I'd trust my personal information to Microsoft before I trusted it to Liberty Alliance. Founding member companies are:
American Express, AOL Time Warner, Bell Canada, Citigroup, France Telecom, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard Company, MasterCard International, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Openwave Systems, RSA Security, Sony Corporation, Sun Microsystems, United Airlines and Vodafone.
Perhaps it's just me, but it sure sounds like their marketers' wet dream.
Ferrari obviously makes unsafe and unreliable cars, as their Formula 1s often break down or crash during a race. If GM made cars as poorly as Ferrari, we would have millions of car accidents and breakdowns a day.
It is ignorant and unfair to criticize a piece of equipment that is being called upon to extend the boundaries of modern engineering, doing completely extraordinary work and being pushed to its limits in every way every time it is used, by comparing its failure rate with mundane, low-stress equipment that has been in mass production for almost a century.
You misunderstand completely. The only reason for that tagline is to advertise the anti-virus software. It would be retarded to filter your mail on such a silly criteria, and everyone knows it. It's an advertisement, just as much as the hotmail advertisement in my sig. No different.
Why would a virus BOTHER to forge the certification? Do you see many spammers forging hotmail advertisements at the bottom of their messages when they have hotmail return addresses (but are clearly spamming through an open relay on a cable modem)? There's no point. No one cares. No one notices. No one even reads it.
I don't disagree that there are ways to get much higher impulse than we currently use. Programs like NERVA already accomplish this.
I do take issue with your suggestion that it might be done with chemical fuels though. Hydrogen + Fluorine, which is to the best of my knowledge the most energy you will get out of the forming of a chemical bond per unit of mass, has a specific impulse around 450. The cryofuels in the SSME (Hydrogen and Oxygen, one step down on the periodic table) are very close to that as well. Surely some optimizations may be possible, but we're very close to the theoretical peak with chemical reactions already. Sure you can cut down on the weight of the tank and engines (although doing this by adding more equipment is somewhat dubious), but that isn't as much research as it is squeezing the last drop out of an orange.
You are correct that there are a lot of possible energy sources for propulsion in the future. Fission, fusion, electrical, kinetic potential/gravitational. But chemicals are simply (pun intended) out of gas when it comes to getting off this planet.
You hit it dead on. While I'm a huge sucker for some of these 'videogame fads' myself (MMORPGs in particular, first AC then FFXI) I at least realize that it's being done not because it provides more enjoyment for me, but because it rakes in more cashflow. It's moneymaking, pure and simple.
It doesn't matter whether we really enjoy it or not, as long as they get money. Sometimes enjoyment and giving them money are linked. Sometimes they're not. They'd prefer the latter, as it frees them from the burden of creating games that don't suck, and make no mistake: this is move towards that. Shareware was a threat, fortunately it was marginalized by addicting most gamers to the steamroller of multi-million-dollar graphics and FMVs. Whether this was intentional or not? Probably not, but who knows.
This, just like the vast majority of video game 'innovations' in the past 10 years, is a scam intended to maximize profits for the companies involved. (Yes, pseudo-FreeMarketeers, I know that's what a company is supposed to do. You forget, however, that as a consumer it's your job to not be a corporate apologist and instead demand that companies give you more for less.)
I am a BYU student and while we are no MIT, our science programs certainly aren't slouches.
Well that's good to hear. Personally I don't really think MIT is all that leading these days anyway. They've been spending way too much time pandering for government and industry grants.
Why would a religious affiliation make you think BYU's achievements are suspect?
Well I admit my initial impressions were incorrect. I wouldn't have asked for replies if I didn't want to get the real story though.
Besides, it's not so much that the religious affiliation itself makes things suspect. I just found it curious that an institution which intentionally limited itself to a relatively small subset of people could also be a leading research university. But it's not really that strange now that I think about it. A more specific charter will attract people from all across the country/world who believe in it, whereas most universities are inherently limited geographically or by field.
Your well-reasoned response has opened my mind a bit, thanks.
P.S. why in the world did you get an "Underrated" mod?
I have no idea. Ah, Slashdot moderations. One of the few things that's even more arguable than religion.:)
BYU is prestigious? It looks to me like a religious school tightly associated with the Church of Latter Day Saints, and I would personally consider any research that comes out of it a little bit suspect. But maybe that's just me. Do they have a good history of acclaimed scientific pursuits?
Perhaps the USAF has more lenient standards. The FAA, on the other hand, has not licensed MS Flight Sim. 2000, at least, had numerous painfully glaring flaws in its physics model when I tried it. Everything from turbulence to clouds to icing, ground effect, all sorts of things were lacking or poorly implemented. Yes, I am a pilot.
X Plane, on the other hand, is FAA-certified. In fact, its physics model is so extensive that it is able to determine handling characteristics based on aerofoil shapes (and has been used to model such characteristics before). It still isn't quite realistic in every regard, but it's a far sight better than MS Flight Sim.
The idea being that PADDs are about as ubiquitous as paper or floppy disks or burned CDs are nowadays. It's supposed to be like handing around a floppy disk that happens to have a touchscreen on it. No big loss. In fact you probably don't care if it gets returned, or even expect it to get returned.
It's a neat idea, and I would be surprised if it didn't happen in some form eventually.
Or ESD's job. Or aRts's job. Or JACK's job. Or god knows what else's job. Most people don't have ANY of those. If it doesn't come included by default, if most programs don't support it, it's completely useless. All of the above are. ESD is marginally effective because many people do use it. It also sucks horrible horrible ass.
If my kernel comes with swmixer.o directly hooked into the kernel's ALSA support, everything can switch to using that, and everyone is happy. End of story. Philosophy is good, but pragmatism is sometimes needed. Sometimes, to get a standard, uniform way of doing things stamped out someone has to give up some of their philosophy and take the pragmatic approach. Suck it up.
No offense intended to flute players out there, but speaking as someone who has played both instruments, it would be several orders of magnitude harder for a robot to play a trumpet than a flute.
Woodwind instruments in general tend to prize consistent, solid airflow to make their music. This is ridiculously easy for a machine to do and do exceptionally well. The design or the reed is what does the conversion from airflow into sound.
Brass instruments are an entirely different animal. 90% of playing a brass instrument is in the lips. If you blow straight through a trumpet, nothing happens. You get a whooshy air sound coming out the other end. If you don't buzz your lips together to get a note, you get basically no sound at all. You tighten the lips to go up to a higher note.
It is significantly more impressive that a set of robotic lips have the articulation and control to be able to play the trumpet.
The way you stated it, that's some of the more ignorant stuff I've ever read. You may have left out some important things, like, they told you that they wanted to be able to print photographs, or they were happy to buy one once they saw there was something better. But since you didn't say that, I'll have assume that they were happy with their printer until you refused to set it up for them.
So what'd you sell them, an ink-jet? That'll only cost about 100 times more in terms of per-page printing costs... nevermind the cost of replacing a printer that WORKS. dot matrix printers are superb for printing out text. They are in fact often much faster than an inkjet in draft mode, plus they support the wonderful tractor feed paper which is again superb for text. If they only want to print out webpages and assignments, what's the problem? Head down to Kinkos if you want to do a resume. There's no need for most people to have a home publishing studio, it's stupid and a waste.
Speaking of a waste, why do you insist on throwing away stuff that isn't broken? That's what's really a waste. Unless it's broken, or you really need a new feature for something, what's the problem? It's not efficient enough? Do you replace your refridgerator every couple years because of the energy savings? No, I didn't think so. It costs less than a computer, and would save more money. Why not? Because it's not neccesary. To quote George Carlin, "Are people really busting their balls to save nine cents on a fucking phone call?" NO.
And finally: REPLACING an Inkjet with a newer model for ink SAVINGS??? Are you on CRACK? I've seen the shit they're putting out for inkjets these days. I am pretty certain my old Canon BubbleJet could out-print any equivalently priced model on a single cartrige by at least a factor of two. It had refillable cartriges too. (as in they have a little hole on them for refills, not even a drill needed) even a full replacement cartrige, print heads and all, was far cheaper than the gouging they do today. In fact, my grandmother just sent her Lexmark back to the company (actually to the President's home address, because she's a mean old lady) because it would not let her refill the ink cartridge and the replacement cartrige cost more than the printer.
In summary: It's disgusting that you would tell people to spend more money because you're too lazy to fix the problem, especially with some self-righteous justification "oh they'll be better off anyway". It embodies all the worst traits of a contractor, and is the reason people distrust them.
Postgresql replication is regarded mostly experimental and is not properly integrated with the server. In larger MySQL deployments, replication is often used for load sharing (direct read only queries against any replica), and for backups.
Perhaps PostgreSQL is not as unreliable as MySQL, so it doesn't need replication nearly as badly. I have yet to see a slashdotted site running postgres fall over and die (although it does get slow). MySQL, on the other hand, how often have you seen it return blank screens, database-refused-connect errors?
How people get off calling MySQL "enterprise level" boggles my mind. It might as well be a fucking flat file that supports SQL. Speed at what cost?
Sorry. I just get so frustrated when my employer needs a database, everyone suggests "MySQL is the greatest" and then my employer goes to use it, finds it doesn't support referential integrity, doesn't support transactions, crashes or locks up or misbehaves under strain, doesn't do anything a database should do, gives up, and BUYS ORACLE INSTEAD.
MySQL is a toy, not enterprise level. It's nice, it's cute, it's relatively fast, but it's not always the best damn tool for the job. MySQL and PostgreSQL both have their niches. Learn them both, use them both.
There is no readily available workforce that has actual Postgresql knowledge.
Sadly true. There are too many MySQL zealots out there that see MySQL as the only possible solution to any problem.
Disclaimer: I am not a PostgreSQL zealot, though I may sound like one. I'm just fed up with the general consensus that MySQL is "the only serious open source database" while Postgres is basically ignored except as a curious sidenote.
This year, it's time for Brood X, the so-called "Big Brood," to surface. Its range stretches from Georgia, west through Tennessee and to isolated pockets of Missouri, north along the Ohio Valley and into Michigan, and east into New Jersey and New York.
"This is one of those years we kind of dread," said Paris Lambdin, professor of entomology and plant pathology at the University of Tennessee. "We had an emergence a couple years ago around Nashville, but nothing like what we expect this one will be."
No other periodical cicada covers so much ground. And with hundreds of them per acre in infested areas, the noise will be hard to miss.
EV Nova? Non-violent? Uhh, my quad capacitor-pulse-laser equipped Scarab and fleet of captured Fed Carriers beg to differ. So do the numerous planets that I've dominated.
Chromatron is a puzzle game of lasers (no, not the killing kind), optics, and geometry. It runs on Mac or Windows. The first 50 puzzle version is free, additional puzzles can be had for very cheap.
It's also *challenging*. If you only have an hour or so per schoolday with the kids, this'll probably last until the end of the schoolyear.:) Give it a try.
I considered "Simple" to be only mildly more interesting than the red square that came in last. How the hell did it win first (and third) place?
Kind of disappointing, although when I read the conditions for each place, I realized that the 'real favourite' would end up being second -- and I was right. Agate Face is amazing for its size.
While I agree that the erosion of personal freedoms needs to be reversed, this is the reason I'm not really worried like the tin-foil hat crowd.
The government is utterly incompetent. Don't fear them, pity them. They are so caught up in red tape that they don't know what's going on half the time.
Can you really imagine it? A government program that tracks things which may actually be dangerous, instead of a silly Oracle-licensed database that is little more than an elaborate moneysink? It's not gonna happen until well after terrorism is no longer a threat and there's something far more pressing that needs to be done. Then, about 50 years after it's finished being relevant, the government may get around to tracking that sort of stuff.
I agree with you for the most part. Cheating sucks, aimbots suck, and hell, even really skilled players suck. All of them suck my enjoyment out of the game because it's just not any fun to be gibbed over, and over, and over, and never win.
(please stop reading here if you aren't interested in reading my random ranting)
I don't, in the general sense, consider an aimbot cheating though. It is definitely unbelievably lame, I won't argue that. It is also probably against the rules of any tournament. Now, if someone falsely says "I'm not using an aimbot" but it turns out they are, then that is cheating. But an aimbot itself is not a cheat, it's just a tool.
An aimbot is a special form of "cheat" in my mind because it does what it does with the same information presented to the player (although weak netcode will allow things like 360-vision or wallhack-like effects -- these are the result of the client app being more than just a viewer and actually doing some of the visibility calculations itself).
The aimbot is simply a "player" in the game who happens to be, for most intents and purposes, a bot. It operates under the same constraints as a real player must. It doesn't break the rules of the game. As a result, it is cannot be absolutely perfect (contrary to popular belief) and it can be beaten by a skilled player. I'm sure Thresh has killed more than his share of aimbots.
I have trouble seeing how being schooled by "Aimbot1" is any different than being schooled by "Thresh". Even if one *is* a computer, it's playing the game the same way you are, and it is apparently better at it than you are. I may find the thought distasteful, but it's still legitimate.
If Gary Kasparov gets beaten at Chess by SuperDuper Blue, then we can for the most part say that a computer is a better chess player than any human. It's not really insulting, they can crunch numbers way faster than we can. You don't get angry at a hammer because it can pound nails into the wall, but you can't do that with your bare hands.:)
Pure cheating, on the other hand, just look to Counterstrike (I pick on it only because its popularity brings with it the cheaters). Things like the infamous speedhack. Someone using speedhack is literally stronger, faster, better than you. No amount of skill on your part will compensate. It's an exploit of the netcode, and it's breaking the rules of the game. It's the equivalent of Gary Kasparov getting beaten by a computer that can move its pawns like queens. He may have been beaten at something, but it wasn't Chess.
They have two remaining gyros. Initially one failed, that was designed to not be a problem. Then another failed, and again it was designed to keep working. But if another one failed it would be useless, they said. A third one failed, and they were able to work around it. If another one failed, there was no way they could go on. Then the fourth failed, and they installed some complex software trickery to allow it to continue working.
Now, I suppose that 2 may be the ultimate lower limit, but given their track record, I bet they could do some surprising things with only one. Maybe it wouldn't be accurate enough to do what they do today with it, but I suspect many people would still find it useful for a variety of things.
As a Canadian who has had Much Music (now FUSE, I hear) for all his life, I can say I honestly felt very very sad for all you Americans when I saw what MTV was like. To be stuck with that and no Much... you poor people.:/
(just kidding... mostly)
Not that I even have TV anymore. DVD Box Sets are teh savior of me! Episodes in order, which episode I want when I want, no commercials, no shitty shows I don't watch, no censorship, widescreen, HD. Is a box of that worth two months of paying for TV? Hell yes.
FPS games would be much more secure if they weren't so open and didn't allow for modding.
Listen, bud. Have you seen a pirated copy of Microsoft Office lately? Is that because it's "too open"? Adobe Photoshop? 3D Studio Max?
The reason online casinos have not been hacked is because the client DOES NOTHING (At least, in every intelligent casino I've ever seen). The client is a graphical display with a button, just like the one-armed-bandits in real casinos. You click a button, the CASINO does the processing, and tells you if you've won based on a random number generator. There's nothing to cheat. The only thing the casino trusts the local, client machine to do is to say "yes, I want to give you money". It doesn't EVER say "By the way, the wheel stopped on 00" and even if it did, the server would rightly say "I don't care what you think, I say it landed on 21. No prize for you."
Games cannot do the same thing because they have an assload more data to display and parse, and network latency is a major issue, not to mention the fact that due to the networking and processing requirements, any servers would have to be massively powerful and well connected to handle more than a few players on at once. Which would effectively kill 99% of player-run servers out there.
It's broken, yes. It still works fine, as clearly shown by the fact that it continues to advance scientific knowledge about once a month. How many other scientific instruments can you say that about?
Say you have a limited edition car, like a DeLorian, or a McLaren F1. Even if one of these vehicles gets totalled, the owner will often choose to have it repaired because you can't get another one easily, and you may not ever be able to get another one at all.
The hubble is worth at least orbit-boosting, if not repairing. The the new telescope won't even be going up for several years after they plan to crash hubble, and we could use it to tide us over as it clearly still works 'good enough' despite being broken.
At WORST, if it breaks further, we'll have an ailing piece of junk that some group of scientists will likely kludge into doing SOMETHING useful while they're waiting for their timeslot on the new telescope. At BEST, we'll have a mostly working space telescope still chugging happily along if the new one turns out to be non-functional, which is a possibility most of the 'who fucking cares about hubble' people seem to ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd trust my personal information to Microsoft before I trusted it to Liberty Alliance. Founding member companies are:
American Express, AOL Time Warner, Bell Canada, Citigroup, France Telecom, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard Company, MasterCard International, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Openwave Systems, RSA Security, Sony Corporation, Sun Microsystems, United Airlines and Vodafone.
Perhaps it's just me, but it sure sounds like their marketers' wet dream.
Ferrari obviously makes unsafe and unreliable cars, as their Formula 1s often break down or crash during a race. If GM made cars as poorly as Ferrari, we would have millions of car accidents and breakdowns a day.
It is ignorant and unfair to criticize a piece of equipment that is being called upon to extend the boundaries of modern engineering, doing completely extraordinary work and being pushed to its limits in every way every time it is used, by comparing its failure rate with mundane, low-stress equipment that has been in mass production for almost a century.
It's funny because it's true. (I'd mod you up if I had points.)
You misunderstand completely. The only reason for that tagline is to advertise the anti-virus software. It would be retarded to filter your mail on such a silly criteria, and everyone knows it. It's an advertisement, just as much as the hotmail advertisement in my sig. No different.
Why would a virus BOTHER to forge the certification? Do you see many spammers forging hotmail advertisements at the bottom of their messages when they have hotmail return addresses (but are clearly spamming through an open relay on a cable modem)? There's no point. No one cares. No one notices. No one even reads it.
I don't disagree that there are ways to get much higher impulse than we currently use. Programs like NERVA already accomplish this.
I do take issue with your suggestion that it might be done with chemical fuels though. Hydrogen + Fluorine, which is to the best of my knowledge the most energy you will get out of the forming of a chemical bond per unit of mass, has a specific impulse around 450. The cryofuels in the SSME (Hydrogen and Oxygen, one step down on the periodic table) are very close to that as well. Surely some optimizations may be possible, but we're very close to the theoretical peak with chemical reactions already. Sure you can cut down on the weight of the tank and engines (although doing this by adding more equipment is somewhat dubious), but that isn't as much research as it is squeezing the last drop out of an orange.
You are correct that there are a lot of possible energy sources for propulsion in the future. Fission, fusion, electrical, kinetic potential/gravitational. But chemicals are simply (pun intended) out of gas when it comes to getting off this planet.
You hit it dead on. While I'm a huge sucker for some of these 'videogame fads' myself (MMORPGs in particular, first AC then FFXI) I at least realize that it's being done not because it provides more enjoyment for me, but because it rakes in more cashflow. It's moneymaking, pure and simple.
It doesn't matter whether we really enjoy it or not, as long as they get money. Sometimes enjoyment and giving them money are linked. Sometimes they're not. They'd prefer the latter, as it frees them from the burden of creating games that don't suck, and make no mistake: this is move towards that. Shareware was a threat, fortunately it was marginalized by addicting most gamers to the steamroller of multi-million-dollar graphics and FMVs. Whether this was intentional or not? Probably not, but who knows.
This, just like the vast majority of video game 'innovations' in the past 10 years, is a scam intended to maximize profits for the companies involved. (Yes, pseudo-FreeMarketeers, I know that's what a company is supposed to do. You forget, however, that as a consumer it's your job to not be a corporate apologist and instead demand that companies give you more for less.)
Okay, my little rant is done now, I think.
I am a BYU student and while we are no MIT, our science programs certainly aren't slouches.
:)
Well that's good to hear. Personally I don't really think MIT is all that leading these days anyway. They've been spending way too much time pandering for government and industry grants.
Why would a religious affiliation make you think BYU's achievements are suspect?
Well I admit my initial impressions were incorrect. I wouldn't have asked for replies if I didn't want to get the real story though.
Besides, it's not so much that the religious affiliation itself makes things suspect. I just found it curious that an institution which intentionally limited itself to a relatively small subset of people could also be a leading research university. But it's not really that strange now that I think about it. A more specific charter will attract people from all across the country/world who believe in it, whereas most universities are inherently limited geographically or by field.
Your well-reasoned response has opened my mind a bit, thanks.
P.S. why in the world did you get an "Underrated" mod?
I have no idea. Ah, Slashdot moderations. One of the few things that's even more arguable than religion.
BYU is prestigious? It looks to me like a religious school tightly associated with the Church of Latter Day Saints, and I would personally consider any research that comes out of it a little bit suspect. But maybe that's just me. Do they have a good history of acclaimed scientific pursuits?
Perhaps the USAF has more lenient standards. The FAA, on the other hand, has not licensed MS Flight Sim. 2000, at least, had numerous painfully glaring flaws in its physics model when I tried it. Everything from turbulence to clouds to icing, ground effect, all sorts of things were lacking or poorly implemented. Yes, I am a pilot.
X Plane, on the other hand, is FAA-certified. In fact, its physics model is so extensive that it is able to determine handling characteristics based on aerofoil shapes (and has been used to model such characteristics before). It still isn't quite realistic in every regard, but it's a far sight better than MS Flight Sim.
The idea being that PADDs are about as ubiquitous as paper or floppy disks or burned CDs are nowadays. It's supposed to be like handing around a floppy disk that happens to have a touchscreen on it. No big loss. In fact you probably don't care if it gets returned, or even expect it to get returned.
It's a neat idea, and I would be surprised if it didn't happen in some form eventually.
Or ESD's job. Or aRts's job. Or JACK's job. Or god knows what else's job. Most people don't have ANY of those. If it doesn't come included by default, if most programs don't support it, it's completely useless. All of the above are. ESD is marginally effective because many people do use it. It also sucks horrible horrible ass.
If my kernel comes with swmixer.o directly hooked into the kernel's ALSA support, everything can switch to using that, and everyone is happy. End of story. Philosophy is good, but pragmatism is sometimes needed. Sometimes, to get a standard, uniform way of doing things stamped out someone has to give up some of their philosophy and take the pragmatic approach. Suck it up.
No offense intended to flute players out there, but speaking as someone who has played both instruments, it would be several orders of magnitude harder for a robot to play a trumpet than a flute.
Woodwind instruments in general tend to prize consistent, solid airflow to make their music. This is ridiculously easy for a machine to do and do exceptionally well. The design or the reed is what does the conversion from airflow into sound.
Brass instruments are an entirely different animal. 90% of playing a brass instrument is in the lips. If you blow straight through a trumpet, nothing happens. You get a whooshy air sound coming out the other end. If you don't buzz your lips together to get a note, you get basically no sound at all. You tighten the lips to go up to a higher note.
It is significantly more impressive that a set of robotic lips have the articulation and control to be able to play the trumpet.
The way you stated it, that's some of the more ignorant stuff I've ever read. You may have left out some important things, like, they told you that they wanted to be able to print photographs, or they were happy to buy one once they saw there was something better. But since you didn't say that, I'll have assume that they were happy with their printer until you refused to set it up for them.
So what'd you sell them, an ink-jet? That'll only cost about 100 times more in terms of per-page printing costs... nevermind the cost of replacing a printer that WORKS. dot matrix printers are superb for printing out text. They are in fact often much faster than an inkjet in draft mode, plus they support the wonderful tractor feed paper which is again superb for text. If they only want to print out webpages and assignments, what's the problem? Head down to Kinkos if you want to do a resume. There's no need for most people to have a home publishing studio, it's stupid and a waste.
Speaking of a waste, why do you insist on throwing away stuff that isn't broken? That's what's really a waste. Unless it's broken, or you really need a new feature for something, what's the problem? It's not efficient enough? Do you replace your refridgerator every couple years because of the energy savings? No, I didn't think so. It costs less than a computer, and would save more money. Why not? Because it's not neccesary. To quote George Carlin, "Are people really busting their balls to save nine cents on a fucking phone call?" NO.
And finally:
REPLACING an Inkjet with a newer model for ink SAVINGS??? Are you on CRACK? I've seen the shit they're putting out for inkjets these days. I am pretty certain my old Canon BubbleJet could out-print any equivalently priced model on a single cartrige by at least a factor of two. It had refillable cartriges too. (as in they have a little hole on them for refills, not even a drill needed) even a full replacement cartrige, print heads and all, was far cheaper than the gouging they do today. In fact, my grandmother just sent her Lexmark back to the company (actually to the President's home address, because she's a mean old lady) because it would not let her refill the ink cartridge and the replacement cartrige cost more than the printer.
In summary: It's disgusting that you would tell people to spend more money because you're too lazy to fix the problem, especially with some self-righteous justification "oh they'll be better off anyway". It embodies all the worst traits of a contractor, and is the reason people distrust them.
Postgresql replication is regarded mostly experimental and is not properly integrated with the server. In larger MySQL deployments, replication is often used for load sharing (direct read only queries against any replica), and for backups.
Perhaps PostgreSQL is not as unreliable as MySQL, so it doesn't need replication nearly as badly. I have yet to see a slashdotted site running postgres fall over and die (although it does get slow). MySQL, on the other hand, how often have you seen it return blank screens, database-refused-connect errors?
How people get off calling MySQL "enterprise level" boggles my mind. It might as well be a fucking flat file that supports SQL. Speed at what cost?
Sorry. I just get so frustrated when my employer needs a database, everyone suggests "MySQL is the greatest" and then my employer goes to use it, finds it doesn't support referential integrity, doesn't support transactions, crashes or locks up or misbehaves under strain, doesn't do anything a database should do, gives up, and BUYS ORACLE INSTEAD.
MySQL is a toy, not enterprise level. It's nice, it's cute, it's relatively fast, but it's not always the best damn tool for the job. MySQL and PostgreSQL both have their niches. Learn them both, use them both.
There is no readily available workforce that has actual Postgresql knowledge.
Sadly true. There are too many MySQL zealots out there that see MySQL as the only possible solution to any problem.
Disclaimer: I am not a PostgreSQL zealot, though I may sound like one. I'm just fed up with the general consensus that MySQL is "the only serious open source database" while Postgres is basically ignored except as a curious sidenote.
gg reading comprehension
This year, it's time for Brood X, the so-called "Big Brood," to surface. Its range stretches from Georgia, west through Tennessee and to isolated pockets of Missouri, north along the Ohio Valley and into Michigan, and east into New Jersey and New York.
"This is one of those years we kind of dread," said Paris Lambdin, professor of entomology and plant pathology at the University of Tennessee. "We had an emergence a couple years ago around Nashville, but nothing like what we expect this one will be."
No other periodical cicada covers so much ground. And with hundreds of them per acre in infested areas, the noise will be hard to miss.
EV Nova? Non-violent? Uhh, my quad capacitor-pulse-laser equipped Scarab and fleet of captured Fed Carriers beg to differ. So do the numerous planets that I've dominated.
Combat rating: Terrifying.
I don't think you played it long enough...
Chromatron is a puzzle game of lasers (no, not the killing kind), optics, and geometry. It runs on Mac or Windows. The first 50 puzzle version is free, additional puzzles can be had for very cheap.
:) Give it a try.
It's also *challenging*. If you only have an hour or so per schoolday with the kids, this'll probably last until the end of the schoolyear.
I considered "Simple" to be only mildly more interesting than the red square that came in last. How the hell did it win first (and third) place?
Kind of disappointing, although when I read the conditions for each place, I realized that the 'real favourite' would end up being second -- and I was right. Agate Face is amazing for its size.
While I agree that the erosion of personal freedoms needs to be reversed, this is the reason I'm not really worried like the tin-foil hat crowd.
The government is utterly incompetent. Don't fear them, pity them. They are so caught up in red tape that they don't know what's going on half the time.
Can you really imagine it? A government program that tracks things which may actually be dangerous, instead of a silly Oracle-licensed database that is little more than an elaborate moneysink? It's not gonna happen until well after terrorism is no longer a threat and there's something far more pressing that needs to be done. Then, about 50 years after it's finished being relevant, the government may get around to tracking that sort of stuff.
I agree with you for the most part. Cheating sucks, aimbots suck, and hell, even really skilled players suck. All of them suck my enjoyment out of the game because it's just not any fun to be gibbed over, and over, and over, and never win.
:)
(please stop reading here if you aren't interested in reading my random ranting)
I don't, in the general sense, consider an aimbot cheating though. It is definitely unbelievably lame, I won't argue that. It is also probably against the rules of any tournament. Now, if someone falsely says "I'm not using an aimbot" but it turns out they are, then that is cheating. But an aimbot itself is not a cheat, it's just a tool.
An aimbot is a special form of "cheat" in my mind because it does what it does with the same information presented to the player (although weak netcode will allow things like 360-vision or wallhack-like effects -- these are the result of the client app being more than just a viewer and actually doing some of the visibility calculations itself).
The aimbot is simply a "player" in the game who happens to be, for most intents and purposes, a bot. It operates under the same constraints as a real player must. It doesn't break the rules of the game. As a result, it is cannot be absolutely perfect (contrary to popular belief) and it can be beaten by a skilled player. I'm sure Thresh has killed more than his share of aimbots.
I have trouble seeing how being schooled by "Aimbot1" is any different than being schooled by "Thresh". Even if one *is* a computer, it's playing the game the same way you are, and it is apparently better at it than you are. I may find the thought distasteful, but it's still legitimate.
If Gary Kasparov gets beaten at Chess by SuperDuper Blue, then we can for the most part say that a computer is a better chess player than any human. It's not really insulting, they can crunch numbers way faster than we can. You don't get angry at a hammer because it can pound nails into the wall, but you can't do that with your bare hands.
Pure cheating, on the other hand, just look to Counterstrike (I pick on it only because its popularity brings with it the cheaters). Things like the infamous speedhack. Someone using speedhack is literally stronger, faster, better than you. No amount of skill on your part will compensate. It's an exploit of the netcode, and it's breaking the rules of the game. It's the equivalent of Gary Kasparov getting beaten by a computer that can move its pawns like queens. He may have been beaten at something, but it wasn't Chess.
They have two remaining gyros. Initially one failed, that was designed to not be a problem. Then another failed, and again it was designed to keep working. But if another one failed it would be useless, they said. A third one failed, and they were able to work around it. If another one failed, there was no way they could go on. Then the fourth failed, and they installed some complex software trickery to allow it to continue working.
Now, I suppose that 2 may be the ultimate lower limit, but given their track record, I bet they could do some surprising things with only one. Maybe it wouldn't be accurate enough to do what they do today with it, but I suspect many people would still find it useful for a variety of things.
As a Canadian who has had Much Music (now FUSE, I hear) for all his life, I can say I honestly felt very very sad for all you Americans when I saw what MTV was like. To be stuck with that and no Much... you poor people. :/
(just kidding... mostly)
Not that I even have TV anymore. DVD Box Sets are teh savior of me! Episodes in order, which episode I want when I want, no commercials, no shitty shows I don't watch, no censorship, widescreen, HD. Is a box of that worth two months of paying for TV? Hell yes.
FPS games would be much more secure if they weren't so open and didn't allow for modding.
Listen, bud. Have you seen a pirated copy of Microsoft Office lately? Is that because it's "too open"? Adobe Photoshop? 3D Studio Max?
The reason online casinos have not been hacked is because the client DOES NOTHING (At least, in every intelligent casino I've ever seen). The client is a graphical display with a button, just like the one-armed-bandits in real casinos. You click a button, the CASINO does the processing, and tells you if you've won based on a random number generator. There's nothing to cheat. The only thing the casino trusts the local, client machine to do is to say "yes, I want to give you money". It doesn't EVER say "By the way, the wheel stopped on 00" and even if it did, the server would rightly say "I don't care what you think, I say it landed on 21. No prize for you."
Games cannot do the same thing because they have an assload more data to display and parse, and network latency is a major issue, not to mention the fact that due to the networking and processing requirements, any servers would have to be massively powerful and well connected to handle more than a few players on at once. Which would effectively kill 99% of player-run servers out there.
Hi Mr. Flamebait.
It's broken, yes. It still works fine, as clearly shown by the fact that it continues to advance scientific knowledge about once a month. How many other scientific instruments can you say that about?
Say you have a limited edition car, like a DeLorian, or a McLaren F1. Even if one of these vehicles gets totalled, the owner will often choose to have it repaired because you can't get another one easily, and you may not ever be able to get another one at all.
The hubble is worth at least orbit-boosting, if not repairing. The the new telescope won't even be going up for several years after they plan to crash hubble, and we could use it to tide us over as it clearly still works 'good enough' despite being broken.
At WORST, if it breaks further, we'll have an ailing piece of junk that some group of scientists will likely kludge into doing SOMETHING useful while they're waiting for their timeslot on the new telescope. At BEST, we'll have a mostly working space telescope still chugging happily along if the new one turns out to be non-functional, which is a possibility most of the 'who fucking cares about hubble' people seem to ignore.
Nvidia fx8600? I am pretty sure that my case doesn't have enough PCI slots.