They have no clue, indeed. Look at the diagram. They forgot the power-button, in case whatever the internet is broadcasting at the moment bores you and you want to turn the internet off.
I really hope that you are not actually surfing with Javascipt enabled.
<sarcasm>Because as we all know, javascript can't be used to improve site functionality or reduce BW overhead in page updates.</sarcasm>
I take it you've never ordered a plane-ticket online or used any site that actually uses javascript for good. For all you people saying javascript is all bad, I urge you to look at Gmail. That's a web-app at it's finest if you ask me.
For the record: I have javascript enabled, and I almost never get popups. The annoyance of a popup every now and then hardly constitutes going back to the pre-javascript web.
Dude... Put down the crack pipe. US media varies from right wing to borderline neo-fascist from a global perspective. That some agree occasionally with the democrats does not make them left-wing. the Democrats are onlyy slightly less right wing than the crackpots infesting the whitehouse.
Today's best AC post. Anything considered far-right where I live, would be considered "socialist, commie, liberal scum" in the US.
Agreed. This is nothing more than a sligtly sophisticated form of "I want free JPEGs!!!1".
You may argue against software patents as much as you like, say they are useless (and in my cases, you will find me agreeing) but even though JPEG and lossy compression may be obvious now it wasn't back then, when the only alternative were TIFF-files (with or without Gzip compression).
Back then, JPEGs were awesome, amazing and got you p0rn faster over that old analog phoneline. JPEGs, if I may say, represents a "invention" that definitely were worhty of a patent. At least compared to those software patents we read about on this site on a near-daily basis.
Michael Rowe deliberately named his site as a homonym of Microsoft to bait them into paying him off.
If Microsoft was baited into paying him off because they were genuinly afraid someone might misstake MikeRoweSoft and Microsoft, people are getting stupider faster than in the known history of man.
And we all know big corporations are the ones who have rights, not individuals. Damn those people making a joke based on corporate entities. That's all I have to say about that matter.
He's a putz, plain and simple.
In that case, I'd like to hear your opinion on halloween. That gotta be full-fledged terrorism by your scales.
I see humour passes as malicious intent these days. C'mon! MikeRoweSoft. It's funny!
Anyway... When it comes to sympathy. "Malicious intent" from a 17 year old kid goofing around or a hungry, corporate beast with enough lawyers to defeat anybody else on the planet, with a history of malicious intent no less.
YET ANOTHER - development platform which will surely have a slick interface that n00bz can pick up and drag'n'drop together some basic apps (but experienced programmers will scoff at) which - of course - will only build apps for MS' proprietary platform
You know.. n00bz as you put, can probably hack together some piece of shit code in Visual Studio. You are absolutely right. But you know what? Proffesionals can actually use it to make decent software. See, I know how my machine work, I know how networks work, I know my fair deal of everything, and if required, I could implement it, but I would definitely scoff at that.
The fact that I don't have to rewrite generic code 10,000 times during the development of a application is something I consider good. Yes, I do think that developers should know what is happening under the hood. No, I don't think they should be asked to implement the same hood every time they make a function call. Say... Do you reimplement the full stdio library everytime you put together a C-program? Didn't think so. That was generic allready decades ago.
Times are moving forward, and lots of stuff that used to be tedious, repetetive and annoying slave labour as far as coding went, is now what I refer to as generic code. Any tool that frees me from writing that is a tool I like. You know, so I can actually concentrate on the application design and program logic.
In that sense C# and.NET (and definitely.NET 2.0) a good thing. A easy, concistent API. Good development tools. There might be better, but I think Visual Studio kicks ass.
And as far as "requiring MSIE 7 and Vista goes", I guess you 've never seen the product you are critizing? ASP.NET gives you exactly as much control as you desire. Or as little. If you go by the defaults, it will automaticly render you pages according to the client capabliities, ie using tables and what not so it even looks good if you are using Netscape 3.0. How is that for "requiring MSIE 7 and Vista"?
I can't believe a AC troll like you actually got moded insightful. However, I guess that's the way of slashdot. Badmouth Microsoft and the mods will love you.
I'm not saying all Microsoft does is good though, but.NET and Visual Studio is one of those things Microsoft actually got 100% right. Granted, it's MS-technology designed for a MS-OS and a MS-infrastructure, but what do you expect? I've yet to see Sony develop SDK-tools for Xbox.
You mean the problem with developers and users not reading the supplied documentation when they need help? Given someone's attitude, I'll say that it will probably stick around for a while.
Sorry about the threadjacking, but I'd just thuoght I'd offer this public service announcement.
A summery of the following discussion:
"My database is better than your database". Honestly. Who didn't see this one coming?
"Implementing any logic in a database is evil". So is obviously offering the option to those who aren't afraid of Stored procedures and Views. Discussion around design philosophy wasn't really any surprise either.
Last, but not least, a gold caption which almost literally goes "Good OO design renders database design irellevant". You heard it first here on slashdot!
It is pretty easy to scale most things in a big n-tier system. Just buy more servers. The database however is really hard to scale. You quickly get to a point where twice the money will buy you only very little extra performance.
True. However, if you have a concise database-interface trough Views and Stored procedures, you can radicly change the DB implementation, by say partioning frequently used tables across multiple servers, spread tables that are frequently accessed at the same time across servers and so on. There's a bunch of obvious guidelines to follow for scaling databases. It just takes some analysis.
After that, all you have to do is update the db-interface (stored procedures, views and so on), and voila, it scales. No need to update any client application what so ever, and it's still the DB doing it's job. Granted, it's not automatic, but I'd rather have the database do what it does well (handle data) than put the load on an application server that may or may not implement the same level of data-handling optimization.
Ofcourse application servers are useful for a bunch of things, but for handling data I trust my DB more than anything else. I guess the real debate is where you put the limits between "Application logic" and "Data handling".
Abstraction? Consistent interface? Application logic? Business processes and procedures? Sorry. That's the app server's duty.
Then I will disagree with you. How many layers you want in your application/data model may vary. Not all apps are written to be n-tier and über-scalable enterprise applications, simply because it's not always needed and in those cases considered a waste of time, effort and resources.
For some tasks and business needs using stored procedures to provide a concise interface to the data is sufficient, even though there may be several different kind of client-apps. Why waste your time implementing a application server if you dont need one? Also most quality databases do some form of query optimization that's beyond anything you will ever do in your application-server code, so by using an application server when not needed, you are probably just throwing away performance in the name of politics.
I see you have a grudge against stored procedures and actually letting the database to what it was designed to do, namely manage the data, but I don't understand why.
MSDE: Not really a high-end database, even though I've seen it employed as one in production systems. Nasty, nasty.
However MSDE -does- have it's merrits. For a developer, you can pretty much count on that working against a lightweight MSDE will produce the exact same results when moving your code over to the production server running MS SQL server 2000. I think that's what the parent poster might have implied.
I'd take MS SQL Server Developer or Enterprise edition anyday, even for development, but not every company can afford one SQL-server licence per developer emloyed. In cases like that, people will likely go for MSDE.
That got to be the understatement of the year. Seriously. Comparing event-based application programming (ASP.NET) to sequential HTML-generation (PHP) is something you just don't do.
Not saying PHP is crap or anything. There's stuff that takes seconds in PHP and ages in ASP.NET and vica verse. There's probably also some Java-alternatives for those who need more advanced webscripting than PHP allows for. "Right tool for the right job" as I usually say.
but you get the ability to not be stuck on your platform and move around
Not disagreeing with you there, though.
Haven't tried mono myself, but from what I've heard it still needs some work in a few departments. Now that.NET 2.0 is released they may also have to do some catching up, unless they've started that work already. Anyway,.NET (though pretty damn good IMO) is definitely MS-technology and if you don't want to get locked into a MS infrastructure, that's proably the worst choice you can ever make.
Second that! It may not be for the average customer, but you'd think that the market for synchroneous lines had matured by now.
I'd rather have 2/2Mbps line than a 4down/1up line, but that may just be me. 24/1 is such a skewed ratio it's just ridiciolous. The leechers will probably love it, though.
As for 24/1... Why not offer a syncroneous 12Mbps line instead? In total it represents the same bandwidth anyway and thus shouldn't cost more. In an ideal world customers should be able to order a total bandwidth and request a ratio that suits their needs.
You missed a "overlay-only" part of the playing process. I want the player to act as a normal window on my monitor, and to show fullscreen on my TV without any more resizing than necassary. A mplayer -> fullscreen PC -> downscale to TV is what is one scaling process in Windows. Overlay to TV, simple as that. I don't want to lose any more image quality than the compression has already taken, thank you.
Windows does this fine. X doesn't. And if custom built kernel, X and mplayer ain't enough to get it going, it's definitely not "seamless". Don't respond like I'm a newb please. I know how to code, I know how to script, I do compile stuff and I can find my way around linux pretty well.
Despite your attempts to convince me this is a no-brainer, it is in fact next to impossible in linux. At least with the graphics cards I've had. I'm not saying linux sucks. In fact I started with saying there are tons of things it does well. I do however say that this is one of the things Windows does waaaay better. Live with it.
When I said "Linux" I meant your average pick-any distro, as all of them run some sort of X on top with Gnome or KDE on top of them (in most cases).
In Windows, open a video-file. Instant overlay-only TV-output. Seamless support as I'd like to call it.
In Linux. Make a custom x-config-file. Then make a separate launch file for mplayer, spawning it in a second x-session with your new custom file config-file. This new mplayer session then in turn lacks any player-controls on your main display unless you want it overlapping your video output, leaving you only with shortcut keys and 5 second-a-time skipping. A lot more work, a lot less functional.
Even though Linux does tons of thing well, there are clearly points which needs improvement. But that'll need a total rewrite of X, and I can't say I see that happening anytime soon. That's pretty obvious to anyone not entirely zealous about OSes.
and of course the plain old short cuts that are really symbolic links in the traditional unix world.
Try sharing that shortcut over Samba. Didn't work you say? Then, absolutely nothing UNIX-like about it.
The unfortunate part is people still think of DOS/Win95
I use Windows XP and it still has lots of shortcomings. However it's multimedia support is waay ahead of Linux, and I use my machine mainly for multimedia. So whatever criticism I may serve, that's based on WinXP and modern Redmond-OSes.
Give me a feature in Unix and Im sure there is an equivalent in NT.
Kernel and network support loading before the GUI?
You'd think any serious server-OS would implement this...
Possible to recover the system without a GUI if needed?
A reinstall with the textmode interface doesn't count.
Modular kernel which can be stripped of unneccesary features?
For whatever reason, increased security, lightweight editions, added native FS support...
Just to list a few. I do however have a job to do:-D
You can't however symlink E:\Movies to D:\Media\Movies. You can only mount entire partitions to a subdir on another partition. Which limits it's usefulness to about zilch.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever get the feeling someone wrote an article merely for the pun?
Good thing the headline didn't contribute to that at all.
They have no clue, indeed. Look at the diagram. They forgot the power-button, in case whatever the internet is broadcasting at the moment bores you and you want to turn the internet off.
Insghtful? WTF? AT least mod this Funny, if you happen to think it is.
I really hope that you are not actually surfing with Javascipt enabled.
<sarcasm>Because as we all know, javascript can't be used to improve site functionality or reduce BW overhead in page updates.</sarcasm>
I take it you've never ordered a plane-ticket online or used any site that actually uses javascript for good. For all you people saying javascript is all bad, I urge you to look at Gmail. That's a web-app at it's finest if you ask me.
For the record: I have javascript enabled, and I almost never get popups. The annoyance of a popup every now and then hardly constitutes going back to the pre-javascript web.
Dude... Put down the crack pipe. US media varies from right wing to borderline neo-fascist from a global perspective. That some agree occasionally with the democrats does not make them left-wing. the Democrats are onlyy slightly less right wing than the crackpots infesting the whitehouse.
Today's best AC post. Anything considered far-right where I live, would be considered "socialist, commie, liberal scum" in the US.
Left? What left? There's no 'left' in USAian (2-party) politics. Just in case you haven't noticed.
I love how that 2-party system of yours absolutely remove any sane point of reference for politics.
person would assume that a company selling such software was doing so in good faith, and without any sort of copyright violation attached.
Assuming good faith from anyone selling rootkits... Oh my. It seems I'm not the only naive person on the planet.
Agreed. This is nothing more than a sligtly sophisticated form of "I want free JPEGs!!!1".
You may argue against software patents as much as you like, say they are useless (and in my cases, you will find me agreeing) but even though JPEG and lossy compression may be obvious now it wasn't back then, when the only alternative were TIFF-files (with or without Gzip compression).
Back then, JPEGs were awesome, amazing and got you p0rn faster over that old analog phoneline. JPEGs, if I may say, represents a "invention" that definitely were worhty of a patent. At least compared to those software patents we read about on this site on a near-daily basis.
Michael Rowe deliberately named his site as a homonym of Microsoft to bait them into paying him off.
If Microsoft was baited into paying him off because they were genuinly afraid someone might misstake MikeRoweSoft and Microsoft, people are getting stupider faster than in the known history of man.
And we all know big corporations are the ones who have rights, not individuals. Damn those people making a joke based on corporate entities. That's all I have to say about that matter.
He's a putz, plain and simple.
In that case, I'd like to hear your opinion on halloween. That gotta be full-fledged terrorism by your scales.
I see humour passes as malicious intent these days. C'mon! MikeRoweSoft. It's funny!
Anyway... When it comes to sympathy. "Malicious intent" from a 17 year old kid goofing around or a hungry, corporate beast with enough lawyers to defeat anybody else on the planet, with a history of malicious intent no less.
Now just who would I side with?
YET ANOTHER - development platform which will surely have a slick interface that n00bz can pick up and drag'n'drop together some basic apps (but experienced programmers will scoff at) which - of course - will only build apps for MS' proprietary platform
You know.. n00bz as you put, can probably hack together some piece of shit code in Visual Studio. You are absolutely right. But you know what? Proffesionals can actually use it to make decent software. See, I know how my machine work, I know how networks work, I know my fair deal of everything, and if required, I could implement it, but I would definitely scoff at that.
The fact that I don't have to rewrite generic code 10,000 times during the development of a application is something I consider good. Yes, I do think that developers should know what is happening under the hood. No, I don't think they should be asked to implement the same hood every time they make a function call. Say... Do you reimplement the full stdio library everytime you put together a C-program? Didn't think so. That was generic allready decades ago.
Times are moving forward, and lots of stuff that used to be tedious, repetetive and annoying slave labour as far as coding went, is now what I refer to as generic code. Any tool that frees me from writing that is a tool I like. You know, so I can actually concentrate on the application design and program logic.
In that sense C# and .NET (and definitely .NET 2.0) a good thing. A easy, concistent API. Good development tools. There might be better, but I think Visual Studio kicks ass.
And as far as "requiring MSIE 7 and Vista goes", I guess you 've never seen the product you are critizing? ASP.NET gives you exactly as much control as you desire. Or as little. If you go by the defaults, it will automaticly render you pages according to the client capabliities, ie using tables and what not so it even looks good if you are using Netscape 3.0. How is that for "requiring MSIE 7 and Vista"?
I can't believe a AC troll like you actually got moded insightful. However, I guess that's the way of slashdot. Badmouth Microsoft and the mods will love you.
I'm not saying all Microsoft does is good though, but .NET and Visual Studio is one of those things Microsoft actually got 100% right. Granted, it's MS-technology designed for a MS-OS and a MS-infrastructure, but what do you expect? I've yet to see Sony develop SDK-tools for Xbox.
It's 2005. How long have we had this problem now?
You mean the problem with developers and users not reading the supplied documentation when they need help? Given someone's attitude, I'll say that it will probably stick around for a while.
Sorry about the threadjacking, but I'd just thuoght I'd offer this public service announcement.
A summery of the following discussion:
That's about it really.
It is pretty easy to scale most things in a big n-tier system. Just buy more servers. The database however is really hard to scale. You quickly get to a point where twice the money will buy you only very little extra performance.
True. However, if you have a concise database-interface trough Views and Stored procedures, you can radicly change the DB implementation, by say partioning frequently used tables across multiple servers, spread tables that are frequently accessed at the same time across servers and so on. There's a bunch of obvious guidelines to follow for scaling databases. It just takes some analysis.
After that, all you have to do is update the db-interface (stored procedures, views and so on), and voila, it scales. No need to update any client application what so ever, and it's still the DB doing it's job. Granted, it's not automatic, but I'd rather have the database do what it does well (handle data) than put the load on an application server that may or may not implement the same level of data-handling optimization.
Ofcourse application servers are useful for a bunch of things, but for handling data I trust my DB more than anything else. I guess the real debate is where you put the limits between "Application logic" and "Data handling".
Abstraction? Consistent interface? Application logic? Business processes and procedures? Sorry. That's the app server's duty.
Then I will disagree with you. How many layers you want in your application/data model may vary. Not all apps are written to be n-tier and über-scalable enterprise applications, simply because it's not always needed and in those cases considered a waste of time, effort and resources.
For some tasks and business needs using stored procedures to provide a concise interface to the data is sufficient, even though there may be several different kind of client-apps. Why waste your time implementing a application server if you dont need one? Also most quality databases do some form of query optimization that's beyond anything you will ever do in your application-server code, so by using an application server when not needed, you are probably just throwing away performance in the name of politics.
I see you have a grudge against stored procedures and actually letting the database to what it was designed to do, namely manage the data, but I don't understand why.
Biting a troll? I dunno, but here goes.
MSDE: Not really a high-end database, even though I've seen it employed as one in production systems. Nasty, nasty.
However MSDE -does- have it's merrits. For a developer, you can pretty much count on that working against a lightweight MSDE will produce the exact same results when moving your code over to the production server running MS SQL server 2000. I think that's what the parent poster might have implied.
I'd take MS SQL Server Developer or Enterprise edition anyday, even for development, but not every company can afford one SQL-server licence per developer emloyed. In cases like that, people will likely go for MSDE.
While compared to .NET PHP is relatively simple
That got to be the understatement of the year. Seriously. Comparing event-based application programming (ASP.NET) to sequential HTML-generation (PHP) is something you just don't do.
Not saying PHP is crap or anything. There's stuff that takes seconds in PHP and ages in ASP.NET and vica verse. There's probably also some Java-alternatives for those who need more advanced webscripting than PHP allows for. "Right tool for the right job" as I usually say.
but you get the ability to not be stuck on your platform and move around
Not disagreeing with you there, though.
Haven't tried mono myself, but from what I've heard it still needs some work in a few departments. Now that .NET 2.0 is released they may also have to do some catching up, unless they've started that work already. Anyway, .NET (though pretty damn good IMO) is definitely MS-technology and if you don't want to get locked into a MS infrastructure, that's proably the worst choice you can ever make.
I see you've understood how writing in ALL CAPS makes your point that much more valid.
Second that! It may not be for the average customer, but you'd think that the market for synchroneous lines had matured by now.
I'd rather have 2/2Mbps line than a 4down/1up line, but that may just be me. 24/1 is such a skewed ratio it's just ridiciolous. The leechers will probably love it, though.
As for 24/1... Why not offer a syncroneous 12Mbps line instead? In total it represents the same bandwidth anyway and thus shouldn't cost more. In an ideal world customers should be able to order a total bandwidth and request a ratio that suits their needs.
Basicly it says "People are using IM. Buffer overflow in IMs is like any other buffer overflow also bad".
May I say "Duh"?
You missed a "overlay-only" part of the playing process. I want the player to act as a normal window on my monitor, and to show fullscreen on my TV without any more resizing than necassary. A mplayer -> fullscreen PC -> downscale to TV is what is one scaling process in Windows. Overlay to TV, simple as that. I don't want to lose any more image quality than the compression has already taken, thank you.
Windows does this fine. X doesn't. And if custom built kernel, X and mplayer ain't enough to get it going, it's definitely not "seamless". Don't respond like I'm a newb please. I know how to code, I know how to script, I do compile stuff and I can find my way around linux pretty well.
Despite your attempts to convince me this is a no-brainer, it is in fact next to impossible in linux. At least with the graphics cards I've had. I'm not saying linux sucks. In fact I started with saying there are tons of things it does well. I do however say that this is one of the things Windows does waaaay better. Live with it.
Improve that and I might consider switching.
When I said "Linux" I meant your average pick-any distro, as all of them run some sort of X on top with Gnome or KDE on top of them (in most cases).
In Windows, open a video-file. Instant overlay-only TV-output. Seamless support as I'd like to call it.
In Linux. Make a custom x-config-file. Then make a separate launch file for mplayer, spawning it in a second x-session with your new custom file config-file. This new mplayer session then in turn lacks any player-controls on your main display unless you want it overlapping your video output, leaving you only with shortcut keys and 5 second-a-time skipping. A lot more work, a lot less functional.
Even though Linux does tons of thing well, there are clearly points which needs improvement. But that'll need a total rewrite of X, and I can't say I see that happening anytime soon. That's pretty obvious to anyone not entirely zealous about OSes.
and of course the plain old short cuts that are really symbolic links in the traditional unix world.
Try sharing that shortcut over Samba. Didn't work you say? Then, absolutely nothing UNIX-like about it.
The unfortunate part is people still think of DOS/Win95
I use Windows XP and it still has lots of shortcomings. However it's multimedia support is waay ahead of Linux, and I use my machine mainly for multimedia. So whatever criticism I may serve, that's based on WinXP and modern Redmond-OSes.
Give me a feature in Unix and Im sure there is an equivalent in NT.
You'd think any serious server-OS would implement this...
A reinstall with the textmode interface doesn't count.
For whatever reason, increased security, lightweight editions, added native FS support...
Just to list a few. I do however have a job to do :-D
That can allready be done.
You can't however symlink E:\Movies to D:\Media\Movies. You can only mount entire partitions to a subdir on another partition. Which limits it's usefulness to about zilch.
Now that would be demanding a little bit much in so short time, wouldn't it?
We will have to wait at least until the avarage workstation has 30GHz dualcore CPUs and at least 10GBs of ram.