Milling is the process of cutting by movign a quickly rotating cuting head in relation to the item being cut down. Most machine shop milling machines have a stationary head, and move the item around, while some cnc machines have a head that moves.
Wasn't Skynet supposed to be self-aware like 5 years ago?
I mean, it's 2003, and we don't even have systems that we can't leave alone over the weekend. Where's the AI that's supposed to do all of the thinking for us, so we can actually get some free time? [Okay, there's that little problem with it trying to kill off all humans, but well, I'm sure they'll fix that in release 2]
The issue with the extra powr going through the lines is that the FCC is woried about cross talk...
If you have a lot of older lines (old punch blocks, etc), it's not twisted. As there's no twist, there's no counter EMI [as you create a magnetic field whenever you have a changing electrical field] The EMI then induces an electrical field in the neighoring lines.
So well, you start having problems in old neighborhoods [old in terms of the age of the phone lines, not necesarily the age of the homes], where modems cause noise on voice lines, and two modems may cause interference with each other.
How do we end up with these acronyms? Don't people do any research before they try to start using acronyms already in use. [I mean, hell, anyone else remember all of the confusion of trying to explain the concept of ATM networks, without having to explain every other sentance that it has nothing to do with getting money].
As for DVDA, these folks have obviously never seen Orgazmo [I mean, try reading the above message with the other meaning of the acronym]
Oh, don't get me started on System 7. What a hog that was.... I mean, they wanted you to have 4 megs of RAM. Four whole megs! Suddenly, you couldn't opt to run with the finder, or the multi-finder, they forced being able to run multiple applications at the same time on you!
Oh...and aliasing...big deal, I had that in 6.0.4 from some shareware system extension. [hey, wait a minute....isn't this that point when they sprung that foul 'balloon help' on us? Oh, yeah, 350k of extra crap in the system folder... and thanks to them, we get today's 'tool tip' crap.]
From my memory of the first one, he wasn't wearing the suit for all of the stunts. I don't know what they consider to be 'difficult', but it's entirely possible that there might be parts of the movie in which the character Peter Parker would have to use his abilities when he's not wearing the disguise.
For the most part, you gain roughly the same advantages, with roughly the same cost. What it's going to come down to in the end is how you recover from a failure...
I mean, if you're using 0+1, and a single drive fails, it goes to raid 0. However, it's just a little ahead in performance to a 1+0 system, so you have to determine if that performance is worth the slightly reduced redundancy. So, if you're using something that's more interesting in keeping the data, because the data's rapidly changing [databases], you'd most likely go with 1+0.
For something that's all about performance, but does want some redundancy [high load file servers], 0+1 might be better for you.
Oh....and as for whole concept of horizontal scaling -- there are times for more machines... however, in this case, if it's 10 users vs. hundreds, that'd mean at least a 20:1 difference. I don't know what your background is, but well, I'm personally not big into having to perform maintenance on 19 machines I don't have to. [not to mention that most support contracts are based on the system... that you have to have 20 times the disk space allocated for OS and applications, and similar overhead for RAM, etc...]
Cost calculations need to be performed on the TCO -- Total Cost of Overhead, not on the initial cost of the hardware. [oh...and if you're buying software, you might have to buy 20x the number of licenses... that little problem when not all software is free]. Sure, you might save some cash up front, and it may be easier to have rolling outages for upgrades later, but when it comes time to do some app upgrade that takes 1 hr donut spinning, and an hour of interactive configuration... you want to do it overnight, or want it to burn your entire weekend. [and well, don't think that after a long weekend, you get to take the upcoming week off... you've got to be there extra hours, in case something went wrong, and won't show up 'till under load.... and you don't get off in advance, as you're prepping everything for the upgrade, and going to meetings to assure people that it's not going to be a problem, but they weren't told the upgrade that's been planned for months is happening in 3 days]
Hmm...might even have to break out my apple//e emulator and see if I still have the binaries, so I can toss it in the collection with Autoduel, Captain Goodnight and Miner 2049er.
[yeah, yeah, I'm off topic...that's why I didn't use my karma bonus... hey, just be thankful I didn't mention Oregon Trail... hmm..that reminds me... I need Choplifter, too.]
I know you weren't replying specifically to me, but I just wanted to mention issues with #3 --
Yes, you can back up only incremental changes, however, if you're backing up to something like tape, you need to use a good backup program to maintain indexes of the tapes...
otherwise, you're going to be going through every last tape you have to find that file that someone accidentally deleted.
[for me, recovery time is key, as if I want something back, I want it now....but of course, all people are different, so some others may see the added cost/effort now to not be worth it]
You might be able to fit a drive onto a 13G tape, but I have systems at home that have over 350G of drive space on 'em. [and even with them at 50% allocated right now, that's still a bunch of tape swapping, and definately more than $10 worth of tapes].
I mean, that's what it always boils down to, isn't it?
Of course, if you have a few mil to spend, you could always just get an EMC Symmetrix, which uses algorithms to load disk information into a cache, to reduce bottlenecking at the disks. [so you modify the data in the cache, and when it gets a chance, it'll write out the changes to multiple disks]
Of course, they're not cheap, but hell, when you consider that you have to buy some pretty big systems to get over 10G of RAM into a box... and it solves the issues with writing out to disk on a regular basis [oh...and a built in UPS with enough time to write out the whole cache...or so they claim]
But for your issue-- to everything else, it's just a disk....so you don't have to reconfigure everything. [okay, the real question is how does this product handle that...and well, if their site wasn't down, they might have some literature on that, but well, it's not.]
It might just be the broken english from using a translator, but I'm just not getting how he's dealing with the issues that have been brought up time and time again.
But let's be even more realistic -- hard drives are almost $1/gig these days. Even if he has worked out the issues that are mentioned (lossy media...I really don't get the new discussion how lossy is lossless), the media deteriorates with age, seek time, etc, the cost savings just aren't there. The only advantage that I can see on this [assuming it does work well], is the physical size of the tapes, and so, you'll be able to pack more data into a fire safe.
Oh...and don't forget... at 13G/tape, you might be looking at 10+ tapes to back up some drives these days....It might be a cool hack, but changing tapes sucks...I'd still rather just mirror to another drive that I can remove, as the random access dramatically improves recovery time.
Well, it actually comes down to three things, as I see it --
Gas is cheap. In the US, it's almost subsidized. Most european countries pay the same amount per L as we pay per gal.
Suburbs. Most Americans don't live anywhere near where they work. There isn't the abundance of public transportation, and when there is, it's considered to be un-cool, or it's not on equal footing with driving. [face it, cars are a status symbol... no other reason for me and other dumbasses to drive in every day when we know there's a chance at spending 3hrs to go 20 miles into DC].
Bad Drivers. Bad drivers => more accidents => more accidents => more government regulations => 'safer' cars => heavier cars => worse gas milage. So now, we've got someone who wants to be fual efficient, and make a nice, light car (which they can), which can protect a driver from a 45mph offset crash.... but they can't regulate the bumper height to keep that Suburban from accidentally backing over you.
Bad drivers also brings us the need to 'intimidate' other drivers (bigger == more fierce), and drive faster (faster == scary... nevermind that drag being a factor of velocity cubed), etc.
In all, America just isn't a ready market for these types of cars...it's going to require not just the technology, but also re-education of the population.
Oh...and GM was the winner of a solar car competition in the past... and both Ford and GM have had electric and hybrid vehicles for a while [over a decade?], but the electrics don't have good range for a typical daily commute [or the top end to keep you from eating the grill of an Excursion on your way into work], and the hybrids are only good for fleet use, as there aren't a whole lot of natural gas refilling stations near my house.
It varies between ISPs. Some ISPs will just move it to a seperate folder, and you can elect to go through it on your own. Some will insert headers on what they believe is spam, so that you can then filter on it. Some will outright reject messages.
Personally, I'm with you -- I'd like very much to get rid of all of the spam coming into my system, but one piece of dropped, legitimate mail is too much. [Although, I don't consider misconfigured mail systems to be legit, so if you're going to send me mail, the DNS for your 'from' domain better be working].
In the interview from InternetWeek, you seemed to not care about false positives. At what point do you care about false positives?
Ie. are you attempting to stop all spam, with the possibility of false positives an acceptable risk, or is there some sort of calculation that your organization uses to balance the false positives (mail rejected as spam that wasn't) against the false negatives (mail that was accepted, but was spam)
When you say 'serious server', you have to qualify it. For systems where everything's going to be loaded into memory, and only logging from ONE application, you're fine with an X1 or V100. [eg, NTP, DNS, DHCP].
Now, for anything that requires file access (HTTP, LDAP, NNTP, SMTP, or even just running multiple apps on a single box), you're going to want to go to SCSI for the benefits of tagged queuing (yeah, I just posted this link on a seperate thread, so the link's redundant, but the message it's supporting is different)
As you said, ATA is fine for desktops, as for the most part, the person's oly doing one thing at a time, however, if there's major disk I/O (video/audio editing), you start getting to 'workstation' class, and could get a performance increase out of SCSI or FC-AL.
As with any engineering or tuning process, you need to know what the characteristics of the system are before you can make a decision. If the process is bottlenecked by CPU, memory, or network I/O, the disks may not have an impact -- however, upgrading one of the other items may suddenly create a need for a better storage architecture.
When you start getting to systems that are performing long term storage (ie, little I/O, but lots of disks), you may have significantly more than just one drive on a SCSI chain.
Now, if you're striping for performance purposes, you'll get better latency by using a single controller for each drive, however, as we don't know what the application is, we can't make gross generalizations about the cost of a project.
I completely agree...They take up way too much space, and I have no idea why people use them.
And how do they know what 'natural' for me is? Do they know my hand size, my arm length, the distance between my shoulders?
Apple had an ergonmic keyboard that wasn't fixed, so that you could spread it more or less as you needed.
All that today's split keyboards are doing is forcing me to use something that was optimally designed for someone else. We live in a day when we can get kitchen counter tops at differing heights, and we can size our chairs, but we can't size our keyboards -- a 6'5" husband is probably using the same keyboard as his 5'2" wife.
It's not just changing the database, it may be the data structure that changes, and you get stuck with it.
Now, under some situations, you can define a view that mimics the original table, but when you're adding extra interfaces to an existing product, and you don't have control of the underlying structure, you have to deal with what might happen when it's upgraded.
It'll normally occur when someone gets on a kick of normalization, or they decide that there's a need to handle journaling on a table.
Obviously, you know what sort of an environment you're dealing with, and how likely the odds are of something like this in happening. The more recently you're taken on new staff, or changed management, the more likely this is to happen.
One of my friends pointed Unicomp to me a while back. They make the old IBM keyboards [I assume it's similar to how Lexmark is the old IBM printer division].
Yes, it's $50 for one of 'em, but well, those people who like the feel of the keyboards think it's worth it. [and it's heavy enough to beat your annoying co workers with, or even stop a rampaging day-trader].
Oh -- and it's dirt easy to move the letters on the keys, as they letters are on a little cap which it not actually part of the key.
It's useful for playing pranks on people who hunt and peck, or for confusing people and hiding random messages. [and after someone's going away party, I'm short a few 'e's and 's'es, as I had to strip down one keyboard just for the letters].
And speaking of rearranging keyboards -- why is that computer keyboards have the 1-3 row on the number pad at the bottom, while telephones have it at the top?
Isn't always the 'better' way, but the basic concept is to use an additional layer of abstraction.
Basically, rather than call 'select field1 from table1 where field2=value2' you call some sort of function. That function contains the information needed to get the information out of the database.
This way, if you ever need to change your backend, you don't have to go picking through every web page on the system to see where that data object might have been referenced.
Now, for one-off projects, this is a cumbersome annoyance, which only gets in the way of the end product. If you're putting something online for a week, and it's going to then go away, this probably isn't worth it. If it's going to stay around for years, and you may have to make changes to your data model or add some wierd functionality later, it's better to have the abstraction, as it keeps you from having to essentially rewrite everything.
In some cases, the extra level of abstraction may save you processing time, as well. Oracle will have to maintain multiple execution plans if there's even a difference in capitalization of field names [even though they're not case sensitive], but by making sure that everone calls the same function, which calls the same exact SQL query, you avoid this problem.
This also makes it much, much easier to optimize your code, oracle or otherwise, as there are times when just the order of the items in the query will affect the execution time. (as it may affect how it does joins, etc).
Now, in your case, you have one layer of abstraction, to keep you from retyping the exact query each time, you may still want to have seperate functions that get a specific set of information, so that you can optimize or otherwise modify them as needed.
I don't like the fact that cars have gotten so well soundproofed against road noise.
I don't like drive through fast food, but hell, I've seen someone eating yogurt in her car, with the cup in one hand, the spoon in the other, while she's steering with an elbow.
And as for 'seeing' the emergency, there's this little concept called 'line of sight'. You see, in Washington, DC, there's these things called 'buildings', which are much, much bigger than the vehicles, and they're all over the place, which makes it hard to see the vehicles if they're not in a straight line in front or behind you. We then have other problems with things called 'hills' and other large vehicles which I like to call 'trucks'.
I've sat at intersections for minutes in DC, when I can hear a siren, but I have no idea where it is. [Doesn't help that my place of work is 2 blocks from a hospital, and 3 blocks from firestation]. People start getting really pissy and honking after a minute or so, which makes it even more difficult to tell where it is by sound alone.
As for my cell phone, yes, I do use it while I'm driving. I used it last night, in fact, to call WTOP to report a three car accident in the snow, so they could make sure the police knew about it to get it cleaned up.
Unfortunately, there's no place along the Suitland Parkway to pull over to make/take a call, and I'm on call 24x7, so I have answered my phone while in transit, as I need to know if I need to turn around, and get back to a terminal immediately, or if I have enough time to sit in traffic and make it home/to work before things get worse.
So, please take your thumb out of your ass, and channel your hostility into more constructive criticism. If you have a problem with something, come up with a solution; just saying it's bad, and you don't like it isn't doing anyone any good... hell, writing a letter to your state/federal/county/city government would be more beneficial than some flame on a website.
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Milling is the process of cutting by movign a quickly rotating cuting head in relation to the item being cut down. Most machine shop milling machines have a stationary head, and move the item around, while some cnc machines have a head that moves.
Of course, questions like this are where search engines come in handy -- http://www-me.mit.edu/Lectures/MachineTools/mill/i ntro.html
I admit that there are some CNC machines that have more degrees of freedom, but for sign cutters and circuit boards, it's just a large plotter.
I'm surprised that as the old school plotters get decomissioned, more people haven't snatched 'em up.
Wasn't Skynet supposed to be self-aware like 5 years ago?
I mean, it's 2003, and we don't even have systems that we can't leave alone over the weekend. Where's the AI that's supposed to do all of the thinking for us, so we can actually get some free time? [Okay, there's that little problem with it trying to kill off all humans, but well, I'm sure they'll fix that in release 2]
The issue with the extra powr going through the lines is that the FCC is woried about cross talk...
If you have a lot of older lines (old punch blocks, etc), it's not twisted. As there's no twist, there's no counter EMI [as you create a magnetic field whenever you have a changing electrical field] The EMI then induces an electrical field in the neighoring lines.
So well, you start having problems in old neighborhoods [old in terms of the age of the phone lines, not necesarily the age of the homes], where modems cause noise on voice lines, and two modems may cause interference with each other.
How do we end up with these acronyms? Don't people do any research before they try to start using acronyms already in use. [I mean, hell, anyone else remember all of the confusion of trying to explain the concept of ATM networks, without having to explain every other sentance that it has nothing to do with getting money].
As for DVDA, these folks have obviously never seen Orgazmo [I mean, try reading the above message with the other meaning of the acronym]
Didn't they sort of do that in Summer School?
I think one of the guys wrote a letter complaining that his sunglasses had broken, and I don't remember what the rest of 'em wrote about.
Oh, don't get me started on System 7. What a hog that was.... I mean, they wanted you to have 4 megs of RAM. Four whole megs! Suddenly, you couldn't opt to run with the finder, or the multi-finder, they forced being able to run multiple applications at the same time on you!
Oh...and aliasing...big deal, I had that in 6.0.4
from some shareware system extension. [hey, wait a minute....isn't this that point when they sprung that foul 'balloon help' on us? Oh, yeah, 350k of extra crap in the system folder... and thanks to them, we get today's 'tool tip' crap.]
From my memory of the first one, he wasn't wearing the suit for all of the stunts. I don't know what they consider to be 'difficult', but it's entirely possible that there might be parts of the movie in which the character Peter Parker would have to use his abilities when he's not wearing the disguise.
For the most part, you gain roughly the same advantages, with roughly the same cost. What it's going to come down to in the end is how you recover from a failure...
I mean, if you're using 0+1, and a single drive fails, it goes to raid 0. However, it's just a little ahead in performance to a 1+0 system, so you have to determine if that performance is worth the slightly reduced redundancy. So, if you're using something that's more interesting in keeping the data, because the data's rapidly changing [databases], you'd most likely go with 1+0.
For something that's all about performance, but does want some redundancy [high load file servers], 0+1 might be better for you.
Oh....and as for whole concept of horizontal scaling -- there are times for more machines... however, in this case, if it's 10 users vs. hundreds, that'd mean at least a 20:1 difference. I don't know what your background is, but well, I'm personally not big into having to perform maintenance on 19 machines I don't have to. [not to mention that most support contracts are based on the system... that you have to have 20 times the disk space allocated for OS and applications, and similar overhead for RAM, etc...]
Cost calculations need to be performed on the TCO -- Total Cost of Overhead, not on the initial cost of the hardware. [oh...and if you're buying software, you might have to buy 20x the number of licenses... that little problem when not all software is free]. Sure, you might save some cash up front, and it may be easier to have rolling outages for upgrades later, but when it comes time to do some app upgrade that takes 1 hr donut spinning, and an hour of interactive configuration... you want to do it overnight, or want it to burn your entire weekend. [and well, don't think that after a long weekend, you get to take the upcoming week off... you've got to be there extra hours, in case something went wrong, and won't show up 'till under load.... and you don't get off in advance, as you're prepping everything for the upgrade, and going to meetings to assure people that it's not going to be a problem, but they weren't told the upgrade that's been planned for months is happening in 3 days]
I loved that game!
//e emulator and see if I still have the binaries, so I can toss it in the collection with Autoduel, Captain Goodnight and Miner 2049er.
Hmm...might even have to break out my apple
[yeah, yeah, I'm off topic...that's why I didn't use my karma bonus... hey, just be thankful I didn't mention Oregon Trail... hmm..that reminds me... I need Choplifter, too.]
I know you weren't replying specifically to me, but I just wanted to mention issues with #3 --
Yes, you can back up only incremental changes, however, if you're backing up to something like tape, you need to use a good backup program to maintain indexes of the tapes...
otherwise, you're going to be going through every last tape you have to find that file that someone accidentally deleted.
[for me, recovery time is key, as if I want something back, I want it now....but of course, all people are different, so some others may see the added cost/effort now to not be worth it]
You might be able to fit a drive onto a 13G tape, but I have systems at home that have over 350G of drive space on 'em. [and even with them at 50% allocated right now, that's still a bunch of tape swapping, and definately more than $10 worth of tapes].
I mean, that's what it always boils down to, isn't it?
Of course, if you have a few mil to spend, you could always just get an EMC Symmetrix, which uses algorithms to load disk information into a cache, to reduce bottlenecking at the disks. [so you modify the data in the cache, and when it gets a chance, it'll write out the changes to multiple disks]
Of course, they're not cheap, but hell, when you consider that you have to buy some pretty big systems to get over 10G of RAM into a box... and it solves the issues with writing out to disk on a regular basis [oh...and a built in UPS with enough time to write out the whole cache...or so they claim]
But for your issue-- to everything else, it's just a disk....so you don't have to reconfigure everything. [okay, the real question is how does this product handle that...and well, if their site wasn't down, they might have some literature on that, but well, it's not.]
It might just be the broken english from using a translator, but I'm just not getting how he's dealing with the issues that have been brought up time and time again.
But let's be even more realistic -- hard drives are almost $1/gig these days. Even if he has worked out the issues that are mentioned (lossy media...I really don't get the new discussion how lossy is lossless), the media deteriorates with age, seek time, etc, the cost savings just aren't there. The only advantage that I can see on this [assuming it does work well], is the physical size of the tapes, and so, you'll be able to pack more data into a fire safe.
Oh...and don't forget... at 13G/tape, you might be looking at 10+ tapes to back up some drives these days....It might be a cool hack, but changing tapes sucks...I'd still rather just mirror to another drive that I can remove, as the random access dramatically improves recovery time.
- Gas is cheap. In the US, it's almost subsidized. Most european countries pay the same amount per L as we pay per gal.
- Suburbs. Most Americans don't live anywhere near where they work. There isn't the abundance of public transportation, and when there is, it's considered to be un-cool, or it's not on equal footing with driving. [face it, cars are a status symbol... no other reason for me and other dumbasses to drive in every day when we know there's a chance at spending 3hrs to go 20 miles into DC].
- Bad Drivers. Bad drivers => more accidents => more accidents => more government regulations => 'safer' cars => heavier cars => worse gas milage. So now, we've got someone who wants to be fual efficient, and make a nice, light car (which they can), which can protect a driver from a 45mph offset crash.... but they can't regulate the bumper height to keep that Suburban from accidentally backing over you.
In all, America just isn't a ready market for these types of cars...it's going to require not just the technology, but also re-education of the population.Bad drivers also brings us the need to 'intimidate' other drivers (bigger == more fierce), and drive faster (faster == scary... nevermind that drag being a factor of velocity cubed), etc.
Oh...and GM was the winner of a solar car competition in the past... and both Ford and GM have had electric and hybrid vehicles for a while [over a decade?], but the electrics don't have good range for a typical daily commute [or the top end to keep you from eating the grill of an Excursion on your way into work], and the hybrids are only good for fleet use, as there aren't a whole lot of natural gas refilling stations near my house.
It varies between ISPs. Some ISPs will just move it to a seperate folder, and you can elect to go through it on your own. Some will insert headers on what they believe is spam, so that you can then filter on it. Some will outright reject messages.
Personally, I'm with you -- I'd like very much to get rid of all of the spam coming into my system, but one piece of dropped, legitimate mail is too much. [Although, I don't consider misconfigured mail systems to be legit, so if you're going to send me mail, the DNS for your 'from' domain better be working].
In the interview from InternetWeek, you seemed to not care about false positives. At what point do you care about false positives?
Ie. are you attempting to stop all spam, with the possibility of false positives an acceptable risk, or is there some sort of calculation that your organization uses to balance the false positives (mail rejected as spam that wasn't) against the false negatives (mail that was accepted, but was spam)
When you say 'serious server', you have to qualify it. For systems where everything's going to be loaded into memory, and only logging from ONE application, you're fine with an X1 or V100. [eg, NTP, DNS, DHCP].
Now, for anything that requires file access (HTTP, LDAP, NNTP, SMTP, or even just running multiple apps on a single box), you're going to want to go to SCSI for the benefits of tagged queuing (yeah, I just posted this link on a seperate thread, so the link's redundant, but the message it's supporting is different)
As you said, ATA is fine for desktops, as for the most part, the person's oly doing one thing at a time, however, if there's major disk I/O (video/audio editing), you start getting to 'workstation' class, and could get a performance increase out of SCSI or FC-AL.
As with any engineering or tuning process, you need to know what the characteristics of the system are before you can make a decision. If the process is bottlenecked by CPU, memory, or network I/O, the disks may not have an impact -- however, upgrading one of the other items may suddenly create a need for a better storage architecture.
When you start getting to systems that are performing long term storage (ie, little I/O, but lots of disks), you may have significantly more than just one drive on a SCSI chain.
Now, if you're striping for performance purposes, you'll get better latency by using a single controller for each drive, however, as we don't know what the application is, we can't make gross generalizations about the cost of a project.
Tagged Queuing Explaination.
However, IBM's working on similar concepts for ATA.
I completely agree...They take up way too much space, and I have no idea why people use them.
And how do they know what 'natural' for me is? Do they know my hand size, my arm length, the distance between my shoulders?
Apple had an ergonmic keyboard that wasn't fixed, so that you could spread it more or less as you needed.
All that today's split keyboards are doing is forcing me to use something that was optimally designed for someone else. We live in a day when we can get kitchen counter tops at differing heights, and we can size our chairs, but we can't size our keyboards -- a 6'5" husband is probably using the same keyboard as his 5'2" wife.
It's not just changing the database, it may be the data structure that changes, and you get stuck with it.
Now, under some situations, you can define a view that mimics the original table, but when you're adding extra interfaces to an existing product, and you don't have control of the underlying structure, you have to deal with what might happen when it's upgraded.
It'll normally occur when someone gets on a kick of normalization, or they decide that there's a need to handle journaling on a table.
Obviously, you know what sort of an environment you're dealing with, and how likely the odds are of something like this in happening. The more recently you're taken on new staff, or changed management, the more likely this is to happen.
One of my friends pointed Unicomp to me a while back. They make the old IBM keyboards [I assume it's similar to how Lexmark is the old IBM printer division].
Yes, it's $50 for one of 'em, but well, those people who like the feel of the keyboards think it's worth it. [and it's heavy enough to beat your annoying co workers with, or even stop a rampaging day-trader].
Oh -- and it's dirt easy to move the letters on the keys, as they letters are on a little cap which it not actually part of the key.
It's useful for playing pranks on people who hunt and peck, or for confusing people and hiding random messages. [and after someone's going away party, I'm short a few 'e's and 's'es, as I had to strip down one keyboard just for the letters].
And speaking of rearranging keyboards -- why is that computer keyboards have the 1-3 row on the number pad at the bottom, while telephones have it at the top?
Isn't always the 'better' way, but the basic concept is to use an additional layer of abstraction.
Basically, rather than call 'select field1 from table1 where field2=value2' you call some sort of function. That function contains the information needed to get the information out of the database.
This way, if you ever need to change your backend, you don't have to go picking through every web page on the system to see where that data object might have been referenced.
Now, for one-off projects, this is a cumbersome annoyance, which only gets in the way of the end product. If you're putting something online for a week, and it's going to then go away, this probably isn't worth it. If it's going to stay around for years, and you may have to make changes to your data model or add some wierd functionality later, it's better to have the abstraction, as it keeps you from having to essentially rewrite everything.
In some cases, the extra level of abstraction may save you processing time, as well. Oracle will have to maintain multiple execution plans if there's even a difference in capitalization of field names [even though they're not case sensitive], but by making sure that everone calls the same function, which calls the same exact SQL query, you avoid this problem.
This also makes it much, much easier to optimize your code, oracle or otherwise, as there are times when just the order of the items in the query will affect the execution time. (as it may affect how it does joins, etc).
Now, in your case, you have one layer of abstraction, to keep you from retyping the exact query each time, you may still want to have seperate functions that get a specific set of information, so that you can optimize or otherwise modify them as needed.
I mean, hell, I don't like it either myself.
I don't like the fact that cars have gotten so well soundproofed against road noise.
I don't like drive through fast food, but hell, I've seen someone eating yogurt in her car, with the cup in one hand, the spoon in the other, while she's steering with an elbow.
And as for 'seeing' the emergency, there's this little concept called 'line of sight'. You see, in Washington, DC, there's these things called 'buildings', which are much, much bigger than the vehicles, and they're all over the place, which makes it hard to see the vehicles if they're not in a straight line in front or behind you. We then have other problems with things called 'hills' and other large vehicles which I like to call 'trucks'.
I've sat at intersections for minutes in DC, when I can hear a siren, but I have no idea where it is. [Doesn't help that my place of work is 2 blocks from a hospital, and 3 blocks from firestation]. People start getting really pissy and honking after a minute or so, which makes it even more difficult to tell where it is by sound alone.
As for my cell phone, yes, I do use it while I'm driving. I used it last night, in fact, to call WTOP to report a three car accident in the snow, so they could make sure the police knew about it to get it cleaned up.
Unfortunately, there's no place along the Suitland Parkway to pull over to make/take a call, and I'm on call 24x7, so I have answered my phone while in transit, as I need to know if I need to turn around, and get back to a terminal immediately, or if I have enough time to sit in traffic and make it home/to work before things get worse.
So, please take your thumb out of your ass, and channel your hostility into more constructive criticism. If you have a problem with something, come up with a solution; just saying it's bad, and you don't like it isn't doing anyone any good... hell, writing a letter to your state/federal/county/city government would be more beneficial than some flame on a website.