Microsoft didn't start at 1.0 because Sybase had already done that.
Until 4.2, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase SQL Server were one. Sybase later morphed into the Advanced Server Enterprise thingy, which incidentally runs splendidly on Linux as an alternative to the open-source stuff; Sybase is a solid product. Anyway, Microsoft bought the rights and forked the code, and MS-SQL evolved independently from then on.
However, they remain highly compatible. The Sybase Transact-SQL flavour remains, as do most of the stored procedures, the client protocol (TDS), etc. Moving between the two implementations is simple, though I would personally never migrate to MS-SQL.
Didn't Borland end up buying the Zortech compiler and turning it into Turbo C? There were a lot of C compilers back then.
No -- Symantec bought Zortech, turned it into Symantec C++, back when Symantec was into development tools; it had the coolest Windows IDE at the time, but like many other Symantec products throughout the years it died a silent death.
Walter Bright probably did a deal with Symantec to acquire the rights to the compiler and development tools; essentially this the free C++ compiler available on the Digital Mars site.
Zortech may have been the first native C++ compiler, but TopSpeed had the better one, known as the fastest compiler around. TopSpeed had a common IDE/back end for C/C++, Pascal and probably some other languages. TopSpeed merged with Clarion and Clarion/TopSpeed was acquired by SoftVelocity. Clarion isn't C++, but its compiler is probably still based on TopSpeed technology.
As a matter of fact, mp3 is a compression scheme for wav format. So it _must_ be converted from wav. Any cd ripper that skips that probably does it as an illusion.
This is utter bollocks.
You're confusing encoding and file format. WAV is a format, a way to lay out an audio file containing encoded waveform data; MP3 is an encoding that also serves as a standalone file format.
WAV is a subformat of the RIFF format (a close cousin of IFF, which was popular on Amiga). Another system that uses RIFF is Microsoft's AVI. RIFF supports multiple streams or "chunks", but this is very rarely used for audio. In effect, most WAV files consist of a small header plus binary data. The header describes the format of this data -- essentially the encoding (PCM, ADPCM etc.), frequency, bit rate and alignment. The encoding is described by a "FourCC" code, a sequence of four characters uniquely identifying the codec. Because of this system, a RIFF/WAV file can easily describe an MP3 stream. However, strip away the header and you have a pure MP3 stream.
All MP3 "rippers" encode to MP3. Some, like CDEx, have an option to wrap the file in a WAV header.
Maybe by "WAV" you meant 16-bit two-channel 22KHz PCM, which is the encoding used by all Red Book audio CDs. Your message is still nonsensical; the encoder cares about the input encoding, MP3 as a compression scheme does not.
Does this mean that future games will be hardware specific?
Well, no. Game developers do prefer the state of the art, but common sense dictates that you target something that is exists and is popular.
Comparisons to browser market shares are appropriate here: When Internet Explorer became the norm, web sites tended to take advantage of IE's superior DHTML and DOM support, but developers have mostly strived to make pages backwards-compatible with Netscape and other less capable browsers. After Mozilla caught up, most web sites still aren't targeting it specifically.
Keep in mind that, according to the article, the board does not currently exist. One's desire to write custom code for a nonexistent board is contingent on several factors, such as the manufacturer's present and potential future market share.
Case in point: Developers used to target Glide, 3Dfx' low-level rendering API. Games these days don't bother: 3Dfx has DirectX support, the effort to squeeze a few extra FPS from writing "straight to the metal" usually isn't worth the time and money, and most importantly, 3Dfx is dead. Its user base is dwindling, and there is no incentive to use the (generally) hardware-specific Glide over the generic DirectX.
As for the development effort: As a former game developer and Direct3D user, I agree with the claim that when targeting both shaders, "they'll have to write more code". A few hundred lines, perhaps, for detecting and using the two extra texture shaders per pass. It's not like it's a new, different API.
"Legacy software" is mostly applicable to the commercial software world of proprietary technology, which survives by forcing upgrades, and it forces upgrades partially through FUD (which includes the notion that an older versions become "obsolete"), partially through lack of support/incompatibilities, and finally through innovation.
Users, especially in the MS-DOS/Windows market, have long been indoctrinated with this idea of a mandatory upgrade cycle and "planned obsolescence". Sometimes this plays against the vendor itself. Plenty of vendors have effectively killed themselves by releasing a product, then boasting to customers how they're already working on the next version which will be a lot better. The result, of course, is that customers don't buy the current version.
Remember, once a closed-source product/version is offed the vendor, it's dead. This is not true if the source code is available and free (in the free-speech sense). As an example, the HypersonicSQL Java RDBMS project was killed by its author in February; a month later, somebody had forked the source, which is now called hsqldb.
17. Can Windows 2000, Windows NT 4, or Windows 95/98 read, write, and boot from GPT?
No. Again, legacy software will see only the Protective MBR.
Note how Microsoft now considers Windows 2000 to be legacy software. That's going to be a big surprise to everyone who is currently running spanking new copies of Win2k.
But then again, we are living in the year 2001. Time to throw the old, legacy OS into the closet and upgrade [off-topic rant] to something that maybe, maybe, maybe this time doesn't try to cram every damn unused piece of code into the swap file even when you have plenty of physical memory left (evil ploy to boost hard drive sales resulting from prematurely failing drives!) [/off-topic rant].
If the product takes off, SAP could start offering commercial support (a la Red Hat & IBM for Linux).
Note that SAP is already doing this. SAP DB has always been supported, since it's part of the SAP/3 product line. The difference is that SAP DB is now free.
SAP DB is different from ADABAS. In July 1997 and May 1999, SAP made agreements with Software AG for the right to sell the SAP version of the ADABAS D database, which is different from ADABAS, Software AG's established mainframe DBMS. As part of these agreements, SAP renamed its version of the software SAP DB. SAP DB has been enhanced and improved independently of ADABAS for several years.
Another FAQ entry answers the question of whether SAP is merely dumping the database on the open-source community so somebody else can clean up their old code:
On the contrary, SAP will continue to develop and support SAP DB to drive future enhancements in cooperation with the open-source community. Leveraging database technology is important for delivering comprehensive and innovative SAP components. Basis development in Berlin contributes to the supply chain management/liveCache, knowledge management/Info DB, and SAP DB for SAP solutions among other tasks.
Also, remember that SAP makes money on consulting/support services. So SAP AG would be foolish to release it merely to pass the burden of providing support on to the community.
American studios and distributors make a lot of money on selling region 1 films to the European market -- something like 40% of sales are European region 1 sales.
And incidentally, the burden of having to supply multiple region encodings of a disc actually means the region code system is more costly. American studios prefer region 1.
The idea that the region codes protect the filmmakers is silly, and the way to improve the system is not to impose restrictions on parallel import, but to remove the system and allow films to be distributed simultaneously in Europe and Asia. Unfortunately that probably entails beaming films digitally from satellites, but sometimes you have to lose something (like picture quality) to gain something else.
As a citizen of a European country, I can tell you that the availability of region 2 films is terrible here, and the quality of these releases often worse, compared to the original releases. (With the exception of subtitle translation, which most people actually like here.) And that's why I had my DVD player modified to support multiple region codes. I would like the freedom of choice. Just like I want to be able to buy books and electronics from the US -- and I do -- I want to be able to buy DVDs.
Unfortunately I live in a country whose stores usually cannot satisfy my refined tastes, and whose economic policies dictate that it be twice as expensive as most others. My enemies include region codes, VAT, customs duty, high shipping costs, US-centric shopping-cart systems, and American electrical standards -- none of which have stopped me yet.
Oracle does use versioning -- as does SOLID, incidentally. However, I don't know the full extent to which Oracle uses this; it clearly provides transaction logging, as well.
InterBase actually pioneered the algorithm, which they call "multi-generational". Here's from an InterBase marketing blurb:
Multi-Generational Architecture and Row-Level Locking
InterBase's unique Multi-Generational Architecture (MGA, also known as versioning) enables clients to access an InterBase server with high concurrency and throughput. Also, the manner in which InterBase stores multiple versions of a given data record means that each client sees a consistent snapshot of the database. A client can update data without interfering with other clients' views of the data. These features result in DBMS technology that is well-suited to handle the short-lived transactions common in OLTP, concurrently with the longer-lived transactions of OLAP.
The server implements true row-level locks, using an optimistic locking strategy. Any number of clients can share read access on a record simultaneously; contention occurs only when two clients attempt to update the same record. In that case, the client who was first issuing an update operation has the option to commit the operation, and the server returns an error to the other client(s)
The combination of versioning and row-level locks give InterBase exceptional throughput and concurrency, when compared with RDBMS implementations that use page-locks or exclusive locks for reading. Readers never block writers, and writers never block readers.
InterBase handles all versioning and locking transparently and automatically for the application. This relieves the developer from the manual locking control required in some other RDBMS products. A number of optional parameters for transactions permit developers to specify other locking behavior.
So InterBase deals with conflicts through row-level locking. So it does not deal explicitly with "dependencies", but rather the first transaction to commit succeeds; later transactions will fail because the versions timestamps will mismatch.
Does anybody else here find it horribly fascinating that Progress -- creators of Progress (a high-end, commercial RDBMS), WebSpeed and SonicMQ -- is expending time, effort and money in developing and marketing MySQL, a rival RDBMS?
Oracle, InterBase and PostgreSQL all implement a generational table algorithm. This is why they do not need transaction logs. Sybase databases and Microsoft SQL Server don't, and rely on icky transaction logs (journaling).
Both schemes work well, but the former is potentially must faster because there is no lock contention: Nobody can ever be writing to the same piece of data, and nobody can ever be reading something that being written, unless explicitly specified in the isolation level.
I hate it when the old-economy, pre-"open source" metaphors and paradigms are imposed on the technology industry. I quote from the article:
[...]
virus had gotten a look at -- but did not corrupt -- a valuable software blueprint, or "source code," for a computer program under development.
I find it extremely interesting that many people still consider source code to be the equivalent to architectural blueprints.
In fact, as we all know, the source code is the software. Whatever "blueprints" exist in a software project comprise whatever design documents you have, and the most formalized kind of blueprint for any project today is your collection of UML/OMT/etc. diagrams.
It's not like you feed the source code into a lathe and have it cut out the final shape of your product, which are then assembled and erected by engineers and painted by graphical designers.
NDS/LDAP as a web database; CNN case study
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 1
NDS is also being used as a more general-purpose object database these days. While NDS/LDAP was originally designed to manage networks, it works like an all-purpose, distributed database, offering true multi-master replication and transactions.
One good example of such usage is CNN, which uses NDS for user tracking ("personalization") on their web site. CNN paid nothing for this; Novell gave away the product purely for marketing purposes. (The site used to have "powered by Novell" on every page; I can't see it now.)
CNN has pretty stringent requirements for performance. This document has some interesting technical details, such as about scalability. For each user they store a unique ID, a set of indexed attributes (for fast lookup), and an XML stream consisting of user metadata. So they use LDAP mostly as an ID-to-object mapper. For the gory technical details, see Personalizing and Customizing Web Content utilizing NDS eDirectory at CNN.
NDS scales extremely well. Core to its scalability is its flexible multiple-reader/multiple-writer replication system, which supports disconnected operation and grafting multiple trees into "forests" like symbolic links.
NDS is expensive. Unlike NDS Corporate Edition, which is the network-oriented product, NDS eDirectory is not off-the-shelf software -- depending on the application, you pay at least $20K -- although, to be fair, that includes dedicated, on-site consultants and hand-holding all the way. User licenses, on the other hand, are quite cheap.
Unlike SQL and RDBMS technology, NDS/LDAP is actually a much more focused system for the kind of database systems needed by today's web sites. Relational databases are extremely good at large, repetitive result sets and table joins, but web pages typically only do "short-burst" queries that return just a few results, and often an RDBMS is turned into a glorified ID-to-object mapper. This is precisely what LDAP (and NDS) excels at. (It doesn't hurt, either, that LDAP queries are intrinsically hierarchical.) Site builders should look to LDAP for a more suitable, and much faster, database paradigm.
Main Entry: E-mail
Pronunciation: 'E-"mAl
Function: noun
Date: 1982 1: a means or system for transmitting messages electronically (as between terminals linked by telephone lines or microwave relays) 2: a message sent electronically <sent him an E-mail>
- e-mail verb
- e-mailer/-"mA-l&r/ noun
McArthur and Chiao clearly had fun cruising around the planet at 25 times the speed of sound, taking a moment every once in awhile to do a bit of extraterrestrial sightseeing. [...]
"Look at the moon up there! Is that the moon?" an awed McArthur said at one point.
These guys sure know the area -- like the back of their hand!
"You guys should see the sunrise coming -- pretty awesome," crewmate Jeff Wisoff told the spacewalkers midway through the 6-hour, 28-minute foray.
"Ah, yes indeedy!" McArthur exclaimed.
Added Chaio: "Wow, this is really cool."
I dig it, man. Maybe the next time, they could shoot somebody funny and interesting up there, like Denis Leary or Nicholas Negroponte, just to avoid more embarrassing dialogue.
Ah yes, Michael Abrash is at Microsoft now. I forgot about that.
Actually, Abrash worked at Microsoft before he joined Id Software. He went back to Microsoft again later after Quake was completed. There's no evidence that Microsoft "bought" him.
I am glad that the much-underrated Brunner is brought back into the limelight.
Having been a fan for a long time, I am depressed that most, if not all, of his books are actually out of print and most easily gotten through second-hand book shops or the magnificient ABE Books.
Brunner wrote a lot, but his books are hard to get. Shockwave Rider is probably the most available novel, followed by Stand On Zanzibar.
(Zanzibar and the wonderful The Sheep Look up are part of Brunner's Brunner's "American Trilogy", which ends with The Jagged Orbit. A friend of mine recommends The Whole Man, unread by me.)
It is a shame that Brunner, one of Britain's finest and most prolific writers, died recently with little publicity. Why is it that sf writers -- Dick, Zelazny, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, and that British bloke who died last year -- tend to fade away rather than burn out?
It's also annoying how the geniuses tend to die prematurely, while tired old hacks like Arthur C. Clarke and Greg Bear are still on this planet.:)
I checked out the Palm IIIc, Palm's colour model. I would definitely buy a Palm if it had a colour display (can't stand the black-on-green monochrome display, but that's just me).
But after having it in my hands for about a minute, my eyes were watering from the extreme brightness. The display has a strange, evil gleam that reminded me of the multicoloured surface of an oil spill, or of a hologram. It hurt my eyes. I knew I could never use it, even with the brightness setting set to the minimum. WinCE units are not like this, and I hope the next colour Palm won't be either.
My point was that the overhead in direct electronic funds transfer is now so low, you can use it for any amount.
And that's new?:) I forget what the bank fee overhead is in my country. It's low enough that buying a $1 soda isn't a problem.
People also tend to use stores as ATMs, something which the stores gladly do, they even ask if you want extra money -- if you buy a $1 soda, you might ask to get 20 bucks in cash, which means $21 is withdrawn from your bank account -- plus a tiny, tiny fee, I believe.
I'm amazed that many ATMs here in the US will actually charge you a fee ($1-$2) to withdraw money from other banks. PayPal (to get back on topic) on the other hand will occasionally give you money.
What you're talking about sounds like a smart card that you load up with electronic money. That exists, too, but I don't see any huge benefits except cutting down on the confirmation delay (no need to dial up a modem to confirm the debit with the bank). A minor benefit is that it becomes like an electronic, refillable wallet -- you can swap cards and refill each others' cards. Since they contain a fixed amount, they become commodities. Beyond that, you will actually lose out on interest, and you also risk losing the card.
If it's not a smart card, what's the difference between Switch and a normal debit/credit card? Do you enter a pin code and wait for a bank confirmation?
So far, I have only seen one store here in NY that offers the "swipe + pin code" thing. In every store I go to, you actually give the card to the cashier, who swipes the card and awaits confirmation. No pin code to enter. Meaning that losing your card is actually much riskier.
Slashdot Mirror
Until 4.2, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase SQL Server were one. Sybase later morphed into the Advanced Server Enterprise thingy, which incidentally runs splendidly on Linux as an alternative to the open-source stuff; Sybase is a solid product. Anyway, Microsoft bought the rights and forked the code, and MS-SQL evolved independently from then on.
However, they remain highly compatible. The Sybase Transact-SQL flavour remains, as do most of the stored procedures, the client protocol (TDS), etc. Moving between the two implementations is simple, though I would personally never migrate to MS-SQL.
No -- Symantec bought Zortech, turned it into Symantec C++, back when Symantec was into development tools; it had the coolest Windows IDE at the time, but like many other Symantec products throughout the years it died a silent death.
Walter Bright probably did a deal with Symantec to acquire the rights to the compiler and development tools; essentially this the free C++ compiler available on the Digital Mars site.
Zortech may have been the first native C++ compiler, but TopSpeed had the better one, known as the fastest compiler around. TopSpeed had a common IDE/back end for C/C++, Pascal and probably some other languages. TopSpeed merged with Clarion and Clarion/TopSpeed was acquired by SoftVelocity. Clarion isn't C++, but its compiler is probably still based on TopSpeed technology.
This is utter bollocks.
You're confusing encoding and file format. WAV is a format, a way to lay out an audio file containing encoded waveform data; MP3 is an encoding that also serves as a standalone file format.
WAV is a subformat of the RIFF format (a close cousin of IFF, which was popular on Amiga). Another system that uses RIFF is Microsoft's AVI. RIFF supports multiple streams or "chunks", but this is very rarely used for audio. In effect, most WAV files consist of a small header plus binary data. The header describes the format of this data -- essentially the encoding (PCM, ADPCM etc.), frequency, bit rate and alignment. The encoding is described by a "FourCC" code, a sequence of four characters uniquely identifying the codec. Because of this system, a RIFF/WAV file can easily describe an MP3 stream. However, strip away the header and you have a pure MP3 stream.
All MP3 "rippers" encode to MP3. Some, like CDEx, have an option to wrap the file in a WAV header.
Maybe by "WAV" you meant 16-bit two-channel 22KHz PCM, which is the encoding used by all Red Book audio CDs. Your message is still nonsensical; the encoder cares about the input encoding, MP3 as a compression scheme does not.
Does this mean that future games will be hardware specific?
Well, no. Game developers do prefer the state of the art, but common sense dictates that you target something that is exists and is popular.Comparisons to browser market shares are appropriate here: When Internet Explorer became the norm, web sites tended to take advantage of IE's superior DHTML and DOM support, but developers have mostly strived to make pages backwards-compatible with Netscape and other less capable browsers. After Mozilla caught up, most web sites still aren't targeting it specifically.
Keep in mind that, according to the article, the board does not currently exist. One's desire to write custom code for a nonexistent board is contingent on several factors, such as the manufacturer's present and potential future market share.
Case in point: Developers used to target Glide, 3Dfx' low-level rendering API. Games these days don't bother: 3Dfx has DirectX support, the effort to squeeze a few extra FPS from writing "straight to the metal" usually isn't worth the time and money, and most importantly, 3Dfx is dead. Its user base is dwindling, and there is no incentive to use the (generally) hardware-specific Glide over the generic DirectX.
As for the development effort: As a former game developer and Direct3D user, I agree with the claim that when targeting both shaders, "they'll have to write more code". A few hundred lines, perhaps, for detecting and using the two extra texture shaders per pass. It's not like it's a new, different API.
Users, especially in the MS-DOS/Windows market, have long been indoctrinated with this idea of a mandatory upgrade cycle and "planned obsolescence". Sometimes this plays against the vendor itself. Plenty of vendors have effectively killed themselves by releasing a product, then boasting to customers how they're already working on the next version which will be a lot better. The result, of course, is that customers don't buy the current version.
Remember, once a closed-source product/version is offed the vendor, it's dead. This is not true if the source code is available and free (in the free-speech sense). As an example, the HypersonicSQL Java RDBMS project was killed by its author in February; a month later, somebody had forked the source, which is now called hsqldb.
- 17. Can Windows 2000, Windows NT 4, or Windows 95/98 read, write, and boot from GPT?
No. Again, legacy software will see only the Protective MBR.
Note how Microsoft now considers Windows 2000 to be legacy software. That's going to be a big surprise to everyone who is currently running spanking new copies of Win2k.But then again, we are living in the year 2001. Time to throw the old, legacy OS into the closet and upgrade [off-topic rant] to something that maybe, maybe, maybe this time doesn't try to cram every damn unused piece of code into the swap file even when you have plenty of physical memory left (evil ploy to boost hard drive sales resulting from prematurely failing drives!) [/off-topic rant].
Note that SAP is already doing this. SAP DB has always been supported, since it's part of the SAP/3 product line. The difference is that SAP DB is now free.
According to the official SAP DB FAQ:
Another FAQ entry answers the question of whether SAP is merely dumping the database on the open-source community so somebody else can clean up their old code:
Also, remember that SAP makes money on consulting/support services. So SAP AG would be foolish to release it merely to pass the burden of providing support on to the community.
And incidentally, the burden of having to supply multiple region encodings of a disc actually means the region code system is more costly. American studios prefer region 1.
The idea that the region codes protect the filmmakers is silly, and the way to improve the system is not to impose restrictions on parallel import, but to remove the system and allow films to be distributed simultaneously in Europe and Asia. Unfortunately that probably entails beaming films digitally from satellites, but sometimes you have to lose something (like picture quality) to gain something else.
As a citizen of a European country, I can tell you that the availability of region 2 films is terrible here, and the quality of these releases often worse, compared to the original releases. (With the exception of subtitle translation, which most people actually like here.) And that's why I had my DVD player modified to support multiple region codes. I would like the freedom of choice. Just like I want to be able to buy books and electronics from the US -- and I do -- I want to be able to buy DVDs.
Unfortunately I live in a country whose stores usually cannot satisfy my refined tastes, and whose economic policies dictate that it be twice as expensive as most others. My enemies include region codes, VAT, customs duty, high shipping costs, US-centric shopping-cart systems, and American electrical standards -- none of which have stopped me yet.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
-- Douglas Adams
InterBase actually pioneered the algorithm, which they call "multi-generational". Here's from an InterBase marketing blurb:
- Multi-Generational Architecture and Row-Level Locking
So InterBase deals with conflicts through row-level locking. So it does not deal explicitly with "dependencies", but rather the first transaction to commit succeeds; later transactions will fail because the versions timestamps will mismatch.InterBase's unique Multi-Generational Architecture (MGA, also known as versioning) enables clients to access an InterBase server with high concurrency and throughput. Also, the manner in which InterBase stores multiple versions of a given data record means that each client sees a consistent snapshot of the database. A client can update data without interfering with other clients' views of the data. These features result in DBMS technology that is well-suited to handle the short-lived transactions common in OLTP, concurrently with the longer-lived transactions of OLAP.
The server implements true row-level locks, using an optimistic locking strategy. Any number of clients can share read access on a record simultaneously; contention occurs only when two clients attempt to update the same record. In that case, the client who was first issuing an update operation has the option to commit the operation, and the server returns an error to the other client(s)
The combination of versioning and row-level locks give InterBase exceptional throughput and concurrency, when compared with RDBMS implementations that use page-locks or exclusive locks for reading. Readers never block writers, and writers never block readers.
InterBase handles all versioning and locking transparently and automatically for the application. This relieves the developer from the manual locking control required in some other RDBMS products. A number of optional parameters for transactions permit developers to specify other locking behavior.
A more technical summary can be found here
Does anybody else here find it horribly fascinating that Progress -- creators of Progress (a high-end, commercial RDBMS), WebSpeed and SonicMQ -- is expending time, effort and money in developing and marketing MySQL, a rival RDBMS?
Both schemes work well, but the former is potentially must faster because there is no lock contention: Nobody can ever be writing to the same piece of data, and nobody can ever be reading something that being written, unless explicitly specified in the isolation level.
- [...]
- virus had gotten a look at -- but did not corrupt -- a valuable software blueprint, or "source code," for a computer program under development.
I find it extremely interesting that many people still consider source code to be the equivalent to architectural blueprints.In fact, as we all know, the source code is the software. Whatever "blueprints" exist in a software project comprise whatever design documents you have, and the most formalized kind of blueprint for any project today is your collection of UML/OMT/etc. diagrams.
It's not like you feed the source code into a lathe and have it cut out the final shape of your product, which are then assembled and erected by engineers and painted by graphical designers.
One good example of such usage is CNN, which uses NDS for user tracking ("personalization") on their web site. CNN paid nothing for this; Novell gave away the product purely for marketing purposes. (The site used to have "powered by Novell" on every page; I can't see it now.) CNN has pretty stringent requirements for performance. This document has some interesting technical details, such as about scalability. For each user they store a unique ID, a set of indexed attributes (for fast lookup), and an XML stream consisting of user metadata. So they use LDAP mostly as an ID-to-object mapper. For the gory technical details, see Personalizing and Customizing Web Content utilizing NDS eDirectory at CNN.
NDS scales extremely well. Core to its scalability is its flexible multiple-reader/multiple-writer replication system, which supports disconnected operation and grafting multiple trees into "forests" like symbolic links.
NDS is expensive. Unlike NDS Corporate Edition, which is the network-oriented product, NDS eDirectory is not off-the-shelf software -- depending on the application, you pay at least $20K -- although, to be fair, that includes dedicated, on-site consultants and hand-holding all the way. User licenses, on the other hand, are quite cheap.
Unlike SQL and RDBMS technology, NDS/LDAP is actually a much more focused system for the kind of database systems needed by today's web sites. Relational databases are extremely good at large, repetitive result sets and table joins, but web pages typically only do "short-burst" queries that return just a few results, and often an RDBMS is turned into a glorified ID-to-object mapper. This is precisely what LDAP (and NDS) excels at. (It doesn't hurt, either, that LDAP queries are intrinsically hierarchical.) Site builders should look to LDAP for a more suitable, and much faster, database paradigm.
- Gimme a break. p2p is *old* technology, not new. It's using p2p in a large, distributed fashion that is new.
Well, Groove has apparently been working on the technology for three years, so in theory their product precedes Napster, for example.Pronunciation: 'E-"mAl
Function: noun
Date: 1982
1
2
- e-mail verb
- e-mailer
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=e-mail
Of course, there's no food called "pasto". There is pasta, plural form pasti. That's probably what you meant. Why ruin an otherwise good joke?
Well, No Cure For Cancer sure was.
And these are supposed to be astronauts?
"Look at the moon up there! Is that the moon?" an awed McArthur said at one point.
These guys sure know the area -- like the back of their hand!
"Ah, yes indeedy!" McArthur exclaimed.
Added Chaio: "Wow, this is really cool."
I dig it, man. Maybe the next time, they could shoot somebody funny and interesting up there, like Denis Leary or Nicholas Negroponte, just to avoid more embarrassing dialogue.
Actually, Abrash worked at Microsoft before he joined Id Software. He went back to Microsoft again later after Quake was completed. There's no evidence that Microsoft "bought" him.
Having been a fan for a long time, I am depressed that most, if not all, of his books are actually out of print and most easily gotten through second-hand book shops or the magnificient ABE Books.
Brunner wrote a lot, but his books are hard to get. Shockwave Rider is probably the most available novel, followed by Stand On Zanzibar.
(Zanzibar and the wonderful The Sheep Look up are part of Brunner's Brunner's "American Trilogy", which ends with The Jagged Orbit. A friend of mine recommends The Whole Man, unread by me.)
It is a shame that Brunner, one of Britain's finest and most prolific writers, died recently with little publicity. Why is it that sf writers -- Dick, Zelazny, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Van Vogt, and that British bloke who died last year -- tend to fade away rather than burn out?
It's also annoying how the geniuses tend to die prematurely, while tired old hacks like Arthur C. Clarke and Greg Bear are still on this planet. :)
I checked out the Palm IIIc, Palm's colour model. I would definitely buy a Palm if it had a colour display (can't stand the black-on-green monochrome display, but that's just me). But after having it in my hands for about a minute, my eyes were watering from the extreme brightness. The display has a strange, evil gleam that reminded me of the multicoloured surface of an oil spill, or of a hologram. It hurt my eyes. I knew I could never use it, even with the brightness setting set to the minimum. WinCE units are not like this, and I hope the next colour Palm won't be either.
And that's new? :) I forget what the bank fee overhead is in my country. It's low enough that buying a $1 soda isn't a problem.
People also tend to use stores as ATMs, something which the stores gladly do, they even ask if you want extra money -- if you buy a $1 soda, you might ask to get 20 bucks in cash, which means $21 is withdrawn from your bank account -- plus a tiny, tiny fee, I believe.
I'm amazed that many ATMs here in the US will actually charge you a fee ($1-$2) to withdraw money from other banks. PayPal (to get back on topic) on the other hand will occasionally give you money.
If it's not a smart card, what's the difference between Switch and a normal debit/credit card? Do you enter a pin code and wait for a bank confirmation?
So far, I have only seen one store here in NY that offers the "swipe + pin code" thing. In every store I go to, you actually give the card to the cashier, who swipes the card and awaits confirmation. No pin code to enter. Meaning that losing your card is actually much riskier.