That's a pretty solid example you're provided there. There's a small issue with you using a truncated customerId, since you're assuming it's an autoincrement variable, and those are going out of fashion now we're having to build for clustered installations. If you're using MongoDB it will be comprised of a serverId, a snapshot of the current time, and a random portion. For a single DB solution, your example is fine.
You could try compressing the binary data, there's no reason that stream can't be compressed by the servers on read / write. Most binary data can usually be compressed, with 50% being about average for the usual contents of a filesystem. I guess you'd get about 25% on that example, but really, anything would be gravy.
Finally, if you data really benefits from being text, and it is a simple column row array like that example, you might as well use a form of CSV e.g.
You can skip the quotes, skip over the padding that is just for the humans, use \n instead of \r\n and only need to escape commas if they occur in your text, which they won't for a lot of fields.
So now you have a human readable text representation that is more efficient that JSON, compresses just as well, and can be loaded into an editor (you surely don't use notepad, favoring notepad++ or another nor brainbead editor that can read unix formatted text files). It doesn't require all those extras brackets and braces and quotes.
JSON is like any hammer. Sometimes you gotta know when it's time to put it down and pick up the screwdriver instead.
JSON is fine for sending a single record, but fails hard when you want to send 1,000s of records, since it sends the contract with every single record. This is made even worse by including lengthy, descriptive field names e.g.
Sending 1,000 copies of that is going to take a lot more packets than a fixed binary format where you can pack the entire thing down to 9 bytes e.g. 8 bytes for the Id, and both bools into a bitset on the last byte.
JSON is definitely verbose in any case resembling that. YMMV.
Don't waste their time trying to relive your old favourite memories again vicariously though them. I grew up playing Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pong, Galaga, Doom, Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft, and all those other old 'classics' - same as many people here. That doesn't mean I'd try and push them onto a child born today.
The equivalent of those games today are the phone games and tablet games that indie companies are producing. Find ones that teach hand eye co-ordination, improve decision making times, and look cute and modern, because those are the games that will one day by their 'space invaders'.
When I was young we had Lego and some very lucky kids had Mechano. Today, give them the digital equivalent, software that allows them to experiment, create, draw, and destroy. Give your kid a graphics tablet and some good art software to go with it. Try them out with game making tools. Give them a makerbot if you're one of those lucky enough to be able to afford them.
Teach them Python or Javascript or LUA or some other small, easy to learn language rather than choking them with BASIC or 6502 assembler or Logo just because you have fond memories of it.
Give them the chance you got. Don't give them a heap of old shit machine that has stone age graphics and beeps for sound just because it's all you had. Give them a modern laptop or a tablet instead. Give them a Raspberry Pi and spend time teaching them how to make that thing dance.
We loved those old things because they fired the imaginations and led the way in technology at the time. They do neither of those things now. Give them access to the stuff of dreams for today, because in 30 years time, today is their nostalgic past.
Given advances in both ASIC and GPU design, I wonder how long it would take to brute force a card these days - or brute force the top 20% of all numbers for instance. GPUs have massively parallel execution which could be brought to bear on the problem.
That said, over here in Aus, transactions under $100 can be performed just by waving your card near a terminal - no pin or CCV required. If they can clone the card details onto those sorts of cards, then they can use 'smurfs' to run around hitting 1,000s of shops up for these low value transactions.
If you think Apple is any better than MS or Google in the privacy stakes then I have a bridge to sell you. Apple, Google and MS all have their own browser to sell you. They all have an app store. They all have preferred search engines and you can bet every one of them is selling every tiny piece of data it can track for every user.
The only difference is that Google fans come away with some change on the purchase over Apple and MS fans.
Some people would break in to steal a pack of gum left on the seat of the car. I've known people who had windows smashed so the thief could steal two dollars that was on show in the centre console!
I buy all my books now as ebooks and for me at least, I don't see any issues with the price of them. In fact, I typically save anything from 20%-80% off the cost of the book on paper at retail. Typical textbooks I buy are about 1/3 the price of paper ones. If anything is true, it's that there is no real value in paper books.
You guys know you can place bookmarks into the ebooks on your Kindle and just jump to them whenever you want from a menu, right? When I read a book, if I see something I might need to reference later, a tap near the top of my screen is all it takes to mark that page. Let's not forget the brilliance of being able to jump straight to the index or table of contents and hyperlink to the info I wanted to find...or search the entire text of the book.
Honestly, I can't see a reason why I'd ever want a paper book again - except perhaps for a really high quality print of fine art.
EQ Next looks promising to me as well. I've dropped some cash into SOE's hands in order to get alpha access and a head start on learning the game and building some cool features. If they come good on their long term promises then I can foresee myself and friends (new and old) having some very enjoyable moments in there.
I doubt there will be a time when we wont be using fat clients but I see myself and the general public using and needing them less as every year passes.
I have a pretty decent rig by any standards these days, full capable of running Crisis 3 at max settings and 60 FPS with about 12 terabytes of local storage available. I used to log onto my PC every day and sit there poring over documents, reading crap off the net, looking at pictures of cats and wasting time on slashdot. I'd fire up my IDE and get some work or hobby coding done or just scratch an itch.
I recently bought a Kindle to give me some time away from the PC. Now I do my reading in an arm chair on the verandah looking out over our gardens and trees. I then noticed that although the Kindle was great for documents, it was terrible for web reading, and I still do a lot of that. I bought myself a Nexus 7. Now whenever I need to study or read I can do it from that comfy chair, while my PC sits idle.
Instead of immediately turning on my PC each morning I grab a Coke and go sit in my chair and swipe my Nexus 7 into life. I check my mail, delete the crap, make note of the interesting, and leave the stuff where I will want to type things since I prefer to do that from a desk and chair. I read the headlines on Slashdot and BBC news. I check the status of my torrents which are running on a headless box (actually a My Book Live hard drive is running Transmission for me).
Having a convenient little device, I can carry around which excels at consuming data means I only ever have to use my PC now when I want to write some code or play one of the latest graphics heavy games.
I am working on a game of my own these days and that means taking a lot of notes, a lot of time spent thinking and quickly writing down those flash ideas that would be gone faster than a desktop PC boots (even with the SSD, it can be too slow once it lumbers into life). I write all my notes using a web browser, either into the tiny little note taking app on Chrome, or directly into a wiki running on one of my low power machines. At no time do I need to load up a large, heavy app running on a big machine to do most of the tasks I do every day now.
There is a place for these heavy desktop based applications, but there's also a place for the lightweight, network connected apps that are now the more dominant force in most people's lives.
Honing is only the first step in getting a blade ready for shaving with. It's the sort of thing you might do every few months. Stropping is what you do every time before you shave, that's the step that makes it really sharp. It's pretty interesting what happens to the metal at a microscopic scale when you sharpen and strop the blade, which rather than removing material works instead by aligning it all.
That's not needed for a razor for two reasons. Firstly, you're going to be sharpening the blade with a stone that is already a completely flat hard surface and of a suitably fine grit. The second thing has to do with the way the blade itself is cast. The razor has a natural in-built guide to hold it at the correct 18-20 degree angle with no effort required from the person sharpening it. The thick part of the blade is made just thick enough so that when you lay it flat on it's side it forms the natural best angle for sharpening.
The actual edge of the blade is incredibly fine, and so you need to ensure correct technique to prevent placing any nicks into the blade. Correct technique involves keeping the blade flat to the surface at all times, never lifting it, but in fact turning it over (rotating each stroke) along the flat side of the blade. You always stroke the edge forwards, rotating at the end of each stroke.
That still won't place a sharp enough edge for shaving onto the blade, but it does ensure that the edge now has the correct bevel. To reach proper sharpness you now need to strop that edge which will align the fins of metal on the edge of the blade. Stropping is done in a similar fashion to sharpening, but in the reverse direction - that is, you always drag the edge and rotate it over on each stroke. Typical strops are made of a fine leather but you also find ones made of hemp, cotton or other materials which are used prior to refining it once again on the leather. For the best edge possible you will want to apply some paste to the surface of the strop, and again there are many possibilities for this task.
I used to think my kitchen knife was sharp until I learnt how to sharpen a razor. There's videos on youtube showing the method and all sort of other minutia related to the simple act of shaving.
None of those would still be sharp enough to shave with so I don't see why you bothered to mention any of them. Why don't you try and actually shave yourself with one of those "terrifying" knives of yours and tell me how it turns out. Take time to note how many nicks or cuts you gave yourself and how close to the skin the blade cut the hair.
The vast number of those free recipes are pretty terrible. My personal favourites are ones which claim to teach you to make a recipe and then the main ingredient is a pre-made sauce from the supermarket. Even the ones that are basically right need usually need a fair amount of adjustment because the poster doesn't know how to use herbs and spices or how to blend flavours.
They are however pretty good if you are just looking for the basic way to make simple dishes and don't mind a bit of experimenting. I usually find 3-4 of the same recipe and try and work out a method based on all of them since most omit something important.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a pretty solid example you're provided there. There's a small issue with you using a truncated customerId, since you're assuming it's an autoincrement variable, and those are going out of fashion now we're having to build for clustered installations. If you're using MongoDB it will be comprised of a serverId, a snapshot of the current time, and a random portion. For a single DB solution, your example is fine.
You could try compressing the binary data, there's no reason that stream can't be compressed by the servers on read / write. Most binary data can usually be compressed, with 50% being about average for the usual contents of a filesystem. I guess you'd get about 25% on that example, but really, anything would be gravy.
Finally, if you data really benefits from being text, and it is a simple column row array like that example, you might as well use a form of CSV e.g.
CustomerId,AllowExtendedConfiguation,IsMaximumLengthRequired
ABCDEF012938487432112424242322426,1,1
XHSGSJD12938487432112424242322426,1,1
OFIDKSA12938487432112424242322426,1,1
You can skip the quotes, skip over the padding that is just for the humans, use \n instead of \r\n and only need to escape commas if they occur in your text, which they won't for a lot of fields.
So now you have a human readable text representation that is more efficient that JSON, compresses just as well, and can be loaded into an editor (you surely don't use notepad, favoring notepad++ or another nor brainbead editor that can read unix formatted text files). It doesn't require all those extras brackets and braces and quotes.
JSON is like any hammer. Sometimes you gotta know when it's time to put it down and pick up the screwdriver instead.
So my example should have actually been 6 characters more verbose than it was ;p
If you're doing it like that you might as well just send a CSV file instead or something similar, rather than shoehorning that into a JSON document.
JSON is fine for sending a single record, but fails hard when you want to send 1,000s of records, since it sends the contract with every single record. This is made even worse by including lengthy, descriptive field names e.g.
{
CustomerId : "ABCDEF012938487432112424242322426",
AllowExtendedConfiguation: "true",
IsMaximumLengthRequired : "true"
}
Sending 1,000 copies of that is going to take a lot more packets than a fixed binary format where you can pack the entire thing down to 9 bytes e.g. 8 bytes for the Id, and both bools into a bitset on the last byte.
JSON is definitely verbose in any case resembling that. YMMV.
Don't waste their time trying to relive your old favourite memories again vicariously though them. I grew up playing Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pong, Galaga, Doom, Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft, and all those other old 'classics' - same as many people here. That doesn't mean I'd try and push them onto a child born today.
The equivalent of those games today are the phone games and tablet games that indie companies are producing. Find ones that teach hand eye co-ordination, improve decision making times, and look cute and modern, because those are the games that will one day by their 'space invaders'.
When I was young we had Lego and some very lucky kids had Mechano. Today, give them the digital equivalent, software that allows them to experiment, create, draw, and destroy. Give your kid a graphics tablet and some good art software to go with it. Try them out with game making tools. Give them a makerbot if you're one of those lucky enough to be able to afford them.
Teach them Python or Javascript or LUA or some other small, easy to learn language rather than choking them with BASIC or 6502 assembler or Logo just because you have fond memories of it.
Give them the chance you got. Don't give them a heap of old shit machine that has stone age graphics and beeps for sound just because it's all you had. Give them a modern laptop or a tablet instead. Give them a Raspberry Pi and spend time teaching them how to make that thing dance.
We loved those old things because they fired the imaginations and led the way in technology at the time. They do neither of those things now. Give them access to the stuff of dreams for today, because in 30 years time, today is their nostalgic past.
Given advances in both ASIC and GPU design, I wonder how long it would take to brute force a card these days - or brute force the top 20% of all numbers for instance. GPUs have massively parallel execution which could be brought to bear on the problem.
That said, over here in Aus, transactions under $100 can be performed just by waving your card near a terminal - no pin or CCV required. If they can clone the card details onto those sorts of cards, then they can use 'smurfs' to run around hitting 1,000s of shops up for these low value transactions.
Heathen scum! nano is my vi!
Check out these old buggers, and the ads featuring Tom Baker, the legendary 4th Doctor Who.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSRC0S7pls8
Computer says, no!
My favourite part is how they type a question into a terminal and get the answer on a printed piece of paper the size of a shopping docket :D
Get him a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10. It doesn't need any discussion.
How many 80 year old men have heard of the Camera Connection Kit?
If you think Apple is any better than MS or Google in the privacy stakes then I have a bridge to sell you. Apple, Google and MS all have their own browser to sell you. They all have an app store. They all have preferred search engines and you can bet every one of them is selling every tiny piece of data it can track for every user.
The only difference is that Google fans come away with some change on the purchase over Apple and MS fans.
Teens probably think ebooks suck because they read them on their stupid little phones instead of using a decent e-Ink reader, a Nexus 7 or similar.
Some people would break in to steal a pack of gum left on the seat of the car. I've known people who had windows smashed so the thief could steal two dollars that was on show in the centre console!
And that cost is reduced to zero when the device you use to read them is something you already bought or would have bought for other general uses.
I buy all my books now as ebooks and for me at least, I don't see any issues with the price of them. In fact, I typically save anything from 20%-80% off the cost of the book on paper at retail. Typical textbooks I buy are about 1/3 the price of paper ones. If anything is true, it's that there is no real value in paper books.
You guys know you can place bookmarks into the ebooks on your Kindle and just jump to them whenever you want from a menu, right? When I read a book, if I see something I might need to reference later, a tap near the top of my screen is all it takes to mark that page. Let's not forget the brilliance of being able to jump straight to the index or table of contents and hyperlink to the info I wanted to find...or search the entire text of the book.
Honestly, I can't see a reason why I'd ever want a paper book again - except perhaps for a really high quality print of fine art.
You should cheer yourself up by watching a lovely cartoon called Grave of the Fireflies!
EQ Next looks promising to me as well. I've dropped some cash into SOE's hands in order to get alpha access and a head start on learning the game and building some cool features. If they come good on their long term promises then I can foresee myself and friends (new and old) having some very enjoyable moments in there.
Let's not forget that DropBox and Google Sync are both useful for moving files around from most platforms to any other.
I doubt there will be a time when we wont be using fat clients but I see myself and the general public using and needing them less as every year passes.
I have a pretty decent rig by any standards these days, full capable of running Crisis 3 at max settings and 60 FPS with about 12 terabytes of local storage available. I used to log onto my PC every day and sit there poring over documents, reading crap off the net, looking at pictures of cats and wasting time on slashdot. I'd fire up my IDE and get some work or hobby coding done or just scratch an itch.
I recently bought a Kindle to give me some time away from the PC. Now I do my reading in an arm chair on the verandah looking out over our gardens and trees. I then noticed that although the Kindle was great for documents, it was terrible for web reading, and I still do a lot of that. I bought myself a Nexus 7. Now whenever I need to study or read I can do it from that comfy chair, while my PC sits idle.
Instead of immediately turning on my PC each morning I grab a Coke and go sit in my chair and swipe my Nexus 7 into life. I check my mail, delete the crap, make note of the interesting, and leave the stuff where I will want to type things since I prefer to do that from a desk and chair. I read the headlines on Slashdot and BBC news. I check the status of my torrents which are running on a headless box (actually a My Book Live hard drive is running Transmission for me).
Having a convenient little device, I can carry around which excels at consuming data means I only ever have to use my PC now when I want to write some code or play one of the latest graphics heavy games.
I am working on a game of my own these days and that means taking a lot of notes, a lot of time spent thinking and quickly writing down those flash ideas that would be gone faster than a desktop PC boots (even with the SSD, it can be too slow once it lumbers into life). I write all my notes using a web browser, either into the tiny little note taking app on Chrome, or directly into a wiki running on one of my low power machines. At no time do I need to load up a large, heavy app running on a big machine to do most of the tasks I do every day now.
There is a place for these heavy desktop based applications, but there's also a place for the lightweight, network connected apps that are now the more dominant force in most people's lives.
Honing is only the first step in getting a blade ready for shaving with. It's the sort of thing you might do every few months. Stropping is what you do every time before you shave, that's the step that makes it really sharp. It's pretty interesting what happens to the metal at a microscopic scale when you sharpen and strop the blade, which rather than removing material works instead by aligning it all.
That's not needed for a razor for two reasons. Firstly, you're going to be sharpening the blade with a stone that is already a completely flat hard surface and of a suitably fine grit. The second thing has to do with the way the blade itself is cast. The razor has a natural in-built guide to hold it at the correct 18-20 degree angle with no effort required from the person sharpening it. The thick part of the blade is made just thick enough so that when you lay it flat on it's side it forms the natural best angle for sharpening.
The actual edge of the blade is incredibly fine, and so you need to ensure correct technique to prevent placing any nicks into the blade. Correct technique involves keeping the blade flat to the surface at all times, never lifting it, but in fact turning it over (rotating each stroke) along the flat side of the blade. You always stroke the edge forwards, rotating at the end of each stroke.
That still won't place a sharp enough edge for shaving onto the blade, but it does ensure that the edge now has the correct bevel. To reach proper sharpness you now need to strop that edge which will align the fins of metal on the edge of the blade. Stropping is done in a similar fashion to sharpening, but in the reverse direction - that is, you always drag the edge and rotate it over on each stroke. Typical strops are made of a fine leather but you also find ones made of hemp, cotton or other materials which are used prior to refining it once again on the leather. For the best edge possible you will want to apply some paste to the surface of the strop, and again there are many possibilities for this task.
I used to think my kitchen knife was sharp until I learnt how to sharpen a razor. There's videos on youtube showing the method and all sort of other minutia related to the simple act of shaving.
None of those would still be sharp enough to shave with so I don't see why you bothered to mention any of them. Why don't you try and actually shave yourself with one of those "terrifying" knives of yours and tell me how it turns out. Take time to note how many nicks or cuts you gave yourself and how close to the skin the blade cut the hair.
The vast number of those free recipes are pretty terrible. My personal favourites are ones which claim to teach you to make a recipe and then the main ingredient is a pre-made sauce from the supermarket. Even the ones that are basically right need usually need a fair amount of adjustment because the poster doesn't know how to use herbs and spices or how to blend flavours.
They are however pretty good if you are just looking for the basic way to make simple dishes and don't mind a bit of experimenting. I usually find 3-4 of the same recipe and try and work out a method based on all of them since most omit something important.