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Comment Re:Bright and Sunny Skies Today! (Score 2) 176

If you think the risks of running in the cloud are less than the risks of running in a traditional data center, you're very much mistaken.

If one AWS AZ goes down I can bring up servers in a second one. If one AWS region goes down I can bring up servers in a second one. In fact to hedge against these risks I *already have* servers in multiple zones and regions.

Sure you can do that with traditional data centers. Just host your stuff across more than one, right? Do you have any concept of what that COSTS? Especially if you, say, want to add servers in multiple data centers, or move servers from one to another. Plus now you have multiple vendors, contacts, SLAs, and so son, and so forth. And heaven help you if you ever want to *decrease* your capacity. Have fun selling those servers on ebay.

Reddit and friends are suffering downtime from a single AZ outage because their architectures have single points of failure. Don't build your systems that way! If you have single points of failure it doesn't matter whether you're hosted in the cloud, in a commercial data center, or in your own data center. Conversely if your architecture is good and doesn't have single points of failure, the hosting question comes down to this: what do you specialize in as a business? If that list doesn't include "running a data center", don't run your own data center. If it doesn't include "maintaining a shit load of hardware", then don't host in a commercial data center either, run in the cloud. I think you will find that this latter category includes 99.99% of businesses.

Comment TOAD for Oracle (Score 1) 1880

I have no idea why Quest Software hasn't put out a version of TOAD for Oracle that runs on Linux, or a cross-platform Java version for that matter.  But until they do, I will develop/administer on a Windows desktop.

Besides, Windows 7 is pretty nice in a lot of ways.  Install cygwin and you've got 90% of the best of both worlds.

Comment Re:I like these training wheels (Score 1) 128

You need a subquery that generates the iterative values for you.  Oracle provides a concise way to do this right in your query:

select x.start_time
     , p.direction
     , sum(p.bytes) as b
  from (select -60+10*(level-1) as start_time
          from dual
        connect by level <= 6
       ) x
     , packets p
where p.time_stamp >= x.start_time
   and p.time_stamp <  x.start_time+(10/24/60/60)
group by x.start_time
        , p.direction

If your RDBMS doesn't have an equivalent to CONNECT BY LEVEL, you will either need to put your values in a table (think a reusable "integers" or "dates" table), or do something like (select -60 as foo from dual UNION ALL select -50 from dual UNION ALL select -40...and so on).

Comment Re:Reinventing the wheel (Score 1) 128

Parameterized queries require pre-registration with the database engine, and have a host of other gotchas. EG: No dynamically created SQL queries.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Build all your queries as parameterized queries (or better yet, stored procedures) and you will never have "type safety" problems. In fact the posting barely makes sense to me. How would you ever end up trying to date-range a string field? That query would never run! Oh right, there are still idiots out there that build queries at runtime. Well, don't fucking do that!

Besides, parameterized queries are 100% immune to SQL injection. You'd think people would care more about that these days.

Comment Well it IS unenforceable... (Score 1, Interesting) 363

I mean, seriously. There is no mechanism by which Do Not Track can actually be made to work as it is currently being proposed. This is more important than whether you think it's a good idea.

If you want to be able to opt out of being tracked, you need to built it in to browser behavior and/or web protocols themselves. You can't simply ASK sites not to track you and expect anything to happen, nor can you rely on a law to do this for you.

Comment Not true and never has been (Score 1) 219

"One of the most dreaded hurdles on the PC upgrade path is the CPU socket. If socket design changes then you'll almost certainly need a new motherboard when you do upgrade."

This is a complete red herring. I have been building my own PCs since 1997. I have not once, ever, been able to re-use a motherboard when upgrading. Yes, some of that is due to sockets changing, but not all of it. Sometimes you need a new board to support the newest memory technology, or to support the changed voltage requirements of the new chips. Bottom line is, unless you're an early-and-often adopter, buying new CPUs the day they're released (which historically has meant spending $900+), you just won't ever get two CPUs' worth of life out of one motherboard, regardless of whether the required socket has changed.

Comment Right for the wrong reasons (Score 2) 755

OOP should absolutely not be taught at the freshman level, because it gets in the way of understanding more basic concepts like, oh I dunno, variables, branching, looping, subroutines, I/O, etc. Their claim that OOP is "anti-modular" is of course absurd. "Anti-parallel" is probably arguable, but how that's relevant at an undergraduate level of instruction is highly questionable.

At any rate the real problem is that colleges offer degrees in "computer science" but not "software engineering". How many of these students will finish their degrees without ever having committed to source control? Without coding to a 3rd-party API? Connecting to a database? Performing maintenance programming? Working in an honest-to-god team?

Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 450

Do you actually know what "deregulation" means in this context? California did not "deregulate" its power industry, it "re-regulated" it into a non-functioning arrangement:

- wholesale power suppliers were free to adjust prices
- retail power providers were not (the aforementioned government price fixing)
- generation costs spiked due to exogenous factors
- You do the math.

It doesn't even take a first year Econ student to figure out that this was doomed from the start.

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