As long as a database engine has stored procedures and a decent client binding library, I can make it go. I've worked with MySQL, SAP/Sybase ASE, DB/2 LUW, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server extensively over the years. There comes a point where you just know enough about the quircks and foibles of each of the databases to get around their particular issues and "just make it go."
People who bitch about the minor syntactic differences between the vendors clearly haven't really ported an application, because the differences in behaviour go far beyond syntactic sugar. Despite the ANSI standards, you can't just install the schema on a competitor's database and expect it to run an application properly without a lot of rework and restructuring.
Sure your basic table structures may remain compatible, but that's about it.
Every vendor has at least a few features that encourage "lock-in" by being incompatible with all their competitor's products.
I do have a rule about which databases I work with, though: if it doesn't have stored procedures, I won't use it. The performance benefits of complex stored procedures vs. logic in the client is just too dramatic to ignore and gloss over. Not to mention the fact that coding the logic in the client application is extremely verbose compared to any stored procedure syntax I've ever encountered.
Unless someone resurrects the "Space Orb" controller, I can't see any version of Descent as being much fun. It was my old Space Orb that made the game at all *playable*.
Nothing is "wrong" with it -- I just don't want to end up being a die-hard "next generation XP user" who is stuck on an obsolete version of the OS. If I can get on the newest edition for free, why not? At least that way the updates will keep coming for more than another year or two -- and most of my hardware is kept running for a decade before it gets replaced.
It was the cheapest i7 option out there, and gave me portability for when I want it. It's not like I'm running servers -- I just need to be able to check script syntax by *creating* the database instances. Performance is a non-issue.
Besides, if a single user can swamp a database even on a laptop, then the database isn't worth developing for. Don't forget -- even laptop hardware is nearly 1000 times as powerful as "servers" were when these products first came out.
If it's free, I'll upgrade my laptop from Win 7 to Win 10. But if it's a subscription model as rumoured, I'll stick with 7.
I'll also have to look into whether it supports the database software I bought the Windows laptop to run. Upgrading is a non-starter if Oracle, Sybase/SAP ASE, and DB/2 LUW won't run on it.
There's an entire branch of research into the subject of language, culture, and perspective. You might want to do some reading before crowing that you discovered something "new".
I've been reading about biometric scanners for over a decade now, starting with the fingerprint reader bar that was on old IBM Thinkpads.
Every single attempt at cheap biometric security has been demonstrated to be insecure or unreliable. When I got my Lenovo laptop, the first thing I uninstalled was their camera-using face scanner software, because I'd read about how easy it was to hack with a photo of the person to be identified.
Sure, there are real biometric devices out there such as government iris scanners and such, but those are not cheap enough for mass deployment. Until such high reliability security devices are available to the consumer at a sane price, I'm going to stick with good old fashioned passwords.
Besides, getting into the machine is only the first step. All that would gain you access to is some personal photographs and documents. Everything else would require access to the keystore and the key passwords for accessing remote servers, so I'm still relatively comfortable that someone hacking my password isn't that great a risk.
I'm also perfectly comfortable with "da goobernmint" scanning my system (with a warrant), because all my "secure" data resides elsewhere, and they won't find so much as a PDF of a bank account statement on the box itself.
I get my DSL (5Mbit) and IPTV (SaskTel MaxTV) for $62 a month. Spending $30-40 just for video streaming seems a rather high price to me -- especially as they've already said they're unlikely to be able to carry all the major US networks. (Of course my package is focused on the Canadian networks, but it also gets "the big 4" from the US.)
At $40/month, that would leave only $20/month to pay for a 10Mbit or better internet connection for streaming the video (my 5Mbit link is data only -- the *actual* link is 25Mbit, but 20Mbit is reserved for video.)
I can't believe the price gouging that goes on throughout most of North America.
There was a time when non-mechanical keyboards were durable, but having had Microsoft, Logitech, and no-name brands die on me in 6-9 months of purchase for the past five years, I finally ponied up for a cheap mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Black switches a little over a year ago. There is no way I will ever go back to a non-mechanical keyboard. As it has survived the lifespan of the previous two keyboards already, I figure I've already saved $30 on it's $90 purchase price compared to the $60 each for the other two keyboards it replaced.
Yes, they are noisier than some other keyboards. But the durability and the feel of the keyboard are well worth that "price".
I'm uncomfortable with Siri, Cortana, the "smart" TV voice commands, and the whole lot of it unless and until all the processing can be done locally. Under no circumstances do I want my conversational data uploaded to the cloud for processing. Damned if I'm going to watch what I say in my own home because of eavesdropping equipment!
1. It's called a "typo." Can you say "typo?" I knew you could. Go treat yourself to a cookie.
2. "Shoddy" is not a grammatical structure.
3. Your point being exactly what?
Your whole "argument" is just to claim some superiority, when I never claimed to use "perfect" English in the first place. In fact, your bitching is about what most people would call "style", which is how one makes the language expressive instead of dryly pedantic.
But I guess all you ever read is factual textbooks, not recreational prose.
Some people think "natural gas" is some be-all, end-all solution that magically reduces the carbon footprint or that is available in unimaginable quantities. It's not. There are limited reserves of natural gas available, and if it were to be used up to produce synthetic gasoline, the vast majority of North America would have a serious problem with home heating systems and the prices of the fuel for them.
You think it costs a lot to heat your home with gas now? Just wait until some bozo wants to buy up half the supply to make synthetic gasoline.
The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.
When someone checks IDE configuration files or broken code into the repository, make sure you publicly and thoroughly humiliate them for the whole team to see. Seriously. I can't tell you how many hours have been lost on projects both corporate/internal and distributed because of crap like that.
If someone is too lazy to even make sure their code builds before checking it in, they deserve to be humiliated as the unprofessional hacks that they are.
People's expectations for low prices are completely unreasonable nowadays. It hasn't been all that long since $2000 was the "normal" price for a decent machine, never mind a portable device. I realize prices have come down a lot, but realistically Blackberry is only a bit more than doubling the price for this custom-configured device compared to the base hardware. That's far from unreasonable in the "preconfigured stack" systems market.
Don't forget, the point of such devices and systems is to have a single supplier you can pin for resolving any issues or problems. You're buying the vendor's services and reputation, not a collection of unconfigured components.
Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, even scientists. Perhaps more so than others, because their pay scales and tenure often depend on being published and cited as often as possible.
The sad thing is that even a plethora of citations does not demonstrate the quality of a given paper. It just means it had one or a few quotable paragraphs; not that it's methodology or conclusions were necessarily stellar.
When I worked on some research back in the university days, the prof in charge of publishing the paper insisted on citing a whole bunch of papers that neither I nor my cohort had ever read. Although the professor was only supposed to be the guide for the research, he'd read those papers so he insisted they had to be cited.
I've always thought that was just "citation bloat" to try to make our own paper look more "researched" than it was.
I've never had a "good" programming job that didn't require a background check. The odds of a convicted criminal getting a job at any of those companies is ZERO.
The towers used to be owned by separate companies: CBC and CTV, plus Global in the Saskatoon and Regina markets. So what good is being able to squeeze another three channels into the allocated bandwidth when there aren't three other channels to broadcast -- save for your own competition, who have their own equipment?
As far as penetration goes, most people either subscribe to SaskTel (IPTV) or to Access Cable, or have subscribed to one of the satellite providers if they're on a farm. The number of people left in this province who want broadcast TV is very low -- mostly people who didn't want or couldn't afford to upgrade their sets to HDTV units in the first place.
Even in Regina, I didn't know anyone who used OTA broadcasts. Those who had HDTVs wanted more selection and subscribed to SaskTel or Access, those who had SDTVs didn't have tuners capable of receiving the broadcasts and therefore still subscribed to SaskTel or Access for "legacy" connectors to their old TVs.
Personally I suspect that the only reason there are still broadcasts coming out of Saskatoon and Regina is there is probably some legal requirement that there be a broadcast tower if you have a studio for the channel in a given market. The studios here in Yorkton were shut down several years before the DTV switch was made, so there was no legal requirement for them to continue broadcasting here.
It's not like channels earn money by broadcasting any more. As I mentioned, most people are not watching OTA broadcasts any more, and the cable/IPTV companies pay the broadcasters for the rights to carry their channels; OTA broadcasts do not generate any such revenue stream.
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Take someone who is suicidal and crying out for help and to talk with their friends, and you block them from talking to anyone!
Why not just had them a gun?
As long as a database engine has stored procedures and a decent client binding library, I can make it go. I've worked with MySQL, SAP/Sybase ASE, DB/2 LUW, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server extensively over the years. There comes a point where you just know enough about the quircks and foibles of each of the databases to get around their particular issues and "just make it go."
People who bitch about the minor syntactic differences between the vendors clearly haven't really ported an application, because the differences in behaviour go far beyond syntactic sugar. Despite the ANSI standards, you can't just install the schema on a competitor's database and expect it to run an application properly without a lot of rework and restructuring.
Sure your basic table structures may remain compatible, but that's about it.
Every vendor has at least a few features that encourage "lock-in" by being incompatible with all their competitor's products.
I do have a rule about which databases I work with, though: if it doesn't have stored procedures, I won't use it. The performance benefits of complex stored procedures vs. logic in the client is just too dramatic to ignore and gloss over. Not to mention the fact that coding the logic in the client application is extremely verbose compared to any stored procedure syntax I've ever encountered.
Unless someone resurrects the "Space Orb" controller, I can't see any version of Descent as being much fun. It was my old Space Orb that made the game at all *playable*.
Ever hear of "developer editions"?
Nothing is "wrong" with it -- I just don't want to end up being a die-hard "next generation XP user" who is stuck on an obsolete version of the OS. If I can get on the newest edition for free, why not? At least that way the updates will keep coming for more than another year or two -- and most of my hardware is kept running for a decade before it gets replaced.
It was the cheapest i7 option out there, and gave me portability for when I want it. It's not like I'm running servers -- I just need to be able to check script syntax by *creating* the database instances. Performance is a non-issue.
Besides, if a single user can swamp a database even on a laptop, then the database isn't worth developing for. Don't forget -- even laptop hardware is nearly 1000 times as powerful as "servers" were when these products first came out.
If it's free, I'll upgrade my laptop from Win 7 to Win 10. But if it's a subscription model as rumoured, I'll stick with 7.
I'll also have to look into whether it supports the database software I bought the Windows laptop to run. Upgrading is a non-starter if Oracle, Sybase/SAP ASE, and DB/2 LUW won't run on it.
There's an entire branch of research into the subject of language, culture, and perspective. You might want to do some reading before crowing that you discovered something "new".
*LMAO* And we're to believe that a cursing, borderline illiterate who can't put together a proper sentence has a say in corporate policy!
Thanks for the laugh, AC. I needed a giggle.
Only for cheques. Interac eTransfers and payments are instantaneous.
I've been reading about biometric scanners for over a decade now, starting with the fingerprint reader bar that was on old IBM Thinkpads.
Every single attempt at cheap biometric security has been demonstrated to be insecure or unreliable. When I got my Lenovo laptop, the first thing I uninstalled was their camera-using face scanner software, because I'd read about how easy it was to hack with a photo of the person to be identified.
Sure, there are real biometric devices out there such as government iris scanners and such, but those are not cheap enough for mass deployment. Until such high reliability security devices are available to the consumer at a sane price, I'm going to stick with good old fashioned passwords.
Besides, getting into the machine is only the first step. All that would gain you access to is some personal photographs and documents. Everything else would require access to the keystore and the key passwords for accessing remote servers, so I'm still relatively comfortable that someone hacking my password isn't that great a risk.
I'm also perfectly comfortable with "da goobernmint" scanning my system (with a warrant), because all my "secure" data resides elsewhere, and they won't find so much as a PDF of a bank account statement on the box itself.
I get my DSL (5Mbit) and IPTV (SaskTel MaxTV) for $62 a month. Spending $30-40 just for video streaming seems a rather high price to me -- especially as they've already said they're unlikely to be able to carry all the major US networks. (Of course my package is focused on the Canadian networks, but it also gets "the big 4" from the US.)
At $40/month, that would leave only $20/month to pay for a 10Mbit or better internet connection for streaming the video (my 5Mbit link is data only -- the *actual* link is 25Mbit, but 20Mbit is reserved for video.)
I can't believe the price gouging that goes on throughout most of North America.
That's pretty messed up when the government itself is concerned about government spying...
There was a time when non-mechanical keyboards were durable, but having had Microsoft, Logitech, and no-name brands die on me in 6-9 months of purchase for the past five years, I finally ponied up for a cheap mechanical keyboard with Cherry MX Black switches a little over a year ago. There is no way I will ever go back to a non-mechanical keyboard. As it has survived the lifespan of the previous two keyboards already, I figure I've already saved $30 on it's $90 purchase price compared to the $60 each for the other two keyboards it replaced.
Yes, they are noisier than some other keyboards. But the durability and the feel of the keyboard are well worth that "price".
I'm uncomfortable with Siri, Cortana, the "smart" TV voice commands, and the whole lot of it unless and until all the processing can be done locally. Under no circumstances do I want my conversational data uploaded to the cloud for processing. Damned if I'm going to watch what I say in my own home because of eavesdropping equipment!
1. It's called a "typo." Can you say "typo?" I knew you could. Go treat yourself to a cookie.
2. "Shoddy" is not a grammatical structure.
3. Your point being exactly what?
Your whole "argument" is just to claim some superiority, when I never claimed to use "perfect" English in the first place. In fact, your bitching is about what most people would call "style", which is how one makes the language expressive instead of dryly pedantic.
But I guess all you ever read is factual textbooks, not recreational prose.
Some people think "natural gas" is some be-all, end-all solution that magically reduces the carbon footprint or that is available in unimaginable quantities. It's not. There are limited reserves of natural gas available, and if it were to be used up to produce synthetic gasoline, the vast majority of North America would have a serious problem with home heating systems and the prices of the fuel for them.
You think it costs a lot to heat your home with gas now? Just wait until some bozo wants to buy up half the supply to make synthetic gasoline.
The money being used to fund "clean coal" should be directed to something that is actually clean, like development of fusion technology.
No one guaranteed the fossil fuels industries a right to earn profit in perpetuity. Fuck 'em.
The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.
We don't need "cleaner coal technologies." We need coal to be GONE. The same goes for pretty much *all* carbon-intensive fossil-fuel industries.
When someone checks IDE configuration files or broken code into the repository, make sure you publicly and thoroughly humiliate them for the whole team to see. Seriously. I can't tell you how many hours have been lost on projects both corporate/internal and distributed because of crap like that.
If someone is too lazy to even make sure their code builds before checking it in, they deserve to be humiliated as the unprofessional hacks that they are.
People's expectations for low prices are completely unreasonable nowadays. It hasn't been all that long since $2000 was the "normal" price for a decent machine, never mind a portable device. I realize prices have come down a lot, but realistically Blackberry is only a bit more than doubling the price for this custom-configured device compared to the base hardware. That's far from unreasonable in the "preconfigured stack" systems market.
Don't forget, the point of such devices and systems is to have a single supplier you can pin for resolving any issues or problems. You're buying the vendor's services and reputation, not a collection of unconfigured components.
Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, even scientists. Perhaps more so than others, because their pay scales and tenure often depend on being published and cited as often as possible.
The sad thing is that even a plethora of citations does not demonstrate the quality of a given paper. It just means it had one or a few quotable paragraphs; not that it's methodology or conclusions were necessarily stellar.
When I worked on some research back in the university days, the prof in charge of publishing the paper insisted on citing a whole bunch of papers that neither I nor my cohort had ever read. Although the professor was only supposed to be the guide for the research, he'd read those papers so he insisted they had to be cited.
I've always thought that was just "citation bloat" to try to make our own paper look more "researched" than it was.
I've never had a "good" programming job that didn't require a background check. The odds of a convicted criminal getting a job at any of those companies is ZERO.
The towers used to be owned by separate companies: CBC and CTV, plus Global in the Saskatoon and Regina markets. So what good is being able to squeeze another three channels into the allocated bandwidth when there aren't three other channels to broadcast -- save for your own competition, who have their own equipment?
As far as penetration goes, most people either subscribe to SaskTel (IPTV) or to Access Cable, or have subscribed to one of the satellite providers if they're on a farm. The number of people left in this province who want broadcast TV is very low -- mostly people who didn't want or couldn't afford to upgrade their sets to HDTV units in the first place.
Even in Regina, I didn't know anyone who used OTA broadcasts. Those who had HDTVs wanted more selection and subscribed to SaskTel or Access, those who had SDTVs didn't have tuners capable of receiving the broadcasts and therefore still subscribed to SaskTel or Access for "legacy" connectors to their old TVs.
Personally I suspect that the only reason there are still broadcasts coming out of Saskatoon and Regina is there is probably some legal requirement that there be a broadcast tower if you have a studio for the channel in a given market. The studios here in Yorkton were shut down several years before the DTV switch was made, so there was no legal requirement for them to continue broadcasting here.
It's not like channels earn money by broadcasting any more. As I mentioned, most people are not watching OTA broadcasts any more, and the cable/IPTV companies pay the broadcasters for the rights to carry their channels; OTA broadcasts do not generate any such revenue stream.