The worst virus/malware cleanup I've done in the last year installed itself via an Acrobat reader security vulnerability. "Don't update Acrobat" isn't really a viable solution to their bloat problem because of that class of issue. More useful ones are "Install Foxit Reader" and "Use Evince on Linux".
You don't need nearly that many unique supervillians because the ones previously put into custody escape all the time. How many times has The Joker gotten out of Arkham? What the comic universe really needs more of in order to lower the crime rate are some superpowered wardens.
The last Gartner Study I read analyzing 2007 put DB2 as basically tied for 2nd place with Microsoft at around 20% each, and both combined are behind Oracle. But market share is not the same as user base, and there I'd bet DB2 is far behind MySQL at least. You might have a case for putting DB2 ahead of PostgreSQL as far as user base goes, but O'Reilly does have heavy open-source roots in their publishing line that I suspect swayed their focus against IBM's product here.
Re:The utility of Nutshell books?
on
SQL in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Typically the on-line reference manuals you'll find show how SQL works on one particular platform. The main value of the "SQL In a Nutshell" books has always been the way you can easily compare what's available on multiple database platforms. You will need to be aware of that sort of thing if you want to support more than one database in your code. And even if you're using some middleware to abstract that away, knowing which features work well and badly on various platforms can guide how you should implement things. A good example here is the messy state of building paginated queries with LIMIT/OFFSET/ROWNUM.
As there is far less variation between, say, Python on various platforms than SQL, this title is somewhat special in that way; I agree that some of the other nutshell books are less relevant nowadays than they used to be. Even when they are the best choice, the printed version isn't necessarily what you want either. Most of my nutshell reading has been through their Safari service lately, rather than the printed books.
Last week PGCon had a session introducing this project and how to use OpenStreetMap with PostgreSQL. One Postgres add-on that's very popular in the mapping space is PostGIS, which lets you do all sorts of spatial bits it used to take expensive propriety tools to handle.
The Q6600 also supports Intel VT, which is becoming increasingly important as virtualization becomes more mainstream. The Q8XXX processors do not. That segmentation in Intel's product line will start getting obvious to more people come Windows 7 XP Mode. Given how Window-centric many game players are, buying a processor without VT support for gaming right now is a particularly bad idea.
Geany has a "Detect from file" setting for indentation that helps with the situation where you need different tab stops for different files. I'm not sure exactly how it works, it seemed to function OK when I used it a few times. Having per-file configuration settings isn't particularly important to me, and agreed that if its something you need for your routine tasks Geany isn't the right editor for you yet. It actually would be nice if said detection supported parsing that particular part of typical mode lines .
The other stuff you mentioned is clearly not a problem with the current code, so your anecdote was either against an older version (quite possible, Geany is still moving around fast) or came from someone who hadn't figured out how to configure it correctly yet.
As for why I find Geany useful, I find the graphical versions of both vi and emacs to feel unnatural compared to applications that were built specifically for the GUI environment. For me, it's important that the UI of my editor match all the other applications I use every day, and Geany doesn't feel very different from Firefox/Open Office/other GTK2 apps.
Also, there's something to be said for software still being actively developed. The one UI quirk I ran into in Geany that drove me crazy ("Save" being grayed out if the doc hadn't been changed) was fixed in about a week once I pointed it out on their developer mailing list.
Does it make a profit? Doesn't look like it could, so expect Kenai to get canned. The discussion of the merger over at The Register has a good intro to the per-project profit focus of the very well managed Oracle.
Sure they can, the only question is how long it will take before they can do it cost-effectively. Sun's normal sales terms talk about how they can pull out of their side of a support agreement in section 5.5. Typically Sun's contracts are executed for some number of years at a time, with even their Perpetual Entitlement Contracts having a renewal date in them. So Oracle could announce an end-of-life date effective a couple of years out, probably 3 years, and start tapering down the support work they do and the free resources available immediately (try and find good Oracle support info without a paid Metalink account).
As for the effects from optical audio cables, they're all lying sacks of shit. You either have bit loss or you don't, any changes in sound quality is a result of the AD/DA chips or speakers, not the cable.
Most digital audio interfaces have an implicit clock that is recovered from the data being transmitted. If the interface between components is crappy, you can end up with the right bits but at the wrong time. This effectively reduces the quality of the audio. As the impact has been both measurable and audible for almost 20 years now, suggesting "you either have bit loss or your don't" is provably false. There is a clear intermediate state where bits are delivered, but with enough timing jitter that the result is slightly degraded.
Cable changes aren't necessarily the best approach to resolve this though--some audio interfaces, like the common Toslink optical one, are really problematic no matter how good the cable involved is. If you have a good enough system for these problems to be audible, using a better digital transmission interface, or something that buffers and reclocks, would be better solutions.
I use a Sansa Fuze, which lets me play FLAC files, works perfectly on Linux, and has a voice recorder. I can also record my voice on my Blackberry with VR+ (there's a version of that for the iPhone and iPod Touch as well). While not perfect for archiving code idea, I can usually get down enough verbal notes to jog my memory of what I was thinking in the car.
Forever War seems to be one of those "writer's first books"...that was slaved over, re-editted, re-written, re-thought, and probably submitted to publishers a dozen times before it finally saw print
Nope; actually his 4th novel, and it was originally written as a serial for Analog Magazine, that's why it was written so tightly. Some of the later editions reverted some of the edits, expanding the text in the process.
Haldeman was really on a roll for a numbers of years starting with that book, "The Forever War", "Mindbridge", "Worlds", and "Worlds Apart" are all great SF novels.
It sure makes sense for Ford to give cars to those who will write positively about their brand, like prolific writer and Fiesta fan Jim Anchower. And it wouldn't hurt to have searches for Ford pictures to return something less tacky.
Obviously it's to improve compatibility with the easy SQL server installs on XP SP3.
MS can't even get all their own software running on SP3 yet, and Mozilla is looking to drop support for all the stable SP2 clients out there? Ouch. I can see dropping Win 2K and pre-SP2, but saying the line has moved to SP3 is pandering to what Microsoft says rather than what people are actually doing. From TFA, it sounds like the new support suggestion is aimed to match the MS support policy, not that they're looking to take advantage of anything in SP3.
Slashdot Mirror
Get yourself an ANCIENT, HORRIBLE laptop for browsing and other non-work computing -- something you'll stop as soon as possible
I like to use a Lenovo system loaded with all their latest software for that job
The worst virus/malware cleanup I've done in the last year installed itself via an Acrobat reader security vulnerability. "Don't update Acrobat" isn't really a viable solution to their bloat problem because of that class of issue. More useful ones are "Install Foxit Reader" and "Use Evince on Linux".
Duh, if you were old enough to have the first edition of DDG you'd know this is all covered there.
WOOSH!
You don't need nearly that many unique supervillians because the ones previously put into custody escape all the time. How many times has The Joker gotten out of Arkham? What the comic universe really needs more of in order to lower the crime rate are some superpowered wardens.
The last Gartner Study I read analyzing 2007 put DB2 as basically tied for 2nd place with Microsoft at around 20% each, and both combined are behind Oracle. But market share is not the same as user base, and there I'd bet DB2 is far behind MySQL at least. You might have a case for putting DB2 ahead of PostgreSQL as far as user base goes, but O'Reilly does have heavy open-source roots in their publishing line that I suspect swayed their focus against IBM's product here.
Typically the on-line reference manuals you'll find show how SQL works on one particular platform. The main value of the "SQL In a Nutshell" books has always been the way you can easily compare what's available on multiple database platforms. You will need to be aware of that sort of thing if you want to support more than one database in your code. And even if you're using some middleware to abstract that away, knowing which features work well and badly on various platforms can guide how you should implement things. A good example here is the messy state of building paginated queries with LIMIT/OFFSET/ROWNUM.
As there is far less variation between, say, Python on various platforms than SQL, this title is somewhat special in that way; I agree that some of the other nutshell books are less relevant nowadays than they used to be. Even when they are the best choice, the printed version isn't necessarily what you want either. Most of my nutshell reading has been through their Safari service lately, rather than the printed books.
Last week PGCon had a session introducing this project and how to use OpenStreetMap with PostgreSQL. One Postgres add-on that's very popular in the mapping space is PostGIS, which lets you do all sorts of spatial bits it used to take expensive propriety tools to handle.
The Q6600 also supports Intel VT, which is becoming increasingly important as virtualization becomes more mainstream. The Q8XXX processors do not. That segmentation in Intel's product line will start getting obvious to more people come Windows 7 XP Mode. Given how Window-centric many game players are, buying a processor without VT support for gaming right now is a particularly bad idea.
Actually, it's worth more, because the bit they disabled is the evil one.
Geany has a "Detect from file" setting for indentation that helps with the situation where you need different tab stops for different files. I'm not sure exactly how it works, it seemed to function OK when I used it a few times. Having per-file configuration settings isn't particularly important to me, and agreed that if its something you need for your routine tasks Geany isn't the right editor for you yet. It actually would be nice if said detection supported parsing that particular part of typical mode lines .
The other stuff you mentioned is clearly not a problem with the current code, so your anecdote was either against an older version (quite possible, Geany is still moving around fast) or came from someone who hadn't figured out how to configure it correctly yet.
As for why I find Geany useful, I find the graphical versions of both vi and emacs to feel unnatural compared to applications that were built specifically for the GUI environment. For me, it's important that the UI of my editor match all the other applications I use every day, and Geany doesn't feel very different from Firefox/Open Office/other GTK2 apps.
Also, there's something to be said for software still being actively developed. The one UI quirk I ran into in Geany that drove me crazy ("Save" being grayed out if the doc hadn't been changed) was fixed in about a week once I pointed it out on their developer mailing list.
Come on, if Roger Grimes had ready access to beer and/or women he wouldn't be writing for InfoWorld.
There aren't as many hosting companies that support PostgreSQL, but they are out there. http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting has a list.
We may also finally find out what the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway really is.
Urban legend, eventually featured in both "Homicide" and later "The Wire".
And Aster nCluster is PostgreSQL based. Yahoo's "homegrown system" also started with PostgreSQL.
Does it make a profit? Doesn't look like it could, so expect Kenai to get canned. The discussion of the merger over at The Register has a good intro to the per-project profit focus of the very well managed Oracle.
Sure they can, the only question is how long it will take before they can do it cost-effectively. Sun's normal sales terms talk about how they can pull out of their side of a support agreement in section 5.5. Typically Sun's contracts are executed for some number of years at a time, with even their Perpetual Entitlement Contracts having a renewal date in them. So Oracle could announce an end-of-life date effective a couple of years out, probably 3 years, and start tapering down the support work they do and the free resources available immediately (try and find good Oracle support info without a paid Metalink account).
Last week Ron Paul even suggested a way to fund them.
As for the effects from optical audio cables, they're all lying sacks of shit. You either have bit loss or you don't, any changes in sound quality is a result of the AD/DA chips or speakers, not the cable.
Most digital audio interfaces have an implicit clock that is recovered from the data being transmitted. If the interface between components is crappy, you can end up with the right bits but at the wrong time. This effectively reduces the quality of the audio. As the impact has been both measurable and audible for almost 20 years now, suggesting "you either have bit loss or your don't" is provably false. There is a clear intermediate state where bits are delivered, but with enough timing jitter that the result is slightly degraded.
Cable changes aren't necessarily the best approach to resolve this though--some audio interfaces, like the common Toslink optical one, are really problematic no matter how good the cable involved is. If you have a good enough system for these problems to be audible, using a better digital transmission interface, or something that buffers and reclocks, would be better solutions.
Suggested reading on this this topic:
Jitter explained,
Digital Domain - Jitter,
Jitter, Bits, & Sound Quality
I use a Sansa Fuze, which lets me play FLAC files, works perfectly on Linux, and has a voice recorder. I can also record my voice on my Blackberry with VR+ (there's a version of that for the iPhone and iPod Touch as well). While not perfect for archiving code idea, I can usually get down enough verbal notes to jog my memory of what I was thinking in the car.
Oracle sales reps claim that they have more linux devs than RedHat and that they feed lots of code back.
RedHat contributes over 8X as many changes to the Linux kernel as Oracle.
I hope you've learned a little lesson here about trusting sales reps.
Forever War seems to be one of those "writer's first books"...that was slaved over, re-editted, re-written, re-thought, and probably submitted to publishers a dozen times before it finally saw print
Nope; actually his 4th novel, and it was originally written as a serial for Analog Magazine, that's why it was written so tightly. Some of the later editions reverted some of the edits, expanding the text in the process.
Haldeman was really on a roll for a numbers of years starting with that book, "The Forever War", "Mindbridge", "Worlds", and "Worlds Apart" are all great SF novels.
It sure makes sense for Ford to give cars to those who will write positively about their brand, like prolific writer and Fiesta fan Jim Anchower. And it wouldn't hurt to have searches for Ford pictures to return something less tacky.
Obviously it's to improve compatibility with the easy SQL server installs on XP SP3.
MS can't even get all their own software running on SP3 yet, and Mozilla is looking to drop support for all the stable SP2 clients out there? Ouch. I can see dropping Win 2K and pre-SP2, but saying the line has moved to SP3 is pandering to what Microsoft says rather than what people are actually doing. From TFA, it sounds like the new support suggestion is aimed to match the MS support policy, not that they're looking to take advantage of anything in SP3.