Browser open several days fully loaded with things? It takes all of 5 seconds to reload a browser. If its really that large of a burden what's the problem? I'm amazed at the behavior changes that I've adapted too now that browsers save open tabs on close/crash. Bookmarks have seen substantial decline, and I don't leave a browser open unless I'm in core development time or looking something up online. With a 5 second start time, there's really no bother for me. Maybe if you have dozens of media rich tabs constantly doing things the load may get larger, but I really can't see a use case for something like that on a regular or even semi-rare basis, though everyone's different.
As a guy who doesn't specifically care what to use besides IE, I can say that I always end up going back to FF from chrome. I try it for a few days, but I can't explain it but there's always something that I need in FF. The browser just seems slightly less likely to work with sites (not necessarily the browser's fault mind you), and I get crashes in it. Despite what I hear from others, I rarely get FF crashing on me. Now that there's plugin isolation, I imagine its less crash friendly. The browser is still a little herky jerky on opening a larger number of flash enabled tabs( like 3-4 youtube pages at the same time), but nowhere near the almost complete freeze of the browser from background loaded tabs at it used to do. I'm using the beta FF right now which seems to work alright.
Google blesses Android releases that they 'support' with things like the marketplace, gmail, etc... If Carriers decide to slide off the rails and write their own stack there's nothing Google can do but to stop sinking resources into helping them and to not allow their apps to run on the device. I'm sure the point will come where Google puts its foot down and says no to phone variants that stride too far from the party line. The problem is that because all this is done behind closed doors we'll never see how far one can take 'Android with Google' compliance. I think in the long run Google will need to publicly release a set of hardware/software specification guidelines that can be followed and enforced in order to maintain Google's blessing. That doesn't mean people can't roll their own -whatever-, simply that the variant isn't an officially Google branded device.
PC's suffered the same fate in that no matter what you bought there were always better chips/cards being shipped that made yours an obsolete husk in short order. It didn't hurt that industry. In fact, its what gave them legs. These days, the PC market is flat because by and large the PC you buy this year is just a little better than the one you bought last year. The only problem with rapid innovation is that software written will stop being supported for your device truly making the device useless. At the moment that doesn't seem too common on Android yet anyways. I haven't seen stats on it, but I imagine that most apps should be targeting 1.6/2.0 profiles which are the majority of the phones out there. You may not be able to play the best and blingy games that newer phones can handle, but that's innovation and the smartphone market won't be slowing down to rest any time soon.
Sounds sensible. I wouldn't be surprised if Google starts supporting web-standards that involve even further web-to-PC bleeding in the near future. I think that at minimum, google wants the equivalent of "Android Market", "Google Desktop", The Google installer, and Google Gadgets to all be integrated into the underlying web platform in a way that most computing needs regarding applications can be fully met through web 'application' running on the host platform / browser. Or maybe more, effectively equating the the browser as a Java /.NET run-time replacement.
To be fair to Google, I thought WebOS sounded like a retarded idea as well, and they seemed to make it look and work brilliantly (Never used it personally, but tons of people seem to like it). If Palm had a half credible marketing department, they may have had a chance before getting bought out.
pardon? This from the guys that literally double the dimensions of the iPhone's apps just to run on the tablet? This from the guys that didn't and still don't multi-task on these devices? Designed for Tablet computing? What are you smoking?
Android isn't designed for Tablet either to be fair. Both platforms had a very small profile and screen requirement. IOS's GUI core was enhanced to include another GUI profile target. There's nothing specifically brilliant about IOS that makes it a tablet user's wet dream besides the fact that it already had touch as its primary interface (admittedly this is one of the primary reasons that previous tablet computing initiatives died out quickly).
To be fair, he did write those novels and others with kernels of the gunslinger, not the other way around. You are right though. The series did start to languish near the end though.
King's got to be around to play himself, nay? With him being around 63, its hard to guarantee that he'll be around another 7 or so years to play his part in the films. By the rate that films are made and aired it could be another 12 years from now before we could see the final film.
Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and Green Mile are all on my somewhat short list of great movies. I personally liked Dream Catcher, but I can understand why some wouldn't love it. The stand was made as a 4 part mini-series and the book was 1200 pages, so yeah they cut corners. The dark tower series is around 3000? pages and being made as three movies and a series. That sounds like a lot more breathing room. More importantly though, this story was King's baby ever since he started writing. He won't let someone step in and make a crappy adaptation. He's been dealing with TV/Movies long enough to know what works and what doesn't.
The first 3-4 books are absolutely amazing. If you like the Gunslinger (which shouldn't take that long to read) the other 3 will be fine. Books 5-7 are ok, but there were times for me that it definitely stepped out of the realm of wow and into something else entirely. That's not to say they were bad, just um different.
HDR is taking frames of varying exposure levels and merging them into a single picture that contains color levels combined from both. It would help in correcting contrast washout areas of the image that aren't the target exposure of the image without needing touch ups. Taking HDR pictures at multiple exposure levels allows for a richer range of captured detail. When I overexpose in sunlight, I get an effect that takes all detail away from a darker piece of the scene. This may be intentional if I'm looking to over saturate other areas of the image using optical capture techniques. Having the same effect could be simulated in post processing by adjusting levels of specific parts of the image, but that's more time consuming and may not lead to the best results. Having one image under exposed and another overexposed means that the richness of each color range can be captured as they were when shooting. That gives a director a lot of power in changing the composition of a shot without needing to re-shoot or do more laborious processing techniques.
It is hard to do period, because any optical capture device has a set exposure that they are capturing for. The other issue is that the image has to be identical basically identical. Any variation (such as time delay between image captures) can cause ugly or unwanted side-effects that would require cleanup later on. Applying this principle to video capture, you -could- have a camera and single lens/sensor taking images at twice higher speeds, but that means reducing the possible exposure times by at least half which ultimately limits the possible lighting conditions that one could shoot HDR in (hard/impossible in the dark?). One could shoot two cameras simultaneously, but then again the problem is that because the images aren't exactly perfect which would lead to ugly artifacts. For close ups, this is all but infeasible because these artifacts become larger and more apparent. Think of this as the anti-3D concept. You want two pictures being taken at the same time, but instead of having them offset based on the capture view plane, the photographer wants them as close to identical in terms of angle / offset as possible. For 3D-HDR movies, you'd need at least 4 simultaneous frames being captured at all times (two left, two right)
These guys' solution seems to be taking one lens and by applying an beam splitter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter) (which ultimately reduces the amount of incoming light) cuts the frame identically between two channels which gets fed into two Canon cameras (capturing video) who are set to varying exposure timings. They've chosen to use 2 stops+/- and I don't really know if that's the ideal for HDR capture or if its just the maximum automatic exposure variation they can choose in the 'pseudo-auto' exposure modes built into the cameras.
Video games get truly negative impact press every time they're decried for their violence, sexuality, etc.. If a school shooting agitator played game X prominently then you can be darn sure that the patents would be screaming from the roof tops for a ban, and knowing places like Walmart, the games would get pulled for no other reason than to appease the mob.
Passports, Driver's Licenses, Social Security numbers... yeah the governments just can't be trusted with your identity. Lets trust in Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Microsoft/IBM/etc for our identity needs. Even better, lets have hundreds of incompatible schemes and make user sign up and use them all. That surely has to be more secure than having a single point of failure. I mean look, There's only one ROOT signatory (Verisign) and you just KNOW they fuck up everything they touch, right?
Correct my if I'm wrong, but couldn't the only one that could realistically track your actions through OpenID be your authentication provider themselves? Don't trust them? Make your own. If you mean that people can track you based on your credentials exposed through OpenID, then I'd say there's absolutely nothing new there. The one flaw I find with OpenID is its reliance on HTML in order to present the authentication. If they came up with some non-html login form standard to allow for application logins, I'd be sold. PS: Oauth+OpenID may be an eventual solution, but every time I look at really integrating into an app I feel like cutting myself instead.
Subjectivity. With Physics, its hard to be subjective about things that are usually proven factual, but its stupidly easy to make subjective opinions about software. It gets even more complicated when we have many facets of value that we put upon software. Who's right when one person only cares about performance, another only loves beautiful code, and another makes everything as modular as possible, etc.. There are too many valid differing opinions over what is 'right' and that is why we have disagreements.
I assume you're referring to hashCode/equals since that can be the most repetitive piece of code there is in the language. If you hate it so much, why not just write static methods to encapsulate the code? Performance will suffer, but it means you won't have to write as much boiler plate. Still not good enough? You could always have pre-compilation macros and suffer with a world without good static analysis. Personally, I'd rather have a little bit more verbiage than the alternatives.
"It's sad how programmers these days give you a blank stare when you ask if you passed something by value or reference." Isn't that what progress is all about? The only way to get more productive in programming is to peel away at the low level complexity and boiler plates in the language / technology. Sure its great have an educational foundation of why things are they way they are, but when it comes down to it, but not every programmer studies comp sci. at an ivy league institution and we all have to learn to live with it.
What can you say? Its a blog. Is it slashdot worthy? No. Can you blame the 'article'? No, because its a BLOG. Its a subjective opinion piece like so many online by a single person's experience.
Much of what I'm going to say is specific to my company, but I hope you see some of the patterns as a symptom of the practice besides just the anecdote. Our lead Architect decided that he didn't want Java programmers couldn't be trusted to perform simple business logic operations, so they hired an ever growing lot of trained Oracle DBA's (I refer to DBA meaning all roles related to databases, not just arch/admin) to support their ever growing codebase of stored procedures.
- Our company's DBA's never used change tracking tools to 'manage' their code. When a new version of database X was needed, they cloned an existing one. They had stored procedures in SVN, but they never used, branched, back-pushed, etc.. that storage in SVN may as well have been a backup step. - They had a single DBA who was able to promote code to any single database (though some DBA's had their own schemas for testing). This meant long delays in projects with several DBA's on the team. - Debugging in code Databases is a lot harder than firing up a debugger for high level languages (I can't say about MsSQL, but true for any of the others) - Free/low cost database development software is almost unheard of outside of the few open source tools used for open source databases. There is a substantial cost to outfitting DB developers for the same or similar role you can fill with high level language developers - Profiling in databases is a matter of getting the most skilled DBA to stare at a program to find the flaws. There are no runtime profilers (At least in Oracle) that I'm aware of beside the built-in cost estimators that is only really good at catching glaringly obvious faults - Database languages are always more primitive than the high level languages interacting with them - Database languages generally don't have the facilities to facilitate code reuse / encapsulation. Ok, I may as well say that Database development tools in general suck it in comparison to high level software. If they have ctrl-space completion, you're in the top shelf of DB development software - Refactoring / runtime diff comparisons (though other runtimes have similar problems) - Having two codebases and two realms of responsibility adds more friction to the diagnosis and resolution of problems
From my experience, DBA's are generally better at domain definition and structuring, but they're crappy programmers. I've seen consistently higher wages paid to mediocre DB programmers than to adequate programmers. If you take work out of the hands of some and put them into the hands of higher paid others, all things being equal, the cost of production goes up, which nobody wants.
Stored procedures and triggers definitely have their places and benefits throughout the system. I don't want to bash the concepts all together. But a little bit of salt can go a long way. Adding too much salt and things start tasting bitter. Stored procs are amazingly well for self encapsulated data operations that just need to be kicked off and left alone. They can be alright to speed up specifically painful highly filtered data sets that need large arrays of input criteria which span multiple domains Triggers are great for performing small yet essential pieces of work. We had a trigger that updated an external table that the table contents had been updated. You can throw in calculated fields into triggers if the calculation is table specific or purely parent data driven. Adding too much into triggers or without consistency means risking ridiculously complicated data race conditions or painfully slow write performance.
Replying to self- I forgot to mention that one of the really great parts of the PS3 was the remote. No more keyboard/mouse combo's to get things working means that the system is super straight forward to use. The only think on the remote that I miss from my old DVD player is a jog-wheel for fastforward/reverse. That was a really rare but absolutely great feature for the remote.
Rewind works, but it isn't 100% all the time. On the odd occasion I have to replay streams back and use the red square jump to fast-forward in order to get close again. This is more of an issue with your PC trans-coding in real-time in reverse! It isn't as good as I'm sure a natively decoding player would work, but at least for me the number of incompatible streams on PS3 is so rare that I don't even think about it anymore.
I also went with the PS3 media server solution. I stumbled around with PC based solutions for years having no end of problems. I always ran into either the lack of a critical feature, or a bug that prevented a functional system to work in my setup. I bought a PS3 slim when it came out as a replacement for my annoyingly slow BluRay player, and I only began to start using it more and more for streaming content in later on. It was just as you said though. Just plug it in, start the app, and away I went. There are two possible caveats to the PS3 exclusive setup:
1. I used to surf the web here and there with the media PC. Having PS3, I -could- surf the web, but frankly the web browsing experience on the PS3 is horrible, so I usually hop over to my PC or use my phone if I need a quick browse while watching shows 2. The color coming out of the PS3 was a tinge lower gamma vs. my media PC. It was really notable at the time when I was running them both in tandem (when I was testing both, etc..) but now that I'm 100% PS3, I can't even tell. Note; This could've been more an issue with the PC's gamma settings than anything. I point it out only as a possible consideration if you're really not sure.
PS: For those using ps3mediaserver, the java sources in SVN seem to be a lot better than the officially posted releases I've noticed way better navigation, slightly better compatibility (though it still has problems transcoding at 10X speedup which occasionally causes sync loss as well as network errors), and it has iTunes playlist support which for me is great since that's the tool I use to build my playlists.
Flash competes with Silverlight, Java Applets, JavaFX, and soon enough, HTML5 (Most of the pieces are in standards now, through I don't think there's a higher level standard for animation and sound sync which is a shame). How are they at all the same? If you mean that Apple spends a lot of money to give you the warm fuzzy hipster differentiation you thrive for, then have a cookie.
Apple is a company that makes software products. You can make whatever you like on a Mac PC and ignore anything Steve jobs thinks is beautiful. They don't stop you. Why? Because when you program for Mac OS, you have the freedom to develop whatever you feel like on their tools platform. Flash is Adobe's tool platform for making rich web content. Its a tool that anyone can make beautiful or crappy apps from.
Your argument is that Adobe is a crappy company because they don't curate every flash application ever published? Or is it that Adobe's tool allows a developer to make crappy looking applications? EVERY platform allows for developers to make ugly apps. Not all platforms have heavily restricted entry policies. Consoles have really heavy quality policies, so there must be no bad console games either, right? Or maybe you think that the flash development platform is ugly? At least that piece of software was actually developed BY Adobe. I've never used it, but I've seen IDE's emulate the LAF. It would be a sad state of affairs if an inferior and ugly development environment was being cloned in the wild. Your whole argument seems to be a sadly misguided fanboyism.
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Browser open several days fully loaded with things? It takes all of 5 seconds to reload a browser. If its really that large of a burden what's the problem? I'm amazed at the behavior changes that I've adapted too now that browsers save open tabs on close/crash. Bookmarks have seen substantial decline, and I don't leave a browser open unless I'm in core development time or looking something up online. With a 5 second start time, there's really no bother for me. Maybe if you have dozens of media rich tabs constantly doing things the load may get larger, but I really can't see a use case for something like that on a regular or even semi-rare basis, though everyone's different.
As a guy who doesn't specifically care what to use besides IE, I can say that I always end up going back to FF from chrome. I try it for a few days, but I can't explain it but there's always something that I need in FF. The browser just seems slightly less likely to work with sites (not necessarily the browser's fault mind you), and I get crashes in it. Despite what I hear from others, I rarely get FF crashing on me. Now that there's plugin isolation, I imagine its less crash friendly. The browser is still a little herky jerky on opening a larger number of flash enabled tabs( like 3-4 youtube pages at the same time), but nowhere near the almost complete freeze of the browser from background loaded tabs at it used to do. I'm using the beta FF right now which seems to work alright.
Google blesses Android releases that they 'support' with things like the marketplace, gmail, etc... If Carriers decide to slide off the rails and write their own stack there's nothing Google can do but to stop sinking resources into helping them and to not allow their apps to run on the device. I'm sure the point will come where Google puts its foot down and says no to phone variants that stride too far from the party line. The problem is that because all this is done behind closed doors we'll never see how far one can take 'Android with Google' compliance. I think in the long run Google will need to publicly release a set of hardware/software specification guidelines that can be followed and enforced in order to maintain Google's blessing. That doesn't mean people can't roll their own -whatever-, simply that the variant isn't an officially Google branded device.
PC's suffered the same fate in that no matter what you bought there were always better chips/cards being shipped that made yours an obsolete husk in short order. It didn't hurt that industry. In fact, its what gave them legs. These days, the PC market is flat because by and large the PC you buy this year is just a little better than the one you bought last year. The only problem with rapid innovation is that software written will stop being supported for your device truly making the device useless. At the moment that doesn't seem too common on Android yet anyways. I haven't seen stats on it, but I imagine that most apps should be targeting 1.6/2.0 profiles which are the majority of the phones out there. You may not be able to play the best and blingy games that newer phones can handle, but that's innovation and the smartphone market won't be slowing down to rest any time soon.
Sounds sensible. I wouldn't be surprised if Google starts supporting web-standards that involve even further web-to-PC bleeding in the near future. I think that at minimum, google wants the equivalent of "Android Market", "Google Desktop", The Google installer, and Google Gadgets to all be integrated into the underlying web platform in a way that most computing needs regarding applications can be fully met through web 'application' running on the host platform / browser. Or maybe more, effectively equating the the browser as a Java / .NET run-time replacement.
To be fair to Google, I thought WebOS sounded like a retarded idea as well, and they seemed to make it look and work brilliantly (Never used it personally, but tons of people seem to like it). If Palm had a half credible marketing department, they may have had a chance before getting bought out.
pardon? This from the guys that literally double the dimensions of the iPhone's apps just to run on the tablet? This from the guys that didn't and still don't multi-task on these devices? Designed for Tablet computing? What are you smoking?
Android isn't designed for Tablet either to be fair. Both platforms had a very small profile and screen requirement. IOS's GUI core was enhanced to include another GUI profile target. There's nothing specifically brilliant about IOS that makes it a tablet user's wet dream besides the fact that it already had touch as its primary interface (admittedly this is one of the primary reasons that previous tablet computing initiatives died out quickly).
To be fair, he did write those novels and others with kernels of the gunslinger, not the other way around. You are right though. The series did start to languish near the end though.
/spoilers:
You
have
been
warned
King's got to be around to play himself, nay? With him being around 63, its hard to guarantee that he'll be around another 7 or so years to play his part in the films. By the rate that films are made and aired it could be another 12 years from now before we could see the final film.
Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and Green Mile are all on my somewhat short list of great movies. I personally liked Dream Catcher, but I can understand why some wouldn't love it. The stand was made as a 4 part mini-series and the book was 1200 pages, so yeah they cut corners. The dark tower series is around 3000? pages and being made as three movies and a series. That sounds like a lot more breathing room. More importantly though, this story was King's baby ever since he started writing. He won't let someone step in and make a crappy adaptation. He's been dealing with TV/Movies long enough to know what works and what doesn't.
The first 3-4 books are absolutely amazing. If you like the Gunslinger (which shouldn't take that long to read) the other 3 will be fine. Books 5-7 are ok, but there were times for me that it definitely stepped out of the realm of wow and into something else entirely. That's not to say they were bad, just um different.
I'm not an expert, but from my limited knowledge:
HDR is taking frames of varying exposure levels and merging them into a single picture that contains color levels combined from both. It would help in correcting contrast washout areas of the image that aren't the target exposure of the image without needing touch ups. Taking HDR pictures at multiple exposure levels allows for a richer range of captured detail. When I overexpose in sunlight, I get an effect that takes all detail away from a darker piece of the scene. This may be intentional if I'm looking to over saturate other areas of the image using optical capture techniques. Having the same effect could be simulated in post processing by adjusting levels of specific parts of the image, but that's more time consuming and may not lead to the best results. Having one image under exposed and another overexposed means that the richness of each color range can be captured as they were when shooting. That gives a director a lot of power in changing the composition of a shot without needing to re-shoot or do more laborious processing techniques.
It is hard to do period, because any optical capture device has a set exposure that they are capturing for. The other issue is that the image has to be identical basically identical. Any variation (such as time delay between image captures) can cause ugly or unwanted side-effects that would require cleanup later on. Applying this principle to video capture, you -could- have a camera and single lens/sensor taking images at twice higher speeds, but that means reducing the possible exposure times by at least half which ultimately limits the possible lighting conditions that one could shoot HDR in (hard/impossible in the dark?). One could shoot two cameras simultaneously, but then again the problem is that because the images aren't exactly perfect which would lead to ugly artifacts. For close ups, this is all but infeasible because these artifacts become larger and more apparent. Think of this as the anti-3D concept. You want two pictures being taken at the same time, but instead of having them offset based on the capture view plane, the photographer wants them as close to identical in terms of angle / offset as possible. For 3D-HDR movies, you'd need at least 4 simultaneous frames being captured at all times (two left, two right)
These guys' solution seems to be taking one lens and by applying an beam splitter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter) (which ultimately reduces the amount of incoming light) cuts the frame identically between two channels which gets fed into two Canon cameras (capturing video) who are set to varying exposure timings. They've chosen to use 2 stops+/- and I don't really know if that's the ideal for HDR capture or if its just the maximum automatic exposure variation they can choose in the 'pseudo-auto' exposure modes built into the cameras.
Video games get truly negative impact press every time they're decried for their violence, sexuality, etc.. If a school shooting agitator played game X prominently then you can be darn sure that the patents would be screaming from the roof tops for a ban, and knowing places like Walmart, the games would get pulled for no other reason than to appease the mob.
Passports, Driver's Licenses, Social Security numbers... yeah the governments just can't be trusted with your identity. Lets trust in Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Microsoft/IBM/etc for our identity needs. Even better, lets have hundreds of incompatible schemes and make user sign up and use them all. That surely has to be more secure than having a single point of failure. I mean look, There's only one ROOT signatory (Verisign) and you just KNOW they fuck up everything they touch, right?
Correct my if I'm wrong, but couldn't the only one that could realistically track your actions through OpenID be your authentication provider themselves? Don't trust them? Make your own. If you mean that people can track you based on your credentials exposed through OpenID, then I'd say there's absolutely nothing new there. The one flaw I find with OpenID is its reliance on HTML in order to present the authentication. If they came up with some non-html login form standard to allow for application logins, I'd be sold. PS: Oauth+OpenID may be an eventual solution, but every time I look at really integrating into an app I feel like cutting myself instead.
Subjectivity. With Physics, its hard to be subjective about things that are usually proven factual, but its stupidly easy to make subjective opinions about software. It gets even more complicated when we have many facets of value that we put upon software. Who's right when one person only cares about performance, another only loves beautiful code, and another makes everything as modular as possible, etc.. There are too many valid differing opinions over what is 'right' and that is why we have disagreements.
People who copy/paste code always get something wrong! That should be lesson #1!
I assume you're referring to hashCode/equals since that can be the most repetitive piece of code there is in the language. If you hate it so much, why not just write static methods to encapsulate the code? Performance will suffer, but it means you won't have to write as much boiler plate. Still not good enough? You could always have pre-compilation macros and suffer with a world without good static analysis. Personally, I'd rather have a little bit more verbiage than the alternatives.
"It's sad how programmers these days give you a blank stare when you ask if you passed something by value or reference."
Isn't that what progress is all about? The only way to get more productive in programming is to peel away at the low level complexity and boiler plates in the language / technology. Sure its great have an educational foundation of why things are they way they are, but when it comes down to it, but not every programmer studies comp sci. at an ivy league institution and we all have to learn to live with it.
What can you say? Its a blog. Is it slashdot worthy? No. Can you blame the 'article'? No, because its a BLOG. Its a subjective opinion piece like so many online by a single person's experience.
Much of what I'm going to say is specific to my company, but I hope you see some of the patterns as a symptom of the practice besides just the anecdote. Our lead Architect decided that he didn't want Java programmers couldn't be trusted to perform simple business logic operations, so they hired an ever growing lot of trained Oracle DBA's (I refer to DBA meaning all roles related to databases, not just arch/admin) to support their ever growing codebase of stored procedures.
- Our company's DBA's never used change tracking tools to 'manage' their code. When a new version of database X was needed, they cloned an existing one. They had stored procedures in SVN, but they never used, branched, back-pushed, etc.. that storage in SVN may as well have been a backup step.
- They had a single DBA who was able to promote code to any single database (though some DBA's had their own schemas for testing). This meant long delays in projects with several DBA's on the team.
- Debugging in code Databases is a lot harder than firing up a debugger for high level languages (I can't say about MsSQL, but true for any of the others)
- Free/low cost database development software is almost unheard of outside of the few open source tools used for open source databases. There is a substantial cost to outfitting DB developers for the same or similar role you can fill with high level language developers
- Profiling in databases is a matter of getting the most skilled DBA to stare at a program to find the flaws. There are no runtime profilers (At least in Oracle) that I'm aware of beside the built-in cost estimators that is only really good at catching glaringly obvious faults
- Database languages are always more primitive than the high level languages interacting with them
- Database languages generally don't have the facilities to facilitate code reuse / encapsulation. Ok, I may as well say that Database development tools in general suck it in comparison to high level software. If they have ctrl-space completion, you're in the top shelf of DB development software
- Refactoring / runtime diff comparisons (though other runtimes have similar problems)
- Having two codebases and two realms of responsibility adds more friction to the diagnosis and resolution of problems
From my experience, DBA's are generally better at domain definition and structuring, but they're crappy programmers. I've seen consistently higher wages paid to mediocre DB programmers than to adequate programmers. If you take work out of the hands of some and put them into the hands of higher paid others, all things being equal, the cost of production goes up, which nobody wants.
Stored procedures and triggers definitely have their places and benefits throughout the system. I don't want to bash the concepts all together. But a little bit of salt can go a long way. Adding too much salt and things start tasting bitter. Stored procs are amazingly well for self encapsulated data operations that just need to be kicked off and left alone. They can be alright to speed up specifically painful highly filtered data sets that need large arrays of input criteria which span multiple domains
Triggers are great for performing small yet essential pieces of work. We had a trigger that updated an external table that the table contents had been updated. You can throw in calculated fields into triggers if the calculation is table specific or purely parent data driven. Adding too much into triggers or without consistency means risking ridiculously complicated data race conditions or painfully slow write performance.
Replying to self- I forgot to mention that one of the really great parts of the PS3 was the remote. No more keyboard/mouse combo's to get things working means that the system is super straight forward to use. The only think on the remote that I miss from my old DVD player is a jog-wheel for fastforward/reverse. That was a really rare but absolutely great feature for the remote.
Rewind works, but it isn't 100% all the time. On the odd occasion I have to replay streams back and use the red square jump to fast-forward in order to get close again. This is more of an issue with your PC trans-coding in real-time in reverse! It isn't as good as I'm sure a natively decoding player would work, but at least for me the number of incompatible streams on PS3 is so rare that I don't even think about it anymore.
I also went with the PS3 media server solution. I stumbled around with PC based solutions for years having no end of problems. I always ran into either the lack of a critical feature, or a bug that prevented a functional system to work in my setup. I bought a PS3 slim when it came out as a replacement for my annoyingly slow BluRay player, and I only began to start using it more and more for streaming content in later on. It was just as you said though. Just plug it in, start the app, and away I went. There are two possible caveats to the PS3 exclusive setup:
1. I used to surf the web here and there with the media PC. Having PS3, I -could- surf the web, but frankly the web browsing experience on the PS3 is horrible, so I usually hop over to my PC or use my phone if I need a quick browse while watching shows
2. The color coming out of the PS3 was a tinge lower gamma vs. my media PC. It was really notable at the time when I was running them both in tandem (when I was testing both, etc..) but now that I'm 100% PS3, I can't even tell. Note; This could've been more an issue with the PC's gamma settings than anything. I point it out only as a possible consideration if you're really not sure.
PS: For those using ps3mediaserver, the java sources in SVN seem to be a lot better than the officially posted releases I've noticed way better navigation, slightly better compatibility (though it still has problems transcoding at 10X speedup which occasionally causes sync loss as well as network errors), and it has iTunes playlist support which for me is great since that's the tool I use to build my playlists.
Flash competes with Silverlight, Java Applets, JavaFX, and soon enough, HTML5 (Most of the pieces are in standards now, through I don't think there's a higher level standard for animation and sound sync which is a shame). How are they at all the same? If you mean that Apple spends a lot of money to give you the warm fuzzy hipster differentiation you thrive for, then have a cookie.
Apple is a company that makes software products. You can make whatever you like on a Mac PC and ignore anything Steve jobs thinks is beautiful. They don't stop you. Why? Because when you program for Mac OS, you have the freedom to develop whatever you feel like on their tools platform. Flash is Adobe's tool platform for making rich web content. Its a tool that anyone can make beautiful or crappy apps from.
Your argument is that Adobe is a crappy company because they don't curate every flash application ever published? Or is it that Adobe's tool allows a developer to make crappy looking applications? EVERY platform allows for developers to make ugly apps. Not all platforms have heavily restricted entry policies. Consoles have really heavy quality policies, so there must be no bad console games either, right? Or maybe you think that the flash development platform is ugly? At least that piece of software was actually developed BY Adobe. I've never used it, but I've seen IDE's emulate the LAF. It would be a sad state of affairs if an inferior and ugly development environment was being cloned in the wild.
Your whole argument seems to be a sadly misguided fanboyism.
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[citation needed]"
Indeed!