Thats what really bugs the hell out of me... If Office only cost 50 bucks i'd probably buy a copy for home use. But there's no way i'm going to pay a few hundred bucks so I can use it at home. I'll use my company laptop or open office.
AFAIK software for personal use is way to expensive.
I am certainly not advocating anything as primitive as sticking to a basic SQL dialect and a subset of database features - that is a waste of the database.
Decaff, I think you would be shocked to see how much of that goes on out there....
DBA's do more than database administration these days. Maybe in very large shops they are restricted to strictly database administration but for me, its probably only 20% of my job.
Nowadays DBA groups manage change control, administer the applications running on the database (Peoplesoft, Oracle applications, SAP, etc), set standards and help developers use the database effectively. (+ more)
Usually when a development group asks me why they should move their database support to our group I only need to ask them a couple questions. Shortly after that they become quiet. Regardless of which database you'd like to have you need a REAL dba. Whether its Oracle, DB2, SQL*Server, mySql or postgreSQL. If you don't think so, your only fooling yourself.
As for hordes of overpriced DBA's, its the same as hordes of overpriced developers. Unfortunately in IT today there are tons of people willing to do the job but most of them are average at best. We find it very difficult to hire good DBA's.
I'm a DBA, so I guess i'm biased. Portable code is nice _IF_ you do it correctly. How frequently am I forced to support 'portable' applications that are performance hogs? Too often thats for sure.
I have no problem with database abstraction but you might as well be using flat files if your not taking advantage of a databases features.
I've seen applications (big and popular ones) use tables instead of sequences (Oracle). Yeah, lock entire table, read row, increment value, update row, unlock table is much faster than a sequence when you have a hundred concurrent users doing updates... Brilliant design, but I guess it runs on all the databases they want to support.
Saying your not going to take advantage of a databases features is like someone programming in java saying they aren't going to use netbeans cause it won't be as easy to port the code.
Ok, probably a bad example but i'm not a developer.
In my example above, here we are paying license fee's for Oracle when they wrote their code to run on SQL Server or DB2 or whatever rdbms they had in mind.
I strongly believe customers should be yelling more at their software suppliers for shoddy code that will run 'anywhere'.
The filesystem is an important factor but its just one piece to the puzzle. Bottlenecks could exist anywhere... When talking about disk you have to make sure it is indeed the root cause of the problem.
ie, we had a job that would take 40 minutes to complete and it needed to run hourly.. That only allowed 20 minutes for users to analyze those results. The root cause of the problem was the poorly designed application but we couldn't get management approval to fix it.
A contributing factor to the problem was the server... Even tho we had multiple disks, they were only setup in concat mode. We convinced the unix team to strip the data and our job went from 40 minutes to 20. (If we were able to properly redesign the app, including the disk change, we could probably had most of the application almost real-time...)
In another case a DBA had set their SGA to have a buffer cache of 1 Meg. Server was tuned, app was tuned but not the database.
What i'm trying to say is.. if your experiencing performance problems you have to make sure you find the root cause before you make any recommendations.
This last season so far is better than anything voyager put out... I'm not a true trekkie, I don't go around wearing the uniform or watch episodes over and over but IMHO Enterprise (especially this season) is much better than Voyager.
But I guess i'm in the minority. Didn't Battlestar Gallatica get a lower viewership than enterprise last weekend?
The nice thing about flash type media is that it requires alot less juice to power. If you were to put a small HD in there it they would have to put in a bigger power supply or the battery life would be even more pathetic.
But what are the reasons behind that depression? Knowing that death could come any day? Not having the same physical abilities as before?
I'm lucky, both my sets of grandparents are still alive but for the past 5 years or so they haven't really 'lived'. My grandfather used to go hunting Moose by himself but now he is unable to do that. (For those that don't know, moose are pretty damn big and heavy..)
He used to own a fishing/hunting camp that you could only get to by seaplane, etc, etc. Alot of the things he loved to do he can't anymore because of age.
Personally i'd love to live forever but i'd be content if I knew for certain there was an afterlife as to which I could be an observer... One of my biggest fears/disappointments is not knowing how human life will be in 200, 500 or 10 thousand years.
Do you have any references to good reading material on how software patents hinder innovation? I don't know much about it and would like to read up on some of the arguments.. Specifically how do they hinder innovation?
in the first place then they'd be foolish enough to switch to an MS product..
Wait now, we use use PSFT in house! Doh!
In all seriousness, i'm not that impressed with peoplesoft... We use the HR, Helpdesk and eRecruit packages... I've been the prime DBA for the latter two. You can say what you want about Oracle products being complex, unwieldy but it provides tremendous flexibility. If you know what your doing there's a ton of stats and debugging info available to you. Psft on the other hand is an absolutely nightmare to tune.
I went by the name Dergan, first person to organize a defeat of the white bunny. I, myself, hated Myth but after that event I came to respect him greatly. Just like everyone can't be the hero, not many people have the same level of charisma to persuade others. Now, he may be totally different in RL.:)
Like I said, in this case player controled outcome wasn't expected but I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who took part in the event that didn't have an awesome time. Yeah, we were all ticked off with the outcome but realistically the dev's hands were tied.
Like another said, its impossible to have divergent story lines with the number of servers these days.
Thats true not everyone can be the hero but there is something exciting about being part of something that could change the outcome. In the end the dev's 'cheated' in order to get the storyline to progress the same as the other servers.
In this case, I wasn't the hero, I didn't organize the defence but taking part in it was the most memorable experience I have had in 5+ years of playing MMORPGS.
I disagree 100% with your post. You don't need to have be a powergamer in order to make a name for yourself, it all depends on game design.
I used to play Asheron's Call and there was one particular event which I double will ever be replicated again in an MMORPG. In AC there was a heavy storyline which progressed each month, (something I haven't seen in other mmorpgs since btw). During this one particular month there was a quest where Bael'Zharon (sp? been a long time) was contained in a crystal shard deep inside a dungeon. If this shard was broken he'd be released and wreak havoc upon the world. Even tho releasing him was against the 'beliefs' of most players the developers counted on us to release him or the storyline wouldn't progress. They assumed that because the quest was there players would do it just 'because'.
Anyways, to make a long story short on our server one character decided to make a stand. He, along with his guild, solved the dungeon and found the shard but instead of destroying it he said, lets protect it and mounted a defense. You had to be pk(pvp) to get into this dungeon and soon the server rallied around 2 sides. One side protecting it, which was a pretty big task. This shard had to be protected 24x7, any lapse would allow someone to destroy it. And the other side bent on releasing their master.
The defense mounted was astounding and surprised the developers, they were at a loss what to do. One server couldn't diverge from the storyline, the tech could only support one, so this shard had to die. Fruitfully they watched attack after attack fail, although there were a couple of close calls.
You didn't have to be high level to participate in this quest. Even low levels played a part, they shipped supplies, patroled looking for groups of pk'ers preparing to attack. I dunno how many times a report would come in and we all get prepared for battle. The thing about PK in AC was that there were consequences, you dropped your most valuable equipment on death. And it while being high level helped it didn't guarantee success, there is skill involved. (Thats another debate but you get the point..)
But back to my original point, this guy Mithrandia (sp?) made a name for himself because of the game design... The game allowed him to make a decision which had direct consequences (even if they were unintended). But it wasn't the only factor, the biggest factor was that he had the personality/social skills to persaude people to do what he wanted. Sure, he was the max level in the game but it wouldn't have mattered if he couldn't convince others to make a stand with him.
So its a combination of factors, game design and personalities and unfortunately todays MMORPGS are lacking in both. But I firmly believe that if the first is there people will rise to the challenge.
Granted I started with a Vic 20 keying in thousands of lines of code from them old Compute or was it Byte magazines (can't remember..) When they came out with the checksum program that was a godsend. I wrote simple programs like an inventory system for my dad's coin collection, etc but nothing too fancy.
Anyways, I have to say it really took off for me once I started to run my own BBS. 2400 baud on my 286, TriBBS if I recall correctly. Setting up Fidonet wasn't the most enjoyable tho but I have to say I learnt alot both programming and configuring software.
I started my kids at age 2, well not programming but getting them familiar with computers. My daugther is 5 and has been able to switch cd's and play all her games since she was about 2. Educational games are pretty good, they teach and are actually fun.
If she gets more interested i'll teach her how to install new games, start using productivity software like Word. Next year she starts getting real homework so it may be handy. Then i'll show her some other apps, maybe she'll have some school assignments where I can work in some other software.
If she actually starts getting interested in programming i'm not sure where i'd start. Maybe something similar to visual basic or web page stuff..... If she yearns for more then i'll get serious, C, Java, Perl... It will all depend on what she's interested in.
Long time to ponder that tho.. Maybe i'll have my computer reduced to a pile a pulp by then. I don't think i'd recommend the industry to her, i'd advise something that didn't involve sitting behind a desk most of the day.
No, people don't go broke when they get sick here but would you rather get sick in a country where you can get immediate care (and possibly lose the shirt off your back) or a country where you have to wait 6 months for a specialist?
I'm Canadian and unfortunately i've had to deal with the healthcare system first hand. Canadian doctors seem to undertreat patients and drag things out. I can't speak for the US system but from what I hear you can basically get in for special tests with little wait time.
So the question is, would you rather live in a country with 'free' healthcare but extremely long wait times or a country where you can get immediate specialist care?
You can't put a price on life and the sooner you get treatment for a problem the better the outcome. It could easily mean the difference between life and death.
But hey, you may be lucky and never experience a life threatening illness.
But for what they charge up here for an 8x10 its definately cheaper to print at home. I bought a pack of 100 sheets of high quality kodak paper for less than 50$ (may be cheaper now, that was over a year ago..)
I use my HP K60 printer and while I can see slight pixelation 95% of the people that visit our house can't tell the difference between photo lab and our printer. Some we've even blown up to 8x10.
I hope they replace the software ASAP! I've had the pleasure of supporting their CRM software for the past 10 months and its been the most painfull experience i've had in awhile. This weekend we had to upgrade peopletools because of a severe design issue which caused insane locking in the database.
Sorry, I was going by my faulty memory.. I recalled somewhere hearing 1.67 billion a day but I found these resources on a quick search.. So its more like 167 billion to day and 200 million a day...
Temporary occupation of Iraq: $1 billion to $4 billion per month
until the next asteroid hits and were like a sitting duck at an NRA convention. But hey, you can put your name down on the "leave me here" list.
There are MANY reasons that we should colonize outer space.. From asteroids, diseases, war, terrorism, etc, etc. Its like the old eggs in the same basket saying.. Although the Earth is a rather big basket.....
Personally I think the money they spent on the iraq war would have been better used at NASA. But your right, the US may find itself in deep financial trouble in the future.... The next powerhouses will be China and India because of their population. May take 20-30 years but at some point the US isn't going to be the only big kid on the block.
Iraq is costing almost 2 billion a day... So in 8 days more money is spent than NASA's entire budget! And while I do support the Iraq war I don't believe the US should have put up the bulk of the resources to do it. You can't bring democracy to a country that doesn't want it.. It took hundreds of years for it to develop in other countries. But thats another thread.
Personally I don't have a blog so others have something to do while surfing the net. Its pretty boring actually.. I post some of the stories that catch my eye, things going on in my life, my dreams, etc.
Like a PnP journal, it will be nice to go back and see some of the things that interested me in 10,20 hopefully 50 years. The benefit to having it online is that I could post/read from my phone if I wanted to.
Personally, i'm not a 'phone talker'... So friends and family (whom most of which I live a great distance from) can login, see whats going on and see some recent pictures of our adventures.
Now saying that, I wish my blog had a 'private' area where I could post some of my thoughts.. Those damn web crawlers pick up on everything!! You can't really make a post about the new co-op student if your wife's mom is reading the site!
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK software for personal use is way to expensive.
Decaff, I think you would be shocked to see how much of that goes on out there....
Nowadays DBA groups manage change control, administer the applications running on the database (Peoplesoft, Oracle applications, SAP, etc), set standards and help developers use the database effectively. (+ more)
Usually when a development group asks me why they should move their database support to our group I only need to ask them a couple questions. Shortly after that they become quiet. Regardless of which database you'd like to have you need a REAL dba. Whether its Oracle, DB2, SQL*Server, mySql or postgreSQL. If you don't think so, your only fooling yourself.
As for hordes of overpriced DBA's, its the same as hordes of overpriced developers. Unfortunately in IT today there are tons of people willing to do the job but most of them are average at best. We find it very difficult to hire good DBA's.
I have no problem with database abstraction but you might as well be using flat files if your not taking advantage of a databases features.
I've seen applications (big and popular ones) use tables instead of sequences (Oracle). Yeah, lock entire table, read row, increment value, update row, unlock table is much faster than a sequence when you have a hundred concurrent users doing updates... Brilliant design, but I guess it runs on all the databases they want to support.
Saying your not going to take advantage of a databases features is like someone programming in java saying they aren't going to use netbeans cause it won't be as easy to port the code. Ok, probably a bad example but i'm not a developer.
In my example above, here we are paying license fee's for Oracle when they wrote their code to run on SQL Server or DB2 or whatever rdbms they had in mind.
I strongly believe customers should be yelling more at their software suppliers for shoddy code that will run 'anywhere'.
ie, we had a job that would take 40 minutes to complete and it needed to run hourly.. That only allowed 20 minutes for users to analyze those results. The root cause of the problem was the poorly designed application but we couldn't get management approval to fix it.
A contributing factor to the problem was the server... Even tho we had multiple disks, they were only setup in concat mode. We convinced the unix team to strip the data and our job went from 40 minutes to 20. (If we were able to properly redesign the app, including the disk change, we could probably had most of the application almost real-time...)
In another case a DBA had set their SGA to have a buffer cache of 1 Meg. Server was tuned, app was tuned but not the database.
What i'm trying to say is.. if your experiencing performance problems you have to make sure you find the root cause before you make any recommendations.
But I guess i'm in the minority. Didn't Battlestar Gallatica get a lower viewership than enterprise last weekend?
The nice thing about flash type media is that it requires alot less juice to power. If you were to put a small HD in there it they would have to put in a bigger power supply or the battery life would be even more pathetic.
I'm lucky, both my sets of grandparents are still alive but for the past 5 years or so they haven't really 'lived'. My grandfather used to go hunting Moose by himself but now he is unable to do that. (For those that don't know, moose are pretty damn big and heavy..)
He used to own a fishing/hunting camp that you could only get to by seaplane, etc, etc. Alot of the things he loved to do he can't anymore because of age.
Personally i'd love to live forever but i'd be content if I knew for certain there was an afterlife as to which I could be an observer... One of my biggest fears/disappointments is not knowing how human life will be in 200, 500 or 10 thousand years.
Personally I am enjoying the series.. I think the current season is the best yet and on par with anything Voyager or Deep Space 9 tossed out.
I did a quick google and read a couple of articles which glossed over the topic but nothing indepth. I'll check them out, tnx.
Do you have any references to good reading material on how software patents hinder innovation? I don't know much about it and would like to read up on some of the arguments.. Specifically how do they hinder innovation?
Wait now, we use use PSFT in house! Doh!
In all seriousness, i'm not that impressed with peoplesoft... We use the HR, Helpdesk and eRecruit packages... I've been the prime DBA for the latter two. You can say what you want about Oracle products being complex, unwieldy but it provides tremendous flexibility. If you know what your doing there's a ton of stats and debugging info available to you. Psft on the other hand is an absolutely nightmare to tune.
Like I said, in this case player controled outcome wasn't expected but I think you'd be hard pressed to find people who took part in the event that didn't have an awesome time. Yeah, we were all ticked off with the outcome but realistically the dev's hands were tied.
Like another said, its impossible to have divergent story lines with the number of servers these days.
In this case, I wasn't the hero, I didn't organize the defence but taking part in it was the most memorable experience I have had in 5+ years of playing MMORPGS.
I used to play Asheron's Call and there was one particular event which I double will ever be replicated again in an MMORPG. In AC there was a heavy storyline which progressed each month, (something I haven't seen in other mmorpgs since btw). During this one particular month there was a quest where Bael'Zharon (sp? been a long time) was contained in a crystal shard deep inside a dungeon. If this shard was broken he'd be released and wreak havoc upon the world. Even tho releasing him was against the 'beliefs' of most players the developers counted on us to release him or the storyline wouldn't progress. They assumed that because the quest was there players would do it just 'because'.
Anyways, to make a long story short on our server one character decided to make a stand. He, along with his guild, solved the dungeon and found the shard but instead of destroying it he said, lets protect it and mounted a defense. You had to be pk(pvp) to get into this dungeon and soon the server rallied around 2 sides. One side protecting it, which was a pretty big task. This shard had to be protected 24x7, any lapse would allow someone to destroy it. And the other side bent on releasing their master.
The defense mounted was astounding and surprised the developers, they were at a loss what to do. One server couldn't diverge from the storyline, the tech could only support one, so this shard had to die. Fruitfully they watched attack after attack fail, although there were a couple of close calls.
You didn't have to be high level to participate in this quest. Even low levels played a part, they shipped supplies, patroled looking for groups of pk'ers preparing to attack. I dunno how many times a report would come in and we all get prepared for battle. The thing about PK in AC was that there were consequences, you dropped your most valuable equipment on death. And it while being high level helped it didn't guarantee success, there is skill involved. (Thats another debate but you get the point..)
But back to my original point, this guy Mithrandia (sp?) made a name for himself because of the game design... The game allowed him to make a decision which had direct consequences (even if they were unintended). But it wasn't the only factor, the biggest factor was that he had the personality/social skills to persaude people to do what he wanted. Sure, he was the max level in the game but it wouldn't have mattered if he couldn't convince others to make a stand with him.
So its a combination of factors, game design and personalities and unfortunately todays MMORPGS are lacking in both. But I firmly believe that if the first is there people will rise to the challenge.
Anyways, I have to say it really took off for me once I started to run my own BBS. 2400 baud on my 286, TriBBS if I recall correctly. Setting up Fidonet wasn't the most enjoyable tho but I have to say I learnt alot both programming and configuring software.
I started my kids at age 2, well not programming but getting them familiar with computers. My daugther is 5 and has been able to switch cd's and play all her games since she was about 2. Educational games are pretty good, they teach and are actually fun.
If she gets more interested i'll teach her how to install new games, start using productivity software like Word. Next year she starts getting real homework so it may be handy. Then i'll show her some other apps, maybe she'll have some school assignments where I can work in some other software.
If she actually starts getting interested in programming i'm not sure where i'd start. Maybe something similar to visual basic or web page stuff..... If she yearns for more then i'll get serious, C, Java, Perl... It will all depend on what she's interested in.
Long time to ponder that tho.. Maybe i'll have my computer reduced to a pile a pulp by then. I don't think i'd recommend the industry to her, i'd advise something that didn't involve sitting behind a desk most of the day.
I'm Canadian and unfortunately i've had to deal with the healthcare system first hand. Canadian doctors seem to undertreat patients and drag things out. I can't speak for the US system but from what I hear you can basically get in for special tests with little wait time.
So the question is, would you rather live in a country with 'free' healthcare but extremely long wait times or a country where you can get immediate specialist care?
You can't put a price on life and the sooner you get treatment for a problem the better the outcome. It could easily mean the difference between life and death.
But hey, you may be lucky and never experience a life threatening illness.
I thought it was dogsleds, 'eh?
I use my HP K60 printer and while I can see slight pixelation 95% of the people that visit our house can't tell the difference between photo lab and our printer. Some we've even blown up to 8x10.
Temporary occupation of Iraq: $1 billion to $4 billion per month
177 mill per day
There are MANY reasons that we should colonize outer space.. From asteroids, diseases, war, terrorism, etc, etc. Its like the old eggs in the same basket saying.. Although the Earth is a rather big basket.....
Iraq is costing almost 2 billion a day... So in 8 days more money is spent than NASA's entire budget! And while I do support the Iraq war I don't believe the US should have put up the bulk of the resources to do it. You can't bring democracy to a country that doesn't want it.. It took hundreds of years for it to develop in other countries. But thats another thread.
Like a PnP journal, it will be nice to go back and see some of the things that interested me in 10,20 hopefully 50 years. The benefit to having it online is that I could post/read from my phone if I wanted to.
Personally, i'm not a 'phone talker'... So friends and family (whom most of which I live a great distance from) can login, see whats going on and see some recent pictures of our adventures.
Now saying that, I wish my blog had a 'private' area where I could post some of my thoughts.. Those damn web crawlers pick up on everything!! You can't really make a post about the new co-op student if your wife's mom is reading the site!