solid in technical skills, you might want to looks at an MBA in general Management or some non-technical concentration.
This is a good point -- and actually, you should definitely spend some time thinking about what *kind* of business skills you want.
I've been thinking of going for an MBA myself -- not because I want to get into project management, HR, etc., *myself*, but because my software designs would be better if I knew more about how the business works, and *could* work. I've learned tons of accounting and business practice details while writing custom software, report generators, etc.. I think an MBA could help me figure out new businesses and business models (as I work for other clients), by teaching me the general principals (whereas now I just know the specifics of one business, really)... plus I might even be able to offer software changes to help them *upgrade* their business processes, instead of just automating what they've had for years.
I still want to spend the majority of my time designing and implementing software... but the more I know about how business works, the better I'll be able to advice fitting new technologies into it (which means more value to the client, and often more interesting projects for me!)
...discovering one stage of the new worm does not describe its lifecycle.
They have some idea of its lifecycle, though obviously they're just getting started learning about the thing.
The current understanding is that when the eggs hatch, if the resulting worm lands on exposed whale bone, it grows into a female (about the size of your index finger). If it lands on a female worm, it stays tiny and becomes a male, living permanently inside the female and basically just producing sperm. If it lands anywhere else, it eventually dies.
A little of it is the love of the gross and the nasty left over from my boyhood (when I'd bring home toads and so on). Clearly some of the scientists are driven by the same thing -- the first scientists to see these worms in '95 (well, the tubes, w/o the worms in them) named them "green snot worms".
The other half is just a basic awe of the incredible diversity of life, and how little we still know about what's out there, and how it works. This is as close as I come to religious feeling. Truth is stranger than even the crazy fictions we make up to scare ourselves at night... I mean, sheesh -- the male worms live in scores *inside* the female, and never eat anything but the nutrients that came in the egg they were hatched in! They're little more than crude sperm factories. And the females survive by growing roots into dead whalebone -- which they can't digest themselves, but their roots are covered in bacteria which can digest it... and the bacteria gets oxygen from the funky hemoglobin-red tassel thing she has on top.
If creatures like this showed up in a movie it'd flop -- we'd all think it was too far-fetched. Cool.
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The docs (try the user guide) do mention transactions, but I didn't see any detailed discussion of how they handle it....
Honestly, you *might* have to wait until all databases were finished, when performing an update, insert or delete. Otherwise how could it possibly handle a rollback (which the docs do mention, so they're supported)?
This isn't as bad as it sounds, though. It's not as if the databases were updated in sequence; they're all updating at once, so it won't take any longer than if you were using a single database, and not clustering at all. And you still have the huge benefit of huge, myriad-join selects running on the nodes independantly of each other... which is where this would really help my projects out. I don't do many intensive updates/deletes/inserts... it's the reports that do lots all the calculations using data from dozens of tables that start dragging things down.
I'm no expert on how database clustering normally works.. so anyone feel free to jump in here.
More details in my post below, but yes -- basically any RDBMS with a JDBC driver is suddenly fair game for clustering. You can even have heterogeneous databases in your cluster!
Cool stuff.
Um... this isn't a database engine (though there *are* database engines written in Java). And I think you're still thinking of Java applets, which is really not a strong point. I'll skip the rant in favor of providing some actual info on the project, though, since it looks really cool.
Here's the homepage, with much better info that the download link above.
Basically, they provide a standard JDBC interface that your application can use normally (no code modification needed at all!). The driver forwards the SQL requests to a central controller that balances them on a cluster of replicated databases (reads are load-balanced and writes are broadcasted).
You can use it with any RDBMS providing a JDBC driver, i.e. almost all existing databases -- anything from Oracle and DB2 to MySql and PostgreSql to, yes, Cloudscape -- anything with a JDBC driver.
Sweet, huh?
It's also highly configurable and extensible (you can even mix *different* kinds of databases in your cluster!), with plug points for adding custom request schedulers, load balancers, connection managers, caching policies, etc.
This could be a godsend for some of my projects. Database access seems to always be the bottleneck that's hardest to fix without complex and expensive solutions.
First, to clear up a few things -- apparently the fact that the victim owned the game isn't really meaningful, because they (killer and victim) played the game together (so where they played doesn't really make a difference). Second, the police investigating the crime *are* saying the reason for the killing was "robbery", not "videogame induced psychosis" or some such nonsense -- it seems like mostly this lawyer who's demonizing the game.
:)
Okay, now onto the interesting part of the discussion. It's nuts to say that the game "caused" the murder. But it's also short-sighted to say that it couldn't possibly have been a factor. Yes, the movies you watch and the games you play affect your state of mind, and your thought patterns. Not necessarily permanently... but they affect it. If they didn't, what would be the point? That's what's cool about a good action flick or videogame -- you get involved; you get an adrenaline rush and a feeling of power. After playing a really immersive game you walk around for a few hours seeing the *real* world in such a different light. Now, most of us have a decent enough moral compass that we know how much of that world you can actually recreate. One of my friends went a little far when we were 10 or so, and shot me with his BB gun, which hurt like hell, and he felt bad (and didn't do that again). That's normal, right? Sure, the "shoot the running target" popped into his head mostly because of the videogames we played -- and he had a lightning-quick trigger finger in the games -- but it was still well in the range of kids learning "that will hurt your friend, and we don't want to hurt our friends". He could just as well have carelessly kicked a soccer ball into my face. Our videogame experiences were balanced off with a lot of normal social interaction, with adults around, where we could learn about peaceful conflict resolution and so on. We didn't solve arguments with hammers.
So the games are not inherently "evil". HOWEVER, if your only role model for living life and resolving conflicts is Manhunt, you're going to be one screwed-up kid.
Bottom line -- with decent parenting, there's no question that a kid can survive any kind of video game... but I suspect a part of decent parenting would be keeping your kid from playing these kinds of realistically violent games, especially where the game requires acting out behavior that is so totally against the morals you're trying to teach them. Yeah, they're going to have to sort out their own way in a morally relative world when they're older (and choices are more complicated); but they'll have a much easier time if they've got the basics down already by the time they get there.
Adult gaming... Personally, I don't play modern shooters (since the first DOOM, really). They make me nauseous. The spinning walls, the gore, the unrelenting tension... I just don't find it fun at all, and I do wonder how good it is for one to frequently engage in virtual brutality like that. But adults gaming is a different animal -- most of us already have basic habits for interacting with others that are pretty worn in. But kids who don't have those habits yet (and the worse their parents/peers/teachers are, the older they may be) just don't need that.
Here's a quasi-parallel situation to think about -- why is it that mothers teach their daughters to be "nice" to their dolls? ("No, honey -- you'll hurt baby's arm if you pull it like that") Because it's practice for dealing with *real* babies, and real other little girls. Pulling hair is bad, soft patting is good, etc.. And in reverse, children of abusive parents often beat up their dolls or toys -- they're just practicing what they've learned (and sadly, they'll frequently abuse their own kids the same way, years later).
Just my thoughts -- sorry if I started rambling a bit.
NEW Laser Tweezers! Remove unwanted, excessive facial hair... permanently! Recommended by a number* of well-known physicians!
(* number may be any integer)
Oh, wait -- manipulating _cells_.
Yeah, I guess that's also useful to humanity... but not as exciting.
If you're already solid in technical skills, you might want to looks at an MBA in general Management or some non-technical concentration.
This is a good point -- and actually, you should definitely spend some time thinking about what *kind* of business skills you want.
I've been thinking of going for an MBA myself -- not because I want to get into project management, HR, etc., *myself*, but because my software designs would be better if I knew more about how the business works, and *could* work. I've learned tons of accounting and business practice details while writing custom software, report generators, etc.. I think an MBA could help me figure out new businesses and business models (as I work for other clients), by teaching me the general principals (whereas now I just know the specifics of one business, really)... plus I might even be able to offer software changes to help them *upgrade* their business processes, instead of just automating what they've had for years.
I still want to spend the majority of my time designing and implementing software... but the more I know about how business works, the better I'll be able to advice fitting new technologies into it (which means more value to the client, and often more interesting projects for me!)
...discovering one stage of the new worm does not describe its lifecycle.
They have some idea of its lifecycle, though obviously they're just getting started learning about the thing.
The current understanding is that when the eggs hatch, if the resulting worm lands on exposed whale bone, it grows into a female (about the size of your index finger). If it lands on a female worm, it stays tiny and becomes a male, living permanently inside the female and basically just producing sperm. If it lands anywhere else, it eventually dies.
I always find this sort of discovery fascinating.
A little of it is the love of the gross and the nasty left over from my boyhood (when I'd bring home toads and so on). Clearly some of the scientists are driven by the same thing -- the first scientists to see these worms in '95 (well, the tubes, w/o the worms in them) named them "green snot worms".
The other half is just a basic awe of the incredible diversity of life, and how little we still know about what's out there, and how it works. This is as close as I come to religious feeling. Truth is stranger than even the crazy fictions we make up to scare ourselves at night... I mean, sheesh -- the male worms live in scores *inside* the female, and never eat anything but the nutrients that came in the egg they were hatched in! They're little more than crude sperm factories. And the females survive by growing roots into dead whalebone -- which they can't digest themselves, but their roots are covered in bacteria which can digest it... and the bacteria gets oxygen from the funky hemoglobin-red tassel thing she has on top.
If creatures like this showed up in a movie it'd flop -- we'd all think it was too far-fetched. Cool.