ACID is wothless when your data is worthless. Following Sturgeon's Revelation, mySQL is perfect for most web use.
But if you're using a dbms for an actual application -- web-based or not -- you (more than likely) need the data integrity that ACID stives to provide.
[running broken apps as non-admin] is something that most non tech people would have a hard time doing it them self's.
Very true; that is why I stated "power user", not "Grandma Foobar".
At least as of two years ago, an out-of-the-box installation of Palm Desktop would not run for a non-admin user. It took a bit of tweaking with permissions and ownerships but I finally got it working properly -- as I'm sure any geek with a bit of UNIX background (and groking the concept of file permission and ownership) would have been able to do the same.
You lost the context, though: the article was in Business 2.0, not Gamer's Monthly.
Yeah, when Grandma Foobar needs a new email device, she will likely just go pick up the cheapest 'puter down at Best Compu Circuit Buy City USA, and it will likely have Vista Basic (VB!) on it. But the article is geared toward the coporation and is refering more to large, hojillion-seat installs -- versus the consumer that will eat the cake handed to them.
Personally, I played Action Quake for very, long time, and didn't get into CS:S until after I (stupidly) dropped too much money on a video card for Doom III (and subsequently purchased the much better Half Life 2). I am sure that the next game that catches my eye -- six years from now? -- will prompt a new 'puter and OS, along with DXx
I think you hit the nail on the head: the article is about not upgrading every PC in your 50-office company, and is not about not buying new PCs.
The author states that there is no compelling reason to purchase an upgrade, and I'd have to agree. What makes Vista better than XP besides more eye candy and sane default security settings? Any competent power user should have the sense to not be logging into their desktop as an admin, and production installations by big companies (should) already have their end-users' PCs locked down to prevent lusers from hurting themselves.
On Windows, I'm using WS_FTP, and have the "Edit" button set to use gVim as my default text editor.
It's been said before, but let me reiterate: [g]Vim is one of the first programs I install on a new 'puter, be it Windows, Mac, or something Unix-y. The syntax highlighting makes coding a shit-tonne easier, as does easy reg-exp search and replace. And once you get used to the command mode, you'll find that file navigation with the home-row keys is quicker than using arrow keys (especially on many laptop keyboards).
The biggest drawback: you'll start trying to enter "command mode" when posting to slashdot:-)
Yeah? That 6Mbps is mine? Where can I view the SLA?
Sorry, I'm just not interested. And if FiOs ever makes it to my neighborhood, I'm not getting wrapped up in that, either. I'm not paying a penny more to Verizon than I have to.
grandma foobar won't feel her favorite recipe site is slow
Four years or so ago, my (now) wife ordered DSL when she got her first apartment. She was hard pressed to tell the difference between dialup and DSL - websites did not seem to load any faster. She kept the service just so that she could surf and not tie up her phone line.
A couple of months later I moved in, bringing my cable modem along and ordering that service. Same computer, same NIC, plugged into the cable modem versus the DSL modem provided very different results: the cable service was faster, on everything from medium sized binary files to websites.
I don't know if it was the PPPoE client, the phone lines, or just the nature of DSL, but out-of-the-box performance was unimpressive, and was blown away by cable.
Grandma Foobar is going to complain that her favorite recipe website seems as slow as it was on dialup, and dump the DSL service.
I understand that with interleaving DSL there's a trade off between latency and throughput, and the choice made is probably the best default choice.
... but I don't have to make that choice with cable.
(And, arguably, if the most common user is just sufing some websites and downloading email (relativly small data transactions), they would benifit more from the reduced latency than increased throughput. But reduced latency doesn't spin dials on Bandwidth Meters, which again indicates that Verizon is choosing lip service over service.)
But then someone re-read the '97 design spec and realized that the New Duke was supposed to feature portal technology; now they're back to the drawing board.
Hey man, I am so psyched for that release of Duke Nukem IV Forever 3D Portalicous. From the get go, 3D Realms was targetting the initial release at the PS3.
Verizon is a fairly honorable company compared to their competition. . . . Certainly a sight better than Comcast and their incompetence or their outright lies.
I'm not a Comcast customer, so I can't speak on them.
I was, however, a Cablevision internet ("Optimum Online") and Verizon DSL customer at the same time for about a month, back when Verizon was still running the "Cable is shared and teh slowz!" advertisements (that the FTC later made them stop running). I learned first hand (and demonstrated to anyone I could get over to my apartment) how much faster cable was than DSL -- with out the hassel of putting filters on all the other phone lines, or of PPPoE.
When I finally called to cancle the service, they tried to keep me on by offering everything from faster service (I didn't even realize that faster DSL was an option) to one year of reduced fees. When I finally said "Look, I have cable, and it is faster with large data and has a lot less lag", the VZ rep put the cancelation through with any further protest. Even Verizon's own employees know that they can't compete with cable internet on a serice basis.
So for every issue I have to call like a baby sitter? No fraking way.
Dude, I don't care who you call, email, or send smoke signals to. It is your issue, you have to work it out.
But as a manager, if I ask for an update on something the reply "I emailed someone about it two hours ago and they haven't gotten back to me yet" is not acceptable. You have to match the medium to the situation, and email is not the medium to use in important or time-senstive situations.
I start cc'ing their manager, and then their manager's manager. Maybe include their peers. Even went up to the CEO 6 layers up once, got a good reaction there. . . . I get political in a way they look like fools if they don't move
Uhm, are you sure that they are the ones looking like fools?
I don't know what you do or what your responsibilites are, but do you really think the CEO's secretary has time to deal with your petty email problems? My response would be a very terse email to your boss suggesting that he finds employees that can handle their own communcation issues.
I actually like email politics,
Phrased that way, it seems to me that you're more interested in checking your email and flaming coworkers than getting your work done. I have never seen a healthy work enviornment that involved "email politics".
I'm not so worried about using raid 0, because it's a backup, and I doubt both boxen will die simultaneously.
Sure, the chances of both machines failing on their own at the same time is probably kind of slim.
But what about external factors? Say, power surges, lightning, floods, fires? That is why backups kept on removable media, stored off-site, are needed.
Yeah, tape drives and tapes are both expensive and too small; I have switched to two external HDs. I leave one plugged in overnight: it gets dumped to, then swap it with the second drive and bring the first home with me. If the computer and on-site external HD get ruined or stolen, I am out a single days worth of data, but that's it. I keep a HD with OpenBSD installed and Samba configured, so my disaster recover plan is to throw that HD in (pretty much) any old machine, restore from the external hard drive, and drink a beer or three.
. ..The little notice they get apparently does not stimulate their curiosity as it does mine. . . . I have one person that will check it each morning and that is it. So if you need an answer before that, you have to call him.
Which is fine. It means he is concentrating on the task at hand and not being easily distracted.
If you need an immediate answer, why the hell are you resorting to email? There is no reliable way to even be sure that he received your message, let alone that he is going to read it right away or take the time to addesss it.
If you need an answer for something, never rely on email. It is great for "please review the attached doc and get back to me by Friday" (if followed up with a phone call before Friday) or "FYI" stuff. But it isn't a substitute for a phone call (which may still be shunted to voice mail), or a physical visit if the person is close enough.
Fine. A command line interface was what we had "in the begining" because it was all the hardware could support.
But you know what? When you're working that closely with a system, you learn it better! No, typing "mv *.txt../textDocuments" won't teach you a wit about x86 assembly, but it will get you thinking about directory structure in a way that explorer.exe prevents one from doing. Using a text editor and a typsetting program like LaTeX can help you format well-structured documents with an ease that winword.exe will never be able to match.
I do not nostagically pine for CLIs. But on my Powerbook, the two most used programs are Terminal.app and Vim.app -- and ls, find, and grep get me through my chores quicker than graphical interfaces do.
How? Is it recording lateral acceleration, i.e. swerving? Are all the black boxes syncing their times with some NTP server, that along with a properly-synced traffic light can tell who actually had the red or green light on a given intersection?
Ah, OK. On my Scientific America DVR I'm renting through Cablevision (NYC area cable company), I don't have an option of just typing in dates and times.
Now that is a feature I would dig, as I'd like to be able to record the two or three hours of Adult Swim with out having to say pick individual, oddly timed shows. But like most good things tech related, I'm hampered by an easy-to-use GUI:-)
Modern body armor fails against anything sufficiently pointy or fast. Knifes and daggers will go right through Kevlar, as will small, fast bullets typically found in rifles (e.g. 5.56 NATO or 22 Magnum Rimfire).
Second Chance and Point Blank used to have more information on their websites, but maybe that was before the WTC destruction. Here's a page that at least hints at different products for protection from ballistic and hand weapons. Rigid, insertable "stab-" or "rifle-plates", sometimes made out of titanium or high-tech ceramic, offer more protection agains the fast and pointy attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
ACID is wothless when your data is worthless. Following Sturgeon's Revelation, mySQL is perfect for most web use.
But if you're using a dbms for an actual application -- web-based or not -- you (more than likely) need the data integrity that ACID stives to provide.
It was always known that UB313 would not be its name forever -- everything is happening as I have foreseen...
Very true; that is why I stated "power user", not "Grandma Foobar".
At least as of two years ago, an out-of-the-box installation of Palm Desktop would not run for a non-admin user. It took a bit of tweaking with permissions and ownerships but I finally got it working properly -- as I'm sure any geek with a bit of UNIX background (and groking the concept of file permission and ownership) would have been able to do the same.
You lost the context, though: the article was in Business 2.0, not Gamer's Monthly.
Yeah, when Grandma Foobar needs a new email device, she will likely just go pick up the cheapest 'puter down at Best Compu Circuit Buy City USA, and it will likely have Vista Basic (VB!) on it. But the article is geared toward the coporation and is refering more to large, hojillion-seat installs -- versus the consumer that will eat the cake handed to them.
Personally, I played Action Quake for very, long time, and didn't get into CS:S until after I (stupidly) dropped too much money on a video card for Doom III (and subsequently purchased the much better Half Life 2). I am sure that the next game that catches my eye -- six years from now? -- will prompt a new 'puter and OS, along with DXx
I think you hit the nail on the head: the article is about not upgrading every PC in your 50-office company, and is not about not buying new PCs.
The author states that there is no compelling reason to purchase an upgrade, and I'd have to agree. What makes Vista better than XP besides more eye candy and sane default security settings? Any competent power user should have the sense to not be logging into their desktop as an admin, and production installations by big companies (should) already have their end-users' PCs locked down to prevent lusers from hurting themselves.
On Windows, I'm using WS_FTP, and have the "Edit" button set to use gVim as my default text editor.
It's been said before, but let me reiterate: [g]Vim is one of the first programs I install on a new 'puter, be it Windows, Mac, or something Unix-y. The syntax highlighting makes coding a shit-tonne easier, as does easy reg-exp search and replace. And once you get used to the command mode, you'll find that file navigation with the home-row keys is quicker than using arrow keys (especially on many laptop keyboards).
The biggest drawback: you'll start trying to enter "command mode" when posting to slashdot :-)
Yeah? That 6Mbps is mine? Where can I view the SLA?
Sorry, I'm just not interested. And if FiOs ever makes it to my neighborhood, I'm not getting wrapped up in that, either. I'm not paying a penny more to Verizon than I have to.
Four years or so ago, my (now) wife ordered DSL when she got her first apartment. She was hard pressed to tell the difference between dialup and DSL - websites did not seem to load any faster. She kept the service just so that she could surf and not tie up her phone line.
A couple of months later I moved in, bringing my cable modem along and ordering that service. Same computer, same NIC, plugged into the cable modem versus the DSL modem provided very different results: the cable service was faster, on everything from medium sized binary files to websites.
I don't know if it was the PPPoE client, the phone lines, or just the nature of DSL, but out-of-the-box performance was unimpressive, and was blown away by cable.
You could do that. I could do that.
Grandma Foobar is going to complain that her favorite recipe website seems as slow as it was on dialup, and dump the DSL service.
I understand that with interleaving DSL there's a trade off between latency and throughput, and the choice made is probably the best default choice.
... but I don't have to make that choice with cable.
(And, arguably, if the most common user is just sufing some websites and downloading email (relativly small data transactions), they would benifit more from the reduced latency than increased throughput. But reduced latency doesn't spin dials on Bandwidth Meters, which again indicates that Verizon is choosing lip service over service.)
No, wait, it's not their fault.
Duke was this close to going Gold...
But then someone re-read the '97 design spec and realized that the New Duke was supposed to feature portal technology; now they're back to the drawing board.
Hey man, I am so psyched for that release of Duke Nukem IV Forever 3D Portalicous. From the get go, 3D Realms was targetting the initial release at the PS3.
I'm not a Comcast customer, so I can't speak on them.
I was, however, a Cablevision internet ("Optimum Online") and Verizon DSL customer at the same time for about a month, back when Verizon was still running the "Cable is shared and teh slowz!" advertisements (that the FTC later made them stop running). I learned first hand (and demonstrated to anyone I could get over to my apartment) how much faster cable was than DSL -- with out the hassel of putting filters on all the other phone lines, or of PPPoE.
When I finally called to cancle the service, they tried to keep me on by offering everything from faster service (I didn't even realize that faster DSL was an option) to one year of reduced fees. When I finally said "Look, I have cable, and it is faster with large data and has a lot less lag", the VZ rep put the cancelation through with any further protest. Even Verizon's own employees know that they can't compete with cable internet on a serice basis.
Or what the groupthink is out in the blog-o-log-o-spherical.
Come on, man, your math is off. When you add the percent sign, you move the decimal two place to the right, not four. Here's the correction:
Dude, I don't care who you call, email, or send smoke signals to. It is your issue, you have to work it out.
But as a manager, if I ask for an update on something the reply "I emailed someone about it two hours ago and they haven't gotten back to me yet" is not acceptable. You have to match the medium to the situation, and email is not the medium to use in important or time-senstive situations.
Uhm, are you sure that they are the ones looking like fools?
I don't know what you do or what your responsibilites are, but do you really think the CEO's secretary has time to deal with your petty email problems? My response would be a very terse email to your boss suggesting that he finds employees that can handle their own communcation issues.
Phrased that way, it seems to me that you're more interested in checking your email and flaming coworkers than getting your work done. I have never seen a healthy work enviornment that involved "email politics".
Sure, the chances of both machines failing on their own at the same time is probably kind of slim.
But what about external factors? Say, power surges, lightning, floods, fires? That is why backups kept on removable media, stored off-site, are needed.
Yeah, tape drives and tapes are both expensive and too small; I have switched to two external HDs. I leave one plugged in overnight: it gets dumped to, then swap it with the second drive and bring the first home with me. If the computer and on-site external HD get ruined or stolen, I am out a single days worth of data, but that's it. I keep a HD with OpenBSD installed and Samba configured, so my disaster recover plan is to throw that HD in (pretty much) any old machine, restore from the external hard drive, and drink a beer or three.
Which is fine. It means he is concentrating on the task at hand and not being easily distracted.
If you need an immediate answer, why the hell are you resorting to email? There is no reliable way to even be sure that he received your message, let alone that he is going to read it right away or take the time to addesss it.
If you need an answer for something, never rely on email. It is great for "please review the attached doc and get back to me by Friday" (if followed up with a phone call before Friday) or "FYI" stuff. But it isn't a substitute for a phone call (which may still be shunted to voice mail), or a physical visit if the person is close enough.
Fine. A command line interface was what we had "in the begining" because it was all the hardware could support.
But you know what? When you're working that closely with a system, you learn it better! No, typing "mv *.txt ../textDocuments" won't teach you a wit about x86 assembly, but it will get you thinking about directory structure in a way that explorer.exe prevents one from doing. Using a text editor and a typsetting program like LaTeX can help you format well-structured documents with an ease that winword.exe will never be able to match.
I do not nostagically pine for CLIs. But on my Powerbook, the two most used programs are Terminal.app and Vim.app -- and ls, find, and grep get me through my chores quicker than graphical interfaces do.
... or he knows the article's format :-)
Oops. My mistake. However...
Those things cause more accidents than they prevent, and are frequently mis-calibrated to on the side of "safety" (read: revenue generation).
How? Is it recording lateral acceleration, i.e. swerving? Are all the black boxes syncing their times with some NTP server, that along with a properly-synced traffic light can tell who actually had the red or green light on a given intersection?
Care to elaborate? Are you saying it has too many features, or that it runs too fast? Or that it has huge hardware requirements?
Ah, OK. On my Scientific America DVR I'm renting through Cablevision (NYC area cable company), I don't have an option of just typing in dates and times.
Now that is a feature I would dig, as I'd like to be able to record the two or three hours of Adult Swim with out having to say pick individual, oddly timed shows. But like most good things tech related, I'm hampered by an easy-to-use GUI :-)
What good is that going to do when they stop sending out the show listings?
No.
Modern body armor fails against anything sufficiently pointy or fast. Knifes and daggers will go right through Kevlar, as will small, fast bullets typically found in rifles (e.g. 5.56 NATO or 22 Magnum Rimfire).
Second Chance and Point Blank used to have more information on their websites, but maybe that was before the WTC destruction. Here's a page that at least hints at different products for protection from ballistic and hand weapons. Rigid, insertable "stab-" or "rifle-plates", sometimes made out of titanium or high-tech ceramic, offer more protection agains the fast and pointy attacks.
Yeah, Harlan kicks ass.
I really enjoyed all the Star Wars stuff he wrote.