I only know of one that operates in that fashion, and it's not really a relational database, but a multi-value database that has an awful SQL interface to be able to say that they support a relational model. The query plans that include more than one join become cartesian joins with filtering, making any SQL query that has even a bit of weight to it unusable on datasets over ten thousand rows.
Needless to say, the same queries in Postgres run with very good query plans, and are two orders of magnitude faster even in small datasets.
Are you from that legendary coastal America? Because around here, people don't know that the word theory has two different meanings, and distrust anything that wasn't invented when they were in their 20s. Just today I saw a woman, probably in her 60s, step back from a touch screen, claiming that she didn't trust the machine.
Come on, look at the feature comparisons, and tell me which actual features of Ultimate make it any faster than Professional, or even Home Premium.
If Ultimate was actually faster than any other version of 7, wouldn't it be in tech news sites everywhere? Ultimate is about more features, not about more speed.
The cost of medical school sure is a reason why care in the US is so awfully expensive. A doctor in Spain gets through medical school for under $10K, total. That would bring us a whole lot more doctors, and far lower doctor salaries.
It'd also even out the difference between specialists and primary care physicians. Out there in Europe and Japan world, most specialists really don't make a whole lot more than someone doing primary care.
Why not be a self-documenting programmer and explain to them how they can make the work relationship a bit better? Even if your personal UI is quirky, people can learn it if you summon your inner Clippy.
Yes, there were religious overtones everywhere, but that doesn't mean that, for the most part, they weren't making it all up as they went along. It's especially obvious with the cylon reveals, many of which came without even an inch of foreshadowing. The creators themselves said that the only reason Starbuck wasn't a cylon was that it seemed to obvious!
From where I stand, it didn't seem that the writers knew where things were going, and just inserted large amounts of foreshadowing as they went, like in Babylon 5. Instead, the feeling is that the writers left all kinds of questions open, without ever having an idea of what the answers were themselves, and in the end struggled to make answers match, like the whole silliness of the theater scenes.
For a similar amount of nonsense, go look at the first couple of seasons of Lost: There's no plot, no cool mystery that will be revealed, just random teasing with no final product. They might as well be part of a software sales team, promising features without ever having the code to actually deliver them.
Oblivion has a great solution to this: Level up poorly. The game is extremely easy if you are strategic when you level up, and get your three x5s in stats you want. Level up poorly a few times and you'll suddenly find yourself quite weak in comparison to your enemies, and everything will feel like a challenge.
On the other hand, you have the opposite, like in Shadow Complex: As the game goes on, it only gets easier and easier, until it is so unbelievable easy that it's just a chore to go from point A to point B.
A game should have a few upward bumps in the difficulty level as you go along, precisely to provide a bit of texture to the experience.
If your HR department is unable to understand the hiring manager's needs, it's precisely in this economy that you can use the help separating the wheat from the chaff: Do you really want to go through 800 job applications? It's easy to spend a lot of time going through applicants. In a small company, spending much time in the preliminary steps of hiring might have higher opportunity costs than hiring someone else to do that for you. A good headhunter has interviewed each applicant he gets, and might be able to save you a lot of time.
The problem is figuring out who the quality headhunters are in the first place. Someone that sends you a fake resume from an applicant is a good headhunter, period.
You might have been a lot less happy if it was the same two cars, but it was you getting t-boned.
Re:A better way to manage downloaded games?
on
Why Games Cost $60
·
· Score: 1
This was the state of affairs last year, unless you called customer service and waited about 3 weeks for someone with the power to make those changes to come back to you. Since, they've released an a license migration process that will make that work:
+5 Is not enough for the value of the parent post. Optimistic Locking is the right answer in 99% of the cases. The issue then becomes how you want to deal with re-submitted of changes. If the entities to be saved are small and very atomic, asking the user to retype, making sure their changes are still sensible on the modified record makes sense. If your records are very large and/or very complex, then you might consider using some business knowledge to see if changes to the record can be grouped logically, and maybe even committed individually: If someone changed data for X shipment of a purchase order, while someone else changed Y, then the changes don't really have to conflict.
But whatever you do, build it around optimistic locking: Don't try to lock a record because somebody just has it open somewhere on a remote location. That path leads to madness.
There's still quite a few companies that relied on Pick-BASIC programs built on top of Pick's multivalued database. There's millions of lines of code running in those systems, and given how different a multivalued database is from a RDBMS, migrating away is not exactly easy.
What do this companies do? They run all the derivatives linked in that wikipedia page, typically running on top of some flavor of Unix. The Pick OS might not run directly on the hardware, but for most user's POV, things aren't really all that different than they were 40 years ago: PROC and Pick-BASIC are still used in pretty much their original form. The main difference, other than the improved hardware, is the extended libraries created to deal with modern technologies. After all, who'd be crazy enough to build a native XML parser for that relic?
I have: Some bonus form of malware that hides as a Firefox extension, and redirects 15% of google searches to some shopping site instead of the proper link. It was easy to remove with regedit once I knew what I was looking for, but malware bytes didn't hit it.
More than that, they expect people to have a very similar concept of what rational is. When people's different motivations are taken into account, what you get is a model that behaves like a real model, but that can't really be used to predict the future results of the market close enough as to let anyone make money from using it.
It's harder than that. What a speculator does is try to guess what other people think the majority will find popular. Read about the Keynesian beauty contest: It shows why the market, while somewhat based in fundamentals, is inherently unstable.
It's not about danger, but about cost. A friend of mine, now working for NASA, did his Masters thesis on the logistics of a Mars mission. His estimates not only required major delays as preliminary, unmanned missions had to be done well in advance to generate fuel and oxygen for the stay, but just the cost of designing, building and launching a vessel to get to Mars without getting the astronauts irradiated would be huge. You could have over a thousand little rovers running around in mars for the price of sending two humans for a stay of very few weeks. With such a difference in scale, does it even matter if the rovers are more limited?
And you call that an equalizer? Realistically, even a million of people with 401k investors have very little power, yet by investing, they are giving financial companies money to play with.
If anything, the major governance issue that we see today in corporations is that small shareholders mean squat, as the people in charge of the operations can bleed the company for years without much risk. They get gains when the company does well, and lose very little when it doesn't. The power of executives is lower than it was back in the 1830s, but not by that much.
In the end, the ones that would win here are the electronics manufacturers that then would sell us ways to bypass the protection, just like all that region locking DVDs did was to make sure that Europeans would buy off brand players that can play anything anyway.
Ever try to do GIS in a key-value store? Statistical analysis? Data mining? Billing?
Key value stores are great for high throughput applications that have very simple and predictable access modes. But for anything else, you are much better of with a RDBMS.
The front line customer apps is not where the money is. It never was, and it never will.
Your main point is valid: The best selling games are typically the most advertised. However, you are missing one more piece to the argument: There's plenty of great games that, no matter how much money you sink on advertising them, could never be huge sellers.
Marketing can't do miracles: It sure can make up for bad quality, but what it can't do is make an unpopular premise work. Would 30 million worth of advertising make Hearts of Iron III sell 3 million copies in the US, regardless of its quality? There's no way you can convince the mass gaming public, the buyers of the Call of Duties and Halos, to go buy a slow paced strategy game. The fact is that, no matter how finely crafted a game is, the first step is making people being interested in the game's premise and main mechanics, and that's something that requires aiming at the mass market in the first place.
Many developers just don't craft their game thinking about that prototypical mass market consumer, and then find that their great game sells half a million copies. The reason that we are seeing good quality more related to sales is not just the advent of gamerankings and metacritic, but the fact that publishers are making it a lot harder for talented studios to take on projects that aren't even marketable in the first place. Great quirky games are now limited to publishers like Atlus, and have budgets designed to keep the studio alive even if the sales are nowhere near the top of any sales chart.
As the industry ages, and learns what the potential of each idea really is, we see the proper amount of development and marketing put into most game designs, which helps fuel the same forces you talk about: Nobody wants to sink millions in marketing for a bad game, and nobody wants to put a lot of resources into a game that does not have a good chance at appealing to the market. Who loses? Those of use that want to see games that aren't aimed straight at the mainstream. It's sad that Beyond Good and Evil didn't sell, but wouldn't it be worse if it had never been created, and instead we had yet another well polished shooter?
Shadow of the Colossus didn't spend nearly as much as Madden games, but it sure had some reasonable marketing push, including some TV ads, and some serious push by Gamestop.
The reason that those two games didn't sell all that well is not the lack of marketing, or the lack of quality, but the fact that they were in no way designed for the mass market. It's the same thing that happens with movies: No amount of advertising of Grave of the Fireflies, an amazing animated movie about war, would turn it into a blockbuster. It's too far from mass market sensibilities to bring mass audiences.
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I only know of one that operates in that fashion, and it's not really a relational database, but a multi-value database that has an awful SQL interface to be able to say that they support a relational model. The query plans that include more than one join become cartesian joins with filtering, making any SQL query that has even a bit of weight to it unusable on datasets over ten thousand rows.
Needless to say, the same queries in Postgres run with very good query plans, and are two orders of magnitude faster even in small datasets.
They do?
Are you from that legendary coastal America? Because around here, people don't know that the word theory has two different meanings, and distrust anything that wasn't invented when they were in their 20s. Just today I saw a woman, probably in her 60s, step back from a touch screen, claiming that she didn't trust the machine.
Is it you, Junis?
Come on, look at the feature comparisons, and tell me which actual features of Ultimate make it any faster than Professional, or even Home Premium.
If Ultimate was actually faster than any other version of 7, wouldn't it be in tech news sites everywhere? Ultimate is about more features, not about more speed.
The cost of medical school sure is a reason why care in the US is so awfully expensive. A doctor in Spain gets through medical school for under $10K, total. That would bring us a whole lot more doctors, and far lower doctor salaries.
It'd also even out the difference between specialists and primary care physicians. Out there in Europe and Japan world, most specialists really don't make a whole lot more than someone doing primary care.
Why not be a self-documenting programmer and explain to them how they can make the work relationship a bit better? Even if your personal UI is quirky, people can learn it if you summon your inner Clippy.
Yes, there were religious overtones everywhere, but that doesn't mean that, for the most part, they weren't making it all up as they went along. It's especially obvious with the cylon reveals, many of which came without even an inch of foreshadowing. The creators themselves said that the only reason Starbuck wasn't a cylon was that it seemed to obvious!
From where I stand, it didn't seem that the writers knew where things were going, and just inserted large amounts of foreshadowing as they went, like in Babylon 5. Instead, the feeling is that the writers left all kinds of questions open, without ever having an idea of what the answers were themselves, and in the end struggled to make answers match, like the whole silliness of the theater scenes.
For a similar amount of nonsense, go look at the first couple of seasons of Lost: There's no plot, no cool mystery that will be revealed, just random teasing with no final product. They might as well be part of a software sales team, promising features without ever having the code to actually deliver them.
Oblivion has a great solution to this: Level up poorly. The game is extremely easy if you are strategic when you level up, and get your three x5s in stats you want. Level up poorly a few times and you'll suddenly find yourself quite weak in comparison to your enemies, and everything will feel like a challenge.
On the other hand, you have the opposite, like in Shadow Complex: As the game goes on, it only gets easier and easier, until it is so unbelievable easy that it's just a chore to go from point A to point B.
A game should have a few upward bumps in the difficulty level as you go along, precisely to provide a bit of texture to the experience.
If your HR department is unable to understand the hiring manager's needs, it's precisely in this economy that you can use the help separating the wheat from the chaff: Do you really want to go through 800 job applications? It's easy to spend a lot of time going through applicants. In a small company, spending much time in the preliminary steps of hiring might have higher opportunity costs than hiring someone else to do that for you. A good headhunter has interviewed each applicant he gets, and might be able to save you a lot of time.
The problem is figuring out who the quality headhunters are in the first place. Someone that sends you a fake resume from an applicant is a good headhunter, period.
You might have been a lot less happy if it was the same two cars, but it was you getting t-boned.
This was the state of affairs last year, unless you called customer service and waited about 3 weeks for someone with the power to make those changes to come back to you. Since, they've released an a license migration process that will make that work:
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/support/systemuse/xbox360/licensemigration/
You can only do it once a year, and it's a bit of a hassle, but it should help you out with Castle Crashers.
+5 Is not enough for the value of the parent post. Optimistic Locking is the right answer in 99% of the cases. The issue then becomes how you want to deal with re-submitted of changes. If the entities to be saved are small and very atomic, asking the user to retype, making sure their changes are still sensible on the modified record makes sense. If your records are very large and/or very complex, then you might consider using some business knowledge to see if changes to the record can be grouped logically, and maybe even committed individually: If someone changed data for X shipment of a purchase order, while someone else changed Y, then the changes don't really have to conflict.
But whatever you do, build it around optimistic locking: Don't try to lock a record because somebody just has it open somewhere on a remote location. That path leads to madness.
It still exists... in a sense.
There's still quite a few companies that relied on Pick-BASIC programs built on top of Pick's multivalued database. There's millions of lines of code running in those systems, and given how different a multivalued database is from a RDBMS, migrating away is not exactly easy.
What do this companies do? They run all the derivatives linked in that wikipedia page, typically running on top of some flavor of Unix. The Pick OS might not run directly on the hardware, but for most user's POV, things aren't really all that different than they were 40 years ago: PROC and Pick-BASIC are still used in pretty much their original form. The main difference, other than the improved hardware, is the extended libraries created to deal with modern technologies. After all, who'd be crazy enough to build a native XML parser for that relic?
I have: Some bonus form of malware that hides as a Firefox extension, and redirects 15% of google searches to some shopping site instead of the proper link. It was easy to remove with regedit once I knew what I was looking for, but malware bytes didn't hit it.
More than that, they expect people to have a very similar concept of what rational is. When people's different motivations are taken into account, what you get is a model that behaves like a real model, but that can't really be used to predict the future results of the market close enough as to let anyone make money from using it.
It's harder than that. What a speculator does is try to guess what other people think the majority will find popular. Read about the Keynesian beauty contest: It shows why the market, while somewhat based in fundamentals, is inherently unstable.
That's only if you live in the right place.
DSL is not available everywhere. FIOS even less so. Satellite can even be a problem in some places. A tree or even a building can be in the way.
There's also those who live in apartment buildings. Often enough, the lease specifies a sole TV provider. If you don't go with them, you have to move.
It's not about danger, but about cost. A friend of mine, now working for NASA, did his Masters thesis on the logistics of a Mars mission. His estimates not only required major delays as preliminary, unmanned missions had to be done well in advance to generate fuel and oxygen for the stay, but just the cost of designing, building and launching a vessel to get to Mars without getting the astronauts irradiated would be huge. You could have over a thousand little rovers running around in mars for the price of sending two humans for a stay of very few weeks. With such a difference in scale, does it even matter if the rovers are more limited?
And you call that an equalizer? Realistically, even a million of people with 401k investors have very little power, yet by investing, they are giving financial companies money to play with.
If anything, the major governance issue that we see today in corporations is that small shareholders mean squat, as the people in charge of the operations can bleed the company for years without much risk. They get gains when the company does well, and lose very little when it doesn't. The power of executives is lower than it was back in the 1830s, but not by that much.
In the end, the ones that would win here are the electronics manufacturers that then would sell us ways to bypass the protection, just like all that region locking DVDs did was to make sure that Europeans would buy off brand players that can play anything anyway.
Ever try to do GIS in a key-value store? Statistical analysis? Data mining? Billing?
Key value stores are great for high throughput applications that have very simple and predictable access modes. But for anything else, you are much better of with a RDBMS.
The front line customer apps is not where the money is. It never was, and it never will.
Your main point is valid: The best selling games are typically the most advertised. However, you are missing one more piece to the argument: There's plenty of great games that, no matter how much money you sink on advertising them, could never be huge sellers.
Marketing can't do miracles: It sure can make up for bad quality, but what it can't do is make an unpopular premise work. Would 30 million worth of advertising make Hearts of Iron III sell 3 million copies in the US, regardless of its quality? There's no way you can convince the mass gaming public, the buyers of the Call of Duties and Halos, to go buy a slow paced strategy game. The fact is that, no matter how finely crafted a game is, the first step is making people being interested in the game's premise and main mechanics, and that's something that requires aiming at the mass market in the first place.
Many developers just don't craft their game thinking about that prototypical mass market consumer, and then find that their great game sells half a million copies. The reason that we are seeing good quality more related to sales is not just the advent of gamerankings and metacritic, but the fact that publishers are making it a lot harder for talented studios to take on projects that aren't even marketable in the first place. Great quirky games are now limited to publishers like Atlus, and have budgets designed to keep the studio alive even if the sales are nowhere near the top of any sales chart.
As the industry ages, and learns what the potential of each idea really is, we see the proper amount of development and marketing put into most game designs, which helps fuel the same forces you talk about: Nobody wants to sink millions in marketing for a bad game, and nobody wants to put a lot of resources into a game that does not have a good chance at appealing to the market. Who loses? Those of use that want to see games that aren't aimed straight at the mainstream. It's sad that Beyond Good and Evil didn't sell, but wouldn't it be worse if it had never been created, and instead we had yet another well polished shooter?
Shadow of the Colossus didn't spend nearly as much as Madden games, but it sure had some reasonable marketing push, including some TV ads, and some serious push by Gamestop.
The reason that those two games didn't sell all that well is not the lack of marketing, or the lack of quality, but the fact that they were in no way designed for the mass market. It's the same thing that happens with movies: No amount of advertising of Grave of the Fireflies, an amazing animated movie about war, would turn it into a blockbuster. It's too far from mass market sensibilities to bring mass audiences.
If your function is 200 lines long, you've already failed.