Whatever your bag, the internet has the ability to promote it beyond whatever was possible prior to having such a simple medium of information exchange.
The best part is you aren't judged for your expression beyond the content of that expression. The worst part is the empowerment by way of obscure unity provided to the "fan boy" who reads without question of credibility. It's a problem when righteousness ensues a night of staying up till 6am washing down caffeine pills with ballz soda.
So I installed Vista on my laptop yesterday. It's the first time I've seen it since 2004. I have to say I like it. The clicking OK for anything accessing system settings can get annoying, but no more than Kubuntu's sudo method of doing everything. At least I didn't have to type in a password everytime, that's a plus.
So after installing everything (the new installer is much nicer than the original installation process) my survey of Vista went pretty much like this. Control Panels, yep that's different. Cool new task manager, but it's not Process Explorer. Nice screen savers, finally something that's close to what KDE offers. Same shitty command window, yawn. Lovely looking interface, chewed up 550MB of ram but I'm into candy and the interface was still very responsive. New games (ie not 10 windows 3.1 minesweeper). Alright... I'm bored.
I guess what I'm getting at is, what is the rush for Vista NOW! WinXP did everything I needed it to do. What it did poorly I got a utility for. Vista may make some of those utilities obsolete, but what did I really need a new OS for (besides candy)? I don't take for granted all the under the hood changes, but why did I need a new OS? It's an OS that runs software. It's not supposed to be the only program you need to do work and play.
With that I respond to the question "What took Vista so long" with "What were you really waiting on?". Furthermore, how can one be so disappointed at something that only improves what was currently working just fine. Before I get the M$ Shill crap in my face I'll say I absolutely hate the marketing angle of Vista and how it will be shoved down the throat of consumers. Power users who don't like DELL or HP on the side of their PC can tack on $399 if they want Ultimate. That's poor, especially since I really only needed DirectX10, which could have been on XP.
We used it at my last shop, maintaining a database file for each "project" and a master database to keep track them. Keeping it in it's realm, it's leagues beyond HSQL or Derby and other databases I've worked with of it's caliber.
It was not without the quirks and kludgey features expected of a 1.0 database. Some of the unusual things (to me) were setting a Term character for scipts, lack of "if exists"/"create or replace", "suspend" in procedures, and identity ID's via triggers. That said, it had triggers as well as fully functional stored procedures, user defined functions, custom exceptions to deliver nice error messages to your JDBC layer and even a simple c API to write low level custom functions that were easily compiled into the db.
The guys always made fun of FireBird for being slow until I replaced rebuilding a hierarchical structure via java (single JDBC call per record) with a recursive stored procedure (single JDBC call for collection in order). JDBC usually incurs a good deal of overhead but I've never seen it so costly as in this case. Removing this JDBC overhead brought the longer running cases of 30-40 seconds (consider this lag opening a word document), down to 1-2 seconds. So the query engine of FireBird is quite efficient considering you know how to sweet talk it.:D
In the process of writing that procedure I discovered that the documentation for FireBird is actually quite good, albeit somewhat confusing with the Interbase/Firebird ambiguity. What I couldn't find in the documentation I found in a rather active FireBird Yahoo Group (may have been Google, whatever).
Don't go comparing it to MySql, PostGRE, Oracle XE, or MSSQL Express. I'm not sure how the performance for databases larger than the amount of available memory will work meaning, I've never profied the IO performance. Still, it's a great alternative to storing complex data structures as binary files or stubbing a prototype db for rapid development.
Ultimately, I'm excited about the new release of FireBird. Kudos to the team.
In other words, the "World" isn't ready for Linux just BECAUSE people ARE lazy, ignorant and (I dare say) downright stupid, as a general rule.
In the words of George Carlin:
"There's a lot of stupid people in this world. When you think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half are dumber than that... That's a lot of stupid people!"
Languages like Erlang and Haskell extract parallelism from the code without the developer having to write multithreaded code.
Great! Those disposable prototypes will run faster than ever. It's just a shame that functional languages don't really have any function. Unless of course your intent is to make college students think, but don't we have perl for that?
Port DirectX over and I most certainly would. I play online games competitively and spend money for a good computer. Suffering a 15% hit when I paid an extra hundred for a %10 faster GPU means any emulation or middleware just isn't an option. Sorry Transgaming. Plus Cegeda takes away from the whole free thing.
There is NOTHING Windows does better than Linux, besides gaming. Servers, check. Office, check. Development, check. Web Browsing, umm. Maybe not ease of use or multimedia? Hmmm. Apple owns that arena... Whoops! That's just another UNIX implementation.
Better yet, beat DX10. Why is it impossible? Is it superior hardware vendor cooperation providing excellent driver support and optimized instruction sets? Does it have some elegant API that software developers are drawn to? Perhaps graphics development requires code hardwired to a platform and can't afford the overhead of an abstraction? I'm really curious about this.
I ordered cables from here. I temporarily dropped $250 for four cables at BB to get my stuff running, ordered the equivalent at that site for $26 shipped then returned the BB stuff 3 days later when it arrived. yay! Never heard of bluejeanscable, but their prices seem pretty comparable... except on their dual-link dvi cables, ouch
What impresses me most about bluejeanscable.com is the information about what you need in a wire for it to be good, and their products are picked based upon what is necessary to cary your signal good. They do a lot of ad-hype debunking and put forth quality information, then recommend a product that matches the logic for the best value. I'll never shop anywhere else for hi-fi cables.
Most people (even administrators and web developers) don't realize the overhead associated with AJAX.
Don't forget about AJAX's ability to SAVE you bandwidth. If all you do is strap AJAX on then yeah, it increases bandwidth. If you use it cleverly to say, change the table and only the table instead of reloading all the sidebars as well as teh button to update the table, you can SAVE bandwidth. Or if you use a drop down to avoid wildcard searches, you can save unnecessary queryies from ever being ran. Precious long running wildcarded queries at at.
A problem with it being all new is that developers want to slather it all over themselves and talk about how Ajaxified their site is. Used correctly it can provide a benefit. Otherwise, it's like reloading your page every 3 seconds. Just because it seems so doesn't mean it's no longer a distributed app.
you don't need JSON to load an array and then to access array elements.
You don't need JSON to load an array. With JSON, you send the array. Of course that won't prove your programing ability to parse out the csv or DOM and "load" it all by yourself.
Why doesn't anyone ever mention JSON on this forum? Why parse out XML into a javascript "object" when the literal notation is not much more difficult and a lot more efficient to "parse" back into the language that will be using it. Not only is it evaulated more efficiently but you'll probably learn a ton about advanced Javascript along the way. Since I don't believe in Ajax frameworks that completely remove you from the JS, I'm a big fan of JSON responses for this reason alone.
Is there something terrible about JSON that I have yet to be burned on?
It depends what you are using it for. For a complex DHTML interface for a web application that people use on a regular basis, sure, ~50KB isn't a big deal, especially when it's usually going to be coming from their cache. But for an average website that just wants to enhance particular aspects of their interface, it's ludicrous to make visitors download all that JavaScript, most of which will remain unused.
...
Sure, there are a lot of instances where it's a good idea to use a library. But I think a lot of the people using libraries like this are doing so because they want to cut corners, not because it's the right tool for the job.
While I personally despise bloat, those 50KB.js files are downloaded once and cached. I may not use every drag/drop function on every page, but it's far easier for me as a developer to just include prototype.js rather than piece a specially trimmed.js file for each page. It also means you download one 50k file once instead of a 20k file per page with mostly redundant code.
Additonally, the point of a framework is to make it easier to develop, and while you may not use 50% of the javascript functions the reward of shaving 25k of precious(?) bandwidth is not worth customizing a standard library, such as prototype or scriptaculous. Not to mention maintainence of my now custom.js file.
'submitting a form without reloading the page! Any easy way to do that?' I must've misunderstood the question but can't you just do an image submit button with onClick=sendFormStufftoPHPScriptThatDoesWhatever() using the xmlhttpreq object?
Very simple when using prototype javascript library.
function submitForm(form) {
new Ajax.Request("comment.php", {
parameters : Form.serialize(form),
onSuccess : updateComment
});
}
For Mac fanboys (that includes me) SP2 isn't that bad, considering that Tiger is on 10.4.7 - that's like XP being on SP7.
I'm not sure how many hotfixes and patches OS X has had but my guess is that's an unfair statement. There have been countless updates that don't constitute a service pack. In fact when I install from my XP cd, I have to first get an update to the updater, then around 15 updates, then SP2, then 15 more updates. Not to mention the bi-weekly security update. On this note XP would closer to XP.2.30(+++).
At least Mac is honest about the version of software you are running. I'm sure there's a change log for 10.4.6 -> 10.4.7 but I would be hard pressed to tell you what the hell I downloaded last week and what it did to my system short of "updating it".
"The program was the most obscene resource hogs I've ever had the displeasure to use"
The home editions are a resource hog. The enterprise edition (at least of mcafee) has a very small footprint and is lightning fast. Mcafee should consider using the same build on their home editions.
That depends on configuration. Where I work, McAfee scans almost every file I/O. Unzipping or installing is absolutely horrible. The memory footprint is 25K, hardly what I consider small. It's incredibly intrusive and runs as the system, meaning I can't kill the thing in taskmgr.
At home, I believe a NAT and common sense(NOT using IE, opening e-mails) are your best tools. The only virus I ever caught was when I was running Norton and all it did was tell me I was infected. I still had to remove and recover from the damages manually. In the least it informs the ordinary user why their computer is behaving poorly, but it's really more reactive then preventive. Not to mention, spyware takes a much greater toll on the average user's system these days.
Henderson_Presentation_2005.doc is HENDER~1.doc,
Henderson_Presentation_2006.doc is HENDER~2.doc,
Henderson_Presentation_2006 (unedited).doc is HENDER~3.doc.
Clearly, we are reaping the benefits of a well-thought-out platform here.
So what then is Henderson_Presentation_2015.doc? Stack overflow?
Slashdot Mirror
But gas explosions are so much more cinematic than silly electrical fires!
Sadistic as it may be, that picture with the jart stuck through the kids shoulder is priceless!
Whatever your bag, the internet has the ability to promote it beyond whatever was possible prior to having such a simple medium of information exchange.
The best part is you aren't judged for your expression beyond the content of that expression. The worst part is the empowerment by way of obscure unity provided to the "fan boy" who reads without question of credibility. It's a problem when righteousness ensues a night of staying up till 6am washing down caffeine pills with ballz soda.
Media hasn't changed folks, only the medium.
So I installed Vista on my laptop yesterday. It's the first time I've seen it since 2004. I have to say I like it. The clicking OK for anything accessing system settings can get annoying, but no more than Kubuntu's sudo method of doing everything. At least I didn't have to type in a password everytime, that's a plus.
So after installing everything (the new installer is much nicer than the original installation process) my survey of Vista went pretty much like this. Control Panels, yep that's different. Cool new task manager, but it's not Process Explorer. Nice screen savers, finally something that's close to what KDE offers. Same shitty command window, yawn. Lovely looking interface, chewed up 550MB of ram but I'm into candy and the interface was still very responsive. New games (ie not 10 windows 3.1 minesweeper). Alright... I'm bored.
I guess what I'm getting at is, what is the rush for Vista NOW! WinXP did everything I needed it to do. What it did poorly I got a utility for. Vista may make some of those utilities obsolete, but what did I really need a new OS for (besides candy)? I don't take for granted all the under the hood changes, but why did I need a new OS? It's an OS that runs software. It's not supposed to be the only program you need to do work and play.
With that I respond to the question "What took Vista so long" with "What were you really waiting on?". Furthermore, how can one be so disappointed at something that only improves what was currently working just fine. Before I get the M$ Shill crap in my face I'll say I absolutely hate the marketing angle of Vista and how it will be shoved down the throat of consumers. Power users who don't like DELL or HP on the side of their PC can tack on $399 if they want Ultimate. That's poor, especially since I really only needed DirectX10, which could have been on XP.
We used it at my last shop, maintaining a database file for each "project" and a master database to keep track them. Keeping it in it's realm, it's leagues beyond HSQL or Derby and other databases I've worked with of it's caliber.
:D
It was not without the quirks and kludgey features expected of a 1.0 database. Some of the unusual things (to me) were setting a Term character for scipts, lack of "if exists"/"create or replace", "suspend" in procedures, and identity ID's via triggers. That said, it had triggers as well as fully functional stored procedures, user defined functions, custom exceptions to deliver nice error messages to your JDBC layer and even a simple c API to write low level custom functions that were easily compiled into the db.
The guys always made fun of FireBird for being slow until I replaced rebuilding a hierarchical structure via java (single JDBC call per record) with a recursive stored procedure (single JDBC call for collection in order). JDBC usually incurs a good deal of overhead but I've never seen it so costly as in this case. Removing this JDBC overhead brought the longer running cases of 30-40 seconds (consider this lag opening a word document), down to 1-2 seconds. So the query engine of FireBird is quite efficient considering you know how to sweet talk it.
In the process of writing that procedure I discovered that the documentation for FireBird is actually quite good, albeit somewhat confusing with the Interbase/Firebird ambiguity. What I couldn't find in the documentation I found in a rather active FireBird Yahoo Group (may have been Google, whatever).
Don't go comparing it to MySql, PostGRE, Oracle XE, or MSSQL Express. I'm not sure how the performance for databases larger than the amount of available memory will work meaning, I've never profied the IO performance. Still, it's a great alternative to storing complex data structures as binary files or stubbing a prototype db for rapid development.
Ultimately, I'm excited about the new release of FireBird. Kudos to the team.
You mean, a computer which only runs programs I intended to run? What a novel idea.
Wow! I could bask in that irony all day. =)
"There's a lot of stupid people in this world. When you think of how stupid the average person is, and realize that half are dumber than that... That's a lot of stupid people!"
Just let me know when they release the uninstaller. kthx =)
Great! Those disposable prototypes will run faster than ever. It's just a shame that functional languages don't really have any function. Unless of course your intent is to make college students think, but don't we have perl for that?
Port DirectX over and I most certainly would. I play online games competitively and spend money for a good computer. Suffering a 15% hit when I paid an extra hundred for a %10 faster GPU means any emulation or middleware just isn't an option. Sorry Transgaming. Plus Cegeda takes away from the whole free thing.
There is NOTHING Windows does better than Linux, besides gaming. Servers, check. Office, check. Development, check. Web Browsing, umm. Maybe not ease of use or multimedia? Hmmm. Apple owns that arena... Whoops! That's just another UNIX implementation.
Better yet, beat DX10. Why is it impossible? Is it superior hardware vendor cooperation providing excellent driver support and optimized instruction sets? Does it have some elegant API that software developers are drawn to? Perhaps graphics development requires code hardwired to a platform and can't afford the overhead of an abstraction? I'm really curious about this.
What impresses me most about bluejeanscable.com is the information about what you need in a wire for it to be good, and their products are picked based upon what is necessary to cary your signal good. They do a lot of ad-hype debunking and put forth quality information, then recommend a product that matches the logic for the best value. I'll never shop anywhere else for hi-fi cables.
Exactly...
... but is it Vista ready?
I can buy a Dreamcast with a bunch of (rare) games for $35 on eBay. That sucks for Sega, but how is that bad for me as a consumer?
Don't forget about AJAX's ability to SAVE you bandwidth. If all you do is strap AJAX on then yeah, it increases bandwidth. If you use it cleverly to say, change the table and only the table instead of reloading all the sidebars as well as teh button to update the table, you can SAVE bandwidth. Or if you use a drop down to avoid wildcard searches, you can save unnecessary queryies from ever being ran. Precious long running wildcarded queries at at.
A problem with it being all new is that developers want to slather it all over themselves and talk about how Ajaxified their site is. Used correctly it can provide a benefit. Otherwise, it's like reloading your page every 3 seconds. Just because it seems so doesn't mean it's no longer a distributed app.
You don't need JSON to load an array. With JSON, you send the array. Of course that won't prove your programing ability to parse out the csv or DOM and "load" it all by yourself.
Why doesn't anyone ever mention JSON on this forum? Why parse out XML into a javascript "object" when the literal notation is not much more difficult and a lot more efficient to "parse" back into the language that will be using it. Not only is it evaulated more efficiently but you'll probably learn a ton about advanced Javascript along the way. Since I don't believe in Ajax frameworks that completely remove you from the JS, I'm a big fan of JSON responses for this reason alone.
Is there something terrible about JSON that I have yet to be burned on?
While I personally despise bloat, those 50KB
Additonally, the point of a framework is to make it easier to develop, and while you may not use 50% of the javascript functions the reward of shaving 25k of precious(?) bandwidth is not worth customizing a standard library, such as prototype or scriptaculous. Not to mention maintainence of my now custom
Very simple when using prototype javascript library.
function submitForm(form) {
new Ajax.Request("comment.php", {
parameters : Form.serialize(form),
onSuccess : updateComment
});
}
I'm not sure how many hotfixes and patches OS X has had but my guess is that's an unfair statement. There have been countless updates that don't constitute a service pack. In fact when I install from my XP cd, I have to first get an update to the updater, then around 15 updates, then SP2, then 15 more updates. Not to mention the bi-weekly security update. On this note XP would closer to XP.2.30(+++).
At least Mac is honest about the version of software you are running. I'm sure there's a change log for 10.4.6 -> 10.4.7 but I would be hard pressed to tell you what the hell I downloaded last week and what it did to my system short of "updating it".
That depends on configuration. Where I work, McAfee scans almost every file I/O. Unzipping or installing is absolutely horrible. The memory footprint is 25K, hardly what I consider small. It's incredibly intrusive and runs as the system, meaning I can't kill the thing in taskmgr.
At home, I believe a NAT and common sense(NOT using IE, opening e-mails) are your best tools. The only virus I ever caught was when I was running Norton and all it did was tell me I was infected. I still had to remove and recover from the damages manually. In the least it informs the ordinary user why their computer is behaving poorly, but it's really more reactive then preventive. Not to mention, spyware takes a much greater toll on the average user's system these days.
Interesting, yet for some reason, dissatisfying.
Of course - this is a feature, not a bug.
Henderson_Presentation_2005.doc is HENDER~1.doc,
Henderson_Presentation_2006.doc is HENDER~2.doc,
Henderson_Presentation_2006 (unedited).doc is HENDER~3.doc.
Clearly, we are reaping the benefits of a well-thought-out platform here.
So what then is Henderson_Presentation_2015.doc? Stack overflow?
Agreed. Active Directory and JAAS talk nicely with each other? That will last as long as the next Windows "patch".
RAID... Redundant Array of Inexpensive(?) Disks.
This should clear up once and for all if the I stands for Independent or Inexpensive. Just add marketing!!!