2) To ensure that current and future employees cannot be 'let go' unless there is *no* other way to reduce costs for the company (ie., senior execs ' pay is based upon company performance -- they lose first, then employees).
They can outsource any new vacancy, so you also lose. That's a fact of real life. Also, what...? Rember they can lose their performance bonuses today and tomorrow more than likely fire you and everyone else at will, to regain their bonuses, and the shareholders awards.
The problem is the complete separation of the shareholders goals and employeers goals, and trying to mixmatch the citizens goals in the political arena. There's just no way in capitalistic land. You probably save money for when you are old, and like it when company X earns higher earnings, stock goes up, you win. But you don't like when they fire you. Or company X doesn't like it when competitor Z outsources jobs...or when competitor Y (from China), can sell 50% cheaper AFTER import tarrifs and barriers.
There is no way to balance things when you have global freedom for corporations and shareholders, but limited rights as "silo citizens" (ie: you can't vote what is to be done at a global level, only in the USA, same with others).
Rich guys can vote with their money at a global scope now. So we either go back to non-globalism, or we track the rich guys at a global level, or we wait 50 years and see what happens (certainly, more skilled people will be available than needed, and if the masses can't !GLOBALLY! ask for better share of the pie, then you won't get a better payment, and the working class will have less income, and there will be less consumers, and lower demand from these workers, which will forever keep demand depressed enough to sustain undecents level of employment). Another solution will be to prompt the "richer classes" (on a GLOBAL scope, else it has no effect other than destrying your economy), to start spending their money in consumption (or making them lose it). That's another (very fair I think) solution.
If you are in the software industry (not talking about OSS, which does not deliver games), you only care about the demand curve mostly. Each game is in a sense a non-commodity (and faces a "private" demand curve), same with music, patented drugs and movies. You either choose one movie or an entirely different one.
So basically, to maximize income here, you only care about the demand curve for your game/drug/movie/sound, completely disregarding costs (95% or more of total cost are fixed costs).
Mhh, so yes, changing the cost of producing a game has no effect on prices, nor the quantity...
Erhh, anyway, as producing games becomes more attractive, more games are produced by the competition (and the company), and games though each face a particular demand curve, can be seen as imperfect substitutes of each other as you mention, so prices will have to go down or each players share will shrink (that may be what's happening, each sells less, but has incentives not to lower the prices....I am not really sure what is really happening, I don't see prices falling down, but I do see more games being produced).
That's/was the problem with basic microeconomics, too much assumptions or ceteris paribus:-) (Un) Common sense and real statistics are better teachers i've found out.
The point is your wages are much higher than those abroad, for similar education or capabilities.
Outsourcing does not create unemployment, but your labour taxes and the fact that you must share your land with a lot of rich that press demand for local goods that can't be exported, like Real Estate, hair cuts, and nursery (driving prices up).
Prohibiting outsourcing will not help much, as companies will move abroad, instead of just moving jobs.
In the software industry, it gets worst...they can create all the software abroad, and import it at ridiculous prices, so a 50% will not hurt much in the general case, if they can then "add value" to it and sell it for several times the cost of import.
Microsoft is a good example of how things will go. They will move most of their software fabs abroad, whether you like it or not, and we already know they don't pay taxes...so there you!
Why would I anyone pay you for more than your work is worth? Middle class citizens should prepare for scarcity, for in a world of global recesion, they have no way to bargain with their bosses...and the bosses can't help them, because competitors aren't lazy either so they better catch the wave.
In brief, you either have savings and lots of money, or very special skills, or you must prepare to the non-middle class.
First of all, the world does not need to hire 100% of the volunteers mass, so you will always have unemployment. The way out? Start charging as much as everyone else is doing (ie: us$200~700 a month for a fairly trained indian or chinesse).
Second of all, the rich americans do not give a shit about either America as a country (unless their business is milking you American Taxpayers, like Microsoft, Defense Contracts, etc...) or their citizens and especially, the middle class. That's why they will outsource at will, because that helps their bottom line, and makes them richer and richer.
Third of all, these rich people can't be taxed much to aid your economy, or else they will move abroad where 70% of the economy is, or they will live a Yatch and pay 0% marginal rate.
So where from now? Global capitalism is ok, but we need some Global Government, or tax collection agency. Rich people can't be touched, because they can bargain everywhere, tax collectors compete against each other to seduce this guys, and the net effect is that neither of them can get a fair share of what they milk out of society, and this trend will continue until countries (as in citizens represented by governments) realize that their rich guys are not really theirs, and that their large companies are not really theirs, and that tax cooperation is the only way to bring balance...there is no other way.
I say, citizens of the world, unite, and bring balance to this mess where mostly everyone loses.
PD: you can't save your butt by forcing wage taxes and the likes. These guys abroad are getting educated, and can work efficiently. If you force them to earn lower wages, they will be forced to accept, they have no better alternatives.
PD2: if you think things are unbalanced, and that labour is really cheap as it is, or that companies should hire more, why not create your own company?
So now you say it's for both sides. It wouldn't work, and does not make sense. Buffet with idle time? Just seduce a suer, and go for a fortune 500 company...the defendant pais the lawers bills! Good for the profession uh? And no, large corporation will not base a 1 billion claim trial on 1 lawer or whatever is the standard fee you are guessing, it's an important risk no matter how likely it is that they win, with juries you can never know. Also, that's not a great problem, if you have a case, you will be lawer financed.
On the other hand, large companies can crunch any small firm just by forcing the other party to spend lots of scarce resources, or to underfund their defense. So the attacker gets to finance the defendands... defense. Also, lawers do not have much to win by choosing to defend a smallunderfunded company. The scare tactics would drop to a minimun.
I wouldn't like SCO trial to be funded by IBM, not any trial against Microsoft, but I would very much like to see these and other large companies speculative attacks stopped with a "finance your victim" rule.
Anyway, I already said it, and you anly responded to say I missunderstood you. I don't expect you to agree, but at least I clearly know why I don't agree with you.
I would do it the other way arround. Big Co sues small company, they have to pay say match 50% for the other party, and 2x the jury costs.
Small company sues large company? If they have a case, it will be easier to find lawers that want part of the treasure chest.
If you do not have equal lawers, you can have justice. After all, it's a scientific fact that people with better lawers tend to win over few underpaid lawers.
Big corporation sues slamm company? Large company should provide defendant with 50% of what big company is spending in the trial AND the court costs x 2.
Small company is suing large corporation? Then it is fine as it is today. You WILL get a good lawer if you have a case, as they you can pay with part of the will be treasure.
Good news, I think there's space for paid and free software. Paid software will be mainly for the boring stuff like fax installers, and boring stuff like, and for a moderate period of time. After a while, paid software will have to move on to other areas as OSS gets to cover what they sell.
It's like a way to fund development, not the way to milk the economy. Sounds great.
You've taken the SCO Linux tour haven't you? Now really, we are very happy that you stay with Windows. It's a nice product, and at least you support India and countries like that where people really have a need for the money (really).
I know a relatively large company that is finding subtle ways in which they add value to the users. It's calledd...what was it?... IMB... IBM, that's it!
Your point is valid nonetheless. For example, I found a great piece of science work to filter my spam, but I lost like 4 ours installing it and trying to figure out where things should go (crm114.sf.net).
What's lacking is the "easy to install" thing, and "easy to use". Someone has to do that, but it's the boring part for a true hacker, and a difficult business to pursue for a company (after the do a good installer, they have to share it for free with... end users!).
Somehow you need to be able to turn your work into a service, or you will not profit from OSS as a man in the middle. You can always profit as an end user anyway. There are thouthand ways.
Why the hardware lock then? That can be done at the software level just easily. I haven't seen any pop-up program selfinstalling under Linux.
They want to turn the PC into a sponsored service appliance where you, the user, pay all the fixed costs, and then have to opt for a limited, controled set of offerings governed by large monopolists cartels.
It's a brilliant idea. Somehow, I think DRM has some uses, IF the buyer is the one that has the key (Example: the company I work for has the key). But if it's any thiird party, then it's something people will regrett to, and that the US will regrett to. The rest of the world will see an opportunity (or if they jump in the bandwagon and claim control of Natial Keys, we are all doomed!).
"With MySQL it was a bit more then just an abstraction problem. Untill fairly recently MySQL did not support foreign keys and it still doesn't by default."
Favour? "Invest 50MUSD in this loser company, that by the way is one of the remaining competitors. Make it autodestruct, and in the way, brind down Linux"...
Nobody loses money to make friends.
The fact that Paul Allen was a founder of BS, and that Melissa works there is a strong indicator that they act on behalf of Microsoft godfathers.
Have read them before, and make a lot of sense. My point was (sorry, I made a lot of spelling mistakes in there...I'm too tired) to capture what SCOX would say. That is, they will try to delay the death sentence. IMHO, they will NOT accept to honor the GPL, and they will not say they are infringing copyrights. The only possible alternative is to try to say: hey, the abused my IP as well, lets settle this in some way (although yes, that's impossible and ridiculous...but who knows what SCOX may do, they do not follow logic, they are in the circus market)
Could be...but still indexes in mysql make the queries really fast. The question you have to ask with using mysql is: "do I do a large of INSERTs or UPDATEs, and few SELECTs", in that case, I believe MySQL is not your best solution.
Hi, this is Darl speacking. I'm answering you last, and wanted to let you know that ALL you works under the GPL have been, in fact, releases as public domian. You see, the GPL is inconstitutional, and we'd be delighted to prove it to you in court...the only drawback is that proving it may takes months...or years! Even if we can't prove it's public domain, at least we'll try to raise concerns about the GPL while at the same time we generate uncertainty in the Linux scene with our IP claims and end users lawsuits...BYE" (tuuu-tuuu-tuuu-tuuu).
It does not take a big performance hit. Maybe you are talking about a corner case, but you have a high degree of query optimizations to do with MySQL. Yes, there are some things that you should be aware. For example, if you used an int(11) field in one table, and an int(12) in a second table, then a join would not use the queries. In that case you should make the int(11) an int(12). There are many things like that. The EXPLAIN in MySQL helped bring 11s queries to 0.001s queries in little time. You also learn to think correctly when doing queries, avoiding stupid queries that _seem_ right.
I know it's a toy, but it's getting there eventually. MySQL already has nested subqueries, both in the WHERE or FROM parts. I am not sure they allow them to be in the SELECT portion, but that really important (can't you always simulate it if you are allowd to use them in the FROM part?).
Stored procedures and triggers are already in beta (i know, but that means they will be usable sooner), transactions are already there and work fine. They will stabilize.
This is a marginal benefit for very large companies but an incredible bonus and fresh air for small and medium companies. The free factor is making small and medium companies more profitable, taking away some of the benefits of being a monster company (ie: minimun size to be able to be profitable in a given business).
MySQL, Postgre or Firebird are suitable for 95% of the jobs IMHO.
Yes, but it is meaningfull nonetheless. If you just think that it's very likely that after reviewing 650 messages, you may have missed one email that you thought was spam, then the "study" is right. I don't care if the number is 900 or 400 emails. Those 400 mails are making me lose a _lot_ of time, and if I value my time, I am losing a lot of productivity, and also missing an important email.
If the program can have a.99 accuracy, then it's a real time saver, and if it only makes a mistaque every 2000 emails, then SURELY I will be more accurate than me. That depends of course, on how much spam you do get. I get arround 20 to 1 ratio of spam to real meat, and I get arround 100 spam messages a day. I can't spend 1 hour a day cleaning spam with 99,9% accuracy, so I am forced to quick sweep. This thing could make me regain the time, and the false positives would mean i even make less mistakes than manually.
The important things is how accurate the antispam tool is, and how accurate I am (ratio of spam to meat, and how much a miss costs me). How much other people make mistaues is not really that important. Everybody knows how much time they have, and how much spam to meat they have, and thus, it's very likely that if they don't have a LOT of time to waste, they will be making a mistake for every 200 to 600 spam messages.
A cross tabulation in Excel is slower than in a real SQL database. Orders of magnitude slower. You must have been doing something wrong. A data is specially prepared to process this kind of data.
Excel has a nice PivotTable reports wizard, as you already know. It is good for common stuff and only if you don't have many records. Also, the need to denormalize in Excel wastes more memory, and as the database grows, it turns slower and slower.
Also, you have a limited number of records. If you have 500.000 records, forget Excel. About 20 records is the borderline of usefullness of PivotTable wizard.
What is hard to do in an SQL database is generating the SQL query that would give you the cross tab. It's not hard really, but wastes valuable time. So you need to do a bit of automation to generate cross tabs quickly. The usual solution is to use a query to generate another query. If you are using Access you can use the PIVOT command (not part of the SQL command, and limited in functionality, but works for simple stuff).
Really, me company uses PivoTable reports extensibly. But if you need to use a large dataset, excel takes 10 miniutes, and Access takes 10 seconds. If you run it directly in a MySQL console, it takes about 3 seconds for 170000 records.
It's easy to grasp the concept of depth of field. But it's not very intuitive, or straightforward. Much less understanding to use it to you benefit.
A simple way to make people understand what's the point with depth of field, or why it's used, was shown to me with an example:
A near object (a mupet) and a large (skycrapper) very far object where shot with 2 cameras. One had a very powefull zoom lens, and the other had a comon lens. The important thing was that the mupet was about the same size in both picture, that was the point. The skycrapper, on the other hand, appeared like a tall big item that didn't even fit the frame. On the other picture, the skycrapper looked like a tiny pencil that wasn't even as tall as the mupet.
Slashdot Mirror
2) To ensure that current and future employees cannot be 'let go' unless there is *no* other way to reduce costs for the company (ie., senior execs ' pay is based upon company performance -- they lose first, then employees).
They can outsource any new vacancy, so you also lose. That's a fact of real life. Also, what...? Rember they can lose their performance bonuses today and tomorrow more than likely fire you and everyone else at will, to regain their bonuses, and the shareholders awards.
The problem is the complete separation of the shareholders goals and employeers goals, and trying to mixmatch the citizens goals in the political arena. There's just no way in capitalistic land. You probably save money for when you are old, and like it when company X earns higher earnings, stock goes up, you win. But you don't like when they fire you. Or company X doesn't like it when competitor Z outsources jobs...or when competitor Y (from China), can sell 50% cheaper AFTER import tarrifs and barriers.
There is no way to balance things when you have global freedom for corporations and shareholders, but limited rights as "silo citizens" (ie: you can't vote what is to be done at a global level, only in the USA, same with others).
Rich guys can vote with their money at a global scope now. So we either go back to non-globalism, or we track the rich guys at a global level, or we wait 50 years and see what happens (certainly, more skilled people will be available than needed, and if the masses can't !GLOBALLY! ask for better share of the pie, then you won't get a better payment, and the working class will have less income, and there will be less consumers, and lower demand from these workers, which will forever keep demand depressed enough to sustain undecents level of employment). Another solution will be to prompt the "richer classes" (on a GLOBAL scope, else it has no effect other than destrying your economy), to start spending their money in consumption (or making them lose it). That's another (very fair I think) solution.
If you are in the software industry (not talking about OSS, which does not deliver games), you only care about the demand curve mostly. Each game is in a sense a non-commodity (and faces a "private" demand curve), same with music, patented drugs and movies. You either choose one movie or an entirely different one.
:-) (Un) Common sense and real statistics are better teachers i've found out.
So basically, to maximize income here, you only care about the demand curve for your game/drug/movie/sound, completely disregarding costs (95% or more of total cost are fixed costs).
Mhh, so yes, changing the cost of producing a game has no effect on prices, nor the quantity...
Erhh, anyway, as producing games becomes more attractive, more games are produced by the competition (and the company), and games though each face a particular demand curve, can be seen as imperfect substitutes of each other as you mention, so prices will have to go down or each players share will shrink (that may be what's happening, each sells less, but has incentives not to lower the prices....I am not really sure what is really happening, I don't see prices falling down, but I do see more games being produced).
That's/was the problem with basic microeconomics, too much assumptions or ceteris paribus
The point is your wages are much higher than those abroad, for similar education or capabilities.
Outsourcing does not create unemployment, but your labour taxes and the fact that you must share your land with a lot of rich that press demand for local goods that can't be exported, like Real Estate, hair cuts, and nursery (driving prices up).
Prohibiting outsourcing will not help much, as companies will move abroad, instead of just moving jobs.
In the software industry, it gets worst...they can create all the software abroad, and import it at ridiculous prices, so a 50% will not hurt much in the general case, if they can then "add value" to it and sell it for several times the cost of import.
Microsoft is a good example of how things will go. They will move most of their software fabs abroad, whether you like it or not, and we already know they don't pay taxes...so there you!
Why would I anyone pay you for more than your work is worth? Middle class citizens should prepare for scarcity, for in a world of global recesion, they have no way to bargain with their bosses...and the bosses can't help them, because competitors aren't lazy either so they better catch the wave.
In brief, you either have savings and lots of money, or very special skills, or you must prepare to the non-middle class.
First of all, the world does not need to hire 100% of the volunteers mass, so you will always have unemployment. The way out? Start charging as much as everyone else is doing (ie: us$200~700 a month for a fairly trained indian or chinesse).
Second of all, the rich americans do not give a shit about either America as a country (unless their business is milking you American Taxpayers, like Microsoft, Defense Contracts, etc...) or their citizens and especially, the middle class. That's why they will outsource at will, because that helps their bottom line, and makes them richer and richer.
Third of all, these rich people can't be taxed much to aid your economy, or else they will move abroad where 70% of the economy is, or they will live a Yatch and pay 0% marginal rate.
So where from now? Global capitalism is ok, but we need some Global Government, or tax collection agency. Rich people can't be touched, because they can bargain everywhere, tax collectors compete against each other to seduce this guys, and the net effect is that neither of them can get a fair share of what they milk out of society, and this trend will continue until countries (as in citizens represented by governments) realize that their rich guys are not really theirs, and that their large companies are not really theirs, and that tax cooperation is the only way to bring balance...there is no other way.
I say, citizens of the world, unite, and bring balance to this mess where mostly everyone loses.
PD: you can't save your butt by forcing wage taxes and the likes. These guys abroad are getting educated, and can work efficiently. If you force them to earn lower wages, they will be forced to accept, they have no better alternatives.
PD2: if you think things are unbalanced, and that labour is really cheap as it is, or that companies should hire more, why not create your own company?
So now you say it's for both sides. It wouldn't work, and does not make sense. Buffet with idle time? Just seduce a suer, and go for a fortune 500 company...the defendant pais the lawers bills! Good for the profession uh? And no, large corporation will not base a 1 billion claim trial on 1 lawer or whatever is the standard fee you are guessing, it's an important risk no matter how likely it is that they win, with juries you can never know. Also, that's not a great problem, if you have a case, you will be lawer financed.
... defense. Also, lawers do not have much to win by choosing to defend a smallunderfunded company. The scare tactics would drop to a minimun.
On the other hand, large companies can crunch any small firm just by forcing the other party to spend lots of scarce resources, or to underfund their defense. So the attacker gets to finance the defendands
I wouldn't like SCO trial to be funded by IBM, not any trial against Microsoft, but I would very much like to see these and other large companies speculative attacks stopped with a "finance your victim" rule.
Anyway, I already said it, and you anly responded to say I missunderstood you. I don't expect you to agree, but at least I clearly know why I don't agree with you.
I would do it the other way arround. Big Co sues small company, they have to pay say match 50% for the other party, and 2x the jury costs.
Small company sues large company? If they have a case, it will be easier to find lawers that want part of the treasure chest.
If you do not have equal lawers, you can have justice. After all, it's a scientific fact that people with better lawers tend to win over few underpaid lawers.
Big corporation sues slamm company? Large company should provide defendant with 50% of what big company is spending in the trial AND the court costs x 2.
Small company is suing large corporation? Then it is fine as it is today. You WILL get a good lawer if you have a case, as they you can pay with part of the will be treasure.
Good news, I think there's space for paid and free software. Paid software will be mainly for the boring stuff like fax installers, and boring stuff like, and for a moderate period of time. After a while, paid software will have to move on to other areas as OSS gets to cover what they sell.
It's like a way to fund development, not the way to milk the economy. Sounds great.
You've taken the SCO Linux tour haven't you? Now really, we are very happy that you stay with Windows. It's a nice product, and at least you support India and countries like that where people really have a need for the money (really).
I know a relatively large company that is finding subtle ways in which they add value to the users. It's calledd...what was it? ... IMB ... IBM, that's it!
... end users!).
Your point is valid nonetheless. For example, I found a great piece of science work to filter my spam, but I lost like 4 ours installing it and trying to figure out where things should go (crm114.sf.net).
What's lacking is the "easy to install" thing, and "easy to use". Someone has to do that, but it's the boring part for a true hacker, and a difficult business to pursue for a company (after the do a good installer, they have to share it for free with
Somehow you need to be able to turn your work into a service, or you will not profit from OSS as a man in the middle. You can always profit as an end user anyway. There are thouthand ways.
Why the hardware lock then? That can be done at the software level just easily. I haven't seen any pop-up program selfinstalling under Linux.
They want to turn the PC into a sponsored service appliance where you, the user, pay all the fixed costs, and then have to opt for a limited, controled set of offerings governed by large monopolists cartels.
It's a brilliant idea. Somehow, I think DRM has some uses, IF the buyer is the one that has the key (Example: the company I work for has the key). But if it's any thiird party, then it's something people will regrett to, and that the US will regrett to. The rest of the world will see an opportunity (or if they jump in the bandwagon and claim control of Natial Keys, we are all doomed!).
"With MySQL it was a bit more then just an abstraction problem. Untill fairly recently MySQL did not support foreign keys and it still doesn't by default."
Favour? "Invest 50MUSD in this loser company, that by the way is one of the remaining competitors. Make it autodestruct, and in the way, brind down Linux"...
Nobody loses money to make friends.
The fact that Paul Allen was a founder of BS, and that Melissa works there is a strong indicator that they act on behalf of Microsoft godfathers.
Have read them before, and make a lot of sense. My point was (sorry, I made a lot of spelling mistakes in there...I'm too tired) to capture what SCOX would say. That is, they will try to delay the death sentence. IMHO, they will NOT accept to honor the GPL, and they will not say they are infringing copyrights. The only possible alternative is to try to say: hey, the abused my IP as well, lets settle this in some way (although yes, that's impossible and ridiculous...but who knows what SCOX may do, they do not follow logic, they are in the circus market)
Could be...but still indexes in mysql make the queries really fast. The question you have to ask with using mysql is: "do I do a large of INSERTs or UPDATEs, and few SELECTs", in that case, I believe MySQL is not your best solution.
Hi, this is Darl speacking. I'm answering you last, and wanted to let you know that ALL you works under the GPL have been, in fact, releases as public domian. You see, the GPL is inconstitutional, and we'd be delighted to prove it to you in court...the only drawback is that proving it may takes months...or years! Even if we can't prove it's public domain, at least we'll try to raise concerns about the GPL while at the same time we generate uncertainty in the Linux scene with our IP claims and end users lawsuits...BYE" (tuuu-tuuu-tuuu-tuuu).
It does not take a big performance hit. Maybe you are talking about a corner case, but you have a high degree of query optimizations to do with MySQL. Yes, there are some things that you should be aware. For example, if you used an int(11) field in one table, and an int(12) in a second table, then a join would not use the queries. In that case you should make the int(11) an int(12). There are many things like that. The EXPLAIN in MySQL helped bring 11s queries to 0.001s queries in little time. You also learn to think correctly when doing queries, avoiding stupid queries that _seem_ right.
I know it's a toy, but it's getting there eventually. MySQL already has nested subqueries, both in the WHERE or FROM parts. I am not sure they allow them to be in the SELECT portion, but that really important (can't you always simulate it if you are allowd to use them in the FROM part?).
Stored procedures and triggers are already in beta (i know, but that means they will be usable sooner), transactions are already there and work fine. They will stabilize.
This is a marginal benefit for very large companies but an incredible bonus and fresh air for small and medium companies. The free factor is making small and medium companies more profitable, taking away some of the benefits of being a monster company (ie: minimun size to be able to be profitable in a given business).
MySQL, Postgre or Firebird are suitable for 95% of the jobs IMHO.
Yes, but it is meaningfull nonetheless. If you just think that it's very likely that after reviewing 650 messages, you may have missed one email that you thought was spam, then the "study" is right. I don't care if the number is 900 or 400 emails. Those 400 mails are making me lose a _lot_ of time, and if I value my time, I am losing a lot of productivity, and also missing an important email.
.99 accuracy, then it's a real time saver, and if it only makes a mistaque every 2000 emails, then SURELY I will be more accurate than me. That depends of course, on how much spam you do get. I get arround 20 to 1 ratio of spam to real meat, and I get arround 100 spam messages a day. I can't spend 1 hour a day cleaning spam with 99,9% accuracy, so I am forced to quick sweep. This thing could make me regain the time, and the false positives would mean i even make less mistakes than manually.
If the program can have a
The important things is how accurate the antispam tool is, and how accurate I am (ratio of spam to meat, and how much a miss costs me). How much other people make mistaues is not really that important. Everybody knows how much time they have, and how much spam to meat they have, and thus, it's very likely that if they don't have a LOT of time to waste, they will be making a mistake for every 200 to 600 spam messages.
That should be (11^12)-1.
512 cpus, single image. It's clustered at 64 cpus per node, but they share memory and the same kernel. I am quoting by memory, so may be wrong.
A cross tabulation in Excel is slower than in a real SQL database. Orders of magnitude slower. You must have been doing something wrong. A data is specially prepared to process this kind of data.
Excel has a nice PivotTable reports wizard, as you already know. It is good for common stuff and only if you don't have many records. Also, the need to denormalize in Excel wastes more memory, and as the database grows, it turns slower and slower.
Also, you have a limited number of records. If you have 500.000 records, forget Excel. About 20 records is the borderline of usefullness of PivotTable wizard.
What is hard to do in an SQL database is generating the SQL query that would give you the cross tab. It's not hard really, but wastes valuable time. So you need to do a bit of automation to generate cross tabs quickly. The usual solution is to use a query to generate another query. If you are using Access you can use the PIVOT command (not part of the SQL command, and limited in functionality, but works for simple stuff).
Really, me company uses PivoTable reports extensibly. But if you need to use a large dataset, excel takes 10 miniutes, and Access takes 10 seconds. If you run it directly in a MySQL console, it takes about 3 seconds for 170000 records.
Or was it the other way around? :-( Damn...yes it was! Damnit.
It's easy to grasp the concept of depth of field. But it's not very intuitive, or straightforward. Much less understanding to use it to you benefit.
A simple way to make people understand what's the point with depth of field, or why it's used, was shown to me with an example:
A near object (a mupet) and a large (skycrapper) very far object where shot with 2 cameras. One had a very powefull zoom lens, and the other had a comon lens. The important thing was that the mupet was about the same size in both picture, that was the point. The skycrapper, on the other hand, appeared like a tall big item that didn't even fit the frame. On the other picture, the skycrapper looked like a tiny pencil that wasn't even as tall as the mupet.
5) It's Windows... is it legal?
6) It's Windows... does it have a virus that could spread?
7) It's Windows... so you already have it preinstalled on the network (94% of the times)
8) It's Windows... does the license allow you to use it on other machines?
9) It's Windows... can you use share it?