To me too, I like lisp. Another thing about SQL is that you sometimes have to be very aware of what is in your datasets or wierd things can happen, particularly with joins. Maybe better SQL programming practices elminate that?
I don't think that is what he means. I think what he means is that it takes more thought about the code to understand exactly what it will do compared to the size of the code.
Pretty much every book on SQL I've seen only gives you obvious examples and covers the most simple uses. Every project I've worked on (for about 10 years) where there is pre-existing SQL written, almost all of it is written inefficiently. I'm not sure this book explains this kind of thing. But I've found 99%+ of the time you don't need to use a cursor, and it's almost always slower.
SQL can do a lot more than most programmers ever try to do with it. There are a lot of clever tricks you can use exploiting its set based nature. The only place I've seen clever solutions beyond simple insert/delete/update statements is some of the trade magazines; the one for MS SQL Server sometimes has some very neat examples. These trade magazines have examples and ideas presented using the SQL language of a particular database, but it's almost always portable wihtout much work. I consider myself pretty good at SQL and even I find it's hard to learn more to get to the point where I can design clever SQL more frequently. Anyone else find that too?
Another thing I've noticed is on some open source projects (and perhaps some closed source ones), particularly web based ones, there is displayed at the bottom the number of database queries used to generate the page. They are often 10 or more, which almost always seems ridiculous. I think there just aren't all that many people out there who understands what SQL can do, how it's different than procedural languages and how to use it beyond a simplistic straight forward approach. Hopefully this book helps explain that - I'll probably browse a bit the next time I'm in a book store.
Harder to find secret areas
on
Just Let Me Play!
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have noticed that secret areas are harder to find in games. It used to be that maps sort of lead you to find the secrets, which for me was fun, and that might be silly, but it was. If the secret was hard to find - there was at least a hint - anyone remember the 3rd map in original Doom where when you crossed a certain place you could hear a door opening somewhere, but it was hard to find it before it closed?
And in a way having just really hard to find secrets is sort of pointless. I don't want to have to climb every conceivable place, stacking boxes in 10 locations to find 9 of them don't have anything and it was a complete waste of time. That is really the more annoying part - wasting time trying to find secrets when games are more complex now allow you so many more options, as in half life, stacking boxes anywhere you want.
For me, the idea started with insects. I'd find some and would want to find out what they were. I've never taken a college level biology course. I had field guides, and they were ok. Maybe I'm just not very bright or maybe it's just that being unititated, identifing things the way the professionals do or even just the way a field guide doesn't seem intuitive.
So the idea started with cataloging insects. I know there are millions, but I wasn't really thinking that deeply into it, but I just wanted to be able to get a rough idea of what something was. So after wrestling with field guides, I figured it would be neat to have fields for almost every feature insects have. Number of segments, bit fields for whether or not they had each special segments (okay maybe not ever special insect segment known to man, but that's when all else fails there's text searches), number of legs, etc.
I've built a few dull data entry systems, most of them web based, and one of them in the academic arena, so I figured I might have the experience needed to tackle this kind of thing. I wasn't really thinking of it so much as a tool to help increase the number of species found, just tool help centralize information.
Identifing plants is even harder, at least for me. I remember trying to identify poison ivy, and often was not sucessful when I had the pictures with me.
I was thinking of filling in some of the very mundane data myself, only because I doubted being able to get any decent biologist or entomologist to do it. It wouldn't be hard to put in some species of ants and select that they have 6 legs and how long their attenna is.
Thank you for the insight. I'll let you know if and when anything comes of this.
I suppose I wasn't planning on it being as ambitious as the project in this article. More of an online field guide. I was not at all planning to have friends or even myself add data.
I'm trying to write a website to do this. I've only recently started. I probably won't be looking for funding, but perhaps at some point donations for hosting if it ever became popular that I couldn't hosting it on the extra bandwidth I have already. I'm planning on it being a free site. Hopefully no ads, or maybe just text ads (I've taken a liking to the ones on k5).
I will rely on knowledgeable volunteers to make entries. As you can imagine, I've thought about it a little already and plan it to be very searchable. I want to storing predation information could make it possible to display large food cycle charts and an interesting way to browse the site. I'd like the data to be very high quality of course - hopefully people who specilize in knowledge of the organisms in question will be adding entries, but I want it to be easy to use. As someone commented earlier 'taxonomy isn't useful anymore'. I really don't know, but I think at the least it could be useful for people who want to find out "what I just saw in my backyard".
If anyone has ideas or sugessions, I'd appreciate hearing them.
[i]To make a long story short, greedy VCs drove an otherwise good company straight into the ground.[/i]
I must be missing something here... I read her history.
They had $20 million in revenue and needed $38 million in venture capital? For what?
Looks to me like ARS let it happen. If having $20 million revenue wasn't enough to enable ARS to grow large enough "to make a substantial impact on the world", then something was wrong. If the $20 million wasn't enough, they should have taken pay cuts, an informal investment into whatever they wanted to do.
I found the phrasing of the following statement interesting :
"In late March 2000, ArsDigita received $38 million in financing"
What does this mean? People don't walk up to you and give you 38 million dollars. You have to either search for investors or investors come to you because they believe in you and your ability to make a return. If it's the latter case, then you take their money and you make clear they can't f%$k with your s%$t.
I've been using it for the last month or so to teach myself electronics.
It is a great book, but I do find it hard at times. I think it's due to it's informative text, but that also helps at time. The text often asks you to take leaps of faith and promises to explain more later. I found it was much easier to understand after I bought some equipment and was able to test some of the presented theories and methods in reality.
When a coffee maker makes bad coffee, can you sue the manufacturer? We've heard about people sueing Mr. Coffee for burining down their house or maybe even squirt boiling hot water at their faces, but what about for bad coffee? What if your business depends on the quality of that coffee? How about televisions? Can a bar owner sue Samsung because their TV is fuzzy during a football game, which many of their patrons come to watch?
What happened to testing out and researching what you buy?
Re:Economic imbalance is the issue here
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
[i]The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation... public support for this dries up pretty fast.[/i]
Seemed to me that terrorism and civilians dying in scores brought on more public support. Where have we seen it dried up?
I probably wouldn't mind this crap so much if they bothered to spend as much effort on the script and characters than they do deciding to film it digitally and all that crap.
Like many, I saw the commentary movies they put up on the starwars.com site (btw, I always like to be kept in the dark as much as possible before seeing a movie - but with the new Star Wars, I figured what the hell). They go on excrutiating detail of why they choose to film digitally and about film making as an art and all that stuff we really just don't give a shit about.
None of that half baked shit is why we liked Star Wars in the first place.
Anyone try watching Phantom Menace a second or thrid time? It's just not interesting. You probably find yourself waiting to see the Darth Maul fight the whole time. And don't get me started on that drone activating and starship flying pansy. He does nothing else in the movie before the fight except look like a bad ass and press a few buttons.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of ISPs give you the same IP longer even if you shutdown for hours or days.
To me too, I like lisp. Another thing about SQL is that you sometimes have to be very aware of what is in your datasets or wierd things can happen, particularly with joins. Maybe better SQL programming practices elminate that?
I don't think that is what he means. I think what he means is that it takes more thought about the code to understand exactly what it will do compared to the size of the code.
Pretty much every book on SQL I've seen only gives you obvious examples and covers the most simple uses. Every project I've worked on (for about 10 years) where there is pre-existing SQL written, almost all of it is written inefficiently. I'm not sure this book explains this kind of thing. But I've found 99%+ of the time you don't need to use a cursor, and it's almost always slower.
SQL can do a lot more than most programmers ever try to do with it. There are a lot of clever tricks you can use exploiting its set based nature. The only place I've seen clever solutions beyond simple insert/delete/update statements is some of the trade magazines; the one for MS SQL Server sometimes has some very neat examples. These trade magazines have examples and ideas presented using the SQL language of a particular database, but it's almost always portable wihtout much work. I consider myself pretty good at SQL and even I find it's hard to learn more to get to the point where I can design clever SQL more frequently. Anyone else find that too?
Another thing I've noticed is on some open source projects (and perhaps some closed source ones), particularly web based ones, there is displayed at the bottom the number of database queries used to generate the page. They are often 10 or more, which almost always seems ridiculous. I think there just aren't all that many people out there who understands what SQL can do, how it's different than procedural languages and how to use it beyond a simplistic straight forward approach. Hopefully this book helps explain that - I'll probably browse a bit the next time I'm in a book store.
I have noticed that secret areas are harder to find in games. It used to be that maps sort of lead you to find the secrets, which for me was fun, and that might be silly, but it was. If the secret was hard to find - there was at least a hint - anyone remember the 3rd map in original Doom where when you crossed a certain place you could hear a door opening somewhere, but it was hard to find it before it closed?
And in a way having just really hard to find secrets is sort of pointless. I don't want to have to climb every conceivable place, stacking boxes in 10 locations to find 9 of them don't have anything and it was a complete waste of time. That is really the more annoying part - wasting time trying to find secrets when games are more complex now allow you so many more options, as in half life, stacking boxes anywhere you want.
on slashdot, rebinding a book = changing a graphic
I open source my fist into your face.
The only thing this story is missing is some half-assed "Cheap as in beer" metaphor.
No, too dumb for that.
I am considering hanging myself by my cordless mouse.
Are you, in fact, a robot?
For me, the idea started with insects. I'd find some and would want to find out what they were. I've never taken a college level biology course. I had field guides, and they were ok. Maybe I'm just not very bright or maybe it's just that being unititated, identifing things the way the professionals do or even just the way a field guide doesn't seem intuitive.
So the idea started with cataloging insects. I know there are millions, but I wasn't really thinking that deeply into it, but I just wanted to be able to get a rough idea of what something was. So after wrestling with field guides, I figured it would be neat to have fields for almost every feature insects have. Number of segments, bit fields for whether or not they had each special segments (okay maybe not ever special insect segment known to man, but that's when all else fails there's text searches), number of legs, etc.
I've built a few dull data entry systems, most of them web based, and one of them in the academic arena, so I figured I might have the experience needed to tackle this kind of thing. I wasn't really thinking of it so much as a tool to help increase the number of species found, just tool help centralize information.
Identifing plants is even harder, at least for me. I remember trying to identify poison ivy, and often was not sucessful when I had the pictures with me.
I was thinking of filling in some of the very mundane data myself, only because I doubted being able to get any decent biologist or entomologist to do it. It wouldn't be hard to put in some species of ants and select that they have 6 legs and how long their attenna is.
Thank you for the insight. I'll let you know if and when anything comes of this.
I suppose I wasn't planning on it being as ambitious as the project in this article. More of an online field guide. I was not at all planning to have friends or even myself add data.
I'm trying to write a website to do this. I've only recently started. I probably won't be looking for funding, but perhaps at some point donations for hosting if it ever became popular that I couldn't hosting it on the extra bandwidth I have already. I'm planning on it being a free site. Hopefully no ads, or maybe just text ads (I've taken a liking to the ones on k5).
I will rely on knowledgeable volunteers to make entries. As you can imagine, I've thought about it a little already and plan it to be very searchable. I want to storing predation information could make it possible to display large food cycle charts and an interesting way to browse the site. I'd like the data to be very high quality of course - hopefully people who specilize in knowledge of the organisms in question will be adding entries, but I want it to be easy to use. As someone commented earlier 'taxonomy isn't useful anymore'. I really don't know, but I think at the least it could be useful for people who want to find out "what I just saw in my backyard".
If anyone has ideas or sugessions, I'd appreciate hearing them.
On this thread!
Maybe I really will ditch Windows as a desktop one of these days.
How about an option to sort comments by User ID. I know it doesn't make a lot of sense, but might provide hours of mindless comment sorting.
I learned all I need to know about web design from http://www.superbad.com and http://www.e13.com
[i]To make a long story short, greedy VCs drove an otherwise good company straight into the ground.[/i]
I must be missing something here... I read her history.
They had $20 million in revenue and needed $38 million in venture capital? For what?
Looks to me like ARS let it happen. If having $20 million revenue wasn't enough to enable ARS to grow large enough "to make a substantial impact on the world", then something was wrong. If the $20 million wasn't enough, they should have taken pay cuts, an informal investment into whatever they wanted to do.
I found the phrasing of the following statement interesting :
"In late March 2000, ArsDigita received $38 million in financing"
What does this mean? People don't walk up to you and give you 38 million dollars. You have to either search for investors or investors come to you because they believe in you and your ability to make a return. If it's the latter case, then you take their money and you make clear they can't f%$k with your s%$t.
I've been using it for the last month or so to teach myself electronics.
It is a great book, but I do find it hard at times. I think it's due to it's informative text, but that also helps at time. The text often asks you to take leaps of faith and promises to explain more later. I found it was much easier to understand after I bought some equipment and was able to test some of the presented theories and methods in reality.
Do we really need to know how far the Moon is from the Earth? What good can come from it?
When a coffee maker makes bad coffee, can you sue the manufacturer? We've heard about people sueing Mr. Coffee for burining down their house or maybe even squirt boiling hot water at their faces, but what about for bad coffee? What if your business depends on the quality of that coffee? How about televisions? Can a bar owner sue Samsung because their TV is fuzzy during a football game, which many of their patrons come to watch?
What happened to testing out and researching what you buy?
[i]The "equalizer" (if you want to call it that) here is terrorism -- if civilians here start dying in scores in retaliation ... public support for this dries up pretty fast.[/i]
Seemed to me that terrorism and civilians dying in scores brought on more public support. Where have we seen it dried up?
Aren't we just at the begining of it?
I probably wouldn't mind this crap so much if they bothered to spend as much effort on the script and characters than they do deciding to film it digitally and all that crap.
Like many, I saw the commentary movies they put up on the starwars.com site (btw, I always like to be kept in the dark as much as possible before seeing a movie - but with the new Star Wars, I figured what the hell). They go on excrutiating detail of why they choose to film digitally and about film making as an art and all that stuff we really just don't give a shit about.
None of that half baked shit is why we liked Star Wars in the first place.
Anyone try watching Phantom Menace a second or thrid time? It's just not interesting. You probably find yourself waiting to see the Darth Maul fight the whole time. And don't get me started on that drone activating and starship flying pansy. He does nothing else in the movie before the fight except look like a bad ass and press a few buttons.
Is anyone else looking forward to this Jar Jar/N'Sync reunion in a couple of years?