Usually a piss-poor database reflects on piss-poor developers.
This is a BIG IMPORTANT POINT. But, unfortunately, the people that are architecting the databases in these cases usually don't realize that they're producing bad designs. All they see is "The database is slow. Why the *!?$ is it so slow!?"
There's usually one or two answers:
1) Your schema is organized poorly.
2) You're just plain juggling too much data at once.
And let's not forget the deadly combination of both 1 and 2.
100M rows, for example, is a lot of data, any way you look at it. If you've got 100 bytes per row (remarkably small in many cases), that's 10G of data. If you're shuffling through all that data every time, yeah, it's gonna be slow. Ya might want to look into reorganizing, or archiving.
Usually a piss-poor database reflects on piss-poor developers.
This is a BIG IMPORTANT POINT. But, unfortunately, the people that are architecting the databases in these cases usually don't realize that they're producing bad designs. All they see is "The database is slow. Why the *!?$ is it so slow!?"
There's usually one or two answers:
1) Your schema is organized poorly.
2) You're just plain juggling too much data at once.
And let's not forget the deadly combination of both 1 and 2.
100M rows, for example, is a lot of data, any way you look at it. If you've got 100 bytes per row (remarkably small in many cases), that's 10G of data. If you're shuffling through all that data every time, yeah, it's gonna be slow. Ya might want to look into reorganizing, or archiving.
instruct the query to first make and then use the index
build multiple indices on a 20M row table, on the fly? Is it worth the effort to build it on the fly if the database can figure out the best way to make and use the indices on its own 99% of the time?
I think that what you're looking for is a database that will allow, but not require, you to tinker programmatically with creating and using temporary indices on the fly. It's still indespensible to have optimizing index functionality in the database for the 99% of proper uses that don't require the extra oomph. And insisting on reinventing the wheel every time simply because "I can do it better than some stupid program someone else wrote" is a rather naive development philosophy. Yes there are times when it's better. But they are vastly outweighed by the times when it's just not worth it. The need for packaged indexing functionality is there.
Let me be the first to say that if they pull off this laser plan, the reward should be to surround them with a million women screaming and throwing tiny pickles at them.
I felt no emotional involvement in Dooku's death, and that was wrong.
Hmmm... I suppose I agree, in retrospect. Anakin wasn't nearly conflicted enough about it.
the part about handing in unsolvable homework is great, though probably slightly embellished.
Indeed. According to Snopes, they weren't unsolvable problems. They were just unproven theorems. He didn't know this, and just thought the assignment was to prove them. And so he did. =)
I'd guess no one else in the theater cared. Let's face it, if you were so disappointed by episodes 1 and 2, why did you even bother to see 3? Same reason everyone else did: closure. The difference between you and everyone else in the theater though was that you were determined going in that this was going to be a bad movie and you just wanted to get the last few story elements out and be done with it. Going in I was scared it was going to be like ep. 1. But I came out more than relieved. Fully satisfied, one might say.
Personally, I was less than impressed with ep. 1, but I didn't think it was terrible. I thought ep. 2 was better. The romantic scenes were very annoying, because Lucas can't write good emotional dialogue and Hayden Christiansen can't emote realistic emotion (except for whiny discontent). However, I loved everything else about ep. 2. And after seeing ep. 3, I have a new appreciation for the romantic scense. Ep. 3 wouldn't have made any sense at all without them. It's utterly necessary that Anakin actually has a reason for his fear.
Ep. 3 was awesome, IMHO. On par with the first 3. Maybe better just because it was dire, so tragic, and looked so good. Moreso of all three than eps. 4-6 were able to achieve. Plus, it answered so many questions I hadn't even realized I had! Now I know why the Jedi shun emotion and attachment. Now I know why the Sith are so dangerous, and why they can get rational people to support them despite that.
Anyway, like I said, it was awesome. I may have to go see it again in the theater, which I don't do often.
No, there was a short tune that played at the title screen, before the story started rolling up the screen. This served as a prelude to, and segued into, the actual overworld theme song, which began to play when the story started rolling.
That title tune was not anywhere else in the game.
Sounds like there's a conflict of interest between two personality traits here:
* Impatience
* Perfectionism
You usually can't have both rule at the same time. Even in games. There's nothing tying you to your seat forcing you to spend hours chasing down that last 2%. So just stop playing when the fun is gone.
I did this with Final Fantasy X. With previous Squaresoft games, I played through once getting everything I could, then played through again with a guide to get everything else. With FF-X, I felt that by the time I finished the game I had pulled all the entertainment I really wanted out of it. I didn't feel the need to go kill the Omega Weapon, or to get the last 2 ultimate weapons for my characters.
I had fun while I played, I got pretty much all of the story that there was to be had, and I got to see the ending. As long as the game doesn't require you to go running around on wild goose chases like just this to see a proper game ending, it shouldn't be a problem.
So like I said, either quash the impatience or the perfectionism, and you'll enjoy games much more.
Yet what do databases offer us to represent textual data: a block of text! Fifty years of computers and they best method we've comeup with for representing a richly structured piece of writing like a wikipedia article is: a block of text. Ok, theres a bit of markup there but its all just stuffed together in a textblob. I might as well just dump it in a file for all the good a database does, indeed thats what yahoo does.
To my mind databases are broken beyond belief.
Well let us know when you think of an alternative to expressing concepts through some sort of language, in a way that simulatneously allows the measure of definition and ambiguity that all conceptual (i.e. ideas, not strict data) communication requires. I'm sure there will be great fanfare, as it would revolutionize life for all humanity.
I propose an alternative complaint that gets more to the source of the issue:
"Thousands of years of communication and the best method the human race has come up with for representing a rich tapestry of ideas and concepts is: words. Aural and written communication. Ok, sure writing has a bit of markup in there and speech has little pauses strewn about, to delimit blocks of thought, but it's all just stuffed together as a stream of letters or phonems. I might as well just draw a picture in the dirt.
To my mind, languages are broken beyond belief."
Leaky != broken. However, using the improper abstraction = a waste of time, money, and effort. The problem is probably not that databases "only" support text as "blobs" of characters. It is more likely that people insist on applying a data-oriented abstraction (it's right there in the name: DATA-base) to a fluid body of information that requires human language.
You're obviously not visiting slashdot enough. That's your problem.;)
J/k. I haven't seen the bug in quite a long time, myself. Several months. At least since before v1.0.1 came out. Not sure if that's related though.
Of course, posting that statement guarantees that I will see it before the end of the day. =)
I've also heard that the problem may be with certain ads, so having an adblocker may circumvent the issue. If you really want to get the rendering bug, I recommend searching the Bugzilla database for Mozilla/Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi
Whatever happened to just letting you pay the entire cost of something, without subsidising it with advertising?
I've often wondered about this myself. I wonder how many companies truly need the ad revenue to survive, because without it consumer prices would be too high. Surely there are at least a few, right? But I'd really like to know how many just rake in ad revenue as extra gravy?
Wait a minute! I thought the next big thing was ethernet over power, not power over ethernet!
What's going on!?
Oh no... I've entered some sort of "Bizarro World" haven't I??? A world where technologies are turned backwards and inside out without warning! What a terrifying prospect!
I understand this. But the effort to eliminate P2P sharing is part of the same agenda that pushes stuff like this bill. And that part has not gotten things the way they want them. That's all I was trying to get across.
And for clarification, I was by no means saying we should be satisfied with this and just go on our merry way. But it's no reason to give up hope. It is somewhat encouraging that it isn't as bad as it could have been. But if we are complacent, it will be eventually.
It would be interesting to compare the last few Clearplay/Cleanflicks stories and look for inconsistencies in the attitudes of individual posters based on the headlines.
Make sure you keep track of who is commenting, and of whether each individual's comment is "positive" or "negative". I suspect that there is an explanation other than just herd mentality. (Though that probably is a factor in some cases.)
I suspect that most of the people that comment, or at least that start longer threads of comment, are people that feel strongly one way or the other. And depending on the wording of the headline, you may be inspired to comment or you may not, depending on which side of the fence you're on.
Me, there are two things that most often inspire me to comment: If I am upset in some way by the post or article itself, or if I am upset in some way by a comment in the discussion thread. "Hear, hear!" type posts don't contribute much unless they are long on explanation, and I seldom check a thread before one of those is up already, so I don't usually bother. The remaining portion of my posts are inspired by a void of information in an article or a comment that I feel I can fill.
As far as this specific issue is concerned, no it's not ideal. I still hope for copyright lifetimes to be reformed someday. I still think it's kind of retarded that ads can't be skipped. (I do understand the motivation--if ads can be skipped, advertisers are literally throwing money away for those people--but personally, I think that's part of the risk of doing business.) I also think that the 3-year jail sentence is ridiculous. To put it in perspective, what's your state's normal sentence for a drunk driver? Ours is less than 3 years, I can tell you that. And I think drunk driving is a heckuva lot worse than selling a prerelease movie.
But it could have been worse. Recent efforts at undermining all P2P activity have failed. Universities don't need to release the identity of students on their networks to the **AA lawyers. And so on.
We won some battles and we lost some on this bill. But there is yet hope to win the war.
I'd check your facts on that troll, unless all those black males are gay, which I highly doubt.
Although I am also dubious of the factuality of the statement, I'd hesitate to call it a troll unless I could show he was actually wrong and that he had no intention of checking his facts.
Now, with that behind me, your statement about black males introduces a completely new set of questions. Are black males actually physically more susceptible, or do they just have more sex than the other demographics? If one of those is true, then the statistic itself bears no evidence of falsity in the statement that homosexual sex transmits AIDS more effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
Usually a piss-poor database reflects on piss-poor developers.
This is a BIG IMPORTANT POINT. But, unfortunately, the people that are architecting the databases in these cases usually don't realize that they're producing bad designs. All they see is "The database is slow. Why the *!?$ is it so slow!?"
There's usually one or two answers:
1) Your schema is organized poorly.
2) You're just plain juggling too much data at once.
And let's not forget the deadly combination of both 1 and 2.
100M rows, for example, is a lot of data, any way you look at it. If you've got 100 bytes per row (remarkably small in many cases), that's 10G of data. If you're shuffling through all that data every time, yeah, it's gonna be slow. Ya might want to look into reorganizing, or archiving.
This is a BIG IMPORTANT POINT. But, unfortunately, the people that are architecting the databases in these cases usually don't realize that they're producing bad designs. All they see is "The database is slow. Why the *!?$ is it so slow!?" There's usually one or two answers: 1) Your schema is organized poorly. 2) You're just plain juggling too much data at once. And let's not forget the deadly combination of both 1 and 2. 100M rows, for example, is a lot of data, any way you look at it. If you've got 100 bytes per row (remarkably small in many cases), that's 10G of data. If you're shuffling through all that data every time, yeah, it's gonna be slow. Ya might want to look into reorganizing, or archiving.
build multiple indices on a 20M row table, on the fly? Is it worth the effort to build it on the fly if the database can figure out the best way to make and use the indices on its own 99% of the time?
I think that what you're looking for is a database that will allow, but not require, you to tinker programmatically with creating and using temporary indices on the fly. It's still indespensible to have optimizing index functionality in the database for the 99% of proper uses that don't require the extra oomph. And insisting on reinventing the wheel every time simply because "I can do it better than some stupid program someone else wrote" is a rather naive development philosophy. Yes there are times when it's better. But they are vastly outweighed by the times when it's just not worth it. The need for packaged indexing functionality is there.
Let me be the first to say that if they pull off this laser plan, the reward should be to surround them with a million women screaming and throwing tiny pickles at them.
It's worse. You forgot a level at the front:
A discussion thread about...
An article, about a website, about a video a guy made, of people in costumes, waiting to see a movie.
I felt no emotional involvement in Dooku's death, and that was wrong. Hmmm... I suppose I agree, in retrospect. Anakin wasn't nearly conflicted enough about it.
the part about handing in unsolvable homework is great, though probably slightly embellished.
Indeed. According to Snopes, they weren't unsolvable problems. They were just unproven theorems. He didn't know this, and just thought the assignment was to prove them. And so he did. =)
Again, no one in the theator seemed to notice.
I'd guess no one else in the theater cared. Let's face it, if you were so disappointed by episodes 1 and 2, why did you even bother to see 3? Same reason everyone else did: closure. The difference between you and everyone else in the theater though was that you were determined going in that this was going to be a bad movie and you just wanted to get the last few story elements out and be done with it. Going in I was scared it was going to be like ep. 1. But I came out more than relieved. Fully satisfied, one might say.
Personally, I was less than impressed with ep. 1, but I didn't think it was terrible. I thought ep. 2 was better. The romantic scenes were very annoying, because Lucas can't write good emotional dialogue and Hayden Christiansen can't emote realistic emotion (except for whiny discontent). However, I loved everything else about ep. 2. And after seeing ep. 3, I have a new appreciation for the romantic scense. Ep. 3 wouldn't have made any sense at all without them. It's utterly necessary that Anakin actually has a reason for his fear.
Ep. 3 was awesome, IMHO. On par with the first 3. Maybe better just because it was dire, so tragic, and looked so good. Moreso of all three than eps. 4-6 were able to achieve. Plus, it answered so many questions I hadn't even realized I had! Now I know why the Jedi shun emotion and attachment. Now I know why the Sith are so dangerous, and why they can get rational people to support them despite that.
Anyway, like I said, it was awesome. I may have to go see it again in the theater, which I don't do often.
From the Gamespy article:
The game begins in a temple in the center of the game world. This is where the main character's loved one lies.
Sound familiar to anyone else? We've seen this intro before, many years ago. =)
story works well even if you are ignorant of the allegory
By amazing coincidence, that is precisely the definition of well-written allegory. =) It works regardless of the level on which you're reading.
Or, they likely don't care. More people are willing to talk about science (or any topic for that matter) than are willing actually to understand it.
That title tune was not anywhere else in the game.
* Impatience
* Perfectionism
You usually can't have both rule at the same time. Even in games. There's nothing tying you to your seat forcing you to spend hours chasing down that last 2%. So just stop playing when the fun is gone.
I did this with Final Fantasy X. With previous Squaresoft games, I played through once getting everything I could, then played through again with a guide to get everything else. With FF-X, I felt that by the time I finished the game I had pulled all the entertainment I really wanted out of it. I didn't feel the need to go kill the Omega Weapon, or to get the last 2 ultimate weapons for my characters.
I had fun while I played, I got pretty much all of the story that there was to be had, and I got to see the ending. As long as the game doesn't require you to go running around on wild goose chases like just this to see a proper game ending, it shouldn't be a problem.
So like I said, either quash the impatience or the perfectionism, and you'll enjoy games much more.
"Keep you're friends close, and you're enemies closer". (Sorry, origin unknown.)
I've often heard this attributed to Sun Tzu, from "The Art of War". Haven't read it myself, so I don't know true that is.
To my mind databases are broken beyond belief.
Well let us know when you think of an alternative to expressing concepts through some sort of language, in a way that simulatneously allows the measure of definition and ambiguity that all conceptual (i.e. ideas, not strict data) communication requires. I'm sure there will be great fanfare, as it would revolutionize life for all humanity.
I propose an alternative complaint that gets more to the source of the issue:
"Thousands of years of communication and the best method the human race has come up with for representing a rich tapestry of ideas and concepts is: words. Aural and written communication. Ok, sure writing has a bit of markup in there and speech has little pauses strewn about, to delimit blocks of thought, but it's all just stuffed together as a stream of letters or phonems. I might as well just draw a picture in the dirt.
To my mind, languages are broken beyond belief."
Leaky != broken. However, using the improper abstraction = a waste of time, money, and effort. The problem is probably not that databases "only" support text as "blobs" of characters. It is more likely that people insist on applying a data-oriented abstraction (it's right there in the name: DATA-base) to a fluid body of information that requires human language.
You're obviously not visiting slashdot enough. That's your problem. ;)
J/k. I haven't seen the bug in quite a long time, myself. Several months. At least since before v1.0.1 came out. Not sure if that's related though.
Of course, posting that statement guarantees that I will see it before the end of the day. =)
I've also heard that the problem may be with certain ads, so having an adblocker may circumvent the issue. If you really want to get the rendering bug, I recommend searching the Bugzilla database for Mozilla/Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/query.cgi
I've often wondered about this myself. I wonder how many companies truly need the ad revenue to survive, because without it consumer prices would be too high. Surely there are at least a few, right? But I'd really like to know how many just rake in ad revenue as extra gravy?
Wait a minute! I thought the next big thing was ethernet over power, not power over ethernet!
What's going on!?
Oh no... I've entered some sort of "Bizarro World" haven't I??? A world where technologies are turned backwards and inside out without warning! What a terrifying prospect!
And for clarification, I was by no means saying we should be satisfied with this and just go on our merry way. But it's no reason to give up hope. It is somewhat encouraging that it isn't as bad as it could have been. But if we are complacent, it will be eventually.
Er... I must have forgotten how to read English, because that page and the article it links to don't really say anything at all about censorship.
For an alternate view on that issue, see here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050425-4847 .html
But seriously folks, can we talk about anything here without it degenerating into a "religious nazi" versus "liberal degenerate" argument?
...Cue the "You must be new here" posts...
It would be interesting to compare the last few Clearplay/Cleanflicks stories and look for inconsistencies in the attitudes of individual posters based on the headlines.
Make sure you keep track of who is commenting, and of whether each individual's comment is "positive" or "negative". I suspect that there is an explanation other than just herd mentality. (Though that probably is a factor in some cases.)
I suspect that most of the people that comment, or at least that start longer threads of comment, are people that feel strongly one way or the other. And depending on the wording of the headline, you may be inspired to comment or you may not, depending on which side of the fence you're on.
Me, there are two things that most often inspire me to comment: If I am upset in some way by the post or article itself, or if I am upset in some way by a comment in the discussion thread. "Hear, hear!" type posts don't contribute much unless they are long on explanation, and I seldom check a thread before one of those is up already, so I don't usually bother. The remaining portion of my posts are inspired by a void of information in an article or a comment that I feel I can fill.
As far as this specific issue is concerned, no it's not ideal. I still hope for copyright lifetimes to be reformed someday. I still think it's kind of retarded that ads can't be skipped. (I do understand the motivation--if ads can be skipped, advertisers are literally throwing money away for those people--but personally, I think that's part of the risk of doing business.) I also think that the 3-year jail sentence is ridiculous. To put it in perspective, what's your state's normal sentence for a drunk driver? Ours is less than 3 years, I can tell you that. And I think drunk driving is a heckuva lot worse than selling a prerelease movie.
But it could have been worse. Recent efforts at undermining all P2P activity have failed. Universities don't need to release the identity of students on their networks to the **AA lawyers. And so on.
We won some battles and we lost some on this bill. But there is yet hope to win the war.
If you follow the "engineering" convention that's used by computers, it's even shorter and simpler: 6e5
Any computer geek should know that it's year first, then month, then day.
The text sorts better that way.
I'd check your facts on that troll, unless all those black males are gay, which I highly doubt.
Although I am also dubious of the factuality of the statement, I'd hesitate to call it a troll unless I could show he was actually wrong and that he had no intention of checking his facts.
Now, with that behind me, your statement about black males introduces a completely new set of questions. Are black males actually physically more susceptible, or do they just have more sex than the other demographics? If one of those is true, then the statistic itself bears no evidence of falsity in the statement that homosexual sex transmits AIDS more effectively.
Someone else modded him down while I was looking for the "-1 Belabored" or "-1 Bad Joke" options in the moderation box. =)
Maybe I should have been looking for "+0.5 Almost Funny"?