Hmm, an aspx page. Looks like a Windows system. Seems kind of slow. But Verizon is very tech savvy; if they're using IIS, it must be able to weather a slashdotting. I should be getting a response soon. Oh, good, looks like my results are finally coming up:
Server Error in '/FiosForHome' Application. Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
Your problem is with the vendors who lock you into SQL Anywhere 5 and don't permit enough concurrent users on it. If that's your basis for judging SQL Anywhere, it's not really fair for you to judge it. Considering ease of administration, ease of development, efficient use of hardware, platform availability, SQL compliance, features, performance, cost, documentation and support, SQL Anywhere is a terrific product, and generally my choice for small businesses and department-level applications.
To clarify, the phrase should be "hoist with their own petard" (or hoisted, in modern usage), not "hoist by their own petard." A petard is a bomb that would be hoisted into position to breach a wall or door.
People who don't know what a petard is commonly hear the phrase "hoisted with his own petard" and think the petard did the hoisting, and then they misrepeat the phrase as "hoisted by his own petard."
Common usage may have replaced the obsolete verb hoise with its participle, hoist, but it has not changed petards from explosive devices into lifting machines.
Just curious... why the choice of a temp table versus directly returning the results to your client?
It can be simpler just to return a result set, as you suggest. I often use a temporary table to allow pre- or post-processing of the results. For example, if I have a payroll application that prints paychecks, I will typically use a temporary table so I can first display a list of checks to be printed, then after the user accepts that list I print the checks, then if the user confirms that the print operation completed successfully I record the checks in a permanent table in the database.
Sometimes in the preprocessing phase I allow editing of the temporary table. Payroll is not a good example of this because it needs to be controlled closely by the application, but something like an address list can be created in a temp table by an SP, then the user can edit the list before printing it.
I understand some people use SPs for everything, as a security measure. I'm not that paranoid.
Stored procs are great, though, for processing lots of data on the server, without wasting resources (network bandwidth, client memory and CPU) sending the data to a client for processing and then posting results back to the database. Even if you have to do record-by-record processing instead of set operations, it's much more efficient to use a cursor on the server than a loop through a resultset on the client.
Stored procs are good at encapsulating a series of operations done periodically, such as end-of-month processing. In some databases you can define an event on the server that will automatically fire the SP. With such an event on the server rather than on a client machine, you don't need to worry about whether the correct client is running and connected when the event is supposed to fire.
Complex reports often require more data crunching that just a single query. I use an SP to process the data and leave the results in a temporary table. My client program runs the SP, then reports with a simple SELECT on the newly generated result table.
CSU, which has just won the European elections, said they won't support Linux since its Feierabendprogrammierer ('leisure-time coders') would destroy Munich's IT-landscape (Microsoft Germany and other big companies are located in and around Munich)...
This is a very common anti-pattern of political rhetoric, used by special interests whose goods and services aren't worth the price the government is paying for them: the reduction of their subsidy will harm the current recipients, and eliminate jobs.
The answer is, the government will spend that money on something else, or (better) leave it with taxpayers so they can spend it on something else. The money will then flow to other jobs, in businesses and industries that are more competitive, where the government should be encouraging capital concentration and job growth.
That answer goes to software publishers, fruit farmers, coal miners, steel makers, missile manufacturers, and any other interest that thinks it should be paid, not for the value of its goods or services, but because such a fat pig is entitled to its place at the public trough. Off to slaughter, piggies!
Right that a Web API would fill a need. But Joel says the Web API will only be on Longhorn clients, not available on older versions of Windows. Joel says Microsoft is betting that the new apps on that API will be so compelling that customers will have a reason to upgrade Windows, and Joel thinks Microsoft will lose that bet.
For Microsoft's strategy to succeed, it has to get developers to produce compelling apps that require the new operating system. Microsoft had trouble getting developers to develop for Windows back when DOS was king, and had to prime the market with its own Windows applications. But after Word for Windows and Excel dazzled users, other application developers had to follow and recreate their DOS products in Windows.
But Joel thinks the new API will not improve web apps so much that users and developers will need to flock to it. It'll be interesting to see what applications Microsoft comes up with to show off the new API and attract upgraders and developers to the new platform.
My favorite quote from the Washington Post article, which reports how SCO and Microsoft have tried to convince customers that Linux's GPL license is dangerous:
"The GPL has this sucking effect of grabbing your IP [intellectual property], sucking it in and destroying your property rights," McBride said.
Torvalds, the Linux founder, ridicules that notion.
"Having a hole in your head has this sucking effect," Torvalds said, firing back at McBride. "The GPL doesn't 'grab' any IP at all. The only thing that is desperately trying to grab other people's IP is Darl McBride and company."
In 1994, the desktop was not a GUI desktop, the desktop was mostly a command-line universe both on DOS-based systems and Linux systems.
I was there, and Windows 3.1 ruled the desktop absolutely. Remember, Windows 95 was originally promised for 1993. Its impending release held customers back from looking at alternatives. Any potential competitor against Microsoft vaporware should look back carefully at that history.
Linux did have an advantage: multiple virtual consoles, real multi-tasking, tcp/ip stack bundled, nfs, file serving capabilities, and DOSemu with compatibility with the past.
OS/2 had all those advantages, plus a GUI, complete with a superior version of Solitaire (the killer app of Windows 3.1). It also supported all Windows 3.1 apps. OS/2 was the superior desktop platform back then; Linux was a command-line hacker's toy.
Windows 3.11 was out, with really few applications.
As others have said, Windows 3.1 at that time had far more GUI applications in 1994 than Linux has now. Most important, it had Word and Excel. Did Linux even support the text-mode equivalents of WordPerfect or 1-2-3, whose users were already defecting to Word and Excel?
Maybe the folks at Novell ignored OS/2 back then, because their world view comprised DOS clients and Novell servers, even as Windows 3.11 for Workgroups was seeding that world's destruction. I'm glad you recognize that.NET will happen because Internet Explorer is fully deployed and the.NET client libraries are shipping. Please do what you can to give the Linux platform the compatibility it needs to remain a viable server platform for.NET web applications.
I can appreciate the attraction of building another.NET competitor that might beat.NET to market. But please remember these points:
When I interviewed through their hiring practices, I went through two phone interviews and then an in-person interview on a golf course (I don't play golf, but the two interviewers do). I was told that I would be considered if I agreed to quit college and to never attempt to get a degree.
No doubt if you seemed interested they would have soured the deal a little more. I hate to break it to you, but you were only there that afternoon because they needed a caddy.
Apache2 itself is rather fringe still. It has approximately a 5% marketshare vs. 65% for Apache1 at the time of this and out of that I would guess the majority are running the Worker MPM. So we are talking about a fringe MPM in a fringe server.
My personal opinion is that the PHP development team should tackle thread-safety, but even if they don't they should update their test servers and certify Apache 2 with mpm_prefork. Their convenience is not a good enough reason for holding all PHP-dependent websites back to an old version of Apache.
This Microsoft deal is the Ante to the poker game...We should get this done and go after several $2-3 Million deals from the expense side of their company. The will help us a lot and if we execute we could exit and Unix componients we have build potentially back to Microsoft or MCS.
When SCO "exits," Microsoft or Microsoft Consulting Services may get the Unix components SCO has built (as commissioned by Microsoft's expense side?). "Exit" evidently means "get out of the Unix business." So how does SCO plan to "execute" so that it will be able to get out of the Unix business? By turning to Linux licensing for its revenue? It's an interesting glimpse at SCO's long-range plan.
A data point on the quality of outsourced tech support:
My neighbor's HP Pavilion kept putting a window on her screen last week, saying her Windows license had expired, and that she needed to enter her credit card number and expiration to validate her copy of Windows, but not to worry because her credit card would not be charged.
My neighbor is in her 80s, but her memory is good and she didn't remember anything about an expiration date for Windows. So she called HP support and got a man with an Indian accent. She told him the problem, and he asked, "How old is your computer?" She told him it was a couple years old, and he said, "If it's that old, Windows could be expired. Try entering the information as requested and see what happens."
Fortunately, my neighbor is much smarter than HP's outsourced call center, and didn't take their advice. She called me and we cleaned mimail.s off her computer. She promises she won't buy from HP again.
Dell offers only Red Hat Advanced Server or Red Hat Professional (which is obsolete), so I bought the PowerEdge with no OS. P4-2.4 GHz, 1 GB DDR, 36 GB 10K rpm SCSI for $817 plus tax. SuSE 9 Pro installed without a hitch.
Dell must be moving a lot of these no-OS boxes. Their official support has been quite RH-centric, but the new website has a page that directly addresses other distros. SuSE recently announced that Dell was working more closely with them, and SuSE has certified a bunch of Dell machines.
If it were necessary to vote in a public location where officials can exclude outside influences, then voters would not be allowed to use absentee ballots.
I agree, ODBC is a critical feature for a "glue" language like Python. There's mxODBC, but commercial use costs $75 per end-user or $1,250 per developer. Most of Python's other database modules are free, but ODBC is needed to fill a lot of gaps.
I'm afraid that Lego is not returning to its roots (building blocks), but may just cut the licensed products (Star Wars, Harry Potter) and concentrate on its own Bionicles line.
I was not thrilled to see that my second grader brought home a Bionicles novella from the Scholastic book fair (which is increasingly a toy fair), especially after I looked at it and saw a grammatical error in the book's very first sentence. Lego has a whole mythology about Bionicles, and that's attractive to kids. But my son lost a couple essential pieces of his Bionicle within days of getting it, and I'm not going to encourage this overpriced, intellectually shallow, proprietary product line as a hobby.
Unfortunately, I could not find more generic Lego blocks in my Christmas shopping. There were some overpriced ($30-$40) Star Wars kits, and a space shuttle for $100, but nothing I wanted to buy. I'm beginning to associate Lego with brands like Scholastic and Disney, that have turned their once-respected product lines into brands of dumb, overpriced junk.
Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, proposed a sustained commitment to human exploration of the solar system -- with a return to the moon as a stepping stone to Mars -- in 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon. NASA came up with a budget-busting cost estimate of $400 billion, which sank the project.
And the difference this time will be... ?
"It's going back to being a uniter, not a divider," a presidential adviser said, echoing language from Bush's previous campaign, "and trying to rally people emotionally around a great national purpose."
The moon program was criticized for its lack of practical value, but at least it was something truly new, undreamed of by most people, seemingly impossible. A moon base is just more of the same as Apollo, but at much greater expense and with far less incremental benefit, and in fact with great potential danger to the space science that won't be done because NASA's budget will be wasted. This synthetic "national purpose" shows that Bush Jr. has as little of "the vision thing" as his father.
Another official involved in the discussions used similar language, saying that some of Bush's aides want him to have a "Kennedy moment" -- a reference to President John F. Kennedy's call in 1961 for the nation to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.
George W. Bush is no John F. Kennedy.
"It's a national unifying thing, it's a world unifying thing," this official said.
Didn't they say that about the International Space Station, before the bills started arriving and going unpaid, and before they realized they'd lost their audience, and that there wasn't much of a show? There are challenges that could unite the nation (universal health care, universal literacy, funding welfare programs with progressive income taxes instead of regressive payroll taxes) or even the world (respect for international law, environmental responsibility) but a moon base is not among them.
"This is a boon for business and a boon for Texas," one official said....
Ah, we knew there must be practical benefits... to business, and to Texas.
One presidential adviser, who asked not to be identified, said, after discussing the initiative with administration officials, that the idea is "crazy" and mocked it as the "mission to Pluto."
"It costs a lot of money and we don't have money," the official said. "This is destructive of any sort of budget restraint." The official added that the initiative makes any rhetoric by Bush about fiscal restraint "look like a feint."
Bush has never cared about budget restraint. He has cared only about reducing the tax burden on the wealthy. His perfunctory tax cuts for the middle class were a feint, too.
NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe, who was a key participant in the White House policy review, said in an interview recently that one goal of any new policy would be to provide much needed clarity to a program that has been drifting.
Slashdot Mirror
Your problem is with the vendors who lock you into SQL Anywhere 5 and don't permit enough concurrent users on it. If that's your basis for judging SQL Anywhere, it's not really fair for you to judge it. Considering ease of administration, ease of development, efficient use of hardware, platform availability, SQL compliance, features, performance, cost, documentation and support, SQL Anywhere is a terrific product, and generally my choice for small businesses and department-level applications.
To clarify, the phrase should be "hoist with their own petard" (or hoisted, in modern usage), not "hoist by their own petard." A petard is a bomb that would be hoisted into position to breach a wall or door.
People who don't know what a petard is commonly hear the phrase "hoisted with his own petard" and think the petard did the hoisting, and then they misrepeat the phrase as "hoisted by his own petard."
Common usage may have replaced the obsolete verb hoise with its participle, hoist, but it has not changed petards from explosive devices into lifting machines.
It can be simpler just to return a result set, as you suggest. I often use a temporary table to allow pre- or post-processing of the results. For example, if I have a payroll application that prints paychecks, I will typically use a temporary table so I can first display a list of checks to be printed, then after the user accepts that list I print the checks, then if the user confirms that the print operation completed successfully I record the checks in a permanent table in the database.
Sometimes in the preprocessing phase I allow editing of the temporary table. Payroll is not a good example of this because it needs to be controlled closely by the application, but something like an address list can be created in a temp table by an SP, then the user can edit the list before printing it.
I understand some people use SPs for everything, as a security measure. I'm not that paranoid.
Stored procs are great, though, for processing lots of data on the server, without wasting resources (network bandwidth, client memory and CPU) sending the data to a client for processing and then posting results back to the database. Even if you have to do record-by-record processing instead of set operations, it's much more efficient to use a cursor on the server than a loop through a resultset on the client.
Stored procs are good at encapsulating a series of operations done periodically, such as end-of-month processing. In some databases you can define an event on the server that will automatically fire the SP. With such an event on the server rather than on a client machine, you don't need to worry about whether the correct client is running and connected when the event is supposed to fire.
Complex reports often require more data crunching that just a single query. I use an SP to process the data and leave the results in a temporary table. My client program runs the SP, then reports with a simple SELECT on the newly generated result table.
I like to use president@whitehouse.gov, but that address is usually registered already.
For an inside look at why and how Yahoo uses PHP, see Michael Radwin's talks.
It is playing in Jacksonville, Florida, and in Washington, D.C. See here where it's showing.
Google's first match on "IBM Novell investment": http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2004/03/p r04029.html
The answer is, the government will spend that money on something else, or (better) leave it with taxpayers so they can spend it on something else. The money will then flow to other jobs, in businesses and industries that are more competitive, where the government should be encouraging capital concentration and job growth.
That answer goes to software publishers, fruit farmers, coal miners, steel makers, missile manufacturers, and any other interest that thinks it should be paid, not for the value of its goods or services, but because such a fat pig is entitled to its place at the public trough. Off to slaughter, piggies!
Right that a Web API would fill a need. But Joel says the Web API will only be on Longhorn clients, not available on older versions of Windows. Joel says Microsoft is betting that the new apps on that API will be so compelling that customers will have a reason to upgrade Windows, and Joel thinks Microsoft will lose that bet.
For Microsoft's strategy to succeed, it has to get developers to produce compelling apps that require the new operating system. Microsoft had trouble getting developers to develop for Windows back when DOS was king, and had to prime the market with its own Windows applications. But after Word for Windows and Excel dazzled users, other application developers had to follow and recreate their DOS products in Windows.
But Joel thinks the new API will not improve web apps so much that users and developers will need to flock to it. It'll be interesting to see what applications Microsoft comes up with to show off the new API and attract upgraders and developers to the new platform.
I was there, and Windows 3.1 ruled the desktop absolutely. Remember, Windows 95 was originally promised for 1993. Its impending release held customers back from looking at alternatives. Any potential competitor against Microsoft vaporware should look back carefully at that history.
OS/2 had all those advantages, plus a GUI, complete with a superior version of Solitaire (the killer app of Windows 3.1). It also supported all Windows 3.1 apps. OS/2 was the superior desktop platform back then; Linux was a command-line hacker's toy.
As others have said, Windows 3.1 at that time had far more GUI applications in 1994 than Linux has now. Most important, it had Word and Excel. Did Linux even support the text-mode equivalents of WordPerfect or 1-2-3, whose users were already defecting to Word and Excel?
Maybe the folks at Novell ignored OS/2 back then, because their world view comprised DOS clients and Novell servers, even as Windows 3.11 for Workgroups was seeding that world's destruction. I'm glad you recognize that .NET will happen because Internet Explorer is fully deployed and the .NET client libraries are shipping. Please do what you can to give the Linux platform the compatibility it needs to remain a viable server platform for .NET web applications.
I can appreciate the attraction of building another .NET competitor that might beat .NET to market. But please remember these points:
Your challenge with Mono is not to defeat Microsoft, but to help Linux survive as a platform for web services.
My personal opinion is that the PHP development team should tackle thread-safety, but even if they don't they should update their test servers and certify Apache 2 with mpm_prefork. Their convenience is not a good enough reason for holding all PHP-dependent websites back to an old version of Apache.
A data point on the quality of outsourced tech support:
My neighbor's HP Pavilion kept putting a window on her screen last week, saying her Windows license had expired, and that she needed to enter her credit card number and expiration to validate her copy of Windows, but not to worry because her credit card would not be charged.
My neighbor is in her 80s, but her memory is good and she didn't remember anything about an expiration date for Windows. So she called HP support and got a man with an Indian accent. She told him the problem, and he asked, "How old is your computer?" She told him it was a couple years old, and he said, "If it's that old, Windows could be expired. Try entering the information as requested and see what happens."
Fortunately, my neighbor is much smarter than HP's outsourced call center, and didn't take their advice. She called me and we cleaned mimail.s off her computer. She promises she won't buy from HP again.
Dell offers only Red Hat Advanced Server or Red Hat Professional (which is obsolete), so I bought the PowerEdge with no OS. P4-2.4 GHz, 1 GB DDR, 36 GB 10K rpm SCSI for $817 plus tax. SuSE 9 Pro installed without a hitch.
Dell must be moving a lot of these no-OS boxes. Their official support has been quite RH-centric, but the new website has a page that directly addresses other distros. SuSE recently announced that Dell was working more closely with them, and SuSE has certified a bunch of Dell machines.
Yes, the odbc module is in the public domain, but it isn't being maintained, and there are some known problems.
If it were necessary to vote in a public location where officials can exclude outside influences, then voters would not be allowed to use absentee ballots.
I agree, ODBC is a critical feature for a "glue" language like Python. There's mxODBC, but commercial use costs $75 per end-user or $1,250 per developer. Most of Python's other database modules are free, but ODBC is needed to fill a lot of gaps.
I'm afraid that Lego is not returning to its roots (building blocks), but may just cut the licensed products (Star Wars, Harry Potter) and concentrate on its own Bionicles line.
I was not thrilled to see that my second grader brought home a Bionicles novella from the Scholastic book fair (which is increasingly a toy fair), especially after I looked at it and saw a grammatical error in the book's very first sentence. Lego has a whole mythology about Bionicles, and that's attractive to kids. But my son lost a couple essential pieces of his Bionicle within days of getting it, and I'm not going to encourage this overpriced, intellectually shallow, proprietary product line as a hobby.
Unfortunately, I could not find more generic Lego blocks in my Christmas shopping. There were some overpriced ($30-$40) Star Wars kits, and a space shuttle for $100, but nothing I wanted to buy. I'm beginning to associate Lego with brands like Scholastic and Disney, that have turned their once-respected product lines into brands of dumb, overpriced junk.