Sheeze, can we put this to rest already? It seems that, for the last couple of console generations, all that people care about is who won and who lost. Number of shipped consoles vs. sold ones, launch date numbers, millons invested in advertising, etc. Nevermind the endless drooling over polygons per seconds, CPUs, memory controllers and the works. People live and die by these numbers, claiming that company X is the winner of this generation while company Y is in the brink of bankruptcy.
Come on guys. I can understand (barely) this kind of insaness from fanboy sites, but please, can we move forward? If you like consoles, why do you care beyond which one is more fun to play, or has more games that appeal to you? Do we really have to get into the pissing contest of which one sold an extra 10 units this month? I mean, is it relevant? Is it even interesting? If you like consoles, you have not one, nor two, but three excellent options to chose from, and that's it. I'd like to see more discussion about games rather than units shipped, Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD or whatever is trendy this week.
Basically, performance. Anything involving subqueries seems to run substantially faster on my system, for example, after a few days of testing. Postgre also supports a wealth of features not available in MySQL until version 5, or with a much better implementation - triggers, stored procedures, functions, the works. You don't know how much you miss these until you find that MySQL doesn't do them, or do them in a completely bizarre way.
Finally, Postgre has a track record of reilability, and for me that fact alone makes it worth checking out. I've seen corrupted databases on MySQL installations for websites, for example.
Perhaps we've tried different versions, but my experience was nowhere as awful...
1. Near-incomprehensible administration panel. The fact that they gave it a fancy name ("Enterprise Manager" or something like that) didn't help. The usability of it absolutely sucks.
Given. It's not unusable, but i've seen better.
2. Bad documentation. All I want is to automatically make database backups every night at 3 AM and upload it to a remote server in encrypted form. With Linux, MySQL and SSH, I can write such a script in 30 minutes. With Windows 2003 and MS SQL Server, I spent 1 to 2 weeks.
I did something similar with a few installations and never took me more than 5 minutes - automatic backups and stored procedures triggering. The dedicated utility (SQL Server Agent) is very easy to setup via the GUI, IMHO.
3. Bad, bad performance. While the game server was running (which used 100% CPU; the game server software sucks but that's another story), the SQL Query Analyzer's performance dropped to near zero. It took 2 minutes to execute a simple "SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar = 2". One day I wrote a tool in Perl (using DBI and ODBC) to automate some database actions. And guess what? Running the same select statement in the Perl tool was almost instantaneous! I have no idea what SQL Query Analyzer is doing to make the query literally 100 times slower.
I have to politely disagree here:) I've created fairly complex DB systems involving triggers, linked tables, stored procedures and lots of functions, and the performance of the server (running on a non-dedicated PIII with 512mb, Win2k3 Server) was stellar. This was both from the query analyzer and being polled from a website (about 10-15 stored procedures every 5 seconds per user).
4. One day I noticed that the server ran out of disk space. It turned out that the database transaction log (not the database itself!) grew to 120 GB! The database itself was only about 100 MB. The documentation told me everything that I don't want to know, but it didn't tell me how to clear the transaction log.
I limited the log size to a sensible value when i first installed the DB, and was a pretty straightforward procedure. Given, i was warned about this issue beforehand by a fellow programmer.
I'm sure someone will tell me that points 1 and 2 say I'm an incompetent database administrator. Well, this isn't a multi-million dollar business and I don't want to waste money on a database administrator which costs me more than $1000 per month! I just want to run the damn game server! I'm competent in SQL. On Linux I don't need a database administrator to maintain a database of this size, so why should I with Windows?
Oh, much agreed. Sadly, we do a lot of work both deploying and customizing SCADA setups, and this kind of systems run only on Windows platforms, which make SQL Server somehow a viable option (even when setting up a dedicated Linux/BSD server can be done for a fraction of the cost). That's when databases other than SQLS are an option - most SCADA software is "certified" to work with a handful of databases. If i was given the choice, i'd reccomend PostgreSQL, which, as far as i've tried, seems to be perhaps the most complete OSS database engine arround, miles ahead of MySQL.
Having said that, i found SQL Server to be an extremely competent product. If it's worth or not its price is debatable, but i really meant that is the best piece of software i've seen MS releasing that i can recall. The database engine is extremely fast and well-featured, and comes with a nice pack of utilities - notably, the Query Analyzer. I've seen commercial alternatives for MySQL, PSSQL and the works, but i've yet to come across an OSS one.
New Microsoft Sql Server coming soon to a store near you. Cant wait for M$ to secretly add this to their SQL server and call it innovation.
Laugh all you want, but MS is one of the leaders in the database world with SQL Server for Windows, and have been for a while now. SQLS is by a long, long shot the best software product Microsoft has ever released, IMHO, and keep doing, right to the latest version. It works great.
Falcon looks to be the long-awaited open source storage engine that may become the primary choice for MySQL, and along the way offer some innovation and performance improvements over current alternatives.
Come on. Give me PostgreSQL any day. After fiddling with MySQL at work for a few custom developments (both versions 4 and 5.0.2) i'm ready for anything else. Gave PSGSQL a shot at home and it runs very nice, with lots of advanced features. Anyone with real-world deploying feedback to share?
C and C++ make you spend a lot of time working around weaknesses in the language and fixing bugs that other languages can never have. A great deal of programmer time is put into developing the broken and slow implementation of half of Common Lisp that every sufficiently complex program must contain.
One mans' weakness is another mans' strength. If you have to spend a lot of time to implement functionality missing from a language, perhaps you chose the wrong tool for the work. This is one of my peeves with the endless Java-vs-C arguments: ok, you think language "x" is better... to do what, exactly? I wouldn't write a device driver with Java just as i wouldn't write web applets in C.
Don't get me wrong, i wouldn't write much in Java anyway, as i hate the language with a passion (i think there're much better choices for interpreted/bytecoded languages), but discussing weaknesses must be done within a frame of reference.
Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual. For example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a tilt bit gets set.
This is the first time i've seen this mentioned, is it true? If it is, and it's actually enforced by Vista (somehow forcing drivers to implement this functionality), my guess is that the average PC won't even be able to boot. Taking a multimeter and measuring voltages arround a motherboard can be a, well, enlightening experience.
Well, yes, Slashdot was always renowed for their editorial objectiveness, specially regarding new Microsoft products:)
But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable - it pretty much boils down to "Well, it looks spiffy, borrows a lot from OSX, and seems to be a worthy upgrade, but none of this really matters as we'll all be using it in a year anyway". Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.
I'd mod you +1 funny if this wasn't so painfully true to life. And if i had any modpoints.
Re:fix the memory leaks first
on
Firefox 3 In Alpha
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unfortuantely Opera 9 is too unstable.
I keep hearing this... don't know why, but in my Linux box, Opera 9.02 is rock solid - it haven't crashed once since i installed it. I experienced a couple of crashes back then with O8 though, but the session management (restores your session completely after a crash) rendered them relatively painless.
I must say all versions of FF i've tried were perfectly stable aswell, but the insane memory requierements (among other peeves) prevents it from being my main browser.
Oh, you mean like the ads I'm seeing on TV saying "Panadol, It's my choice"? Or like so called infomercials out there, which is half an hour of someone raving about how good a certain brand of blender is?
The same Panadol ad with the Panadol logo at the end? Or the shopping channel infomercials that reminds you every 20 minutes that the "show" you're watching is a paid advertisement? Come on, the line might be thin, but it's still there. The fact that advertising nowadays is pretty fucked up doesn't excuse it.
All advertising is a evil manipulative trash for the mind. This is just advertising (shudder) 2.0.
Much agreed. It's just it can't be called advertising once the little detail of who's advertising is left off. Or better said, disguised as something completely different.
No, bullshit. Sorry. This is NOT marketing, and in fact it's borderline deceiveing. I don't give two shits if they call it viral marketing, or astroturfing, or whatever. It is a scam simply because it intends to mislead the consumer by making him beleive that what he's seeing was created by someone who really would like a PSP for Christmas. The fact that this one is so poorly made that it begs to be laughed at is irrelevant. I don't know what saddens me most, the fact that a lot of people just can't grasp the difference or (even worse) that they're so used to this kind of promotion that think it's normal.
By the way, this was created by a PR agency - just click here.
But then again, it's Sony we're talking about. It's not like they have a track record in this sort of matters...
Some of my favorite comedic quotes about religion were from the great late Bill Hicks. This one is priceless too:
"A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to see a fucking cross? Ow! Maybe that's why he hasn't shown up yet...it's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a sniper rifle pendant... Just thinking of John, Jackie. We love him. Trying to keep that memory alive, baby.
[mimes shooting a rifle]
I did that routine in Fyffe, Alabama, and after the show these three rednecks came up to me. 'Hey, buddy! C'mere! Hey Mr. Comedian! C'mere! Hey buddy, we're Christians and we don't like what you said!'
Not that i'm saying that copyright infringement is good (even when i thing software patents should be abolished) - but if the developer that implemented the code that infringes on the so called Microsoft patent does not live in the USA, or any other country that recognizes this patents' validity, what happens?
Am i the only one who thought they were placing the logo in space? I swear, the moment i raise my eyes and find a corporate logo hanging in the sky i'm going on a killing rampage.
Pretty nice, but i can (and did) do the same with Python. I'm taking about stuff like SAP XI, a 250,000$ software package i have to work with every day and breaks if you switch browsers, use a "non-supported" OS or dare to upgrade the damn JRE. Same with Java applets for cellphones. You can write portable Java code, i agree - you can also do it in other interpreted languages. Hell, you can do it in C if you're careful enough.
Like i said, Java does have its perks. Flawless portability it's not one of them.
Java is an easy to learn, fully cross platform (and by fully, i don't mean pseduofully like most languages, if you code a GUI in Java, you don't need to install stuff like GTK+ to make it work in windows / linux), with a 'one class file fits all' attitude.
This is a perpetuated lie. I once readed a quote here in/. that said something like "Java. Cross platform... as long as you run the exact version of the JRE, wit the exact version of the Java libraries, in the exact OS", and in my experience, this is 100% true. In fact, i wrote Perl and Python programs that were much more portable (and ran better) than Java counterparts.
Java has its perks, but it is NOT fast and it's not as portable as Sun want us to beleive.
Actually, i hold Microsofts' hardware in high regard, even when i hate most of their software products. I know a lot of people do aswell. The problem here is tha the Zune is a product released solely to be no-less-than-Apple... and it shows.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheeze, can we put this to rest already? It seems that, for the last couple of console generations, all that people care about is who won and who lost. Number of shipped consoles vs. sold ones, launch date numbers, millons invested in advertising, etc. Nevermind the endless drooling over polygons per seconds, CPUs, memory controllers and the works. People live and die by these numbers, claiming that company X is the winner of this generation while company Y is in the brink of bankruptcy.
Come on guys. I can understand (barely) this kind of insaness from fanboy sites, but please, can we move forward? If you like consoles, why do you care beyond which one is more fun to play, or has more games that appeal to you? Do we really have to get into the pissing contest of which one sold an extra 10 units this month? I mean, is it relevant? Is it even interesting? If you like consoles, you have not one, nor two, but three excellent options to chose from, and that's it. I'd like to see more discussion about games rather than units shipped, Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD or whatever is trendy this week.
Basically, performance. Anything involving subqueries seems to run substantially faster on my system, for example, after a few days of testing. Postgre also supports a wealth of features not available in MySQL until version 5, or with a much better implementation - triggers, stored procedures, functions, the works. You don't know how much you miss these until you find that MySQL doesn't do them, or do them in a completely bizarre way.
Finally, Postgre has a track record of reilability, and for me that fact alone makes it worth checking out. I've seen corrupted databases on MySQL installations for websites, for example.
Perhaps we've tried different versions, but my experience was nowhere as awful...
:) I've created fairly complex DB systems involving triggers, linked tables, stored procedures and lots of functions, and the performance of the server (running on a non-dedicated PIII with 512mb, Win2k3 Server) was stellar. This was both from the query analyzer and being polled from a website (about 10-15 stored procedures every 5 seconds per user).
1. Near-incomprehensible administration panel. The fact that they gave it a fancy name ("Enterprise Manager" or something like that) didn't help. The usability of it absolutely sucks.
Given. It's not unusable, but i've seen better.
2. Bad documentation. All I want is to automatically make database backups every night at 3 AM and upload it to a remote server in encrypted form. With Linux, MySQL and SSH, I can write such a script in 30 minutes. With Windows 2003 and MS SQL Server, I spent 1 to 2 weeks.
I did something similar with a few installations and never took me more than 5 minutes - automatic backups and stored procedures triggering. The dedicated utility (SQL Server Agent) is very easy to setup via the GUI, IMHO.
3. Bad, bad performance. While the game server was running (which used 100% CPU; the game server software sucks but that's another story), the SQL Query Analyzer's performance dropped to near zero. It took 2 minutes to execute a simple "SELECT * FROM foo WHERE bar = 2". One day I wrote a tool in Perl (using DBI and ODBC) to automate some database actions. And guess what? Running the same select statement in the Perl tool was almost instantaneous! I have no idea what SQL Query Analyzer is doing to make the query literally 100 times slower.
I have to politely disagree here
4. One day I noticed that the server ran out of disk space. It turned out that the database transaction log (not the database itself!) grew to 120 GB! The database itself was only about 100 MB. The documentation told me everything that I don't want to know, but it didn't tell me how to clear the transaction log.
I limited the log size to a sensible value when i first installed the DB, and was a pretty straightforward procedure. Given, i was warned about this issue beforehand by a fellow programmer.
I'm sure someone will tell me that points 1 and 2 say I'm an incompetent database administrator. Well, this isn't a multi-million dollar business and I don't want to waste money on a database administrator which costs me more than $1000 per month! I just want to run the damn game server! I'm competent in SQL. On Linux I don't need a database administrator to maintain a database of this size, so why should I with Windows?
Oh, much agreed. Sadly, we do a lot of work both deploying and customizing SCADA setups, and this kind of systems run only on Windows platforms, which make SQL Server somehow a viable option (even when setting up a dedicated Linux/BSD server can be done for a fraction of the cost). That's when databases other than SQLS are an option - most SCADA software is "certified" to work with a handful of databases. If i was given the choice, i'd reccomend PostgreSQL, which, as far as i've tried, seems to be perhaps the most complete OSS database engine arround, miles ahead of MySQL.
Having said that, i found SQL Server to be an extremely competent product. If it's worth or not its price is debatable, but i really meant that is the best piece of software i've seen MS releasing that i can recall. The database engine is extremely fast and well-featured, and comes with a nice pack of utilities - notably, the Query Analyzer. I've seen commercial alternatives for MySQL, PSSQL and the works, but i've yet to come across an OSS one.
New Microsoft Sql Server coming soon to a store near you. Cant wait for M$ to secretly add this to their SQL server and call it innovation.
Laugh all you want, but MS is one of the leaders in the database world with SQL Server for Windows, and have been for a while now. SQLS is by a long, long shot the best software product Microsoft has ever released, IMHO, and keep doing, right to the latest version. It works great.
Falcon looks to be the long-awaited open source storage engine that may become the primary choice for MySQL, and along the way offer some innovation and performance improvements over current alternatives.
Come on. Give me PostgreSQL any day. After fiddling with MySQL at work for a few custom developments (both versions 4 and 5.0.2) i'm ready for anything else. Gave PSGSQL a shot at home and it runs very nice, with lots of advanced features. Anyone with real-world deploying feedback to share?
C and C++ make you spend a lot of time working around weaknesses in the language and fixing bugs that other languages can never have. A great deal of programmer time is put into developing the broken and slow implementation of half of Common Lisp that every sufficiently complex program must contain.
One mans' weakness is another mans' strength. If you have to spend a lot of time to implement functionality missing from a language, perhaps you chose the wrong tool for the work. This is one of my peeves with the endless Java-vs-C arguments: ok, you think language "x" is better... to do what, exactly? I wouldn't write a device driver with Java just as i wouldn't write web applets in C.
Don't get me wrong, i wouldn't write much in Java anyway, as i hate the language with a passion (i think there're much better choices for interpreted/bytecoded languages), but discussing weaknesses must be done within a frame of reference.
Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called "tilt bits" if they detect anything unusual. For example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a tilt bit gets set.
This is the first time i've seen this mentioned, is it true? If it is, and it's actually enforced by Vista (somehow forcing drivers to implement this functionality), my guess is that the average PC won't even be able to boot. Taking a multimeter and measuring voltages arround a motherboard can be a, well, enlightening experience.
Well, yes, Slashdot was always renowed for their editorial objectiveness, specially regarding new Microsoft products :)
But the article was neither favorable nor unfavorable - it pretty much boils down to "Well, it looks spiffy, borrows a lot from OSX, and seems to be a worthy upgrade, but none of this really matters as we'll all be using it in a year anyway". Sadly enough, i think that's more or less right.
I'd mod you +1 funny if this wasn't so painfully true to life. And if i had any modpoints.
Unfortuantely Opera 9 is too unstable.
I keep hearing this... don't know why, but in my Linux box, Opera 9.02 is rock solid - it haven't crashed once since i installed it. I experienced a couple of crashes back then with O8 though, but the session management (restores your session completely after a crash) rendered them relatively painless.
I must say all versions of FF i've tried were perfectly stable aswell, but the insane memory requierements (among other peeves) prevents it from being my main browser.
Oh, you mean like the ads I'm seeing on TV saying "Panadol, It's my choice"? Or like so called infomercials out there, which is half an hour of someone raving about how good a certain brand of blender is?
The same Panadol ad with the Panadol logo at the end? Or the shopping channel infomercials that reminds you every 20 minutes that the "show" you're watching is a paid advertisement? Come on, the line might be thin, but it's still there. The fact that advertising nowadays is pretty fucked up doesn't excuse it.
All advertising is a evil manipulative trash for the mind. This is just advertising (shudder) 2.0.
Much agreed. It's just it can't be called advertising once the little detail of who's advertising is left off. Or better said, disguised as something completely different.
It's different the second it has a Sony logo plastered over it.
No, bullshit. Sorry. This is NOT marketing, and in fact it's borderline deceiveing. I don't give two shits if they call it viral marketing, or astroturfing, or whatever. It is a scam simply because it intends to mislead the consumer by making him beleive that what he's seeing was created by someone who really would like a PSP for Christmas. The fact that this one is so poorly made that it begs to be laughed at is irrelevant. I don't know what saddens me most, the fact that a lot of people just can't grasp the difference or (even worse) that they're so used to this kind of promotion that think it's normal.
By the way, this was created by a PR agency - just click here.
But then again, it's Sony we're talking about. It's not like they have a track record in this sort of matters...
...and pay another $725,000 to cover the state's attorneys' fees.
Well, i think i fucked up good when i picked my career path.
Some of my favorite comedic quotes about religion were from the great late Bill Hicks. This one is priceless too:
"A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. Do you think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to see a fucking cross? Ow! Maybe that's why he hasn't shown up yet...it's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a sniper rifle pendant... Just thinking of John, Jackie. We love him. Trying to keep that memory alive, baby.
[mimes shooting a rifle]
I did that routine in Fyffe, Alabama, and after the show these three rednecks came up to me. 'Hey, buddy! C'mere! Hey Mr. Comedian! C'mere! Hey buddy, we're Christians and we don't like what you said!'
I said 'Well, then forgive me.'
Later, as I was hanging from the tree..."
Essentially the PS3 is a computer that runs software.
;)
Unlike my PC which runs music and bedtime stories?
Not that i'm saying that copyright infringement is good (even when i thing software patents should be abolished) - but if the developer that implemented the code that infringes on the so called Microsoft patent does not live in the USA, or any other country that recognizes this patents' validity, what happens?
Theodore Sturgeon, "Microcosmic Gods". I loved that story when i was a kid.
Am i the only one who thought they were placing the logo in space? I swear, the moment i raise my eyes and find a corporate logo hanging in the sky i'm going on a killing rampage.
Pretty nice, but i can (and did) do the same with Python. I'm taking about stuff like SAP XI, a 250,000$ software package i have to work with every day and breaks if you switch browsers, use a "non-supported" OS or dare to upgrade the damn JRE. Same with Java applets for cellphones. You can write portable Java code, i agree - you can also do it in other interpreted languages. Hell, you can do it in C if you're careful enough. Like i said, Java does have its perks. Flawless portability it's not one of them.
Java is an easy to learn, fully cross platform (and by fully, i don't mean pseduofully like most languages, if you code a GUI in Java, you don't need to install stuff like GTK+ to make it work in windows / linux), with a 'one class file fits all' attitude.
/. that said something like "Java. Cross platform... as long as you run the exact version of the JRE, wit the exact version of the Java libraries, in the exact OS", and in my experience, this is 100% true. In fact, i wrote Perl and Python programs that were much more portable (and ran better) than Java counterparts.
This is a perpetuated lie. I once readed a quote here in
Java has its perks, but it is NOT fast and it's not as portable as Sun want us to beleive.
I'm moving to Hell this summer. I hear the weather is lovely down there lately.
I have AdAware installed on my computer but haven't bothered running it in about 2 years since it never picks up anything.
Gee, that's normal. I find AdAware picks up less and less spyware with each new release. SpyBot is still ok though.
Actually, i hold Microsofts' hardware in high regard, even when i hate most of their software products. I know a lot of people do aswell. The problem here is tha the Zune is a product released solely to be no-less-than-Apple... and it shows.