Either way, it's highly unlikely the "encryption" scheme is much more sophisticated than a single XOR operation. Decrypting that field for a substantial portion of the database SELECT statements would be a huge overhead.
Or you encrypt the value you want to look for before using it in your WHERE clause. Unless the key is individually salted for each person, you can do a much quicker binary comparison with encrypted value against encrypted value. If it IS individually salted, you could store a hash to compare with rather than the full value, decreasing the amount of work that needs to be done. As far as I'm aware, performing a hash operation + compare would be quicker than full decryption + compare. If you don't salt the hash, it's even faster, though an attacker would be able to use a rainbow table then.
Besides, CSRs and billing would only need the encrypted data occasionally anyway. It wouldn't be a huge overhead to decrypt if you only run billing once a month - let it go overnight. You could even split it across the month, running portions at a time depending on the billing date for each customer.
TFS - lag on every operation that gets worse the more files you have checked out, and the larger your source tree is. I've had it take several minutes to rename a single file. As soon as you do a check-in, suddenly it's back to instantaneous.
Database projects - lag that gets worse the more complex the project is. Save a file, wait 20 seconds. Save a lot of files, you might as well go to lunch. Don't even think about referencing other projects. And if Visual Studio crashes, you lose an hour whilst it regenerates the database model.
Silverlight projects - Start getting to a decent size, and you'll endure multi-second lags every time you switch tabs. Make that double if the tab is a XAML designer. And the build times are glacial.
I should note these experiences were all on a quad-core, 8gb of RAM 64-bit version of Vista, but we had developers on XP and Windows 7 finding exactly the same.
Thank goodness I don't have to deal with Visual Studio any more. It's fine for small projects, but as soon as you start having large, enterprise-scale applications, the constant freezes and lag become unbearable.
Optus Australia had (until a few months ago) plans that were 15 cents per KB over the limit. I'm on one, with 500mb of data allowance... heaven help me if I go over that.
Exactly. There's also Sanctuary, leaving at least two more sci-fi shows on at the moment. Still, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. What's the point of a sci-fi channel that shows barely any sci-fi?
I'd argue Openmoko failed because they were too busy making shiny user interfaces to get the thing working.
It had nothing to do with the level of lock-down and everything to do with the thing not even covering the essentials of being a phone, let alone smartphone. Just the little things, like... say, making and receiving phone calls reliably, or being able to have it suspend and actually work when it woke up.
The hardware wasn't so bad, but they seemed to think that being open source would magically provide them with functioning software.
Hm? My old (consumer) connection at home was 6m/0.5m (ADSL).
Who were you with that offer such an odd plan, let alone 512k upload? The best ADSL plan I've ever seen other than 512/512 is 8000/384.
Currently at 20m/2m (VDSL). At my company, most of the branch offices have 20m/2m ADSL2+ connections.
ADSL2+ simply isn't available at a good proportion of exchanges, so there are a lot of people stuck with either slow ADSL or getting ripped off with Cable.
If you only have 256kbps upload, you either live somewhere in the montains, or don't pay enough.
We're on the edge of Melbourne, right about where it starts to become a rural area. We pay quite a bit for a decent download limit (95gb), but we're over 5km from the exchange so the best we can sync at is 1500/256.
And I know I'm not in the minority because I have friends all across the city who all have similar connections. 1500/256 is pretty standard for those who don't have unlimited internet budgets, or who aren't in the inner suburbs. Lots of people who can't have their mates over for a game of Diablo 3 because Blizzard won't add LAN play. Lots of people who will thus not be buying it.
Not necessarily backwards as they are overcome some of the slowness of the old LAN days. Doesn't anyone else remember having to install IPX to get Starcraft to work?:)
Having to install IPX hasn't been a problem for years, so that argument doesn't even make sense any more.
We frequently have LAN parties with World of Warcraft with a single cable modem connection and can all play easily without a hitch.
Not everybody has a decent connection like that. Plenty of people are stuck on ADSL, where you're lucky if you have 256kbps upload. I'm sure I'll be thanking Blizzard for dropping LAN play when I've saturated my connection and suffer horrible lag, not to mention the lag we already get here in AU when playing on US servers.
The downside is having to have an internet connection, but the fact is internet is so ubiquitous these days it shouldn't make a difference.
Not every situation where you'd want to play games includes an internet connection. I've been to many LAN games held in halls and schools with 200+ people where there's not an internet connection in sight, and that's exactly the sort of situation where you'd want to load up a game and have 8 or more people roll over the legions of hell. No LAN play makes it impossible.
And this completely ignores the other benefit of LAN games, and that is hackable characters.
If someone else wants to join a LAN game that is already in progress, you can simply copy your existing character, rename it and free up the skill points so they're all ready to drop in and start playing in minutes with all the quests and waypoints set. Or to make the game quicker we'd create an amulet with the maximum number of bonuses you could place on an item.
Being able to edit the characters was one of the things that made it fun. We had competitions on who could hack up the best level 1 Hell-Difficulty character! Or we'd amp up the useless skills until you had level 200 Teeth and could one-shot bosses. It was stupid, silly fun, and that's part of what made the game last long after it should have gotten boring.
Granted, allowing local characters online was foolish, and they should have never had open Battle.Net. But dropping LAN play will mean that I, and a lot of my friends, won't be buying it. It'll be just like Hellgate:London.
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Either way, it's highly unlikely the "encryption" scheme is much more sophisticated than a single XOR operation. Decrypting that field for a substantial portion of the database SELECT statements would be a huge overhead.
Or you encrypt the value you want to look for before using it in your WHERE clause. Unless the key is individually salted for each person, you can do a much quicker binary comparison with encrypted value against encrypted value. If it IS individually salted, you could store a hash to compare with rather than the full value, decreasing the amount of work that needs to be done. As far as I'm aware, performing a hash operation + compare would be quicker than full decryption + compare. If you don't salt the hash, it's even faster, though an attacker would be able to use a rainbow table then.
Besides, CSRs and billing would only need the encrypted data occasionally anyway. It wouldn't be a huge overhead to decrypt if you only run billing once a month - let it go overnight. You could even split it across the month, running portions at a time depending on the billing date for each customer.
I'd venture a guess that you're not using:
I should note these experiences were all on a quad-core, 8gb of RAM 64-bit version of Vista, but we had developers on XP and Windows 7 finding exactly the same.
Thank goodness I don't have to deal with Visual Studio any more. It's fine for small projects, but as soon as you start having large, enterprise-scale applications, the constant freezes and lag become unbearable.
Optus Australia had (until a few months ago) plans that were 15 cents per KB over the limit. I'm on one, with 500mb of data allowance... heaven help me if I go over that.
Exactly. There's also Sanctuary, leaving at least two more sci-fi shows on at the moment. Still, it's a pretty sad state of affairs. What's the point of a sci-fi channel that shows barely any sci-fi?
I'd argue Openmoko failed because they were too busy making shiny user interfaces to get the thing working.
It had nothing to do with the level of lock-down and everything to do with the thing not even covering the essentials of being a phone, let alone smartphone. Just the little things, like... say, making and receiving phone calls reliably, or being able to have it suspend and actually work when it woke up.
The hardware wasn't so bad, but they seemed to think that being open source would magically provide them with functioning software.
Personally I thought the news was that no one knows what 0.3% of the linux kernel is written in.
Most likely the missing 0.3% is makefiles and miscellaneous scripts.
Hm? My old (consumer) connection at home was 6m/0.5m (ADSL).
Who were you with that offer such an odd plan, let alone 512k upload? The best ADSL plan I've ever seen other than 512/512 is 8000/384.
Currently at 20m/2m (VDSL). At my company, most of the branch offices have 20m/2m ADSL2+ connections.
ADSL2+ simply isn't available at a good proportion of exchanges, so there are a lot of people stuck with either slow ADSL or getting ripped off with Cable.
If you only have 256kbps upload, you either live somewhere in the montains, or don't pay enough.
We're on the edge of Melbourne, right about where it starts to become a rural area. We pay quite a bit for a decent download limit (95gb), but we're over 5km from the exchange so the best we can sync at is 1500/256.
And I know I'm not in the minority because I have friends all across the city who all have similar connections. 1500/256 is pretty standard for those who don't have unlimited internet budgets, or who aren't in the inner suburbs. Lots of people who can't have their mates over for a game of Diablo 3 because Blizzard won't add LAN play. Lots of people who will thus not be buying it.
Not necessarily backwards as they are overcome some of the slowness of the old LAN days. Doesn't anyone else remember having to install IPX to get Starcraft to work? :)
Having to install IPX hasn't been a problem for years, so that argument doesn't even make sense any more.
We frequently have LAN parties with World of Warcraft with a single cable modem connection and can all play easily without a hitch.
Not everybody has a decent connection like that. Plenty of people are stuck on ADSL, where you're lucky if you have 256kbps upload. I'm sure I'll be thanking Blizzard for dropping LAN play when I've saturated my connection and suffer horrible lag, not to mention the lag we already get here in AU when playing on US servers.
The downside is having to have an internet connection, but the fact is internet is so ubiquitous these days it shouldn't make a difference.
Not every situation where you'd want to play games includes an internet connection. I've been to many LAN games held in halls and schools with 200+ people where there's not an internet connection in sight, and that's exactly the sort of situation where you'd want to load up a game and have 8 or more people roll over the legions of hell. No LAN play makes it impossible.
And this completely ignores the other benefit of LAN games, and that is hackable characters.
If someone else wants to join a LAN game that is already in progress, you can simply copy your existing character, rename it and free up the skill points so they're all ready to drop in and start playing in minutes with all the quests and waypoints set. Or to make the game quicker we'd create an amulet with the maximum number of bonuses you could place on an item.
Being able to edit the characters was one of the things that made it fun. We had competitions on who could hack up the best level 1 Hell-Difficulty character! Or we'd amp up the useless skills until you had level 200 Teeth and could one-shot bosses. It was stupid, silly fun, and that's part of what made the game last long after it should have gotten boring.
Granted, allowing local characters online was foolish, and they should have never had open Battle.Net. But dropping LAN play will mean that I, and a lot of my friends, won't be buying it. It'll be just like Hellgate:London.