I'd love to just be able to play with some of the demos they have shown off in the videos. Chucking stormtroopers at wooden beams over large pits just looks like a great stress reliever. Add in the ability to change the properties of the beams, and also the ability to throw droids while I was at it, and I'd lose hours just seeing what I could do to hapless stormtroopers.
I also hear plenty of reasons why many teachers unions are ineffective.
#1: Required membership. Make the Union actually have to work to keeps its members and it will get a hell of a lot better at representing its members.
On the other hand, the Union is needed, as the States have been showing with the "No School Left Behind Act" they are dead set on centralizing control over them, then fucking them all up equally. After all, there is no last place when everyone is at the bottom.
I see no problem with the idea of differential pay for teachers in different subjects. Yes, it would suck to be an English teacher and make half as much as the Math teacher, but I'm willing to bet that we can find twice as many qualified English teachers as Math teachers. The moral of the story, pick a more in demand subject.
I would expect that one of the considerations for the FAA director is that, whether they go to Linux/Google Apps or Vista/Office 2007, they are going to face a re-training issue. Vista is different enough that a lot of old habits are going to have to be forgotten and new ones learned. Office 2007 is a PITA to relearn. You're stuck with the Ribbon, and you're going to learn it and like it, cause you cannot revert to the old interface. At this point, jumping to Linux, with say KDE, and Google Apps wouldn't be that much worse, if at all. The interface is very Windows like, so there shouldn't be a whole lot to relearn. I've not seen Google Apps, but I'm gonna guess that learning it after having been in MS Office forever is about on par with getting used to Office 2007.
In a way, I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot by redesigning the interface to their two flagship products at the same time. As an IT manager, you're now looking at retraining issues for both products at once anyway, why not look at alternatives which aren't so expensive and laden with DRM crippling?
And for your car?
Now my car does not have an "iPod dock" (better known as an AUX input). Not to mention I don't own an iPod, nor do I have enough music on CD's to fill the damn thing anyway. I like having some form of music during my commute; and with my inability to pay $16 for a CD, excepting rare occasions, I don't have a huge selection of music to work from. No, I'm not going to futz around with iTunes et al. either. I just want something I can tune to and have a fairly random collection of music within a genere I enjoy. It would be even nicer if it included new stuff on occasion, and local news/traffic. Unfortuneatly, all of the stations which are within range of my commute, and in generes which I enjoy are owned by ClearChanel. It would be nice to think that this ruling is going to make things better, but I know better. The Federal Censorship Commission (FCC) is just slapping the big guys on the wrist to placate the plebes, then it will be back to business as usual.
Though, to prove that I am a hipocrite, I do subscribe to XM. I finally got sick of 55 minutes of commercials/idiots talking and 5 minutes of one of the same damn 4 songs per hour. Ya, I could buy a CD a month for the same money, but this avoids the need to hunt for stuff I'll like.
My normal knee-jerk reaction to the government doing this is, "hell no!" Usually the government screws up anything it gets a hold of; however, in this case, I think the analogy is spot on. Communications networks are becoming very much like the highway system in everyday necessity. I think I would be all for the government buying out the existing infrastructure (fiber and copper) at a reasonable price, and then using tax money to extend and expand it. Heck, we paid for the Spanish-American war as a surcharge until recently, why not use a similar surcharge to expand capacity. Also, One flat fee could be charged (per KB possibly) for all companies, regardless of what they are providing, thus giving a good boost to the good parts of net neutrality. Might even go so far as to make it work like the US Post Office, make it an independent entity who's sole purpose is providing bandwidth, and they must be self sufficient on the fees they generate.
Basic D&D still has the bane of all non-math types: ThAC0
While it is easy for anyone who is somewhat math inclined, I have seen many people struggle over that small aspect. One of the great things about 3rd Ed. was that the designers finally figured out how stupid it was to have people subtracting negative numbers, turned the whole system around so that it was all addition. Really, if you spend a bit of time with the math behind it, you'll find that the dice rolls to hit are the same, the math is just simplified.
Also, Basic D&D was good if all you wanted to do was "roll" play, but god forbid you wanted to do anything which was not combat based. It was certainly a good start, and I am thankful for the time I got to spend with that game when I young, but it really does belong in a museum an not on the tabletop anymore.
Would you support the development of technology to get 5 minute warrants? Why can't a police officer send an email with relevant information and pictures to a judge who reviews it and issues the warrant electronically??
I think it would be better to simply allow the officer to register that a device is being used, and then they have to defend every use retroactively. e.g. Show that there was some level of probable cause to justify tracking a vehicle.
For example, when an officer deploys such a device, he needs to call a dispatcher to have it activated. In order to activate it the dispatcher needs to input the officer's name and badge number, a physical description of the vehicle, and a reason. All said information is stored in a database and a notification sent to the oversight board that a new use case has been created and will need to be reviewed.
The officer can then conduct use the GPS system as needed, but there is oversight of every use to watch for abuse. The only important caveat here is that the oversight board is going to need to be made up of reasonably intelligent citizens, with no ties to the police force. Which may be hard to do.
I still order my systems with floppy drives. Between OS installs and needing specific controller drivers (yes, I could slipstream them, but with Dell changing controllers constantly, this would be an annoying moving target), and Symantec Drive Image for rapid system deployment (multi-casting an image rocks!); I still use floppies on a fairly regular basis. Also, even with Server 2003 R2, you still need a floppy to do ASR.
you know there's far more to the West Coast than simply Southern California.
Ya, but the rest of it sucks.;-)
Seriously though, gaming in Southern California seemed to be in a rut the last time I went to a con. All of the RPG events were either D&D or Vampire. Or, god save us all, Vampire LARP. After reading the flier a few times and not seeing anything different, I just gave up on Cons here. And, not being willing to fly to halfway across the country for a con, I never even looked into GenCon, so this is the first I ever heard about it being on the West Coast. Which is part of the reason I think it failed, it doesn't seem like it was well advertised, or if it was it must have been limited to the LA Metro area. And there's more to Southern California than LA, though ya, much of it sucks, but no where near as much as LA.
This is my worry too. Lucas arts has the world's best goldmine for games in the Star Wars franchise, but they insist on releasing games on too short of as schedule and they end up half done, and half-baked.
A well done lightsaber/jedi game would rock. I somehow expect that we'll just end up with Redsteel with glowing swords. Granted, I would probably still buy it, as will most geeks, and I'll probably enjoy it for a while; it will still come off as crap in the end.
I'm not so sure that the Wiimote would be the limiting factor in a sword game. It seems to do a reasonable job of sensing position, even when not pointed right at the screen. Try Super Swing Golf out, when you address the ball, you actually have to make sure that your wrist is not rotated, or it will affect the angle of the club face. Also, when you swing though, the angle of your swing, and the rotation of the Wiimote are also accounted for to some extent. Overall, the Wiimote seems to handle 3D space really well.
Furthermore, my math professors generally don't allow calculators.
Had just about the same thing here. My first semester calc instructor wanted everyone to have a TI-something-or-other, as she like to have us do the graphing calculator based problems during class. After about the third time of telling me I should get one, and then having me finish the problem by hand before most of the class ha figured out where the on button was on their calculator, she gave up.
The best part was that, after her class every higher level math class was taught by an instructor who didn't allow calculators at all, not even basic 4 function Casios. All of the suckers who had bought the fancy calculators were whining up a storm. You were going to do it all by hand, and personally I found that much better. You are in a math class to learn to do math. If the calculator is doing all of the thinking for you, you're not learning anything. Sure, in Chem, Physics, etc. use a calculator, the math isn't the important thing in the class; but in a math class put the calculator away.
I thought I might be getting trolled, but oh well.
The post was about copying, not opening in notepad. Yes, notepad is very broken when it comes to opening large files. This has always been true.
Err... his screen shot doesn't show there being any breadcrumbs. Where exactly is he supposed to click?
That's because he's already farked it. The breadcrumb sits in the address bar until you do something else with it. If he had actually learned a bit about the interface before complaining about it, he might not have made such an obviously wrong claim. He was supposed to click the folder he wanted to jump back to in the breadcrumb, not on the history drop-down.
How does it cope with long directory names? Say I had a 255 character directory name, too wide to display, and wanted to go up two levels, how would that work?
This is where I do view it as breaking down. Once the path gets too long for the address bar, it starts hiding levels in a small button on the left, with a "<<" symbol. Personally, I would have rather gone for a truncating of names with an ellipses, but that's probably more a matter of personal choice than a real problem.
Actually, of all the disparaging terms I used ignorant was the most correct. I'll admit I was in full rant mode, I'm just tired of seeing senseless MS bashing, there are enough problems with Windows without making stuff up. I have this thing about intellectual honesty, if you're going to do a write-up about the "sins" of Vista at least spend enough time with it to figure out what is real an what is a lack of knowledge. ignorance: the state or fact of being ignorant : lack of knowledge, education, or awareness
Open Windows Explorer, browse to a folder, preferably once several layers deep. Look at the address bar, you will see something like C:\ -> Windows -> System32 -> drivers -> etc
To go back up, just click on the folder you want to go up to. e.g. to get back to the Windows folder, click on Windows.
First off, the article was specifically talking about the search field in the windows explorer window. If you look at the screenshot he is referencing, you can clearly see the search box, which does function as he wants. Below that are the advanced options to do other stuff. Second, the start menu search does come up with files, and even goes inside some of them. For example, I have a text file with my WAN IP settings, if I open the start menu and type "network", it shows me that there is a file (stuff gets grouped by type) named network.txt. If I instead type "DNS2" which is the line I used to denote the secondary DNS server in that file, once again the start menu shows me that there is a file with that string in it. While there are probably much better desktop search programs out there, the built in Vista one is not half bad.
So, I stand by my statement, the claim that search doesn't work as search is stupid. Perhaps the author has a broken install, in which case I'll retract my statement in favor of "foot in mouth"; personally, I'm just guessing it's the standard senseless MS bashing which has become common these days. There's enough stuff to bash MS about, which is valid, we don't need to make stuff up.
At a guess, the primary reason for the change is that MS is continuing its push to unify web browser an file browser design. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. IE7 uses the address bar for history, they've now copied that design into the file browser. Most of the other UI elements are similar in location and function now too. Really, I was just commenting on the fact that the author is complaining about a lack of something, which is right in front of him. If you're going to say that something is missing, in a public forum, it's a good plan to make sure that it's really missing.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista box for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
Start backing up your data now.
Any system which chugs along for that long on a 17MB file either has some serious problems, or a dialog box hiding behind an active window waiting on a response. I'm running Vista on a laptop and while the file copy is slow, it's nothing like that.
Nope, the blogger is just an idiot. Or possibly just ignorant, but I feel like being insulting.
The new file browsing interface is broken
Notice that when I clicked on the dropdown it shows me a bunch of websites. A BUNCH OF FRICKEN WEBSITES! No, not the usual tree of folders, and My computer so I can locate a file.
Apparently the "Folders" tool on the left is too hard to use. Take a look at his picture, if he just clicked on the "Folders" link on the left he would have a nice, easy to navigate tree right there. Yes, the address bar's drop-down is a sort of history. As for the web sites, mine seem to spawn a web browser (Firefox even) just fine.
One other bone I have to pick with the new browsing interface is the difficulty in going back to the parent of the current directory. The new way makes going back up a few folders a much longer process. Simply stated there is no one button that will always bring you back up to the parent.
Again, the author shows his ignorance. Just click on the breadcrumb of where you want to go, ta-da! you're now there. Granted it's not a button, but it's infinitely more useful. Not only can I go up one level with one click I can go up n levels with one click.
The new start menu sucks (Kind of)
This one I will give him is a wash. The built in search rocks. And personally, I'm used to <Win>+R to open the run dialog. <Win>+R then 'c:' still gets me an explorer window at c:\. Though I tend to use <Win>+E and then using the folder tree to get to the c:\, but to each their own. My major complaint with this is that shutting down has changed for me. I used to use <Win>, U, S, <Enter> to shut down. That's gone now, now I just hit the power button on my laptop.
Windows Networking is a mess
This one I'll give him. Changing IP addresses is now buried yet another layer deeper. You had to dig enough in XP. This "Network and Sharing Center" is a bit annoying. Though one thing it does have going for it is that you can quickly tell whether you are sharing folders or not, and control it from there. Overall, more of a "meh" than a problem.
Windows Search Is Broken - Now when I want a simple search for any file that contains the string 'IntelliAdmin' I can't do it.
And, we're back to stupidity. There is a little box in the upper left hand corner of the Explorer window, oddly labeled "search", it's even visible in some of his screenshots. Type a string of letters in, and Presto! Vista goes and finds any file with the applicable search string (it even checks inside Word, Excel and text documents.)
Windows copying has not improved
This is another one I'll give him, copying and the associated network issues are a problem MS needs to fix. For the entire OS to seize up because a network location is unreachable is just stupid.
Overall the author of the article manages to just show that he's only touched Vista long enough to be annoyed with the changes, and not get used to them. I've been running Vista since RC1, and excepting driver support which sucked in the release candidate, but that's to be expected, I've generally liked Vista. Most of the complaints I have heard are either ill-informed or just downright wrong. That's not to say that there aren't still issues with Vista. Driver support still sucks, the network hang-ups should really be fixed (or at least give me a cancel button for when I know I mistyped), changing security and network settings are now buried one layer deeper in almost all cases, and getting used to the security pop-up takes some doing. Though, in defense of the last one, this is something that people have been asking for; just running everything as a local administrator is insane, you wouldn't run Linux as root all the time would you? One thing that Vista does lack in this regard is a non-admin way of viewing settings that should require admin level rights to change. I'd like to be able to view the Computer Management snap-in without running it as admin.
Most likely the 22 million accounts being searched line was added by some idiot journalist with no clue how a database works. In his defense, he was probably parroting information from some talking head, who was also clueless as to the internal working of the databases. Said spokes-hole probably heard that there were 22 million or so transactions in the year, and that the system would need a bit to do the search, so he just threw that number out there to sound like he knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
Assuming that the credit card database uses some sort of SQL type language, the DBA probably just put together a query along the likes of:
SELECT a.CustomerName, a.CustomerSSN, b.TransactionDateTime, b.TransactionAmount FROM tblCustomers a, tblTransactions b WHERE b.TransactionDateTime >l= @StartDate AND b.TransactionDateTime =< @EndDate AND b.TransactionAmount = @KnownAmount AND b.RecipientAccount = @KnownAccount
Or something akin to that. (by the by, what is the German equivalent of the US's Social Security Number? I assume that all countries have some sort of citizen tracking number.)
The end result would be that the DBA would get back a result set which only included those accounts which had made a purchase of this specific amount in this time period to this specific account. And, with good indexes, most of those 22 million records would not have even been scanned at all. Also, I suspect that any DBA at a major credit card company is far better at what he does than I am, so they will probably have an even better way to go about this than what I just whipped up.
This type of thing would make me laugh, but for the fact that one of the primary database applications I support has this sort of silliness built in. ESRI's ArcSDE 9.1 in the MSSQL version uses a table named SDE_table_registry. The primary purpose of this table is to keep track of the type of data stored in the other tables. While this does make some sense in that the data in a geodatabase is usually classified as either point, vector or raster it would be nice if they would key off of the object_id (sysObjects or sys.objects) instead of actually listing the table name in SDE_table_registry, and doing so with an nvarchar(13). Also, every row has the current database name as an field as well.
Is there anyway to use stored procedures and still have database portability?
Usually stored procedures can be dumped to DDL along with the rest of it.
Is there any good way to properly manager thousands of stored procedures, with source control, in an easy to define manner?
One option I have seen is to use Visual Source Safe, obviously this is a Microsoft solution and assumes Microsoft's SQL server, but I'm willing to bet that a little bit of digging will turn up something similar for Oracle. And in the spirit of OSS, if you're using MySQL, you can just roll your own.;)
I realize that stored procedures have their place, but I never quite understood using them for just about every query as some projects do. It puts too much logic in non-portable code in the database, and it's hard to group together the stored procedures into a logic manner like you can do with object oriented classes and functions.
Each way has it's pro's and con's. Also, people tend to see things differently depending upon where they are coming from. My guess is that you are a software developer and don't spend a lot of time with databases. As such, it's not surprising for you to want everything to happen in code. When you run into DB people, you'll find that a lot of them want everything to happen inside the RDBMS and for the code to stay the hell away from the tables. Neither one will always be the right way to do it, you'll end up needing to blend the two.
This strikes me as the same path that eventually led Comdex (formerly a large, important computer show, now a memory) into the dirt. Originally, it was intended for developers, but more and more end users wanted in, and got in. By the end it was nothing but a worthless marketing show aimed at the end users. E3 seems to have followed this same trajectory. This E4A is just the last gasp of breath escaping its lungs.
What if it were $2 and the # of viewings or time was limited?
Maybe. The first question is going to be whether or not I need to buy a new DVD player or not. On of the reasons DIVX bothered me was that I had to buy a new player for it. I have a good DVD player, I'm not buying a new one so that I can subscribe to some silly service, Blockbuster is within walking distance. The second part of it is going to be ease of use. Downloading and burning a DVD is enough trouble, if I'm having to jump though a bunch of other hoops as well, it's not gonna happen. Lastly is going to be timeliness. At the moment, I have a 3Mb download (DSL) so a 4.5GB download is going to take around (4.5GB * 1024MB/GB * 8Mb/MB * 1s/3Mb * 1min/60s * 1hr/60min = ~3.4hr) 3 and a half hours. And that doesn't figure in overhead and burn time, so it's probably going to be closer to 4.5 to 5 hours. If I plan ahead, this will be fine, if I am bored and looking for a movie to entertain me, it's not feasible. Also, how much bandwidth am I going to get on the servers? Is the service actually going to provide me with a 3Mb download stream, or are they going to limit me to 1Mb or worse?
I'm willing to bet that the place this will work is going to be at kiosks or even Blockbuster et al. They can keep the movies on local storage and then burn on demand. Assuming that I don't have to replace my DVD player, and that the discs expire appropriately, this could be a boon for the DVD rental business. They would no longer need to worry about being out of stock on a particular movie, just the burnable discs themselves. I could view the movie then toss the disc (hopefully biodegradable and organic based). Of course, Blockbuster specifically would never go for it, how would they charge late fees then?
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I'd love to just be able to play with some of the demos they have shown off in the videos. Chucking stormtroopers at wooden beams over large pits just looks like a great stress reliever. Add in the ability to change the properties of the beams, and also the ability to throw droids while I was at it, and I'd lose hours just seeing what I could do to hapless stormtroopers.
I also hear plenty of reasons why many teachers unions are ineffective.
#1: Required membership. Make the Union actually have to work to keeps its members and it will get a hell of a lot better at representing its members.
On the other hand, the Union is needed, as the States have been showing with the "No School Left Behind Act" they are dead set on centralizing control over them, then fucking them all up equally. After all, there is no last place when everyone is at the bottom.
I see no problem with the idea of differential pay for teachers in different subjects. Yes, it would suck to be an English teacher and make half as much as the Math teacher, but I'm willing to bet that we can find twice as many qualified English teachers as Math teachers. The moral of the story, pick a more in demand subject.
I would expect that one of the considerations for the FAA director is that, whether they go to Linux/Google Apps or Vista/Office 2007, they are going to face a re-training issue. Vista is different enough that a lot of old habits are going to have to be forgotten and new ones learned. Office 2007 is a PITA to relearn. You're stuck with the Ribbon, and you're going to learn it and like it, cause you cannot revert to the old interface. At this point, jumping to Linux, with say KDE, and Google Apps wouldn't be that much worse, if at all. The interface is very Windows like, so there shouldn't be a whole lot to relearn. I've not seen Google Apps, but I'm gonna guess that learning it after having been in MS Office forever is about on par with getting used to Office 2007.
In a way, I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot by redesigning the interface to their two flagship products at the same time. As an IT manager, you're now looking at retraining issues for both products at once anyway, why not look at alternatives which aren't so expensive and laden with DRM crippling?
And for your car?
Now my car does not have an "iPod dock" (better known as an AUX input). Not to mention I don't own an iPod, nor do I have enough music on CD's to fill the damn thing anyway. I like having some form of music during my commute; and with my inability to pay $16 for a CD, excepting rare occasions, I don't have a huge selection of music to work from. No, I'm not going to futz around with iTunes et al. either. I just want something I can tune to and have a fairly random collection of music within a genere I enjoy. It would be even nicer if it included new stuff on occasion, and local news/traffic. Unfortuneatly, all of the stations which are within range of my commute, and in generes which I enjoy are owned by ClearChanel. It would be nice to think that this ruling is going to make things better, but I know better. The Federal Censorship Commission (FCC) is just slapping the big guys on the wrist to placate the plebes, then it will be back to business as usual.
Though, to prove that I am a hipocrite, I do subscribe to XM. I finally got sick of 55 minutes of commercials/idiots talking and 5 minutes of one of the same damn 4 songs per hour. Ya, I could buy a CD a month for the same money, but this avoids the need to hunt for stuff I'll like.
My normal knee-jerk reaction to the government doing this is, "hell no!" Usually the government screws up anything it gets a hold of; however, in this case, I think the analogy is spot on. Communications networks are becoming very much like the highway system in everyday necessity. I think I would be all for the government buying out the existing infrastructure (fiber and copper) at a reasonable price, and then using tax money to extend and expand it. Heck, we paid for the Spanish-American war as a surcharge until recently, why not use a similar surcharge to expand capacity. Also, One flat fee could be charged (per KB possibly) for all companies, regardless of what they are providing, thus giving a good boost to the good parts of net neutrality. Might even go so far as to make it work like the US Post Office, make it an independent entity who's sole purpose is providing bandwidth, and they must be self sufficient on the fees they generate.
Basic D&D still has the bane of all non-math types: ThAC0
While it is easy for anyone who is somewhat math inclined, I have seen many people struggle over that small aspect. One of the great things about 3rd Ed. was that the designers finally figured out how stupid it was to have people subtracting negative numbers, turned the whole system around so that it was all addition. Really, if you spend a bit of time with the math behind it, you'll find that the dice rolls to hit are the same, the math is just simplified.
Also, Basic D&D was good if all you wanted to do was "roll" play, but god forbid you wanted to do anything which was not combat based. It was certainly a good start, and I am thankful for the time I got to spend with that game when I young, but it really does belong in a museum an not on the tabletop anymore.
Would you support the development of technology to get 5 minute warrants? Why can't a police officer send an email with relevant information and pictures to a judge who reviews it and issues the warrant electronically??
I think it would be better to simply allow the officer to register that a device is being used, and then they have to defend every use retroactively. e.g. Show that there was some level of probable cause to justify tracking a vehicle.
For example, when an officer deploys such a device, he needs to call a dispatcher to have it activated. In order to activate it the dispatcher needs to input the officer's name and badge number, a physical description of the vehicle, and a reason. All said information is stored in a database and a notification sent to the oversight board that a new use case has been created and will need to be reviewed.
The officer can then conduct use the GPS system as needed, but there is oversight of every use to watch for abuse. The only important caveat here is that the oversight board is going to need to be made up of reasonably intelligent citizens, with no ties to the police force. Which may be hard to do.
I still order my systems with floppy drives. Between OS installs and needing specific controller drivers (yes, I could slipstream them, but with Dell changing controllers constantly, this would be an annoying moving target), and Symantec Drive Image for rapid system deployment (multi-casting an image rocks!); I still use floppies on a fairly regular basis. Also, even with Server 2003 R2, you still need a floppy to do ASR.
you know there's far more to the West Coast than simply Southern California.
;-)
Ya, but the rest of it sucks.
Seriously though, gaming in Southern California seemed to be in a rut the last time I went to a con. All of the RPG events were either D&D or Vampire. Or, god save us all, Vampire LARP. After reading the flier a few times and not seeing anything different, I just gave up on Cons here. And, not being willing to fly to halfway across the country for a con, I never even looked into GenCon, so this is the first I ever heard about it being on the West Coast. Which is part of the reason I think it failed, it doesn't seem like it was well advertised, or if it was it must have been limited to the LA Metro area. And there's more to Southern California than LA, though ya, much of it sucks, but no where near as much as LA.
This is my worry too. Lucas arts has the world's best goldmine for games in the Star Wars franchise, but they insist on releasing games on too short of as schedule and they end up half done, and half-baked.
A well done lightsaber/jedi game would rock. I somehow expect that we'll just end up with Redsteel with glowing swords. Granted, I would probably still buy it, as will most geeks, and I'll probably enjoy it for a while; it will still come off as crap in the end.
I'm not so sure that the Wiimote would be the limiting factor in a sword game. It seems to do a reasonable job of sensing position, even when not pointed right at the screen. Try Super Swing Golf out, when you address the ball, you actually have to make sure that your wrist is not rotated, or it will affect the angle of the club face. Also, when you swing though, the angle of your swing, and the rotation of the Wiimote are also accounted for to some extent. Overall, the Wiimote seems to handle 3D space really well.
Furthermore, my math professors generally don't allow calculators.
Had just about the same thing here. My first semester calc instructor wanted everyone to have a TI-something-or-other, as she like to have us do the graphing calculator based problems during class. After about the third time of telling me I should get one, and then having me finish the problem by hand before most of the class ha figured out where the on button was on their calculator, she gave up.
The best part was that, after her class every higher level math class was taught by an instructor who didn't allow calculators at all, not even basic 4 function Casios. All of the suckers who had bought the fancy calculators were whining up a storm. You were going to do it all by hand, and personally I found that much better. You are in a math class to learn to do math. If the calculator is doing all of the thinking for you, you're not learning anything. Sure, in Chem, Physics, etc. use a calculator, the math isn't the important thing in the class; but in a math class put the calculator away.
I thought I might be getting trolled, but oh well.
The post was about copying, not opening in notepad. Yes, notepad is very broken when it comes to opening large files. This has always been true.
Err... his screen shot doesn't show there being any breadcrumbs. Where exactly is he supposed to click?
That's because he's already farked it. The breadcrumb sits in the address bar until you do something else with it. If he had actually learned a bit about the interface before complaining about it, he might not have made such an obviously wrong claim. He was supposed to click the folder he wanted to jump back to in the breadcrumb, not on the history drop-down.
How does it cope with long directory names? Say I had a 255 character directory name, too wide to display, and wanted to go up two levels, how would that work?
This is where I do view it as breaking down. Once the path gets too long for the address bar, it starts hiding levels in a small button on the left, with a "<<" symbol. Personally, I would have rather gone for a truncating of names with an ellipses, but that's probably more a matter of personal choice than a real problem.
Actually, of all the disparaging terms I used ignorant was the most correct. I'll admit I was in full rant mode, I'm just tired of seeing senseless MS bashing, there are enough problems with Windows without making stuff up. I have this thing about intellectual honesty, if you're going to do a write-up about the "sins" of Vista at least spend enough time with it to figure out what is real an what is a lack of knowledge.
ignorance: the state or fact of being ignorant : lack of knowledge, education, or awareness
Just about what I'm claiming.
Open Windows Explorer, browse to a folder, preferably once several layers deep. Look at the address bar, you will see something like C:\ -> Windows -> System32 -> drivers -> etc
To go back up, just click on the folder you want to go up to. e.g. to get back to the Windows folder, click on Windows.
First off, the article was specifically talking about the search field in the windows explorer window. If you look at the screenshot he is referencing, you can clearly see the search box, which does function as he wants. Below that are the advanced options to do other stuff. Second, the start menu search does come up with files, and even goes inside some of them. For example, I have a text file with my WAN IP settings, if I open the start menu and type "network", it shows me that there is a file (stuff gets grouped by type) named network.txt. If I instead type "DNS2" which is the line I used to denote the secondary DNS server in that file, once again the start menu shows me that there is a file with that string in it. While there are probably much better desktop search programs out there, the built in Vista one is not half bad.
So, I stand by my statement, the claim that search doesn't work as search is stupid. Perhaps the author has a broken install, in which case I'll retract my statement in favor of "foot in mouth"; personally, I'm just guessing it's the standard senseless MS bashing which has become common these days. There's enough stuff to bash MS about, which is valid, we don't need to make stuff up.
At a guess, the primary reason for the change is that MS is continuing its push to unify web browser an file browser design. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. IE7 uses the address bar for history, they've now copied that design into the file browser. Most of the other UI elements are similar in location and function now too. Really, I was just commenting on the fact that the author is complaining about a lack of something, which is right in front of him. If you're going to say that something is missing, in a public forum, it's a good plan to make sure that it's really missing.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Vista box for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes.
Start backing up your data now.
Any system which chugs along for that long on a 17MB file either has some serious problems, or a dialog box hiding behind an active window waiting on a response. I'm running Vista on a laptop and while the file copy is slow, it's nothing like that.
Apparently the "Folders" tool on the left is too hard to use. Take a look at his picture, if he just clicked on the "Folders" link on the left he would have a nice, easy to navigate tree right there. Yes, the address bar's drop-down is a sort of history. As for the web sites, mine seem to spawn a web browser (Firefox even) just fine.
Again, the author shows his ignorance. Just click on the breadcrumb of where you want to go, ta-da! you're now there. Granted it's not a button, but it's infinitely more useful. Not only can I go up one level with one click I can go up n levels with one click.
This one I will give him is a wash. The built in search rocks. And personally, I'm used to <Win>+R to open the run dialog. <Win>+R then 'c:' still gets me an explorer window at c:\. Though I tend to use <Win>+E and then using the folder tree to get to the c:\, but to each their own. My major complaint with this is that shutting down has changed for me. I used to use <Win>, U, S, <Enter> to shut down. That's gone now, now I just hit the power button on my laptop.
This one I'll give him. Changing IP addresses is now buried yet another layer deeper. You had to dig enough in XP. This "Network and Sharing Center" is a bit annoying. Though one thing it does have going for it is that you can quickly tell whether you are sharing folders or not, and control it from there. Overall, more of a "meh" than a problem.
And, we're back to stupidity. There is a little box in the upper left hand corner of the Explorer window, oddly labeled "search", it's even visible in some of his screenshots. Type a string of letters in, and Presto! Vista goes and finds any file with the applicable search string (it even checks inside Word, Excel and text documents.)
This is another one I'll give him, copying and the associated network issues are a problem MS needs to fix. For the entire OS to seize up because a network location is unreachable is just stupid.
Overall the author of the article manages to just show that he's only touched Vista long enough to be annoyed with the changes, and not get used to them. I've been running Vista since RC1, and excepting driver support which sucked in the release candidate, but that's to be expected, I've generally liked Vista. Most of the complaints I have heard are either ill-informed or just downright wrong. That's not to say that there aren't still issues with Vista. Driver support still sucks, the network hang-ups should really be fixed (or at least give me a cancel button for when I know I mistyped), changing security and network settings are now buried one layer deeper in almost all cases, and getting used to the security pop-up takes some doing. Though, in defense of the last one, this is something that people have been asking for; just running everything as a local administrator is insane, you wouldn't run Linux as root all the time would you? One thing that Vista does lack in this regard is a non-admin way of viewing settings that should require admin level rights to change. I'd like to be able to view the Computer Management snap-in without running it as admin.
Most likely the 22 million accounts being searched line was added by some idiot journalist with no clue how a database works. In his defense, he was probably parroting information from some talking head, who was also clueless as to the internal working of the databases. Said spokes-hole probably heard that there were 22 million or so transactions in the year, and that the system would need a bit to do the search, so he just threw that number out there to sound like he knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
Assuming that the credit card database uses some sort of SQL type language, the DBA probably just put together a query along the likes of:
SELECT a.CustomerName, a.CustomerSSN, b.TransactionDateTime, b.TransactionAmount FROM tblCustomers a, tblTransactions b WHERE b.TransactionDateTime >l= @StartDate AND b.TransactionDateTime =< @EndDate AND b.TransactionAmount = @KnownAmount AND b.RecipientAccount = @KnownAccount
Or something akin to that. (by the by, what is the German equivalent of the US's Social Security Number? I assume that all countries have some sort of citizen tracking number.)
The end result would be that the DBA would get back a result set which only included those accounts which had made a purchase of this specific amount in this time period to this specific account. And, with good indexes, most of those 22 million records would not have even been scanned at all. Also, I suspect that any DBA at a major credit card company is far better at what he does than I am, so they will probably have an even better way to go about this than what I just whipped up.
This type of thing would make me laugh, but for the fact that one of the primary database applications I support has this sort of silliness built in. ESRI's ArcSDE 9.1 in the MSSQL version uses a table named SDE_table_registry. The primary purpose of this table is to keep track of the type of data stored in the other tables. While this does make some sense in that the data in a geodatabase is usually classified as either point, vector or raster it would be nice if they would key off of the object_id (sysObjects or sys.objects) instead of actually listing the table name in SDE_table_registry, and doing so with an nvarchar(13). Also, every row has the current database name as an field as well.
Is there anyway to use stored procedures and still have database portability?
;)
Usually stored procedures can be dumped to DDL along with the rest of it.
Is there any good way to properly manager thousands of stored procedures, with source control, in an easy to define manner?
One option I have seen is to use Visual Source Safe, obviously this is a Microsoft solution and assumes Microsoft's SQL server, but I'm willing to bet that a little bit of digging will turn up something similar for Oracle. And in the spirit of OSS, if you're using MySQL, you can just roll your own.
I realize that stored procedures have their place, but I never quite understood using them for just about every query as some projects do. It puts too much logic in non-portable code in the database, and it's hard to group together the stored procedures into a logic manner like you can do with object oriented classes and functions.
Each way has it's pro's and con's. Also, people tend to see things differently depending upon where they are coming from. My guess is that you are a software developer and don't spend a lot of time with databases. As such, it's not surprising for you to want everything to happen in code. When you run into DB people, you'll find that a lot of them want everything to happen inside the RDBMS and for the code to stay the hell away from the tables. Neither one will always be the right way to do it, you'll end up needing to blend the two.
This strikes me as the same path that eventually led Comdex (formerly a large, important computer show, now a memory) into the dirt. Originally, it was intended for developers, but more and more end users wanted in, and got in. By the end it was nothing but a worthless marketing show aimed at the end users. E3 seems to have followed this same trajectory. This E4A is just the last gasp of breath escaping its lungs.
What if it were $2 and the # of viewings or time was limited?
Maybe. The first question is going to be whether or not I need to buy a new DVD player or not. On of the reasons DIVX bothered me was that I had to buy a new player for it. I have a good DVD player, I'm not buying a new one so that I can subscribe to some silly service, Blockbuster is within walking distance. The second part of it is going to be ease of use. Downloading and burning a DVD is enough trouble, if I'm having to jump though a bunch of other hoops as well, it's not gonna happen. Lastly is going to be timeliness. At the moment, I have a 3Mb download (DSL) so a 4.5GB download is going to take around (4.5GB * 1024MB/GB * 8Mb/MB * 1s/3Mb * 1min/60s * 1hr/60min = ~3.4hr) 3 and a half hours. And that doesn't figure in overhead and burn time, so it's probably going to be closer to 4.5 to 5 hours. If I plan ahead, this will be fine, if I am bored and looking for a movie to entertain me, it's not feasible. Also, how much bandwidth am I going to get on the servers? Is the service actually going to provide me with a 3Mb download stream, or are they going to limit me to 1Mb or worse?
I'm willing to bet that the place this will work is going to be at kiosks or even Blockbuster et al. They can keep the movies on local storage and then burn on demand. Assuming that I don't have to replace my DVD player, and that the discs expire appropriately, this could be a boon for the DVD rental business. They would no longer need to worry about being out of stock on a particular movie, just the burnable discs themselves. I could view the movie then toss the disc (hopefully biodegradable and organic based). Of course, Blockbuster specifically would never go for it, how would they charge late fees then?