And yet, in many other places, Oracle is complete overkill. I see so many databases where there's maybe 150,000 rows in the entire database, spread over something like 30 tables, with the number of users in the 20-40 range. PostgreSQL is a far better choice for that sort of thing than Oracle - and a far more pleasant product to boot.
And I think you'd be surprised how well it scales. It can certainly keep 8 CPU's busy (in a meaningful way), according to various benchmarks I've seen (and I haven't seen anything beyond that, but that doesn't automatically mean it's bad either).
There's a significant misunderstanding here, which is the following: price does not just say something about, well, price, it also says something about _value_.
If Linux is cheaper, it must be because it is not as good and therefore has to compete on price. If Linux is more expensive, it must be because it is really quite good and can afford to ask a higher pricetag.
Learn this lesson well: asking for more money means you are being more professional, and have a higher value product. It means you will be talking to the CEO instead of the junior IT person. It means more respect, more income, and more trips to the golf course for you.
...must be millions of inhabited worlds, each populated by beings that believed themselves to be the center of the very universe, each believing that their existence had so much significance on the cosmic scale that this would not happen to them.
Instead they find themselves in the most sucky situation in the entire galaxy...
Don't you think the life of a smoker is hard enough in the UK yet?
Don't reduce me, bro.
I could make a joke about me not going out to hunt you smokers down one by one, but since this is a pretty serious thread I will give a serious answer.
Imagine you are in a hospital bed. You are surrounded by your friends and loved ones, and they are crying, because you are dying of lung cancer. Can you see that?
Now imagine that you could go back - back all the way to before you got that dreadful disease... To today, in fact. And you can go out today and make a choice: a choice to either end up in that bed, or another that will avoid it. What will it be?
At first I thought to ridicule your notion that rank beginners should be taught software engineering theory. Than I thought, "I won't bother. There is nothing I can do for him now, the Mods will get him."
Oh, and that was "sarcasm", by the way. Like the original poster I'm also a little uncertain why a fairly trivial algorithm that quite a few probably already made as a child in one form or another is suddenly worthy of the frontpage...
Amen. Once in a while you wish Slashdot had a golden +10 moderation, and this is one of those times.
"Terrorism", when looked at number of deaths per year, is basically a total non-issue. How many people have been killed by terrorism in the UK in the last 50 years? Would anyone support a program where you spend _millions_ per prevented death, knowing that far more deaths could have been prevented by spending the same money to prevent something with far higher mortality rates - say, by improving traffic safety, or by reducing the number of smokers?
Terrorism is such political bullshit. Sure, some people get killed (and I grief for them), and we do need to be careful - but we should not, under any circumstance, change our entire way of life, the entire structure of our civilisation, just because a bearded monkey in a cave in Afghanistan got a little upset with us.
There is no al queada (oh sure, there are some people taking that name, but there is no Dr. Blofeld-style, centrally led organisation hell-bent on destroying western civilisation. It is all opportunistic, people sharing a banner that was largely _invented_ by the US). And bin Laden, if he is still alive at all, is a sick, dirty old man living under extremely poor conditions in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and only a threat to himself.
It's a Jovian plot. Soon Mercury will not be making the grade either, and slowly, one by one, the other planets will be biting the dust, until only one is left.
Say no to this slippery slope! Call your senator today and have them stop this nonsense!
Based on what I gather in my country the use of Perl is actually in decline, while Python's is growing.
It should be noted here that Asmodai is in fact a demon, and therefore lives in hell. So keep that in mind before you adjust your strategies based on what languages he is using...
Your effort is not wasted. If you follow sub-optimal strategies the game just gets harder, not impossible.
Were you happy with the good/evil system in Bioshock? No matter how you played, you always got the same amount of adam. So what is the point of making one choice or another? A different movie at the end? That's kinda weak... Why not add some real consequences to such a choice?
Whereas in Deus Ex, if you chose certain upgrades (speed over strength, for example), you would have to use different strategies in later levels. That makes the experience a lot more fun, to me at least, and adds a lot of replay value to the game.
Uhm, you can restart the game and make different choices, so it is actually rather unlike life in that sense. And it probably depends on our personality types, but I find games that feature no meaningful choices on my part to be rather unsatisfying in the end.
In my favor, my puny 120GB harddisk only holds a few games on a permanent basis: System Shock 2, Sands of Time, and Deus Ex. Everything else gets installed, played, and eventually removed.
Indeed, that's the impression I got as well. And that focus on weapons is just depressing. Remember where you start off at the dock in DX1, and you get berated for choosing the GEP-gun? *That* is how DX1 dealt with weapons. Sure, it was also a shooter, but the real draw was the fantastic storyline, the various RPG mechanics were a lot of fun, and you had to live with the choices that you made.
I have had my fill of nameless, faceless muscle guys with big guns. I have already stopped buying games that only seem to get reviews that focus on the details of the weapons instead of on gameplay or storyline - evidentally these games are now so much alike that there is no need to talk about anything else anymore.
Anyway, let's rejoice that we had games like DX1 at all, that there was a time when such things were possible. Like the 2D scrolling shooter they are dead now, but they are fondly remembered as the grand experiments that they were...
SG1 managed a fairly consistent look (it looked a lot like Canada, except with medieval villages;-) ), so I'm a little surprised that none of the screenshots seem to reflect this. Maybe trees are just too boring?
There is no NEED for E-voting. 12-24 hours to handcount paper ballots is sufficient and also enough to have the counting audited/supervised by independent parties.
The problem then becomes, 'How do we determine who is an independent party who is unbiased enough to give us a truthful audit?' Other than that little problem, though, I agree with you fully.
Ok, since you apparently lack any kind of clue I will spell it out for you... To solve this conundrum, you must figure out who might be interested in a fair outcome. That suggests you might want to include people from every group you can vote for (easy in the US), and any concerned citizens who do not want to live in a dictatorship.
Then you get all these people together and let them count. Once all present agree on the outcome, the vote is final.
Now, for the sake of argument, let's say you want to subvert this process. The number of people you have to subvert includes the entire set of counters, in enough counting stations that it makes a difference. That's thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people (that's the high "Nixon Number" of an earlier poster). A conspiracy with that many people is hard to keep hidden. And that's precisely why you need to count like this.
[x] I am a spammer myself and I want to instill a sense of hopelessness in people [x] I only care about problems, not solutions [x] any solution that covers less than 100% of all cases is unacceptable to me [x] I like spam"
Your post surely applies to the antispam measures taken by my provider, but between them they keep my mailbox pretty much free of unwanted messages. And by posting this every time any kind of potential solution is discussed, you are ruling out the possibility of a solution altogether.
I used to have a sense of smell, but I lost it after ~20 years of having a blocked nose. Now I've had surgery so the blockage is gone, but the sense of smell seems to be gone forever.
Frustratingly, once in a long while I suddenly *do* smell things - just for a second, and then it disappears again. These are almost always smells that I associate with specific childhood situations (like the smell of the house of a friend where I used to play).
My sense of taste seems to be working fine, although I cannot compare against other peoples' of course. But I can distinguish all the usual tastes so that seems to be ok.
All this makes me believe the problem is purely in my head; I can smell just fine, I've just learned to ignore it completely.
Don't you just love the number of times people say "You don't really need CMYK support"? For those of use who work in the professional publishing world and see our work printed on real presses, YES WE DO!
I'm not in that industry, but just to satisfy my curiosity: can you explain a bit better?
I understand about the inks and everything, but surely the translation from RGB to CMYK is a purely mechanical process (i.e. you convert from one format to another and possibly spply s bit of calibration)? So why shouldn't you do all your work in RGB, and then as a final step convert to CMYK and print?
Not intended as a flame, I'm genuinely interested in learning why it is needed, and why it seems to be so difficult to support...
Funny story: I got my current job by impressing an interviewer by coding a bit of Z80 assembly on paper, and then adding the hexcodes for good measure. So yes, I have them optimized. Maybe not all, but give me a piece of paper and I can reconstructed a substantial part of the entire set.
I used to do fMSX Amiga, which is an MSX emulator for the Amiga. Since MSX had a Z80 I had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted with that particular instruction set, and being able to read hex-dumps was actually quite a benefit during development of the emulator.
DJNZ is completely obvious actually: it means "Decrease (B), Jump (if) Not Zero" and will decrease the B register, and jump to the specified label if it is not zero.
And I expect all of you to have it, and the other Z80 mnemonics, memorized next week. There will be a test. And then there will be cake.
Interestingly, an experiment was conducted a few years ago in which a completely incompetent ruler was set up as a head of state of one of the worlds larger nations. After four years of bad rule that included a record deficit, starting two illegal wars, and alienating most of their allies, the people of that nation were asked if they would vote for him again. And they did! So yes, I would say that ideology certainly trumps facts.
In fact I probably shouldn't be talking about this, since the experiment is still ongoing...
Slashdot Mirror
And yet, in many other places, Oracle is complete overkill. I see so many databases where there's maybe 150,000 rows in the entire database, spread over something like 30 tables, with the number of users in the 20-40 range. PostgreSQL is a far better choice for that sort of thing than Oracle - and a far more pleasant product to boot.
And I think you'd be surprised how well it scales. It can certainly keep 8 CPU's busy (in a meaningful way), according to various benchmarks I've seen (and I haven't seen anything beyond that, but that doesn't automatically mean it's bad either).
There's a significant misunderstanding here, which is the following: price does not just say something about, well, price, it also says something about _value_.
If Linux is cheaper, it must be because it is not as good and therefore has to compete on price. If Linux is more expensive, it must be because it is really quite good and can afford to ask a higher pricetag.
Learn this lesson well: asking for more money means you are being more professional, and have a higher value product. It means you will be talking to the CEO instead of the junior IT person. It means more respect, more income, and more trips to the golf course for you.
...must be millions of inhabited worlds, each populated by beings that believed themselves to be the center of the very universe, each believing that their existence had so much significance on the cosmic scale that this would not happen to them.
Instead they find themselves in the most sucky situation in the entire galaxy...
or by reducing the number of smokers
Don't you think the life of a smoker is hard enough in the UK yet?
Don't reduce me, bro.
I could make a joke about me not going out to hunt you smokers down one by one, but since this is a pretty serious thread I will give a serious answer.
Imagine you are in a hospital bed. You are surrounded by your friends and loved ones, and they are crying, because you are dying of lung cancer. Can you see that?
Now imagine that you could go back - back all the way to before you got that dreadful disease... To today, in fact. And you can go out today and make a choice: a choice to either end up in that bed, or another that will avoid it. What will it be?
At first I thought to ridicule your notion that rank beginners should be taught software engineering theory. Than I thought, "I won't bother. There is nothing I can do for him now, the Mods will get him."
Oh, and that was "sarcasm", by the way. Like the original poster I'm also a little uncertain why a fairly trivial algorithm that quite a few probably already made as a child in one form or another is suddenly worthy of the frontpage...
Why is this front page material? Lego mosaics are ancient, and the source code is probably trivially simple.
Because it is a Google lead engineer doing it! Therefore it must be magic!
Amen. Once in a while you wish Slashdot had a golden +10 moderation, and this is one of those times.
"Terrorism", when looked at number of deaths per year, is basically a total non-issue. How many people have been killed by terrorism in the UK in the last 50 years? Would anyone support a program where you spend _millions_ per prevented death, knowing that far more deaths could have been prevented by spending the same money to prevent something with far higher mortality rates - say, by improving traffic safety, or by reducing the number of smokers?
Terrorism is such political bullshit. Sure, some people get killed (and I grief for them), and we do need to be careful - but we should not, under any circumstance, change our entire way of life, the entire structure of our civilisation, just because a bearded monkey in a cave in Afghanistan got a little upset with us.
There is no al queada (oh sure, there are some people taking that name, but there is no Dr. Blofeld-style, centrally led organisation hell-bent on destroying western civilisation. It is all opportunistic, people sharing a banner that was largely _invented_ by the US). And bin Laden, if he is still alive at all, is a sick, dirty old man living under extremely poor conditions in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and only a threat to himself.
Stop the fear already.
It's a Jovian plot. Soon Mercury will not be making the grade either, and slowly, one by one, the other planets will be biting the dust, until only one is left.
Say no to this slippery slope! Call your senator today and have them stop this nonsense!
Based on what I gather in my country the use of Perl is actually in decline, while Python's is growing.
It should be noted here that Asmodai is in fact a demon, and therefore lives in hell. So keep that in mind before you adjust your strategies based on what languages he is using...
Your effort is not wasted. If you follow sub-optimal strategies the game just gets harder, not impossible.
Were you happy with the good/evil system in Bioshock? No matter how you played, you always got the same amount of adam. So what is the point of making one choice or another? A different movie at the end? That's kinda weak... Why not add some real consequences to such a choice?
Whereas in Deus Ex, if you chose certain upgrades (speed over strength, for example), you would have to use different strategies in later levels. That makes the experience a lot more fun, to me at least, and adds a lot of replay value to the game.
Uhm, you can restart the game and make different choices, so it is actually rather unlike life in that sense. And it probably depends on our personality types, but I find games that feature no meaningful choices on my part to be rather unsatisfying in the end.
Indeed. You are correct, and I stand corrected.
In my favor, my puny 120GB harddisk only holds a few games on a permanent basis: System Shock 2, Sands of Time, and Deus Ex. Everything else gets installed, played, and eventually removed.
Indeed, that's the impression I got as well. And that focus on weapons is just depressing. Remember where you start off at the dock in DX1, and you get berated for choosing the GEP-gun? *That* is how DX1 dealt with weapons. Sure, it was also a shooter, but the real draw was the fantastic storyline, the various RPG mechanics were a lot of fun, and you had to live with the choices that you made.
I have had my fill of nameless, faceless muscle guys with big guns. I have already stopped buying games that only seem to get reviews that focus on the details of the weapons instead of on gameplay or storyline - evidentally these games are now so much alike that there is no need to talk about anything else anymore.
Anyway, let's rejoice that we had games like DX1 at all, that there was a time when such things were possible. Like the 2D scrolling shooter they are dead now, but they are fondly remembered as the grand experiments that they were...
SG1 managed a fairly consistent look (it looked a lot like Canada, except with medieval villages ;-) ), so I'm a little surprised that none of the screenshots seem to reflect this. Maybe trees are just too boring?
There is no NEED for E-voting. 12-24 hours to handcount paper ballots is sufficient and also enough to have the counting audited/supervised by independent parties.
The problem then becomes, 'How do we determine who is an independent party who is unbiased enough to give us a truthful audit?' Other than that little problem, though, I agree with you fully.
Ok, since you apparently lack any kind of clue I will spell it out for you... To solve this conundrum, you must figure out who might be interested in a fair outcome. That suggests you might want to include people from every group you can vote for (easy in the US), and any concerned citizens who do not want to live in a dictatorship.
Then you get all these people together and let them count. Once all present agree on the outcome, the vote is final.
Now, for the sake of argument, let's say you want to subvert this process. The number of people you have to subvert includes the entire set of counters, in enough counting stations that it makes a difference. That's thousands, possibly tens of thousands of people (that's the high "Nixon Number" of an earlier poster). A conspiracy with that many people is hard to keep hidden. And that's precisely why you need to count like this.
Why not cut it down to this:
"Your post advocates
[x] a solution
to the problem of spam. It won't work, because
[x] I am a spammer myself and I want to instill a sense of hopelessness in people
[x] I only care about problems, not solutions
[x] any solution that covers less than 100% of all cases is unacceptable to me
[x] I like spam"
Your post surely applies to the antispam measures taken by my provider, but between them they keep my mailbox pretty much free of unwanted messages. And by posting this every time any kind of potential solution is discussed, you are ruling out the possibility of a solution altogether.
Stop that or I will "fix" all of you... With a blunt knife.
I used to have a sense of smell, but I lost it after ~20 years of having a blocked nose. Now I've had surgery so the blockage is gone, but the sense of smell seems to be gone forever.
Frustratingly, once in a long while I suddenly *do* smell things - just for a second, and then it disappears again. These are almost always smells that I associate with specific childhood situations (like the smell of the house of a friend where I used to play).
My sense of taste seems to be working fine, although I cannot compare against other peoples' of course. But I can distinguish all the usual tastes so that seems to be ok.
All this makes me believe the problem is purely in my head; I can smell just fine, I've just learned to ignore it completely.
Don't you just love the number of times people say "You don't really need CMYK support"? For those of use who work in the professional publishing world and see our work printed on real presses, YES WE DO!
I'm not in that industry, but just to satisfy my curiosity: can you explain a bit better?
I understand about the inks and everything, but surely the translation from RGB to CMYK is a purely mechanical process (i.e. you convert from one format to another and possibly spply s bit of calibration)? So why shouldn't you do all your work in RGB, and then as a final step convert to CMYK and print?
Not intended as a flame, I'm genuinely interested in learning why it is needed, and why it seems to be so difficult to support...
So Godel proved that Russell was wrong, then?
Good try, but I doubt you will be able to convince the americans.
Funny story: I got my current job by impressing an interviewer by coding a bit of Z80 assembly on paper, and then adding the hexcodes for good measure. So yes, I have them optimized. Maybe not all, but give me a piece of paper and I can reconstructed a substantial part of the entire set.
I used to do fMSX Amiga, which is an MSX emulator for the Amiga. Since MSX had a Z80 I had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted with that particular instruction set, and being able to read hex-dumps was actually quite a benefit during development of the emulator.
DJNZ is completely obvious actually: it means "Decrease (B), Jump (if) Not Zero" and will decrease the B register, and jump to the specified label if it is not zero.
And I expect all of you to have it, and the other Z80 mnemonics, memorized next week. There will be a test. And then there will be cake.
Interestingly, an experiment was conducted a few years ago in which a completely incompetent ruler was set up as a head of state of one of the worlds larger nations. After four years of bad rule that included a record deficit, starting two illegal wars, and alienating most of their allies, the people of that nation were asked if they would vote for him again. And they did! So yes, I would say that ideology certainly trumps facts.
In fact I probably shouldn't be talking about this, since the experiment is still ongoing...