| last updated:11 Sep 2003 10:35 UK time |
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| JOS Statistics - Recent Comments (Comments added for week ending Sun 07 Sep 2003) | View Other Weeks |
| Remember Six Degrees? | Sun 07 Sep | RP |
| Hey Joel, remember this link? http://www2.creo.com/sixdegrees/ What o you think of it now? Is it the Google of Desktop? This is not a hostile question, I just want to know what you think of it. |
| Sun 07 Sep | realist | Looks like a great tool, probably not for developer types though, we're control freaks who would never allow anything else to control our domain other then ourselves. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Andy | Yeah definitely, it seems like a good idea for novice users. But for developers, and anyone else who typically has a much larger workspace, I'm not sure of how it would work. Though I think Microsoft is moving away from the folder paradigm in the next version of Windows. This will be interesting. I've noticed at work that there is this dividing line between people who understand the concept of a file system and those who don't. Those who do tend to be much more computer literate in all areas than those who don't. I don't know why it is so hard to understand for non-technical people, but it is. For a developer, it's so trivial, just a regular tree, a hierarchy, but that is foreign to most people. |
| Sun 07 Sep | J. D. Trollinger | There are some people who just can't seem to get an intuitive grasp of how to use a computer. My friend Mike has been using computers (poorly) since we were both in college back in the late 1980s, and he's still completely clueless. Adding page-numbers to a Word document poses a challenge to him. He doesn't differentiate the Google search box from the address bar on his browser. I suppose I shouldn't be too judgmental. I can't sing, dance, or play sports for shit, so I guess we all have our blind spots. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Drink Or Die | Very smart software. In the beginning of their explanations how the product works they try to link to Wolfram's 'A New Of Science' (which under normal conditions would qualify the software as spyware and the whole business as a scam), then present the intelligence behind their algorithms: 'The rules around Six Degrees' file relationships are threefold. Files are related if: * They are attachments to messages in the same email thread * They have similar names (e.g. myfile.doc is similar to myfile2.doc) * They reside in the same folder.' Never thought of such an approach. Brilliant. |
| Why would one need an XML database? | Sun 07 Sep | Puzzle Ment |
| I have been researching databases and database design for a college course - basically to list the pros and cons of ODBMS and RDBMS. In my research, I came across XML databases such as http://www.bluestream.com Why would anyone want an XML database? |
| Sun 07 Sep | Joe Pants | Why would someone want a database of user logins? If your app needs user login data, have a database of user login data. If your app needs to deal with xml data, have an xml database. |
| Sun 07 Sep | | 'If your app needs to deal with xml data, have an xml database' once again proving the value of the advice you get often has a strong correlation with the price you paid for it. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Chris Cooney | Hmm, XML data - what exactly is that? I know that user login data has certain attributes and that it follows some form, but xml data does not. It's mostly useful as an interchange format, so I see little need to maintain a database in xml. Anybody care to name a use for such an animal? |
| Sun 07 Sep | John Rosenberg | XML is really useful for data interchange and for storing settings in little config files, but I don't see any reason as to why you would want to store data as XML itself. |
Sun 07 Sep | Matthew | Why would anyone want an XML database?1. To look good on a resume. Mmm, thats about it really. Seeya |
| Sun 07 Sep | no name | There is no good reason for an XML database. |
| Currencies in On-line Store | Sun 07 Sep | Evgeny Gesin /Javadesk/ |
| We sell an e-Commerce solution that includes On-line Store and Shopping Cart. One our customer just asked to allow the users to see prices in different currencies. Such users in Europe will select Euro, users in USA will select $US, in Canada $CA, in Japan Yens and so on, and see the price in their local currencies. Our shopping solution provides the administrator with an interface to enter daily currency rates. The currency calculator may then automatically recalculate the prices based on the user selection of the currency. But I have some questions. 1. Should the user be allowed to see prices in his/her currency in the Shopping Cart and Order History, or in the whole On-line Store, including Product Catalog? 2. Suppose the user in Europe will select Euro to see prices in Euro. Should the on-line shop charge the user in $US or in Euro? 3. If the user will be charged in Euro, what happen if he/she doesnt have a bank account in Euro? 4. If the user will be charged in Euro, what happen if currency rates provided by the shop administrator differ from the rates in the user bank? 5. If it is so useful, why big on-line stores, like Amazon and Bookpool, do not provide prices in different currencies? Waiting for your opinions. Thanks. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Frederic Faure | FYI, Amazon has localized sites, where items are presented in the currency of the country, with usually the item in USD added: www.amazon.co.uk www.amazon.co.jp www.amazon.fr etc. Seems to me that, either via cookies or user profile (ie. login required), you should display items in the user's currency so that they aren't required to click on a button to get prices in the currency they're used to. If the site operates in the US, you should tell the user that the company that provides their credit card (Visa, etc.) and their own bank will charge... a certain amount for the transaction, which should be added in addition to delivery charges and possibly VAT (right now, I doubt any US-based online store bothers adding VAT and sending the money to the user's gov't ... ) |
| Sun 07 Sep | David Jones | Amazon, for one, operates a separate store in Canada. The orders are sourced from a Canadian warehouse; the whole thing is sub-contracted to Assured Logistics. (Very good service BTW; I ordered a book on Monday and had it in my hands by Thursday.) What's more important than currencies is: - Do you even ship to Canada? (Some don't. And they tell you this only halfway through placing an order.) - What's the shipping rate? (For a $60 item, it's $10 U.S or $30 to Canada. Bzzt!) - What customs duties apply? I can easily convert US$ to CAD$; the real concerns when I order from the U.S. are shipping and customs fees. PST and GST are obvious, but some items carry an 18.5% duty, which makes the effective GST+PST+duty tax a whopping 38.5%!!! There are vendors (www.borderfree.com) who specialize in software to automate all of this. www.anybook4less.com is a useful model. You indicate where you live, and it searches 20+ online bookstores for your book and tells you how much it costs at each one - AFTER exchange and shipping! Bottom line: get it right, or don't bother. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Matthew Lock | I wouldn't worry about currency conversions. If the prices are in US dollars or Pounds any web surfers from other countries will be aware of the exchange difference. Most credit card merchant accounts can only debit in the local currency anyway. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Ronnie L | The problems with shipping to Canada really only applies to books, since Canada censors them and they need to clear customs (which is sometimes quick, but sometimes can take up to a couple months). That's why most publishers just don't bother... but for other products I don't think unique restrictions apply any more than all the other country quirks. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Frederic Faure | "Censors them"? |
| Sun 07 Sep | rz | canada is similar to NZ with censorship policy. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Ronnie L | Yes, for both fiction and non-fiction if they look like they might contain violence, obscenity, racism or criticism of government (more like sedition than regular criticism) and I think one other topic, they need to be checked against the banned list, which is hundreds of pages long. It's supposed to be an electronic check, but inexplicably some take a month or two to clear. Maybe it's for just new books that need to be reviewed and cleared manually ? I did ordering software two jobs ago for a online bookseller (not amazon) and there was an electronic list we got regularly from Canadian customs to check against and flag, but for whatever reason that wasn't effective because some orders would get held up and people would demand refunds or get chargebacks on their cards, then a month later the order would show up and they'd end up getting it for free. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Stephen Jones | And I thought Saudi was bad! ¡Y Viva España! |
| Sun 07 Sep | Grayne Wetsky | So when Canadians order paperback novels, do they open up the package and find the pages are all curled back like somebody's already read it, and sections have been blacked out with a marker? Do they think WTF? Or just read it anyway and make up words to fill in the blanks? |
| Sun 07 Sep | JWA | First, don't make the users enter in a daiy exchange rate. Grab it from a web service somewhere automatically. You can give them an option to tweak it if they want to, but daily manual intervention on somthign like that is crazy. Second, a company can charge in any currency to a credit card and the service automatically processes it into the currency of the user's account. So, if your users are in the US with US accuonts, they charge in dollars, and the customer's credit card statement will show a charge in dollars and the euro conversion of it. --Josh |
| Sun 07 Sep | Robert Jacobson | One extra thought... make sure that the currency conversion figures are accurate (equivalent to what the user's credit-card company will actually apply) and be up front with how the currency conversion is calculated. I bought a few computer games from Dragon.ca a while back. It's claim to fame was that it was located in Canada, so supposedly it was cheaper for US customers than comparable US stores. The site actually charged credit cards in Canadian dollars, but also displayed the supposed US equivalent price for each item. After my purchases, I discovered that the actual charges to my credit card were always a dollar or two higher than the advertised price. When I checked the fine print on the Dragon.ca web site, I discovered that they were fudging the conversion prices by using an unrealistically favorable conversion rate -- one that credit card companies would never use -- and rounding the 'estimated US price' downward. It seemed pretty fraudulent. (Thankfully the company's no longer in business.) |
| Sun 07 Sep | Philo | Shouldn't the credit card companies have a webservice or cgi that you can pull *their* conversion rate from? Seems the safest way to go... Philo |
| Recommendation Advice Needed for Book | Sat 06 Sep | Ram Dass |
| Hi: Can any poster recommend a book on J2EE - that takes the reader through the design, coding and implementation process of a web based application? It will be great if it can have Eclipse as the IDE. Thanks |
| Sat 06 Sep | RB | J2EE Design and Development by Rod Johnson. Wrox press. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Dustin Alexander | I second this book. And anything else by the Wrox press. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Philo | Because they're collector's items? Philo |
| Sun 07 Sep | Rhys Keepence | Rod Johnsons book is a great beginners book for J2EE. However most of the WROX stuff I have found unimpressive. Most of it seems to be written by industry newbies and merely provides a summary of what you can find on the web. I am more interested in the why and when rather than the how. |
| Newsletter with difference. | Sat 06 Sep | JD |
| Hi All, I was checking Macromedias newsletter Edge. There they had link to one of the article. Check it here: http://www.macromedia.com/newsletters/edge/september2003/index.html?sectionIndex=4&trackingid=OMN_AAEW Can you see something missing??? I read the text by Mr. Alan and then suddenly it stopped at ....pushed into the, I was wondering what to do, how do I scroll and suddenly I saw those numbered buttons at bottom and upon clicking them I realised that they are used to move from page to page! Talk about fucked up usability! I mean why on the earth you need to use FLASH in such a wierd way? I mean I have seen too many examples like this where FLASH usage is simply killing usability. What you say? JD http://jdk.phpkid.org |
| Sat 06 Sep | Ged Byrne | Also, I have a fast broadband connection and I had to wait for a download. Usually I only have to wait for video, or something really impressive. After my wait I get a few pages of text and a couple of pictures. Nothing that couldn't be done with HTML in no time at all. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Darren Collins | And you've gotta love how it crams the content into a 5'x7' area, when I've got a whole 21' monitor it could use! Flash can be good, but even Macromedia finds it hard to do good with it. |
| CityDesk development/testing question | Sat 06 Sep | GiorgioG |
| In the middle of the flash-based demo of CityDesk 2.0 at http://www.paxlogica.com/cddemo/Part1.html , Joel is surprised that the pre-publishing step of editing the file with Notepad.exe works (he adds an html comment we rock!) - which begs the question - how does Fogcreek test CityDesk and its other software before releasing it? This isnt a dig at Joel or his software because we all do it, but its a little scary that even the so-called experts dont do a thorough job of testing their applications. (No matter how I write the above it sounds insulting - sorry Joel, not my intention.) It reinforces the opinion that developers are not the best testers and dedicated QA/testing staffs are needed. Of course, I dont remember if FogCreek has a QA guy. |
| Sat 06 Sep | S.C. | That is a demo, not a beta testing report... And he probably rehearsed a couple of times before the real thing. So don't think he'd be really surprised. But I think the demo gives me an amatuerish impression. I heard the ticking of the keyboard. There were short periods of dead-air, random motion of cursor and typing the wrong key and retyping. Maybe he did these intentionally because he wanted to give us a casual feeling. I just think it could've been better. |
| Sat 06 Sep | B# | I have to disagree. I liked the casual feel of the demo. Especially the gray/green issue. I prefer this to the polished talking head crap you usually see. IMHO |
| Sat 06 Sep | Mitch & Murray (from downtown) | I can see the professional IT crowd really getting into the 'We rock!' comment ... Sheesh. What is this, a tractor pull? |
| Sun 07 Sep | Matt Foley | The demo was fine but for heaven's sake turn off that ridiculous "fade menus into view". Does anybody really leave that option enabled? |
| Sun 07 Sep | Darren Collins | If Joel was genuinely surprised, it probably wasn't because CityDesk hadn't been tested and nobody knew whether the feature would work. It's more likely that the feature was written and tested by other people, and Joel just hadn't seen it himself yet. |
| Sun 07 Sep | JWA | The way I took it was that he was doing it off the cuff and was surprised it worked because he was just pulling the command line out of his head. The We rock think seemed to be in general, not because the function worked. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Philo | My thoughts - -If that was off the cuff, I'm absolutely impressed. That's a long script to follow for the first time flawlessly. -But I don't think it was off the cuff. Joel doesn't spend 20 minutes recording a demo if he hasn't scripted every keystroke and tried everything two or three times. ;-) So, since it was almost definitely scripted, I'd suggest taking it out. The demo is speaking to the user or prospective purchaser, and suddenly the demonstrator is talking to .... who? And of course there's the comment I made in the Lingo thread - when you want someone's attention to be on your product, you don't distract from it. This thread alone indicates the comment is jarring, which means now your audience is thinking about the comment instead of the product. That alone justifies leaving it out. Philo |
| #JoS IRC Channel? | Sat 06 Sep | GiorgioG |
| Anyone (Joel?) interested in putting together a JoS IRC Channel? Sometimes these discussions are better suited for chat - we might even cut down on some of the chatter that we get on here... In any case, Ill be idling in #JoS on Efnet.... |
| Sat 06 Sep | Drink Or Die | Will you have ftp timers, too? Or fserv? |
| Sat 06 Sep | Simon Lucy | I miss ftp by mail myself |
| Sat 06 Sep | Stephen Jones | Ever heard of time zones? |
| Sat 06 Sep | Philo | ...so the channel should be hopping all the time, right? :-) Philo |
| Sun 07 Sep | braid_ged | I knew this day would come, I sat awake late at night looking up at the stars (wondering where the roof was), dreaming of this day. Of course the irony is all the software development dudes and dudettes chatting away about superior methodologies while they should be developing. ('you have serious Joel on Software issues dude!' ) |
| Excel crashes on saving template | Fri 05 Sep | Sathyaish Chakravarthy |
| Ive been saving my Excel template many times till now for the last two days into a file called Copiers1.xlt. Now, it has started giving me a GPF and starts crashing Excel when I save it under the same name. If I save it under a different name, it still does not save saying Document not saved. No help button is available on the message box. What could be causing this? Please help me as I have been stuck for the last 4 hours with this and have changed several machines and re-installed Excel also but nothing seems to have changed. What this template file is supposed to do is, pick up the path of an Access database from the registry, read from the table in an Access database and display the data in a tabular form in the spreadsheet. It allows to the user to edit existing data displayed in the template file, add more rows in the file and then click a menu item called Save to database (this is also added by the VBA code I am writing in the template file) to filter invalid data by validating it against a set of rules and then save all the rows to the same table in the same Access database. Finally all, this data travels over Winsock to a server located in the head office of my client for whom I am developing this application. The head office computer then issues a read receipt for the data it has received. The Excel module had 25 odd modules, which includes 18-20 class modules and five odd Standard modules. It also includes the standard object modules like the modules for each sheet and one for the Workbook. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Mike | VERY VERY typical office experience. Welcome to the club. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | I had to abandon that file and create a new one, and insert all those modules all over again to get back on track. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Tony Chang | I agree with Mike. I find it pretty common in Word for the file to get in a state where it's ruined and I have to start over again. Especially if you do something really unusual like create a document with more than 100 pages or *god help you) try to produce a document with cross references and an index. All in the nature of the anti-productivity suites. If you want to have an even worse time loosing your data, try OpenOffice. |
| Sun 07 Sep | MugsGame | [ If you want to have an even worse time loosing your data, try OpenOffice.] Except that the native OpenOffice format is compressed XML, so you can always try fixing any problems manually. |
Sun 07 Sep | Matthew | MugsGame,
Except that the native OpenOffice format is compressed XML, so you can always try fixing any problems manually.Which no doubt will be very helpful to the original poster, who is using VBA. Seeya |
| Design Advice Needed - For Generating Graphics | Fri 05 Sep | Ram Dass |
| Hi: I have a set of data - all numeric that can change depending on the parameters. An example of such data will be, say, the wind speed, barometer readings at Lake Erie, Lake Placid, Lake Huron and Lake Ontario. Now the wind speed and barometer readings from all 4 lakes will effect the weather outlook pattern for a region - this is a fictitious rational and simply to illustrate the question I have below. Now I would like to dynamically generate graphics based on the data from the 4 lakes onto a screen. The screen will have 4 spheres - representing each lake. The size and color of the sphere will depend on the likelihood of bad weather - this data is dynamically calculated based on raw weather data, e.g wind speed. How is it best to dynamically generate the above graphic? Ideally I would like to create a web based solution. Can I produce a JPEG output based on calculation from the raw data? I am open to using .NET or J2EE - I am very familiar with .NET but have started to learn J2EE and would like to learn more - so I am extremely neutral on the platform. How would it be best to list the data associated with each lake. Initially I though of tabulating the result below the graphical representation. However it will be neat if a user places his Cursor on a sphere - and the data appears in the alt pop-up (not a pop-up browser). But I am not sure the above is possible as there are 4 spheres on 1 JPEG - each having different data sets. The above problem is for my personal coding - so I am open on the platform, database and technology used. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Sam Livingston-Gray | Haven't played with it much, but I believe PHP has some image-generation capabilities. As for getting the pop-up, you could simply generate one image for each lake, and set its ALT tag accordingly. Then the browser will take care of your pop-up for you. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Exception guy | Now's a perfect time to drop everything and go read at least one of the books by Edward Tufte. Start with 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' - see his site at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ Once you read his work, you'll understand: 1. why certain visual information displays are better than others (no, it's not just subjective), and 2. how to maximize the information you can transmit visually [One of his books talks about the special issues related to displaying info on computers, rather than on paper or another medium; I don't remember which one]. I hope you find them helpful (plus, the pictures are pretty!). |
| Fri 05 Sep | UI Designer | Exception Guy - that's exactly what I was thinking as I read the post. I attended his 1 day course 'Presenting Data and Information' this summer. Thoroughly recommended. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Lee | There's a ton of ways you could go.. There's a bunch of packages that will generate graphics like that (I can think of a couple in Perl anyway). However, its probably alot easier to do with some javascript and some CGI. IE When you mouseover a sphere change the text in a div. I recently displayed percentage score by stretching a 1 px high graphic and changing its color based on certain thresholds. Maybe your could have a set of 3-4 static graphics you could alternate based on certain conditions. I'm not a big fan of displaying specific information in ALT tags. IHMO, it's bad design because only someone whose very interested in your site or very bored will notice. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ankur | Yep, you can generate JPEGs on the fly using ASP.NET and GDI+. Simply instantiate a Bitmap object, create a Graphics object from it, draw your snazzy spheres/circles on the graphics object, then save the JPEG (or GIF or PNG). |
| Fri 05 Sep | Spam | Maybe try ImageMagick? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Opus | '...using ASP.NET and GDI+. Simply instantiate a Bitmap object, create a Graphics object from it, draw your snazzy spheres/circles on the graphics object, then save the JPEG (or GIF or PNG). ' ...or send it directly to the browser |
| Fri 05 Sep | van pelt | The Gimp has a scripting capability that powers image generation on a few sites I've seen (the only example I can remember the URL for right now is cooltext.com) |
| Fri 05 Sep | Alex | GNUPLOT is what all the *nix weenies use for that sort of stuff. It runs on Windows (and most OSes), but I don't know how well it will interface with your stuff. It draws the graph, you just give it data & how you want it to look, which is easier than trying to draw the boxes and lines yourself, I think. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Israel Orange | GD Image library is excellent. http://www.boutell.com/gd/faq.html |
| Fri 05 Sep | Anonymous Cowboy | http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/03/07/scalablevectorgraphics/default.aspx |
| Sat 06 Sep | jdm | For generating graphics on the web, bitmap is *not* the way to go. I have worked with VML (vector markup language) on IE 5+ to create interactive graphics, and it's quite simple to do--Google will give you all the resources you need. Also, there are ActiveX controls available if you don't want to bother learning VML. I have not used them, but I assume they are easy to use, and some will also generate bitmaps for other platforms. |
| Sat 06 Sep | jdm | You could also use SVG (scalable vector graphics) which is similar to VML, but has the blessings of W3. Both vector languages use simple text markup to generate graphics, similar to HTML--in fact, they are really instances of XML. The graphics can be changed readily using DOM and Javascript. SVG is fast becoming the language of choice for generating maps on the web. I can't wait for SVG to be used in sites like Mapquest, because it is completely scalable and uses antialiasing. Unfortunately SVG requires a plugin (see Adobe's version, for example); IE has so far supported rendering of only VML. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Arron Bates | Java's 2D graphics ability is truly amazing and no book shows it off better than: Java 2D API Graphics by Vincent J. Hardy. It's just an awesome book. It's one of my few truly prized tech books. Sits proudly next to Design Patterns GoF book. The graphics and layouts in the book rank up there with photoshop/illustrator manuals (I'm not kidding). You make graphics from this book, and they will be truly looking sweet. |
| Localization question | Fri 05 Sep | Joel Spolsky |
| In US Windows there are a bunch of mnemonic keyboard accelerators, like Ctrl+S = save Ctrl+X,C,V = cut, copy, paste etc. Are these the same in every language version of Windows or do they get localized? Thanks! |
| Fri 05 Sep | GiorgioG | http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/pdfs/lingo_guide_book.pdf#p52 |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | I'll swear they are the same, at least in W2K and Win XP They certainly don't change when you change the keyboard layout and input language. Not all of them are mnemonic anyway. Crtl + C for copy is, but the other three on the bottom line are simply there because of their relationship to C. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | I disagree with the advice given in the book that they should be translated. But check what the appropriate version of Windows or Word does (as I said I don't think it translates) |
| Fri 05 Sep | Robert Chevallier | The common ones are not localized in French as far as I know: CTRL+O, CTRL+S, CTRL+C,X,V,Z,P,A,N But usually application specific ones are localized so they are easier to remember E.g: CTRL+F (find) are sometimes CTL+R (Rechercher) |
| Fri 05 Sep | Robert Chevallier | Agree with Stephen. The guide doesn't distinguish between accelerator keys (ALT+) which MUST be localized and Shortcut key. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Janek Schwarz | I did a quick check with WordPad on a German Windows 2000, SP1. He're the shortcuts:
Ctrl-N -> New Document
Ctrl-O -> Open Document
Ctrl-S -> Save Document
Ctrl-P -> Print Document
Ctrl-Z -> Undo
Ctrl-X -> Cut
Ctrl-C -> Copy
Ctrl-V -> Paste
Del -> Delete
Ctrl-A -> Select All
Ctrl-F -> Find
F3 -> Find again
Ctrl-H -> Replace
Alt-Enter -> Object Properties
On German keyboards, the 'Ctrl' key is entitled 'Strg' so the shortcuts are in fact Strg- |
| Fri 05 Sep | Eric Debois | Swedish and Dutch software uses ctrl-c / x /v etc just like english versions. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Joel Spolsky | Thanks. I'm working on the CityDesk localization kit and wondering if I have to worry about these. So I guess European users of software are used to things like Ctrl+P for print even if that's not remotely mnemonic... With Ctrl+X, C, and V my guess is those keys were chosen to allow easy chording: using the left hand on the keyboard and the right hand on the mouse, and it's easy to move things around. On keyboards with a different arrangement of letters this advantage might not work... |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ori Berger | In the Hebrew version of Windows, The "File" = "Kovetz" menu in most programs is opened by Alt-"Koof", which is actually Alt-E and not Alt-F. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Eric Lippert | > With Ctrl+X, C, and V my guess is those keys were > chosen to allow easy chording: using the left hand > on the keyboard and the right hand on the mouse, > and it's easy to move things around. Correct, and Apple did it first. IIRC (and I may not be!) there was quite a long period during the Windows 3.1-and-earlier days when X and V were not cut and paste. I don't recall which keys were, but I do recall my simultaneous frustration (because I kept hitting the wrong keys when they changed it) and elation (because X-C-V is so obviously better) causing a great deal of cognitive dissonnance for about a month. Eric |
| Fri 05 Sep | __ | Zip up, your Cooper is showing. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Matthew Lock | In Japanese windows they also use the same keyboard shortcuts as English |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | 'IIRC (and I may not be!) there was quite a long period during the Windows 3.1-and-earlier days when X and V were not cut and paste.' The original shortcuts were: Ctrl+Delete = Cut Ctrl+Insert = Copy Shift+Insert = Paste There is, in some sense, some logic to these keybindings. But the chording value of X/C/V cannot be beat. :) |
| Sat 06 Sep | Marcos Rubinelli | Please, don't translate shortcuts. This only confuses people that use both the English and localized versions. It is terribly distressing to press Ctrl-S to save a spreadsheet in Excel 2000, Brazilian Portuguese version, and discover that I underlined (Sublinhar) a cell instead. I think that people at Microsoft figured that out a few years ago, because in WinXP they use the standard English throughout. I was loath to use notepad in Windows 98 because it used Ctrl-L instead of Ctrl-F for the Find command. |
| Sat 06 Sep | MugsGame | While we're on the subject: a bizarre localisation gotcha I ran into with Excel recently. In French (and other) locales, Comma Separated Value (CSV) files use a period as the field separator. This is because comma is used as the decimal separator. If you have an application which exports CSV, you have to adapt your separator depending on the system locale. Which means CSV files aren't portable between locales! IMHO, the format name (CSV) dictates that the on disk separator should always be comma, and that only the on-screen presentation should be locale sensitive. But it seems not... |
| Sat 06 Sep | B# | I have run across this as well and have changed all my separators to | pipes with no problem so far. I would be interested to hear of any issues that you've countered. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Thomas Eyde | As a developer I swear to US-English versions of everything. So doing a find in Norwegian Word is difficult, as ctrl + f is localized to mean bold ('fet' in Norwegian). Ctrl + f is, 'obviously', changed to ctrl + b. When I use a Norwegian Word I always bold the text before I remember the find shortcut is changed. Norwegian for 'find'? It's 'finn'. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Ricardo | In the Spanish version of Office, the 'edit' shortcuts (ctrl-c, ctrl-x, ctrl-v) are the same, but the rest are translated. Ctrl-G for Save ('Guardar'), ctrl-N for Bold ('Negrita'), etc. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Matt Latourette | Windows still retains the original Ctrl+Delete, Ctrl+Insert, and Shift+Insert bindings for cut, copy, and paste in addition to the newer Ctrl+X,C,V for usability reasons. There's no good reason to force people who learned Windows 3.1 to relearn how to cut, copy, and paste and there is a certain logic to the choice of keys. I've found very few applications that don't support those key bindings. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Chris Tavares | Another advantage of the old key bindings is that Ctrl-X, C, V have absolutely no chording value for us lefties. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Colin Newell | We have just been using Russian Windows with the language settings set to Russian etc. and the same ctrl-c hotkeys do work. The one thing to note however is that we have an english keyboard attached to the box, not a russian one. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Robert Chevallier | Mugsgame, The problem with CSV is that a decimal sign for number is locale dependent. Ie: in French, the decimal separator is a comma, so you cannot use it as a separator between fields. The solution is then to use a semi-colon. Good products usually allows you to define what are the separators for decimal and fields, so you have no problems exchanging data. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Thomas Eyde | Why should a file format obey local currency formatting? Nearly all, if not all, programming languages use the dot as the decimal sign, why shouldn't file formats follow the same convention? You would be really thick if you can't read the numbers in your cvs file the one time you have to open it in notepad. |
| Do you know the world is round? | Fri 05 Sep | Danil |
| Inspired by Why Johnny cant reed gud. Can you prove that the earth is round, or is that something that you know only because you were taught? |
| Fri 05 Sep | anon | Some twat in Egypt proved it a couple thousand years ago with only a couple of sticks. How about something harder? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | I have fun with this one a lot, often following bitchfests about teaching creationism. I point out that for most people, evolution or physics are just as much religion as creationism is - they're taken 100% on faith. And this brings an exceptionally valid point for software development - always question. Perform timings, benchmarks, comparisons. Ask for documentation. Be able to state *why* bound controls are evil, or why you prefer SP's over embedded SQL. Mantras and silly consistencies are for lesser individuals. ;-) Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | Jeff MacDonald | Didn't someone fly a plane around the world? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Steve Barbour | You're all a bunch of heretics! Next you'll be trying to tell me that earth revolves around the sun, and that I am not the center of the universe. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Jeff MacDonald | Hey!! I thought the earth revolved around Larry Ellison. |
| Fri 05 Sep | !El gato es muy gordo! | How about that nice round shadow on the moon during an eclipse? The fact that we can see the shape from space, every other planet we can see is round, etc? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Peter Breton | > Can you prove that the earth is round, or is that something that you know only because you were taught? Now I have to go epistomological on you: can we prove things about the physical world at all? We can indeed assemble a body of evidence to demonstrate fairly convincingly that *to the best of our knowledge* the world is (approximately) round, but that is not a proof, in the mathematical sense of the word. And while going meta: what standards of evidence will you establish? Does a photograph of the earth from space constitute proof, or must you see it in person? If everything must be proved by demonstrating it to you, then the amount of things that you can believe in will be small indeed. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Name withheld out of cowardice | I once read that the ancient Greeks even knew the world to be round because when a ship appeared on the horizon its sail was always seen first. The author's point was that it is nonsense to think that in 1492 educated people actually thought the world was flat. The question was how big it was. I also recall reading that the Arab mathematicians had a pretty calculation done as to the circumference of the world but that Columbus either wasn't aware of it or misread it. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | Actually I lived and taught for years in the town where Columbus's cartographer came from, Blanes at the southermost point of the Costa Brava. One of the main streets in Blanes, Joaquim Ferrer is named after him, and there is a small side street hidden in the old corner of Barcelona called Carrer Ferrer de Blanes. Few people know what the guy was famous (infamous for) whereas the life story of the town's other leading citizen, the writer Joaqium Ruyra, is taught in all the local primary schools. Must be embarrasing when your town's most favourite son owes his fame to being so spectacularly wrong. And even more so when the direct result of his mistake is United States world domination :) |
| Fri 05 Sep | Tim Sullivan | Philo: Evolution and physics are not taught in a vacuum, nor are they absolute claims of accuracy. Science in general only claims to approach the truth. Along with evolution and physics (and biology), students are taught the scientific method, which is designed to question absolutes, find problems with answers, and work to more accurate solutions. Unlike the other method (my priest, or mom, or psychic, or alien abductor told me so), it works pretty well, replacing old theories with new ones as more evidence is discovered. As for whether the world is round, I know it for 2 reasons: 1) when I look at the horizon at the ocean or on the Prairies, it visibly curves; 2) I've been around it in a plane. There are other proofs that don't require faith, but I'm not going to type them out here. :-) |
| Fri 05 Sep | Mark Hoffman | 'And even more so when the direct result of his mistake is United States world domination :) ' A lot more went into the US dominated the world than some silly European who got lost and made landfall in the wrong place.... |
| Fri 05 Sep | __ | How about the pictures of the earch from space? Oh, yeah, those were faked... sorry! |
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | 'students are taught the scientific method, which is designed to question absolutes, find problems with answers' ...except of course for generally accepted community norms. Questioning those will usually get you ostracized. Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | Danil | 'The question was how big it was.' That question had been answered by Eratosthenes, sometime before 200 BC. Columbus was stoned. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Tim Sullivan | Philo: Unless you have a really good reason to question, say, the law of conservation of energy, changes are you won't be treated with professional respect if you decry it. However, science frequently has undergone radical changes in their theories when evidence was shown to the contrary. Indeed, Einstein's theories have been updated by people like Hawking. In science, nothing is absolute if someone can show differently, consistently. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Church Lady | Of course, you realize that
-- Windows is the OS of choice among Judeo/Christians, as it was built on capitalism.
-- Unix/Linux (and especially BSD) are the OS of choice for ummmm,
|
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | 'Unless you have a really good reason to question, say, the law of conservation of energy, changes are you won't be treated with professional respect if you decry it.' From what I've seen, it's actually 'if you question the law of conservation of energy, you won't be treated with professional respect, whether you have good reason or not' Question the establishment, get tarred and feathered. Question the establishment for a few generations and you might just start to make some progress. Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | Jim Rankin | '...except of course for generally accepted community norms. Questioning those will usually get you ostracized.' If you want to talk ostracism, try questioning natural-materialist philosophy in any 'academic' institution. |
| Sat 06 Sep | qwerty | Shadow distance changes the further north-south you go. Not much of an intellectual leap from there. |
| Sat 06 Sep | RB | The Earth isn't round, it's an oblate spheriod. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Shane_from_Dominos | I have proof ;) http://www.visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev116/ev11664_rotate_320.mpg |
| Sat 06 Sep | char* full_name() | > Shadow distance changes the further north-south you go. Not much of an intellectual leap from there. HA! How would that prove the world is round, spheric or any other shape of your choice? I state that earth is a plane and the sun is very close above, some 20000 km above. And of course, the sun's diameter is only a few kilometers, say 10 or so. The further I walk away from the point where the sun is exactly above, the longer the shadows get thrown. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Philo | I once read a really good SF story - two astronauts in a capsule enroute to the moon were talking about previous missions that had all disappeared just as they started around the dark side of the moon. They got into a philosophical discussion, with one guy taking the stance that the reason the missions disappeared was that the earth and heavens were 'built' as a habitat for man and couldn't stand closer examination. Then, as they came around the moon, they saw the back of it - scaffolding and trusses, with writing on them. Cut to a debriefing, where it becomes apparent that the whole thing was a 'Capricorn One' type charade on the astronauts, to test psychological effects of the unknown. Their viewscreens were *supposed* to blank out when they circled behind the fake moon, and they'd observe the astronauts to see how they reacted to the stress. Instead, now one astronaut was in a seizure-induced coma and the other was in a religious fugue state... Philo |
| OODB: Are they viable? | Fri 05 Sep | Glade Warner |
| Are Object Oriented Databases (OODB) viable? What do they do for you? How do they compare to relational datbases? How have you used them? |
| Fri 05 Sep | anon | Why would an OODB be any less 'viable' than an RDBMS? It wasn't all that long ago that Oracle was an upstart company with some new technology, was it? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Mike | Yes and no. They are not going to replace rdbms any time soon. They are slower, generally. If you are so excited about OOP that you wet yourself, then the OODB is a natural storage environment. If you have traditional data storage needs go with a traditional method. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ori Berger | anon: There's no a-priori reason they should be less viable. But it's not like they're new; They've been around for nearly 20 years, and for most projects, most of the time, they are still not viable. The only OODB I can say I really have experience with is ZODB; as far as I know, it _is_ characteristic. My conclusion is that you're better off with an RDBMS. Not because it's perfect, but rather, because (with the existing selection), it is much easier to get what you want out of an RDBMS than an ODBMS. And more often than not, the relational model just fits a problem better. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Nick | Fabian Pascal and CJ Date have addressed OODB's (and XML DB's) a number of times in the last several years over at http://www.dbdebunk.com . I don't have a direct link to any particular article, but you can browse the content. But be warned: Pascal comes off as so arrogant that he's painful to read. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Phillip J. Eby | ZODB isn't really an OODB. It's a persistent object store. There's a *big* difference. OODB's these days tend to be either expensive commercial products, or undocumented academic projects, without much of a middle ground. Instead of middle-of-the-road OODB's, you tend to find O->R mapping toolkits and libraries. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ori Berger | ZODB is indexed and ACID transactional, which is what I consider the defining properties of a 'DBMS'. An RDBMS also has to be relational (well, duh), and an ODBMS also has to store objects well, respecting their is-a and has-a relationships - which ZODB also does well. Phillip, is there a standardized definition of OODB? What makes ZODB not an OODB? Can you point to something which you do consider an OODB? [P.S: There isn't a concensus on what OO means] |
| Fri 05 Sep | Phillip J. Eby | ZODB is *not* indexed. You can store indexes *in* it, but ZODB itself is not indexed. That in itself is one of the characteristics that make me view it as more akin to GDBM or BerkelyDB, than an OODB. It also doesn't have a query language, or schema mechanism. I'm not aware of a specific formal definition of an OODB, but have a look at: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/clamen/OODBMS/Manifesto/htManifesto/Manifesto.html ZODB would fail on many of the 'Essential Characteristics' listed here. |
| Fri 05 Sep | StickyWicket | I used ObjectStore for a few years. I don't know if it's still around because I know the company was bought out a while back. The worst thing about OS was the performance and some of its quirks. It wasn't very fast (for things like heavy transactions) and it tended to commit a heck of a lot of memory for relative simple transactions. However, the database was a simple file that could easily be moved around and copied, backed-up, etc. This made it 10x easier to work with than SQL although not having a backup agent meant you had to schedule downtime. To be fair, I never had one crash, fault, or integrity with the product. All in all, not bad. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | ROFL! This may be better than 'nobody needs more than 640k': 'Gates: There never have been, and there never will be in the next decade, any relational databases.' (from the dbdebunk site) You know, I'm thinking Gates isn't such a visionary - what he *does* do well is react quickly and doesn't get oversold on his own investments. He's made some colossal missteps in trying to guess the future - he doesn't choose a course and drive down it (like Ellison), rather he seems to stay light on his feet, testing a dozen waters at once and being incredibly willing to kill business directions without a second thought. Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | anon | http://www.versant.com/ |
| Fri 05 Sep | anon | [anon: There's no a-priori reason they should be less viable. But it's not like they're new; They've been around for nearly 20 years, and for most projects, most of the time, they are still not viable.] You don't understand my point. My first question is 'why are they not viable'? It's likely many of the responses would include some comment on performance (basically, a database system can never be fast enough). But that's a technical question, not one of viability. There's a reason we started with VisiCalc and not Oracle v8.0. So, if you assumed that we could get similar performance from an RDBMS and an OODB, which would you pick? The one where you got to retrieve business objects by name or the one where you had to retrieve data from several locations and 'join' them to create the sets you needed? The answer might still depend on the business problem you're trying to solve, but there wouldn't be any silliness about 'viability'. It's just a matter of time. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | Both OODBs and POSs (Persistent Object Stores) are viable, for the right kinds of problems. The reason people rely on RDBMSs so much is that, in part, they've been trained to think of data relationally. It's not that a relational model is necessarily better or worse than some other model, but it's almost certainly the thing most people are the most comfortable with. It's habit, as much as anything else. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ged Byrne | Behind the Relational Model there are some very strong math. The relational model started with as a solid set of proven theory and worked its way towards implementation. I don't think that Object Orientation has that kind math behind it. I think OO started off as implementation and has been searching for a solid theory since. You may say that math is nothing more than pie in the sky theory that doesn't mean a thing in the real world. Well, I think that 'logical differences are big differences.' This thread has already pointed out how wrong the predictions of industry leaders have turned out, and how short lived their fads. If you read Turing or Van-Neuman then its all still relevant. Go furhter back to Bool, further still to Newton, keep going to Pythagoras ... |
| Fri 05 Sep | Nick | 'Gates: There never have been, and there never will be in the next decade, any relational databases.' Philo, I don't know if he's wrong on that one. IIRC no vendor has fully met the point by point requirements for a RDBMS specified by Codd. Part of Rule 12 is probably theoretically impossible: 12. Nonsubversion rule There should be no backdoor to bypass the security imposed by the DBMS. [Maybe this is the rule that Gate's objected to. :-p] There were some funny comments in that article, though. |
| Fri 05 Sep | M | In regards to this question, I have heard from "others" that relational has been and will continue to be the popular data store because the storage mechanism is much more distinct from how you choose to use the data (i.e. objects and their logic). The theory is the data is more valuable than the logic over time, thus you keep a data store built for the data and not the logic. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | Nick - yeah, Bill could spin it that way, but coming from the father of 'nobody needs more than 640k', Microsoft Bob, and the guy who almost let the internet pass him by, I'm inclined to think he's not that great a visionary. Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | GiorgioG | He's worth how many billions? What's being a visionary worth to you? ;-) Besides, what does it mean to be a visionary? It's all about the $, because it's just business folks... |
| Sat 06 Sep | Philo | Giorgio - read my previous comment. Visionaries are people like Larry Ellison or Michael Dell, who see a course (RDBMS or commodity computers) and drive down it, pushing for public acceptance. Gates (IMHO) doesn't do that, with perhaps the notable exception of providing for developers before anyone else. But his list of 'vision' failures is long and distinguished. I think Gates' modus operandi isn't 'see the future and seize it' - it's 'keep as many avenues open as possible, and be willing to admit your mistakes and change direction instantly' That's why we see so many dead techs out of Redmond (ActiveDocuments, Chrome, various API paradigms, etc, etc)- they didn't take off flying, so they were shot in the head. Philo |
| Sat 06 Sep | Brian | Getting back to the original topic, what does an API for an OODB look like? Are you bound to a particular language? Certainly the fact that you can access every mainstream RDBMS from every mainstream language is a factor in their mind share. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Software Build Guy | OQL is the equivalent to SQL in the OODB world. Products such as Poet FastObjects and Versant claim to act as object persistence and full databases. What I have seen of them they tend to have a issue as they grow to have access times increase geometrically. Mentioned resources: Poet FastObjects: http://www.fastobjects.com/eu/ Versant: http://www.versant.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&bid=21&btitle=Products&mid=10&ceid=48 and an OQL reference: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis550/oql.pdf |
| Sun 07 Sep | Chris | I read an article a while back that made a good case against OODB's. I can't remember where it came from, but the main point was this: Data outlives paradigms. In other words, with a flat set of data to work with, you can always get it to work with whatever the programming flavor of the day is. But when you stuff that same data into an object-oriented model, you're stuck with that model, even when OOP has been replaced by the next big thing. Chris |
| Sun 07 Sep | Zahid | Take a look at a product called Caché from Intersystems ( http://www.intersystems.com/ ). They call it an 'object database', and while I don't know whether that title is accurate based on the theoretical criteria described in this thread, it sure is cool :) They presented to our user group a couple of months ago. For those who favor SQL as a data access tool, Caché exposes a SQL interface as well as the object one. It also has a cool 'gateway' feature to integrate with other DBMS' (basically, allowing you to query across DBMS' transparently). |
| Sun 07 Sep | Matthew Lock | Postgresql has some Object-esque feature I believe. |
| Sun 07 Sep | anon | [In other words, with a flat set of data to work with, you can always get it to work with whatever the programming flavor of the day is. But when you stuff that same data into an object-oriented model, you're stuck with that model, even when OOP has been replaced by the next big thing. ] So, what if you really need to access data as objects, but you jumped on the RDBMS 'bandwagon'? This is exactly the sort of thing XP tends to discourage: shooting yourself in the head now, so you MIGHT be better off in the future. If you need an OODB, you need one. If you need an RDBMS, then you need that. If you need to keep your data on stacks of punch cards held together with rubber bands, then that's cool too. I suppose that no one out there normalizes their data since they might need that 'flat set of data' at some later date? Did we really go through all this hand wringing when RDBMS were first introduced? |
| CMS | Fri 05 Sep | The Real PC |
| I am looking for an open source CMS. For example I looked at JBoss Nukes but it didnt seem to be exactly what I need. Does anyone have recommendations or experiences with CMSs? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Konrad | OpenCMS (http://www.opencms.org) looks pretty good to me, but I have never used it. Uses MySQL, don't know whether this can be changed =) |
| Fri 05 Sep | Konrad | Sorry, useless comment - it's also a java web application so you can dunk in straight into Tomcat. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Chris Winters | If by CMS you mean an application that manages content rather than a Slashdot clone, then Bricolage [1] is an industrial-strength solution. It doesn't try to be an application server, it just manages content and allows you to perform personalization using whatever tool you prefer. [1] http://bricolage.cc/ |
| Fri 05 Sep | Scott Evans | I just learned from a friend that Red Hat has a CMS -- I had no idea. I haven't had time to research it but I kinda figured 'Red Hat... open source'. Anyone have more info? A google search for 'red hat cms' points me here: http://www.redhat.com/software/rhea/cms/ |
| Fri 05 Sep | Clay Dowling | I have a small system I have created at http://www.lazarusid.com/ebusiness.shtml It has the advantage of being open sourced and pretty light weight. A little light on documentation though. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Joel Spolsky | I would guess that what RedHat has is the leftovers of ArsDigita (ACS - arsDigita community system). If you're going that route there's also OpenACS. |
| Sat 06 Sep | The Real PC | My boss decided we're going to use the web interface to Subversion. I'm going to see if I can improve it, because right now it is not very usable, in my opinion. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Bored Bystander | I posted the question recently re: selecting a no-brainer CMS for a nonprofit. I found and installed PostNuke (www.postnuke.com ). It is php/mysql based. Installation was dead easy - and I do not know PHP or mysql all that well. As far as my needs of having a simple and easy to administer site, this fills the bill. It's straightforward to remove functionality that isn't needed. Postnuke gives you the kitchen sink but it's very configurable without messing too much with the source. Supposedly it has an XML-RPC interface to allow the outside world to syndicate your content. This is *not* yet tested in production, but my initial impression is very favorable. |
| Sat 06 Sep | The Real PC | Bored, Can the users edit pages with their preferred editor? Can you import and export an existing web site? As far as I could tell, JBoss Nukes (which is a recent Java port of PostNuke) forces users to edit in its web forms, and would not import an existing web site. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Bored Bystander | I'm running into that issue right now. A quick answer is - yes, it is possible to import existing content. But no, the assistant admins can't use their HTML editor of choice and FTP and upload it - you have to work through the Postnuke admin interface. The main reason for this is that Postnuke keeps virtually everything - all forum and news data, all config information - in mySql tables. In my case, I need to import the existing content of the original web site. I want this legacy content to simply be pages that are displayed within the main window area as a result of clicking certain links (An 'Old Stuff' menu). Postnuke does not seem to have this ability out of the box. There are, however, many Postnuke add-ons called 'modules'. There is a module named ContentExpress (available at Sourceforge) that is intended specifically to allow the 'anointed' level of user to post pages that aren't part of stories or threaded forums. There is also a less powerful module called 'Content'. Overall, this problem of importing existing content 'feels' too complex, but I have not seem much of anything in the Postnuke community written on the subject. |
| Sun 07 Sep | tapiwa | Joel is correct. The redhat cms began life as a Java port of the arsdigita cms. Have not used the redhat version but openACS is pretty good. |
| Sun 07 Sep | tapiwa | to be honest though, it is quite difficult to recommend something without a few more details on what exactly you want to use it for. For a lot f sites, something like moveable type is enough. Simple and templateable, but nothing in the way of personalisation. I use this on my own website http://www.tapiwa.com the different nukes have their strengths, and have enough bolt ons to make them realistic options to consider. A lot of people just install them as standard, but I have seen some really nice and different *nuke sites. You can also move further up the field with stuff like openACS and redhat CMS which support Oracle and have been used in industrial strength websites. Harder to use and customize, but what you lose in ease of use, you gain in features and customizeability (whoa... new buzzword!!) Just a few questions... Do you have language of choice? Do you have access to server and not just webhost? How many pages is the site expected to be? How many users and content creators do you envision? Do you need workflow and version control? Do you need personalisation for your visitors? How many different types of content (eg. news vs discussion vs essays vs xyz) ?? How regularly is the content updated? How much development time have you got? Without knowing the answers to the questions above, the options are endless. |
| Sun 07 Sep | The Real PC | The organization has existing web sites and we don't want to change them very much. I'm not sure how many users there will be eventually, but I guess under 10. None of the pages are interactive, as far as I know. We need version control and conflict management. How often the sites are updated depends on which sites. Actually, I am not very familiar with what happens with these sites, having just recently been given this project. I have access to the web servers. My boss generally prefers Java or mod_perl, but I also know PHP quite well. Another programmer developed a mod_perl CMS which uses Subversion. Since he already spent a lot of time on it, we are most likely going to use it. It seems pretty good, except for a couple of things I don't like and hopefully will be able to change easily. For example, every time a user wants to edit one file, it checks out a whole directory (because Subversion will not check out just one file) to a temporary directory and then removes it. The user has to wait for all this to happen. Instead, I want to keep a working copy of all the web sites that will be synchronized with the live site. Users will edit pages from the working copy. In the existing CMS, users would not even be able to preview their pages after editing. I think, or hope, that after my changes it will be usable. I could also add an option to edit pages in a web form (like Postnuke), for users who know HTML and just want to make a quick change. That would be faster than downloading the page and opening it in an editor. However, when they are moving stuff around on a page and making design changes they won't want to do it in a web form. So I'd like to provide both options. |
| Computers, and black Jack Simulations | Fri 05 Sep | Albert D. Kallal |
| The use of computers for simulations is a very cool aspect of computers. In fact, I owe much of my carrier to this concept. I purchased my first AppleII computer to actually run black jack simulations. I wanted to play blackjack in casinos for a living, but needed to run some tests and numbers first (I wanted to know what I could win per hour, and the books did not give me good numbers in this regards). Back then, to get any amount of computing power cost real dollars, and the concept of having my own computer that was fast enough to actually simulate the game of black jack was a most magical concept. Even when at university we got a grant from the computing faculty to use the mainframe for the study of blackjack. We got tons of extra time on the mainframe, and did not have to pay for it. We also started using “teams” (comprised of other CS students) to play the game at casinos. Having played a good deal of blackjack in the Casino’s I started to ask the question: If a person can learn to play black jack, and win, why do not more people not do this? I mean, why not play blackjack? It turns out that playing blackjack well does not really require a special memory (practice takes care of this). However, it does requite that you are a person of logic, and also a very process originated type of person. In other words, you don’t believe in superstitions, or luck when it comes to cards. Of course, most casino’s are filled with people who are chasing luck, and not a process. Basically, if you have the smarts, discipline and mind to focus on a project such as playing blackjack, then you are no doubt a educated Engineer, software developer, dentist, doctor etc. In other words, those people that have the ability to win at blackjack are NOT playing blackjack because they already have a good career. The discipline and focus you need to GET GOOD ENOUGH at this game is the same process you need to do well at school. If you did well at school and went on to get a university education then you had the means (money), and the smarts and resources to build one self a good career. In fact, if you are involved in computing, then you likely started your own business and were able to put it all together. Or, if you are willing to put that kind of effort into playing blackjack, you might as well become the top selling real estate guy in your city. In other words, the abilities here requited are not easy, but starting your own SUCCESSFUL real estate companies is not easy either. So, if you can be successful at blackjack, then you already likely are that kind of person who had the ability to get educated and likely already has a good job! (or started a good business etc.). So, very few people play blackjack for a living, since the abilities needed means you already are doing something else more interesting or more lucrative! However, for some of those that can’t find work in computing..perahps playing blackjack for a living is a possibility! For a really interesting article in Wired on this subject, check out: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.09/vegas.html It is wonderful article, since virtually the whole concept of card counting and computer simulations made the above possible. I studied and tried many of the concepts explained in the above a good number of years before those guys! I wonder if there is any other business or venture that can benefit from simulations? Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Fri 05 Sep | sgf | Well, in additoin to your reasons, here's a few others not to make blackjack a career: - smoke filled rooms - noisy rooms - surrounded by mostly drunk, innumerate morons who think gambling makes sense. Other than that it sounds like fun :) |
| Fri 05 Sep | RocketJeff | Interestingly enough, the founder of my previous employeer, Blair Hull, started out as a professional blackjack player. He turned the knowledge/strategy of blackjack into an options tading philosophy and built one of the largest privately held trading companies - Hull Trading. Unfortunately for the company, Blair (and the other partners) sold it to Goldman Sachs. GS sliced & diced it so that there are very few shards of the original left. Old article about Blair/the company: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/08/hullbenchmark.html Blair's campaign website (note - no mention of Blackjack!): http://www.blairhull.com/ |
| Fri 05 Sep | Rick | Also you need a large bankroll (e.g. $100K) to make any money out of the 1 or 2 percent edge you can get from card counting, and the standard deviation is so huge you have to not mind when you lose $10K in a single day (or hour) and just keep playing. Add to that the stress from having to disguise yourself every day and duck and weave around pit bosses who are watching you closely and eager to kick you out for card counting... no thanks! |
| Fri 05 Sep | RocketJeff | Just to add to Rick’s comment (which was correct - if the casino even _thinks_ you're card counting, they immediately ban you from playing [as do all the other casinos]). I heard Blair talk about his blackjack days several times. The most elaborate card counters work as a team - the actual counter always makes small bets and doesn't try to win (or use the knowledge he’s gathering). If the table turns favorable, he signals to the other guys who come over and make large bets. These guys don't look like they're counting - they try to look like the average tourist (drink in hand, talks a lot, etc). Once the table goes cold (or they win enough) they leave. At this level, there's a lot more to the strategy of casino blackjack then just mathematics. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brian | Did anybody ever read the book 'The Eudaemonic Pie' [ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0595142362/qid=1062778236/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8533350-3572631?v=glance&s=books ]? I stumbled over it in the library when I was an undergrad. It's a fun story about hippie hackers who build computers in their shoes to win at roulette. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brian | I should point out that it's nonfiction, though the description makes it sound otherwise. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | The reason few people play Blackjack for a living is that casinos, and bookmakers, don't like a level playing field. Al;bert's comment about card players going into Real Estate is interesting. in the 1980's and early 90's the US had the best Bridge team in the world. Most of the players were in the real estate business. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ted Graham | Bringing Down the House http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743249992/qid=1062782968 is a good, recent book about graduate students playing BlackJack for profit. Ted |
| Fri 05 Sep | rz | Albert, a number of my friends are real life professional casino gamblers. Blackjack is very hard to beat these days. You basically need a team approach as described in Bringing down the house. Counting cards with an 8 deck shoe is next to impossible, and even if you can figure it out, or if you target smaller casinos who only use a 4 deck shoe, if you are a lone white guy that keeps winning at blackjack, you will be marked as a counter, asked to leave, and put on a blacklist that is faxed around to other casinos. After the MIT team got exposed, the team approach is also very hard. I've heard that there are still guys making money playing black jack, but I have no idea what strategy they are using. You are underestimating what it takes to be a pro gambler. The discipline and focus it takes to consistently make six figures a year gambling is probably about 10 times the discipline and focus it takes to get a 6 figure middle manager job. My friends that are pros are all poker players. Poker is a game where you are competing with other poker players, not against a house that is trying to weigh the odds so that you can have no edge whatsoever. So, it is still possible to make a go at it as a pro poker player. It does take an enormous amount of practice and discipline to get to the point where you can support yourself playing poker. In fact I would say that if you applied the amount of discipline and focus necessary to become a pro poker player to ANYTHING, you would be equivalently successful doing whatever you chose, thus you really have to convince yourself that poker is what you want to do with your life. Most of the pro poker guys i know are convinced that poker was their calling in life (weird as that may sound). It isn't as though they just thought being a pro poker player would be cool or fun, they truly believe that is what they are meant to be doing. |
| Fri 05 Sep | rz | Regarding simulations, your actual question. :) In the USA, TONS of federal funds are being allocated to medical research. This means everything from genomics to epidemiology, to medical record processing. I personally work on a couple projects where we make heavy use of monte carlo techniques to simulate disease outbreaks. Thus if you are opportunistic and into simulations, target the research arms of a few universities near you and figure out how much grant money they have allocated to 'BIOTERRORISM DEFENSE' or anything in epidemiology. Biomedical departments often have some good biologists and good statisticians, but have no one capable of translating their ideas into code. Thus if you are able to simulate an epidemic based on some data you are given from their emergency room databases, you can position yourself as a technical consultant on some of these research projects. In my experience, I've been able to charge fees equivalent to what I charge for boring corporate work, and the work is more interesting, and far more relaxed. good luck. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Knowledge maker | Anybody want to form a cabal to 'solve' roulette using digital cameras and shoe processors? The technology is much better these days. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | rz basically nailed everything: - You can't win at Blackjack without cheating - You can't cheat at Blackjack without being caught - You'll swing -- very wide -- so you need a huge bankroll If you want to make money gambling legally, the first, last, and only game to play is poker. You absolutely must be first rate at reading people. I've watched a lot of pro poker, and almost without fail, the guys who win are what you'd call 'loose' players. They flout the conventional statistical wisdom (almost all start by reading The Super System, which is an excellent intro book, and then move on from there). You seem them playing more hands, playing statistically bad hands, and they end up winning. They aren't playing the cards, they're playing their opponents. They're so good, their instinct makes it seem like they have X-ray vision. Those are the people who live to play, and love the game. You have to be at that level to make real money at it. A typical large tournment will cost between $5k and $25k to enter, and have at least 100 players in it (I think the last World Series of Poker had almost 900 entrants). You're typically going to have to take at least 5th or 6th place to replace the money you spent entering the tournament. You have to be able to play poker for days straight in a tournament; some will last as long as a week, playing very very long days. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | You can win at Blackjack by counting the cards; it's perfectly legal, though they will ban you for it. The point about the top class poker tournaments is that even many professionals don't enter expecting to make money. They get the experience of playing against top class opposition, and then does them in good stead when they recoup their losses by playing against palookas. And I must mention one of my favourite Bridge stories. In a London club where a fair number of young wannabee Zia Mahmouds hung out and make a precarious living, there was a millionaire businessman who owned a couple of garment factories, and went to the Bridge club four or five times a week, leaving losses of tens of thousands of pounds a year on the table. One night the professionals were walking to the all night bus stop at four or five ion a chilly winter morning, overcoats tightly buttoned up, when the businessmen drove past them in his Rolls Royce, and gave them a friendly wave from the driver's seat. 'Ah, there goes the loser', one of the professional card players announced, through chattering teeth. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | 'You can win at Blackjack by counting the cards; it's perfectly legal, though they will ban you for it.' Right. I was very careful to call it 'cheating', meaning a violation of the rules, rather than 'illegal', meaning a violation of a criminal law. Good points about poker tournaments. I mean, you can always play in cash games, but you have to play big enough stakes to get the idiots out of the game, and to make the winnings meaningful (because, for instance, most cash Texas Hold 'Em games will be Limit, rather than No Limit). |
| Fri 05 Sep | Mike McNertney | As others have pointed out, even with a provably optimal style of play, the casino still has an edge in blackjack unless you count cards. Doing this will eventually get you banned from the casino. Winning at blackjack is more about tricking the casino than beating the game. Poker is different. Tournament poker is (mostly) a game of skill. Luck is still involved of course, as it is with any endeavor. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | There is no rule in blackjack that says you can't count the cards. The casinos aren't banning you for cheating, they're banning you for playing well and winning. And cheating (such as having a button hole TV camera attached to a lithium iron battery and a transmitter that sends the vidoe stream of the outside to where it can be slowed down and the individual cards noted) is a criminal offense in Nevada punishable by ten years jail. |
| Fri 05 Sep | pdq | Knowlege Maker, You will probably have to include lidar (laser radar. Look it up in google) as one of your technologies. There are some new eyesafe ones that might be small and light enough to bring in a casino. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Tom Vu | Counting cards was great the 60s and 70s with the likes of Ken Uston and Ed Thorpe but then casinos made it harder and you had to have teams which still isn't a cash cow. People that were successful or could be successful in that arena moved on to similar roles like, in the case of Hull, trading. By the time the general public hears about where these people are, that arena will have become unprofitable. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Louie the Chair | All the pro BJ discussion is at bj21.com by the way... The big things nowadays are team play like somebody said above, and alerting services for when some new riverboat casino opens up in Podunk, MO with local yokel new dealers who expose the hole card when they pull 'em out of the shoe if you sit in the right spot. Everybody swoops in the first weekend and cleans 'em out. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Christopher Baus | Casinos do indeed ban players they suspect of counting cards. Here in NV the casinos can kick out anyone for any reason. B.J. is the only game where the odds are actually in the player's favor, and the casinos ban you if you are good. That's why even though I live one mile from a casino, I never drop a dime in a machine or spend a chip at a table? The truth of the matter is I fully support the casinos because they pay my income tax. And I thank all the tourists that come to visit our great state, for helping me with my mortgage payment. If you play long enough you will lose. Most people don't seem to be able to understand this. May believe the longer they play the better chance they have of hitting it big. Crazy logic, but ... well you know... |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | 'If you play long enough you will lose. Most people don't seem to be able to understand this.' I don't think that people fail to understand this. I'd say that people who gamble recreationally (as opposed to obsessively) probably overwhemlingly believe one (or both) of these things: 1. They consider the money played as the cost of entertainment; 2. They know that, with some things, there's an off chance of winning big, but they aren't counting on it. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Andy | A very interesting article somewhat related to this: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/03/magazine/03DAHLMAN.html It's about a guy who has 'hacked' the racetrack system and made a relatively consistent, predictable living (and a good one at that). (NY Times seems to have a bug in that you can access their pay articles through direct links, BTW). But I must agree with everyone else, in that this requires just as much effort as a 'legit' job. Some people just like this kind of stuff, just like you and I like software. And while a lot of gamblers could use some basic math skills, the best ones seem to have an edge that goes above and beyond what calculations can give you. They seem to have a hypersensitity to patterns... they can achieve the same or better results without ever sitting down with a computer, but rather by playing millions of games. Also I read some article in the NY Times as well talking about a guy who recently won a big poker tournament. He actually honed his skills online (where you can play hands much faster). So apparently he says that there is nothing about reading someone's 'poker face', which obviously you can't do on the internet -- it's about reading the bets. The money talks. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Albert D. Kallal | >>Counting cards with an 8 deck shoe is next to impossible, and even if you can figure it out, Actually, playing with 2, 4, 6 or 8 decks is NO DIFFERENT in terms of difficulty. That is a very common myth. In fact, there was even errors in that Wired article. Such as making one mistake is a really bad thing. Making one mistake is not such a big deal at all. One hand/ one mistake is not going to make, or break the situation in one night. (you certainly don't want to make mistakes, but ONE mistake is NOT make or break situation). However, while playing BJ against more decks does not increase difficulty of play at all, it does lower your odds by the fact that you get LESS betting opportunities to make money. In fact, if the casinos just went to a 10 deck shoe and shuffled up when they reach 5 decks each time, it would be VERY difficult to make money. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Sat 06 Sep | Stephen Jones | This quote from the article Andy mentions is irrestible; ---' Dahlman puts it a little differently. 'I'm a MOTO player,' he says. 'Master of the Obvious. It's just that more things are obvious to me than to most people.' ------ |
| Sat 06 Sep | Louie the Chair | Albert, they could just do single-deck and shuffle after every hand, too... but while they're shuffling, people aren't playing the game so the casinos are giving up profit, AND a lot of players won't play any more because they mistakenly think they can count and have an edge (when they can't, or make too many errors). |
| Sun 07 Sep | Clutch Cargo | Simulations aren't very interesting. Neural nets that learn how to play by playing against themselves are interesting. Check out the book Blondie24. The newest thing in Blackjack is an automated system that tracks the players, their bets and their cards. Guess what happens to players who consistently raise their bets when the count is favorable? Oh, and team stuff won't work in a lot of places, Casinos simply implement a rule that you can't enter a game in the middle of the shoe. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Albert D. Kallal | >>>The newest thing in Blackjack is an automated system that tracks the players, their bets and their cards. Guess what happens to players who consistently raise their bets when the count is favorable? Gosh, can you like homer Simpson go duh?? How stupid do you think we are? You think that a casino is even stupider? Casinos have always watched tables like a hawk. The whole point of that article was about how steps were taken to not tip off the casino. Fact is the card counters and betters DID NOT CHANGE the amount they bet. This went a long way to fooling the casinos. Also, if you been in casinos, you don’t see clean cut University type students sitting at a table with $1000 of chips. The fact that these guys dressed the gamblers part and did things like use people of Asian decent etc really did go a long to keep the casinos off guard. >>>Oh, and team stuff won't work in a lot of places, Casinos simply implement a rule that you can't enter a game in the middle of the shoe. Yes, what huge hit the casino takes. A nice couple walking with a stack of chips from the roulette table can’t even stop at a few blackjack tables on the way out. They have to sit and wait for the shoe to finish? Yea,...good luck there...those folks will just continue walking. Same goes for people walking with winnings from the slots. Can’t park at the blackjack tables for few quick bets? Casinos are simply loathe to create a atmosphere where you can’t walk up to a table and place a few bets. A horrible solution at best. Good software is all about making things easy. Good casinos is all about making betting easy. If you are telling me that Casinos are much better at watching players and tracking their winnings, you are kind revealing a secret like humans breath air. The fact that humans breath air, and casinos track what happens at each table should not be the slightest surprise to you. Albert D. Kallal Edmonton, Alberta Canada kallal@msn.com http://www.attcanada.net/~kallal.msn |
| Cancelling an Asynchronous Query in ADO | Fri 05 Sep | Ling |
| Im writting a search facility that will be used against a large number of clinical records. The main screen has a Stop Search button that is activated as soon as the user hits the Search button. The code behind the Search button calls a method on a class that initiates an asynchronous search on the database (using a stored procedure). However, I have a problem because the call to the Cancel does not return sooner. This happens when the query being returns a large record set. It seems that SQL server tries to clean up before returning. I would have expected to get control back as soon as I made the call to the Cancel method. Could anybody on this forum know of a work around that can be used to fix this problem? Im running VB6 SP5, with SQL Server 2000 on Win XP. |
| Fri 05 Sep | __ | DoEvents? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ling | DoEvents may not solve the problem because the user will be interested in cancelling the intial search and using a different criteria. They could also want to close the search screen entirely. The form won't unload untill ADO is done and unloaded. On a different note, 'inserting' 'DoEvents on a complex system without proper design is inviting trouble. Been there n gotten my fingers burnt. |
| Fri 05 Sep | __ | Instantiate a search class that is independent of the form. If the user cancels the search, unload the class and reset the form If they want to do a new search, instantiate a new instance. Tidy up the connection, etc behind the scenes. This shouldn't affect clean-up, no? |
| Sat 06 Sep | Sathyaish Chakravarthy | You could try this. Take a connection object with events. Also take a boolean variable and call it something like BoolRolledBack. When you fire your command object or open your recordset in the asynchronous execution mode, set BoolRolledBack to False and call the BeginTransaction method on the connection object. Also provide for DoEvents when you execute command object or open your recordset. In the click of the Stop button, call the RollbackTrans method on the connection object. In the RollbackTransComplete event of the connection object, set BoolRolledBack to True. Immediately after firing your command object or opening your recordset, keep querying the State property of the recordset object or command object and in the loop, also keep checking the BoolRolledBack flag. If the BoolRolledBack flag is True, close up your recordset object and set it to nothing. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Matthew | Ling, If you are interested, http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/scripts/wa.exe?A0=visbas-l#SUB would be a good list on which to get assistance with this problem. Seeya |
| Rebooting after install | Fri 05 Sep | Plover |
| I got recently assigned to maintain a software product. While learning about the product I noticed that after each install/uninstall action, it prompts for a re-boot but ignoring to re-boot prompt does not seem to have any adverse effect. My question is, when do we need a re-boot after installation? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Andrew Hurst | Learn more about the project. There is probably something it does to the registry that requires a reboot. But either way, the answer is in the source code, not on this web board. There are too many possible answers, we can't give you a good answer. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Chris Tavares | On a lot of projects, a previous version required a reboot for some reason (usually replacing system DLLs), but on more recent OS's the reboot is no longer needed. You'll have more friends among your customers if you can get rid of the reboot. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | With Win2k, there are three answers I know of: 1) Interacting with system files or services can require a reboot, either to hook them properly or to hook them at startup. 2) Replacing a previous version (upgrade/reinstall) may require a reboot if active files are affected 3) 'Rebooting makes sure the install is in a known state' <-weenie answer (and generally the actual answer) I look at it this way - if ORACLE can be installed without a reboot, then nobody has an excuse. Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | somebody | Reboots are typically needed when a shared DLL is in use but needs to be replaced. The software might work without a reboot because you didn't have the DLL or it wasn't in use (and the install writer was too lazy to account for this), or you had a newer DLL that didn't need replaced (and the install writer was too lazy to account for this), or you had an older DLL and simply didn't stumble on the issues that require a new version (or the newer version isn't really needed in the first place). Fixing this so it only reboots when absolutely necessary is a noble cause that I'm all for, but, one note of advice, you DO NOT want to be the guy who dumps the reboot because you don't think it's necessary and then has to explain to management why a bunch of customers are calling support because the product doesn't work (and, yes, they will call support before rebooting on their own). In short, don't assume that because it works for you, it'll work for everyone. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Better than being unemployed... | From what I've seen, a lot of software does a reboot 'just to be on the safe side'. Maybe it's only passed a system test because it's rebooted after install. It's annoying, but it's one way of covering your tracks and standing a better chance of things working on every PC. On the other hand, it is possible with a good spec for the installer to get something that will check every out of date file and see if it can unlock it and upgrade it before mandating the reboot. |
| Fri 05 Sep | 19th floor | Check this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations The installation renames any locked shared files it cannot replace and stores the new file name in this key in order to retry the process after reboot. If any file is present in this key the installation will request a reboot. Now, if your package installs MDAC2.7 for instance, the chances are big one of the files is locked by one of your applications. An MSSQL service can be one of the culprits. Install Shield installs MDAC2.7 with every installation without checking the existing version. If the existing MDAC version is the same as the installed version you can safely skip the reboot since it won’t change any file. I guess somebody decided to solve the MDAC DLL Hell this way. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Seth | It is because it runs on windows. The users there of love to reboot. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Mohamad Afifi Omar | Use linux, my most uptime is 102 day while installing webserver, database server and complete programming tool (compiler IDE blah bvlah) . I just reboot the pc because I want to transfer the it to another building. Highest uptime can be found here http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html btw if anybody reading is M$ supporter, only a Win2K machine has passed a 2 year uptime, I guess no service pack or security patch update ....(either a very busy or very lazy admin). and no, dont search for - uptime highest - at google because the 1st result is the reverse result (pun). The best things in life are free. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | 'I guess no service pack or security patch update' Upgrade the kernel on a Linux box w/o a reboot, and I'll be impressed. :) Linux boxes have good uptimes, because they took a different (note: not better or worse) approach to supporting multiple versions of a library. |
Sun 07 Sep | Matthew | It is because it runs on windows. The users there of love to reboot.Yet another insightful response from your local Linux (or Mac?) advocate. Seeya |
Sun 07 Sep | Matthew | My question is, when do we need a re-boot after installation?http://www.wise.com/KBArticle.aspx?articleno=918&keywords=restart might be helpful. Seeya |
| Prices ending in 9, 99 or 999 :( | Thu 04 Sep | jake |
| Why are so many prices ending in 9, 99 or 999? Examples of prices $ 9.90, $98, $399, etc. :-( When I compare prices, I always round such prices up, and Im angry at the people who set the prices like that, and force me to do an extra mental operation. Do these prices work? I mean, is there a study proving that if you sell a software for $29, you will get significantly more sales than if you sold it for $30 ? |
| Thu 04 Sep | Stephen Jones | ---' I mean, is there a study proving that if you sell a software for $29, you will get significantly more sales than if you sold it for $30 ?'---- Yes |
| Thu 04 Sep | Phillip J. Eby | If you dislike the irrationality of such prices, you'll *really* dislike other interesting facts about people's purchasing habits. For example, changing the color or shape of packaging makes a difference, too. Signs that say 'Sale' make a difference, regardless of an item's price. Advertisements that claim a sale bring more people in than ads that don't. These things have been proven in studies, but my wife has also seen them on a day-to-day basis at her store. Apparently, human beings are not rational. On the positive side, it means that you can make more money by paying attention to details. :) |
| Thu 04 Sep | Ankur | These studies were done on mail-order catalogs several years ago. One I studied in my marketing class was the price for a certain dress. If they priced the dress at $39.99, they got a certain number of sales. If they priced the dress at $45, they got fewer orders. That makes sense. Then they priced it at $49.99, and sales went back up. So yes, the .99 trick works. |
| Thu 04 Sep | An Aussie Chick | I consider myself to be very 'aware' of these sort of influences. Aware, but still human, and I always have a laugh at myself when I find myself reaching for something purely based on an irrational value (such as 1c less, or based on color, and yes shape of packaging!!). My husband and I oftern have a giggle when we are doing our weekly shopping and purchase a more expensive item based purely on some superficial value....still tend to buy it though, life is perhaps too short to take it all too seriously. |
| Thu 04 Sep | LesC | There is actually another reason for these prices. It was so that sales staff *had* to work the cash register so that the customer would get their change. Otherwise, it would be far too easy for the sales staff to just pocket the sale. Or so I have been told. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Phillip J. Eby | That may be another reason. But I really doubt it's the only, or even primary one. My wife has done *lots* of pricing experiments in her store, and there are some prices that just sell better. Sort of like the whole 39/45/49 price mentioned above. Sometimes a higher price sells better than a lower one, if it's a more 'normal'-sounding number. On the positive side, she's effectively narrowed it down to a list of 'acceptable' prices that things can be (i.e. prices that sell), and then simply selects the largest one that the market will bear for the item. :) |
| Thu 04 Sep | Scot | Phillip, Do you see any pattern to these prices that sell? If so, would you please share them? Thanks! |
| Thu 04 Sep | rz | in one of those "ZIG ZIGLER'S KEYS TO SELLING" type books at barnes and noble, the author says that any price with a "7" in it will outsell those without. |
| Thu 04 Sep | www.marktaw.com | I'm aware of these things to, but catch myself saying "It's only four bucks" sometimes when it's $4.99 and I'm not thinking. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Dennis Forbes | Interestingly my wife rounds down when we're discussing something she wants, and up when it's something I want. :-) |
| Thu 04 Sep | Alex Chernavsky | If someone (Stephen?) has a reference to a specific study about this "9" business, let me know. I work in retail now, and most of our prices end in ".99" (the prices were set by the previous manager). I was going to round them up, because I'm irritated by this somewhat underhanded attempt to make the item appear less expensive than it really is. However, I might reconsider, if there is actually good evidence showing that this pricing strategy is effective. Thanks. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Philo | Alex, you've answered your own question. If it doesn't work, it's not devious. But since you can change prices at will, why not experiment? Let us know what you find out. [Note from Alex in a few months: 'I discovered that randomly changing prices all the time gets you fired'] Philo |
| Thu 04 Sep | Makes No Cents | My second year marketing prof (many moons ago) indicated that prices without any fractional portion i.e. $50.00 or $100.00 are used to achieve a perception of higher price, thus higher quality As such, high end retailers use this strategy to to just the opposite effect of what has been described above. They want to make the purchaser feel that they are buying an exclusive item. A case in point: I was at a local mall the other day that has a GAP store and Tommy Hilfiger store next to one another. Pants at Tommy Hilfiger: $75.00 Pants at the GAP : $69.99 |
| Thu 04 Sep | Alex Chernavsky | Philo, I'd love to do an experiment, but it would take too much effort to gather any kind of rigorous data. I suspect that the effect -- if it exists -- would be fairly small and hence would be hard to detect over the noise. |
| Thu 04 Sep | steelkid | It's a devil's trick. When you're buying something ending with 9.99, you're getting... Turn it upside down, and you'll see! :) |
| Fri 05 Sep | char* full_name() | An interesting thread.... More than once I when I was shopping I bought the more expensive choise because the cheaper looked .... too cheap. At such times, I question my being rational. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Simon Lucy | One of the not so interesting marketing jobs is pricing. Yes an ending 9 will allow you to pretend the product is cheaper than it is. In EC countries that price needs to include VAT if its a retail sale because that's the way it is, wholesale or business pricing can show the goods value and then the VAT on top of that. |
| Fri 05 Sep | El desconocido mas famoso del mundo | I saw an experiment on a TV show not long ago there they priced two identical items with different prices and put both next to each other in the store. I don't remember if it was a 9.99 kind of price but anyway, the more expensive item sold better than the cheaper one. Customers knew to explain that too as it seemed the expensive one was of better quality, although they were absolutley identical. So yes, there is a lot of psycology in pricing. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | Alex, just look at marktaw's comment above and you've got your answer. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Alex Chernavsky | Stephen, I would still like to see a study (or studies). Marktaw's comment is interesting, but introspection isn't reliable. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to do double-blind, placebo-controlled studies to test drugs. We could just ask people if they thought the experimental medicine was helping them. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Mickey Petersen | When Bang & Olufsen -- a very expensive and stylish TV/Stereo/Phone/Speaker producer -- first launched their products, they picked moderate prices but found their sales slow. So instead, they practically tripled the price of their products, giving the 'rich' people the idea that the product was aimed at them exclusively, thus they sold a lot more. They still price their products this way. |
| Fri 05 Sep | apw | This is most evident at US gas stations....unleaded gas $1.519 / gal, in Wilmington, NC...While clearly marked on the signs it is probably the most effective use since most people would say the gas costs $1.51 not $1.52 |
| Fri 05 Sep | jake | The current marketing theory regarding prices is, quite simply, that one must experiment with several prices and details. The factors influencing pricing optimization are too complex and too random, so there is no theory around them, other than the fact that you must test, test, test with different prices and so find the one that brings in the most profit. But, studies about prices like 9.99 $ should have been done a long time ago, and results should be available to us now. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Philo | Yesterday I was looking at Mappoint services again. They've changed their pricing - now they're MORE expensive ($15,000/year) At that price, I think only bighuge companies can afford it - and almost nobody is going to pay that for 'find our nearest branch'. Or so you'd think. But obviously if they've raised their price during this IT slowdown, they must be doing well. Philo |
| Fri 05 Sep | Phillip J. Eby | ...or maybe that's just what they want you to *think*... ;) |
| Fri 05 Sep | David Clayworth | I heard a story that KFC introduced a slight variant on their fries as an alternative, and they did poorly (hardly ever asked for). However when they charged a premium for them they sold better. I have certainly witnessed the 'perceived value' effect in community theatre. A show where the tickets cost a small amount will often be better attended than a free show. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Clutch Cargo | I worked for Laplink once when they hired this new clown to run the place. One of the (only) things he did was adjust the price from xx.95 to xx.99, because he wanted the extra 4 cents. Priceless. |
| Fri 05 Sep | runtime | I used to shop at a video rental store that priced videos at $0.96, so that after tax, your total price was $1.00. That made life easier for buyer and seller because there was no extra change making. It's common now for stores to advertise no-sales-tax 'sales', which a similar idea. |
| Fri 05 Sep | www.marktaw.com | I know wal-mart uses the last two digits as a code... like x.92 means clearance, below wholesale price, that sort of thing. I remember an example where a woman who sells jewelry in New Mexico told her employees to put half price stickers on everything, and they did.. Sales went through the roof. Why? Well, they didn't mark anything down, they just said the labelled prices were half what the regular price is, so people thought they were getting really good jewelry at a nice price. Anyway, this doesn't answer the x.99 question. A google search for (99 cent pricing study) turned up this as the first link: ... 2000 Rutgers University study found that people reading an advertisement for a dress were more likely to judge it as relatively low-priced -- and lower in quality -- when advertised at $49.99 rather than for a penny more, $50.00, even when everything else in the ad remained the same. Any time someone has a price ending in .00 it strikes my eye, it seems more boutique and less like everyone else who you assume is just trying to trick you somehow. Of course, this is because of the perception that .99 prices are some sort of marketing trick... The question is, who came up with it? And why did it stick? |
| Fri 05 Sep | Exception guy | Perhaps the comment by Makes No Cents ("...prices without any fractional portion i.e. $50.00 or $100.00 are used to achieve a perception of higher price, thus higher quality") explains why some fancy restaurants list prices as "11" or "12.5", rather than "11.00" or "12.50" like they might, or "10.99" and "12.49" like chain places would do. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Knowledge maker | Hey, this was answered already in this thread....when something is marked $9.99, it's got to be rung up on the till, so that you get your 1cents change. The teller can't just pocket the $10. That's where it all started. Apparently. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Stephen Jones | Have you any documentary evidence for this claim? |
| Fri 05 Sep | GP | No clear answers, but many references in this paper: http://marketing-bulletin.massey.ac.nz/article8/research1b.asp |
| Fri 05 Sep | Brad Wilson | 'Hey, this was answered already in this thread....when something is marked $9.99, it's got to be rung up on the till, so that you get your 1cents change.' Almost nobody lives where there is no sales tax any more. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ged Byrne | I saw the 'Perveived Premium' in action when the Wife and I were buying a new electric tooth brush. There were two on offer in the exact same range. One was £19.99 and the other £29.99. Can't remember the exact prices, but there was definately a £10 difference. The Wife wanted to go for the £29.99, since that was what we had budgeted and it must be better. Being a programmer, I decided to compare the actual difference. The difference was: 1) A charging indicator 2) 2 space heads. That was it. A pack of 3 replacesment heads was just £3 and who needs a little green led to tell you its plugged in. Even after I pointed this out, the Wife still wanted to go for the more expensive toothbrush. |
| Fri 05 Sep | Ged Byrne | Spare heads. How illeterate am I? |
| Fri 05 Sep | GP | 'Almost nobody lives where there is no sales tax any more. ' Sorry, but I didn't understand the relationship with the .99 topic ? |
| Sat 06 Sep | Brad Wilson | There is an assertion that the .99 prices were based on trying to prevent salespeople from pocketing exact change without going through the cash register (like they could if something were, say, exactly $5 or $10). I was just pointing out that sales tax sort of obliterates that theory. |
| Sat 06 Sep | anon | It is still unlikely that the total bill (including sales tax) of a single purchase would be a round number. Plus, the use of charging .99 has other benefits to perpetuate it. When I once worked as a cashier, it was obvious that a round purchase was scammable. |
| Sat 06 Sep | UI Designer | In the UK, the price of an item on the shelf is what you pay at the cash register i.e. taxes are included in the displayed price. In North America local sales tax is added to the displayed price at the cash register. So something for $0.99 could be $1.06 when you actually pay for it. |
| Sat 06 Sep | somebody | >> I was just pointing out that sales tax sort of obliterates that theory. << I believe that .99 pricing predates the general existence of sales tax by far. The story I'm familiar with is that one of the famous American retailers (Wanamaker?) began the practice because he wanted to hear the sounds of cash registers opening and see change being passed for every transaction. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Stephen Jones | The need to open the cash register/avodi employee pilfering is really pretty week, unless it can be backed up with some documentary evidence. Any fractional figure will result in change being given; th e.99 figures in fact cry out for the assistant to keep lots of one cent pieces in his pocket. What is clear enough is that whatever the reasons some retailers emobraced it, the practise continues to this day because it suggests a lower price. |
Sun 07 Sep | Matthew | Almost nobody lives where there is no sales tax any more.Its official. All Australians are nobodies. ;-) We don't have any (visible) sales tax. We pay the price on the sticker. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Daniel S | Doing something like putting half-price stickers on normally priced items is illegal in Australia. Recently a large music store in Adelaide was fined $40,000 or so for advertising a keyboard as "marked down" when the price had not changed. |
| fave RSS feed? | Wed 03 Sep | Jack Silverberg |
| Just installed FeedDemon beta (excellent piece of software, suggested by other poster in the recent RSS thread). Any recommendation for good RSS feed site? Thanks |
| Thu 04 Sep | Jason Watts | http://www.joelonsoftware.com/rss.xml Would this be considered karma whoring? |
| Thu 04 Sep | Prakash S | http://www.newsisfree.com Also check out the Top 100 Rss feeds... for A List Bloggers. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Daver | There are a couple of sites that monitor blogs and index who they are linking to according to popularity. These lists are available as RSS feeds. One that I monitor is blogdex ( http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/xml/index.asp ). This gives an interesting view of pop culture trends (or at least a US blog/geek centric one). A similar feed was made available recently from Yahoo, “Yahoo! News - Most Emailed” at http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/mostemailed . Yahoo had a number of other feeds (US news, world news, etc.) that I can’t find at the moment. If you are a fan of Sourceforge, they have a bunch of general feeds available as well as 5 feeds for every project hosted. This is a nice way of keeping track of interesting software that has become available and/or is becoming popular. For example, today I noticed (on the SourceForge.net Project News feed http://sourceforge.net/export/rss_sfnews.php ) the new release of an RSS aggregator called RSSOwl, which is written in Java but has a beautiful UI using SWT. You can also open a free account at www.newsisfree.com which can give you RSS feeds for your favorite news sources that don’t yet support RSS feeds. |
| Thu 04 Sep | www.marktaw.com | Not quite an rss feed, but I like http://www.freshnews.org/ a lot. The top ten headlines from 30 tech sites. There are other sites like it, with maybe headlines from more sites, but this one I've been visting for years. I like the layout, it's uncluttered & easy to read. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Just me (Sir to you) | title='The BugBlog' description='An (almost) daily look at computer bugs and their fixes' xmlurl='http://www.bjkresearch.com/bugblog/bugblog.xml' htmlurl='http://www.bjkresearch.com/bugblog/' title='MSDN Just Published' description='Keep current with all the new technical articles, columns, specifications, and resources published on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN).' xmlurl='http://msdn.microsoft.com/rss.xml' htmlurl='http://msdn.microsoft.com/' title='Larkware News' description='Neat stuff for the Windows software developer' xmlurl='http://www.larkware.com/larkware2.xml' htmlurl='http://www.larkware.com/' title='Microsoft Download Center' description='The ten latest downloads from the Microsoft Download Center. (For personal and non-commercial use only.)' xmlurl='http://www.thundermain.com/rss/' htmlurl='http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/' title='Last 20 Uploads on Only4Gurus.com' description='Free technical documentation for download about ASP, ASPX, ASP.NET, VB, VB.NET, Active Directory, C++, C#, Visual Studio, Data Access, BizTalk, Security, Data Mining, BI, PocketPC, Tablet PC, Mobility, SQL, TSQL and even more.' xmlurl='http://www.only4gurus.com/v2/rss/last20.asp' htmlurl='http://www.only4gurus.com/' |
| Thu 04 Sep | Just me (Sir to you) | btw. anyone else here thinks Joel really needs to fix his url regexp for this board? Loose the " " on the url's in the post above to make them work. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Duncan Smart | This seems to do the trick using the .NET Regex library: ((http|ftp)://|\bwww\.)\S+(?=\b) Your mileage might vary with the MS Scripting Regex object. |
| Thu 04 Sep | Jeff MacDonald | I really like Eric Sink's stuff: 1. http://software.ericsink.com/rss_features.xml 2. http://software.ericsink.com/rss.xml Jeff |
| Sun 07 Sep | Bill | If you are obsessed with thoughts of your job going overseas: http://www.YourJobIsGoingToIndia.com/backend.php |
| Adobe Acrobat 6.0 | Thu 21 Aug | JD |
| Hi All, Recently installed Acrobat 6.0 on my machine. It is bit heavy on Memory but there is one thing which I absolutely HATE. I have set up preferences to NOT TO DISPLAY PDF in browser. Still, whenever I click on PDF link it will try to open it there itself instead of popping up the Open/Save dialog box. Did Adobe test their product properly OR I am having problem with my machine?? Anyone else faced similar prob? JD |
| Tue 02 Sep | pb | Adobe needs to seriously wake up and see that the commanding position that PDF has could erode very rapidly because of the obsolute horridness of the 6.0 reader on both Windows and MacOS. A PDF reader should obviously be extraordinarily lite. Adobe's is clearly no. http://www.schubert-it.com/ has a great plug-in for MacOS/Safari. |
| Sun 07 Sep | Alvin Goh | I find that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 took very long time to load especially when other applications are running. I am actually looking for the crack for this software. Would appreciate that if anyone does know, do let me know. Thanks!! |
| Database table design suggestions?? | Sat 06 Sep | suhu |
| Hi, need some suggestions on a database table design. I am using Access / VB6 and here is the scenario. I will try to be as clear as possible. I am designing a simple Invoice system which links to a Inventory system. Once invoice is created, stock will be reduced from the Inventory. But I am thinking of making this SAME program also work for customers who dont need the inventory part. The Invoice table is linked to InvoiceDetail table. The Product table is linked to the Invoice Detail (one to many). How to solve this problem for InvoiceDetail records that do not need Product table info since referential intergrity rules state that Invoice Details must have a foreign key from Product table. I just need some suggestions and I can figure it out. Thanks again. |
| Sat 06 Sep | Albert D. Kallal | Obviously your rule is that those detail records DO NOT need a FK, so you must adjust to that. Either you do, or do not allow records without the FK. I see no reason at all to enforce the fact that detail records must have a product id. Why? I think the real problem here is are you actually going to write code to update the inventory levels, or use a code free solution, and calculate the inventory on the fly? Depending on the type of inventory, NOT using any code to update the inventory levels will SAVE TONS of code. |