It's called "My Documents" and you can redirect it with group policy to a server, removeable drive, whatever. There is also the Default User and All Users profiles, where you can stick things you want everyone to have at profile creation or permanently (respectively). This stuff has worked pretty much seamlessly for us since the release of Windows 2000.
We never run around to desktops installing shortuts or anything. Group policy's installation tools, as well as the computer startup/shutdown scripts and user login/logoff scripts allow us to do just about everything.
You're not using ANSI-style JOIN syntax (except for the LEFT JOIN), which is a big no-no. It should never have been written that way to begin with, unless an old version of MySQL didn't understand INNER JOIN syntax. The "JOIN condition in WHERE clause" appraoch can be ambiguous in a lot of situations, which is why the ANSI JOIN syntax was created.
As for the use of the temp table... well, enough has been said about that by others.
Actually, to be ANSI-compliant, the code you have would need changes in the JOINS, the use of the temp table (make it a subselect), and the non-standard functions (UNIX_TIMESTAMP, INTERVAL, GREATEST, and LEAST), which have ANSI equivalents.
So really, you coded this to MySQL's spec, without regard for prtability. It's not surprising that it is not very portable.
You can, almost. Of course it would never be a simple as converting a single file format, but if you're using a tool like this for conversion, and an "abtracted" database library like JDBC or your language's equiavalent, the transition could be pretty easy. Of course, you have to tweak all that non-standard MySQL code to be ANSI SQL compliant. Perhaps it's trivial, for your app, perhaps not.
I've seen an application that only uses ANSI SQL, usually the 1992 variant, and JDBC. It concurrently supports Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostGreSQL from the same code base with simple configuration file changes. It takes a lot of discipline to build an app to the lowest common denominator like that, when every DB vendor has a multitude of cool time-saving but not-yet-totally-standard SQL features you could use. But MySQL wouldn't even support the lowest common denominator of ANSI SQL-92.
...give us free money, now! This is merely a budget-grab by an NGO. Happens all the time.
An environmental group says: "The earth is warming! We need a crash program to figure this out, right now! Trust us, we're a bunch of Ph.D., so we're way smart!".
Then an oil-industry consortium says: "We need more domestic oil and natural gas. We have to start drilling now, but we need to do it on land we don't own because we're all tapped out, and the economy is threatened. Trust us, all our expert geologists agree!"
A few lunches with a congressman, plus a campaign donation or two, and billions from the public treasury flow directly and indirectly into their hands.
This is called lobbying. Just because it's a group of "science educators" doing this doesn't mean they're not after personal gain (higher budgets, more grants, more status). They're just trying to get in on the gravy train that the U.S. Congress provides.
I personally have "excellent" karma, but mostly for "funny" mods I get about twice a year, and the occasional factualy "informative" post I make. Most of my posts run counter to the Slashdot groupthink (I've been called pro-MSFT, pro-copyright, pro-Republican, etc.) So you can have excellent karma by being occasionally funny and occasionally informative, while rarely getting an "insightful" (groupthink) mod.
So, despite being a thirty-something IT manager who thinks Richard Stallman makes about as much sense as Fidel Castro, I still manage to get mod-points galore. Sometimes I get as many as 15 mod points in a single week. I do try to be judicious with my mod points, and I hopefully the meta-modding reflects that. So perhaps positive meta-modding may lead to more positive karma (or more mod points). Who knows? I don't really care enough to look at the Slashcode.
The majority of web developers I know develop on the mac anyways.
Exactly zero of the dozens of web developers I know use Macs. They all use Windows or Linux. They actually develop programs that generate websites, usually in.NET, Java, PHP, etc.
Only the web designers I know use Macs. Graphic/web designers are not the same developers, despite what they may think. They generally have the ability to make sites pretty, and tweak the layouts generated by the programs developers create. Most designers cannot build software at any reasonable level of compentency.
Huge problems arise when designers try to act as developers, and of course vice-versa. People with good skills in both areas are extremely rare. It isn't 1997 anymore. Back then, the ability to generate pretty HTML and graphics made you a "webmaster." But the bar has been raised. These days, any good website needs both good developers (programmers) and good graphic/UI designers.
But anyway, I think you probably meant "web developers":= "people that make the site look good," rather than "people that build the logic behind the website." But in most job postings I've seen, "developer" very specifically means programmer, while "designer" means UI layout and graphics work.
Rumor has it the Chinese and South Koreans are well on their way to deploying TLAv6 nation-wide. TLAv6 enables enough acronyms to assign one to every atom in the universe. As a result, there exists the possibilty of a "fractured" acronym space in the near future, one in which American and European acronym users cannot excahnge information with Asian acronym users. The US and Europe are destined to lose acronym-industry leadership if they do not act swiftly!
So use a 16-character, randomly generated, base-32 encoded number as the ID. You'd have to have over a trillion votes cast to have even a 50% chance of a collison.
But that's not the real issue. The real issue with this "tecket" system is being able to buy or coerce votes, as others pointed out.
Some cryptographers invented a receipt concept that used transparent layers so that a person could verfy their vote without being able to prove it to somebody else. But the printers then become a bottleneck, as they jam, and cost more money than paper.
Microsoft has always defined a "processor" as a "occupied processor socket on the motherboard". When I bought SQL Server 2005 for our quad-Opteron 870 system, I only paid for four CPU licenses.
You, like many other DNS Blacklist supporters, assume that anything that was blocked by the RBL is spam. That is most definitely NOT the case. How many of the tens of thousands of messages you blocked were legitimate messages desired by your users? You'll never know... but I'll guarantee you it was above 1%.
Like most spam shops, they hop IP addresses (and organization names) from multiple providers, as they get continually kicked by the more reputable ones.
Actually, it was largely the French and the Germans that sold Iraq WMDs... the US played a very small part in that (although we sold him some "dual use" technology during the 80s).
I said "it" as in the whole... the U.S. military budget is several times that of any other military on Earth. I agree individual soldiers aren't well-compensated. Few important jobs in the public sector are: police, firemen, teachers, and soldiers are all underpaid for the value they offer society.
The U.S. Military is extraordinarily good at what militaries are designed to do - blow shit up, kill enemy soldiers, and prevent military attacks on the U.S.
In short: It's the Michael Jordan of armed combat, and is compensated accordingly.
...the time value of money and maintenance. $9,000 over 20 years is actually more like $12,500 in real dollars, assuming 3% inflation. So you're up to $0.125/kWh right there. Add in maintenance costs over that 20-year period, and you could be paying double that figure.
$0.25 per kWh is not a good deal. It's the same basic reason we all don't run our own backyard generators - one huge power plant is far more efficient than a bunch of small ones.
Now, huge industrial wind farms are another matter... those achieve costs per kWh closer to traditional coal-fired generation, but the variable load they introduce to power grids is very problematic from a distribution and demand forecasting standpoint. Lots of reserve conventional generation must be kept on-line to handle changing conditions. See the obligitory Wikipedia link.
But that's my point... the corruption the GP mentioned is in no way new, unprecedented in scale, or party-specific. Corruption is, indeed, prevalent in all political systems.
It is a testament to Western-style Democracy that the system survives - and even thrives - despite corrupt politicians. When the power of any individual in government is limited, corruption isn't as damaging to the whole. Despite what most Europeans think, George Bush's powers are *not* unlimited. Congress ultimately controls the money, and congressmen serve the whims of their constituents to a far greater degree than the President. They are frequently "un-elected" as a result. Just ask Joe Lieberman - possibly the most honest guy in national American politics. He is now a private citizen.
Rove/Abramoff/DeLay triangle is really the most systematically unfair, corrupt, and underhanded political machine to exist in the past 25 years
You've obviosuly never heard of Chicago or the "Democratic Machine". 50 years of the most corrupt city, county, and state government ever to grace America's shores. Heck, the Machine even threw the 1960 presidential election to Kennedy. And it's still going on (Gov. Blagoevich is currently the subject of about 10 federal invetstigations, and Mayor Daley's patronage scandals will probably prevent him from running again).
Dude, the Soviet-Communist governments in Russia and Europe were amongst the worst polluters in history. Brown coal, Chernobyl, plenty of chemical dumps, etc.
History has shown that a standard-issue Commie government doesn't give a shit about the individual - just the power of the state or collective. So Commies don't care if a few individuals get cancer from benzine in the ground water, or chokes to death on sulfuric acid rain? The environmental horrors left behind by the Reds will be with us for a long, long time.
There are many issues with the "one thread per connection" or "one thread per object" sort of models. There is a lot of overhead per thread, not the least of which is stack space. On a modern OS, a typical thread will have around 1 MB of stack and other "housekeeping" space allocated to it, meaning at most a few hundred threads can fit in 2 GB of memory when you account for actual application data.
This is why all scalable web servers and database servers use "thread pooling" or "connection pooling". Do some Google searches on those phrases to learn the details.
The "everything is a thread" model is for lazy programmers, as surely as single-threaded programming is.
You gave up your right to sue when you agreed to the license.
IANAL, but I do lots of contract negotiations on behalf of my company. I do know this: A contract cannot allow the contracting parties to agree to ignore the law. In many jusisdictions, "lemon laws" and consumer-protection laws take precendence over any license agreement (or other contract).
So, for example, the license agreement may say "software sold as-is with no warranty", but in many states require that all goods sold have basic fitness and suitability-to-purpose. That is, the software must work in general - otherwise the seller has committed a fraud. Software that crashes every 5 minutes, for example, would not pass this test.
By extension, software sold as "security software" that does nothing - or negativly impacts security - would not pass the "basic fitness and suitability-to-purpose" test.
Who cares about mobile phones? They have a negative impact on quality of life when they do work.
I think the GP was referring to things like: sewers, highways, clean water, state-of-the-art hospitals, good schools, inspected produce and meat, a huge variety of consumer goods, and all the other trappings of Western societies. These things are in short supply in many parts of India, China, and other off-shoring centers.
When the Democrats are also demonstrated to have systematically abused the voting apparatus to rig elections, then there will be just as large an uproar.
Umm... you've never heard of the city of Chicago and the "Democratic Machine"? Over 70 years of outright fraud, including swinging the 1960 presedential election in favor of Kennedy (ballot stuffing to the tune of 91% of the vote!). Newer crimes and misdemeanors by the Chicago Machine are uncovered almost weekly, with Mayor Daley and Governer Rod Blagojevich sacrificing thier staff to Federal investiagors.
Republicans or Democrats, the party in power will always have players with few scruples that try to rig the election process. The answer? Always vote against the incumbent, no matter what their party affiliation. You'll be better off.
Ahem... if the lemmings on the West Coast would move to where the water is they would not have to really worry about water shortages. In the developed wold, water shorteages are only a problem because people want sunshine year-round, and they choose to live in insensible places like SoCal.
California is mostly a desert. Throughout human history, societies have largely avoided such places as being unable to sustain life. But tens of millions of idiots in Saab convertibles seem to think those rather basic rules don't apply to them, and now complain that they're running out of water.
I live on the shores of Lake Michigan, and water is too cheap to meter in my community. Wanna buy some? Get ready to pay out the ass... we Chicagoans will make OPEC look like the Girl Scouts.
I knew a company that bought a bunch of OEM windows XP licenses with an equal number of $0.35 CD-rom audio cables. It was perfectly in compliance with the license according to a very large and reputable reseller.
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It's called "My Documents" and you can redirect it with group policy to a server, removeable drive, whatever. There is also the Default User and All Users profiles, where you can stick things you want everyone to have at profile creation or permanently (respectively). This stuff has worked pretty much seamlessly for us since the release of Windows 2000.
We never run around to desktops installing shortuts or anything. Group policy's installation tools, as well as the computer startup/shutdown scripts and user login/logoff scripts allow us to do just about everything.
You're not using ANSI-style JOIN syntax (except for the LEFT JOIN), which is a big no-no. It should never have been written that way to begin with, unless an old version of MySQL didn't understand INNER JOIN syntax. The "JOIN condition in WHERE clause" appraoch can be ambiguous in a lot of situations, which is why the ANSI JOIN syntax was created.
As for the use of the temp table... well, enough has been said about that by others.
Actually, to be ANSI-compliant, the code you have would need changes in the JOINS, the use of the temp table (make it a subselect), and the non-standard functions (UNIX_TIMESTAMP, INTERVAL, GREATEST, and LEAST), which have ANSI equivalents.
So really, you coded this to MySQL's spec, without regard for prtability. It's not surprising that it is not very portable.
You can, almost. Of course it would never be a simple as converting a single file format, but if you're using a tool like this for conversion, and an "abtracted" database library like JDBC or your language's equiavalent, the transition could be pretty easy. Of course, you have to tweak all that non-standard MySQL code to be ANSI SQL compliant. Perhaps it's trivial, for your app, perhaps not.
I've seen an application that only uses ANSI SQL, usually the 1992 variant, and JDBC. It concurrently supports Oracle, DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostGreSQL from the same code base with simple configuration file changes. It takes a lot of discipline to build an app to the lowest common denominator like that, when every DB vendor has a multitude of cool time-saving but not-yet-totally-standard SQL features you could use. But MySQL wouldn't even support the lowest common denominator of ANSI SQL-92.
...give us free money, now! This is merely a budget-grab by an NGO. Happens all the time.
An environmental group says: "The earth is warming! We need a crash program to figure this out, right now! Trust us, we're a bunch of Ph.D., so we're way smart!".
Then an oil-industry consortium says: "We need more domestic oil and natural gas. We have to start drilling now, but we need to do it on land we don't own because we're all tapped out, and the economy is threatened. Trust us, all our expert geologists agree!"
A few lunches with a congressman, plus a campaign donation or two, and billions from the public treasury flow directly and indirectly into their hands.
This is called lobbying. Just because it's a group of "science educators" doing this doesn't mean they're not after personal gain (higher budgets, more grants, more status). They're just trying to get in on the gravy train that the U.S. Congress provides.
I personally have "excellent" karma, but mostly for "funny" mods I get about twice a year, and the occasional factualy "informative" post I make. Most of my posts run counter to the Slashdot groupthink (I've been called pro-MSFT, pro-copyright, pro-Republican, etc.) So you can have excellent karma by being occasionally funny and occasionally informative, while rarely getting an "insightful" (groupthink) mod.
So, despite being a thirty-something IT manager who thinks Richard Stallman makes about as much sense as Fidel Castro, I still manage to get mod-points galore. Sometimes I get as many as 15 mod points in a single week. I do try to be judicious with my mod points, and I hopefully the meta-modding reflects that. So perhaps positive meta-modding may lead to more positive karma (or more mod points). Who knows? I don't really care enough to look at the Slashcode.
Exactly zero of the dozens of web developers I know use Macs. They all use Windows or Linux. They actually develop programs that generate websites, usually in .NET, Java, PHP, etc.
Only the web designers I know use Macs. Graphic/web designers are not the same developers, despite what they may think. They generally have the ability to make sites pretty, and tweak the layouts generated by the programs developers create. Most designers cannot build software at any reasonable level of compentency.
Huge problems arise when designers try to act as developers, and of course vice-versa. People with good skills in both areas are extremely rare. It isn't 1997 anymore. Back then, the ability to generate pretty HTML and graphics made you a "webmaster." But the bar has been raised. These days, any good website needs both good developers (programmers) and good graphic/UI designers.
But anyway, I think you probably meant "web developers" := "people that make the site look good," rather than "people that build the logic behind the website." But in most job postings I've seen, "developer" very specifically means programmer, while "designer" means UI layout and graphics work.
Rumor has it the Chinese and South Koreans are well on their way to deploying TLAv6 nation-wide. TLAv6 enables enough acronyms to assign one to every atom in the universe. As a result, there exists the possibilty of a "fractured" acronym space in the near future, one in which American and European acronym users cannot excahnge information with Asian acronym users. The US and Europe are destined to lose acronym-industry leadership if they do not act swiftly!
So use a 16-character, randomly generated, base-32 encoded number as the ID. You'd have to have over a trillion votes cast to have even a 50% chance of a collison.
But that's not the real issue. The real issue with this "tecket" system is being able to buy or coerce votes, as others pointed out.
Some cryptographers invented a receipt concept that used transparent layers so that a person could verfy their vote without being able to prove it to somebody else. But the printers then become a bottleneck, as they jam, and cost more money than paper.
Microsoft has always defined a "processor" as a "occupied processor socket on the motherboard". When I bought SQL Server 2005 for our quad-Opteron 870 system, I only paid for four CPU licenses.
You, like many other DNS Blacklist supporters, assume that anything that was blocked by the RBL is spam. That is most definitely NOT the case. How many of the tens of thousands of messages you blocked were legitimate messages desired by your users? You'll never know... but I'll guarantee you it was above 1%.
Like most spam shops, they hop IP addresses (and organization names) from multiple providers, as they get continually kicked by the more reputable ones.
See the entries in SpamHaus's database.
Actually, it was largely the French and the Germans that sold Iraq WMDs... the US played a very small part in that (although we sold him some "dual use" technology during the 80s).
Obligatory Wikipedia link.
SLEEP is a Windows Resource Kit utility... freely dowloadable for all Microsoft OS since NT4, but it is not installed by default.
I said "it" as in the whole... the U.S. military budget is several times that of any other military on Earth. I agree individual soldiers aren't well-compensated. Few important jobs in the public sector are: police, firemen, teachers, and soldiers are all underpaid for the value they offer society.
The U.S. Military is extraordinarily good at what militaries are designed to do - blow shit up, kill enemy soldiers, and prevent military attacks on the U.S.
In short: It's the Michael Jordan of armed combat, and is compensated accordingly.
...the time value of money and maintenance. $9,000 over 20 years is actually more like $12,500 in real dollars, assuming 3% inflation. So you're up to $0.125/kWh right there. Add in maintenance costs over that 20-year period, and you could be paying double that figure.
$0.25 per kWh is not a good deal. It's the same basic reason we all don't run our own backyard generators - one huge power plant is far more efficient than a bunch of small ones.
Now, huge industrial wind farms are another matter... those achieve costs per kWh closer to traditional coal-fired generation, but the variable load they introduce to power grids is very problematic from a distribution and demand forecasting standpoint. Lots of reserve conventional generation must be kept on-line to handle changing conditions. See the obligitory Wikipedia link.
But that's my point... the corruption the GP mentioned is in no way new, unprecedented in scale, or party-specific. Corruption is, indeed, prevalent in all political systems.
It is a testament to Western-style Democracy that the system survives - and even thrives - despite corrupt politicians. When the power of any individual in government is limited, corruption isn't as damaging to the whole. Despite what most Europeans think, George Bush's powers are *not* unlimited. Congress ultimately controls the money, and congressmen serve the whims of their constituents to a far greater degree than the President. They are frequently "un-elected" as a result. Just ask Joe Lieberman - possibly the most honest guy in national American politics. He is now a private citizen.
You've obviosuly never heard of Chicago or the "Democratic Machine". 50 years of the most corrupt city, county, and state government ever to grace America's shores. Heck, the Machine even threw the 1960 presidential election to Kennedy. And it's still going on (Gov. Blagoevich is currently the subject of about 10 federal invetstigations, and Mayor Daley's patronage scandals will probably prevent him from running again).
Dude, the Soviet-Communist governments in Russia and Europe were amongst the worst polluters in history. Brown coal, Chernobyl, plenty of chemical dumps, etc.
History has shown that a standard-issue Commie government doesn't give a shit about the individual - just the power of the state or collective. So Commies don't care if a few individuals get cancer from benzine in the ground water, or chokes to death on sulfuric acid rain? The environmental horrors left behind by the Reds will be with us for a long, long time.
There are many issues with the "one thread per connection" or "one thread per object" sort of models. There is a lot of overhead per thread, not the least of which is stack space. On a modern OS, a typical thread will have around 1 MB of stack and other "housekeeping" space allocated to it, meaning at most a few hundred threads can fit in 2 GB of memory when you account for actual application data.
This is why all scalable web servers and database servers use "thread pooling" or "connection pooling". Do some Google searches on those phrases to learn the details.
The "everything is a thread" model is for lazy programmers, as surely as single-threaded programming is.
IANAL, but I do lots of contract negotiations on behalf of my company. I do know this: A contract cannot allow the contracting parties to agree to ignore the law. In many jusisdictions, "lemon laws" and consumer-protection laws take precendence over any license agreement (or other contract).
So, for example, the license agreement may say "software sold as-is with no warranty", but in many states require that all goods sold have basic fitness and suitability-to-purpose. That is, the software must work in general - otherwise the seller has committed a fraud. Software that crashes every 5 minutes, for example, would not pass this test.
By extension, software sold as "security software" that does nothing - or negativly impacts security - would not pass the "basic fitness and suitability-to-purpose" test.
Who cares about mobile phones? They have a negative impact on quality of life when they do work.
I think the GP was referring to things like: sewers, highways, clean water, state-of-the-art hospitals, good schools, inspected produce and meat, a huge variety of consumer goods, and all the other trappings of Western societies. These things are in short supply in many parts of India, China, and other off-shoring centers.
Umm... you've never heard of the city of Chicago and the "Democratic Machine"? Over 70 years of outright fraud, including swinging the 1960 presedential election in favor of Kennedy (ballot stuffing to the tune of 91% of the vote!). Newer crimes and misdemeanors by the Chicago Machine are uncovered almost weekly, with Mayor Daley and Governer Rod Blagojevich sacrificing thier staff to Federal investiagors.
Republicans or Democrats, the party in power will always have players with few scruples that try to rig the election process. The answer? Always vote against the incumbent, no matter what their party affiliation. You'll be better off.
Ahem... if the lemmings on the West Coast would move to where the water is they would not have to really worry about water shortages. In the developed wold, water shorteages are only a problem because people want sunshine year-round, and they choose to live in insensible places like SoCal.
California is mostly a desert. Throughout human history, societies have largely avoided such places as being unable to sustain life. But tens of millions of idiots in Saab convertibles seem to think those rather basic rules don't apply to them, and now complain that they're running out of water.
I live on the shores of Lake Michigan, and water is too cheap to meter in my community. Wanna buy some? Get ready to pay out the ass... we Chicagoans will make OPEC look like the Girl Scouts.
I knew a company that bought a bunch of OEM windows XP licenses with an equal number of $0.35 CD-rom audio cables. It was perfectly in compliance with the license according to a very large and reputable reseller.